from The Writer's Almanac (Garrison Keillor, Am. Public Media):
Today (March 6) is the birthday of writer and humorist Ring Lardner, born in Niles, Michigan (1885). He was a sports columnist who wrote about the Cubs and White Sox for the Chicago Tribune, and covered baseball all over the Midwest. He tried to write a column each day, and one day he was desperate for sports news, so he wrote a fictional dialogue between two baseball players playing a poker game, complete with the slang he had heard so many times traveling around with various baseball teams. That column was such a success that he began writing in the voice of a player named Jack Keefe, who sent letters home to his friend Al Blanchard in their hometown in Indiana. The columns were published in the book You Know Me Al (1916).
Ring Lardner wrote, "He looked at me as if I were a side dish he hadn't ordered."
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