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1954: The MLB All-Star Game Returns to Cleveland

If ever the Greater Cleveland area needed a break to take their mind off their troubles, July, 1954, couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.

The 21^st annual All-Star Game took place at Cleveland Municipal Stadium off the shore of Lake Erie on July, 13, 1954. The last time Cleveland hosted an All-Star Game was in 1935.

What exactly was ailing the city? Let us count the ways.

The Indians final series before the All-Star break was held at Comiskey Park, where the Chicago White Sox swept the Tribe in four games. It was a miserable series for the Indians. They left 31 men on base with Al Rosen (last year’s AL MVP) stranding nine without picking up a single RBI. The Tribe star center-fielder, Larry Doby, also was without an RBI. What made matters worse, the New York Yankees ended the first half of the season sweeping the Washington Senators, winning nine in a row and 12 of their last 14 to slice the Indians once comfortable lead down to a half a game in the American League.

The deafening alarm bells were ringing in full force. Cleveland fans were fretting over yet another late season collapse.

Shirley Povich, columnist for the Washington Post, wrote on the morning of the All-Star Game, "The Indians, their hitting attacked defused by good White Sox pitching, have reason to be apprehensive. This was the year in which they weren't supposed to go into their customary fold-up routine, but you don't blow four straight to the White Sox at a time when the Yankees are charging in high gear, as the Yankees are doing....neither the Indians nor the White Sox have the depth to contest with the Yanks."

Al Wolf from the L.A. Times, echoed Povich’s sentiments: "Even the most ardent Cleveland rooters must be wondering if it's going to be the same old story. Three years in a row, the Indians have had to settle for second place. Something always seems to happen."

Outside of baseball, the All-Star Game was a welcome diversion to Clevelanders who were being flooded with press coverage, reporting a grisly murder case that gripped the city and quickly became a sensational national story.

Just nine days before the All-Star Game, in the early morning hours of July 4, 1954, Marilyn Sheppard, a 31-year-old housewife and mother (four months pregnant) was beaten to death in her bed (at their lakeside home of Bay Village) with an unknown instrument. Her body was splattered with blood, pools of blood were found throughout the home. The blood-soaked victim was the wife of Dr. Sam Sheppard, a 30-year-old osteopath, who claimed he was sleeping on the family’s downstairs couch when his wife was savagely murdered.

It wasn’t until July 30, that the Cleveland Press screamed with the front-page headline: "Why Isn’t Sam Sheppard in Jail?” that Sheppard was arrested and charged with murder in the first degree. On December 21, the doctor was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently overturned his conviction in June, 1966.

Clevelanders, in fact, were accustomed to crime and colorful crime figures, such as Alex (Shonder) Birns, a mobster and racketeer from Cleveland, who was once labeled as the city's "Public enemy No. 1" by the local newspapers.  Just a day before the All-Star game, Birns went on trial for income tax evasion. He was convicted and served three years in the federal penitentiary.

More bad news came during All-Star week when it was reported that Hall of Famer Tris Speaker, 66, suffered a heart attack. The local hospital (Lakeside Hospital) said he was in good condition. Speaker, the “Grey Eagle,” was the player manager for the 1920 World Champion Cleveland Indians.

By July 13, 1954, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, there were 32 cases of polio reported in Greater Cleveland, an increase from 23 cases reported at the same time last year.

So, Cleveland was ripe, to be sure, for the all-stars to roll into town and put on a show that would help them forget the doom and gloom weighing them down.

Many thought that holding the All-Star game in Cleveland was “altogether fitting and proper” considering the city’s deep roots to the national pastime.

As the Sporting News so eloquently wrote, "Rich is the history to which the 1954 All-Star game added another chapter. Charley Somers...Sunny Jim Dunn...Alva Bradley...Ernest S. Barnard...Billy Evans...Cy Slapnicka...Roger Peckinpaugh--all of them played major roles in making and keeping Cleveland a hotbed of baseball interest. The All-Star game will go to every city in both majors before it returns to Cleveland. But nowhere will it be more welcome, nowhere will visitors to the great mid-summer show feel more at home."

The manager for the American League was Casey Stengel; for the National League, it was rookie manager Walter Alston of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The Cleveland Press reported that the betting along “Short Vincent” (a popular hub of activity in downtown Cleveland, between East 6th and East 9th streets) had the NL as 7-5 favorites to win the midseason classic. The Press also reported a moderate amount of ticket scalping in the lobbies of a number of downtown hotels.

Contrary to popular opinion, Jimmy Piersall, the Boston Red Sox center fielder, who was picked for the 1954 All-Star game and covered the 21st All-Star classic for the Boston Globe, wrote a column, predicting an AL victory. "I feel sure we'll beat those National Leaguers tomorrow," Piersall wrote, “but I think it's going to be a close game. I'd say about 5-4 for our side."

Despite the AL holding a commanding 12-8 All Star game advantage, there was good reason for the NL to be heavily favored.

The senior circuit was simply billowing with currents of power. Dodger center fielder Duke Snider was scorching the league in the first half of the season, batting .367 with 20 home runs and 70 runs batted in. Stan Musial (appearing in his 11th All Star game) was hitting .331 with 82 RBI's and 26 home runs. The Cincinnati Reds burly first baseman, Ted Kluszewski, was batting .312 with 22 home runs and 66 RBI's. And Willie Mays entered the All-Star game with a robust 31 home runs. Baseball statisticians, in fact, were buzzing whether the "Say Hey Kid" might very well surpass Babe Ruth's single season home run record of 60 set in 1927. Mays was 11 games ahead of the Babe’s pace in 1927.

Additionally, the NL hitters combined for 230 home runs compared with 152 for the AL.

Despite a mediocre 7-6 record, Casey Stengel opted to use his own 25-year-old southpaw Whitey Ford to start the game. The Yankee manager thought he would be the best man for the job to face Duke Snider, Stan Musial, and Ted Kluszewski of the NL, all left-handed hitters.

Walter Alston, named Robin Roberts (11-8) of the Philadelphia Phillies as his starter for the NL, making it the fourth time in five years, the fireballing right-hander started for the senior circuit in an All-Star game.

The first pitch was set for 1:30 pm.

The television announcers were Mel Allen and Gene Kelly for NBC.  Jimmy Dudley and Al Helfer handled the radio play by play for WHK and WERE in Cleveland. The Chicago Tribune reported that a "Cleveland's summer orchestra entertained early arrivals with hit songs from recent Broadway musicals."

July 13^th was a hot day with a blazing sun beating down on the field; a soft breeze drifted through the stadium, making the game barely comfortable for the 68,751 fans who poured through the turnstiles. It was the second largest crowd in All-Star game history.

And Indians fans were thrilled to discover Stan Coveleski, celebrating his 66th birthday, was in the house. Coveleski won three games for the Indians in the 1920 World Series.

The first two frames of the game were quiet. It wasn’t until the bottom of the third inning when the American League exploded for four runs. With runners on second and third, the Cleveland Indians third baseman Al Rosen (penciled in at first base) who was mired in a slump with an injured index finger, cracked a home-run to left-center, the ball carrying 380 feet and putting the AL up 3-0. The very next batter, Ray Boone, a former Indian no less, smacked a solo home run to practically the same spot of Rosen’s mighty clout. This marked the first time in All-Star history back to back homers took place in the same inning.

In the 4th, the senior circuit was equal to the task. Sandy Consuegra, the Cuban-born right-handed pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, took the baton from Whitey Ford and proceeded to give up five consecutive hits (after retiring Alvin Dark of the Giants). Ray Jablonski, the Cardinals third baseman, slapped a hard single to center, scoring Duke Snider and Stan Musial. With runners on second and third, Jackie Robinson stepped inside the box and crashed a double off the right center field fence, scoring Kluszewski and Jablonski with the tying runs. Consuegra was lifted for Bob Lemon. With Robinson stationed on second, Don Mueller (Giants), pinch hitting for Roberts, drove a long double into the alley in right center, scoring Robinson to put the NL up 5-4.

The American League came roaring back to tie the score in the bottom of the 4th. After Chicago White Sox shortstop Chico Carrasquel lined a single to left, Minnie Minoso sliced a ball to left center field for a long single with Carrasquel scampering to third. Willie Mays (who just replaced Snider in center, with Snider moving to right) skillfully handled Minoso's hard smash to prevent extra bases. Cleveland Indians infielder Bobby Avila lifted a fly ball to medium left, deep enough to score Carasquel for a sac fly, and tying the score at 5.

The hitting assault continued in the 5^th

With Snider on base, Ted Kluszewski crushed a towering drive over the right field fence, for a two-run home run, putting the Nationals back on top, 7-5.

Cleveland's Al Rosen is greeted at home plate by the Yankees' Yogi Berra after Rosen hit his second home run for the AL in the 1954 All-Star Game.  Photo Credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS

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In the bottom of the 5th, Al Rosen, who prior to the game practically begged Casey Stengel to bench him because he didn't think he would help the AL, walloped his second home run of the game, a two-run shot (traveling 400 feet) with Yogi Berra on base. Rosen’s majestic blast gave him five runs batted in, tying an All-Star record set by Ted Williams in 1946.

The game was tied at 7 after 5 innings.

The AL tacked on another run in the 6th (with Warren Spahn on the mound) when Avila singled home Ted Williams who was planted on third, giving the junior circuit an 8-7 advantage.

In the top of the 8^th, with Mays on base, Cincinnati outfielder Gus Bell put the National League up again, 9-7, when he smashed a home run over the fence in right center. Dean Stone, the rookie southpaw (Washington Senators) replaced Bob Keegan to become the AL's sixth pitcher of the game.

Arguably, the most controversial play of the game was triggered when second sacker Red Schoendienst of the Cardinals attempted to steal home plate but was gunned down on close play at the plate to end the inning. Third base coach Leo Durocher stormed up to home plate umpire Bill Stewart and administered a severe verbal lashing as only the demonstrative Giants manager can, arguing vehemently that Stone never came to a complete stop before rifling the ball to home plate. Stone, according to the fuming Durocher, should have been called for a balk. After the game, Lippy Leo was still furious, telling reporters "Ed Rommel, the third base coach umpire saw it [the balk] and told me so, said Leo, "but he was helpless to do anything about it because Stewart refused to ask him for an opinion. I simply can't understand how this game of baseball is played today”, Durocher roared.

In the bottom of the 8th, down a run, the AL managed to put the score in double digits with a three-run outpouring. Another Cleveland Indian, Larry Doby, pinch hitting for Stone, tied the game with a solo home run over the left center fence. Later in the inning, with the bases loaded and two outs, the tobacco chomping Nellie Fox (White Sox) managed to send a bloop single just out of the reach of Giants shortstop Alvin Dark on the edge of the outfield grass, scoring Berra and Mickey Mantle, and putting the AL up 11-9 heading to the 9th.

Before the Chicago Cubs Randy Jackson popped up to Berra to end the game, there were some nervous moments and high drama in the final frame when Stan Musial came to the plate with Snider on first base. The NL’s clean-up hitter laced two long drives that just went foul in the right-field stands, just missing tying the game.

The AL held on with an 11-9 victory for their first win in the All-Star game since 1949 when the junior circuit beat the NL, 11-7 with manager Lou Boudreau.

Dean Stone was credited with the win despite throwing only three pitches. Prior to the 1954 All-Star Game, Casey Stengel, the “Ol' Perfessor” had lost four consecutive All-Star games.

Many questioned NL skipper Walter Alston's decision to leave pitcher Jimmy Wilson with a 6-0 record on the bench with no action. The Milwaukee Braves right-hander was the only one of 8 pitchers never to throw a pitch.

Seven records were broken in the 54' All-Star game, including 17 hits by the AL, 31 hits for both the NL and AL; while the AL’s 4 home runs tied the record set by the NL in 1951.

The gross receipts for the game totaled $292, 678 or $259,204 after taxes, a record for an All-Star Game (another $110,000 from television and radio), with sixty percent of the proceeds going toward the players pension fund.

The post-game mingling among reporters at the Hollenden Hotel was appreciably dampened, when it was learned that sportswriter Grantland Rice , considered the dean of the nation's syndicated sports columnists (whose columns were carried in more than 100 newspapers) died after suffering a stroke while working in his downtown office. Granny was 73.

A striking irony of the 1954 All-Star Game centered on how Casey Stengel may have helped his chief American League rival, the Cleveland Indians, as both teams prepared for their second half of the season quest to clinch the pennant.

In a New York Times column published two days after the All-Star Game (July 15, 1954) with the headline: "A Pyrrhic Victory?" written by Arthur Daley; the Times prized columnist wondered if Casey Stengel may have inadvertently breathed new life into the Tribe.

Daley writes, "He [Stengel] used the ailing Al Rosen and that invalid cured his troubles with two homers (he hadn't one in seven weeks) and five runs batted in; the slumping Bobby Avila broke forth with three hits and two runs batted in; Larry Doby belted a game-tying pinch home run." "As a moral builder," Daley continued, "for the wilting Indians, the All-Star game was perfect...so it will be with the renewed vigor and spirit that the Tribe resumes its regular operations today."

Despite their uncharacteristic swoon just prior to the All-Star break, the Indians ended the season strong, finishing an impressive 111-43 (.721 winning percentage), which included an 11-game winning streak (September 8-20) 8 games ahead of their chief rival, the Yankees, to advance to their first World Series in six years and claim their third American League championship in franchise history.

The Tribe, of course, were unceremoniously swept by the New York Giants in the World Series.

One of the advantages of hosting an All-Star game is being surrounded by a swarm of reporters with a mission to fill their notebooks. Indians GM Hank Greenberg took full advantage of the abundance of journalists in town to press his case for interleague play. The former Tiger slugger was convinced interleague play wouldn’t diminish, one iota, the uniqueness and novelty of the All-Star game. Greenberg told Hal Lebovitz of the Sporting News, “In a schedule providing for inter-league play, the curiosity would remain and the competitive angle would be even stronger because the games actually would count in the standings."

A Footnote:

Though the All-Star game in Cleveland witnessed an abundance of future Hall of Famers,  July, 1954, was the month and year another future Hall of Famer was born, only it would take a few years for many to realize it.

It was in July, 1954, that a 19-year-old truck driver from Memphis Tennessee, Elvis Presley, entered the Memphis’ Sun Studio to record “That’s All Right” (Mama), an up-tempo blues song written by Arthur Crudup. The young, financially strapped musician fused the rhythm and blues song with a shade of country music. It quickly became Presley's first smash hit, sending him on the fast road to international fame and fortune.

***

NOTE: A heartfelt thanks to my friends at Proquest who allowed me to access the archives of the Chicago Tribune and L.A. Times.

 

–Bill Lucey

November 29, 2018

WPLucey@gmail.com

 

 

1935: The MLB All-Star Comes to Cleveland

The year 1935 was known for a number of alarming events.

Most prominent being Adolf Hitler announcing German re-armament in violation of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles; it was the year of the first modern “race riot,” which took place in Harlem, where three died, with hundreds more wounded. It was also the year the FBI tracked down the Barker Gang, including its ring leader, Ma Barker, an American mother of several criminals who was gunned down (along with her son, Fred) in the small town of Ocklawaha, Florida at a rented house on Lake Weir.

In 1935, many Americans were still feeling the wallops of the Great Depression. Unemployment hovered around 17 percent, down from 25 percent, with many only able to find part-time work. Others, dropped out of the workforce completely.

But baseball, once again, made Americans forget about their troubles, at least for one sunny day in July. The third annual Major League Baseball All-Star game was held in Cleveland, Ohio on July 8, 1935.

The game wouldn’t be played, though, without a surge of protest from the fans and sports writers, who didn’t like how rosters would be selected.

This mid-season classic would deviate from the previous two; in that this would be the first All-Star game in which the fans would be shut out from selecting who would make the All-Star squad. In 1933 and 1934, selection of the All-Star teams was up to the fans, who could vote for the All-Stars through newspaper ads featuring official ballots. Beginning in 1935 (and lasting through 1946) each league’s eight managers selected the participants while the All-Star team managers chose the starters.

Despite taking a dim view of the rule change, Clevelanders were thrilled to have the All-Star game in their home town, a city that didn’t have much to cheer about since the Cleveland Indians beat the Brooklyn Robins (Dodgers) in seven games (five games to two) in the 1920 World Series.

Before the All-Star break, Cleveland was stuck in 4^th place, seven games behind the New York Yankees.

John Lardner, a sports writer and the son of Ring Lardner, writing in the Plain Dealer just prior to the All-Star game, wrote, " In the general excitement, the city of Cleveland is trying hard to forget its own troubles (otherwise known as the Cleveland Baseball Club). It has been declared a civic offense to mention the Indians at all during the next couple of days. You can mention Joe Vosmick and Mel Harder if you want to, because they belong to the All-Star squad, but everything else, including the standing of the club and result of the last series with Detroit, is verboten."

Looking through the Cleveland newspapers at the time, the city was bustling with activity to forget about the Indians lackluster season.

Vaudeville and radio star Bob Hope, who grew up in Cleveland, was performing at the Palace Theater, while popular newspaper columnist and humorist, Will Rogers, was lampooning the political climate in Washington at Keith’s 105^th Theater, a venue near University Circle (on the east side of Cleveland). Rogers died tragically the following month in a plane crash in Alaska along with the plane’s pilot, famed American aviator, Wiley Post.

If you wanted to catch a movie the night before the All-Star game, you could plop yourself down to take in Shirley Temple in "Our Little Girl" or "Reckless," a 1935 American musical film directed by Victor Fleming and starring Jean Harlow, William Powell and Franchot Tone at a number of movie houses around town.

A day before the All-Star game, Babe Ruth, the “Sultan of Swat,” stormed into town like a hurricane. Ruth ended his professional playing career a month earlier (June 2) with the Boston Braves after 22 seasons, ten World Series and 715 home runs.

The former home run king reportedly took the morning train from New York into Cleveland. When he arrived, he played 27 holes of golf at a Country Club. He shot an 82.

The lobby of an unnamed Cleveland hotel was reportedly flooded with stars, including Eddie Collins, GM of the Boston Red Sox, Tris Speaker, Branch Rickey, vice president of the St Louis Cardinals, Boston Red Sox president, Tom. L. Yawkey, Thomas S. Shibe, president of the Philadelphia Athletics and Roger Hornsby who helped Mickey Cochrane manage the AL all-stars.

The temperature on game day was described as perfect for a baseball game with just a few non-threatening cloudy skies lurking over Cleveland Municipal Stadium on the shores of Lake Erie. Game time was scheduled for 1:30 in the afternoon with gates opening sharply at 10:00 a.m.

Just prior to the game, Babe Ruth, whose heroics had long since faded from a bygone generation, still remained a big attraction with the crowd. The Plain Dealer reported that a gaggle of photographers hovered over the Babe with cameras whirring with lightning speed as he took his seat along the first base line.

"For more than 10 minutes," Plain Dealer reporter Alan Silverman observed, "the photographers photographed, while Babe smoked a heavy black cigar, brushed dust off his brown sports coat, straightened his flannel trousers and talked to smartly-dressed, Mrs. Ruth."

Once known for wolfing down hot dogs in a blink of an eye, the Babe turned down the 15 cent hot dogs’ vendors were selling.

When players realized the Bambino was in the house, they immediately darted over to the first base line to shake his hand. The Babe’s presence, in fact, overshadowed the presence of Ohio Gov. Martin L. Davey, and Cleveland Mayor, Harry L. Davis. Film star, Joe E. Brown, who appeared in the motion picture "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1935), reportedly stood on the field near Ruth's box for several minutes before anyone noticed him.  Even the baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, turned few heads; that is, until it was time for him to throw out the first pitch.

Game announcers were reportedly Jack Graney for CBS radio; and Tom Manning announcing for NBC radio.

The stadium was packed with 69,812 in attendance, though less than the 80,000 they originally expected. The gross receipts from the game totaled, $93, 692.80, with a government tax of $12,000. Billy Evans, business manager for the Cleveland Indians said that roughly $60,000 from the $93, 692.80 taken in for the game would be directed to the poor and needy throughout the city.

Frankie Frisch (St. Louis Cardinals) manager for the National League selected his own ace, Bill Walker of the Cardinals to the start the game.  Player/manager Mickey Cochrane, skipper for the Detroit Tigers, went with Lefty Gomez (New York Yankees) to take the hill for the Junior Circuit.

The 1935 All-Star game was over before it ever really began when the AL delivered an early round KO.

In the bottom of the first frame with Lou Gehrig stationed on first, third sacker Jimmie Foxx (Philadelphia Athletics) with a 3-2 count, drove a curve ball from the NL southpaw deep into the left-field stands, putting the AL on top, 2-0. The AL tagged on another run in the second inning when catcher Rollie Hemsley (St. Louis Browns) tripled off the wall, later scoring on Joe Cronin’s (Boston Red Sox) sac fly.

The NL's only run came in the 4th inning, when the Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop Arky Vaughan slashed a double to right. New York Giants Bill Terry first baseman Bill Terry slapped a hard single to center field, scoring Vaughan for the NL's first and only run of the game.

With two quick outs in the bottom of the 5th, Cleveland Indians left-fielder Joe Vosmik slapped a single to left field. Tigers second baseman Charlie Gehringer then bounced a single past Chicago Cubs second baseman Billy Herman, moving Vosmik to third. Gehrig walked to load the bases. Foxx stepped to the plate with the bases loaded, ready to inflict some heavy damage. The Athletics power hitter laced a ball back through the pitcher's box; New York Giants pitcher Hal Schumacher couldn't handle the hard smash, only managing to deflect it, allowing a run to score with the bases still loaded. Philadelphia Athletics left-fielder Bob Johnson struck out swinging to end the inning.

Jimmie Foxx, “The Beast,” was responsible for three of the AL’s four runs in their 4-1 win over the NL. The convincing win gave the AL their third consecutive win since the mid-season classic was first launched in 1933.

Unusual by today’s standards, AL skipper, Mickey Cochrane, only used two pitchers. Lefty Gomez pitched through six innings. He then passed the baton to Cleveland Indians ace, Mel Harder, who only gave up one hit (a double by Jimmie Walker) in three innings of work. Gomez and Harder combined for a four hitter.

Despite Lou Gehrig going hitless, he registered the loudest out of the game.

In the bottom of the 7th, the "Iron Horse “drove a ball to deep center field in front of the bleachers at the 450 ft mark. Jo-Jo Moore (New York Giants) who entered the game as a reserve outfielder, managed to chase the ball down in a dead sprint. Many thought if the game had been played at the Indians other home, League Park (66th and Lexington), Gehrig’s long drive would have most certainly cleared the fence.

Though the 1935 All-Star game didn’t have as much fireworks as many had anticipated, the real fireworks were actually ignited in the days after the game by newspaper columnists.

One of the loudest grumblings about the game was the lack of players Mickey Cochrane used for the game. The Tigers skipper used only 13 of the 20 players on the roster. He never used Rick Ferrell, Boston Red Sox catcher or Buddy Myer (Washington Senators) at second base. Cochrane elected to keep his own second baseman, Charlie Gehringer, for the entire game.

Many columnists protested that fans deserved the chance to see a vast majority of all-stars on the field even for an inning or two.

Cochrane's motives were also called into question when he decided not to use his own pitcher, Schoolboy Rowe, in the game. Many believed the Detroit manager wanted to keep Rowe's arm fresh for an important upcoming east coast trip once the season resumed.

Frankie Frisch, by comparison, used 18 of the 20 players on his roster. Even when he found his team behind, the NL manager inserted reserves, if only to let fans see some of their favorites. Dizzy Dean (St. Louis Cardinals), for example, even though pitching six innings the following day was inserted late in the game.

Other than having Mel Harder relieving Lefty Gomez, the only changes Cochrane made was in the last inning when he removed left-fielder Bob Johnson and replaced him with Ben Chapman of the Yankees. And Doc Cramer (Philadelphia Athletics) replaced Al Simmons (Chicago White Sox) in the outfield.

By leaving the decision of selecting the roster to the managers, columnists roared, it meant fans were deprived of seeing the likes of Hank Greenberg (Tigers), Ted Lyons (White Sox), Cy Blanton, Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher, Travis Jackson, shortstop for the New York Giants, and Pie Traynor, third sacker for the Pittsburgh Pirates, among others.

According to a number of columnists, managers were thinking strictly of the best players who would perform “best under stress”, not giving much thought to fan favorites.

A nagging issue with the All-Star game was that a number of managers didn’t like the mid-season game at all. They felt It interrupted with the general flow of the season and placed an extra traveling burden on a number of teams.

Stuart Bell, Cleveland Press columnist, slammed the managers for not embracing the All-Star game with more gusto.

“The game [All-Star game] is one of the few constructive moves baseball has made in many years. Managers and players ought to be sold on it.” “And fan appeal,” Bell wrote, “should come ahead of any desire to win out league pride.”

In the weeks following the 1935 All-Star game, there was a chorus of protests from team owners, arguing that the All-Star game should be abandoned altogether. The owners were reportedly dissatisfied with the share of the gate receipts they were receiving.

The owners decided to hold off deciding the fate of the All-Star game until their annual December meetings.

One small footnote about the 1935 All-Star game. Through 2018, pitcher Lefty Gomez holds the record for most wins in an All-Star game:  3 (1933, 1935, 1937).

And the six innings pitched by Gomez during the 1935 All-Star game still stands as a major league record for an All-Star game.

 

–Bill Lucey

WPLucey@gmail.com

November 7, 2018

Field of Blood: Is the U.S. On the Road to Another Civil War?

In 1856, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner was severely beaten on the Senate floor by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina.

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Is the United States headed for another Civil War?

After reading Yale historian Joanne B. Freeman’s magnificent book, “Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War,” I was stunned to learn just how much physical violence took place within the halls of Congress before the Civil War, especially during the 36^th Congress (1859-1861).

Through her scrupulous research, Freeman reports that between 1830-1860, there were 70 violent incidents between congressmen in the House and Senate chambers, nearby streets, and dueling meeting grounds. Freeman, moreover, found clashes involving canings, fistfights, brandished pistols, and brick throwing, among others.

Most students of U.S. political history are well aware of the most infamous act of violence in the U.S. Congress.

On May 22, 1856, Rep. Preston Brooks (D-S.C.), viciously struck Sen. Charles Sumner (R-Mass.) in the head with a cane while he was sitting at his desk in the Senate chamber, leaving the Massachusetts senator semiconscious and near death, soon after Sumner delivered his famous “Crime Against Kansas” speech, in which he argued that Kansas should be admitted to the union as a free state. Sumner's inflammatory speech was a harsh indictment on the spread of slavery, while attacking several senators by name, including Andrew Butler of South Carolina.

Freeman presents scores of other physical clashes on the House floor and on the streets of Washington.

On April 17, 1850, during a debate on the Compromise of 1850, Sen. Henry S. Foote, D-Miss., a supporter of the compromise, pulled a pistol from his coat after Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, D-Mo. rose from his desk and stormed toward him. Senate colleagues grabbed Foote and wrestled him to the ground.  A motion was made to censure Foote, but failed to move beyond the committee level.

Shortly before 2 a.m. on February 6, 1858, Pennsylvania Republican Galusha Grow and South Carolina Democrat Laurence Keitt exchanged a series of insults, then blows during debate over the Kansas Territory’s pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution. "In an instant the House was in the greatest possible confusion,” the Congressional Globe reported. More than 30 Members joined the melee. Sergeant-at-Arms Adam J. Glossbrenner was instructed to use mace in order to restore order to the House. In one comical twist to the melee, Wisconsin Republicans John “Bowie Knife” Potter and Cadwallader Washburn ripped the hairpiece from the head of William Barksdale, a Democrat from Mississippi.

According to Freeman, fights and brawls became so frequent, that many congressmen strapped guns and knives each morning before heading off to the nation’s capital. Ever since the Sumner canings, Northern congressmen were strongly encouraged to arm themselves. Freeman documented more than a dozen fights in the 36^th Congress.

Freeman’s Field of Blood couldn’t have been published at a more timely moment in U.S. history.

160 years ago, the country was split down the middle over slavery. Having abolished slavery, Northerners sought to prevent its spread; the South was determined to assert its right to hold slaves. With no compromise in sight, war was the only solution. The Civil War was America’s bloodiest conflict with roughly two percent of the population, an estimated 620,000 men, losing their lives in the line of duty. 

When I think of the deep, spiteful divisions that gripped the country over slavery, I wonder if the sharp division over immigration in 2018 will have a similar harmful effect, to such an extent that it irreparably rips the country in two?

Back in July, a Gallup poll showed that immigration was the most important issue gripping the country with 22 percent of Americans citing it as the top problem. 

And on Monday, just eight days before the midterm elections, President Trump said he's prepared to deploy at least 5,200 active-duty troops to the southern border to confront migrants, preventing them from entering the country, citing national security concerns. 

 

The above video of a melee breaking out, isn’t from the United States Congress, it’s actually from the Mexican Congress.

But a similar brawl taking place in the U.S. Congress might be just around the corner, especially if the vitriol and toxic political climate we’re living in doesn’t simmer down.

Civility and comprise, after all, have left the building. We longer have the likes of John McCain and Ted Kennedy to engineer a grand bargain.

In Field of Blood, readers learned that Congress suffered a crushing blow when Daniel Webster and Henry Clay passed away in 1852, which reflected in Freeman’s mind the “passing of the spirit of compromise along with a passing of a generation.”

Congress might not come to blows in their respective chambers in the present 115th congress. Rather, their weapons of choice are to spew venom and vitriol through social media, especially Twitter.

Internet users are subjected to daily doses of anti-immigration vs pro-immigration rants, not only from congress members themselves but from their growing legion of supporters, spewing more hatred, demonizing opponents, and placing the country into a damaging specter of tribal warfare with little room for mutual agreement.

To me, the animus taking place on social media is just a 21^st century version of the pistols, knives, and bricks that Congress used to bully their opponents with in the 19^th century on the eve of the U.S. Civil War.

Another glowing similarity between the political climate in the slavery debate and the immigration debate is the role of the press.

In Field of Blood, Freeman chronicles the highly partisan nature of newspapers at the time of the slavery debate. It wouldn’t be uncommon for Southern papers, for example, to report Northerners were the aggressors, and the Southerners were the calm voice of reason throughout the crisis.  Newspapers and congressmen often struck deals to present Washington to its constituents back home as it needed to be presented. “Newspapers at the time,” Freeman wrote, “weren’t into truth telling.”

Reporters not into truth telling could just as easily be said about a number of news outlets of this present generation from Fox News to MSNBC to all the partisan blogs flooding the Internet, including Daily Kos, Red State, Breitbart News, or Mother Jones.

“With malice toward none, with charity for all,'' Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, fell from the heavens at just the right time to heal the nation during one of the most tumultuous times in the nation's history.

It was only a few months ago when Rasmussen Reports published a survey showing that nearly a third of U.S. voters expect civil war within 5 years.

As the nation, the U.S. Congress, and the American voters, come to terms with the present crisis of immigration, many are looking for the leader who will bridge the great divide tearing this country into smithereens before another Civil War takes place.

Who will that leader be before it’s too late?

 

–Bill Lucey

WPLucey@gmail.com

October 30, 2018

Book Review: Remembering When Government Was Good

 

“We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.”

― Franklin D. Roosevelt

 

During the bruising U.S. 2016 presidential election, voters were constantly reminded Washington was elitist, broken and has failed the American people.

David Goldfield, professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, in his captivating book, “The Gifted Generation: When Government Was Good,” reminds us of the time when government wasn’t so broken.  He reminds us that polio was largely cured (Salk vaccine) due to the growing role of the federal government in national health, and science; when the G.I. Bill (after W.W. II) allowed thousands of working-class Americans to earn a college degree, including helping put thousands into jobs, houses, and businesses.

When the Soviets launch of Sputnik embarrassed our nation on how far we lagged behind our chief adversary in space, we didn’t point fingers and demonize those in office. Rather, we worked together as a republic to find a solution, which was the passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958, strengthening education in sciences, foreign languages, and area studies in Universities. The NDEA was hailed as the most important national education legislation in 100 years. According to Goldfield’s splendid research, “1.5 million men and women had gone to college on NDEA’s student loan program, 15,000 of those earning doctoral degrees.”

The passing of the Clean Air Act of 1963, the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the passage of Title IX in 1972 (using the office of Civil Rights to police sexual discrimination), the founding of the EPA and the Clean Air Act, were all heroic acts of federal legislation to improve equality and quality of life for all Americans.  They were accomplished under a Democratic Chief Executive as well as a Republican Chief Executive and signed into law due to both aisles in Congress coming together as one team to improve conditions for all Americans.

Imagine, as Goldfield chilling points out, for the first time since W.W. II, children are less likely to be better off economically than their parents; and more chilling still, more than 20 percent of children live in poverty, ranking the U.S. 28^th among 34 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations.

In this toxic political environment of tribalism (blue vs red, Fox News vs MSNBC) we’re living in; when compromise has become an evil word, there was a time in this country, which historian David Goldfield chronicles so masterfully, when there existed a firm partnership between Washington and the people that helped them fulfill the promise of the American dream.

Whatever became of that country?

—Bill Lucey

WPLucey@gmail.com

October 18, 2018

Who Belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Journalists?

While scanning my Twitter feed, a picture of Mount Rushmore, sculpture in the Black Hills in Keystone, South Dakota popped up.

Mount Rushmore, of course, features 60-foot sculptures of the heads of four United States presidents: George Washington (1732–1799), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), and Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865).

This got me to thinking, what if there was a Mount Rushmore for journalists? Which individuals would best represent the very best of American journalism?

So, I checked in with some prominent journalists to ask who they would put on Mount Rushmore, high above the dense forests and pristine streams of South Dakota.

Before getting to their personal preferences, I listed the four individuals who I thought best represented the "growth, development and preservation'' of American journalism, along with brief biographical sketches.

• Adolph S Ochs

When newspaper publisher and Cincinnati, Ohio native, Adolph Simon Ochs, age 36, bought the New York Times in 1896, he took over a publication whose circulation had plunged to 9,000 readers; with outstanding obligations of $300,000, while losing $1,000 a day.  In addition, it had a number of competitors to contend with.

Unlike other New York City dailies that were blatantly partisan, Ochs insisted his paper concentrate on objective reporting, and steer away from the sensational reporting involving murders, macabre crimes, and the “if it bleeds it leads,” mentality practiced by its chief competitors. He also reduced the price of the newspaper. As a way of consolidating its editorial independence, the Times refused advertising dollars and contracts from governments.

The New York Times under Ochs’ stewardship became the first national "newspaper of record." From 1896 to 1935 daily circulation increased dramatically, so much so that by the 1920s, the newspaper had nearly 800,000 readers.

Ochs was additionally instrumental in keeping his paper up to date with all the latest technology, giving the paper a fresh new look.

Descendants of Ochs still reside over the Times to this day and he will be glad to know his newspaper is still a powerful and influential news source in the 21^st century with a daily circulation of well over one million subscribers. The Times, moreover, have won 94 Pulitzer Prizes, a record seven in 2002 alone.

• Dorothy Thompson

International correspondent and political commentator, Dorothy Thompson, was known to many as the “First Lady of American Journalism”.

Before moving to New York City and launching her journalism career in 1917, she was a fierce Suffragist soon after graduating from Syracuse College in 1914.

During World War I, she became a foreign correspondent, first reporting from Vienna, then was named bureau chief in Berlin during the 1920s for the New York Evening Post.

She was one of the first American correspondents to warn of the terror Adolf Hitler would unleash on Europe. She wrote that the "National Socialist Revolution in Germany would prove to be the most world disturbing event of the century and perhaps of many centuries."

Thompson was back on American soil in 1936; and soon unveiled her widely read "On the Record" syndicated column which ran in the New York Herald Tribune and more than 150 other newspapers from 1936-1958.

Time Magazine ran a cover story on her on June 12, 1939, and described her and Eleanor Roosevelt as being “two of the most influential women in the country.”

• David Broder

David Broder, the "Dean of the Press Corps'' as he was dubbed, covered 11 U.S. Presidents in his famed reporting career, beginning with the Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“The high priest of political journalism “(another of his affectionate nicknames), first landed at the Washington Post in 1966. Previously, he reported for The New York Times, Washington Star and Congressional Quarterly.  He was one of the most prominent political scribes in the nation's capital, who cultivated, according to those who knew him best, some of the most authoritative and wide-ranging sources, from little known precinct officials to senior members of the U.S. Congress. Broder traveled more than 100,000 miles a year on his political beat.

Dan Balz, Chief correspondent covering national politics, the presidency and Congress for the Washington Post, once wrote that Broder "knew the details of everything but never lost sight of the big picture. In an era in which political reporting has become more and more focused on minutiae,'' Balz explained, "he kept his focus where it belonged — on the events and forces that move ordinary Americans and shape history.”

Mr. Broder was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in May 1973 for distinguished commentary, for explaining the importance of the Watergate scandal in a "clear, compelling way."

In a 1990 survey by Washingtonian Magazine, opinion-page editors of the largest 200 newspapers rated Broder as "Best Reporter," "Hardest Working" and "Least Ideological" among 123 columnists.

• Jimmy Breslin

Jimmy Breslin, who began his newspaper career as a sportswriter for the New York Herald Tribune, soon segued into a brash street-wise city reporter and columnist, who didn't write about the rich and famous--but rather--gave voice to the down and out raging through the city, the infamous, marginalized, the unscrupulous, and the deadbeats of society.

Writer Pete Hamill once said of Breslin, "I think he believes that it is his responsibility to let the voiceless have a voice. He's definitely not interested in interviewing [then U.S. Secretary of State] George Shultz."

In 1970, Breslin was viciously attacked by American mobster Paul Vario, who was later portrayed by actor Paul Sorvino in the Martin Scorsese film Goodfellas. 

After the Herald Tribune folded, Breslin wrote for the New York Post from 1968-69; then the New York Daily News, from 1978-88, before landing at Newsday in 1988, where he stayed until writing his final column (as a staff member) on November 2, 2004.

The Queens native won a Pulitzer in 1986, when he was with the New York Daily News for a series of columns which "consistently championed ordinary citizens." In an interview, he said he wasn't surprised he won a Pulitzer, but was surprised " he hadn't won at least five Pulitzer's by now."

Some of Breslin's most noteworthy columns, include: interviewing the $3.01 gravedigger, Clifton Pollard, at John F. Kennedy's funeral; and in 1977, covering David Berkowitiz, the infamous "Son of Sam" who was terrorizing the New York City streets. Berkowitz began writing personal letters to Breslin.

Breslin, along with writers Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, and others, have often been credited with being the early pioneers who ushered in "New Journalism," that is, a new breed of gifted writers who reported on the social and cultural earthquakes of the 1960s and '70s in newspaper and magazine journalism that read like compelling fiction.

Outside of the newsroom, Breslin wrote a number of books, including: "Can't Anybody Here Play this Game." (about the hapless 1962 New York Mets), "World Without End, Amen: A Novel" "Table Money," the biography "Damon Runyon: A Life," and "I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me," a memoir about his 1994 brain surgery.

Responses from Journalists on Who Should Be Included on the Mount Rushmore of Journalists?

• ) 1.) Horace Greeley 2.) Walter Lippmann 3.) James Reston 4.) Murray Kempton,

—Sam Tanenhaus, American historian, biographer, journalist, and former New York Times Book Editor. He currently is a writer for Prospect, a monthly British general interest magazine.

 

• ) 1.) Ralph McGill would be up there. 2.) H. L. Mencken 3.) Mike Royko.... Still thinking...."

—Bob Ryan, Sports columnist emeritus for the Boston Globe.

 

• ) 1.) Murray Kempton 2.) Nina Bernstein. 3.) Tom Robbins.

 —Jim Dwyer, reporter and columnist for The New York Times

 

• 1.) Don Graham) 2.) James Reston 3.) Katharine Graham 4.) Ben Bradlee  5.) Neil Sheehan 6.) Bob Woodward

—David Ignatius, associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post. 

 

• "I might add Otis Chandler "

—Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times

 

• ) 1.) William Allen White 2.) Edward R. Murrow 3.) Lincoln Steffens 4.) Dorothy Thompson

—George Vecsey, New York Times sports columnist

 

• ) 1.) Ben Bradlee  2.) Abe Rosenthal 3.) Murray Kempton 4.) Mary McGrory

—Warren Hoge, former New York Times reporter and currently vice president for external relations at the International Peace Institute, a New York-based think tank.

 

• ) 1.) Meyer Berger 2.) Edward R Murrow 3.) David Halberstam 4.) Thomas Nast

—Doug Clifton, former executive editor of The Miami Herald and Cleveland Plain Dealer

 

• "I’d be happy with Katharine Graham up there solo"

—Anne Kornblut, a Pulitzer Prize–winning recipient at the Washington Post, currently serving as director of strategic communications for Facebook.

 

• ) 1.) Murray Kempton 2.) A.J. Liebling 3.) I. F. Stone 4.) Edward R. Murrow 5.) Ida B. Wells, 6.) James Gordon Bennett 7.) Don Hewitt 8.) Adolph Ochs

—Sam Roberts, Urban Affairs Correspondent for The New York Times

 

• ) 1.) Ida Tarbell  2.) Carol Loomis 3.) Bob Woodward

—Clifton Leaf, Editor for Fortune Magazine

 

• 1.) Max Frankel ) Ben Bradlee 3.) Kay Graham

—Norman Ornstein, political scientist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

 

• ) 1.) Bob Woodward (and Carl Bernstein) 2.) Mike Royko  3.) Jimmy Breslin 4.) Katharine Graham /Adolph Ochs “in owner wing.”

—Dave Hyde, award-winning sports columnist for the South Florida Sun Sentinel newspaper, the main daily newspaper of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

 

             —Bill Lucey

            WPLucey@gmail.com

            October 4, 2018

Saying Goodbye to Mom

“Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.”

― J.M. Barrie

It’s hard saying goodbye

Especially when it’s your beloved Mother.

A Mother who guided her five children (Ellyn, Patricia, Liz, Katie, and myself) through some tumultuous storms, heartbreaking setbacks, new challenges; a Mother who was an anchor of courage--losing her best friend, my Dad, Jerry (Jeremiah) in 1994 and her daughter (Patricia) in 1997 from lung cancer.

My Mom embraced calamity and disappointment with a renewed burst of courage and optimism. Guided mostly by her deep love of God and strong devotion to her family, always looking for the sun through the dark, foreboding skies; her belief brighter days were just around the corner.

“Things happen for a reason,” was her guiding principle through our family’s most difficult times.

No one embraced the happy times more than Mom. Birthday’s, anniversary’s, Thanksgiving and especially Christmas, Mom’s home was always filled with joy, laughter, family, friends, and an abundance of love. No one was happier than Mom, when her grandchildren (Michael, Christopher, Dawn, and Brittany) were around her; and later, her great grandchildren (Dustin, Justin, Brandon, Savannah, and Sophia).

If you understand where Mom came from, you will better understand why family was so critically important to her.

Helene Elizabeth Knox was born March 14, 1921 in Peace River, a small town in northwestern Alberta, Canada, just below the Smoky River confluence. Though she lived in the United States since marrying in 1947 (New York City), she proudly remained a Canadian her entire life.

Her mother, Sarah, died young. Her father, James, not knowing how best to raise Helene, along with her sister, Agnes, and brother, James, were dispatched to a convent in Peace River. So, Mom’s childhood was filled, more or less, with not so happy memories of strict French nuns, who rarely showered their inhabitants with much affection; they were prone, rather, to meting out harsh discipline with an iron hand.

Mom was on her own at the tender age of 16, enrolling in a business secretarial college, landing a job in Toronto; and then working for the government as a secretary in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, where she met her future husband, my Dad, Jeremiah Joseph Lucey, during World War II.

So, when Mom and Dad raised their family, birthday’s, Sunday breakfast with the entire family (after mass, of course), summer vacations at cottages, graduations and anniversary dinners at Miller’s Restaurant in Lakewood, and the joy of the Christmas season with a fully decked-out Christmas tree (with bright decorative lights adorning the outside of the house) became of utmost importance to our parents. At birthdays, Mom knew each of our favorite dinners and desserts from spaghetti and meatballs to German chocolate cake.

Mom began each morning right up until she recently broke her hip, sharply at 6:00 a.m. While waiting for the coffee to brew, she never missed a day of reciting the rosary, usually in the dark, before flipping on the lights.

Not until much later in our lives, did our family come to realize it was Mom’s devout religious faith that nourished her and became a source of sustenance during turbulent times.

One major disappointment in Mom’s life was when she became afflicted with macular degeneration (blurred or no vision in the center of her eyes, AMD or ARMD), leaving her only with weak peripheral vision. Mom was an avid reader, she devoured books like most of us devour McDonald’s French Fries. It was a mighty big challenge for her to train herself to listen to books on tape. She accepted the setback, as always, with patience and grateful that at least she can listen to tapes. Large heaps of books on tape were regularly deposited in Mom’s mailbox.

Mom was many things, but one thing she wasn’t was sugar and spice and everything nice if you got her dander up.

She could be a real firecracker, to be sure.

If something she bought from the store wasn’t working or was defective, or she was overcharged, she often could be heard, bellowing out: “Wait until I give them a piece of my mind!”

When I was a kid, there many times, I pretended I didn’t know my Mom when she was arguing with store clerks while shopping.

One time, when I was about seven or eight, I came back from the corner barber shop with a nasty looking haircut, at least by my Mom’s standards. I cringed when she dragged me through the Parma neighborhood (Gerald Ave.) past all the neighbors, back to the barber shop and screamed at the startled barber: “Do you consider this a haircut!”?

But that was Mom.

And we loved her for it. Her strong spirit and verbal lashings still live on through a couple of my sisters, namely Ellyn and Kathleen (Katie).

Physically, the last five or six years have been difficult for my Mom. She has gone through a series of operations for multiple fractures to the spine; her vision was getting progressively worse. Always so fiercely independent, she refused a nursing home or assisted living facilities. Mom, somehow, managed to get through the day by touch and feeling things around her.  For the times she was in the hospital, she was a terrible patient. She always wanted to be home in her own bed.

Though always fully alert and aware of her surroundings, this past year, Mom’s memory wasn’t what it once was. She was forgetting more and more things, names of long-distance relatives, what day it was, etc.

After her operation a week ago on her broken hip, at 97 years old, Mom showed her age for the first time in her life. She looked frail, slightly disconnected from those around her. Her spirit was noticeably diminished.

When she was transferred to Mount Alverna (across from St. Anthony’s) on Thursday afternoon, it suddenly struck me (like a bolt of lightning) looking at her so frail in the bed, her bones so brittle, unable to eat, that this was to be her last stop.

I knew the end was near.

Still, when I left her at 7 p.m. that evening, she was joking, her spirits seemed up.

Then the call came from my sister Ellyn (at around 11:30 p.m.) that they were having trouble resuscitating her.

By the time I arrived at Alverna, we were informed our Mom passed away.

The good Lord, at long last, had called her home to reunite with her best friend, my Dad, and my Sister, Patricia.

By far, the most difficult thing I have ever experienced is watching my Mom in bed, motionless with her breathing stopped, knowing she’ll never speak to me again.

The words of Victor Hugo, in Les Misérables came to mind: “Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead. --I shall feel it."

We’ll miss you Mom.

Life will never be the same.

 

—Bill Lucey

October 1, 2018

 

 

Mourning the Loss of Stiff Newspaper Competition in NYC

Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune was highly recognized for her front-line reports of the Korean War in the 1950s, which earned her a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.

Photo Credit: Life Magazine

***

Whatever became of the once thriving newspaper market in New York City?

Despite the mass migration to the Internet over the last two decades, you would think in a city of over 8 million inhabitants, New Yorkers, at the very least, could support two major dailies aside from the gargantuan, financially secure, New York Times.

Apparently not.

In its second quarter of 2018, The New York Times has more than 3.8 million total paid subscriptions of which 2.9 million are digital-only with operating profit leaping to $40 million from $26.5 million in the same period of 2017.

In June, the N.Y. Daily News slashed its editorial staff in half to focus on breaking news at the expense of local news and sports.  According to regulatory filings, the Daily News loses about $30 million a year.

In addition, the Tronc owned tabloid has seen its daily circulation dwindle to 200,000 from a once robust one million readers; while its online traffic to its website has plunged 30 percent.

In 2013, Gabelli & Co media analyst, Brett Harriss, estimated News Corp.’s New York Post loses $110 million a year.

New Yorkers suffered another mighty blow when it was learned at the end of August that the Village Voice, founded as a nickel alternative news weekly in 1955 by three New Yorkers: Dan Wolf, Edwin Fancher, and Norman Mailer, announced it was ceasing operation. In April, 2017, the tabloid known for its lively counterculture coverage ended its print edition to focus on online content.  Declining revenue, stiff local competition for classified advertising revenue, high staff turnover, and the departure of prominent writers were the reasons most cited for its collapse.

Interestingly, just as I was reading about the calamitous financial state of the newspaper industry in New York, I stumbled on a reference to a book I never read before: “The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune’’ by Richard Kluger, a former New York Herald Tribune and Wall Street Journal reporter. He left journalism to concentrate on writing books. His 1996 examination of the tobacco industry, "Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris," earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1997.

“The Life and Death of the Herald Tribune” is hardly a new book.  It was actually published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1986, over thirty years ago.

Though an oldie, it’s certainly a goodie.

The New York Herald Tribune was published between 1924 through 1966. Its 20-story building was located at 230 W. 41st Street.

The Herald Tribune came about as a result of the merger between The Herald founded by James Gordon Bennett in 1835 and the Tribune founded by Horace Greeley in 1841.

Before the merger, like the Tribunes of ancient Rome, Greeley, as founder of the New York Tribune, or so it has been told, would serve the common people in the defense and promulgation of their rights. The Tribune was a Whig paper dedicated to abolishing slavery and prohibiting liquor. It also became the voice of the Republican Party.

The New York Herald under James Gordon Bennett earned its stripes for its crime coverage, the more lurid the better, and sensational crimes, such as the killing in 1836 of 23-year-old Manhattan prostitute Ellen Jewett, whose body was hacked to death, including suffering partial burns to her body on 41 Thomas Street, about six blocks from City Hall.

As I made my way through this rich and colorfully written history of the Tribune, its celebrated tradition, prize-winning writers, its biting editorials, and thorough foreign coverage, especially its unmatched war coverage, I gained a much greater appreciation of its pioneering journalists and its reverence for editorial integrity.

During its celebrated history, the Herald Tribune won nine Pulitzer Prizes for exemplary journalism.

This was a newspaper, after all, which featured Emma Bugbee, who became the first female reporter at the Herald in 1911 and would remain at the Herald Tribune for 55 years, covering the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt. a number of political conventions, and most prominently, the women’s suffrage hike from Manhattan to Albany in 1912.

Another revolutionary journalist at the Herald Tribune was Marguerite "Maggie" Higgins, who remained at the paper from 1942-1963, principally as a war correspondent, covering World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, and is credited for blazing a new trail for female war correspondents.

Higgins was the first woman, moreover, to win a Pulitzer Prize for Foreign Correspondence awarded in 1951 for her coverage of the Korean War.

Highly touted Herald Tribune foreign affairs reporter, Ralph Barnes, in 1935, through shear dogged reporting, unearthed much of the twisted mind set of the Nazi regime, particularly surrounding Adolf Hitler's blatant anti-Semitism. Later, he covered the “The Munich Agreement” (permitting Nazi Germany's annexation of portions of Czechoslovakia) in 1938.

On November 17, 1940, Barnes boarded a British bomber to report on Benito Mussolini's invasion of Greece. The airplane crashed in Yugoslavia, killing Barnes and three Royal Air Force crewmen. The Salem, Oregon native is remembered for being the first war correspondent killed during World War II.

In addition to its brilliant war coverage, the Herald Tribune hired some of the most gifted and shrewdest editors in the business.

Stanley Walker, for example, was the city editor of the Herald Tribune from 1928 through 1934, during the paper's golden age. Walker strongly believed reporters did their best work during the ages of 25-30 when journalism was still an adventure for them. "After that," Walker maintained, "it would become too much of a grind to pursue sources day and night all over town." Walker was heralded for his keen attention to detail when reporters submitted a story and ferreting out abuses of the English language. Among Walker's stern rules of thumb to his young reporters, included:  "Pick adjectives like you would a mistress or a diamond; too many are dangerous and produce diminishing returns."

 And "fancy writing is a sign of an insecure craftsman." Another: "let the verb tell the story."

The Trib's night city editor, Lessing Lanham (Engel) Engelking, preached, "The right verb is the shortest path to maximum impact."

James Bellows, editor of the Herald Tribune from 1961 through its closing, developed a predilection for taking a chance on young writers, encouraging them to write in a style that best worked for them. Bellows was instrumental in hiring what might be considered the “Murderers' Row” of writers, including, Gail Sheehy, Thomas Wolfe (later would write “Bonfire of the Vanities”), and a young, brash, Irish-American reporter, Jimmy Breslin, who joined the staff in the middle of 1963.  As Kluger tells it, Breslin found his unique writing style early in his career, usually siding with the "debtors and deadbeats, the impoverished, trapped in criminality."

New York Herald Tribune columnist Jimmy Breslin found it difficult to produce copy unless "goaded" by a fast approaching deadline.

 ***

Dan Blum, assignment editor on the Herald Tribune’s metro desk, once described Breslin as "noisy, aggressive, argumentative, hostile and obscene-he threw daily tantrums. He was great and wanted everyone else to know it. He was an immense pain in the butt, the Maria Callas of the city room, but she was worth the trouble."

Walter Arm, a reporter for the Herald Tribune for 25 years, was considered one of the finest police reporters in town.; and Nathaniel Fein was a photographer for the New York Herald Tribune for 33 years (1933-1966), capturing some of the biggest newsmakers of the age, including Albert Einstein, Ty Cobb, Queen Elizabeth, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, William Westmoreland, Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Schweitzer, Marilyn Monroe and Carl Sandburg. Fein is best known, of course, for photographing the frail, cancer stricken, Babe Ruth on his final appearance at Yankee stadium, which earned him the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for his photograph "The Babe Bows Out."

Those who work hard, usually play hard. The Herald Tribune was frequently described as a “hard-drinking staff,” who often could be found whetting their whistle at the Artist and Writer's Restaurant at 213 W. Fortieth Street, affectionally known as "Bleek's,'' for its owner, Jack Bleek.

Much like the news department, The Herald Tribune's Sports Department was blessed with a number of talented journalists, including its editors.

Roger Kahn (who would write “Boys of Summer”), was a former Herald Tribune copy boy who would cover the Brooklyn Dodgers for the Tribune in 1952 and 1953 before becoming sports editor of Newsweek in 1956.

Stanley Woodward, arguably journalism's most famous sports editor, who during his tenure wanted to compete head on with the New York Times by “out-writing them.” Woodward brought Red Smith to the Herald Tribune in 1945. In a 1933 column of his, Woodward coined the word, “ivy’’ in reference to Ivy League schools.

A reporter once wrote the following sentence after a college football game: "The second half saw the tide of the game turn." Woodward immediately jumped on the reporter's misguided sentence. " A period of time cannot see anything; do it again and I'll jump out of the window."

One thing the Herald Tribune never lacked was compelling, widely read columnists, like Walter Lippmann, who won two Pulitzer’s for the Herald Tribune (1958 and 1962), Joseph Alsop ( a top insider of Washington politics), and Evans and Novak (Rowland Evans and Bob Novak) who beginning in May, 1963 introduced their "Inside Report," a popular column noted for bashing the tenets of liberalism and taking a hard line against the Soviet Union, subjects, amazingly, rarely touched upon by their contemporaries. Humorist Art Buchwald was another widely publicized columnist.

The Arts Department at the Herald Tribune took a back seat to no one.

Judith Crist was with The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter, film critic and arts editor for 22 years. She was the first woman to become a full-time film critic at a major American newspaper. She broke from other film reviewers by writing scathing reviews of “Spencer's Mountain,” “The Sound of Music”, and “Cleopatra,” among other Hollywood classics.

Film director Billy Wilder once said that inviting Crist to review a film was "like asking the Boston Strangler for a neck massage.”

Eugenia Sheppard revolutionized fashion reporting by introducing a women's fashion page in 1956 accompanied with a column, "Inside Fashion."

Virgil Thomas was the New York Herald-Tribune's music critic from 1940 to 1954, and according to Washington Post writer Tim Page, "was a force in American cultural life." Much like Judith Crist, Thomas broke from contemporaries by puncturing the "masterpiece syndrome."  In his very first review for the New York Herald Tribune in 1940, he wrote that the "New York Philharmonic was no longer a part of the city's intellectual life."

Book Week attracted a number of distinguished intellectuals and literary giants to review books, including Mark Twain, Henry James, Grantland Rice, Don Marquis, Ivan Turgenev, Stephen Crane, Robert Benchley, Henry Morton Stanley, and Richard Harding Davis.

Much like the way daily newspapers websites tarnished the quality of reporting, by rushing to get content online, the Herald Tribune followed a similar path.  In 1950, in hopes of beating their competitors to the punch, they introduced an 8 p.m. “Early Bird” edition. As Richard Kluger wrote: "The hallmark of the Tribune had always been good writing and good editing. Which went by the wayside when it launched its Early Bird edition." "The edition," Kluger noted, "curtailed research and churned out hastily and incomplete stories. Editorial integrity was sacrificed to boost circulation.”

But this would be just the beginning of the end for the Herald Tribune.

Under publisher Ogden Reid (1955-1958), the Herald Tribune’s profits vanished by 1957.

By 1963, the New York Times gobbled up 40 percent of the advertising revenue in the area; with the Daily News, (a solid money maker) 24 percent, while the other four papers scrambling for the other third. The Herald Tribune lost $4 million in 1963.

In addition, a 1963 Gallup Poll reported that readers preferred the New York Times to the Herald Tribune, largely due to its comprehensive and diverse coverage.

The final, crushing blow to the Herald Tribune was the 114-day newspaper strike of 1962-63, a strike which involved 10 unions and seven daily newspapers, including the New York Times, the N.Y. Daily News, the N.Y. Post and the New York Herald Tribune.

When the strike ended, the Herald Tribune's circulation was down 92,000 copies, forcing them to raise the price of the paper to a dime. More importantly, during the lengthy strike, readers found they could get along without a newspaper and increasingly began to turn their attention to television for the latest news. As of September 30, 1963, circulation of six daily New York papers were down 11.9 percent on weekdays and 8.3 percent on Sundays, according to reports from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Loss of readers, revenue, advertisers, and an outdated printing plant all factored into the Herald Tribune’s decision to cease operation. Its final edition was April 24, 1966, leaving New York City with only four major dailies: The New York Times, N.Y. Daily News, the N.Y. Post, and World Journal Tribune in the afternoon. The World Journal Tribune folded on May 5, 1967.

Imagine, in 1923, New York had 17 daily (English language) newspapers.

After the Herald Tribune folded in 1966, the Washington Post and New York Times each acquired one-third of the newspaper from Whitney Communications. In 1991, they became co-owners when they bought out the Whitney shares. And on October 22, 2002, The New York Times’ bought the Washington Post's share of the International Herald Tribune for less than $75 million.

As testament to the enormous talent housed inside the Herald Tribune newsroom, four writers for the paper, after it folded, went on to win Pulitzers, including Jimmy Breslin, Red Smith, art critic Emily Genauer and Art Buchwald.

So, after finishing Richard Kluger’s scrupulously researched, brilliantly written history of the New York Herald Tribune, I can’t help but mourn the immense talent that has gone down the drain at the N.Y. Daily News and the Village Voice in a city that was once fertile ground for talented reporters and thriving newspapers.

-30-

—Bill Lucey

WPLucey@gmail.com

September 11, 2018

All Time Favorite Novel: A Survey

 

How’s your summer reading going?

With social media running amok, and cold, heartless, political divisiveness invading our television sets, the likes to which we’ve never seen before-there’s no better feeling than cracking open the covers of a new book and getting far away from the maddening crowd.

In case you haven’t noticed, PBS has launched a new series, “The Great American Read” , in which they have surveyed Americans readers, asking them their favorite novel.

The series returns on September 11 with seven new episodes, culminating in the finale on October 23, where America’s Favorite Novel will be announced, following months of the public voting.

And for those who think reading books has become obsolete and gone the way of public pay phones and video rental stores, surveys have shown, thankfully, that not to be the case.

According to a Gallup Poll , more than one in three (35 percent) are heavy readers, reading 11 or more books in the past year, while close to half (48 percent) read between one and 10 and just 16 percent read none.

Additionally, among those who read at least one book last year, the vast majority say they most often read printed books, at 73 percent. About one in five most often read electronic books, while only 6 percent mostly experienced books in audio form.

And why wouldn’t book reading still be in vogue?

Ever since the 18^th century, particularly Victorian literature, novels had replaced poetry and drama, as it began to depict the lives of the middle class, and downtrodden, struggling with their morality and circumstances.

Small wonder, then, that Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) is often hailed as the first novel. The story of the shipwrecked sailor on an un-inhabited island on the Coast of America, Crusoe survives by self-reliance and hard work, embodiments of the Protestant work ethic, common themes that began to run through a number of narratives at the time.

On the other side of the Atlantic, American writers like Mark Twain (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884) and Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March, 1953) would expand upon Defoe’s picaresque, that is, a series of loosely connected episodes.

Set in a Southern antebellum society, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a biting satire on racist attitudes, among people and places along the Mississippi River and the hypocrisy of a civilized society.

The Adventures of Augie March depicts a poor Jewish boy in Chicago during the Great Depression, lacking any ambition, but through a series of comical episodes of steps and missteps, succeeds nonetheless. The novel explores some misguided assumptions about the typical American success story and what is the better path toward happiness.

Scholars have pointed out that the works of Samuel Richardson (Clarissa, 1748), Daniel Defoe, and Henry Fielding (Tom Jones, 1749), reflect the evolving society, a reading public (with greater literacy rates), a greater sense of scientific discovery, calls for democratic reforms with growing economic independence, and a strong Protestant ethic.

"The novel," Miriam Bailin, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Washington University in St Louis, argues, " can't be separated from its material history as well as its expanded readership in all classes.  Paper got cheaper, modes of printing got faster, and sales were not by subscription as in the past but distributed increasingly by booksellers and made available to borrow from proprietary libraries (kind of like Blockbuster was for movies). "

Making books more affordable for a growing reading public was certainly the brainchild of Sir Walter Scott (who published three-volume novels) and made them affordable to the general public by making them available for purchase in monthly installments.

Sub-climaxes, or serial novels, leaving the public on the edge of their seat until the next installment was ingeniously employed with great success by Charles Dickens, when he published ``Pickwick Papers'' in 19 monthly installments in 1836-37. In England, the periodic installments cost a mere shilling, making fiction affordable to a new class of readers.

George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope and William Makepeace Thackeray also published novels in serial form; as did Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James in America.

The 19^th century, of course, ushered in the age of industrialization. Literature began to follow suit with works of realism with characters who weren’t necessarily heroes but depicted the challenges they faced in a cold, unsympathetic world, such as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, a seminal work, many argue, which lit the match that sparked the American Civil War.

The 20th century is largely carved up into two phases of literature--modern literature (1900-1945) and contemporary literature (1945 to the present), also referred to as postmodern with characters questioning the existence of God, challenging the political and social conventions of the age, and the supremacy of the human reason on a variety of topics from the Great Depression to Hiroshima, the morality of war, up through communism and racism.

As Alfred Bendixen so succinctly wrote in the Blackwell Companion to the American Novel   "In the last 20 years, the literary landscape has been enriched by the work of African-Americans, Latina/a, and Asian American writers who have moved the novel into a fuller engagement with some of the basic contradictions at the heart of American democracy, the conflict between the ideals of the society devoted to freedom, equality, opportunity, and the realities."

To get a sense of the reading tastes of book lovers, I reached out to some individuals, to ask them their all-time favorite novel. What follows is a list of responses.

• "A tie between All The Kings Men" (Robert Penn Warren) and The Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)."

—Dean Baquet, Executive Editor of The New York Times

 

• "Gone With The Wind" (Margaret Mitchell) and "Debt of Honor" (Tom Clancy).

—Kellyanne Conway, American pollster, political consultant, and Counselor to President Donald Trump.

 

• "It would be a tie between Proust and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. But then there is Don Quixote, War and Peace, much of Jane Austen, Middlemarch, and Joyce’s Ulysses. For USA, the choices have to include Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, and several by Faulkner. ‘’

—Harold Bloom, American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University.

 

• "Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry). But this was hard to say. His characters are so real you weep for them. I know I sound a little purple but I mean it.”

—Rick Bragg, author, journalist, former New York Times reporter, and currently a writing professor at the University of Alabama. He also writes a column for Southern Living.

 

• “The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald). I re-read it every summer, along with his stories: Winter Dreams and Rich Boy.”

—Jill Abramson, former New York Times Executive Editor and currently Senior Lecturer in Harvard's English Department

 

• "The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky); second would be American Pastoral (Phillip Roth)

—Alan Dershowitz, American lawyer, legal analyst, and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

 

• “Impossible question but probably Dickens Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens) followed by A Fine Balance ( Rohinton Mistry). American novel would be Angle of Repose ( Wallace Stegner).”

—Anne Sebba, British biographer, writer, lecturer and journalist.

 

• "Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain).”

—James McPherson, American Civil War historian and Professor of American History (Emeritus) at Princeton University.

 

• “The Great Gatsby" (F. Scott Fitzgerald).

Chris Matthews, political commentator and talk show host for Hardball with Chris Matthews, on MSNBC.

 

• “The Great Gatsby” (F. Scott Fitzgerald).

—Pat Buchanan, political commentator, author, and syndicated columnist.

 

• "The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne). The novel that defines what America is"

—John Sutherland, Newspaper columnist and author. Currently, an Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London.

 

• "Charlotte's Web"( E.B. White).

—Sarah Lyall, journalist, former New York Times London correspondent, and currently a writer at large for the Times.

 

• "Favorite American novel is Moby Dick (Herman Melville).”

—Niall Ferguson, British historian, political commentator, and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

 

• "Gone With the Wind (Margaret Mitchell). No contest. "

—Sally Quinn, author, journalist, who writes about religion at The Washington Post.

 

• "Moby Dick (Herman Melville) and Middlemarch (George Eliot).

 —Stephen Greenblatt, Author, American Shakespearean and literary historian at Harvard University.

 

• "In addition to The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), A Separate Peace (John Knowles), Charlotte's Web (E.B. White), The Shipping News (E. Annie Proulx) and The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen).

 —Amy Walter, American political analyst, and national editor of The Cook Political Report.

 

• "The Blue Flower (Penelope Fitzgerald).”

 —Thomas Pavel, literary theorist, critic, and novelist currently teaching at the University of Chicago.

 

Facts about Novels and Novelists

• The pop song, topping the charts in the U.K and U.S., "Total Eclipse of the Heart," (1983) written by Jim Steinman and sung by Bonnie Tyler was inspired by Emily Brontë 's Wuthering Heights.

• Charles Dickens slept facing north, believing it would improve his writing.

• The coining of the word “cliff-hanger” is credited to Thomas Hardy. In the novel, " A Pair of Blue Eyes," published in Tinsley's Magazine, Hardy depicts one of the protagonists, Henry Knight, as hanging off a cliff.

• Edith Wharton was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

• “All’s Well That Ends Well,” was the original title for Leo Tolstoy's epic novel before settling on “War and Peace.”

• Mary Shelley experienced a number of dark and foreboding events leading up to the publication of Frankenstein (1818), her Gothic masterpiece of horror that may have added an extra layer of darkness to her writing: "Her father disowned her after she became pregnant out of wedlock, her first child was premature and died shortly after birth, her elopement with Percy Shelley basically made her an outcast in society, her half-sister committed suicide (as did Percy Shelley's first wife, to whom he was married when he was starting his relationship with Mary)"; this according to Ashley Carlson, Associate Professor of English at the University of Montana Western

• The earliest recorded use of the word "baseball" in an English novel is in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey written in 1798-1799.

• George Orwell's Animal Farm was banned in the Eastern Bloc countries until the collapse of communism in 1989.

• The Starbucks Coffee chain derived its name from Herman Melville's novel, Moby Dick. Starbuck is a crew member on the ship.

• In addition to Ernest Hemingway committing suicide by a gun shot, so did his physician father, while his sister, Marcelline, and brother, Leicester, committed suicide by drug overdoses.

• When it was published in 1925, The Great Gatsby sold a disappointing 21,000 copies, less than half of sales for ``This Side of Paradise’’ and ``The Beautiful and Dammed,'' It wasn’t until April 24, 1960 that The New York Times wrote: ``It is probably safe now to say that it [The Great Gatsby] is a classic of twentieth-century American fiction.’’

• Arthur Conan Doyle was a trained ophthalmologist and opened up a practice on upper Wimpole Street in London. With no patients, not one, he had plenty of time to write short stories, about a detective, Sherlock Holmes, based on Doyle's time in medical school where the autopsy of a body or corpse was conducted like a thorough investigation. His stories were originally published by Strand Magazine.

• In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first African American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

—Bill Lucey

WPLucey@gmail.com

July 26, 2018

 

 

How Americans View the World Cup Spectacle

"Rule, Britannia!"

Is the cross-pollination of Brazil and Serbian fans permitted?

***

We are well into the 21st World Cup; and many, even as I write this, are reaching for the hand held mobile devices to see if Belgium held off England, as the two teams squared off in the Group G for the top spot.

A couple of days ago, soccer (or football) fans were stunned when learning that Germany, winner of the 2014 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA, World Cup), was eliminated after losing to South Korea, 2-0.  It was the earliest exit for a German team at the World Cup since 1938.

The World Cup is traditionally an electrifying time for millions from all corners of the globe, which sparks pent-up jingoism and national fervor; national holidays are typically held in many countries, kids skip school, and productivity at work plunges. It’s a highly celebrated time, when poor nations are on the same playing field with rich nations.

It’s the most watched sporting event in the world.

Oddly, even if the United States did qualify for World Cup competition this year, the excitement for soccer in America is well below that of other countries.

According to a Gallup Poll , only seven percent say soccer is their favorite sport to watch, well behind football at 37 percent, basketball (11 percent) and baseball ( 9 percent).

While living in South Florida a number of years ago, I asked an editorial writer if he was looking forward to the World Cup? He told me that he “found it difficult getting excited about a sport which features players kicking aimlessly at a ball with no chance of scoring.”

When I asked investigative journalist and author, Carl Bernstein, if he held a similar view as the editorial writer, he snarled: “Soccer is a great game.   Period.  And there is nothing aimless about those kicks. “

Pat Buchanan, political commentator, author, and syndicated columnist, told me that he only watches soccer “when I am in the barber’s chair.  They have it on both big screens.  Never been to a game.  Not my sport.”

Harold Evans, a British-born journalist, and former editor of The Sunday Times (1967-1981), expressed to me a more profound view of the World Cup. "Orwell disdained the nationalism incited by such team sports. “

“Personally, I love the World Cup,’’ Evans said. “I saw England defeat Germany in 1966, one of the most amazing finals. Soccer is a true team sport, pass to pass, goal to goal, save to save. And the athletic skills are matched by a range of histrionic characters. Who could not be thrilled, entertained and educated: where, out of nowhere, did these guys come from."

I never fail to be amazed how the World Cup brings out such national pride in people no matter where they’ve taken up residence.

When living in Fort Lauderdale (this probably would have been about 2006), I distinctly recall a group of construction workers on Las Olas Boulevard, all huddled around the radio, listening to a World Cup match Mexico was involved with.

And just last weekend, while ushering a Cleveland Indians game at Progressive Field in Cleveland, I noticed some fans flaunting World Cup jerseys of Serbia and Mexico.

Warren Hoge, former New York Times London bureau chief and foreign correspondent (now with the International Peace Institute), tells me, "I still haven’t gotten over the Brazilian dream team’s loss to Italy in the 1982 cup in Spain, when Paolo Rossi broke free for a full field counter attack goal that sank Brazil’s chances and sent me wandering the streets of Rio where I then lived in the kind of inconsolable despair that I can only compare to the night of the Trump victory."

"I love international soccer" Hoge further explained, "and follow it closely, starting with the jogo bonito of Brazil 40 years ago, continuing through the years I lived in London and regularly went to Stamford Bridge to see Chelsea to tomorrow at 2 pm when I will be glued to my television set with Brazilian colleagues watching the Selecao Brasileiro take on Serbia. I think the World Cup is the greatest spectacle there is."

One thing I quickly learned about the World Cup spectacle: as easily as it lifts people’s spirits to the heavens, it can just as easily plunge their spirits to the depths of despair.

Shakespeare scholar, James Shapiro, from Columbia University, for example, responded to my email from a small island in Greece, where there's no cars, but stacks of restaurants with large screen TVs, all showing the World Cup.  "It matters in the rest of the world," Shapiro wrote, "hugely, in ways that it never will in the US.  I’m too crushed by Iceland’s loss—they had so many chances--to say anything more."

Another thing I learned is that a great many soccer fans may not have a favorite horse in the race, but love the game for its sheer excitement, many likening it to Super Bowl Sunday.

"I love the World Cup," New York Times sportswriter, George Vecsey, who covered eight of them, says. "I love the many stages - outsiders, new faces, upsets, and sometimes a superior champ, say, like Germany last time. Lots to see. Shame for people who miss it. Then again, I avoid NFL. Chacun à son goût.”

Still others like Associated Press baseball writer, Ron Blum, thinks some games are great, "but way too many are dull, with 10 and 11 men behind the ball. And Cleveland Indians beat writer for Cleveland.com  Paul Hoynes, is attracted to the entertainment facet of the games. "I like listening to the English announcers. I like the words they use and the dialects," Hoynes said.

So, there you have it, a wide mix of opinions on why the World Cup has become so near and dear to their hearts with matches “dripping with drama,” while others would rather, much rather, rearrange their sock drawer than watch soccer.

 

—Bill Lucey

WPLucey@gmail.com

June 28, 2018

Angelina Jolie Tackles the Jim Thorpe Story

Angelina Jolie, Jim Thorpe, Martin Sensmeier

Photo Credits: Neil Mockford/FilmMagic; Photofest; Barry King/Getty Images

 

"The danger in writing about Jim Thorpe is that the chronicler finds himself losing all restraint in an unavoidable tangle of superlatives. Yet there is almost no other way to describe the man and still do justice to him."

• Arthur Daley, The New York Times, March 31, 1953

***

In an age that regularly gives us the astonishing pyrotechnics of LeBron James, Tom Brady and matinee idol Aaron Judge, comes a new biopic about Jim Thorpe, arguably the greatest athlete ever in the world. The film, according to Variety, will be co-produced by actress, director and humanitarian activist Angelina Jolie. 

At the close of the 1912 Olympic Games, Sweden's King Gustav V reportedly told Jim Thorpe: “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.”

The film will be titled: “Bright Path: The Jim Thorpe Story.”

Thorpe's mother gave him the Indian Tribe name of Wa-Tho-Huck, meaning "bright path." Official records, however, list him as James Francis Thorpe.

It’s been nearly 70 years since “Jim Thorpe: All-American” was portrayed on the silver screen by Burt Lancaster, with a predominantly white cast.

In a sharp break from other productions of American Indians, “Bright Path” will be told from a Native American perspective. Thorpe will be played by Martin Sensmeier, a Native American actor who grew up learning and participating in the traditions of his tribes in southeast Alaska.

Jolie told The Hollywood Reporter,“I’m honored to be working on this project.  I have had the privilege of spending time with Bill Thorpe [one of Thorpe's surviving sons] and will be listening to and guided by the Tribes and the Thorpe family in the making of this film.”

Beverly Singer, associate professor of Native American studies at the University of New Mexico, expressed optimism about the upcoming movie. “I know screenwriter Sterlin Harjo, who should not only write the story but direct it. He's that good of a Native American writer and director,” Singer said. “He would change the way films about Native Americans are made and told in Hollywood.”

The spectacular feats of multi-sport athlete Jim Thorpe, a Sac and Fox Indian, has been well documented. He propelled to instant fame during the 1912 Olympics, becoming the only Olympian to win gold medals in the pentathlon (fencing, shooting, swimming, riding and cross-country running) and the decathlon (100-meter dash, long jump, shot put, high jump, 400-meter dash, 110-meter hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin and 1,500-meter run). The young, gifted athlete additionally became the first Native American to win gold medals for his home country.

The medals were stripped from him the following year (1913) by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for violating his amateur status once it was discovered he had been paid ($2 a game, $35 a week) to play semipro baseball in North Carolina in 1909 and 1910 (Rocky Mount and Fayetteville in the Eastern League), a common practice among collegiate athletes at the time, only Thorpe used his own name instead of a fictious one.

For more than 70 years, the Olympic champion and his family relentlessly petitioned to get the medals back and to have Thorpe reinstated by the IOC, which included a written plea on behalf of the family by President Gerald Ford in 1975.

All attempts failed.

Finally, in January 1983, the IOC presented duplicate medals to Jim Thorpe's surviving family members and restored his name to Olympic glory.

Medals or not, in February 1913, Thorpe signed a three-year contract with the New York (baseball) Giants for a hefty sum of $6,000 a year (including a $500 signing bonus), the most paid to a rookie at the time. Thorpe’s signing was initiated more to attract fans to the games than for his questionable baseball skills. During his career on the diamond, he batted .252 with three teams: New York, the Cincinnati Reds and Boston Braves. During his last year in the major leagues in 1919, he batted .327.  The most damaging shortcoming that hung over Thorpe's baseball career was that he couldn't hit curveballs, a rumor, many think, wrongly perpetuated by Giants manager John McGraw.

Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist James E. Doyle once asked Thorpe about his weakness for hitting curveballs. “That's a great big lie! Someday I'd like to catch up with the guy who first started that rumor and tell him off right. Whoever he is. Why, I could hit a curve with some of the best of them — that's the truth and no bragging at all — and I only wish there were records around to prove it.”

Thorpe ventured into professional football in 1915 with the Canton Bulldogs in the Ohio League for an eye-popping sum of $250 a game, leading Canton to a number of championships over its chief competitor, the Massillon Tigers.

Following Canton, Thorpe played football for the Oorang Indians, Cleveland Indians, Rock Island Independents and a number of other teams before retiring at age 41 with the Chicago Cardinals in 1929.

Knowing “Bright Path: The Jim Thorpe Story” is being told from a Native American viewpoint will undoubtedly spark loud cheers from the Indian community.

Native Americans, after all, have traditionally been brutally represented in the cinema.

In her book, “Native American Son, The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe,” author Kate Buford documents how from the very beginnings of talking pictures, Indians were demonized, depicted crudely as screaming savages, pillaging encampments, raping and scalping human prey. Buford wrote that “producers and casting directors gave little thought to authenticity in the race to turn out a product to meet the renewed demand for Westerns.”

In addition to Indians being described as riotous savages, Buford highlighted the communication skills of Indians in many Western films, which often included “grunts, a made-up Indian language and pidgin English.”

Shannon Keller O’Loughlin, executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA), a nonprofit advocacy organization whose mission it is to improve the well-being of American Indians and Alaska Natives, certainly welcomes the new Jim Thorpe biopic being presented from a Native American point of view. “Anytime that Native Americans are shown in film, and played by Native Americans,” O'Loughlin said, “representing the human condition outside of stereotypes such as the stoic, or drunk, or mascot, or hippie, or … then we are growing up as a society.”

“All peoples,” O'Loughlin added, "should be able to control their images, their stories and lifeways. AAIA’s wish for this film is that it does not take any shortcuts, and present all parts of Mr. Thorpe’s life, not just his athletic success.”

Aside from the extent to which Indians were savagely portrayed in motion pictures, Jeffrey P. Beck, professor of English at Penn State (Harrisburg), and author of “The American Indian Integration of Baseball," recalled the unabashed racial taunts Native American athletes, including Jim Thorpe, had to absorb in the early part of the 20^th century, especially professional Native American baseball players.

“Cat-calling, race-baiting, bullying and forms of out-and-out racism,” Beck said, “were commonplace. Indian athletes were expected to assimilate (and sports were supposed to be a tool for that assimilation) and to endure a fair amount of abuse on the playing field.”

Beck said that practically all Indian players were given the moniker “chief.” And most were regularly subjected to racist taunts by fans, which included Indian war cries; others yelled, “Back to the Reservation,” while still others belted out, “Dog soup! Dog soup!” a reference to some Indian reservations with a history of eating dogs.

“Another stereotype,” Beck continued, “that all Indian players had to confront was that of ‘the bad Indian,’ meaning a drunken Indian.” When Thorpe was with the Giants, the hot-tempered McGraw told him, “A young fellow like you shouldn't ever drink. Besides no Indian knows how to drink.” The way he said Indian really irked Thorpe, Beck explained.  Fearless, Thorpe shot right back at his manager, questioning the Irish and their shameless reputation for the bottle. McGraw immediately snapped at Thorpe, “Don't get smart with me!”

Thorpe's friend and teammate, John Tortes “Chief” Meyers, was sometimes called “nigger,” especially from the bleachers, because of his dark skin, Beck said.

In addition to the blatant racism Thorpe faced in his lifetime, Beck hopes the film will show that despite his extraordinary athletic skill, prior to signing with the Giants, the Sac and Fox Indian played very little baseball at that high level.

John Tortes “Chief” Meyers and Jim Thorpe of the New York Giants

 

“I hope the film will tell that part of that story,”  Beck said, “noting that in Thorpe’s friend John Meyers' words, ‘He was the greenest recruit you could imagine,’ when he started with the Giants. I think the Thorpe incident with Meyers, in which he wakes him up late at night to grieve about the loss of his Olympic medals, is an important part of the story, and it came in a context in which Thorpe bonded with Meyers as Indians playing under difficult circumstances in a tough media market.”

Angelina Jolie's “Bright Path” and the telling of the Native American experience couldn't have come at a more fitting time.

In January, the Cleveland Indians announced they would discontinue using the Chief Wahoo logo at the end of the 2018 season. Many considered the logo (a cartoonish caricature of a Native American smiling ear-to-ear) to be racist and at odds with the socially progressive era of the 21st century.

Asked what Jim Thorpe would have thought about the Chief Wahoo controversy, Jeffrey P. Beck, said, “I think Thorpe would have recognized in the Chief Wahoo logo the same kind of racism that his generation faced on the baseball field. 

“He also would have likely known,” Beck explained, “that the 1915 Cleveland team voted to change its name to Indians in part because of the success of Louis Sockalexis, the first Indian star in the major leagues who played briefly with Cleveland in 1897-98. Thorpe, I think, would be glad that the Wahoo caricature is gone, but still want Sockalexis to be remembered.”

According to a study by Stephanie Fryberg, American Indian psychologist at the University of Washington, “American Indian mascots are harmful not only because they are often negative, but because they remind American Indians of the limited ways in which others see them. This in turn restricts the number of ways American Indians can see themselves.” 

Another slice of the upcoming film many hope will not be overlooked is Thorpe’s schooling at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.

Specifically, Michael E. Roberts, president and CEO of First Nations Development Institute, wishes the film underscores the ruthlessness and racism of the founder of the Carlisle Indian School, General Richard Pratt, whose most famous quote on assimilation was “Kill the Indian: Save the Man,” which opened up a process in which Indian children were unconscionably taken from their homes to assimilate them into American society. 

“This very act,” Roberts charged, “is the epitome of one of the acts of genocide: Genocide by forcibly transferring children. There are few fond memories of the boarding school process among those who survived it. The physical, emotional and sexual abuse of Indian children at boarding schools is well chronicled.  Thorpe himself ran away from Haskell Institute in Kansas several times.”

In addition to being uprooted from their homes, American Indians had other obstacles to overcome, especially at the federal level.

“During Mr. Thorpe’s era,” Shannon Keller O’Loughlin explained, “Indian Tribes were being terminated, and Indian people were being removed from their homelands and relocated to the cities where they were promised jobs — but jobs never came.  Federal attempts to assimilate Tribes and eradicate the ‘Indian problem’ was the paramount federal policy of the 1950s.”

In 1953, the year of Jim Thorpe's death, Congress terminated federal recognition and assistance to more than 100 tribes. Public Law 280 imposed state criminal and civil jurisdiction on many tribes in California, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon and Wisconsin. The law imposed financial hardship on many tribes, resulting in the loss of millions of acres of valuable natural resource land through tax forfeiture sales. Federal policy emphasized the physical relocation of Indians from reservations to urban areas.

It wasn't until the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 was passed that American Indian children were able to be placed with extended family members, other tribal members or other Native American families for foster-care or adoption purposes. The law additionally protects the tribes' interest in retaining custody of their children.

The final complicated piece to the Jim Thorpe saga, which many hope will be retold in the upcoming movie, centers on the tug-of-war with family members over his final resting place. 

Jim Thorpe’s third wife, Patricia, wanted her husband buried near his home in Prague, Okla. But when the state declined to erect a monument in his honor, she accepted a financial offer from the town of Mauch Chunk, Pa., to move his remains there where a monument would be built over his grave. The town subsequently renamed itself Jim Thorpe in 1954.

According to published reports, Patricia Thorpe stormed in with the police and a hearse and took his body away in the middle of the funeral ceremony, whisking it away to Pennsylvania to be buried.

Thorpe's sons having been fighting for decades to have their father buried back in Oklahoma, on his native soil. In keeping with tribal culture when someone is not buried in the land of their family, “the soul wanders.”

Despite all his Olympic glories and magnificent displays of athleticism on the baseball and football fields, Thorpe didn’t lead an easy life. His twin brother (Charlie) died when he was 9; his mother (Charlotte View) died of blood poisoning before he was a teenager. And his father (Hiran), known for his volcanic temper, often beat his young son. Another tragedy was the death of his son from polio at age 3 following his marriage to Iva Miller (1913).

After his professional career, while fighting for greater emancipation for American Indians, including self-determination, he faced mounting financial hardship, and lapsed into heavy drinking, the reason, many say, was over two failed marriages.

Just two years before his death, it was reported he was a charity case in a Philadelphia hospital, where he had undergone surgery for removal of lip cancer.

In 1950, an Associated Press poll voted Thorpe the outstanding male athlete of the first half of the 20th century, far ahead of Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Ty Cobb, Bobby Jones and Joe Louis. Of the 393 votes, 252 named Thorpe first; 45 named him second; and 29 third.

Despite his shortcomings, he’ll forever be immortalized as the greatest athlete the world has ever seen.

As novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.”

— Bill Lucey

WPLucey@gmail.com

May 23, 2018

***

Native American Facts and Figures

• The Navajo Nation would be the 42nd-largest state in the Union. The Navajo Nation is larger than each of the following states: Maryland, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Hawaii, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island.

• 19 Tribal Nations are larger than the state of Rhode Island.

• 12 Tribal Nations have a land base larger than the state of Delaware.

• 229 Tribes are in Alaska.

• There were 334 federal- and state-recognized American Indian reservations in 2010.

• 567 tribal nations are located across 35 states and within geographic borders of the United States; each tribal nation exercises its own sovereignty. Each of the 567 tribal governments is legally defined as a federally tribal recognized nation.

• In 2010, 5.2 million people (or 1.7 percent of the U.S. population) were identified as American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) alone or in combination with other races, while 0.9 percent identified as AI/AN alone.

• While the overall U.S. population grew about 9.7 percent between 2000 and 2010, the percent of the U.S. population identifying as American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) alone or in combination with other races, grew 27 percent since the 2000 census.

• The median income of AIs/ANs households is $35,062. This compares with $50,046 for the nation as a whole.

• Native peoples and governments have inherent rights and political relationships with the U.S. government that does not derive from race or ethnicity. Tribal members are citizens of three sovereigns: their tribe, the United States and the state in which they reside. They are also individuals in an international context with the rights afforded to any other individual.

• Native people in Maine did not receive the right to vote in national elections until 1954 or in state elections until 1967. Native people in Colorado faced literacy test requirements and were some of the last to be enfranchised in 1970.

• 66 percent of American Indians and Alaska Natives are eligible and registered to vote.

• 22,248 AIs/ANs were serving in the military as of March 2012.

• On the reservations, 39 percent of Native people are in poverty — the highest poverty rate in America.

• According to the BIA Labor Force Report, Indian joblessness is about 49 percent with unemployment at 19 percent for Native people on the reservations.

• As of 2012, small and moderate gaming operations made up 56 percent of Indian gaming. In total, nearly 240 tribes across 28 states operated 420 gaming establishments representing a $27 billion industry. Many Indian tribes are using gaming revenues to fund economic development activities on reservations and more effective provision of tribal government services, including health services, early education programs and language and cultural preservation activities.

• The Indian Self-Determination Education and Assistance Act of 1975 allowed Tribes to contract with the federal government, so Tribes could run their own health, education and other programs.

• The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed in 1988 — though a compromise of inherent Tribal sovereignty to regulate Class III gaming, requiring a compact with States, and the fact that the IGRA has created the most complex regulatory scheme for gaming, the Act’s purpose is to support Tribal gaming to develop self-determination and strong Tribal governments. All revenue for Tribal gaming is legislated to support only Tribal programs.  (Whereas corporate gaming supports a corporation’s interests and not the public.)

• The NMAI Act (1989) and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) support the protection of graves, and repatriation of ancestors, burial items, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony on federal or tribal lands, and in control of federal agencies or museums. AAIA was involved in developing this legislation and continues to be a part of its effective implementation today.

— Researched and compiled by Bill Lucey

May 23, 2018

Source: National Congress of American Indians; Association of American Indian Affairs (AAIA) 

 

How Newspapers Reacted to Chappaquiddick in 1969

 

Sometimes, it’s impossible to burn bridges.

With Sen. Edward Kennedy having passed away nearly 10 years ago, and the tragedy of Chappaquiddick nearly 50 years old, you’d think the scandal that erupted after that muggy July weekend in 1969 would be but a distant memory by now.

But like a bad check, it has returned.

Thanks to director John Curran, the motion picture “Chappaquiddick” (written by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan) and produced by Entertainment Studios, hits theaters nationwide on April 6.

The film explores the mysterious events surrounding the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne (played by Kate Mara) after Ted Kennedy (Jason Clarke) drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Mass., landing upside down in eight feet of water.

According to published reports, Curran avoids indicting or absolving Kennedy in the film. After depicting the facts of the case, the New York born director and screenwriter leaves it up to the audience to draw their own conclusions.

What exactly happened at Chappaquiddick?

The Chappaquiddick incident couldn’t have come at a worse time for Ted Kennedy, who was only 37 at the time. His star was rising in the U.S. Senate and was being heavily favored by most public opinion polls as the candidate most likely to be nominated by the Democratic Party for the 1972 presidential election.

But then, in a blink of an eye, his hopes and dreams were shattered on that fateful July weekend in 1969, just two days before the Apollo 11 Moon Landing.

Ted Kennedy's submerged 1967 Oldsmobile and a picture of Mary Jo Kopechne who drowned in the car. She was 28.

***

On the weekend of July 18-19, 1969, Sen. Kennedy invited six women who had worked for his late brother Robert to attend a reunion at the annual Edgartown Yacht Club Regatta race (a sail boating race) to honor their supervisor, Dave Hackett.

The party or cookout (after the race) took place at a rented cottage on Chappaquiddick Island, accessible by ferry from the town of Edgartown on the nearby larger island, Martha's Vineyard.

The party was attended by six married men (including Sen. Kennedy) and six unmarried women.

Sometime during the evening on July 18, Sen. Kennedy claimed he wanted to head back to the Shiretown Inn in Edgartown.

According to testimony, one of the campaign workers at the reunion, Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, feeling tired, expressed to Mr. Kennedy that she would like to catch a ride with him so that she could catch the ferry, which was closing at midnight.

For reasons never fully explained, Kopechne, left behind her purse and hotel room key at the cottage. She also never informed anyone that she was leaving.

After the young campaign worker hopped into the car with the senator, what exactly took place over the next few hours is a matter of speculation.

Kennedy maintained that they were driving toward the ferry but made the wrong turn on Dike Road (an unlit, dirt road) that led to Dike Bridge. Moments before reaching the bridge, according to his testimony, he slammed on the brakes, before driving off a side of the bridge, landing upside down in eight feet of water of Poucha Pond.

Many question the “wrong road’’ scenario, reasoning that it would be virtually impossible to have turned on Dike Road without immediately being aware of the mistake.

The biggest shroud of mystery centers on why it took the senator nearly 10 hours to report the accident?

He testified that he made seven or eight attempts to dive into the water to rescue Kopechne but had trouble breathing. So, he began walking and running for help, but couldn’t make out any shapes and was only able to stay on the road from the silhouettes of the trees.

But evidence subsequently emerged that Kennedy would have, in fact, come across at least three lit cottages (only 500 feet from the bridge) where he could have asked for help.

Kennedy described that night as a "jumble of emotions-grief, fear, doubt, exhaustion, panic, confusion, and shock.”

According to medical reports, he suffered a concussion.

The fire department dispatched a diver, Capt. John Farrar, to recover the body submerged in the pond. He told reporters, she, [Kopechne] "was in what I call a very conscious position, meaning she’d been alive and functional after the car had entered the water, roof first. Her head was at the floorboards, where the last bit of air would have been. It seems likely she was holding herself into a pocket of air to breathe.”

The diver thought the car Kennedy was driving “must have been going at a pretty good clip to land almost in the middle of the channel.” He also said that had he been called soon after the accident, “there was a good chance the girl could have been saved.”

Kopechne’s body was recovered at 8:45 a.m., the morning after the accident.

Edgartown Police Chief Jim Arena, filed a complaint in Edgartown District Court, charging Kennedy with “leaving the scene of an accident without negligence involved.” The special prosecutor, in his report, stressed that Kennedy had been driving “with extreme caution” at the time of the accident.

More alarm bells were set off when it was learned that an associate medical examiner took less than five minutes to determine Kopechne’s “death by drowning,” while never fully undressing her, and never turning her body over from front to back. He said no autopsy was needed.

The chief medical examiner who was off duty at the time of the drowning, told reporters that there was no conclusive evidence of death by drowning. Contradicting the associate medical examiner, he said, “we don’t know if the girl died of a heart attack, stroke, or from drowning.”

Within hours of Kopechne's death, K. Dun Gifford, a Kennedy aide, flew a chartered plane into Edgartown (the Martha's Vineyard town of which Chappaquiddick is a part), with orders to get her body off the island, beyond the state’s jurisdiction.

When Kennedy finally did arrive at the Shiretown Inn (after swimming or paddling a boat through the 500-foot channel), he reportedly made 12 calls from a pay phone before giving his statement to police.

Cynics question if the senator was really in a state of “exhaustion, panic, confusion, and shock,” how could he have made so many phone calls?

In 1969, Senator Edward M. Kennedy and his wife, Joan, after a court appearance on the Chappaquiddick Island car accident.
Photo Credit: Librado Romero/The New York Times

***

Since it took the senator more than a week to address the tragedy in public, rumors about the accident were running wild, including rumors that Mary Jo Kopechne was pregnant and the car plunging off the bridge was no accident. Others picked up whispers that Joseph Gargan, a Kennedy cousin, was initially willing to take the rap for Ted Kennedy.

There was also the "third girl in the car'' theory advanced, which suggests that Rosemary (“Cricket”) Keough, one of the girls who attended the cookout, was in the car with Kennedy, and Kopechene was sleeping in the backseat. When the car was recovered, Keough's handbag was found in the car.

Deputy Sheriff Christopher "Huck" Look acting as a special officer for a private party the night of the accident, came forth with testimony that between 12:30 a.m. and 12:45 a.m. he noticed a dark car approaching the intersection of Dike Road. The car, according to Look, was driven by a man with a female passenger in the front seat. The car drove onto the private Cemetery Road and stopped. He thought they were lost and approached the car. The driver then put the car in reverse and headed east toward the ocean (not the ferry), along Dike Road. The Deputy Sheriff said he did catch a glimpse of the license plate of the car, which he thought began with an "L" and contained two "7's, which did indeed match Kennedy's license plate number: L78-207.

Look reportedly said he saw "a man driving . . . someone next to him" and possibly (although he wasn't 100 percent sure)"someone else in the back seat."

Look's testimony punched damaging holes in Kennedy's testimony that they were headed for the ferry. It also contradicts the time element, suggesting that Kennedy had been with Kopechene for more than an hour before the car plunged off the bridge.

On the 25th anniversary of Chappaquiddick, the BBC developed a theory that when Kennedy was driving Kopechne, he noticed an off-duty police officer in his patrol car. Alarmed that the officer may question why he’s in the car with a young beautiful woman, Kennedy got out of the car and returned to the party. And it was Kopechne who then took over the wheel of the car before driving off the bridge. For those who subscribe to this theory, this would account for the long gap between the drowning and when Kennedy reported the incident to police.

Whatever conspiracy theory anyone clung to, the end result was that on July 25, 1969, Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident. He received a two-month suspended sentence, and had his license suspended for a year.

The Massachusetts senator resumed his senatorial duties at the end of July, 1969.

Case closed.

Though the circumstances surrounding the drowning was never prosecuted, the younger brother of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy was never able to carry the torch of the Kennedy legacy that would propel him into the White House.

Ted Kennedy did go on to have a remarkable career in the United States Senate as the “Liberal Lion,” rising to senior Democratic Party member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee; the Immigration Subcommittee; and the Armed Services Committee. In 2006, Time Magazine named him as one of America’s top 10 senators.

Still, Chappaquiddick forever hung over him like a dark, ominous cloud.

The Chappaquiddick scandal ultimately derailed his attempt to unseat Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. After losing 24 primaries to Carter (he won 10) Kennedy dropped out of the race, never to throw his hat into the ring again.

To get a sense of the newspaper coverage Ted Kennedy received in the weeks and months after Chappaquiddick, I gathered some snippets of columns in 1969 from a variety of newspapers.

Press Reacts to Chappaquiddick

"For the third time in less than six years, sudden death has touched the Kennedy family and thereby altered everyone's picture of the American political future."
-David S. Broder, The Washington Post, July 27, 1969

"One need only to look at what the handsome Massachusetts senator has been, or might be, accused of to realize that once all the legal questions are cared for the important accusations against Kennedy will probably be the kind that never get tried in any place but the court of public opinion."
--Carl Rowan, Chicago Sun-Times, September 7, 1969

"Every passing day for the last seven weeks Edward Kennedy has been faced with a dilemma more cruel and oppressive than it was the day before. For it has become increasingly likely that for him to survive in public life and be allowed merely to serve what he regards as the continuing causes of his dead brothers-let alone achieve the Presidency--there can be no escaping a candid and complete account of his behavior before and after the accident on Chappaquiddick Island in which Mary Jo Kopechne drowned."

--Joseph Lelyveld, New York Times, September 7, 1969

 "Instead of a more complete explanation that might wipe away those doubts, Kennedy has chosen silence--amid hope by some of his supporters that time will erase memories of the tragedy. Therein lies Kennedy's political trap. His refusal to talk will receive nationwide exposure at the inevitable first confrontation between Kennedy and the press. That can only multiply suspicions that there was something to hide on Martha's Vineyard."
--Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1969

"If the political consequences of Edward Kennedy's personal difficulties prove as disastrous for him as seems indicated, the likelihood of his being the Democratic nominee for President in 1972 is greatly diminished and perhaps destroyed. This could have extraordinary consequences for American politics."
--Tom Wicker, The New York Times, July 27, 1969

"The power of genuine tragedy, as defined by Aristotle and understood by every later generation, lies in its demonstration that even the mighty and powerful among us are, because they are mortal and have flaws, liable to suffer judgements that no human standard of justice would impose."
--David S. Broder, The Washington Post, July 31, 1969.

The real test is not really here in a courtroom in Edgartown or in the Supreme Judicial Court in Boston. What is at stake here is the public man's credibility--whether the public really believes that Sen. Kennedy has leveled with them in this case."
--Robert Healy, The Boston Globe, September 3, 1969

"The other Bostonian, Ralph Waldo Emerson, would have been intrigued by the Kennedy triumphs and the Kennedy tragedies. In his essay on the duality of life, he argued that every human excess causes a defect, and every defect an excess; every good an evil; for everything you have missed, a gain, and everything you have gained, a loss."
--James Reston, The New York Times, August 15, 1969

"Whatever the answers, one can reasonably conclude that Kennedy-by his own words-showed that in this episode, at age 37, he could not command himself in a critical situation. It was bad luck for him, perhaps, to have been in a dazed condition and to have to rely on sycophants like Markham and Gargan for counsel during those horrible hours. Too bad there wasn't a hard-nosed guy around to coldly tell Teddy the score. It is also clear that the power of the Kennedy name and wealth provided a treatment by the law which ordinary citizens don't enjoy. Big names cow small-town cops."
--Nick Thimmesch, Newsday, August 1, 1969

"What he now faces is a very long struggle. His assets are his name, his talents and his wealth. His liabilities are Chappaquiddick. He will now have to make it more or less on his own. Chappaquiddick having apparently broken the natural line of succession. If, over the next four or five or ten years, he is able to show by his achievements a sobriety of purpose, a strategic manliness, a sense of destiny and resolution, then he will transcend the affair” [of July 18 ].
--William F. Buckley Jr., Los Angeles Times, September 22, 1969

"Kennedy will come back with the passage of time. Someday he will be effective again in the Senate debates that he will have to pass up in the immediate future. Until then, however, there are painful reminders that one of the voices which carried some authority in the Senate won't be effective."
--Reg Murphy, the Atlanta Constitution, July 31, 1969

"Like all strong men whom an unkind fate forces to traverse the valley of the shadow, the senator himself further seems to have gained in strength and self-knowledge. If the present chapter ends as seems most likely, he will thus appear in the next chapter as a major leader of very special promise. And if one may look ahead, a major leader is likely to be badly needed in 1976."
--Joseph Alsop, Los Angeles Times, November 4, 1969

***

 Chappaquiddick Facts

"Chappaquiddick" is an Indian word that means “separate island."

The automobile Ted Kennedy was driving the night of the accident was a 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88. License Plate Number: L78 207 .

Mary Jo Kopechne’s blood-alcohol level at the time of death was determined to be .09 percent.

Edgartown Police Chief Jim Arena took a written statement from Kennedy after the accident. He never administered a test as to determine whether he had been drinking.

Ed Hanify, Kennedy's lawyer, made arrangements to have the senator's car destroyed by a compactor. Mary Jo's clothing that she had worn that night—including a blouse that had bloodstains on the back—was burned.

Senator Ted Kennedy's televised address (July 25th) to the nation in 1969 was delivered in the library of his father's house. The speech was written chiefly by Ted Sorenson, President John F. Kennedy’s principle speechwriter.

In addition to Mary Jo Kopechne's, the other women at the party on the night of the accident were: Susan Tannenbaum, Esther Newberg, and Rosemary Keough. Two others, Maryellen and Nance Lyons, arrived the next day. They were known as "Boiler Room Girls," for working the phone room (boiler room) for delegate counts during Bobby Kennedy's 1968 ill-fated presidential run.

Also present at the party were Kennedy's cousin, Joseph Gargan, and Paul F. Markham, previously, a U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Attorney Charles Tretter, Raymond La Rosa, and John Crimmins (Kennedy's part-time driver).

The people who gathered at the Kennedy compound (Hyannis Port, Mass.) after the tragedy were: Ethel Kennedy, Harvard Prof. Arthur Schlesinger, Stephen Smith (business and campaign manager to Kennedy), former Sec. of Defense, Robert McNamara, Theodore Sorensen, Burke Marshall (Kennedy family lawyer), and Richard Goodwin (speech writer to the Kennedy's).

Kopechne remained in the car until her body was recovered by a Fire Department diver at 8:45 the next morning.

When Kennedy reported the accident to the Edgartown police, it was 9:45 a.m. -- some nine or 10 hours after he left Kopechne in his car.

Ted Kennedy's wife, Joan Bennett Kennedy, suffered her third miscarriage a month after the incident at Chappaquiddick.

The Kopechnes family reportedly received a financial settlement of $140,923 through a Kennedy insurer.

***

Additional Reading on Chappaquiddick

Chappaquiddick FBI Files

Excerpts from the Testimony of Senator Kennedy at Inquest into Kopechne Death (New York Times).

What Happened at Chappaquiddick By Vivian Cadden, McCall's. August 1974

The End of Camelot, Vanity Fair Magazine, September, 1993 

Chappaquiddick's unanswered questions By Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, July 21, 1994

NOTE: I’d like to express my heartfelt thanks and gratitude to the kind folks at ProQuest for allowing me to access the Los Angeles Times Historic Archives. Thanks too to Rick Mastroianni, Research and Library Director, at the Newseum, for providing me with some historic pdfs from 1969.

--Bill Lucey
April 2, 2018

WPLucey@gmail.com