DEENA YELLIN, Staff Writer The Record (Bergen County, NJ) 05-18-2001 THE BOYS OF SUMMER -- CAMPERS, NOW GRANDFATHERS, CELEBRATE 50-YEAR REUNION By DEENA YELLIN, Staff Writer Date: 05-18-2001, Friday Section: NEWS Edition: Two Star B, Also in Two Star P, One Star B...

CHATHAM -- It's the same story as the one told by Ivy League freshmen every fall: the tumble from the upper eschelons of the high school class, as June's valedictorians take their places among September's superstars at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale. Only this...

John Mayer and the Dixie Chicks helped guide Don Henley on a trip through his musical memories that left the singer-songwriter feeling "very strange." They joined Henley's Eagles bandmate Timothy B. Schmit, Sam Moore, Keb Mo, Trisha Yearwood, Michael McDonald, Shawn Colvin and Seal in...

Clem Labine, a relief pitcher who threw two of baseball's most significant shutouts in his role as a part-time starter and pitched for two Dodgers World Series championship teams in the 1950s, died Friday. He was 80.Labine had been in a coma at Indian River...

Any baseball book that begins with a quotation from Dylan Thomas can't be all good. But then, ["The Boys of Summer"] is about a team so extraordinary that Marianne Moore wrote poems to it, so perhaps Roger Kahn's pretentiousness is not entirely out of place. The "boys of summer" were named [Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, Andy Pafko, Billy Cox and Carl "Skoonj" Furillo]. They were the starting lineup of the best...

The world of which Roger Kahn writes in The Boys of Summer ended less than a quarter-century ago, and its continuity, statistically and intellectually apparent, is an illusion of symbolic logic in which baseball seems to be the same old game because the measurements of the diamond have not changed. In truth, the Brooklyn Dodger team which was Kahn's to cover for the Herald Tribune was the last leap of the flame of romance in baseball, as the Tribune was the last fiercely individualist newspaper. Meas...

Judged on its own nostalgic terms, The Boys of Summer is a glorious recollection, recalling for us the spurious perfection of Brooklyn in the 1940s and early 1950s, its Brooklyn Eagle, which screamed joyously in a six-column spread in 1941, "WE WIN!" after the team won its first pennant in twenty-one years. Brown v. Topeka was far away in some state that couldn't even field a major league team; Joe McCarthy's extravaganzas had little impact on our schoolboy parochialism. What had...