Blueprint for November: Home Runs

Our staff writer Mark Olshaker and I spent the summer of 1981, the most glorious summer of each of our lives, traveling the country with a film crew and visiting the stars of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers for a documentary based on Roger Kahn’s bestselling book, The Boys of Summer. While Duke Snider was the color commentator at the time for the Montreal Expos, we found most of his former teammates in their 50s or 60s and working in their old hometowns: Pee Wee Reese worked in marketing for Louisville Slugger; Clem Labine managed a clothes manufacturing operation in Woonsocket, Rhode Island; Carl Erskine was a bank vice president in Anderson, Indiana; Roy Campanella, long disabled from a famous car accident, was a consultant for the Dodgers; Preacher Roe ran a family grocery store in Viola, Arkansas; and Carl Furillo, battling cancer at the time, worked as a night watchman at a factory in Reading, Pennsylvania.