Roger Kahn and "The Boys of Summer"

      Roger Kahn this week passed on the great baseball world beyond our lives. His best-known book will be in my life forever.
      My copy of The Boys of Summer is well-worn, the cover a bit tattered. It was one of about 20 books he wrote, along with thousands of stories/articles.
     The story of the 1952 and '53 Brooklyn Dodgers -- a fabled team -- is not just about baseball, it is about life. It is also the story of Kahn's early life and writing (sportswriting) career, and the love for the Dodgers shared by him and his father.
     And, in April 1972 -- just after it was published -- the book was the subject of my first book-review newspaper column. That's how much I loved that book.
     I began that column by writing about Gil Hodges, the man-mountain first baseman of those Dodgers who had died (heart attack) -- as the manager of the New York Mets just the previous Sunday.
     The Dodgers weren't my team, nor is this even my favorite baseball book. That one is named Dynasty, and you might the team and the era -- 1949 to 1964 -- that covers. 
     Yes, that is the team that kept Kahn's Boys of Summer from winning the World Series. (But not in 1955.)
     Let's clear this up: In 1952 and 1953 -- when I was 5 and 6 -- I was still in the old country, not knowing the second thing about baseball (the first was it was a sport I knew as honkbal.) Did not know about the Yankees or the Dodgers ...
     Roger Kahn, by then, was a young sportswriter covering his hometown team for a hometown newspaper. What a life.
     He was as much a fan as a writer. Not uncommon for us sportswriting types. And after 1972, I was a fan of his, just as I remain a fan of many, many baseball scribes.
     (In fact, folded inside of my Boys of Summer book is a Sports Illustrated article on another great baseball writer -- the best ever, I think -- also named Roger: Roger Angell.) 
     In another life, another setting, maybe I would have been a Dodgers fan. Thanks to Kahn's book, I greatly appreciate those late 1940s/mid-1950s teams that were the Yankees' foremost (and perhaps bitter, but much-respected) rivals.
     You had to love Duke, Campy, big Gil, Skoonj (Carl Furillo), Newk, Oisk, Preacher, Clem, Joe Black, Billy Cox, Shotgun Shuba, Andy Pafko, and mostly, Pee Wee and Jackie. 
     But not Leo the Lip.
     Kahn, after several mostly personal chapters, visited more than a dozen of those old Dodgers stars almost two decades later to tell their stories and update their lives (by then, a couple had passed, so he visited their families and hometowns).
       We can say that, in a way, we -- particularly at the Shreveport Journal in the early 1980s -- borrowed from his book with the "whatever happened to ..." stories. Kahn's format was, well, our role model. And to some extent, that is  what we have done with this blog over the past seven years.  
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      Here from the February 7 New York Post is part of the Kahn obituary written by Zach Braziller:

Roger Kahn (Associated Press photo)

     Roger Kahn, the accomplished author known best for his tale, “The Boys of Summer,” died Thursday night at the age of 92. His son, Gordon, told the Associated Press that Kahn passed away at a nursing facility in Mamaroneck [N.Y.].
     ... His 1972 best-seller about the Brooklyn Dodgers ... was a hit, 15 years after the club moved to Los Angeles. It alternated between Kahn's time covering the team in the early 1950s for the Herald Tribune and 20 years later.
     "At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams," he wrote. 
     Kahn got his start in 1948 with the [Herald] Tribune, working as a copy boy. He began covering the Dodgers, along with the [New York] Giants and Yankees, in 1952. He became the sports editor at Newsweek by 1956. He also wrote for Esquire, Time and Sports Illustrated.
      ... He was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 2006.
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      When I think of the Dodgers and this book, I think of two friends who were avid Dodgers fans: (1) Billy Don Maples, our longtime buddy from Bossier City (with ties to Bossier High, Louisiana Tech University and then as a coach at Airline High in Bossier) and (2) Pete Alfano, a veteran sports and general writer/columnist at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram  during my time there who had Brooklyn roots and kept a miniature scale model of the famed Ebbets Field ballpark on his desk. They loved their team.
      We lost Billy Don (to cancer) two years ago. Miss him. He followed the Dodgers to the end.
      When I wrote the column on the book -- geez, 48 years ago -- Billy Don was one of the people who liked it most.
      Pete has moved on from newspapers, but at last glance was working -- teaching digital media writing at the University of North Texas in Denton. And likely still rooting for the Bums. He was always happy to remember 1955 when the Dodgers -- finally -- beat the Yankees in the World Series.
      Carl Erskine, at 93 and in his hometown of Anderson, Indiana, is the last living link to the featured individuals in The Boys of Summer, a pitcher whose chapter in the book was one of the most endearing. 
       And now the writer himself, the talented Roger Kahn, is gone. We thank him.
       (Next: A sad story, a Boys of Summer connection)