Jerome Holtzman

One of my culture heroes died the other day. Jerome Holtzman was 82 years old.

Jerry was one of the greatest baseball writers of all time -- in fact, he's in the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. For decades he was every Chicago Sun-Times editor's go-to guy when it came to smoking out obscure historical facts about the game. In his long career he came to be known as "The Dean" by his fellow scribes, and his name was hallowed in every barbershop in Chicago and a few other city-states besides.

I remember him best for three things, one of which touched me personally:

First, in 1981, a wunderkind sports editor who thought his pages should appeal better to yuppies shocked us all by stifling Jerry's nonpareil column as the product of old-fartism, and Jerry jumped to the Tribune, where he held court for two more decades. The wunderkind sports editor lasted only a few more months before he was sent packing. (This was a harbinger of what is now happening as non-newspaper "idea men" sodomize the Tribune and its sister newspapers.)

Second, Jerry had the largest, bushiest, most expressive eyebrows I have ever seen. They looked like dancing caterpillars.

Third, Jerry was an extraordinary gentleman, a state one doesn't often encounter in a profession full of egoes and elbows. At a crowded restaurant late in the 1970s he sought out my Lady Friend and told her how much he admired her husband's work, and there was nothing patronizing about his praise, as there so often is when people talk about the profoundly deaf. Years later, when I lauded his books in my Baseball Lit reviews -- he had gone to the Tribune by then and no longer had the home field advantage -- he would write me short notes of thanks. That was rare in itself, because the reviewed don't often thank their reviewers, but Jerry always took pains in those notes to mention other things I had written. He was subtly telling me that he read my stuff and liked it well enough to remember it.

There's no need to mention the URLs of the many obituaries that are singng his praises today. Just Google "Jerome Holtzman" and you'll see plenty of them, including a longish one in The New York Times, which does not often send out-of-town journalists to a just reward.

He was a sweet reporter and a sweet human being.

More North Woods wildlife

They say healthy whoopee lasts well into the seventies and even eighties, and isn't this septuagenarian a walking billboard for that happy fact, even for a denizen of the Upper Michigan wilderness, where men are men and women are women and sparks fly when the twain meet?

The photo was taken yesterday at the Lake Superior Day celebration in Ontonagon, Michigan, better known in my whodunits as Porcupine City. The woman had just debarked the schooner Madeline, where I perched on the ship's stern with my camera.

You can bet money that I will work the sentiment on this T-shirt into a mystery novel -- if somebody hasn't copyrighted the phrase.

Meanwhile: You go, girl!

Do bears track on the beach?

The Lady Friend was having a cuppa this morning on the beach when she spotted fresh bear tracks all along the shore not 20 feet from the Writer's Lair. Some time last night, a 200- to 250-pound bruin had ambled from one end of the property to the other, leaving dessert-plate-sized tracks in the damp sand. I can't wait for the motion-detector game camera to come from Cabela's so I can capture our night visitors. It'll be another week.

Close-in sunset

Yes, almost every time I photograph a sunset on Lake Superior, it's from a wide-angle perspective to take in the entire cloud-dappled sky. On July 15, however, it seemed that the the brilliant colors on a small part of the horizon justified using a 135-400 mm. zoom telephoto at its shortest setting.

Vandalized!

We've been at the Writer's Lair on Lake Superior for two weeks now, and haven't seen much wildlife save for loons, mergansers and gulls just offshore. This year our encounters with local fauna seem to take place unseen and in the dark.

Last night our new bird feeder was trashed, even the steel standard bent. We suspected a mama bear and three cubs that have been spotted around the vicinity, but instead of bear tracks in the soft ground around the feeder, there were a number of deer imprints, according to the CSI squad that swarmed over the property shortly after dawn.

One of the investigators gravely concluded that the malefactor was large, possibly belligerent, maybe even antlered, and advised us to take steps to protect life and property.

We'll repair the feeder, but henceforth each evening we'll bring it into the cabin.

Vandalism always makes one feel violated, if one lives in the city. Up here in the semi-wilderness, however, residents are simply content not to get eaten along with the bird seed, and shrug off such four-footed depredations as part of the price one pays for living next door to nature.

Now if I can figure out how to rig a camera with a motion detector . . .

Changing the world ad nauseam

As a book review editor for 33 years, I quailed every time the UPS man brought me a new review copy of a book whose subtitle included the words ". . . That Changed the World." For some reason publishers believe that hackneyed and hyperbolic phrase sells books, even if it bears no resemblance to reality.

In fact, a couple of years or so ago some smart guy (was it P.J. O'Rourke?) wrote a hilarious sendup for (was it the New York Times Book Review?) on the subject. I wish I could find it and wallow in resigned indignation some more. (If any of you remember who it was and where it was published, please clue me in.)

My crankiness this morning is spurred by the discovery that David Maraniss, an otherwise sterling journalist, has produced a new book called Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World. It may be an excellent work (many of the reviews are highly laudatory) but I do not plan to read it, just because of that goddam phrase.

Think I'm overreacting? Just Google "That Changed the World" (within quote marks, please).

Two million, nine hundred twenty thousand hits.

Dayumn!

This photograph from Wikipedia Commons shows the real Indian paintbrush.

Big error in the post last Wednesday about the wildflower called Indian paintbrush. Everything I wrote about it is accurate (as far as I know), but the photograph accompanying the post is of orange hawkweed, not Indian paintbrush.

I discovered my mistake by perusing the guidebook mentioned in Saturday's post and wondering why the illustration it carried of Indian paintbrush looked nothing like that of the flower I had photographed. A few pages later the orange hawkweed -- not even distantly related to Indian paintbrush, although it's often called "devil's paintbrush" -- cropped up, and it's a ringer for the photograph I took.

Pretty as it is, orange hawkweed, an immigrant from Europe, is considered a noxious alien in backyard gardens. It's not palatable, but it isn't poisonous, either. So much for being a potential murder weapon.

Sigh.