George Frazier’s duende

OP-ED | Charles Fountain

100 years after his birth, columnist haunts our imagination

June 12, 2011|By Charles Fountain

THE ECHOES grow ever more faint as we move ever farther from their source. George Frazier has been gone for 37 years, and we don’t hear as much about him anymore.

But, oh, how those echoes did thunder in their day. As a columnist at the Globe, and before that at the Herald, the wistful George Frazier could make us pine for days when Hobey Baker played for Princeton, or Count Basie and Duke Ellington played the Roof at the Ritz, their music wafting out across the Public Gardens and the Charles River and into the soul of a generation. The puckish Frazier would make us laugh and think in the same column, cutting to the quick of a Boston pol’s overstuffed persona while talking about nothing more than his hat (Sonny McDonough) or his pants (Dapper O’Neil). And the angry Frazier would eventually abrade our sensibilities, whatever they were, for his was a mercurial and unpredictable voice.

“George is like a jazz musician,’’ his friend Charlie Davidson, the Harvard Square clothier, famously said a quarter-century ago. “Jazz musicians know the melody, but they never play the melody; they’re always playing the improvisation. George is like that. People keep searching for the melody, but there is no melody. George was always playing the improvisation.’’

Immortality in a business as ephemeral as daily journalism is nigh-on impossible, but every city has a newspaper guy who will be forever identified with that city. H.L. Mencken in Baltimore, Jimmy Breslin in New York, Mike Royko in Chicago, Herb Caen in San Francisco. Frazier, born in Southie 100 years ago last week, is that guy for Boston.

In the years since his death, the Globe has reprinted dozens of his columns, sometimes just to let readers savor them again, or for the first time. Sometimes because they were still timely, such as the 1970 tribute to Fred Astaire that ran when Astaire died in 1987. Writers who knew him and writers who didn’t constantly evoke Frazier’s name and his words, because, well, because having George Frazier in your piece is like having the most interesting guy in the bar at your table. Besides, whatever it was you’re trying to say, chances are pretty good that Frazier said it with far more élan.

READER COMMENTS »

View reader comments » Comment on this story »