Best-known for performing the most popular baseball poem, "Casey at the
Bat." Filmed as one of the first talkies, 5 years before
Der Jazzsänger (1927),
Casey at the Bat (1922), was
included in Ken Burns'
Die Baseball-Story (1994). Hopper, a fervent
New York Giant fan, first performed the then-unknown poem to the Giants
and Chicago Cubs, on the day his friend, Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher
Tim Keefe had his record 19 game winning streak stopped, August 14,
1888. The dying General William T. Sherman was also in the audience
that evening, along with Keefe and his brother-in-law
shortstop/attorney John Montgomery Ward. 2 months later the Giants won
New York's first world championship.
Hopper recited Casey for almost 40 years in films, on stage, records,
radio etc. Known as the "Husband of His Country" for his 6 marriages.
He became totally hairless, with blue-tinged skin, possibly from
reaction to a patent medicine. Even so, his powerful voice and great
sense of humor mesmerized women all his life. One of his wives was the
gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Their son, the white-maned William
Hopper, played private investigator Paul Drake on Perry Mason for many
years.
