THE WRITE STUFF: Rounder Records co-owner Bill Nowlin has penned 15 books about the Red Sox, and has three more on the way. |
October 1, 1967. Bill Nowlin, a 22-year-old college student who’d spent the summer bumming around Europe on $2 a day, is at Fenway Park, crouched behind the low wall separating the players from the fans. Two outs, top of the ninth. The Red Sox are about to clinch a tie for first place by defeating the Twins. They’re on the verge of what will be known as “The Impossible Dream,” beating 100-1 odds to win the American League pennant. Jim Lonborg throws; Rich Rollins hits a pop-up to shortstop. Rico Petrocelli backpedals, squeezes the ball, and within moments radio announcer Ned Martin is exclaiming, “There’s pandemonium on the field!”
Nowlin was one of the first people to vault over the wall and rush the mound. “My seats were in the grandstands, way high up,” Nowlin says. “I moved around so I was between the screen and the third-base dugout. They weren’t thinking this mob would go out on the field. When I got out to the mound, I clapped Lonborg on the back and said something inane like ‘good job.’ ”
I was there, too, in the right-field grandstands. I was 11, and before I hit the field with another wave of fans, I checked with my parents. They gave their assent — this was a joyous celebration, no riot — and off I went. It was the happiest moment of my young life. (Keep in mind: the Red Sox, nicknamed “The Cardiac Kids,” hadn’t won the pennant just yet — the Angels needed to beat the Tigers in the second game of their double-header — but it felt like it. The Angels won 8-5.)
Birth of a (Red Sox) Nation
When Nowlin and I meet up nearly 40 years later, at a pizzeria near Fenway, we swap stories. We’d both gathered bits of turf and sand from the field for souvenirs. We’d both lost them over time.
But Nowlin has spent a lot of time going back over 1967. He is a co-editor of, and contributing writer to, The 1967 Impossible Dream Red Sox: Pandemonium on the Field. (Re-edited parts will run throughout the season in Red Sox programs.) Lonborg penned one of the book’s forewords. Of the celebration, he wrote it was “really a special thing and, yes, it got a little scary, but some of Boston’s finest came and helped me. What happened after that came could never happen again.” (See “Cast of Characters.”)
Nowlin’s exhaustive Impossible Dream is published by the book arm of the Burlington-based company he co-owns, Rounder Records. That’s how most Bostonians — at least music fans — know him: as one of the three co-founding Rounders, the folks who championed folk and blues artists back in 1970 and went on to build New England’s largest independent label.
