Bob Feller is dead. Signed for $1 and an autographed baseball, he never played a day in in the minor leagues. Went straight to Cleveland where he played for the Indians his entire career. People who hit against him and Nolan Ryan both (how many of them could there be--but oh well) said that Feller threw harder than Ryan. Toward the very end of his career, someone finally clocked a Feller fastball--at 98.6 mph. Amazing. He walked tons of batters and hit more batters than pretty much anyone. But he also led the league in strikeouts 7 times (2581 for his career) and struck out 17 in a game when he was 17. He served in the Navy during WW2 and missed four season, the only Chief Petty Officer in the Hall of Fame.Feller was very opinionated--one of those straight-talking midwesterners with many passionate views but no discernible politics. (Forced to find a label, I'd say progressive farm-state populist.) Most of the Hall boys (good old ones, typically, let's face it) think it's a fine idea to admit Pete Rose, but Feller was outspoken against it.
Bob Feller and Negro League star Satchel Paige broke racial barriers by traveling cross country on barnstorming tours that matched Major Leaguers and Negro League stars. Paige and Feller had pitched against each other going back to Feller’s days as a schoolboy amateur. Feller also had a founding role in the Major League Players Association, the union that today represents players.
I've visited the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown just twice--once as a child with my father, and again maybe about ten years ago with my own children, then 6 and 9. I was hoping they'd get to see Feller at least from a distance (we were visiting just prior to the Induction Weekend in the summer). Walking along those crowded little streets, we turned a corner and literally bumped into Bob Feller. Quickly bought a baseball from a store and asked him to sign it; he did and chatted with us for a few minutes. We found an old Feller card too.
Rest now, young thrower of smoke.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
