Eddie O’Brien, Who Played for Pirates With His Twin

Eddie O’Brien, left, and his brother Johnny, right, also starred for the Seattle University baseball team. They are pictured here with Pittsburgh Pirates Manager Fred Haney. Credit via David Eskenazi Collection

 Eddie O’Brien and his twin, Johnny, were basketball and baseball stars at St. Mary’s High School in South Amboy, N.J., but when they graduated in 1948, their athletic careers seemed to be over. They were only 5 feet 9 inches tall, and no college program wanted them.

But by the mid-1950s, the O’Brien twins had become familiar figures on the national sports scene.

When Eddie O’Brien died in the Seattle area on Feb. 21 at 83, he was remembered for teaming with Johnny to bring Seattle University to national basketball prominence, then joining him as a middle infielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Their potential as college athletes was recognized while they were playing in a national semipro baseball tournament in Wichita, Kan., in 1949. They faced a team that included a first baseman named Al Brightman, who happened to be the Seattle University baseball and basketball coach.

The game went into extra innings.

“In the 12th, I got on first and Brightman asks, ‘How are your grades?’ ” Eddie O’Brien once told The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “I told him: ‘I can’t talk to you now. I just got the steal sign,’ and I stole second. That was it. A week later, we got scholarship offers in a telegram.”

Violinist Who Vanished

The New York Times - Patricia Travers, shown in 1946, stopped performing in public by the early 1950s, giving no notice and never explaining why.

March 7, 2010
Patricia Travers, Violinist Who Vanished, Dies at 82
By MARGALIT FOX

At 11, the violinist Patricia Travers made her first solo appearance with the New York Philharmonic, playing  Lalo’s “Symphonie Espagnole” with “a purity of tone, breadth of line and immersion in her task,” as a critic for The New York Times wrote in 1939. At 13, she appeared in “There’s Magic in Music,” a Hollywood comedy set in a music camp. Released in 1941 and starring Allan Jones, the film features Patricia, chosen by audition from hundreds of child performers, playing with passionate intensity.

Quite an amazing video, that.

In her early 20s, for the Columbia label, she made the first complete recording of f Charles Ives’s Sonata No.2 for Violin and Piano, a modern American work requiring a mature musical intelligence. Not long afterward, she disappeared. Between the ages of 10 and 23, Ms. Travers appeared with many of the world’s leading orchestras, including the New York, London and Berlin Philharmonics and the Boston and Chicago Symphonies. She performed on national radio broadcasts, gave premieres of music written expressly for her and made several well-received records.

Then ... nothing, a six-decade-long silence that lasted from the early 1950s until Ms. Travers’s death on Feb. 9 at 82. Her death, of cancer, in a Montclair, N.J., nursing home, was confirmed by her lawyer, John Sullivan. Ms. Travers, who never married, leaves no immediate survivors.

Ms. Travers disappeared by hiding in plain sight, living quietly with her parents in the house in Clifton, N.J., in which she had grown up. She remained there till well past middle age, through the death of her father in the 1980s and her mother in 1995. Afterward, she moved to a condominium nearby. By all accounts, Ms. Travers rarely spoke of her career. As her obituary last month in The Record of Hackensack, N.J., reported,  neighbors knew her only as the reserved owner and manager of a commercial property in Clifton she had inherited from her parents.

That obit is worth looking at, for a different take: Carnegie Hall was atwitter as Patricia Travers — an 11-year-old from Clifton with brown curls and an angel’s face — ascended the stage Patricia, who took up violin at age 4, performed the Mendelssohn Concerto with the National Orchestral Association "to a rapturous and prolonged demonstration," Olin Downes wrote in The New York Times on Jan. 16, 1940. The performance helped propel a career as brilliant as it was fleeting.

Curious, the Hackensack obit quotes the Times critics, and the Times does not.

Why Ms. Travers gave up the violin will never be fully known. But it is possible to make an educated guess, based on old newspaper accounts of her career (reading between the lines), and on the work of contemporary psychologists who study gifted children. As psychologists have found, a prodigy’s life is defined by a particular narrative arc — one that often ends, as Ms. Travers’s did, with early promise unfulfilled.

“Prodigies are much less likely to go on to become major famous creative geniuses than they are to become unheard-of and drop out,” Ellen Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College, said in a telephone interview on Friday. “What it takes to become a prodigy is very different from what it takes to become a major creative adult.” She added, “Most do not make that leap.”

An only child, Patricia Travers was born in Clifton on Dec. 5, 1927. (The year is often given erroneously as 1928; it was common then for prodigies to be billed as younger than they really were.) Her father, Samuel, was a lawyer, semiprofessional singer and accomplished violin maker. Her mother, the former Veronica Quinlan, is described in some accounts as having been an amateur pianist.

Patricia began violin lessons at 3½, eventually studying with the violinists Jacques Gordon and Hans Letz. At 6, she gave her first public concert, at Music Mountain, the summer chamber music festival in Falls Village, Conn. At 10, she performed on national radio with the Detroit Symphony under John Barbirolli. At 11, Patricia was already playing a violin made by Guarneri del Gesù; before she was out of her teens, she also had a Stradivarius.

One of the few people alive who performed with Ms. Travers then is Lorin Maazel, who stepped down last year as music director of the New York Philharmonic. Mr. Maazel, who turned 80 on Saturday, led the Pittsburgh Symphony several times as a child conductor, with Ms. Travers as the child soloist. “Patricia was a soulful artist, mature and poised,” Mr. Maazel wrote from Europe in a recent e-mail message. “One didn’t think of her as a child prodigy.”

If the young Ms. Travers was “reticent and somewhat withdrawn,” as Mr. Maazel recalled, onstage she came alive with a fire that drew praise from most critics. Writing in 1939, when she was 11, the journal Violins and Violinists rhapsodized, “We feel sure that the prophecy that Patricia Travers is to become known as one of the great women violinists will be fully realized.” But with such prophecies comes great pressure, and many prodigies eventually undergo a psychological crisis. “It hits at adolescence,” said Professor Winner, the author of “Gifted Children: Myths and Realities” (Basic Books, 1996). “That’s when they say: ‘Who am I doing this for? My parents or me?’ ”

At that point, prodigies often stop playing. Ms. Travers, however, appeared to make it through her teenage years. She became a specialist in modern American music at a time when few performers gave it much thought. She recorded work by Ives, Roger Sessions and Norman Dello Joio. In 1947, at Carnegie Hall, she gave the premiere of “Incantation and Dance,” written for her by the Hawaiian-born composer Dai-Keong Lee. But when she was in her early 20s, her notices, once glowing, grew more measured. In 1951 The Christian Science Monitor reviewed a performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto by Ms. Travers, then 23, with the Boston Symphony: “Miss Travers at present appears to be in an intermediate position between two extremes,” the review said. “On the one hand her foundational studies are well in the past; she is obviously a professional who is competing very well among her peers. On the other hand she is not yet either a brilliant technician nor a compelling interpreter.”

The Boston engagement appeared to have been her last with a major orchestra. “She gradually dropped from sight,” Mr. Maazel recalled. “Don’t know why. Probably, as happens in most early-career artists, she just lost motivation and perhaps went in quest of the proverbial lost childhood.” Ms. Travers’s Strad and Guarneri passed to other hands long ago. At her death, she had just one violin left — not a valuable one, her lawyer, Mr. Sullivan, remembered her saying. The only person for whom Ms. Travers seems to have played as she grew older, he said, was her mother.

An earlier version of this article misspelled the Guarneri family name as Guarnari.

The Hackensack obit continues:
Patricia Travers, an only child, stayed put in Clifton with her parents, Samuel and Veronica. She never married. When she died on Feb. 9, at 82, she was remembered not as an incandescent talent but as an attentive Allwood Road landlady. Miss Travers tended the small row of tan-brick stores her father, a lawyer, built in 1950. She became more involved in managing the property after her father died in 1981 and her mother in 1994.

One of the stores is Allwood Florist. Kathy Milne, an employee there, knew Miss Travers for 17 years. She had no idea Miss Travers once had the world at her feet. "How many people Google their landlord?" Milne said. "She was just the nice lady you sent the check to." Googling helped Wayne lawyer John Sullivan learn more about his client of nearly 40 years.

Google your landlord.

Also unable to shed light on Miss Travers’ career was Joshua Bell According to Cozio.com, a Web site that identifies and prices old stringed instruments, the 42-year-old international star and Miss Travers had a violin in common: the 1732 "Tom Taylor" Stradivarius. Miss Travers owned it from 1945 to 1954. Bell owned it from 1987 to 2001, when he reportedly sold it for a little over $2 million. Through his spokeswoman, Bell said he never heard of Patricia Travers.

Sy Syms: 1926-2009

Remembrances



For an 'Educated Consumer,' He Discounted Designer Suits

By STEPHEN MILLER

Sy Syms was a pioneer of off-price designer labels whose fame rested on folksy commercials that belied his talents as a merchandiser.

Mr. Syms, who died Nov. 17 at age 83, is remembered by many New York men as the source for their first suits, and by television viewers of both sexes as the star of late-night ads featuring Mr. Syms proclaiming, "An educated consumer is our best customer."

Originally a seller of bargain men's clothing and haberdashery in the Wall Street area, Mr. Syms later opened stores in suburban malls. He offered designer-label clothes at discounts he claimed were 30% to 50% and more off retail prices.

Mr. Syms's monotone gave few clues to his background as a broadcaster. Ultimately, Mr. Syms joined the pantheon of other do-it-yourselfer admen in the New York area, such as Tom Carvel in the ice-cream business and Victor Potamkin, an auto dealer. Mr. Syms was savvy enough to set up his own ad agency to ensure that he got the agency discount when he bought airtime.

"He had the ability to be a merchant, a promoter and a financier all at the same time," says Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates, a retail consulting and investment banking firm. "He is the first guy to offer discount designer suits on a major scale."

Investment bank and retail consultant; interesting combination.

Born Seymour Merinsky in Brooklyn, Mr. Syms was the son of Russian immigrants who started out in the collars and cuffs business. He served in the Army during World War II, studied broadcasting at New York University on the G.I. Bill, and worked as a radio broadcaster for a few years in the late 1940s, calling minor league baseball games.

In 1950, Mr. Syms joined his brother's clothing store, "Merns," near Manhattan's financial district. In 1959, he left to open his own store, called "Sy Merns," and was forced in a legal dispute to use a different name, according to an account provided by the company. He chose "Sy Syms," and opened on Cortlandt Street, near his brother's store and a few blocks from Wall Street.

I remember Merns, vaguely.

"It was his joy to be on the selling floor from 12 noon to 2 o'clock," says Marcy Syms, Sy's daughter and now chief executive of the company. "That's when the traders and bankers and lawyers would come in." Today, salespeople are still called "educators," she says, which follows his habit. "He loved to explain the clothes."
Obituaries

* Notable deaths from the business world and entertainment industry from Tributes.com.

The Cortlandt Street store made headlines when U.S. Steel Corp. wanted to eject Syms to make way for construction of a skyscraper in 1967. With months still remaining on his lease, Mr. Syms refused to budge and told The Wall Street Journal it would take "a minimum of $100,000" to get him to move. He soon moved for a much smaller sum.

Mr. Syms's shop on Cortlandt Street was adjacent to the Hudson Tubes. There, trains ran to New Jersey, where an estimated 90% of his customers lived. In 1971, he opened his largest store ever in Paramus, N.J., and began more aggressively moving into marked-down brand-name suits. He also added women's wear.

To support his expansion plans, Mr. Syms started advertising on the radio, reading the scripts himself. The first television ad came in 1974, and it was Mr. Syms who took credit for the trademark "educated consumer" phrase. It replaced an earlier slogan, "Unbelievable Syms!"

As his business expanded, Mr. Syms cut deals with big European labels such as Armani and Brioni to buy their excess production, and would then sell it at something close to wholesale.

In the early days, Syms clerks would snip the designer label out of the suit before handing it over to customers. Stores were kept Spartan, with black walls and plain racks weighed down with huge amounts of merchandise.

The formula worked, and Syms expanded in the 1970s and went public in 1983. Ms. Syms succeeded her father as CEO in 1998. This year, Ms. Syms led Syms Corp. in the takeover of retailer Filene's Basement. Altogether, Syms now operates 52 stores.

One fan was New York Mayor Edward Koch, who has shopped at Syms since the 1960s. "I just bought two jackets there," Mr. Koch said in an interview. "They're both big bargains."