Eighty Years to Right a Wrong
Panelists Jim Thorn, Dr. Lawrence Hogan, and Jim Robinson. Photo courtesy of Nick Diunte.
Baseball, Politics and the Press
A significant moment in baseball occurred in New York City on July 5, 1930, but the event was not covered by the traditional press.
For the first time ever, Yankee Stadium hosted a game featuring two teams from the Negro Leagues, but no one in 1930 could have read about the game in the New York Times.
On Monday night (July 26, 2010), the Museum of the City of New York hosted a panel to talk about the Negro Leagues and the game that was held on July 5. The panel was moderated by baseball historian Jim Thorn and featured Negro Leagues player Jim Robinson and Dr. Lawrence Hogan, a professor and author of Shades of Glory: The Negro Leagues and the Story of African-American Baseball. Read the rest of this entry »
The American Story
A PATCHWORK OF PEOPLE
What did your great-grandparents do? If you think about it, they were probably important players in helping develop our country, no matter what their role. And have you ever thought about how very different their lives were than the lives we lead today?
I was reminded of this difference on my recent visit to Frederick, Maryland when I was provided with a small booklet containing the reminiscences of Lavenia Waskey; the book was a collection of her memories of growing up along the C&O Canal. The stories were undated, but Lavenia must have been born about 1905-08 as she was still relatively young and living at home during the 1918 flu epidemic.
Pools and Politics
Last week I wrote about baseball catcher Roy Campanella. Reading his autobiography sent me in search of who, what, when, where, and why about the end of discrimination in professional baseball.
This week I went in search of a similar answer. My July e-letter is about summer pleasures, and I started wondering what brought an end to segregation of public swimming pools. I had a vague memory of a recent book on the topic and found and ordered Contested Waters by Jeff Wiltse (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). I didn’t have to read far to come upon a telling story:
In Youngstown, Ohio in 1951 the winning Little League team decided that a fitting way to celebrate the victory was a trip to the local swimming pool. When coaches and the players and their families arrived at the pool, one player was not permitted to enter. The child, Al Bright, was asked to sit on the lawn outside the pool area. Several parents took issue with the lifeguards who were enforcing the pool’s no-negro policy.
The guards finally agreed to a concession. Everyone else got out of the pool. Little Al was put in a rubber raft and a lifeguard pushed him around the pool on the raft. Wiltse writes that Al was specifically told not to touch the water.
This was 1951…59 short years ago. How can this be? Read the rest of this entry »
Baseball and Politics: A Reminder of a Time They Intersected
Every now and then a great gift falls in one’s lap unexpectedly.
My most recent gift came in the form of a book, a sports autobiography. I don’t follow sports, so my head-over-heels-in-love feeling about this book couldn’t be more surprising.
I am at work on a project for the Westchester County Historical Society that involves researching some of Westchester’s prominent residents of the past. In an effort to get their stories out of the file folders and into people’s hearts and minds, we are working on a website that will be an ongoing project to bring the details of these people’s lives to light.
In need of a sports figure, I perused the possibilities. Roy Campanella, the catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers who helped break the color line in baseball, lived in Greenburgh for fifteen years, so I ordered his autobiography, It’s Good to Be Alive.
Small Town Parade Has Big Place in Local Hearts
Each year Larchmont–a suburban community in Westchester, New York, measuring only one square mile–celebrates Memorial Day with a parade on the Thursday evening preceding the holiday weekend. This year was no different, however, the sudden onset of thunder about ten minutes before the scheduled start of the parade gave us pause…would the event be rained out?
We waited until the last possible moment to make the five-minute walk to Village Hall on Larchmont Avenue where we like to watch the parade. As we strode quickly along, people waiting out the storm in their cars began to pop out amidst a light rain. Read the rest of this entry »
The Romance of the Rails and the Pleasure of Remembering
On Saturday, May 22, a miscellaneous group of about thirty people gathered at the Mount Pleasant Public Library in Pleasantville, New York to hear author Joseph Schiavone talk about his book, More of ‘The Old Put,’ his second book about the Putnam Division of the New York Central Railroad.
Read the rest of this entry »
Recognizing Progress: The 1938 Celebration of Airmail Week
Today, e-mail travels in a matter of moments, text messages arrive in real time, and almost all items sent through the U.S. Mail spend at least part of their time on an airplane. With our present day sensibility, it is hard to think back to a day when air travel for letters was a rarity–a special service promising speedy delivery and therefore worthy of an extra postal fee.
America’s First Ladies and their Jewelry
The types of jewelry the various first ladies wore and what they spent on their adornments gives an interesting lens through which to view a presidency as well as a specific time period in our country’s history.
Last week Elyse Zorn Karlin, a jewelry historian and editor-in-chief of Adornment, The Magazine of Jewelry and Related Arts, gave a fascinating presentation about first ladies and their jewelry. The event was held at a club in New York City and Karlin’s remarks were part of her research on a book about the First Ladies, which she is co-authoring with Yvonne Markowitz, the Rita J. Kaplan and Susan B. Kaplan Curator of Jewelry at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
New Postage Stamp Honors Late Cartoonist Bill Mauldin
If you have ever stopped by the post office to buy a special type of stamp for a wedding invitation or a holiday card, then you have had the pleasure of admiring the various stamp designs that the U.S. Postal Service offers.
Assuring That Women’s Stories are Told
Gloria Steinem has been quoted as saying, “If we don’t see a history with women, we don’t know that we can create it.” My final post for the month of March, Women’s History Month, will be dedicated to two organizations — the Smith College Library system and Women’s eNews — both of which are assuring that history will include the contributions of women.
For the last few years, I have been on the Friends of Smith College Executive Committee. I’m a Smith alum, and as a writer, I treasure libraries. What’s more, the Smith libraries are special. Director Christopher Loring has made certain that the Smith library system looks to the digital future and provides all the latest necessities for students to conduct 21st century research, but he also oversees the past in the form of an archival collection of women’s history papers known as the Sophia Smith Collection, which has been under the direction of Sherrill Redmon for the past 17 years.
While one might assume that the Smith archives would be a repository for the papers of women who attended Smith, Redmon has made it her mission to actively pursue the papers of grassroots activists who have led the way in various social movements. While Gloria Steinem, a Smith graduate, might have donated her papers to Smith anyway, Redmon has made sure that a scholar coming to study Steinem’s papers will find that the collection is a home for many like-minded souls. The collection includes papers of the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, Planned Parenthood, the YWCA and of well-known women including Marcia Gillespie, Loretta Ross (human rights activist), and Margaret Sanger. Redmon also created “Voices of Feminism,” an oral history project of the contemporary women’s movement.