McLouth resident Jim Crawford doesn’t have any trouble remembering what he was doing 50 years ago today: collecting 50 cents from big sister Judie.

“I was 8 years old, and my sister was 13, and she had a big crush on Mickey Mantle,” recalled Crawford, who grew up in Valley Falls. “Everything was Mickey Mantle this, Mickey Mantle that. It made me so sick I just about puked.”

Before it came to that, Crawford had a brainstorm that a half-century later still pays emotional dividends.

“My father always used to bet on the World Series, so I thought I’d make a bet with my sister,” Crawford said. “I said, ‘How about I take the Dodgers and you take the Yankees for 50 cents.’ I was only 8. I had no idea the Dodgers never won. I’m sure she knew that. And I told her, ‘If the Dodgers win, you can never talk about Mickey Mantle in this house again.’ She said OK.”

Fifty years ago today, Gil Hodges singled in a run in the fourth inning of Game 7 and drove in another in the sixth with a sacrifice fly in support of lefty Johnny Podres (eight-hit shutout), and the Dodgers won, 2-0.

“Nobody ever got more out of a 50-cent bet than I did,” said Crawford, who lives with wife, Janet. “The silence was beautiful.”

Crawford

And in the long run, inspirational. The ’55 World Series held so much meaning for Crawford since it was the first successful one-up of an older sibling, that he wrote a lengthy poem about it. Crawford received a copyright for “1955.”

Fifteen years later, the world premier of documentary “1955: Seven Days of Fall” airs today at 5 p.m. on ESPN Classic Sports. It’s based on Crawford’s poem.

“They call me a poet in it and I wish they didn’t do that,” Crawford said. “I’ve got to live around here and now people are going to think I’ve got ruffles on my sleeves.”

A former tax collector for the Internal Revenue Service, Crawford, 58, won’t have to shop for a 95th birthday present for his mother, Alba. That will come one day early when Jim visits his mother in Valley Falls to watch the documentary with her.

“She’s had quite a year,” he said of his mother with pride. “Last year she was named Queen of the Sesquicentennial.”

Made for TV

Getting the poem, or at least a portion of it, onto TV didn’t take 150 years, it just seemed that way to Crawford at times.

Crawford said Joe Anderson from the Kansas University film department took an interest in the poem in 1998 and made transforming the words into a video a class project for the semester. Film producer David Gramly, then a graduate student at KU, put in “several hundred hours of work” on the project, according to Crawford, who sent that “12-minute video” to several companies, one of which took on the project. FilmFocus TV, based in Boca Raton, Fla., produced the documentary that airs tonight.

The poem, written in ballad style with every other line rhyming, does not deal so much with baseball particulars, rather with what the ’55 World Series meant to the country during a rare time of peace. Though he shies from the label “poet” Crawford’s words certainly were poetic.

Consider a pair of excerpts:

“To say that life was simpler then,

May be an understated clause.

The world respected Uncle Sam,

And even rebels had no cause.

The very air seemed clearer then,

And to us sports fans most of all,

As we watched without obstruction,

The classic rivalry that Fall.”

And:

“One team of men was held the gem,

Of all who played this diamond game.

They wore pin stripes of big business,

And showed accounts in profit’s name.

Ruth and Gehrig, and DiMaggio,

Some of baseball’s undisputed best,

Had passed their dominant tradition

On to Mantle, Berra, and the rest.

The other team, of less renown,

Boys from across the trolley tracks,

Were five times the ‘Bomber’s’ victims,

And now wore monkeys on their backs.

‘Dem Bums’, as they were called by some,

Had become known by those defeats;

So they were put at distant odds

To best the business-like elites.”

‘Sometimes you just get it right’

Explaining away his eloquence, Crawford likened himself to the author of a World Series perfect game.

“Don Larsen was not a good pitcher, but for one day he was perfect,” Crawford said. “Sometimes you just get it right and you don’t know how you did it.”

Why did he wait until 35 years after Game 7 to write the poem?

“I was working with baseball players in Perry, the PONY League, and it was a real vitamin for my spirit,” Crawford said. “We won 70 of 72 in four years. I was kind of a misplaced person at the time. I lost my job and my marriage at the time, and they were all more than kind to me. That got me in a baseball mood. I buried my energy into those teams and those kids. And during those times I read ‘The Duke of Flatbush,’ and in that book Duke Snider talked about the whole period of the ’50s being special, and I got to thinking nobody really addressed those seven games as a subject.”

The divergent fan bases and postseason fates of the teams at the time made for good poetry.

“I think it does expose the dichotomy of the human spirit,” Crawford said. “The Yankees represent that thing we were all taught to be, that great success. The Dodgers were patron saints of the underdogs. We’re all taught to be successes, but most of us are underdogs.”

The more Crawford studied the personalities of the players on the team, the more he realized the similarities.

“They all grew up in the Depression, and most veterans from middle-class or lower-class families,” he said. “The public perception was that they were so different. Not at all true.”

Crawford mailed his poem to Cooperstown and was given a lifetime pass in return. He also mailed it to several members of the ’55 Dodgers.

Years later, former Dodgers pitcher Carl Erskine informed Crawford that he was “feeling down” after attending Roy Campanella’s funeral in 1993 and pulled the poem out to read it again for comfort. Hearing that from “Oisk” was among the many reasons Crawford has no regrets over failing to profit from his “labor of love.”

Besides, he already profited to the tune of 50 cents, which 50 years ago was : well, not really all that much money.

“I don’t appear anywhere in it,” Crawford said of tonight’s show. “That’s a nice break for the viewer.”