For former East Williston Mayor Nancy Zolezzi, the start of the baseball season evokes fond memories that extend beyond the national pastime to an important part of her own past.
“We would go to Dodgertown every year,” Zolezzi said, recalling the annual trips her family made beginning in the late 1970s to the then Brooklyn Dodger’s spring training facility.
The family pilgrimage was led by Zolezzi’s father, Bill Roeder, who covered the Brooklyn Dodgers camp for the New York World Telegram during the 1950s until the team left Brooklyn.
“He absolutely loved baseball, loved the Dodgers,” she recalled. “I have home movies of Jackie Robinson running the bases.”
Memories of the family trips and her father’s career as a baseball writer return in the spring aided by photographs and other mementos Zolezzi and her family have gathered.
A family photograph on her desk at Zolezzi Collision in Williston Park shows a bored looking little girl standing behind then New York Mets Manager Gil Hodges during one spring training family trip she did make with her dad in 1970 – just months after the Amazin’s had won the World Series in 1969.
Her father moved on to Newsweek magazine in 1960, but would regularly buy the family tickets for Old Timers Day at Shea Stadium, where he would catch up with old Dodgers acquaintances.
Zolezzi, who grew up with her family in Roslyn, said she became a fan of the Mets when she was older, but her affection for baseball began early.
“I always liked baseball. We would go to games when I was younger,”
Zolezzi said as a child she wasn’t really aware of what her father did during those spring training days until he had retired and they started making the trip south several years before he died.
But, she said, she realized his deep affection for the place when he showed her the sights at Dodgertown for the first time.
“My dad would bring us all down. He would show us all Dodgertown,” she said. “He would have retired to Vero Beach” – the location of the Dodgers’ spring training complex until they moved to Arizona in 2009.
Zolezzi said she developed a sense of what covering the Brooklyn Dodgers had been like for her father, in the days when sportswriters and athletes spent time together when they weren’t at the ballpark.
“They socialized. They didn’t write bad stories,” she said.
Brooklyn Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese, she recalled was her dad’s neighbor when he went to Vero Beach.
Last year, when Brooklyn Dodgers pitching legend Ralph Branca made a local appearance for a book signing, she met him and revisited memories of her father.
Branca and Roeder shared a disdain for flying and she said they would share a train ride to New Orleans at the end of spring training each year when the Dodgers would play exhibition games in the Caribbean to minimize their air time to “puddle jumper” flights after their train trip.
Her father’s love of visiting Dodgertown, Zolezzi said, is a legacy Roeder passed on to his daughter and her children, particularly her son, Joseph.
Her father died in 1982, but Zolezzi said the family tradition of visiting the Dodgers in Vero Beach was firmly established in his memory for the relaxed interaction with the ballplayers.
“That is the reason we started going and continue to go,” she said. “It was almost like a family there.”
Joseph Zolezzi, now 28 years old, remembers how meeting a Dodgers catcher Mike Piazza when the young Zolezzi was 10 years old ignited his interest in baseball. Piazza, in his third year with the Dodgers, approached the Zolezzis and asked if they’d like to have their picture taken with him and signed a baseball .
“That’s where I had my earliest memories of baseball,” Zolezzi said. “I was always a Mike Piazza fan.”
He also remembers talking to Bill Russell, then managing the team, and Dodgers centerfielder Brett Butler, who was just returning to active duty with the team after surviving salivary gland cancer. He recalled Butler as an “extremely friendly” ballplayer.
“I think he was very happy to be back,” Zolezzi said.
The Zolezzis were happy to be basking in the sun and the friendly attitude the Dodgers projected in Dodgertown. They remember seeing Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda riding around in a golf cart and coach Manny Mota riding a bicycle through the Dodgers complex.
“It was more intimate. You had contact with the players,” she said.
Joseph Zolezzi also remembers a close encounter with Dodgers pitching great Sandy Koufax, then a Dodger coach, at a local driving range Zolezzi was visiting with his great uncle, Bill.
“I got sick and wound up throwing up about 15 feet from Sandy Koufax,” he recalled. “My uncle was mortified.”
His grandfather’s love of the Brooklyn Dodgers has filtered through to the younger Zolezzi, who named his dog “Duke” after the ballplayer he most admires.
“Duke Snider is my favorite player to this day,” he said. “I would do anything for the Dodgers to be in Brooklyn again.
