Love Story

Peter Golenbock was three years old when the New York Yankees began their historic tear through the American League in 1949. Born in New York City, he could have become a National League fan, but he recognized at a most early age that the Dodgers and Giants didn't win with anything approaching the consistency that prompted his love affair with the Yankees.

Then, too, it was much more convenient to make the IRT run to 161st Street and Yankee Stadium than to venture to the hinterlands for baseball at the Polo Grounds or Ebbetts Field. Through the impressionable years, Peter loved the Yanks, all of them. It began with DiMaggio, Henrich, Raschi, Reynolds, Rizzuto, and Page. Then the Mantle era and Yogi, Ford, Larsen, Martin, and Maris, plus guys like Pepitone, Linz, Bouton - an endless parade of names, some of them memorable and others, like Zack Monroe, brief pages in the championship onslaught composed by George Weiss and orchestrated for the Stadium sward by Charles Dillon Stengel.

From 1949-64, a 16-year span, the Yankees won 14 American League pennants and nine World Series crowns. Peter Golenbock was a Dartmouth sophomore when the bottom fell out in 1965. His love has remained, but the past decade has prompted him to look back for the pleasures that soothe the contemporary pain of long, lean days for the Yanks.

Dynasty is the product of two years of travel (27,000 miles) to interview and pore over 250,000 clippings about the life and times of the people who earned the love and respect of Peter Golenbock (and millions more) - and the animosity of the other millions who bled for the Giants, Dodgers, Red Sox, and other teams that tried with occasional success to knock them from their pedestal.

The book is a fitting companion for TheGlory of Their Times, Baseball When The GrassWas Green, and The Boys of Summer. Like TheBoys of Summer, it deals with a particular team, but, unlike Roger Kahn's visit with the Dodgers of 1953, it covers an era of success unmatched by any team in any sport, produced by a collection of athletes who play with the verve and confidence of professionals and shared in the joys and burdens that accompanied their mastery of their sport.

It's a chronology of anecdotes, incidents, and memories which bring to life again the Yankee magnificence. For Peter Golenbock, it's a love story that makes for easy reading. He's captured the Yankees, a decade later, and reminded us of their devastating talents. Like the day in Boston in 1956 when Andy Carey, Stengel's "butcher boy," swung and missed at two bad pitches, prompting Stengel to order Billy Martin, the on-deck hitter, to "... tell that son of a bitch to swing at a good pitch and hit a home run."

Martin relayed the message and on the next pitch, a high inside fast ball, Carey lashed a game-winning home run. "When the Old Man tells us to do something, we do it," said Martin.

The Yankees from 1949-64 were that good, and so is Peter Golenbock's first book.

DYNASTY. By Peter Golenbock'67. Prentice-Hall, 1975. Illustrated.394 pp. $9.95.

Mr. DeGange is Dartmouth Director of SportsInformation.