Shirley Povich, who did not see a baseball game until he was out of high school, rose in just a few years from golf caddy to copyboy to sportswriter extraordinaire. In his column, "This Morning," which appeared in the Washington Post from 1933 to 1974, he covered the glory days of baseball with style and a sense of the dramatic. One of his best-known columns appeared on 9 October 1956, when Povich reported "a pitching job for the books": "The million-to-one shot came in. Hell froze over. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. Don Larsen today pitched a no-hit, no-run, no-man-reach-first game in a World Series."

Shirley Lewis Povich was born on 15 July 1905 to the Lithuanian immigrants Nathan and Rosa Povich, who owned a furniture store in Bar Harbor, Maine. He was one of nine surviving children; the first child, still an infant, had crawled out onto the back porch, which...