Silly Little Country

David Halberstam

...sadly killed in a traffic accident.

I read some of his journalism, and two of his books, and one of them was a piece of magic I stumbled across at just the right time - October 1964.

It is a brilliant re-creation for me of the most magical major league baseball season I can recall - this was partly because I was 15, and playing the game, and partly because I had an accidental attachment to the St. Louis Cardinals, born of the remarkable fact of electromagnetics that KMOX from St. Louis could carry at night clearly to my bedroom radio in the Ottawa Valley, and partly because the Cardinals were so completely out of the pennant race at mid-season.

And in the end the World Series was played against the Yankees. And that Series was very exciting and won by the good guys.

It was the year of Bob Gibson, brilliant black fastball pitcher, of Barney Schultz, improbable knuckleball pitcher, and of Harry Carey before he went to Chicago.

This would not mean much to someone who had not paid attention that year, but Halberstam had done his homework, and made it all come back in wave after wave of delightful nostalgia. And he discovered a lot of what that year meant for the sport and for America.

Had this been the only book he wrote, I would still feel the world is a smaller place for this loss. But he did so much more, well documented today all over the blogosphere.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 8:59 PM