Irv Schreiber is always trying to teach me Yiddish words, as in, I’m getting bupkis for writing this appreciation of him. But he didn’t have to teach me the word that best applies to him, which is mensch. A mensch is someone of consequence, someone to admire and emulate.
As far as I’m concerned, Irv comes by the title of mensch from the years I’ve known him on the softball field, playing the game the way it is meant to be played.
He learned how to play ball on the streets of New York, playing punchball and stickball in the Bronx and Brooklyn. “Punchball is where you use your fist,” he explains. “If our mothers weren’t looking, we’d steal a broom and cut off the head and there was our stick. We used to measure how good we were by how many sewers we could hit the ball past. I was a two-sewer hitter.” Is that good? “You bet it’s good!”
He played some high school ball. He pitched, but fast-pitch, not the slow-pitch style he later learned for senior softball. “We had a great pitcher named Frank Ciffoni. I watched him and said, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ He had a signed contract with the New York Yankees. He was killed in Germany in 1944. Never made it to the Yanks.”
As for Irv’s stickball career: “We didn’t care who won or lost, we just loved the game. Our fathers, though, they put money up. Up to $3,000. One of them was a bookie, a bicycle bookie, meaning he rode his bike to his bettors. My father used to bet with him.
“We had a pretty good group of softball players on our block, but when a team from Jersey came in and played us, they had a black kid who could pitch windmill and knucklers and do crazy things with the ball so you couldn’t hit it, and after that the fathers didn’t bet so much.”
On softball, anyway. “We were playing on this clay field where usually they played tennis when the nets were up, and the fathers would go into this little hut they had there and play craps. They had a floating crap game in Brooklyn. It was Tuesday nights in our apartment. The fistfuls of currency in their hands! They played so much the cupboards in our kitchen were pocked by dice marks.
“My father was a well paid dress designer. He worked on Broadway near where it converges with 7th Avenue. In the winter my father would go to Florida to bet on the dogs. When he moved out to California, he used to go to Gardena and play lowball. That was his game.
“Me and my brother saw how much money our father lost gambling. My inheritance was an old shoeshine rag of his. That and some bills. The thing is, I’ve still got that rag, and he’s been gone for 44 years.”
Irv grew up to be very careful with money—an accountant, in fact. “These days, the banks are disappearing, but I’ve protected my money,” he says. “Most of it is in CDs.” A word to the wise.
The Navy interrupted Irv’s college career and put him in a sailor suit from January 1944 to June 1946. He trained as a radioman, then as a Huff Duff expert. Huff Duff was HFDF, which was High-Frequency Direction Finders. The Huff Duff Teams would calibrate ships’ direction finders, the gizmos that allowed the USN to locate German ships when they sent radio transmissions.
“I loved the Navy,” Irv claims. “I met a lot of nice guys from different parts of the country. I remember this fella from the South who wouldn’t wash or bathe. We used to throw him in the shower. I trained in Geneva, N.Y., then got stationed in Norfolk, where they had bars with signs saying, ‘No dogs or sailors.’ I went into the Navy at 183 pounds and came out at 183 pounds. I loved Navy food. One of the schools I went to was in Portland, Maine, and they served a lot of baked beans. The Navy served baked beans all over. My wife serves baked beans to me to this day.”
After his discharge, Irv went back to New York and enrolled at Brooklyn College. He pitched for the school’s baseball team. He started and won one game. In another game, he recalls, “I threw the batter a knuckler, and it really dipped, but he hit it into center field, and I think it’s still going.” So no pro career for Irv. Then he put in another year at CCNY. Eventually he finished his degree at UCLA, graduating in January, 1950.
When he had first gone to California, where his parents moved in 1948, he left behind a girlfriend in Brooklyn, Diane. “I went back to Brooklyn after I graduated. We were going to get married. But I found out she’d eloped. I guess it was because I never wrote her.” (Four years later, Irv married Beverly June Flaxman, a native Angeleno, and they are still married.)
He got an accounting job on 6th Avenue in Manhattan and commuted from Brooklyn by subway. In August, the heat was unbearable underground and Irv bailed back to California. He used to visit his designer Dad’s company, Twentieth Century Frocks, and later Dorothy Lamour Fashions.
In the 1950s, California was leading America into the good life of neon signs and two-tone cars. Was Irv a California dreamer? “I’m not a dreamer,” he says. “I figured I’d get married, have some kids and see what happens.”
He got a job at Eastern Iron and Metal Co., where he was office manager, weighmaster and PBX operator as well as keeping the books. Later he went into commercial finance with a company that made loans to small businesses. “I got customers, ran the office, prepared financial statements, fought the IRS and won. I loved fighting the IRS.” He retired in 1996.
He used to play a lot of handball and was one of those guys who bowled one night a week. “I told my wife when we got married, ‘Sunday is my day,’ and she’s never objected.”
This left him available when “In 1982 a fella I knew said, ‘Let’s go play softball.’ I hadn’t played any ball for 38 years. He said, ‘This you can play.’ They tried me out in the senior league in Culver City, where I lived then and still live. I started out at shortstop. A week or two later Dante Moretti came into the league, goodbye, I moved to third. I moved around the infield until eventually I wound up at pitcher.
“I played in Culver City until 2004. A lot of the guys are still around, some are gone. Dante Meretti, I once had to go to his house for something, and he opened the door and I said, ‘Is Dante Meretti there?’ He said, ‘I’m Dante Meretti.’ I didn’t realize he was bald.
“I remember a knock-down fight between Teddy Miller and Sammy Lu. Teddy was on top of him punching him. We pulled him off. Later he said, ‘I’m glad you stopped me, I’d have killed him.’
“There was a low-grade character named Abe Zaft. We used to go to Vegas to play tournaments there. Abe used to yell at girls from our car, but they never would get in. Seymour Sherman, he’s got to be 90 now, he’d come to Vegas with us. We always went to this Italian restaurant and Seymour would start singing. He had a great voice. The whole restaurant would stop eating and listen.”
Irv’s greatest memory involving a round ball came when he threw out the first ball at the Dodgers’ first game in the Coliseum in 1958. This story is not in the history books. “I went with my boss Jack Garten and a guy named Andy, who was the barman at the best restaurant on the wrong side of town, which was Paul’s Duck Press. Andy took a ball to the game with ‘Welcome to the Dodgers, come eat at Paul’s Duck Press’ written on it. Before the game started, I threw it out on the field where the Dodger players could pick it up. A few minutes later, the mayor threw out the second ball. I don’t know if any Dodgers ever went and ate at Paul’s Duck Press. It isn’t there any more, and neither is Jack Garten, who some time later drove his car into a light standard going to the airport.”
Irv would like to still be playing softball, but his legs won’t let him. But he enjoyed good health and mobility for many years. He recalls during his pre-softball career, “I took a shot playing handball and knocked my knee out to here. The orthopedist said I had water on the knee. I said, ‘O.K., let it float.’
“I went to the barber shop and saw an article in a magazine about Joe Namath’s knee operation which said, if you’ve got knee trouble, here’s the operation you should have. But I wasn’t earning $400,000 at the time like Namath, and I didn’t have to move that fast. So I didn’t do anything.
“Thirty years later I had the knee replaced. Not the one I hurt then, the other one.”