DeWolf Hopper Sr.

Biography

DeWolf Hopper Sr. turned a comic baseball monologue into a lifelong passport to fame. On 14 August 1888, the New York Giants were reeling from Tim Keefe’s snapped 19-game win streak when Hopper—a theatre star and unabashed Giants rooter—strode onto the stage at Wallack’s Theatre, faced the wounded team and their Chicago Cubs rivals, and uncorked Ernest Thayer’s unknown ode to a swaggering slugger. In the house that night sat General William T. Sherman, gaunt and dying, flanked by Keefe and shortstop-lawyer John Montgomery Ward. Two months later the Giants clinched New York’s first World Series title; Hopper’s recitation of “Casey at the Bat” had become the city’s unofficial rally cry. He never let go of it. For four decades the poem rode his booming baritone through vaudeville houses, gramophone discs, radio waves, and the 1922 DeForest Phonofilm—an early talkie that beat The Jazz Singer to sound-on-film by five years and later showed up in Ken Burns’ Baseball. Between encores Hopper collected five more wedding rings, prompting wags to dub him “the Husband of His Country.” A bad reaction to a patent tonic left him hairless and his skin moonlit-blue, yet the voice and wicked wit kept dressing-room doors revolving. One of those brides was Hollywood gossip empress Hedda Hopper; their son, silver-templed William, would trade the family footlights for Perry Mason’s investigator Paul Drake.