Long before TV, ESPN, sports talk radio, the sport of boxing was one of America’s most popular sports. Along with baseball and horse racing, boxing was one of the three sports that people followed. There was not much of an NFL to speak of, the NBA wouldn’t begin for another quarter century and the NHL didn’t come to America until the next year.

So, when heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey brought 90,000 fans into New York City’s Polo Grounds for his September match with Argentina’s “Wild Bull Of The Pampas” Luis Angel Firpo, even the newspaper of record agreed the story belonged on Page One.

Re-reading Dawson’s breathless prose now, reporting from ringside with a stadium full of noise around him, brings back an innocent era when the average fan had one - and only one - way to find out what happened. They had to read the newspaper.

Writing with the sports world hanging on his every word, Dawson punched down on his typewriter keys the way Dempsey dispatched Firpo.

“In the shortest and fiercest battle ever fought between heavyweights, Jack Dempsey last night knocked out Luis Angel Firpo before a crowd of 90,000 at the Polo Grounds 57 seconds after the second round began.

“But no champion ever had a closer call. In the first round, after Firpo had gone down seven times, one of his long smashing rights caught Dempsey fairly and knocked him clear through the ropes. The champion’s head disappeared over the edge of the ring, his white-clad legs shot up in the air, and it seemed that a new world’s champion was about to enter into his glory.

“On the count of nine, Dempsey managed to stagger back into the ring, but the end of the round found him obviously badly shaken and staggering as he had never staggered before.

“To the spectators at the ringside it looked as if Dempsey were all gone, but his head and his heart were still there and enough punching power to carry him through to victory in the second round.”

Writing on deadline, you can almost feel the sweat on Dawson’s palms as he pounded out the thrilling details of what he had just witnessed in the past five minutes (3:57 of actual fighting with a minute rest period in the middle.)

The champion was, what, KNOCKED OUT OF THE RING? He got back in and KNOCKED THE GUY OUT IN THE NEXT ROUND? And you were there to SEE THAT?

Dawson’s story was a long, detailed one, especially for a less-than-two-round fight. But he was there and you weren’t. And in 1923, everybody wanted to know what in the world happened.

The reason I have the story is some years ago, I found The New York Times Encyclopedia of Sports at a yard sale and kept the boxing volume. It was printed in 1979, long before the Internet and YouTube made tracking down archival stories as easy as logging in.

As a kid, I had that Aurora model which, somewhat ironically, depicted Dempsey slamming Firpo on the ropes when the reason we remember the fight is because it was Dempsey who went flying through the strands, landing on the typewriter of New York Tribune writer Jack Lawrence. Firpo was down 10 times in less than two rounds, according to the NY Times headline, yet he knocked Dempsey out of the ring. Wild.

Aurora’s “Dempsey vs. Firpo” model. Dempsey is winning here, not why we remember it.

When, as a kid, I got a DeJur projector one Christmas and some time later found an ad in Ring Magazine for “Ring Classics,” a series of silent 8MM movies, obviously one fight that I could not wait to see was Dempsey-Firpo. Twelve knockdowns in two rounds, Dempsey knocked out of the ring, holy smokes, the movie might be silent but the action would jump off the screen, right?

Wrong. Firpo was big and strong and as crude a boxer as you ever saw. Dempsey went flying at him at the opening bell, Firpo landed a bomb of a right hand that knocked Dempsey to one knee, then Firpo spent most of the rest of the round getting knocked down. Sometimes from punches, sometimes from the wind. Sometimes from Dempsey, standing over his prone body, waiting to wallop him once he tried to get up.

The neutral corner rule, where the fighter who has knocked a man down is supposed to go to a neutral corner while the count continues either wasn’t applied or forgotten or ignored. In Dempsey’s title fight with Gene Tunney a few years later, it would cost him as he knocked Tunney down in the seventh round and did not immediately hustle to a neutral corner, costing him precious seconds where Tunney, on the canvas, might have had to arise before he was ready to resume fighting. That was called “The Long Count.”

Near the very end of that first round, Firpo lands a thunderous right - Dempsey might still have been fuzzy at that point - and then another with a sort of punch/shove that launched the champ out of the ring. He gets back in - we don’t know for sure if he was out for more than 10 seconds - and the round ends.

When the second round begins, Firpo is on his back after just a few punches and a few knockdowns, is then counted out. The Times said it was ten knockdowns in their headline. After Firpo was counted out, Dempsey comes over and helps the guy up. Really. I’m not sure Firpo really understood the fight was over.

A little over a quarter century later, the Associated Press did a poll ranking the Dempsey-Firpo fight as “the most dramatic sports event of the first half of the 20th century.” Reading that today, even after Dawson’s stirring account of the fight, makes you laugh. We’ve seen so many dramatic sporting events on TV since then. Would Dempsey-Firpo even draw a single vote?

Looking at that archaic film of Dempsey-Firpo, even as well done as it was for 1923, it’s hard to even imagine the breathless excitement that must have rumbled through the offices of the New York Times that September night, front page editors deciding to put a sports story on the top of Page One. That kind of thing did not happen. That’s how big that story was.

Watching the actual film for the first time way back then when my Ring Classics film arrived, sure, I was disappointed. The stories I’d read from writers who spoke about these events with such unquestioned authority and maximum drama, the film did not convey that at all. You saw a relentless Dempsey, and Firpo, a big lug of a heavyweight from Argentina who was as crude a fighter as you might see in some local tavern on a night of the full moon and that fluke knockdown through the ropes that might have been half-punch, half-push. But was it a memorable fight?

If you were one of the 90,000 in the Polo Grounds or maybe a reader, picking up a New York Times issue still warm from the press, sure. Watching the film, the actual account of what happened in those memorable four minutes in the Polo Grounds, the story was a lot more exciting.

History can be like that, I guess. There’s what we were told happened, then there’s what really did happen and sometimes, like Dempsey-Firpo, the two don’t agree. The question that remains is all those sportswriters who voted in the Associated Press poll in 1951 had probably seen the films of the fight. They were shown in theaters, everybody was talking about the fight, there had never been such a wild title fight and they had to truly know what that night, that fight was truly like. And they voted it No. 1 anyway. Were sportswriters in those days romantics, too?

I’m glad I read the stories before I saw the fight. When I got my turn to write about sports a few years later, I remembered writers like James P. Dawson, how he understood that he had an audience of readers hanging on his every word. He couldn’t let them down. Re-reading his story over 100 years later, I don’t think he did. Reality stepped in, damn it.

Author John Nogowski, a boxing enthusiast, once got to write a story for Boxing Illustrated magazine on the inaugural Boxing Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Canastota, New York. Publisher Bert Randolph Sugar ran the story but never paid me. That tells you a lot about boxing, doesn’t it? Nogowski has been writing a Substack since May of 2024 and has written several books; two on baseball - “Diamond Duels” - a deep dive into the game’s historic matchups, “Last Time Out” - a collection of stories on the final MLB games of baseball’s greatest players. He’s also written two books on music, three editions of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and a similar volume on Neil Young - “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” due next year.

Then the guy heads to Virginia. North Carolina after that. Heads to Georgia and finally, Nashville to end this part of the tour on August 1. It’s tiring just writing down the dates, ain’t it?

After a couple months off, he starts a 30-date tour in Europe starting in October where he’ll visit Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Slovenia, Luxembourg. Then Switzerland, Italy, Austria, winding up in the UK with stops in Bournemouth, Birmingham, Sheffield, Blackpool and five closing dates in London, finishing December 8.

There really is no reason to worry. At 85, Bob Dylan seems to be defying age, logic, fans, maybe even gravity. He’s on what seems an endless tour, just added a whole bunch of shows overseas, all the way into December. Why? You wonder.

Now, we should be clear about this. Yes, I’ve written three editions of a comprehensive book on Bob Dylan’s career, the records, the books, the interviews, the speeches, the movies, the performances (Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography) but I am about as far from trying to figure out or explain the guy as anybody.

Where does he get the energy? The motivation? Is his goal to make every single person who was alive in his lifetime see him in concert?

If it was just the concerts, that’s one thing. He shows up, plays an hour and a half of whatever the hell he feels like. Hires and fires guitarists if and when he feels like it. That’s not all. For some inexplicable reason, he’s started a Patreon pay site where he (or somebody) posts things like “Letters Never Sent” - a letter from Soupy Sales to Phil Silvers or one from Mark Twain to Rudolph Valentino or one from James Baldwin to Walt Disney. Quite a clever - if somewhat twisted - idea, isn’t it?

There are a bunch of them and these name drops - Huey Long, P.T. Barnum, Jack Johnson, Rocky Marciano, Gene Vincent, Charles Darwin - are daring, imaginative and out of this world. There are short stories, too. The site is advertised as “A living archive of lectures from the grave, letters never sent and original short stories curated by Bob Dylan.”

Curated? We know he’s welded gates, painted pictures, created whiskey and who knows what else? But a Patreon website? Why? And there’s also an Instagram site (@bobdylan) with odd, unexplained videos, over a million followers and even more unexplained items.

As we know - I’m one of them - there are all sorts of authors writing all sorts of books about Bob Dylan. I’ve got another one ready to go. And you wonder what it is about the guy that gets under everybody’s skin so?

I listened to some of a podcast the other day with author David Hajdu, who wrote “Positively Fourth Street” a book about Dylan’s formative years in Greenwich Village and on the podcast, Hajdu explains that when he heard Dylan say that the first time he’d really heard The Beatles, he was in Colorado, Hajdu didn’t think that was true. (Imagine Bob telling a lie!)

So he found out about a cross-country trip that Dylan had taken in 1964, when Hajdu says, The Beatles held the top four spots on Billboard and that on the trip, there was nothing but AM radio available in the car he rode in. So he went to the trouble of tracking down the actual playlists from the radio stations that Dylan would have been able to get on the car radio, just to confirm that he had to have heard The Beatles before Colorado.

Really. I’m not making this up. Compared with the rest of America, I suppose someone who’s written three editions of a book and all sorts of Bob Dylan posts on my Substack since I cranked this sucker up in May of 2024 would qualify as Dylan-obsessed. I plead guilty.

But I’m not in Hajdu territory. Or even interested in all that Patreon stuff. Who knows if it’s really from Bob or if he has some A-I hookup, just having a big laugh on all of us?

I’ve been very critical and skeptical of those Dylan Dissectors who insist Dylan stole sentences from Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London and F. Scott Fitzgerald and all sorts of other writers in “Chronicles, Vol. 1” And looking at this mind-bending flurry of stuff on Instagram and Patreon along with this endless tour, how can you take any of this seriously?

Is Bob just linking his name to all this stuff just to blow everyone’s mind. Sort of the same attitude John Lennon had with writing “I Am The Walrus.” Remember when Lennon learned that his old teachers at Quarry Bank school were having students pick apart Beatle lyrics, he thought he’d really give them something to work on and came up with “I Am The Walrus.” What if Bob Dylan is doing a broader scale version of that? Will we ever really know?

Is he ever going to explain or comment on his intent with all this? Does he get a secret sort of kick sending some of his fans and writers down these rabbit holes? We will likely never know. Bet he likes that, too.

Here’s the third edition of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography,” which covers all of Bob’s studio albums, his recordings, films, books, you name it, it’s probably in here. I’ve written a similar volume on Neil Young’s work, due later this year. I’ve also written two books on baseball - my son is a former major-league first baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals and Pittsburgh Pirates. “Diamond Duels” is a look at the game’s historic matchups - Hank Aaron was 1-for-23 against Don Drysdale before hitting 17 HRs off the guy. “Last Time Out” is a collection of stories about the final games of some of baseball’s all-time greats. All my books are available on Amazon.

Within a matter of a few months, Presley wouldn’t even consider $37.91 tip money. How many people do you know whose life has had that kind of turnabout? It was a rise as improbable as it was remarkable. And to think it almost never happened.

It was at the end of what looked to be a failed recording session that steamy July night, Presley started banging out an old Arthur Crudup tune, “That’s All Right, Mama,” an old blues song Sun Records owner and producer Sam Phillips was stunned Presley even knew.

Phillips came out of the recording control booth, got Presley to back up and start over. He asked guitarist Scotty Moore and bass player Bill Black to follow him and the three of them recorded the Crudup song.

A couple nights later, when Phillips brought the acetate over to his friend and radio DJ Dewey Phillips over at WHBQ a mile and a half away in the lobby of the Hotel Chisca and asked him to give it a spin, neither he, nor Dewey or Elvis had any idea what was going to happen. Nobody could have.

As writer Peter Guralnick explained in the first half of his superb two-volume Presley biography “Last Train To Memphis,” the song was an immediate hot connection.

“The response was instantaneous,” Guralnick wrote. “Forty-seven phone calls, it was said, came in right away, along with fourteen telegrams? – he played the record seven times in a row, eleven times, seven times over the course of the program. In retrospect, it doesn’t really matter; it seemed all of Memphis was listening as Dewey kept up his non-stop patter…”

As we celebrate 250 years of America, the story of the wholly improbable rise of Elvis Presley still surprises us and it always should. Even now, 72 years later, the depth of such an immediate response to a record is startling. It was as if, starting in Memphis, entire cities all across America had kept their late-night radios on for years and years, hoping for some sort of sign or message of hope, excitement, jubilation, anything to shake things up. Here it came from a guy earning less than $40 a week. There was so much more to come. More than anyone could have expected, including Elvis himself.

The 19-year-old Elvis Presley, about to become a worldwide sensation.

The artifacts of Presley’s tumultuous life are still being uncovered. What seemed a rather tacky coffee-table book called “Elvis Presley Treasures” came out a couple years ago, collecting 100 items from his life. Here’s a library card Elvis signed taking out Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus.” Here’s a job application where Presley is described as a “rather flashily dressed ‘playboy’ type.”

Or how about this, an Elvis-written response to a fan letter, errors and all?

“ Dear xxxx: I have received your letter and I don’t think your crazy. I understand how you feel because before I started singing and lived in the poorest part of town and my father made only 45$ a week. Please try to understand that I cannot do what you ask. It would not be the right thing to do. Also somday you will be glad I didn’t! There is somebody in this world that’s meant for you and you only. With him only you will find happiness. I don’t love you and I doubt if I ever could so let’s please be friends and let it drop there. You don’t know the kind of life I lead and the letters I receive so please understand. Your friend, Elvis Presley. P.S.: If you write again, send me a picture for my scrapbook.”

Can you imagine getting a letter back from Elvis Presley, especially one as considerate and gentle as this?

“You don’t know the kind of life I lead,” he says and at this stage of stardom, we can only imagine what he might be talking about. And Elvis keeping a scrapbook, as if he couldn’t quite believe all that was happening to him and wanted to paste some of those letters and newspaper stories so he could believe it, too.

In an earlier Guralnick book “Lost Highway,” there’s a line from Elvis that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post around this time that shows he was as mystified as everyone else.

“I don’t know what it is,” Elvis told writer C. Robert Jennings. “I just fell into it, really. My daddy and I were laughing about it the other day. He looked at me and said, ‘What happened, El? The last thing I can remember is I was working at a can factory, and you were driving a truck.’ We all feel the same way about it still. It just…caught us up.”

In some ways, in 2026, the life of Elvis Presley, at least the first half of it, seems almost impossible to believe. Could something like that still happen in America?

Reading Guralnick’s two-part biography of Presley, Bob Dylan offered this:
“Unrivaled account of Elvis as he walks the path between heaven and nature in an America that was wide open, when anything was possible, not the whitewashed golden calf but the incendiary atomic musical firebrand loner who conquered the western world, he steps from the pages, you can feel him breathe…”

We can still hear him sing, too. Can talent and drive still triumph? It did once. Was that enough? Can we ever truly measure the distance Elvis Presley traveled, from where he was to where he rose?

Starting at $37.91 a week.

Author John Nogowski writes often about popular music on his free Substack, now in Year Three. He’s written three editions of a comprehensive book on Bob Dylan: “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography,” a forthcoming book on Neil Young: “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography,”; two books on baseball - his son is a former major-leaguer - “Diamond Duels,” a deep dive into the game’s great historic matchups, “Last Time Out,” a collection of stories about the final games of baseball’s greatest players and a book about his experiences teaching Mark Twain’s “Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn” at a struggling minority Florida high school for a dozen years. He’s a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant and is currently at work on a book on Bruce Springsteen.

Since I’ve written three editions of a book on Bob Dylan, you’d have to think he’d be up there on my personal list. And the guy has been making records since the 1960’s. My new Neil Young book should be out at the end of the year or the beginning of next so I spent a lot of hours with him last year. And since I’m working on a Bruce Springsteen book at the moment, there’s a lot of Bruce, too. But there has been since I first saw him the day he finished the “Born To Run” album in 1975.

But you know who I bet would be a surprise on my personal list, maybe even to him if he was still around to look at the numbers? Tom Petty.

It’s hard to believe that we lost the guy nearly a decade ago at the end of a grueling tour he was trying to finish with a broken hip. He passed on October 2, 2017 at 67. And speaking selfishly, the guy had so much more music in him, didn’t he?

I’m not sure about your own listening habits but when I’m in the car and I have my Sirius XM on, I seem to wander between Elvis Radio (Channel 75), Bruce Springsteen (Channel 20), U2 (Channel 32) and Petty (Channel 31). And with Petty’s terrific “Buried Treasure Show” mixed in there, I might spend more time there than anywhere else.

And reading Zollo’s thoughtful, comprehensive book of conversations with the guy, you miss him all the more. What was always fascinating to me about Petty’s music was it was of a piece - you knew it was him right away - but within that well-defined sound, there was creativity. “Breakdown” sounds nothing like “The Waiting” which is on the other side of the pond from “Here Comes My Girl” and a track like “Don’t Come Around Here No More” is also him, fun, refreshing and still surprising.

While his best songs sound effortless, as if they just poured out of him (and probably did), don’t think for a moment that they were easily thrown together or just tossed off one afternoon. There was some genuine craft there. As Petty explained to Zollo near the end of the book.

“Yeah,” he told Zollo, “it always makes me laugh when I read that my music is simple. Because if you think it’s simple, try and do it. It’s not simple. There’s a lot of nuance. And light and shade. It’s not a simple thing. It’s sometimes much harder to do, really…”

Zollo agrees. “I think your songs seem to be simpler than they are,” he says.

“They’re not simple,” Petty continues. “I was in a music store recently, and a guy was trying to impress me and he was playing all our licks. Saying, “Hey, look at this!” And he had every one wrong. He had the right root of the chord. But we use a lot of variations of chords. For example, I use a lot of variations of G. I don’t play, necessarily, a straight G. There’s a lot of variations on those chords. And this guy was playing everything straight. So he thought it was right, but it wasn’t.”

As a fledgling guitarist myself - and you can’t get more fledgling than me, now in my 40th year trying to go from C to A minor without a hitch - many of his songs do seem pretty easy to play. You can certainly recognize the chords of “I Won’t Back Down” or “A Heart With A Mind Of Its Own” or “Free Fallin’” when you can find them on your guitar but getting it to sound exactly like Tom Petty and the brilliant, underrated guitarist Mike Campbell, that’s a tough task.

As Petty described himself many times, he was the kind of guy who walked around the house, guitar strapped on all the time, always playing, riffing, trying to find something new. Often enough, he did. And when they came on the radio, you were excited. It was something new from Petty, yet somehow familiar, too. That’s not easy to pull off.

For many bands, the box set is an easy way to fill the coffers. Collect your greatest hits, a handful of B-sides maybe or an outtake or two or a live track and you’re all set. Some bands have put out several of them.

In 1995, for whatever reason, Petty and the Heartbreakers decided to put out “Playback” which is a six-CD collection of their most celebrated hits on the first three CDs but the remaining three have all sorts of outtakes, surprises, fun tracks that give you a broader perspective of their music.

I’ve been listening to it all morning and it’s one of the best box sets I have. Petty talks about it with Zollo late in the book and gives the track-by-track breakdown that made me want to break it out again. I’m glad I did. If you’re a Tom Petty fan, Zollo’s book is comprehensive and highly recommended.

Unlike the career-long hosannas for a Neil Young or a Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan, I’m not sure Petty ever felt quite as appreciated as he might have been. To be around that long, to have that many hits, to be a part of the Traveling Wilburys, too, the guy made a major contribution to popular music. But do we think of him that way? I wonder.

His solo album “Full Moon Fever,” for example, might have been played more than any other single cassette I ever had. I wasn’t the only one. Famed record producer Rick Rubin, who finally got to work with Tom late in his career, said the same thing. He didn’t listen to anything else in his car for over a year. It’s that good a record. And to think the record company rejected it on first listen.

“I brought the record in,” Petty told Zollo, “and they didn’t like it. Which had never happened with me. I was stunned. They didn’t like it…They didn’t hear a single…So I was pretty devastated. And I just put it on the back burner…then later on, I brought the record back. And the regime had changed at MCA. And I brought exactly the same record in, And they loved it.” As did just about everybody else who ever bought it. One of the great solo records.

That cassette included Petty’s hilarious between sides message to listeners. Remember it?

“Hello, CD listeners. We have come to the point in this album where those listening on cassettes or records will have to stand up or sit down and turn over the record or tape. In fairness to those listeners, we’ll now take a few seconds before we begin side two. Thank you. Here’s side two.”

Tom Petty’s music was rich, full of excitement and fun, a guy who sounded as if he was having the time of his life. And he wanted that for his fans, too. Listen to “Playback” or Tom Petty Radio some afternoon and you’ll miss him, too.

Good thing you can always turn to Sirius XM Channel 31. He’ll be there waiting.

Author John Nogowski has been a fan of Tom Petty’s music since his first album. He’s written about popular music for many years, including three editions of a comprehensive book about Bob Dylan: “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and forthcoming book on Neil Young: “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and two books on baseball: “Diamond Duels” a deep dive into the game’s historic matchups and “Last Time Out” a collection of stories of the final games of baseball’s all-time greats. He’s also written a book about his teaching experiences at a struggling minority Florida high school, teaching Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” He’s been writing a Substack since May of 2024 and is a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant. He’s currently at work on a book about the music of Bruce Springsteen. His books are all available on Amazon.

Well, as someone who spent a lot of time in the classroom with J.D. Salinger’s classic “The Catcher In The Rye,” I surely would like to celebrate the novel, one of the most impactful in my lifetime. And it’d surely be fun to discuss the book and how it connected with the 116 patrons so far who’ve registered and coughed up the $13.61 admission charge, or roughly ten times what Salinger charged for the hardback in 1951 ($3.00) to attend. There’s always lots to talk about with “Catcher.” Why, it even made the New York Times today.

That’s part of it. The other, and perhaps more intriguing aspect of that evening will be to hear what Salinger’s son Matt has to say about the rest of the Salinger canon. If he says anything.

You see, back in February of 2019, Alison Flood, a writer for England’s “The Guardian” published an interview with the younger Salinger in response to what had been revealed in Shane Salerno’s “Salinger” 2013 docudrama that ended with a prospective list of all the unpublished, completed works that Matt’s father had carved out in his Cornish, New Hampshire bunker and refused/declined/was simply reluctant to publish.

So these manuscripts have sat around at least since J.D.’s death on January 27, 2010. And in the interview with Flood, Matt, the executor of his dad’s will, vowed the work was coming. She wrote: “JD Salinger’s son has confirmed for the first time that the late author of The Catcher in the Rye wrote a significant amount of work that has never been seen, and that he and his father’s widow are “going as fast as we freaking can” to get it ready for publication.

“He wanted me to pull it together,” Matt said, “and because of the scope of the job, he knew it would take a long time. This was somebody who was writing for 50 years without publishing, so that’s a lot of material. So there’s not a reluctance or a protectiveness: when it’s ready, we’re going to share it.”

“This will take years,” he said. “I don’t owe an apology, I don’t think, but your readers should know that we’re going as fast as we freaking can … I feel the pressure to get this done, more than he did.”

That was seven years ago. Some time later, your correspondent stumbled into a Diego Courchay post on Substack where he happened to run into Matt Salinger at a book fair in Guadalajara, Mexico. Here’s what Matt told him: “What will be published is not what some biographers have promised,” Matt said. “There is this ridiculous biography which chest-thumpingly announced he wrote these five or six novels and that they’re going to come out, and even gave a date for when they were going to come out. Great! And then Harvey Weinstein made a movie of it…My father didn’t write any of those five or six novels. I mean, I’m not even sure he wrote one novel.”

“There are hundreds and hundreds of pages of beautiful writing, profound writing, hysterically funny writing, great dialogue, all the sort of raw nuggets that he mined from this vein that he was mining his whole life of the Glass family [the subject of two of his novels and various short stories].

“So all that will be available to readers who loved his writing, and I think they will rejoice. But to those who were given false expectations of other jewel-like, perfectly polished finished works, they’re going to be sorely disappointed, and shame on those biographers who gave them false expectations. But I don’t want to say much about what it is, because I don’t want to affect the reader’s expectations myself. I want them to discover it.”

Maybe Matt will clear all that up tomorrow night. Since the New York Times hyped the event, perhaps they’ll send a reporter to ask those questions. Nobody will ask him why his dad just stopped publishing. We’ve sort of clued into that. And the biographies and legal wranglings that closed out his life made it pretty clear Salinger was deadly, legally serious about his privacy and that his words were “for him.”

But any writer writes to be read, don’t they? Did he truck out to that “Do Not Disturb” bunker every day for years and years thinking that all those words he carefully crafted would never be shared?

The story goes that Salinger once got into a grudge match with a New Yorker editor who wrongfully (in Salinger’s view) inserted a comma in the wrong place. His words mattered that much.

So what did he work on after “Hapworth 16, 1924” was published in the New Yorker on June 19, 1965, taking up almost the whole magazine. It was a dense, hard-to-read story that drew all sorts of criticism that some assumed drove him into publishing silence for the next 45 years of his life and now, another 16. It was a struggle to get through, I’ll tell you that.

Maybe he was written out, realized it and just didn’t know what else to do. Or, as critic Christian Kriticos wrote for The Millions in 2015, he was up to something else.

“One of the most common criticisms leveled against the Glass stories was that Salinger was writing them purely for himself, at the price of alienating his readers,” he wrote. “Salinger even admitted as much, stating “I write just for myself and my own pleasure,” and “there is enough real danger, I suppose, that sooner or later, I’ll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods.”

“Thus,” Criticos writes, “Hapworth” came for many to represent the culmination of this, and the ultimate in insufferable self-indulgence, with its endless verbosity and preposterous length. Even within the story, Salinger appears to acknowledge this, with his narrator warning us that “This is going to be a very long letter!” and later urging the reader “Please, please, PLEASE do not grow impatient and ice cold to this letter because of its gathering length!”

So, Criticos wonders if “Salinger was “trying something new, arguably something different than any other American writer: to reconcile non-material (Eastern) ways of transcendence with the particulars of American daily life.” Writer Roger Lathbury contends that this accounts for its unusual style — “a letter that is not a letter” — and that to write what Salinger wanted to write necessarily required “a seismic shift in sensibility.”

“Salinger addressed this exact concept in an earlier story entitled “Teddy,” which also takes a child prodigy with spiritual gifts as its protagonist: “It’s very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America.” Likewise, the form of “Hapworth” is recycled from an earlier unpublished story, “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” which is also presented as a letter written home from summer camp.

“Thus, one might hypothesize that in “Hapworth” Buddy’s voice is apparent via a brief introduction before the letter begins, in which he assures us twice that he intends to type up an “exact copy,” which is what we will read. This over-assurance is immediately suspicious, and the opening line, in which Seymour states “I will write for us both,” might also serve as evidence.”

What if that is the case? What if Salinger had outdistanced his critics? Watching “Salinger” — with all its flaws and overdone bits — made me think about that. But reading the story is a mighty task. So must have been writing it.

As Critikos concludes: “This is the crux of “Hapworth” — it defies interpretation, and in this way stands as Salinger’s ultimate embodiment of the Glass family’s ideals. Just four years earlier he had admitted that Buddy was his “alter-ego,” blurring the lines between fiction and reality, and here we see him bringing the ideals of his fictional world into the reality of his work as a writer.

“In Franny and Zooey, Salinger quotes at length from Swami Prabhavananda:“You have the right to work, but for the work’s sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work.” “Hapworth” can be seen as a culmination of this ideal, as it represents Salinger writing purely for himself, and for the pleasure of the work. The fact that he continued to write for the rest of his life, but ceased publishing, also meant he was rejecting considerable “fruits.”

As far as we know, Matt Salinger’s are the only pair of eyes that have looked at those manuscripts. Does he think they’re worth sharing with a world of curious readers? Did his father ever try and clue him into his intent with all these pages? Or is he just as baffled as critics were in 1965 after “Hapworth”?

His father did leave the door open for further publication, otherwise Matt would never have given that Guardian interview, right? It seems unlikely that any posthumous writings would do anything to add to the Salinger canon. But what if “Hapworth” was, as Criticos suggests, a breakthrough and we missed it? Maybe the distance, hearing Salinger’s voice again after all this time will change things.

We know this much. Something was driving J.D. Salinger to walk across his Cornish property into that writing bunker just about every day for decades. Maybe he was indeed, writing just for himself and his own pleasure, as he once explained. Maybe he was on to something else. That’s a question I hope someone throws at Matt tomorrow night. Wish it was me.

Author John Nogowski taught “The Catcher In The Rye” in high school and college classrooms for over a decade. In almost every case, the students connected with main character Holden Caulfield, surprising given the decades that had passed since the book’s original publication. Teaching at an all-minority school up through 2023, the novel seemed to carry surprising weight, prompting one of my star students to suggest she wished “she could date him.” Salinger’s short stories were very popular with my classes, especially “For Esme - With Love And Squalor” - clearly about his World War II experience. Nogowski has written about his teaching experience with another American author - presenting Mark Twain’s “Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn” to an all-black high school classes. One student called Huck “the brother I never had.” He’s also written two books on baseball - “Diamond Duels” and “Last Time Out” and two books on popular music - “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and the forthcoming “Neil Young, A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” due at the end of the year. He’s written a Substack since May of 2024 and is a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant. He’s at work on a book on Bruce Springsteen.

If you ever needed any indication that time indeed does fly, that the world surely is always ready to move on or that Satchel Paige’s time-worn advice “Don’t look back, somethin’ might be gainin’ on ya,” remains the sagest sort of advice, consider this: The American Football Conference Champion New England Patriots are to begin their 2026 training camp in Foxborough on July 24. Ten days.

Yes, folks, football season is around the proverbial corner. Already? It’s true that MLB is having its All-Star break, the NBA summer league has just started and the outrage over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show is only now calming down. But the NFL is almost upon us. The NFL Hall of Fame game from Canton, Ohio - the Arizona Cardinals vs. the Carolina Panthers is just 23 days away.

Those Patriots will open their 2026 season on a Sunday night (Sept. 9) against the same Seattle Seahawks’ team that thumped them 29-13 in the last Super Bowl. That’s just 57 days away. Off-season is over, kids. Let’s strap it on and get after it. Again.

How can football be here already? Are these guys ready to start running and hitting one another? Didn’t the National Basketball Association just crown the New York Knicks? Is the Big Apple done celebrating? Is the city ready to turn its civic attention to the Giants and Jets now? After the almost boundless joy of a long-sought after New York championship, here are uh, your Jets and Giants, folks. Live it up!

Watching the New England Patriots’ season and Maye a year ago was like those Christmas days when you were a kid and you thought you’d opened all of your gifts under the tree and suddenly, Mom moved a couple of hidden presents from behind someone else’s wrapped packages and you got to open a couple of cool, wholly unexpected surprise gifts.

That was exactly how it felt watching the 2025 Patriots. There were no expectations to speak of. Years of desultory Bill Belichick drafts had left the talent cupboard nearly bare. QB Drake Maye showed promise but put the ball on the ground too often. (Isn’t that a stylish way of saying the guy fumbled too much?) Sometimes, he forced the ball and found enemy hands more receptive than those on his side.

But he could run, was as athletic as any quarterback in the league and seemed to be the kind of guy the team related to, a Steve Grogan-type, a one-for-all, all-for-one signal caller. That was an encouraging sign.

As the year unfolded, Maye revealed that rarest of young quarterback traits, the ability to hit the deep ball. And it wasn’t like the Patriots’ receiver corps was a bunch of burners. They had to work to get open but time and again, Maye found ways to make the big throw or run for a big third down.

Vrabel’s defense continued to improve as the year went on and aided by a schedule unusually negotiable (that is, ranked as one of the easiest in recent NFL history), the Patriots wound up being the surprise team of 2025, going all the way to the Super Bowl.

Along the way, long-time New England fans marveled at Vrabel’s enthusiastic post-game hug lines, always on camera, these exact bursts of genuine affection eschewed or scorned by the legendary ball-busting Belichick for so many years after games or even practices.

“Jesus, Brady, I can get a kid from Foxborough High to make that throw…”

Yes, Virginia, there was joy on those faces in 2025, none more so than on the mug of the coach himself. Playing for Vrabel’s Patriots was, uh, FUN?

Can that sort of thing re-occur in 2026? True, the regular-season schedule is less forgiving and the Patriots aren’t going to sneak up on anybody. But Maye did add the kind of deep-threat receiver the Patriots haven’t had since maybe Randy Moss in A.J. Brown and if Maye can improve half as much, say, as he did last year, there may not be a better thrower/runner in the whole NFL other than maybe perennial MVP candidate Buffalo’s Josh Allen.

There’s hope the Patriots’ offensive line — exposed as a real issue in the Super Bowl — will be much improved and recent drafts have replenished things on either side of the ball. Can the team stay injury-free in 2026? Will the cast of rookies have an impact?

Coaching and personnel changes across the league itself has also cast an air of mystery about the 2026 season. John Harbaugh takes over the New York Giants, Joe Brady steps up in Buffalo and eight other coaches take on new jobs. There’s turnover galore in the NFL but that’s not a concern in New England where Vrabel was a well-deserved NFL Coach of the Year and he returns Offensive Coordinator Josh McDaniels, the AP’s Assistant Coach of the Year, who’s back with another chance to keep tutoring Maye.

And Maye, who narrowly missed winning NFL MVP himself, may be as apt a pupil as Patriot fans hope. In the team’s dramatic - and exceedingly difficult road win in Denver, Maye came up with the call of the game on his own, calling one play in the huddle, getting the whole team (and the defense) headed in one direction while he took off in another, a ballsy, exactly strategically brilliant naked bootleg to salt away the ballgame.

It was a “Go To The Head Of The Class” sort of play, the kind of call that would have had a Belichick gnashing his teeth whereas Vrabel first had to catch his breath, then appreciate the gnad-u-larity it took for Maye to make the call, then carry it out with nerve and daring.

Lots of furniture stores are throwing out that “Christmas in July” promotion these steamy summer days. For Patriot fans though, that holiday may be just ten days away.

Author John Nogowski was just as surprised at the success of the 2025 Patriots as anybody whoever muttered “In Bill We Trust” in days gone by. Talking about the NFL in July is not something I ever imagined me doing. But it was a thrilling and wholly unexpected season from Mike Vrabel’s Patriots and with training camp opening just ten days away, how can you not be excited? Nogowski has written two books on baseball - “Diamond Duels” and “Last Time Out” and two books on popular music, three editions of a comprehensive book on Bob Dylan: “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and a similar forthcoming volume on Neil Young, “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography,” due later this year or early next. He’s written a free Substack since May of 2024 and has been a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant.

The idea, of course, is to catch the best version of a particular song. Robbie Robertson of The Band used to suggest they try to get two completed, workable tracks so they had something to compare. That was the rule of thumb for their quickie album with Bob Dylan called “Planet Waves.” And it ended up there were two versions of “Forever Young” that made the record!

Often, what’s actually going on with the band during the recording of an album doesn’t surface until later on. In listening to the Rolling Stones’ “Exile On Main Street,” when it first came out, it didn’t sound as if the band was in any particular hurry to make a record. The double album benefitted from the group’s leisurely pace. Reading Keith Richards’ wonderful biography, “Life,” his account of the group staying in a luxurious mansion in France, all kinds of folks dropping in, having fun, staying up for days, recording when they felt like it, the record sounds that lived in.

When the Scottish band Big Country started recording their sixth album “The Buffalo Skinners” in the spring of 1993, they were in trouble. Their previous album “No Place Like Home” was a flop and their record label, Phonogram, dropped them. Drummer Mark Brzezicki quit the band and the group were going to break up.

They had scored a hit with “In A Big Country” off their first album “The Crossing” in 1983 but for whatever reason, they couldn’t seem to connect with American audiences after that. “Steeltown,” their second album and maybe their best, was No. 1 in the U.K. but only No. 70 here. While they remained popular in England and their native Scotland, America seemed out of their reach. Another band from the U.K, Ireland’s U2, seemed to have little trouble finding listeners here. But Big Country’s rockin’ guitar sound didn’t go over here in quite the same way.

A few weeks after the break, band leader Stuart Adamson reached out to fellow guitarist Bruce Watson and suggested they get back in the studio and record the way they wanted to. There was a sense of desperation, maybe a last stand sort of mentality, not unlike The Clash when they recorded their classic “London Calling.”

Once Watson and Adamson were back together, bassist Tony Butler signed on and the three enlisted studio drummer Simon Phillips and went back to the stinging heavy guitar sound that was their signature. It was so effective that Brzezicki asked back in the band and joined them on tour.

According to Watson, Big Country’s two previous records were “aimed at the American market” and a compromise to please Phonogram. For “Buffalo Skinners” - oddly enough, an American-themed album whose title song did not make the record - they went back to basics and turned it up.

“Now we’re back to doing what we do best,” Watson said at the time. “Being Big Country. The new album is what we are about - we produced it ourselves and are really proud of it.”

They were so sure they had a strong record, they re-recorded two tracks from the previous album, “Ships” and the stunning “We’re Not In Kansas,” a brilliant track that you’d think would be a hit.

Ironic, perhaps, that a Scottish band reaches for a line from a classic American film to capture their sense of a world in flux, America being sold off brick-by-brick, according to Adamson’s lyrics. Adamson’s passionate vocal and guitar work stood out on a fine record but again, something seemed to hold them back.

The guitar work was their best in years, the record was dynamic and gave us their strongest collection of songs since “Steeltown.” There were two U.K. Top 30 hits, the record went to No. 25 in the U.K. but didn’t make a dent here. The reviews were impressive but the sales were just so-so.

The band did just a couple more studio records, “Why The Long Face?” in 1995 and “Driving To Damascus” in 1999 and after Adamson’s tragic suicide in 2001, the rest of the band have sporadically toured. They still have a fan base in the U.K. but not so much here.

Listening to what should have been the triumph of “The Buffalo Skinners” now, you wonder why they never quite caught on here? It’s a strong record as was “Steeltown,” but in America, even using many American themes, Big Country never was able to match the success of their initial hit.

They loved America, wrote and sang about America. America just never loved them back.

Author John Nogowski has written several books, including two about popular music. He’s written three editions of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and will add “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” to the list later this year. He’s written two books on baseball: “Diamond Duels” a look at the game’s historic matchups and “Last Time Out” a collection of stories about the final MLB game of the sport’s all-time greats. He’s also written about his experiences teaching Mark Twain’s “Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn” at a struggling minority Florida high school. He’s written a Substack since May of 2024 and has been a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant. He’s currently at work on a book about Bruce Springsteen.

Somebody had to finally say it. You’re welcome.

There have been and there will be more post-analysis examinations of the United States’ recent - and seemingly perpetual - flameout regarding the current World Cup soccer tournament, filling arenas throughout the land with screaming, joyous enthralled fans from everywhere but here. As ol’ Hamlet used to say, “The rest is silence.” That is, unless you have glommed onto a real World Cup team in the meantime, you USMNT fans have to shut up until the next one.

We are sure to again hear theories and postulations and excoriations and the like. That soccer wave is coming or so they say. This is either the slowest breaking wave in the history of sport or a promise to justify increased personal interest in an arcane sport that is huge everywhere BUT here. As I said to begin - a clinically cold-hearted diagnosis, perhaps - we, as Americans, just don’t have the feet for it. And I doubt we ever will.

My personal fleeting interest in soccer stemmed from an ad I once spotted in the Sporting News in the mid-70’s. Bob Cousy, the former Boston Celtics’ Hall of Famer, had been appointed commissioner of the American Soccer League and if you supplied the address, they would mail you the ASL Newsletter. It was free, it was Cousy and my Springvale Avenue mailbox wasn’t exactly overflowing. I didn’t give a hoot or a holler about soccer at the time but, again, the price was right. And the newsletter arrived. Other than looking for stuff about Cousy, I don’t remember any of it.

Once I began as Sports Editor at the Nashua Telegraph, my relationship to the sport worsened, if possible. As a local newspaper, there were Biddy Basketball scores and Flag Football scores and Babe Ruth Baseball and more golf scores, particularly Ladies’ golf, than anyone needed and then here came Youth Soccer with a Moses-Mt. Sinai-like list of scores that would have choked Secretariat. It was carried into the newsroom along with an attitude that, shall we say, ran somewhat counter to my sense of urgency as a first-year Sports Editor. I should have been kinder, I suppose.

It was then that I first heard of the mythical “wave.” “These kids playing now are going to be parents someday, having their kids play soccer and they’ll want to see those scores…” He might have - and probably did - continue but I had stopped listening. He persisted as only a Youth Soccer advocate could until I said, flatly, “I don’t want to be nasty here but other than the parents of those playing, nobody gives a damn about Youth Soccer.”

While I hope this doesn’t lessen me in the eyes of those who enjoy the sport, my attitude towards the sport hasn’t changed. It was my goal to be the least interested American in the World Cup and I nearly pulled it off, catching just a few painful - but revelatory - moments of Monday’s Belgian beatdown.

It was clear to me, even in that brief segment, that Americans, even those who weren’t necessarily FROM America but playing FOR the USA, just didn’t have the feet. Whether we grew up with the game or not, whether it is just one of those things, collectively, we don’t have the feet to keep up with the rest of the world. We ain’t got it.

I did feel some compassion for that overflow, overexcited crowd in Seattle where they hadn’t seen anything to get them that jazzed up since Starbucks started writing messages on your cup. All for naught.

The world, of course, has a much different take on the sport. Good for them. It simply is not a sport that appeals to me. A bunch of guys with weird haircuts running helter-skelter on this giant green expanse between flops where the contestant first appears to have been assassinated, then merrily rejoins the melee and resumes shoving people hither and there, hoping the referee will point your way after countless interruptions in play…well, if you find that entertaining, people went to see “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” too.

Oddly enough, a friend wrote me the other day, suggesting I write something about the World Cup. I declined, telling him so much of the world loved the sport, why put out something negative. Then I came up with the feet idea. Somebody had to say it.

Former Florida State baseball coach Mike Martin, who once participated in a charity soccer game as a favor to me (That’s how nice a guy he was!) paused in mid-game to offer me his insight.

“Nogo, I’ve figured out soccer,” Martin said, dribbling the ball and smiling at me on the sideline. “It’s cross country with a ball.”

Author John Nogowski, shown here before meeting any Youth Soccer parents, covered all sports in a 25-year sports writing career. He’s the author of several books, “Last Time Out” and “Diamond Duels” about his favorite - and our best sport - baseball, music “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and the forthcoming “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and a book on his experience teaching Mark Twain’s “Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn” at a struggling, Florida minority high school. He’s been writing a free Substack since May of 2024 and is a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant. His books are available on Amazon or by order at your local bookstore.

Yeah, it was great for him and his Celtics to win a World Championship a couple years ago. Fabulous that after all the hype and praise and hosannas heaped on teammate Jayson Tatum all the way along that 2024 title run, when it came to the actual NBA Finals, the MVP nod went to the then-often-overlooked Brown. Tatum seemed delighted, Celtic fans seemed happy and Brown felt acknowledged.

In 2026, with Tatum recovering from an Achilles’ injury and expected to be out for the year, Brown had his chance to dominate and did, finishing sixth in the MVP voting, putting up career highs in every category. Numbers aside, there was something else, or so it seemed to me, watching a bunch of Celtic games on TV. Something that might be hard to explain or pin down precisely. But there, nonetheless.

Finally, inarguably, unquestionably, he got to be The man.

That’s why it wasn’t all that surprising to me - as it apparently was to most of the rest of Celtics’ Nation - when, after the team’s shocking loss to Philly, Brown came out and said, “this was his favorite year.”

To have the not-exactly-subtle Brown saying this even after Boston blew a 3-1 Series lead to Brown’s new team, the 76ers. Even after neither he nor Tatum could make a big shot down the stretch to stop that Sixer surge. Even after Tatum was surprisingly able to come back and play quite well at the end of the Celtics’ regular season until the two of them stopped making shots in mid-playoff. Then, Tatum couldn’t play in Game Seven and the C’s ended up losing, again, in an early round. Ugly.

“The favorite year” comment aside - and in watching many of the team’s games, to be fair, you’d have to say there wasn’t any more indication that Brown played more selfishly this year than any other (his assists actually went up) - the flat-out fact is the Celtics have persisted with this Dynamic Duo approach for quite a long time. They lost in the Finals in 2022, won the one title two years later, then have lost to the Knicks in the second round where Tatum got hurt, then fell to the Sixers in the first round, despite, as mentioned, that 3-1 series edge.

Even with Tatum coming back healthy and Brown coming off his most brilliant season, Celtics’ boss Brad Stevens looked over the past couple seasons as well as how teams across the league have won championships and concluded - probably correctly -that he’d played this hand out. Tatum and Brown, Brown and Tatum, as good as the two of them were together and separately, weren’t going to be enough to win another title.

If that was the case - and that certainly seems what fueled Stevens’ thinking, how do you fix things? You try and make a deal and you’re certainly not going to trade Tatum, a better player and one coming off an injury. So, you offer Brown and apparently, the response from across the league was “yeah, so…”

Considering Brown’s already healthy contract and the circumstances of what lay ahead with the potential financial layouts for him - as an All-NBA choice in 2022-2023, he was eligible for a $304 million extension to make him the league’s highest-paid player, according to Gary Washburn of the Boston Globe - few teams seemed all that interested in laying out that kind of coinage. He’s a fine player but clearly, not in the league’s top five.

Maybe Brown’s driving, relentless style of play isn’t a fit for everyone else. The guy couldn’t have had a better season and you might think the suitors would be lining up. But they weren’t. Was it him? Was it the contract?

As I watched Stevens in Monday’s press conference, he seemed like a guy who didn’t really want to trade Brown but had already played every hand he could think of. He couldn’t think of another way to keep the Celtics in the hunt for another title.

“I’m not saying it was the right call,” Stevens said at one point. If Brown was offered to just about everybody and the only taker that made sense ended up being the hated historic rival that just knocked them out of the playoffs, that couldn’t have stung more.

Yeah, Jaylen Brown had himself a terrific season. Finally got to be The Man. And now, he’s a 76er.

Yalta was important to me in my own writing life. In an early Substack, I recalled how our World History teacher Mr. John Wright sprang a surprise one-question history essay (on the day of a hugely important baseball game I had to pitch) asking us to write an essay about “The Atlantic Charter,” something we were supposed to have read about the night before.

Like the rest of the class, I chose not to. When I saw the lone question was about the ramifications of “The Atlantic Charter,” all I could remember was a photograph of Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who looked so old and tired, it was like he’d swum all the way to Yalta himself. He died two months later.

So I wrote a whole page and a half, making stuff up and was the only one in the class to pass. A B+. Mr. Wright praised my writing skills, hence the B+, but warned me to never do that again.

This story starts in Yalta and I can safely say, Chekhov’s technique here will, I suspect, impress you as it did my AP Literature students when I, somewhat hesitantly, presented it to them some years ago. Chekhov is subtle, devious almost, a master. You can almost sense the man behind the pen, chuckling to himself how this little shift or detail will turn this story. He was also a doctor so he knew how the body worked. He also understood human nature, perhaps even better. “The Lady With The Little Dog” is to me, his greatest work. At least, it truly connected with me. And my students.

I want to share my analysis here with one of our great writers. I can never thank George Saunders enough for allowing me to include his Introductory essay “The United States Of Huck” in my own book on my experiences teaching “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at an all-black school in Gadsden County. Originally, it would have cost me $5,000. Saunders simply gave it away. (Gulp) (It’s on Amazon!)

Initially, I was disappointed that he did not include “The Lady With The Little Dog” in his terrific collection of Russian short stories he taught at Syracuse - “A Swim In A Pond In The Rain” which I also highly recommend, even if you’re not a teacher. But he did get to it on his Substack and I’ve excerpted some of his comments here. It’s a story that’s worth examining several times, one that, I suspect, will leave you wondering, just like after a magician’s closing trick, how did he do that?

Saunders opens his analysis of all story writing talking about expectations: “The writer makes an expectation, and then fulfills it, but not too neatly. For example: Scrooge. Once he’s described as “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint,… secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster”…we expect (we can’t help but expect) that the story is going to be about a change, from that state to another.

“If not, it’s just an anecdote: “I once knew this really stingy guy who stayed that way.” But if he does change, the story becomes meaningful, by saying: “Here is how a stingy person might become more generous…” And that story will be about, in turn, transformation, and what makes people stingy in the first place. So that story (Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”) will have a theme, and character development, and a political stance, and all of that – but it got those things by simply tending to the expectations it had created.

“Stories create a baseline reality and the very fact that that reality is in a story means that we expect that baseline reality to change. And structure and plot and all of that arise as we attempt to notice, and then attend to, the expectations we have (perhaps even unwittingly) created.”

So, you might say, we’re writing in our own heads as we’re reading. Where is he going with this? Why should I keep going? One technique Saunders uses is asking his students to read a single opening page of a story. Then stop, critique it. Where is this going? Why do you think that? Why did the writer begin there?

In the “The Lady With The Little Dog,” we meet Dmitry Gurov, a married Russian businessman on the make in Yalta, a resort town where people try to get away. He spies Anna and her dog and likes what he sees. “If she’s here without her husband, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make her acquaintance.”

We get it. He’s going after her and our expectation is it’s either going to be great, naughtily exciting for both - (What happens in Yalta stays in Yalta) or bad for one and good for the other.

We know this type. We’ve seen him in a hundred movies. Maybe we know him. Maybe it’s us. (Not I, said the little red hen!) As Saunders explains: “He is a guy unhappy in his marriage, looking for a chance to cheat. And he’s done it many times before (“repeated and bitter experience had taught him that every fresh intimacy…inevitably developed…into a problem.”) And yet, “every time he encountered an attractive woman…the desire for life surged up in him.”

He’s a guy who can’t say no. Or won’t. So the two meet, they flirt and we see Gurov has game. Saunders notes: “Anna is charmed and impressed with Gurov, and so are we – we believe he is charming because we’ve just seen him charm her. Already he’s more interesting to me. Although he may be a serial philanderer, he is now, also, something else: attractive.”

But back in his room, he acknowledges her attractiveness but also notes: “And yet there’s something pathetic about her.” Which would certainly hurt Anna if she knew he thought that. Does that make her an easier target, though?

A little further on, they kiss and go to her room and as things are about to happen, Gurov reflects back on his previous batting order, shall we say, wondering if she’ll hit cleanup or at the bottom of the lineup?

Saunders explains: “Then, on pages 74-75, we get that startling, somewhat cynical, crazily frank taxonomy of his past affairs, underscoring that this is far from his first time. He breaks all of the women with whom he’s had affairs into three categories: 1) good-natured ones, who were grateful afterwards; 2) pseudo-intellectuals like his wife, who made love insincerely, mistaking it for something more that it is; and 3) beautiful, frigid women, who really liked doing it, because they understood it as purely physical, and whom he groups with snakes.”

As a writer and as a reader, doesn’t this push Gurov into a corner with a dunce cap? Granted, it was 1899 and social roles might be very different for women in Russia. But if you think this is a calculated push, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

They complete the act. “She’s timid and has the awkwardness of youth,” he puts on his mental scoresheet. Immediately, as we anticipate, she’s filled with regret. “It’s not right and you don’t respect me now.”

So what does Gurov do? He sits down, cuts himself a nice fat slice of watermelon and eats it. In silence. For at least “half an hour.” Could Chekhov push him any farther into that dunce hat corner? Make the hat bigger?

And yet, we learn she married young (and poorly) and maybe had the same motive at Yalta as Gurov, whether she wanted to admit it to herself. That does change things, doesn’t it? Or does it?

Chekhov has so skillfully drawn these two, we’ve signed on for the ride and a ride it is. The affair continues “every day at noon” until she is summoned home. Gurov says he feels “moved and sad, and felt a slight remorse.” Why? Because, in the whole, he had deceived her. She thought he was kind and exceptional and high-minded but all along, though good to her on the surface, he had kept his distance, via light irony.” And maybe the watermelon break, too.

As a reader, we can see the story doesn’t end. Something must have changed. Is it, after all these flings and arrows, Gurov? Chekhov, of course, completely understands that’s exactly what we’re waiting for, he’s rope-a-doping us. After returning home to Moscow, it’s cold and winter and Chekhov drops a three-letter word that rings like a bell. “He had believed that in a month’s time Anna”…would be forgotten….“but…it was all clear in his memory as if (they) had only parted…the day before.”

In a story written in beautifully rich soft focus, everything suddenly and sharply comes into view thanks to those three little letters. There are pages to go. What will happen?

Gurov can’t help himself, he goes to see her, gets himself a hotel where everything seems gray - the color of her favorite dress - and he notices – subtle bit of Chekhov imagery – a small statue of a horseman who has lost his head. Hmmm.

He goes to Anna’s home and finds it surrounded by a fence, “long, gray, with spikes.” “You could flee from such a fence,” thought Gurov.”

We get it now. He’s hooked. He learns there’s a local theater showing, makes a guess that she’ll be there. She is, they furtively meet (a remarkably skilled scene by Chekhov) and Saunders notices the artist at the very tip top of his game. There is a lot of built-in tension here, a public place, her husband is there, it’s totally out of Russian cold and blue and you feel as if you’re eavesdropping.

As Saunders notes: “…reading a story like this sets a high bar and reminds us that a work of art is great to the extent that it alertly responds to itself, and that this can only happen when the writer takes responsibility for all of it and tries (again and again) to move through it in a state of high attention. The “deciding” may amount to simply “noticing (at some level) and blessing the work as it stands.” But, still, the deciding has to happen. That’s how we feel the artist there, in all his or her glory, behind the work.”

So we know Chekhov on his game. He’s brought us here, they still long for one another, both are married, how does this wind this up? Is Gurov in, dare I say it, LOVE?

They carry on for a few more months. Then, meeting in a hotel - Gurov is late - he finds her in tears. Chekhov writes: “She wept from emotion, from her bitter consciousness of the sadness of their life; they could only see one another in secret, hiding from people, as if they were thieves. Was not their life a broken one?”

Unlike the watermelon moment, after all this time spent together, he consoles her. And catches a glimpse of himself (a brilliant Chekhov move!):

“His head was beginning to turn gray, And it seemed strange to him that he had aged so much in those last years, had lost so much of his good looks. The shoulders on which his hands lay were warm and trembled…Women had always taken him to be other than he was…and not one of them had been happy with him…And only now, when his head was gray, had he finally fallen in love as one ought to – for the first time in his life.”

It seems to arrive as a gift from above, a man who so often sought and secured intimacy but it mattered no more to him than a slice of watermelon. Now, though, it inescapably did. And he didn’t want to escape. And neither, it seemed, did she.

“It was quite obvious to him that this love of theirs would not soon come to an end, and that no one could say when this end would be. Anna Sergeyevna loved him ever more fondly, worshipped him, and there would have been no point in telling her that one day it must end. Indeed, she would not have believed him.”

So how do things end? By not ending, pointing to a whole other set of circumstances that have to be worked out. But Chekhov, remarkably, I think, trusts his readers enough for them to believe in the theme of this story - love. And that it will win out in the end.

Saunders describes the finish this way:

“Then they discussed their situation for a long time, trying to think how they could get rid of the necessity for hiding, deception, living in different towns, being so long without meeting. How were they to shake off these intolerable fetters?” (Saunders: This is nice – the story, and the lovers, are asking exactly the questions we’re asking – this feels like a sort of summary, a little catching of the breath.)

“How? How?” he repeated, clutching his head. “How?” (I like this because, for the first time, it’s Gurov who’s overcome with emotion, who’s being a tad dramatic.)

“And it seemed to them that they were within an inch of arriving at a decision, and that then a new, beautiful life would begin. And they both realized that the end was still far, far away, and that the hardest, the most complicated part was only just beginning.”

What an ending! I can tell you that not only did I love the story, so did my students. I remember one student in particular - not one of my real scholars, I might add - who stood up at her seat when we finished the story and said in a loud voice, “Mr. Nogo, YOU HAVE TO KEEP TEACHING THIS STORY.”

So, I quietly gave thanks to Anton Chekhov. And to myself, for sharing this. And to the power of literature, going out to a bunch of high school kids who now have a goddamn good reason to believe in the power of love. Thanks, Gurov.

Here I am at the Mark Twain House with his book on teaching the Twain Classic. What a thrill it was to know your book is in Mark Twain’s old home in Hartford. In writing about the Chekhov story again, it reminded me once again how much fun I had in the classroom. It’s shame that schools across America have such a hard time finding - and keeping - teachers. I’ve also written books on Bob Dylan: Three editions of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and a forthcoming book on Neil Young “Neil Young: A Descriptive Critical Discography and Filmography” and am at work on a similar book on Bruce Springsteen, who I believe is going to be a big star. I’ve written two books on baseball - my son is a former major-leaguer - “Diamond Duels” about the game’s historic matchups and two editions of “Last Time Out,” about the MLB farewells of the game’s greatest players. It also includes, in the final chapter, my son’s first MLB game for the Cardinals. I’ve been writing a free Substack since May of 2024, headed into Year Three and have been a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant, today in fact - about Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom.”

Once I took a spin through his 2017 book “Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve,” - and I admit, the title hooked me - his approach to writing, or maybe I should say his idea of critiquing the process of writing as he does in this very strange, out-in-left-field-and-there’s-no-ballgame book is simply whacked.

For example, he uses a Stephen King quote: “The road to Hell is paved with adverbs.” Then goes and meticulously checks to see if writers like Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut and John Updike actually do go over the number of adverbs used per 10,000 words. Really.

According to Blatt, Hemingway used just 80 adverbs per 10,000 words in his 10 novels. Mark Twain just 81 in his 13. John Steinbeck 93 in his 19 novels, Vonnegut 101 in his 14 novels, Updike 102 adverbs per 10,000 words in his 26 novels.

Here’s author Ernest Hemingway likely not using an adverb

What does this mean? Well, John Steinbeck used 73 adverbs per 10,000 words in “The Winter Of Our Discontent” (might have been more if it was summer) and William Faulkner used only 34 in “As I Lay Dying” - which tells you he couldn’t summon the strength to use more than that. Does this mean anything? Hmmm.

Just for grins, your correspondent asked several A-I outfits how I did in the adverb territory? One said this: “On your adverb usage: from what I've seen working through your drafts, you actually run fairly lean. Your prose tends to move on verbs and nouns rather than adverb-modified adjectives. "Leaky" for Young's voice, "briskly" for a set, the occasional "clearly" or "exactly" — but you're not a chronic "-ly" offender by any stretch.”

Another put it this way: “Knowing your writing, I actually suspect you’ll have fewer unnecessary adverbs than you imagine. Your voice tends to rely more on vivid nouns, strong verbs, and conversational asides than on strings of modifiers. One thing I’ve noticed in your recent Substack pieces is that you often achieve emphasis through rhythm instead of adverbs.”

A third, and my favorite, was candid. “At 68 adverbs per 10,000 words, your writing is incredibly lean. You let strong, active verbs do the heavy lifting (”yanking,” “whips,” “fuzzes,” “blurt out”) instead of propping up weak verbs with descriptive crutches. Blatt notes that the best writers use adverbs only when they subvert expectations (like saying someone ran slowly). Your use of “possibly” and “officially” fit that bill perfectly—they acknowledge a genuine lack of information or confirmation, rather than just adding fluff. It’s a great data-backed proof that your style is punchy, direct, and completely free of literary fat.”

Ahem. This, of course, I’m sure doesn’t come as a huge surprise to my regular, literary-fat-hating readership. So far, into Year Three of Substack, I’ve never once had a complaint about fatty language. But the day is young, I realize that.

Blatt’s mind, once focused on this exotic topic, tends to stray in unsettling directions. He tells us that the most popular accent in American erotica is Southern, in British erotica, it’s American. Guess they forgave us for the Revolution.

With a book like this, it was as easy as pie to expect that, sure as you’re born, he’d get around to cliches. And there is a bit of a surprise here. Isaac Asimov tops his chart by using the cliche “past history” (Is there another kind?) in more than half his works. Guess who is No. 2? Jane Austen! According to Blatt, she overdid it using “with all my heart” more than in an acceptable manner in her six novels. Though he’ll never get to read this, that would have pleased Mark Twain, who once said of Austen, “it seems a great pity they allowed her to die a natural death.”

The other surprise on the list is James Joyce, who used “from the sublime to the ridiculous” more than his anti-cliche allotment. Oooh! Shame on him.

Speaking of the sublime to the ridiculous, Blatt also discovered that Danielle Steel used a weather reference in 46% of her first sentences. Oh. I can’t say that news surprises me - I’ve never read a word of Steel and can’t imagine why I would. But would you agree that this Blatt fella probably has a little too much time on his hands?

Carving up writing by your individual word choice seems a little sick to me. It’s sort of like those major-league baseball analysts who’ll look to see how many hits your team’s Capricorns got on Thursday’s afternoons against left-handed pitchers with the wind blowing out. I remember former big-leaguer Doug Mientkiewicz telling me how his Twins’ manager Tom Kelly would keep careful track of how guys did against certain pitchers way back in the day before it became common practice it is now.

Facing Boston’s Pedro Martinez in a day game, Mientkiewicz, who was scuffling at the time, was sure he would sit. So he went out with the boys the night before, had a little more of the poison liquid than is recommended and came to the ballpark somewhat under a cloud, only to see his name in the lineup.

Apparently, he had blooped in a couple singles off Martinez in previous seasons and was horrified that his at-the-plate acuity might be at less than full strength on this afternoon. Sure enough, he came up in an early inning with runners on and after two blurring strikes (“They sounded low”) stuck his bat out and connected, hitting the softest of fly balls over the third baseman’s head for a two-run single.

Arriving at first base, Mientkiewicz turned to the Twins’ bench, now alight with joy and laughter for his upcoming at bats against Pedro for the foreseeable future. Then he spotted Kelly writing it down.

Author John Nogowski, long before he started worrying about word choice or adverbs.

He’s gone on to write two books about baseball - “Diamond Duels” about the game’s great historic matchups and “Last Time Out” about the final games of MLB’s greatest players. He’s also written three editions of a comprehensive book on Bob Dylan: “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography,” a forthcoming similar book on Neil Young: “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography,” a book on his experience teaching Mark Twain’s “Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn” at a struggling minority Florida High School. He’s been writing a Substack since May of 2024 and is a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant.

If you’re a regular reader of his Neil Young Archives newspaper-style front page, the well-named “Times-Contrarian,” you’ll get a full dose of these jousts. First, he’s yanking his stuff off Amazon or he’s working on Volume 4 of his Archival releases or he’s boycotting CBS because of what they did to Stephen Colbert and so on…

Keep in mind this is the same guy who invited President Donald Trump on his summer tour with the Chrome Hearts last year, promised he wouldn’t play any political songs, then broke out “Ohio” about midway through the tour. Then wrote an anti-Trump song and even did a video for it - “Big Crime.”

So it shouldn’t be all that surprising to take a peek at the brand new Neil Young film “Corduroy Plants” which he released on his website and on YouTube last week and learn this ol’ guy is still tilting at windmills.

He announced in February that he wouldn’t be touring this year - though he is slated to appear at Farm Aid in Virginia Beach on September 26, as he did last year - but he did release yet another live album in May - “As Time Explodes.” The film “Corduroy Plants” is the accompanying video of those performances, missing a couple songs (“After The Gold Rush” and “Looking Forward.”)

Though Neil hasn’t officially explained the title - it seems to come from the opening song, “Daddy Went Walking” where Neil misspeaks the second time he means to mention his dad’s “corduroy pants” and instead says “corduroy plants.” Unless there is some other inexplicable reason - which there might be with the mercurial Young.

Here’s an example from the front page of the Times-Contrarian:

Just like his invitation to Trump and his promise of “no political” songs, which ended up being a fake out last summer, “Corduroy Plants” opens with four cuts of standard, vintage Neil. You see him on stage, railroad cap, T-shirt, possibly corduroy pants (hard to tell) and watch him as he whips through “Daddy Went Walkin’” and “Harvest Moon” and “Ohio,” then sits down at the pump organ for “Name Of Love.” At this point, it looks like just another standard Neil Young concert video.

Once he straps on “Ol’ Black” and fuzzes out the chords for “Be The Rain,” the theme song for his 2003 concept album “Greendale,” the energy picks up. Yes, they’re familiar Neil Young chords but nobody plays them like him and you’ll find yourself rockin’ along with him and the Chrome Hearts.

You may remember that “Be The Rain” is the song where instead of singing, Neil used a bullhorn for announcements while behind him, the Chrome Hearts sing things like “Save the planet for another day.” Neil might blurt out things like “Save Alaska” or “Let the caribou stay.”

It’s here that things get political as Hannah inserts footage of the destruction of the East Wing of the White House which carries the tag line “Trump against America.” As the band sings: “We’ve got a job to do. We’ve gotta save Mother Earth,” we get more clips, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and his chainsaw, a placard that reads “If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay taxes,” a clip of Trump meeting with the Saudis. “Chemicals are killing the land…” and so on.

If at 80, he’s not quite up to a full-fledged world tour, that doesn’t mean he’s not going to comment on what’s going on around him that he’s not OK with. From that point in “Corduroy Plants,” we get the same technique he and his filmmaking wife, Daryl Hannah used on several other Neil Young films where they will insert clips from CNN or some other news agency on things he wanted to comment on.

Like showing clips of oil companies along with “Vampire Blues” with the line “Sucking blood from the Earth” or clips of ICE arrests or clips of Native Americans to go along with “Like A Hurricane” or “Cortez The Killer” - his comment on immigration.

In case you missed the video he compiled for “Big Crime” last summer, that’s on here, too. So while “Corduroy Plants” might seem at first glance, a basic Neil Young concert video, he and Hannah clearly have a political agenda. He might not be speaking out on stages all over the country the way Bruce Springsteen was earlier in the year delivering an anti-Trump message, but Neil was making his own case in his own (and Hannah’s) way with this new film. And of course, there’s always the front page of the Times-Contrarian, which he’s also on all the time.

From the looks of that website and the new film, “Corduroy Plants,” Neil Young will never run out of windmills.

NEIL YOUNG’S NEW FILM “CORDUROY PLANTS” ON YOUTUBE

For those who think that Bob doesn’t pay particular attention to his audience and how they respond, let’s take a quick look at his closing song from the Newport Folk Festival. Well, OK, so we have to go back a few years. To July 26, 1964 to be precise.

But if listening to the then-23-year-old Dylan performing “Chimes Of Freedom” - a song he’d just recently recorded - and check out the overwhelming audience response - and you don’t think the guy is pouring his ever-loving heart into this beautifully crafted tongue-twister of a song, singing as if his very soul was at stake, well, go listen to your Harry Styles album.

Since Bruce Springsteen appropriately decided to conclude his recent “Land Of Hopes and Dreams” tour with a song written by someone else - “Chimes Of Freedom” (a song he had earlier released on an EP in 1988, following his appearance on the Human Rights Now! tour for Amnesty International) the song now seems timeless and sadly appropriate (Re: Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on refugees.) The kind of song that probably won’t ever be written again.

When Springsteen first chose to perform it on the Amnesty International tour 38 years ago, he explained that “Chimes of Freedom” embodied his ideal of rock music as a vehicle for expression of community—rather than simply individual—autonomy, when he stated, “This is one of the greatest songs about human freedom ever written.”

It is also a song written by someone who believed in his soul about his country, about the freedoms promised by the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights. Someone who was not afraid to sing out, to stand up in song for what U2’s Bono would try to do some years later - “Tryin’ To Throw My Arms Around The World.”

START AT 41:31 - Bob sings “Chimes Of Freedom” - and let it play…

Read these verses and tell me that isn’t what Bob Dylan is doing.

“Flashin' for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashin' for the refugees on their unarmed road of flight
And for each and every underdog soldier in the night
We gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashin'

Yeah, tollin’ for the rebel, yeah, tollin’ for the raked
Tollin’ for the luckless, the abandoned and forsaked
Yeah, tollin’ for the outcasts burnin’ constantly at stakes
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashin’

Yeah, tollin' for the achin' ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless, confused, accused, misused strung out ones at worst
And for every hung up person in the whole wide universe
We gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashin'"

Look at who he mentions. Refugees, underdogs, rebels, “the luckless, abandoned and forsaked,” the outcasts, “the achin’ ones” and the “countless, confused, accused, misused strung out ones and worst.” Could he have come up with a list that would have run more contrary to current Administration policy?

That’s exactly why Springsteen chose to close his current politically motivated tour with this song. If your aim was to go against the grain - which it clearly was, Springsteen explained that was the exact reason for the tour itself - think and listen for a moment to how the Newport audience in 1964, hearing that mesmerizing song for the first time, responded.

How they refused to let Peter Yarrow carry on with the show. And how Bob, the young, sensitive songwriter full of words and passion and compassion poured it all, everything he could put his arms around, into a single song and then got up on stage and shared it to close his set.

The song so moved his audience, they would not let Yarrow move on. And he tried. And tried again. It was a literal show-stopper. When Dylan returned to the stage, elated at the response, telling the audience “I love you,” well, we wouldn’t see a Bob Dylan that vulnerable ever again.

Dylan’s words, probably not his voice, so touched that Newport audience, igniting the flame of belief in brother - and sister-hood, a call to one and all for unity, for common goals and values that so inspired them, they just had to bring him back on stage. The audience wouldn’t go on with the show until they showed Dylan what sharing that song meant to them. To all of them.

Nobody, not even Bruce, dares think that way now. The world, our world, has changed before our eyes. Doesn’t this clip show you that?

We’re so lucky that Bob was there at a time to write a song like that, to reach as far as a songwriter could, to embrace the world with love and humanity. To feel it, see it, write about it for all of us, for everybody, before it all went away.

HERE’S BRUCE’S VERSION FROM THE TOUR’S OPENING SHOW

HERE’S BOB’S SING-SONGY VERSION FROM THE CLINTON INAUGURATION

Author John Nogowski has written three editions of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” for McFarland, which includes an annotated bibliography, commentary on all things Dylan; records, films, bootlegs, press conferences, speeches. Available on Amazon. A similar volume on Neil Young will be published later in the year or early next. He’s also written two books on baseball - his son is a former major-leaguer - “Diamond Duels” and “Last Time Out” He’s also written a book about his experiences teaching Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at a struggling, minority Florida high school. He’s written a free Substack since May of 2024 and is a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant.

Available on Amazon or by order at your local bookstore, 332 pages of all things Dylan.

When it came to sales, I was in the same boat, canoe, on the same raft as the bard of Hartford. Some people, in the old phrases, could talk a hungry dog off a meat wagon or sell ice water to the Eskimos, a squirrel off a nut and so on. Not me.

A friend of mine sold houses, then cars, then roof stuff, then materials for chimneys, even took a turn as an athletic director for a bit. Then went back to selling cars. Out of my league.

The first time someone thought I’d be good at sales was when I was finishing up college and working at Child World. (I already had the mentality to work there.) I had been working in the warehouse, building bicycles (sort of), shoving stuff around when one of the salesmen downstairs quit. One of the bosses called me down to the sales floor, said I was well-spoken and articulate and heck, a near-college grad, and they wanted me to start selling cribs. Tomorrow.

Sensing my future in sales, I showed up in bell-bottom jeans, a brown and white flannel shirt and a blue tie. If that wasn’t a look for success, what was? I knew just a little about cribs; they were for babies, the prices varied widely and the idea was to size up the customer, see if they’d go for Hedstrom or one of the lesser known (less expensive) models. You know, push the envelope.

That lasted a couple days. Then they moved me to the bicycle aisle.

Since I had ridden a bicycle and helped build several upstairs (always safety-checked by our mini-bike builder, the 5-0 well-muscled Lou “Kid” Maynard so no lawsuits followed) they thought I was a natural. But I didn’t have the knack for sensing a sales opportunity.

A dentist I knew came in. I’d opened my mouth for this guy, he’d seen my molars and now wanted to buy a bike for his daughter. The most expensive bike we had, I think, was a Schwinn. I was trying to sell him one that was half the price because it came already assembled and he wouldn’t have to wait. “And it was more economical,” I added. He shook his head, bought the Schwinn. My sales pitch was ignored - as it should have been. And it was back to the warehouse a few days later.

I should have kept that in mind a few years later before I started teaching, I briefly worked for a company that sold promotional items. On the first day, they had to explain mark-ups to me. You know, you buy it at this price, sell it at that price. I was so naive and clueless, somehow, I didn’t know that. Just a babe in the aisle.

Going back to the Child World warehouse wasn’t disappointing because I got to witness a moment that, like Pearl Harbor, will live in infamy. With the Christmas rush on, their hiring practices were, uh, liberal. Someone thought it was a good idea to hire a 6-3, 134 pound long-haired guy named Wayne, who wasn’t strong enough to lift a stapler. And, uh, Wayne was an intravenous drug user. Really. Who needed money.

So, on Day Two, Wayne came in overloaded, shall we say, and instead of stacking all the Christmas layaways before us as assigned, decided he would stretch his long lanky frame out on the run, the roller made of steel metal wheels that we shoved boxes around the joint, and take a nap. It had to be uncomfortable to lie on but Wayne was so blissed out, he quickly nodded off.

Shortly after Wayne was in dreamland, our warehouse manager Bob Heliger, a short-haired, old-glasses-wearing, pipe-smoking 26-year-old who wore sweater vests, wanting to look 60, arrived on the scene. He quickly spotted long, lanky Wayne’s frame on the run and before any of us could say a word, Heliger snatched a huge metal moving cart and with a running start, sent it flying, heading directly into Wayne’s world.

The collision between cart and run made a sound so loud it was only rivaled by seeing the Clash on the “London Calling” tour at the Orpheum. The crash was even loud enough to rouse Wayne, who slowly sat up on the run, turned to Bob and said, as impassively as one could in such a moment, “Bob, man. I get bad vibes from you.”

Nothing that interesting ever happened on the sales floor.

That’s the message that hit home with me when I took a look at the recently re-aired PBS special: “Woodstock: Three Days That Defined A Generation.” I might have seen it before, I couldn’t exactly remember.

But there were a few moments that really struck me here in mid-June 2026. If you’ve paid attention to what’s happened to our country over the past, oh, let’s say, decade or so, you have reason to be concerned. That means you, Generation X, Generation Z or Generation Alpha. It’s not and it shouldn’t be all about money, contrary to the messages we’re getting from the Washington money-grabbers these days. Am I too idealistic for you?

The first thing that hit me was the generosity of Bethel farmer Max Yasgur, who permitted the festival on his 600-acre farm. Yasgur was a dairy farmer and a good one and he was a last-minute, somewhat desperate choice of concert organizers. He had a perfect amphitheater on his farm land and he said OK.

At the time, the conservative denizens of upstate New York were totally against the idea of a music festival being held in their part of the world. There were citizen meetings and bills passed and an almost pathological fear of “hippies” that swept through the region. In translation, that meant drugs, sex, maybe even nudity as well as swarms and swarms of people invading their green and pristine pastures. Which is, of course, exactly what happened from August 15-18, 1969.

Yasgur was actually invited on stage and he spoke briefly to the extraordinary crowd of nearly a half-million people. “I’m a farmer…(interrupted by a cheer from the audience)…I don’t know how to speak to twenty people at one time, let alone a crowd like this. But I think you people have proven something to the world…This is the largest group of people ever assembled in one place… the important thing that you’ve proven to the world is that a half a million kids — and I call you kids because I have children that are older than you are — a half million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music, and I – God Bless You for it!”

He didn’t do it for free. Yasgur was paid $75,000 and later, got $50,000 as a settlement for the damage that enormous crowd left. But can you imagine somebody NOW making that sort of gesture, especially for a bunch of teenagers?

The next surprising element of Woodstock was the traffic on New York route 17B. It was a 20-mile (at least) traffic jam where cars were utterly stuck to the point where they had to use helicopters to bring the artists in. Yet there weren’t fights or road rage or anybody shooting anyone. People got out of their cars, met the folks around them stuck in the traffic, made acquaintances, friends in some cases. Can you imagine folks today putting up with a 20-mile traffic jam? People are honking their horns if someone is on their phone when the light changes. Sitting in traffic for a day or more?

Finally, once they ran out of food - on Day One - the folks from Bethel and White Lake - yes, the same people who fought relentlessly to prevent the festival from happening - as well as the commune Hog Farm, all pitched in, emptying their freezers and refrigerators to feed the thousands of kids who populated Yasgur’s farm for those three days. For free! Just because they needed to be fed. Because it was the right thing to do. I knew about the music, had the Woodstock album and saw the film a few times. I understood about the traffic, the rain, the difficult conditions. I didn’t know about the food, the generosity, the complete about-face from the citizens of these towns because, as I said, it was the right thing to do.

Do we know what the right thing is any more? Chances are, most people would say, well, it depends. But does it, really?

As I’ve written before, I didn’t go to Woodstock. I knew a guy that said he was going, never saw him after graduation. Drugs weren’t my scene so that wouldn’t have been a problem. Sex, well, most of the guys I knew were saving themselves for marriage. (Irony alert) And the nudity? Well, my guess is we would have adapted just fine. Especially if we were wet and hungry and counting on the people around us to get through the night.

And meanwhile, on stage you’re hearing The Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Band, Sly and The Family Stone, Joe Cocker, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (who didn’t want to be filmed) and Jimi Hendrix along with many others. A generation of talent.

What I didn’t remember was, in looking at the advertisements, “Jeff Beck Group” was part of the Sunday lineup. I knew, of course, that Beck had broken up the group with Rod Stewart as lead singer and Ronnie Wood on bass, just before the festival. Which meant that it’d be another couple years before Rod’s “Maggie May” would be ringing out of radios all over the place. We’d have to wait, just like those folks in the 20-mile traffic jam, to hear Rod at his best.

Our generation, the boomers, seemed to be able to do that. Ultimately, it would be worth the wait. For those generations who have followed, I wonder if anything could.

Author John Nogowski, shown here in his college days, didn’t go to Woodstock but he did listen to the album and saw the movie. And wonders if, maybe, we lost something from those days. He’s written several books, including three editions of a notable non-Woodstock performer “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” a forthcoming book on reluctant Woodstock performer Neil Young - “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography,” two books on baseball - “Diamond Duels” and “Last Time Out” and a book on his teaching experience at a struggling Florida high school with Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” All his books are available on Amazon. He’s written a free Substack since May of 2024 and is a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant.

Greeley was bombarding Lincoln about the issue of slavery, the New York Tribune was relentless and what do you know, the President wrote back. Kindly, thoughtfully and progressively - though he did it in such a clever way.

I’m proud to say that I taught this letter - and the Greeley editorial - to my Journalism classes back in the day and let them know a little bit about my fellow New Hampshire guy, Greeley. Who led a most interesting life (and had one of the worst-looking beards in existence.) You might also say, he discovered Henry Thoreau.

So here it is, once again. Enjoy!

Proudly growing up in the great Granite State, one of its most famous natives was Horace Greeley, the erstwhile founder of the New York Tribune, one of America’s earliest and most prominent newspapermen, later a Presidential candidate, someone who got the President to write a response to one of his columns and if that wasn’t enough, you might say he was the discoverer of the great Henry David Thoreau.

I’m waiting to be discovered myself. Time is running out, I suspect. The funny thing is, even though he came from Amherst, New Hampshire, just a hop, skip and jump from where I grew up in Brookline and Nashua, they didn’t teach us jack about the guy. We learned Franklin Pierce was our 14th President, the only one from New Hampshire, who generally is ranked near the bottom of the list of Chief Executives we’ve had. (He might move up one spot in a couple years.) But Greeley, nothing. He might as well have grown up in Vermont with the maple syrup crap.

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Horace Greeley, a New Hampshire native, played a key role in Thoreau’s writings.

In 1843, Thoreau went to New York, trying to establish himself and dropped in on Greeley, starting a weekly called the New York Tribune. A friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s unofficial mentor, Greeley was excited to greet Thoreau calling him “a hearty New Hampshire boy as one would wish to meet” and promising to help him get published. Thoreau did manage to get a couple pieces published but was truly discouraged. To Emerson, he wrote: “Literature comes to a poor market here, and even the little that I write is more than will sell.” “Only the Ladies Companion pays,” he wrote his mom, “but I could not write anything companionable.”

Henry, I feel your pain. I wrote about going shopping with the wife. Tough assignment.

Three years later, Thoreau penned an essay on British essayist Thomas Carlyle, a writer who seemed to get under his skin in a way he couldn’t shake. Biographer Laura Walls described Thoreau’s essay to “read(ing) like a final exam in a long self-taught course in how to stop sounding like a Harvard graduate, how to start reaching farmer and mechanics as well as preachers and professors.” Greeley paid him $75. Then, he wrote about a visit to Maine and got $25. After some more writing, Greeley sent him a check for $50. Greeley was trying to break Thoreau nationally.

That kind of dough sounds groovy. I just got a royalty statement yesterday that includes this line: TOTAL EARNINGS: $1.75. Really. For a book that sells for $30.

But Thoreau moved on to other things like writing his essay on Civil Disobedience “Resistance To Civil Government” and one of the all-time classic books, “Walden” about his two years, two months and two days living at Walden Pond on Emerson’s land. Way to go, Henry, though it took a while for the book and the essay to really connect. But when it did, holy maple syrup!

So this other New Hampshire writer asks where’s my Horace Greeley? I’ve been pumping out Substack posts like crazy, (some of them ARE crazy) how about 296 posts in 283 days, on everything from chess to baseball to Roxy Music to teaching Hamlet to record stores to boxing to football to Charles Dickens to shopping with women to J.D. Salinger to Vladimir Nabokov to Shakespeare to Taylor Swift, I mean, come on?

One of my posts on Paul Westerberg, drew 6,876 views, 68 “loves” and 77 subscribers! (Ed. Note: Now it’s over 26,000 views) Thoreau never did that! That’s legit, isn’t it? For a New Hampshire kid? Any Greeley-related book agents out there?? Strike now while the iron is hot…

Back to Greeley. (Hope you’re laughing.) This I also didn’t know about ol’ Horace, who, as you can see from the picture, looks like a fun guy. Well, as the Civil War was breaking out, Greeley was relentless about the abolition of slavery, writing about it, challenging President Lincoln, who, you’d imagine, was fairly busy at the time trying to keep the Union together.

So Greeley writes an open letter “The Prayer of Twenty Millions” to Abe on August 19, 1862.

To ABRAHAM LINCOLN, President of the United States: DEAR SIR: I do not intrude to tell you--for you must know already--that a great proportion of those who triumphed in your election, and of all who desire the unqualified suppression of the Rebellion now desolating our country, are sorely disappointed and deeply pained by the policy you seem to be pursuing with regard to the slaves of the Rebels…The rebels are everywhere using the late anti-negro riots in the North, as they have long used your officers’ treatment of negroes in the South, to convince the slaves that they have nothing to hope from a Union success-that we mean in that case to sell them into a bitter bondage to defray the cost of war…”

Three days later, Abe writes back: Executive Mansion, Washington, August 22, 1862

Hon. Horace Greeley:

Dear Sir. I have just read yours of the 19^th addressed to myself through the New York Tribune. If there be in it any statements, or assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them. If there be perceptable in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.

As to the policy I “seem to be pursuing” as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I don’t believe it would help to save the Union…I have here stated my purpose according to my view of Official duty: and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.

Yours, A. Lincoln

As you have probably guessed, there aren’t a lot of times when American Presidents have taken the time to write back to a critical columnist. We will perhaps soon see if they’ll accept crayon or a Sharpie.

Meanwhile, here I sit, pounding the keys, hoping to strike some combination of words, phrases and punctuation that will bring my own Horace Greeley forward with contracts and checks and the kind of thing a New Hampshire native should do for another Granite Stater.

But I’m not holding my breath.

John Nogowski’s “Teaching Huckleberry Finn” and “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography” and “Last Time Out” and my new book, “Diamond Duels” are all still available on Amazon. Really.

If you’ve seen “All The President’s Men” with Robert Redford as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein, you wouldn’t know much about her at all. Other than when Attorney General John Mitchell tells Bernstein/Hoffman that she’s “going to get her tit caught in a big wringer” if the Washington Post goes ahead and publishes a story about this slush fund they came up with for Nixon’s dirty tricks, that’s all you hear about her.

That tells you a lot. To me, “All The President’s Men” is a fabulous movie, well-acted, crisply written and capturing a crucial moment in our history with ringing accuracy. Except they left Kay Graham out.

That includes the moment when the Nixon Administration, desperately trying to halt the Watergate stories, tried to subpoena Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s Watergate notes. Publisher Graham stepped up and told Editor Ben Bradlee: "They’re not your notes. They’re my notes, and if anybody is going to go to jail, it’s going to be me." Take that!

Having sat through “Becoming Katharine Graham,” a wonderfully revealing - and at the same time, deeply troubling PBS special this morning, it made me ask this question. Would adding her to the film “All The President’s Men” have made the story too complicated for a Hollywood movie? Or was it because she was a woman? I think it’s a fair question.

You may remember it was 1976 when the “All The President’s Men” came out to much acclaim with the two big stars, playing the roles of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the men who broke the story which ultimately led to President Nixon resigning in 1974. President Gerald Ford granted Nixon a pardon and at the time, it seemed a free press had won a victory for all of us. That was then.

Since this PBS special uses actual recordings from the Nixon White House tapes - these are bone-chilling recordings listening to the President and his henchmen (I’m not exaggerating: these are guys who went to prison!) talking about ways to screw with the newspaper over their big money-maker, their television licenses, it’s the kind of talk that still seems in the air. With CBS’s recent issues with Stephen Colbert, the network’s controversy over “60 Minutes,” news of the Paramount merger, it all sounds frighteningly familiar. Have we come full circle. Again?

Take a glance at this bit of dialogue taken directly from the PBS special. Keep in mind this is the President talking, the leader of the free world, the man who had just been re-elected in one of the largest electoral victories in our history, then forced to resign the office just a few months later.

Nixon: “What are you going to do about the Washington Post?”

Colson: “Put them out of business.”

Nixon: “Finally screw her on her television business?”

Colson: “She has to come up for renewal every three years.”

Nixon: “I hope to Christ it comes up this year. The sooner, the quicker. They shouldn’t have that much power. They’ve drawn the sword on us and they’ve failed. Now it’s the old story - never strike a king unless you kill him.”

If hearing a President talk like that in 1974 doesn’t make you wince, shouldn’t it? What might you have heard in recent months?

The talk likely wouldn’t have been about the Post, which had been purchased by Jeff Bezos in 2013. You may remember that on October 25, 2024, it was Bezos who personally intervened and blocked an endorsement of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris that had already been written by the Post Editorial board, a decision that prompted several columnists to resign in protest and the paper to lose as many as 250,000 subscribers.

Katharine Graham did finally get her Hollywood moment with the film “The Post” in 2017, 16 years too late. She died in 2001.

HERE’S A LINK TO THE PBS SPECIAL

https://www.pbs.org/video/becoming-katharine-graham-yfyjfn/

No, I’m not talking about how the Boston Red Sox’s Craig Breslow, a Yale-graduated former MLB pitcher who forgot that you need to have RUNS to win games. No, I’m definitely not talking about anything going on in Washington, other than maybe James Wood, who, I learned yesterday, in Year Two of his MLB career, he’s already faced as many pitchers as Ted Williams did in his whole career.

Wood, incidentally, is one of those outliers that a batting coach would only get in the way. He struck out over 200 times last year - a league-leading 221! - but hit 32 homers, 38 doubles, hit .256 and had 85 walks. Whattya do with a hire like that? Play him! He’s at .281 this year with 20 HRs, hits the baseballs harder than anyone else in the majors and yes, has exactly 100 whiffs. It’s June 17.

This is what A.J. Liebling’s old boxing friend Colonel John R. Stingo would call a “labyrinthian digression.” He once told Liebling that he let “disinclination limit the horizon of your anticipation.” Or something like that. Gotta love throwing the language around like that.

Which brings me to today’s likely surprising Substack topic - Toy Story! And as I scan all the roles and things I’ve witnessed in my 72 years and a few days on this planet, I can’t think of two hires that were any more perfectly fitted to their roles than Tom Hanks as Woody and Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear. They delivered! I know a guy named Jeff LightFOOT but I don’t think they’re related. Though personality speaking, there are some similarities.

Hanks as Woody is just what you would think: Friendly, someone everyone who knows him looks up to, just a sweet, shy guy. Probably a lot like me.

Allen as Buzz is full of himself - he’s an astronaut, after all and they’re bred to think that, aren’t they? But he’s funny, often unintentionally, like the other Lightfoot guy I know, and the two of them together in the “Toy Story” movies are a pair that Laurel and Hardy, if they had been around to see, would have loved. Like we do.

So I’m excited to see “Toy Story 5.” It’ll be inside, so no gnats, probably cool since the heat is cranking up here in Georgia after a delightfully mild Spring and they have concessions!

Now, before you’re ready to argue that Robert DeNiro was better in “Raging Bull” or Meryl Streep was better in one of about 30 roles, I didn’t insist “Woody” and “Buzz” were better, just as perfectly suited for their roles as anybody I can think of in the movies, in politics. In baseball, maybe David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez for a few years, Lou Gehrig and that Ruth fella for a while were the scourge of the American League, Mantle and Maris had a couple nice years shooting for a 296-foot right field fence, but Woody and Buzz certainly gave us more laughs than any of them, except maybe Manny.

As a rule, sequels tend to be a bit of a drag. “The Godfather” and “The Godfather II” were exceptions. “Godfather III,” bringing in the Pope…ehhh. If you count “Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn” as a sequel to “Tom Sawyer,” Mark Twain had a real winner there. There were others, I’m sure, my readers will come up with. Like Vol. 7 of “The Fast and The Furious,” say. (I don’t think they are reading my Substack.)

But “Toy Story 5” due out this weekend, from what I’ve read, is a terrific revival of the Woody and Buzz show with enough plot twists and current themes to ring home with parents and kids all over America. There seems to be pitched battle between toys - Buzz, Woody, Mr. Potato Head, the little Army men, etc. and technology. And when you think about it and look back to your days as a kid, wow.

When I was really a kid and hung up on Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone - Fess Parker was more believable as Davy - I walked through the New Hampshire woods with a hockey stick that I pretended was “Old Betsy” Davy’s famous flintlock rifle. And yeah, I used to wet my thumb and put it on the sight at the end when I was going to take aim at some Native American about to attack me.

My friend, Mark Fountain, who accompanied me on these excursions into the woods, carried a knife, I seem to recall. So he was either Jim Bowie, a healthy Bowie like we didn’t get to see at the Alamo or Georgie Russell, Davy’s pal played by Buddy Ebsen, who later discovered oil and became a millionaire. We looked but didn’t find any in the New Hampshire woods, just a lot of rocks, sticks, and no arrowheads. We looked for those, too.

The idea of two kids spending the whole day and maybe part of the night on some screen somewhere pretending to shoot guys like in “Call Of Duty” or “FIFA” (ugh) or even playing MLB or NFL or NBA or NHL was not something that we even considered. They weren’t invented yet. Fortunately.

Playing computer games are fun. I remember losing my voice (and half my mind) the first time I played “Super Mario” trying to get the little mustachioed bastard to make those jumps at my brother-in-law’s house. Then letting him trick me into playing a baseball game - he was the Yankees, of course - beating me with a suicide squeeze bunt. (He’d played the game before and knew that kind of trickery.) I haven’t forgiven him yet. Maybe someday.

So maybe “Toy Story 5” will wake parents - and kids - up a bit about the virtues of playing outside, using your imagination, finding rocks and rabbit poop and getting some fresh American air while you still can.

I will say, had I grown up here in Georgia, I’m quite sure the gnats would have gone after Davy Crockett like Santa Ana did. That would have been a problem.

Author John Nogowski never pretended to be George Washington, AI thought it was a good idea. Now when we watch “The West Wing,” we always look for my portrait just behind Jed Bartlet. He’s written several books and did not use a fountain pen. The most recent is “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography” due out at the end of this year or early next. Similar to my three-edition look at Uncle Bob: “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography 1961-2022” a comprehensive book that looks at everything he’s done, records, books, concerts, movies, speeches, even an annotated bibliography. I’ve written a lot about baseball, as you can probably tell. “Diamond Duels” is a look at the game’s great historic matchups, “Last Time Out” is about the final games of baseball’s greatest players and the final chapter includes my son John’s first major league game, playing first base for the Cardinals of St. Louis. He got a hit, too. All my books are available on Amazon. Since retiring as a teacher in 2022, I’ve had 34 Op-Ed posts in the Hartford Courant and have been writing a Substack since May of 2024. Still going. Stop in. It’s free.

John singled off Cy Young Award-winner Dallas Keuchel in Chicago just a couple days before Dad’s birthday.

With 365 days to choose from (and one more every four years), it’s hard to say why one day should have more cool stuff happen on it than its brothers and sisters on either side. Talk about sibling rivalry.

But the more you look at June 16, no matter the year, stuff HAPPENED on this day. It’s 167 days into 2026, a few days away from the midpoint of a year (July 2, at noon. You’re welcome) and all this wild stuff goes down. Why?

Generally speaking, we’re winding down Spring and headed for Summer in Georgia and yes, someone has already notified the gnats. I would like to know, personally, where the little bastards are AND who tells them, “John is outside now. ATTACK!”

For the literary minded, June 16 is the day the Irish writer James Joyce chose for the setting of his famous novel, “Ulysses.” Some people in Ireland are celebrating this day by eating kidney, buying lemon soap and other revolutionary things. (Those Irish know how to party!)

I haven’t read “Ulysses” as yet but I did teach several stories from “Dubliners” back in my teaching days (“Araby and Eveline and Counterparts and The Dead”) and while some higher-ups might suggest Joyce was too difficult for high schoolers, au contraire! (Throwing a little French in there. Not bilingual or anything, just showing off.)

For the rock and roll minded (My hand goes up) today is the day that Bob Dylan recorded (on Take Four, but they kept going) “Like A Rolling Stone.” The song was so dadblamed difficult to get down, Bob and the guys only got through the entire song once. According to the masterful Greil Marcus, ahem, a recent subscriber - the guy wrote a WHOLE BOOK ABOUT THIS ONE SONG - they tried 24 takes, more or less, finally settling on Take Four, the ONLY time they made it through the entire song.

For those interested in autocracy via the assembly line, today was the day Henry Ford incorporated Ford Motors and later, won the praise of Adolf Hitler in “Mein Kampf.” There’s a Daily Double for you!

June 16 was also the day - and maybe there is a connection here - that Abraham Lincoln, a famous President who was later assassinated and put on a penny which will very soon no longer exist - delivered his famous “House Divided” speech. Later reprised and rewritten for a Seinfeld episode. Sorta.

Today, the 16th of June, was the day Napoleon beat the spread AND the Prussians, speaking of Daily Doubles, in the Battle of Ligny. It was Napoleon’s last win. Made him feel taller.

In a related story, the good, wooden-shoes wearing people of Holland or The Netherlands forbid people to wear orange clothes in 1784. This could be particularly upsetting to a future President.

In a story that will later be related, Virginia became an English Crown Colony because the London Company went bankrupt. Bankruptcies, orange, hmmm.

In 1567 - let’s hope somebody takes the hint - Mary, The Queen of Scots, was imprisoned in Lochleven Castle. No word on whether a ballroom was involved.

In 2015, somebody came down an escalator, paid people standing around in the lobby $50 to pretend to be excited about his announcement. In a related story, seven years later, the Revlon Company filed for bankruptcy. As Casey Stengel once said, “You could look it up.”

I just did. Happy Bloomsday, everyone.

Author John Nogowski is somewhat relieved that he wasn’t born on June 16. It’s August 23, friends, which my mother said makes me a Virgo by nine minutes. Let’s see you pull that one off. She did drive through a hurricane and had me early. So if I’m ever late, I have a ready-made excuse. He’s written several books, two on baseball - “Diamond Duels” and “Last Time Out,” two books on music, “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography” (3rd edition!) and the forthcoming “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography.” He’s also written a book on his experience teaching Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at a struggling Florida minority high school. Since retiring in 2022, he’s contributed 34 columns to the Hartford Courant, written three books and is currently at work on a book on Bruce Springsteen, whom the author first saw the day he finished the “Born To Run” album. (Bruce didn’t mention it to him, the author found that out later.) He’s written a free Substack since May of 2024 and invites everyone to swing by and browse through the 677 odd - and I do mean “odd” - posts. His books are available on Amazon. Thanks, friends.

All Bob’s albums, annotated bibliography, films, 332 pgs. all Bob, all the time. On Amazon.

When I happened to see a Joe Frazier fan the other day insisting that “Joe never ducked anybody.” Well, either this guy has a short, convenient memory or maybe he wasn’t alive when this stuff was going down, like Joe’s hand-picked opponents did so quickly. Namely, Dave Zyglewicz (on the way up), then Terry Daniels and Ron Stander. Really?

Reading that fan’s comment, I was immediately reminded of this unholy trio of “opponents” that Joe fought, two of whom came after he won a well-deserved 15-round unanimous decision win over the previously undefeated Muhammad Ali on a day that will live in infamy for Ali fans, March 8, 1971. Joe didn’t duck anybody?

These guys were nowhere near the Top Ten, outside of their local tavern. When you’re the champion, shouldn’t you defend your title against qualified contenders? That’s the way you’re supposed to do it, isn’t it?

While I can’t quibble with the decision in the first fight, when Joe flattened Ali in the 15th round and nearly did in the 11th, also keep in mind that of the three scorecards for the fight, Referee Arthur Mercante (8-6-1), judges Artie Aidala (9-6) and Bill Recht (11-4…wonder how he found his way home), Ali managed to get at least one vote in 10 of those other 13 rounds, giving Frazier the 11th and 15th. That’s a close fight. Frazier deserved the win and on that night, was at the peak of his game.

But before we start throwing him up in the all-time rankings, let’s remember George Foreman bounced him off the canvas six times in two rounds in 1973, when Frazier was in his prime, then KO’d him again three years later, probably after the cobwebs cleared for Joe.

Since Muhammad Ali had his title taken away by the courts and the Ali we saw vs. Jerry Quarry was a long way from the guy that stopped Zora Folley, we never got to see Prime Ali vs. Frazier. Had he been able to keep on fighting, chances are he would have met Frazier long before 1971, the money would have been too hard to resist for both camps. In my mind, the 1967 or 1968 Ali would have handily outpointed Frazier as he did everyone else he met. And unlike Joe, and this may piss Frazier fans off, Ali fought everybody.

Why didn’t Joe fight Ken Norton? Or Mac Foster? Or Ron Lyle? Or Earnie Shavers? You know why. If Oscar Bonavena can put you on the floor twice (which he did), and Frazier had to struggle to win a 15-round decision against the not-exactly stylish modern “Bull of The Pampas,” you have to be careful. And they were with Joe.

Now to give Frazier credit, he did deflate blubbery Buster Mathis (243 pounds to Joe’s 204 after Buster dropped a bunch) when they met in 1968 after Buster beat him in the Olympic Trials. Frazier also beat Jerry Quarry twice and George Chuvalo, who were, at least, contenders.

But of Ring Magazine’s Top Ten heavyweights of 1973, he fought just four - Foreman, which didn’t go well, Ali, whom he would lose to twice more and Bonavena, whom he beat twice after getting decked twice in the first fight, and Quarry, whom he also beat twice, the first time in a war.

In 1969, you could have added Leotis Martin to that Top Ten list after his KO win over Sonny Liston. There are those who insist Frazier wanted no part of Martin at the time. Unfortunately, Martin had to retire due to a detached retina. It would have been a good fight.

Watching the Frazier-Foreman II fight this afternoon - and you can say Joe was, like Ali vs. Leon Spinks or Jimmy Young, well past his prime in that fight - it’s impossible to imagine him ever beating Foreman. Or a prime Sonny Liston. I could go on.

Yeah, he was great the night he beat Ali. Give him that. But otherwise, when he was a champion, not much there. Terry Daniels. Ron Stander. Really?

Sure, he was tough, he had one of the best left hooks in boxing history and to Yancey Durham’s credit, just like Cus D’Amato with Floyd Patterson, Durham was shrewd in the way he steered his man to the title. Patterson, incidentally, was just 33 in 1968 and as always, in great shape. Might he have been a good guy for Joe to fight on the way up?

Because of the way boxing is, whoever happens to be champion at a given time can pick and choose who he wants to defend his title against, generally within a year. But it’s not a hard and fast rule. Jack Johnson went over two years without defending his title. Same for Jack Dempsey.

Usually it’s a matter of honor. You’re the champ and you want to prove to everyone you can, like John L. Sullivan used to brag, “lick any son of a bitch” in the house. Floyd Patterson, for example, knew that it was unlikely he would be able to beat Sonny Liston (two first-round KO’s!) but as champ, he felt an obligation. So he fought him twice and each time got decked in less than a full round.

We don’t know what went on for sure in the Frazier camp. Maybe Joe did want to fight Norton, Lyle, Shavers, Mac Foster or some of the other challengers. Or he did want to give Ali another chance before Foreman flattened him in January of 1973.

But it sure didn’t look it. That’s history, folks. It doesn’t blink.