Gooney Bird’s Long Journey to the Big Apple

(Zell's Pinstripe Blog)

First off...If you are wondering who “Gooney Bird” is..that is Don Larsen. This is how he got that nickname.

Larsen also had a reputation as a partier. Stengelonce said of Larsen, “The only thing he fears is sleep.” When Larsen crashed his car into a lightpole in the middle of the night during spring training, after curfew, Stengel quipped, “He must have went out to mail a letter.” Larsen’s teammates gave the gangly right-hander the nickname, “Gooney Bird.”    

I thought this was a hilarious story. Not fun for Mr. Larsen, but it was definitely fun to read. Don is 79 years-old, so you could imagine that this wasn’t an easy trip for him.

The NY Times: Trip Down Memory Lane Becomes Weeklong Odyssey for Don Larsen

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It was supposed to be a routine journey for Don Larsen, a trip from his home in Idaho to New York and back two days later. Larsen traveled east two weeks ago to tape an interview for the MLB Network about pitching a perfect game for the Yankees in the 1956 World Series.

An excursion that Larsen figured would take about 60 hours turned into a six-day odyssey because of brutal weather on both coasts. Larsen waited in line for 11 hours at one airport, cursed a borrowed cellphone after it died and wondered if he would make it home for Christmas.

But Larsen was stranded with countless other travelers whose plans were scuttled in mid-December. Four days into Larsen’s jaunt, Andrew Levy, the sports marketing agent who helped plan the trip, went almost 24 hours without hearing from him. So he called the police in Seattle and asked if an incident report had been filed on a 79-year old white male. Fortunately, none had been.

The interview was the seamless part of the trip. Two days after arriving in New York, Larsen and Yogi Berra, the Hall of Famer who caught his perfect game, gathered at the network’s studios in Secaucus, N.J., on Dec. 19, a Friday, to watch a film of the perfect game and discuss their memories with Bob Costas. The game and the interviews will air on the network’s first day of programming on Thursday.

Snow blanketed the area as Larsen was reminiscing about the only perfect game in World Series history, so he never trekked to Newark Airport for his scheduled flight to Seattle. Larsen, who had left his hotel that morning, returned to Manhattan and checked into a different hotel. He had another flight scheduled for Saturday afternoon.

Larsen took a limousine to Newark on Saturday and waited for several hours. After the flight was canceled, Larsen was told that his best chance to get to Seattle was to fly out of Kennedy Airport on Sunday. Larsen switched to his third hotel in three days.

On Sunday, Larsen went to Kennedy and had a “Groundhog Day” experience as another flight was canceled. If Larsen hurried, he was told, he could get a flight out of Newark. Levy quickly arranged for a car service to take Larsen to Newark. Finally, Larsen’s flight took off.

From Seattle, Larsen said he started to feel closer to home. All he needed to do was hop a flight to Spokane, Wash., where he had left his car, and then make the one-hour drive to his home in Hayden Lake, Idaho. He was so close. Or was he?

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Click on the NY Times article to read the rest of the story…

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“I’ve never had problems like that before,” Larsen said. “The storms came in and, all of a sudden, I was stuck. I don’t like to be stuck anywhere.”

“You got no place to go,” Larsen said. “What are you going to do?”

“I didn’t even want the phone,” he said.

“I had to go to the bathroom,” he said.

Next Christmas, Larsen said, he is not traveling anywhere.

“You won’t see me back there in ’09,” Larsen said. “Not unless they do it in Hawaii.”

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