What prompted you to write a book about Ebbets Field? How did any personal connection you have to Brooklyn, the Dodgers, or Ebbets Field influence you? 

I think it’s a subject that found me as I was growing up in Brooklyn. My Dad was a firefighter at the old Engine Co. 244 in Coney Island, which was down the block from Garguilo’s Restaurant; his father was a Deputy Commissioner of a city agency under LaGuardia, and my Dad’s two grandfathers were both Civil War volunteers from Brooklyn, one of them a fireman, the other a stonecutter, who worked on a lot of the statuary in Green-Wood Cemetery. There’s an awful lot of pride in place among Brooklynites and people who trace their roots to this place anyway. You could say Brooklyn’s a part of my DNA.

I grew up first at 97th Street and Third Avenue in Bay Ridge.  Pee Wee Reese lived up the block on Barwell Terrace; Duke Snider lived a block away at the corner of Marine Avenue,