Sid Feder, a sportswriter at war
Sid Feder spent a dozen years in the 1930s and ‘40s covering the most important sporting events in the country for the Associated Press. From the World Series to the Kentucky Derby to every one of Joe Louis’ heavyweight championship bouts from 1937 through 1948, Feder was on hand with his typewriter.
Between his long career as a sportswriter and his groundbreaking books on organized crime in the 1950s, though, Feder spent nearly two years as a war correspondent for the AP, covering the fighting in Italy, Southern France and beyond.
Born July 27, 1909 in New Jersey, Feder studied for three years at New York University before dropping out to work at the AP’s New York office in 1931. He handled a variety of assignments for the wire service, working the news desk and helping out as a reporter, often without a byline, before joining the sports department in 1936.
Among his regular stops was Yankee Stadium, where he covered Joe McCarthy’s teams that won six World Series in an eight-year span. Among other highlights, Feder was in the press box on July 4, 1939, for one of the most memorable days in the old stadium’s history.
In the end it was too much for Lou, this “Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day” put on for the iron horse that infantile paralysis has put in the roundhouse to end the greatest endurance record the game has ever known.
Flanked by former teammates of the great 1927 team and present mates of the current world champions, all gathered to do him honor, Gehrig’s shoulders bent, and tears rolled down his dimpled cheeks.
And there wasn’t a throat among the 61,808 spectators into which a lump didn’t bob up to make swallowing difficult.
After covering the last of that run of Yankees titles in 1943, Feder headed across the Atlantic to write about the war.
Shortly after arriving in London in the spring of 1944, he filed the kind of ellipsis-filled column that was common at the time, sharing his impressions of his surroundings:
Your first air raid puts more lumps in your throat than a bad case of tonsils. … Head for the nearest underground — and the Brooklyn-Manhattan line is practically a second story job compared to the depth they’ve dug the local subways — and the lumps drop right into your heart. … Women with babies in their arms, kids who should be home reading fairy tales, old codgers who’d look natural on the front steps whittling — all trying to get a few minutes rest and sleep in the double-decker bunks put up on every station platform. … Some of them have been sleeping there four years now. … A lot of the youngsters, in fact, never knew any other bed.
His stay in England was brief, as he arrived in Naples by late April to begin coverage of the Mediterranean theater. One of his first stories filed from there hearkened back to his comfort zone — a piece on former NFL star Mike Mikulak, now a major serving as the chief of military police in Naples.
Feder spent much of the spring working out of Allied headquarters in Naples, with occasional visits to the front, then moved to Rome following the Italian capital’s liberation in early June.
On Aug. 15, 1944, Feder accompanied the 36th Infantry Division ashore in Southern France, marveling at the lack of opposition as some elements of the landing party raced three miles inland within four hours of hitting the beach near Cannes.
Hitting on a pair of small narrow beaches covering a sector about three miles wide in this area, they had expected to tangle with all kinds of hell. Instead, the troops … encountered only scattered small arms fire.
I counted only four wounded men across the entire beach, which is virtually the same spot as that on which Napoleon landed on his return from his exile in Elba.
Less than two months later, Feder was with British forces as they landed in Greece to flush the Germans out of the long-occupied country. As he covered the fighting from the beaches into Athens, though, Feder’s mind drifted back home, as he would write once he returned to Italy on Oct. 17.
“The worst fate that can happen to a baseball fan is being in Greece at World Series time surrounded by British troops and without communications to find out what is cooking,” he wrote. “For Greece doesn’t know how important the Series is and the Tommies don’t care.”
Missing the World Series for the first time in a decade, Feder eventually learned that the Cardinals had prevailed against the upstart Browns in the all-St. Louis affair.
After seeing out the rest of the war in Europe with Fifth Army, Feder returned home in late summer 1945 and was on hand in Detroit for Game 1 of the World Series between the Tigers and the Cubs.
Feder would leave the AP in 1947 to freelance for a variety of publications, then served as editor of Baseball magazine in the early 1950s. But he wasn’t content to spend the rest of his career covering sports.
He teamed up with high-profile prosecutor Burton Turkus to publish his first book, Murder, Inc., in 1951, and it became an immediate sensation that was later adapted for a 1960 movie of the same name starring Peter Falk.
In 1954, Feder and fellow journalist Joachim Joesten published a biography of gangster Lucky Luciano as the former newsman settled into a niche writing true crime stories.
Feder and his wife moved to Victoria, Texas, in the mid-1950s and he began writing a sports column for the local paper when he wasn’t working on his books. He was in the process of writing The Great Brinks Holdup when he died in February 1960 after spending several weeks confined to his home due to a heart ailment. He was 50 years old.
Joseph F. Dinneen, a fellow reporter turned true crime author, finished the book for him and it was published in 1961.
wow. interesting read. that's my grandfather and namesake.
The Internet Movie Database claims that Feder was born in 1906 and died at age 81 in 1987 - and not born in 1909 and died at age 50 in 1960. Which is correct?