The Battle Royale Cometh-The Dogfight For The Soul Of The Democratic Party-Call It Between Sleepy Joe Biden And Feel The Bern Sanders And You Would Not Be Far Off

By Alan Jackson

                                                                               

I have been around the political and cultural commentary business for a long time so nothing surprises me much when readers come out of left-field to have their say. That was the case recently from several readers who got up on their hindlegs when I mentioned, in passing, that a bigtime fight was brewing underneath the struggle for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. I mentioned, again in passing, that the corporate Democrats have had such a stranglehold on the party that it has become a fossil, has forgotten how to use its majority to actually win and forestall all the bullshit coming from the right. Has become the party of the donor class (or part of it), lobbyists, media mavens, and fussy insider bureaucrats who could not find their ways pass the Beltway with three tries.

No question that the Democrats have never claimed to be anything but a pro-capitalist, pro-corporate globalization party including one presidential candidate who has made a mantra out of declaring she is a “capitalist to the bone.” But in other times, and not to far back, they used to at least use the fig leaf of being a “people’s party.” (That “not too far back” being on the long side the New Deal and short side some variation of the Great Society.) Hence the alienation of former traditional bases like the working class, especially the working poor. The task as they have seen it is to get out the vote on election day and then do business as usual.    

Enter a new approach, an approach that reflects the very real damage Republicans have done to the electorate through voter suppression, increased hoops to pass through to register to vote and getting to the ballot box itself. That is to realize that many constituencies are hungry to have a say in history. Groups that have been neglected or not seen as reliable and worthwhile prospects to organize (from the comfort of Washington offices to be sure). In short what has become known as the Phillips thesis where rather than concentrate on some white working-class voter who might listen to the message, really a mythical figment of the Beltway imagination the party go after the young and energetic en masse, communities of color in all their diversities and the working poor (those who are working two and three jobs to put food on the table).        

So yes two very different ideas of how to avoid in the short term another Trump four years, four years unchained and long term to confine the Republicans to the dustbin of history. These ideas got their first serious workout in the Clinton-Sanders clash for the 2016 Democratic nomination but not everybody, including me, saw how much the corporate Democrats were out of step with the times and could not muster enough energy to beat a second-rate third rate bum of the month like Donald J. Trump. In every way as we head into the 2020 campaign season this fight which has been a long time coming is going to be played out as the race falls between Sleepy Joe Biden and Senator Sanders (with an outside chance of Senator Warren carrying some grassroots water). More later.   

When The Big Boys From The East Got Their Wanting Habits On-A Saga From The Files of Ace Private Detective Phil Larkin 

By Lawrence Parker

The popular best-selling private detective writer Max Bloom says that Ray Chandler mostly got it all wrong back in the 1930s when Private Detective Phil Larkin landed the Sternwood case which made his nut for a long time. Maybe too long as it turned out because after some early successes he fell under the bus, wound up doing repo and key-hole peeping work for some sleazy Post Street agency and then as go-fer for the rising star Sheila Graham over on Bay Street when his star got pulled down in San Francisco. But that was later, later when the shades got pulled down tight. What Max, what Max told me okay, was from the days when Phil was the rough justice windmill guy ready to churn up bad guys and sweep the ladies off their feet and into some silky sheets.

A generation ago if I said the Sternwood case all ears would be listening since that was the one where the rich and famous of early Hollywood mixed freely with the gangster element out in California in the days before the boys from the East decided to crash the party and get some sun as well. Phil Larkin who had worked in the Los Angeles D.A.s office before getting the boot for not being able to look the other way when the graft came around for the office still had some friends there. One of them had some kind of connection to the Sternwoods, maybe had done the old man, a retired general among other things, a favor or two and was he was saying thank you. This Sternwood family by the way is yes the same family or at least the old man was who along with silent partners John D, Rockefeller and Jay Gatsby cornered the La Brea tar pits and the rest is history.      

That part Ray Chandler got right but what he got wrong, wrong as rain was what the General wanted Phil for, what chore needed tidying up. Ray tried to chalk it up to the old man needing help trying to figure out what to do about Carmen, his youngest and wildest daughter’s gambling debts-pay and be bled or throw some rough stuff and be done with it. Even Ray admitted that the job if as described was one for a lawyer rather than a brute-like private eye. What the deal really was, and in the end it turned out to be not the General’s play but his equally wild and oldest daughter Vivian’s was to find her husband, a rough trade guy named Rusty Regan out of the IRA and Irish freedom fight so rough trade is right. It looked like she had tried to do the right thing when she decided to divorce him and take up with the legendary gangster Eddie Mars, the guy who ran every racket legal and illegal in Southern California by stepping over everybody else either with his good-looking charms or guns.  Sure it made for a better story if it looked like some old half dead General was looking for salvation, looking for his boon companion Rusty but there you have the skinny.    

Of course Phil took the case, he needed the dough, needed to work the case for twenty-five and expenses a day. Figured to ride the carousel for a month or two, come up empty and make a mint for little heavy lifting. Phil, an old-school street-smart guy knew he had to kick around the jams a little so he headed first to see what was what with that gambling debt stuff, see if there were any leads there. The General, or rather the General’s man-servant had given Phil the card demanding the gambling debt repayment with the name of a guy fronting a rare books operation out of Sunset Boulevard. An operation which had to have had plenty of protection from cops and gangsters alike since even a schoolboy knew back then that “rare books” were a fancy name for pornography, for smut. In this case for the high-end trade, the perverts with dough and no last names.         

That is where Max says Ray got it wrong although how knowing Phil and his thing for the ladies he didn’t know that Phil was not chasing after elderly male perverts and pedophiles to see what they were buying Max did not know. For no known reason once Phil figured the operation out (helped along by a female clerk who was clueless about rare books or anything else for that matter) he decided to confirm what was going on by following some dandy with a book in his arm grabbed from the bookstore. Bingo-smut. And good citizen Phil keeping such stuff off the streets. Reality. Phil went to another bookstore nearby to see if anybody knew what the owner looked like. Bingo-he found a curvy, vivacious bookworm who did and they whiled away the afternoon drinking brandy and whatever waiting for the owner to show. That owner would show but faced a tough night as Phil would find out after following him and his boyfriend to a secluded cottage where the smut was photographed. Photographs which included young Carmen in the buff. Somebody did not like that idea and shot our smut-peddler very dead. It turned out later that this Nancy and his boyfriend were cooking the books against the real boss-one Eddie Mars and found himself in front of a few slugs. So much for cleaning the streets of garbage.    

Max Bloom after reading and reviewing Phil Larkin’s manuscript about the Sternwood case realized exactly what Ray Chandler had done wrong. Not wrong in a literary sense but wrong as to the actual case and its solution which under his guidance the reader was left up in the air with more questions than answers about what was happening. Of course Chandler was writing his lurid detective novels in the 1930s at a time when every crime detection novel had to have some sexual hook into the case if for no other reason than to justify those saucy and sexy front covers with half-naked women in stressful situations to lure the mainly male readers in. In the usual run of the mill story that was the highlight of the event since about sixteen different codes were in play and everything was done by inference and suggestion.

This situation is where Chandler got played false. He, after setting up Phil on the case to find Rusty Regan via some queen rare books dealer named Geiger plays the scene as revenge for broken romance. According to Ray this young stud chauffer named Owen Wilson was all heated up over this hot pants Carmen Sternwood not knowing just how kinky she was and susceptible to any suggestion especially when she was high as the sky on drugs. One night this Owen followed the play to Geiger’s secluded house where Carmen was in the midst of a photo shoot. Bang, bang one stately queen of a Hollywood naughty book seller bites the dust.

Meanwhile a third party, a grifter named Brody connected to the Geiger operation vis his hard as nails girlfriend of the moment, having seen Geiger killed (and been accused of doing the deed himself) having grabbed some photos of Carmen as blackmail bait decided that he could live on easy street by grabbing the load of books and setting up shop for himself. And he almost succeeded, no, the whole set-up was too many moving parts for a small-time hood, a guy who couldn’t put two nickels together at most times. Ray got this part right. Phil caught up with this Brody looking for those Carmen photos which needed to be squashed. After some chatter and a guest appearance by Carmen to claim the photos (and screw things up) Brody saw Phil’s reasoning, gun in hand. Then Brody winds up making his last fatal move by answering his door. Bang, bang one less grifter is around town.

Along the way the reader finds out that young Owen, you remember Owen, got mysteriously washed up to shore after speeding over a guardrail in one of the Sternwood fleet of automobiles. Along the way Phil trailed the guy who he thinks shot Brophy who turned out to be the stately queen of Hollywood’s boyfriend Carl who thought Brody had done his lover (and meal ticket) in. When everybody put their heads together the whole thing looked like nothing but a classic murder revenge cycle with the dip that it involved homosexuals in the big love mix. That is what the coppers spread anyway.

All bullshit, or almost all although Owen was sexually crazy for Carmen and Carl and Geiger were not so closeted lovers.  What Ray missed, maybe others too was that the big boys from the East, the guys with the funny accents and plenty of muscle and firepower had played out the cities on the coast what with their white slave, prostitution, dope, gambling, protection rackets fully developed and needed to expand their operations. California and sun beckoned, wide open territory at least from the scouting reports. The big player in Southern California, the good-looking guy who could handle a gun and starlet at the same time was one Eddie Mars. Eddie who not so coincidentally was Geiger ‘s protection against coppers and interlopers alike. Let Geiger run the smut and rake in the dough while he provided some of the “models.”     

                     

When the big boys headed west, when they sent guys like Owen Wilson also known as the Boogie Kid which if Mars had known earlier might have saves some grief, their first target was the soft underbelly of the illegal trade-smut. This is why whatever feelings Owen developed for Carmen on the job he was sent West and found out that she was connected with Geiger who was the max daddy of the smut operations right out on Sunset Boulevard. Geiger had to go, and he went leaving for a short enough time room for a classic grifter like Joe Brody to get his fingers on the goods. Thinking he would run the easy street racket. Not knowing that the big boys were in town to start their work. Bang, bang Joe Brody farewell. What Joe didn’t know, and what his killer, Geiger’s boyfriend, Carl who actually wasted Joe had been sent out by those same big boys to soften up Geiger with his predilection for the odd and kinky stuff. They had originally thought they could use Geiger as their front, for a while but no go. With this description you know a soft shoe like Eddie Mars is going to find himself in the Pacific Basin in the not distance future. A lot different story than that romance noise Chandler bought into.  

       

Of course Phil Larkin had his own axe to grind, was protecting himself and that Vivian Sternowood he got tied up with for a while. They might have been married but at least they shacked up together for a while so there is that. Then there is the shadowy role, the not quite legal role Phil played in covering for Carmen around the Rusty Regan matter we all found out (via Phil’s memoir or the police files) was so much noise once it was clear that Regan was some kind of emissary from the big boys in the East. Letting Carmen take the slight fall for the death satisfied everybody. With all that, even the murk, everything falls into place better. It is easier to understand that this was nothing but a death knell for one Edward Mars late of Santa Monica shores. Why although everybody knows Bugsy, Lucky, Woody in the criminal pantheon out west Mars has disappeared from that history.     

The toughest thing Phil had to do once he figured the big move from the East was gaining an ally to find Rusty for the old man. Hot pants Carmen was out of the question so the logical choice was Vivian, after all she had been married to the renegade IRA commando. That was not as easy as it seemed since Eddie had for his own reasons mostly to get in with the old-line Sternwood crowd, let Vivian run up some serious gambling debts on her own and it was only after Eddie did a slow-burn double-cross letting her win one night on his off-limits casinos and then had one of his henchmen try to rob her outside the joint. Which would have happened if it wasn’t for Phil eagle-eyed intervention. So Vivian sees the light, or begins to.   

The main drag from there between Phil and Vivian is to keep Carmen out of the clutches of the coppers over what seemed to be Carmen’s murder of Rusty. That dog bone is what kept Vivian deep-tied to Eddie for so long not knowing that the big boys had Eddie earmarked for the Pacific Basin when they thought (correctly as it turned out) that Eddie had his big fingers in that death. Nobody in New York City, Brooklyn, Hoboken or Newark was going to shed tear number one if Eddie went down for the Rusty killing or because he got in the way of what the big boys were trying to muscle into. In short Eddie was one doomed mother.    

Here's the play on how Eddie went down in the end. Somehow that female clerk at Geiger’s storefront, the one who played footsies with the late Joe Brody found another daddy, a small time second-rate private eye with fewer brains than desires. That two-bit punk played emissary from the witch because she knew exactly where Eddie Mars’ wife was holed up. Eddie had the bright idea to cover tracks by putting his wife in cold storage and letting everybody think she had run off with Rusty. That two-bit private eye wasn’t as brittle in the end as one would have thought, as Phil thought. In any case Phil got the address. Although maybe he should not have wanted it since by the time he had gotten there the big boys’ agents had rubbed out Eddie’s small army. Eddie’s wife got away in the cross-fire with Vivian’s help.  The big boys got to Eddie and his two-so-called bodyguards and Eddie Mars left no trace of his small time Southern California criminal operations. (From Eddie’s perch new-found boss of bosses Bugsy branched out to very lucrative Vegas).

Once Again The Fate Of The Wanting Habits-The Eternal Search For El Dorado  

By Ronan Saint John

Recently in drawing some comments about my hone of its many guises, the most common one that the location was somewhere in the American West during Spanish-cowboy days) I mentioned that for a kid like me, a projects kid, such legends played into the wanting habits all kids from such places had about having “enough.” That comment above all others, maybe reflecting the times or readership, drew sighs of disbelief. Disbelief that a child’s wanting habits were so strong that they would be worthy of comment some fifty years later. The kicker was a reader, a young reader from the tone of the remarks, never had heard of such a term as “wanting habits” except in an old-time Bessie Smith song from the 1920 Down-Hearted Blues. On the one hand I was glad that this person’s frame of reference was so remote but also flabbergasted that some people, young or old, had no clue that a determined part of the population had such desires, and had had them unfulfilled.

Now there is no way that what I, and every project kid from my project, or any growing up project after World War II called that ache in our hearts “wanting habits” but that is what they were. That is as good a way to put the condition, still lingering in the background today, that I felt. You see what that young reader was, is clueless about is that some people grow up in desperate poverty not necessarily of their own making. The classic statement of that would come from hard-pressed mothers when you asked for say a dollar to go to the double-header Saturday afternoon movies. The answer: “we barely have enough money to pay the rent never mind that.” That refrain punctured all my childhood (until, old enough, I figured out way to get stuff that I could sell to do what I needed to do not always legally) in some variation for we were poor dirt through all that period until I got to high school and we got some partial relief.     

         

Memories, sharp memories come back of endless bouts of breakfast oatmeal, of having Karo syrup sandwiches, yes, the blood sugar level was through the roof, endless bologna and cheese sandwiches and Saturday franks and beans. More. Wearing older brothers’ hand-me-down whatever condition including what must have been generations of patched jackets and trousers. Many cold nights when we could not pay the oil bill and could get no more credit. Having girls, girls I was interested in from the ranch house development newly built up the road from the projects dismiss me out of hand once they knew I was a projects boy. Yeah, those wanting habits came in many forms and guises. So don’t tell me that there were no wanting habits developed back then that lasted in some cases a lifetime. Don’t tell me an El Dorado dream was hooey either.  

Rumbling And A-Tumbling On Campaign Trail 2020-The Mysteries Presidential Candidates Jockeying For Position Unfurled-Maybe

By Sam Lowell

In the old projects neighborhood when I was a kid we used to, being very short of money for official store-bought games, play a game called fuzz ball. The idea, the winning idea was to figure out where the twelve to fifteen balls (old golf balls found on a country club golf course just sitting there for the plucking even if we were trespassing) would wind up once the rules were established which basically kept things moving (and each of us off the other’s back about fouls and stuff). It was that ancient silly game that I was thinking about recently when I was asked by my political comrades who are along with me ever since last January knee-deep, no, waist deep in the 2020 presidential campaign on behalf of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.      

The real connection between fuzz ball and this odd-ball presidential election campaign are the number of ups and down in the process before some kind of clear winner is asserted. Many a time I thought I had the game in the bag only to have some goof golf ball come up and whack my chances. When my Bernie group got formed last winter we thought we had it all figured out and in some ways we had, have but mainly the jury is still out. Then Sleepy Joe Biden and Senator Sanders apparently mainly on previous name recognition were assumed to have the front-runner status. Senator Sanders jumped out into the lead as long as Sleepy Joe had not formally declared his candidacy. In the meantime serious contenders like Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts were putting ground games together as were holy goofs like Andrew Yang and little Tommy Steyers were spreading plenty of dough around to keep visible and pray for rain or something.

Then come late spring and Sleepy Joe’s formal announcement that he wanted to be king of the hill. That sent his stock way up the charts. Why? Somehow sight unseen he was the only one who could beat one Donald J. Trump, the only hope of the corporate friendly establishment wing of the Democratic Party. That mantra kept him afloat for far longer than any of us in the Sanders corner expected until the debates, until Sleepy Joe actually opened his mouth and was found to be made of pure dust (which still hasn’t kept some from using the same old, same old argument about electability)

Some people got nervous though and started looking for the next best thing which turned out for a minute through the summer to be Senator Warren, if she could do business, tone down her act. And she come. Every day you would hear about her surging in some polls and if you weren’t just a little wary, and a little cynical about such polls when they were all over the place she looked like she would be queen of the hill. She fell down a bit on Medicare for All and her general wonkish demeanor and draw and right now she is licking her wounds. We shall see what happens in the early going when actual votes are counted. Not everybody put their eggs in one basket though. Pistol Pete from South Bend began to get (and still have) some serious play if Sleepy Joe falls down or Professor Warren can’t make a turnaround. We shall see.

Through all of this I have not mentioned Senator Sanders who took the biggest hit when Sleepy Joe entered the lists. His numbers never really moved all summer and he was written off (if not previously then at that time) as a favorite of the fanatics in the party and not much else. Worse Senator Warren was pulling voters from his fringes (and cadre too) so by early October it looked like he was done for. Especially when the heart attack scare took hold about his age and such. That was the nadir but strangely from his recovery period onward he has moved up the charts again. Not an unimportant consideration that rising star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) saved his bacon by a big endorsement and rally in Queens when he was on the ropes. For that he should be eternally grateful. Who knows what will happen as we head into the actual vote-counting but my political comrades and I have agreed that looking at Iowa and New Hampshire the Senator has a shot at getting over the finish line. Something that in early October seemed totally improbable even to we die-hards.    

Rumbling And A-Tumbling On Campaign Trail 2020-The Mysteries The Preference Polls Unfurled-Maybe

By Sam Lowell

Recently in a quick sketch after reading a crime novel by the late Robert B. Parker which was a fictionalized account of legendary black baseball player Jackie Robinson’s 1940s breaking in the Major Leagues I noted that as a kid I was crazy to crunch numbers, and still am. That despite the fact, unlike Parker apparently and Lowell’s own Beat maven Jack Kerouac, that I did not wile away my hours pouring over baseball stats like RBIs, averages, ERAs. I even admitted to the cardinal sin of 1950s childhood of not going deeply overboard in charting the amazing Mickey Mantle of the New Yrok Yankees. Still I liked the number crunches.       

Fast forward to 2019. I along with a coterie of my old political comrades have taken a very big leap forward in attempting to stem the rot of the age of Trump by supporting a candidate, in this case Senator Sanders from Vermont, for the Democratic Party nomination against Trump next year. Once we had made our decision back in January it was natural for me to be assigned the number crunching task extraordinaire of following and analyzing the preference polls. I will have to say I was amazed at the number of polls that are out there as if each news agency or polling outfit could not trust any other source but their own to give their spin on the numbers. In the old days a few organizations such as Gallup and Harris would do the bulk of the work and that would be that. Now there is literally a whole cottage industry doing this kind of work. Nate Silver over at “538” actually ranks poll reliability among his other chores.     

Here is the funny part, the part where old-time polling meets new technology. Almost every poll contains a caveat warning that their numbers only reflect “a moment in time” during the campaign season. Nice, right. The beauty of having had a large field for the Democratic Party nomination is that a whole layer of candidates are bunched together within, get this, the margin of error, meaning something like a four to five point swing which could mean anything for any candidate.

Here something equally as funny the gaps between the numbers of the two dozen or so authoritative polls is unbelievable wide and frankly baffling considering they all are assumed to use some scientific random processing to get results. Frank Jackman made me laugh one day when he mentioned that based on some of the polling numbers whether maybe the pollers just went out on the street and ask opinions of passers-by. Or use an old dodge like land lines as the source. In any case for now at least I take these beautiful numbers as “moments in time” and we shall see what flushes out as the process goes forward. Enough for now.       

Rumbling And A-Tumbling On Campaign Trail 2020-The Mysteries Of Presidential Politics Unfurled

By Allan Jackson

Anybody serious about politics, meaning me in the first instance, will if they play the game long enough find that they have twisted and turned in the winds more than once. Take this 2020 Presidential election cycle. Normally I would, along with many friends, cover the race without getting our hands dirty. From the sidelines. This age of Trump though has most of us worried that the Republic cannot stand another four years of this madness. If Trump wins reelection, meaning that he will be totally untethered from anything not having to run again then people like me, left-wing people will be facing the bastinado come Inauguration Day 2012, or find ourselves running up in the hills somewhere.

To forestall that possibility, either possibility actually,  a number of us in January met to decide not whether we would cover the campaign but how deeply we would invest in some candidate whom we thought could beat Trump and save us from that bastinado/head for the hills scenario. On its face that idea might not seem surprising since millions of citizens take a crack at politics every four by participating in the presidential sweepstakes. But not us. We, the group that formed the committee in Boston to work some campaign have all been involved in more left-wing political causes that you could shake a stick at, all the time for most of the past fifty years or so (or in the case of Frank Jackman now sixty years). We are the remnant of the Generation of ’68 who abhorred the idea of getting bogged down in elections for individual candidates with blah-blah programs soon forgotten when the power boys roll their dice. We would particularly scoff at somebody like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for, as socialist in good-standing, even thinking about running for elective office. Be as we said and still say more often than not part of the problem not the solution.    

            

But we live in troubled times, a time when we feel the Republic, that beautiful old ragged institution that we would all prefer to work under is in danger from forces well beyond whatever one Donald J. Trump can unleash. And hence that early January 2019 meeting to decide who to support with cash, time and energy in 2020. The meeting itself was made up of veterans, including veterans now peace workers, old-time civil rights advocates, a sprinkle of students, mostly bogged down with college debt, community organizers and activists and the like. The key was that each invitee had been, was, is an organizer who would go out and organize others to swell our ranks (something that has actually happened although as any political organizer knows you can never have enough of them).  

That first meeting, that contentious first meeting centered on two points-who to support and where to expend our energies since we were close to New Hampshire the first primary state in the nomination process come February 11, 2020. That latter point was fairly easily settled although a couple of people balked at focusing on New Hampshire when there was plenty of work to be done at home. They left but the rest of us agreed that Iowa and New Hampshire were important historical grounding boards for most successful campaigns.

That brought us to which of the then myriad (and still plentiful) candidates ready to take on Trump, some serious, others who knows what they were about. This is where some of us got a little shamefaced (actually Frank Jackman brought up the old refrain about electoral candidates being part of the problem not the solution although he was among the strongest partisans that we set up a committee early and grab a candidate as well. The “contest” if you will had been centered on one Bernard Sanders, U.S. Senator from Vermont who had run hard but unsuccessfully against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Massachusetts U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren. Others were vetted, including the perennial Joe Biden, former Vice President under Barack Obama and the darling of the Democratic Party establishment (maybe less so now in the winter of 2019) but came up with too much negative baggage, or were too light-weight to take the heavy mud fight that will be the 2020 General Election.       

I found it hard to believe that after a million years of scoffing one Senator Sanders that I would be his biggest partisan come selection time. But such are the times. The kicker for many of us was that despite being out in the wilderness from many years with his entirely supportable programs like Medicare for All, his version of the Green New Deal and college debt forgiveness he stood fast all these years and you could trust him to work like seven dervishes to enact the programs after 2020. Trust a characteristic in very short supply these days. Courage too now that I think about it. In the end that would be the main draw from selecting Senator Sanders as our candidate. Senator Warren has adopted many of Senator Sander’s ideas along the way and for a while was dishing out a new program a week but we felt she was a weak reed against a guy like Trump. Somebody mentioned that there were only so many wonks who would appreciate her papers (including us who wound up having to read them all). Not enough to    

beat Trump in a mud fight. I will leave it at that.

When The Oklahoma Kid Did Not Infest My Childhood Dreams-Complete With Reasons

By Sam Lowell

Recently on an airplane ride of some duration I did a little light reading to pass the time. The book I was perusing by the well-known late crime novelist Robert B. Parker was a fictionalized account of the trials and tribulations of the legendary baseball player and heroic breaker of the color-line in Major League baseball Jackie Robinson-and his white bodyguard. That later part carrying the bulk of the fiction around the story. One of the subplots in the story is the utter devotion of a young male baseball fan who whiled away many hours dealing with players, their statistics and their teams. That dedication to task got me to thinking about others whose spent their lonely or forlorn childhoods in that manner. The great Beat novelist Jack Kerouac even had imaginary leagues and all kinds of statistical materials. Others, some well- known, some not had similar stories.

Not me. Not me despite growing up in one of the golden ages of major league baseball when it was for all intends and purposes the dedicated national pastime. This before the endlessly boring football fouled the airwaves and our Sundays and other television nights. I grew up in the 1950s, in the post Brooklyn to Los Angeles and New York to San Francisco times when the leagues reached nation-wide levels despite the crying, the continual crying if I hear right about the diehards, of the Dodgers and Giants leaving the town bereft. My time was the time of New York Yankees run when they were almost unstoppable if healthy. And maybe that is why I was nonplussed by baseball, by counting major league players and their stats and whatever else was going on in that world.          

This was the time of stand-out star Mickey Mantle, the Oklahoma Kid who could hit homers, bring in runs and hit for average like nobody’s business. But let’s look at it this way even though I was no homer for the then horrible Boston Red Sox how could a kid from the waterfront projects relate to such athletic prowess from out in dustbowl Oklahoma. Funny, because I loved to deal with numbers too. Sorry Jack and cast but your devotion leave me cold.