Maury Wills was one of those players who shows up in sports from time to time. He wasn’t quite a Hall of Famer, but he was a very good player and he did something that fascinated millions of fans. The game was baseball and what Wills did was steal bases. …

Almost everyone who ever aspired to become a radio music host at some early point heard this warning: Do not, repeat do not, think that this job means you will ever be playing your own record collection on the air. The way radio has worked, for many years, is that…

Jerry Allison died Monday at the age of 82, and his obituaries all began with the fact he was the drummer in Buddy Holly’s band, the Crickets. That’s fair, because that’s the reason most readers would be interested in him. His story has a couple of other dimensions, though, and…

There’s a subplot in Prime Video’s delightful The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel where — mild spoiler alert — Mrs. Maisel’s father Abe Weissman (Tony Shalhoub) feels stifled as a professor at Columbia and takes a job as a critic for The Village Voice. He starts with a surge of exhilaration, like…

One of the awkward little secrets of early rock ’n’ roll is that many of the musicians who made it great had little or no use for it. That doesn’t mean the singers or the writers, whose passion gave the music its furious energy — the energy that enabled it…

It’s not exactly clear what parts of what songs Lamont Dozier wrote in the Holland-Dozier-Holland team at Motown Records in the mid-1960s. We don’t need to know. We do know that his death Monday, at the age of 81, is a terrible loss to American songwriting. Lamont Dozier and brothers…

Vin Scully was born with a great announcing voice. It was what he did with this voice that made him maybe the best baseball announcer ever. Scully died Tuesday at the age of 94. His death was announced during a close game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San…

When they hold the ultimate all-time draft with every player who ever played in the NBA or the ABA, if I get the first pick, I’m taking Bill Russell. This will make the second and third pickers happy, I guess, because they will get to fight over Michael Jordan and…

Beaver Cleaver’s older brother died this week and naturally that got me to thinking about whether human beings by nature are good or evil. Wally Cleaver, I can say for sure, was not evil. He was kind of heart and he followed the Golden Rule, like every other character on…