By Louie Ferrera
My dad Ray Ferrera passed away quietly last week, he was 95. Here’s my tribute to him.
On Father’s Day in 1965 I was eight years. My dad was taking my older brother Ray and I to see our first baseball game at legendary Yankee Stadium. I’m sure I must have been super excited, but I don’t have any actual memory of that. Our mom would most surely have made us sandwiches, baloney or salami, but I can’t remember which. The ride to the Bronx must have felt like an eternity. All of it has faded into the fog of the past, all except for this.
After the long trudge up the concrete ramps at The Stadium, we emerged from the promenade into the upper deck in left field and I was simply thunderstruck by what I saw…green. The enormous expanse of the outfield grass was a shade of green that my eight year old mind had no previous frame of reference for. This was surely how Dorothy must have felt when she stepped from the sepia-toned world of 1930s Kansas into the Technicolor wonderland of Oz. The Yankee Stadium outfield was The Emerald City, it was all of the glory that is the color green. Up until that point, every baseball game I had watched with dad was viewed on our tiny black and white television set. Of course I knew that grass was green but THIS green? Needless to say this first impression of a major league baseball field has stayed with me my entire life
Besides being Father’s Day, it was also Bat Day. Every kid who walked through the turnstiles received a real wooden bat with a Yankee autograph stamped into the barrel (mine was third baseman Clete Boyer’s). There were upwards of seventy thousand people there that day, by far the most I’d ever seen assembled in one place. It was brutally hot, the concession stands ran out of soda. I sat rapt as Bob Sheppard’s booming baritone announced the Yankee line-up, his voice reverberating through the cavernous expanses of Yankee Stadium like the voice of God: “Batting third and playing first base, numbah seven Mickey Mantle.” The Mick was my childhood Idol. He hit a triple that day.
The way I connected with my dad was through sports. To say that he was a sports enthusiast would be a gross understatement. We’d watch whatever was on tv: baseball, football, basketball, hockey. If none of the major sports were on we’d stoop to golf and even bowling. Dad would sit in his chair, puffing on a cigar and sipping from a long-neck Bud. Together we lived and died by our favorite teams. One of my most cherished sports memories was when Ray, dad and I watched the Knicks win their first ever NBA title with a seventh game blowout against the LA Lakers. Besides baseball, dad took us to lots of other games: the Jets at Shea Stadium, the Giants when they played at Yankee Stadium, the Rangers and Knicks at Madison Square Garden. Back in his heyday, dad was also an athlete. He played basketball for Montclair High School. I remember feeling so proud while looking at those old black and white photos of him in his uniform.
On Father’s Day 2009 Carol and I took our five year old twins to their first baseball game. It was a sellout crowd that day at Pac Bell Park in San Francisco as the Giants took the field. Memories of Bat Day with my dad at Yankee Stadium swirled through my mind as I sat next to my own son. We were decked out in our hometown colors cheering on the Giants. I had come full circle. Like father like son.