Frank Graham

No damage save two library stamps, pocket and bar code. DJ in Mylar taped to the book.Clean, Small photo section, Pro baseball great struck down by ALS which shares his name. 1942, 5 1/4 By 7 3/4"

An account of the establishment and importance of the nation's largest park describes its attractions and resources

In January of 1903, American League president Ban Johnson, “his pince-nez riding precariously on the bridge of his nose,” raised a glass to toast his young baseball league, which had just received permission to purchase the Baltimore organization and establish a team in New York City. That marked the genesis of the fabulous Yankee franchise (known in 1903 as the Highlanders) as well as the opening chapter of Frank Graham’s The New York Yankees: An Informal History. One of fifteen team histories commissioned by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in the 1940s and 1950s, The New York Yankees traces the most successful team in either league from the beginning through their 1943 World Series victory over the Cardinals, ending with a quick synopsis of the 1944 season. In Yankee (and baseball) history, of course, Babe Ruth stands above all the rest, but he is flanked by such legends as Joe DiMaggio and Lou Gehrig. Wee Willie Keeler is there, too, joined by fellow Hall of Famers Charlie “Red” Ruffing, Herb Pennock, and Bill Dickey. The Hall of Fame lineup also includes Miller Huggins, Lefty Gomez, Ed Barrow, Joe McCarthy, Tony Lazzeri, Waite Hoyt, and Earle Combs. In his foreword, Leonard Koppett writes that Graham’s “New York Sun columns called ‘Overheard in the Dugout’ delighted me as I was growing up; but what I learned later, when I got to work alongside him, was that they were as good and as reliable as court transcripts. He didn’t take a lot of notes. He just absorbed what was being said—and what it meant in the right context—and reproduced it in graceful prose and natural speech. It is this style of narration through dialogue that makes his books come so alive.” Twenty-four black-and-white Yankee photographs enliven Graham’s informal history.

A lively, often irreverent, authorized history of the Audubon Society. Frank Graham, Jr., takes readers through Audubon's first century, from its beginnings in 1886 to the highly visible, politically sophisticated, globlly minded orgainization of the present.

The final chapter of Frank Graham’s dynamic history of the New York Giants is entitled “With One Swipe of His Bat.” For sheer drama and a colossal slice of baseball legend, the core of that chapter cannot be topped—Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ’round the world,” the three-run homer in the 1951 playoff series that determined that the Giants—not the Dodgers—would win the pennant. Graham, of course, starts at the beginning, 1883, the year the Giants were born. With characteristic panache, Graham tells us how it was: “This was New York in the elegant eighties and these were the Giants, fashioned in elegance, playing on the Polo Grounds. . . . It was the New York of the brownstone house and the gaslit streets, of the top hat and the hansom cab, of oysters and champagne and perfecto cigars, of [actress] Ada Rehan and Oscar Wilde and the young John L. Sullivan. It also was the New York of the Tenderloin and the Bowery.” One of fifteen team histories commissioned by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in the 1940s and 1950s, The New York Giants was first published in 1952. Some of the most colorful characters in the game pass through these pages as well as some of baseball’s brightest legends, many of whom appear in the book’s twenty-three photographs. Hall of Famers Christy Mathewson, Mel Ott, Frankie Frisch, Carl Hubbell, and Bill Terry star among the headliners in the illustrious history of the Giants. Other Hall of Famers include John McGraw, “Beauty” Dave Bancroft, “Iron Man” Joe McGinnity, Leo Durocher, Buck Ewing, Amos Rusie, John Montgomery Ward, and Ross Youngs. In his foreword, Ray Robinson gives his impression of Frank Graham: “I had been reading Graham’s warm ‘conversation pieces’ for some years, first in the New York Sun, then in the Journal-American, but I had no idea how kind and modest he was. The columnist Red Smith, Graham’s good friend, once referred to him as ‘a digger for truth, a reporter of facts . . . with an incredibly accurate ear and an implausibly retentive memory.’ To Smith, Graham was the finest sports columnist of his time.”

Originally published in 1981 and long out of print, this dual autobiography covers five unforgettable decades of the New York sporting life from 1915 to 1965. Told initially from the point of view of Frank Graham, premier sportswriter for The New York Sun, A Farewell to Heroes also includes the chronicles of Frank, Jr., who picks up the narrative as he becomes a sports journalist in his own right. Frank Graham, Sr., was a self-taught writer known for his uncanny ability to capture the high drama of a game-winning play or the color of a fight mob’s conversation in spare, straightforward prose. As a reporter, he covered the rough-and-tumble Giants of John McGraw’s day and continued through boxing’s greatest era, spanning the reigns of Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis.As the younger Frank tells more of the story, we watch Lou Gehrig take Babe Ruth’s place as the Yankees’ star and then trace his glorious career to its tragic conclusion. We see firsthand the legendary Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson and boxing’s brief but golden age on television in the 1950s. Aided by sixteen photographs and preserving the most masterful of his father’s writing while adding to it the best of his own, Frank Graham, Jr., has given the sports fan A Farewell to Heroes, perhaps the ultimate sports reminiscence of a time when the romance of sport gave life a golden hue, when heroes still roamed the earth. “In what he calls this ‘kind of dual autobiography,’ he is his father’s son, having learned to look and listen as his father did and still go his own way,” says W. C. Heinz, longtime sportswriter for The New York Sun, in his new foreword to this paperback edition.

First published in 1945 as part of the acclaimed Putnam series of team histories, Frank Graham’s colorful chronicle presents the Brooklyn Dodgers in “all their glory and all their daffiness” from the team’s beginnings as the Atlantics in 1883 through 1943, with a short summary of the 1944 season. In his foreword, Hall of Fame sports writer Jack Lang writes that “in an era that produced for New York sports fans such outstanding sportswriters as Grantland Rice, Sid Mercer, Bill Slocum, Bob Considine, and Tommy Holmes, one of the very best was Frank Graham, whose columns appeared in the New York Sun and later the Journal-American.” Graham covers every aspect of the Dodgers—games, fans, players, managers, executives. And these Dodgers produced their share of legends: Wee Willie Keeler, Mickey Owen, Dazzy Vance, Babe Herman, Charles H. Ebbets, Wilbert Robinson, Charles Byrne, Casey Stengel, Leo Durocher, Zack Wheat, Burleigh Grimes, Steve McKeever, Ed McKeever, Larry MacPhail, Max Carey, Dixie Walker, Branch Rickey, Dolph Camilli, Hugh Casey, Nap Rucker, Van Lingle Mungo, and the voice of the Dodgers, Red Barber. Dealing with the various executives, Graham notes that in the beginning, Charles Ebbets did everything from selling tickets and scorecards to helping out in the front office. In the 1930s, the inept Dodgers provoked laughter until Larry MacPhail moved from Cincinnati to Brooklyn in 1938; one year later, the Dodgers were contenders. When MacPhail departed for the Army after the 1942 season, Branch Rickey succeeded him. Rickey’s scouts signed every youngster who could hit, run, or throw, even though many of them were headed for the war. “When they came back in 1946,” Lang explains, “Rickey had cornered the market on the nation’s young talent—more than six hundred ballplayers.” This history of the Brooklyn Dodgers contains eighteen black-and-white illustrations.

Fiction

The Nation's River

Accounts of ten major league pitching performances that resulted in no-hit games of Walter Johnson, Paul Dean, Johnny Vander Meer, Bob Feller, Allie Reynolds, Alva (Bobo) Holloman, Sal Maglie, Don Larsen, Bill Monbouquette, and Sandy Koufax.