Bill Russell at the March on Washington, 1963

When Auerback was named coach sixteen years earlier, The Boston Globe had carried the story on the inside pages, surrounded by racing results and local high school sports scores. But the editors of the New York Times considered Russell’s hiring [in 1966] so momentous that they ran their article on the front pages, next to stories on bombing strikes in Hanoi, proposed peace talks between the United States and Vietnam, and the Ford Motor Company’s recall of thirty thousand vehicles for safety defects.

–John Taylor

The Rivalry: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, and the Golden Age of Basketball

(image/U.S. Information Agency. Press and Publications Service.)

A few weeks ago I got to talking with a park ranger at one of the Manhattan sites about Cypress Hills National Cemetery. This person is a seasonal who does not live in New York City but is stationed here for the summer and will return to grad school in late August. He wants to make the most of his time here and is taking regular busman’s holidays to see this and that. One place on his list is the national cemetery. I hope he goes. Who knows? Maybe he already has given the level of interest he expressed.

Spread out over parts of Brooklyn and Queens, CHNC is one of the original national cemeteries Lincoln created during the Civil War. A few years back I took the Hayfoot and a friend there on a brutal summer’s day. I am glad we went but in retrospect I saw that, well, maybe it would have been better put of until autumn.

The Daily News sent a crew there over Memorial Day weekend. For me one of the striking things at the cemetery was the rostrum mentioned in the small clip. One sees this at Gettysburg, Antietam, and elsewhere and seeing one here in New York is a strange experience.

The Los Angeles Forum, where Showtime happened

Last night before crashing and burning exhausted I finished Showtime, Jeff Pearlman’s new book about the great Laker teams of the 1980s. Because my family roots are in Boston cheering for the Lakers would have been heresy. Thirty years later I don’t have to care. Call it the miracle of growing older.

The NBA Finals that always sticks out most in my mind was the 1984 contest between the Lakers and Celtics. By this time my family had been uprooted and marooned in South Florida for nearly a decade. Rationally or not, we saw the series as a connection to something deeper than just who would win the NBA trophy.

One must remember that this was still the period before the NBA had become the streamlined entertainment juggernaut it is today. Just a few earlier the NBA finals were not shown live on television; so inconsequential had the league become that the network televised the finals on tape delay after the late news. Read that sentence again.

Lakers vs Celtics had everything. It was East Coast vs West Coast, Bird vs Magic, the return of a historic rivalry, and yes there was a strong racial element added into the mix, though I personally never got caught up in that.

The Celtics took that series in seven games and won at home in the old dump that was Boston Garden. What I remember the most is that the following week my family and I returned to Boston for my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary. My grandfather picked us up at the airport later on the same day that the team had its parade. For reasons I have never understood he was curiously determined to downplay the entire thing. Because it was the pre-internet days my brother and I walked down to the corner store and bought both the Globe and Herald over the few days we were back where our roots lay.

The Lakers and Celtics played in the finals the following year and again in 1987. For me though it was never the same. The 1980s have a strong before and after element. I graduated high school in 1985; after graduation I was another young person trying to figure out my place in the grand scheme of things.

Showtime began in 1979 ran its course until Magic Johnson’s announcements that he was HIV positive in November 1991. Reading Pearlman’s excellent narrative reminded me of how long that was and what I left behind.

(image/Eddy Lambert)

A Civil War headstone, though not the one mentioned in the post

I had an interesting experience this past week. The Sunday before last I was in Green-Wood Cemetery enjoying the scenery and taking photos now and again as I do. I took a pic of one Civil War headstone that struck my eye. After I got home I did a little research to find what I could on this individual. Searching one of the genealogy websites I found out he was an accomplished middle-grade officer in the 5th New York. There are many veterans of Duryees Zouaves in Green-Wood. I soon realized he was in someone’s family tree and so I emailed the lady about my pics and the records I found. I would love to share them here, but for privacy and decorum’s sake I will refrain.

Well, before I knew it I got an email back from the woman who told me she had never known her great, great grandfather had been a Civil War veteran. I found that a little odd given the man’s stature, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. I was happy to provide the information.

Now that spring is almost here I am going to get into the cemeteries of New York City in a bigger, more systematic way. The Hayfoot and I have been to a good many here and in DC, but it has always been haphazard. To a degree this was intentional: I go to Green-Wood because it is around the corner and I am trying to unwind on a weekend day. I almost submitted a proposal to the Association of Gravestone Studies conference in Indiana based on the graves of the various Roosevelts buried in the Greater New York and DC areas but decided I was not quite ready. Maybe next year.

postcard of Youngstown, Ohio, c. 1910

Last night I finished George Packer’s sobering new book The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. Packer consciously modeled the book on John Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy. Passos’s Trilogy depicted America as it was between 1910-1930. Packer talks about America between roughly 1970 and today. Trilogy was a series of novels; the stories told in The Unwinding are all too real.

It occurred to me when I read the book that I have never lived in a world where there was no Rust Belt. I found myself wishing my great friend Charles Hirsch were still alive. He was precisely twenty years old than I am and grew up at the tail end of Industrialized America. The loss of our manufacturing job base was something he talked about frequently. Were he still here today we would have talked about Packer’s book and broken it down.

This past November before he died we were planning a trip for this upcoming summer to his native Minnesota, where he was going to take me to some of the old mining towns and places like that. He would have been the perfect guide.

Packer does more than just discuss the collapse of American manufacturing. He tells the story of the deficit, banking crisis, political stalemate, and other ills that have plagued us in recent years. The book works because he puts a human face on the issues. He lets people from all sides tell their stories of success and/or failure in their own words.

I found myself getting older reading the farther I read along. So much of what seems like current events to me–say the energy crisis of the early 1970s–now reads as history. It is terrifying, too, to realize that the wheels aren’t on as tightly as you think they are.

I am sorry about the lack of posts recently. It may seem I have been slacking but I have actually been actively writing these past few weeks. Today I put the nearly-final touches on the third of three encyclopedia articles. Tomorrow I will give it one last proofread and then send off to the editor.  It’s not something one does forever but I have written a dozen or so encyclopedia articles now and feel I always get something out of the process. I found these ones especially enjoyable and worthwhile to write. All three were related to NPS sites. I knew a fair amount about how national parks and monuments are created but I feel I now have a fresher perspective. Staring at the blank page will do that for you.

I have also been busy putting a proposal together for something about which I will comment if it transpires. Time will tell.

If you are on Facebook and have not “liked” the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site Facebook I urge you to do so if you have the desire. One of the reasons my posting has been lighter here is because I have been doing some things for the TRB. I have been there almost five months and have been enjoying it a great deal. Roosevelt is great because one can take any aspect of American history and make TR part of the story. He is an interpreter’s dream.

The Theodore Roosevelt Sr. I am writing is underway as well. I am a little concerned about finding enough primary material but I think there is enough. He is a fascinating guy in his own right. His is a story worth telling. I was in Green-Wood this past Sunday roaming around the Roosevelt and other headstones. So many great stories…

The supporting cast of Barney Miller in a 1975 publicity still

Because it has been  a long week we thought we would focus this Sunday morning on some lighter fare, this interview about 1970s television show Barney Miller. I have never understood why this show–which did last eight seasons–is not a greater part of our cultural memory. That it fell between genres–cop show, escapist sit com, socially relevant sit com–is the best I can come up with. One thing I think that hurt BM was being on ABC instead of CBS. The Tiffany Network, with its stable of Norman Lear shows such as All in the Family, Maude, One Day at a Time, and others, would have done a better job generating a following.

I have wanted to watch old episodes but alas BM is not available on either Amazon Prime or Streaming Netflix.

I had never thought about the idea that a show about a police precinct would itself be a statement coming after the social unrest of the 1960s. I know BM is in syndication and still watched by a large number of folks. I imagine though that its audience is primarily aging and watching for its nostalgia factor. It would be great if this show were rediscovered by a younger cohort in that “everything old is new again” vein in which popular culture operates.

I was looking something up in a 1903 copy of Scientific American earlier today when I got distracted by the ads in the back. Here is one that was so irresistible I had to share.