You could certainly say that today, but, wonderfully, it's a comment about baseball in 1884, soon after it became a professional sport. It's from Fifty-nine in '84, the story of Hoss Radbourn, a "barehanded baseball" player in the days before gloves and helmets and few regulations when players were literally putting their lives in each other's sometimes broken hands day after day of play.
Already the National Pastime in the 1860s, and as the country built itself back up after the Civil War, it was at first a joyful, fun, leisurely, healthy game played by whole towns--one early version was called "town ball"--and celebrated in poetry, notably by Walt Whitman!
Once cut-throat competitive strategies and money moved in, the game got fast-paced and ruthless. A pitcher could throw the ball straight at the batter if he wanted. And did. Hoss Radbourn was hit in the chest the season before his titular season and unable to pitch for a time but got back in the game by grit and willpower.
Sort of like Scarlett O-Hara! Gone With the Wind is 75 today.
I heard this story on NPR this morning, on my way home from lap swimming in the glittering sandy-bottomed pool. (I took swimming lessons in this same pool and did "water ballet," or synchronized swimming as it is called, olympically, today. Ah, those water ballet days are gone with the wind....)
Susan Stamberg went to Atlanta to see where Margaret Mitchell wrote her novel, in a tiny ground-floor apartment, on a Remington, while laid up with an ankle injury. She wrote it to entertain herself after she ran out of things to read!
10 comments:
Fiddle dee dee!
Going to a baseball game this weekend (or, as a friend once called them, "Hot dog games").
Yay!
Fiddle tee hee! Have fun, Hannah!
Ahhh Gone with the Wind... I've never seemed to be be able to finish the book or the movie!
So I should be writing GWTW while I am laid up instead of yakking on the internet? Good to know.
Yes, Julie. Although keep in mind that R. Grace was never able to finish reading it...!
I just received your book in the mail! Fast fast fast!
I hope you get mine soon.
I'm interested in that sand-bottomed swimming pool. Can you explain that?
There is sand on the bottom of a regular concrete-bottomed pool from a giant sand area in the aquatic center. They vacuum the bottom of the pool daily, but our lap-swim section was still sand-striped early this morning.
Ooh! Do you have the Red Cross Swim Certificates from Beginners, Advanced Beginners, and Intermediates?
Visualizing a synchronized swimming version of "Gone With the Wind" with ballet legs and back dolphins, and especially floral bathing caps!
Certificates, yes. Red Cross ones, no. Gone With the Wind as water ballet, yes!
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