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First Sentences

“They watched as a dead man was brought to the hospital: a fractured skull, blood everywhere, ligaments ripped loose from their mooring—medics had hauled him there ‘in three buckets,’ a bystander remarked.” Reid Mitenbuler, Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer, an Epic Journey, a Lost Age.

“There was an old Jew who lived at the site of the old synagogue up on Chicken Hill in the town of Pottstown, Pa., and when Pennsylvania State Troopers found the skeleton at the bottom of an old well off Hayes Street, the old Jew’s house was the first place they went.” James McBride, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.

“Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair.” Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.

“Everyone in Lamperdown knew that Mr. Behrens, who lived with his aunt at the Old Rectory and kept bees, and Mr. Calder, who lived in a cottage on the hilltop outside the village and was the owner of a deerhound called Rasselas, were the closest of close friends.” Michael Gilbert, Game Without Rules.

“In August 1945, after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan surrendered, the soldiers, sailors, and airmen scheduled to participate in the invasion of Japan reacted as you might expect.” Evan Thomas, Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II.

“When people ask me what I do—taxi drivers, dental hygienists—I tell them I work in an office.” Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.

“Approaching the museum, ready to hunt, Stéphane Breitwieser clasps hands with his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklau, and together they stroll to the front desk and say hello, a cute couple.” Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession.

“Killing someone is easy.” Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club.

“For more than a decade, defenders of democracy have been issuing a stark warning: The world is in the midst of a ‘democratic recession,’ with sign of a turnaround on the horizon.” Sohrab Ahmari, Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It.

“Jacob Finch Bonner, the once promising author of the ‘New & Noteworthy’ (The New York Times Book Review) novel The Invention of Wonder, let himself into the office he’d been assigned on the second floor of Richard Peng Hall, set his beat-up leather satchel on the barren desk, and looked around in something akin to despair.” Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot.

“In January 1829, Abram Garfield emerged from a shack in Orange, Ohio, swiveled west, and started toward what passed for civilization on this frontier.” C.W. Goodyear, President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier.

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Remember the Panama Canal Treaties

Knowledgeable people find the roots of the Republican Party’s dysfunction in the hyperpartisanship practiced by Newt Gingrich when he became Speaker of the House in 1995. Others find tentacles spreading from the Tea Party movement which emerged in 2009 and brought conspiracy theories into mainstream politics. But seeds were planted twenty years earlier with the now largely forgotten battle over the Panama Canal treaties, which I learned about when I read Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right (2008) by Adam Clymer.

Clymer explains how the fight over the Panama Canal Treaties helped fuel the rise of the modern Right. Both treaties were signed in 1977. One treaty gave the United States the right to use force to assure that the canal would remain open to ships of all nations. The second treaty gave Panama control over the canal starting in 2000.

In order to take effect, the treaties not only had to be signed by the leaders of Panama and the United States, they also had to be ratified by appropriate bodies within those countries. After Panama did so in a plebiscite, a political battle ensued in the United States Senate over their ratifications. According to Clymer, this led to the emergence of Richard Viguerie, a founder of modern conservatism, the use of direct-mail marketing, and the rise of single-issue PACs designed to raise money and defeat moderate Republicans.

Although it was President Jimmy Carter who signed the pacts, the negotiations had started under President Nixon. The treaties were thought desirable because they gave America the right to assure the canal’s neutrality, and they removed a flashpoint for much of Latin America, and Panama in particular, by giving Panama control over the canal. Those supporting the treaties maintained that they would increase the security of the canal by helping to remove the threats of guerrilla attacks, which were almost impossible for America and Panama to defend against. 

The treaties were backed by some prominent conservatives, including Henry Kissinger and William Buckley, but they were also attacked by other conservatives in near-hysterical terms. Opponents maintained that this was a surrender of American sovereignty, and furthermore, the military leader of Panama was pro-Communist. Marxists would control the canal and Panama, and the harm to the U.S. as a result would be tremendous.

What is surprising to a modern surveyor of the political scene is that some Senators supported the treaty simply because they thought it was the right thing to do even though they knew that their ratification votes would harm them politically. The single-issue PACs targeted some of these Senators and through direct-mail marketing, inflamed a cadre of voters. Republicans who supported the treaties were defeated in primaries when they stood for reelection. Their overall record did not matter. Their vote on this one issue doomed their political careers. On the other hand, Ronald Reagan opposed the Treaty, and some, including Bill Buckley, maintained that the treaty controversy helped elect Reagan president.

 This is an issue that is now largely forgotten even though its aftermath still affects the United States. A lesson from the controversy has been absorbed, even if that lesson’s source is not remembered. Republican politicians are in fear that if they don’t toe some single-issue lines, a portion of conservatives will target them and defeat them in the primaries. The result is that the politicians cannot develop nuanced positions; compromises are verboten. Instead, the “wrong” stance on individual issues can result in a primary defeat even if the politician accepts the conservative line on other matters. If I don’t completely accept the NRA’s positions, I may be defeated in the primary. If I adopt a moderate stance on abortion, I may be defeated in the primaries. If I have concerns about tax cuts, I may be defeated in the primaries. And so on. The result is a lockstep, hard-right conservatism. Back in 1978, some conservative Senators studied a complex situation and decided that a ratification vote for the Panama Canal treaties was in the best interests of the country. What is remembered is not that their position was right, but that some lost their political careers as a result.

History, of course, has shown them to be right. The Canal functions just fine. Panama is not a hotbed of anti-American Communism. Those who were wrong, however, did not pay a price for their belief. They continued in office. And most of us have forgotten the debate.

In what now seems impossible, Democrats and Republicans joined together to ratify the treaties. Fifty-two Democrats and sixteen Republicans voted for ratification, while ten Democrats and twenty-two Republicans voted against. We have seen little of such bipartisanship since the Panama Canal treaties. On the other hand, since that 1977 controversy we have seen many conservatives benefit even when proved wrong.

The Republican party has been on a forty-year path to its present dysfunction.

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Snippets

Hamas attacks Israel. Is this, as an American Jewish leader said, not only an attack on Israel but on Jews? If so, is the war on Hamas also a war on Islam and Muslims? A related question: Can one criticize or even question Israel without being labeled, or being, antisemitic?

A conservative candidate for president said that the incumbent president should urge, lean on, coerce Egypt into taking in those who are fleeing from Gaza. He did not, however, say that the United States should open its welcoming arms and take in more refugees.

About two decades ago I went to Israel on an unusual junket—all expenses paid to study terrorism from an Israeli perspective. An interlude in the trip was a guided walk around Jerusalem. We started at a place that overlooked Jerusalem. Our exceptional guide pointed out things in the old city; where Bethlehem was and is in the hills near Jerusalem; the Palestinian-controlled territory; the wall marking the boundary (although Israelis called it a fence, not a wall); and a mural-painted wall (this was called a wall) behind us, which prevented Palestinians down below from shooting into Israeli apartments up above.

Our location was a parking lot, and a nearby food van was, like many other Israeli places, playing old American rock and roll. The third song I noticed was Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. I almost laughed at the remarkable fortuity. I know that the song is about a woman’s strength in rejecting a lover who walked out, but what better chorus could there be as I looked out over Israel and Jerusalem than I WILL SURVIVE.

During this trip, because of the sensitive places we visited—military and intelligence facilities—we were accompanied by heavily-armed young men, and in Jerusalem I fell into step with one such escort. A few moments later, some men rounded a corner shouting and elbowing others aside. I asked the escort, born and raised in Israel, what that was about, and he replied, “Just some Arabs showing off.” He and I exited the old city together, and I was visually assaulted by a row of tacky tourist shops. American rock and roll came from them, too, and the first song I heard outside the old city was R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion. I smiled and said to the escort, “That doesn’t seem right for Jerusalem.” He stopped, paused a beat, and thoughtfully said, “I think that is the only way.”

Is he right? Can there only be peace if we lose our religion?

“There are only two gods worth worshipping. Chance and electricity.” Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

“We’ve all been blessed with God-given talents. Mine just happens to be beating up people.” Sugar Ray Leonard. (Why is it always Sugar Ray? Why not Sugar Jim or Sugar Marie?)

Each year, the U.S. gives nearly $4 billion to Israel in military aid, which since the founding of Israel has totaled hundreds of billions of dollars. Only occasionally has this been controversial. On the other hand, some in Congress don’t want any more aid for Ukraine. They contend that sending this money abroad is a drain on our economy. But when I read about Ukraine aid, the story often says that Ukraine is using major portions of the money to buy American-made arms and other military supplies. How much of the Ukraine aid is actually spent in the United States?

“Admiration for ourselves and our institutions is too often measured by our contempt and dislike for foreigners.” William Ralph Inge.

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The Shot Heard ‘Round the World (concluded)

          The writings by Doris Kearns Goodwin and Red Smith about Bobby Thomson’s dramatic home run turned my thoughts to Don DeLillo’s remarkable novel, Underworld, which I had read twenty years earlier. It is not an easy book, or at least it was not for me. I started the book and gave up. A few years later, I picked it up again, this time finishing it, realizing that I had just read something extraordinary.

Don DeLillo’s Underworld starts with a set piece about that mythic baseball playoff game won by Bobby Thomson’s home run in the bottom of the ninth, and echoes of it recur throughout the novel. A few years ago, I thought of DeLillo’s portrayal of that day again in an unlikely place—waiting in line at Kennedy airport for a flight to Rome. I found myself in conversation with the man behind me who was a professor at a university in Naples. He told me that his specialty was Italian-American literature. I had heard of many academic concentrations, but never of this one. I asked what authors interested him and he mentioned Richard Russo. I was somewhat taken aback. When I have read Russo, I only thought that I was reading an American novel, not an Italian-American one. His list did not include Mario Puzo, but he praised John Fante, an author I had never heard of. (Because of this conversation, I have since read Fante’s Bandini Quartet­, which I had trouble finding. My copy was shipped from England. These novels are quite good, and I should thank him for putting me on to them.) He went on to talk about DeLillo, and I asked him about his reaction to Underworld. He was effusive. I asked if he had trouble understanding that baseball game at the beginning of the book, and he gave a charming smile and chortled that he did not have a clue about what was going on. I did not try to explain. There is something so peculiarly American about that baseball game that I did not think a few minute’s conversation on the topic could accomplish much with a foreigner, and, furthermore, while I did feel that the game had some sort of significance besides its mere outcome, I was not sure why.

          Finally, after reading about the game by Doris Kearns Goodwin and Red Smith, I read for the third time DeLillo’s take on it, and I began to understand at least some of the reasons why that playoff lives in American consciousness. Perhaps every moment in American history is some sort of watershed, but this game encapsulated aspects of American history and past culture and foretold changes that were to come.

          In 1951, baseball provided a peaceful connection to the past. “You do what they did before you,” DeLillo says. The Bobby Thomson game was played at a time when America was thinking it could put the sacrifice and horrors of World War II behind it and carry forward a peaceful world. Baseball reminded us of that past. DeLillo has Gil Hodges, a Brooklyn player in that game, say the Polo Ground is “a name he loves, a precious echo of things and times before the century went to war.”

          Baseball also then resonated with a wide swath of Americans, or at least American males. Red Smith, writing a few years after the game, noted that almost every American male had played some version of baseball, whether it was baseball itself, or softball, stickball, five hundred, punch ball, kickball, or myriad other games. In 1951, it was America’s sport and somehow represented a perpetually youthful America. DeLillo writes about Thomson that “he is forever Bobby now, a romping boy lost to time. . . .”

Baseball is just a game, but it could feel more momentous. DeLillo writes, “The game doesn’t change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life.” And a particular game could feel as if it fit into the tide of American history. Russ Hodges’s producer says about Thomson’s home run, “Mark the spot. Like where Lee surrendered to Grant or something.”

          We readers of Underworld know, however, what its characters did not: that the dominance of baseball was going to fade. A column by Red Smith makes that point. He had driven to Florida for baseball’s spring training, where many major league baseball teams prepared for the regular season. He said that once on these drives he had seen baseball and all those other games being played by men and boys in the various towns along his route, but now he no longer did. DeLillo foreshadows this change by having the broadcasters ask how one is to explain the 20,000 empty seats in the stadium. The sport’s hold on America was still strong, but it was waning.

The 1950s was the beginning of many changes to America, and the famous playoff stood on that cusp. Looking back at that game, there seems to be a time up until Thomson’s home run and a different time afterwards, and DeLillo creates scenes in the grandstands that indicate changes soon to come. No one knows, as far as I know, what happened to the baseball Thomson hit once it landed in the left field seats, but in DeLillo’s telling one Cotter Martin wrests it away from others scrambling for the ball and leaves the park with it. Cotter, an African American youth, has sneaked into the ballpark and is seemingly befriended by a white man seating nearby. Of course, almost all Americans in 1951 knew that a major change in our race relations had occurred only a few years before when the major leagues’ color barrier was broken when the Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson, who played in the famous game. A few know that the next scheduled batter after Thomson was Willie Mays, who would not have been playing if that color bar had not been bashed. In 1951, it may have seemed that we were finally making great peaceful strides towards resolving our racial problems. Bill Waterson, the white man talking with the black kid in the novel, seems to capture that, but we readers know that racial peace and resolution faced many violent episodes after 1951 and still has not been reached.

Emmitt Till and the Birmingham church bombings, snapping dogs and firehoses, bus boycotts and many killings were soon to come. And DeLillo has Waterson turn creepy towards Cotter. The white man wants the baseball that the boy has fought for. Bill yells at Cotter that he is going to get the ball and threatens violence. He chases Cotter out of the stadium and through the surrounding streets, and Cotter is only safe with his new possession when he makes it into the black Harlem that was not far from the Polo Grounds.

The game also stood on the cusp of a great change in American mass culture: the rise of network TV. The coast-to-coast broadcast of the game was itself a harbinger of that, but DeLillo signals it in another way. He has Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor, and J. Edgar Hoover together in attendance. (I do not know if Sinatra, Gleason, and Shor were at the game, but I know Hoover was there.) They joke and drink, but Gleason keeps saying that he should be at rehearsal for “The Honeymooners,” an icon of 1950s television that was to air for the first time in two days.

But something else happened on the very day of Thomson’s home run that would greatly change America. Until 1951, Americans had been little bothered by the thought that they might be killed at home by a foreign government, but on October 3, 1951, the same day as the famous playoff game, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. We learn that fact when a message is delivered to Hoover informing him of that blast. After that October day, Americans could never again safely tuck themselves into bed the way they had before. The always present strain of paranoia in American now had a much firmer basis, and that paranoia was going to dominate the U.S. in coming years.

An apocalypse was now palpably possible, and DeLillo, a master of portraying American paranoia, has sheets of Life magazine float down from the upper deck onto Hoover. Those pages contain a reproduction of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s panoramic painting of apocalyptic slaughter. Hoover becomes mesmerized by the images of incredible agony, and the painting and its horrific portrayals recur again and again in the novel.

We want that baseball game to be a kind of unifying experience. DeLillo has Russ Hodges, the Giants announcer, think “this is another kind of history. He thinks [the fans] will carry something out of here that joins them all in a rare way, that binds them to a memory with a protective power. . . . Isn’t it possible that this midcentury moment enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping of strategies of eminent leaders, generals steely in their sunglasses—the mapped visions that pierce our dreams?” The game may have been memorable, but almost instantly it was only a memory. This prologue concludes with a drunk in a raincoat running the bases who leaves his feet to slide into second base: “All the fragments of the afternoon collect around his airborne form. Shouts, bat-cracks, full bladders and stray yawns, the sand-grain manyness of things to come. . . . It is all falling indelibly into the past.”

DeLillo had first published his depiction of the baseball game as a magazine piece before the book was written. He titled the piece “Pafko at the Wall.” (Andy Pafko was the Dodgers left fielder who watched the ball sail over his head into the stands.) When DeLillo placed this piece as the beginning portion of Underworld, he re-titled it as “The Triumph of Death.”

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The Shot Heard ‘Round the World

It is baseball playoffs time. I just yawned as I am sure many others do about baseball and its postseason. This indifference, however, is a bit misleading. Many may talk and write about baseball’s demise, but attendance at major league games increased this year. More people went to the parks than in the years immediately preceding Covid. Even so, baseball and its playoffs do not gain the national attention they once did. We don’t anoint them with the significance of past years, nothing like the playoff that ended with the most famous home run in history — the home run that many at the time and even since saw as some sort of American turning point that went beyond baseball.

          I wasn’t aware of it when it happened. It was on television, I have read, but my family did not then own one. It was on the radio, but I did not care. I was aware of little beyond our backyard and our block, even though I ventured further than that to attend one of our two years of kindergarten. I was six years old.

          But my world changed a lot during the next three years, and when I was nine, I learned about it. By then the Braves baseball team had moved from Boston to Milwaukee. I had become a baseball fan, and the New York Giants had traded Bobby Thomson to my Braves prior to the start of the 1954 baseball season. Almost every mention of Thomson referred to that famous home run (only Babe Ruth’s “called” shot could compare) which Thomson hit on October 3, 1951. With the season nearing its end, the Giants were far behind the Brooklyn Dodgers—13 and a half games. The Giants, however, went on a tear winning 37 of their last 44 scheduled games. The regular season ended in a tie, which produced the National League’s first playoff, a two-out-of-three affair. The Giants won the first game; the Dodgers the second. In the decisive contest, the Dodgers were winning 4 to 1 going into the bottom of the ninth. The Giants scored one run and got two more runners on base. Thomson then hit a three-run homer that won the game and the National League Championship for the Giants. (The Giants went on to lose the World Series to the New York Yankees.)

          There have been other exciting, season-concluding home runs. Joe Carter of the Toronto Blue Jays hit one to end the 1993 World Series, and even more dramatic was the end to the 1960 World Series. The New York Yankees had won three games over the Pittsburgh Pirates in blowouts, outscoring their opponents 38 to 3. Pittsburgh had won three close games. In the seventh and deciding game, the Yankees were leading when Pittsburgh scored five times in the bottom of the eighth after a ground ball took a bad hop hitting Yankee shortstop Tony Kubek in the throat and wiping out what appeared to be a double play. Down two runs, the Yankees scored twice in the top of the ninth with the aid of some unorthodox base running by Mickey Mantle. Pittsburgh’s second baseman Bill Mazeroski, who averaged a mere eight home runs per season and who had already hit a decisive home run in Game 1 of the series, led off the bottom of the ninth. On the second pitch, he hit a miraculous home run over the left field wall to win the game and the baseball championship for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

          And since 1961, Super Bowls, NBA, college football playoffs, and college basketball championships have concluded on exciting, improbable plays. Even so, that 1951 game with Bobby Thomson’s home run seems to live on in the American consciousness in ways Mazeroski’s homer and the other exciting games have not. Or maybe I just think that because several things I have read recently and a conversation with a Neapolitan have placed that game high in my consciousness.

          One of the books was the 1997 memoir of her childhood by the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Wait Till Next Year. She was raised in a middle class New York City suburb that emerged after World War II in a family of rabid Brooklyn Dodger fans. The 1951 playoff between the Giants and Dodgers was a momentous event in her eight-year-old life. In those days, playoff and World Series games were played during the day, and her teachers had allowed their charges to listen to the first two games on the radio, but Doris asked to stay home on the afternoon of the decisive game to watch it on that new instrument, a television. Her mother readily consented. She was not alone. Half her classmates also were not in school that afternoon. But the spectatorship was many more than diehard New York and Brooklyn fans, for a continental cable had been finished a few months earlier, and these playoffs were the first nationally televised sporting event.

          Kearns, as she then was, describes the tension of a close game, with the Dodgers scoring three times in the top of the eighth to take a 4-1 lead. And then the fateful bottom of the ninth. The Giants had scored to pull within two runs and had two men on base. The Dodgers’ pitcher Don Newcombe was tiring, and the manager replaced him with Ralph Branca. “I was horrified,” Doris writes. “Images of Branca’s other failures filled my mind.” She pleaded for this move to be rescinded. “But my pleas were fruitless. The stage was set, the moment irrevocable. Ralph Branca stood on the mound, and Bobby Thompson was advancing to the plate.”

          And the home run came, and along with it, she reports, “the never-to-be forgotten voice of Giant announcer Russ Hodges. ‘There’s a long fly. . . . It’s gonna be . . . I believe.’ He stopped for a moment. Then, as the ball dropped majestically into the lower decks of seats, there came that horrifying shout. ‘The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!’”

          Broadcasts were not routinely recorded in 1951, but many of us have heard Hodges’ depiction of the famous Bobby Thomson home run 1951. Doris Kearns Goodwin makes it seem as if she heard it on the television, but the reports I have read said that his call was preserved on a tape recording by a Brooklynite made off the radio. Perhaps Hodges was simultaneously broadcasting on radio and TV, but that seems unlikely, and if the Goodwin family was listening to the radio while watching the television broadcast, I would have thought the Goodwins would have been listening to the Dodgers announcer, Red Barber. (Barber, it is reported, pronounced Hodges overexcited call as “unprofessional.”)

          Perhaps Doris really did hear Hodges make the call. Perhaps, like me, she heard it later. It is memorable, and perhaps she conflated it into the actual memory. What’s clear is that for her this game produced what has been sometimes called a “flashbulb memory” in which a memory of a momentous event becomes, we believe, indelibly etched into our mind. We probably all have some of these. Research, however, has shown we are often mistaken in details of these memories. (When I looked at some of this research for an academic project, they were called flashbulb memories. With the decline of flashbulbs, I wonder if researchers now use a different term.)

          Kearns Goodwin makes clear the importance of the event. “It was the worst moment in my life as a fan. . . . From that moment to this, Bobby Thomson and the Brooklyn Dodgers would be forever linked, the mere mention of his name calling forth in every Dodger fan instant recognition, comradeship, a memory of where they were, how they felt.”

          Doris had been posting the baseball scores in the window of a local butcher shop whose owners were Giants fans. She was so miserable that she avoided the shop until she received a bouquet of roses from the owner (“It was the first time anyone had sent me flowers.”), imploring her to come back because she was missed. “My excitement about the flowers drained my humiliation and pain over the Dodgers’ collapse.” She went to the store and posted the last Dodgers’ score of the season.

          The memorability of the game and the pomposity of its importance to some sports fans is seen in a continuing reaction. Goodwin writes that she now lives in Concord, Massachusetts, that is celebrated as the site of the first battle of our Revolutionary War, which was commemorated in a famous line from a no-longer famous poem written in the first half the nineteenth century. When she takes visitors to Concord’s Old North Bridge and sees the inscription on the monument there, ‘the shot heard round the world,’ “I think privately of Bobby Thomson’s home run.” This characterization, however, is not confined to her private thoughts. Thomson’s homer was characterized with the Revolutionary War line almost from the moment that ball landed in the stands. I recently tested my assumption that that playoff result lives in the minds of many Americans who had no personal connection with the game. I asked a biergarten drinking buddy, who was born twenty years after it happened, if he was familiar with Bobby Thomson’s home run. He immediately said, “The shot heard ‘round the world.’”

          I have also been dipping into American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith edited by Daniel Okrent. Smith, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning sportswriter, is best known for the four-times-a-week columns he wrote for New York City newspapers in the four decades after World War II. Of course, he wrote about the famous home run with a lede, published on the day after the game, that has been characterized as one of the best: “Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.” Okrent labels that opening and the rest of the piece “the platonic ideal of a column about a major sports event.” I found Smith’s recounting to be enjoyable, and his often-remarkable prose is always worth examining. However, what first struck me in the October 4, 1951, column is that the writer immediately sensed that Thomson’s home run was not just one among many exhilarating sports events that he had seen. It stood alone. Not just to the rabid fan of one team or the other, it was, as they say, a game-changer even to the seasoned sportswriter, who could no longer believe that he had seen it all.

          But I noticed something else in Red Smith’s column. He mentioned that there were “34,320 witnesses” to the game. The later depictions of that afternoon make it seem as if the whole country or at least all interested in sports or at least all of New York City or at least all of its baseball fans were living and dying with each pitch. On the other hand, the Polo Grounds, where the game was played, had a capacity of 55,000. More than 20,000 seats were empty. Perhaps the game was not as important when it was played as its extraordinary outcome later made it become.

(concluded October 16)

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Snippets

A recent article about a Sarasota bar owner who supports gun rights and gives “lessons” on the Second Amendment in his bar got me to thinking. His version of the Second Amendment — a version espoused by others of his ilk — asserts that American freedom rests not so much with an armed militia, army, or law enforcement but with an armed civilian populace. Without guns we would soon have an oppressive autocracy denying freedoms to the populace. This reasoning simply doesn’t pass muster. Most people in this country do not possess firearms and yet they are able to exercise their rights. They speak freely, go to church, and vote. Their rights have not been taken away because they don’t have a gun.

In fact the pro-gun constituency comes up short in giving us examples of gun-toting masses preserving freedoms. Perhaps it can be claimed that private property has been made more secure by firearms, but what about all those other rights? When has carrying a gun preserved your right of free speech or your right to a jury trial? On the other hand, try to think of when one person carrying a firearm has deprived others of their rights. Our history is filled with examples of guns used to prevent others from speaking freely or peaceably assembling. Every time a gun has been used in a robbery it has been used to deny someone’s right to property. Every time a gun has been used in a murder or a wounding or even in an accidental shooting, the bearer of that gun has denied the individual rights of others.

 Furthermore, our history is replete with instances in which masses of armed civilians denied freedoms to others. For just a couple of the many examples, read David Zucchino’s Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy or Charles Lane’s The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction.

          Some also proclaim that guns should be carried for self-defense, and that a well-armed citizenry makes us all safer. Good people with guns can stop the bad people. I thought of this while reading about Charles Boles who was in California during the Gold Rush. The author says that Boles “no doubt carried a Colt revolver and a bowie knife—almost all men did in California, for there was very little law enforcement in the early years of the gold rush. Man—and the fledgling state’s few women—knew that they were responsible for their own self-protection.” Thus, California in the early days was a paradise to some self-described libertarians: Little government but widespread gun-packing. This surely must have been a safe place to live. Of course, it was not. “Heavy drinking, coupled with an armed populace, led to astronomical homicide rates, among the highest in peacetime America. In the 1850s, California saw murder rates twenty to thirty times greater than the current national rate.” So says John Boessenecker in Gentleman Bandit: The True Story of Black Bart, the Old West’s Most Infamous Stagecoach Robber.

As Jose Maria Luis Mora said, “The word liberty has often served for the destruction of the substance of liberty.”

I, like others, feel that Hunter Biden is being singled out for his gun violation. I am confident that many good ol’ boys have bought guns without disclosing their substance abuse problems and did not get indicted. If his name weren’t Biden, Hunter would probably not be facing jail. On the other hand, I can’t have much sympathy for him. Without his last name, Hunter Biden would not have made all the money he did. If you are going to take credit for the rain, then you have to accept the blame for the drought.

“A weapon is an enemy even to its owner.” Turkish proverb.

You can check this out: More gun deaths are suicides than homicides, self-defense, accidents, or good people killing the bad.

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Dress for Success??

“You can be better dressed when you own a lot of stuff.” Helen Gurley Brown.

The Senate recently changed its dress code. Many, appropriately considering the topic, got their undies all twisted. The Senate then reversed itself and reverted to the old code.

Apparently, the Senate has a formal dress code. Who knew? It must be written down somewhere, but most dress codes that affect almost all of us are the unwritten rules of good taste and proper decorum. These standards, however, change. We all could cite examples. For example, when I was a kid, men almost always wore a jacket and tie when attending church. Perhaps this was thought decorous because people believed that Jesus wore a Harris tweed or a flannel worsted with a tie and spit-polished brogues. Now, however, while few may wear robes and sandals to Sunday services, many men can worship without a jacket and tie.

Similarly, women in all sorts of settings can do their work satisfactorily while wearing pants when in the not so olden days they had to wear a dress or skirt. The spouse remembers her first “real” job in 1969. She was cold in the office and decided one day to wear her very nicest slacks. You’d think she had come to work naked. The president of the organization came by, looked her up and down, decided that it was okay, and silently left her alone. Revolution!

Back in the day, women showed cleavage in public only in the rarest of settings. Today peek-a-boobing is everywhere.

The notion of proper clothing changes, even in the Senate, apparently, except not this time. This Federal teapot tempest, however, has had me thinking about some dress code encounters.

I was not presented with guidelines on how to dress when I first started going to court a half-century ago, but somehow, we all knew robes were required for judges (although a famous federal judge did not wear them), suits with ties for men, and dresses for women. Indeed, I was ill at ease when the codefendant’s counsel at one of my first trials appeared wearing a fisherman’s sweater. I worried that the jury might see this as disrespectful with the disdain rubbing off on me and, more importantly, my client. (A judge back then said that when he was a prosecutor, he would never pick a man for the jury who appeared coatless because that person was showing disrespect to the criminal justice system.) I should not have been concerned. The co-counsel was a splendid attorney, and his client was acquitted. Mine got a hung jury.

There was an exception to the suit convention in court. When I started, some courtrooms were not air conditioned, and on the hottest days of a sweltering New York City summer, the judge often allowed male attorneys to take off their jackets. Prosecutors and defense counsel draped their coats on the backs of chairs. I did not. I wanted my clients to see me as a professional representing him and divorced from the courtroom crowd.

I always wore a suit while in court, except for one time. I had bought for other occasions a stylish double-breasted blue blazer that had cost more than anything I had ever bought before. The accepted accompaniment to this jacket then were gray pants, but I had bought fashion-forward taupe trousers to wear with the jacket. In my humble opinion, I looked great in this ensemble. I wore this to the office one day when I had no scheduled court appearances. That afternoon I got a call from a court clerk telling me a defendant had been brought in on an old warrant and that the judge wanted me to represent him. I felt uncomfortable going to court in my splendid attire. It wasn’t a proper suit after all. After the proceeding concluded, the judge called out my name and said that he wanted to talk with me. I was nervous when I went up to the bench. My anxiety increased when the judge said that he noticed what I was wearing. But he continued by saying that his tailor had been trying to get him to wear pants like mine when he wore a blazer and asked where I had bought them. Phew. Even so, I only wore suits when I had a court day, and my sense of decorum was upset years later when I volunteered in some public defenders’ offices around the country only to find that the lawyers regularly wore sports coats to court.

My mostly frequently encountered formal dress codes have been to play golf and tennis. My summer community has such rules. I quickly adapted to the golf code since I already owned appropriate shorts and shirts although they were bought at discount places, not the pro shop. However, tennis at one place was a bit more bothersome because that club harkened back to stuffier times and required all-white attire. I had to buy the whites and could not wear the same colorful shirts I wore on the links. But once I made the purchases, which were not overly expensive, I easily followed the dress code, even though my play was hardly of Wimbledon quality.

Of course, golf and tennis dress codes are a class thing, but even more so are the events that require black tie. (I never saw anyone in a business suit turned away from such formal occasions, but the many glances at the underdressed would have made some people at least a bit uncomfortable.) This was not a problem since I had a second-hand tux that I inherited from the spouse’s father. Later I expanded my formal attire by buying my very own tux at a deep discount. I haven’t been invited to a black-tie event in a long time, but I might have to turn it down if I got such an invitation. I find that where I store my formal clothes is a magic closet that simultaneously shrinks the waist and lengthens the legs. It’s a mystery how that can happen, although the spouse has theories to explain it. I don’t care to listen to them.

Restaurant dress codes, however, often irked me. I liked my suits and ties for which I had carefully shopped always seeking fashion and distinctiveness that I could afford. (You never would have caught me in those Brooks Brothers suits resembling a uniform. I guess many men feel most secure if their clothing looks like everyone else’s. And, I also avoided the clothier because I knew the Civil War connection between the emergence of “shoddy” and Brooks Brothers.  After wearing suits fifty or more hours a week, I wanted to wear something else when going out, but some “fine dining” establishments required “gentleman” to wear a coat and tie. When making a reservation, I would inquire about the dress code. I remember when a relative was visiting, and I thought it would be exciting for him to go to brunch at a restaurant in a fancy hotel that overlooked Central Park. The relative told me that he had not brought a traditional coat and tie and only had a leisure suit (remember that hideousness?) with him. The reservation manager told me that a coat and tie were required. I asked if the leisure suit would suffice. I could feel the icicles shot through the telephone wires into my ear as the manager, I assume wearing black tie, said, “There certainly will not be any leisure suits in my restaurant.” I never dined in that place with or without that relative.

Dress codes may have been irksome on occasion, but one time I got offended because of a dress code. Our kid was in a private school that followed the New York practice of giving the little darlings a week off from the rigors of second grade for the week of Presidents Day. The spouse and I, however, with our academic jobs, had to work this week. Furthermore, we did not have the money to go skiing in St. Moritz, Aspen, or even Stowe, or perhaps go to the beaches of the Bahamas or the like as the moneyed kids did with their parents. Instead, we opted for a meager substitute. I would take the kid cross-country skiing for a three-day weekend to some place within driving distance. Thus, one year we were off to an old resort lodge that seemed to be gasping for its last breath in a world of jets. But the place had extensive grounds and promised our skiing.

The weekend, except for one thing, was a bust. The resort may have advertised cross-country skiing, but the weather was in the 50s. When it was not drizzling, fog came in. There was no snow. I tried many things to keep the kid occupied. We watched the movie Turner and Hooch, which the resort was showing. The kid hated it (drooly dog was disgusting), and we left. We went to the ice skating rink, where I was uncomfortable when a divorced woman, with a largely neglected daughter, tried to pick me up. And my kid, I found, hated ice skating. We went bowling. The kid was afraid that a finger would detach in the bowling ball. We did go on a hayride and an outdoor cookout, which the kid found acceptable.

In hindsight, there was one blessing. I had seen an ad in The New Yorker for homes being built in a nearby resort community. We went there to fill up an hour or two. I liked the homes and the feel of the place. I told the spouse that it might be a place to spend some time in the summer. We rented there that following summer, and that community has been our summer home now for over thirty years.

And then there was the lodge’s restaurant. The resort was expensive for our budget, but it included meals. I counted on not spending on food elsewhere. Because it advertised outdoor winter activities, including, of course that absent skiing, I had packed only for all that winter fun. However, when I got to the dining room for the first evening, a figurative bar came down across the threshold. I needed to wear a coat and tie. I had on hiking boots, a green corduroy shirt, and jeans, which I had thought appropriate for the winter fun. A staff member looked me up and down, went to a closet, and pulled out a jacket that was several sizes too large, and a tie I don’t remember, but I know that it did not knot well under the collar of my green corduroy shirt also packed for winter fun. The jacket was of a polyester fabric that I had never worn before. It was brown, a very unattractive brown. When I threw it on the bed, it made a pile that I thought the large, slobbering dog Hooch could have left on the pavement. Yes, people stared as we headed for our table, perhaps because we were a mixed race family at a time when many people had not seen one like us, but I am also certain that my attire offended them.

When the time came to leave, I left the coat and tie in our room figuring that the staff would return them to the closet of punishment for those unfortunates like me who came unprepared. Then a week later, a package arrived at home. It was from the resort. I opened it and saw the jacket with a note that I must have left it behind. I was offended that anyone might think I would own such a poopish-colored polyester jacket. I thought I was doing a favor to some other customer by not returning it, so I threw it in the trash.

We have all encountered dress codes, whether formal or established by convention. And we all know that dress codes change. They aren’t now what they were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. I expect that they will be different, maybe even in the Senate, some day. In spite of such history, there will always be people who will object to changes and say that we have to uphold “standards.” When I hear that I think back to what I have read about the Rainbow Room, the art deco masterpiece sitting atop one of the buildings of Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center. When it opened, it had high standards. It required white tie for gentlemen. But the Rainbow Room could not maintain that standard, and soon found itself admitting men wearing black tie.

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Laws Changed by the Few

In a pseudonymous essay written as the American colonies moved towards independence, John Adams wrote that a republic is a “government of laws, not of men.” He was contrasting a system with a despotic emperor who is “bound by no law or limitation but his own will.” In contrast, Adams wrote, a republic “is bound by fixed laws, which the people have a voice in making.”

Following Adams, we often proudly proclaim that the United States is a nation of laws, not of men. The Supreme Court is about to begin a new term. This should remind us that it is only partially true that we are a nation of fixed laws. Instead, our laws change through the actions of a handful of people who sit on the Supreme Court.

We have seen dramatic evidence of that recently, but this is not new. Franklin Roosevelt’s plan to expand the Supreme Court was triggered by the actions of Supreme Court men. (We didn’t believe in women justices in those days.) As Jeff Shesol writes in Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court (2010), between 1933 and 1936, the Court overturned congressional acts at ten times their traditional rate often citing long-neglected doctrines. The Court frequently breathed new life into obscure clauses of the Constitution in order to abolish the democratically enacted laws of the New Deal. Indeed, it was the Chief Justice at the time who made the statement affirming that our fundamental law is a law determined by a few. Charles Evans Hughes said, “We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.” Evans could have said something similar about many of our laws.

It is fair to wonder whether the judges use neutral legal doctrines to alter our law or whether it is their politics or economic viewpoints (or what they ate for breakfast as one legal scholar has suggested). A study a few years after John Roberts became Chief Justice found that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren found in favor of businesses 28% of the time. That rate increased to 48% under the Burger Court; 54% under the Rehnquist Court; and 64% under the Roberts Court. (Justice Antonin Scalia voted for criminal defendants in non-white-collar crimes 7% of the time, but in white collar crimes 82% of the time. William Rehnquist voted 8% of the time for criminal defendants in non-white-collar crimes, but 62% of the time for white-collar defendants.)

Despite the slogan that we are a nation of laws, it is clear that we do not really believe that. Confirmation battles over Supreme Court nominations demonstrate this. We believe that people who constitute the Court can determine the law. (The myth is that ideological contention over Supreme Court nominations began with Robert Bork, forgetting that the earlier nomination of Abe Fortas as Chief Justice was the first Court nomination to be defeated by a filibuster. As I have written, Bork was not “borked,” but myths continue to live on even when false. See AJsdad.blog of September 3, 2018, “Borked! Really?”)

We have tended to focus on the United States Supreme Court when considering how a few individuals determine our law, but increasingly there are battles over state supreme courts as well. Several decades ago “tort reform” became a political issue. The law of torts governs who should pay and how much when someone is injured. With the claim that recoveries for injuries were harming both the economy and healthcare, business, manufacturers, medical institutions, and insurance companies targeted the nominations and elections of state supreme court judges. Money poured into the selection processes. What had been a backwater of our political system now saw contentious advertising and campaigns because the powerful knew that our laws were not immutable.

Today the battles over state supreme court nominees focus on abortion and gerrymandering. Last spring Wisconsin had a costly election for its supreme court. The court was viewed as equally split between conservatives and liberals, and the newly-elected judge was expected to be the deciding vote on abortion and gerrymandering. Pennsylvania has a similar election coming up this fall.

Even though our history shows otherwise, the statement is still often repeated that America is a nation of laws, not of men. Perhaps the powerless have always known that this is a myth. Thus, a character in James McBride’s new novel The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store utters a truism that goes beyond race: “‘White folks’ laws,’ Nate said softly, ‘The minute you leave the room, the next white fella comes along the law is how he says it is. And the next one comes along and the law is how he says it is.’”

The moneyed and the powerful try to shape supreme courts so that the few can alter the law in ways that the rich and powerful want. And these days, they are often successful.

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A Home Nestled in the Mountains

We went to northwestern North Carolina to see if the Asheville environs might be a place where we would like to spend our “golden years,” which recently have been plagued with aches, pains, hiccups, surgeries, and way too many doctor appointments. We had had only slight previous contact with the area. Decades ago, we had visited the spouse’s aunt and uncle’s retirement home in the area; we had spent a weekend at a family reunion nearby; and we had camped and gotten lost in the surrounding Blue Ridge mountains in that long ago time when we traveled with a tent, sleeping bags, and a Coleman stove.

Our research indicated that Asheville had a pleasant climate, one with a change of seasons, but with milder winters and summers than what we have been used to. The weather for our week was beautiful. We had also been told that Asheville, which had voted for Biden and Obama, was an accepting, welcoming place, and that also seemed to be true.

We were too busy viewing old folks’ homes (aka “continuing care retirement communities”; see spouse’s blog of September 19, 2023) to visit Asheville’s second most famous tourist destination. (I am assuming that “the outdoors” is first, for the area’s mountains and streams, which once entranced me, now beckon many others.) In one of our previous travels there we had visited the Biltmore Estate built in the late nineteenth century by George Washington Vanderbilt II, the grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who made fabulous amounts of money. A fabulous amount of that descended to GWV who spent a fabulous amount on the Biltmore Estate. The 250-room house, still in private hands, and the 8,000-acre grounds are open to the public. Biltmore, I thought, was an incentive to live in Asheville. I imagined that I would visit the place during all the seasons and attend programs at the Estate. A little research made me doubt that. Tickets normally are about a hundred bucks, but they go 40% higher during the Christmas season, and an annual pass for one person is $300. Maybe for the first year in Asheville, I might visit Biltmore, but after that . . .?

We did, however, visit — or almost visited — the boyhood home of the writer most identified with Asheville, Thomas Wolfe. Driving back to our hotel from a local CCRC, we headed to Wolfe’s boyhood home which the internet told us was open to the public. What we did not read, however, was that the home itself could only be viewed as part of a regularly scheduled group tour. We were ten minutes late for one and two hours early for the next. We eschewed the house tour.

The adjacent visitors’ center, however, had an informative 20-minute documentary on Wolfe’s life and another room of photographs, manuscripts, and objects concerning the writer. I knew the name of a couple of Wolfe’s novels and even one of his short stories, “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn.” (Wolfe lived for several years in Brooklyn, and I recently learned that I have unknowingly passed his old residences many times.) But I have not read a word he has written other than a passing sentence or two. I once heard that if you did not read Thomas Wolfe when you were young, you would find him unreadable. That wisdom came to me when I was no longer young and had not read him, and I decided that I would remain a Wolfe virgin. Most of my readerly friends have not read Wolfe either, but one recently tried. He announced the author “unreadable.”

The time spent at the visitors’ center did not inspire me to tackle any of his novels. I was confirmed in what I already thought I knew — that his books are egotistical, narcissistic autobiographies, not really novels with a beginning, middle, and end. The narrator of the documentary read poetic and descriptive passages that captured time and place, but the sentences also pushed on long after they should have found a period. Perhaps if I were to settle in Asheville, I would read Look Homeward, Angel, the thinly-disguised first novel about Wolfe’s early life in the town, but not until then.

We did, however, stay in a hotel that Thomas Wolfe wrote about, or more accurately, he wrote about the department store that would later be turned into the hotel. The structure was built in 1923 to house Asheville’s leading retail emporium, but when the downtown experienced a severe decline during the Depression and after World War II, the department store closed. In 1988 it was converted into a hotel, which today gives a hint of the building’s history by having displays of mid-twentieth clothing and by announcing our elevator’s arrival on the top floor with a voice saying, “Fourth floor. Women’s wear.” (This was a bit curious since a store directory on the ground floor indicated that women’s clothing had been on the second story.) Our suite with a separate sitting area had a quirky layout, but it suited us just fine for a week (except for the frustratingly intermittent internet service).

The department store was owned by the Jewish Solomon Lipinsky. This heritage was not noted in the hotel, but a plaque embedded in the sidewalk out a side entrance on a street lined with small shops noted that in the early twentieth century more than a dozen Jewish merchants owned stores in the neighborhood. Of course, there must be stories here. How did Jewish people decide to settle in Asheville more than a century ago? What were their relationships to the rest of the community? Where did they go to school? Did they intermarry with Christians? If not, what were the mating rituals? Perhaps Thomas Wolfe wrote about this, but I have my doubts, and I am not going to investigate.

The hotel was in the heart of downtown Asheville, which has many buildings from a century ago, although, like our hotel, many have been repurposed. Small shops abound. The spouse and I speculated about how the many clothing shops, mostly women’s, could survive with what appeared to be limited foot traffic, but if there were empty storefronts, they were few.

Asheville is known as a foodie haven, and the downtown had restaurants galore. We ate every night within walking distance of the hotel and especially enjoyed a place featuring the remarkable fusion of Hawaiian food and Texas barbecue. We had great ribs, and the fried green tomato was excellent, unlike the mediocre one we had had at a diner the day before. A large tapas place in a Moroccan-like setting served us several dishes we liked, including slow-roasted carrots and remarkably tasty lima beans. Not every restaurant was great. The spouse did indulge her southern roots in one place by having pimiento cheese, which she, a stern critic, anointed as excellent, but the rest of the food was mediocre, and a fried chicken place highly touted by locals was merely okay.

Strolling to the restaurants, we always passed one or two street musicians who to this untrained ear seemed talented as they played a jazz saxophone or muted trumpet. In addition to food, Asheville is known for music, and we got hints of its ubiquity. From the open windows of restaurants and bars, music of differing quality floated, and we saw many signs touting musical performances at hours usually past our bedtimes.

The downtown was enhanced by a good, independent bookstore with a public library nearby. Even so, to this dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker the downtown was small, and its charms, it seemed, could be quickly exhausted.

On the other hand, it would amuse me to live in Buncombe County (Asheville is the county seat). According to many sources (word origins are often disputed), because a nineteenth century Congressman from the area often spouted irrelevant drivel on the floor of the House of Representatives, the still useful term “bunkum” emerged. No one we met in Buncombe County mentioned that.

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Please Take Good Care of . . . Me (Guest Post by the Spouse)

The husband and I have just returned from Altamont (with apologies to Thomas Wolfe) where we visited five continuing care retirement communities (CCRC). These popular retirement options (increasingly known as “life care communities” or “senior living solutions” [who thought up such an awful term?!?!?] are designed to make your last years on earth as pleasant and carefree as possible. Towards that end, they promise independent living in a comfortable apartment (or free-standing “cottage” or “villa” or “townhome”), meal service (usually one meal a day), housekeeping, a fitness center (machines and pools), day trips, art workshops, chapel, library (either check-out or book swap), book clubs, bridge, mah-jongg, musical events, etc. etc. etc. (God forbid you should just want to relax and read your book.) Importantly, the best ones offer “assisted living” should daily activities (like bathing and dressing) get to be overwhelming, memory care should dementia raise its ugly head, and skilled nursing should such be required. For all this fun one usually pays an entrance fee (higher the bigger the dwelling) and a monthly fee. The monthly fee may remain constant as one moves from, say, independent living to memory care, or it may start off small-ish (never really small) and get steeper as one moves to more hands-on levels of care.

Now. There are several problems with all CCRC’s. While they offer some welcome activities to those of us who no longer get up in the morning to go to work, they also tend to remind us that we no longer get up in the morning to go to work, and we need other things to keep us engaged with the living. Moreover, it requires us to come to terms with the fact that bad things happen when one gets older. But the main problem with all of these CCRCs is that everyone, I mean everyone, is OLD. Some of us old people don’t like the idea of always being around old people. I know, I know, but there it is.

Nevertheless, off we went to investigate.

The first community we visited was Meade Valley Farms (not its real name), “nestled in a picturesque setting” about 20 minutes outside Altamont. It comprised about 30 free-standing homes clustered on top of a rise that overlooked pastureland, a corn field, and a community garden. Although maintenance of property was part of the package, one could also add landscaping to the patio portion of one’s own home. Pleasant enough. The clubhouse (meeting room, fitness center, therapy pool) were down the rise and across the road. In other words, you could get all the exercise you needed just by hiking to the fitness center and back. If one of you had to go into assisted living, that facility (which we were not invited to tour) was further even than the clubhouse. One of the homeowners — a retired high school principal and his wife — were eager to open their home for a tour. The husband (we’ll call him Tom) greeted us outside his neatly-organized two-car garage in crisp jeans and a well-worn T-shirt. The house was modestly appointed but immaculate. Scented candles burned; the kitchen was uncluttered and spotless; a pantry showed canned goods stacked alphabetically; homemade quilts graced the beds; the front patio was awash in flowers. Tom told us that he rose daily at 3 AM to take a brisk walk around the grounds. He did indeed look amazingly fit for a man in his 70’s. His wife, clearly a consummate homemaker, was equally fit. They had been residents for some ten years and seemed to play the roles of mayor and first lady. Now let’s face it: My house is not immaculate (I hate scented candles); I do not alphabetize my canned goods; we are not what you’d call in tip-top shape; I don’t garden; I want a lap not a therapy pool; I want a grocery store that’s not 20 minutes away. But still, it was pretty and pleasant.

On to Holly Grove. Despite its perky name, Holly Grove is stately and large and expensive. Situated off a main Altamont shopping thoroughfare, it has almost 400 residences including apartments, villas and cottages. Although the villas and cottages were quite pretty from the outside, their fit residents tend to live forever, so you can’t expect one of these homes to become available for at least ten years. Apartment residents are also fit, but they die more readily (and there are more of them), so the apartment waitlist is only five years. To get on the waitlist requires a $1000 fee (not unusual) as well as certification of health and financial solvency (less usual). But Holly Grove has everything: Three dining rooms, art studio, fitness center (lap pool!), woodworking shop, library, mah-jongg, book clubs, auditorium, graciously appointed public spaces, lovely grounds, hiking trails, etc. etc. etc. And indeed, we saw lots of folks coming and going to various activities. Residents’ artwork (some of it surprisingly good) lined the hallways. The three-bedroom apartment we were shown (the owner was traveling in Europe) was elegantly appointed with Persian carpets, antiques, a classic chandelier. All of a sudden, we felt slightly underdressed. (Would I have to wear make-up in the fitness center? What if my shirt has a spot on it? Would people notice?) Everything was all under one roof. A good thing, right? But just to make decision-making as hard as possible, the husband pointed out that if you’re never going to leave the building anyway, why does it matter whether you’re in Altamont or Peekskill? Why are we thinking of moving 1000 miles away from our beloved New York?

Let’s move on to…

Oakwoods. Right up front it didn’t help that they forgot we were coming. It didn’t seem to be an overwhelming obstacle, though, and we were quickly introduced to a marketing person, who was extremely attractive, tanned and healthy, and attentive and knowledgeable about the area and the place. Her very presence, however, reminded us that we were no longer tall and tan and young and lovely. So, even though they had forgotten about us, they were welcoming. The picture in their brochure shows ten people outdoors around a fire pit. Gosh, they’re having such a good time! Everyone has a wine glass; one fellow holds a saxophone. There are six women and four men, but we never saw a male resident. Widows abound…everywhere…not just at this place. Oakwoods is out by Meade Valley Farms…or further out. The drive from Altamont is expressway followed by country roads. The nearest grocery store??? Hospital??? Oakwoods has lots of stuff, but we didn’t see anyone using it. We were, however, graciously invited to stay for lunch. I asked whom we should pay, and our Beatrice said that, of course, it was on them. White tablecloths and waiter service for lunch was nice, but we were alone in the dining room except for one other couple. Assisted living was again in a separate building, a short drive away.

The next place, Haverford Hills, was as big as Holly Grove and in the same suburban-type area of Altamont. They had a marketing approach different from all the others. Instead of a one-on-one appointment, they invited several potential residents (in our case about 25 souls) to a Power Point presentation and group tour. Very corporate. Coffee and not-very-good pastries were available during the presentation. Now. I’m sure it will come as a surprise to you, but not all old people are attentive, knowledgeable, cultured, or good conversationalists. Some talk too much — mostly about themselves; some are just rude; some are all the way to boorish. And when you go into a CCRC, you must expect to meet all kinds of people…as we did with this particular group. However, it struck me as not the wisest marketing strategy to present the opportunity of meeting such unpleasant company as you were considering where you wanted to live for the rest of your life! After a car-sick-inducing bus tour of the grounds (villas, cottages — 10-year waitlist), we had a walking tour of the indoor facilities (nice enough), but no tour of apartments (Covid had scared off residents from inviting strangers into their homes). Floor plans and video tours were made available online. We were invited to stay for lunch…at our own expense which, in our case, was $25. How welcoming is that? Day trips to here and there were available — for a fee. Everything here seemed to be “for a fee.”

Finally, we came to Esterbrook Estates. An hour’s drive from Altamont, this all-inclusive 400-resident place was off the beaten path, but within 10 minutes of a shopping mall with pharmacy and grocery store. All of the buildings were connected. You never had to go outside– ever (even though that particular day the weather showed off admirably). We were invited to have lunch on the house before we met with a marketing agent. The cafeteria-style menu said that lunch would have been $4.75 apiece. When we went into the marketing office, there was a small sign that welcomed us by name. The public spaces were comfortable, but not splashy. The fitness center was fully stocked with brand new machines, but the pool was…not a lap pool. There was the usual art room, meeting rooms, library. Assisted care was in the same building as the independent living apartments. The 3-bedroom apartment we were shown felt large, was full of light, and was near a storeroom (mostly filled with residents’ Christmas decorations in locked cages). A small, trout-stocked lake with a biking/hiking trail around it was nearby. The marketing agent (a man this time) was about 50, tall and personable like a Rotarian might be. He paid close attention to us and our questions. His pitch was complete and enthusiastic, and it included an easily understood account of what at first appeared to be complicated payment options. Deal-breaker (besides the pool): dinner was available in the cafeteria from 5-6:30. Really?!?!? 5 o’clock??!?!? Only old people eat at 5 o’clock!

So. Which one would you choose?