While anyone who has ever stepped foot into an after-school Sentinel meeting knows the newspaper can launch students into remarkable writing careers, few stories illustrate this more clearly than that of Sentinel and St. Luke’s alumnus Peter Golenbock ‘63.

Golenbock’s love for baseball began early. At age 12, he discovered Frank Graham’s book The New York Yankees: An Informal History in his local library, and it quickly became a favorite. From then on, he knew he wanted to be the centerfielder for the New York Yankees. He played baseball all the time and was the captain of his summer camp varsity team that won 100 straight games.

He arrived at St. Luke’s in sixth grade and soon met a teacher who would shape the rest of his life. Golenbock calls former Headmaster Dr. Joseph R. Kidd his “greatest influence, for certain.” Dr. Kidd taught him the value of precise grammar and the art of diagramming sentences, skills Golenbock believes are “sadly lost to today’s generation of writers.”

During his sophomore year at SLS, while standing at the plate in a baseball game, he faced a curveball that broke clean across the strike zone. In that moment, he realized he would never become the Yankees’ centerfielder. The dream that had guided his childhood quietly slipped away, but another path was about to open.

That path began at the Sentinel. Golenbock spent all four years of high school on the newspaper’s staff, and during the paper’s twenty-third year of publication, his senior year, he served as its Sports Editor. For the first time, he could combine his love of sports with the writing foundation he had gained in Dr. Kidd’s classes.

At Dartmouth College, he continued this work, writing about athletics for all four years and becoming sports editor his junior year. Some of his articles even appeared in the New York Times and The Boston Globe.

After graduating from Dartmouth, Goldenbock studied for three years at NYU Law School, where he admitted he “spent a lot of time at Madison Square Garden and Yankee Stadium.”

In 1972, he got a job working for the legal department of Prentice-Hall, a publishing company. Six weeks later, he walked down to the trade book division of the company, knocked on the top editor’s door, and talked himself into a contract for his first book, Dynasty. The book chronicled the Yankees teams from 1949 to 1964 that won 14 pennants and nine World Series titles. After the book’s publication, a New York Times Article called it one of the best baseball books ever written.

Golenbock’s career only grew from that point. The Bronx Zoo, which he coauthored with Yankees pitcher Sparky Lyle, became a New York Times bestseller and was later named as one of Sports Illustrated’s Top One Hundred Sports Books of All Time.

Across his career, Golenbock has written 70 books, including ten that reached the New York Times bestseller list. Critics have praised him as “undoubtedly one of the nation’s foremost and best-known sports authors” and the writer behind “some of sports’ most important books.”

So while joining the Sentinel may not guarantee one the degree of literary success of this alumnus, it can’t hurt either.