When the Beatles played Shea Stadium in 1965, it was Pete
Flynn who drove them from the stage to beyond the centerfield fence, where an armored car waited to take them to the World's Fair heliport. And when Paul McCartney made a surprise appearance at a Billy Joel concert last month, guess who drove McCartney to the stage on a golf cart?
McCartney did not remember the bearded man with thick forearms and a quick laugh, but somebody did tell him the story. "He laughed," Flynn said the other day. "I guess he said, 'I can't believe the guy is still here.'"
Pete Flynn the groundskeeper tells you all you need to know about Shea Stadium. He was there on Opening Day in 1964 (after two years at the Polo Grounds) and he was raking and scooping on the infield after the rain Friday. It says everything about a place when a good person wants to hang around that long.
Shea never has been grandiose; it has just minded its own business and exuded its own homespun gruff charm. Flynn - like Bob Mandt, who was selling season tickets out of a trailer when Shea was being built and still is a Mets consultant - reflects the joie de vivre that always has been Shea's DNA, and he has added to it.
He was the longtime head groundskeeper who repaired the field after fans celebrated Mets titles by tearing it up. When he had a chance to retire, he went back to being one of the crew. After his usual winter with the grandchildren in Connecticut, he plans to work at Citi Field next year. Still, today's goodbye will be hard.
"I'm here all my life; I'm here 45 years," the 70-year-old said. His work life and his real life have been mostly the same. "It's tough to leave."
Today, he will be honored on the field he has so carefully and tirelessly tended for decades. This time, he will be an honored guest, introduced with Tom Seaver, Willie Mays, Darryl Strawberry, Mike Piazza and other Mets legends during the farewell ceremony. "I never expected that," Flynn said.
He never expected a lot of things when he left a farm in Ireland's County Leitrim for a better life. He tried uranium mining in Canada, then followed his two sisters to New York. Flynn applied at Allied Maintenance on West 19th Street.
"That was a Thursday afternoon and I got hired Monday at the Polo Grounds, the 29th of January, 1962," he said. "I started out as a handyman, so I built the advance ticket office with blocks and I built a storeroom up on the second level."
When they needed someone to do grading, Flynn pointed out he had done a little landscaping in Canada. He has been on the grounds crew ever since.
For him, memories flow a lot better than the sewage during Shea's first opener. An ejector pump failed and Flynn and fellow workers swept to keep the waste from oozing onto the field. Not that the field, built on a swamp, was so great.
"It took them all season to find the drains," he said with a guffaw. "They had metal detectors. Every time the team went on the road, they were digging holes everywhere."
Then there was 1986, when the field had to be redone overnight. The Mets had an afternoon game after fans had caused havoc with the clincher the night before. "We just made it by game time. I was just putting the lines down when the national anthem was playing," he said.
Flynn wouldn't trade a minute of it, not even 1974-75, when the Mets, Jets, Yankees and Giants all played there. After that, there was almost no grass on the field and no gas in Flynn's tank. "They put me in the hospital a couple weeks," he said. "I was run down. My blood count was down to zero."
Fact is, his memories trigger ours. For Sue Lucchi, the director of stadium operations and his current boss, it was driving by Shea with her parents when she was a little kid. For yours truly, it was being mesmerized by my first big-league game (twinight doubleheader against the Dodgers, 1964), watching Lenny Dykstra's home run and Robin Ventura's grand single, hearing Bobby Bonilla offer to show a fellow writer the Bronx, getting doused with bleach, feeling Shea shake during the 2000 pennant drive, sensing the earth move with Piazza's home run after 9/11.
A tip o' the cap to you, Pete Flynn, for helping to make Shea so hospitable to all of us.
He's still one of the best workers, Lucchi said. He will get his due today alongside the players he has known for so long. When the oldtimers come back, they all have the same reaction: "Are you still here?"
That's what people have been saying about Shea for years, too.
