[Hankphenom]

A coincidental post today about the book "The Glory of Their Times" reminded me of the death yesterday of legendary jazz critic and author Nat Hentoff, whose 1955 book "Hear Me Talkin' to Ya: The Story of Jazz by the Men Who Made It" served as Lawrence Ritter's inspiration for his classic work of the recollections of old ballplayers. Hentoff's book features interviews with jazz musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Paul Whiteman. Ritter, a jazz fan, told me he had read Hentoff's book and that when Ty Cobb died in 1961, it occurred to him that someone should get that generation's baseball players' memories on the record just as Hentoff had done with the early jazz pioneers. As the chairman of NYU's School of Finance and a well-regarded author in that field, Ritter secured a contract for his book and used his school breaks and vacations over the next several years traveling the country to track down ancient ballplayers and record their conversations on his state-of-the-art German reel-to-reel tape deck. "The Glory of Their Times" was published to universal acclaim in 1966 and has been in print ever since, with sales in the hundreds of thousands. A 4 CD, 5-hour audio set edited from the original tapes came out in 1998 and is available at Amazon.