Bloodline
The headwaters of this river come from forks leaking westward out of the Appalachians. They join in the foothills like estranged brothers and are then fed by countless and nameless tributaries dribbling from porous slabs of Kentucky limestone to form the Cumberland, which widens and deepens and continues snaking westward, twisting and falling through the rolling region and finally dropping down into Tennessee, where it spills through the concrete walls of the Cordell Hull Dam, the tailwaters bending around and meeting up with the Caney Fork, a cold, north-flowing river, in the town of Carthage, the county seat of Smith County, near where the father now waits for what’s his.
“Ain’t much opportunity in this world for boys like you,” he says. His youngest son is lying on the passenger-side bucket seat beside him, wearing a grocery bag for a diaper, listening.
They all slept here in the van …
Baseball’s True Birthplace Turns 200
Cooperstown is a rich man’s lie
Hamden NY is the birthplace of baseball, or ‘bass-ball’
Go ask 100-year-old Alice Blackman on July 13 as she glides past the down-staters in a ’57 Chevy convertible
In the July 13, 1825, edition of the Delhi Gazette, nine residents of the newly established town of Hamden, New York, issued a challenge to an “equal number of persons” from any town in Delaware County: to “meet them at any time at the house of Edward B. Chace, in said town, to play the game of BASS-BALL, for the sum of one dollar each per game.” The ad was dated the day before, and signed by the two Chase brothers, Eli Bagley, Ira and Walter Peak, H.B. Gondrich, R.F. Thurber, Asa C. Howland, and M.L. Bostwick. There is no evidence that the challenge was taken up, but the ad appeared again a week later, and a gloveless game involving wooden bats and bases is held to have been played in the region at the time. There is currently no known earlier mention in print of a baseball game on American soil.
The challengers included the local innkeeper, a town clerk, and other documented …
Gamboling With Gamble Rogers
Itinerant south-central Florida troubadour ain’t no Rodgers and Hammerstein
Yet the New York Public Library lovingly preserves his songs and yarns, from ‘Habersham County Mephistopheles’ to ‘Bovine Midwifery’
Spoilers: His father swam at Dartmouth; His grand-uncle designed Yale’s library; He became a kind of folk-song Faulkner after drinking with the man himself at U. Va., just as Stephen Malkmus might have done.
The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound contains over half a million physical recordings stored in individually labeled slipcases so as to be easily retrieved by the hard-working archivists at the New York Public Library. The archive contains recordings of Billy Sunday preaching sermons, Irving Berlin singing his own songs, and Toscanini performing at the Metropolitan Opera. It is named after Richard Charles Rodgers and Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hammerstein II, a New York-born songwriting duo who made a gazillion dollars creating Broadway hits set in places where neither man had ever traveled, such as Oklahoma!, a musical about a farm town in which the biggest word used by any of the hick characters is “Oklahoma” (unless you include compound words, such as “smart-alecky”).
The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives is also home to a rare 12-inch LP titled Sorry Is As Sorry …
