Quitting the Paper

By Paul Hemphill Southern Voices Magazine 1970s (Collected in Too Old to Cry) On the Kansas City Star you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and will help him if he gets...

Smith Hates For it to End Like This

By Tom Archdeacon The Miami News January 22, 1979 Darrell Smith sat there and listened quietly. What he heard hurt him, but he didn’t speak. He looked down at the floor. He fidgeted and fumbled with a small Instamatic camera he had brought to the game. Six feet away,...

Toots Among the Ruins

By Joe Flaherty Esquire October 1974 Across the isle of Manhattan these days floats a torch song for the past. The wail seems to be strained through a muted horn or, better yet, siphoned through a derby. What occasions this is the belief that the Apple has turned...

Diary of a Damn Yankee Fan

By Richard Ben Cramer The Baltimore Sun October 17, 1977 I admit it. I’m a Yankee fan, always have been. It wasn’t my fault, really…you see, my grandfather… Well, enough apologies. The fact is I’m glad the Yankees are back and if you had any sense, you would be too....

Long Gone

By Paul Hemphill From Long Gone 1979

The Day Bobby Blew It

By Brad Darrach Playboy July 1973 Bobby Fischer heard a knock at the door. It was sometime after ten A.M., Thursday, June 29, 1972. Three days before the first game of his match with Boris Spassky for the world chess championship. Eleven hours before the plane left...

My Life in a 36DD Bra, Or, The All-American Obsession

By Eve Babitz Ms. Magazine April 1976 When I was 15 years old, I bought and filled my first 36 DD bra. Since then, no man has ever made a serious pass at me without assuring me in the first hour that he was a leg man. Tits! Why, he hadn’t even noticed! The tacit...