June 8, 1961: Danny Murtaugh is like the Pirates. Tough, blue-bearded, underslung jaw, he looks like a sulfurous-tempered truck driver. Actually, he is shy and modest and the kind of worrier whose biggest fear when he took the manager's job was that other managers around the league might not want to take him on as a coach if he failed.

June 2, 1961: Parry O'Brien at the age of 29 will be a chief drawing card at the Compton Invitational tonight. He is one of the most durable and remarkable athletes of our time. In the record books of track and field -- which mean more on the veldts of Africa and the steppes of Russian than Spalding's Baseball Guide ever could -- he rates a page all to himself.

June 1, 1961: Among those celebrating the convictions of Blinky Palermo and Frankie Carbo is a Boyle Heights prizefight manager named Harry Shall. Harry gave the government a chance to throw the book at Blinky Palermo a long time ago, nearly 10 years, when he haled him into Federal Court for stealing a fighter from him but Harry made the mistake of lumping CBS, Pabst beer, the IBC and others in his suit and Harry was lucky to escape in his underwear when their battery of lawyers got through with him.

May 31, 1961: Emile Griffith is a slashing boxer from the Virgin Islands whose waist is so narrow and shoulders so wide that he would have to go to a tailor for his suits even if it weren't the only way he could get a belt in the back that buttons in the middle -- and colors to match the silver and gold buckles on his shoes.

May 26, 1961: There was in our midst this week a young man whom the pressures of baseball exploded like a too-tightly wound clock. Jim Piersall has lived out his baseball career on the narrow edge of hysteria -- and once in 1952 he toppled over when the Boston Red Sox (reluctantly, because he's a gifted player) had to throw a straitjacket over him and put him in a mental institution.

May 25, 1961: Baseball fans may be a superstitious lot, but they’re nothing compared to the players and their mystic rites. Jim Murray says: “You can always tell a ball team on a winning streak. The locker room smells like a flophouse. Most ballplayers wouldn't think of changing an article of clothing while they're winning.”

May 24, 1961: Donald George Bragg is depressed. In the first place, some young upstart had just broken his listed world record in the pole vault. In the second place, the upstart had done it using a fiberglass pole and it is the considered opinion of Donald George that this is like winning a craps game with dice you can't throw a seven with, or a card game with five natural aces.

May 23, 1961: The Angels, who have a clear track to 10th place at the moment, are even ready for desperate measures. They are encouraging people to come out and root AGAINST them.

I tested this idea for soundness with an old friend of mine from my magazine days, Chuck Champlin. He quickly switched his thoughts into gray flannel, pushed his horned-rimmed glasses up his nose and decided that what was needed was good old Madison Avenue know-how.

May 22, 1961: A horse, left to his own devices, would no more run a race for his daily oats than you would wrestle the butcher two out of three for a pork chop. It's that pest on his back, the jockey, who louses up his otherwise peaceful day at the feedbag.

But Bill Shoemaker, who rode his 4,000th winner the other afternoon, is an old smoothie with the horses who gets a good ride out of a mount the same way a cad coaxes a kiss out of a girl -- with soft words and smooth technique.

May 20, 1960: Jim Murray has the day off, but I couldn’t pass up this artwork by Jack Clark. I can’t find anything about him in The Times' clips, but I’ll keep looking.

May 19, 1961: Jim Murray revisits the 1960 crash of a chartered plane carrying the Cal Poly football team, killing 22 people.  As always, he does a terrific job.

May 17, 1961: John F. "Pep" Lemon, an old-time catcher, is superintendent of parks in the city of Fullerton and his job is trees and shrubs and lawns. But it's also kids. Pep never had a child of his own, but the den of his home is lined with pictures of kids in uniform -- most of them catchers' uniforms but some in military uniforms. Three of them --"best prospects you ever did see" -- were buried in those military uniforms, Billy Jones, Von Jones and Earl Stoner, before a big league scout ever got a look at them.