September 19, 1920, 100 years ago: Roger Angell is born in Manhattan. As has been noted today, he is 5 years older than The New Yorker magazine, and has been contributing to it for most of its history.
His father was Ernest Angell, a lawyer and later the director of the American Civil Liberties Union. His mother was Katharine Sergeant, The New Yorker's 1st fiction editor. When his parents divorced, his mother married one of the top essayists of the era, E.B. White. He graduated from Harvard University, and in World War II, he served in the U.S. Army Air Forces, the forerunner of the U.S. Air Force.
It was during The War (always, as my grandmother, born in 1924, taught me, Capital T, Capital W) that he first contributed to The New Yorker, in 1944. That was 76 years ago. The magazine published his short fiction and some personal narratives. Eventually, these would be collected and published in book form, including The Stone Arbor and Other Stories in 1960, and A Day in the Life of Roger Angell in 1970.
He was a fan of the New York Giants baseball team. He was there at their home field, the Polo Grounds, at the team's last great height, on September 29, 1954, as Willie Mays made The Catch, to help the Giants win Game 1 of a World Series they would win by a sweep over the Cleveland Indians. He was also there at the team's farewell, their last game at the Polo Grounds, on September 29, 1957, 3 years to the day. The team's move to San Francisco was announced the month before.
"The loss of the New York Giants was absolutely heartbreaking," he told Ken Burns for his 1994 documentary Baseball. And yet, neither he nor anyone else wrote a heartfelt book about the Giants, the way Roger Kahn -- 7 years younger, a newspaperman instead of a magazine man, and Jewish as opposed to the Protestant Angell -- did for the Giants' arch-rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers, with The Boys of Summer in 1972.
That oversight, on the part of Angell, George Plimpton, and any other writer worth his salt who had been a Giants fan, caused the Dodgers to "win the historical argument." Although the Giants were far more successful on the field, and had legends like John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, Mel Ott, Carl Hubbell and Willie Mays, and won the most famous game between the teams thanks to the Pennant-winning home run by Bobby Thomson in 1951, it is the Dodgers that people remembered.
So people remembered Jackie Robinson, and not just for his historical achievement. They remembered Roy Campanella and Duke Snider and Pee Wee Reese and Gil Hodges and Don Newcombe. And forgot about pretty much any Giant not named Mays and Thomson. Monte Irvin? Alvin Dark? Whitey Lockman? Don Mueller? Sal Maglie? They became secondary figures behind "the lordly Yankees" and the beloved Dodgers. By the time Noel Hynd published his excellent The Giants of the Polo Grounds in 1988, it was too late.
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In 1962, New Yorker editor William Shawn sent Angell to Florida, to write about Spring Training. It was the first time he'd been professionally asked to write about baseball. He took to it like a duck to water, and may have written better about the sport than anyone ever has.
That same year, the New York Mets debuted as an expansion team, moving into the Polo Grounds until their long-term home, which would be named Shea Stadium, could open for the 1964 season. They were horrible, while the Yankees were defending World Champions and would be again. And yet, the Mets still had decent attendance by the standards of the time. And it was a different kind of fandom. The media called these young Met fans, some of them too young to have gone to Giant or Dodger games on their own, but now old enough to do so, "The New Breed." Angell described them as follows:
Everybody thinks New York only cares about champions, but we cared about the Mets. I remember going to some games in June that year and they were getting walloped, they were getting horribly beaten. But the crowds came out to Polo Grounds in great numbers and people brought horns and blew these horns.
After awhile I realized that this was probably anti-matter to the Yankees who were across the river and had won for so long. Winning is not a whole lot of fun if it goes on. But the Mets were human and that horn I began to realize was blowing for me because there’s more Met than Yankee in all of us. What we experience day to day in our lives, there’s much more losing than winning, which is why we love the Mets.
Speak for yourself, Roger. Life gives us so much garbage, so it helps to have a winning team to give us something to be happy about.
But he wasn't speaking just for himself. Like so many other writers, on baseball and other subjects, he was better when writing about sad things, such as a great ballplayer realizing the end is near, or said player's fans realizing that the man they grew up idolizing would soon no longer be able to play on the same level, or at all.
In 1972, Angell published his 1st book about baseball, The Summer Game. He covered the next 5 seasons, 1972 to 1976, in Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion. The word "companion" was an excellent choice.
It was a time of tremendous transition in the game: Not only were the last of the 1950s stars retiring (which his piece "Three for the Tigers" discusses in regard to 3 guys watching Al Kaline come to the end in 1974, getting to 3,000 career hits but not before his lifetime batting average drops below .300), but the designated hitter came to the American League, and the reserve clause was struck down, replaced by limited free agency.
These books were followed by Late Innings in 1982, and Season Ticket in 1988. In 1991, Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader was published, as the literary equivalent of a greatest hits album. He had resisted the idea of doing an "as told to" biography, but he relented in 2000, following Yankee pitcher David Cone around during what turned out to be his most difficult season. The result, in 2002, was A Pitcher's Story: Innings with David Cone, as perhaps baseball's best writer and one of its smartest players had -- the terminology is ironic -- a hit.
Roger has married 3 times. With his 1st wife, Evelyn, he had daughters named Callie and Alice. Sadly, he outlived all 3. Callie became an expert on art and, perhaps as an extension, the films of Andy Warhol, and a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. But she took her own life in 2010. Alice died of cancer in 2019.
With his 2nd wife, Carol Rogge, had had a son named John Henry. Roger also outlived Carol, who died in 2012. John Henry now lives in Portland, Oregon -- which would be weird if his father lived in Portland, Maine. Actually, his half-sister Alice did, and Roger... lives in nearby Brooklin, Maine (not "Brooklyn"), with his 3rd wife Margaret Moorman, a fellow writer.
In honor of his 100th Birthday, the Mets put a cutout of him in a seat behind home plate at Citi Field, along with the other cutouts serving as stand-ins for fans during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Happy Birthday, Roger. May there be many more seasons to come.
UPDATE: Roger Angell died on May 20, 2022, in New York, of congestive heart failure. He was 101.
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