The final resting place of the spectacularly corrupt Boss Tweed, right, and the headstone for New York journalist Pete Hamill, left.
I was in Brooklyn recently and spent most of one afternoon walking around Green-Wood Cemetery. I knew that among the luminaries, scoundrels and common people of New York resting there is William Magear Tweed, better known as Boss Tweed for his corrupt reign as head of Tammany Hall political machine in the 1860s and early ’70s. Tweed’s resting place is marked on a handout map I picked up at the cemetery gate, and after tracking down Leonard Bernstein, DeWitt Clinton and a varriety of lesser mortals, I set out to find him.
Many, many Green-Wood graves declare the importance of the interred with monumental columns and all manner of statuary. Tweed’s is substantial but less than imposing. Standing there taking in the scene, my eye was drawn to another headstone, one just behind and to the left of Tweed’s. It belongs to Pete Hamill, a Brooklyn-born journalist, novelist, raconteur and adviser to Robert F. Kennedy during the 1968 presidential campaign.
What’s the story there? Why is Hamill hanging out with Tweed?
Hamill had a lifelong attachment to Green-Wood — he grew up nearby and played there as a kid — and had often expressed a kind of admiration for Tweed, especially his political skills and attention to what politicos now call “constituent services.”
In reviewing a 2005 Tweed biography for The New York Times, Hamill wrote: “Give me Tweed before any crusader for earthly utopias: religious, Marxist, fascist or neocon. Save me from tinhorn messiahs, and from almost every Republican or Democrat now holding public office. In this era of true believers and invincible mediocrity, give me Tweed.”
Sometime around 2010, Hamill asked Green-Wood’s president, Rich Moylan, for a tour.
“Pete said, ‘Rich, I really need to buy a plot in the Green-Wood,’ as he always called it,” Moylan recalled in a 2024 interview. “And I said, ‘Pete, if we drive around, you see a spot you like, let me know, and we’ll try to find something for you there.’ We got to Boss Tweed’s plot, and he said, ‘Rich, stop. There. Can you find me something there?’ I said, ‘We’ll try.’ Called him back a few weeks later, we found him a spot.”
Hamill certainly recognized Tweed’s flaws. His 2005 book review noted Tweed “remains the epitome of big-city corruption.”
But he adds: “Tweed is a wonderfully vivid subject, a man of gigantic, Rabelaisian hungers. He seems always to have wanted more. More food. More money. More power. Unfortunately, for a long time he got what he wanted.”
I don’t think Hamill the crusading journalist wanted a spot near Boss Tweed with the idea of keeping an eye on a larger-than-life ne’er-do-well. Instead, I’m guessing he figured that if there is some sort of bardo-like afterlife, he wanted the most entertaining company possible.
One of the best places in Berkeley to go for a stroll is the big campus a little ways uphill from us, the University of California. Even with round after round of new and ever-more-intensive construction and development, the main campus retains a hint of its original park-like feeling. It’s still has a good number of elegant old buildings that give a glimpse into the university’s past.
Above is Hilgard Hall, designed by John Galen Howard and built in 1916-17, is part of UC Berkeley’s agricultural complex. The full inscription, the work of UC President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, is “To Rescue for Human Society the Native Values of Rural Life.” I’ve always found the building attractive and wondered about that motto.
The university’s 1981 nomination to place Hilgard and more than a dozen other campus structures on the National Register of Historic Places includes a mini-history of the building and the inscription:
“In addition to its association with Eugene W. Hilgard and its historical importance as the second building to be added to the Agriculture complex, Hilgard is architecturally important as an unusual variation on the Classic theme, an attempt to incorporate Northern Italian Renaissance motifs into an academic, Neo-Classic design.
“Hilgard was dedicated October 13, 1917. The structure was originally to be sheathed in granite like [the adjoining] Wellman [Hall]; however, economy measures imposed by World War I changed the material to cement-washed concrete. The $350,000 for construction came from a $1.8 million bond issue from the Regents, provided by a 1914 State initiative. Twenty-five thousand dollars of the cost was for equipment. The building was begun August 1, 1916 and completed on schedule in 1917.
‘… The attic of the west elevation was planned to contain an inscription which President Wheeler and Howard at first wanted to apply to the work of Professor Eugene Hilgard who established the first U.S. agricultural experiment station at the University and served as the first Dean of the College of Agriculture (1874-1904), but they could not come up with an appropriate motto. In April, Howard suggested, ‘Given by the People of the State of California A.D. 1915,’ and in May, Wheeler suggested, ‘To bring food for the peoples from the breast of the earth.” Wheeler changed his mind and in September suggested ‘To (help) rescue for human society the moral values of rural life,’ which was changed to ‘To Rescue for Human Society the Native Values of Rural Life.'”
As always, there’s much more history here than meets the eye and more than one way of seeing it. I might be inclined to see the building as a relatively modest monument to John Galen Howard’s Beaux Arts sensibilities and the university’s rather lofty, not to say pretentious, statement of its mission. But what might lie below the surface?
Hilgard Hall — every element, from its namesake to its architectural details to the inscription — was the subject of a harsh critique a few years ago through the lens of critical whiteness studies. Among other things the author brings to light is Hilgard’s earlier career at the University of Mississippi, where he sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War and was an apologist for slavery.
In the author’s view, the building is a text in white supremacy. Describing the building’s inscription, the author writes:
“… We can scratch beneath the surface of the epigraph to hear whiteness speak its name. Without identifying a subject, the root verb to rescue interpellates whites. Domination disguised as saviorism is a classic imperialist move, predicated on the Racial Contract, or set of formal and informal agreements among whites to advantage themselves as a group through domination and exploitation of nonwhites. In naming the reality of the Racial Contract, Mills elucidates that ‘society’ is not made up of free and equal individuals, as European humanism declares, but rather is a divided between white people and racialised subpersons. To rescue is ‘the white man’s burden’ and fits the settler-colonial context of Manifest Destiny. …”
Franklin Treat House (aka Treat/Peirce House) in Frankfort, Maine.
If you head toward the Maine coast from Bangor on U.S. 1A, you come to a hamlet on the Penobscot River called Frankfort. Drivers are forced to slow down to negotiate a sharp lefthand turn, and when they do, they’re confronted with this house. Like many travelers, I stopped to take a couple of pictures. I’m not sure I’m showing the place to its best, or worst, advantage in the image above; there’s much more to take in here than you can capture in a five-minute stop.
Looking at the picture after the fact, I felt sure I could dig up some of the place’s history. I was right. The first thing I came across was a recent real estate listing that identifies the building as the Franklin Treat house, built in 1864. The agent’s writeup is unusually frank:
“The materials used and craftsmanship can still vaguely be seen, but decades of abandonment and lack of maintenance have taken a rough toll on this former beauty. Currently in need of a massive clean out then extensive renovations and repairs, this 4,300 square foot historic icon could offer up to 6 bedrooms and as many bathrooms with its three floors. Bring your safety shoes, flashlight and visions of preservation!”
The former elegance “can still vaguely be seen.” “In need of a massive clean out.” “Bring your safety shoes.” As my dad often said when looking at some lost cause house along the road, “All it needs is a little TLC.”
Listings show this beaten-down wreck and its one-acre lot went on the market for $79,900 in early 2024, eventually selling for $35,000 a year later. From all outward appearances, little or no work has been done on the place by its new owner, whoever she or he or they may be. A stack of books visible in one of the front windows in a Google Street View image from 2023 is still right where it was.
But there is more to learn and appreciate about this house. In 2022, Down East magazine ran a beautifully wrought short feature about the house. The very best part of the piece is the story of how the writer, Michele Christle, got to know the home’s owner, a man named Dana who bought the place years ago with a notion to turn it into a bed and breakfast:
“Dana purchased the forsaken mansard in 2013, sealing its fate in his once-capable hands,” Christle wrote. “I have now passed countless hours on the porch with him, our conversations often obliterated by Jake Brakes. I learned that he oversaw the renovations of four historic bed-and-breakfasts on Mount Desert Island, where he was an innkeeper for 25 years. The mansard is the sixth house he’s owned. Now 72, he enjoys entertaining, company, and surprises. The yard sales keep him going. Some days, however, his tone shifts. ‘This house is killing me,’ he’ll say. He’s survived two heart attacks; his kidneys aren’t functioning well. Doctors estimate that he has two years left to live. But he’s accomplished almost everything he set out to do in life, he told me. He doesn’t have regrets, except, perhaps, that he hasn’t been able to ‘do’ the house.”
The Down East story carries an editor’s note that Dana died shortly after the piece was published. On her own site, Christle called him an “incredible human.”
“I learned so much from Dana during the many hours I sat with him on his porch during his yard sales over the years—he was a magnanimous human, a showman full of generosity and hospitality,” Christle wrote. “He was kind, gentle, hilarious, and brimming with ideas for projects and a deep appreciation for spontaneity. I continue to learn from Dana (and his family and friends) even after his passing and am grateful for all he and the Treat Peirce house have given me to think about.”
“Elias Vance,” a fictional Georgia high school history teacher created by artificial intelligence. (Why is he walking toward the wall instead of the door?)
A while ago, a friend reposted an appealing little essay she’d come across on Facebook. The piece told of a Georgia high school history teacher who’d done his best for more than three decades to show his students the complex reality of the United States’ past.
“… My classroom was a living thing,” the essay said. “History there wasn’t a series of sterile, polished dates; it was loud, complicated, and often painful—just like the country itself. I taught the brilliance of the Constitution alongside the brutality of the Middle Passage. I wanted my students to feel the gravity of our past, to recognize the ghosts that still haunt our halls.”
The piece was attributed to an Elias Vance, and I have to say, he sounds like my kind of history teacher, telling it like it was (and is). But all was not well in his world, he wrote. His teaching had come to the notice of local school officials, who deemed his insistence on teaching the truth “divisive.” Faced with a demand to “soften the edges” of his lessons, to use dumbed-down textbooks and to emphasize America’s “positive heritage,” he walked. Now, he said, he spent his days posting occasionally on “the local community pages”:
“Just brief reflections, sharing the narratives the new books want to omit. I write about the unsung figures, the hard-earned victories, and the complex, tragic, beautiful story of us. The comment sections are a sea of former students—some now parents themselves—and total strangers. They all echo the same sentiment: “Don’t stop, Mr. Vance. We need the truth.”
Of course, when I went looking for more about the heroic Elias Vance, the story immediately fell apart. Our high school history hero proved to be an AI creation (as Snopes later confirmed ). Oh, the irony: an essay extolling the virtue of truth, the necessity to honestly appraise our history, that was a total fabrication.
Is there any harm in that? As my friend said when I pointed out the Elias Vance story was made up, the tale does point to a real issue — the push by Trump and his movement to sanitize, rewrite or deny key aspects of our history. The AI-generated story happens to present the issue in a way with which lots of people will sympathize: those alarmed by our president’s totalitarian impulses; those appalled by the denial of the nation’s legacy of racism and racist violence; those disgusted by attempts to erase the memory of Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election.
It’s true that our history is full of fables and too-good-to-be-true tales of virtue and heroism going back at least to Parson Weems’s invention of the George Washington cherry tree myth. Some of the stories are even based in fact. Abraham Lincoln really did have a nearly universal reputation for honesty. John F. Kennedy really was decorated for heroism for saving his PT 109 crew after it was struck by a Japanese destroyer and sank during World War II.
But it’s important to know the difference between pure invention and narratives based in fact, even when some of the facts may be disputed (some point to Lincoln’s penchant for political calculation as undercutting his “Honest Abe” image; naval experts are still debating the role Kennedy’s command decisions played in the sinking of PT 109).
So yes, in a world where it’s becoming harder and harder to retain a grip on what’s real and what’s not, the “Elias Vance, Honest History Warrior” hoax is damaging. It further erodes the boundary between reality and fiction. It also exposes a related problem: the tendency of large segments of social media audiences, even really smart people, to uncritically accept much of what they read and see.
To be honest, when I first saw the Elias Vance story, I was thinking of reposting it myself. But first I wanted to know more about Mr. Vance. Within a couple minutes of searching him online, it was apparent he didn’t exist. Within 10 minutes, it was obvious the story came from a Facebook account that has churned out multitudes of inspirational, AI-generated stories about people doing good deeds for the less fortunate. It was also clear that the account is just one of many — thousands? tens of thousands? millions? — doing the very same thing.
One example relates the story of a 72-year-old high school custodian who dies alone during his overnight shift and posthumously turns out to have been a mentor and benefactor to generations of students. It’s hard to do the story justice, really — ancient, kindly Mr. Vance, who to the teaching staff was merely “the invisible old man in the grey uniform who unclogged the toilets,” was running an all-in-one tutoring, crisis counseling and nutrition support service. He taught calculus, bought clothing for kids in need and was a reassuring ear to students facing crises like how to come out or deal with teen pregnancy. He even talked a student out of downing a bottle of pills to end her life. The story is chock-full of details like this:
“Elias’s daughter, Brenda, flew in from Chicago. She stood by the casket, looking overwhelmed and expensive in her designer suit. She told the funeral director she expected maybe ten people. She told him her father was a ‘distant man,’ a workaholic who cared more about his job than his family. ‘He never called,’ she said, adjusting her glasses. ‘He was always “working late.” I never understood why he loved mopping floors so much.’ “
There are probably dozens of other AI-generated Elias Vance stories floating around out there on social media. He’s a hero in some, a villain in others. Unlike the story of Elias Vance the history teacher, most are pretty obvious fictions.
Maybe the “Elias Vance History Teacher” tale reflects something real about our times, and that’s something that needs to be said. By the same token, though, it’s more important than ever to know what’s “real” in terms of events that have actually transpired and what’s invented to make a point about events. “The Grapes of Wrath” is an amazing and truthful document of its times, but it wasn’t a documentary.
“I reached some plains so vast, that I did not find their limit anywhere I went, although I traveled over them for more than 300 leagues … with no more land marks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea …. [T]here was not a stone, nor bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by.”
That was Coronado in 1541, describing his journey across the Plains in search of nothing that was actually there. Of course, the Llano Estacado — the Staked Plain — is anything but trackless today. I’ve driven through parts of it more than once. But despite all the ranching, farming, fencing, drilling and pumping that’s gone on there and is still going on, it retains a feeling of vast space.
(Here’s an excellent post on a ghost town in eastern New Mexico that talks about the origin of the name Llano Estacado.)
The Oxford English Dictionary definition of “retirement,” sense 4.a, which is said to have been in common use since the mid-18th century:
“The state or condition of having left office, employment, or service permanently, now esp. on reaching pensionable age; the period of a person’s life after retiring from office or employment. Also: the state of having withdrawn permanently from one’s usual sphere of activity. Frequently in in (one’s) retirement.”
I’m looking that up because — here’s my buried lede — I’ve worked my last day as a staff reporter and editor at KQED in San Francisco, and, having reached my early 70s, the popular notion of what lies ahead is retirement. I don’t think the OED definition quite fits me, though. I refer to the “condition of having left employment … permanently.” As I’ve been telling people, I don’t feel like I’m done with journalism, where I’ve spent nearly all of my adult life. I feel like I’ll always have stories to tell and will find ways of telling at least a few of them. But maybe that’s insecurity speaking, prompted by all the uncertainty I feel about what really comes next.
I’ll leave The Retirement Chronicles there for now. More to come.
Conor McGregor, as seen in central Derry, May 2025.
What’s going on here?
Conor McGregor, the former cage-fighting champion and Irish whiskey entrepreneur, has become de facto leader of an Irish anti-immigrant campaign with strong echoes of the U.S. MAGA movement. Further MAGA parallels: McGregor, who lost a civil suit alleging sexual assault earlier this year, has announced he’ll run for the Irish presidency. See: “Conor McGregor, MMA fighter, alleged rapist, Ireland’s next president?“
The first day of our trip to Ireland, back in late April, we ran into the aftermath of a McGregorite anti-immigrant rally in Dublin. It was staged just two days after the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, which opened Irish nationalists’ initially failed, ultimately victorious effort to end British rule. Rally participants wrapped themselves, literally, in the Irish tricolor, and some chanted slogans like “Ireland for the Irish.” In Trumpian fashion, McGregor claimed a vast throng of more than 100,000 people turned out. Having been in the area where the rally was held, there ain’t no way a crowd anywhere near that size was present. Most sources estimated it at about 5,000.
The anti-immigrant gathering was followed immediately afterward by a smaller anti-racist rally and march that began in front of the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, hallowed ground in modern Irish history as the site where the Easter Rising of April 1916 began. We walked alongside the march a few blocks to its end point outside the Garden of Remembrance, dedicated to the memory “of all those who gave their lives in the cause of Irish freedom.”
Why were we seeing a sign mocking Conor McGregor and his followers in Derry, a place where he won’t be running for anything? I think it’s because McGregor’s rhetoric touches a nerve in a place that at least outwardly is still closely linked to the struggle for Irish independence and the associated fight to achieve civil rights for the minority Catholic population.
The city is part of the six counties partitioned from the rest of Ireland in the early 1920s, which remain part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. The very name of the place is contested; in United Kingdom parlance, the town is called Londonderry. It’s famously divided along sectarian and the associated political lines, Protestant/Loyalist and Catholic/Republican. In Catholic/Republican parts neighborhoods, which is mostly what we saw, the ideology expressed in street art is still strongly, even radically, Republican, and embraces other liberation causes (Palestinian nationalism, for instance) and rejects McGregor’s narrow, reactionary, anti-immigrant nationalism.
Newly painted Palestinian nationalist/Irish Republican mural in Derry’s Bogside neighborhood, May 2025.
Hussey’s Folly, Dingle Bay, County Kerry, Ireland. May 2025.
“If you ever find yourself in Dingle” sounds like the start of a joke. I don’t know what the rest of it would be, but if you do ever find yourself there, there’s a beautiful walk out from the town’s harbor, past this tower, and then to the cliffs beyond.
The date given for the tower, called Hussey’s Folly, is 1845. That was the first of Ireland’s devastating famine years. The construction was a make-work project, something devised by a local landholder for the poor and hungry to do in return for wages or food. Similar projects, often involving exhausting physical labor like road-building, were carried out all over Ireland as the country starved. Here’s a decent writeup on the “famine roads,” some of which are still used as part of the national road network: www.frrandp.com/2025/01/famine-roads.html.
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!”
