Joe Black was a baseball pioneer, the first black pitcher ever to win a World Series game. He was Jackie Robinson's roommate on the Brooklyn Dodgers. Joe Black then became the only Major Leaguer to become a full-time public school teacher after his baseball career ended. The Black family lived in a very modest house right next to the authors father's auto body shop near the railroad tracks in the poorest part of Plainfield, New Jersey and they knew his late father, Nathan. The author first met Mr. Black when he came to Hubbard Junior High School as a teacher and baseball coach and their forty-five year friendship continued until his death in 2002. As his teacher, coach, and mentor until the end of his life, Mr. Black became a trusted friend and mentor. He greatly influenced the authors life, his law practice, and his family. Selzer was given the honor of being the opening speaker at Joe Blacks Memorial Celebration on June 1, 2002. Many of Joes friends, acquaintances, and former colleagues contributed stories for this book; among them are Bill Cosby, Sandy Koufax, Bob Costas, Joe Garagiola, Dusty Baker, Jerry Reinsdorf, Jerry Colangelo and others. John Teets, former CEO of the Greyhound Corporation, talked of Joe Black's progress in advancing to become the first African American executive in the transportation industry. While in this position Joe Black wrote an an inspiring and motivational nationally syndicated column and did radio spots, both called "By the Way". Several of these thoughtful columns appear in this book.

He was told that the color of his skin would keep him out of the big leagues, but Joe Black worked his way up through the Negro Leagues and the Cuban Winter League. He burst into the Majors in 1952 when he signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers. In the face of segregation, verbal harassment, and even death threats, Joe Black rose to the top of his game; he earned National League Rookie of the Year and became the first African American pitcher to win a World Series game. With the same tenacity he showed in his baseball career, Black became the first African American vice president of a transportation corporation when he went to work for Greyhound. In this first-ever biography of Joe Black, his daughter Martha Jo Black tells the story not only of a baseball great who broke through the color line, but also of the father she knew and loved.

Billionaire media mogul Bill Parrish is considering a merger between his company and another media giant and is about to celebrate his 65th birthday with an elaborate party planned by his eldest daughter, Allison. His youngest daughter, Susan, a resident in internal medicine, is in a relationship with one of Bill's board members, Drew. She is considering marriage, but Bill can tell that she is not passionately in love. When she asks for the short version of his impassioned speech, he simply says, "Stay open. Who knows? Lightning could strike!". When their company helicopter lands, he begins to hear a mysterious voice, which he tries with increasing difficulty to ignore. Susan meets a vibrant young man at a coffee shop. He takes an interest in her and tells her that lightning may strike. She is enamored but parts without getting his name. Unbeknownst to her, the man is struck by multiple cars in a possibly fatal collision. Death arrives at Bill's home in the uninjured body of the young man, explaining that Bill's impassioned speech has piqued his interest. Given Bill's "competence, experience, and wisdom", Death says that for as long as Bill will be his guide on Earth, Bill will not have to die. Making up a name on the spot, Death is introduced to the family as "Joe Black". Bill's best efforts to navigate the next few days, knowing them now to be his last, fail to keep events from going rapidly out of his control. Drew is secretly conspiring with a man bidding for Parrish Communications. He capitalizes on Bill's strange behavior and unexplained reliance on Joe to convince the board of directors to vote Bill out as chairman, using information given to him inadvertently by Bill's son-in-law, Quince, to push through approval for the merger which Bill had decided to oppose. Quince is devastated. Susan is confused by the appearance of Joe, believing him to be the young man from the coffee shop, but eventually falls deeply in love with him. Joe is now under the influence of human desires and becomes attracted to her as well. After they make love, Joe asks Susan, "What do we do now?" She replies, "It'll come to us". Bill angrily confronts Joe about his relationship with his daughter, but Joe declares his intention to take Susan with him for his own. As his last birthday arrives, Bill appeals to Joe to recognize the meaning of true love and all it encompasses, especially honesty and sacrifice. Joe comes to understand that he must set aside his own desire and allow Susan to live her life. He also helps Bill regain control of his company, exposing Drew's underhanded business dealings to the board by claiming to be an agent of the Internal Revenue Service and threatening to put Drew in jail.

“I realize that I am a soldier of production whose duties are as important in this war as those of the man behind the gun.” So began the pledge that many home front men took at the outset of World War II when they went to work in the factories, fields, and mines while their compatriots fought in the battlefields of Europe and on the bloody beaches of the Pacific. The male experience of working and living in wartime America is rarely examined, but the story of men like these provides a crucial counter-narrative to the national story of Rosie the Riveter and GI Joe that dominates scholarly and popular discussions of World War II. In Meet Joe Copper, Matthew L. Basso describes the formation of a powerful, white, working-class masculine ideology in the decades prior to the war, and shows how it thrived—on the job, in the community, and through union politics. Basso recalls for us the practices and beliefs of the first- and second-generation immigrant copper workers of Montana while advancing the historical conversation on gender, class, and the formation of a white ethnic racial identity. Meet Joe Copper provides a context for our ideas of postwar masculinity and whiteness and finally returns the men of the home front to our reckoning of the Greatest Generation and the New Deal era.

Death suspends activities for three days during which he falls in love with a beautiful girl, and through her realizes why mortals fear him.