In every room of Roger Kahn's home there are photographs. Visual remembrances of his children and grandchildren are magneted to the fridge and framed on tables and walls alongside likenesses of Dodger pitcher Clem Labine. "First day I covered the team he took me to the movies." There's a photo of Major League pitcher Mudcat Grant, and one of Kahn himself 60 feet below the Caribbean in full diving gear. Ironweed author William Kennedy stares from his frame near an autographed baseball bearing the US Presidential seal and the inscription: "To Roger - A man who knows baseball. G. Bush."
Yes, it's "W", and this little piece of memorabilia will be banished to his office upstairs, near the "wall of shame," a corner to which his wife and children have exiled all such relics of Republican administrations. Baseball for Roger Kahn is bipartisan.
His office walls are lined in memories: oil renderings of baseball stadiums, a 1958 photo of Kahn in a group including Batista, taken in Cuba. Kahn is wearing the biggest smile of anyone. He points out that smile, and then indicates a dour-looking man in the same black and white photo. "He says to me the first day, 'Why you not smile?' I was smiling every day after that, 'cause what you don't see in this picture are the machine guns."
A photo with Oral Hershiser is inscribed, "Best thing about religion is it helped me restrain my ego." There's an 8 X 10 photo of Thomas Jefferson's tombstone. Kahn holds open the page where Robert Frost signed his collected poems, "To Roger Kahn, from his friend Robert Frost after an afternoon of real talk together at the cabin in Ripton 9/2/60."
"I went to Breadloaf the summer Bobby Thompson hit that home run." Kahn attended the prestigious writer's workshop in 1951 (the year Thompson hit the pennant-winning shot for the New York Giants off the Dodgers' Ralph Branca) and again in 1955 as a fellow. There he met and befriended the revered poet Robert Frost, with whom he shared a love of language and a love of the game.
"He was 77 when he pitched to me. It crossed my mind if I hit a line drive through the box I could kill America's favorite poet. So I changed my orientation and chopped down for a fielder's choice out at first."
The sportswriter speaks of Robert Frost with deep reverence. "He sits in an Adirondack chair and waits. He knows he's Robert Frost...always Mr. Frost; I never robbed him. Not like these kids I teach...to them I'm 'Roger' an hour in..." He chuckles.
Roger Kahn is referring to the James H. Ottaway Sr. Endowed Professorship he held at SUNY New Paltz this spring, where he taught a course about his writing process, choosing topics, research, and the employment of prose that novelist James Michener has described as having "high moral purpose and great poetic accomplishment."
"One of the finer journalistic traditions has been for one generation to guide those that follow," Kahn said on becoming the Ottaway professor. "Harold Rosenthal of the Herald Tribune taught me how to tip on the baseball beat. Red Smith reminded me that no matter how dramatic a ballgame seemed, it was not a battle of Titans. John Lardner suggested that putting some humor in your stuff was a benediction."
When asked whom he most admires, it is not surprising to find Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, and Robert Frost at the top of the list. Eugene McCarthy and Stanley Woodward are there too, along with Roger Laurence Kahn, his son. The second of his three children, Roger took his own life at the age of 22 after years of struggle with heroin addiction.
"I tried a lot of ways with him and every one of them was wrong. I don't have the chance to try again." It is a pain he shares with Jackie Robinson and Robert Frost, both of whom had sons who died at their own hands. Deep subtext to enduring friendships.
There's another photo near "the wall of shame": a young Kahn taking one on the chin from Jack Dempsey, about whom he wrote the biography Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring Twenties. Roger Kahn chuckles as he stares at that photo, that stilled moment of sublime triumph. "Two weeks of boxing at Camp Robinson Crusoe made me able to stand in the ring with Jack Dempsey."
