1 The Family Web The original Hoyts were from Manchester, Vermont. My father's mother's maiden name was Waite. It makes a strange first name for a child. It's not like John or Tom or Frank or Henry or Jim. When there's trouble and someone says, "Who did that?" there are lots of guys by the name of Jim. Which Jim was it? But when they say it was some guy with a strange name, it could only be me, Waite Hoyt. When I was attending school at PS 90 in Brooklyn, we had a fire drill one day and lined up in the hall. I gave the kid ahead of me a shove, and he inadvertently pushed the kid ahead of him, which knocked down about twelve others. The principal called my mother and said I had knocked down twelve boys. How in the hell could one guy like me knock down twelve kids? I was lucky if I could knock down one, but they all fell down anyway. I was a kid born to trouble, and being named Waite didn't do me much good. I was born on Second Place in Brooklyn, but while I was still an infant, we moved out to Hawthorne Street in Flatbush. It was a beautiful place. The oak and chestnut trees were planted near the curb and, in full bloom, would reach over toward each other and sort of shake hands. My earliest memory is when I was about four years old. The streets of Brooklyn in 1904 were not paved, and out in front of our house at 241 Hawthorne, the avenue was badly rutted. Vegetable hucksters came through with their carts and wagons, which completely tore up the streets. My dad was such an enthusiastic baseball man. He and a neighbor named Herman Bank created a baseball diamond, Hawthorne Field, about three blocks down from us. It was quite an athletic field. Dad played third base on a team called the Hawthornes and was a pretty good ballplayer. Heinie Zimmerman, who at the time was playing with the Chicago Cubs, I believe, brought an exhibition team down there, and the Hawthornes beat them. Dad would take me out and teach me how to catch a ball, field, and throw. We'd stand in the middle of the street, and the ball would bounce badly because of those ruts. Once in a while I'd get hit in the face, throat, or neck, and he would yell, "Keep your head down! Keep your head down!" If I cried, he'd shout, "Shame on you! Shame on you!" Every good ballplayer keeps his head down on ground balls, and I had to learn this no matter how much it hurt because, as my father said, you have to accept the bad with the good. I was taught to scoop up the ball with a backward motion. Fielders don't shove their hand forward because that knocks the ball away. My father would stand behind me, grab my wrists, bring my arms above and behind my head and then propel my right arm forward. He repeated this until I could do it by myself. Then a body turn was added, and finally, I was given an actual ball to throw. At first, we'd throw it back and forth on the lawn and then across the street, about fifty feet. I could just about reach him. Little by little I grew stronger and stronger. He would toss the ball high in the air, and I was supposed to catch it. Of course, I missed a lot. I had trouble finding it in the air. I can still smell that baseball. It was made of horsehide and just had an aroma of its own: lovely, lovely--clean and burnished in a sacrificial aura, soon to be hit and scuffed. To a young disciple of the game, it was a thing of beauty to be petted, turned, and tossed with careful affection. Actually, there were several kinds of baseballs. The nickel rocket was stuffed with old scraps of leather, and then there was the ten-cent ball; the twenty-five-cent lively bounder, which was rubber-centered and bounced like a golf ball; the fifty-cent ball; the seventy-five-cent ball; the dollar Junior League size, a big ball. Then of course there was the regular League ball, which cost a dollar and a quarter. Gradually, the knack for throwing a baseball came to me, and oh, my father was so overjoyed. He told me that his grandfather (Walter Fowler Hoyt) invented the curveball. Others have made that claim, of course. In any case, I'm quite sure my great-grandfather's curveball was better than mine. I never did get the hang of that curveball. Excerpted from Schoolboy: The Untold Journey of a Yankees Hero by Waite Hoyt, Tim Manners All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
