I can remember as a child, the Good Humor truck coming up the street on a summer afternoon while we were playing in the field across the street, its signature music blaring. Unlike the Steve Wright joke, the song it played was not Helter Skelter.
The title of this post is taken from the name of a song by Love from its 1967 masterpiece Forever Changes.
Summertime's hereAnd look over thereFlowers everywhereIn the morning, in the morning
Or, in my case, Grandpa Rock. Walter White rhapsodizing on the virtues of Steely Dan. He may have been a meth kingpin and killer but what great taste in music! Extra bonus points for mentioning Boz Scaggs who, in 2012, toured with Dan co-founder Donald Fagen and frequent Dan background singer Michael McDonald; here they are performing Boz's big hit Lowdown.
Stunning photo by Sophie Hay, an archaeologist working at Pompeii, taken from the Certosa di San Martino Museum in Naples. The museum is housed in a former Carthusian monastery built in the 14th century, located on the north shore of the Bay of Naples.
The photo looks west towards the center of the city and the still active volcano Vesuvius, which stood 1,000 feet taller before the eruption of 79 AD. The ruins of Herculaneum lies on the coast just behind the pillar on the right, while Pompeii is a bit further to the right and a couple of miles back from the coast.
A staggeringly glorious day to be looking over Naples and Vesuvius. pic.twitter.com/dy6Av3RgJP
— Dr Sophie Hay (@pompei79) January 21, 2024
It was the 1975 team that made me a Red Sox fan, and specifically these two guys, Fred Lynn and Jim Rice (along with El Tiante and Bill Lee). I'd moved to the Boston area in August 1973 and was a National League and Mets fan. But two things appealed to me about the Sox, (1) everyone in Boston hated the Yankees, which was part of the baseball creed in which I'd been raised, and (2) late in the '74 season rookies Lynn and Rice joined the club. Of course, it helped they won the pennant in '75 and the greatest world series I'd seen, three games to four (don't forget Carlton Fisk and Bernie Carbo!). Freddie won the Rookie of the Year and MVP awards, while Jim hit .309 with 22 homers before getting hit by a pitch and breaking his hand a week before the end of the season, causing him to miss the series.
It was also the season that the future Mrs THC and I attended our first Red Sox game together and saw Rice hit the longest home run I ever saw in person.
Here they are a couple of days ago in Springfield, Massachusetts; Jim at 70, Fred at 71, both looking good.
Twins reunion …Jimmy looks great. … stories flying. @MGMSpringfield #Soxwinterweekend @NESN @RedSox pic.twitter.com/eAE2Q1kyMG
— Fred Lynn (@19fredlynn) January 21, 2024
Looks like THC will be leaving the presidential line blank on the ballot for the first time since he started voting in 1972 (McGovern was my choice back then).
I wish this was happening instead!
What elderly men should be doing pic.twitter.com/fwsgFh9qMD
— Emil O W Kirkegaard (@KirkegaardEmil) January 21, 2024
Unfortunately, my post of September 2021 proved accurate.
Without a song, the day would never endMy first Perry Como post! I became aware of this song when it was singled out by Bob Dylan in The Philosophy of Modern Song, one of my favorite books of the past few years.
The most unhip guy I remember on TV from my childhood (other than Lawrence Welk). This is how Dylan got me to listen:
Perry Como was the anti-Rat Pack, like the anti-Frank; wouldn't be caught dead with a drink in his hand, and could out-sing anybody. His performance is just downright incredible. There is nothing small you can say about it.
Perry is also the anti-American Idol. He is anti-flavor of the week, anti-hot list and anti-bling. He was a Cadillac before the tail fins; a Colt .45, not a Glock; steak and potatoes, not California cuisine. Perry Como stands and delivers. No artifice, no forcing one syllable to spread itself thin across many notes.
Perry Como lived in every moment of every song he sang. . . When he stood and sang, he owned the song and he shared it and we believed every single word. What more could you want from an artist?
The song was recorded by Perry a month before I was born in 1951, and composed in 1929 with music by Vincent Youmans and lyrics from Billy Rose and Edward Eliscu. Now I love listening to it.
Vladimir Lenin died on this date one hundred years ago. That was a good event but a shame he had not died a decade earlier, before he had the chance to inflict so much damage on so many people. A man full of hate who, upon gaining power, reveled in being merciless to his perceived enemies. In October 1917, he led the Bolshevik Revolution which overthrew the social democrats who had been governing Russia since the overthrow of the Czar in February. In January 1918, he ordered the Bolsheviks to forcibly dissolve the Constituent Assembly, the first freely elected representative body in Russian history, and then consolidated the communist dictatorship. In September 1918 he launched the Red Terror; mass shootings "inflicted without hesitation" in order to intimidate the populace. As Krylenko, Lenin's Minister of Justice, stated, "execution of the guilty is not enough, execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more."
The extreme measures extended to those who supported the party but dissented from any of its actions. In early 1921, sailors of the Russian fleet at Kronstadt, an island near St Petersburg, who had supported the Bolsheviks completed since the October revolution, demanded an end to the monopoly of Bolshevik power, economic freedom and restoration of civil rights for peasants. This was not a democratic revolution, as the sailor demands were based on class differences. The repression by Lenin's government was ruthless. Military suppression in which thousands were killed in the fighting while those who survived were executed or imprisoned. Lenin used the incident to complete suppression of any dissent within the party and to completely eliminate any competing parties.
Lenin was inserted into the revolutionary chaos of Russia by the Germans who hoped his presence would undermine the new government's efforts to continue its participation in the First World War (read The Sealed Train for details). Though the German effort succeeded in the short-term, longer term it led to the rise of the Soviet Union, which proved much more deadly for Germany less than three decades later.
For decades, defenders of the Soviet Union and communism contended that it was Stalin that perverted Lenin's vision (and some have continued to do so even more recently - see the New York Times 2017 celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution; read Normalizing Mass Murder and Repression), Solzhenitsyn's works and the documentation that became available with the fall of the Evil Empire in 1991, ended any doubt it was Lenin who instituted Terror and the Gulag as a tools of governance.
Lenin's life and death raise questions.
Do the impersonal forces of history govern? How much of a role do individuals play in determining the tides of history?
Certainly, Marxism is based on the former. But in the case of the Bolshevik Revolution it was Lenin's personality and fanaticism that determined the course of his party. None of his colleagues exhibited the stridency; none had the charisma of Lenin. He was, for the worse, the indispensable man.
Without the presence of Lenin, it is very unlikely the Bolshevik Party
would have seized power later in 1917. It was Lenin who unflinchingly insisted on the coup that, as historian Edward
Crankshaw wrote in the October 1954 edition of The Atlantic:
The Bolshevik Party in crisis was nothing but Lenin's will and the men who were prepared to submit to it absolutely. If Lenin had resigned after his return to Russia in 1917 it would have lost its identity, swallowed up by the Mensheviks and the "Compromisers." Lenin would have formed another party, but too late to win for himself the government of Russia; there would have been no Soviet Union. On the other hand, had Lenin given in to the popular demand and allowed his most trusted colleagues to persuade him into compromise, he would have lost his own identity and Bolshevism would have lost its meaning; there would have been no Soviet Union.
When is extra-judicial violence justified to protect against those who would destroy any possibility of a freer and democratic society?
The social democrats who ruled Russia in the interim between the abdication and Lenin's coup, knew what he was plotting. While they did try to arrest him at one point, their indecisiveness and ineffectivness allowed the Bolsheviks to ultimately succeed. They lacked the will to do what needed to be done; arrange for the killing of Lenin. Without Lenin, Russian history takes a different course. We don't know what that course may have been, but we know the tragedy of the next 74 years and the toll it took on millions of lives and its long term impact politically. The same question arises in the case of Hitler, like Lenin, a unique and irreplaceable personality.
An edited reprint of a prior Things Have Changed post
I've spent some time exploring the early history of professional baseball in America (I wrote about the origins of the pre-professional game in Madame Blatavsky and the Birth of Baseball). The still-amateur game exploded in popularity in the Northeast and Midwest in the years after the Civil War with clubs being established in many cities and towns. Coming across a discussion of the Pythian Base Ball Club of Philadelphia, a black ball team led by Octavius Catto, which mentioned that Catto died at the age of 32 in 1871 piqued my curiosity and I found a biography had been published at the website of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) Bioproject, which revealed Catto had been a significant public figure, known for much more than his baseball career. More recently I've been making my way through a very long and very detailed biography of Catto, which exhaustively investigates his family background and race relations in Philadelphia, "Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America". Catto's life and death are a reminder that while the white post-war South may have instituted legal (de jure) discrimination, and introduced a reign of terror to control the newly freed people, the de facto discrimination in Northern states also proved effective in resisting attempts at assimilation by blacks, sometimes with deadly consequences.
(Right, Catto from SABR Bioproject)
Catto was born in Charleston, South Carolina; his mother a free black woman and his father, born a slave but later freed by his master and becoming a Presbyterian minister. In 1848 Reverend Catto moved his family to Philadelphia, the northern city with the largest black population, and during the 1850s young Octavius attended the Institute for Colored Youth (ICY), the city's only high school for blacks, where he was class valedictorian. In 1859 he was hired as a teacher at ICY in English, mathematics, Latin, and Greek.
During the Civil War, Catto actively led recruitment drives that raised several regiments of U.S. Colored Troops for the Union. With the end of the war he plunged into a leadership role, campaigning for passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, as well as undertaking direct actions, such as a campaign to allow blacks to ride on Philadelphia streetcars, which ultimately, with the help of his wife, succeeded. The SABR biography provides a concise account of his impressive efforts to obtain full civil rights for the black community.
Even in baseball he was a pioneer, co-founding the Pythians in 1866 and becoming the team's star infielder. According to the SABR biography:
". . . many of the players belonged to the Knights of Pythias Lodge, and thus they became the Pythians (derived from a mythical priestess at the Greek Temple of Apollo). Besides Catto, the Pythian leadership included other prominent blacks who emerged from Underground Railroad families. Club president James W. Purnell worked with abolitionists John Brown and Martin Delany, and vice president Raymond W. Burr was descended from American revolutionary Aaron Burr and was the son of a prominent black activist."
Catto saw baseball as promoting black self-improvement and an opportunity to press for integration.
In 1869 the Pythians played the first documented game between black and
white teams, but while continuing to play such contests, the Pythian application to join the
National Association of Base Ball Players was voted down. Though, for a few years, black
ball players were to occasionally play in the professional leagues, a
firm color line was established by the late 1880s which remained in
place until 1947 when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers.(1)
Catto led another campaign to get black voters to the polls in the Philadelphia mayoral election in 1871, despite white intimidation; the night before the election, two blacks were beaten and shot (one fatally), by whites. The next day, Catto purchased a six-shot revolver and was on his way home to get the ammunition he had purchased when confronted by two white men who had been searching for him. One of the men, Frank Kelly, pulled a revolver and shot Catto three times, killing him. Kelly was eventually tried for murder, but despite the testimony of six eyewitnesses (three white and three black), all of whom stated the unprovoked Kelly shot Catto, he was acquitted by the all-white jury.
W.E.B. DuBois later wrote of Catto,
"And so closed the career of a man of splendid equipment, rare force of character, whose life was so interwoven with all that was good about us, as to make it stand out in bold relief, as a pattern for those who have followed after.”
According to the SABR biography:
Even whites were outraged at Catto’s murder in his quest for civil rights. His funeral procession was the largest since Lincoln’s assassination and unprecedented for a black man. Over the three-mile route, tens of thousands of black and white Philadelphians watched in reverence for a fallen hero, as more than 125 carriages paraded by, containing Congressmen, military leaders, local politicians, students, colleagues, soldiers, ballplayers, and fellow civil rights activists.
Memory of Octavius Catto and his legacy faded over the years. Over the past twenty years, he has received renewed recognition for his pioneering efforts. In 2017, a 12-foot bronze statue of Catto was dedicated and erected in front of Philadelphia City Hall.
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(1) The integration of Major League Baseball in April 1947, at a time when baseball was the most popular sport in America, was one of two significant events signaling a change in attitudes towards blacks in the late 1940s. The other event was President Truman's July 1948 Executive Order mandating the desegregation of the military services. For eight decades after the Civil War, white America resisted efforts by black Americans to assimilate into the life of this country, even while we were successfully assimilating millions of immigrants. These two actions were turning points for America.
There are a few places I go to when wishing to see pictures that are calming. This is from a UK-based site that just posts pics of trees along country roads. I think this location is a few miles southwest of Edinburgh in Scotland.
The lane, and the tree, at Outbank. pic.twitter.com/f2hexqziqM
— 🌳Tree-lined🌳lanes🌳 (@LanesTree) January 12, 2024
This is the Ray Charles take on Eleanor Rigby. Ray's arrangement and vocal adds a very distinct feel to the song, different and as good as the Beatles original. In the Beatles original, Father McKenzie is observed from a distance. In Ray's version, Father McKenzie speaks directly to us.
(Bari, Italy)
"On the afternoon of 2 December [1943], Air Marshal 'Mary' Cunningham held a press conference in Bari, in which he told reporters that the Luftwaffe had lost the air war in Italy. 'I would consider it a personal insult', he told them, 'if the enemy should send so much as one plane over the city'. Cunningham was a brilliant and inspired air commander, yet there was a touch of hubris about his comments because that same afternoon a lone Messerschmitt Me 210 twin-engine reconnaissance aircraft flew over Bari, spotting a mass of Allied merchant vessels crammed into the harbour."
- The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943 by James Holland
The Allies had invaded Italy in early September, the British Eighth Army landing on the toe and advancing north, while the Fifth Army, containing both American and British divisions, came ashore at Salerno, south of Naples (the Americans landing by the ancient Greek temples of Paestum). By the beginning of December, the Allied advance slowed to a bloody crawl north of Naples, and along the Adriatic coast. However, the important ports on the Italian heel, Taranto, Brindisi, and Bari had been captured and were handling the massive amount of supplies required to support the armies and the new air force bases around Foggia. Cunningham was correct in his assertion that the Allied air forces dominated the sky. But that was almost all, but not all, of the time.
In this instance, the reconnaissance report prompted the Luftwaffe commander in Italy to send 105 bombers to the port that very evening. They were able to foil radar, no fighter defense was scrambled, and anti-aircraft fire was ineffective. The result was disaster for the tightly packed merchant ships. Twenty seven merchant ships were sunk and another twelve damaged. One of the first hit was an ammunition ship which resulted in a massive explosion breaking windows seven miles away. A thousand seamen and another thousand civilians were killed. The port was not back in full operation until February 1944. As bad as the toll in ships, supplies, and people, there was another aspect of the raid initially covered up by the Allies.
Among the ships sunk was the John Harvey, an American vessel carrying 2,000 mustard gas mortar bombs. The Allies always maintained a supply of chemical weapons to be used in retaliation if the Germans used such weapons first. Tight security was maintained regarding the cargo and neither the Bari harbormaster and any local military personnel knew about the presence of the mustard gas (the ship's captain and those of its crew who knew about the contents were killed in the explosion). American Heritage gives this account of the dramatic explosion:
"The explosion of the John Harvey shook the entire harbor. Clouds of smoke, tinted every color of the rainbow, shot thousands of feet into the air. Meteoric sheets of metal rocketed in all directions, carrying incendiary torches to other ships and setting off a series of explosions that made the harbor a holocaust. Jimmy Doolittle, still standing by the shattered window of his office, was staggered by the terrific blast. Huddled on the east jetty, Heitmann and other survivors from the ships in the harbor were bathed in the bright light momentarily and then bombarded by debris, oil, and dirty water. The inhabitants of old Bari who had rushed to the harbor to escape the flames within the walls of the ancient section were gathered along the shore when the John Harvey exploded. There was no time to run, no time to hide, no time for anything. One moment they were rejoicing in their good fortune in escaping from the flames of the old city; the next they were struck by the unbearable concussion of the blast. Some were blown upward, their broken bodies flying twenty-five to thirty feet high. Some were hurtled straight back the way they had come. "James Holland reports what followed:
". . . as the John Harvey was hit a large amount of these mustard gas mortar shells leaked liquid sulphur mustard into water already slick with oil. A number of sailors leaping from stricken vessels then found themselves in the sea and exposed to the poison, much of which mixed with the oil, caught fire, and produced noxious fumes. Within a day, 628 patients fished out the harbour were suffering from blindness and chemical burns."
Hundreds of Italian civilians, injured by the cloud of mustard sulphur vapor that spread over the city, also presented themselves to medical facilities. Baffled medical personnel had no clue as to the source of the injuries. By the end of the month 83 of the military patients had died along with an unknown number of civilians and others permanently injured. If medical personnel had known at the time about the presence of mustard gas, many injuries caused by prolonged exposure to low concentrations of
mustard might have been reduced by bathing or a change of clothes. Instead the initial victims were only thought to be suffering from shock and immersion, wrapped in blankets, and left for 12 to 24 hours to recover.
Within a few days, the mysterious symptoms caused Lt Colonel Stewart Francis Alexander, a doctor with experience in chemical warfare, to be sent to Bari. Alexander quickly concluded that mustard gas was the source, although the military command refused to confirm, and convinced medics to treat for those symptoms which saved many lives.
In February 1944, the U.S. issued a short statement acknowledging the presence of mustard gas in Bari, but the entire incident received little attention at the time. General Eisenhower approved Dr Alexander's report and the U.S. declassified documents related to the incident in 1959. However, the British destroyed many documents and did not acknowledge the presence of mustard gas until 1988, at which time it amended the pension payments of those still living.
Tissue samples taken by Dr Alexander were later used in the development of the initial type of chemotherapy based on a mustard derivative.
The quote that begins this post is from James Holland's recently published account of the first four months of the Italian campaign. Holland, co-host of the popular WW2 podcast We Have Ways Of Making You Talk, gives us a well written account of that misbegotten campaign, which the Allies began with too high expectations and too little logistical support and infantry, ending up mired in the mountains of south Italy from November 1943 until well into May 1944. A miserable and deadly time for soldiers on both sides and a horror for the civilians caught in the middle. Holland provides plenty of strategic overview and background but the strength of the book are the contemporaneous accounts taken from letters and diaries of American, British, Canadian, and German soldiers and of Italian civilians. They provide an immediacy to the account. Holland does not use later interviews or memoirs. His approach provides an immediacy, as we see human reactions at the time of the events when no one knew what the outcome would be.
Memorial in Bari to those killed and injured in the air raid
