With the Dodgers and Giants neck and neck, the Giants won the pennant after a three game playoff culminating with Bobby Thomson’s shot heard around the world. This rivalry only heightened if the teams played one another, and no where was it clearer than during the 1951 pennant race.

Other neighbors rooted for the Giants as the kids on the block enjoyed a friendly rivalry with one another. Doris’ next door neighbor and best friend Elaine Friedle was a Yankees fan and loved Billy Martin as much as Doris stuck with Jackie Robinson. The home to three major league franchises the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants, New York was the capital of baseball. Southard Avenue in Rockville Centre was emblematic of New York in the 1940s and 1950s.

Through good times and bad, the Kearns family were Dodger fans through and through. Yet, it was her father’s love of baseball that he passed on to his youngest daughter and the family’s love of the Brooklyn Dodgers that shaped and molded Doris’ childhood. She became a vociferous reader and enjoyed stories like Nancy Drew and the Bobsey Twins and later Gone With the Wind and David Copperfield.

Helen was an avid reader and taught Doris how to read from the earliest of ages. They already had two girly girls on their way to teenage popularity and a career as nurses, so they were determined to have their new daughter Doris Marguerite follow in the mold of Rosie the Riveter and chase whatever dream she desired. Already the parents to fourteen-year-old Charlotte and nine-year-old Jeanne, the Kearns’ did not expect to be parents again in their mid to late thirties. It was then that I was determined to become a history major and follow in her footsteps.ĭoris Kearns was born on January 4, 1943, a surprise baby to her parents Michael and Helen Kearns of Rockville Centre, New York. This feeling was enhanced when she published Wait Til Next Year in 1997, the year I graduated from high school. In essence, Ms Goodwin was an adult version of myself, and I was determined to be her when I grew up. I shortly discovered that she had at the time written history books on both the Roosevelts and Kennedys and had maintained her love of baseball into adulthood. Missing the season cut short by a strike, I turned to Burns’ film for comfort but was more enamored by a female historian and baseball fan who could clearly hold her own with the men.

I first discovered Doris Kearns Goodwin in 1994 when Ken Burns sought a female voice to balance out the men as a narrator for his new documentary Baseball. Did anyone ever discover a book that was written just for them? Wait Til Next by Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of the United States’ master historian storytellers, is such a book for me. Women’s History Month 2019 continues with a reread of a personal favorite.

Doris kearns goodwin baseball book