Sports Illustrated editor and writer Robert W. Creamer published approximately three hundred articles during the magazine's first thirty years but established a broader reputation with a biography of Babe Ruth that New Yorker editor and baseball writer Roger Angell called in The New York Times (13 October 1994) "perhaps the best portrait yet struck of an American sports hero." Five years in the making, the book benefited from the coincidence of its appearance with Hank Aaron's pursuit of Ruth's career home-run record; yet twenty years later the New York Observer (25 March 1994) still ranked Babe: The Legend Comes to Life (1974) one of the top ten baseball books of all time. Also included on the list was Creamer's Stengel: His Life and Times (1984), making him the only author doubly honored.

Creamer was born on 14 July 1922 to Joseph and Marie Watts Creamer in the village of Tuckahoe, which is part of the town...