Visiting Dick Allen in the hospital made a 9-year-old realize that his hero was also human

There were few places Arlen Specter couldn’t go in the summer of 1967. He was Philadelphia’s District Attorney, a candidate for mayor, and a few years removed from authoring the single-bullet theory on the Warren Commission.

So it was easy for Specter, who also happened to be a sports fanatic and would later become a regular caller on sports-talk radio during his years as a senator, to weave himself into Dick Allen’s hospital room that August.

“He wanted to go see Richie Allen and he wanted to take his 9-year-old son with him,” said Specter’s son, Shanin. “So he just showed up at Temple University Hospital in Richie Allen’s hospital room.”

Allen, who was elected Sunday to the Baseball Hall of Fame after a decades-long wait, was then the larger-than-life Phillies slugger who sent home runs flying over the roof of Connie Mack Stadium.

» READ MORE: Maybe Dick Allen’s inclusion in the Hall will help heal Philadelphia’s deep racial wounds in baseball

Allen didn’t have a publicist or an Instagram account. He didn’t host a podcast and his meteoric homers didn’t live on YouTube. His life was not curated. Every move wasn’t planned.

For kids in the 1960s, Allen’s image was shaped by the baseball cards they collected and what they watched at Connie Mack Stadium or at home on black-and-white TVs. And what they saw grew into legend as if Allen was a baseball-playing Paul Bunyan who swung a 42-ounce bat.

“Dick Allen was just a god in our house,” said Specter, who gazed out the window every time his dad drove by Allen’s home on Wissahickon Avenue.

It was easy for a child in August 1967 to believe Allen was invincible. Allen homered in the All-Star Game a month earlier when the midsummer classic was still the midsummer classic. He had just homered twice against the Mets and homered 40 times the previous season. The Phillies didn’t sniff the pennant that summer, but they had Allen. For Specter and so many others of that generation, that was enough. Allen was their gateway to baseball.

But here was the hero in a hospital bed wearing a white gown with an enormous bandage covering almost his entire right arm. His hand was cut severely after Allen said he pushed it through his stalled car’s headlight.

The Specters chatted with Allen about his injury, which the ballplayer said would force him to miss the rest of the season. They wished him well and went on their way. For the 9-year-old Specter, it was a chance to meet his idol. And it was also a reminder that the ballplayer he adored was human, too.

“It was such an indelible moment in my life because Richie Allen was a god in our household and such an enormous figure in Philadelphia,” said Specter, 67, a trial lawyer and law professor. “And it was also upsetting to see him humbled by being so badly injured. I just remembered this enormous bandage. I’ve never seen anyone have a bandage like that.”

Allen said in August 1967 that he wanted to get out of Philadelphia because of the way the fans treated him. The ballpark was like a lion’s den, Allen said.

A star rookie three years earlier, Allen had became the frequent target for boos after he fought Frank Thomas — a white teammate — during batting practice in 1965. Thomas, who was said to have instigated the fight with a racial comment, was sold to the Houston Astros, and the fans turned on Allen. His Philadelphia experience was never the same.

“We 9-year-olds didn’t know or care about the rest of it,” Specter said. “That just wasn’t part of our understanding of sports. When I went to get a baseball glove, I got a Richie Allen glove. Of course. Who else would you get? That’s the way we 9-year-olds thought about Richie Allen in 1967.”

A weeknight game in August 1967 against Pittsburgh was rained out, providing Allen a night away from the jeers. A day later, the Daily News reported that Allen severed two tendons in his right wrist and cut a nerve while pushing his old 1950 Ford at home in the rain. The car’s battery was dead, the report said, and Allen was pushing it so he could jump-start it. His hand went through the headlight, surgery was performed that night at Temple Hospital, and Allen’s season was over.

“The car was on a hill, with the front wheels wedged against the curb,” Allen wrote in Crash, the 1989 book he co-authored about his life. “To move it, I had to shove it from the front. I gave it a push, but when I did my foot slipped on the wet ground. I felt my hand rip through the headlight. When I pulled out my hand, it looked like it had been blown off by a land mine. Blood was spurting everywhere. Underneath the blood, my hand looked like a bowl of spaghetti.”

Since this was Allen, the newspaper account was almost immediately questioned. His relationship with Philadelphia was already thinned. The fans booed him and the reporters grilled him. It didn’t take long for other theories to emerge. Is that really how it happened?

» READ MORE: Dick Allen’s induction into the Hall of Fame is a victory for his greatest advocate and friend

“Nobody, it seemed, wanted to believe the real story,” wrote Allen, who died in 2020. “Over the next few days I heard all kinds of crazy versions about what happened: I’d been knifed in a bar fight, I’d been cut with a razor by a jealous lover, I had jumped through a window after getting caught sleeping with a teammate’s wife. Maybe I brought all the speculation on myself by dodging the press. Or maybe the fact that I liked to have a few drinks made the other stories seem possible. Whatever the reason, I was depressed enough by what happened. The fact that people didn’t believe me only made it worse.”

Allen had an 8-inch scar on his hand and had trouble moving his fingers after they removed the cast. He thought his career was finished. He left Philadelphia after the season, fleeing the stress of home on a road trip to “find myself.”

“I went on a serious bender,” Allen wrote.

He drove to California and then Mexico, finding peace by himself in his car and at bars. He molded a piece of foam rubber into the shape of a baseball and started squeezing it as soon as he woke up, hoping to re-strengthen the hand that helped him hit home runs over the Coca-Cola sign atop the left-field roof.

He took batting practice in California with the Dodgers’ Willie Davis and still didn’t feel right. But Allen was determined to not let his career end with a headlight. He returned to Philadelphia and joined a construction crew. His friend was the foreman and Allen worked as a bricklayer.

“Every time I picked up a brick, my hand hurt,” Allen wrote. “But the tough outside work was just what my hand needed. After a while I began enjoying the work, too. It was nice to do a job and not hear boos while I was doing it.”

By spring training, Allen’s hand was ready and his story stayed the same. The fans at Connie Mack Stadium didn’t seem to buy it as their treatment of Allen became even worse in 1968. The fans who used to boo were now throwing things at him. He wore a batting helmet while playing defense. Allen said first it was pennies and then bolts and finally beer bottles. He wore a helmet in the field for the rest of his career.

“The people who knew me well — and not many people in Philadelphia did know me well — knew I was telling the truth,” Allen wrote.

Arlen Specter’s career didn’t just get him into hospital rooms but it also opened the doors to exclusive areas of Connie Mack Stadium. The Specters watched the Phillies from a perch near the ballpark’s roof, almost like an owl’s nest above the field. It was a perfect view, once they survived the rickety elevator ride to the top. There was a concession stand behind the seats and everything was free.

“For me, everything being free was a completely foreign concept,” Shanin Specter said. “I would get a burger and a hot dog and a black-and-white milkshake. Sitting up there with your dad and a black-and-white milkshake in this special consecrated place, it was just an amazing experience.”

Specter followed the Phillies to Veterans Stadium and Citizens Bank Park, but nothing could replicate the old ballpark. The Ballantine scoreboard, the green grass, and the free milkshakes. Plus, Allen was in the batter’s box.

» READ MORE: Dick Allen, the Phillies’ first Black star, didn’t let the boos and racism stop him from becoming an icon

“He just could do things that no one else on the Phillies could do, no one else could come close to doing,” Specter said. “He hit the ball so far and he had a gracefulness to everything he did from the way he fielded the ball to the way he threw the ball to the way he swung the bat. He was a big man, so for him to have that gracefulness was also extraordinary.”

Allen was his hero, just like he was to so many other Philadelphians who learned to love the game at 21st and Lehigh. Allen was not perfect; he even said he wondered how much better his career would have been if he didn’t play angry. But humans aren’t perfect and Specter learned in that hospital room that his hero was human. Even heroes have scars. But for a generation of fans, they learned that those scars aren’t enough to end your story.

“It’s a wonderfully redemptive moment,” Specter said. “I know it’s about him, but it’s a lesson for all of us. Hang in there. We’re all faulted. Hang in there. In his own way, he hung in there. Didn’t he? No one understands what he went through. It’s a great thing for all of us in Philadelphia, for all of us who understand the frailties of human beings.

“For those of us who were young then and have lived a long life since, we know that each of us is highly imperfect. The youth of the late 1960s in Philadelphia are an older generation now, but we lived through the experience that all of us are highly imperfect. It’s heartwarming that a person of imperfection can be seen beyond those imperfections and be literally admitted to the Hall of Fame. It’s the validation of our hero worship and it’s also the comfort that we can take that all of us are judged on a more balanced scale.”