Wait Till Next Year

The Book of the Week is “Wait Till Next Year” by Doris Kearns Goodwin, published in 1997.  This is the first portion of an autobiography of a New York female baseball fan who grew up in the suburb of Rockville Centre, Long Island in the 1940’s and ’50’s.

During the author’s childhood, there were three baseball teams in New York: the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants and New York Yankees. Between 1949 and 1957 inclusive, one or another of these teams played in the World Series. The author’s father inspired in her a diehard Dodgers fandom. She was taught to keep score, and did so for every regular season game for years and years, starting in the late 1940’s. It was a time in history in which men played for their love of the game. The greats at that time included Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Peewee Reese, Gil Hodges, Enos Slaughter, Robin Roberts, Richie Ashburn, Allie Reynolds, Phil Rizzuto and many others.

Kearns Goodwin was raised as a Catholic, but attended public school. Nevertheless, the nuns struck fear in her heart in many ways, one of which was pressuring parishioners to refrain from entering any house of worship other than a Catholic one.  So when Campanella was coming to her area to speak at a non-Catholic church, she faced a moral dilemma. The priest reassured her that she would not be going to hell, because the event was not a religious service.

Baseball was so popular in the author’s community that in 1955, a radio broadcast of the seventh game of the Dodgers-Yankees World Series was piped through the public address system of her high school. The kids were willing to stay after school to hear it. Back in the day, World Series games were played in the afternoon. When the Dodgers won, thousands of people danced in the streets. The baseball players came back to a Brooklyn restaurant that evening for their victory dinner, interacting personally with fans without any security at all.

For the first twelve years of her life (before the neighborhood changed), Kearns Goodwin’s family was quite close with all of the different (white) families (of different religions) in her community. Their homes were as open to her as her own home.

Read the book to learn more about the author’s coming of age in a bygone era of baseball and Postwar suburbia.

Wild Ride

The Book of the Week is “Wild Ride” by Ann Hagedorn Auerbach, published in 1994. This is a long story largely similar to many others in which one person acquires and abuses too much power in an organization that eventually comes to a bad end.

The horse racing industry is largely a playground for the wealthy, as it costs big bucks to purchase, stable and train horses for racing. There is only a tiny probability of profiting, considering all the different risks, and the factors required to produce a winning horse.

Major racing sites are located in Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky; New York City, Saratoga Springs in New York State, and Hialeah in Florida.

Calumet Farm was the site of the training and spawning of racehorses. It was owned by the Wright family, whose patriarch’s goal in the 1980’s was to turn it “… into a bustling assembly-line style breeding operation, hellbent on producing winner after winner.”

In the early 1980’s, J.T. Lundy wed a Calumet heiress with the aim of inheriting the large horse farm. He inherited it at 41 years old.  He  immediately engaged in excessive spending on farm renovations, the purchase of a corporate jet and additional horses, and paying more workers. In the industry in general, new systems were created by financiers to cash in on the horse-racing boom.

Lundy spent other people’s money (namely the Wright family’s) to fund his wheeling and dealing, while also commingling personal and business funds. The family (who knew nothing about horse racing) trusted him and his colleagues (who had numerous conflicts) to run the business and do what was in the family’s best interest.

The chief financial officer of Calumet attempted to duly inform Lundy of the farm’s mounting debt service, the unpaid insurance premiums and dwindling resources, etc. at the end of the 1980’s.

By November 1990, Calumet had approximately two hundred thoroughbreds and one hundred employees. Its fifteen-year-old stud Alydar, accounted for a large part of its revenue.

Sadly, the industry would reach its saturation point within a decade of Calumet’s soaring reputation as the premier place to breed winning horses. Read the book to learn the details of how the farm had gone from owing not a cent with the death of an heir prior to Lundy’s takeover, to the largest instance of debt explosion in the history of bluegrass.

20 Things You Didn’t Know

The Book of the Week is “20 Things You Didn’t Know About Everything” by the editors of Discovery Magazine and Dean Christopher, published in 2008.  This book briefly covers a range of topics, regaling the reader with trivia and interesting factoids.

One topic covered was airport security. As might be recalled, at this book’s writing, “The U.S. government continues to spend untold billions developing technology designed to detect weapons [which were never found in Iraq]– but extremely little on techniques and training to ferret out troublemakers at our airports.”

There are at least sixteen thousand classified species of bees. On average, bees fly at fifteen miles per hour. The honey they make can be used as an antibacterial wound-healer, because it contains certain infection-fighting substances. The chapter on mosquitoes lamented that people must learn to live with the blood-sucking bugs; however, it completely failed to mention that there exist fish that eat mosquito eggs, thus keeping the pest’s population down in certain places in the world, such as Florida and Australia.

At the book’s writing, there was a museum on the history of contraceptives in Toronto, Canada. Read the book to learn additional fun information.

Behind the Times

The Book of the Week is “Behind the Times, Inside the New York Times” by Edwin Diamond, published in 1993. This book tells the history of the newspaper and the people who, through generations, to help it stay in business, changed its contents, its target readers (and therefore its sales territory) and its personnel.

In the 1950’s, the Times consisted of four realms: the weekday paper, the Sunday edition, the foreign correspondents, and the Washington bureau. Each had its own hierarchy, but all employees encountered an arrogant corporate culture because their difficulty in getting hired helped project an image of an exclusive club from which they derived prestige.

In the 1980’s, the paper was forced to look to the suburbs for readers, and acquire various west-coast newspapers, a magazine group and broadcast properties. Advertisers were able to glean significantly more marketing data and more predictable circulation numbers on readers with expanded home delivery.

The Times was a family-owned enterprise whose eventual patriarch, Punch Sulzberger served as the top leader for three decades, into the early 1990’s.  Unfortunately, he was resistant to change, so finalizing a decision to make a major revision to the paper, say, to add a section or column, took months or even years.

A task force did not always help speed up the process because the business and news departments had different goals. Finally, in 1982, the business side sold out in the name of staying in business. The managing editor began to allow “product placement” in news stories. In the 1980’s, a financial turnaround was enjoyed by the paper, in large part thanks to fashion reporting.

Around the same time, the Times’ hegemony reached its peak when competing print news sources had gone out of business. Many readers used the paper as their bible as to which performing arts shows to attend, which movies and videos to view, and which books to read. The paper was eventually taken to task– for its conflicts of interest in its exertion of extreme undue influence of such entertainment for decades– by someone who had a point. However, that someone also had an ulterior motive aside from exposing greed and abuse of power.

Sadly, the 1990’s gave way to more and more opinion writing rather than conveyance of new information. Read the book to learn much more about the reasons for the changing Times.

Werner Erhard

The Book of the Week is “Werner Erhard, The Transformation of a Man, The Founding of est” by W.W. Bartley, III, published in 1978. This is a biography of the founder of a consciousness-raising movement of the 1970’s.

Born with the name Jack Rosenberg in 1935, the subject of this biography grew up in the Philadelphia area, raised as an Episcopalian. He was the oldest of three siblings, who were born after he turned twelve years old. As a teenager, he rebelled against his mother, who treated him like a spouse rather than a son. Additionally, he got his girlfriend pregnant. Rosenberg and his girlfriend wed just after he turned eighteen years old. They had three additional children but he abandoned his family and absconded with another woman. Rosenberg thought of himself as a victim. In his words, “That requires that someone must have done it to you. That person is automatically bad, and may be punished. As a victim, you get to be righteous…”

In May 1960, Jack Rosenberg changed his name to Werner Erhard in order to transform himself into the complete opposite of what he once was. This also involved cutting off all communication with his first wife, children and immediate family. This he did for more than a decade. But in his new self, Erhard found his calling. He was a spellbinder as a salesman. He began training sales forces and making lots of money. Erhard used an unconventional approach to door-to-door sales: communication based on trust through total honesty rather than attempting to make a quick buck. He became incredibly well-read in psychology and philosophy.

Finally, Erhard jumped on the behavior-modification-training bandwagon fad of the 1970’s, naming his business “Erhard Seminars Training.” He held therapy sessions for hundreds of people at a time, pressuring them to change the “positionalities” of their minds by getting rid of their righteousness, regret and resentment. He lectured them on perfectionism with regard to attention to detail. Anything less would mean they were just surviving and not maximizing happiness.

In the real world, people tolerate bad customer service and mean corporate cultures because they must; in the ideal world Erhard envisioned– people’s effective, honest communication would help them shed their value judgments in their existence, activities and possessions in a way that would make them happy.

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional details on Erhard’s life and how he came to realize that he was meant to help his customers and clients improve their lives.

My Life So Far

The Book of the Week is “My Life So Far” by Jane Fonda, published in 2005. This insightful autobiography describes an actress, activist and exercise instructor whose childhood family life was psychologically challenged. Throughout her life, she has been continually working through various emotional, moral and gender issues.

Born in the Santa Monica Mountains in December 1937, Fonda was lavishly raised alternately by a nanny and her parents, who were absent on and off. Her father was a famous actor on Broadway and in movies; her mother, until she suicided, was in and out of mental hospitals. Fonda was close with her younger brother, Peter. She became a bulimic and developed an “appeaser” personality.

Although Fonda had a leg up in her career due to her famous father, she chose to engage in activities that she felt were societally beneficial. The media and the U.S. government, however, treated her like a criminal. She was put under surveillance by the FBI, CIA, State Department, IRS and Treasury Department, which created dossiers of thousands upon thousands of pages just about her. In 1979, she settled a lawsuit against them in which the government admitted its guilt.

In 1972, Fonda visited Hanoi to gather information and inform the American people about Nixon’s evil Vietnam-War schemes, a few of which were already in progress. Later that same year at the Academy Awards ceremony when she won a Best Actress Oscar for “Klute,” she maturely did NOT make a political statement, having been told it was the inappropriate place for doing so.

Fonda believed that presidents made war due to their feeling pressure from society to prove their masculinity. She herself was a product of this same environment, judging from her taste in men. Her third husband– media billionaire Ted Turner– “…was unable to experience intimacy because there just wasn’t room in his brain for words other than his own.” He was an emotionally needy narcissist.

Read the book to learn how Jane overcame her eating disorder, achieved success in acting, exercise-business enterprises and political activism, and how she improved her relationships with family and friends.