BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

June 17 is the birthdate of Maurits Cornelis Escher, illustrator, whose trompe-l’oeil drawings play on his intuition of complex geometries and our assumption that the world is a regular place where water always flows downhill and where if you climb a stairs you will go up. M. C. Escher, as he would be known, was born in Holland (Friesland) in 1898. His family moved to Arnhem where he attended school fitfully, but early on he developed a fascination with drawing and attended an art school where he studied architecture, failed most of his subjects, and kept on drawing. Soon, however, he’d found a teacher who understood him and so when, aged 24, he set off for a tour of Italy and Spain he was ready to be inspired, and to draw. What happened then and really until he died, through a life filled with marriage and parenthood and a continent filled with war, was that, as before, he kept on drawing, perhaps most famously his Drawing Hands (1938), of two hands sketching each other right down to the cufflinks, Relativity (1953), a topsy-turvy picture of stairs ascending and descending, or possibly descending and ascending, which (if you ask me) must the inspiration of the Hogwarts staircases in the Harry Potter books and then movies. Or try Waterfall (1961) where the water doesn’t always fall.

[Stanley]

We can dedicate June 18, 2013 to amateurs everywhere. For that, of course, almost any day would do, but June 18, 1799 was the birth date of a most dedicated amateur, an astronomer, William Lassell, born in Bolton, Lancashire, apprenticed at 14 to a Liverpool trader, in due course an amazingly successful brewer (he left a fortune of about $13 million in today’s money) and a devout Congregationalist, but fascinated always by the night sky. He built his first telescope when he was still an apprentice. As he prospered, he built a mansion, “Starfield,” outside Liverpool and stocked it with another home-made telescope, in 1833, this one mounted to follow an object through the earth’s rotation, a neat trick for a mere amateur. Then in 1845 a bigger (24”) and better telescope (this time grinding his own lens on a machine he made himself). At Starfield, Lassell held “star parties” (at one of which he found his wife), discovered moons of Neptune, Saturn, and Uranus, and became well known to the scientific community. When Victoria and Albert came to Liverpool in 1851 she wanted to (and of course she did) visit Starfield. Lassell became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1849 (the year he won the Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal), made a bigger telescope and moved it to Malta (for the air), and since his death in 1880 has had four heavenly objects named after him. His 24" telescope has been rebuilt and stands in the grounds of St. Michael’s School, outside Liverpool, on the site of Starfield.
Robert M. Bliss

[Stanley]

Science and religion need not always be at war, and (among many others) Blaise Pascal may be cited as proof that peace—of a sort—is possible. Born on this day, June 19, in 1623, Pascal at age 16 showed his prodigious talents in mathematics, amazing Réné Descartes with his ‘essay on cones,’ now known as Pascal’s Theorem. Meanwhile, still as a young man, he demonstrated some first principles about hydraulic pressure and later proved that air pressure fell as one’s altitude increased. This was first demonstrated by lugging a primitive barometer up a mountain, but later Pascal proved the point in only the height of a church steeple. All this was in aid of proving, contrary to Aristotle, that vacuums did exist, work which also credits Pascal with fundamental advances in the philosophy of science. Pascal’s commitments to science did not put him fully at rest with religion, and he would become prominent in the Jansenist movement, a kind of proto-Protestant heresy within French Catholicism. Be that as it may, Pascal’s last writings, Lettres provinciales and Pensées, are deeply religious. They are also said to be among the finest prose works of French literature. Ironically, given his own deep faith, “Pascal’s Wager” (one of his Pensées) would later give comfort to legions of agnostics who chose to live their lives as if God really existed, as it were betting against hellfire.

[Stanley]

Lillian Hellman was born into a German-Jewish immigrant family in New Orleans, LA, on June 20, 1905, 108 years ago today. She would become perhaps the most successful female playwright of the 20th century, and certainly the best known. By the time she got into trouble with the House Un-American Activities Committee, in the early 1950s, she was making about $150,000 a year in salary and royalties (about $1.5 million in today’s $$). But she lost almost all of her salary when she refused to testify about the political activities and loyalties of her friends and associates. “I will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” she said. Was she a Communist? Not that it matters too much, but she was certainly a rebel, and perceptively observed that “rebels do not make good revolutionaries.” Hellman’s first big success was The Children’s Hour (1934), a gripping drama about a false accusation (of lesbianism). She then got involved with Dashiell Hammett, for whom she became the model of Nora Charles (and, as he said, some of his villains, too), before turning to international issues in the war year of 1941 with Watch on the Rhine, a patriotic, pro-British piece that won her the enmity of the Communist Party before, so to speak, she won the enmity of our super-patriots. Lillian Hellman mostly recovered her income, quarreled with Diana Trilling and Mary McCarthy, left no survivors, and died in 1984.

[A Jewish friend of mine, Jack Sussman, was a dentist in NYC in the 1950s. He was a card carrying member of the US Communist Party and was hauled up before the committee and 'exposed'. A lot of hiss clients deserted him but all the dentists in his area were Jewish and refused to take anyone who had deserted Jack so they had an interesting choice, either suffer toothache, travel long distances or swallow their prejudices. He lost very little business. Remember the film Marathon Man? The film company needed a run-down dentist's office to film the famous scene where Laurence Olivier probed Dustin Hoffman's teeth. They picked Jack's office and he coached Olivier in the proper techniques.]

[Stanley]

In much of the world, construction machines with a shovel at the front and a backhoe digger are known as JCBs. If you’ve ever wondered why, June 21 is your day to find out, for it’s the birthday of Joseph Cyril Bamford, born in 1916 in Uttoxeter, England. His family manufactured agricultural machinery. But after schooling Joseph Cyril did not go to work for the family firm, rather joined a competitor and was their sales agent in British West Africa. WWII interrupted, and he saw active service with both the RAF and the USAF, returning to a depressed economy in 1945 where he found himself selling Brylcreem. He didn’t enjoy this much so set up a machine shop in his garage under the registered name of JCB Limited. His modus operandi was to “focus on what you do best, be innovative, reinvest in product development, use the latest technologies.” A series of inventions quickly followed (the “JCB” itself in 1953), and because he took as his life model the great social welfare entrepreneurs of the 19th century like the Cadburys and Lord Lever (whom he called “practical socialists”) he invested also in high wages, training schemes, welfare projects, and a 10,000 acre recreational estate for his workforce. By 2000, JCB employees were (in terms of value added) seven times more productive than the average British skilled worker. Bamford married Marjorie Griffin in 1942. She and their two sons survived him (he died in 2001), and today Anthony Bamford runs the firm.

[Stanley]

The war novel has gone somewhat out of fashion, but there are some great ones, for instance John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers (1921), Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), and more recently Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong (1993) and Pat Barker’s “Regeneration trilogy” (1991-95). All of those are set in The Great War, the First World War, a war so cataclysmic for European culture that it continues to provoke the literary imagination. But it’s not only the war itself; it is also that the greatest war novel ever came out of that war, All Quiet on the Western Front (Im westen nicht neues) (1929), by Erich Maria Remarque, born on this day, June 22, in 1898, into a working-class family in Osnabrück, Germany. He would serve in the German army, on the western front, and be wounded five times. After the war Remarque taught, drove race cars, cut stones, and wrote advertisements, but his war kept wanting to get out, and All Quiet on the Western Front was the remarkable result, the title itself an ironic comment on the German war ministry’s false reporting of the carnage to its citizenry. In due course the Nazis would burn the book, and Remarque, finding himself in the USA in 1939, became an American citizen. Remarque wrote many more novels, some of them excellent, but never again did he express the creative power of his very first effort.

[Stanley]

June 23, 2013 is a good date for those who believe, or perhaps hope, that the sorts of thinking that characterize history, literary criticism, and some of the social sciences is properly quite distinct from scientific rationalism. That’s because it’s the 345th anniversary of the birth, in Naples, in 1668, of Giambattista Vico, the son of a bookseller. His relatively humble origin may explain why he never attained a really prestigious university chair, but he became professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples. There he developed a strong faith in humanistic thinking and a deep scepticism about scientific reductionism. He began with a view that true wisdom required being able to understand (and articulate) all sides of an argument, especially for any who would take public office. He moved on, however, in his most famous work, The First New Science (1725 with subsequent revisions), a complex piece which concludes that true knowledge is (so to speak) produced by human history and is best attained by studyingthe origins and development of human society. Or, one might say, history is the queen of the sciences. Fairly obscure in his own time, Vico’s work was resurrected by an astonishingly diverse range of thinkers after 1800, ranging from Michelet and Marx to James Joyce and Isaiah Berlin. Not surprisingly, then, Vico is difficult to summarize and to this day refuses to join a faction or lead a movement. He is what he was, and he would like that.

[Stanley]

June 24, 2013 is the 171st anniversary of Ambrose Bierce’s birth (1842) to a pair of rather literary parents, a father named Marcus Aurelius Bierce and a mother, Laura, who claimed descent from William Bradford. All his siblings (12!!!) had names beginning with A, an alliterative habit that did not stick on Ambrose. He grew up in a county named Kosciusko and went to school in Warsaw, which probably improved his sense of humor. He then worked as a printer’s devil, appropriately enough, before enlisting in the Union Army where he had terrifying experiences being quite brave, for instance at Shiloh. In peacetime Major Bierce went west with the army but retired in San Francisco where he became a writer in journalism, in short fiction (at which he became a master) and in satire. There he also met Sam Clemens, aka Mark Twain, and perhaps because the two had such similar origins, experiences, and outlooks they did not always like one another. Some of the best bons mots of each would be at the other’s expense. Bierce was perhaps the more consistently prosperous of the two, writing for major newspapers nearly all his life. He disappeared in Mexico in 1913, reporting on the Mexican revolutionary army. Today, Bierce is best known for his Devil’s Dictionary (1906, 1911) in which you will find that a “Conservative . . . is a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.”

[Stanley]

A look around almost any modern streetscape, these days, should be enough to convince anyone that we like our buildings to use right angles, gable ends excepted. Windows should be in straight, ranked lines. Roof ridges should run along an absolute level. Visually, the building should carry our line of sight up, along plumb vertical lines, or laterally along parallels. Symmetry should rule the whole unit. That would be so unless, perhaps, one went to Barcelona, the heart city of the Catalan region, and viewed some buildings designed by Antonio Gaudi, who was born in a Catalan village 161 years ago today, on June 25, 1852. Trained as an architect but already awash with the designs of nature, of Moorish architecture, and bowled over by modernism, utopian socialism, and Christian mysticism, Gaudi impressed his teachers but frightened them too. On his graduation, the director of his school said “we have given this academic title to a fool or a genius.” Probably the latter, but the former was always abubble, ready to erupt. Gaudi’s exuberant structures—those that survive—are mostly declared World Heritage sites by Unesco and are objects of pilgrimage for architects and artists from all cultures. Even his lampposts and newstands are worth a look, but he is most famed for his la Sagrada Familia, a massive, highly irregular urban church, and his goggle-eyed, squiggly-lined apartment houses in his beloved Barcelona.

[Stanley]

We are pretty sure that Big Bill Broonzy was born on this day, June 26, but the exact year and place are matters of dispute. Let’s take Big Bill’s word for it and say Mississippi, 1893, 120 years ago today. Those years have seen several revolutions in the lives of African-Americans, and Bill wrote and sang about several of them, first of all in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, using a fiddle he made out of a cigar box, then in France with the American army, and then he came back home to racial America and moved to Chicago where there was more work and more freedom. Along the way he sang folk songs, spirituals, and rural and urban blues, changed to the guitar and by 1927 had changed his name to Big Bill (this and that), and had recorded for Paramount. Broonzy he soon was, although Paramount got it wrong as “Broomsley,” but by the 1930s he was Broonzy, well known on the black music circuit and increasingly turning his hand to composition. After World War II his fortunes improved further, partly through his talent, partly through his connections with the likes of Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry, Studs Terkel, and Brownie McGhee. And Broonzy was inspiring others, too, for instance the youthful boys who would form the Rolling Stones. Big Bill died of cancer in 1958, but you can hear his many voices on remastered recordings, and in 2009 his lyric “Black, Brown and White Blues” was used in the benediction prayer at Barak Obama’s inauguration.

[Bodger]

He was also an exponent of the 12 string guitar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0c1c0ZsTLA

[PanBiker]

On of my favourites:

[BBvideo 425,350]http://youtu.be/QKt1_4SlUSw[/BBvideo]

[Stanley]

Bob would like the fact that his bit on Broonzy triggered you off.

June 27, 2013 is the 144th anniversary of the birth, in 1869, of Emma Goldman, who moved to St. Petersburg with her unhappy parents and then in 1885 emigrated to the USA with her sisters Helena and Lena. In Russia she had imbibed radical ideas and her early work experience in the USA (sewing at $2.50 a week) did not endear her to American capitalism. In New York City she found a lover and mentor in the anarchist Alexander Berkman who, Pygmalion-like, helped her become probably the most radical woman leader in industrializing America. The brutal Homestead lockout and strike (1889) pushed Berkman and Goldman over the edge, and they plotted to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, the employer’s leader, which they thought would be a grand anarchist gesture to “strike terror into the soul of [Frick’s] class.” That class was pretty jumpy at the time, witness all the “Armories” it was building around the country, and it might have worked, but Berkman only wounded Frick and then (ironically, one must say) was beaten almost to death by Frick’s workers. Goldman and Berkman were imprisoned but it didn’t cure them, and Emma lived on until 1940, earning money as a midwife (she had studied that in prison) and radical lecturer, being charged (unfairly) for plotting President McKinley’s assassination, founding the radical journal Mother Earth, advocating contraception, revolution, and, always and forever, anarchy. Emma Goldman died in Toronto in 1940 and, after some unseemly delays, the US government allowed her body to be buried in a leafy suburb of Chicago.
[It was Emma who said "If voting changed anything they'd make it illegal"]

[Stanley]

June 28, 2013 is the 107th birthday of Maria Goeppert-Mayer, whose Nobel Prize in 1963 made her only the second woman Nobelist in Physics (after Marie Curie, in 1903). And thereby hangs our tale. Maria Goeppert was born in Kattowitz, then in Prussia, in 1906. She studied at Gottingen, where three of her professors would win Nobels, and completed her PhD in 1930. In that year she married Joseph Mayer, another physicist, and the couple moved to the USA where Joseph taught at Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and Chicago, while Maria was unable to obtain an academic appointment. However, she continued to do research (for instance as a “voluntary Research Associate Professor at Chicago) and also worked independently at Los Alamos, and in 1950 co-authored a book with Hans Jensen on Elementary Theory of Nuclear Shell Structure describing their work together. What was at issue was how, and why, some atomic nuclei are especially stable. Her theory was that certain numbers (“magic numbers”) of paired neutrons and protons join in “spin orbit coupling”, and she used the analogy of a room full of dancers, waltzers indeed, to visualize the problem. That work won her (and Jensen) the Nobel Prize. At length, perhaps out of embarrassment, Maria was granted a personal chair at UC-San Diego, where now a fund in her name exists to encourage young women to become physicists.

[Stanley]

Our anniversary today is one of the funnier cartoonists ever to grace the pages of The New Yorker, Helen Hokinson, who was born 120 years ago on June 19, 1893, in Mendota, Illinois, in what might be called perfectly ordinary circumstances. Her father Adolph sold farm machinery and her mother Mary was the daughter of Phineas Wilcox, “the Carpenter orator,” a minor Iowa politician of the rural variety. Helen had a talent that wouldn’t keep her in Mendota, drawing and painting, and she went to the Chicago Art Institute to get better at it. In her early 20s she seemed stuck in commercial art, e.g. for Marshall Fields in Chicago, but then something struck and she pulled up sticks and moved to New York to make her fortune, which turned out to be cartoons for the new, then trendy New Yorker, where she became especially friendly with the writers, e.g. James Thurber, who supplied her with captions (to which she then drew her cartoons). Helen specialized in wealthy, ditzy, substantial matrons who didn’t quite get what was going on in the world, whom she affectionately called her “best girls.” But she was unprejudiced, lampooning a certain type of guy every month for The Ladies’ Home Journal. Her matronish “girls,” though, are classics, and many can be seen today by cruising the web under Helen Hokinson.

[LINK]

[Stanley]

June 30, 2013 is the 328th anniversary of John Gay, who was born in Barnstaple, England, in 1685 and educated there in the local grammar school and by his uncle, the local vicar. He got what everyone thought was his big break when he was apprenticed to a silk merchant in London, but he didn’t like the servility of apprenticeship and instead became a famous writer, a friend of Alexander Pope’s, and the client of noble patrons, even a client of one royal one (the Duke of Cumberland). With such friends as these, he made quite a bit of money as a poet, which says something about London culture in the early 18th century, but was soon in danger of throwing it all away with the work for which, today, he is justly famous, The Beggar’s Opera, which gave us the characters of Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum, and which (at the time) was seen as a vicious satire against the King’s chief minister, Robert Walpole. However, the actress who played Polly in due course became the Duchess of Bolton, whose good friend the Duchess of Queensbury saw to Gay’s comfort. So all was well. And in due course, the play became the Threepenny Opera (1928: Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht) and Gay was again famous.
[The apprentice who did not like restraint or servility (Samuel Johnson)]

[Stanley]

"What a brave man she was, and what a good woman." Turgenev.

July 1, 2013 is the 209th birthday of Armandine-Aurore-Lucille Dupin, who is much better known as George Sand, born on this day in 1804 inParis. Brought up mainly by her grandmother in rural Berry, she married (1822) Baron Dudevant, who did not satisfy her romantic nature or imagination, and she left him nine years later to take up an independent life in Paris, where her first novel, written as George Sand, Indiana, was a passionate apologia for a woman who leaves her unhappy marriage to find tru love. This was to be a constant theme in her writing and in her life, and she also broke convention by creating working class heroes. George Sand took many lovers in her life, most famously Prosper Mérimée and Frédéric Chopin. Several of her novels were not very well disguised narratives of her amours, but she is more famous for novels written later in her life and set in the countryside she first knew as the ward of her grandmother. She later wrote charming stories for her grandchildren (her separation from Dudevant left her custody of her two children), but before that supported the revolution of 1848 and the Paris Communards of 1870. She died in 1871, leaving behind her most famous quotation, “there is only one happiness in live, to love and be loved.”

[Stanley]

Those whose college years begin badly can take comfort from the story of Thurgood Marshall, born on July 2, 1908, 105 years ago. Marshall had to deal with a segregated school system in his native Maryland, so perhaps we can make allowances, but did young Thoroughgood have to get in trouble for misspelling his name “Thurgood” and then, later, in college, why did he join in hazing and pranksterism? His classmate Langston Hughes said he was “rough and ready, loud and wrong” as a freshman and sophomore. However, he fell in love with Vivien, became an A student, tried to get into the segregated University of Maryland law school, went to Howard Law, was first in his class, and later successfully sued the state of Maryland. Today his bronze statue stands outside the Thurgood Marshall Law Library at the University of Maryland, because this young troublemaker became the finest civil rights lawyer of his time, lead counsel for the NAACP, and senior lawyer in the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case, 1954. He would later become the first African-American justice on the US Supreme Court, where that orneriness that characterized his early college years still showed in his increasingly prophetic, and eloquent, dissents as the court majority began to undo the legacy of the civil rights era, and in his refusal to make peace with Ronald Reagan, for whom, Marshall said in 1989, he would not do the job of dogcatcher.

[Stanley]

July 3 is the birthday of a great number of interesting people, but let’s pull out of the hat Sir Tom Stoppard, still alive and kicking and born on July 3, 1937, in Zlin, Czechoslovakia. He wasn’t then Sir or Stoppard, of course, but Tomás Straussler, the son of a company doctor (for a shoe manufacturer). The family was of Jewish descent so when the Germans took over the Sudetenland, they hopped it to Singapore, where the shoe company had a manufacturing facility. Then it was off to Darjeeling, and then to Connecticut, where Tomas, now “Tom” Straussler, went to the Mount Hermon School. Later, his father having been killed by the Japanese, Tom’s mother married a Major Stoppard (British Army), and that’s how he got his surname. How he got his astonishing verbal skill as a playwright is another matter. The family settled in England, Tom started life (at 17!!!!!) as a journalist in Bristol where (at the theatre) he became friends with Peter O’Toole, then just starting out too, and another neophyte, director John Boorman. His first play was staged in Bristol, then a Ford foundation grant took him to Berlin where (of all places!!!) he wrote Rosencrantz and Guuildenstern Are Dead, his first big success (1968). He does comedy better than anyone else, but with a philosophical twist that makes you listen before you laugh. He’s given his name to the genre, “stoppardian”, so on July 3, 2013, Happy 76th to the funniest serious man in theatre.

[Stanley]

Satire is usually associated with prose, but today we celebrate a satirist who used mainly pictures, or more accurately drawing. He was Rube Goldberg, a nearly mythical figure whose name has entered the language, as in “Rube Goldberg Invention”, who was born on this day, July 4, in 1883, 130 years ago today. Rube didn’t start out to satirize American inventions and inventiveness. Indeed, he set out to invent things. Born to a prosperous and successful immigrant family (his dad was police and fire commissioner of San Francisco), Rube trained as an engineer, civil type, and looked like he might become pretty expert in fresh and waste water systems, but quite quickly he quit engineering for journalism, signing on with the San Francisco Chronicle as their sports cartoonist. From there by quite a large number of complicated steps (a bit like a Rube Goldberg invention) he became famous, a leading light of New York’s cultural world, a Pulitzer-prize winning political cartoonist, and of course the inspired draughtsman of hundreds of “Rube Goldberg Inventions,” outlandish devices that required several pulleys, cables, springs, and platforms to, let us say, crack a walnut. It was catching. At about the same time that Rube climbed to the top of the American cartooning tree, W. Heath Robinson was doing the same in Britain, where “Rube Goldberg Inventions” are known as “Heath Robinsons.”

[Stanley]

The discovery of DNA, and the development of DNA dating, have had a profound, sometimes startling effect on our understanding of evolutionary processes. But the basic theory of evolution remains pretty much intact, thanks not only to Charles Darwin (of course) but also to Ernst Mayr, born on July 5, 1904 in Wurzburg, Germany. In the course of his long, active life (Mayr died in 2005) he brilliantly defended Darwin while adding fundamentally to the strength of the theory, and indeed was the principal author of the “modern synthesis” of what we probably shouldn’t call Darwinism. But Mayr was first and possibly foremost a birdwatcher. It was this that distracted him from his medical studies, and it was this that brought him to the attention of New York’s Museum of Natural History. His first task for them, aged but 23, was to undertake a now-famous expedition to New Guinea to collect, and map, that island’s spectacular diversity of birdlife. He went on to become a curator at the Museum, then a museum director and professor at Harvard, and always working on difficult problems in evolutionary theory. “Everyone should have a problem,” he once told a group of teen-aged birdwatchers in the Bronx. Ernst Mayr discovered quite a few problems, and lived long enough, and lively enough, to solve most of them.

[Stanley]

Every once in a while, Hollywood gets biography just about right, as it did in 2002 with the biopic Frida, starring Selma Hayek. Not only did Hayek look like the subject, Frida Kahlo de Rivera, but the movie’s narrative was within shouting distance of the facts of Frida’s life, leaving out that she was born on July 6, 1907, 106 years ago today. Frida was a woman of courage, overcoming a debilitating illness and a devastating traffic accident to become a painter of note, especially a portraitist. But perhaps because she had had to fight against polio, first, and then multiple broken bones (including her spine), her favorite and perhaps obsessive subject was herself. “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” But it also fit her sense of mission, to depict Mexico’s full heritage, as her mixed-race parentage (German, Hispanic, and Amerindian) gave her a striking representation of the people of Mexico. In her self-portraits, Frida is dressed traditionally, often surrounded by traditional objects of Mexican culture or in a naturalist landscape. Her wounds also figure in her self-portraits. She died at only 55, perhaps of her illnesses and injuries, and her ashes are lodged in a pre-Columbian urn, true to the last to her calling. And, by the way, she married Diego Rivera, then remarried him, in a stormy but fruitful relationship which put Mexican art, and politics, on the world map.

[Stanley]

July 7, 2013 is probably the 107th anniversary of the birth of Leroy Page, among whose legends would be exactly when he was born. Probably in 1906, in Florida. His parents, John and Lula, changed his name to Paige because it seemed more “hightoned”, and later Leroy made himself into Satchel when, at the age of seven, he impressed other workers at the local train station with his contraption for moving baggage. Satchel Paige became famous, though, as the iron-armed pitcher in the Negro League,starting—and finishing—an impossible total of games, and making himself legendary before the major leagues integrated. Satchel would pitch exhibitions against major league teams, and struck out with apparent ease the likes of Rogers Hornsby and Joe DiMaggio (who called him the fastest pitcher he’d ever faced). Besides a punishing fast ball, he became famous for a fast wit, if of the homespun variety, so that when the major leagues finally did integrate, in 1947, the baseball public was probably readier for Satch than for anyone, and he did not disappoint, proving a competent and sometimes a deadly pitcher despite his advanced age—whatever it was. Satch played 18 seasons in “white” ball, 12 of them in the majors, and finally hung up his arm at the incredible age of 51 (or thereabouts). A tip of the hat to Satchel Paige, please.

[Stanley]

July 8, 2013 is the 350th birthday, if that’s the right word, of the state of Rhode Island, for it was on this day in 1663 that King Charles II granted Dr. John Clarke and his associates a charter for “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.” Among John Clarke’s associates was Roger Williams, a fire-brand minister who by 1663 was identifying himself as an Anabaptist and who had already from the 1630s made of the area a kind of heat sink for religious enthusiasts of various stripes. They couldn’t agree on much, but one idea they held fiercely in common was that one’s religion (or, indeed, one’s lack of religion) should not bar one from the political community. For Williams, the state was a ship at sea, and as long as you knew how to furl sails or swab decks of drop anchor, you belonged to that civil society, whether you were protestant or catholic, muslim or infidel. Rhode Island had practiced this “separation” from the first, mainly in Williams’ view to protect the purity of his congregation, and Charles II was for his own reasons happy that it should continue, and so the English king wrote into the colony’s foundation document that there would be complete freedom of religion. This was much to the dismay of neighboring colonists, e.g. those in Massachusetts, for whom religious freedom meant only the freedom to practice their own religion. We are fortunate that it was Rhode Island’s definition that eventually prevailed.

[Bodger]

some of its early inhabitants
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rhode ... ograph.jpg