Longtime readers of The New Yorker will not, of course, need to be reminded who Mr. Angell is — an eminent baseball writer, an editor at the magazine since 1956 and the stepson of E. B. White. But they may wonder where “Greetings, Friends!,” an annual poem that was a New Yorker institution for nearly eight decades, has been. It was written by Frank Sullivan from 1932 until 1974, and by Mr. Angell starting in 1976. But “Greetings, Friends!” vanished after its 1998 iteration and has not been seen again until now.
Mr. Angell, for example, once won a palindrome competition with the writer Alastair Reid, Mr. Gill wrote, by composing the following epic, the speaker of which is an insane war veteran in a government hospital: “Marge, let dam dogs in. Am on satire: Vow I am Cain. Am on spot, am a Jap sniper. Red, raw murder on G.I.! Ignore drum. (Warder repins pajama tops.) No maniac, Ma! Iwo veritas: no man is God. — Mad Telegram.” Mr. Gill wrote that the palindrome was, at the time, “perhaps the world's longest.”
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