For Sid Dorfman, three score and 10 equals a lifetime of sports journalism
At an age when many modern teens are trying to improve their video game skills, Sid Dorfman, the peerless sports columnist for The Star-Ledger, embarked on a career the length and depth of which we will probably never see again.
To call him a walking encyclopedia would be cliched…and inaccurate: He’s also a thesaurus, dictionary, social register, and yellow pages. To try to condense his contributions to the worlds of sports and journalism into a few hundred words is a fool’s errand. Among his many honors, he has been inducted into several halls of fame, most recently the MetroWest Jewish Hall of Fame in 2004.
The Newark-born Dorfman began his career as a 15-year-old high school correspondent for the Newark-based Morning Ledger in 1935. Two years later he took on an additional position with Metropolitan News Service, which supplied such life-cycle information as wedding notices and obituaries for newspapers around the New York-New Jersey area.
When the boss of MNS ran off with the secretary in 1938, Dorfman took over the company; the following year, he changed the name to Dorf Feature Service.
The DFS office, now located in Mountainside, is practically empty at 9 a.m. Only Dorfman and his assistant are present. The rest of the staff —50 full-time and 40 part-time employees — will start their day around 11.
It has become a family business: Two of Dorfman’s children, Gary and Rhoda, work for the company, as does Scott, a grandson. Joseph, the son of his second wife, Marrianne, works in sales.
“Retirement is not for me,” Dorfman said. “If you retire, you die.” So, on the verge of his 86th birthday, he still comes to the office every morning. “I love operating this organization, to be able to get up every morning and write columns….” Dorfman has been writing those columns ever since The Star-Ledger first went to press in 1939.
During the conversation, Dorfman several time mentions his father, Harry, who, as an 18-year-old cantor, came to America from Odessa, Ukraine, in 1903. Dorfman said he remembers standing outside his Newark shul as a youngster, marveling to hear his father and his contemporaries talk so knowledgeably about Hank Greenberg, the first Jewish baseball superstar.
Harry Dorfman passed away in 1981 at 96. When Greenberg died in 1986, sports columnists Jim Murray and Jerry Izenberg, a close colleague of Sid Dorfman’s, wrote about the father’s obsession. Dorfman said that after reading Murray’s column, he looked up and said, “Pop, you ain’t going to believe this, but you just got 15 minutes of fame here.” Laminated copies of the columns hang next to a proclamation signed by Gov. Richard J. Codey in May 2005 commemorating Sid Dorfman’s 70 years on the job.
Dorfman is credited with many innovations. He expanded coverage of high school and college athletics and girls’ sports (recognizing the potential for adding their mothers as readers) and introduced an “all-state” ranking system for schools and individual athletes. “There are 322,000 students in 47 colleges in New Jersey,” he said. “Factor in their families and the schools’ alumni, and you have millions of fans who were being neglected. Regional newspapers can’t keep up, so we provide that service.”
Asked if there were any other professions he would have liked to try, he said, “I can’t think of anything else I would have wanted to do. I think there are other professions that are more important perhaps, but then again, what’s more important than the newspapers in relation to our democratic society?”
This launched an oration about the dangers of the Right, which he considers “a small minority.”
“They complain about the mainstream press being the enemy of society. My God, if you didn’t have a mainstream press, you wouldn’t have to worry about society; it wouldn’t exist.”
Having been in the industry for almost three-quarters of a century, Dorfman has seen his share of technological innovations. “We’re in a transitional period,” he said. “The whole industry is questioning what it has to do to remain viable.” Unlike other veteran newsmen, Dorfman said, he believes there can be an “accommodation between newspapers and the Internet.”
“People will not give up their newspapers that easily. [They] still love the printed word right in front of them. Besides, you can’t take [the Internet] into the bathroom.”
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