FORMER SPORTSWRITER AND EDITOR AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

By FRANK LITSKY - THE NEW YORK TIMES

Joseph Durso, a former sportswriter and editor at The New York Times and the author of many books on sports history, died Friday 31 December 2004 at University Hospital in Stony Brook, New York.

Mr. Durso, who lived in Nissequogue, N.Y., was 80. The cause was cancer, his wife, Margaret, said.

Mr. Durso, who retired from The Times in 2001 after 51 years with the paper, covered the Mets and the Yankees as his main assignments. He also covered the Kentucky Derby frequently, and during the 1990's he reported regularly on thoroughbred racing.

Mr. Durso received the J. G. Taylor Spink Award from the Baseball Writers Association of America in 1995 for his contributions to baseball writing, placing him in the writers' and broadcasters' wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

With Eleanor Gehrig, the widow of the Yankees' Lou Gehrig, he wrote “My Luke and I.”

The book was made into a 1978 television film “A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story,” starring Blythe Danner, Edward Herrmann and Patricia Neal.

Mr. Durso wrote biographies of Casey Stengel, Joe DiMaggio and John McGraw; a memoir of the Yankees years, with Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford; histories of Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden; and "The All-American Dollar," about the rising importance of financial affairs in the sports world.

Joseph Paul Durso was born June 22, 1924, in New York City and was reared in Hudson Falls in the Adirondacks and in Upper Darby, Pa.

He left New York University in his junior year to enlist in the Army Air Forces and became a pilot and flight instructor.

He returned to college in 1945 with so little money for clothing that he often wore an Army uniform to class. He received a bachelor's degree in economics in 1946, and a year later he earned a master's degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

Mr. Durso became a reporter for The Newark Evening News in 1947. Months later, he moved to radio station WINS in New York as a news and sports writer and soon became its director of news and special events.

He left in 1950 to become a copy editor on the national news desk of The Times. He served as an assistant to the national news editor, head of the city copy desk and an assistant city editor. He became a sportswriter in 1964.

During a 119-day newspaper strike in 1962 and 1963, Mr. Durso and Theodore M. Bernstein, an assistant managing editor, presented a nightly radio show on WQXR, telling what Page 1 of The Times would have looked like each day. Years later, Mr. Durso did sports commentary that was syndicated by WQXR five nights a week. For many years, he was a visiting professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.

In addition to his wife, Margaret, he is survived by his sons, Peter and David, of Glen Cove, N.Y., and Christopher, of Stony Brook, from his marriage to his first wife, Elsie, who died in 1992; a stepson, Joseph Darnell, of Wantagh, N.Y.; a stepdaughter, Elise Boehm, of Stony Brook; a brother, Michael, of San Diego; a sister, Teresa Durso, of Hudson Falls, N.Y.; and nine grandchildren.

SPECIAL TO CANADIAN BASEBALL NEWS – 5 JANUARY 2005