Not Such A Tough Cookie

Cookie spent 1933 with Oakland, then was signed by Pittsburgh. Three years later he was traded to Brooklyn. "He was a skinny, awkward kid then," his good friend Charley Dressen remember?. "He ran funny, sort of waddled, but he got there quick. He was a quiet fellow. He'd sit in the dugout, slouched down, maybe daydreaming. Then he'd say something and make everybody laugh."

"Cookie was a character," says a newspaperman who covered the Dodgers then. "He walked funny and always needed a shave. His shirt would be hanging out of his pants, and he wore his hat at a weird angle. Cookie would just sit there, not realizing he looked any different than the next guy."

"Oh, I used to know it," Lavagetto said recently. "I used to enjoy wearing one sock up, the other down. I don't know why exactly. I just enjoyed it."

Cookie also decided he would enjoy flying. He and his pal Dolph Camilli signed up for lessons at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. "We'd get up early, get out to the airfield at 9 and be back at Ebbets Field in plenty of time," says Cookie. "We flew Piper Cubs. I'll never forget when the trainer made me put the plane in a spin for the first time. I saw houses and land, then clouds and trees and more clouds—was I scared! The trainer says, 'Want to do it again?' I told him, 'Hell no.' "

Soon after both players got their pilots' licenses, Larry MacPhail, owner of the Dodgers, found out about it and, characteristically, exploded. "One day Durocher stood up in front of the whole team," says Cookie. "He said that Camilli and Lavagetto are hereby fined $500 apiece for activities detrimental to the ball club."

Bizarre Brooklyn

Nothing that happened in Brooklyn before the war was quite as bizarre as Jack Pierce's visits to Ebbets Field. Pierce, a Brooklyn tavern owner, developed a great affection for Lavagetto. He watched every game from behind the visitors' dugout, because it was close to third base, Cookie's position. He used to hire two taxis to go to the ball park, one for himself and his friends, the other for his balloons, banners and buckets of champagne and ice.

"He'd spread those banners out over the rail," says Lavagetto. "Each one would have 'Cookie' written on it. Then he'd start releasing the balloons. I think they were filled with helium. And, of course, they'd drink their firewater."

Pierce would sit there throughout the game yelling "Cookieee! Cookieee!" The story goes that in one clutch situation with Lavagetto at bat, Pierce was yelling so much that Lavagetto had to step away from the plate and tell him to shut up. Cookie then lined out a hit to win the game. Everybody was happy, but when Cookie and some of his teammates returned to their Brooklyn hotel, there was Jack Pierce with tears streaming down his face. His feelings were crushed.

It should not be overlooked that Lavagetto was a fine player. For the most part he batted second in the Brooklyn lineup, and there were few players better at slapping the ball to right field behind the runner. "He was a great two-strike hitter," recalls Whitlow Wyatt, the ace of the Dodgers' pitching staff before the war. "With men on base he was about the toughest man to get out that we had on the club."