No. 63: BUDD SCHULBERG / We talked about the famous champions he had known & then he let me hold his Oscar. A day spent with a personal hero & living history.

He worked (disastrously) on a screenplay with F. Scott Fitzgerald. He walked around Hoboken with Brando & sat ringside for Louis vs Schmeling. His dad cashed cheques signed by Thomas Edison, et cetera

Faithful readers of this Substack know that the first thing I turn to with the daily news is the obituary section. Thus, the first thing I read when I landed on the New York Times page was an obit of Victor S. Navasky. Yeah, I know: Who he? You go through life doing many things and an obituary writer will boil it down to the a sentence. From the NYT’s Joseph Berger:

Victor S. Navasky, a witty and contrarian journalist who for 27 years as either editor or publisher commanded the long-running left-leaning magazine The Nation, and who also wrote the book “Naming Names,” a breakthrough chronicle of the Hollywood blacklisting era, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 90.

Now, you’re wondering why I would talk to this intellectual heavyweight, me being a humble scribe more likely to pick up the Baseball Encyclopedia than the Nation. As improbable as it sounds, though, I had occasion to have a long talk with Mr Navasky almost 20 years ago.