Lance Mannion

Poor and lonely in the Texas Hill Country

Posted Wednesday night, August 21, 2019.

Somewhere on the LBJ Ranch. Lyndon Johnson National Historical Park. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.

When I look through the notebooks in which I took my notes from the interviews with those men and women, I find over and over the word “poor” written. There was a level of poverty there that a city person could hardly imagine. Some of the families who lived outside the little towns that dotted the Hill Country---Dripping Springs, Blanco, Junction, Telegraph---still lived in the log dwellings called “dog-runs,” which were two separate rooms or cabins connected under a continuous roof, with an open corridor that had been left between them for ventilation. That was where the dogs slept. When Lyndon Johnson was growing up, there was very little cash in Johnson City. Very little. You could get a dime for a dozen eggs, but you had to sell them in Marble Falls, and Marble Falls was twenty-three miles away from Johnson City. One of Lyndon Johnson’s boyhood friends, Bed Crider, relates how he rode horseback the twenty-three miles between Johnson City and Marble falls keeping the horse at a walk and carrying those dozen eggs in a bos he held in front of him so they wouldn’t break, just for a dime. “Lonely” is a word that I found over and over again in my notes...Lyndon Johnson didn’t even grow up in Johnson City, small and isolated as it was; he grew up on the Johnson Ranch, which was fourteen miles beyond Johnson City, farther out into the hills. One corner of that ranch came down next to what they called the Austin-Fredericksburg Road, which was really not a road but only a graded, rutted path between these two places. Lyndon’s little brother, Sam Houston Johnson, would tell me how he and Lyndon used to sit on the fence at that corner for hours when they were little boys hoping that a rider or carriage would come by so they’d have a new person to talk to.

---from “A Sense of Place” in “Working” by Robert Caro.

Math as liberation and resistance

Posted Friday night, August 16, 2019.

Soviet junior high school history classroom, circa the mid-1970s.

To a Soviet child, the afterschool math club was a miracle. For one thing, it was not school. Every morning Soviet children all over the country left their identical concrete block apartments a little after eight and walked to their identical concrete school buildings to sit in their identical classrooms with the walls painted yellow and with identical portraits of bearded dead men on the walls---Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in the literature classrooms, Mendeleev in the chemistry classroom, and Lenin everywhere. Their teachers marked attendance in identical class journals and reached for identical textbooks that they used to impart a perfectly uniform education to their charges, of whom they demanded uniformity in return. My own first-grade teacher...actually made me pretend my reading skills were as poor as the other children’s, enforcing her own vision of conforming to grade level. The first time I spent an afternoon solving math problems...I sat for what seemed like an eternity, holding a pencil over a drawing of some shape. I do not remember the problem, but the solution required transposing the shape. I sat, unable to touch my pencil to paper, until a teaching assistant came by and asked me a very basic question, something like “What might you do?”

“I might transpose it, like this,” I answered.

“So do it,” he said.

Apparently, this was a place where I was expected to think for myself...I hunched over my piece of paper, sketched out the solution in a couple of minutes, and felt a wave of relief so total that I think I became a math junkie on the spot...The joy of feeling my brain rev up, rush toward a solution, and be affirmed for it felt like love, truth, hope, and justice all handed to me at once.

---Masha Gessen,  “Perfect Rigor”.

Mathematics was antithetical to the Soviet way of everything

Posted Sunday night, August 11, 2019.

VASILY FEDOSENKO / REUTERS

That Russia produced some of the twentieth century’s greatest mathematicians is, plainly, a miracle. Mathematics was antithetical to the Soviet way of everything. It promoted argument; it studied patterns in a country that controlled its citizens by forcing them to inhabit a shifting, unpredictable reality; it placed a premium on logic and consistency in a culture that thrived on rhetoric and fear; it required highly specialized knowledge to understand, making the mathematical conversation that was indecipherable to an outsider; and worst of all, mathematics laid claim to singular and knowable truths when the regime had staked its legitimacy on its own singular truth. All of this is what made mathematics in the Soviet Union uniquely appealing to those whose minds demanded consistency and logic, unattainable in virtually any other area of study. It is also what made mathematics and mathematicians suspect. Explaining what makes mathematics as important and beautiful as mathematicians know it to be, the Russian algebraist Mihkal Tsfasman said, “Mathematics is uniquely suited to teaching one to distinguish between right and wrong, the proven from the unproven, the probable from the improbable. It also teaches us to distinguish that which is probable and probably true from the which, while apparently, probable, is an obvious lie…"

---from "Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century" by Masha Gesson.

What Sam Johnson refused to see that his son made a point of seeing all too well

Posted late Thursday night, July 25, 2019.

The Pendernales River as it flows along the southern edge of the LBJ Ranch in Johnson City, Texas. Photo by Cynthia Dorminey courtesy of the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park and the National Park Service.

“The Years of Lyndon Johnson”, Robert Caro’s not-yet-finished multi-volume biography of LBJ, has been the nonfiction equivalent of Proust for me: something I feel I have to read but keep putting off for “someday” when I can carve out the uninterrupted time. Reading “A Sense of Place”, the essay in Caro’s book of essays on his life as a writer, “Working”, on how Caro researched how the land LBJ grew up on informed LBJ’s character and influenced his life and his politics,as if they’re separate things, is making me think “someday’ is fast approaching and I should start carving.  

Generations before, during the 1870s and 80s, the era of the “Cattle Kingdom,” there had been a great, sprawling Johnson Ranch along the Pendernales River from which huge herds had been driven up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, with the original Johnson Brothers returning with their saddle bags bulging with gold. But the family had ceased making money and had lost the ranch some decades before Lyindon was born in 1908 and now, when Lyndon was about ten years old, it came on the market, and Sam Johnson determined to buy it---to recreate the original “Johnson Ranch,” to make the whole Pendernales Valley “Johnson Country” again.

One reason the ranch had been lost, however, was that its soil had worn out, had washed away when cattle grazed on it, or, later, when attempts were made to grow cotton on it, and there was no longer much soil left on the limestone base. You couldn’t do anything with the land. It still looked beautiful and fertile---when you go to the ranch today, the grass covers those rolling hills; there are still big, majestic live oak trees with their shiny leaves, but beautiful as it was when Sam looked at it, there wasn’t going to be any way of making much money out of the land, and Sam didn’t realize that. Seeing how beautiful it was, he had this romantic dream of restoring the great Johnson Ranch, and so he believed he was going to make it pay, and, to outbid other people, he overpaid for the ranch. He paid so much that the ranch couldn’t possibly earn back what he paid for it, and very quickly, when Lyndon was fifteen, Sam went broke and lost the ranch. And a crucial element of Lyndon Johnson’s youth is a consequence of that loss: the insecurity that followed. The family...moved to a little house in Johnson City. Every month Lyndon had to live with the fear that the ban was going to take the house away. He lived in a house in which his father, broken by his financial failure, was constantly ill, and there was often no food, and neighbors brought covered plates. Worst of all, perhaps, his father became the laughing stock of the town, an object of ridicule (“Sam Johnson is a might smart man. But he’s got no sense”) in the speeches given at political barbeques as his son stood listening…

When I began The Path to Power, I had this romantic idea about Sam, that he was such a great legislator, fighting for the people and all. Then one day Lyndon’s cousin Ava, his favorite cousin, said to me---I could tell she didn’t like it when I talked about Sam in so admiring a way.---she said, “Let’s drive out to the Johnson Ranch and you get there and that grass-covered landscape looks beautiful, and fertile. And she said, “Now, get out of the car.” I got out of the car. Ava was an old woman but a very forceful woman. She said, “Now kneel down,” and I knelt down, and she said, “Now stick your fingers into the ground.” And I stuck my fingers into the soil and I couldn’t even get them into the ground the length of my finger. There was hardly any soil on top of that rock. There was enough to grow the beautiful grass but not enough to grow cotton or graze cattle. Ava said to me, “Do you understand now? Sam didn’t really see. He didn’t want to see. It looked so beautiful.” In other words, she was saying, he didn’t see the reality of it. The reality---the hard unblinking facts… 

---from “Working” by Robert Caro.

“The most important thing for Lyndon was not to be like Daddy.”

Posted Thursday night, July 18, 2019.

A master legislator with a romantic streak: Lyndon Johnson’s father, Sam Ealy Johnson, at work in his office in the Texas State House of Representatives, circa 1905. LBJ Presidential Library via Wikipedia.

You can’t get very deep into Johnson’s life without realizing that the central fact of his life was his relationship with his father. His brother, Sam Houston, once said to me, “The most important thing to be like Daddy.”

His father, Sam Ealy Johnson, looked remarkably like Lyndon. Both were over six feet tall, both had very big ears, both had that big jutting jaw and piercing dark eyes. And both had the habit---Sam when he was in the Texas legislature, Lyndon when he was in the House and the Senate in Washington---of putting one arm around the shoulders of someone they were trying to persuade while grabbing the person’s lapel with the other han an holding him firmly and leaning into his face as they talked. They were both master legislators. Sam, the father, was a very idealistic legislator, a legislator with a romantic streak, a legislator who felt that the purpose of government was to help people “caught in the tentacles of circumstance.”

Sam was described as “a man of great optimism,” and to some extent that optimism was justified in Austin: opular and skillful in the legislature, he got an  impressive number of laws passed. But also had to make a living, and he had to make it in the Hill Country. And his “optimism,” his romantic, idealistic streak, kept him from looing at hard facts. In the Hill Cournty, that really cost him---cost him among other things, the love, or at least the respect and admiration, of his elder son.

---from “Working” by Robert Caro.

Second in the series. Here's what came before---> Nancy Pelosi is Counting Votes.

"Fuego!"

Posted Monday evening, July 8, 2019.

The farmhouse at la Colonia de Víznar near the Andalusian village of Alfacar where the poet Federico Garcia Lorca was held prisoner the night before he was executed by a fascist firing squad in August 1936. His body was buried by the side of the nearby road in an unmarked grave that hasn’t been found yet although the search has been on for decades. Photo via Barbarous Nights.

On the dark field adjacent to the road, the soldiers told the prisoners to stop. The five men weren’t professional executioners. They had taken a side and now accepted their duties, some more zealously than others. One of the soldiers who would later brag in public about having shot Lorca in his “big head,” was the frst cousin of a man whom the poet had unflatteringly fictionalized in a new play. One of the other men had paced nervously earlier in the night, exclaiming, “This isn’t for me! This isn’t for me!” Another, the leader of the firing squad and a former chauffeur for the first prime minister of the Republic, had lost his ten-month-old son the day before.

The five men lifted their guns and fired.

---from “The Age of Disenchantments” by Aaron Shulman.

Romance de la Luna Luna

Posted Monday afternoon, July 8, 2019.

Detail from “Bathing Woman” by Joan Miro. 1925. Courtesy Georges Pompidou Center, Paris, via WikiArt.

Following up on the previous post, “There was, famously, no moon…”

Moon came to the forge
in her petticoat of nard
The boy looks and looks
the boy looks at the Moon
In the turbulent air
Moon lifts up her arms
showing — pure and sexy —
her beaten-tin breasts
Run Moon run Moon Moon

If the gypsies came
white rings and white necklaces
they would beat from your heart
Boy will you let me dance —
when the gypsies come
they’ll find you on the anvil
with your little eyes shut
Run Moon run Moon Moon
I hear the horses’ hoofs
Leave me boy! Don’t walk
on my lane of white starch

The horseman came beating
the drum of the plains
The boy at the forge
has his little eyes shut
Through the olive groves
in bronze and in dreams
here the gypsies come
their heads riding high
their eyelids hanging low

How the night heron sings
how it sings in the tree
Moon crosses the sky
with a boy by the hand

At the forge the gypsies
cry and then scream
The wind watches watches
the wind watches the Moon

--- “Ballad of the Moon Moon” by Federico García Lorca, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Arvio. Collected in “Poet in Spain”, poems by Lorca, translations by Arvio.

There was, famously, no moon

Monday morning, July 8, 2019.

“A small daub of beauty added onto a story that is at heart nothing more than proof of human brutality”: Andulsian countryside at night similar to the spot where the poet Federico García Lorca was executed by a fascist firing squad as Aaron Shulman describes it in “The Age of Disenchantments”. The countryside is similar. The sky is not. There was, famously, no moon the night Lorca died. Uncredited photo via GoSpain.

There are many books about Lorca, and nearly all of them mention the fact that the moon wasn’t visible on the night he was killed. I mention this, too, in my account of his death---twice, to be exact. The moon appeared frequently in Lorca’s poetry, perhaps most iconcally in “Romance de la Luna Luna” or “Ballad of the Moon, Moon” which includes the short line, so heartrending in retrospect, “Haye, luna, luna, luna”--- “Flee, moon, moon, moon.” The people who write about Lorca’s death highlight the moon’s absence because of the poetic irony and tragic aura: a man who constantly called out to the moon for inspiration wouldn’t have been able to seek its comfort during his last moments on earth as he looked up at the sky, knowing he was about to die.

 I understand why biographers underline Lorca’s abandonment by the moon. It is gorgeously terrible. Yet, objectively, it means absolutely nothing. The moon’s absences was incidental, random, trivia that only takes on the meaning we give it. It allows us to add a small daub of beauty, however painful, onto a story that is at heart nothing more than proof of human barbarity. We can’t control history, our evocations of Lora’s final minutes seem to say, but we can control the stories we tell about history. It’s true: converting experience into narrative gives an illusion of control, and sometimes even actual control. This is the ultimate tragedy of Lorca.---that he lost not just his life but his words, his role as teller of his story. His death was his end as narrator…

---from “The Age of Disenchantments” by Aaron Shulman.

The great Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca’s death as the great Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca himself might have written it if he had lived to write it

Posted Monday morning, July 8, 2019.

Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. The photo, via El Espanol, is uncredited and undated, but it looks to me that it was taken when Lorca was in his mid- to late thirties, which would mean it was taken not long before he was executed by a fascist firing squad near the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in the summer of 1936.

Started “The Age of Disenchantments: The Epic Story of Spain’s Most Notorious Literary Family and the Long Shadow of the Spanish Civil War” by Aaron Shulman the other night. Stayed awake almost until dawn listening. Did it again last night. I’m not very far in but it’s already shaping up to be one of my favorite books of the year. This passage is the opening paragraph. It sounds to me like a paragraph Hemingway could have written or like a scene from a play Lorca would have liked to write himself but couldn’t for the obvious reason....

Before dawn on August 17, 1936, a man dressed in white pajamas and a blazer stepped out of a car onto the dirt road connecting the towns of Vizman and Alfacar in the foothills outside Grenada, Spain. He had thick, arching eyebrows, a widow’s peak sharpened by aa tar-black receding hairline, and a slight gut that looked good on his thirty-eight-year-old frame. It was a moonless night and he wasn’t alone under the dark tent of the Andalusian sky. He was escorted by five soldiers, along with three oter prisoners: two anarchist bullfighters and a white-haired schoolteacher with a wooden leg. The headlights from the two cars that had delivered them here illuminated the gropu as they made their way over an embankment onto a nearby field dotted with olive trees. The soldiers carried Astra semiautomatic pistols and German Mauser rifles. By now the four captives knew they were going to die. The man in the pajamas was the poet Federico García Lorca…

---from “The Age of Disenchantments” by Aaron Shulman.

Hemmed in by a passel of legalities

Posted Thursday night, March 14, 2019.

Major Chevallie had only spent three weeks at West Point---he left because he found the classes boring and the discipline vexing. He nonetheless awarded himself the rank of major after a violent scrape in Baltimore convinced him that civilian life hemmed a man in with such a passel of legalities that it was no longer  worth pursuing. Randall Chevallie hid on a ship, and the ship took him to Galveston; upon disembarking at that moist, sandy port, he declared himself a major and been a major ever since.

---from “Dead Man’s Walk” by Larry McMurtry.

A battalion of like-minded luminaries deploring the state of things

Posted Thursday night, February 14, 2019.

Why does this remind me of Twitter?

Normally, after Sunday mass, the [warden] addressed a few edifying words to the prisoners. All they knew about him was that his name was Mauricio Valls and that before the war he’d been an aspiring writer who worked as secretary and errand-boy for a well=known local author, a long-standing rival of the ill-fated Don Pedro Vidal. In his spare time Valls penned bad translations of Greek and Latin classics and, with the help of a couple of kindred souls, edited a cultural pamphlet with high pretensions and low circulation. They also organized literary gatherings in which a whole battalion of like-minded luminaries deplored the state of things, forecasting that if one day they were able to call the shots, the world would rise to Olympian heights.

---from “The Prisoner of Heaven” by Carlos Ruiz Zafron.

"When Fermín embraced organised pessimism the best option was not to argue with him."

Posted Sunday night, January 27, 2019.

Far from smiling at my poor jokes, Fermín would grab any opportunity to embark on one of his tirades in support of doom and gloom.

‘The entire future looks [dark] anyway,’ he would declare. ‘If there’s going to be a flavour in vogue in this age of butchery, it will be the stink of falsehood and crime disguised in a thousand euphemisms.’

Here we go, I thought. The Book of Revelation according to St. Fermín Romero de Torres.

‘Don’t exaggerate, Fermín. You should get more sun and fresh air. The other day I read in the paper that Vitamin D increases our faith in fellow humans.’

‘Well, I also read in the paper that imported cigarettes make you taller and that banks around the world are deeply committed to eradicating poverty and disease on the planet in les than ten years,’ he replied. ‘So there you go.’

When Fermín embraced organised pessimism the best option was not to argue with him.

---“The Prisoner of Heaven” by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

Fermin composed of cartilage and attitude

Posted late Sunday night, January 6, 2019.

He'd lost some weight, and considering he was thin as a rake at the best of times and his body seemed mostly composed of cartilage and attitude, his appearance was becoming worrisome.

---from "The Prisoner of Heaven" by Carlos Ruiz Zafron.

The fundamental dishonesty of adults

Posted very early Monday morning, January 7, 2019.

The fundamental dishonesty of adults never fails to amaze her, their assumption that you’ll believe whatever they say just because they’re grown-ups and you’re a kid. As if the history of adults’ dealing with adolescents were one long, unbroken continuum of truth-telling, as if no kid was ever given a reason to distrust anyone over the age of twenty-five.

---from “Empire Falls” by Richard Russo.

The more Trump changes, the more he remains the same

Posted Friday night, December 7, 2018.

All-around amazing guy at absolutely everything: the new owner of the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League circa 1984. Photo by Ray Howard of the Associated Press.

Donald had a habit of saying things that were “without a sliver of truthfulness?” Really? Even back then? How about that?

“The first time I met Donald Trump was on a flight to a league meeting,” said Vince Lombardi Jr., son of the the legendary Packer coach and president/general manager of the Michigan Panthers. “I didn’t know who he was, just he was a busy young guy. He started asking me all these football questions, then he told me I had no idea what I was talking about. I thought, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’ Later on, I noted one very unique thing about the people who worked for him. They only knew two words--- ‘Yes, Donald.’”

People paying a visit to Trump’s office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower didn’t merely sit in a bland reception area, waiting to meet the big man. No, they first had to endure an eight-minute film that chronicled the greatness of Donald J. Trump, New York icon and all-around amazing guy at absolutely everything. The video lavished plaudits upon “the visionary builder.” Read a deep-voiced narrator over shots of Trump Tower: This is Manhattan through a golden eye, and only for the select few...Any wish, no matter how opulent or unusual, may come true…

“It was ridiculous,” said Barry Stanton, who covered the Generals for the Journal-News, a

Westchester, New York-based paper. “Part of the the film was actually a sales pitch for condos at Trump Tower. And it wasn’t optional. If you wanted to speak with the Donald, you had to hear how amazing he was…”

Though [league commissioner Chet Simmons’] wasn’t one for eccentric millionaires and their annoying excesses, the USFL needed stable ownership. So he could overlook the warning signs, like the NFL having ignored Trump in approximately 2.7 seconds when he made overtures to buy the Baltimore Colts in 1981. Or when Trump---boasted without a sliver of truthfulness---that “I was offered NFL teams. I could have bought NFL teams in the course of the last three or four years…”

...at the league meeting in New Orleans…Trump told his peers that the league had been “heading very rapidly downhill”...until his arrival. According to the the book Trump Revealed, Trump alone, “by his own account, had orchestrated a complete flip in the perception of the USFL among fans, reporters, and the people who controlled the purse strings at major television networks.”

...

“He understood nothing about football,” said Mike Tolin, who produced the league’s weekly highlight show. “Far less than your average fan.”

...

“He was great entertainment,” said Charley Steiner, the Generals’ announcer. “But he was also poisonous. He didn’t care about the league, about the players. He cared about one person, and only one person only.

:”He cared about Donald J.Trump.”

---from “Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL” by Jeff Pearlman.

C.B. Whiting violates his personal destiny

Posted Saturday night, December 1, 2018

For his part, Charles Beaumont Whiting, sent away from home as a boy when he would have preferred to stay, now had no…desire to return from Mexico…but when summoned, he sighed and did as he was told, much as he had always done. It was wasn’t as if he hadn’t known that the end of his youth would arrive, taking with it his travels, his painting and poetry. there was never any question that Whiting and Sons Enterprises would one day devolve to him, and while it occurred to him tat returning to Empire Falls and taking over the family business might be a violation of his personal destiny as an artist, there didn’t seem to be any help for it. One day, when he sensed the summons growing near, he tried to put down in words what he felt to be his own best nature and how wrong it would be to thwart his true calling. His idea was to share these thoughts with his father, but what he’d written sounded a lot like his poetry, vague and unconvincing even to him, and he ended up throwing the letter away. For one thing he wasn’t sure his father, a practical man, would concede that anyone had a nature to begin with, and if you did, it was probably either to deny it or whip it into shape [and] show it who was boss.

---from “Empire Falls” by Richard Russo.

Weather report from our meteorologist Mark Twain

Posted Tuesday night, November 27, 2018.

Yes, the weather is bad, and if I were dealing in weather it is not the brand that I’d put up in cans for future use. No, it is the kind of weather I’d throw on the market and let it go for what it would fetch, and if it wouldn’t sell for anything I would hunt up some life-long enemy and present it to him. Failing in this, as a last resort I should probably take it out on the big bridge, dump it into the Mississippi and start it to Europe via the jetties. I’d unload it someway, and that quickly, too.

____________________________________________________

The rain is famous for falling on the just and unjust alike, but if I had the management of such affairs I would rain softly and sweetly on the just, but if I caught a sample of the unjust out doors I would drown him.

____________________________________________________

Winter is begun here, now, I suppose. It blew part of the hair off the dog yesterday & got the rest this morning.

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When a person is accustomed to 138 in the shade, his ideas about cold weather are not valuable. . . . In India, “cold weather” is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.

Moses Herzog is disappointed by the positive results of his check-up

Posted Tuesday night, November 13, 2018.

Fifty years ago, Saul Bellow was looking into the future and reading my mind after my last check-up for satirical effect, the bastard...

Dr. Emmerich, stooped but energetic, examined him, sounded his chest and his back, flashed the light in his eyes, took his blood, felt his prostate gland, wired him for the electrocardiograph.

“Well, you are a healthy man---not twenty-one, but strong.”

Herzog heard this with satisfaction, of course, but still he was faintly unhappy about it. He had been hoping for some definite sickness which would send him to a hospital for a while. He would not have to look after himself. His brothers, who had given up on him, more or less, would rally to him then and his sister Helen might come to take care of him. The family would meet his expenses and pay for Marco and June.

---from “Herzog” by Saul Bellow.

Babe Ruth and the Celebrated Horse Dexter

Posted Saturday night, November 10, 2018.

“Trotting for a Great Stake”: Chromolithograph by Currier & Ives, 1890, courtesy of the Springfield Museums.

So, I’m back to reading “The Big Fella”, Jane Leavy’s new biography of Babe Ruth. Like I said, the reason I stopped almost right when I started and thought I was putting it aside for a while wasn’t the book itself. It’s that it wasn’t telling me anything new about the Babe. Leavy was telling the story well---in a way that sounded new because good writing sounds new and good storytelling is new or news at the same time it’s very old, a tale as old as time, and whatnot. But I needed more distraction, I guess, and I got impatient. And I didn’t take proper note of the subtitle.

“Babe Ruth and the World He Created”.

I didn’t hear in my head the emphasis on and.

When I got thinking about it, I got curious. What was that world he created like, I wondered, what was in it? Maybe I already know too much about the Babe, but there are probably things about the world around him I don’t.

Turns out, there’s a lot. Like the ghost of a champion harness-racing horse named Dexter.

The “Celebrated Horse Dexter.” A sports celebrity in his day---just after the Civil War---whom Leavy likens and then unlikens to Ruth, the Babe being as friendly, good-natured, and obliging celebrity as Dexter, apparently, was not…

The Union Race Course was the first dirt track in the nation and home to Dexter, a four-legged nineteenth-century superstar known for setting records and defying convention. The big bay with four socks, a blaze on his nose, and a lot of flash was trained by the great Hiram Woodruff, who operated a hotel on the premises. Currier & Ives memorialized their feats in a series of lithographs: “The Celebrated Horse Dexter, ‘The King of the Turf,’” “Going to the Trot,” and ‘Coming from the Trot.” Daniel Webster had frequented the place. Oliver Wendell Holmes composed odes to its steeds.

Unlike the genial Babe, who drew people to him, Dexter’s disposition was “so wicked that he had to be gelded,” the New York Times noted in his obituary. Also, unlike the Babe, Dexter had objected to trivial exhibition of his prowess, one September day in 1869, between races at another Long Island course, Dexter had been called on to entertain the crowd. Breaking away form his young handler, he dashed across the field at world-record speed, crashing into the stable with such force that he split the doors and wrecked the sulky behind him. He then proceeded to circle the mile-long track in 2:21.

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“The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created” by Jane Leavy is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

Rule Breaker in Chief

Posted Thursday night, November 8, 2018.

Went back to Jane Leavy’s “The Big Fella”. You knew I would, didn’t you?

If the twenties were a monument to modern man’s creative capacity for mischief, as E.B. White wrote, Ruth was the chief mischief maker. In a city of rule breakers---everyone who bent an elbow in 1927 was breaking the law of the land---he was rule breaker in chief. He never embodies the traditional public virtues that defined ancient celebrity, and he didn’t have to. Instead, he gave the public glimpses of a bad boy having the time of hs life. Hadn’t they told him he was a bad boy? He did his adult best to fulfill the mandate: punching out umps, chasing after boobirds in the grandstand, driving the wrong way up a one-way street (“I’m only going one way!”), sleeping with other men’s wives but ignoring his own. Everybody loved, forgave, and maybe even envied the Babe for being himself.

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“The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created” by Jane Leavy is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.