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time—Bruce threw himself into the Indians, his team in Freehold’s Little League, coming off the bench to play right field. Bruce was perhaps more enthusiastic about baseball than he was talented. Jimmy Leon (now Mavroleon), who shared teams with Bruce for years, still recalls the time when a high fly ball floated across the summer sky toward his teammate’s outstretched glove. Money in the bank. “But then it just hit him in the head. So it was kind of like that.” Still, Bruce was proud to be a part—no matter how small—of the Indians’ undefeated season in 1961. Which became slightly less perfect when the team lost the championship series by coming up short in two straight games against the Cardinals, a team coached by Freehold barber Barney DiBenedetto. 5
    But no matter how sweet the boyhood moments, Bruce still had his old man’s fragile psyche to deal with. “You couldn’t access him, you couldn’t get to him, period,” says Bruce, recalling his many attempts to talk to his father. “You’d get forty seconds in, and you know that thing that happens when it’s not happening? That would happen.” When dinner was over and the dishes were done, the kitchen became Doug’ssolitary kingdom. With the lights out and the table holding only a can of beer, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and an ashtray, Doug passed the hours alone in the darkness.
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    In February 1962 Adele gave birth to her and Douglas’s third child, a daughter they named Pamela. The baby’s arrival required the family to pick up stakes and move to a slightly larger duplex at 68 South Street, in a white house (equipped with both a furnace and running hot water) nestled up against a Sinclair filling station. Absent the burdens of history and expectation, baby Pam’s sweet presence was strong enough to evaporate the gloomy fatalism that defined so much of Doug’s family experience. The thirteen-year-old Bruce proved an especially doting big brother, so while it was officially Ginny’s responsibility to keep the baby changed, fed, and peaceful, Bruce was, by all accounts, more attuned to the baby’s needs. No matter what else Bruce was doing, the sound of his baby sister crying triggered immediate action. “I really took care of her,” Bruce says. “I did everything, the diapers and all that. So we were very close when she was very young.”
    One day in 1962 Fred and Alice were chatting with Adele in her new South Street kitchen, visiting with the baby, and waiting for Doug to come home from his night shift at the plastics plant. Saying he felt a little under the weather, Fred went upstairs to take a nap. When Adele went up to check on him an hour later, the old man was cold and still; obviously dead. Running downstairs to tell Alice the terrible news, the older lady responded with a nod. Deciding to hold off from doing anything else until Doug came home, they sat together in the kitchen until the door opened. Doug responded with the same absence of emotion his mother had shown. He paused for a moment, said, “Oh, okay,” checked his pockets for coins, and then went to a pay phone to call the funeral home and alert a few relatives. When Bruce heard the news after coming home from school, he became hysterical. “It was the end of the world,” he says. “But we didn’t talk about my grandfather’s death. He was probably about sixty-two, sixty-three, or sixty-five when he went. I was quite close to him, but you never know how to react as a child. I remember the funeral, the wake, and all those things. But it wasn’t like today. Everyone was still . . . just different.”
    With the Randolph Street house close to being condemned, the widowed Alice moved in with her son’s family. She spent most of her days helping care for Pam and also took the opportunity to shower more adoration over her fourteen-year-old grandson. Once again, she took to laying out his clothes in the morning, making his favorite treats, and glowing