Dan Barry with A Safe Haven, but Not Safe From All; T.O. does Dallas, so the Morning News finally makes it to Alexander City, Ala.; Robert L. Smith in Cleveland with Ohio new 'border' town; the LA Times starts a series; and, man, I sure am enjoying Gary Smith's Beyond the Game (Thanks, Sara). Check out this opening graph of Damned Yankee, which doesn't let up for a second:
Everything you will read on the next 23 pages revolves around one photograph. The rest of the old man's past, you must understand, is all but gone. The framed baseball pictures were smashed by his hammer. The scrapbook thick with newspaper clippings was fed to the furnace in the basement of the Sears, Roebuck in Paramus, New Jersey. The trophies, with their figurines of ballplayers and eagles and angel-like women, were placed on a portable table in the middle of a ball field and annihilated, one day, by the old man's rifle arm. Have you ever heard the popping sound an angel makes when it's struck by a fastball?
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