IT’S “WORLD SERIES” TIME -- SOMEONE, PLEASE TELL THE REST OF THE WORLD!

By Edwin Cooney

Many years ago, I had the privilege of hearing a loving grandmother assure her wondering grandson that not everyone has to be interested in baseball and that it was perfectly all right if even a little boy wasn’t interested in it at all.  So it likely is with the whole world: for camel drivers in Pakistan, sheepherders in New Zealand, drug cartel bosses in Columbia, bullfighters in Spain and Pope Benedict XVI in Vatican City.  However, for Americans, America has been the "world" at least since that Democratic newspaper publisher John O. Sullivan put God and all humanity on notice in 1845 when he declared that America possessed a “Manifest Destiny.”

Still, as the San Francisco Giants and the Detroit Tigers are locked in an intense if not deadly struggle in 2012, the world, and even much of America, has other matters on their minds.  Of course, it isn’t as if baseball hasn’t tried to engulf all humanity in its peanuts, crackerjacks and beer realm.  During the off season between 1888 and 1889, Albert Goodwill Spalding, a former star pitcher turned sporting goods king, took the Chicago Colts (now the Cubs) and a group of All Stars on a trip that included Hawaii (then a separate nation), New Zealand, Australia, Sri Lanca, Egypt, Italy, France, Scotland and England.  The players played baseball when they could but were forced by circumstances to postpone some scheduled games.  Meanwhile, they tossed balls over the pyramids of Egypt and used the right eye of the Sphinx for target practice.  They viewed private hula dancing performances, rode rickshaws, watched rules football in Australia, and watched --  and even played -- cricket.  Even though “Atlas Shrugged,” neither Spalding nor the other baseball moguls hesitated for a moment to call the annual American and National League Championship series that was finally established in 1903 “The World Series.”

As for the two teams, the Giants have represented two cities, New York and San Francisco. They have been in seventeen World Series going back to 1905 when John J. McGraw’s Giants defeated Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics four games to one.  That was the year after the testy McGraw had had sufficient power to refuse to play the "upstart” American League in a World Series.  (The Boston Pilgrims had defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates in a best five out of nine series in 1903 and McGraw wasn’t going to allow his Giants to be humiliated by the “Junior Circuit’s” 1904 Bostonian champions.) The Giants of New York would win a total of five World Series: 1905, 1921, 1922 (the previous two over the Yankees who were new to the World Series in 1921), 1933 and 1954.  Their New York series record was 5 and 9.  Since coming to San Francisco they have been in three World Series: 1962 (when they lost to the Yankees in seven games), 1989 (the infamous “Earthquake Series" which they lost to the Oakland Athletics), and 2010 (when they defeated the Texas Rangers in five games).

As for the Detroit Tigers, World Series competition has visited the “Motor City” a total of ten times.  Their record is four wins and six losses: 1935 and 1945 over the Chicago Cubs, 1968 over the St. Louis Cardinals, and 1984 when they swamped the San Diego Padres, four games to one.  (The Tigers have the dubious distinction of being the only team the lowly Chicago Cubs have beaten in two World Series -- 1907 and 1908).

As the Giants enter their eighteenth and the Tigers their eleventh “World Series,” they appear evenly matched.  Both teams are led by splendid gentleman managers, Bruce Bochy of the Giants and Jim Leyland of the Tigers.  The Tigers are deeper in power hitting and the Giants are deeper in starting pitching.  The Tigers can be nearly disastrous on defense and in the bullpen; the Giants’ hitting can be embarrassingly erratic.

It has become almost traditional that the mayors of World Series cities make bets.  This year, San Francisco’s Ed Lee says that if Detroit prevails he’ll do a day of public service benefit work in Detroit.  Detroit mayor David Bing, a former National Basketball Association star, has agreed to do the same in San Francisco.

Between 1952 and 1980, the World Series winner even predicted America’s political fate.  If the American League champion won the World Series,  Americans would elect a Republican.  Otherwise, the Democratic candidate would prevail.  The American League’s Yankees elected Ike in 1952 and 1956.  The National League’s Pirates elected Jack Kennedy in 1960 and the National League’s Cardinals elected Lyndon Johnson in 1964.  The American League’s Tigers and Athletics elected Nixon in 1968 and 1972 respectively while the National League’s Cincinnati Reds (probably much to the chagrin of Cincinnati’s highly Republican-leaning constituency) elected Jimmy Carter in 1976.  However, since the National League’s Philadelphia Phillies elected Reagan over Carter in 1980, all World Series political bets seem to be off!

It’s a matter of record that only twice, in 1992 and 1993, has another member of the world community of nations, Canada’s Toronto Blue Jays (of the American League), had the temerity to snatch America’s World Series Championship trophy.

Hence, I offer an observation and a question. 

Observation:  America’s world baseball supremacy appears secure for the time being!

Question:  I wonder if baseball’s championship trophy is still made in America?

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

THE VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDACY—WHERE THE VITAL AND THE OBSCURE MEET

By Edwin Cooney

Since the “Year of our Lord 1900,” Democrats and Republicans have nominated a total of 44 men and two women to serve as the vice president of the United States of America.  That includes 25 Democrats and twenty-one Republicans.  Two defeated vice presidential candidates—Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1920 and Earl Warren in 1948 (one from each party) have gone on to great presidential and judiciary glory.  FDR would be elected president four times between 1932 and 1944, and Earl Warren would serve as Chief Justice of the United States from 1953 to 1969.  Exactly why each of these candidates was chosen and what value they ultimately were is largely a matter of pure historical and political speculation.

So daunting for the Democrats was the task of defeating Teddy Roosevelt for election in 1904 that they chose two of the most obscure possible candidates to run for president and vice president.  Their presidential candidate was Judge Alton B. Parker, Chief Judge of New York State’s Appellate Court.  The real shocker however was their vice presidential candidate—he was eighty-one year old West Virginia entrepreneur and former U.S. Senator Henry Gassaway Davis.  Parker seems to have had little to say about his running mate.  Back then, the vice presidency was largely up to the bosses in both parties.  So, why did the leadership of the Democratic Party choose such an old man to run for the second highest office in the land—an office he was unlikely to ever achieve?  The answer is simple—money!  Some say Davis contributed about $120,000 (which would be about 3 million in today’s dollars) to the campaign.

The year 1920 was an open year for both parties.  Thomas Woodrow Wilson, although both old and crippled due to his October 1919 stroke, actually wanted a third term. The war weary party and nation longed for youth and glamour.  The GOP nominated on the tenth ballot of its Chicago convention the handsome and gregarious Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding of Ohio.  As for Harding’s running mate, Harding and the Republican Party leadership wanted to nominate Wisconsin’s progressive Senator Irvine Luther Lenroot.  However, the bosses took Saturday night, June 12^th, 1920 off and the conservative core of the convention selected Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, who’d broken the 1919 Boston Police strike, in his place.  Thus, Calvin Coolidge and not Irvine L. Lenroot became our 30^th president when Harding died on August 2^nd, 1923.

In 1920, Democrats, meeting in San Francisco, chose former Ohio Governor James Middleton Cox as their presidential nominee even though he’d been divorced.  For his running mate, Democrats nominated the handsome and athletic Assistant Secretary of the Navy 38-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Prior to the convening of the 1920 Democratic convention there was a movement to nominate the man who had served as Woodrow Wilson’s Food Administrator during World War I, Herbert Clark Hoover.  No one knew at that time that Mr. Hoover was a Republican.  Hence, there was a distinct possibility that the 1920 Democratic ticket could have been Herbert Hoover for president and Franklin D. Roosevelt for vice president.  Roosevelt’s major appeal wasn’t his glamour, but his last name.  It was the same as his Republican fifth cousin’s, (Teddy) Roosevelt.

The 1924 Democratic convention at Madison Square Garden lasted 10 days and 104 ballots before it finally nominated John William Davis of West Virginia for president.  As the Democratic vice presidential candidate that year the exhausted party nominated Nebraska Governor Charles Wayland Bryan.  The reason for Bryan’s vice presidential nomination was largely because he was the brother of William Jennings Bryan, the party’s three time presidential nominee and former Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson.  Calvin Coolidge slaughtered them at the polls that November.

In 1932, FDR’s political captain James A. Farley arranged his boss’s nomination by agreeing to put House Speaker John Nance Garner of Texas on the ticket.  It was a close call for Roosevelt as back then it took a two-thirds vote of Democratic Party delegates to secure the party’s presidential nomination.  That rule had been in existence since the days of Andrew Jackson, thereby giving southern and western delegations equal or greater power than delegations from the larger states.  By 1936, the Democratic Party rescinded the two-thirds for the simple majority rule for nominating presidents and vice presidents it has today.  Ironically, in 1940, when FDR was seeking an unprecedented third term in office, he was powerful enough to force Democrats meeting in Chicago to nominate Henry Agard Wallace, his Agricultural Secretary, as his running mate.  Had the party balked he was ready to threaten not to run.  By 1944, however, the party more or less forced FDR to drop Wallace ultimately in favor of Senator Harry S Truman -- labor’s favorite candidate.

Vice Presidents Harry S Truman, Richard Milhous Nixon, Spiro Theodore Agnew, Walter Frederick (Fritz) Mondale, and George Herbert Walker Bush won nomination because they brought either a geographical or an ideological balance to the party’s national ticket.

One may reasonably assert that the fastest path to permanent political obscurity would be to be the losing vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket.  Names such as Adlai Ewing Stevenson I -- William Jennings Bryan’s vice presidential candidate in 1900; Henry Gassaway Davis -- 1904; John Worth Kern of Indiana -- Bryan’s final vice presidential running mate in 1908; Arkansas Senator Joseph Taylor Robinson -- Al Smith’s VP candidate in 1928; Senator Charles Linza McNary of Oregon -- Wendell Lewis Willkie’s Republican Party VP candidate in 1940; Senator John William Bricker of Ohio -- Thomas Edmund Dewey’s 1944 running mate; Senator John Jackson Sparkman of Alabama -- Adlai Ewing Stevenson II’s VP candidate in 1952: and, of course, Congressman William Edward Miller of Lockport, New York -- Barry Morris Goldwater’s 1964 running mate -- have few groupies political or otherwise.

As for the two female vice presidential candidate losers, Democratic Congresswoman Geraldine Anne Ferraro -- Walter Mondale’s 1984 running mate -- and Alaska Governor Sarah Louise Palin -- John Sidney McCain III’s 2008 VP hopeful -- obscurity has to be somewhat balanced by notoriety.  After all, to be under consideration for the second highest executive office in the modern world has to be not only an honor, but a significant lifetime achievement in anybody’s career.

Five losing vice presidential candidates, Carey Estes Keefauver of Tennessee -- Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 VP candidate; Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. -- Richard Nixon’s 1960 nominee; Robert Joseph Dole -- Gerald Ford’s 1976 running mate; Lloyd Millard Bentsen, Jr. -- Massachusetts Governor Michael Stanley Dukakis’s 1988 running mate; and Jack French Kemp -- Robert Dole’s VP partner in 1996, were chosen, in part, for their national prominence.

Estes Keefauver had led a Senate investigation of organized crime in the early 1950s.  Henry Cabot Lodge had been a prominent United States Senator from Massachusetts and Ike’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1953 to 1960. (Lodge’s grandfather Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr led the successful fight against Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations in 1919 and 1920.)  Robert Dole had served as Republican Party national chairman in the early 1970s and as GOP Minority Whip at the time of his selection for the 1976 GOP ticket.  Lloyd Bentsen was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and had beaten George H. W. Bush for the U.S. Senate seat from Texas in 1970.  Jack Kemp, in addition to his public service in the House of Representatives and in GHWB’s cabinet, had been a star quarterback for the American Football League’s Buffalo Bills in the late 1960s.

Paul Davis Ryan’s prominence is new while Joseph Robinette Biden’s prominence is extensive.  Should Ryan be the losing vice presidential candidate in 2012 his future will depend on how valuable to the ticket his candidacy is assessed as having been.  If he’s rated as having been valuable, like Edmund Sixtus Muskie of Maine (Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr.’s 1968 running mate), Ryan could be a rising star in the Republican Party.  Should Joe Biden be the losing candidate in 2012, even with his extensive experience, it’s likely that his public career will come to an end.

There are a dozen vice presidential candidates whose significance is hard to evaluate: James Schoolcraft Sherman -- William Howard Taft’s vice president who had the temerity to die during the 1912 campaign in which he was running for re-election; Vice President Charles Warren Fairbanks who served under Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt between 1905 and 1909 and who was the unsuccessful GOP VP candidate in 1916 under Charles Evans Hughes; Vice President Charles (Hell-and-Maria) Dawes, a banker and a songwriter who served as Coolidge’s vice president from 1925 to 1929; Charles Curtis, (who was nearly half Native American) who was Herbert Hoover’s Vice President from 1929 to 1933; William Franklin "Frank" Knox who was Governor Alfred Mossman Landon’s running mate against FDR’s bid for a second term; Vice President Alben William Barkley (who was called “the Vip”), a marvelous Kentucky politician and gentleman who served under Harry Truman from 1949 to 1953; Thomas Francis Eagleton and Robert Sergeant Shriver who both ran with the late Senator George Stanley McGovern in 1972; Vice President James Danforth Quayle, 1989-1992; Vice President Albert Arnold Gore, 1993-2000; Joseph Isadore Lieberman, the Democratic vice presidential nominee under Gore in 2000; and Johnny Reid “John” Edwards, Senator John Forbes Kerry’s 2004 unsuccessful vice presidential running mate.

The names of two men must have special acknowledgment here.  Ironically, neither of them was nominated by one of the two major parties for vice president, but they both achieved that office.  The names are, and you know them well, Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. and Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller.  Both dedicated a large part of their lives to public service and deserve to be well remembered and highly regarded.

If I had to grant an award to the most valuable vice presidential candidate of the last one hundred and twelve years, it would go to Lyndon Baines Johnson whose 1960 vice presidential candidacy probably insured John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s victory. 

Perhaps the grandest vice presidential candidate and actual vice president was Thomas Riley Marshall, Woodrow Wilson’s vice president between 1913 and 1921.  Marshall knew what the nation needed most and told wonderful stories.  “What this nation really needs,” he once observed, “is a good five cent cigar.”  Marshall, who was from Indiana -- a state considered critical to political success during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries -- used to tell the story of the couple who had two sons.  One of them went to sea and the other son became vice president of the United States.  The sad part of the story is that neither son was ever heard from again!

Someone once observed that a major political party’s vice presidential nomination is like the last cookie on the plate—-nobody wants it, but somebody always takes it.  All I can say in response to that observation is that for four men -- Theodore Roosevelt, 1900; Calvin Coolidge, 1920; Harry Truman, 1944; and Lyndon Johnson, 1960 -- it must have been a fortune cookie!  Inside each of those four cookies there must have been a ticket to the White House!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

AND THE WINNER WAS…!

By Edwin Cooney

Unless you’re a history nerd like me, it’s possible, even likely, that you’ve worried more about your next dentist appointment or about your next colonoscopy than you have about the actions and personhood of Vice President Joe Biden during the past four years!  Even though some of his detractors regard him as something of a pain (guess where!), I’ve always liked the guy.

The general consensus seems to be that last week’s vice presidential showdown in Danville, Kentucky -- (of all places!) was contentious if not particularly enlightening.  This was the night for Joseph R. Biden to actually earn his six figure annual salary by bringing the president a clear political victory in this series of jousts we call political debates.  I say that because historically vice presidents have been more valuable as politicians than they’ve been as office holders or, if you prefer, as “public servants.”

Under the constitution, a sitting vice president has only one duty and that’s to preside over the United States Senate and to cast the deciding vote if that “world’s greatest deliberative body” vote is tied.  Any other duty a sitting vice president has is at the discretion or pleasure of the president.

It’s easy, and therefore tempting, to trivialize what vice presidents have and haven’t accomplished, since non-accomplishments vastly outnumber vice presidential accomplishments.  Still, at least from a theoretical standpoint, I find it both sobering and instructive when we do get a peek at how some past vice presidents have considered weighty national matters.

Throughout the spring and early summer of 1850, the United States Senate was debating the admission of California into the union.  Three aging senators, Henry Clay of Kentucky, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, all of whom would be dead within two years, were debating California’s entrance into the union.  Clay and Webster, the two “great compromisers,” were working to cut a deal while Calhoun opposed outright California’s admission into the union.  President Zachary Taylor, a non politician and a slave holder, announced that he’d veto what came to be known as the California Compromise because it contained the infamous fugitive slave law provision.  Taylor believed that while the constitution protected slavery in the states, the federal government had no business getting involved in the recapture of “run away slaves.”  He made it clear that such a bill would not get past his desk.  Vice President Fillmore, on the other hand, who reportedly personally hated slavery, went to the “President’s Mansion” and told President Taylor that if the California Compromise was tied in the senate, he’d support it.  Exactly what Taylor told Vice President Fillmore, Mr. Fillmore never revealed.  However, President Taylor suddenly died after scarfing down too much contaminated cherry milk punch at the July 4^th, 1850 dedication of the Washington Monument.  Thus, the newly minted President Millard Fillmore, as promised, signed the California Compromise. Incidentally, he did so against the advice of his wife Abigail (Powers) Fillmore who had once been the president’s schoolteacher. And the crisis between the North and the South became even more of a moral crisis than a political dilemma.  Many believe that if civil war wasn’t inevitable before passage of the fugitive slave law as part of the Compromise of 1850, it became so once the former vice president signed that morally flawed bill.

According to Professor Robert A. Caro’s latest multivolume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, the enmity some members of the Kennedy administration held toward LBJ was such that neither JFK nor RFK paid any heed to Vice President Johnson’s advice as to how to get any bill through the congress.  Hence, the martyred president’s gleaming civil rights record immediately after his assassination has not stood the test of time.  As I see it, one may well conclude that had JFK better utilized LBJ’s practical political knowledge, health care and tax cut legislation may have been passed to the nation’s benefit, and John F. Kennedy may have been a near great president rather than a mere above average president.  As it stands, Lyndon Baines Johnson, rather than John Fitzgerald Kennedy, is legitimately rated a near great president in the annals of presidential evaluation.

Historically, vice presidents have been most valuable to sitting presidents as “political hatchet men.”  Throughout the 1950s, President Eisenhower used Richard Nixon to get down and dirty with Democrats during the off year congressional elections of 1954 and 1958 while he hovered above the political playing field.

Having been useful to Ike as a political hatchet man, Richard Nixon subsequently used Vice President Spiro T. Agnew to pillory anti-Vietnam war critics until, as many believe, Agnew became sufficiently popular among conservative Republicans to be a possible threat to the president’s prerogatives if not to the president’s political security.  There are many who insist that Spiro Agnew was significant enough politically that, had Nixon protected him from prosecution for fraud and tax evasion, he might never have been forced to resign the presidency.

If Americans regard last Thursday’s nationally televised "Paul and Joe Show" as mere political chatter, than who won can hardly matter.  If neither man can gain political advantage for the head of their ticket, perhaps traditional vice presidential obscurity has a genuine national purpose!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

AND YOU THINK IT'S POLITICS, RELIGION, OR BASEBALL? -- I THINK NOT!

By Edwin Cooney

For as far back as I can remember, it’s been observed that baseball is America’s “National Pastime.”  Since I like baseball, I’ve always gladly bought that idea.  Lately, however, I’ve concluded that America’s real pastime is something far more applicable to human nature than baseball or perhaps even democracy itself.

With the 2012 November elections only 31 days away, Americans are doing what they like to do better than anything else except to eat.  Not only are they good at this, they thoroughly enjoy it.  More than that, they insist upon it. For example, which do people prefer?

Geico or State Farm Insurance?

Football or baseball?

Wendy’s or Denny’s?

Steak or pasta?

Beer or wine?

And finally, Obama or Romney? It goes on and on.

Two events this last week, the almost unbelievable success of the Oakland Athletics and the first of three presidential debates, brought this phenomenon to my attention.

Last Wednesday afternoon, thanks to a very good friend of mine, I attended the 162^nd game on the American League schedule of the Oakland Athletics along with 36,076 other souls. What came through to me -- loud and clear -- in my seat behind first base (aside from the cheers of delight when the A's defeated the mighty Texas Rangers to take sole possession of first place in the AL West for the first and only time it really counted in the schedule) was how much the success of a professional baseball team really and truly mattered to millions of people.  Many of those fans wore green and gold jackets, sweatshirts, and hats with A's colors and logos on them.  Some fans wore A's charms and buttons, waved A's programs and pennants, rang cowbells, tooted horns, and shouted until they were hoarse:  “Let’s go Oakland” or “Let’s go A's.”  For many fans, during that three hour plus time period, no civic or personal concern mattered nearly as much as an A's victory on the field of play. Aside from that, whether the A's really have the talent to go on to win the World Series this October was less important than what these fans hoped will happen.  Whatever the talents of the Rangers, Tigers, Orioles or Yankees was quite beside the point in comparison to likelihood or even reality.

Later that night, fifty or seventy or whatever million people sat down in front of their television sets to watch President Barack Obama take on former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in the first of three debates that could well determine who will be responsible for peace and well-being over the next four years in America and in the world.  While some may have worn Obama/Biden or Romney/Ryan campaign buttons at the various debate parties held around the nation, it is likely that there was less cheering for either contestant in comparison to what I heard earlier that day at the Oakland- Alameda County Coliseum.

Like sports franchises, political candidates (especially since 1840 when William Henry Harrison became the third oldest man to serve as president) have become the focus of political parades and “circuses.”  In 1840, the aristocratic Harrison, whose father Benjamin Harrison was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and whose grandson Benjamin Harrison (“Little Ben”) would also become president, was billed as the “log cabin and hard-cider candidate.”  However, rather than a log cabin, William Henry Harrison was born on a Virginia plantation on Tuesday, February 9, 1773.  His worth to the people was tied to his military victory over the Shawnee Indians at the Battle of Tippecanoe on Monday, November 11, 1811 when he was Governor of Indiana Territory.  The cry in the fall of 1840 was “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.”

At the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum last Wednesday, nothing mattered in comparison to an A's victory.  At debate parties held all over the country, little mattered but what each candidate could do for the people -- and for many there wasn’t enough said about that by either candidate.  Competitive sports and politics, clever commercials for everything from restaurants and insurance companies to pharmaceutical products and beyond, point to America’s real “pastime.”

As I see it, America’s real “pastime” isn’t really baseball or any other sport. It isn't about politics, entertainment, religion or even money.  Like the time, the weather or your spouse’s mood, America’s real “pastime” is ever changing.  The only way to really know what it is precisely to take control of it would be to accurately measure it.  The problem is that it’s like trying to hold mercury in your hand or eat chicken broth with a fork. America’s real pastime is our immediate and continuing need for personal and collective gratification.

As vain and decadent as that may seem on the surface, it may well be that our national fickleness is the vital element in our American character that will keep us forever free!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

AH, HERE’S OCTOBER, SO CRISP AND DELICIOUS!

By Edwin Cooney

Okay, before I get into trouble with the properly precise among you, I must stipulate the following:

Every day and month of the year has its individual significance as people are born, marry, get a job, have children, make decisions and ultimately die.  However, it seems that every month has its own flavor.  Thus I invite you to take a quick trip with me through October, one of my favorite months of the year, to savor its flavor.

Beginning with this very date, six presidents celebrated October birthdays:

Jimmy Carter (President 1977-1981) was born on Wednesday, October 1^st, 1924 in Plains, Georgia. He was the first president born in a hospital.

Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-1881) took his first breath on Friday night, October 4^th, 1822 in Delaware, Ohio.

Chester Alan Arthur (1881-1885) became an American citizen in Fairfield, Vermont on Monday, October 5^th, 1829.

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961) opened his baby blues for the first time in Denison, Texas on Tuesday, October 14^th, 1890.

Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (1901 - 1909) gave his first lusty cry at about 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, October 27^th, 1858 at 28 East 20^th Street, New York City.

John Adams (1797-1801) began his principled and sometimes austere existence in Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts on Wednesday, October 30^th, 1735.  Can you smell the birthday candles and perhaps even taste the cake?

Just two of our presidents thus far have passed away in October.  President Franklin Pierce (1853-1857) died on Friday, October 8^th, 1869 in Concord, New Hampshire.

Handsome Frank, whose term was made tragic by the death of his son and by “Bleeding Kansas from beginning to end," was the only president to keep his entire cabinet throughout his term in office. Herbert Clark Hoover (1929-1933) passed away on Tuesday, October 20^th, 1964 at age 90 in New York City.

October baseball is especially exciting.  It was on the mild Indian Summer afternoon of Sunday, October 1^st, 1961 when Roger Maris, a former North Dakota high school football star, broke Babe Ruth’s 34 year-old record of 60 home runs in a single season. (Ironically, just two years later, Mark McGwire one of the men who would break Roger Maris’s home run record in 1998, was born in Pomona, California.  The date was Tuesday, October 1^st, 1963.)

Friday, October 4^th, 1957 should have merely been an off day between the second and third games of the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Milwaukee Braves.  Instead, it was the day Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet government successfully launched Sputnik, the world’s first manmade satellite, into space and many Americans experienced the taste of brain numbing and bone chilling fear.  Many of us wondered: if those Communists could launch a satellite, how soon would they be able to launch an orbital atomic bomb against which we’d be defenseless?

Then, of course there’s October 12^th on which most of us celebrate the 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus to our part of the world.

On Wednesday, October 9^th, 1940, John Winston Lennon made his first appearance in Liverpool, England.  His calling was that of writing, producing and singing songs.  Along with Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and Yoko Ono, young Lennon provided music that cheered and thrilled us, made us wonder, and even allowed us to “imagine the seemingly impossible.” Those songs linger in our hearts even today, over 30 years since his voice was so suddenly, outrageously and tragically stilled!

Like Santa’s sack, October is loaded with almost countless goodies, holidays, sensations and emotions.  There are those crisp fall days and chilly fall nights when we men get to dance and cuddle with sweater-clad ladies before a crackling fire or in a cozy living room accompanied by soothing music.  Then there are those early to midseason college and professional football games and most certainly baseball playoff and World Series games.  The glory of these contests is that they quicken the pulse in anticipation of complete (but harmless) triumph over a sports foe -- as opposed to the desperate and essential triumph of the soldiers’ battlefield. 

If you are a Canadian citizen, it’s Thanksgiving Day on the second Monday of the month (any time from October 8^th to the 15^th).  October fests offer good beer and plates heaped with delicious rib-sticking food and delightful deserts whether you live in Berlin, Germany or Jonesville, USA.  Finally, there’s spooky Halloween which, if not taken too seriously, can delight the imagination with memories of childhood stories such as Grimm’s Fairytales or the story of Hansel and Gretel.  If you survive that, Halloween’s doughnuts, cider and hot chocolate are just the ticket to bring October to a happy and memorable close.

This quick pass through October is far from a complete history or even overview of the month.  However, hopefully it’s a tempting spoonful.  How does it taste?

It tastes just fine to me! How about you?

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY