About this ebook
Born in Indianapolis in June 1925, Jack Olsen grew up chasing his father across a Depression-era America of unpaid bills, midnight departures, and furnished rooms abandoned in the dark. Ole "Swede" Olsen was a man of spectacular invention, a charmer, a bigamist, a gambler, and a compulsive fabricator who claimed to have pitched for the Detroit Tigers, wrestled crocodiles for Ringling Brothers, and shaken hands with Mr. Pike himself at the top of Pikes Peak. Young Jack believed him. Most people did.
The family eventually landed in Philadelphia, where Swede managed semi-pro baseball teams, rubbed shoulders with Connie Mack and Mickey Cochrane, and once watched Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson play at a grimy field at 44th and Parkside. Jack grew up in the bleachers, proud to be the pitcher's kid, heir to a legacy that was equal parts genuine love of the game and breathtaking fiction.
But there was also just a boy. Sharp as a tack and relentlessly curious, young Jack absorbed everything: the Depression-era streets of Overbrook and Highland Park, the Polish and Danish immigrant grandparents with their old-world pride, the semi-pro ballplayers tramping through the family kitchen, the Philadelphia of Shibe Park and Baker Bowl. Neighbors froze to death on their front steps. Fathers lost their jobs and never recovered. Jack watched all of it with the wide-open eyes of a boy who didn't yet know he was taking notes.
What shaped him wasn't just his father's chaos but his mother Florence's quiet endurance, a Jersey City girl who married Ole at eighteen and spent the next two decades compensating for his spectacular unreliability. Between them, they gave Jack everything he needed to become one of America's greatest journalists: an eye for the lie, an ear for the story, and an unshakeable instinct for the human beings underneath.
Warm, wry, and often hilarious, The Pitcher's Kid moves between heartbreak and laughter with the ease of a natural storyteller writing about the only subject he never got to cover professionally: himself.
It is the last gift Jack Olsen left his readers. And it is the most personal thing he ever wrote.
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About the author
Jack Olsen is the award-winning author of thirty-three books published in fifteen countries and eleven languages. A former Time bureau chief, Olsen wrote for Vanity Fair, People, Paris Match, Readers Digest, Playboy, Life, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, New York Times Book Review and others. His magazine journalism appeared in thirteen anthologies. His books included The Misbegotten Son, The Bridge at Chappaquiddick,, the eco-thriller Night of the Grizzlies, and his monumental study of a Nazi massacre in Italy, Silence on Monte Sole. Three of his works were adapted for the screen, including Have You Seen My Son? on ABC.
Olsen's journalism has earned the National Headliners Award, Chicago Newspaper Guild's Page One Award, commendations from Columbia and Indiana Universities, the Washington State Governor's Award, the Scripps-Howard Award and other honors. He was listed in Who's Who in America since 1968 and in Who's Who in the World since 1987. The Philadelphia Inquirer described him as "an American treasure."
Olsen has been described as "the dean of true crime authors" by the Washington Post and the New York Daily News and "the master of true crime" by the Detroit Free Press and Newsday. Publishers Weekly called him "the best true crime writer around." His studies of crime are required reading in university criminology courses and have been cited in the New York Times Notable Books of the Year. In a page-one review, the Times described his work as "a genuine contribution to criminology and journalism alike."
