Chez Chesler

The Scooter is dead.

I'm too young to have seen him play, but I grew up with his Money Store ads and his announcing the Yankees on the radio.

I remember one call from a late 1970s summer, a pennant race not unlike the current season, except then the pennant meant more, and I had not yet gone over to the dark side.  Rizzuto's call went something like this: "It's a long fly ball.  It's going... It's going! (pause) Holy Cow!  (pause) What a fantastic one-handed catch!"

Baseball was a lot more fun to listen to when Rizzuto was announcing.

I never got around to sending him a fan letter, and I never got around to sending one to Milton Friedman before his death last fall.  I think that leaves only Yogi Berra still alive of my childhood heroes.

Labels: Heroes, obituary, Rizzuto, Scooter, Yankees

Today would have been my wife's birthday, but after beating Hodgkin's Lymphoma, and a myriad of after-effects of the radiation therapy she received, including breast cancer and pneumonitis, she exercised the "Til Death do us part" clause way too early, late last month.

Labels: cancer, Hodgkins, Lymphoma, Memoriam, obituary