My Summer of ‘68
I spent much of the summer of 1968 with a transistor radio, listening to Bob Gibson pitch. That’s the summer my grandmother and aunt threw me in a car and drove me to Chicago because the Democratic Convention was there. I didn’t care about the convention, but I cared deeply about the Cardinals who were in town playing the Cubs. We took in two games at Wrigley.
Recently there was an article on ESPN.com (thanks, Flanders!) about Zack Greinke, pitcher for the KC Royals, following his 38 innings without giving up an earned run. It included these words about Gibson:
“While at least 25 others have matched Greinke’s feat, not surprisingly, five of those took place in 1968 (the Year of the Pitcher). We thought we’d look at some great pitching stretches, beginning with the most dominant run you’ll see:
Bob Gibson, Cardinals, 1968
11 GS, 11-0, 0.27 ERA, 99 IP, 56 H, 13 BB, 83 SO
In a stretch that lasted from June 6 to July 30, Gibby allowed a slugging percentage of .190. He completed all 11 starts. He threw eight shutouts. And there was nothing cheap about it — he allowed just three runs during the streak.”
Was anyone else listening to Harry Caray that summer?
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Frank Schaeffer’s apology for the death of Dr. Tiller. “Like many writers of moral/political/religious theories my father and I would have been shocked that someone took us at our word, walked into a Lutheran Church and pulled the trigger on an abortionist. But even if the murderer never read Dad’s or my words we helped create the climate that made this murder likely to happen.” The offense, he claims, isn’t the pro-life position, but the rhetoric of hatred that often surrounds the issue (on both sides).
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In the first quarter of the twentieth century, a Charlie Chaplin craze swept America. All over there were Charlie Chaplin look-alike competitions. Chaplin himself entered one in San Francisco. He didn’t even make the finals.
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“The point is to see the person standing right in front of me, who has no substitute, who can never be replaced, whose heart holds things for which there is no language, whose life is an unsolved mystery. The moment I turn that person into a character in my own story, the encounter is over. I have stopped being a human being and have become a fiction writer instead.”
Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith
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Anyone been to a Tokens Show, hosted by Lipscomb Bible prof Lee Camp? Sounds fun!
Here’s an earlier post with a fuller account of 1968:
My insular world of Neosho, Missouri protected me from much of what was happening in 1968. That fall, I entered 7th grade at Neosho Junior High School and started my downtown paper route after school.
So much was happening in the world that year. The Tet offensive was launched in January. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, and Robert Kennedy in June. Only later did the impact of the My Lai Massacre begin to sink in as we heard news reports about Charlie Company and Lt. William Calley.
Occasionally I’d get to watch “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.” Goldie Hawn and Lilly Tomlin made quite an impression — in their own ways. Tiny Tim was singing, “Tip Toe Through the Tulips,” Mike Wallace was launching “60 Minutes” (Don’t you know some exec said, “It’ll never last”?), Peggy Fleming was skating, and Joe Namath was wearing a mink coat!
But in my world, it was Bob Gibson. My beloved Cardinals were headed back to the World Series (after their wins in 1964 and 1967), led by the greatest pitcher of his era. You may disagree — but, hey, start your own blog!
In 1968 Gibby won the National League MVP and the Cy Young. His ERA for the year was 1.12, with 268 strikeouts and 13 shutouts. Maybe most remarkable is that he completed 28 of his 34 starts. Can you imagine a pitcher today having half that many completed games? I still remember having my little transistor radio nearby on any day Gibson was pitching.
That summer my maternal grandmother and my cool, young aunt (who was probably 20ish at the time) took me to Chicago. We were visiting lots of relatives along the way, but I think my Grandma wanted to be there for the start of the Democratic Convention when her candidate, Robert Kennedy, would be nominated. After his assassination, she changed allegiance to Eugene McCarthy, and in August we headed for the Windy City, with Grandma preaching Democratic politics to anyone who would listen.
I’m sure what my aunt remembers most about the trip is the beginning of that stormy convention. (Will there ever be another quite like the 1968 Democratic Convention? And yes — I was there!) But what I remember is that these two women I loved took me to Wrigley Field. And of all luck, they were playing the Cardinals! I had so much fun, they took me back the next day.
In October, we (yes WE — I considered myself part of the team) were facing the Detroit Tigers. With the newspaper connection, we again scored tickets, this time to game 6.
I was in a bit of a predicament as a Cardinal supporter. Because the Cards went into game 5 with a 3-1 lead. If we won that game, we’d repeat as WS champs. But I wouldn’t get to see them in game 6. So I rooted for St. Louis, but didn’t mind much when they lost.
The rest is sad history for a Cardinal fan. We lost both the sixth and seventh games. But that’s not the really sad part. The saddest was that we wouldn’t be returning to a World Series until the 1980s.
In October the Cards lost the World Series and in November Richard Nixon was elected president. My grandma and I were both sad.
Yes. Tokens is AMAZING.
I think my wife and I have been to 4 of them. We won’t be able to go to this one, cause I am not as gainfully employed as I once was, and can’t drop 30 bucks on tickets. But we’re always there in Spirit.
What’s amazing too is how incendiary some of the things Lee and others talk about at Tokens can and should be (for all of us) yet we’re able to hear and think about them openly without anger. Music has a way of doing that.
Construing the column on its narrowest merits, OK, but Schaeffer’s “apology” rings a bit hollow, much like Dimmesdale’s “confession” in _The Scarlet Letter_: the kind of faux humility that makes the naive, old bluehairs swoon but is cynically intended to help the audience overlook the deeper, more sinister truth.
It’s really less of an apology and more of a stage for what really interests him: gaining a measure of personal absolution by showing how his sins have been carried on by his former allies since his “enlightenment,” his conversion to the pro-abortion side. His political-rhetorical agenda is clear. Are we to understand that Schaeffer cannot distinguish in kind between (a) Jeremiah Wright’s “God d-mn America” polemics and (b) VP Cheney’s rather tame assertion that Obama’s policies are making us “less safe?” That’s just a political fig leaf.
Cheney is and will always be among the favorite whipping boys of the so-called progressives, like Schaeffer. But we must remember that as long as there are legitimate differences in policy views about national security, there will always be differences of opinion as to which options make us more safe, and which options make us less safe. That is not hate speech. That is a logical necessity because of the nature of the turf where the policy battle is being fought. Cheney believes Obama is making some bad calls with dangerous implications, and it is fair game to say so.
(The flip side, of course, is that Obama’s foreign-policy statements also carry the very clear implication – and on some occasions, the explicit assertion – that the Bush/Cheney policies of the last eight years, not least the establishment of the prison at Club Git’mo, have made the U. S. less safe. I don’t hear Schaeffer castigating Obama for *that* brand of so-called “hate speech.” As well he shouldn’t, because it’s not; it is a legitimate policy difference.)
But the larger point, of course, is that Schaeffer is demonizing Cheney in precisely the way that he pretends to decry when others are the targets.
qb
I wasn’t listening to Harry Caray that summer, but my Dad was. He was a nine year old boy in St. Joseph who hid a transistor radio with head phones in his desk (the kind that the top flipped open) and listened to the ‘68 series. Still a crushing loss to this day for him, and vicariously through him for me.
How did Harry end up with the Cubs?
My dad’s favorite trick Cardinal question, who was the Cardinals RF during their great run in the 60’s?
Always enjoy your posts, thanks for letting us read.
I also was and still am an avid Cardinal fan. The days of Harry and Jack on the radio were golden. Who would ever forget “Holy Cow!” and “That’s a Winner!”? The right fielder for the Cardinals in 1967 and 1968 was the great Roger Maris. In 1964, when the Cardinals won the Series, it was Mike Shannon before he switched to third base. By the way, Harry left the Cardinals when he and Auggie Busch had a parting of the ways and he went to the White Sox. I think he also was with another team, maybe the A’s, before landing with the Cubs.
I noticed that Schaeffer’s bio at the Huffington Post reveals that he survived both polio and a fundamentalist/evangelical upbringing. Poor guy. So glad he’s recovered.
In 1968, with racial riots, unrest and a city on the verge of imploding, Detroit NEEDED that World Series win. One might even suggest that there was Divine intervention as the Tigers came back from a 3 games to 1 deficit and Mickey Lolich (a 3 game winner in the ‘68 series) beat Bob Gibson in game 7.
Yep, I, too, was listening to the Cards on a transistor radio, in Memphis. I’m not convinced Detroit needed to win the Series. After all, I needed the Cardinals to win!
Ah 1968, what a year! The Battle of Chicago, preceded by the RFK assassination, preceded by the MLK Jr. assassination, preceded by My Lai. And all that went with it from civil rights and anti war demonstrations; to Resurrection City in D. C. a few years earlier, and all the free concerts with Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez etc. (They say if you can remember the 60s you weren’t really there but that is just intended to be humorous.)
I watched it all on the evening news and believed (ever so naively) that Walter Cronkite and the rest of national news anchors were objectively reporting the news. We smoked marijuana as often as we could and predicted it would be legal in five years at the most. The next summer I hitched hiked and hopped freight trains around the country from Abilene to northern New Mexico communes to California and back again. I gotta admit I wasn’t your typical ACC boy then nor now. I could not have cared less about sports as there were momentous intellects currents afloat and “the times, they were a changin”
What fantastic visions we claimed all the while believing that man was basically good and that, given enough time, we would solve all our problems. You see in the CofC I was taught that man was basically good and that God had done his part and now we just needed to do our part.
Thirty years later I would visit Toul Sleng prison – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuol_Sleng – and then walk the killing fields and kick at the dirt under the tree where they tossed the babies in the air and bayoneted them on the way down before raping the mother. I picked up a human tooth from the dirt and keep it in one of those little velvet boxes that engagement rings come in. At the end of that day I retired to the Foreign Correspondents Club overlooking the Mekong river to drink enough to become less sober after the day’s sight seeing. I still don’t know what to do with the tooth – whether to bury it or cremate it – but I keep it and show it to people that tell me mankind is basically good.
What a difference a few years makes in one’s perspective.
I attended my first Tokens show this past December. Made a FOOL OUT OF MYSELF talking to Amy Grant (Vince Gill was one of the main performers) that night. The show was amazing!! It’s a DEFINITE MUST if you are in Nashville!!!
If we honestly believe (I do) that abortion is the taking of innocent life, then the terms we use to describe it are bound to be laden with violent implications. A strong denunciation of extremist violence is a must (and I’m glad to see that those denunciations are coming from many corners of the pro-life and evangelical circles), but it must not be accompanied by a watering down of the message.
It is a dreadful thing to discuss. Let’s not let that stop us.
I like Francis Schaeffer : (
I think a dispassionate examination of the typical pro-life position reveals a host of inconsistencies and contradictions. (Note, I’m pro-life but idiosyncratic in my ancillary beliefs due to my attempts to be thoughtfully moral rather than ideological on this issue.)
First, if pro-life advocates really believe that abortion is “murder” then the killing of Dr. Tiller seems perfectly justified, equivalent to trying to assassinate Hitler. So it’s morally inconsistent for pro-life people to shy away from endorsing the Tiller killing. If you are pro-life you are morally culpable if you don’t shoot abortion doctors. That is, unless, one is a committed pacifist, rejecting all violence. But most pro-life people at my church are not pacifists. In short, if you wanted to be a morally consistent pro-life person you either 1) Must acknowledge that it is your moral duty to shoot abortion doctors and act on that belief (or be a coward and hypocrite), or 2) Be a committed pacifist across the board.
Second, most pro-life people contend that “life” begins at conception. If so then late term abortions are morally equivalent to first trimester abortions. But the pro-life camp consistently targets late term abortionists (like Dr. Tiller) for their acute ire and violence. But this uneven rage toward late term abortions tacitly endorses the logic of Roe v. Wade, that the moral status of the fetus isn’t a binary issue but is continuous and increasing across the trimesters. In short, the killing of Dr. Tiller, as a late term abortion provider, is an illustration of how, at a tacit level, most pro-life supporters acknowledge the logic of Roe v. Wade.
Finally, most pro-life supporters are Republicans and would likely attend no tax “tea parties.” In short, they are demanding millions of babies to be born each year while failing to vote for social policies that would support those babies and their mothers. Pro-life policy creates acute, real-world economic pressures, affecting not only the mother’s choice but the well-being of the child after birth. The only morally consistent policy position is to be a pro-life Democrat where one is both voting for life and social policies aimed at aiding mothers and children in the lowest economic brackets after pro-life policies have been implemented.
The sum of the matter: Most pro-life people I know at church are morally confused on multiple different levels.
It is not wise to throw rocks at your own glass house.
Henry, Yours is, imho, riangulation at best.
That’s what I get for running away from my packing and not proofing – here’s what the above should read:
Henry, yours imho, is triangulation at its best.
I spent a lot of time listening to the Cards during that time frame. My dad would go into my sister’s room where there was a radio and lay on the bed and listen to the game. I would go in there and lay down by him and listen with him. I’m sure it wasn’t as often as I think, but it is one of the fondest memories I have with him. Being from the bootheel of Mo. each and every game was recounted and analyzed in the local barber shop and coffee shop the next day. Many times I was there with my Dad listening to the conversation of grown up men excited like little boys. I remember Gibson got so mad if anyone got a hit off him much less score a run.
1968 yes what a year. I was listening to Harry Carey and Jack Buck every night. Yes there were many other things happening that year but as a 9 year old, they didn’t compare to my St. Louis Cardinals, Bob Gibson and Lou Brock. Nothing else really mattered. I would go to the corner store in south St. Louis and get that package of baseball cards hoping it would have a Cardinal. I can still taste that flat piece of bubble gum!! That was also my first year as a camper at our church camp! Haven’t missed a summer of church camp since!
Let me add a fourth area of moral inconsistency regarding the pro-life movement, adding to the three Henry mentioned above.
If you really–as in really, truly–believe abortion is murder how could so many pro-life supporters reduce pregnancy prevention to abstinence-only programs? If abortion is murder then any and all means are necessary to prevent potential pregnancy and subsequent abortions. To be pro-life and abstinence-only is to make your sexual ethic more important that all those aborted babies. Rather than handing out condoms you are willing to live with more abortions.
Just one more way, added to Henry’s list, that shows the moral inconsistencies of the pro-life movement.
the clint above is not me