The Cool of the Evening

Paula Kurman shares her forty-year love story with baseball legend Jim Bouton in her heartfelt memoir, The Cool of the Evening.

“I am among the most fortunate of women. I loved Jim Bouton and was well and truly loved by him for more than four decades. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

They met on October 15, 1977, at Bloomingdale’s department store in Hackensack, New Jersey. Jim Bouton, Major League pitcher, twenty-one game winner for the New York Yankees, and author of the iconic exposé Ball Four, and Dr. Paula Kurman, professor of interpersonal communication at Hunter College. It was love at first sight.

Paula knew absolutely nothing about baseball when they met, or any other sport for that matter. And Jim had never heard of interpersonal communication, but he thought reading nonverbal behavior was creepy. Yet despite their obvious differences, Paula and Jim were soulmates. Together they created a partnership of equals that was greater than the sum of their parts. It lasted forty-two years.

Laced through with humor, passion, and intelligence, Paula shares the intimacy and adventures of their married life through the blending of families, moving from suburban New Jersey to rural Massachusetts, where they built a home on top of a hill deep in the wilderness of the Berkshires, the shattering blow of the death of a daughter, the healing of stonework and ballroom dancing—and finally, the devastating long-term illness that took Jim’s life in the summer of 2019.

Through it all, to the very end, Paula and Jim’s passionate love for each other grew and deepened. The Cool of the Evening is a celebration of their remarkable relationship.