A neat piece of Phillies history

Larry Shenk, the former longtime public relations director for the Philadelphia Phillies, tweeted this image on August 26 along with the message: "Honoring a Pennsylvania Dutch tradition Phillies give a hex sign to kids accompanied by a paying adult, Sunday, August 9, 1970, Connie Mack Stadium. The Double Distlefink is symbolic of good luck."¹

A short news item that was published on LancasterOnline in 2020 gives some history associated with the Phillies' hex sign giveaway:

"In June 1970, the Philadelphia Phillies were suffering from a truly stunning series of injuries, and had decided to turn to Pennsylvania Dutch superstitions to try and turn their luck around.

"It all started May 2, when Phils catcher Tim McCarver had his right hand fractured by a foul ball during a game in San Francisco. Mike Ryan replaced him and, literally minutes later, broke his left hand in a play at the plate.

"Three weeks later, starting May 21, five more players were out with injuries over the span of just six days.

"Thus, the power of the hex sign was enlisted.

"Jacob Zook, a 'hexologist' from Paradise, was enlisted to create three large hex signs to be mounted on the dugout roof at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia. The signs were installed without injury, but only time would tell if their mojo was successful in protecting the players."

George Crudden, who was sports editor of the Lancaster Sunday News at the time, helped Shenk and the Phillies get in touch with Zook for the dugout hex signs.² And the smaller hex signs that were later made for the Aug. 9, 1970, giveaway were produced in Lancaster County. According to an article by Lancaster New Era Sports Editor Larry Greybill that was published August 3, 1970, the signs were made by Dutch Peddler, a Reamstown company run by Ron Good of Ephrata and Dan Durso of Reading. 

Good approached Bill Giles, then the Phillies' vice president, about the potential giveaway.

"Giles liked the idea of buying the signs from a Lancaster County firm," Greybill wrote. "Good took care of the details. His firm will produce 8,000 hex signs in a deal that involves several thousand dollars."

At the conclusion of his column, Greybill asks: What if the Phillies lose with 8,000 hex signs in the crowd?

"I don't even want to think about," Good told him. "That's enough to keep me awake nights."

Well, it turned out to be a split decision. The Phillies hosted the Chicago Cubs for a Sunday doubleheader on August 9. In front of a crowd of 19,907, the Phillies lost the opener, 4-1, but won the second game, 6-1, thanks to the efforts of Tony Taylor and Barry Lersch.

Writing a column about baseball superstitions for the Philadelphia Daily News the next day, Stan Hochman began: "It was 'Double Distlefink Day' at the old ballyard and [Phillies coach] Doc Edwards looked at the gaudy little disk with two tulips and the two birds perched on the heart and he said, 'they look like pheasants to me,' which tells you how little West Virginia catchers know about Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs. The birds are supposed to be goldfinches and the arrangement is supposed to bring good luck. And when was the last time a Pennsylvania Dutchman struck out with the bases loaded? Anyway, there's a place for hex signs at the ballyard."

The Phillies finished the 1970 season with a record of 73-88, a half-game out of last place in the National League East. Would they have been even worse without the hex signs from Lancaster County? The following season, the Phillies moved into Veterans Stadium and lost 95 games. 

Today, those hex signs from the 1970 ballpark giveaway are extremely hard to find and likely sell for quite a bit of money on the rare occasions when they hit the market. 

Meanwhile, 54 summers later, the 2024 Philadelphia Phillies are 81-56 and have the second-best record in Major League Baseball. But I'll say no more. I wouldn't want to put a bad hex on them.

Footnotes

1. The widely accepted spelling of the word today is distelfink. But most of the coverage from 1970 that I came across spelled in distlefink.

2. I was LNP | LancasterOnline's sports editor for 4½ years during 2014 through 2018, but didn't do anything to directly help the Phillies. The Eagles, however, did win their Super Bowl during my tenure.

Flashback to outer space

Facebook reminded me of this photo post from 10 years ago today (Sept. 1, 2014), when Ashar decided we were going to start having a Word of the Day, complete with quotes and historical tidbits.

For fun, here are some of Papergreat's Star Trek-related posts from over the years:

• 1975 Power Records recording with a trio of Star Trek tales
• Unfortunate apparel of 1980: The official Star Trek duty jacket
• Advertisements for a pair of 1980s Star Trek games
• Telegram: Sandra & Leonard Nimoy plead with JFK for a safer planet
• 2014 snapshots from Geppi's Entertainment Museum
• The Nimoy Award for 1967 goes to Miss Nancyann Hiera!
• From 1982: William Shatner peddles Commodore's VIC-20
• Illustration: "Revolving Poker Rack" from Pacific Game Company
• Very authentic Star Trek postcard for Annika in Sweden
• Some WKBS-48 nostalgia
• Papergreat's 3,000th post, with a special celebrity guest
• Stay-at-home shelfie #43
• Snapshot & memories: Me in a Star Trek shirt
• RCA, NBC, Star Trek and color
• Not just any old Star Trek paperback

A few old newspaper stories about people rescuing cats

From the January 8, 1927, edition of The Gazette and Daily in York, Pennsylvania. Thank you, John Almony.

From the January 26, 1925, edition of the Atlantic City (New Jersey) Daily Press.

From Dorothy Gaines' "In and About Tucson" column in the October 25, 1973, edition of the Arizona Daily Star. Sister Theresa Seraphim, a Russian Orthodox nun from England, wrote a 1966 book titled All God's Creatures. She died in 1990, but her legacy and work continue at The Hermitage No-Kill Cat Shelter and Sanctuary in Tucson. 

Book cover & inscription: "A Confederate General from Big Sur"

It's been 13½ years since there was a post that was fully about a Richard Brautigan book, so I think it's high time for another. 

• Title: A Confederate General from Big Sur
• Author: Richard Brautigan (1935-1984)
• About the cover: The wave is a portion of the 1831 woodblock print "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" by Katsushika Hokusai. That's Brautigan himself holding the umbrella. I have searched the internets far and wide, but cannot determine who the woman is. Please leave a comment if you know!
• Back cover promotional text: "An amazing story ... You'll feel better about the whole world after reading this." — Los Angeles Herald Examiner
• Original publication date: January 22, 1965
• This edition: This is the Ballantine Books paperback. First printing, June 1973.
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 160
• Cover price: $1.50. (A little pricey for a 1973 paperback! That's the equivalent of about $10.50 today.)
• Dedication: "to my daughter Ianthe"
• First sentence: "When I first heard about Big Sur I didn't know that it was a member of the Confederate States of America."
• Last sentence: "Then there are more and more endings: this sixth, the 53rd, the 131st, the 9,453rd ending, endings going faster and faster, more and more endings, faster and faster until the book is having 186,000 endings per second."
• Random excerpt #1: "I went downtown to see three movies in a Market Street flea palace. It was a bad habit of mine. From time to time I would get the desire to confuse my senses by watching large flat people crawl back and forth across a huge piece of light, like worms in the intestinal track of a tornado."
• Random excerpt #2: "She went down to the pet shop and came back with two alligators. We asked her why she'd gotten two alligators and she said they were on sale."
• Rating on Goodreads: 3.98 stars (out of 5)
• Goodreads review: In 2007, Kyle wrote: "The best use of weird metaphors, brilliant and silly and vulgar and nothing to do with anything. You can read it in two hours and it will make you happy and sad and think differently about alligators, motorcycle parts, hippies, and hitchhiking down highway one to Big Sur."
• Amazon review excerpt: In 2011, Michael H. Jones wrote: "I first read this novel forty years ago while working as a poll watcher in New Jersey. I forget what party I was supposedly 'watching' for, but my dad and I were the only ones in town. During the long, boring day I read Confederate General and laughed so hard at different times that I cried, and snot dripped down my face. I am sure the other party's watchers are still convinced that Democrats are mental."
• Twitter memory (I'm not calling it X): In 2022, @DougieTraill tweeted: "A Confederate General from Big Sur. It was my gateway to Richard Brautigan. My dad recommended it to me, and let me read through his Brautigan collection. Gave us a shared interest to talk about, and brought us a bit closer when I was being a moody 14-15 year old dickhead!"

Bonus: The inscription in this copy of the book

The "magical" world of early 1970s interior decorating

I came across the 1970 book Better Homes and Gardens Creative Decorating on a Budget a while back at a Goodwill store and knew that it contained vast horrifying treasures inside that would be worth sharing here. The late 1960s and 1970s were indeed an, ahem, magical time when it came to interior decorating, and most of that "style" was still around, albeit in grungier and smelling-of-smoke form, when my generation was growing up in the early 1980s.

Weirdly, when I search Google now, I mostly find articles that say 1970s interior decor was unfairly maligned and/or is making a well-deserved comeback. It's kind of crazy. I think most of this must be coming from hip younger folks who didn't live through the era in their parents' and grandparents' houses. 

James Lileks had it right with his 2004 book Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible '70s. (There's also a valuable website documenting the horrors to go along with it.)¹ 

Without further ado, here are some images from Better Homes and Gardens Creative Decorating on a Budget. Prepare to be triggered.

Leading off with a daily double: 

What if the entire room were green?

I'm not sure this in an upgrade from the green rooms

Wood paneling, a jaguar pattern and Snoopy

I have so many questions. Let's start with the rugs. That little statue. And the chair that looks like it would be at home in "The Changeling."

At least the TV isn't the center of the room

We are not discussing the thing hanging on the wall²

"Butt joints and glue" sounds right

That's one way to establish a maritime theme

We're sitting on WHAT to eat our watermelon?

The infamous beaded divider curtain

Finally, we're not finished until we show a bathroom with a carpeted toilet cover

Footnotes

1. James Lileks was previously mentioned in the 2019 post "Matchbook: Hartwig's The Gobbler Supper Club & Gobbler Motel."

2. And we are definitely not revisiting this clown painting on the wall.

Saturday's postcard: The white squirrels of Olney, Illinois

This Genuine Curteich linen postcard shows the famed white squirrels of Olney, Illinois.

The Olney colony, the "White Squirrel Capital of the World" is still going fairly strong today. Wikipedia notes that the white squirrels have the right of way on all streets in the city of 9,100 human inhabitants. 

The city of Olney's website, which offers a detailed history of how the white squirrels came to inhabit the area and thrive, notes that the 2023 squirrel count found 858 gray squirrels, 73 white squirrels and 85 cats. (That cat count was down from 106 in 2022, a decrease that the city termed "greatly welcomed.")

The city report also noted with concern that extinction of the white squirrels there is possible by 2034 if no efforts are made to help preserve the population. But another study estimates that extinction would not occur until 2059. Suggested strategies to help the white squirrels include relocating some of the gray squirrels and providing "generous" food and water for the white squirrels, especially in the winter. Residents are encouraged to plant fruit and nut trees.

Other prominent white squirrel communities are located in Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi and New York. A few college campus also have their own white squirrel populations, which are fiercely protected by the human community.

Postcards of Olney's white squirrels from over the decades are fairly abundant on eBay. In a search, I even came across an image of a nifty QSL card (for the McWilliams family) touting Olney's white squirrel community.

A postcard of Earle W. Cook's house, for some reason

OK, here's a bit of a head-scratching mystery.

Why did Dexter Press produce this postcard of the house of Mr. and Mrs. Earle W. Cook, on its triangular plot of land in Kingman, Arizona?

According to Diane Allmen's Dating Dexter Press Postcards webpage, this card (55990-B) was produced in 1962. Other than the Cooks' names and "Kingman, Arizona," the only things listed on the back are the address — 215 Caminodelascolinas, which should be more properly stated as 215 Camino de las Colinas — and the publisher, Fritz Studio of Kingman.

Based on the address, I'm not sure this house still exists.

Earle Wayne Cook Sr. (1902-1966) died just a few years after this postcard was published, of a heart attack on the Fourth of July 1966. The main item of note I can find about him is that he was a Democratic Arizona state senator representing Mohave County. His businesses included bottling, ranching and mining.

And here's a plot twist the postcard publishers certainly couldn't anticipate: In 1967, Cook's son, Earle Theodore Cook Jr., attempted to murder his wife, Jeanne, by blowing up the airplane she was traveling on.

You read that correctly.

It's 2024, and these miscellaneous old postcards can still take you down some serious rabbit holes, folks.

The first article I came across was in the November 19, 1967, edition of The Arizona Republic. The headline states "Bomb Suspect Son of Mohave Senator." The subhead reads "Earle T. Cook Recalled in Kingman as Bright Young Man."

The first paragraph states: "Earle T. Cook, 37, held in Chicago under $100,000 bond for an alleged attempt to bomb a jetliner, was a native of Kingman and the son of a veteran Mohave County senator who died last year."

The federal trial was incredibly swift. Just a few months later, on February 6, 1968, Earle Jr. was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison. The details are summarized in a modern-day Chicago Tribune article by Colleen Connolly. Earle Jr. had apparently been trying for a while to kill his wife of 15 years and the mother of his two sons. He contacted a hit man and considering drowning and shooting as other murder methods.

Finally, Earle Jr. took things into his own hands and built a bomb at home.

I'll let the Tribune take it from here:

"What happened next is unthinkable in today’s world of air travel. Cook took his wife to O’Hare and checked her bags while she waited in a lounge, according to a Tribune report. An FBI agent said Cook then removed the contents of one of the bags, placed the homemade bomb inside and handed the bags to an airport porter who checked them. There was no search of the bags whatsoever. Ironically, the same porter who took the luggage without checking it handled it roughly, causing parts of the bomb to dislodge and malfunction, the FBI surmised.

"When the bomb went off in the luggage compartment, it made a loud noise that caught the attention of the pilot and passengers, but nobody realized it was a bomb. The pilot thought the plane struck a downdraft, so he kept flying. It was only when they arrived at their destination in San Diego that the crew found the bomb parts and wreckage in the luggage hold."

Earle Jr. was busted. His likely affairs with other women, conversations with the hit man and multiple insurance policies on his wife didn't help matters during the trial.

According to the Tribune, before being sent off to prison, Earle Jr. said: “I feel that I have been given a trial under a system I believe in. I believe in our form of government. The only thing I am sorry about is that I am innocent. The evidence presented didn’t quite portray my innocence.”

Earle Jr. remarried in 1977 and died in 1981 at age 50. I couldn't find an obituary. All I have is this unused postcard of his parents' house in the Arizona desert.

Late nights and weekend afternoons of horror in the 1970s

There's a long, wonderful history of horror and science-fiction movies, often presented by horror hosts, being shown on television, usually late Friday nights or on weekend afternoons. Today, the tradition continues via streaming platforms and online communities. 

Here are a small handful of clippings on the topic I came across while browsing through Newspapers.com.

First up, this December 23, 1971, article in the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News announces the forthcoming debut of Dayton horror movie host Dr. Creep (Barry Lee Hobart), who would ghoul-rule the airwaves starting on January 1, 1972. Interestingly, though his debut was days away, his host name hadn't been finalized when this article was published. It states that they were considering Frank N. Stein, the Creep, Mortis Macabre and Corpus D. Lecti.

Here are some TV listings from the January 8, 1977, TV page of The (Glens Falls, New York) Post-Star. (I think I applied there after college; I still have all of my rejection letters bundled somewhere.) Packaged between a couple of old pirate movies, Shock Theater is showing 1946's Catman of Paris, which is praised in modern reviews for having a pretty good horse-and-carriage chase scene.

This advertisement is from the October 23, 1975, edition of The (Pottstown, Pennsylvania) Mercury. It's for an appearance by WPHL-17's Dr. Shock at a local Halloween event. Dr. Shock was portrayed by magician Joe Zawislak from 1969 until 1979, when he died suddenly of a heart attack at age 42. There's an hourlong tribute video to him on YouTube. ( The bottom part of the advertisement is difficult to read, but the event location is Boscov's East at the Lebanon Valley Mall.)

Another TV listing, this one from the February 5, 1977, edition of the Asbury Park Press of New Jersey. In this one, Creature Double Feature is packaging one of the worst movies of all time, The Astro-Zombies (Ashar and I can confirm this), with one of the greatest movies of all time, The War of the Worlds.

Finally, here's an amusing reader letter published in the July 16, 1978, edition of The Tampa (Florida) Tribune. "F.G." was tired of the oldies, probably after years of watching Universal films from the Shock! package. He wanted more modern stuff. But, given that these programs had fairly low budgets, if his wish came true, he probably got a whole lot of 1970s fare such as The House of Seven Corpses, The Legend of Boggy Creek and The Bell from Hell.