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Newsday.com
Ex-Met Hunt gets seats, courtesy of Bayville's Peluso
BY KEN DAVIDOFF
ken.davidoff@newsday.com
12:30 AM EDT, May 19, 2009
It cost $869 for a pair of seats to the torn-down Shea Stadium last year, and Louise Martone Peluso wanted a set for her Bayville home.
A Brooklyn Dodgers fan back in the day, Peluso, 88, had been a Mets fan since right around the time the club first opened Shea in 1964. She loved Casey Stengel's plea, "Can't anybody here play this game?!'' She even had formed a friendship with Gil Hodges' widow, Joan.
Peluso thought the seats would look perfect in her living room. Then a friend of her brother's said he would be interested in another pair, so Peluso purchased two more seats and stored them in her garage, in the original box shipped to her by New York City officials.
It was that second purchase, a mere afterthought at the time, that put Peluso in a most unexpected situation. That extra pair of seats will shortly be in the possession of Ron Hunt, the man who recorded both the first hit and first home run by a Met at Shea and also became the first Met to start in an All-Star Game.
"It just hit me that I had to give them to you,'' Peluso told Hunt on Mondayin a telephone conversation.
Peluso, who still works as a secretary for L. Martone & Sons, a family-owned roofing and sheet metal company in business since 1918, read my "7th-Inning Stretch'' on April 26. In the column, Hunt expressed regret that the Mets wouldn't give him two seats despite his significant role in the team's history.
He had seats from three other ballparks where he played - the Polo Grounds in New York, Crosley Field in Cincinnati and the old Busch Stadium in St. Louis - and he wanted to add the Shea seats to his game room at his farm in Wentzville, Mo.
"They wanted money,'' Hunt said last month, "and I told them, 'I played for 7,000 dollars [a year] and had to play for four years to get a pension. If you can't get me two seats, then stick them up your --.''
Because she never made contact again with her brother's friend who originally requested the seats, Peluso still had the extra set. She planned to give it to someone in her immense family; she has 18 nieces and nephews, and when you add their descendants, family gatherings often can include more than 80 people.
Yet the news about Hunt affected her enough that Peluso changed her mind.
"Here he did so much. To make seven thousand dollars!" Peluso said. "The ballplayers today probably make that in 15 minutes."
She asked one of her nephews about the idea, "and his face lit up,'' Peluso said. She asked her brother, she said, "and his face lit up. Everyone I mentioned it to, no one said, 'Don't do that. Let me have them.' They just said, 'What a wonderful idea!' "
Yesterday, Hunt, 68, sounded far more cheerful as he spoke with Peluso. "I've never forgotten the support I got from New York fans," he said. He wants to meet Peluso when he comes to New York in August for a couple of appearances.
"I feel like I made a new friend today," Peluso said, smiling.
And the longtime fan of opera and gardening and baseball now has a prominent fan of her own in Ron Hunt. |
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