The Chipmunks

Submitted by Stan Isaacs

No Chattering in the Press Box

The lost tribe of sportswriters known as the Chipmunks

By Bryan Curtis

A few months ago, George Vecsey stopped writing his regular sports column for the New York Times. This is a big deal. Among the members of the most exclusive club in sportswriting, Vecsey was the last to trudge to a newspaper office. He was the last of the Chipmunks.

The Chipmunks were founded in 1962 or thereabouts. No one seems to remember. But their origin story goes like this: One day, in the New York Yankees locker room, there was a group of young sportswriters chattering away like they owned the place. Which they pretty much did. Across the room, there was an old sportswriter. The old sportswriter had once been the undisputed king of the locker room, but in this youthful chatter, he saw the future.

"You sound like small, furry animals," snarled Jimmy Cannon, the old sportswriter. "You're making that kind of noise. You sound like a goddamn lot of chipmunks."

Chipmunks. Well, that did it. The young writers had Jimmy's insult printed on sweatshirts. They handed out the sweatshirts like uniforms. "Rather than a term of derision," says Newsday's Steve Jacobson, "we made it our identity." Yes, for the next half-century, members of the most exclusive club in sportswriting would call themselves Chipmunks …

Larry

One night in 1962, Larry Merchant, a Chipmunk, was on the Philadelphia Phillies team plane. If you know Merchant from HBO — he recently threatened to kick Floyd Mayweather's ass — you can guess that the column he was typing on his Olivetti was snide. Sammy White, a backup catcher for the Phillies, was sitting in the seat in front of him. He got annoyed by the clacking of Merchant's keys. So White reached behind his head and tried to yank out the paper from the typewriter. The Olivetti flew down the aisle of the plane.

Merchant, who is 81 years old now, meets me at a New York hotel one morning. At his request, it is 7:45 a.m. Regarding the Sammy White incident, he says with a smile, "I did two things." He sent the bill for a new typewriter to the Phillies. And he wrote in his Philadelphia Daily News column: "It was the best throw Sammy White made all season."

These are the Chipmunks: Merchant of the Daily News; Stan Isaacs, Steve Jacobson, and George Vecsey of New York Newsday; Phil Pepe and Paul Zimmerman of the World-Telegram and Sun; and the late Leonard Shecter, the late Maury Allen, and the late Vic Ziegel of the New York Post.¹

In 1966, a Sporting News article described a Chipmunk writer as having "beatnik tendencies in dress and manner" and "hustle, in the form of endless questioning." The News also detected a blog-like admiration network: a "constant concern with, and profound admiration for, the literary talents of himself and his fellow chipmunks."

But the biggest qualification for Chipmunk membership was that you had to write sports for an afternoon paper. Back then, morning papers like the New York Times supplied the game replay, the who-what-where-when. At an afternoon paper, you had to break some news, come up with a funny angle. It wasn't blogging — let's not insult anyone here. But it pushed against the prevailing currents of sportswriting in the same way. "When we came along," Stan Isaacs says, "New York newspapers were stale. They were predictable." They weren't anymore.

Larry Merchant became the Philadelphia Daily News sports editor when he was 26 years old. He had a helmet of black hair and — his baseball writer Stan Hochman reports — the build of a tailback.² Merchant's sports page was a pirate ship. In 1958, he learned that two Philly workingmen had had a fight on the job that they'd decided to settle in the boxing ring. Well, the first tenet of Chipmunk sportswriting is that you hype what's interesting, not what's hyped. Merchant played the bout like Ali-Frazier. The first-day Daily News headline was, "'He Called Me a Lousy Bricklayer.'" The second-day headline was, "'He Is a Lousy Bricklayer.'" The crowd at the Cambria was so big they had to call the fire department.

Merchant was hired by the New York Post in 1966. There, he practiced the second tenet of Chipmunkery: impudence. "One thing about all of them that's important," says the writer Pete Hamill, "is there was no sentimentality. By which I mean, no faking sympathy that they didn't feel." The broadcaster Marv Albert says, "I thought Larry Merchant was one of the great sports columnists of all time. I'd get the Post to read him."

One afternoon, Merchant was in the Yankee Stadium press box when word came in that Jackie Kennedy was at the game. The young sportswriters were told to keep away. "I said, 'Fuck it,'" Merchant remembers, "and I went down and tried to interview her." Merchant reached the First Widow and asked if she had a word for the Post. "Thank you," Kennedy said. She flashed a defensive smile. Merchant asked again. "Thank you," Kennedy said, still smiling.

Merchant: "So after about eight thank-yous, I got the idea."

A Chipmunk maintained a suspicion of sports television, which was beginning to encroach on his turf. "Television," Lenny Shecter wrote, "is like some gentle, mindless robot carrying sports tenderly in its arms to the top of the mountain and then over the cliff." Case in point: The 1970 Super Bowl between the Colts and Cowboys was a lousy game that featured 11 turnovers. But the NBC announcers remained mute. "They reacted," Merchant wrote, "as though they were watching a squadron of Communist pigeons defiling the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier."

Merchant was an urbane gent. Any sportswriter on deadline can come up with a movie reference, but a Chipmunk aspired to be a true cultural traveler. At the 1960 World Series, Merchant and several others saw Lenny Bruce perform. Merchant wrote about '60s radical Abbie Hoffman's stint as a Brandeis tennis player.³ "Why wouldn't you write about Abbie Hoffman playing tennis at Brandeis?" Merchant says. You would, of course, unless you were too busy writing what a swell guy Mickey Mantle was.

It was at Hoffman's apartment that Merchant met the acid guru Timothy Leary. "Leary said something," Merchant remembers, "that was directly on point to what we were doing. He said, 'If you want to study human behavior, don't watch rats in a maze. Go sit in the center-field bleachers at Fenway Park.'"

Larry Merchant took that observation and got a whole column out of it.

Tony Kornheiser, who broke into newspapers at the height of Chipmunkery, thought the young, hip, wiseass sportswriters were minor gods. "It was more than wanting to be as good as them," Kornheiser tells me. "We wanted them to like us."

Jimmy's Apartment

As any Chipmunk would tell you, a good story needs a heavy. I have him right here. He's Jimmy Cannon, the Chipmunk nemesis. This is Jimmy's apartment.

Tonight, Cannon and the Chipmunk Phil Pepe had been covering the fights at Madison Square Garden. Cannon asked for a lift home. Pepe regarded this as a mixed blessing. For while Cannon was arguably the most famous sportswriter on the planet, he was his own favorite subject. He'd drone on about his pal Hemingway. Or read his own hypnotic prose that allowed him to cannonball right into a ballplayer's head. Cannon would begin a column, "You're Mickey Mantle … " And then he'd tell you what Mantle hoped and feared.

So: You're Jimmy Cannon. You've entered a late inning where you're very famous but you're no longer especially important. Soon, no New York paper will carry your syndicated column. "It was a crabby old man who was seeing the end of his era," says Robert Lipsyte, the former Times sports columnist. "Here were these guys who were young and energetic and relating to ballplayers and passing him by. That's what made him angry."

So tonight, Jimmy, you're motioning Phil Pepe into your bedroom. Don't get funny ideas! You just want to show Pepe a little painting of the New York skyline that hangs over your bed. "It didn't look like anything special to me," Pepe says. Then he notices the artist's signature. Frank Sinatra. Frank gave Jimmy a painting. Pepe is floored.

You're Jimmy Cannon, and on this night, anyway, you showed that goddamn Chipmunk how great you are.

Lenny

Leonard Shecter, the young Chipmunk at the New York Post, once wrote that he hated sports. "Bullshit," Steve Jacobson says. "He loved it." But like H.L. Mencken and Lester Bangs, Lenny showed his love in a funny way. He loved sports by whacking it with a bat.

Shecter and the Chipmunks arrived at the sports page at a propitious moment. The sportswriter of 1942 had gotten terrific access to athletes but swallowed the salacious stories. The sportswriter of 2012 has poor access, but makes up for it (sometimes, in theory) by writing the salacious stories. "There was this shining moment of the Chipmunks," says Robert Lipsyte, "in which they had total access and they pretty much wrote what they saw."

Shecter was on the Yankees team train in September 1958 when Ralph Houk, then a coach, slugged reliever Ryne Duren in an intramural brawl. Shecter's scoop — given to his editor only reluctantly, and a day late, after he was berated for getting beaten on another story — peeled back the curtain on how ballplayers behave.

Vince Lombardi waved Shecter into his inner sanctum in 1967. In Shecter's Esquire profile, Lombardi came off as a sniggering sadist. Shecter found a Packers player sprawled out on the ground, the other players averting their eyes as if he were "lying in a doorway in the Bowery." He printed St. Vincent's four-letter words. In a wicked touch, Shecter described the number of Packers stars who were prematurely balding, as if Lombardi had screamed their hair off.

Lombardi read the profile and, for the first time in his life, took a knee. "It absolutely destroyed him," the Packers' PR director said to biographer David Maraniss. Lombardi told reporters the article had brought his mother to tears.

This was Shecter's Chipmunkery: An all-out assault on the old-time heroes. He had a rule he called Shecter's Law of Diminishing Persons, which stated that the farther a man could hit a baseball, the more likely he was to be an asshole. Screw 'em, then! The Chipmunks hunted for "losers" — Shecter's affectionate term — whose distance from greatness might convince them to be co-conspirators. This is how Shecter met Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton.

"I first learned about him in spring training in 1962," Bouton remembers. "As soon as I made the roster, players came over and said, 'Wait till you meet that fucking Shecter.' 'Whatever you do, don't talk to that fucking Shecter.' I thought that was his first name: Fucking Shecter."

On the first day of the season, Fucking Shecter strolled into the Yankees locker room. He was a fat man⁴ with a mustache and a square face — Marty Appel, the former Yankees PR man, says he is reminded now of a young David Stern. "I look over," Bouton says, "and here's a guy with a big smile on his face, the friendliest-looking guy in the world. He comes over and we have a nice conservation. I thought, He was a great guy!" If Mickey Mantle had seen this meeting, he would have wept.

At a lunch in 1968, Shecter suggested Bouton ought to keep a baseball diary, and Bouton told him he'd already started. There have been a lot of things written about the book that sprouted out of that diary, Ball Four, which Bouton wrote and Shecter edited. But think of it from the sportswriter's point of view. For a man who longed to kick in the door to the locker room, here was the door being kicked out. It was an inside job. "He effectively had a camera and a microphone on buses and in the hotel rooms and the bars," Bouton says.

They had 18-hour editing sessions in Lenny's Manhattan apartment.⁵ They read drafts of Ball Four so many times that it became unfunny. "I can't judge it anymore," Shecter said to Bouton. "It seems like it's all cardboard." When news of Mantle's booze pilgrimages landed like an anvil on baseball, Bowie Kuhn suggested that Bouton blame the book on Shecter.⁶ Leukemia killed Shecter in 1974, at 47, before he could see Ball Four used as evidence to bury the baseball owners at the arbitration hearings.

After Ball Four exploded, Marty Appel says, "The tendency around the Yankee organization was to say Shecter never liked sports, never liked baseball, never liked the Yankees." To which the proper response is: Bullshit. He loved them.

Back at Jimmy's Apartment

You're Jimmy Cannon, and you're staggering, reeling, collapsing on the mat. This is May 1971. You were getting ready for the Kentucky Derby when you suffered a stroke at your apartment. When the paramedics find you on the floor some two days later, you've passed the time thinking about old boxers. Your left arm is paralyzed.

Jimmy, in your sad, final years, you don't exactly shower the Chipmunks with love. But in one interview⁷ — in the midst of a stream of anti-Chipmunk invective — you admit the youngsters "aren't so bad." This may be your curmudgeonly way of saying that the old sportswriter and his young nemeses have a lot in common. "Jimmy," Robert Lipsyte says, "was the original Chip."

Clear away the generational angst and it's obvious. When Cannon was young, he'd shoved aside old, tremendously famous, tremendously bad sportswriters (Granny Rice, Paul Gallico) just like the Chipmunks shoved aside Cannon. Before he became a reactionary venting about black Muslims, he'd quipped that Joe Louis "is a credit to his race — the human race." Adjust for years and here's Lenny Shecter describing the feds' case against Muhammad Ali: "One can only guess that some important person in Washington said, 'Get me that n-----' … "

The Chipmunks aren't renouncing Cannonism, Jimmy. They're making an adjustment. An adjustment for the age of free agency and televised fights and black Muslims and Jim Bouton. You're Jimmy Cannon. Maybe in your hard heart you realize the Chipmunks are rebels, just like you, who stepped into the on-deck circle at a different time.

Stan

On a warm day last spring, Stan Isaacs, the wiliest of the Chipmunks, stands in the door of his Pennsylvania retirement cottage. Before we list the rebellions Isaacs staged on the sports page, we should start with what could be called his coda. Steve Jacobson, Isaacs's colleague at Newsday, once turned to him in the press box and asked what he was writing — you know, so they wouldn't overlap.

"Don't worry," Isaacs said. "It won't be what you're doing."

"You might want to see this." Isaacs, who is 83, is leading me to to a small, sunlit room. This is Stan's office. In addition to being the site from which he still cranks out a column, it is the National Archives of Chipmunkery. There's a black-and-white photo of a young Isaacs with Muhammad Ali. Another of Larry Merchant in his pretty-boy days. Stan has a photo of Jimmy Cannon, but it hangs in the bathroom.

Isaacs started at Newsday in 1954. As New Yorkers fled to Long Island, Newsday grew into a suburban powerhouse with a swashbuckling sports editor, Jack Mann. Long before the Times, Newsday began refusing the free plane rides and goodies that had been doled out by team owners since the golden age of sportswriting.⁸ "We felt we were serious newspaper guys trying to treat sports like city-side reporters," Isaacs says. Another important tenet of the Chipmunk: If you're going to be a professional wise guy, you first have to be a professional.

Isaacs was a pro. In 1964, he caught San Francisco Giants manager Alvin Dark saying black and Latino athletes lacked "mental alertness." Nearly two decades later, he discovered a fellow dissident named Keith Olbermann doing radio in New York. According to Olbermann, the profile Isaacs wrote got him his very first gig on television.⁹

But the best part about writing from Long Island was the elbow room. Larry and Lenny were under the thumb of their Manhattan editors. Stan was free to be a spritely humanist — a liberal in all senses — gathering material for his Groucho Marx routine. "I don't know any other paper in the country where he could have done that kind of thing," says the Chipmunk George Vecsey, who worked with Isaacs at Newsday. "He set a tone of goofiness and worldliness and intelligence all in the same package."

Rebellion no. 1: the 1962 World Series. Ralph Terry, the New York Yankees pitcher, throws a Series-clinching shutout in Game 7. Later, at his locker, Terry takes a call from his wife and then explains to the sportswriters that she'd been up all night feeding their baby. In his Brooklyn accent, Isaacs squeaks: "Breast or bottle?"

Rebellion no. 2: a Yankees game in Kansas City. Isaacs learns that owner Charlie O. Finley has installed a sheep meadow beyond the right-field wall. Isaacs takes his typewriter, leaves the press box, and reports from the meadow for the entire game.

Rebellion no. 3: "Now here's a column no one else would have written," Isaacs says in his office, as he pulls out a clipping. February 25, 1969. At a museum, Isaacs sees a painting that dates from 1560 and is credited to Pieter Brueghel the Elder. There are children climbing on each other's backs, and Stan thinks old Pieter may have discovered the precursor to buck buck.

Stan Isaacs takes that notion and gets a whole column out of it.

Sportswriting is like a Third World country. It makes up for a lack of natural resources with an endless supply of revolutionaries. The Chipmunks weren't the last exclusive club. The next one included Tony Kornheiser (the Times), David Hirshey (the Daily News), and Henry Hecht (the Post). Thurman Munson dubbed them "the Munchkins." "We were so enamored with the Chipmunks," Kornheiser says, "that we got brown shirts with little animals on them and tried to peddle ourselves as the Munchkins." After that, some more clubs were founded, once-young writers grew into bitter, old Jimmy Cannons, and here we all are on the Internet today.

Stan Isaacs says to me, "This gives you a sense of my nature. The Bryn Mawr women's basketball team is 0-18. I think I should go and talk to the coach."

He pauses. I can see Stan plotting a Chipmunk column, one that takes "normal" sportswriting and does a Groucho walk in the other direction. "Oh-and-eighteen," Isaacs says with fascination. "What's that like?"

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Men Who Went Against The Grain For Me

By Sheila Klass

 These days I wear a handsome gold wristwatch from my employer, Manhattan Community College, CUNY.  I can’t tell time on it, but I love it nonetheless and I don it first thing  after my shower every morning.  It is my trophy!  I’ve been teaching English at the college for forty-five years .  That I shower daily  is ample proof  of my modernity; I grew up in a one-bath-a –week, heat-your-own-water Brooklyn flat.

     This luxurious watch, designed as a gift for an academician, obviously HAD to have Roman numerals!  Ancients are happiest with the script of their childhood. Unfortunately, I can’t read those tiny lines etched in gold. 

    I am legally blind. 

      Nevertheless, I am  still a dependable member  of the work force. There are so many of us survivors who are still working that  a term  has been coined to describe us: OLD OLDS.  I’m fond  of it; in the 1930’s my well-off Uncle Harry had a precious car he called  his OLD OLDS.

The fact that I still work, that I  like work and want to work troubles some people.  Why don’t you sit back and smell the  flowers?” the coy ones wonder.  You need a hobby, the bossy ones advise.  Surely your pension can’t be so small, the estimators guess.

“I like work,” I say, and I have learned that is enough.  No  need to try to share the esoteric  pleasures of a busy day dealing with books and language and ideas and academic nonsense.

The woman who chairs my department is an African American scholar and a role model for our students, many of whom are women of diverse ethnicities.  In her they see mirrored their own possibilities.  My own youth offered no such hopes.  In the orthodox Jewish community in Williamsburg, a Brooklyn slum, I knew only two kinds of women: those who aspired solely to be wives and mothers in the Tradition, and the rigorous, non-Jewish, unmarried schoolteachers who came to civilize us, the children of immigrants. 

Though I had no role models, I did have help.  Oddly, it was from men, not proto-feminists but men who unaccountably went against their own religious and chauvinist convictions sometimes to help me toward independence and a career.  I remember them with gratitude.

In Eastern District High School in 1944, a balding English teacher interprets “The Scarlet Letter” brilliantly. He leads us to appreciate the strength and beauty of the human spirit in Hawthorne’s heroine, Hester Prynne, forced by Puritan Boston to wear the letter “A” for adulteress.  But this very teacher, who adores Hawthorne and has spent his life immersed in scholarship, has adopted his idol’s prejudices as well. Intrinsic in femininity, he argues, is lack of genius.  As writers, women might be good, but can never be great.  With malicious pleasure, he quotes Hawthorne’s description of a cow belonging to Margaret Fuller, the bluestocking writer.  “She is very fractious and apt to kick over the milk pail…but she has a very intelligent face and seems to be of a reflective cast of character.  I doubt not that she will soon perceive the expedience of being on good terms with the rest of her sisterhood.”

We all know Hawthorne is not talking about the cow.  He hates this woman writer who is presumptuous enough to go her own way.  I sit silently, bewildered by this injustice.  I do not dare to challenge it.  I am too ignorant and too cowardly.

My teacher goes on to quote Hawthorne on the women writers of his day.  “America is now given over to a d----d mob of scribbling women, and I

should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed.”  I am so glad when at last we leave Hawthorne for Dickens.

            Yet, at the end of the school year, this same teacher recommends me – not a boy – for English Honors.  He scribbles “Excellent!” in red pencil on my final essay, and he takes the trouble to keep me after class to urge me, “Go to college.”

“No one in my family has ever gone to college,” I tell him.

“Never mind.  Don’t let your education end here.  You can be quite a good writer,” he argues fiercely.

I cannot help myself.  “Good but never great,” I murmur, and he flushes, recognizing his own words.  “Don’t let it all end here,” he repeats. “You have a fine mind.”  I am dismissed.

Confused, but inspired and grateful, I begin to think: Yes!  I will go to college.  I’ll go to Brooklyn College.  After all, it’s free.  What could be better?  I am jubilant.  It won’t all end here.

My parents, unfortunately, do not see it that way.  They argue that I am smart enough already. That really means, “ Your mouth is too big already.” They insist that what I must do immediately after graduation is get a job and help out at home, while I wait for someone to marry me.  My father speaks rhapsodically of a mythical “big” man he knows who might hire me for a clerical job.  A white-collar job!

My parents are impoverished observant Jews.  My mother – American-born, the eldest of seven children – never finished high school.  An avid reader of romances in her youth – Sir Walter Scott, Eleanor Porter, R.D. Blackmore – she reveres education and scholarship but not for me.  She takes her fixed position: bitterly opposed.

My father, who emigrated from Hungary just in time to fight in World War I, reads and speaks Hungarian, German, Yiddish and English; he reads Hebrew as well.  For years he worked as an immigration interpreter but the Depression ended that. He is a clothing presser in a factory that makes theatrical costumes. While Torah study delights him and occupies his spare time, scholarship and Judaism are, for him, synonymous – for men.

I take the Brooklyn College entrance exam.  There are bitter fights at home.  I pass the exam.  The battles increase in ferocity. Until – armed with the very thin bravado that comes of teenage desperation – I find a job as a live-in babysitter near the college, a room, breakfast and dinner in exchange for various domestic tasks. I move out.  It is 1945.  I am the first unmarried young woman from our community to do this heinous thing.  My parents try to conceal their disgrace; they do not acknowledge to anyone that I am not living at home.  When the men in the synagogue ask questions, my father is evasive.  He is mortally embarrassed.

My mother does not relent.  My father, slowly at first and then with increasing kindness, surreptitiously sends me a few dollars when he can and sometimes he sends me a salami.  He begins to ask an occasional question about what I am studying. He is fascinated by much of it. Very gradually (and never in front of my mother) he becomes proud that I am a “college girl,” a phrase that is a delectable sweet on his lips.  Periodically, he garners a remnant of cloth in his factory and sews me a skirt or a pair of slacks.  Since the fabrics are meant for theatrical extravaganzas and he is a presser  - not a skilled tailor - my garments tend toward the bizarre, but I am grateful for them.

I work weekends roasting nuts in the window of the huge Planter’s Peanuts store opposite Duffy Square in Manhattan.  I am violating the Sabbath.  I understand how much this hurts my father, but he does not hassle me about it.  It is my only source of income.

In 1949 I graduate.  He comes to the Commencement, and Miracle of Miracles, he brings my mother along!  The day makes him happy, though he is troubled by my decision to go to graduate school.  “Enough is enough,” he says, then wisely lets it drop .   During the graduation he is one of those embarrassing fathers who hurries up and down the aisles snapping countless pictures.  What a bright and glorious day he makes for me on that field in Flatbush!

One other man looms as an unexpected source of strength during my college days, my late brother-in-law, a massive ex-football player and an unlikely figure in any feminist’s pantheon. A truck-driver, he had to quit high school during hard times and he works in his father’s meat delivery business.  They work in the late hours of the night and in the early morning delivering meat to the city’s small restaurants. 

This man, married to my sweet gentle sister, finds me argumentative and politically softheaded, an altogether peculiar sister-in-law careening toward spinsterhood on the academic track.  “Too smart for your own good,” he sums me up.  We differ on practically everything in arguments that are frequent, loud, long, and good-natured, for that is his temperament.  He is not a man to hold grudges.

Late one night, in 1947, he finally brings himself to believe what I have been saying all along – that I want to be a writer more than anything in the world.  “A writer should have a typewriter,” he tells my sister, as he gets into his work clothes to set out to deliver meat.  And he goes out and buys me one.  I mean goes out literally.  At 2:00 A.M. he buys me a Smith Corona portable from a street peddler near the wholesale meat markets on Tenth Avenue. 

“It’s probably hot,” he assures me with glee.  “The guy took off like a bird the minute I gave him his money.”

Who knows?  My brother-in-law always spends too much, and when we protest his extravagance he invariably defends his purchases by claiming he got them very cheaply because they were “hot”. 

“Do me a favor,” he asks me privately. “Don’t mention outside who gave this to you.  I don’t want to be known as the idiot of the neighborhood.

“Why?” I ask.

“For encouraging your pipe dreams.  Just don’t talk about it.  Okay?”

I agree.

That typewriter stays hot for more than thirty years through college and graduate school and then through countless drafts of my books.  I pass it on to my children, who use it through high school.

My life moves along.  After two years of graduate work in Iowa City, I return to teach Junior High School in Harlem -- for a long time.  I marry and have two children. I stay at home to care for them.   

Seven more years pass, and I sorely miss teaching. I find part-time work at Borough of Manhattan Community College; I am ecstatic.  Each semester for the next three years I teach one or two courses, and, in emergencies, I substitute, readily, for colleagues.  I am teaching composition, literature, and, occasionally, creative writing. 

When I am almost forty years old, my husband and I decide we want one more child.  I become pregnant.  I continue to teach and all is well.  The baby is due during the winter recess.  A crisis occurs.  The BMCC English Department is suddenly awarded several “faculty lines.”  The college is expanding and they are beginning an immediate search for qualified, full-time faculty.  I am qualified, ungainly in the last trimester of my pregnancy, but qualified!  And like Barkis in “David Copperfield”,  I am ‘willin’. 

The Chairman of the English Department is a quiet, scholarly bachelor, a poet.  Often, we talk about our favorite writers and sometimes we read one another’s work and offer criticism.  He is a consummate academician and administrator, brought in years before to correct a chaotic, unruly situation. He runs the Department thoughtfully and skillfully.

He sends for me.  “There are new, full-time lines,” he says, “and I would gladly recommend you – except for your condition.”

“I’m absolutely fine,” I assure him.

“I know you are – now,” he says gravely,  “but remember: when I came here this Department was anarchic.  There was a lot of irresponsibility and excessive absence.  I need to be sure that anyone we hire will be here every teaching day.  “If this baby . . .?”  He rubs his chin pensively, conjuring up fearful scenarios.

“The baby isn’t due till Christmas break.  I promise you I will be here every teaching day.” 

He is listening, but I can sense his uncertainty.

“It’s a commitment I can make honorably.  I respect the way you run the Department.”

He taps a pencil and ponders.  I know that I have been absolutely reliable so far. And that he is a fair person.  I count on him.

            He gets up smiling and comes round the desk to give me his hand.  “I’m with you,” he says.  “We writers have to look out for one another.  But I’m the easy part.  Now we only have to convince the Dean.”

            The Dean of Faculty is a cold,  courtly scholar of the very old school.  His hair, his eyes and his suits are iron gray.   He has never been seen – even on the hottest days of summer – without a vest as well as his jacket.  Legends about his conservatism, his inflexibility, and his integrity abound.  He is an institution within our institution.  I tremble at the prospect, but I want the job.

            First, my Chairman goes to see him and presents my application and curriculum vitae.  He argues my case: academic achievements, professional experience, publications, years of part-timing and loyalty to the school.  He offers fresh copies of my books for the Dean’s perusal. 

            Right off, the Dean says no.  He is adamant.  Most appalling to him is the unseemliness of a woman in my condition standing in front of a class.  All around the country, women are wearing miniskirts -- but the Dean has not noticed the changes.

            My advocate argues for me with such fervor that he wears the Dean down to the point where the Dean at least promises to consider my candidacy.  “Look at her books,” my colleague urges.  “Her condition is irrelevant.  She’s a valuable teacher.”

            No one could have done more for me.  A whole week passes and I am in despair.  Then a formal letter comes requesting that I appear for an interview.

            I don my most flowing maternity dress, a pale blue cotton creation of endless pleats and fabric, which cannot do very much for me because this is a large baby I am carrying.  I do my hair in what I consider a neat and scholarly style, and I take pains with my make-up and grooming.

The Dean comes to greet me at his office door and almost carries me to a large chair.  He moves to sit behind his vast, polished desk on which there is a single, rather thin set of papers in a folder – my file.

“Mrs. Klass,” he says, “I have been looking at your vitae.”  There is a long pause during which he puts on his glasses and riffles through the few papers.  “It is seven years since you left your last full-time employment.  How can you account for those seven years?”  An implicit accusation of malingering, of idleness, hovers in the air.

“Well,” I begin, “I had two children and I stayed home to raise them.  I wrote a number of books, two of which were published.”

Elbows on the desk, he presses his hands together palm-to-palm.  The silence is awesome as he weighs these activities of mine.

“Actually, those were pretty busy and productive years,” I follow up, “if you count two children and two books.”

He reflects on this challenge.  “I count children and books,” he finally responds and gives me a thin smile.

Tremors course through my body like aftershocks.  I am so excited and overwhelmed, it occurs to me that I might go into premature labor right there in his immaculate lair.  The thought is so unseemly it helps relax me.

“And now,” he says, “though it may be indelicate, we must talk about your condition.  I believe that full-time working at this stage would be perilous for both you and the child.”

It is 1967.  I know of no precedents, and I have no legal resources to help me.  “I brought a note from my doctor,” I say doggedly, and hand it over.

“Nonetheless” the Dean continues somberly, “I had a cousin who died in childbirth some years ago simply because she did not rest and take care of herself.”

“I rest a lot and take very good care of myself,” I assure him.  “I love teaching here, and if you give me the chance I’ll do a very good job.”

“We’ll have to see,” the Dean says, rising and hastening to assist me out of the chair.  I do a creditable job of getting up.  “This is a highly irregular situation,” he goes on.  “I wouldn’t have expected it of your Chairman.  I shall have to consider its many aspects.”

I am emboldened by desperation.  “It is very hard to be discriminated against – as you well know – because of a natural physical condition,” I say, looking him in the eye.

At the door, he shakes my hand firmly. “I admire your spirit.  I wish you good health and an easy time of it.”

I thank him, and I repeat, “I hope children and books count enough.

Looking a little dazed, he stands in his doorway and watches as I trundle off as light-footedly as possible.

My Chairman is in his office waiting eagerly.  At his request, I reconstruct the entire interview.

“It’s hard to believe, but I think maybe you’ve got it,” he says, shaking his head in wonder.  “The Dean is really a fair and decent man.”  He begins to grin.  “I really think you’ve got it.”

He is prescient.

Indeed, I had it!  And I have held onto it for forty-five years. 

I am awed and grateful when I think about these men of generous spirit who defied custom and culture,  who forfeited male privilege so I might realize my ambition.  They went against  the grain for me. Their generosity was, what Hawthorne, when he was truly great, celebrated: the strength and beauty of the human spirit.

OBAMA ‘PLAGUED’ BY PROBLEMS

By Harriet Posnak Lesser

(My friend Mischa Goss, who works for the White House Requisitions Office, sent me this top secret memo from Holy Moses Enterprises of Egypt Land, NY. Please read before Election Day. It explains a lot.)

Dear Barack Obama,

We regret any inconvenience caused by a mix-up in the online order you placed in December 2009. The blame rests with our OT guys. No, we did not mean IT guys, we meant OT guys as in Old Testament.   Your order somehow ended up with our Bible Department, which has been sending you plagues instead of the plaques you actually requested.  (You know, the ones that said “HOPE” in big blue caps. REMEMBER??) Our office, which until recently used only stone tablets, has now gone hi-tech thanks to a generous grant from the Melissa and Bill (Golden) Gates Foundation and therein lies the problem.  We realize that you inherited a financial crisis, an overwhelming unemployment rate, a huge budget deficit and John Boehner, but according to our eye for an eye; tooth for a tooth policy, we have to charge you for the order, aka The Deluxe Exodus Package, which includes the following:

Frogs: We arranged for a swarm of frogs, fish, sea birds, etc. to come out of the Gulf of Mexico in 2009, following the explosion of a BP drilling rig that dumped millions of barrels of oil into the water. Amazing how that always works. 

Lice: We sent most of them to Congress where they are working both sides of the aisle and irritating the heck out of people. Really hairy situation.

Dog flies:  Couldn’t find any flying dogs so we launched a Navy drone over Iran in 2011 and let the Iranians bring it down.  Never learned how that ended, so we are not billing you at this time.

Murrain:  A fancy name for the cattle plague  which was mailed to the White House shortly after your inauguration.  You spoiled that by immediately banning sick cows from the food supply. Guess you didn’t trust the chef, a leftover from the Bush administration.

Boils: 2011 was our best year yet for wildfires.  We hit Arizona, Texas and California real bad.  Then you stepped in with the big bucks and ruined everything.

Just Plain Plague: We delivered our combination Bird/Swine flu in 2009, causing an expensive albeit fleeting distraction. Billed as the deadliest strain ever, it was renamed H1N1 and disappeared shortly afterward. Lots of swine and a few birds sued the government for slander anyway.

Darkness:  This one had nothing to do with us. Blame it on daylight saving time and Ben Franklin.

Hail: In 2010, you pledged $100 million in aid to Haiti after a killer earthquake decimated the island. Guilty! One year later, we hit Japan with a quake and followed up with a tsunami.  Even we get tired of same old.

Hail 2: We made history with Hurricane Irene in August 2011. Because you’re such a good customer, we’re putting Irene on the installment plan to be paid in full by January 2012 or January 2016.  We call such arrangements “term” insurance.

Firstborns:  Please be advised that we’ve dropped Plague Number 10 in accordance with our No Smote-ing Policy.

Like the Biblical originals, all these plagues have worked.  Check out what’s happening in Egypt now.  Meanwhile, we owe you one more shipment.  You have a choice of locusts or Kardashians, the worst plague known to 21^st century humanity.  And that’s fer sher.

A Time of Mickey Mantle, Me and J. Edgar Hoover

By Stan Isaacs

The Federal Bureau of Investigation seems to be in the news these days on many issues. It reminds me of a time when, to my great surprise, the FBI linked my name with none other than Mickey Mantle.

In the summer of 1998 CBS Channel 2 in New York broke the story that the FBI had investigated Mantle. It cited some1969 correspondence between President Nixon’s domestic adviser, John Erlichman, and the FBI. New York Times sports media columnist Richard Sandomir noted that I was listed along with Mantle, Billy Martin and Mr. Branch Rickey.

It turned out to be in connection with the 1969 baseball All Star Game in Washington. Nixon invited a large group of baseball people, executives, former players and the press to a reception the afternoon preceding the night game. The White House had asked for an FBI check on the guests who would be attending the affair, and a CBS correspondent had used the Freedom of Information act to acquire copies of the FBI report. It mentioned Mantle and me among others.

Actually, the report stated that “the central files of the FBI reveal no pertinent derogatory information regarding the following individuals.” A long list of blacked-out names followed. Some names that were not blacked out included baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, Kansas City Royals owner Ewing Kauffman, NBC executive Carl Lindemann, Pittsburgh Pirates broadcaster Bob Prince and Los Angeles (nee’ Brooklyn) Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley, whom many law-respecting folk might have regarded as a true enemy of the people.

All of the above were given a clean bill of health by the FBI. There was, however, another section that said, somewhat ominously I believe, “attached are separate memoranda regarding the following individuals: Stan Isaacs, Mickey Mantle, Billy Martin and Mrs. Branch Rickey.” I’d like to think I was listed first because I was the most suspicious suspect, but I take it that the names were listed in alphabetical order.

It developed that Mantle was in the FBI files because he had received threatening letters in the mail, and that in 1956 he reportedly was blackmailed for $15,000 after being caught with another man’s wife in a compromising position. And because his name--and probably Martin’s too—had come up in connection with gambling. A 1963 entry has a source telling the FBI that Mantle received telephone calls from a known gambler.

It is difficult to comprehend why Mrs. Rickey, the gentle wife of the general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, also was worthy of special treatment by the FBI. It couldn’t be, could it, because she approved of her husband’s role in breaking the color line in baseball by signing Jackie Robinson?

I believed that my newfound eminence stemmed from having started my newspaper career in the long ago with the Daily Compass. That was the late-but-not-lamented-by-many left wing daily of the McCarthy era that existed for three financially challenged years. It was most noted for having been the paper of residence of the legendary I.F. Stone.

After my name in the FBI report was cited in the Times, I decided to do what I had meant to do for a long time: ask the FBI for my file. Eventually it was sent to me. It consisted of 15 pages. I thought it would include some juicy stuff stemming from my days at the Compass as a possible enemy of the republic when I argued for such subversive causes as putting Satchel Paige in the baseball Hall of Fame.

Nope. My file included nary a word about the Compass. It started when I was at Newsday where I settled in as sports reporter two years after the Compass folded. It noted that I worked for Newsday and gave my address on Marshall Street in Elmont, Long Island where I had lived previously. It even listed my old phone number at West 88^th Street in Manhattan.

I have to admit I was a disgustingly upstanding citizen because it was recorded that there were no “negative reports” on me from the Credit Bureau of New York, the New York Bureau of Motor Vehicles and the Bureau of Criminal Identification.

The name of the person who seemed to have ratted on me was blacked out on several pages. I couldn’t figure out what would have been subversive about me at Newsday other than the fact that I once wrote a glowing piece about the football team of the Red Devils of Freeport High School. My wife thinks it was because I wrote the column called, “Out of Left Field.”

I must have passed muster with J. Edgar Hoover’s sleuths because I went to the reception. Nixon told us about listening on the radio to the tumultuous development in the 1929 World Series when the Philadelphia Athletics overcame the Chicago Cubs with a 10-run rally in the seventh inning of the fourth game. He wowed the baseball people by reciting a batter-by-batter description of the happening. I learned later that Nixon had, the night before, bade his son-in-law, David Eisenhower, to research that inning and give him the specifics details.

Like all the others, I had my picture taken shaking hands with Nixon. My mother disapproved of the photo.   

Some Slings and Arrows -- Touching a Few Bases

By Stan Isaacs

Some short shots in sundry directions:

How unhappy would we all be if the United States pulled its troops out of Iraq , Afghanistan, Germany and South Korea?

I am not a fan of the new “Sunday Review” section of the New York Times. At a time when we are inundated with opinions -- from every source this side of a loudmouth orating on a street corner --  the Times has joined the cacophony of pronunciamentos. I preferred when the Times presented intelligent summaries that put the week’s news in perspective.

I keep waiting for somebody to undue the boffo mistake of eliminating the cartoons and the jokes of the late-night comedians from the Sunday section. The “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me” feature plays well on public radio stations; it doesn’t read funny in print.

I miss Bob Herbert from the Times op-ed page. And Frank Bruni doesn’t make up for the loss of Frank Rich to New York Magazine. And I do wish that President Obama and his people make it a point to start their day with Paul Krugman’s column, when he writes.                 

                                      *         *            *

With all that, here’s an about-face: praise and appreciation for the breaking-the-mold act of running a near 4,000 word piece by Emory University psychology professor Drew Westen on Aug. 7. Westen’s “What Happened to Obama’s Passion” was a brilliant analysis of  President Obama’s ineffectiveness and the disappointment of a populace that  expected so much more of him. 

Westen’s book “The Political Brain” was a groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in determining the political life of the nation. He has drawn considerable attention in Democratic circles.

At the heart of his essay on Obama is this: “When faced with the greatest crisis, the greatest levels of inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it.”

In the same vein was a column by Philadelphia Inquirer’s Dick Polman who urged the President to adopt the 1968 campaign “give-‘em-hell” style of Harry Truman.  Polman wrote, “Mr. President, can you speak Truman? If you want to stay in office beyond 2012, you need to channel his language.”

He asked that Truman heed the words of Cicero, the orator of ancient Rome. Cicero reputedly said that if you find yourself stuck in politics, start a fight. Even if you don’t know how to win it, it’s only when the fight is on that you can hope to see your way through.

A friend who wants so badly to see a rally by Obama struck a poignant note in a recent discussion about Obama’s difficulties. He said, “They are eating him up.”

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (Ind.) also makes a significant point. He says there is no doubt Democrats will be voting for Obama in 2012 because the Republican alternative will be so way-out -- or awful. But that doesn’t mean he should be given a pass now. Sanders  urges Democrats to put the heat on Obama for progressive policies, the very heat applied by Westen in his epic essay.

I have tried, without luck, to find out if the Westen essay made any kind of impact at the White House. I hope so.

The greatest con job pulled on the American people is the Republicans making the case that by not taxing the filthy rich, it helps create jobs for the needy poor. 

Gripes:

            -The low sound level in too many new movies; American flicks as well as British.

            -The ear-piercing sounds coming out of public address systems at ball parks and arenas.

           - Movie theaters loading up several commercials,  then five full-of-violence movie previews (we used to call them “coming attractions”)  before delaying the movie anew by displaying the names of several production companies.  

            - Long delays between pitches at big league baseball games.

            - Long delays between points in tennis matches, notably the incessant bouncing of balls by Novak Djokovic before he serves. .

            - Long waits by golfers standing over their putts; a reason to root for Rory McElroy, who goes up to the ball and, without a pause, hits it.    

            - Screeching by women tennis players as part of their serves

I feel sorry for Tiger Woods.

Do Republican House of Representatives leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor deserve any more respect than the most rabid Tea Partyniks?

I feel sorry for the Mets

It doesn’t thrill this NY-Brooklyn loyalist that the Los Angeles National League team seems to want to assuage guilt by wearing uniforms with “Brooklyn” on the uniform front with a B” hat on certain day games. The Walter O’Malley stain can never be washed away.

The Rupert Murdoch hacking story needs a juicy ending. That would be the discovery of criminality by Murdoch’s Fox Network and NY Post.  

I’d like to see one major league franchise alternate “This Land Is Your Land, This Land is My Land” with the usual “God Bless America” during seventh-inning stretches.

An Open Letter to My Fellow Vanguardians:

Let’s Save the Economy this Week

By Harriet Posnak Lesser

Well, you’ve done it again.  You’ve made me revert, albeit briefly, to the self-doubting, inarticulate newbie I was in the fall of 1950.  This time you did it in one fell swoop.  (Oops; see what I mean?)  Actually, in several -- and - -recent fell swoops.

There was Stan Isaacs’s wonderful dissertation on Paul Revere’s horse; Larry Eisenberg’s hilarious response; the brilliant and biting piece that Myron Kandel sent around  on Joe Republican; Sheila Klass’s heart-wrenchingly brave articles,  and Norman Gelb’s riveting report on the London riots. All of this literary largesse amplified by Herb Dorfman’s excellent and witty commentary. 

Then I thought, hey, maybe I’m not that unworthy after all. I’m here.  I’m blogging. And that has given me the courage to offer up an idea that could save the economy.  Yes, the ECONOMY.  Don’t turn away.  Don’t turn the page.  It would be a huge mistake, as well as a physical impossibility.

Read me out: Everybody’s talking about the economy, but nobody’s doing anything about it. I don’t know a macro from a mackerel, but there seems to be a relatively simple fix to our major problem – restoring consumer confidence.   According to a report from Reuters, consumer confidence dropped from 63.7 in July to 54.9 in early August, the lowest since May, 1980. Consumer expectation plummeted as well.  Help is definitely needed, but figuratively and literally, there’s nobody home in Washington.

So here’s how it would work:  Declare a national Consumer Confidence Day.  Set aside a specific date and ask everyone in America to go out and spend a maximum of $20 on something they really don’t need.  (Bread doesn’t count, even for carb freaks like me.  Chocolate does qualify, however.)  Stores, most of them heavily overstocked, would cooperate by offering bargains in hope of getting their share of the action.  Employment would get a brief boost because extra help would be needed in the way of clerks, private sector store guards, truck drivers to transport the merchandise and additional people in warehouses and factories to get merchandise ready for transport and sale.

This could be bigger than Black Friday and certainly more ecumenical.  I don’t know about you, but my personal need for Christmas tree ornaments is limited. 

I’m not joking! Think I’m misguided, demented, off my trolley? (as an aside --anybody remember the Church Avenue trolley?)  Well, if I am any of the above, it’s your fault, my dear fellow Vanguardians, for having been and continuing to be such darned good writers.

Together we can stave off a “1984” future. (And remember, all’s well that’s Orwell.) Are you with me? I think it’s worth a shot.  If it fails, we can always revert to that time honored solution of our childhoods.  We can put on a show.  Hey, it worked for Judy and Mickey. 

Sincerely,

Harriet Posnak Lesser

Once Upon a Time …

By Harriet Posnak Lesser

I am writing this with trembling hand.  My inkwell is almost empty and my old quill pen has seen better days (but haven’t we all?).  Despite the debilitating hunger that saps my strength and inflames my brain, I am determined to share my tale before it is too late. Read it and weep, as I have. The story of Grimmelda Miller is a tragic parable for our time.

I met Grimmelda in the summer of 2011 shortly after she moved to Happyland, an idyllic American suburb. Perhaps you are old enough to remember that terrible time; it was a season marked by political upheaval and climate change gone mad.  Grimmelda was heavy with child and despite the fact that her husband had left her for a Michele Bachmann lookalike, she was content with her lot. Grimmelda had a special talent for coping with adversity. Hand her a lemon and she made lemonade.  Give her a cracked egg and she made an omelet.  She could even spin dross into gold.  (If you’re wondering what dross is, I Googled it and it means waste matter.) How could poor Grimmelda know that her exceptional ability would spell destrucshan (distruckshen?) for herself and the rest of the country?

One day her father-in-law, a wastrel like his son, ran into the richest man in Happyland and, to make himself appear important, he bragged that he had a daughter-in-law who could spin dross into gold.  Being a man of few words, the rich neighbor said,  “Bring her house later, do demo.”

The wealthy man led Grimmelda to a small dark room in the basement of his McMansion.   There was a spinning wheel, a chair, and a huge pile of dross. “Spin dross gold tonight or die,” he warned before walking out and locking the door.  Poor Grimmelda was terrified and began to sob.  There was no way she could complete the task by morning.  Just then, the door flew open and in walked a strange little man who asked, “Wassupkiddo?”

“I have to spin this #$%^#  pile of dross into gold by morning or die.”

“What’ll you give me if I help you out?” he queried.

“How about my first born child?” she asked brightly.

“Nah,” said the little man.  “I hate kids.  Just sign this piece of paper and I’ll turn that heap of dross into gold.”

Grimmelda complied and the manikin seated himself at the spinning wheel and worked all night until the dross was gone.  The rich gentleman was very pleased, but instead of letting Grimmelda go, he married her and gave her more piles of dross to spin into gold.  Each night the little man returned to help her.  His only request was for people to sign his mysterious paper and pretty soon, he had the signature of everyone in Happyland.

And then, without warning, he stopped coming around.  The piles of dross grew bigger and bigger, and Grimmelda’s greedy husband threatened to leave her. She had almost given up hope when the little man suddenly reappeared.  “Did you happen to find a very small pair of bifocals?” he asked .“I can’t read that paper.”

“BTW, what does your paper say?”

“I thought you’d never ask.  It gives me permission to lower tax ceilings on every house in Happyland and crush all the people living there.”

Grimmelda began to cry uncontrollably.

“Stop being a wuss. They knew what they were signing,” the manikin said.

“It’s fine with me, but I need help with my spinning,” she sobbed.

“Okay. I’ll do it if you can guess my name.”

“Game on!” Grimmelda said.  And she guessed one name after another.  “Harry, John, Nancy, Mitch.”

“No way,” the little man squealed, jumping up and down with joy.

Grimmelda mentioned every name she could think of and then in an unexplained moment of enlightenment, she asked, “Is it Grover Norquist?”

“Who told you?” he screamed, waving his precious piece of paper. His face became redder and redder until he disappeared in a puff of smoke.And so, ceilings did not crash, lives were not crushed and everyone was saved, at least for a while.

But there will always be people willing to sign dumb pledges.  

Problem is, they all live and work in Happyland, a suburb of Washington D.C.   

“An Accidental Sportswriter” Touches Significant Bases

By Stan Isaacs

I find it hard to write a column about Bob Lipsyte’s new book, “An Accidental Sportswriter.” It’s hard to write about somebody in your trade who is a better writer and keener thinker than you are.

Lipsyte of the Times is more than Lipsyte of the New York Times. He has written several works of fiction, some prize-winning young adult fiction, a stunning book with comedian Dick Gregory, books about different aspects of sports, notably “Free to Be Muhammad Ali” and hosted TV discussions. A youthful-looking 73, he is a man who is somewhat of a blend of self-questioning and hubris.

In an important book that includes encounters with Billie Jean King, Howard Cosell, Mickey Mantle, Ali, Gregory, Joe DiMaggio, Lance Armstrong and Bob Costas, Lipsyte writes, “”I hadn’t figured out that sports led to everything and everything led to sports.”  (Confession: I skipped the chapter on a car racer.)

Lipsyte is a contrarian. He goes against the grain of most of what we have been fed in what he calls “Sports World”. He has been in the forefront of writing about women in sports, racism, gays, drugs, the Muhammad Ali dynamic. While I have dipped a toe into these issues, Lipsyte has seized them as his own and emerged as a more significant sportswriter than many of the names that have dominated the sports journalism of our time. But he is not perfect; he misuses the word, “fulsome” (it has a negative, not a positive connotation) and he has an affinity for exclamation points.

He is funny. He is fair. He can praise an individual while laying out his faults. He is right on with the description of Howard Cosell, the dyspeptic, mad, hypocritical egotist of the airwaves. He writes, “Sure, he (Cosell) hustled sports—football, boxing, baseball briefly, the Olympics, and some made-for-TV early reality games—but he also delivered thundering jeremiads against greed, exploitation, racism, and the spurious use of tax dollars and eminent domain to build stadiums that would enrich the owners with whom he loved to mingle.”

He admits he loved Cosell. Certainly, the friendship was solidified by the high regard Cosell had for Lipsyte. Cosell hired him as a handsomely-paid writer on his short-lived variety show which the head writer said “is so bad not only is no one watching, they are going next door to turn off their neighbor’s set.”

Mohammad Ali has been a significant figure in Lipsyte’s career. He writes, “He was the single most important sporting lens through which I learned about politics, religion, race, and hero worship….in watching him change and grow for almost fifty years I’ve watched myself.”

He had bitter disagreements with Ali over Malcolm X. “By pointedly saying that anyone who turned away from Elijah Muihammad deserved death,” Lipsyte writes, “Ali seemed to be almost offering his preapproval of Malcolm’s execution.” They would argue angrily until someone intervened.

He writes about the much-married Ali’s outrageous skirt chasing. In one scene Ali picks up three young girls and then takes one in the motor home he was using as a dressing room for a charity boxing match. Lipsyte writes, “Ali grinned at us as he closed the door behind himself. I watched for a while, until the motor home began to jiggle on its springs. I imagined that the champ was floating and stinging.”

At times like these I remember the early Cassius Clay trumpeting that he wouldn’t be like Joe Louis, trafficking with many women, winding up broke. Ali hasn’t wound up broke. The man who was vilified when he challenged authority is now a cash cow trotted out for a fee by the establishment he so often railed against.

As I do, Lipsyte loves Billie Jean King. He writes, “I believe Billie Jean was the most important sports figure of the 20^th century. Not only was she the feminine symbolic leader of the movement representing half the world’s athletes and potential athletes, she had also been a leader of the revolutionaries that had overthrown the most oppressive concept in sports – amateurism -- a dictatorship by which sports officials (well-paid executives if not wealthy aristocrats) controlled unpaid athletes. “

Lipsyte gained access to the black world through his association with Dick Gregory in the writing of Gregory’s autobiography, “Nigger.” The title shocked many people; they would not buy the book even if they were sympathetic to Gregory’s social message. But, writes Lipsyte: “I loved his dedication: ‘Dear Momma—Wherever you are, if you ever hear the word ‘nigger’ again, remember they re advertising my book.”

Access is the greatest aphrodisiac, and if I am at all jealous of Lipsyte—and I am—it is because I think his association with the Times and sports documentaries gave him closer access to big names. He had the same kind of early brush-offs from Mantle and DiMaggio that I had, but then he goes back to them and comes away with kindlier feelings about them than I ever had.

Lipsyte has had a long fight battling testicular cancer. His own use of drugs makes him less than critical of athletes accused of using performance-enhancing substances--bicyclist Lance Armstrong in particular. There was the time a woman stopped Armstrong and asked him how his belief in God had helped him as a cancer patient. He writes, “Armstrong replied, ‘Everyone should believe in something,’ he said in his direct, almost chilly way, ‘and I believed in surgery, chemotherapy, and my doctors.’ ”

Fascinating for me is Lipsyte’s relationship with Bob Costas, as brilliant a television voice as Lipsyte is a writer.  Of their first intense conversation, Lipsyte writes, “Costas suggested that I might be happier—certainly my readers might be happier—if I tried less to be provocative and more to be open-hearted. He said he sensed my humanity but thought I was suppressing it, moving past the boundaries of skepticism into cynicism, not finding pleasure in the games or the goodness of even flawed athletes.”

Lipsyte says of Costas, “No one else has ever walked so gracefully the line between journalist and shill. He is one of Jock Culture’s most treasured cheerleaders, and that’s no pose. His 2000 book on baseball pointed out the game’s flaws in such statesmanlike prose that people thought he might be a candidate for Major League Baseball Commissioner. Why not? We’ve done much worse.” Grudging praise but praise nevertheless.

They had another intense dialogue, this one more comfortable, 14 years later. “There were areas where we needed to agree to disagree. It was apparent that I did not consider him the journalist he thought he was. There was no chapter on steroids in his baseball book. (‘I was talked out of it,’ he said, ‘and I regret that now.’)”

Yet there is admiration in Lipsyte quoting Costas’ take on him. He says Costas wants “a dash of celebration and admiration along with the excoriation. It gives you more credibility for when you criticize.

Costas goes on: “In the sixties and seventies the issues were more clear cut—gays, women, Ali—and you were on the right side. When you made your bones on those big issues, the prevailing tone needed a counter-puncher. ..But now the prevailing tone is so mean you have to play it straight. ..There needs to be more nuance…more of a need to celebrate. …It’s not a breach of integrity to find within what you disapprove things that are worthy of approval and celebration.”

Lipsyte came away wondering “if Costas and I were secret sharers in some way, each disappointed in the other and perhaps even disappointed in himself.”

The last chapter of “An Accidental Sports Sportswriter” is an eloquent paean to his father, Sidney, an educator who lived past 100. I think it is the chapter Bob Lipsyte most enjoyed writing.

Sarah Palin’s History Is

As Good as Longfellow’s

History is what you make of it, and Sarah Palin enriched the lore of Americana recently with her startling retelling of the Paul Revere saga. People haven’t appreciated her excursion into pedagogy and are laughing at her. Not me. I am indebted to her for bringing Revere and his horse back into the national consciousness.

I don’t think Palin’s retelling the story of Revere’s ride is a funny matter because I have a passionate interest in the subject. I long have sought the answer to this burning question: What was the name of Paul Revere’s horse? Or more accurately, the horse that Revere rode into history and into Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

I admit that Palin got her facts wrong when she said, “He who warned the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms by ringing those bells, and makin’ sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.”

He was warning his fellow countrymen, not the British. A mistake for sure. But old Longfellow, the poet, made a few mistakes of his own. He rates as one of the great public relations flacks of all time for the job he did ennobling Revere. He had Revere warning colonists all the way to Concord. Not true, because Revere was captured by the British outside Lexington. And Longfellow conveniently forgot to mention that there were two other riders, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott. They were not caught.

I am a bit disappointed in Palin, though, because she didn’t mention anything about Revere’s horse. If she did, she probably would have gotten that wrong, too, because most people who have given Revere’s horse a name have been wrong. I have tracked down and exposed these names as phonies: Peg, Sparky, Dobbin, Thunderer and Scheherazade. Nor was it Silver, Mr. Ed, Man o' War, Secretariat or Rosinante.

In view of the mountain of misinformation about the name of the horse, I am not offended by the theory offered now by the eminent Yiddishist, Larry Eisenberg. He writes that “Revere was Jewish. His original name was Reverowitz. He called his horse, ‘Ferdela’ and he would frequently order it to ‘giddyyepsheh.’ ” (Ferdela is Yiddish for horse-which Palin might not know).

I wouldn’t be surprised if Eisenberg wound up as a vice president running mate of Sarah Palin.

Harriet Posnak Lesser, another Brooklyn College scholar, picked up on Palin’s history lesson to enlighten us further. She writes that “Revere was the 15th of 12 children, born to the Reveres who were known for their truthfulness, fruitfulness and lousy math skills…Grandpa Revere is credited with saying, ‘Two can live as cheaply as one, if one is a cross dresser’…After the famous Boston Massacre in 1903 (Boston Red Sox five games, Pittsburgh Pirates three) Paul became a patriot until he realized he was in the wrong ballpark because the Patriots are a football team…In 1763 he joined the Sons of Liberty but switched to the Sons of the Pioneers when Roy Rogers made him an offer he couldn’t refuse…”

I regret to inform that Lesser’s history errs on the colorful side. In actuality Revere was an on-call messenger for the American colonies He was taken in a rowboat on the night of April 18, 1785, across the Charles River from Boston to Charlestown. He took off on a borrowed horse of Deacon Larkin in Charlestown and rode almost 13 miles toward Concord. He was captured outside of Lexington where a British major ordered him to give his horse to a sergeant.

In his diary of the event Revere wrote that he “got a horse of Deacon Larkin…I set off on a very good horse.” No mention of the name.

So we know that it all goes back to Deacon Larkin. And that leads to one legitimate claim. It comes from a thin book entitled, “Some Descendants of Edward Larkin” (Knickerbocker Press, 1930) by William Ensign Lincoln. It states, “Samuel Larkin, born Oct. 22, 1701, died Oct. 8, 1784; he was a chair maker, then a fisherman and had horses and stable. He was the owner of Brown Beauty, the mare of Paul Revere’s ride…The mare was loaned at the request of Samuel Larkin’s son, Deacon John Larkin, and was never returned to her owner.”

This persuaded the historian David Hackett Fischer to declare in his book, “Paul Revere’s Ride” that Brown Beauty was the name. That should be the end of it. But I am not convinced. Doesn’t Brown Beauty ring a little too hollow? Doesn’t it sound too much like Black Beauty of the famous novel? Hmmm.

I wish Sarah Palin had said something about this. I wish she had come up with a name. She probably would have got it wrong, but so what. It is fashionable to be wrong when trying to recreate Paul Revere’s ride. (See Longfellow’s poem).

There is one person who never gave a damn for the horse or Paul Revere. That was Joe E. Lewis, the pixieish comedian and degenerate horse player. He said he disliked Revere because he “gave one of history’s bad rides. He took the horse wide at Lexington.”