Arnold Hano

Early life and education

The youngest of two boys born to Clara (née Millhauser) and Alfred Barnard Hano, Arnold Hano spent his pre-school years in northern Manhattan's Washington Heights, in close proximity to both the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium. A Yankee fan at 4, Hano responded to New York's 1926 World Series loss by switching his allegiance from the Yankees to the Giants, where it has remained ever since. That same year, his family moved from Manhattan to the Bronx, where it would remain for more than a decade, precisely the period which, by Hano's own reckoning, comprised his formative years.

By age three, Hano had learned to read under the tutelage of his six-and-a-half-year-old brother, Alfred, Jr. By the time he was eight, Hano was writing news stories for his brother's mimeographed weekly, The Montgomery Avenue News, albeit stories paraphrased from published newspaper articles. Before long, he grew tired of recycling other people's ideas. Once again, his brother encouraged him:

So I invented a cop who would always fall to his knees when he shot the bad guy and I called it Sitting Bull. It was my first pun. [...] I did about six or seven of these episodic things. I was eight years old, writing the equivalent of a novel for a street newspaper that we sold for a nickel a copy, door-to-door.

The brothers' journalistic venture soon ran its course, and the writing muse receded, for the time being. Hano attended DeWitt Clinton High School, graduating in 1937, and started that fall at Long Island University's Brooklyn campus. However, his initial plan to pursue a career in medicine soon fell by the wayside.

One day I wandered into the newspaper office, and they were laughing. I didn’t know you were allowed to have fun. They were enjoying themselves, so I changed from a science major to an English journalism major in my sophomore year. I became the sports editor of the college weekly in my junior year, and senior year I was editor-in-chief with another guy.

For a budding sportswriter, the timing proved particularly fortuitous when LIU's basketball team won the recently established National Invitational Tournament (NIT) in two of those three years. Long before that transpired, however, Hano knew one thing for certain. "I didn’t know how or what – would it be a newspaper, or freelance, or a novelist, but I knew I’d write." Hano went on to earn his Bachelors degree, graduating cum laude in 1941.

Career

That summer, Hano was employed as a copy boy by the New York Daily News. Once his sports background was established, Hano's duties were expanded accordingly. Accompanying the News photographer to sporting events, he was now tasked with providing captions for those shots he brought back to the office, thus affording the nineteen-year-old undreamt of opportunities to chronicle baseball history. As Hano put it, almost 70 years later:

I’m the luckiest fan in the history of the world. When I was a copy boy at the Daily News, I was sitting in the Ebbetts Field press box when that ball got away from Mickey Owen.

Interrupted in these endeavors by the United States' entry into World War II, Hano followed his brother into the armed forces in 1942 (Alfred, to the Air Force; Arnold, the Army), eventually serving in an artillery battalion of the Seventh Infantry Division, participating in the Aleutian Islands Campaign and later landing in the first wave on Kwajalein Atoll. Shortly after that battle, informed that his brother was missing in action on a mission over Germany, Hano successfully applied to be commissioned as an infantry officer at Fort Benning, thus allowing him to be deployed to the European Theater, where he hoped to find his brother. However, before this plan could be realized, the war ended and Alfred's remains were recovered.

After his discharge, Hano returned to New York and a career in book publishing, first as managing editor with Bantam (1947–49), then as editor-in-chief with Lion Books (1949–54). In the latter capacity, Hano served as editor for, among others, novelists C.M. Kornbluth, David Goodis, David Karp and Jim Thompson. Thompson, in particular, would benefit from Hano's input and support, which sparked an unprecedented period of productivity.

It was during this period, specifically August 1951, that Hano debuted as an author with the baseball-themed young adult novel, The Big Out, described by New York Times' reviewer Ralph Adams Brown as "one of the most thrilling sports novels this reviewer has ever read."

But it was 1954 that proved to be the turning point for Hano; he left Lion Books, determined to sink or swim on the strength of his writing. What gave rise to this sudden resolve was an across-the-board ten per cent pay cut imposed by Martin Goodman. But by far the most important event that year – or at least the most pertinent to Hano's emergence as a writer – was Game 1 of the 1954 World Series, Hano's handwritten record of which would form the basis for his breakthrough book, A Day in the Bleachers, published the following year. Notwithstanding poor marketing and disappointing sales, the book was embraced almost without exception by critics and has since come to be regarded as a classic of sports literature, with new editions published in 1982, 2004, and again in 2006. Moreover, the book's signature passage, its description of Willie Mays' most famous play, has been, and continues to be, frequently cited, quoted, or reprinted in full.

Buoyed by the book's enthusiastic reception, Hano began to establish himself as a freelance writer, his work appearing in publications such as The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, TV Guide, Sport, Sports Illustrated, Seventeen, Good Housekeeping, Boys' Life, Argosy, Saga, and True's Baseball Yearbook. Willie Mays was also the subject of one of several sports biographies written by Hano during the nineteen sixties and seventies, the others being Sandy Koufax, Roberto Clemente, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Muhammad Ali. Moreover, Hano was a frequent contributor to Lion Books' annual paperback series, Baseball Stars of 19 _ _ (later published by Pyramid Books), providing forty of its chapter-long player profiles between 1958 and 1975. In addition, Hano wrote one book—Greatest Giants of Them All, published in 1967—composed entirely of such chapter-length biographies.

On April 7, 1964, Hano was named 1963's Magazine Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association. Two weeks later, he received the 1963 Sidney Hillman Memorial Award in the category of magazine journalism (as selected by judges Alan Barth, William Shirer and Howard K. Smith), for “The Burned Out Americans,” a muckraking study of conditions facing migratory farm workers in California's Central Valley.

Hano has also taught writing at the University of Southern California, Pitzer College, and the University of California, Irvine. Between 1989 and 1992, Hano was a contributing editor at Orange Coast Magazine.

In 2012, Hano became the 12th recipient of Baseball Reliquary's annual Hilda Award, established in 2001 "to recognize distinguished service to the game by a fan."

On July 19, 2015, The Huffington Post announced the upcoming release of Hano! A Century in the Bleachers (circa fall 2015 with a November 2015 DVD release), a documentary examination of Arnold Hano's life and work, produced and directed by Jon Leonoudakis. Among its interviewees are Hano and fellow sportswriters Ron Rapoport, Ray Robinson, John Schulian, Al Silverman and George Vecsey, plus artist Mark Ulriksen, and former Major League stars (and subjects of multiple Hano magazine articles) Orlando Cepeda and Felipe Alou.

Personal life

Hano has two children (Stephen A. and Susan C. Hano) by his first marriage. Hano and his current wife, the former Bonnie Abraham, have been married since June 30, 1951; they have a daughter, Laurel. Bonnie and Arnold Hano have lived in Laguna Beach since September 1955, with the exception of a two-year Peace Corps stint spent in Costa Rica, starting in July 1991. Active in community affairs ever since their arrival, the two were honored as 2013 "Citizens of the Year" in that year's Laguna Beach Patriot's Day Parade.