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.…

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.…

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.”…