The sportswriter Hemingway admired grew up on Bond Street in Niles

Ring Lardner was born in Niles in 1885, the youngest of a big family in a household most kids would have envied. The Lardners lived in a Gothic Revival house on Bond Street built decades earlier by a local banker — fourteen rooms, a pipe organ inside, and grounds out back that ran to a carriage house, tennis courts, and a toboggan slide. Ringgold, the boy everyone called Ring, grew up comfortable and a long way from the dugouts and racetracks he’d later make his name writing about.

He became one of the most admired American writers of his time, though he wore it lightly. Lardner started as a sportswriter and turned the way ballplayers actually talked into literature. His best-known book, “You Know Me Al,” ran first as a series of stories in the Saturday Evening Post — letters from a thick-headed, self-deluding rookie pitcher, written in the busher’s own ungrammatical voice. It’s funny and quietly merciless, and writers took notice. Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all counted themselves admirers; Fitzgerald, who knew him personally, modeled a character partly on him.

Lardner left Niles young and lived most of his adult life elsewhere, writing columns, stories, songs, and plays until his death in 1933. But the town hasn’t forgotten where he started. The Niles History Center keeps him on its downtown walking tour with a marker noting the birthplace, one stop among the brick storefronts and the old houses.

It’s a particular pleasure to read him here. Stand on Bond Street, picture the kid on that toboggan slide, then crack open a chapter of a semi-literate rookie explaining to his pal back home exactly how he’s about to get cheated by the big leagues. The voice came from somewhere, and somewhere was here.