DEATHS ; Notable Passings; The Thread to Pay Last Respects

BobHufford said:

Robert Conrad, dead at 84. RIP.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/n...sV83dzwSVB07NxkUpg3ZRsCwqW5XP1-iZWPnIa7gvXOQ8

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LizzieMaine said:

One of the greatest baseball writers of the latter half of the twentieth century died last week at the age of 92. Roger Kahn grew up in Flatbush, within throwing distance of Ebbets Field, and was a devoted Dodger fan from childhood. He grew up in an intellectual family -- his father was an editor for the highbrow radio quiz program "Information Please" -- and while his interest in baseball horrified his mother, his father encouraged it, leading young Roger to a career as a copyboy for the New York Herald Tribune's sports department. Within just a few years, he was the youngest beat reporter in the National League, traveling with the Dodgers for the 1952 and 1953 seasons. He formed an especially close friendship with Jackie Robinson, and became his partner in a magazine focusing on "Negro sports," before moving on to a long association with "Sport" magazine.

In 1970, Kahn wondered what had become of the players he'd gotten to know with the Dodgers. So he looked them up -- traveling all over the US to talk with them again about the directions their lives had taken since baseball -- and the result was "The Boys of Summer," a moody book combining baseball with ruminations on the meaning of human mortality. There had never been anything else quite like it, and it took the publishing world by storm -- kicking off an entire genre of literary baseball books that continues down to the present day.

Kahn wrote extensively almost to the end of his life -- he published his last book, "Rickey and Robinson," in 2014, to "set the record straight" about the relationship between those two baseball legends. I read "The Boys of Summer" not long after it came out, and it made me think about The Game in a way I'd never considered -- and in a way that's never left me since.

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LizzieMaine said:

There's a couple of images from that book that really haunted me -- Billy Cox, a truly great third baseman, tending bar in a sleazy club in a grubby little town, while patrons got into obscene fights while he was trying to talk to Kahn, and Carl Furillo as an embittered construction worker at the World Trade Center, damning Walter F. O'Malley to hell for releasing him while he was injured. I think reading those scenes were the first moments I started to think of ballplayers as *people.*

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MisterCairo said:

Paula Kelly, whom I had a crush on from her early series Night Court days, has died, aged 77:

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/entertainm...ace-emmy-nominee-was-77/ar-BBZUFJ4?ocid=ientp

I never knew why she left (pushed out?) the show, Markie Post eventually taking the key lead as the defence lawyer.



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LizzieMaine said:

There's a couple of images from that book that really haunted me -- Billy Cox, a truly great third baseman, tending bar in a sleazy club in a grubby little town, while patrons got into obscene fights while he was trying to talk to Kahn, and Carl Furillo as an embittered construction worker at the World Trade Center, damning Walter F. O'Malley to hell for releasing him while he was injured. I think reading those scenes were the first moments I started to think of ballplayers as *people.*

Click to expand...

LizzieMaine said:

One of the greatest baseball writers of the latter half of the twentieth century died last week at the age of 92. Roger Kahn grew up in Flatbush, within throwing distance of Ebbets Field, and was a devoted Dodger fan from childhood. He grew up in an intellectual family -- his father was an editor for the highbrow radio quiz program "Information Please" -- and while his interest in baseball horrified his mother, his father encouraged it, leading young Roger to a career as a copyboy for the New York Herald Tribune's sports department. Within just a few years, he was the youngest beat reporter in the National League, traveling with the Dodgers for the 1952 and 1953 seasons. He formed an especially close friendship with Jackie Robinson, and became his partner in a magazine focusing on "Negro sports," before moving on to a long association with "Sport" magazine.

In 1970, Kahn wondered what had become of the players he'd gotten to know with the Dodgers. So he looked them up -- traveling all over the US to talk with them again about the directions their lives had taken since baseball -- and the result was "The Boys of Summer," a moody book combining baseball with ruminations on the meaning of human mortality. There had never been anything else quite like it, and it took the publishing world by storm -- kicking off an entire genre of literary baseball books that continues down to the present day.

Kahn wrote extensively almost to the end of his life -- he published his last book, "Rickey and Robinson," in 2014, to "set the record straight" about the relationship between those two baseball legends. I read "The Boys of Summer" not long after it came out, and it made me think about The Game in a way I'd never considered -- and in a way that's never left me since.

Click to expand...

LizzieMaine said:

There's a couple of images from that book that really haunted me -- Billy Cox, a truly great third baseman, tending bar in a sleazy club in a grubby little town, while patrons got into obscene fights while he was trying to talk to Kahn, and Carl Furillo as an embittered construction worker at the World Trade Center, damning Walter F. O'Malley to hell for releasing him while he was injured. I think reading those scenes were the first moments I started to think of ballplayers as *people.*

Click to expand...