He Wrote Until The Day Before He Died

For seventy-four years Shirley Povich’s sports columns appeared in the prestigious Washington Post, a newspaper where he started working at when he was only 19 years old in 1924.

His final column appeared on a Friday. He’d died of a heart attack the night before at the age of 92. He had written over 15,000 columns and pieces for the paper. A small man, thin and neat, he scratched 5 feet 8 but just barely and he was a household name if you’re household cared anything about sports—or even if they didn’t.

Shirley was born in Bar Harbor to Orthodox Jewish immigrants who came from Lithuania in the late 1800s. His dad owned a local furniture store here, which helped him and his wife support ten children.

Shirley grew up surrounded by wealthy summer visitors and he caddied at the country club. Edward B. McLean, the publisher of the Washington Post told Shirley to move to Washington, D.C. so that he could be a copy boy at the paper and McLean’s caddie on his own golf course. The combined income was $32 a week. He earned more as a caddie.

Despite not owning a pair of long pants or being on a train, he went. The first man he caddied for at the course was President Warren G. Harding, one of McLean’s friends.

He started off on the police beat, moved on to sports, studied law at Georgetown and eventually got his own bylines. During World War II breaking two vertebrae in Japan. He was shipped back to a Pearl Harbor hospital. According to his New York Times obituary written by Ira Berkow, “Many who went ahead on the ship, including the legendary war correspondent Ernie Pyle, were killed.

Povich wrote in his autobiography, “I was leading a charmed life for reasons unknown to anyone before or since.”

That charm occurred despite his name, which was common at the time as a boy’s name in Maine. He was listed in “Who’s Who in American Women.” In the listing it said he was married to his wife Ethyl who he had met on a blind date in 1930.

“The next year, they dropped me , like they used to in the New York Social Register if you had married a stripper—the snobs,” The Times quotes him as saying.

According to the Jewish Virtual Library, “In 1926, at age 20, Povich was named Post sports editor, the youngest sports editor of a metropolitan daily in the nation. His column, “This Morning With Shirley Povich,” ran from August 1926 until 1974, interrupted only by a stint as a war correspondent in the South Pacific during World War II. In 1933, Povich gave up his position as sports editor to concentrate on his column, logging more than 15,000 columns during his career, including some 50 a year after his “retirement” in 1973. Povich, who covered 60 World Series and 20 Super Bowls, was an eyewitness to most of the significant sporting events of the 20^th century: the 1927 Dempsey-Tunney “Long Count” fight; Ruth’s “called shot” in the 1932 World Series; and Cal Ripken breaking Lou Gehrig’s consecutive-game streak. Povich wrote with clarity, style, grace, and wit, and some of his writings are considered sports journalism classics. At Lou Gehrig’s retirement speech at Yankee Stadium in 1939 he wrote: “I saw strong men weep this afternoon, expressionless umpires swallow hard, and emotion pump the hearts and glaze the eyes of 61,000 baseball fans in Yankee Stadium. Yes, and hard-boiled news photographers clicked their shutters with fingers that trembled a bit.”

“Povich was an early voice for the integration of sports, writing a column advocating the integration of Major League Baseball in 1939, eight years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. When he finally signed, Povich wrote: “Four hundred and fifty-five years after Columbus eagerly discovered America, major league baseball reluctantly discovered the American Negro…” He regularly criticized then-Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall for refusing to hire any black players. On one occasion, Povich wrote: “Jim Brown, born ineligible to play for the Redskins, integrated their end zone three times yesterday.”

The Povich family have long been associated with Mount Desert Island and Hancock County, Maine. Michael was the district attorney. Eddie was a state legislator and owned a small conveince store in the heart of Ellsworth. Their famous cousin, Maury, would come visit with his wife, Connie.