Sidebars

Manners By Bob Sanders

In the general scheme of things, it was a decidedly inconsequential moment.   It happened during a conversation with Alan over coffee at the Black Drop, a name that for me conjures up visions of a place where Professor Moriarty, over there in a shadowy corner, might scheme horribly evil plans in a Sherlock Holmes mystery.  The conversation was about the Mizner brothers and their rambunctious experiences many decades ago.  Wilson was the Alaska Gold Rush finagler prior to becoming a Broadway producer while Addison designed mansions during the Florida land boom.  It was Addison who invited Chicago hoodlums to party in Palm Beach major digs nearing completion, armed them with BB guns, then suggested they fire their ammunition into pine paneling.  Mizner’s amusing con had moneyed homeowners believing they had acquired the latest status symbol: wormwood.  

 The every third Wednesday or so discussion with my friend Alan went on a bit as things do at an hour’s worth of coffee at the Black Drop and I added a burst of enthusiasm about Wilson Mizner’s Alaskan adventures detailed in a Joe McGuinness memoir, Going to Extremes. Thanks to Sarah Palin, Alaska, in a rather perverse way is hot, hot, hot these days.   Dove-tailing into my recollections of Gold Rush stories, my friend commented about his having recommended the McGuinness book to countless friends and acquaintances over the years.   

In retrospect, my friend, who writes a sprightly column of satire for a Bellingham publication,  Cascadia Weekly, could have mentioned that he had recommended the book to me about six months ago.  He didn’t and it wasn’t until a few days after the coffee house conversation that a USA story appeared telling of Road Show, an on again, off again musical about the Mizners with a score by Stephen Sondheim.  Reading of the Mizner musical somehow produced a jarring reminder that I had had a senior moment. With it came a realization that Alan’s good manners are all too rare today. Let me count some of the ways.

Golf is, perhaps, the most mannerly of sports, yet one wonders these days after reading in Golf Digest about the current rather alarming failure to repair golf greens.  In terms of the game’s rather exquisite etiquette, repairing a ball’s mark is the sporting equivalent of “please” and “thank you.”  Ask a veteran player and you’ll be told that things are getting worse rather than better.  You’ll also hear about failures to rake bunker sand, driving balls into the foursome ahead and not allowing faster foursomes to play through.

I recall the kind of grace under pressure all too rare these days.  It occurred on the 15^th hole of the Westwood Country Club in Rocky River, Ohio where I caddied in the early ‘40s; involved was a club championship semi-final match.  I was carrying the bag of Dr. McNamara’s opponent, one up when McNamara chipped from off the green.  His caddy, tending the flag, pulled the pin as the ball, dead on and of proper pace, neared the hole.  Unfortunately, the caddy had trouble with the pin, it went up and forward, and the ball was struck coming to rest some 15 feet away.  McNamara missed his par putt and lost the hole.  The doctor, perhaps aware of how crestfallen was his caddy, barely flinched eventually losing one down.  The fact that I can remember Dr. McNamara’s name and the event speaks well of him; further, it provided another valuable lesson as I learned much about character--a lot of it while caddying.  I like to think Dr. McNamara’s classy act was his reaction to how badly his caddy felt .

Then, there are poor manners like the kind when you’re on a long bus ride with one noisy person seated in the middle of the vehicle thus making a seat change inconsequential in terms of sheer decibel count.  Armed with a cell phone, she decides the excitement of the moment demands strident calls to far too many of her friends about such monumental subjects as the rain striking her window, what she had had for dinner at a hotel, I.pod acquisitions and clothes she almost bought.  Ringtones, including such standard fare as the Notre Dame fight song that go off in crowded movie theaters (hopefully during the soft drink commercials you paid $8 to see), is a subject so vast and bizarre it demands more than oblique comment at a future date. 

Noise includes bars that can’t decide whether patrons want to watch AND listen to sports events or hear wretched music composed for the tin-eared.   All too many taverns choose an infuriating middle ground and turn off the TV sound for dreadful musical attempts.

Television, particularly those talk shows, is a Newton Minowian reminder of what a vast wasteland of poor manners TV has become.  While the McLaughlin Group on PBS has led The  Obstreperous Division of the Outrageous Talking Heads League during recent years, there is a relatively new contender who has emerged from the pack.  Joe Scarborough, whose greatest sense of disappointment while serving in the U.S. House of Representatives (1995-2001) had to have been ground rules preventing filibustering, is now a bombast bozo as the title figure of MSNBC’s Morning Joe.  Like FOX’s Bill O’Reilly, Scarborough is yet another deeply committed conservative who often makes failed attempts suggesting that his political path is road middle.  

Quick with an invective, Scarborough dispenses wrath largely upon news reader/panelist Mika Brzezinski who takes more unadulterated guff than “Dingbat” Mildred ever did from Archie Bunker.  Hardly a dingbat, Brzezinski is easily the most suffering of the show’s second bananas who include columnist Mike Barnicle, pleasant neophyte Willie Geist and Pat Buchanan, long-time Republican Party apologist.  All, with the exception of Buchanan, wear looks of bemused resignation when Scarborough thunders on the comments of others rarely able to complete simple sentences.  Syndicated columnist Miss Manners should be attracted by Scarborough if only because of his recent utterance of the paralyzing F word, an on-air occasion resulting in Morning Joe now being produced on a seven-second delay.

 Speaking of suffering the slings and arrows of close TV association, there’s the often short shrifted Alan Colmes whose uneasy partnership with the remarkably naïve Sean Hannity will soon end.  It is Hannity’s sideshow barker approach to news “analysis” that has all the hail fellow persona of Joe the Bartender, a Jackie Gleason invention who served cold ones and blather to the off camera Mr. Dennehy.   Hannity is spot on with his Joe the Bartender except for little evidence of street smarts.             

Common discourtesy while driving very likely trumps most other areas of graceless behavior.  Living in the Cordata area of Bellingham, WA, I have discovered the pluperfect place for outright hostility.  It’s at a roundabout where Cordata Parkway meets Kellogg Rd. near Whatcom Community College, an attractive school of occasional higher learning.   Set in a community of 55+ citizens, the roundabout is truly a place where youth meets the elderly while driving challenges emerge exponentially.    

What happens is, for lack of a better name, a game of roundabout chicken with geezers either thoroughly confused by the roundabout as a first time event or unable to remember how the problem was overcome when last confronted.  There is also the whip-right-through factor made so by young drivers disinclined to slow down as they approach what for many oldsters is the dreaded roundabout.  Hey, those kids are in a hurry in their disordered lives, they’re late for class, and look out, Charley and Mabel!

 In many cases cars roaring through the roundabout are going so fast they don’t have time to honk, a subject that reminds me of a good friend who had an interesting solution many years ago to a moment’s frustration, a solution not recommended in today’s dangerous world.

My friend, a woman beautiful and feisty, was driving a car that, without warning, quit on her while she was attempting to get on a Los Angeles freeway.  A guy driving behind her decided to express his ire by honking incessantly.   After three or four minutes of his foolishness, my friend climbed out of her car, approached her fellow motorist with a smile on her face and said: “If you’ll trade fucking places with me, I’ll honk your fucking horn and you can try to get my fucking car started.”      

The man broke up in laughter, they traded places, the guy got her car started, and it all ended on a happy note.  The story was told me by the woman, still beautiful and feisty 40 years later.  I married her and she occasionally is prone to uttering an obscenity but only when it’s on the money.                                                    

Fox Trot for Sarah? By Bob Sanders

Although the following meeting never took place, the likelihood of the essence of such  a parley is much too overpowering to dismiss.  The scene is Roger Ailes’ office at the Fox News Network.  Ailes is the man who, as founder and president of Fox News, is responsible for what you see on the controversial channel.  You know the rest of the people.

Ailes:      “O.K.  Sarah Palin won’t be coming to Washington as an Alaskan senator.  We know she’s bored by the governorship, moose hunting, hockey moming and all that stuff they do in Alaska.  We also know she has sniffed the sweet smell of success and for some time we’ve realized that her ability to connect with the public is tantamount to a demand that she appear with regularity on Fox News.  Gentlemen, the challenge before us is a woman who is hot, hot, hot.  What do we do with her?  She’s perfect for TV, and a big winner among our fair and balanced audience.  What think you, Bill?

O’Reilly:     “I’ve been on the phone with Palin and….”

Ailes:          “Don’t go there, Bill.  Your new contract specifically states no more telephone sex.  That, and the bloviating reduction clause demanded by Rupert.  By the way, I’ve been reading the sexual harassment suit affidavit filed four years ago by our former producer.  It’s on the web and I have to say you really got hammered on that one.” 

O’Reilly:       “Yeah, the media extremists like the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC…”

Ailes:             “The all-time best line about you was Tina Fey’s.  Four years before Palin came along, it was Fey who commented about the threatened $60 million lawsuit.   ‘That sounds like a lot,’ suggested Fey, ‘until you figure it works out to about $2.99 a minute.’”

Ailes:               “How about you, Sean?  How would Palin work on your show?”

Hannity:         “Frankly, Roger, I’d much rather talk about the lead-in to my show.  You know that our fair and balanced approach to the dissemination of news is our strongest hold on our highly perceptive audience.  Why don’t we kick off my show with an Arnold Schwarzenegger-like chops shouting a voice-over--something like: ‘Sean Hannity, he’s a great American.’  That’s what the folks say when they call in on my radio show.”

Ailes:                “We know you’re a great American, Sean , but let’s talk about Sarah.  She’s hot, hot, hot.  Did you read what Dick Cavett wrote about her in the New York Times?   He called her the Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla.  Cavett is bright, bright, bright.  We’ve got to bring Sarah on board.  She’s so very today.  Any thoughts, Brit?           

Hume:                “I got your email this morning, Roger.  The one about Palin providing Iditarod remotes from a snowmobile driven by the First Dude.  I see Palin doing the first remote from “Moose Alley” between Yentna Station and Skwentna.  I like it--even the dog food tie-ins.  On the other hand, I’m not crazy about that Russian reality show as an audience getter.  I don’t care how tame that bear might be, I don’t think our audience will go for Sarah wrestling Ivan. However, I do like the symbolism since we still hate the Russians.  What if, God forbid, Ivan goes nuts for her like everyone else.  Let’s think that one thoroughly through. Some of us at this table might think that would be exciting TV.”

Ailes:                   “Brit, you really have lost your enthusiasm for the job.  No wonder you’ll soon take a hike from Fox.   Does anyone here have any thoughts about teaming Sarah with Ann Coulter or Dr. Laura?  It could be good cop/bad cop interrogations of all the drive-by media who helped Obama win.   Our audience will eat it up like a plentiful plateful of pepperoni pizza on the Red Neck Riviera.  Any thoughts, Mike Huckabee?”

Huckabee:           “I’m not much of a pizza man--particularly in view of those exit polls indicating McCain only got seven per cent of the pizza delivery vote.  This was devastating and I’m inclined to blame Mitt Romney for making fun of the thin-crusted variety.  The references to such consumers being ‘pizza elites’ was over the top.”    

Ailes:                    “But, what about Palin?

Huckabee:          “I dunno.  Maybe that’s too much Bible thumping for one show?  Maybe Sarah and I could do something classy.  How about a show titled ‘Sarah & Huck Examine the Classics.”            

Ailes:                   “You mean classic pizza?”

Huckabee:          “No.  I mean classics like ‘Slim Pickens, An Analysis of His Rebel Yell in Dr. Strangelove,’ ‘The Grim Realities of Watching Grass Grow’ and ‘The Cause and Effects of Charismatic Oatmeal.’  I’m sure Sarah could add a lot of introspective detail.  We’ll stay away from the processing of animals, however.  That turkey clemency story was a real turkey.”  

Ailes:                   “Bill, can we do anything with your Culture Warrior status and your vocabulary segment as you look out for the folks and improve their vocabularies?  Could we, for example, put Palin in wet T-shirts with the words printed on them.  The type, of course could be in Times Roman which might add some dramatic juxtaposition in view of your daily diatribes against the New York Times and defense of religion.  It might very well be interpreted as a further demonstration of how middle of the road you are.”      

 O’Reilly:         “Great idea.  I’ll call Palin right away.  Can’t wait to see her in a wet T-shirt.”

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Sidebars St. Louis Memories By Bob Sanders )

 

Stan Kann died a couple of months ago, a matter of little significance unless you have lived in St. Louis or recall any of Kann’s TV appearances including 77 on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson.

I knew Kann in the mid-50s after I went to work for TV Guide in St. Louis, a city then trying to shake off an odd unofficial slogan:  “First in Shoes, First in Booze and Last in the American League.”  Victimized by a decided lack of self-esteem, the smallest town ever to be home concurrently to two major league teams lost the Browns to Baltimore in 1954 amid little public consternation, shoes went south to Brazil and other exotic places, and a lot of distilleries shuffled off to Kentucky.

While Kann was well-known then as the Fabulous Fox Theater pipe organist, he was gaining recognition for an overwhelming affinity for antique vacuum cleaners.  He had something like 50 of them, a collection that would eventually number more than 150.  Kann’s unusual hobby had as its origins a predilection as a youngster for smelling the insides of vacuum cleaner bags.  That was four years after beginning organ lessons.  Kann’s unabashed love of vacuum cleaners as a youth found him spending a great deal of time wandering down St. Louis streets ever alert to the sounds of Hoovers, Electroluxes, Eurekas and Singers; hearing a foreign vacuum sound, he took to knocking on doors asking if he could take a look.  To no one’s surprise, he worked briefly as a vacuum-cleaner salesman and learned to fix them.

It isn’t often you run into someone transfixed by carpet cleaners, a subject of discussion every time I chatted with him on the set of “The Charlotte Peters Show” on KSD-TV.  Peters, the mother of Pulitzer Prize -winning cartoonist Mike Peters, was one of TY’s original crazies in the days when everyone connected with programming was making it up as they went along.  Kann, co-host and musical director of the show, eventually met fellow St. Louisan Phyllis Diller, by then an established comedienne and a vacuum cleaner conversation was struck up.  Sensing Kann and his collection of machines had comedic merit, she recommended him to Carson.  As Kann told the Associated Press, “When she saw my vacuum collection, she said, ‘I’m going to call the Carson show, ‘cause you’re nuts.’”  Appearing armed with vacuum cleaners on June 8, 1966, Kann wound up doing 76 more shows.

A story goes with that first Carson show.  In a fortuitous development, stagehands put wrong handles on a number of the machines producing the kind of uproar further enhanced by Carson who had a facile touch at such moments.  Kann’s machines included household gadgets that somehow always failed to work.

St. Louis’s Bismarck Restaurant at 12^th & Olive, hard by the Post Dispatch and broadcast chattels KSD and KSD-TV, attracted a lot of media people.  I was having dinner there one early October evening in 1956 when I spotted Kay Lorraine coming through the entrance.  A former territorial band singer, she had landed the year before at KSD as a DJ and I had provided occasional help by suggesting music for her show.  I motioned her to join me, pulled out a chair and she sat down with devastating results.    The chair collapsed, she fell injuring her back, the maitre ‘d shouted: “Get that damn chair out of here” and I became a witness in what became a lawsuit.  The testimony I gave her attorney was, obviously, detrimental to the restaurant--particularly the line: “Get that damn chair out of here.”

The lawsuit followed me to Atlanta, Rochester, NY, the Quad Cities and Kansas City--future stops during my TV Guide tenure.  In each community, I was contacted by an attorney to verify my testimony.  I lost contact with Kay who had been treated by Dr. Robert F. Hyland, a famed surgeon whose specialty was patching up major athletes and whose son, Bob, was a highly successful general manager of KMOX radio.

It was at KMOX in 1954 that Jack Buck began broadcasting St. Louis Cardinals games.  Jack, a boyhood friend (we played on the same baseball teams) in Lakewood, Ohio, would eventually do 44 years of Redbirds games.  It was the first of 14 years with obstreperous Harry Caray who, like Buck, would acquire the description announcers strive for and rarely attain: “legendary.”

I was a regular at the old Sportsman’s Park on Grand Avenue as a result of a press pass given me by Al Fleischman of Fleischman-Hillard, the Cardinals public relations firm.  It was the next year that I began noticing a guy who at each home game took a recording device to a far corner of the press box and described the games.  A 29-year-old former catcher who had quit baseball because of a shoulder injury suffered while blocking home plate for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Joe Garagiola soon joined Caray and Buck to form arguably baseball’s best broadcast team.  A product of The Hill, a St. Louis Italian neighborhood, Joe had grown up with Yogi Berra, also a catcher.  It was Garagiola who eventually coined a phrase most associated with the position.  Joe, referring to all the paraphernalia worn by receivers, tagged them “the tools of ignorance.”   After baseball broadcasting, Garagiola became a regular on NBC’s “Today,” then appeared for many years on USA’s coverage of the “Westminster Kennel Show.”

I recall a conversation with Garagiola about wondrous sights we have been privileged to witness.  Joe’s contribution was about being conducted to a large room in St. Louis where major league baseballs were stitched by a great many women gathered for their creation’s final step.  According to the former catcher, the stitching was accomplished in such a way that both arms of the women were thrust heavenward to ensure tight lacing of the balls.  As Joe’s narrative continued, I could envision a scene accompanied by the kind of energetic musical dissonance as that composed by Igor Stravinsky.  The scene was, “stupefying” according to Garagiola.   “Man,” he said, “all those unbelievably healthy boobs bouncing in that room was an unforgettable sight.”  Years later while employed by Playboy, I would tell Hugh Hefner of my discovery by way of the broadcaster’s story, but nothing came of it.  Pity. 

A couple of years later, I was on a KMOX Jack Buck talk show and told the story of two kids who grew up in an Ohio town and played on the same team.  One day the shortstop thought he heard the center fielder talking to himself.  As the two came off the field after the third out, the shortstop asked: “Hey, Jack.  Are you talking to yourself?”

Replied Buck: “Yeah, Rob, (I was Rob back then) someday I’m going to be a sports announcer and I’m practicing.”

Jack was one of the most versatile sports broadcasters.  He did the World Series, Super Bowls and a great variety of other events.  Inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1987 as a recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award, he made the Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 1990 and the Radio Hall of Fame in 1995.

Just how much of an effect Harry Caray had on Buck during their 14-year association is anybody’s guess.  Mine is that Harry’s bombast and outrageous rooting for the home team sent Jack in another direction.  It was Jack Buck’s intelligent and balanced reporting, a long and vast memory and a sense of humor that made him one of the great sports announcers.

When Jack died, I told my story about his center field “broadcast” to a member of the Cleveland Plain Dealer sports staff who dropped it into an obituary filed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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Sidebars Elliott Roosevelt By Bob Sanders

Sidebars    Elliott Roosevelt    By Bob Sanders    (general)

 

It’s an odd feeling being corrected about a story you’ve told for many years.  I owe a large “thank you” to Peter Collier and David Horowitz whose The Roosevelts: An American Saga is not only a brilliant examination of America’s longest-lasting and most powerful dynasty but one providing details about a small part I believed I had played in the life of Elliott Roosevelt.

I thought my first “contact” with Roosevelt was in the very early spring, 1945.  World War II was winding down, the U.S. Navy had given me a pre-embarkation leave from Port Hueneme’s Camp Bedillion in Southern California, and my transportation of choice to Cleveland was Air Transport Command.

ATC made it possible for patient servicemen and women to hitchhike home and back at no cost.  Flights were irregular, usually short enough that destinations were not achieved as the crow would fly.  The first leg of my journey put me down in Phoenix.  All set for the second leg which would take me to Denver, I was bumped for, what I was told, a dog accompanied by Air Force brigadier general Elliott Roosevelt, son of FDR.  Further, the dog was being taken to its owner, actress Faye Emerson, Roosevelt’s most recent wife.

I never saw Roosevelt or the dog, merely informed by an Air Force serviceman responsible for the passenger list that Roosevelt had pulled rank.  Messrs. Collier and Horowitz make it clear that “three servicemen, one of them on his way home to see a dying father, were bumped from a flight on Elliott’s authority so that Blaze, a bull mastiff he had bought Emerson, could be flown to her in California.”  Since I was headed east, there is no way I could have been one of the servicemen.  I suspect the guy who blamed Roosevelt had read or heard the real story, scorned FDR and told anyone bumped from a flight that Elliott was responsible much as Bill Clinton is blamed today for everything this side of what’s  wrong with the New York Yankees.

During the next 25 years, Elliott Roosevelt had added to his credentials as the black sheep of a somewhat dysfunctional family whose six children (Anna was the lone female) married a total of 19 times.  The most physically attractive of FDR’s sons, Elliott pursued wine, women and money, the latter through a great variety of careers and deals most of which were abject failures.  An exception was Roosevelt Enterprises, a business created to exploit his mother Eleanor.  A syndicated column, “My Day,” books, magazine articles, radio and TV helped make FDR’s widow a major household name.  The success of Roosevelt Enterprises alleviated some of the family rancor directed his way after manipulating the sale of the family residence, Hyde Park, and the surrounding land.  In spite of marriages to wealthy women, Elliott was broke half the time, according to his chroniclers.  A lot of people thought he was simply a dead beat.

In 1970, Playboy expanded its Club-Hotel holdings by purchasing The Plaza in Miami Beach.  It was an odd buy in every way.  Located just north of the Fontainebleau, The Plaza had been built by the high flying Harry Singer who sold the place to the Teamsters Union.  The hotel staff, largely inherited by Playboy, professed little knowledge of the hotel’s recent history and I was told by those who know about such things that any inspection of the sale’s paper trail would end in bewilderment.

Dispatched to Miami Beach to bring attention to the hotel, I learned that Elliott Roosevelt had re-surfaced in the Fun and Sun Capitol having taken a job in 1964 as a greeter for the convention center, then elected mayor of the city before losing a re-election bid.  When I arrived in Miami Beach, Roosevelt headed the community’s Tourist Development Authority and was about to become a lobbyist for Portugal dictator Antonio Salazar. In The Roosevelts:  An American Saga, the authors tell of Elliott’s being aware of an elderly woman staring at him in a Lisbon bookstore.  “Don’t you recognize me?” she finally asked.  “You look familiar.  Who are you?”  The woman smiled, “I’m your first wife.”

Roosevelt became a target in my publicity campaign largely because of his name albeit one that had been dormant for a while.  There existed then a curiosity about the Roosevelts similar to the Kennedys today.  I also figured veteran photo editors, in all likelihood, would recall the late President’s son who over the years had been screwing up so impressively with women.  A picture of Elliott Roosevelt being served poolside at the Playboy Plaza by a Bunny revealing more than a dollop of cleavage would likely bring the kind of attention I was seeking.  (Perhaps it’s worth pointing out, gentle reader, that the early 70s were far less gender-sensitive times as your humble narrator plied his flackery wiles in creating further Playboy awareness).   

I called Roosevelt exhibiting my usual stalwart good manners managing to make no references to Blaze, the dog, or the health of any of his former wives including Faye Emerson who in 1948 had slashed her wrists in a suicide attempt during what I’m certain was an, otherwise, hearty Thanksgiving family gathering.  Indeed, he was agreeable to bring additional attention to Miami Beach and the wonderful world of Playboy.  I suspect those were slow days for him.  We set a date and time, I hired a photographer and the shoot was on.

Elliott was by then on his fifth wife, Patty Peabody, a divorcee with four children.  She was 12 years younger than he and the two over the course of 20 years (he died in 1990) would live in 35 different residences.

The photo shoot was set for early October and, as things eventually unraveled, I learned once again that timing is everything.  Fortunately, the World Series was being played.  Having set up a dinner table poolside (the high diving board in the background identified the hotel), I felt confident about the shoot having picked a bevy of Bunnies including one over-endowed with dazzle and chosen from among a hutch clutch of cottontails.  She, exhibiting the firm’s famous Bunny Dip while serving, and Elliott would be photographed to lend further mystique to Hugh Hefner’s world of fantasy.

Traffic on any given day in Miami can be wicked and such was the case when photo time rolled around.  Because the hotel was in the midst of a $1.5 million renovation, the only Bunnies in town were in the Miami Playboy Club across a causeway--something like 15 minutes normal drive.  I got a call the Bunnies were running late, a message I passed along to Roosevelt, showing signs of grumpiness. 

“Are you a baseball fan?” I asked him.  “Yes, old sport,” was the reply.

With that I commandeered a TV plus a vast collection of extension cords averaging something like 20 feet apiece.  I must have hooked up a dozen of the damn things to reach the set and  enhanced the TV’s picture with a deftly placed patio umbrella.  That’s what old sports do for each other. 

Soon Roosevelt was into the game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Cincinnati Reds.  The Series, won by the Orioles, was dominated by their third baseman, Brooks Robinson.  A wonderful quote by Pete Rose came out of the contests when the man eventually banned from baseball for gambling said in reference to Robinson’s defensive skills: “He could play third base with a pair of pliers.”

After a half-hour or so, the Bunnies arrived including one who would help rightfully return Elliott Roosevelt to the consciousness of a nation whose celebrity appetite, in those days more like a propensity for White Castle sliders, would grow into today’s Triple Whopper kind of entranced worship.

Elliott was a good photo subject.  He looked more like his father than any of his brothers.  Then 60 and in reasonably good shape, his jaw jutted, his eyes sparkled in the brilliance of the Florida sun, his smile seemingly radiated an appreciation of his version of the good life, and he appeared to be enjoying himself.  One got a quick glimpse of what Faye Emerson and the other wives saw in him--at least at first glance.  Food was brought forth, the Bunny did her dip, the photographer grabbed some shots and I knew we got a subdued ogle out of Roosevelt.

Accompanying Elliott, the Bunnies and the photographer to the lobby, we passed the hotel’s soon-to-be Sidewalk Café and I noticed a workman applying mortar to the room’s ceiling.  After putting Roosevelt in a cab, I took the photographer and the Bunny of the impressive dip back to the Sidewalk Café, then talked the mortar guy into ignoring union rules allowing her to pose on a step ladder.

The Roosevelt picture moved only on the Southeast United Press International wire.  The step ladder Bunny made the national wire and the picture picked up all over the country plus Mexico City and chunks of the world where pictures of pretty women were published.  Associated Press wanted no part of the proceedings.  You win some, you lose some.

Three points are patently clear about what happened.  People like pictures of pretty women  better than sons of U.S. presidents, never underestimate interest in the World Series, and it’s journalistically sound to go for one more question and one more picture.

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