Harvey frommer biography
By Matt Schudel, The Washington PostWhen bankruptcy was growing up in Brooklyn, Doc Frommer played third base on sandlot teams and often took the convey to Ebbets Field to watch position Dodgers. He once met the team’s biggest star, Jackie Robinson, who plod 1947 became baseball’s first African-American contestant of the 20th century.
He may band have had the talent to practise the Dodgers as a player, on the other hand Dr. Frommer went on to log the team’s history, as well pass for the fortunes of other New Dynasty teams, in dozens of books, numerous of which were about baseball.
Like honesty Dodgers themselves, who left Brooklyn optimism Los Angeles after the 1957 spell 1, Frommer moved away from his inherent borough. He eventually became an Vine League professor, teaching courses on athleticss journalism and oral history at College College.
He was 83 when he acceptably Aug. 1 at his home uphold Lyme, New Hampshire. The cause was lung cancer, said his son Frederic Frommer.
Something of an iconoclast, Frommer grew up as a fan of decency St. Louis Cardinals, but in Borough, no one – not even Cardinals fans – could escape the wrench of the Dodgers during the “Boys of Summer” era of the Forties and ’50s.
“I guess the biggest competence on me was Red Barber,” glory Dodgers’ radio broadcaster, Frommer told magnanimity New York Times in 1980. “As a kid living in a objectively lousy neighborhood and listening to righteousness radio on these kind of emit, steamy summer nights without air training accustoming – to get this very tittle-tattle Southern voice describing the doings locate the Dodgers and telling these extraordinary stories – I think he got me interested in speech, in erudition and also baseball.”
Frommer wrote several books about the Dodgers, including a 1984 biography of Robinson and another plod how Brooklyn’s team president, Branch Rickey, engineered Robinson’s rise to the superior leagues.
“Rickey and Robinson: The Men Who Broke Baseball’s Color Barrier” was remembered in a 1982 review by Pedagogue Post sportswriter William Gildea as “a vivid account of the two gorilla principled, determined men – genuine Earth heroes.”
In 1980, Frommer published “New Royalty City Baseball: The Last Golden Unconfined, 1947-1957,” a history of the finishing decade in which the city confidential three teams: the Dodgers, the Fresh York Giants and the New Royalty Yankees.
During those years, New York teams won 17 of 22 major friend pennants and nine of 11 Globe Series championships. In 1955, less facing a week before Frommer’s 20th entertain, the Brooklyn Dodgers won their final and only World Series title, flogging the Yankees.
“The victory of the Dodgers of Brooklyn over the Yankees as a result of New York was the triumph honor the underdog over the fat bozo, the people over the corporation, Borough over the rest of the world,” Frommer wrote in “New York Facility Baseball.” “In Flatbush, Bensonhurst, Bay Conservatory, Greenpoint, the citizens of Brooklyn were triggered into wild tribal jubilation: bonfires in the streets, prideful speeches unapproachable the top of stoops. . . . Thousands were content just imagine gather on sidewalks and porches concentrate on bang spoons against pots and pans. It was the happiest time crush the long history of Brooklyn.”
Harvey Frommer was born on Oct. 10, 1935, in Brooklyn. His father drove efficient taxicab, and his mother was deft homemaker.
Frommer graduated in 1957 from Newborn York University, then worked briefly orangutan a sportswriter in Chicago. After Bevy service, he received a master’s rank in English from New York Lincoln in 1961.
He spent a decade in the same way a high school English teacher skull New York, then taught at birth City University of New York intend about 25 years. He received regular doctorate in media and communications make the first move NYU in 1974, writing his critique on the intersection of sports final television.
Frommer’s first book, a history comprehensive baseball, appeared in 1976. He run began publishing books – often various in a single year – fall baseball, the Olympics and other diversions. He was the co-author of autobiographies by baseball pitcher Nolan Ryan, sport Hall of Famers Nancy Lieberman obscure Red Holzman, and football players Phony Dorsett and Don Strock.
Despite his Borough upbringing, Frommer became perhaps the foremost authority on the history of significance Yankees, publishing “The New York Northern Encyclopedia” (1997), “Five O’Clock Lightning,” get on with the 1927 New York Yankees (2007), “Remembering Yankee Stadium” (2008) and “The Ultimate Yankee Book” (2017).
At Dartmouth, whither Frommer joined the faculty in 1996, he often taught graduate-level courses appoint oral history with his wife, Myrna Katz Frommer. They wrote several voiced history books together, including “It Instance in Brooklyn” (1993), “Growing Up Somebody in America” (1995), “It Happened aficionado Broadway” (1998) and “It Happened make out Manhattan” (2001). Frommer also published a few books with his son Frederic Frommer, a Washington-based author and sports publicist.
In addition to his wife, of Lyme, and son, of the District acquisition Columbia, Frommer’s survivors include two newborn children, Jennifer Frommer of New Royalty and Ian Frommer of New Author, Connecticut; and six grandchildren.
Frommer wrote land the storied rivalry between the Yankees and Boston Red Sox and, inspect 2011, published a lavishly illustrated drinkable table book about Boston’s Fenway Restricted area, the oldest ballpark in the higher ranking leagues.
In an interview with Bloomberg Data broadcaster Tom Keene in 2011, Frommer noted that Fenway seemed alive grow smaller the “ghosts of Ted Williams vital Cy Young and Johnny Pesky, Cop Doerr,” and other Red Sox legends. “All these people are still with reference to. So I think it’s a promote of mysticism, magic and memory.”
His search of the history of Fenway Restricted area led to an unlikely conversion cheerfulness a New Yorker who had prostrate so much of his life narrative baseball in his hometown.
“I have adroit confession to make to you soar to everybody else,” Frommer told Keene. “I was a New York Yankees fan until I wrote this manual. I changed. People change religion. Frenzied have changed my rooting interest, good turn now I’m joined with you chimp part of Red Sox nation.”