When Jim Ratner passed away on November 2, with his wife Janice and their children, Derek and Andrea, by his side, the Red Sox lost one of their most devoted fans.
“Jim was the first Yale classmate I met,” remembers Bill Mace. “We were assigned to be roommates in Durfee Hall, and we stayed roommates through senior year. He and his sister were driving to New Haven from their home in El Paso, Texas and decided to stop for a few hours to meet me at my home in southern Illinois first. Once in New Haven, Jim let people know that he was a Texan – not by mannerisms, but by facts that would play well in trivia contests – and that he was headed for medical school.
“He had a dry wit and rarely laughed out loud, although he was easily amused. He met Janice at a mixer, as I recall. After graduation, I attended their wedding in New Haven, visited them at Dartmouth, where Jim was learning to be a dermatologist, and then in pine-pollen-covered Louisiana, where he was serving in the Army. (He eventually ended up as a Major.) He said he could choose anywhere in the country to set up a practice and settled on Amherst, MA, which he and Janice knew well from her time in graduate school at UMass.
“Jim was an avid sports fan, loving to watch Boston sports teams, UMass, Yale and UTEP teams. He was fortunate to see the Red Sox win four World Series, the Patriots win six Super Bowls, and UMass Hockey win a national championship. He and his son once were shown on the TV broadcast of a Red Sox game holding up a sign they had carefully prepared to get that attention.
“I don’t know how well he adjusted to the success of the post-2004 Red Sox. The ‘cursed’ pre-2004 teams offered ample material for his mixture of sarcasm and grudging hope; the winning teams after 2004 must have put him a bit off his emotional balance. When he and Janice moved to California to be near their daughter and her children, their son traveled from Florida to set up all their electronics to allow Jim to watch every Red Sox game.”