fiefoe | "One Summer"

Among the cast of thousands, my favorite is easily Babe Ruth. The aftermath of that summer is largely not that happy though.

His first roommate, Ernie Shore, was dismayed to discover weeks into the season that throughout that period Ruth had been sharing his toothbrush.
in the space of one-thousandth of a second—the duration of contact—through the miracle of physics it converted the sizzling zip of an incoming 90-mile-an-hour baseball into an outgoing spheroid launched cloudward at 110 miles an hour.
Once when Huggins criticized Ruth and his teammate Bob Meusel for their lack of discipline and output, Ruth carried the diminutive Huggins to the rear platform of the observation car and dangled him upside down over the rails.
On another occasion, he was reported to have used a visitor’s bald head to knock the ashes from his pipe.
By the time of Lindbergh’s flight, one-third of all the money America spent on furniture was spent on radios.
it is surely the most bizarrely sinister episode in American history that officialdom was prepared to deliver to its own citizens an agonizing death for engaging in an act that had until recently been an accepted part of civilized life, was still legal nearly everywhere else in the world, and was patently harmless in moderation.
The rise in anti-German sentiment gave a huge boost to the temperance movement.
Coolidge began his long climb up the political ladder. He became first mayor of Northampton;
(Eventually, in 1931, the dome was dedicated by Herbert Hoover, who would go, it was said, to the opening of a drawer.)
A fact largely forgotten now is that many of the great ocean liners of the twenties were actually German ships under new names. Cunard’s Berengaria, a vessel so splendid that Cunard made it its flagship, had originally been the German Imperator.
He was also one of the seventeen pitchers allowed to continue throwing a spitball after 1919.
The great Mississippi flood of 1927 had two lasting legacies. First, it accelerated the movement of blacks out of the South in what is known as the Great Migration.
Engineers explained to him that a large skyscraper typically weighed about sixty thousand tons while the rock and earth excavated for the foundations would weigh more like a hundred thousand tons,
The world was so delighted and enthralled with Ford’s ignorance that one enterprising man sold hastily printed copies of Ford’s testimony for 25 cents each day outside the courthouse, and bought a house with the profits.
Ford so admired the head of his soybean research division, Edsel Ruddiman, that he named his only child after him.
Rice used the plane for aerial surveying but also stocked it with bombs to drop on any jungle natives he found difficult or obstreperous.
The Miami Herald carried so many property ads that one Sunday edition ran to 504 pages.
As he sailed through the silver of that summer dawn, the stars watched with a still delight to see a child of earth so brave riding the air, a comrade of cloud and wind and foaming wave. And as he neared his goal the sun, the sea and 'the huge unfettered spaces hailed him a victor and chanted to him, “Well done."'
pending the invention of dubbing and subtitles, sound movies could only be shown where people spoke the language in which the movie was made.
Elliott realized that the trick of a successful execution was to adjust the application of electricity continuously and judiciously throughout the process, rather as an anesthesiologist controls the flow of gas to a surgical patient, so that the subject was rendered first unconscious and then lifeless in a progressive and comparatively peaceful manner.
The case came before the U.S. Supreme Court in the spring of 1927. The court ruled by a vote of 8 to 1 that Buck should be sterilized. The majority opinion was written by eighty-six-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.—a man of such long life that he had fought as an infantryman in the Civil War.
which concentrated electron beams and fired them in bursts, multiplying their intensity. Inspired, Lawrence returned to Berkeley and produced the world’s first particle accelerator.
Beer required corruption on an epic scale. You can’t hide a brewery,
He proved, however, to be a bundle of odd notions.