The Red Smith Reader

by Dave Anderson

  You can hear them at night when the moon is hidden;

  They sound like the rustle of winter leaves . . .

  The party was quiet. “If Granny were here now,” Rube said to Colonel Red Reeder of West Point, “he’d be talking.”

  “Right,” another said, “he’d be asking Red here, ‘Hey, how about that Virginia team pretty near beating Army?’ Or he’d want to know what you thought about the election, Rube. Or he’d be talking about some book he’d just read, not his.”

  General Rosie O’Donnell was across the room. He and his West Point sidekick, General Blondie Saunders, were two of Granny’s all-time favorites. Mrs. Kit Rice tells of the morning her squire got home showing traces of wear, but full of reassurances.

  “Everything’s all right, honey,” he said. “I’ve been out with Rosie and Blondie.”

  Everything’s still all right with Granny. Nothing can be said of him now that he didn’t say better of somebody else. For example, there is a verse he addressed to Charon, the boatman of the Styx, after many of his friends had died:

  The Flame of the Inn is dim tonight—

  Too many vacant chairs—

  The sun has lost too much of its light—

  Too many songs have taken flight—

  Too many ghosts on the stairs—

  Charon—here’s to you—as man to man—

  I wish I could pick ‘em the way you can.

  JOE PALMER DAY

  1957

  In the dining room at Belmont, Joe Palmer’s friends were swapping stories about him. It seemed only a little while ago that Joe was there, holding up his end of the conversation to say the very least, but the feature race this day was a handicap named in his memory and it was not the first or the second or the third so titled. If figures matter, it will be five years, come Halloween, since the Herald Tribune’s wonderful racing writer left an unfinished column in his typewriter.

  “It keeps happening all the time,” one fellow was saying, “that something comes around the track and I think, What a shame Joe isn’t up here to write about that. For instance, I guess the two forms of animal life that he loathed most were state racing stewards and people who watered down whiskey.

  “Well, since he died there’s been a man around who lost his license for cutting the whiskey he served, and he was also a state steward. If Joe had been around to work him over—”

  “That reminds me,” another began, and while he told a story the others waited, with no especial patience, to get in one of their own. As the day wore on, truth did not necessarily prevail, which would have been all right with Joe Palmer.

  “This department,” Joe wrote, “had a reputation for unswerving truthfulness until approximately the age of seven, and would no doubt have it still except for leaving Kentucky temporarily at that age. But since then various things have happened, and now a certain admiration is felt for a well-told falsehood. This is wrong, of course, but there you are.”

  Belmont is a pleasant place and this was a pleasant, uncrowded day. Some millions were spent on physical improvements since last season, but the changes hardly show. To the casual eye this old cavalry post looks just about as it did when Joe temporarily shared Greentree Cottage there with John Gaver and would occasionally watch the morning works before bedtime.

  Actually, the most noticeable change isn’t on the course at all, but in Creedmoor, the big mental hospital beyond the far turn. There’ve been additions there, a skyscraper construction that gives the patients an unimpeded view of all the racing, even that on the Widener Chute. Almost certainly Joe would have approved.

  Conn McCreary dropped by to chat. He was one of Joe’s favorite guys, though they were relentless adversaries at poker. The broken leg which Conn suffered this summer when a horse banged him against the starting gate has just about repaired itself.

  Joe DiMaggio, an infrequent visitor, was in a box with friends, taking a somewhat more modest profit than he used to get from an afternoon at Yankee Stadium. “I only wish,” he said, “that I’d do as well as I know the Yankees are doing.”

  At the moment the Yankees were playing the White Sox. There had been no report as to the score. They won, of course.

  Sammy Renick, the little man who does television at the races, said he and DiMaggio had just paid a call in the jockey’s quarters.

  “I took Joe in there a couple of years ago,” Sammy said, “and one of the jocks looked up and said, ‘Here comes God.’ Today when he walked in, one of ‘em said, ‘Here comes God—with Renick.’ Do you think that moves Joe up, or back?”

  “A man who spends his life poking around racetracks,” Joe Palmer wrote, “gets, in addition to a view of human nature which is at once more tolerant and less rosy than any endorsed by the clergy, a rather unreasonable fondness for certain places. I say unreasonable, because it does not seem to be dependent upon architectural or horticultural attractiveness, on setting, on comfort, or even on the quality or cleanliness of the racing at these places.”

  There were five fillies and mares in the Joe Palmer Handicap, all connected with somebody who had been Joe’s friend. Jimmy Jones had two from Calumet Farm, just down the Versailles Pike from Joe’s home in Lexington, Kentucky. These were Amoret and Beyond.

  Attica was running in the silks of Kentucky’s Hal Price Headley, and George B. Widener, president of Belmont in Joe’s time, had Rare Treat. Jack Skirvin saddled the other, named Gay Life.

  “On Joe’s account,” a man said, frowning at past performances, “I’ve got to bet Gay Life. I can’t find any excuse for it here, though, and there are some awful nasty comments about his races.”

  The comments were justified. Gay Life ran out of speed early. Attica and Rare Treat ran Amoret down in the stretch and raced to a rousing finish, with Rare Treat the winner in a photo.

  Joe’s friends tore up their tickets and went downstairs for a bourbon—even those who preferred Scotch. They lifted their glasses silently.

  THE COACH

  1962

  It was a little country baseball field near the highway somewhere in rural Massachusetts, much closer kin to a pasture lot than to Yankee Stadium. “See that field?” Stanley Woodward said, pointing from the car. “I started the sweetest riot there you ever saw in your life.”

  At that moment he spotted a Cooper’s hawk or a loggerhead shrike or something, and his interest in birds distracted him from his sinful past. For anybody who knew him, though, it wasn’t hard to guess what had set off the riot.

  He would have been pitching for the visiting team, and the chances are he chose a strategic moment to stick the ball in somebody’s ear. For as a young pitcher Stanley was—to borrow a line from Uncle Wilbert Robinson of the old Dodgers—fast and “pleasingly wild,” and any good hitter coming up with big runs on base had better stay loose.

  The fierce combativeness that has characterized Rufus Stanley Woodward for sixty-six years is one of many reasons why he has been one of the finest all-around newspaper men and far and away the greatest editor and department head I have ever known. In a sandlot ball game or as a rough tackle at Amherst or in a friendly “wrestling” match with Jock Sutherland (the only honest rassling match I ever saw) or in the highly competitive newspaper field, he came to play and he played to win.

  Now, after two hitches on the New York Herald Tribune, the Coach is benching himself. Hell be back in the game from time to time, and if the rest of us try hard enough to approach the standards he established, it ought to remain a good game. But pretending it will be the same game is self-deception.

  Mere truculence, of course, doesn’t make a man great. The qualities of greatness in Stanley are a rich and brilliant mind, a supple wit, uncompromising integrity, broad knowledge and understanding, and a ferocious dedication to the job. Sometimes the best of these—integrity and dedication—were a cross on his shoulders, for they got him into rows with publishers and executives who did not understand that when he fought them he was fighting to give them a be
tter newspaper.

  “Woodward did not come to us by accident,” the editor of the paper in Worcester, Massachusetts, wrote in effect when Stanley left his home town for Boston. “He came because newspaper work is the only field that interests him.”

  “He is often contemptuous of his superior officers,” Joe Palmer said, “barely tolerant of his equals and unfailingly kind and considerate to his subordinates.”

  Joe Palmer, greatest of turf writers, had seen at first hand how Stanley battled for his men. Rebuilding after World War II, the Coach hired Joe in 1946 and this rounded out what may have been the finest sports staff ever assembled. “Holy mackerel!” Tom O’Reilly said when he heard that Palmer was coming. “Next week they’ll hire Thomas A. Edison to turn out the lights.”

  It was not the intention of Stanley’s father to raise up a newspaperman. He wanted a big-league catcher, and as soon as the boy could walk, his sire and Jess Burkett, the mighty hitter who lived in Worcester, began training him. Reluctantly they converted him to pitching when, about high school age, his eyesight began to fail.

  For a year he was blind. Unable to pitch or catch, he played the fiddle. If he attacked the violin as he attacks a typewriter, he must have been hell on G strings.

  Operations restored his vision but he had to wear glasses playing football at Amherst. He was self-conscious about the cheaters; he would tuck them into the knee of his football pants, jog blindly on to the field with an end at one elbow and a guard at the other, then surreptitiously slip the glasses on.

  He tried this before the big game at Williams, or maybe Wesleyan. He did not see the low rope stretched along the sideline. The busted shoulder finished him for the season. It is unlikely that Amherst’s rivals were displeased, for Stanley was not then and is not now a cuddly adversary. Once when he and his friend Dan Parker were peppering each other in their columns for the fun of it, Stanley was warned that he had picked a formidable sparring partner.

  “Oh,” he said mildly, “I know Dan’s smarter than I am, but I fight dirtier.”

  Sometimes it has seemed that Stanley had a quality of second-sight which enabled him to be on the scene when unexpected news broke. He wasn’t born with a caul, though; he just knows his business.

  Thus he would pass up an Army-Navy football game to be in Boston when Holy Cross brought off an unforgettable upset of unbeaten Boston College. Though no racing fan, he managed to be at Suffolk Downs when rioting horse players tore the joint apart. When Philadelphia’s mounted cops rode valorously across Franklin Field clubbing young Penn and Princeton skulls, Stanley was perched on Thrombosis Terrace watching with a connoisseur’s keen appreciation.

  Thus also as a war correspondent, in both the European and Pacific theaters. When the 101st Airborne landed behind German lines, Stanley dropped out of the sky with them. When the carrier Enterprise got racked up, Stanley was on the next wave.

  Though no baseball scout ever had a more discerning eye for talent in his field than Stanley in his, the Coach has a blind spot where his own writing is concerned. When Army coaches decided that a slaughter by Michigan was due to the West Point center’s failure to give the football a quarter-turn on presenting it to the quarterback and he observed that this is like blaming the Johnstown flood on a leaky toilet in Altoona, he doesn’t consider it wonderful.

  He has written that to let Jack Kramer, that gold-plated debaucher of amateur youth, coach the Davis Cup tennis team, is like electing Jean Lafitte commodore of the New Orleans Yacht Club. And when the Cornells railed at him for misquoting their anthem, he replied that he had visited their campus often and in his considered judgment it was higher above Cayuga’s water than far above.

  WILLARD MULLIN

  1971

  The National Cartoonists Society is running a hog-killing in the New York Hilton tonight saluting Willard Mullin, a member, as “sports cartoonist of the century.” With him on the dais will be the greatest of heavyweight champions, Jack Dempsey, and Mrs. Charles Ship-man Payson, the gracious lady who owns half of Greentree Stable and most of the New York Mets.

  Nobody will quibble with the society’s designation of Dempsey as “athlete of the century” or Joan Payson as “No. 1 Lady in Sports,” but “sports cartoonist of the century” is poppycock. Willard Mullin, as any fool should know, is the sports cartoonist of all human history.

  From the hairy ancestor who scratched his picture stories on the cave walls right down to this moment, there never has been another like the square-rigged squire of Plandome, Long Island. Call the roll from Bud Fisher, Bob Edgren and Tad Dorgan, to Murray Olderman and Bill Gallo, and nowhere do you find all the qualities that distinguish Willard Mullin.

  With his perception, wit and marvelously comic pen, he was much more than an illustrator or a caricaturist. He was a warm but penetrating critic of the human scene, and each of his drawings was an editorial. I would hate to admit how many times over the years I swiped a whole column from one of his cartoons.

  The past tense is employed here, not because Willard has lost the hop on his fastball but because he is quitting these parts to go sand-painting or something on Fort Myers Beach, Florida. Newspapers today won’t provide the big block of space that Willard’s commentaries occupied in the World-Telegram, six days a week for thirty-three years.

  That’s too bad for the newspapers, too bad for their readers and too bad for the New York scene which Willard has brightened since escaping from California in 1934. He’ll be missed in many places, perhaps most of all by surviving members of the Village Green Reading Society.

  This was an informal group that met two or three times a year in New Haven when the late Herman Hickman was Yale’s football coach. Along with Herman and Charley Loftus, then in charge of public relations in the athletic department, there were Grantland Rice, Frank Graham, Tim Cohane, Willard and Joe Stevens, of the sports catering clan.

  At meetings the order of business included drinking, eating, literary and poetic composition and recitation, laughter, argument, and song. Nobody ever had more fun.

  It was a privilege and an education to sit with Willard in a press box and watch his imagination work. For seven or eight innings he would watch, say, a baseball game in Ebbets Field, alert to all the nuances of the occasion. Then he might say, “I think I’ll have the Bum coming into a saloon and saying . . .” Laughing, he would describe some comic bit of business that would capture the essence of the event he was watching.

  Everybody remembers with pleasure the characters he had created to represent various teams—the Brooklyn Bum with toes peeping from cracked shoes; the big, dumb oaf who was a New York Giant; St. Louis Swifty, a steamboat slicker who portrayed the Cardinals; and the St. Louis Brown, po’ white trash with a jug of corn squeezin’s.

  When the Bum moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, he went Hollywood on the drawing board, putting on sunglasses, a beret and Bermuda shorts. When the Boston Brave took his breechclout to Milwaukee, his speech took on a trace of German accent and a beer belly grew steadily rounder.

  Willard was fun to work with and a joy to read. He is the best of companions, though it isn’t always easy to stay the course. We don’t have many guys around who can live it up with Willard and keep going at his pace into the tiny hours.

  Stanley Woodward could. That old Amherst tackle was a great bear and Willard, designed on a less massive scale, is broad-shouldered and muscular. One night at Bear Mountain Inn they were hand-wrestling for the drinks. Stanley exerted sudden pressure, and dislocated Willard’s thumb.

  It was the right thumb, the one on Willard’s drawing hand. Stanley oozed remorse from every pore. “Hit me, Willard,” he begged, “please hit me!” He offered his face unprotected, removing his glasses first.

  Not that there were any hard feelings. Another night when the three of us were together at the same cheerful watering hole, we convinced Willard that his genius wasn’t appreciated on the World-Telegram and Stanley hired him for the Herald Tribune. Next day Stanley
and I dragged ourselves out of bed in the Forest Lodge, where Jack Martin had planted us, cocked a bleary eye at deer grazing outside, and summoned the new employee: “Come, Willard, we’ve all got to get down to the office.”

  “I’ll start next week,” Willard said, burrowing deeper.

  CRUMBUMS

  1969

  Fourteen hundred people with a price on their heads slithered through the winter’s first snowstorm the other night to graze together in recognition of Toots Shor’s forty years in New York.

  The price was $100 a head, which seems slightly ridiculous when you consider that celebrating forty years of Toots Shor is like celebrating a broken hip. Actually, the crumbums came to salute themselves for survival.

  The roster of crumbums present—i.e., friends of the saloonkeeper—ranged from District Attorney Frank Hogan to former Chief Justice Earl Warren, from Bob Hope and Pat O’Brien to Joe E. Lewis and Gordon MacRae, from Horace Stoneham to Horace McMahon, from Johnny Rotz to Johnny Lujack.

  Indeed, there’s a former haberdasher out in Independence, Missouri, who probably would have been there a few years ago when he was in his early eighties. As a Senator and Vice President, Harry Truman was a licensed crumbum, and he pouted a good deal when the Secret Service told him the old joint on 51st Street was off-limits for the President.

  The improbable scope of Toots Shor’s friendships flabbergasts people from narrower worlds. They don’t understand that in forty years in the saloon business it is impossible not to meet everybody, and Toots never forgets anyone. Years ago this fact was remarked on by Bill Veeck, the free spirit who used to operate baseball franchises the way Shor runs a bar—noisily.

  “What I love about him,” Veeck said, “he’s no front runner. When I was a busher in Milwaukee, he was just as obnoxious to me as when I had the world champions. He’s a foul-weather friend, which is the worst kind.”