Baseball

The year began with a funeral.

St. Patrick's Cathedral, on New York's Fifth Avenue, held more than four thousand mourners. Another ten thousand people, most of whom had never met the deceased, crowded the sidewalks across the avenue, in front of Rockefeller Center, throughout the hour-long service. One hundred twenty-five policemen stood watch. The body arrived at the cathedral by hearse, in a bronze coffin. The procession had begun from the apartment at Ninety-third Street where the man had died, just three blocks directly west of the place where he had been born seventy-one and a half years before. That, in turn, was just one block south of the enormous manufacturing plant that had been the original source of his wealth.

Even as the hearse moved down Fifth Avenue, three large brewery trucks removed most of the seven hundred floral arrangements that had been received since Friday morning directly to the cemetery in Westchester, to which a fifty-car procession would repair after the service at St. Patrick's. Only flowers enough to fill two more hearses accompanied the coffin.

The family -- one surviving brother and two sisters, two nephews, and four nieces