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 -- sat in the cathedral's front left pew. In the front right pew sat Fiorello H. LaGuardia, mayor of the city of New York; U.S. Senator Robert E Wagner; and former New York governor and Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith.

More than five hundred of the dead man's employees were among the congregants, most of them workers at the same brewery that had supplied the trucks bearing the flowers to Westchester. One of the brewery employees in the cathedral had worked for the man, and his father before him, for forty-nine years.

The solemn High Mass of requiem was scheduled for 11:30 A.M. The family entered through a side door at 11:20. Five minutes later the police concluded that the cathedral was becoming overcrowded, closed all the doors, and began turning away late-comers.