THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 19
Janet Mills, the governor of Maine—to
certify the occasion with an official proc-
lamation of Roger Angell Day.
Before getting to the whereases, she
said, “In Maine, while we brag about
our ponds and peninsulas, our gardens,
our granite, our grandkids and green
fields, and goats old and young, our
woods, our words and our language are
the dearest thing to us. That is why I’m
here to honor a premier wordsmith,
Roger Angell—someone who has used
words to elevate us, to inspire us, to get
at the truth. He tells it straight. He writes
about winning and he writes about the
pain of loss and regaining life again.”
Angell had his own list of thank-yous,
as well as an apology to “everybody else
in town who has been discommoded by
this interruption to their wonderful Sat-
urday and going about their business,
large numbers of whom have little or no
interest in an old guy from away. I am
from away. I will always be from away,
and I don’t mind. I’m away from New
York City, which I love—I love New
York; I love leaving New York to come
up here, and I love going back there. I’m
a New Yorker through and through, but
I think I also qualify as a Brooklin reg-
ular, and I’m very proud of this.”
One request: “I want you all please
to keep your distance—social distance—
be very careful. And if there’s any im-
pulse to rush the podium here and pick
me up on your shoulders and carry me
around, resist that.”
—Mark Singer
off some recent designs: apes and aliens
waiting at airport security, a print of angry
paisley swirls (“Peeved Paisleys”), stud-
ies for a stink eye. “The intent is always
to try to make myself laugh,” he said, be-
fore signing off. He was working on a
sea-monster puzzle and had to go.
—Anna Russell
Roger Angell
1
DEPT.OFHOOPLA
ANGELLATAHUNDRED
B
orn five years before the founding
of this magazine—but a contribu-
tor for only the past seventy-six—Roger
Angell has spent his one-hundredth
summer in customary fashion. In late
June, he and his wife, Peggy Moorman,
drove a spring-chicken ’97 Volvo wagon
from their COVID refuge, in the Catskills,
to Brooklin, Maine, and settled into their
gray-shingled camp on a point over-
looking Eggemoggin Reach, with Deer
Isle in the near distance. Angell began
coming to Brooklin in 1933, the summer
before he turned thirteen. That was the
year his mother, Katharine Sergeant An-
gell White, and his stepfather, E. B.
(Andy) White, each a foundational
source of The New Yorker’s DNA—Kath-
arine primarily as a fiction editor and
nurturer of writers, Andy as progenitor
of the magazine’s editorial voice—bought
an eighteenth-century farmhouse, with
an attached barn, in North Brooklin, sit-
uated above a large pasture, pond, and
woods that sloped down to a gravelly
beach on Allen Cove, on Blue Hill Bay.
When Angell returned to Brook-
lin this year, he anticipated observing
certain seasonal and quotidian routines:
admiring the Eggemoggin Reach Re-
gatta of wooden sailboats; morning round
trips with his walker to the Center Har-
bor Yacht Club (“a porch surrounding a
Ping-Pong table,” in his description); a
6:30 p.m. Scotch-and-water (plenty of
ice and a side of cheese, crackers, and ol-
ives), in time for the news (usually NBC,
always PBS); postprandial Yanks/Mets/
Bosox broadcasts; and periodic visits to
the Brooklin Cemetery, where, in the
shade of an expansive oak, six headstones
mark the graves of Katharine and Andy
White, Roger’s brother Joel White, his
daughters Callie and Alice Angell, and
his wife of forty-eight years, Carol Rogge
Angell (1938-2012). Next to Carol’s is an
identical seventh, a slender marble slab
engraved with his own name and birth
year, standing by. Although Angell spent
five-plus decades as a fiction editor and
is best known for his matchless œuvre
of baseball writing, including seven books
and scores of blog posts, his most widely
read essay for the magazine was “This
Old Man,” a ninety-three-year-old’s un-
flinchingly intimate account of what one
discovers, savors, bears, rues, and forgives
in the late chapters of a very long-lived
life. He recalls a threat from Carol as her
death neared: “If you haven’t found some-
one else by a year after I’m gone I’ll come
back and haunt you.” He obliged in the
summer of 2014, when he and Moor-
man married a week or so before he was
inducted into the writer’s section of the
Baseball Hall of Fame; the following
winter, he was elected to the American
Academy of Arts and Letters—a dual
distinction uniquely his.
One non-routine engagement: Ac-
cording to the chronometer, Angell won’t
segue into his second century until Sep-
tember 19th, but various friends of Friend
Memorial Public Library, in the center
of Brooklin, decided to celebrate early.
On a sunny Saturday in early August, an
ample crowd gathered on the front lawn
of the library’s modest white Greek Re-
vival home. Among them were grownups
in summer hats, dogs, children sitting
cross-legged in the grass, relatives from
near Portland (three hours down the
coast), and Angell’s stepdaughter, Emma
Quaytman. Absent, alas, were his son,
John Henry Angell, et famille, grounded
in Portland on the opposite coast. Also
absent was a particular nephew, Steve
White, president and chief owner of the
renowned Brooklin Boat Yard—away
delivering, yes, a boat with his partner,
Jen Sansosti.
Perched on a wooden stool on the
porch was the honoree, dressed in blue
cotton pants, a blue-and-white checked
button-down shirt, penny loafers, pur-
ple face mask, and his signature Wooden
Boat ball cap. The preliminaries included
music by a three-piece string band and
recitations of thank-yous to a long list
of volunteers. Then a convivial woman
with short blond hair was introduced—
