David Schacker has kept the tattered black-and-white photo for 72 years, now buried deep in a closet at his home near downtown Toronto. A few days ago, shortly after Gil Hodges was elected to the Hall of Fame, he decided to take on a new look. The image has lost its former luster, but its excitement still shines through. The bright-eyed child, just a month away from turning 11, smiles brightly as he shakes hands with a local legend.
Hodges went to St. Petersburg in December 1949 to visit a group of young boys recovering from polio. Visited Giles Hospital. He arrived dressed in full Santa attire, complete with beard, hat and boots, but the disguise wasn’t fooling anyone. The boys have spent the past few months huddled around their 12 ½ inch Stromberg-Carlson television set. When they weren’t doing physical therapy each day, they were watching the Brooklyn Dodgers play. And Hodges, who was selected to his first All-Star game that year, appeared in 156 of them. They knew who he was the moment he walked through those doors.
Hodges walked up to Schacker and held out his hand. Years later, Schacker still remembers how big the first baseman’s hands were. But up close, how gentle Hodges looked. This guy was an All-Star, he had just driven in 115 times and had 170 hits. He was beaming as he sat in Schacker’s hospital bed in Crown Heights.
To say it was a surreal experience would be an understatement. The past few months have been difficult for Schacker, a talented tennis player and fast runner. Instead of hitting a ball on the baseline or running the streets of Bay Ridge, he had to spend hours doing physical therapy every day. Having a good time wasn’t a 10-year-old’s idea. But from September 1949 to June 1950, that was his reality.
The Dodgers made those nine months bearable. Schacker was an avid fan who grew up on the team starting in 1946, which included Pete Reiser, Dixie Walker and Kirby Higbe. He had never had a TV, so it was exciting for him to watch his favorite players hit, run and steal live in real time. Hodges was only at the beginning of his Hall of Fame career, but Schacker knew he was not only talented, but special. He was a player who lived in Brooklyn year-round. The Dodgers first baseman could be seen walking his dog down the block. He could be seen buying cigarettes at the corner store or buying milk on his way back from the ballpark. In many ways, Hodges felt like one of them. He was a neighbor, a familiar face, a friend.
“Gil Hodges’ surprise visit was more like that of a respected fellow Brooklynite than that of a remote superstar descending from Mount Olympus like Joe DiMaggio,” Schacker said. “It was a unique time in a unique place with a unique team.”
Compassion was at the heart of Hodges and even permeated his game. He knew his role in hitting the ball from distance and did it well. For a first baseman, getting a runner out of third base was more important than batting average. To this day, he holds the record for most sacrifice flies in a single season with 19 from 1954.
But it wasn’t enough for him to help the team. Hodges also felt a personal responsibility to help his community. In this age of multi-million dollar contracts, it’s hard to imagine an All-Star first baseman driving the mailman he recently met to his home in Mill Basin or donating $500 (a significant sum). 1950s salary) was sent to a damaged Jewish day school. It is even more difficult to imagine that this behavior was done quietly and not out of a desire for self-promotion. But by all accounts, his intentions were pure.
“He couldn’t drive past a bus stop or leave someone without giving them a ride,” said Mort Zachter, who wrote his biography. “Most people would have driven by, but he stopped.
“There are probably countless examples of him doing these kinds of things that we don’t know about, acts of kindness that will be forgotten over time.”
For 72 years, Schacker has kept his black-and-white photographs close at hand. He survived the 500-mile move from Brooklyn to Toronto and all the stops in between. He keeps it not only to commemorate unexpected acts of kindness, but also to remind us that sometimes seemingly devastating changes in life can get us to our destination.
St. Even after his release from Giles, Schacker’s diagnosis made his daily life uncomfortable. A former left-handed stickball player, he had to quickly learn how to throw and bat with his right hand because the disease had damaged his left arm and hand. He could no longer race, and was forced to find a new hobby, which led him to take up his writing. He became the sports editor for his high school newspaper and eventually attended Cornell University.
There he met his friend Dick Hampton. One night in 1962, Schacker and Hampton were playing a board game at Figaro, a Greenwich Village coffeehouse, when two women from Vassar College walked in. Hampton happened to know one of them. The other, Maxine, became Schacker’s wife of 58 years.
“Suppose I went to another school on an athletic scholarship,” he said. “I never would have gone to Cornell to meet someone who was with me when I met Maxine in Greenwich Village years later. One change in your life can change everything that follows.”
Maxine and David moved to Toronto in 1973., David worked in advertising and Maxine worked as an artist. In 1996, she founded a private college called Max the Mutt College of Animation, Art & Design, and David worked on the public relations and marketing side of the business. It later expanded and became a government-recognized private vocational college in 1999. Max the Mutts graduates have worked at Pixar, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Warner Bros. Works at companies like Games, etc. David retired in 2005, but Maxine remains as one of her co-directors.
In 2017, David achieved a career highlight by publishing his first children’s book, “The Life and Times of Sir Reginald Tubb,” about an abandoned bathtub taken home by a family of bears. He is currently working on his next book project.
Schacker often reminisces about his days in Brooklyn. For a time, the only Golden Ages he knew were the ones he read about in history books: the era of Ruth and Gehrig, DiMaggio and Hodges. He attends games at Ebbets Field and plays at St. Louis. While watching the game on Giles’ small television, it never occurred to him that he might be living in a golden age. But he said he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
“Maxine and I are an unbeatable team,” he said. “If I hadn’t been diagnosed in 1949, my life would have taken a completely different direction. Maybe you went to a different college, maybe you had different friends, maybe you were a great athlete. “But maybe my life wasn’t as happy as it used to be.”
