August 10, 2014 · 7:50 pm

Not your grandmother’s feminism

The panel discussion on women’s rights I covered late last week seemed a little like something out of a time capsule. You just don’t see that sort of thing much any more.

During the sixties and seventies, my formative years, feminism went from zero to sixty in a handful of years. In 1963, the year Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, women had no protections against discrimination in the workplace. They could legally be denied contraception and kept off juries. Property rights within a marriage — and when dissolving a marriage — were sketchy, at best.

Most of that changed over the next decade, but the failure of the Equal Rights Amendments remains, to some, a symbol of unfinished business. Women still earn less than men, are more likely to live in poverty than men, and to be physically abused than men. Recent years have seen an erosion of the reproductive rights that were such an important part of the women’s movement.

One can frame the latter as protecting the unborn, but moral arguments aside, limiting a woman’s choices is undeniably a loss of freedom. And, many people believe some of the more extreme laws are more about control than saving lives.

In any event, last week’s discussion was unlike any I had heard in quite some time. Certainly, women do have far more opportunities than they did a half-century ago, and that has no doubt lessened the urgency of the women’s movement. Several of the participants said young women don’t like the term feminism, or to be identified as feminists.

The Tulsa World story I filed on the discussion, though, got a surprising amount of traffic, which makes me wonder if the old arguments are not as settled as we thought.

 

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August 6, 2014 · 8:43 pm

Politics, race and the Klan

A minor brouhaha on Wednesday about a rural Republican bean dinner featuring Gov. Mary Fallin and and “information you may not know” about the Ku Klux Klan illustrates the power of history’s shorthand and just how clueless many Americans still are about race and racism.

Fallin, who faces re-election in November, quickly distanced herself from the event; her spokesman said she had never confirmed her appearance there, and certainly would not be going now.

The elderly county chairman responsible for the dinner said he had only intended to highlight the Klan’s Southern Democrat origins. He seemed genuinely surprised, bewildered and hurt that anyone would draw more controversial conclusions.

As a tangible force in even regional politics, the Ku Klux Klan has not been a viable organization in many decades. As shorthand for racism, it remains a powerful symbol. The mistake is to think the Klan, in any of its incarnations, fully defines racism. The fact that some Democrats started the Klan in 1865 is useful knowledge but not overly meaningful to the racial politics of 2014. Both parties have had plenty to answer for, right up to the present.

 

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August 2, 2014 · 8:00 pm

Pepper Martin

(From a column written in 1992 during my career as a sportswriter)

In 1930 Pepper Martin hit .363 for Rochester in the International League. This, however, was not what impressed the parent Cardinals. Every player in St. Louis’ regular lineup hit .308 or better. Four reserves had averages above .320. No, what impressed general manager Branch Rickey was Martin’s salary: $4,500.

By shipping Taylor Douthit, who had finagled $14,000 out of the thrifty Mahatmah, to the Reds, Rickey saved the strapped (so he said) Cardinals $9,500 and happened upon a major star.

Martin spent eight long years in the minor leagues. He hopped freight trains to get to his first spring training. Until 1931, he never made more than a few thousand dollars a season.

When Martin got 12 hits in his first 18 at-bats of the ’31 World Series, his wife Ruby said, “He’s always been a hero to me. When we were in grammar school I stood on a soapbox to cheer for him. Now when the crowd yells my eyes get misty.”

—–

Although Martin was known as the “Wild Horse of the Osage,” he was born in Temple in southwestern Oklahoma and grew up in Oklahoma City. He turned professional with Guthrie of the Oklahoma State League in 1923.

He debuted with the Cardinals in 1928, appearing in 39 games and getting into one World Series game as a pinch runner. He went back to the minors the next year, and it was not until ’31, when he batted .300 with 75 runs batted in, that he established himself as a star.

Martin’s aggressive, headlong style made him injury prone, and by 1937 he was struggling to stay in the lineup. At the end of the 1940 season he was made manager of the Cardinals’ minor league team in Sacramento, despite hitting .316 that year.

Baseball players in those days generally had off-season jobs, and Martin had some doozies. He drove miniature stock cars for awhile, until the club made him stop, and played in a country music band. One winter he was general manager of the Oklahoma City minor league hockey team. He returned to the major league team in 1944, when most of the regular players were in the military, and batted .279 in 40 games. At age 54, he appeared in a few games as player-coach of the Tulsa Oilers in the mid-1950s.

In later years, Martin became athletic director of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. He died suddenly of a heart attack at age 61, in 1965.

 

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July 29, 2014 · 10:06 pm

The Curveball

The story is that 14-year-old Arthur Cummings came up with the idea for the curveball while throwing clam shells on a Brooklyn beach in 1863. If he could make a clam shell curve, the boy mused, why couldn’t he do the same with a baseball?

The obvious answer is that, aerodynamically, a baseball is not a clam shell. Cummings, though, kept experimenting, and over the next few years became adept at spinning the ball up to home plate in a way opposing batters had never seen. It was tough to do. In those days the ball was delivered underhand, and strikeouts were rare.

As a schoolboy in 1865, Arthur Cummings pitched a team of Oswego County, N.Y. all-stars to victory over neighboring Onondaga County. Later that he year he joined an amateur team in Brooklyn, and was 37-2. Two years later, now with the Brooklyn Excelsior Club, Cummings’ sweet deliveries earned him the nickname “Candy.” It was by that name he was known the rest of his pitching career.

Over the next decade, Cummings pitched for a variety of amateur and professional teams. In 1872 he pitched every inning of a 52-game season for the New York Mutuals, and led the National Association in innings pitched, complete games and strikeouts — with a grand total of 14. In 1874 he struck out six consecutive Chicago White Stockings.

Cummings retired from baseball in 1877 at the age of 28, and opened a paint and wallpaper store.

Then and now, there is considerable disagreement over whether Cummings “invented” the curveball. Other pitchers, most notably Fred Goldsmith of the White Stockings, insisted they developed the pitch before Cummings. No other pitcher in baseball’s early days was more closely associated with the curve, however, and when the Baseball Hall of Fame opened in 1939, William Arthur “Candy” Cummings was inducted posthumously as the father of the curveball.

Until the early twentieth century, the curveball was considered by some to be unsportsmanlike and a form of cheating. The president of Harvard forbid his team to use it, and at one point the curveball was illegal (the spitball, however, was not). Over the years, the curveball and its derivatives have flummoxed would-be hitters and physicists alike. A fierce debate raged for many years over whether the curveball actually curved or was merely an optical illusion.

Asked his opinion, the great Cardinals pitcher Dizzy Dean replied, “Go stand behind a tree sixty feet away, and I’ll hit you with an optical illusion.”

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July 25, 2014 · 9:22 pm

The hanging of Frank Henson

Before lethal injection, before the electric chair, before the walls went up at the state prison in McAlester, individual counties were responsible for executing criminals convicted of capital crimes.

Only one such execution occurred in Tulsa County.

In early 1911, a scuffle broke out in a bar at Dawson. Dawson has long since been absorbed into the city, but in 1911 it was a rural ranching and coal-mining community on the Frisco line. When the dust cleared, a county deputy names Charles Stamper was dead and all fingers pointed to a black man who went by the name Frank Henson.

Henson was duly trialed and sentenced to death. Remarkably, given current attitudes, Tulsa County appealed the sentence. It did not want to execute Henson or anyone else. Oklahoma had executed only two people in its first three years of statehood, and Gov. Lee Cruce opposed capital punishment on moral grounds. But in this case he refused to intervene. Frank Henson was to hang by the neck until dead.

Sheriff Bill McCullough, a former cowboy with a big handlebar mustache, had the job of building the scaffolding and, when the executioner failed to show up, tying the noose, putting it around Henson’s neck, and dropping the trapdoor. McCullough would be sheriff a decade later during Tulsa’s 1921 race riot, but late in life called the Henson execution “about the worst job I ever had to do.”

Henson, maintaining his innocence until the end, was brought to the gallows just after dawn on March 31. Five hundred people had gathered to watch, despite the hour.

A black preacher named C.L. Netherland read the Twenty-third Psalm. Henson asked to speak. The witnesses had lied, he said. Stamper fired first, without identifying himself, said Henson.

“I’m going to get higher than any of you,” he said. “Some of you are going to have tribulations getting there.”

Henson prayed for McCullough and the other lawmen escorting him, asked God to forgive them, “for they know not what they do.”

Then, finally, he said, “My name is not Frank Henson. It is Amos Bell. You won’t find anything bad behind that name.”

The noose was then placed around Henson’s — or Bell’s — neck and a hood placed over his head.

“Are you ready Frank?” McCullough asked. When Henson didn’t respond, the sheriff added “may God bless you,” as he pulled the lever to drop the trap door.

“Whether the execution of Henson was justifiable was a question debated her for some time,” the Tulsa World reported. “Many wanted the sentence commuted to life imprisonment.”

Even in 1911, it seems, capital punishment was a source of controversy and strong feelings.

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