George Shuba, Whose Handshake Heralded Racial Tolerance in Baseball

George Shuba greeted Jackie Robinson, right, when Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in a minor league game in 1946. Credit Associated Press

George Shuba, the Brooklyn Dodgers outfielder who played in three World Series during the 1950s but who was best remembered for his welcoming gesture to Jackie Robinson at home plate on the day Robinson, as a minor leaguer, broke baseball’s color barrier, died on Monday at his home in Youngstown, Ohio. He was 89. His son, Michael, confirmed the death.

Playing in Brooklyn for seven seasons, Shuba was usually a backup, but he had his moments. Known as Shotgun for his ability to spray line drives, like buckshot, out of his left-handed batting stance, he batted .305 for the Dodgers’ 1952 National League pennant-winner. He was the first National Leaguer to hit a pinch-hit homer in the World Series, connecting for a two-run drive off Allie Reynolds at Yankee Stadium in Game 1 of the 1953 Series.

But his career was most pointedly defined in Jersey City, by an image at home plate at Roosevelt Stadium two years before Shuba made his major league debut.

But his career was most pointedly defined in Jersey City, by an image at home plate at Roosevelt Stadium two years before Shuba made his major league debut.

On the afternoon of April 18, 1946, Robinson became the first black player in modern organized baseball when he made his debut with the Dodgers’ Montreal Royals farm team in their International League opener against the Jersey City Giants.

Shuba in 1948. Credit The New York Times

In the third inning, Robinson hit a three-run homer over the left-field fence. When he completed his trip around the bases, Shuba, the Royals’ left fielder and their next batter, shook his hand.

Congratulating a home-run hitter was a commonplace ritual, but Shuba’s welcome to a smiling Robinson was captured in an Associated Press photograph that has endured as a portrait of racial tolerance.

“I couldn’t care less if Jackie was Technicolor,” Shuba told The Montreal Gazette on the 60th anniversary of that handshake. “We’d spent 30 days at spring training, and we all knew that Jackie had been a great athlete at U.C.L.A. As far as I was concerned, he was a great ballplayer — our best. I had no problem going to the plate to shake his hand instead of waiting for him to come by me in the on-deck circle.”

Robinson had four hits in five plate appearances that afternoon in the Royals’ 14-1 victory. In their second game of the season, Shuba hit three home runs.

Green-Wood after dark

Benjamin Norman for The Wall Street Journal - Green-Wood Cemetery’s catacombs, which date back to the early 1850s, will be open to visitors during Saturday’s moonlight tour. More photos from inside cemetery.

Green-Wood was founded in 1838 as the graveyards of Manhattan were filling up. It quickly became one of the city’s top draws for tourists, until a rule instituted in the 1960s limited entry to plot owners or those visiting specific graves. Those restrictions were lifted in 1999, and visitors returned in droves. Now 200,000 people come to Green-Wood each year, lured by the famous figures resting within its grounds, including Leonard Bernstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

I've been there myself, in fact; some years ago.

Moonlight tours and other creative ventures provide much-needed cash for Green-Wood, but the fund-raising ideas aren’t always successful. The moonlight tours have been less divisive and consistently popular, drawing up to 250 people with the unusual mix of tombstones and tunes. “We have two accordionists that come with it. They play ‘Blue Moon’ and other appropriate tunes for a moonlight tour,” Richman said.

Kind of gaudy

Vic DeLucia/The New York Times: Bob Guccione at his Manhattan home in 1994. He moved out in 2006 after creditors foreclosed.

Bob Guccione, who founded Penthouse magazine in the 1960s and built a pornographic media empire that broke taboos, outraged the guardians of taste and made billions before drowning in a slough of bad investments and Internet competition, died Wednesday in Plano, Tex., The Associated Press reported. He was 79. A statement issued by the Guccione family said he died at Plano Specialty Hospital after a long battle with cancer, The A.P. said. His empire began in London in 1965 with a bank loan, an idea and an accident. The loan was for $1,170. The idea was a new magazine with nude photos to outdo Hugh Hefner’s Playboy. And the accident was an old mailing list, so that promotional brochures with pornographic samples went out to clergymen, schoolgirls, old-age pensioners and wives of members of Parliament.

The outcry was huge. And there was a $264 fine for mailing indecent materials. But all 120,000 copies of the first issue of Penthouse sold out in days, and Mr. Guccione, a struggling artist from New Jersey who had been knocking around Europe for more than a decade, was on his way to being a tycoon. By the early 1980s he was one of America’s richest men, king of a $300 million publishing empire, General Media, which owned Penthouse, with a monthly circulation of 4.7 million in 16 countries, and 15 other magazines, including Omni and Penthouse Forum as well as titles on bodybuilding, photography and computers, in addition to book, video and merchandising divisions. Forbes listed Mr. Guccione’s net worth in 1982 as $400 million. His art collections, worth $150 million, included works by Degas, Renoir, Picasso, El Greco, Dalí, Matisse and Chagall. Troves of art and antiques filled his Manhattan home, a 17,000-square-foot double town house on East 67th Street, and his country estate in Staatsburg, N.Y. Mr. Guccione looked the part of the libidinous pornographer. He was tanned and muscled, and he wore slim pants and silk shirts open to the waist, showing gold chains on a hairy chest. His personality was volatile, but he did not drink, smoke or use drugs.

“He was a mass of contradictions, engendering fierce loyalty and equally fierce contempt,” Patricia Bosworth, who had been executive editor of Mr. Guccione’s Viva magazine in the 1970s, wrote in Vanity Fair in 2005. “He hired and fired people, then rehired them. He could be warm and funny one minute and cold and detached the next.”

Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabatini Guccione was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 17, 1930, the son of Anthony and Nina Guccione. He was raised Roman Catholic in Bergenfield, N.J., and said he considered the priesthood, but decided to be an artist. In 1948 he graduated from Blair Academy, in Blairstown, N.J. At 18 he married the first of his three wives, Lilyann Becker, and had a daughter, Tonia. The marriage soon failed. Over the next 12 years he traveled in Europe and North Africa, sketching tourists in cafes and working odd jobs. In Tangier he met Muriel Hudson, an English singer. They traveled together for several years, were married in 1955 and had four children: Bob Jr., Nina, Anthony and Nick. In 1960 they settled in London, where he ran a dry-cleaning business, drew cartoons for a syndicate and edited a small newspaper. A mail-order business, selling back issues of men’s magazines, put him deep in debt, and his wife left him, taking the children. But Penthouse transformed his life.

With Kathy Keeton, a dancer from South Africa who was his girlfriend, his business partner and later his wife, Mr. Guccione challenged Playboy at the height of the sexual revolution, introducing Penthouse in the United States in 1969 and building it into one of the nation’s most successful magazines, a mix of what was billed as “sex, politics and protest” that took in an estimated $3.5 billion to $4 billion over 30 years. Its images of women, often shot by Mr. Guccione, left little to the imagination. Compared with Playboy Playmates, as the Hefner centerfold models were known, Penthouse Pets were arrayed in more provocative poses. The magazine infuriated feminists and conservatives, but others praised it for breaking taboos. Penthouse occasionally ran nude layouts of well-known women, including Madonna. In 1984, sexually explicit photos of Vanessa Williams, taken two years before she became the first black Miss America, appeared in Penthouse. Ms. Williams lost her crown and sued for $500 million, but the suit was dropped and Penthouse reported a $14 million newsstand windfall.

And she got a Hollywood career.

Aside from the battle of the centerfolds, Penthouse offered an aura of class: fiction, celebrity profiles and political articles. It published Alan Dershowitz, Stephen King, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates and J. P. Donleavy, and interviews with Germaine Greer, Gore Vidal and Isaac Asimov. Other Guccione magazines made splashes: Viva, featuring male nudes for female browsers, folded in 1978 after five years; Omni, a science and science fiction offering, began in 1978 and ended in 1995. Mr. Guccione employed his children and father in his enterprises.

Folded? Seems a tenuous choice of words, for a magazine.

The dissolution of the Guccione empire took years. A $200 million Penthouse casino in Atlantic City never materialized, and he lost much of his investment. A $17.5 million movie containing hard-core sex scenes and graphic violence, “Caligula,” was shunned by distributors, and Mr. Guccione lost heavily. He once hired 82 scientists to develop a small nuclear reactor as a low-cost energy source, but it came to nothing and cost $17 million. The government took chunks of his fortune. In 1985, the Internal Revenue Service demanded $45 million in back taxes. In 1992, he had to borrow $80 million for another tax bill. In 1986, after a scathing federal antipornography report, Penthouse was withdrawn from many newsstands and circulation revenues — a major source of income — fell sharply. The trend accelerated in the 1990s as Internet pornography grew increasingly available. Mr. Guccione responded with more explicit sexual content that drove advertisers and vendors away, limiting many sales to pornographic bookstores. Ms. Keeton, the president and chief operating officer, died in 1997, and friends said her loss had profound effects on Mr. Guccione’s business and personal life.


Mr. Guccione, who developed throat cancer in 1998, sold artworks, media properties and his Staatsburg estate as revenues dwindled and debts soared. Penthouse posted a $10 million loss in 2001, General Media filed for bankruptcy in 2003, and he resigned as chairman and chief executive of Penthouse International. Creditors foreclosed on the Guccione mansion, and he moved out in 2006. Dozens of items from the town house — fireplace mantels, marble columns, even a circular staircase — were auctioned off by a Connecticut gallery in 2009 for a fraction of their presale estimates, with the proceeds going to a charity.


“Kind of gaudy,” said Dave Kerr, a prospective buyer looking skeptically over the lot. “It wouldn’t work in our house. I guess he lived a different lifestyle.” A list of survivors was not immediately available.


October 20, 2010: Bob Guccione, Penthouse Founder, Dies at 79. By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Green-Wood

This seems the correct blog for this post: a story about the Brooklyn cemetery. Details in the story are new to me, but I visited Green-Wood in April 2004.

Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, the resting ground for such 19th-century titans as jeweler Charles Lewis Tiffany and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk, is running out of its main source of revenue: burial plots. To keep it alive, the 200-year-old cemetery's president, Richard Moylan, turned it into a nonprofit that gives guided tours and hosts cultural programs and art exhibits.
Slideshow

My pictures: Civil War memorial. Look closely, and find lower Manhattan.

Another look from the Civil War memorial






Harry Chadwick's grave, laid out in baseball diamond shape, complete with bases.


A major reason for my visit: the grave of Old Brains, General Halleck.


Not the Pearly Gates, exactly; Green-Woods gates.

Historian and self-confessed baseball nut

Reading column of 5 best baseball books in weekend WSJ, entry number 2 is book by Jules Tygiel.

July 4, 2008
Jules Tygiel, Historian, Dies at 59
By BRUCE WEBER

Correction Appended

Jules Tygiel, a historian and self-confessed baseball nut whose Brooklyn upbringing inspired his highly regarded scholarship on Jackie Robinson and on the integration of American society seen through the lens of baseball, died on Tuesday in San Francisco, where he lived. He was 59.

The cause was cancer, said his wife, Luise Custer.

For 30 years, Mr. Tygiel (pronounced ty-GELL) worked in the history department at San Francisco State University, where he taught mostly conventional courses on the Great Depression, the history of California and the history of labor in the United States. His published works include the story of C. C. Julian, the Los Angeles oil business con man of the 1920’s, and a biography of Ronald Reagan. But if the classroom and the library were Mr. Tygiel’s intellectual haunts, his heart was on the ball field.

“Writing this book has allowed me to combine my vocation as a historian and my avocation as a baseball fanatic,” Mr. Tygiel wrote in an introduction to his best-known work, “Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy” (Oxford University Press, 1983).

“I spent joyous months poring over sports pages, reading microfilmed back issues of The Sporting News and devouring baseball biographies.”

A meticulously researched and gracefully written account of the relationship between blacks and professional baseball, the book begins with Robinson’s first game in what had been segregated white pro ball, on April 18, 1946, when he got four hits, including a home run, playing for the Montreal Royals of the International League.

From there it uses Robinson’s experience in Montreal and, beginning the next season, with the Brooklyn Dodgers as the centerpiece of a history of baseball’s integration — from the early days of the game through the appearance on the field, in 1959, of Pumpsie Green, the first black player for the last major league team to integrate, the Boston Red Sox.

A “rich, intelligent cultural history,” as it was described by Christopher Lehman-Haupt of The New York Times, the book was among the notable books in The Times’s Book Review of 1983. In 2002 it was ranked No. 50 on Sports Illustrated’s list of the top 100 sports books of all time.

“He loved all aspects of baseball,” Ms. Custer said. “And as an academic, it was important to him to write not just for academics.”

Jules Everett Tygiel was born in Brooklyn on March 9, 1949. His father and mother ran a store that sold and repaired pens, lighters and electric shavers. They lived in the East Flatbush section, not too far from Ebbets Field, home of Robinson’s Dodgers, and a place the young Mr. Tygiel first visited when he was 7.

“My favorite player was Jackie Robinson, largely because he integrated baseball,” Mr. Tygiel wrote. “I was not sure what this meant, but I knew it was wonderful. I thus learned my first lesson in race relations and politics.”

Mr. Tygiel graduated from Brooklyn College, then received his M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the U.C.L.A. He taught at the University of Tennessee and the University of Virginia before settling at San Francisco State in 1978.

He wrote or edited several other books about race and baseball, including “Past Time: Baseball as History” (Oxford, 2000) and “Extra Bases: Reflections on Jackie Robinson, Race and Baseball History” (University of Nebraska Press, 2002).

His books on other subjects include “The Great Los Angeles Swindle: Oil, Stocks and Scandal in the Roaring Twenties” (Oxford, 1994) and “Ronald Reagan and the Rise of American Conservatism” (Longman, 2004).

In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1982, he is survived by his mother, Rose, of Tucson; a brother, Philip, also of Tucson; a sister, Martha, of the Bronx, and two sons, Charles, of Santa Cruz, Calif., and Sam, of San Francisco.

Richard Zitrin, a law professor who was among Mr. Tygiel’s oldest friends, said Mr. Tygiel was especially proud of being the commissioner of the Pacific Ghost League, a fantasy baseball league — the first on the West Coast, Mr. Zitrin said — that the two men started in 1981. He wasn’t a bad sandlot ballplayer, either.

“Good shortstop, solid glove,” Mr. Zitrin said. “Slap hitter.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 8, 2008
An obituary on Friday about Jules Tygiel, a baseball historian noted for his writing on the role of Jackie Robinson in integrating baseball, referred incorrectly to the game Robinson played on April 18, 1946. It was his first game in what had been segregated white professional baseball, not his first pro game.

Songwriter for Elvis, Sinatra and King Cole

This is the second obit of an important musical figure that I've found only in London media: this one in the Independent, the one below, of Ed Thigpen, in the Guardian. Curious, to say the least.

Aaron Schroeder: Songwriter who wrote for Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and Nat 'King' Cole

Friday, 26 February 2010

The New York publisher and songwriter Aaron Schroeder was one of the key figures around the Brill Building in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a songwriter who preferred to collaborate with others, especially in improving the commerciality of a promising song. Several of his 300 published compositions were recorded by Elvis Presley, including the multi-million seller "It's Now or Never" (1960). He liked to say, not entirely in jest, "I don't read music – that's why I make so much money."


Aaron Harold Schroeder, who was born in Brooklyn in 1926, was a competent pianist, mostly playing by ear, who was first attracted to the big bands of the 1940s. An early success was with "At a Sidewalk Penny Arcade" (1948), which was recorded by both Rosemary Clooney and Guy Lombardo. In 1955, he was working as a staff writer for the publishing company Hill and Range when he learnt that they were supplying songs to Elvis Presley, who had been signed to RCA-Victor Records.


Schroeder was asked to improve a song by other staff writers, "I Was the One", and the result was the B-side of "Heartbreak Hotel" and made the US Top 20 in its own right. Schroeder was so impressed with Presley that he said to another songwriter, Clyde Otis, "I've got a title, 'Anyway That You Want Me (That's How I Will Be)', so let's write the song." It was released as the B-side to "Love Me Tender", and, again, made the US Top 20 in its own right. Schroeder also wrote one of the first tribute songs to Presley, "My Boy Elvis" by Janis Martin.


Presley stockpiled songs to cover his time in the US army and he had great success with Schroeder's songs "I Got Stung" (later recorded by Paul McCartney) and "A Big Hunk O' Love". When Presley returned to civilian life in 1960, Schroeder wrote his first hit, "Stuck on You".


While serving in the US army, Presley developed a taste for Mario Lanza's recordings and took to singing "O Sole Mio" for his own amusement. Presley's publisher, Freddy Bienstock, wanted a new English lyric, and Schroeder and Wally Gold wrote "It's Now or Never" in 30 minutes. The record, which was released in 1960, sold 20 million copies. Schroeder used his windfall to start his own label, Musicor. Whenever Schroeder was away from home, he would buy his wife, Abby, a new charm for her bracelet. This led to him and Gold composing "Good Luck Charm" (1962), another trans-Atlantic chart-topper for Presley.

Never knew that Elvis liked Mario Lanza.

Schroeder appeared as a songwriter in the rock'n'roll film Disc Jockey Jamboree (1957), in which Carl Perkins sang his song "Glad All Over". Besides writing rock'n'roll songs, Schroeder maintained his contact with more traditional singers. In 1958, Frank Sinatra had a hit with "French Foreign Legion" and Perry Como with "Mandolins in the Moonlight". Nat "King" Cole recorded two of Schroeder's songs, "Sweet Bird of Youth" (1959) and "Time and the River" (1960).

A fledgling songwriter, Gene Pitney, showed Schroeder his work and Schroeder was so impressed that he encouraged him to become a performer as well as a songwriter, effectively establishing the Musicor label through his success. Pitney, who sometimes wrote under his mother's maiden name, Anne Orlowski, co-wrote "Rubber Ball" (a hit for Bobby Vee and Marty Wilde), "Today's Teardrops" (a B-side for Roy Orbison) and "Talkin' in My Sleep" (Billy Fury) with Schroeder, while Schroeder placed his song "Hello Mary Lou" with Ricky Nelson.

Well, hello, Mary Lou ...

Schroeder produced many of Pitney's singles, including the Burt Bacharach and Hal David songs "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance", "Only Love Can Break a Heart" and "24 Hours from Tulsa", but Bacharach preferred to have control. Schroeder also wanted the publishing rights to the songs and in 1965 there was an argument over Bacharach and David's film song for Pitney, "The Fool Killer". Schroeder's wheeling and dealing let him down and the song (about an axe murderer!) was not used in the film and had little application elsewhere. Instead, Bacharach and David shifted their attention to Dionne Warwick.

Among his other songs were "Apron Strings" (the B-side of Cliff Richard's No 1, "Living Doll"), "Cincinnati Fireball" (Johnny Burnette), "Make Me Know You're Mine" (Conway Twitty), "Wildcat" (Gene Vincent), "Lucky Devil" (Frank Ifield), "Because They're Young" (Duane Eddy) and "Twixt 12 and 20" (Pat Boone).


In 1966, Mike Jeffrey, the manager of the Animals, arranged a publishing deal for Jimi Hendrix with a company, Yameta, which was incorporated in a tax haven in the Bahamas. Yameta, in turn, formed a partnership with Schroeder, ensuring that Hendrix received relatively little for his songs, perhaps as little as £10 in £100.

He took care of his own songs, but screwed Hendrix.

Schroeder negotiated the music rights for Hanna-Barbera's animated productions and he wrote the theme song for Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969). In 1978, Schroeder wrote a US country No 1, "She Can Put Her Shoes Under My Bed Anytime", for Johnny Duncan, but it was his past successes that consolidated his income. He would tell songwriters, "Your songs are your children – they take care of you when you are old." By promoting celebrity concerts, he and his wife did much to improve the fortunes of the Berkshire Theatre Festival.


Spencer Leigh


Aaron Harold Schroeder, songwriter and music publisher: born Brooklyn 7 September 1926; married Abby (one daughter); died Englewood, New Jersey 2 December 2009.