Month: January 2019

                                                                              OCTOBER MAGIC

I’ve always loved October. The days are usually crisp and bright. The leaves turn crimson and gold. It’s football weather, but baseball’s fat lady still has to hit her high note before the boys of summer put the bats and balls away. And when I was a kid, the fat lady’s song started, “To look sharp and feel sharp too, choose the razor that is best for you…”, followed by the announcer’s words, “The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports brings you the World Series”. I don’t guess anything could excite me as much as that sound, not Tarzan’s “I—E—I—E—I”, or the Lone Ranger’s “Hi-yo, Silver”, or even Richard Rodger’s Victory at Sea music, my introduction, and what an introduction it was, to classical music (on second thought, my first taste of classical music may have been Peter and the Wolf in 2^nd or 3^rd grade). The World Series meant that I could watch my hero, Duke Snider, center fielder for my beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, Dem Bums from Flatbush, hammer a Whitey Ford fastball over Mickey Mantle’s head and over the fence in center in Ebbet’s Field or Yankee stadium, home of the despised Bronx Bombers.