It’s King Felix vs. Phil Hughes this afternoon and the smart money has the M’s ending their losing streak.
But, stranger things have happened.
Brett Gardner LF
Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira DH
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher RF
Russell Martin C
Jorge Posada 1B
Eduardo Nunez 3B
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Picture by Bags]
Schulian vs. Israel, or Vice Versa
By John Schulian
Once the word got out that the Daily News was going belly up, life got real interesting.The Tribune took another run at me, a serious one this time, and the Sun-Times wanted me, too. But the brain trust there had a fallback plan if I jumped: they would hire my old friend David Israel. If I landed at the Sun-Times, the Tribune would hire him.
I don’t know how the executives we were dealing with felt, but Israel and I had a hell of a good time. We told each other what the kind of money we were being offered, and we wound up settling for pretty much the same deal, Israel at the Trib and yours truly at the Sun-Times, which was where I belonged. The people who were running the paper were the same ones who had hired me at the Daily News. It was great to tweak their noses-–you’ve got to keep the big cheeses honest, you know-–but it also would have been severely bad form to turn my back on them a little more than a year after they gave me the chance of a lifetime.
The end result of all the wooing and courting was supposed to be a showdown: Schulian vs. Israel, or, if you prefer, Israel vs. Schulian. All I can tell you is that I did what I did and he did what he did, and we were both damn good at it. We weren’t going to make anybody forget Red Smith and Jimmmy Cannon battling for the heavyweight championship of New York’s sports pages, but we gave the people what was probably the best show of its kind for the next couple of years.
Israel made the Trib’s sports section better by walking in the door. With his brains and writing talent, he forced the sleepwalkers on the staff to step up and do better work.He still loved to stir things up, too, especially when he was ripping Larry Bird, who was an uncommunicative dolt in college. And yet Israel wasn’t as outrageous as he’d been when he was the Washington Star’s enfant terrible. Maybe he had outgrown that stage, or maybe he was already looking for a life beyond sportswriting. He’d seen Dan Jenkins and Bud Shrake make the jump from Sports Illustrated to doing books and movies, and he wanted to do the same. After the 1981 Final Four, he left the Tribune to take a job as a city columnist at the L.A. Herald Examiner. It was his first step toward a new life in Hollywood.
I thought he’d made a smart move, but even though I’d had show business in the back of my mind since I was a kid, I still saw myself as a newspaperman. There was something exhilarating about writing four columns a week and having a magazine piece to do on the side. I was making more money than I ever dreamed of (but never as much as some people thought I was), and I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t like the awards and kind words, too.
Just when I’d start to need a bigger hat, though, I’d have one of those days where, to borrow a line from Red Smith, I didn’t have anything to say and I didn’t say it very well. Amazing how something like that can remind you how great you aren’t.
Heck, yeah. Take that, Mongo.
Here is W. C. Heinz’s most famous newspaper column:
Two generations later, writers are still deconstructing Heinz’s work to figure out how he got everything so right. And we return to “Death of a Racehorse” because it is about economy, precision, and restraint. And it was written on deadline. Jeff MacGregor, who wrote a memorable piece about Heinz for Sports Illustrated, once called the column, “the Gettysburg Address of sportswriting. A run of words so slender and moving that nothing can be added or taken from it.”
In a message board chat, MacGregor added:
There’s so much going on here that’s remarkable, let’s just talk a little about story architecture. Check the meter and the sentence length at the beginning. And then at the end. Compare the sentence, “‘Air Lift,’ Jim Roach said. ‘Full brother of Assault.'” to the last sentence in the piece. Compare the long sentence beginning “Assault, who won the triple crown…” to the last sentence in the piece. Notice the reiteration of the statement, “Full brother of Assault,” in the middle of the piece.
The column is built a little like a poem or concerto. Certain meters and phrases recur and repeat. Heinz knows going in how he wants the column to land, so he front loads the phrase “Full brother of Assault,” then reinforces it again halfway along. By the time he strings together that last long sentence, with its inexorable drive, those now-familiar meters and phrases have the rhythm and power of music in them, and the story resolves, like a great song, on a chord that is not only completely satisfying, but at once surprising and inevitable. Hence the chill most people feel when reading it.
This piece is a tiny, nearly perfect machine of art and engineering. There’s a lot to learn here about story structure, and lyric, and what’s possible in only a small space. Heinz learned a lot of that from Hemingway. Heinz’s powers of observation and description and his matchless ear for dialogue are his own, of course, but he was a true student of Hemingway’s work, and often reread him very closely in order to figure out exactly how a certain effect had been achieved.
So maybe part of the lesson here is that to become better writers, we need to become better readers.
Chris Jones, in an appreciation for the Nieman Storyboard, writes:
Heinz never makes the mistake of telling us too much, of becoming sentimental or maudlin. We see the blood. We hear the jockey’s crying. We shiver with each clap of thunder and the coming rain. These are the only things that matter in the world.
…He doesn’t do much else to set the scene. Yes, he describes some of the crowd, but only vaguely. He describes the coming storm. But he hasn’t written so much as he’s reported. Nearly every sentence in this story contains a fact and that’s about it. There are no metaphors or similes, unless you count his note that the gun is shaped like a bell. There are very few adverbs, and every quote is said – not exclaimed or opined or bleated. And in this place where this horse died, there was a pile of loose bricks.
Finally, back in 2008, Gare Joyce wrote a fine portrait of Heinz for ESPN. Worth checking out.
My grandfather gave me his copy of “The Elements of Style” in 1988 when I was a junior in high school. The edition was published in 1959. I keep it on my night table and return to it often. “Death of a Racehorse,” understated and beautifully crafted, is like that. Something to revisit to see how it’s supposed to be done.
“Death of a Racehorse” is reprinted with permission from Gayl Heinz.
Tonight gives return of Eric Chavez.
Brett Gardner LF
Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher RF
Jorge Posada DH
Eric Chavez 3B
Francisco Cervelli C
Our old pal C.C. is on the hill.
Never mind the hubbub (bub):
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
Dig this wonderful piece of research by Bob Egan on the locations of Dylan album covers.
And thanks to Matt B for the link.
Dig these cool Raymond Chandler book covers by Tom Adams over at Scott Dutton’s most excellent blog.
Dirty, like that Bastard.
This is my workout jam of the week.
The trade deadline is on Sunday and the place it be, if you are not plugged in to Twitter, is MLB Trade Rumors and Hardball Talk. They’ll keep you up-to-date on all the scuttlebutt.
Think the Yanks will make a move? Maybe for a reliever or a bat? Will they get crazy and trade for a starting pitcher? There haven’t been any major rumblings but that doesn’t mean something won’t happen.
[Photo Credit: Dr John 2005]
Last night I saw a girl with red hair on the subway. She must have been seven or eight-years-old. She was sitting between two women in their late forties. The women were in animated discussion and the girl, who was wearing pink sneakers and had long feet, looked up at them. I couldn’t tell if one of the women was her mother or if they were aunts or what. They were speaking in Russian. Then I noticed a man was with them too, sitting next to one of the women. Four Russians. They dressed like they were not from around here.
I watched the girl. Sometimes she was included in the conversation. Mostly, she listened. It reminded me of being a kid, always hanging around adults, comfortable in their company. At one point, they all laughed. I don’t know why. Even the man. It was a brief moment but they all looked so content. I wondered if the girl would remember this train ride when she grew up.
I took a mental picture of them all smiling and thought of what happened in Norway last weekend. I know this is a mad, vicious world. I understand darkness but am grateful for the light.
[Photo Credit: Film is God]
It’s gunna rain tonight. Let’s hope they get the game in. The Mariners have lost 634 games in a row which means they’ve they’ll take two-of-three from the Yanks, right?
Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher DH
Russell Martin C
Andruw Jones RF
Eduardo Nunez 3B
Brett Gardner LF
We do the cheering:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Photograph by Drew Medlin]
The Sun-Times Also Rises
By John Schulian
I forget how far in advance we knew the Daily News was going under. A month, six weeks, it couldn’t have been more than that. The publisher, Marshall Field IV, climbed up on a desk in the city room, gathered the troops around him, and broke the bad news.I was on the road, hearing everything second-hand. By the time I got back, everybody was scrambling. Some Daily News people were just moving down the hall to the Sun-Times. The others were left to their own devices.
The one big-name defection to the Tribune was Bob Greene, who had been a cityside columnist at the Sun-Times pretty much since the day he got out of Northwestern. And a damn good one, too. Inspired by Breslin, of course, and yet very much his own guy, great instincts, irreverent, a lively writer. I remember a column he did about a trial where this kid who’d been shot down in the street was close to death and the jury went to the hospital to listen to him testify. It was a stunning piece of work. And Greene wrote books too, not just collections of his newspaper stuff but one about covering a presidential campaign and another about touring with Alice Cooper. But by the time I got to Chicago, it was as though aliens had seized control of his brain. He’d lost his edge and turned precious and cloying. And he was barely 30. To compound Greene’s problems, Royko hated him as only Royko could. The kindest thing I ever heard Mike call him was a “ dirty little shit.” Obviously, the idea of their working shoulder to shoulder wasn’t going to fly. So Greene jumped to the Trib and took at least one friend from the Sun-Times with him.
There may have been other defections, but the mass exodus wouldn’t come until Rupert Murdoch bought the Sun-Times six years later. In 1978, there was a different mindset entirely. Whether you worked for the Sun-Times or the Daily News, your first thought was “Beat the Tribune.” Those of us who came from the Daily News thought we were better than either the Trib or the Sun-Times. If the Sun-Times had been the p.m. paper and the Daily News the a.m., we firmly believed the Daily News would have been the one that survived.
Even today, if you ask Daily News people who moved to the Sun-Times, they’ll tell you their hearts still belong to the Daily News. And it’s been gone for 33 years. Not surprisingly, there were Sun-Times people who despised the newcomers from the Daily News. That was the way it should have been, too. Hell, the papers had been at war for decades. Why make nice now?
The merger, as it was euphemistically known, worked pretty much swimmingly in sports. The guys from the Sun-Times were great, especially Ron Rapoport, a very smart, lively columnist with a well-developed social conscience, and Randy Harvey, who could do anything and do it well. Combined with Mike Downey, Phil Hersh, Ray Sons (who’d gone back to writing full time), Kevin Lamb, Brian Hewitt and me, that was a formidable staff. Not on a par with the Boston Globe or L.A. Times or the Philadelphia Daily News, but still a damn good read. Problem was, some of our best people quickly started moving on to stardom elsewhere. Downey became a columnist at the Detroit Free Press. Harvey jumped the New York Daily News’ experiment with an afternoon paper and our executive sports editor, Kerry Slagle, headed for Inside Sports. But Kerry’s replacement, Marty Kaiser, turned out to be a masterful editor, and the staff, even depleted, was one to be proud of.
The joker in the deck was a Sun-Times sports columnist named Bill Gleason, a professional South Sider who got it in his head that he hated Royko and me more than anybody else on the planet. I heard that Gleason had even taken the cigar out of his mouth long enough to walk into the city room and announce that he wanted to punch out Royko. Mike thought that was hilarious. I don’t think he would have minded tangling with Gleason. As for me, I didn’t know how Gleason felt until the Daily News was in its final days and I ran into him at O’Hare. I said I was looking forward to putting out a great sports section at the Sun-Times, and he started running his mouth about how I tried to get him fired. Believe me when I say I never tried to get him fired. I never tried to get anyone fired. A newspaper guy’s life is hard enough under the best of circumstances. We’re all in it together. But from that moment forward, I never spoke another word to Gleason.
Our feud, if that’s what it was, created some complications, of course. The worst was during the 1978 World Series when we both wrote about the classic duel between Reggie Jackson and Bob Welch. If I’d been teamed with another columnist, we would have talked things over and gone in different directions. But Gleason and I just put on our blinders and wrote what was the story of the night. I didn’t realize the conflict between us had reared its head in such an obvious way until I talked to the office the next day. For what it’s worth, though, my column got big play and his was buried inside. And that’s the way it was going to stay no matter what the subject for the rest of my days at the Sun-Times.
There are a ton of baseball blogs but few that are truly original. Josh Wilker’s Cardboard Gods is one, Batgirl’s old Twins blog was another. And then there is Flip Flop Fly Ball, by the British graphic artist Craig Robinson. Craig’s site has been a wonder for years but now he’s published his first book, a must-have for any baseball fan. I recently had a chance to rap with Craig about the book, his site, and baseball.
Dig:
Bronx Banter: You are from England and yet you have a great love for baseball. What are your first memories of the game?
Craig Robinson: I guess the first memories were from movies. You might not notice it in the States, but to us non-Americans, baseball is noticeable because it is referenced so often. Players will be mentioned, TV screens will be showing games, baseball terminology is used. As for an actual first memory, it was being on the subway from Midtown up to the Bronx, being surrounded by pinstripes and blue caps; the atmosphere outside of the ground along River Avenue, and once inside the ground being a bit perplexed by the national anthem being played. (In British soccer, the anthem is only ever played at international games and at the FA Cup Final.) I went with a couple of NY-based colleagues, and as soon as the game began, I was peppering them with questions. My biggest memory, though, was being amazed at how fast the pitchers were throwing.
BB: Which baseball movies did you see?
CR: My favorite is “Sugar.” Really loved that movie. “Pride of the Yankees,” “The Sandlot,” “Bang the Drum Slowly,” “Field of Dreams,” “The Rookie”. They all tend to at some point find their way onto my screen when I’m tired and hung over on a Sunday. The baseball references I remember most are from Seinfeld, actually. Keith Hernandez spitting, Joe DiMaggio dunking his donuts, and George Steinbrenner in general.
BB: Oh, man. So what did you learn about American culture from them?
CR: I think the movie references just show how ingrained the sport is in American life. And on a personal level, the sentimental talk of fathers and sons is something I can never recapture. I missed out on that because my parents fucked without contraception on an island on the other side of the Atlantic. And, although this doesn’t really answer the question, I’ve learned a lot about American people because of baseball. Without doing any real research, I imagine there’s been a love/hate relationship with Americans since soldiers were stationed in the UK during the Second World War. All my life, Americans have often been portrayed as fat tourists in check pants mispronouncing London landmarks. And in recent years as a bully throwing its weight around in the world. And I feel there’s a level of anti-Americanism in Europe. The great thing that baseball has given me is the chance to talk to people from outside of New York. The first non-Yankee or Met game I went to was in Philadelphia, and on the subway platform, I asked a guy if I was on the right side to go to the ballpark. We got chatting, he gave me a can of beer in a brown paper bag, and we had a great conversation all the way to Citizens Bank Park. I’ve had nothing but good experiences with American people in their cities. When they wish me a good time in their city, state, country, they really sound like they mean it, and I absolutely adore that.
BB: Don’t British boys have a father-son connection through soccer or ruby, boxing or cricket?
CR: I guess some must do, yes. Nobody in my family was that interested in sport. Yes, we’d kick a football around, but it wasn’t any passing on of knowledge or anything like that.
BB: Did you follow or play cricket as a kid?
CR: I was terrible at cricket. Couldn’t do the bowling action smoothly at all. It was all soccer for me. I mean, we had to play soccer, cricket, and rugby at school, but I never cared for cricket or rugby. Since the new 20Twenty format came about, though, I’ve gotten a tiny bit more enjoyment out of watching it.
BB: Was baseball made fun of when you were growing up as the men’s version of rounders?
CR: Yes. There wasn’t even the “men’s version of” at the start, a lot of British people simply refer to it as “bloody rounders.” And I quite likely did that, too. I don’t want to generalize too much, or do my countrymen down, but when it comes to American sports, we tend to be quite snobby about it. As soon as the topic comes up, someone will mention the amount of commercial breaks. And fail to see the irony that the sports we watch feature uniforms with advertising on the front. I mainly think, though, that the time difference makes it hard for British people to get into American sports. It takes a willingness to give it a go, and then a willingness to stay up til gone midnight on a Sunday to watch a football game.
BB: What is it about baseball that you found attractive?
CR: The aesthetics plays a big part. I love the uniforms and the ballparks. I love that it’s so simple: whites at home, grays on the road. I love that the game is orderly for the most part. Pitcher throws ball, batter tries to hit ball, fielder catches or throws the ball, while the batter runs. The elegance of a good double play is pretty much my favorite thing in sports. This is also where the Yankee fan in me comes out, but I love how simple both the uniforms are. They’re beautifully elegant. I love that they look like gentlemen in their uniforms, wearing long trousers; not looking like overgrown children in shorts. I love the lack of advertising on the uniforms. The unique ballparks are such a joy, too. It amuses me to think of future civilizations who discover ancient baseball fields and texts, how they’ll be baffled that a game with such a dizzying amount of statistics, everything measured perfectly is played in parks which are of different dimensions. And the aesthetics inherent in the game’s strong ties to its past. Almost from the off, I could read as much about Gehrig or Mantle as I could about Cano or Jeter.
BB: Other than the uniforms, why the Yankees?
CR: Really, it shouldn’t have been that way. It was an accident of the schedule that they, not the Mets were at home when I was on my trip to NY in 2005. And to come to the game fresh and root for the biggest, most successful team is, I can see, kind of crass. I can try and justify it in many ways. As a European living six hours ahead of Eastern Time, it would’ve had to have been an East Coast team; it would’ve had to have been in a city where I would want to repeatedly visit. But most of all, it’s simply that I fell in love with baseball that night, and on that night, baseball was Yankee Stadium and the Yankees.
BB: Did you ever watch a game before you went to Yankee Stadium?
CR: Only on TV. That was what prompted me to go to a game. I was in NY on business, so caught a few innings here and there of Yankee and Met games on TV. It made no sense, the commentators made no sense, but I was intrigued enough to want to find out what was going on. The first game I saw live was July 27, 2005. Twins 7, Yankees 3. Johan Santana got the win, Al Leiter the loss.
BB: When you started watching games and learning the rules how did you teach yourself what was going on?
CR: I kept notes, and this is how the site started, really, made maps and charts, just to remember things like which teams were where, and where they used to be. It sounds silly, but playing MLB: The Show on the PSP helped a lot too. I had no opportunity to learn the rules by playing the game, but playing a video game version was a decent substitute. Even then, it took me about six months to realize runners had to tag up on sac flies!
BB: Do the numbers, the stats, appeal to you at all?
CR: Not particularly, it just was something that had to learn about to be able to properly appreciate players, and I enjoyed learning about statistics. I’m not really deep into it, I pick and choose what I want to read. I mean, obviously I don’t care about wins, saves, or RBIs particularly. But I’d say I only really look at 10% of what Fan Graphs does.
BB: Can you talk about your interest in the visual arts? What led to your career as a graphic designer? Did you read comics growing up, Judge Dredd and all that?
CR: This is where the father-son connection comes in. My dad was an architect. He wasn’t Frank Lloyd Wright or anything, but he did pottery and even some string art and macramé as hobbies (it was, of course, the 1970s). I always enjoyed drawing as a kid, did a lot of it at school, and then went to art school to study three-dimensional design and university to study jewelrey. I think the things I learned from education were incidental, and mostly, I learned what I didn’t want to do. It was only when, as a working man, I continued drawing, making sketchbooks, and early computer drawings that I realized the greatest talent I have is to kinda do fun stuff. I would love to be Mark Rothko or Yves Klein, but my brain doesn’t work that way. And it was doing the fun, silly stuff in the early days of flipflopflyin.com that lead to me getting a couple of freelance jobs, and then moving to Berlin to work for a web design company. When I left there, I continued freelance illustrating. And still do. I was never really that big into comics. The only ones I read regularly were The Beano when I was pre-teen, and as a teenager, Oink! and Viz.
BB: The sense of fun is integral to your work. Were you a big fan of comedy? Did your father hip you to the Pythons, Beyond the Fringe, or the Goons?
CR: Yeah, comedy is one of those things that I think the British do very well. Monty Python was on TV a lot, and more primetime stuff like The Two Ronnies, Morecambe and Wise, and Les Dawson. When the Young Ones and Blackadder came along, that kinda sealed it for me and I think a lot of my generation. I still notice it in the way people of my age talk, we’re so influenced by the way Ben Elton and Richard Curtis wrote for Blackadder. A whole generation of people who use the word “thingy” a lot.
BB: So saying you like The Goons is like saying you like Charlie Chaplin, right? Hey, did you know that Benny Hill was a very big show over here in the States in the ‘70s and early ‘80s? Used to play it on Channel 9 in NY late night. The Young Ones were on MTV.
CR: Ha ha! I do like Buster Keaton! For me the Goons was just one step removed from where humor was at. I watch it now, and totally appreciate it, but back then, with TYO and Blackadder, things had gotten a bit more, for want of a better word, punk in its attitude. Yeah, Benny Hill’s popularity in the US is one of those weird things that I don’t really understand. I was never really a fan, although I loved the Carry On… films, which were full of smut and innuendo. Proper British silliness. For example:
BB: That’s classic. So, you’ve done your site for several years. How did the book come about?
CR: I was very lucky; a literary agent Farley Chase got in touch with me about a week after the site went online. He liked the site, we had a meeting, and worked on a proposal. I’d also had contact with Pete Beatty, an editor at Bloomsbury, and while the proposal was being put together, he and I separately were having a continual email discussion about all sorts of stuff, mostly baseball, but we got on very well, so it was great that we ended up working together on the book.
BB: What was it like seeing images that you designed for a computer screen on the page?
CR: I’ve kinda gotten used to it over the years. Illustration being my day job, I’m used to seeing computer drawings printed in magazines and newspapers or in a couple of cases, on billboards. I am used to it, but the thrill never goes away. There is something nice about being able to flick through pages and see the colors. And especially for some of the more complex chart, they’d be difficult to fully appreciate on
screen.
BB: Did it change the nature of any of them? I know when I’ve done drawings or small paintings and then made bigger versions of them, the change in dimensions alters everything about the picture.
CR: Not really for the infographics, but certainly for the drawings. Especially the drawings made with the Brushes app, a fantastic painting tool for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. They definitely feel more real printed in the book. I do some pictures by hand, but not that many. Those tend to be more sketchy/doodley. Since getting that app, I’ve found that I don’t really keep a sketchbook with me as much as I used to, cos I can do everything I want to do with my iPod.
BB: Do you ever worry about running out of ideas?
CR: I don’t. Over the years I’ve gotten used to those dry spells, but that’s the joy of the creative rainy seasons: there are always ideas backed up that I’ve not had time to use.
BB: Has the book changed your approach to your work?
CR: I don’t think it changed things that much. It did free me up to do a couple of the more detailed and large charts, because of the restrictions of screen sizes. And, yes, it’d be great to do it more than once, if only because it will mean that the first one was a success!
BB: Sweet. Just a few more, back to baseball. Since you started following it have you gone deeper into the game with each passing season or has some of the appeal worn off on you yet?
CR: Every passing season reminds me of how little I knew the previous season. When friends talk about some 80s reliever or first baseman, I’m at a loss. There’s so much I don’t know, that it hasn’t had a chance to wear off. And the last two seasons have been the first seasons where I have watched a team in the ballpark regularly. I enjoyed getting to know the Blue Jays last summer, and similarly, have enjoyed the Diablos Rojos del México this summer.
BB: Is there a particular period or decade that you are especially drawn to?
CR: Watching the Ken Burns thing, I very much enjoyed the dead ball era stuff, and from an aesthetic point of view, I like the 60s and 70s.
BB: What turns you off about the game? Both historically and currently?
CR: The color barrier, obviously. I don’t enjoy the moralistic outrage about steroids. It’s not just a baseball thing, but I wish homosexuality wasn’t just something that is ignored. The Indians logo, the Tomahawk chop. Taxpayers paying for ballparks is obscene. And, maybe it’s because I’m not American, maybe it’s because I’m not a patriotic person (I don’t see why I should be any more proud of an English person doing something great in sports or life than a German, Mexican, Chinese person doing those things); but the anthem, God Bless America, and militarism makes me a like uncomfortable. And I have absolutely no interest in anything Ty Cobb ever did on the field, because he seemed like what can only be described as a despicable human being. He’s where I put an asterisk. I’m quite sure there were other hideous baseball players, but he’s the one I’ve taken a particular dislike to. I wish MLB and the Hall of Fame would stop seeing themselves as moral guardians. And, quite frankly, a posthumous Hall of Fame entry for Marvin Miller would be disgraceful. They need to sort that shit out now before it’s too late.
The book is out now. Buy it at a store. Or a place like this.
What do you do with a cranky wife on a Sunday evening? A cranky wife who doesn’t like the heat. You throw her in the car, blast the a.c., and take her for ride is what you do. Last night the drive took us to McLean Avenue in Yonkers where you’ll find more Irish folks, real Irish folks, than Americans.
We went to a pub, made sure it is air-conditioned. I ordered her something fried–and fast.
Then she was a heppy ket.
W.C. Heinz was one of the great magazine writers of the 20th century. Thanks to his daughter Gayl, we are going to run a series featuring some of Heinz’s work. First up, the original manuscript for a Pepper Martin profile that appeared in True. The story ran in the October issue, 1959.
Now, dig Heinz’s original:
[Photo Credit: Gaspar Tringale]
The sky is grey this morning and the heat has relented for the moment.
Happy Monday.
