Lest we forget: Harvey Frommer

It’s with sadness that I report the passing of Harvey Frommer, the very definition of “a gentleman and a scholar,” who passed away August 1 at the age of 83.

In a way, Harvey was responsible for the Bookshelf.

It was almost 30 years ago when my first by-lined piece appeared in print: a book review of Shoeless Joe and Ragtime Baseball for the Elysian Fields Quarterly (you can read that one here). That got my foot in the door and gave me the confidence to pitch reviews and articles to baseball and more general publications. That ultimately led to creating this blog (not to mention the opportunity to publish my own books).

I regret having never had the opportunity to meet Harvey in person, although I did have the pleasure of interviewing him a number of times when I was with the New Jersey Jewish News. He was quite proud of his religious heritage — he and his wife, Myrna, co-authored Growing Up Jewish in America: An Oral History and It Happened in the Catskills: An Oral History in the Words of Busboys, Bellhops, Guests, Proprietors, Comedians, Agents, and Others Who Lived It — and served as one of my go-to guys for comments about the intersection of Jews and sports; sadly, none of those pieces are still available on the publication’s revamped website.

I asked his son, Frederic — also an author — for permission to re-post the announcement on Facebook. With a few edits, here you have it…

One of my earliest and fondest memories of him was putting my sister Jennifer and me into a duffel bag and sneaking us into the hospital to see my newborn brother Ian – back then the hospital didn’t allow kids to visit. My dad was never one to follow rules, having grown up tough and battle-tested in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the 1930s and 40s, back when it was a very rough neighborhood.

While working full-time as a high school teacher in New York City, he earned his Ph.D., focusing his mid-1970s dissertation on the intersection of sports and television, which he used to launch an amazingly prolific career writing more than 50 books, including the autobiographies of Nolan Ryan, Tony Dorsett and Red Holzman.

About 25 years ago, this quintessential New Yorker moved up to the woods of New Hampshire, to co-teach oral history with my mom, Myrna Katz Frommer, at Dartmouth College. He loved finally having land and seeing the deer, turkeys, and occasional bears on his property, and scooting around on his Mule ATV like a character out of “Green Acres.” And he loved the many students he had over the years.

Dad was a passionate sports fan, especially of the St. Louis Cardinals, a team he started rooting for in the 1940s, because, as he put it, he didn’t want to root for the NYC teams all his friends did. When Ian and I were boys, he would smash ground balls at us in our tiny backyard in Queens to hone our reflexes. Later, I had the pleasure of collaborating with him on a few baseball books. He was always looking for the next challenge, and even in his final months, started thinking about writing a double-biography of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, before his illness made that impossible. He was a one-of-a-kind personality and we miss him already.

Here’s the obituary from the AP, as well as others from the Washington Post and Newsday.

May his memory be a blessing.