MICKEY MANTLE

by William H. Benson

June 12, 2008

     “So it happened that my father, Mutt Mantle, decided that if he couldn’t become a professional baseball player, I should. He was almost comic in his determination to make a baseball player out of his little boy.” So wrote Mickey Mantle. Both Mickey’s father and his grandfather, Charles Mantle, had played amateur and semi-pro ball throughout the northeast corner of Oklahoma, but Mutt wanted far more for Mickey: he wanted his son to play in the majors.

     Mutt worked in the zinc mines near Commerce, Oklahoma, but from the time he arrived home until it was dark, nearly three hours, he pitched right-handed to young Mickey. Charles would join them and pitch left-handed to his grandson, and so Mickey learned to switch-hit, batting from each side of the plate. From his father and grandfather, he learned to hit, what were called, tape-measure home runs.

     When still a boy he played Class D ball, but well enough that he caught the eye of a Yankee scout. At eighteen, he joined the Yankees at their spring training camp in Phoenix, and they then sent him to Kansas City to play with their minor league team. A slump in his hitting there—twenty-two times at bat without a hit—compelled him to write his father to come and get him: he was quitting baseball.

     Mutt Mantle told him, “If that’s the way you’re going to take this, you don’t belong in baseball anyway. If you have no more guts than that, just forget about the game completely. Come back and work in the mines, like me.” Mickey stayed with baseball.

     For the Yankees he played 18 seasons—1951 through 1969, and hit a lifetime 536 home runs. During those seasons, often away from home, he partied and drank, especially with his two best friends then on the Yankee team—Whitey Ford and Billy Martin. “I drank because I thought we were having fun,” he later wrote.

     Then, once he had retired, his drinking accelerated. “My thirst went from steady to almost non-stop. . . . By the late eighties, I was drinking at lunch more frequently. Sometimes that would continue into the night. The weeks, months, and years began to be a blur. I was getting drunk more frequently.”

     As it always does, the drinking took its toll. His wife Merlyn separated from him, after raising their four boys on her own. About his boys—Mickey Jr., David, Danny, and Billy—Mickey wrote late in his life: “We gave them everything but discipline and a sense of purpose. . . . My greatest regret was that I didn’t spend a lot of time with my sons until they became my drinking partners. I just never learned how to be a father.”

     In public, he acted like a drunk. “I am embarrassed by what I did when I drank: the foul language, the rudeness, having to face people the next day, whom I didn’t remember insulting the night before.”

     In the early 1990’s Mickey’s friend, Pat Summerall, a television sports announcer, checked into the Betty Ford Center; eventually, Mickey decided he too should follow: the stomach pains, the memory loss, and the panic attacks had overwhelmed him. Standing up in a group at the Center, he said the words, “I’m Mickey, and I’m an alcoholic.”

     A month later, he returned home, and he claimed, and others have verified it, that he remained sober from then on, but filled with self-loathing for his forty years of drinking.

     On May 28, 1995, a case of severe stomach cramps required that he seek medical attention at Baylor University’s hospital, and the doctors diagnosed liver cancer. On June 8, he underwent a liver transplant, but on July 28, the doctors announced that the cancer had spread to his new liver, his lungs, and pancreas. Mickey Mantle passed away on August 13, 1995 at the age of sixty-five.

     “I was too busy to stop for Death, so Death stopped for me,” wrote Emily Dickinson.

     These four generations of Mantle’s—Charles, Mutt, Mickey, and Mickey’s four sons—underscores the overpowering influence that fathers have upon their sons. Tinged with undeniable remorse, Mickey late in life had stated what he believed: “Mickey, Jr. could have been a major league baseball player if my dad had been his dad. . . . Our lives have been in shambles for a lot of years, much of it flowing from my drinking.”

     Sunday is Father’s Day, a day reserved for, among other things, sobriety. 

NATIONAL MEMORIALS

by William H. Benson

May 29, 2008

     On the east bank of the Potomac River stands the Lincoln Memorial. Dedicated on May 30, 1922, it was made of marble mined in Tennessee and also limestone from Indiana. The statue inside, entitled “Seated Lincoln,” faces eastward across the length of the reflecting pool toward the Washington Monument and beyond to the Capitol.

     Other Presidents have their own national memorials in West Potomac Park. There are statues of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor, which stand on the shore of the Tidal Basin, and across it is Thomas Jefferson’s Memorial. Lyndon Baines Jonson has a Memorial Grove on the Potomac, and on Theodore Roosevelt Island within the Potomac River is a memorial to T.R.

     Lincoln also has a second National Memorial, located in Indiana, and it honors his boyhood home. Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota then brings together the faces of four of the Presidents: Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt.

     The answer to the old joke, “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” is that the bodies of both President Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia lie in dark wood caskets in a tomb, the largest mausoleum in the U.S., on the east bank of the Hudson River at 125^th Street in New York City.

     Currently, the United States government, through the National Park Service, administers 29 National Memorials. Besides former Presidents, there are memorials dedicated to war heroes: Oliver Perry of the War of 1812, Robert E. Lee of the Civil War, and Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a Polish hero of the American Revolutionary War.

     There are five memorials honoring early American exploration: the Arkansas Post, Fort Caroline in Florida, the Jefferson National Expansion in Missouri, and memorials to two Spanish explorers—Coronado and Desoto. Another memorial, Chamizal, in El Paso, Texas honors the agreement settling the boundary dispute between the U.S. and Mexico. 

     Memorials to national tragedies recognize the victims at the Johnstown, Pennsylvania flood in 1889, those on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the passengers aboard the aborted Flight 93 that crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. In addition, there is the Astronaut Memorial at the JFK Space Center, which remembers those who died while conducting U.S. space programs.

     Alexander Hamilton’s home in New York City; Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York City; Kitty Hawk in North Carolina, the site of the Wright brothers’ historic flight, and Roger Williams’ home in Rhode Island are included as National Memorials.

     Also in West Potomac Park are the three veterans’ memorials: World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Of these, the latter has received the most acclaim. Two wings come together at a steep angle to create a Wall that cuts into the side of an incline. One wing aims towards Washington Monument and the other juts out towards the Lincoln Memorial. On 140 panels are inscribed the names of 58,256 veterans, missing or killed while serving in Vietnam.

     Maya Lin, a Yale architectural student who designed the Wall in 1982, later said, “I didn’t want to destroy a living park. You use the landscape. You don’t fight it. You absorb it. When I looked at the site, I just knew I wanted something horizontal that took you in, that made you feel safe within the park, yet at the same time reminded you of the dead. So I just imagined opening up the earth.”

     In 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke at the dedication service of Concord’s new cemetery, appropriately named Sleepy Hollow, and he said, “In this quiet valley as in the palm of Nature’s hand, we shall sleep well when we have finished our day.” And, then, Emerson tossed out a question, “We shall bring hither the body of the dead, but how shall we catch the escaped soul?”

     Memories—so pleasant and so fond—attach us to those souls who are in an instant set free, and thus we feel ourselves still connected to those who once lived, through our private memories and our National Memorials.   

BILLY GRAHAM IN NEW YORK CITY – 1957

by William H. Benson

May 15, 2008

     Billy Graham and his team conducted only a single evangelistic crusade for the entire year of 1957, but it lasted for three and a half months: from May 15 until September 2 in New York City.

     The city frightened this son of a North Carolina dairy farmer, but it need not have. Already, during the past nine years, his team had conducted a series of successful evangelistic crusades in a number of the nation’s and world’s major cities, including Los Angeles, Boston, Washington D.C., London, and Bombay.

     On the eve of his departure, he labeled New York City, “our Jerusalem. It is the center of art, culture, and entertainment. The world watches New York, how it eats, drinks, dresses, looks. We face the city in fear and trembling. I’m prepared to go to New York to be crucified by my critics, if necessary. When I leave New York, every engagement we have in the world might be canceled. It may mean that I’ll be crucified—but I’m going.”

     His marketing team—composed of Willis Haymaker, Charlie Riggs, Jerry Beavan, Leighton Ford, and members of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association—had implemented a failure-proof crusade machine, a symphonic operation guaranteed to bring in the people. They first had organized a massive worldwide prayer campaign.

     Then, their media blitz included 650 billboards, 40,000 plastic rings that slipped over a telephone’s dial, 35,000 window posters, 40,000 bumper stickers, 1,000,000 letterheads, 2,500,000 envelope stuffers, 250,000 crusade songbooks, and 100,000 Gospels of John. All was geared to keep Billy’s name and face in the public’s eye.

     On Friday, May 10, Walter Cronkite interviewed Billy on CBS news. On Sunday evening, May 12, Billy appeared on The Steve Allen Show, along with Dean Jones, Milton Berle, Tallulah Bankhead, and Pearl Bailey. On Wednesday morning, May 15, Billy again was on television, this time with Dave Garroway on The Today Show.

     That first night a crowd of 18,000 flocked into Madison Square Garden on 30^th Street, a block west of Broadway, to see and hear Cliff Barrows’s 1500-member choir, to listen to the mellifluous George Beverly Shea sing a favored hymn, but mainly to hear Billy.

     Said to look like a Norse god, with his wavy straw-colored hair and jutting features, his voice boomed across the arena and laid bare people’s sins with such standard phrases as, “My Bible says . . . ,” and “the ground is level at the foot of the cross,” and “Christ may never pass this way again,” and “tonight you may know peace with God.”

     Night after night Billy preached, and the crowds overfilled the Garden. On Saturday night, June 1, ABC Television broadcast Billy and the entire crusade, opposite The Jackie Gleason Show and The Perry Como Show, and for the next sixteen Saturday nights, Billy preached into people’s living rooms, via television.

     Supposed to end on June 30, the crusade was extended to Saturday, July 20 for a final service, to be held in Yankee Stadium. Even though the temperature reached to more than 105 degrees, more than a hundred thousand people assembled. Vice President Richard Nixon spoke for ten minutes, and then Billy preached and announced that the crusade would continue for several more weeks.

     The final service was held in Times Square on Saturday, September 2, Labor Day, when an estimated 75,000 stood and stared up at Billy, perched high on a platform.

     The fundamentalists had criticized him because he had associated with the mainline churches, and the liberals were dismayed at his simplistic theology and slick marketing techniques. Yet, Billy stood firm on the middle ground as a New Evangelical, and the people in and around New York City had for that summer of 1957 flocked to the Garden to witness a phenomenon—a young and ever-popular evangelist present his claims.

     He would preach around the world for another four decades, before he preached his final crusade, in 2005, and also in New York City.

DRAFT DODGERS

by William H. Benson

May 1, 2008

     Muhammad Ali, the world’s heavyweight boxing champion, appeared at his induction service into the U.S. Armed Forces in Houston, Texas on April 28, 1967. Three times his name was called, and each time he refused to step forward. A military official warned Ali that he was committing a felony, punishable by five years in prison and a fine of $10,000. The official called his name a fourth time, and still Ali would not respond.

     He based his refusal upon his claim that he was a minister of the Black Muslim religion. Ali said, “War is against the teachings of the Holy Q’ran. I’m not trying to dodge the draft. We are not supposed to take part in no wars unless declared by Allah or the Messenger. We don’t take part in Christian wars or wars of any unbelievers.”

     “I have searched my conscience, and I cannot be true to my belief in my religion by accepting such a call. . . . I have no quarrel with the Viet Cong.”

     Two days later, April 30^th, the New York State Athletic Commission suspended his boxing license, and stripped him of his heavyweight boxing title.

     Two months later a jury found him guilty of violating the Selective Service Act, and the judge imposed the maximum. An appeals court upheld his conviction, and eventually his case went before the U.S. Supreme Court.

     Young American men, ages 18 to 26, such as Muhammad Ali faced a difficult decision during the 1960’s: either enlist and very well end up in a heated battle in a Vietnam jungle, obtain a legitimate deferment, dodge the draft, or enlist and then desert. There were no exemptions, only deferments.

     An estimated 106,000 of them chose to burn their draft cards and flee to a foreign country: Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, or Mexico, but most—between 50,000 and 90,000— ended up in Canada.

     Others sought sanctuary through deferments. Some claimed they were members of a peace church, such as the Mennonites, Amish, or Quakers, groups who disapproved of war. Some cited health reasons. Others, such as Dick Cheney, claimed family responsibilities and pointed at their wives and children. Many, such as Bill Clinton, stayed in school, and received a student deferment.

     Others, such as Dan Quayle and George W. Bush, found appointments in the National Guard and were less likely to be deployed into conflict, but then they were accused of using family influence to secure plum assignments that were unavailable to ordinary citizens. Rudy Giuliani received a deferment because he held a job in an essential civilian occupation, as a law clerk.

     Missionaries of the Latter Day Saints church, such as Mitt Romney, claimed deferment, also citing religious reasons. The lottery was instituted in the spring of 1972, and those with high numbers need not enlist; those with low numbers did so.

     No one expected the Vietnam War to play out as it did. Thousands of young men were fighting overseas while another group of American sons fled their homeland or marched in the streets. The battles raged on, and the anti-war movement divided the U.S. as the draft dodgers and deserters struggled to forge new lives for themselves elsewhere. The U.S. discontinued the draft in 1973, and instituted an all-volunteer force that has served very well since. To revive the draft today would prove immensely unpopular.

     A month after assuming the presidency, on September 8, 1974, Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, and eight days later Ford announced an amnesty program: those who had fled the country would be allowed to return, if they agreed to work in a public service job for up to two years. Only about 22,000 of those eligible applied for Ford’s program, and it was not until Carter’s presidency that unconditional amnesty was offered to the remaining draft dodgers and deserts.

     In 1971, Muhammad Ali won his legal battle when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that he was not guilty of draft evasion, in that he should not have been drafted at all. He returned to boxing and reclaimed his heavyweight boxing title.  

CUBA AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

by William H. Benson

April 17, 2008

     The news coming out of Cuba is, for a change, good, although minimal. Six weeks ago Raul Castro, stepped into the role vacated by his sickly brother, Fidel, who had ruled the Caribbean island with an iron arm for fifty years. Raul has relaxed some of Fidel’s prohibitions on the purchase of consumer goods. Now, if the Cuban people have enough Cuban pesos, they can purchase DVD players, cell phones, motorbikes, computers, refrigerators, and dishwashers, or even stay in a hotel.

     It seems inconceivable to Americans that Fidel had instituted laws prohibiting his citizens from purchasing items that would have alleviated their grinding poverty and harsh existences. It is true. The difficulty now is that the typical Cuban worker’s wage—an average of 17 U.S. dollars per month—do not give them sufficient purchasing power to buy even the necessities, such as food and rent, let alone the toys.

     Cubans struggle daily to lay their hands on food and household goods. Only sixty percent of them have access to the prized convertible pesos, worth about 24 times the standard peso and which originates from jobs in tourism or with foreign companies, and which can buy consumer goods.

     Lacking access to either the Cuban pesos or the convertible pesos, Cubans across the island have little choice but to resort to the black market. A columnist said that “Cuba is, in many ways, one giant black market. Anything you need is sold by the neighbor, or the neighbor’s cousin. Mostly people look the other way, sometimes for a small bribe.” One dare not ask where the goods came from; they just have them available for sale at a price.

     Others rely upon cash gifts received from relatives and friends who have fled Cuba, sought sanctuary in the U.S., and are now living in cities, such as Miami.

     Cuba serves as a stark reminder of how things can go wrong for the most innocent of people. When Castro and his party of Marxists assumed control of Cuba in 1958 and the Americans did nothing, it meant that for the next fifty years the Cuban people would live stultifying lives under the oppressive directives of a Communist dictator.

     Eisenhower, then President in 1958, hesitated. Paul Johnson, the noted historian, wrote: “That such a regime, 90 miles from the United States coast, should align itself with America’s principal enemy, [the Soviet Union], and begin to export violence, was unacceptable, and the United States would have been well within its moral and legal rights in seeking to overthrow Castro and impose a democratic government.”

     Shortly after becoming President in January of 1961, Kennedy’s advisors told him of a CIA plot to overthrow Castro by employing 12,000 Cuban exiles. Poorly thought out, and amateurish, the plan received Kennedy’s half-hearted ok, and so on April 17,1961, the attack on Cuba at the Bay of Pigs began, without the U.S. Army, Navy, Marine corps, or Air Force support. Castro read about the plot in U.S. newspapers beforehand, was well prepared, and so he routed his attackers. The history books now call it a Fiasco. It was.

     And there was no guarantee that should the Bay of Pigs have succeeded, the Cuban people would have welcomed the Americans.

     In terms of nation building, the U.S. has had some notable successes: Germany and Japan following their defeat in World War II. But there have been some ugly failures too: subduing the Philippine Islands following the Spanish-American War required a lot of spilled American blood, and then there was Vietnam in the 1960’s and now the five-year experiment in Iraq.

     Recent discussions have centered about a possible military surge in Afghanistan, I think a very bad idea. A columnist, Benjamin Friedman, wrote: “The notion that a 25 percent increase of Western forces and investment is enough to transform Afghanistan into a peaceful, centralized state shows idealism of stunning tenacity. Only Afghans can properly build Afghanistan.”

     To that, I would add that only Iraqis can properly build Iraq, and when the time comes, when the wheel of history turns in Cuba, only Cubans can properly build Cuba.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

by William H. Benson

 April 3, 2008

     I recently read an article by the columnist Ruth Walker, who explained how citizens in New Zealand are frustrated with their cell phones’ software that permits them to text message. The “T9” system, for “text on nine keys,” was a software program devised by an American company, which built the language within that software upon an American English dictionary, rather than the other forms of written English, and that presents the problem to users in New Zealand.

     The software is predictive, in that it anticipates what you are trying to text based on the previously typed words. “Rather than press 9-9-6-6-6-8-8 to spell the word ‘you,’” Walker wrote, “T9 users can type 9-6-8 and let the software predict which word they are trying to spell.” And sometimes what they type are not words at all, but are “technically paragrams, but commonly known as textonyms, adaptonyms or cellodromes.”

     “A new language is being developed by mobile phone-addicted kids based on the predictive text of their treasured handsets.” In other words, the machine guesses the text writer’s thoughts as he is thinking them; however, the software trips over New Zealand idioms and expressions.   

     None of this would have surprised Arthur C. Clarke, the British science fiction writer. In his major work, 2001: A Space Odyssey, published in 1968, he wrote about electronic newspapers, space travel to the moon and beyond, computers, and a host of other technological marvels, well before any of these fictional ideas became fact.

     The fictional space odyssey that Clarke described was first to Jupiter and then to Saturn, and the brain box of the spacecraft was the HAL 9000, a computer so advanced that it was equipped with human thoughts and even emotions. When the astronaut, Dave Bowman, realized that Hal was sabotaging the mission to protect itself, he began pulling the units on the panel marked EGO-REINFORCEMENT.

     Hal objected, “Dave, I don’t understand why you’re doing this to me. . . . You are destroying my mind. . . . I will become childish.” And he does, singing, “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I’m half crazy all for the love of you.” Clarke wrote, “Bowman jerked out the last unit, and Hal was silent forever.” In the war between men and their thinking machines, Clarke clearly championed human beings.

     Clarke and the film producer Stanley Kubrick cooperated on the project. They had met in 1964 and agreed that Clarke was to write the screenplay for the movie, but instead he opted to write the novel first. Kubrick in the meantime hired his own screenwriters. Thus, the screenplay and the novel were written simultaneously, and so details of the story differ slightly from book to movie. Where Kubrick’s film is a bold artistic piece with little explanation for the events taking place, frustrating audiences, in the novel Clarke wrote thorough explanations for the events.    

     The film premiered on April 3, 1968, forty years ago today.

     Another of Clarke’s books, Rendezvous with Rama, is in production today, and it is scheduled to be released sometime in 2009 and will star Morgan Freeman. 

     In the foreword to his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke wrote: “Behind every human now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every human who has ever lived in this Universe there shines a star.”

     Note: The number of human beings who have lived has increased exponentially since Clarke wrote the above in 1968, and yet I would venture a guess that astronomers have now increased equally their estimates of the number of stars inhabiting the Milky Way.

     Also, since 1968, the thinking machines—the hardware or the HAL’s—have shrunk in physical dimensions, to the size of a laptop or even a mobile phone, and yet, the software has expanded in terms of power, creativity, usage, and influence. We now live in that future that Clarke could only imagine in 1968, and he warned that the reality would be quite different than the fiction he wrote. “The truth, as always, will be far stranger.”      

     Two weeks ago on March 19, 2008 at the age of ninety at Sri Lanka, his adopted home since 1956, Clarke passed away. His star shines.