Roger Kahn's books show a true love of baseball

It was April 1983, and the early spring weather was raw.

Baseball season had started, and the Class A Gastonia (NC) Expos had a doubleheader scheduled with the Columbia Mets. I was covering the Expos for the paper now known as the Gaston Gazette, and had in fact been honored as South Atlantic League sportswriter of the year the previous season.

I was the proverbial big fish in a small pond when it came to baseball writing, but on this day I was going meet the biggest fish in the ocean. Roger Kahn, the man who wrote "The Boys of Summer," was coming to town with the Mets.

Roger Kahn

Kahn was a minority owner of the Columbia Mets, and he was planning to spend the summer with the team writing a book about minor league baseball.

It didn't work out that way. The owner of the franchise was a minor-league George Steinbrenner, and he got angry every time people talked about Kahn.

After a month or so of that, Kahn gave up on Columbia and shifted his attention to the Utica Blue Sox of the short-season New York-Penn League for the book that turned out to be "Good Enough to Dream."


But on this night in early April, I was going to interview Kahn. He hadn't really dressed for the weather. His only jacket was one of those Mets warmup jackets, and the wind was going right through him.

He asked me if there was anyplace that was warm, and barring that, if he could get something to drink that would warm him up.

Bad news.

Gaston County was dry as a bone.

Since Kahn didn't seem all that interested in the on-field action, I told him I had the better part of a fifth of vodka at home. His eyes lit up.

Really.

So we drove to my townhouse, went into the kitchen and sat down. I found a clean glass and put it in front of with the vodka. He didn't want any ice cubes or mixers. He just poured himself a glass and drank it.

We talked for two hours, stopping only when he drank the last of my vodka. I really can't remember any of the specifics, and I have no saved clippings from my first five years in the newspaper business.

He was the middle one of three legends I met and interviewed while working in the Carolinas -- Roger Maris in 1982, Kahn in 1983 and Henry Aaron in 1984. All I remember about the stories I wrote was how disappointed I was with the results and how I wished I could have done them 5-10 years later.

Kahn gave me his home phone number in upstate New York if I had any questions. I never used it and I no longer have it.

He lived a long life and did a lot of good work. I always wondered if he was disappointed that his first book turned out to be his best book.

Just today I learned that Kahn died Friday at age 92.

It has been a long time since we met. I'm 15 years older now that he was in 1983. There are a lot of people I met and forgot in my years in newspapers.

Roger Kahn isn't one of them.

I remember him. He's one of the many reasons baseball means so much to me.