Lou Kranz’s dad was a butter and egg man.  In the Bronx  during the Depression, Mr. Kranz delivered.  Today, in California, it’s his son Lou who delivers.  Timely line drives, running catches, reliable all-round play—Lou is the butter and egg man, still speedy at 79.  “I always was a good athlete, but not exceptional,” he says modestlIn fact, Lou is a sports all-rounder, especially racquet games.  He remains a frequent winner of ping-pong tournaments on cruises.  He was a tennis standout from his high school days, when he was No. 2 on his school team, throughout adulthood, when he was a consistent tournament player.  He quit the game at 63, when knee surgery led him to give up tennis in favor of senior softball.  Besides, his wife Marion told him when he was invited to play, “Go fool around.”  With senior softball.

Lou remembers  a lifetime of playing games requiring a steady hand and quick feet.  “As a kid, I used to hang around in a local pool room.  They had a ping-pong table there, and I learned to play.  One time this ping-pong hustler came in.  He’d let you win, then he’d want to play games for a dollar.  He beat me, sure, and I lost a dollar or two.  He turned out to be the U.S. No. 1.  Later I saw him on TV.”

Lou played all the street games a kid would play in the 30s and 40s in the Bronx, chiefly stickball and punchball.  “You were measured by how many sewers you could hit the ball.  Willie Mays could hit three sewers.  I could hit about one and a half,” he says.

Lou was a big fan of the Giants, baseball and football.  He was in the stands at the Polo Grounds on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941 for a game against the football Dodgers.  “At half time,” he recalls, “there was an announcement, ‘Would General So-and-so report to somewhere or other.’  After the game was over, on our way home, we found out about Pearl Harbor.”

In 1947, Lou scored a World Series ticket and saw the game in which the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Al Gionfriddo robbed Joe DiMaggio of a home run, causing Joltin’ Joe to kick the dirt between first and second, in a rare (for him) display of on-field emotion.  You too can watch this famous dust-up on YouTube.

Lou’s family, both mother and father, came from Poland.  “My mother and father were third cousins—that explains a lot about me,” he jokes.

Although Lou’s father made deliveries (and later drove a taxi), going to college was a requirement for Lou and his older brother.  “We weren’t well off, but I never felt want.  I never lacked for money,” Lou says.  So he went to City College and graduated with a business degree.

Then, with the Korean War just concluded, he was draft bait.  He went to Army Basic Training at Fort Bliss, Texas, where he and some of his tentmates were court-martialed for skipping guard duty.  His punishment was a week of kitchen duty under armed guard.

In December 1954 he began an 11-month tour in Korea.  “I was in a cable bridge engineering company, composed entirely of men who didn’t know anything about engineering.  I had a buddy who worked in the company office and had access to a Jeep.  We’d drive into Seoul.  That was a break from all the guard duty I pulled, watching bodies float down the Han River.  All of us also had girls from the village.  In retrospect, it was too bad they had to do that, but everyone in Korea was so poor, and we weren’t complaining.”

Back Stateside, Lou decided to join his brother and his sister-in-law in California.  He stayed with them three months and worked on starting a career and figuring out the opposite sex.

Sex first.  “I was a pretty good-looking guy, but I wasn’t getting anywhere.  I was a camp counselor at this co-ed camp.  One time I was playing ping-pong and a senior counselor, a girl, said to me, ‘Lou, I gotta ask you—all the girls think you’re stuck up.’  Stuck up?  Shy was not the word,  I didn’t know what to do.

“Even later, when I was out of the Army and living in California, I told myself, “I gotta overcome this.  I gotta become a good dancer.  So I went to Arthur Murray and learned how to dance.  It was easier after that, and I dated a lot.  I met Marion at a Hillel party.  We got married in January, 1960.  I hit the jackpot!  We have a son, Jeremy, born in 1963, and a daughter, Myrna, born in 1966.  They’re both teachers, both married, but no grandchildren.”

Lou says he was “never very ambitious to make a lot of money.  I worked in a department store, Grayson’s, in downtown L.A., as a credit manager.  Then I was advised to get into factoring.  That’s where you buy and sell accounts receivable.  I got a job at United Factors, the biggest firm on the West Coast.  I was credit manager in the furniture department, with about 12 people.  Eventually the firm was taken over by Crocker Bank and I went to work for a collection agency.  I worked mostly wholesale.  I retired when I was 60.”

By that time Lou was already active in senior softball, playing left center on the undefeated Big Green Machine in the Manhattan Beach league’s opening season.  He recalls another player joking about “the three great Jewish ballplayers, Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax and Lou Kranz.”

“I’ve had a lot of thrills playing sports,” he says.  “I love the competition and the recognition, although I have to admit, I’ve lost something over the years.

“When I was a kid playing football, once I scored seven touchdowns in a game.  Years later, I went back to the Bronx with Marion and we went back to that park.  I told her, ‘This is the park where I scored seven touchdowns.  They should have my name on the entrance.’  She said she doubted if it happened.  Now I wonder if it really did….”