The incomparable Steve Rushin visits with three kids of baseball legends, including Irene Hodges. Irene Hodges was 18 years old when she visited her father at his shop in New York City on a fall day in 1969. A raucous workplace celebration was underway. The firm managed by Irene's dad—the Mets—had just won the World Series. Irene and her 19-year-old brother, Gil Hodges Jr., braved the crossfire of champagne corks to get to their father's office, where the silent phone on Gil Hodges's desk drew the attention of their mother, Joan. “Gil,” Joan told her husband, “you should call your mother.” Gil's mother was at home, watching the celebration on TV in Indiana, where Hodges began his long journey to secular sainthood, first as a Marine in World War II, then as a beloved member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, then as a player for the original Los Angeles Dodgers and the original New York Mets, and finally as manager of those Amazin's. Gil thought for a moment and said: “That's a long-distance call. I think I should make that one at home.” Irene Hodges is now 71 and living again in the house where she grew up, in Flatbush, where she's caring for her 95-year-old mother. It's the same split-level to which Gil Hodges returned in the 1960s after managing the Mets, in the same borough where he played first base at Ebbets Field, 75 feet from Jackie Robinson, once upon a time. “He used to walk to the stores around here,” says Irene. “He was part of the church, part of the community, did the same things anyone else would do. He'd go to the butcher, go to the supermarket. People would shake his hand, put an arm around him and say, ‘Hey, Gil, how are you? Good luck tonight; we're rooting for you.' It was never intrusive, never threatening.” It was a 20-minute drive home from Shea Stadium on that crisp Thursday afternoon 53 years ago, and Irene is now thinking of the lost world it betokened—of long-distance calls, rotary-dial phones, World Series day games and baseball at the center of attention. All of it has long since passed from this world, as has her father, but that day in 1969 keeps his memory alive. “He had just won one of the biggest World Series in New York history,” Irene says of that phone call to her grandmother. “But that didn't change the essence of the man. He was still going to do the right thing.” In his moment of professional triumph, Gil Hodges called his mother from home. Says Irene: “That's the perfect story of who my father was.” https://www.si.com/mlb/2022/06/16/kids-of-summer-daily-coverhttps://www.si.com/mlb/2022/06/16/kids-of-summer-daily-cover