After several unsuccessful tries to reach him by phone, I caught up with Dick Mahoney in his wife’s beauty shop Friday morning. Dick is a baseball fan par excellence … of the Red Sox variety. I figured he, if anyone in these parts, would have had contact with the recently departed and much beloved New York Yankees catcher, coach and sage, Lawrence Peter Berra.
“Yeah, I have a picture I took of Yogi and a few stories,” Mahoney said, his gruff Boston brogue still distinct after a half century in the South.
Mahoney settled into one of the chairs in the salon — you know, the ones like those in Eudora Welty stories, with the clear plastic hair dryers that look like a space helmets — and began to talk, not so much about Berra, but about the game he loves.
Mahoney, 74, grew up in Brockton in South Boston. Like other factory towns encircling Boston, Brockton was a bare-knuckles kind of place, a working-class melting pot of Irish Catholics, Polish, Italians and Eastern Europeans.
For boys growing up in America’s cities during that time, the hometown major league baseball team loomed large. The local ballpark was quite literally a field of dreams.
“I grew up in right field,” Mahoney says of Boston’s Fenway Park. A dollar and a quarter became a ballgame for us,” he said. “It was 10 cents each way on the street car. Fifty cents for the bleachers; a dime to get a scorecard; and 35 cents would get you a hot dog and a coke and a bag of peanuts.”
Mahoney played semi-pro ball, first base and pitcher. A job with General Tire brought him south in 1965. Right away he found a spot with the Columbus Redbirds at Propst Park. Baseball helped ease what might have been a difficult transition, he says.
In 1975, lured by the promise of World Series tickets, Mahoney traveled to Boston. The tickets never materialized. Vowing that would never happen again, Mahoney pitched the idea of writing the occasional baseball story to then Dispatch sports editor Skip Burson. He parlayed Burson’s yes into what would essentially become a press pass for life with the Sox.
In 1979 Mahoney and his wife Jenny traveled to Boston on what would be the occasion of Red Sox legend Carl Yastrzemski’s 3,000th hit. The Sox were playing the Yankees, then coached by Berra. Before the game, Mahoney chatted with Berra, who autographed a baseball for Mahoney’s friend in the stands.
He visited again with Berra at spring training in Florida years later. There the hall-of-famer regaled Mahoney’s party with stories about growing up in St. Louis with Joe Garagiola.
“He had a sense of who he was, but he wasn’t obnoxious about it,” Mahoney said.
In 2007 Mahoney visited Boston where his daughter Meagan was living (Meagan is now in her third year of surgical residency in Jackson.)
Not surprisingly, the two went to Fenway where 50 cents was good for not much more than a jingle in the pocket.
“It was 35 bucks a seat, that is if you could talk somebody into it,” Mahoney said.
Mahoney has one indelible baseball memory that occurred far from Fenway. In 1988 he was in the press box there for a series with Oakland when someone asked about the klieg lights in a corner of right field.
“They’re filming a movie down there, something about baseball in a cornfield in Iowa,” sportswriter Peter Gammons said.
Six years later, Dick and Jenny traveled to Waterloo, Iowa, for the 40th anniversary celebration of the ordination of Father May, a Catholic priest who had been in Columbus years earlier.
On the drive home Mahoney decided to detour by Dyersville, Iowa, where “Field of Dreams” was filmed. He wanted to see the baseball diamond in a cornfield that has become a shrine for lovers of the game.
They arrived in the morning. Mahoney knocked on the door of the farmer who owned the field. The farmer encouraged the Mahoneys to look and stay as long as they liked.
At the baseball field, Dick and Jenny found a man, who had not been there when they arrived. The man had a bat, baseball and glove.
“You expecting a game today?” Mahoney asked.
“No,” the man answered. He then went on to tell his story.
The man was a farmer from Blue Mound, Kansas. Since seeing “Field of Dreams,” years earlier, he had been haunted by the idea of coming to Iowa. The field exerted a powerful, unexplainable and persistent pull, he said.
“For some reason, yesterday I decided it was time to go,” the farmer said to Mahoney. “I asked my wife, and she said OK.”
“I drove all night and got here five minutes ago. My real dream is that someone would show up here and pitch to me.”
“Your dream just came true,” Mahoney said to the farmer from Kansas. “I’m a left-handed pitcher.”
The two men walked out on the field. Mahoney pitched to the farmer, and then the farmer pitched to Mahoney.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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