By Mark Kram Esquire November 1989 How civilized the fame game was then, a timid, furtive glimpse for the observer, the observed cordoned off by a dreamlike distance of respect. Worship knew its place; so did greatness. It was caught sharply once by a young American...
By Ivan Solotaroff The Village Voice September 4, 1990 By the banks of the Truckee River, under a nearly full moon, a tall, vaguely Hispanic-looking man with beautiful shoulder-length black hair, a foot-long beard, and a plump, perfectly relaxed body comes over to...
By Paul Hemphill The Atlanta Journal Constitution Magazine 1970s The whole world is running off to Miami for the Christmas holidays. Look around and you will have cause to wonder why all of these cities and towns even bothered to string colored lights above their...
By John Schulian Bronx Banter July 8, 2011 George Kimball was blessed with the kind of voluble charm you find in an Irish bar, and, brother, let me tell you he’d been in a few. No amount of drink, however, could rein in his galloping intelligence. It was as pure a...
By John Lardner From You Know Me Al 1959 edition The You Know Me Al letters have an unusual history, in terms of reputation. The impact of their original publication, forty-five years ago, was such that their fame has endured to a large extent by word of mouth, like...
By Dave Anderson True 1964 The great ones never lose their style. Even today Joe DiMaggio swings the bat majestically in the Old Timers games. Sammy Baugh can show a rookie quarterback how to lead a receiver slanting across the middle. Put Eddie Arcaro up on a...
By Peter Richmond GQ July 1992 The lights are rheostated low inside a customized bus parked on Tenth Avenue in Manhattan at nine o’clock on a winter dark evening. Two candle flames dance on a table. Eddie Murphy stares at them, without speaking. Hammer just dropped...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter April 24, 2012 Mark Kram Jr. is one of the finest practitioners we have of long-form newspaper journalism, better known as the bonus or takeout piece. He has been with the Philadelphia Daily News since 1987 and his work has appeared in The...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader The origins of “The Gookie,” from one of the great showbiz memoirs, Harpo Speaks! The man who first inspired me to become an actor was a guy called Gookie. Gookie had nothing to do with the theatre. He rolled cigars in the window of a...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader Is James Brown the most influential American musician of the 20th Century? He’s certainly in the conversation along with Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan and Michael Jackson. His story—the undeniable musical legacy as well as the catastrophic...
By Juan Williams The Washington Post Magazine May 17, 1987 When I was a little boy, the one event I dreamed of seeing in person was a big prizefight. Other sports were on television or available to a kid who wanted to sell Cokes. The big fights were in exotic places...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader Here is something I have noticed about reprinting material that was previously published but not available to us online—it ain’t for everyone. Why? Well, say I reprint a story that was published 40 years ago. Some folks will be turned...
