Casey at the Bat
Every newspaperman in San Francisco, of course, knew who "Phin" was, but nobody else did, and so when the poem was copied by other papers, the meaningless signature was usually lopped off. Meanwhile, Mr. Thayer had quit the newspaper business and gone into the more profitable vocation of manufacturing woolen goods at Worcester, and people gradually forgot that he had once been a humorist. But after Mr. D'Vys's claims had been given a wide publicity, he went before a notary public at Worcester and made an affidavit to the facts of the case—although, as he remarks, the affidavit "left D'Vys quite undiscouraged." He too had made an affidavit!
But Mr. Thayer's story is supported by a great deal of outside evidence. Eugene Lent, who went west with him and was a member of the Examiner staff when "Casey" was written, became afterwards one of the best known lawyers in San Francisco, the senior member of the firm of Lent & Humphrey, and on more than one occasion has borne testimony to his personal knowledge that Mr. Thayer wrote the poem; Theodore F. Bonnet, who was covering baseball for the Examiner at the time, has also told the story of the poem's first appearance; in 1896, Mr. Hearst asked Mr. Thayer to write another series of ballads, this time for the New York Journal, and he contributed four
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