Post by nutsberryfarm 🏜 on Feb 7, 2020 20:59:14 GMT
www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2020-02-07/roger-kahn-dodgers-boys-of-summer-dead
Bill Veeck, who in his full-throttle lifetime owned the Cleveland Indians, the St. Louis Browns and the Chicago White Sox, and thus knew a little about baseball, once observed, “Roger Kahn is doomed to go through life having everything he writes compared with ‘The Boys of Summer.’”
As it turns out, Veeck was dead center. In introductions, in print, whenever the name Roger Kahn appeared, it was invariably followed by, “the author of ‘The Boys of Summer.’” Not that it bothered Kahn, who went right on writing. If fans, baseball people and Sports Illustrated wanted to hail his work, which sold more than 3 million copies, as the finest baseball book ever written, well ....
Forever linked to his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, the subject of his signature work, Kahn died Thursday in New York, his literary agent Robert Wilson said. He was 92.
Acclaimed by many as the best baseball writer in the country, his prolific output was widely diverse. He wrote more than 20 books, two of them novels, the others dealing with such topics as politics, Jews in America, racial injustice, student unrest and boxing, and countless magazine articles on whatever else he found interesting or disturbing.
He had also been sports editor of Newsweek, editor at large of the Saturday Evening Post, a columnist for Esquire magazine, a writing professor at three colleges, and a friend and admirer of poet Robert Frost.
Even so, he often wandered back to baseball, his first love. Besides his 1972 epic, “The Boys of Summer,” in which he recalled his childhood as a fan of the Dodgers, the team he covered as a sportswriter in the early 1950s, then examined the same players’ mostly unhappy lives after baseball, he wrote eight other books about baseball and baseball players and their lives.
He lifted the title of his major work from a poem by Dylan Thomas, who described “the boys of summer in all their ruin.” In an era when all but the very best ballplayers made ordinary money, most returned to normal working lives after retiring from baseball. Here, for instance, is how Kahn found retired outfielder Carl Furillo, who had turned fielding crazy caroms off the right field wall in Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field into a science:
“The carom of life is harder for Carl Furillo to play. ... He is a bitter hardhat putting elevators in Manhattan office buildings. He thinks baseball used him badly. ‘The bad leg had me walking funny and I had to have two operations for a ruptured disk. That comes on account of the injury but I figure, flip it, I gotta take care of myself. ... ’ The question that dangles, or caroms, is the bitterness justified? Or is it ‘E-9’ for the right fielder in the larger playing field of life?”
Bill Veeck, who in his full-throttle lifetime owned the Cleveland Indians, the St. Louis Browns and the Chicago White Sox, and thus knew a little about baseball, once observed, “Roger Kahn is doomed to go through life having everything he writes compared with ‘The Boys of Summer.’”
As it turns out, Veeck was dead center. In introductions, in print, whenever the name Roger Kahn appeared, it was invariably followed by, “the author of ‘The Boys of Summer.’” Not that it bothered Kahn, who went right on writing. If fans, baseball people and Sports Illustrated wanted to hail his work, which sold more than 3 million copies, as the finest baseball book ever written, well ....
Forever linked to his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, the subject of his signature work, Kahn died Thursday in New York, his literary agent Robert Wilson said. He was 92.
Acclaimed by many as the best baseball writer in the country, his prolific output was widely diverse. He wrote more than 20 books, two of them novels, the others dealing with such topics as politics, Jews in America, racial injustice, student unrest and boxing, and countless magazine articles on whatever else he found interesting or disturbing.
He had also been sports editor of Newsweek, editor at large of the Saturday Evening Post, a columnist for Esquire magazine, a writing professor at three colleges, and a friend and admirer of poet Robert Frost.
Even so, he often wandered back to baseball, his first love. Besides his 1972 epic, “The Boys of Summer,” in which he recalled his childhood as a fan of the Dodgers, the team he covered as a sportswriter in the early 1950s, then examined the same players’ mostly unhappy lives after baseball, he wrote eight other books about baseball and baseball players and their lives.
He lifted the title of his major work from a poem by Dylan Thomas, who described “the boys of summer in all their ruin.” In an era when all but the very best ballplayers made ordinary money, most returned to normal working lives after retiring from baseball. Here, for instance, is how Kahn found retired outfielder Carl Furillo, who had turned fielding crazy caroms off the right field wall in Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field into a science:
“The carom of life is harder for Carl Furillo to play. ... He is a bitter hardhat putting elevators in Manhattan office buildings. He thinks baseball used him badly. ‘The bad leg had me walking funny and I had to have two operations for a ruptured disk. That comes on account of the injury but I figure, flip it, I gotta take care of myself. ... ’ The question that dangles, or caroms, is the bitterness justified? Or is it ‘E-9’ for the right fielder in the larger playing field of life?”
