We’re staying tonight in Independence, the seat of Inyo County, along U.S. 395 near all sorts of history. Manzanar, the World War II concentration camp for Japanese-Americans, is just to the south. We’re in the middle of the Owens Valley, a place defined in modern times by the loss of its water to sharp operators from Los Angeles.
More immediately, one thing that strikes me about staying along U.S. 395 is the all-night truck traffic. It’s not a constant, relentless parade. But every few minutes or so, an eighteen-wheeler rolls through, either headed north to connect with Interstate 80 in Reno or south toward Los Angeles or maybe the desert routes to Phoenix.
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS seen from Mono Lake, Eastern Sierra Nevada.
We started the day by driving down to O’Shaughnessy Dam and Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, the facilities that impound the Tuolumne River in a once pristine Sierra valley and bring water to 2.5 million people in the Bay Area (and as part of a larger system including hydroelectric facilities also supply power to some city operations in San Francisco and elsewhere). I hadn’t intended to spend much time there, but we got to walking the trail on the north side of the reservoir and pretty soon it was early afternoon.
We took our time driving over Tioga Pass and down to Lee Vining and checked into a motel and had dinner at the local Mobil gas station — it’s actually a well-known eatery and just what you need if you’ve spent a long day hiking or driving or both. Then we headed to the south shore olf Mono Lake to see whether we could sight Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS again. There was a nearly full moon lighting up the tufa formations along the shoreline, but yes, the comet was still clearly visible naked-eyewise and more so with any kind of camera. I didn’t bring a tripod on this trip, so I have to resort to handheld phone-camera shots. There were several guys along the lakeshore shooting the spectacle with professional gear — I imagine we’ll see some of those shots soon.
Along the road to Hetch Hetchy, snags still stand eleven years after the Rim Fire swept through Stanislaus National Forest and parts of Yosemite National Park.
To keep it short and sweet: We’re taking a quick trip over to the Eastern Sierra. The past few years, this has involved a drive from Berkeley and a sunset stop along the road near Tioga Pass. This time we splurged and stopped at one of the lodges west of the park. We got here in time to take a quick before-dinner walk — a walk, not a hike, since it was along the road toward the long-drowned Hetch Hetchy Valley (drowned by San Francisco, but that’s another story).
Highway 120, the main road into the park from the Bay Area, goes through part of the area that burned during the Rim Fire in 2013. Much can be said about that — I happened to be up in Yosemite on a quick trip with my nephew Sean the day the fire really blew up, and we had to get home by way of Fresno. The fire burned for a very long time and at the time became the third largest fire by area in California history. It was an epic. Just eleven years later, it ranks as the state’s twelfth largest fire — nine bigger ones, including a couple about four times as large, have occurred since 2017. The point of mentioning that is that even though the Rim Fire has probably faded from most people’s memory in the wake of all the large, destructive and deadly fires that have occurred since, the evidence of the blaze is all around us in this area.
After our walk and before dinner, we went out to try to find evidence of another spectacle, Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. I was really kind of blown away by it.. Reasonably bright as the dusk deepened, with a fantastically long “tail” (or so it appeared to me). Looking forward to more sightings.
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS over the Tuolumne River canyon, October 14, 2024.
If Charles O. Finley had gotten his way, the A’s might never have come to Oakland.
From the moment he gained complete ownership of the Kansas City Athletics in early 1961, he began trying to move the team. He explored taking the A’s to Dallas-Fort Worth, Milwaukee, Louisville, Atlanta, San Diego, New Orleans and Seattle before settling on Oakland and its brand-new Coliseum as the team’s new home.
When the American League approved the move in October 1967, Kansas City had seen enough. The contempt local fans and officials felt for Finley when he left town is often summed up in an outraged (and outrageous) quote attributed to — but apparently never uttered by — the late Missouri Sen. Stuart Symington.
The day after the American League approved the A’s move, later accounts insist, Symington went to the Senate floor to denounce Finley and declared, “Oakland is the luckiest city since Hiroshima.”
It’s such an over-the-top line — and all the better for being delivered by a U.S. senator in the august chamber of “the world’s greatest deliberative body” — that writers to this day are still quoting it. Someone out there has even updated it: With the A’s and current owner John Fisher on the way to Nevada, it’s now Las Vegas that’s the luckiest city since Hiroshima.
My first impulse when I came across the quote in a Ron Fimrite Sports Illustrated feature on Oakland’s especially dreadful 1979 season was to look up the 1967 news stories recounting Symington’s sensational statement. It must have made a splash, and I wouldn’t be above using it myself for a piece I was writing on the history of the A’s.
But it turns out there is no record of the quote being attributed to Symington until years after his actual 1967 remarks — or at least no record that someone going through online databases can find.
With that caveat – that we’re depending on what we can mine from an imperfectly preserved record – here’s a summary of how the quote evolved and was eventually placed in Sen. Symington’s mouth:
The Congressional Record for Oct. 19, 1967, reprints Symington’s brief remarks on the floor, which he made after participating in negotiations with the American League about the A’s status.
Symington made no mention of Hiroshima, according to the Record. But neither did he hold back from blasting Finley, calling him “one of the most disreputable characters ever to enter the American sports scene.” He added that while it hurt to lose major league baseball in Kansas City, it was a pleasure to get rid of the team’s owner.
The resulting news accounts, including a front-page story from the Kansas City Star’s Washington bureau and an Associated Press story carried all over the country, match the Record’s account and quote Symington’s description of Finley as “disreputable.” The stories are very specific. The Star mentions that Oregon Sen. Wayne Morse yielded the floor in the middle of a speech to allow Symington to deliver his statement about Finley. The AP notes Symington’s speech took two minutes. Neither account includes the purported (and irresistibly quotable) “Hiroshima” comment.
The Kansas City Times, sister paper of the Kansas City Star, published an account of Symington’s Senate speech on Oct. 20, 1967. Neither the story nor any other source at the time suggested Symington mentioned Hiroshima.
But if Symington didn’t say anything about Finley and Hiroshima on the Senate floor, where did the phrase come from and how was it eventually credited to him? There are a couple of clues about the origin that show up in printed sources.
In the weeks before Finley’s move to Oakland became official, many thought the A’s were headed to Seattle. A few days before the American League’s decision, Dick Young, a New York Daily News columnist, wrote in the nationally distributed Sporting News, “It looks like Seattle is the lucky city. The last city with that kind of luck was Hiroshima.”
Young’s column ran in The Sporting News’ Oct. 14 edition. On Oct. 16, the Kansas City Star reported the proceedings of a City Council meeting that included this nugget:
“Turning his sarcastic talents on Charles O. Finley, Athletics owner, Councilman John Maguire remarked: ‘No other city but Hiroshima has been so blessed.'” The metropolis Maguire appears to be referring to in that account is Kansas City itself, not Oakland or Seattle.
Yes, comparing the impact of a reviled team owner to a nuclear attack that had killed tens of thousands of people was memorable because it was ironic, insensitive and bitterly funny. The appearance of these statements so close together suggests the birth of what a later generation would call a meme.
Then came the American League vote on Oct. 18 — Councilman Maguire was part of the city’s delegation to the league meeting. On Oct. 19, Symington made his apparently Hiroshima-free speech on the Senate floor. Then, in the days immediately following the news the A’s were California-bound, variations on the Hiroshima line began showing up in papers around the country.
The earliest example that I’ve turned up — “by getting Finley, Oakland became the luckiest city since Hiroshima” — appeared in the Oakland Tribune on Oct. 22. The quote was attributed only to “one quipster.”
On Oct. 25, Los Angeles Times columnist John Hall wrote, “Somebody else said it first. With Charlie Finley and the A’s on the way, Oakland is the luckiest city since Hiroshima.”
Two days later, the San Diego Union’s Jack Murphy followed with this: “Oakland doubtless regards the arrival of Finley with emotions ranging from delight to despair. To borrow a line from John Hall, Oakland is the luckiest city since Hiroshima.”
In the following weeks, months and years, the quote was attributed to sportswriters in Chicago, Kansas City, “the Midwest,” California, Wisconsin and Texas. In some cases, it was said to be the wit of some unnamed Kansas Citian. Sometimes it was not attributed at all and was reprinted as a recently overheard wisecrack.
The quote never completely fell from circulation, but in 1973, six years after its first appearance, its author finally got a name when The New York Times Magazine credited it to Kansas City Star sports editor Joe McGuff.
That attribution was apparently based on an interview with sportswriter Wells Twombly, who wrote a feature on Finley and the A’s for the magazine. Here’s the passage:
“If you try to figure Finley out, you’ll only succeed in confusing yourself,” says Kansas City Star sports editor Joe McGuff, who called Oakland the luckiest city since Hiroshima when Finley took the Athletics there. “His capacity for turmoil is incredible. He thrives on it. He enjoys tough times so he can work his way out of them and give himself credit.”
Perhaps McGuff, a legendary Kansas City journalist who eventually became the Star’s editor in chief, did say something like that. But scouring his stories and columns on the A’s departure from Kansas City doesn’t turn up the Hiroshima bon mot.
Also in 1973, Ron Bergman, an A’s beat writer for the Oakland Tribune, published “The Mustache Gang,” an account of the team’s first world championship season. Bergman had written about Oakland’s welcome for Charlie Finley for The Sporting News in 1967. That piece used the quote and attributed it to “a Midwest sportswriter.” His 1973 tome ascribes the words to Symington.
Two popular books that came out shortly afterward did the same.
“Charlie O.,” published in 1975 by Sacramento Bee writer Herb Michelson, used the quote, attributed to Symington, for book-jacket copy. That guaranteed it would get attention and many reviews quoted the line and its attribution.
“Champagne and Baloney: The Rise and Fall of Finley’s A’s,” by Berkeley poet and jack of all literary trades Tom Clark, appeared in 1976. Clark goes out of his way to say Symington’s Hiroshima one-liner could be found in the Congressional Record. That was untrue, but Clark’s use of the quote attracted the attention of New York Times book reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt:
“Still, for all that Finley’s threat to the national moral fabric has been pumped out of proportion, one has to admit that his presence on the scene has inspired some amusing rhetoric. …
“When, in 1967, Finley moved the A’s from Kansas City to Oakland, Senator Stuart Symington sputtered, ‘Oakland is the luckiest city since Hiroshima.’ ”
Those two books and their reviews appear to have settled the matter: Writers ever since have repeated that Symington compared the Finley effect to the A-bomb. That spurious attribution has been especially popular this year, with the quote appearing in many accounts of the A’s imminent departure from Oakland.
At the end of the day, and at the close of the Athletics’ era in yet another bruised and sorrowful hometown, the evidence shows the “HIroshima” idea started with someone else — New York columnist Dick Young — and that the quote was passed around for years before it became the too-good-not-to-be-true declaration of an important public figure who, based on his actual words, really did detest Charlie Finley.
Published by the Oakland Tribune late in the summer of 1917 after the American Expeditionary Forces had landed in France to join the war against Germany. It’s a weird combination of nationalistic pride and fantasy: the war as a game in which baseball-playing Americans would enjoy a peculiar advantage in slinging “chunks of death” (grenades) at the enemy. (And we’ll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home.)
The text:
That American Base Ball Arm
“They say the French poilus stared when they saw how the Americans could throw a bomb, and no wonder. Who should be able to throw if not the Americans? What was all that baseball for if not to teach the youngsters of the United States how to hurl a missile straight and true? Of course we can’t all be pitchers. The real pitcher will be the star bomber wherever he is placed. But any ball-playing American lad will be able to give a good account of himself when it comes to one of those dramatic crises when a chunk of death must be planted, and planted quickly and accurately, in the enemy’s midst. A world is in the bleachers to watch the fateful game. And what a shout will go up when all “our boys” make their home run!”
Container ship headed into Port of New York, July 1, 2024.
Among the many ways to categorize most air travelers is their choice between aisle seat and window seat. (No, I don’t think anyone really chooses a middle seat).
Aisle-seat travelers are focused on convenience. They can get up any time they want without climbing over someone or making everyone else in their row move. The freedom that convenience wins is the ability to walk to the back of the plane to use the tiny restrooms and maybe get a nice leg-stretch. Aisle-sitters see flying as a chore, something to endure.
Window-seat fliers are people who, despite suffering the many large and small inconveniences of modern air travel and getting crammed into smaller and smaller spaces on-board, still see a little adventure in the flight experience. At least that’s my take, as someone who chooses a window seat 100 percent of the time. The adventure comes in witnessing the dramatic moments of takeoff and landing and watching the country and shy reveal themselves in the hours in between.
Yes, you might nod off occasionally as you wonder which river, lake, town or highway that is sliding by miles below you. But for every instance your attention wanders, there’s another where you’re surprised by the chance appearance of something happening in the sky around you — thunderheads building up in the distance — or down there on the surface.
Maybe, after a long landing approach over the sea, on a coast far from your own, a freighter will glide beneath you amid infinitely scalloped waters, churning toward port, its bow wake creating a perfect chevroned symmetry in the last light of the evening.
Brightline Holdings, a company developing high-speed train service from Las Vegas to the L.A. area, broke ground the other day on a system it says will cost $12 billion. The 218-mile route will include four stations. The company says it will begin service in 2028, in time for the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
We’ll see how credible those estimates and promises are, but in a state notorious for obscene infrastructure cost overruns and project delays, the promise of a working train system from scratch in four years seems miraculous. (Yes, hear a voice says, “If it sounds too good to be true. …”)
The Santa Clara Valley Transportation’s Authority’s project to extend BART six miles through downtown San Jose currently carries a price tag of $12.7 billion. Given the project’s shocking recent price escalation, no one will be too surprised to see the cost rise further. And as the price goes up, the VTA keeps pushing the extension’s forecast opening date further into the future. Once upon a time, the agency talked about the line opening by the end of this decade. Now it’s scheduled to start carrying paying passengers in around 2037.
No particular point here — the facts alluded to above are well known. But no one I know has called out the similar cost estimates for the two projects, which are very different in almost every other way. Brightline will run down a highway median on the surface, for instance. The BART route through downtown San Jose involves a deep, five-mile-long tunnel, construction beneath an urban center, and working in a region where property acquisition costs are extreme, among other differences.
But even given all that, you naturally wonder whether one of the projects here is exceedingly skillful at stretching dollars and the other, not so much.
Cutting to the chase: I just turned 70. To celebrate the occasion, Kate and I came to Chicago (where I’m writing this) to visit family and friends. A brief travelogue:
April 1
We flew from San Francisco to Chicago’s O’Hare airport. The first minutes of that flight take you over Oakland or Berkeley. On our April Fool’s Day trip, we had a nice view of the soon–somewhat desolate-looking Oakland Coliseum and Arena complex — former home of the Oakland Raiders and Golden State Warriors (and soon-to-be-erstwhile home of the Oakland A’s, who will decamp to Sacramento as they await construction of a stadium in their alleged eventual home in Las Vegas).
April 2
The big day. Thanks to my sister Ann and her husband Dan, I got my name in lights. We had a great time, including a trivia quiz in which I stumped the room by asking which two rivers merge to form the mighty Illinois River.
April 3
It was rainy and cold, with some intermittent snow flurries, our first three days in Chicago. I think my big activity of the day was driving my brother John to the airport for his return to Brooklyn. The picture? A local resident schools neighbors on automotive etiquette. This day also featured a visit to Pequod’s Pizza on North Clybourn.
April 4
The El, along North Franklin Street, encountered during our hunt for Italian beef.
On Thursday, the 4th, it was dry and a little warmer with occasional splashes of actual sunshine. Our son Thom was getting ready to fly back to Los Angeles. But first: We needed to find Italian beef sandwiches. First stop: Mr. Beef, on North Orleans, a place you’ll kind of know if you’ve watched “The Bear.” The restaurant was closed to accommodate film crews working on the show’s third season. Our backup spot was Al’s Beef on West Taylor Street,
April 5
On Friday, the 5th, we went down to the south suburbs to meet one of my high school writing teachers, Mort Castle, and his wife, Jane, at Aurelio’s Pizza in Homewood. Did I remember to take a picture of this Crete-Monee High School reunion? No. And neither did they. Later, Kate and I wound up at the Izaak Walton League’s Homewood Preserve. Note blue skies and evidence of direct sunlight.
April 6
On Saturday, the 6th, we drove out to the Fox River valley to see my high school German teacher and longtime friend Linda Stewart. She moved back to the town of Geneva, just up the road from her hometown of Aurora, in 2023. Also pictured: her dog, Pecan.
April 7
On Sunday, the 7th, we joined the throngs traveling to view the total solar eclipse happening the next afternoon. Our destination was Indianapolis and the home of my high school friend Dan Shepley and his wife, Paula. I had discounted the possibility that there’d. e a lot of traffic, but heading down Interstate 65 from northwestern Indiana, I discovered how naive I was. Stuck in one especially gnarly traffic jam north of the Kankakee River, we got off the interstate and made most of the trip on two lane roads heading south and east. Among the casual sightings along the way, a wind turbine being erected south of the town of Monon. We made it to Dan and Paula’s eventually.
April 8
Eclipse Day. We hung out at Paula and Dan’s all day. The sky show lived up to the hype, and the show on the ground, featuring neighbors who turned the event into a partym was good, too.
April 9
On Tuesday, the 9th, we wended our way back to Chicagoland, sticking to back roads until we suddenly realized we needed to get on the interstate (I-55 in this case) to get back in time for an online appointment Kate had.
Helper, Utah, and environs. (this is on the northern outskirts, and according to some maps, this was part of a hamlet, or maybe just a siding on the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad, called Martin at some time in the past. Maybe the locals still call it that.
In October 2022, I took a driving trip that took me to Salt Lake City, Moab, and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, among other stops. I took U.S. 6 between Salt Lake and Moab. The route heads south and east and along one stretch descends through a striking piece of landscape called Price Canyon. At its southern end, the canyon levels off and widens into a valley, where you’ll find the town of Helper. I stopped at the outskirts, walked around a little, and took a few pictures. I posted one to Facebook, and a friend who commented asked where the name of the town came from. Never one to let the opportunity for a bit of research pass me by, here was my answer:
Hi: I took note of your comment on Facebook wondering where Helper, Utah, got its name. It turns out not to be a super-long story, unless I can turn it into one.
The short version is this: The town started out as a small settlement at the point where a rugged piece of western topography called Price Canyon (and the Price River that flows through it) open into a little valley where Teancum Pratt, the hard-luck son of one of Utah’s Mormon pioneers, settled around 1881. About the same time as Pratt’s arrival (with his two wives and seven children; eventually he and his wives had 17 children, and he did prison time for his plural marriage), the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad, was laying out a route down Price Canyon. Trains traveling up the canyon — to the northwest, toward Salt Lake City — faced a long grade, about 1,700 feet in 15 miles. The railroad chose a site near Pratt’s new homestead for a station where it would position extra locomotives — “helper” engines — to enable Salt Lake-bound trains to make it up the canyon. So there it is. “Helper” became the name of the community that grew up around the station. I think it’s at least as good as “Prattville.”
When I drove through there, what I noticed was the spectacular route through the canyon and the striking cliffs surrounding the town (along with the sign of the Balance Rock Motel). It’s almost too much to slow down enough and contemplate how the world we’re moving through was shaped. When I manage to do that, I’m always surprised and often pleased in a way by what I find.
On the outskirts of Helper, Utah.
For instance, this guy Teancum Pratt. There seem to be lots of little capsule histories that name him in reference to Helper, but none that mention much of his personal experience. I describe him as “hard luck” after reading just a little of his journal. Among the episodes he describes in narrating his life before Helper, here’s one from his teens:
“In my 15th year, I had the misfortune to lose half of my left foot, which was frozen off while working for George Higginson. I was driving a freight team of 2 yoke of cattle. It was winter. We made it to Salt Lake City before Christmas. Mr. Higginson sent me on to Lehi Fields with both teams of cattle. This took me all day and night, and by morning I was frozen badly. Mr. Higginson treated me badly, being fed on bread alone and not enough of that.”
And here’s a summary of events just before he dragged his clan to what would become Helper:
“I found that my physical strength was not sufficient to endure hard labor and about the last of June, 1880, I came to the conclusion that I would go out to the frontier and take up land and either sink or swim in the attempt to maintain ourselves. So hearing of Castle Valley, I struck out and came to Price River on the 24th of July, 1880, coming down Gordon Creek from Pleasant Valley and locating at the mouth of Gordon Creek. But the neighbors were hunters, trappers, and bachelors, and soreheads and did not welcome any settlers, so I had a very tough time of it and had to leave that location and moved up to what is now Helper, at that time a lovely wilderness, and commenced anew in 1881.”
Pratt found that the land he had settled wasn’t particularly fertile, and among the various ventures he embarked upon was coal mining. Coal is still a big deal in that area of Utah — Helper is located in Carbon County, which is still a major producer (and has been involved in recent years in trying to build a coal port in Oakland). Mining drew lots of people, money and union organizing to Helper and environs.
And crime, too: In 1897, just up the canyon from Helper, Butch Cassidy and associates managed to hold up the payroll manager of one of the coal companies who had come down on the train from Salt Lake City to pay miners.
And of course, all that just barely scratches the surface of the past of this one place. What transpired here before the “settlers” wandered in? Maybe I’ll get to that.
Conclusion of seminar. Hope all’s well with you as autumn draws on. …
Even after having spent my entire professional life editing — alongside some reporting and a few other desultory wordsmithing endeavors — I often feel like I’m still trying to get the hang of it.
For instance: On the streaming series “Julia,” a wonderful retelling (and embroidering) of the story of Julia Child’s emergence in the early 1960s, one of the main characters is her editor at Knopf, Judith Jones. She appears in many scenes looking over manuscripts from the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and John Updike. Those scenes are meant mostly to show her tireless devotion to her work. But I see something else. Watching her, I wonder about the strength of character, the discrimination, the literary skill and the sensitivity to writers’ egos it would take to have the confidence and certainty to edit the work she was editing. It takes a certain kind of boldness to offer or even substitute your judgment and understanding for that of a creator. Every time I see her cross out a line or write a suggestion, I think about that boldness and the kind of tension that would arise when the author reviews her work.
That tension is at the heart of a documentary I went to see last year with my friend (and writer) Jon Brooks. The movie is “Turn Every Page,” and its the story of Robert Caro’s half-century-long working partnership with editor Robert Gottlieb. Gottlieb worked with Caro on “The Power Broker,” the landmark study of the career of New York’s singular highway and housing autocrat Robert Moses. And after that, Gottlieb handled Caro’s multivolume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson. As Caro says, he is currently at work on the fifth volume of a projected three-volume work. Gottlieb died last June, and Caro labors on without him. Lots of Caro’s readers wonder whether the final volume of the Johnson series, which will deal with LBJ’s successes in the realm of civil rights and his tragically misguided commitment to the Vietnam War.
But back to the subject at hand, editing. Here’s how Gottlieb described it in “Turn Every Page”:
“Editing is intelligent and sympathetic reaction to the text and what the author is trying to accomplish. … Basically, it’s expressing your reaction, and that works if the writer really understands that you’re in sympathy with what he or she is doing.” I should add that later in the movie, he also says “Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.” (Elsewhere, Gottlieb once described book editing as “a strictly service job … Your job is to serve the book and the writer.”)
As I said at the beginning, after 50 years or so futzing around with words, I feel like I’m still learning. And that insight into being the intelligent, sympathetic listener in service to the writer and the book (or the story) hits home with me.
