Posted 9:59 AM by Gene

In writing about The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant Jonathan Yardley astonishingly forgets the men who made the Damn Yankees score so sweet: Richard Adler and Jerry Ross. Frank Loesser discovered them and they wrote brash pop tunes for the likes of Ernie Ford and the Treniers before they hit the big time with The Pajama Game. Damn Yankees followed, and tragically nothing else. Ross's story is very sad: for years he went back and forth to some Jewish Y theater program on unheated subway cars, and he got very sick in the lungs; an exploratory operation failed, and he died at all of 29. (The PBS bio incorrectly says leukemia.) In the current CD issue of the Damn Yankees cast album is a picture of the songwriters looking understandably grim; look carefully and you can see the scar just below Ross's throat. Adler went on to write a few flop musicals and launched a profitable jingle business. No, do not forget Adler and Ross: they wrote two glorious shows.

(Revised 4/10/09; slight grammatical blunder)