Alaska Employment Law

Three deaths this week of cultural icons, one major, two minor – George Steinbrenner (age 80) had a massive heart attack just a few days after I began reading Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball, a new biography by esteemed sports writer Bill Madden. Harvey Pekar (age 70), author of the American Splendor comics, succumbed to cancer in his sleep. And finally Tuli Kupferberg (age 86), founding member of the Fugs and one of the few true links between the Beat Generation 1950s and the Revolution Generation 1960s, also fell to cancer.

I am really enjoying Madden’s book. I’m sick of all the retrospective adulation for Steinbrenner. The Boston Herald’s Ron Borges offers another view, one to which I subscribe:

My mother always told me not to speak ill of the dead. In George Steinbrenner’s case, we’ll make an exception. It’s funny how a mean, blustery bully passes away and becomes a loveable guy who just wanted to win. The Boss did charitable things for which he never sought credit. He was a hell of a businessman even if he was born on third base. He could be charming, funny and good copy but wait a minute. All this hail fellow stuff forgets a few things.

He’s the only owner in history to be suspended twice for shady dealings. He made illegal campaign contributions to the only president to resign before completing a term (Richard Nixon), and got caught paying a gambler to gather dirt on Dave Winfield, with whom he was engaged in a petty, personal war.

He terrorized and disrespected many of his employees, including but not limited to Billy Martin, whom he fired five times.

He fired Yogi Berra without facing him after promising Berra he’d have the whole season on the job and waited 14 years to apologize, to which Yogi rightly said, “You’re late.”

He dumped all over Dick Howser after the manager took the Yankees to 103 wins, forcing Howser to attend his own execution and listen to the Boss claim he’d decided to go into real estate. When it was over, the Boss was put out because the media didn’t eat the sandwiches he’d laid out. Who had an appetite after that?

My Herald colleague Gerry Callahan insists all the Boss wanted to do was win. True, but he didn’t care if the dice were loaded. How you win should count, although these days it doesn’t.

Here are excerpts from earlier reviews that touched on Pekar and Kupferberg, just so you don’t think I am bandwagon jumper. I’ll miss these guys. George, not so much.

The Beats: A Graphic History (2009) is more or less what it says it is – a book in the style of a graphic novel, featuring long sections on the lives of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs – the Big Three of the Beats – and shorter pieces on minor poets and writers. I was drawn to this book when I saw that much of the text was by Harvey Pekar, whose work (he was the comic book writer for the way cool American Splendor series) I admire. But the text is uninspired, and Ed Piskor’s artwork for the sections on the Big Three is flat, clunky, badly drawn. If anything, The Beats: A Graphic History reminds us how squalid the lives of Beat poets and writers could be, and if squalor is not that much fun to read about, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to remember, given that the Beat writers are too often romanticized. The Beats is more successful when discussing some lesser characters, such as Kenneth Patchen and, especially, Tuli Kupferberg, the founder of the band The Fugs, the name a tip of the hat to Norman Mailer’s censored f-word in his first novel, The Naked and the Dead. Kupferberg’s story is a cultural bridge from the 50s to the 60s, and was fascinating to read. However, on the whole I can’t recommend The Beats. There are much better books on the subject.
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Dean Haspiel has also collaborated with Harvey Pekar, who writes the storyline for the American Splendor comics, which I have not read in a while but recall fondly. Mr. Pekar does not live a splendid life (he’s from Cleveland, and he writes about Cleveland), but he reveals it, with all its numbing familiarities to ours, in the American Splendor books. The way to read Harvey Pekar so to buy American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar, a double anthology with illustrations by, among others, the redoubtable Robert Crumb. Highly recommended. (Mr. Pekar’s tales were also made into a fine film.)