Meet The Sports Writers

[Bill Burgess]

Arthur Daniel Cooper

Born: November 29, 1878, Boston, MA, (confirmed by WWI Civilian Draft Registration and the 1880 census.)
Died: August 22, 1946, Boston, MA, age 67,---d. at his home in South Boston, MA.

Boston sports writer;
Boston agent, (June 5, 1900 census)
Boston newspaper reporter, (April 18, 1910 census)
Boston newspaper reporter, (January 8, 1920 census)
Boston Attorney at law, (April 12, 1930 census)
Graduated Boston Latin School (Boston, MA), 1909-11
Attended Harvard Universty (Cambridge, MA), 1909-1911; Graduated 1913
Boston American, yachting editor, 1904
Boston Post, sports writer, 1910
Boston Red Sox, traveling secretary, 1911
Boston Evening Transcript, Federal Court reporter
Graduated Suffolk Law School, April, 1924, (sworn as member of the bar.)
New England League of Professional Baseball Clubs, Secretary-Treasurer, 1914-15
unemployed newspaperman, lived in South Boston, (September 12, 1918 WWI Civilian Draft Registration)
self-employed in Boston, MA, (April 27, 1942 WWII Draft Registration.)
Practicing lawyer, never married.

"Since leaving College I have been connected with the Boston Post for a period of a year. Also connected with the Boston American Baseball club, Jersey City Baseball Club, and in 1914-15 was Secretary-Treasurer of the New England League of Professional Baseball Clubs. Have been active in city politics in Boston but never a candidate, although nominated for the City Council by the chairmen of the twenty-five ward committees of the Democratic party in 1915.

For three years I have been addressing all sorts of clubs, fraternal organization, et., all over New England on various topics of the world of sport.

While at College I worked for the Boston Post as a sporting writer and traveled with major league clubs all over the circuits." (Harvard College, Class of 1913; Secretary's Second Report, June, 1917.)

Father: James Fenimore., born March, 1842, MA, was produce dealer; Mother: Julia Ann (O'Reilly), born September, 1846, Ireland.

Boston Globe obituary, August 24, 1946, pp. 8.--------------------------------------------Sporting News' obituary, September 4, 1946, pp. 29.

[Bill Burgess]

Albert F. Wolf, Jr.---AKA Al Wolf

Born: March 7, 1904, Omaha, NE
Died: October 8, 1966, Los Angeles, CA, age 62,---d. in Houston on Saturday night, while covering football game between UCLA/Rice University.

Los Angeles sports writer;
Omaha, NE, 6-year old, (April 22, 1910 census)
Omaha, NE, 15-year old, (January 10, 1920 census)
Omaha, NE, reporter, newspaper, (April 5, 1930 census)
Omaha, NE, sports copy writer, (April 27, 1940 census)
Los Angeles Times, sports writer, 1939-1966;
Graduated University of Nebraska, 1926
Omaha World-Herald, sports writer, 1926 -June 1, 1939
Los Angeles Times, sports writer, June 1, 1939 - 1956

Father: Albert F., born Illinois around 1861; Mother: Christina, born Germany around 1876; Wife: Wilma Baker, born Nebraska, around 1909.

[Bill Burgess]

And then there were some sports writers who were not primarily baseball writers. But their excellence merits them inclusion here, and gives this tribute enhanced historical relevance.

Melvin L. Durslag

Born: April 29, 1921, Chicago, IL
Died: Stive Alive

Los Angeles sports writer;
Los Angeles, CA, 8-year old, (April 5, 1930 census)
Los Angeles, CA, reporter, newspaper, (April 18, 1940 census)
Sporting News' correspondent, 1950 - 1984
Los Angeles Herald Examiner, sports columnist, 1939 - 1989.
Los Angeles Times, sports columnist, 1990 - 1991.
TV Guide, writing editor, (30 years)
Mel was primarily a football writer.

Father: William, born Czechoslovakia, 1890?; Mother: Freda, born Czecho-slovakia, 1892?;

Born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 29, 1921, sportswriting legend Mel Durslag covered Olympics, professional and college sports, and every Super Bowl during his more than 50 year career. For his outstanding work, Durslag received many accolades including being named California Sportswriter of the Year seven times. Durslag began his career with the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in 1939 and went on to write for the paper for an incredible 50 years, before moving to the Los Angeles Times for the last two years of his career. In addition to his work with theHerald-Examiner, Durslag also worked as a correspondent for Sporting News from 1950-1984, was writing editor of TV Guide for 30 years, and wrote articles for national magazines including the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, and Esquire from 1947-1990. He retired in 1991. In recognition of his outstanding career as a sportswriter, Durslag was inducted into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame on April 24, 1995.

In 1956, Melvin interviewed disgraced Black Sox' player, Chick Gandil, who recounted for him Gandil's version of the 1919 Black Sox' scandal for Sports Illustrated. Sports Illustrated published the interview that year - "This is My Story of the Black Sox Series, by Chick Gandil, as told to Mel Durslag." Sports Illustrated, September 17, 1956.

January 30, 1971.

[Bill Burgess]

George Arnold Strickler

Born: August 12, 1904, South Bend, Indiana
Died: December 7, 1976, Evanston, IL, age 72,---d. heart ailment in his Evanston home.

Chicago general writer / sports writer;
Sugar Creek, IN, 6-year old, (April 19, 1910 census)
Oronoko, MI, 15-year old, (January 6, 1920 census)
Chicago, IL, publicity agent, stadium, (April 3, 1930 census)
Chicago, IL, sports writer, newspaper, (April 9, 1940 census)
Graduated Indiana University (South Bend, IN)
Notre Dame University
South Bend
Atlanta
Chicago
Chicago Stadium publicity director
Chicago Tribune, sports editor, January 8, 1966 - 1969
George was primarily a football writer.

Father: Dr. Louis Strickler, born Indiana, 1854?; Mother: Cora A., born Indiana 1870?;

George was the First President of the Professional Football Writers Association, the Executive Director of Chicago Tribune Charities (sponsors of the College All-Star game), Publicity director for the NFL, assistant general manager of the Green Bay Packers, a founding director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and head of the sports department on the Chicago Tribune.

The Dick McCann Memorial Award is given to a reporter who has made a long and distinguished contribution to pro football. The McCann award is presented annually at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. It is sometimes referred to as the "writer's wing" of the Hall of Fame.--1969 George Strickler, Chicago Tribune.

Sporting News' obituary, December 25, 1976, pp. 55.------Chicago Tribune obituary, December 9, 1976, pp. C1.


----------------------------------1955

[Bill Burgess]

John Roberts Tunis

Born: December 7, 1889, Boston, MA
Died: February 4, 1975, Essex, CT, age 85---d. at his home

General writer / sports writer;
Cambridge, MA, 8-year old, (June 7, 1900 census)
Winchendon, MA, machinist, machine shop, (January 7, 1920 census)
Norwalk, CT, writer, newspaper, (April 5, 1930 census)
Norwalk, CT, author & writer, magazines & books, (April 8, 1940 census)
Graduated Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), 1911 (tennis team)
Cambridge University (Cambridge, MA)
Boston University Law School
US Army (served in France, WWI, as 2nd Lieutenant)
New York Evening Post, sports writer, 1925 - 1932
NBC radio, Tennis commentator in New York, 1934 - 1942.

Mother: Caroline G., born Massachusetts, October, 1855; Wife: R. Lucy, born Massachusetts, 1890?;

John wrote 2,000 magazine articles and more than 3 dozen books.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Roberts Tunis (December 7, 1889 in Boston, Massachusetts - February 4, 1975 in Essex, Connecticut) was a well-known and prolific author of juvenile sports fiction. Tunis's work was unusual in that many of his books included socio-political themes, including war (notably World War II in his novel, His Enemy, His Friend) and racism.

Tunis was born the son of a Unitarian minister, who died when he was six years old. In 1911 he graduated from Harvard, where he was a member of the tennis team, and went on to study law at Boston University. In World War I he served in the U.S. Army in France, rising to second lieutenant. Prior to his fiction career, Tunis reported on sports for the New York Evening Post and later covered tennis for NBC radio, including the first U.S. broadcast from Wimbledon.

Nine of Tunis's novels were about baseball, most of them dealing with the triumphs and travails of the Brooklyn Dodgers. His most famous creation was Roy Tucker, a pitching phenom who injured his elbow and then fought his way back into baseball as an outfielder, and Tunis surrounded Tucker with a host of supporting players - "Bones" Hathaway, "Razzle" Nugent, "Fat Stuff" Foster - who vividly evoked baseball's golden age. It has been said that Tunis's baseball books are "not only the best sports fiction for 10-to-14 year-olds ever written, they are among the best sports fiction - period." Pete Hamill picked The Kid From Tomkinsville, the first Tunis book to feature Tucker, as one of his five favorite sports novels, writing that "virtually every sportswriter I know remembers reading it as a boy."

JOHN R. TUNIS (1889-1975) was considered one of the finest writers for young people during the 1940s and '50s. He wrote more than twenty books, many of them award winners. The timeless appeal of his novels has made them enduringly popular with readers of all ages.

Authored:
American Girl, Brewer, 1928
Iron Duke, Harcourt, 1938
Duke Decides, Harcourt, 1939
Champion's Choice, Harcourt, 1940
Kid From Tomkinsville, Harcourt, 1940
Sport for the Fun of It, Barnes, 1940
Democracy and Sport, Barnes, 1941
All-American, Harcourt, Brace, 1942
Million-Miler, Messner, 1942
Keystone Kids, Harcourt, 1943
Lawn Games, Barnes, 1943
Rookie of the Year, Harcourt, 1944
Yea! Wildcats, Harcourt, 1944
City for Lincoln, Harcourt, 1945
Kid Comes Back, Morrow, 1946
High Pockets, Morrow, 1948
Young Razzle, Morrow, 1949
The Other Side of the Fence, Morrow, 1953
Go, Team, Go!, Morrow, 1954
Buddy and the Old Pro, Morrow, 1955
American Way in Sport, Duell, 1958
Schoolboy Johnson, Morrow, 1958
Silence Over Dunderque, Morrow, 1962
A Measure of Independence, Atheneum, 1964

New York Times' obituary, February 5, 1975, pp. 35.--------------------------------Sporting News' obituary, March 1, 1975, pp. 46.

[Bill Burgess]

Abbott Joseph Liebling

Born: October 18, 1904, New York City
Died: December 28, 1963, New York City, age 59

General Journalist / sports writer; Jewish
Manhattan, NY, 5-year old, (1910 census)
Hempstead, NY, 16-year old, (January 22, 1920 census)
Dartmouth College (Honover, NH) (admitted 1920, transferred)
Columbia University, (NYC) (School of Journalism),
New York Times, sports writer, 1925
Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin, reporter, feature writer, 1927 - 1939
New York World Telegram, feataure writer, 1931 - 1935
The New Yorker (magazine), sports writer and columnist, 1935 - 1963
Mainly a boxing writer.

Father: Joseph, born Germany-Austria, 1873?; Mother: Anna, born New York, 1878?; Wife: Jean Stafford (novelist, m. 1959, d. 1963)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia below
Abbott Joseph Liebling (October 18, 1904 – December 28, 1963) was an American journalist who was closely associated with The New Yorker from 1935 until his death.

Biography
Liebling was born into a well-off family in Manhattan's Upper East Side, where his father worked in New York's fur industry. His mother was from San Francisco, Anna Adelson Slone. After early schooling in New York, Liebling was admitted to Dartmouth College in the fall of 1920. He left Dartmouth without graduating, later claiming he was "thrown out for missing compulsory chapel attendance". He then enrolled in the School of Journalism at Columbia University. After finishing there, he began his career as a journalist at the Evening Bulletin of Providence, Rhode Island. He worked briefly in the sports department of the New York Times, from which he supposedly was fired for listing the name "Ignoto" (Italian for "unknown") as the referee in results of games.

In 1926, Liebling's father asked if he would like to suspend his career as a journalist to study in Paris for a year.

I sensed my father's generous intention, Liebling replied, and, fearing that he might change his mind, I told him that I didn't feel I should go, since I was indeed thinking of getting married. "The girl is ten years older than I am," I said, "and Mother might think she is kind of fast, because she is being kept by a cotton broker from Memphis, Tennessee, who only comes North once in a while. But you are a man of the world, and you understand that a woman can't always help herself...." Within the week, I had a letter of credit on the Irving Trust for two thousand dollars, and a reservation on the old Caronia for late in the summer, when the off-season rates would be in effect. [Source: The New Yorker, March 29, 2004, p. 54.] Liebling later wrote that the unsuitable proposed marriage was a fiction intended less to swindle his father than to cover his own pride ast being the recipient of such generosity. [Source: Liebling, A.J., "Between the Meals, an Appetite for Paris", Library of Congress Catalg Card Number 85-73123, ISBN 978-0-86547-236-5 and ISBN 0-86547-236-X, p. 63.]

Thus in summer 1926, Liebling sailed to Europe where he studied French medieval literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. By his own admission [Source: "Between Meals, an Appetite for Paris", see above, passim] his devotion to his studies was purely nominal, he seeing the year as a chance to absorb French life and appreciate French food. Although he stayed for little more than a year, this interval inspired a life-long love for France and the French, later renewed in his war reporting. He returned to Providence in autumn 1927 to write for the Journal. He then moved to New York, where he proceeded to campaign for a job on Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, which carried the work of James M. Cain and Walter Lippmann and was known at the time as 'the writer's paper.' In order to attract the attention of the city editor, James W. Barrett, Liebling hired an out-of-work Norwegian seaman to walk for three days outside the Pulitzer Building, on Park Row, wearing sandwich boards that read Hire Joe Liebling. [Source: The New Yorker, March 29, 2004, p. 54.] (It turned out that Barrett habitually used a different entrance on another street, and never saw the sign.) He wrote for the World (1930–31) and the World-Telegram (1931–1935). He married Mary Anne Quinn in 1934 despite knowledge of her schizophrenia; she was often hospitalized during their marriage.

Liebling joined The New Yorker in 1935. His best pieces from the late thirties are collected in Back Where I Came From (1938) and The Telephone Booth Indian (1942).

During World War II, Liebling was active as a war correspondent, filing many stories from Africa, England, and France. His war began when he flew to Europe in October 1939 to cover its early battles, lived in Paris until June 10, 1940, and then returned to the United States until July 1941, when he flew to Britain. He sailed to Algeria in November 1942 to cover the fighting on the Tunisian front (January to May 1943). His articles from these days are collected in The Road Back to Paris (1944). He participated in the Normandy landings on D Day, and he wrote a memorable piece concerning his experiences on a landing craft. He afterwards spent two months in Normandy and Brittany, and was with the Allied forces when they entered Paris. He wrote afterwards: "For the first time in my life and probably the last, I have lived for a week in a great city where everybody was happy." Liebling was awarded the Cross of the Légion d'honneur by the French government for his war reporting.

Following the war he returned to regular magazine fare and for many years after he wrote a New Yorker monthly feature called "Wayward Press", in which he analyzed the US press. Liebling was also an avid fan of boxing, horse racing and food, and frequently wrote about these subjects. In 1947 he published The Wayward Pressman, a collection of his writings from The New Yorker and other publications. During the late forties, he vigorously criticized the House Un-American Activities Committee, became friends with Alger Hiss, divorced his first wife, and married Lucille Spectorsky in 1949. (He was later to divorce again, and marry author Jean Stafford in 1959.)

In 1961, Liebling published The Earl of Louisiana, originally published as a series of articles in The New Yorker in which he covered the trials and tribulations of the governor of Louisiana, Earl K. Long, the younger brother of the Louisiana politician Huey Long.

Liebling died on December 28, 1963, and was buried in the Green River Cemetery, East Hampton, New York.

Authored:
The Wayward Pressman (1947, essays)
The Sweet Science (1956)
The Earl of Louisiana (1961, biography)
Just Enough Liebling (2004, anthology)

New York Times' obituary, December 29, 1963, pp. 42.

[Bill Burgess]

Herbert Warren Wind

Born: August 11, 1916, Brockton, MA
Died: May 30, 2005, Medford, MA, age 88---d. pneumonia in an assisted-living facility.

General writer / sports writer;
Brockton, MA, 3-year old, (January 2, 1920 census)
Brockton, MA, 13-year old, (April 7, 1930 census)
Brocton, MA, journalist, newspaper enterprise, (April 4, 1940 census)
Graduated Yale University (New Haven, CT),
Graduated Cambridge University (Cambridge, MA), 1939 (Masters Degree in English Literature)
New Yorker, staff writer, 1947 - 1954, 1962 - 1989
Sports Illustrated, 1954 - 1960
Primarily a golf writer, but also wrote a wide range of sports, including, tennis, basketball and football.

Father: Max E., born Austria, 1882?; Mother: Dora, born Russia, 1885?;

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Herbert Warren Wind (August 11, 1916 – May 30, 2005), an American sports writer renowned for his writings on golf.

Life and career
Born in Brockton, Massachusetts. Wind developed an early love of golf at Thorny Lea Golf Club in Brockton. He was a graduate of Yale University and Cambridge University. At Cambridge, Wind became friends with the noted British golfed writer Bernard Drawin, a grandson of Charles Darwin.

Wind wrote for The New Yorker from 1947 through 1954 and again from 1962 to 1989. He was a writer for Sports Illustrated in between. Although associated with golf, Wind wrote articles on a wide range of sports including tennis, basketball, and football.

In his article on the 1958 Masters, he dubbed the 11th, 12th, and 13th holes of Augusta National "Amen Corner." It was inspired by a jazz record Wind bought in college, Shoutin' in the Amen Corner.

In 1992, the Professional Golfers Association honored Wind with its lifetime achievement award. The United States Golf Association presented Wind with the Bob Jones Award, its highest award, in 1995, the centennial of the USGA. He is the only writer to receive the award.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pages 16-17 From Winter 2009 Florida Golf Magazine ©Copyright 2009, All Rights Reserved.
Golf’s Laureate In Winter
Herbert Warren Wind Reminisces On 50 Years of Sage Reporting; Interviewed & written, June 2002 by Bob Labbance; Reprinted from Fall 2002 Florida Golf Magazine

He is one of our last bastions of civility. A connection with an old world class, poise, manners, gentlemanliness and demeanor that is slowly disappearing in modern society. In addition to his social comportment, he wrote about sports in a style that could stand up to the writing of the great American scribes — writers like Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner. For more than half-a-century, Herbert Warren Wind has carried the banner as America’s greatest sports writer, as well as one of Massachusetts most famous and distinguished residents.

Now, at age 85, his memory is no longer perfect — but then, whose is?
If there has ever been a cliché that rings true, it’s that Herb Wind has forgotten more about golf than most close observers of the game will ever know. Wind has been everywhere and done everything, and along the way he’s earned the respect of everyone who’s been involved with the game for the past 50 years. Now that the pressure of deadlines is gone, Wind is content to read a bit, write a bit and watch on television the games he once followed on foot, like a young cop patrolling the streets of his beat. But Herb Wind’s beat was the playing fields of America, and he knew every inch. These days, he’s less than thrilled with the sport he once covered so passionately.

His articles on golf’s major championships made him seem omnipresent — prowling every corner of a 300-acre property and missing nary a stroke by the top contenders. “Well, that’s what you did,” recalls Wind of his conduct at the big tournaments. “You got out on the course on the first day and you said, ‘I’m going to cover so-and-so.’ You’d watch him and if he played well you might follow him for the whole round. As you did you’d pick up on other things — another player may be four under after five holes and so you pick him up; then you might go in and check the boards, but you’d be back out on the course soon after.

“Sometimes you might be out on the course for 10 hours — you not only learn how the course is playing but you might see some wonderful golf being played. Then you would rush home and get it down and quick as you could while it’s fresh in your mind. It was common for me to walk 36 holes or more each day.”

Today’s sportswriters should take a cue. Too many spend most of their time in the press tent watching the television coverage. Wind always believed in seeing the action up close. Perhaps that’s why his writing still occupies such an exalted position. “Some of the writers go out on the course today,” notes Wind, “but most of them just watch on TV and wait until the players come in to be interviewed. I think you have to go out and watch to find out how the course is playing. Plus while you’re out there, all of a sudden a player makes a double bogey and you see how he reacts to that. Then you can gauge fairly well how he’s going to do the rest of the championship.”

While Wind’s advancing years sadly remind us that even the greatest minds can fall prey to aging’s ills, some things remain clear as a bell 75 years later. “I first started playing golf when I was 9 years old,” he recalls. “My dad had some money so I had the opportunity to play at Thorny Lea [GC in Brockton, Mass.]. We lived at 26 West Elm Street in Brockton and I could walk up to the 15th tee in about 10 minutes. There was a very good coach at Thorny Lea and I started lessons when I was nine. Bill Shields was a very smart guy — ran the whole course and kept the place in good shape — he was a consummate professional.”

Wind knows how valuable the start he got in golf was, and laments the fact that others weren’t given the same opportunity. “We had two private courses and one public in Brockton, but they didn’t have enough people who cared about keeping them up and teaching others how to play the game. There are many more people today who care about the game and are teaching kids to play.”

The accomplished author thanks his father for planting the golfing seed in him. “My father played, in fact, everybody in the family played. After dinner my father would say, ‘Who wants to go out and play some golf?’ Sometimes my brother and both my sisters would walk up there to play a few holes with us.”

Nevertheless, Wind has a realistic picture of his abilities as a youngster. “I was not an outstanding golfer at Thorny Lea,” he says. “There were some kids who were better than I was, but I got plenty of instruction there. You also learned how to play better by watching. There was a Greater Boston Four-Ball League at the time. They would come by in the early spring and you could see some very good golfers play — some became professional.”

Wind chose college life instead of the competitive circuit, though he both wrote about and played golf at Yale University. In 1933, he picked golf as the subject for his freshman thesis, and so began a romance that would last through six decades. Upon graduation in 1937, he wasn’t so sure what to do.

“My father owned the Wind Shoe Company. I worked there on vacations from college and I liked my father very much. But the factory life didn’t interest me, and that’s when I decided I wanted to be a writer. So I went to Cambridge for two years.”

In 1939, Wind received a masters degree in English Literature at Cambridge University, and furthered his golfing education by visiting the great courses of Scotland.

A far-away look washes his face as he recalls those days.
“I don’t think the great courses will ever get old, and you never get tired of a good golf course. You have to go to those Scottish courses because those are the ones that are worth getting to know even better. If you go back there you can find what their particular charms are, and what their hidden difficulties are. A good course should still reveal what the designer had in mind when he laid it out, no matter how many years have passed.”

After Cambridge, Wind enlisted in the Army and served nearly five years during World War II as an administrative officer in the Army Air Corps, stationed in China and Japan. One of his assignments in the military was to write a “true” history of the war in the Pacific for the Japanese people, to replace the propaganda they had been hearing. When he returned to the United States in 1948, Wind sought a career in journalism.

“When I got out of the service I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do, but I wanted to write. So I went to New York City and got a job at The New Yorker.”

Wind began by writing the ‘Profiles’ feature, still hoping to bring sports to the literary magazine. “I bought myself a place in western Massachusetts, about a two-hour drive from the city. It was a nice area, there were three or four courses around and I played there.”

He must have built upon his early talents from Thorny Lea, because in 1950 Wind entered the British Amateur being held at St. Andrews, and advanced to match play. He was defeated in the first round by J.C. Wilson three up with one to play. “I didn’t do very well in the Amateur, but I did learn something by watching the good players at the Old Course.”

Wind moved to Sports Illustrated when that magazine was launched in 1954. He stayed five years, and when he returned to The New Yorker the magazine instituted a column entitled ‘The Sporting Scene,’ giving Wind an outlet for his passion for golf.

He contributed for more than 40 years, while also authoring nearly a dozen books. He collaborated with golfers such as Ben Hogan, Gene Sarazen and Jack Nicklaus; and in his later years he also wrote the introductions to the Classics of Golf series.

Through the years, Wind was a welcome guest at The Masters, and a friend to Bobby Jones. “When Jones started Augusta National it was great to go down there. It was such a nice southern place with golf people who knew the game and the weather was so enjoyable, especially for Northerners that time of year.” The respect was mutual, as Jones once wrote, “Herb Wind is devoted to golf. He is a fine, sensitive writer whose works range from essays of the most accurately appreciative kind to some of the finest golf reporting I have ever read.”

Others echoed what Jones so eloquently stated, including Bing Crosby who once wrote: “Here in our country, the dean is, without question, Herbert Warren Wind. Through the years, no man has covered the golfing scene so thoroughly or so beautifully.” Fellow Bay State writer and golfer John Updike adds: “Golf has attracted many fine writers, but none extols the game with more authority and affection than Herb Wind, or more successfully conveys its gracious, fickle, generous spirit to the printed page.”

When asked if he keeps in touch with these voices from the past, Wind looks melancholy for a moment. “No, I don’t really see any of my old golfing friends,” he laments from the senior care facility where he now lives. “I’m here now seven years. There are very few men, otherwise its all women. I used to have lunch with a couple of the guys who knew golf and we’d talk, but now most of them are gone. But I can’t complain; this is a pretty good place to be an old guy.”

Wind never married. He has two sisters in the area and a brother back in Brockton. They come by occasionally to remember the old days.

“When I retired I wanted to come back to Massachusetts, but not necessarily to Brockton. I like the people here and the house atmosphere, and I’ve done a little writing and at first, played some golf. But I haven’t followed golf that much in the last few years.”

Herb Wind has seen the play of golfers from Bobby Jones to Tiger Woods, but he’s not that impressed with the methods of the modern champions. “I don’t care much for the style of play today. It’s all about power off the tee, and then a putting contest on the green. There are no shotmakers any more; no one that can craft a shot to match the conditions. That’s what disappoints me about golf today.”

When reminded of the talents of Tiger Woods, Wind offers: “He’s remarkable isn’t he?” And then adds: “Fortunately, the classic courses will always require far more than just a long ball. You have to get to know the course and all its qualities. You have to be able to hit it far but you also have to control the ball. Few can do that any more.”

This time of year, Wind is much happier to watch the Red Sox, and dream with the rest of New England of that long-awaited World Series victory. “I watch the Red Sox all the time on television. They have a pretty good team this year, but I don’t know enough about the other teams to know if they can keep it up all season. I think they might have the right owners and players this year to go all the way. But you never know until the fall.”

He pauses, then adds, “Baseball’s the greatest game isn’t it?”
No Herb, golf is. And it wouldn’t be so without you.

Interviewed and written by Bob Labbance in June 2002
Reprinted from Fall 2005 Florida Golf Magazine

Authored:
Wind wrote or edited 14 books in addition to his numerous articles for magazines. His The Story of American Golf is considered a seminal work on the subject.

The Complete Golfer, editor
Game, Set, and Match
The Gilded Age of Sport
Great Stories from the World of Sport, co-editor with Peter Schwed
The Greatest Game of All with Jack Nicklaus
Herbert Warren Wind's Golf Book
The Modern Fundamentals of Golf with Ben Hogan
On the Tour with Harry Sprague
Playing Through
The Realm of Sport, editor
The Story of American Golf
Thirty Years of Championship Golf with Gene Sarazen
Tips from the Top, editor
World of P.G. Wodehouse
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Wind"

New York Times' obituary, June 1, 2005, pp. B9.

[Bill Burgess]

Joseph Hill Palmer, Jr.---AKA Joe Palmer

Born: October 18, 1904, Lexington, KY
Died: October 31, 1952, Malverne, NY, age 48---d. heart failure

New York General writer / sports writer;
Lexington, KY, 5-year old, (1910 census)
Georgetown, KY, 15-year old, (January 2, 1920 census)
Georgetown, KY, teacher, state university, (April 11, 1930 census)
Fayette, KY, publisher, newspaper, (May 2, 1940 census)
Graduated University of Kentucky (Lexington, KY), B.A., 1927; M.A., 1928;
University of Michigan, A.B.D.
Taught English at University of Kentucky & University of Michigan before he became a writer.
The Blood Horse, Associate editor / business manager, 1935 - 1944
American Race Horses, editor, 1944 - 1946
New York Herald Tribune, racing columnist / editor, 1946 - 1952
Palmer moved to New York in 1946 to work for acclaimed sports editor Stanley Woodward as the New York Herald Tribune racing editor.
Primarily a horse racing writer.

Father: Joseph W., born England, 1864?; Mother: Sallie F., born Kentucky, 1864?; Wife: Mary Cole Holloway, born Kentucky, 1911?; Son: Joseph Holloway, born Kentucky, 1939?;

-----------------------------------------------------------------------Washington Post obituary,-------------------Chicago Daily Tribune obituary,
New York Times' obituary, November 1, 1952, pp. 21.----------------------------------------November 1, 1952, pp. 10.--------------------November 1, 1952, pp. B2.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sporting News' obituary, November 12, 1952, pp. 22.

[Bill Burgess]

Herbert Randoph Sugar---AKA Bert Sugar

Born: June 7, 1936, Washington, DC
Died: March 25, 2012, Mt. Kisco, NY, age 75,---d. lung cancer / cardiac arrest

Boxing writer;
District of Columbia, 4-year old, (April 2, 1940 census)
Graduated University of Maryland (College Park, MD),
Graduated University of Michigan, 1961 (JD and MBA dgree)

Father: Harold, born Maryland, 1907?; Mother: Anna, born Pennsylvania, 1912?;

Bert's wikipedia---From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bert Randolph Sugar (born June 7, 1936, in Washington, D.C.) is a boxing writer. He currently resides in Chappaqua, New York.

Education
Sugar graduated from the University of Maryland and earned a JD and MBA from the University of Michigan in 1961. After passing the bar exam, he worked in the advertising business in New York City. In 1959 he founded the University of Michigan Rugby Football Club.

Career
Sugar bought Boxing Illustrated magazine in 1969 and was editor until 1973. From 1979–1983 he was editor and publisher of The Ring. In 1988 he once again began editing Boxing Illustrated. In 1998 he founded Bert Sugar's Fight Game.

Sugar has written over 80 books, mostly on boxing history. Various boxing books that Sugar has written include Great Fights, Bert Sugar on Boxing, 100 Years of Boxing, Sting like a Bee (with José Torres), The Ageless Warrior (Preface, with Mike Fitzgerald) and Boxing's Greatest Fighters. Sugar was called "The Greatest Boxing Writer of the 20th Century" by the International Veterans Boxing Association.

In May 2009 he and Running Press published Bert Sugar's Baseball Hall of Fame: A Living History of America's Greatest Game.

Other media
He has also appeared in several films playing himself, including Night and the City, The Great White Hype and Rocky Balboa. He has been called Runyonesque (in reference to Damon Runyon) by Bob Costas, and "one of the foremost historians alive," by the Boston Globe newspaper. Along with Lou Albano he helped write The Complete Idiot's Guide to Pro Wrestling. He writes a regular sports column for Smoke Magazine, a quarterly cigar lifestyle magazine.

Sugar was elected to the International Boxing Hall of Fame in January 2005.

[Bill Burgess]

Jesse Peter Abramson

Born: March 10, 1904, Mountaindale, NY
Died: June 11, 1979, Mt. Vernon, NY, age 75,---d. cancer

New York sports writer; Jewish
Manhattan, NY, 6-year old, (1910 census)
Brooklyn, NY, 17-year old, (January 6, 1920 census)(listed Jesse Abrams)
Bronx, NY, reporter, newspaper, (April 8, 1930 census)(listed Jesse Abrahamson)
Mt. Vernon, NY, reporter, newspaper, (April 16, 1940 census)
New York Herald Tribune, 1924 - 1966

Father: Meyer, born Russia, 1876?; Mother: Ida, born Russia, 1874?; Wife: Dorothy L., born New York, 1906?; Mark L., born New York 1931?; Daughter: Linda, born New York, 1938?;

Profound knowledge, amazing memory for facts. Widely recognized as the country's leading authority on track & field, at least until 1948 when Cordner & Bert Nelson came along and founded Track & Field News. Jesse attended every Olympics from 1924 to 1976. Won James J. Walker Award for service to boxing, career achievement award from New York Track Writers Association. Founder & long-time President of New York Track Writers, and served as President of New York Football Writers' Association.
Track and Field Hall of Fame, (1st media inductee.)
Primarily a Track and Field and football writer.

His New York Times obituary, written by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Red Smith, reads: “Jesse Abramson, a distinguished figure in sports journalism for 56 years and widely recognized as the nation’s leading track and field writer. Colleagues called him ‘The Brain’, in recognition of his profound knowledge of track and his phenomenal memory for detail.

“As a rookie on the Herald-Tribune in 1924, Abramson rewrote Grantland Rice’s condensed cable dispatches from the Olympic Games. Then, starting in 1928, he attended every summer Olympics through 1976. He covered the Games for the Herald-Tribune until 1964 (the paper folded in 1966), was foreign press liaison at the 1968 Games in Mexico, covered the 1972 Games for the International Herald-Tribune, and was press liaison in 1976.

“Mr. Abramson received many honors, including the Grantland Rice Award of the Sportsmen Brotherhood, the James J. Walker Award for service to boxing, and the career achievement award from the New York Track Writers Association. He was a founder and long-time president of the New York Track Writers Association, and the NYTA’s annual award to the outstanding athlete of the year is named for him. He was also president of the New York Football Writers Association.”

In 1981, Abramson was honored as the first media person to be elected to the National Track & Field Hall of Fame.
--------------------------------------------------------
Born on 10 March 1904 in Mountaindale, a small village in the Catskill Mountains, near Spring Valley, New York, Jesse was the son of Louis, a tailor, and Minnie Virship Abramson. His birth, however, was recorded officially as May 11, because the courier whom his family had sent to register his birth procrastinated for an entire day. Moreover, he was registered only as Peter Abramson. Soon after his birth the family moved to the Brooklyn borough of New York City. In 1922 Abramson served as editor of the Stuyvesant High School yearbook and graduated valedictorian from the Manhattan-based public high school.

Although accepted by Columbia University for enrollment in the fall of 1922, Abramson instead took a position as a stringer in the sports department of The New York Herald about a week before the beginning of the semester. "I was only being paid per story," Abramson told Chuck Stogel in a June 24, 1978 Sportscope interview, "but I was lucky to have a friendly editor who would put one column of mine in the first edition and then a fresh copy in the second edition.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2003. Entry Updated : 12/02/2003
Jesse P. Abramson: 1904-1979:

"Sidelights"
Sportswriter Jesse P. Abramson was known as "The Book" among his contemporaries because of his extraordinary memory and profound knowledge of sports. Although his expertise was greatest when it came to track and field, Abramson also wrote authoritatively about boxing, college football, baseball, swimming, fencing, rowing, and automobile racing. He earned a reputation as an accurate, tireless, inquisitive reporter capable of vivid reportage.

Abramson began writing about sports for the New York Herald in the early 1920s, an era known as the Golden Age of American sports. During the 1920s, the popular appeal of sports rose dramatically. Part of the reason for this was a new generation of journalists, sometimes called the "gee whiz" school of writers, who created exaggerated, heroic images of talented athletes, such as Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey. Although influenced in the beginning by their exaggerated hyperbolic style, Abramson nevertheless developed his own deliberate and authoritative approach. In his articles, he reported the unfolding of a football game, a track-and-field meet, or a prizefight in such a way that readers had the sense of actually witnessing it themselves.

Abramson was accepted by Columbia University in the fall of 1922, but he opted instead to take a position as a stringer in the sports department of the New York Herald. "I was only being paid per story," Abramson told Chuck Stogel in a Sportscope interview, "but I was lucky to have a friendly editor who would put one column of mine in the first edition and then a fresh copy in the second edition. I was able to make about $125 a week as a stringer, which was as much as anybody working full-time back then." At the Herald, one of the oldest newspapers in the United States, the young reporter had the chance to work with some of the country's best sportswriters. He covered high school football, track-and-field meets, and provided profiles of top performers from the prep schools. He also authored a weekly column summarizing high-school and college freshman sports in the metropolitan New York area.

In 1924 the New York Herald became the New York Herald Tribune and hired Grantland Rice to cover the Summer Olympic Games from Paris. Transmitted by cable, his reports arrived to the sports desk in a condensed text that needed rewriting. Abramson was given the assignment of filling out the terse reports. "You see, at that time," Abramson explained to Stogel, "all overseas copy was sent in cable-ese. It was an abbreviated transmission of mostly verbs and nouns to save money. We'd rewrite the stories by filling in the rest of the needed words." Rewriting Rice's reports provided a big break in Abramson's career; afterward, he was given his own byline and was assigned to the Olympic Games, track and field, and amateur sports in general as his permanent principal beat for the Herald Tribune. He provided firsthand coverage of the Olympic Games in Amsterdam in 1928, Los Angeles in 1932, Berlin in 1936, London in 1948, Melbourne in 1956, Rome in 1960, and Tokyo in 1964. In 1968, he worked for the Mexican Olympic Committee as the foreign press chief at the games in Mexico City, and covered the event for the Washington Post. He reported on the 1972 games in Munich for both the International Herald Tribune and the Washington Post. At the Montreal summer games in 1976, he served as the press liaison for the U.S. Olympic Committee. Because of his knowledge of the Olympics, especially track and field, Abramson's presence at the games was considered essential by many reporters.

Abramson witnessed and wrote about more than fifty years of Olympic Games. During those years, the games were dominated by American athletes, who won more gold, silver, and bronze medals than any other nation until 1952, when the Soviet Union entered a team that came within five medals of the seventy-six garnered by the United States. In 1956, the Soviet Union surpassed the United States in total medals, ninety-eight to seventy-four. Although Abramson wrote glowingly about America's Olympic performers, he had recognized by the early 1960s that the rest of the world, especially the Soviet Union and the Eastern Europeans, had caught up with and, in some events, surpassed the United States.

Many commentators consider the track and field events to be the heart of the Olympics. Similarly, many track-and-field correspondents regarded Abramson as "the dean of American track and field writers and scholars," as Bob Hersh of Track and Field News put it. Abramson distinguished himself from other track-and-field correspondents by his unmatched memory for statistical details and his appreciation for the philosophy behind the sport. Abramson also reported on more than a half-century of track-and-field competitions outside the Olympics. In track and field, as in the larger Olympic movement, he saw the United States dominate the sport internationally, only later to be challenged by the Soviet Union and other emerging nations.

At the conclusion of the American indoor track-and-field season, the New York Track and Field Writers Association annually awards the outstanding male athlete a trophy in Abramson's honor. After his death the USOC Invitational also created the Jesse Abramson Memorial Award to recognize meritorious service to track and field.

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Family: Born March 10, 1904, in Mountaindale, NY; died of cancer, June 11, 1979, in Mount Vernon, NY. Memberships: New York Track Writers (founder and president).

AWARDS
Grantland Rice Award of the Sportsmanship Brotherhood; James J. Walker Award for service to boxing; award for meritorious service from the New York Track and Field Writers Association; prizes from E. P. Dutton publishers for stories, 1948, 1952, 1957, 1958, and 1965; inducted into Track and Field Hall of Fame (Indianapolis, IN) in honor of career achievements, 1981.

CAREER
New York Herald Tribune, New York, NY, reporter until 1966; director of U.S. Olympic Invitational indoor meet, 1966-1979; writer on track and field sports.

Covering the November, 1948 Army/Navy Football game.---Sporting News' obituary, July 7, 1979, pp. 50.

[Bill Burgess]

John Kennedy Hutchens

Born: August 9, 1905, Chicago, IL
Died: July 22, 1995, New York City, age 89

New York author, book critic;
Downers Grove, IL, (April 21, 1910 census)(listed as J. Hotchens)
Missoula, IL, 14-year old, (January 12, 1920 census)
Manhattan, NY, newsdesk, newspaper, (April 18, 1930 census)
Cambridge, MA, Dramatic Editor, newspaper, (April 10, 1940 census)
Graduated Hamilton College (Clinton, NY), 1926
Daily Missoulian, reporter
Missoula Sentinel (Montana), 1926 - 1927
New York Herald Tribune, book reviewer, 1948 - 1963
New York Evening Post, reporter, film critic, assistant drama editor, 1927-28;
Theatre Arts (magazine), assistant editor, 1928-29, drama critic, 1929-32;
New York Times, drama staff, 1929-38;
Boston Evening Transcript, drama critic, 1938-41;
New York Times, radio editor, 1941-44;
New York Times Book Review, assistant editor, 1944-46, editor, 1946-48;
New York Herald Tribune, author of book news column, 1948-56, daily book reviewer, 1956-63;
Book-of-the-Month Club, member of editorial board, 1963--

Father: M. J., born New York, 1867?; Mother: Leila, born New York, 1867?; Wife: Katherine, born Massachusetts, 1907?; Daughter: Anne, born New York, 1936?; Son: Timothy, born New York, 1938?;

John Hutchens had long experience as a drama critic before becoming radio editor of the New York Times in 1941. He was with the New York Post in 1927 and 1928, served as assistant editor and drama critic for Theater Arts magazine during the early thirties and was assistant dramatic editor for the New York Times until assuming the radio post.

Authored:
One Man's Montana: An Informal Portrait of a State
The American Twenties, edited by John K. Hutchens
The Best in the World: 2
The Gambler's Bedside Book
Gene Fowler, 1890-1960. Recollections By His Friend On The Occasion Of The Publication Of His Last Book

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------New York Times' obituary, July 25, 1995, pp. A13.

[Bill Burgess]

Frederick James Corcoran---AKA Fred Corcoran

Born: April 4, 1905, Cambridge, MA
Died: June 23, 1977, Scarsdale, NY, age 72

Massachusetts Golf Promoter;
Cambridge, MA, 5-year old, (April 27, 1910 census)
Cambridge, MA, 14-year old, (January 16, 1920 census)
Cambridge, MA, salesman, manufacturing, (April 14, 1930 census)
Started caddying, 1914, Belmont Springs (Mass.) Country Club, near Boston,
Caddy master, 1918, associate golf secretary, 1923-25.
Massachusetts state golf handicapper, 1925

Father: Michael F., born Massachusetts, 1882?;

Authored:
The Official Golf Guide
Unplayable Lies, By Fred Corcoran, With Bud Harvey

New York Times' obituary, June 24, 1977, pp. 87.--------------------------------------------------------National Cyclopaedia of American Biography.--Sporting News' obituary, July 9, 1977, pp. 54.

-------------------August 1, 1940.----------------------------------------August, 1967.


August 14, 1947; Babe Didrikson Signing Movie Contract
Mildred Babe Didrikson Zaharias, present U.S. and British Women's Golf Champion and, according to sports writers, the greatest all-around woman athlete of all-time, announced that she was turning pro to accept a $300,000 motion picture offer, which I could not very well reject.
L-R: Babe Didrikson Zaharias, husband George, business manager, Fred Corcoran, of Boston, who will manage her business affairs.


March 20, 1940: Pinehurst, NC- Mrs. Dick Metz of Chicago, recent bride of the stellar pro golfer, ----------------Craig Wood, left, whose American Ryder Cup golfers defeated a team headed by Walter Hagen received
watches her husband play in the North and South Open Golf Championship here. Fred Corcoran.-----------------the valued trophy from Fred Corcoran (center) manager of the tourney, while good loser Hagen looks on.

[Bill Burgess]

Ralph Emerson McGill

Born: February 5, 1898, near Chattanooga, TN
Died: February 3, 1969, Atlanta, GA, age 70,---Burial: Westview Cemetery, Atlanta, GA

Atlanta sports writer;
Civil district 12, TN, 2-year old, (June 28, 1900 census)
Chattanooga, TN, 21-year old, (January 10, 1920 census)
Atlanta, GA, sport writer, newspaper, (April 10, 1930 census)
Atlanta, GA, editor, newspaper, (April 6, 1940 census)
Nashville Banner, 1922 -
Atlanta Constitution, 1929 - 1969; International/political, 1933; editor-in-chief, 1942, Publisher, 1960.

Father: Ben F., born Tennessee, June, 1868; Mother: Mary L., born Texas, December, 1877; Wife: Mary Elizabeth, born Tennessee, 1907?;

New Georgia Encyclopedia excerpt:
Ralph McGill, as editor and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, was a leading voice for racial and ethnic tolerance in the South from the 1940s through the 1960s. As an influential daily columnist, he broke the code of silence on the subject of segregation, chastising a generation of demagogues, timid journalists, and ministers who feared change. When the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregated schools in 1954 and southern demagogues led defiance of the court, segregationists vilified McGill as a traitor to his region for urging white southerners to accept the end of segregation. In 1959, at the age of sixty-one, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.

Starting in 1922 became the Nashville Banner 's sports editor and sports columnist.

Joined the Atlanta Constitution in 1929. In 1933 he started concentrating on international and political journalism. Became editor-in-chief in 1942 and publisher in 1960. Worked until his death. Friend of Col. Huston and Wilbert Robinson.

He was a longtime editor and publisher of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and later performed ambassadorial functions for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. (Bio by Teencat)

Ralph's Wikipedia page:
Ralph Emerson McGill was an American journalist, was best known as the anti-segregationist editor and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution newspaper. He won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1959.

McGill was born near Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee and attended school at the McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, but did not graduate because he was suspended his senior year for writing an article in the student newspaper critical of the school's administration. He got a job working for the sports department of the Nashville Banner and soon worked his way up to sports editor. In 1929, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia to become the assistant sports editor of the The Atlanta Constitution. Wanting to move from sports to more serious news, he got an assignment to cover the first Cuban Revolt in 1933 and covered the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938. These articles earned him a spot as editor of the editorial page in the Constitution, which he used to highlight the effects of segregation. In response, many angry readers sent threats and letters to McGill. In the late 1950s, McGill became a syndicated columnist, reaching a national audience. He became friends with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, acting as an ambassador to several African nations. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, he received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College in 1960, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, and had "Ralph McGill Boulevard" named for him in Atlanta. In 1963 he published his book The South and the Southerner. McGill died of a heart attack, two days before his 71st birthday.
-------------------------------------
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Ralph McGill combined an omnivorous literary intellect, a keen storyteller's sense, and a crack reporter's speed to become Georgia's most influential journalist of the twentieth century. During forty years at the Atlanta Constitution as an editor, publisher, and daily columnist, he built a national following as a white Southern editor who questioned segregation and challenged the demagogues who exploited it. His journalistic courage and his gift of clear, moving moral expression earned McGill a reputation as "the conscience of the South."

Born in the small farming community of Igou's Ferry, near Soddy, Tennessee, young Ralph Emerson McGill wrote for student publications at both the McCallie School (Chattanooga) and at Vanderbilt University (Nashville). Before leaving college, McGill began covering sports, politics, and crime for the Nashville Banner, which he eventually joined full-time in 1922. In 1923 he became the Banner's sports editor, which is where he got his first experience as a daily columnist, writing "The Sport Aerial." He also traveled regularly to distant cities on game assignments, an experience that prefigured a lifetime habit of peripatetic journalism.

After moving to the Atlanta Constitution in 1929 as assistant sports editor, McGill convinced the Constitution's editors to send him to cover the Cuban revolution, an assignment that whetted his appetite and bolstered his credentials for general news coverage. In 1937 he won a Rosenwald fellowship to travel and study first-hand Scandinavian farm marketing and rural schools. Before he left Europe McGill traveled through Germany and Austria, where he filed reports for the Constitution on Adolf Hitler's Nazi politics. The trip produced McGill's first book, Two Georgians Explore Scandinavia (cowritten with Thomas C. David, for Georgia State Department of Education) in 1938.

That same year McGill was appointed Constitution executive editor in charge of news, sports, society pages, and his 'Break O Day' sports column gave way to the more general 'One Word More' column on the daily editorial page. In 1942, the Constitution named him editor-in-chief. That year McGill gained a national reputation through his editorial support of progressive candidate Ellis Arnall, who defeated the three-term segregationist governor Eugene Talmadge. Much in the way of Henry Grady, who had campaigned for a "New South" in the post-Reconstruction Georgia, McGill became known beyond as a voice for amore modern Georgia. His causes included Southern farming reform, abolition of Georgia's county-unit electoral system, and a moderate but committed effort to eliminate segregation.

By the late 1940s, McGill's essays appeared regularly in national magazines such as Saturday Review, Saturday Evening Post, New Republic, and Atlantic Monthly. During this time McGill published his sole piece of fiction, a short story about police racism for Harpers entitled "She'll Talk Later." In the 1950s, McGill's already sizable audience became a daily, nation-wide one. The Constitution was purchased by the Cox newspaper chain in 1950, and McGill's columns began to be distributed to other Cox papers. In 1953 the Constitution moved his popular column to page one. Then, in 1957, the North American Newspaper Alliance agreed to syndicate McGill in sixty newspapers nationally.

In 1959 the Pulitzer Prize Committee awarded McGill their 1958 prize for editorial writing. Praising his 'courageous and effective editorial leadership' of the Constitution, the committee cited McGill's 1958 editorials for their "clearness of style, moral purpose, sound reasoning and power to influence public opinion." In particular, they singled out McGill's editorial "A Church, A School," which was a denunciation not only of the "rabid, mad-dog minds" of racist terror bombers, but also of the Southern opinion leaders "politicians and journalists especially" who McGill felt had had abused their positions of influence and inflamed public opinion against court-ordered desegregation. "It is not possible," McGill wrote, "to preach lawlessness and restrict it."

In 1960, McGill was named publisher of the Constitution, a title that had less to do with McGill's invovlement in the business of the paper and more to do with protecting him from the paper's mandatory retirement age so he could continue to write his daily columns. Over the next decade, the honors and official recognitions of his career poured in. Morehouse College, Harvard, Columbia, Notre Dame and 14 other colleges awarded McGill honorary degrees. In 1963 his "part autobiography, part history" book, The South and the Southerner, won both the Atlantic Monthly annual non-fiction prize and the Florina Lasker ACLU award. For having "courageously sounded the voice of reason, moderation, and progress during a period of contemporary revolution," President Lyndon Johnson honored McGill with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.

Ralph McGill died of heart failure in Atlanta on February 3, 1969.

Authored:
No Place to Hide: The South and Human Rights (Volume One)
No Place to Hide: Volume Two
Southern Encounters: Southerners of Note in Ralph McGill's South
The Best of Ralph McGill: Selected Columns
The Fleas Come with the Dog
The South and the Southerner
A Church, a School: Views on Problems in the South Today
Israel Revisited
Ralph Emerson McGill; February 5, 1898 - February 3, 1969
Search the Scriptures
The South and the new Southerner

[Bill Burgess]

Frederick McFerrin Russell---AKA Fred Russell

Born: August 27, 1906, Nashville, TN
Died: January 26, 2003, Nashville, TN, age 96,

Nashville sports writer;
Civil District 3, TN, 13-year old, (January 2, 1920 census)
Nashville, TN, sports writer, Newspaper, (April 14, 1930 census)
Nashville Banner, 1929 - 1987), reporter, 1929, sports editor, 1930 - 1969, sports director, 1969-87, Vice-President, 1955 - 1999.
Mostly football & golf sports writer.
Football Writers Association President, 1960 - 1961.
National sportscasters & sports writers Hall of Fame, 1988.

Father: John E., born Tennessee, 1874?; Mother: Mabel M., born Tennessee, 1882?;

Fred Russell Article

Fred Russell, by Bill Traughber

Legendary Nashville sports writer Fred Russell would have turned 100 years in 2006. Russell was one of the most devoted and fair sports writers to cover Nashville and Vanderbilt athletics. His death at age 96, in 2003, closed a chapter of Nashville sports assigned to someone who was not a player or coach. Russell worked at the Nashville Banner from 1929 until it ceased publication in 1998.

Russell was a native Nashvillian who was born on August 27, 1906. His mother, Mabel Lee McFerrin Russell, was a composer and in her youth wrote The Vanderbilt University Waltz. During the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition in Nashville, the song was featured on Vanderbilt Day when the statue of Cornelius Vanderbilt was dedicated.

Russell gives credit to his mother as being the influence that sent him to Vanderbilt after graduating from Nashville’s Duncan School. He entered Vanderbilt in 1923, and as a freshman, pledged Kappa Sigma fraternity. One of his fraternity brothers was the older Lynn Bomar, a 1923 Vanderbilt football All-American.

Pranks would also be a trait that friends of Russell would always be on alert. In his semi-autobiography, Bury Me In An Old Press Box, Russell wrote about one of his shenanigans targeting Bomar:

“I also had the responsibility, as a freshman, of awakening Bomar in time for him to get to classes, and at the end of the school year I did this one morning by rolling the biggest lighted firecracker I ever saw under his bed. When it exploded I feared the whole corner of the fraternity house had been blown off, and I was so scared that even Bomar in his BVD’s chasing me across the street and deep into the campus couldn’t catch me.”

Russell attended the Vanderbilt Law School and played on the 1925-26 Commodore baseball teams. He would credit his accessibility to athletes as a motivation to eventually become a sportswriter. One of his baseball teammates was Red Sanders a Commodore football player and future Vandy head coach.

Russell wrote, “Indeed, one balmy May afternoon with the breeze in the trees outside the third floor classroom window, I had dozed off during a lecture. For how long, I don’t know—perhaps two or three minutes—but I was awakened by a gentle nudge of the classmate seated next to me.

“He called on you,” whispered this helpful, protecting friend. “Taken off-guard, flustered, I quickly if desperately responded in loud, clear tones: “I’m not prepared on that case, sir.

“The tragedy was that the stern and feared Professor Fitzgerald Hall had not called on anybody. It was an interruption of his lecture that he did not appreciate, and not until years later did I get to fully explain the reason. The perpetrator of the trick was Sanders, of course.”

Russell did graduate from Vanderbilt ‘27, earned his Law degree and passed the State Bar. His first job as an attorney was in the legal department of the newly formed Real Estate Title Company in Nashville, which he was manager. His duties were confined to the area of deeds, mortgages, liens, examining abstracts, etc.

A year later, Russell was out of a job as his company was merged. All the time he was practicing law, being away from sports bothered him. In June 1929, he was offered a choice of jobs at the Nashville Banner. Russell could sell ads at $25 a week or be a cub reporter at $6 a week. He took the reporting job.

“Ever since I began reading sports pages when I was seven or eight,” Russell wrote, “I had envied sports writers almost as much as athletes who were boyhood heroes to me. I’d always imagined sports writing must me the greatest life in the world. Of course, now I am confirmed in the belief. Back there, as a boy around Wartrace, I would memorize sports poems of Grantland Rice and Morgan Blake. I thought those two sports writers were great.”

In September 1929, Russell was happily transferred to the sports department as the editor. One of his first duties was covering Vanderbilt football. Three years later, he married the former Katherine Early. The couple would have four daughters together, Kay, Ellen, Lee and Carolyn.

Russell worked at a time where there were no computers and the weapon of the sports writer was a manual typewriter. It was a tough life, but only to those who didn’t love their job in sports. Long train rides gave way to the developing airline service of the country in this era.

“I can remember one afternoon in 1932 when we were advised that a class from George Peabody Teachers College was touring the building,” Russell wrote in his autobiography. “When they reached the sports department, two of us were on the floor playing marbles—for keeps—while our tallest staffer was shooting a basketball at the Western Union clock on the wall. It wasn’t quite as bad as it may sound; the clock had been giving trouble and the paper was sponsoring a marble tournament with which somebody, as a refresher, had to become familiar.

“In those days nothing seemed to matter much just as long as the newspaper got out, and everybody had fun getting it out. There was a lot of pride in the work—and a lot of play. It was a robust, unpredictable place. Publishing week-day afternoons and Sunday mornings, we got to work no later than 7 A.M., and it was no shock occasionally to find some weary associate stretched across the copy desk asleep. Most likely he had stayed in the card game in the photographic department so late that it wasn’t worth going home.

“On Saturdays we worked straight through from seven in the morning to two o’clock Sunday morning. A late Saturday night pastime was to shoot a .22 rifle at the rats that scrambled about on the overhead heating pipes near the dimly lit entrance to the city room. This often proved an unnerving greeting to unexpected visitors just stepping off the elevator.”

In 1936, Russell departed briefly from sports to write a series of exclusive articles on the kidnapper of Mrs. Alice Speed Stoll of Louisville. The series gave him the “National Headliners Club Award” for that year.

Awards were not unfamiliar to Russell, in his life he was given this partial list of awards: Grantland Rice Memorial Award, 1958; Jake Wade Award, 1966; U.S. Olympic Award for distinguhised journalism, 1976; Distinguished American Award from the National Football Foundation and Hall of Fame, 1980; Bert McGrane Award from the Football Writers Association of America; Chairman of the Honors Court of the National Football Hall of Fame and President of the Football Writers Association of America, 1965-66.

Russell traveled the country coast-to-coast attending the biggest sporting events such as a Dempsey fight in New York. He knew the greats as Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, Bear Bryant, Adolph Rupp, Red Grange, Otto Graham and Casey Stengel. He knew them all. Russell said one of his greatest moments was in 1953 when a dinner was held in his honor commemorating his 25 years of service at the Banner. In attendance to celebrate were Grange, Jones and Dempsey.

Russell’s “Sidelines” column was informative and gave the reader an insight or story that only he could reveal. From 1949-1962, he wrote the annual “Pigskin Preview” for the Saturday Evening Post. Russell is the author of seven books, one of which he dedicated to his daughters: “To my little girls, who made this book practically impossible.”

When Vanderbilt Stadium was rebuilt in 1982, the Fred Russell Press Box was dedicated. The new Vanderbilt baseball press box also bears his name.

One of Russell’s first books was about the early beginnings of Vanderbilt football, which was published in 1938 and covers the sport from 1886-1937. The dedication by Russell in Fifty Years of Vanderbilt Football states:

“The great wide world of “Vanderbilt Men” back from all the states and all the seas, to Dudley Field, as the pages of this book are turned.

Here meet the men of McGugin and the men of Morrison, and with them, arm in arm across the chalked field of time, go the heroes of Vanderbilt’s glorious, golden fifty years.

Some view the scene from Valhalla; some through the mist of years—but under the banner of Gold and Black all are here reunited, Vanderbilt men, forever.

To this cause, the pleasant labor of this book is dedicated.”

Authored:
Bury Me in an Old Press Box: Good Times and Life of a Sportswriter
I'll Go Quietly
50 (Fifty) Years of Vanderbilt Football
Big Bowl Football the Great Postseason Classics
Funny Thing about Sports
I'll try anything twice
Tongue Pie: Prose and Poetry 1969-2005

L-R: 1953: Red Grange, Bobby Jones, Fred Russell, Jack Dempsey. They all attended a dinner for Fred.


------Fred Russell/Granny Rice.-----------------------------------------------------------------------New York Times' obituary, February 26, 2003, pp. A23.

[Bill Burgess]

Quentin James Reynolds

Born: April 11, 1902, Bronx, NY
Died: March 17, 1965, New York City, NY, age 62---d. of cancer (primarily abdominal) in California, who was en route to his home in New York City.
Burial: Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, Kings County, NY

New York sports writer, war correspondent;
Brooklyn, NY, 8-year old,(May 5, 1910 census)
Brooklyn, NY, newspaper, (April 19, 1930 census)
New York, NY, Associate editor, magazine,(April 5, 1940 census)
Attended Brown University (Providence, RI),
New York Evening World, (reporter, rewrite man, sports columnist)
New York World-Telegram,
Intermational News Service,
Collier's associate editor, 1934 - 1939

Father: James J., born New York, 1877?; Mother: Katharine, born New York, 1879?;

Journalist and Correspondent, wrote for Collier's and published 25 books that include "The Wounded Don't Cry", "London Diary", "Dress Rehearsal", and "Courtroom", a biography of lawyer Samuel S. Leibowitz. After World War II Reynolds became known for his libel suit against columnist Westbrook Pegler, who called him "yellow" and an "absentee war correspondent." He won the largest judgment at the time. (bio by: Helaine M. Cigal)

Wikipedia page.
Quentin James Reynolds (born April 11, 1902, New York City – died March 17, 1965, San Francisco, California) was a journalist and World War II war correspondent.

As associate editor at Collier's Weekly from 1933 to 1945, Reynolds averaged twenty articles a year. He also published twenty-five books, including The Wounded Don’t Cry, London Diary, Dress Rehearsal, and Courtroom, a biography of lawyer Samuel Leibowitz. He also published an autobiography, By Quentin Reynolds.

After World War II, Reynolds was best known for his libel suit against right-wing Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler, who called him "yellow" and an "absentee war correspondent". Reynolds, represented by noted attorney Louis Nizer, won $175,001, at the time the largest libel judgment ever. The trial was later made into a Broadway play, A Case of Libel, which was twice adapted as TV movies.

In 1953, Reynolds was the victim of a major literary hoax when he published The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk, the supposedly true story of a Canadian war hero who claimed to have been captured and tortured by German soldiers. When the hoax was exposed, Random House, Reynolds' publisher, reclassified the book as a novel.
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Quentin Reynolds (Sportswriter. Born, New York, Apr. 11, 1902; died, Travis A.F.B., Calif., Mar. 17, 1965.) A campus boxing champion and varsity football player at Brown, Quentin James Reynolds began his career as a sportswriter at the Brooklyn Daily Times. Reynolds moved to the Evening World, then to the International News Service (1932-33) after the World was sold. He went to the World-Telegram in 1934 and remained until the start of World War II. Reynolds then left sports to become a war correspondent. He became a noted reporter during the war and, in 1946, began nearly two decades as a magazine writer and author. Some of Reynolds’ writing in this period was on sports, but much of it was on geopolitics. He also wrote more than two dozen books, including a best-seller about the 1940 Battle of Britain, a life of Ireland’s patron saint, Patrick, and biographies of, among others, Winston Churchill and Gen. Jimmy Doolittle. Reynolds was subject to criticism that his work, while well-crafted, tended to fawning when it involved Allied war heroes. A burly and gregarious man, he looked and acted like a foreign correspondent. He was sticken while returning from the Far East and died, as he might have wished, at an Air Force base hospital. Reynolds’ brother, James, was an Assistant Secretary of Defense. (The Bill Shannon Biographical Dictionary of New York Sports is an open database of sports biographies maintained by Jordan Sprechman and Marty Appel.)

New York Times' obituary, March 18, 1965, pp. 33.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sporting News' obituary,
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------April 3, 1965, pp. 34.



1940's USO: Quentin Reynolds, Peggy Alexander, Bob Hope.---1957: Anna Lee, John Henry Faulk, John Charles Daly, Quentin Reynolds.