You might call this a transition day in rock music history. For instance, one year to the day after the Rolling Stones released “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” …
… Brian Jones left the Stones, to be replaced by Mick Taylor.
The Rolling Stones had a big day today in 1963: They made their first TV appearance and released their first single:
The number one song today in 1975 (pictured with the official tractor of Roesch Farms):
Five years later, Gary Numan drove his way to number nine:
Today is the 70th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Europe, D-Day.
I hadn’t planned on writing about D-Day because so many others are commemorating it today … until I found something that I think well symbolizes D-Day specifically and the difference between Americans and others on this planet. It was written by Thomas D. Hazlett in 1999 about Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day: The Climactic Battle of World War II:
Even today we think of the Wehrmacht as a mighty force. Certainly, its well-trained, well-armed, battle-tested soldiers struck a fearsome pose at Normandy, the most heavily fortified coastline in history. The Allies viewed the Germans as an unforgiving piece of iron.
So doubts ran high as 175,000 Allied troops–Yanks, Brits, Canadians, and Aussies–traversed the English Channel. Could the children of democracy prove themselves warriors? Would they freeze in mortal combat? Adolf Hitler, who slept until noon on D-Day, believed the disciplined defenders of Third Reich would crush the soft soldiers of the liberal West.
Yet Ambrose shows that it was the rigid Nazi war command that fell apart on D-Day. The Allied soldier kept his head while all about him were (all too often) losing theirs. Such resilience proved necessary. The best-laid plans of the Supreme Allied Command were almost immediately rendered moot; the massive landing amounted to a chaotic dumping of troops into a very hostile environment. Allied forces landed out of position, units were a shambles, and radio communications were knocked out.
But Ambrose identifies a crucial difference between the German and Allied fighting men. The Germans were hamstrung by sweeping orders issued from far away. In contrast, the Allies relied on mid-level and junior-grade officers issuing impromptu commands based on facts gleaned first-hand.
There is no more dramatic example of F.A. Hayek’s seminal discovery: the importance of dispersed information–“knowledge of time and place.” Hayek, who was to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1974, published his memorable essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” in the American Economic Review just the year after D-Day. It explained the motive force driving Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” by noting that great efficiencies resulted when millions of dispersed individuals, motivated by market incentives, utilized the information uniquely available to them to make decisions. It’s why a decentralized competitive system beats a top-down bureaucracy, even when the planners are “experts.”
The bloody beaches of France graphically illustrate the advantages. German soldiers had been commanded to defend every inch of coastline. They were rendered immobile by strict orders to stay put–why trust low-level soldiers to freelance when the High Command had it planned out already? But that strict Wehrmacht policy saved Allied troops even in places where they were extremely vulnerable. The ferocious Panzer tank divisions set aside for counter-attack were too precious to trust to field commanders; only Der Führer had the right to deploy those. As the military genius in Berlin snoozed, German positions were overrun. Even then, despite reports from the front, Hitler held back his elite motorized units, convinced the real landing was to come at Pas-de-Calais.
Meanwhile, Allied soldiers dodged mines and intense enemy fire. They were hopelessly ill-equipped–in the chaos of the landing, their best heavy equipment never made it to shore–but they improvised. Mid-level commanders–sometimes a sergeant was the highest-surviving rank–seized the moment, issuing orders and rallying soldiers. Empowered by a flexible command structure, leaders emerged instantly, spontaneously. Fighting units were reconstituted and assault plans redefined on the fly.
Perhaps the classic demonstration was the landing on Utah Beach at 6:30 a.m.–the first wave. Due to unexpectedly strong tides, landing craft deposited units over 1,000 meters from their pre-arranged positions. Heavy machine gun fire pinned down those who managed to survive long enough to reach the beach. Crouching for cover, U.S. infantrymen assembled and spread out their maps. They had no radio contact, and most of their commanders could not be located. What the hell to do? Should they get down the beach to where they were supposed to be, or attack the German artillery directly in front of them?
The ranking officer quickly made a decision: “Let’s start the war from here.” With that, brave Americans charged Nazi fortifications straight ahead, knocked out guns, scaled the bluff, and circled around to capture the ground they had originally been assigned to take.
While no lowly soldier in the Wehrmacht had the authority to revamp official orders, the Allied invasion consisted of little besides ad hoc heroism. Decentralized information stormed the beaches on June 6, 1944, and irreparably breached the Atlantic Wall by dusk. Pretty good theory for one day’s work. Pretty good work for one day’s theory.
That night (in the U.S.), Franklin Roosevelt, president and senior warden of his Episcopal church, led the nation in prayer:
Forty years later:
Sunday, meanwhile, is the 30th anniversary of one of the worst tornadoes in Wisconsin history, in Barneveld shortly after midnight, without warning:
I’ve written about Barneveld before here. The summer of 1984 was the summer after my grandfather’s death, so I was tasked with driving to Boscobel to pick up my grandmother for my brother’s graduation. I went down Thursday, stayed overnight, and we went back to Madison Friday morning. Iowa TV was reporting on severe weather to the west, but where I was all it did was thunder off in the distance.
The next morning, though, as we left, I flipped through the FM radio and heard some strange reports about civil defense and people saying they were all right. They made no sense given that we had heard nothing about a tornado the night before; no Madison TV had live coverage from Barneveld, and we hadn’t seen anything on TV about a tornado. Then we drove through Black Earth, where the tornado had gone after flattening much of Barneveld, and saw, on the east side of town, a huge tree uprooted.
The next day was my brother’s graduation. His graduation party was interrupted by a tornado warning, for a funnel cloud sighting one mile from our house. (I remain skeptical because that funnel cloud should have been visible from our house.) Three days later, another tornado warning was issued in Dane County.
Less than a year later, I did a journalism-class story on the one-year-later aftermath. I was struck then by the incongruous combination of brand new houses, empty concrete slabs where houses had been, and scrape marks on Barneveld’s water tower far higher than any vandal could have accomplished. And, of course, there were a group of gravestones in the Barneveld cemetery with the same date of death on them — June 8, 1984.
Harry Caray died in 1998, but he can still make news today.
Caray announced for 25 years for the Cardinals before he was fired by owner Gussie Busch. I have heard, from people who were in a position to know, more than one version as to what specifically got Caray fired, though the general detail is consistent, as reported by Chicago Sports Memories:
After the 1969 season, his 25th with the Cardinals, Caray was abruptly fired. “I expected a gold watch,” he later joked, “but what I got was a pink slip.” It was a devastating blow, but not a complete surprise in light of allegations that he had become amorously involved with the attractive young wife of an Anheuser-Busch executive. Caray never denied it. “I’d rather have people believing the rumor and have my middle-aged ego inflated,” he said, “than deny it and keep my job.”
The other version, by the way, was that he “had become amorously involved” with the girlfriend of a very, very, very senior “Anheuser–Bush executive.”
After one season in Oakland, Caray moved to Chicago to announce for the White Sox.
But most baseball fans know Caray from his years announcing the Cubs.
After the Cubs improbably won the 1984 National League East title, Caray said in the Cubs’ locker room …
According to this Chicago Sun–Times story, Caray usually got his wish, even keeping records:
Grant DePorter, CEO of the Harry Caray’s chain of eateries, inherited the diary, one of eight, all from the ’70s and early ’80s, in four boxes of memorabilia, World Series tickets and cashed checks, that the executor of Caray’s estate found when he cleaned out his office.
Knowing my interest in all things historical, DePorter asked if I wanted to take a peek at one, and I swung by Harry’s and walked away with 1972.
I should say right away that this is not a Dear Kitty, pour-out-your-heart, frank-assessment-of-my-friends kind of diary. Old Harry was not big on introspection, as he was the first to admit.
“I’m a convivial sort of guy. I like to drink and dance,” he told an interviewer once.
Caray was the Cardinals’ color broadcaster for many years in St. Louis. Driven out of town in 1969, he migrated to Chicago, via a misfire year in Oakland, to announce first for the hapless White Sox, finishing his career in a golden twilight glow with the Cubs.
In 1972, he had just begun his tenure with the Sox. A savvy businessman, Caray cut a deal pegged to ballpark attendance, which doubled, largely thanks to his flamboyant presence. It would make him very wealthy, though in 1972 he was still tallying each bar tab.
“Remember, you used to be able to deduct a three-martini lunch,” DePorter said.
Saturday, Jan. 1, lists four bars: the Back Room, still on Rush Street, plus three long-ago joints: 20 E. Delaware, Sully’s and Peppy’s, with expenses for each $10.30, $9.97, $10, and $8.95. This in a year when a six-pack of Old Style set you back $1.29.
You needed to cite who you entertained to get the write-off, so on New Year’s Day he lists Dave Condon, the Tribune sports columnist; Billy Sullivan, who owned Sully’s; and Joe Pepitone, the former Yankees first baseman who had been traded to the Cubs.
And so it begins. A chain of old-time Chicago bars — Riccardo’s, Boul Mich, Mr. Kelly’s. A posse of early 1970s sports figures — Wilt Chamberlain, Don Drysdale, Gale Sayers. Plus a few unexpected blasts from the past: boxer Jack Dempsey, comedian Jack Benny.
“These guys did nothing but go out and have a few cocktails,” said Jimmy Rittenberg, who owned Faces, which Caray visited 14 times in 1972. “I don’t know how they did it. They were 20, 30 years older than me and I couldn’t keep up with them.”
Jan. 16 something unusual happens. Caray is in Miami, yet there are no expenses, just one enigmatic word, “Super.”
After that break, if indeed it was, comes 288 consecutive days in bars, not only in Chicago, but New York City, and of course on the road with the Sox, beginning with spring training in Sarasota.
The unbroken streak pauses Nov. 3, when all we get is “to K City @310.” The only completely blank day is Monday, Nov. 6 — what must THAT have been like? Then off to the races again.
Clay Felker, founder of New York magazine. Caray’s former boss, A’s owner Charlie Finley. A few surprises: Sox owner John Allyn. Several times. That surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. All I knew about their relationship was that Allyn fired Caray, and Caray replied with this timeless retort:
“I can’t believe any man can own a ballclub and be as dumb as John Allyn. Did he make enough to own it, or did he inherit it? He’s a stupid man. This game is much too complicated for a man like John Allyn.”
But that was 1975, the epic year when White Sox players complained they did so poorly because of Caray’s critical broadcast booth assessments, drawing my favorite Caray line: “Hey, you can’t ballyhoo a funeral.”
So what was it like to stand in the Pump Room (16 visits in 1972) and hoist a few with Caray?
“I was out with Harry Caray a couple of times,” the Tribune’s Rick Kogan said. “It was always at the Pump Room. He was one of the most charming people in the world.”
How so?
“Drunk but joyful,” Kogan said. “It always wound up being a joyful, laughter-filled time.”
Caray was always surrounded by friends like TV sportscaster Tim Weigel.
“He really liked Tim Weigel,” Kogan said. “I was an audience, at best, with those two characters around. They had incredible mutual affection. There was no better place to share that mutual affection than over way too many cocktails.”
I assumed that White Sox broadcasters today do not hang out in bars every night fraternizing with ballplayers and other assorted celebrities. But, not liking to assume things, I phoned the Sox and asked whether current announcers Steve Stone, who shared a mike with Caray, or Ken Harrelson, burned the midnight oil.
They declined to comment.
That kinda says it all, huh?
Toward the end of the diary, on Dec. 24, comes the kicker. After spending at least 354 of the previous 357 days in bars (DePorter counted 61 different tap houses) Caray writes, in a bold hand, “Vacation in Acapulco. Then “Vacation” every day until the year runs out.
Which makes me wonder how he knew he was on vacation. I guess if nobody was playing baseball in front of him and when he looked over the rim of his drink he saw Mexico, then he knew he was on vacation.
But give Caray credit. As old-fashioned, and perhaps even pathological, as the bar-crawling seems today, there is another truth worth mentioning: Harry Caray could have taken his drinks at home. He went out because it was his job.
“He felt the bartender and bar people were his fans,” Rittenberg said. “He felt he was responsible He would stop in 10 joints. He was just a gregarious guy.”
Bleacher Report adds:
Jimmy Rittenberg, former proprietor of Faces—a bar Caray visited 14 times over the course of 1972—says Caray and his drinking buddies could outlast men 30 years their junior at the bar.
“These guys did nothing but go out and have a few cocktails,” Rittenberg said. “I don’t know how they did it. They were 20, 30 years older than me and I couldn’t keep up with them.”
Well, this being Wisconsin, it is hardly our place to criticize one’s drinking habits as long as one can hold one’s liquor. As far as I know, Caray was never arrested for drunk driving, and Caray was well known for drinking, not for incidents resulting from said drinking.
After Caray died, his son, Braves announcer Skip Caray, told the story of Harry, his then-broadcast partner Jack Buck, and young Skip going out the night before a Cardinals spring training game. The next day’s game against the White Sox included a catcher (who later ended up with the Brewers) named Gerry McNertney, whose last name proved difficult to announce for the presumably hung-over older Caray and Buck. “McNertney” proved so difficult, in fact, that the two decided to replace him before his third at-bat, despite the fact that McNertney was still playing. Radio is theater of the mind, after all.
(I might as well point out here that I have never broadcast while inebriated, though I have occasionally had a beer or two before games, and I have never imbibed during games. There is no opportunity to do so in high school and college games, unless you figure out a way to sneak in a bottle. I assume that announcing while impaired in today’s society is a good way to make that game your last game as an announcer.)
Skip Caray was known to hoist a few, too, or at least make drinking references. More than once, he said, “The bases are loaded, and I wish I was too,” sometimes replacing himself with the manager having to deal with the bases-loaded mess. Caray would also, until Braves owner Ted Turner made him stop, announce the bottom of the fifth inning by saying, “We’ve come to the bottom of another fifth.” Unlike his father, however, Skip’s health — according to one account, diabetes, congestive heart failure, an irregular heartbeat and reduced kidney and liver function — made him stop drinking, though after Harry missed a few games after becoming overcome during a game in Florida he reportedly switched to nonalcoholic beer.
Skip Caray died at 68. His father, Harry, was reportedly 83 when he died. Skip claimed Harry reduced his age every time he got a new employer, which, whether true or not, certainly adds to the aura, doesn’t it?
I took this photo (untouched) with my new smartphone in Kieler, Wis., at my oldest son’s baseball game last night. The temperature was in the 70s. I was wearing one of my 32,754 polo shirts and shorts. The only problems were the gnats, which are nasty enough this year to carry off someone.
The weather is expected to be similar today, when I travel to Cassville to cover a baseball regional final game between the Comets and their archrival Potosi (one of the state champion teams I’ve gotten to cover, back in 1993). The game comes on at 4:45 p.m. on http://www.theespndoubleteam.com.
After the craptacular damnable winter we lived through, I think we deserve this.
We begin with a song that was set on this date (listen to the first line):
The number one song today in 1955 was probably played around the clock by the first top 40 radio stations:
Anniversary greetings to David Bowie and Iman, married today in 1992:
Right Wisconsin’s Savvy Pundit could have opened with “Please allow me to introduce myself,” from the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil”:
Hello, my name is Evil. I know I am not a welcome guest at your societal garden party. I know most of you like to ignore me or pretend I simply do not exist. I know acknowledging me makes a lot of you queasy because it runs counter to the polite, oh-so-politically-correct, anti-absolutist, relativistic fantasy world you have created for yourselves.
But let me warn you, and state this unequivocally: I will not be ignored.
Oh, I know you’ve tried. I concocted shootings and drugs and gang violence. You relegated these occurrences to “news in brief” or ignored them completely as if I didn’t even exist that these were just normal byproducts of urban life and not clear evidence of my presence. How rude of you.
Since you callously wouldn’t acknowledge my presence when the killings and shootings were merely one thug on another, I upped the ante and brought an innocent 10-year old on a playground into the mix. Surely that would get me noticed.Instead, you gave the credit to others. You blamed the gun used. You blamed poverty. You blamed race. You blamed Scott Walker. (Seriously, isn’t that becoming a little cliché? What, George W. Bush wasn’t available? You’re embarrassing yourselves.)
But as I noted, I WILL NOT be ignored. And so now I give you the Slender Man stabbings. Who or what are you going to try to blame this time?
Race? Ha! Whites
Urban male culture? Try again. 12 year old girls.
Guns? Nope, A knife.
Gangs? Don’t insult me! A pajama party sleepover.
Poverty? Better luck next time: Middle class.
Milwaukee? Try Waukesha.
Poor, underfunded, failing schools? Not a chance. Just to drive that point home a little more clearly I even used the modern-day mark of an affluent school – the school-issued iPad for every kid – as part of my play on this one.
And yet you continue to resist admitting my tangible existence. You cling doggedly to your relativistic claptrap. You live in a constant state of denial concerning the state of human nature. You try to wish away the Hobbesian reality, even after I give you example after nasty, brutish and short example of unfettered individuals living in their own state of nature. You believe that trying to constrain behavior by declaring the existence of any absolute of right or wrong makes you “intolerant,” something that you seem to believe is literally a fate worse than death. You believe that your children are blank slates of creative virtue and it is society’s role not to besmirch them with judgment, rules or absolutes instead of realizing that from birth they are self-centered bundles of depravity for whom virtue is an inherently unnatural act that can only be instilled in them intentionally over time by patience, persistence, and discipline.
We are supposed to be comforted by David Ignatius, I guess:
Perhaps it’s a consequence of the United States being a relatively young nation that had to tame a wild frontier, but through our modern history, Americans have had a tendency to worry about whether our leaders are “tough enough” for the world’s challenges. Presidents who talk about their yearning for peace, as Eisenhower often did, are frequently pummeled by commentators for being too “soft.”
We’ve recently been in one of those cycles ofnational worry, as critics attack President Obama’s supposedly feckless and weak-willed foreign policy. The particulars of the case against Obama involve his reluctance to use military force after the frustrating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Economist magazine raised the basic question of Obama’s credibility, asking in a May 3 cover headline: “What would America fight for?”
I agree that Obama’s foreign policy has not been as firm, especially in dealing with Syria and Russia, as it should have been. As a result, the United States has suffered some reputational damage. But listening to the recent debate, I have increasingly been struck by its recurring cyclical themes, as opposed to the specifics involving Obama. Yes, this president may be overly cautious. But a retreat to lick the nation’s wounds is fairly common after wars — and rarely does lasting damage.
A useful compendium of anxiety about U.S. weakness is a book called “Taking on the World,” about columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop, written by Robert W. Merry. He explains that at nearly every point from the late 1930s to the late 1960s, the Alsops (especially Joe, the dominant voice) were warning that weak and irresolute U.S. leaders would open the door for our adversaries — in Europe, China, Korea and Vietnam. Sometimes the Alsops’ jeremiads proved correct. But often, they were flat wrong.
The Alsops’ suspicion of Eisenhower was especially sharp. They feared Eisenhower’s willingness to make peace in Korea would open the way for Russian and Chinese aggression. “The future of Asia may well be at stake” in maintaining French power in Vietnam, Joe wrote in 1954. Similarly, wrote Stewart in 1955, the French retreat from Algeria “could fatally weaken the Western alliance.” The Atlantic alliance would “founder” if the British were defeated over Suez in 1956, wrote Joe. U.S. defenses would be gutted if Eisenhower cut $5 billion from the $40 billion defense budget in 1955. And on it went.
The Alsops’ concern about Eisenhower reached its apogee during the debate over a supposed “missile gap” between Soviet and U.S. strategic forces. In a 1958 column, Joe accused Eisenhower of being “misinformed” or “consciously misleading the nation” about the “flaccid” U.S. shortfall. Joe even pushed then-Sen. John F. Kennedy to make a 1958 speech about the “peril” represented by this imagined gap.
Ike knew from intelligence that the gap was nonexistent, but he feared blowing his sources, so he let the worriers rant on. When Kennedy became president, his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, finally seeing the intelligence, announced that the gap was a myth. Joe at first thundered that McNamara had been “hoodwinked by the bureaucracy.”
Then came Vietnam, a war that Joe chronicled and championed — and that he saw as an ultimate test of U.S. willpower. He brooded that Lyndon Johnson would display “presidential weakness” and applauded every escalation that showed Johnson would not “subside by degrees into surrender.” The United States finally retreated from Vietnam, but over time U.S. global power remained greater than ever.
The worriers get one big thing right. A strong, forward-leaning United States is essential for global security. But many of the fulminations about supposed weakness and retreat of U.S. power tend to be mistaken.
Ignatius is a political writer, and he appears to have no background in business journalism. You are familiar with the phrase “past performance does not necessarily lead to future results.” Apparently Ignatius is not.
Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson didn’t have to deal with radical Islam, fanatics who are ready to force others to submit to their perverted vision or destroy those who refuse to conform. None of them had to deal with Vladimir Putin, who wants to reassemble the old Soviet Union, and like the U.S.S.R. has nukes, while lacking the U.S.S.R.’s bad economics. The world views a five-terrorist-for-one-deserting-soldier prisoner swap, and laughs at us. Think China is afraid of us? Perhaps some Chinese leader will resurrect Nikita Khrushchev’s prediction, “We will bury you.”
Believe it or not, the U.S. has enemies. Russia, for one. Iran, for another. No country has ever lost a war because it was too strong, but countries lose when they are too weak. And that is now us under our spineless, feckless administration.
You have to be either willingly ignorant, a blind optimist or an Obama-lover to not believe the U.S. is worse off, and getting worse, under Obama and his America-weakening foreign policy.
Not that my parents were paying attention, but the number one song two days into my life was:
Twenty-eight years later, the number one song was by a group that sang about aging nearly two decades earlier:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 