Jerome Holtzman (1926–2008)
Author of Fielder's Choice: An Anthology Of Baseball Fiction
About the Author
Jerome Holtzman was named the first official historian for Major League Baseball in June 1999 by Commissioner Bud Selig. He's the "dean" of America's baseball Boswells & was the baseball columnist & national baseball writer for the Chicago Tribune from 1981 until 1999. He joined the Tribune in 1981 show more after 38 years at the Chicago Sun-Times & the Daily Times. A member of baseball's Hall of Fame, he was assigned major league baseball in 1957 & traveled with the Cubs & the White Sox for 28 years, dividing his time equally between the two clubs. (Publisher Provided) Sportswriter Jerome Holtzman was born in Chicago, Illinois on July 12, 1926. After the death of his father when he was 10, his mother could no longer support the family and he spent the remainder of his childhood in an orphanage. At the age of 17, he worked as a copy boy at The Daily Times. He spent two years in the Marines and then returned to the paper to cover high school sports. In 1957, he became a baseball writer for The Sun-Times and in 1981 he became a columnist at The Chicago Tribune. In 1959, he invented the statistic known as the save, which in 1969, became the first new official statistic ackowledged by Major League Baseball since 1920. He published No Cheering in the Press Box, an oral history featuring the recollections of 18 of his colleagues, in 1974. He also wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on baseball and the year-end summary of the baseball season for the Official Baseball Guide for numerous years. In 1989, he was elected into the writers' wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. He died from a stroke on July 19, 2008. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Works by Jerome Holtzman
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Holtzman, Jerome
- Birthdate
- 1926-07-12
- Date of death
- 2008-07-19
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- USA
- Occupations
- sportswriter
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 8
- Also by
- 2
- Members
- 235
- Popularity
- #96,241
- Rating
- 4.1
- Reviews
- 4
- ISBNs
- 14
Cumulatively, these oral histories present a picture of American sportswriting, and very much the American newspaper world, in general from the 1920s through the 1960s. For one thing, there were no journalism schools in those days. Most of these writers became newspapermen by showing up in newsrooms and wrangling a position whereby they made coffee and emptied wastepaper baskets. Maybe, eventually, they'd be sent out to cover a high school basketball game when whoever was originally assigned called in sick. If you did a good job, you might get another assignment. The book's final interview is with the legendary Jimmy Cannon, who tells this story:
_____________________________
I was about fourteen when I started as an office boy on the Daily News. I worked the lobster trick--from midnight to eight in the morning. One night, after I'd been there for about two years, there was a shortage of rewrite men. The whiskey must have been flowing pretty well, and for some reason a guy on the desk gave me a short story to write, about three hundred words. It was on Decoration Day, about a kid who ran away from a summer resort and came to Manhattan.
Harvey Duell, who was one of the great newspapermen, was the city editor of the Daily News. He read the story, and the next day there was a note in my box: "See Mr. Duell." Well, us boys didn't see the city editor unless we were in trouble. I thought I was in trouble. When I went to see him, he was very kind and said, "I understand you wrote this, young man."
He asked me where I learned to write. I said, "I don't know if I can write at all."
Then he told me, "This is the second thing you've done that's impressed me."
"What's the first?"
"I sent you out for coffee one night and you refused a tip."
I said, "I don't remember. I must have been crazy that night."
That's how I became a city-side reporter.
_____________________________________
Another part of that world described by many of the interviewees is the different relationship the reporters built with the players and managers (I should have noted earlier that the interviews deal mainly with baseball writing) in the earlier decades of the 20th century. The writers rode in the same trains during road trips, played in the same poker games, and often went on the same hunting and fishing trips. The writers describe the difficulty of still having to criticize a player's performance or a manager's decision making when it was someone you were friends with otherwise. On the other hand, they were much less likely to write about a player's personal flaws or misadventures of the field than sportswriters today are. Many of the writers offer their memories and impressions of particular players, people like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Ted Williams, and even earlier players and managers. All in all, these writers were fine storytellers, which makes their oral histories fun to read. They paint a mostly romantic picture of that bygone era of American sports, though the difficulties of spending so much time on the road and in hotels are noted, as are the pressures of writing on deadline.
Of the eighteen journalists interviewed, I had only heard of seven: Paul Gallico, Shirley Povich, Abe Kemp, Ford Frick, Red Smith, John R. Tunis and Jimmy Cannon. Tunis who also wrote many (what we would now call) YA sports novels, wrote my favorite baseball novels as a boy, the Roy Tucker series starting with The Kid From Tompkinsville. Tunis had a surprising (to me at least) observation to make about American culture of the 60s and 70s, saying that he disapproved of the growing trend to make sports, and especially youth sports, all about winning, as if the games didn't mean anything if you didn't win them. He says (and I'm paraphrasing, now) "I'm much more interested in writing about characters who don't win, about what they go through and what they learn." I found that of interest in particular because of the derision some people want to heap on parents and educators nowadays who have tried deemphasize the "win at all costs" mentality, making fun of, for example, participation trophies as hippy, woke b.s. Given that Tunis represents that emphasis on only valuing winners as a new trend at that time, it made me wonder whether such attitudes ebb and flow within American culture more than I'd previously realized. Or maybe Tunis was just one observer with an ax to grind. Anyway, I highly recommend this book for anyone with an interest in baseball and baseball history, or even maybe just in the history of American journalism in general, as seen through the lens of the sports section.… (more)