Read Beat (...and repeat)

There are a lot of baseball books out there but few delve into the kind of detail that Steve Gietschier (rhymes with "itchier") delivers in "Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years."
His book covers the sport from the depths of the Great Depression to the uncertainties of World War II right through the 1950s. Gietschier draws his title from the quote, "I prefer turbulent progress rather than quiet stagnation," uttered by Brooklyn Dodger executive Branch Rickey, the man who integrated the major leagues by inserting Jackie Robinson into the Dodger lineup in 1946.
While Robinson broke the color barrier, another individual highlighted by Gietschier brought color to the game. Bill Veeck, the man responsible for planting ivy in Wrigley Field  was both a promoter and a forward thinker, the author told Steve Tarter.
Veeck served in the Marines during WWII, suffering an injury that later resulted in the amputation of his right leg. But losing a leg didn't slow Veeck, the owner of the Cleveland Indians when they won the World Series in 1948.  After taking over the St. Louis Browns, Veeck was responsible for sending 3-foot-7 Eddie Gaedel to the plate in 1951, the smallest batter to ever appear in a major league game (Gaedel walked on four pitches as you might have figured).
Veeck later took ownership of the Chicago White Sox. "He was renown for trying to attract fans," noted Gietschier, who shed light on the exploits of another executive,  Harry Frazee, the former Peorian who was the Boston Red Sox owner  remembered for selling Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1920.
Ruth was sold for $100,000 (in today's money, that would be $1.5 million).
While the story goes that Frazee sold off Ruth to finance his Broadway productions, that version isn't quite right, said Gietschier. 
"You have to remember that Ruth, while a rising talent in 1920, wasn't doing what Shohei Ohtani is doing for the Los Angeles Angels this year, starring as both pitcher and slugger," he said, adding that Ruth was also a troublemaker and a free spirit at that time. 
The fact that Ruth slammed 54 home runs in his first year with the Yankees, 39 more than the National League home-run leader, forever tainted the transaction that Red Sox fans have agonized over for 100 years.
  

America was a nation of farmers in the 19th century. As R. Douglas Hurt notes in his book, "Agriculture in the Midwest 1815-1900," someone in 1900 born after the War of 1812 would have seen dramatic changes in farming practices.
"They would be able to recount harvesting wheat with a sickle. They could discuss threshing a crop with a machine. They would have observed the power of a steam engine and, by the end of the century, perhaps heard about a gas-powered engine that suggested great promise for a new form of agricultural power," he said.
Early in the 19th century, 80 percent of Americans lived on a farm. It was also a nation of immigrants. Families arrived from Europe, moving to the Midwest in search of a place to farm in places like the Grand Prairie of Indiana and Illinois or fields in Michigan or Ohio.
"Irish, German, Polish and Scandinavian immigrants, like their earlier counterparts from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states and the Upper South sought opportunity in the Midwest that only the land could provide," he noted.
By 1850, one-third of Wisconsin's population was born abroad, Hurt told Steve Tarter.
Hurt documents the evolution of the American farm in the Midwest, starting with the acquisition of land, the development of market towns like Chicago and Cincinnati and the ever-changing drive for efficiency in the field, whether growing crops or raising livestock.
The book begins by following Aristarchus Cone, a young man of 22, who arrives in Peoria by steamboat in 1837 to find a place in the sun. Cone takes off on foot and treks the 90 miles to Rock Island before crossing into what would later become Muscatine County in Iowa.
Cone sets up a farm in Iowa and stayed right there until 1905 when he died at the age of 90, noted Hurt, who focuses on individual accomplishment rather than statistics to tell his story.

Come with us now to a stretch of lonely desert in New Mexico during the latter days of World War II. Under extreme secrecy, there’s activity here that involves the country’s top military officials and some of the best minds in the world, scientists steeped in cutting-edge physics at work harnessing a nuclear chain reaction that will result in the first atomic bomb.

That’s the story that Janet Farrell Brodie tells in her book, “The First Atomic Bomb—The Trinity Site in New Mexico.” The action takes place 220 miles south of Los Alamos, the government’s secret laboratory where the Manhattan Project sought to develop a new weapon on untold power.

Before the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war with Japan, the atomic weapon was tested in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945.

As we soon learned when the bombs leveled two Japanese cities, the test was successful if you consider it a success coming up with the deadliest weapon ever conceived.

But just as the new movie, "Oppenheimer," reveals, the testing that took place in New Mexico faced plenty of obstacles. "It was a case of extreme secrecy. Everything had to be routed to avoid the possibility of a potential spy or noisy neighbor finding out what was going on. They used fake addresses and fake names," said Brodie.

The secrecy that cloaked the test site remains to this day, she said. While open to the public, it's only for a few hours on just one or two days a year.  "There's nothing really to see but quite beautiful desert," said Brodie who told Steve Tarter that she and her husband paid a visit to the site on the designated day several years ago.

There were actually two tests made in the desert, she said. The first, called "the 100-ton test," using only "a little bit of plutonium" "shocked some scientists" with the amount of radioactive particles that were released, she said.

After the Trinity test proved successful two months later,  atomic components were immediately on their way to Japan, said Brodie. "Everything was rushed." she said.

Brodie describes the atmosphere at the time of the test and the work that surrounded the project, building roads, dealing with neighboring residents (who lived miles away) and the interaction among the scientists, themselves.

The author also touches on Operation Paperclip in her book, the code name for the project that brought some 1,600 German scientists, technicians and their families to the United States following the war, helping develop  U.S. weaponry as well as assisting the American space program at NASA.

As the co-founder of American Prairie, Curtis Freese is an ecologist working to help restore the wildlife in the grasslands of the Great Plains. His book, "Back From the Collapse," is a study in what's happened over the years in the Great Plains and what's being done to establish a large refuge that will let bison, wolves, beaver, prairie dogs and grassland birds thrive once again.
In explaining his title, Freese said that the collapse refers to animal populations that have seen losses of 90 percent or more. "The beaver was the first to go in the early 1800s due to the fur trade," he told Steve Tarter.
The loss of beaver meant a keystone species was affected. "Beavers are the ultimate ecosystem engineers, surpassed only by humans in their ability to alter the landscape and what grows on it," stated Freese.
Beavers have even more impact on the semiarid systems found on the western Great Plains. "Beavers can ecologically transform small upland streams from narrow channels of water bordered by grass to ponds and marshes bordered by forest with far-reaching consequences for biodiversity," he said.
Freese pointed out that Native Americans recognized the beaver's role in the ecosystem.  
Following the decimation of beaver populations, the bison and big predators were all but eliminated in the Plains before the 19th century was over, he said.
"In the 1880s and 1890s, four to six thousand wolves were killed every year just in eastern Montana," said Freese, noting that tactics included loading up a dead buffalo with strychnine. "Pretty soon there'd be a dozen dead wolves around the carcass," he said.
Freese touts present efforts to add on to the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in Montana, an area that spans 5,000 square miles. "American Prairie (americanprairie.org) wants to run it just like a national park," he said, adding that camp sites and huts are available to the public.
The Great Plains was once the American version of the Serengeti, said Freese, referring to the African refuge with its lions, wildebeest and Cape buffalo.
"People have forgotten what that looks like," he said, touting the range of North American animals that once roamed the Great Plains.

“It attacks old and young alike,” declared the Pike County Democrat in 1866. The Illinois newspaper wasn’t talking about a cholera epidemic but baseball fever.

Robert Sampson details the game’s early popularity in Illinois in his new book, “Ballists, Dead Beats and Muffins: Inside Early Baseball in Illinois.”

In the aftermath of the Civil War, papers up and down the state were singing the praises of this new phenomenon called base ball (two words back then).

“(Baseball) is spreading like an epidemic,” the Chicago Tribune observed. “Everybody is batting balls and running bases—young, middle-aged and old,” stated the Cairo Democrat.

“At Peoria, ballclubs sprouted everywhere,” wrote Sampson, editor of the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, who identified Captain M.A. Stearns, an Army recruiter in Peoria as one of those who encouraged adoption of the game by organizing the Olympic Base Ball Club in town.

Before he was shipped off to a new post in Fort Reno in the Montana Territory, Stearns did his best—as club president and as a pitcher—to help establish baseball in Peoria. Never mind that his team lost to the Celestial Club of Pekin by a 53 to 35 score.

As for the title, ballists were what they called ball players back them while the Dead Beats was just one of the many figurative names that teams took in those early days (such as the Lively Turtles of Rock Island). Muffins were players that weren't all that accomplished, said Sampson, adding that games between teams made entirely of muffins often drew large crowds.

Access to a train line was important for baseball teams that wanted to travel, Sampson told Steve Tarter. “With few exceptions, teams were in cities, towns and villages served by the growing railroad network in Illinois, soon to become the largest  system of all the states in the union,” he said.

Peoria teams had the benefit of traveling by rail or river. “The Fort Clark Base Ball Club and supporters boarded a special car attached to a train for a match with Chillicothe while, a year earlier, Peoria’s club took the Peoria City Steamboat up the Illinois River to Lacon, promising passengers multiple recreation activities on board and on land,” Sampson noted.

You had your early heroes in this new game. Pana attorney J.C. McQuigg would later be recognized as the Babe Ruth of his era, the author said, “striking the ball so hard it was termed a ‘hummingbird,’ posing a danger to fielders who got in the way."

By 1870, the baseball craze had cooled. It had become established with more organized leagues taking over but the novelty was gone, said Sampson. So were the long accounts that newspapers had been running (that provided the basis for his book).

The battle for civil rights in the United States has always involved people willing to stand up and be passionate about what they believe. Two of those people were Mary McLeod Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt. The alliance between the two women forms the basis for “The First Ladies” by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, a work of historical fiction that allows the reader to better understand what racial conditions were like in the 1930s and 1940s.

Mary McLeod Bethune was born in Mayesville, S. C. in 1875, the 15th child of former slaves Patsy and Sam McLeod, the first child in the family to be born free. Young Mary got to attend school even though her father had initially wanted her to join her brothers and sisters in the fields. After learning to read, Mary received the opportunity to attend the Scotia Seminary in Concord, N.C. and then the Moody Bible College in Chicago. She made the most of it, pledging to encourage education.

After marrying Albertus Bethune in 1898, she heard that there was no school for black children in Daytona Beach, Fla. She decided to start one. She opened the school in 1904 with five students. A year later the school had 100 students and three teachers. Later that school turned into Bethune-Cookman College.

Before FDR became president, Eleanor Roosevelt was impressed with Bethune the activist and educator. Roosevelt was drawn into a friendship with someone who shared the same beliefs in women’s rights and the power of education. The two women become fast friends, Benedict and Murray told Steve Tarter, confiding their secrets, hopes and dreams with each other.
  
 When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president, the two women began to collaborate more closely, particularly as Eleanor moved toward her own agenda separate from FDR, a consequence of the discovery of her husband’s love affair with a member of his staff. Eleanor became a controversial First Lady for her outspokenness, particularly on civil rights.

While Eleanor Roosevelt blazed a trail for equality at the highest levels of government, Bethune worked on the job front. Franklin Roosevelt appointed her to the National Youth Administration to help promote promote employment during the Depression. As a result she became the first African-American woman to hold such a lofty position in Washington.

“I think about the things that Mary went through,” said Murray. “Here she was one of the most powerful black Americans in the country but when she went to visit Eleanor Roosevelt and FDR in the White House she had to ride in the colored car on the train from Florida to Washington, D.C. She lived in both worlds.”

Benedict and Murray, both accomplished writers, collaborated last year on “The Personal Librarian” and have a third book of historical fiction planned together for release next year.
 
 

Public broadcasting wasn’t some grand plan that just happened. Josh Shepperd traces the setbacks, minor victories and hard work that had to take place before the experiment that is public broadcasting took shape.

His book, “Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting,” identifies the universities that built the first educational program networks in the 1930s.

You learn, for example, that Carl Menzer served as engineer, announcer and station manager at the University of Iowa radio station in Iowa City in those early days. He was also a one-man show on the air, willing to go to great lengths to meet federal criteria for a full broadcast day, said Shepperd. “To meet requirements for on-air programming, Menzer took to playing his violin for hours on end over the air,” said Shepperd.

Later Menzer got the idea of having other Big 10 schools supply programming that the stations could trade with one another, later to be known as the “bicycle network” as programs were "pedaled" between stations. Between the 1930s and late 1940s, Menzer was responsible for exploring different ways to relay and exchange information between radio stations. He also helped found the University of Iowa’s TV station.

While NPR has soared in recent years as the driving news force on radio, radio was only penciled in at the last second when Washington passed legislation that led to establishing public broadcasting networks in this country. Shepperd noted that originally the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 only mentioned television. The word “television” was crossed out and replaced by ”broadcasting” on the original bill, said Shepperd.

Mark Dawidziak has a new book out, this one on Edgar Allan Poe. It takes its place on the bookshelf alongside other volumes Dawidziak has written. It’s a varied lot with subjects such as Mark Twain (who he has portrayed on stage for 44 years), Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Matheson and classic TV shows like “Twilight Zone,” “Columbo,” and “Kolchak: the Night Stalker.”

In the new book, Dawidziak makes the point that Poe is completely misunderstood. “Our vision of Poe remains a blurry one, at best,” he writes. “The Poe we know—or think we know—is a grotesque caricature. He’s the sickly pasty guy with the sunken eyes, huddled over a manuscript in an attic, a raven perched on his shoulder. A red-eyed black cat sits among the cobwebs at one hand, a bottle of cognac at the other. We’ve reduced him to this cartoonish image, letting a small part of his literary output completely frame that distorted perception,” noted Dawidziak.

But Poe, famous for writing “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Raven,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” was so much more than a creator of horror tales, Dawidziak told Steve Tarter. In his short life—Poe died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 40 in 1849—Poe’s largest output came as a literary critic and a tough one (nicknamed the tomahawk). He was also an accomplished poet.

“Poe had to find sources of income. He sought to support himself as a professional writer. That was not the norm. Most writers at that time had a day job such as being a teacher,” said Dawidziak.

As a result, Poe wrote a lot—enough to fill 17 volumes when his collected works were published in the early 20th century. “Poe was also funny. He wrote as much comedy as he did horror. We just don’t read the funny stuff,” he said.

Along the way, Poe also created the modern detective story, said Dawidziak, noting that the author "was a dedicated artist who was constantly revising manuscripts."

While Mark Twain’s image has expanded beyond “Huck Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” with the release of writings that showed “he had a lot to say about religion, and the damn human race,” the view of Poe has not similarly been enlarged, said Dawidziak.

“One of the reasons I wrote the book was while the publisher was interested in the mystery of his death, I was more interested in how he lived,” Dawidziak said.

Doug Howard and David Bianculli produced an entire book about endings, specifically television finales. The book, “Television Finales—from ‘Howdy Doody’ to ‘Girls’” (2018), is a collection of essays edited by Howard and Bianculli that catalog the last show in  a series where an effort is made to provide closure, answer lingering questions or send characters off to different spin-offs.

The most famous TV finale came when “The Fugitive” added a late-summer two-part conclusion in 1967 allowing Richard Kimble to stop running, a watershed moment for television, said Howard.

But it wasn’t by grand design. “ABC wasn’t at all interested in ending ‘The Fugitive,’” said Bianculli, who also serves as a TV critic on NPR’s “Fresh Air. “But after they ran the finale in the dead of summer and outrated an appearance by the Beatles on the ‘Ed Sullivan Show’ three years earlier that had been the biggest TV event up to that point, the finale became common and almost mandatory,” he said.

The first finale of note came on “Howdy Doody,” a kids show that finished a 13-year run in 1960. That’s when the camera closes in on Clarabell the Clown, a character played by three different actors, none of whom had uttered a word in 13 years. 

When Clarabelle says very quietly, “Goodbye, kids,” Howard suggests the effect might have proved alarming for some people. “If you had any kind of clown phobia, this is your worst nightmare come true,” he said, adding the scene is available on YouTube.

But finales are known to stir fans that have followed a particular program for years, said Howard, an English professor at Suffolk County Community College in New York. “Sometimes people don’t want to say goodbye,” he said.

Bianculli told Steve Tarter that the finale of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” was “very Seinfeld-ian” That’s when creator Carl Reiner (who played Alan Brady on the show) announced plans to play Rob Petrie, the chief writer, in the final episode.

Sometimes finales don’t go over or come too late, noted Bianculli, the professor of TV studies at Rowan University. “The finale to ‘The Walking Dead’ was like the dog that caught a car that stopped. At one time it was the most-watched cable show and it was excellent over the first several years. But the show refused to die. It went on too long. I’m just not interested in any spinoffs at this point,” he said.

When it comes to TV finales, however, the hardest thing may just be keeping up. Both Howard and Bianculli admitted to looking forward to two finales this Memorial Day weekend—when “Barry” and “Succession” come to an end. 

In writing "The Influencer Industry," Emily Hund, a University of Pennsylvania researcher, had a challenge: to explore the "increasingly-commercialized, social media-focused and sprawling internet environment" to find the influencers, the people that we go to to find truth or at least what we believe to be the truth.
"Amid the immense noise of social media content, who should be singled out as worth listening to?" That's the question that Hund posed.
What she found out is that the game has changed.  In the internet's early years, there were bloggers who gained audiences, individuals who did an end run around traditional media to reach the public.
But as more money came into play, as advertising campaigns became involved, as marketers took action branding deals followed and the influencer industry grew at a startling rate, said Hund.
Today with "a massive pool of influencers" on the scene, Tik Tok plays a major role when it comes to the influencer industry.
"We've reached an existential turning point," Hund told Steve Tarter. The public is rightfully frustrated now but needs to aware of what has happened: "The mass media era of the 20th century became atomized in the 21st, personal stories and interactions became vehicles for commercial messages," she noted.
"Digital self-expression, and the degree to which it is considered 'real,' became tied to the shifting needs of profit-motivated companies," writes Hund.