Interview with Jim Syta
Name, occupation
Jim Syta. I’m a patent attorney.
What years were you a teenager?
1974-1980.
Who were some of your favorite celebrities/idols as a teenager?
I would say in the early part of my teen years I idolized baseball players including Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Lou Gehrig.
I think my favorite as a teenager was Roy White, Bobby Murcer, Reggie Jackson, Sparky Lyle, Thurman Munson, Mickey Rivers, and Catfish Hunter.
I always read a lot about and idolized Babe Ruth just as kind of like being the greatest. In my mind he was the greatest baseball player who ever lived so he had more of an idol status for me.
Woody Allen, I was a fan of his movies. Clint Eastwood and Alfred Hitchcock.
Maynard Ferguson, he was a trumpet player.
Farrah Fawcett, Suzanne Somers, Jaclyn Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Olivia Newton-John.
Why did you care about them?
Even before my teen years, I was playing baseball with neighborhood kids, and that was my favorite sport, so we just naturally gravitated towards it, not just me, but all my neighborhood friends. We would also watch professional baseball on TV, and we got interested in certain teams, my favorite team was the Yankees.
I would say I was proud of them for the progress that they made through my teen years, from being kind of like a mediocre team to being like the best team.
And then I would also say I felt, it made me feel better about myself, because now I was a long-time fan of a team that was now the best team.
I admired them, too. I would fantasize about playing professional baseball, playing on the Yankees, playing center field for the Yankees.
Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, I really admired people who could make funny movies. I did start thinking about it more as something I could do, or that I might be interested in doing.
Clint Eastwood played a cool character in all of them, and he just became kind of like a movie icon for that reason. He exuded strength, but without a lot of talking, and I thought maybe those were qualities that maybe I could somehow incorporate into my own self.
And I admired Alfred Hitchcock’s and Orson Welles’ abilities to direct movies.
How did you interact with your favorite celebrities as a teenager?
I don't know if it fits with the word interact, but obviously baseball players, I would watch them on TV.
We would kind of mimic what they would do on the field, and so everybody would kind of know, “oh, you're doing the batting stance of Tony Perez” or whoever.
We were kind of interacting with them in a very indirect way.
And also, we played a game.
It was called Strat-O-Matic Baseball.
This was a dice-based baseball game that would come out every year on these cards. If you played the game, it was based on statistically trying to recreate how the actual players would have played in the previous year of baseball, of the Major League Baseball.
You would get a pack of cards for each team, and then each card would be one player.
We kept records of the games. And that, again, was a way that we interacted with our favorite players because we got to be kind of like the manager of the team.
If I was the manager – I would be the manager of the Yankees.
And I was playing this game, and then I could interact with Thurman Munson or Reggie Jackson or Roy White by deciding where to place them in the batting order and what pitcher to pitch and when they should steal a base, you know, stuff like that.
That was a big way that we interacted with the baseball players.
What about fan mail? Were you part of any fan clubs? Did you read any magazines, sports magazines?
Yeah, we read two different sports magazines on a regular basis.
One was called the Sporting News, which is kind of more like a newspaper, but they would have articles like a magazine would have, but it's more like a newsprint kind of format.
And Sports Illustrated was a true magazine, and we would read that.
We didn't belong to a fan club.
However, we would write letters, not to specific baseball players, but we would write letters to the teams and we would ask them to send us – we didn't use the term merch back then – but basically we were asking for any kind of sticker or pamphlet or team photo.
We would just politely ask if they could send us something from their team.
I also had posters of my favorite celebrities.
What kind of relationship do you feel like you had with your favorite celebrity?
It felt like a very distant relationship.
I felt I was a fan, but very, very far away from them.
I didn't feel like I knew them personally.
So I felt the relationship was very slight, very tenuous.
It's almost like they didn't know me.
How do you interact with your favorite celebrities now?
Well, some of it's very much the same as what I did as a teenager.
I watch movies and TV shows who have celebrities that I might be interested in. I would say the difference is that like, there's certain things I don't do anymore. I'm not buying posters anymore.
I'm not really watching talk shows to hear celebrity interviews. I do if I do come across one, I still might enjoy hearing an interview with a celebrity. But I guess I don't seek it out as much, probably.
I'm maybe exposed to more celebrity interviews when I'm browsing through YouTube stuff, for example, I might come across.
It's usually something that was on TV, but I didn't watch it on TV, but now it's on YouTube. With baseball, I keep up with the Yankees more through YouTube and the Yankees website now than ever before.
I've kind of eliminated like The Sporting News and the Sports Illustrated reading.
With movies, I'm still watching them. I guess what's different is there's different ways to watch movies now, so it's not through broadcast TV or going to the movie theater.
Although I'm probably never going to watch a broadcast TV movie anymore. I do still go to movies in the theaters, but more often than not I'm watching it through a streaming service, some kind of streaming service. That's probably, or still sometimes on DVD.
What kind of relationship do you feel you have with your favorite celebrities now?
Yeah, I'm not even sure I would use the word relationship… I don't think I have a relationship with any celebrity right now. I'm a fan of certain baseball players or something, or movie directors. I guess it's still a fan relationship if you can call it that. I would say it's probably more of a distance. The distance I feel is even more than what I felt when I was a teenager.
Why do you feel like the distance is more than when you were a teenager?
Because I have other things in my life going on that take up my time and energy, and my interests are directed to other things other than the celebrities, so I just don't.
They're occupying a smaller space in my life, so therefore they feel more distant because of that.