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The Night Bullets Hit The White House

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The gunman parked his black Honda directly south of the White House, on a closed lane off Constitution Avenue. It was about ten minutes to nine on the evening of November 11, 2011. He pointed a semiautomatic rifle out the passenger window, aimed directly at the home of the president of the United States, and pulled the trigger. Then again, and again.

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A bullet smashed a window on the second floor, just steps from the First Family's formal living room. Another lodged in a window frame, and several more pinged off the roof, sending bits of debris to the ground. At least eight bullets flew seven hundred yards across the South Lawn. Seven of them struck the Obama family's upstairs residence.

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President Obama and his wife were out of town on that chilly evening. But their younger daughter, Sasha, and Michelle Obama's mother, Marian Robinson, were inside the home. Their older daughter, Malia, was expected back any moment from an outing with friends.

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Secret Service officers rushed to respond. One, stationed directly under the second-floor terrace where the bullets struck, drew her .357 handgun and prepared to crack open an emergency gun

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Carol Leonnig "Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service" (2021)

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Twas for the good of my country I should be abroad

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I'm still worried about Jim Hudson. This is quite different.? This takes place on a much less emotional plane.? This took place at an inspection of an American army camp where they had the lady soldiers of the American army whose initials escape me for the moment.

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And there was an inspection and they were called upon to number.

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So these girls, all in their lovely uniforms, they numbered and it sounded like this, "One Two Three Four Five (deep voice)"

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At this "five", the sergeant's eyebrows lifted, and he said,? "Would you say that again, number five."

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"Five"

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So he shipped this girl straight into the orderly room and spare searching questions were asked, and it was discovered that this girl was in fact a man.?

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They got this man and they said, "What was the idea of enlisting in the women's army?"

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And he said, "Well, you see, I joined up in the men's army but I'm too small and they wouldn't have me."

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They said, "You can't just join up as a woman, you're a guy."

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He said, "Well, I wanted to fight, but I couldn't join the men's army, so I joined the woman's army. It was for the good of my country that I should be a broad."

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Denis Norden 580611b

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Ask Well

I've seen several menopause-oriented brands selling anti-aging estrogen creams for the face. Is there any science behind them?

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Hot flashes, night sweats and vaginal dryness are common symptoms of menopause. But the skin can undergo changes in midlife too, including sagging, thinning and becoming more dry.

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Estrogen is key to maintaining skin integrity, said Dr. Susan Massick, a dermatologist at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. When estrogen levels dip during menopause, your skin can become thinner with less collagen and elasticity, potentially causing more dryness or wrinkling.

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Some companies sell estrogen-infused face creams and serums - over-the-counter or via prescription - that are supposed to prevent and reverse these changes. One doctor on Instagram said that using prescription vaginal estrogen cream on your face can increase collagen production and minimize dryness.

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While this use of estrogen cream "makes sense, in theory," Dr. Massick said, we need more research showing that it is safe and effective.

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In one review published in 2019, researchers analyzed the results of about two dozen studies. They involved menopausal and post-menopausal women who used topical estrogen - including in gels, creams, ointments and patches - on their faces, abdomen, buttocks, forearms and thighs. The authors concluded that it was "plausible" that estrogen could minimize wrinkles and improve skin dryness, texture and elasticity. However, the studies they reviewed had various limitations, including that they looked at small groups of women. And some of the review's authors were consultants for a skin care pharmaceutical company, presenting a conflict of interest.

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Dr. Massick said that we need more rigorous research.

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Estradiol, the active ingredient in vaginal estrogen creams that are prescribed for menopause-related vaginal dryness and pain during sex, is a potent and therapeutic form of estrogen, said Dr. Mary Jane Minkin, an OB-GYN at Yale Medicine.

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Some of her patients use it off label to treat dry and wrinkled skin on their faces, she said. But she doesn't encourage this use - and the dermatologists we spoke with didn't recommend it either.

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Estriol (a form of estrogen that is produced during pregnancy) and phytoestrogen (a plant compound that mimics estrogen in the body) are two ingredients often found in estrogen-based skin care products, Dr. Massick said. But the research on them is limited.

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Applying estrogen to the skin could cause irritation, and trying any new topical product could lead to an allergic reaction, rash or redness, said Dr. Jacqueline Watchmaker, a dermatologist in Scottsdale, Ariz.

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Estrogen could also worsen any dark patches and discoloration or make blood vessels more apparent, she added; or it could aggravate conditions Iike eczema and rosacea, said Dr. Debra Jaliman, a dermatologist in New York City.

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The biggest question surrounding topical estrogen, however, is how much of the hormone gets absorbed into the bloodstream.

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When used vaginally, Dr. Minkin said that only "minuscule" amounts of estrogen seem to be absorbed, so it stands to reason that the same rules would apply when using it on the face.

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But until more research is done, Dr. Massick suggested that women who have or are at higher risk of developing "hormone-sensitive conditions" - like breast, uterine or ovarian cancers, or polycystic ovary syndrome - should avoid using estrogen-based skin care products.

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Because of these potential safety concerns and the lack of evidence of benefit, Dr. Watchmaker and the other dermatologists recommended not using estrogen as skin care until more research is done.

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Prescription topical retinoids (like tretinoin) and over-the-counter retinol can increase collagen and elastin, a protein that strengthens and plumps the skin. They can also boost cell turnover, which helps brighten skin and smooth fine lines, Dr. Watchmaker said.

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Hyaluronic acid can help minimize dryness, she added. And antioxidants like vitamin C and niacinamide can reduce redness, improve discoloration and enhance skin texture, Dr. Jalirnart said.

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?In-office treatments can also help, Dr. Jaliman added. These include laser resurfacing. which triggers collagen production and evens out skin tone; dermal fillers to add volume and smooth fine lines: and nonsurgical skin tightening procedures that stimulate collagen production.

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Applying sunscreen with an SPF 30 or higher every day is also crucial. Ultraviolet damage accelerates skin aging, and sunscreen will keep problems like wrinkles and thinning from getting worse, Dr. Massick said.

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If you're not sure how to address your skin issues, she recommended seeing a dermatologist who can develop a tailored skin care routine for you. Also, check in with an OB-GYN for help ad-dressing other menopausal symptoms.

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Erica Sweeney

On November 4, 2008, at just after 11 P.M., CNN called the presidential election for Barack Obama. The Obamas watched the returns with extended family at a hotel room near Chicago's Grant Park, the scene of a quickly growing Obama campaign rally. The densely packed crowds gathered there broke into cheers and dancing when news broadcasters announced his win.

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The elated throng was twice the size expected for the rally - roughly 240,000 people - when Obama finally took the stage at one in the morning. Few could know the lengths to which the Secret Service had gone to protect the president-elect for that memorable twenty-five-minute speech. The Service had installed two van-sized sheets of bulletproof glass - ten feet high and fifteen feet wide - on the right and left sides of Obama's lectern. Television viewers couldn't see the glass, but in person they were as obvious as a two-ton block of ice. The two-inch-thick plates were intended to shield Obama from the risk of snipers in the high-rises above the park. Agents tested the placement of the glass by taking up positions in apartments above and "firing" red laser beams at agents standing in for Obama. The airspace around the park had also been made a no-fly zone for the night. The supervisor overseeing protection for the event thanked the Obama campaign for instantly agreeing to a raft of extra precautions.

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"They never blinked when we told them we had to do the glass," the supervisor said. "They understood."

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That night, a large part of the country celebrated. But for Obama, the danger had ratcheted up exponentially, literally overnight. The Intelligence Division, which assessed threats to the president, immediately felt itself struggling to triage and assess a skyrocketing number of threats. Agents estimated that in the months immediately before and for several months after he took office, Obama received four times as many death threats as his predecessors - as many as thirty a day.

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The weekend after the election, at a Maine convenience store, a sign invited customers to join a betting pool on when Obama would be assassinated. "Let's hope we have a winner," the sign read. In Vay, Idaho, police found a sign on a tree offering a "free public hanging" of Obama. At North Carolina State University in Raleigh, anonymous artists had spray-painted KILL THAT NIGGER and SHOOT OBAMA in a tunnel that students used to cross the campus.

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Carol Leonnig "Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service" (2021)

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FAMILY

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At the end of my first trip to the West Coast I wound up, for some reason, in the Las Vegas jail. Cops had stopped me on my way home to my vibrating bed. When they'd asked for my name I had said, "Why do you ask?" After that things went real fast.

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So I found myself that night having dinner in the prison cafeteria. One of the convicts named Vinnie said, "Anyone want my fucking carrots?" in a tone that sounded more like "What asshole here likes carrots?" I jumped at the offer and said, "Oh sure, yeah, I love carrots," and at that moment I realized I was too enthusiastic. I was a carrot lover, and I had shown my weakness and my vulnerability.

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When Vinnie passed me his plate, the idea crossed my mind that nothing comes without consequences in any place, particularly that place.

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Later that night, smoke, soot and embers were floating up around my bunk, and I thought, My God, the whole place is on fire. I sat up in a panic and looked over the edge of my bunk, and there were Vinnie and his friend Frank making a little campfire under the empty bunk below me. They were trying to toast some bread they had stolen from dinner. They had rolled up the mattress so that the metal surface of the bottom bunk was exposed, and then they had lit a whole roll of toilet paper under the bunk to heat it up.

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The spongy white bread was lying like some strange artwork entitled "Wonder Bread on Gray Metal."

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I went to sleep that night thinking I had to make a real effort to get the hell out of there. Finally after seven days, my girlfriend back in New York managed to get money to a bondsman, and I was released, I got out of Vegas as fast as I could and headed straight for the Grand Canyon.

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I got there at sundown, perfect timing at last. The next morning I made my slow way down, deep into the bowels of Mother Earth. The hot, dry sun baked my newly freed body. I came upon a stream. It was crystal clear, a rushing transparency.

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I pulled off my shorts and slipped into the stream. Its shocking coldness made all parts of me come together and immediately be there. Then some part of me surprised another part by yelling out, "Oh my good Christ! Oh shit! Oh God, it's cold!"

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As I relaxed, I became all body wrapped in a transparent cocoon of rushing water. I lay there looking up at the massive rock walls. Here, I thought, I could lay to rest a part of me, let my raging past soar up and out of me. Above me, I sawall these ghosts. I saw Mom in her sundress and saddle shoes, stomping. I saw Dad spreading her ashes over the bay. I saw Vinnie and Frank, the two toast-cooking jailbirds, come out together from under my bunk bed, squinting and smiling in the sun. They all joined hands and danced a great boogie-woogie chain dance to heaven.

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Spalding Gray "Spalding Gray Stories Left To Tell" (2008)

Where the money came from has been argued about as much as anything in the Black Sox story, but the only plausible source is Arnold Rothstein. The other purported fixers were poseurs, or entered the conversation either too early or too late to have played a part. What little money made it into the hands of the ballplayers came from two Rothstein associates. Moreover, everyone mentioned in connection with the fix - gamblers from other cities mostly - had a direct and proven connection with Arnold Rothstein. And none of these men or groups of men had a connection with each other, except through Rothstein.

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Rothstein himself would always deny involvement. Those who charged that it was him, he pointed out, were up to their own necks in the scandal and looking to save them. When asked about the 1919 World Series, Rothstein always said his only involvement was betting on the White Sox and losing money. He made the case for his innocence under oath before the grand jury in 1920, and did it so convincingly that he was never indicted in the case. That was the way it was with Rothstein. In a criminal life that spanned more than a quarter century, he was never convicted of any crime. He had connections and charm and the best lawyers, and nothing ever stuck to him.

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Escaping culpability for his role in the 1919 Series fix may have been Rothstein's most famous dodge, but it wasn't his most remarkable. Earlier in 1919, he had shot three policemen in front of nineteen witnesses - and gotten away scot-free. He was overseeing a crap game in a West 57th Street apartment when, at two in the morning, there came a heavy rapping on the door and voices demanding to be let in. Rothstein had been robbed twice during private gambling evenings in the previous year and wasn't taking any chances this time. He responded to the knock by firing three shots through the closed door. Each one struck a New York City police detective. Three shots, three officers, three wounds. The officers weren't hurt badly, a shoulder wound and two flesh wounds in the arm. Rothstein was as solicitous as he could be. His limousine took the officers to the hospital. Knowing they were dealing with a man who had considerable pull with both the courts and city hall, the cops apologized, saying publicly that they understood gamblers were naturally wary of being robbed and that they should have been clearer about identifying themselves as police.

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Rothstein was indicted, but the case was dismissed because the policemen had not seen who had fired the shots, and all of the nineteen men in the room testified before the grand jury that they hadn't either. All but one denied he had even heard shots fired; another testified that he had seen a muzzle flash but didn't know who fired. Any man who can so deftly beat a felonious assault rap is too good to let himself be taken down by murky allegations about fixing some baseball games.

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History's best guess as to what it cost to fix the World Series - the cash actually paid to the seven players who took money for agreeing to be a part of the fix - was at most $80,000-$90,000. This was quite literally pocket money to Arnold Rothstein: at the height of his power and celebrity, he would often travel the streets of Manhattan with $100,000 in cash in the pockets of his bespoke suits. Rothstein had in effect financed the biggest sporting scandal in American history with what he had on him.

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Arnold Rothstein - A. R. as he was known to associates and newspapermen - remains one of those larger-than-life personalities from the 1920s, someone whose story seems to fit far more comfortably into fiction than biography. F. Scott Fitzgerald modeled Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby on Rothstein, though Wolfsheim is a far more thuggish and cartoonish figure than the pol. hed, sophisticated, well-connected real-life Rothstein. Damon Runyon, the Hearst writer who mined Broadway for stories and characters the way Rothstein mined it for his pocket money, saw another side of Rothstein when he made him the inspiration for Nathan Detroit, the master of the floating crap game in Guys and Dolls. But Runyon, too, portrayed just one dimension of Rothstein - the rakishness and bravura. Nathan Detroit is street-smart and devilishly mischievous, but he's also a bit sentimental, perhaps even a little na?ve - thus ultimately far more redeemable than the manipulative, ruthless, vengeful real-life Rothstein.

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To the newspapermen, and thus to the American public in the 191Os, Arnold Rothstein was simply a "gambler" which, although making him slightly unsavory, proved no obstacle to admission to the best circles. It gave him cachet.

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Rothstein moved comfortably through the worlds of politics, business, Broadway, and Manhattan society. His rumored involvement with the Series fix made him a national figure, but he was already a celebrity in his home city by 1919, his life making wonderful newspaper copy. He married a showgirl and had affairs with at least two others. He owned thoroughbred racehorses and was a visible presence at the horse track. He'd won $300,000 on a single race at Laurel in 1917, a head-turning triumph until he won $850,000 on a single race at Aqueduct in 1921 and another $850,000 on a single race at Saratoga a month later. He ran a Times Square gambling parlor until a reform movement in 1912 landed a lot of New York police officers who had been paid to look the other way in jail. Rothstein responded by starting New York's first and longest-running floating crap and card games, in a different hotel or apartment every night, always one step ahead of whatever police officers he couldn't payoff. After things got too hot in Times Square, he moved his fixed casino out to Long Island, and in the summer of 1919 he opened The Brook, the most elegant of all of Saratoga Spring's wink-at-the-law casinos, where the dress code in season was always evening wear and the clientele came from the demimonde, the Social Register, and all the strata in between-all of them the sort of men who could afford to lose five and six figures a night, and frequently did.

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The newspapers almost always treated him kindly, because he was connected in that world too; his friends included Runyon, with whom he regularly shared a table at Lindy's, and Herbert Bayard Swope, editor of the New York World, who was a regular at the card and dice games Rothstein sponsored. The newspapers wrote of his friends and sometimes business partners, men like Charles Stoneham, the owner of the Giants and partners with Rothstein in a New York bucket shop, and John McGraw, manager of the Giants and partners with Rothstein in a Midtown pool hall.

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Thirty-seven years old in 1919, five foot seven and a fit 160 pounds, abstinent in the matters of smoke and drink, partial to silk shirts and conservative, dark, custom-tailored suits, Rothstein was more than just the raffish gambler from the newspaper stories. He was a gangster, one of New York's most powerful, with tentacles reaching into every corner of gangland commerce. "A. R. fenced millions of dollars in stolen government bonds," wrote his biographer David Pietrusza, "backed New York's biggest bootleggers, imported tons of illegal heroin and morphine, financed shady Wall Street bucket shops, bought and sold cops and politicians."

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Any sporting man with brains and guts enough to try to pull off something like a World Series fix would have eventually and inevitably found his way to Rothstein. He was the gold standard in big-money fixes. "Everyone went to A. R. when they needed something," wrote Pietrusza. "Everyone had to pretend to be his friend. He was the man who made things happen, who put people together." He was the man with whom to have the conversation.

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There are conflicting opinions as to whether somebody brought the scheme to Rothstein or whether Rothstein hatched the scheme and passed it to associates who could execute it. Sport Sullivan, former ballplayers Bill Burns and Billy Maharg, St. Louis gambler Carl Zork, and who knows how many others all talked to Rothstein about a fix sometime during the 1919 season, leaving the impression that Rothstein was merely the facilitator. But Chicago gambler Mont Tennes came away from an August conversation with Rothstein in Saratoga believing that he had already put a fix in place. Tennes was so sure he told Cubs owner Charlie Weegham about it.

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Carl Zork was part of a cabal of St. Louis gamblers who had long dreamed of fixing a World Series. Between them they knew a fair number of ballplayers who would be willing to tank a game for a few bucks, and they had had some success in influencing the outcome of some regular season games. But to fix a World Series, they needed their contacts to be on a team that was playing in the World Series, and there was never a guarantee of that. The St. Louis men were also rather light in the wallet; it was one thing to make a living as a gambler, quite another to make a good living at it. Thus Zork approached Rothstein - whenever that was - with a proposal that was far more concept than plan. Still, Rothstein no doubt listened with polite interest, as he even then foresaw a role for Zork and his colleagues in this, should it come together in another way.

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Charles Fountain "The Betrayal: How the 1919 Black Sox Scandal Changed Baseball" (2016)

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The design of the Golden Gate Bridge is far superior to that of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, but an entirely different kind of disaster was averted in 1987 when the Golden Gate celebrated the golden anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, San Francisco allowed 300,000 people to walk across it, with 500,000 more hoping to do the same. The turnout was ten times what had been expected, and people were packed shoulder to shoulder for the entire I.7-mile length of the bridge. As a result, the bridge deck sagged a full seven feet until the people were removed and the overflow crowd was, thankfully, turned away. The problem wasn't poor maintenance; the bridge had been well maintained, which certainly helped to avert disaster. And it wasn't a problem of design. As a suspension bridge, the structure was engineered to bend and move, and while this was the biggest load the bridge had seen, "it did not exceed the design load capacity of the bridge," as engineer Mark Ketchum pointed out. In this case, the problem was the math. According to Stephen Tung of the San Jose Mercury News, while the weight of the individuals on the bridge was unknown, "if the average person weighs 150 pounds and occupies 2.5 square foot in a crowd . . . that's more than double the weight of cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic." Had the additional people been allowed access. there would have been a catastrophic tragedy.

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Temple Grandin "Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions" (2022)

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The escape led to embarrassing headlines in the news, and more grumbling inside the Lincoln administration about the continued threat of counterfeit dollars weakening the U.S. financial system. President Lincoln soon called for a commission to address the problem.

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Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch had an idea for a permanent fix: creating a "regular permanent force whose job it [would] be to put these counterfeiters out of business." He suggested forming a special unit within the Treasury Department to track down, arrest, and prosecute them.

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But Lincoln would not live to put McCulloch's idea into action. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went with his wife, Mary, to see the play "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theatre in downtown Washington. The president had received numerous death threats, and his aides had succeeded, after years of prodding, to get him to accept that he needed a bodyguard. A team of four police officers borrowed from the local department took turns accompanying him on his travels out in public. But his police officer the night of the play was the weakest of the group, well known for drinking and falling asleep on the job. He left the passageway of the president's box so he could watch the play, then strolled across the street to the Star Saloon to have a drink. John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer who had heard of the president's upcoming visit to the theater, stepped behind Lincoln in his box to the left of the stage and shot him in the head. The president died after sunrise the next morning.

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Carol Leonnig "Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service" (2021)

Ask Well

I recently learned that I'm lactose intolerant. Do I really need to avoid all dairy?

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Some 30 million to 50 million people in the United States have lactose intolerance. This means their bodies can't adequately break down lactose, the sugar present in milk.

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The result can be gas, bloating, nausea, diarrhea and abdominal pain, symptoms that typically occur within about 30 to 60 minutes of eating a lactose-rich food, said Beth Ferrell Jenks, a dietitian and assistant professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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The good news: While individual tolerances to dairy foods can vary, certain lower-lactose dairy products can help keep lactose intolerance symptoms at bay.

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Eating With Lactose Intolerance

?Trouble with lactose intolerance tends to begin in adulthood, when our bodies gradually makes less lactase, an enzyme that breaks down lactose.

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Some people might not notice this change, said Dr. Suneeta Krishnareddy, a gastroenterologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. But others may have symptoms that include nausea and vomiting, said Dr. Nitin K. Ahuja, a gastroenterologist at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia.

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Understanding your triggers involves some trial and error.

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Here are the dairy products most, and least, likely to exacerbate your symptoms.

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The Worst Offenders

DAIRY MILK Skim, 1 percent, 2 percent and whole milk all contain between 12 and 12.5 grams of lactose per cup. That's around the maximum amount of lactose people with an intolerance can consume per day without having symptoms, said Ella Haddad, a dietitian and professor emeritus of nutrition at Loma Linda University in California.

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UNAGED (OR FRESH) CHEESE

Cheese generally contains less lactose than milk, but some varieties have more than others. Cheeses that haven't been aged typically contain more lactose than aged cheeses, Ms. Jenks said. This is because during the aging process, bacteria break lactose down, converting it into lactic acid. Unaged cheeses tend to be soft and moist. A half-cup serving of cottage cheese with 2 percent milk fat contains about four grams of lactose. Divo table-spoons of fat-free cream cheese has nearly two grams.

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ICE CREAM

Many ice creams, which are mainly made from milk and cream, are rich in lactose. But some contain more lactose than others. If an ice cream contains more milk than cream (you can tell by checking if milk is listed before cream on the ingredients list), it is probably rich in lactose, Dr. Haddad said. This is because milk contains more lactose than cream.

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OK in Moderation m

HARD CHEESE Varieties like Parmesan, Cheddar and Swiss have been aged and therefore contain little lactose and are often easier to digest than un-aged varieties, Dr. Krishnareddy said. A one-and-a-half-ounce serving of Parmesan or Cheddar, for instance, contains less than one-tenth of a gram of lactose.

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OTHER FERMENTED PRODUCTS Fermented dairy foods like yogurt, kefir and sour cream contain bacteria that help break down lactose, Dr. Krishnareddy said. This lessens the load on your small intestine.

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BUTTER This kitchen staple is made from milk, cream or both by separating the fat from the rest of the liquid, leaving most of the lactose behind, Dr. Haddad said. One pat of butter or a table-spoon of cream contains about half a gram of lactose or less.

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What Else Can Help?

?Many supermarkets carry lactose-free dairy products made from milk but with the lactase enzyme mixed in.

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Dairy-free products like milk made from almonds, soy or oats; cheese made from nuts; and ice cream made from soy or coconuts are also lactose-free.

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Over-the-counter lactase enzyme supplements can help reduce your symptoms when taken with a meal.

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Caroline Hopkins Legaspi

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Sergei Rachmaninoff Is Drowned Out By Harpo Marx

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The Garden of Allah,

Los Angeles

Summer 1931

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Forty-three years later, Rachmaninoff's youthful Prelude in C-Sharp Minor remains by far his most popular piece. 'One day the Prelude simply came and I put it down,' he recalls. 'It came with such force that I could not shake it off even though I tried to do so. It had to be there - so it was.'

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And so it remains, his albatross. Now devoting himself exclusively to his career as a concert pianist, it exasperates him that it is the only piece of his that audiences ever want to hear him play. They seem to think he has never composed anything else. Consequently, he has grown to detest it, and prefers all his other preludes. 'I think them far better music than my first, but the public has shown no disposition to share my belief,' he complains. The piece pursues him everywhere, an obligation he can never shake off. When he played it in London a few months ago, one critic detected a certain grudging quality about it, complaining that he 'flung it at the audience like a bone to a dog.'

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If it is a bone, it doubles as a boomerang. 'The big annoyance of my concert life is my C-Sharp Minor Prelude. I'm not sorry I wrote it. It has helped me. But people ALWAYS make me play it. By now I play it without feeling -like a machine!'

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Between concerts in Texas and Chicago, the elderly Rachmaninoff is taking a break in a bungalow at The Garden of Allah. Sometimes known as 'the Uterus of Flickerland', the Garden of Allah consists of twenty-five bungalows set around a main hotel, in lush grounds full of orange, grapefruit, banana and palm trees. Built in 1927 by Alla Nazimova, a star of the silent movies, its vast swimming pool is shaped like the Black Sea, to remind Nazimova of her childhood in Yalta.

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(It is at the Garden of Allah that a friend of Robert Benchley tells him that drink is a slow poison, prompting Benchley to reply, 'That's all right. I'm in no hurry.' Humorists are attracted by the irreverent atmosphere of the Garden of Allah, among them Arthur Sheekrnan, one of the Marx Brothers' scriptwriters, who plays Cecil B. DeMille's The Crusades over and over again in his bungalow simply so that he can hear Loretta Young say to her husband, Richard the Lionheart, 'Ya gotta save Christianity, Richard, ya gotta!')

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It is, in a way, the Los Angeles precursor of New York's Chelsea Hotel, a refuge for transients from the East Coast like Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker. Alexander Woollcott describes it as 'the kind of village you might look for down the rabbit-hole'. Over the years, it has certainly been populated by some outlandish figures. The switchboard was once taken over by an operator who believed he could read character from voices, and refused to put through calls from anyone whose voice he disliked. Many residents drink to excess, regularly losing their footing and tumbling headlong into the pool. 'I used to wait for them to come home and fall in,' says the playwright Arthur Kober. 'It was like waiting for a shoe to drop. I'd hear the splashes and then I'd go to sleep.' Tallulah Bankhead used to like strolling naked around the pool by moonlight. Less seductively, while filming The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Charles Laughton loved to swim in it with his hump still on.

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Perhaps Sergei Rachmaninoff should have guessed from its reputation that the Garden of Allah would not offer the necessary respite from his busy concert schedule. But, then again, how was he to know who his next-door neighbor would turn out to be?

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For three years, the Marx Brothers have been on the road, performing their stage show Animal Crackers across America. But in 1931 they are offered a film contract by Paramount, and move to Los Angeles. Harpo, the brother who never speaks, chooses to rent a bungalow at the Garden of Allah. He thinks that his bungalow - a little distance from the main hubbub - will let him exercise both sides of his character, extrovert comedian and introvert harpist. He takes to the Garden of Allah like a duck to water. It is, he says, 'the best place to practice I ever had'.

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('There is a character who goes by the same name I do who is kind of a celebrity; he writes in Harpo Speaks!. 'He wears a ratty red wig and a shredded raincoat. He can't talk, but he makes idiotic faces, honks a horn, whistles, blows bubbles, ogles and leaps after blondes and acts out all kinds of hokey charades. I don't begrudge this character his fame and fortune. He worked damn hard for every cent and every curtain call he ever got. I don't begrudge him anything - because he started out with no talent at all. If you've ever seen a Marx Brothers picture, you know the difference between him and me. When he's chasing a girl across the screen it's Him. When he sits down to play the harp, it's Me. Whenever I touched the strings of the harp, I stopped being an actor.')

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But one day while he is practicing his harp, the sound of a piano shatters the peace.

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'I was looking forward to a solid weekend of practice, without interruptions, when my new neighbor started to bang away. I couldn't hear anything below a forte on the harp. There were no signs the piano banging was going to stop. It only got more overpowering. This character was warming up for a solid weekend of practice too.'

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He storms over to the office to register a complaint. 'One of us has to go.' he says, 'and it's not going to be me because I was here first.'

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But the management prevaricates. When he discovers that the neighbor 'whose playing was driving me nuts' is none other than Sergei Rachmaninoff, it occurs to him that they will never ask such an illustrious guest to move. He has only one weapon left in his armory,' his harp. 'I was flattered to have such a distinguished neighbor, but I still had to practice. So I got rid of him my own way. I opened the door and all the windows in my place and began to play the first four bars of Rachmaninov's Prelude in C-Sharp Minor, over and over, fortissimo. He wished he'd never written it. After playing it for two hours I knew exactly how he felt ... My fingers were getting numb. But I didn't let up, not until I heard a thunderous crash of notes from across the way, like the keyboard had been attacked with a pair of sledgehammers. Then there was silence. This time it was Rachmaninoff who went to complain. He asked to be moved to another bungalow immediately, the farthest possible from that dreadful harpist. Peace returned to the Garden.'

?

Six years later, Harpo exacts further revenge. In A Day at the Races, he appears in a battered top hat playing the piano with increasing ferocity. The more he plays the piano, the more he wrecks it; by the end, he has reduced it to smithereens, leaving only the plate, which he then picks up and plays as a harp.

?

Is it really a coincidence that the piece he destroys in this memorable scene is the Prelude in C-Sharp Minor by Sergei Rachmaninoff?

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Craig Brown "Hello Goodbye Hello" (2011)

FAMILY

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I'd come back to do a theater workshop on Block Island. My father lived near the train station in Kingston, Rhode Island, and I asked him to pick me up and drive me to the Block Island ferry. I thought we could have a good visit in the car.

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"What do you mean, Dad?"

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At the train station Dad gave me that old obligatory bundle-of-wire hug and we rode in silence. Close to the ferry, he said, "You know Rock-Chan-Spud"-whenever he forgot which son he was with, he called all three names out - "I was thinking, if we miss the ferry, we could have a beer together."

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He said, "We could go to my summer cottage, if we miss the ferry."

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I said, "Well, let's miss it."

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"What do you mean?" He said.

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"I can get another one in an hour!" I answered.

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Every summer my stepmother and father would rent a cottage by the sea and never use it. They'd just leave it locked up; it was like an idea. And he wanted to go to it. So I said, "Let's go," and he did a U-turn in the car - I'd never seen him do that - and off we went. He opened the cottage for the first time that summer and it was all mildewed in there, and he got out the cocktail munchies.

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They were all fog-bound: wilted Cheez Doodles, soggy pretzels, those lite peanuts that are like Styrofoam and two teeny cans of Budweiser - not my favorite beer, not my favorite-size can. But it was a drink with Dad!

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We went to the picnic table out back near the water's edge and oh, God, this heavy Rhode Island fog was coming in; thick pea-soup fog. It was like the opening of a Eugene O'Neill play.

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We sat there in silence until I broke it and said, "Well, Dad, I guess it's good we have this chance to talk. I don't think we've talked since I was fourteen and you told me the facts of life on a golf course. But I was wondering, now that you're about to be eighty, do you have any regrets? Because I sometimes feel that my life is ruled by regret. I have so many. Do you have any, Dad?"

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"Nope. Just that I never climbed Mount Katahdin." (Either FAMILY or another cast member makes the sound of a foghorn.)

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(Gestures to sound and explains.) Sound of foghorn.

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"You know, Gram Gray once told me that you and Mom were married in the white church in Barrington on Halloween. "What a kinky, imaginative day to get married on. Why'd you do that, Dad?"

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"Seemed as good a day as any." (FAMILY or other cast repeats foghorn sound.)

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"You know, you had three children, you had three boys. I never had any children, I don't know why - I don't know if it's by mistake or that I'm afraid to have them, or if I can't have them.

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What did you get out of having them, why would anyone have children?"

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"That was the thing to do in those days."

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(FAMILY or other cast member repeats foghorn sound.)

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"Well, I won't bother you anymore. But I did want to ask you one more question. You had three boys, I was the middle son. Dad, why was I the only one that wasn't circumcised?"

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Long pause.

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"You weren't'?"

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Then I said, "Well, I guess we better get going."

?

And Dad said, "Oh all right, pack it up. Yep, yep. Lock up, lock up."

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We locked up the house. We got outside and he realized he hadn't called my stepmother, Sis, to find out what kind of fish to bring home from the Galilee market, and he said, "Oh shit! I forgot to call Sis."

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Then he unlocked the door and went back in to call, and I thought, My father never said "shit" in front of me in his life. He came back out and I realized I'd left my Danish school bag in there.

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The cottage was locked up again and I said, "Oh shit, Dad, I left my Danish school bag in there." And then I realized we had just bonded. Those two "shits" made all the difference. I told this story at my father's memorial service. I did. My stepmother said afterward, "You're crazy. You're on drugs. Your father never said that word in his life. Don't you ever come back to Rhode Island as long as you live!"

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Spalding Gray "Spalding Gray Stories Left To Tell" (2008)

Twice more in the 1920s, the Black Sox found themselves back in the headlines.

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In 1922 Buck Weaver, Hap Felsch, Swede Risberg, and Joe Jackson all filed separate suits against the White Sox, claiming their contracts had been wrongfully terminated and that they were owed back pay. The Weaver suit was filed in Chicago; the Felsch, Risberg, and Jackson suits, in Wisconsin, where the White Sox business was incorporated. Only the Jackson case ever came to trial, heard in Milwaukee over two weeks in January and February of 1924. Most of the principals in the Black Sox case either testified or had depositions read into the record, and if the case attracted somewhat less newspaper interest than the criminal trial two and a half years earlier, it was still a front-page story for the length of its run.

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Jackson was the trial's most dramatic witness. On direct examination he told the story of having been duped by Harry Grabiner, before the 1920 season, into signing a contract he had been told had excluded the hated ten-day clause, the standard major league provision that allowed a club to terminate a contract for any reason with ten days' notice. Jackson was a persuasive witness, well spoken and sympathetic as he told his story.

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On cross-examination, however, the court saw a different witness. For some reason, Jackson denied all that he had said to the Cook County grand jury in September 1920. When White Sox attorney George Hudnall read from the transcript and repeatedly asked: "Were you asked this question and did you give this answer?" Jackson repeatedly answered: "No, Sir, I didn't" or "I didn't make that answer" According to Black Sox-trial historian William Lamb, Jackson denied or repudiated 119 points from his sworn grand jury testimony. It was peculiar, if not bizarre testimony, and it did not sit well with Judge John Gregory, who held his tongue for the moment. However, when the White Sox had completed their case - which included testimony from the Cook County grand jury foreman and stenographer, saying that Jackson had indeed said all that he had just denied - and Gregory had charged and excused the jury, he called Jackson before the bench. "You stand here self-convicted of the crime of perjury," he told him, and ordered bailiffs to arrest him and hold him on $5,000 bail. "When the jury has returned its verdict, I shall have something more to say on this case," Gregory said. While waiting for the verdict the following morning, he told the court: "Either [Jackson's] testimony here or his testimony before the Chicago grand jury was false. I think the false testimony was here."

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Jackson was in custody only a few hours before making bail, and was in the courtroom the following morning when the jury returned its verdict. They found for Jackson on all counts, awarding him $16,711.04. Normally, this is the point at which the judge thanks the jury for its service and its verdict. Judge Gregory instead scolded them. "How you could answer some of those questions in the manner you have, the court cannot understand. Jackson stands before this court a convicted perjurer and has been committed to jail. It did not need a court or a jury to determine that. Jackson determined that for himself." Gregory then set aside the jury's verdict on the grounds of fraud and perjury, though Jackson would never stand trial on those perjury charges.

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The outcome of the Jackson trial took the starch out of the other three suits.

?

All were plagued by delays and postponements and never came to trial. The Felsch and Risberg suits were eventually settled for pennies on the dollar. The same may have happened with the Weaver case; court records show only that it was terminated in December 1925.

?

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Charles Fountain "The Betrayal: How the 1919 Black Sox Scandal Changed Baseball" (2016)

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The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion killed eleven and injured many others, and the subsequent oil spill created one of the largest environmental disasters in our history. It was caused by a combination of operator error and poor maintenance, exacerbated by a disconnect between policies and practices. Forty-six percent of the workers on Deepwater Horizon feared reprisal if they reported safety problems in a culture that prioritized cost cutting and efficiency. By all reports, this tragedy might have been prevented had management adopted better protocols.

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According to investigative reporting by David Barstow, David Rohde, and Stephanie Saul in The New York Times, Horizon's systems deployed but didn't function, were activated too late, or were not activated at all. The crew was trained to field problems but was unprepared for a blowout, fires, and power loss. The Times article reported that while the handbook was hailed as a "safety expert's dream," it didn't answer the basic question of when to act. When action was required, the crew failed to deploy the emergency shutdown system. Further, said the article, "one emergency system alone was controlled by 30 buttons." The employee responsible for shutting it down claimed she had not been taught how to use the system. "I don't know any of the procedures," she said.

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The blowout preventer (BOP) is exactly what it sounds like: a 400-ton valve that works like the plug in your toilet tank, only it's meant as a final failsafe in the event of various forces causing the well to blow. Blowout preventers are meant to be the "ultimate fail-safe," but the investigation by the New York Times reporters concludes that the BOP "may have been crippled by poor maintenance. Investigators have found a host of problems - dead batteries, bad solenoid valves, leaking hydraulic lines - that were overlooked or ignored." On top of that, a routine maintenance inspection didn't happen. And even as the crew evacuated, they were met with another compromised set of protocols that were meant to have ensured their safety. Bewilderingly, though they practiced evacuation drills, "they had never rehearsed inflating and lowering the raft They had trouble freeing it from the deck, more trouble keeping it level and more trouble still getting it loaded." Even the lifeboats were a near-epic fail.

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Temple Grandin "Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions" (2022)

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On January 6, the forces pulling the country apart erupted in violence on the Capitol grounds. That day, the president egged on his angry supporters gathered for his speech on the National Mall, urging them to march on Congress and block lawmakers from certifying a "stolen" election. "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore," Trump said, telling his chanting followers they were all going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to give Republican lawmakers a message. "We're going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country." The mob did as he asked. Thousands marched to the Capitol and quickly broke through the police barricades on its west lawn. After another hour of battling the police in their path, hundreds broke through the Capitol's windows and doors, in a chilling scene that resembled newsreels from a third world country. Inside the Senate chamber, where lawmakers had gathered to certify the election, a small Secret Service detail whisked Vice President Pence off the floor to a hideaway office. Only seconds later, an off-shoot of the mob, chanting that Pence was a traitor, rushed up to a second-floor landing where Pence and his agents had just passed.

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Despite the heroism of their brothers in arms that day, some Secret Service personnel again took to social media in the days after January 6, empathizing with and defending the mission of the armed rioters who breached the Capitol - the same ones who had endangered the Pence agents and pummeled Capitol Police officers with metal pipes and bats. One Secret Service officer called the armed protesters "patriots" seeking to undo an illegitimate election, and falsely claimed to her friends that disguised Antifa members had started the violence. One presidential detail agent reposted a popular anti-Biden screed that criticized Democrats for their relentless attacks on Trump. It read: "I tolerated #44 (Obama) for 8 years and kept quiet. Here is my issue with the whole, 'let us all be a United States again' that we heard from Joe Biden. We remember the 4 years of attacks and impeachments. We remember the resistance and 'not our president'. We remember the president's spokesperson being kicked out a [sic] restaurant. . . . We remember that we were called every name in the book for supporting President Trump."

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Others shared the commentary of pro-Trump conspiracy leaders criticizing Democrats. One agent reposted the image of an upside-down American flag, a military signal for extreme distress, with the words of right-wing activist Raheem Kassam: "In less than 12 months they closed our businesses, forced us to wear muzzles, kept us from our families, killed off our sports, burned down our cities, forcibly seized power, and shut down our speech. Then they accused *us* of the coup."

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Given all the ways the Secret Service had enabled Trump in the last year - from enabling his authoritarian march across Lafayette Square to the murmured support in the ranks for overturning Biden's election - it was understandable that the president-elect and his aides had doubts. Was the agency entrusted with Biden's life fully committed to the assignment? So serious was this concern about Trump's corrosive hold on the Secret Service that Biden transition advisers urged that the agency swap out all members of the Trump presidential detail before Biden's inauguration. Headquarters agreed to a compromise. They would bring back some of the senior agents whom Biden knew well from his vice presidential detail and make them supervisors on his new presidential team. Biden advisers, meanwhile, laid plans to replace Murray in the first half of 2021. The incoming team was disturbed by a director who would allow the Service to be used in an authoritarian photo op and in campaign events that jeopardized the public and their own workers' health, and let a top official cross over to a political role in the White House. When Trump lost reelection, Murray had even returned Ornato to the Secret Service fold, as he was not yet eligible for retirement, and promoted him to be an assistant director.

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"The biggest tragedy is that Trump politicized a part of the Secret Service, who pride themselves on being apolitical," one newly departed agent explained. "That's the Trump effect."

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Trump gave the Secret Service a parting gift on his way out, a result of him fomenting the armed insurrection at the Capitol and stoking alt-right extremists' dreams of overthrowing the government. The protection agency spent the final two weeks of his ad-ministration scrapping and rapidly rewriting its months of security plans for the inauguration of the forty-sixth president. Newly bracing for another violent assault, the Service directed a massive lockdown of the city unlike any other in modern history. Their effort, coordinated with the Pentagon, the FBI, and numerous law enforcement agencies, would encase the Capitol, the White House, and many of the monuments of the National Mall in eight-foot-tall black fencing, topped by razor wire in key spots near where Biden would pass. For several days before the inauguration, security teams blocked traffic from entering more than 350 square blocks of down-town Washington and adjoining neighborhoods, and later shuttered thirteen subway stations in the city's core. More than fifteen thousand National Guard soldiers were deployed to help secure an emblematic American ceremony, an event that was typically attended by hundreds of thousands of cheering spectators and now had to be treated as an active target of domestic terrorists.

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Carol Leonnig "Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service" (2021)

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Where Mystery begins justice ends

(Edmund Burke)

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I'm not asking you to go back through the centuries. You can stay right here. It'll be all right.??

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I want you to go with me to a factory in the north of England, one of the largest manufacturers of those orange juice cartons that you have in cinemas. They are very useful things because you can blow down the straw during love scenes.? So of course it is classed as an essential industry.

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And this was one of the very biggest of those firms making these orange juice cartons, Mrs. J H Tree and Company, very large establishment.

?

And having this close association with the entertainment business,they naturally had a very thriving amateur dramatic society.? And one week they were due to put on their annual production, which was Maid of the Mountains

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There was a young girl who worked in the pulping department, where they separated the pips.?? You notice that you never get any pips in those orange juices. The pips are sold separately to Edmundo Ross for use in his miraculous shows. And this was her job.

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And she was very much in love with Gordon, who was the chief of the accounts department, a very handsome young man with nice smile, very nice even teeth.? Actually, his odd teeth were nice as well. But he was altogether very attractive and they were very much in love with one another.? Gordon loved Kate.? Kate loved Gordon.

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And they were due to star together in this Maid of the Mountains and the arrangement was, after the first night they would go straight away and get married and the very nearest license bureau.? And they would live happily ever after.? But unfortunately a few days before the production, who should come along but the boss's daughter.

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Now the boss's daughter, whose name was Edith, Edith Tree; she was a rather large girl. She was shaped something like a hundred watt bulb.? And she demanded that, being the boss's daughter, she should star, in fact take the main part in Maid of the Mountains, which actually they thought meant one of the mountains.

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But, no, it was the maid, the part of the maid that she wanted. Being the boss's daughter, what could they do.

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And the very old char hand there said, "Well, you've got to make up your mind, lad.? You can't have your cake and eat it too."

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So naturally he had to give in and let the boss's daughter, Edith, play the part.? Well, poor Kate was absolutely broken-hearted about this. This was to be her big evening.

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And the same char hand saw her sobbing in the corner and said, "Now don't you worry.? Because I've fixed everything.? When you get into your proper clothes, 'cause I'll guarantee you, when that Edith Tree comes on, five minutes late, she'll be off again.? So you get ready."

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She said, "Well, what have you done?"

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He said, "Well, the stage is right under the huge vat where they store the orange juice.? And I 'ave pierced a small 'ole in ceiling above where she stands. I will guarantee you, the minute she utters her first word, that orange juice will come down all over here."

?

She said, "Are you sure?"

?

He said, "I give you my word. Where Miss Tree begins, juice descends."

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Denis Norden 580604b

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Ask Well

I always get sneezy and congested around the holidays. Is my Christmas tree to blame?

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The holiday season can be a time filled with joy, mirth and - sometimes - itchy eyes, irritated skin, congestion and wheezing. This cluster of symptoms, sometimes referred to as "Christmas tree syndrome," typically doesn't stem from an allergy to the Christmas tree itself.

?

But sometimes certain hitchhikers on the tree, like mold or dust, can cause a reaction, experts say. And if you're sensitive to the tree's fragrance or sap, that can also irritate your skin or airways.

?

Thankfully, there are ways to minimize the risk that your Christmas tree will turn you into a sneezing, sniffling Scrooge.

?

Typically, when people are allergic to trees, they are allergic to their pollen.

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But evergreen pollens are less likely to induce an allergic reaction than other tree pollens, and trees don't usually produce pollen around this time of year, so it's unlikely that a person would be truly allergic to a Christmas tree, said Dr. Joshua Davidson, an allergist and immunologist in Redondo Beach, Calif.

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That said, you could still experience allergic or allergy-like reactions when spending time with your favorite pines, spruces and firs. Here are some potential causes.

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MOLD

Certain types of mold can grow on a Christmas tree. And if you're allergic to that mold, bringing a tree into your home can cause allergy symptoms, Dr. Davidson said. In one 2023 study, researchers analyzed the results of allergy tests administered to more than 1.6 million people in the United States between 2014 and 2019. They found that nearly 17 percent of them showed an allergy to Alternaria alternata, a common type of mold that can grow on Christmas trees.

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The mold is so small that you can't see it with the naked eye, said Dr. Sanjiv Sur, an allergist and immunologist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. But if your tree was growing in rainy or humid conditions, he said, mold is more likely to be present. Mold may also grow more easily if the tree is stored or transported in an unventilated, damp space, Dr. Sur said.

FRAGRANCE

Although many people love how Christmas trees smell, their scent - which comes from chemicals called terpenes - can also cause problems. "It's not really an allergy, but it's just irritating to the airway," Dr. Davidson said, and it can cause sneezing, congestion, itchy eyes and sometimes wheezing and chest tightness.

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SAP

Touching your Christmas tree - and especially its sap or resin, a thick substance that trees release after injury - could irritate your skin, too, Dr. Sur said.

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DUST AND OTHER DEBRIS

If your tree is grown in a dusty area, or transported through one (like a dirt road or construction site), it may bring dust into your house, Dr. Sur said. If you have an artificial Christmas tree, you may not be in the clear, either. People usually aren't allergic to fake Christmas trees, but because the trees are often stored for much of the year in dirty lofts or storage spaces, they can easily accumulate dust mites and mold, said Dr. Linda Cox, an allergist in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

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"This has happened to many of my patients," she said. After coming in with bad asthma attacks, they'll often say that they were triggered after being in their attics.

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If you're experiencing respiratory symptoms around your tree, air purifiers containing HEPA filters can help by removing mold and other irritants from the air, Dr. Cox said.

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You can also try to kill any mold that might be lurking on your tree, Dr. Sur said. Mold needs humid conditions - at least 55 percent relative humidity - to grow. If you're having symptoms and your air feels muggy, try running a dehumidifier. You can also purchase a hygrometer, which measures relative humidity, for less than $15, he said. Dr. Davidson said you could also take decongestants to alleviate your symptoms.

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If you develop skin irritation after touching your tree, try creating "a barrier" between your skin and the tree by wearing long sleeves and gloves the next time you need to touch it, Dr. Sur said.

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When putting up a potentially dusty or moldy artificial tree, consider wearing a mask, like an N95, Dr. Cox suggested.

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And if nothing else, remember that any suffering you experience will be short-lived - much like the holiday season. "It's just a few weeks," Dr. Sur said. "In January, it should all disappear."

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Melinda Wenner Moyer

?

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CAREER

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I'd entered what Renee's mother calls the Bermuda Triangle of Health. She says that between fifty and fifty-three years old is the Bermuda Triangle of Health. Things start going wrong with you then. I was coming into it - with a macula pucker in my left eye. I was called in by my eye doctor for an examination, because he wanted to see if my condition was deteriorating. I go back to that waiting room. They dilate my pupils; I'm sitting there in the waiting room, waiting in the fuzz.

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I see this person come out of my doctor's office. In my dilated condition I see this little guy backing out in a pinstripe suit, making real jerky movements, kind of like in a Buster Keaton movie. He's waving like a wind-up toy. Like he's this ... automatic something, I don't know what.

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He turns and starts walking toward me. I'm amazed and shocked to see that he's got on one of those rubber Nixon masks that we used to buy in joke shops when Nixon was president. What the hell is going on in my doctor's office? He's walking right toward me, and as he gets closer I realize that it is Richard Nixon.

?

I think, No, wait a minute, maybe his pupils are dilated too, and he thinks I'm Ralph Lauren.

?

Richard Nixon is walking directly toward me - with intent. As though he were going to come up to me and say, "Hi, I saw Swimming to Cambodia, and I loved it!"

?

He walks right up to me, and I say, "Oh hi."

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He says nothing, and then he walks out. He just leaves. I go into my doctor's office and I say, "Was that Richard Nixon who just left here?"

?

"Oh yes, nothin' the matter with him."

?

"Well, there is no justice in the world, is there."

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Spalding Gray "Spalding Gray Stories Left To Tell" (2008)

?

Joe Jackson was a simple man, but hardly the ignorant rube portrayed in the sports-page caricatures of his day. He never played barefoot because he couldn't afford shoes, or because he was unused to shoes, having grown up without them as many newspaper fantasies had it through the years. He did once playa couple of innings of one game without shoes, because a new pair had left his feet blistered. This happened while playing in Greenville, South Carolina, either in city's Textile League or for the Greenville Spinners during his first year of organized ball in 1908. He took at least one at-bat in his stocking feet, either tripled or homered, depending upon the account being rendered, and when he arrived or passed, third base, a fan was alleged to have shouted: "You shoeless son of gun, you!" Carter "Scoop" Latimer of the Greenville News, himself then just teenage reporter, overheard (or invented) the shout, and Joe Jackson was forever after "Shoeless Joe." It was a nickname befitting humble rural roots and an uncomplicated personality.

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By that point in his young career, Jackson was already fashioning a baseball reputation deserving of a memorable nickname. Baseball had been his deliverance from an otherwise Dickensian boyhood. He was born in Brandon, a mill town just outside Greenville, in July 1889.'

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The oldest of eight children, he had not a day's schooling his entire life. By six, when he might have been in the first grade, he was sweeping floors in a mill in Brandon. By thirteen he was working twelve-hour days in the mill alongside his father. What daylight hours were not spent on the cotton-mill floor were spent on the ball field. He was a big kid; by sixteen he was six foot two and gangly, not yet anywhere near his major league weight of 185 pounds. Still, he already had those Pop eye forearms and hands the size of skillets, and, gangly teenager or not, he could hit a baseball half again as far as anybody else in town and throw it like it had been shot from a cannon.

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He was playing for the Brandon Mills baseball team by the time he was thirteen. There were thirteen mills ringing Greenville, and Saturday afternoon games in the Textile League would attract crowds of several hundred to a couple thousand or more, and the players became objects of great affection and celebrity in their local mill communities. And nobody was more celebrated than the marvelously gifted teenager from Brandon. "Joe's Saturday specials" -line drive home runs that were still rising when they sailed over the outfielders' heads-became the talk of Brandon, and every time he hit one, his younger brothers would scramble up into the stands to pass the hat so that the Brandon fans might show their gratitude. There were times the fans showed their gratitude to the tune of $lO or so, as much as a full week's wages at the mill. Such a phenomenon was Jackson that he was recruited away from Brandon Mills by the rival Victor Mills team, with the promise of a softer job in the mill and time off to practice.

?

Greenville got its own team in organized baseball in 1908, and Jackson was one of the first players signed, to a contract paying him a princely $75 a month. Pros or semipros, it was all the same to Jackson; he had a great year, batting over .350 to lead the Carolina Association in hitting. On an off day in July he married his Greenville sweetheart, Katie Wynn-he was nineteen, she fifteen. And in August, he got the news that the Philadelphia Athletics had bought his contract. He was going to the big leagues, as soon as the Carolina Association season was over.

?

By that point in his young career, Jackson was already fashioning a baseball reputation deserving of a memorable nickname. Baseball had been his deliverance from an otherwise Dickensian boyhood. He was born in Brandon, a mill town just outside Greenville, in July 1889.

?

The oldest of eight children, he had not a day's schooling his entire life. By six, when he might have been in the first grade, he was sweeping floors in a mill in Brandon. By thirteen he was working twelve-hour days in the mill alongside his father. What daylight hours were not spent on the cotton-mill floor were spent on the ball field. He was a big kid; by sixteen he was six foot two and gangly, not yet anywhere near his major league weight of 185 pounds. Still, he already had those Pop eye forearms and hands the size of skillets, and, gangly teenager or not, he could hit a baseball half again as far as anybody else in town and throw it like it had been shot from a cannon.

?

He was playing for the Brandon Mills baseball team by the time he was thirteen. There were thirteen mills ringing Greenville, and Saturday afternoon games in the Textile League would attract crowds of several hundred to a couple thousand or more, and the players became objects of great affection and celebrity in their local mill communities. And nobody was more celebrated than the marvelously gifted teenager from Brandon. "Joe's Saturday specials" - line drive home runs that were still rising when they sailed over the outfielders' heads - became the talk of Brandon, and every time he hit one, his younger brothers would scramble up into the stands to pass the hat so that the Brandon fans might show their gratitude. There were times the fans showed their gratitude to the tune of $lO or so, as much as a full week's wages at the mill. Such a phenomenon was Jackson that he was recruited away from Brandon Mills by the rival Victor Mills team, with the promise of a softer job in the mill and time off to practice.

?

Greenville got its own team in organized baseball in 1908, and Jackson was one of the first players signed, to a contract paying him a princely $75 a month. Pros or semipros, it was all the same to Jackson; he had a great year, batting over .350 to lead the Carolina Association in hitting. On an off day in July he married his Greenville sweetheart, Katie Wynn - he was nineteen, she fifteen. And in August, he got the news that the Philadelphia Athletics had bought his contract. He was going to the big leagues, as soon as the Carolina Association season was over.

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The problem was that he didn't want to. He was terrified of leaving home, of being away from his parents and his new bride, and he only got on the train after his Greenville manager, Tommy Stouch, was hired by Athletics manager Connie Mack to make sure the reluctant rookie made it to Philadelphia. Stouch and Jackson got as far as Charlotte, a hundred miles from Greenville, when Jackson's panic got the better of him. When the train stopped at the Charlotte station, Jackson got off, without telling Stouch, and caught the next train back to South Carolina. Back home, he exhibited no interest in going to Philadelphia. Mack sent injured outfielder Socks Seybold, who had formed a bond with Jackson when he had scouted him earlier in the year. Seybold succeeded where Stouch had failed in getting Jackson to Philadelphia. But neither Seybold nor Mack could make Jackson comfortable in the big, strange, northern city.

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The newspapers had made him a celebrity of the first order well in advance of his arrival. He came bearing an outsized reputation, as well as his personal bat, handcrafted by a Greenville woodsmith, stained black by rubbed-in tobacco juice, wrapped carefully and lovingly in cloth for the trip, and nicknamed "Black Betsy" In his first big league game against Cleveland, Jackson and Black Betsy singled in his first at-bat to drive in a run. He had no more hits, but hit the ball hard twice more that day, made an over-the-shoulder catch back by the centerfield flagpole, uncorked a couple of strong throws from the outfield, and altogether impressed the writers, who made him the focal point of their stories. "Jackson looked extremely good in his first game, and as if he didn't possess a single weakness: good at bat, good on fly balls, good on the bases and fast on his feet" wrote one.

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Cleveland left town after that game, and Ty Cobb and the Tigers came in.

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Newspaper stories were full of anticipation, as Jackson would now be matched against the player to whom he was most often being compared. Two days of rain made the hyperbole particularly heavy, as the writers had nothing else to write. Two days of rain meant that Jackson had two days away from the ballpark, the only place he might possibly have felt comfortable in the large, unwelcoming city.

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Major league clubhouses could be cruel places in the early years of the game.

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Every rookie was a threat to a veteran's job, and they were hazed and bullied unmercifully; every rookie who cracked and went back to the bushes was another who wouldn't be taking somebody's job. Never mind what that rookie might bring to the lineup; self-preservation nearly always trumped team chemistry in this hardscrabble world. When the rookie was particularly naive and vulnerable, or particularly celebrated-and Jackson was all of these-the abuse could be unrelenting and brutal. Years after the fact, Jackson confided to a friend that in those first days in Philadelphia his Athletics teammates had made him feel as bad as he had ever felt in his life. They mocked his illiteracy and his country-bumpkin ignorance. In their most famous prank, they convinced him to drink the water from the dining-table finger bowl, then laughed loudly and derisively as he left the hotel dining room in shame.

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Before the rains had cleared and Jackson could square off against Ty Cobb, he was back on a train for Greenville. This time he stayed ten days, as newspapers reported that he had left because he was afraid of life in the big city – true - and afraid of facing Ty Cobb on the ball field - certainly not true. The newspapers flat-out called him a coward, an unfair pejorative that would dog him for years. Under threat of suspension from Connie Mack, and at the urging of his mother, Jackson returned to the Athletics on September 7. He stayed less than a week, his vulnerability exacerbating his teammates' insensitivity. After going 0 for 9 in a double-header against Washington, he was once again back on the train to Greenville. And this time he wouldn't budge. Mack reluctantly suspended him. The local paper reported, "JOE JACKSON HAS BEEN SUSPENDED BY MACK: BRANDON BOY CAN NEVER PLAY ORGANIZED BALL AGAIN:'

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Like so many newspaper headlines of the day, that overstated the situation.

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Jackson reported to spring training in 1909 and showed well, playing together with a team of rookies that included Eddie Collins, Frank Baker, Stuffy McInnis, and Jack Barry, players that would form the corps of the Athletics' championship teams of the next half decade. But while Jackson had shown as well as any of them, and at nineteen going on twenty was probably physically ready for the big leagues, it would take two more years of playing in the South before he was emotionally ready for his big league career to take root. Mack tried to nurture the young, insecure prodigy. He offered to hire an off-season tutor to teach Jackson to read and write. Jackson declined. "It don't take no school stuff to help a fella play ball" he said.

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What did help a fella play ball - at least a deer-in-the-headlights player like Jackson - was to play it among friends, and for Jackson that meant playing in the South. According to the Jackson legend, the Athletics were paused at a Reading, Pennsylvania, train station at the end of spring training when Jackson caught sight of a line of milk cans on the platform, their southern-city destination labels in plain view. "I wish you'd put a red tag on me and ship me along with the milk cans down South" Jackson supposedly told Mack, which is how he ended up playing the 1909 season with Savannah of the South Atlantic League. That story was first told by Fred Lieb, as much a legend in the newspaper game as Jackson was in his game. It made for wonderful newspaper copy when Jackson became a star, and a wonderful historical insight later still when Jackson became the subject of histories and biographies. Neither Lieb nor apparently anyone else ever once questioned how the illiterate Jackson was able to read the milk labels to know they were headed south. As a movie newspaperman once noted: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

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Jackson led the Sally League in hitting in 1909 with a .358 average, and had five hits in seventeen at-bats when called up to Philadelphia in September. Though Katie Jackson came with him to Philadelphia this time, her support could not penetrate the dugout; the taunts of his teammates continued, and Jackson continued to be uncomfortable in their presence. "My players didn't seem to like him," Mack admitted years later. In 1910, still hoping to buy some time to find a way to make Jackson comfortable in Philadelphia, Mack assigned Jackson's contract to the New Orleans Pelicans of the Southern League, where Jackson again flourished, batting .354 and winning his third batting title in as many minor league seasons. The Pelicans had a close working relationship with the Cleveland Indians - still known then as the Naps, after their captain Napoleon Lajoie - and played a number of spring training games against the big league club. Cleveland management came away very impressed with the young outfielder on loan from Philadelphia, and team owner Charles Somers began asking Connie Mack what he would take to trade Jackson to Cleveland. In midsummer Mack relented, trading Jackson for outfielder Briscoe Lord, a player forgotten to history, to be sure, but a steady major leaguer at the time, who would hit .278 for the Athletics that summer and help them win the 1910 pennant.

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Whether it was because Jackson was now two years older or because Cleveland had a wholly different zeitgeist than Philadelphia, Jackson came to Cleveland and immediately became one of the game's biggest stars. He batted .387 in twenty games in 1910 and hit .408 in his first full season in the big leagues in 1911, then .395 and .373, before falling to .338 in 1914. He never won a major league batting title; it was his misfortune to play in the time of Ty Cobb. The year Jackson hit .408, Cobb posted a career-best .420 to win the fifth of his eventual twelve batting titles. Jackson's lifetime average of .356 is third all-time, trailing only Cobb's .367 and Rogers Hornsby's .358. Jackson was the original five-tool player. In the dead-ball era, his career slugging average was .518; he was a speedy and intuitive base runner, and a gazelle in the outfield with that cannon for an arm.

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He was happy and comfortable in Cleveland. Home, and frequently away as well, Katie Jackson was a regular at the ballpark, always sitting in the last row of the grandstand, directly behind home plate. The newspapers took notice. At home, however the game might be unfolding, she would always leave at the end of the seventh inning, so that supper would be on the table when Joe walked home to the apartment they shared in the shadow of League Park.

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Charles Somers treated his players well, and unlike in Philadelphia, Jackson was accepted and well liked by his teammates. He was never as happy in his major league life as he was during his four and a half years in Cleveland. Nevertheless, the most gifted of ballplayers cannot make a team a winner if he is surrounded by clods, and so it was with Jackson in Cleveland. After a third-place finish in 1913, the Indians tumbled into the American League cellar in 1914, losing 102 games. They would lose ninety-five more in 1915, and by midseason the Cleveland fans had lost interest, and the Indians' balance sheet was as troubled as its won-loss record. The team's finances were placed in the hands of receivers, and owner Charles Somers was forced to sell his liquid assets to save his business. His most valuable liquid asset was Jackson's contract, which went to the White Sox in August. Technically it was a trade; the Indians received three forgettable players in return. But the key to the deal was the large check that Comiskey sent Somers's way, the amount never revealed but reported at the time to be somewhere between $15,000 and $31,500.

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Happy though he had been in Cleveland, Jackson was glad to be going to Chicago. To begin with, the White Sox were a wealthy franchise, and Jackson had every reason to hope his salary might improve in Chicago, a misreading of Charles Comiskey, who could be generous when it suited him and earned him headlines, and cheap when no one was looking, which was most of the time. Comiskey had made headlines when he spent $50,000 to acquire Eddie Collins from the Athletics prior to the start of the 1915 season and signed him to a fiveyear contract at $15,000 per year. He was just as proud of his acquisition of Joe Jackson, calling him "the best straightaway hitter in the game" and boasting to the newspapers that he was paying his new outfielder a $10,000 salary, a baldfaced lie; Jackson's salary was $6,000 per year from 1915 to 1919.

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Beyond the hope for more money, Jackson had sound baseball reasons to welcome the move to the White Sox, a team on the cusp of moving into the ranks of the American League elite. In addition to Collins and Jackson, Comiskey had bought the minor league contracts of Happy Felsch, Buck Weaver, and Lefty Williams. The newspapers were saying throughout 1915 that Comiskey was in the midst of assembling the best team money could buy. It would take a couple of seasons for the Sox to prove the prophecy correct, but they ultimately would, and Jackson was one of the main reasons why. His stats slipped a bit from his Cleveland years, but not so much that anyone noticed. He remained among the league leaders every year in batting average, hits, runs batted in, and runs scored.

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Chicago marked a transition in Jackson's life. He was no longer the country bumpkin; quite the opposite, he had turned into a big-city dandy. He had his teeth fixed. He developed an affinity for bespoke suits and thirty-dollar pink silk shirts, which he often wore with patent-leather shoes from an extensive collection of showy, expensive footwear. It was almost as if he was saying to the world:

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"Shoeless? Hardly," He could be seen behind the wheel of a new Oldsmobile, both on the streets of the South Side and in the ads in newspapers and magazines, where Jackson endorsed the Olds. He did not, however, become completely citified. When he traveled, he always brought along a jug of corn liquor.

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He was a magnet for kids. The young boys of the South Side would seek him out, and he them. Boys would gather as he left Comiskey Park and scramble to carry his bats. Or he would stop by a sandlot with a baseball he'd taken from the clubhouse and offer to have a catch, and sometimes take a swing or two with the young boys.

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But among the older lads, his teammates on the White Sox, Jackson remained very much a loner. He roomed with Lefty Williams on the road, and sometimes the two players would socialize together with their wives in Chicago. But in a clubhouse filled with cliques, jealousies, and mistrust, Jackson coped with the interpersonal dysfunction by withdrawing. His clique was, as always, a clique of two, himself and his wife, Katie.

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During his time in Chicago, Jackson admitted to his wife and a few close friends that some of the fun had gone out of the game. He and Katie began to save and invest their money. They bought a home for Joe's parents in Greenville, and after the 1916 season they bought an elegant waterfront home for themselves in Savannah. The city had charmed the couple ever since Joe's minor league season there in 1909, and it would remain their home for more than fifteen years.

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Joe's first business venture had been a vaudeville show called "Joe Jackson's Baseball Girls", with which he toured in the offseason. The show made him some money but almost cost him his marriage. There were rumors in the winter of 1915 that Jackson was involved with one of the girls from the show, rumors with enough credibility to cause Katie Jackson to consult a divorce attorney. The marriage - from all accounts a forty-three-year love story - survived that single rough patch, and Jackson's subsequent investments were more suited to domestic tranquility. He invested in pool halls in Chicago and Greenville, as well as a farm, and later a liquor store, in Greenville. Most lucratively, and most enduringly, he opened a dry-cleaning and valet business in Savannah after he and Katie had bought their home there. Jackson gave his wife credit for his investments. "I've been blessed with a good banker;' he said in 1949, "my wife. Handing the money to her was just like putting it in the bank."

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But it was Jackson who worked the businesses, managed a dozen or so people in Savannah, dealt with the public, and saw the business through to profitability. Newspaper stories in the later years of his life-always given to exaggeration when it came to Jackson-reported that his investments and business had made him a millionaire. That was far from true. Nonetheless, by the end of his playing career, he was making at least as much money from his business investments as he was from his baseball salary. And when the end of that baseball career came so suddenly in the fall of 1920, the unschooled, unlettered, so often ridiculed Joe Jackson was far better positioned than any of his Black Sox brothers to make a living in the life that would come after.

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After the trial verdict, Jackson returned to Savannah and the dry-cleaning and valet businesses. During baseball season, however, the businesses were mostly Katie Jackson's responsibilities, for Joe continued the peripatetic life of a baseball player. He played ball until he was in his late forties, all over the country, for a game or two here and there, maybe for a full season. He often played under assumed names in the early years, right after the banishment, yet word would get around Joe Jackson was scheduled to play, and grandstands and foul lines would be packed with fans. By the 1930s he was playing and coaching under his own name, mostly in semipro leagues in Georgia and South Carolina, where the crowds had ebbed and he was playing for the joy and the memories.

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In 1933, he sold his business in Savannah, and he and Katie moved back to Greenville. They built a pleasant brick bungalow in West Greenville, and Joe opened a liquor store. There he lived out his years among his people, buying ice cream cones for the young boys who would stop by his home for some stories and some tips on hitting, enjoying a wide and loyal circle of friends who never asked about Chicago and 1919.

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Now and again, others would ask. And Jackson's story as always the same - he was an innocent man. Recovering from a heart attack in the summer of 1942, Jackson gave a lengthy interview to the Sporting News. The writer was Scoop Latimer of the Greenville News, Jackson's original Boswell, the man who had given him the "Shoeless Joe" moniker back when only Greenville had heard of either of them. The result was a flattering page-one story that was said to have earned Sporting News editor Taylor Spink an upbraiding from Commissioner Landis, who was upset that one of baseball's outcasts was being celebrated so by the "Bible of Baseball." The story was heavy on atmosphere; Latimer describes trophies, mementos, and scrapbooks from a long career; shows Jackson surrounded by those neighborhood boys seeking advice on hitting; and lets Jackson summon memories of a certain home run off Walter Johnson and talk of his admiration for players like Eddie Collins and Ty Cobb. It is short on any detail on 1919. In a 3,500-word story, Jackson and Latimer spend fewer than three hundred words talking about the Black Sox, and all of that is given over to Jackson's second newspaper denial of the say-it-ain't-so exchange, and another assertion of his innocence. "I think my record in the 1919 World's Series will stand up against that of any man in that Series or any other World's Series in all history," he said, pointing to his acquittal in the criminal trial as further evidence of his innocence.

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"If I had been guilty of 'laying down' in the Series, I wouldn't be so successful today," he continued. "For I'm a great believer in retribution. I have made a lot more money since being out of baseball than when I was in it. And I have this consolation - the Good Lord knows I am innocent of any wrong-doing."

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Latimer didn't press Jackson with any hard questions. Neither did Atlanta writer Furman Bisher, who ghosted a Sport magazine article that appeared under Jackson's name in October 1949, the thirtieth anniversary of the Black Sox Series. It is unclear how many of the facts in the stories in the Sport article were Jackson's memories and how many were stories Bisher had unearthed, but what is clear is that the article was never fact-checked the way a modern magazine article would be. There are facts presented for the first time - Jackson's claim that he went to Comiskey the night before the Series began and begged him to keep him out of the lineup - that have since become a part of the Black Sox legend but have been neither verified nor recorded anywhere else in the voluminous Black Sox history. Jackson and Bisher get some facts wrong, such as the name of the judge in the criminal trial, and there are smaller inconsistencies with history, too. But overall the voice that emerges from the piece is one of dignity and pride, bereft of bitterness, rancor, or the wish to blame others for what had befallen him. Joe Jackson came across as a sympathetic figure, deserving to have his life judged on more than simply the events of 1919.

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And people were starting to do that. One springtime in the late 1940s, Ty Cobb and sportswriter Grantland Rice went up to Greenville just after the Masters Tournament in Augusta, about a hundred miles away. The two men arrived unannounced at Jackson's liquor store and found him behind the counter. A flicker of recognition crossed Jackson's face, quickly suppressed when it wasn't returned. Cobb rummaged about the store and finally approached the counter with a bottle of whiskey. No one had said a word.

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"Don't you know me, Joe?" Cobb finally blurted.

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"I know you," Jackson replied, "but I wasn't sure you wanted to speak to me. A lot of them don't."

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The three men talked of old times after that, the subject of 1919 apparently not coming up. Before he left, Cobb told Jackson: "Joe, you had the most natural ability, the greatest swing I ever saw." Of course the vainglorious Cobb couldn't leave it at that. Following Jackson's death in 1951, he backhanded the compliment, telling Arthur Daley of the New York Times, "I used my brain to become a great hitter. I studied the art scientifically. Jackson just swung. If he had had my knowledge, his average would have been phenomenal"

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Rice, the syndicated columnist with an enormous national influence, had been one of the Black Sox players' shrillest critics back when the scandal first broke. Perhaps still unsure of his feelings on Jackson and his legacy, he didn't write about the visit until much later, when he was composing his memoirs in 1954. Rice's reticence is telling of the overall attitude toward Jackson and the other Black Sox at this point in the story. A quarter century was sufficient time to begin reflecting and reconsidering what had happened; it was not sufficient time for some to begin forgiving. It was a cautious dance that the press and the public did in those last years of Jackson's life. The unbridled scorn had softened, surely, but the public affection was not yet there.

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Still, there were efforts to rehabilitate Jackson's reputation in the last years of his life. In February 1951, the South Carolina legislature passed a resolution calling upon the commissioner of baseball to "reinstate Shoeless Joe Jackson as a member in good standing in professional baseball." The petition made its way to the desk of Commissioner Albert "Happy" Chandler, where he ignored it, thus establishing a precedent for Jackson petitions coming before the commissioner of baseball.

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In the summer of 1951, the Cleveland Indians, celebrating their fiftieth anniversary and the fiftieth anniversary of the American League, reached out to their fans for votes to name the best players at each position over the team's first half century. The winners would be the first inductees into the Cleveland Indians Hall of Fame. The first ballot was missing Jackson's name, and though Jackson had left Cleveland thirty-five years before, the fans immediately noticed its absence. After a number of complaints and write-in votes for Jackson, the team reprinted the ballot, this time with Jackson's name; he was an overwhelming winner. But while his support was broad and deep-seated, it was not universal. At the induction ceremony in Cleveland in September, which Jackson could not attend because of illness, a handful of newspaper articles and letters to the editor decried the team for honoring a man of "impugned baseball integrity."

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If the honor comforted Jackson, the residual criticism that came with it wounded him even more. When the Indians arranged an alternate tribute for Jackson - they would present him with the gold clock representative of his place in the Cleveland Hall of Fame during an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in New York in December of 1951 - Jackson refused to go. It would give his critics another news hook for again bringing up his past, he felt, and he lacked the strength and will to face that again. But Katie Jackson and Joe's brothers, sisters, and friends all pressured him to accept. It would be a chance to state his case and clear his name before a national television audience, they argued. Jackson finally relented and agreed to do the show. His health still frail from his recent heart attack, he would travel in the company of his doctor and, of course, Katie. The appearance was set for Sunday December 16. But on Wednesday, December 5, at ten in the evening, Joe Jackson, in failing health since his first heart attack seven years before, suffered another heart attack and died in the bedroom of his West Greenville home. He was sixty-two. He was the first of the Black Sox players to die.

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His legacy upon his death, at least as seen through the prism of the newspaper obits, was uncomplicated. Though most stories acknowledged Jackson's lifelong claim of innocence, the headlines all trumpeted that he was one of the eight White Sox players banished from the game for throwing the 1919 World Series. The ensuring decades have proven it's not that simple.

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Charles Fountain "The Betrayal: How the 1919 Black Sox Scandal Changed Baseball" (2016)

It is heartbreaking to have a child who is toilet trained lose his toilet training. If that occurs, the first step is to rule out a urinary tract infection that can be easily diagnosed with a urine sample. Other possible causes could be GI problems such as diarrhea or parasites. Dr. Bauman has found that some pre-teen children lose bladder control due to a spastic bladder and that sometimes the drug Ditropan is helpful.

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In conclusion, it is vital to remember that, with most children with autism, and especially with those who are nonverbal or have limited verbal skills, behavior is communication. Sudden or unexplained acting out behaviors that continue for days or weeks are often the result of hidden physical issues affecting the child. Before you ask for more and more powerful psychiatric drugs, you must absolutely, positively rule out a treatable medical problem.

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Temple Grandin "The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism & Asperger's" (2011)

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At around 6 P.M. on a warm Friday evening in September, most of Washington had begun to shut down their computers, pack up their things at work, and officially commence their weekend. President Obama still had a few senior staff meetings before he, too, would head out for a weekend getaway at Camp David. He was scheduled to depart the White House with his two teenaged daughters in an hour, flying to meet his wife at the presidential retreat in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains.

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Six blocks south, though, a former Army scout had just arrived in the city. Suffering from delusions and panicky dreams, Omar Jose Gonzalez could feel the adrenaline in his veins. He was itching to set off on his important mission.

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Gonzalez parked his 1996 Ford Bronco off Fifteenth Street near the Holocaust Museum, cracked his windows a little, and hopped out. The disabled Iraq War veteran had lost his wife and his home near Fort Hood, Texas, and had been living in his car, short-term motels, and campgrounds for the last several months. Part of his foot was missing after the Humvee he was riding in rolled over a roadside bomb in Baghdad. His family felt he had been struggling to keep hold of reality after he returned from three tours and eventually retired with a disability in 2012. A cavalry scout, he described watching friends getting blown up. At his home near Fort Hood, he kept guns leaning behind the doors. He feared children he didn't know and warned his wife they could be deadly.

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As he set off for the White House on foot, he left hints of a life that was unraveling: two dogs in the Bronco's backseat, jars filled with his urine on the floorboards, and eight hundred rounds of ammunition, two hatchets, and a machete in the trunk.

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At 6:25 P.M., Gonzalez reached the southeastern corner of the White House's fenced grounds and began casing the perimeter for a way in. The forty-two-year-old soldier marched up the western border on Seventeenth Street, then along the north fence on the Pennsylvania Avenue pedestrian plaza, then down Fifteenth Street on the east.

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Four Secret Service officers who patrolled the compound for trouble - two on bikes and two on foot - noticed Gonzalez at different points in his walk. A few even recognized the caramel-complexioned man with a shaved head from a visit the previous month. That day, he had been walking along the south fence line with a hatchet tucked into his pants belt. He said he used it for camping and stowed it in his car. Today, in his dark T-shirt and baggy cargo pants, he didn't appear to be carrying anything or behaving oddly. They let him pass.

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Gonzalez doubled back to the north fence line, where most tourists were content to snap photos. But this Army vet knew he had to get inside. He had a life-or-death matter he had to discuss with the president.

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As dusk fell, two starkly different scenes played out on opposite sides of the White House grounds. On the South Lawn, order and serenity ruled. An orchestrated routine that the Secret Service had rehearsed over and over repeated itself. On the North Lawn, a modest problem set off a series of cascading disasters. Every last one of the Secret Service's defenses disintegrated. And officers sworn to tell the truth would lie about the mistakes they made.

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Around 7:05 P.M., President Obama stepped out of the Oval Office into the soft evening air. A briefcase of weekend reading in his hand, he strolled down the West Colonnade with his deputy chief of staff, Anita Breckinridge, then said goodbye to go meet his daughters.

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Four suited Secret Service agents shielded Barack Obama's flank and back as he walked from the South Portico's ground-floor exit to his waiting helicopter in the grass. Malia and Sasha, along with a school friend, followed close behind their dad, canvas backpacks of schoolwork strapped to their shoulders.

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Most of the Secret Service's traveling shift that would accompany Obama the next three days had already left for the Anacostia Naval Station. They were catching their own helicopter ride north and would receive the president when he arrived at the retreat. Now agents on the temporary "make-up" shift took their positions around the family to ensure they departed safely.

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One of the presidential detail agents who often protected the Obama daughters, Stavros "Nick" Nikolakakos, an expert marksman and fitness fanatic of Greek descent, had spent a chunk of his career preparing for a high-stakes shootout. But he wasn't expecting much excitement tonight. Before the First Daughters' detail, the black-haired Bronx native had worked as the top-ranked sharp-shooter on CAT, the Secret Service's elite Counter Assault Team. The daughter detail was relatively ho-hum compared to that, but it was a good route to rise to the president's detail.

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This Friday evening, on the access-controlled White House compound, Nikolakakos and his fellow agents searched for any movement, sharp sound, or odd shape, their eyes darting back and forth. Meanwhile, Obama looked eager to escape the capital after another draining week. He gave a short wave to the skeletal Friday night press pool, wishing them a good weekend.

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His daughters, sixteen and thirteen, walked on toward the helicopter, keeping their eyes forward, turned away from the flashing cameras. The agents halted at the end of the paved walk, staying out of the picture frame. The famous family stepped onto the grass alone and the cameras whirred. When the Obamas reached the white-topped green helicopter, the president ushered his daughters and guest up the short accordion stairway, then climbed aboard behind them.

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The president's walk to Marine One and departure from the South Grounds had become a well-choreographed movement in the modern era, repeated several times a week as he dashed from city to city. This serene image, captured hundreds of times, was as close as the president could get to appearing a carefree everyman strolling across his backyard without any bodyguards or guns in view. In reality, a small militia stood at the ready.

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Obama's Secret Service protectors feared that helicopter departures provided a choice opportunity for enemies to attack. Marine One's lumbering liftoff from the lawn - clocking the same speed as the helicopters that had carried President Eisenhower in the 1950s - made the president a sitting duck for his enemies in the sixty to ninety seconds it took for the helicopter to rise and begin its flight path.

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So, as they'd done for hundreds of POTUS helo lifts before, Secret Service officers in uniform and plain clothes fanned out from the South Portico to Constitution Avenue. They scanned the adjoining streets and crowds on the nearby Ellipse for anyone who might pull out a rifle or grenade launcher to try to take down the president's slow-moving aircraft. Counter-sniper officers posted on the White House roof checked their sight lines on the South Grounds and nearby roofs and balconies for unusual movements. Four officers on the Emergency Response Team, wearing all-black tactical gear and Kevlar vests, lurked on the southwestern side of the grounds. They stayed close enough to tackle any intruder who got close to the landing zone.

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"Renegade departing Crown," agents heard over their earpieces, the president's familiar code name.

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Like other agents standing by, Nikolakakos knew the First Family would be helicoptering northward in a minute, his shift would end, and he could give his guard-dog reflexes a rest. Marine One lifted off without a hitch, albeit a few minutes late, at 7: 1 6 P.M.

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The president left in the nick of time. In three minutes, all hell would break loose.

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With Marine One airborne, all 154 Secret Service agents, officers, and supervisors working to protect the complex that night started breathing a little easier. It was simply a natural reaction when Obama left the premises: The Boss was on somebody else's watch now. On the South Lawn, members of the Counter Assault Team now started stripping off their hot tactical gear and loading it into SUVs parked on the nearby south drive. Some took out their earpieces - no need to monitor the radio now.

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Agent Nikolakakos walked with a shift supervisor toward the house and into the Diplomatic Room. Both men needed to collect some of their belongings from Staircase, the detail agents' down room under the First Family residence.

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On the north side, Officer Clifton Monger, an experienced canine officer stationed with his dog in a van just west of the North Portico, grabbed his cellphone to make a personal call. The former Marine no longer was solely focused on the White House radio frequency but thought he could monitor it with one ear. He had left a second tactical radio, one he used to communicate with his emergency response team, in his locker.

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Officer Sean Hughes, a lanky, brown-haired newbie who was guarding the front door at the North Portico, left his post to talk to his friend stationed just inside the house. Officer Phylicia Brice had graduated from officer school together with Hughes a few months earlier. She was headed to New York to help with the upcoming United Nations Assembly, so Hughes was offering her some suggestions for places to eat and visit in the Big Apple.

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At 7:19 P.M., while Monger was on a call and Hughes and Brice were chatting, Gonzalez hopped onto a three-foot-high concrete wall abutting a section of the White House's black iron fence. This section of fence was under repair and missing its spiky decorative finials. From the concrete barrier, Gonzalez easily hoisted himself onto the seven-foot-six-inch fence and straddled the flat top. A short bald officer stationed just twelve feet away spotted him and yelled at Gonzalez to stop. He missed grabbing him by an arm's length. Gonzalez swung his leg over and landed on the White House grounds in one swift motion.

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He was the fifth fence jumper that year, part of an increasing nuisance for the Secret Service officers guarding the complex. Most of them were mentally troubled people. All were easily stopped within a few yards of where they landed, usually by the canine.

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On this Friday night, though, nearly every single thing that could go wrong did.

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As Gonzalez crossed the fence line, his body passed through an infrared beam similar to an invisible dog fence. He also set off a ground sensor soon after he landed. Both sounded an "alarm break" at the Secret Service's Joint Operations Center on the ninth floor of Secret Service headquarters on G Street. The team there was supposed to coordinate the response to emergencies and threats at the White House six blocks away.

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An alarm and a flashing red light on the JOC console gave the location where the intruder had entered. Gonzalez had cleared the fence near Charlie 4, Zone 312 - just east of the complex's main visitor gate on Pennsylvania Avenue.

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Kenneth Havens, a Secret Service officer in charge of alarms at the JOC that night, heard a muffled radio transmission: "Jumper! .. . north fence line." Havens wanted to be sure officers heard the location, so they could nab him. He pushed the radio console's microphone for White House One, the frequency for all officers on the complex.

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"Got a jumper," Havens said. "North ground center fence jumper. North fence line fence jumper. North fence line."

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This was failure number one of the night. Other than the phrase "got a jumper," none of Havens's broadcast reached the officers. Unbeknownst to him or many others in the JOC, the sophisticated radio console the Service bought four years ago for the command center hadn't been set to automatically override other officers' calls. One officer had "keyed" his radio - depressed a button to speak - just before Haven and canceled his transmissions to everyone.

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Gonzalez meanwhile proceeded in a curved route toward the east side of the driveway in front of the mansion, running with a limp.

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Two officers on the Emergency Response Team, the tactical team wearing black vests and in charge of putting down trouble, were standing guard inside the Charlie 2A booth immediately to the east of the North Portico. Here was failure number two.

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Someone had removed the speakers from the booth's alarm system. Officers had been joking that summer about officers somehow "liberating" high-end speakers from fixed posts on the ground. So the two ERT officers received no broadcast alerts about what was happening.

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Even with that glitch, the two men picked up the telltale signs of a jumper. They heard yelling from the north fence line officers. They saw floodlights come on at key guard booths, a standard signal in the case of a jumper.

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The men came out of their booth within five seconds, moving quickly toward the north driveway, and readied their long guns for what might come. Though they couldn't see him yet, they were in the perfect spot to intercept Gonzalez.

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Next came failure number three. The emergency response officers were thinking: We don't have to rush this guy. They'd been trained to let the dog handle jumpers.

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The Belgian Malinois, the Secret Service's fail-safe method for neutralizing fence jumpers, was bred to home in on a designated enemy and launch like a missile to take down that prey. Known as the leaner, meaner German shepherds, these dogs had taken down nearly every jumper on the grounds. Canine handlers were trained to release the dogs within six to seven seconds of any perimeter breach.

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Within the same five seconds it took the ERT officers to come out of their booth, Officer Hughes had run back out to his abandoned post at the front door. Hughes squinted to see through the bright lights shining down from the portico. Black trucks and hedges blocked his vision, but he could make out officers moving toward the North Lawn.

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Now eight seconds after the jump, Hughes drew his 9-millimeter P229 pistol out of his hip holster and backed away from the front door. He remembered from academy training that the canine and the ERT were supposed to tackle any jumper. He had also heard in training that the dog could get confused about whom to attack and he wanted to reduce the risk of that by staying clear. But that training presumed that a Malinois with big teeth was bounding his way.

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At the eleven-second mark, Gonzalez came chugging into view, curving around the east side of the fountain in the center of the circular drive. Where the hell is the dog? one ERT officer thought.

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Failure number four was something nobody would have predicted: The dog was so late he missed the whole incident. The Malinois on duty that night had been resting in a comfy crate in the back of a parked van next to the portico when Gonzalez made his jump. Monger, his handler, was on his phone. Officers were supposed to monitor their radio closely at all times, but they had so little free time that quick personal calls were allowed. Despite years of trying to hire enough officers, the White House still suffered from a manpower shortage, and officers were still being called in and ordered to work extra shifts. On average, they still worked half their days off.

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Another ERT officer on the west side of the North Lawn who was closest to stopping Gonzalez didn't run to grab him. He instead ran to get Monger and the dog. Monger learned there was a jumper when he glanced through his van window and saw an officer running outside. He hopped out of his vehicle, unlocked the Malinois from his crate, and started running with his dog on a long leash.

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It was now thirteen seconds since Gonzalez's jump. The intruder had a big head start on what was supposed to be the White House's crack security team.

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Canine handler Monger and his dog came from the west and reached the grassy lawn in front of the North Portico fifteen seconds after the jump. Monger hadn't had time to make sure the dog locked on to the jumper. He couldn't successfully sic the dog unless it'd already been trained on a single target. The two ERT officers from the Charlie post on the east side had rushed over in an L formation to try to corner Gonzalez. But Gonzalez surprised them all by plowing into the thick, century-old boxwood hedge that surrounded the front of the portico platform.

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On the raised marble landing, Hughes kept his service pistol at chest level and took cover behind a pillar at the far east corner of the portico. He saw rustling in the shrubs below and thought it might be a scuffle.

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But Gonzalez - a broad-shouldered bald man with light brown skin and wide eyes - was only wrestling with the bushes. He stepped out of the dense shrubs and lumbered up onto the western steps of the stone portico. "Stop now! Get down! Stop!" Hughes yelled at the intruder at the top of his voice.

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Failure number five was captured on CNN's live feed aimed at the White House's front door. Hughes was taking cover more than fifteen feet from that door. Nothing blocked Gonzalez's path into the president's house other than the risk of Hughes's shooting him. Gonzalez stepped up to the white-framed threshold, seeming to look through Hughes. The officer didn't move. The Service had not trained him for this possibility - a man standing at the White House's front door? - but he didn't think he should shoot to kill. He later explained that he believed the jumper wasn't armed, the doors were locked, and the priority was to let the dog take the man down and avoid being attacked by the canine himself.

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Failure number six unfolded inside the White House. On the other side of the door, in the vestibule, Officer Phylicia Brice had never received the advance warning of the menace outside. The "crash box," installed at all booths and standard posts, was supposed to sound an alarm for intruders. But the box at Brice's post and others inside the mansion had been muted at the request of the White House usher's office more than a year earlier. Frequent false alarms tended to disrupt events inside. So Brice never heard any emergency broadcasts. Seconds before Gonzalez reached the door, she realized this was an emergency when she looked out the window and saw Hughes with his sidearm drawn.

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Failure number seven was that because Brice didn't get any warning of the jumper, she didn't have time to properly lock the doors. She pulled them shut but wasn't able to latch them with the heavy-set pins when Gonzalez yelled from outside, "Let me in!" He gave the two decorative wooden doors a firm push with both hands, and they flew open. He came crashing in and knocked Brice to the ground.

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In twenty-nine seconds, Gonzalez had made his way from a public sidewalk to inside the White House. He had gotten directly past eight trained security professionals on a compound staffed with 154 men and women in total.

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Brice jumped back up and tried to tackle Gonzalez, but at roughly five foot five, she was no match for his much bigger frame. She yelled at him to stop. He didn't and kept walking briskly toward the East Room. She pursued him and reached for her baton to hit him, but she grabbed her flashlight by mistake.

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The delay let Gonzalez walk into the East Room, a grand ballroom that had hosted some of the country's most historic ceremonies. Brice threw her flashlight to the floor and pulled her handgun on Gonzalez, but he continued to ignore her commands that he stop. He turned back into the grand hall and toward the State Floor.

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Failure number eight was the result of assumption. While Brice was struggling to control the intruder, the ERT officers outside didn't rush inside to give her backup. They paused outside the door. This unique SWAT team, trained to put down all manner of threats, believed the CAT team was responsible for handling emergencies inside the White House, while they handled the outside. The only problem was that the CAT team, then loading their gear after the president's departure, was not monitoring their radios. They had no clue about the jumper.

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Failure number nine was the result of bad communication. Like CAT, PPD agent Nikolakakos and supervisor Joshua Pruett had little warning about the intruder. Agents on the president's protective detail used a different radio frequency than the one for officers protecting the White House. Mostly, they couldn't be bothered with the volume of White House traffic. But in some rare cases it mattered, and they missed what was happening.

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The two agents got their first signal of trouble when they heard muffled yelling echoing down toward Staircase from one level above. Luckily, the whole building was an echo chamber. Both agents bounded out of the down room, where agents gathered between assignments and trips, and up the stairs leading to the East Room, where they found the true hero of the day - Officer Michael Graham - on top of Gonzalez. Graham had lunged at the intruder to bring him to the ground, but Gonzalez was still wrestling to get free.

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Nikolakakos helped Graham by grabbing the intruder's arms. Meanwhile Pruett kept his gun drawn on Gonzalez. Nikolakakos cuffed Gonzalez's wrists behind his back and began a cursory search for any explosives or other weapons. The agent dug into the Army veteran's pocket. Some chewing tobacco tumbled out. Then Nikolakakos felt something metal and pulled out a folding knife with a three-and-a-half-inch blade.

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The three men looked at one another in disgust, at the insanity of anyone getting through hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of security technology, rings of duplicative security systems, and that many Secret Service guards. Here a fence jumper had made it deep inside the mansion and right up to the steps of the president's private living quarters. And he was armed.

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"Jesus Christ," one of the agents said. "The guy's got a knife."

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Carol Leonnig "Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service" (2021)

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