H.L. Hunt…

was born on this date in 1889. Hunt was a Texas oil tycoon who, among other things, fathered 14 children with three women, including two that he was married to simultanously. The worst thing about Hunt was his politics; the best his sense of humor. The following story illustrates the latter (quotation from Football Digest).

Lamar Hunt, the son of H.L., was one of the founders of the American Football League and owner of the Dallas Texans (who became the Kansas City Chiefs).

[Lamar] Hunt may not have looked it, but he had a lot of money. His father, the legendary H.L. Hunt, had a fortune estimated at $600 million, which may not seem all that impressive in today’s era of billionaires but made him one of the nation’s richest men at the time.

It was the elder Hunt who came up with the best-remembered quote from the AFL era. After his son reportedly lost $1 million in his first season, H.L. was asked how long Lamar could keep doing that. According to various reports, he said Lamar would go broke in about 150 years if he kept it up.

Jim Brown…

was born on this date in 1936.

Brown was listed as the 4th greatest athlete of the 20th century by ESPN.

Brown played only nine seasons for the Cleveland Browns — and led the NFL in rushing eight times. He averaged 104 yards a game, a record 5.2 yards a pop. He ran for at least 100 yards in 58 of his 118 regular-season games (he never missed a game). He ran for 237 yards in a game twice, scored five touchdowns in another game and four times scored four touchdowns. He rushed for more than 1,000 yards in seven seasons, scorching opponents for 1,527 yards in one 12-game season and 1,863 in a 14-game season.

“For mercurial speed, airy nimbleness, and explosive violence in one package of undistilled evil, there is no other like Mr. Brown,” wrote Pulitzer Prize winning sports columnist Red Smith.

Read the entire ESPN essay on Jim Brown: Brown was hard to bring down.

Albuquerque’s favorite sons

The Flying Maloof Brothers

The story of the Maloofs in America starts in another Las Vegas, a dusty, heartbreak of a town in New Mexico two hours northeast of Albuquerque. George Maloof Sr. was the son of Lebanese immigrants who ran a general store there, a place that supplied local ranchers with the necessities of life. The family moved to Albuquerque to focus on beer distribution just before George Sr. went off to the University of Colorado. He had to hurry home to take over the business after his father suffered a heart attack.

In a relatively poor state like New Mexico, being a beer distributor makes you a very important person, particularly if your brand has 50 percent market share, which Coors did in its heyday there. So when one of Albuquerque’s major banks was ailing in 1976, George Sr., a member of its board, was asked to take over. ”My dad got puffed up and flattered and he came home and told my mom, You know, such-and-such wants me to be the chairman of the board,” Joe said. ”And my mom looked at him — and this was the statement that probably saved us — and she saPOSTID: ‘Are you crazy? Why do you want to work so hard for someone else? Why don’t you just buy it?”’

Colleen’s intervention would be worth $140 million (the amount in stock the bank was sold for in 1993) and underwrite the dreams of the entire Maloof family.

The four bachelor Maloof brothers, owners of a Las Vegas casino, the Sacramento Kings and an “everyday mardi gras of cleavage, fast cars and front-row seats.”

It’s 10 o’clock, do you know where your children are?

From The Smoking Gun:

FEBRUARY 12–If you follow up the “dirty dancing” contest at your daughter’s 12th birthday party with a field trip to Thirsty Jake’s to get the kids some booze, don’t be surprised if you end up in cuffs. And that’s exactly what happened to an Ohio man who pleaded guilty Monday to eight counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor in connection with the January 31 all-nighter described in the below Newark Police Division report. Jeffrey Yingling, 52, threw the party and made the booze run with several partygoers in tow–none of whom was over the age of 13. According to a statement given to cops by one 12-year-old girl, she nagged Yingling to score them some brew and offered to “be his kid if he bought some beer.” Yingling, who has four prior DUI convictions, copped his misdemeanor pleas in Licking County Common Pleas Court, where he is scheduled to be sentenced later this month. He faces a maximum of four years in prison.

Washington’s Birthday or Presidents’ Day?

George Washington was born on February 11, 1731, according to the Julian calendar. In 1752, however, Britain and her colonies adopted the Gregorian calendar, the calendar we use today. The change added 11 days and designated January rather than March as the beginning of the year. Accordingly, Washington’s birthday was February 22, 1732.

The federal holiday was celebrated on February 22 until legislation in 1968 designated the third Monday of February the official day to celebrate Washington’s birthday. In 1971, when the 1968 Act went into effect, President Nixon proclaimed the holiday Presidents’ Day, to commemorate all past presidents, not just Washington and Lincoln. This was never intended or authorized by Congress; even so, it gained a strong hold on the public consciousness.

The states are not obliged to adopt federal holidays, which only affect federal offices and agencies. While most states have adopted Washington’s Birthday, a dozen of them officially celebrate Presidents’ Day. A number of the states that celebrate Washington’s Birthday also recognize Lincoln’s Birthday as a separate legal holiday.

Phony No-Spam Registry

From The Washington Post:

The Federal Trade Commission is warning people not to fall for a Web site claiming to offer an e-mail version of the federal do-not-call registry. The “Do Not Email Registry” invites folks to submit their e-mail addresses to stop getting junk e-mail. Trouble is, the site has no affiliation with the government, despite what its Web address (www.unsub.us) might suggest….

The FTC (www.ftc.gov) issued a press release Thursday saying the site appears to be a scam that could be collecting e-mail addresses on behalf of spammers.

Richard Ford…

was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on this date in 1944. As they often do, The Writer’s Almanac has a nice essay on Ford, one of NewMexiKen’s favorites.

[Ford is] best known as the author of the novels The Sportswriter (1985) and Independence Day (1995). He has said that one of the reasons he became a writer is that he was mildly dyslexic as a child and had to concentrate on words more intensely than most people. He also lived across the street from novelist and short story writer Eudora Welty, and his mother used to point her out to him as someone to look up to.

After his father had a heart attack, Ford went to live with his grandparents, who managed a hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas. He went to college to study hotel management, but when he got there he realized what he really wanted to do was read literature, and he switched his major to English. After college, he taught for a year, tried to join the Arkansas State Police, and spent a semester at law school. In 1968, he moved to New York City, got married, and decided on a whim to try to become a writer. He said he wanted to do something different, and “being a writer just seemed like a good idea. It was just casting off into the dark.”

Ford’s first novel, A Piece of My Heart, came out in 1976. He followed that up with The Ultimate Good Luck (1981). The two books together sold fewer than 12,000 copies, and Ford started thinking that maybe he wasn’t cut out for writing novels. He quit writing fiction and got a job as a sportswriter for Inside Sports magazine, covering baseball and college football. He liked his new job and would have kept at it if the magazine hadn’t…folded the following year. He didn’t have anything else to do, so he started writing a novel about a fiction writer who becomes a sportswriter after the death of his son. The Sportswriter was published as in 1986, and it was huge critical and popular success. He wrote in The Sportswriter, “I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people—men and women alike—could go on to happier, more productive lives.”

Ford’s 1995 novel Independence Day picks up where The Sportswriter left off, with the sportswriter now a realtor trying to connect with his wife and his teenage son. After Ford finished writing it, he read aloud the whole 700-page manuscript, twice. Just before it was going to be published, his editor mentioned offhand that there were quite a few verbs that ended in “-ly”. Ford agreed, and spent two weeks going back through the novel to change all the “-ly” verbs he could. All of his work paid off: Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995.

Ford said, “If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.”

“Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing’s worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.” Independence Day

The Golden Record

The two Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977 and are now more than 8 billion miles from earth. The Voyagers carry:

a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim.

The music on the Golden Record:

  • Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, conductor. 4:40
  • Java, court gamelan, “Kinds of Flowers,” recorded by Robert Brown. 4:43
  • Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 2:08
  • Zaire, Pygmy girls’ initiation song, recorded by Colin Turnbull. 0:56
  • Australia, Aborigine songs, “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird,” recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes. 1:26
  • Mexico, “El Cascabel,” performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México. 3:14
  • “Johnny B. Goode,” written and performed by Chuck Berry. 2:38
  • New Guinea, men’s house song, recorded by Robert MacLennan. 1:20
  • Japan, shakuhachi, “Tsuru No Sugomori” (“Crane’s Nest,”) performed by Goro Yamaguchi. 4:51
  • Bach, “Gavotte en rondeaux” from the Partita No. 3 in E major for Violin, performed by Arthur Grumiaux. 2:55
  • Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14. Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor. 2:55
  • Georgian S.S.R., chorus, “Tchakrulo,” collected by Radio Moscow. 2:18
  • Peru, panpipes and drum, collected by Casa de la Cultura, Lima. 0:52
  • “Melancholy Blues,” performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven. 3:05
  • Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes, recorded by Radio Moscow. 2:30
  • Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, Sacrificial Dance, Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Igor Stravinsky, conductor. 4:35
  • Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1. Glenn Gould, piano. 4:48
  • Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20
  • Bulgaria, “Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin,” sung by Valya Balkanska. 4:59
  • Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes. 0:57
  • Holborne, Paueans, Galliards, Almains and Other Short Aeirs, “The Fairie Round,” performed by David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London. 1:17
  • Solomon Islands, panpipes, collected by the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service. 1:12
  • Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen. 0:38
  • China, ch’in, “Flowing Streams,” performed by Kuan P’ing-hu. 7:37
  • India, raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho,” sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30
  • “Dark Was the Night,” written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson. 3:15
  • Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, Opus 130, Cavatina, performed by Budapest String Quartet. 6:37

Read more about the Golden Record from NASA.

The Battle of Piestewa Peak

The name of Squaw Peak in north-central Phoenix was changed to Piestewa Peak last year to honor Army Pfc. Lori Piestewa, the first female American Indian soldier to be killed in combat. Piestewa, a Hopi mother of two, was killed last March 23rd, when her company was ambushed near Nasiriyah, Iraq.

Now there appears to be an effort in the Arizona legislature to reverse the name change, presumably because Gov. Janet Napolitano strong-armed the State Board on Geographic and Historic Names into bypassing normal procedures.

As reported by E.J. Montini in The Arizona Republic:

[O]ne of the first things Arizona legislators hope to accomplish this year involves finding a way for state government to once again sanction the word “squaw.”

In particular, a large group of Republican legislators is very interested in returning Spc. Lori Piestewa to the status of squaw by restoring the name of the Phoenix mountain that was changed last year in her honor.

The legislative effort is led by Rep. Phil Hansen of Peoria, Arizona.

Hansen is a fifth-generation Arizonan who has had long and honorable careers in both the private sector and the military.

“Those people who give the final sacrifice for their country I hold in the highest regard,” he said. “But I don’t hold Lori Piestewa in any higher regard than any other person from Arizona who died for their country. And the fact that she may be the first American Indian woman to die in the service of the United States to me is immaterial. To me she’s still a soldier and should have no more recognition than any other person that that happened to.”

Perhaps we honor all of our lost soldiers when we honor any one. After all, we would not say that naming Luke Air Force Base after one man did a disservice to the others from Arizona who gave their lives over foreign skies, would we? Besides, if we change the name of Piestewa Peak now, it means going back to squaw, which would be like going back about 100 years to a time when calling a native woman such a thing was acceptable. Would anyone do it now? Would Hansen?

“For the first part of my life I rarely came face to face with an Indian,” said Hansen, who’s 71. “They were very reclusive. You’d see them on the street in Phoenix selling baskets or pottery or whatever. More recently I don’t know that the subject has ever come up. I have a dictionary that has a date of 1977 on it. I looked up squaw and it doesn’t say anything about it being derogatory.”

He said he wouldn’t use the term to describe a Native American woman now, but not because it was insulting. Only because it wasn’t contemporary and had a more “historical quality” to it. Perhaps like those historical words we once used to describe African-Americans. If the governor were asked to approve one of those words for a landmark I’d hope she would do what she should do if a “Squaw Peak” bill lands on her desk. Veto it.

Read the entire Montini column.

The great escape

This from an article on Squaw Peak in The Arizona Republic last spring:

In December 1944, during World War II, 25 German soldiers escaped from a POW camp set up in Papago Park [Phoenix]. Some of the escapees intended to float a boat down the Salt River, which they had seen only on maps. They were sorely disappointed when they discovered that the river was dry. All the prisoners were quickly captured, except for their leader, a U-boat captain, who hid for a month in a cave on Squaw Peak before he was recaptured.

Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat

Joseph Ellis likes David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing:

David Hackett Fischer’s new book, ”Washington’s Crossing,” is a highly realistic and wonderfully readable narrative of the same moment that corrects all the inaccuracies in the [Emmanuel] Leutze painting but preserves the overarching sense of drama.

The centerpiece of Fischer’s story is the daring attack across the Delaware by 2,400 soldiers in the Continental Army, who routed the Hessian garrison at Trenton, then fought two additional battles at Trenton and Princeton the following week. Though the sizes of the armies were small compared with the numbers that fought at later battles like Gettysburg or Normandy, Fischer argues convincingly that the actions at Trenton and Princeton were the most consequential in American history, for these stunning victories rescued the American cause from what appeared to be certain defeat and thereby transformed the improbability of American independence into a distinct possibility, eventually an inevitability….

For reasons beyond my comprehension, there has never been a great film about the War of Independence. The Civil War, World War I, World War II and Vietnam have all been captured memorably, but the American Revolution seems to resist cinematic treatment. More than any other book, ”Washington’s Crossing” provides the opportunity to correct this strange oversight, for in a confined chronological space we have the makings of both ”Patton” and ”Saving Private Ryan,” starring none other than George Washington. Fischer has provided the script. And it’s all true.

Read the entire review.

Remember The Maine

On February 15, 1898, a mysterious explosion destroyed the American battleship Maine in Havana Harbor and helped propel the United States into a war with Spain. The USS Maine was in Cuba, officially, on a mission of friendly courtesy and, incidentally, to protect American lives and property in the event that Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain might escalate into full-blown warfare. “Yet,” writes author Tom Miller, “the visit was neither spontaneous nor altruistic; the United States had been eyeing Cuba for almost a century.”

On board the Maine that sultry Tuesday night were 350 crew and officers. Shortly after 9 p.m. the ship’s bugler, C. H. Newton, blew taps. The ship bobbed listlessly, its imposing 100-yard length visible from stem to stern. “At 9:40 p.m.,” writes Miller, “the ship’s forward end abruptly lifted itself from the water. Along the pier, passersby could hear a rumbling explosion. Within seconds, another eruption–this one deafening and massive–splintered the bow, sending anything that wasn’t battened down, and most that was, flying more than 200 feet into the air…. In all, 266 of the 350 men aboard the Maine were killed.”

The American press was quick to point to an external explosion–a mine or torpedo–as the cause of the tragedy. An official U.S. investigation agreed. On April 25, 1898, Congress formally declared war on Spain. By summer’s end, Spain had ceded Cuba, along with the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam, to the United States.

In 1976, Adm. Hyman Rickover of the U.S. Navy mounted yet another investigation into the cause of the Maine disaster. His team of experts found that the ship’s demise was self- inflicted–likely the result of a coal bunker fire. There are those, however, who still maintain that an external blast was to blame. Some people, it seems, just won’t let you forget the Maine.

–Source: Smithsonian Magazine, February 1998.

Harold Arlen…

was born Hyman Arluck in Buffalo, New York, on this date in 1905.

A short list from the more than 400 tunes written by Harold Arlen:

Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive
Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea
Come Rain Or Come Shine
Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead
Hooray For Love
It’s Only A Paper Moon
I’ve Got the World on A String
One For My Baby
Over The Rainbow
Stormy Weather
That Old Black Magic

Matt Groening…

was born in Portland, Oregon, 50 years ago today. The Writer’s Almanac has this biographical essay on the creator of The Simpsons.

[Matt Groening] hated grade school, because his teachers were always confiscating his notebook drawings and tearing them up. He began keeping a diary when he was in fifth grade, vowing that he would never forget the injustice he suffered.

He drew cartoons for his high school newspaper and once ran for class president as a joke. In his campaign, he said he was the founding member of “Teenagers for Decency.” He was shocked when he got elected. He tried, unsuccessfully, to rewrite the school’s constitution to make himself absolute dictator.

Groening decided to move to Los Angeles after college to try to make it as a writer. He lived in a neighborhood full of drug dealers and thieves, and got a job ghostwriting the memoirs of an 88-year-old filmmaker. After that, he worked at a convalescent home, a waste treatment plant, and a graveyard. He started writing a comic strip based on his daily troubles called “Life in Hell.” The main character was a miserable rabbit named Binky. He made the comics into booklets and mailed them off to everyone he knew. He started to sell the booklets in record stores, and the Los Angeles Reader eventually began to run the strip. Within a few years “Life in Hell” was syndicated in weekly newspapers across the country. Groening said, “I had no idea I was going to make cartooning a career. I was doing it merely to assuage my profound sense of self-pity at being stuck in this scummy little apartment in Hollywood.”

When a TV producer asked Groening to created a TV show, Groening decided to invent a cartoon family that would be the exact opposite of all the fictional families that had ever been on American television. He named the parents after his own parents, Homer and Marge, and he named the two sisters after his own sisters, Lisa and Maggie. He chose the name Bart for the only son because it was an anagram of the word “brat.”

The Simpsons has gone on to become the most popular and longest running sitcom in America. Groening no longer writes for the show, but he gave it its basic premise, which is that authority figures are generally mean and stupid. He said, “Teachers, principals, clergymen, politicians—for the Simpsons, they’re all goofballs, and I think that’s a great message for kids.”

The aggressive press

The blogsphere and even mainstream media — does The Daily Show count? — are pumped because the Washington press corps was aggressive this week on the Bush National Guard issue. (Whom do we thank, Michael Moore or Peter Jennings?)

NewMexiKen is somewhat less frenetic about the awakened press. I’ll wait and see if they show the same intensity regarding the more current war.

Jack Benny…

was born as Benjamin Kubelsky on this date in 1894. In The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, the entry for The Jack Benny Program runs from page 355 to 363. Then he was on television.

NewMexiKen knows how corny the jokes and skits would sound now — how corny they undoubtedly were then — but tucked among my fond memories is being at my Great Grandmother’s house in Rensselaer, New York, more than 50 years ago. I was sick, so stayed home with Gram that Sunday evening while the rest of the family socialized. She had to be in her seventies; I no more than five or six. We listened to The Jack Benny Program on radio. And all I can remember is how hard we laughed.

I feel pretty certain the radio audience that Sunday consisted of people my parents and grandparents’ age and they were laughing too. If you know, please tell me a television program today that could as easily amuse four generations.

National Park Service

NewMexiKen apologizes for any difficulty you may have in loading this page. In a fit of disregard for the public, the National Park Service has taken its web server down today for system maintenance — on a Saturday — in the middle of the day — for 12 hours (8 a.m. to 8 p.m.).

The difficulty for NewMexiKen readers is that links from NewMexiKen to Park Service photos and sites will not work.