ERNEST LAWRENCE THAYER

Ernest Lawrence Thayer (1863–1940) – Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Thayer studied philosophy at Harvard, where he also served as and editor for the Harvard Lampoon. After graduating he toured Europe, and was in Paris when a college friend, William Randolph Hearst, offered him a job as a humor columnist for his new paper, the San Francisco Examiner. He worked for the Examiner for three years, and contributed a few comic poems to another Hearst paper, the New York Journal, before quitting to oversee his family’s mills in Worcester. In 1912 he retired and moved to Santa Barbara, where he married Rosalind Buel Hammett. Casey at the Bat, first published in 1888, did not gain popularity until several months after its publication, when the popular singer-actor-comedian De Wolf Hopper performed it on Broadway before an audience that included team members of the New York Giants and Chicago White Stockings (today’s Cubs).

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