I’m the luckiest fan in the history of the world. When I was a copy boy at the Daily News, I was sitting in the Ebbets Field press box when that ball… - Arnold Hano

When he died, he held fourteen baseball records, a little man with a bashful smile, a silken swing, baseball's legendary nice guy. His death was the worst that could have happened to baseball, but his playing career had been the best.

Jim was a big sheepdog of a man, 6-feet-4, 250 pounds, softhearted, soft-spoken. I never heard him use a dirty word; I never heard him tell a salacious story. Yet his novels are full of such words and stories; he seemed to have a need to dig deeply into the dark depraved nature of man. Nobody did it better. But then, anything he did, he did better. Two years ago, crippled by strokes, he appeared in a film, "Farewell, My Lovely," playing the cuckolded judge. When his wife in the film, played by Charlotte Rampling, carries on with Robert Mitchum in front of him, there is a look on his face that is part bewilderment, part despair and all forgiveness. He was that way, turning up the dark corners of the soul with love and forgiveness.

I enjoyed that interview. He's a guy who not only says what he means but backs it up, too. I'll never forget the night I interviewed him. It was a rainy night at his house in L.A. and I kept looking outside on the lawn. He had this big black Doberman he called Rommel, and it sat out there in the rain eating a chaise lounge.