Editor, novelist, biographer and journalist Arnold Hano, who was best known for his book A Day in the Bleachers, in which he recalled "what he saw, heard and felt at the Polo Grounds during a 1954 World Series game in which Willie Mays made 'the Catch,' " died October 24, the New York Times reported. He was 99.
A Giants fan since he was four years old and living a block from the Polo Grounds, he retained his love for the team into adulthood. In 1954, "while working as an editor in book publishing and living with his wife, Bonnie, in mid-Manhattan, he plunked himself down on one of those planks to watch the Giants face the Cleveland Indians in Game 1 of the World Series," the Times wrote, adding that he "had long been intrigued by the aura of a Series opening game. He wanted to experience it and considered writing a magazine article about it, so he took notes in the margins of his game program and of the pages of the New York Times that he had brought along to read while waiting for the game to start."
Hano later expanded his notes into a 10,000-word account and tried to sell it to the New Yorker, but was rejected. He subsequently turned his experiences into A Day in the Bleachers, which was published in 1955 and "would become a classic, hailed as a forerunner of the subjective New Journalism that flowered a decade later," the Times noted.
In the New York Times Book Review, novelist James T. Farrell wrote that Hano provided "vignettes of other bleacher denizens and writes us a dramatic account of the game itself--and, although we know its outcome, our interest is held here as it might in a novel."
And in 1985, legendary baseball writer Roger Kahn observed that "Hano's writing style was informed and unpretentious, and you could feel those splintery old Polo Grounds bleachers beneath you and smell the mustard on the hot dogs, which were usually served up cold."
Hano was managing editor of Bantam Books in the late 1940s, then editor in chief of the paperback line Lion Books before turning to freelance writing full time. He wrote more than 20 books, "including biographies of Mays and other celebrated sports figures as well as novels, and he contributed articles to major national magazines, touching not only on sports but conservation, racial issues and the plight of migrant workers," the Times said.
For all its modern travails, baseball "still remains our greatest game," Hano once wrote. "It is also the simplest. It often comes down to a boy, his baseball glove and a hero."