Yankee Stadium; Fifty Years of Drama

by Joseph Durso

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395140072
• ISBN13: 9780395140079
• Release Date: January 1972
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 155 Pages
• Weight: 2.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The fifty years of history for the House that Ruth Built

Yankee Stadium was "The House That Ruth Built," but it has been a stage for much more than baseball. When Yankee Stadium opened in April 1923 it was Babe Ruth who hit the first home run, but it was Casey Stengel of the New York Giants who hit the first World Series home run in the new park. Of course, Stengel would return years later and manage the Bronx Bombers to ten of the twenty-nine pennants they had earned when Joseph Durso, sportswriter for the "New York Times," authored this look at the first Fifty Years of Drama.Durso celebrates in text and pictures many of the outstanding moments in the history of Yankee Stadium: Babe Ruth's 60th home run and Roger Maris's 61st, Lou Gehrig's 2130 consecutive game streak, Joe DiMaggio's 56 game hitting streak, Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series, the 1958 play-off between the New York (Football) Giants and the Baltimore Colts, both of the Joe Louis-Max Schmeling fights, and Brazilian soccer star Pele. Nor was the rich history of Yankee Stadium restricted to sports: Pope Paul VI celebrated mass on the stadium's turf, Billy Graham preached near second base, circus acrobats performed, and famous politicians and others threw out the first pitches. Most of the book, obviously, is dedicated to baseball, but Durso covers college and professional football, lists the two dozen championship fights that took place, and even goes behind the scenes to show the "modernized" scoreboard installed in 1959. Although there is a color photograph of Mickey Mantle connecting on the cover, "Yankee Stadium: Fifty Years of Drama" is illustrated with black & white photographs from Babe Ruth shaking hands with John J. McGraw in 1923 to Thurman Munson holding his baby in his catcher's mitt. Of course, since we are now more than half way through the next fifty years of Yankee Stadium history, this is a book more for those who first remember seeing the ballpark in the Bronx when they went as kids in the Fifties and Sixties, before the renovation took out all those girders. This is a book of not just drama, but memories.