In passing

While waiting for my New Hampshire photos to be developed, in the hope that some shots of my week as a Dean volunteer will turn out to be worth posting in a blog entry, I’ll instead present one of my occasional weekly reviews of noteworthy passages.

In a comment on someone else’s blog, I noted that Bob Keeshan was my generation’s Fred Rogers.  Keeshan, the first Clarabelle on The Howdy Doody Show before moving on to his magnum opus as Captain Kangaroo, died at age 76 in Quechee VT after a long illness.  The world he shared with Mr. Green Jeans, Bunny Rabbit, Mr. Moose and others debuted in 1955, and stayed on CBS for nearly 30 years.  It was a morning staple in my formative years, much as Misterogers Neighborhood was for later children.  The Captain was sillier than Misterogers, not overtly educational like Sesame Street and The Electric Company, but he was gentle and kind and just plain fun to be with.  He was entertainment for children of an earlier, more innocent day, when television was just as much of a child as we were.

Even more than Babe Didrickson, Fanny Blankers-Koen, dead of Alzheimers disease in Amsterdam at 85, established that women belonged at the pinnacle of athletic greatness.  After moderate success at age 18 in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, she saw the next two Games cancelled by World War II, then suffered malnutrition during the Nazi occupation of the Low Countries.  Yet she continued to train under her coach and husband, Jan Blankers, while also bearing a son and a daughter.  By the time of the 1948 London Games, most pundits thought she was too old (at 30) and would be better off raising her children.  Had they known that she was in the first trimester of another pregnancy, their howls would have been all the stronger.  Blankers-Koen proved her critics wrong in the most emphatic way possible, winning gold medals in the 100m, 200m, 80m hurdles, and 4x100m relay.  Only Jesse Owens in 1936 and Carl Lewis in 1984 have matched that achievement.  Amazingly, she might have won even more golds if the rules hadn’t limited her to three individual events ... Blankers-Koen held the world record in the high jump from 1943 through 1951, and in the long jump 1943-1954!  Track-and-field’s governing body, the IAAF, named Fanny Blankers-Koen the female athlete of the century in 1999.

Steve Allen devised the concept, and Johnny Carson made it an iconic American institution, but Jack Paar did as much to create the formula that is The Tonight Show as anyone.  Paar was 85 when he passed away in Greenwich CT on January 27.  Allen’s invention was more a variety show, starring the endlessly-versatile Steverino in skits and noodling at the piano, than it was a true talk show.  When Paar assumed the show’s mantle in 1957, however, he transformed it into something very much like what we see today—opening monologue, witty repartee, and only occasional silly skits and schtick.  Paar was much more of a reactive deadpan and a droll wit than the ever-mugging Carson, the broadly crass Leno, or the sarcastic Letterman, but those worthy successors to Paar’s throne are still just building variations on the themes he originated.  Jack Paar hosted The Tonight Show for only five years, moved on to a prime-time talk show for another three years, then retired from the entertainment business in 1965.

The name Lloyd Bucher was on the world’s lips in 1968.  He skippered the USS Pueblo, an old WWII Liberty ship, monitoring North Korean ship movements and radio traffic, when his vessel was commandeered by PRK gunboats on January 23, 1968.  One man was killed and 10 others (including Bucher) were wounded in the attack, during which the lightly-armed Pueblo didn’t fire a single shot.  The 82 remaining crew members were held in a North Korean prison, beaten severely and nearly starved to death, for 11 months before the lame duck Johnson administration issued a formal apology to gain their release.  Bucher suffered right along with his men, then nearly had to face a court-martial for failing to defend his command again its attackers.  Cooler heads prevailed, and Bucher stayed in the Navy until 1973.  Bucher was 76 when he died in Poway CA, after an extended illness partially attributable to his Korean ordeal.

Ernest Hendon was the last survivor of the infamous Tuskeegee Syphilis Study, in which US Public Health Service “researchers” deliberately withheld antibiotic treatment from a group of blacks from rural Alabama.  Ostensibly, the project was examining the natural history of syphilis, an unconscionable affront to its subjects and to everything that science should stand for.  After all, doctors had been observing and documenting that natural history of the disease for centuries prior to the introduction of simple, inexpensive, effective treatment.  Mr. Hendon passed away in Opelika AL, age 96.

If he’d been known only by his own name, it’s very unlikely that Elroy Hirsch, who died in a Madison WI assisted-living facility at the age of 80, would be memorialized here.  Oh, he was a star halfback at the University of Wisconsin, then had a solid career in the NFL.  Eventually, he returned to the Badgers as the school’s Athletic Director between 1969 and 1987.  No, we remember Elroy Hirsch because in October 1942, Chicago Daily News sportswriter Francis Powers wrote about a Badger game in Soldier Field: Hirsch ran like a demented duck. His crazy legs were gyrating in six different directions all at the same time during a 61-yard touchdown run that cemented the win. There are very, very few nicknames that resonate as powerfully as that of Crazy Legs Hirsch. 

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