Vin Scully was all over my living room floor for a few months, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled.
To be truthful, it wasn’t Scully himself sprawled on the carpet. My husband was collaborating on a book based on photographs taken by Barney Stein, who was the Brooklyn Dodgers’ team photographer from 1937 through 1957, and images of a young Scully were among the photographs scattered over our floor. How to choose which ones to publish, when there were dozens more wonderful photos than there could be pages in the book?
Not every photo made it into “Through a Blue Lens: The Brooklyn Dodger photographs of Barney Stein,” but every photo in the book is a gem. There’s Carl Erskine — blessedly still with us at age 95 — Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges. They were captured in their youth, at their athletic peak. Growing up in Brooklyn after the team left for Los Angeles in 1958, I’d heard stories about the hapless Bums. These photos added a new dimension to those stories, made them more vivid, more real.
