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Houses of the Holy

Lost Ballparks

Diamonds

Baseball may no longer be the national pastime, but for the first two-thirds of this century its primacy among American sports was unchallenged. Much of its appeal during that golden age came from the physical environment in which it was played: a group of memorable ballparks with distinct personalities, some stately, some intimate, and all with characteristic quirks.

Three recent books celebrate the continuing fascination with baseball’s past in quite different ways. Green Cathedrals is, as its subtitle implies, an encyclopedic listing of every ballpark, past or present, that has ever hosted a major-league or Negro-league game. It includes such obscurities as Rocky Point Park in Warwick, Rhode Island, where the National League’s Boston club played a Sunday game on September 6, 1903. It also has rare photographs and drawings of places most readers will never have heard of (all in black and white) and much useful information. For example, we are told that Minnesota’s Metropolitan Stadium “was the second Major League park built in a cornfield. The first was Perry’s Park in Walte’s Pasture, home of the National Association Keokuk Westerns in Keokuk, Iowa in 1875.” The focus is on anecdotes and details; ballpark dimensions and seating capacity are given where available, including year-by-year changes. There is little sense of the overall feel or character of the parks listed, but the sheer completeness of Mr. Lowry’s compilation makes it baseball’s version of the Domesday Book.

Lost Ballparks avoids the exhaustive statistics and arcana of Green Cathedrals to concentrate its attention on a score of important stadiums—the old homes of twentieth-century National League and American League franchises, with a few minor-league parks thrown in. This smaller group is examined in depth, with lots of pictures (some in color), team histories, and lists of great moments to go along with the descriptions of the parks themselves. The author, Lawrence S. Ritter, is an economist who has written several outstanding books on baseball, including the classic The Glory of Their Times. His smoothly entertaining style, free of cliches, preaching, and sententiousness, is a welcome change from much modern baseball writing.

Michael Gershman’s Diamonds seeks to combine these two approaches. It’s a complete history of baseball parks, from the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, where the first recorded game was played in 1846, to Camden Yards in Baltimore and the new Comiskey Park in Chicago. It lucidly explains the progression from simple enclosed pastures to wooden stands to today’s concrete-and-steel behemoths, throwing in some surprising details along the way. The first luxury “sky boxes” were installed in Chicago’s Lakefront Park in 1883; several early ball yards had designated areas where the wealthy could park their carriages and watch the game from them, like a drive-in theater; and Washington’s Griffith Stadium, longtime home of the Senators, was built in three weeks for a twenty-thousand-dollar insurance settlement received when the previous stadium on the site burned down. The author manages to include a fairly complete history of the game itself by way of its architecture.

For the baseball fan interested in history, Green Cathedrals is a book to refer to often and to mine for fascinating trivia, Lost Ballparks is a book to sit down with, to read and savor, and Diamonds is an exhaustive but never dull survey that provides the most complete overview of the subject.

Hostile Skies

The air war began with a trio of Stuka dive bombers attacking Polish railroad bridges and ended with a lone B-29 opening its bomb-bay doors over Nagasaki. “The difference in capability between the slow, angular Stuka,” writes the veteran airman Walter J. Boyne, “its very shape a swastika in the sky, and the beautiful silver B-29 cruising high over Japan is a perfect example of the expansion of airpower that took place in six years of war. The relatively small 250kilogram bombs the Stukas used at Dirschau related directly to the past; the 23-kiloton yield of the ‘Fat Man’ bomb used at Nagasaki cast a terrible shadow for the future.”

What happened in between those two events is an immensely complicated tale made admirably clear by Boyne and told with vigor and conviction. His brisk, well-written history finds a nice balance between the technical elements and the human ones while it retells the familiar (but endlessly absorbing) story of the Battle of Britain, retrieves the woefully underappreciated efforts of the Russian air force, nods to the futile and forgotten gallantry of the Italian fliers, and follows America’s airborne fortunes from the hapless early days of the appropriately named Boeing P-26 Peashooter to the unchallengeable might of the Superfortresses.

The succinct appendix of aircraft types that closes the book gives the Douglas SBD Dauntless an epitaph any warplane would be proud to call its own: “Low-wing, all-metal, Ed Heinemann-designed dive-bomber; won Battle of Midway, and with it, Pacific war.”

. . .And What They Wore to the War

This big book makes it clear that the Second World War was the absolute golden age for leather bomber jackets. The same spirit that so exuberantly decorated the noses of fighters and bombers also enlivened what their pilots and crews wore into combat. The authors have assembled color photographs of jackets worn over seventy-five years, from the long leather flying coats of the biplane airmen to the nylon U.S.A.F. jackets on American pilots over Baghdad. Most of the decorations painted or patched on—leggy bomber maidens and battling cartoon figures—were aimed at fellow fliers, but some were intended to be understood only by a contingency audience. “Dear Friend,” the legend on some jackets reads in Burmese, “I am an Allied fighter. . . . I only want to do harm to the Japanese and chase them away from this country. . . .” The crudely rendered Bugs Bunnys, Popeyes, Devils, Red Skulls, underdressed cowgirls, “PanzerDusters,” “Kraut Krushers,” and righteous Wimpys are mostly appealing, and some of the bombers painted on leather have achieved a softening patina over half a century. Scenes of Hitler as a skunk or of Amazonian women straddling bombs pop with energy. Painted columns of bombs, such as the thirty stacked tidily on the breast scoreboard of Capt. Robert Vickers, tally an airman’s completed missions. “Long after the last flyer has gone west,” writes John Campbell in his foreword, “the jackets will remain as a memorial to those brave men and the world they fought to save.”

Photographic Evidence

The Bettmann Archive is often the first stop on the research trail for illustrations for this magazine. Its holdings continue to grow and to broaden in scope, so it is no surprise that Bettmann has decided to publish a new edition of its “portable archive,” a book full of riches from the collection’s New York City headquarters. This is certain to be of interest to people in the book and magazine trades, particularly those who work out of town and don’t have the luxury of dropping into the ordered chaos at the archive’s home office. But you don’t have to be in publishing to get pleasure from this volume; you just need an interest in pictured history and a sense of the connectedness of things. In a grouping titled “V-Signs,” FDR, Boris Yeltsin, liberated French citizens, and a knife-wielding Palestinian all offer the same internationally understood gesture. Elephants get a page of their own, opposite electricity (entries are organized alphabetically); the latter includes a 1940 photo of a researcher demonstrating static electricity, his hair flying straight up at zany odds with his sober scientist’s face. If any pattern emerges from this volume, it is that of a kind of crazy quilt of images, impressions, and textures, and as such it is peculiarly absorbing.

RECORDINGS

Concert Classics

Here are new discs by a top American orchestra and a top American conductor, recorded in top modern sound, of twentieth-century classics from two different American universes. The Gershwin disc features a stunning Rhapsody in Blue in the rarely heard but very snappy original version for jazz band as well as a first-rank performance of another of Gershwin’s most popular big works, An American in Paris. The other disc contains “difficult” modern masterpieces from the 1950s and 1960s. The authoritative performances of works by Schuller, Babbitt (for orchestra and synthesized tape), and Cage (based on chance) may not win many new converts, but the main attraction, Elliott Carter’s twenty-three-minute Variations for Orchestra, from 1954, should. Carter, who is now eighty-five and who as a boy was encouraged to compose by Charles Ives, may very well be remembered as America’s greatest composer of his time, and this disc gives a good indication why. The music is atonal, complex, and uncompromisingly experimental; it is also viscerally powerful, shapely, immediately grasped, and lovely in multitudinous ways. If you want to understand and truly enjoy what American modern classical music was all about when it seemed most forbidding, there is no better place to start.

A Musical Gumbo

The first commercial recordings of the Cajun folk music of Louisiana were made in 1928, just as the discovery of oil in the region was opening up that long-isolated culture to the word. This disc offers twenty-three of the earliest Cajun records, all from between 1928 and 1934, and the music is like nothing else—or a very little bit like a lot of things. The throbbing groan and wheeze of accordions gives it a carnival-like sound with more than an echo of popular French music; the plaintive fiddles and the wails of the raspy-voiced singers sound part European and part bluesy; the foot-stomping square-beat dance rhythms reach back to the nineteenth century. The performers, including Joseph Falcon, the Breaux family, and Amédé Ardoin, an African-American accordionist who was beaten nearly to death at a dance hall after a white woman mopped his brow, all are legends in the music. Everything here, from “Ma Blonde Est Partié,” which remains the “Cajun National Anthem” sixty-five years later, to “Le Blues du Petit Chien,” with its hauntingly kaleidoscopic background churn, is heartfelt and intense.

VIDEOS

Invading Cuba

The “splendid little war,” as Secretary of State John Hay called it, was the Spanish-American conflict of 1898, when seventeen thousand Americans invaded Cuba to liberate it from Spanish rule. While this quiet little documentary repeats some familiar truths about the war—that it marked the first signs of America’s growing world power, that part of its large appeal at home derived from phony press accounts written back in Miami—the film also offers the historical novelty of footage of our soldiers in the Cuban jungle. Even the restaged old newsreel scenes show the real soldiers re-enacting on the spot. This was in fact the first filmed war anywhere. Teddy Roosevelt flexes his combination grin and grimace surrounded by his Rough Rider volunteers, who had won the respect of the professional soldiers they fought alongside. Gen. William Shafter offers a three-hundred-pound mounted target as he leads his men. Americans disembark from boats, and men take cover and pop off shots at San Juan Hill. While not as miraculous as hearing Gettysburg veterans talk in the same filmmaker’s documentary Last Reunion of the Blue & Gray, this glimpse of battles fought in the last century sheds vivid light on a war whose memory often seems more faded. The film is supplemented by a brief audio interview with the last survivor of San Juan Hill, made a year before his death in 1987.

The Birth of a Nation

The Story of a Patriot was made in 1957 as a sort of primer for tourists at the newly restored Colonial Williamsburg. It has been shown at the visitors’ center ever since. There’s a reason the foundation hasn’t seen fit to update the program. The half-hour film holds up remarkably well, thanks to a clever screenplay, good production quality, and a lead performance by Jack Lord, who went on to star as Detective Steve McGarrett in “Hawaii Five-0.”

The story is told through the eyes of John Fry, a fictional Virginia planter who has just been elected to the House of Burgesses. The action begins when he first travels to Williamsburg in 1769, just after the British have inflicted new taxes on the colonies in the form of the Townshend duties. Fry witnesses debates in the House and discussions in the taverns, at nearby plantation homes, and in back-room meetings with Thomas Jefferson. In the process the viewer is essentially taken on a tour of Colonial Williamsburg and given a full history lesson about the speech, mannerisms, and styles of the time, and the convincing scenes of Patrick Henry’s orations give a good idea of the issues that motivated the fledgling nation. By the film’s end Fry’s loyalty to England has been overwhelmed by his loyalty to the other colonies, and he supports a crucial vote for American independence. It’s fairly corny stuff, but in the last scene, when the American flag is raised over the Williamsburg Capitol, it’s truly affecting.