Our House: A Tribute To Fenway

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Our House: A Tribute to Fenway Park
By Curt Smith, George Bush, 288 pages, May 1999
Masters Press NTC/Contemporary Publishing Group

By Lisa Reynolds

Don’t begin Our House: A Tribute to Fenway Park, Curt Smith’s terrific look at Boston Red Sox and Fenway history, at the beginning.

Instead, flip through the photos and lithographs tracing the park’s triumphs and tears. Pay special attention to the pictures documenting the July 4, 1998, game against the Chicago White Sox. Now open to Page 215 and read the last five pages of the finale, which describe that ordinary but special day.

Smell the aroma of fried dough and Italian sausage on Yawkey Way and Lansdowne Street. “Slowly, by twos and threes, like citizens in a town hall, ... enter Fenway through ground-level archways in its red-brick facade. Then, into the tunnel, up a walkway, and toward the field.” Search for the Monster, which “towers, as real as any relative.” Relive the Kid, Yaz, Fisk’s home run, Clemens’ 20-strikeout game in 1986.

Does it even matter that the Red Sox lost that July 4 game?

As poll after poll shows, part of the reason to go to Fenway Park is the ballpark itself. Smith, who has written such books as Voices of the Game and America’s Dizzy Dean, leads a passionately well-written tribute to the host of this year’s All-Star Game. Joining him are baseball and Red Sox lovers such as Doris Kearns Goodwin, late baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti and former President Bush, a man for whom Smith used to write speeches.

Smith begins his study of one of baseball’s most cursed teams in the early 1900s, when the Boston Pilgrims played at what is now the indoot athletic facility at Northeastern University. While many people have covered the history of the Red Sox, Smith frequently ties his discussion of the team with the status of Fenway at the particular time. He includes statistics about the varying lengths of the outfield and seating capacity; the rise and fall of attendance -- one game attracted just 461 people. He describes the many “Lucy-took-the-football” teases from which Townie fans suffered until “as psychologists will tell you, human beings usually revert to form.”

Most of all, Smith writes warmly of - and even dedicates Our House to - the man who is the source for many of his greatest Red Sox memories: Ted Williams. The left fielder’s hitting provides as much fond recollection as the autograph he received in 1966. “By the 1950s, yarns about the Kid outnumbered seagulls over Lansdowne Street,” and Smith includes many of them, all without losing focus of Fenway.

So often, sports writing becomes cliched and pedestrian, which makes reading Our House that much more of a welcome treat, like cold water on an afternoon date with the bleachers. Of the 1940-41 Red Sox Smith writes, “Quietly, like still water shedding ice, the Red Sox flowed with Hall of Famers.” John Updike recalls “the uproarious clatter when a foul ball sailed into the broadcast booth.” Even the photo captions are witty: “The dictionary defines logic as the science of correct reasoning. Mo Vaughn became league MVP, led the 1993-98 Sox in homers, and was then dispatched to California.”

As Boston Globe associate editor Martin F. Nolan says, Fenway is “a ballpark, not a stadium. ... a talisman for the poetically inclined.” Occasionally, Smith gets carried away, even for Red Sox musings. By his fourth or fifth bashing of “gray-and-concrete” bowls, we more than understand that the likes of Shea Stadium (beyond the obvious 1986 horror), Astroturf and retractable roofs represent an evil worse than the designated hitter.

The writing also assumes a little too much of a familiarity with Boston baseball history. It isn’t clear until looking at one of the 50 pages of outstanding, obsessively compiled appendices that the Boston Pilgrims became the Boston Red Sox in 1907. The first references to stars such as Carl Yastrzemski and Nomar Garciaparra are confusing more than creative; even a history- and research-loving fan such as myself can become befuddled.

But these are minor quibbles of a tribute nicely timed to coordinate with plans for a new Red Sox home. Our House makes one further appreciate how Fenway has, according to current Red Sox radio announcer Joe Castiglione, “the feeling of a real city neighborhood spilling over into the park itself.” After reading this book, any true baseball fan will want to order tickets for a Fenway game as soon as possible.

Grade: A-

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