The last time I communicated with Andy was in 1999 – the year Tiger Stadium closed. The late Joe Falls, the Detroit-based sports columnist who is enshrined in the writer’s wing of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, bought my idea of doing a three-hour CD with voices of baseball greats giving memories of the famed ballpark. We spent much of that summer on the project and I gave it its title: “Echoes of Tiger Stadium.”
An executive at a Detroit company who was a card collector, and from the same ethnic background as Pafko, bought many copies for gifts and to give a gift back, I wrote Andy and asked him to write a personalized thank-you to the exec.
He did, on an index card we framed along with a large photo version of the famous Pafko baseball card, and our summer had a happy ending.
Andy Pafko was number one with me in many ways.
He died in 2013 in a Michigan nursing home, four months shy of his 93rd birthday.