ABSTRACT
As he was growing up in small-town Michigan, Ring Lardner had no ambition to become a journalist nor did he envision the day when he would regularly interact with the baseball players that were his heroes. He was born March 6, 1885, in Niles, Michigan, a small town just five miles north of the Indiana state line. His parents, Henry and Lena Phillips Lardner, were at the top of the Niles social scale. Henry, a gentleman farmer, was descended from Lynford Lardner, a British immigrant who became a leading citizen of Pennsylvania in colonial times. Lena Bogardus Phillips was the daughter of the Reverend Joseph Phillips, the rector of the Trinity Church, the Episcopal Church where anyone who was anyone in Niles worshipped on Sunday morning. Lardner reached the top of Chicago journalism in 1908. From 1908 to 1910, Ring alternately covered the Cubs and White Sox for the Chicago Tribune, the major Chicago newspaper.
