First Of September

Football has been my favorite sport since I can remember having a favorite sport or knowing what sports were. I can still remember watching Joe Namath and the Jets upset the Colts in Super Bowl III. I was five at the time. It wasn’t the first football game I’d watched, but it was the first one I’d watched from beginning to end. Many, many more would follow.

But, this was 1971, and, in 1971, football season was not the monster it is today. Major colleges played 10 games and there were no such things as conference championship games. There were a dozen bowls and the season ended on January 1^st. The NFL hadn’t come up with the concept of the twelve-month calendar, keeping the league in the news year-round. The 1970 season had ended with the Super Bowl on January 17^th. The draft was held two weeks later, and the league then shut down until July when training camps started. Of course, the NFL preseason was worth watching in those days, since starters actually played and the games were often a lot of fun.

The first was always “The College All-Star Game”, which was played in Chicago and featured the previous year’s NFL Champion against an all-star team of picks from the previous NFL draft. The game was played from 1934 until 1976 (with the exception of 1974, when it was cancelled by a strike), and the fact that it took folks over 40 years to figure out just what a terrible idea the game was (Seriously, you want to send your top rookies, guys you hope can help you in the coming season, to a training camp where they won’t learn your schemes or playbook all in the service of risking injury in a meaningless exhibition game?) is only slightly more astounding than the fact that the game survived into its second season after the first game ended in a scoreless tie. (A total of 25 points were scored in the first four games combined.) The game shuffled off this mortal coil after the 1976 contest in which the Pittsburgh Steelers mugged the out-classed all-stars (The starting QB for the college team was Mike Kruczek, who would become Terry Bradshaw’s back up and inspire so much confidence in the Steelers’ coaching staff that, when Kruczek was forced to start six games for an injured Bradshaw, the team threw the ball exactly 85 times. In six games. Among those 85 tosses were three interceptions and not a single touchdown pass. Kruczek played four more seasons before retiring. And, to this date, he STILL hasn’t thrown a touchdown pass. But, I digress.) for nearly three quarters. At that point, high winds prompted Ara Parseghian, who was coaching the All-Stars, to call time out. Fans, who’d been sitting in a heavy rain all night, took this as invitation to run onto the field and begin sliding around on the artificial surface. (I am not making this up.) With the rain coming down even harder, the officials ordered the teams to their locker rooms. The fans took this as an invitation to continue running around and sliding on the turf…before tearing down both goal posts. (Keep in mind, this was DURING the game and, no, I’m STILL not making this up.) With the goal posts down and the field conditions atrocious due to the continued downpour, Pete Rozelle finally made the decision to call the game. This led the fans still in the stands to, basically, riot, pouring onto the field and starting several brawls. (Nope, still not making it up.) I am also not making up the fact that none of this convinced Chicago Tribune Charities, which had been sponsoring the game since the 0-0 thriller in 1934, that the time might be nigh to put an end to the contest. The organization planned to hold another game in 1977, but, cooler heads (and rising insurance costs) prevailed and The College All-Star Game went the way of the single wing, making The Hall of Fame Game the new preseason opener (when, you know, the field is painted properly.) But, again, I digress.

The point is that, even counting the preseason, which began at the end of July, there were six full months without football, and, as most of those months fell in the summer, well, that meant baseball ruled my sporting world from April through mid-September, when college games began and the NFL games began to count. And, the team that ruled my baseball world was, of course, the Pittsburgh Pirates.

In 1971, most of my sports heroes wore the uniform of the Pittsburgh Pirates. There was Roberto, of course. And Willie. And a personal favorite, Al Oliver, a guy whose swing remains the sweetest I’ve ever seen in 40-plus years of watching the game. And, unlike my football heroes (and, I had a few), Roberto and Willie and Al weren’t just around once a week. They were with me every day, every day from April through September. Now, they weren’t often on TV, because this was, again, a different era. (How limited was TV coverage of the team in 1971? Well, let’s remember that there were several scheduled doubleheaders a year in those days, and KDKA, the television home of the Buccos, engaged in the strange practice of showing HALF a doubleheader. No, I’m not making that up, either.) But, the radio had the Buccos on it almost every day, and that was especially wonderful in the summer when, obviously, we didn’t have to deal with school and school bedtimes.

Now, this isn’t to say we didn’t have a lot to do in the summer. We did. Lots and lots of fun stuff. But, there were plenty of hours in the day, hours that were usually taken up by school, homework, and such, to fill. And, baseball on the radio was a great way to fill it. Of course, I didn’t listen to every game. Sometimes other things got in the way. But, I listened to a lot of them and even kept score of some. (I learned to do this at a young age and have always enjoyed it. I never, however, got as good as my great aunt, who scored every single game all year in a special notebook that also contained space for all the out-of-town scores, which she recorded faithfully by often listening to a radio late at night and picking up games from as far away as Los Angeles…and, no, I’m not making that up either. Want to know what Willie Stargell did on May 7^th? My aunt could turn to the page, tell you that Starg went 1-4 with a solo home run in the Buccos 3-2 victory over the Dodgers in Los Angeles and that the homer came in the sixth off Don Sutton. She could also tell you  that Mudcat Grant threw two perfect innings in relief to get the save, and, by the by, the scores of every other game that took place in The Majors that day. But, I digress once again.)

The point is that the 1971 Pirates weren’t just my heroes, they were my companions on many a summer day and night. I can still, to this moment, recite the everyday lineup from memory. Manny Sanguillen catching. Bob Robertson at first. Dave Cash at second. Jackie Hernandez, who’d come to the team in a trade the year before, at short, subbing for the injured Gene Alley. Richie Hebner at third. In the outfield, Stargell in left, Oliver in center, and, of course, the Great Roberto in right. Every day, whether I watched the game, listened to the game, or simply read about the game in the paper the following day, I followed the Buccos, followed as they slowly pulled away from the field in the NL East, followed and began thinking about another chance to win the NLCS, which the team had lost to the Cincinnati Reds the year before.

And, I wasn’t the only one. Lots of the guys I hung around with followed baseball and the Pirates, and they all loved the team. A lot of them collected baseball cards like I did and prized their Pirates. A lot of them chose various Pirates to portray during our endless summer whiffle ball games. (Nobody could be Clemente if John Stumpf was playing. John was ALWAYS Clemente, and any attempt to change this would devolve into a near fist-fight until someone would yell, “Oh, let him be Clemente and let’s PLAY!” Every. Single. Time. It got to the point where no one would be Clemente even if John weren’t playing, on the off chance he’d show up and join the game in progress. Yep. Digressing again.) So, you can imagine my surprise when, one fine day as school approached, as our time playing whiffle ball and football on the street were about to be reduced to weekends and as much time as we could steal after school, some folks began talking smack about the Buccos. A few of the guys, the guys who’d been pulling for the team and portraying various Pirates in our games all year said they’d never root for them again.

Now, fans turning on their team is something that happens in sports. The main culprit is usually a long period (or, in the case of some fans, a short period) of losing. Other things can have an effect, too, though. Some Packers fans turned on the team after it parted from Brett Favre. Some Cowboys fans did the same after Tom Landry was fired. Some Browns fans never returned to the team after it left Cleveland for Baltimore. (Those, by the by, have been, to this point at least, the LUCKY Browns fans.) The Pirates saw the city turn on them twice in recent decades, once in the 80s with the drug trials and again during the 20-year losing streak.  (And, a third instance may be underway.) So, it happens. But, what happened here was a different animal.

The 1971 Pirates weren’t losing. They were in the process of winning 97 games. They weren’t leaving town or involved in a scandal, and they weren’t parting with a popular player or manager. No, the Pirates transgression was different. See, Robertson and Hebner weren’t available on September 1, 1971. So, the team moved Cash to third base and slotted Rennie Stennett in at second. Meanwhile, Oliver moved to first to replace Robertson, and, with left-handed Woody Fryman pitching for the Phillies, Gene Clines got the start for Al in center. Doc Ellis started the game on the mound for the Pirates. Now, if you don’t know those Buccos like I do, you may not understand the significance of those moves. If you do, you know. The Pirates became the first team in the history of major league baseball, which went back exactly 100 years at that point, to start nine black players. And, that was enough for some people to start hating them…even though the starting nine played exactly one and one-third innings. (A wild Ellis walked four and was pulled for Bob Moose in the second. The other eight guys, however, were doing plenty of damage, blasting out Fryman and scoring nine runs in the first three innings.)

To say I was shocked at some of the stuff I was hearing about my team would be an understatement. At the dinner table, I brought it up to my father, who was quite the baseball player in his day and instilled in me my love of the game. “Some guys say they hate the Pirates now, because they played nine black guys yesterday.” Dad: “Yes, and they won the game. I hope they play nine black guys tonight, too.” They didn’t. The next day, Alley played shortstop and Steve Blass pitched. The Bucs lost to the Expos. Shortly, Hebner and Robertson returned to the line up and the team rolled to the NL East title by seven games over the Cardinals. And, that meant the NLCS for the second year in a row.(The 1971 NLCS was only the third in history, by the by, and the Pirates became the first team to qualify twice.)

The Pirates lost the opener to the Giants in San Francisco, then ran off three straight wins, wrapping the series with back-to-back victories over future Hall of Famers Juan Marichal and Gaylord Perry. The World Series didn’t start any better than the NLCS had. The Bucs lost two in a row in Baltimore, and the joke was that the team was like an elephant. It was coming home to die. Not so much. The Pirates won three straight at Three Rivers, and, after the Orioles pulled out the sixth game in the tenth back in Baltimore, well. It was time for the Great Roberto. Clemente homered to put the Pirates in the lead in the final game, and Jose Pagan doubled the lead by doubling in Stargell in the 8^th. I can still see Willie steaming around third and heading toward the plate, the look on his face telling Orioles catcher Elrod Hendricks, “Don’t be there when I get there, Elrod.” Elrod wasn’t there. The Orioles scratched out a run in the eighth, but the ninth ended with Blass leaping into the arms of Robertson, and a lot of guys who stopped loving their team looking for room on the bandwagon.

I can still picture the team. Sangy. Robertson. Cash. Hernandez. Hebner. Willie. Scoops. The Great Roberto. And, I can still picture that other team, too. The one that played only an inning and a third together, and found out that’s all the longer it took to make history. I can also still see my Dad at our table. “I hope they play nine black guys tonight, too.” Because, no matter how old you get, you don’t forget your heroes.

 

Ambrose and Orion

This piece is about the stories of two men, stories that are somewhat contemporaneous as parts of them take place in the pre-Civil War America of the 1800s. The men, one you’ve likely never heard of and the other you almost certainly have, are Orion Williamson and Ambrose Bierce.

Now, it’s Mr. Williamson you’ve likely never heard of, and, after I’m done with this story, you’re going to wonder how that’s possible. Williamson was a farmer who lived in Selma, Alabama in the 1850s. (OK, so far you aren’t wondering why you’ve never heard of him, but, hang on a minute.) One day in July of 1854, a hot day as you might imagine, it being Alabama in July, Mr. Williamson got up from his porch, where he was sitting with his family, and walked across an open field to move some grazing horses into the shade. On the way, he picked up a stick and swished it back and forth as he walked through the ankle-high grass toward the horses. A pair of neighbors, Armor Wren and his son, was passing by at the time. Just in time for Williamson to waive at his neighbors, take one more step…and vanish into thin air.

What happened next is likely what you’d expect to happen next. Both the neighbors and the family ran to the spot. Nothing there. No hole. No Williamson. Just grass. Now, this was an empty farm field. There was no place to hide. Nowhere for Williamson to go. Still, the family and neighbors searched for several hours, though where they thought Williamson could have gone, I can’t imagine. Word spread. Hundreds of men gathered. More searching took place. Well into the night. No sign of Orion Williamson. None. Eventually, more volunteers and a team of geologists arrived. They dug up the spot where Williamson disappeared. And, found nothing but solid rock a few feet below the surface.

Orion Williamson was never seen again. Perhaps, though, he was heard. Reportedly, on occasion, for several weeks after the incident, Williamson’s wife and son heard him calling for help. Each time this happened, they’d run into the field and find nothing. And, each time, Williamson’s voice sounded farther and farther away. Finally, the voice stopped, and with no trace of Williamson ever found, a judge declared him dead. Gone. Without a trace. Right in front of friends and family.

OK, so, how does Ambrose Bierce, the guy you almost certainly have heard of, fit in here? Well, it was Bierce who made the Williamson story famous, telling it in a newspaper article and in book called “Can Such Things Be?” Both of those publications came decades after the incident itself. Bierce, unlike some authors, was as well known in his time as he is today. And he remains popular a century after his death, with his most famous story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” having been adapted to film several times. The major reason for Bierce’s continued popularity is his absolute brilliance as a writer. His Civil War short stories remain among the best ever written about the war and the period and his ghost stories (yes, he wrote ghost stories, too), have led experts to regard him as the most important American writer of horror fiction between Poe and Lovecraft.

But, Bierce doesn’t just figure in here because he told Williamson’s story. What you may not know is that the Civil War veteran and writer who spread the story of Williamson’s disappearance disappeared himself, and just as completely as his subject.

Bierce was 71 years old in 1913 when he decided to go on what he expected to be the last trip of his life. He planned to tour the old Civil War battlefields, then go into Mexico and on to South America. He left Washington, D.C. in October and had passed through Louisiana and Texas by December. That much, we know. And, not much more. Most historians believe that he entered Mexico. And, if you know the history of the period, you know that, in December of 1913, the Mexican Revolution was underway. Many believe he rode with Pancho Villa’s army, accompanying him as far as the city of Chihuahua (though a few doubt this). And, that’s it. From that point (or, from a point before if you’re one of those who don’t believe Bierce met up with Villa or even entered Mexico…there’s no proof either way), there’s nothing. Ambrose Bierce is simply…gone. So completely that even his date of death is in question. It’s generally recorded as “1914”, but it could have been in 1913…or even 1915 or later for all we actually know. Gone. Just like Orion Williamson. Or. Not like Williamson at all. Not at all.

And, I’m not talking about circumstances here, about things like the fact that Bierce was either in a foreign country that was dangerous at the time or, at the very least, travelling alone far from home and that Williamson was yards from his front porch, about things like the fact that someone almost certainly knew what happened to Bierce, but that said fate was never recorded or that that record has never been discovered despite several investigations, while no one knew what happened to Williamson. No, I’m talking about a far larger difference.

Ambrose Bierce’s story, messy and lacking a satisfying conclusion as it is, is true. Orion Williamson’s, despite being passed off as such by lots of people over the years since it allegedly occurred, is not. And, it’s the details of the stories themselves that ought to clue you in to the differences between them.

Check out some of the pieces of the Williamson story and see how well they jibe with reality. Note the neighbors who just happen to be passing by at the exact instant Williamson disappears. Coincidence, no? How about the little picture-painting touches, like the height of the grass, the swishing of the stick, the waive and the single step before the disappearance. Definitely hallmarks of an apocryphal story. But, of course, none of that is proof, just something to get your detector going, if you will. But, there’s proof a-plenty.

An examination of area newspapers at the time shows not a single mention of the Williamson story. Not one story about an incident that allegedly involved a man disappearing into thin air in front of four witnesses, two of them, conveniently, independent. There was not one mention of the massive search involving hundreds of men. And, if the papers weren’t derelict enough in their duties in not printing a story this big (and, there wasn’t anything actually in those papers that compared), they also missed the arrival of the “team” of geologists (that term ought to set bells to ringing as well) who dug up the field (because, apparently, nobody else thought to dig a hole until geologists arrived).

And, lest you think this is just a story about incompetent journalists, a little further investigation blows that theory out of the water. First, there’s Armor Wren and son. A check of census records shows that neither ever existed. Further record checks fail to turn up any judge ever declaring Orion Williamson dead. And, there’s a reason for that. Williamson was never born. Census records show that, like Wren and son, Williamson and his family never existed, either. And, now you understand why Bierce, when he put this story in a newspaper, placed it in the entertainment section.

Now, after what I’ve just told you, would you be surprised to know that, despite having been debunked dozens of times over the century-plus since Bierce first printed it, the Williamson story is still repeated as true? When five minutes research or, in fact, the use of any kind of logic, show it to be apocryphal? Would you be surprised? Bierce wouldn’t. In fact, if he were around right now, I suspect you’d get the barely perceptible nod and the famed sardonic smile. Because, if there was one thing Ambrose Bierce understood, it was people, especially the American people.

Untrue “Facts”

This week, we turn the old “It’s a well-known fact” bit on its head. Because, here are things people think they know that aren’t true at all.

Napoleon was not short. Yes, he was called “The Little Corporal” (and, there are various theories as to the derivation of this nickname, which likely had to do with his relatively low-rank at the time), but, in fact, Napoleon was 5’7”, which, while a couple of inches shorter than the average Frenchman today, was slightly above the average height for a Frenchman of his time.

Nero did not fiddle while Rome burned. We’ve all heard the story. The mad emperor ordered that the city be set on fire in 64 AD and then sat in his palace (or the Tower of Maecenas or a private stage) playing music and singing while it burned. In fact, Nero was not even in Rome at the time, he was in Antium, and he wasn’t playing any “fiddle” since the violin wasn’t invented for another thousand years.

Scientists and educated people did not think the world was flat during the Medieval period nor the time of Columbus. Scientists knew the Earth was round by the 4^th Century BC, so Columbus’ journey was not an attempt to “prove” the world was round (especially because Columbus himself didn’t think it was…he believed it was pear shaped). Columbus wanted to prove that Asia was much closer than anyone thought. (And, he was wrong about that. In fact, if he hadn’t run into the West Indies, he and his crew would have starved to death.)

The world is not flat (You wouldn’t think I’d have to include this…) but Magellan didn’t prove that by sailing around it. In fact, Magellan was killed about half way through the trip. Juan Sebastian Elcano took over and did complete the circumnavigation of the world, proving that the nimrods who still believe that it’s flat are as dumb as stumps.

Humans did not co-exist with dinosaurs. (Again, you wouldn’t think…) Dinosaurs had been gone for over 60-million years before the first humans arrived (though humans were around at the same time as things like saber-toothed cats and wooly mammoths.)

Vikings actually didn’t have helmets with horns on them. The idea that they did came from an 1876 production of Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen.”

And, speaking of Vikings, they did not drink out of the skulls of vanquished enemies, either. The belief that they did so came from a mistranslation of a term used to refer to drinking horns. (So, yes, they drank out of horns, but did not wear them.)

The famed “iron maiden” was not a Medieval torture device. In fact, it never even existed in the Middle Ages. Instead, the “iron maiden” was pieced together in the 18^th Century from several artifacts contained in museums in order to create objects that would attract people to commercial exhibitions.

Chastity belts were not common in Medieval times, since, like the “iron maiden” they didn’t exist at all. Current “examples” of same are either fakes or devices built in the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries to prevent…something…that people of the time believed caused insanity.

A penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building will not, if it hits a person, kill them nor will it crack the sidewalk. The terminal velocity of a penny is 30-50mph, and that is not enough velocity to crack a skull or concrete. (And, you couldn’t drop anything from the top of the Empire State Building directly to the ground anyway, because of the shape of the building.)

Twinkies do not have a shelf life of “decades”. In fact, it’s only about 45 days.

And, speaking of Twinkies, no one ever claimed in court that eating Twinkies made them commit a crime. This misconception comes from the case of former San Francisco Supervisor Dan White, who killed San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. White’s attorneys argued, successfully, diminished capacity as a result of severe depression. White was a former health enthusiast, and his eating of Twinkies was presented as evidence of that depression. White, by the way, served five years for voluntary manslaughter, and, less than two years after his release from prison, committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning at age 39.

Lemmings do not commit mass suicide by jumping off cliffs or following blindly to their respective dooms during “mass migrations.” Lemmings, on occasion, do something biologists call “dispersal”, meaning they leave an area en masse when they’ve exhausted the food supply. And, while lemmings can fall off cliffs accidentally or drown when trying to cross rivers, they are not deliberately killing themselves to decrease population as a result of some internal instinct nor blindly following to their deaths. So, why does this myth persist? Well, the main culprit is a 1958 documentary called “White Wilderness”. “White Wilderness” was a Disney film and it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. And, producers were determined to get some footage of an alleged lemming “mass suicide”. But, since those don’t happen, they decided to fake one. What they did was fly some lemmings into Calgary (while claiming that the scene they were shooting happened in the Arctic), put them on a snow covered turntable, and take tight shots of a few dozen out of place (lemmings are not native to Alberta) animals walking around in a circle. And, when they had enough film, they then, basically, threw the lemmings off a cliff into the Bow River to drown (while claiming they were jumping of their own accord into the Arctic Ocean).

The average person in the Middle Ages did not die in his or her 30s. While that was the average lifespan in the period, said lifespan was greatly affected by a ridiculously high mortality rate among infants and children. If a person lived to be 21 in the Middle Ages, he or she was likely to live into his or her 60s. Of course, life being what it was in those days, many probably wished for an earlier death.

Marie Antoinette never said “let them eat cake” in any language. The quote came from Rousseau, who wrote, in 1766, of an incident from 25 years earlier in which “a great princess” (whom he did not identify), when told that the country people had no bread, said “Then let them eat cake.” At the time of the writing, which, remember, was 25 years after the incident happened, Antoinette was an eleven-year-old child in Austria and the French Revolution was 23 years away.

Orson Welles’ 1938 radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds” did not cause widespread panic. Few people actually heard the broadcast in the first place and, among those that did, only a few scattered incidents and reports of increased calls to emergency services resulted.

Einstein never failed a math exam. In fact, he had already mastered calculus at 15. What he failed was his first entrance exam into the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School at a time when he was two years younger than his fellow students. He passed on the second try.

Frogs do not leap out of boiling water nor will they sit in cold water until it’s heated enough to kill them. If thrown into boiling water, frogs die and if water they are in is slowly heated, they’ll attempt to escape before any damage is done.

Vomiting was not a regular part of dining in Roman times and a “vomitorium” was not a room used for vomiting, but an entranceway through which crowds entered and left a stadium.

Marco Polo did not import pasta from China. Pasta was introduced to Italy by Arabs from Libya during their invasion of Sicily, six centuries before Marco Polo. (Though “Marco Polo” is a far better name for the pool game than “Nameless Arab From Libya” would be…)

The Rolling Stones were not performing “Sympathy for the Devil” when a man was stabbed to death by Hell’s Angels acting as security at Altamont. The band was actually playing “Under My Thumb”.

The “daddy longlegs” spider is not the most venomous spider in the world and its fangs can pierce human skin. It carries just a tiny amount of venom, however, and its bite is harmless to humans.

People do not swallow a large number of spiders in their sleep over a lifetime. A sleeping human makes plenty of noise, noise that warns spiders away.

Poinsettias are not highly toxic to humans or cats. Eating the leaves will cause no more than an upset stomach in either human or feline.

It does not take seven years to digest chewing gum. You can’t digest it at all and it will pass through the digestive system just like other indigestible material and at the same rate.

You do not lose most of your body heat through the head, unless you are an infant or the head is the only uncovered part of the body.

Sir Walter Raleigh did not introduce either potatoes or tobacco to England from the New World. Potatoes were first grown in Italy and spread across Europe from there and tobacco was introduced into France by Jean Nicot (from whose name we derive “nicotine”) and spread to England from there. (Old Walt also never threw his cloak across a puddle so the Queen could step on it.)

Drug “flashbacks” are not caused by leftover drugs being stored in fat cells, but are a psychological phenomenon.

No “witches” were burned at the stake in Salem. Of the accused that were executed, one was pressed to death and the other 19 were hanged.

Oh, and the majority of the saga of Salem and its “witches” did not take place in modern Salem, Massachusetts, but in neighboring Danvers.

Again, I’m not making any of this up. You can look it up. But, don’t bother. It’s all true (or, false.)