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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?

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First Sentences

“When Sarah and Maynard Clover brought their seventh child into the world on September 12, 1896, they were evidently at a loss for a name.” Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon.

“It was hot. When Alice and Emma, the two white ducks, got tired of diving and swimming about the pond, they climbed out on the bank and looked over toward the house where Mr. Bean, the farmer, lived, and: ‘Oh!’ said Emma, ‘the house looks as if it was melting.’” Walter R. Brooks, Freddy the Detective.

“The free individual has long dominated the American political imagination.” Alex Zakaras, The Roots of American Individualism: Political Myth in the Age of Jackson.

“Shrill sounds split the air.” Susan Moore Jordan, The Case of the ‘Carousel’ Killer.

“People love dead Jews. Living Jews, not so much.” Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present.

“I bet you didn’t know that bleach masks the smell of blood.” Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer.

“Samuel Adams delivered what may count as the most remarkable second act in American life.” Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams.

“The Titans were gone.” Jane Gardam, Last Friends.

“The connections between mathematics and poetry are profound.” Sarah Hart, Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connection Between Mathematics and Literature.

“Ask any Negro. They’ll tell you: a woman does not play a saxophone.” Charlotte Carter, Rhode Island Red.

“It was one of the early days of the third millennium after Christ.” Mustafa Akyol, The Islamic Jesus: How the Kings of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims.

“Let me tell you about desert people.” Ruchika Tomar, A Prayer for Travelers.

“In the late spring of 1912, the graceful yacht Enchantress put out to sea from rainy Genoa for a Mediterranean pleasure cruise—a carefree cruise without itinerary or time-schedule.” David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.

“‘Hell is empty, Armand,’ said Stephen Horowitz.” Louse Penny, All the Devils are Here.

“We live in the age of disinformation.” Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past.

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Snippets

I stopped at the roadside popup market to buy some vegan chili. It comes frozen. I like it, and I like having it in the freezer for a quick dinner when I don’t have the inclination to do my own cooking. I bought four. They are $8 a piece. Should I have been appalled or surprised when the guy who served me got a calculator to decide what I owed?

“In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.” Fran Lebowitz.

We are considering selling our house and moving into a condo, but not surprisingly, the ones that seem desirable always cost a little more than we can afford. I am reminded of the wise words: “Thrift is a wonderful virtue—especially in an ancestor.”

The 120-year-old house in the country often needs work, but I have learned that at this time of year, I have to be tolerant of our workmen. They do a good job, but right now they can be hard to get. It is hunting season, or should I say seasons. There is regular deer season, bow-and-arrow deer season, black powder deer season, turkey season, duck season, goose season, bear season. . . . And on the first days of these seasons, as with first day of the trout season in the spring, the workmen are out hunting, or fishing, not working at my house. But a remember what I heard years ago, “If God didn’t want man to hunt, he wouldn’t have given us plaid flannel shirts.”

Did I miss them? I have not heard those who rightfully complain about America’s mass incarceration and long prison sentences deriding the twenty-two-year sentence given the Proud Boys leader.

A wise person said: “An excellent time to win freedom by means of good behavior is before you go to jail.”

I don’t know of any legislative accomplishments of Jim Jordan, Congressman from Ohio and Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, even though legislative accomplishments are supposed to be the reason why people go to Congress in the first place. Instead, Jordan, who as Lillian Hellman said about Norma Shearer, has “a face unclouded by thought,” seeks to block or discredit criminal and other investigations into Donald Trump’s activities. The FBI, the Justice Department, state law enforcement officials are partisan hacks, at least when they do things Jordan does not like. In The Devil & Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession David Grann describes another Ohio Congressman a generation ago who, from the floor of the House where his statements could not be used in a defamation trial, said, “Mr. Speaker, I have evidence that certain F.B.I. agents in Youngstown, Ohio, have violated the RICO statute and stole large sums of cash.” The speaker was James Traficant who was later convicted of ten felony counts, including racketeering and taking bribes. Also what comes to mind are the words of the FBI agent in charge of the Traficant investigation: “Every time we charge another public official, the media presents it as another black eye for the community. I’d prefer if they portray it to the community as another step in cleansing ourselves.” The agent concluded, “As long as they choose to put people in office who are corrupt, nothing will ever change.”

“Man is the only animal that laughs. He is the only animal that has a House of Representatives.”

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Educational Disconnect

Grade schools and high schools are back in session, but I sometimes wonder why. I hear again and again that our schools are a failure, so why send kids there? On the one hand, the schools do not teach. On the other hand, they teach the wrong stuff. Of course, this is a disconnect. If the schools are not good at teaching, it does not make much sense to get exercised over their curriculum. This, of course, is a bit like what Woody Allen said about a resort: The food is awful. And the portions are so small.

That many think that our schools fail our kids was confirmed by a recent Gallup poll on education. The polling organization asked how satisfied the polling participants were with the quality of education students received in grades K-12. The responses: 9% are satisfied; 33% are somewhat satisfied; 32% are somewhat dissatisfied; 23% are completely dissatisfied; and 2% had no opinion. In other words, the total of those indicating a dissatisfaction with the present American education were in a distinct majority, outnumbering the satisfied cohort by fourteen percentage points.

This question was about all K-12 schools. The results were even more depressing when respondents were asked about the quality of the education in public schools: 9% are very satisfied; 20% are somewhat satisfied; 28% are somewhat dissatisfied; and 40% are very dissatisfied. While the satisfied/dissatisfied split for all schools is about the same now as it was a decade ago, that split has widened for the public schools. Now 68% fall into the dissatisfied camp while in 2013 56% did.

So, K-12 education generally in this country sucks, and public education sucks even bigger time, or at least that is what the country thinks as indicated by the Gallup poll. But wait: There is more information.

The poll respondents were asked if they had a child in school, and what grade their oldest child was in. The responses indicated that 33% had their oldest child in K-5, 21% had the oldest child in grades six through eight, 44% had the oldest child in high school, with 2% not responding to the question. Overwhelmingly, these children were in public schools—82%, with 9% in private schools; 1% in parochial schools; 3% in charter schools; and with 5% home schooled.

Here comes the shocker: The poll participants were asked about the quality of the education their oldest child was getting. The responses: 32% are completely satisfied; 48% somewhat satisfied; 14% somewhat dissatisfied; 6% completely dissatisfied. The satisfaction group, now at 70%, was even a bit higher than in 2013 when the satisfied cohort was 67%.

So, there is a big disconnect between the general populace’s perception of our education and those with children in our schools. Over two-thirds of the parents were in the satisfied group, while only 42% of the general population fell on the satisfied line. I have been trying to figure out why this split exists, but I don’t have answers. I could give speculations but that is all they would be.

I was not a participant in this poll, and I don’t know how I would have responded. I do know some K-12 teachers, whom I respect, but I have no firsthand knowledge of the K-12 educational system. It has been a lifetime since I graduated from high school, and a quarter century since my son did. Whatever I think I know about our education comes from news stories, politicians, headline-seeking parents, and pundits (also seeking attention), and this is mostly negative. But I find it striking that those who have important contact with the system—parents with kids in school—report satisfaction with the quality of the education being delivered.

Can somebody explain this to me?

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Thoughts on Labor Day

“Labor Day symbolizes our determination to achieve an economic freedom for the average man which will give his political freedom reality.” Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Erik Loomis writes in A History of America in Ten Strikes (2018): “Labor Day was created as a conservative holiday so that American workers would not celebrate the radical international workers’ holiday May Day.”

“The employer generally gets the employees he deserves.” Sir Walter Gilbey.

“Under a capitalist society such as that of the United States, employers profit by working their employees as hard as they can for as many hours as possible and for as little pay as they can get away with.” Erik Loomis.

A wise person said, “The world’s work must be done by some of us. We can’t all be politicians, pundits, and financiers.”

“I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.” Jerome K. Jerome.

“We have too many people who live without working, and we have altogether too many who work without living.”

“We don’t teach class conflict in our public schools. Textbooks have little material about workers.” Erik Loomis.

Apparently, Henry Ford never worked on one of his assembly lines doing a repetitive task hour after hour, day after day, year after year, for Ford said, “Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.”

“To sneer at another man’s work is the special privilege of little minds.”

“If a laborer were to dream for twelve hours every night that he was a king, I believe he would be almost as happy as a king who should dream twelve hours every night that he was a laborer.” Blaise Pascal.

In 1919, the average work week in dangerous conditions for steelworkers was 68.7 hours.

“To do great work a man must be very idle as well as very industrious.” Samuel Butler.

“It’s always been and always will be the same in the world: the horse does the work and the coachman is tipped.” Anonymous.

“We work not only to produce but to give value to time.” Eugène Delacroix

The 1963 March on Washington, famous for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Among other things, it advocated for a $2-an-hour minimum wage (about $20 in today’s money) and expansion of the Fair Labor Standards Act to agricultural workers. When King was assassinated, he was in Memphis to support a union strike.

Adam Cohen reports in Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America (2020) that in a recent election cycle, political action committees supporting business interests outspent PACs aligned with labor 16 to 1.

“With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that have ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in man, than any other association of men.” Clarence S. Darrow.