It's Friday, June 3, 2022, the day of the week when I pass along a quotation intended to be uplifting or enlightening. Today, I didn't need to look for inspiration any further than my own family. It came from my father, Lou Cannon, who turns 89 years old today, and it concerns baseball, which will not surprise loyal readers of this morning missive.
On June 3, 1933, in New York City, Irene and Jack Cannon welcomed the first of their two sons into the world. They named him Louis, and they soon moved back West, where Jack was born and raised. Lou and his brother Joel Robert Cannon -- Bob to his family -- grew up in Nevada, mostly in the towns of Fallon and Reno.
Lou went to the University of Nevada, transferred to San Francisco State, got married, was drafted into the U.S. Army, had four kids, and pursued his dream of becoming a reporter. Along the way, he taught his three sons and a daughter, all born in California, to love newspapers and baseball.
San Francisco was an easy place to appreciate the national pastime, no small thanks to centerfielder Willie Mays, who plied his trade there. The quality of journalism in the Bay Area wasn't always on a par with the play of the Giants, but 45 years before Lou Cannon was born, the San Francisco Examiner published a poem that did both endeavors -- newspapering and baseball -- proud.
June 3, 1888, was a Sunday. Tucked inside the pages of that morning's San Francisco Examiner -- between a long-forgotten unsigned editorial and a column by the brilliant Ambrose Bierce -- was an unsigned poem, "Casey at the Bat."
Its author, who earned his customary fee of five dollars, turned out to be Ernest L. Thayer, a former editor of the Harvard Lampoon. In college, Thayer had known William Randolph Hearst, whose family owned the Examiner. Casey was a fictional character, although he may have been inspired by Thayer's best friend, Harvard's resident slugger and baseball team captain.
That man's name was Samuel Ellsworth Winslow, and he would become mayor of his hometown of Worcester, Mass., and a Republican congressman. He had such imposing physical presence that, to this day, "the mighty Casey" is an easy image to conjure from Winslow's photograph.
Whatever Thayer's original motivations, the poem is meant to be read aloud, and it owes its enduring popularity to a 19th century stage actor and Broadway musical star named DeWolf Hopper, who first recited it on Aug. 14, 1888.
That day was Ernest Thayer's 25th birthday. It was also a day that DeWolf Hopper's beloved New York Giants lost to Cap Anson's White Stockings at the Polo Grounds, 4-2 -- the same score, coincidentally, by which Casey's "Mudville Nine" goes down to defeat.
Hopper, then starring in a comic operetta called "Prince Methusalem," wanted to honor the presence of the ballplayers in the audience when a friend, recently returned from San Francisco, pulled out a clipping of a baseball poem: Why not memorize this and recite it on stage?
The poem was "Casey."
And so, between acts, Hopper did exactly that. The crowd, including the ballplayers, assumes Casey will wallop the third strike he sees. Of course, that's what they expect. But the unanticipated ending is the enduring appeal of Thayer's poem. The mighty Casey has struck out.
In his own memoir, "Once a Clown, Always a Clown," Hopper recalls looking out in the audience and seeing the Giants' catcher Buck Ewing and the other players looking at him expectantly as he dropped his rich voice from B flat to below low C in preparation for the punch line.
"Buck Ewing's gallant mustachios give a single nervous twitch," he wrote. "And as the house, after a moment of startled silence, grasped the anticlimactic dénouement, it shouted its glee."
Hooper estimated that he recited that poem 10,000 times in his career. And it's been read by millions more Americans over the ensuing years as well.
James Earl Jones, the modern actor whose voice most resembles Hooper's, recorded a memorable rendition in 1996. Before he died, five years ago this week, the great Frank Deford took his turn at bat in a recorded a version that NPR released to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the poem.
NPR is pretty high-brow, as journalism goes, but it will come as no surprise that 20th century poets and culture critics would roll their eyes at the mere mention of "Casey." Well, not all of them. On this date in 2016, I read a fascinating piece in VICE Sports in which author Michael Weinreb examined the poem's literary merits.
"I think ‘Casey at the Bat' is a damned good poem," California poet laureate Dana Gioia told Weinreb. "It's not Yeats' ‘Sailing to Byzantium,' but it doesn't have to be. It's the finest poem ever written about baseball. It's at the center of the baseball canon. It's very easy for a literary person to condescend to ‘Casey at the Bat,' but no poem remains universally popular for more than 100 years unless it has considerable merit."
The rise of the modernist movement, however, coupled with elites' newfound cultural snobbery meant that in the 20th century, rhyming poems like "Casey" were mocked precisely because they appealed to a mass audience. In Dana Gioia's telling, this trend was to America's detriment.
"Poets lost their ability to talk to a nonliterary audience," he said. "It diminished both poetry and the culture." And that's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
