I’d been trying to capsulize why I will miss the baseball writings of the late Roger Angell when my friend Joe Connor nailed it: “Because you didn’t need an advanced degree in mathematics to read him.” Angell, who died May 20 at the admirable age of 101, had the day…

You could say Ronnie Hawkins was the man who wasn’t Elvis Presley. Okay, that phrase technically describes every living male on the planet. But few of the rest of us racked up as many potential parallels to Elvis as his fellow musician Hawkins, who died Saturday at the age of…

Saying the world of local radio has lost one of its great characters and champions may sound, these days, like saying the town just lost its last blacksmith. More of historical curiosity than contemporary relevance. But that’s exactly what should be said about William O’Shaughnessy, who owned Westchester radio stations…

Our friends at Downton Abbey won’t leave, and the film Downton Abbey: A New Era, which opened Friday, reminds us why we don’t want them to. At a time when television and movies are awash in psychotic villains and tortured antiheroes, it’s hard to overstate the pleasure of spending two…

TULSA — The Bob Dylan Center, which opened here last week, reminds us how deeply we should appreciate the best American songwriter of the last 60 years. It also reminds us that if we ever start assuming we really know the guy behind all that songwriting, well, we’ll always be…

A lamentably departed colleague of mine from the New York Daily News, Bill Bell, had a banjo joke. This guy owns a banjo and he’s sick of it. He doesn’t want it any more. He just wants to get rid of it. He tries to give it to schools, to…

Two pieces of terrible news just reminded me how I used to really like professional hockey. Guy Lafleur, who played for the Montreal Canadiens in the 1970s and into the 1980s, died Friday, one week after the death of Mike Bossy, who played a couple of years later for the…

I’d love to see Dion DiMucci’s story on Broadway. It’s a good story. It’s as good as his music. Growing up as maybe the only kid in the Bronx who wanted to be Hank Williams; bursting into early rock ’n’ roll stardom with the Belmonts through a combination of good…

Anyone who cares about early rock ’n’ roll will and should remember Art Rupe as the music man who gave us Little Richard. What needs equal or more remembering about Art Rupe, who died Friday at the age of 104, is that he also gave us a small army of…