Baseball and the word that must not be said

Yankee outfielder Jake Powell, left, is presented with a wallet as a token of esteem from fans of Laurel, Maryland, where he once played semi-pro ball, by Laurel mayor E.E. Hatch. (Library of Congress).

     Bob Elson is not the sort of person you’d expect to touch off one of the most notorious racist incidents in the history of Chicago sports.
     A former choir boy who sang with the famous Paulist Choir, his golden voice made him a natural for radio.
     But that’s the thing about racism. It’s a snake; you never know when it’s going to spring out of some hidden recess and bite you.
     In the 1930s, Elson broadcast both Cubs and Sox games. The Bears, too. On days when there were no home games, he would sit in a windowless studio and recreate out-of-town contests from telegraphed reports.
     Finding something to put on the air was a constant challenge. The “Man in the Dugout” interview was Elson’s idea: Fill time before the first pitch talking to players.
     On a lovely late July day in 1938. Elson was at Comiskey Park with his live microphone, chatting up players. He buttonholed Yankee slugger Jake Powell, who batted .455 in the 1936 World Series.
     “How do you keep in trim during the winter months in order to keep up your batting average?” Elson asked. A lazy pop up of a question. But Powell muffed it, big time.
     “Oh that’s easy,” he replied. “I’m a policeman. I beat ...”
     And here he used the plural of a word that I’m not even going to hint at. Not my choice — I would just lay it on you, full bore, and trust you would not shatter like glass.
     “... over the head with my blackjack.”
     Mary DeVoto, a veteran history teacher at Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School, more recently used the word, trying to contextualize offensive sports team names. Now she’s out of a job.

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A kink in the flag

  

     Odd things happen. It's a shame that most people are so quick to lay them at the feet of ghosts, or aliens, or telekinesis, or whatever mass delusion or carny trick tickles our fancy, and so miss the genuine wonder of something unusual happening for ordinary though unexplained reasons.
     Look at our American flag as I saw it out our bay window last Tuesday. It somehow arrayed itself into that odd folded, kinked configuration and was just stuck there, suspended. I whipped out my phone and quickly snapped a photo, then stepped onto the porch. It was still like that. I took another another photo, and thought to shift to video. But by by then the flag had simply relaxed, drooping back into its usual draped shape. I took a third.
     What happened? I don't know. I imagine some intersection of the breeze, the dynamics of the fabric, the temperature. But I can't know for sure. Maybe you have theories. I suppose it could have been something supernatural—the flag itself cringing in utter patriotic revulsion away from the soil of the country it represents. I do know this: in 21 years of flying a flag off my front porch—I wrote about acquiring this particular flag from the venerable W.G.N. Flag & Banner Company at 79th and South Chicago Avenue—I've never seen anything like this, and I imagine should I live here another 21 years, I'll never see it again.

Flashback 2006: Release the polar bears

     Ravenswood bureau chief Caren Jeskey is under the weather—not COVID, she assures me—and so will not be writing her usual Saturday report for today. All of us in the extended EGD community direct our best wishes and focused laserlike healing karmic energy (see, I can get with the program) toward her speedy recovery.
     But with the Olympics dominating television (or so I'm told; I don't know, I haven't watched a second) I thought I would reach back into the vault of a previous take on the biennial blowout. A reminder: you don't need China to dislike the Olympics. This is from a time when the column filled a page, and I've left the original headings.

OLYMPIC MOMENTS

     Gosh I'm enjoying the Olympics. Which is odd, because typically I disdain them. The summer Olympics are a weird conglomeration of tedious activities you wouldn't consider paying attention to the previous 206 weeks. ("Not now, Honey, the high jump is on!") And the Winter Olympics—how many times can you watch guys skiing down mountain sides? It's worse than golf.
     But this year is different. I couldn't breathe a word against the Olympics; in fact, I'm finding the Olympics a pleasure, because the wife and boys are really enjoying them. By 7 p.m. they're parked on the sofa, rooting for the old red, white and blue. Which gives me about two hours alone to relax and read a book, uninterrupted, confident that the shouts filtering up from downstairs are mere enthusiasm, and not some inter-boy crisis crying out for Dad's immediate mediation.
     Oh, I'll slide down for a few minutes—don't want them to think I'm standoffish—and watch a bunch of spandex-clad loonies flying around a patch of ice. (They really should release some polar bears or something to give the race a bit of pizzazz). Then I excuse myself and return to my book. I'll miss the Olympics when it's over.

ON THE NIGHT TABLE

The book I've been reading is Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. The smoothest of writers, Bryson takes you by the hand and glides you through astrophysics and chemistry and biology and all that stuff you learned in high school and promptly forgot.
     In trying to humanize the science, Bryson tells the stories behind the various big discoveries, and here it becomes really interesting, because in every case—literally every case—the pursuit of light and knowledge is accompanied by a messy catfight of super-sized egos clawing each other's reputations to tatters. You'd almost think it was a history of backbiting and bumbling which only incidentally mentions stars and fossils.
     Deep in the book he quotes German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, in a line too delicious not to pass along: "He observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person."
     More than one researcher at Fermilab or the University of Chicago will want to embroider that on a pillow.

SOME ARE DISAPPOINTED

     In checking into Alexander von Humboldt enough to call him "a German naturalist," I discovered that a variety of things are named after him—a penguin, a lily, a skunk, a shrub and Humboldt County, Iowa, plus the city of Humboldt, halfway between Des Moines and Sioux Falls, population 4,452. How did that happen?
     The Humboldt County Web site gives no clue, but begins with this charmingly self-effacing statement: "Humboldt creates a favorable impression on most every visitor to this scenic city . . ."
     Perhaps the few who are unfavorably impressed feel Humboldt has restrictive parking for such a small town. You can't park your car on the street at night between November and May— unless you are a physician making a house call, which is lovely. Otherwise you risk getting a ticket that will set you back $20.
     The cost of living is a heck of a lot less there. You can buy six—count 'em—six spaces in the Humboldt Union Cemetery for $750, though if you want to erect a headstone the city charges you a fee, and that fee is $2.   
     Humboldt is not without controversy—it recently asked San Francisco welfare authorities to stop sending homeless people to Humboldt County. The City by the Bay has a program where homeless people can receive a one-way bus ticket anywhere in the country, and of the thousand or so shipped eastward, 13 chose Humboldt.

HELP FOR THE HOMELESS

     San Francisco insists that its bus ticket program isn't just designed to get the homeless out of town, but to send them to their own former homes. Social workers—in theory—are supposed to ascertain that people using the program are actually going someplace where they'll be taken in and given help and support.
     That is the ideal solution to the homeless problem—help 'em find a home. Even the hardest heart—and it's all I can do to not snarl "scram!" as I hurry past panhandlers on some days—has to soften after the story about Raymond Power Jr., the disturbed New York lawyer and Vietnam vet who ended up on the streets in Chicago, living in a shelter with no memory of who he was or where he came from. You wouldn't want the city to have put Power on a bus and shipped him just anywhere. Would you?
                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 22, 2006

Olympics coverage: a gold medal in glossing over

     Something is happening soon. An occurrence, at a place, involving people. Interested? No? OK, maybe I didn’t give you enough information. It’s a sporting event, a big competition, far away. Better?
     All right, all right: the 2022 Winter Olympics. Skiing, ice skating, bobsledding and more. Opening ceremonies are Friday.
     It’s on television — NBC is carrying it, and I just heard a radio commercial that summarized the above without once mentioning what used to be a salient fact: the location.
     The Olympics are taking place in China. And while the host country used to be significant, now it’s a footnote. Why? Bad optics. The ruthless oppression of China’s Uyghur population. The crackdown on Hong Kong. They don’t quite mesh with the Olympian ideal of competition and fair play.
     There’s more. China’s mounting passion to subjugate the free and independent nation of Taiwan. Its vassal state of Tibet. And our two-year trade war.
     Quite a lot, really.
    But wait, as Ron Popeil said. There’s more. Don’t forget Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, who accused a high-ranking Community Party member of assault last November then was yanked from sight, popping up in a variety of staged shams whose ham-handedness was almost reassuring.
     The Birthplace of COVID.... 
     You get the picture.
     So “China” gets coughed into a fist, lest viewers who’d otherwise get excited about watching luge decide to pass. Myself, I might tune in, just for a glimpse of our totalitarian future, whether imposed from without or embraced from within. Seamless lies backed by faceless power. Something to look forward to.

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The empire of death

Inscription entering the Paris Catacombs. It reads "Stop! This is the empire of death."

     A grim New York Times analysis found that the death toll from COVID in the United States far outstrips that in any other wealthy industrialized country: at least 63 percent higher than in England or Germany or France.
     One barely needs to mention why. More than a third of Americans—36 percent—are not fully vaccinated. In Canada, it's 20 percent. More than a third of Americans are obese—in Japan it's 4 percent—which makes a sufferer far more susceptible to die from COVID.

     Fat, medically ignorant people. Not exactly what is traditionally in mind when hopping around, poking your fist in the air and chanting, "We're Number One! We're Number One!"

     But any port in a storm, right?
     With vaccines politicized, 20 percent of the United States citizens refusing their shots entirely and even more skipping the booster, the omicron is scything across the country virtually unchecked. I don't know about you, but lots of my friends and relatives are suddenly getting it. All vaccinated, thank goodness. Those who aren't are 23 times more likely to be hospitalized. Already 891,000 have died over the past two years, and at this rate—about 2,500 COVID deaths. a day—we'll reach a million dead before St. Patrick's Day.
     Not that the anti-vaccine crowd will care. As I've said many times before, once you start ignoring reality, the specific reality being ignored hardly matters.
     And the rest of us? The most cautious follower of science falls prey to the natural acceptance of almost any risk. Think of how the risk of any new technology is viewed: autonomously-driving cars. Each death in their testing is treated as a specific calamity. Totally unacceptable! While regular human-piloted cars can mow down 20,000 or 30,000 people every year and nobody balks at getting behind the wheel. Because we're used to that. Maybe someday a half million or so Americans dying every year of COVID is just the price we pay for living in an ignorant, fear-ridden, anti-social country. Like school shootings. Just something shrugged off. What can a person do? It isn't like anybody can do anything.
     Plus most Americans couldn't find other countries on a map, never mind keep track of what happens in them. If they did, we'd have universal health care. And frankly, between Putin getting ready to grab Ukraine, and his biggest fanboy, Donald Trump gathering his energies to seize control of the government at home in a more focused and forceful manner, I could see an argument that COVID is the least of our problems right now. Which is also terrifying.

History is a journey we all must take together

Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950

     Winning the Pulitzer Prize nauseated Gwendolyn Brooks.
     That gets left out when the story is told about how the Chicago poet became the first Black writer to win the honor. Brooks skips it herself in her interview for the American Folklore division of the Library of Congress.
     It’s an important detail. Imagine: it’s May 1, 1950, about 6 p.m. in her modest residence at 9134 S. Wentworth Ave. Dusk, and the power is out — her husband, Henry Blakely, no mean poet himself, is having trouble at the auto shop. But their phone still works, and it rings. The Chicago Sun-Times calling — no wonder I like this part — to congratulate her.
     “On what?” Brooks asks.
     Reporter Jack Star tells her:
     “You just won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.”
     “I didn’t!” she screams, feeling “sick in the stomach,” she later wrote in her journal.
     Whenever somebody tells any history for any reason, it’s smart to pause and wonder why they’re telling that particular story. Toward what end? Diving deeper into Brooks’ win is worthwhile because of the innocence of her “On what?” and the shock of that “I didn’t!” I love that; it makes me feel I’m seeing her before me, not as an about-to-be-famous poet, but as a regular person, a woman standing in a darkened room, finding out that after 20 years of constant effort — she published her first poem, “Eventide,” at 13 — her life has changed. The scream itself is a poem. There was no one there to hear it except her small son. But a few minutes of me tapping on a keyboard, and you can hear an echo now, and maybe think about Brooks. Maybe feel connected to her and seek out her poetry.

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Hardier and hardier

     One drawback of only going into the office every few months is that you miss out on seed catalogues. If you haven't seen a seed catalogue lately, they are no longer modest affairs listing various types of flower and vegetable seeds for sale, but glossy, expensively-produced celebrations of lifestyle and philosophy and nature—think Vogue magazine, but for produce—that create this entire world of beaming, gorgeous children and barefooted Earth Mother types emerging like Venus from rustic farm buildings, carrying wicker baskets bursting with cornucopias. 
     I'm usually fairly immune to this kind of thing, flipping through more out of idle curiosity.
But three years ago I was leafing (sorry) through the Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalogue, ogling the Kyoto Red Carrots and Mary Washington Asparagus, when I noticed the "Chicago Hardy Fig." 
     I couldn't resist. You can get the full backstory here.  

From small figs, mighty trees come.

They sent me two seedlings, thank God, because I credulously planted one outside (Chicago Hardy Figs, remember?) And the bag said they were good in Zones 5 through 10, and Chicago is on the northern border of 5, meaning we should just get in under the wire. I glossed over the part about planting it in pots and dragging the pots into shelter for the winter, as well as the line "These tender young plants generally have no resistance to cold," Rather explicit, now that I look at it.

      The first winter turned one of the CHF into a blackened stick. Suspicious soul that I am, I dragged the second CHF inside before the frost, just in case, where it wintered upstairs in my office next to my desk. Each spring for two years I muscled it outside. Last summer, sitting next to the front steps, it squeezed out two small green figs that I knew better than to try to eat.      

     This year I was a little worried. It had grown bigger, maybe two feet tall, and after I brought it in, to the dining room—in a bigger pot. I wanted to give it as much room as possible. So a terracotta pot as large as it could be and still move. Taking it upstairs was out of the question.
      When I first moved it into the dining room, just before the first frost of November, the shock of moving—or because it was autumn—turned all its leaves yellow.They all fell off except one, and I worried I had killed the thing, or that it was infested, investing in some expensive anti-bug leaf soap that I carefully spritzed on each leaf. 

     For  a month it sat leafless. But I kept watering and hoping and look at it now, above. My Chicago Hardy Fig keeps on pushing out these enormous vaguely hand-shaped leaves and, well, it's February and freezing outside, but my CHF is putting on a botanical show that I had to share. Maybe that's where its name comes from—the thing keeps pushing. (Actually, it seems that the plant became popular here). I have a good feeling about the future of my CHF.

     Or should I say our Chicago Hardy Fig, speaking of sharing, as my wife has practically adopted it. I tried to water it Monday morning and she all but yanked the watering can out of my hands with the snarl of an angry she-lion protecting her young. She would take care of it. Didn't want me overwatering. I had already killed one. 
     I did some reading, and the CHF can grow 15 feet tall and a dozen feet wide, which ought to provide some interesting dinner party conversation. I haven't told my wife that part yet. The tree seems to want to grow horizontally, and I'm trying to use a few notched sticks to encourage it to grow upward. They'll also kick off 100 pounds of figs with "sweet and juicy with a rich, honey-like flavor." Something to look forward to.