Roger Kahn, author of the Dodgers baseball classic ‘The Boys of Summer,’ dead at 92

Bill Veeck, who in his full-throttle lifetime owned the Cleveland Indians, the St. Louis Browns and the Chicago White Sox, and thus knew a little about baseball, once observed, “Roger Kahn is doomed to go through life having everything he writes compared with ‘The Boys of Summer.’”

As it turns out, Veeck was dead center. In introductions, in print, whenever the name Roger Kahn appeared, it was invariably followed by, “the author of ‘The Boys of Summer.’” Not that it bothered Kahn, who went right on writing. If fans, baseball people and Sports Illustrated wanted to hail his work, which sold more than 3 million copies, as the finest baseball book ever written, well ....

Forever linked to his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, the subject of his signature work, Kahn died Thursday in New York, his literary agent Robert Wilson said. He was 92.

Acclaimed by many as the best baseball writing in the country, his prolific output was widely diverse. He wrote more than 20 books, two of them novels, the others dealing with such topics as politics, Jews in America, racial injustice, student unrest and boxing, and countless magazine articles on whatever else he found interesting or disturbing.

He had also been sports editor of Newsweek, editor at large of the Saturday Evening Post, a columnist for Esquire magazine, a writing professor at three colleges, and a friend and admirer of poet Robert Frost.

Even so, he often wandered back to baseball, his first love. Besides his 1972 epic, “The Boys of Summer,” in which he recalled his childhood as a fan of the Dodgers, the team he covered as a sportswriter in the early 1950s, then examined the same players’ mostly unhappy lives after baseball, he wrote eight other books about baseball and baseball players and their lives.

He lifted the title of his major work from a poem by Dylan Thomas, who described “the boys of summer in all their ruin.” In an era when all but the very best ballplayers made ordinary money, most returned to normal working lives after retiring from baseball. Here, for instance, is how Kahn found retired outfielder Carl Furillo, who had turned fielding crazy caroms off the right field wall in Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field into a science:

“The carom of life is harder for Carl Furillo to play. ... He is a bitter hardhat putting elevators in Manhattan office buildings. He thinks baseball used him badly. ‘The bad leg had me walking funny and I had to have two operations for a ruptured disk. That comes on account of the injury but I figure, flip it, I gotta take care of myself. ... ’ The question that dangles, or caroms, is the bitterness justified? Or is it ‘E-9’ for the right fielder in the larger playing field of life?”

The “Boys of Summer” by Roger Kahn

(Unknown/Unknown)

One season, Kahn bought and operated a minor league team, the Utica Blue Sox in upstate New York, so that he would be properly prepared to write “Good Enough to Dream,” a book about baseball in the lowest of the minor leagues, another hit among baseball cognoscenti.

With all the accolades, though, came occasional controversy, conflict and utter sadness.

His 1989 book on the disgraced and baseball-banned player-manager Pete Rose, for instance, in which he professed belief in Rose’s claims that although he’d gambled on other sports he’d never bet on baseball games, was widely panned as ridiculously naïve, if not downright deceitful.

Wrote one critic of “Pete Rose: My Story,” “Of all the devastation Rose has wrought on the game he purports so grandly to love, the soul of Roger Kahn as ravaged in this book is one of the saddest ruins to behold.”

Then Kahn was flayed anew when Rose, years later, finally admitted that he had, indeed, bet not only on baseball but on his own teams’ games.

“[Rose] was always surrounded by a bodyguard of liars,” Kahn told Bill Dwyre of The Times in 2007, “and so the question had to be put to him, before we went forward with the book. I must have ... asked him five times, ‘Did you bet on baseball?’ And the answer was always the same. He’d look me in the eye and say, ‘I’ve got too much respect for the game.’

“I regret I ever got involved in the book.”

Author Roger Kahn at his house in Coron–on–Hudson, N.Y., in 1997.

(Todd Plitt / Associated Press)

Kahn also was on Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” ABC news program the night in 1987, when longtime Dodgers executive Al Campanis, on the 40th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier, told a national TV audience that blacks “may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager or, perhaps, a general manager.”

“My first sense was shock,” said Kahn, who had been close to Robinson and was a friend of Campanis as well. “My next thought was, ‘How can I bail him out?’ ... Then I got to thinking that I wouldn’t want to hear this kind of talk at a party, much less on a TV show in front of millions of people, so I can’t bail him out of his position at all.”

He didn’t, Campanis ignored Koppel’s attempts to let him recant and shortly afterward was no longer a Dodgers executive.

Kahn endured a bitter divorce from his second wife and an ensuing six-year legal battle over money and child custody, but worst of all was the suicide death of his troubled younger son, also named Roger. A student at UCLA, battling depression and drug abuse, he intentionally overdosed while Kahn was trying to sort out the myriad problems with the Rose book.

Kahn was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 31, 1927, and came by his love for baseball and writing naturally. His father, Gordon, a teacher at Brooklyn’s Thomas Jefferson High School, was a diehard Dodgers fan who began taking Roger to games as an infant. His mother Olga, also a teacher at Jefferson High, much preferred literature, leading family readings of classical authors.

In 1948, the year after Robinson broke the color barrier, Kahn, having attended New York University off and on, went to work for the New York Herald Tribune as a copy boy. There, he met the paper’s legendary sports editor, Stanley Woodward, and occasionally wrote stories for the section.

In one of his submissions, he used the phrase, “a dubious battle.” Asked by Woodward where he had run across that description, Kahn answered, “A novel by John Steinbeck. He took the title from [English poet John] Milton: ‘In dubious battle on the plains of heaven.’”

Replied Woodward, “You know Milton and you like baseball. Keep running errands and answering the phone. Something may turn up for you in sports.”

By 1952, Kahn was covering his beloved Dodgers for the paper, and forging a bond with Robinson. He saw firsthand the racism Robinson had to battle, although his paper wouldn’t let him write about it, and supplied much of the content for Robinson’s short-lived Our Sports, a magazine aimed at an African American readers.

Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, home of Roger Kahn’s beloved Dodgers, in May 1960 after the team had long left for Los Angeles and demolition had begun.

(Barney Stein Photo Collection)

Said Kahn in a New York Times interview in 1996, “Robinson has been called a pioneer, prophet, visionary and SOB. He could be any or all. Mostly, I remember him as a man who would risk anything, even his life, for what he believed in.”

Kahn covered the Dodgers for several seasons, becoming the best-paid beat writer in New York at $10,000 a year. Then, after calling Ebbets Field a “sarcophagus” in a story, he was taken off the Dodgers and reassigned to the New York Giants, with whom Willie Mays was fast becoming, as Kahn described him, “the most exciting player” he had ever seen.

By 1956, the still-young Kahn had moved on to Newsweek and his career was off and running.

“All my life, I’ve tried to write literature,” he wrote on his website. “I am aware that, like Stan Musial and Ted Williams at the bat, most of the time I’ve failed. But the critical word is ‘try.’ That effort has been the wonder of my life.”

Kahn is survived by his third wife, Katharine Johnson, son Gordon, daughter Alissa Avril and five grandchildren.

Kupper is a former Times staff writer.

1/25

Kobe Bryant, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sean Connery and more.  (Los Angeles Times)

2/25

Rafer Johnson, winner of the 1960 Olympic decathlon gold medal, was a man whose legacy was interwoven with Los Angeles history, beginning with his performances as a world-class athlete at UCLA and punctuated by the night in 1968 when he helped disarm Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin at the Ambassador Hotel. Johnson lit the Olympic flame at the opening of the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles. He was 86.
  (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

3/25

With his quick wit and easy smile, Alex Trebek drove the game show “Jeopardy!” up the ratings charts and became a welcome television host in America’s living rooms. As the quiz show rolled through the decades, Trebek remained a comfortable fit — in a 2014 Reader’s Digest poll, Trebek ranked as the eighth-most trusted person in the United States, right behind Bill Gates and 51 spots above Oprah Winfrey. He was 80.
  (Los Angeles Times)

4/25

Guitarist Eddie Van Halen’s speed and innovations along the fretboard inspired a generation of imitators as the band bearing his name rose to MTV stardom and multiplatinum sales over 10 consecutive albums. The streak made Van Halen one of the most successful bands in rock history, including two albums that reached diamond status (10 million copies sold): 1978’s debut “Van Halen” and 1984’s “1984.” He was 65.  (Wibbitz/Getty)

5/25

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg championed women’s rights — first as a trailblazing civil rights attorney who methodically chipped away at discriminatory practices, then as the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court, and finally as an unlikely pop culture icon. A feminist hero dubbed Notorious RBG, Ginsburg became the leading voice of the court’s liberal wing, best known for her stinging dissents on a bench that mostly skewed right since her 1993 appointment. She was 87.
  (Kiichiro Sato / Associated Press)

6/25

Chadwick Boseman’s breakout role was playing Dodger Jackie Robinson in the 2013 sports biopic “42.” The next year, he made an electrifying lead turn as James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, in “Get on Up.” Then came the role that would change his career: As Black Panther, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first Black superhero, Boseman became the face of Wakanda to millions of fans around the world and helped usher in a new and inclusive era of superhero blockbusters. He was 43.
  (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

7/25

Sumner Redstone outmaneuvered rivals to assemble one of America’s leading entertainment companies, now called ViacomCBS, which boasts CBS, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, BET, Showtime, the Simon & Schuster book publisher and Paramount Pictures movie studio. Unlike contemporaries Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner, Redstone was not a visionary, but rather a hard-charging lawyer and deal maker who pursued power and wealth through the accumulation of content companies. He was 97.

  (Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times)

8/25

Regis Philbin reigned for decades as the comfortable and sometimes cantankerous morning host of “Live,” first with Kathie Lee Gifford and later Kelly Ripa, above. He earned Emmy nominations by the armful, hosted New Year’s Eve specials, rode in parades, set a record for the most face-time hours on television and helped reinvigorate prime-time game shows with “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” He was 88.
  (Charles Sykes / Associated Press)

9/25

Rep. John Lewis famously shed his blood at the foot of a Selma, Ala., bridge in a 1965 demonstration for Black voting rights, and went on to become a 17-term Democratic member of Congress. An inspirational figure for decades, Lewis was one of the last survivors among members of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s inner circle. He was 80.
  (Mark Humphrey / Associated Press)

10/25

Country music firebrand and fiddler Charlie Daniels started out as a session musician, which included playing on Bob Dylan’s 1969 album “Nashville Skyline,” and beginning in the early 1970s toured endlessly with his own band, sometimes doing 250 shows a year. In 1979, Daniels had a crossover smash with “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” which topped the country chart, hit No. 3 on the pop chart and was voted single of the year by the Country Music Assn. He was 83.  (Rick Diamond / Getty Images for IEBA)

11/25

Carl Reiner first came to national attention in the 1950s on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” where he wrote alongside Mel Brooks, Neil Simon and other comedy legends. He later created “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” one of TV’s most fondly remembered sitcoms, and directed hit films including “The Comic” (1969), starring Van Dyke; “Where’s Poppa?” (1970), starring George Segal and Ruth Gordon; “Oh, God!” starring George Burns and John Denver; and four films starring Steve Martin. He was 98.   (Associated Press )

12/25

The flamboyant, piano-pounding Little Richard roared into the rock ‘n’ roll spotlight in the 1950s with hits such as “Tutti-Frutti,” “Long Tall Sally” and “Good Golly, Miss Molly.” The Georgia native’s raucous sound fused gospel
fervor and R&B sexuality, profoundly influencing the Beatles, James Brown (who succeeded him in one of his early bands), Jimi Hendrix (one of his backup musicians in the mid-’60s) and Bruce Springsteen. He was 87.
  (Boris Yaro / Los Angeles Times)

13/25

Don Shula was the NFL’s winningest coach, leading the 1972 Miami Dolphins to the league’s only undefeated season. He coached the Baltimore Colts to one Super Bowl and the Dolphins to five, winning Lombardi Trophies after the 1972 and ’73 seasons. He was 90.
  (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

14/25

Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak crushed dissent for decades until the 2011 Arab Spring movement drove him from power. During his presidency, which spanned nearly 30 years, he protected Egypt’s stability as intifadas roiled Israel and the Palestinian territories, the U.S. led two wars against Iraq, Iran fomented militant Shiite Islam across the region and global terrorism complicated the divide between East and West. He was 91.  (Sameh Sherif / AFP/Getty Images)

15/25

Among his 40-odd films, burly Brian Dennehy played a sheriff who jailed Rambo in “First Blood,” a serial killer in “To Catch a Killer” and a corrupt sheriff in “Silverado.” On Broadway, he was awarded Tonys for his roles in “Death of a Salesman” (1999) and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (2003). He was 81.  (Dia Dipasupil)

16/25

Singer-songwriter John Prine broke onto the folk scene in 1971 with a self-titled album that included two songs brought to broader audiences by Bette Midler and Bonnie Raitt: “Hello in There” and “Angel From Montgomery,” respectively. In 2019, he was elected to the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He was 73.  (Frazer Harrison / Getty Images for Stagecoach)

17/25

Country singer Kenny Rogers racked up an impressive string of hits — initially as a member of The First Edition starting in the late 1960s and later as a solo artist and duet partner with Dolly Parton — and earned three Grammy Awards, 19 nominations and a slew of accolades from country-music awards shows. Country purists balked at his syrupy ballads, but his fans packed arenas that only the titans of rock could fill. He was 81.  (Suzanne Mapes / Associated Press)

18/25

Xerox researcher Larry Tesler pioneered concepts that made computers more user-friendly, including moving text through cut, copy and paste. In 1980, he joined Apple, where he worked on the Lisa computer, the Newton personal digital assistant and the Macintosh. He was 74.  (AP)

19/25

Ski industry pioneer Dave McCoy transformed a remote Sierra peak into the storied Mammoth Mountain Ski Area. Over six decades, it grew from a downhill depot for friends to a profitable operation of 3,000 workers and 4,000 acres of ski trails and lifts, a mecca for generations of skiers and boarders. He was 104.  (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

20/25

Screen icon Kirk Douglas brought a clenched-jawed intensity to an array of heroes and heels, receiving Oscar nominations for his performances as an opportunistic movie mogul in the 1952 drama “The Bad and the Beautiful” and as Vincent van Gogh in the 1956 drama “Lust for Life.” As executive producer of “Spartacus,” Douglas helped end the Hollywood blacklist by giving writer Dalton Trumbo screen credit under his own name. He was 103.  (Annie Wells / Los Angeles Times)

21/25

“Queen of Suspense” Mary Higgins Clark became a perennial best-seller, writing or co-writing “A Stranger Is Watching,” “Daddy’s Little Girl” and more than 50 other favorites. Her sales topped 100 million copies, and many of her books, including “A Stranger is Watching” and “Lucky Day,” were adapted for movies and television. She was 92.  (Associated Press)

22/25

Fred Silverman was the head of programming at CBS, where he championed a string of hits including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “All in the Family,” “MASH” and “The Jeffersons.” Later at ABC, he programmed “Laverne & Shirley,” “The Love Boat,” “Happy Days” and the 12-hour epic saga “Roots.” He was 82.  (Associated Press)

23/25

Former California Rep. Fortney “Pete” Stark Jr. represented the East Bay in Congress for 40 years. The influential Democrat helped craft the Affordable Care Act, the signature healthcare achievement of the Obama administration, and also created the 1986 law best known as COBRA, which allows workers to stay on their employer’s health insurance plan after they leave a job. He was 88.  (Associated Press)

24/25

News anchor Jim Lehrer appeared 12 times as a presidential debate moderator and helped build “PBS NewsHour” into an authoritative voice of public broadcasting. The program, first called “The Robert MacNeil Report” and then “The MacNeil-Lehrer Report,” became the nation’s first one-hour TV news broadcast in 1983. Lehrer was 85.  (David McNew / Getty Images)

25/25

Terry Jones was a founding member of the Monty Python troupe who wrote and performed for their early ’70s TV series and films including “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in 1975 and “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” in 1979. After the Pythons largely disbanded in the 1980s, Jones wrote books on medieval and ancient history, presented documentaries, wrote poetry and directed films. He was 77.  (Associated Press)