Jake and Stanley: Together Again

Steve Jacobson and Mookie Wilson. OldTimers Day, 2022.

Two Stanleys: Polo Grounds, 1962

​ For decades, they were teammates in the sports pages of that great paper, Newsday.
Steve Jacobson could cover anything, and ask probing questions,
Stan Isaacs saw life from his natural position – way out, left field.

They were my colleagues and my friends and my inspiration when I worked at Newsday in the 60s. We even played touch football together.
 
Now, by the great karma of memory and files and editors, Steve Jacobson and Stan Isaacs are back.  
Stan passed in 2013 but his words are being revived in an autobiography, “Out of Left Field: A Sportswriter’s Last Word,” to be published in April.
Steve -- also known as Jake -- is very much with us in a current podcast celebrating a magnificent book he wrote in 2007: ”Carrying Jackie’s Torch: The Players Who Integrated Baseball – and America,” by Lawrence Hill Books.
Jake's book is, alas, out of print at the present time (as Casey Stengel used to say), but as part of Black History Month, the book has been celebrated in a podcast by Steve Taddei, from his perch in the Bay Area.
 
“I found ‘Carrying Jackie's Torch’ at the public library,” Taddei wrote in an e-mail. “The book fit in well with ‘Leadership Lessons From the Negro Leagues,’ because it gave me perspective to the adversity my heroes of the 1960's and 70's went through and overcame on their journey to the Major Leagues.”
 
It is no secret that the evils of segregation, which kept Black players out of “organized” ball were not magically dispersed by Jackie Robinson’s first game with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.
Robinson took the first curses from opposing dugouts, the blatant reluctance of some Brooklyn teammates, and the daily problems of living a family life. And it was still going on when Steve Jacobson was talking to players in the 60s.
 
One of the most approachable was Jim (Mudcat) Grant, a star pitcher.  One day Grant challenged Steve to expand his questions -- talk to other Black players who ran into the walls of segregation.
 
Years later, that’s what Jacobson did – hearing how Black players at first could not stay in hotels with their white teammates, how they had to eat brown-bag lunches in team buses,  how players felt underrated by their managers and teammates.
 
Always a dogged reporter, Steve sought out players we knew from our working years --Tommy Davis who always greeted writers from “my hometown” of Brooklyn, Ed Charles, the spiritual center of the 1969 championship Mets, Bob Gibson, the great pitcher who used his hard veneer to keep hitters – and reporters-- at bay, and Dusty Baker, whose winning personality carried him to an enduring career as manager. Henry Aaron. Ernie Banks, Monte Irvin, Larry Doby.
 
In this podcast, Taddei spoke by phone with Jake (and me, a little) and near the end, Anita Jacobson, Steve’s wife, who tells about the hotel pool in Florida, where the Mets took spring training, circa 1965.
Anita -- who cooks and teaches cooking -- recalls what she and my wife Marianne did when another white mother pulled her child out of the pool rather than share chlorine water with a Black child.
Life was like that for the Black baseball people who carried Jackie’s torch. Steve Jacobson
worked hard to get memories of the Black players, and now Taddei has honored what Jacobson did in his book.
Here’s the podcast:
               
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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leadership-lessons-from-the-negro-leagues/id1646816110?i=1000644226588
 
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Now, here is today's scoop: Stan Isaacs’ words are back in print.
In his retirement, Stan was writing his memoirs, but after the crushing death of his vibrant wife, Bobbie, in January of 2012, Stan’s heart was broken, and the book was unfinished when he slipped away, 15 months later.
Fortunately, Aram Goudsouzian, an editor for the University of Illinois Press, became interested in the genre of sportswriters – starting in the late 50s, in their chattery, irreverent, fearless and informed glory in the 1960’s. The Chipmunks: Stan Isaacs. Larry Merchant of the Philadelphia Daily News and Leonard Shecter of the New York Post and other chatterers. 
 
“I’ve been working on a book about sportswriters and the big political and cultural shifts of the 1960s, and in the course of my research I read Mitchell Nathanson’s excellent biography, Bouton,” Goudsouzian wrote in an e-mail.
“In the notes he had a record of Stan’s unpublished memoir, which I thought might be a good primary source for my own book. So I emailed Nathanson about it, and he put me in touch with Stan’s daughter Ellen, who sent me an electronic copy. As I read it, I had the sense that it should be published – though it needed editing, it had Stan’s distinctive voice and a lens into the shifts of the Chipmunks’ era.”
 
Never having met Stan, Goudsouzian gave the manuscript some nips and tucks, and undoubtedly some enlightened surgery. Stan knew himself as a quirky lefty, coming out of the Depression and the politics of the 1930s, and he told his best stories in this book.

The photo on the cover?  One night, covering the Yankees in the old ballpark in Kansas City, Stan chose to watch the game from the hill behind right field, patrolled by a few sheep. Back home on Long Island, Jack Mann, the builder of the great Newsday sports section, took an AP photo of reporter-and-sheep, and wrote the caption: "Stanley, is that ewe?" 
Vintage, definitive Chipmunkery. 
 
Jacobson’s world, Isaacs’ world, Mann's world, are definitely from another time. Nowadays, young people do not read newspapers…and newspapers die….and even a great paper like The New York Times has chosen to blow up its sports section, with its tradition of columnists licensed to report and comment.
I went to the Times in 1968, blessed with the skills and attitude of Isaacs and Jacobson and the other chipmunks. Just llike ball players who respectfully refer to more than one of their teams as "we," I am proud of my Newsday and Times associations. 
 
Miraculously, in these hard times for sports sections, Stan Isaacs still patrols left field and Steve Jacobson still carries Jackie’s torch. Together again.