SIR ROGER BANNISTER 

     Although the Marathon has become the most popular running event during the past twenty years, for many years track enthusiasts considered the mile run the event that fascinated them most.  Today high school distance runners do not run the mile, but instead they run 1600 meters, which is approximately thirty yards more than the mile.

     But, the International Amateur Athletic Federation, the world body of track and field, recognizes today only records in metric distances, except for the mile.  It is still in the record books.  The mile, that part of the old British measurement system, still remains for track enthusiasts the last lone surviving vestige in the wholesale sellout to the metric system.  Please, do not remove the mile run.  It has too much history to be shoved aside.

     The mile requires the sprinting ability of a 400 meters runner plus a portion of the endurance necessary to complete a marathon.  Judgement of pace, knowing when to speed up and when to slow down and reserve strength, becomes crucial.  It often becomes a race of wits.  One competitor puis his intelligence and determination as well as his or her speed and stamina against another at all stages of the event.   

     Twenty-nine years ago this spring I was a high school sophmore running the mile and was not winning any ribbons and certainly not setting any records.  It was for me painfully difficult work, but still I read and dreamed of what a Wichita, Kansas high school/college student named Jim Ryan had done setting records in both the 880 yard run and the mile.  America felt proud.  Then there was his main competitor, Kipchoge Keino from Kenya, Africa, who beat him in the 1500 meters run at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

     Eventually, I stumbled across the story of Roger Bannister.  In 1913 a guy named John Paul Jones set the first official mile record at 4:14.4, and throughout the next forty years exemplary runners like Glenn Cunningham and Gunder Haegg of Sweden steadily approached but never quite broke through the four minute mile.  In fact, Gunder Haegg set the record in 1945 at 4:01.4, and there it stayed for the next nine years until Roger Bannister broke it.  It had become a psychological barrier.

      To run a sub four minute mile means that a runner must run four laps around a track layed out to include 440 yards at an average of less than sixty seconds for each lap.  Roger Bannister’s plan was to concentrate on his quarter mile times.  On May 6, 1954 in windy conditions at a meet at Oxford, England, Bannister electrified the world when he broke the record with a time of 3:59.4, the first person below four minutes.  With the help of two teammates who set the pace, his quarter mile times were 57.5, 60.7, 62.3, and 58.9.

      Amazingly enough, six weeks later on June 21, 1954 John Landy of Australia broke Bannister’s mark with a time of 3:58.  Then, the following August the two met at the British Commonwealth Games, and there Bannister beat Landy.  But both had times under four minutes.  With the barrier cracked others, such as Peter Snell, Steve Ovett, and Sebastian Coe, lowered the record even further.  Today the record is held by Noureddine Morceli of Algeria with a time of 3:44.39, a full fifteen seconds off Bannister’s time.

      And whatever happened to Roger Bannister?  He retired from competitive racing in 1955 to concentrate on his medical studies, eventually receiving his M.D. degree at Oxford in 1963.  Then, in January of 1975 Queen Elizabeth II knighted him, and so he became a very surprised Sir Roger Bannister.  And the last I heard about the American hero, Jim Ryan, was that he was now the head librarian at one of the Kansas universities.  

STONEHENGE

by William H. Benson

March 25, 1999 

     Another spring is upon us, and with it baseball has arrived.  (Will it be another homerun slugfest this year?)  Green is showing up in the lawns, and the wheat fields already are a bright growing green.  The St. Patrick’s Day parades are behind us, and the Easter parades are just around the corner.  Farmers are working in their fields eager to plant the corn and other spring crops.  Warmer brighter days lighten the winter’s heaviness.  Seasons arrive, and then they leave; their cyclical imprint etched deep upon humankind’s consciousness.

     Last Saturday, the 20th, the vernal equinox arrived.  This is one of the two days each year when the days and nights are of equal length everywhere on the earth.  Last Saturday’s sunrise was at 5:57 a.m., and sunset was at 6:05 p.m., 12 hours and 8 minutes.  People on the North pole, the South pole, the equator, and all points in between had 12 hours of daylight and of night.

     Because the earth tilts 23° 27¢ relative to the plane of the earth’s orbit around the sun, the sun strikes the earth either directly on the equator or above or below it as the earth revolves around the sun.  On the vernal equinox the sun crosses the equator creating equal days and nights.

     Humankind has marked the seasons for millennium.  The attitude that “one day is as good as another” is fine until you want to begin planting the same day every year, and you need to know when that day is. 

     In southern England eighty miles west of London is Stonehenge, a monument of stones built by early Britons beginning as early as 3000 B.C and continuing until 1000 B.C.  Modern archaeologists discovered early on that the stone marker 80 yards east of the megaliths casts a shadow on the altar placed in the center of the stones at dawn on the summer solstice.

     Then, in 1963 the astronomer Gerald S. Hawkins deduced that the monument served as an accurate astronomical calendar.  He first assumed that all of these huge stones had to be placed according to some master plan.  He then discovered that the archways, vistas, heelstone, capstones, and pillars created sighting lines.  But to what?  Placement, he believed, was deliberate to stress viewing.  Bringing in a computer he identified that of the 12 unique sun/moon rise/set points (as of 1500 B.C.), 10 of them were marked by sightings along the stones properly aligned at Stonehenge.  Only two–midsummer moon sets at -29° and at -19°–were not marked.  The sighting lines focused upon the sun and the moon, not to the stars nor the planets.

     Why did ancient man devote so much energy and time to such a difficult project?

     Hawkins offered three answers:  Stonehenge served as a calendar.  It assured the priests of their power.  And, it provided a game for the thoughtful.     

     He wrote: “. . . many people of many different thoughts and cultures came to Stonehenge.  Different rulers, designers, priests, and workmen set their brains and hands to the vast work of alteration, adaptation, change, and creation.  The great monument grew from a simple circle open toward the midsummer sunrise to a rectangle-within-a-circle to a massive and complex cathedral of stones standing in arched circles and horseshoes.”

      Time is the valuable thing of life.  The tools we choose to mark it have varied over the aeons.  Thirty plus blocks of gray sandstone standing 13+ feet above the ground and each weighing 28 tons have been replaced today with daytimers, calendars, charts, tables, scientific instruments, and electronic gadgetry.  The elaborate apparatus tells us its now spring and time to play ball.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

by William H. Benson

March 11, 1999 

     On Thursday, March 11, 1302, Romeo married Juliet, according to the English playwright, William Shakespeare.  The newlyweds failed to celebrate even their first anniversary, for in the Prologue to the play, the chorus admits: “A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life.”

     Yale University’s authority on Shakespeare, Harold Bloom, wrote recently, “The permanent popularity, now of mythic intensity, of “Romeo and Juliet” is more than justified, since the play is the largest and most persuasive celebration of romantic love in Western literature.”

     Juliet, not yet fourteen years old, describes her feelings of love:

     “And yet I wish but for the thing I have.

      My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

      My love as deep: The more I give to thee

      The more I have, for both are infinite.”

     But because of the feuding of their families–the Montagues and the Capulets, the young lovers commit mutual suicide.  In the final scene as the Prince of Verona overlooks the carnage, he ends the play with these words:

      “Go hence to have more talk of these sad things;

        Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished;

        For never was a story of more woe

        Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

     Harold Bloom argues in is his recent book that Shakespeare invented the “human” in literature.  Before him, characters in literature age and die, but they do not change.  “In Shakespeare, characters develop rather than unfold, and they develop because they reconceive themselves.  Sometimes this comes about because they overhear themselves talking. . . . The more one reads and ponders the plays of Shakespeare, the more one realizes that the accurate stance toward them is one of awe.”

     In Elizabethean English he wrote, and his power to enthral and charm audiences/readers has transcended the four centuries since.  His characters, the wordplay, the audacious ideas, comedy, tragedy, history–he could do it all, the best ever.  His fellow collegue, Ben Johnson, wrote: “He was not of an age, but for all time!”

     The Academy Award nominations are out, and on Sunday evening, March 21st, Whoopi Goldberg will host the presentations of the Oscars.  The favorite to win Best Picture that night is the World War II film “Saving Private Ryan”; however, I suspect that the Italian-produced film “Life is Beautiful” may steal that award.

     For Best Original Screenplay critics are betting on “Shakespeare in Love”, last year’s romantic comedy.  The film is about the young playwright William Shakespeare who is struggling with writer’s block (a fallacious idea for someone who actually wrote like a machine).  It feels like “trying to pick a lock with a wet herring,” he says.  He meets an aristocratic English lady, falls passionately in love, and then in the afterglow sits down and writes “Romeo and Juliet”.            

     It seems that Hollywood has discovered and even likes Shakespeare.  “After 400 years of being merely the greatest of all writers, Shakespeare is suddenly an adorable guy and a pop icon.”

     Until Oscar night, “Beware the Ides of March.”  Julius Caesar failed to heed the warning.  Will we make the same mistake?

PERSIAN GULF WAR

by William H. Benson

February 25, 1999 

     Operation Desert Storm’s aerial campaign began in mid-January 1991 and was immediately a success.  Wave after wave of Allied bombers and missiles pounded Iraq’s capital, Baghdad, and other key targets during those first days of the Persian Gulf War.  The ground offensive then began on February 24, 1991, and one hundred hours later on the 27th, President Bush appeared on nationwide television to announce “Kuwait is liberated.  Iraq’s army is defeated.”

      But before leaving Kuwait, Iraqi troops deliberately set fire to Kuwait’s oil wells.  The smoke darkened the sky ugly.  And now eight years later the United Nations, still trying to bring Saddam Hussein to his knees, is caught somewhere between threats and actual bombing.

      Recently, I read General H. Norman Schwartzkopf’s autobiography, It Doesn’t Take a Hero.  He mentions that in addition to overseeing the military operation, he also had to play the role of a diplomat to the Saudi’s on whose sandy soil he and his forces stood.  At 10:00 pm. most evenings he wandered over to discuss certain matters with Prince Khalid.  He wrote, “To my consternation . . . what loomed largest for them was the cultural crisis triggered by the sudden flood of Americans into their kingdom. . . . The touchiest issues almost always involved religion.”

     For example, American women soldiers were seen working in T-shirts and were accused of disrobing in public;  Saudi women never show their arms.  Prince Khalid demanded that Schwartzkopf stop such brazen behavior.  Then, Christmas in 1990 presented a problem, but there was no way that even he, a General, could halt services from being held.  Christmas trees appeared, but Schwartkopf warned his staff that “even the very sight of a cross is very offensive to them. . . . We have to be sensitive to their desires.”

      A report of a wild party involving women dancing and alcohol being served was verified when CNN broadcasted a clip of it.  That evening a bewildered Schwartzkopf had to assure the distraught and excited Prince Khalid that he would investigate this matter and put a stop to it.

      James Michener in almost a kind of naive innocence once wrote, “I have been studying Islam for many years, and I cannot see any valid reason why this religion and Christianity cannot cooperate.” 

      The historian Will Durant had a different viewpoint.  “Nothing, save bread, is so precious to mankind as its religious beliefs; for man lives not by bread alone, but also by the faith that lets him hope.  Therefore, his deepest hatred greets those who challenge his sustenance or his creed.” 

     The rival religions and civilizations, Christianity and Islam, have clashed for centuries, beginning almost from their birth, continuing through the crusades, and into the modern era.  A third faith, Jewish, was then caught between the main combatants and cut by both swords.  The crusades of a millennium ago were in part the European Christians’ attempt to free Palestine, the Holy Land, from the Muslims.  After several centuries, the exhausted Europeans gave up, and a curtain dropped between the West and the East.

     The Persian Gulf War was another crusade and yet, different.  Although the liberation of Kuwait, rather than Palestine (Israel), was the primary objective, Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles were sometimes aimed at Israel.  Schwartkopf, the Christian, and Prince Khalid, the Muslim, hammered out agreements in which the Islamic culture was not polluted but remained pure.  Together, they learned to work together to fight and defeat a wildly aggressive Muslim brother, Saddam Hussein.  That curtain dividing East and West had opened but only for a brief moment.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

by William H. Benson

February 11, 1999 

     We now celebrate Presidents’ Day rather than individually honoring either Abraham Lincoln’s or George Washington’s birthdays, and yet, what they each achieved is sufficient reason for pausing for at least a day and reflecting.  Lincoln, the giant among the Presidents, casts a long shadow which still falls across the land called America and upon all Americans.  His birthday, February 12, 1809, is tomorrow.  We pause, and we reflect.

      Lincoln’s law partner in Springfield, Illinois, Billy Herndon, who knew him best, said, “Mr. Lincoln always told enough of his plans and purposes to induce the belief that he had communicated all, but he reserved enough to have actually communicated nothing. . . . Mr. Lincoln read less and thought more than any man in his sphere in America.”

      Lincoln believed in human rights, in individual dignity, in person liberty, and in civil justice.  His political ideas he derived straight from the Declaration of Independence, from which he often quoted.  A liberal democrat, his genius was in stating familiar ideas in striking and symbolic form.

      But the essential Lincoln cannot be understood apart from his stance toward slavery.  That institution tempered his soul and gave direction to his life.  It was the overriding reality of his time.  There was no escaping it.  It was the American national tragedy, a gigantic anomaly.  It mocked the Declaration of Independence.  Lincoln hated the idea of one man owning another.

      He spoke of the time he took a boat down the Mississippi River into the South.  “There were on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons.  That sight was a continual torment to me, . . . a thing which has the power of making me miserable.”  The cruelties of slavery bruised Lincoln’s tender soul.

      Decades before, Thomas Jefferson, a slaveowner himself, wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; his justice cannot sleep forever.”

      Lincoln forced himself to think through the harsh realities of the slavery problem, and by his relentless logic, he arrived at two fundamental ideas.  First, he concluded that slavery threatened American democracy.  Unless it was eradicated, it would end by wrecking freedom all together. “Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them.”  A worm in a beautiful apple will eventually rot from within the entire apple.

      Second, he wanted a solution to ending slavery that would not lead to the destruction of the nation.  But, alas, in part because he was elected President in 1860, the Southern states in a fit of passion and frenzy withdrew from the nation and created their own, the Confederacy.  The resulting Civil War, North against South, brother against brother, family against family, gathered up everything ugly and hideous that war can muster up and dumped it squarely upon the American continent.  Lincoln’s nightmare erupted into a reality he was forced to live through.

      But there in the midst of the vicious contest on January 1, 1863, he issued a proclamation.  “Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln . . . , do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States . . . are, and henceforward shall be free.”  He and the federal government declared that slavery was illegal, and he said, “If my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.”

     “I want every man to have a chance,” he said repeatedly.  The American system of government, he believed, was set up for that very purpose.

      Lincoln’s words and ideas are worth saying again and again.  We pause, and we reflect.