C8 ALOCALLIFE:RONMENCHINE,76
Sports announcer helped lead movement to bring baseball back to Washington
BY T. REES SHAPIRO
Menchine dreaded more than Sept. 30, 1971. It was to be the last day major
A
league baseball would be played in the nation’s capital for another three decades. That morning, the WWDC ra-
dio play-by-play announcer woke up in a particular funk. It was a dreary autumn dawn, and rain trickled down his bedroom win- dow. “I hope it keeps raining,” Mr.
Menchine said to himself, as he later recounted to The Washing- ton Post, “and they rain the damn thing out — and I won’t have to broadcast it.” ForMr.Menchine, who died at
age 76 on Sept. 10 at his home in Baltimore County after a heart attack, such thoughts were com- pletely out of character. He was best known as an ebullient per- sonality and sports fanatic who had one of the most extensive baseball memorabilia collections outside of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. When he arrived at Robert F.
Kennedy Stadium, his mood did not improve, evenwhenthe Sena- tors were ahead of the New York Yankees, 7-5, in the top of the ninth inning. Days before the game, Senators
owner Robert Short announced his intent to move the Washing- ton team to Arlington, Tex., at the end of the 1971 season. Mr. Menchine was not happy with the decision and lambasted Short on the air during the last game. “It was a disaster,” Mr.
Menchine told The Post in 2004. “I am a pretty effervescent guy, but when I did that game I was pretty devastated, because here I had waited all my life for this opportunity, and I was watching
RonMenchine was the Senators’ play-by-play announcer for WWDCfrom 1969 to 1971.
it slip away. I did the game in a monotone.” Short, who was home in Edina, listening to Mr.
Minn.,
Menchine’s broadcast by a tele- phone hook-up, repeatedly called the radio station pleading with the managers to calm the an- nouncer. But Mr. Menchine wouldn’t
quit, and as he later recalled, “I told the station, ‘What’s he going to do, fire me?’ ” With only one out to go in the
game, many of the 14,460 fans in attendance burst onto the field in a display Mr. Menchine called “a madhouse.”
Souvenir-seekers scooped dirt,
grabbed patches of turf and even stole the bases. Many fans shook hands with their favorite athletes standing idly by in the mayhem. When it was clear that the
game could not be finished, the umpires awarded the Yankees a 9-0 forfeit victory, nullifying the Senators’ 7-5 lead and imminent win. Post sports columnist Shirley
s the last “voice of the Washington Senators,” there was no day Ron
Povich recorded the tumultuous scene: “By then, the crowd mood was
so philosophical, ‘So what?’ Or more accurately, ‘So what the hell?’ Then the Senators were finished, even if the ballgame wasn’t.” As the fans stormed the field,
Mr. Menchine said in the last broadcast, “Can you imagine the capital of the world not having a major league team?” After the Senators left for Tex-
as,Mr.Menchine helped lead the movement to bring baseball back to Washington. He sent one tape recording of the last game’s high- lights to baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, and another to the White House, addressed to Presi- dent Richard M. Nixon. In a cover letter to the presi-
dent, Mr. Menchine wrote,“I sin- cerely hope you put the prestige of your office behind a drive to bring major-league baseball back to Washington and return to the fanssomething they should never have lost in the first place.” Mr. Menchine often expressed
his anger toward Short, the Sena- tors owner, who removed base- ball fromWashington until April, 14, 2005, when the Nationals played their first game at RFK Stadium. “The city will never forgetwhat happened, and some of them still hate [Short] for it,”Mr.Menchine told the Dallas Morning News in 2005. “But no one thought base- ball would be gone for so long.” Albert Ronald Menchine was
born April 24, 1934, in Baltimore. He never married. He is survived by a sister. He received a bachelor’s degree
from the University of Maryland in 1956, then served two years in the Army before beginning a career in sports broadcasting in the Baltimore area, hosting pre- and postgame shows for the Ori- oles. He was the Senators’ play-by-
play announcer for WWDC from 1969 to 1971. Mr. Menchine was known to dress like a radio an- nouncer, too, often donning an outfit of a plaid shirt, plaid jacket and plaid pants — each of a different pattern. He appeared as an extra in the
1976 film “All the President’s Men,” with a speaking role as a defense lawyer for theWatergate burglars and exchanged dialogue with Robert Redford, who was portraying Washington Post re- porter BobWoodward. Because of Mr. Menchine’s ec-
centric wardrobe — a 1976 Post profile of him said he wore “clothes so loud that they almost outtalked him”—he had nothing appropriate to wear in the movie. Instead, he had to borrow a conservative brown suit from his brother-in-law. In the 1970s and 1980s, Mr.
Menchine did voice-over work and was a play-by-play college football announcer, including for the Naval Academy. As a sports fanatic, he attended
memorabilia trade shows around the country throughout his life. He had an extensive collection of baseball-themed postcards, and his book, “A Picture Postcard History of Baseball,” was pub- lished in 1992. The 1976 Post profile of Mr.
Menchine also described his pro- digious eating. When he was on the air for the Senators, Mr. Menchine “used to run two miles a day, play a couple of sets of tennis, and then put away a couple of shrimp cocktails, some bourbon, a couple of steaks, salad and pie a la mode.” In his will, Mr. Menchine dic-
tated that $2,000 be appropriat- ed for a luncheon in his honor at the Country Club ofMaryland for friends. “With the size of this bequest,”
he wrote, “It is my hope that the party might last several days.”
shapirot@washpost.com
EZ SU
KLMNO OBITUARIES
Phyllis M. Bokman ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT
Phyllis M. Bokman, 71, an ad-
ministrative assistant at the Uni- versity of Maryland from 1987 to 2002, died Sept. 13 at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington County. She had colon cancer. She was born Phyllis Mary
Moorleghen in Belleville, Ill., and was an administrative assistant for the CIA from 1957 to 1963. She was a Bethesda resident
and a member of St. Jane Frances de Chantal Catholic Church in Bethesda. Her husband of 43 years, Carl
S. Bokman Sr., died in 2003. Survivors include three chil-
dren, George Bokman of Chevy Chase, Carl S. Bokman Jr. of Woodbine and Gregory Bokman of South Riding; her mother,Hel- enMoorleghen of Arlington; two sisters, Ann Barnes of Attica,N.Y., and Theresa Haffner of Kailua, Hawaii; five brothers, JohnMoor- leghen of Sacramento, JimMoor- leghen of Johnson City, Tenn., Tom Moorleghen ofWoodbridge, Paul Moorleghen of Alexandria andMarkMoorleghen of Seattle; and four grandchildren. —LaurenWiseman
Robert Simms ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL
Robert Simms, 86, a retired
assistant principal at James W. Robinson Jr. Secondary School in Fairfax County, died Sept. 2 at his home in The Villages, Fla., after a heart attack. Mr. Simms moved to The Vil-
lages in 2004 from Locust Grove, Va.
Mr. Simms worked in the Fair-
fax public school system for 30 years, beginning as an industrial arts teacher in 1951 at the old GrovetonHigh School. In 1961, he became assistant
principal at W.T. Woodson High School, where he worked for 10 years before moving to Robinson in 1971.
During his career, he helped
launch the Fairfax Teachers Cred- it Union, now the Apple Federal CreditUnion,andservedas chair- man of the finance committee for many years.He retired in 1979. Robert Simms was born in Lockwood, W.Va., and served
ANTONINAPIROZHKOVA,101 Preserved legacy of Isaac Babel BY MATT SCHUDEL Antonina Pirozhkova, who
wrote an affectingmemoir of her life with her common-law hus- band, Russianwriter Isaac Babel, and devoted years to keeping his memory alive after he vanished in the Soviet prison system, died Sept. 12 in Sarasota, Fla., at age 101. The cause of death was not reported. Ms. Pirozhkova (pronounced
peer-uzh-KOH-va), an engineer who helped design the Moscow subway system, met Babel in 1932,whenshewas 23 andhewas 38. As the author of “Red Caval- ry” (1926) and “Odessa Tales” (1931), Babel was hailed as per- haps the finest master of the Russian short story of the 20th century. Babel and Ms. Pirozhkova
shared an apartment from 1934 until May 1939, when he was arrested by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. He was married to another woman at the time, with whomhe had a daughter. WhenMs. Pirozhkova’s daugh-
ter with Babel was born in 1937, shewrote in her 1996memoir, “At His Side: The Last Years of Isaac Babel,” he arrived at the hospital “carrying so many boxes of choc- olate that he [had] to steady the top of the stack with his chin.” But two years later, during in
one of the purges of intellectuals under the regime of Joseph Stal- in, police agents accused Babel of being a member of a subversive anti-Soviet group and of being a spy for Austria and France. When the NKVD entered his
apartment, Babel made a com- ment that has since become sadly famous: “They didn’t let me fin- ish.” Ms. Pirozhkova rode with him
to the Lubyanka prison, she re- counted in her book. They parted at the gate,with Babel telling her, “Someday we’ll see each other.” “For some reason,”Ms. Pirozh-
kovawrote, “I kept thinking, ‘Will they at least give him a glass of hot tea? He can’t start the day without it.’ ” It would be the last time she
would see him. She was told he was sentenced to “10 years with- out right of correspondence,” which was widely understood as code for execution. Nevertheless, Ms. Pirozhkova
held out hope until 1954, when she received a death certificate indicating that her husband had diedMarch 17, 1941—supposedly
Virginia Wolf FEDERAL EMPLOYEE
VirginiaWolf, 95, an informa-
tion officer inU.S. Department of Agriculture’s entomology divi- sion during the 1960s, died Sept. 15 atMontgomeryGeneralHospi- tal in Olney. She had Alzheimer’s disease. She was born Virginia Anne
Simmons in Portland, Ore., and received a bachelor’s degree in English from Reed College in Portland in 1936. She moved to the Washington region in the early 1940s and had been a Rock- ville resident. Herhusbandof 61 years,Harry
E. Wolf, died 1999. Survivors in- clude two children, R. PeterWolf of Bethesda and Catherine W. Swan of Atascadero, Calif.; and two grandchildren. —LaurenWiseman
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2010
three years in theArmy after high school.He was a 1950 graduate of the West Virginia University In- stitute of Technology and re- ceived amaster’s degree in educa- tion from the University ofMary- land in 1953. Survivors include his wife of
55 years, Joann Corell Simms of The Villages; two daughters, Jac- queline Hicks of Potomac Falls and Amy Treat of Woodbridge; and three grandsons. —Megan Buerger
Livia P. Hewitt CIA OFFICE MANAGER
Livia P. Hewitt, 82, an office
manager for the CIA’s special ac- tivities division from 1982 until she retired in 1992, died Sept. 11 at Virginia Hospital Center in Ar- lington County of sepsis. Mrs. Hewitt, a McLean resi-
dent,wasan administrative assis- tant for the Foreign Service from 1962 to 1966. Livia Paula Sarcione was a
native of Providence, R.I., and a graduate of the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut. Her husband of 33 years, Ash-
ley C. Hewitt Jr., died in 1993. Survivors include two children, Devon Hewitt of McLean and Douglas Hewitt of Santiago, Chile.
—LaurenWiseman
PIROZHKOVA/BABEL FAMILY ARCHIVE
Antonina Pirozhkova, common-lawwidow ofRussian literary giant Isaac Babel, was an accomplished engineer and, later, a writer.
during the early stages of World War II. She carried on with her work
as an engineer until she retired in 1965. She then dedicated her life to keeping Babel’s reputation alive and to finding out what happened to him after his arrest in 1939. She edited a two-volume col-
lection of his works and in 1972 published a book of reminiscenc- es by his contemporaries. She also began writing an account of her life with Babel, which would not appear in complete form in Russia until 2001. It wasn’t until the late 1980s
that Ms. Pirozhkova would learn Babel’s true fate. After a 20-min- ute show trial, he had been sen- tenced death and was executed Jan. 27, 1940. In hermemoir,Ms. Pirozhkova
described Babel’s writing habits and their interactions with other writers and cultural figures, such as Andre Malraux, Andre Gide, Maxim Gorky and Boris Paster- nak. Despite the bleak point of view
ofmuch of his fiction, Babel sent out cheeryNewYear greetings: “I wish you merriment, as much merriment as possible, for there is nothing on earth more impor- tant.” Ms. Pirozhkova’s book was
hailed as a literary tour de force when it came out in 1996, show- ing a glimpse of a lost world. “She is not by profession a
writer,” critic Francine Prose wrote in Newsday, “yet somehow her lack of literary pretension or ambition serves to make her memoir ever more powerfully affecting. Her narrative is cool,
straightforward, unadorned, un- emotional, devoid of pathos of self-pity.” Ms. Pirozhkova lived for 71
years after she last saw Babel but nevermarried anyone else. “The anguish of loss never
leavesme,” she wrote. Antonina Nidolaevna Pirozhk-
ova was born July 1, 1909, in the Siberian village of Krasny Yar. After her father died when she was 14, she helped support the family by becoming amathemat- ics tutor. Ms. Pirozhkova graduated in
1930 from what is now Tomsk Polytechnic University in Siberia and later moved to Moscow. She became the principal designer of five of the most elaborate impos- ing stations in Moscow’s subway system and trained hundreds of other engineers. She helped build tunnels in the Caucasus Moun- tains duringWorldWar II. She continued to prepare tech-
nical articles on engineering and construction design through the 1980s. In 1996, Ms. Pirozhkova and
her daughter, Lidiya Babel, moved to Silver Spring, where her grandson — then a theater professor at Catholic University — was living. The entire family resettled in Sarasota in 2006. During the past few years,Ms.
Pirozhkova worked on an autobi- ography, which she completed shortly before her death. Her memories of her life with
Babel, she told The Washington Post in 1997, never faded with time. “They are as vivid aswhenthey
happened,” she said.
schudelm@washpost.com
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