Oreland author to speak on the glory days at Shibe Park

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When Jack Rooney was growing up, major league baseball was a neighborhood phenomenon. Ballparks were not the sprawling stadiums they later became, surrounded by oceans of parking lot, but compact affairs that occupied a city block, often with working-class row homes across the street.

Jack Rooney, 89, professor emeritus of psychology at La Salle University, grew up in one of those homes. His was on 20th Street in North Philadelphia, and his neighborhood sports center was Shibe Park, home of the Philadelphia Athletics.

“At the time, in the early years, people who lived on 20th Street had a great view of the ballpark,” Rooney said Monday, speaking by phone from his office at La Salle, where he still works as a part-time administrator. “They charged people to watch games from their houses. As a kid growing up there, seeing the games, seeing the fans, of course, and also selling lemonade and hot dogs and parking cars and all that sort of thing, it was an experience.”

Rooney, who today lives in Oreland, has recounted his experiences in a memoir he calls “Bleachers in the Bedroom: The Swampoodle Irish and Connie Mack,” which he will discuss Sept. 30 at the Free Library of Springfield Township.

His talk could go one of two ways, depending on the preferences of his audience, he said. He might focus on what went on inside the stadium during the 1920s and ’30s, or he might focus on his own life during the same period. The baseball angle would probably be more factually reliable, because, as Rooney confesses, he has taken some liberties with his personal stories.

“It’s basically a memoir, but it’s not factual,” he said. “Well, what I’ve done is taken instances that happened from my past and embellished them a bit … The baseball information is factual, but the incidents I say happened to me, I’ve taken a writer’s license.

“What I try to do is give people a sense of what it was like growing up in an urban neighborhood during that time.”

One thing that really did happen, he said, was that his aunt’s boyfriend served as Franklin Roosevelt’s chauffeur the day the president delivered a speech at Shibe Park. While FDR addressed the crowd in the stands, the boyfriend drove his friends around the neighborhood in the president’s car.

“Swampoodle” refers to the part of North Philadelphia around the Allegheny Avenue railroad, although, to Rooney, it is as much a state of mind as a physical locale, defined largely by its Irish identity.

“There was [also] a section of Washington, D.C., that was called Swampoodle,” he said. “Neighborhoods in those days were kind of ethnic neighborhoods.” Continued...

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