Whenever anyone under the age of fifty sees an old newsreel film of Joe DiMaggio's fifty-six-game hitting streak of 1941, he is almost certain to be brought up by the fact that nearly everyone in the male-dominated crowds seems to be wearing a suit and a fedora or other serious adult hat. The people in those earlier baseball crowds, though watching a boyish game, nonetheless had a radically different conception of themselves than most Americans do now. A major economic depression was ending, a world war was on. Even though they were watching an entertainment that took most of them back to their boyhoods, they thought of themselves as no longer kids but as grown-ups, adults, men.
- From The Perpetual Adolescent, one of Joseph Epstein's essays in In a Cardboard Belt!
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