"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
It was 1945, and rookie pitcher Dave "Boo" Ferriss was mowing down American League hitters for the otherwise hapless Boston Red Sox, when the writer's father, "quite possibly the most rabid Red Sox fan on earth," fastened on an unlikely idea:
That summer he got the wildly implausible notion that if he invited Ferriss to dinner, Ferriss would come. The hook: My dad's birthday was approaching, and he wanted, more than anything else in the world, to celebrate it with the Mississippi right-hander. To my grandparents' slack-jawed amazement, Ferriss, who was getting so much fan mail that the Red Sox had assigned someone to help him manage it, said yes. He arranged tickets for a day game for my father and grandmother. After the game, the three of them went out to dinner at the Red Coach Grill in Boston. When my grandmother commented on his kindness, Ferriss replied, in an accent thicker than buttermilk pie: "It don't cost nothin' to be nice, ma'am."
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