)[12] After describing his childhood enthusiasm for Schoor's work—typical of his generation of school children—best-selling sports author and sports-PR executive Marty Appel wrote, "Give [Schoor] the player’s year by year stats, throw in some good newspaper clips with some quotes about how the scout discovered him, create some locker room conversation between the star and his manager, sprinkle in some self-doubt after that .222 average in the first month of the rookie season, and bang, you had a 190-page book at $4.95 with a handful of some of the team’s best free publicity photos tucked in.
"[5] Journalist Jeff Kallman adds: "If you are my age, and you became a baseball fan early enough in childhood, you probably know the name Gene Schoor.
He wrote a library's worth of sports biographies for children in the 1950s and early 1960s.... Schoor's technique ... involved mulcting as many newspaper and/or magazine articles as he could find about his subject, using the creamier quotes, making sure they included tales of how his subject was scouted, a quote or three in which our hero had his doubts, and as much rah-rah in the triumph as could be tolerated short of a need for Tums.... [T]he books were hits and they did give a lot of kids an entree into reading by way of their game.
This group of sportsmen will underwrite all expenses of the chosen candidates and will pay a salary of $10,000 a year for the full training period.
"I started to ad-lib right there," Schoor recalled; at the time (as Sports Illustrated later put it), his group "had little more than an idea, a restaurant and a shoeshine."
The group's first major prospect (but at least fiftieth client) was James J. Beattie; at 6 feet 8 3/4 inches and 240 pounds, he was said at the time to be "the biggest boxer to ever enter the ring."
"I passed out," Schoor alleged in his court complaint; "Bells have been ringing in my head ever since and I had a fuzzy feeling for weeks."
[19] In 1994, Schoor sued Kennedy biographer Nigel Hamilton and publisher Random House for $20 million, claiming that material in the defendants' best-selling book JFK: Reckless Youth had been appropriated, without payment or proper acknowledgment, from Schoor's research files (including extensive interview notes).
His wife had died, he had no other family [note: Appel adds a postscript suggesting Schoor had an illegitimate son], and the nursing home costs depleted all of his remaining money.
Kind people at the home tried to sell his remaining author copies of his own books to get him some spending cash, but he was suffering from mild dementia and lacked memory recall.