Hall of Fame is ‘Grace-less,” but at least there’s Jim Thome

 

Bill Knight column for 7-22, 23 or 24, 2021

 

Reader feedback was mixed to a recent column expressing regret that the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s rejected Mark Grace (again, the only ballplayer to lead the Major Leagues in hits in a decade not elected to Cooperstown besides Pete Rose). Some shared my sense of injustice at Grace’s snub, and others said he deserves ostracism for his history of DUIs, which can be dangerous to others as well as irresponsible, and the private Hall of Fame and voting baseball writers are free to honor more exemplary athletes such as fellow first baseman and Illinois native Jim Thome.

Fair enough. Thome was respected as a hard-nosed player and a nice human being, both factors in his 2018 induction into the Hall of Fame on his first year of eligibility. He deserves the recognition.

Born in Peoria in 1970 to Joyce and Chuck Thome, James Howard Thome was the youngest of five kids and grew up watching his family play sports, and playing with them. (Eventually, Thome wore his baseball pants “old-school,” with his socks showing to his knees, in tribute to his dad and grandpa, who wore their uniforms that way in softball and minor-league competition.

Jim played sports in youth leagues and in school in Bartonville, Ill., where he played basketball as well as baseball, and earned All-State honors. Not drafted by Major League Baseball, Thome enrolled and played both sports at Illinois Central College, where at a game in Chicago he caught the attention of scout Paul Hoynes of Cleveland, which drafted hm in the 13th round in 1989.

Thome’s athletic potential and character may have been inherited and shaped at home, but his talent and endurance came from his work ethic and from coach and manager Charlie Manuel, who became his mentor. (Manuel – Thome’s manager or hitting coach from 1991 to 2002 – suggested Thome mimic the character Roy Hobbs from the film “The Natural,” pointing his bat toward the field before the pitcher was set.)

Invited to the Indians’ pre-season camp, Thome didn’t make a roster and stayed at extended spring training. In 1989 and 1990, Jim played in rookie-league clubs in the Gulf Coast League and the Appalachian League.

Mid-season in 1990, Thome was promoted to Class-A Kinston in the Carolina League, and the following year he made the jump to AA ball for the Canton/Akron Eastern League affiliate. After 84 games there, Jim was moved up to Colorado Springs in the Class-AAA Pacific Coast League for 41 games and had his major-league debut on September 4, 1991.

He split time in 1991-93 between Cleveland, Colorado Springs and Charlotte, in 1994 was promoted to the majors where he stayed.

A premier power hitter, the right-hander batted left, and partly in response to errors at his initial third-base position, Cleveland in 1997 moved him to first, letting him focus less on defense than offense. That year he made the All-Star team for the first time.

Despite a few years of various injuries, the 6’4” slugger became a five-time All Star and played for Cleveland, the White Sox, Minnesota and Baltimore in the AL, and the Phillies and Dodgers in the NL.

In 2,543 games over 22 years, Thome logged 2,328 hits with a .276 batting average, 612 homers, and 1,699 RBIs, and his post-season production put him in elite company – his playoff home-run total (17) was third all-time, after Mickey Mantle and Reggie Jackson (both with 18).

Thome became just the 23^rd ballplayer to hit 500 home runs (his was at US Cellular Field in Chicago –on the White Sox’s 2007 Jim Thome Bobblehead Day!).

Sportswriters affectionately called Thome a “throwback,” a player with old-fashioned approaches and attitudes.

He was humble, too.

“I am a guy from Peoria, Illinois,” Thome said. “Never, ever, growing up as a kid did I think my name would someday be mentioned in the same sentence with guys like Babe Ruth, Mickey mantle or Reggie Jackson.”

Off the field, Thome’s activities were also impressive. His charitable work ranged from the United Way and the Make-A-Wish Foundation to literacy and anti-hunger campaigns. MLB honored him with the Roberto Clemente Award for community involvement and the Lou Gehrig memorial Award for his giving character. Elsewhere, the Baseball Writers Association gave him its 1995 Good Guy Award; the MLB Players Association named him 2001’s Man of the Year; and the Sporting News chose him as “No. 1 Good Guy” for his philanthropy.

So, yes: Thome is deserving, no doubt. Still, for baseball fans, it’s not Thome vs. Grace, or an “either/or” question.

It should be a “both/and” recognition.

Are UFOs now unifying or dividing us?

Bill Knight column for 7-19, 20 or 21, 2021

 Donald Rumsfeld died June 29, four days after the release of the U.S. Department of National Intelligence report to Congress on UFOs (now called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: UAP). The study might as well have featured the former Defense Secretary’s 2002 comment:

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know,” he said. “We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.”

The report’s declassified parts about various sightings is inconclusive about whether beings pilot UAPs or if the truth has been hidden for years, but something’s been happening for decades.

“U.S. intelligence officials have found no evidence that the aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots in recent years are alien spacecraft,” the report says, “but they cannot yet explain the unusual movements that have puzzled scientists and the military.”

Just between 2004 and this year, the Navy studied 144 sightings by government personnel (crew on the USN cruiser Princeton saw an object drop from 60,000 feet to the surface of the sea in seconds, hover, then speed away).

The report adds, “Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects.”

In Illinois, the National UFO Reporting Center in Davenport, Wash., says since 1947, the state had 2,758 sightings, though that’s probably a fraction since people were reluctant to go public.

The late author Philip Jose Farmer recalled seeing a UFO after work at a Peoria steel mill.

“I along with several hundreds of other people saw a UFO one summer night in the early 1950s; a round blue ball. It shimmered. The Air Force claimed it was a weather balloon, but weather balloons don’t glow bright blue or stop suddenly and reverse path or dart off quickly at right angles or circle or dive swiftly down and then ascend even more swiftly and then just disappear.

“Weather balloons always go with the wind; they don’t go against the wind or shoot off in the south direction when they’re going east. Nobody’s controlling them,” he continued. “What I don’t know is what caused this – electromagnetic or astronomical or meteorological.”

Also in Illinois, a Tinley Park crowd including police and people in aviation and the military in 2004 saw three colored balls, apparently connected, moving through the sky, and in 2006 a dozen United Airlines workers witnessed a big disc floating above O’Hare airport, then speeding upward through the clouds.

The topic is no longer dismissed as something from kooks or frauds, and polls show 1 in 3 Americans (Democrats, Independents and Republicans!) believe the world has had extraterrestrial visitors.

Illinois Congressman Mike Quigley, a 5^th District Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said, “The stigma is gone. That’s as big a change in policy as I’ve witnessed about this issue.”

Indeed, NPR, “60 Minutes” and Scientific American all have covered the question and its implications, but New Yorker magazine writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus conceded there’s difficulty in reporting things we don’t know or understand because we think we already understand them.”

Decades before the deceptions called “deepfakes” (videos of people, places or things that didn’t actually exist), a photo in a hardback book I checked out of my small-town library excited my imagination, already enthused about space: George Adamski’s 1953 best-seller “Flying Saucers Have Landed.”

            Adamski, a non-scientist who dabbled in philosophy in the 1940s, launched a career lecturing about hosting extraterrestrials and visiting other planets. Even at age 10, my excitement turned to “Hey, wait a minute!” since I knew they were uninhabitable. Adamski, it turns out, was a hoaxster.

            But I also thought aliens could exist. Assuming there’s no intelligent life anywhere except Earth seems incomprehensible. And vain.

Some physicists, such as Michio Kabu and the late Stephen Hawking, warned against seeking alien contact because superior civilizations could harm our world. But Albert Einstein is reported to have said, “It is entirely possible that behind the perception of our senses, worlds are hidden of which we are unaware.”

Maybe because I enjoyed novels such as H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” or Robert Heinlein’s “Door into Summer,” I wonder whether drive-by visitors come from different times.

 “We can’t, as yet, explain them,” Farmer said, “and maybe these unexplainable things or beings can’t explain us.”

Although DNI’s report is inconclusive, it also accepts our ignorance: We don’t know what we don’t know. Whether that’s comforting or troubling, maybe in realizing how little we know, humanity could benefit from some healthy humility.

Friedan was feminist leader and labor journalist

 

Bill Knight column for 7-15, 16 or 17, 2021

 Too often, we’re all in “silos” limiting our views, not realizing other experiences and information that could be useful.

A great example is Betty Friedan, the downstate Illinois native who 50 years ago this week was a founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus, along with Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, Gloria Steinem and others.

If more people knew of Friedan’s complete background, she and the NWPC may have had more allies, and those supporters may have found additional backing from such feminists.

Beside NWPC, most of us know Friedan was the first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and a leader in the unsuccessful push for an Equal Rights Amendment. However, too few realize that Friedan, born Bettye Naomi Goldstein in 1921 in Peoria, was a journalist in high school and Smith College in Northampton, Mass., and an advocacy reporter covering working women’s rights, the labor movement and other progressive issues years before the release of her 1963 best-seller “Feminine Mystique,” about the unfulfilled lives suburban women faced.

From 1942 into 1952, Friedan was a reporter for Federated Press, which provided stories to labor unions for local publications. Then she was a staffer for seven years at UE News, a publication of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE).

“It was a loss to American history that a remarkable journalist and feminist leader failed to bring forward the seminal contributions that labor ideals and struggles had made to feminism in the 20th century,” wrote James Lerner, former UE News editor, in his book “Course of Action: A Journalist’s Account from Inside the American League Against War and Fascism and the United Electrical Workers Union (UE), 1933-1978.”

Friedan grew up in Peoria, the daughter of Harry and Miriam (Horwitz) Goldstein. Miriam was a journalist for a Peoria newspaper until she married Harry, a jeweler. After graduating from Smith, Friedan studied for a year at the University of California-Berkeley, then declined an offer to remain there in order to work as a labor journalist.

“Goldstein and I frequently covered stories of broad national interest to union members, including equal rights for women in the workforce,” Lerner wrote. “She wrote a number of important articles on women’s wages, among them several pieces on wage discrimination against women in the electrical industry.”

In 1947, Goldstein married Carl Friedan, who’d work in public relations and advertising. Betty Friedan (she’d dropped the “e” from her name) took maternity leave in 1949 to give birth to their first child, then returned to UE News, where one of her best pieces was 1952’s “UE Fights for Women Workers,” outlining working women’s exploitation. Foreshadowing “Feminine Mystique,” she described ads that show women working in GE kitchens, watching Sylvania TVs or using Westinghouse Laundromats:  “Nothing is too good for her,” Friedan wrote, “– unless she works at GE, Westinghouse or Sylvania, or thousands of other corporations.”

Biographer Daniel Horowitz wrote, “For Friedan herself, the fight for justice for women was inseparable from the more general struggle to secure rights for African Americans and workers.”

That’s probably forgotten because of the onslaught of anticommunist attacks on unions by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the McCarthy Senate hearings in the late 1940s and early ‘50s – plus a clause in 1947’s Taft-Hartley Act requiring union officers to sign an anti-communist affidavit. That all weakened the UE, whose membership dropped from 600,000 in 1946 to 71,000 in 1950, a decline leading to cutbacks including Friedan’s layoff.

Friedan later became concerned about being “blacklisted,” as Horowitz noted: “Had Friedan revealed all in the mid-1960s, she would have undercut her book’s impact, subjected herself to palpable dangers, and jeopardized the feminist movement.”

If people knew the ties between Friedan the labor journalist as well as Friedan the feminist, there might be more understanding and solidarity between those movements, plus better outcomes to derailed campaigns as different (yet connected) as the Equal Rights Amendment and the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act).

Friedan seemed to realize that in 1997, when she told journalist Judith Warner that the greatest threat to the future of the women’s movement wouldn’t be “age-old sexism, persistent stereotypes, gender expectations or unfairly shared caretaking duties. The larger danger would be the tilt in our national values that occurred in the last decades of the 20th century: ‘the culture of corporate greed,’ the downsizing and downgrading of formerly solid middle-class jobs and ‘the sharply increased income inequality between the very rich … and the rest of us, women and men’.”