The real name of the Little League team was the B'nai B'rith, but everyone called them the B'nai Bagels. Their manager was Bessie Setzer, but everyone called her Mother Bagel, and the team grew to love her and even Spencer, Brother Bagel, their coach.
Which was fine for everyone but Mark Setzer. For him it made problems. Because with a mother as manager and a brother as coach, he felt he had lost his right to be awful on the field and had gained a lot of sticky situations. Then, in addition to worrying about his performance on the baseball team, he had to worry about his performance at his Bar Mitzvah and about his friend, Hersch, who had moved to another part of town and found another best friend.
Practicing in the relative privacy of The Projects, where there were some very good and very interesting players, helped Mark's game. It took more than that to help the rest, though. And there were some tough moments before Mark felt competent to handle the social situations and moral decisions his position demanded of him.
Only a few years ago, E. L. Konigsburg was packaged in the lumpy, acid-stained lab coat of a chemist. After receiving a Bachelor of Science degree from Carnegie Institute of Technology, she went to the Graduate School of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh until with sudden insight—two minor explosions in the laboratory sink—she realized that it was easier to teach than to be a part of chemistry. So this is what she did after her husband, David, received his doctorate in psychology and moved the two of them to Jacksonville, Florida. She retired from teaching for a time to bear three children: Paul, Laurie, and Ross. She returned to teaching briefly before her husband moved the five of them to various suburbs of New York City. But after Ross started kindergarten she began to write in the mornings and produced her first book Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth. This book was named runner-up for the 1968 Newbery Medal. Her second book, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, was named winner of the 1968 Newbery Medal. She is the first author ever to have a Newbery winner and a runner-up in the same year.
The Konigsburgs live in Jacksonville, Florida, again.
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