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Review by Roger Miller
Once upon a time, my children, writing for the newspapers was such an admired trade that the youth of America stood in line for a chance to practice it. Young men -- yea, even scions of the Ivy League -- would hire on to newspapers as copyboys (alas, there were few if any copygirls), willing to serve as humble messengers for a few months or even a couple of years in the hope that it would put their foot on the first rung of the editorial ladder.
Now the Fourth Estate is such a low one and writing is so little regarded that writers have been transmogrified into "content providers" and the packaging of the news takes precedence over the reporting of it. Thus Hard Copy doth make monkeys of us all.
But in that happier time, which flourished until the 1950s, there were young men like Roger Kahn, who in 1948 dropped out of New York University to become a copyboy at the New York Herald Tribune. So coveted were such spots on the Trib, considered the best-written newspaper in America, that he would not have gotten it without his father's influence, and at that he had to wait five months for an opening.
From that modest beginning he went on to become a highly respected baseball writer for the Trib and then a writer on baseball and other subjects for magazines. Eventually he began writing books, and in 1972 he published The Boys of Summer, describing his experiences covering the 1952-53 Brooklyn Dodgers, which is regarded as one of the finest books ever written about baseball.
After that came more books, most of them on baseball, until now he has come almost full circle with Memories of Summer: When Baseball Was an Art and Writing About It a Game. It is not a revisiting of The Boys of Summer -- more like a revisiting of the summer years of his own life. It is a fond look back, and, though Kahn is not given to foolish nostalgia, contains a few explicit or implicit expressions of regret at pleasant things that have passed from our national pastime and our national life.
One thing, however, he does not regret, and that is the passing of the virulent racism that infested baseball, and sports in general, when he was coming up as a writer. If this book, which is something of a grab-bag of connected chapters, has a theme, it is the shame of racism in baseball -- and, it must be said, in many of the journalists who covered it then.
The chief figure in this theme, of course, is Jackie Robinson, who broke the color bar in major league baseball about the time Kahn was breaking into newspapering (which, it must also be said, stayed lily white even longer than baseball) and who became Kahn's good friend. But the figure the author admires most in this regard is Willie Mays. He calls him "this greatest of all ballplayers [who] played baseball by default" because, even though football was his better sport, the bar to blacks in college and professional football was even greater.
The author draws a full portrait of Mickey Mantle: "A snarling, sullen hero . . . but within that frame there lived a truly decent fellow, waiting to break out." And briefer portraits of other figures in or around the sports world, including the vulgar, gross, and totally self-absorbed Giants manager, Leo Durocher.
Primarily, though, Memories of Summer is a visit to the past, which, as the novelist L.P. Hartley said, is a foreign country where they do things differently. Then, major league ballplayers, far less lavishly recompensed than now, used to hold down winter jobs (Dodgers pitcher Preacher Roe, for instance, taught geometry). Then, time used to stop at the beginning of October -- a golden interregnum, when dust motes danced in the low-slanting rays of the sun -- and all of America attended to the World Series.
And then, a boy who wanted to play big league ball but instead grew up to write about it, used to take long walks with his father, talking about baseball. "The passion to play dominated my spirit, that and the distinct but overlapping passion to win the good opinion of my father."
The reader has the impression that the author realizes he did win it, though perhaps it took four decades after his father's death in 1953 for it to strike home. That realization, too, is what this book is about.
Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Lopez, Pennsylvania. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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