by David Krell | Nov 18, 2016 | David Krell
John McGraw was to baseball what Henry Ford was to the automobile. They did not invent their respective industries. They reinvented them. Straddling the line separating the 19th and 20th centuries, McGraw ended his career as a baseball player by performing the...
by David Krell | Nov 17, 2016 | David Krell
Baseball is a never-ending source for popular culture storytellers whose tales tap a range of emotional veins in fans of the National Pastime. We cry when Gary Cooper reenacts Lou Gehrig’s “Luckiest Man” speech in The Pride of the Yankees. We cheer...
by David Krell | Nov 16, 2016 | David Krell
In 1961, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as the nation’s youngest elected president, The Dick Van Dyke Show débuted, and Alan Shepard became the first American astronaut in space. 1961 was also the year of Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle. The M&M boys. As...
by David Krell | Nov 13, 2016 | David Krell
In the 2013 movie 42, T.R. Knight plays Harold Parrott, the publicity chief for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Parrott, a former sports writer, was well suited for the task of handling his former brethren from the press box. He knew their pressures, their deadlines, and...
by David Krell | Nov 12, 2016 | David Krell
Willie Mays ended his career where he began it. New York City. His was a career of milestones. As a rookie, Mays was a witness to baseball history. On October 3, 1951, he was in the New York Giants on-deck circle when Bobby Thomson hit the Shot Heard ‘Round...
by David Krell | Nov 11, 2016 | David Krell
The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training gives the underdogs from southern California’s North Valley League a shot at the Houston Toros—a bigger, stronger, and faster team. Where else could the climactic game take place but the Astrodome—the post-modern Eighth...
by David Krell | Nov 9, 2016 | David Krell
Disco’s transition from musical genre to mainstream phenomenon occurred when John Travolta mesmerized movie audiences in 1977 with his portrayal of fictional Brooklynite Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. After Travolta’s bravura performance, disco...
by David Krell | Nov 8, 2016 | David Krell
As dusk anticipated relieving the sun of its duties during the twilight of October 3, 1956, Paul Newman hustled through the stage entrance of the Mansfield Theatre, an august Broadway institution on West 47th Street in Manhattan. Before he achieved icon status in the...
by David Krell | Nov 7, 2016 | David Krell
Weary from influenza and pleurisy, Joe McCarthy walked into his colonial house on the evening of June 22, 1950 feeling a wave of relief coursing through him with the sedation that only one’s home can provide after a long trip. Weakened by the illnesses plus the...
by David Krell | Nov 6, 2016 | David Krell
New Jersey is more than the land of Bruce Springsteen, Tony Soprano, and the Meadowlands. It is also the home state for three players in the Baseball Hall of Fame. In a career spanning 1888 to 1901, Billy Hamilton played for the Kansas City Cowboys, the Philadelphia...
