What Do You Know About Books By Tri City Writers, About the Tri City Area?
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Bay City native Kim Chapin wrote books about sports as diverse as soccer, football, tennis, running and auto racing.
The fact that he achieved national acclaim but is not widely recognized in his hometown is an oft-repeated story. There is little doubt he was the most accomplished sports writer ever from Bay City.
Bay City's Kim Chapin
Sportswriter Extraordinaire.
Mr. Chapin, a onetime tennis star at Vanderbilt University and writer for Sports Illustrated, died recently. But his books "Dogwood Afternoons" and others like "Fast As White Lightning," "The Road to Wembley" and "Billie Jean King," co-authored with Billie Jean King, live on to perpetuate his memory.
Chapin, whose first name actually was Saxon, died November 23, 2011, at home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 69. Kim was born and grew up in Bay City and started playing tennis competitively at age 10. He twice competed in the national junior championships.
At age 15, he began covering prep sports for The Bay City Times, where his father worked as a linotypist. Kim won a Grantland Rice Memorial Scholarship for prospective sportswriters from the Thoroughbred Racing Association to attend Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he wrote for the college paper and played on the tennis team.
After college he became a sportswriter under the famous Jim Minter at the Atlanta Journal. Then he was recruited by Sports Illustrated magazine where he was a reporter mainly covering auto racing.
Kim's other books included "Tennis to Win," (Harper Collins), "The Beauty of Running" (with Gayle Barron, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.), "Namath: My Son Joe," (with Bill Kushner). With filmmaker Lance Bird he wrote the script for a documentary about endurance racing, called "The Speed Merchants."
He was the sports editor of the new newspaper, The Santa Fe Reporter beginning in 1974. He served as a referee with the Northern New Mexico Soccer Association, officiating at adult and youth soccer games. Kim is survived by his wife, Anne Constable; two sons: Alexander Burnet Chapin of Salt Lake City, and Nicholas Constable Chapin of Portland, Oregon; and his mother, Roberta Chapin of Bay City. His father, Wendell Phillips Chapin a longtime tennis player and local champion who coached and taught tennis at Delta College, died at age 78 in 1990.
Local authors are often unheralded in their hometowns and even famed best-selling novelist James Michener complained about being treated as a relative nonentity by folks from his home in Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
For instance, the heroic literary accomplishments of the late Edward Jablonski are less than obscure in his hometown of Bay City. However, Mr. Jablonski, who started in Journalism on his family's Polish language weekly newspaper here, wrote two dozen highly acclaimed books about the air war in World War II and the biography of George Gershwin and other Broadway musical legends.
The obvious need for a summary of local authors as well as books about this area led this writer to compile "The Literary History of the Saginaw Valley." A presentation on his subject was made recently to the Torch Club of the Saginaw Valley.
Local authors studied include Howard Kohn, Mardi Link, Mike Wendland, Jeremy Kilar, Leon Katzinger, Ned Brandt, Dorothy Langdon Yates, Dr. Esson Gale, William L. Clements, Stuart Gross, Andrew Liveris, Peter B. Frantz, Gerry Higgs, Les Arndt, Dale Wolicki, Dr. John Way and Dave Miller, Ray Herek and Meade Gougeon.
The bizarre story of Alison Hicks, Bay City born tennis pro who was unfairly arrested and abused under notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona, and has written a book and produced a movie, "Backspin," about her experience, will be reviewed.
The presentation will be reprised Jan. 11 at a meeting of the Bay County Genealogical Society and Jan. 23 at the first of three weekly classes for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) group at Saginaw Valley State University.
The works of the early writers who came here to chronicle the lumbering industry will be reviewed, along with the mysterious "Four Cities: A Study in Comparative Policy Making" that talks surreptitiously of government and social activities in Bay City, Saginaw, Kalamazoo and Muskegon.
The second and third classes at SVSU, on Jan. 30 and Feb. 6, 9:30 - 11:30 a.m., will deal with local authors and books about the area as well as my recently published book from Michigan State University Press, "Apostles of Equality: The Birneys, the Republicans and the Civil War."
How the Birneys and other abolitionists in Michigan impacted the course of the nation through the formation of the Republican Party and the Civil War is the essence of the larger story of the development of this nation's tradition of freedom and equality.
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chapinstudio Says:
On January 01, 2012
at 05:10 PM
Nice article, Dave. As with several other publications around the Country us siblings of Kim are not mentioned. It's as of he never had his two Sisters,Carol Stephanson of Vancouver,BC and Wendy Chapin Ford of Newburyport,MA who by the way has Authored her second book, Normalcy. Her first,"To get back home" was published a couple years ago. Kim's Brother, Robert Wendell Chapin lives in Midland.
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jwkilar Says:
On January 03, 2012
at 04:50 PM
Dave, Noble endeavor and excellent idea. I often thought that Delta never gave much credit to its numerous authors.
Remember Lou Doll who wrote histories of Ann Arbor, Pat Drury, Mike Herrig and the Sharphoters regiment in C. W. VanZandt recently wrote a novel about BC. I have Judge Butterfield's old book FOUR CITIES, and he told me, and wrote it in the cover that Alpha is Kalamazoo, Beta is Jackson, Gama is Muskegon and Delta is BC. Once you read it, it is clear. No Saginaw. I used his typology in the conclusion of my Lumbertowns book, and the comparisons based on what happened a century ago are amazingly sound. |
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Dave Rogers |
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