Saturday, August 18, 2007

40 YEARS AGO

Monday, August 13, 2007

An American In Paris, 1967

Sox Fan Nancy Macmillan recounts her 1967 story:

In a Red Sox season that was, as the DVD has it, impossible to forget, my most vivid and enduring memory originated not in Fenway Park, but 3,000 miles away.

The trip to Europe my husband and I had planned as our last getaway before our first child arrived in December coincided with the end of the regular season—bad timing! When we made the arrangements, the RedSox didn’t look like contenders for the pennant, and once they started their surge, it was too late to change the dates of our trip.

So here we were in our funky hotel room in Paris, the morning after the season ended. Before the Internet and other wonders of modern technology, news of baseball games was scarce on the other side of the Atlantic. As we drank our coffee in bed, we speculated about the weekend just past. Could the RedSox have won both Saturday and Sunday and taken the pennant? At first it seemed unlikely, but then we decided they could have won, and we needed to find out as soon as possible.

But how? Finally, one of us thought of the American Express office a few blocks away. Surely someone there would know all the important news from the U.S. We got dressed and proceeded to American Express. It turned out all the employees were French, but they had the information we and the other 20 or so Americans in the office were eager for. When they told us the RedSox had won the pennant, we total strangers hugged and danced and whooped and hollered, to the puzzlement of the office staff—an early manifestation of RedSox Nation.

We were back in Boston in time for the World Series, and that was wonderful, but what I’ll always remember is the celebration for the Impossible Dream team in Paris.