Word: goodwin
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...Goodwin learned the game by keeping score in the red score books her father gave her. She listened to each game on the radio and kept meticulous notes so she could recount the game exactly to her father when he came home from work. He did not tell her for many years about the box scores in the newspaper, so she assumed her role as the household Dodgers record-keeper was absolutely vital. Even after she discovered the sports pages and after the games began to be televised, Goodwin held fast to her score books: thus, a historian was born...
Equal in importance to her love affair with baseball was Goodwin's quirky relationship with the Catholic Church. For a child, Goodwin was remarkably devout to the teachings of the Church. She won catechism contests by naming the Seven Deadly Sins and took the teaching of the Church as the last word on every issue. She often fell asleep during her long nightly prayers, for she was convinced that their length determined both the length of her stay in Purgatory and the success of the Dodgers...
Inevitably, though, Goodwin's attachment to baseball came into conflict with her strict Catholic regimen, with a gravity that could only be a child's. Goodwin's recollection of her First Confession is perhaps the most endearing scene in the book. "I wished harm to Allie Reynolds [the Yankee pitcher]," she tells the priest. "Yes, I wished that Enos Slaughter of the Cards would break his ankle, that Phil Rizzuto of the Yanks would fracture a rib, and that Alvin Dark of the Giants would hurt his knee...I wished all these injuries would go away once the baseball season...
...Goodwin's tone is serious throughout: she treats her childish, five-year-old fears and reverence for Jackie Robinson with the same kind of gravity with which she later treats her perception of McCarthyism and the problems of adolescence. Bereft of landmarks that indicate change in maturity and voice, one never knows exactly how old Goodwin is at a given moment. On the other hand, growing up is indeed an invisible process--one is seldom conscious of growing older. Thus, the book's greatest problem is also that which lends it the most credibility...
...Says Goodwin of writing the book, "The greatest pleasure...came from finding these kids on my block. Someone remembered the sound of screen doors slamming--that was our signal that someone had come over--and someone else remembered the sound of honking horns after the Rosenberg execution...This made me realize how much needs to be remembered and how much can be remembered when people are prompted...