“Hell, I Could Have Written a Story Every Day on the Babe”
Sportswriter Richards Vidmer was in many ways more interesting than the subjects he covered.
The son of a brigadier general, Vidmer served as a pilot in World War I (nearly losing his leg in a stateside aerial collision), and on General Eisenhower’s staff in World War II, where one of his duties as an intelligence officer was to chaperone (and report on) Eleanor Roosevelt for a full month.
“I thought it was going to be one hell of an assignment,” said Vidmer. “But to put it briefly, Mrs. Roosevelt charmed me. I thought she was delightful.” (It wasn’t all cushy security details for Vidmer in WWII; he was once shot in the hand by a Nazi sniper.)
Between wars, he was a prolific beat writer covering the Yankees for The New York Times, and later a columnist and reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. An accomplished athlete himself — he played football at George Washington University, and played minor-league baseball — Vidmer was friendlier with the athletes he covered than with his colleagues in the press box.
The Yankees, among others, appreciated his discretion. “Hell, I could have written a story every day on the Babe,” he recalled 50 years after the fact. “But I never wrote about his personal life, not if it would hurt him. Babe couldn’t say no to certain things. Hot dogs was the least of ’em. There were other things that were worse. Hell, sometimes I thought it was one long line.”
The roguish Vidmer was no slouch in that department himself, and served as the inspiration for Young Man of Manhattan, a best-selling romantic novel about a “playboy sportswriter” (assuredly the only time those two words have been paired).
After the war, Vidmer found it impossible to return to sports writing (“Sports was no longer glamorous to me, not in comparison to what had gone on over there”). He became a European correspondent for the Herald Tribune, married the daughter of a Borneo Rajah (the second of three marriages for Vidmer), and for a time pursued the easy life as an ersatz golf pro in Barbados.
Vidmer passed away in 1978, at the age of 79, but not before he offered a delightful, extended reminiscence in Jerome Holtzman’s oral history of the golden age of sports writing, “No Cheering from the Press Box.”
“The thing that saved my life in the newspaper business was that I never had any desire to have a drink until five o’clock, until after my work was done,” said Vidmer. “Then, I could catch up with anybody.”
Even, apparently, the Babe.
Jeremy Lehrman is the author of Baseball’s Most Baffling MVP Ballots. For more baseball, click here.
