Once a Dodger . . .

The fabulous Louis Norman Newsom, known to millions of citizens as Buck, Bobo, or Old Showboat, came back to his spiritual home last week. The Dodgers bought him from the Washington Senators. Price: $20,000 and a hot rookie pitcher, Jack ("Tex") Kraus.

The deal was a natural. The staggering Dodgers, screwily skidding toward the National League pennant, desperately needed help to beat off the annual stretch-drive of the St. Louis Cardinals. Buck Newsom is not only hot help as a powerhouse righthander in the box--he is, by instinct, a natural member of the Daffinness Boys. And his return to Brooklyn, after twelve years, had the same curve of historic inevitability as the return of Ulysses from the Trojan Wars.

The Era of Wonderful Newsom. In his times in baseball, Old Showboat has been in 13 clubs in eight leagues. He has had nine fractured bones, from a split thumb to his famed broken leg of 1931-32.* He is very possibly the most superstitious man in baseball. He never ties his own shoelaces--someone else does this while Bobo stands by majestically, with arms folded. He can't win unless he takes off his street socks just so, before a game, dangling them one at a time by their garters over his street shoes until they swing into his shoes without his putting a hand on them. (The left sock must go in first.) On his way to the dugout between innings he has to toss his glove over his head so that it drops on the foul line. Any deviations from these fetishist formulas mean horrible bad luck. The luckier fans have seen him in a vast, glittering automobile with a two-tone horn and his name in rich gold leaf in meat-wagon-size type on the dashboard. He sometimes drinks milk for hours in nightclubs, drawing exhilaration from the sound of his voice.

On certain gold afternoons he has briefly seemed to rank as one of the great all-time baseball stars. On others he has played like a nearsighted substitute on the Married Men's team of a department-store annual outing.

"Mr. Showboat." But he has courage: once, hit in the leg by a line drive in the second inning, he fell dramatically to the ground. A heckler shouted: "I guess that'll make you quit, Mr. Showboat!" Glaring balefully, Bobo pitched the remaining seven innings, covering first base on bunts, running out two fine hits, and narrowly losing, 5-to-4--with a broken kneecap that kept him out of the line-up for two months. Two years ago, with the Detroit Tigers, he won the first World Series game of his life. That night his father died of a heart attack. Few days later, upper lip stiff, Newsom pitched a game for his dad, a superb three-hit shutout, and two days after, lost a heartbreaker, 2-to-1, that would have made him immortal, baseball-wise. Next year he was terrible, again.

With all this in mind, every U.S. baseball fan--including Wendell Willkie in Cairo, who reported he was "in a sweat" because he didn't know how the Dodgers had done for the last three games, and thus couldn't answer the main question of the U.S. troops in Egypt--knew that Buck Newsom was a natural Dodger. They were glad his fantastic Odyssey was over--Brooklyn to Jersey City to Macon to Little Rock to Chicago to Albany to Los Angeles to St. Louis to Washington to Boston to St. Louis to Detroit to Washington to Brooklyn again. They all knew him as a Man Of Purpose, though the purpose is usually weird; as the game's biggest present-day outsize ego, though he delivers the goods every so often with the crushing simplicity of an anti-tank gun; and as a man dying to stand the rest of the National League on its head--which is what Brooklyn needs.

Result of his first attempt as a 1942 Dodger: Cincinnati Reds, 0; Newsom, 2 --a four-hit whitewash which sounded to Owner MacPhail like Series money already in the cash register. But four days later, Bobo was terrible again--the Boston Braves knocked him out of the box in the sixth.

* When Little Rock sold him to the Cubs, the ebullient Newsom started to drive to Chicago to congratulate Owner Phil Wrigley on getting such a superb pitcher. The car, driven at the routine Newsom rate of 90-odd miles per hour, jumped the icy road. Just before spring training, Newsom went to a mule sale, and a mule kicked his freshly healed leg into smithereens again.

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