Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Our president tweeted: “As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!)”

The plot I just hatched

With my wisdom unmatched

Puts the Kurds at great risk.

But I reiterate

That my wisdom is great,

And Turkey must fear for its fisc.

Should this help the Islamic State,

My move still is great.

Under my hairsprayed thatch

Lies wisdom that no one can match.

          Many of the Democratic presidential candidates have said that they would not allow their children to take a position akin to the one Hunter Biden had with the Ukrainian company. Their statements trouble me not because their progeny should take such corporate directorships, but because I find it of concern that the candidates think they have the absolute power to order their grown children around.

          Remember those Boeing Max 737’s that crashed? A multiagency task force concluded that a poor regulatory system that relied heavily on Boeing to ensure the planes’ safety had helped compromise that safety. Crowds at Trump rallies mindlessly cheer when he proudly announces that he has slashed “regulations.” Perhaps these people who blindly trust corporations to do the right thing should have to fly in Boeing Max 737s.

I am no one’s pawn,

But I invite to the White House lawn,

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

He flatters me as he should.

He’s my friend; thus, he is good.

He may kill our allied Kurds,

But I will stop him with words.

But he will listen to me, this Erdogan.

If he does not—his economy’s gone.

The say it’s too late.

The Islamic State is

          Resurging at this very minute

No matter

It won’t be my fault because

I know just how to spin it.

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Chasing Waterfalls (continued)

Mary Jemison was born in 1743 on board a ship as her parents emigrated from what is now Northern Ireland to America. When she was twelve, she and family members were captured from their Pennsylvania farm by Indians. The rest of her family was killed, but she was adopted by the Seneca. She married a member of the Lenape Indians, and after he died, she married a Seneca man. She had a half dozen children with the two men. When she was eighty, she published her life story, or at least the story as it was written down by an American minister, James Everett Seaver.

This book falls into the once-popular genre of captivity narrative. (Much of what I know about captivity narratives comes from Leonard Slatkin’s Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600- 1860). The numbers are not precise, but over athousand European descendants from New England villages were captured by and lived with Native Americans between 1677 and 1750. A study of 750 of these whose fates were known found that about 300 were ransomed and returned to New England after captivities ranging from six months to twenty years. Fewer than a hundred were killed, and others disappeared into Canada or elsewhere, and sixty became Indians. Some who returned to European settlements wrote about their experiences. Mary Rowlandson’s A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson was the first and perhaps the most popular. A hundred years after its first publication in 1682, the memoir was still being printed.

Rowlandson’s book was the archetype for many captivity narratives to follow. In her first-person account, as Slotkin puts it, “[T]he Indians become the instruments of God for the chastisement of his guilty people. . . . The experience of captivity . . . leads her to the perception of her own fallen debased, even beastlike condition, her absolute dependence on God, her weakness in the face of sin, and the precarious nature of all human conditions.” The return to the New England community did not fully resolve this pain and anxiety. “Yet the captive, like the regenerate convert, has experienced a thing that his fellows has not. . . . He has perceived that life is lived on the brink of an abyss, and this perception stays with him as an acute and continuing anxiety for the state of his soul and the wrath of God’s judgment on sinful people.”

Jemison’s story, written a century and a half after Rolandson’s, was not one of survival and Christian salvation, but it, too, was popular, selling in the 1820s as much as the best-selling novelists, Sir Walter Scott and James Fennimore Cooper. While Jemison may also have represented American values in an alien world, her resolution of this dichotomy was not with a return to the white world but by finding her place in Native American society.

The Seneca certainly valued Mary Jemison. In 1797, the Seneca Nation signed the Treaty of Big Tree with the United States. The Seneca negotiators included Mary Jemison. Not surprisingly, no woman was part of the negotiating team for the Americans. I have no idea when a woman first helped the United States negotiate a treaty, but I am willing to bet it was long after Jemison acted for the Seneca. And perhaps those facts might help us understand why some abducted colonial women chose to stay with the Native Americans.

Although the Seneca surrendered much land in the treaty in exchange for money, they also retained essential hunting and fishing rights and some relatively small parcels of land. Jemison was praised for how well she negotiated, and after the treaty the Seneca made her a land grant making her one of the largest landowners in western New York, the title to which was confirmed by the state in 1817.

Perhaps to the surprise of many readers, she spoke movingly about her first Indian husband, “Sheninjee was a noble man. . . . Yet, Sheninjee was an Indian. The idea of spending my days with him, at first completely irreconcilable to my feelings; but his good nature, generosity, tenderness, and friendship towards me soon gained my affection; and strange as it may seem, I loved him!”

After Sheninjee died, however, she married a much different man. Slotkin describes Hiokatoo as “no such quasi Christian as Sheninjee but a war-loving, torturing red devil, renowned for his cruelty to the whites.” Even so, Jemison came to admire him as “a kind of Indian Daniel Boone,” who had more strength and power than those around him. “Mrs. Jemison and her second husband—the pure white and the pure Indian—emerge as admirable characters in her narrative. She states that she has refused an opportunity to return to her white family, preferring her family ties to the bloody Hiokatoo.”

The land that she was granted now is part of Letchworth State Park. She sold the land late in her life when she felt that too many whites were moving nearby. She moved to the Buffalo Creek Reservation, where she died in 1833. Four decades later, she was reinterred near her old home on the Genesee River on what is now Letchworth State Park land.

In chasing waterfalls, we learned about two women who had much to do with Letchworth State Park—Caroline Bishop, who was not widely known, and Mary Jemison, who had much fame. We also learned that one of the most famous women in American history, Eleanor Roosevelt, helped create a unique attraction near the waterfalls.

(continued sporadically)

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Chasing Waterfalls (continued from October 4)

We went chasing waterfalls to Letchworth State Park in western New York state.  The park is a seventeen-mile strip along the Genesee River as it flows north to Lake Ontario. (Yes, there are a lot of rivers that flow north.) We were chasing waterfalls, and the park has three large ones. They were all magnificent, but they made me feel old. The spouse and I wished we had visited the park decades ago (but we never heard of Letchworth until much later) because we would have done much more hiking on the well-maintained trails.

Our country has many wonderful state parks, but surely few of us are familiar with even most of them, and the 2015 newspaper poll that labeled Letchworth the number one state park in the country was a bit silly. However, having been there, that outcome seems at least defensible.

On the other hand, while the Genesee flows through a scenic gorge that was beautiful from every angle, it does seem a stretch to call Letchworth, as some do, “the Grand Canyon of the East.” It does not have the depth of the Grand Canyon with different climates and flora as you descend. It does not have the colors of the Grand Canyon. It does not have the burros of the Grand Canyon. It is not the Grand Canyon of the East. Letchworth, instead, has beauty and charm of its own. And it has its own history.

William Pryor Letchworth donated a thousand acres to New York state in 1906 that formed the heart of Letchworth State Park. Mr. Letchworth, a successful industrialist and businessman from nearby Buffalo, had started buying the land a half century before. Pictures at the park show that the riverbank was clear cut and studded with ugly lumbering mills. W. P. Letchworth razed the mills and allowed most of the land to reseed naturally. A house was also part of the purchase. Letchworh had this site landscaped by William Webster, who had been mentored by Frederick Law Olmstead. Letchworth named this estate Glen Iris. Glen Iris functions today as an inn.

The restaurant in the inn, where we had an ok lunch, is named Caroline’s. The back of the menu explained why but left me with some questions. Letchworth did much charitable and social work with a special concern for children, and in 1875 he inspected all the state institutions that housed children. The menu indicates that Caroline Bishop met Letchworth when she was fifteen and was impressed by him. She completed her education and taught school for ten years but then in 1883 became a secretary and executive assistant to Letchworth, who was sixty. The menu states, “Caroline was his true right hand—from research and writing assistance for his numerous books to knowing every detail of his business and legal documents.”

She was with Letchworth when he suffered a stroke and when he died seven years later in 1910. She became superintendent of the park at its inception and later the curator and librarian of the museum that stands on the Glen Iris grounds. She worked at the park until shortly before her death in 1926.

William Pryor Letchworth was a noteworthy man, and his name lives as does a bit of his story in Letchworth State Park. Caroline Bishop must have been a noteworthy woman. How many females were superintendents of state parks in 1915 or helped create a museum that still attracts people? But as with many other noteworthy women, even with her abilities widely apparent, she was consigned to be the sidekick to a “great man.” Most of these women are lost to history, so I was glad that the restaurant in Glen Iris was named after her, and I could learn something about Caroline Bishop.

But, I must confess, I wanted to know a bit more. The brief accounts of Mr. Letchworth I have read mention no marriage but an active male social life. The brief accounts of Bishop’s life do not mention any social life except for what seems the delicately put statement that Caroline “was also a close companion [to Letchworth], because once she began as his assistance (sic), she never left his side.” My prurient side was left hanging. Tell me more, please, tell me more.

Caroline Bishop’s roles in the life of Mr. Letchworth and in the creation of the park named after him may have been largely forgotten and she may have been little known in her lifetime except as an easily forgettable minor adjunct to Letchworh, but another woman with a connection to the land that would become Letchworth State Park, Mary Jemison, was widely known.

(continued October 11)

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Snippets

News reports state that “Ukrainian oligarch” Victor Pinchuk donated $150,000 to Donald Trump’s now-defunct foundation. (Can any of you tell me any good works that the Trump Foundation did while it was funct?) In 2015 Pinchuk invited Trump to speak at a conference in Kiev, which Trump did by a video link. Trump praised Pinchuk as “a very, very special man.” But as you assess how this makes you think about our president, throw into your thought hopper that the same news report also said that Pinchuk gave more than $10 million to the Clinton Foundation and was invited to dinner at Hillary and Bill Clinton’s Washington home.

Not too long ago, I played a game while watching Fox News. I would bet with myself how long it would take until I heard “Hillary.” On Hannity’s show, it almost never took more than a minute and usually fewer than fifteen seconds. Now while watching Fox I count the seconds until I hear “Hunter Biden.” And, I note, the last time I watched Hannity, within five seconds I heard both Hillary and Hunter Biden mentioned. (I do not recommend turning this into a drinking game. It would be too dangerous to your health.)

When did Rudy Giuliani stop mentioning 9/11 every time he spoke? I almost miss that guy.

The notes of the phone call between the American and Ukrainian presidents have Volodymyr Zelensky saying to Donald: “I would like to tell you that I also have quite a few Ukrainian friends that live in the United States. Actually last time I traveled to the United States, I stayed in New York near Central Park and I stayed at the Trump Tower. I will talk to them and I hope to see them again in the future.” Isn’t it sad that the Ukrainian thought he could ingratiate himself with the American president by saying that he had stayed in a $600-a-night hotel room and that he might get friends to do so, too? Isn’t it even sadder that he might have been right?

My very large brain       

Said lean on Ukraine

To get me some poo

So I can be re-elected.

But a whistle blew,

I’m in such deep doo,

I might even be ejected.

I could be impeached;

Not fair! The law I was not teached.

          “The man was intoxicated; drunk on a little man’s dreams of revenge.” Robert Harris, Munich.

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Chasing Waterfalls (continued)

We drove south from Niagara Falls, skirting Buffalo, to Mt. Morris, New York, as we chased waterfalls. Although I have been a resident of New York for a half century, I had never been to this part of the state. I was struck by the beauty of western New York made more beautiful by goldenrod blooming everywhere. It not only lined roads and driveways, huge fields of the golden flowers were around every bend. I had had no idea of goldenrod’s beauty before. Was it planted? Did it have a use? Of course, I thought of allergies, but I later learned that goldenrod is not a major cause of hay fever. It blooms the same time as rag weed, and rag weed is the major culprit of allergy sufferers.

Although I had not before seen so much blooming goldenrod, the golden colors made the spouse and me think of our spring barge trip through Burgundy where the blooming colza fields carpeted the land with a similar shade of yellow. I could not help but wonder what van Gogh would have produced from this wondrous western New York of hills and valleys colored in swatches and patches and fields of gold.

We got to Mt. Morris, New York, late in the afternoon, checked into a not-very-good motel, and drove to what passed for a downtown—little more than an intersection. My economic calculus says that there is an inverse relationship between the number of “antique” stores in a locality and the town’s prosperity. Of the few downtown blocks of Mt. Morris, one was lined with what proclaimed themselves to be antique stores, perhaps comprising a quarter of the existing establishments. Such stores in struggling towns seldom contain valuable items but are primarily filled with stuff that looks as if it had been discarded, and the Mt. Morris stores followed that pattern. Even so, the spouse and I like poking around such places, and we filled the remainder of the afternoon at a couple of the stores.

I was looking at some respectable shirts in the first store, but they did not fit. (Of course, they were too small.) The person manning the store came over and tried to find one that could contain me, but I don’t think that a sale was the chief goal. He wanted to talk. On a weekday in September, he did not have many customers. It took some effort to get away from what could have been a never-ending conversation, but the escape was brief, for a clone of this person was manning the second store we entered.

He, too, was retired and after parting with this fact he told us what the job had been—something with New York state—and what his starting salary had been and how that pay had impressed his father. Hardly taking a breath, he said that his mother now took care of him and did his laundry and cooking. After the briefest of pauses, he said that she was ninety-nine. The spouse and I separated and foraged in the store piled high everywhere with cast iron pans, bottles, Christmas ornaments. I don’t remember if I asked him, but he did old us he did not make a living from the store. “Last month may have been the first time I made enough to pay the rent.” Acquisition was his hobby. He went to auctions on the weekend, and he loved getting something that intrigued him. The store seemed to be the result, but he said that he had several barns even more filled than his store. He did not seem to mind that we stayed beyond closing time, and even though we bought $40 worth of “antiques,” he did not really seem to care whether we made the purchases as long as we would listen to him talk and, occasionally, reply.

The two men manning the antique stores as well as the motel clerk all recommended Questa Lasagna for dinner. We went and were surprised. The cook and owner, we were told by a server, was a graduate of the CIA—no not that one, but the Culinary Institute of America. I have been to other restaurants in out-of-the-way places were a CIA graduate was cooking, and the food has always been good or better than good.  That was also true for Questa Lasagna, where all the pasta was homemade. You don’t get house-made pasta in many restaurants in population centers; I certainly didn’t expect it in a town of a couple thousand in western New York.

Eating is part of the reason I travel. I go to experience new things—landscapes with flora and fauna I have not seen; people who are different from those I encounter in my daily routines; museums that get me to see things I had not before; architecture that has me experience shapes and forms and spaces outside of my normal encounters; music I don’t normally hear; stores with goods and books and prints that I will not see at home. And I want to experience food. Of course, on any trip, I have to eat, but I want the experience of someone “cooking.”  By that I mean that a restaurant is not just microwaving or presenting meals prepared by some distribution company that I could get in a thousand different places, but that someone in the kitchen is actually cooking, not just thawing what someone else has prepared. And at Questa Lasagna someone was actually cooking.

Adding to our surprise, we found a restaurant five miles away the next night where people were cooking, EuropaCafe. Two women born in Poland, but who met in New York, owned this place. They offered among other items an incredible array of soups, many of which I had never heard of before. I had a sour rye soup, whose Polish name I don’t remember, that was distinctive and incredibly good and incredibly filling. Although I went on to get more food—a hunter’s stew based on sauerkraut, fresh green beans, stuffed cabbage—I really needed nothing beyond the soup. I heartily recommend both these restaurants.

While the real cooking of these places was a bonus for our visit, our reason for being in the Mt. Morris area was to visit Letchworth State Park and chase more waterfalls.

(continued sporadically)

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Chasing Waterfalls

          We did go chasing waterfalls, looking not for a lost son, but for an unseen (by us) part of America and perhaps a long-lost youth.

          We drove the Honda Fit the six hours from the Poconos of Pennsylvania to Niagara Falls. I had done most of this drive before, but the spouse had not. I was happy to do it again since it is lovely countryside, but the point was not the hills and spacious valleys with well-tended farms, but those fabled Falls where neither of us had been. We had, of course, seen Niagara Falls many times, or at least images of it in pictures, movies, and television. That does raise the question of why go see something in person that you have “seen” many, many times before. Does your physical presence near a famous sight really add something significant to your already existing experiences of it? For me, it has varied. I, not surprisingly, “saw” the Eiffel Tower many times before I was in Paris, but I, of course, thought that a Paris trip should take in the Eiffel Tower. That in-person view did not affect me much. It did not seem to add much of significance to my life experiences other than that I could now check off that I had seen the Eiffel Tower.

          On the other hand, on each of my visits to the Grand Canyon I have felt that no picture could ever do it justice, and I was thrilled that I had personally seen the view from both rims. The differing reactions are not just because one is manmade and the other is a wonder of nature. I have seen many views of the New York skyline from the air—from planes or helicopters or buildings. But every time I went up to the observation deck or upper floors of the World Trade Center, I was mesmerized by the sight of New York City from even though I had “seen” it many times before. The spouse had seen many images of Chartres Cathedral, but when we finally went there, she was moved to tears.

          I have no theory about my different reactions in personally seeing a famous sight–why those personal views of the Grand Canyon or the city skyline made me see them fresh and anew and as if I had never encountered them in any way before, while the Eiffel Tower sighting was close to “Been there, done that.” But off I went to the I-already-know-what-this-looks-like Niagara Falls.

          That déjà vu feeling was certainly there for the town of Niagara Falls, Ontario, which we drove through before seeing the Falls. It may once have been a cute village, but now it is hard to separate it from many other tourist towns. It did not have its own unique identity but was seeking to be a mini-Las Vegas—tacky shops, huge hotels, casinos, light shows, Ferris wheels, and dancing fountains. But, of course, this Las Vegas wannabe has what the big LV does not have—Niagara Falls.

          We did not see the Falls until we had checked into the hotel and ascended to our room. We pulled back the curtains, and there was the promised view—American Falls, the higher but narrower cascade, off to our left and the panorama of Horseshoe Falls almost in front of us. Even though we were looking through framed glass, I realized that I was not glancing at a picture or a video; I was staring intently at something that seemed alive right in front of me.

          We walked to the Niagara River, but on the way, we encountered Niagara Falls, the town. We thought that we could take a shortcut through a casino that stood between our hotel and the waterfront, but, in good casino fashion, no route was straightforward thus forcing visitors to spend as much time in the gambling joint as possible. We got out of the casino close to where we entered, but then made our way down several steep blocks (which somehow were even steeper on the way back) to the well-maintained park at the river’s edge. It had perfect views of the two falls. We walked to the railing and stared. We then strolled a few feet, leaned on the railing, and stared. Walked a few more feet, leaned on the railing, and so on. It was hard to take my eyes off the Falls, partly because they played a great trick with the mind. They were ever-changing; the water that came over them would never go over the Falls again. But simultaneously, the Falls seemed eternal. Even though I knew that the Falls had changed in man’s memory as chunks of the ledges had fallen away under the water’s constant pressure, what I saw seemed as if it had always been there and always would be.

          The Falls made me think not only of time immemorial but also of my youth. I grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan, and some of the water I watched falling could have started its journey from Wisconsin rivers and streams. How likely was that? How long would such a trip take? We high school boys had a ritual of relieving ourselves of the excessive beer we had drunk into Lake Michigan off the end of the Sheboygan lighthouse pier. Was it possible that the cascade at Niagara Falls was partly me?

          Every time we could, we looked at the Falls. At the park, riding a funicular to the waterfront, out of our hotel room in the different lights of the day and night. They were always the same and always different. They are lit at night, which makes them different, but not really, from the day. At sunrise with the barest pink on the horizon, they had a different setting but were still unalterable. The mist, or the spray, or the fog, or whatever is the proper name for the water vapor that rises out of the base of the Falls, however, did change. It was always present, but its height varied every time we looked. Early in the morning it reached as high as our hotel room, fifty stories in the air.

          As is to be expected, we did a few touristy things besides gawk at the Falls. We went to a concept restaurant, but neither of us would recommend it. On the other hand, we took the walk under Horseshoe Falls. We descended in an elevator to an observation post nearly at the foot of the Falls. Then we entered tunnels under the cascade with portals that allowed us to stand a few feet behind the water. We could sense, but never truly comprehend, the power that was produced by this geologic formation.

          I would not say your life is incomplete if you don’t see Niagara Falls. On the other hand, it is not a waste of time to see them. In its literal meaning of creating awe, they are awesome.

Twenty-four hours at Niagara Falls, however, was sufficient, and the next day we drove to Mt. Morris, New York, to chase more waterfalls.

(Continued October 4)

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The Shot Heard ‘Round the World (concluded)

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 contest 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 be reached.

Emmitt Till and the Birmingham church bombings, snapping dogs and firehoses, bus boycotts and many killings were yet 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 lived long after its initial short run, which 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?” However, 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 (continued)

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, and 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 particularly 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 Hodge’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 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 town along his route, but now he no longer did. DeLillo foreshadows this change by having the broadcasters ask how can you explain the 20,000 empty seats in the stadium. The sport’s hold on America was still strong, but it was waning.

(concluded September 30)

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The Shot Heard ‘Round the World (continued)

          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 and remains with many Americans. 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 the 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.

          These writings by Doris Kearns Goodwin and Red Smith 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.

(continued September 27.)

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The Shot Heard ‘Round the World

          I wasn’t aware of it when it happened. It was on television, I have read, but we 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 probably baseball’s most 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 the last 44 scheduled games, and 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 exciting, season-concluding baseball games since then ending that ended with a home run. Joe Carter of the Toronto Blue Jays hit a homer to the 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. Bill Mazeroski, who averaged a mere eight home runs per season in a long career and who had already hit a decisive home run in Game 1 of the series, led off the bottom of the ninth, and on the second pitch, hit a 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 those readings 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!”

(continued September 25)