jews d

T rue Af
A ficionados

ALAN MUSKOVITZ CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Eddie Lake
Society
members live,
breathe and
talk baseball
year-round.

ABOVE: Eddlie Lake Society members
Frank Reinstein and Irwin Cohen with
some of their Tigers memorabilia.

N

o World Series for our Tigers this year because their 2017
season was more of a World of Tsuris. With the Fall Classic
beginning next week, our beloved Bengals are absent from
post-season play for the third consecutive year.
With this past season’s trades to reduce their $199.75 million
payroll, they’re also absent most of their superstars. And what is
the average Jewish baseball fan to do now that the Tigers are void
of our one and only Jewish manager Brad Ausmus? Move on to
football? Not so fast.
The aforementioned topics are reasons enough to keep talking
baseball with a passion if you happen to be one of dozens of mem-
bers of our Jewish community who live, breathe and think baseball
even as winter approaches. That’s because they’re members of a
distinguished group of baseball aficionados that is Detroit’s Eddie
Lake Society (ELS). Fifty percent, give or take, of the society’s 100
members are Jewish. But Eddie who?
Eddie Lake is an ordinary ball player who donned the Old
English D from 1946-1950. Ordinary being the operative word in
describing why his name was chosen to be the namesake of the

society by its founder, the late Detroit News sportswriter Joe Falls,
who created the group 20 years ago. But why Eddie Lake?
“He did very little to be immortalized as a major league ball
player,” Jerry Green, a colleague of Falls wrote of Eddie Lake in
2015. “But that is the perverse reason Eddie Lake has been immor-
talized in Detroit. Because he was ordinary. So, it is that a group of
baseball addicts — ordinary men and women — meet monthly in
gab sessions of the Eddie Lake Society.”
So, nu? Where’s the Jewish connection? Joe Falls wasn’t Jewish,
but the co-founder of the society, Max Lapides, 90, of West
Bloomfield is. As the story goes, Max called Joe one day to spout
off about one of his columns, which resulted in a lunch date —
and several more lunches and a friendship. Joe expressed to Max
that while he covered all sports, he wished he could get a group
together to just ... talk ... baseball. And the rest, as they say, is his-
tory.
If each Jewish member of the society had his or her own base-
ball card, you’d learn quickly they’re a veteran group. Dr. Manny
Sklar, 92, former chief of gastroenterology at Sinai Hospital, who

continued on page 12

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October 19 • 2017

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PHOTOS BY JERRY ZOLYNSKY

on the cover

in
the