This past weekend I was in St. Louis for a memorial service for my mother, who died at the age of 88 this past November, and although I have been reluctant to do so, I have been persuaded to post my eulogy for her in its entirety:
Von McDaniel. I want to talk about Von McDaniel. We are here today to honor the memory and celebrate the life of my mother, Mary Gendler Zorensky, and when I think of her now the name Von McDaniel comes to mind.
Of course, as we know, my mother was a beautiful woman, whose great beauty did not diminish with age. Her beauty was matched by her intelligence, too, and the gentle, sweet quality of her temperament. Moreover, as we have heard, she was a woman who devoted herself not just to her family but to the many philanthropic and charitable causes that she held dear, including the Jewish Federation, various institutions of the City of Saint Louis, and this university.
But I do not want to talk about my mother’s many accomplishments and honors. I want to talk about Von McDaniel, a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals back in 1957. I want to talk about Von McDaniel because I still remember the experience of riding in the car with my mother and all my siblings on a warm night in June, back in 1957, when I was twelve years old. We sat in the car, listening to Harry Caray on the radio, as the Cardinals played the Brooklyn Dodgers, the defending National League champions, and Von McDaniel, a young 18-year-old kid, just out of high school, a $50,000 bonus baby, was brought in as a relief pitcher in the late innings of a very close game.
In those days, my mother often would pack all of us in a pale blue Ford Country Squire station wagon for long car rides on hot summer evenings, while our father was working late at the office. First, we would go out for a quick dinner and ice cream. Then, in the long twilight of early summer, my mother would drive west, taking us on meandering routes with no specific destination. There was no air conditioning in the car, no satellite radio, not even a cassette player, just melting ice cream, five restless, sweaty, squabbling kids, my mother at the wheel, and Harry Caray’s beer-soaked play-by-play voice on KMOX.
My mother would drive at a steady pace on winding roads, away from the main highways. She was a very good driver, too. Actually better, I think, than our father, in spite of his great love of the automobile. She handled the car well, and there we were, all packed in the Country Squire, with no idea where we were going, gazing out at the passing farmland as the sun slowly set on a hot summer night.
I am not sure all my siblings were giving as much attention to the game on the radio as I was, but I remember sitting in the front seat next to my mother. She had her eyes on the road ahead, but from the concerned look on her face I could see that she was caught up in the tense drama of the moment along with me.
It was the bottom of the ninth inning, and the Cardinals had a one-run lead, but the Dodgers had a man on base, and Duke Snider, Brooklyn’s great slugger, a mighty hitter whose baseball card I cherished, was coming to the plate to face this new kid, Von McDaniel. Yes, Von McDaniel, who was making only his second major league appearance after coming straight out of high school.
I was excited because McDaniel was pitching his fourth inning of shutout relief, and he actually was on the way to his first major league victory, but at that moment, as Duke Snider stepped into the batter’s box, both my mother and I feared the worst.
Of course, even then I knew about Von’s brother, Lindy, who already was an established Cardinal pitcher, and who with Von would eventually lead the Cardinals to a second-place finish in 1957. My mother knew who Lindy was, too. Indeed, she already had become an ardent fan of the Cardinals that year, with a considerable knowledge of the team, because she had been forced to listen to Cardinals games on the radio whenever my brother and I were around.
Perhaps, I shouldn’t say, “forced.” In truth, my mother chose to listen to the games because she knew it was something her sons cared about very much, and she became an enthusiastic Cardinal fan with an interest in baseball that stayed that with her for the rest of her life.
Yes, even in her later years, with all her children grown up, she still would watch the Cardinals play on television. But it isn’t just her appreciation of baseball that I want to talk about today.
There I was on that summer evening in 1957, anxiously listening as Duke Snider came to the plate, and my mother was there, too. She was present, caught up in the moment with me, as she always was when I needed her, and that really is the point of all this.
As the mother of five children, she had many demands placed on her and, in those days, not always a great deal of help. But somehow she managed. She was not an absentee parent. She was always there. Certainly, it was not always easy. She was a woman married to a very strong-willed man, a woman who tried to remain loyal to both her husband and her children when it was sometimes difficult to do so. But she did the best she could, and when I was a young boy growing up, she always was there for me, and for my siblings, as well.
She picked us up from school, helped us with our homework, tucked us in at night, and tried to amuse us on hot summer nights when our father was working. But she did much more than that. She also was genuinely eager to share our interests, like baseball, and to support us in our efforts to reach our goals. It was not always easy for her, but she was always there, listening to our hopes, helping us with our problems, cheering us on when we were successful, and commiserating with us when we were not.
That’s all I want to say. My mother was there -- a constant presence I could rely on when I was growing up, and back in June of 1957, when Von McDaniel faced Duke Snider and got him to ground out, she sighed with relief, as I did.
I still remember the look on her face at that moment. She smiled at me and nodded. It was a smile I will not forget.
