Forever young

Does Sid really still work up his columns?

That’s a common question lobbed at any Star Tribune journalist at a cocktail party. First question: Do you know Sid? Second question: He doesn’t actually still work, does he?

Yes. That’s the short answer. And there is no long answer. No buts. No kinda, sorta. He works. Nearly every day. He tracks down interviews. He bugs important people for one-on-ones. He snags an exclusive off to the side at a news conference. He calls people; they call him back. And he still jumps on the WCCO airwaves, too, just as he’s done since the 1950s.

Sid gets help with the technicals, in recording and transcribing his interviews, but Sid Hartman writes Sid Hartman columns. Three times a week. Four in the fall.

You can say he’s slowed down a bit, but only because there was a long period of superhuman Sid writing six or seven columns a week. He treks through the Star Tribune newsroom three or four times a week these days, parks in his own personal Smithsonian of an office and works another piece of printed history into form with his editor, Jeff Day.

He’ll tell a story, crack a joke, dig out a remarkable piece of Minnesota sports history, usually from his head, sometimes a shelf or a drawer, or the picture-filled walls of that office. But mostly: work.

This streak of hard work, the span of it all, is mindboggling. As a newspaper-hawking boy, he hustled in the Depression. As a 99-year-old columnist, he told his sports editor he wanted to start blogging more. Unheard of. Imagine an Instagram influencer who got a first break in a talkie. A Tesla engineer who trained on Model Ts.

Back near the beginning, in 1938, Ted Williams and Sid Hartman were two young pros in Minneapolis. They both “had big dreams back then,” Williams remembered many years later.

Williams’ one summer in right field with the Millers was a prelude to him becoming the best hitter anyone’s ever seen. Hartman’s summer of ’38 led to 81 more similar summers of sports and newspapering, making him the most prolific sportswriter anyone’s ever known.

When Williams was long retired and Sid was stretching his prime into a new millennium, Williams said “Sid has quite a story to tell.”

He’s still telling it. Three times a week. Four in the fall.