When I was working at the Yakima Herald-Republic in the early 1980s, I did a story on Harlond Clift, a former major-league star who in his old age was living a lonely life of near-poverty in a trailer home in Yakima.
It wasn’t until years later I found out that Mel Stottlemyre, another former major-league great abiding in Yakima, had been moved to action by that article. He took it upon himself to visit Clift (with his sons in tow) and help him out, starting a relationship that he maintained for years.
When I was covering Mel’s son, Todd, with the Oakland A’s in 1995, he told me that story.