Like a Ken Burns documentary woven with many voices and half-forgotten events, this history of the 1962 season in Major League Baseball covers much more than the pennant races and the World Series matchup between the Yankees and the transplanted Giants. It was the second year of John F. Kennedy's "Camelot" presidency, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis and astronaut John Glenn's orbit of the Earth, and the year a Black graduated from the University of Georgia for the first time.
It was also the year of Beverly Hillbillies and The Rifleman and The Flintstones on television while Marilyn Monroe died from an overdose of sleeping pills and Romper Room host Sherri Chessen aborted a fetus after taking the tranquilizer thalidomide.
And, of course, it was the year the New York Yankees and San Francisco Giants played to a penultimate seventh game in the World Series with the Yankees leading 1-0 in the bottom of the 9th inning when slugger Willie McCovey came to plate with Mattie Alou on third base and Willie Mays on second.
