Why 1941?

For my debut entry on this blog, I just wanted to say a quick thank-you to everyone who's expressed an interest in reading "1941," and all of you who've already pre-ordered. I'd like this to be a regular conversation between me and you, talking about anything that needs to be talked about, whether it's about 1941 or 2007.

People have asked me all the time why I was drawn to this subject, and at first glance it may seem as if 1941 was selected randomly from a hat (or so says Publisher's Weekly, which also throws the word "macabre" around as if this were an homage to Stephen King. That, I can assure you, it is not).

Really, the germ for the idea came from a conversation I had with Phil Rizzuto in an elevator at Yankee Stadium during the 2001 World Series. As you may recall, there were a lot of heavy hearts everywhere in the city, still, during those final days of October and early days of November. There was still a smoldering ruin in lower Manhattan. People seemed ambivalent about caring too deeply about sports yet, with 9/11 still so fresh in the memory.

It was Scooter who made the parallel about 1941. He'd been a rookie that year, had received his draft notice in spring training and realized that for all anyone knew, this could be it for life as we'd always known it. "It was a terrifying time to be young," Rizzuto told me, "because if you were healthy enough to hit a baseball you were certainly healthy enough to shoot a rifle."

Then he said the thing that stuck with me most.

"You read the sports section a lot," he said, "because you were afraid of what you'd see in the other parts of the paper."

And really, in our world of 2007, there's a lot of the same to explain our national fascination with sports. It really is one of the last legal narcotics, a way to separate ourself from the real and the surreal of every day life, away from Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and also the horrors of war and suffering and the daily pulse of human tragedy. New York dived into that 2001 World Series as a healing salve, same as New Orleans turned to this year's Saints as a way to overcome Katrina, same as San Francisco and Oakland used the 1989 World Series as a balm from the shattering earthquake that interrupted that series for ten days.

What made 1941 unique, though, was the fact that every day, it seemed, someone legendary was doing something legendary. DiMaggio. Williams. Louis. Greenberg. Even Bobby Riggs, who'd later gain lasting infamy, was one of sport's genuine heroes in 1941. I can tell you, as a guy who spent a lot of time reading old newspapers, it was a heck of a time to be alive, because you could be scared stiff one minute and thrilled to goose bumps the next. I wanted to capture that in this book; I hope I did; I hope you enjoy.

Till next time. Thanks for reading.

Mike Vaccaro