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Oh, yes--a lot more than it is today.

Right. But now the way that money was divided--and this is important in the beginning of my career--was that he had remarried. He'd married a very lovely woman some years after his first wife died, and he had six children. So when he died, the money was divided in seven parts. The widow got a good chunk of it, and the six children divided the rest.

Now, I'll have to tell you a few words about my father, because my mother died the day before I was 16. And I was the only son, so--

Did you have any sisters?

No, I was the only child. But the important thing to remember is that my father and I were together then from the day before I was 16 until his death.

Now a word about how my father and mother met. In those days, when they were young, it was considered quite the thing for respectable young ladies to take elocution lessons and recite, you know, “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck” and stuff like that. My father, who was a very handsome, charming, wonderful man--I absolutely adored him and so did everybody else--besides being quite a ballplayer, gave elocution lessons on the side and was a lithographer by profession. In about 1892 my pop got a tryout with the Brooklyn Dodgers as the catcher. The Dodgers were members of a league called the