You can’t take the New Yorker out of Society of Midland Authors’ recent award-winning biographer and St. Charles resident Judith Testa, and you certainly can’t wash out the dirty mouths of trash-talking baseball players. “Fucking cocksucker this and fucking asshole that—that’s the kind of language that baseball players actually use, ” proclaims Testa, who remembers, at age 7, watching Dodgers’ feared pitcher of the 1940s and 1950s and subject of her latest book, Sal Maglie, commonly known as “Sal the Barber.” Testa, a retired NIU art history teacher and author of “Rome Is Love Spelled Backward,” has clearly strayed away from her expertise to delve into her favorite childhood pastime and focused on “the one sport she always truly understood or cared about.” She says of Maglie, “He was really scary—not just to batters but to his audience, even watching him on television,” she says. “He was very sinister, he just conveyed an atmosphere of menace.”
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