He never collected or sought any royalties from the comedian Hopper, or from any of the poem's frequent republications.įather: Edward Davis Thayer (wool magnate, b. He rarely read "Casey" in public, and could not recite it from memory. Numerous rumors and theories persisted for decades (and still do) about Casey's true identity, but Thayer repeatedly said that the poem was not based on any particular ball game or players. Toward the end of his life he returned to philosophy, writing several articles on the topic, but found to his frustration that he was increasingly well known for a poem he had written in just a few hours when he was 24 years old. The few other poems he wrote were generally light, comic, and forgettable. Thayer's father owned a prosperous wool mill and the family was wealthy, so Thayer worked only sporadically, for his father's mills when he was young, and as a newspaper columnist later when the spirit struck him. It was republished a few weeks later in the New York Sun, but its popularity came mostly from almost 40,000 performances of the poem by comedian DeWolf Hopper (1858-1935). It was the Examiner that first published Thayer's ode to baseball, Casey at the Bat, on 3 June 1888, under the pen name "Phin". Remains: Buried, Santa Barbara Cemetery, Santa Barbara, CAĮrnest Thayer studied philosophy under William James at Harvard, and later wrote a weekly column for classmate William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner.
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