Roger Kahn
1927 -2020
The passing of Roger Kahn at the age of 92 needs to be noted for the simple reason that he wrote what is generally acknowledged as the single greatest sports book of all time:
Kahn was a long time New York sports writer who as a very young man had the good fortune of being assigned to the Brooklyn Dodgers beat by his paper, the New York Herald Tribune in the first half of the decade of the 1950's, and thus was exposed to one of the most storied teams ever, those Dodgers of Robinson, Reese, Campanella, Hodges, Snider, Furillo, Erskine, and so on and so forth. "The Boys of Summer", published in 1972, was part the story of Kahn's own youth growing up in New York in the 1930's and 1940's, part the story of actually covering this team, and here is the best part, the story of Kahn revisiting these storied heroes in the late '60s and early '70s to see what they were currently doing as older men. (Actually, at the time, I recall that publicity for the book talked about Kahn revisiting them as "old men", but since they were actually guys who were then in their forties, I prefer to use the term "older" men.)
Anyway, it was remarkable book that was about a lot more than baseball. It was about fathers and sons, about prejudice and courage (the story of Jackie Robinson is, as it should be, at the heart of the book), and about how life treats all of us, sometimes not in the kindest of manners. It has become the book to which all other sports books are compared. For example, a great book about the 1970's Steelers, "Their Life's Work" by Gary Pomerantz from a few years ago was called in reviews "the 'Boys of Summer' of football." Every baseball fan should read it, but so should everyone. It is that great a book.
Kahn continued to write, and most of it is good stuff, but nothing ever compared to his masterwork, "The Boys of Summer."
Actor and raconteur Orson Bean was killed in a pedestrian accident in Los Angeles over the weekend at the age of 91. He had a long and varied career as an actor. I last remember seeing him appear in an episode of Modern Family a few years ago. He was an interesting guy who "dropped out" of the mainstream in his late forties or early fifties and lived a peripatetic hippie lifestyle with his family for a few years. I most remember him for his appearances on New York based game shows and as a guest on talk shows such as the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and the Merv Griffin Show. He was always smart and amusing, and he always made it a point to tell a single stand alone joke with each appearance. I remember one in particular, and I will tell it to you here as a tribute to Mr. Bean.
A guy brings his female parrot to a pet shop in order to have her bred with a male parrot that was housed there. After some back-and-forth negotiations, they agree on a stud fee of $100. They then put the female into the cage with the male and cover the cage with a towel to allow them some privacy. Shortly thereafter, an unbelievable amount of squawking and squealing is heard and the cage starts to shake alarmingly. The shop owner pulls the towel off of the cage only to see that the male parrot has the female pinned to the floor of the cage with one claw while he's pulling her feathers out with the other claw and yelling "For a hundred bucks I want you naked!!"
Now THAT'S a joke.
RIP Roger Kahn and Orson Bean.
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