Bob Berman: ‘I Wouldn’t Change My Name For Anybody’

“STAND UP STRAIGHT!” the old gentleman barked at me. He was a former dance instructor, and cared about visitors’ postures. The man stood bent over, suffering from osteoarthritis, but every once in a while flashed a fleshy smile. At 88, his head was still covered with hair, mostly white. Back when his hair was black, during what they called the Great War, Bob Berman caught the Great One.

“Boy could he throw. My, my, what a man,” Berman said that day. His age made it difficult for him to remember much, but Walter Johnson was indelibly marked in his mind. “I loved that man. He was my God down there. Walter Johnson, I’d do anything for him. I followed him around like a dog follows his master.’

Bob Berman, in his day, was like the Moonlight Graham character in the movie Field of Dreams. Despite spending most of the season with the Washington Senators in 1918, he played in only two games. He never got an at-bat that whole season. But, at 19, he caught Johnson.

“Johnson, who would win 23 games that season and was possibly the best pitcher in baseball, was summoned in relief in the last inning against the Browns to try to protect a 6-4 lead,” wrote Ira Berkow in a New York Times column about Berman. “The Senators had rallied in the late innings and had used up their other two catchers — one was pinch-hit for, the other pinch-hit. No one was left to catch Johnson except the third string catcher, Robert Leon Berman.’

It was June 12, 1918. The box score showed that Berman — “Bergman,” it called him — had two putouts on Johnson strikeouts, and no miscues. It was the end of his major league career.

Berman lived most of his life in New York City, and on Long Island. But by June, 1987 he had moved to his daughters house in suburban Connecticut. That is where we met one afternoon. Sitting around the living room, his memory prodded by his daughter Barbara Berman Cassidy, Berman looked al the old black-and-while pictures of a handsome young man in a Senators uniform and tried, earnestly but with difficulty, to remember what it was like growing up n New York. “I was an honest-to-goodness Jewish youngster growing up on the lower cast side, he said. `Then we moved to the Bronx. We had our tough times. There were three of us, myself, my two sisters — we were the children.’

They grew up on Fulton Avenue across the street from Crotona Park, where Berman played baseball with neighborhood boys. “So that meant there were no houses there at all. All clear. Lovely!”

His family was not always as lovely. “I had a father, may the good lord rest his soul.” His father was a marble polisher, born in Russia. “He was a tough guy. Five-foot-eleven, weighed about 180, 190 pounds, with a temper that went with it. And he drank all the time.” When Berman was getting out of public school, his mother took him aside.

“Bobby, do me a favor,” she said. “I want you to promise me one thing. Don’t ever take a drink.”

Berman responded, “Mother, I understand. I shall never drink in my life.”

He paused. “You want to know something? I never have?” Another pause. “It used to gall him to think that his only begotten son, when it came to the holidays like Passover and so on, wouldn’t touch the wine.”

Berman’s mother never lived long enough to see him enter professional baseball. His parents’ first choice was for young Bobby to become a professional. “A professional, yes. A doctor, or a lawyer. And the next best thing would be [to go to] City College of New York (CCNY). My mother, she was expecting me to be a Latin teacher.”

But at Townsend-Harris High School, a Manhattan prep school for CCNY where one of his cousins had graduated, Berman preferred baseball to academics. “It was one of those real high-class schools,” Berman said. “Well, I wasn’t a very, very fine student; I was a good student. If I liked the subject, I studied for it.

“I wanted to get into [baseball], and here I was getting too much studying. You had to make a certain average, and you had to work hard, and I couldn’t see myself doing that.” He had a falling-out with a teacher, and left the school.

So he went to Evander Childs High School in the Bronx; they needed a catcher.

The Israelis, it is said, find the desert-blooming flower called the sabra to symbolize what they see as their national character: prickly on the outside, sweet inside. The sabra could also represent Bob Berman: prickly for those who crossed him — especially if they crossed his religion. Every few minutes, as if it were a mantra, Berman said something like, “Nobody was ever going to call me ‘Jew-this’ or `Jew-that’ and get away with it. He had to put up his hands.”

After Berman graduated high school he went directly into baseball. Barbara Cassidy asks her father who tried to sign him.

“Branch Rickey, wasn’t it?”

“Branch Rickey. That’s it.”

“What club was it?’

“He had some kind of club. I don’t recall it,”

“Anyway,” she continues, seeming having heard it several hundred times growing up, “he had this contract all signed with Branch Rickey. And then he asked you, ‘What is your profession of faith,’ or whatever. And you said, ‘Are you saying you do not want Jews on your team?’ And you took the contract and tore it up.”

“That’s right, that’s right. “Now I get that.”

“Which was very cute of him,” she said.

Berman’s most blatant incident of anti-Semitism occurred during a spring training trip with the Senators in New Bern, South Carolina.

“Oh, and this one guy, I’ll never forget. This one fellow, I forget his name now, he was a pitcher. A farm boy, about six-foot-two or -three. Something like that. Probably about 190 pounds. Big kid. And this is his first season with the ballclub, too. He’s trying to make the ballclub, just like I’m trying to make it.

“We’re in an intrasquad game and he got pummeled one inning. He’s coming back to the bench. The guys started to kid him, which is normal. He turns around and says, `What do you expect ii you have this Jew? With an epithet attached to it. ‘This catcher, he doesn’t know how to call ’em, or anything like that.’

“I didn’t say anything. I put my glove down, took my mask off took my chest protector off, took my shin guards off, and I said, ‘Pardon me? What did you say? I didn’t hear you.’

“And he repeated it again. And — Bing! — I hit him. Down he goes. Can’t get up. The fellows of the team are getting all excited. he says, ‘I didn’t mean it.’

“I said, ‘No. He’s going to apologize. Otherwise I’m going to beat the living life outta him. Nobody can do what he did to me. I don’t care who he is. I’ll take a beating, too’. And he was made to apologize.

“Walter was the one who interfered, nicely. He said, ‘Thataboy!’ And from then on the word went out. ‘Leave that kid alone. He’s got the guts to fight and he’ll fight.’ And I made the ballclub.”

Berman was sent to Jersey City after his season in the sun; he later became part of the first known all-Jewish battery, with Al Schacht, in his pre-Clown Prince of Baseball days. After a couple years in the International League, and played semipro ball until the mid 1930’s. “I was a star then,” Berman said.

One team he played for was the South Philadelphia Hebrews knows as the SPHAs. “We were, next to pro, the finest semipro [club] you could find anywhere,” he said. They barnstormed all over, playing teams both black and white. “I don’t know how the hell we went, but we traveled. Listen, we’re talking about 1918, 1919. Things were pretty tough. Money was scarce, and here you are a Jewish ball team. Strictly Jewish. Mama mia!”

Did the opposing players bench jockey him? He is asked. “I guess they did. I don’t know. I had resigned myself to go through life down there, learn to take certain things, and show them you’re not afraid to back what you say. I didn’t lie to them. Whatever I said was the truth. I was a different character from most of these people. I had more education than most of them. I had been to college and all that. I would take a beating, but [the other guy] would too.”

Berman refused to do what almost every other Jewish ballplayer would have done in that era: change his name. “I wouldn’t change my name for anybody. I was born Robert L. Berman. That was it. And if you don’t like it you can do the next best thing.”

He married Dorothy Schrampf in 1926; their marriage lasted until her death, 50 years later. (Berman did not keep up Jewish observance past his childhood.) Meanwhile, a CCNY degree in hand, he began to teach — not Latin, but physical education. He spent some time teaching and coaching at Stuyvesant High School, the bulk of his post-baseball career was spent at Franklin K. Lane School in Brooklyn. One of the students he coached, Bob Grim, made the Yankees in the late 1950s. At one point Berman introduced the art of ballroom dancing into the New York City schools, and continued teaching it for years. (He even taught for a while at Arthur Murray’s dance studio.) He retired from Lane in 1968.

When I saw him in 1987 he said he still exercised every day, despite an arthritic hip. “It’s tough, but it’s up to the individual, that’s all. The good thing that helped me [was that] I loved to dance.” Thus his concern with my less-than-perfect posture.

The next time I saw him, five months later, he spent most of his time at a daycare center. The man had lost more of his memory, but none of his charm. He was overjoyed when I brought him a Washington Senators cap.

Less than a year later, in August 1988, Bob Berman died, four months after moving into a nursing home and five months short of his ninetieth birthday. The newspaper ran a death notice, a little bit smaller than the box score they had printed back in 1918.

“I was getting $150 a month,” he had said a year before he died. “And — listen to this — I would have played for nothing! Just to be playing ball there. I was in seventh heaven. I was in the major leagues and nobody can take that away from me.”

He was right. Nobody can.