I have to say that before a New York Public Library discussion on obituaries in October 2008 I don't think I had heard the name Daniel Okrent, one of the discussion mates of Anne Wroe and Marilyn Johnson. I knew someone had been appointed an Ombudsman at the Times in the wake of Jonathan Blair and Howell Raines, but his name was not familiar. He had since left that post and sounded like he was straining to complete a book on American history. I do remember he was funny. In fact, they were all funny, but maybe none more so than the moderator Paul Holdengraber, who further immortalized Robert McG. Thomas, Jr.'s famous piece on Edward Lowe by asking in his Austrian clock-maker accent what was so special about "keeeeety-liter?" Nothing, until he says it. Well, he did ask.
But, catching up on the papers, there in the The Wall Street Journal, June 6, on the Op-Ed page is a story about Rudy Mancuso's photo of "The Shot Heard Round the World," taken at the moment Bobby Thomson's homer put the Giants into the World Series in 1951.
The writer of the piece, Joshua Prager, has made a bit of a career on the event and published a book about it. He is also the writer who broke the story in the Journal in 2001 that told of the Giants stealing pitch signs with a telegraph and a buzzer. I remember writing to Dave Anderson after reading that one, telling him their lunch had just been eaten by the then financial paper.
Anyway, Prager writes, that Thomson's homer commenced inspiring so much prose that Daniel Okrent weighed in that it imperiled "great stretches of Canadian pulpwood forest."
A great line. I doubt Okrent said it in 1951, because he didn't look that old in 2008 at the NYPL, but how nice to be quoted in what actually becomes a tribute piece to Rudy Mancuso, who passed away on May 10, at 89.
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