Letters

Raney Frick lives in Kalispell, Montana, and after hearing last week’s program, she wrote as follows:

“I am not really a sports fan and find myself listening to your program mainly because it just comes on next.”

Not, perhaps, an entirely auspicious beginning, but Ms. Frick goes one to say, “I have to admit I loved the program this morning. Not so much the stuff about football and the women’s basketball, but I loved the Titanic Thompson story. Fantastic job.”

Regarding the show from the morning of November 6, Jane Lowell, who hears Only A Game on KWMU in St. Louis, was not so laudatory. “I waited forty minutes to hear about the Giants’ victory. Your acknowledgement of it lasted less than ten seconds. You spent more time on the Rangers and the Cowboys. Is this because they are a west coast team or do you just hate the Giants?”

I don’t know how old you are, Ms. Lowell, but my guess is that I was rooting for the Giants of Willie Mays, Whitey Lockman, Don Mueller, Mike McCormack and Alvin Dark…not to mention the Giants of Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Orlando Cepeda, and Juan Marichal before you were born. I don’t follow the current Giants as closely as I did those heroes of yore, but I certainly don’t hate them. By November 6, the Giants – and you - had had five nights to celebrate their triumph. We gave their achievement the additional attention we thought appropriate.

During that November 6 show, in connection with silly speculation that Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore might be implicated in a potential recruiting scandal involving Iowa football, Charlie Pierce and I wondered together why else Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore might have been in the middle of the country. Larry Smith, who hears the program on WFCR in Amherst, Massachusetts, wrote to let us know that Mr. Kutcher was born in Iowa. As the Mickey Rooney character in “Requiem For A Heavyweight”, said habitually “That’s good to know.”