Kevin Nelson, Writer

May 3, 2012. The article I wrote about Kerry Yo Nakagawa and the feature film he made about Nisei baseball, American Pastime, is now online, published by Sports Collectors Digest. Check it out right here. The article is headlined "Nisei Baseball: How the pain of wartime internment camps became one man's passion," and "passion" is the right word when describing Kerry. He's an amazing fella, completely dedicated to telling the story of Nisei baseball. The movie is good too, excellent for families. 

This photo, which is part of the article and is also in my book, The Golden Game, shows a historic meeting of cultures in Fresno in 1927 when Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth played an exhibition game with Japanese-American stars of that time. From left, they are Johnny Nakagawa (Kerry's uncle, I believe), Gehrig, Kenichi Zenimura, Ruth, Fred Yoshikawa and Harry Iwata.

[end]

2.4.12. Here's a fine shot of James Dean, above, sitting in a race car at the start of a race, ready to rock. You see his intensity and see that he was no Hollywood poseur when it came to automobile racing; he was into it. As I write in Wheels of Change, I thought the photo was taken in Bakersfield. But no, it was Santa Barbara, as author Lee Raskin points out here, while adding some nice details about other people who were involved:

Hi Kevin...I forgot to mention earlier that the photo you used in your book of JD ...was taken by photographer, Frank Worth at Santa Barbara, May, 1955.  Jimmy is actually sitting in #75, a RHD Ferrari Mondial, owned by Johnny von Neumann (standing on other side of Jimmy with hands on the door in photo), who was the Porsche dealer and owner of Competition Motors in Hollywood. This Ferrari was raced by JvN's step-daughter Josie in the ladies class at Santa Barbara. In my James Dean: At Speed book, there is a sequence of photos taken by Frank Worth and my text as the narrative.

My post last time was a letter from Lee about Dean, which you can see right here. [end]

Aug. 29, 2011 The other day at the vintage races at Laguna Seca, I picked up a couple of copies of Classic and Sports Car Magazine, an entertaining English monthly about vintage cars. One of them was an old issue dating back to July 2010. Last night I was reading it and lo and behold, stumbled upon a review of Wheels of Change that I had never seen before. They liked the book in England too! If you're curious, here is the review:

Aug. 12, 2011 If you're ever watching a movie and you wonder about one of the cars shown in it, here's the website for you: Internet Movie Cars Database, or IMCDb.org. Similar to the all-movie site IMDB.com, only about cars, IMCDb.org is an encyclopedic site that identifies cars in the movies, including reader comments that tell you year, make and other features. Last night, as we were watching "The Fast and the Furious" (not the 2001 film with Vin Diesel, but the 1954 black and white "B" movie made by Roger Corman and set at the Pebble Beach Races and Concours d'Elegance, where I'm going next week), my wife flipped over to IMCDb on her iPhone to see what cars we were looking at. IMCDb catalogs most of the cars seen in the movie, including these two fine English sportscar imports.

1953 MG-TD

1953 Jaguar XK-120

July 27, 2011. An email today from a reader of the blog here at KevinNelsonWriter.com.

"Thanks for all the work you do and information you share. I have tried to be an educated memorabilia consumer since the late 1990s. I am currently finishing my thesis in Economic Crime Management, and my thesis topic is better educating consumers around sports memorabilia fraud. Keep up the great work and if you have any advice let me know."

Kevin Nelson responds: My pleasure, and thanks for the kind words! We cover lots of topics here at KevinNelsonWriter.com, one of them being fake memorabilia and the crooks who sell it. You keep reading and we'll keep providing the info.

July 25, 2011. Check it out: Here's an article I wrote about Andy Strasberg, a San Diego sports agent and lifelong Roger Maris aficionado (and friend), who is helping to celebrate this, the 50th anniversary of Maris's record-breaking 61-home run season for the Yanks. The article was published in a magazine in June and just posted online. Click here and enjoy.

July 2, 2011. Recently I received this note from a reader: "I was wondering if the audio version of The Greatest Golf Shot Ever Made was ever digitized for CD?  I know you mentioned it on your blog a few years back. I am a big fan of George S. Irving, and know someone who is a huge golf fan who would be so thrilled to have this, but alas, I no longer have a cassette player. Thanks."

The Greatest Golf Shot, now out of print, was a collection of golf stories and anecdotes made into two audiobooks, which were voiced by the highly honored Broadway actor George S. Irving. A few years back I received word from the publisher that they were going to turn the tapes into CDs, but that was the last I heard of it. You would think the author would know everything there is to know about his work, but the truth is, sometimes the author is the last to know. I frankly don't know what the state of this project is, but your letter has spurred me to look into it. I do still have a cassette player, but alas, I don't use it much. [end]

May 4, 2011 Lately through my communications company, Southampton Media, we have been working with several firms on how to better tell their stories. We have created Power Points for them to present to venture capital investors, who are interested in potentially planting seed money into their companies to make them grow. Such investors need to know the financials of any project—the numbers must work out, no doubt—but like everyone else in the world, even the most hard-nosed businessmen/investors like to hear a good story, told well. Curiously though, I've found that many new as well as established companies and organizations have no idea how to tell their stories to potential investors, the public at large, or even their own customers. And yet effective storytelling can help you achieve your business goals, as this recent piece in Investor Business Daily shows.

April 19, 2011. Sometime after Operation Bullpen was released, I received a call from a chap named Randy Roberts, inviting me over to see his $100,000 baseball card and memorabilia collection at his house. But one thing led to another, and I never took him up on his nice offer. Time passed. Then I got another call from Randy, who said he was now thinking about selling his collection and that he'd love to have me see it before he did. So this time I said yes. I brought my sons with me, and we spent a pleasant morning looking at old baseball cards that are worth pretty good new money. Always the writer, I thought the question Randy was considering—whether or not to sell a treasured collection of keepsakes—was interesting, and worth further development. Click here for the article I wrote on it for Sports Collectors Digest.

What do I know from spices? Not much, really. I know salt, pepper, and on those occasional occasions when I roast up a chicken (not long ago, actually, I made one to celebrate our 13th wedding anniversary—huzzah!), I will comb through our spice cabinets in search of a precious vial of Penzeys Poultry Seasoning. This is no easy task—the searching, I mean. Our spice cabinets packed with Penzeys are more crowded than a New York commuter train at rush hour.

What, you don't know Penzeys? People who do cook and are good at it (such as my wife, who learned about Penzeys from her mother; knowledge of Penzeys is apparently passed down from generation to generation, like a family heirloom) swear by the Wisconsin company's spices. Wouldn't cook without them, they say. Far better than the supermarket brands. 

The other day when it was freezing outside, we made hot chocolate from the Penzeys Hot Chocolate Mix. The hot chocolate was tasty, and I enjoyed the directions on the jar too: "Hot Chocolate: Mix 1 rounded TB in each cup of milk. Stir well, simmer gently, sigh contentedly."

Wheels of Change was one of three books nominated for "Best Book of the Year," an annual award presented by the Los Angeles Motor Press Guild, the most prestigious organization of automobile journalists and industry professionals in the country. Awards were given in the categories of photography, articles, audio-visual, and books. The awards dinner took place Dec. 7 at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, and about 150 people attended. Jay Leno appeared and made some opening remarks.

Designed to honor "excellence in automotive journalism," the awards are presented in the name of the late Dean Batchelor, a truly excellent writer and journalist and one of the founding fathers of the hot rod revolution in this country. Book of the Year honors (and the Batchelor Lifetiime Achievement Award) went to Can-Am Cars in Detail, by Pete Lyons, who spoke briefly when he came to the podium to accept his award. The ceremony was not set up for Lyons and the other winners to give acceptance speeches, and so even if Wheels had won I likely would not have said much. But because it was Pearl Harbor Day, it started me thinking about what I would have said if a) the judges had chosen my book and b) if I'd had the guts to actually stand up and say the things I was thinking. This, then, is the acceptance speech I never gave, for the book award that never was: [...more...]

This is a passage from The Thanksgiving Visitor, by Truman Capote (a beautiful short story, by the way, that can be read as an adult and enjoyed or read with children, who will equally enjoy it):