by Terry Turner
“The Boys of Summer” is a baseball book that became a best seller by extolling the talents of a group of former Brooklyn Dodgers and then follows their lives after their days of athletic heroism.
Roger Kahn, a Brooklyn native, delved into the past of these forgotten titans of the baseball world and came up with an entertaining and sensational insight into the personalities of such former greats as Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, and Gil Hodges.
Kahn thinks nothing of quoting James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas as he sprinkles their intellectualism with the wisdoms of Dodger manager Chuck Dressen and Billy Cox. Author Kahn calls on his background as former sports editor of Newsweek magazine, contributor to Sports Illustrated, and rookie reporter of the now defunct New York Herald Tribune.
His thesis is that here are a group of very athletic men who congregate in Vero Beach, Fla., each February and then through a strange metamorphosis became “the boys of summer” by displaying their skills in game intended for little boys.
The book gained its best seller reputation on the sharp, incisive, reportorial skills of an imaginative novelist of Kahn’s caliber. After succinctly describing their baseball talents, he journeys to chart the roughhewn careers up the ratholes of their lives of retirement away from baseball.
Through the eyes of the author the reader sees the tragic lives of Campanella, who is now a paraplegic, the sadness of Jackie Robinson’s heroic cause of the involvement of his son in heroin addiction; Billy Cox’s job as a bartender; and Gil Hodges’ losing fight against a failing heart.
The book is jocular, and at one point actually an autobiography because it describes the author’s upbringing, his baptism as a Brooklyn boy, then a rookie baseball writer, and lastly how the Brooklyn Dodgers affected his life.
“Boys of Summer” contributes to the baseball fan a new knowledge of the stresses and strain of the life of a big leaguer, his attempt at the age of thirty-five to try to recapture the strength and speed that he knew at twenty, and the regret at being finished with a chosen career at age forty.
This book comes as welcome relief to the baseball fan who appreciates baseball but yearns for the missing excitement of baseball.
The book contains 442 pages and is published by Harper and Row publishers of New York.