“Yeah, Wayne, it’s your dad. I wanted to tell you that my friend Richard, the writer, died yesterday. I heard it on the radio, and they said Richard Cramer, and I couldn’t believe it. He was a nice guy. I’m gonna miss him.”
Richard (Ben Cramer) lived on a farm around the corner from my dad in Chestertown, Md., an odd place for someone who won a Pulitzer Prize for Middle East reporting to plant himself. Or maybe not so odd, when you really think about it. Getting the hell away from everything has helped writers write for untold epochs. Chestertown’s as “the hell away” from everything as anyplace.
Dad leased part of Richard’s farm to grow crops that wouldn’t fit on his immaculate little fruit farm and found a neighborly pal. They were both about the same age. Actually, Richard was a year younger, Dad pointedly liked to point out. They both liked baseball a lot and would toss around their memories of the 50s and 60s. His house was loaded with baseball memorabilia and stacks upon stacks of books and papers everywhere. So is Dad’s house. Just in the garage, there are a couple unruly open-topped boxes of bats that he nabbed from equipment managers for the Phils and Orioles in the 80s. Cal Ripken’s rookie spikes. A set of Bob Boone’s shin guards. Pieces of the true cross.
Richard’s love of baseball is more well-documented. He wrote as much about that game as the one he won his Pulitzer for, that being politics. Maybe better, too.
I read his obit in the Times, and one line jumped out at me. It was about his Ted Williams story in Sports Illustrated. I remember reading that one in 1986 as a 15-year-old. It came in a year’s subscription to SI that my grandpa got me for Christmas. Just amazing. Stuck out like a wildfire in a forest — and this was a fine period for SI. It really got me and Gramps talking for the first time. He started telling me about Ted, and about fishing, and about how he could see Ted abusing Mickey Cochrane that way in a fishing boat, and of course how he (meaning Gramps) caught Dizzy Dean’s home run in the 1934 World Series. Funny how a lot of our baseball discussions ended there.
The best kind of writing makes this happen, even if just between the reader and the writer, and Richard Ben Cramer had that down. I think it’s what all us writer wretches really want. One meaningful conversation.
Not a shock that Dad and Richard would talk baseball. But they talked life, too. They had plenty in common in the end, this world-traveled, revered writer and my thick-bearded, overalled farmer Dad. Both of them got married early and had their marriages fly apart. Both of them ended up getting remarried fairly late in life. Richard had just married his girlfriend of more than five years. Met her right in Chestertown. Dad had to meet his girl in Elkton and drag her to Chestertown.
They would turn over all this life between them while Richard smoked a stogie (“Man, he really loved his cigars,” Dad said. “And he would cough a lot. I wanted to tell him to cut back on the stogies, but I never did.”). All the things we love kill us. Lung cancer. Dad said he didn’t even know Richard was sick.
I’m sad today that I never took the chance to meet him, didn’t even realize he WAS him, or got to let him know what he made happen between a very old man and a very young one across an impossibly long Florida dining room table. Makes me doubly sad that Dad told me more than a few times about his sports writer friend on the other farm who said he’d really like to meet me and read my book. Heh. Read MY book.
But I think I’m more sad that Dad lost his farm buddy.
wayne lockwood 