Talking About Stanley and Yogi on May 1

4/30/2012

Yogi Berra and Stan Musial go way back. They could even have been teammates except that the Cardinals offered more bonus money to Joe Garagiola than to Yogi, which is how history was made, or altered.

Yogi met Carmen at Stan & Biggie’s restaurant – he was wearing golf spikes.

On Tuesday at the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center in Montclair, N.J., I will be talking about my biography, Stan Musial: An American Life -- about this great and perhaps under-rated Hall of Famer.

http://www.georgevecsey.com/books-by-george-vecsey.html

This is a paid luncheon event at noon, with a copy of the book included in the admission. For information please check the museum web site or call: 973-655-2378.

http://www.yogiberramuseum.org/events.php

Stan and Yogi were both seen as good-luck charms by their teammates. I’ll get into that, too.

Hope to see you there.

GV

Karl Scheibe

6/5/2012 10:32:53 am

I have just completed your STAN MUSIAL: AN AMERICAN LIFE. You and I are about the same age, but I was born in Illinois. (I am a recently retired Professor of Psychology at Wesleyan University.) And like you, I am a lifelong Stan Musial fan. I remember driving through Donora, Pennslyvania on my way to college in Connecticut from Illinois. I remember the first major league ballgame--in Wrigley Field. The year was, I believe, 1950. My hero hit an inside-the-park home run. -- I think your book totally admirable. You show Musial as a brilliant ballplayer, a throughly decent man, and in many ways an ordinary person. Yes, he is, perhaps, underrated--especially in relation to DiMaggio and Williams. And certainly he is much more of a conventional guy. But I never lamented his reputation score. He was just thoroughly admirable--with flaws, to be sure. Maybe he did threaten to kick some kid in the shins one day--but he must have signed a million autographs for others. -- I thought your final chapter--where you meet the Man and touch his small, soft hands, was beautiful. Certainly you had to reach to find the material you needed for this book--for he doesn't have the pizzaz of some of his contemporaries. But you have done your job with delicacy and good taste. -- My commendations.

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8/20/2012 10:33:08 pm

Stan and Yogi were both seen as good-luck charms by their teammates. I’ll get into that, too.

Hope to see you there.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
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

Talking About Stanley and Yogi on May 1

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