Their words endure

He was a shy, thoughtful man whose ambition was to be a successful writer.  On his graduation from Harvard, his friend and classmate, William Randolph Hearst, hired him as a humor columnist and cartoonist for The San Francisco Examiner.

He lasted a year and small change before returning to his native Massachusetts, conceding sadly that as a writer he “had nothing to say.” This year his last piece, published in the June 5, 1888, Examiner, celebrates its 120th birthday. It probably stands alone as the most popular and durable creation in all sports literature.

Historians have speculated that the work could have faded into obscurity had an unsigned copy not caught the eye of comic actor DeWolf Hopper, a leading light of vaudeville and the New York stage, and a devoted sports buff. Hopper, noted for his resonant bass voice, debuted the material Aug. 14, l888, and it won instant popularity.

More than four decades later, Hopper estimated that he performed the work ”over 10,000 times” mostly before live audiences, but also on radio and in films.

Years after its debut, the one-time Examiner journalist, his authorship then firmly established, finally saw Hopper perform the classic.

True to form, he declined both royalties and a writer’s credit and gave the artist full rights to use the material as he chose. The failed writer, who once lamented he had “nothing to say,” was Ernest Lawrence Thayer whose “Casey at the Bat” has delighted baseball fans and countless others for more than six generations.

A contemporary of DeWolf Hopper along the Great White Way was a singer-dancer-songwriter as gregarious and social as Ernest Thayer was quiet and retiring.

A Tin Pan Alley habitué, he wrote lyrics to dozens of songs, many of which he performed on vaudeville stages.  In 1908 he married Nora Bayes, a celebrated beauty and chanteuse with whom he wrote “Shine on Harvest Moon” which he and Bayes introduced in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1908. 

The song enjoyed huge success both then and later when it was revived in l944 for the Hollywood musical of the same name.  Another 1908 melody, however, won him even wider recognition and today, a century later, remains a centerpiece at sports venues around the country.  Those who track such things claim that, except for “Happy Birthday” and our national anthem, it is the most widely played song in the nation.

Since its first public performance by the composer and Bayes, it has served as a duet prop for Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra in an MGM musical, the subject for a jazz treatment by Andre Previn and an unlikely selection by the Japanese punk band Nicotine.

If and when you take in a big league baseball contest, chances are close to 100 percent you’ll be invited to join in the chorus of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh-inning stretch.  Incidentally, lyricist Jack Norworth, attended his first major league game in 1940, 32 years after he penned  baseball’s anthem.

-- Harry O. Bain is a Porterville resident and a septuagenarian contributor to The Recorder.