Eric The Blue

Playing catch with dad

Thinking about my dad, who died Thursday. Feel like I must have asked him to play catch with me 10,000 times before I was 10 years old. Though he'd likely point out that 10,000 is impossible, since there are fewer than 4000 days in 10 years, many of them in winter, etc., etc. Whatever, lots of times, and I can't remember him ever saying "No" or even "In a minute"—just dropped what he was doing and got his glove. ("Look, if the ball is above your waist, and you try to catch it with your palm up, there's no place in your glove for the ball to go. Fingers up on high ones!") 

He was a physicist, and seems to have had a successful STEM career, but I'm pretty sure he was a better dad than scientist. Chuckling now to think how, in my early memories, he comes home from work wearing a thin dark tie with a white short-sleeved shirt accessorized by the pocket protector. Central casting! He played a lot of catch dressed like that, because he never said, "Let me change first." Full obit here.

 

 

Bill Russell, 1934-2022

When I was a kid, I read through the part of the school library where the sports bio/memoirs were shelved. Though it was hard then to satisfy my appetite, I think now that almost all these books were just efforts to cash in on celebrity while it lasted. Since most of the "authors" probably didn't have the time or inclination to write anything, it was also a financial windfall for the sports media person who received a "with" or "as told to" credit. But two of these books made a lasting impression, one by Jackie Robinson called I Never Had It Made and the other, by Bill Russell, who died yesterday, called Go Up for Glory. As I remember them, these memoirs eschewed behind-the-scenes, locker-room revelations but did include quite a lot on the subject of race in America. Russell, for example, unless I'm remembering the episode from another source, related in his book a story about hotel accommodations when he had been selected to play in some kind of college all-star game. He called ahead to make sure there'd be no issue with him staying at the hotel—if memory serves, the game was going to be played in one of the Carolinas. The manager told "Mr Russell" that there would of course be "no problem"—most likely, arrangements had already been made. Russell, who would've been only about 20, was a little put off by what he took to be fake hospitality, and so pushed the envelope by asking whether he could also use the hotel's swimming pool. Moments of dead silence followed by, "Of course, but we'd ask that you try to be inconspicuous." Russell then observed, with a mix of glee and bitterness, that, being Black and 6-10, the chance of being "inconspicuous" at the hotel swimming pool, in Carolina in the 1950s . . . unlikely. 

The Times's obit is here. In 13 professional seasons, he led the Celtics to 11 NBA championships—for purposes of comparison, Michael Jordan won 6 with the Bulls, and LeBron James has won four. Thirteen seasons is enough for the cast of supporting players to have entirely turned over: Russell was the common link between Bob Cousy and Bill Sharman and, later but repeat Celtic champions as well, Don Nelson and John Havlicek. He also won two NCAA championships at the University of San Francisco and an Olympic gold medal in 1956. Though a dominant player, he did manage to be something like inconspicuous on the court. As the obit points out, he disdained dunking and gesticulating celebrations of his prowess. Instead of spiking shots of opposing players into the fifth row of seats, resulting in an inbounds pass for the other team, he tipped them toward teammates and open spaces, causing turnovers and, often, triggering a Celtic breakout and lay-in. 

His career as a citizen-activist lasted his whole life. In his prime with the Celtics, he participated in the March on Washington and was seated in the front row when King delivered his most famous speech. His outspokenness created enemies. He received threats and his home was vandalized. He was proud and at least sometimes prickly. Long after they were retired, his former teammate Bob Cousy, who's white, sent him a letter expressing regret for not having publicly taken Russell's side on civil rights issues, including one occasion when Cousy played in an exhibition game boycotted by Russell and other Black players after they'd been denied service at a hotel restaurant. The letter went unanswered, according to Cousy, until he received a phone call more than two years later. President Obama awarded Russell the Medal of Freedom. A few years later, when Trump said protesting NFL players should all be "fired," Russell, now well into his 80s, posted to Twitter a picture of himself with his medal, kneeling. 

 

 

Postscripts

 

One of the pleasures of a New Yorker subscription is reading the brilliant if alarmingly regular obituaries, composed by a staff writer, of a recently deceased colleague at the magazine. It's not for nothing that these people have found their way into a certain line of work. The most recent specimen, here, concerns John Bennet, an editor unknown to the public, who is eulogized by quite a well-known writer, Nick Paumgarten. The piece enumerates some "Bennetisms," including:

A writer is a guy in the hospital wearing one of those gowns that's open in the back. An editor is walking behind, making sure that nobody can see his ass.

If you don't like something I write, remember: there's no one walking behind me! Paumgarten says he has on the wall of his office a draft of a long "Profile" he'd written for the magazine. It had been edited by Bennet, and somewhere around the middle several consecutive paragraphs, spreading across a few pages, were X'd out. In the margin, Bennet had chicken-scratched the justification for this long excision: "Blah, blah, blah." If you are at all inclined, I recommend the whole thing—it's not long (no blah, blah, blah). 

Here is another recent contribution to the genre, Ian Frazier's obituary of Martin Baron, a fact checker at the magazine for 35 years. Quoted snippets cannot convey its excellence, which has something to do with a modulated and understated tone that creates an overall effect well beyond the sum of things explicitly stated. Apparently not the easiest fellow to know too well, though esteemed by Frazier, Baron had become a superannuated figure, awaiting his end in an apartment in the Bronx where he smoked Marlboros out of the presence of home healthcare workers and, with politeness almost awkward in its formality, conversed with an old colleague who had come for a last visit. 

The video above is of comedian Dina Hashem. I think she's hilarious, often in a similarly understated way. The bit in this routine concerning the former boyfriend with an unusual sexual proclivity seems to relate subterraneanly to the recent handiwork of some state legislatures.

Boyfriend: I like sex with pregnant women.

Hashem: I'll gain a few pounds for you, but that's as far as it goes.

Boyfriend: But it would turn me on to feel a life within you.

Hashem [deadpan but exasperated, indicating her body with hand gestures]: I'm alive. 

Mark Shields, 1937-2022

Mark Shields, who died this morning, was for years a Friday night political commentator on PBS NewsHour, formerly known as the McNeill Lehrer Report. He'd discuss the week's political news with a conservative sparring partner—earliest one I can remember was Paul Gigot, then David Gergen, and most recently David Brooks. I must have seen a thousand of these segments in the 90s and early aughts, often the midnight rerun while the effects of happy hour were starting to wear off. Today, everyone is saying what a mensch he was, and I'm sure it's true, but if you only knew him because you consumed political journalism on TV what stood out (besides the fact that I almost always agreed with him) was his wit. He once said, on live television, something like, "Regarding Chris Christie, I'm probably about the last person who should tell him to join a gym. But let me tell ya something: watching that guy get out of an SUV, it was like watching the Russians get out of Afghanistan. Took that long." 

He was an Irish Catholic, a Marine, a Notre Dame grad (major: philosophy), a sports fan (Red Sox and Georgetown basketball), smart and funny and, according to the testimony of many, kind—one thing about the Christie quip, he wasn't punching down. 

Update: I keep forgetting it's 2022. Here's the clip. It's hilarious that Rush Limbaugh fans faulted him for "mocking Christie's weight."

 

 

Roger Angell, 1920-2022

As indicated here, I have for the past several Aprils felt an added gram of dread when Opening Day came and went without comment by Roger Angell, the editor and baseball writer at The New Yorker who turned 101 on his most recent birthday. I should have saved it all for 2022 as he died yesterday. New York Times obit here. His colleague David Remnick's "Postscript," in The New Yorker, draws upon Angell's breezy but weighty—it's alchemy—essay on advancing decrepitude, "This Old Man," which I remember made me laugh out loud while I read it one day in a Target Starbucks. It can be funny when it's not you—yet. Before his wits deserted him, my dad liked to say that old age was not for the faint of heart.

I subscribe to The Gray Lady and The New Yorker so preemptive apologies if some of these links take you to a paywall. Fyi, as recently as a few months ago you could get the Times for $3 a week and, for $12, a tote bag and 12 issues of The New Yorker. 

The Times obit mentions the "inventive imagery" with which Angell enlivened his baseball writing, and provides a few good samples, though not my own favorite: he said, of the effect made by an untouchable pitcher quietly accruing a string of strikeouts, grounders, and weak pops, that "the click of another passing inning is like someone closing a door in the next room." His wrap up of the 1975 baseball season, the one in which Carlton Fisk famously motioned from the batter's box for his big fly to stay fair, included what one might think of as an Answer to Critics:

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift. 

 

Local resident does well but dies young

Prince died on this day in 2016. A few weeks ago, footage of him being interviewed during a 1970 Minneapolis schools teacher strike made a social media sensation after it was discovered by a music fan who, in his job for the local CBS affiliate, was alert enough while reviewing old tape to recognize an unnamed interviewee, age 11, who said he was on the teachers' side "because they work, they be working extra hours for us and all that stuff." 

The above picture, of the 1971-72 basketball team at Bryant Junior High in south Minneapolis, has also been widely disseminated on social media. Prince, wearing #3, is kneeling at one end of the front row. Discussions of Prince as a basketball player inevitably quote his junior high coach, Richard Robinson, who said he was an excellent player but couldn't crack the starting lineup because he was undersized and there were so many other talented guys on the team. The Current has, here, "an oral history of Prince's love of basketball" that includes Robinson's reminiscences. He wasn't blowing smoke about having some good athletes on his junior high basketball team. I'm reasonably sure that #20 is Greg Boone, who a few years later was runner-up to Kevin McHale for Minnesota's Mr. Basketball Award. And #21 standing in the back row is Duane Nelson, who was good enough to play college basketball at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee—he was widely regarded during his life (he died in 2011) as Prince's half-brother, though the picture got murky after the musician died without living parents, offspring, or a will, and a probate court started hearing evidence from diverse claimants. I believe the kid wearing #4 and kneeling at the opposite end of the front row from Prince is Russell Gary, who played college football at Nebraska and was later an all-pro defensive back for the New Orleans Saints. Big #31, Calvin Anderson, went to Nebraska with Gary and played in the offensive line for the Cornhuskers. It's kind of humorous to read about Coach Robinson remembering how the wispy Prince, who in his maturity attained the height of 5' 2", repeatedly complained to him about being only the sixth or seventh man with this group. He quit playing basketball after his sophomore year at Minneapolis Central High School. Friends say he had other interests. 

I have a bit of a biographical connection to this photograph. I graduated high school the same year as Prince and his teammates, and I think my junior high basketball team might have played against Bryant in a tournament—it's also possible that they were only in the same tournament and that, though we didn't play them, their Afros made an impression on me. What I know for sure is that, a few years later, several of the kids in this picture were seniors on the basketball team at Central High, which went through the regular season undefeated. They were joined by a junior, Andra Griffin, who, after a college career at the University of Washington, was selected in the fifth round of the 1981 NBA draft by the Seattle Supersonics. I was on the team at Columbia Heights. Our team was pretty good—co-champions of a competitive league—but, to give you some idea, we beat Minnetonka in a close game early in the season, and when Central played Minnetonka in a holiday tournament they slipped past them by the score of 88-48. A 40-point win was not uncommon for them; like I say, Minnetonka was no weakling. Central was in the same region as us, so all season we knew that they stood in the way of us qualifying for the state tournament. We ended up being the #2 seed in the region tournament, and, had it gone according to Hoyle, would have played Central in the championship game. But we lost in the semifinal to North High School, and a couple nights later North, in a huge upset, toppled Central. The two teams had played twice during the regular season and Central had won by 66-54 and 79-65. I don't have a scrapbook; I'm pulling this information from the 1976 Central High yearbook. 

Back to Prince, my fellow class of '76er. Here he is (below) performing "When You Were Mine" at First Avenue on August 3, 1983, by chance my 25th birthday. I was probably playing in a softball game, like an idiot. Information about the show, including the setlist, is here: I guess that night was the first time he ever did "Purple Rain" live. The show was a benefit for the Minnesota Dance Theatre, which sheds some light on the following tidbit from the Wikipedia article on Prince:

While attending Bryant, he was trained in classical ballet at the Minnesota Dance Theatre through the Urban Arts Program of Minneapolis Public Schools. He grew to become an advocate for dancers, and would later use his wealth to save the ailing Joffrey Ballet in Chicago during the 1990s.

If you know "When You Were Mine" from the record "Dirty Mind," it's fun to hear him sing it that evening in his (surprisingly low) natural voice. For the recorded version, he also made some changes to the lyrics, perhaps anticipating the sensibilities of people like Tipper Gore. I've always loved Prince, partly for his music but also because he was a worldwide superstar who never left the city of his birth, Minneapolis. When in 2015 the Minnesota Lynx won the WNBA championship, he had the team over to Paisley Park and played a private concert for them that began in the wee hours of the morning after they had won the final game, which he attended. When his death was announced six years ago, Lindsay Whalen recalled that night, here. Quit the team but always loved basketball!

 

 

Across the Great Divide

I try to take note when (my) cultural icons die, but I missed the passing, last August, of Nanci Griffith. Today is the second anniversary of John Prine's death, so here she is doing a duet with him:

 

And performing "Across the Great Divide," the Kate Wolf standard that opens with the rhymed couplet: "I've been walking in my sleep/Counting troubles instead of counting sheep":

 

 

Memento mori

Toured a Memory Care Unit this morning, I wish just for the hell of it, and the experience may have operated on me like a subliminal memento mori as I just realized that, upon returning home, I served my kids the traditional Lutheran funeral lunch: ham sandwiches on little buttered buns (the kind that taste slightly sweet with a dusting of flour on top), in this case an unrealistically constrained selection of pickles and olives and other relishes, jello "salad," and a cookie—they're not old enough yet for coffee, no matter how weak it is. 

Sorry girls, no marshmallow topping on the "salad," this was merely a simulation inspired, additionally or alternately, by the news that Louie Anderson died today. I'll be in need of the Memory Care Unit myself when I forget his TV debut with Johnny Carson. He walks out on the stage, allows everyone to take in the sight of him, begins, "Sorry I can't stay long, I'm between meals." 

"I went to McDonald's so all the statistics have changed." 

Postscript: Joan Didion

The good thing about authors being mortal is that their deaths provide such people as me with an opportunity to read about them in leading journalistic outlets aimed at the general reader. Suddenly, in other words, you don't have to seek information out. This lasts for a few days, maybe a week.

When I clicked recently on "Joan Didion didn't play golf, but her writing had qualities for which all golfers should strive," I wasn't expecting anything like this, in GOLF Magazine. I think he's trying to imitate her style? He hasn't altogether succeeded, but he does get at a frequent effect, which is that of a directness that is simultaneously sort of disorienting. She's nervous, a little jumpy, even if the individual sentences are poised. At the comedy club, if you think you know where the joke is going to land, and then it lands somewhere else, that is a sign of a good joke. Didion's sentences are like that. Some of her obituarists, trying to describe her style, give the impression of having entered "mordant" or "incisive" in a thesaurus, in order not to repeat another obituarist, but the golf journalist—he did something different.

Inevitably individual works are mentioned and described, and it may be that my taste is lacking, for it seems that my favorite, "Sentimental Journeys," about the Central Park Jogger case from 1989, is never mentioned. A 29-year-old Ivy-educated woman with a Wall Street job and an apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side was assaulted and raped in Central Park while jogging after dark. Didion observes, in what resembles a thesis statement near the beginning of an essay that runs to more than 40 pages in her collected nonfiction:

Later it would be recalled that 3,254 other rapes were reported that year, including one the following week involving the near decapitation of a black woman in Fort Tryon Park and one two weeks later involving a black woman in Brooklyn who was robbed, raped, sodomized, and thrown down an air shaft of a four-story building, but the point was rhetorical, since crimes are universally understood to be news to the extent that they offer, however erroneously, a story, a lesson, a high concept.

In the essay, Didion describes the erroneous "story," "lesson," or "high concept" that made the case a sensation. Here is a sample of her exposition. The first sentence refers to the fact that the victim's name was not published in media reports, though it was known on Centre Street (a metonym for the administration of justice in NYC, as it's home to the Municipal Building and more than one courthouse) and north of 96th Street (the southern boundary of Spanish Harlem, where most of the suspects lived).

That the victim in this case was identified on Centre Street and north of 96th Street but not in between made for a certain cognitive dissonance, especially since the names of even the juvenile suspects had been released by the police and the press before any suspect had been arraigned, let alone indicted. "The police normally withhold the names of minors who are accused of crimes," the Times explained (actually the police normally withhold the names of accused "juveniles," or minors under age sixteen, but not of minors sixteen or seventeen), "but officials said they made public the names of the youths charged in the attack on the woman because of the seriousness of the incident." There seemed a debatable point here, the question of whether "the seriousness of the incident" might not have in fact seemed a compelling reason to avoid any appearance of a rush to judgment by preserving the anonymity of a juvenile suspect. . . .

This emphasis on perceived refinements of character and of manner and of taste tended to distort and flatten, and ultimately to suggest not the actual victim of an actual crime but a fictional character of a slightly earlier period, the well-brought-up virgin who briefly graces the city with her presence and receives in turn a taste of "real life." The defendants, by contrast, were seen as incapable of appreciating these marginal distinctions, ignorant of both the norms and the accoutrements of middle-class life. "Did you have jogging clothes on?" [prosecutor] Elizabeth Lederer asked [defendant] Yusef Salaam, by way of trying to discredit his statement that he had gone into the park that night only to "walk around." Did he have "jogging clothes," did he have "sports equipment," did he have "a bicycle." A pernicious nostalgia had come to permeate the case, a longing for the New York that had seemed for a while to be about "sports equipment," about getting and spending rather than having and not having: the reason that this victim must not be named was so that she could go unrecognized, it was astonishingly said, by Jerry Nachman, the editor of the New York Post, and then by others who seemed to find in this a particular resonance, to Bloomingdale's.

Plainly my strategy is just to give an example of her distinctive voice rather than trying, and like most everyone else failing, to describe it, but I would point out how effective that last sentence is—the way its cadence is slowed by all the subordination, a build-up to the withheld kicker, "Bloomingdale's." Didion's skepticism about the propriety of naming the juvenile suspects was warranted. They were convicted at trial in 1990, the same year Didion's essay was first published in The New York Review of Books, but the convictions were vacated in 2002 after a man whose DNA was a match for semen collected at the scene confessed and provided authorities with details of the crime. The original defendants sued the city, which eventually settled for more than forty million dollars.

“There were, early on," Didion had written, "certain aspects of this case that seemed not well handled by the police and prosecutors, and others that seemed not well handled by the press." 

Joan Didion, 1934-2021

From the New York Times's obituary of Joan Didion, the writer who died last week:

Her attraction to trouble spots, disintegrating personalities and incipient chaos came naturally. In the title essay from "The White Album," she included her own psychiatric evaluation after arriving at the outpatient clinic of St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica complaining of vertigo and nausea.

It read, in part: "In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure." This description, which Ms. Didion did not contest, could describe the archetypal heroine of her novels.

[Snip]

The intricacies of Cuban-American politics were the subject of "Miami" (1987), another extended foray into personal journalism, which some critics began to find wearying. Everywhere Ms. Didion went, it seemed, she found the identical set of circumstances: looming chaos, an atmosphere saturated with dread and absurdities described by unwitting participants in cliched language indicated by quotation marks.

In an Introduction to a collection of Didion's nonfiction, John Leonard, who did not grow weary, nevertheless limns the same sensibility. He alludes to the critic (Randall Jarrell) who thought T. S. Eliot would have produced "The Wasteland" if assigned the task of composing a poem about the Garden of Eden. Similarly, indicates Leonard, with Didion. Elizabeth Hardwick's essay about Didion is called "In the Wasteland." No one "likes" the world according to Joan Didion, and few would agree that she's even describing the world they think they know, but she makes her case. The title of the aforementioned collection is We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live. The phrase occurs in one of her essays and, out of context on the cover, has an air of vague uplift such as might have been approved by someone in marketing. But if you read through even a fraction of its 1100 pages you'd see that an apt gloss is more along the line of "we lie to ourselves in order to feel good." 

 

Bob Dole, 1923-2021

 

 

Thanks to Trump, Republicans who die on schedule over the next few years are all going to look like statesmen. Bob Dole, who died today, was 98, and it's not even funeral fudging to say that he had some good traits, like a long record supporting voting rights and a sense of humor. He's great in the above clip with Norm Macdonald, who played him on SNL. On another occasion Dole, seeing ex-presidents Carter, Ford, and Nixon sitting together on a dais, quipped, "Look, it's See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Evil."

After leaving politics he did some work for Pfizer and even participated as a subject in some early Viagra trials. If you're reading this, you have access to the Internet, and can verify that I am not making this up. In a CNN interview, Dole said Viagra was a "good product" and he wished he'd invested in it right away, causing Jay Leno, in his monologue later that night, to observe, "Leave it to a Republican to think that making money off Viagra is the best thing about Viagra." In Dole's defense, he did say that his wife, Elizabeth, was "startled."

I remember reading somewhere that, while everyone knows the injury Dole incurred in World War II resulted in a withered arm, it was less well known that he could not raise the hand on the other arm above around shoulder level. For about the last 75 years of his life, he needed help dressing and brushing his teeth. Elizabeth deserved some fun. 

Robert Bly, 1926-2021

 

The picture is of two American poets, Galway Kinnell and Robert Bly, in a Manhattan eatery sometime in the 1970s. Bly is the one leaning forward and pointing, quite possibly a characteristic posture, judging by his poems. By the time this picture was taken he had already co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War (1966) and won a National Book Award (1968) for the poems collected in The Light Around the Body. One of the poems is called "Three Presidents," which is about (sort of) Andrew Jackson, TR, and JFK, but it's JFK's successor who makes the longest shadow in the book. Another of the poems is "The Great Society," the title referring to President Johnson's domestic program but also to the state of the union according to Robert Bly. It begins:

Dentists continue to water their lawns even in the rain

The whole poem is here. One section of The Light Around the Body is called "The Vietnam War." You might think that poems about current events would inevitably decline in significance; Bly would have been familiar with “Drum Taps,” the section within Leaves of Grass about the Civil War, and must have been trying to do for the Vietnam War what Whitman had done for the one he lived through. Whitman's war poems are full of tenderness; the tone is of modulated sorrow. Bly's are savage. Here is one of especial regional interest called "Driving Through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings." (Bly grew up on a farm in Lac Qui Parle county, near the town of Madison in west central Minnesota.) The very best, I think, are characterized by a kind of restrained fury, like "Counting Small-Boned Bodies":

Let's count the bodies over again.

If we could only make the bodies smaller,
The size of skulls,
We could make a whole plain white with skulls in the moonlight!

If we could only make the bodies smaller,
Maybe we could get
A whole year's kill in front of us on a desk!

If we could only make the bodies smaller,
We could fit
A body into a finger-ring, for a keep-sake forever.

Bly, who had been suffering from Alzheimer's for about a decade, died Sunday at his home in Minneapolis. He was 94. 

The Kunin Collection at MIA

Myron Kunin was the Twin Cities businessman who founded the Regis Corporation. From the Star Tribune obit, published on Saturday, November 2, 2013:

Kunin, Myron "Mike" of Minneapolis, age 85, died peacefully on Wednesday morning. . . . Myron, a lifetime Minneapolis resident, grew up near Lake of the Isles, and lived for the last 30 years in a house less than six blocks away from his childhood home (where his mother, Florence, lived until her death, at 102, in 2007). His father, Paul, was a Russian immigrant, a barber and beautician, who owned a beauty salon in Minneapolis, and met Florence when he styled her hair. Myron was born in 1928. He attended Kenwood elementary, West High School, and then the University of Minnesota. Mike married Anita Hochfeld, of Portland Oregon, whom he met when she was visiting her cousins in Minneapolis. They recently celebrated their 62nd wedding anniversary. Mike had several different jobs after college, but he eventually purchased his father's salon business in 1958, renamed it Regis Corporation, and over time he transformed it entirely. Throughout the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s, Regis grew rapidly and continuously, as Myron foresaw the changing American marketplace and adapted Regis accordingly. When he stepped down from the Board of Directors, after 50 years at the helm, the Regis corporate group had more than 13,500 salons and more than 65,000 employees.

I quote the parts of the obit concerning his business career as it was to me something of a revelation—not that he was a successful businessman, I knew that, but the scope and specific endeavor were to me unknown, for I knew him mainly as an art collector. I had no understanding of how much money he spent to acquire his collection, which was in two main areas: African statuary art, and contemporary American painting, especially portraiture, "contemporary" in the sense that Kunin was alive when most of it was created. The year after he died, Sotheby's auctioned his collection of African art for over $40 million. Part of the American collection is on loan to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It's not hard, from the Kunin collection at the MIA, to come toward some conclusions about what interested him, and it's not what I anyway would expect from a beauty salon magnate. He put it this way in a 2005 interview:

I try to buy things that are an extension of the Renaissance, the Old Master artists, and that have some kick to them. I like a painting that reaches in and grabs your heart and stomps on it. . . .

To get a taste of what he meant, you can go here, the blog post of a recent visitor to Minneapolis who feels as I do about the Kunin collection at the MIA—it's the best thing in the museum. She has a lot of pictures of the portraits in the "portrait room," which is just one of the rooms holding the collection. Here's a picture I took of a painting in another room:

It's by John Wilde, a Wisconsin artist who died, age 86, in 2006. I could be wrong, but I think Wilde had in mind the famous painting by the Renaissance master Pieter Breughel the Elder, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," which is the subject of possibly Auden's most famous poem. If Kunin had the same thought, it might explain part of what he liked about this picture, since he was attracted to works that seemed "an extension of the Renaissance, the Old Masters." Here, female Icarus comes to the rural Midwest and jumps out the top of a barn. As in Breughel's painting, every detail is carefully wrought and adds to the total effect. The birds flit about the nude falling figure who, though her hands are spread like wings, will soon land on the concrete below. The fence visible at the lower right is of barbed wire. Through the window at the far left the head of a man with a clown face is visible. The abandoned wagon is in the role of what Auden, in the closing lines of his poem about the Breughel picture, described as

the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

In my photo, it's almost as hard to see as clown man, but the abandoned wagon holds an abandoned doll lying prone and splayed, like the main exhibit is about to be. 

Charlie Watts, 1941-2021

 

Most of us will never get closer to Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones drummer who died last week, than by watching "Gimme Shelter," the 1970 documentary film best known for its footage of the violence at the Altamont Speedway concert on December 6, 1969. But the movie is more than just that. My favorite scene, of the ones I can now remember, was filmed a few days earlier at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama. The band has just recorded "Wild Horses" and it's being played back to them. The above still is of Watts listening at the moment his drums come in. The whole thing—the scene at Muscle Shoals, not the whole movie—is below: really fun to watch. Seems like a fitting obit for Watts inasmuch as he appears pleased with the work he did. 

 

 

Walter Mondale, 1928-2021

 

I like this video of Walter Mondale, presiding over a joint session of Congress in his capacity as vice president, announcing the defeat of the Carter-Mondale ticket by Reagan-Bush. He laughs when reporting his own paltry electoral vote tally and the assembled members of Congress rise in a standing ovation as he jokes with the Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill.

"A landslide," says Mondale, "I did it!"

"Very impressive!" replies O'Neill. 

On every viewing I notice something new. Mondale, a college football player, is dwarfed by Tip O'Neill, who must have been quite a big man. Closest I can come to confirming this is that the Wikipedia article says he possessed "expansive appetites" before relating how, at a White House breakfast soon after Carter took office, O'Neill was appalled by the dainty fare served up by the abstemious new president. "You know," he said, addressing Carter, "we won the election." 

Probably the two most striking aspects of the clip—Mondale's self-deprecating humor and the evident affection with which colleagues of both parties regarded him—are related. The New York Times obit, published Monday, notes that talking himself up was for Mondale the hardest part of the job. To Washingtonians he must have seemed like proof The Prairie Home Companion was realistic. It's a little discouraging, but cosmically apt, that tributes have been sparse on account of his death coinciding with final arguments and then a verdict in the Chauvin trial.

Around fifteen years ago I was strap hanging one day on a crowded light rail car when through the fog of my public transportation consciousness it occurred to me that the older fellow sitting a few feet away directly in line with my blank gaze looked vaguely familiar. Yes, it was the former ambassador, senator, and vice president of the United States. He must have been on his way home from the airport—had a small suitcase sitting on one of those wheeled trolleys with him. You'd think—anyway, I'd think—someone like him might have had a driver pick him up from a VIP area of the airport. At least a cab. No, Mondale takes the train. Not really incognito either, unless you count a maroon U of M baseball cap pulled down pretty low over the eyes. He was sitting on one of those benches that face the aisle so there was no reason for me not to study him as he chatted amiably with the person next to him—a "staffer" of some kind, I guessed, but then the guy disembarked at the same station as I and Mondale travelled on. Probably started chatting with someone new. Not all Scandinavians are sullen. 

Elgin Baylor, 1934-2021

Elgin Baylor, who died yesterday at age 86, played his first two NBA seasons for the Minneapolis Lakers. He was a rookie during the 1958-59 season, which I believe is the first year the Lakers played their home games at the Armory in downtown Minneapolis. Before that, most of their games were at the Minneapolis Auditorium. During my days as a contributing member of society, the Armory was used as a parking garage, and I was in there a lot as it was across the street from the building I worked in.  Just about impossible to imagine it as a venue for NBA games but Baylor had a pretty good  season there in 58-59: Rookie of the Year, although, by the numbers, he could as well have been the league MVP—he averaged 24.9 points per game (second best in the league), 15 rebounds (third best), and 4.1 assists (eighth best). Baylor would never win the MVP award. Starting in his second season, it went to either Russell or Chamberlain almost every year for a decade. Once in that span it was Oscar Robertson. His team, the Cincinnati Royals, wasn't much but in the year he won it he practically averaged a triple double: more than 31 points per game, 11 rebounds, and 9.9 assists. 

Scanning Baylor's career numbers, what stands out to me is his rebounding. Over 14 NBA seasons, he averaged 13.5 rebounds per game. He was 6-5. No mislick on the keyboard: he was 77 inches tall. Michael Jordan's career rebounds per game average was 6.2; Larry Bird, 10.0; Magic Johnson, 7.2; LeBron James, 7.9 (so far). Baylor was always a rebounding machine. In his junior year of college, at Seattle U, he averaged 20 rebounds a game—and 30 points. Seattle U didn't have a lot besides him, but in his senior season that was enough to advance to the NCAA championship game, which they lost to Kentucky. Baylor was named the tournament's Most Outstanding Player, which I'm sure he was—probably by a lot, since the award usually goes to a member of the championship team.

It seems odd to me that I have almost no memory of him as a player, even though contemporaries like Chamberlain, Russell, Robertson, and his teammate Jerry West are vivid. I can picture Hal Greer shooting free throws but regarding Baylor, one of the greats, I'm essentially blank. I guess West played a couple of seasons after Baylor was done, and in the 60s the Game of the Week usually featured Chamberlain or Russell (or both), which would explain too why I can picture the 76er's Greer. Not being able to call to mind an image of Baylor playing basketball seems fitting only in the respect that in the first NBA season of my life he starred for my hometown team, winning the Rookie of the Year Award while playing in a building that would later be known to me as a parking garage. 

 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1919-2021

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet and arts ambassador who died last week at the age of 101, could not be accused of having been born on third base and then acting like he hit a triple.* The circumstances of his very early life were so calamitous that certain facts of his nativity were unknown to him into his maturity—he knew his birthday was March 24, for example, but only that the year of his birth was either 1919 or 1920 (it was 1919). His father, an auctioneer in the suburbs of New York City, died right around the time Lawrence was born—the biographical sketch in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry says the elder Ferlinghetti died "while the boy was still small" but his New York Times obituary says the death occurred "before Lawrence was born." His mother was then admitted to a state mental hospital before Lawrence, the youngest of five boys, turned 2. Nothing that I have seen takes up the question of what became of the four older boys. Lawrence was taken in by a woman he called "Aunt Emily," though she seems to have been a more distant relative of his mother. Her full name was Emily Monsanto and she took Lawrence to France, where they lived from 1920 to 1924. She then returned to the New York area with 5-year-old Lawrence. At some point, either before Emily took him to France or after they had returned and she was looking for work, Lawrence lived in an orphanage. She eventually found work as a governess for an affluent family in Bronxville—the Anthology and the obit provide different names for this family. The next awful thing to happen is that Emily went insane. By this time, however, the Bronxville family had taken to young Lawrence and he remained with them, reading through the extensive home library and eventually enrolling, presumably on their dime, at the University of North Carolina, a choice inspired by his devotion to native North Carolinian Thomas Wolfe's autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel. He graduated with a BA in journalism just as the US was entering World War II. Ferlinghetti served in the navy and, after the war, attended graduate school at Columbia, for a master's degree, and the Sorbonne, in Paris, from which he received a doctorate in comparative literature. That's the first 31 years of a life that would last almost 71 more.

Ferlinghetti moved to San Francisco in 1951 and opened City Lights Books two years later. His book store soon became something like a salon for the Beat movement in literature, and its small press published poetry, that of Ferlinghetti and others, including Allen Ginsberg's Howl in 1955. No more obscurities in the biographical record from this point forward, but the preexisting ones persist. One of Ferlinghetti's longer poems is called "Autobiography" but its self-mockery would seem to make it an unreliable guide to biographical fact. It's made largely of two- and three-line units, the last line an undercutting blow:

I thought I was Tom Sawyer
catching crayfish in the Bronx River. . . .

I looked homeward
and saw no angel.
I got caught stealing pencils
from the Five and Ten Cent store
the same month I made Eagle Scout. . . .

I landed in Normandy
in a rowboat that turned over. . . .

I hear America singing
in the Yellow Pages.

The text of the whole poem is here. Ferlinghetti himself (I think) reads the poem, here, as a photographic montage of images whirs by, with musical interludes. 

 

*Don't know whether it was original with him, but I'm familiar with this line because Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, of Iowa, applied it to President Geo. W. Bush: "He was born on third base and acts like he hit a triple." 

Henry Aaron, 1934-2021

Hank Aaron, who died today at age 86, has as strong a claim as anyone to being baseball's GOAT (greatest of all time). Let's run through some statistics, indicating his place on the all-time list:

Games played—3298—3rd (behind Pete Rose and Carl Yastrzemski)
At bats—12364—2nd (behind Rose)
Runs—2174—4th (behind Rickey Henderson, Ty Cobb, and Barry Bonds)
Hits—3771—3rd (behind Rose and Cobb)
Home runs—755—2nd (behind Bonds)
Runs batted in—2297—1st
Total bases—6856—1st
Extra base hits—1477—1st

His lifetime batting average was .305. While in his 20s, he won three gold glove awards. His cumulative career statistics were compiled without benefit of any eye-popping season. He never won the Triple Crown. He was league MVP just once. He played for one World Series champion, the 1957 Milwaukee Braves, and in his career played in only 17 post-season games—he batted .362 in those games, 25-for-69 with 6 homers and 16 RBI. He never hit more than 47 homers in a season (but hit at least 30 fifteen times). His biggest RBI year was 132 (but he averaged 100 per season over his entire 23-year career). Compared to his National League contemporaries Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente, he seemed almost determinedly unflashy. He wasn't at all physically imposing—6 feet tall, 180 pounds—and, in my memory, was so relaxed in the batter's box as to appear almost sleepy. He'd wait longer than most hitters and then flick his quick hands: in keeping with everything else, no tape measure shots, just one vanilla home run after another, about 35 a year for more than 20 years. 

I think I've talked myself into it: he's the GOAT. Look over those eight pretty fundamental statistical categories again. He's no farther down the list than fourth, all-time, on any of them, and he's at the top of the list for RBIs, total bases, and extra base hits. Of the players whose names appear ahead of his in more than one of the categories, two, Rose and Cobb, were compared to him just banjo hitters, and another, Bonds, used steroids. Mays was better than Aaron in the field and on the bases. Ted Williams walked more, had an even higher slugging percentage, and, were it not for time lost to military service, might have had career numbers to rival Aaron's. Everyone's case for being the GOAT requires some special pleading, but the case for Aaron seems to me the most straightforward. The guy with the third most hits had the second most homers, the most total bases, and the most RBIs. 

Some philosophers

I follow on Twitter Agnes Callard, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago with a lively  feed. The other day she retweeted someone who had reproduced the following paragraphs, by the philosopher Jerry Fodor (pictured), with the comment, "I wish I could write like Jerry Fodor." The passage looks to me like a footnote in an actual academic paper Fodor wrote:

⁴I am reading, "What makes Wheaties the breakfast of champions?" as asking "What about Wheaties makes champions of (some, many, so many) Wheaties eaters?" rather than "What about Wheaties makes (some, many, so many) champions eat them?" The latter question invites the reasons that champions give for eating Wheaties; and though these may include reference to properties Wheaties have by virtue of which its eaters become champions, they need not do so. Thus, a plausible answer to the second question which is not plausibly an answer to the first might be: "They taste good."

I am uncertain which of these questions the Wheaties people have in mind when they ask "What makes Wheaties the breakfast of champions?" rhetorically, as, I believe, they are wont to do. Much of their advertising consists of publicizing statements by champions to the effect that they (the champions) do, in fact, eat Wheaties. If, as may be the case, such statements are offered as arguments for the truth of the presupposition of the question on its first reading (viz., that there is something about Wheaties that makes champions of those who eat them), then it would appear that General Mills has either misused the method of differences or committed the fallacy of affirmation of the consequent. 

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less. 

With Wheaties I'm familiar, and I've now googled "Jerry Fodor," "method of differences," and "affirmation of the consequent." Fodor was a philosophy professor, or philosopher, whose specialty was "philosophy of mind," including "philosophy of language" and "cognition." I take it he was interested in questions like, "What is going on in your mind (or brain) when you are engaged in what we call 'thinking'?" Sometimes it seems like you are saying words to yourself:

Boy, I really hope the team that plays its home games in the city in which I live wins the tournament.

But that doesn't explain all "thoughts." For example, if someone asked, in something I was reading,

What does a carburetor look like?

I would "think the words"

I have no idea

but someone else, who actually knows what a carburetor looks like, would have some kind of brain activity more accurately represented by a phrase like "formed a mental image" of, in this case, a carburetor: no words, in other words, but a picture instead. These are the kinds of things, it seems, that Fodor thought about, including while reading the panel of a Wheaties box at the breakfast table. 

The "method of differences" refers to a reasoning process sometimes illustrated by a family meal gone bad. If everyone eats everything and everyone gets sick, the culprit is a mystery; but, if one person refrains from eating salad, and she's the only one who doesn't get sick, then logic dictates that suspicion falls upon the salad. But be careful!

Carl Lewis, Lindsey Vonn, and Michael Phelps eat Wheaties for breakfast, whereas Eric Jorgenson prefers frosted miniwheats. Therefore, eating Wheaties for breakfast makes Olympic champions.

The fallacy of affirmation of the consequent is another instance of the slipperiness associated with assigning causes to events. From the truth of a conditional statement 

If there's a power outage after a storm, then the houses will be dark

one should not conclude that the following switcheroo results in more truth:

If the houses are dark, then there's been a storm and the power is out. 

While clicking here and there, from the starting point of "Jerry Fodor," I ended up reading this obituary of the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin. It's quite long, and I'd bet 97 readers out of a hundred will remember only the anecdote pertaining to an incident from Dworkin's courtship of his eventual wife. He'd been an ace law student and so as a young man got a job clerking for the famous federal appeals court judge Learned Hand. At the start of one of their first dates, Dworkin explained that he had to drop off a document at the home of his boss. Hand, who was then in his 80s, met the young couple at the door and insisted that they step inside. He then spent the next two hours mixing dry martinis and talking brilliantly. As they were leaving, Dworkin's future wife said to him, "If I see more of you, do I get to see more of him?"

Enjoyable, though arguably a better fit in Hand's obituary.

Lonnie Durham

When my daughters, ages 12 and 9, say that something "sucks," I often suggest an alternative, such as "stinks" or "tis to be rued," but one thing that really does suck is when, curious about some old friend or acquaintance, you google their name and the first return is their obituary. This is what happened to me yesterday when I googled "Lonnie Durham" and within a minute or two had read this. No reason to have been surprised, I suppose: he was 86. Weird how, at least for me, it's apparently impossible to imagine people you've lost touch with advancing through life. I'm not surprised to be 62, or that my dad is 87: this is what happens when, day after day after day, you don't die. But it was shocking to me that Lonnie Durham should have been 86. He's frozen in time at the front of the classroom, expostulating on Shakespeare or Milton, being diverted from his notes by a student question, launching off in some new direction now and speaking extemporaneously, his knowledge apparently comprehensive.

A few disconnected thoughts relating to the obit. I knew none of the details of the first 30 or so years of his life, but, from an altitude, they must be shared by a lot of Americans his age—the Depression, a struggling family, a gifted kid with a period of "drifting," military service and the GI bill and education and, because of his abilities, fellowships and graduate school and a PhD followed by an academic career in which he, as we say, "made a difference" in the lives of hundreds of young people. I was his teaching assistant one term for "Introduction to Shakespeare." This would have been during the 1981-82 school year, start of Reagan's first term. In the first or second class session, he lectured on Shakespeare's biography and the theater world in which he worked, including the detail that he was not only a playwright but an actor too. Toward the end of the class period, a student asked whether, back then, actors had the status and social prestige that they enjoy today. Lonnie said that they most certainly did not and, elaborating, explained that the Globe Theater was "on the other side" of the Thames, alongside the bear-baiting sites and other low entertainments, to keep the riffraff away from the respectable precincts of the capital's business and governmental hubs. Zoning, in other words. Eyes twinkling, he added, "Why, any of Shakespeare's colleagues would have been astounded to be informed that, almost 400 years hence, a man, and not the most distinguished among them, would rise from their ranks, to become the leader of a great and powerful nation . . . ." 

Lonnie connected a lot of the world's absurdity and troubles to something he called "the cult of masculinity." This referred to the way in which males, under the impression they have incurred some slight, feel unmanned and are thus tempted to perform desperate compensatory acts, such as voting for Republicans. To illustrate further, here is Lady Macbeth manipulating her husband whose determination to attain the throne by killing his guest and kinsman, the current king, is flagging:

                                  Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since?
And wakes it now to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely? From this time
Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valor
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'
Like the poor cat i' th' adage?
. . . .
When you durst do it, then you were a man.

(The cat in the adage wants the fish but is laughably afraid of getting its paws wet.)

I often think of Lonnie when some swashbuckler is swashbuckling, and am then inevitably reminded of my most vivid interaction with him. I had injured myself and my arm was in a sling. Naturally, he asked the cause, and I had to explain that I had broken my shoulder sliding head first in a ball game. He laughed, and when he was done laughing he "predicted" that this was "the kind of ball game in which the pitcher, employing an underhanded motion, delivers a grapefruit-sized spheroid toward the overfed batter, and that when enough outs have somehow been made for the game to end everyone goes to a bar to speak of their exploits, old and new." Exhibited no interest in whether I'd been called safe!

David Kaiser, 1969-2020

David Kaiser, who died last week of brain cancer at age 50, was known to some as a crusading journalist whose essays in The New York Review of Books took on prison rape and the efforts of Exxon Mobil to cover up what the company knew about climate change. If you knew of him without being familiar with his contributions to the Review, then you likely are acquainted with the lineage of the Rockefeller family and the world of big dollar philanthropy: Kaiser was the great-great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller and the president of the Rockefeller Family Fund. His New York Times obituary, by John Schwartz, who covers climate change for the Times, is informative and affecting, never more than in its conclusion:

David Walter Kaiser was born on July 27, 1969, in Cambridge, Mass., to Neva Rockefeller Goodwin and Walter Kaiser. His mother, who survives him, is a distinguished fellow at Boston University's Global Development Policy Center. His father, who died in 2016, was a professor of English and comparative literature at Harvard University.

In addition to his wife and his mother, Mr. Kaiser is survived by two daughters and a sister, Miranda Kaiser. 

Mr. Kaiser graduated from Columbia University in 1991 with a degree in American history. He and Ms. Corbett met in 2011 through the online dating service OkCupid. They discovered a shared interest in criminal justice reform, Ms. Corbett recalled, and Mr. Kaiser seemed startlingly open.

"I asked what the worst thing he'd ever done in a relationship was—and he told me!" she said. "I thought he was being so transparent, but there was a lot he wasn't telling me."

What he had left out was that he was a Rockefeller. She said that when he did tell her, months later, she wanted to break off the relationship; she was unable to see, she said, how "a person with a working-class background and leftist politics could possibly have a successful relationship with someone from a family of such privilege." They married in 2012.

In late 2018, Mr. Kaiser began experiencing episodes of forgetfulness, which led to his diagnosis early the next year. Ms. Corbett said that in recent months he had told her: "Of course I wish my life were going to be longer. I wish I could see who the girls will turn into." But, she said, he added, "I've also been an extremely lucky person—more lucky than most."

The above picture, taken in Maine in 2017 by Ben Stechschulte, accompanied the obit. David's hand is on his mother's shoulder. His sister Miranda is at the far left. I think it's an odd photo: three pairs, one a mother and son, another (center) a married couple (Rebecca Rockefeller Lambert and her husband, Michael), and then at the left Miranda and Peter Case. I've read and re-read Peter's wedding notice in the Times without grasping how he fits in. Maybe that's why he and Miranda, though paired, have a space between them. He got the message about the shirts, however. 

John Lewis (1940-2020)

I've been reading around on the Internet about John Lewis, the civil rights leader and Georgia Democrat who died yesterday at his home in Atlanta. Here's the section on his "early life" from the Wikipedia article:

John Lewis was born on February 21, 1940, in Troy, Alabama, the third of ten children of Willie Mae (née Carter) and Eddie Lewis. His parents were sharecroppers in rural Pike County, Alabama.

As a young child, Lewis had little interaction with white people; by the time he was six, Lewis had seen only two white people in his life. As he grew older, though, he began taking trips into town with his family, where he experienced racism and segregation, such as at the public library in Troy. However, Lewis had relatives who lived in northern cities, and learned from them that the North had integrated schools, buses, and businesses. When Lewis was eleven, one of his uncles took him on a trip to Buffalo, New York, and, afterwards, he was even more acutely aware of Troy's segregation. 

In 1955, Lewis first heard Martin Luther King, Jr. on the radio, and, when the Montgomery Bus Boycott (led by King) began later that year, Lewis closely followed the news about it. Lewis would later meet Rosa Parks when he was 17, and met King for the first time when he was 18.

The top of the article includes a note stating that, as its subject recently died, extensive revisions are in progress. That might account for why, when I read the article last night, it said that Lewis had never seen a white person till he was 6. My first thought was that seems almost unbelievable. My second thought was that my dad, born 7 years before Lewis in rural Kandiyohi County, Minnesota, had almost certainly never seen a black person when he was 6. If not for my attendance at a Twins baseball game as a kindergartner, I might not have, either. 

It's not taken up in any of the early obituaries and tributes I've seen, but the details of Lewis's early rise within the civil rights movement must be a good story. What did his parents Willie and Eddie, the sharecroppers in rural Alabama, think when their son, age 23, stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and addressed the assembled thousands a few minutes before Martin Luther King delivered his most famous speech? Later that day, Lewis shook President Kennedy's hand in the Oval Office. The historian Michael Beschloss, speaking about Lewis on the television this morning, explained that Kennedy was nervous about the March on Washington. He had prevailed, barely, over Richard Nixon in the presidential election of 1960—the popular vote had been essentially a tie, 49.72 to 49.55 percent, and the states Kennedy won had included North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. These states had been voting Democratic since the Civil War, on account of Lincoln having been a Republican. Kennedy wasn't eager to lose their support, and according to Beschloss, the White House welcome that day for King, Lewis, and the other civil rights leaders was "tepid." Kennedy had gone so far as to have someone in his Administration at the ready to drown out the words of any speech that got too radical—the method was to have been a Mahalia Jackson recording blared across the National Mall. The next year, 1964, Kennedy was dead and President Johnson is said to have muttered, as he signed the Civil Rights Act into law, "There goes the South." If he said it, he was right. Nixon won the presidency in 1968. The popular vote was again evenly divided, but the Democrat, Hubert Humphrey, was almost shut out in the South: Nixon won Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, and both Carolinas; except for Texas, Johnson's home state, the rest of the old Confederacy gave its electoral votes to 3rd-party candidate George Wallace, the governor of John Lewis's home state who was most famous for having declared, in an inaugural address, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

Nevertheless when Wallace died in 1998 Lewis, by then a congressman from Georgia, eulogized him on the editorial page of the New York Times. The Times ran Lewis's article beneath the headline, "Forgiving George Wallace." The piece is notable for its tone of possibly strained respect and for what Lewis leaves out. "But the George Wallace who sent troops to intimidate peaceful, orderly marchers in Selma in 1965 was not the same man who died this week," he writes—eliding the fact that Wallace's troops had done more than just "intimidate" the marchers. Lewis himself was one of fifty-eight marchers beaten so severely as to require treatment at a local hospital, in his case for a fractured skull. In the below picture, he's kneeling in the foreground, holding the back of his head with his right hand. 

More John Prine: "Hello in There" &c

 

It can be tedious when people press their enthusiasms on others, but once someone did me the favor of insisting I "listen to this," so one more on John Prine who died April 7 at 73 from Covid-19. He made his first record the year he turned 25—before that he'd been a mailman, and it's amazing to think that "Hello in There" tumbled out of the mind of a 24-year-old postal employee. Stephen Colbert reminisces below, with Brandi Carlile, who then pays tribute with her rendition of one of Prine's best. And below that her with Prine plainly having a good time. Finally Kasey Musgraves performs "Burn One with John Prine" while he listens. Chekhov is said to have been "a writer's writer": ship it across the ocean to America and translate to music to get John Prine.

 

 

 

John Prine, 1946-2020

 

 

Jim Dimick, 1928-2019

The youngest is me, summer of 1970, documenting my participation in the Jim Kaat Sports Camp. Of course that's the Twin Hall of Famer to my left. To my right is my camp counselor, whose name I for some reason remember, and not because it was Eldridge Turkenfreiter: Doug Johnson. The tallest, wearing the sweatshirt, is Jim Dimick, who died earlier this week in Northfield, where he had been the head baseball coach at St Olaf College from 1967 to 1994. He also assisted in football and basketball. If I remember right, Doug (my counselor) was the shortstop on St Olaf's baseball team and the quarterback of its football team. He would have been the one handing the ball off to the legendary Ole Gunderson, who, despite the passage of a half century, and only three seasons' worth of games played (freshmen weren't eligible for varsity competition), still holds the school record for career rushing yards.  His son, Shane, was a baseball all-American for the Gophers.

Back to Dimick. I used to go to a lot of high school basketball games in the winter, and once, arriving at Sibley High School well before game time, I idled for awhile in front of the trophy case. I noticed that they had been the baseball champ of their conference almost every season through the first half of the 1960s. All the team photos were there, and I recognized the coach: Jim Dimick. Then, suddenly, no more championship photos after the midpoint of the decade. The school would have needed a new coach, because Dimick moved on to St Olaf in 1967, and that's when the Oles' run of conference baseball championships began—fourteen of them in Dimick's twenty-seven seasons. 

I don't know how he did it. I don't think he was an aggressive recruiter. He knew baseball, for sure, and was also a good and patient teacher, but that wouldn't necessarily distinguish him from a million coaches whose teams won only fifty-five percent of their games. His obituary says he was "called to be a coach," and whatever intangibles that mystical phrase is meant to indicate must have applied in spades. I suppose that whoever wrote the obituary could have said "born to be a coach," which would have left out the undersense of having a Christian vocation, something Dimick claimed to possess. I took a class from him in the Phy Ed department, and he was a kind of clean raconteur, a story to illustrate every point, lots of corn pone, but to dislike him even a cynic in training such as myself would have to have been determined. I remember we had an assignment involving the plan for a baseball practice, and he wrote at the bottom of my paper, "Not enough batting practice!" To defend myself I would have said that, in my experience, if you can't hit you can't hit and no amount of practice is going to help you—probably the kind of can't-do attitude that is a bar to getting better. Dimick's players got better. 

John McCain campaigns in Lakeville

 

Taking in all the McCain tributes today, I noticed how many of them feature his response to the red-sweatered woman in the above clip from the 2008 presidential campaign.  This occurred at a "town hall" just a piece down I-35 from where I live, and I distinctly remember not being favorably impressed at the time.  Asked a question by a manifest crackpot who, after stumbling around a bit, settles finally on the epithet "Ay-rab" to describe Obama, McCain says, "No ma'am, he's a decent family man and citizen with whom I just happen to disagree"--the apparent implication being that the Venn diagrams of "Arabs" and "decent family men who are also American citizens" do not overlap.

If you wanted to cut McCain some slack--and I do--you might want to consider, besides the more famous interaction with the woman, the one from the same town hall that begins the above clip.  The man says he's "scared" of Obama, and McCain replies that there is no cause for that, Obama is a decent man.  The crowd expresses its disappointment--with McCain's answer.  Then later, same forum, the woman in the red sweater says something similar, and McCain, probably getting sick of this crap, repeats the line about Obama's decency, which isn't now right on point considering exactly what the woman said.  But, really, notwithstanding her assurances that she'd read up on Obama, she didn't have anything to say except a sort of generalized complaint that, at a high level, amounted to Obama being--she stammered and paused before settling on "Ay-rab" because she didn't know how to put it--different, not one of us, a scary other, (a colored guy).  Same general complaint as the fellow who said "cohorts" when he meant "cavorts," and she got the same general rebuke.

This time, McCain's answer elicited some tepid applause.  It's as if the attendees had given up on their candidate being an asshole.  They'd have to wait eight years for that.

Brief obituaries of unhideous men

 

With apologies to David Foster Wallace, author of a collection of short stories entitled Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.  I haven't read it, but assume it features a lot of hideous men.  There are exceptions, and, alas, they too are mortal.

My sister told me today that Bob Gelle, a former colleague of hers at St. Olaf College and a friend of my parents, died yesterday.  His obituary is here.  More than two notable things, but here's two.

One, I know it was a different time, but--holy crap!--what a great athlete he must have been.  After growing up in Osakis, Minnesota, all-state in football and state champion in the shot put, he gets a football scholarship to the University of Minnesota, and is starting at linebacker his sophomore season, 1950.  He decides he prefers basketball, however, and becomes a three-year starter for the basketball team, captain and MVP his senior season.  He also played baseball for the Gophers.  Oh, and threw the shot and discus for the track team.  Four sports at the U of M!  How good was he at basketball?  Good enough to be drafted by the Lakers after his senior year.  I knew this history, vaguely, I think mainly from my dad, but my sister, who knew him better, was shocked.  He wasn't a big talker, especially about himself.

Two, he never played for the Lakers, or so far as I know even tried out, opting instead to fulfill "his Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) obligations at Fort Meade in Maryland."  Quaint.  He returned to Minnesota in 1956 to teach social studies and coach at Edina High School.  After one year, he was offered the head basketball coaching job at St. Olaf, a position he held until 1981.  He also coached football and track and field, taught physical education, and was athletic director for seventeen years.

He was the basketball coach at St. Olaf during my student days, and I remember one game, against a team whose coach had a Napoleonic complex, in which I'm about 90 per cent sure Gelle pulled a fast one.  St. Olaf had been locked in a tight game when, sometime in the second half, a close call went the Oles' way, and Coach Napoleon couldn't control himself: he was assessed multiple technical fouls and ejected from the court.  While he was performing his Bob Knight act, Gelle quietly inserted St. Olaf's best foul shooter, who was being spelled on the bench, back into the game.  When order was restored, this kid made about nine free throws in a row, and suddenly the game wasn't very close any more.

The last time I saw Gelle was at my mom's funeral in 2014.  He would have been 83, and was getting around with the aid of a walker--I think the joints in his legs had given out from carrying around the musculature of his upper body for so long.  I remember that he kidded around with my young daughters and wasn't wearing a necktie.  I can't remember him wearing a necktie. He wouldn't have been the type to special order anything, and he probably couldn't buy off the rack dress shirts that he could button at the top--neck too big.

Exhibit A-1 of America's casino economy might be the king's ransom paid to athletic superheroes, with the result that those not quite good enough to make it can seem somewhat pathetic figures.  The syndrome is no doubt abetted by the psychological distress brought on by the way all the public adulation gives way to gray obscurity when the subject has attained the approximate age of 23.  Gelle seems to have been saved from this fate by intelligence and a kind of plodding decency that, having been an occasional listener to "Prairie Home Companion," I associate with the Lutheranism that he evidently practiced his entire life.