His words still hang around
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This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from December 1982.
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HOLLYWOOD - When Casey Stengel was fired from the New York Yankees in 1960, he uttered those wry words of lugubrious resignation: "I was 70 years old, and I'll never make the mistake of being 70 years old again."
Pure Stengel. And as spoken by Pat O'Brien, the lines have that crackling edge that only an actor famed for his portrayal of football's Knute Rockne could offer in this portrait of the baseball legend named Charles Dillon "Casey" Stengel. I have just heard the tape of O'Brien's terrific one-man show (save for a contribution by broadcaster Jack Brickhouse) put together by William Brashler from the Stengel pronouncements and called "Casey: Which Is Myself."
"Casey: Which Is Myself" is a great joy to hear, it is part of the National Radio Theater series of dramatizations of classic and contemporary drama.
Here's O'Brien as Casey, speaking, that wondrous tongue called Stengelese and discussing his childhood: "I listened to my father because he was my father and also because he made a living spraying water on the streets to keep down the dust, and I thought any man who could sell something to people that they could get for free was worth listening to."
And here's Casey on the subject of his catcher Yogi Berra: "I don't like to have a catcher looking at me all the time to get me to call the next pitch. With Yogi, I didn't have to do that and people didn't believe it. Yogi said to me, 'You can observe a lot just by watching.' And that's very true." And Casey on the subject of age: "Just say I'm a man that's been around for a while, a man that's been up and down, a man that's played with the dead ball and the lively ball and lived to tell the difference. Why, most people my age are dead now and you can look it up."
And further from Casey: "I started out when I was 35, which is old for a player, which is young for a manager. Now that might confuse the youth of America, as age usually does."
And when Casey was inducted into the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y.: "I'm thankful I had baseball knuckles and couldn't become a dentist."
Here's Casey discussing his amazin' New York Mets: "A lot of times I'd sit on the bench and I'd look down the row and I'd ask myself, 'Can't anybody here play this game?"
Casey could play. He could indeed in his younger days. In one World Series, playing for the New York Giants, Casey hit an insidethe-park home run and Damon Runyon, that master stylist, wrote it up the next day as follows:
"This is the way old Casey Stengel ran yesterday afternoon running his home run home.
"This is the way old Casey Stengel ran running his home run home to a Giant victory by a score of 5 to 4 in the first game of the World Series of 1923.
"This is the way old Casey Stengel ran running his home run home when two were out in the ninth and the score was tied and the ball still bounding inside the Yankee yard.
"This is the way - "His mouth wide open.
"His warped old legs bending beneath him at every stride. "His arms flying back and forth like those of a man swimming the crawl stroke. "His flanks heaving, his breath whistling, his head far back. "Yankee infielders, passed by old Casey Stengel as he was running his home run home, say Casey was muttering to himself, adjuring himself to greater speed as a jockey mutters to his horse in a race, saying, 'Go on, Casey, go on.' "The warped old legs, twisted and bent by many a year of baseball campaigning, just barely held out under old Casey Stengel until he reached the plate, running his home run home. "Then he collapsed."
