We were watching MSNBC Friday evening, when they segued into quickie telephone tributes for George H.W. Bush, followed by Lester Holt narrating the prepared tribute.
One of the film clips was of a little boy in a back-yard rundown, lovingly getting tagged out by the right, gloved hand of an elder, presumably the Bushes we now know as 43 and 41. It was so sweet, people playing the American game with great big smiles and sweeping tags. Mister, I’m a baseball man--Ry Cooder. My conduit to President Bush, the baseball man, came via Curt Smith, a speechwriter during the Reagan-Bush years, who in 1989 invited a gaggle of sportswriters and broadcasters to the White House for a baseball schmooze-fest. I wrote about the President’s glove in his desk drawer. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/03/sports/sports-of-the-times-.251-hitter-talking-baseball.html When I heard about President Bush’s passing, I immediately thought of Curt Smith, and his admiration for his former boss. It is well known that President George H.W. Walker was a crier. Wept easily. Smith once told how he was assigned to write a speech for the visit to Pearl Harbor on the 50th anniversary of the attack that kicked off the Pacific war on Dec. 7, 1941. On Saturday I asked Curt for his recollections of No. 41 – and the speech. This is what Curt Smith wrote back: Bush truly loved the game: played, coached it in Texas, mentored players, captained his team at Yale. He made the first two College World Series in 1947-48. He accepted Babe Ruth’s copy of the Babe’s memoir in 1948 as Yale’s captain as Ruth was dying of cancer. He coached all four of his sons in Little League. He took Queen Elizabeth to a baseball game, staged a great event at the White House to honor Williams and DiMaggio on the 50th anniversary of their magical 1941, invited Musial and Yastrzemski to the White House as he prepared to go to Poland to, among other things, christen Little League Baseball there, on and on and on. He and I talked baseball, he had my Voices of The Game at Camp David. Our first meeting he told me, “I’d rather quote Yogi Berra than Thomas Jefferson,” and meant it. He knew more Berraisms than I did! Pearl Harbor evolved from the fact that I generally did “values, inspiration, patriotic” speeches for Bush. I had always read a lot about World War II and was very conversant with Bush’s role in the War. I knew of his great modesty. As I kid he hit a couple homers once. His mother Dorothy eyed him and, referencing the grand Protestant hymn, said, “Now, George, none of this ‘How Great Thou Art’ business.” Bush was naturally self-effacing and deferential, two of the reasons he drew people toward him. He hated to use the word I in speeches. Try writing speeches that way! In any event, our speech staff was constantly frustrated at how the country didn’t know the Bush we did—because of Bush’s dignity, innate reserve, feeling that the President should set an example. (What a concept!) I wanted the country to see the man that we did. In talking with the President, I tried to subtly make this point. Bush, on the other hand, had been 17 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, a Sunday. He had friends who had died. He had gone next day, a Monday, and tried to enlist. The draft board said, in essence. “Sonny, you’re too young. Come back when you’re 18.” He did, enlisting the day he turned 18. Bush, at heart a very sentimental, emotional man—a softie, as he and we knew: again, a reason so many of us loved him — was concerned he would not get through the speech. “I don’t want to break down,” he said. I didn’t tell him I wanted him to break down: that would have been unseemly. I did say that “This will be a chance for you to talk about an event that will show the Nation the kind of person you are.” As things turned out, he didn’t break down, but did choke up; his voice faltered; he was clearly moved. In retrospect, Bush, who almost to the end was unsure whether he could give the speech, was very glad that he did. And in the next 25 years, as a former President, the country came to see almost precisely Bush as we had—sentimental, giving, kind, funny, patriotic—one terrific person. (With great thanks to Curt Smith) Curt did not include this Pearl Harbor story in his terrific recent book, “The Presidents and the Pastime: The History of Baseball & the White House,” published by the University of Nebraska Press. Bush, a .251 hitter at Yale, was surely the best player and biggest fan of all presidents who have tossed out ceremonial baseballs on opening day. They were baseball people, the Bushes, part of the carriage trade that made the New York Giants the elite team of the big city. George Herbert Walker, Jr., uncle of the future No. 41, owned a piece of the Mets, starting in 1962 – a clubby gent who, as I recall, was fine with sportswriters calling him “Herbie.” They were easy to be around, the Bushes. I was lucky enough to meet No. 41 twice, both in baseball settings. I wrote about my second meeting when Barbara Bush passed last May: https://www.georgevecsey.com/home/a-quick-chat-with-barbara-and-george-bush However, I did not get as close to No. 41 as my boyhood pal, Angus Phillips, did for the Washington Post. Invited to a dawn fishing trip on the Potomac, Angus reported to the White House a few minutes early and somehow was ushered into the living quarters where he discovered the leader of the free world padding around a hallway, clearly just out of bed. Angus’s classic tale of the visit…and the fishing….is included here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/sports/daily/dec99/25/phil25.htm George H.W. Bush was the last World War Two veteran to serve as president. He kept his old George McQuinn mitt in his desk drawer in the White House. Whatever else he was, he was a softie. And a baseball man. * * * The New York Times also prepared a magnificent spread on No. 41: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/us/politics/george-hw-bush-dies.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/01/obituaries/george-bushs-life-in-13-objects.html
Altenir Silva
12/2/2018 08:25:28 am
Dear George: Thank you so much for sharing this piece with us. I loved your story about the President’s glove into the desk drawer.
George Vecsey
12/2/2018 01:57:45 pm
Altenir, thanks. Saturday Night Live did a tribute to Mr, Bush by noting his friendship with Dana Carvey:
Altenir Silva
12/2/2018 03:42:36 pm
I meant, his final words were "I love you, too." 12/2/2018 12:56:08 pm
I always liked Bush, Sr. in all the roles he served our country. A man who keeps a baseball mitt in the Oval Office and is a Yogi Berra fan is certainly special.
George Vecsey
12/2/2018 01:59:33 pm
Alan, thanks. Laura Bush was a quiet presence. Got a lot done, in her way, and surely influences her husband, I am sure to this day. 12/2/2018 01:24:15 pm
Babe Ruth died on August 16, 1948, which was also my date of birth only a few years later. I was thirteen at the time and learned from my father that he had been a regular customer in Radio Clinic’s 83 Street appliance store.
George Vecsey
12/2/2018 02:05:24 pm
The Babe lived on Riverside . His daughter talks about "Daddy" being a regular in the West Side neighborhood.
Altenir Silva
12/2/2018 04:23:36 pm
Dear George: Thanks for the link of SNL. As said Mr. Rubin, a man that loved baseball and was a Yogi Berra fan is certainly special. I began to love baseball because of Babe Ruth. Actually, because of a movie titled THE BABE (1992), directed by Arthur Hiller and written by John Fusco. John Goldman made an adorable Bambino.
Hansen Alexander
12/2/2018 08:12:06 pm
Thanks for sharing the baseball side of the first President Bush. Surprised you did not mention the Medal of Honor ceremony and Stan Musial at the White House. Maybe it was contained in the various links I did not open.
George Vecsey
12/3/2018 09:35:38 am
https://www.georgevecsey.com/home/a-quick-chat-with-barbara-and-george-bush
Brian Savin
12/3/2018 09:43:47 pm
The current media treatment of Bush Senior disturbes me greatly. It is dishonest. When President, his major media coverage did not look much different from the disgustingly dishonest coverage of our current President. It changes on a dime when the threat is out of office or dead and there is another current and thus more important target. Does no one remember how George the First was treated by media? I do.
George Vecsey
12/4/2018 08:53:53 am
Brian, I totally understand your comment.
Brian Savin
12/7/2018 04:26:54 pm
Today it was reported that the Finnish company that owns Louisville Slugger has been acquired by a Chinese government company. The LS company has been protecting its last Pennsylvania Forrest of ash trees from the onslaught of Manchurian Emerald ash beetles. Now the Chinese “takeover” is in another sense complete. We’re down to Dolgeville, NY. — the last stand of the American Pastime —Adirondack bats. O tempora! Comments are closed.
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Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html Categories
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