On Roger Maris, baseball, and heroes

(There are lots of memories associated with this baseball card.)

I was absolutely consumed by baseball until I was about 13.  I played on a Little League team, I practiced pitching in front of a full-length mirror in my home, I watched games on tv incessantly, and I collected baseball cards.  At the end, I had 3,333 baseball cards, mostly from the 1950s, which my mother overlooked in the basement when she moved from my childhood house.  I never saw them again.  Oh Mom!  Because of this addiction and the data on the back of the baseball cards I had memorized, I knew nearly every stat about every player on nearly every team.  In 1958, one set of stats I committed to memory was the following: right fielder, batted left, threw right, born in Hibbing, MN, rookie year with Cleveland Indians.

Roger Maris only played for the Indians during 1957-58, the first year of his famous career.  He was traded to Kansas City in 1958, and then to the Yankees in 1960, where he played with Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra.  But even in his first year as a pro, there were high hopes for Maris, who later hit 61 homers in the 1961 season, breaking Babe Ruth's record that had stood for 34 years.  So Maris was already one of our heroes among my baseball-loving comrades on the northwest side of Lima, Ohio.  His Rookie Year baseball card of 1958 was hot within trading circles, one of those prizes where you instantly threw away the gum inside the package as soon as you saw the "Roger" and the Indians' uniform.

In those days, it was a common field trip for boys' groups at school to go to a professional baseball game.  Given where I lived, the trips usually went north to an Indians' game in Cleveland; on occasion, we got to travel south to a Redlegs' game in Cincinnati.  The cost of a ticket was about $2, and the stands were never even a third full back then.  (Many years later, I thought I would take my family to a Blue Jays game when we were visiting Toronto.  We walked up to the stadium at game time and were promptly told they had been sold out for weeks.  And if they had tickets, it would probably cost our family of five about $150.  I was in disbelief.  I don't remember reading that stat on the back of a baseball card.  I guess I had been out of touch with my childhood game for a long time.) 

So it was sometime in 1957 when the group of boys (it was always only boys) with which I was traveling headed to Cleveland for a game.  I can no longer remember who the Indians played that day or who won the game.  Our excitement was focused on the habit of congregating around the outside door on the back of the stadium where the players emerged after the game and their showers.  If you were lucky, and the players were in an accommodating mood, they would stand there for a few minutes and sign autographs.  After one of those games, I remember an angry Mike Garcia emerging into the light and the throngs of baseball-loving boys only to shove us aside and to stomp his way to his car, signing nothing.  He had pitched badly that game, and he was bringing his work home with him that day.

But the highlight of my baseball celebrity memories was the day that Roger Maris and Al Smith walked out among their faithful disciples.  We rushed to get their signatures.  I got Al Smith's right away, and he had hit a home run that day.  Then I jumped over to the Maris crowd, and eventually worked my way to a position right in front of the guy.  He signed my baseball program.  But the immense pressure of all those young male bodies was incredible, pushing me forward well within the personal space of the soon-to-be famous ball player.  It reminded me of the feeling I had at the Pussycat Dolls' concert I attended at Cornell last year outside on the lawn.  Students pressed so hard toward the stage that I had to get out of there.  I staggered toward the edge of the crowd as best I could, inadvertently groping students of both sexes.  I was embarrassed at the looks I got, but it was not my fault.  I wanted to scream that I have been married to the same woman for 41 years, and I'm the father of three grown children, and I have peripheral neuropathy so my balance is not so good, and I am not a pervert.  But no one would have believed me.

So to extricate myself from the crowd of autograph seekers around Roger Maris, I had to get down on my hands and knees and crawl out of there.  I swear to whomever you believe, I crawled right between his legs to escape!  It did not seem that weird to me at the time.  I was desperate, I couldn't move, and I was not big enough or strong enough to push my way out of that mess.  So I saw daylight about 18 inches above the ground and I went for it.  I was successful.  I escaped intact with the guy's autograph, which was worth significant bragging rights for many months after.

Men like Maris and Mantle were a big deal to boys like me.  We had little chance of becoming famous or of mingling with the famous, so our brief moments of encounter with them were worth a lot.  Those brief moments gave us something to talk about back home, and made watching them on tv even more magical than it would have been otherwise.  They were heroes to us in every sense of the word.  Maris' autograph, for which I was so proud, was written in pencil.  That signature later faded badly on the glossy paper of that baseball program, which disappeared along with my baseball cards.  But the memory of that day is still very fresh in my mind.

Those men informed our dreams and kindled our imaginations, in spite of any personal problems or improprieties they might have suffered off the field.  I think Bob Costas, the sports commentator par excellence, said it best.  Although he was referring to Mantle, I hope his sentiment still applies to many stars who young people emulate today:  "In the last year of his life, Mickey Mantle, always so hard on himself, finally came to accept and appreciate the distinction between a role model and a hero. The first, he often was not. The second, he always will be. And, in the end, people got it."

Does touching a bird's nest cause the female to abandon it?

(Male Bobolink.  The male usually helps at the nest, but the female does most of the work.)

Did you grow up with your mother telling you not to touch that robin's nest because the mother would not come back and the babies would die?  Most of us did.  This has to be one of the most frequently uttered adages in all of nature lore.  The fact is, this is mostly myth.

During the 1980s, Eric Bollinger and I studied Bobolinks in upstate New York.  Bobolinks are a polygynous (i.e., males commonly have more than one female mate) species in the blackbird family.  The males have an incredibly long, bubbly song and their appearance is described as having  a tuxedo on backwards.  They are about the size of a sparrow.  Bobolinks build their grassy nest on the ground.  The female lays one egg per day until she has completed a clutch of five, begins incubating with the laying of the penultimate egg (next to last), incubates the eggs for 10-12 days, and then feeds her nestlings for another 10-12 days until they fledge.  Males usually help feed nestlings, but they are not as attentive as females.

Eric and I and our technicians located hundreds of Bobolink nests in those years, which are built on the ground in hayfields and meadows.  Once we located a nest, we placed a bamboo stick in the ground about a meter away from the nest with some colored plastic flagging on the top of the stick so we could relocate the nest at will.  Once found, we checked the contents of the nest every day to determine its progress and success.  When the nestlings were about 7 days old, we removed each one from the nest, collected a blood sample, measured it, placed an aluminum band on one leg, and returned it to the nest.  In some years, we removed the eggs and measured them before returning them to the nest.  In other words, we disturbed the nests a great deal during their three-week life, although we were careful not to trample the concealing vegetation around the nest any more than absolutely necessary.

Nearly 1,000 nests endured this harassment, and Eric and I learned a great deal about the behavior of  females because of it.  If we found a nest while the female was constructing it, she usually abandoned the nest.  If we found the nest when she had laid only 1-2 eggs, she often abandoned the nest.  Once the female had laid her full clutch of eggs and began incubating, she almost never abandoned, and if the nest contained nestlings, she would absolutely never abandon her brood.  The same seems to be true of most other birds as well.

Think of it this way: the more the female had invested in time and energy in the whole operation, the less likely she was to give it up.  Remember also, most birds have only a limited seasonal window during which they can successfully complete the nesting cycle.  In the case of Bobolinks, it takes a total of about 30 days from initiation of nest-building to fledging of their young.  In addition, they continue to feed their fledglings after they leave the nest for some period of time.  Bobolinks do not return from South America until early May and they start moving south again in August.  If they had to start over with the nesting cycle part-way through, they would barely have enough time to get those babies to a size and age where they could endure a long migration at the end of the summer.

Realize that the patterns I have described above probably apply to most songbirds in North America.  They may not apply equally well to tropical birds, which live in an area with many predators, and which always seemed to me to be extremely wary of predation threats.  Those species might abandon their nests more readily than temperate species.

So when your mother or grandmother tells you not to touch that nest because the female will not come back to it, you can say: "Well Mom, it goes like this".  There is a danger of attracting predators to a nest that you have disturbed, and where you have presumably left your scent.  Raccoons are very good at following these clues.  But as far as the female of the nest is concerned, she has invested too much for too long to walk (well, or fly) away easily.

Motivation: what you need to learn Korean

(Bored soldiers.  I knew that feeling so well.)

By the fall of 1969 I had completed my training in Military Intelligence in the U.S. Army at Ft. Holabird, MD and was awaiting orders for my first duty station after graduation.  We were all nervous because this was during the heaviest years of fighting in Vietnam and most soldiers were sent there, regardless of their specialty in the military.  The Tet Offensives in 1968 and 1969 were massive and bloody, and they were on the mind of every GI.  So my wife and I were on pins and needles waiting for the orders that would determine the next direction of our lives.

On the day in question in late August, I was about to play a tennis match after duty-hours for the Ft. Holabird team against another military base. One of my friends on the court yelled at me about whether I had gotten my orders today.  We had, in fact, gotten them, but I had not had a chance to talk to Robin about them.  But Robin heard the question, jumped to her feet and marched across the tennis court directly over to me, balls flying past her head in both directions, and demanded to know if I had received orders.  I told her not to worry; I was assigned to go to language school in Virginia.  How bad could that be?

So in September, I began Korean language training in Arlington, VA at a new complex of high-rise buildings called Crystal City.  That area is so developed now that I couldn't even find the building where I spent so much time when I visited a couple of years ago.  The Defense Language Institute was contracted by the military to teach languages to military personnel in this place as well as on the west coast at Monterrey; they taught over 50 languages there.  There were three Korean classes to begin that month, and I was assigned to the class of Mr. Cho.  All instructors were native speakers of the language they taught.  Each class contained 10 GIs, where we sat in a straight line in school-like chairs with a desk top in a very small room with our instructor.  Our instruction lasted 7 hours per day, 5 days per week, for 50 weeks.  I can hear the audible groans from the peanut gallery now.

The class was tedious, and we had to do some studying at night to memorize the dialogue for the next day.  We learned to speak, read, and write the language.  There was a great deal of oral work during each day's class, as we were randomly called upon by Mr. Cho to answer his questions in Korean, or to translate what he had said.  We learned about Korean culture, history, food, music, and geography.  We received a pretty good education in all things Korean.  But, the room was small and sterile, you looked at the same nine guys every day, all day, and the educational routine was just that-a monotonous routine.  In short, it was the most boring year I ever spent in my life.

But the alternative was scary and so most, but not all, of us stuck it out.  Every Friday we had an exam on that week's work.  If you failed the test three weeks in a row, you flunked out of language school and you were reassigned.  Reassignment almost certainly meant going to Vietnam.  In fact, when Mr. Cho got totally frustrated with us, which he did often, he would say in his broken English: "You study hard, or you go other place".  And that "other place" in Southeast Asia was a place none of us wanted to go.  So we plodded along, week after boring week, hating the boredom, but hating the idea of what lay ahead if we faltered even more.

Thanks for everything! Anna Maria Alberghetti

(Anna Maria and I had such a good time together.)

It was the summer of 1967 and I was working as Assistant Tennis Pro at Scioto Country Club in Upper Arlington, Ohio.  I played tennis for Ohio State in those days and John Hendrix was the coach at OSU.  He was also the Head Pro at Scioto CC, so he hired me for the summer.  I mostly played tennis with elderly women who needed company and who needed someone to make them laugh on the court while hitting tennis balls.  I also ran tennis clinics for kids, strung tennis racquets, and I got to play quite a bit of tennis when I wasn't teaching.  Not a bad gig all-in-all.

One of the members of the club was a developer who was ready to have a Grand Opening of his housing development.  He and Coach cooked up the idea of having a tennis exhibition at the development as part of a gala opening, and Bob "Harry" Harrison and I were given the assignment.  Harry also played for OSU, so we were old friends.  But the exciting part of the event was the planned appearance of a celebrity that the developer had hired, or bribed, or coerced in some way to show up and mingle for a while with prospective buyers of his houses while watching our tennis exhibition match.

The celebrity was Anna Maria Alberghetti, a woman who is well-known to those of my generation.  Alberghetti started her career as an opera singer and a child prodigy at the age of 6, performed at Carnegie Hall at 13, and then starred in about a dozen movies in the 1950s and 60s.  She won a Tony Award for her Broadway performance in Carnival in 1962.  I specifically had remembered her in Cinderfella in 1960, where she co-starred with Jerry Lewis.  And she was on the cover of Life magazine twice.  Wow!

So Harry and I were to play a singles match in front of the famous Anna Maria and that was it--no other matches but ours, no other distractions for the movie star.  She could focus on our talent and our Ohio personalities, she would enjoy herself thoroughly, she would raise our praises in Rome when she returned to her homeland, and she would giggle and tease and horse around with us after the match.  In short, she would have an afternoon so entertaining that she would never forget it, nor would she ever forget us.

Anna Maria showed up in a limousine, exactly befitting a famous person.  She was surrounded with 4 or 5 men who wore sunglasses; I assumed they were body guards.  Anna Maria also wore large sunglasses and a large, wide-brimmed hat.  Her arrival was anticipated by the crowd with great excitement; Harry and I giggled like 3rd graders before the match.  The only problem was that she arrived AFTER we had finished our match.  She got there in time to see two tired, sweaty, and smelly wannabes gawking at the black entourage, and I mean black.  The limousine was black.  All the bodyguards were dressed in black.  They reminded me of a scene from The Sopranos.   Everyone wore dark sunglasses.  And Anna Maria never said a word the entire 30 minutes that she was there; I mean she never uttered a sound-not in Italian, not in English, not a moan, not a sigh, nothing.  She signed autographs, while the ends of her mouth were turned up ever so slightly in what could be defined as a smile.

It then occurred to me that maybe the guys in black were sent there by the tennis coach from Purdue, the only team in the Big Ten Conference that we could beat in those days, to whack Harry and me.  This whole thing was just a setup to eliminate one-third of OSU's team.

By sundown I realized that the entire episode was just another of life's disappointments.  We had a lot of those in Ohio.  Anna Maria came and she went.  She saw nothing, said nothing, sang nothing and, I am sure, remembered nothing. 

But I'm much older and more sophisticated now.  I think that next spring I will go to Rome; I love Italy after all.  I will call Anna Maria and have her meet me for coffee at the Piazza Navona.  She can bring along those other hot Italian movie stars of yesteryear--Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren.  I'm sure they all know each other.  And Anna Maria and I can relive old times, and reminisce about Columbus, Ohio, and we will throw our heads back in gleeful laughter, and Gina and Sophia will wish they had been there with us.  Ohhhhhhhhh hum.

The short, but eventful, avian calendar

(Daffodils at DrTom's.  It goes so fast; winter will be here before we know it.)

I tend to think of the year in bird seasons. April and May are the best months of the year for me because most of the species in this part of the world breed and nest during those months. June and July is fledgling time, when adults are busy feeding their still somewhat-dependent offspring, and the rest of the year is boring. It is just that by comparison, after May, it all goes downhill for me, and I begin looking forward to the following April. This is a terrible way to live, really.

As year-round residents, we have chickadees, nuthatches, cardinals, titmice, brown creepers, crows, blue jays, and woodpeckers, and some other species. Several of these are common at bird feeders stocked with sunflower seeds tended by homeowners. But now those species have become more conspicuous—they are singing and calling, prospecting for nest sites, and even building nests. The extremely high-pitched song of the brown creeper is common in my woods now. (This song is so high-pitched that some humans can not hear it). Chickadees are calling throughout the day, and I saw a pair checking out a small cavity in a dead red maple yesterday. Woodpeckers are tapping, barred owls are calling (although they do that all year), and crows certainly have an active nest by now.

Red maple and aspen are flowering now, but leaves are forming on some species. This will increase rapidly over the next couple of weeks. And, of course, this is the season for daffodils, tulips, and forsythia to bloom. Juneberry just finished flowering.  Dogwood and lilac will follow shortly.

So the locals have come alive, but we now have new members in the community, who left us last fall to go to warmer, more productive climes. For the most part, the birds that have now returned by mid-April are the so-called “short-distance migrants” that wintered in southern U.S. Song sparrows, American robins, brown-headed cowbirds, dark-eyed juncos, and accipiter hawks, are back and acting sexy. Eastern phoebes and broad-winged hawks, who have returned, came from a bit further. Phoebes can winter as far south as Mexico and broad-winged hawks can winter even further away. From the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website: “A recent study attached satellite transmitters to the backs of four Broad-winged Hawks and followed them as they migrated south in the fall. The hawks migrated an average of 7,000 km (4,350 mi) to northern South America, and traveled an average of 111 km (69 mi) each day. Once at the wintering grounds, the hawks did not move around much, staying on average within 2.6 square km (1 square mi).” And there are ruby-crowned kinglets, which just arrived at my place, but they are passing through to breed in coniferous forests farther to the north.

April is the beginning of the bird year for me. Everyone is now vocalizing, looking for their mates from last year, and locating nest sites. May will be even better, when the long-distance migrants return. The action is picking up, but I want every day to slow down. Based on my bird-oriented annual calendar, “winter” is only three months away.

Does the existence of New Orleans make ecological sense?

(New Orleans and Katrina.  How many more times will we rebuild it?)

As an ecologist and an environmentalist I have often wondered whether New Orleans makes any sense at all. This major city is located on the Louisiana coast 2-6 meters below sea level. Using the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, we try to build structures that block the waters of the Atlantic Ocean from flooding this historic metropolitan area of about 1,000,000 people. I have concluded that given the costs of rebuilding the city’s structures and housing, and the probability that future disasters due to hurricanes and flooding are probably 100%, that it does not make sense to continue supporting this endeavor.

My argument goes like this. When we know that a particular disaster has a high probability of occurring, we should minimize our investment of resources in that location. We know the following with virtual certainty at this point: polar ice caps are melting, sea level is rising, and cyclonic storms that arise over the warming oceans of the world are likely to be more common and more intense than in the past. This means that Katrina-like events will occur again along the Louisiana coast. The question is whether humans can design and build structures that will hold out against these powerful natural events. Maybe we can learn something from a place in the world that has been fighting this battle for centuries: the Netherlands.

From Wikipedia, we find that “After the 1953 disaster, the Delta project, a vast construction effort designed to end the threat from the sea once and for all, was launched in 1958 and largely completed in 2002. The official goal of the Delta project was to reduce the risk of flooding in the province of Zeeland to once per 10,000 years. (For the rest of the country, the protection-level is once per 4,000 years.) This was achieved by raising 3,000 kilometres (1,864 miles) of outer sea-dykes and 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) of inner, canal, and river dikes to "delta" height, and by closing off the sea estuaries of the Zeeland province. New risk assessments occasionally show problems requiring additional Delta project dyke reinforcements. The Delta project is one of the largest construction efforts in human history and is considered by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the seven wonders of the modern world.”

In other words, given 2,000 years of experience with trying to keep the ocean at bay in a country where 27% of the land is below sea level, the Dutch have developed a system that is so extensive and so elaborate that it is considered one of the seven wonders of the modern world. The jury is still out as to whether even this will continue to work against rising seas. Now, I am not an expert on this topic, but it appears that the storms that pound the Louisiana coast are more powerful in terms of wind than what typically comes from the North Sea, and the Caribbean storms occur more frequently. In other words, the chances of Americans designing a system that can prevent the kind of disaster we saw in 2005 from occurring again and again seem remote to me.

I realize it is not politically correct to talk about abandoning a city with a 300-year old history. And New Orleans is an important conduit for oil, natural gas, and other products entering through that deep-water port. However, I am sure that some kind of elevated housing could be constructed for those who choose to remain there to work in those industries, which are vital to U.S. commerce. I envision that something like an oil rig structure could be devised that would serve the purpose. But to spend billions of dollars and to squander hundreds of tons of physical materials to rebuild repeatedly seems like folly, not to mention the future human suffering that this encourages.  I would make the exact same argument for development of any kind on the floodplain of rivers, on an active earthquake fault, or next to an active volcano.  It is not a matter of IF disaster will occur again, it is only a matter of WHEN.

I have often admonished my children that the future is not likely to look like the past, and to behave accordingly. This is particularly true in a world that is so populous that we are even changing the climate. It is time that global planners incorporate more ecological thinking into their repertoire. Southeastern Louisiana was once a vast wetland at the mouth of the Mississippi River, and I suggest we let it revert to its natural state.