Remembering Roger Angell, and Fishing with Karen Chee

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 31 May 2022

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Roger Angell, who died last week, at the age of 101, was inducted in 2014 into the Baseball Hall of Fame in recognition of his extraordinary accomplishment as a baseball writer. But in a career at The New Yorker that goes back to the Second World War, he wrote on practically every subject under the sun; he also served as fiction editor, taking the post once held by his mother, Katharine White. Angell “did as much to distinguish The New Yorker as anyone in the magazine’s nearly century-long history,” David Remnick wrote in a remembrance last week. “His prose and his editorial judgment left an imprint that’s hard to overstate.” In 2015, Remnick sat down for a long interview with Angell about his career, and particularly his masterful late essays—collected in “This Old Man: All in Pieces”—on aging, loss, and finding new love.

Plus, we join the comedian—a writer for “Late Night with Seth Meyers” and “Pachinko,” and a New Yorker contributor—on her favorite kind of outing: a fishing trip that doesn’t yield any fish.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:08.8	I'm David Remnick and this is The New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:12.2	Last week, Roger Angel, the longtime fiction editor of The New Yorker, and a friend to
0:17.4	generations of staffers at the magazine, died at home at the age of 101.
0:23.8	As a writer, Roger took up the subject of baseball in the early 60s just as the mits were
0:28.0	being born, and he was soon recognized as the greatest chronicler in the history of the
0:33.2	game.
0:34.5	One of the best memories I have at this magazine was sitting in the left field stands with
0:38.1	Roger at Shay Stadium as the Yankees beat the mits in the deciding game of the World
0:43.4	Series in 2000, and then entering the Yankees locker room with Roger under huge plumes
0:49.4	of champagne.
0:51.0	Joe Torrey, the Yankees manager who had known Roger since his playing days, greeted Roger
0:56.2	like a brother.
0:57.2	We're going to revisit now an interview I did with Roger in 2015 just a year after he
1:02.9	was inducted into the baseball hall of fame in Cooperstown, New York.
1:08.7	One of the things that always amaze me about your baseball riding is that you have a tone
1:14.9	of a happy man, of someone who's going at this at his leisure, and that all the difficulty
1:23.2	of riding, which we know to be the case, is somehow way out of the frame.
1:29.3	There is this voice of someone just in love with what he's watching.
1:34.0	That's hard to achieve.
1:35.4	Well, it developed over the years.
1:37.9	I mean, I didn't really plan it in advance.
	...

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