And further enshrined in heaven will be a hoped for sub-set of those people, the ones who know full well they saved something, cannot find it amongst their piles, but know they have it. So, they keep looking. And are rewarded when they find it.
Along the way through my rabbit hole I came across what was quite appropriately a December 30, 2003 NYT piece written by Robert D. McFadden that I had saved. Bronx Man Is Rescued From His Own Paper Prison. Mr. McFadden's lede goes:
A Bronx man trapped for two days under an avalanche of newspapers, magazines and books was rescued by firefighters and neighbors yesterday in a small urban drama that recalled the macabre tale of the Collyer brothers.
The lede of course is pure gold. Anyone who doesn't know anything about the Collyer brothers is in for a good read if they deep dive.
That poor fellow was a hoarder, so I suffered no such bad luck. So finding the full copy of The New Yorker from March 25, 1967 that I bought on eBay because it contained a priceless Roger Angell piece on New York Ranger hockey makes the day complete. Perhaps more than the day. The euphoria might last a week. I might even forget about the price of gas for a while.
As anyone who reads obituaries knows by now Mr. Roger Angell just passed away at 101 in his home in Manhattan. Anyone who worked at The New Yorker as long as he did surely was not going to be anywhere else but Manhattan when they passed away.
Mr. Angell is a literary legend. Just read the obit and you'll why. He's credited with being a great baseball writer. But does anyone remember the 1967 piece on the New York Rangers, a hockey team that played the game at the time at "Old" Garden on 8th Avenue between 49th and 50th streets, where the cigarette smoke hung in the air by the third period in games the Rangers were more than likely to lose? They weren't every good in those days, and were most often left out of the four team playoffs at the end of the season in the six team National Hockey League. Oh, how things have changed. But this isn't about my memories of going to see those games at the Old Garden with its side balcony admission price of $1.50 (end balcony, unobstructed view, $2.00), it's about Mr. Angell's piece.
I don't know when I originally read the piece. I didn't get The New Yorker. In 1967 I was just out of high school and by then had dropped out of two colleges. I probably started to read the story in a doctor's office, maybe spent the 35¢! to get a newsstand copy, and read the rest of the story in the back of the family flower shop.
I always remembered the story. So, being retired I gave it a go several years ago and tried to find the article again. Research at the New York Public Library, the big guy on 5th Avenue, lead me to microfilm for The New Yorker where I found the story and the edition it was in. I read it. I must have made a copy, but I wasn't satisfied with that. I looked into eBay and purchasing the hardcopy. Success. I forget what it cost me, but it was not 35¢.
The New Yorker of 1967 played peek-a-boo with its stories. There was no index, so finding the copy of the edition I had to thumb through many pages—with ads for products no longer in existent and hairstyles certainly never to be seen again—until page 128 when the piece appears, built around an inserted cartoon. "The Sporting Scene: The Last Flowers in the Garden."
Mr. Angell's piece is precipitated by the fact that 1967 will be the last season for the "Old" Garden. A new one is being built atop Penn Station, and will open in 1968. And that Garden is still with us, vastly reconfigured, improved, and now the oldest arena in the N.H.L. It's old, but not the Old Garden.
Mr. Angell's opening paragraphs set the stage for the Garden's unique ambiance. He acknowledges the cigarette smoke:
"...the cigarette smoke thickening under the spotlights up near the yellow Quonset-siding ceiling..."
He acknowledges the vast variety of events that were held at the Garden (and still now) but the kicker is when he admits, like I would...
"the Garden—to me, at least—means ice hockey first. Hockey and the Rangers.
Memories of games and players follow. One of my favorite players of the Rangers in the '60s was Harry Howell, No. 3, the reliable defenseman described by Angell thusly:
"Enemy bombers arriving in Howell's territory are rarely shot down; they seem, rather, to fly into a wall of wet Kleenex and stick there, kicking. When carrying the puck through a cloud of opposing forecheckers up to the safety of center ice, Howell has the reassuring, mistake-proof elegance of a veteran waiter managing a loaded tray in heavy dinner traffic."
The writing is precise; it is elegant.
Mr. Angell weighs in on the upcoming expansion of he N.H.L. when the league will add six teams to the lineup.
"Television money. as much as with all sports, is what breeds expansion, and I can only dread its further intrusion into this particular sport. Television's prissy eye has always looked quickly away from rowdiness, fights, and the spilling of angry blood by its athletes, and its pauses for commercials will at last lower the pulse rate of this winged game. Hockey will be bigger, duller, cleaner, and duller next year."
Not everything comes true. The game has evolved away from the outright donnybrooks that would see sticks and gloves and players from the bench clutching at each other as they waltzed around the ice holding each others' jerseys, "when the ice suddenly resembled a bombed glove factory."
If anything, the game is faster, the passing crisper, and with the added five feet behind each net, and allowable two-line passing, has evolved into the desired European hockey of constant motion. There are far fewer whistles these days, and less freezing the puck along the boards waiting for a whistle to stop play. Play continues. Play-by-play announcers are sometimes left breathless because there haven't been stoppages.
Some of the best word portraits are of Emile Francis, (The Cat), the general manager and coach of the Rangers who just passed away. "Emile Francis was a goalie playing for 14 years, mostly in the high minors..."
Francis, the builder of this team is a small wiry intense man, whose pale face bears only a few reminders of the two hundred and forty stitches, the five-times-broken nose, and the eighteen lost teeth of his playing days. (The expanses of empty gums visible at any N.H.L. practice session would electrify a denture manufacturer.
Francis was a sergeant in the Canadian Army at the age of sixteen, and during one practice session in January I heard him deliver a ten-minute oration to the ranks that matched, in vocabulary and high-register breath control, anything I encountered during a lengthy stretch under several famous parade-ground Ciceros.
But it is the game itself, played in the confines of an arena with pillars, balconies, obstructed views, and a closeness to the ice that cannot be achieved with modern bowl design that Mr. Angell recreates the festive atmosphere. In closing...
All of us there, between our own roars, will be adding almost to the last and surely the best flowers of our Garden bouquet: the bright balloons batting from hand to hand in the end promenades between the periods; the organ wheezing out the "Mexican Hat Dance;" the wintry electric slither of skate blades; and the sudden cry of "Ooo!" as a puck flies past the home goal and strikes—ponk!—against the glass and bounds away, and the Rangers, fortunately, gather it in and fly up the ice.
Remember that sound the next time you're at a game. Remember Roger Angell.
Ponk!
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
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