It’s strange interviewing a friend who is dying, but Karl Zinsmeister is at peace. I met Karl in Washington, DC, in the spring of 1981, when we two Upstate New York hicks were new to the staff of Senator Pat Moynihan. The first thing I learned about him was that he and his girlfriend (and
Ah, the indignities of age. Over the past year I’ve suffered significant hearing loss. “Huh?” has become my favorite word and I’ve developed a strange new respect for the loonies who hear voices. Aspiring to stoicism, I informed Lucine, my wife, “When I hit 60 I figured that I was entering a stage in which
I once knew a man so cheap he would call my dad to report that he’d found a nickel on the pavement of the local racetrack’s parking lot. I don’t know if Jim would have stooped to conquer a penny as well – I wouldn’t put it past him – but I like to think
The Morgan Affair in 1826 led to the first third party in American political history
I suppose I should hate this city, the Typhoid Mary of cultural imperialism
A brilliant meteor blazed through the Summer Triangle early in the show, eliciting oohs and aahs and apolitical cheers
Since democracy is dead in New York, I write in dead persons
Technically we are moving south, though I doubt we qualify as snowbirds
Despite the multitudinous sins committed against the game and its culture, I’m once again giving it the old college try
The first spade hit the dirt on July 4, 1817, near the appositely named Rome, New York
The folksinger’s lifeboat capsized far too soon
Homestand is the most anti-MLB but pro-sandlot and hick-circuit baseball book ever published
Skipper was hyperalert, Russ vigilant but pensive
I went on a weeklong comets-and-asteroids-destroy-our-world binge
Like so many intrusions upon our liberties, it was introduced to America by war
You never know when or wherefrom these pitches are coming. I doubt that even Oscar Wilde could hit much above .500 in this league
I don’t know where the time has gone
The wonderfully idiosyncratic sporting variant achieved extraordinary popularity in rural Iowa
The fringes of fame, the outer purlieus of power, are always much more interesting than the epicenter
‘My forty-five-year-old self is inhabiting my nine-year-old body’
