Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / A Necessary Spectacle

As New York Times sports columnist Selena Roberts recalls it in her new book, Australian tennis great Margaret Court thought she had scored a cushy payday when aging feminist-taunter Bobby Riggs challenged her to a televised tennis match in the early 1970s. When Riggs surprised the Wimbledon champ with an upset victory, spectator Billie Jean King saw the event as no less than a blow to the nascent women's rights movement.

Since King and Court were giants of women's tennis at the time, it followed that Riggs would challenge Billie Jean and so he did in 1973. But King vowed she wouldn't be blindsided by the irascible Riggs. She came into their 1973 match as well trained as Court had been poorly trained, and the rest is history.

Roberts literally brings us courtside in A Necessary Spectacle -- Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs, and the Tennis Match that Leveled the Game, sharing her belief that the Riggs/King event was a  lot more than a personal victory, that it created a baseline credibility for the women's game that has given it equal play with men in many arenas of the game today.

Judge Roberts in the Cross-Hairs

Yahoo News reports:

"(President) Reagan-era documents showed that John Roberts, then working as an assistant to White House counsel Fred Fielding in 1984, had corresponded with Bob Jones III, the former president of Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C., about the case of Peter Ng, a fundamentalist minister. Jones, then president of the Christian fundamentalist university, had complained to the White House that the Immigration and Naturalization Service was harassing Ng.

"The White House refused to get involved in the case. In a Jan. 4, 1984, memo, Roberts said it had received another plea from Jones. "Mr. Jones suggests in his letter that you would have reacted differently to an alleged civil rights violation, and in a thinly veiled threat, asserts that the alleged insensitivity of the administration to fundamentalist Christians will not go unnoticed by that sizable voting block," Roberts said in a memo to Fielding."

If The Shoe Fits, You Must Convict

Be on the lookout for ruby slippers. Yes, of course, what other ruby slippers do you know of? The very ones that Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz. They're missing!

Some thief entered the Grand Rapids (MI) Children's Discovery Museum on Saturday night or Sunday morning and filched the footwear from a small display case, according to KARE 11, Minneapolis, MN:

"They were one of the four existing pairs of ruby slippers Judy Garland wore in "The Wizard of Oz." Children's Discovery Museum director John Kelsch said the slippers belong to a Los Angeles man who loaned them to the museum for ten weeks this summer. The slippers were insured for $1million."

Don't Know Much About History?

History Wire is reasonably certain the President didn't absorb the text of his current sermon from Yale, but George Bush is using the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II to draw historical comparisons between that war and the current Iraqi conflict, according to PhillyBurbs.com:

"With a San Diego naval base as a backdrop Tuesday, the president was to praise World War II veterans in a speech two weeks after the anniversary of the Aug. 14, 1945, surrender by Japan that ended World War II. "The president will draw some historical comparisons between the war that we were fighting then and ... the global war that we're engaged in now," White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said. Also, Bush was likely to point out similarities between "the murderous ideology" that countries joined together to defeat in World War II and "the murderous ideology that we are working to defeat today," McClellan said."

Losses of "Biblical Proportions" Feared

Meteorologists are calling for Hurricane Katrina to wreak damage and loss of life of "biblical proportions," as those of us outside the storm area hope and pray for minimal destruction. To put Katrina in perspective, the NOAA Coastal Services Center website has a compilation of the worst hurricanes in American history, including the 1900 Galveston flood, the New England hurricane of 1938 and Hurricane Camille of 1969.

"The web site provides information about U.S. coastal county population versus hurricane strikes as well as links to various Internet resources focusing on tropical cyclones. The interactive mapping application allows you to search the National Hurricane Center historical tropical cyclone database and graphically display storms affecting your area since 1851."

We'd refer those seeking to learn more about these epic storms to several excellent books on the subject. Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm depicts the effect of the Galveston disaster on the lives of ordinary people who lived there. R.A. Scotti writes of the '38 epic in Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938. And Philip D. Hearn brings us a more modern take in Hurricane Camille: Monster Storm of the Gulf Coast.

Hang onto your hats!

The Makings of a Comic

Millions have slapped their thighs at Robert Klein's humor, but few know the background that shaped the delivery of the comic who held forth on late-nite TV perhaps as much as any other. Now Klein gets to turn straight in his memoir, The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue, giving the inside dope on how a funnyman becomes exactly that. We suppose it helps to be Jewish and from New York, as the New York Times observes:

"The beginning of his success is where his memoir ends. This is a book about the people and places that molded him, starting at his boyhood home in the Bronx and summers in the borscht belt of the Catskills, where he gets a job as a lifeguard. At the time he thinks he wants to become a doctor, but the resort's comedians enthrall him. He gets onstage, substituting for a social director who quit, and tells some jokes. ''It was crude, but it worked,'' he writes. The next summer, employed as a busboy, he makes love and decides that sex ''is a lot like eating, in that after a full meal, one feels, fallaciously, that he may never need to eat again.''

Maine Sets New Record

The Boston Globe reports that a pair of 18th century paintings set a price record for the state of Maine at a weekend auction, in selling for $605,000, albeit pocket change for the Manhattan market:

"The bidding on the fireboard and three-panel overmantel by Jonathan Welch Edes took place Saturday at Thomaston Place Auction Galleries. "We had four or five phone bidders and three or four in the audience," said Chris McIntosh, general manager of the auction house. "It went to an audience member who promptly paid for it and took it out the door."

Abscam Defendant Dies

FROM 580WDBO.COM, FLORIDA:

"Former congressman Richard Kelly is dead at the age of 81. Kelly died at a nursing home in Stevensville, Montana where he retired. The former Orlando area congressman was caught in the 1980 Abscam corruption scandal. He was one of several congressmen convicted of taking bribes from F-B-I agents posing as fronts for an Arab sheik seeking influence. Kelly was convicted of accepting 25-thousand dollars, but the decision was overturned in 1982 when a judge ruled the F-B-I's persistence amounted to entrapment. A higher court reinstated the conviction in 1984. Kelly was sentenced to 6 to 18 months in prison. He served 13 months. Before he was elected to Congress in 1974, Kelly spent 14 years as a circuit judge in Pasco and Pinellas counties."
    

They Walked the Walk

FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS:

By Charles Odom

"Ted Turner, Henry Aaron and the later former Mayor Maynard Jackson Jr. were among 11 people inducted to the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame on Friday. Members of the diverse group stood at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site with a plaque containing their footprints and had their shoes preserved in display cases.

"This is the celebration of a few brave and courageous souls, men and women, whose personal sacrifice and commitment to justice was free of malice, greed and self-promotion," Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin said."

Billy Graham's Next Chapter

FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES:

"CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- With self-deprecating jokes and a heartfelt call to never be "ashamed of the Gospel," the Rev. Billy Graham helped break ground on a library and museum yesterday aimed at telling his story to the world long after he is gone.
    Mr. Graham, 86, held what he has said will be his final revival meeting in June in New York City, and gave no indication yesterday that he has changed his mind. He joked about his difficulty hearing and urged supporters attending the private ceremony to carry on his life's work of spreading the Christian faith."