100 Year Run: RIP Sid Hartman

[Guest]

“We had very little in common. But we became the best of friends. Sid had integrity, which is why he was successful. He didn’t embellish what you told him, which is why you could trust him. I’ve said it before: As one man can love another, I loved Sid.”

Bud Grant

Sid Hartman and Bud Grant made the unlikeliest of best friendsSid and Bud — the persistent reporter and the outdoorsy athlete/coach — bonded for life
“It’s hard to describe why we hit it off, because we were totally opposite of one another,” Grant said. “He was just a good person who as a columnist had integrity. He was involved in my life longer than anyone else, longer than my parents, my wife, my kids — longer than anyone. He was my best friend.”
From his early reporting days, Sid made a habit of coming to the Gophers locker room after practices. Other reporters had gone home by then or back to their offices, Grant said.
“I often was slow to dress and leave the locker room when I was playing at the U,” Grant said. “I had no place to go necessarily, and was in no hurry, so Sid and I often walked out of practice together. We’d end up having dinner together, and after I got married, my wife, Pat, would get off work at 6 and the three of us would eat together.”
Grant invited Sid to go duck hunting once, and the two of them, along with the late Otis Dypwick, the U communications director, and Gophers fullback, linebacker and captain Dave Skrien, left for Morris, Minn., after a Saturday Gophers football game.
“Otis was speeding through Litchfield, I think it was, and we got pulled over by a cop,” Grant said. “Sid of course got out and started talking to the officer, asking him if he was a football fan and telling him that right there, in the back seat, he had two Gopher football players. Sid told him we had just finished playing a game, and that we were going duck hunting.
“Then Sid said, ‘Would you like to see a game yourself?’ and the officer said, ‘Sure.’ So Sid pulled out a couple of tickets and handed them to the cop, who put them in his pocket. Then the officer handed a piece of paper to Sid and said, ‘And here’s a ticket for you, Mr. Hartman.’ ”
Sid and Grant’s relationship grew so tight that some 60 years later, on the night before Pat Grant died of Parkinson’s disease in 2009, she made her much-heralded goulash for her husband, their son, Peter — and Sid.
https://www.startribune.com/sid-hartman-...572790732/

[Guest]

Crazy how long he's been around. Sid was a grown man, working in newspapers, before Pearl Harbor. That just blows my mind. 

My first real job was at a newspaper and I worked there for almost 10 years. Even in that short amount of time, I saw a lot of "old newspaper men" come and go. I don't know whether it's my distorted memory of them or what, but they all seem to wear frumpy, ill-fitting, nicotine-stained shirts and kept bottles of scotch in their desk drawer. Unlike Sid, a lot of them were unable to adapt to changing technology and were let go before they could retire. Ben Folds wrote a great song about men like this, men who were "forgotten but not yet gone." 

This song made me sad when I first heard it 20 years ago because it reminded me of the old newspaper guys. Now it makes me sad because I'm that guy. Or very close to it. LOL. RIP Sid.