Remembering Shea Staduim
As I read somewhere that the day that Shea Stadium will close down approaches (in September), I recalled a time when Mets games were an important part of family life for me. For those of you who aren't baseball fans or who don't know the New York area, Shea Stadium was opened in 1964 in Queens to house the new New York Mets baseball team. My single mom found it a great place to spend an inexpensive evening with her two daughters, me 10 and older sis 12. You could take a subway right to the park (we never owned a car) and I don't know what admission was, but it was cheap. My mom often had another woman, someone usually from her midtown office, along for the games and my sister and I learned for the first time about baseball. But mostly we were delirious to be out at night with mom, watching as the night deepened and the bright field lights and the deep green outfield and burnt orange infield came alive. We also loved the Mets fans around us. Loud, raucus and almost obsessive, they had coffee cans and wooden spoons, homemade horns, bells, whistles and other noise makers which my sister and I never had a hope of being allowed to imitate. Of course in those days the Mets were new, and not very good as I recall. But we loved them.
I guess my mom wasn't a Yankee fan and Yankee Stadium was harder to get to and not in a neighborhood a single woman wanted to walk with two young girls at night. (Although my Dad, who lived across town from us in Manhattan used to love to tell us that Yankee Stadium was owned by the Catholic Church and, being Catholic, wasn't that just grand?)
One year about 1988 or 89 my husband and I were in NYC visiting my mom and we all decided to go to a Mets day game. I had forgotten how tall Shea Stadium is and when we took our seats in the rafters in a chilly wind, we realized that even the resident crows and pigeons were flying below us and about four innings in, stiff with cold, we decided we'd had enough and left.
Despite that, and the fact that Shea is far from a great ballpark, it will always be part of my childhood - along with the big World's Fair globe nearby - and that's how I'll remember it.