Sports and American Culture
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I Hid It under the Sheets captures a bygone era - the late 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s - through the reminiscences of award-winning ""New York Times"" reporter Gerald Eskenazi. This first-person recollection shows radio's broad impact on his generation and explains how and why it became such a major factor in shaping America and Americans. For Eskenazi and his peers, radio had virtually no competition from other forms of media, aside from newspapers. Because of this, radio was able to create a common American culture, something that is not found in today's multifaceted world. Eskenazi shows how the popular programs of the times - from the ""Lone Ranger"" to ""The Fat Man"" to ""The Answer Man"" - helped create a culture of values (telling the truth, being courteous, being courageous, and being a moral person). Eskenazi's personal anecdotes about each program are interspersed with interviews of personalities ranging from Tom Brokaw to Colin Powell about their own experiences with radio. Brokaw, who grew up in South Dakota, found radio brought him closer to the world beyond him. Would he have become the newsman he is today without the radio to pique his imagination? Eskenazi also shows how important radio was to immigrants seeking to become a part of the American experience. Through radio, even he, a Jewish kid from the Bronx, could grow up feeling connected to the dominant medium of the times. For those who yearn to remember a time gone by, to laugh at childhood memories, or merely to learn about life during a simpler time, this book is for you.
In 1959, Gerald Eskenazi dropped out of City College, not for the first time, and made his way to the New York Times. That day the paper had two openings - one in news and one in sports. Eskenazi was offered either for thirty-eight dollars a week. He chose sports based on his image of the sports department as a cozier place than the news department. Forty-one years and more than eighty-four hundred stories later, New Yorkers know he made the right decision. When Eskenazi started reporting, sports journalism had a different look than it does today. There was a camaraderie between the reporters and the players due in part to the reporter's deference to these famous figures. Unlike today, journalists stayed out of the locker rooms, and didn't ask questions about the players' homelives, or their feelings about matters other than the sports that they played. In The Changing Face of Sports in America, Eskenazi details how much sports and America have changed since then. His anecdotes regarding famous and infamous sports figures from baseball great Joe DiMaggio to boxer Mike Tyson illustrate the transformation that American culture and journalism have undergone in the past fifty years. E