Today In History: Baby Fae

Today is the 25th anniversary of surgeons implanting a baboon heart into a human infant. "Baby Fae" survived 21 days before succumbing to kidney failure.

Scientists have still been unsuccessful in transplanting a human heart into a banker.

Today is Saint Crispin's Day

"This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day."

Henry V, Act 4, Scene 3. Think of it as medieval Veterans Day.

My Trip to the World Series--Memories of Tom Romenesko

It's been thirty years since my trip to the 1979 World Series so I thought I'd tell the story:

It was a cold winter day in early 1979 when I first met Tom Romenesko. I called on him in his "office" at Memorial Stadium to sell him on Greensboro Printing Company producing the season game programs for the Hornets, the new baseball team in town. Tom was general manager of the new franchise, but as one of a three-person staff he was just about everything else too. His office looked like a converted storage room (I think it was), and the rest of the stadium was just as dilapidated. It look all of its 50 years old. Tom's office must have been heated, but all I remember was that it was damn cold! We talked about baseball, the old Greensboro baseball teams that I had so ardently followed as as kid, and the advantages of his having GPC produce the Hornet programs.

It must have been pretty good salesmanship--we got the order, and over the process of producing the job (and for the next two years, too), Tom and I got to be good friends. Tom was one of the most promotional-minded people I had ever met. He knew he was in the family entertainment business, not just the baseball business, and he worked tirelessly to make sure Hornets games were good family fun. I believe this is more than slightly responsible for the success baseball has had in Greensboro since then.

Tom's zeal for promotions reminded me of Bill Veeck, the great Chicago promoter. (Tom had many good ideas, but one that didn't work out was selling sponsorship of the foul-poles at the stadium to the Holly Farms Chicken folks--foul-poles, fowl-poles, get it? har-har.)

For the game programs, Tom wanted to print "lucky numbers" throughout the program so he could offer prizes to program purchasers to stimulate sales. This was a difficult technical production problem. GPC could only number two pages at a time and Tom wanted eight numbers per program,which presented a big challenge. We found that another local printer, L&E Packaging, a tag-and-label printer and not a direct competitor, could number large 8-page sheets so we contracted with them for that portion of the project and Tom was a happy customer.

The Hornets were a farm-team of the Cincinnati Reds that year and the "Big Red Machine" was in a battle for the National League pennant that summer. As a farm team general manager, Tom got four World Series tickets. He wasn't able to go to the series so he offered the tickets to me and my friend Hugh Morton, Jr. We jumped at the opportunity and planned a great trip to Cincinnati.

And we'd have had a great time, too, except for the fact that the World Series was in Pittsburgh that year. The Big Red Machine lost three straight games to the Pirates in the best of five 1979 NLCS so Hugh and I stayed home. All I have is copies of the tickets to our great seats for games that were 300 miles away.

Tom was GM of the Hornets for three years before moving on to bigger things. We sort-of kept up over the years, but the last time I talked to Tom was in late 2000 I think. The Hornets/Bats/Whatever had new ownership and one of the new owners said what they needed was a GM like Tom Romenesko. Someone then suggested why not get the real Tom Romenesko so they contacted him to see if he might be interested. Tom called me to see what I knew about the new owners and I told him I didn't really know much but I thought a lot of Jim Melvin. I wasn't able to see Tom when/if he came to interview, and in the end he didn't get the job, and I haven't talked with him since, though we've e-mailed a couple of times.

I have suggested too the Grasshoppers that they should have a Tom Romenesko Appreciation Day sometime. It would be a fitting tribute to the person who more than anyone else made minor-league baseball successful in Greensboro.

Here is an article from Sports Illustrated in 1979 with a little about the Hornets and Tom. It brings back some fond memories:

"In the meantime, Nashville cannot rest on its laurels. Greensboro, North Carolina, is suddenly challenging it as the nation's top minor league town. Greensboro had been without professional baseball for a decade when the Hornets arrived this spring, under the direction of a former umpire named Tom Romenesko. The Class A ball club is on its way to drawing 170,000, which would exceed Greensboro's population and perhaps make Romenesko the choice to succeed Schmittou as The Sporting News Minor League Executive of the Year. "

Here is a picture of Tom and his wife Becky (and my friend Jeanne Tannenbaum) from the fall of 1981.

But Can He Spell "Potato"?

President Obama had a little trouble with numbers yesterday when he was presenting Medals of Freedom to a number of prominent Americans. He didn't get any of Billie Jean King's right. (From Althouse.)

Significant Digits

Stumbling around the Internet this morning I ran across this post:

"Their findings aren’t all that favorable to those of us with lofty views of Twitter, because as it turns out, 40.55% of tweets are pointless babble."

I didn't click further to see how they defined "babble" or how they determined whether the babble was of the pointless or pointed variety. What stopped me cold was the precision of 40.55%. Not 40% or 45% or even 41%. 40.55%!

One of the concepts I learned in engineering school was that of significant digits. Way too many folks don't understand this important principle. For the innumerate it is the functional equivalent of a grammar error. It reflects poorly on the credibility of the author.

One-third of a million isn't 333,333, it's about 330,000. Any number more precise than that is drivel. There are only one or two significant digits in a million ( between 500,000 and 1,500,000 or even between 900,000 and 1,100,000) so a third of that number has only one or two significant digits.

That's today's lesson in Numeracy. For further reading, go to this book. I recommend it!

The Hurt Locker

I saw The Hurt Locker yesterday, and I really liked it. It is a realistic, unromantic, austere, intense story of a squad of EOD (explosive ordnance demolition, i.e. "bomb squad") soldiers in Iraq in 2004. Joe Morganstern of the Wall Street Journal had a very accurate review.

Kathryn Bigelow’s film, which was written by Mark Boal, manages to be many things at once—a first-rate action thriller, a vivid evocation of urban warfare in Iraq, a penetrating study of heroism and a showcase for austere technique, terse writing and a trio of brilliant performances. Most of all, though, it’s an instant classic that demonstrates, in a brutally hot and dusty laboratory setting, how the drug of war hooks its victims and why they can’t kick the habit.

I give the movie 4 Stars!

Our Representatives in Congress Are Hip!

So, Congress has decided to spend the $100 million in savings they recently trumpeted by purchasing three new Gulfstream G550 executive jets for $200 million. This makes Congressfolks hip, as in hypocritical, ironic, and privileged.

"The notion that some lawmakers feel it beneath their dignity to travel with the masses on commercial jets is nothing new. But news of the House plan does bring to mind three salient facts, all of which the Democratic leadership hopes the public does not think of in relation to the jet purchase.

Congress isn't short of hypocrisy. Most of the Democrats and their environmentalist allies are reflexively opposed to private jet travel because of its excessive carbon footprint. Or, at least, they are opposed to private jet travel for others.

Neither does it recognize irony. CEOs of the Big Three automakers were excoriated for traveling in their private jets last year to testify in Washington.

And some have an outsized sense of privilege. In 2007, just a month into the new Democratic majority, Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked that taxpayers provide a jet that could make a nonstop flight to her Bay Area district. She reportedly wanted a luxury, stateroom-outfitted version of Boeing's 757-200 like those the vice president, first lady and Cabinet officials fly on.

And there was a lot of foot-stamping when the Bush White House said no."

Happy Birthday. Good News!

Sixty-seven years ago today I entered this world. It was front page news in the Good News:

My Other Car Is a F/A-18

Or is it a Formula One Racer?

Details here. (From Adobe's John Nack.)

On Grammar

I might have become an English major if the discussions on grammar in Mrs. Hunsinger's 9th grade English class had been this interesting. (Vulgarism ALERT)

Orders of Magnitude

Today's Rant: I hate it when writers mix up various number denominations (trillions, billions, millions, etc.) in the same article. I believe good writing form dictates writers should chose one denomination and stick with it. For example in today's Wall Street Journal there is an article on the federal government's efforts to institute various cost savings In a Savings Shocker, the Government Discovers That Paper Has Two Sides. In it, Jonathan Weisman writes about a $2 trillion budget deficit, a $100 million savings challenge, and various savings of $52 million, $320,000, $18 million, $5 million, $573,000, $318,000, $47,160, $2 million, $3.8 million, and later, $40 billion.

This is seriously misleading. If Weisman were to pick one denomination, (say, million, since that is the most common) and be consistant, these numbers would be a much more revealing: $2,000,000 million, $100 million, $52 million, $0.18 million, $0.47 million, $2 million, $3.8 million, and $40,000 million. The difference between $2 trillion and $100 million may not sound like much, but the difference between 2,000,000 and 100 is clear.

Is Your Doctor Killing You?

This month seems to by my "doctor" month: colonoscopy last week, cardiology 6-month check-up this week, and my annual physical next week. I am a "victim" of coronary by-pass surgery as well as a small stroke a couple of years ago, so I'm attentive to my coronary health. As best as I can determine, the one thing I can do to improve my life expectancy is to lose some weight.



But the hard thing is just how does one go about losing the weight. I'm not sure physicians are all that good at telling us how to shed the excess pounds. A year and a half ago I read ("slogged my way through" may be more accurate) Gary Taubes book Good Calories, Bad Calories which makes a very persuasive case for the fact that the basis for most nutrition advice in this country is wrong, i.e., we should be eating a heart-healthy low-fat diet and should be exercising and controlling the amount of calories we consume. Taubes says the science and the medical research prove that a low-fat diet, which by its nature is a high carbohydrate diet, is precisely the thing that is making us all fatter.

The Good Calories book is a very difficult read. It goes deeply into the physiology of obesity and diet, but I think the results are worth the effort. For someone who doesn't want to invest the couple of weeks of free-time reading the book takes, it is probably worthwhile to listen to Taubes lecture on the subject. He recently did so at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock School of Medicine, available here.

The entire lecture is about an hour long, but if you don't want to spent that much time, forward to the conclusion (click on the "Thumbs" tab in the player window and then click (or double-click) on the antepenultimate slide (third from the last) and listen to the six minute summary at the end of the lecture.

Taubes' research makes a lot of sense. One questioner calls this "the biggest public health disaster in modern history--the epidemic of obesity and diabetes". Most physicians still believe what they learned in school in the past 40 years--that low fat is healthy because everyone knows it's true. Physicians who are not aware of the latest science and research may be killing us with bad advice.

In the 18 months since I read Taubes book I've been following a low-carb lifestyle, and though I haven't lost much weight, I haven't gained any either even though I've paid virtually no attention to the number of calories I've eaten. However, I am influenced by that fat-is-bad image in the back of my head. For example, at lunch I've given up Vienna sausages (0 grams of carbs) and will have a whole wheat sandwich (20 grams of carbs) instead because everyone says the sandwich is healthier. Maybe soon more doctors will realize low-carb is healthier than low-fat and it will become easier to eat a healthy low-carb diet.

Tom Watson

I've been a fan of golfer Tom Watson ever since he came out on the PGA tour in 1971. I had a good friend in the Army named Tom Watson, and though they was no connection between the two I still always was a Tom-Watson-the-golfer fan. When TWTG came to the 1993 GGO my friend Wade Peoples got the above autograph for me.

About the only resemblance between my golf game and Tom's was that we generally carried the same number of clubs in our bags. I did, however, once make a stroke that Tom would have given a lot of money for. In 1984 I took a golfing trip to Ireland and Scotland with my buddy Roy Johnston. We played one round at Carnoustie in Scotland and it was very memorable.

We had two old guys, John and Charlie, for caddies. Both were life-long Carnoustie residents. John was 67 and retired and had been caddying since his retirement. John was 76 and had been caddying all his life. Both had followed Ben Hogan when he came to Scotland for the 1953 (British) Open tournament at Carnoustie and had several stories about Ben's exploits. After hitting our tee shots on the first hole, I asked Charlie if they played "mulligans" in Scotland. His reply: "Aye, lad, we do. We call them 'three'.".

Roy, John, Preston, and Charlie

Tom Watson won his first Open Championship in 1975 at Carnoustie. He needed five rounds to win that year since he and Jack Newton were tied after 72 holes. In all five rounds, Tom boggied the 16th hole, a 235-yd par three he has described as the toughest par 3 in golf. For Tom, maybe, but not for me. Against Charlie's advice (he thought it was too much club) I rifled a 3-wood shot to about 5 feet from the hole. Of course, I missed the birdie putt, but I know Tom Watson would have loved to have that 3 in any of his five tries in 1975. I even have photo evidence of the shot.:

Does Tom have a chance to win the Open Tournament tomorrow? I don't think so. The USA Olympic Hockey team had no chance against the Russians in 1980, The Jets had no chance against the Colts and the Mets couldn't win the World Series in 1969. NC State stood no chance against Phi Slama Jamma in 1983.

On second thought, maybe Tom can win.

Ted Williams

As I have written before, I've been a Ted Williams fan since I was a little boy and my father told me he had been in service with Ted. I never met Ted and I was very envious of my friend Hugh Morton, Jr. who had a picture of himself and Ted. Ted has been the news a couple of times today.

In the Wall Street Journal today Allen Barra has a review of the up-coming HBO Special “Ted Williams—There Goes the Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived”. I don't have HBO and I hope that some of my friends who do will tape the show for me. (Do you think anyone still knows how to tape tv shows?)

This morning, the right-center field of Bloggerstan was all atwitter with stories about President Obama's throwing out the first pitch at last night's All-Star Game. See here, here, or here. Locally, even Dr. Joe couldn't help piling on. Joe certainly had the cruelest critique: "Obama throws like a girl". Joe also included a YouTube video of pitcher Steve Hamilton throwing his "floater folly" pitch, but Joe doesn't mention one of the early "floater" pitchers, Rip Sewell, and his Eephus pitch.

Ted Williams probably did more than anyone else to make the Eephus famous. In the 1946 All-Star Game, held at Fenway Park, Sewell faced Ted in the bottom of the 8th inning with the National League already behind by nine runs and with two men on base. Rip threw Ted a first Eephus pitch and Ted missed badly, but Rip couldn't stand prosperity. He tried again. On the second Eephus, Rip always said Ted popped it up. Rip said at first he thought he could catch it, and then he thought the second baseman would catch it. Finally, he thought the right fielder would surely get it. Reportedly, the ball landed many rows deep in the right field bleachers, others say it was the bullpen. The final score was 12-zip, the first All-Star shut-out, and the Eefus was legendary.

One of my other favorite Ted Williams stories involves the All-Star Game a decade later. At mid-century, two of the best players in baseball both played in Boston, but they rarely faced each other. Ted's Red Sox were in the American League, and Warren Spahn, a Hall-of-Fame left-handed pitcher was with the Boston Braves in the National League. The Red Sox and Braves did play an exhibition game each spring, and in one of those games, Spahn faced Williams and struck him out with a very tough pitch. After the game, Ted was effusive with his praise of the pitch and told Warren it was one of the toughest pitches he had ever seen. It was almost unhittable. In the 1956 All-Star Game, in Washington, DC, Spahn faced Williams in the 6th inning with the NL leading 6-0. Nellie Fox had singled ahead of Ted, so Warren badly needed to get Ted out. He decided to try his "unhittable" pitch, and Ted parked it over the big right field fence in Grifith Stadium. Rounding second base, Ted looked at Spahn and grinned, and Warren knew he'd been had! He must have lost a little concentration, as Mickey Mantle, following Ted, went back-to-back and Warren was finished for the day. The NL won the game 7-3 but Spahn had learned a valuable lesson about Ted Williams devotion to hitting.

Who Ya Gonna Believe?

Me or your lying eyes?

Do you see the pink, green and blue spirals? The green ones and the blue ones are the same color. (From frolic with Volokh.)

Buck Earle

On the occasion of Father's Day of the centenary year of my father's birth I offer this tribute. I was 10 when he died suddenly at age 43 so I didn't know him well, but E. D. Broadhurst, who had a column for the local paper wrote about my father after his funeral in 1952. Much of what I know about my father's personality was in that article. It says some very nice things about Buck.

My father, who was also Elias Preston Earle and named for his father (and grandfather), was called "Buster" growing up, but as an adult this morphed to "Buck", the name by which everyone knew him. Though I barely remember him, he left me with a number of life lessons, some important, others less so.

He taught me to respect books, not just for their content but as books. Even today I find it almost impossible to throw away a hard-bound book.

He taught me to love baseball. I learned to read to read baseball articles in the summer of 1949. He had told me that he was in service with Ted Williams in WW II so I was always a Red Sox fan. Only later in life did I realize "in service with" meant Buck was on a destroyer in the Atlantic while Ted was a Marine aviator in the Pacific. If that was good enough for my dad, it was good enough for me.

He taught me the value of photography as a hobby. After a half-century of saving memories in pictures I realize how valuable this lesson was.

He taught me to keep my knife out of the jelly jar. We didn't have many rules around my house growing up, but if one of us (my two sisters or me) tried to use a knife (rather that a spoon) to reach into a jelly jar, we were sure to be rebuked. Even today I can't use a knife in a mayo jar without thinking of him.

I never heard my parents have a fight or heard my mother, Margaret, say a harsh thing about my father. On one occasion, about 15 years ago, she did mention one night what a spend-thrift he was--that he'd get paid on Friday and if she wasn't careful he'd have spent it all by Monday. She was very careful with money, and that was the lesson I learned. I often think I'd have been happier if I'd learned Buck's lesson rather than Margaret's.

Here is the Broadhurst column, As We See Them, from November 1952. I suspect we all wish we could be as well remembered when we're gone. Click to make it readable.

Start Small

If the Obama administration wants to manage the US auto industry, perhaps they should start with something smaller and simpler, like the pencil industry. Todd Zywicki cited this essay "I, Pencil" in a post on the Frolic-with-Volokh Conspiracy today.

On second thought, after reading the essay, maybe they should just leave both alone.

"My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!"

And this is just one small part. Read the whole thing.

Restaurant RIP

Ed Cone mentions the closing of the Madison Park Restaurant and Ged comments and links to some of his thoughts about restaurants dead and dying.

On a different note, one of my favorite writers, James Lileks, has a regular Monday feature on his blog The Bleat from his extensive collection of matchbook covers.

I've also collected matchbooks over the years and have somehow kept most of the last 30 years' specimens. Some time ago I took the time to scan and organize them and I'm surprised to see there are almost 400 of them. Included are almost 40 from Greensboro restaurants that are no longer with us. Some are greatly lamented, others less so. How many do you remember? As usual, click to see a larger version.

I'm really sorry that one of the unintended negative consequences of the war on tobacco is that we no longer have these wonderful reminders of things past.

Thinking about a Small Car?

If you're wondering what cars may look like after the new gas-mileage standards go into effect, you might want to look at some small cars of the present and past. In addition to the current Smart car or the Mini Cooper, there are the small cars of the past. Perhaps the smallest, the Peel p50, was tested by the BBC's Top Gear show here. Jeremy Clarkson drives a P50 to work and then takes it to work with him. I love the video of driving around the BBC. More on the P50 here and here.

Cecile

A half a century ago, when I was in junior high school and had just discovered which sex was opposite, I was badly smitten by the prettiest girl at Central Junior High School, Cecile Mayrand. I wasn't the only one though, as I think half the boys at Central felt the same way. I tried all through the eighth and ninth grades to get her attention but never could.

During the ninth grade Cecile's family moved to Winston-Salem but she stayed in Greensboro to finish the school year. During that summer we palled around some and by the end of the summer she seemed to notice me a bit--at least enough for me to start writing her in Winston.

We corresponded for the full year of the 10th grade. I'd write and wait anxiously for a response. In 1957, for a kid without a driver's license, Winston-Salem might as well have been Timbuktu--that 26 miles was a long way away.

I didn't see Cecile until I got my driver's license the next summer, and my first road trip was to see her. I drove to Winston and we dated several times that fall, but that was also the time I started dating Ann Winchester. After Ann and I began dating, I didn't go back to Winston but once or twice. Ann and I dated all through high school and college and got married when I graduated from Clemson in 1964.

I lost track of Cecile after high school, but I often thought of her. She sort of played the Suzanne Somers role (the mysterious blond in the Thunderbird) in my personal American Graffiti. When I asked old friends, of folks from Winston, about her, no one knew much about her after high school. Someone said they thought she had married a doctor; someone else said they thought she was living in Hawaii. I often wondered what happened to her.

In the late nineties, things looked up for finding out about her when Google came along, but not knowing her married name was a real drawback. Googling for "Cecile Mayrand" brought up a lot of references for various French-Canadians, but nothing about the correct Cecile

Then last year, after Glenn Reynolds wrote about Will Lavender's mystery Obedience, which has a very intriguing prologue (see it here) I tried Google again, and there, thanks to Google Books, was a reference to Phillip Mayrand and his sister Cecile Broadhurst in a book about the history of Topsail Island where the Mayrands owned property. So with a current last name, it was easy to find her current address

I wrote her the first of the year to see if she remembered me, and she did. She answered my letter and filled in some of the details of her life: She had married a doctor, and had lived in Hawaii, but had moved back to NC when she and her first husband separated a number of years ago. She remarried in 1987 and has moved to Topsail Island where she and husband Ed Broadhurst live next to the Gold Hole there).

While visiting some friends in Morehead City over Memorial day, I made a side trip and had a very nice lunch with Cecile and Ed in Topsail Island. We renewed old friendships and talked about our lives over the past 50 years--a very nice day. If Garrison Keillor were writing this, he'd find a nice poignant heart-warming ending, but real life is a little different. It was just a very pleasant lunch and chat. I hope we can see each other again.

Here is another picture of Cecile in junior high school, with some other friends of the period: Cecile, Mike Thompson, me, and Ann Kluttz on the first row and Scottie Troxler, Mike (Tom) Cribbin, Martha Watson, Cricket Conner, Laurie Lamb, and Charles Howell on the back row.

Here are two pictures from this weekend, of Cecile and Ed and of Cecile and me. I don't think either of us has changed much, do you?