How to Get a World Series Ring

October 4, 2013

The Boston Herald’s op-ed page features a piece by Cornelius Chapman today that serves as a perfect segue to post-season baseball in Boston.

Sports scribe put literary hat in Ring

Of all the newspaper reporters ever to tap a typewriter in Boston, only one has had his work collected by The Library of America, a recognition that it rose to the level of literature.

That man was Ring Lardner, who worked for this paper’s predecessor, The Boston American.

This year is the centennial of Lardner’s last season as a full-time sportswriter. While he lived here he covered the Boston Rustlers, who would become the Boston Braves, for $45 a week.

 

Chapman – who wrote The Year of the Gerbil, a history of the 1978 Red Sox-
Yankees pennant race – hits some of the high points of Lardner’s career: “Alibi Ike,” “Haircut,” “shut up, he explained” (a famous line from The Young Immigrunts, one of the hardreading staff’s favorites). He also notes Lardner’s  “profound” impact on our language and quotes British novelist Virginia Woolf, who said Lardner wrote “the best prose that has come our way.” Hey – we love Lardner, but Ginny went a bit overboard there.

Unfortunately, Chapman forgot Lardner’s most timely work: A World’s Serious.

Just a taste:

 

Picture 3

 

Picture 2

 

Picture 5

 

And etc. as Lardner would say.

You can find the rest in The Portable Ring Lardner (but not, sadly, in the Library of America volume).

Or you could send us a really nice note and we’ll send you a PDF.

See you at the Serious.

 

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The Young Immigrunts Edition

August 16, 2012

(With apologies to Ring Lardner)

Today’s Boston bakeoff features the new Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that allows young undocumented immigrants avoid deportation and obtain work permits for at least two years.

For once, the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald are perfect complements to one another: the Globe has facts, the Herald has opinions.

The Globe piece is a standard, albeit sympathetic, news report detailing the particulars of the new policy and documenting the efforts of would-be applicants to take advantage of it.

Earlier Wednesday, about 20 members of the Student Immigrant Movement gathered on Friend Street in Boston to share tips and pointers on filling out the application.

Isabel Vargas, who came to the United States from the Dominican Republic when she was 8 years old, told others at the meeting, held in the offices of Greater Boston Legal Services, that the opportunity to apply would transform her future.

“When I apply for a job, I don’t have to be all nervous about what Social Security number I’m going to give,” Vargas, 20, said.

Today’s Herald, meanwhile, has no news report but does feature two opinion pieces.

The first is an editorial:

Immigration muddle

President Barack Obama has created what looks to be a 50-state muddle as local officials are left to grapple with the consequences of his unilateral rewriting of the nation’s immigration policy.

Now make no mistake, we’re with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg andNews Corp. [NWS] head Rupert Murdoch (the former owner of this paper) in their call for genuine immigration reform that will contribute to the country’s growth. The two men were in town Tuesday to make their pitch for just such a new and dispassionate look at the issue.

But Obama’s election year epiphany that he could implement his own version of the DREAM Act by executive order, granting at least a temporary amnesty to young illegal immigrants, has left states to sort out what exactly that will mean.

The second is an op-ed:

Obama ‘law’ helps illegals

What does President Barack Obama call a bill which has repeatedly failed in Congress?

A law!

The Department of Homeland Security yesterday began accepting applications for the “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA) amnesty program. The move will award renewable two-year grants of legal status, including work cards and Social Security numbers, to illegal aliens claiming to have arrived before their 16th birthday.

Huh – maybe this division of labor between the Globe and the Herald will catch on.

One could cover Red Sox games, for instance, while the other concentrates on the players’ submarining of Bobby Valentine.

Or one could cover the U.S. Senate race while the other makes Indian jokes.

Oh, wait – they’re already doing that one.

P.S. You really should read Lardner’s The Young Immigrunts (linked above). It’s a hoot.

 

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