I carried mail on the south side of Milwaukee for thirty-one years, and on every route I ever had, somebody had a ballgame on. A radio on a porch, a TV through a screen door, a man on a stepladder with a transistor in his shirt pocket. You could walk a whole route in July and never miss a pitch.

I retired in April. My wife said, Walter, you have been telling those stories for forty years, write them down before you forget which ones are true. So I bought a computer from my nephew and here we are. Some of these happened. Some of them I made up. A few I made up so long ago I can't remember which is which anymore, and that, my wife says, is what a writer is.

The seventh game of the 1957 World Series was played on Thursday, October 10, in the afternoon, in New York, and I was fifteen years old and sitting in fifth-period American History at a high school on the south side of Milwaukee, and there was nothing on God's earth I could do about it.

Our teacher was a man named Mr. Kowalczyk who wore the same brown suit every day and had never, in the six weeks we'd known him, cracked a smile. About ten minutes into class the door opened and the janitor rolled in a radio on a library cart, and Mr. Kowalczyk plugged it in and turned it on and said, "Today we will be studying history." That was the only joke I ever heard him tell. It was a good one.

Burdette was pitching. He'd already beaten the Yankees twice in that Series, and here he was again on two days' rest, and every one of us knew his arm had to be hanging by a thread. You could hear the crowd in the Stadium on the radio, that big hollow New York sound, and you could hear thirty-one kids in a classroom in Milwaukee not breathing.

We scored four in the third. A boy named Eddie Brandt stood up on his desk and Mr. Kowalczyk told him to sit down, and he did, and then Mr. Kowalczyk stood up on his own chair, and nobody ever believed us afterward, but I was there, and so was Eddie, and so were twenty-nine other people.

The bell rang for sixth period in the middle of the seventh inning. Nobody moved. The next teacher came to the door to see why nobody had come to her class, and she stayed too.

When it was over, five to nothing, a shutout, the Milwaukee Braves champions of the world, I don't remember anything that anybody said. I remember the sound. It started in our room and then it was the whole school, and then it was out the windows, car horns, church bells, a man across the street banging a pot with a spoon. That night the whole city went downtown. My father, who never went anywhere, took us. We didn't do anything. We just stood on the sidewalk with everybody else and honked at nothing, and my father, a man who did not hug, put his arm around my shoulders and left it there.

I have been a Braves fan and then a Brewers fan for forty-two years since, through the Braves leaving for Atlanta, which I have not entirely forgiven, and some Brewers seasons I won't discuss. We've never had another day like that one. That's all right. You only need one.