Drye Goods

The Golden Anniversary of Maris's Remarkable Season is Being Forgotten

2011-09-12T12:01:00.016-04:00

No one seems to be noticing that 50 years ago this month, Roger Maris was closing in on one of Major League Baseball's most revered records.

By September 12, 1961, Maris had hit 56 home runs and was within sight of the legendary Babe Ruth's single-season record of 60, which Ruth set in 1927.

But Maris's phenomenal home run production had suddenly tailed off as the 1961 season was drawing to a close. On September 12, he went homer-less against the Chicago White Sox and was in the middle of a seven-game dry spell. He wouldn't hit home run number 57 until September 16 against the Detroit Tigers.

Maris was feeling the pressure of his run on Ruth's record. Teammate Mickey Mantle also was in the chase for the record with 53 home runs, and he'd become the sentimental favorite among fans and sportswriters to break the record. But an injury would shorten Mantle's season, and he'd finish with 54 home runs.

Maris, 26 at the time, was a quiet, no-nonsense man who'd grown up in Fargo, North Dakota. (Click here to see an essay about a family connection to Maris.) He was unaccustomed to the intense public scrutiny that came with playing baseball in New York City and was annoyed by the constant presence of reporters. He'd been labeled by reporters as surly and uncooperative during post-game interviews. He was losing sleep, and was in such a state of anxiety that his hair was falling out.

And although there were still 16 games remaining on the Yankees' 1961 schedule after the game of September 12, Major League Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick announced that same day that unless Maris or Mantle hit 61 home runs by the 154th game of the season, it would not count as a new single-season record.

The reason for Frick's ruling was because in 1961, the American League had added two new teams and extended its season to 162 games. So Mantle and Maris would play eight more games that season than Ruth's Yankees had played in 1927.

What Frick did not announce with his ruling was that he'd been a good friend of Ruth's and did not want to see the Babe's record eclipsed.

Maris had raised his home run total to 58 when the Yankees took the field in Baltimore September 19 for a double-header against the Orioles that would be games 153 and 154. He went hitless in the first game and managed only a single in the second game. So in the eyes of Ford Frick, Ruth's single-season record was still intact.

Maris hit homer number 59 the following day against Baltimore, and he hit number 60 when the Orioles came to Yankee Stadium on September 26.

Maris's final home run of the 1961 season came on October 1 against pitcher Tracy Stallard of the Boston Red Sox. In the fourth inning, Maris took two pitches outside the strike zone. But he connected on Stallard's third pitch, a knee-high fastball on the outside corner.

"There it is," announcer Red Barber said the moment the ball left Maris's bat and sailed into the right-field stands. "Sixty-one."

Maris rounded the bases with his head down and went straight to the Yankees' dugout after touching home plate. He seemed surprised at the lengthy ovation from about 23,000 fans who attended the game, and, with a big smile on his face, stepped out of the dugout twice to acknowledge the cheers.

No one would approach Maris's accomplishment until the steroid-riddled seasons of the late 1990s. (Click here for a Drye Goods essay about that.) Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds all shattered Maris's single-season record, but all of them later were linked to using performance-enhancing steroids when they were piling up their astronomical home run totals.

In my mind, that makes Maris's feat all the more remarkable. Even though he had eight more games than Ruth, he did it without cheating. I've watched a lot of baseball games this season, and I don't recall hearing any mention of the golden anniversary of this achievement. And that seems wrong. Why isn't Major League Baseball officially observing this milestone? Could it be that they don't want anything that might remind fans of the absurd number of home runs hit during the steroid era?

Active 2011 Atlantic hurricane season predicted by CSU forecasters

2011-04-12T09:24:00.004-04:00

Forecasters at Colorado State University are predicting that the summer of 2011 will bring another active hurricane season to the Atlantic Basin.

Meteorologists Phil Klotzbach and William Gray think 16 named tropical storms will form between June 1 and November 30. Of those storms, nine will develop into hurricanes with winds of at least 74 mph, and five of those will intensify into major hurricanes with winds exceeding 110 mph.

Klotzbach and Gray think the active season will be fueled by very warm waters in the Atlantic Basin, which includes the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. The CSU forecasters also think that a weather phenomenon known as La Nina also will enhance storm formation in the Atlantic.

A La Nina event occurs when waters in the equatorial region of the Pacific Ocean are cooler than usual. The cooler waters often cause atmospheric conditions over the Atlantic Basin that allow tropical storms to develop. These favorable conditions can include diminished wind-shear. When wind-shear is high over the Atlantic, tropical storms have trouble forming and strengthening because the wind-shear disrupts their development.

If the 2011 hurricane season is active, it will continue a trend of busy seasons that began in 1995. Gray, a pioneer in the science of long-range hurricane forecasting, thinks this cycle of active seasons is caused by changes in salt content of the Atlantic waters. Salt level fluctuates because of ocean currents. An increase in the salt content makes ocean waters warmer, and hurricanes draw their enormous energy from warm water.

The cycle of active hurricane seasons can last 20 years or longer.

Last summer's hurricane season was the third-most active on record, but the activity went virtually unnoticed because no storm made landfall in the U.S. Meteorologists including Gray and Klotzbach don't think this kind of luck can continue.

Alabama Family Will Donate Historic House for Renovation as African-American History Museum

2011-04-06T21:11:00.008-04:00

(NOTE: This is a news release I've sent out about the effort to renovate one of Plymouth's oldest and most historic structures.)

An Alabama family with North Carolina roots will donate an early 19th-century house dating back to the earliest days of Plymouth's history for renovation and use as a museum depicting African-American history and culture.

The house, listed in the National Register of Historic Places as the Picot-Armistead-Pettiford House, will be donated by the family of Velma and James Braye of Tuskegee Institute, Alabama to a non-profit organization to be designated in Plymouth. The donation was arranged by the Plymouth Small Town Main Street Committee, with assistance from senior historian Carl Westmoreland of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati.

The Brayes, their daughter Linda Bulls, son-in-law George Bulls, and granddaughter Salena Bulls decided to donate the house after a private meeting in Plymouth April 1 that included family friend Peter McNair, Westmoreland and his wife Carol, and representatives of the Plymouth Small Town Main Street Committee.

Earlier that day, nine-year-old Salena Bulls said she thought it would be "great" if the house was used as a museum. "Like Salena, I think it's a wonderful thing that the house will be utilized as an African-American history museum," said Velma Braye, who grew up in the house. "It's something I've been wanting since 2000.

Braye's mother, Gladys Whitley, who died in 2000, was the house's last occupant.

Westmoreland said the house is a "capsule of history" whose historic stature is enhanced by its unusual succession of owners.

"Each owner made a significant contribution to Plymouth and to the whole notion of American striving and attainment," Westmoreland said.

The two-story wood-frame house overlooking the Roanoke River was built in 1814 by physician Julian Picot, a Frenchman who is thought to have come to the settlement that is now Plymouth in the 1780s after being shipwrecked on Ocracoke Island. Picot arrived in Plymouth at about the same time the town was established in 1787. Plymouth was incorporated in 1807, only seven years before Picot bought a lot at the corner of West Main and Monroe streets where he built the house.

Plymouth, located about six miles upstream from where the Roanoke River empties into the Albemarle Sound, became one of North Carolina's busiest ports after the nearby Dismal Swamp Canal opened in 1805. Ships loaded at Plymouth traveled down the Roanoke, across the Albemarle Sound, and through the canal to the deepwater port about 100 miles away at Norfolk, Virginia.

In 1844 the title to the house and lot was transferred to Robert Armistead, a Plymouth merchant. Robert Armistead died in 1857, but his brother Thomas lived in the house until after the Civil War. Plymouth saw heavy fighting during the war, and Thomas Armistead's house was one of only a handful of buildings that weren't heavily damaged or destroyed before the war ended in 1865.

Local oral history has long linked the house to the Underground Railroad that helped escaped slaves in the Antebellum South find their way to freedom. But some historians challenge that theory because the 1850 Census indicates that both Armistead brothers owned slaves.

Thomas Armistead's house was sold at a public auction in 1886 to William H. Hampton. The house stayed in the Hampton family until 1913, when it was bought by Jane Brinkley. The following year, Brinkley sold the house to Reuben Pettiford, an African-American brick mason.

Westmoreland, the historian, noted that this transaction in which a white owner sold a house to a black buyer was very unusual in 1914.

Reuben Pettiford died in 1916, but his descendants still own the house. The fact that the house has stayed in the hands of an African-American family for nearly a century and was used as a boarding house and hotel for blacks during the so-called "Jim Crow" era of segregation also is historically significant, Westmoreland said.

"We are delighted that the Braye family has decided to make this huge contribution to our effort to improve downtown Plymouth," said Willie Drye, chairman of Plymouth's Small Town Main Street Committee. "The Picot-Armistead-Pettiford House is one of North Carolina's most historic buildings, and the restoration of this great old house as a museum of African-American history and culture will be a milestone for our downtown commercial district. This will be a wonderful addition to our collection of museums focusing on Plymouth's rich maritime, Civil War and natural histories."

The Small Town Main Street Committee will immediately launch a fund-raising effort to put a new roof on the house and stabilize the historic structure, Drye said. Advisors from the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources will help plan the roof, he said.

Bob Feller, 1918-2010

2010-12-16T08:30:00.018-05:00

Bob Feller was an affable Iowa farmboy who happened to have a thunderbolt attached to his right arm. The passing years took away that thunderbolt, but did nothing to diminish Feller's genuine friendliness toward baseball fans who loved the same game he did.

Feller died of leukemia yesterday at the age of 92. When my old pal Alan Snel in Tampa sent me a link to the news story about his passing, I immediately thought of the moment when I met Feller briefly in Port St. Lucie, Florida when he signed an autograph for me in, I think, 1994.

I collect about anything that's related to baseball, and I have the cover from the April 19, 1937 edition of Time magazine that featured "Rapid Robert" on the cover. Feller, 19 years old and still fresh off the farm, had a lopsided, "aw shucks" grin as he fingered a baseball that he could reportedly throw at 104 mph.

Feller was signing autographs before the minor league St. Lucie Mets played a Florida State League game at Thomas J. White Stadium. Feller, a Hall of Famer, wasn't charging for his autograph, something that players routinely do today.

I put the Time cover in front of Feller and asked him to sign it. He seemed a bit surprised to see it, and picked it up to look at it a little more closely. After studying the photo of himself as a teenager, he said he remembered the photo, and also said something about breaking his father's ribs with a pitch.

I didn't quite understand what he said, but there was a long line of people waiting behind me and I didn't have time to quiz him about it. He signed his name on the cover and handed it to me and I stepped aside for the next person in line. Before I was out of earshot, however, I heard Feller finding something to say to each fan who stepped up to get his autograph. Again, that's an unusual courtesy by today's standards.

Later, I discovered that the April 19, 1937 edition of Time included an anecdote about Feller cracking three of his father's ribs with an errant curveball when he was 14.

In 18 seasons with the Cleveland Indians from 1936 to 1956, he threw smoking fastballs past American League batters, compiling 2,581 career strikeouts and winning 266 games.

Feller undoubtedly would have surpassed 300 wins and probably added at least another 1,000 strikeouts to his total had he not spent four years in the Navy during World War II.

NOTE: The photo at the top of this post is my memento from my brief meeting with Feller. The other photo of Feller was shot by Alan Snel at a ballpark in Florida and is used with his permission.

December 7, 1860: A Nation on the Verge of Exploding

2010-12-07T22:40:00.008-05:00

As Christmas approached in 1860, the United States was a very edgy nation. After decades of debate and compromise and political equivocation about the morality of legalized slavery, the issue of institutional bondage was pulling the country apart.

Many Southerners were incensed at the election of Abraham Lincoln a month earlier, and passions were so hot in South Carolina that the state legislature was seriously talking about leaving the Union. And they weren't angry because Lincoln had pledged to end slavery. Lincoln, a pragmatist to the core, hadn't said anything about ending the "unique institution" that underpinned the South's agrarian economy. South Carolinians were furious because he'd said he simply was opposed to the expansion of slavery into territories that weren't even states at the time.

So on Friday, December 7, 1860, the United States was a nation that was about to burst apart even though Lincoln would not take office until March 1861. The newspapers of the day were filled with stories about "the crisis of the Union" and the "disunion question" and worries about whether South Carolina's inflammed passions would spread and prompt other Southern states to withdraw from the Union.

In the South, slaveowners were terrified of an insurrection by their slaves. On December 7, 1860, the New York Times published a letter from an unnamed woman in South Carolina to her uncle in New York City.

"The country here is all aglow with the fires of revolution, and such is the intensity of excitement that we can scarcely find time or inclination to talk or think of anything else than the political topics of the day, and the moral and social consequences directly pertaining to secession," she wrote. "I fear that secession and revolution are, with our people, foregone conclusions; that we have gone too far, retraction and recession are impossible, and that civil war with all its consequent horrors is already upon us."

In that same issue, the Times also published a letter from a young man in Tennessee to his father in which the Tennessee resident worried about the fragmenting of the country and the possibility that slaves would take up arms against Southern slaveowners.

"(T)he passions of the people (are) being aroused, in both sections of the country, and ambitious demagogues (are) urging them on," he wrote.

The letter-writer told his father he had no particular desire to defend slavery but would take up arms to defend his family. "What do you think, father, of going to California?" he wrote. "Not to avoid danger, or to desert any to whom we owe help, but to go, all of us, where we shall be at peace from this question, which is so much to be lamented on all accounts."

The worst fears of these and other Americans came to pass. The Civil War would erupt in April 1861 when South Carolina troops fired on federal troops manning Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina.

The war is still the bloodiest in the nation's history. And it still stirs passions and causes consternation 150 years later. For most of my adult life, I've been pondering my family's involvement in that war, and I'm still trying to make sense of it. As we observe the Civil War Sesquicentennial, I'm going to post some thoughts, comments and documented family history about that war. Please watch for those posts and comment on them where you think it's appropriate.

NOTE: The illustration at the top of this post is a political cartoon from 1860 commenting on how the election of Abraham Lincoln as president tore at the nation's political bonds.

Study Shows Gulf Coast Hurricanes Weaken Before Landfall

2010-12-02T06:08:00.012-05:00

The U.S. Gulf Coast has been pounded by some fierce hurricanes in the past decade, but a recent study shows that cooler waters near the shore kept the storms from being much worse.

The study was conducted by the National Hurricane Center in Miami and Colorado State University.

Hurricanes draw their power from warm ocean water that has been heated to at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit to a depth of around 160 feet. During the summer, the water in the central and southern Gulf of Mexico often is much warmer than 80 degrees, and this water has fueled some of the most intense hurricanes in history.

In 2005, these warm waters allowed Hurricane Dennis to become one of the most powerful July hurricanes on record. On July 7, Dennis's winds reached 150 mph as it roared across the Gulf about 500 miles southeast of Mobile, Alabama. It looked like the eye of the powerful storm was going to go straight up Mobile Bay and into downtown Mobile as a devastating Category 4 hurricane.

But when Dennis got within about 150 miles of the coast, it encountered the cooler inshore water and that helped reduce its fearsome power. Still, the storm made landfall between Mobile and Pensacola as a Category 3 storm with winds of about 120 mph.

The cooler waters near shore also probably helped diminish two other very intense hurricanes just before they made landfall on the Gulf Coast in the summer of 2005 -- Hurricane Katrina in August and Hurricane Rita in September.

"It's something special about the Gulf of Mexico," said Mark DeMaria, one of the co-authors of the study.

The study noted that when storms are over the central and southern Gulf of Mexico, they're over warm water from the tropics. On average, storms' winds intensify by about 8 mph for every 12 hours they're over this water, the study said.

But the water in the northern Gulf hasn't been influenced by this tropical warming, and so the warm water inshore isn't as deep.

"When hurricanes move over that water, (the storm's) high surface winds tend to mix cooler water up to the surface, which can lessen a storm's intensity," DeMaria said.

There are, of course, always exceptions. Sometimes, ocean currents bring warmer water closer to the coast, and that can cause devastating consequences if a hurricane reaches that water. In 1969, Hurricane Camille may have crossed one of those freak currents of very warm water as it approached the Gulf Coast. The storm lost little, if any, intensity as it neared landfall, and on August 17, Camille's eye came ashore at Pass Christian, Mississippi with winds of about 190 mph.

The study was published in a recent edition of the Journal of Weather and Forecasting. Viewing the full study requires a paid subscription, but an abstract can be viewed here.

NOTE: The NOAA photo above shows Hurricane Dennis just before it made landfall on July 11, 2005.

Spirit of '10?

2010-11-22T19:23:00.022-05:00

We're in a war against some dangerous people who are willing to use any means they can come up with to kill as many people as possible. But it seems that we're thrusting our heads deeper and deeper into the sand to avoid confronting this reality.

The latest -- and maybe the most disturbing -- example of this refusal to acknowledge reality is being played out today in many airports where controversial new search techniques are being used by the Transportation Safety Administration to screen airline passengers before they board airplanes.

News reports say that the new security measures, which had been planned for some time, were implemented when an Al Qaida plot was uncovered last month to ship bombs aboard cargo airplanes and explode the bombs over the U.S. Airline passengers now have the option of either going through a new full-body scanner or being hand searched by a TSA officer.

MSNBC describes the search as an "open-palmed pat-down that many travelers, and even some security officers, feel is too personally invasive." Passengers can avoid the search by going through the full-body scanner. The scanner displays a nearly nude image of a passenger to a TSA officer who is out of the public view.

So, one way or the other, airline passengers are being required to submit to something that is seriously discomforting. Still, the Los Angeles Times reported recently that the TSA said that 28 million people boarded passenger planes during the first two weeks of the new security procedure, and only one percent of those passengers declined to go through the scanner and had to undergo the hands-on body search.

The Times reported that TSA said it received fewer than 700 complaints about the hands-on searches. That's a tiny proportion of the millions of people who had to undergo security checks before boarding airplanes.

It's easy to understand the annoyance of passengers who have to undergo these new search procedures. It is unsettling and humiliating to have your privates groped or displayed on a screen. But there is this war going on, and we are continually reminded of how fiercely our enemies hate us and how intensely they want to kill us, preferably in large, spectacular numbers. They would love nothing better than to explode a passenger airplane crammed with Americans over a large city so that chunks of flaming wreckage and body parts rained down on horrified witnesses who would then blame the government for not preventing this tragedy.

So it's hard for me to understand the mentality of those who are the loudest in protesting the increased scrutiny. And it's also baffling to me that the complaints of such a small group could explode into the broiling scandal that has erupted in the past few days.

In the December issue of Vanity Fair, editor Graydon Carter notes that Americans seem to be "full of inchoate rage, and . . . constantly throwing fits and tantrums". Carter published his comments weeks before the latest outrage. And our enemies are playing this anger like an instrument.

I've long been fascinated by the history of World War II. As I've gotten older, I've realized how propaganda was used to shape public opinion and persuade people to get with the program. And propaganda always makes me uneasy because it's used to emphasize one point of view and diminish or conceal other points of view. So when I see a poster like the one above that I've altered for this post, I also realize that the same techniques were being used by the Allies and their enemies.

I can't help but compare that era to today. However misleading the propaganda images from that time may have been, it's clear that people were willing to put up with much more danger and inconvenience than we are now. For example, beginning in September 1940 and continuing for months, Nazi Germany bombed London and other British cities every night. By May 1941, about 43,000 civillians had been killed in the attacks that came to be known as the Blitz. That means that far more people were killed every month during the Blitz than were killed in the attacks on New York on September 11, 2001.

But as Carter noted in his Vanity Fair column, a poll taken at the time showed that the British were more upset by food rationing than they were by the constant bombing. They simply were determined to carry on in the face of Hitler's savage onslaught.

What we're being asked to put up with isn't even on the same scale as what Londoners endured during the Blitz. But my god, how we're complaining. And how gratifying this must be to the thugs who are determined to kill us.

Recalling an Infamous Home Run

2010-10-10T05:55:00.014-04:00

I've been down with the flu for several days and it's disrupted all the normal routines. It's a pretty nasty bug. I'm at the stage now where it's a low-grade fever and general aching malaise interrupted by occasional fits of violent and rather painful coughing. And there are powerful sneezes as well.

So I've spent most of the past few days in the guest bedroom. We have a stereo in that room that has a cassette tape deck, and I've dug out old tapes that I haven't played in years, tapes that in some cases I'd forgotten I have. And I've passed much of the time by drifting in and out of sleep as I listen to, among other things, Garrison Keillor monologues.

I've also spent the last several nights in that room so Jane can sleep without being awakened by my sudden noisy coughing and weary groans of exasperation. Around 3:30 this morning I woke up coughing and couldn't go back to sleep. So I sifted through the old tapes looking for something to put on the stereo.

One of the tapes I'd forgotten I have is a copy of the radio broadcast of the seventh game of the 1960 World Series between the New York Yankees and Pittsburgh Pirates. So I put that one into the player.

I was 10 years old when that game was played, and I remember it very well -- at least the final few innings. I didn't realize it at the time, of course, but that World Series game and the 1960 Major League baseball season was the end of an era. In 1960, there were still only 16 Major League teams -- eight in each league -- and the teams played a schedule of 154 games.

In 1961, Major League baseball would begin an expansion that would eventually swell the number of teams to 30, increase the regular season schedule to 162 games, and lead to a post-season playoff that stretches into November.

When New York met Pittsburgh in the 1960 World Series, I was at the peak of my passion for the Yankees. I'm not sure how a hick kid from a tiny rural town in the South became a Yankees fan, but I think it must have had something to do with Mickey Mantle. I'd learn later that Mantle was about as tragically flawed a man as has ever lived, but in 1960 he was a god walking among mortals.

I lay there in the dark listening to broadcaster Chuck Thompson's account of the game, which was played on October 13, 1960. At some point I realized that the 50th anniverary of that memorable game is only a few days away. The fact that I'm getting old enough to recall events 50 years ago is a little unsettling. I remember all of the fanfare surrounding the 50th anniverary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, which occurred years before I was born, and so that anniversary celebrated an event that, for me at least, was safely in the distant past and wasn't a reflection of my own aging.

But now, I'm old enough to remember things that happened half a century ago. Time passes.

The game itself was a wild, high-scoring, see-sawing affair. After two innings, Pittsburgh led 4-0. But the Yankees rallied, and by the sixth innning they held a 5-4 lead.

In 1960, World Series games were played during the day, and October 13, 1960 was a Thursday. So that meant that I wasn't able to turn on the game until after I'd gotten home from school. But I got home in time to see the end of the game.

In the top of the eighth inning, the Yankees extended their lead to 7-4, and it looked like it was all over. But in the bottom of the eighth, a fluke occurred that changed the course of the game. With Gino Cimoli on first, Bill Virdon hit a bouncing ground ball to Yankees shortstop Tony Kubek. It should have been an easy double-play, but the ball hit a pebble, took a wicked erratic hop, and hit Kubek in the Adam's apple. Everyone was safe, Kubek had to leave the game, and before the inning ended the Pirates had taken a 9-7 lead.

Still, the Yankees came back in the top of the ninth inning to tie the score at 9-9, and I was confident that the Yankees would hold the Pirates in the bottom of the ninth and win it in extra innings, especially since the bottom of the Pirates' lineup was coming to bat in their half of the inning.

Listening to the tape last night, of course, I knew what would happen. Bill Mazeroski would lead off for the Pirates against Ralph Terry. He'd take Terry's first pitch for a called ball. Then he'd hit Terry's second pitch over the left field wall, the Pirates would win, 10-9, Pittsburgh would go berserk, and I'd trudge quietly upstairs to my room with tears of disappointment running down my cheeks.

Listening to the game in the dark through a feverish haze 50 years later, I didn't start crying. But I still shook my head in disbelief that Terry gave Mazeroski a pitch that he could knock out of the damn ballpark.

NOTE: The photo at the top of this post was shot by George Silk for Life magazine. It shows University of Pittsburgh students watching from the tower of the Cathedral of Learning and cheering Bill Mazeroski's home run that won the 1960 World Series.

Jane Returns with Irish Whiskey

2010-09-30T20:58:00.004-04:00

So Jane got back a few hours ago from her trip with her mom to Ireland, and she brought many presents -- including a bottle of Irish whiskey that supposedly isn't available in the U.S.

So we sat on the front porch and listened to the stack of Irish folk music CDs she brought, and I sipped Irish and Jane drank wine and we watched the rain that's been falling all week. I read that we've had more rain in the past two days than we had during the infamous Hurricane Floyd in 1999, which put most of the area around Plymouth under eight or 10 feet of water. But since the wetlands around the Roanoke River here haven't been developed, we stayed dry.

Anyway, Jane brought me a bottle of Green Spot Irish whiskey. I've been drinking scotch for years. The Irish whiskey is sweeter than scotch, but not as sweet as bourbon, which I've never cared for.

She also brought me a mini-bottle of Irish potcheen, or moonshine, as it's known in these parts. Note that the label says it's "Now Legal" in Ireland. Haven't opened that yet.

And, oh yeah, while in Ireland she went to some restaurants and visited an old castle, and some writer's thing in Dublin.

OK, OK, I'm Finally on Facebook . . .

2010-09-20T13:28:00.014-04:00

. . . but I'm a tad uneasy about it. And the story by David Carr in the Sunday New York Times Arts & Leisure section about the new movie, "The Social Network," didn't do anything to diminish my uneasiness about plugging in to this giant online virtual-socializing and snooping enterprise.

The movie is based on the story of the creation of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg, a socially clumsy young man at Harvard who, in a sense, executed the uber-geek's ultimate ironic twist. He channeled his frustrations, social ineptitude and exceptional intelligence into creating what the Times calls "the largest engine of social interaction in the history of mankind."

And he made a gigantic amount of money in the process.

Here's how the Times described both the movie and the phenomenon of Facebook: "Social media -- with the technology that allows people instantly to inform dozens or hundreds of thousands of people about where they've been and what they've done, in pictures and in words -- become a kind of self-replicating organism in the film, feeding and consuming all who mouse over it."

So Facebook ranks up there with the invention of the printing press and the telephone in terms of ideas that have altered our world. Many innovations have claimed to make the world smaller, but Facebook has used the Internet and the proliferation of personal computers to reduce the world to the size of a telephone booth, if anybody still remembers how small a telephone booth is.

And, like a cranky hermit living in a cave high in the mountains, I've deliberately avoided Facebook until it seems like I'm the last person in the civilized world to join the fun. Even people whom I thought had jumped off the grid long ago have Facebook pages. The New York Times says there are 500 million people with Facebook accounts. So, clearly, the rest of the world doesn't have the reservations about Facebook that I have.

Why have I avoided it? Partly just simple orneriness. The older I get, the less comfortable I am with cutting-edge technology. And there's also the fact that I'm lazy, and maintaining a Facebook page is a form of work.

But mostly, I've avoided Facebook because I'm afraid of it. I read George Orwell's novel, 1984, a long time ago, and it affected me. 1984 describes a world in which an oppressive, authoritarian government knows everything about you and can observe your every move.

Facebook is a massive central data base into which one deposits detailed acounts of one's likes and dislikes, comings and goings, political and religious beliefs, sexual preferences, favorite colors and football teams, and recent purchases. That's an awful lot of info for someone somewhere -- or anyone, anywhere -- to have access to at the click of a mouse button. It's like Big Brother with a smile, to borrow a phrase I picked up somewhere, probably while browsing the Web. And I worry about what some people might do with that info.

Still, it's fascinating and absorbing to be able to tell the world about your favorite movies, your favorite books and quotes, and post favorite pictures of your cats or your friends in unguarded moments. And I'm enjoying it.

And if you're wondering why I finally decided to jump into Facebook, you'll have to go to my page to find the answer. I'm going there now to add 1984 to my list of favorite books and add a personal news update that I've posted a new entry on "Drye Goods."

Hurricane Karl Floods Mexico

2010-09-17T19:39:00.004-04:00

Hurricane Karl made landfall earlier today near Veracruz, Mexico. Here's a link to a story I did today about Hurricane Karl for National Geographic News.

Meanwhile, a weakening Hurricane Igor is expected to diminish to a Category 2 storm (winds of 96 mph to 110 mph) as it passes just east of Bermuda late Saturday. If Igor follows the forecast, Bermuda will be on the weak side of the storm.

Monster Igor Won't Bother Us

2010-09-13T23:44:00.005-04:00

Hurricane Igor has become the most powerful hurricane of the 2010 season, but it's not going to threaten the U.S. So it's OK to breathe a sigh of relief and milk an obvious laugh from the fact that this year's monster storm carries the name of one of Hollywood's funniest characters -- the misshapen, bug-eyed lab assistant Igor played hilariously by Marty Feldman in the movie "Young Frankenstein." In the movie, Feldman's character insisted that his name be pronounced "Eye-gor."

Hurricane Igor's strongest winds reached 150 mph earlier today, an intensity that put it on the verge of becoming a Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Scale. But it looks like that intensity may have been Igor's peak because as of 11 p.m., the storm's strongest winds had diminished to 140 mph.

Here's a link to a story I did earlier today for National Geographic News about why Hurricane Igor is expected to stay well offshore.

NOTE: The photo illustration at the top of this post is a composite of a graphic from the website Weather Underground and Marty Feldman as "Igor" in the movie "Young Frankenstein."

Igor is Out There

2010-09-08T20:17:00.011-04:00

Tropical Storm Igor has formed from a tropical wave that rolled off the west coast of Africa a few days ago. The storm is expected to become Hurricane Igor by Saturday and strengthen as it rolls across the unusually warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center in Miami are saying that predicting the intensity of Igor during the next few days is "tricky." But it's a different story when you look at Igor's prospects for strengthening 10 days or so from now.

"There is plenty of warm water and light shear forecast in the path of Igor, which would promote development of a large and powerful hurricane," the latest NHC forecast says.

If Igor does become a powerful hurricane, it would be in keeping with many of the storms that have received the "I" name since 1995, when we entered a pattern of more active hurricane seasons.

Only in 1997 was the season not active enough to produce the nine storms needed to reach that year's "I" name. And three times in the past seven years, the "I" storm became a memorable monster hurricane.

In 2003, Hurricane Isabel formed from a tropical wave on September 6. Isabel reached its peak intensity as a Category 5 hurricane with winds of 165 mph. Thankfully, the storm weakened before it made landfall at Cape Lookout, North Carolina. But it still did massive damage and blasted us back into the 19th century for a couple of weeks when its eye passed over us here in Plymouth.

Hurricane Ivan, which formed September 2, 2004, became one of the worst hurricanes on record when it devastated the Caymen Islands as a Category 5 storm (see

here for a 2007 post about the awful power of Hurricane Ivan).

After smashing the Caymens, Ivan entered the Gulf of Mexico and struck Pensacola, Florida as a Category 3 hurricane with winds exceeding 120 mph.

Hurricane Ike formed September 1, 2008 and peaked as a Category 4 storm with 145 mph winds. Ike lost most of its fury as it crossed the length of Cuba, but still caused major damage when it struck Galveston, Texas a few days later.

There's no way of knowing for certain what this storm will do, but given the severity of its infamous "I" predecessors, it's a little unpleasant to contemplate a Hurricane Igor -- especially with a name that is straight out of Hollywood monster movies.

Maybe It's Time for Butch Davis to Go

2010-09-06T12:12:00.014-04:00

North Carolina nearly pulled off an amazing win over Louisiana State this weekend, losing to the Tigers 30-24 when a Tar Heel receiver dropped what would have been the game-winning pass in the end zone as time expired. Replays showed that a Tiger defender probably should have been called for pass interference on the play.

Chaz Misenheimer and I watched the LSU-UNC football game Saturday night at his home in Richfield. It was the kind of game that should have had us on our feet and screaming, especially when UNC staged a remarkable second-half comeback that put them within a questionable officiating call of winning the game.

At halftime, it looked like UNC was going to get blown out by LSU, a Southeastern Conference powerhouse that won a national championship just two years ago. Carolina trailed 30-10, and was playing like a clumsy, poorly coached high school team. Two or three times, the center and quarterback couldn't even execute the snap, resulting in a fumble that was recovered by LSU. And on one play when quarterback T.J. Yates was standing in a shotgun formation in his own end zone, the center snapped the ball past his ear and out of the end zone when Yates wasn't expecting it.

Yet the Tar Heels still made a game of it. Despite Carolina's remarkable second-half performance, however, I watched the game quietly, but it wasn't because I was indifferent to the outcome. I was subdued because what I feared would happen when UNC hired Butch Davis as head football coach in 2007 apparently has come to pass. The NCAA is investigating the Tar Heel football team for possible rules violations. Carolina's near-miraculous comeback against LSU is even more amazing when you consider that more than a dozen players -- including most of their starting defensive team -- were held out of the game because of the investigation.

Three years ago, I made a blog post titled "Go Tar Heels -- I Think," At that time, Davis was in the news because he was expected to bring a "new culture" to Carolina's football program. Presumably, that new culture involved putting the football program on an equal footing with its stellar basketball program. Tar Heel basketball teams have won six national championships without even a hint of NCAA violations.

In that 2007 post, I wondered whether Davis -- who had a 71-38 record and three Big East championships at the University of Miami -- could steer clear of NCAA violations and build a national powerhouse football team at a university that takes academic standards seriously. Among the possible violations being investigated by the NCAA is an allegation that an academic tutor may have improperly helped some football players write term papers.

To their credit, UNC officials prohibited the players being investigated by the NCAA from playing in the LSU game. They probably forfeited a huge win by doing that, because if those players had been in the game, they probably would not have made the mistakes their inexperienced substitutes made that gave LSU at least 16 points.

UNC is one of the best public universities in the nation, and a degree from UNC is a source of pride among its graduates. If the investigation reveals even questionable conduct by Davis in supervising his players, he should be fired. Anything less would cheapen the value of a UNC degree.

Blogging Hurricane Earl

2010-09-02T14:47:00.033-04:00

Monday, September 6: Here's a link to my National Geographic News story explaining why Hurricane Earl weakened as it approached the Outer Banks.

Also, got an email today from Arlene Vadum in Worchester, Massachusetts that included a brief comment on Hurricane Earl's visit to New England a couple days ago. Worcester is well inland from Cape Cod, where Earl was expected to pass near or over Saturday afternoon as a Category 1 hurricane. But Earl weakened to a tropical storm and was pushed a little farther out to sea by that Canadian front, and so the blow to the Cape and the Northeast was much less than had been feared.

Arlene writes: "We got the rain, pretty hard for a time, and virtually no wind. People didn't do anything special in Worcester because we were told that Earl wouldn't affect us. I saw on the news that people were not going to the Cape and the islands because of Earl, but in the end the news seemed to say that there was 'much ado about nothing,'"

Thing is, you can't decide what to do during the next hurricane warning based on what you did during the previous storm because the next hurricane might make a last-minute turn in your direction and be far worse than expected. But anyone who's lived on Cape Cod any length of time knows that.

9:15 a.m. Friday: We're getting light but steady rain here in Plymouth as Hurricane Earl moves away from us. The storm made its closest approach toward us a few hours ago. I stood on our side porch a few minutes ago and took a quick look around the neighborhood, and I didn't see anything that looked like damage. Didn't even see any limbs in my back yard from the huge pecan trees that usually drop limbs even during a light breeze.

We sat around last night with our neighbors, Jennifer and Ben, and watched some of the local coverage of Hurricane Earl. Almost felt sorry for some of the local TV news reporters. They had been prepared to do the Jim Cantore-style standup-in-the-storm spots, and nothing was happening -- no driving horizontal rain, no fiercely gusting winds to shove them around, no loud crashing waves or wind-driven debris in the background.

I don't mean to make fun of Hurricane Earl's visit, however. We were lucky. The storm weakened some and turned slightly away from the Outer Banks, and so things were not nearly as bad as they could have been.

But we may not be so lucky for the rest of the month. Tropical waves are rolling off the west coast of Africa, and conditions are still ripe for hurricane formation. And this is the time of year when the so-called Cape Verde hurricanes form. These are storms that begin as tropical waves and quickly become tropical storms as they pass the Cape Verde islands. These are the breeding grounds for monster hurricanes such as Hurricane Ivan of 2004.

There's a tropical wave that recently rolled into the Atlantic that's likely to become Hurricane Hermine. There probably also will be a storm that gets the "I" name that the monster Ivan got six years ago. The name for that storm this year is Igor. If a hurricane does get the "I" name, it could become a very bad storm. And contemplating the possibility of a monster storm named Hurricane Igor makes me a little uneasy.

11:30 p.m.: Light steady rain started about an hour and 15 minutes ago and you can tell the streets are wet when cars pass because they make that "skish" noise that tires make on wet pavement. My barometer has dropped in the past few hours, but the winds are light and essentially it's a damp, breezy and very muggy evening. Reminds me of Key West this time of year.

As of 11 p.m. Earl had weakened to a Category 2, which means that its peak winds are 96 mph to 110 mph. Judging from the radar images, the storm is no longer moving westward and is starting a turn to the north well before it approaches Cape Hatteras, which means that it's probably not going to come as close to the Outer Banks as was predicted earlier.

10:15 P.M.: We had brief intermittant showers here about an hour ago, but for the most part it's been a pleasant evening to sit on our neighbors' porch and drink beer and enjoy the breeze. I'll update later.

7:31 p.m.: Hurricanes are just fiendishly unpredictable, even in this era of weather satellites and sophisticated computer software designed to make them more predictable.

The latest update for Hurricane Earl has it weakening considerably before it blows past North Carolina. Earl is now a Category 3 storm with peak winds of about 115 mph, and it's expected to diminish to Category 2 before it approaches Cape Hatteras. That means its peak winds will be no more than 110 mph.

Earlier forecasts had it maintaining at least Category 3 strength as it passed the Cape. Had it stayed that strong, its peak winds could be approaching 130 mph.

This is why being a hurricane forecast specialist is such a difficult job. When you put out a warning that a hurricane is approaching, you have to convey to the people on the coast that they're in a dangerous area. You don't want to overstate the danger, but the consequences of understating the danger are so dire that you can't afford to be responsible for giving thousands of people an excuse to stay put instead of getting out of harm's way. There's always a good chance that the hurricane will be worse than expected, and those people who got complacent because of your understated warning suddenly are facing a deadly situation.

There are some subtle signs of Earl's approach here in Plymouth. Jane and I sat on our enclosed front porch for about 90 minutes and had drinks and watched the weather. The very tall trees on our neighbors' lots across the street are swaying the way they do only when a major storm is approaching. So Earl's approach is subtle but noticeable.

Stay tuned.

5:45 p.m. My story about Hurricane Earl has been posted at National Geographic News. See this link:

5 p.m. Barometer down slightly, from 1013 mb at 2 p.m. to 1011 mb at 5 p.m. I did a story about Hurricane Earl for National Geographic News that will be posted shortly. I'll post a link here when it's up.

The satellite image shows Earl as of 5 p.m. EDT. More of eastern North Carolina is now covered by the edges.

2:53 p.m: As of 2 p.m., Hurricane Earl is offshore from Charleston and has weakened a little since the 5 a.m. update. But Earl's strongest winds are still around 125 mph, and it's expected to strengthen a little and have winds exceeding 130 mph as it aproaches the North Carolina coast tonight. Earl is expected to make its closest approach around 2 a.m. Friday, when it'll be offshore from Cape Hatteras.

As you can see from the above satellite image, we're starting to see the edges of Hurricane Earl here in Plymouth, which is about 100 miles south of Norfolk and about 80 miles west of Cape Hatteras. If the storm maintains its projected path, we're not likely to see any fierce winds tonight. But hurricanes are unpredictable, and I spent part of the morning clearing small objects out of our yard, fueling up my pickup truck, and making sure the gas-powered generator was working.

My barometers are slowing starting to fall, an indication that there's a bad storm out there somewhere.

I'll have another update around 4:30 p.m.

Powerful Hurricane Earl Headed Our Way

2010-09-02T05:23:00.009-04:00

Hurricane Earl is expected to be an intense Category 4 hurricane when it makes its closest approach to the North Carolina coast early tomorrow morning. The current forecast predicts that Earl's strongest winds will exceed 140 mph around 2 a.m. Friday when the storm's eye is about 40 miles east-southeast of Buxton, a village at Cape Hatteras. At that point, Hurricane Earl will be about 115 miles east-southeast of Plymouth, North Carolina, where Jane and I live.

If Earl maintains this intensity, it'll be among the strongest hurricanes north of the 35th parallel, which falls roughly halfway between Cape Lookout and Cape Hatteras. Hurricanes draw their strength from warm ocean waters, and the water temperatures usually aren't warm enough to sustain the storms this far north. But ocean temperatures off the coast of the Southeast are well above normal this year, and there's plenty of fuel to keep Earl stoked as it moves northward.

As I'm writing this, I just got an email alert saying that a hurricane watch has been issued for portions of the Massachusetts coast. A hurricane watch means that hurricane-force winds -- that is, winds of at least 74 mph -- are possible within the watch area.

By contrast, a hurricane warning has been issued for the North Carolina coast. A hurricane warning means that hurricane-force winds are expected within the warning area.

I'm going to try an experiment in live-blogging as Hurricane Earl approaches North Carolina. The storm is expected to be offshore and due east of Savannah, Georgia around 2 p.m. today. I'll start a new post then and make updates as Earl gets closer. Please check back.

NOTE: The graphic at the top of this post is from the website Weather Underground.

The Cat Days of Summer

2010-07-21T15:28:00.010-04:00

It's been a godawful hot summer here in eastern North Carolina. As I'm writing this, the thermometer on our side porch, which is in the shade, is touching 98, and the humidity makes it feel like a sauna. And more of the same is expected tomorrow.

It's so hot, I'm recalling the heat jokes I heard years ago when I lived in Macon, Georgia. How hot is it in Macon? So hot that they keep the charcoal in the refrigerator. So hot that in the summer, Satan rents out hell and lives in Macon.

We're deep into the so-called "dog days of summer," which run approximately from early July through mid-August. The dog days got their name from the ancient Romans, who attributed the heat at this time of year to Sirius, the dog star.
The heat affects every living thing. In his 1815 book, Clavis Calendaria, Or A Compendious Analysis Of The Calendar, John Brady noted that this is the time of year "when the seas boiled, wine turned sour, dogs grew mad, and all creatures became languid, causing to man burning fevers, hysterics and phrensies."

Cats personify the "languid" effect of the heat. Felines are more prone to sleep on their backs during extremely hot weather. I'm assuming it's somehow cooler.

The picture at the top of this post shows Ike, our rather large (14+ pounds), two-year-old tuxedo tomcat, snoozing on his back on the bed during the hottest part of the day.

I've seen Ike sleep like this often this summer. I snapped the above photo a couple days ago, when I spotted him snoozing in his favorite basket atop our bedroom closet. Those are Ike's paws visible above the rim of the basket.

So We're Back . . .

2010-07-11T21:26:00.004-04:00

Jane and I got back a few days ago from our July 4th trip to Baltimore, where (1) We watched our nephew, John Morrow, play in a lacrosse tournament; (2) We had lots of crab cakes and beer; (3) Visited the house where Edgar Allan Poe lived from 1832 to 1835, and (4) I was sick in bed in the hotel for a day with some kind of flu-like illness (and no, it wasn't related to the crab cakes and beer).

So it's been hot and I'm lazy. I'm working on a few ideas for new postings. In the meantime, here's what the view looked like earlier today when Jane, Beaucat and I went out to the front porch for Sundowners. And by the way, I usually drink my vodka martinis with a slice of Vidalia onion, but we were out. So I was forced to substitute an olive.

Anyway, more to come soon . . .

Very Busy, Please Stand By

2010-06-19T10:04:00.002-04:00

I've got deadlines approaching for several projects and will have to focus on those for the rest of the month. Please check back by Drye Goods in a couple weeks for new postings.

How I Slid Into an Appreciation of Chinese Culture

2010-06-08T19:50:00.028-04:00

There's a big fuss out in Hacienda Heights, California because elementary school kids there are being taught the Chinese language and something about Chinese culture, and the instruction is being paid for in part by the government of China.

Some people think the whole thing is another in a series of sinister plots to undermine our sacred American values. They think it poses a serious threat to our very way of life. What better way to overthrow the government of a country and instill communism, they reason, than to brainwash the children who will one day take the reins of that government?

In their view, anyone who studies anything about China is a potential traitor. So I guess it's time for me to confess something -- a long time ago, in that bastion of undisciplined and dangerous free-thinking that is Chapel Hill, I studied ancient Chinese culture. And God help me, I enjoyed it and haven't been the same since.

But the Chinese government had nothing to do with coercing me into taking this subversive course, nor was I bent on fomenting revolution. I swear that the only reason I took it was because I was desperate to get a decent grade in summer school. I signed up for the course -- known at the time as Chinese 50 in the University of North Carolina curriculum catalog -- because it was famous for being, in the student slang of that era, a "slide."

A slide was a class in which you could get a decent grade by doing little more than filling a seat in the lecture hall for a semester. The names of such courses are circulated among the mediocre students on the campuses of colleges such as UNC, where you always seem to find yourself in classes with students who are a whole lot smarter than you and ruin the grading curve for everyone else.

So during that summer session I took a seat in one of the largest auditoriums on campus, joining academically sluggish football players, party-hearty frat boys and other less-than-focused semi-scholars who knew their college careers depended on a QPA-boosting grade in this course.

I wish I could remember the name of the professor who taught Chinese 50, but that's long gone from my memory. But I do clearly remember his appearance and mannerisms. He was a small, wispy, slightly nervous American Caucasian, probably late 30s-early 40s, with a scraggly beard and graying hair. In those days you could still smoke in UNC classrooms, and he chain-smoked throughout his lectures.

In short, he was not a very imposing figure. But he was deeply in love with the culture and history of China, and he intensely wanted to communicate that love to his students -- even though he knew his class was a sort of summer purgatory for those who'd discovered that academics was probably the least-interesting of all the things you could do in Chapel Hill.

On the first day of class, he laid his cards on the table. If you show up for all the classes and do all of the assigned work, you'll get a 'C,' he told us. If you do a little more than the assigned work, you'll get a 'B,' and if you do still more work you'll get an 'A,' he said.

But I'm not doing this so you can kick your mind into neutral and coast through summer school, he said. I'm doing this because I think the ancient Chinese built one of the greatest civilizations in world history, and I'm hoping you'll pick up just a little bit of that from this class.

And then he proceeded, during those muggy North Carolina summer mornings, to tell us a fascinating story of a long-ago people who were sublimely civilized. Like any group of humans, there were scoundrels, wastrels and thieves among them, but their culture was focused on moderation and self-discipline.

The ancient Chinese recognized the deep flaws of human nature, and took that into account in making their laws. They recognized that no human is as powerful as the forces of nature, and structured their lives to be in harmony with their surroundings. They recognized the ceaseless interplay between simplicity and complexity in all aspects of human existence, and wrote poetry and essays to express that.

They even devised a written language that was not intended to be spoken, but was designed to communicate an idea or a passion by creating a series of images in the minds of readers. It was a language that existed only in the mind, sort of like telepathy.

I also learned about Lao Tzu, the ancient philosopher who supposedly scolded Confucius for his pride and vanity and wrote the Tao Te Ching before disappearing forever.

I got a B+ for the course, but more importantly I came away from that class with a lingering fascination for a civilization and a system of thought that was based on reasoning and intellect instead of emotion and acquisitiveness.

It's been decades since I took Chinese 50, but a week hasn't gone by that I haven't thought of that class in some context. And now the story emerges about the frightened people in Hacienda Heights who have freaked out because kids there are learning something about China.

So the adults are upset because the children may become wiser than their elders. I think Lao Tzu might find that amusing.

NOTE: The symbols at the top of this post are Chinese for "change."

Baseball's "Human Element" Throws Monkey Wrench Into the Game

2010-06-03T20:11:00.014-04:00

The phrase "human element" has been used a lot during the past couple of days when people talk about Detroit Tigers' pitcher Armando Galarraga losing a perfect game because an umpire missed a call that would have put Galarraga into the record books.

Umpire Jim Joyce admitted that he'd missed the call on a play at first base that would have ended the game and preserved Galarraga's pitching gem. He even apologized to Galarraga after the game. But MLB commissioner Bud Selig refused to overturn Joyce's blown call and declare that Galarraga had indeed pitched a perfect game, sparking outrage among many fans.

Baseball purists such as I love to talk about the "human element" of baseball. Invoking the human element means that even though baseball has rules that theoretically prevent any sort of advantage for either team, we purists recognize that human frailties often decide the outcomes of games. And we supposedly accept that as part of the game, just as we have to accept that a pebble in the infield can suddenly change the path of a ground ball and alter the game.

Calling it the human element sounds more noble than saying that an umpire blew a call. And there's a long history of Major League baseball games that have been affected by that particular human element -- including several perfect and near-perfect games.

New York Yankees' pitcher Don Larsen pitched the most famous perfect game in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series. But Larsen probably had a little help from plate umpire Babe Pinelli. With two outs in the ninth inning, Pinelli called Brooklyn Dodger pinch-hitter Dale Mitchell out on a third strike that many witnesses thought was well out of the strike zone. Pinelli, the human element in this game, apparently decided that Larsen deserved the perfect game and ended it before Mitchell could spoil the masterpiece.

In May 1959, Pittsburgh Pirates' pitcher Harvey Haddix pitched above and beyond the boundaries of normal perfection when he didn't allow a runner to reach base for 12 innings. Facing one of the toughest lineups in baseball at the time, Haddix retired 36 consecutive Milwaukee Braves batters.

It was an unprecedented performance, and I doubt that anyone will ever accomplish it again. But Haddix and the Pirates lost the game in the 13th inning. Since he'd pitched nine perfect innings before losing, he was credited with a perfect game -- until MLB changed the scoring rules in 1991 and wiped Haddix's perfect game from the record books.

In May 1972, Chicago Cubs pitcher Milt Pappas retired 26 straight San Diego Padres' batters. Then, one out and one strike away from perfection, Pappas threw two pitches that were close enough to be called third strikes. But plate umpire Bruce Froemming -- that ornery human element -- apparently didn't have the same respect for perfection that Babe Pinelli had in 1956. Froemming called both pitches balls, and Pappas's perfection was lost to human imperfection.

I had mixed feelings when I heard that Bud Selig was going to consider whether to reverse Joyce's call and declare that Galarraga had pitched a perfect game. That umpire-as-human-element thing came to mind, and I thought that maybe Joyce's blown call should not be reversed.

Then Selig made his ruling, and I was angry, and I know why. I just don't like Selig. He could say publicly that his mother loves him, and my instinctive reaction would be to snort and call him a liar. My old friend Chaz Misenheimer has a description of Selig that sums up the opinion of many fans, including me. Chaz says Selig is "a smiling, spineless, gutless jellyfish of a bureaucrat who couldn't pick up Barney Fife's whistle."

Milt Pappas -- still sore that he lost his bid for perfection 38 years ago because of the human element -- was more succinct in his description of Selig's decision. He called the commissioner "Mr. No-Guts."

At the same time Selig announced that he is going to convene a committee, confer with the players unions, yada yada yada, and figure out some way to prevent this from happening again.

I'll admit that I'd probably have complained regardless of what Selig decided. But his wimpy, bureaucratic effort to please everyone and avoid controversy reminded me of why I dislike him. He's breaking his back to avoid having to make a tough decision himself.

NOTE: The screen-grab photo at the top clearly shows that pitcher Armando Galarraga's foot is touching first base ahead of Cleveland Indians' runner Jason Donald. The play should have been the final out of Galarraga's perfect game.

CSU forecasters predict "very active" hurricane season

2010-06-02T17:18:00.006-04:00

There seems little doubt that we're in for a stormy summer. Earlier today, Colorado State University forecasters Phil Klotzbach and William Gray released a statement predicting that the 2010 Atlantic Basin hurricane season -- which started yesterday -- will be "very active." The CSU meteorologists think that 18 named tropical storms will form before the end of the season on November 30. They think 10 of those storms will strengthen into hurricanes with winds of at least 74 mph. Five of those hurricanes could develop into major hurricanes with winds exceeding 110 mph.

Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that 14 to 23 named storms could form in the Atlantic, with 8 to 14 of those storms becoming hurricanes. NOAA also said that three to seven major hurricanes could form.

The news from the CSU forecasters is even worse for the Caribbean Sea. Klotzbach and Gray think this year could be similar to the awful summers of 2004 and 2005, two of the most active seasons on record. Monster hurricanes such as Ivan, Katrina, Rita and Wilma formed in the Caribbean during those summers, and 2005 became the most active single season on record with 28 named storms.

Several factors are expected to contribute to this year's exceptional hurricane activity.

The El Nino weather phenomenon that kept the lid on last summer's hurricane activity is dissipating. El Nino events occur sporadically and are caused by an unusual warming of waters in the Pacific Ocean off the northwest coast of South America. When an El Nino occurs, it creates strong upper-level winds over the Atlantic, and these winds disrupt hurricane formation.

Largely because of last summer's El Nino, only nine name storms formed in the Atlantic Basin, which includes the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.

Waters in the tropical Atlantic also are unusually warm this year. Hurricanes draw their energy from warm ocean water, so this could provide plenty of fuel for the storms.

Klotzbach said that an active hurricane season could affect efforts to contain and clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. "If the storm tracks to the west of the oil, there is the potential that the counter-clockwise circulation of the hurricane could drive some of the oil further towards the U.S. Gulf Coast," he said. "We do not expect that the oil slick will have much of an impact on any tropical storm or hurricane that passes over the area."

NOTE: I shot the photo at the top of this post here in Plymouth during the eye of Hurricane Isabel, which struck North Carolina in September 2003.

"I lament that there are those who can learn no lesson of humanity ..."

2010-05-31T14:07:00.018-04:00

It's Memorial Day 2010, and we're entangled in a couple of wars that seem to have no end. But as Harper's Weekly noted in its issue of August 17, 1861, war is pretty much the perpetual state of the human race.

"War is among the oldest historical facts," Harper's editors wrote. "The world has always been fighting more or less. It is the final appeal when ignorant men quarrel or when grave men differ. It is not necessary to hate your enemy, but it may be necessary to kill him. If a man sincerely thinks that he ought to cut your throat, he can not complain if you think with equal sincerity that he ought not."

Harper's published those words less than a month after the First Battle of Bull Run, the first major battle of the Civil War which had been an unmitigated disaster for Union forces.

For 234 years, young men and women have been sent to fight in America's name. Sometimes they've been put in harm's way for reasons that were questionable at best. Other times, they unquestionably preserved our way of life.

But regardless of the reasons, young lives were cut short. So here are some photos of the Americans who have gone off to fight since the Civil War.

The photo above, from the Library of Congress, shows unidentified Confederate soldiers who were captured during the Battle of Gettysburg, which was fought from July 1 to July 3, 1863. More than 600,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died in the Civil War, which provided a horrifying example of the carnage of war in the Industrial Age.

The photo at right, from the website FamilyOldPhotos.com, shows Davis Wilson Wolfcale, a corporal in the Indiana National Guard. Wolfcale was around 21 years old when this photo was made during his service in the Spanish-American War of 1898. That war was touched off by the mysterious explosion of the battleship USS Maine in Havana, Cuba in February 1898.

It was the golden age of Yellow Journalism, and Americans' passions were inflamed by sensationalistic and wildly inaccurate stories published by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, who were locked in a fierce battle for newspaper circulation in New York.

Wolfcale survived that war and died in Michigan on October 13, 1941, about six weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into World War II.

The United States was reluctant to enter World War I, which broke out in Europe in August 1914. Americans were enraged when a German submarine sank the passenger liner Lusitania in 1915. Still, American troops didn't join the Allies fighting Germany until 1917. The fresh American troops turned the tide of the war, and Germany surrendered in 1918.

The above photo, from the website WorldWar1Gallery.com, shows unidentified American soldiers during World War I, which was called the Great War because no one imagined there could be another conflict of the scale of that war. They were wrong, of course.

The United States was still a segregated society when it entered World War II in 1941, but black soldiers and sailors played a vital role in that conflict. This photo shows an African-American soldier working on a truck engine at Fort Knox, Kentucky in June 1942. The photo is from the National Archives and was made by Alfred T. Palmer.

The war that erupted on the Korean peninsula in June 1950 wasn't even given the designation of "war" at first. It was officially referred to as a "police action." But the fighting against Korean and Chinese communist forces was as bloody and deadly as any war the United States was ever involved in. And it was a war of uncertain purpose. When a cease-fire was finally signed in July 1953, Communist forces still occupied North Korea and controlled the North Korean government.
This photo shows an American soldier of the 19th Infantry defending a position in Korea during the grim fighting of July 1950. It's from the website The Korean War, produced by B.L. Kortegaard.

The Viet Nam War was another well-intentioned but confusing effort to stop the spread of communism in Asia. The war provoked a determined anti-war movement in the United States and opened cultural and social fissures that still haven't been closed 35 years after the war ended in 1975.

The above National Geographic photo shows a young American soldier warily relaxing in Viet Nam.

The latest major commitment of American troops reflects some profound changes that have occurred in our society since the end of the Viet Nam War. Women are now serving in combat. This U.S. Army photo shows Specialist Jennie Baez serving in Iraq. American forces have been in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003.

The last photo shows Navy Chief Petty Officer Adam L. Brown of Hot Springs, Arkansas. Brown, a decorated Navy SEAL, was killed a couple of weeks ago in Afghanistan. He left behind a wife and two children. The photo is from the website ArkansasOnline.com.

I have no doubt that the enemy Brown was fighting in Afghanistan means to do us harm and has to be fought. But his death calls to mind another quote from that Harper's Weekly issue of August 17, 1861. The quote is from the 19th-century English poet Walter Savage Landor: "I lament that there are those who can learn no lesson of humanity, unless we write it broadly with the point of the sword."

NOTE: The photo at the top of this post shows the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. It was shot by Myron Davis for Life magazine in 1942,

Boycott BP, continued

2010-05-27T20:18:00.003-04:00

As crude oil gushes from British Petroleum's blown-out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico and anger at the uncontrolled spill increased, BP essentially is deploying truckloads of lawyers to mitigate the damages to their corporate bottom line. Not long ago, BP began an effort to cap their financial liability for the spill at $27 million.

Believe it or not, $27 million is not a lot of money these days. Let me put a little perspective on that figure.

If someone wins the Powerball lottery drawing on Saturday, they'll have the option of accepting a prize of about $114 million if they take a lump-sum payout. If they opt for an annuity, they'll get a total of about $220 million in annual payments spread out over 30 years.

So a Powerball winner would be pocketing more than four to eight times more than what BP wants to pay in liabilities for the negligence that led to one of the worst environmental disasters in our time. In other words, BP wants to limit their liability to the amount a winner receives in a mediocre lottery payout.

Here's a little more perspective. Nicholas Graham, writing today for the Huffington Post, reports that the spill is costing BP about $16 million a day. But there's no reason to worry about BP's solvency. In the first quarter of 2010, BP made a profit of about $66 million per day, Graham reported. And for 2009, BP's profits were $14 billion.

If you take that figure of $66 million per day in profits and divide it by 24, the result is $2.75 million. So if BP succeeds in capping their liability at $27 million, their penalty for a catastrophe that will cause untold billions of dollars in damages that someone will still be tabulating years from now will cost them less 10 hours worth of profit.

It would be the equivalent of someone dropping a dollar bill in the grocery store. BP is not even going to notice a $27 million fine.

So, as I said yesterday, boycott these people. They don't need any more of your money.

Boycott BP

2010-05-25T20:21:00.007-04:00

I'm usually very deliberate about what I post on this blog. Even when I'm upset about something, I don't sit down and bang out some kind of hasty screed and slap it up here. I do sometimes pester friends with e-mail rants about something that's annoyed me, but I'm very careful about posting anything publicly.

But the disaster that's taking place in the Gulf of Mexico as I write this is so disheartening and so infuriating that, for the moment at least, I don't want to be all deliberative and careful and even-handed about what I say. I'm very angry and deeply frustrated. And my emotion is aggravated because I visited the Louisiana wetlands a few months ago, shortly before the British Petroleum oil rig blew out and started dumping millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. So I'm wondering what those beautiful, pristine wetlands that I saw a few months ago look like at the moment.

I learned to appreciate coastal wetlands when Jane and I lived in South Florida. My perception of wetlands evolved during the time we were there. Before I lived in Florida, I regarded wetlands as dreary, dangeous and disgusting swamps. They were soggy snake-infested wastelands. Ick.

But that was before we made a few visits to the Florida Everglades, and visited many of Florida's wonderful state parks. After a few years, I realized that wetlands are amazing. They are the fountain of life and a barometer of environmental health.

It's a pretty simple equation: If the wetlands are healthy -- if the alligators are basking in the sun, and the turtles are sunning themselves on a log, and the herons are carefully stalking through the shallow water, and the otters are floating on their backs and cracking clams on their stomachs -- everything else, even if it's a thousand miles away, probably is healthy.

So in late February, while en route to Texas, some friends and I stopped for a few minutes at what I guess was a state park along the Creole Nature Trail in Louisiana. To be honest, I didn't pay that much attention to where we were and I can't tell you the name. It was a pleasant 15 minutes to get out of the car and walk around. There was a boardwalk over the wetlands. I shot a few snapshots. It reminded me of Florida.

And then we were on our way. I took what I saw for granted. Now, of course, I'm wondering what's going on in the wetlands where we stopped.

Accidents happen. I realize that. And risks must be taken. When I was much younger, I spent many years working hard-hat jobs where carelessness could get you seriously hurt or killed in the blink of an eye. Because of bad luck or my own inattention to detail, I could have been killed a couple of times. But the money was good, brushes with death are funny when you're 25 years old, and I'm still here. The money helped me pay my way through school, and the only thing I can figure about why I'm still alive is that it just wasn't my time to go.

So my point is that I realize that heavy industry -- the kind of industry that carries big risks but pays rewards, big paychecks, and big benefits to our nation -- is part of our system. I certainly wouldn't change that.

But it's becoming pretty clear that the British Petroleum Company did a lousy job of running at least one oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. And it wasn't carelessness, or bad luck, or a so-called act of God that caused that oil rig to blow up, kill 11 people, and cause what's probably going to be the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.

BP gamed the system, apparently to cut expenses. They avoided having to install and maintain safeguards that could have prevented this catastrophe. Now, no one knows for sure how we're going to prevent the Gulf of Mexico from becoming a giant lake of oil.

So, for whatever it's worth, my tiny little response to this is to declare that I'm through with BP. I'll never spend another nickel at a BP station unless my gasoline gauge is slam against the "E" and I need a gallon or two of gas to get me to the next station.

Yes, it's silly symbolism in a way. But my suggestion for everyone is to boycott BP. Don't spend any more money with these people. All they're concerned about is their own bottom line, and the only way they're going to realize the magnitude of their failure is to see that bottom line suffer.

So, boycott BP.

Photo: Wetlands near Cameron, Louisiana, late February 2010.

N.C.'s Former Golden Boy Now Trying to Stay Out of Prison

2010-05-20T16:01:00.011-04:00

John Edwards, the disgraced former candidate for vice-president and one-time golden boy of North Carolina politics, is back in the news. There are reports out that he's trying to cop a plea-bargain deal with the FBI and the IRS to avoid going to jail for misusing campaign funds to buy the silence of his former mistress, Rielle Hunter.

Say it ain't so, John-boy.

When Edwards was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1998, I was delighted. Finally, after decades of having North Carolina associated with the thick-skinned, hell-no politics of the late Jesse Helms, here was someone who I thought represented the state's true political heart. Edwards reminded me -- and apparently a lot of other people -- of the late Terry Sanford, a progressive Southern Democrat who served as North Carolina's governor in the early 1960s and later won a seat in the U.S. Senate and served as president of Duke University.

Edwards seemed to have stepped straight from the streets of Mayberry, the fictional North Carolina town that has been immortalized in "The Andy Griffith Show." In Mayberry, people disagree with each other but their disputes inevitably are resolved by the application of some good old down-home common sense, usually applied by the town's joshing, good-natured, smarter-than-he-looks sheriff, Andy Taylor.

Edwards cultivated an image that made you think he'd grown up as the best friend of Sheriff Taylor's son, Opie. "I believe I can be a champion for regular people," Edwards said back when he was crafting that image. "My own life experience allows me to see things through their eyes. They are the people I grew up with, the people who worked with my father in the mill, the people I fought for as a lawyer."

It sounded so good. When Edwards was elected to the Senate in 1998, it seemed the first step in a political career that could very well take him to the White House. But something changed when Edwards set up shop in Washington, D.C. Or maybe he didn't really change, he just shifted gears to pursue his true ambition of becoming president. He seemed to instantly forget the good old folks in the mill towns back home and set his sights on the White House the moment he arrived in the District of Columbia.

I'll admit I was fooled at first by Edwards's charm and political skills. But in my own defense, I also was among a few people who started having serious doubts about Edwards's sincerity soon after he took office and years before his hypocrisy was brought to light.

Around 2000, an issue surfaced in North Carolina politics that should have been tailor-made for Edwards's populist promise to represent the interests of the "regular people" he grew up with. The U.S. Navy began a ham-handed and ultimately futile effort to force Washington County, North Carolina to accept an unwanted training airfield for carrier-based jet fighters from nearby Norfolk, Virginia.

Since the jets using the training field -- known as an outlying landing field, or OLF -- would not be based in Washington County, there would be no economic benefit to the county for having the airfield. And the constant coming and going of the noisy, low-flying jets would be a serious disruption of residents' daily lives.

Despite protests from local political leaders and nearly every single one of the 13,000 residents of Washington County, the Navy pushed ahead with its plans.

Washington County is one of the state's poorest counties. Around 52 percent of its population is African-American. The county has little political clout. So the Navy thought it could force the OLF on the county because no one would come to its defense and the political costs to politicians for not opposing the OLF would be minimal.

Long story short, the Navy's plans to build the OLF in Washington County were halted thanks to a determined effort by local residents, the generosity and legal skill of the Charlotte law firm of Kennedy Covington, and the eventual opposition of most of the state's political leaders.

But John Edwards was nowhere to be seen in the fight against the OLF that dragged on for several years. He should have been a leader in the opposition to the Navy's plan. But he ducked it. And since the fight against the OLF never really gained national attention, no one called him on his refusal to represent the people he'd promised to defend. The most effective opposition to the OLF came from U.S. Senator Elizabeth Dole, a Republican.

All of this was playing out while Edwards was a rising star in the national Democratic Party. The OLF issue was still undecided in 2004, when Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry picked Edwards as his running mate for vice-president. Edwards's personal charm, boyish good looks, and soothing Southern accent seemed to make him the perfect running mate and regional counterbalance for the New England native Kerry.

The Kerry-Edwards ticket lost. Not long after the ticket's defeat in the 2004 election, reports surfaced that Kerry deeply regretted picking Edwards as his running mate. And then in late 2007 the National Enquirer -- a supermarket tabloid scorned by so-called serious political journalists -- nailed Edwards in an affair with Rielle Hunter. And now the guy who could have been Opie's pal and perhaps President of the United States is negotiating with the feds to try to avoid a prison term.

You fooled us, John. Frankly, I hope you go to jail, even if it's only for a few months. In case you've forgotten your small-town North Carolina roots, hypocrisy has never been popular among the "regular folks."

An Evening of Nostalgia at Durham Athletic Park

2010-05-11T18:13:00.016-04:00

In the summer of 1989, a couple on their second or third date had the following approximate conversation during a Durham Bulls baseball game at Durham Athletic Park:

Girl: So my mom went to high school with some guy who broke some kind of baseball record.

Guy: What was his name?

Girl: I don't remember.

Guy: What team did he play for?

Girl: I don't know.

Guy: Hmm. Where did your mom go to high school?

Girl: Fargo, North Dakota.

(A brief pause, while the guy searches his memory for hometowns of famous baseball players.)

Guy (astonished): Roger Maris? Your mom knew Roger Maris?

Girl: Did he break some kind of record?

Guy: Yes. In 1961 he broke Babe Ruth's record for home runs.

Girl: Maris. Yeah. Maris. That name sounds right.

The guy was me, and for almost 20 years I've been married to the girl whose mom occasionally saw Roger Maris in the halls of Fargo Central High School before he transferred to Shanley High.

Maris was five years old in 1939 when the Bulls played their first game at the then-new Durham Athletic Park. If 1939 seems like a simpler time, it was at least partly because simplicity was cheap and people couldn't afford extravagance during the Great Depression. Durham Athletic Park was a WPA project that was built for around $100,000.

Thousands of baseball games have been played at the DAP in the past 71 years, and there's no way to calculate the memories that are associated with the old ballpark. And when you sit in the DAP in the complicated and tiresome present and review your memories of long-ago games you saw there, the past always seems infinitely simpler and thus more appealing than the moment in which you're living.

That's what nostalgia is. And last night I was awash in nostalgia when I attended a special Bulls' game at the DAP. It was fun. And it was a bit strange.

I have no idea how many games I attended at the DAP from 1980 to 1993, when the Bulls were a Class A minor league team in the Carolina League. But it was the backdrop of my summers in those days. At one game, I heard a 12-year-old boy perfectly describe the visual appeal of Durham Athletic Park. "It's like everything is just the right size," he said.

Hollywood spotted that small-town charm, however, and the DAP became a co-star in the movie "Bull Durham" that starred Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.

The movie made a national brand of the Durham Bulls. But it also profoundly changed the ambiance at the DAP. The usually large crowds at Bulls games were swelled to overflowing by tourists who came not to see baseball, but to be seen at the DAP. At one game, I heard a woman ask her friend, "Which one is first base?"

The Bulls moved into a glitzy new retro-chic ballpark on the other side of town and soon became a Class AAA team, one rung below the Major Leagues. The DAP fell into disrepair and was looking positively shabby by the late 1990s.

But it had become a major landmark for the city, which has spent about $5 million to renovate the ballpark and has an agreement with Minor League Baseball to use the park to train grounds-keeping crews. There's also plans to build a museum of minor league baseball at the DAP, and the ballpark is being used by area amateur teams.

So with irony that only an ancient Chinese philosopher could understand, the cause of the DAP's demise -- that damned movie -- has also become its salvation, because the movie made it too valuable to lose.

The Bulls played the Toledo Mud Hens in the DAP last night to celebrate the renovation of the old ballpark. My wife couldn't make the game, but I wasn't about to miss it. For the record, Toledo defeated Durham, 6-2, before 3,911 fans.

The playing field was immaculate, but the bleachers that used to be along the foul lines have been removed. So I sat on the grass behind the left-field fence with Ben Misenheimer, who is the son of a guy I grew up with back in Stanly County.

We had a few beers. We talked about baseball, and what a great coach Ben's late grandfather was, and I told Ben how much I enjoyed playing for his grandfather. I told the story about my mother-in-law and Roger Maris, and the guy sitting next to us on the grass overheard it and laughed. Ben plays for a semi-pro baseball team in nearby Raleigh that plays some of its games in the DAP, and he talked about what it's like playing in the old landmark.

So it was a typical night at the DAP, and 20 years from now in a time that is more complex and complicated than today, Ben and I will be talking about the good old days when we saw a game together at Durham Athletic Park.

Photo and film clip: The photo at the top of this post shows early arrivals going into Durham Athletic Park before the Bulls' game against the Toledo Mud Hens.

The film clip shows Durham Bulls first basemen Chris Richard flying out for the second out in the bottom of the ninth inning. If the film clip appears as a black rectangle, it should still play if you click the "Play" button.

"Kamikaze Bugs" are the World's Most Aggressive Biting Insect

2010-05-03T17:44:00.008-04:00

When Jane and I lived in South Florida, I thought the small coal-black mosquitoes that swarmed around us in clouds when we went into the Everglades were the world's most annoying and aggressive biting insects. But now that we've lived in eastern North Carolina for a while, I'm convinced that the deer flies that emerge here every year around this time make the Glades mosquito look timid and withdrawing by comparison.

And after battling these crazed insects while working for a few hours this morning in a neighbor's yard, using a .44-caliber magnum pistol to kill them seems perfectly reasonable to me.

It takes me 15 or 20 seconds to walk to an outbuilding at the back of our property. When I make that walk this time of year, I'm likely to feel five or six deer flies bounce off my head.

I started calling these beastly insects "kamikaze bugs" the first time I encountered them. There is nothing subtle about how they approach a target. They just come at you full tilt and don't stop until they slam into you. And if they bounce off, they slam into you again. And when I feel one hit me, I slap angrily and reflexively, and I often feel something disgustingly wet and squishy but also primitively satisfying beneath my hand. Hence my nickname for them.

But the most annoying thing about deer flies is their bite. It's not nearly as painful as a bee or yellow-jacket sting, but it is a tiny, sharp and annoying nip on your exposed skin -- and at this time of year here in the South, people are exposing more skin every day.

I grew up about 250 miles southwest of here in the North Carolina Piedmont. I spent an awful lot of time outdoors, especially in the spring and summer. I remember several biting insects that were a warm-weather annoyance -- giant horseflies, small bee-like insects we called "sweat bees," and the ubiquitous mosquitoes -- but I don't remember being bedeviled by deer flies.

Deer flies emerge here in late April or early May, and live until around early August. That's not a long time for them to accomplish whatever task the Creator assigned them in the Grand Scheme of Things. But whatever their purpose is -- and it clearly involves sucking blood -- they pursue it with a frenzied gusto during the few months that they have.

A website produced by the Illinois Department of Public Health (apparently they also have them up there) says deer flies are attracted to their targets by the carbon dioxide and moisture that is exhaled during breathing. Their bite is painful because of their tiny, scissors-like jaws. The bite draws blood, and the bugs are happy -- at least until they're reduced to a bloody pulp by an enraged swat from their victim.

So it's early May here in North Carolina and these tiny nemeses have become part of the backdrop of the emerging season, along with the herring run on the Roanoke River, fading azalea flowers and magnolia blossoms that will open in a few weeks. And if our neighbors hear sporadic gunfire from our property during the next few months, they'll know I'm working in the yard.

Photo by R.C. Axtell, North Carolina State University

The Venerable Shag is a Southern Classic

2010-05-01T14:20:00.015-04:00

NOTE: The videos may appear as black rectangles, but they should still play if you click the "Play" button."

The Shag, which has been described as a laid-back version of the Jitterbug, has its roots in the dance crazes of the 1920s and '30s that swept New York and other large cities, but the dance has evolved into a Southern tradition. Friday evening, shaggers turned out on the banks of the Roanoke River in downtown Plymouth to dance to the Band of Oz, a group that's been playing rhythm-and-blues and soul music for shaggers since the 1970s.

In the video above, John Daigle -- in the yellow shirt -- is shagging with his wife Eileen. In the background, Chris Winstead, in the pink shirt, dances with Jim Hardison. They're members of the Eastern North Carolina Shag Club in Greenville. You can pick up on the easy tempo of the dance as you watch these dancers, but the Shag's ancestors were much more frenzied.

In June 1937, syndicated columnist George Ross issued a tongue-in-cheek warning to his readers about a wild new dance craze. "'Shag' is the latest dance that threatens to sweep the country," Ross wrote, noting that the dance "has been in vogue in the south for years."

"It is the only dance step ... that goes well to swing music," Ross concluded.

But he was referring to a dance that also went by the name of the Collegiate Shag, which took its place with two other wildly popular dances of that era -- the Big Apple and the famous Jitterbug. All three were fast, frenetic dances done to swing music. Dancers flailed their arms wildly and did high kicks. A careless dancer on a crowded floor could easily deck another dancer who happened to be too close.

The Collegiate Shag and other swing-era dances were done to music with a tempo of around 200 or more beats per minute. In the brief clip below from the 1939 movie "Blondie Meets the Boss," you can see the dramatic difference between the Collegiate Shag and the more sedate Carolina Shag.

There are many variations of the story about how the Carolina Shag evolved from its wilder ancestors, but most of the stories agree that the dance was developed in the beach towns of North Carolina and South Carolina in the 1940s and '50s. Instead of the rapid tempo swing music, however, dancers did the Carolina Shag to the more serene tempo of rhythm and blues -- around 110 to 130 beats per minute.

That's a more civilized pace that also allows shaggers to sip a beer as they dance.

Another forecaster predicts an active hurricane season

2010-04-28T05:32:00.006-04:00

The News and Observer of Raleigh reported yesterday that Lian Xie, a professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences at North Carolina State University, is predicting that the 2010 hurricane season will be "unusually active."

Xie (whose last name is pronounced "Shear") forecasts that 15 to 18 named tropical storms will form in the Atlantic Basin between June 1 and November 30. Of those storms, nine to 11 will strengthen into hurricanes with winds of at least 74 mph.

During the past 50 years, an average of about 10 named tropical storms have formed each summer.

Xie and his team of researchers also predict a high likelihood that a hurricane will make landfall somewhere along the southeastern coast of the U.S. The NC State team said the chances are seven in 10 that a hurricane will strike there.

The forecasters also said that there's a better-than-even chance that a major hurricane with winds exceeding 110 mph will make landfall somewhere on the Gulf Coast.

Xie and his researchers based their forecast on 100 years of hurricane data as well as weather patterns and the temperature of water at the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. Hurricanes draw their strength from warm water, and temperatures in the Atlantic Basin -- which includes the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico -- are warmer than usual.

Xie's researchers included NC State professor of statistics Montserrat Fuentes and graduate student Danny Modlin.

The NC State forecast is the second prediction this year for an active hurricane season. Earlier this month, forecasters at Colorado State University predicted that 15 named storms will form this year, with eight of those storms strengthening into hurricanes.

Iceland's Volcanoes: Where's the WWN When You Need It?

2010-04-20T21:37:00.008-04:00

A couple of years ago I bemoaned the demise of The Weekly World News, a supermarket tabloid that was sort of a cross between the Mad magazine that I loved as a kid and the New York Post.

WWN's journalism was a blend of low-brow popular culture, primitive and pervasive human fears, and straight fiction. And I loved it. It was outrageous, unabashed, pseudo-journalism satire.

One of my favorite features in the WWN was the "Satan's Face" photos that showed up every so often. These were photos, usually of storm clouds or billowing smoke, in which you could see some hint of a demonic face. I recall three with captions that read something like "Satan's Face Seen in Hurricane Andrew" and "Satan's Face Seen in Storm Clouds Over Chicago" and "Satan's Face Seen in World Trade Center Fires."

The spectacular photos of the recent volcanic eruptions in Iceland have made me think of the Satan's Face photos in the old WWN. The WWN's strict black-and-white format would have diminished some of the impact of the color photos, but the eruptions would have been a perfect opportunity for the tabloid to speculate about the recurring presence of the Evil One.

So I'm passing along this amazing photo of one of the Iceland volcanoes, along with my sincere admiration of the skill of the photographer who got this spectacular shot. You can see a vague outline of a face -- fiery eyes in the upper right corner, a glowing nose beneath the eyes, and the hint of a mouth.

FYI, lightning often flashes in the clouds that form during an eruption. Scientists are still trying to figure out why this happens. Whatever the reason, the lightning combines with the belching flames to create truly unworldly special effects.

Photo by Jon Pall Vilhelmsson

April 1935: Administrator seeks hurricane protection for veterans working in Florida Keys

2010-04-19T08:39:00.013-04:00

This post is the latest in a series describing the events leading up to the tragedy of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935.

By mid-April 1935, veterans work camps administrator Fred Ghent was trying to provide hurricane protection for the 600 or so World War I vets building a highway in the Florida Keys as part of a New Deal construction project.

Ghent had lived in Florida since 1925 and was well aware of the death and devastation hurricanes can inflict. Miami had been nearly destroyed in September 1926 by what was then the most powerful hurricane on record. In 1928, an even more powerful storm came ashore at Palm Beach, roared across the Everglades, and shoved a deadly flood out of Lake Okeechobee that killed at least 3,000.

Ghent took over as the administrator in Florida for the federally sponsored work program for veterans on April 1, 1935. On April 9, he sent a letter to Joseph Hyde Pratt, a regional supervisor for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in Atlanta. The start of hurricane season on June 1 was less than two months away, and Ghent knew he had to come up with some way to protect the men living in three work camps on the low-lying Keys.

"We do know . . . that this area is subject to hurricanes, and in view of this knowledge, it is our duty to every man employed on the keys, in connection with this program, to furnish a safe refuge during the storm," Ghent wrote.

Ghent realized the men under his supervision could not stay on the islands if a hurricane came their way. The men were living in small, poorly constructed shacks on the beach, only a foot or two at most above sea level. The shacks wouldn't stand up to even a minimal hurricane.

Soon after he became administrator, Ghent proposed building a large, well-constructed hurricane shelter for the men in the Keys. But that plan was dropped because it was too expensive.

The only alternative was to move the men if a hurricane came their way. But that presented a different set of challenges. Drunkenness was a constant problem among the vets, and Ghent knew the men would be very difficult to control if they were moved even briefly away from the work camps.

"The chief source of all the trouble amongst the veterans seems to be caused by liquor," Lieutenant Colonel M.R. Woodward of the Florida National Guard noted in a memo he wrote on April 8, 1935. National Guard troops had been stationed near the work camps since March 1 after the veterans went on strike demanding better working conditions and improved sanitation in their camps.

But even armed soldiers weren't enough to keep the determined veterans from getting drunk.

"One of the main functions of the Guard is to keep out all illegal shipments of liquor," Woodward wrote. "The veterans resort to drinking shoe polish, hair tonic and other fluids that contain alcohol; this creates a very bad condition when men become intoxicated on these drinks."

Ghent knew that no towns would want the drunken, brawling veterans in their midst during a storm. But he knew he had to do something. He would spend the rest of the summer trying to devise a plan.

NOTE: The map at the top of this post, published in the Miami Daily News in 1935, shows the route of the highway being built by World War I veterans in the Florida Keys.

Mascot Ice Hockey

2010-04-13T06:49:00.006-04:00

NOTE: The video embed above may be displaying as a black rectangle. But it should still play if you click on the "Start" arrow.

Jane and I recently went to a Carolina Hurricanes' game at the RBC Center in Raleigh. It's been a frustrating year for the 'Canes, especially since they were expecting a good season after making it to the finals of the NHL's Eastern Conference Stanley Cup playoffs last year. But they lost to the Buffalo Sabres and later ended the season without qualifying for the playoffs.

Still, the game Jane and I attended had a few moments of fun. The 'Canes were celebrating the 10th birthday of their mascot, Smokey, who is, I think, supposed to be a pig in recognition of North Carolina's tasty, diet-busting barbecue.

Smokey's birthday was celebrated during one of the intermissions with a brief hockey game between teams of mascots assembled for the birthday celebration. I wish my old pals in Florida, Alan Snel and Jeff Houck, could have seen this contest. It reminded me of the days when we watched mascots race around the bases between innings of Florida State League games at Thomas J. White Stadium in Port St. Lucie, Florida. I remember watching one race when we wondered if an especially top-heavy mascot representing Wonder Bread was going to make the turn at third base without toppling into the dugout.

I would have posted this video clip weeks ago, but I've had problems getting it to upload to Blogger. I think I've finally figured it out. Anyway, during this 30-second clip, you can watch the Geico Gecko -- one of the few mascots who could actually skate pretty well -- score a goal. One of the other mascots had an assist on the play, but I couldn't tell which one it was.

So, Al and Jeff, this one's for you.

CSU Forecasters Predict Active 2010 Hurricane Season

2010-04-09T08:38:00.004-04:00

Forecasters at Colorado State University think four major hurricanes with winds exceeding 110 mph will form in the Atlantic Basin during a busy 2010 hurricane season.

CSU meteorologists Phil Klotzbach and William Gray also predict that the coming summer storm season will be much busier than last year. Klotzbach and Gray think eight hurricanes will develop from 15 named storms. The forecasters cite two reasons for a busier-than-average hurricane season -- the dissipation of the El Nino that kept the lid on the 2009 hurricane season and very warm waters in the Atlantic Basin, which includes the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.

About 10 tropical storms with winds of at least 35 mph form in an average hurricane season. About six hurricanes with winds of at least 74 mph form during an average season, and about two of those storms evolve into major hurricanes.

The 2009 season saw nine tropical storms form, with three of those storms developing into hurricanes that spawned two major hurricanes.

An El Nino is a meteorlogical phenomenon that occurs occasionally in the Pacific Ocean off the northwest coast of South America. The event occurs when waters in this part of the Pacific are unusually warm.

When an El Nino forms, it diverts the normal flow of upper-level winds known as the jet stream. This disruption creates strong winds over the Atlantic Basin that disrupt hurricane formation. Gray and Klotzbach noted that the 2009 El Nino reduced tropical cyclone activity to about 70 percent of the average season. The forecasters think the 2010 season will see about 160 percent of the average season.

The CSU team also thinks there's a 69 percent probability that at least one major hurricane will make landfall somewhere on the U.S. Atlantic Coast.

CSU meteorologists, led by Gray, have been issuing preseason hurricane forecasts for 27 years. The forecasters incorporate 58 years of hurricane data into their predictions.

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30. CSU will issue another seasonal forecast on June 2.

April 1, 1935: Vets' Work Camps Get Sympathetic Supervisor

2010-03-30T12:56:00.005-04:00

This post is the third in a series marking the 75th anniversary of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, which struck the Florida Keys on September 2, 1935.

On April 1, 1935, Fred Ghent took charge of the camps housing World War I veterans enrolled in a federally sponsored work program in Florida.

In many ways Ghent, an Alabama native, was the perfect man for the job of supervising a group of jobless, discouraged and troubled men. He'd been a safety supervisor for the Florida Emergency Relief Administration, which was the agency charged with carrying out President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs in the state. But more importantly, Ghent also was a World War I veteran who could identify with the problems plaguing the men who'd landed in the work program during the worst years of the Great Depression.

Ghent would be in charge of the six work camps that the Florida Emergency Relief Administration had set up in Florida. The three beachfront work camps in the Keys housed about 600 men from all across the United States. Camp 1, the northernmost camp, was on Windley Key where the vets quarried coral used in building a highway from Miami to Key West. Camp 3, the southernmost camp, was at the southern tip of Lower Matecumbe Key, where the men were building a bridge. Camp 5 was between the other two camps at the northern end of Lower Matecumbe Key, not far from the village of Islamorada.

A few weeks after taking the job, Ghent assembled the veterans in the Keys camps to explain his plans to them. He also told them that he wanted to help them untangle their disorderly lives. "I don't believe there's a man in the ranks who would be here if he wasn't a victim of the Depression and his financial condition, which was caused by something beyond his control," he told the men.

But it would take more than sympathetic understanding to keep the unruly veterans in line. The crude work camps in the isolated, sparsely populated Keys were beyond the reach of law enforcement. There was no entertainment or recreation for the vets. So their main form of amusement was drinking, and when their monthly payday came around, they turned into a drunken, uncontrollable and brawling mob.

Ghent started meeting individually with the vets to try to help them find solutions to their problems. But he couldn't control the drunken rowdiness that made the residents of the small settlements near the camps very uneasy.

"If they had 10 cents, they had to have a bottle of beer," Bernard Russell, a lifelong resident of Islamorada, recalled in a 1996 interview. "You know, the poor old guys, they'd been through enough, I guess. We knewwhat they had gone through, and we accepted them."

NOTE: The cartoon at the top of this post pokes fun at the heavy drinking of the World War I vets living in work camps in the Florida Keys in 1935. The cartoon appreared in the May 4, 1935 issue of the Key Veteran News, a weekly newspaper published by the vets in the camps. The cartoon is part of the collection of Jerry Wilkinson of Tavernier, Florida, who is president of the Historical Preservation Society of the Upper Keys.

March 24-25, 1935: Washington Post Story Portrays Vets as Living in Island Paradise

2010-03-25T09:31:00.008-04:00

NOTE: This post is the second in a series observing the 75th anniversary of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, which struck the Florida Keys on September 2, 1935.

By late March 1935, the Roosevelt Administration had for months been quietly sending hundreds of jobless World War I veterans to oceanfront work camps in the remote Florida Keys to work on a New Deal construction project. The vets were building a highway from Miami to Key West.

The work program had been out of the national spotlight but that changed on March 24 and 25, when the Washington Post published a two-part series about the down-and-out vets' presence in the Keys. The Post headline for the story of March 24 said the vets were partying in their island paradise.

Post reporter Edward T. Folliard's stories had a decidedly sarcastic and patronizing tone. His story of March 24 said the vets were "encamped on a pretty little coral island as working guests of Uncle Sam." The men had recently gone on a "booze rampage," Folliard wrote.

The 600 or so men in the Keys camps were casualties of the Great Depression. Many of them also had been psychologically scarred by combat in World War I. Today, their condition is known as post-traumatic stress disorder. In 1935, it was called shellshock.

For many of the vets in the Keys camps, life had been a constant struggle since they'd been discharged from military service after World War I ended in 1918. Even during the booming economy of the 1920s, they were troubled. They'd been plagued by depression and a sense of alienation. They'd had trouble holding down jobs, staying married, and raising families. Many of them drank far too much.

The economic catastrophe of the Great Depression had made their troubled lives even more chaotic. In 1932, about 40,000 desperate veterans gathered in Washington, D.C. seeking help from the federal government. The vets had been promised a $1,000 bonus -- about $15,500 in 2009 dollars -- for their wartime service, but payment wasn't due until 1944. The veterans who came to Washington in 1932 wanted Congress to pay them half of the bonus immediately.

President Herbert Hoover opposed the early payment, and in July 1932 he ordered General Douglas MacArthur to evict the men from federal property. MacArthur exceeded Hoover's orders, however, and used troops to chase the men out of the District of Columbia and set fire to their ramshackle camps.

Photos of the eviction were published in newspapers across the country. The incident helped turn public opinion against President Hoover and contributed to Franklin Roosevelt's landslide victory in the November 1932 election.

Roosevelt had campaigned on a pledge to help the "forgotten man," and after his inauguration in March 1933, jobless vets again assembled in Washington to urge early payment of their bonus. The vets were the epitome of the men Roosevelt had promised to help. Like Hoover, FDR also opposed paying the bonus early, but recalling Hoover's public relations blunder, he sought a way to help the vets while simultaneously getting them out of the nation's capital.

When Key West -- once one of the nation's most prosperous cities -- declared bankruptcy in 1934, Roosevelt Administration officials saw a chance to showcase the New Deal, put the vets to work, and get them far away from Washington. They decided to remake Key West as a tourist town.

In August 1934, the Roosevelt Administration's efforts to restore Key West were showcased in a New York Times editorial written by Julius Stone, who was in charge of the federal government's emergency relief operations in Florida. The federal government would use Key West's natural beauty and the labor of its residents to return the city to prosperity and demonstrate the effectiveness of the Roosevelt Administration's policies to pull the nation out of the Depression.

But in 1934, getting to Key West by car wasn't easy. Motorists had to use a combination of secondary roads and ferries. The journey was slow, and the ferries didn't operate during rough weather.

The solution was to build a major highway down the islands so tourists could easily drive from Miami to Key West. And the jobless vets were the ideal labor force for the project.

When the Washington Post reporter arrived, about 600 men were living in the camps and more were arriving every day. Their meals were provided at no charge, and they were being paid $30 a month for their work -- about $465 in 2009 dollars.

But Folliard had little sympathy for the vets' plights. His March 24, 1935 story focused on the "debauchery" in the work camps and said almost nothing about the construction work the vets were doing. The story of March 25 -- 75 years ago today -- briefly mentioned a bridge construction project the vets were working on, but again focused on politics and described the primitive work camps in terms that made them seem comfortable.

Folliard did not mention, however, that only a few months earlier, conditions in the camps had been so bad that two vets died from meningitis.

The photo at the top of this post shows one of the work camps in the Florida Keys that housed World War I veterans working on a highway construction project in 1935. The camp was destroyed by a hurricane that struck the Keys on September 2, 1935.

Happy Birthday, Beaucat

2010-03-17T21:52:00.006-04:00

It's Beaucat's birthday, more or less. He's officially 17 years old.

Jane and I don't know the exact date that he and his sister Harrie were born. They didn't give us birth certificates when we got them in July 1993 at the St. Lucie County Animal Shelter in Fort Pierce, Florida. But we figured they were born sometime in March of that year. So Saint Patrick's Day is as good a day as any to designate as their birthday.

I've already talked about Beaucat's current condition in a recent post, so I won't go into a lot of detail again other than to say that he's an old guy who's hanging in there. He sleeps a lot, but he still reports for lap-cat duty on Thursday and Sunday evenings when we go to the front porch for sundowners.

So instead of focusing on his age, I thought I'd do a retrospective of his career. Here are some photos of him and his late sister, who died of cancer in 2005.

The first photo above was made around Christmas 1995, in Florida. The gray furry thing floating around his nose is a catnip mouse that was his Christmas present that year.

Here's Harrie with something she swiped from the Christmas tree in 1995. We borrowed the thing from "It's a Wonderful Life" about an angel being created every time a bell rings. We'd hang a bag of catnip next to a bell on the lowest branch of the tree so that any cat who swatted the bag would ring the bell. Harrie loved to swat the catnip.

This is Harrie soon after we moved to North Carolina in 1997. The table she's looking over was made by my grandfather sometime in the early 1920s.

Here's a photo I made in the winter of 1999. I couldn't believe that the cats sat this way long enough for me to grab the camera and get this shot. But it was a very cold day, and the wood stove was putting out a lot of heat, so I guess they had no reason to move.

Here's Harrie examining the final draft of Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. I shot this in May 2002.

Finally, here's a shot of Beaucat made on the night of September 18, 2003 a few hours after Hurricane Isabel blew right over us. The lighting is from a flashlight. We didn't get power back for a couple of weeks. Isabel was a very bad storm, but Beaucat and Harrie, being South Florida natives, ignored it. They curled up and snoozed on the couch while Jane and I worried about whether the house was going to withstand winds that included a 120-mph gust when the eye reached us.

Commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935

2010-03-14T14:52:00.006-04:00

September 2, 2010 will be the 75th anniversary of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, the most powerful hurricane to make landfall in the United States. The eye of the hurricane came ashore at Long Key, Florida on Labor Day Monday of 1935 with winds that probably exceeded 200 mph and a storm surge that may have reached 22 feet or more.

The official death toll of the storm was 408, but the actual toll could have been higher. Most of the victims were jobless World War I veterans who had been sent to the Florida Keys as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program to provide jobs during the Great Depression. The veterans were living in three makeshift work camps on the low-lying islands and were unprotected from the powerful storm. They were building a highway from Miami across the islands to Key West.

Keeping tabs on the unruly vets was difficult, and they often came and went without camp administrators being aware of their movements. So it was impossible to account for all of the vets after the hurricane. Some of the missing veterans may have left camp just before the storm without notifying camp officials; others undoubtedly were literally blown away by the hurricane and their bodies were never found.

Had the vets not been in the Keys, the Labor Day Hurricane would have been little more than a meteorological oddity – an extremely powerful hurricane that made landfall on islands that were sparsely populated in 1935. But their presence transformed this hurricane into a national tragedy. The vets were from all over the country, and their deaths made headlines across the U.S. The political fallout caused some headaches for the Roosevelt Administration as FDR was about to launch his campaign for his second term in 1936.

In 2002, National Geographic published my book, Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. A paperback edition was published in 2003. The book also was the basis for “Nature’s Fury: Storm of the Century,” a documentary that premiered on the History Channel in 2006.

I spent more than four years researching and writing the book, and in the process I compiled a detailed timeline of the events related to the storm. For the next six months, I’ll be using that timeline – as well as excerpts from my writing about the hurricane – to make regular postings about the events leading to the tragedy that occurred on Monday, September 2, 1935. Please check back from time to time as I commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935.

Images of the Afterlife

2010-03-10T01:31:00.012-05:00

I have no reason that I know of to doubt that I've got many more productive years ahead of me. But I'm old enough to know that those years won't seem as long as the years seemed to be when I was a kid, or even when I was a young man.

So I'm starting to ponder more seriously what, if anything, comes after this life when, as the 17th-century poet John Donne phrased it, "the bell tolls for thee" and you pass on, to use the gentle, euphemistic phrase that polite people here in the South use instead of that awful, finite and terrifying word die.

I have no realistic idea what happens when that moment comes. Maybe, as author Andrew Holleran suggested in his novel Dancer from the Dance, you're returned to the nitrogen cycle. Or perhaps Douglas Adams had it right in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when he quipped that maybe you vanish in a puff of un-smoke.

I grew up attending a small United Methodist church in the rural South, and the earliest image of the afterlife that was implanted in my mind combined a child's concept of the Christian vision of heaven as a sort of Disneyland theme park with images from old Looney Tunes cartoons. You see a Ferris wheel and other celestial amusements rising from behind gleaming alabaster walls, all of it floating on a fluffy white cloud. Saint Peter -- a sort of cherubic, rosy-cheeked bouncer with wings and curly blond hair -- guards the Pearly Gates, admitting the Good and sending the Bad to that big red one-way escalator that descends to a very hot place.

My thinking has evolved since those days. But it's hard not to return to familiar images. And so one of my favorite drinking games with friends is to imagine what Saint Peter might say to us when we show up for our dates with Eternity.

Before I go any further, I need to describe my personal image of Saint Peter. He's not the angelic cherub I described above. I seem him more as Humphrey Bogart in a reprise of his role as Rick, the cynical but sentimental saloonkeeper in the classic movie "Casablanca." Bogey plays a sort of Saint Peter-like character in that move. People from all over Nazi-occupied Europe come to his saloon hoping to find some way to escape to Lisbon and from there to the freedom of America. Bogart occasionally helps a worthy freedom seeker to leave Casablanca.

I see the entrance to heaven not as tacky, gilt-colored gates but as the airport in the movie's final scene. And even though thousands of people are dying every moment and all of them are meeting Saint Bogey at the instant of their deaths, when your time comes it's just you and him and night and fog. He's wearing a trench coat and a fedora with the brim snapped down over his eyes, and an unfiltered cigarette (yes, smoking is OK in heaven, if you're dead you're not worried about cancer) dangles from his lips, and the smoke curls off the cigarette and merges with the fog.

So you're standing in front of him and he's looking you up and down, and he doesn't say anything but the expression on his face seems to say, "What the hell are you doing here, chump?"

Then he's holding a battered clipboard and shuffling through the dog-eared pages of your life, and he's skimming quickly over everything but stops at something and stares for a moment, and then he raises his eyebrows and mutters, "Jesus Christ, you actually did that?" And while he's doing this, the cigarette keeps burning but doesn't get shorter.

And then the moment comes when he's going to tell you to either enter the Pearly Gates or take that red escalator. He takes the cigarette out of his mouth, discards it with a flick of his finger, and gives you another once over. You wait for him to speak.

I have an old friend named Chaz Misenheimer, a guy I grew up with, who's told me what he hopes to hear at that moment. We're both very fond of "The Andy Griffith Show," which presents an idyllic image of life in small-town North Carolina. We also have a strong preference for the older black-and-white episodes that were made before Don Knotts left the show and took his character of Barney Fife with him. But we've seen all of these old B&W episodes many times.

So when Chaz stands before Saint Peter, he hopes to hear him say, "Come on in, we've got 20 black-and-white episodes of 'The Andy Griffith Show' that you've never seen."

As for me, my guess is that when Saint Bogey takes that cigarette out of his mouth, he won't say anything. He'll just stare at me coolly until I finally get the unspoken message and turn and trudge toward the red escalator. But just as I'm about to step on the descending stair, I hope I hear him say, "Come on back, I was only kidding. You can come in."

NOTE: The picture at the top is from "Satan's Waitin", a Looney Tunes that released in 1953. The cartoon was written by Warren Foster, drawn by Virgil Ross, Arthur Davis, Manuel Perez, Ken Champin and Hawley Pratt, and directed by Friz Freleng.

On the Road, Back Soon . . .

2010-02-23T05:23:00.006-05:00

I'll be traveling for the next week or so in Texas and on the Gulf Coast. Please check back for new postings in early March.

'Till then, here's a Gulf Coast sunset I shot many years ago.

An Old Friend in Winter

2010-02-18T16:14:00.010-05:00

My pal Beaucat will be 17 years old in a few weeks, and it’s hard to watch a close friend grow old.

Beaucat has been with Jane and me since we lived in Florida. We got him and his sister, Harrie, at the St. Lucie County Animal Shelter in Fort Pierce. I was reluctant to get pets. We were both busy with very demanding jobs, and I didn’t think we’d be able to spend any time with them. And I knew that sooner or later, we’d have to deal with losing them, and that made me uncomfortable. But Jane talked me into it.

One day in July 1993, we agreed to meet at the animal shelter during our lunch hour. Jane got there ahead of me and had found two kittens she liked by the time I got there. I stood in front of a small cage, the attendant opened it, and the kitten that would become Beaucat came right out like I was late for an appointment. He walked up my right arm, stood on my shoulder, and meowed loudly. I’m guessing he was saying something like “What took you so long? Get me the hell out of here.”

Beaucat is doing a lot of loud howling these days, but it’s a different kind. From what Jane and I have read at various cat websites, it’s related to old age. He seems out of it at times, sort of lost. The howling, according to what we’ve read, is because he’s confused, disoriented and lonely. It’s a sort of feline senile dementia.

It’s not easy to deal with sometimes, because he can be very, very loud and it sounds like he’s mad and scolding me. It’s an incredibly grating howl, and it can instantly break my focus if I’m trying to concentrate on work. Sometimes he does it when I’m in the middle of a phone call, and I have to explain to whoever I’m talking to that no, I’m not torturing a cat, I have an elderly cat that’s getting senile.

But he usually stops when I pick him up and drape him across my shoulder. That seems to be where he’s wanted to be since that day 17 years ago in the animal shelter. When I was working on my first book, he was often draped across my shoulder snoozing. It became such a habit for us that I’d suddenly realize I didn’t remember when he’d jumped on my lap and climbed up on my shoulder, or how long he’d been there. And when I pick him up now, he often drapes across my shoulder, sighs loudly and settles down, and for a while it’s just like old times.

We lost Harrie (right) to cancer in 2005, and the sadness that had made me reluctant to get pets in the first place because they’d eventually die was as bad as I’d feared. But Harrie was a great cat, and having her for 12 years was wonderful.

Beaucat’s time will come sooner rather than later, and I dread it. But he’s been a great companion and has enriched our lives, and I wouldn’t take anything for that memory.

Tar Heels miss Psycho-T's intensity

2010-02-11T10:32:00.011-05:00

It’s been a tough year for the University of North Carolina basketball team. As mid-February approaches, the Tar Heels are near the bottom of the Atlantic Coast Conference standings, and the prospects of improving seem remote.

It’s quite a comedown from a year ago, when Tyler “Psycho-T” Hansbrough led the Tar Heels to their sixth national championship. *

Hansbrough was unlike any player I’ve ever seen in a Carolina uniform. He wasn’t the first immensely talented player to lead UNC to glory. But his focus and passion for winning were unearthly. He was a superstar who played as though he was a scrappy but marginally talented teenager trying to win the last spot on a high school junior varsity team.

He was bloodied, banged and decked by other players, and he bounced up and charged back into the game. He dove for loose balls like a crazed little point guard instead of a 6-9 power forward. Sometimes when he grabbed an offensive rebound and put it back up to score, it seemed like he had the entire opposing team literally hanging onto him.

His manic intensity prompted his teammates to nickname him Psycho-T, and you could see his intensity on his face. To borrow a phrase from “My Name Is Earl,” he had crazy-eyes. And he gave that kind of effort for four years, unheard of in an era when college superstars forego their junior or senior seasons to become instant millionaires in the NBA.

Despite losing Hansbrough and every other key player on last year’s team, UNC was ranked sixth nationally by the Associated Press at the start of the 2009-10 season.

I don’t claim to be a highly skilled basketball analyst, but I’ve watched UNC long enough to know that that ranking was far off the mark. Back on January 2, as the Atlantic Coast Conference basketball schedule was getting underway, I sent the following to Alan Snel, an old friend in Tampa who knows I’m an intense Carolina fan:

“As for the basketball Heels, I’m not expecting much from them this year. Maybe 3rd or 4th in the ACC and a game or two deep into the NCAA (tournament). Of course, that’s a very good season for most teams. They’re loaded with talent, as usual, but I don’t think they’ve got the experience to do better in the conference or NCAA tourney this year.”

Turns out I overestimated the Heels’ season. After last night’s loss to (shudder) Duke (shudder), they’re 13-11 and unlikely to make the NCAA playoffs unless they have a phenomenal stretch run – the kind of intense, focused run that could only be inspired by a player like Psycho-T.

The team has been hampered by injuries that sidelined players who could have made a difference. Something else is plaguing this year’s Tar Heels, however, and coach Roy Williams has been unusually frustrated.

Williams has assembled his usual collection of highly talented athletes. But anyone who goes after a big prize eventually learns that once you reach a certain level of competition, exceptional talent alone is not enough to win because the other guys are just as good as you are. Beating players who are as good as you are takes willpower and a lot of hard work. Caulton Tudor, a veteran sportswriter for the News and Observer, noted that Williams said he’d never before had to coach effort.

Carolina has seemed astonishingly listless and indifferent at times, and I’m thinking the lethargy is directly related to Tyler Hansbrough’s departure. While he was at UNC, he showed the Tar Heels the kind of effort it takes to win, and his example motivated his teammates to give the effort it took to win a national title. Until another player emerges with that same drive – and until injuries heal and Carolina can consistently put their best five players on the floor – UNC will struggle.

So I guess the lesson, not very profound but certainly instructive, is that one person can make a tremendous difference in the effort exerted by a group of people. And the Tar Heels are suffering from the absence of Hansbrough’s intense desire to win.

(* The Tar Heels' six national titles include NCAA championships in 1957, 1982, 1993, 2005 and 2009. In 1924, before the NCAA tournament started, they were named national champions by the Helms Foundation. The banner for the 1924 title is hanging in the rafters of the Dean Dome with the five NCAA banners.)

Photo of UNC coach Roy Williams by Chuck Liddy for the News and Observer

State Farm will cancel hurricane coverage in Florida at peak of 2010 season

2010-02-04T13:41:00.011-05:00

NBC News reported yesterday that on August 1, State Farm will cancel homeowners' insurance coverage for about 125,000 customers in hurricane-prone Florida. But NBC did not explain why State Farm probably chose that date to end its coverage.

Anyone who’s lived in Florida any length of time knows that the worst hurricanes usually come after August 1. By that date, the summer sun has been heating the tropical Atlantic for several months, and there’s plenty of warm water to fuel the monster storms that usually form between mid-August and mid-September. Although very powerful hurricanes have formed in July, the memorable monster storms such as Hurricane Andrew, Hurricane Camille and the unnamed killer hurricanes of 1926, 1928 and 1935 all formed after August 1. And the five major hurricanes that affected Florida in 2004 and 2005 and inflicted more than $40 billion in damages all came after that date.

State Farm was required by law to give policyholders at least six months’ notice of cancellations, NBC reported. The company could have started that six-month countdown at any time. But any insurance actuary knows that the likelihood of a catastrophic hurricane striking Florida – and the subsequent payout of billions of dollars in damage claims – is far greater after August 1. So it doesn’t seem unlikely that State Farm decided to reduce its exposure to damage claims by ending its coverage when the worst storms usually form.

There also are early indications that the upcoming summer is going to be more active than 2009. A weather phenomenon known as El Niño kept the lid on last summer’s hurricane season by creating upper-level winds over the Atlantic that disrupted hurricane formation throughout the summer. But meteorologists expected the El Niño to dissipate during the winter of 2009-10, and there are clear signs that that’s what is happening.

So if those upper-level winds are gone, more hurricanes are likely to form in the tropical Atlantic this summer.

NBC News also reported that State Farm will help the customers it’s dumping find coverage with other agencies.

Photo of downtown Punta Gorda, Florida after Hurricane Charley in August 2004 is by Mark Wolfe for FEMA.

Seattle artist commemorates Willie Mays and "The Catch"

2010-01-21T09:21:00.024-05:00

Diehard baseball fans still talk about “The Catch” that Willie Mays made at New York’s Polo Grounds in the 1954 World Series. But high-rise apartments now cover the ground where the stadium once stood, and the memory of Mays’s unearthly play 55 years ago is fading.

Seattle artist Thom Ross wants to make sure that future generations of fans – especially New Yorkers – remember that moment when Mays did the impossible. He has created a life-sized five-part illustration of the feat that shows Mays from the moment he zeros in on the baseball that Cleveland’s Vic Wertz drove to the deepest part of the stadium until he whirls to throw the ball back to the infield after making the catch.

Ross’s illustration of Mays's catch has twice gotten the attention of Sports Illustrated magazine, and he’d like to erect a permanent version of “The Catch” in New York at the spot where Mays performed his feat. He already has a permanent display at Safeco Field in Seattle showing the moment the Seattle Mariners beat the New York Yankees in the 1995 American League Division Series.

Ross hauled his illustration across the U.S. and set it up temporarily at the Polo Grounds Towers last September. The photo at the top of this post shows Ross's display. The exhibit stirred the memories of some older residents who recalled the moment, but it bothered Ross that the kids who saw his work didn’t know anything about what had happened there.

“The little kids that lived there, no one told them that Willie caught the ball where they played,” Ross told me recently. “These kids live in a sacred place, and there’s no one there to pass that story along.”

To erect a permanent version of The Catch at the Polo Grounds Towers, however, he needs permission from New York City officials. He's tried to contact the office of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but hasn't gotten a response.

Ross and I have been talking about his effort since he recently saw my blog post about the trip I made to the site of the Polo Grounds a couple of years ago with my nephew John Morrow and brother-in-law Bob Morrow.

Around 54,000 people saw Wertz drive a long, towering fly ball to the deepest part of the Polo Grounds in the eighth inning of Game One of the 1954 World Series. Mays probably was the only person in the ballpark who thought the 460-foot blast could be caught. But his opinion was the one that mattered. To the amazement of the crowd and people who still watch the play on video today, Mays chased down the long drive and hauled it in at full gallop.

Jack Brickhouse, who was doing the radio play-by-play broadcast of the game, said Mays’s catch “must have been an optical illusion to a lot of people.” But Mays was nonchalant.

“I had the ball all the way,” Mays told reporters after the game. “There was nothing too hard about it. I’ve made better catches.”

Ross was a toddler living with his family in San Francisco in 1954. He recalls his father telling him about the catch, but he didn’t really become aware of Mays until the Giants moved to San Francisco in 1958 and played the New York Yankees in the 1962 World Series.

Ross sees a deeper meaning in Mays’s extraordinary play and thinks it’s “a beacon, and a challenge, to all people who dare to dream.”

The Catch also has become a personal inspiration for Ross.

“I was able to incorporate Willie and his Catch into my philosophy on my own life as an artist, and I saw that the same effort, talent and dedication would be demanded of me,” he says. “And because Mays did indeed catch the ball, I knew my own dreams and wishes were possible. It was all in how much I was willing to put out, what effort I was willing to do.”

(Photo of Mays's catch in 1954 World Series is a Wide World photo)

Baseball's steroids era mirrors America's obsession with excess

2010-01-12T11:20:00.009-05:00

So Mark McGwire (above, right) finally has admitted that he was juiced when he and Sammy Sosa (left) resurrected America’s interest in baseball with their spectacular home run duel in 1998.

McGwire and Sosa accounted for 136 home runs that summer, and their chase of Roger Maris’s single-season record of 61 captured the nation’s attention unlike any event since the cancellation of the 1994 World Series because of a contract dispute between the Major League Players Association and team owners.

Author Jacques Barzun once noted that anyone wanting to understand America should learn about baseball. So if baseball is a microcosm of America, maybe our current financial mess was foretold in the cancellation of the ’94 series and the McGwire-Sosa home run extravaganza four years later.

During negotiations for a new labor contract in 1994, team owners wanted to establish a limit on players’ salary increases. The Major League Players Association didn’t want limits and threatened to strike if the owners tried to impose them. Neither side budged by the September 14 deadline, so the rest of the season and the World Series were cancelled.

It was a stunning indicator of how deeply the obsession with money had penetrated our national psyche. Despite the chaos and uncertainty caused by two world wars and the Great Depression, the World Series had been played every year since 1905. But in 1994 this venerable event could not survive the immovable greed of millionaire players and billionaire owners.

Fans were furious and interest in the game plummeted when the 1995 season began.

Yet Major League Baseball’s annual revenue has steadily increased since the strike. Blomberg.com reported that MLB had a record $6.5 billion in revenue for the 2008 season, and that seven teams set attendance records.

How did MLB overcome fans’ disgust and increase revenue in the wake of the 1994 strike? CNN noted in 2006 that MLB tapped into Internet-driven income sources that didn’t exist at the time of the strike. But the foundation for the revenue surge of the past decade was laid when team owners and league administrators looked the other way while talented athletes boosted their already exceptional skills with steroids. Some players built up muscle mass that seemed supernatural and launched phenomenal home run outbursts at a time in their careers when such totals typically declined among players of earlier eras.

Fan excitement returned when longstanding home run records were shattered by apparent super-athletes who seemed on the verge of eclipsing the careers of legendary earlier stars such as Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Hank Aaron. Crowds filled the stadiums. The damage from the lost World Series of 1994 seemed short-lived and greatly over-estimated.

The home run orgy in Major League baseball coincided with a national obsession with excess that blossomed in the 1990s and continued after the turn of the century. Everyone wanted bigger houses, bigger automobiles, bigger cheeseburgers. Big was in, biggest was best. Merely having enough wasn’t nearly enough. You had to have far more than enough, and you had to display it conspicuously. Never mind that you’d used a junk mortgage – the financial equivalent of steroids – to buy a $600,000 house on a $35,000 income, or that you’d artificially inflated your living standard by making minimum payments at 18 percent interest on a half-dozen maxed-out credit card accounts. You were living large, and that’s what life has been all about for the past 20 years.

And what about those who said this artificial prosperity couldn’t last and sooner or later everything would collapse and there’d be hell to pay? Whiners. Losers. Girly men.

When McGwire’s and Sosa’s home run battle took place in 1998, everyone thought we’d all become Internet millionaires by the Millennium. McGwire hit 70 home runs; Sosa hit 66. Both players surpassed a season home run mark that had been reached only twice in the previous 71 years.

But amid all the excitement, rumors emerged that many Major League players – including McGwire and Sosa – were using steroids. And the rumors escalated a few years later when Barry Bonds exceeded McGwire’s and Sosa’s accomplishments and started closing in on the record for career home runs held by Hank Aaron.

MLB’s halfhearted effort to police steroids was undermined when the players’ union diluted attempts to monitor players. So the league hired former U.S. Senator George Mitchell to investigate steroid use. He filed his report in December 2007 – about the same time that some people were getting seriously worried about the proliferation of shoddy mortgages and the unheard-of escalation of housing prices.

Mitchell’s report linked some of the game’s most prominent names to steroid use.

New York Yankees superstar Alex Rodriguez admitted in early 2009 that he’d used steroids earlier in his career. Rodriguez’s admission came as an edgy nation watched stock prices tumble and jobs disappear amid revelations of spectacular mismanagement and fraud in the financial industry.

It also was revealed that superstar pitcher Roger Clemens may have lied to Congress during an investigation that followed Mitchell’s report. And Barry Bonds faces trial for allegedly lying to federal investigators about his steroid use.

So now, all those flashy home run records of the late 1990s look as phony as a Bernie Madoff financial statement. Meanwhile, home run totals for seasonal leaders in both Major Leagues have declined and now are closer to the totals compiled by mere mortal players before the era of steroid supermen.

And in the real world, Americans are making do with less as they struggle to clean up the financial wreckage caused by years of mindlessly pursuing a lifestyle of wretched excess.

Baseball survived its painful return to normalcy. We have to hope that this is an indicator that America also will readjust to reality.

(Photo of Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire is by CP Photo)

Hinchliffe Stadium was an Art Deco showcase for black baseball legends

2010-01-09T09:39:00.029-05:00

It’s been barely a decade since Hinchliffe Stadium hosted a sports event, but judging from the once-grand old stadium’s appearance today, you’d think it’s been much longer.

Still, the old ballpark that overlooks a birthplace of American industry in Paterson, New Jersey has been added to the National Register of Historic Places, and there’s hope that it will be restored. Paterson voters recently overwhelmingly approved a non-binding referendum to issue more than $15 million in bonds to repair the stadium and make other public improvements. The vote essentially gives Paterson officials permission to issue the bonds, but does not require them to do it.

Hinchliffe Stadium would receive about $13.5 million for renovations, and it will need every dollar. Trees are growing in the stadium’s entrances, and long-ago fires have charred a few wooden structures inside the stadium. Piles of trash are everywhere, mostly beer cans and whiskey bottles. But there’s also discarded clothing, socks, sneakers and boots, and even a small safe that’s had the door pried open.

And then there’s the graffiti. In 1986, the New York Times reported that Hinchliffe was “well-guarded” and untouched by graffitists who were painting just about everything else in Paterson. But graffiti artists have found their way to Hinchliffe.

Still, when you look a little closer at some of the architectural details, it’s obvious that Hinchliffe Stadium was a gem of Art Deco design. There’s the Cuban tile on the roofs of the ticket offices, the ceramic tile ornamentation above the ticket windows and the rounded corners of the stadium’s concrete walls.

The most elegant reminders of Hinchliffe’s former glory, however, are small bas-relief sculptures of classical athletes on the stadium’s exterior walls. They depict Olympic athletes hurling the discus, running races, throwing the javelin.

Years ago, Hinchliffe undoubtedly was one of the best small stadiums in the Northeast to watch a sports event. Fans sitting in the upper levels of the 10,000-seat U-shaped stadium could see the New York City skyline about 15 miles away.

Hinchliffe Stadium was this year’s stop on the annual pre-New Year’s search for forgotten baseball parks. This is the fourth year that my nephew, John Morrow and my brother-in-law, Bob Morrow, and I have chased the ghosts of summers past in New York and New Jersey. That's John standing at a stadium entrance in the top photo. Links to the other posts about old ballparks are at the end of this post.

The stadium, a WPA project, was named for Paterson Mayor John V. Hinchliffe and opened in 1932. It was a focal point of local pride in a city that doesn’t get enough respect for its place in American history. In 1792, Alexander Hamilton formed the Society of Useful Manufactures, an investment group created to develop the fledgling nation’s first planned industrial city. Paterson was the result.

A strong-armed outfielder probably could throw a baseball from Hinchliffe’s right field gate to the roaring Great Falls of the Passaic River. Early industries used the falls’ energy to power factories. Paterson became famous for textile mills, Colt firearms, locomotive manufacturing and silk production. The engine that powered Charles Lindbergh’s “Spirit of St. Louis” airplane across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927 was built in a Paterson factory.

Hinchliffe was an all-purpose stadium, hosting high school, college and professional football; boxing; professional soccer; and even midget automobile races. But what has put the stadium on a short list of historic athletic arenas is the fact that in the 1930s and 1940s, it was the home field for two teams in the old Negro League.

In the days before Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers and broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947, about two dozen all-black teams played in larger cities across the U.S. Hinchliffe is one of only three surviving stadiums where Negro League teams played.

The New York Black Yankees of the Negro National League started playing their home games in Hinchliffe Stadium in 1934, a banner year for the stadium. Besides the Black Yankees’ home games, Dizzy Dean pitched an exhibition game in Paterson a few days after leading his St. Louis Cardinals to the 1934 World Series title. And in December 1934, the NFL champion New York Giants played an exhibition football game in Hinchliffe against the Paterson Panthers of the American Professional Football League. The Giants took a hard-fought 10-0 win over the Panthers.

In 1936, the New York Cubans of the Negro American League played some of their home games at Hinchliffe Stadium.

Hinchliffe became a showcase for black baseball talent, including local stars and future Hall of Fame members Larry Doby and Monte Irvin. Doby, a stellar athlete at Paterson’s Eastside High School, tried out for the Negro League’s Newark Eagles at Hinchliffe Stadium and starred for the Eagles before World War II. After spending three years in the service, he became the first black player in the American League when he joined the Cleveland Indians in July 1947, a few months after Robinson debuted with the National League Dodgers.

Irvin was a high school baseball star in nearby Orange when the Eagles gave him a tryout at Hinchliffe in 1937. He went on to star with the Eagles before being signed by the New York Giants baseball team in 1949.

The Black Yankees played their last season in Hinchliffe Stadium in 1945. The stadium was used for other events for another 50 years, however, including high school football and baseball and midget auto racing. And it was the scene of a tragedy. On Friday, September 13, 1946, driver Ray Jackson was killed when his car struck a guard rail during a race.

Hinchliffe Stadium was used for high school football games in 1997 and then closed. It has been unused and deteriorating since then. But Paterson native Brian LoPinto, a founder of the Friends of Hinchliffe Stadium, has been working to change that.

LoPinto would like to see the stadium restored to its appearance when it opened, and hopes that eventually, fans will return to Hinchliffe Stadium to watch the same events that drew them 70 years ago.

Despite the stadium’s current dilapidated state, LoPinto thinks it’s still salvageable.

“It’s still pretty sturdy, it’s made of pretty good material,” he said. “It’s an amazing survivor of the neglect that’s happened over the years.”

Other links: Friends of Hinchliffe Stadium, http://www.hinchliffestadium.org/; Roosevelt Stadium, http://wdryegoods.blogspot.com/2009/01/site-where-color-barrier-was-broken-is.html; Polo Grounds, http://wdryegoods.blogspot.com/2008/01/once-it-was-quite-thing-to-go-to-polo.html; Ebbets Field, http://sidesalad.net/archives/003056.html.

. . . and Happy New Year

2009-12-25T21:13:00.003-05:00

My guess is that there's a good chance that your living room looked a lot like this earlier today, or maybe it still does.

This shot of Macy's Department Store in New York shows the aftermath of the Christmas rush. The photo was made by Nina Leen for Life in 1948.

I'm glad 2009 is almost over. Here's hoping that 2010 is a better year. And I do hope people will start calling it "Twenty-Ten" instead of "Two Thousand Ten."

Happpy New Year.

Merry Christmas

2009-12-24T12:51:00.002-05:00

This video animation by Joshua Held of The Drifters' version of "White Christmas" has been making the rounds on the Net for several years now, but I never get tired of it. In my opinion, The Drifters' arrangement is the best version of this classic ever recorded.

The Drifters recorded their version in 1954, shortly after tenor Clyde McPhatter left The Dominoes and joined the group. McPhatter sang lead on most of the Drifters' recordings, but for "White Christmas" bass singer Bill Pinkney took the lead.

It was an inspired move. Pinkney's resonant bass does wonderful things with Irving Berlin's lyrics that Bing Crosby couldn't touch. And Clyde McPhatter adds his soaring tenor in a brief solo.

The backup vocals are provided by Jimmy Oliver, Gerhart Thrasher and Andrew Thrasher.

'Twas the Season, Part 12

2009-12-23T15:07:00.005-05:00

In 1916, the U.S. Congress passed the first federal child labor laws in the U.S. But the Keating-Owen Act applied only to kids 16 or younger working in mines and factories. The law was aggressively opposed by textile mill owners in the South, however, and it was overturned by the Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote in 1918.

It would be 20 years before another effort was made to regulate the labor of children. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 included restrictions on child labor that withstood a legal challenge in 1941.

This Christmas drawing makes a statement about child labor nearly a century ago. The drawing is from the December 1916 issue of Harper's magazine. The artist's name is Calvert, but I could not dig up his or her full name.

'Twas the Season, Part 11

2009-12-22T06:38:00.005-05:00

Christmas 1861 was clouded by the war that had erupted eight months earlier at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. What caused the American Civil War – slavery, state’s rights, an inevitable clash of incompatible economic systems – is still being debated today. But before it ended in 1865, more than 620,000 American soldiers would die.

When the January 4, 1862 issue of Harper’s Weekly was sent out to 120,000 subscribers, few Americans realized how prolonged, grim and bloody the conflict would become. Harper’s editors certainly didn’t have a clue. “A Happy New Year!” they wrote in that issue. “It can hardly fail to be that. The tempest upon our Southern horizon is already wasting itself away.”

This engraving by Winslow Homer was on the cover of Harper’s January 4 issue. It shows Union troops happily opening a crate of Christmas presents. Socks, food, books and booze are being handed out to the delighted soldiers.

'Twas the Season, Part 10

2009-12-21T06:22:00.004-05:00

A junior executive makes merry with the secretaries at this office Christmas party in New York in 1948. If you look closely, you'll see that there are no wedding bands on anyone's fingers, so you have to wonder if he eventually steered one of them to the mistletoe.

Note the guy's tie. The 1940s were a classic era for men's ties. Hand-painted silk neckties were the style, and flamboyance was the norm. This guy's tie, with its geometric design, was the height of fashion for the day.

The photo was shot by Cornell Capa for Life magazine.

'Twas the Season, Part 9

2009-12-20T13:33:00.004-05:00

December 1951. U.S. troops were mired in a politically unpopular war on foreign soil. Among the American casualties was Marine Corporal Richard E. deVilliers. He'd worked for Bell Telephone before being shipped off to Korea, where he was killed in action.

As a memorial to their former co-worker, a group of Bell employees in San Francisco sent Christmas packages to every member of deVilliers's unit. The grateful Marines found a South Korean tailor to create a Santa costume, turned a jeep trailer into an impromptu wheeled "sleigh," and celebrated Christmas far from home.

The above drawing depicting the Christmas 1951 celebration is from a Bell Telephone ad that was published in the December 1952 issue of Harper's magazine. If there's an artist's signature on the drawing, I couldn't find it.

'Twas the Season, Part 8

2009-12-19T08:19:00.005-05:00

This is downtown Spencer, Iowa in 1936, in the middle of the Great Depression.

Times were very bad, but Spencer still managed, in a very modest way, to observe the Christmas season. How? You have to look closely for the town's seasonal decorations. There's a single strand of lights strung between streetlamps, and another strand from the roof of the Spencer Daily Reporter across the intersection to, presumably, another building on the other side of Main Street.

Click on the picture to enlarge it and get a better look at the lights.

The photo is from the website "Papa Ted's Place," http://www.papatedsplace.com/, and was posted by Ted Althof Jr. There's no information about who shot the photo.

'Twas the Season, Part 7

2009-12-18T06:37:00.005-05:00

This photo of an anonymous young girl standing stiffly beside her family's Christmas tree is from the early 1930s. Things were much more formal back then. Getting your picture made was an Event and not an everyday casual occurrence.

The photo is from the website "Papa Ted's Place," http://www.papatedsplace.com/ and was posted by Ted Althof Jr. There's no info about who the girl is, or who shot the photo.

'Twas the Season, Part 6

2009-12-17T10:33:00.005-05:00

There's not a lot of info about this photo in the Life magazine online archive. It's titled "Shantyman's Christmas," and it was part of a series of photos shot for Life by George Silk in 1953.

A shantyman is a sailor who leads the crew in sing-alongs. The word is derived from the French word "chanter," which means "to sing."

There's no info about where Silk shot this photo. I'm guessing maybe New England. What is clear, however, is that the captain and his crew or family are decorating his small craft for Christmas.

'Twas the Season, Part 5

2009-12-16T05:17:00.005-05:00

The previous photo in this series showed Santa Claus with a problem: A scared little kid who clearly wasn't happy about sitting on Santa's lap. That's a serious problem for someone whose job is spreading the joy of the season.

But it looks like this Santa was up to the job. There's no record of what he said or did to calm the kid's fears, but whatever it was, it was exactly the right thing. The kid's faith in Saint Nick has been restored.

The photo was shot by Frank Scherschel for Life magazine in 1946.

'Twas the Season, Part 4

2009-12-14T20:25:00.007-05:00

Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as Santaphobia. And it looks like this kid might be a victim of the irrational fear of Santa Claus.

Some kids are really scared of Jolly Old Saint Nicolas. For starters, he’s a lot bigger than a little kid. And after all, “He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good.”

Yikes. And if that’s not enough to induce some deep-seated adult neuroses, there's also the fact that you can’t keep him out of your house.

Frank Scherschel shot this photo for Life magazine in 1946. It looks like this Santa had a public relations problem to deal with -- a little kid who did not like being picked up by a big hairy guy who knew his every thought and action and could come into his house at will.

How did he handle it? Check back tomorrow.

'Twas the Season, Part 3

2009-12-12T22:58:00.004-05:00

This photo could be subtitled "The Creepy Side of Christmas." It shows an infamous and immediately recognizable dictator at his 1941 Christmas party, when he was approaching the peak of his power.

The photo was shot by Hugo Jaeger for Life magazine.

I'm posting old Christmas photos from the Web. Stay tuned for more.

'Twas the Season, Part 2

2009-12-11T17:14:00.003-05:00

Here's a followup to yesterday's photo of the Santa seminar at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. This Santa is taking the seminar's final exam. Looks like he's working on an essay question.

The photo was made by Martha Holmes for Life magazine in 1948.

I'll be posting old Christmas photos as I come across them on the Web during the next few days.

'Twas the Season, Part 1

2009-12-10T16:22:00.015-05:00

I’m scanning the Web for old Christmas photos and posting the ones I like.

This 1948 photo by Martha Holmes shows a training seminar for Santas at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. The Santa Claus in charge is delivering a lecture to the student Santas. Note the ash trays in front of the students. It was a different era.

This photo is from Life magazine.

I’ll be posting these for the next few days as I come across them.

So, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Season’s Greetings.

2009 hurricane season was quiet, but 2010 season may be more active

2009-12-01T16:30:00.004-05:00

The 2009 hurricane season, which ended yesterday, was very quiet thanks to an El Niño that created storm-suppressing wind shear over much of the Atlantic Basin. The Atlantic season produced nine named storms, three hurricanes, and two major hurricanes with winds exceeding 110 mph.

An El Niño is a weather phenomenon produced by unusually warm waters off the northwest coast of South America. The event causes prevailing upper level winds – known as the jet stream – to shift southward over the Atlantic. The winds disrupt hurricane formation.

But meteorologists think next summer could be more active than this year because the El Niño effect probably is going to dissipate before next spring. And while the El Niño kept the lid on the Atlantic season, it was a major factor in a very active hurricane season in the Pacific. The central and eastern Pacific saw 20 named storms, including powerful Hurricane Rick, the second-most-powerful hurricane on record for the Pacific.

Meteorologists at Colorado State University also noted a few other characteristics of the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season, including:

• A late-starting season. Tropical Storm Ana – the season’s first named storm – did not form until August 15. That’s the latest that the first storm formed since 1992. That year’s first storm was memorable, however, because it was Hurricane Andrew.

• The nine named storms that occurred during 2009 are the fewest since 1997 when eight named storms formed.

• There were 27.25 days during which a named storm was active. That’s the lowest number since 1991, when only 24.25 named storm days were recorded.

• Three hurricanes occurred in 2009 - the fewest hurricanes since 1997 when there were also three hurricanes.

• There were only 11.25 days during which a hurricane was active, the fewest hurricane days since 2002 when 10.75 hurricane days were reported.

• Only two major hurricanes formed during the 2009 hurricane season. The last time that fewer than two major hurricanes occurred in a season was in 1997 when only one major hurricane (Erika) formed.

• No Category 5 hurricanes developed in the Atlantic in 2009. This is the second consecutive year with no Category 5 hurricanes. The last time that two or more years occurred in a row with no Category 5 hurricanes was 1999-2002.

• No named storms formed in June or July. The last time that no storm activity occurred in June or July was 2004 (Alex formed that year on August 1). This is the 18th year of the past 66 years with no storm formations in June or July.

Gehrig, Jeter and the Age of Context-Free Sportscasters

2009-10-28T07:26:00.007-04:00

I don’t like Tim McCarver. But if I’m going to watch any of the World Series that starts tonight, I’m going to have to put up with him.

McCarver, who was a catcher for four Major League teams from 1959 to 1980, is now a baseball broadcaster for Fox Network Sports. He’s won Emmy Awards as a sports analyst.

I don’t care. In my opinion, he’s a shallow huckster who, like so many sportscasters today, sees his job as selling a product rather than giving an accurate description of what’s happening on the field.

Last week during one of the American League Championship Series games between the Los Angeles Angels and the New York Yankees, McCarver glibly stated that Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ star shortstop, has more “postseason” hits than Lou Gehrig, the Yankees’ legendary first baseman from 1923 to 1939.

That was one of those smoke-and-mirrors statistics that broadcasters today love to recite. I think they throw those kinds of stats out there to make you think that the athletes you’re seeing today are the greatest in history, and those old guys who played the game back in the prehistoric days before 1980 can’t compare to the jocks of today.

Now, Derek Jeter is a fine baseball player who will be remembered as one of the best shortstops for a team that already has two shortstops – Tony Lazzeri and Phil Rizzuto – in the Hall of Fame. Jeter almost certainly will enter the Hall the moment he becomes eligible.

And technically, Jeter does have more “postseason” hits than Gehrig. But the operative word in McCarver’s statement is “postseason.”

Jeter joined the Yankees in 1995. Since then he’s played in 132 “postseason” games, which include the elongated league playoffs as well as the World Series. To get to the World Series, a team can play in as many as 12 postseason games. The World Series could add as many as seven more games to the modern “postseason.”

Jeter has collected 164 hits in those “postseason” games. By comparison, Gehrig had only 43 “postseason” hits during his career. So if you lump all of Jeter’s postseason games together, he has more hits than Gehrig by a wide margin.

What McCarver didn’t bother to mention, however, is that Gehrig’s “postseason” games only included the World Series. When Gehrig played, there were no league playoffs preceding the World Series. The first place team in the American League played the first place team in the National League in the World Series.

Gehrig played in 34 World Series games. When you compare Jeter’s and Gehrig’s performances in World Series games – that is, when you compare apples to apples – the outcome is different. In 32 World Series games, Jeter has 39 hits – four fewer than Gehrig.

But McCarver will never provide that kind of background. He will merely spout context-free statistics that create misleading impressions about the game you’re watching. He'll tell you that Jeter has more "postseason" hits than Gehrig, but he won't tell you that Jeter has played in about four times as many "postseason" games as Gehrig did.

So if McCarver starts reciting statistics during the 2009 World Series trying to tell you that today's players are breaking longstanding records, don’t take his word for it. Look it up.

55 years ago, wailing sirens warned of Hurricane Hazel

2009-10-15T09:18:00.010-04:00

From their small house in Cherry Grove Beach, South Carolina, a block or so from the Atlantic Ocean, Bessie Mauney and her four friends heard the sirens wailing throughout the day on Thursday, October 14, 1954. But it never occurred to them that they were in any danger.

The women were from Stanly and Rowan counties in the heart of North Carolina’s piedmont, far inland from the coast. There was not a television in the modest cottage, and they were enjoying each other’s company too much to turn on the radio or even glance at a newspaper. They were unplugged from the rest of the world.

Fifty-five years ago this morning, Mauney and her friends realized why the sirens had been blowing. In those days before The Weather Channel and satellites provided continuous coverage of hurricanes, the sirens had been a warning that Hurricane Hazel, one of the worst hurricanes in history, was headed their way. The storm’s eye came ashore on Friday, October 15, 1954 with peak winds of at least 140 mph and a storm surge that reached 18 feet in some places.

“She said they were doing a lot of talking, and they weren’t paying any attention,” recalled Bessie Mauney’s son, James Mauney, of New London, North Carolina. “They heard the sirens but they didn’t know what it meant.”

The cottage was built on stilts high enough to allow Bessie to park her 1952 Chevrolet beneath the house. But the storm surge quickly put the car underwater and sent seawater rising into the cottage. The women were trapped.

The U.S. Weather Bureau started tracking the storm that would become Hurricane Hazel on October 5, 1954. The Weather Bureau’s office in San Juan, Puerto Rico said a “small hurricane” had formed in the Atlantic about 30 miles east of the Caribbean island of Grenada.

As the storm moved westward across the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea, it quickly intensified into a deadly Category 4 hurricane with winds exceeding 130 mph. By October 9, Hazel had turned sharply to the north. In Miami, Weather Bureau meteorologist Grady Norton was so worried about the powerful hurricane that he was working long hours despite a serious heart condition that had prompted his doctor to order him to take it easy. But Norton suffered a stroke while on the job and died.

On October 13, Hurricane Hazel moved through the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti. The storm lost some of its intensity as it crossed Haiti and the Bahamas, but quickly regained strength when it got back over open waters.

The U.S. Air Force sent a hurricane hunter flight from Bermuda to monitor Hazel on October 14. Captain William E. Harrell, who’d flown into other hurricanes, had never seen anything like what he saw that day in Hazel’s eye.

“Usually the ocean is blue or green with little cotton-white patches,” Harrell told reporters after his flight. “But the ocean on each side of the hurricane was like a sheer white sheet as far as I could see. To me, this was a phenomenal sea.”

As Hurricane Hazel moved northward paralleling the coast, the storm picked up speed and soon was racing along at almost 30 mph. Around 8 a.m. on October 15, the hurricane’s outer fringe reached North Island, South Carolina, just south of Myrtle Beach. An hour or so later, Hazel’s eye came ashore near the North Carolina-South Carolina border. Its huge storm surge was made worse because it happened to make landfall at exactly the time of the highest tide of the year along that part of the coast.

At Cherry Grove Beach, winds reached an estimated 130 mph, and seawater was three feet deep in Bessie Mauney’s cottage. Afraid that the building wouldn’t stand up to the storm, Bessie and a cousin climbed into a nearby tree. With the hurricane roaring around them, they clung to the tree for hours. Inside the house, their terrified friends climbed atop a bar to escape the water.

The storm surge lifted the cottage off its foundation and carried it away. The building held together, however, and finally came to rest in a marsh about a half-mile away. “It was well-built,” James Mauney said. “A carpenter here from New London, James Eudy, built the house in the late 1940s.”

As fierce as Hazel was at Cherry Grove Beach, the hurricane was even worse a few miles away in North Carolina. The hurricane’s eye came ashore at Oak Island around 9:30 a.m. The Coast Guard station at Oak Island estimated Hazel’s winds at 140 mph.

Bessie Mauney and her friends survived their ordeal, but it was two days before she was reunited with her family back in Richfield. Eventually, the cottage was returned to its lot at Cherry Grove Beach, and James Mauney said it’s still there today.

Hurricane Hazel is still the worst hurricane to strike North Carolina.

"All traces of civilization on that portion of the immediate waterfront between the state line and Cape Fear were practically annihilated,” the U.S. Weather Bureau later reported. The storm killed more than 600 people from Haiti to Canada, and caused more than $2.6 billion in damages in today’s dollars.

Bessie Mauney’s ordeal during Hurricane Hazel had a powerful effect on her, and she and her husband sold their interest in the cottage.

“My mom said she didn’t want to go to the beach anymore,” James Mauney said. “I don’t think she ever went back to the beach. It really shook her up.”

Photo of historical marker by J.J. Prats, from The Historical Marker Database

UVa 16, UNC 3 (dammit)

2009-10-04T13:36:00.004-04:00

To my niece Patty at the University of Virginia

Dear Patty:

Here’s the photo of me wearing a UVa T-shirt to pay off the bet we made a couple weeks ago during the trip to Richmond. I have a bag over my head because I was frankly embarrassed by the Tar Heels’ performance yesterday, or, rather, their lack of performance.

I don’t know who the geniuses were that ranked UNC in the Top 25 at the start of the season, but they clearly don’t know beans about football. Carolina did win their first three games, but they weren’t exactly playing powerhouses – The Citadel, Connecticut, and ECU. And when the real season starts, they lose to Georgia Tech and then UVa.

So I think the Tar Heels were very overrated. They can’t even beat a team that lost to William & Mary, for chrissakes.

Oh well, basketball practice starts in a few weeks.

Hope to see you soon,
Willie

Looking for Captain Q-Tip

2009-09-30T15:25:00.010-04:00

I lived briefly in Richmond, Virginia after I got out of the Army, and I’ve had a deep affection for the city ever since.

It’s got problems – some of them identical to other larger cities, some of them unique to Richmond. But it’s also a colorful, quirky old city with deep history and some fascinating neighborhoods.

I lived in a neighborhood known as The Fan, a residential district that was started soon after the Civil War ended in 1865 and much of Richmond was rebuilt. The neighborhood gets its name from the fact that it’s shaped roughly like the old-fashioned fans that were used in churches on hot days before air conditioning.

Richmond is full of statues, and when I lived there, one of the neighborhood landmarks was a statue of a Civil War soldier that was nicknamed Captain Q-Tip. The statue actually was a memorial to a Confederate artillery company known as the Richmond Howitzers. But you can tell at a glance how Captain Q-Tip got his name. An often-heard phrase when I lived in The Fan was “Meet me at Captain Q-Tip.”

I went looking for the Captain on a recent weekend trip to Richmond with my wife, my mother-in-law Shirley Morrow, and our niece Patty Morrow, who’s a junior at the University of Virginia. But it’s been many years since I was in the old neighborhood, and I couldn’t find the statue. I also discovered that new construction by Virginia Commonwealth University has dramatically changed the landscape of several city blocks in The Fan.

So I started wondering if perhaps Captain Q-Tip had become a victim of VCU’s progress. Finally, I saw a man and a woman that were old enough to have lived in Richmond for a while.

I interrupted their conversation and asked if they knew of a nearby statue of a Civil War soldier holding an artillery swab. They looked puzzled. “We used to call him Captain Q-Tip,” I said.

They smiled. “I’ve never heard it called that, but I can see where the name came from,” the woman said.

Turned out I was less than two blocks from the Captain. Patty shot the above photo of my reunion with my old friend.

Dairy farmer recalls working while Hurricane Hugo howled

2009-09-22T16:22:00.007-04:00

Twenty years ago, an old friend in Richfield, North Carolina was trying to get his dairy herd milked while Hurricane Hugo roared around him.

I’ve known Butch Brooks since we were in the first grade together. He’s now running his family’s dairy farm near Richfield, which is 186 miles inland from Charleston, South Carolina. Hugo made landfall at Charleston around midnight on September 21, 1989 with peak winds exceeding 135 mph and a storm surge of about 20 feet.

The people in Richfield and other towns in the rolling hills of North Carolina’s southwestern Piedmont don’t usually concern themselves with hurricane warnings. But Hugo was a very unusual hurricane in many ways. The storm was what is sometimes called a “bulldozer” hurricane – a storm that retains much of its power after making landfall and causes unusually severe damage as it moves inland.

Butch had been following news reports of Hugo’s landfall in Charleston. Forecasters said the storm would pass over the area around Richfield – about 40 miles northeast of Charlotte – around daybreak on September 22. So Butch and his crew started work around 2:30 a.m. to try to get the herd of 180 dairy cows milked before Hugo arrived.

It seemed like a good plan, but the storm moved faster than forecasters expected. Butch and his workers had just started the milking process when Hugo reached them. They’d been working for about an hour when the electricity went out, shutting down the milking machines.

Hugo’s winds were still blowing at around 85 mph when it reached North Carolina, and some residents recalled later that the air smelled like they were at the beach.

The milking crew hooked a portable electric generator to the power takeoff of a tractor and kept the milking machines going. Trees and a few small buildings were going down around them as they worked in the dairy barn. “Debris was flying around through the air,” Butch said.

Postponing the milking until the storm passed wasn’t an option. If cows aren’t milked, it can cause serious health problems or perhaps even kill them, Brooks said.

But Butch’s wife Wanda wasn’t happy about her husband being out in the middle of a howling hurricane. She and their kids rode out Hugo in their basement. Wanda later told me that, as the storm roared outside, she thought to herself, half joking and half seriously, “If (Butch) lives through this, I’ll kill him.”

It took about four hours to get the herd milked. They finished about 6:30 a.m. just as Hugo was finishing its destructive work in Stanly County and moving into the North Carolina mountains. Trees had been blown down across his pasture fences and a couple of small buildings had been destroyed, but no people or animals had been hurt.

Hurricane Hugo cut a path of devastation through the Carolinas and was the most expensive hurricane on record at the time. The storm killed seven people and did about $1 billion worth of damage in North Carolina alone. The total death toll from Hugo in the U.S. and Caribbean was 76, and damages totaled about $10 billion.

Butch said Wanda hasn’t forgotten that September morning 20 years ago. “She reminds me of it rather often, her idiot husband who went out in the middle of a hurricane,” he said.

Hurricane Floyd brought epic flooding to North Carolina

2009-09-17T07:18:00.009-04:00

Ten years ago, Hurricane Floyd came ashore at Cape Fear, North Carolina, bringing flooding of epic proportions. Before the waters receded, the little town of Princeville and parts of several other towns would be underwater, and rescuers in boats and helicopters would pluck 1,500 people from roofs across eastern North Carolina.

Hurricane Floyd became one of the most expensive disasters in the state’s history. But the stage was set for Floyd’s devastation by a nearly forgotten storm that lingered over the state a couple of weeks earlier. Hurricane Dennis soaked the Outer Banks and eastern North Carolina, moved offshore, then looped around and gave the same area a second dousing. The ground was saturated with at least 10 inches of rain from Dennis when Floyd came ashore.

Hurricane Floyd formed from a tropical wave that moved off the west coast of Africa on September 2, 1999. Floyd got its start in the infamous spawning grounds of monster hurricanes near the Cape Verde Islands. “Floyd was a classic Cape Verde storm, very large, one of the largest I can remember,” recalled Rusty Pfost, meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service office in Miami.

By September 12, Floyd had developed into a major hurricane. I was in the Florida Keys working on research with historian Jerry Wilkinson. Around 6 a.m. on the morning of Monday, September 13, 1999, Jerry and I checked The Weather Channel. Floyd’s peak winds were approaching 150 mph, and it had turned toward the Bahamas and the Keys.

Jerry and I stared at each other for a moment. “I’ve got to get the hell out of here,” I said.

I helped Jerry and Mary board up their house on Key Largo. Around 9:30 a.m. I started one of the eeriest journeys of my life.

As I drove northward from the Keys up the Florida peninsula, Floyd was ripping into the Bahamas with winds of around 155 mph. It seemed that I was just ahead of a rippling wave of fear. When I stopped for gas, lines were starting to form at the pumps. Interstate 95 was gradually getting more crowded. I got the feeling that if I stopped for even a few minutes, I’d be engulfed by traffic. So I kept moving.

I stopped for the night in Darien, Georgia, about 60 miles south of Savannah. I was back on the road early the next morning. Behind me, Floyd had turned and was menacing the southeast coast from Jacksonville north. What would become the largest peacetime evacuation in U.S. history was starting. During the next two days, more than 2.3 million people from Florida to Maryland would move inland. In South Carolina, Interstate 26 from Charleston to Columbia was gridlocked.

Rain was falling steadily when I reached eastern North Carolina, and in some places secondary roads were already underwater because the ground couldn’t absorb any more water. That seemed ominous.

The hurricane’s eye passed over Plymouth around 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, September 16. By that time, the storm’s winds had diminished dramatically. Around 9:30 a.m. we lost power, but it was back on by 3 p.m. Other than the brief power outage and a few tree limbs down, we saw little effects from Hurricane Floyd in Plymouth.

Still, the storm dumped around 20 inches of rain on ground still saturated from Dennis. The results were devastating. Everything around us seemed to be underwater. But we were high and dry in Plymouth.

I heard later that we’d stayed above water here because the Roanoke River’s floodplain has not been altered by development. When Floyd’s floodwaters came downstream, the water spread out into the Roanoke’s natural wetlands. So we were untouched in Plymouth. But if we’d wanted to go to Raleigh, about 120 miles west on U.S. 64, we’d have had to drive north into Virginia and then turn back into North Carolina to get around the swollen rivers and flooded roads.

It was weeks before the waters receded and the cleanup could begin.

The Wilmington (N.C) Star-News reported Hurricane Floyd’s grim stats:

· 35 people killed in North Carolina, most of them drowning in freshwater. A total of 57 people died during Hurricane Floyd in the U.S. and Bahamas.

· Spectacular livestock losses in North Carolina, including 2.1 million chickens, 753,000 turkeys, and 21,500 hogs.

· $6 billion in damages in North Carolina.

· 7,000 North Carolina homes destroyed, 17,000 homes uninhabitable, and 56,000 homes damaged.

Photo: NOAA satellite photo shows Hurricane Floyd approaching U.S.

1935 flight of first hurricane hunter has been forgotten

2009-09-02T07:48:00.010-04:00

Seventy-four years ago today, Leonard Povey climbed into the cockpit of a tiny fighter plane and went in search of one of the most powerful forces ever to roam the Atlantic Ocean.

Povey found his quarry in the Straits of Florida – the storm that became the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, still the most powerful to make landfall in the United States. It was almost certainly the first time that an airplane was used to track a hurricane. But Povey’s historic flight has been forgotten.

Povey was an American who was a flight instructor for the Cuban army air force. He was based in Havana. Cuban authorities decided to send Povey in search of the hurricane because there were conflicting predictions about its position and forecast track. The U.S. Weather Bureau – the predecessor to today’s National Weather Service – said the storm’s center was just off Cuba’s northern coast and would make landfall at or near Havana. But barometers in Havana were rising, an indication that the hurricane was moving away from that city.

“Conflicting reports of Havana observers kept the capital in jitters most of the day,” the Havana Post, an English-language newspaper in the city, reported in its edition of September 3, 1935. “One of the reports said that the hurricane would strike here at 6 p.m.”

So on the afternoon of Monday, September 2, 1935, Povey was dispatched to locate the storm.

The Post said that Povey made his flight in an “army pursuit plane.” He confirmed that the hurricane had turned to the north and was moving away from Cuba and toward the Florida Keys.

The Associated Press wrote about Povey’s flight a few weeks later, and the story was published by newspapers in Florida, including the Miami Herald. The story, published in the Herald on September 23, 1935, included a few quotes from Povey about his flight.

“I was unable to fly close to the disturbance, visible to me for miles,” Povey said. “It appeared to be a cone-shaped body of clouds, inverted, rising to an altitude of 12,000 feet. The waves in the sea below broke against each other like striking a sea wall.”

Povey didn’t try to fly into the hurricane’s eye, as hurricane-hunters do today.

The storm’s eye made landfall a few hours later at Long Key, Florida. Its lowest recorded barometric pressure reading at landfall was 26.35 inches, or 892 millibars, making it the most intense hurricane on record for the U.S. The storm’s winds – thought to have been around 200 mph – and its storm surge of 18 feet or more devastated a 40-mile section of the Keys from Tavernier to Marathon and killed more than 400 people. The death toll included about 260 World War I veterans who were working on a New Deal construction project building a highway between Miami and Key West.

Povey suggested that airplanes be used to monitor hurricanes. But there’s no indication that anyone followed up on his suggestion. In 1944, however, military pilots based in Texas flew into a storm in the Gulf of Mexico. By that time, Povey’s pioneering flight had been forgotten, and the 1944 flight is regarded as the first time an airplane was used to track a tropical storm.

Quiet summers can produce a monster hurricane

2009-06-22T20:42:00.008-04:00

The forecast for the 2009 hurricane season predicts a calmer summer than we’ve usually had in the past decade or so. But very powerful storms have formed in summers that have been otherwise very quiet.

The forecast for this summer from William Gray and Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University predicts 11 named tropical storms forming by November 30, when hurricane season ends. Five or so of those storms are expected to strengthen into hurricanes with winds of at least 74 miles an hour. And two of the hurricanes are expected to intensify into major hurricanes with winds exceeding 110 miles an hour.

That’s slightly above the average for hurricane seasons since 1851. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s website says that an average of nine tropical storms, five hurricanes and two major hurricanes have formed each summer for the past 158 years.

But a quick look at NOAA’s hurricane archives reveals some worrisome statistics about below-average hurricane seasons.

First, two of the three most powerful hurricanes to strike the United States formed in seasons when there was very little activity otherwise. The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, which is still the most powerful hurricane to make landfall in the United States, formed in a summer that saw only six total tropical systems – far below the 158-year average. That’s the same number of tropical storms that formed in 1992. But 1992 also produced Hurricane Andrew, the third-most powerful hurricane at landfall.

Only Hurricane Camille, which became the second-most intense storm to make landfall in 1969, came out of a very active season. That year, 18 tropical storms formed.

There’s more unsettling info among the list of other very intense hurricanes that have made landfall in the United States.

· The summer of 1900 produced only seven tropical storms. But one of those storms became the Category 4 killer hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas and killed 6,000 or more people.
· In the summer of 1915, only six tropical storms formed. But one of them intensified into a Category 4 hurricane that struck New Orleans and Galveston.
· Only five tropical storms formed in 1919. But one of them was a Category 4 bruiser that devastated Key West and crossed the Gulf Coast to strike Texas.
· In 1928, six tropical storms formed. But among them was another infamous Category 4 killer, the so-called “Okeechobee hurricane” that came ashore at Palm Beach, roared across the Everglades, and shoved a deadly flood out of Lake Okeechobee. That storm killed perhaps 3,000 in the small lakeside towns.
· In 1960, Category 4 Hurricane Donna followed a track very similar to the Labor Day hurricane of 1935, making landfall in the Florida Keys. Only seven tropical storms formed that summer.

Powerful and deadly hurricanes also formed in seasons that saw exactly the same activity as is predicted for this year.

Hurricane Hazel, the most intense hurricane on record for North Carolina, formed in 1954. Eleven tropical storms formed that year. And Hurricane Hugo, a devastating Category 4 hurricane that made landfall near Charleston, South Carolina, formed in 1989, a summer that also saw 11 total tropical storms.

I don’t know that there’s a correlation between quiet hurricane seasons and very intense storms. But this list of murderous monsters that blew away otherwise quiet summers is a pretty clear indication that residents on the Southeast and Gulf coasts should keep a wary eye on the Atlantic for the next few months.

Facing the realities of war

2009-02-25T08:26:00.005-05:00

The United States had been involved in World War II for about 18 months when Life magazine published an issue focusing on American casualties. In its edition of July 5, 1943, Life reported that 12,987 Americans had been killed since the United States entered the war in December 1941.

The magazine’s cover showed Army Air Corps soldiers carrying the flag-draped coffin of a fallen comrade to a grave in Tunisia. The photo was seen by millions of Life readers. Life also devoted 23 pages of that issue to listing the name of every armed forces member who’d been killed in combat.

“As a nation, the U.S. is not accustomed to big war casualties,” an accompanying story said. “Not since the Civil War has its manpower been seriously weakened by battle losses.”

Yet Life’s editors thought that Americans were strong enough to see a photo of a dead soldier’s coffin and 23 pages of names and hometowns of those killed in action. And the magazine’s editors also noted that combat deaths were going to rapidly increase. “During most of that time, it has been on the defensive, fighting only when necessary, building up its strength,” the editors wrote. “When the great, offensive battles come, its casualties will mount.”

They were right. When World War II ended in 1945, more than 416,000 American soldiers and sailors had been killed.

In other issues throughout the war, Life also published photos of American combat dead on the battlefield. And newspapers across the nation published a daily list of war deaths.

That’s a stark contrast to the policy put in place when United States troops invaded Iraq in 2003. Photos of flag-draped coffins of the Iraq war dead have been prohibited.

That’s a bad policy, one that is intended to sanitize the war and hide its grim realities from the American public. And instead of protecting the privacy of families who have lost someone in the war, it’s an insult to them. Their loss and sacrifice goes unnoticed.

But that may be about to change.

The New York Times reported yesterday that 69 percent of respondents to a recent poll want the photo ban lifted. And in his speech to a joint session of Congress last night, President Obama noted that the United States has been at war for seven years. “No longer will we hide its price,” he said.

Maybe that statement is an advance notice that the ban will be lifted. It’s time to face the realities of war. We were strong enough to face it during World War II, and we need to know that we’re still strong enough for it.

You're never too old to have some fun

2009-02-06T16:59:00.006-05:00

Our cat, Beau, isn't as agile and lively as he was in 1993, when we got him as a kitten from the animal shelter in Fort Pierce, Florida. He'll be 16 in a month or so, and that's roughly equivalent to age 80 for humans.

But like the grandfather who still enjoys a couple of stiff vodka martinis from time to time, our old pal still knows how to catch a buzz once in a while. He's always had a decided fondness for catnip, and Jane brought in a couple of fresh bags last night.

I seriously doubt that I'll be able to lie down and rabbit-kick like this if I live to be 80, but I do hope to still be enjoying my vodka martinis.

Site where racial barrier was broken is now blocked by a wall

2009-01-08T23:44:00.011-05:00

Jackie Robinson had quite a day when his Montreal Royals went to New Jersey to open the 1946 International League season against the Jersey City Giants before a sellout crowd of 25,000 fans in Roosevelt Stadium.

Robinson, playing his first game as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Class AAA farm team, banged out four hits in five trips to the plate, including a three-run home run in the third inning. Montreal, the Dodgers’ Class AAA farm team in the International League, pounded Jersey City 14-1.

Robinson’s debut with the Royals had a much greater significance than his impressive performance on the field, however. Roosevelt Stadium became the site of the first regular-season game in which an African-American player took the field as a member of a previously all-white professional baseball team. That was huge news in 1946, when the U.S. was essentially a segregated society.

Robinson became the first black player in the Major Leagues the following year when he was promoted to Brooklyn. He was named the National League Rookie of the Year in 1947 and played 10 seasons with the Dodgers. Robinson was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1962.

But Robinson made a contribution to our nation that went far beyond the statistics he compiled as a player. His Major League career broke through the wall of segregation and became a milestone in the civil rights movement. So Robinson’s presence in that nearly forgotten game 63 years ago makes Roosevelt Stadium a legitimate historical landmark just as much as the Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina became a landmark after the 1960 sit-ins protesting the store’s refusal to serve black customers.

That Woolworth’s lunch counter is now in the Smithsonian Institution. But Roosevelt Stadium is long gone and all but forgotten. When my brother-in-law Bob Morrow, my nephew John Morrow and I went on our third annual post-Christmas search for ballparks of yesteryear, we found only a few scant reminders of the old stadium.

During the past two Decembers, John, Bob and I have visited the sites of Ebbets Field in Brooklyn and the Polo Grounds in Manhattan. The Ebbets Field trek was posted on Jeff Houck’s lively blog, SideSalad, and can be seen at http://sidesalad.net/archives/003056.html.

You can see the story of last year's visit to the Polo Grounds in the Drye Goods entry of January 5, 2008. Each time, I shot a photo of John standing in front of a marker denoting the sites of the stadiums.

I think we’ve discovered a definite trend about what happens to old baseball parks. Like Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds, Roosevelt Stadium is now multi-family housing. Unlike the sites of the old New York ballparks, however, there’s no public marker designating the spot where Jackie Robinson started changing the world. Or if there is, the public can’t see it. What once was Roosevelt Stadium is now a gated community called Society Hill.

The guard at the Society Hill gatehouse told us that a stadium had once been there but we couldn’t enter. So instead of the usual picture of John standing in front of a marker, I got a shot of him standing in front of the wall that separates Society Hill from the rest of the world. As near as I can figure, the stadium’s centerfield wall would have been maybe 300 feet behind John, and home plate would have been 700 feet or so from where he’s standing.

The Associated Press photo at the top of this entry shows teammate George Shuba greeting Robinson as he touches home plate after his home run. In those days before high-fives and fist bumps, a handshake was the standard post-home-run greeting of congratulation.

Sixty years after that handshake, New York Times writer George Anderson wrote about the importance of the moment when, for the first time, a white player congratulated a black teammate for hitting a home run. For Shuba, the gesture was automatic.

“Our teammate hit a home run so I shook his hand,” Shuba told Anderson in the 2006 Times story. “It didn’t make any difference to me that Jack was black. I was glad to have him on our team.”

Anderson also reported that Shuba had had a framed copy of that photo hanging in his living room for 40 years.

We found a copy of that AP photo in a Capital One Bank at the Stadium Plaza shopping center near Society Hill. The photo is one of several large pictures of Roosevelt Stadium displayed in the bank’s lobby. But the bank manager wouldn’t let me take shots of those photos without getting permission from her boss, and we didn’t have time to wait for that.

The only other reminder of the ballpark we found was Stadium Pizza, a restaurant in the shopping center.

Roosevelt Stadium was built on an arrowhead-shaped peninsula known as Droyer’s Point that juts into Newark Bay. The ballpark was part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration program that was intended to put Americans back to work during the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was designed by architect Christian Ziegler and was considered a prime example of Depression-era Art Deco architecture.

When the stadium opened in 1937, Jersey City Mayor Frank “I am the law” Hague decreed that it would be named Roosevelt Stadium in honor of the president. John P. Gallagher, who was a boy at the time, wrote in a 1984 letter to the editor of the New York Times that “Roosevelt Stadium was our sports palace, playground and pride.” It became one of minor league baseball’s premier ballparks. In addition to hosting the game in which Robinson broke baseball’s racial barrier, the stadium was the site of 14 Brooklyn Dodgers’ home games in 1956 and 1957.

After the 1957 season, the Dodgers announced they were moving to Los Angeles. Jersey City officials scrambled to keep Major League baseball in Roosevelt Stadium, trying to persuade the Pittsburgh Pirates, Philadelphia Phillies and Cincinnati Reds to play some of their home games there. But all three teams refused the offer.

The New York Giants of the National Football League played a few exhibition games at the stadium in the early 1960s, and it was used for minor league baseball off and on until 1978, when it was abandoned. By the mid-1980s, Roosevelt Stadium had fallen into serious disrepair.

In 1984, the decaying ballpark was torn down. In his Times letter, John P. Gallagher lamented the destruction of his boyhood memory and had strong criticism for the forces that allowed the stadium to be demolished.

“Yet in our hearts we'll wonder what kind of a society we live in that has so little respect for tradition and destroys the structures that house them . . . .,” Gallagher wrote.

Shumaker saw newspapers' current problems coming decades ago

2008-12-09T10:26:00.005-05:00

The Chicago Tribune and its affiliate publications are in bankruptcy, and somewhere in the Great Newsroom in the Sky, Jim Shumaker is shaking his head and muttering a few profanities.

At least, that’s what I want to believe, because the Tribune has long been known as a hard-nosed newspaper, and Shumaker was the epitome of the hard-nosed journalist. But if he were still alive, he wouldn’t let the above lede see the light of publication unless I’d confirmed that not only had he been shaking his head, but I could also quote in exact detail the profanities he’d used.

There’s deep trouble among newspapers across the U.S. Besides the Trib’s bankruptcy, the New York Times is essentially mortgaging its mid-town Manhattan home to keep afloat. And the Miami Herald, once a bastion of journalism excellence, reportedly is up for sale because its owner, the McClatchy Company, also is having cash-flow problems.

Newspapers are suffering from a steep decline in advertising revenue caused by both the emergence of the Internet and the current economic crisis. But there are other reasons, including dramatic changes in the national psyche and our sense of priorities. And Shumaker saw at least part of the change coming decades ago.

As a reporter and editor from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, Shumaker was fearless, stubborn, and driven to find the truth and report it accurately. He hated pomposity and pretense. And he had little use for reporters who avoided the vital nuts-and-bolts news stories and cherry-picked high-profile glamour stories with an eye toward winning awards.

Shumaker was a legend at the University of North Carolina when I was in school there. I wanted badly to get into his news reporting class, but it always filled up.

But I was lucky enough to become friends with him in the mid-1980s when I was managing editor of the News of Orange County, a county seat weekly in nearby Hillsborough. I’d drop by his office on the UNC campus every week or so. By that time, Shumaker had achieved an odd form of celebrity thanks to cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, one of Shumaker’s former students. MacNelly was the creator of the nationally syndicated comic strip “Shoe,” which starred an ill-tempered, quick-witted, sneaker-wearing bird named P. Martin Shoemaker, who was editor of the Treetops Tattler-Tribune.

Everyone around the UNC J-school knew that Shumaker had been the inspiration for MacNelly’s irascible bird/editor. But for the first few years of the strip’s life, the quickest way to get cussed out and booted from Shumaker’s office was to mention the comic strip in his presence.

By the time I started hanging out in Shumaker’s office, he’d accepted the link between himself and the cartoon bird. MacNelly had given Shumaker one of the original drawings for a Sunday “Shoe” strip, and Shumaker had framed it and hung it in his office in Howell Hall. Still, he referred to the strip’s main character as “the buzzard.”

During one of my visits, the subject of journalism awards came up, and Shumaker snorted. Awards mean nothing, he said. He told me about the time he’d been asked by the Florida Press Association to pick three winners from among dozens of news stories submitted by Florida newspapers. “Like a damn fool, I agreed to do it,” he said.

Soon, a big box of newspaper clips arrived. Shumaker opened the box, glanced at the contents, and shoved the box into a corner of his office.

Time passed. The Florida Press Association sent a polite letter gently reminding Shumaker of his obligation to pick three winners from among the entries. He ignored the letter. A second letter, not quite so polite, came to his office. He ignored that one as well.

Finally, a letter that was blunt enough to impress even Shumaker arrived. But it also made him angry. He hauled the box from the corner and dumped the contents into a pile on the floor. “I reached into the pile and started pulling out clips,” he said. “I said, ‘This is first place, this is second place, and this is third place.’ They never asked me to be a judge again.”

Shumaker also was bothered by the students he was seeing in his classes in the mid-‘80s. They weren’t taking his reporting classes to become news hounds. They wanted to learn to manipulate the news, and they wanted to be paid more than they could earn as reporters.

“They all want to go into (bleeping) public relations,” Shumaker said.

Shumaker was still a member of the UNC faculty when he died of cancer in 2000. By that time, what had been the School of Journalism had been reconfigured and re-named the School of Journalism and Mass Communication – a concession, I assume, to the growing trend of managing the news instead of reporting it.

A couple of years ago, I had lunch in Chapel Hill with Phil Meyer, whose advanced reporting class I’d taken at UNC. Before joining the UNC faculty, Meyer was a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter in the old Knight Ridder chain. Meyer isn’t as earthy and profane as Shumaker was, but he is every bit the old-school journalist that Shumaker had been.

Our conversation eventually came around to Shumaker. Meyer said that Shumaker had been upset by the changes in the J-School and what he perceived as the dwindling number of old-fashioned journalists on the faculty.

The reasons why newspapers are struggling are complex and varied. But as Shumaker had noted, the roots of the current mess go back at least 25 years, when newspapers began turning away from substantial, in-depth journalism and started focusing more on bottom lines and superficial reporting.

The photo of Jim Shumaker is from the web page http://parklibrary.jomc.unc.edu/shuendow.html

Fort Laramie was a crossroads of the Old West

2008-11-16T09:03:00.013-05:00

For much of the 19th century, Fort Laramie, Wyoming was, depending on your point of view, an island of civilization and safety in the trackless prairie or a persistent reminder that your world was steadily being taken away from you.

If you were headed west on the Oregon Trail on a five-month journey to the California gold fields in 1850, Fort Laramie was a welcome sight. You could get a brief rest, have a blacksmith make repairs to your wagon, and stock up on canned goods and other necessities for the rest of your journey.

But if you belonged to one of the Plains tribes of Native Americans, Fort Laramie was a major source of trouble.

The old Army post is now Fort Laramie National Historic Site. I visited there with my sister and brother-in-law a few weeks ago, and was fascinated by the place.

The vista of the surrounding prairie can’t have changed much since the days when troops were stationed there. You’re still in the middle of nowhere, with only brown prairie grass and the trees that line the banks of the Laramie River for scenery. Despite the isolation, however, Fort Laramie was a crossroads of history. Mark Twain, “Wild Bill” Hickok, Wyatt Earp, “Calamity Jane” Cannary, and “Buffalo Bill” Cody were among the thousands who visited the fort or passed through on stagecoaches.

I expected to see the Hollywood version of an Old West fort – the rustic timber palisade with blockhouses at each corner. But Fort Laramie never had a palisade.

Only walls remain of many of the old buildings, but several have been restored to their approximate 19th century appearances.

The barracks, above, housed a company of soldiers.

The sleeping quarters were on the second floor . . .

. . . and mess hall was on the ground floor.

A couple of the officers’ residences also have been restored. This is the entrance to one of them. The house was built in 1884, only a few years before the fort was closed.

This shows the dining room table as it might have appeared for Sunday dinner around 1887.

It was a warm day when we visited Fort Laramie, and I came across this juvenile rattlesnake sunning himself on the graveled walking path. He looks bigger in the photo than he actually was because there’s nothing else to provide perspective. But he was too young to even have his rattle, which the snakes don’t acquire until they start shedding their skins.

There were small signs warning visitors to watch out for rattlers if they ventured off the walking path. I’m sure the soldiers at Fort Laramie had to keep constant watch for them.

The photo at the top of this entry shows soldiers stationed at Fort Laramie in the late 19th century.

Did you vote?

2008-11-04T14:26:00.011-05:00

This rustic little community building is a polling place in Martin County, North Carolina. It's just off U.S. 64 a few miles east of Williamston.

Everything I've read says the turnout today is going to be phenomenal. The small parking area was crowded, and people were coming and going while I stopped to shoot these photos around 2 p.m.

Thank God, it'll be over soon

2008-11-02T01:16:00.002-04:00

(Saturday Evening Post cover, "Undecided," by Norman Rockwell, November 4, 1944)

Cold, Wet World Series

2008-10-28T16:27:00.005-04:00

Today’s weather forecast for Philadelphia predicts a high of 47 degrees and a 100 percent likelihood of rain. Or there could be some snow mixed in there.

So forget about the Philadelphia Phillies and Tampa Bay Rays completing game five of the World Series today. After playing most of last night’s game in a steady and undoubtedly chilling rain, the contest was suspended in the sixth inning with the score tied 2-2.

Major League baseball officials hope to resume the game tomorrow night. There’s a 20 percent chance of precipitation Wednesday, but even if it’s bone dry, the forecast high is only 49 degrees. If the thermometer does get that high, it’ll be sometime during the day. So that means the temperature at game time undoubtedly will be lower than that, and rapidly falling toward the forecast low of 34.

But the game will have to be completed somehow, even if it means playing it in below-freezing conditions.

Major League baseball’s expanded postseason is partly to blame for presenting the ridiculous sight of players wearing caps with earflaps in near-freezing weather. The two teams that meet in the World Series after winning division and league playoffs could be playing as many as 19 postseason games spread over three weeks after the regular season ends, usually around October 1.

The expanded playoffs undoubtedly have stimulated fan interest in Major League baseball because there are now eight teams chasing a World Series berth. But the expanded playoff has meant that the postseason has been extended to Halloween, and huge TV revenues have dictated that most of the games be played at night. And playing night baseball in late autumn means that there’s a very good chance that the conditions are going to be wretched.

It doesn’t have to be this way. If Major League teams played more doubleheaders during the regular season, the expanded postseason playoffs could begin earlier and be completed by mid-October at the latest.

Doubleheaders once were a fan’s delight and a manager’s headache. The fans loved them because they got two games for the price of one, and the managers hated them because having to play two games in one day caused havoc with their pitching rotations. But it was just part of the game. The good managers figured out a way to accommodate the problem and still win more games than they lost.

In 1958, the Philadelphia Phillies played 18 doubleheaders. Those twin bills accounted for 36 games – about 23 percent – of the 154-game schedule that MLB teams played at the time. The Phillies’ 1958 schedule included two dates when they played doubleheaders two days in a row.

On July 27, 1958, the Phils played two games in Los Angeles against the Dodgers. The following day, they were in San Francisco for a pair of games against the Giants. On August 31, the Phillies went to Cincinnati for a doubleheader against the Reds, and the next day they traveled to Pittsburgh for another doubleheader against the Pirates.

Some teams played even more doubleheaders in 1958. The New York Yankees, for example, played 21.

By contrast, the Phillies played only two doubleheaders during the season just completed – on September 7 in New York against the Mets, and on September 15 in Philadelphia against the Milwaukee Brewers.

If today’s teams played only 12 doubleheaders, that presumably would eliminate 12 playing dates and allow the regular season to be finished by mid-September. The playoffs could then start around September 18, and even if the World Series went seven games, it would be over before mid-October and the inevitable cold, chilly rains.

But, of course, that’s not likely to happen. MLB isn’t going to give up the revenue from 12 dates that would be lost to doubleheaders, and the Major League Players Association probably wouldn’t go along with it either.

So we’re stuck with the sight of players wearing caps with earflaps in the World Series and seeing their breath as they try to warm their hands between pitches. It’s an odd way for the so-called boys of summer to finish the season. (AP Photo: Philadelphia ground crew rolls out the tarp after umpires suspended the game.)

The kid quarterback with the cool name

2008-10-10T23:13:00.004-04:00

Any time Notre Dame comes to town to play football, it’s a big game for the home team. The Fighting Irish will be in Chapel Hill tomorrow, October 11, to take on UNC, so, ipso facto, it’s one of the biggest games on the Tar Heels’ schedule in years.

I was in the stands at Kenan Stadium when Notre Dame played Carolina exactly 33 years ago tomorrow, and it was a game I’ll never forget. The Irish had a young sophomore quarterback with one of the most colorful names I’ve ever heard. More about that guy in a moment.

Carolina came into the game with a record of 2-2, but the wins had come against the likes of William & Mary – not exactly a football powerhouse – and Virginia, which was the doormat of the ACC in those days. UNC would finish the season at 3-7-1. The Irish came into the game ranked 15th in the nation, and they’d finish the season 8-3. So the Heels really had no business being on the same field with Notre Dame.

But something strange and inexplicable happened that day. The game was scoreless at halftime. Notre Dame – the school of “wake up the echoes” where the so-called “Touchdown Jesus” mural overlooks the football stadium – had been held scoreless by a North Carolina defense that had allowed lowly Virginia to score four touchdowns a week earlier.

In the third quarter, what had been merely strange became truly bizarre. UNC scored twice. And somehow, the Tar Heel defense still held deep into the fourth quarter. With eight minutes left in the game, the 50,000 or so fans who’d crammed into a stadium with 48,000 seats were staring in disbelief at the scoreboard. It said, “North Carolina 14, Notre Dame 0.”

Then Notre Dame quarterback Rick Slagger threw a short touchdown pass to Ted Burgmeier. The Irish tried a two-point conversion but failed. So now it was 14-6.

Later, I realized that what happened next probably was inevitable. In addition to players and coaches, Notre Dame had priests patrolling their sideline. And they had nuns cheering them on behind the end zone. And they had a coach whose last name was “Devine,” for God’s sake.

I’m sure it would be improper to use the phrase “praying their asses off” in reference to priests and nuns, but I have no doubt that something like that was going on among Notre Dame’s sizable contingent of clerical supporters during the game’s final minutes. How are you going to beat a team that has that kind of pull?

Then Devine put in that quarterback who had the world’s most perfect name for a football hero. When his name was announced over the PA system, I remember thinking, No, that can’t really be that guy’s name. And then, in the blink of 100,000 eyes, the kid led the Irish to two scores, including a game-winning 80-yard touchdown pass with one minute showing on the clock.

Final score: Notre Dame 21, North Carolina 14.

It wasn’t until years later when that quarterback had become a household name among even casual sports fans that I realized that maybe Divine Intervention hadn’t been entirely responsible for Notre Dame’s last-minute game winning comeback. See, that Notre Dame kid with the perfect name for a football player was Joe Montana. And after that game in Chapel Hill, Montana made a specialty of pulling out games in the last minute during an NFL career that led him to the Hall of Fame.

So as I said, it was a memorable game – so memorable that I still have the ticket stub.

Football Saturday

2008-09-27T13:42:00.004-04:00

A fall Saturday. Across the country, fans are gathering to watch football. Today’s matchups feature such fierce traditional rivalries as Michigan State vs. Indiana, Purdue vs. Notre Dame, Georgia vs. Alabama, and Edenton vs. Plymouth.

I shot this photo earlier today at a county recreation department football field that’s a short walk from where we live. The kids in the blue T-shirts are from Edenton, which is on the other side of the Albemarle Sound from Plymouth. The Plymouth team is wearing the white T-shirts.

The youngster with the ball picked up a nice gain on this run. And in case you’re wondering what the grownup is doing on the field, the rules allow coaches to be on the field to position their young players before each play.

The teams are playing flag football. A defender stops a ball carrier by grabbing one of the streamers on the other player’s belt.

Plymouth was leading 8-0 when I had to leave.

Eighty years ago, a night of terror

2008-09-16T23:24:00.007-04:00

Eighty years ago tonight, thousands of people around Lake Okeechobee were dying horrible deaths. The most powerful hurricane on record up to that time was shoving water out of the giant, shallow saucer of a lake and inundating several small lakeside towns. Most of the deaths occurred in Pahokee, Belle Glade and South Bay.

Thousands were killed – so many that it took almost 80 years to count them all. For years, the official U.S. death toll was placed at 1,833. But in his 2002 book, Black Cloud: The Great Florida Hurricane of 1928, author Eliot Kleinberg says that as many as 4,000 may have been killed in the U.S. – most of them during that awful night of September 16, 1928.

The death toll rises to a staggering 7,000 when you add those killed during the hurricane’s earlier rampage through the Caribbean Sea.

The hurricane made its U.S. landfall at Palm Beach around 6 p.m. on September 16, 1928 and moved westward across the Everglades to Lake Okeechobee. Most of the victims who were killed by lake flooding were black migrant workers who were harvesting fall crops at the productive vegetable farms near the lake. They were buried in an unmarked mass grave in West Palm Beach and promptly forgotten. In his book, Kleinberg discusses the racial aspects of the tragedy.

I asked Kleinberg – who also writes for the Palm Beach Post – to respond by e-mail to a few questions about his book. Here are his comments.

What prompted you to start digging into this story?

“I wrote my first story about the 1928 hurricane during the 60th anniversary in 1988. As a South Florida native and a hurricane history buff, I thought I knew all about the '28 storm. I knew hardly anything. Over the years, the more I learned – especially about the outrage of the unmarked grave – the more amazed I was that more hadn't been written about this. As the 75th anniversary approached, I began thinking about a huge special section in the Palm Beach Post. The more I thought about it, the more I realized: this is the most historic event in the history of my home, and it was a hurricane, and I'm the newspaper's chief writer for local history, and hurricanes, and hurricane history. This needs to be a book.”

Was there anything you discovered in your research that surprised you?

“There were two big surprises.

“One was the major role played by the American Red Cross and the irony that that agency was accused of racism, when it was just about the only entity that didn't practice it. (Editor’s note: the ARC mounted a massive relief drive to help storm survivors.)

“The tragic story of Coot Simpson (sorry, no spoilers; you'll have to read the book) was not a surprise, which is a tragedy by itself. (Editor’s note: Without revealing too much information, Simpson was a black laborer who was killed by a National Guard soldier after the hurricane.)

“I was surprised that my editor was surprised that Florida in 1928 was part of the Deep South and practiced institutional racism.”

Given reports about the structural integrity of the Herbert Hoover Dike (a 150-mile long dike that was built around Lake Okeechobee after the 1928 hurricane), do you think a repeat of the 1928 tragedy is possible today?

“There cannot be a repeat of the 1928 disaster. The dike might breach in spots but it would have to completely wash out, which is not going to happen with a massive 50-foot pyramidical berm. Also, this time around, many of those in the Glades will have been able to flee, which they couldn't do in 1928, because of lack of roads and, for most, lack of any kind of transportation out.”

Any other important or interesting points?

“Two important points:

“First, it is amazing that this is the second deadliest natural disaster of any kind in U.S. history and most Americans – heck, most Floridians – never heard of it. I say in the introduction that one has to wonder how it would be remembered had it drowned 3,000 white businessmen in downtown West Palm Beach or smashed a black tie affair on Palm Beach, instead of drowning thousands of poor black migrant workers.

“Second, when I do talks about the book, people ask, ‘Have we learned the lessons of the 1928 storm?’ I say, ‘We haven't learned the lesson of the last storm.’ People still do nothing to prepare for hurricane season, and the approach of a storm finds them scrambling for plywood and canned soup and water and, for the first time, mulling whether they need to evacuate and, if so, where they need to go. Hurricanes are just about the only weather event we can see coming and for which we can prepare. Failing to do so seems inexcusable.”

The photo shows a dramatic statue on the grounds of the Palm Beach County Public Library in Belle Glade, Florida. It depicts a family trying to flee the floodwaters that are about to overtake them.

Chasing hurricanes, back soon

2008-09-13T18:32:00.003-04:00

The hurricane season has really heated up, and since late August I've scarcely stopped writing about them for National Geographic News. All this hasn't left much time and focus for even occasional blogging. I'll be back with more regular postings as soon as the tropics quiet down.

Meanwhile, you can visit the NG News website at http://news.nationalgeographic.com. And if you can endure my shameless self-promotion, take a look at a profile NG News Director David Braun did on me a couple of weeks ago. It's at http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/2008/08/hurricane.html

The photo shows Hurricane Ivan, the monster storm of 2004, as seen from space.

Labor Day greetings

2008-08-29T20:38:00.002-04:00

Wishing you a relaxing Labor Day weekend from Drye Goods.

Hurricane Rita: The anatomy of a perfect storm

2008-08-24T12:42:00.005-04:00

I dug up this NOAA satellite image of Hurricane Rita while going through some old files on my PC. It shows the rapid development of a perfect hurricane and the storm's equally rapid deterioration.

Rita formed during the horrific summer of 2005, a hurricane season unlike anything on record that produced 28 named storms. That was the summer of Hurricane Katrina, which nearly destroyed New Orleans, and Hurricane Wilma, which intensified from a tropical storm to the most powerful hurricane on record for the Atlantic Basin in barely 24 hours.

Rita became the fourth-most powerful storm on record for the Atlantic, surpassed only by Hurricane Wilma, Hurricane Gilbert (which formed in 1988) and the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935.

Rita somehow didn’t get quite the same attention as the other powerful hurricanes that formed in 2005. The hurricane lost a lot of its strength before it made landfall at the Louisiana-Texas border on September 24. But it was still a very powerful Category 3 hurricane that inflicted severe damage. Paul Trotter, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Slidell, Louisiana, told me that for a few days, Rita turned southwestern Louisiana into “a third-world country.”

It’s fascinating to watch the storm form as it crosses the Straits of Florida and then get organized and crank up as it barrels westward across the Gulf of Mexico. (You'll probably need to play the video a couple of times to see it completely.) You can see the eye just starting to form as it passes the Florida Keys on September 20. The eye is becoming distinct somewhere around the Dry Tortugas later the same day.

By September 22, when the Rita is roughly due south of Mobile Bay, the hurricane is at full roar, with sustained winds of 180 miles an hour. At this point, Hurricane Rita is pretty much a perfect storm. Its eye is tiny and well-defined, the unmistakable characteristic of a hurricane at the apex of its strength.

Had Hurricane Rita made landfall at this intensity, it would have leveled everything in its path.

But luckily, these extremely powerful storms can’t hold on to that kind of intensity very long. In fact, the mechanism of their weakening is sort of built in to their mechanics when they become this powerful. At this peak intensity, hurricanes often start going through a process known as an eye-wall replacement cycle. This means that a new eye wall starts forming around the old one. It’s sort of like Mother Nature putting a noose around the hurricane’s neck and choking it down. While this cycle is taking place, the hurricane weakens. But once the cycle is completed and the new eye wall is in place, the storm can start re-intensifying until the next replacement cycle.

As Rita takes aim at Louisiana, you can see its eye starting to cloud over and become less distinct. By the time the center of the storm touches the coast, the eye is no longer visible, an indication that the hurricane has weakened considerably from its peak intensity.

Still, there were winds of about 120 miles an hour around that indistinct eye when it came ashore.

An active hurricane season has been predicted for the rest of this summer and fall. Tropical Storm Fay – the season’s sixth named storm – has been plaguing Florida with heavy rains for a week.

September 10, considered the peak of the season, is still several weeks away.

New Jersey, um, State Fair?

2008-08-14T22:02:00.006-04:00

Someone says “New Jersey.” What comes to mind?

· Bruce (as in Springsteen).
· Tony (as in Soprano).
· Political corruption (as in, well, lots of it).
· Toll roads (as in New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway, and thank God for EZPass).
· The City (as in, going over to).

Urban images, all of them. I’d bet more money than I can afford to lose that one phrase that would not come to mind would be this one: New Jersey State Fair. State fairs are for places like Iowa, and North Carolina, and Nebraska, and Georgia, and other states in the South and Midwest with largely rural populations and lots of dairy farms and people who are sincere and have no idea how to be sarcastic or world-weary or why an EZPass is so useful.

New Jersey State Fair? The state that gave us Frank Sinatra (from Hoboken) and Lou Costello (from Paterson), two thoroughly urban guys who probably couldn’t tell a bull from a steer (there is a small but critical difference, you can look it up), has a state fair?

Yes, they do. In Sussex County, well away from the smog and pavement and elbow-rubbing, NJ-Transit-riding, daily grind that is life as they know it from about Exit 9 northward on the Turnpike.

And as you’ve probably figured out, we discovered the New Jersey State Fair a few weeks ago. The video shows a brief parade of antique tractors. You can hear, over the putter of the engines, my brother-in-law Bob and I commenting as they pass by.

It was fun and totally unexpected, not the kind of thing you’d expect to do during a visit to Jersey. Gotta say, though, it was not nearly as big as the North Carolina State Fair.