BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

July 10, 2013 is a good day to toast the Irish contribution to American politics, for it’s the 146th anniversary of the birth of Finley Peter Dunne, himself the son of Irish immigrant parents but more to today’s toast was the creator of “Mr. Dooley,” the wise fool of the streets and taverns, whose wide Irish brogue lampooned the political foibles of his day and, for a time certainly, entered our political language. Dunne himself, born in 1867, was a poor student, managing to graduate last in his high school class (a considerable achievement, when you think about it), but an apparent gift of getting where he wanted to be. While still in school he was a stringer for the Chicago Telegram and then worked for a succession of papers, including the Tribune. By the 1890s he was chief editorial writer for the Chicago Post, but began the Mr. Dooley pieces for extra pay (at $10 per throw—about $400 in today’s $$), at first simply to entertain. But the 1899 publication of a book of Mr. Dooley’s monologues made Dunne a national figure, with no less a fan than Theodore Roosevelt, himself the subject of some of Mr. Dooley’s fiercest barbs (some politicians don’t mind being laughed at). Dunne married a champion golfer, moved to New York, continued to write Dooley material, edited national magazines, and became a legendary figure in the city’s club culture. The complete Dooley oeuvre is to be found at the interesting Theodore-Roosevelt.com site. (LINK)

Occasionally we celebrate living persons in this anniversary sheet, and we’ll do so for Dr. Oliver Sachs, born on July 9, 1933, in London. So, happy 80th birthday, Dr. Sachs. Educated at Oxford, Sachs moved to the USA where he became a noted professor of neurology and psychiatry, but more to the point a prolific author who has taught us much about the phenomenon we call in our day-to-day humdrum language “the human brain.” His forte is to describe, then to analyze, actual clinical cases. He sees his style as a throwback to 19th-century medical and scientific writing, which may be true; if so, it’s struck a chord in our own time. Not everyone fancies—or approves of—Sachs’s habit of parading individual cases before the public, but he’s certainly opened to a wider public the brain’s extraordinary powers of cognition and the bizarre things that can happen when, so to speak, the wiring goes wrong. He has also written about himself in the same detached and yet (it seems to me) compassionate style, as in A Leg to Stand On, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood,and Hallucinations, wherein he recounts his own experiences with mind-bending pharmaceuticals. His most famous works are (probably) Awakenings (1973) and Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007). Pick one up at your local library. I predict you will be glad of it.

[Stanley]

July 11 will have to be the day for pigs and spiders, for it’s the 114th anniversary of the birth (1899) of Elwyn Brooks White, E. B. White as most people came to know him, but “Andy” to his friends, a nickname picked up at Cornell, where he studied English a bit inconclusively before decamping to New York City, then Seattle, and then again New York where he fetched up just in time for the founding of The New Yorker magazine. Over his protests, for he was a shy man who didn’t think much of his talents, he was hired by founder Harold Ross, at the suggestion of editor Katharine Angell, whom White later (1929) married. They would share a long and happy life as writers and best friends, as White famously wrote an unusual combination. They were also pretty good as parents, at least according to their children, and this might also be inferred from White’s children’s stories, notably Charlotte’s Web (1952), about a good writer with eight legs and a radiant vocabulary. White himself became the very soul of The New Yorker in the late 20s and 30s, his style and wit gracing his (unsigned) “Talk of the Town” pieces and enlivening occasional longer essays. He and James Thurber made a team and early collaborated on a famous spoof on a very serious subject, Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do (1929). Andy and Katharine retired to Maine as soon as they decently could and farmed in a desultory manner until her death in 1977. White died eight years later. White’s stepson Roger Angell still writes for The New Yorker.

[Stanley]

July 12 is the birth date of Dr. George Washington Carver, or so says the New York Times. Let’s say that Carver was born on this day in 1865, or possibly 1864, in Diamond, Missouri. Very conscious of the shadow of slavery, George’s family sent him to Neosho where there was a school for black children, and he proved a precocious student. Rejected by his first choice college because of his race, he entered Simpson College, and then Iowa State, where he first studied art and music but where Ms. Etta Budd advised him to switch to botany, where (in turn) Professor Louis Pammel noticed his brilliance and urged him to stay on for a Master’s. Later, he returned to Iowa State for a summer to do further research, when my grandfather (then a scholarship student) cared for his living quarters. From Ames, Carver moved on to Tuskegee where he directed Agricultural Research and made many important discoveries that helped black (and white) Alabamians escape some of the poverty traps of southern sharecropping. “From the South’s red clay and sandy loam, he developed ink, pigments, cosmetics, paper, paint” and of course he made more than you can possibly imagine from peanuts. Carter never patented his discoveries, viewing them all as gifts of God, and in 1941 he gave his entire life savings ($33,000) to a foundation for agricultural research. He died a poor man in January 1943, full of years and honors. ©

[Stanley]

Sidney James Webb, later Lord Passfield, was born in London on July 13, 1859, 154 years ago today. He and his ilk would have a profound effect on the development of British democratic socialism, the Labour Party, and several important institutions in British intellectual life. “His ilk” included his wife, Beatrice Potter Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Annie Besant, William Morris, and John Ruskin. Generally middle and upper-middle class, of an aesthetic turn of mind but believing aesthetes to be intensely practical, they came of Protestant dissenter liberal stock and then went further than their parents in analyzing the ills of industrial society – and then doing something about it. H. G. Wells thought them all rather silly (see Wells’s The New Machiavelli), preferring a more red-blooded socialism, and they did have their naivetés, but they kept on in their good-natured way, worked hard, thought a lot, and accomplished much. Between them, Sidney and Beatrice Webb founded the Fabian Society, the London School of Economics (where Sidney became its first Professor of Public Administration, an unheard of category in the British academy), the Fabian Society, and the New Statesman magazine. Webb himself became a Labour member of parliament in 1922 and then, as Lord Passfield, a reforming Secretary of State for the Colonies and President of the Board of Trade. For their pains, and on the petition of George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney were interred in Westminster Abbey.

[Stanley]

July 14, 2013 is the 101st anniversary of the 1912 birth, in Okemah, OK, of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, named for the newpresident and the son of a race-baiting politician and a mother probably already demented by Huntington’s Chorea, an hereditary illness that would claim Woodrow’s life at 55 (1967). Of course by then Woodrow Guthrie had become Woodie Guthrie, had thrice eloquently abjured his father’s politics in his songs, and was the patron saint-martyr of the burgeoning folk movement. He didn’t get there easily, for his youth was a time of great hardship for Oklahoma farmers, and in the mid 1930s he himself joined the Okie exodus to the promised land of California. There his musical bent, and his way with words, were marketable commodities, and his populist values also found a radio audience. He wrote, sang, and played his way to fame and a list of friends that ran from John Steinbeck to Alan Lomax. Just so, Woodie translated himself to New York City, several recording contracts and a fruitful collaboration with Pete Seeger (who by the way is still with us). Among the folk singers who trooped to his bedside, perhaps for a ‘laying on of the hands,’ was young Bob Dylan, but also among the anointed was his son Arlo (b. 1947). Woodie Guthrie’s centennial year, 2012, produced yet another spate of woodiemania, including a handsome tribute from the Smithsonian. So it’s likely that his melodies will remain with us for at least a little while.

[I met Pete Seeger in NY and heard him sing in United Nations Plaza in aid of refugees and later in aid of his campaign to clean up the Hudson River, a good man. Heard Arlo Guthrie singing Alice's Restaurant on the Circle Line cruise round Manhattan Island.]


Pete Seeger singing in United Nations Plaza in 1981 in support of El Salvador victims.

[Stanley]

In 1630, at the rather tender age of 24, a young Dutchman etched a self-portrait showing the viewer a range of possible emotions, surprise, fear, wonder, perhaps anticipation, but above all humanity. “Eyes wide open,” lips pursed as if to speak, hair a bit at odds with the head, the image evokes an individual quite alive and, just like us, rather unsure of what that might mean, slightly comic perhaps. It is the face of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, born on July 15, 1606, 407 years ago today and, arguably, the greatest portraitist who ever lived. The son of a Protestant baker and a Catholic mother, Rembrandt grew up amidst the Dutch miracle, whereby a low country divided by faith, threatened by the sea and without a whole lot in the way of natural resource not only won its independence from the world’s greatest monarchy but became, per capita, the richest nation in Europe (and by some distance). The individuals who accomplished this miracle actually thought themselves to be individuals, and Rembrandt would capture them perfectly, typically surrounded by or clothed in the accomplishments, material and symbolic, of their lives, faces enlivened by light and shadow, often just on the verge of speaking to us—or sometimes mute as if privy to some great secret. And throughout he painted himself, 90+ self portraits which survive as if to remind us exactly who he was. Rembrandt himself. ©

[PanBiker]

Celebrated in the Google Doodle yesterday.

[Stanley]

July 14, 2013 is a day to salute Independence, Missouri, and not because of our beloved HST, but because it’s also the birthplace of Virginia Katherine McMath, born on this very day 102 years ago. Once her parents got divorced and her mother remarried, she was Ginger Rogers and she was smitten with vaudeville, acquainted with Eddie Foy, and on the threshold of an astonishing career that started with a bang on Christmas Day 1929 when she sang and danced in a revue called Top Speed. George and Ira Gershwin saw her, signed her to star in Girl Crazy, and brought in a young chap from Omaha to improve her dancing. That was Fred Astaire, and together in the 1930s Ginger and Fred would define the song and dance musical. It’s probable that Fred taught Ginger, but he was gallant about it. She got so good, he later said, “that after a while anyone else who danced with me looked wrong.” There’s also no doubt that Ginger’s beauty and grace made Astaire, no Clark Gable, look good, or at least better than he looked on the street. There were 33 Rogers-Astaire dance numbers in nine films, 1933-1939, probably the most famous of the films being Top Hat (1935) and Follow the Fleet (1936). Her talent went beyond dance and after the Astaire fling had flung, Ginger Rogers successfully navigated comedy, noir, verité and drama roles. She was a woman of many talents who played many parts.

[Stanley]

'there's a little bit of Nils Bohlin in every car'

In 1939, at about the same time that General Motors CEO Alfred Sloan refused to install safety glass in his cars (safety, he said, was not his business), Nils Bohlin was getting his diploma in mechanical engineering from a Swedish institute. Born on this day, July 17, in 1920, Bohlin worked on safety design for the plane maker, Saab, before moving over to Volvo in 1958, specifically as a safety engineer. There Bohlin designed, and patented, the three-point safety belt, some version of which you will probably wear today. Installed in most Volvos from 1960, and spreading quickly across Europe, the belt had a dramatic impact on fatalities and injuries in European car crashes. In 1967, Bohlin published a statistical analysis of over 28,000 accidents that proved the point so sufficiently that the United States Department of Transportation made the belt compulsory in American passenger cars. But as if to prove that safety was not his business, either, Bohlin in 1967 released the patent, making the design free for anyone to use. Not very many of us could say that we have saved tens of thousands of lives. Nils Bohlen could. Leaving behind him two adopted children and a passel of grandchildren, he died in 2002 and is buried in a churchyard in rural Sweden.

[Stanley]

Earthworms, though in appearance a small and despicable link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable chasm .. Gilbert White

One might be forgiven, these days, in thinking that science and religion are perpetually at war with each other. Certainly there are politicians who think so. But since it wasn’t always so, perhaps it need not be so now. Among the copious evidences for such an argument, if one wanted to make it, the work of the Reverend Gilbert White would rank highly. Born on July 18, 1720 in his grandfather’s vicarage at Selborne in rural Hampshire, White was perhaps fated to a religious life, and indeed he would himself become vicar of Selborne. Besides doing a creditable job of caring for souls, White cared for, observed, and tried to understand the countryside and the plants and animals that inhabited it. He is today called the first ecologist, for he sought to understand the interrelationships between and among species and environment. He could also be called the first animal behaviorist for he wrote about how, and speculated about why, creatures act as they do (rather than, for instance, as they ought). Whatever else he was, he was an observer, a practitioner of the scientific method, meticulously recording the flight patterns of birds and butterflies, the social habits of field mice, and the varying populations of species. Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, continuously in print since 1789, is a science classic, an act of piety, and a pretty good read, too.

[Stanley]

A toscanini of science.
July 19, 2013 is the 92nd anniversary of the birth of Rosalyn Yalow, who took a job as typist in the biochemistry unit at Columbia University (only on condition that she study stenography) and soon enough became the second female Nobelist (in medicine). Her timing was good. Born in 1921, she graduated from Hunter (then Columbia’s College for Women) in 1941, just in time for a shortage of men in graduate programs. She was of course good enough for a science PhD, but they didn’t want women in those days. But the University of Illinois wanted graduate students, of almost any gender, and they offered this bright young girl from Manhattan ateaching assistantship in 1941. She married another graduate student, Aaron Yalow, in 1943. They kept kosher, had two kids in fairly quick order, and she still got her PhD in 1945. Off the young couple went, back to NYC, the Bronx this time, where she formed a team of two with Solomon Berson, the idea being to help the Veterans Hospital develop a “radioimmunoassay” system (to diagnose minute levels of disease or other dysfunctions in the blood). Yalow and Berson were, according to one colleague, the “Toscaninis” of the effort. The rest of us, he said, were the “organ grinders.” Solomon Berson would have shared her Nobel but he died in 1972, and the Nobel was awarded to Dr. Rosalyn Yalow in 1977. Nobels are never awarded posthumously.

[Stanley]

He invented the dark ages and then dispensed light.
Whether Europe had a “Dark Ages” is debated, but it certainly experienced a humanist revival, and the names most readily associated with humanism’s early flowering are Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Dante. Interestingly enough, the three were friends. And as it would happen, July 20, 2013 is the 709th anniversary of Petrarch’s birth, in Tuscany, in 1304, as Francisco Petracco, into a family that was prosperous enough to follow the papacy to Avignon, France, in 1309 and then send Petrarch to university (first Montpelier and then Bologna) to study law. He disliked the law, ingrate that he was, and spent more time brushing up his Latin and experimenting with classical verse forms. By the time he was 30 he was a recognized writer, with a classic play (Africanus) under his belt, and an ambassador of culture. Rome proclaimed him Poet Laureate, the first since classical times, and he traveled through much of Europe. Indeed, Petrarch helped to establish travel as an enhancing, aesthetic, and educational experience, both for its sights and the interesting people one might encounter while en route. Through letter writing, he made and cultivated many friends, including Boccaccio and Dante, and he became quite a scholar,too. Oddly enough, it was Petrarch who first gave currency to the idea that Europe had a “Dark Age.” Thus he created a market for enlightenment.

[Stanley]

Jonathan miller and other noted celebrations.

Besides being the wedding day of Daniel Joseph Patrick Haley and Greta Katherine Bliss, July 21, 2013 is the 79th birthday of Jonathan Miller, who probably would have been “only” an extraordinarily talented medical doctor but got sidetracked into theater, then opera, then fiction and non-fiction, and in sum became one of our leading litterateurs. Born in London to a professional family on this day in 1934, Miller read medicine at Cambridge, graduated in 1959, and had embarked on a graduate fellowship in medicine at University College, London before his disreputable past caught up with him and turned him, first, towards comedicrevues. His leading role in Beyond the Fringe (first in 1960 at the Edinburgh Festival with Peter Cooke, Dudley Moore, and Alan Bennett) brought him the Anglophone world’s attention, and although he did fruitfully continue his medical work it’s fair to say it became a sidelight. Beyond the Fringe (apologies for the pun) Miller became in the 1970s a leading opera director, then in the 80s produced the BBC Shakespeare series (and directed six of the plays himself), took a 1990s detour into neuropsychology where he developed a fascination with how we came to be a speaking species, and along the way has been a leading campaigner for gay rights, a husband, and the father of three children. Clearly a person of many talents, one who deserves a happy birthday at 79.

[Stanley]

Some poets suffer the fate of being remembered for a single line or stanza, when perhaps we should think of their work more broadly. Such was the fate of Emma Lazarus, born on this day, July 22, in 1849, 164 years ago. Her immortal lines, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. . .” are inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, but come from a sonnet, a rather good one, really, “The New Colossus”. Indeed Emma Lazarus was a poet, certainly a good one and well thought of in her day. Born to a wealthy family of long standing in New York City, she was exceptionally well educated and was fluent in five languages. Indeed much of her output was written first in German, and she was the leading American popularizer, and translator, of the poet Heinrich Heine. Emma published her first volume of poetry at a very tender age (17), but during her short lifetime was better known for poems published occasionally in leading magazines. Her work brought her the welcome attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with whom she corresponded, and was particularly well received in England. Emma wrote “The New Colossus” in 1883, to help raise funds for the erection of the famous statue. It did that, but it also inspired Emma’s Catholic friend, Rose Lathrop, to found a new Dominican order of nuns devoted to works of charity among the poor. It is well that Emma’s lines grace the lady with the light.

[Stanley]

July 24, 2013 might have been the 93rd birthday of Bella Savitzky Abzug, but her heart let her down in 1998. Born on this day in 1920, her values perhaps foretold by a father who called his shop the “Live and Let Live Meat Market,” Bella made her first public speech in her teens by reading Kaddish for her father (despite her gender) and didn’t look back after that. Her attitude was “we couldn’t make something of ourselves unless we bettered society,” so she bettered herself through education (Hunter College, Columbia law), and then set about society, first as a reforming, radical lawyer. Elected to congress in 1970 (“this woman’s place is in the House”), she campaigned for equal rights (for women and gays), against the Viet Nam War, for a sunshine law, and was one of the first congresspeople to call for Nixon’s impeachment. Gerrymandered out of her seat, Bella became a leading advocate on environmental issues and for peace in the Middle East (which she felt was consistent with her Zionism). Unusually, the United Nations General Assembly gave her its Blue Beret Peacekeepers award. Pushy and loud (Norman Mailer said Bella’s voice would “boil the fat off a taxi-driver’s neck”), she inspired devotion or derision. Her husband—one of the devoted—said of her that she was “one of the few unneurotic people left in society.” They met on a bus on their way to a violin concert.

[Stanley]

July 25, 2013 would have been the 93rd birthday of Rosalind Franklin, who would have been a grand old dame of science, a Nobelist with Crick, Watson, and Wilkins for her role in parsing the structure of DNA. However, she died in 1958, aged 37, and the “DNA Nobel” was not awarded until 1962. And Nobels are never awarded posthumously. Dr. Rosalind Franklin was born in 1920, in Notting Hill, London. In school she was as good at sports (and Latin) as she was in science, but it was science she chose at Cambridge, where she also won her doctorate in 1945 (on the porosity of coal). She moved on to Paris and the lab of Adrienne Weill, who needed someone who knew how to measure the porosity of coal. There she perfected her x-ray crystallography, and that won her an appointment (in 1951) to King’s College London and the lab of Maurice Wilkins. Franklin had to deal with a good deal of misogyny (and Wilkins’ impatience with her methodical approach) but the lab was racing to find the structure of the “genetic material” and her skills were essential. What happened next is still in dispute, 60 years post facto, but in March 1953 Franklin’s London colleagues gave James Watson a sight of her x-rays of DNA, and he (and Francis Crick) were bright enough to see how those pictures unlocked the secret of the double helix. And so the race went to the Cavendish Lab at Cambridge and not to Franklin and Wilkins.

[PanBiker]

Celebrated in a very good Google doodle yesterday Stanley.

[Stanley]

I noticed it but didn't make the connection.....

[PanBiker]

Rosalind looking through the double helix at a representation of her photo-chromatic x-ray plate 51. She was within weeks of unravelling the puzzle herself and although common to share data between the labs it was done without her knowledge.

[Stanley]

"The liar's punishment is not that he is not believed but that he cannot believe anyone else." George Bernard Shaw.
On July 26, 2013, Mick Jagger reaches the Age of Enlightenment (that’s 70, by the way), but instead we will celebrate George Bernard Shaw, born on this day, in Dublin, in 1856 and destined for a very long, productive life (he died in 1950) as critic, playwright, and reforming gadfly. What you may not know is that Shaw hated schools (“prisons in which children are kept to prevent them chaperoning their parents”) and yet was a co-founder of one of the world’s more famous schools, the London School of Economics. He had a somewhat disjointed childhood with a mother in London and a father in Dublin, but once he joined mom he was off to the races, first with bad novels and then with music and drama criticism (much more successful). Before Shaw reached the tender age of 78 (take that, Jagger!!) he’d won a Nobel (for Literature, 1926) and an Oscar (for screenwriting, 1934), and like any good upper middle-class socialist insisted that the prize money go to other purposes than adding to his bank balance. (The Nobel financed the translation of Strindberg’s works into English.) Just so, at his wife Charlotte’s insistence his marriage was never consummated, so he left no children, but he left us a word, “shavian”, used to describe wit which turns on paradox, surprise, and elegant expression. E.g. “England and America are two countries divided by a common language.” So today, be shavian. The world will be the better for it.

[Stanley]

There's nothing worth the wear of winning, but laughter and the love of friends." Hilaire Belloc

If ever a man was born out of his time, it was Hilaire Belloc, noted Catholic apologist, writer of immortal children’s verse, prolific essayist, and absurdly loyal son of Balliol College, Oxford. Born on July 27, 1870, 143 years ago today, of a French father and English mother, he plighted his troth to England, went to Balliol, graduated with a brilliant First in history, and thought he would be elected to an All Souls College fellowship. Disappointed in that, he gave his life to letters and lived it with flair. This included courting his American sweetheart with a cross-country walk to her home in northern California (he financed his way by sketching portraits of farm families and writing comic verse for them, so check your attics!!) and a remarkable put down of a voter in his first parliamentary campaign. The voter “accused” Belloc of being a Catholic. Belloc’s response: “Sir, so far as possible I hear Mass each day and I go to my knees and tell these beads each night. If that offends you, then I pray God may spare me the indignity of representing you in Parliament.” He won handily. His politics are best described as liberally reactionary, or perhaps vice versa, and at this remove we may best remember him for his children’s poetry. Go to your local library and demand his Cautionary Tales for Children (1907), the zany morals of which made rebels of generations of young English folk.

[Stanley]

July 28, 2013 is the 147th anniversary of Beatrix Potter, born in 1866 and destined to become the world’s most published author of children’s stories, most famously The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) which was her first. What is less well known, and as interesting, is that Potter was an amateur scientist and science illustrator who—but for the sexism of 19th-century science—might have developed in a different direction. Her leading interest was in mycology, the study of fungi, and working with George Massee she developed a respectable theory of how fungi reproduced. Her admission ticket to science was through her distinguished family (her chemist uncle was ViceChancellor of the University of London), her mainly private education, and her parents’ interest in their country estates in Scotland and (later) the English Lake District, where young Beatrix lovingly painted, and invented stories about, the local fauna. These formed the basis of charming letters to friends, and to their children, and moved Beatrix away from science. Former governess Annie Moore urged Beatrix to do something more with the illustrated letters she had sent to Annie’s children. And thereby hangs Peter Rabbit’s tale. The complicated life of this fascinating person, including insight into her conservation work in the English lakes, is the subject of the 2006 film Miss Potter, in which Beatrix is well played by Renée Zellweger.

[Stanley]

Walter Hunt, born on July 29, 1796, was the first of thirteen children born to Sherman and Rachel Hunt in frontier New York, on the western fringes of the Adirondacks. Walter was educated after a fashion in a rural school, and then apprenticed to a stonemason. But he was really a tinkerer and a young man with a reforming impulse, and he set about improving the workplaces of his parents and their neighbors through inventions. His first go was a flax spinner, patented in 1826, with the specific aim of helping people to cope with a depression in flax prices. After moving to New York City, Hunt invented an easily operated warning bell after witnessing a carriage accident. Many other inventions followed, including a portable knife sharpening wheel and rounded furniture castors, but most famously (and perhaps incongruously) the sewing machine, the safety pin, circus stunt shoes, paper shirt collars, and the repeating rifle. Hunt sold most of his patents for cash, so he never became wealthy and seems not to have desired wealth. He sold the safety pin patent for $100. Hunt did sue Elias Howe for a share of sewing machine profits, an issue finally settled when, much later, Isaac Singer made a cash payment to Hunt’s children, but originally Hunt had not patented his sewing machine because he feared it would put people out of work. He enjoyed a certain fame, however, and died much lamented in 1859.

[Stanley]

July 30, 2013 is the 123rd anniversary of the birth, in Kansas City, of Charles Dillon Stengel, who when his sporting talents brought him into major league baseball took his home city’s initials as his nickname and became Casey Stengel. Born in 1890 to a middle class German-American family, Casey (or Charles) wanted to be a dentist, but he was so good at baseball that—following the lines of least resistance, as most of us do—he migrated instead to the Kansas City Blues and then to pro teams at Kankakee, Shelbyville, and Maysville before hitting the big time in 1913 with the Brooklyn Dodgers and a $2,100 contract (about $50,000 in today’s $$). He was a fine player (for the Dodgers, then the Pirates, then the Giants, and then the Boston Braves) but would be best remembered as a manager, his first big successes being with the Toledo Mud Hens, the Milwaukee Brewers (a minor league club), and the Oakland Oaks, each time chalking winning seasons, but most famously with the world champion New York Yankees (1949-1960) and then the miraculously incompetent New York Mets (1961-1965) where he “saw new ways to lose I never knew existed before.” Besides being a brilliant manager, Stengel was the master of the quotable quote. If it hadn’t been for Yogi Berra, another urban Missourian with a certain verbal talent, Stengel would likely be the most quoted baseballer in history.

[Stanley]

"In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed . . . dissension, diversity, the grain of salt are needed." Levi.

As a writer and scientist, Primo Levi has few equals. Born on July 31, 1919, into a close-knit family of liberal beliefs, he learned from his father and mother a love of reading which sustained him to the end of his life in 1987. A bright child, Levi was educated in the finest schools in and near his native Turin, and he survived the bullying that went with being Jewish and being very small by making a few close friends (with whom he enjoyed hiking and skiing), and excelling as a student. Like everyone else, Primo joined the Italian young fascist organization, but as the partnership between Mussolini and Hitler matured, he found the going increasingly dangerous. By the time he qualified as a chemist, Italian firms could not hire Jews, so he worked under an assumed name in a firm extracting nickel for the German war effort. These ironies were not lost on Levi, and after surviving the rigors of war and Auschwitz, he turned to literature to work them out. He continued to work as a chemist, and his best writing, reflective and autobiographical, combines his joy in scientific endeavor with his difficulties in understanding what happened to him, and western civilization, in the Holocaust. His The Periodic Table (1975) explicitly linked his life story to elemental qualities, and in October 2006 the Royal Institution (London) named it the best science book ever written.