Around Strasburg, Bill Phifer wears a blue baseball cap with a white "B" on the front. On his sleeve, he wears his feelings for the team the cap represents — the Brooklyn Dodgers.

As a boy, he would lie awake at night and be able to tell from the crowd noise at nearby Ebbets Field how his team was faring.

Later, he would sneak into the ballpark when the gates were opened to take out the garbage and hide until the crowd was let in hours later.

It was the late 1940s and 1950s, the era of "The Boys of Summer," as Roger Kahn called it in his 1972 book of the same name. Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier and the team was filled with stars like Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese and Duke Snider.

At 15, Bill befriended two batboys and wound up with a job cleaning the visiting teams' clubhouse. He became the visitors' batboy in 1952.

"I was one of only eight ... kids in the entire United States who... could say that I've worn every official National ... League uniform," Bill wrote in a journal.

At times, he subbed for the Dodgers' batboy.

Bill worked for $3 a day and tips, carrying bats, shining shoes, cleaning clubhouses and running errands.

If a day game followed a night game, he slept there instead of going home.

But before games, he could also go out on that green field and shag and play pepper with the players.

"The better they were, the better they treated you," he said of the major leaguers.

He was in the stands at the Polo Grounds when Bobby Thomson, of the New York Giants, blasted "the shot heard 'round the world," beating the Dodgers in the 1951 playoffs.

"I was between 20-25 feet from where his homer landed," Bill said.

"Terrible day."

He was the visting team batboy in 1953 and then worked in the Dodgers' offices for a time.

"Good days," he said. "Fun days." But when it was over, he admitted, he didn't look back on it as "a big deal." Nostalgia came later.

He didn't get a chance to celebrate the Dodgers' only World Series win in Brooklyn when they beat the Yankees Oct. 5, 1955 . He had gone into the Army on Oct. 3.

He went to college, married, raised a family and spent a career on Wall Street as an insurance broker.

In 1980, he and his wife, Jane, came here "antiquing."

"We just loved the area," said Bill, now 73.

In 1990, they bought a house on Miller Street in Strasburg and for "48 weekends out of the year, we trudged down and back" to renovate the house.

In 1994, they moved in from Long Island.

The Dodgers stole away to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. Bill's allegiance didn't follow them.

"The Brooklyn Dodgers died in October of 1957," he said.

The Los Angeles Dodgers?

"That's a different team. The other team."

"Greed" moved the team, he said. He is unhappy with those who, he says, rewrite history to say owner Walter O'Malley was forced to move the team. He was upset when O'Malley was posthumously inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame.

"He was a nasty person," said Bill, who is on the honor roll in the Brooklyn Dodgers Hall of Fame.

Ebbets Field is gone, but a seat from the ballpark sits on Bill's porch.

As for a favorite team now, he guesses it's the Phillies.

"They're playing that 'other' team," he said.

Quizzical
Sometimes I just walk into it. I was quizzing daughter Abigail, 13, on definitions for a school test.

"Fossil," I said.

"You," she answered.