She lived for a dream that wouldn’t die. Ruth Ann Steinhagen, dies at 83.
The Chicago woman whose near-fatal 1949 shooting of former Cubs first baseman Eddie Waitkus inspired the book and movie “The Natural” died with the same anonymity with which she lived for more than half a century.
The 19-year-old’s crime, which put a spotlight on stalking crimes, nearly killed Waitkus, 29, and temporarily sidetracked his career. The incident also helped to draw attention to “baseball Annies” — young, hero-worshipping groupies who would pursue major league ballplayers, often relentlessly.
However, from the time that Ruth Ann Steinhagen left Kankakee State Hospital in 1952 after undergoing nearly three years of psychiatric treatment, she disappeared into near obscurity — so much so that one of her final next-door neighbors said he lived there for more than 15 years before learning her history.
Steinhagen, who never spoke publicly about the Waitkus incident after her release from the hospital, spent much of her final 42 years living in a modest house on the Northwest Side with her parents and sister.
She died Dec. 29 at Swedish Covenant Hospital of a subdural hematoma caused by an accidental fall in her longtime home, a Cook County medical examiner spokeswoman said. She was 83.
Her death had gone unreported and was only discovered when the Tribune was searching death records for another story.
Repoz
Posted: March 16, 2013 at 08:17 AM |
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http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19840101/REVIEWS/401010363/1023
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/features/2001/movies/reviews/the_natural/
Also this link, with picture of Steinhagen: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-03-14/news/ct-spt-0315-steinhagen-eddie-waitkus-20130315_1_chicago-woman-ruth-ann-steinhagen-eddie-waitkus
She was good at stalking at first, but then she went too far.
I could watch that every day for a LONG time before I ever got tired of it.
this is sexism plain and simple. females aren't really responsible for what they do (unless they do it for money)
you betcherass that if this was a female athlete, say, dottie hinson, shot by a male fan, that he woulda been in the slammer before you could say, oh poor boy.
*Given all your wacky girly bits always pumpin y'all full of crazy juice natch.
Suspension of disbelief seems selective for some.
Wait....46 year old people don't bat .490 and slug .800?
Best. Mitchell Appearance. Ever.
Everyone refused to sign Bonds so we don't know.
I can't suspend my disbelief at how many people like that movie and Redford in it.
You guys probably also liked the book Catcher in the Rye :-)
In my view, the movie would work better as a short film of about 5 minutes, with a minute explaining the backdrop and then a few minutes on the home run scene. Done and done.
Everyone refused to sign Bonds so we don't know.
Robert Duvall's "Max Mercy" character doesn't take enough personal pleasure in being vindictive to deserve a Hall of Fame ballot.
My Crim Law professor was adamant that those places are prisons with a different sign on the front and white uniforms instead of brown.
Brimley's one of those guys who looked 50 when he was 25. Poor bastard.
I don't think anyone wanted to see that. We didn't want to see it in The Natural and we didn't want to see it when it happened in Fatal Attraction.
It's Glenn Close.
You guys probably also liked the book Catcher in the Rye :-)
It was a solid movie. Catcher in the Rye sucked.
I wanted the main character to die a hideous death starting on about page 10.
And what does that have to do with literary achievement?
Me too. I remember voicing this in my 9th grade class, and my opinion was not shared by my classmates. My guess is that if I read it again today, I would still think that Caulfield was an annoying "phony" brat, but maybe I'd see him as more of an antihero and I'd enjoy the book more. At the time, I didn't enjoy it at all.
And what does that have to do with literary achievement?
Are there are great books, great movies, great stories where the common reaction is to hate the main character? Honest question.
And I believe the history of the reaction to the book testifies Holden Caulfield is not generally hated. Au contraire.
True, though, some works generally recognized as great were, and are, held in low esteem, even in some cases despised. Their main characters, too. Hamlet for instance, character and play, has been criticized by, oh, Samuel Johnson, Byron, T. S. Eliot.
Henry James--Mark Twain said he'd rather be condemned to John Bunyan's Heaven than read Henry James. And he had this to say of Jane Austen:
“I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin bone!”
And of course there's Fennimore Cooper's Literary Offenses.
People have said the same thing in my lifetime about Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and many others.
But, all that still doesn't answer the question. Why do you hate it and what does that have to do with literary achievement?
I didn't say anything about its literary legacy. Neither did snapper, for that matter. Why did I hate it? I can only report that my 14 year old self disliked it, and that he hated Holden Caulfield.
But I am curious if there are any genuine classics that feature main characters that are widely hated. And of course I don't mean charismatic antiheros like, I dunno, Milton's Satan.
"It's a freakin' movie" can be used to defend The Day the Clown Cried. It can defend anything, and as such it's not really a useful argument.
I don't see how; has anyone ever seen it?
only Jerry Lewis and his lawyers
That's why I asked you. It's called furthering a conversation.
But if you're going to reflexively go into defense mode, forget it.
Widely hated by you and snapper? You will have to answer that. If it is to apply broadly, then it’s self-defeating, for the most part. I would say that there few classics where all the characters are widely hated, and that applies to Catcher in the Rye. You and snapper aren’t “widely”.
Some rather repellent main characters that most readers nevertheless feel for, though:
Humbert Humbert.
Raskolnikov.
Captain Ahab (and Claggart in Billy Budd).
Meursault in The Stranger.
Clegg in The Collector.
Tons of characters in Cormac McCarthy.
The Bible (the main character, God, is a pretty unsavory character).
Richard III.
Dorian Gray.
Stanley Kowalski.
Nicola Six in London Fields (everyone in London Fields)
Jay Gatsby (everybody in the Great Gatsby?)
Richard II
Hamlet (in that will you EVER make a decision for Christ's Sake, Jesus ****! sort of way)
Clyde Griffiths in Dreiser's American Tragedy
I'd also argue that Zuckerman in pretty horrible in every Roth novel, but that's being even more subjective than I'm already being above
Caulfield seemed to me to be the same kind of insubstantial insincere "phony" (ironically the character's own favorite putdown) that he spends the entire book railing against. I remember him as an uninsightful insincere hypocrite who is the unreliable narrator (like Humbert Humbert or a Henry James character or maybe even Huck Finn) of Salinger's satire of teen angst - a practical joke on teachers and the generations of juveniles they compelled to read it in school.
Raskolnikov came to my mind right after I posted that...
Sorry, didn't mean for it to come off that way. I thought that you were pouncing on a statement I never made. For better or worse I don't feel qualified to talk about Catcher in the Rye's legacy because it's been so long since I read it.
I wasn't trying to pretend that my interpretation was important or definitive. I too was just furthering a conversation.
Holden Caulfield is a 16-year old boy, for Christ's sake, who is having an emotional breakdown. He's just lost a little brother whom he loved very much, his older brother that he idolized has sold out to Hollywood, and he fears that his little sister will be hurt. He worries about his mother and father, and other characters. He is repelled by the way people hurt each other, misunderstand each other, and he recognizes that he is not totally free of those faults. He's left childhood and is entering adulthood and it scares the #### out of him. Exactly what is it about him that makes some so angry and judgmental. (In a way, it is a testament to Salinger's artistic skill that he is able to elicit such a response, one all out of proportion.) Is that how you would view and treat a real adolescent in your life?
A real adolescent in crisis and suffering a loss needs support (which Caulfield never gets) but cannot be allowed to hide forever behind defenses rather than mourn the loss.
When the Branagh Hamlet came out, I went to see it with my then-GF, who was very smart and very cranky... she'd never read Hamlet and didn't really know the story. On the way out of the theater, she asked me, in all sincerity, "Why doesn't he just kill him?" I always enjoyed her ability to get to the damn point.
If Hamlet were to have killed Claudius in Act III, what would Shakespeare have filled Acts IV and V with? :-)
Claudius- "What we would do, we should do, when we would. For this 'would' changes and hath as many abatements and delays as there are hands, are fingers, are eyes. Then this would becomes like a spendthrifts sigh, that hurts upon easing."
The very short reign of Laertes.
That's why the pivotal moment is Glen Close, the woman in white, standing up. The woman who shot Redford was dressed all in black. Bump's wife was, too, and the last thing Redford says to her is that he's met her before. He chooses the woman in white, and he redeems his old sin by hitting the home run into the lights.
Focusing on the physical consequences of the wound is painfully literal and ignores the Arthurian elements of the story (the team, after all, is named the New York Knights). The Arthurian legends are full of sins that are never forgiven and wound that never heal.
The Arthurian symbolism is almost pedantic in the book, which makes the interesting (and to my eye, weaker) choice of having Roy Hobbs choose to throw the game. That fits the Arthurian theme of having poor choices poison someone's life, but makes the ending dangerously close to a shaggy dog tale. (It ends with a tear-stricken young boy demanding "Say it ain't so, Roy! Say it ain't so!")
Also, I'd rag on those who let their hate for Holden ruin their appreciation for the writing, but I feel that way about nearly every F. Scott Fitzgerald character, so there's that.
and Harry Shearer, for some reason.
Greenback - is your stance 'eh, it's a sports movie, what did you expect?' If so, you nailed why I mostly avoid them. (As opposed to, genre films have certain demands.)
Or, rather, that's not where it should end. The point is why do they hate it, and does that hate reflect on artistic creation. People seem content with venting--cryptic venting, and that isn't literary criticism. They've blurted out a visceral reaction, formed in most instances years ago, and they think that's all there is to it. It may be where therapy begins, but it's not where critical appraisal ends. It's telling that no one wants to go into why they react as they do--or recall reacting as they do. It's telling that they won't or can't consider the book as a literary creation separate and divorced from their personal psychology.
And Nine Stories is a great short story collection. It's the Highway 61 Revisited of short story collection. Each story/track is excellent, but each is excellent in a different way. As are, for that matter, all of Salinger's subsequent works that have thus far been published.
The Washington Post had a long obit this morning that can be accessed directly without any registration or paywall, complete with a picture of Steinhagen playing first base while in prison. I submitted it just a minute ago before seeing this thread.
This quote alone makes the article worth reading:
Such dedication should not go unrequited. That shrine should be in the Hall of Fame.
As for the crazy ####, did she later read The Catcher in the Rye and say to herself, oh, yeah, that speaks to me?
It spawned Bret Easton Ellis.
Nuff said.
And Sylvia Plath and Hunter Thompson and Jay McInerney and Dave Eggers. Like baseball seasons, people remember most fondly the books about unhappy young people they read when they are eleven.
And it had #### in it that I hated. It portrayed nuns as saintly, ephemeral creatures rather than the neurotic celibates they really were (that I knew from experience even at the age of 15). It talked about the Lunts (who the were the Lunts? Even my parents only had a passing familiarity with the ####### Lunts). Holden the protagonist was a spoiled future frat boy (I remember asking myself is "What teenager has enough money to check into a NY hotel by himself or rent a whore? He comes off like a Duke basketball fan.). Salinger made fun of a kid with acne. Great fun in that. Holden resenting his roommate getting a piece of ass. JD comes off as a frigid prude there.
Thanks, JD. Thanks for helping to ruin my adolescence.
Yes, Baseball's Natural by John Theodore, a very interesting biography. Among other things, Waitkus had seen some grisly combat in WW2, and was afflicted with PTSD that Steinhagen compounded. He was an alcoholic, and compensated during his playing days by taking all kinds of stimulants: an object lesson in the abuse of greenies. He had to have been a pretty good ballplayer before all his troubles started, to be as good as he was in the event.
This about sums it up for me.
Jay Gatsby (everybody in the Great Gatsby?)
Read this around the same age (maybe a year or two later) and I didn't hate Gatsby at all.
Yeah, he's a sleazy phony, but he doesn't have any pretensions of holding the moral high ground like Caufield.
I love how you respond to Salinger's wildly inaccurate stereotype with one of your own. Methinks the truth must lie somewhere in between, or as a mix of both.
Edit: and I don't much like nuns. With very few exceptions, they have gone to left-wing dipsy-doodle land in the last 40 years.
I never read Catcher in the Rye until I was in my late 30's, by which time it just seemed to be a rather dated piece of light fiction, although mildly enjoyable. I guess not being able to appreciate Salinger is one of the problems of not having suffered through an overly neurotic adolescence.
Disclosure: I loved the book at age 11 and I loved it the last time I read it at age 52. I really did.
It's a 2-hour movie. You can really only tell so much of a story in 2 hours, and the story here is about Hobbs. Any time you give to his son or his lover (or Pop or anyone else) you take away from getting to know Hobbs and what makes him tick. Every movie under six hours has to take some shortcuts like this.
I really don't follow him on this. Why is that the only way the movie can go. Why can't this story be about Hobbs's triumph over tragedy? It may not be THE ending that Ebert wants to see but it's an ending and if the story is about redemption or triumph over adversity it works. Why must the bleeding be a false alarm or deadly? Isn't life filled with events that fall between these two extremes?
And when they make The Natural: The Miniseries, you will get to know all about these people. Spoiler Alert: Pop likes oatmeal.
Unrealistically insightful into others, for a 16-year old, and yet he has no insight into himself.
Making him a pretty typical 16-year-old.
That is the problem. As Ebert stated:
That's a strong criticism of a lot of YA fiction, I agree: The Outsiders (still a pretty good novel) tends in that direction, and lots of subsequent books just have impossibly precocious narrators. Holden, though, is full of snap judgments, patronizing attitudes, prejudices; there are people he can't figure out (like Mr Antolini). He doesn't strike me as some empathically-gifted kid, just someone who's a bit hyperactive socially and emotionally.
As to having insights into others but not one's self, again, that's the human condition (my one insight from my last 54 years :)
Fair enough, I guess, but this is really just who Ebert wants to know about. Hobbs was a supremely talented person who fell into obscurity and made it all the way back to the top. I find that a really interesting story. And let's face it, if we got to know Pop better, we'd probably decide he was a superstitious idiot.
Dean Moriarty in On the Road is not the easiest guy in the world to like. Although he does seem to have charisma out the wazoo.
Also I suppose whether On the Road is a genuine classic or not is another discussion.
About where Salinger was coming from and how he changed the literary aesthetic. It's a been a good while since I've read those biographies (unauthorized and incomplete), but this says something about JD:
A point Menand emphasizes is that Salinger is not a '50s writer. He's a '40s writer--those were his formative years. And he reminds us that it was Seymour Glass's war experiences that sent him over the edge. (And that The New Yorker rejected Catcher when it was offered to them to excerpt.
This here is a fine appreciation of Salinger:
A gift of words and silence
I'm presently re-reading On the Road (been probably 20 years since I last read it), and I'm surprised that the force of its language still holds. The ending is a somewhat forced poetry, but it's good anyway. You really get the sense of a place and time. Of movement.
Okay. I personally would rather read Catch-22 or watch The Big Red One instead.
I'd say his main characters were pretty unlikeable, as I don't think likeable people existed in any of his universes. But I'm not entirely sure most of his books had main characters. Looking up his catalogue now I didn't quite read all of his books, but I sure read a bunch of them. I find it very difficult to believe that if I returned to them I'd enjoy them as much as I did as a teenager. I haven't read any of his books since I was about 17, though I did write a paper on the censorship trial of Naked Lunch a couple years ago. Apparently Burroughs and the publishers figured a good, showy censorship trial would garner some attention. But the problem was no one was buying the book, so no one was bothering to stop people from buying the book. They devised a plan to smuggle a copy into the country, but do a really poor job of it and get caught. But several of these attempts failed because no one seemed to realize the book was banned, or if they did, didn't care.*
*Note, this story may actually involve Ulysses which also had a big censorship case, and the Nanked Lunch guys were actively trying to emulate...I get things mixed up easily.
For Love of Evil...features Satan in a positive light, so I'm guessing the author should be hated.
And Raistlin Majere is a full on bastard... :)
It isn't a wildly inaccurate stereotype. It is the honest truth. One nun I had slapped a female classmate of mine as hard as she could full in the face, snapping her head to the side. And this classmate was 8 years old at the time. The offense? She had the audacity to use her $1 value Easter seals she was supposed to sell for the parish to instead decorate the inside of her spiral notebook. It happened right in front of me. I'll never forget it. But most of the nuns I had weren't so vicious. All they would do is grab you by the hair or the chin and smash your head against the slate chalkboard. Physical abuse for minor infractions were the norm. It was like living in a concentration camp.
And the nuns I had were McCarthyite right wingers all the way. Hated the Vietnam protesters, hated rock and roll, hated secular ideas (I didn't find out that Charles Darwin existed until I got to high school), hated sex, or anything that smacked of sexuality or sensual love. Girls couldn't wear their skirts above the knee. They weren't allowed to wear patent leather shoes. They couldn't wear jewelry to school except religous paraphernalia like a cross and chain or scapulas. Pierced earrings were forbidden, for instance. We were forced to attend church everyday, and had to attend the stations of the cross after school everyday during Lent (I would not be afraid of going to hell, if there was one, because having to attend SoTC would be worse).
as for The Natural (movie) i think it would have worked LOTS better if redford had gotten someone else to play him at age 18 like he did in sneakers. and yeah, the symbolism was kinda thick and the villians like out of the cartoons. it's not one of my favorites. or even my favorite redford movie. that is indecent proposal, because i can see without ANY difficulty why it wasn't exactly a tough choice for the girl to make
as for catcher in the rye
well, youse guys talk about it so much i decided to read it a few years back. got through i think 4 chapters before i got drowned in tiresome. he's a spoilt, rich, tiresome teenager who really REALLY could use some parents. i mean the kind who actually TALK to their kid instead of leaving him to sink. any mother whose son is 16 damm well knows that when any male says something like - i'm good, i'm fine, no problem - when his arm, head or heart is broke - you just ignore that stuff and take care of your kid (same goes for adult males)
i disagree that he had actual INSIGHT into people, he knows what they do, he doesn't see what they do because of any sort of real understanding why they do/think what they do/think. and no, he doesn't look inward. i think that is an adult thing, not a teenage thing.
Speaking of books that don't measure up when read again later in life, though the Twins trilogy holds up much better than the initial set ...
I have that feeling with a lot of science fiction/fantasy books I read when I was younger in life and went back and re-read...One of my favorite book at age 16 was Wolfling by Gordon R. Dickson. Read it again a few years ago after finding it at a used book store, and wow, was it a pretty bad book. I am afraid to go back and read any of the other Dickson books I loved, as I have him as one of my favorite writers of all time, but if that book took that much of a drop, who knows how the others stand up(was never a Dorsai fan) Similarly I could say the same about a lot of books that I read between my 16-21 years, and then reread again, they just did not stand up to my personality changes.
Lucy from Peanuts.
I never took Caufield as a character who was intended to be sympathetic or as someone with whom I'd closely identify* - it was a character study with an unreliable narrator. entertaining, clever, and with something to say. Didn't read it until college, because I though Nine Stories was pretty fantastic and figured I ought to give it a go.
* I quickly learned others felt differently, mind you.
Read Catch 22 in grad school (found it on the ground) and loved it. Sequel, not so much.
A) Teacher's often being readers
and
B) having 2 hours of work in an 8 hour shift
A Canticle for Lebowitz was a fun one. I seem to recall another about Adolf Hitler's son becoming a politician in 1970s Germany, Dances with Wolves, and Briget Jones's Diary, which I somehow didn't realize was Pride and Prejudice until reading the book. Which is actually even more embarassing than not realizing You've Got Mail is Pride and Prejudice. (Though neither is as embarassing as liking Briget Jones's Diary and You've Got Mail).
Agamemnon is a real dick in the Iliad.
That's a fair qualification. I guess I'd say instead that Holden has been disillusioned young, for a lot of the right reasons: but yes, he's often guessing (projecting?) that any given individual he meets might be a goddam phony, though a lot of them certainly turn out to be.
You've Got Mail is Pride and Prejudice
I thought You've Got Mail was Sleepless in Seattle :) No, You've Got Mail is The Shop around the Corner, of course, which hinges on unsuspected identity in a way that P&P doesn't.
There are villains (as opposed to antiheroes) who are occasionally central to their classics. Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady is one. There is so little to like about him that the novel almost doesn't work, because you just are sick from the start that Isabel Archer would even get involved with him. (The film doesn't work at all, because John Malkovich is so loathsome – as opposed to his antihero in Dangerous Liaisons, for instance.)
To bring things full circle, Colin Firth has played both the Valmont character from Liaisons and the Darcy character in P&P and Bridget Jones. Nice range, because I sure the hell wouldn't want to see Malkovich in Pride & Prejudice.
Strindberg's Dance of Death has very unlikable main characters. It's the prototype of which I guess Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is the exemplar. The movie hasn't live, but some think it should.
I must have been thrown by the use of Pride and Prejudice in the actual movie.
He also played the Darcy character in Pride and Prejudice, which (and this time I'm 75% sure I'm right) is Pride and Prejudice.
Yes. Conversations beyond the superficial can get urgent, even passionate. I think there are about ten a day just on this site. I didn't realize I was battering you. I just asked.
The thing is (and since we've last actually engaged, I haven't been addressing you at all--propositions exist separately from personalities), you're not now 14-years old. You should be wondering why you reacted so strongly then and so strongly now. That's what I would think--but if not, not. Obviously, it struck a chord in some way. If my kneejerk reaction to a mention of a character in a book is to say vehemently that I wish he were dead, and now many years later I still felt that way, I would wonder why that is so. Especially if pressed. And if I were interested in what makes good literature and what doesn't, I would wonder what my visceral response means. Does it mean it's not a good book--or maybe that makes it an especially good book. Which? That's all I wanted to know. I wasn't just putting you on the spot for the sake of doing so without a point. You said, though, you haven't thought about it and aren't interested in thinking about it now. Okay, case closed.
Everybody gets a trophy. There are no losers at this school. Happy?
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