‘Did You Write Mine?’

Marty Noble, himself now dead, writing about an encounter in Cooperstown with Whitey Ford back in 2010:

Because I no longer covered the Mets, as I had done for decades, he lost track of me. So when our paths crossed at the Otesaga, the hotel headquarters for Hall of Fame weekend, he asked what had become of me.

“I can’t find you on the box [the computer] anymore,” he said.

“Well, I have different assignments now,” I said. “Columns and features and I do a lot of obituaries of baseball people.”

“Jeez, how many guys die?” he said.

I explained that parts of obituaries are written well before deaths occur so that stories can be posted quickly when needed. “Newspapers have many obits done for famous people,” I said. “The [New York] Times updates the president’s almost every day.”

After a moment’s thought, Whitey looked at me quizzically and asked, “So, did you write mine?”

I said, “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I did.”

“How’d it turn out?” he asked.

★ Saturday, 10 October 2020