By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2016/10/24/how-the-world-turned-since-their-last-series-triumphs/In 1954, Edward R. Murrow forced a fabled television showdown with Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy on Murrow’s groundbreaking
news program,
See It Now. The two men had more in common than just their middle initial. They were both born the same
year in which the Cubs last won the World Series—Murrow in Guilford County, North Carolina; McCarthy in Grand Chute,
Wisconsin.
And, no, their coincidental same year birth has nothing to do with the Cubs winning their last World Series championship to
date, pending the outcome of the proceedings due to begin Tuesday night. Your chronicler was born four years to the day
after
See It Now‘s 1951 premiere, and even they won’t hold it against him.
Murrow and McCarthy were hardly the only significant births in 1908. So were those of Michael E. DeBakey, M.D. (the cardiac
pioneer who made open heart surgery possible), Abraham Maslow (the psychologist who fashioned the subsequently-criticised
“hierarchy of human needs”), Mel Blanc (also known as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Sylvester and Tweety, Burns & Allen’s Happy
Postman, and Jack Benny’s put-upon violin teacher), Lyndon Johnson, Estee Lauder, Thurgood Marshall, Oskar Schindler, the
Model T Ford, and
the Hoover vacuum cleaner.
Some say this year’s Cubs and Indians beat as they sweep as they clean. Which probably means this World Series to come
isn’t going to end before a seventh game. Some also say, considering each team’s history of calamity following their last World
Series triumphs, that this Series could be called a Tragical History Tour.
In the year of the last Cubs World Series title, too, William Howard Taft won the presidency, the Eiffel Tower sent a long-distance
radio message for the first time, King Carlos I of Portugal was assassinated, Wilbur Wright made the first known flight on
European territory (specifically, France), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were thought to have been whacked in Bolivia,
and the
Christian Science Monitor published its first edition.
The Indians, whose last World Series conquest was 1948, shouldn’t feel left out. A woman born in 1908, Eve Arden, became
Our Miss Brooks and a radio star; a man responsible for turning rock and roll into macabre theater (Alice Cooper) was born;
two members (Mark Farner, Craig Frost) of America’s best-selling rock group of 1969-75 (Grand Funk Railroad) were also
born.
So was (uh, oh) Steve Goodman, the folk artist, author of
“The City of New Orleans,” and Cub fan who authored the Cubs’
rallying cry
“Go, Cubs, Go”—in 1984, the year of Goodman’s death of leukemia at 36 and Leon Durham’s error at first base
in Game Five of the National League Championship Series.
So were Gerry Adams (Sinn Fein president), Steve Barber (who’d combine on a no-hitter with Stu Miller for the 1960s Orioles),
Kathy Bates, Teresa Carpenter (who won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize re-awarded after original winner Janet Cooke’s winning article
turned out a fabrication), Donald Fehr (the former executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association), and
John Hart, who built the 1990s Indians powerhouse that ruled the American League Central without winning a World Series.
In the same year, Peter Goldmark created the long-playing (33 1/3 rpm) album at Columbia Records. Sri Lanka declared
independence from what was left of the British Empire. Warner Brothers filmed the first colour newsreel. Harry Truman prodded
Congress for a civil rights program.
McCollum v. Board of Education took religious instruction out of public schools. Cleveland’s
temperature hit the all time low of five below. Citation won the Kentucky Derby. North Korea proclaimed itself a Communist state
(oops! a democratic people’s republic). Israel became an independent country. Radio Denmark opened and
Finian’s Rainbow closed. California un-banned interracial marriage. The Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine—known colloquially as
Baby—ran the world’s first working program on an electronic stored-program computer. And, Orville Wright died . . . eleven
months before the original Wright flyer went to the Smithsonian.
The Indians may have won the World Series, but in 1948 they also broke the American League colour line, courtesy of (in order)
Larry Doby and Satchel Paige and set a team record for most double plays (turning, not hitting into, wisenheimers) in a game,
with six.
The Cubs haven’t won the World Series in so long that if they win this one, they’ll have featured the first black men ever to play
on a Series winner in a Cubs uniform. That spinning sound you hear is that of Cap Anson, in his grave, and long may the racist
spin.
It was Anson, the player-manager for the franchise when still known as the White Stockings, who refused an exhibition game
against the Toledo Blue Stockings whose catcher, Fleet Walker, was black, instigating the formal colour line Jackie Robinson
would fracture forever in 1947.
When Albert Spalding—owner during the Anson era—sold the team in 1902, and a newspaper wag noticing their new youthful
makeup called them cubs, the team name became the Cubs. When the Cubs decided it was time to join the breakage of the
colour line, they couldn’t have done better if they pre-ordained it—picking another Kansas City Monarchs shortstop (as Robinson
had been), Ernie Banks.
Banks, the eternal optimist who taught people to smile through the worst of times without forgetting them. Banks, who genuinely
loved the game and the Cubs and who really did say, “It’s a beautiful day—let’s play two!”
Bet on it. He’s hectoring Larry Doby and Satchel Paige in the Elysian Fields right now, urging, “It’s a beautiful month—let’s play
two World Series!” What a wonderful idea! It would beat the living hell, historical and otherwise, out of Election Day, among other
current national sorrows.
