On Oct. 1, 2015, Dave Hall’s best friend was murdered. But nobody in the tight-knit community of Glide, Oregon, could stop by his place to console him, because Dave’s house had burned to the ground twelve days earlier. “It was a log home with a shake roof, and we hadn’t had rain in four months,” he tells me, as we sit on a bluff looking over Oregon’s famed North Umpqua. “The fire inspector said it was the hottest house fire he’d ever seen. Said it melted things he’d never seen melted.” Dave burned both feet trying to rescue his cat from the fire. He didn’t succeed. “I was certain that would be the saddest day of my life,” he says. “Then Larry died two weeks later.”
Lawrence Peter Levine was born on April Fools’ Day 1948, to a Jewish family in the Bronx. He was the second child of Marion and Eddie Levine, and he lived with his parents, grandmother, and older sister, Joanne, on the third floor of a six-story apartment building. Larry attended public grade school at PS 105 where, according to Joanne, only twenty-nine of the thousand children at the school were non-Jews.
Being a family from the Bronx, everyone was a Yankees fans. Eddie worked as a dress salesman at a showroom in downtown Manhattan, and through a chance encounter, met and became friends with another Eddie—five-time World Series winner Eddie Lopat, who spent twelve years as a major league pitcher, most notably for the Yanks. Lopat pitched in the 1951 All-Star game, and in 1953, led the American League in both winning percentage and ERA. He was also Larry Levine’s godfather.
So, naturally, Larry became a ballboy, for the Yankees, during that era. He went to many games with his dad, getting to meet greats like Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto—all idols of every boy in the Bronx. This exceptional childhood experience gave Larry an early love of baseball that he would carry with him the rest of his life.
Larry’s family left the Bronx and lived briefly in the largely Jewish suburb of New Rochelle, before departing for California when Larry was twelve. Fifty years later, as a writer, Larry talked of his childhood in a 2011 essay for : “I was raised a city boy—NYC, West Los Angeles. A golf course was about as close to nature as I got. I didn’t catch my first fish until I was in my early 30s, on the banks of the Rogue where Fruitdale Creek comes in, below the house where I lived. Possibly I had been reading Hemingway—, maybe, where the young Hemingway is always fishing one European
