 (Laura Vecsey's first home) (Laura Vecsey, former sports columnist and political writer, still writing after all these years, now often about real estate. Laura has written about the disparity of homes for young people starting out. That touched my wife and I who had jobs and our own home in our early 20s, because it was possible. Please read Laura's piece and and make comments on her site. GV.) The odds are unfairly stacked against the next generation of our kids LAURA VECSEY NOV 3, 2022 I keep running the numbers, and looking at the markets, and taking into consideration the reality of being 60 with a 24-year-old daughter who makes minimum wage and is likely to never earn much more on top of that, and it only further confirms that nothing adds up, and nor will it ever. I don’t think I’m alone. Hardly. All around us, we see 20-something and even 30-something offspring whose jobs options, pay scales and housing needs keep them living at home, or bouncing back home when a roommate flames out or rental costs balloon beyond affordability. It’s not news, yet it continues to be startling. The Federal Reserve is trying to cool home prices with its fourth consecutive jumbo rate hike. More listings are taking price reductions, fewer homeowners are opting to sell now that mortgage rates are over 7 percent. A $300,000 home — which is now below the national median price! — is out of reach for first-time buyers, or any buyers with fixed incomes. That in turn pushes rents higher as more people compete for fewer options, which then pushes a lot of young people back home. That makes what’s taking place a societal buzz kill as much as a financial wack job. Young people are stuck! Parents are stuck, or worried, or frustrated, or racking their brains trying to understand why kids these days talk about van life. If they haven’t exactly given up, they can see they’re being squeezed and left to hold the bag. While there’s been great talk about the flexibility the pandemic caused since workers could go remote and relocate from affluent coastal cities for bigger homes in less pricey environs, I get the feeling that what we read about generally only scratches the surface of the repercussions we’re experiencing from so many cataclysmic events so close together. Today, a real estate article in The New York Times makes plain what we already see. “Historically, first-time buyers made up about 40 percent of the market. But the share of first-time buyers fell to 26 percent during the 12-month survey period, from July 2021 through June 2022, plummeting to the lowest level since the trade association began tracking such data in 1981,’’ reports Ronda Kaysen. The headline was a little bracing, especially since it underscored the way the wealth of white Americans, particularly those around my age, is accelerating the inequity: “Older, White and Wealthy Home Buyers Are Pushing Others Out of the Market” I think I’ve been part of that equation, which is another startling thing to consider. In using our knowledge of real estate, and capitalizing on some ability to invest, and our willingness to move or act on good opportunities, Diane and I have been in markets where housing prices have risen 20 to 50 percent in a matter of three to five years. Seattle. Baltimore. Long Island. Saratoga Springs. The past 20 years has been an explosion of housing wealth, the results of which are finally and dramatically squeezing the American Dream. We considered it our good fortune to be able to use these “tools for wealth” if only to make sure we don’t have to eat cat food G-d willing we live to our actuarial table destination. But it’s all coming home to roost, so to speak. We look out and see the devastating impact high housing costs has had on the lives of a lot of people, including the kids of our friends and families, including the increasing number of homeless people begging for food money on the corners of downtown Saratoga Springs. Meanwhile, this small city continues to attract second and third home buyers who recognize it as a pocket of affluence. That reality only further compels people who can afford good things to aggregate here. Housing has always been a way to self-select your neighborhood, but the impact now is far more exclusionary. That’s sad. That has an impact down to the way the next generations can be part of a community. Having your own home, regardless of how modest or grand it is, really is such an important part of separating from your parents; establishing yourself as an individual; setting up a nest for your own new tribe. It’s the place where you embrace your own life, where you run it and pay for it and agonize over it and fix it and mow the lawn or change a lightbulb or learn how to cook better or …. everything! I can’t imagine my life being the same without the experience I had buying my first home. My first home: A $73,500 Dutch colonial at 731 Hampton Ave. in Schenectady. In 1988 or so, five years after graduating from college, I had moved to Albany and worked at the Times Union newspaper. After two years of renting up here, my partner and I decided to start looking at what we could afford, and where we wanted to be. Not the suburbs. Not in Albany. Not in Troy. We wanted urban but safe and walkable to stuff. Within weeks, we found a Dutch colonial house in the Upper Union section of Schenectady. The house was two blocks to restaurants and shops, and right across the street from Central Park — a huge and lovely public park with a swimming pool, hiking trails, cookout grills, hills and paths and a rose garden. There were hardwoods and a formal dining room, a sunroom and a bright rear den behind French doors. Three bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms, a level lot and detached garage. It was $75,000, and we paid $73,500, having borrowed $5,000 or $7,000 from my parents and using whatever cash I had to put down. Over the few years we owned the place and lived there, I had such an incredible sense of security, of peace, not because things were smooth-sailing 100 percent of the time but I could always sit on my porch and read a book. I could go in the yard and rake the leaves. I could walk to the park or the library or the deli for lunch. Mortgage rates were over 10 percent back then, so it’s not like the payment was “cheap.” But getting to own something as substantial as a handsome single-family home, and to have such a place to run my life … it was the demarcation point in my life that let me know: I was on my way. To where? That is another question! There have been many houses along the way. We were the kind of high-flying Americans riding the gravy train of the Web 2.0 wave and tech surge to this place we’re all at now — a place where there’s scant little middle ground left between wealth, or at least financial stability, and the cliff people are either falling off or can never climb. It all seems to have pitted us into another division. People who can have their own home, or homes. And people who never will. Unaffordable. Unfair. If you liked this post from You Know What I Mean?, why not share it? Share https://lauravecsey.substack.com/p/buying-that-first-home-a-faded-american?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1147992&post_id=82330057&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email © 2022 laura vecsey 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe You sent him.
You sent him in 2016 if you somberly assured that Trump was "good for the economy." I know people with money who wanted more money and they saw Trump as a guy who would preserve their kind of order. Money guys. Republican guys. I don't talk politics, or anything, with people like that, these days. The evidence was clear in February of 2016: Trump was a guy who would stand up in a rally and whip up the boosters by whining how people like him couldn't get a break any more. Had to hide their psychic white gowns and mental peaked hats. Trump and his money guys unleased the mob on Feb. 16, 2016. Violence was in the air, in Trump's sneering lament that life was tough for guys like him. He prepared his mob to rush to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and somehow he encouraged the guy with the hammer to rush to the Pelosi household on Thursday evening, looking for the Speaker of the House or her husband or anybody. Who set up the vigilantes preparing to swarm to the voting stations between now and Election Day? The mobs plan to intimidate people who want to vote, and officials who want to give an honest count of the ballots. You did, many preachers of America, who told their flocks that Trump was a true soldier of Christ, who would fight against abortion, who would approve of Texans to run around with a gun, without even a license to carry it. Who put a target on Nancy Pelosi and her family? The same candidate who put nicknames on the Speaker of the House, using venom he frequently shows toward women. He has sought a reputation for seeking sex with many women, but behind that is a contempt for the entire gender. He cannot tolerate a political opponent, particularly somebody smart and entitled and female. Just the way Trump put a mark on the heckler early in 2016, he encouraged the mob to rush the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 -- making Nancy Pelosi a leading enemy. But people who voted for Trump should remember, as the mob picks up its weapons: Trump is good for the economy.  Sorry, Mac, That Train Aint Running I have not watched an inning, an out, a pitch, since the Mets disintegrated what seems like months and months ago. I just can’t watch. I gave so much to the Mets all season, probably 125 parts of 162 games. Got nothing left. Philadelphia is playing Houston in the World Series – now the coda to a long and lucrative process, four separate rounds as northern weather gets more iffy. (I know, I know, last year I railed against baseball adopting the basketball/hockey endless playoffs, but this year I give up. The World Series has become "The Finals." Baseball needs to make money so badly that, in the era of Rob Manfred, they play forever, pimping for gambling sites, encouraging people with a gambling jones to put money on each pitch, each swing. After a year of Mets melodrama, I need a break – reading good books, watching the tube with my wife, puttering around the house, seeing our family, at least until the pandemic clamps down again. (Well, not exactly. In the spirit of conscientious bloggery, I must admit I will be watching the World Cup of soccer, in Qatar, beginning on Nov. 20, with the United States meeting Wales the next day. The World Cup only comes around once every four years, which is part of the mystique of the event, although the masters of world soccer keep twitching to run the event more frequently. The dopes.) Only one more thing about this World Series: Nothing against the Phillies, who staged a gallant rally late in the season, when they had been dead meat under Joe Girardi. Good for them. My Pennsylvania relatives report loud noise from Philly. Enjoy. However, I am rooting for Houston for one reason only – Dusty Baker. He was a friend of my late pal, Bob Welch, with the Dodgers, and he runs in the same circles as some other friends in the Bay Area, and he has had some memorable managing gigs. Only thing he hasn’t done is win a World Series. Go Dusty. *** I did consult a few good friends of mine from Jamaica High in Queens, back in the day, to see how they feel about the "World Series." By Walter Schwartz For much of the past season, the Yankees were, or at least thought they were, the best team in the world, or the pre-determined champions of the world. But that was before they won their division and were given a bye in the first round. Soon after mid-season, it began to come tumbling down and the deficiencies became apparent: a straggling bullpen, a struggling bench and a stultifying manager. A lot has already been said about the uncertainty of their relief pitchers and reserve players, but a major part of the issue is the guy in the dugout, a sullen, unapologetic, inconsistent handler who begrudgingly dodged post-game questions (many of them softball) from the media and walked off without ever thanking any member of them. Every one of the post-game commentators (including Michael Kay and David Cone) rebuked the manager for his pitching and lineup tactical decisions during the Astros series. Anyone who thinks the vociferous shouts we heard were only for Donaldson, Carpenter and, sadly, Judge, is mistaken. The way I saw and heard it, the loudest of the fans were booing, “Boooooone”. So where does this go or should go? I know the present manager remains under contract (as was Joe Girardi who was let go by the Phillies and look what happened afterwards!), but if I were a gambler I’d place a bet on whether Boone was invited back, although the odds would be changing from batter to batter and inning to inning. (I might suggest to the Commissioner doing just that during the Houston-Philly series.) That’s how ridiculous and greedy it is for baseball to allow between-inning, and at other times, betting commercials to infiltrate the “national pastime” and particularly the children who watch them. And that’s my take how the Yankees got yanked. (Walter Schwartz was once upon a time the editor of the Hilltopper, the newspaper of Jamaica High School, long since put out of existence by New York "leaders" who, of course, knew best.) By Jean White Grenning (Jean is our Class-President-for-Life. As the pandemic abated for the warm months, she and Phyllis Rosenthal were known to take in a ballgame here and there, in our home borough.) We are “The Ballpark Twins.” Loyal Mets fans to the end. It may be an old saying but “Wait til next year!!” George, I have no great love for Yankees but they are a New York team so I was hoping they would win. They are like the rich kid whose father can buy him everything but he can’t buy him a winning team. That’s it from me. Jean By Alan Levine
So now we get to the World Series, with the best team in the American League facing a National League team that finished a fairly distant third in its division. I consider this a ludicrous state of affairs, fueled by television networks and greedy owners and players. That three teams who had won more than one hundred games each were eliminated in a hodge-podge of short, jerry-built, sudden-death series tarnishes a game meant to reward hard work and season-long persistence. Here is my proposal for restoring the big leagues to a semblance of sanity, which probably illustrates nothing more than how old I am. 1. Add one team to each league. 2. Divide each league into two, strictly geographical, divisions. 3. Eliminate all regular season interleague play. 4. Have each team play fourteen games against each of the teams in its division and eight games against each of the teams in its league's other division. 5. At the end of the 162-game season, each league has a best-of-seven playoff between the two division champions. 6. The World Series will be between the winners of each league's playoff. 7. Everyone goes home by Columbus Day. 8. We'll discuss the designated hitter some other time. As for the ghost runner, there is no discussion. Keep him in the dugout. (Alan Levine is my friend from junior high school. He is still working.)  My ode to Thomas McGuane's short story in the New Yorker was followed by these photos from my good friend and master photographer John McDermott, long-time soccer presence, now riding the range (on his bicycle) in northern Italy. John wrote: "One of my favorite assignments ever was to go to Colorado for a German magazine and shoot a story on contemporary cowboys. I had a great time, but ended up with a sore butt and back, not being used to riding a horse up and down steep trails. The deal with the cowboys was, “We'll give you a horse but then you need to help us with the cattle when we need you. So I got to play cowboy a little too." John added: "The shoot took place at a ranch and in the mountains outside of Crested Butte, Colorado. The rodeo was the Cattleman’s Day event held annually in nearby Gunnison. One of the best assignments ever. The Germans were good for that. I did a lot of lengthy photo reportage assignments for Focus-on mega-churches in Texas, on the medical marijuana industry in California, on earthquake preparation in SF, on writer Isabel Allende and many others. They tended to give more space to good photography than most American magazines did. Of course, now most of the American magazines are either greatly diminished, online only, or just gone." Well, cowboys are supposed to be gone, too, but John McDermott's photo essay -- and Thomas McGuane's short story in the New Yorker -- prove that cowboys endure.  Starin' at the south end of north bound cattle Slavin' in the saddle all day You've got to be some kind of natural born fool To want to live your life this way ---What Am I Doing Here, Michael Martin Murphey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RxewxnXMGo      GV adds: Several people couldn't open the Thomas McGuane short story, so I took the liberty of downloading it here:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/10/take-half-leave-half  Thomas McGuane Cowboys used to be part of our daily mythology. I’m old enough to remember when television came along, cowboys galloping across our screen, Hopalong Cassidy, Matt Dillon, Gene Autry, some of them singing, most of them shooting and slinging a lariat and speaking terse truisms about right and wrong, what defines a cowboy. The leading presenter of modern cowboys is Thomas McGuane, whose books and films keep up with the times. Imagine my delight at opening the current New Yorker and finding a lush short story by McGuane, about two childhood friends who sign on for summer work crews. Rufus and Grant, he with some credits from community college, both try to define their “occupation.” Their summer employer describes the folkways of former frontier – “the old grazing law, ‘Take half, leave half, and leave the big half.’” The preoccupation with how things are done seems charmingly old-fashioned these days, when nothing quite seems moral. As they talk on the phone before meeting for their summer job on the range, Rufus says: “Cowboys fix fence, Grant. They don’t build fence. No no no no no. If some rancher tells you he’s got a little fence to build, you just ease on.” Who thinks about rules and morals these days? People who would have been cowboys in an earlier century now sport automatic weapons and make up new rules. But somehow cowboy truths survive. I think that’s why I love old-fashioned cowboy songs, dressed up in modern examples, in one of my favorite CDs tucked into my iPod – “Cowboy Songs,” circa 1990, with Michael Martin Murphey singing old favorites with gruff male talent singing and playing, and Tammy Wynette providing darling backup. In Murphey's CD, some of the cowboy truisms seem smoothed over by modern niceties – “them was the days” when cowboys got drunk on payday, or a cowboy gets into “a foolish” gambling fight. In a new version of “Home on the Range,” Murphey laments how Indigenous Americans have been forced to move on, but in another song, 16 Texas Rangers are buried with arrows in their chests. As I read McGuane’s short story in the New Yorker, I can hear Murphey singing the catechism of the old West: In “Cowboy Logic,” an old cowhand quizzes a young recruit about how to spot the real cowboy among three guys squeezed into the front of a pickup. Then there is Ian Tyson’s song, “Cowboy Pride:” Cowboy pride will always get a man through Cowboy pride will make a fool of you In his short story, McGuane points out the dangers but also the thrills of cowboy life apparently a decade or two before this belligerent time. The rough-hewn Rufus tells his pal about a romance that has just broken up: “I met her when I was delivering oxygen. I stopped by to pick up the equipment after her dad died. She was so beautiful I told her how much I wanted her. She pointed to the couch and said, ‘Over there O.K.?’” McGuane’s shop talk of the Montana range is sometimes blunt, sometimes complicated, with the feel of a master composer laying out the chords and themes that sound like, feel like, danger. This is the old west, right? I was reminded of another Michael Martin Murphey rendition of the traditional song, “When the Work’s All Done This Fall” – about a cowboy who can’t wait to see his mother, back East, as soon as the herd is delivered and so is the pay. Rufus and Grant, long-time friends, one defined by scruffy old shirts, one by rock-band t-shirts, find themselves goading their horses up a steep hill In the work of a frontier master, there is no foreboding of buffoon reality TV hosts and deluded gun-carrying thugs with no moral compass. McGuane makes the young cowboys so appealing, as they try to define their calling, so quaint, so noble, so dangerous. *** The Oct. 10 issue of the New Yorker can sometimes be read in its entirety, unless you’ve gone beyond the monthly ration. Wait: you don’t subscribe to this great magazine? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/10/take-half-leave-half (Sept. 6: When the glorious season went downhill) What can you say about a baseball team that died? That it was talented and spirited. That it played with vestiges of old-timey baseball. That it had Edwin Diaz jogging in from the bullpen, accompanied by Timmy Trumpet. That it ran out of gas in the final month.* From spring training to Labor Day, the Mets found ways to win, sometimes with power, sometimes with guile and bunts, sometimes despite two iconic pitchers showing signs of mortality. Mets fans reassured each other that this was one of those rare seasons in the team’s torturous history. Buck Showalter, glowering in the dugout, had all the information in his meticulous, finicky mind, in his little black notepad. In the second half of the season, the Atlanta Braves asserted themselves (“They are the World Champions,” Good Old Howie Rose said on the radio recently.) There are theories about why the Mets fell apart. The pitchers caught up with Pete Alonso and Francisco Lindor. Not enough power from the two catchers. The late-season acquisitions were exposed. (Tired of watching Daniel Vogelbach take third strikes?) DeGrom and Scherzer could not pitch late into games. The “organization” showed mixed messages in bringing up three callow prospects late in the season, without time to adjust to the majors. But I’ll tell you the worst thing to happen to the Mets in 2022:, when a record-setting 122 Mets hitters were hit by pitches. The worst was when Starling Marte was whacked on his right hand on Sept. 6. Marte was the soul of the Mets, a refugee from the lower depths of the majors, with an athletic strut, a knowing smile, the ability to steal a base, hit a homer, bounce against the wall to make a catch. I always liked him with the Pirates. With the swagger of Smokin’ Joe Frazier, the late heavyweight champion, Marte was always on the move, connecting with fans, perpetual motion. But Marte did not play until the wild-card series, a full month later -- stealing a base or bouncing into the outfield wall, with a splint on his aching right middle finger. By the time Marte got back, the Mets’ fire was gone. The final month was sour, particularly in the three wild-card games. ---When Max Scherzer was bombarded for four homers in the opening game, a lot of Mets fans -- so colorful, so verbal, so passionate -- took the low road with yowls and boos for Scherzer. Shame on them. I bet St. Louis fans didn’t boo anybody as the Cardinals went down and out, at home. --- In the Mets' third and final game with the Padres, while Joe Musgrove was mowing down the Mets, Showalter asked the umpires to check him for a foreign substance on face or uniform. The umpires poked at Musgrove’s ears, which only made Musgrove even more resolute, as he pitched seven innings, giving up one hit. I’ve known Showalter since his first days as Yankee manager, and I get a kick out of him and his old-school game tactics. But Showalter’s ploy against Musgrove looked cheesy. So the Mets’ season is over. No point in looking ahead. The three lead pitchers were wobbly in crucial series. Some contracts are up. The “prospects” never did get enough experience to show what they might do next year. But Mets fans have their memories – Nimmo’s catch, Escobar’s torrid September, McNeil’s batting title, gallant slides home, swarms on game-ending hits, and most of all, the trumpets for Edwin Diaz, now echoing in the Mets' empty ball park. With all due respect to the other baseball team in New York, and the classy slugger, Aaron Judge, for this worn-down Mets fan, it is now time for the old Brooklyn saying: "Wait til next year." --- * With homage to Erich Segal, author of "Love Story"  Our friend Loretta Lynn died Tuesday morning. So many people have written about her, and one of the very best tributes is by Laura Vecsey, former sports and political columnist in major newspapers. This is from Laura's website: www.facebook.com/laura.vecsey/posts/pfbid02yWChPjadTu4Rgy6Du8bLGMjdGLvfVsgxf4kgKZWoy6aFTLtSLtMqWyHEdMJQJLhZl?comment_id=482346450441875&reply_comment_id=769685197443225¬if_id=1664950825091225¬if_t=feed_comment&ref=notif By Laura Vecsey Loretta Lynn was 90 when she passed away today. But she will always be 13, which is how old she was said to be when she married Doolittle Lynn and left Butcher Hollow, Kentucky for Washington State, 4 babies in 4 years and singing at grange halls en route to American originalism stardom. In fact, Loretta Lynn was 15 when she got married, and that was the only small deceit ever in her entirely genuine life. By sheer good fortune to be the daughter of George Vecsey, who was deemed the right person to write Loretta's biography, I was able to spend a good deal of time around Loretta Lynn for a few years. I can safely say that among the many celebrities and stars and powerful people I have been able to rub elbows with in my life, I'm not sure anyone will measure to Loretta's light. There is a reason some people are stars, icons, once-in-a-lifetimes. Loretta made me understand that. An incredible combination of spirit, light, beauty, talent, work ethic, righteousness and humor. As my father worked recording taped interviews with Loretta, I got to go along on some of trips to wherever she was performing. My father met Loretta after a mine blew up in Hyden, Kentucky, close to where Loretta had grown up. She performed a benefit for the families and, as my father was the New York Times correspondent for the Midwest based in Louisville, he was there for the coal mine catastrophe and her performance. They got along, and her Nashville agent knew Loretta's story had to be written, and my father was the absolute right man for the job. An incredible listener, thoughtful interviewer, my pops says Loretta wrote the book herself and surely she knew how to create a narrative arc and fill it with detail and emotion, but this was a good pairing my father and Loretta. As my father would get time with Loretta, I would be allowed on her tour bus as it sat parked outside of concert halls or country music festivals. The cast of characters in and out of the bus was a sight to behold for a young teenager. Her son Ernest Ray was touring with her one year, and really it was all so he could snag as many groupies as he could between sets. I'd watch her seasoned band perform all sorts of side jobs -- drive the bus, hawk merchandise, set up autograph lines -- and then hit the stage and every note from pedal guitar to drums and fiddle perfectly. Loretta would sit at the table in the bus, full of quips and comebacks, as many questions as answers. "I may be ignorant, but I'm not stupid," she'd say. She was self-aware and curious and had perfected the ability to run a tour and be a star and care about her fans and her music and fellow musicians and her hair and costumes in a way that took a toll on her physically and mentally. Still, I remember watching the scene from Robert Altman's "Nashville" in which Ronee Blakely plays a Loretta Lynn-esque character whose grueling life on the road and marital issues sends her to a hospital for exhaustion. I remember thinking ... as compelling as Ronee Blakely was and vulnerable and beautiful, she couldn't quite capture the true originality of Loretta, the fire and the determination and the ability to confront and yet sidestep pain and bad times. Loretta was a star that no amount of time or deterioration could blunt the light. Levon Helm knew it. Jack White knew it, bringing Loretta back to the studio for Van Lear Rose to cast the American icon into a new modern light. But even Jack White trying to put his spin on Loretta could never best the best of Loretta. I was really lucky to have known her. My undying memory of Loretta Lynn brings me such a sense of good fortune and joy. It was around 1975 or '76, and my father took us all to meet up with Loretta in Massachusetts where she was playing at a festival in Cohasset MA -- south of Boston near Plymouth. She either had a day off or time off between sets and we all agreed it would be a fun trip to go see Plymouth Rock. With Cherokee on her mother Clara's side, Loretta was long proud of her Native heritage, so she was particularly curious about the Wampanaug Chief Massasoit, whose peaceful nature helped keep the Pilgrims alive. It was a sunny but windy day, I recall, and Loretta was a slight thing wearing jeans and some kind of denim jacket, her long dark hair blowing all around. As we walked through the streets down to the state park, we stopped at an ice cream stand and all got a cone. Loretta got black walnut, and went to town licking it so to keep it from dripping all over. She was in good spirits, pulling her hair out of the cone, until we finally arrived at the place where Plymouth Rock sat in its confined station near the shores of Plymouth Bay. Loretta straightened her head up, took a look over the iron rail to the ground below. "That's Plymouth Rock?'' she said: "Why I've got bigger rocks in my driveway!" And she went on to talk more about the gorgeous Chief Massasoit and I knew that she had taken some pleasure in knowing the Chief was the better man in the deal, same as she sang about having too many babies, and how The Pill was the freedom women needed, and how cheating men deserved Fist City, and that being home with family was in the end the right place to be, even for the Coal Miner's Daughter whose gift and starshine will let her live forever. (Below: My father walking with Loretta and her agent, David Skepner, outside the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.)  Loretta Lynn escorted by her manager, David Skepner, and a wet biographer, October, 1975. GV: Two good friends, now both gone. David Skepner died on 9-11. See this.
I have a piece on the NYT website, Wednesday, with thanks to the Culture editors who asked me to write about helping Loretta with her book. (The NYT link does not seem to be opening here, for some reason, but try looking up nytimes.com and loretta lynn and vecsey.) I understand it will also run in the Thursday paper.) https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/arts/music/loretta-lynn-coal-miners-daughter.html https://www.georgevecsey.com/home/talking-and-writing-about https://www.georgevecsey.com/home/talking-and-writing-about-loretta https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/arts/music/loretta-lynn-coal-miners-daughter.html Here is the NYT obituary by Bill Friskics-Warren, who writes so well about Nashville: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/arts/music/loretta-lynn-dead.html And here is the NYT appraisal by the always-astute Jon Pareles: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/arts/music/loretta-lynn.html A few words about Loretta's Cherokee heritage (via her mother, Clara.) She was always proud of her roots, before it was cool. Laura Vecsey remembers our sojourn to Plymouth Rock, how Loretta was intensely fascinated by the Wampanoags and their chief, Massasoit. When she and Mooney bought their ranch west of Nashville, she started to learn more about how the Cherokees were forced from their homes (just a little bit of American history the country never taught us, back in the day.) The Duck River is about 10 miles to the west of the Lynn ranch at Hurricane Mills. Loretta said she could hear the Cherokees crying as they marched along the Trail of Tears. She brought her pride with her on the stage. On Page 16 of the original hard-cover book, Loretta has a few words about Andrew Jackson and other Tennessee people who sent the Cherokees away. The Johnson sisters were part Native Americans -- Loretta Johnson, most strikingly -- and in 1968, the four women delivered a load of clothing and supplies to the Red Cloud school in South Dakota, and later Loretta and her band played a benefit up there. I thank our Laura for reminding us about that side of Loretta Lynn.
Oy, it’s back – the theme of Donald Trump as prototypical Queens lout. I gather this from this Sunday’s NYT, a review by Joe Klein of a new book by Maggie Haberman, both of whom I admire greatly. But somehow the lumpen masses of Queens County are still being connected with the disturbed, amoral thug who has terrorized the U.S. and the world since 2016. As it happens, I grew up on a busy street, about half a mile from the Trumps to the west and the Cuomos to the east. Many of my friends went to grade school with Freddie Trump, older brother of Donald, and say good things about him. But in the big picture, nobody is typical of Queens, which ranged from ethnic western Queens to the remaining open spaces of eastern Queens. In the middle was Jamaica High, one of the best schools in the city. (Nasty little Donald was sent off to private schools, where, theoretically, money would buy protection if not character uplifting.) Was central Queens to blame for the criminal tendencies of Donald J. Trump? That premise annoys me because I could name dozens of friends and acquaintances who worked for success in more socially-acceptable ways. I will name only a few – Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who grew up a block of so from the Trumps, who came through a hard childhood to become a major voice in feminism and journalism (Letty has a new book), and Steven Jay Gould, a grade or two younger than me, who became a major scientist. Nowadays, I follow the very public activity of two other Jamaica grads -- Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee from Yale, representing an urban ward in Houston, and Jelani Cobb from Howard, a bad right fielder for Jamaica (he says) but a terrific journalist and professor. I submit that the striving ethos of Queens produced those four above, and thousands more, beyond the larcenous Trumps. From our little chunk of Queens in mid-to-late-‘50s: the professor and NASA scientist, two civic activists from Jamaica Estates, our Class President-for-Life who has been air-lifted into Alaska in the winter to serve as teacher and community volunteer, and several judges, including one long settled in Washington State. I could tell you about my Black pal in the Jamaica chorus who had to lobby against being stereotyped into vocational classes, and now has a doctorate and a career in a government agency. (We sang the school song at his recent Significant Birthday celebration.) I could tell you about the Cleftones, who sang under-the-streetlights doo-wop harmony for decades. Then there was the Holocaust survivor who played soccer at Jamaica and became a doctor out west. We had five doctors on the Jamaica soccer team. One could also sing. One became a med-school dean. One has been working at a Queens hospital in the worst of the Covid pandemic. And speaking of doctors, one of the wittiest and smartest kids in Jamaica Estates graduated from college and then realized she could have become a doctor – and she did, years later, and has had an admirable career. Two guys in the same radio-journalism class with me turned out to be well-known political activists for decades. And another teammate (a doctor) and his kid sister (an academic) lived next door to the Trumps for a while. She remembers how her ball would bounce into the Trump yard and Terrible Little Donald, 4 or 5, would pounce on it and say, “It’s in my yard. It belongs to me.” Kind of like classified government papers, you might say. By the way, the drive to excellence was not just a Jamaica High phenomenon. At nearby Forest Hills High, the star jump-shooter, Stephen Dunn, played at Hofstra and became a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. At Van Buren High, which sprung up in our eastern neighborhoods, a future lawyer, Alan Taxerman (the late and lamented Big Al to readers of this site), was sure he was the smartest kid in the universe, until he noticed that Frank Wilczek actually was. (Wilczek later won the Nobel Prize in physics – see Van Buren’s hall of fame.) And then there were Central-Queens people who went into business, education, government, law, library work. Was there something in the air or the water of Central Queens that led thousands of us to socially-acceptable lives? Joe Klein – again, a long-admired colleague – mentions elders making snide references to other ethnic groups. Were we all Archie Bunkers? I ask this because my household was a meeting place of the Discussion Group, organized by two upwardly-bound subway motormen, one white, one Black, kept at 50-50 ratio, comprised, by definition, of Queens bootstrappers with ideals. My brother Peter recalls being a little kid, sitting at the top of the stairs, listening to loud voices and loud opinions -- but then refreshments would be served and voices would soften, laughter would commence. It was a lesson for the next generation. You could care – and you could get along. What was the motivation for we rustics out there in Queens? Were we different from kids in “The City” A friend of mine was running with a fast little group from Manhattan, and I tagged along, impressed by how they knew the music clubs and museums and parks of Manhattan. (One of our new friends, a very nice girl named Gloria, actually lived on Park Avenue, facing the new Lever Building, and went to the very elite and public Bronx Science. I often wonder what became of her.) As I look back, going into The City (by subway) reminds me of the John Travolta character in “Saturday Night Fever,” when he visits his dancing partner, who has moved up in the world. She shames him into losing a brutish edge to his Bay Ridge behavior. But that, remember, was just a movie. We in Central Queens were pushed by post-war ideals and ambitions, many of our teachers setting examples of inclusivity. (By the way: New York City could not run Jamaica High in the 21st Century, so the city closed it down, history and potential be damned. See Jelani Cobb’s article: https://www.georgevecsey.com/home/the-new-yorker-analyzes-the-end-of-jamaica-high) I tend to avoid all books about Trump. Just the journalism and the copious glimpses of Trump on the tube plus half a dozen meetings with Trump in less horrible times are quite enough for me. I love the reporting by Maggie Haberman, and the many insightful works of Joe Klein. But being caught up in a Trumpian caricature makes my Central-Queens skin crawl.
 Maury Wills: One run, one aggravated strawberry This is why I love baseball: No matter how hard the new analytics types try to invent a new sport, the ashes of the old game, the real game, spark into flames again. On the day before Maury Wills passed, a current major-league player performed some derring-do worthy of the old master. Terrance Jamar Gore is not dashing into the Hall of Fame or even a steady spot on a major-league roster. But when a contending team needs what sports broadcasters like to call “foot speed,” plus “smarts,” Gore is often hailed from the minor leagues to bedevil pitchers, catchers and whoever is supposed to be covering the next base. Maury Wills did the bedeviling on a daily basis for 14 major-league seasons, winning three World Series for the Los Angeles Dodgers. His life – the ups, the downs – was described by Rich Goldstein in the NYT on Tuesday. Before I get to Terrance Gore, Wills’ spiritual descendant, I will share two visions of Wills: ---At the peak of his career as brilliant leadoff man for the light-hitting but championship Dodgers, Wills threw his smallish body at the next base and its surrounding dirt paths – enough to incur red abrasions, known in the trade as “strawberries,” on his hips. The off-season was not long enough to heal them, so by the following March Wills would be grinding his skin all over again. (Some old-timers wore sliding pads inside their uniforms but Wills and other players preferred uniforms tailored for their slight builds, hence perpetual strawberries.) ---Wills did not merely steal bases. He borrowed baseball wisdom from ancients like Casey Stengel, when the Old Man managed the new team in New York in 1962. I cannot pin down when and where this happened, but I heard about it since 1962: Casey was giving a pre-game sermon to some Mets about the value of the “butcher boy” – slashing the ball downward, better than a bunt. The Mets seemed bored by the lecture but Casey noted one astute pair of eyes belonging to Maurice Morning Wills, the Dodgers’ shortstop, at the edge of the circle. The Old Professor was happy to have one student. So that was Maury Wills. Baseball has since evolved into a perpetual home-run derby, with would-be sluggers armed by details like “launch angles” and “exit speed.” Speaking of home runs, both New York teams had long-ball frolics Tuesday evening—Aaron Judge hitting No. 60 and Giancarlo Stanton hitting a walk-off grand-slam homer for, yes, you got it, the Bronx Bombers, and the Mets coming back from a 4-0 deficit on a 3-run blast by Pete Alonso and a grand-slam by Francisco Lindor. Quite a night for “exit speed.” Before that, the Mets won a game last Sunday on the legs and wits of Terrance Gore, all 5 feet, 7 inches and 160 pounds of him. Gore is 31 and with a ball cap on his head he looks half that age. He has a .217 major-league batting average, higher than that of some lugs lunging at every pitch. He is a stolen-base specialist, used in vital circumstances in big games, and already has three World Series rings and would not mind running and sliding the Mets into this year’s Series. The Mets picked him up from the minors in August, and he got into the tie game when Tomas Nido led off the eighth inning with a single. Everybody knew why Gore was out there. The pitcher threw several times to first base to keep him close, but Gore confidently edged back onto the dirt basepath, busting for second as soon as the pitcher threw home. The catcher’s throw flew into center field and Gore scrambled up and darted to third, and he scored the tie-breaking run on a single by Brandon Nimmo. Home runs are fine. But even with the gigantic pitching staffs of today, the game should have room for a running specialist. And if you are not yet charmed by the concept of the running specialist, ladies and gentlemen, the professional pride and knowledge of Mr. Terrance Jamar Gore:  The last time Her Majesty stopped over There’s a story to the larger-than-life cutout. Our friend Rachel had it made up for her commercial work in New York. She also had cutouts of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. When Rachel passed way too young, her sister Miriam offered them to us. Mostly they reside peacefully in our house, but they get brought front and center on occasion, which this most certainly is. *** The Royals have a hold on people. This is apparent from the respectful mourning for Queen Elizabeth II, since she passed last Thursday. Americans seem to be taking stock of how they feel about a monarchy, The Revolution to get rid of monarchy seems like ancient history. My wife points out that in recent years, American television has been full of dramas and documentaries about England, almost as if America were longing for a bit of structure and, dare one say it, manners, after four years of being savaged by rabid Trumpian jackals. Then again, England has a veneer of "royal" manners but they did not stave off the ruinous Brexit or the odious Boris Johnson. The most interesting evaluation of Elizabeth II comes from Bonnie Greer, an African-American writer who has lived in England since 1986 and now has dual citizenship. Greer said Black “church ladies” in America actively respect and imitate Queen Elizabeth’s poise and dress, her purses and her hats, her image of holding things together. *** Both Marianne and I have roots in England that are traceable back to….well, my wife-the-genealogist finds links back to William the Conqueror. Her family traces back many centuries to the Manchester area. Her mother’s father -- born in Massachusetts -- was a gentle, curious little chap you could envision toddling down to the greengrocer or the chemist, in Rochdale or Bury or Salford or Oldham, where his people came from. My wife can trace a chain of her family names, all over the world. My mother was born in England – in Liverpool -- but she would always, always, say, “We were really from Southampton,” where her father was usually posted with the White Star Line, except for a short stint in Liverpool before World War One. Liverpool is known for its scousers – a mix including Irish from just across the sea. I never heard me mum take credit or pride in Liverpool – not even the Beatles. My kid brother Chris confirms my impressions that our mother, who cried when FDR died, admired Winston Churchill, whose middle name was Spencer. That was also my mother's maiden name, and Princess Diana's maiden name, and a frequent middle name in our sprawling family. Our mom was very proud of being British; when an Australian relative came to visit, Mom broke out the best English china -- but Chris doesn't think she was very interested in the royals. *** My wife and I have both been lucky to visit England, sometimes for weeks at a time. It is impossible to visit England without being aware of the monarchy – sometimes in person. *** My wife once spent 15 muddy, drizzly minutes in the presence of Princess Anne, quite long enough to form an impression. This happened via our friend, a Sloane Square solicitor, whose firm did work for the royal family. We stayed with him a couple of years when I was covering Wimbledon, which coincided with the rowing races at Henley. (I believe our friend had been a coxswain at one of the colleges of Oxford, but he is gone now, so I cannot check.) He was a gallant old bachelor who enjoyed squiring Marianne about Henley, on a classically dreadful summer day. They were at a prime reserved table with other connected people – one of them a physician for the Royal Family. As the rain fell, Princess Anne was walking past their table, and she recognized them. They stood up, of course, but with a casual wave she motioned them to sit back down, while she chatted with them. “She had a white hat and a white brocade dress, covered with mud, and she was wearing Wellies,” my wife recalls, using the common British term for the universal mud boots. She was informal and poised, at the same time, my wife says. (This sighting matches my impressions of Princess Anne from my years covering the International Olympic Committee. Princess Anne, once an equestrian competitor, later a member of the I.O.C., had a good reputation as an activist against performance-enhancing drugs.) *** In England, the Royals are on the telly, in the papers and the magazines, always on the brain. My friend Logan thinks he once saw Queen Elizabeth, a mile or so from Buckingham Palace. “I was jogging down Jermyn Street one early Sunday morning,” he recalled in an e-mail on Sunday. “No one around. It’s ‘one way.’ A limo passed by me and through the window I got this very regal wave. I waved back. Am sure it was Her Majesty. Spring of 1987, I think.” I could wonder, wouldn’t the queen have a companion car, smoked windows, bristling security? But what’s with the wave? My theory is, on a quiet street near the palace, early on a Sunday morning, only queens wave. *** I had a royal sighting once, in one of my early assignments to Wimbledon, when the press tribune was directly alongside the Royal Box. Princess Diana was on the guest list that day; we reporters checked her out early and often. Later, I noticed her looking back at us, perhaps wondering about that raffish lot, as we chattered and gestured our way through the afternoon – a fitting Shakespearean upstairs/downstairs balance to the swells in the Royal Box. She should have heard some of the Brit reporters, the Beastie Boys with their lurid commentary, imitating plummy royal accents. I’d like to think she would have laughed. Her two little boys were scuttling around the box, watched by helpers. Their mom was looking around. Her blue eyes were piercing. *** I’ve never observed the new King Charles. Our friend Alastair did a wicked imitation of him, making him sound mopey. (Then again, Alastair lived in Wales and referred to England as “them.”) I read a book that quoted Emma Thompson, a good friend of Charles, about his complexities; she also said he was a good dancer and a good human being.  Emma Thompson likes King Charles. That works for me. Not all the old-timers wore uniforms at the grand celebration of antiquity. The old players, legends all, visited Queens on Saturday as the tradition of Old-Timers’ Day was honored after a gaping absence of 28 years. How wonderful it was to sit in my home cave and watch Frank Thomas, Jay Hook, Ken McKenzie and Craig Anderson from the first team in1962. They were good people then, helping Casey Stengel create the lovable myth of the Amazin’ Mets. Now, in the very young and very promising era of the new owner, Steven Cohen, the Mets brought back 60 old-timers to stand in for the Richie Ashburns and Alvin Jacksons who toiled so honorably in 1962. Wonderful touch: room on the field for family members representing Gil Hodges, Tommie Agee, Willie Mays and my departed friend, 1986 coach, Bill Robinson.  Steve Jacobson and Mookie Wilson Mingling with the old-timers was my friend Steve Jacobson who helped cover the first season for Newsday and starred as columnist for decades. Steve, going on 89, was welcomed by Jay Horwitz, the haimish maestro of Mets alumni affairs, who also invited me as a surviving veteran of 1962. But I’m still ducking public gatherings during the pandemic, so I stayed home and waited for Steve to call me with the gossip. Steve said he wished he could have chatted with all of them, but there was such a crush, everywhere. He could have talked to Frank Thomas about hitting 34 homers and driving in 94 runs, and Ken McKenzie, who had the only winning record (5-4), and Craig Anderson, who won both ends of a May doubleheader over the Milwaukee Braves to raise the Mets’ record to 12-19 and cause manager Bobby Bragan to call the Polo Grounds a “chamber of horrors.” Oh, yeah. The Mets promptly lost 17 straight, en route to a 40-120 record. Steve also could have talked to Jay Hook, with his engineering degree, who won a game one day and told the writers it was like eating sour cherries but then tasting a sweet cherry. (All three 1962 pitchers present Saturday were part of Casey’s respected “University Men” – McKenzie from Yale, Anderson from Lehigh and Hook from Northwestern.)  Steve Jacobson and Ron Swoboda Steve did have time to mingle on the field, wearing a Newsday ball cap, with his wife, Anita, snapping photos of him with epic Mets including Ron Swoboda and Mookie Wilson (who later would gambol in the outfield in the old-timers’ game, along with another sleek alum, Endy Chavez.) The part that Steve treasured most was having a few old Mets tell him he had been one of those sportswriters who did not throw them under the bus when they had a bad hour on the field. We were reporters, we were critics, but we were not rippers. Now the Mets are in a new era. Steven Cohen, a grown-up Mets fan, used his money to hire Billy Eppler, Buck Showalter, Francisco Lindor and Max Scherzer. Who knows if the Mets will hold off the Braves and go far in the post-season? But gestures like the recent Keith Hernandez number-retirement and Willie Mays number retirement (honoring the jolly first owner, Joan Whitney Payson, indicate a generosity of pocketbook and heart. (Speaking of not throwing people under the bus: a few old players and writers and fans have blasted the previous ownership of Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz for not putting enough money into the franchise. I have a friend who ran a center called Abilities, Inc., on Long Island, which helps people function better in work and social life. I am told that the Wilpon-Katz family was generous with money and energy.)
Let's just say: the Mets are in a new era. I was happy to hear my friend Steve Jacobson bubble about his hours back at the ball park with similarly elderly Mets who once upon a time gave the fans so many memories -- some of them even good. The other day I was writing about Dominic DiSaia, and his photo of Vin Scully, and I mentioned photographers I ran around with, back in the day. One of them is John McDermott, who bonded with me on the soccer beat and also at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Norway. Speaking Italian fluently, John charmed our way into the Italian hospitality tent up on an icy mountain plateau, by offering some of my NYT souvenir pins (“distintivi”) -- pure gold at the Olympics. The food was great, as one might expect, and so was the scene when Alberto Tomba, three-time Olympic gold medal ski racer, slowly checked out every table, like an entitled don in one of the Coppola masterpieces. (Oh, yes, that was Roberto Baggio's voice on John’s cellphone.) John McDermott – originally from Philadelphia -- gets around; he loved San Francisco for decades, riding his bike and hanging around with locals like Dusty Baker, but six years ago he moved to Italy with his wife, Claudia Brose, originally from Cologne. They live in Appiano, in the northeast corner of Italy, where German and Italian intermingle, but lately the couple has been making forays to Naples for the ambiance. Claudia has a business conducting photography seminars, and John demonstrates the art of street photography in one of the most vital cities on earth. In Naples – Napoli --- English or northern RAI broadcast Italian only go so far, but in Napule life is often conducted in Neapolitan, not so much a dialect of Italian as a Romance language, endangered, to be sure, descended from Latin. John enclosed a link to a video he put together, using his photographs, backed up by the song by Pino Daniele raised in the Spaccanapoli district, who died in 2015. What draws John and Claudia back to Naples? "The warmth, energy and openness of the people, the chaos and the way everything just works out," John wrote the other day. I get it. My first foray to Naples was in 1970 when my wife and I took our three young children around Italy, the most child-friendly country I know. I went back in 1989 to work on a Times magazine feature on Diego Maradona, the Argentina soccer star who played for the Napoli club – a perfect spot for the flawed athlete. Maradona defied the club’s attempt to set up an interview, even when the club driver took my to Maradona’s villa at the top of the old Greek hill area, Posillipo. I called the number I had for him and somebody messed with my mind, leaping from Spanish to Italian and back. And when I went to a club practice Maradona did not show up that day, leaving his coach sputtering and fuming. Tough town. I realized this at the Napoli club match that Sunday. As I made my way to the press tribune, my guide nudged me under the overhang – just before a wadded cannonball of wet tissue splatted against the wall, like a baseball, where I had been standing. The “ultras” in the stands surely had good aim. Next time I visited Naples was at the 1990 World Cup when Argentina was defending its 1986 title. While I was working, my wife meandered down to the harbor, with life pulsing in the shops – at least until a couple of older ladies wagged index fingers and warned, “Signora, Signora,” and motioned for her to hide the bracelet on her wrist. The local lads were quite adept at snatching jewelry from tourists, they signalled. The pre-teens of Naples are known as “scugnizzi” – urchins – a matter of civic pride. Sit at an outdoor café and a scugnizzo will try to sell a few loose cigarettes, as a way of getting closer. Oh, yes, tough town. Maradona, local hero, played to the Napolitani by urging them to root for his Argentina team when it played Italy in the semifinal. His words, as John McDermott recalls them, were, “364 days a year they call you “terroni” -- an Italian pejorative term for southerners. “Today they want you to be Italian. Don’t be fooled by them. We are your team! You belong with us!” Maradona’s brazen appeal was rewarded with a victory over Italy, but Argentina lost the final to West Germany. He’s gone, now, a victim of his excesses, but Diego Armando Maradona is the flawed patron saint of Naples. As John and Claudia wander through the tangled, pungent streets, they see his likeness everywhere -- the man who found his spiritual home.  “It’s dirty and chaotic and sometimes nerve-wracking,” McDermott wrote me. “But it is also a constant, vibrant, non-stop show of real life lived out in public.”
John expands on his love for Naples in this link: https://aphotoeditor.com/2022/04/14/the-art-of-the-personal-project-john-mcdermott-2/ As I work my way through John’s photos, I can hear, can smell, and surely can see the pulsing life in the alleyways of Naples. *** Long live the photographers who take us to these places. *** The NYT – the former gray lady – now lavishes color photos on its subscribers. Did you see this recent masterpiece on Budapest? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/travel/budapest-hungary-memories.html  When Vince Scully died, I was honored to get a call from the Times, asking me to write a column from the perspective of my youth as a Brooklyn Dodger fan. When the paper arrived in the driveway the next morning, my column was accompanied by a lovely photo of Vin Scully, from behind, as he called a night game at Dodger Stadium. (The bizarre thing is that the photo was not included in the copious spread on Scully in the great nytimes.com obit spread on the website.) The photo by Dominic DiSaia perfectly demonstrated the link between Scully and his fans since the Dodgers moved to LA in 1958. (I’ve gotten over it; oh, yes, I’ve gotten over it.) The photo in the glowing night demonstrated the link between a grand franchise and the mellow, knowing, professional voice of Vince Scully. The fans in Dodger Stadium are one thing, but the audience “out there” is also tangible. We saw the stadium and sensed what was beyond, from the back of Scully’s fertile head. So that left me with a question: who is Dominic DiSaia and how did he take the photo of Vin Scully from behind? Let me pause and say that I have a career’s worth of partnership with the many great NYT staff photographers as well as free-lancers, stringers, most notably Ken Murray, an artist who roamed Appalachia with me in the early ‘70s. I got to know the work habits and minds of photographers. Dominic DiSaia, I learned, is an independent photographer, 47, raised in Southern California, based in LA. He does commercial and advertising photography with a major in sports. In 2013, he proposed a project for ESPN about a day in the life of Vin Scully. He got approval but in a limited way – no photos at home, only at Dodger Stadium, and nothing during the game. “He wasn’t too thrilled about it,” DiSaia told me over the phone, a note of admiration in his voice. “He was a very private man.” DiSaia did learn that Scully would call his wife now and then from the booth, also off limits to the photographer. DiSaia snapped away, when he could, and then he got lucky. One of the aides in the broadcasting booth area told him that the seventh-inning stretch was a bit longer than normal breaks, and he let DiSaia slip into the aisle behind the broadcasters. There he learned something I have never heard about any broadcaster before: Scully kept a Jolly Rancher candy on his desk and would suck on it – the same one -- between innings – to keep his mouth moist. But he would not drink anything during the game so he could not feel the need to use the men’s room. Vin Scully was, along with all his other traits, disciplined. With only a few seconds of access, and not wanting to get in Scully’s field of vision, DiSaia stood behind Scully and saw the big picture – the broadcaster and his audience, in the stadium and wherever that broadcast went. As the Dodgers began batting in the home half, DiSaia snapped away, and then slipped out into the corridor. As it turned out, this was an epic night at Dodger Stadium. Yasiel Puig, from Cuba, hit his first two homers, and DiSaia happened to be in the photographers’ well alongside the dugout, and another photographer caught DiSaia a few feet from the new hero, as the crowd cheered. Later, DiSaia learned, Vin Scully, always alert, said: “Viva Cuba! Viva Puig!” Terse and perfect.  Dominic DiSaia (red arrow) and Yasiel Puig After the game, DiSaia caught up with Scully for the promised wrapup photo, in the parking lot – but true to his private bent, Scully did not want a glimpse of his actual ride home – a hired driver, because by that time Scully was not driving at night. So Scully went off into the night, and DiSaia polished his photo essay for ESPN. Scully must have liked the photos because he signed a copy and included it in a cache of souvenirs that he sold to bulk up the college fund for grandchildren. DiSaia does retain rights to the photo, and has a print available at: https://dominic-disaia-photographs.square.site/ He also has a website: www.DominicDiSaia.com After that night in 2013, DiSaia continued to work in sports around LA, but as for Vin Scully: “I never saw him again in person.” How often do journalists say that about the epic person they met on a memorable assignment, and never again. DiSaia retains a respect for Vince Scully that matches the worldwide impression – a master artist who knew his audience and himself, as he faced out into the night, and into the ears and hearts of ball fans everywhere.  Buck Showalter, center, with Jeremy Hefner and Glenn Sherlock We all need a momentary diversion from the 10 or 12 top terrors loose in the world. The Mets do it for me -- playing a brand of ball I thought had gone out of style. As of Monday morning, they were tied with the Yankees for the best record in baseball. Nothing like big-market money. I think of all the years when I worked at appearing professionally neutral. Now that I am retired, I am free to watch the Mets – with two separate Met-centric smartphone message dialogues going at the same time. The Mets are so much fun to watch because they are defying the launch-angle, exit-velocity analytics trend that has rendered contemporary baseball so stultifying. It can be done. The Mets of recent years had the same bad habits of other teams – trying to put the ball over the fence and get their moon shots on TV and social media. Managers came and went – good grief, one general manager was a reforming player agent -- but New York money-guy Steve Cohen bought the team and brought in Billy Eppler as general manager and hired Buck Showalter as manager and now the Mets hitters are humbling teams with their lopsided shifts, hitting it where they ain’t, in the immortal phrase of Wee Willie Keeler. Jeff McNeil once was lost but now he’s found – propelling a home run now and then, when it comes naturally, with his good swing. Showalter is doing one of the most noticeably great managing jobs I have seen in a long time. I’m happy for him. Met him the winter before he took over the Yankees, a boy manager who had impressed Billy Martin with his knowledge as a fringe coach during spring training. Now he was getting his chance. I flew into Pensacola one morning in mid-February of 1992 and he drove me to his old neighborhood, more Alabama than Florida, introduced me to his pals at the gas station, in a town where his late father, a former Little All-American fullback and a high school principal-coach, was a legend, and then we stopped off to meet his mom. Ever after, when I was around his team, Buck he would point to me and say, “There’s George, he’s been to my hometown, he understands.” I wasn’t always sure what I understood, but, sure, Buck, sure. These days, he is a master at work in his dugout, intense, obsessive, usually with bench coach Glenn Sherlock at his side, as a sounding board. Have you ever seen coaches more alert, more pro-active, than Wayne Kirby (social director at first base), Joey Cora (performing acrobatics at third base), Eric Chavez (hitting coach, smiling reassuringly in the dugout) and Jeremy Hefner, (pitching coach, foxlike, alert to every nuance of his charges?) During the game, Showalter conducts little seminars with lifers like Max Scherzer and Francisco Lindor, while popping sunflower seeds into his mouth and making snarky comments to the umpires. Old school. Buck neglects nobody. He gets players into the lineup, before they get too rusty. He benched Mark Canha for a few days after the Mets spent more of Steve Cohen’s money for Tyler Naquin, and on Sunday Buck put Canha back in the lineup, and of course the pro responded. And for those hard-core fans, who spend their hot summer days and nights peering at the tube, it’s been a pleasure to watch the pitchers holding the Mets together when Scherzer was hurt, when Jacob deGrom was recuperating. The past week, those two aces have been back, as good as ever. Buck tried to nurse deGrom through the sixth inning on Sunday until Dansby Swanson broke up the no-hitter with a two-run homer and Buck nodded and gave deGrom the rest of the day off. It is a memorable season for Edwin Diaz, reviled in his first season in town, now having the best relief season ever seen – entering to the stirring trumpet music. On Friday Showalter recognized this was August, and they were playing the Braves, so he asked Diaz to pitch two innings and received six outs of Koufaxian brilliance. Luis Guillorme – once known primarily for having caught a wayward bat (the baseball kind) in the dugout – has been so good that Buck uses him in most days. day. Along with the Diaz entrance, the best show on the Mets is Guillorme and Lindor playing Marquis Haynes and Goose Tatum (ask your grandfather) with the ball as they trot off the field at the end of an inning. And I haven’t even mentioned Pete Alonso…or Starling Marte….or Brandon Nimmo…the other pitchers. (I am also taken with Carlos Carrasco, and his El Greco-painting serenity.) Entire odes could be written about the Mets -- and sometimes are, on our smartphone links-- during this compelling season that gives us a rest from all the other stuff.  Daniel Vogelbach, instant folk hero, scoring from first. Photo by member of Mets text chain. Vogelbach (in German, means a bird at a small stream) was lauded in Monday’s NYT, in the New York Today feature by James Barron.  Trying to Save the History of Appalachia. Photo, thanks to NY Times. When I covered Appalachia from a home base in Louisville, some of the grand leaders of Appalachia had a suggestion for me: why not live in Whitesburg, the center of the universe?
They had a point – “they” being Harry Caudill, lawyer and writer, and Tom and Pat Gish, who put out the great weekly newspaper, The Mountain Eagle (“It Screams.”) Those grand figures of the Kentucky mountains both lived in Whitesburg, in Letcher County, current population 2,200. Also in Whitesburg was Appalshop an invaluable repository of the images and words and sounds of mountain people, mountain culture, mountain history. (See Randolph Fiery's tribute to Appalshop, Comment No. 9.) Now Whitesburg, and Appalachian history, have been crushed by the floods that have marauded through Eastern Kentucky in the past week. The floods have spread mud over every inch of the treasures of Appalshop. I am sick. Here's the NYT article. Fifty years ago, that might have been me writing it. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/04/us/kentucky-flood-appalshop-archives.html?searchResultPosition=1 I have already written about the stricken counties and given three general funds. (below) How can I tell anybody to prioritize a center of history against hospitals and food drives and housing centers? I only know that Appalshop is special, representative of the world that is being washed away because most elected public officials and industry (Here’s looking at you, Commodore Manchin) pay no attention to the region they helped dig up. Here’s a link for Appalshop. https://appalshop.org/news/appalachian-flood-support-resources Now back to our previous disasters: *** In my first month on a new job covering Appalachia, I happened to be nearby when the mine blew up on Dec. 30, 1970. I drove until I found the narrow road leading to the site where 38 miners had been killed in the dog-hole Finley mine at Hyden, Ky. Around 8 or 9 PM, I noticed a Red Cross truck, with long lines, and I waited my turn for, as I recall, a cheese sandwich and a coffee, for which I was extremely grateful. The Red Cross was there at other disasters, like the one at Buffalo Creek, W. Va., on Feb. 26, 1972. People have to eat, in all those isolated towns, most of them on bottom land, inundated by the downpour and the disintegrated hillsides of Appalachia. In the latest horror story, good people and good organizations, are feeding the flooded mountain hamlets of Eastern Kentucky. The Red Cross is there, because it always is. https://www.redcross.org/donate/disaster-relief.html/?cid=disaster_brand&med=cpc&source=google&scode=RSG00000E017&gclid=CjwKCAjwlqOXBhBqEiwA-hhitORr5j455Wf9c-eU79JiSEfjnvHknssybFb8oyhktMRnu0So8boHfxoC4qkQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds Kentucky is lucky enough to have a thinking, feeling governor named Andy Beshear. Only last December, a tornado hit Western Ky, and he set up a special relief mission. This week Gov, Beshear set up another relief mission in the eastern part of the state: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/how-to-help-flood-victims-in-kentucky Also present is the World Central Kitchen, run by the Washington, D.C. chef, José Andrés. It seems he is everywhere – most recently in Ukraine – and I am not surprised that within hours workers and volunteers were somehow getting to the inundated towns, preparing hot food, good food. https://wck.org/en-us/news/kentucky-flooding I would urge a contribution to any of these funds. I take this disaster personally because this flood has brought up the same towns (Hazard, Troublesome Creek, Isom, Viper, Cutshin, Fisty…) and the same family names I saw on mailboxes in clusters along the highway (Amburgey, Webb, Sturgill, Stamper, Estep). Death and disaster introduced me to Appalachia, and now death and disaster focus my attention, again. The climate continues to grow worse and so have the senators from Kentucky -- people like Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul. Neighboring West Virginia has the coal-dealer, Commodore Joe Manchin, doing something for the good of others only when it profits him. (The Senate? Have you seen the list of 41 Republican scoundrels who have banded together to deprive military veterans of medical benefits for a burn-pit plague?) So what chance do regular Appalachia people have, trying to survive alongside the creeks and rivers in the region known as the “dark and bloody ground” to the Shawnees and Cherokees who were there before Daniel Boone and his kind. Appalachia has been messed over by government and by industry. The least we can do for the flooded people of Kentucky is help feed them.
Suzyn Waldman speaks Bostonese. Chris Russo speaks Rabid Canine. Congratulations to both icons of the New York ear (and head, and heart) who have just been voted into the Radio Hall of Fame. Their endurance has demonstrated the power of the spoken (or sung) word, for people driving a car or working out or just lazing in a chair. Radio lives. And Suzyn Waldman and Chris Russo have endured for decades, from their early days on WFAN. Waldman is the radio compañera of John Sterling, the long-time play-by-play mainstay of Yankee games. Sterling, bless his heart, provides shtick and nicknames and operatic exaggeration to back up his long career of calling games. Suzyn Waldman (from Newton, Mass., and Simmons College; but you could hear that) had an earlier career in musicals – most notably playing Dulcinea in “Man of La Mancha.” Then she gravitated to talking about sports and was hired by WFAN. Was she a novelty act? She blew up that stereotype by doing what the best reporters do, on any beat. She hung out. She asked questions. And she won the respect of players, managers, coaches and the informed beat writers. From her time in the clubhouse, she knew what player was favoring a sore leg, or was in the doghouse, or had a weakness for a slider. The listener came to rely on her commentary, always politely but authoritatively following Sterling’s calls. Plus, she can follow the fickle bounces in distant corners of a stadium. Yankee fans soon realized: Suzyn Waldman knows her stuff. Not only that, but Waldman became such a moral force that she brokered a reunion between George Steinbrenner and Yogi Berra, who rightfully harbored a grudge against The Boss for having fired him. Blessed are the peacemakers, like Suzyn Waldman. Christopher Russo materialized as a sports reporter on the radio spectacle called “Imus in the Morning” – dominated by the equally brilliant and vicious Don Imus. Your ear could not miss Russo’s babbling patter that resembled Daffy Duck in the cartoons. When the station morphed into all-sports WFAN, he was paired with the opinionated Mike Francesa. (Imus called Francesa and Russo “Fatso and Froot Loops.”) In 1991, I wrote a column about Russo in which I unearthed his secret life: his mom came from England and was reportedly horrified by his diction; he had attended colleges in three different countries – England, Australia and the U.S., and before that he had attended a private school in New York State. Away from the live microphone, I detected a pleasant, centered, educated and ambitious kid who had taken speech therapy and did not mind admitting it. My headline (columnists got to write their own headlines in those days) was: “Mad Dog Is a Preppie.” He and Francesa were wired, babbling about game strategies the night before or pending trades or players who had popped off; I will admit there were times when I needed to see if the odd couple could flush out an owner or a commissioner or an agent. Nobody wanted to be hectored by Mike and the Mad Dog. It was compelling radio, in its way, as long as they lasted together. These days Russo is on Sirius. Sorry, a lot of new things like Sirius and podcasts are outer space to me. I’m a child of radio. I can still remember Edward R. Murrow scaring the hell out of me with his war dispatches from London when I was 4 and 5, and when we managed to survive that war, I found Arthur Godfrey’s jovial variety shows and Red Barber’s erudite calls of the sainted Brooklyn Dodgers. I discovered music on the radio – from Crosby and Sinatra to Aretha and Bob Marley and The Band and Dolly Parton, disk jockeys from the long-ago Jack Lacy on WINS-AM to William B. Williams on WNEW-AM (until I heard him destroying a vinyl record, live, on the air, by some new shaggy-haired kids from Liverpool.) Radio: Garrison Keillor, NPR, Jonathan Schwartz and Peter Fornatale on WNEW-FM, the doomed classical station WNCN, and nowadays an upgraded WQXR-FM particularly Terrance McKnight from Morehouse, 7-11 PM weeknights, the eclectic John Schaefer on WNYC and the great interviewer Brian Lehrer, WNYC, both AM and FM. Baseball? It was invented for the radio, or vice versa, never more than when the grubby forces of Major League Baseball condemn Mets or Yankee games to other networks. Radio is a vibrant medium, all on its own – and Suzyn Waldman and Chris Russo are deservedly in the Radio Hall of Fame.  Another flash flood, this one in Buchanan County, Va. It’s too hot to go out in Southwest France, report my cousin Jen and her husband Sam. Bulletin: Wildfires in Nouvelle Aquitaine and Gironde, Meanwhile, London was bracing for 104-degrees Fahrenheit – which would set a record. Back in the southwest corner of Virginia, they are still digging out after the aptly-named Dismal River suffered a flash flood last week. I know that portion of Virginia, from my days on the coal beat. Decades of strip-mining – lopping off the tops of mountains to get at the coal – have destroyed the watersheds of Appalachia. (I wrote a book called “One Sunset a Week,” about a miner’s family in adjacent Russell County. Every time the heavens erupted, the rains washed down detritus from strip-mining, known as “red dog.” That was 1974.) If only the governors and senators of Appalachia knew about this. Perhaps they might do something. The prototypical politician from Appalachia is Joe Manchin of West Virginia. He must know the ultimate flood is coming because he’s fitted himself out with a yacht, anchored outside Washington. When the Potomac rises, Commodore Manchin is going to float safely downstream – but to where? The Commodore has been busy. Last week, he slipped up behind the helpless ancient figure of Mother Nature and whacked her with a coal shovel and stole her pocketbook. He did it by voting against the tax bill that would have at least recognized the danger of rising temperatures, and the role of fossil fuel, not only all around the world but in his home state of West Virginia. His Inner Republican said he was being a guard dog for fiscal sanity, blah-blah-blah, but we know better. We know that decisions that affect the future of world ecology are made by the (white) (old) men who are either rich or wannabes. The Commodore is not only a scientific authority but also a coal baron, via his family business. It’s in trust, the Commodore tells us. He knows nothing – just like it was a shock to him that his daughter, Heather Bresch, presided over a drug company, Mylan, when the price of EpiPens – used to treat allergic reactions -- soared to $600 a shot. This was a shock to the Commodore. These kids today never tell their parents anything. Maybe the flood on the Dismal River in neighboring Southwest Virginia was a shock to the Commodore. Maybe the flood in Yellowstone National Park was a shock to the Commodore. Maybe the heat wave in far-off Europe would be a shock to the Commodore, if he heard of it. But the Commodore doesn’t have time to monitor events in such distant places. He just wants to balance the books, like a good Republican, although he is nominally a Democrat, and make sure energy moguls continue to make an honest buck, so they can all afford yachts to escape the cataclysm, so they can float off to some safe place, like maybe the Marshall Islands. Oh, wait. The Marshall Islands are going under, day by day. But don’t tell Commodore Manchin. He is heroically standing up for his constituency – energy barons, coal-mine operators. He’s a man of the people. A few of them. * * * I seem to be writing a lot about Commodore Manchin these days:: https://www.georgevecsey.com/home/write-about-west-virginia-she-said https://www.georgevecsey.com/home/watching-manchin-thinking-about-the-the-sopranos  Borrowed from that great asset, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news
 The last we saw of the nuclear family (NB: In the first version of this, I forgot to mention the heroes and victims of Trump's rampage -- the police officers who were left to fight it out, without adequate weapons or backup, by that murderous thug of a President. Some of them were present in the front row, mute and injured witnesses to the massive evidence being presented. There were also two guys who just happened to get caught up in the rampage, now professing sorrow, without a trace of remorse or wisdom. One couldn't even find a jacket and tie to appear before Congress. The other guy tried to apologize to Harry Dunn, the brother who had to swat vermin with his bare hands that day. Dunn is a wonderful person. To his credit, he gave the man a blank stare and let him go his way. The witness still has to answer to his wife, who was present on Tuesday. Good luck with that. My belated thanks to the officers who were set up to fail and be injured, by the President of the United States. GV) I have become addicted to the Jan. 6 committee hearings – hanging on every response, every nuance, every face in the audience. I have not been this involved in any television spectacle since The Sopranos, all those years ago. In fact, I am deeply afraid this series will end the same way The Sopranos did – by going dark, with no final conclusion for the chief character. Tony Soprano and Donald Trump. Guy from Jersey, guy from Queens. When the Sopranos series ended so abruptly – with Tony, Carmela and A.J. eating onion rings while waiting for Meadow to park the car – I understood what author David Chase had done. He let all of us construct our own ending. Okay. Deep down, it was only a TV series, and in some strange way I saw Tony as a family man (as well as a bully and a murderer and gangster), so I concocted my alternate coda for the family – new identities and fingerprints, a swanky home in Boca Raton, the kids in college. Another chance. I could concoct another persona for Tony but I cannot imagine another life for Trump--or his admirers. As of now, I bet there might even be six or seven middle-of-the-road Republican voters around the country who have bothered to watch or read the hearings and have decided Trump is a vile criminal, after all. I have the terrible feeling that AG Merrick Garland will sleepwalk through the final Biden years, and Trump will talk his way out of everything, the way he did starting near the family bunker in Jamaica Estates. In the meantime, I watch these hearings the way I watched the Sopranos. Don’t call me. Don’t text me. I’m a total Fan Boy for Liz Cheney the way I once was for Edie Falco, and I hang on the patriotic history lessons from Rep. Jamie Raskin the way I did on the scowling gangland sagacity of Steven Van Zandt, Tony’s consigliere. This current series is the best education in civics I have ever seen on TV. Every member of the panel reminds those of us who are listening what democracy means, or should mean. I have tried not to rage at the revelations in each of these made-for-TV “hearings,” keeping my cool as people revealed the ways Trump garroted and knifed and shot democracy. I held back my rage on Tuesday watching a weasel lawyer named Cipollone try to suggest he had undergone a miracle cure – seen the light, praise the Lord – although it was clear the committee’s lawyers had suggested he might want to testify, or else. The weasel was 18 months late. However, there are still surprises, particularly last week from Cassidy Hutchinson, the 26-year-old aide to another weasel, Mark Meadows. (What is it with people like Mark Meadows, Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy and the aforementioned Cipollone – they need a strong Fuhrer type to make them feel whole?) Anyway, Miss Hutchinson was still young enough, had not been around politics long enough to have her heart corrupted, and she had the visceral understanding that bad things were going on down the hallway and she shamed the weasel Meadows into at least acknowledging the dark intentions of Trump. Cassidy Hutchinson has taken on the aura of a latter-day Paul Revere, sloshing through the slimy bogs of Washington, shouting, “The weasels are coming! The weasels are coming!” Someday there may be a Cassidy Hutchinson stamp – put me in for a 100-pack. I did lose it on Tuesday, however. My position watching this horror show has come from the Iris DeMent song – “No Time to Cry.” “Working overtime to make sure that I don’t come unglued.” But then Rep. Stephanie Murphy from Florida, one of the panel members I knew least, gave her short summation of the day. She is, she revealed, from a family that escaped by boat from Vietnam. She praised the United States of America, and she linked the committee’s work with the ideals of truth and democracy….and to my amazement I started to weep, great big salty tears rolling down my face, and I turned to my wife (who does not hold back her rage at these thugs) and I found myself blubbering, “They don’t get any of this, do they?” I was referring to the enablers and hustlers and explainers and deniers and downright racists who supported, and continue to support, Donald J. Trump, who is worse than anybody in “The Sopranos.” The Sopranos merely murdered and stole. These people are worse. Unless the Justice Department steps up, I can foresee another show going dark.  Rep. Stephanie Murphy, left, and eight colleagues (This is the way an American hero acts.) Some people become heroes once. John McCain was a hero four different ways, by my count. He was a hero in wartime and he was a hero during the stench of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. That is why I am celebrating the news that he has posthumously been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The medal is going to deserving people like --Sandra Lindsay, a nurse who lives in the same town I do, who became the first American to be inoculated against Covid. --Simone Biles, the Olympic champion who excelled despite being assaulted in one form or another by a rogue doctor, the gymnastics federation, and the FBI -- Megan Rapinoe, who caught my eye with her brazen sorties as a star soccer player, and then caught the eye of the world with her support of female athletes and LGBTQ causes. ---And so many others. John McCain touches my heart in a special way because he was a perpetual hero, and also a very human public figure. I met him once in his office in 1999, when we talked so easily during a break in a Senate investigation of the Olympic movement. (He had just savaged an American Olympic official who sounded too vague to the senator.) I began with a question about something else: my wife had sat next to one of McCain’s service buddies on a long flight to Asia. The man told her how the senator was quietly leading some vets to raise money and goods and shipping them to, yes, Vietnam – the same country that had broken his arms during a long and cruel captivity. In his office in 1999, I asked McCain why he helped Vietnam. His answer was an eloquent shrug with his damaged shoulders -- a gesture of modesty. John McCain was also a hero during his doomed campaign in 2008 when Republican voters vilified Sen. Barack Obama as “an Arab.” John McCain snatched the microphone back with the response that his fellow senator was a good man, a family man. McCain asserted that he would make a better president, but he told his own people that they need not worry about the loyalties of his opponent. That is the instinctive act of an American political hero. Or used to be. The fourth time John McCain was a hero was in 2017 when it was apparent he was dying of cancer. With a post-operative scar on his head, John McCain strode, military-like, to the floor of the Senate, where his colleagues were voting whether to scuttle much of the health-care program known as Obamacare. At 1:39 AM, John McCain faced the twisted Mitch McConnell and jabbed his right thumb downward, in a decisive gesture straight from the Roman Colosseum. No repeal. Ongoing health care for millions. That, for me, is the act of a hero. The recipients of the Medal of Freedom are always varied. I became interested in the medal in 2011 when Stan Musial, whose biography I was writing, was among the honorees. Through a Washington insider friend, I received a special guest pass, (more access than a journalist) and mingled with the guests and the recipients, including a fading Stan the Man. I watched President Obama appear, so knowing and enthused about each of the recipients and their fields. I got to chat with Bill Russell, still fierce-looking, and tell Yo-Yo Ma how much I admired his diverse cello repertoire On the way in, a Washington lawyer pal of mine was showing me a photo of himself with a very young President n 1961, and a handsome lady spotted the photo and said, “That’s my brother” – meaning President Kennedy. She was Jean Kennedy Smith, another recipient that day. After the ceremony, Yo-Yo Ma sat in with a Marine string quartet in the lobby, and his pal President Obama stood near him, and on the way out, “back to work.” the President extended his hand to people nearby, and one of them was me -- an act of grace I will never forget. So, yes, I count the Presidential Medal of Freedom as one of those great American honors. Now the medal is going to other deserving recipients. There is no A List and B List. But I will say, in my heart, the recipient who thrills me the most this time around is John McCain, four-time hero. In the midnight hour on a murky Saturday night in late October of 1986, Shea Stadium was going mad.
A squiggly grounder by Mookie Wilson had somehow kept the Red Sox from winning the World Series that night – and fans were screaming, and nearly a dozen New York Times writers were pounding away at their laptops, shouting into phones, bustling noisily to update their early stories for the last print deadline of the evening. Enlightened cacophony. The sports editor, Joseph J. Vecchione, sitting behind us in the pressbox, was coordinating with the staff in the office, making dozens of decisions, on the spot. Then it was over. We had gotten it done, on deadline. A young Times news reporter, doing spot duty to cover fan madness, police activity, etc., watched the sportswriters (so often maligned as “the toy department”) do their jobs. When things quieted down, the young reporter said casually to the sports editor, “Wow, that was impressive,” or words to that effect. And Joe Vecchione said drily: “We do it every day.” If Joe had added, “Kid,” he would have sounded just like Clint Eastwood in “The Unforgiven.” That professional pride epitomized Joe Vecchione, my friend and advisor in my early days of writing the sports column. Joe passed Friday evening at 85, after years of suffering from Lewy body disease, cared for by his wife, Elizabeth, a wise and devoted nurse. They are parents of Elissa Vecchione Scott and Andrea Vecchione, with three grandchildren: Joe’s aura of family man was clear to people around him. He was a boss with values. I got to know him as a terse, decisive voice on the phone, in the 70’s, when he was an editor in the photo department, and I was a news reporter. Sometimes I was at breaking news and I had to coordinate with the photo editors. Joe was authoritative and efficient. Then he was plucked by Abe Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb to help form the new SportsMonday section, and he was there in 1980 when sports editor LeAnne Schreiber recruited me to be a reporter, filling in for Red Smith or Dave Anderson here and there. When LeAnne moved on, Joe became sports editor, and when Smith died in 1982, it was Abe Rosenthal’s decision to hire a new columnist, and it turned out to be me. Here is where the kindness and shrewdness of Joe Vecchione took over. I had been conditioned by 10 years as a Times news reporter, to keep any trace of myself out of the copy. Give sources. Quote authorities. No opinions. That was the old, gray NYT – and I was one of the foot soldiers, thoroughly indoctrinated. As a columnist, I knew the subject matter, and could write and report, but I was trying too hard to find a voice, hinting at my opinions. I was being too cute. Joe had some advice (and I paraphrase:) “Be yourself. Tell us what you think. People want to know how you feel, what you know, what is right and wrong. Don’t hold back. This is the way things are going these days. You have freedom.” He removed a decade of thoroughly valid reportorial rules, freeing me up to be a columnist. Joe also had an instinct for hiring and enabling good people, hiring columnists Ira Berkow and Bill Rhoden, relying on deputy editors like Bill Brink and Lawrie Mifflin, and he backed up his columnists. I benefited from this in 1990, when I was writing columns from the World Cup of soccer, held in Italy. The young American team, in its first appearance in 40 years, managed a taut 1-0 loss to the Italian team – a huge accomplishment. But I pointed out that Italy did not have great strikers – that is, players gaited to score goals from up close – and I wrote this was because their great national league imported scorers from Germany and Argentina and Brazil. I wrote: “The home-grown players do not develop the knack of scoring. Mussolini once lamented that his was a nation of waiters. It is not stretching the truth to say that Italy is currently a nation of midfielders.” The next day, the sports department got a call from an Italian-American reader who felt using the remark attributed to Mussolini was prejudicial. (Fact is, I love Italy and root for the Azzurri, except when they play the U.S.) The person in the office, taking the call, told the reader that the sports editor was okay with my comment. And who is the sports editor? “Joseph J. Vecchione.” That pretty much ended the conversation. Joe could be tough, and he had to make a lot of decisions. I once was whining in the office about something or other, and Lawrie Mifflin, the deputy sports editor and loyal friend of Joe’s and mine, told me, in effect, “You have no idea how much he has to handle every day” – including complaints from leagues, teams, player unions, sponsors, agents, public officials, fans, to say nothing of staff members. In Joe’s regime, we let it fly, and Joe fielded the complaints, kept most of it from our ears. Joe was sports editor for a decade, then moved back into the mainstream of the paper. He retired at 65 and the editors promptly brought him back to help the transition to the new building a few blocks away. Over the years, I was impressed by the masthead names, the serious people (some of whom condescended to sports personnel), who were his social friends. They trusted him – for core values, like honesty, like thoughtfulness, like culture. That is no small statement about a Times official, my friend, who helped move the sports department into the future. (Any insights/anecdotes about Joe? Please add them in Comments, below.)  Trump and Bill Stepien: always a trail of victims It all came back to me – my telephone interview with the popinjay proprietor of a doomed gambling den.
Watching the Jan. 6 hearings on Monday, I heard former toadies Bill Barr and Bill Stepien talk about the emptiness of Donald J. Trump, who lost the 2020 election and then went blank when aides tried to tell him it was over. Could not take in information or considered opinion, even when it was meant to help him in his chosen field, that is to say, the presidency. Then I remembered -- the good old days of 1999, when Trump was not trying to wreck the United States of America but instead was merely bringing down the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. In addition to siphoning money from people with a gambling jones, the Taj also ran boxing cards, for people who like to see others bleed. Always hustling his faux-golden appearance, Trump was up front when a boxer named Stephan Johnson was beaten unconscious and lugged off to the hospital where he died within hours. As an abolitionist toward boxing (tempered by liking so many boxers I met), I wondered if the death of Stephan Johnson might touch some primitive form of Trumpian conscience. So I made a call to Trump's gatekeeper, asking for an interview. They knew me. I had grown up not far from the Trump Tara, knew his older brother Fred (a nice guy), and had also met Ivana Trump through a New York Czech connection. Plus, I had seen Ivana – twice as smart as her husband – try to coach the man through press sessions regarding the New York Generals football team he owned. I could see he did not have a grip on details. Now I was wondering how he could explain his part in boxing, in the death of Stephan Johnson. Over the phone, he was dim-wittedly vague, coming up with cliché after cliché about boxing: ''I love boxing, but it's a dangerous sport.” ''I hate what happened. 'It's something you have to get through. I think boxing is an alternative.' In some cases, the boxing ring is better than anything else.'' ''You have to understand that we do not sanction the fights,'' Trump said. ''That is done by the New Jersey State Athletic Control Commission. All we are is the venue -- and fighting is popular. Every fight sells out. We have other things like gymnastics; they don't sell out. All I know is, boxing sells out.'' I’ve talked to other boxing people who made more complex arguments for boxing. But Trump was inarticulate. Flat. Empty. Didn’t know. Didn’t care. The world has since seen what is really inside -- the raging egocentric sending the deluded and the deranged out to do battle at the Capitol, telling them he would be along shortly. Now we are getting sworn testimony from people who served him, like Barr, who back-stabbed his old law and church pal Robert Mueller. Even Bill Barr had enough of Trump. Solid Republican campaigners and lawyers and advisors describe him as not able to follow their advice that it was over. Sounds like the guy on my phone in 1999 -- the good old days, when he merely wrecked his businesses, and his family. How far would Trump go? His inability to know truth has even scared off Ivanka Trump, the oldest child, the one he sent off to mingle with European leaders, much to their disdain. This committee showed taped testimony from Ivanka, whose furtive eyes darted from side to side, looking for the nearest escape hole. *** In this spectacle of a nation in trouble, I found two positive scenes: --The former head of the Fox election evaluation grew, Chris Stirewald, was asked how his group on election night, 2020, had analyzed the incoming returns in the pivotal state of Arizona. With visible pride, Stirewald told about the experts from both parties, who reached the judgment that absentee ballots, counted later, would swing the state to Joe Biden. Fox beat the opposition – that is a big thing in journalism -- and they were correct. As a journalist, I felt great pride in what this guy and his staff had done. For his proven expertise, the network of Tucker Carlson fired him. *** --One of the panel members, Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, noted that Bill Stepien had been scheduled to give live testimony Monday, but had rushed home when his wife went into labor. (With little notice, the committee staff pulled out vital segments of his previously taped testimony.) I was touched when Rep. Lofgren noted that Stepien had every right to go home to be with his wife. Let me just add that if the other party were running a hearing, and that happened, I would not expect such a note of grace *** (My interview with the inarticulate Donald Trump, when he was merely a New York joke, in 1999.) https://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/12/sports/sports-of-the-times-a-front-row-witness-to-death.html  Stan Einbender of Hofstra (R) and Bob Larsen of Wagner (L) shared a laugh, Foley's, 2012. Photo Fred R Conrad, NYT  Stan Einbender, 1960 Hofstra yearbook. Carol Studios. Stan Einbender, Jamaica ’56 and Hofstra ’60, passed on June 10. He had turned 83 on June 1, and had been in failing health for months, lovingly cared for by his wife, Roberta. This is a hard one for me to put together because Stan and I were in the same school for nine straight years -- Halsey Junior High and Jamaica High in Queens, then Hofstra College in Hempstead. Then Stan went to dental school and served as a dentist as a captain in the Army at Fort Lewis, Wash., and settled into his practice in New Hyde Park, marrying Roberta Atkins, helping her with their two children, driving around to dog shows all over the place, in with their English Mastiffs -- a big guy showcasing his big pets. We became much closer in the past two decades, as old Hofstra basketball and baseball guys (and one aging student publicist) got together at Foley’s in NYC. I would drive into the city and back, sometimes with other front-liners, Donald Laux and Ted Jackson. Basketball was our common denominator. Stan had a great souvenir of his season as a 16-year-old senior on the Jamaica varsity -- a scar on his forehead, from the city tournament in the old Madison Square Garden when he was hammered by Tommy Davis of Boys High. When Tommy became a star with the LA Dodgers, I would remind him that an endodontist on Long Island was looking to get him back.  Stanley in 59-60 season. I was at courtside on a sleepy January afternoon in 1960 when Hofstra lost on a long basket by Wagner at the buzzer. It turned out to be the only loss in a wonderful season – 23-and-1, but not good enough to get into a post-season tournament. Half a century later, we caught up with the villain who had beaten Hofstra with that long jump shot – Bob Larsen and a couple of teammates met a few old Hofstra guys at Foley’s, and I wrote about that in the Times., https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/sports/ncaabasketball/52-years-later-recalling-a-shot-that-sank-a-season.html In our old age, basketball was the link. Stanley had two season tickets at the Hofstra gym, right above the scorer’s table, and sometimes he would invite me. He became friendly with the coaches, first with Mo Cassara, then with Joe Mihalich, two basketball lifers who loved our old stories about the memorable coach, Butch van Breda Kolff, the old Knick. (Crude and also insightful, Butch was oddly formal, often calling his players by their full first names—Donald, Curtis, Stanley. As the publicist, I was “Grantland.”) Every October, Joe would invite us to a practice, let us sit behind the basket, give us frank insider critiques of his team. He called Stanley “Doc.” For one afternoon, my guys were part of the team, part of the school, again. I remember at one October practice, the star of the team, a shooting guard at 6-foot-3, also from Queens, was chatting with us, and was politely bemused that Stanley was the star rebounder at the same height. (I wrote about those sweet annual visits to our alma mater.) https://nationalsportsmedia.org/news/my-alma-mater-thrills-some-old-players- Just before the pandemic, Stan stopped getting around, because of Parkinson’s disease and other problems. We would talk on the phone and he would talk about Roberta’s art work and how well she took care of him…and proudly about their family: son, Harry, who had taken over the endodontist practice, (“better hands than me”) and his wife Macha and their children, Max and Remy, and Stan and Roberta's daughter, Margaret Morse, and her husband Richard and their children, Olivia and Henry. He always knew what they were doing. When I visited them last week, Roberta was masterfully managing a hospice operation. (I never heard him complain about his bad breaks with health, and he was always upbeat about the home care from aides like Kenia.) We sat by his hospital bed and we talked about the old days and our dwindling Hofstra guys, and his Yankees and his Rangers….and I praised how inclusive he was about his basketball world. This is what I told him: A decade ago, my wife and I were visiting our friends, Maury Mandel and Ina Selden up in the Berkshires, and Maury’s kid brother Joe and his wife Jean were also there. I suddenly blurted to the younger brother, ”Hey, I know you – from junior high school.” Turned out, Joe had been in the same class as Stanley – and had played on the same class team (Stanley was also on the school team.) I ostentatiously pulled out my cellphone and called Stanley: “I got Joe Mandel here, from Halsey.” They started chatting, more than six decades later, and Stanley told him, “You were a good point guard on our class team.” As any old schoolyard player knows, there is no higher compliment than being praised by a college star. Generous guy, Stanley. Then they started talking about the girls in their class. We continued that conversation the other day -- basketball and girls in our grade -- and for a few minutes, it was very nice to be 13 again. ** (It's so nice to see comments or emails to me, from old friends. Ken Iscol from junior high. Jean White Grenning and Wally Schwartz from Jamaica. A lot of the Foley's gang. Just to drop a few names. Roberta (I knew her brother, Jerry Atkins -- in grade school!) has held things together, admirably. The funeral is Monday at 11:30 AM at Beth David Cemetery, 300 Elmont Rd., Elmont, N.Y. 11003.) For the moment, please feel free to remember Stanley…and say hello to Roberta and the family… here…. They are monitoring the lovely comments here on this site. Thanks. GV  Lot of victories -- plus, five Oscars. Hofstra classmate Francis Ford Coppola dropped by in 2018. Shaun Clancy, proprietor of the great Foley's in rear. Captain Einbender at the head of the table, of course. Ted Jackson, lower left, and FF Coppola both started at Jamaica High and transferred.  Dick Conant. Photo: The New Yorker A 300-pound man is gliding down the river in a canoe. His appearance, his shabby belongings stuffed into every corner, are straight from the last thousand homeless people you saw, under the bridge, on the subway bench. But Dick Conant did it differently. He had the intellect and knowledge of the med-school applicant he once had been. He could paint. He carried hard-covered books in his canoe, and some days he just lazed by the river and read. He also could read the river, could decipher the maps, could extract knowledge from other riverman (and more than a few riverwomen) he met on his missions along the Intracoastal. People on the banks, people seeing him lug his jumbled belongings through the streets, stopped to talk to him, were stunned by his intellect, by his knowledge, and also by his tales of a girlfriend named Tracy waiting for him back there somewhere. People never forgot him. America – free-falling into cruel anarchy these days – is built upon wanderers. It’s in our blood. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and Jim. Daniel Boone and family making their way through the Cumberland Gap in 1769 as if it belonged to them instead of the natives. Lewis and Clark, ditto, toward the Northwest. John Ledyard’s canoe trip down the Connecticut River from New Hampshire – in 1773. The guy hitch-hiking on Route 66, singing to himself, a regular Chuck Berry. Dick Conant struck a chord. Sometimes the people on the riverbank, meeting this strange hulk, ingesting hot sauce the way other people suck on a Tic-Tac, grew quiet, as if confronting some inner wanderer. Hmmm, they thought. Hmmm. That’s what Ben McGrath, a writer for the New Yorker, thought a few yards from his home on the Hudson River, where the Dutch once encountered the Lenape. McGrath was fully nested, job, wife, growing family, but he was fascinated by this articulate and charismatic giant who secured his canoe near McGrath’s backyard. Hmmm. In the interests of journalistic/literary curiosity, McGrath chatted him up, and vice versa. And when the big man pushed off, McGrath went with him, in a way. Dick Conant was canoeing downriver for perhaps the last big jaunt of his wandering days, and McGrath tried to stay in touch. Then one day on a bad stretch of North Carolina river, the canoe turned up, but not the man. An authority found McGrath's name scribbled on a river map and called him, and McGrath wrote a haunting piece for the New Yorker. He was now into it, big-time, collecting every name and phone number and e-mail address Conant had scribbled somewhere. The only name and address missing was that of Tracy, the lost love Conant always said was waiting for him back in Montana, or somewhere. Now, McGrath has written a touching book entitled “Riverman: An American Odyssey,” recently published by Alfred A. Knopf, including photos of Conant, and photos of a few of his paintings. How did a college soccer player (Albany State) come to be most at home on rivers? McGrath writes about the large and complicated Conant family (he likes every Conant he meets) and all have their version of what happened to kid brother Dicky: too many drugs, too much booze, the late 60’s. (The book is worth it for the meeting at Woodstock between Dick Conant and Jimi Hendrix.) There is a one-sentence allusion to the young boy's quick exodus from a church summer camp: inexplicably, McGrath lets it sit there for many chapters before another quick allusion or two as to why Dicky left that camp, and never seemed the same. That human mystery aside, “Rivertown” is a touching ode to all river towns, most of them falling apart, a century past their prime, but inhabited by people still in touch with the water rushing past. I’ve known rivers (see below): Hannibal, Mo., two visits in the late ‘50s: Louisville, Ky., when my young family rode our bikes alongside the Ohio; as a news reporter, accompanying ecologists on a canoe glide on the Youghiogheny, a tributary of the Monongahela; Uncle Harold Grundy’s cottage in Bath, Maine, a few steps from the Kennebec he had dredged before WW II -- I never appreciated river towns as much as I do now, via the mobile Conant. McGrath solves no mysteries. He writes that Conant either sighted or imagined Tracy, a latter-day Dulcinea, an American Beatrice. Conant drank and danced gracefully in river-town bars, telling people how he was soon going soon to be with Tracy; women were charmed by his eloquent faithfulness; but he never got back. (Unless he’s there now.) ("Cathy, I'm lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping ("I'm empty and aching and I don't know why." --- "America," Paul Simon.) McGrath writes the book half expecting Conant to ring him from some river town and fill him in on the empty canoe, about his recent adventures. The alternative is to slip onto the river in a suitable craft, just to see what’s out there. *** From the classic poem by Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," Gary Bartz has recorded his version: “I’ve Known Rivers.”  Zinedine and Veronique Zidane: Once in this stadium... Why can’t I commit? This is my dilemma, doctor, as a recovering sportswriter. Essentially, I root for four teams – the New York Mets, the two US national soccer teams, and also Italy’s soccer team, a passion going back to 1982, when Italy won.
(in 1998 in Aix-en-Province, I twitched my head so badly when Roberto Baggio hit the cross-bar against the French team, on a day off for me during the World Cup. “They’ll kill you,” my wife said, of the French patrons of the pub.) I know sports fans who need to have a team in every game they watch. Does it make the event more exciting? I don’t know. I do know that I could not crank up a favorite in the Champions League final between Real Madrid and Liverpool on Saturday. I had reasons to root for Liverpool. Me mum was born there, but throughout her long and educated life she had no interest – no knowledge, I suspect—of the Liverpool team. (“We were really from Southampton,” she would say. Her father was posted in Liverpool for a short time by the White Star Line, before moving to the States.) If I were going to root for Liverpool, it would be because of the informed passion of our oldest grandchild, named George, who has been storing up soccer details since he was 2 or 3 and he could beat me in the FIFA electronic game. A decade or so ago, George committed to Liverpool, and then he switched into an even higher gear when they acquired Mohamed Salah, the Egyptian will-of-the-wisp, one of the sweetest (is that even a soccer word?) athletes I have ever watched, almost a holy man. I tried to commit to Liverpool for the final, but I also have the strong memory of my college pal, Ward Wallace, who moved to Spain for a PR job in the mid-60s, As a business person in Madrid, he became a loyal fan of Real Madrid, the New York Yankees of Spanish football. Ward had season tickets to Bernabéu Stadium and eventually moved to a smaller flat right near the stadium. In 1991, he and I had an Italian lunch al fresco across the street from Bernabéu. Ward passed a few years ago, but his passion for Real has made it impossible for me to root for Barca or Atletico, etc. On Saturday, during the final, I daydreamed of all the Champions League finals I have seen, although never in person: the majority in L’Angolo, the wonderful and vanished bar on Houston St., run by Pino-from-Sicily. The games and years blur but I can see stirring rallies by Manchester United and AC Milan, in L’Angolo, in the company of soccer pals like Massimo and Ricardo and Logan and Denise. I’ve watched a final at the flat of Paul Gardner, who has taught me so much, along with our friend and colleague, Lawrie: I believe I’ve watched a final or three in the company of Lawrie and hubby Duncan-from-actual-Arsenal, and Roger-the-Chelsea fanatic. Most finals blur, but the best I ever saw was by Didier Drogba, who carried Chelsea on his broad back, playing the full field, offense and defense. In the time of Covid, I settled into the TV cave in our basement on Saturday, with grandson George texting me regularly, praising the new Liverpool weapon Luis Diaz. Meantime, I was caught up in my impressions of three decades of covering soccer: *-Carlo Ancelotti, now a venerated coach of Real, but in the 1990 World Cup in Italy, he was a heady midfielder for Italy with a constant smile, despite injuries. *-Thibaut Courtois, the Belgian keeper for Real Madrid, who always seemed a bit wooden to me when he played in England, but on Saturday he was stoically repelling shots by Liverpool – the Man of the Match, George and I agreed, even before the final whistle. *- Conversely, Mo Salah seemed to be trudging in mud, after a brutal schedule of national and club matches, a nearly criminal demand on these great players. “He needs the summer to recover,” my grandson texted. *- My neutrality remained steady, but a grand memory took over when the TV crew caught a glimpse of Zinedine Zidane, the French artiste who, in 1998, performed the best individual final I’ve ever seen – in this very stadium, Stade de France -- controlling the ball with his feet or gliding into the air for two, count ‘em, two header goals. My wife was there that day, because kind friends had a spare ticket, in the lower stands, with a great view of Zidane, as he floated. On Saturday, on the TV, there was Zidane, now a former Real Madrid coach. unable to hide his narrow marksman eyes inside a white hoodie, and accompanied by his striking wife, Véronique, a dancer and model. The camera did not linger long, but the sight of Zidane et femme seemed to call up the memories of 1998 – a grand omen for Real Madrid. -- Real Madrid did win, 1-0, as Vinicius Jr., flitted past Trent Alexander-Arnold, the wandering right back. “We go again next year,” my grandson texted. I was neither elated nor sad, because I did not have a team in this match, but I had watched some of the best players in the world. Was I missing something by not having a team? I really do not know.  Love this photo: scribe, kayak, dog Ever since Roger Angell passed last week, friends have been e-mailing about how great he was, and asking how well I knew him.
Let me say, he was grand company in a pressbox watching a game. I always thought he seemed liberated by his mid-life discovery, his strange hobby, writing about baseball. It began as his left-brain, right-brain activity, when he wasn’t editing temperamental fiction writers or conducting in-house business at the New Yorker or dealing with the vicissitudes of life. He enjoyed the hell out of this other world, and it showed. He also loved paddling his kayak or sailing along the Maine coast when he wasn’t writing about Pete Rose or Reggie Jackson or the baseball denizens of the Pink Poodle, his hangout in Arizona during spring training, or editing what any sportswriter would respectfully call “real writers.” Now and then, he would pop into Yankee Stadium or the Mets’ ballpark, without the weary pack-mule trudge of the beat writer or old-fashioned sports columnist (been there, done that) lugging a laptop, expected to produce profundity on deadline, halfway through the season, 81 up, 81 to go, plus the endless autumn trek. As we all said in our alibis for why we were not Roger Angell: we had deadlines. While we were pecking away, he could hang back and chat up a ball player who grasped that this older guy knew the game and was not looking for a few quick quotes. I admired the working friendship he developed with, let’s say, Dan Quisenberry, a submarine-style relief pitcher with the Kansas City Royals, who was cool enough to explain his technique. Roger also took seriously the first female writers in the press box and – gasp – the locker room, who were professionals, just like men, if you can imagine. So, how well did I know him? I got off to a dumb-ass start. It must have been 1968 when I sat next to a guy near 50 and we introduced ourselves and he said something about “New York” and I thought he meant the new weekly magazine so I wished him luck with the new publication. To his credit, he did not correct me, nor did he back away from this dolt. Later I deduced that he wrote for the New Yorker and began subscribing, not just for his occasional baseball pieces but for the great eclectic literacy of the magazine. I still subscribe to the New Yorker in the age of Editor David Remnick – a great guy who started as a daily sportswriter, for goodness’ sakes. The arrival of the New Yorker—the print version – is a highlight of this pensioner’s life. Did I learn anything from Roger Angell? The best part was the way he thought independently and observed the sub-marginal things and had the time and space and license to elaborate. Plus, he had talent -- could play with themes and details, knowing exactly what he was doing. He was a model, but then again, in our collective world, no journalist should lack for models. My parents were journalists and I came along in the pioneer Newsday sports department in the 60s, with crusty old editors and the new breed of chattering younger types, known as Chipmunks. And then there were books that made me want to write longer and better. In the early 60s, I sought out “Bull Fever” by Kenneth Tynan, a London drama critic who roamed to the corridas of Spain, or “Cars at Speed,” by Robert Daley (son of the noted Times columnist, Arthur Daley), who had bolted to Europe to write about the Grand Prix – and life in the old world – and ignited my wanderlust. In the same period, I read “Night Comes to the Cumberlands,” by Harry Caudill, a lawyer from an old Kentucky family, whose lament for the defaced mountains made me want to go to Appalachia and see what was left. So many great writers, out and about, dealing with current issues, from their heart, from their eyes, from their brains, writing at entertaining length. Over the decades, I was always happy to spot Roger Angell in the press box. I cannot remember what we talked about, but it was fun. When I retired at the end of 2011, I kept up by phone when I particularly loved something he had written, and I called when he had a death in the family. When my wife and I started visiting her elderly uncle in coastal Maine, I called to tell Roger how much we loved his other world. My wife says I should have told him that some Angells popped up in her sprawling family tree from New England in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Finally, a confession: Every year, readers would look for Roger’s annual Christmas poem, hailing and pairing people with exotic and yet topical names. For decades, every December, I scanned the poem for my name, but it never appeared. I never told him how sad I was. Other than that, Roger Angell was, just as you imagined, great company as well as great reading. * * * In case you missed: Obit by Dwight Garner: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/sports/roger-angell-dead.html Tyler Kepner’s appreciation: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/sports/baseball/roger-angell.html And a labor-of-love sampling of Roger’s work, from Lonnie Shalton, lawyer in Kansas City and a true lover of baseball: http://lonniesjukebox.com/hot-stove-192/ |
