Category: History

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Oakland: The Luckiest City Since …

Oakland Coliseum, June 20, 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.

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‘The Fateful Game’

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!”

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How Helper (Utah) Got Its Name, and Other Stories

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. … 

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Your American Mass Shooting Calendar

This week marks the anniversary of a couple of recent mass shootings: The massacre of innocents in Uvalde, Texas, last year, and the slaughter of transit workers in San Jose two years ago. Naturally there will be coverage of the anniversaries. We’ll revisit the trauma. We’ll hear hopes and prayers that we’ve learned something about how to prevent similar tragedies.

The anniversaries made me think about how many dates mark major mass shootings. I kind of had it in the back of my head that you could make up a calendar of all these episodes where, when you look back just a little way, you could see the hundreds of lives taken, the thousands upon thousands altered forever, at the whim of well-armed strangers. What I had in mind was something like the Roman Catholic calendar of saints’ feast days. Or more darkly, one of those “page-a-day” calendars. This one would be “A Massacre a Day.”

It sounds like fun of the grimly ironic sort, if you don’t think about the people involved. But when I sat down to write down the incidents I recall off the top of my head — starting with one in 1966 and then continuing through those that occurred over the many years I’ve been in newsrooms — there’s little irony and no fun involved. The most sobering thing is that there have been so many of these mass killings in recent years that each new one seems to be making less of an impression.

Here’s the list, in calendar order — 36 separate dates (which, just. to be clear, I had to look up). I suppose the really grim thing about this is that if you searched a little and went beyond the most notorious recent and historic incidents, you’d probably have no problem filling up a 365-day calendar.

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The Fifth-Grader’s Picture File: The Browns

Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown and Bernice Layne Brown, 1965.

It’s a little strange to look at this as a long-time Californian (or at least a long-time Californai resident. Are they the same thing?).

Pat Brown was a really important figure in state government through the mid-1960s, and there are several things I immediately associate with him: the State Water Project, for instance, and California’s Master Plan for Higher Education. And the fact he took office in a period where the state was growing like crazy. But what, specifically, would have made me, a fifth-grader in the Chicago suburbs, write the governor’s office for a picture? Maybe I had heard mention of him as a potential running mate for President Johnson in 1964 (yes, I would haver been paying attention). Maybe I heard some other news item or an approving remark from my parents. I have no real idea.

This arrived in the mail in March 1965 — probably the same week that I got the first picture in my collection, the portrait of Otto Kerner. Brown was in his second term, having beaten Richard “You Won’t Have” Nixon (to Kick Around Anymore) in 1962. Standing for his third term as governor, he wasn’t so lucky. In 1966, Brown lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan, winning just three of the state’s 58 counties (San Francisco, Alameda and Plumas).

How did he come by the nickname Pat? This is what he said during a 1982 oral history interview:

Brown: It was 1917 when I was in the seventh grade they had these four-minute speeches for the sale of Liberty Bonds. We had to write a speech and then we had to deliver it. I’ll never forget that I made the speech and I ended up by saying, “Give me liberty or give me death,” and the kids at school started calling me “Patrick Henry” Brown. It’s an amazing thing how they shortened it to “Pat.”

Q.: How did you see that at the time, as derisive or as something that was …?

Brown: Oh no, it was friendly, very friendly. It usually is when they give you a nickname. It was a fortuitous thing that happened because I think “Pat” Brown helped me later on in political life. It gave me an Irish connotation which was really somewhat undeserved because I was half German and half Irish.

Of course, I should mention Bernice Layne Brown, the governor’s wife, also pictured above. She and her husband were both San Francisco natives. Her official biography mentions that they eloped to Reno when they were in their early 20s. The short writeup also says this: “Bernice was ambivalent toward politics. The Governor’s Office confirmed this in a 1960 press release which stated, ‘Mrs. Brown frankly admits she never would have chosen a political career for her husband if the choice had been hers to make.'”

Not mentioned in the official biography: The Browns were parents to the state’s longest-serving governor, Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr. But you knew that.

From the governor’s office postal meter: “California: The nation’s leading state.”

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From My Big Pile of Old Baby Boomer Stuff: Governor Otto Kerner, 1965

Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, 1965.

The way I remember it is I was home from school — I was a fifth-grader at Talala School in Park Forest, in Chicago’s south suburbs. I’m sure I was bored and looking for something to do — I wasn’t that sick. I was as interested in politics as any fifth-grader — well, not counting my former classmate Billy Houlihan, whose father, John J. Houlihan, was getting ready to run for the Illinois House of Representatives (he won and wound up serving four terms). I’ve forgotten my specific motivation on the long-ago day in question, but I sat down and wrote a letter to Otto Kerner, who had recently begun his second term as governor, congratulating him on his victory and asking for an autographed picture.

The portrait above, with a short letter acknowledging my note, arrived a week or two or three later. I was inspired, and a hobby of sorts was born. I started writing to other politicians who were in the news: Edward Brooke, the Republican Massachusetts attorney general who became the first popularly elected Black U.S. senator and the first to serve in the Senate since Reconstruction; Pat Brown, the Democratic governor of California; Nelson Rockefeller, the “liberal” Republican governor of New York.

Soon, I started going down the list of members of the U.S. Senate. The notes I sent were brief and to the point, written in my imperfect Palmer method cursive on a sheet of blue-lined notebook paper: “May I please have an autograph of Governor X or Senator Y?” — not much more than that. I was pretty unaware of the politics of a lot of the senators whose portraits I was requesting. So I sent away for pictures of Richard B. Russell of Georgia and John McClellan of Arkansas, two of the staunchest segregationists in “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” (Robert Caro’s “Master of the Senate,” the third volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson, is an effective antidote to that “greatest deliberative body” nonsense.) But I also wrote to Bobby Kennedy’s and Gene McCarthy’s offices.

After collecting about 60 or 70 of these signed pictures, I got bored with the project. I was still passionately interested in what was happening in politics — in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, especially — but the interest took other forms: going with my mother to the weekly peace vigil at the post office in Park Forest, for instance.

What is there to remember about the man in this particular portrait?

Kerner became a national figure in 1967 when President Johnson appointed him to lead a commission studying the causes of the widespread riots of that summer — the ones that always come to mind were in Detroit and Newark. The resulting report unflinchingly concluded that the nation’s long history of white racism, oppression and abuse of Black people drove the 1967 uprisings. (“What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”)

The report was a little too unflinching for Johnson’s taste, and he declined to publicly endorse its conclusions or support its call for a sweeping program of investments to address the effects of past discrimination.

Still, before Kerner’s second term as governor was over, Johnson nominated him to serve on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But Kerner’s undoing was not long in coming: He was indicted in 1972 for conspiracy, income tax evasion, mail fraud and perjury. The indictment said that early in his first term, he had agreed to set favorable racing dates for a Chicago-area horse track in exchange for stock in the track, which he later sold at a significant profit. Kerner was convicted on 17 counts. On appeal, all but four of the counts, all for mail fraud, were thrown out. But he was sentenced to three years in prison — a sentence that was cut short by the discovery he was suffering from lung cancer. He died in May 1976.

Kerner’s New York Times obit mentions that some supporters never believed he was guilty, and many others remained sympathetic to him after his fall. A few months before Kerner died, the Times reported, “Chicago journalists organized a ‘newsmen’s testimonial dinner to Otto Kerner.'”

“‘We like the guy personally, no matter what he’s done, and we thought it would be a shame if someone didn’t do something for him,’ said Steve Schickel, a television reporter for station WLS-TV. “

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‘Desperate End of a Desperate Life’

From a short visit to Virginia City, Nevada, in The Last Summer Before the Pandemic. (Caution: the following contains explicit details of gruesome Gold Rush-era saloon violence. )

We spent a couple minutes on the main street, but when I spotted the cemeteries on the north end of town, I knew that’s where I wanted to go. The carving on this monument drew my eye — it’s exquisite but restrained. I was slow to appreciate the inverted torches at the four corners. The inverted torch, a common motif on cemetery monuments, is said to symbolize death; the flame, eternal life.

As to Major George E. Ferrend: Who was he?

Below is an account of his passing, drawn from a January 1875 number of the London Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News. The LIS&DN, which neglects to mention that Ferrend died in Virginia City, was republishing an account carried in a newspaper called the Pall Mall Gazette. The Gazette, in turn, appears to have borrowed its story from a somewhat more detailed account published Dec. 9, 1874, the day after Ferrend’s death, in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. None of the stories I’ve found mention his wife, who according to the monument died two months after her husband.

Among incidents not recounted here is Ferrend’s role as a second in an 1863 duel between the editor of the Territorial Enterprise and the editor of a rival publication. The Enterprise employed Mark Twain at the time.

Here’s the story recounting Major Ferrend’s life and demise:

DESPERATE END OF A DESPERATE LIFE

The death of an Englishman in California is reported by the San Francisco Call. On the morning of the 26th ult., Major George E. Ferrend, a well-known citizen of San Francisco and famous everywhere or the Pacific coast, shot himself in the head, and thus put an end to an eventful career.

Major Ferrend was born in Lancashire and was educated at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He entered the Army, but owing to trouble of some kind sold out. He then went to Buenos Ayres, where he was the leading spirit in a revolution which was successful, but was subsequently driven out of the country, and came to California.

In June 1853, he left Sacramento with a company he had raised and joined General Walker in his Nicaragua expedition. With Walker, whose chief of artillery he was, he performed prodigies of valour, particularly distinguishing himself at the battle of Rivas, where at times he was a host in himself, loading and firing a gun which sent scores of the enemy to the ground at each discharge. During the Nicaragua campaign he was wounded 13 times, but these wounds were but a few of many others, for on his body there were 48 scars of wounds received in battles and personal conflicts at various times.

He had especially one terrible personal encounter in Camptonville, California, about the year 1858 with a man of desperate character, during which he received a most serious wound with an axe. He had previously had some trouble with this man, and it was understood that when they again met, they should “meet fighting.”

The desperado shortly after came into a saloon, armed with an axe, where he saw the major pleasantly sitting in his shirt sleeves with a large knife in his hand. As the desperado advanced, the major rose and stood warily watching his foe and perfectly motionless, save that he constantly turned the wrist of the hand that held the knife, so that the weapon disagreeably flashed in the eyes of his opponent.

All of a sudden, as the desperado’s eye was fixed on the knife, the major sprang forward with the leap of a tiger and drove the knife not through the heart but through the whole body of his foe, the point projecting at his back. At the same moment, the blade point projecting the axe was buried in the small of the major’s back. Both fell on the floor together.

The desperado was dead, but the major, contrary to expectation, recovered, and was as ready as ever for fresh exploits and adventures. His numerous deeds of daring would fill a volume. He ultimately settled in San Francisco, where he accumulated a considerable amount of property.

After shooting himself in the head, he lingered for a few hours and assigned as a reason for the act he had committed that he feared he would ultimately become insane owing to one of the wounds he had received which affected his head.

The major was proprietor of a well-known saloon bearing his name, he was much esteemed by all who had the pleasure of his acquaintance, and his death has greatly shocked the whole community of San Francisco. The only wish he expressed in his last moments was that “he might die a man.” He need hardly have troubled himself on this score, for whatever may have been his errors there was certainly nothing feminine in his nature. — Pall Mall Gazette

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‘I Bequeath Myself to the Dirt …’

Whitman tomb, Harleigh Cemetery, Camden, New Jersey, November 2012.

“Forum,” KQED’s daily discussion show, is doing reruns this holiday week. And today one of the topics covered was titled “Would You Consider Becoming Compost?” The subject was a new California law that allows people to choose to compost their remains instead of embalming and burying or cremating them. One of the guests was from Recompose, a Seattle company that does “ecological death care,” aka human composting. One of the facts she shared is that the company’s process renders a body into about one cubic yard of soil — enough to comfortably fit in the bed of a pickup truck. That sounds like a lot of “material”; she explained that the volume is due to soil used in the composting process.

Composting sounds all right to me. And the show topic reminded me of one of my favorite pieces of poetry, a section from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” It comes from the famous “I sound my barbaric yawp” passage: 

I bequeath myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

Ah — what an optimistic vision of how we might persist on this Earth we love and link ourselves to the future and future-kind. I am not looking for an epitaph just yet, but those last three lines certainly ring in my mind.

Whitman touched more than once on the process that would allow him to “bequeath myself to the dirt.” In “This Compost,” he mused on how the earth disposes of “those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations? Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?” He marvels at the “chemistry” that purifies these leavings and turns them into new growth and life so that “when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.”

Given his declared enthusiasm for the soil and leaving himself to future generations, it’s kind of ironic that Whitman wound up building a tomb in a Camden, New Jersey, cemetery for his final resting place (his brother George, a Union officer in the Civil War, and other family members are also interred there).

If you want to visit, the Harleigh Cemetery in Camden is pretty easy to find. Failing to fetch him at first, check your map apps. He’s stopped right there, waiting for you.

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Road Blog: Never Rip

Driving in search of an aspen grove I had read about — more accurately described as a “clone,” a stand of trees generated from a single seed and growing from a single root system — that is alleged to be the world’s most massive organism, I happened across the above, painted on the side of the general store in Koosharem, Utah. That’s about 150 miles south of Salt Lake City and not too awfully far from Interstate 70 (to the north) and Interstate 15 (to the west). Here’s a 2012 image of the same sign, which suggests strongly the piece has been “renewed “over the years.

John Scowcroft and Sons, the Ogden, Utah, firm that made Never Rip Overalls through about 1940, was founded by an English convert to Mormonism who emigrated to Utah in 1880. His commercial endeavors in his new home are reported to have started in the confectionery and bakery business and later expanded into clothing and dry goods.

It’s not clear exactly when Scowcroft and Sons began making “Never Rip Overalls.” ZCMI — Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution, the Utah firm formed in the late 1860s to promote Mormon enterprises and entrepreneurs — marketed “never rip” overalls around the turn of the 20th century, as did a New York-based firm that made Keystone Never Rip Overalls. (And “never rip” was a popular sales claim in this era, as evidenced by the slogan for Ypsilanti Health Underwear: “Never rip and never tear — Ypsilanti Underwear.”)

But based on what you find in the newspaper archives it appears that Scowcroft probably started turning out overalls and started a big advertising push for Never Rip Overalls in 1913. The company’s ads touted the clothes’ durability, of course, but put more emphasis on the fact that its products were made in Ogden and that its workers’ salaries supported other local businesses. It claimed a weekly payroll of $1,200 to $1,500 for 150 “boys and girls” (the latter sometimes described as “Utah maids”) who made the goods. Scowcroft also advertised that it was a union shop — apparently organized by the United Garment Workers Union.

Ogden Standard, June 9, 1913.
Ogden Standard, July 9, 1913.

Based on those payroll numbers, workers were making an average of $8 to $10 a week. If you figure a 50-hour work week, that would put pay at 16 to 20 cents an hour. Since workers at the plant were paid a piece rate, getting compensated for each item they produced rather than for each hour worked, pay probably varied widely. Scowcroft said in a recruitment ad late in the decade that “girls” were started out at $7.50 a week during training but could earn much more — even $27 a week — once they picked up speed. (One government report from this era suggests a typical work week in the garment industry was more like 55 to 60 hours a week. Average wages ranged from 14 to 40 cents an hour depending on the skill involved in the position and workers’ gender — then as now, female workers were paid less than men working in the same positions.)

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‘George A. Wyman, 1st Across America’

George A. Wyman waypoint, Emigrant Gap, California, August 2017.

We happened across the sign above along Interstate 80 west of Donner Summit at the beginning of a road trip to see the August 2017 solar eclipse. 

It took me nearly five years and a chance encounter with this image to actually look up George A. Wyman and what the whole “1st Across America” thing is about.

In short: Back in 1903, he made what is said to have been the first trip across the United States via motorized vehicle — in his case, a motorized bicycle produced by a company in San Francisco. Wyman’s journey began in the city, too: at Lotta’s Fountain, on Market Street. The fountain became famous three years after Wyman’s departure as a meeting place in the aftermath of the 1906 Great San Francisco Earthquake, a bit of history that’s commemorated with a pre-dawn ceremony every April 18, the anniversary of the catastrophe. 

Naturally, you’ll want to read more about George A. Wyman and his machine.

If I’m right, you’ll want to check out the George A. Wyman Memorial Project, which has published a day-by-day account of the adventurer’s cross-country journey. The site includes a pretty good tale, too, about how the late publisher of the Los Angeles Times found and restored a 1902-vintage motor bicycle that he believed to be the one Wyman rode.  

The day-by-day account mentioned above is drawn from Wyman’s dispatches — including pictures — to a publication called Motorcycle Magazine, which sponsored the trip. The story that unfolds in those reports shows Wyman to have been unflinching in the face of often hostile conditions along his route and the frequent breakdowns of his 90-pound, 1.25-horsepower machine. Especially in the West, he regularly found the bone-rattling ride along railroad ties — yes, he was riding on the railroad— preferable to the deep sand or intractable mud that made it miserable to travel on what passed for roads. When the trip was over, he estimated he’d ridden 1,500 miles on the cross-ties; on several occasions, he had close calls with trains that overtook him when he was on the tracks.

Occasionally, Wyman turned in truly dramatic accounts of his travels. His June 4, 1903, entry, describing his trip through a mountain downpour between Laramie and Cheyenne, Wyoming, is a must-read.

But mostly, he was matter-of-fact about most of his difficulties. Here he is a few days later, mentioning a piece of equipment had broken:

“One more cyclometer was sacrificed on the ride from Ogallala to Maxwell (Nebraska), snapped off when I had a fall on the road. I do not mention falls, as a rule, as it would make the story one long monotony of falling off and getting on again. Ruts, sand, sticks, stones and mud, all threw me dozens of times. Somewhere in Emerson I remember a passage about the strenuous soul who is indomitable and ‘the more falls he gets moves faster on.’ I would like to see me try that across the Rockies. I didn’t move faster after my falls. The stones out that way are hard.”

He frequently commented on the reception he got along the way — which was mostly amazement at both the length of his journey and the technology he was using. On June 24, he stopped for the night in Ligonier, Indiana, a town about halfway between Chicago and Toledo:

“I thought that when I got east of Chicago folks would know what a motor bicycle is, but it was not so. In every place through which I passed, I left behind a gaping lot of natives, who ran out into the street to stare after me. When I reached Ligonier I rode through the main street, and by mistake went past the hotel where I wanted to stop. When I turned and rode back the streets looked as though there was a circus in town. All the shopkeepers were out on the sidewalks to see the motor bicycle, and small boys were as thick as flies in a country restaurant. When I dismounted in front of the hotel the crowd became so big and the curiosity so great that I deemed it best to take the bicycle inside. The boys manifested a desire to pull it apart to see how it was made.“

Wyman’s motor bicycle was a sort of hybrid, consisting of what looked like a conventional bicycle frame fitted with a small gas tank and motor. A leather drive belt — which broke and required mending constantly — ran between the motor’s crank shaft and a pulley on the rear wheel. The motor and transmission apparatus had given out as Wyman neared the end of his journey. Luckily, he could simply pedal the bike, and pedal he did, riding the last 150 miles from Albany to New York City without stopping overnight to sleep:

“I made frequent stops to rest and I attracted more than a little attention but I was too tired to care. I can smile now as I recall the sight I was with my overalls on, my face and hands black as a mulatto’s, my coat torn and dirty, a big piece of wood tied on with rope where my handlebars should be, and the belt hanging loose from the crankshaft. I was told that I was ‘picturesque’ by a country reporter named ‘Josh,’ who captured me for an interview a little way up the Hudson, and who kept me talking while the photographer worked his camera, but to my ideal, I was too dirty to be picturesque. At any rate, I was too tired then to care. All I wanted was a hot bath and a bed. ”

Wyman’s arrival in New York after his 50-day epic attracted little attention, it seems. A scattering of papers across the country carried a brief Associate Press story that hailed him as “the first man to cross the American continent on a power-propelled road vehicle.” Motorcycle Magazine suggests one reason the feat may not have gained wider attention: Wyman himself didn’t boast about it.

“Now that the narrative has been completed and a review of the whole trip can be taken, it stands out in its entirety as a supreme triumph for the motor bicycle,” the magazine said. “It was not only the most notable long distance record by a motorcycle, but also it was the greatest long trip made in this country by any sort of a motor vehicle.  This is a fact to which attention was not called by Wyman in his story and it is one that should be emphasized.  In fact, Wyman’s story was altogether too modest throughout.”