Cavanman's Diary: A most cruel alignment of stars

This September will mark 70 years since the most famous All-Ireland football final of all time between Cavan and Kerry in the Polo Grounds.

The old stadium is no more – standing where the baseballers and footballers once sported and played is a housing project which is one of the most dangerous in the five boroughs.
Not long after Cavan won their third All-Ireland at the venue, it began to decline. By the dawn of the 1950s, it had become like the rest of the city, a faded beauty, a pretty old dame with a busted nose.
Crime rocketed in the area. Urban blight came quickly, quicker than the authorities anticipated. Neighbourhood kids would offer to mind your car for a buck - if you didn’t play ball, you’d be out the price of a tyre.
A low point arrived 67 years ago this week, on July 4, 1950. That morning, Barney Doyle was up early, pottering around his home in Fairview, New Jersey. A 54-year-old native of Dublin, the papers reported, Barney had been living in the US for over three decades. A ship’s carpenter by trade, he was between jobs and had plenty of time to indulge his pastimes of baseball and boxing.
The big man had once managed fighters in small hall shows in Jersey, with the Cinderella Man James J Braddock, a future world heavyweight champion at a time when the title may as well have read “world king”, once a name on his books.
July 4 was a big day. After early Mass and a hurried breakfast, Barney left his home at 8.30am, stopping to collect a freckled, goofy kid called Otto Flaig, 13-year-old son of a friend, and the pair headed for the Polo Grounds. It was Giants v Dodgers and Barney was a Giants man, through and through. Unlike Braddock’s, though, there would be no Cinderella story.

 

Chamber

The duo took their seats in the upper grandstand, facing home plate. Above it on the horizon, perched atop a hill called Coogan’s Bluff, was a cluster of dingy apartments. Unknown to 49,000 baseball fans in the stadium, in one of the houses, a 14-year-old black kid was playing with a new toy. It was a .45 pistol he had found in Central Park. In the chamber was one bullet, one bullet he had saved to fire on July 4.
At twenty past noon, as the teams took to the field, the boy, Robert Peebles, clambered on to the grimy roof, pointed the gun and squeezed, aiming into the air, just for fun, just to see what would happen.
Five hundred metres away in Seat 3, Row C, Section 42, Barney was turning to speak to Otto, the kid he had brought with him as a treat to see Willie Mays and all the rest. The bullet entered his skull via the left temple and lodged in his brain. He dropped his scorecard.
Barney was gone.
As the police removed his body, fans who had been standing in the gangway nearby, thinking he had died of natural causes or fallen ill or, maybe, not thinking on it at all, scrambled for his seat. The next day, the city’s tabloids carried the photo on their front pages.
A famous Time magazine article on the story entitled Seat 3, Row C, carried the following description of the aftermath.
“‘What's the matter?’ asked Otto, and got no answer: Doyle was already dead.”
I discovered this tale when researching the history of the Polo Grounds. I tried to track down some of Doyle’s relatives, with some success. I spoke to some O’Connors, who live in Dun Laoghaire and the UK; Doyle was their mother’s first cousin. They believe the Doyle family originally came from Slane, Co Meath. They have a relation in New York, a man named Ralph Atti, who sent them Doyle’s ring and tie clip. I followed up with more messages to them but the trail went cold.
I exchanged emails with an artist from Wicklow – Barney was his great grandfather’s brother, he told me, but he hadn’t much more information.
Next, I found a policeman called Keith Hermann, who had posted something about Barney Doyle online a decade ago. I added a few Keith Hermanns on Facebook and messaged them all. One replied and demanded to see a photo of my journalist’s ID. I obliged and showing the cop’s wariness, proferred some details.

 

Switched

“Bernard was a baseball fanatic and humble man. On the day of his death he brought a friend's son to a game.
“As they sat down, the smaller child couldn't see the game due to a larger person in front of him. Bernard switched seats with the boy and minutes later, a shot fired from a tenement building's roof by another young boy tracked into the stadium and into Bernard's head, killing him right there. Had he not switched seats either the man ahead of him, or the boy he'd taken to the game, would have been killed instead.”
And then, just as I asked him more questions, he replied with the word “out”. When I responded, he just said “good day” and, with that, the cagey law enforcement officer cut off contact.
So I tracked down another woman in New York called Maria Atti, whom he had mentioned. She was on her way to church when I messaged her. She confirmed that the Barney Doyle killed on July 4, 1950 was her grandfather and, get this, that he was actually born in Lowell, Massachusetts. His parents were Andrew Doyle and Helen Meade, who emigrated from Ireland.
“Remember one thing,” she told me, “my grandfather did not have life insurance. My grandmother was told that my grandfather paid admission to the Polo Grounds. Therefore, he entered at his own risk. My grandmother was a wonderful lady who worked the night shift as a licensed practical nurse.”
Knowing for certain now that Doyle was born in Lowell and not Sallynoggin (where I thought I had found his family on the census after a painstaking trawl), I signed up to check the registers over there and found that Doyle’s mother was actually born in Wales and that he was, in fact, born in August 1896, making him 53 – and not 51, as widely reported – at the time of his death.
He had been drafted for both world wars and was listed as being of medium physical build with brown hair and blue eyes. I viewed a photo of his burial place (there is a website called FindAGrave.com, would you believe) and I found that Otto Flaig, the neighbour’s son he had brought to the game, went on to become chief of police in Peterboro, NJ.
Was he inspired by his dealing with the authorities on that fateful day? And what became of the killer, Robert Peebles (a few of that name are listed including one man, tantalisingly, who would be around the 80-mark now)? I don’t know.
As of now, the trail has gone cold, the forgotten death in the ballpark slipping back into the mists of time.