The Boys of Summer: Roger Kahn and Me

It was the next to last day of the National Education Association Representative Assembly, July 2009. It would be my last RA.

There would be a moment reserved for me to get to the podium and say good-bye. I knew it would be emotional.

Some months beforehand, one of the other Executive Committee members wondered out loud, in front of others, whether I would cry at the end. I thought that to be crass, but behind the scenes, some of them could get that way. In a backhanded way, it was a challenge: Can you take it? Can you handle your final moments?

The thing is, I wondered myself. But I had the antidote: A recognition that life went on. (After all, it did and it has.) It would help me be brave. I had the phrase that told it. It had jumped into my head with superb timing.

It was from the book The Boys of Summer, by Roger Kahn, who died yesterday at 92. It has been heralded as the greatest sports book ever; one wonders, but it has to be in the handful mentioned in any conversation to that regard. I had read it long before.

It was during the last week of my college career. I had bought it used in Conkey's Bookstore in downtown Appleton, WI. The cover was already torn and there was an odd red ink marking in the top page border. I read it in waiting the few days for the graduation ceremony.

It was poignant and extremely moving. It was about many things concerning sports, but even more concerning life: How the famous deal with the end of fame and go on to other lives. It was a page-turner. Great players for the then-Brooklyn Dodgers and not-so-great players told of their transitions: people like Carl Erskine, Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Gil Hodges, and the magnificent Jackie Robinson, whose journey just to get to a major league baseball field was revealed in expository writing that rivals Martin Luther King's in its power.

Whatever they had achieved, notoriety waned as soon as they walked away from Ebbets Field or Dodger Stadium for the last time. Kahn underlined the lesson that I too, learned: fame is fleeting. People tend to forget you as soon as you leave the spotlight. The challenge of being within it is matched, if not surpassed, by that of knowing that it will end.

Kahn wrote, too, of his own growing up and the meaning of baseball, and baseball writing, in his life. It was done with great sensitivity and deep respect. The passage of time and the release of fame has been recorded with little greater depth than in The Boys of Summer.

I thought it quite appropriate to quote from it, even though I didn't have it with me; not only because I had achieved some marginal amount of fame as a sports columnist in Cedarburg, WI, but because the timing couldn't have been better.

Here I was at the end of the time in which I had accomplished what would be my highest achievement: representing 3.2 million members here, there and everywhere; participating in vital discussions dealing with American public education; speaking to groups internally and externally, sometimes to great success. Never would I have such influence on so many people again, even for a few moments.

The phrase settled well as I typed it: And then it was time to start uphill toward another morning and another home. It was the text's final words. It beckoned me like a friend. It was exactly the way I felt.

It would be uphill indeed. There would be several more homes, how many I couldn't tell, to fit between my forced retirement from teaching and getting a leg up on Social Security--eight years in all. But after a metaphorical comment about how the NEA was now in a new 'season,' so to speak, I could be sufficiently buttressed in telling the RA how I felt.

So posthumously, I want to thank Roger Kahn for helping me raise myself through a tough moment. In a conversation with a member from Oregon several months later, he was kind enough to tell me that in twenty years, he hadn't heard a better farewell speech.

In no small way, reading Kahn's book at the conclusion of my college education helped propel me toward more sports writing--I had been the sports editor of the campus newspaper, the Lawrentian--and find value in that and in whatever I could lend to it, even while I taught high school full-time. The pluck I would build through the support and defense of my writings would hold me in good stead when it came to union politics and putting myself out there to crowds ever larger. It would get me used to absorbing Rudyard Kipling's refrain that success and failure are similar imposters and help me accept both of them in stride.

One more phrase from The Boys of Summer hit me in an opportune moment. I had seen it before because I'm getting daily missives from people who study and follow the writings of the Stoics. Their motto is Memento mori: Remember that you will die. Roger Kahn had written it reflecting the memory of his father, who helped him learn baseball.

I thought of that almost immediately after awakening from my heart surgery, where the doctor had repaired three major arteries, one of which he later said was 99% plugged; I had been literally at death's door. Remembering that one will die can be frustrating and depressing, sure. But as these modern Stoics remind us, it can also propel one to get everything out of life, squeeze every last drop, that one can. Then when the moment comes, one can move uphill to another morning and another home with as much satisfaction as one can muster.

Be well. Be careful. Memento mori. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark