Sport: Big Man from Nicetown

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From the first, this year promised to be different. The Dodgers started so fast that the whole league has been chasing them hopelessly ever since. With a ten-game and an eleven-game winning streak, they racked up the big lead that they have been hanging on to steadily. They have been equal to all their troubles. Out of long experience. Manager Walter ("Smokey") Alston knew just how to discipline Big Don Newcombe when he kicked up a fuss about pitching batting practice (TIME, May 23); Big Newk has been pitching (18 won, i lost) and hitting (.376 at week's end) with astonishing skill ever since. With Pee Wee Reese, Junior Gilliam and Carl Furillo all doing their share, there is hardly a chance that the team can pick up its old habit of relaxing and folding in the stretch. Above all, Campy is back in shape. For two weeks the Dodgers fretted while he recovered from a loose bone spur in his knee; now he functions with his old, Buddha's efficiency. Last week he was back behind the plate to help a couple of rookie pitchers, Don Bessent and Roger Craig, hold off the opposition and give the Dodgers' sore-armed veterans a rest. At bat, he is once more teaming up with Centerfielder Duke Snider to make one of the toughest one-two hitting combinations since Ruth and Gehrig. Campy settles into the batter's box with sure confidence—legs spread, left foot in the bucket so that he is half facing the pitcher—and he rattles out base hits, and moves with the swift authority that is the secret dream of American youth.

Up from the Milk Route. Roy Campanella has been nurturing that dream ever since he was 15, when he started playing baseball for pay in a North Phil adelphia neighborhood known as Nicetown, where he was born 34 years ago. From his Sicilian father, piano-legged Roy inherited his proportions and a capacity for enjoying hard work. While he supported a wife and five hungry kids on the pro ceeds of a vegetable wagon. John Cam panella still managed to save enough cash to chip in with his brothers and open a chain of neighborhood groceries. From his Negro mother. Roy learned piety. Al though his father was a Roman Catholic, his mother took him to Baptist church, raised him on the precepts of the 23rd Psalm. Today. Campy sees nothing un usual in the fact that he sends his own old est son to a Presbyterian Sunday school simply because it fields a smart "Little League" baseball team.

As a roly-poly youngster. Campy sold newspapers, cut grass, shined shoes. Mornings he got up at 2:30 to help his older brother Lawrence run a milk route. By 5:30 he was back in bed; at 8 he was on his way to school. Always, young Roy's income was turned over to his mother, and always, his allowance was spent on movies or a ball game. Shibe Park (now Connie Mack Stadium) was within walk ing distance of the Campanella home, and any afternoon there was a game. Roy was there, too. For a quarter a kid could get an unofficial bleachers seat on the roof of one of the houses adjoining the field.

Most kids on the narrow Nicetown streets played a form of stickball; not Roy Campanella. His big hands felt awk ward on a slim broomstick. He played honest sand-lot baseball with the Nicetown Colored Athletic Club or the Nicetown Giants. Soon he was good enough for American Legion ball with Loudenslager Post No. 366.