By Joan Garvin

Family, friends and colleagues gathered at Temple Beth Am in Los Altos Hills July 7 to commemorate the life of Leonard Koppett of Palo Alto, who died June 22.

Mr. Koppett’s family immigrated from Russia when he was 5 and settled in New York City only a block away from Yankee Stadium. That circumstance and a love of music brought from Russia and nourished here colored his life.

Mr. Koppett was a sportswriter. Starting as an undergraduate at Columbia University in 1940, he covered the Yankees, the Giants, the Dodgers, the Knicks and later the Mets — for the New York newspapers, the Times, the Post and the Herald Tribune — and did it well enough to be the only writer elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame, 1992, and the Basketball Hall of Fame, 1994. He published 16 books (one scheduled for released this year) on sports.

When the Koppetts moved to Palo Alto in 1973, he became the first West Coast correspondent for the New York Times. In 1979, he joined the Peninsula Times Tribune as a columnist, then sports editor and editor emeritus until he left in 1993.

Duane Kuiper, former second baseman for the Cleveland Indians and the Giants, now a Giants announcer, admitted that he was probably one of the few people who didn’t like to talk with Koppett.

“He could make me look like an idiot in four seconds or less,” Kuiper said. “I loved listening to him. (But) he would ask me questions like, ‘Who was more important to baseball: Judge Landis or Marvin Miller? My response was ‘let me get back to you.’”

Koppett’s son David said kids now can get information by logging on to the Internet seach engine Google; they had the Library of Congress in their house.

“Dad’s idea of concise was 850 words,” he said. His father once argued with him for 20 minutes about a book “he hadn’t even read! The most annoying part was, that he was right.”

Mr. Koppett’s lifelong love of music threaded through everything he accomplished. His daughter, Katherine Koppett Richter, a corporate training consultant, remembered her dad’s taking her to operas and ballets from a very young age.

His son David, now a TV producer for Fox Sports Net Bay Area, said that after his dad’s recent heart attack, the doctors had warned the family of possible brain damage. He and Katherine filled the anxious hours with the New York Times crossword puzzle. They pondered a 9-letter word for an Italian opera until their father’s voice answered, “Rigaletto..”

Mr. Koppett delivered his wife Suzanne at the door to Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco where they planned to attend the Sunday evening performance. After parking the car, he returned to the Hall and died suddenly in the lobby.

Mr. Koppett transcended sports in his life and in his writing. Only six days before his death, he met a colleague, Milliam Gould, for lunch at Gordon Birsch in Palo Alto. Gould is the Charles A. Beardsley Professor of Law Emeritus at Stanford University and author of the recently published “Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor,” in addition to several books on labor law.

With Hall of Fame basketball player Al Attles, they combined their expertise to present seminars and forums on sports law at Stanford University since 1988.

Attles played with the Philadelphia and Golden State Warriors for 11 years and coached Golden State for 14. He played in Philadelphia in the ’40s so he has known Mr. Koppett on the East and West coasts over the six decades.

“It was always a pleasure to be around him,” Attles said. “(What I ) like about him is that he never, never talked down to anyone. He (usually) knew he was right, but never made you wrong.”

Gould said Mr. Koppett was “classy and in a class by himself; a giving man as well as a learned man.” He added that Mr. Koppett was always willing to advise or counsel others and never asked for attribution.

Mr. Koppett is survived by his wife of 39 years, Suzanne; children David and Katherine and their spouses and his first grandchild, born 20 hours after his death, named Lea in his honor.