The Farm Report

Whenever I’m blue, I get a book down from the shelf, turn to page 78 and begin to laugh.

It’s The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book  (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), edited by Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris.

It’s one of those books available by special order. You can also find a used copy online for $85 or so. It’s worth every penny. You can also find it at the library, which is a pretty cool place. It’s like the Internet, only with stuff printed out.

On page 78, the authors simply list their favorite nicknames of ballplayers. I’ve never needed more than five bites of the first column before I begin to feel better.

I present this selection of names as a public service to all humanity. If only the United Nations General Assembly would join me in my mission to bring peace to the world . . . .

If this was read aloud before that body, in all the languages of earth, we could achieve a just and lasting peace.

It’s hard to fight when you’re laughing.

(I use the Rocky Bridges card as an illustration. The nickname ‘Rocky’ isn’t nearly as funny as his real name — Everett. But Boyd and Harris write an essay on every baseball card in their book and the essay on Bridges is probably the funniest.)

Unfortunately, the tradition of baseball nicknames seems to have been lost. Since Boyd and Harris compiled this list three decades ago, there haven’t been too many colorful additions. Chris Bermandoes his part on ESPN. There was a player on the University of Florida baseball team some years back named Dave Majeski. I tried to get one of my sportswriter friends to work Purple Mountains Majeski into his story one day. He did, but it didn’t catch on.

The baseball nickname is the entymological equivalent of the dodo. So appreciate these names while you can.

Bless you, Brendan Boyd and Fred Harris. Your book is a treasure.

(Insert drum roll . . . )

Read this aloud at the office. Suggest new names for your pals. Fuck bringing sexy back. Let’s bring nicknames back.

(Big rimshot here . . . )

And now, broken down into alphabetical order, the silliest baseball nicknames we can find:

A: Wagon Tongue Adams,  Snitz Applegate,  Bow Wow Arft.

B: Bee Bee Babe, Sweetbreads Bailey, Rattlesnake Baker, Belve Bean,  Bananas Beans,  Desperate Beatty, Boom Boom Beck, Jittery Joe Berry, Hill Billy Bildilli, Red Bird, The Darling Booth, Goobers Bratcher, Bunny Brief, Chops Broskie, Turkeyfoot Brower, Oyster Burns.

C: Scoops Carey, Ding-a-Ling Clay, Whoops Creeden, Crunchy Cronin, Dingle Croucher.

D: Daffy Dean, Peaceful Valley Deizer, Hickory Dickson, Bullfrog Dietrich, Buttermilk Dow, Pea Soup Dumont.

E: Piccolo Pete Elko, Slippery Ellam.

F: Broadway Flair, Sleuth Fleming, Suds Fodge.

G: Inch Gleich, Gabber Glenn.

H: Snags Heidrick, Bunny High, Bootnose Hofman, Herky Jerky Horton, Twinkles Host, Highpockets Hunt.

J: Bear Tracks Javery.

L: Candy LaChance, Whoop LaWhite, Bevo LeBourveau, Razor Ledbetter, Grasshopper Lillie, Memo Luna.

M: Cuddles Marshall, Humpty McElveen, Beauty McGowan, Sadie McMahon, Boob McNair, Spinach Melillo, Earache Meyer.

O: Peach Pie O’Connor, Orval Overall.

P: Pretzels Pezzullo, Cotton Pippen, Pinky Pittinger, Primo Preibisch, Truckhorse Pratt, Lumber Price, Shucks Pruett, Shadow Pyle.

Q: Wimpy Quinn.

R: Icicle Reeder, Raw Meat Rodgers, Half-Pint Rye.

S: Slim Sallee, Horse Belly Sargent, Skeeter Scalzi,  Silk Stalking Schafer, Wildfire Schulte, Steeple Schultz, Blab Schwartz, Pius Scwert, Twinkletoes Selkirk, Colonel Bosco Snyder, Spook Speake, Fish Hook Stout, Inky Strange, Sleeper Sullivan, Homer Summa, Suds Sutherland, Ducky Swann.

T: Patsy Tebeau, Pussy Tebeau, White Wings Tebeau, Adonis Terry, Cannonball Titcomb, Turkey Tyson.

U: Dixie Upright.

V: Peak-a-Boo Veach.

W: Podgie Weihe, Icehouse Wilson, Kettle Wirtz, Chicken Wolf.

Z: Zip Zabel, Noodles Zupo.

Tom Wolfe started with a simple question: What do you do after you walk on the moon?

How do you top that?

After romping around on the lunar surface, you can imagine the empty feeling that comes upon you even when you do something exciting. Going to Wal-Mart on a Saturday morning loses its thrill. After all, you’ve been on the moon.

Wolfe called it “post-orbital remorse,” the condition that affected the astronauts who walked on the moon.

How many of us know for certain that our lives have peaked?

The look at the astronauts started as a Rolling Stone series Wolfe wrote in 1973. When he began digging deeper into the story for the book-length version, he got so involved that he had to cut off his manuscript before it became unwieldy. When it came out in 1979, The Right Stuff(Picador, $16) told the story of the space program from the test-pilot days of the pioneers in the late 1940s, up through the end of the Mercury program, in 1963. The story of the third generation of astronauts, those who were part of the Apollo program, remains tucked away in his archive of magazine articles.

The Right Stuffremains the great work of literature to arise from the space program. There are other fine books, including Gerard DeGroot’s Dark Side of the Moon(New York University Press, $35), which took a comic look of the space race. Next month,Wayne Biddle’s book about the engineers behind rocketry – also calledDark Side of the Moon (W.W. Norton, $25.95) may add to the serious works about the space program.

There have been a number of astronaut memoirs and picture books along the way. Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, wrote before of his post-orbital remorse in Return to Earth (Random House, 1973). For the 40th anniversary of his moonwalk, he’s written Magnificent Desolation(Harmony Books, $27).

When Return to Earth came out, Aldrin was not long back from the moon and deep into his post-orbital problem. In short, he was very much a work in progress.

In his new book, Aldrin is closer to the end of the story and – I’m pleased to report – he’s in the Zip Code of his happy ending. He stared down the demon of depression (which he dealt with in Return to Earth) and now he’s also battled alcoholism.

(To learn more about Aldrin’s battle with alcoholism, seewww.cleanandsobernotdead.com.)

Aldrin not only knows the moment 40 years ago when his life peaked. He also knows when he hit bottom – trucked out on public relations tours, selling used cars – and wrecked two marriages on his way.

This memoir starts with the peak – the moon landing, told in gripping detail – and then his battle to recover his life, nearly losing it to drink.

It’s a compelling story, all the more fascinating for what it followed, that historic trip to the moon with Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins. As Armstrong and Aldrin stood on the lunar surface and looked around, they searched for words to describe what they saw. “Magnificent . . . desolation,” Aldrin said.

Of all the words that have been devalued in the modern world, it’s probably “incredible” that has lost all its meaning. What we did to put men on the moon was incredible. Most everything else is less.

The word for “anchorman” in Swedish is kronkiter. That tells you an awful lot about how important Walter Cronkite was to broadcast journalism. He so thoroughly defined a role that the job took its name from him.

I believe his genius as a broadcaster was in coverage of the live event. He gathered information — as a reporter — then knew precisely when to use it (or, rather, download it). He learned how to talk over pictures and not insult the intelligence of viewers by explaining the obvious. He always knew the background, the interesting personal histories, of the people he was covering. And that’s what made his broadcasts superior to those of the other networks.

He also was a great student. In the late 1950s, when he realized that the space race was coming, he learned everything he could about the tools and the technology. And that’s why he beat the socks off of all the other networks during the coverage of the space program in the 1960s. When the inevitable launch delays occurred, all the other networks could say was, “Well . . . there appears to be some delay. The rocket is still on the launching pad . . . .” But Walter not only knew the problem, he could tell us about it in terms we could understand.

And that’s the way it was — for space launches, political conventions, election nights and, sorry to say, a number of political assassinations. He delivered a lot of bad news.

He was an artist of journalism.

He was also part of the last generation of broadcast journalists to come from a newspaper background. He got into broadcasting after making fun of friends who worked in radio. When put-up-or-shut-up time came along, Cronkite was up to the challenge.

He was one of those people who defined the medium. The “super” — super-imposition of an identifying name over an image onscreen — was invented during Cronkite’s coverage of the 1952 Democratic convention. Producer Don Hewitt recognized that Cronkite’s reporting and its deep background would be disrupted if he had to stop when every new shot appeared on screen in order to identify the person in the picture. Having lunch at a diner, Hewitt noticed the ‘today’s special’ sign and bought it from the manager. He experimented with putting letters on the black background of the board, dropping out the black, and leaving white letters to pop up on the black-and-white screen. It was a great breakthrough, and it all started at a greasy spoon in Chicago.

Another thing Cronkite brought into being: longer newscasts, with room for feature pieces, such as Charles Kuralt’s “On the Road” vignettes. Back in the early 1960s, network newscasts were 15 minutes long — nothing more than a headline service, really — until Cronkite said he wouldn’t do the job unless CBS expanded its news broadcast to a half hour.

It took a while for someone to try to define what Cronkite — and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley — did. Eventually, they were called anchorman. But Cronkite insisted on being called managing editor of CBS News. It was a tradition he carried over from his newspaper and wire service career and it indicated the sort of care and precision that he brought to the profession. Sad to say, much of that grace and professionalism has been lost.

I met him once at a dinner in Arizona. In fact, that evening was a trifecta of journalism greatness. I shook hands with Cronkite, was the butt of a characteristically snide comment from Andy Rooney and squeezed into a buffet line with Bill Mauldin. Rooney was laughing when he made the joke at my expense, and no offense was taken. Mauldin was a little embarrassed to squeeze in front of me in line. But meeting Walter — well, it was a little like shaking hands with Mount Rushmore.

It was Sept. 12, 2001, and New York – along with the rest of the world – was still numb with shock from the terrorist attacks of the day before.

America’s royal acting couple was at a hushed Manhattan restaurant. Life as we knew it had changed. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward ate quietly, until Newman set down his knife and fork, dabbed his mouth with a napkin and stood. Without introduction or explanation, he began singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Within a few moments, the other diners stood and sang along with the National Anthem. At the end of the song, Newman bowed, sat and returned to eating dinner with the woman he loved so dearly.

Something about that little story, which appears in Shawn Levy’s new biography, Paul Newman: A Life (Harmony, $29.99), perfectly sums up the late actor. He was a pure product of America, renowned as a philanthropist and citizen as much as for his screen presence. And no matter what he did, we always seemed to trust his judgment and follow him.

If you liked Paul Newman – and really, who didn’t? – then you will love Levy’s biography. Don’t come here looking for dirt. It’s not an obsequious, fan-worshipping biography, but Levy obviously likes the man.

That’s no crime. Reading a biography written by someone who loathes the subject is no fun.

Even though Levy never had an interview with the Blue-Eyed One, we still get a rich and full portrait of the guy.

He was a gifted actor, whose skill and ability began to limit his roles. After developing such  a strong screen presence over the years in such films as The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke andButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), it was nearly impossible for the public to accept him as anything other than Paul Newman. And it’s not like that was a bad thing to be.

But he was so much more.

He was a political activist, but without the smarmy, condescending you-stupid-fuck attitude affected by many of today’s movie stars / amateur radicals. (Sean Penn, you could learn much from Mr. Newman.) Even those on the opposite side of the political aisle admired Newman’s intelligence and the grace with which he made his points.

He was a good and generous citizen, who used his wealth – much of it acquired through his garage-born business in making popcorn and spaghetti sauce – to build camps for children with cancer. Giving these kids some joy in a life that might otherwise not have much was vital to his mission of being Paul Newman.

He was a race-car driver, but much more than a slumming dilettante from Hollywood. He not only drove, but he partnered in one of the great racing teams of modern auto sports history.

And, of course, he was also a husband. He was so good, he makes the rest of us look like talking pretenders. When Joanne visited him on the set of one of his last films, he lit up when she came near him. He was sitting in his chair, waiting for his next shot, and patted his lap. When she sat down, he snuggled into her neck and said, “Are you still my broad?” The rest of us might get slapped for using that Rat Pack word, but Newman could carry it off.

The great insight in Levy’s engrossing book has to do with Newman’s marriage. He was always in love with Joanne, always in pursuit, always filled with admiration for his wife – even though he might express himself in somewhat crude terms. As it turns out, this man who was the most desired man in America, was always fawning after his wife, totally in love with her for the 50 years of their marriage. No doubt he could have had any woman he wanted. Apparently, he only wanted one.

OK, so maybe we do learn of a couple of indiscretions. They were affairs of opportunity, loneliness and separation. He was forgiven, apparently, after serving appropriate penance. But even these breaks in the Tiffany case of this perfect marriage make Newman more appealing. When he recognized his error and what a wonderful woman to whom he was married, he did what he needed to do to save his marriage.

And there is also the story of Newman’s son, Scott, who dealt with his father’s daunting shadow by hiding it and becoming addicted to the drugs that eventually killed him. (Again the good citizen, Newman used his personal tragedy to create The Scott Newman Center, to help educate young people about drug abuse.)

Newman’s life was both charmed and cursed.

Then, of course, we have the films he left behind. Levy’s book will have you planning a Paul Newman weekend on your DVD player. Once you start looking over the titles, though, you begin to realize it’s going to be Paul Newman month.

The films are all so familiar that Levy doesn’t waste our time by rehashing plots and narrative points. He tells us how Newman prepared for his roles, how he diligently rehearsed with his fellow actors, and the grace and skill he left for us to admire.

You don’t read this book; you inhale it. Paul Newman: A Life probably won’t end up as the definitive Newman biography. Down the road, some writer will have access to things that Levy couldn’t get his hands on. Newman left behind hours of interviews recorded for an unwritten memoir. There are also reams of notes and correspondence. And perhaps there are more revelations about how that Levy couldn’t find because he was not in the inner circle.

But Levy’s book is certainly a wonderful, vivid portrait.

It kind of makes you want to stand up and sing along

You’re probably wondering what Hunter S. Thompson has to say about Sarah Palin. Maybe you’re curious about his thoughts on the first months of Barack Obama’s presidency. Could be you want to know his predictions for the upcoming professional football season.

We can’t know what he would think, of course. And don’t for a moment presume that you would know his opinion, say, of President Obama. Thompson was many things and most of them were unpredictable. He was a brilliant man, a gifted writer and an artful, challenging conversationalist. Largely self-educated, he would see historical and literary parallels in nearly every avenue of discourse and for him writing / art / conversation was a parry-parry-thrust sort of game.

As much as his army of readers misses him, imagine being a close friend and missing him. When there is a Great Historical Moment – the Obama Inauguration, for example, or the death of Michael Jackson – the friends all prepare for the illumination and insight of their old buddy, for a moment forgetting that he is gone.

So, unless there is a Mojo Wire in the Great Beyond, we cannot know what Hunter S. Thompson thinks about Palin, Obama or Jackson. And it reminds us how much we miss that voice of his, the twisted and insightful literary voice he brought to the world. He left behind a lot of writing and over the next decade or so, it will be carefully published by the family’s literary trust. The first major posthumous work, The Mutineer – his third volume of collected letters, edited by Douglas Brinkley – will appear next year.

Thompson was such a good writer that he was able to knock down the barrier between conversation and literature and write with such confidence that it was like speaking to the man. And when he spoke, it was generally in well-crafted, well-thought-out sentences. To some, he mumbled. But it was a question of having the right kind of ears to hear him.

For those who miss that voice, Anita Thompson has collected some of her husband’s best interviews in a substantial new volume,  Ancient Gonzo Wisdom (Da Capo, $18). On first blush, you might think the book redundant. After all, last year writers Beef Torrey and Kevin Simonson collected the essential interviews in Conversations with Hunter S. Thompson (University Press of Mississippi, $22) and that, it would seem, was that.

But no. Anita Thompson’s new book repeats only a couple of the interviews and one of those – Craig Vetter ’s landmark 1974 Playboy Interview – is truly a classic of the form. What she has done is to dig deep into the Gonzo archive and transcribe a number of broadcast interviews – many quite obscure – and assemble a solid and indispensible record of Hunter S. Thompson’s public life as a writer, from 1967 (publication of Hell’s Angels) to the end of 2004, three months before his suicide.

And, of course, we again feel the pain of his loss. There was so much on his mind . . . always on his mind . . . that he would have needed three more lifetimes to put it all on paper the conventional way. Instead, this book shows those ideas through his artistry as a conversationalist. He rarely repeated himself and as the late-in-life books of letters (The Proud Highway and Fear and Loathing in America) showed, he was an artist at correspondence.

(Click here for a sample from Ancient Gonzo Wisdom – a 1967 ABC News interview with Thompson about Hell’s Angels.)

These two books of interviews show Thompson in a variety of moods. Whether ebullient or dour, Thompson was never boring. Devoted readers who can quote chapter and verse on his life will find background and insight to his work. Those who don’t know his work but may know him only from the clownish image that Garry Trudeau fabricated of Thompson for Doonesbury will enjoy the good times, the insights, the wicked wisdom of the real Hunter S. Thompson.

Ancient Gonzo Wisdom reminds us of why we miss him and how much his absence is deeply felt. Imagine the loss that must be shared by his close friends, his son and grandson, and the widow who prepared this wonderful book to share with us.

(From Bill McKeen’s Book Blog at Creative Loafing.)