Harry´s Blog

We have a new president - a great speaker and an exceptional man. We can only hope that a new era has begun. This mess of a world needs men (and women) of integrity. There are many, many setbacks, but there are moments. Join me in hoping for an extended moment, and even a continual change for the better.

There Are Moments

Yes, there are moments. But between those moments there are long, long periods.

I’ve always had nostalgia for the days of railroads as you see them in the films of the Thirties and Forties. Adding to the atmosphere are the Redcaps in the great metropolitan railroad stations and the Pullman Porters of the sleeping cars. These men are probably all gone now, but when they were around, I’m sure nostalgia wasn’t anything that touched them.

The view from the outside is always different from the view within.

Pullman Sleeping Car sounds wonderful. The word Pullman conjures up luxury and cushions. You’d think that George Pullman, the initiator of the Pullman cars, must have been a swell fellow. He wasn’t. The situation of those elegant black men was deplorable. They had to pay for their uniforms, their food and there were no benefits. While the passengers, they served, slept on comfortable beds, they had short naps on a cot behind a curtain in the toilet. There was no such thing as relaxing.

Our Founding Fathers were great men with vision, but the splendid documents they authored did not apply to all the inhabitants to the Thirteen Colonies. It took the Civil War and 13th and 19th Amendments for those documents to apply to all Americans.

Let’s jump to 1942! That year the Tuskegee Program for was initiated, or negroes, which was the term of the time, by liberals, who just happened to be members of the Democratic Party. It was one of the steps that led to the Civil Rights Bill of 1965.

There’s a film about the men who first joined this program titled The Tuskegee Airmen. In a scene pilots in training are forced to land on an Alabama highway, where a chain gang happens to be working. The guards guide the chained blacks from the highway with their rifles to make room for the aircraft. When the pilots emerge and remove their goggles, the astonished guards gasp. “They’re niggers!”

The camera then pans to an old black prisoner, who says: “Our boys are pilots!”

I don’t know if that scene took place in reality, but others like it have taken place.

One of the Tuskegee airmen was the great bassist Percy Heath of the Modern Jazz Quartet, who left us in 2005. And of course, many great jazzmen and -women played their part in breaking down racial barriers. It’s really hard to look down on someone whose abilities you admire.

White musicians like Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Charlie Barnet and Gene Krupa were among the first to integrate bands and John Hammond, the great jazz impresario and critic, was the man who first had blacks on the stage of Carnegie Hall and integrated the audience of the Hall.

I am a jazz buff, and I’ve followed up and written about this subject, but I’ve never been a baseball fan - or a sports fan, for that matter.

I’m not one of those guys who’d sit for hours in a stadium, a ballpark or in front of a TV-set watching a game. It was all a foreign language for me. And it still is. But I did like listening to Bill Stern tell stories about athletes on his radio show. I had a pocket book of those stories, but unfortunately, I lost it years ago. What I’m saying is that the individuals interest me, not the game they play.

I guess I’m not really one to write about baseball, but here’s an interesting fact: in the days when there were white teams and black teams, there was an annual white vs. black game, and guess who invariably won? That’s right, it wasn’t the white team. And the losing team very seldom took the loss as gentlemen.

Isn’t that sad? I like to think that in the old days there was chivalry among athletes.

Well, as we know, Branch Rickey the Dodger coach broke through the racial barrier with Jackie Robinson back in 1947. Most of Jackie’s teammates didn’t buddy up to him. Imagine, they got up a petition to keep the black out! One man, shortstop Peewee Reese, a Southern boy, didn’t play along. He refused to sign and quashed it.

The petition was stopped, but not the attempts to block the black by the Dodgers, the fans, and certainly not by players of the other teams.

There was a game when the insults and catcalls were particularly loud. I quote from an editorial of The Washington Post in 1997: “Mr. Reese called timeout, trotted, over from shortstop and just stood there with his hand on Mr. Robinson’s shoulder for a long moment, looking steadily into the crowd. Never a slugger, he hit the equivalent of five home runs that day.” (1)

So, it seems there is some hope for us.

- Herbert Kuhner

(1) Herald Tribune, April 2,1997, from The Washington Post.