-- Ebbets Field lives in the souls of ball fans. The aforementioned Mike From Northwest Queens discovered this photo online of the Boys of Summer, standing around the batting cage, just talkin’ baseball. A glossy copy of this photo used to be taped in our house when I was a kid. Just seeing Jackie and Gil and the rest, I feel 12.
 
---Next, Lee Lowenfish, New York polymath on baseball, jazz, movies, et al, sent along a blog by Steve Wulf, longtime Sports Illustrated star, dissecting every name and reference in the Dave Frishberg jazz song -- elegant riffs about the long-ago Brooklyn pitcher with the mellifluous name of Van Lingle Mungo.

Wulf’s treatise, with photos, is the reason the Internet was invented. He describes how Frishberg “plumbed The Baseball Encyclopedia for the names, some of which are delightful rhymes; Max Lanier and Johnny Vander Meer; Barney McCosky and Hal Trosky, Lou Boudreau and Claude Passeau." 
Frishberg chose the names for poetry rather than dismal analytics. May there always be music in the loving associations of baseball, now blessedly emerging from hibernation.
                      *     *     *
Steve Wulf’s long and loving assessment of “Van Lingle Mungo.”
https://www.stevewulf.com/blog/mungo
Ladies and gentleman, David Frishberg: 

This was always one of my favorite weeks, when I was working – the first round of the NCAA men’s tournament, when weird things could happen, and did.
I loved being in some arena, with eight – count ‘em, eight – teams still alive, still dreaming.
Teams I never heard of during the long season, teams with fresh nicknames and gaudy colors and wired coaches and peppy cheerleaders and sassy mascots. Sometimes we were seated near the college bands, with their own characters and sizes and shapes and hair styles. Sometimes they were more fun to watch than the game.

I have other events I love – any match in the World Cup of soccer, the U.S, Open of tennis in my home county, and just about any Mets game, because. Oops, almost forgot epic Stanley Cup finals of Islanders or Rangers, plus The Derby in Louisville, where we used to live. 
I remember my pal Charlie Pierce always loved the Saturday of the Final Four, but I hold out for the opening day, for the unknowns, the upsets, the slippery slopes.

Take the first round in 1986. I was there, Perpetual contender Indiana was playing outsider Cleveland State. Before the game, Bobby Knight swaggered out to shake hands with his counterpart, Kevin Mackey, chubby little dude out of Boston. Some words were spoken, followed by cranky words and gestures from the terrible-tempered Knight.
''I said, 'Hey, take it easy on me, Big Guy,''' Mackey told reporters later. ''But, hey, he's no fool. I'll paraphrase his answer for you. He said: 'I'm not gonna give you any breaks out there.' ''
I’ll bet he paraphrased Bobby Knight.

Then, Cleveland State, seeded 14th in the region, promptly beat Indiana, seeded third, 83-79, and Knight, who liked to lecture reporters, said any fool knew that Cleveland State was loaded, with a guard named Mouse McFadden, New York City guy, who had somehow wound up at Cleveland State with an outlaw/outsider tag.

I have to tell you, it was fun. And the fun continued to the next day when Cleveland State showed up early for its off-day media conference and witnessed the players from Navy – particularly  David Robinson, close to his ultimate 7-foot-1 height, in spit-shine shoes and uniform and polysyllabic vocabulary and braces. Mouse and his mates were clearly impressed by Robinson's polished  interview.

Ten years later, double upsets on the first day:  defending champion UCLA sleepwalked against Princeton, which cut them up with crisp interior passing, and I re-named the school “The University of Catatonia at Los Angeles.”
The same first round, tiny Earl Boykins, looking like somebody’s sixth-grade kid brother, helped Eastern Michigan stun haughty Duke, 75-60. In the closing minutes, Boykins dawdled with the ball, staring into the stands while dribbling. It was his night.
In the next round, little Boykins (admitting he might not even be his listed 5-foot-7) was beaten by Connecticut, whose coach, Jim Calhoun, raved that Eastern Michigan reminded him of his first coaching stop, with Northeastern in Boston -- outsiders, bootstrappers, who never gave up.

You didn’t have to be at the game. In 1991, I turned on the television and watched Richmond, seeded 15th, coached by Dick Tarrant, city guy out of Fordham, play a brainy, resolute game to knock off Syracuse, 73-69 – the first time a 15th seed had defeated a second seed.  
The last barrier fell in 2018 when the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, defeated Virginia, 74-54. For a list of major upsets, see this.
​
Last year, there were no upsets, no nothing. My alma mater, Hofstra, reached the finals of its conference tournament against Northeastern and Coach Joe Mihalich called a timeout and delivered an impassioned speech about playing the best five minutes of their lives – which they did, with baskets and stops and rebounds, and celebrated the victory for the next 24 hours….until the NCAA called off the tournament because some people in the country had figured out there was a pandemic going on. I later told Mihalich – a lifer, who made some of my old jock friends feel welcome -- that this was a great five minutes of coaching that he would always remember. Now Mihalich has missed this season for health reasons, and Hofstra fell short. Joe, you know what my Brooklyn Dodger fans used to say: “Wait til next year.”
 
I pay almost no attention to college sports these days, but I have memories. At this time of year, when fellow Irish-Americans celebrate, I know it’s time for the NCAAs. This year’s entire tournament is being held in Indianapolis, a traditional center of basketball in this country. The players will keep the game going until the world gets back to some semblance of normal, when we can pay more attention to stomping coaches and high-flying players and acrobatic cheerleaders and crowded stands – and wide-eyed student lunatics in the pep band blaring saxophones. Plus, upset time.
             *     *      *
 
My 1986 column on Cleveland State:
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/16/sports/sports-of-the-times-the-secret-is-out.html
 
My followup column on Mouse McFadden and how he got to Cleveland State:
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/19/sports/sports-of-the-times-the-mouse-makes-the-grade.html
 
My 1996 column on Earl Boykins:
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/15/sports/sports-of-the-times-earl-boykins-has-arrived-on-the-scene.html
 
When Indiana gave its heart to underdogs Princeton and Eastern Michigan.
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/17/sports/sports-of-the-times-indiana-gives-its-heart-to-game-s-underdogs.html

I felt a surge--not of medication but of love and respect, first for the scientists who jumped into battle while the previous “president” was lying to his country.
​I was thankful for all the medical workers who have saved lives and comforted family members; those workers deserved first crack at the vaccination.
The first nurse to get inoculated was an administrator, Sandra Lindsay, who lives in the same town we do. ​
​My left arm ached a bit for a day, but according to the experts, one shot of Pfizer means even if you pick up a stray bit of Covid, you will not go to the hospital, you will not die, particularly if you wear double masks and minimize contacts.​

​The President of the United States leaned forward, to speak to a nation, maybe even a world.
This much he knew, he said. We will get through this.
He was speaking at the White House Monday to honor 500,000 Americans who have died, so far, in the pandemic.

He was speaking like a parent, like a leader, like a healer.

“I know it’s hard, I promise you. I know it’s hard, I remember,” Biden said. “That’s how you heal, you have to remember. It is also important to do that as a nation. To all those who have lost loved ones, this is what I know: They’re never truly gone. They will always be part of your heart.”

Everybody knows about his losses – a first wife and a young daughter, a grown son.
And he seemed to know about their losses, all half a million.
 
“This seems unbelievable, but I promise you, the day will come, when the memory of the loved one you lost will bring a smile to your lips before a tear to your eyes…I pray for you that day will come sooner rather than later.”

This reassurance was unlike anything the United States, the entire world, had heard from a President in the previous four years. No need to elaborate or explain -- just that he cared.
 
During this speech, I had a flashback, to my earliest memories, when my parents and grandmother would turn off the lights and put up dark shades over the windows, in case of a bombing raid. And when my family was reassured by the same crackling voice on the radio that had sustained people during the Depression.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt did it like the patrician he was. Joe Biden is a man of the working people. But nobody has quite aimed for the heart of the collective "we" as FDR did. 
My mother cried the day FDR died in 1945. She had lost her father to an auto accident as she entered her teens. FDR came along a few years later. 

Now Joe Biden is trying his imperfect best to be a leader to this fractured country. He says there are no Republicans, no Democrats, in this fight against the Covid virus.
 
Biden has been taking on stature since Rep. Jim Clyburn rescued him from the snowbanks of Iowa and New Hampshire, and presented him to the hearts of Black voters, not just in South Carolina but all over. This was more than a political move; it was a move of faith.
 
Now Biden speaks to everybody who will listen, not about him, but about them. He is elderly, and he speaks as an elder.
"You're gonna be okay. You're gonna be okay." 
 
After presiding over a moment of silence in front of thousands of lit candles, outside the White House, Biden returned past the military guards, into his new home.
His shoulders seemed to be sagging from the pain of all those deaths, but Jill Biden would occasionally touch him, so tactile, so caring. And through the window the TV camera picked up Doug Emhoff, the big-time lawyer and husband of Vice President Harris, putting his hand on Joe Biden’s right shoulder, patting him, several times, reassuring the healer. 
             *     *     *
And speaking of dignity, Merrick Garland was interviewed by the Senate Monday, regarding his nomination for Attorney General. This is the man who was shafted – as was the entire nation – by Mitch McConnell in the final year of the Obama regime, keeping Garland from the Supreme Court.
Now Garland was speaking of the values he would bring to the Attorney General. Without mentioning the servile Bill Barr, the previous attorney general, Garland emphasized that he would be serving the country, not the President. He is clearly a man of intellect and character.
​
We have real people, people who feel. All of us are being liberated.
​            *    *    *
(President Biden's speech. The most wonderful part is around 6;00.) 

Here it is, frigid February, and I am suddenly feeling peppy again – because I talked with my pal Ron Swoboda down in New Orleans,  getting his impressions of two very different managers, Gil Hodges and Gene Mauch.
 
We were talking baseball, and I was immensely happy, being in touch with a guy I’ve known since spring training of 1964 when he was a bubbly Met farmhand and I was a full-of-myself young sportswriter in spring training.
 
It is a well-known medical fact that the advent of spring training is an antidote for SAD – Seasonal Affective Disorder.
When I was a young reporter, as soon as  the Super Bowl was over, the wires would run photos of the LA Dodgers working out informally in their pastel playground at Chavez Ravine before going to camp. Winter was on notice.
 
It’s still that way, in the time of the troubles -- the triple-witching-confluence of dead-soul senators and the lack of Covid shots and the dismal weather all over the nation, including New Orleans where Rocky lives.
 
But then, presto, in the past week, the Mets released their spring training schedule plus their regular season schedule, brought in two major-leaguers to fill out their roster, and announced that the very reliable pitcher, Seth Lugo, was having chips removed from his elbow -- plus the new owner and yet another new general manager to learn the job on the fly.
That’s a lot of baseball news for a fan to mull.
 
Swoboda and I were on the phone after a friend sent me a recently-discovered video of Branford Marsalis from NOLA, the saxophone master who plays jazz and classical, recalling his occasional appearances with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. (The video was from 1996, less than a year after Garcia passed.)  
 
Then our conversation swerved to Swoboda’s joy about the kidney transplant that has kept his friend and teammate Ed Kranepool going, and he tossed his usual rave for the tandem of Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman in the Holy Year of 1969.
“If we don’t have those two guys, we ain’t in the World Series,” Swoboda exclaimed, not mentioning the diving catch he made that saved a game and maybe the Series. That’s a given.
 
Then he said he wished the Hall of Fame would get its values in order and find a way to include Gil Hodges – “As a player! As a manager!”
Fifty years after Hodges died of a heart attack, Swoboda is one of his greatest supporters, ruing the times he sassed Hodges when he was young, headstrong Rocky. He has realized – and written – that Hodges was a brilliant manager, often ahead of the action on the field.
 
Hodges would make strategic decisions that made sense and often turned out correct. He was a Marine who had run the headquarters for his boss after the landing on Okinawa; he knew a thing or two about chain of command.  With the Mets, he moved relief pitchers and pinch-hitters and platooned semi-regulars -- basic stuff -- and he made his decisions with his icy Marine stare, as fixed as a bayonet.
 
Rocky rebelled, and earned himself an exile to another country – Montreal – in 1971 where the manager was Gene Mauch, the intense strategist who, oddly enough, had made his debut with Brooklyn as a teenager, just like Hodges. Two Branch Rickey guys.
 
Swoboda had played against Mauch’s teams and now he wore the same uniform, watching Mauch make moves that had two or three layers that players (or anybody else) could not have predicted.
 
One example of managerial maneuvering came on June 21, 1971, with the Expos holding a 2-1 lead going into the eighth inning in Atlanta.
(One more reason I love baseball is that every play in more than a century can be demystified by records, particularly on the invaluable website retrosheet.org.)
 
Jim Nash, a big righty with the Braves, gave up a leadoff single to Ron Hunt, the old Met. Mauch then sent up Clyde Mashore, a marginal right-handed hitter, to bunt for Mack Jones, a fading veteran. (“Mack might have hit one in the gap,” recalled Swoboda who observed all this from a seat in the dugout.)
 
Mashore failed to bunt twice, so with two strikes, Mauch yanked him for Jim Fairey, a left-handed hitter who promptly flied to center field.
As a result, Mauch’s machinations added up to nothing, but then Rusty Staub and Ron Fairly, both left alone to swing the bat, made hits, and the Expos scored two runs. But the Braves scored five times in the bottom of the eighth for a 6-4 victory.
 
Swoboda, liberated for the second game of the doubleheader, went 0-for-3 ….and four days later he was traded to the Yankees. His Mets days were long gone.
 
Swoboda has stayed with the game – for decades, broadcasting for the New Orleans minor-league team, now relocated, and appearing at Mets’ fantasy camps, and always one of the most popular old-timers to come back to New York.
He suffers with the Mets, and inevitably the talk goes back to his first manager Casey Stengel and his polar opposite Gil Hodges, plus Swoboda’s pals, Ed Charles -- The Glider -- and Cleon Jones and Tommie Agee.
It’s cold in New Orleans, and it’s cold in New York, but both of us are warmed. We are talking baseball.
              *     *     *
The game Swoboda remembers:
https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1971/B06211ATL1971.htm
 
Swoboda’s career records:
https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/S/Pswobr101.htm

My NYT column about 1969 with help from Ron Swoboda: 
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/sports/sports-of-the-times-amazin-mets-fans-will-always-have-1969.html

The brilliant interview of Branford Marsalis, recently rediscovered:

No Football.
No dopey lawyers about to get stiffed by their seditious client.
​No Covid talk.
Four visuals over the electronic transom.
A good day. 

With Melbourne in the news, the great tennis photographer Art Seitz downloaded some classics from his vast portfolio. This one touched me -- Harry Hopman, the champion Australian tennis coach and his American wife Lucy. Art had no way of knowing this, but the Hopmans were neighbors  back in the 1970s, when he was coaching at the Port Washington Tennis Academy, after his long Davis Cup glory.  I was doing a story on him and he suggested a restaurant in town called The Bunkers Inn. My wife and I drove up and down Shore Rd. trying to find it, but then she said: "There it is. La Bonne Cuisine." I quickly learned to hear Australian and we loved his stories about Rocket and Muscles and Emmo and all the lads. He was  working with Hy Zausner, the  proprietor of the academy, where children took lessons and sometimes you played on the next court to famous players. He was enjoying Long Island, he told us: Why, he had recently attended his first Bar Mitzvah.
After Harry passed in 1985 I used to see Mrs. Hopman at the US Open -- great smile, good memories of their Port Washington days. She passed in 2018, age the age of 98.
​Art Seitz:  thanks for the memories. man.
            *     *      *

From my friend Ed-the-Soccer-Player came this clip about the Thomas  Wolfe Memorial in Asheville, N.C.  I am sure Ed noticed in my thoroughly enjoyable time on the NYT Readalong last Sunday, when somebody asked about the de rigueur bookshelves behind me. I gave a quickie tour, including a number of vintage books by the favorite author of my (extended) adolescence, Thomas Wolfe. I have issues with some of his dated portrayals of Blacks....but I owe Wolfe for making me read, and care about the mountain town of Asheville, N.C. (I recently discovered the overlooked segment about his father, as a boy in Pennsylvania, sassing Rebel troops heading south, toward Gettysburg-- a masterpiece, originally excised by Wolfe's editor.) 
My man Ed asked if I had ever seen the boarding house Wolfe's mother ran in Asheville -- the emotional heart of "Look Homeward, Angel" -- and now an attraction for Wolfe buffs. The answer is, yes -- not during my Appalachia rambles but on a drive northward  toward  Louisville for the Derby. I found a motel across the street from the Wolfe home and requested a room overlooking the home -- and that rainy evening I stared down at the home, thinking of all the emotional moments Wolfe described. The next day I took my tour of the home -- and also visited Wolfe's grave nearby. (He died on Sept. 15, 1938 --18 days short of reaching 38, of tuberculosis he most likely caught in the mountain boarding house of his mother. I am well aware that I was born nine-plus months later.) So, Ed, yes, I've been to the Wolfe home. 
​              *     *     *

In my e-mail, the always-welcome dispatch by Letty Cottin Pogrebin, my classmate at Jamaica High.
Feel free to make your own interpretation. . 

I Just Might Like This Super Bowl

Sunday's Super Bowl will be different from the first LIV Super Bowls:  The Young Lady Poet. 
 
In a flash of brilliance, the NFL – or maybe Jay-Z, the impresario of the show -- has recruited Amanda Gorman, the star of the Inauguration, to write and recite a poem honoring three admirable Americans.
 
Ms. Gorman is imprinted on my brain, a vision in yellow and red, a fresh face blinking in the mid-day sun, reciting her poem of hope to a nation ground down by four years of incompetence and cruelty.
 
Her presence is one of the great lateral plays ever:  a pitchout from Dr. Jill Biden to her husband, who told the Inauguration folks, who made it happen, or rather, Ms Gorman made it happen.
 
Not yet 23, Amanda Gorman appealed to better selves more than anybody ever did at any Inauguration, including John F. Kennedy (“Ask not…”)  and surely more than anybody ever has at a Super Bowl. I hope Ms. Gorman’s deals for modeling and publishing, the mass production of The New Great Thing, will not get in the way of her poetry and her idealism. But for the moment, she's the reason I plan to watch.   
The young lady poet from LA and Harvard is quite a step up for the National Football League, in which quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt a time or three in homage to Black Lives Matter and has not thrown a pass since.
 
It may sound incongruous coming from a long-time sports columnist but I'm just not a fan of football -- waiting around all week for the ball to be in play something like 12 minutes.  I covered some Super Bowls and I watched some -- a numbing week of buildup followed by the Big Game plus copious TV timeouts for new commercials plus the pregame show and the halftime show. 
For playoff excitement, I’ll take a Stanley Cup final series (Islanders, early 80s)  or Celtics-Lakers (mid 80s) or many World Cup soccer matches. 

It all comes back to me now: the games I covered mostly blend into each other -- in midweek, buses took reporters to an arena where we made mooing sounds as if being guided by cattle prods, down a gloomy corridor to tables where players waited to be interviewed. 

Fortunately, the sainted Dave Anderson was writing his knowing columns about the Super Bowl.
One year, my wife and I went to the New York Philharmonic, where Maestro Mehta asked the audience to please not follow the game on their phones, lest they cheer inadventently. Another time we went to a New Year feast in Chinatown, with the dragon parade from table to table. 
 
I do have a few memories of Super Bowls:
1969. Super Bowl III – I followed up north as Joe Namath, in the good old informal days, could take a few rays poolside and tell reporters the Jets would beat the Baltimore Colts – and they did. Joe Willie’s loosey-goosey persona still looms over the game.
1970. IV. My first Super Bowl in person -- in cold, rainy New Orleans, where I spent a lot of wonderful time in Preservation Hall listening to Sweet Emma Barrett and the house musicians. 
1982. XVI. Back after 10 years of being a news reporter in the Real World., I found myself stuck in a snow-bound Detroit suburb, the media piled into buses to the domed stadium in Pontiac. Then, Vice President George H.W. Bush chose to do some fund-raising in downtown Detroit and his late arrival clogged up the roadways with security, which meant reporters had to scramble over snowy fields to get to work, like overladen mountain goats. 

1983. XVII. Rose Bowl – The rain-slicked Rose Bowl was no place for fancy stuff and race-horse football but a percheron named John Riggins lugged the ball for 166 yards and a Washington victory -- old-fashioned mudball.
1986. XX. The Chicago Bears, my favorite team from childhood, won, as defensive end Richard Dent, as supple as a limbo dancer, was voted the most valuable player, a rarity for a defensive player.
1987. XXI. Pasadena:  Having criticized the management of the Giants in the past, I got to see George Young’s team win the Super Bowl, and in the winning clubhouse I shook the hand of Wellington Mara, the gracious and long-suffering owner.
2000. XXXIV. Atlanta. We were invited to a garden party at the home of Lynda and Furman (the iconic columnist) Bisher – but an ice storm forced them to cancel. My wife and I sat in our downtown hotel, watching drivers careen off guardrails on the Interstate like linemen whacking each other.

2003: XXXVII. In London to write about The Real Football, I watched the Super Bowl on the telly and was impressed by how well the English broadcasters knew the sport.
2015. Laura and Diane had just moved back east from Seattle, where they had become infatuated with the team they lovingly called The Fleahawks. In the closing minutes, Seattle drove toward what would be a game-winning touchdown. All they had to do was hand the ball off to Marshawn Lynch, the powerful fullback….but instead, quarterback Russell Wilson cocked his arm – and we screamed in unison: “Noooooo!!!!!” ---Interception in endzone. Fleahawks lost. Worst bench call in the history of the Super Bowl.

This year, nothing is normal. I may even watch the game itself, because of Pat Mahomes, the Chiefs' quarterback -- sort of the football version of the Lady Poet: young, smart, talented, engaging.
I will be rooting for her to have another great moment, with the world watching. 
               *   *    *
(The links to theReadalong:) 
​Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sreenet/posts/10105690116457802
YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvk49eLPgc8&list=PLpcj64uXCCR-TTeP4RrCnF9pAYutl4iuL&index=1
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:6762930856265953280/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/neilparekh/status/1357166008260255745
              *   *    *
​Links to my post: : 

 http://www.espn.com/nfl/superbowl/history/winners
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_Bowl_halftime_shows

Did I have fun in New Orleans in 1970?
https://www.nytimes.com/1970/01/11/archives/fans-celebrate-in-vieux-carre-30000-join-in-festivities-opera-and.html?_r=0

Spent most of my time here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=WHT6IldqG8s​

Worst Coach  Call in Super Bowl history: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=U7rPIg7ZNQ8 

0 Comments

What is still there, within silent, impassive elders?
How can they be reached, revived, made happier?
This video suggests something more can be done, with mind, with balance.
It comes from Australia, from the ABC Science outlet, and it shows elders, people suffering from Parkinson’s disease and other debilitating conditions, responding to the universal blessing – music – and its partner, dance.
           *     *      *
At this point, you might prefer to just watch.
          *    *       *
But let me add this:  I was hooked in the first few minutes because the video reminds me of my mother’s last months in the very nice Chapin Home in Jamaica, Queens.
She had suffered a stroke plus other indignities of old age, and she rarely spoke.
 
Sometimes my wife would pop in with CDs of operas we knew my mother loved -- “La Boheme” or “Madame Butterfly”--  and my mother would smile with recognition.
 
She did not burst into song or try to dance to “Musetta’s Waltz” but she surely perked up. A few times she even spoke my wife’s name.
 
Some of the other residents would migrate to the room, and listen to the music, which brought smiles and nods and humming memories of the past.
 
In this video, the Australian network delves into the science and the mysteries of the impact of music, but there is so much more to be learned. My wife, who knows more than I do about the science of the brain, asks if, by watching these transformations, couldn’t therapists use the power of music, the muscle memory of youth, to enable daily physical and mental action?
            *      *       *
I can tell you this: my kids and grandkids could dig up the music that stirs me, right from my vintage iPod with the click wheel.  
                *         *
My thanks to Bruce-from-Canada, for calling my attention to the Australian science video.         

The headline above was texted by a family member during the Inauguration, on our little round-robin message board that has tied eight adults together for the four past ugly years.
 
I personally was trying to find some way to comment here on the spiritual optimism of President Biden and the uplifting composure of the “dignitaries” and the stunning talent of the young poet and the truly American mix of the celebrants.

They all provided inspiration….and I was letting it sink in….when I opened the group email from my Jamaica High School friend, the great Letty Cottin Pogrebin.
As always, Letty has been ahead of the rest of us, writing:
 
I intended to post nothing but good news on this, the day that will see simple decency return to public life and discourse in the person of President Joe Biden, and history being made by Vice President Kamala Harris. (But today's euphoria can't erase the conflagration of Jan 6th and the shameless-who-shall-be-nameless #45 who lit the fuse.) 
 
Letty included the Youtube bit from James Corden that, she says, “has gone viral.”
It ends with one thoroughly cathartic act by Corden.
Letty's websire: 
http://www.lettycottinpogrebin.com/
 
I am taking leave for the day, to watch the reruns of the Inauguration that might, just might, start to fumigate the past four years.
           *     *    *
Your thoughts? Comments welcome, indeed, beseeched.
            *    *    *
On that note, introducing Amanda Gorman, not yet 23, the youngest poet ever to grace an inauguration: 

I probably should have written about Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday today. His legacy is with us -- Stacey Abrams and others paving way for Black and Jewish candidates winning in Georgia, and hundreds of leaders of color around U.S. They are a sign of hope for the future, which begins Wednesday as soon as we dump Trump and his pardon patrol -- PillowMan a sure sign of the rot.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/us/politics/trump-pardons.html?searchResultPosition=1
                     *     *    *
Slow that I am, I have just discovered there is such a thing as PillowMan.
That’s right.  He was Donald Trump’s new best friend for a few days, or so he thought – disregarding the public fact that Donald Trump does not have friends.

I only realized PillowMan's existence on Sunday morning when my wife told me, and I looked him up. As other Trumpites scurried to get a new life, and maybe new fingerprints, a newfriendship was growing.
(Maybe only for the moment. More below.)  

PillowMan, whose real name is Mike Lindell, apparently has a company called MyPillow, and is on TV a lot plugging his product as well as yakking on Fox.
I would have thought this would somehow get in the way of Material Girl, a/k/a Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who is often hustling tea cozies or lamp shades of her design.
But somehow, PillowMan got into the inner circle, giving counsel to, as the papers are calling him, “the defeated President.”

How much did this cost PillowMan? Nobody knows, but maybe he was making political donations or paying for pardons to some of PillowMan’s family, friends, henchmen.
(Are Covid vaccines also on the Trump market? Is that why I get “Currently Unavailable” when I try to sign up?) 

Anyway, PillowMan has talked and spent his way into the inner sanctum, and has been photographed laughing it up with the defeated President.
Their ease and happiness with each other reminded me of something, or somebody.
Wait, I’ve got it. Remember Richard M. Nixon’s best pal, Bebe Rebozo, a Florida real-estate developer and banker? They hung out together and Rebozo was always doing favors for Nixon, that often involved expensive homes.

PillowMan seems more political than Rebozo was -- apparently advising Trump as the White House cadre narrowed down, particularly after Trump’s thuggish foot soldiers followed his orders and tried to take over the Capitol on Jan. 6.

While Trump was pondering the long flight to Florida, PillowMan apparently showed up at the White House a few days ago with plans for averting the Inauguration of the man who actually won the election.
But PillowMan made a mistake. A big mistake.He  brought the plans in printed form, overlooking Trump's well-known allergy to the printed word. 

According to Sunday’s Washington Post, Trump glanced at the PillowMan Papers and suggested he check it out with any White House lawyers still risking their careers by working for Trump to the end.
Read these sad words in the WaPo:
 
But Lindell said Trump was noncommittal on what he would do with the information and told him to talk to the lawyers, who were dismissive and argued with him.
“They were skeptical,” Lindell said. “They were disinterested, very disinterested. They are giving the president the wrong advice.”
He said the lawyers did not allow him to see Trump again.
 
It’s heartbreaking to hear about good friends moving apart.
             *    *    *
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/10/us/bebe-rebozo-loyal-friend-in-nixon-s-darkest-days-dies-at-85.html
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/business/media/mypillow-mike-lindell-trump.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-florida/2021/01/16/be0b8ad4-5756-11eb-a817-e5e7f8a406d6_story.html

Hey, you!
The three of you, smirking Republicans, defying Congressional staffers who are trying to get you to wear a mask, to keep from passing around germs.  .

Look at you, wearing the same insolent smirk as the still-President of the United States, who looks like he is trying to take us all down.
I take your behavior personally because, maybe you three have heard, there is a pandemic going on – and masks help protect people. You three may also have heard by now that three members of Congress came down with Covid-19 since being sequestered with Republicans when Trump’s Army came calling.

Here’s why I take it personally. We happen to see one of the three -- Rep. Pramila Jayapal from Seattle, knowledgeable and decent -- on the channel we watch. 

We saw Rep. Jayapal last Wednesday, wedged below a seat in the upper gallery of the House, when anti-social morons were patrolling the hallways, doing Trump’s bidding. There was fear on her face, for what could happen next. The domestic terrorists may not have gotten her, but somebody in a later scrum passed along a little souvenir -- Covid-19.
I don't know if it was the insolent threesome in the photo above, but those three bare-faced wise guys -- Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga), Markwayne Mullins (R-Okla.) and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz) -- are pretty much laughing off the offer of masks in close quarters. They think it’s funny, like Trump at one of his WWE rallies, telling the herd that he’d like to punch somebody in the face.  
 
I don’t know much about them except that Taylor Greene is identified as a follower of QAnon, which, I gather, is a dangerous cult believing in mad fantasy. She’s been in Congress only a few days but she’s already infecting people in her own vicious way.
Here’s why I take this personally. Many of the smartest and kindest authorities on the tube these days, talking about Covid-19, are of Indian descent - like Rep. Jayapal - doctors and academics and politicians. They represent an uptick in the skills and social ethics of our country, balancing the slope-browed thugs wandering the halls of Congress. 

It’s about race. But you knew that already. Race.

We have relatives and friends of color.  My wife made 14 trips to India a while ago, doing volunteer work with children, and she loves the country and the people.  Rep. Jayapal and vice-president-elect Kamala Harris both have roots in Chennai (formerly Madras), the sixth largest city in India – a city known as the health capitol of India, for its skills and services.

Who are these members of Congress who cannot put on a mask as a sign of respect and to avoid spreading germs? In the NYT the other day, Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham wrote about the evangelical Christian base – make that white, evangelical, Christian base – of the armed marauders.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/us/how-white-evangelical-christians-fused-with-trump-extremism.html
 
Their version of religion makes them uncomfortable with dark-skinned people as well as knowledgeable people who try to explain the virus to them.
I know a bit about them. Some people I love scurried off to vote for Brother Trump in 2016 because their pastor said Trump was a man of God, and really, what else is there? (My guess is also that the evangelical pastors figured Trump would be good for the economy – their economy.  They live pretty well, you know.)

So now we have the man of God telling his people to go storm Congress.
Big man. He would have liked to storm with them but his bone spurs were acting up.
Besides, Trump had other people doing his work for him – people who would breathe on other people.
Diabolical, you could say.
Somebody got Rep. Jayapal, the gentlewoman from Chennai and Seattle.
Like I say, I’m taking this personally.
        *      *     *
Tweet from Rep. Pramila Jayapal: “I just received a positive COVID-19 test result after being locked down in a secured room at the Capitol where several Republicans not only cruelly refused to wear a mask but recklessly mocked colleagues and staff who offered them one." 

​Andy Tansey
1/8/2021 09:01:04 am
Having had the privilege of being acquainted with some of the Bush kin, I tend to agree about HW. I believe there was a sense of duty to the country that went along with the privilege of material comfort that the family has.

Now having had the benefit of a few more days of history since George's perceptive piece about Thornburgh, I admit to a sense of visceral relief when Pence and McConnell came around on Wednesday. Something like, "See, even they are resisting the Sociopath in Chief . . . ." I can't help that my visceral reactions were not in line with more thoughtful reactions. We cannot allow Republicans' more sensible reactions over the past couple of days to dilute their record of abdication of responsibility to such ideals as truth, democracy and the constitution for more than the past four years.

Our country faces enormous challenges as the Internet has empowered and deceived ignorant white trash - I'm sorry - into believing they matter more than others, based on misinformation. I remember that my 4th grade history book was essentially a compilation of chapter-length biographies of important Americans, including Robert E. Lee. I think curricula need to include strong education from K-12 about discernment of truth over the internet. Scary.
REPLY
bruce
1/8/2021 09:10:44 am
andy,

i think pence and mcconnell are officially listed in the better late than never category.
REPLY
Andy Tansey
1/8/2021 09:41:01 am
Nope, Bruce. That's what I'm afraid of. "Too little, too late."
Alan Rubinlink
 
1/8/2021 09:56:19 am
Their actions are too late to merit much praise. It was nice to see them publicly chastise Trump, but for me it does not make up for their four years of support.

Cabinet members DeVos and Chao may have resigned in protest, but avoiding a vote on invoking the 25th amendment might have played a part in their decision.

(I was gearing up to write something about my despicable ex-neighbor from Queens, who is trying to take the country down with him. Then I read the obits of two people who enriched my life, in several senses of the word, and realized I need to pay homage to Michael Apted and Tommy Lasorda.)
                 *       *       *
I was afraid of what Hollywood would do with Loretta Lynn’s book, and her life, and her roots in Eastern Kentucky. Having been the Times’ Appalachian correspondent, I was blessed to get to know her and be asked to write her autobiography, and have her tell me great stories that made the book “Coal Miner’s Daughter” so easy to put together.  

Then the book was marketed to Hollywood. From a vast distance, I heard rumors that this producer or that director wanted to put out a steamy version, a Beverly Hillbillies knockiff, of her colorful life.  But then, way out of the loop, I heard that the Hollywood gods had lined up producer Bernard Schwartz….and screenwriter Tom Rickman….and British director Michael Apted.

I exaggerate sometimes that when I say that I was invited to an early private screening in Manhattan and  brought a fake mustache and a wig and a raincoat I could put over my head like gangsters do when they are arraigned. I did fear the worst.
Then the movie began in the little screening room and I saw Levon Helm, as Loretta’s daddy, coal dust all over his face and hands, coming home from the mine and being met by his daughter, played by Sissy Spacek, and instead of goofus cartoon figures they were tender father and daughter, giving thanks that he had survived another shift underground.
I could breathe. No disguises necessary.
“The good guys won,” Rickman told me later.
Michael Apted, best known for his “Up” documentaries,  was a principal good guy. He has died at 79. 
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/movies/michael-apted-dead.html 

I got to meet Apted a few months later at the “grand opening” in Nashville, where my wife and I were treated like one of the gang. Levon, Sissy and Loretta (if I may call them by their first names) gave an impromptu concert at the hotel, and the next day “we” took a chartered bus up to Louisville.
I chatted with Apted for a few minutes and told him how much I loved the movie, how fair it was to the region and how it lived up to what we had tried to do with her book.
I still remember one sentence: “I am no stranger to the coalfields.” Later, I looked it up and saw he was born in posh Aylesbury and grew up in London, but the point was, Michael Apted was a serious film-maker who traveled and learned and listened. For a more distinct Appalachian feel, he incorporated some locals into the movie, just as Robert Altman did in the movie “Nashville.”
I never met Apted again, but I am eternally gratefully to him and Schwartz and Rickman and the talented performers.
                                   *     *     *

I knew Tom Lasorda better. I met him in the early 80s when he was already a celebrity manager with his monologues about “bleeding Dodger-blue blood.”  He made it his point to know the New York sports columnists and including us as bit actors in his own personal production..
One time he told me that “Frank” had been at the game the night before. I guess I looked blank and he sneered at me and shouted, “Frank! Frank! Frank Sinatra!”
Wherever he was, Lasorda’s clubhouse office might be home to show-biz or restaurant types, plus Mike Piazza’s father, Vince, Lasorda’s childhood pal.

One time, in a big game in LA, the Dodgers had a lead in the late innings and there was a commotion in the dugout as Jay Johnstone ran out to right field and waved off some directive.  Later we asked Lasorda what happened, and he said he tried to send Rick Monday out to play defense – a normal tactic -- but Johnstone had run past him, saying, “F--- you, Tommy, I’m not coming out!” Lasorda told it -- laughing, proud of Johnstone’s stand – particularly since it had not cost the Dodgers.

I was working on a book with Bob Welch, the pitcher and my late friend, about his being one of the first athletes to go through a rehab center for alcoholism. I knew Lasorda had made a brief visit to the center during Bob's family week, and I wanted his recollections, but Lasorda was evasive. Finally, on the road, he agreed to talk to me in his hotel suite, blustering, raising his voice, as if somebody were listening in the next room.
“He’s not an alcoholic!” Lasorda shouted. “He can take a drink or two! He just has to control it!” – totally against what recovering addicts know to be true.

I will give Lasorda credit for giving me the time…and his point of view. Whenever we met, he always said hello. Whatever his personal life was like, he loved wearing Dodger Blue. In his bombastic showboat way, he incorporated peripheral types, like a New York sports columnist, into his world, and he made us enjoy our little part of it.
                                        *      *      *
Richard Goldstein and Tyler Kepner have told many great tales of Lasorda’s life: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/sports/baseball/tommy-lasorda-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/sports/baseball/tommy-lasorda-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/sports/baseball/tommy-lasorda-dodgers.html?searchResultPosition=1

​

Doctor, Doctor! I have great news! That malevolent earworm has subsided. I don't have to worry 24/7 about what he is stealing, what he is breaking. I have more time for other things -- like reading.
     *      *      *
We can’t get enough of our long-lost neighbors. At least, I can’t. And the growing study of Neanderthals  tells me this is a collective curiosity.

With a flash of recognition, we see something of ourselves in them, as they tried to survive, 

As the earth thaws, as our science grows, we are learning more about the people who co-existed with “us” until about 40,000 years ago.
Many “humans” stare at renderings of what Neanderthals may have looked like, based on recent findings of Neanderthal bones. Sometimes the adults are pictured holding a child, just like us.

The latest source of my fascination is a book, “Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art,” by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, published by Bloomsburg Sigma in November, and already greedily devoured by this reader.
Sykes is a scientist who took eight years to write this book. She was still finishing it last spring when the pandemic began, which motivated her to compare our lot with the demise of a previous people. (Just like the Neanderthals, we have some contemporaries with no clue about what is killing a lot of us.) 

The author gives us the romance of a lost people, still kicking around in some DNA. I am jealous that I do not seem to have a trace while two friends have  1 or 2 percent.. 

The more I read, the more my admiration grows for Neanderthals, named for one of the early discoveries in the Neander Valley near Dusseldorf, Germany. Sykes describes in great detail how they chiseled tools out of rocks, knowing what they were doing, and how they made spears and arrows to hunt the fat-laden animals that would sustain them.
​
Sykes details how these Neanderthals  migrated with the seasons and shifts in climate, how they seemed to know, to remember, where the water was, where hiding places were, where they could cook, congregate, tend to their tools and garments, care for children, and sometimes bury their dead.

Other people existed in the same regions – Homo sapiens up from Africa, Denisovans across Asia, both groups  encountering Neanderthals as they made their last stand in southern Europe.

Sykes saves the best part for the end – the mystery that has made Neanderthals an appealing subject. 

Married, with two young daughters, living in mid-Wales, Sykes helps the reader understand a people that got squeezed out, many perishing in the caves and crannies of Spain and France.
 
As we unworthy survivors pollute the only world we have, Sykes points out one benefit of our pollution: Soon we will discover more Neanderthal bodies emerging from the melting permafrost.
Twelve hours after I read her prophesy, I found a recent story about an ancient baby wolf that has been found intact in the Yukon.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/21/science/wolf-puppy-mummy.html
 
Before we expire, we may understand more about our complex ancestors as they roamed the earth, at least three separate species, standing on two legs, encountering each other on their search for food and shelter and, when they got up close, sometimes doing what came naturally. 
 
I don’t think I am giving away too much to reveal Sykes’ final words, which confirmed to me the current aura of these people who were “just like us.” Sykes’ penultimate chapter ends: 
“Neanderthal. Human. Kindred.”   
            *  *    *
(my previous post on Neanderthals)
https://www.georgevecsey.com/home/lets-have-some-respect-for-neanderthals
 
(The recent NYT review of Sykes’ book)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/07/books/review/kindred-neanderthals-rebecca-wragg-sykes.html?searchResultPosition=2 

One of my favorite “teachers” passed on the turnaround between wretched 2020 and overburdened 2021. 

Richard Thornburgh, a former governor of Pennsylvania and U.S. attorney general, died on Dec. 31, at 88.

I met him when I was a news correspondent in the Appalachians, and through the years I reached out a few times for comments and background – for a column on drug testing in baseball, for my biography of Stan Musial.
Richard Thornburgh seemed to me a just person, a good teacher, a great storyteller who shared with me a close view of Musial, his boyhood hero in western Pennsylvania.

Our first meeting was in Pittsburgh in 1971 when I was working on a story about a pollution case, involving acidic runoff from a factory into the Monongahela River, a few miles upstream from the confluence with the Allegheny to form The Beautifiul Ohio. 

The offending company was of modest size, but waiting in the docket were offenses attributed to huge corporations that contributed to Pittsburgh-area people holding their noses 24/7.
Thornburgh was the federal prosecutor for Western Pennsylvania, appointed by President Nixon. He knew the Times was covering, and suggested I attend jury selection, and we would talk later.

After a long morning session, we repaired to the bar at the Pittsburgh Hilton, with its scenic view of the confluence and the rugged hills, and Thornburgh gave me a quickie seminar on jury selection:
-- Why had he excluded the woman with glasses who was reading a hard-covered book in a front row of jury candidates? Precisely, he said. He did not want people who might think outside lines he would be setting. Okay.
-- Well, in that case, why had Thornburgh chosen, for foreman, a dean for a state junior college? Precisely, he said. He wanted somebody who worked in a structure, who was favorable to some form of law and order. Okay.

As my seminar continued, I spotted two faces from my previous life – Al McGuire and Jack McMahon, basketball players and coaches from St. John’s University, my childhood team. They pulled up chairs, and the smart and gregarious McGuire began grilling Thornburgh on the case, and law, and other cosmic subjects. Thornburgh got in a few sage questions for McGuire, and seemed delighted that I knew these characters, from a vastly different world. The NYT was buying.)

The case meandered onward after my little story, and eventually, polluters began to clean up their acts – courtesy of Thornburgh. Pittsburgh is a cleaner place today because of cases like that.
https://www.nytimes.com/1971/06/24/archives/two-canoeists-may-win-bounty-in-pollution-case.html?searchResultPosition=3
​
I kept up with Thornburgh as he became attorney general and governor, when he was hailed for his leadership during the Three Mile Island nuclear threat. Later, he returned to private practice.

During the drug scandals in baseball in the early 2000s, I found an essay Thornburgh had written about the complications of testing, citing his Yale friend A. Bartlett Giamatti, the baseball commissioner who had expired days after banishing Pete Rose for rampant gambling offenses.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/sports/baseball/17vecsey.html?searchResultPosition=1
 
While I was researching the Musial biography, I ran across Thornburgh’s name as part of a merry band of Americans who had met in Rome during the reign of the Polish Pope John Paul II. (James Michener, the writer, had described this confluence of superstars.) Musial had been Thornburgh’s favorite player during his childhood in Pittsburgh – and Thornburgh could imitate Musial’s batting stance as well as his autograph.
 
We corresponded another time or three and then – bad news on the doorstep -- I picked up the paper on New Year’s morning and saw he has passed. I learned that his first wife had been killed – just like Joe Biden’s wife – in a car accident.
 
Richard L. Thornburgh seemed to be a public servant in the best sense of the word. When I covered his pollution case, I got the feeling he believed companies really should not be pouring their crap into the river. Thank you, sir.
                     *      *     *
(Somewhere in my mental notebook, from one-off  glimpses as a reporter, I keep a list -- a short list -- of Republicans I Have Seen Up Close and Respected:  Richard Lugar of Indiana, Howard Baker of Tennessee, Fred Thompson of Tennessee, in his younger days. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey. John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky -- despite his hiring an amoral slug named McConnell -- Tom Davis of Virginia. John McCain of Arizona, with whom I spent two glorious hours in his Senate office. Plus, Fiorello LaGuardia, NYC mayor when I was a little kid, who read “the funnies” to people on Sunday radio. And Richard L. Thornburgh of Pennsylvania, my “mentor” in law and government service.)
                              *   *     *
 
Thornburgh’s life is described by the master of NYT obits, Robert D. McFadden.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/us/politics/richard-thornburgh-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1
 
The Musial biography, with anecdotes from Pittsburgh boy:
https://books.google.com/books?id=0AkepOpOYEQC&pg=PA300&lpg=PA300&dq=vecsey+and+thornburgh+and+musial&source=bl&ots=yi6KqAhAC-&sig=ACfU3U2EvuMEiItQBzQmiI57zaLCW1jgqQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjNqtDh6_rtAhUOw1kKHTa0DYUQ6AEwAHoECAEQAg#v=oepage&q=vecsey%20and%20thornburgh%20and%20musial&f=false
 
Three Mile Island Recap:
http://thornburgh.library.pitt.edu/three-mile-island.html

Shadowy figures around a bonfire, silence that screamed of fear.
It was Dec 30, 1970, and people were waiting, waiting for what they already knew. 
The mine had blown up. 

This was outside Hyden, a Kentucky town I had never heard of, until the office back in New York said I'd better get there, fast. 
 
The next hours are a sad blur to me – a reforming sportswriter on my first month as a news reporter in Appalachia, trying to make sense of a coal-mine explosion.
 
I had taken the job offer from Gene Roberts, the legendary national editor at the NYT, and my wife and three small children had just moved to Louisville. On the next-to-last day of 1970 I drove down the Mountain Parkway for a feel-good, get-acquainted story, my first from the Appalachian Mountains. 

After a few hours, I decided to call the office before heading back to Louisville. 
The office told me a mine had blown up about an hour to the east, so I took off.
I found the mine and saw a woman walking on the chewed-up dirt road. ​I stopped my car and opened the passenger door and she got in. 
We did not say a word. Her fear was palpable, as if she were thinking, "I am now a widow."
I let her out near the crowd outside the mine office. When I parked my car, I realized she had left a pair of gloves and a can of cat food.

The troopers herded reporters behind barriers so we would not intrude on families, but reporters always find ways. The one thing we knew was that there had been an explosion on the day shift at the Finley mine at Hurricane Creek.

As darkness fell, we knew that 39 miners had been in the drift mine – a horizonal opening into an Appalachian slope. One miner had been blown clear of the mine mouth and was alive; the rest were inside, and we pretty much got the point.

Family members clustered together, as if forming a protective huddle against outsiders. It felt like one of Goya's haunting "Disasters of War," on which he wrote: "This I have seen."
 
Gov. Louis Nunn arrived and informed the reporters that this is the kind of thing that happens once in a while in coal mining. Then he got on the helicopter and headed back to Frankfort. 

 Somehow, I scribbled a rudimentary story in my notepad and waited my turn for the one telephone on the mine wall. A trooper guarding the phone got itchy about my taking up time but I fended him off with shrugs and hand signals, and he let me finish. (I asked the office to call my wife and say I would not be home that night.)
 
The warm spell ended abruptly, and snow began to fall – a desolate scene, lit by bonfires. The Red Cross was giving sandwiches and drink to everybody.
My very supportive colleague in the Washington bureau, Ben Franklin, using his vast sources, dug up news that the non-union, "dog-hole" mine had been open less than a year with numerous citations but no major penalties or shutdowns. 
 
I needed a place to stay that night, and Dr. Tim Lee Carter, who represented the district in Congress, suggested a motel just north of Harlan – “ a short ride from here,” he said.
Turned out to be 34 miles – 51 minutes, much longer in a snowstorm.
 
I made it up the hill to the motel and got a room but of course had no clothing, no shaving kit, no change of shoes. I was alive. I made some phone calls and went to sleep.
 
The next morning, there was nearly a foot of snow on Pine Mountain.
Heart in my mouth, I told myself that I was now a New York Times news reporter and I needed to get back to the story.
My car did not have snow tires.
I tried to gun it uphill but the car spun out, onto the shoulder – a good thing, since the other side of the road was facing downhill. Nobody without four-wheel drive and chains was going over Pine Mountain that day, so I worked the story via the motel phone, and bought a fresh shirt from a trucker who was also stranded and spent New Year’s Eve watching the snow fall. 

On New Year’s Day, reinforced with snow tires, I made it over Pine Mountain and back to the mine, still feeling very much like an outsider. The sun was out, and reporters waited for more details.

The county judge – the top elected official in Kentucky counties – a sturdy guy named George Wooton -- was crouched over a bonfire, frying “coal-miner steaks” –  bologna.
The owner of a neighboring mine was giving his opinion of what caused the explosion – words to the effect that “those miners made a big mistake.”
In one sequence, Judge Wooton calmly laid the frying pan alongside the fire, stood up, and with one swift punch, he cold-cocked the talkative mine owner, who was out for a few minutes, before slinking away, while Judge Wooton resumed frying bologna. (I found out the other day that Wooton had served under Patton during WW II; tough old guy lived to be 94.)
         
The next day, Ken Murray and I attended the first funeral for any of the miners, attended by other miners. Nobody was talking much, there was an air of let’s-get-it-done. I didn’t understand at the time, but later learned that the first man buried had been the “shot man” in the mine – the one who detonated the explosives.
 
In the days and months ahead, I covered hearings in Washington or Kentucky and watched Finley miners smirk and swagger as they testified they knew nothing, nothing, about the explosion.
 
It turned out that the “shot man” had regularly used the fast-working but dangerous primer cord, an outdoor device that was unsafe inside a mine, with its methane-gas deposits and live sparks – particularly in certain barometric  conditions, like a warm day in December, with a snowstorm on the way.
 
The understanding of the dangers, the violation of law and common sense, was part of the ethic of miners. Mining was the best way to make a living in isolated Eastern Kentucky. In pillow talk, miners sometimes told their wives or girlfriends what was going at the mine, but other times they practiced a miner version of omertà.
 
I loved this part of my job, speaking up for Appalachia, whose coal was used to heat and cool much of the country, after the rubble had been dumped in the narrow valleys. (Even now, fools like Donald Trump blather about reviving the coal mines; the miners know better.)
 
In the days and months ahead, I returned to Hyden for hearings, interviewing some of the widows, like Edith Harris, smart and outspoken, who said the “rich widows” were, in a perverse way, envied for the insurance money they received.

For months afterward, the gloves and can of cat food from the woman on the mine road remained in my car; I could not bear to touch them.
To this day, when I think of the bonfires and the silent suffering in the wintry darkness, the very name “Hyden” gives me the shivers.
               *     *       *
--- A few months after the mine blew up, I ran into Judge Wooton in a coffee shop on the Mountain Parkway, and he raved about Loretta Lynn, who had come off the road to give a benefit for the miners’ families. I made a mental note to write about her for the NYT – which ultimately led to my helping Loretta write her book, “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”
          *       *      *
 ---After the Hyden nightmare, as long as I worked as a roving reporter, I kept a bag in my car trunk, with clothes and a shaving kit and warm shoes.

--  (some of my articles)
https://www.nytimes.com/1970/12/31/archives/toll-of-39-feared-in-mine-explosion-bodies-of-15-are-recovered-from.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1971/03/13/archives/miners-fears-recalled-in-testimony-of-widows.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1971/12/20/archives/kentucky-communitys-scars-visible-a-year-after-mine-disaster.html
              *    *     *
---Wonderful recent photo spread in the Courier-Journal:
https://www.courier-journal.com/picture-gallery/news/local/2020/12/23/hyden-kentucky-mine-disaster-photos-then-and-now/3939417001/
       *     *       *
 --Kentucky-born Tom T. Hall – “The Storyteller," whose work I admire -- visited Hyden early in 1971 and wrote a song about the disaster:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3Gmlp7PeDw

Some lady said, "They's worth more money now than when they's a-livin'. "
And I'll leave it there 'cause I suppose she told it pretty well

There are people out there, breathing a killer virus at you.
There is also a ton of snow on the ground where I live.
My suggestion: try tuning out the Lame-Duck Orange Sicko for a day.
I did it over the weekend. Good Stuff on everywhere. .
 
I started with a link from a friend known as The Cork Lady. (Ireland, that is.)  She and her husband sent me a link to a concert via the shut-down Metropolitan Opera -- Bryn Terfel with a holiday concert from his native Wales.
What a wonderful surprise: the concert (with no audience) was in the Brecon Cathedral – a place we know and love, in the highlands above Cardiff, The vivid stained-glass brought back memories of a beautiful summer evening, still light outside, our friend and host Alastair (like all Welsh men) singing in a chorus.
While Terfel and a talented cast took turns, my mind drifted to Brecon in long-ago summers --sheep being marshalled by border collies, the jolly sound of tourists on canal boats from the nearby Usk River, trips to upscale pubs along the canal, and Alastair going to Brecon market to buy lava bread (pungent, allegedly edible seaweed from the coast.) Not exactly Christmas memories, but lovely memories nonetheless.

At 5 PM, another link – this one via the Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, Stephen Dunn, my friend from his days as a zone-busting shooter for Hofstra College. No. 20 was known as Radar on a 23-1 team.
Radar writes as he shot – smoothly -- his latest book, Pagan Virtues, just out. 
Stephen’s poetic aim is still perfect but his voice does not permit him to read his own work these days. In a weekly web poetry reading, called LitBalm, some of his new work was read, and read well, by his friend Indran, while Stephen listened in one of the squares on the laptop grid. Keep lofting these jumpers, man.

At 9 PM, we turned on the local PBS station, Channel 13, with its Saturday-night feature -- a classic, or classy, movie (sometimes, inexplicably, displaced by drippy oldie concerts). But not Saturday.
Mercifully, there was the Trevor Nunn movie version of “Twelfth Night,” from 1996, Shakespeare’s gender-bender comedy, with a cinematic shipwreck and looming Cornwall hills and castles and Helen Bonham Carter falling in love with a saucy emissary with a highly dubious mustache draped across her kissable upper lip.
The cast, as in any English rendition of Shakespeare, was marvelous, but let me praise two:  Nigel Hathaway as Malvolio, the resident mansion bully, and Ben Kingsley, for goodness’ sakes, as an omnipresent troubadour (with a really nice voice, his own; it turns out that Kingsley was once urged to pursue singing by his pal, John Lennon.)

(We recently saw a stage version of Twelfth Night via the marvelous National Theatre's at-home series, prompted by the pandemic. In that version, Malvolio is female, played by Tamsin Greig, and her comeuppance seems more cruel than Hawthorne’s.) During the final scene Saturday night, when everybody finally figured everything out, I had tears in my eyes. Good Shakespeare does that to me.

The antidote for tears came nine – count ‘em, nine – minutes later, on “Saturday Night Live,” the last new one for a month apparently. The host was Kristen Wiig, one of the all-timers, visiting her old haunts.
Her opening bit was singing the wintry standard “My Favorite Things,” and when she botched the lyrics, she was joined by another all-timer, Maya Rudolph, who also botched the lyrics, and was in turn joined by the current all-timer Kate McKinnon.
Regarding McKinnon: I am watching SNL more in my “retirement” than I ever did, and am totally enthralled with McKinnon
In the all-time web ratings of SNL females, I propose St. Gilda as first, and Tina Fey as second (those laser eyes, looking right at you), and McKinnon now ranks third, with me.
I love her versions of Rudy and Dr. Fauci and that fuzzy little attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and McKinnon also aces some dark-side female roles, throwing off heat in all directions. How Shakespearean.

​
 That brings us to Sunday. 
The far-flung family of Anna and the late Kate McGarrigle is staging a virtual reunion, Sunday, all over the world, apparently. It will be streaming (at a price) and available for two weeks, starting at 3 PM. The cast includes longtime backup Chaim Tannenbaum, third-sister Jane McGarrigle, and other staples of that wonderful time. I will catch it, and think of Kate.
                *   *    *
Also, Nick and Teresa Troiano Masi (Terry and I worked on the paper at Jamaica High) have a grown daughter, Terri Dierkes, who is a cantor in a church in Connecticut, and a leading member of a lovely Christmas concert, which aired Sunday. Details at:
    https://www.musae.me/terridierkes/experiences/876/an-enchanted               
 
Finally, ongoing, for a season of great plays in our homes, the National Theatre is showing 12 filmed plays, for quite modest fees. We've seen about half in recent years. Wonderful stuff. 
https://www.ntathome.com/products?webSyncID=15a5de53-1723-d49e-1058-0eb4b6cd67b0&sessionGUID=2739e281-ec60-d680-c4d7-0b68a7328c91
                           *     *    *
There’s a pandemic out there. Nasty weather all over. 
Stay safe til the vaccines get here. 
​You can't watch The Dangerous Fool every second. 
Ride it out. Stay safe. Happy Holidays to all. ​

       
Diego Maradona died two weeks before Paolo Rossi, but they were already linked -- two scamps who hijacked separate World Cups. 

Rossi got there first by four full years, more of a surprise than when Diego Armando later commandeered the 1986 World Cup. Maradona was expected to produce a World Cup in his career, but Rossi came from essentially nowhere, from Limbo, from ignominy.

I was at both World Cups, my first and second of eight. Rossi’s rampage stunned me, a Yank who had no clue about world soccer, but was curious.
Brazil was always the favorite and the experts also mentioned  Argentina with El Pibe de Oro (The Golden Kid), West Germany, of course, and, reflexively, there was always England, only 16 years past its host-nation glory of 1966.

Instead….instead….Italy came roaring into the World Cup in Spain, like kids on Vespas, roaring into a genteel piazza, grabbing unattended purses from table top -- the dreaded Scippatori.

Italy, the Azzurri, came as a shock after a gambling scandal a few years before. Rossi apparently knew of the coup, but said nothing, and was suspended for two years – at the peak of his career, as an opportunistic forward who found unguarded entryways to the goal.
Rossi was reinstated – what a coincidence – only months before the World Cup because the chatty manager, Enzo Bearzot, wanted him on the squad. I had not arrived at the World Cup in Spain for the first round, and Rossi barely arrived for the three matches, rusty and so insecure that he was waiting for Bearzot to bench him. However Bearzot kept telling him to get his stuff together, he was playing.

The engine was tuned up by the second round – a bizarre three-team round robin quarterfinal. Argentina, which had won in 1978, was touted to win, this time with chunky spectacular Maradona. Brazil, the perennial darlings who played with a flare, was also touted to win, with brilliant offensive players named Socrates, Zico and Falcao.

Italy played Argentina in the first match, and a swaggering defender named Claudio Gentile, known in Italy as Qaddafi, not only because he had been born in Libya but because he tended to hurt people. Non-molto-Gentile mugged Maradona early and often, rendering him pointless, insensate. (That is Gentile, Qaddafi, shirtless, in the video above.) 
Meantime, vroom, vroom, here came Italy, players operating in space they never saw in the nasty defensive-minded Serie A of Italy. They moved the ball upfield and then, out of nowhere, came Paolo Rossi – still in the starting lineup? --che sorpresa – operating in wide open lanes that could have accommodated six lanes of Italian autoroutes.
Rossi did not score, but was a threat, and Maradona hobbled off, and Gentile swaggered in victory.

Next, Italy played Brazil, which moved the ball so magically for 75 or 80 yards but then stumbled into Italy’s defensive chain – Il catenaccio.
I remember one moment. The Brazilian right back, Leandro, wanted to get into the fun of moving the ball upfield, so he took off downfield. His swath of unguarded field suddenly was invaded by 12 or 14 Vespas, motors roaring, vroom-vroom.
Italy won, and Rossi scored three goals, I was beginning to get the point. Rossi scored twice in the semifinals against Poland, whose best player was banned for too many yellow cards. Then in the finals, with West Germany’s best player hobbled with a leg injury, Rossi scored once and Italy won, 3-1.
Rossi was voted the star of the game, and while I was in Madrid, writing about the match, my friend Thomas Rogers of the Times, back home in New York, wrote a lovely Man in the News profile of the surprising Paolo Rossi:
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/12/sports/man-in-the-news-from-disgrace-to-hero.html

I will always love the Brazil of 1982 – the best team ever to not win a specific World Cup – but I was now a wannabe Italian.
Other teams, other stars, come and go: Zidane’s beautiful final in 1998, the U.S. getting cheated by a blatant handball by Germany in 2002, Spain’s coming-of-age in 2010, Germany’s nearly-perfect meshing in 2014.

Now that I am retired and free to root, I wait for the United States to mature (which it is doing with magical frequency from young stars like Reyna and McKennie and Pulisic in Europe)

But I always have a second team – Italy – the blue shirts, the merry little tarantella of an anthem, the legends of maestri like Roberto Baggio and Andrea Pirlo and Alessandro Del Piero, and always going back to Paolo Rossi, who came from disgrace and took over a World Cup. Vroom-vroom 
You always remember your first.
               *    *    *
(Obit of Paolo Rossi in The Guardian.) 
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/dec/11/paolo-rossi-obituary

Don't we all have things we miss in this pandemic -- beyond family and friends?
I miss my home town twinkling on the western skyline.
I wrote about this a few months ago.
www.georgevecsey.com/home/i-miss-my-home-town
On Sunday I did something about it.

With the plague at full blast, I had to deliver something to the NYT plant in the College Point section of North Queens. 
It was a cold day, very little traffic. Ideal driving conditions.
My muscle memory told me how to handle the turns and merges and quick decisions of parkway driving in the city,
With every mile, my exhilaration grew. 
First stop was the NYT plant; since my retirement in 2011, I have become friendly with the people there.
On a quiet Sunday morning, I dropped off the item and kept going. 

I drove around to the front of the awesome building on the glacial hill. My mom was in the first wave of students in the new building -- in 1927. She loved the school as much as I do; it was our major bond,  She passed in the very nice Chapin Home, a few blocks away, in 2002. The city, in its dunderhead way, terminated Jamaica High  a few years ago -- a DiBlasio failure -- but there are several smaller schools tucked away in the building that will last forever.  

The main thing is that thousands of people are dying per day because of the Orange Fool and his little helpers in Congress. (Somebody on MSNBC called them "eunuchs" on Saturday. Sounds about right.)
Americans are dying at a growing rate because he has convinced a horrifying chunk of the nation they can breathe on each other at close range. 
Nurses are getting sick, getting demoralized. This is the tragedy. We know that. 

The personal side of Covid-19 is the carnage in a region I know well, North Queens, one of the worst-hit neighborhoods in the country. The human side has been caught by the NYT in a special section in the Sunday paper, written by the great Dan Barry. You won't hurt my feelings if you abandon this blog and go read about the very American swath of Queens, the losses of humans who are now real to us., 
www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/nyregion/coronavirus-new-york.html

Meanwhile, the Orange Fool is trying to break the nation in his final weeks, protesting the election, which he lost soundly. To cover for himself while he pillages, he sends out Rudy the Clown, performing Opera Buffa in the courts of America. We know that, too. 

Nothing’s working, and now I am beginning to realize that even the Web-driven delivery system. designed to keep consumers safe from germy stores, is starting to sputter and falter.
​
For once in my journalistic life,, I just sniffed a trend. After encountering delays on most things I tried to do online, I just read another story in the NYT's Sunday paper:  the backup of many items ordered online for delivery. The system is on overload. Plus, it's the holiday shopping season. None of this, I hasten to add, is as bad as Covid-19.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/business/ecommerce-shipping-holiday-season.html

NB: The following is the bleat from the comfortable class, which wants to shop and do business by computer, by phone, by courier. 

That "system"  breaking down, too.
Most online and telephone ventures are met with a long pause. Banks. Stores. Utilities. Services. People are working from home. Good luck to you. I got this message the other day: 

"Due to COVID-19, our carriers are experiencing delays in shipping packages. Thank you for your patience. Please check online for the status of your order."

That message pops up regularly, online or on recorded announcements, from the new masters of the Internet. Even Amazon is having trouble with Covid in the warehouses, and when the workers complain, Amazon seems to be putting the legal squeeze on them, in classic management heavy-handedness:   
https://www.wweek.com/news/business/2020/12/02/workers-risking-the-covid-19-outbreak-at-amazons-troutdale-warehouse-signed-a-strict-confidentiality-agreement/

Here are three personal examples of services wearing down. Bear in mind, this is the whine of somebody (me) who would pay somebody else to do his shopping, to deliver his goods: 

*-- Our regional cable company used to have techies available on the phone, some of them quite knowledgeable, in their weary sarcastic Long Island accents, talking Luddites into re-setting their TV sets. Now the company depends on a Chat system with people apparently in call centers working from a script. One of our sets went rogue the other day. and the voice at the other end told me to perform the normal reboot functions. No good. He claimed to run some tests. Nothing. “Your box is broken,” he typed. “I will send you a new box.” In a few weeks. Okay. When he was done, I noticed a little white card in a slot in the box. I pulled it out and inserted it again. The TV set immediately went on. How do I notify the unreachable cable company? Let’s see if they send the box.

*-- Another hurdler for the well-off: We selected nearly 60 grocery items from our favorite big-box emporium but the "system" shuddered to a halt when the store tried to hand off the order to a delivery service.  I asked for help online and got a personable bloke at a call center -- in Durban, South Africa. I  love Durban! Spent my best three days of the 2010 World Cup alongside the Indian Ocean, smell of curry in the homey little hotel. Great memories. Alas, the agent couldn’t help me, and my food order got blown out during the transfer. I typed it all over again, somehow got the order from a very capable delivery guy. The process? Maddening. But of course we ate well. As I say, indulge me.

*-- We ordered a few basic items from a very good office-supply chain.  It was supposed to take two days,  but got stuck in a warehouse somewhere. A very helpful agent named Pamela convinced me to wait for the delivery, which arrived Saturday morning, four full days after ordering. But as the saying goes, nobody died. 
                   ***
You know what's efficient? I'll tell you what's efficient: The federal government. Medicare. The very thing our Vandal-in-Chief is trying to break. I went online Friday to finalize the drug programs for my wife and myself in 2021. The process took less than 15 minutes for the two of us. Every step was simple. The same thing is true about ventures into Social Security – real people or website -- smart, knowledgeable, polite, able to solve the problem. Just what we need to tear down, according to angry maskless Trumpites.
                      ***
Meanwhile, if we listen carefully, there is the crunch of things being broken, on purpose, Trump still trying to harm immigrants while stuffing goodies into his gunnysack. Evidence of pardons for money, pardons for his sweet little kiddies. People are being told not to believe the obvious election results. 

After this guy vacates the White House, please, somebody, check the silverware. 

Diego Armando Maradona died Wednesday at the age of 60.
Many of us have tales to tell about his genius, about his flaws, about his legendary burst through England’s defenses in the 1986 World Cup, and his other goal that day, a cynical punch of the ball: “The Hand of God.” 
My friend John McDermott, long-time soccer insider (and player in a tough San Francisco league), an American now living in northeast Italy, often visits Napoli, the raffish city settled by Greeks long ago, known for its symbol, the scugnizzi, the street boys.
Playing for SSC Napoli, Maradona from Argentina found his spiritual home. The city of the scugnizzi understood him best.
John McDermott often visits Napoli, for subject matter, to teach photography, to enjoy the city.

On Wednesday, when word came of Maradona’s death, John send me some photos and he also wrote:
“Diego in his finest hour...the 1986 World Cup Final...RIP, Campeon. I first covered him in 1979 for Sports Illustrated, games against Holland in Bern and against Italy in Rome. He was a kid among men but was already acknowledged as an arriving superstar. There were to be many more occasions after that where I witnessed his brilliance first-hand.

“In his book ‘The Simplest Game,’ the distinguished soccer journalist Paul Gardner wrote, 'No player in the history of the World Cup had ever dominated in the way Maradona ruled over Mexico-86.'”
​Of Maradona's legendary solo goal against England in that tournament Gardner described the run as “10 seconds of pure, unimaginable soccer skill to score one of the greatest goals in the history of the World Cup.” Such was his importance to Argentina that the country has just declared three days of national mourning. But he also belonged to Napoli and the southern Italian city is also in mourning. An ironic note, Diego died on the same day as George Best, fifteen years ago. If Maradona and Pelé were the greatest players of all time, Best was not very far behind them.” Photo © John McDermott.

You ask if I ever met Maradona. Sort of.  To prepare for the 1990 World Cup in Italy, the NYT Magazine asked me to write a profile of the stubby wizard who had hijacked the 1986 World Cup. I started doing my homework, as I wrote in my book, “Eight World Cups,”  Henry Holt, 2014.
 
Somebody slipped me Maradona’s home phone number in Naples. I dialed the number and in my very modest Italian I explained my mission. A male voice at the other end immediately switched to a form of Spanish. All right. I switched to my limited Spanish. The man at the other end shifted back to Italian. He seemed to understand my message – I was a New York Times reporter, looking to interview Maradona – and he professed to take my number, and promised to pass it along. I did not get a call back.
 
In the spring of 1990, I went to Naples and with the help of Cristina, the very able NYT bureau translator/guide, I saw Maradona play, meshing perfectly with Careca, a Brazilian forward, the two of them as smooth and swift as a Lamborghini
 
Afterward, Napoli held a press conference in a room near the locker room. To my delight, Maradona himself materialized, his thick curls showing a touch of gray, an earring glittering from his left lobe.
After they lowered the microphone for him – geez, he was short – Maradona began answering questions.
That voice sounded familiar.
Son of a bitch. That was the voice on the other end of the phone, the guy who kept switching languages on me. Cristina said his guttural Italian, with an Argentine accent, was not bad at all.
 
The obits will tell the sad and probably even sordid tale of a genius who fell apart before our eyes, banished from the 1994 World Cup for having a “cocktail” of drugs in his system.
His legacy is contained in the video of one screaming South American broadcaster, witnessing the romp of Diego Armando through the English defense. Never mind the Hand of God scam. This goal was human soccer brilliance, genius on the fly.