That was a lovely crowd gathered the other day to bid farewell to Jim Henneman, who left us, at 89, after covering every sport around here — except maybe quoits — from the dawning of the Kennedy White House years until recently.
He covered the Orioles for so long, and so well, that the ball club named the press box at Camden Yards after him. He wrote about the Baltimore Colts when John Unitas was a young man in high-top cleats, and he wrote about the Baltimore Bullets of Earl Monroe and Wes Unseld so knowingly that the team snatched him away from the newspaper business for five years so he could run their press office.
As a kid, Jim played varsity baseball and basketball at Calvert Hall and then at Loyola College. He coached some amateur teams. He wrote a marvelous book called “Baltimore Orioles: 60 Years of Orioles Baseball,” and was president of the Baseball Writers Association of America.
How well regarded was he by the players he covered, and his peers?
At the farewell service last week, it was Tim Kurkjian, the veteran baseball writer, who told the big crowd at the Ruck Funeral Home, “Jim Palmer was here to pay respects earlier today. When is the last time you heard about a Hall of Fame player paying respects to a sportswriter?”
And it was Boog Powell who was calling Henneman’s room at Great Baltimore Medical Center as the days dwindled down.
Across the years, you could find the Henneman byline in The News American, The Sun, PressBox and Baltimore Magazine. After the city’s daily newspapers downsized or folded, he spent a couple of decades as the official scorer at Orioles home games.
He was talking about writing a memoir when his time started running out.
He was part of that terrific collection of sportswriters at The News American when I was breaking in there. Autumn of 1966, baseball season’s over, and Jim was covering Navy football. Give him any sport, he could write about it.
As the kid on the staff, I was sent to Annapolis on game days as Jim’s assistant. He’d write running play-by-play of the Middies’ game, and I’d phone his copy to somebody on the sports desk back in Baltimore as deadline approached and the game reached its climax. It was a primitive system, but it’s all that we had 60 years ago.
I was still a college kid doing an internship back then, but Jim never made me feel like anything less than a pro.
He gave everybody that kind of respect. Not only the people he dealt with every day, but his readers. He wrote with intelligence, wit and a keen analytical eye that came from playing the games himself and watching the action across most of the decades that comprised modern Baltimore sports history.
He did it for such a long time that Jim Henneman became a treasured piece of our history himself.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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