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Doug Villhard knew that Red Grange might have been the greatest running back in the history of college football. He was also singularly responsible for helping make the National Football League an established professional league. But Villhard said what drew him to write the historical novel, The Golden Age of Red, was Grange’s alliance with C.C. Pyle, the man who became America’s first sports agent.

The University of Illinois is the setting as the book takes off with Pyle running the Virginia Theater in Champaign, Illinois. The year is 1924 and it's the year that Red Grange, already America’s darling, turns in a performance for the ages against a vaunted Michigan team.

Villhard paints a picture of Pyle as a Hollywood has-been who still has connections (Charlie Chaplin visits him in Champaign). Pyle is a 42-year-old former actor forced to live in the past. Yet he notices when the newsreel lights up the screen in the 1,500-seat theater (that still stands, by the way), customers go wild when Grange’s exploits are shown. “This guy’s a national hero right here on campus and he doesn’t even know it,” figures Pyle who lets Grange sneak in the backdoor to watch the movies to avoid the crowd’s adulation.

The story takes off from there as Villhard takes us on a thrill ride with the man sportswriter Grantland Rice called the Galloping Ghost. Grange charges through a spectacular career with Illinois and carries on to boost the fortunes of the Chicago Bears in the rough-and-tumble NFL, a league that Villhard said was closer to professional wrestling than what we know today as pro football.

The U of I will rededicate the 100-year-old Memorial Stadium on Oct. 19 with ceremonies to include a Red Grange symposium.

College football was a very big deal in the 1920s, especially at big state schools like Illinois and Michigan. That’s why they built a stadium to hold 67,000 in 1924 (today Memorial Stadium has been enlarged to hold more than 80,000). Of course there just weren’t enough seats in any stadium to accommodate all the people who wanted to watch Red Grange play football in 1924.

If you were lucky enough to get one of those seats back on Oct. 18, 1924, you had to be worried at the prospect of facing a fabled Michigan team that came into Champaign riding a 20-game winning streak. 

Following the Michigan coach’s old-school strategy that valued field position over all else, they kicked the ball to Grange who takes it at the five-yard-line. 

Big mistake. Grange runs it back for a touchdown and the rout is on. Grange proceeds to score four times before halftime. In the second half, Grange scores another touchdown, throws a TD pass, and intercepts two passes while playing defense. Final score: Illini 39 Michigan 14.

In 1991, Sports Illustrated cited Grange’s performance in that game as “the most unforgettable moment in sports.”              

Another major character in Villhard’s novel is Coach Bob Zuppke, the Illini coach. Villhard believes the only reason Zuppke isn’t regarded as one of the great football coaches of all time--like Knute Rockne and Amos Alonzo Stagg--was his refusal to sign out-of-state students that later cost him wins in the highly competitive Big Ten. He believed that if you were a true footballer and grew up in Illinois, you should play for the Illini, said Villhard.

The field at Memorial Stadium is named for Zuppke, the "razzle dazzle" coach credited with inventing the huddle, the screen pass, the spiral snap, and the flea flicker (The QB hands the ball off to a running back who laterals the ball to a receiver. The receiver then laterals the ball back to the quarterback for a pass). Zuppke and Grange shared a special relationship but the coach opposed Red going pro and didn’t talk to Grange for years after his greatest star joined the Bears.

It’s a story of World War II but it’s also a story of politics, power, seduction, and intrigue. Did I leave anything out?

Pamela Churchill Harriman didn’t as Sonia Purnell’s book, Kingmaker, makes clear. The British biographer and journalist spent five years gathering information on Harriman’s life, including gaining access to a wealth of fresh research, interviews, and newly discovered sources. 

Harriman, who died in 1997, is well-known as Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law, the 20-year-old who played cards with Winston in the middle of the night when bombs were falling on London but she was also a power broker whose influence extends to the present. It was Harriman who bolstered Joe Biden’s career back in 1988  early in the Delaware senator’s career.

Pamela Harriman got around, to put it mildly. She successfully wooed W. Averill Harriman, the wealthy businessman who came to London as Franklin Roosevelt’s “Lend Lease” representative in 1940—before America was in the war. Lend Lease was the result of Churchill’s efforts in urging FDR to provide a beleaguered Britain with much-needed war supplies—much to the annoyance of the U.S. separatist movement. 

This was a time when England was just hanging on, rapidly running out of manpower, munitions, and supplies as Nazi forces loomed across the channel. But she did even more to advance “Operation Seduction USA,” as Purnell put it: she bedded generals, high-ranking officials, and representatives of the media (most notably Ed Murrow whose “This is London” broadcasts helped Americans experience England’s plight during the Blitz)—all for the sake of jolly old England.

She married Randolph Churchill and had his child, Winston II, but the prime minister’s son, awash in gambling problems, was a disaster as a husband, said Purnell. The pair were divorced following the war and Pamela found herself out of a job along with father-in-law Winston, as Clement Attlee and the Labour Party swept to power in 1945.

After moving to France, she spent time with playboy Prince Aly Khan before falling in love with Gianni Agnelli, the head of auto giant Fiat. After four years the couple broke up but Agnelli, whose own career is one for the books, stayed in touch-- calling Pamela every morning at seven for the rest of her life, said Purnell. 

In 1960 Pamela moved to America and married Leland Hayward, the Broadway producer with shows like South Pacific, The Sound of Music, Mister Roberts and Gypsy to his credit. Harriman enjoyed their 11-year marriage until his death. At age 51, she married Harriman, her lover from the war, and now 79 and a widower. 

Being married to the elder statesman of the Democratic Party kicked off a new chapter in Pamela’s illustrious life—that of a person of influence. “Adversity galvanized her,” noted Purnell, pointing to how she countered the Reagan landslide of 1980 by pumping up Democratic hopes. Harriman reminded them that Churchill came back (getting re-elected prime minister in 1951) and that Democrats could, too. 

At her funeral, Clinton acknowledged that without Harriman’s support, he might never have been president. Purnell noted that it was through Harriman’s connections in Washington, her hobnobbing with the high and mighty, that allowed a young politician from the state of Arkansas to gain visibility and ascend to the national stage. A grateful Clinton named her U.S. ambassador to France, a position she held until her death.

There was virtually nobody of substance in the 20th century that Harriman didn’t know or work with, Purnell said, offering a list that included such luminaries as Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Nelson Mandela.

Earlier biographies have painted Harriman as a sex-obsessed gold digger, a courtesan who craved power, as “the other woman” in her relationships with married men. There w

The 20th century American department store: a palace of consumption where shopping meant something more than simply getting what one needed. Every major city had at least one department store with a name that lives on even in this age of discounters and online buying.

New York, of course, was the nation’s business capital, main market and fashion center. 

Julie Satow tells the story of how women helped develop the department store and fashion in this country even though men owned the buildings. Inside the store, however, women ruled.

When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion is a story of the 20th-century. Satow relates how Hortense Odlum turned Bonwit Teller into a multi-million-dollar success even though she had no training in the retail field. 

Dorothy Shaver helped make it possible for American designers to leave their mark, escaping the shadow of the always-popular Parisian originals at Lord & Taylor while Geraldine Stutz reinvented the look of the modern department store at Henri Bendel in the 1960s.

These women succeeded at a time when the world of work was run by men, noted Satow. “There were very few women bosses around when Hortense Odlum called for change in the 1930s,” she said.

Odlum objected to dresses that “shrieked cheap or whispered chic,” Satow stated. Initially, the entrenched garment industry (dominated by males) was dismissive. But Odlum pushed ahead for quality in women’s clothing. She also had ideas to draw men into the store such as the 721 Club within Bonwit Teller which allowed males to smoke cigars or drink whiskey while watching models exhibit the latest fashions.

Shaver not only promoted American designers but brought Art Deco to America in the late 1920s, said Satow.

Among the many stories that Satow tells in When Women Ran Fifth Avenue involves Salvador Dali, the irreverent surrealist, in 1939. Hired to do a window display at Bonwit Teller, Dali labored all night on his creation that involved a wax dummy stepping into a bathtub. Only the dummy’s blonde wig was crawling with beetles with tears of blood running down her face. Reaching out of the tub were some 100 wax arms holding mirrors. The whole theme was based on Narcissus, the Greek myth detailing the affliction of excessive vanity, said Satow.

Dali finished his window display in the early morning hours and went back to his New York hotel to sleep. Meanwhile, Bonwit Teller opened. Complaints poured in regarding Dali’s window. Customers and passers-by found it objectionable, even obscene.  As a result, the store replaced Dali’s scantily clad figure with a traditional mannequin in a tailored suit.

When Dali came by at two in the afternoon to view his handiwork, he was enraged to see the changes made. After registering a protest with Bonwit officials, Dali returned to the window display and pushed the bathtub right through the store window, sending it and himself crashing to the sidewalk outside the store. Unhurt, Dali was then arrested and held for several hours before paying a fine of $500, the exact price of his commission.

The Dali incident reflects the importance of window displays in the 20th century department store. “By the 1940s, there was a retail rule of thumb that one-third of all sales could be credited to impulse purchases resulting from window displays,” noted Satow.

Among the pioneers of displaying product in store windows was L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In 1897, Baum launched The Show Window, a monthly journal that advised merchants on how to attract a customer’s attention. With the success of his Oz books in 1900, Baum left the retail world behind, said Satow.

But a department store needs more than striking window displays. Satow points to Dorothy Shaver’s work in overhauling Lord & Taylor’s advertising. Shaver hired artist D

The overriding message you get after reading the essays collected by Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University history professor, and Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University Law School, is that all the voting issues of today (charges of voting fraud, voter suppression, and foreign interference with the vote) have been with us a long time.
Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue outlines this country's less-than-illustrious past in pursuing democracy.
"The most significant challenges to free and fair elections in the United States have not, and do not, come from abroad, they have come from domestic actors," writes Nicole Hemmer in her essay on election deception.
Regarding foreign interference, Jeremy Subi noted that "the U.S. was, after World War II, the most aggressive and pervasive foreign election meddler. The Cold War national security state enabled Washington's reach into the election of other societies, but the country's own elections remained largely insulated, until the 21st century."
Greenberg pointed to past presidential elections that were contested in this country. "If the 2000 election was a wake-up call and the 2020 election a full-scale alarm, other elections had also stumbled to the finish line--most famously in 1800, 1824, and 1876," she noted.
Too often, election problems have been left unresolved and "kicked down the road," said Greenberg in an interview with Steve Tarter.
"As we approach the 2024 presidential election, the dangers to democracy of a contested election are now indisputably clear...let's keep our fingers crossed," she stated.

By now most of us have heard of some of the daring deeds executed by the special operations teams that worked undercover during WWII. Shannon Monaghan has added to that body of work through her latest release, A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men.
Monaghan follows the exploits of four Britishers, David Smiley, Peter Kemp, Billy McLean, and Julian Amery. These four show remarkable courage and resilience as they wend their way through WWII from Albania (where the primary goal was to keep German troops tied up in the Balkans rather than heading off to fight Russia) to Cairo to Romania to Thailand and other points in between.
Along the way in Monaghan's book, Peter Fleming pops up. That's Ian Fleming's older brother, a star in his own write and a purported model for the character we know as James Bond.
You learn in Quiet Company that undercover work is anything but easy. You're not only fighting an enemy as dangerous as Nazi Germany but dealing with local political divisions and regional rivalries. Then there's the matter of bureaucracy which dictates movement and supplies.
Monaghan follows her four fighters through the war into other wars and other fronts: the Mideast, Hungary, and Vietnam being a few of them. "They saw the Cold War coming," said Monaghan.
While reading Monaghan's work, clandestine maneuvering becomes routine. In 1949, seeking the help of an Italian military group in overthrowing the Hoxha regime in Albania, our heroes flew in to make their pitch. "If it's no, I'll leave one bottle of brandy in your hotel room. If it's yes, I'll leave six," they were told.
They got six. 

When Ellie Laks found herself communicating with animals early on, she said she didn't think anything of it. But as Laks, continuing with her communications, got older, "people looked at me as though I was crazy," she said.
But Laks also rescued and rehabilitated animals. As co-founder of The Gentle Barn, a rescue mission for animals with no other place to go, she celebrated the organization's 25th anniversary this year with the publication of her second book, Cow Hug Therapy. Laks published Her Gentle Barn in 2014.
She credits a cow named Buddha, a rescue cow that spent 13 1/2 years at the Gentle Barn, for making cow hug therapy possible.
The Gentle Barn has three facilities the public can visit: Los Angeles, Nashville and St. Louis. 
The organization cares for 200 animals with 60 people on staff and hundreds of volunteers, Laks said.
Those interested in visiting are encouraged to book online, she said, noting that private tours and field trips are also available.

Anyone around youngsters knows that among the many benefits is reading children’s books—to your child or to yourself.

Children’s literature offers stories and pictures that we all need to enjoy—not just kids. One of the best examples of that is some of the work done by Chris Sickles of the Red Nose Studio in Greenfield, Ind., just a stone’s throw from where Wilbur Wright was born.

Sickles, 50, is a freelance illustrator whose credits include the New York Times and Wall Street Journal as well as producing The Look Book and Build along with illustrating Elvis is King and Here Comes the Garbage Barge by Jonah Winter, The Beginner’s Guide to Running Away from Home by Jennifer Huget, and The Secret Subway by Shana Covey.

Described as the mastermind of Red Nose Studio, Sickels creates three-dimensional characters and scenes that serve as illustrations for children's books and other projects. You have to see his work to really appreciate it. In his 2022 effort Build, he created “wonky versions” of toy bulldozers, dump trucks, and cranes 

Sickles may say wonky but another way to describe his work is wondrous. There’s imagination at work here that makes you understand why he’s identified as “insanely talented” in one of the accounts of his work online.

His creations come from old pieces of wood, typewriter keys, whatever the artist can glom onto to fire his sculptural artistry. He grew up on a small family farm where things always had to be fixed with what was around. That continues to serve as his approach to art, Sickles said. 

“As an illustrator, my job is to create an image that hopefully makes a viewer or reader stop and pursue content further, whether that’s a book cover or an image in a magazine,” Sickels explained when his work was exhibited at the University of Indianapolis in 2018.

When Sickles did the art for Secret Subway, a story about Eli Beach’s effort to build a pneumatic subway in New York City in 1870, he produced some 20 characters including Beach, himself, Boss Tweed (the mayor who ran New York who opposed Beach’s effort) as well as construction workers, passengers, and New York residents, all in 1870 attire. “I probably got into it more than I should have,” he laughed.

Incidentally, Beach’s block-long subway was demonstrated successfully with much fanfare but unfortunately never went anywhere. With Tweed and the established railway in opposition, once Beach’s effort was discovered, the secret subway was entombed and forgotten. It wasn’t until 1904 that New York finally got its subway.

Sickles said one of the things that appealed to him about the story was that Beach had to deceive city officials to build what he initially described as a way to deliver mail. Pneumatic tubes still serve that function in some places. They’re also still very much in use at drive-in banks. That’s a lesson for kids, the artist said—not to be mischievous—but not to get too hung up with all the rules so often laid down by adults.

On June 24, 1946, a bus carrying 16 members of the Spokane Indians baseball team careened off a mountain pass in Washington’s Cascade mountains, killing nine players. It remains the deadliest accident in the history of American professional sports.

Eric Vickrey’s Season of Shattered Dreams takes us back to that fateful season, providing an account of events leading up to the accident and how individuals coped after such a catastrophic crash.

This was the era of postwar baseball. Like other national institutions, the sport had to recover after four years of fighting. President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized that keeping baseball going through the war could boost the country’s morale but, with 90 percent of the 5,000 professional ballplayers in the country part of the war effort in some capacity, things certainly weren’t the same. Of the 44 minor leagues in the nation, only nine operated during the war, Vickrey noted.

The 1946 season started with promise, however. “Major league training camps overflowed with players attempting to shake off the rust and rediscover baseball skills put on the back burner during the war,” stated Vickrey.

Vic Picetti (rhymes with machete) was the hottest 18-year-old prospect on the Spokane squad. The San Francisco speedster could hit and was considered a sure bet for the major leagues. Vickrey said that one major league team had reportedly offered $50,000 for his services (the equivalent of over $800,000 today).

There’s a picture in Season of Picetti taking instruction from Casey Stengel, then managing in the minors. Vickrey said the Picetti family offered up a scrapbook of the young man’s baseball accomplishments still treasured after almost 80 years since the 18-year-old Picetti died in the bus crash.

The accident took place on Snoqualmie Pass some 50 miles east of Seattle. Vickrey describes how a black sedan, trying to pass a truck on the narrow mountain road, suddenly appeared in the wrong lane in front of the bus as it was headed downhill over the pass. The sedan clipped the front end of the bus. The driver tried valiantly to keep the vehicle on the road but the bus broke through the protective guard cables, plunging over the side of the ravine.

Ben Geraghty, who had earlier switched seats with another player, was thrown out a window. After regaining consciousness, he viewed a gruesome scene: the bus had burst into flames and come finally to rest on the embankment some 300 feet from the road. He took off his jacket to smother the flames from a teammate.

Geraghty recovered and, while he never played baseball again, went on to a 20-year career as a minor-league manager, achieving success with several teams while being highly regarded for his baseball knowledge and handling of players. Hank Aaron, who played for Geraghty with the Jacksonville Braves in 1953, called him the finest human being he ever met.

Jacksonville was a club in the Sally League, made up of teams from Southern states that had never allowed players of color in its 49-year history. That changed in 1953 when Aaron, Felix Mantilla, and Horace Garner joined the team. When black players were prohibited from eating in some of the restaurants with their white teammates, Geraghty would order burgers and bring them back to the bus, noted Vickery.

Sadly, Geraghty never achieved his goal of managing in the big leagues, remaining in the minor leagues to teach players the fundamentals of the game he loved so much. In the minors, players usually traveled by bus which meant Geraghty spent years riding about with the memories of that fateful day Snoqualmie Pass. “Ben would sit behind the driver and consume a case of beer each trip in an attempt to drown away the nightmarish images…of that horrible crash,” stated Pete Wevurski, a sportswriter with the Jersey Journal.

Vickrey also includes the story of Jack “Lucky” Lohrke, a member of the Spokane

Among the digital giants that we've probably come to take for granted is the all-knowing Wikipedia site.
Stephen Harrison has taken notice. In fact, for the past five years, he's been following Wikipedia in a column called "Source Notes" in Slate magazine.
Recent articles of his carry titles such as "Wikipedia is covering the war in Israel and Gaza better than X" and "Wikipedia will survive A.I."
Harrison has carried his interest in Wikipedia over to The Editors, a suspense novel that the Washington Post labels "strikingly relevant." 
Harrison said he became fascinated with Wikipedia after moving to New York several years ago. Wanting to know more about the city's extensive transit system, he consulted Wikipedia and was impressed with the information he found there. After looking up the sources of several specific articles, Harrison found that they were written by a couple of teenagers from Queens. That got him hooked on learning more about the many volunteers who provide input to the site and edit its contents.
Harrison noted that, as in his fictional work, attempts have been made to compete with Wikipedia over the years but, for various reasons, haven't gained traction. 
Harrison says that Wikipedia does a good job of providing "neutral" information but he doesn't recommend it as a single stop for students. "I think it's a good place to start one's research but not to finish there," he said.

As one of the Four Horsemen of the Noir Apocalypse (the others being Dashiell Hammett, James Cain, and Cornell Woolrich), Raymond Chandler has a unique place in our literary history.

Chandler invented Philip Marlowe, after all. He wrote about the mean streets of Los Angeles years before Dragnet. His novels have been developed into quintessential noir movies such as The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely. 

The list of actors who’ve played Marlowe, the definitive private eye, includes Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, George Montgomery, James Garner, Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum, and, most recently, Liam Neeson.

Born in Chicago but raised in England before moving back to the United States in his 20s, Chandler developed a perspective that came through in his writing, said Tom Williams, author of A Mysterious Something in the Light: The Life of Raymond Chandler.

Chandler was the proverbial outsider from the start when his mother placed him in a fancy British prep school. He remained somewhat out of step even after his return to the States, said Williams, noting that “Chandler’s reasonably easy to see but hard to grasp.” 

If you listen to Chandler’s voice on some of the interviews that exist, you find his accent is neither British nor American but just different, Williams said. 

Chandler found his footing in Los Angeles, however, when, while in his 40s, he turned to writing detective fiction. Fascinated and encouraged by pulp magazines like Black Mask, Chandler wrote lines like “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.”

Marlowe’s dialogue had a purity and straightforwardness that explains the character’s popularity with readers but Chandler (often photographed with a pipe clenched tightly between his teeth) could be difficult, noted Williams.

When James Cain, the author of Double Indemnity, wasn't available to write the movie screenplay (he was under contract to another studio), the call went out for Chandler. So began a rocky 10-week collaboration between Chandler and the film’s director, Billy Wilder.

The two men were unable to get along from the first, said Williams, suggesting that collaboration wasn’t Chandler's strong suit. At one point, Chandler left the studio in a huff, citing a slew of complaints about Wilder, blaming him for everything from arriving late to meetings to opening the blinds without permission.

Despite their differences, the film that was produced stands as a classic, Williams said. In casting Fred MacMurray, better known for comedic roles, as the wayward insurance salesman, the audience found a likable murderer, he said.

Chandler also had problems with another famous director. While Chandler’s name appears on a screen credit on Strangers on a Train, he didn’t have much to do with the film, often cited as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best. It seems that Chandler reportedly referred to Hitchcock as “that fat bastard,” a comment that Hitch apparently overheard after making a special trip to Chandler’s home in La Jolla to discuss the screenplay.

Chandler wrote a script for the film but Hitchcock not only didn’t use it but made a ceremonious gesture of dropping Chandler’s effort in the trash during a production meeting for the film.

Lest you think that Chandler and Philip Marlowe exist only in noir’s colorful past, the Los Angeles Times reported earlier this year that the Chandler estate has been licensing new literary treatments of the private eye with different authors since 1989. In The Goodbye Coast, published in 2022, Marlowe drives a 2008 Mustang GT and knows how to use GPS.