May 2009 - Richard M. Langworth

Baseball: The Summer of 1960

31 May 2009 Comments 1 Comment

As a sequel to 1960, let’s take 2019. See “Nats Win!”

Until 2019 I was a frustrated fan of the Washington Nationals, as I was the old Washington Senators. As a New York schoolboy in the Fifties, I’d go up to Yankee Stadium to root for the Senators when they were in town. Always wore my navy blue cap with the white block “W.” Big, scary Bronx voices would shout: “Hey, kid—the Washington section’s in the bleachers.”

The Senators were perennial heartbreakers, although in mid-1952 they were only five games out of first place and considered to be pennant contenders.…

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Bulldog Not: Say it isn’t So

28 May 2009 Comments 0 Comments

“The classic British bulldog, a symbol of defiance and pugnacity, may now disappear. A shake-up of breeding standards by the Kennel Club has signalled the end of the dog’s Churchillian jowl. Instead, the dog will have a shrunken face, a sunken nose, longer legs and a leaner body. The British Bulldog Breed Council is threatening legal action against the Kennel Club. Chairman Robin Searle said: ‘What you’ll get is a completely different dog, not a British bulldog.’

I referred this one to longtime colleague, prominent motoring writer and bulldog partisan Graham Robson, who writes:

As a long-time bulldog owner (you have met various of my much-loved mutts) I am at once delighted and appalled by what is being proposed.…

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Black Swans Return to Chartwell

26 May 2009 Comments 0 Comments

“All the black swans are mating, not only the father and mother, but both brothers and both sisters have paired off. The Ptolemys always did this and Cleopatra was the result. At any rate I have not thought it my duty to interfere.” —Churchill to his wife, Chartwell, 21 January 1935

Seventy-five years ago Lady Diana Cooper observed that Chartwell’s birds “consist of five foolish geese, five furious black swans, two ruddy sheldrakes, two white swans—Mr. Juno and Mrs. Jupiter, so called because they got the sexes wrong to begin with, two Canadian geese (‘Lord and Lady Beaverbrook’) and some miscellaneous ducks.”…

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Jack French Kemp 1935-2009

21 May 2009 Comments 2 Comments

“Dash of greyhound, slipping thongs…”

On Eleuthera, where we spent many winters, there was fascination with U.S. Presidential elections. A virtue of island is that racism, in the sense we all know it, doesn’t really exist. Our easy-going tropical strand features smiles of welcoming locals and friends who have known each other for years. It just doesn’t seem to matter whether the face in front of you is black or white.

So it was perfectly natural for the wife of our local grocer to ask me in 2008: “Is it possible for a non-white to be elected President?”……

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O’Reilly, Churchill and “Poison Gas”

11 May 2009 Comments 4 Comments

A famous quote from the Vietnam War, alleged to have been made by a U.S. pilot but actually uttered by journalist Peter Arnett, was: “…it became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” I was reminded of it when Bill O’Reilly on Friday May 8th destroyed Churchill in order to save him.

Intent on disproving Barack Obama’s non-quote of Churchill (“We don’t torture”; see “Obama, Churchill and Torture”), the Fox News Channel commentator, conducted an “investigation,” which turned out to be a phone call to a professor at Boston University, whose name I forget.…

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“Here is a law which is above the King”

6 May 2009 Comments 0 Comments

Do you know where Churchill made this statement? “Here is a law which is above the King which even he must not break. This reaffirmation of a supreme law and its expression in a general charter is the great work of Magna Carta; and this alone justifies the respect in which men have held it.” —J.F.

Yes, in a book in 1956. Churchill was explaining Magna Carta, the Great Charter of Freedoms, one of the towering benchmarks of Western Civilization. In his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. 1, The Birth of Britain (London: Cassell, 1956), 256-57.…

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Re-Rat Awards to Senators Gregg, Specter

5 May 2009 Comments 0 Comments

In Finest Hour 142, Spring 2009, I proudly presented the Churchill Re-Rat Award (issued infrequently) to Senator Judd Gregg (R.-NH), who accepted nomination as President Obama’s Secretary of Commerce but then withdrew, saying he could not balance “being in the Cabinet versus myself as an individual doing my job.” Gregg’s nomination had sewn fear among conservatives who learned that NH’s Democratic Governor, John Lynch, would appoint a liberal Republican in his place.

On 26 January 1941 Winston Churchill, who had deserted the Conservative Party for the Liberals in 1904 but oozed back into the Conservative Party in 1925 (after being appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer the previous year by Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin) remarked to his private secretary John Colville: “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.”…

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Printed Signatures and “Painting as a Pastime”

1 May 2009 Comments 5 Comments

I recently acquired Painting as a Pastime, reprinted 1965. Across from the title page is the memorable photo of Mr. Churchill at an easel. Under this photo is his signature. The signature seems authentic, however I am not an expert and am unsure. For this edition, is there a signature that has been printed under the photo? —W.R.

Yes; it’s a printed signature, present in every copy of the book. When Churchill actually signed copies, it would usually be on the first free endpaper, or occasionally on the title page.

Painting as a Pastime, Churchill’s charming essay on his chief hobby (and other hobbies—he is also big on books) was first published in The Strand magazine in 1921, reprinted in Thoughts and Adventures, and finally published as a volume in its own right in 1948.…

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