Oral Histories: Miami and the Super Bowl

Harvey Frommer is a noted sports author and oral historian. He has written more than forty-two sports books including Remembering Yankee Stadium, Remembering Fenway Park, and the autobiographies of Red Holzman, Nolan Ryan, and Tony Dorsett. Cited in the Congressional Record and by the New York State Legislature as a sports historian and journalist, Dr. Frommer is a professor in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program at Dartmouth College. In When It Was Just a Game: Remembering the First Super Bowl (Taylor Trade Publishing), Frommer tells the fascinating story of the ground-breaking AFL–NFL World Championship Football game played on January 15, 1967. Filled with new insights, containing commentary from the recently discovered unpublished memoir of Kansas City Chiefs coach Hank Stram, and featuring oral history from many who were at the game—media, players, coaches, fans—the book presents back story and front story in the words of those who lived it and saw it go on to become the Super Bowl, the greatest sports attraction the world has ever known.

Just in time for the one-hundredth anniversary of Miami Beach, It Happened in Miami, the Magic City: An Oral History (Taylor Trade Publishijg) by Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer, features nearly seventy mini-memoirs, ranging from World War II to today, including segregation, Meyer Lansky and cops and robbers, the Cocaine Cowboys, the post–war glamour of the flashy hotels designed by Morris Lapidius such as the Fountainbleau and Eden Roc, the Jewish presence and contributions, the swinging days of the Rat Pack, and the presence of Muhammad Ali at the iconic Fifth Street Gym, the preservation efforts that saved art deco, and the days of the Mariel and Pedro Pan and the Cuban impact.