The Perils of Being a Football Writer

Ring Lardner (1885–1933)
From The Great American Sports Page: A Century of Classic Columns

Interesting Links

“Meet the journalist who invented sports blogging a century ago” (Ed Sherman, Poynter)

Video presentation: “Ring Lardner: Literary Hero of Niles” (Mollie Watson, Niles History Center)

Previous Story of the Week Selections
• “Simple Simon,” Ring Lardner
• “This Side of Paradise?” Heywood Broun
• “The Lost Cause,” Red Smith
• “Indiana’s Town of Champions,” Edith Roberts

Buy the book
The Great American Sports Page: A Century of Classic Columns from Ring Lardner to Sally Jenkins
List price: $29.95
Web store price: $15.00

University of Chicago cheerleader and football player, 1907. Illustration by F. Earl Christy (1882–1961). For several years during the first decade of the twentieth century, Christy produced variations of an annual theme for college sports team merchandising, including postcards, posters, programs, and even pillows. (Library of Congress)

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When Ring Lardner was a junior at Niles High School in Michigan, he “was introduced,” as he put it a quarter century later, “to Cicero, German, geometry, gen. history and 2 other studies which I forget.” He was also introduced to football, playing tackle for the school team. His start in the first game was not promising, as he recalled in the folksy vernacular that had become his trademark:

We was playing Carroll Hall again and the ground was covered with wet snow. We had to punt and I started down the field hoping I would not get there first as their punt catcher was a man named Hogan. Well I did not get there first or last neither one as I decided to stop on the way and lay down a wile. This decision was reached immediately after receiving a special message from admirers on the side lines in the form of a stone carefully wrapped up in wet snow. The message was intended for my ear and came to the right address. For the rest of that fall I was what you might term stone deaf on that side and I thought maybe that was the reason I never heard our quarterback call my signal.

In spite of the injury, which has more than a hint of embellishment, Lardner finished out the year on the team. Ring Lardner Jr. later pointed out in his memoir of the family that it was remarkable his father played football at all. “Ring was born with a deformed foot, which was corrected by an operation in infancy and a metal brace he wore till he was eleven. The fact that he played tackle on the high school football team in his junior year would be an impressive indication of his recovery, except for the supplementary fact that his graduating class consisted of eleven girls and five boys.”

Much of Ring Lardner’s celebrated sports journalism covers baseball, as does his early short fiction, including the Jack Keefe stories collected in his best-known book, You Know Me Al. Yet in the early days of his career, writing for the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers, he also wrote about football, and his articles, which tended to be more straightforward than his baseball journalism, were admired by readers, players, and coaches. In 1915, when he had become a household name for his nationally syndicated daily column, “In the Wake of the News,” Amos Alonzo Stagg, the legendary University of Chicago coach, praised his football reporting in a profile published by the Press Club of Chicago’s magazine, The Scoop. “Lardner comes to the training quarters after the game with the other reporters. He doesn’t ask any questions. But he listens to the others’ questions while those big eyes of his are roaming around. Then he goes to his office and writes a story that contains more real football information than any of the others have gathered.”

Known among his colleagues and players for a deceptively quiet demeanor, Lardner could be coyly mischievous in print, and he occasionally used his column as an opportunity for hoaxes and pranks. He recalled one such episode:

On Thanksgiving morning I printed a dream story of a Michigan-Chicago game that was supposed to take place that afternoon. I wrote an introduction and followed it with a probable line-up, naming players who had been stars ten or twenty years in the past.

Now, there had been no hint of a resumption of athletic relations between Chicago and Michigan. Moreover, Thanksgiving games had been ruled out of the Middle West long, long before, because they interfered with church or turkey or something. Nevertheless, believe it or not, a crowd of more than five hundred people—this is Mr. Stagg's estimate—went to the University of Chicago's football field that day and stood around for hours, waiting for the gates or the ticket windows to open. At length they returned home mad, and many of them telephoned indignant messages to my boss.

Then as now, fans took football seriously, and a reporter whose writing seemed unreasonably critical or dismissive of the home team could expect hostile reactions in the form of angry letters or worse. In 1921, after Lardner and his family had moved to New York, he wrote “The Perils of Being a Football Writer,” a satirical piece recalling—and exaggerating—the occasionally tense relations between sports journalists, team members, and the fans.

Note: Joe Miller was a British actor among the Drury Lane players during the early decades of the eighteenth century. His reputation for seriousness outside of the theater led members of his troupe to credit him teasingly for their new jokes. After his death, the writer John Mottley published Joe Miller's Jests, or the Wits Vade-Mecum (1739), which was reprinted in dozens of revised editions during subsequent decades. By the end of the century, several competing series appeared, each carrying Miller’s name, which until the early twentieth century became for joke books what Webster’s is for dictionaries. Fielding Harris Yost was the University of Michigan football coach from 1901 to 1926, during which the team won ten Big Ten titles and six national championships.

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below.
You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.

The Perils of Being a Football Writer

CWell friends here it is the middle of the football season and maybe your favorite team looks like it will win the championship, and I don’t want to be no kill joy but I can’t resist from telling you what a treat you missed this fall namely I was going to write up some of the big games down east but at the last minute the boss said no. He didn’t state no reasons but I wouldn’t be surprised if I knew what they was and guess he is right for once. I don’t know nothing about the game but that don’t seem to stop a few of the other boys that is writeing it up and I doubt if my mgr. took that part of it into consideration but I guess he felt like my write ups would be kind of silly and I might get smart and introduce a spirit of levity into my write ups which would be out of keeping with a game which is almost sacred you might say and the coaches and aluminum of all the different colleges would be off of me for life. Then in the 2d place maybe he asked the different newspapers if they wanted the stuff and they all said no. If that is the case it may of had something to do with his decision as he is funny that way.

Well anyway I ain’t going to write up on football games but wile we are on the subject I would like to say a few wds. in regards to this great autumn complaint and firstly I beg to assure my readers that when informed that my services as football reporter was neither required or desired I managed to not break down in public because I once had that job for several seasons and I wouldn’t number it amongst the melons of journalism.

From the middle of Sept. till xmas a football reporter can’t go in his office without they s a bunch of letters from students or old grads or the coaches themselfs and the letters always starts out by calling you some name and then the writer goes on to say why and the he—ll don’t you give more space to the old Yellow and Pink. All we ask is a square deal, but we ain’t getting it. By a square deal they mean 8 columns about the old Yellow and Pink and nothing about nobody else and the 8 columns has got to be 8 columns of glory hallelujah. Maybe it’s necessary to mention that the Yellow and Pink was beat 98 to 0 last Saturday by the Old Mauve, but you are supposed to excuse this on the grounds that Buster Gifford the Yellow quarterback, was out of the game with a hangnail, but even at that the old Yellow would of rallied and tied the score in the 4th period only just as they were getting started, Jesse James, the head lineman, called an offside and the 5 yd penalty took the heart out of our boys. Coach Dunglebury says the penalty was a outrage as none of his men was ever offside in their life. He had learned them different.

Well friends when a man is a football reporter he gets acquainted with the different coaches and asst. coaches and theys a few of them that is as good fellows as you want to meet a specially some of the asst coaches and some of my best friends is asst coaches and a few head coaches too. And if any of the last named is reading this article I want them to understand that they are not the ones I am talking mean about. It’s the ones that ain’t reading this article that I refer to when I say that they’s no class of people that compares with head coaches when it comes to fair mindness unlest it’s the boys that wrote the official communiques during the war.

Dureing my turn of service as a football expert they was numerous occasions when different head coaches spent the sabbath writeing a letter to my sporting editor asking him to give me the air as a special favor to them. And they were also 2 occasions when coaches wrote to him and said that my write up of their game the day before was the best football report they had ever read and lest my readers should think I am bragging I will hasten to exclaim that in each of these 2 cases the teams who these gents coached had win a close game and my articles was nothing but hymns of praise for how well the teams were coached.

One of a football reporter’s little chores is generally to look up both coaches after the game and see what they have got to say for themself. The coach of the winning team pretty near kisses you but you don’t no sooner than lay eyes on the other guy when you realize for the first time that the result of the game was your fault. I won’t repeat none of the alibis that these birds have thought up as you would think I was copying out of Joe Miller’s joke book but instead of that I will tell you about the time I got the surprise of my young life and that was up to Ann Arbor, Mich. Cornell and Michigan had just had a alleged contest and the score was something like 35 to 10 in favor of Cornell. So afterwards I went in the Michigan dressing room to see Mr Yost and there he was smileing from ear to ear and I says
“Well what about it?”

“Well,” he says, “I guess we was lucky to score.”

The trainer worked on me for a hr.

I don’t know how they are running it out west now days but here in the east the coaches has a meeting in the off season and picks out the officials for their next season’s games and here is another place where fair play and sport for sport’s sakes comes leaping to the surface like a ton of lead. I don’t need to go into no details but it would be kind of fun to see the same system tried out in big league baseball, namely let the managers pick out their own umpires. As soon as a ball club lost a game, why the manager would say, “He can’t never umpire no more games for me” and when 8 games was lost the manager would be out of umpires and congress would half to pass conscription.

And it would also be fun if the football coaches was allowed to tell the newspapers who they could send to report their games. A lot of the boys that is now writeing up the games would have their Saturdays free for golf.

Originally published November 6, 1921, in various newspapers via the Bell Syndicate.

Kid’s Strategy Goes Amuck as Jake Doesn’t Die

Ring Lardner (1885–1933)
From The Great American Sports Page: A Century of Classic Columns

Interesting Links

Eight Myths Out (Society for American Baseball Research)

Interview: Rick Kogan with Ron Rapoport, editor of Frank Chance’s Diamond: The Baseball Journalism of Ring Lardner (WGN Radio, Chicago)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Where Do You Get That Noise?” Ring Lardner
• “Baseball as the Bleachers Like It,” Charles E. Van Loan
• “Jim Crow’s Playmates,” Red Smith

Buy the book
The Great American Sports Page: A Century of Classic Columns from Ring Lardner to Sally Jenkins
List price: $29.95
Web store price: $15.00

“Fix These Faces in Your Memory”: Photo collage syndicated to various newspapers in September 1920, showing the eight Chicago White Sox ballplayers who conspired with gamblers to fix the 1919 World Series. Eddie Cicotte in the center, framed by (clockwise from top left) Happy Felsch, Chick Gandil, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Buck Weaver, Swede Risberg, Fred McMullin, and Claude Williams. (WikiCommons)

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“My career as a regular baseball correspondent ended in May of 1913, when the Chicago Tribune set me to work writing a daily column on the sporting page, with occasional assignments on the side—world’s series, championship fights, football games, and so on,” recounted Ring Lardner just three months before his death. “My interest in the national pastime died a sudden death in the fall of 1919, when Kid Gleason saw his power-house White Sox lose a world's series to a club that was surprised to win even one game.”

It is the stuff of myth: how Lardner, one of the country’s most famous baseball journalists, gave up writing about the sport for good because of the Black Sox scandal, in which eight Chicago White Sox players ensured their own loss to the Cincinnati Reds in the 1919 World Series to collect $100,000 from professional gamblers. As with many myths, Lardner’s story of disillusionment is an oversimplification built on a grain of truth.

The scandal did surprise Lardner—not the crime itself (it was by no means the first time that ballplayers had fixed games to reap gambling wins) but its breadth and prominence. Lardner felt bad for Kid Gleason, the White Sox manager, who had become a friend and who proved to be oblivious to his team’s shenanigans. Lardner was especially disappointed with Eddie Cicotte, one of the ringleaders of the conspiracy; only four years earlier, he had described Cicotte in his customary Ringlish, “They ain’t a smarter pitcher in baseball and they’s nobody that's a better all-round ball player, no pitcher, I mean.”

The scandal would not become public until the following September, when the eight players were indicted, but various journalists and baseball officials realized what had happened during or soon after the series. Lardner apparently learned of the charade by the end of the second game. For the opening pitch of Game 1, Cicotte, a faultless knuckleball thrower, threw a clean strike. His second pitch, however, beaned second baseman Morrie Rath in the back; it was the prearranged indicator to outsiders that the fix was on and the first clue to Lardner and his colleagues that something was off. In the fourth inning, when the Reds scored five runs, additional oddities were noticed by reporters, including a botched double play that seemed intentionally bungled. The final score was 9–1. Lardner—who had himself bet a large sum on the White Sox—later told his fellow journalists that he confronted Cicotte in the hotel that night, and the pitcher’s excuses did little to assuage his concerns. Lardner’s dispatch after the second game, which the White Sox lost 4–2, was the closest he came in his whimsical coverage of the World Series to voicing his suspicions publicly:

It’s a Big Scandal: Ring discovers cause of defeat.
October 2, 1919: Gents, the biggest scandal of a big year of baseball scandals was perpetrated down here this afternoon when the American League turned against itself and beat the White Sox out of the second game of the present horror. . . .

The remainder of the article hinted that the game recorded by “Mr. Announcer” and “Mr. Scoreboard” bore little resemblance to the actual game being played on the field. After the second game, several of the reporters met up at a roadhouse outside Cincinnati and, led by Lardner, composed a new song set to the music of “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”:

I’m forever blowing ball games,
Pretty ball games in the air.
I come from Chi.
I hardly try,
Just go to bat and fade and die.
Fortune’s coming my way,
That’s why I don’t care,
I’m forever throwing ball games
And the gamblers treat us fair.

Yet was the gambling scandal the event that caused Lardner to leave baseball behind? “I was only four at the time and can't testify directly to my father's reaction,” his son Ring, Jr., recalled in a memoir,

but I don't think a deeply disillusioned man could dash off that lyric, and the way he spoke about the event later gave me the feeling he was at least as concerned about losing a substantial bet . . . as he was about the moral turpitude of the players. Ring took his gambling seriously and did not, as Maxwell Geismar writes in Ring Lardner and the Portrait of Folly, always lose money on his bets; in 1927, for instance, he won thirty-two hundred dollars against odds by his selection of the Pittsburgh Pirates to win the National League pennant.

There was something else that had happened that changed his attitude toward baseball, and that was the introduction of the “crazy” or livelier ball, which made it a hitter’s instead of a pitcher’s game and which he maintained had been done deliberately to make Ruth’s home runs possible.

Indeed, while he sometimes blamed the Black Sox scandal for his disenchantment, Ring Lardner, Sr., claimed even more often that the so-called “lively ball” was what drove him away. During the 1920 season, league owners changed the rules to eliminate spit balls and mud balls and to refresh worn balls more frequently, making them easier to see. At the same time, younger batters began emulating Babe Ruth’s new style of hitting. The result was a rapid increase in hits and home runs. As Lardner explained in “Why Ring Stopped Covering Baseball,” published in the July 1921 issue of American Magazine:

A couple yrs. ago a ball player named Baby Ruth that was a pitcher by birth was made into an outfielder on acct. of how he could bust them and he begin breaking records for long distants hits and etc. and he become a big drawing card and the master minds that controls baseball says to themselfs that if it is home runs that the public wants to see, why leave us give them home runs so they fixed up a ball that if you don’t miss it entirely it will clear the fence and the result is that ball players which use to specialize in hump back liners to the pitcher is now amongst our leading sluggers when by rights they couldn’t take a ball in their hands and knock it past the base umpire.

In 1930, he was singing the same tune, with the additional conviction that the ball itself was made of different stuff:

Manufacturers of what they are using for a ball, and high officials of the big leagues, claim that the sphere contains the same ingredients, mixed in the same way, as in days of old. Those who believe them should visit their neighborhood psychiatrist at the earliest possible moment. . . .

If a pitcher pitched a swell game, I wanted to see him win it. So it kind of sickens me to watch a typical pastime of today in which a good pitcher, after an hour and fifty minutes of deserved mastery of his opponents, can suddenly be made to look like a bum by four or five great sluggers who couldn’t have held a job as bat boy on the Niles High School scrubs.

Even before the scandal or the introduction of the lively ball, there were other events that played significant roles in the direction of Lardner’s career. In June 1919 he had cut ties with the Chicago Tribune and contracted with the Bell Syndicate to write a weekly column; it would be published in 150 newspapers for the next eight years—during which he would nevertheless cover all but two World Series. In the fall of 1919 he, his wife, Ellis, and their four sons moved to the East Coast, first to Connecticut and then to Long Island. While living in his new home in Great Neck, he befriended F. Scott Fitzgerald, who encouraged his short story writing, introduced him to famed editor Maxwell Perkins, and later derided Lardner’s earlier career as talent wasted on a “boys’ game, with no more possibilities than a boy could master.” Greeted with admiration and increasing respect from the likes of H. L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, and Ernest Hemingway, he soon set his sights on the stage, where he struggled—and ultimately succeeded—at the task of writing a Broadway hit. The game of baseball may have changed, but so had Ring Lardner’s ambitions.

We present Lardner’s column about the first game of the 1919 World Serious (as he called it). Rather than comment on Cicotte’s signal pitch, Lardner highlights a different beanball, one thrown in the eighth inning at Cincinnati second baseman Jake Daubert by White Sox fastball reliever Grover Lowdermilk, who was in fact quite notorious for his wild pitches. The piece also mocks the seemingly endless fourth inning when the Reds took a commanding lead. And, in what might be the first hint to his readers that he suspected the Chicago players were up to something, Lardner jokes that they may as well have been wearing the home team’s uniforms since everyone seems to have been playing on the same side.

Notes: Pat Moran, the Reds manager, and Kid Gleason both broke with tradition and announced the starting pitchers the day before the first game began. Erskine Mayer and Bill James were two White Sox pitchers; although neither was implicated in the scandal, both played their final MLB games in the 1919 World Series. Heinie Groh played third base for the Reds; Happy Felsch was center fielder for the White Sox and one of the conspirators. Lardner’s final quip that the next day’s starters would be Rube Bressler for the Reds and Lefty Sullivan for the Sox was meant as a joke. Neither pitcher appeared in the series; the injury-prone Bressler had been failing as a pitcher and would become a successful hitter, first baseman, and outfielder for the Reds during the 1920s, while White Sox pitcher John Jeremiah “Lefty” Sullivan played only four games in his MLB career; his intimidating fastball and curveball were undercut by a heart condition that caused him to get dizzy whenever he tried to field the ball.

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below.
You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.

Kid’s Strategy Goes Amuck as Jake Doesn’t Die

CCincinnati, Ohio—Gents: Up to the eighth inning this pm, we was all setting there wondering what to write about and I happened to be looking at Jake Daubert’s picture on the souvenir program and all of a sudden Jake fell over and I thought he was dead so I said to the boys: “Here is your story:

“Jacob E. Daubert was born in Shamokin, Pa., on the 17 of April, 1886, and lives in Schuykill, Pa., and began playing with the Kane, Pa., club in 1907. With Cleveland in 1908 and Toledo for two years. Joined the Brooklyn club in 1910 and remained there until this season. Then joined the Cincinnati Reds and fell dead in the 8th inning of the 1st game of the world serious.”

So everybody got up and cheered me and said that was a very funny story but all of a sudden again Jake stood up and looked at the different pts. of the compass and walked to 1st. base and wasn’t dead at all and everybody turned around and hissed me for not giving them a good story.

Well gents, I am not to blame because when a man has got a fast ball like Grover Lowdermilk and hits a man like Jake in the temple, I generally always figure they are dead and the fact that Jake got up and walked to 1st base is certainly not my fault and I hope nobody will hold it vs. me.

That was only one case where Mr. Gleason’s strategy went amuck. His idear there was to kill the regular 1st. baseman and then all Mr. Moran would have left to do would be to either stick Dutch Reuther on 1st. base where he couldn’t pitch or else stick Sherwood Magee over there where he couldn’t coach at third base. But Jake gummed all up by not dying.

Well another part of Mr. Gleason’s strategy was dressing the White Sox in their home uniforms so as they would think they was playing on the home grounds in front of a friendly crowd but the trouble with that was that the Reds was all dressed in their home uniforms so as you couldn’t tell which club was at home and which wasn’t and it made both of them nervous.

Then to cap off the climax Mr. Gleason goes and starts a pitcher that everybody thought he was going to start which took away the element of surprise and made a joker out of the ball game. If he had of only started Erskine Mayer or Bill James or any of the other boys that I recommended why the Reds breath would have been took away and even if they had of hit they couldn’t of ran out their hits.

The trouble with the White Sox today was that they was in there trying to back up a nervous young pitcher that never faced a big crowd in a crux before and when he got scared and blowed why it was natural for the rest of them to also blow up. But just give these young Chicago boys a chance to get use to playing before a big crowd with money depending on it and you will be surprised at how they get on their ft. and come back at them.

Nobody should ought to find fault with Mr. Gleason, however, for what happened today. As soon as it was decided that they would have 9 games in this serious why the Kid set down and figured that the rules called for 9 men on a side and if 1 Red was killed per day and the serious run the full 9 games why they would only be 1 man left to play the final game and 1 man cant very well win a ball game even vs. the White Sox the way they looked. But Daubert didn’t die as expected and they will know better next time then to hit a left handed 1st baseman in the egg.

As for the game itself they has probably never been a thriller game in a big serious. The big thrill come in the 4th innings when everybody was wondering if the Sox would ever get the 3rd man out. They finely did and several occupants of the press box was overcome. The White Sox only chance at that pt. was to keep the Reds in there hitting till darkness fell and make it a illegal game but Heinie Groh finely hit a ball that Felsch could not help from catching and gummed up another piece of stratagem.

Before the game a band led by John Philip Sousa played a catchy air called the Stars and Stripes Forever and it looks to me like everybody would be whistling it before the serious runs a dozen more games.

It now looks like the present serious would be 1 big surprise after another and tomorrow’s shock will occur when the batterys is announced which will be Rube Bressler for the Reds and Lefty Sullivan for the Sox. This will be the biggest upset of the entire fiasco.

I seen both managers right after today’s holy cost and Moran said hello old pal, and Gleason said hello you big bum so I am picking the Reds from now on.

Originally published October 2, 1919, in various newspapers via the Bell Syndicate.

Rhythm

Ring Lardner (1885–1933)
From Ring Lardner: Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links

“The Forgotten Genius of Ring Lardner” (Allen Barra, The Daily Beast)

National Recording Registry Project essay about Rhapsody in Blue (Jim Farrington, Library of Congress)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “A Day with Conrad Green,” Ring Lardner
• “The Jest,” Dorothy Parker
• “Me and Old Duke,” Albert Murray
• “Taste in Music,” Virgil Thomson

Buy the book
Ring Lardner: Stories & Other Writings
You Know Me Al | The Real Dope | The Young Immigrunts | The Big Town | collected and uncollected stories | 961 pages

“‘It didn’t get popular,’ said Hart, ‘because Verdi didn’t know rhythm.’” Illustration by American artist J. W. McGurk (1886–1939), published across a double-page spread over the beginning of Ring Lardner’s story “Rhythm” in the March 1926 issue of Cosmopolitan.

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Readers of The New York Times are not accustomed to opening the Sunday Book Review section and learning about the death of a major American writer. Yet on April 4, 1926, Henry Logan Stuart revealed that Ring Lardner had died from “a fatal attack of conchoids, a disease which is superinduced by a rush of sea shells to the auricle or outer ear.” His demise was described by Miss Sarah E. Spooldripper in the “introductory eulogy” to The Love Nest and Other Stories. Stuart reviewed the collection, “the last that came from Lardner’s pen,” and concluded, “And now he has passed on, and it is not likely that we shall ever look upon his like again. Why don’t the research men bone up a little better on conchoids?” The reviewer conveyed the equally sad news that Miss Spooldripper herself had also passed away, as the book informed readers in a footnote:

Miss Spooldripper lived with the Lardners for years and took care of their wolf. She knew all there was to know about Lardner, and her mind was virtually blank. It was part of her charm.

. . . Two months ago she was found dead in the garage, her body covered with wolf bites left there by her former ward, who has probably forgotten where he left them.

Some readers didn’t get the joke. “I don’t know whether you’ve seen the book, but I had an introduction to it written as if I were dead,” Lardner wrote his friend Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. “The Sunday Times ran a long review and played up the introduction strong, saying it was too bad I died so young, etc., and the result was that Ellis [Lardner’s wife] was kept busy on the telephone all that Sunday assuring friend and reporters that I was alive and well.”

That year, Lardner was at the height of his fame as a short story writer. Ray Long, the editor of Cosmopolitan—at the time, one of the nation’s leading publishers of fiction—offered $3,000 for each of Lardner’s next six stories—or $3,500 a piece, if he agreed to twelve stories. Lardner ended up writing more than two dozen pieces over a four-year period for Cosmopolitan, receiving after two years as much as $4,500 for each story, an unheard-of amount for any writer during the 1920s. Lardner tried not to let it go to his head. He continued to decline to write the novel his friends and publisher urged from him (“after one chapter he would be even more bored than the reader,” he told his son), and he retained a reputation as a master of self-deprecation—as the kind of author who could joke that his wife wasn’t in attendance at his deathbed because she had “chosen this time to get a shampoo and wave in preparation for the series of dinner dances that were bound to follow.”

Not all his wit was directed at himself, of course. His friends F. Scott Fitzgerald and Grantland Rice, the sportswriter, get passing mentions in the faux obituary that prefaces The Love Nest, with Lardner (masquerading as Spooldripper) claiming tongue-in-cheek that Mr. and Mrs. Rice were “unmistakably” the couple who inspired “Mr. and Mrs. Fix-It,” one of the collection’s more farcical satires, about a couple who aggressively meddles in other people’s affairs. “They recognized themselves and did not speak to Lardner for a week,” he wrote, but soon the Rices were back to their old tricks, exhibiting their “intolerable example of maniacal Southern hospitality.”

Some of Lardner’s humor directed at fellow celebrities, however, was less whimsical and more acerbic. George Gershwin was one such acquaintance; although the author and the composer were not close, their social orbits occasionally brought them together. Ring Lardner, Jr., recalled sitting with his brothers in pajamas at the top of the stairs during parties hosted by his parents; “on two different occasions George Gershwin came and played what must have been just about everything he had written to date.” Yet, as Jonathan Yardley notes in his biography, the senior Lardner preferred the composer “when he wasn’t so Gershwinesque”—that is, before the celebrated debut in 1924 of Rhapsody in Blue, with its blend of classical and jazz influences. “Sophisticated as Ring was,” wrote Doubleday editor Donald Elder, “he had at bottom a naive distrust of highbrows, quite apart from his hatred of artistic or any other kind of pretentiousness.”

Lardner’s story “Rhythm,” published in the March 1926 issue of Cosmopolitan just before its appearance in The Love Nest collection, features Harry Hart, a composer of derivative popular tunes who decides to step up his act and compose a symphony; the increase in his airs is matched only by the decrease in his finances. In the story, Lardner makes the connection to Gershwin explicit; “Gershwin was ahead of me,” Hart muses after the devastating premiere of his first symphony. While it’s not known whether Gershwin ever read the story, much less what he may have thought of it, it’s tempting to imagine that, four years later, he composed “I Got Rhythm” as a response.

Notes: The fictional Broadway producer Conrad Green, a satirical figure based on Florenz Ziegfeld, appeared previously in Lardner’s story “A Day with Conrad Green.” In “Rhythm,” Lardner blends fictional characters with real-life celebrities of the 1920s cultural scene, many of whom he knew (and some of whom he poked fun at). Among them: Rudolf Friml was a Czech-born American composer of operettas and musicals popular in the 1910s and ’20s. Giulio Gatti-Casazza was manager of the Metropolitan Opera from 1908 to 1935. Deems Taylor was an American composer and music critic. Alma Gluck, a soprano, was an opera singer and popular recording star. Walter Donaldson was a composer of many hit songs, including “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby,” “Love Me or Leave Me,” and “My Blue Heaven.” A party in the story takes place at the home of Lardner’s good friend Heywood Broun, a columnist, sportswriter, and drama critic. Guy Bolton was a British-born librettist of Broadway musicals. Ernest Boyd was a critic and journalist. Conductor Leopold Stokowski was the longtime leader of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Gus Kahn was a lyricist of popular songs, including “I’ll See You in My Dreams” and “Goofus.”

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This story is slightly immoral, but so, I guess, are all stories based on truth. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Baseball as the Bleachers Like It

Charles E. Van Loan (1876–1919)
From Baseball: A Literary Anthology

Interesting Links

Obituary: “Charles E. Van Loan, Humorist, Dies in East” (Sausalito News)

Baseball on the Cover of The Saturday Evening Post (Baseball Researcher)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Baiting the Umpire,” George Jean Nathan
• “Where Do You Get That Noise?” Ring Lardner
• “Jim Crow’s Playmates,” Red Smith
• “The Man Baseball Forgot Plays the Hand He’s Dealt,” Jane Leavy

“Baseball Fans,” cover artwork by American illustrator Robert Robinson (1886–1952) for the September 30, 1911, issue of The Saturday Evening Post.hr>

In the autobiographical essay “How I Broke into the Magazines,” written months before his death at the age of 42, Charles E. Van Loan described his transformation from sportswriter to best-selling author. Prompted by “the friend of a friend of Jack London,” he had written his first short story years earlier, when he was a cub reporter in Los Angeles. “There were three murders in that story, and one suicide. The most that I can say for those murders is that they were thorough. . . . I polished the seventeen pages till I could polish them no more, and then boiled them down to twenty-three or four.”

In 1909, after two years at The Denver Post, Van Loan nabbed a decent-paying, high-profile stint at the Hearst paper New York American and moved to Brooklyn with “one wife, two children, one job, and three manuscripts,” including a much-thumbed copy of that first story. “I suppose that every newspaper man who lays siege to the Big Town carries a cargo of fiction manuscripts in the top tray of his trunk.” He also carried with him letters of introduction to one Robert H. Davis, the influential fiction editor for the Munsey magazine empire. It was during this period that he wrote the essay “Baseball as the Bleachers Like It” for The Outing Magazine—an irreverent yet genuine attempt to answer the evergreen question, “What is the attraction in baseball?”

One of Van Loan’s first assignments at the American was to cover the Stanley Ketchel–Jack O’Brien rematch in Philadelphia on June 9, 1909. He arrived and sat quietly in the seats next to a “staid business man,” who began mimicking Ketchel’s every move as soon as the bell rang. The man “sat perched on the edge of his chair, his shoulders hunched to protect his ears from wild swings, his fists in constant motion, his tongue ditto—waiting for one thing and one thing only, the sudden crushing triumph of the affirmative. . . . Then it happened.” His neighbor, imitating Ketchel’s “deadly left swing” that ended the fight, knocked Van Loan into the aisle, flat on the ground.

That slug was his first contact with Robert H. Davis. The two men took the train back to New York together and Davis told Van Loan to come see him about the magazine business when he had a chance. Confirming the gist of Van Loan’s much-embellished magazine article, Davis recalled that the very next morning his boxing casualty presented himself in the offices of Muncey’s Magazine, bearing a manuscript and those three letters of recommendation. Van Loan, six-foot-two with an athletic build, was an imposing figure; as Davis remembered it, “When he sat down at my desk, he completely surrounded it.” Davis told him to keep the letters and leave the manuscript, but Van Loan insisted that the editor read his story on the spot.

Within a week, Davis helped the would-be author place a tale about horse racing, “The Drugstore Derby,” in The All-Story, one of the pulp monthlies published under the Muncey umbrella. Davis himself took the author’s first baseball story, “The Golden Ball of Argonauts,” for the flagship magazine. And that story with three murders and a suicide? Before the year was out it appeared, much revised and edited down to size, as “The Street of the Whispering Shadows” in Munsey’s The Scrap Book. Two years later, at Davis’s urging, Van Loan quit his sports writing job at the American and turned his full attention to writing fiction, publishing nearly two hundred stories over a ten-year period. He became a regular contributor to The Popular Magazine with his comic pieces set in the world of sports, particularly baseball, racing, boxing, and golf. After 1913, as his stories began to appear in such publications as Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, his humorous tales were populated by a broader spectrum of Americans, including politicians, filmmakers, circus performers, college students, newspaper reporters, and sightseers.

Van Loan’s successful metamorphosis convinced fellow sportswriters Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon that they too could write fiction for magazines and books. He helped bring Lardner’s first “busher” stories to the attention of editors, although Lardner later complained that Van Loan’s role had been overstated. The young Runyon, when drunk (which was often), would confess to his colleagues that his not-so-secret desire was to become a poet. He once tried—unsuccessfully—to pay for a drink with one of his poems after reading an anecdote about children’s author Eugene Field, who used to trade handwritten copies of verse for shots of whiskey. Runyon followed Van Loan from Denver to New York, moving in with the journalist and his wife and driving them both crazy with his erratic behavior. Van Loan quickly found him a job at the American so their boarder could afford to move into his own place. Within a year, with the help of the Van Loans, Runyon sobered up for good, solidified his position on the newspaper staff, and convinced Ellen Egan, the woman he had left behind in Colorado, to marry him. (Gertrude Van Loan wrote to her to vouch for the improvement in his behavior.) He later claimed that he had helped Charles Van Loan come up with the plots for some of his short stories.

The last five years of Van Loan’s life were a disheartening combination of misfortune and productivity. In late 1914, a few months after moving back to Los Angeles with his family, he was returning from a hunting trip in the mountains near San Bernardino and lost control of the car. He was thrown down a steep embankment, and the vehicle rolled over him as he lay unconscious on the ground, fracturing his skull and crushing his torso. The friend traveling with him miraculously escaped with a few bruises. Van Loan never fully recovered from his injuries (he lost use of his left arm) and his remaining years were a series of operations and therapy, complicated by chronic nephritis. Yet he remained extraordinarily active and many of his colleagues were unaware of how much pain he was in. His contributions to The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines increased; he wrote the stories for Little Sunset, the first feature film about baseball, and for more than a dozen other movies, one of which he directed; he published five books, including Buck Purvin and the Movies, based on his popular film series set in Hollywood; he taught himself how to play golf one-handed, achieving scores in the low 80s on eighteen-hole courses; and he played a prominent role in the campaign to save the Grand Canyon from developers and turn it into a national park. In November 1918 he accepted a promotion to associate editor at the Post and moved his family back east to Philadelphia. In February of the following year, he suffered a hemorrhage and died on March 2. Back in Los Angeles, his 71-year-old father died, apparently of a heart attack, minutes after being informed of his son’s death.

“During the years between 1909 and 1919,” wrote Davis in an obituary, “he made himself the poet laureate of the golf-course, the prize-ring, the diamond, and the race-track. No writer before Van Loan was more familiar with the characteristics, foibles, strength, and adorable weaknesses of those about whom he wrote.”

  

Note: Van Loan refers to “the gentle art of the lamented Queensberry,” meaning boxing. The Queensberry rules for boxing were written by British athlete John Graham Chambers and published in 1867 under the name of John Sholto Douglas, ninth marquess of Queensberry.

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The man in the box office, whose swift, money-changing fingers play on the pulse of the amusement-loving public, will tell you that a baseball franchise in a large city is a “mint.” . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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A Day with Conrad Green

Ring Lardner (1885–1933)
From Ring Lardner: Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links
Audio: Ring Lardner Jr. discusses the writings of his father Ring Lardner (Studs Terkel Radio Archive)

“Florenz Ziegfeld 101” (Musicals101)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Some Like Them Cold,” Ring Lardner
• “Franklin D. Roosevelt Inaugurated Tomorrow,” Moss Hart
• “The Man Who Came to Dinner with George Kaufman Directing,” Morton Eustis
• “Terry Helburn,” Frances Parkinson Keyes

Buy the book
Ring Lardner: Stories & Other Writings
You Know Me Al | The Real Dope | The Young Immigrunts | The Big Town | collected and uncollected stories | 961 pages

Cover study for the October 3, 1925, issue of Liberty magazine. Oil on board with label paste-ups by American illustrator Ruth Eastman (1882–1986). Click on image to see full painting. Courtesy of MutualArt.

Soon after 22-year-old Ring Lardner arrived in Chicago to take on a job as a sportswriter for the Inter-Ocean newspaper, he went to see Follies of 1907 at the opulent 2,200-seat Nixon Theater. Advertisements in the Chicago papers touted the show as “Ziegfeld’s musical revue that made the Jardin de Paris famous,” with the promoters perhaps hoping that theatergoers wouldn’t know that “Jardin de Paris” was the name invented by Florenz Ziegfeld for the rooftop garden he leased from the New York Theatre in Times Square. American critics had roundly derided the new show as “vulgar” or “indecent” (“raw, common, and noisy,” grumbled one Chicago reviewer), but Lardner loved it. Encouraged by the success of his new extravaganza, Ziegfeld made it an annual event—and Lardner attended every subsequent edition. The young sportswriter could have hardly imagined, however, that two decades later he would work with the famous impresario on various stage productions.

By the 1920s Ring Lardner was a household name, but his greatest unrealized ambition was theatrical success and he hoped that he would find the key to Broadway fortune by working on Ziegfeld Follies of 1922. He wrote four skits for that year’s show, two of which were used in the final production: “Rip van Winkle, Jr.” (about a man who wakes up twenty years later, in 1943) and “The Bull Pen,” featuring Will Rogers as a baseball old-timer. Disheartened that so much of his script was reworked, revised, or flatly rejected by actors and managers alike, Lardner wrote about the experience in his trademark vernacular the following spring for Hearst’s International magazine:

It ain’t no secret neither that thousands of marks and rubles is spent on scenes which is throwed in the ashcan as soon as the producer has saw them in dress rehearsal. But I wonder if many people knows how much dough is just plain wasted in paying royalties to lyric writers, composers, and authors, a specially the last named.

I hope Mr. Ziegfeld is out fishing when this article is published because if he seen it he might start thinking. . . .

After Follies of 1922, Lardner began collaborating with Gene Buck on two plays for Ziegfeld, the first a comedy for Follies star Fanny Brice, which went nowhere, and later an adaptation of Lardner’s story cycle Gullible’s Travels, about a Chicago couple trying to find a husband for the wife’s sister. Ziegfeld torpedoed the latter play, titled Going South, when the team first presented it, but he had second thoughts in the summer of 1925 when Buck suggested that it might be reimagined as a musical comedy. Newly interested, Ziegfeld sent contracts to the two men. “There were clauses in them which I wouldn't sign even with a manager I could trust,” wrote Lardner, and to Buck’s dismay neither man would budge.

Meanwhile, box-office receipts for Ziegfeld’s current Broadway musical, Louie the 14th, were rapidly fading after a respectable six-month run. Desperate for a new show, Ziegfeld tried again in August to entice Buck and Lardner to transform the play into a musical, engaging composer Vincent Youmans, whose surprise hit musical No, No, Nanette made him a sudden celebrity that year. He capitulated to Lardner’s demands, sent each of the three men a $500 advance, and set an impossible deadline—October 1—to put together a full-fledged show. Lardner rewrote the show, but Youmans apparently didn’t think much of the result and the arrangement fell apart. “I was so sick and tired of the whole proceeding that I was glad of it,” he wrote to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Buck still thought he could convince Ziegfeld and Lardner to stage the show but “between you and me, dear Scott and darling Zelda, Ziegfeld is not going to produce the show at any time, whether he wants to or whether he doesn’t.” The flailing Louie the 14th ended up playing to a half-empty house through December.

While Lardner was enduring one disappointment after another in the theater, he was still able to write some of his best and most famous stories, including those that would be collected in How to Write Short Stories (with Samples) and The Love Nest and Other Stories. He channeled his ambivalence about Ziegfeld into one of the selections. “I’ve got a story coming out in Liberty for October 3 [1925] of which Flo is the hero,” Lardner wrote to the Fitzgeralds. “When, and if, he reads it, he won’t offer me any more contracts, even lousy ones.” The story, “A Day with Conrad Green,” portrays a successful theater producer who (as H. L. Mencken put it) “turns out to have the professional competence of a chiropractor and the honor of a Prohibition agent.” There is no indication, however, that Ziegfeld ever found out about the story and he called again on the author at the end of the decade.

In 1929 Lardner finally had a bona fide Broadway hit: June Moon, a collaboration with George S. Kaufman based on the Lardner story “Some Like It Cold.” In the wake of this success, Lardner agreed to work on Smiles, a Ziegfeld musical featuring Marilyn Miller and Fred and Adele Astaire, with music by Vincent Youmans. At first Lardner merely contributed lyrics for a pair of songs, but one number, written for the Astaires, proved to be such a showstopper when the production was workshopped in Boston that (according to Lardner) Miller threatened to quit unless he wrote an equally humorous number for her. Knowing Ziegfeld was in a bind, Lardner demanded—and received—what he admitted was “an unheard of advance royalty,” took the train to Boston, and ended up writing a dozen songs, half of which ended up in the show.

Lardner was appalled by what he saw; as he wrote to his son John, “The book of the show, by William Anthony McGuire, was unbelievably terrible as I saw it in Boston, but it may be better when it opens here [in New York] Tuesday night. . . . The three stars are cutting one another’s throats and each trying to help him- or herself instead of the production.” Fred Astaire, for example, axed an opening number because the ensemble would precede him on stage in outfits that would detract from his entrance. Before Lardner left Boston, several of the performers and crew were discussing the show’s prospects in his hotel room, and one of them speculated that the “Astaires are going to steal this show.” “That would be petty larceny,” Lardner responded.

Lardner was mostly amused rather than annoyed by the debacle: “I wouldn’t have missed it because it was so ludicrous,” he told his son. The last-minute attempts to salvage the show were so frantic that Lardner and Youmans had to write or revise several of the songs by long-distance telephone. Unsurprisingly, Smiles, which opened in November 1930, was savaged by the critics, and it closed after 63 performances. It was the last time Lardner worked with Ziegfeld, who died in Hollywood during the summer of 1932. Lardner died of a heart attack a year later at the age of 48.

Notes: Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta was a Spanish painter of the early twentieth century. Deems Taylor was an American composer and music critic who came to prominence in the 1920s. Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby were a songwriting team whose many hits included “Who’s Sorry Now?” and “Three Little Words.”

Donald Elder’s biography Ring Lardner (1956) is the source for many of the above details concerning Lardner’s career with Ziegfeld.

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Conrad Green woke up depressed and, for a moment, could not think why. Then he remembered. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Quick Returns

Ring Lardner (1885–1933)
From Ring Lardner: Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links
“Ian Frazier on why Ring Lardner is ‘a major figure in twentieth-century letters’” (Library of America)

“Scott Fitzgerald, on Friend Ring Lardner” (Boat Against the Current)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Some Like Them Cold,” Ring Lardner
• “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
• “The Duel,” O. Henry

Buy the book
Ring Lardner: Stories & Other Writings
You Know Me Al | The Real Dope | The Young Immigrunts | The Big Town | collected and uncollected stories | 961 pages

“‘Listen!’ I said. ‘What did them two girdles cost?’” Illustration by American artist May Wilson Preston (1873–1949), drawn for “Quick Returns” when it appeared in March 27, 1920, issue of The Saturday Evening Post and reproduced the following year as a plate in the collection The Big Town. Preston illustrated most of Lardner’s stories in the Post.

In the mid-1920s Ring Lardner, at the urging of his neighbor F. Scott Fitzgerald, changed his publisher from Bobbs-Merrill to Scribner’s, and Maxwell Perkins became his editor. Scribner’s purchased the plates for all of Lardner’s previous books and made plans to issue them in a five-volume collector’s set. Instead of asking other writers to write forewords, Perkins wrote to his new author and asked him to provide prefaces for the edition. Perkins insisted that Lardner, perhaps America’s most famous columnist at the time, was simply too famous to ask anyone else to do the job. “The theory of an introduction is that the author needs someone who is of higher standing than himself, and you are not in a position where from this point of view anyone is available.”

Lardner was happy to oblige, and the short piece he sent Perkins to introduce his 1921 collection The Big Town begins:

This book deals with the adventures of a man and his wife and his sister-in-law who move to New York from a small Middle Western city. Because the writer and she who jokingly married him moved to New York from the Middle West, and because the writer has almost as many sister-in-laws as Solomon, several Nordic blondes have inquired whether the hero and heroines of the book are not actually us. Fortunately, most of the inquirers made the inquiry of me, the possessor of a notoriously sweet disposition. Two of them, however, asked the madam herself and were both shot down.

In the first place, the ladies of the book are supposed to have enough money to make them and the gent more or less independent. Nothing like that in our family.

In the second place, the sister-in-law of the book has a hard time getting a man. The sisters-in-law in real life acquired permanent men while still in their nonage, you might say, and didn't have to move out of the Middle West to do it. . . .

Behind a veil of humor, Lardner slightly underplays the similarities between himself and his narrator. Both the real and fictional families have roots in Niles, Michigan (where Lardner was born), both husbands launched their careers in South Bend, Indiana, and readers can easily find other surface resemblances between Lardner’s biography and the fiction of The Big Town. Furthermore, Lardner intentionally blurred the boundaries between life and literature in his nationally syndicated columns, writing in character as “Ring Lardner,” a comical and somewhat fictionalized version of himself—the “wise boob,” as he later called the type of character he was famous for creating. Part of Lardner’s popularity depended on his whimsical disregard for the lines between truth and fiction, sincerity and satire, reporting and exaggeration—not to mention the reader’s uncertainty over whether any given piece was by Ring Lardner or “Ring Lardner” or some entirely new creation.

Unlike his alter ego in The Big Town, however, Lardner was not dragged reluctantly to a new life in New York. For at least five years Lardner had toyed with the possibility of moving there. In 1914 he received a fan letter of sorts from Franklin P. Adams, a columnist who had moved from Chicago to New York and who would later become an influential promoter of up-and-coming writers. Adams wondered whether Lardner had ever considered moving to Manhattan, and Lardner responded, “It’s dough and the prospect of it that would tempt me to tackle the New York game. I think a gent in this business would be foolish not to go to New York if he had a good chance.”

In 1919 that chance arrived. Lardner was in New York, still working for the Chicago Tribune, when he met up with John Neville Wheeler in a bar. Three years earlier Wheeler had launched the Bell Syndicate, which distributed columns, fiction, comics, and the like to newspapers across the nation. As Wheeler later recounted, Lardner agreed to a deal after several rounds of drinks. A few weeks later, however, the newspaperman became nervous about whether Lardner believed they had really come to an arrangement, and he sent a follow-up note suggesting they draw up a written agreement. Lardner responded by telegram: “If you knew anything about contracts you would realize we made one in the Waldorf bar before five witnesses, three of whom were sober.” The “contract” lasted eight years.

Eventually, more than 150 local newspapers signed up for the new column, guaranteeing Lardner an annual income of at least $30,000. Excited by the addition of Lardner’s name to their pages, many editors ginned up enthusiasm among their readers weeks before the first column appeared. In mid-October, for example, an article on the front page of the El Paso Herald, under the day’s lead story (“AUSTRIANS RATIFY TREATY OF PEACE”), announced that Lardner would soon be publishing his column in the paper—and readers might well have thought the man was on his way to Texas. “It’s a name to conjure with, isn’t it?” the editors bragged. “Ring Lardner has a wider circle of readers than any humorist today. . . . Now Lardner is to join the staff.” The paper continued to promote Lardner’s arrival as a coming attraction nearly every day, often on the front page. Finally, on November 1, 1919, the first column appeared in El Paso (and in newspapers all across the country) under the title “Moving to the East.” In it, Ring Lardner explains to his readers that he has just arrived in New York to try his hand at writing a Broadway play and from there he will submit a weekly column: “I have excepted the kindly editor’s genial offer and wile I do not claim merits as a literary man the editor says that does not matter and if I will just write in my own breezy style (the way I talk as he expressed it) he and his readers will be more than satisfied.”

The move “to the East” also provided Lardner with the inspiration for two books: The Young Immigrunts (a previous Story of the Week selection) and the five stories published as The Big Town: How I and the Mrs. Go to New York to See Life and Get Katie a Husband. According to biographer Donald Elder, when Lardner began writing “Quick Returns,” the first of the Big Town stories, “he probably did not have the last episode in mind.” The stories reflect in myriad ways Lardner’s own adventures (and misadventures) as a greenhorn in New York. For instance, after he wrote the first two stories, he moved to Great Neck with his wife and sons and likewise changed the setting for the next story to Long Island. (The third story also contains a single mention each of the protagonist’s first and last names, Tom Finch. Neither name appears again.)

Although its components were written and published separately in The Saturday Evening Post over a period of eighteen months, The Big Town is perhaps the closest Lardner came to writing a novel. “No other book of Ring’s, You Know Me Al included, has the coherence and structure that The Big Town has,” notes Jonathan Yardley in his biography of Lardner. “The city has changed and so has the country, but the clash between the one and the other still goes on; the story Ring tells here of how one couple conducts its own little struggle is an enduring delight.”

Notes: Lardner scatters throughout the story a few references to various celebrities and other cultural touchpoints from the era. John Pierpont Morgan Jr. took over the family’s banking and financial empire when his father died in 1913. Oliver Lodge was a British physicist known for his interest in psychic phenomena and the afterlife. The Oliver Hotel, which opened in 1899, was South Bend’s most luxurious inn; it was demolished in 1967. Composed in 1863 by Joseph Barnby and popular for more than a century, “Sweet and Low” is a musical setting of a poem by Alfred Tennyson. George M. Cohan was a preeminent musical comedy performer, playwright, and composer; his more than three hundred songs included “Over There” and “Give My Regards to Broadway.” Frederick “Doc” Cook was an American explorer mostly remembered for falsely claiming to have reached the North Pole in 1908.

Lardner alludes a couple of times to Jack Dempsey, Jess Willard, and the boxing match in Toledo in 1919, when Dempsey won the heavyweight title by defeating Willard, who was the much larger fighter. Other athletes mentioned include Harvard fullback and placekicker Charles Brickley, University of Chicago quarterback Walter Eckersall (a good friend of Lardner’s), Purdue quarterback Edward C. Robertson, Boston Beaneaters second baseman Bobby Lowe, and Philadelphia Phillies left fielder Ed Delahanty.

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This is just a clipping from one of the New York papers; a little kidding piece that they had in about me two years ago. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Some Like Them Cold

Ring Lardner (1885–1933)
From Ring Lardner: Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links

“The Forgotten Genius of Ring Lardner” (Allan Barra, The Daily Beast)

Truman Capote and Groucho Marx discuss Ring Lardner (among other things) on The Dick Cavett Show (YouTube)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Carmen,” Ring Lardner
• “The Man Who Came to Dinner, With George Kaufman Directing,” Morton Eustis
• “Franklin D. Roosevelt Inaugurated Tomorrow,” Moss Hart

Buy the book
Ring Lardner: Stories & Other Writings
You Know Me Al | The Real Dope | The Young Immigrunts | The Big Town | collected and uncollected stories | 961 pages

Also Available
Kaufman & Co.: Broadway Comedies
The Royal Family | Animal Crackers | June Moon | Once in a Lifetime | Of Thee I Sing | You Can't Take It with You | Dinner at Eight | Stage Door | The Man Who Came to Dinner
List price: $35.00
Sale price: $14.00

“She Has Got No Use for the Boys But Treats Them Like Dirt.” Detail from an illustration for “Some Like Them Cold,” in the October 1, 1921, issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

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Ring Lardner was keen to hit it big on the stage. Over the course of his career he wrote more than one hundred plays, sketches, and skits. His earliest attempt, a musical, dates from 1903, when the eighteen-year-old was dabbling in community theater productions in his hometown of Niles, Michigan. Yet, even after he became famous, his many attempts to see his work staged were often frustrated by producers, directors, and actors. After he created various sketches to be used in the annual Ziegfeld Follies revues, he published an essay complaining that the performers reworked the script in favor of their own crowd-pleasing one-liners. “Why is his name attached to them on the program?” the author mused about himself before declaring, “I wouldn’t cash the checks neither if it wasn’t for the wife and kiddies.”

Years later, Ring Lardner Jr. recalled when his father asked George M. Cohan how to become a success in show business. “You’ve been in the theatre business for twenty years,” Ring Sr. said. “You write songs and sing them. You dance. You write plays and produce them. You know everything there is to know about the theater. You’re the one man who can tell me what I want to know. Mr. Cohan, how the hell does a guy get on the water wagon?” Their conversation led to the 1928 collaboration Elmer the Great, a Broadway flop that cost Lardner $6,000 even though the play seen by audiences retained hardly anything he wrote for it. Before opening night of the trial run in Chicago, he jokingly (and nervously) wrote in his trademark dialect to his former colleagues at the Chicago Tribune. “I was invited to the first rehearsal which I listened all through it and then had to ask Sam Forrest the director if I hadn’t fell into the wrong theater by mistake.”

Elmer the Great closed on Broadway in October after forty performances, a source of embarrassment to its alleged cowriter. Nevertheless, a few weeks later George Kaufman invited Lardner to collaborate on an adaptation of his popular story “Some Like Them Cold,” which had been published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1921. Still smarting from his previous venture on Broadway, Lardner at first declined, but he soon changed his mind and by early 1929 the two writers were working together on the play. Lardner contributed the first draft, Kaufman revised it, and rehearsals began using a third draft from Lardner, who also provided the music and lyrics. Now titled June Moon, the show went through even more revisions at performances in four East Coast cities, leading up to the Broadway premiere on October 9, 1929. The reviews were excellent and the show ran for 273 performances before going on a national tour. Lardner finally had a bona fide Broadway hit.

As biographer Jonathan Yardley notes, however, “June Moon is a play about the songwriting business, a satire of Tin Pan Alley that has many funny moments but very little to do with the story upon which it is based.” The original version, “Some Like Them Cold,” is about a struggling songwriter in New York and a “working girl” in Chicago who, having briefly met at a train station, exchange a series of flirtatious letters. The story was much admired by Lardner’s contemporaries; Dorothy Parker declared it one of four great American short stories of the era, alongside selections by Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and Wilbur Daniel Steele. Edmund Wilson, in his 1924 assessment of Lardner’s career to date, singled out the story as showcasing his literary strengths:

He has shown an unexcelled, a perhaps unrivalled, mastery of what, since the publication of Mencken’s book, has come to be known as the American language. . . . Lardner has marked the distinction between the baseball player’s and the prize-fighter’s slang, can speak the language of the Chicago songwriter of “Some Like Them Cold,” who has come to New York to make his fortune, and has equally at his command the whole vocabulary of adolescent clichés of the young girl who writes to the songwriter, and of the quite different set of clichés of the middle-aged man from New Jersey who goes to Florida for his golden honeymoon. . . . There is nothing artificial or forced about the use of slang in these stories; it is as natural as it is apt.

Wilson pushed Lardner hard to immortalize himself with a novel, and he insisted that Lardner was selling himself short by continuing to write humor pieces for magazines. “Will Ring Lardner, then, go on to his Huckleberry Finn? . . . What bell might not Lardner ring if he set out to give us the works?” F. Scott Fitzgerald also urged Lardner to write a longer work of fiction. “He was willing to settle for a novella,” wrote Ring Lardner Jr., “and he felt it should be about Great Neck,” the Long Island community where both men lived (and, infamously, drank). “I don't know exactly what Ring said to him, but when I asked my father if he would ever write a novel, he said that after one chapter he would be even more bored than the reader.”

So Lardner never did attempt to write the big book everyone seemed to expect from him—which many critics ever since have offered as the reason why Lardner is not as widely read as he deserves to be. Still, he left us a number of great stories, including “Haircut,” “The Golden Honeymoon,” and “Some Like Them Cold,” our current Story of the Week selection.

Notes: Levy’s and Goebel’s were leading music publishers of the period. Established in 1904, the Friars Club is a private association in New York for comedians and other show business personalities. Robert W. Service is an English-born Canadian poet (1874–1958) whose popular verses (such as “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”) are anything but "high-brow." The two lyricists to whom Charles compares his writing partner are Irving Berlin (“White Christmas,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” etc.) and Benny Davis (“Baby Face,” “There Goes My Heart”). Made popular by Al Jolson, “My Mammy” is a song with music by Walter Donaldson and lyrics by Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis. Bbl was a common abbreviation for barrel. Georgie White is Charles’s overly familiar name for the Broadway producer known for the musical revue George White’s Scandals, of which there were sixteen editions from 1919 to 1939.

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Dear Miss Gillespie: How about our bet now as you bet me I would forget all about you the minute I hit the big town and would never write you a letter. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Simple Simon

Ring Lardner (1885–1933)
From Ring Lardner: Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links

Interview: Ian Frazier on why Ring Lardner is “a major figure in twentieth-century letters” (Library of America)

“The Sportswriter Who Wrote American Better Than Anyone Anywheres” (John Lardner, Deadspin)

Previous Story of the Week selections by Ring Lardner
• “Where Do You Get That Noise?”
• “The Young Immigrunts”
• “Haircut”

Buy the book
Ring Lardner: Stories & Other Writings
You Know Me Al | The Real Dope | The Young Immigrunts | The Big Town | other stories | much more | 961 pages

“And I wished you could see her look at me, Al.” Illustration by American artist May Wilson Preston (1873–1949) for the story “Simple Simon” in the collection The Real Dope (1919). Preston’s drawing was also used for the front cover of the book’s jacket.

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Ring Lardner had been working as a sports journalist for a decade when, in 1913, he began writing sketches about fictitious baseball players and sharing his drafts with his colleagues at the Chicago Tribune. The newspaper’s Sunday editor learned of Lardner’s efforts and offered to consider his first story for the paper’s feature section. Lardner submitted “A Busher’s Letter Home,” featuring Jack Keefe, an uneducated, likable, gullible, and somewhat hapless minor-league player. Lardner adopted a daring approach; the entire story was written as a series of letters, filled with Keefe’s slang, misspellings, and malapropisms. Worried that readers wouldn’t endure the unusual prose style, the Tribune editor turned it down, so Lardner decided to send it to George Horace Lortimer, the editor of The Saturday Evening Post, who accepted it for publication. It appeared in the March 7, 1914, issue and would be the first of twenty-six stories starring Jack Keefe.

The “Busher” stories became so popular that the rather mundane tale of the initial episode’s rejection and acceptance became the stuff of legend, retold and embellished in various accounts as Lardner’s fame grew (and probably helped along by half-truths disseminated by the author). Finally, in 1925, when Burton Rascoe, a journalist and critic at the New-York Tribune, published his own version of Jack Keefe’s creation story, Lardner had had enough and wrote in exasperation:

It isn’t often I care what the boys and girls say about me in print, (Author’s note: That’s a dirty lie!) but honestly, Burton, that stuff you wrote. . . . The first “busher” story was never sent back by the Post; it was accepted promptly by Mr. Lorimer himself. I didn’t show it to [veteran sports journalists] Hugh Fullerton or Charlie Van Loan first; I sent it to Mr. Lorimer at the Post’s office, not to his residence; I didn’t write “Personal” on the envelope in even one place; I didn’t write any preliminary, special delivery, warning letter to Mr. Lorimer; no sub-editor ever asked me to correct the spelling and grammar, and I never sent any sub-editor or anyone else a bundle of letters I had received from ball players. Otherwise—

What is not in dispute is that Lardner made off quite well from the initial rejection. The Tribune editor had offered to pay $50 for Lardner’s first work of fiction if the paper ran it, but the Post paid $250 for it—and for each of Lardner’s early offerings. Nine of his stories (including six Jack Keefe installments) appeared in the Post before the end of 1914 and by the time the last Keefe selection appeared in 1919 Lardner was earning $1,250 per story.

Somewhat to Lardner’s surprise, the Jack Keefe stories earned literary respect and critical acclaim. Perhaps the most unexpected among his many fans was Virginia Woolf, who stumbled upon the stories a decade later and ended up including Lardner in a review essay on new American authors.

. . . Mr. Lardner has talents of a remarkable order. With extraordinary ease and aptitude, with the quickest strokes, the surest touch, the sharpest insight, he lets Jack Keefe the baseball player cut out his own outline, fill in his own depths, until the figure of the foolish, boastful, innocent athlete lives before us. As he babbles out his mind on paper there rise up friends, sweethearts, the scenery, town, and country—all surround him and make him up in his completeness. . . .

“It is easy to speak English badly,” Lardner biographer Donald Elder reminds us, “but very hard to make a literary style out of bad English.” Book critic Jonathan Yardley, who also wrote a biography of Lardner, explains, “Ring was trying to be both funny and accurate. He was also trying to get down on paper the words of a man who wrote the same way he talked.” One aspect of this prose technique that has received particular attention from critics is the pattern of Jack’s misspellings. Lardner explained to his editors that, on the one hand, someone like Jack would believe in his own ability to spell the simpler words, but overconfidence would lead him to spell some familiar words the way they sounded. On the other hand, he would feel the need to look up or to ask how to spell the harder words.

Fifteen of the Jack Keefe stories were subsequently gathered in three book collections. The first, and most famous, is You Know Me Al (1916), which gathered the six “Busher” stories published in the Post in 1914. Two years later, when the United States entered World War I, the market hungered for war stories, so Lardner transferred Keefe from the baseball diamond, via the draft, to the Army. The three selections in Treat ’Em Rough (1918) describe life in basic training, while the six episodes in the final collection, The Real Dope (1919), take Lardner’s hero to the war in Europe.

The stories in The Real Dope were informed by Lardner’s eleven-week assignment as a war correspondent in France, where he saw little in the way of actual combat—much like his hero, who spends all six episodes “crazy to get up there to the front” to experience “some real actions.” While they wait in boredom, Jack and his fellow soldiers spend most of their time playing pranks on each other and especially on Jack. In the book’s final story, “Simple Simon,” the soldiers redirect the focus of their shenanigans to someone even more clueless than Jack, while Jack himself finally sees some “actions”—although not quite of the type he was anticipating.

Notes: In the second letter Jack mentions Guy Meyer, “the French ace,” who real name was Georges Guynemer, a fighter pilot credited with destroying 53 enemy aircraft before he was killed in action in 1917. He also jokingly refers to German military leaders Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, who together directed the German army from April 1916 through the end of World War I. The German speegle mentioned on page 282 is a mirror (from the word Spiegel). John J. Pershing (page 283) was commander of American Expeditionary Forces during World War I. French military leader Ferdinand Foch was appointed supreme commander of the Allied armies in March 1918. Charles Comiskey (page 292) was ballplayer, manager, and owner of the Chicago White Sox.

The story’s final paragraph describes the outset of the Second Battle of the Marne (July 15–August 6, 1918), a German offensive halted by the Allies in the vicinity of Reims, after which the Germans were driven back by an Allied counteroffensive. The Allied victory was of decisive importance for the outcome of the war.

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FRIEND AL: Well Al we have been haveing a lot of fun with a bird name Jack Simon only the boys calls him Simple Simon and if you seen him you wouldn’t ask why. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.