July 20, 2018
THE SECOND MOST IMPORTANT PATRON:
Now in Living Color: Ted Williams's Last Game (Bill Pennington, July 19, 2018, NY Times)
Bill Murphy, a 19-year-old student at an art college in Boston, skipped class on Sept. 28, 1960, and bought a $2 ticket to Fenway Park. Ted Williams was playing his last game in the major leagues.Even more auspiciously, Murphy brought his 8-millimeter color film camera with him."I wasn't a rabid fan, but something told me to go," Murphy said last month. "I took my camera to the front row and shot scenes as I roamed freely around the park all afternoon."A few days after the game, Murphy developed the film. There was Williams, one of the best hitters to ever play the game, clouting the last of his 521 home runs for the Red Sox in his fabled final at-bat. Murphy showed the film to his father and a few friends then tossed it into a desk drawer where it has remained since, all but hidden.
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (John Updike, 10/22/60, The New Yorker)
Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs--hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 20, 2018 3:56 AM