Addie was born in New York City on February 6, 1910, as Robert Richard Addonizio. He was the fifth of ten children of Antonio and Teresa (Spaziante) Addonizio, Italian immigrants who came to the United States late in the 19th century. (One of Addie’s seven brothers was Johnny Addie, a renowned ring announcer at Madison Square Garden from 1948 to 1971 who worked more than 100 world championships.) At the time of Addie’s birth, the family lived in Greenwich Village, but later moved to Mount Vernon, a suburb north of the Bronx.

After graduation from Mount Vernon High School, Addie enrolled in the journalism school at the University of Alabama, where he joined the boxing team. In a retrospective of Addie’s career, Thomas Boswell wrote in the Washington Post: “Addie was that rare youth who couldn’t figure out what he liked to do better – slug it out with a middleweight or write poetry and songs.” Addie recalled that in his second bout, the Southern Conference champion knocked him down 13 times, but Addie kept getting up. “Finally,” said Addie, “he was so tired he couldn’t raise his hands and I knocked him out.”1

After graduating from Alabama, Addie held a variety of jobs before joining the staff of the New York Journal-American. He left that job in 1938 to work for the Washington Times (later Times-Herald). Initially hired as assistant sports editor, he also served for a time as a general reporter. At one point his coverage of a sensational murder trial put him on the front page for 26 straight days.

When the United States was drawn into World War II, Addie enlisted in the Army Air Corps, ultimately rising to the rank of captain. For a time he was assigned to the Royal Air Force as a radar controller at Uxbridge, the radar center for the defense of London. One night Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a regular visitor to the center, brought along Generals Eisenhower and Patton. When Addie was asked by Patton to explain the entire operation, he told the general to wait because he was busy dealing with a German air raid.2 A later assignment was to temporarily administer cities in France and Germany that had been liberated by the Allies. “It was my misfortune,” he would later write, “to be the first one on the scene at both Dachau and Buchenwald, two of the most infamous of the Nazi concentration camps. The scar has never healed.”3

After the war Addie returned to the Times-Herald as a full-time sportswriter. In February 1949 he married professional tennis player Pauline Betz. As an amateur, she had won the US Open Championship in 1942, ’43 and ’44, then again in 1946, the same year she also won the Wimbledon title and appeared on the cover of Time magazine. After being barred from major championships in 1947 for simply considering becoming a professional, she played professionally until 1960. In 1965 Betz was elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame. The couple had four sons: Robert (Rusty), Jon (adopted), Gary, and Richard (Rick) Addie, and a daughter, Kim, a prize-winning poet and novelist who reclaimed the original family surname of Addonizio.

Addie’s career was interrupted again in 1951 when he was called into service during the Korean War. This led to another encounter with General Eisenhower, who was then in France as supreme commander of NATO. While escorting a group of American newspaper publishers interested in interviewing Eisenhower about a possible run for the presidency, Addie was assigned to deliver a secret message to the general. When asked by Eisenhower if he was a career service officer, Addie, who felt at ease with even the most eminent personalities he encountered, replied, “Hell no, I’m a sportswriter who was recalled in the Korean war.”4

They discussed sports for a while, then Eisenhower asked Addie for advice as to what to say if the publishers were to ask him about the presidency. Addie suggested that he say he was focused on his job with NATO but that he would not entirely rule out the possibility of entering the presidential race. That, said Addie, led to many US papers saying for the first time that Eisenhower might become a presidential candidate. Later, when Eisenhower was president, he said to Addie: “I don’t know whether to thank you or damn you. Look at all the time you’ve taken away from my golf.”5

After two years in the service, Addie returned to the Times-Herald. When the paper was purchased by, and merged into, the Washington Post in 1954, publisher Philip Graham asked Addie to stay on. With the two papers, he served as the Washington Senators beat writer for 20 years until the team moved to Texas in 1971. Addie was proud to say that he never missed a day covering the team. After the Senators’ departure, Addie covered the PGA tour until his retirement in 1977.

Two of his favorites among the Senators were managers Charlie Dressen and Gil Hodges.

Dressen, with whom Addie played gin rummy and went to the race track, “was a delight to be with because each day was a new chapter. He was like a sparrow always flitting about and chirping about what he intended to do on the field.”6 Addie and Hodges, a golf partner, would visit Indian graves when the team was in Kansas City, looking for artifacts. When Hodges left Washington to become the Mets manager, he sent Addie a note thanking him for his friendship and support, adding, “I honestly don’t know of another sportswriter who is more honest and respected than you.”7

Addie kept himself busy in his years at the Post. In addition to covering the Senators, for many years he wrote six or seven columns a week as well as a column, “Addie’s Atoms,” for The Sporting News from the mid-1950s to the mid-’70s. In 1967 he served as president of the Baseball Writers Association of America, and in 1981 he was selected by his fellow baseball writers to receive the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, for which he is recognized in the “Scribes & Mikemen” exhibit in the Library of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. In the late 1970s he served on the Hall of Fame Committee on Baseball Veterans.

An unabashed sentimentalist, Addie was known as a fan’s sportswriter, a title he gladly acknowledged. “I wrote like a fan because I always was one,” he said. “I wrote like one of the players’ friends because I was that too. And I always emphasized the good.”8 His daughter, Kim, confirmed her father’s passion for sports. “He was in love with baseball,” she said. “He loved the human aspect of the game. He was a fan, and he was a real newspaper man. I remember him typing at the kitchen table on his old Smith-Corona.”9

In his 1977 retrospective, Thomas Boswell wrote: “Among sportswriters, Addie was most unique for the affection he inspired both among those who read him and among those about whom he wrote.” Addie clearly enjoyed being part of the sportswriters’ community. In a column for The Sporting News at the time of his retirement, he wrote: “Always, there was a great camaraderie in the fraternity. If you missed a quote that made a good column or a good dressing room story, there was always someone to refresh your notebook. Sportswriting always was for the free souls and once was the last rampart of opinion free from editorial nudging.”10

His light touch as a writer reflected his amiable and self-deprecating personality, which endeared him to many prominent athletes and other public figures. A well-known personality in Washington, Addie was immediately recognizable because of his trademark red socks and dark glasses. (The socks were a fashion choice, but the dark glasses were a necessity; shrapnel from a bomb blast in World War II had made his eyes sensitive to light.)

Addie worked at a time when sportswriters were more or less on an equal social and economic footing with people involved in sports. This meant that a writer, especially one as affable as Addie, would not only report on the people he covered but also socialize with some of them. In Sports Writer, the memoir he published in 1980, Addie recounted leisure-time encounters with athletes, coaches, and managers at local watering holes, card tables, and race tracks.

When the book was published, Morris Siegel, Addie’s former colleague at the Washington Post, wrote: “Those who have been privileged to be sportswriters could not have chosen a more qualified authority to speak for us. Addie was indeed a sportswriter, and a gifted one at that. It was all he ever wanted to be.”11

Several of Addie’s anecdotes involve athletes indulging their fondness for beer and booze, as well as their ingenious methods of avoiding curfew. The night before the fifth game of the 1956 World Series, Addie was at El Boracco, a New York nightclub, with Yankees pitcher Don Larsen. At 4 a.m. Addie left in order to get a few hours’ sleep before covering the game. According to Addie, Larsen, who would pitch the first and only perfect game in World Series history that day, “lingered a little longer.”12

One time Addie himself contributed to the delinquency of three players. Invited to a party at the home of a friend in New York, he asked Senators sluggers Jim Lemon, Harmon Killebrew, and Bob Allison to go along. When they reminded Addie that manager Cookie Lavagetto had a strict 11 p.m. curfew, he assured them that since Lavagetto was a pal of his they needn’t worry. When the players returned to their hotel around one a.m. they each found a note from Lavagetto telling them they were fined $200. When Addie went to Lavagetto the next day to accept blame for the incident, the manager said he would rescind the fines if the Senators won both games of that day’s doubleheader against the Yankees. Addie passed on the message to the players, then against all odds the Senators did sweep the doubleheader when Lemon hit a homer in each game and Killebrew and Allison hit one apiece.

While Sports Writer contains any number of interesting autobiographical tidbits, it is mainly a collection of his memories of sports figures, from the obscure to the world-famous, as well as of notable figures in politics and show business. Among the more prominent figures with whom he had more than a professional relationship were Vince Lombardi, Ted Williams, Rocky Marciano, Babe Zaharias, Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, and Red Auerbach.

The most famous gathering place for athletes and celebrities in the 1940s and ’50s was Toots Shor’s New York City saloon, a favorite haunt of such notables as Joe DiMaggio, Bob Hope, and Frank Sinatra. Addie shared many recollections of time spent at Shor’s hanging out with Shor himself, athletes, fellow sportswriters, and celebrities such as Jackie Gleason and Don Ameche. Noted journalist and commentator Bob Considine, another regular at Shor’s, who wrote a biography of the saloonkeeper, was godfather to Addie’s daughter, Kim.

Working in Washington, Addie had the opportunity to establish close ties with an array of Washington dignitaries interested in sports. Two of his close friends were Supreme Court Justice Byron “Whizzer” White (an All-American halfback at Colorado), and General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joints of Staff. He knew every president from Truman through Ford, except for Kennedy. He did, however, know Kennedy’s sister Kathleen, who worked with him at the Washington Times-Herald before World War II and had a desk across from his. When he returned to the paper after the war, Kathleen’s desk was occupied by a young photographer named Jacqueline Bouvier, the future wife of John F. Kennedy. They did not see each other after she left the paper, but in November 1963 Addie was approached at a restaurant near the White House by Dave Powers, an assistant to President Kennedy. Powers said that the president knew of Addie and that he was sure that Kennedy would like to talk about sports with him. He then told Addie that he would arrange a meeting when the president returned from his trip to Dallas the following week.

One indication of the range of friends and admirers Addie acquired over the course of his career was the dozens of congratulatory notes and telegrams he received upon retiring in 1977. Among the well-wishers were President Carter, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, League Presidents Lee MacPhail and Chub Feeney, Judge John Sirica, Angelo Dundee, Red Auerbach, Sonny Jurgensen, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Billy Martin.

Kim Addonizio said of her father: “He was very warm, a big-hearted person. Often I wouldn’t see him when I was young because he’d come home late and I was asleep. I asked him to wake me when he got home. He would, and then I’d sit on his lap and we’d watch TV. He had the soul of a poet. Retirement was hard for him. Writing was his life.” 13

Addie concluded a personal retrospective he wrote for The Sporting News when he retired with the following: “Maybe I’ll get used to living a day without a deadline. Or maybe it will be like the great line Jimmy Cagney, the actor, wrote. He tells about an old man who was crying and was being comforted by a young girl. ‘Old man,’ she asks, why do you weep?’ He answers: ‘I thought that the years of my youth were mine to keep.’”14

Bob Addie died of cardiac arrest on January 18, 1982. He is buried in Saint Gabriel Cemetery, Potomac, Maryland.

Sources

Addie, Bob. Sports Writer (Lanham Maryland: Accent, 1980).

The Sporting News

Washington Post

Bob Addie file, Baseball Hall of Fame Library

Telephone interview, Kim Addonizio

Thanks to Kim Addonizio and Bill Francis (Baseball Hall of Fame Library) for their assistance.

Notes

Indeed, if Roger Angell’s story were presented to Roger Angell in fictional form—which could happen because his primary profession has been not writer, but fiction editor—he would be justified in rejecting it for implausibility, for a plot with a bit too much coincidence and permutation, within a setting of decidedly too much elegance and sophistication. As yarns go, this one has been a doozy.

The tale begins on September 19, 1920, in New York City. The household into which Roger (no middle name) Angell was born was far from ordinary. His father, Harvard-educated Ernest Angell, was a Wall Street lawyer who would eventually become the New York regional director of the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as national chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union. His mother, Bryn Mawr-educated Katherine Sergeant Angell, was a writer and editor who would be among the first recruits to The New Yorker magazine following its 1925 founding, and would retain a prominent role there for 35 years.

It was from his father—who’d grown up in Cleveland, and remained a lifelong Indians fan—that young Roger was given a warm introduction to baseball. Writing in 1970, the son quotes the father:

“We had Nap Lajoie at second. You’ve heard of him. A big broad-shouldered fellow, but a beautiful fielder. He was a rough customer. If he didn’t like an umpire’s call, he’d give him a faceful of tobacco juice. The shortstop was Terry Turner – a smaller man and blond. I can still see Lajoie picking up a grounder and wheeling and floating the ball over to Turner. Oh, he was quick on his feet!”1

Ernest wasn’t just a fan, he was a seriously competitive ballplayer far into adulthood, in the local-nine pick-up manner of the era. And, as his son describes it, “my father sailed through Harvard in three years, but failed to attain his greatest goal of making the varsity in baseball, and had to settle for playing on a class team.”2

Angell describes his father:

… lean and tall, with long fingers, brown eyes, and a sense of energy about him. … Handsome and dashing in the flattering, tightly cut suits and jackets of the 1930s (like Gary Cooper, he remained unstuffy in a vest), he strode swiftly, banged doors behind him, and swarmed up stairs, appearing always on the verge of some outdoor errand or expedition. Bravura came naturally to him …

It was this spirit, brought to mountain climbing, to figure skating, to tennis and trout fishing, to skiing and canoeing and gardening and so forth, that sometimes inspired us in the family to call him The King of the Forest.3

And so the never-deskbound “King of the Forest” instilled in his boy a deep avocation for not just baseball—Roger was a pitcher into high school until developing a sore arm—but many other sweaty pursuits, including golf, horseback riding, ice skating, swimming, tennis, and most especially, sailing. Father and son were both raised in circumstances of abundant comfort (if not plain wealth) and both pursued careers of engrossing intellectual challenge, yet both eschewed the ever-available temptation to passively let the flesh soften. This Teddy Roosevelt-style gung ho embrace of the physical realm by an otherwise bookish sort rests at the heart of the perspective of Angell’s first-person-narrative baseball writing.

From his mother Roger Angell inherited his gift for comprehension and mastery of the written word. Moreover, he was afforded the opportunity to essentially replace her at The New Yorker, and sustain a most unique family legacy half a century further. Nevertheless, Angell’s relationship with his mother wasn’t always easy:

Most memories of my mother are affectionate and cheerful, but still center on the bottomless worries and overthoughts that descended on her late in her life. And not always so late, come to think of it.

… For her a fistful of candy never had a chance against the complicated right thing. She loved us all, anxiously and bemusedly, but forgot to hand out kisses because we were great runners or really good-looking or the smartest kid on the block. Stuff like that went without saying, only she never said it.

Nancy Franklin, in a remarkable piece about my mother in The New Yorker in 1995 (she’d never met her), wrote, “It’s funny; as an editor she was maternal but as a mother she was editorial.” This made me laugh, not cry, and it has come to me over time that my own way of loving her was often simply to try to cheer her up.4

Even with formidable advantages, Angell’s childhood knew emotional pain. Ernest and Katharine divorced when Roger was eight:

One explanation for the divorce was that my father, who went to France in 1917 with the A.E.F. [American Expeditionary Force] as a counter-intelligence officer—he spoke French and some German—adopted a Gallic view of marriage and was repeatedly unfaithful to my mother after he came home. Another was that my mother had fallen in love with E. B. White, a colleague of hers at The New Yorker ….

She always insisted that there was no connection between her divorce and their marriage, which came three months after her return from Reno. Whatever. What can be said for sure is that each of my parents grew up with a critically missing parent—she a mother, he a father—and pretty much had to fake it in these roles with their own kids. They worked at this all their lives, though it sometimes pissed you off or broke your heart (choose one) to watch them.5

Following the divorce, young Angell (and his older sister Nancy) lived with their father. But they continued to spend significant time with their mother also, and Angell developed a close relationship with his stepfather E. B. “Andy” White that would last for decades.

White’s primary occupation was editor and writer for The New Yorker, alongside Katharine, but he authored many books as well. He became best known for the highly-acclaimed children’s novels Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan, and also co-wrote (with William Strunk Jr.) the writer’s manual The Elements of Style that has been standard issue for college undergraduates since its initial publication in 1959 and four subsequent re-issues.

Angell’s fondness for White was not so much son-to-father (White was seven years younger than Katharine, and ten years younger than Ernest) as nephew-to-uncle:

My mother and Andy White got married in 1929 … and though my sister and I were only weekend and summertime visitors with them after that, I soon felt as much at home at their place—on East Eighth Street and then East Forty-eighth Street, in New York, and then in Maine—as I was with my father the rest of the time.

A fresh household sharpens attention, and one of the things I picked up was that sense of ease and play that Andy brought to his undertakings. Though subject to nerves, he possessed something like that invisible extra beat of time that great athletes show on the field. Dogs and children were easy for him because he approached them as a participant instead of a winner.6

As a teenager Angell was boarded at the elite Pomfret School in Connecticut. His summers were actively busy, often involving ambitious vacations arranged by his father:

I was a New York City kid who knew the subways and museums and movie theaters and ballparks by heart, but in the 1930s also got out of town a lot, mostly by car. I drove (well, was driven) to Bear Mountain and Atlantic City and Gettysburg and Niagara Falls; went repeatedly to Boston and New Hampshire and Maine; drove to a Missouri cattle farm owned by an uncle; drove there during another summer and thence onward to Santa Fe and Tesuque and out to the Arizona Painted Desert. Then back again, to New York.

Before this, in March 1933—it was the week of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first inaugural—I’d boarded a Greyhound bus to Detroit, along with a Columbia student named Tex Goldschmidt, where we picked up a test-model Terraplane sedan at the factory (courtesy of an advertising friend of my father’s who handled the Hudson-Essex account) and drove it back home. A couple of months later, in company with a math teacher named Mrs. Burchell or Burkhill and four Lincoln School seventh-grade classmates, I climbed into a buckety old Buick sedan and drove to the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago; we came back by way of Niagara Falls …. 7

Following graduation from Pomfret in 1938, Angell followed his father’s path and attended Harvard. In June 1942 he graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in English. Barely a month later, with World War II in full flame, Angell was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Force.

He undertook basic training in Atlantic City, then was troop-trained to Lowry Field, outside Denver, for armament school. After further training, he served a long stint at Lowry as a machine gun instructor. In early 1944 Angell was transferred to a Public Relations post in Honolulu, where he became the managing editor of Brief, a weekly magazine distributed to American service members throughout the Pacific theatre. He never saw combat. In his autobiography Angell presents a long list of friends and acquaintances who lost their lives to World War II, and he assesses that he had “not been in the war exactly, but like others back then I’d got the idea of it.”8

While stationed at Lowry Field in October 1942, Angell married Evelyn Baker, who’d been his girlfriend throughout his college years. She was “thin and brown-haired, with a strong chin,” and “tougher than anyone [he]’d met before.”9 They would remain married for more than 20 years, and had two daughters, Caroline (“Callie”) and Alice.

At the conclusion of the war, Angell “observed Christmas of 1945 on the homeward-bound carrier Saratoga, converted to a transport.”10 He was 25 years old, and ready to begin his career.

No suggestion exists that Angell had any ambition other than to be a writer. He and Evelyn “swiftly acquired New York jobs and friends, an apartment in the upper reaches of Riverside Drive, a two-tone Ford Tudor, a bulldog, and … a baby daughter…. The works.”11 He spent his first post-war year avidly contributing to whatever publication would accept his pieces. In 1947 Angell landed his first serious job, with Holiday magazine, an upscale new travel periodical. He would become senior editor, and remain there for nearly a decade.

The Holiday gig provided Angell with not just interesting work and a budding income, but the sort of experience that simply couldn’t be found elsewhere. In his autobiography Angell recounts a particular six-week 1949 business trip to Europe, crossing the Atlantic aboard the French liner De Grasse, in which he and Evelyn rubbed elbows with actor Alfonso Bedoya (who sneered “We don’t need no badges” in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), with playwright Tennessee Williams, and with novelist Somerset Maugham (at his opulent Villa Mauresque estate in Cap Ferrat in southeastern France).12 Angell was doing just fine.

But in 1956 Angell would take employment with The New Yorker, the job he was perhaps destined to have, and the one he would hold for the rest of his life.

Angell was a perfect fit for The New Yorker, not just because of his boundless ability as a writer and editor, and, of course, his matchless pedigree, but for his breadth of interest and curiosity. As a writer, he contributed a variety of stories, casuals, “Notes and Comments” pieces, movie reviews, and for many years the magazine’s annual Christmas verse under the heading of, “Greetings, Friends!” Within the topic of sports alone, in addition to his baseball pieces, Angell wrote about tennis, hockey, football, rowing, and horse racing. As a fiction editor, among his stable of regular writers were John Updike, William Trevor, and Woody Allen.13

The idea of Angell chronicling baseball for the magazine was not his, but came from editor-in-chief William Shawn (the father of playwright and actor Wallace Shawn). As Angell explained, “Our magazine is in the enviable position of ‘covering’ only those things which appeal to specific writers and editors.”14 Shawn sent Angell to Florida in early 1962 with the task of delivering a piece about Spring Training, and the April 7, 1962, issue of The New Yorker included Angell’s “The Old Folks Behind Home,” a leisurely observation of exhibition games from the perspective of elderly retired fans.

This initial piece was well received, but there was no strategic plan for Angell to contribute baseball articles on a regular basis. “I just kept going,” Angell explained. “I had no idea it would go on this long…. I just went on from year to year because I always found something else I wanted to write about. It seemed to be a good fit.”15

Angell soon settled in to a pattern of contributing two or three baseball pieces a year. He deliberately made no attempt to formally “cover” the sport in the manner of The Sporting News or Sports Illustrated, but instead maintained the perspective of a fan. His vantage point was typically a seat in the grandstand rather than the press box, and he was as likely to focus on fellow spectators and the ballpark experience as the athletes and action on the field. A good example is his consideration of attending a New York Mets game at the Polo Grounds in the summer of 1963, in that antique ballpark’s final season:

The dirt, the noise, the chatter, the bursting life of the Met grandstands are as rich and deplorable and heart-warming as Rivington Street. The Polo Grounds, which is in the last few months of its disreputable life, is a vast assemblage of front stoops and rusty fire escapes. On a hot summer evening, everyone around here is touching someone else; there are no strangers, no one is private. The air is alive with shouts, gossip, flying rubbish.

Old-timers know and love every corner of the crazy, crowded, proud old neighborhood. The last-row walkup flats in the outer-most lower grandstands, where one must peer through girders and pigeon nests for a glimpse of green; the little protruding step at the foot of each aisle in the upper deck that trips up the unwary beer-balancer on his way back to his seat; the outfield bullpens, each with its slanting shanty roof, beneath which the relief pitchers sit motionless, with their arms folded and their legs extended; and the good box seats, just on the curve of the upper deck in short right and short left: front windows on the street, where one can watch the arching fall of a weak fly ball and know in advance, like one who sees a street accident in the making, that it will collide with that ridiculous, dangerous upper tier for another home run.

Next year, or perhaps late this summer, all this will vanish. The Mets are moving up in the world, heading toward the suburbs. Their new home, Shea Stadium, in Flushing Meadow Park, will be cleaner and airier: a better place for the children.

Most of the people there will travel by car rather than by subway; the commute will be long, but the residents will be more respectable. There will be broad ramps, no crowding, more privacy. All the accommodations will be desirable: close to the shopping centers, and set in perfect, identical curves, with equally good views of the neat lawns. Indeed, a man who leaves his place will have to make an effort to remember exactly where it is, so he won’t get mixed up on his way back and forget where he lives.

It will be several years, probably, before the members of the family, older and heavier and at last sure of their place in the world, indulge themselves in some moments of foolish reminiscence: “Funny, I was thinking of the old place today. Remember how jammed we used to be back there? Remember how hot and noisy it was? I wouldn’t move back there for anything, and anyway it’s all torn down now, but, you know, we sure were happy in those days.”16

Angell’s baseball pieces in The New Yorker were a hit, and they became the channel through which he gained fame. In 1972, the first ten years of these articles were collected and published as The Summer Game. The book was critically acclaimed and an immediate bestseller. The notice in The New York Times Book Review could hardly be more laudatory: “Page for page, The Summer Game contains not only the classiest but also the most resourceful baseball writing I have ever read.”17

As the decades flowed, so did Angell’s quietly perceptive and finely wrought baseball impressions in The New Yorker. They continued to be collected and retrospectively presented in book form, to sustained market appetite as well as critical praise: Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (1977), Late Innings: A Baseball Companion (1982), Season Ticket: A Baseball Companion (1988), Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader (1991), and finally a “greatest hits” version, Game Time: A Baseball Companion (2003).

In a break from the formula, at the age of 80 Angell wrote A Pitcher’s Story, a book-length study of star pitcher David Cone that is also a thorough examination of the art and challenge of pitching in general.

Altogether Angell’s body of work is quite unlike any other. As Steven P. Gietschier of The Sporting News put it:

Angell is that rare baseball fan who has been able to make a career out of his pleasure. Without abandoning the wonder, the affection, and the detachment that characterize a fan’s kinship to baseball, Angell has fashioned a string of remarkable essays that explore the sport in consistently new ways. His work possesses a grace and elegance previously unknown in sports journalism and has earned a lasting place in the literature spawned by the national pastime.18

Angell was prominently featured among the sage on-camera interviewees in Ken Burns’s 1994 documentary film Baseball. In 2011 Angell was named as the inaugural recipient of the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing, and in 2013 he received the J.G. Taylor Spink Award from the Baseball Writers Association of America, the baseball writers’ equivalent of the Hall of Fame. He is the first non-newspaper writer, and the first non-Baseball Writers Association of America member, to win the Spink Award, which is voted upon by the BBWAA membership.

In February of 2014, The New Yorker published “This Old Man,” Angell’s pondering on the implications of his being still alive at 93. With neither self-pity nor boastfulness—instead, with wry humor—Angell opens with a presentation of a long list of old-guy ailments (arthritis, macular degeneration, shingles, a heart condition, knee trouble, a herniated disk), before assessing:

I’ve endured a few knocks but missed worse. I know how lucky I am, and secretly tap wood, greet the day, and grab a sneaky pleasure from my survival at long odds. The pains and insults are bearable. My conversation may be full of holes and pauses, but I’ve learned to dispatch a private Apache scout ahead into the next sentence, the one coming up, to see if there are any vacant names or verbs in the landscape up there. If he sends back a warning, I’ll pause meaningfully, duh, until something else comes to mind.

… Decline and disaster impend, but my thoughts don’t linger there. It shouldn’t surprise me if at this time next week I’m surrounded by family, gathered on short notice—they’re sad and shocked but also a little pissed off to be here—to help decide, after what’s happened, what’s to be done with me now. It must be this hovering knowledge, that two-ton safe swaying on a frayed rope just over my head, that makes everyone so glad to see me again. “How great you’re looking! Wow, tell me your secret!” they kindly cry when they happen upon me crossing the street or exiting a dinghy or departing an X-ray room, when the little balloon over their heads reads, “Holy shit—he’s still vertical!”19

Though the mood of the piece retains this spunky attitude, Angell devotes much of it to the subject of personal loss, that booby prize awarded to those who outlive their peers: “the downside of great age is the room it provides for rotten news”.20 Like that of his parents, Angell’s first marriage ended in divorce, but a half-century following the breakup Angell here still mentions Evelyn (who passed away long ago), and with warmth. He writes at vivid length about his second wife, Carol Rogge (whom Angell married in 1963; together they had a son, John Henry), who passed away in 2012 at the age of 73, and most achingly he writes about his late daughter Callie, who committed suicide in 2010 at the age of 62.

With the authentic wisdom available only to the very, very old, what Angell writes about most in “This Old Man” is coping: getting by, if not overcoming, difficulty and pain and heartbreak and sorrow. Being Angell, he devotes attention to the many things he loves, including dogs and family and friends and reading and Scotch whisky and (yes) baseball and music and movies and jokes. He also devotes cheerful attention to the subject of sex, and in this undertaking his familiar delicate touch has never been more finely exhibited.

The article concludes, indeed, with an affirmation of the ever-invigorating power of the matters of the heart:

Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love. We oldies yearn daily and hourly for conversation and a renewed domesticity, for company at the movies or while visiting a museum, for someone close by in the car when coming home at night.

… I believe that everyone in the world wants to be with someone else tonight, together in the dark, with the sweet warmth of a hip or a foot or a bare expanse of shoulder within reach. Those of us who have lost that, whatever our age, never lose the longing: just look at our faces. If it returns, we seize upon it avidly, stunned and altered again.21

Well into his tenth decade, Roger Angell’s writing continues with burningly profound candor. His latest offering (last? we’ll see if that safe drops) is just the latest in a very, very long line of essays that set a towering standard, whether the subject is the sport we love, or the people we love most deeply.

Published May 15, 2014

Postscript

Roger Angell died at the age of 101 on May 20, 2022.

Notes

Bob Broeg (rhymes with “egg”) was a titan of sports writing and knowledge in St. Louis for six decades. He was a local boy through and through, growing up in south city, attending the University of Missouri, and working in St. Louis (aside from a very brief time early in his career in Boston), from 1946 until his death. He held his dream job, St. Louis Cardinals beat writer, at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, before being promoted to sports editor, and then to assistant to the publisher. Even into his so-called retirement, he continued to write a Sunday column and also special columns whenever the mood struck or events warranted. He hosted a KMOX radio show with friend and rival columnist Bob Burnes, where he opined about sports for years. He lent his name to the St. Louis SABR chapter and regularly attended the Bob Broeg Chapter monthly meetings. He was an author of many books, including one on his favorite team, the Gas House Gang. Most importantly, he was highly respected by so many in the St. Louis area, both the people he covered and his many readers and listeners.

Robert William Patrick Broeg was born on March 18, 1918, to Robert Michel Broeg, a bakery deliveryman, and Alice (Wiley) Broeg. He tells the story in his inimitable style, “So in the afternoon in the kitchen at Virginia and Pulaski in South St. Louis, Madame Mal Practice used her forceps like ice tongs, grabbing me fore and aft, rather than left and right. One tong scarred my left eye, permanently blurring my vision. No corneal transplants back then. The other tong dug into the back of my cranium. So, yeah, I had a hole in my head from day one.”1 His father got another doctor to come by to mend the baby’s wounds. In 1923, little brother Frederick Charles Broeg joined the clan.

Even with a bad left eye, Broeg had an early inclination toward reading and writing. His parents bought all four St. Louis papers every day (grand total — eight cents). He read them all but his favorite paper was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, at least that is what he insisted after being a Post-Dispatch employee for five decades. He particularly liked the sports pages, baseball and boxing being his main interests, just as they were the major sporting interests in the country at the time. He also devoured the ‘Baseball Joe’ series of books about fictional baseball titan Joe Matson. He received the first in the series at age nine from his uncle while recuperating in the hospital from appendicitis. After that, he asked for, and received, additional books in the series for birthdays and Christmases.2

May 30, 1927, was a special day for nine-year-old Broeg. His uncle Will was tasked with bringing him to the ballpark for a Memorial Day doubleheader. Sitting in the right field bleachers, his most vivid memories of the Cardinal sweep were the sights and sounds of the ball hitting the bat and the smells of popcorn and peanuts. He also remembered Billy Southworth, future St. Louis pennant-winning manager, patrolling right field. It would be the first of many games for Broeg.3

Even though Broeg didn’t remember him from his first game, his favorite player growing up was “The Fordham Flash” Frankie Frisch. He tried to imitate his hitting and fielding style, including learning to switch hit. He was right-handed, so hitting right with a bad left eye probably was good incentive to bat from the left side. In later years, Broeg was lucky enough to become friends with Frisch, including penning a book titled, “The Pilot Light and the Gas House Gang,” featuring Frisch prominently.

Broeg attended Mt. Pleasant grade school. The historic building is still in existence today, no longer a school, but an apartment building. During the summers he attended dime admission movies three days a week, and played baseball, basketball, and soccer whenever he could. His protective parents forbade him from playing football after they found out he had practiced with the school team. His father wasn’t wild about him playing soccer either, but Broeg played organized soccer for three years before dad said no more. He was modest about his playing ability, writing in his autobiography, “Over the years I got to play with some pretty good baseball and basketball teams, if only because I was smart enough to organize more talented guys to play on teams I managed. Naturally, I reserved a starter’s role for myself.”4 As a teenager, he attended an open Cardinals workout at Sportsman’s Park, not because he thought he could play professional baseball but because he wanted to meet Frankie Frisch. Instead, the Cardinals’ Cuban coach Mike Gonzalez ran the workout. After the tryout, Gonzalez assessed Broeg in his heavily accented English, “You fiel’ hokay, boy, but you throw like old womang!”5

After he realized he would never be a professional baseball player, becoming a sportswriter was Broeg’s focus. His fourth grade teacher saw his interest in reading and writing and arranged a meeting with Post-Dispatch baseball writer J. Roy Stockton, Broeg’s favorite columnist. He was impressed by both Stockton and the Post-Dispatch operations.

Broeg’s favorite season from his childhood was 1930. His beloved Cardinals won 22 of their final 26 games to take the pennant. He loved the big offense era and delighted in Jim Bottomley and Frankie Frisch’s exploits, along with the bench players on the team. He also remembered attending the last game of the year, after the Cardinals clinched, witnessing the major league debut of Cardinal legend Dizzy Dean, who pitched a three-hit, 3-1 complete game victory over the Pirates. A week later he attended his first World Series game, witnessing Jimmie Foxx bury the Cardinals with a home run in the ninth inning off a Burleigh Grimes slow curve. Broeg remembered and told stories like this for the rest of his life.

Broeg went to high school at Cleveland High, which is now known as Cleveland Junior Naval Academy. The historic building he attended school in sits silently in his old neighborhood, waiting for redevelopment. He was president of his senior class and the baseball team manager, finagling his way onto the baseball team and playing a few times in his senior year, garnering a few base hits and a game-ending catch.

During the summers, Broeg and his friends played baseball every day of the week (except Sunday) on the Cleveland High field. Typically they’d work odd jobs in the morning to earn enough money to buy used baseballs from the Cardinals and the Browns, sold at the princely rate of three scuffed balls for a buck. On Saturdays, some young adults would join in and they’d play triple headers. Sundays were reserved for league games while wearing real uniforms at other locations in the city.

In high school Broeg was developing his comma-rich, descriptive writing style, writing regularly for the school newspaper and penning the baseball team season summary in the 1936 yearbook. One paragraph reads: “Spectators almost witnessed a rarity of rarities in the season finale — a no-hit, no-run game; but, alas, and alack, Bob Gerst, Beaumont’s star chucker, failed on only three occasions to keep Cleveland hitless. John Lamping, Bob Broeg, and Norv Bleitz were able to secure one base knocks off the Beaumont north-paw who pitched a nifty ball game, while his team mates were raising riot with the offerings of the South Siders’ pitchers.”6 During his junior year, he wrote a story about Branch Rickey, which included an opportunity to interview the great man. Rickey was impressed by the story and promised Broeg a job with the Cardinals the summer of 1936 before he went off to college.

Broeg’s father, who started working for a living after dropping out of grade school, did not insist that his sons work. His reasoning was that once they started working they’d never stop so they should enjoy their childhood. Broeg didn’t start working regularly until after he graduated high school in December 1935. He helped the Post-Dispatch prep sports editor cover high school events. After those temporary assignments went well, he started covering Public High School League triple header baseball games on Saturdays. He’d cover the games, then go down to the Post-Dispatch and file the stories. That work netted him $7.50 a week. He also wrote a column for a South St. Louis free delivery weekly newspaper, getting 10 cents a column inch. Broeg never struggled coming up with enough words to fill a full column and take home two dollars.

In April 1936, he showed up at the Cardinals’ offices and met traveling secretary Clarence Lloyd. Lloyd didn’t know what to do with Broeg, but eventually made him a ticket taker. The best part of this job for Broeg was that when the fifth inning ended, the ticket takers were freed up to watch the rest of the game. And sometimes, particularly during weekday games, not all ticket takers were needed, so Broeg could watch the whole game free. After high school closed for the summer, he filled his evenings by working as the official scorer and public address announcer at the St. Louis Softball Park. He took home one dollar a night for two evening games.

Broeg started attending the University of Missouri Journalism School in the fall of 1936. He joined the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, largely because, by washing dishes after meals, his monthly house bill was halved to $27.50; tuition for the semester was $30. Broeg’s total spending allowance, based on what his parents could afford, was $35 a month, so he was just barely able to squeeze by, often subsisting on care packages from mom.

While at Missouri, Broeg worked for the student newspaper (of course). Foreshadowing his own newspaper career, he wrote a weekly column. He also got a job in the university public relations department. This helped cement his lifelong love of Ole’ Mizzou and the football program. The legendary football coach, Don Faurot, for whom the Missouri football field in now named, started coaching Missouri one year before Broeg enrolled and pulled the football program out of the doldrums. Broeg met J. Roy Stockton again when the newspaperman came to town to cover a Washington University-Missouri football game. He remembered Broeg from their earlier meeting and told him to send some examples of his writing. From that point forward, Broeg lobbied Stockton for a job with the Post-Dispatch.

Summer work in 1937 was as a ticket taker for the Cardinals again. But in the depression in 1938, Broeg could only manage some umpiring in local leagues. He took a college course and was still able to continue with Missouri in the fall. In the summer of 1939, The Sporting News called. They offered him a job at $12.50 a week which he gratefully accepted. But when the Cardinals’ publicity department offered him $20, he took that job on the condition that the Cardinals clear it with The Sporting News. They didn’t, and editor J.G. Taylor Spink was not happy. Broeg wrote him an apology; Spink wrote him a brief reply, “My dear Bob: As you get older, you’ll realize you’ve got to consider the feelings of others.”7 It was the right decision for young Broeg. Not only did he make more money, he also worked with another new employee, and a person he would end up covering in the future, a young man named Bing Devine, future general manager of the Cardinals.

When Broeg got back to the University of Missouri, he accepted a job with the Associated Press in the Columbia office. He was able to work for them and finish his degree. He also met Dorothy Carr, his future wife. After his Christmas, 1940 graduation, he inquired, but the Post-Dispatch had no position for him. So he continued working for the Associated Press in the Jefferson City office on a temporary assignment on the state capital press team. His main job was to send stories out via the punch machine. He also got some experience editing reports sent to small newspapers. After several months, the AP put his name on a list of ‘unassigned’ employees. The office in Boston picked him up. He said goodbye to his girlfriend and family and moved to the East in late summer of 1941.

Broeg was assigned as the ‘night side rewrite man’ in the Boston AP office. His shift from 5 PM to 2 AM left him days available to go to ball games. Boston, like St. Louis, had baseball teams in both leagues, so he had plenty of opportunities to go to games. The Boston Braves were run by Bob Quinn, who had headed the St. Louis Browns back in the 1920s and were managed by Kansas City native Casey Stengel, so Broeg had some common foundations to make connections. But he definitely wanted to get into more sports writing and return to St. Louis and kept writing to J. Roy Stockton. The AP promised him a move to Wichita but it didn’t materialize. Finally, his mentor wrote back and told him while the Post-Dispatch didn’t need anyone, the rival St. Louis Star-Times had a need in their sports department. Broeg contacted sports editor Sid Keener and got the job along with more money, a princely $42.50 per week.

Broeg’s time in Boston wasn’t long, only about 18 months, but he was a witness to some amazing individual achievements. He saw Ted Williams hit .406, Lefty Grove win his 300th game, Paul Waner achieve 3,000 hits, and pitcher Jim Tobin hit four consecutive home runs, a pinch-hit home run followed by three home runs the following day while pitching. He remembered these events fondly and these experiences added to his baseball-encyclopedic mind.

Broeg happily moved back to St. Louis in the summer of 1942. He was making more money, working in the sports department of a newspaper in his hometown, covering his Cardinals, and able to live at home and enjoy mom’s home cooking. His main job was as a copy reader, making sure the baseball game play-by-play accounts were correct. His Cardinals were great in 1942, winning 43 of their final 53 games and ending with 106 wins, two more than the rival Dodgers — plus a World Series win over the Yankees.

Uncle Sam drafted Broeg in 1941 but, due to his bad eye, ruled him 4F. After the war began, he tried to enlist in the Marines but they were reluctant due to his eyesight. He signed a waiver but they told him to go home. Late in 1942, he got the call from the recruiter informing him that they would accept his enlistment. He shipped out to San Diego for boot camp the third Tuesday in December and returned to St. Louis in February, 1943. The Marines assigned him as a recruiting sergeant for St. Louis, instead of an overseas deployment, due to his bad eye. The return home worked out perfectly, allowing him to wed Dorothy Carr on June 19, 1943. The Marines found out about his writing and journalism experience and transferred him to Washington, DC. They wanted to put out a magazine on par with the Navy’s and enlisted the writer to help. Luckily for the young couple, a contact also got Dorothy a position in the capital so they were able to stay together. He led the effort on the magazine but also found time to research and write the first of his many books, Don’t Bring That Up! Skeletons in the Sports Closet, which wasn’t published until April, 1946.

In another lucky break (Broeg considered his life a long series of lucky events) Leatherneck Magazine wanted a Marine to cover the 1944 World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns. They checked their roster and found four card-carrying members of the Baseball Writers Association of America. Three of them were deployed overseas but Broeg was right there in Washington, DC. So he was sent to St. Louis to cover the Series. He remembered that Series fondly — especially because the Cardinals won — while speaking on the banquet circuit and in St. Louis Chapter SABR meetings.8

In 1945 the Marines were finished with Broeg. He made a good impression on pretty much everyone he met or worked for because he had several job offers to choose from. But it was really no contest. The Post-Dispatch offered him $75 per week to work in the sports department. This was young Broeg’s dream fulfilled. He would write sports for the Post-Dispatch for the rest of his life.

He had many different sports assignments, including both his beloved Cardinals and Missouri Tigers football. In 1949, he noticed Cardinals traveling secretary Leo Ward wearing a bow tie. He thought it held up better to the rigors of travel and looked so much better, so he asked Ward to show him how to tie it. From that moment forward, he always wore a bow tie, which became his signature. He also stayed more than busy writing. While working for the paper he also freelanced for The Sporting News and other magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post.

The managing editor of the paper, Ben Reese, knew Broeg was a great writer for the paper. In 1950, he insisted Broeg be made beat writer for the Cardinals, but longtime writer and Broeg’s boss, J. Roy Stockton, held the position and didn’t want to give it up. So Broeg was assigned to the Browns instead. The Browns were a terrible team, run by entertaining owner Bill Veeck. In 1951, Broeg had a part to play in the Eddie Gaedel affair. The evening before the event, he was drinking with owner Veeck. He didn’t tell Broeg what was going to happen but he did tell him to make sure there would be a Post-Dispatch photographer at the second game of the doubleheader the next day. Typically, by August the Browns were comfortably out of the pennant race and photographers might only cover the first few innings of the first game and then leave. Broeg told the photographer to stay, which led to the classic photo of Gaedel batting in the second game of the doubleheader. It also left Broeg with a story he would tell when prompted, including his brief interview of the tiny pinch hitter in the press box.

By 1952, Broeg was the lead on the St. Louis Cardinals’ beat, the job he always wanted. But, as usual in any business, great performance leads to promotion. In 1958 J. Roy Stockton retired and Broeg was made sports editor. But he didn’t give up writing. He was a writing editor. In fact, managing editor Raymond Crowley told Broeg, somewhat derisively, that he was “90 percent writer and 10 percent editor.”9 Broeg loved the editor position because he could pick and choose his travel assignments, going to cover all the events he really wanted to see. He also completely shaped the sports department, hiring all the writers from 1958 to 1977.

In 1958, Broeg was elected President of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. One of his duties was to attend the banquet circuit of writers’ dinners around the country. He was embarrassed that St. Louis didn’t have a dinner and the writers hardly ever met. So he resolved to start an annual dinner in St. Louis and organized the first event. Guests at that dinner included Stan Musial, Frank Frisch, Rogers Hornsby, and George Sisler. If that wasn’t enough, the NBA All-Star Game was in St. Louis that year, so Broeg scheduled the dinner to allow the NBA players to attend, which helped drive even more ticket sales. The dinner is still held annually, still has a premier lineup of guests, is highly anticipated, and has raised a huge amount of money for scholarships. He considered it one of his proudest legacies.10

Broeg continued following the Cardinals, writing about the team and his favorite player as an adult: Stan Musial. While he didn’t exactly coin Musial’s nickname, he did popularize it in writing. He heard Brooklyn fans murmuring when Musial came up to bat but couldn’t understand what they were saying. Traveling secretary Leo Ward told him they were saying, ‘Here comes that man.’ And so he wrote about it, noting that Stan was “The Man.” He also wrote five columns a week while editing the sports section of the paper. In 1964 he co-wrote Stan Musial, the Man’s Own Story, the iconic autobiography of the great player.

The pressures of being an editor affected Broeg’s health. He quit his three-pack-a-day cigarette habit in 1954 but the stresses of the job impacted him. He also had a temper. He was a fit 6-foot, 195-pounder with strong convictions and not shy about defending them. When in college, he had a near fight with Leo Durocher while working publicity for the Cardinals (stopped before blows landed by a Dodger trainer). His AP supervisor in Boston was a difficult personality and they nearly tangled one evening after some drinking. He punched a drunk who made him drop his evening snack of cookies on the floor of a hotel elevator in the 1950s, and almost slugged Howard Cosell at a boxing promotion. As sports editor, he tried to make sure that when his anger surfaced, he kept it general, not wanting to focus it on one of his employees. There are stories of thrown office equipment, but none of people being bullied or belittled. The stress, along with late night sessions with sports figures, helped lead to an ulcer. Eventually his doctor told him to stop drinking to let the ulcer heal.

Broeg was an old-school reporter. He was critical at times, but players respected him because he knew his stuff and told the truth. However, he didn’t report items that would impact the players’ privacy, such as late-night escapades. He would also act to keep them out of trouble. Cardinal broadcaster Harry Caray was routinely very hard on Ken Boyer, magnifying every mistake the captain made over the radio. One day the players received word that Caray was coming down to the clubhouse. Boyer planned to confront him, but Broeg hurried to the door to get to Caray before Boyer. With one punch, Broeg laid out Caray. After walloping the broadcaster he turned to Boyer and steered him back to his locker with the advice that Boyer shouldn’t get physically involved with the media.11 In later years, when the Post-Dispatch ran a positive story on Caray when he was broadcasting White Sox games, Broeg was angry about the paper idolizing that broadcaster.12

There was no question that Broeg was the boss when he was the sports editor. He was very encouraging to his employees and very protective of his guys when someone from outside gave them problems. He was proud of his many years in the position, the people he hired and mentored, and the way he shaped the sports department.13

Broeg was a giant among the nation’s sportswriters, especially for someone reporting from a city not named New York. In a ‘farewell’ column in 1987, Post-Dispatch reporter Kevin Horrigan wrote of Broeg:

“During the 25 years from the end of the big war to 1970, Bob Broeg was one of the giants of this business. His baseball coverage and his sports columns reflected the tenor of his times, and indeed, helped set the tenor of sports coverage in America. He wrote more, and better, than all but a few sportswriters in America. He helped make the Cardinals the unofficial civic religion of St. Louis. He defined the Missouri Tigers in their glory years.”14

On November 1, 1975, after a year-long bout with lung cancer, Broeg’s beloved wife Dorothy died. The couple was childless. On July 23, 1977, he married Lynette Anton Emmenegger. With that marriage, he finally left his city apartment and moved into her house in the St. Louis suburb of Frontenac.

KMOX radio, the flagship radio station for Cardinal baseball, tapped Bob Broeg and St. Louis Globe Democrat sports writer Bob Burnes to host a regular radio show. There was nothing Broeg loved more than an attentive audience for his sports stories and he did the show for years, bringing his voice to St. Louis sports fans. His radio style was very genuine and filled with informative asides, just like his print columns. He also spent some time on television in the 1960s, hosting a studio show aired before Cardinal games.

Broeg was closely involved with the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was named to the Board of Directors in 1972, serving for 28 years. He also served on the Veterans’ Committee for many years. He took those responsibilities, along with the responsibility of Hall of Fame voting, very seriously. He always thought it was a shame that Ted Simmons, who he felt was a deserving candidate, was only on the ballot one year, so he always voted for ten players, not to get everyone in the Hall but to keep deserving guys on the ballot.

In 1977, Broeg was “promoted” to Assistant to the Publisher. This took him officially out of the sports department. He only wrote one column per week (instead of his normal five) and no longer was tasked with editing the sports page, but he noted he would never retire. In fact, since his newspaper obligations were lessened, his book writing picked up. He wrote or contributed to at least twenty books, most of which were published after this date. In 1978 he had a minor stroke but fully recovered. In recognition of his amazing career, he received the J.G. Taylor Spink writers’ award from the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1979.

Broeg could wield profanity like a fencer would use his blade. Although he spent many years around baseball locker rooms and in male-only newsrooms and press boxes, he claimed he inherited the use of the profane from his Aunt Millie during his youth.15 He would tell wonderful stories peppered with salty language at mostly male gatherings such as the 123 Club and the St. Louis SABR Chapter meetings. But when a woman was present, his stories would change subtly. For example, instead of a throw coming to the infielder ‘cock high’ it might come in ‘waist high.’16 And if he did let an expletive slip when a woman was present, he’d always quickly apologize with an ‘excuse me dear.’17

As Broeg aged, he may have slowed down but his mind remained sharp as ever. He continued covering sports and speaking on the banquet circuit. In 1984, the St. Louis Chapter of SABR approached Bob Burnes to name the chapter after him. He politely declined. So the chapter then asked Broeg, who quickly agreed. This was the most fortunate turn of events in St. Louis SABR chapter history. He became an avid attendee at the monthly meetings, delivering his stories and sports insight month after month. He also provided assistance getting player guests at the St. Louis SABR conventions in 1979 and 1992.

Broeg’s eccentricities charmed people. Besides the signature bow tie, he was a voracious consumer of saltine crackers. He would complain about his stomach ‘boiling’ and the crackers and iced tea (which became his substitute for beer when his doctor told him to stop drinking) helped ease it. Fellow Spink Award winner and colleague Rick Hummel remembers on cold days, particularly at Missouri Tigers football games, Broeg would wear his winter boots but also put his feet in cardboard boxes to stay warm.18

Broeg’s awards are many, but he listed the ones he was most proud of in his autobiography. “I’ve received the University of Missouri Journalism School’s medal award and had the blushing pleasure of having the Society for American Baseball Research, of which I am a proud member, designate the local SABR branch as the Bob Broeg St. Louis chapter. Also, the Post-Dispatch is kind enough to designate their scholar-athlete honorees as winning the Bob Broeg Top Ten Award. And at Cooperstown, I received the national BBWAA’s award in the Hall of Fame writers’ wing.”19

Broeg was approachable and accommodating. When Charles Alexander was writing his book on Rogers Hornsby, he set up an interview with Broeg. When the time came, Broeg was in the hospital but still agreed to do the interview.20 He was always happy to talk to anyone about sports at any time and was never condescending to anyone.

During the last two years of Broeg’s life, he suffered from strokes that affected his vision and made it more difficult for him to get around. However, various people helped drive him to events and made sure he could still attend all the important events. True to form, he never retired, and with his last column published in the Post-Dispatch on June 20, 2004, reminisced about talking sports with President Ronald Reagan in 1986 at a White House luncheon. He died from infirmities on October 28, 2005, survived by Lynette and stepchildren Greg and Lisa, along with his brother Fred and his nieces and nephews. His Catholic mass and burial service, heavily attended by so many of his colleagues and the people he covered, including Stan Musial, was on November 3, 2005. He is interred in the Sunset Memorial Park and Mausoleum in Affton, Missouri.

There were many tributes to the man by the people that he covered. Here is a small sampling:

• “His laughter ran from the tip of his toes through his entire body.” — Joe Garagiola
• “When I think about Broeg, I smile, because he was very honest and knew his stuff and would stand up for his writing.” — Tim McCarver
• “Of all the people, Bob Broeg and Gene Autry loved baseball more than anyone else.” — Whitey Herzog
• “The distinguishing thing about him was his quality of eternal boyishness.” — Bob Costas
• “He traveled with us for 25 years, and he was a great personal friend, and a great writer.” — Stan Musial21
• “You know what I’d like more than a couple of hours talking baseball with Bob Broeg? A couple of days!” — Ted Williams
• “Bob Broeg is the finest, fairest journalist I ever met.” — Don Faurot
• “Broeg has the memory of a 2000-year-old man. The sports stories are great. His life story is even better.” — Jack Buck22

To Broeg words meant things and the meanings were important. His obituary noted, “…[his] writing style was once described as so thickly layered with anecdotes and names and finite details that at times it’s like trying to take notes from someone reciting personal experiences on the scale of ‘War and Peace.’”23 The reason he used such descriptive language was because he was trying to describe exactly what he meant and tell a good story along the way. Even his epitaph needed extra description. He long noted it should be: “He was fair, as in just, not as in mediocre.”

Acknowledgments

This biography was reviewed by Joe DeSantis and Norman Macht, and fact-checked by Warren Corbett.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author also accessed Ancestry.com, and Newspapers.com. Additionally, the author posthumously thanks Bob Broeg himself for all those memories made at SABR Bob Broeg Chapter monthly meetings.

Notes

1 Bob Broeg, Memories of a Hall of Fame Sportswriter, (Champaign, Illinois: Sagamore Publishing, 1995), 1

2 Ibid, 33

3 Ibid, 34

4 Ibid, 54

5 Ibid, 54

6 1936 Cleveland High School Yearbook, 125

7 Bob Broeg, Memories of a Hall of Fame Sportswriter, (Champaign, Illinois: Sagamore Publishing, 1995), 105

8 Bob Broeg, author’s recollections during SABR chapter meetings, ~2000

9 Bob Broeg, Memories of a Hall of Fame Sportswriter, (Champaign, Illinois: Sagamore Publishing, 1995), 280

10 Jerry Vickory, Phone Conversation w/Author, March 8, 2019

11 Ibid

12 Rick Hummel, Phone Conversation w/Author, April 3, 2019

13 Ibid

14 Kevan Horrigan, “Bow Ties, Commas, Redbirds, and Tigers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1D

15 Bob Broeg, Memories of a Hall of Fame Sportswriter, (Champaign, Illinois: Sagamore Publishing, 1995), 13

16 Jerry Vickory, Phone Conversation w/Author, March 8, 2019

17 Barbara Sheinbein, Email to Author, February 13, 2019

18 Rick Hummel, Phone Conversation w/Author, April 3, 2019

19 Bob Broeg, Memories of a Hall of Fame Sportswriter, (Champaign, Illinois: Sagamore Publishing, 1995), 375

20 Steve Gietschier, Phone Conversation w/Author, February 27, 2019

21 John M. McGuire, “Hall of Fame Sportswriter Bob Broeg Dies,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 29, 2005, B5

22 Bob Broeg, Memories of a Hall of Fame Sportswriter, (Champaign, Illinois: Sagamore Publishing, 1995), Dust Jacket

23 John M. McGuire, “Hall of Fame Sportswriter Bob Broeg Dies,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 29, 2005, B5

Simon Burick was born on June 14, 1909, the first of six children – three sons and three daughters – of Rabbi Samuel F. and Lillian Burick, Russian Polish immigrants who settled in Dayton in the first years of the 20th century. The rabbi served as spiritual leader of Beth Abraham Synagogue for more than 50 years, setting an example for his son’s life.

After graduating from Stivers High School, Burick enrolled in the pre-med program at the University of Dayton. By then he’d already gotten a taste of the newspaper business, working as a $2-a-week correspondent for his high school and receiving his first byline on August 26, 1925. He worked summers at the Daily News as an office boy, telephone operator and finally a sportswriter. Soon he caught the eye of the paper’s publisher, James M. Cox, former Ohio governor and 1920 Democratic presidential candidate. When the sports editor’s job opened up, Cox offered it to him at $30 a week, twice his previous salary.

Burick jumped at the chance and never returned to college. Of his parents’ reaction, Burick said, “I don’t think they ever quite understood why their son chose sports writing as a means of making a living, but they never discouraged me.”2 For himself, he said, the decision “was a boon to humanity. I would have been a terrible doctor.”3 His first column appeared on November 16, 1928. Late in his career he observed that he’d received a promotion when he was 19 years old and never gotten another one.

The job was a learning experience but Cox encouraged his energetic protégé to expand his horizons beyond Dayton and, in time, to regard the world as his beat. Burick covered his first Opening Day at Cincinnati’s Redland (later Crosley) Field in 1929. Rereading the resultant article years later, he said, “It was schoolboy writing that demanded editing and didn’t get it.”4

Other “firsts” came rapidly in the next few years – first Kentucky Derby in 1929, first World Series in 1930, first heavyweight title fight in 1931. Meanwhile on June 28, 1935, he married Rachel “Rae” Siegal, a schoolteacher from New York; their marriage would last nearly 50 years and produce two daughters, Lenore and Marcia.

With Cox’s backing, whenever there was a major sporting event of any kind anywhere in the country, Burick was there. His personal box score would eventually encompass all but two Kentucky Derbys through 1986, major bouts of heavyweight champions from Max Schmeling to Muhammad Ali, all but one World Series from 1934 to 1984, the first 20 Super Bowls, five Summer Olympic Games from Rome (1960) to Los Angeles (1984), and the Cincinnati Reds’ opening game every year from 1929 to 1984.

He was never a baseball beat writer. But of all the sports he wrote about, baseball was his first love. His office was 52 miles from Crosley Field, but he was a regular presence in the clubhouse and the press box there. One of his big stories was a bombshell he dropped on February 17, 1948, after Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey spoke at Wilberforce University near Dayton. Speaking at a historically Black institution after the conclusion of Jackie Robinson’s first season with the Dodgers, Rickey recounted for the first time a vote major-league owners had taken in the fall of 1945 opposing the desegregation of Organized Baseball.5

Baseball officialdom had long disingenuously denied that there was any rule or formal policy against signing Black players and when the story went national, the other owners exploded with indignant denials.6 Rickey expressed surprise at the reaction, but the writer was convinced that Rickey had made his comments with calculated intent. Years later Burick wrote that at one point during his speech, Rickey turned to him and said, “What I am saying, Si, is on the record. If your pencil is not sharp, I will sharpen it for you.” Afterward, he gave Burick his notes to help in writing Si’s column.7

Burick went to spring training with the Cincinnati Reds for the first time in 1937. Before long the annual trip became a family affair. Si and Rae would take the girls out of school and they would all go together. Looking back as an adult, the Buricks’ younger daughter wrote an engaging reminiscence for the New York Times about getting to know not only the Reds players but other nice men including Mr. Musial, Mr. Schoendienst and Mr. Frisch, an older gentleman who liked to talk baseball with seven-year-old Marcia while they collected seashells on the beach. The girls took their schoolwork with them to Florida; in third grade, Marcia learned long division by figuring batting averages.8

Si wasn’t a collector, but one artifact he held onto reflected his appreciation of baseball history. He met Babe Ruth at spring training in 1948, months before the Baminbo’s death, and got his autograph on a ball. When Henry Aaron broke Ruth’s career home run record in 1974, his signature was added to the ball. And when Burick accompanied the Reds on a tour of Japan in 1978, he got the ball signed by the Japanese home run king Sadaharu Oh.9

Burick’s writing was characterized by gentle, self-deprecating humor; the man himself was known for a love of wordplay and atrocious puns. Until the mid-1970s, he called his column Si-ings. One of his favorite passages was inspired by the Triple Crown-winning thoroughbred Secretariat:

“This horse is the opposite of everything I am. He is young, he is beautiful, he is fast, he has hair, he has strong legs, he is durable, he has a large bank account. And his entire sex life is in front of him.”10 When a topless dancer invaded the playing field during the 1970 Super Bowl, Burick looked on as four police officers ran her down. “And they took her away two abreast,” he observed.11

He was a role model and a father figure to generations of young sportswriters at the Daily News. Rae referred to them as “Si’s boys.”12 When they in their turn began to travel the country, they were immediately welcomed and accepted as representatives of “Si’s paper.”13 He was also a painstaking writer and teacher who never left a participle dangling and frowned on “win” as a noun.

“It was as if he invented who and whom,” one of his boys wrote.14

In 2003 one of the boys, longtime Daily News baseball writer Hal McCoy, following the trail Burick had blazed, received the Spink Award. In his acceptance speech, McCoy acknowledged Burick’s importance as a mentor. Burick was respected for the quality of his work, admired for his unfailing honesty and fairness, and beloved for his innate decency.

“He has stood above the easy putdown and cheap, synthetic anger,” wrote Arnold Rosenfeld, editor of the Daily News. “When he speaks in rare outrage, the reader can know he means it, and that something’s wrong.”15 Joe Falls, sports editor and columnist for the Detroit News, was more succinct. Members of the nomadic fraternity of sportswriters, he said, regarded Burick as a hero.16

“I kind of hang around Si and hope he doesn’t notice it,” Falls wrote. “I keep hoping some of him rubs off on me.”17

Burick received job offers from New York and elsewhere, but he stayed put. One of the last writers to serve as both sports editor and featured columnist at a metropolitan newspaper, he typically turned out five columns a week, sometimes seven. By 1982 he estimated he had written 13,000 columns for the Daily News, averaging 1,000 words each. A fair guess would be that by the time he died he had written 15 million words for one newspaper.

Starting in 1935, he also hosted a 15-minute show on local radio (and later television) five days a week. The show aired for the 5,000th time in 1958 and continued until 1961.

His workload at the paper left little time for other writing. His byline cropped up occasionally in The Sporting News or the Cincinnati Reds yearbook. He collaborated on two slender books, Alston and the Dodgers (1966) with longtime friend and southern Ohio native Walter Alston; and The Main Spark (1978) with Reds manager Sparky Anderson.

In 1982 the Daily News published a collection of his columns. For Byline: Si Burick – A Half Century in the Press Box, the writer modestly winnowed a near-lifetime’s work down to barely 60 articles. In addition to the Rickey story and assorted examples of Reds coverage, the baseball pieces included Burick’s coverage of Bobby Thomson’s home run, Don Larsen’s perfect game, and Casey Stengel’s 1958 testimony before a Senate committee.

Burick increasingly viewed sports in the context of world events, writing columns about the death of John F. Kennedy, civil rights protest at the 1968 Olympics, and terrorism at the 1972 Olympics. On rare occasions he stepped away from sports altogether. In 1971, when the Daily News mounted a series about Dayton’s changing neighborhoods, Burick volunteered a bittersweet 2,000-word essay on the near east side, where he grew up. As feared, he found that all the landmarks of his youth had disappeared. He said the piece generated more reader reaction than anything else he ever wrote.18

As the years added up, so did the honors. He was represented in Irving T. Marsh and Edward Ehre’s annual Best Sports Stories anthology 16 times. He was named Ohio Sportswriter of the year by the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association 18 times, including 14 in a row from 1962 to 1975. The University of Dayton, which had earlier created a Si Burick Award to be given to a top student in journalism or broadcasting, presented him with an honorary doctor of humane letters degree in 1977. The Reds hosted Si Burick Night at Riverfront Stadium on August 30, 1983. He received the Red Smith Award from the Associated Press sports editors in 1986.

His long string of consecutive Opening Days in Cincinnati was broken in 1985, when he traveled to Salisbury, North Carolina, to be inducted into the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association Hall of Fame.

The pinnacle came on July 31, 1983, when Burick accepted the Spink Award at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Busloads of admirers came from Dayton and from Northampton, Massachusetts, where daughter Marcia lived. Inductees on the same day included his old friend Walter Alston, who was unable to attend because of ill health.

“Mine has been a career of joy,” Burick told the crowd. “Joy has been the keynote of my life as a sportswriter and as a baseball writer. I never considered it hard work. I never considered it work.”19

Burick remained healthy and active well into his 70s. He continued to travel widely. He never adapted to computers. He tapped out his stories on a typewriter; when he was on the road, he dictated them over the telephone, then called back to the office an hour later to see if there were questions.

His wife died in 1985. He was hospitalized for 82 days after open-heart surgery in 1986 and was subsequently diagnosed with leukemia. Through it all he carried on, continuing to write an occasional column from home. In nearly constant pain,20 he went to Washington, DC, on October 20, 1986, when he was among 14 veteran sportswriters and sportscasters invited to a White House luncheon with President Ronald Reagan to mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Sporting News.21 The last event he covered in person was the Ohio State-Michigan football game on November 22, 1986. He wrote about watching the game with former Ohio State coach Woody Hayes, another old friend.

Si Burick never retired. His final column appeared on December 7, 1986. He died three days later.

Acknowledgments

This biography was reviewed by Rory Costello and Bruce Harrris and fact-checked by Terry Bohn.

Notes

1 Si Burick plaque at the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

2 Si Burick, Spink Award acceptance speech, July 31, 1983, on file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

3 Burick, Byline: Si Burick – A Half Century in the Press Box (Dayton, Ohio: Dayton Daily News, 1982), iii.

4 Burick, Byline: 3.

5 Burick, “Rickey Tells Story of Signing of Robinson,” Dayton Daily News, February 17, 1948: 16.

6 Lee Lowenfish, Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 451-52.

7 Burick, Byline: 147.

8 Marcia Burick Goldstein, “Spring Training: Bonus for a Little Girl,” New York Times, February 26, 1978: 359.

9 Bill Madden, “A Gem of an Autographed Ball,” The Sporting News, November 25, 1978: 53. See also Joe Falls, “Burick is Dayton,” Dayton Daily News Magazine, July 24, 1983: 16.

10 Burick, “Super Bowl Beautiful; So is Bogie Busters Bash,” Dayton Daily News, June 13, 1973: 10.

11 Dave Kindred, “Of Human Jukeboxes and the Hammer,” The Sporting News, January 27, 1992: 6.

12 Gary Nuhn, “As Good a Boss as This Writer Could Ever Want,” Dayton Daily News, December 12, 1986: 6.

13 Hal McCoy, “Si Burick,” Dayton Daily News, August 25, 1985: 97.

14 Nuhn.

15 Arnold Rosenfeld, “Our Si Burick Gets His School Letters,” Dayton Daily News, April 24, 1977: 16.

16 McCoy.

17 Joe Falls, “Burick is Dayton,” Dayton Daily News Magazine, July 24, 1983: 14.

18 Burick, Byline: 167.

19 Burick, Spink Award speech.

20 Mark Katz, “Si’s Last Days Truly a Profile in Courage,” Dayton Daily News, December 12, 1986: 6.

21 Burick, “Reagan Recalls Foibles, Fun of Sportscasting,” Dayton Daily News, October 21, 1986: 1.

While covering the Yankees, and sometimes the Giants and Dodgers, every day for New York papers, he estimated he contributed 5,000 words a week to The Sporting News for three decades, more than any other writer. That platform gave him a wide audience, because most people in the game read Baseball’s Bible. Daniel also wrote many magazine articles and reported on boxing and football as well as baseball. He co-founded boxing’s bible, The Ring magazine, with his mentor Nat Fleischer in 1922. He wrote two biographies of Babe Ruth.

Daniel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on June 6, 1890, but his family soon moved to New York. His birth name was Daniel Markowitz (the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame spells it “Margowitz”). When he started his sportswriting career, while a student at Columbia and the City College of New York, his editors didn’t want him to use his Jewish-sounding name, so his first byline was “By Daniel.” Later he hesitantly approached his father and said he planned to change his name legally to Daniel M. Daniel. His father told him it was no big deal because “Markowitz isn’t your real name, either.” An immigration clerk had mangled the family name when Dan’s forebears immigrated through Ellis Island. 1

His first newspaper was the New York Herald in 1909, where he worked for $20 a week. When the paper’s part-time writer covering the Dodgers’ spring training demanded a raise to $5 a day, the sports editor refused to pay such an outlandish sum and sent the college boy to take over. Daniel’s parents were disappointed; they wanted him to join the long line of doctors in the family. Daniel tried medical school, but “I couldn’t stand the cadavers.”2

At the beginning of his career he wrote his stories longhand before switching to a typewriter. Moving on to the Press and then the Telegram, he began writing a weekly column called “Ask Daniel,” fielding questions from readers. He answered them, sportswriter Red Smith said, “in terms that left all doubt dead and partly decomposed.”3 Once Daniel wrote, “No, for the 4,678th time, nobody has ever hit a fair ball out of Yankee Stadium.”4

In 1925 the Baseball Writers Association gave him an award for the best story of the year. It was his account of the deciding game of the World Series when Washington’s 37-year-old Walter Johnson, probably the most beloved man in the game, lost to the Pirates. “The rain kept pouring down the visor of his cap,” Daniel said. “He looked like he was crying his head off.”

Daniel was a tall, stooped, heavy-set man with a long, jowly face, a gravel voice, and a forbidding manner. He habitually wore a three-piece suit long after vests went out of style and presented a dignified—or pompous—demeanor. His New York rival Dick Young wrote, “He acted gruff, but he was a pussycat.”5

Daniel frustrated his rivals with his frequent scoops. Often, when a reporter trumpeted a new story, other writers would scoff, “Daniel had it last week.” Some of those scoops came about because he was a participant rather than a reporter. In 1930, with the Great Depression beginning to strangle the nation, Babe Ruth was holding out for $85,000 during spring training. “Without the Babe there wasn’t an awful lot to write about,” Daniel said. As he told it, he pointed out to Ruth that unemployed men were selling apples on street corners. Ruth claimed that was news to him: “Why don’t people tell me these things?” Daniel persuaded Ruth to sign for $80,000. He wrote the story and his editor congratulated him on beating the competition again. But the next morning, the Babe had changed his mind. Daniel exploded. Watching his scoop go up in the smoke of one of Ruth’s cigars, he told the star, “You’re going to sign before twelve o’clock.” The writer hauled the Babe to see owner Jacob Ruppert and the deal was done. On another occasion he claimed to have brokered a deal between Ruppert and the Yankees’ pitching ace Red Ruffing. But when a rival scooped Daniel, he would write dismissively, “It came as no surprise to this reporter. …”6

He boasted, “I was one of the fastest writers who ever covered baseball. If it didn’t go fast, it was no good. I quit.” But he was a pedestrian writer, no match for lyrical competitors such as Grantland Rice, Frank Graham, and Red Smith. The subjects of Daniel’s stories didn’t just say things; they “exuberated” and “vehemed.” When Daniel began pontificating in the press box, Graham would tell him, “Oh, Dan, stop veheming.”7 For a time Daniel wrote a column in The Sporting News under the byline “Snorter Casey,” adopting the semiliterate vernacular made popular by Ring Lardner.

Before Joe DiMaggio played a regular-season game for the Yankees, Daniel anointed him “the successor to Babe Ruth.” In DiMaggio’s first year, Daniel prepared a profile of the new savior and the World-Telegram advertised it in advance. But while Daniel was writing his piece, another paper offered the rookie $3,000—nearly half his salary—for his life story. Daniel told him the World-Telegram could not pay him any money. DiMaggio replied, “You got here first, and you are entitled to the story.”8 Daniel became one of the Yankee Clipper’s biggest boosters.

Controversy surrounds some of Daniel’s decisions as official scorer during DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941. Daniel said he scored 21 of the games. On July 1 DiMaggio went hitless in his first two times at bat against Boston. On his third try he topped a grounder to Red Sox third baseman Jim Tabor. DiMaggio slipped and fell to his knees as he broke from the batter’s box, but Tabor threw the ball away. Daniel scored it a hit, then growled, “Damn you, DiMaggio. Hit ’em clean.” The scorer’s call didn’t matter; DiMaggio rapped a clean single later in the game, his 43rd straight, and tied Willie Keeler’s ancient record in the second game of that day’s doubleheader. DiMaggio said later, “That was one of the few times I got a break from the scorer on a questionable play. Instead of giving me the benefit of the doubt—not that I was asking for it—they usually made sure it was a clean hit.” Daniel credited DiMaggio with hits in two games on balls that White Sox shortstop Luke Appling couldn’t handle; some other writers thought both calls were questionable. The next spring Daniel told DiMaggio, “There was just as much pressure on me and the scorers around the league not to cheapen the streak.” Daniel later insisted, “I never favored him one iota and made him get his hits as I saw them.”9

Daniel was never shy about offering advice to teams and players. After the American League won the 1946 All-Star Game, 12-0, he wrote, “The events that transpired yesterday in Fenway Park make it clear that the National League is in imminent danger of becoming a minor league unless immediate steps are taken.” But when the Cardinals won that fall’s World Series, he wrote, “The autumn classic demonstrated once again that the National League has a distinct margin of superiority over the junior circuit.” Another writer gibed, “In July you stick it to the National League and in October you kick the Americans around. What is this?”

“I’ve warned them both,” Daniel replied. “Now they’re on their own.”10

“The baseball writer of my heyday had something to tell,” he told Jerome Holtzman in No Cheering in the Press Box. “He had opinions. He was a critic as well as a historian. Now you go into the clubhouse after a game and you find baseball writers wandering around, at times even putting words into the mouths of some of the boys.”

Daniel was an unapologetic disciple of what was later labeled the “gee-whiz” school of sportswriting. “Nobody was ever afraid of me,” he said. “…I wasn’t going around derogating people. …. I wasn’t looking to run baseball down. I was eager to run baseball up.” He claimed close friendships with Yankee managers Miller Huggins and Joe McCarthy, who was notoriously tough on reporters. He admired McCarthy’s attention to detail, but he was not friendly with John McGraw, whom he called “arrogant.” He said, “McGraw overdid strategy.” As for Casey Stengel, “We thought he was a stopgap. We thought he was in there to tell jokes and while away a season or two until the club could get tightened up and reorganized.” Stengel won the first of his 10 pennants in his first season and went on to win a record five consecutive World Series. “I got along beautifully with Casey, and I had no complaints.”

Traveling with the New York clubs for 40 years, “There were times when I got tired of writing, but I enjoyed the fun of baseball and everything about it until that damn night ball came in. That ruined the whole business,” he told Holtzman. “After the (afternoon) game you came back to your hotel, had your dinner, went up to your room and batted out your game story. (Daniel wrote for afternoon papers, so he had no evening deadline.) Then you went down to the lobby, and who was in the lobby? The manager, the coaches, and a few players.” But Daniel seldom drank with them; he said he had seen too many sportswriters drown their careers in a bottle. “In those days baseball writing was the number-one assignment on any paper,” he recalled. “Now it’s number one hundred. This thing of night baseball, this dashing down to the clubhouse after the game to interview the manager and dashing back to the press box.”

As he grew older Daniel sometimes fell asleep during games. One writer warned another not to wake him: “He’s busy interviewing John McGraw.” David Halberstam commented, “He was, in his own mind, if not in the minds of his colleagues, the official oracle of the sport.”11 In The Sporting News he was a reliable mouthpiece for the owners, a resolute defender of the status quo. For most of his career the teams paid writers’ travel expenses, a conflict of interest that was not stamped out until the 1960s.

In 1959, his 50th year as a newspaperman, Daniel’s colleagues in the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America honored him with the Bill Slocum Award “for long and meritorious service to baseball.” He had served as the chapter chairman for five years and had been national chairman of the baseball, football, and boxing writers associations. He also served as a member of baseball’s rules committee and the Hall of Fame’s Veterans Committee.

In 1966 Daniel’s newspaper, the Scripps-Howard chain’s World-Telegram and Sun, merged into a new publication, the World Journal Tribune. When that paper folded the next year, the 77-year-old Daniel’s newspaper career ended. He called it “the murder of New York journalism.” The city had 15 English-language dailies when his career began; only three were left. (Daniel’s work lives on in the A. Bartlett Giamatti Research Center at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, which preserves many of his newspaper stories in individual players’ files.) Although he no longer wrote for The Sporting News, he sent the paper an indignant letter when the first Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia was published in 1969, altering the statistics of many old-time stars on the basis of new research. Daniel fulminated (as he might have put it), “This business of digging ‘new’ major league records by means of a computer stinks.”12

He continued writing for The Ring and still went to his office at the magazine when he was in his 80s. And he continued writing about baseball, contributing stories to the Little League World Series program. In 1972 baseball’s Hall of Fame honored him with the J.G. Taylor Spink Award “for meritorious contributions to baseball writing.” Although Spink Award winners are often called Hall of Famers, they are not members of the Hall; like broadcasters, the writers are honored in the “Scribes and Mikemen” exhibit in the museum.

Daniel died in his sleep of cancer in Pompano Beach, Florida, on July 1, 1981, at the age of 91. His daughters Roberta Yates and Naomi Stein survived. A newspaperman to the end, he wrote his own obituary to be published “on the event of my death, which is scheduled in the next 15 years, it may be of interest … that I am the only baseball writer who has achieved every distinction that it is possible for a baseball writer to attain.”13

Notes

1 Smith, Red. “Dan Daniel Warned ’Em,” New York Times, July 5, 1981, S3.

Kieran started in 1915 as a golf writer with the Times, and then moved to the New York Tribune baseball beat under Grantland Rice in 1922. After a brief stint with the New York American in the Hearst chain2, he returned to the Times, lured by the prospect of crafting that paper’s first bylined column of any kind. “Sports of the Times” debuted January 1, 1927, and Kieran wrote it until late 1941, when he left the Times and sports for a general interest column in the New York Sun.3 By that time Kieran’s erudition and a recommendation from Herald Tribune4 columnist Franklin P. Adams had landed him a spot on NBC Radio’s “Information Please” quiz show panel, where he began providing extemporaneous sports and other expertise in 1938. Kieran left newspaper work in 1944, and when “Information Please” ended its radio run, he took his unique skills to the new medium of television. He worked in editing while continuing to write about the outdoors before retiring in 1952 to coastal Massachusetts, where his nature writing flourished.

John Francis Kieran was born August 2, 1892, in the semi-rural Kingsbridge section of the West Bronx, New York City, to James M. and Kate Donohue Kieran, both Irish-Americans. James Kieran was a New York public school principal who became a professor at and ultimately president of Hunter College, the prestigious women’s school. Kieran’s mother also taught school prior to marriage. The Kieran home was book-and-learning oriented, and the seven Kieran children were sometimes referred to as “the seven smart Kierans”–a brother, James, wrote for the Times and helped establish the American Newspaper Guild; a sister, Helen Kieran Reilly, wrote mystery novels; and another brother, Leo, also wrote for the Times. Always waggish, John Kieran liked to describe his family as “poor but Irish” and said that his mother “wrote poetry but otherwise showed no mark of derangement.”

“Really a country boy all the time,” as Kieran characterized himself, he recalled growing up in a neighborhood of unpaved streets, apple orchards, backyard vegetable gardens, and horse-drawn buggies and sleighs. His family kept rabbits and pigeons, while he and his siblings scouted the woods, played baseball, swam in the summers and skated and bobsledded in the winters. The family owned a small farm in Dutchess County, which Kieran described in Not Under Oath as a family vacation playground. “I dreaded the return to the city in autumn. I roamed the fields and woods all day and at night I slept in a tent on a knoll above the farmhouse. In short, I wanted to live there if possible.”

Kieran attended P. S.103 in Harlem, graduated from Townsend Harris High School, and enrolled in City College of New York before a transfer to Fordham University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1912. He played shortstop at both City College and Fordham and after college played as much golf and tennis as his schedule allowed. Hiking was a lifetime avocation.

Disdaining further education and making good at least temporarily on his desire to live on the Dutchess County property, Kieran convinced his father to back him financially in a poultry business on the farmstead. He also picked, packed, and shipped barrels of apples, and, to supplement income and “help with the bills for chicken feed,” taught in a one-room Dutchess County school that served the local farm community. But, “I did not prosper. I had a hound and a horse and a gun and I loved the life on the farm, but I couldn’t make a living there. Even so, a year on the farm had left a deep mark on me. It had quickened my youthful love of the outdoors into a growing interest in natural history.”

Back in New York, Kieran shunned employment that would have confined him to an office and took work as a construction company handyman. From immigrant laborers he acquired a conversational knowledge of Italian. He also used the job to learn the rudiments of civil engineering and stuffed his pockets with books on poetry, plant life, astronomy, and varied other subjects for subway rides when work took him across the city: “As long as Kieran had a book handy there was no such thing as an idle moment,” William Curran notes in Kieran’s entry in Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography.

Despite the opportunities for subway study, Kieran eventually found the long, crowded rides stifling. In Not Under Oath he recalled, “After giving the matter a little thought, I decided to become a newspaperman. Like everybody else, I believed that I could write if I had the chance.” It was 1915 and the chance came through a family friend, Frederick T. Birchall, assistant managing editor of the New York Times. Birchall knew Kieran’s familiarity with athletics and assigned him to the sports department, where he spun his wheels for a few weeks, then turned acquaintance with a local country club golf professional into a story about the club. That convinced the Times city editor that the paper needed a regular golf writer and that Kieran should have the beat. “A most pleasant assignment it was,” Kieran recalled, and through it he met another young golf writer who became a lifelong friend, Grantland Rice.

When the United States entered World War I, Kieran enlisted in a New York volunteer engineer regiment.5 It became the Eleventh Engineers (Railway) and shipped out to France on July 14, 1917; its members were among the first 20,000 Americans to land overseas. The regiment provided engineering support behind the lines in the deadliest sectors of the fighting in France but Kieran recalled, “I never experienced anything worse than a good shaking up now and then when a shell landed too close for comfort.” Kieran was discharged as a staff sergeant on May 5, 1919, after 23 months in the service, nearly all of them overseas.

“As soon as I was turned loose by the army,” Kieran recalled, ‘I married the girl I left behind me,” Alma Boldtmann, a native New Yorker of French and German descent who had been chief of the telephone operators at the Times. They settled in the Riverdale section of New York and raised three children: James M., John Francis Jr., and Beatrice.

Kieran returned to writing golf for the Times and also got experience reporting track meets, basketball, amateur boxing, fencing, billiards, “and even dog and cat shows.” By 1922, however, an opportunity to work with Grantland Rice and to have his own bylined column and a baseball beat prompted Kieran to join the New York Tribune. He relished the travel aspect of the work, using his mornings to learn about the cities he visited and rekindle his interest in nature. Of Pittsburgh, he recalled: “Just over the outfield fence in Forbes Field lay Schenley Park through which I roamed regularly with my field glasses on the alert. It was a good place to look for migrant warblers in May and September.”

The Tribune baseball beat carried with it recurring duty as official scorer at the Polo Grounds. During a May 15, 1922, Tigers-Yankees game there, Kieran, the old college shortstop, charged Yankee shortstop Everett Scott with an error on a ball hit by Ty Cobb. Sportswriter Fred Lieb, seated at a distance from Kieran and without consulting him, scored the play a hit in his Associated Press box score. At the end of the season, with Cobb at either .401 or .399 depending on the May 15 scoring and with American League President Ban Johnson firmly in Cobb’s corner, Kieran and other New York writers were unsuccessful in their contention that the official scoring should prevail. Although even Lieb reversed himself, Johnson didn’t. Despite the local support, the incident left Kieran disenchanted with a lack of support from his national group, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, and with the baseball establishment.6 Kieran never lost his love for the game he played as a boy and collegian, however, and as late as 1939 worked out in uniform with the Red Sox in spring training.

In 1925, lured by William Randolph Hearst’s bankroll and the overtures of Damon Runyon, Kieran left the merged Herald Tribune for his own column, “Wild Oats and Chaff,” at the New York American. Although he was able to use the column to indulge his penchant for light verse, he was never comfortable with Hearst’s mercurial management style and was soon “looking for the escape hatch.” Birchall, his old confidant at the Times, had become managing editor there, and in December, 1926, hired Kieran to not only return, but also to launch the Times’ first-ever bylined column.

Thus began “Sports of the Times,” appearing under Kieran’s name on January 1, 1927, and still a staple, through Kieran, Arthur Daley, Robert Lipsyte, Dave Anderson, Red Smith, and George Vecsey.7 Kieran used the column assignment, which he deemed “a real cushy billet,” to indulge what sportswriter Frank Deford describes in his 2012 memoir Over Time as an excellent trait for a writer: “A fellow who may have deep abiding personal interests, but who has a natural curiosity for almost anything he doesn’t know.”

“I could choose my own topics, go where I wanted and wrote as I pleased within reasonable limits,” Kieran recalled. “This gave me great freedom of movement and a wide choice of subject matter.” He used this freedom and the Times resources for travel to London and Paris. “I rambled scandalously and touched on topics that rarely found their way into the sports section of any reputable newspaper.8 I carried on scandalously in light verse, too.”9

And nature continued to beckon. “Whenever I went to cover outdoor competition of any kind–baseball, football, tennis, golf, polo or horse racing–I kept my eyes open and saw more things than my press badge called for. On trips to cover ball games in St. Louis and Cincinnati I learned the western meadowlark’s song is much sweeter than that of our eastern meadowlark and that there are noble mossy-cup oaks in Forest Park in St. Louis. A man would get a good grounding in botany simply by identifying all the native shrubs and trees at the Saratoga racing plant.” Kieran used similar observations from his walks around New York City to do a series of nature articles for the Times Sunday Magazine section.

Kieran’s broad expertise and wit were becoming well known around New York. In May 1938 he received a call from Dan Golenpaul, producer of a new NBC Radio show, “Information Please.” The panel and audience participation quiz show had been in existence about a month, and Kieran recalled “they were seeking new panelists. They had discovered that not all the original quartet could go the distance.” The studio and radio audiences wanted to hear about sports, but only Franklin P. Adams, a fellow-columnist friend of Kieran’s, knew anything about the subject, and even his knowledge was limited. After an off-the-air test run, Golenpaul snapped up Kieran to join Adams and acerbic pianist-composer-actor Oscar Levant on the regular panel, which also had a fourth guest panelist each week. His beginning $40 stipend ultimately grew to $200 a week for a half-hour unrehearsed appearance.

Moderated by the urbane Clifton Fadiman, the program became nationally popular in a matter of months. Kieran in 1964: “I may be prejudiced–I’m sure I am–in saying that it was the most literate popular entertainment program ever to go out over the air on radio or television.” Kieran’s Boston Globe obituary observed “he became one of the most popular persons in the entertainment world,” and “his breadth of interest and depth of knowledge lifted him from the realm of sports writing into national prominence.” That the show was in Kieran’s recollection “as much a comedy as a quiz show,” only boosted its appeal as the panel toured the country during World War II promoting war bond sales and Kieran reprised the show’s format in several USO appearances overseas.

Even as he explored arcane subjects within the broad landscape “Sports of the Times” allowed, baseball was never far from Kieran’s mind. He was intrigued by fellow polymath Moe Berg, a philology and law school graduate with reading knowledge of more than half a dozen languages. “Perhaps it was the incongruity of such an erudite young man making his living playing major league baseball that amused Kieran. For many years the columnist kept his readers informed about ‘Professor’ Berg’s progress through the nation’s research libraries as well as his activities behind the plate, making Berg one of the widely recognized players of his era, despite his lowly position as a third-string catcher,” William Curran observes in his Gale’s profile. Berg reached such celebrity that he, described by Kieran as “baseball’s One-Man Mystery,” appeared as the guest panelist on “Information Please” three times.

Major leaguers recognized Kieran’s unique combination of knowledge and skills. Lou Gehrig’s Yankee teammates called on the columnist to write the verse engraved on the commemorative award they presented to their stricken friend during his memorable retirement ceremony at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939.10

By late 1941 Kieran had already published his first three books and was still active with “Information Please.”11 But producing 1,100 words a day, seven days a week, for “Sports of the Times” burdened him to the point that he left the Times for less-rigorous work at the New York Sun. There, he mixed nature and sports in his “One Small Voice” column. Although it was shorter and appeared less frequently than his former Times column, “One Small Voice” was widely syndicated and reached a broader national readership. Still, although working under less stress, he suffered a minor heart attack while at the Sun. After Alma died in 1944, Kieran resigned and ended his newspaper career.

Kieran’s loyal radio public could finally see “the short, trim, pixie-ish man with jug-handle ears, awkwardly angular face and impish eyes” whose “Brooklyn taxi-driver accent” they had enjoyed for years when he took on a television documentary series in 1949. On “John Kieran’s Kaleidoscope” he hosted and narrated a collection of short- subject films on astronomy, natural history, chemistry, physics, biology, atomic energy, and other wide-ranging topics that had been made for movie theaters. Edited for television, the 15-minute shows appeared as 104 weekly originals. “[Kaleidoscope] never made the big league, the New York stations, but ran in many other big cities and often the whole series was re-run under the same sponsorship for another two-year term,” Kieran recalled.

“Information Please” remained on radio until 1948 with Kieran still on board. He returned as the only original panelist when the show made a three-month foray into television in 1952 as a summer replacement.

Kieran had remarried in 1947–to Margaret Ford, a Boston Herald feature writer 12 years his junior. While in post-newspaper semi-retirement in New York from 1945 through 1952 he briefly edited Golenpaul’s new Information Please Almanac, but turned his primary literary attention to writing about nature. Having become “a serious though self-trained naturalist,” according to his Gale’s profile, Kieran published two books on birds, another on wildflowers, and another on general nature. His birds-wildflowers-trees trilogy was completed in 1954.

With Kieran’s now-flexible schedule, he and Margaret began to explore her home area around Boston for retirement. When his New York radio and television obligations ended in 1952 they moved to Rockport, Cape Ann, Massachusetts, where Kieran’s second-floor study, displaying his four original Audubon prints, overlooked the Atlantic Ocean.12 He was free to roam the surrounding woods, bogs, and shores, observing the ever-changing natural landscape and bird life.

Margaret enjoyed her hobby of watercolor painting while Kieran, whose lifetime credo was “I am a part of everything that I have read,” continued to read voraciously, study nature, and write. He recalled in Not Under Oath that Margaret “has given me the best years of her life–and mine.” With Margaret, Kieran co-authored a biography of naturalist John James Audubon in 1954. And busy as he was, Kieran found time to write the entertaining Not Under Oath, published in 1964.

Free to concentrate on full-time nature writing, in 1959 Kieran published A Natural History of New York City, which chronicled his many weekend walks through Van Cortlandt Park and highlighted the more than 28,000 acres of public park land within the city limits. The work won the 1960 John Burroughs Medal for nature writing, and in 1988 Van Cortlandt Park named its trail around the park’s lake and freshwater wetlands area the John Kieran Nature Trail. His adopted hometown of Rockport honors Kieran with the John Kieran Nature Preserve and The John Kieran Collection, which includes his donated books, at the Rockport Public Library.

In 1973, as he joined an elite circle honored “for meritorious contributions to baseball writing”–including Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon, and J. G. Taylor Spink himself–Kieran most likely enjoyed the irony when the Baseball Writers’ Association of America voted him the Spink Award, 51 years after the national group had failed to support his official scoring decision in the Cobb-Ban Johnson incident. His citation, presented at Hall of Fame Induction Day ceremonies on August 12, 1974, proclaims: “Did most to prove to newspaper readers and radio listeners that sports writers’ knowledge was not confined to pressbox and clubhouse,” and concludes, “Result: Fountain of information that brought distinction to Kieran and craft.” Kieran’s Spink Award came on the heels of his election to the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame in 1971.

Kieran also received the President’s Medal from Fordham University in 1981. “The stumping of the scholarly John Kieran [on “Information Please”] was a singular occurrence,” was part of the award citation.

He died in Rockport later that year, December 10, 1981, at age 89.

Writing 17 years earlier, Kieran had conveyed in his Epilogue to Not Under Oath a distinct sense of the eternal promise he found in the natural surroundings he loved: “But the tide of the young year has turned. The dark mornings are getting lighter each day. The sun lingers a little longer each afternoon. The buds are beginning to swell on the poplar and the alder catkins are lengthening in the frozen swamp. Soon in the hush of dusk over the inland meadows we will hear the first shrill quavering notes of the peepers–the dauntless invisible heralds of ever-returning spring. Cheerfully I echo Browning; ‘Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made . . .’ Reader, farewell. May your life and loves be as happy as mine have been.”13

Acknowledgment

Gabriel Schechter, SABR, Cherry Valley, New York.

Sources

Frank Deford, Over Time: My Life As a Sportswriter (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012), 136.

John A. Garrity and Mark C. Carnes, ed., American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 658-659.

Jerome Holtzman, ed., No Cheering In The Press Box (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1973), 34-45.

John Kieran, Not Under Oath (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1964).

Fred Lieb, Baseball As I Have Known It (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, Inc., 1977), 68-71.

“John Kieran,” Weekly Shout-Out, Montgomery County Public Library, Rockville, Maryland, October 31, 2008, December 3, 2008.

George Vecsey, “Sports of the Times,” New York Times,” December 16, 2011.

Boston Globe, John Kieran obituary, December 11, 1981.

New York Times, John Kieran obituary, December 11, 1981.

The Sporting News, July 4, 1970, December 22, 1973, August 31, 1974, May 3, 1980.

Baseball-Almanac.com

BaseballHallofFame.org

BaseballLibrary.com

Baseball-Reference.com

Cyber-Nation.com (John Kieran quotation entry)

MyOldRadio.com (“Information Please” guests log)

FindAGrave.com (John Kieran entry)

NYHistory.org (John Kieran entry, Bill Shannon’s Biographical Dictionary of New York Sports)

Retrosheet.org

VanCortlandt.com (John Kieran Nature Trail entry)

William Curran, “John Kieran,” Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography Database, Gale Research, Detroit, Michigan, 1996.

Giamatti Research Center, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, New York, Excerpts from John Kieran file.

John Kieran Papers Abstract, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Notes

Samuel Harold Lacy was born in Mystic, Connecticut, on October 23, 1903, according to some sources, including his own autobiography. However, recent research, as well as census documents, suggest he was actually born in Washington D.C., circa 1904 or 1905. He was the youngest of four children born to Samuel Erskine Lacy, a notary public2 (also identified in some sources as a researcher in a law firm),3 and his wife Rosa (Bell). It wasn’t until Sam was in his fifties that he learned his mother was a full-blooded Native American, from the Shinnecock tribe, and a member of the Mohawk Nation; but this was never mentioned when he was growing up.4

According to his autobiography, when Sam was two, the Lacy family moved to Washington, D.C., where Sam’s paternal grandparents lived. His grandfather, Henry Erskine Lacy, became D.C.’s first Black police detective.5 Sam was raised not far from Griffith Stadium, then home to the major league Washington Senators. (Fans back then, including Sam, and many sportswriters, often preferred the name Nationals.)6 Among his favorite childhood memories were how much his father loved baseball, and how much he enjoyed reading the newspaper. Young Sam inherited both traits. At Armstrong Manual Training School (later known as Armstrong Technical High School), he played football and basketball, but he was always drawn to baseball and earned acclaim for his pitching skills. The local newspapers covered schoolboy sports, and one sportswriter wrote about “Sam Lacy, the high school hurling ace” who struck out the side against a Howard University freshman team to preserve an Armstrong victory.7 In another game, Lacy helped to defeat intercity rival Baltimore High.8 In addition to playing sports, he covered them for Armstrong’s newspaper,9 although at that time, he did not envision turning that activity into a career.

Because he grew up only a few blocks from Griffith Stadium, Lacy, along with several other neighborhood boys, would often visit the ballpark in the summer to shag fly balls during batting practice. That was how he met some of the Nationals, and ran errands for some of them.10 But as friendly as he was with big-name players like Walter Johnson, it didn’t change the fact that Washington was a segregated city, and Griffith Stadium was no exception: when he wanted to watch a game, he could only do so from the “colored-only section,” out in right field.11 Meanwhile, as a teen, he found that during the summer, he could earn extra money as a vendor, selling merchandise in the stands at Griffith Stadium. He also served as a caddy for golfers at the all-white Columbia Country Club in nearby Chevy Chase, Maryland. Among the men for whom he caddied was Nationals’ secretary-treasurer Ed Eynon,12

After graduating from high school in 1924, Lacy wanted to get a fulltime job in sports: he envisioned coaching a basketball team, or perhaps being a player-manager for a semipro baseball team, but his mother insisted he go to college. To make her happy, he enrolled at Howard University, but while many sources say he graduated, he did not. In his autobiography, he acknowledges that he left after only one year.13 Lacy had already played for a couple of Black semipro teams, including the Washington Black Sox, LeDroit Tigers (a neighborhood team from LeDroit Park, an upwardly-mobile Black neighborhood near Howard University), and the Bachrach Giants. He decided to see if he could become a successful player-manager. But while he enjoyed doing both, it became obvious that a career in Black baseball would not earn him enough money to support a family. He had married in 1927, and he and his wife, the former Alberta Robinson, wanted to have children. They would ultimately have a son, Samuel Howe (better known as Tim), who followed in his dad’s footsteps and became a sportswriter.

In need of a profession that offered a stable income, Lacy gravitated towards journalism, where he could report and write about sports, even if playing was no longer feasible. By 1930, he was working for the Washington Tribune,14 where he covered all the local teams, and wrote a regular column called “Looking ’Em Over with the Tribune.” Gradually, he worked his way up, becoming the paper’s sports editor in 1934.

Like many sportswriters for Black newspapers, Lacy did not just confine himself to which teams won or which players did well. He now had a platform to comment on social trends, including discrimination against Black athletes. In one commentary from early 1934, he remarked upon how white students were often given new and modern athletic facilities, while local Black students were relegated to using outdated and inadequate gymnasiums. Sometimes, he critiqued how Black people were depicted on radio, once taking comedian Will Rogers to task for using the N word during a network radio skit.15 And sometimes he spoke about the effects of racism.

One story Lacy told in a column was about his own father, who had been a passionate fan of the Washington Senators and had taken him to the games for years… until one very unpleasant incident that occurred in 1924, prior to the Senators’ World Series opener against the New York Giants. His dad was standing in the crowd, watching a parade in honor of that event. He was cheering the players as they marched toward the stadium, proudly waving a classic “I Saw Walter Johnson Pitch His First Game” souvenir banner he had gotten in 1907. But as the players approached, Senators’ first-base coach Nick Altrock, well-known as the team’s clown, suddenly threw a “dirty, wet towel” at Mr. Lacy, striking him. Feeling humiliated and angry, he went home and never attended another Senators game.16 (Some sources, including Lacy himself, have told another version of the event, saying that Altrock spat in Mr. Lacy’s face. That is not the way Sam described what happened to his dad in his 1998 autobiography, but it is what he told an interviewer for Sports Illustrated in 1990.17 In either case, his father was deeply hurt by what had occurred, and Sam was affected by it even years later.)

While he kept up with Major League Baseball, Lacy was also one of the many Washingtonians who followed the Negro Leagues faithfully. When he was a player, he knew (and sometimes played against) a number of big names, including the versatile pitcher Martin Dihigo, and star shortstop John Henry “Pop” Lloyd. Now, as a fan, he enjoyed watching stars like Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige. But as Lacy recalled years later, few of the Negro Leagues players he knew in the 1920s questioned why they couldn’t be in the majors. They understood it was how things were, and they put up with the situation, seeing no alternative.18 However, that didn’t stop Black baseball writers like Lacy, along with Wendell Smith, Joe Bostic, Frank “Fay” Young, and others, from speaking out. And in the end, their influence helped to persuade white Major League owners that the time was right to bring in Black players.

As early as 1935, Lacy was using his column in the Tribune to advocate for integration of the major leagues.19 Then, in 1937, he decided to approach some of the owners in person. Lacy first went to Washington Senators’ owner Clark Griffith to suggest that Griffith’s last-place team might benefit from adding some of the Homestead Grays’ players (including such greats as Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, and Cool Papa Bell);20 Griffith was not interested, telling Lacy the “climate wasn’t right” for taking such a step.21 Lacy responded, “The climate will never be right if you don’t test it.”22 It is also worth noting that in addition to the fact that many owners agreed with segregation in principle, some were making money from it: few Negro Leagues owners could afford to buy their own ballpark, and major league owners, including Griffith, derived revenue from renting their parks to Negro Leagues teams when their own teams were out of town.23

By 1939, Lacy’s columns were being published in the Baltimore Afro-American (back then, the newspaper had offices in both Washington and Baltimore, as well as several other cities). That August, Lacy interviewed some Negro League players, asking them how they felt about the ongoing campaign that baseball writers (and by now, even some fans) were waging to get the major leagues to integrate. He wondered if what the writers wanted was in fact what the players wanted, and he decided to ask some of them. The results showed quite a bit of ambivalence. For example, Vic Harris, player-manager of the Homestead Grays, worried that the major leagues would simply pick off the Negro Leagues’ few biggest drawing cards, leaving the rest of the players — who were good, but not great — to struggle to make a living when large crowds no longer showed up for the games. Felton Snow, player-manager of the Baltimore Elite Giants, worried that some of the players might not behave in a responsible manner if they were to receive big salaries, thus giving Black players a bad name.

Jud Wilson, third baseman of the Philadelphia Stars, wasn’t worried, however. He said it was pointless to even discuss this, since it wasn’t going to happen at any time soon. As he saw it, the major leagues were dominated by southerners, loyal supporters of segregation, so no change was likely, no matter how much certain people advocated for it. Further, he doubted that integration would be good for Black players, since so many cities did not have integrated hotels or practice facilities, and even most ballparks were segregated. What was needed, Wilson said, was a “universal movement” for change, and in 1939, he did not see such a movement occurring. Newark Eagles player-manager Dick Lundy focused the conversation on what he saw as the flaws in the Negro Leagues’ business model: he believed the league needed stronger ownership (with owners who had the money to invest in their teams) and better publicity. He discussed some other problems he had observed, but the bottom line was that, rather than worrying about if and when integration might come, he believed there should be a greater effort to improve what there already was; running the Negro Leagues in a more professional way was the number one thing on his list. He said he had heard promises for 25 years that this would happen, but thus far, it hadn’t. He concluded by saying that if the Negro Leagues were perceived as a stronger organization, they could “DEMAND rather than SOLICIT recognition.” 24

Whether those responses disappointed Lacy or not, he seemed very willing to quote them, and to get his readers engaged in the conversation about whether integration was good for Black players or not. After integration occurred, Lacy himself became the object of scorn from some of the owners, who blamed him for the ultimate end of the Negro Leagues.25 But when he was criticized, he would respond, “The Negro Leagues were an institution, but they were the very thing we wanted to get rid of because they were a symbol of segregation.”26 Despite continued resistance from white major league owners and ambivalence from some Negro Leagues players, Lacy was undeterred; he would continue insisting that the time was right to give Negro Leagues players their chance. His efforts to discuss the situation with major league baseball executives were frequently thwarted, Then-baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis was among those who refused to even meet with him.27 And although he and other Black baseball writers continued to advocate for change, it would not be until 1947 that the first Black baseball player, Jackie Robinson, finally got the opportunity Lacy and others had talked about for years.

Throughout the 1930s, as he had done since childhood, Lacy took on numerous jobs, even while he was writing about sports for the Tribune. He continued to coach or manage local semipro and schoolboy teams. Sometimes he even umpired local baseball games. He also tried his hand at radio. Due to segregation, there were few Black announcers on the air, and even fewer Black sportscasters (the first was Jocko Maxwell, circa 1930 in New York City), but Lacy was able to get a sports program on D.C. station WOL for a few months in 1935.28 Local baseball fans were already very familiar with his voice; throughout much of the 1930s, he was a public address announcer at Griffith Stadium. Whenever the Homestead Grays played Negro Leagues games there, Lacy was the one who introduced the players, called the plays, and kept the fans informed about what was going on. He also had an assistant, a young man named Harold (later known as Hal) Jackson, who eventually took over the stadium announcer role.29 Jackson went on to a successful career as a broadcaster. This was just one of many times in Lacy’s life when he served as a mentor. Another young man who learned a lot from him was an up-and-coming reporter named Arthur “Art” Carter, whom he hired at the Tribune in 1937. Carter subsequently went on to a long career at the Afro-American.30

Black sportswriters of that time were expected to cover Black athletes from many sports, both local and national; thus, Lacy’s beat included Black athletes in baseball, track, boxing, basketball, and college football. He also gained a reputation for pursuing the facts, even if what he wrote was sometimes controversial. For example, in October 1937, a story he wrote about a college football player proved contentious. Lacy’s intention was to expose racism in college athletics, and to point out the hypocrisy of the discriminatory policies many conferences utilized. He wrote about a star college quarterback, Syracuse University’s Wilmeth Sidat-Singh, who was frequently identified in print as Indian and referred to as “the Manhattan Hindu” by reporters. But Lacy had discovered that the young man was not from India at all. Rather, he had been born to Black parents in Washington, D.C. After his father died, his mother remarried, and Wilmeth was adopted by her new husband, an Indian surgeon from New York.31 This mattered because many colleges, even up north, adhered to a “gentlemen’s agreement” that they would not play their Black athletes against southern teams. And Wilmeth Sidat-Singh, despite having an Indian last name, was actually Black. When Lacy’s story broke, Syracuse University was scheduled to play against the University of Maryland, which was a member of a conference that did not play against Black athletes. Suddenly, Sidat-Singh was pulled from the starting lineup, and he lost his opportunity to play in a big game. Syracuse lost, and Lacy wrote, “An undefeated football record went by the boards here today as racial bigotry substituted for sportsmanship… Wilmeth Sidat-Singh, a Negro who had won his way into the hearts of his Syracuse teammates and student associates, was denied the privilege of playing in today’s ‘contest’ when Maryland University [sic] officials learned his nationality and demanded removal…”32

Sometime in 1940, Lacy left the Afro-American to work at the Chicago Defender for several years as an assistant editor. By some accounts, he clashed with sports editor Frank A. “Fay” Young — they were two men with forceful personalities, and perhaps such clashes were to be expected.33 But Lacy simply explained in his autobiography that the Defender wanted him to cover news, rather than sports, and that was not where his heart was.34 Another reason he decided to leave occurred in 1943. Lacy thought he had finally persuaded the owners to hear a presentation about the case for Black players in Major League Baseball; but instead of letting him make that case, the Defender sent someone else — actor Paul Robeson. The Defender’s management thought the well-known, but outspoken, Black entertainer would generate more publicity for the cause than a sportswriter.35 But the presentation was unsuccessful. Frustrated, Lacy returned to the Baltimore-Washington area, where he rejoined the Afro-American as Sports Editor; he would remain there for the next five decades.

By 1944, Lacy was also back on the radio, doing a Sunday morning baseball-themed program with Harold Jackson on station WINX; they interviewed Negro Leagues players and discussed recent Homestead Grays’ games.36 Meanwhile, Lacy continued advocating for baseball’s integration. In March 1945, he wrote letters to every major league owner, suggesting they form a committee to study the possibility of integrating the game. A committee was formed, but only on paper — it never had any meetings.37 On the other hand, momentum for change was finally building: in that post-World War II era, even some of the white-owned mainstream newspapers like the New York Times were coming out in favor of the integration of baseball.38 And when Branch Rickey announced that Jackie Robinson had been signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Afro-American put Lacy on a new beat: covering all things Jackie Robinson. At the time, it was considered the biggest sports assignment for any Black reporter, and Lacy would soon distinguish himself.

In late February 1946, Robinson reported to the AAA Montreal Royals spring training camp in segregated Daytona Beach, Florida. Lacy was there to cover him, but they also ended up traveling together and becoming friends. In much of Florida, Black players like Robinson were forbidden from staying in the same hotels or eating in the same restaurants with their Royals teammates. Robinson and Lacy, along with another Black Montreal prospect, pitcher Johnny Wright, stayed in private homes, as was often necessary for Black people traveling in the south. But despite enduring the obstacles and the unequal treatment, Lacy was gratified to see history finally being made. On March 8, Robinson played seven innings in a scrimmage game. For Lacy, this was more than just a practice. “It was the first time in history that a colored player had competed in a game representing a team in modern organized baseball.”39 And in his Afro-American column, he admitted his own nervousness whenever Robinson played: “I was constantly in fear of his muffing an easy roller under the stress of things,” he wrote, expressing his hope that the young man would give his critics no excuse to dismiss him. But in the end, Robinson did not disappoint, even under difficult conditions.40

Covering Robinson was a challenge for Lacy and other black sportswriters assigned to the “Robinson beat.” Southern segregationists made it clear they were not welcome: for example, a cross was burned on the lawn of the boardinghouse where they stayed before an exhibition game in Macon, Georgia.41 Lacy was often denied entrance to the press box, sometimes told he had to report from the stands or from the dugout. In one instance, at Pelican Stadium in New Orleans, he was told he could only cover the game from the roof. He climbed all the way up there, and to his surprise, he was soon joined by several white sportswriters, including Dick Young of the New York Daily News, who wanted to show him that they accepted and respected him. Of course, they didn’t want to embarrass him, so instead they claimed they were just there to get a suntan. But Lacy understood, and he appreciated the gesture.42

Even after Robinson made the major leagues and Lacy’s presence in the press box was no longer forbidden, discrimination against Black players and Black sportswriters persisted. In fact, long after 1954’s Brown vs. the Board of Education decision began the process of ending segregation, many parts of the country remained segregated well into the late 1960s. On many road trips, Lacy and the Black players still had to stay in inferior accommodations; they couldn’t eat in certain restaurants; taxis would not stop for them, forcing them to walk to the ballpark; and they were taunted by some of the fans. But Lacy never made the story about himself. He always focused on the games and the players. And he maintained his reputation for being fair. After Jackie Robinson won the Rookie of the Year award in 1947, he reported to 1948 training camp late, and out of shape. As much as Lacy respected Robinson (and vice versa), the sportswriter took the young man to task, as he would any player. He criticized Robinson for having a “lackadaisical attitude” and “laying down on the job.” Robinson, determined to prove Lacy wrong, responded almost immediately, getting back into shape and resuming his excellent play.43 And although most of Lacy’s reporting was on the “Robinson beat,” he still covered the Negro Leagues sometimes,44 and he kept in touch with many of the players he knew in Washington and Baltimore.

By 1948-1949, as a few other clubs signed Black players, in both the major and minor leagues, he was able to cover them. But although Lacy was now well known at many ballparks, one door remained closed: the Baseball Writers Association of America was still an all-white organization. Lacy could sit in the press box (in some cities), but like his colleague Wendell Smith, he was not a member. The excuse some chapters used when excluding the Black writers was that most of their papers were weeklies, and not dailies. By the late 1940s, even some white members had come to believe this was a distinction without a difference, and they said so.45 After all, the Black reporters worked just as hard and covered just as many games in the course of a week. In 1948, Lacy became one of the Baseball Writers’ first black members, paving the way for other Black writers. (Lacy asserted that he was the first,46 and other sources agreed;47 but some sources have said that Wendell Smith was first.)

By now, Lacy was receiving offers from mainstream white publications, but he remained at the Afro-American. He liked the work, and he liked the Baltimore-Washington area. In 1952, his personal life underwent some turmoil, as his first marriage ended in divorce (by his own admission, he was not home much, and at times, he liked to gamble). He remarried several years later and credited his new wife Barbara with being a stabilizing force in his life and making him a more responsible person.48 (Barbara’s daughter Michaelyn became Sam’s stepdaughter.)

Long after baseball had integrated, Lacy continued to advocate for more respect for Black athletes, no matter which sports they played. He covered six Olympic Games; he wrote about Black tennis champions like Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe; he covered track and field star (and Olympian) Wilma Rudolph, and Black golfer Lee Elder, as well as numerous boxers, and football and basketball players. Sports were his passion, and he was still reporting on them for the Afro-American well into his late 90s. In fact, several days before he died on May 8, 2003, at age 99, he had filed his next column — just as he had done for so many years.49 For the last three years of his life, his son Tim had driven him to the office,50 but that was the only accommodation he made to his advancing age. Lacy’s death was front page news at the Baltimore Sun,51 and newspapers from coast to coast carried the story; many also carried tributes. More than 200 mourners attended Lacy’s funeral at the Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Washington D.C., including Baltimore’s then-mayor Martin O’Malley, numerous sportswriters and sportscasters who had worked with him (or been mentored by him), and local pro athletes, including former Baltimore Colts’ running back Lenny Moore.52 He was buried at Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in Suitland, Maryland.

Lacy won a long list of awards and honors during his career: In January 1985, he was inducted into the Maryland Sports Media Hall of Fame.53 In July 1991, he received a lifetime achievement award from the National Association of Black Journalists.54 In 1997, Major League Baseball commemorated the 50th Anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s breaking baseball’s color barrier; Lacy threw out the first pitch on April 15, 1997, at the game between the Orioles and the Twins.55 In October 1997, the Baseball Writers Association of America named him the winner of the BBWAA Career Excellence Award (then known as the J. G. Taylor Spink Award). In April 1998, he won the Red Smith Award from the Associated Press Sports Editors, for “major contributions to sports journalism.”56 And in July 1998, he was inducted into the Writers Wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

Reflecting on Lacy’s life and legacy, Afro-American publisher John Jacob “Jake” Oliver said, “Sam Lacy was everybody’s father, everybody’s uncle, everybody’s coach. He was the man who taught a whole generation of our writers here at the [Afro-American newspapers] how to be journalists … he probably [knew] more history about what 20th century African-American sports was about than anyone else … we can never say enough about Sam Lacy …”57

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Malcolm Allen for his suggestions on the initial draft of the biography, which was also reviewed by Norman Macht and checked for accuracy by SABR’s fact-checking team. The author also wishes to thank librarians Herbert Rogers and Christine Iko of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore for their assistance.

Sources

In addition to the sources mentioned in the Notes, the author referred to documents on Ancestry.com, as well as using information from several SABR bios.

Photo credit: John Mathew Smith, Flickr.com. Creative Commons License, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Notes

1 Frank Litsky, “Sam Lacy, 99; Fought Racism as Sportswriter,” New York Times, May 12, 2003: B7.

2 John C. Walter and Malina Iida, Editors, Better Than the Best: Black Athletes Speak, 1920-2007 (Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 2010): 3-4.

3 Chris Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2012): 57.

4 Sam Lacy, with Moses J. Newsom, Fighting for Fairness (Centerville, Maryland: Tidewater Publishers, 1998): 13-14.

5 Sam Lacy, with Moses J. Newsom: Fighting for Fairness: 15.

6 Sam Lacy, with Moses J. Newsom: Fighting for Fairness: 24.

7 “Armstrong Manual Training School,” Washington D.C. Evening Star, May 6, 1923: 26.

8 “Armstrong Manual Training School,” Washington D.C. Evening Star, May 12, 1923: 24.

9 Steve Katz, “Sam Lacy Traveled Rough Road with Black Athletes,” Baltimore Sun, August 17, 1980: C5.

10 Marilyn McCraven, “Writing on the Wall,” Baltimore Sun, April 1, 1997: 1F, 5F

11 Barry Horn, “Sam Lacy: Honoring the Voice of Change,” Burlington (Vermont) Free Press, April 26, 1998: 4C.

12 Steve Katz, “Sam Lacy Traveled Rough Road with Black Athletes,” Baltimore Sun, August 17, 1980: C5.

13 Sam Lacy, with Moses J. Newsom, Fighting for Fairness: 24.

14 Litsky, “Sam Lacy”: 99.

15 Sam Lacy, with Moses J. Newsom, Fighting for Fairness: 31.

16 Sam Lacy, with Moses J. Newsom, Fighting for Fairness: 25.

17 Frederick J. Frommer, You Gotta Have Heart, (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020): 56.

18 Quoted by Jim Reisler, in Black Writers, Black Baseball (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, revised edition, 2007): 15.

19 Frederick J. Frommer, You Gotta Have Heart: 56.

20 “Thomas Mulloy, “A Picture of Sam Lacy,” Cleveland Call & Post, May 6, 2009: C1.

21“Quoted by Jim Reisler, in Black Writers/ Black Baseball: 15.

22 Quoted by Howie Evans, “75th Anniversary of Negro Baseball League Celebration Slated,” (New York City) Amsterdam News, December 2, 1995: 48.

23 Bob Luke, The Baltimore Elite Giants: Sport and Society in the Age of Negro League Baseball (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009): 5-6.

24 Sam Lacy, “Players Indifferent About Entering Major Leagues,” Baltimore Afro-American, August 5, 1939: 19.

25 “Thomas Mulloy, “A Picture of Sam Lacy,” Cleveland Call & Post, May 6, 2009: C1.

26 Litsky, “Sam Lacy: 99.

27 Charlie Vascellaro, “How Sam Lacy Helped Integrate Major League Baseball,” Baltimore Sun, April 22, 2013: A17.

28 Radio Listings, Washington Tribune, November 19, 1935: 8.

29 Hal Jackson, with James Haskins, Hal Jackson: The House that Jack Built, (New York: Amistad Press, 2001): 24-25.

30 Lawrence A. Still, “A Pioneer of the Black Press: Remembering Arthur Carter–War Reporter, Civil-Rights Veteran,” Washington Post, June 26, 1988: C5.

31 “Lacy’s Scoop Derailed History at the University of Maryland,” Baltimore Afro-American, February 22, 2017: https://www.afro.com/sam-lacy-scoop-derailed-history-university-maryland/

32 Ron Fimrite, “Sam Lacy: Black Crusader,” Sports Illustrated, October 29, 1990: https://vault.si.com/vault/1990/10/29/sam-lacy-black-crusader-a-resolute-writer-helped-bring-change-to-sports

33 Jim Reisler, Black Writers/Black Baseball: 15.

34 Sam Lacy, with Moses J. Newsom, Fighting for Fairness: 44.

35 Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Greatest Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008): 41.

36 See for example, Advertisement in the Washington Tribune, June 24, 1944: 29.

37 Chris Lamb, “Heavy Hitters for Integrated Baseball: Sportswriter Sam Lacy and Wendell Smith Reported on Jackie Robinson’s Journey to the Major Leagues,” Baltimore Sun, February 18, 1996: 7F.

38 Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Greatest Experiment: 3.

39 Quoted by Chris Lamb, Heavy Hitters: 7F.

40 Sam Lacy, “Looking ‘Em Over,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 16, 1946: 25.

41 Ron Fimrite, “Sam Lacy: Black Crusader”: https://vault.si.com/vault/1990/10/29/sam-lacy-black-crusader-a-resolute-writer-helped-bring-change-to-sports

42 Barry Horn, “Sam Lacy”: 4C.

43 Mike Klingaman, “Hall of Fame Opens Door for Writer,” Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1998: 1A.

44 Sam Lacy, “Homesteads Drop 9-6 Tilt to Elites,” Baltimore Afro-American, July 24, 1948: 29.

45 Vince Johnson, “Jim Crowism in the Press Box,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 22, 1949: 17.

46 Sam Lacy, with Moses J. Newsom: Fighting for Fairness: 99-100.

47 Vince Johnson, “Jim Crowism”: 17.

48 Sam Lacy, with Moses J. Newsom, Fighting for Fairness: 27.

49 Mike Klingaman, “Pioneering Sportswriter Fearless,” Chicago Tribune, May 11, 2003: section 3:1

50 Kenny Lucas, “Lacy Eulogies Hail Champion,” New York Daily News, May 17, 2003: 56.

51 Mike Klingaman, “Crusading Sports Journalist, Integration Pioneer, Dies at 99,” Baltimore Sun, May 10, 2003: 1A.

52 Derrill Holly, “Hundreds Attend Writer’s Funeral,” Charlotte Observer, May 17, 2003: C12.

53 Doug Brown, “28 Football Players to be Honored for their Courage Playing in Pain,” Baltimore Sun, January 24, 1985: C3.

54 Alex Dominguez, “Pioneer black sportswriter cleared a path for others,” Baltimore Sun, August 26, 1991: 4B.

55 Roch Kubatko, “Barney, Other Fans Say Thank You,” Baltimore Sun, April 16, 1997: 5D.

56 “Afro-American’s Lacy Presented Smith Award for Sports Journalism,” Baltimore Sun, April 19, 1998: 2C.

57 John Jacob “Jake” Oliver (The HistoryMakers A2003.273), interviewed by Larry Crowe, November 12, 2003, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 6, story 4, John Jacob “Jake” Oliver talks about sports journalist, Sam Lacy.

Bob Considine called Shirley Povich the master of the “declarative sentence.” He said that Shirley used all the 26 sharp-edged tools of the alphabet to drive home his point. He claimed that Povich never failed to make a point, a thought, a sentiment, a belief. Herbert Bayard Swope called the creation of a daily journalistic endeavor “the curse of everydayness.” But Shirley had turned that endeavor into “the joy of everydayness.”

Shirley Povich was born on July 15, 1905, to Lithuanian immigrant parents. His father and mother, Nathan and Rosa Povich, owned a furniture store in affluent Bar Harbor, Maine. Shirley was one of nine surviving children; the first-born child died when it crawled out on to the back porch, which was held up by pilings on the ocean and fell in and drowned. How did Povich get the name “Shirley”? In Jewish tradition a child is named after someone deceased. Shirley was named after his grandmother Sarah. With Shirley being the eighth child, the family was running out of boy’s names and came up with “Shirley.” Povich went on to explain that he knew at least four other boys in school in Maine who were named “Shirley,” so it did not particularly bother him. (“Shirley” was a masculine name until the 1900s. Shirley Temple opened the floodgates for the name.)

One of his brothers, Abe, was a star high school athlete in football, basketball and baseball. Povich’s contact with the national sports scene came from reading the newspapers that were brought in from Boston on the night boat.

Povich caddied at the country club in Bar Harbor for two years for Ned McLean, owner of the Washington Post. McLean took a liking to Shirley and saw in him a bright and intelligent person. McLean invited Povich to attend his alma mater, Georgetown University, at his expense. Shirley traveled to Washington, D.C., but stopped off in New York, climbed up Coogan’s Bluff and watched as the Giants defeated the Yankees in the World Series. It was the first major league game he had seen. When Shirley arrived in Washington, he caddied for McLean and President Warren G. Harding, in order to help pay for his expenses while he was attending Georgetown. In 1923, Povich became a copy boy at the Washington Post. He attended his first regular season ballgame in Washington, where he saw Walter Johnson pitch.

Shirley, a fast learner, quickly worked his way from the copy desk to the city room. He became a police reporter and a rewrite man. Then in 1924 he was offered a job in the sports department along with a five-dollar raise. He jumped at the chance. Having his name atop an article was so thrilling to him that he could not wait for the paper to come out, so he ran down to the pressroom just to make sure he was not dreaming and ran his hand over the type that carried his name. Barely two years later he was promoted to sports editor at the age of twenty-one, the youngest sports editor at any metropolitan newspaper in America. At that time the Washington Post was a struggling newspaper with low circulation, and Shirley along with others did not have much of a budget to work with.

In 1926, Shirley Povich began his much read and praised column, “This Morning.” Attending the Dempsey-Tunney fight of the “Long Count” fame, he was in the company of such great writers as Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon and Heywood Broun. Shirley wrote in his column, “although Dempsey lost he actually became more popular than when he was winning.”

On February 21, 1932, Shirley married Ethyl Friedman of Baltimore, whom he had met on a blind date. It was the middle of the Depression, and when Shirley returned from his honeymoon, he learned his pay had been reduced from $60 a week to $51. In fact, every Post employee had been cut by fifteen percent. Things got so bad that several Post employees had to sleep in the Post building because they could not afford regular sleeping quarters. Bob Considine, a promising young reporter, quit the Post and moved to the Herald for better pay. In 1933, McLean auctioned off the Post to Eugene Meyer. The first thing Meyer did was to rescind the pay cuts. The same year Povich gave up his position as sports editor to concentrate on his column.

Apocryphal stories fill the baseball world. How they get started is often a mystery that never gets solved. Shirley covered the 1932 World Series when Babe Ruth supposedly pointed to the centerfield bleachers at Wrigley Field and on the next pitch deposited the ball to that very spot. But Shirley talked to Bill Dickey, the Yankee catcher, years later, and Dickey told a different story. Dickey’s story was that Ruth was not pointing to the bleachers in centerfield but at Charlie Root, the Cub pitcher who had quick-pitched Ruth on the previous pitch. Ruth was angry and told Root in no uncertain terms not to do it again. Shirley asked Dickey, “How do you know this?” Dickey replied, “Because Ruth told us when he came back to the bench.” “How come you never told anybody?” Dickey said, “All of us players could see it was a helluva story so we just made an agreement not to bother straightening out the facts.”

Baseball is full of facts and statistics, and the overwhelming amounts can leave us cross-eyed and bewildered. To make a point, one day in the middle 1950s, Shirley was writing his daily column when he was surprised to see a man enter his office. The stranger was ill kempt and looked as if he needed a good meal. “You don’t know me,” the man said. “No, I don’t,” replied Shirley. “My name is Dick Crutcher and I pitched for the Boston Braves in 1914 and won a few games for them.” Shirley looked around on his desk and spied the Encyclopedia of Baseball. He quickly scanned the pages and, sure enough, found the name Richard Louis Crutcher. Shirley asked the man where he was born. The man answered, “Frankfort, Kentucky in 1893.” “The book says 1891,” noted Shirley. The man said, “Those figures aren’t correct, I ought to know when I was born.” Shirley: “How many games did you win in 1914?” The man “I won 5 and lost 6.” Shirley looked in the encyclopedia and saw that the man was correct. As the man was about to leave, Shirley’s eye caught another item in the encyclopedia. “It says here that you died on June 19, 1952.” The man, highly indignant, drew himself up to his full height and replied, “Remember what I said about those figures?” he roared. “They’re not always accurate.” Was the man who he said he was? How is a writer to extract the truth?

Povich opposed racism in all sports. When first writing on Joe Louis he did not paint him in a good light. He saw Louis as a “Dark Destroyer.” But after Louis’ defeat by Max Schmeling in 1936, Povich was won over to Louis as a man who had been following a pattern of modesty and self-effacement. After Louis defeated James J. Braddock for the heavyweight championship, Povich predicted rightly that Louis would be champ for a long time.

Though Povich wrote about all sports, his favorite was baseball. In defense of baseball being a dull sport, Povich wrote, “Only the people who think so are dull.” Povich cited the interludes in a ball game when a pitcher was fiddling with the ball on the mound staring at some six-foot, 200-pounder whose aim was to knock the ball down his throat. And the man coming to bat knocking the dirt out his spikes when there really is no dirt was a man a little reluctant to dig in against a man sixty feet six inches away who was ready to toss a hard ball at him going 95 miles per hour. Povich wrote about the balletic beauty of the double play and the crunch of a headlong slide into homeplate on a close play when the runner’s head meets the shin guards of an immovable catcher.

When Lou Gehrig made his farewell speech at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, Shirley Povich wrote, “I saw strong men weep this afternoon, expressionless umpires swallow hard and emotions pump the hearts of and glaze the eyes of 60,000 baseball fans in Yankee Stadium. Yes, and hard-boiled news photographers clicked their shutters with fingers that trembled a bit.”

Povich argued for desegregation in baseball. In 1941 he went to Florida and watched several Negro League teams. He felt that many were better than current major leaguers and many were just as good.

Between 1971 and 1973, sportswriter Jerome Holtzman conducted a number of interviews with senior and retired sportswriters. The questions he proffered were about the dual roles of the sportswriter as reporter and as publicist of ballclubs, what was appropriate and inappropriate to write about. One of those interviewed was Shirley Povich. Shirley said that at the beginning of his writing career on baseball he was a “Hero Worshiper.” Shirley described the long trips during his early years covering the Senators: “There you were in your trains, your private cars, and you worked on the trains of course. And from Boston to St. Louis it was something like twenty hours. But you were there with the ballplayers. You got to know them. You got to be friendly with those you wanted to be friendly with and you learned which ballplayers didn’t like writers. A great many.” Later he detached himself from the ballplayers, feeling that he gained both independence and confidence. “You say to yourself” Povich said, “They’re the ballplayers. Let them play the game. I’m a reporter. It’s a necessary separation.”

The possibility of co-optation will always loom over any sportswriter’s head especially when following a game that involves the reporter traveling with the team. The danger always exists of baseball scratching the reporter’s back and vice versa in a possible harmful symbiotic relationship. G. Edward White in his book Creating the National Pastime stated that, “The significance of baseball journalists in the emergence of baseball as the National Pastime was also a function of the nature and limits of their coverage. Whatever journalists and players thought of one another in the fifty years after 1903, neither side could have remotely anticipated the often adversarial, stage managed, yet sycophantic relationship that exists between professional ballplayers and the media today.” Povich took steps to avoid this by distancing himself from the players.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, plunging America into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942 gave his blessing to Major League baseball to continue as a morale booster for the country. This caused Povich to write, “That man in the White House did indeed earn the label of the Nation’s First Fan.” However, Povich went on to add that baseball stars and journeymen alike had a duty to serve their country when called. He felt that the dodging of the draft in World War I by players working in shipyards in order to avoid the draft should not be allowed.

Povich himself became a war correspondent in the South Pacific along with Ernie Pyle. He spent some time with Pyle and was scheduled to accompany him to Ie Shima, but he broke several ribs due to air-turbulence while flying. It was at Ie Shima that Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet. Povich covered the bloody battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa with the First Marine Division.

Povich returned to the United States at the tail end of the 1945 season and resumed covering baseball. In 1947, Jackie Robinson apparently became the first black player to play in the major leagues, but Povich revealed that Moses Fleetwood Walker held that honor. When the signing of Jackie Robinson occurred Shirley wrote, “Four hundred and fifty-five years after Columbus eagerly discovered America, major league baseball reluctantly discovered the American Negro.” He felt that the complete emancipation of the black ballplayer occurred when an Art Ditmar fastball decked Larry Doby, and Doby got up, charged the mound, and threw a punch at Ditmar. Jackie Robinson had been under severe restraints from arguing with umpires and fighting with other players. Now the bonds had been loosened.

In 1961 Shirley made the list of Who’s Who of American Women. The honor was rescinded when it was discovered that Shirley was actually a man.

Povich hammered at the owner of the Washington Redskins, George Preston Marshall, who refused to hire black football players at a time when most other teams were employing them. This caused Shirley to write, “Jim Brown, born ineligible to play for the Washington Redskins, integrated their end zone three times yesterday.”

Shirley could be acerbic at times. He felt the rebuff of Howard Cosell when he criticized Cosell in his column. Cosell never spoke to Povich again. Povich for his part said, “I’ll just have to live with that.” Povich felt that modern sportswriting concerned itself more with the personal lives of sports figures than it had in yesteryear. He thought the later breed of writers talented, but thought they often wrote as if they were trying to avoid the subject. He felt that his generation of writers was more penetrating.

Povich was president of the Baseball Writers Association of America in 1955. Some of his other honors include The National Headliners Award in 1947, the E.P. Dutton Prize for best short story news-coverage in 1957, the Grantland Rice Award for sportswriting in 1964, and the Red Smith Award in 1983. In 1975 he was honored by the Baseball Hall of Fame with the J.G. Taylor Spink Award.

Shirley retired in 1974 but still wrote occasionally for the Post. He later said that his favorite ballplayers to interview were Ted Williams and Walter Johnson. He said that the brash young Williams matured into a more personable human being. The hardest player he tried to interview was Joe DiMaggio.

Povich and his wife Ethyl had three children, two boys and a girl. David is an attorney in the law firm of Williams and Connolly; Maury is a talk show host and married to newscaster Connie Chung; and Lynn was the first woman senior editor at Newsweek is the author of The Good Girls Revolt, a book about the sex discrimination lawsuit that she and others filed against the magazine.

Povich could be biting at times, but he tried to do it in a gentlemanly way. He was direct and to the point, but his arrows were rarely tipped with venom. When Shirley died, there was a great outpouring of praise for him from the many who started their mornings with Shirley’s column. There were people who felt that Shirley almost single-handedly kept the Post alive in the 1920s and 1930s through his column. His column, some said, was like cereal in the morning, warm and inviting. To them he was the warm-hearted guy who said, “Welcome to the day.”

The scribes of ancient times were indeed masters of the declarative sentence as they paid homage to their heroes. Shirley Povich’s heroes were of a different kind-ballplayers, fighters, and gridiron heroes. And though he used the declarative in writing about these people, he also knew they were only after all mere mortal human beings.

One big love affair-that was how Shirley Povich described his 75-year marriage to the Washington Post. At his 75th anniversary George Solomon, assistant managing editor/sports said, “Shirley is a great sports writer, an even greater human being and truly the most remarkable man I ever met.”

Shirley Lewis Povich died on June 4, 1998, of a heart attack in Washington, D.C., at the age of 92. Surviving him were his wife Ethyl, sons David and Maury, and daughter Lynn.

Shirley Povich is one of the few sportswriters to have had a baseball park named after him. Shirley Povich Field, completed in 1999, is located in Cabin John Park in North Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. It is the home field for the Bethesda Big Train, a team in the Clark Griffith Summer Collegiate Baseball League.

Sources

Povich, Shirley. All These Mornings. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969.

_____. The Washington Senators. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1954.

Shirley Povich Files at National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown,
New York.

Ward, Geoffrey C. and Burns, Ken. Baseball: An Illustrated History. New York: Knopf, 1994.

Washington Post.com; Shirley Povich Tribute.

White, G. Edward. Creating the National Pastime. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

“He was not just a great sports writer,” fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Dave Anderson wrote, “he was a great American writer in the class of Hemingway and William Faulkner.”2 Ernest Hemingway called him “the most important force in American sportswriting.”3

“I flinch whenever I see the word literature used in the same sentence with my name,” Smith wrote. “I’m just a bum trying to make a living running a typewriter.”4

Besides a Pulitzer Prize, he won the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award; George Polk Award; Grantland Rice Memorial Award; and was the first recipient of the Associated Press Sports Editors’ Red Smith Award for lifetime contributions.

For years he wrote 800 to 900 words a day, six days a week. “There’s nothing to writing,” he said. “All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.”5 When a young writer asked him how to do a sports column, Smith told him, “Be there.”6 He believed in shoe-leather reporting, not armchair pontificating. “It was people he was most interested in,” his biographer, Ira Berkow, wrote. “Games came second.”7

No twirlers, twin killings, or circuit clouts marred Smith’s columns. Leaving behind the overwrought clichés of the genre, he wrote plain and graceful English decorated with humor wherever he could find it. He thought sports was entertainment, and he strove to entertain.

A Red Smith sampler:

• Ninety feet between bases is the nearest to perfection that man has ever achieved. It accurately measures the cunning, speed and finesse of the base stealer against the velocity of the thrown ball.8
• Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel.9
• Of a losing football team: They had overwhelmed one opponent, underwhelmed twelve, and whelmed one.10
• A writer he didn’t like was dedicated to the ruthless stamping out of the simple declarative sentence.11
• A spectacular defensive play by Jackie Robinson was the unconquerable doing the impossible.12
• Baseball is dull only to dull minds. Today’s game is always different from yesterday’s game, and tomorrow refreshingly different from today.13

Smith was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on September 25, 1905, the second of three children of Walter Philip Smith and the former Ida Richardson. Ida claimed to be a descendant of the Duke of Wellington, whose given name was Arthur Wellesley, so she named her sons Arthur and Walter Wellesley. (Smith later learned that the duke had no legitimate direct descendants.) His father owned a wholesale and retail grocery business with two brothers. The boy was called Wells, then Brick, and finally Red, for his hair.

Wells was short, slight, and wore glasses. He played baseball, poorly, but his favorite participatory sport was trout fishing, a passion he would carry for life. When he graduated from high school, he told his father he planned to be a newspaperman. “Whoever heard of a newspaperman with money?” the senior Smith asked. His son replied, “Who ever heard of a Smith with money?”14

He had to work for a year to save money before entering Notre Dame, where he waited tables and served as secretary to a professor from his hometown. He joined the track team, coached by football coach Knute Rockne, but quit after he finished last in his first mile race.

After graduation Smith found his first newspaper job with the Milwaukee Sentinel in 1928, making $24 a week as a general-assignment reporter. A year later he moved to the St. Louis Star as a copy editor, with a raise to $40. When half the sports staff was fired for taking payoffs to promote wrestling matches, he was transferred to the sports department — an accidental sportswriter — and covered the Cardinals and Browns. He met Kay Cody at a party and married her in 1933.

In 1936 the Philadelphia Record offered him $60 to cover the Athletics and write a seven-day-a-week column. “Red Smith” was born in Philadelphia when he told an editor to change his byline from Walt Smith.

By the end of World War II Smith was approaching 40 and supporting his wife, daughter, Kit, and son, Terry, on $80 a week, plus earnings from freelance magazine articles, when he made the big time. Stanley Woodward, sports editor of the New York Herald Tribune, had scouted the “little guy on the Philadelphia Record” by having his secretary clip a month’s worth of Smith’s columns. When they met, Woodward told him, “You are the best newspaper writer in the country and I can’t understand why you are stuck in Philadelphia.”15

The Herald Tribune’s circulation trailed its morning competition, the Daily News and Times, but Woodward was determined to make his sports section Number One. A hulking former college football tackle who was called “Coach,” he recruited the best writers and cultivated them with gruff love. He advised Smith to “stop godding up those ballplayers.”16

Smith started with the Trib as a general-assignment sports reporter for $100 a week. On December 5, 1945, he began the six-day-a-week column that would be an ornament for the paper for the rest of its life. Woodward told him, “Keep the column entertaining and write anything you want short of libel.”17 Within a few years the column was syndicated to newspapers nationwide. With Smith’s share of syndication revenue, Woodward commented that he was “making telephone numbers” — five figures, not beginning with a 1.18

The shy Midwesterner became a star on the New York sports scene, a regular at Toots Shor’s saloon, which he called “the mother lodge.”19 He soon qualified for Shor’s Table #1. His best friends were other sportswriters: Frank Graham, Grantland Rice, and Shirley Povich, three of the most distinguished practitioners of the craft. They traveled together to the biggest stories on the baseball, college football, boxing, and thoroughbred racing circuits while consuming lakes of liquor — scotch or sometimes vodka and tonic, no lime, for Smith.

Baseball was his favorite sport, outdistancing boxing and horse racing by a nose. He had no use for basketball and warned against hockey and other winter sports that would “freeze your toes off.”20

Unlike many other luminaries in his trade — including Damon Runyon, James Reston, and Jimmy Breslin — Smith rejected most opportunities beyond the sports page. He covered the presidential nominating conventions in 1956 and 1968, writing about them as if they were sporting contests, but otherwise stuck to his corner of the world. He turned away offers to write books; all of his books were compilations of columns. His colleague Dave Anderson wrote, “If being a sportswriter was good enough for Red Smith, it had to be good enough for anybody”21

At its peak, his column was carried by more than 250 papers, and his work was studied in university writing classes. By 1958 Newsweek magazine put him on its cover as “the world’s most widely read sportswriter.”22 The next year he and Kay were guests on Edward R. Murrow’s popular CBS-TV show, Person to Person.

But the 1956 Pulitzer Prize, journalism’s Oscar, went to Arthur Daley of the New York Times, the first sportswriter to be honored for commentary. (There is no Pulitzer for sportswriting.) Smith, and many of his colleagues, were stunned. He sometimes made fun of Daley’s plodding prose, which seldom if ever revealed an original thought. “It made Red angry,” Povich recalled, “and he pointed out that they gave Daley the Pulitzer Prize for General Excellence of his columns. Red said, ‘Name one.’”23

Just as Smith was at the top of his game, three newspaper strikes in the 1960s killed the Herald Tribune and three other New York dailies. Their remnants rose from the dead in a new paper, the World Journal Tribune, but that horse designed by committee lasted only eight months. The surviving papers — the Times, Daily News, and Post — had a full stable of sports columnists, so Smith was left with no New York outlet. He continued his column in syndication, and Women’s Wear Daily improbably picked it up, making him the New York garment industry’s most widely read sportswriter.

As he faced uncertainty about his career, Smith’s wife was diagnosed with liver cancer. He nursed Kay through the next four months while continuing to write his column. For a change, writing was a relief. Kay died on February 15, 1967.

With the loss of his wife, his paper, and most of his New York audience, Smith appeared to be in decline as he neared retirement age. He began drinking heavily, alarming friends and his son, Terry, a New York Times reporter. Smith’s older brother, Art, also a newspaperman, was an alcoholic who had failed in several tries at sobriety.

After 34 years of marriage and a year of widowhood, Smith hesitantly began dating Phyllis Weiss, a widow 15 years younger with five children in their teens and early 20s. She may have saved his life; she and her kids certainly changed his outlook. They were married on November 2, 1968.

His career also rebounded. In 1971 the New York Times, the world’s most influential newspaper, had an opening for a sports columnist. Managing editor A.M. Rosenthal said he asked himself who was the best of the breed, and had no doubt about the answer. The 66-year-old Smith called his hiring “reverse nepotism,” since his son already worked for the Times. Years later Rosenthal said, “I get depressed sometimes editing this paper. But whenever I get down, I say to myself, ‘Wait a minute. I hired Red Smith.’”24

Smith shared the “Sports of The Times” column with Arthur Daley, each writing three a week, with Dave Anderson contributing two. After Daley died in 1974, Smith and Anderson each wrote four.

The Times nominated Smith for the 1976 Pulitzer Prize without telling him. He was the second sportswriter, after Daley, to be honored for excellence in commentary. Publicly Smith was suitably grateful, but he confided to his friend Tom Callahan that the prize meant nothing to him: “It’s part of being with the New York Times.”25

Smith’s peers honored him that same year with the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Spink Award for sportswriters. “Smith had a fine sense of the absurd in human conduct and a penetrating perception of detail for accuracy,” the Hall said.26

Now in his 70s, Smith was an old man following young men’s games. He began writing more about the games off the field, the social issues behind the scenes of athletic competition. He acknowledged that he had missed the broader significance of Jackie Robinson’s breaking the color line. He had written often about Robinson the player, but seldom about his symbolic importance. In the 1960s, when Muhammad Ali refused to serve in the army on religious grounds, Smith lumped the heavyweight champion with the “unwashed punks who picket and demonstrate against the war.”27

His columns for the Times reflected a more liberal outlook. He thought his stepchildren had helped open his mind to new ideas. He railed against the Olympic movement’s devotion to phony amateurism and the NCAA’s profiteering off the unpaid labor of student athletes.

He had long opposed baseball’s reserve clause, and his coverage of the Players Association was “so different from other writers of his era, such as Dick Young,” said the union leader, Marvin Miller. “When he asked a question, I felt certain it was because he wanted to know the answer and that he would not ignore the facts that didn’t fit a preconceived opinion.”28 Smith blamed the owners for the strike that wiped out much of the 1981 season.

He had also ridiculed the women’s rights movement. When a student sports editor, Anne Morrissy, became the first woman accredited to the Yale Bowl press box in 1954, Smith called her a “crusading cupcake.”29 He thought a press box or locker room was no place for a woman. But in the 1970s he mentored Jane Leavy early in her career writing sports for newspapers and magazines. Once, finding Leavy shut out of the Yankees’ clubhouse because of her gender, the Pulitzer winner gave the cub five pages of notes and quotes.30

Smith’s writing about issues raised a stink when he called for a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He wrote two columns on the subject, but only one appeared in the Times. Sports editor Le Anne Schreiber objected to the second column because it contained an important factual error and was peppered with what she considered excessive Cold War rhetoric. On deadline, she couldn’t reach Smith — he had taken his wife to the theater — so she killed his column.31

When word leaked out, Smith’s fellow columnists hammered the Times for censorship. He pronounced the kerfuffle “a bloody bore.”32 He said he disagreed with the decision, but the paper had a right to reject the column.

Smith’s health began to deteriorate in the late 1970s. He underwent surgery for bladder cancer and again for colon cancer. Congestive heart failure left him short of breath. He found it increasingly difficult to “be there,” and usually wrote in a barn behind his country home in Connecticut.

The Times offered to reduce his workload, and his son pleaded with him to slow down. He finally agreed to cut back. After turning in his first column on the new three-a-week schedule, he went into a hospital and died at 76 on January 15, 1982.

“Dying is no big deal,” Smith said once. “The least of us will manage that. Living is the trick.”33

Acknowledgments

This biography was reviewed by Jan Finkel and fact-checked by Jeff Findley.

Notes

John Wendell Smith, an only child, was born in Detroit, Michigan on June 27, 1914.1 His father, John Henry Smith, grew up in Dresden, Ontario, Canada.2 John Henry Smith cooked for Canadian and American railroads and Great Lakes ships. He migrated to Detroit in 1911. The elder Smith later served as head steward at the city’s Yondotega Club, an exclusive social organization. He also worked as a private chef for Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company.3 In 1912, he married Detroit native Lena Gertrude Thompson. She was a housewife and a member of three volunteer groups connected with St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church (now St. Matthew’s and St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church)–Willing Workers, King’s Daughters, and the Dorcas Society.4

Smith grew up in a predominantly white, working class neighborhood on Detroit’s east side. He pitched during sandlot baseball games with youths on his block, including Mike Tresh.5 Tresh later spent 12 seasons in the major leagues, playing for the Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Indians. Tresh’s son, Tom, also played in the major leagues.

According to Smith’s friend and former neighbor, Martin Hogan, Smith first saw Negro League baseball in the Motor City.6 The Detroit Stars, led by outfielder Turkey Stearnes, played at Mack Park, a single-decked, wooden stadium located near Smith’s home.7 Smith and Hogan walked to the stadium without money. Often the gatekeepers let them in after a few innings, or another visitor brought them inside the park.

Smith also played basketball for the Detroit Athletic Association team at the Central Community Center.8 Sportswriter Russell J. Cowans wrote about one of Smith’s basketball games in 1932.

“With Wendell Smith, 17-year-old Eastern high school forward pacing the way with seven baskets and three fouls shots, the Detroit Athletic Association basketball team crushed the highly-touted Cincinnati Lion Tamers Saturday night 62 to 22, at the Central Community center gymnasium.

“Smith was a thorn in the sides of the Cincinnati outfit. He was all over the court raimming [sic] the hoop with most of his shots. He might have increased his total but numerous times he passed to a teammate with an easy shot near the basket.”9

Despite these good times, Smith experienced some racial problems. According to Hogan, he was not allowed to play on sports teams at predominantly white Southeastern High School. “I know it was hard for him,” Hogan said. “He was not permitted to play sports. I don’t know whose policy it was.”10

Smith played American Legion baseball, but officials removed him from the team. Henry Ford interceded on Smith’s behalf and he was reinstated. 11

Smith suffered a crushing blow as a teenager. During an interview with Jerome Holtzman, he said he had won an American Legion baseball championship game, but after the game Detroit scout Wish Egan told Smith he could not sign him because he was black. Egan signed the losing pitcher and Mike Tresh, Smith’s teammate.12 According to Smith’s widow, Wyonella, Smith cried.13 The incident spurred Smith’s activism.

After high school, Smith enrolled in West Virginia State College (now West Virginia State University) in 1933 as a physical education major. The school, located in Institute, West Virginia, was predominantly black. He met his first wife, the former Sara Wright, at the school. Wright minored in music. They married during the late 1930s.14

Smith competed for the school’s baseball and basketball teams. On Christmas Day, 1933, the Yellow Jackets basketball team faced Smith’s old squad, which had changed its name from Detroit Athletic Association to the Central Big Five, in Detroit. Smith scored nine points, but West Virginia State lost. 28-19.15

Smith began to develop his media skills in college. As the football team’s publicist, he kept sportswriters informed about the squad’s progress. He wrote a sports column for the campus newspaper, the Yellow Jacket. In one column, he praised Pittsburgh Courier columnist Ches Washington for his coverage of the school’s football team.16

After Smith graduated in 1937, he got a job with the Courier. At the time, the weekly was one of the leading black newspapers in the United States. Smith started with a salary of $17 per week. While at the Courier, he extensively covered Negro League baseball, helping to preserve the exploits of the players and owners for future scholars and fans.

In 1938, Smith launched his fight against baseball’s color line with his column “A Strange Tribe,” which criticized blacks for supporting major league baseball when it maintained a color line.

“They’re real troopers, these guys who risk their money and devote their lives to Negro baseball. We black folk offer no encouragement and don’t seem to care if they make a go of it or not. We literally ignore them completely. With our noses high and our hands deep in our pockets, squeezing the same dollar that we hand out to the white players, we walk past their ball parks and go to the major league game. Nuts — that’s what we are. Just plain nuts!”17

The following year, Smith made strides at the paper. He surveyed major league players about their attitudes toward black players. He wanted to disprove the idea that the players opposed blacks in the majors. He talked to 40 players and eight managers at the Schenley Hotel, located near the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Forbes Field. Most of the interviewees said they did not oppose integration. Smith later told Holtzman the Courier management liked the survey and gave him a raise.18

In 1940, Smith got good news at home and work. Sara Smith gave birth to their son, John Wendell Smith Jr. The boy would be Smith’s only child. That same year, the paper promoted him to city editor; he eventually advanced to sports editor.

Smith, along with other black sportswriters, campaigned for the integration of major league baseball during the 1940s. The list of activists includes Joe Bostic, of the Harlem-based People’s Voice, and Sam Lacy, of the Washington D.C.-based Afro-American.

Lacy described his and Smith’s mutual passion for the fight. He wrote: “We talked deep into the nights in ghetto hotels, at his house in Pittsburgh and in my home in Washington, at dimly-lit ballparks where our paths would cross while covering Negro National League games, in lunchrooms in Harlem and in greasy spoon hogmaw joints of Memphis, St. Louis, Baltimore and Philadelphia.”19

Bostic took two Negro League players to the Brooklyn Dodgers’ camp unannounced to demand a tryout in early April 1945. Later that month, Smith had taken three Negro League players to a prearranged tryout with the Boston Red Sox. The players were Robinson, a shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs, Marvin Williams, a second baseman for the Philadelphia Stars, and Sam Jethroe, a center fielder for the Cleveland Buckeyes.20 That tryout generated little publicity in the mainstream media.

On the way home afterward, Smith met Dodgers president Branch Rickey in New York. Rickey asked Smith if any of the players he took to Boston could succeed in the majors. Smith recommended Robinson.

Smith later told sportswriter Shirley Povich why he had touted Robinson. “He wasn’t the best Negro ballplayer I could have named. There were others with more ability but to have recommended them would have been a disservice to the cause of the Negroes.

“I recommended Robinson because he wouldn’t make Negro baseball look bad either on the field or off it. Jackie got my vote because of many factors. He was a college boy. I knew he would understand the great responsibilities of being the first Negro invited to play in organized baseball in more than 60 years. He was a mannerly fellow. At UCLA he had played before big crowds. I gambled that he wouldn’t freeze up under pressure. And he had an honorable discharge from the Army as a lieutenant.”21

The recommendation helped both Robinson and Smith. In August 1945, Rickey met with Robinson in Brooklyn. Two months later, Rickey signed him to a minor league contract. To assist Robinson, Rickey paid Smith to serve as Robinson’s mentor and arrange for lodging and travel during 1946 and 1947. During the 1946 season, Robinson played for the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ Triple-A affiliate. Robinson led the Royals to the championship of the International League and victory in the Little World Series. Smith wrote stories about his progress.

The following year, Smith watched history unfold. On April 15, 1947, he sat along with other sportswriters in the press box at the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Ebbets Field. The Dodgers played their season opener against the Boston Braves. Smith took notes while Robinson took the field as the first black man to play major league baseball in the modern era. The Dodgers won the game 5-3. Robinson didn’t record a hit, but he scored one run and played first base flawlessly.

Smith produced four stories. In one, he wrote: “It was a great day. It was a great day for Brooklyn. It was a great day for baseball, and above all, a great day for JACKIE ROBINSON!”22

After Robinson joined the Dodgers, Smith ghosted a Courier column for him.

In August 1947, Smith joined the Chicago Herald-American, an afternoon newspaper. He became one of the first black sportswriters to work for a daily newspaper.23 Smith initially split time between the Courier and the Herald-American before he eventually left the Pittsburgh paper. Smith’s first assignment for the Herald-American was a series of articles about Robinson’s rise to the major leagues. He contended that Robinson’s signing proved anyone could succeed in this country. “It’s a story of this great country and proves beyond every doubt that a man can soar to lofty heights in the United States if he has the ability,” he wrote. “True enough, the struggle may be more difficult for some more than others, but Jackie Robinson, a Negro and first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers, is proof enough that it can happen.24

Smith notched a few achievements in 1948. He wrote the first biography of Robinson, entitled Jackie Robinson: My Own Story. The book has one embarrassing error: it lists Robinson’s full name as “John Roosevelt Robinson.” The correct name is Jack Roosevelt Robinson.25 That same year, Smith became one of the first black writers admitted into the BBWAA and covered the Summer Olympics in London for the Courier.

Smith’s personal life changed during this period. He and Sara Smith divorced. Sara eventually remarried and obtained a Broadcast Music, Inc., composer’s license. She handled about 30 recording acts.26 John Wendell Smith Jr. followed his mother into the music business. He released a few songs, including a high-tempo rocker called “Puddin’ Pie.”27 Sara Smith helped manage her son’s music career.28

Wendell Smith married the former Wyonella Hicks in 1949. They had met while they worked at the Courier. After they moved to Chicago, Wyonella Smith worked as a secretary for Harlem Globetrotters owner Abe Saperstein.29

In 1949, Smith’s previously warm relationship with Robinson began to change. Smith slammed Robinson in the Courier for hinting that some sports reporters were treating him unfairly after a confrontation between Robinson and a teammate. Smith alleged Robinson “isn’t as popular in the press box as he once was.”30 According to a Chicago Tribune article written by Holtzman in 1993, Smith had told him he and Robinson had fallen out and hadn’t spoken in nearly ten years. In the same article, Holtzman reported Wyonella Smith’s insistence that the two men had remained friends.31

In addition to his work covering baseball, Smith became a noted boxing writer. During the 1950s, Smith notched achievements in the field. He was elected president of the Chicago Boxing Writers and Broadcasters Association in 1953. Smith established another first for black sports journalists in 1958. That March, he provided radio commentary, along with Dr. Joyce Brothers and Jack Drees, for the middleweight championship fight between Sugar Ray Robinson and Carmen Basilio at Chicago Stadium.

Smith conducted his final media crusade in 1961. At the time, black major leaguers whose teams held spring training in the southern states still had to stay in segregated accommodations. The lodgings and dining available to them were less desirable than those their white teammates enjoyed. Smith covered the issue in both the Chicago’s American, which had evolved from the Herald-American, and the Courier.

In the January 23, 1961, issue of the American, Smith wrote: “Beneath the apparently tranquil surface of baseball there is a growing feeling of resentment among Negro major leaguers who still experience embarrassment, humiliation, and even indignities during spring training in the south. This stature of respectability the Negro has attained since [Jackie] Robinson’s spectacular appearance on the major league scene has given him a new sense of dignity and pride, and he wants the same treatment in the south during spring training that he has earned in the north.”

“The Negro player resents the fact that he is not permitted to stay in the same hotels with his teammates during spring training, and is protesting the fact that they cannot eat in the same restaurants, nor enjoy other privileges.”32

During the campaign, Smith deployed blunt prose. After Birdie Tebbetts, then vice president of the Milwaukee Braves, claimed the black members of the Braves were satisfied with segregated accommodations, an angry Smith wrote the following for the Courier:

“When Mr. Birdie Tebbets [sic] was a major league catcher, he was acknowledged as a competent receiver but never considered dangerous at the plate in a crucial situation.

“On the basis of his reception to the nationwide protests over the deplorable conditions which Negro players — particularly his own — must tolerate in the South during spring training season, one can only conclude that Mr. Tebbets [sic] is still a weakling when the chips are down.”33

Full integration throughout spring training accommodations in Florida and Arizona took place within the next two years.34

Smith earned recognition for the desegregation campaign. The magazine Editor & Publisher called him a reporter with “a built-in social conscience.”35 In October 1961, Smith received a second prize among Chicago sports reporters from the Associated Press.36

Two years later, Smith left the American. He became one of the first black journalists to work for a Chicago television station when he joined WBBM to cover news and sports in February 1963.37 A year later, he switched to WGN, another Chicago television station. At WGN, Smith joined a sports team led by Jack Brickhouse.38 At the time, Brickhouse was building a career as the longtime announcer of Chicago Cubs games at the station. Smith eventually became the sports anchor for the station’s 10 P.M. news broadcast. Smith also helped the news division by covering stories and working on special projects. In 1965, the station broadcast a show about the first ten years of Richard J. Daley’s career as mayor of Chicago. As part of the program, Smith interviewed Daley and accompanied the mayor on a helicopter tour of the city. That same year, Smith produced a show about the social gains made by blacks in Chicago. Smith also frequently appeared on People to People, an urban affairs television program broadcast on WGN.

Smith made additional career advances during his later years. He started writing a weekly sports column for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1969. In 1971, he was named to the Special Committee on the Negro Leagues for the Baseball Hall of Fame. That committee made Satchel Paige its first choice for induction in the Hall of Fame. In January 1972, he won election as the first black president of the Chicago Press Club.

By 1972, the relationship between Smith and Robinson had warmed. Robinson released his final autobiography, I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography of Jackie Robinson. In the book, he acknowledged his debt to Smith for his recommendation to Rickey.39 During that year, Robinson and Smith appeared together in Chicago and recounted Robinson’s tryout with the Red Sox.40

After Robinson passed away that October, Smith memorialized him in a column for the Sun-Times.41 Sometime later, Smith, suffering from cancer, was hospitalized. Robinson’s co-author, Al Duckett, visited him. Smith told Duckett he was thrilled about Robinson’s acknowledgement.42 Shortly afterward, on November 26, 1972, Smith passed away.

For about three weeks after Smith died, tributes flowed in from Chicago and national journalists.

“He was an able newsman, but more, a respected gentleman in his profession and a dear friend,” Irv Kupcinet wrote for the Sun-Times.43

“There was a soft humor about Wendell, never anything vicious,” Jack Griffin wrote for the Sun-Times. “He was a fairly big man. He walked with a sort of a shuffle, a limp left over from his athletic days at West Virginia State.

“I knew the part he had played in bringing Jackie Robinson in the major leagues as baseball’s first black player. I knew because other people told me. Wendell never mentioned it. He never operated with the bugles playing.”44

“Wendell was neither a black bigot nor an Uncle Tom,” Robert Cromie wrote for the Chicago Tribune. He was a beautiful guy who liked all good people and was, in turn, liked by everyone worth bothering about. He could lose his temper. I once saw him shove a burly guard aside in Yankee Stadium after an altercation — with an ease that made me suddenly realize how very strong he was. But laughter was more his style. I always think of him as laughing because he had so delightful a sense of humor”45

“Like old soldiers, sportswriters never die, they just fade away, and black baseball players of the Negro Leagues, as well as black major leaguers of the present and the past, should never let his memory die,” Brad Pye, Jr. wrote for the Los Angeles Sentinel.46

The memory of Smith has not died. Within a month after his death, the Chicago Press Club renamed its scholarship fund the Wendell Smith-Chicago Press Club Scholarship Fund. Around the same time, the Chicago Sun-Times donated $1,000 for a scholarship in Smith’s memory to be awarded through the National Merit Scholarship Fund.

In 1973, the Chicago Board of Education named an elementary school in his honor. The Chicago Baseball Writers group created the Wendell Smith Award. The University of Notre Dame and DePaul University established a Wendell Smith Award, given to the Most Valuable Player of the schools’ annual basketball game in 1973.47 In 1975, the Chicago Park District named a park after Smith. In 1982, Smith was elected to the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame; he was elected to the Chicagoland Sports Hall of Fame in 1983.48

After Smith’s death, Wyonella Smith worked in the public information office for the City of Chicago’s Department of Aging.49 She eventually moved into a senior residence facility located on the city’s South Side. The same facility housed Mary Frances Veeck, the widow of former White Sox owner Bill Veeck. The two women have maintained a strong friendship.50

Public interest in Wendell Smith increased during the 1990s. The BBWAA’s Spink Award committee nominated Smith in 1993. The full membership voted for it, making him the first African-American to receive the honor. In 1994, Wyonella Smith accepted the award on his behalf at the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s annual summer ceremonies. West Virginia State University inducted him into its hall of fame the same year. The following year, Holtzman released an updated edition of his book, No Cheering in the Press Box. The book, a collection of interviews with sportswriters, includes his interview with Smith.

In 2013, Smith received more posthumous recognition. The film 42, which took its title from Robinson’s jersey number, was released in theaters. The film focused primarily on Robinson’s first two years with the Dodgers organization and depicted his relationship with Smith. The National Association of Black Journalists inducted Smith into its Hall of Fame.51 The Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism created the Sam Lacy-Wendell Smith Award. The award recognizes a sports journalist or broadcaster who has made significant contributions to racial and gender equality in sport.52

A year later, in 2014, the Associated Press Sports Editors honored Smith with their Red Smith Award.53

Smith had gained wide admiration and respect, but did not escape criticism. Chicago Defender columnist Fay Young claimed Smith was “anxious to grab off some glory” when he took players to the tryout with the Red Sox.54 Michigan Chronicle sportswriter Bill Matney claimed that Smith recommended a high school player to Rickey without observing the player in person. That player flopped in the minor leagues.55 When a black Brooklyn player opted to stay in a black hotel instead of housing with the rest of the team in a white-owned hotel, Smith wrote an angry letter to the player. The player gave the letter to a team official, who tried to chastise Smith.56

Author Mark Ribowsky criticized Smith in his book, A Complete History of the Negro Leagues, 1884 to 1955. Ribowsky alleged Smith and other writers for the black press helped destroy the Negro Leagues. He argued that writers cut back on coverage of black baseball in favor of the major leagues after Robinson joined the Dodgers.57

Smith’s actions contradict that claim. In May 1947, Smith had reminded readers to continue to support black baseball.58 In a 1949 letter to Rickey, Smith suggested that the Dodgers sponsor a black baseball team.59 Smith continued to cover the Negro Leagues’ East-West All-Star game.60

Despite this scattered criticism, most observers recognize Smith’s professional achievements and modest personality.

A late-career example of this mindset took place in 1960. By then, he had established a strong reputation in his field. Yet, he did not focus on himself. Instead, he expressed gratitude to others for his career. In a column for the Courier, he thanked previous Courier sports editors for blazing a trail for his own career.

“This has been a life of splendor and excitement — baseball training camps, fight camps, the Olympics and other arenas of excitement for the younger ones that the older ones, by their dedication and perseverance made possible.

“Thus those who sit in the press box at the World Series, or ringside at the big fights, or in “typewriter row” at similar classics, should remember that they are there because of the ceaseless campaigns waged by those before them, particularly by those representing this newspaper.”61

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the Chatham-Kent (Ontario, Canada) Public Library; the Chicago Public Library’s Special Collections and Preservation Division; the Chicago Public Library’s Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection; the Detroit Public Library’s Burton Historical Collection; the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Inc.; the West Virginia State University Archives and Special Collections Department; and West Virginia State University’s Sports Information Department.

This biography was reviewed by Jack Zerby and Donna L. Halper and fact-checked by Kevin Larkin.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted the following books, periodicals, and internet websites:

Buni, Andrew. Robert L. Vann of the Pittsburgh Courier: Politics and Black Journalism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974).

Cooper, John. Season of Rage: Hugh Burnett and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Toronto: Tundra Books, 2005).

Manley, Effa and Hardwick, Leon Herbert. Negro Baseball … Before Integration (Adams Press. Chicago, 1976).

Peterson, Robert. Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

Rampersad, Arnold. Jackie Robinson: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1997).

Reisler, Jim. Black Writers, Black Baseball (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 1994).

Robinson, Jackie. Baseball Has Done It (Philadelphia: Lippincott: 1964).

Ruck, Rob. Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

Rowan, Carl with Jackie Robinson. Wait till next year: the life story of Jackie Robinson (New York: Random House, 1960).

Tygiel, Jules. Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and his legacy. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

Wiggins, David K. “Wendell Smith, the Pittsburgh Courier-Journal and the Campaign to Include Blacks in Organized Baseball, 1933-1945,” The Journal of Sports History (1983): 5-29.

Weaver, Bill L. “The Black Press and the Assault on Professional Baseball’s “Color Line,” October, 1945-April, 1947,” Phylon (Fourth Quarter, 1979, Volume XL, No. 4).

Bleske, Glen L. “Agenda for Equality: Heavy Hitting Sportswriter Wendell Smith,” Media History Digest (Fall-Winter, 1993): 38-42.

Ancestry.com, Chicagobaseballmuseum.org, Newspapers.com, PaperofRecord.com, YouTube.com.

Notes

1 The date of birth was stated on the draft card Smith completed during World War II.

2 One of Wendell Smith’s cousins, Hugh Burnett, campaigned against racial discrimination in Dresden, Ontario, during the 1950s. His efforts are noted in John Cooper’s book, Season of Rage: Hugh Burnett and the Struggle for Civil Rights, published in 2005.

3 Michigan Chronicle, July 9, 1966, A-1. The same article names another cousin of Wendell Smith, Herb Jeffries. Jeffries, also known as Herbert Jeffrey, was a singer and an actor who earned some renown as cinema’s first black singing cowboy during the 1930s. He starred in “The Bronze Buckaroo” and other Westerns. Jeffries also sang with Duke Ellington in the 1940s.

4 Detroit Free Press, October 1, 1970: 17-C.

5 Wendell Smith, “Smitty’s Sport Spurts,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 27, 1940: 16.

6 Martin Hogan, telephone interview with the author, June 11, 1996.

7 Richard Bak. Turkey Stearnes and The Detroit Stars: The Negro Leagues in Detroit, 1919-1933 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 58.

8 The Central Community Center was eventually renamed the Brewster-Wheeler Recreation Center. It was closed in 2006.

9 Russell J. Cowans, “Detroit Nips Cincinnati 5,” Chicago Defender, January 16, 1932: 9.

10 Hogan interview. The yearbook from Smith’s senior year in high school does not list participation in any extracurricular activities for Smith.

11 Editor & Publisher, “Sports Writer Champions Desegregation in Baseball,” April 1, 1960.

12 Jerome Holtzman, No Cheering in the Press Box (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 323.

13 Dave Hoekstra, “Jackie Robinson and sportswriter Wendell Smith: a team for the ages,” Chicago Sun-Times, April 7, 2013.

14 While Smith attended West Virginia State, he established a long-term friendship with his roommate Will Robinson. Robinson lettered in four sports at West Virginia State University, graduating in 1937. Robinson coached Pershing High School in Detroit, where he won the state title in 1967 with a team led by future National Basketball Association star Spencer Haywood. Robinson later became the first black scout in the National Football League (Lions) and the first black head coach for an NCAA Division I school (Illinois State University). There, he coached future NBA player and head coach Doug Collins.

15 Russell J. Cowans, “Detroit Team Defeats West Virginia 28-19, The Tribune Independent, December 30, 1933: 7

16 Wendell Smith, “Sportiana,” The Yellow Jacket.

17 Wendell Smith, Smitty’s Sport Spurts, Pittsburgh Courier, May 14, 1938: 17.

18 Holtzman, 315.

19 Sam Lacy, “Opening Much More than Pandora’s Box,” The Afro-American, March 13, 1973: 7.

20 Jethroe eventually played in the major leagues. He won Rookie of the Year honors after his debut with the Boston Braves in 1950. He also played for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

21 Shirley Povich, All These Mornings (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 13.

22 Benedict Cosgrove, Covering the Bases: The Most Unforgettable Moments in Baseball in the Words of the Writers and Broadcasters Who Were There (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997), 74.

23 Smith continued to write a sports column for the Pittsburgh Courier on a freelance basis until 1967.

24 Wendell Smith, “Jackie Robinson’s Story the Saga of a New America,” Chicago Herald-American, August 20, 1940: 25.

25 Jackie Robinson as told to Wendell Smith, Jackie Robinson: My Own Story. (Greenberg: New York, 1948): 7.

26 Chicago Defender, “Son of Sports Scribe Discs ‘Puddin’Pie’,” July 12, 1960: 21.

27 Chicago Defender, “Son of Sports Scribe.” The song “Puddin’ Pie” can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzLZyaK7Vt8.

28 John Wendell Smith Jr. died in 1988. Sara Smith, later Sara Bembry, died in 1992.

29 “Personalities in the News: TV Newsman produces ‘Negro in Chicago,’” Chicago Defender, March 16, 1965: 11.

30 Wendell Smith, “Wendell Smith’s Sports Beat,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 19, 1949: 10.

31 Jerome Holtzman, “Jackie Robinson and the Great American Pastime: And the man behind him,” Chicago Tribune, April 11, 1993: B-4, 5, 15.

32 Wendell Smith, “Negro Ball Players Want Rights in South,” Chicago’s American, January 23, 1961: 1.

33 Wendell Smith, “Wendell Smith’s Sports Beat,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 18, 1961: 27.

34 Brian Carroll, “Wendell Smith’s Last Crusade: The Desegregation of Spring Training, 1961,” The 13th Annual Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, William Simons, ed., (McFarland Press, Jefferson, North Carolina), 2002.

35 Editor & Publisher, “Sports Writer Champions Desegregation in Baseball,” April 1, 1960.

36 Chicago’s American, “Newswriting Winners Named,” October 15, 1961.

37 Chicago’s American, “Smith to Enter TV, Radio Field,” February 9, 1963.

38 George Castle, “Brickhouse top on-air salesman for both sports, racial tolerance,” Chicago Baseball Museum website. The article includes a recording of part of Smith’s broadcast from June 11, 1967.

39 Jackie Robinson and Al Duckett. I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography of Jackie Robinson. (New York: HarperCollins, 1972), 41.

40 David Condon, “Jackie Robinson: A Man of Summer,” Chicago Tribune, June 25, 1972: S-3, 3.

41 Wendell Smith, “The Jackie Robinson I knew,” Chicago Sun-Times, October 25, 1972: 98, 100.

42 Jet, “Sportswriter Who Aided Jackie Robinson’s Entry Into Baseball Dies at 58,” December 14, 1970, 30.

43 Irv Kupcinet, Chicago Sun-Times, November 27, 1972: 40.

44 Jack Griffin, “Wendell Smith: Courage, dignity, fun,” Chicago Sun-Times, November 27, 1972: 82.

45 Bob Cromie, “Warm Memories of Wendell Smith,” Chicago Tribune, November 29, 1972: 26.

46 Brad Pye, Jr., “A Giant Is Dead,” Los Angeles Sentinel, December 7, 1972: B-5.

47 John Leusch, “Notre Dame nips DePaul by 72-67,” Chicago Tribune, January 12, 1973, C-1.

48 “Notes,” Chicago Tribune, September 17, 1983, A-5.

49 David Schneidman, “Worker, 79, to city: I do my job well,” Chicago Tribune, May 18, 1984: B-7.

50 Ben Strauss, “Friendship as Priceless as the National Pastime,” New York Times, August 22, 2012.

51 “NABJ selects Six Journalists to be inducted into NABJ’s Hall of Fame,” October 1, 2012, NABJ press release.

52 “Povich Center Announces Sam Lacy – Wendell Smith Award,” July 2013, Povich Center press release.

53 Rhiannon Walker, “Wendell Smith honored with Red Smith Award,” University of Maryland Sports Journalism Institute, May 21, 2014.

54 Fay Young, “Through the Years,” Chicago Defender, May 26, 1945: 7.

55 Bill Matney, “Jumpin’ the Gun,” Michigan Chronicle, July 19, 1947: 15.

56 A.S. “Doc” Young, “The Black Athlete in the Golden Age of Sports: Stereotypes, Prejudices, and Other Unfunny Hilarities,” Ebony, June 1969: 114-122.

57 Mark Ribowsky, A Complete History of the Negro Leagues, 1884 to 1955, (Birch Lane Press, New York, 1995), 288.

58 Wendell Smith, “The Sports Beat,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 3, 1947: 14.

59 Wendell Smith letter to Branch Rickey dated July 5, 1949, from Wendell Smith file, National Baseball Hall of Fame.

60 Wendell Smith, “Wendell Smith’s Sports Beat,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 20, 1949: 22; Wendell Smith, “Wendell Smith’s Sports Beat,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 11, 1951: 14.

61 Wendell Smith, “Wendell Smith’s Sports Beat,” Pittsburgh Courier, September 17, 1960: 17.