Reno: A City Trembling

The archived column table was becoming cumbersome;

from now on, clicking the Speed Graphic at the left will take you to the old stuff

July 15th Thursday: The bad news is, it's cruising to Long Beach; the good news is, they're sending us the Queen Mary.

click on the Photoshopped toy T-Bird conked out on my back fence to read an old Hot August Nights column (2002)

'Tis said that if one is going to plagiarize a writing, use a heavyweight source, so here we go tonight with the heaviest of publications, my once-a-week, Friday-night treasure The New Yorker Magazine, probably the last magazine in the US of A whose editors know the difference between an ümlaut and a dieresis, or how many dots are in an ellipsis... That's the kind of magazine I want to steal stuff from. In a paragraph or five you'll read this booty I seized.

In 19 years of writing a weekly column I frequently had to run a correction to something I wrote the weekend before. Wrong. Usually it was my own inattention - tracing Arlington-to-Chestnut-to-Belmont Streets, south-to-north, knowing full well Belmont was south of Chestnut. Names - I knew them both personally but still tangled up Union 76 service station operator Swede Olson with caterer Swede Mathisen. Sometimes I had help - a butchered 1948 Nevada State Journal piece with me lucky enough to have the only person alive when it happened reading my column and pointing out "my" error (I told the late veteran Journal editor Ty Cobb, Sr., that he was smart enough to stick with the 1930s that few readers could remember vividly, in his Cobbwebs columns; I was dumb enough to run the 1960s and '70s when most of the perpetrators and participants were still alive and could squawk about my dumb recollections.)

Some topics defied accuracy and research. I once wrote that any scribe who wrote about irrigation ditches, churches, railroads or architects was typing in a minefield (if the late Dale Darney didn't agree with a railroad piece, I trashed it - he got his facts from the Bancroft Library in Berkeley.) I had fun with a church one time, blew the hell out of the piece and found out later that the postwar church parishioner/volunteer secretary/archivist had a beef with the pre-war lady of the same job title, regarded her as a brazen hussy and ergo rewrote the church's records to reflect her own flawed and biased memory. I wrote it and paid for it the next week. And in 2006, (I think; there goes that research thing again) I wrote two weekends of columns about LaVere Redfield and thereafter added him to the four enumerated above.

Often an "editor" helped: In a piece about San Francisco's Palace of the Legion of Honor, I scribed "Alma Spreckels" as being its major contributor and some well-meaning but greenhorn editor/clerk assumed that if Freckles is right for a comic strip then I surely meant that Alma must be Spreckles. I didn't. I heard from a Bay Area contingent over that one. "An heroic" changed to "a heroic" was almost an annual affair.

Some screwups were interesting; and one is extremely timely with the events of this week (July 13): While writing a tribute to our RHS baseball coach and later a local icon named Bud Beasley, I paraphrased Casey at the Bat liberally, giving attribution to its writer Ernest L. Thayer, noting that the classic baseball poem landed the poet Thayer in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

I heard almost immediately from Hall officials that writers, announcers, and other non-playing personages associated with baseball were "included" or "seen" in the Hall of Fame, but only baseball players (and managers and owners) were "inducted into" the HOF. Nerves were a little frayed at the time because Tigers catcher Bob Uecker "I always thought the knuckleball was the easiest pitch to catch. Wait'll it stops rolling, then go to the backstop and pick it up" had gone into the Hall, or whatever, for broadcasting, certainly not for playing. The Hall of Fame was trying to make the difference clear and I wasn't helping.

Now, we find this week that Bob Sheppard, the incredible public address announcer for the Yankees for five decades, passed away, and national sports pages and broadcasts were full of Sheppard's earlier induction into the Hall of Fame (as a matter of fact: Sheppard's Yankee Stadium microphone, identified as his by a plaque, is on display in Cooperstown). Like Thayer, although his contribution to baseball was immense, he was not inducted into the Hall of Fame. Thus, one can see how easy it is sometimes to have to run a correction for something one writes.

Enough. I heard a reader say, "What the hell are you getting at, Breckenridge?"

Here now, intact in Arial navy-blue text, our Correction of the Week, reprinted with attribution to the May 31, 2010 issue of The New Yorker magazine, pp 78:

A review about "Israel Is Real: An Obsessive Quest to Understand the Jewish Nation and Its History," by Rich Cohen, included a quotation from the book that misstated the name of the Ehud Barak's father and his town of origin. He was Israel Brog, not Shmuel Goldfein, and he came from Pusalotas, Lithuania, not from Plotsk, which is in Poland. The quotation also misstates the person responsible for the change of Barak's original surname. It was Barak himself, not his father.

The review, following the book's account, misstated the history of the refugee ship Exodus. It was originally a Baltimore packet steamer, the President Warfield, not a transport donated by Samuel Zemurray, a fruit magnate nicknamed Sam the Banana Man.

Now returning to the Blue Plate Special's Book Antigua black typeface, I note that, (a) I'm good, but I couldn't possibly make that stuff up, (b) one can see how an innocent reviewer can get screwed up by a flawed source, and, (c) reading how author Rich Cohen hammered up the tale of Brog, Goldfein, Sam the Banana Man or whatever this book is about, I now feel much better about tangling up Swede Mathisen with Olson and Belmont Street for Chestnut, and a litany of my other gaffes.

For old time's sake I'm ending this with, Have a good week, and God bless America.