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captainsblogSo far, I give it all an E. For the program, that means "excellent," but for me, "exhausted." I just got into La Keenta Een within the half hour, 14 hours after leaving my sister's and nine after arriving in the university student center, our home for today and the next two.
What a range of speakers, stories and perspectives. One PhD-type played it largely straight, reading a thoroughly researched paper about the Mets' 1970s business practices (unfondly known to us then as the "Midnight Massacre"), but just about everybody else departed from their texts, telling tales from the heart and offering memories and opinions that made 1962 as real as the game the Mets "put in the books" with a win a couple of hours after I got here.
Even the non-presenting attendees had contributions. One, here just to attend, commented after a panel about the team's inaugural year in the rickety old Manhattan ballyard left behind by the Giants after the 1957 season. His question was a good one (why the Dodgers, who left Brooklyn for the West Coast at the same time, have so much more of a following among Met fans), but his cred outshone everyone's on the entire campus, for he attended his first Giants game at the Polo Grounds, not in 1957, but 1927. He got a round of applause just for being there, as I pray I will if I attend a sequel to this conference 40 years from now.
We've had two Hall of Fame presenters already. As in working-in-Cooperstown Hall of Fame. I recently read and loved a recent book by one of them, and he added much to the background of this team we love in spite of their faults. He was the first that invoked many specific memories of that mastermangler of the English language, Casey Stengel.
In highlighting some of the more obscure first-year fizzlers on the Met roster, he noted that one of the debut season's first pitchers was a Quebec-native acquisition from the Red Sox who spoke no English. Picture, he said, being on a pitching mound, speaking none of the native tongue, and having to take English lessons from Casey Stengel. It's a wonder his brain didn't explode then and there.
His fellow panelist, a regular Dodger attendee at Ebbets Field before their defection, followed with his own observations of both those final years in Brooklyn and the early ones in the Polo Grounds and eventually Shea. He, too, recalled Casey's way with words and the ways they left all sense of sanity behind.
Then came the real treat for me: a panel discussion featuring half a dozen sportswriters and broadcasters who I'd read, heard, remembered, many of whom had interviewed the Ol' Perfesser personally in their careers. Longtime local sports anchor Sal Marchiano put it this way: “Interviewing Casey Stengel or Muhammad Ali is like stealing money.” Both would just fill tape with a mind-boggling amount of wisdom and wordplay that made reporting it a joy. As this-all is for me, if you couldn't tell.
Ask me what Walter Plinge and Sidd Finch have in common. I now know this, thanks to the recollections of longtime Newsday columnist Stan Isaacs and current one Mark Herrmann. I heard a great quote from childhood hero Ron Swoboda, who, in all likelihood I will MEET tomorrow night: "Some people have a career. I had a catch." I heard, and re-heard, over a dozen anecdotes I already knew by heart about the foibles of this team, which, in the end, are our foibles, acted out and redeemed for us.
And we're only a third done.
----
Work intervened only modestly throughout the drive and the day; I will send some emails out before the first session tomorrow to pour cold water (or possibly bleach) on them, and hopefully it'll be a quiet Friday beyond that. Most of the presenters are just going off notes, although a few have Powerpoints; I will likely convert a few of my illustrations into slides, add some audio I dug up, work in a few media-related anecdotes from today, and then wing it without much more new material on Saturday. The attendees won't have copies of the papers, and in fact the organizer said it could be a year or more before the academics approve them all for publication. But the last thing I'm worrying about now is scholarly attribution. I'm just happy to be with friends, new and not-so-new, sharing a joy in a fun and meaningful way.
The real Mets won in real time today, but we ended tonight with a documentary about the fans of the team (an unauthorized team biography which had to have all players' faces and on-field action pixelated out). The film ended with the Mets losing the seventh game of their last playoff appearance, six Octobers ago. That was during our 2006 freak October snowstorm in Buffalo, and I wrote about that night shortly after the time, also after I'd spent all of it, and the next morning, in and coming back from Rochester trying to fix my work computer which had been damaged during the storm. I wound up losing that computer, but in time, the pain passed and it was time for disk drives and input devices to report again.
As I will, round 9 tomorrow morning. More to come (including, I hope, better pictures if I can get Godot II charged up and taking some).
What a range of speakers, stories and perspectives. One PhD-type played it largely straight, reading a thoroughly researched paper about the Mets' 1970s business practices (unfondly known to us then as the "Midnight Massacre"), but just about everybody else departed from their texts, telling tales from the heart and offering memories and opinions that made 1962 as real as the game the Mets "put in the books" with a win a couple of hours after I got here.
Even the non-presenting attendees had contributions. One, here just to attend, commented after a panel about the team's inaugural year in the rickety old Manhattan ballyard left behind by the Giants after the 1957 season. His question was a good one (why the Dodgers, who left Brooklyn for the West Coast at the same time, have so much more of a following among Met fans), but his cred outshone everyone's on the entire campus, for he attended his first Giants game at the Polo Grounds, not in 1957, but 1927. He got a round of applause just for being there, as I pray I will if I attend a sequel to this conference 40 years from now.
We've had two Hall of Fame presenters already. As in working-in-Cooperstown Hall of Fame. I recently read and loved a recent book by one of them, and he added much to the background of this team we love in spite of their faults. He was the first that invoked many specific memories of that mastermangler of the English language, Casey Stengel.
In highlighting some of the more obscure first-year fizzlers on the Met roster, he noted that one of the debut season's first pitchers was a Quebec-native acquisition from the Red Sox who spoke no English. Picture, he said, being on a pitching mound, speaking none of the native tongue, and having to take English lessons from Casey Stengel. It's a wonder his brain didn't explode then and there.
His fellow panelist, a regular Dodger attendee at Ebbets Field before their defection, followed with his own observations of both those final years in Brooklyn and the early ones in the Polo Grounds and eventually Shea. He, too, recalled Casey's way with words and the ways they left all sense of sanity behind.
Then came the real treat for me: a panel discussion featuring half a dozen sportswriters and broadcasters who I'd read, heard, remembered, many of whom had interviewed the Ol' Perfesser personally in their careers. Longtime local sports anchor Sal Marchiano put it this way: “Interviewing Casey Stengel or Muhammad Ali is like stealing money.” Both would just fill tape with a mind-boggling amount of wisdom and wordplay that made reporting it a joy. As this-all is for me, if you couldn't tell.
Ask me what Walter Plinge and Sidd Finch have in common. I now know this, thanks to the recollections of longtime Newsday columnist Stan Isaacs and current one Mark Herrmann. I heard a great quote from childhood hero Ron Swoboda, who, in all likelihood I will MEET tomorrow night: "Some people have a career. I had a catch." I heard, and re-heard, over a dozen anecdotes I already knew by heart about the foibles of this team, which, in the end, are our foibles, acted out and redeemed for us.
And we're only a third done.
----
Work intervened only modestly throughout the drive and the day; I will send some emails out before the first session tomorrow to pour cold water (or possibly bleach) on them, and hopefully it'll be a quiet Friday beyond that. Most of the presenters are just going off notes, although a few have Powerpoints; I will likely convert a few of my illustrations into slides, add some audio I dug up, work in a few media-related anecdotes from today, and then wing it without much more new material on Saturday. The attendees won't have copies of the papers, and in fact the organizer said it could be a year or more before the academics approve them all for publication. But the last thing I'm worrying about now is scholarly attribution. I'm just happy to be with friends, new and not-so-new, sharing a joy in a fun and meaningful way.
The real Mets won in real time today, but we ended tonight with a documentary about the fans of the team (an unauthorized team biography which had to have all players' faces and on-field action pixelated out). The film ended with the Mets losing the seventh game of their last playoff appearance, six Octobers ago. That was during our 2006 freak October snowstorm in Buffalo, and I wrote about that night shortly after the time, also after I'd spent all of it, and the next morning, in and coming back from Rochester trying to fix my work computer which had been damaged during the storm. I wound up losing that computer, but in time, the pain passed and it was time for disk drives and input devices to report again.
As I will, round 9 tomorrow morning. More to come (including, I hope, better pictures if I can get Godot II charged up and taking some).
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no subject
Date: 2012-04-27 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-27 05:33 pm (UTC)(And you get a reply, since Hofstra apparently doesn't like LJ).
no subject
Date: 2012-04-29 02:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-27 10:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-27 10:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-27 02:41 pm (UTC)I know you'll rock it out when you present your paper.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-27 03:33 pm (UTC)