I love March Madness, the NCAA men’s basketball championship. In the midst of baseball lockouts, pro basketball teams tanking, and — OMG —Tom Brady coming out of retirement (because of course he did) we needed some good news.
I love March Madness, but probably not for the reason you would think. Oh, I get a thrill from the buzzer beaters and the bracket busters. I am all in for switching channels between two, three, and four games during that first wild weekend to catch as much action as possible. I delight in seeing the lower seeds knocking off the blue bloods (see you, Kentucky). And yes, I am head-over-heels in love with the 15-seed St. Peter’s Peacocks (which will probably be the kiss of death this weekend).
But somewhere along the way I realized why I was enjoying the experience in a special way this year. There are no gambling ads. No annoying come-ons for sports books. No old former athletes pitching you to give up your hard-earned money. None. Nada. Zilch.
How refreshing.
As I wrote last September, awful gambling ads now dominate almost all sports broadcasts. Virtually every professional and major college sports league has decided to go all-in on betting. Before the games, during the games, during the at-bats in baseball games, while football teams are in the huddle, after the games. Bet $1 on anything and get $100 free. Seriously. How naïve can one be to spend your hard-earned money with that come-on? If you know they will give you $100 to bet for free, you can put your money down on the fact that you will lose more than you win if you play for any length of time.
Why do this? Follow the money. And the gobs of money — and the people it brings out — will affect the games in ways known and unknown. I suspect it won’t be good and will drive away long-time fans.
But at least this year, the NCAA tournament has not been filled with gambling ads. I’m quite content to see endless versions of the commercials with AT&T’s Lily (Milana Vayntrub) interviewing replacements to fill in while she watches the tournament. (The one with Coach K is pretty good). The Progressive Bundles resort features one of the best “eww” moments ever when the teenage girl catches her parents in the love tub. I laugh every time those crabs walk over to give homage to LeBron James in his crab walking Hummer. I sing along with Queen as the drivers of the GMC Sierras don’t have to use their hands for silly things like holding on to the steering wheel. Yes, I even laugh time and again at the Chuck Kuts. What I don’t have to see is Drew Brees talking about living your “bet life” (whatever the hell that is).
I almost always have a baseball-related post up on More to Come this time of year. But I’m on a bit of a blogging break, so I’ve been taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archivesor — as in this instance — sharing some great posts from other writers.
Robyn Ryle writes insightful pieces on You Think Too Much from her home in the beautiful Main Street community of Madison, Indiana. Earlier this week her most recent post — Thinking about inequality and baseball — landed in my email in-box. It captured a number of thoughts I’ve been having around the owner lock-out of the players and the selling off of talent when making a few more bucks becomes more important than fielding a competitive team. I’ll pull a few quotes, but do yourself a favor and go read Robyn’s entire post.
People are willing to give up a lot in order to make sure others don’t get more. That’s what experimental economist Daniel Zizzo found in a 2001 experiment. He gave some volunteers more money and some less. He found that volunteers were willing to spend their own money if it reduced the amount of money others had.
Zizzo called it burning other people’s money…a phenomenon that isn’t economically rational, but is explained psychologically by our sense of how “deserving” we believe others to be. The study helps us understand why specific policies to reduce inequality in the United States are often so unpopular — we tend to believe everyone is less deserving than ourselves.
It might also explain what’s happening with my Reds, where owner Bob Castellini was among four owners during the recent collective bargaining agreement negotiations to vote no on what at the time was the “best and final offer” from the players. With that ‘no’ vote, Castellini and the other owners showed they were more than willing to burn their own money in the form of lost games to prevent the “undeserving” players making significant gains from what is a $10.7 billion dollar business.
At this point I could tell that Robyn was going to hit on a number of nerves. And she didn’t disappoint.
Once the players’ association and the league did reach an agreement — one that did not include many of the demands the player started with — Castellini showed just how he felt about the small gains players did achieve by commencing what in baseball we call a ‘fire sale,’ or in this case, petty revenge.
After writing a bit about the impact on her Reds, she moves into explaining how inequality works in the larger society, using baseball as an example.
The players aren’t arguing that they should make the same amount of money as the owners. They’re not socialists. They weren’t arguing for a radical overhaul of the status quo, even though that status quo is responsible for the currently skewed distribution. All they want is a slightly larger piece of a very big pie.
“But Mike Trout got a $426.5 million contract!” you might be yelling at me right now, which is true. It’s also exactly what the owners and the CEOs and the other capitalists want you to think. Sure, get mad at Mike Trout. Forget about the fact that Arte Moreno as an owner makes enough money to pay Mike Trough $426.5 million dollars along with the salary of the other 25 players on his team. To paraphrase Chris Rock, Mike Trout is rich. Arte Moreno is wealthy. There’s a big difference between the two. Either way, you need to ask yourself why you’re mad about Mike Trout or Patrick Mahomes or Steph Curry but not about the dudes (it’s always dudes) who pay them.
Then, after a few more paragraphs, she nails it for me.
The players association, on the other hand, shows us what it might take to break this mental logjam in our thinking about inequality. Their union is famous for its culture of collective thinking. In addition to wanting a more equal distribution of revenue, the players other demand is to end ‘tanking,’ the practice of deliberately depressing payroll in a way that sacrifices a team’s ability to compete. They want to play in a league in which the people in charge actually want to win games, instead of just generating revenue — another radical concept. They want to make it less possible for owners to do what Bob Castellini is currently doing to the Reds, reducing salary and giving fans a team that is almost guaranteed to finish last in their division. Exciting, yeah?
Let me put it more plainly — the players want baseball to be good. The owners just want to make money. Period. End of story.
Just go read the entire piece. And then you can leave a comment on Robyn’s blog, as I did.
And yes, I’m having a bit of trouble getting up for the 2022 season of the fire-sale Nationals. After a decade of pretty damn good baseball in the district, I hate the thought of watching AAA games again at inflated MLB prices.
More to come…
DJB
NOTE: For other pieces on More to Come about how life imitates the World Series (and baseball) check out:
Thanks, Boz, for the memories (2021) on the retirement of a writer who understood baseball was definitely not about numbers.
As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent articles, blog posts, or books that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.
Image of baseball field by Cindy Danger Jones. Image of money by S.K. Both are from Pixabay.
This Saturday, priest, theologian, and author James Alison will speak at St. Alban’s parish in Washington on Choosing Judgment or Joy: Helping people of faith move from anger to love. Alison’s appearance is supported by the St. Alban’s Endowed Memorial Lecture Fund, which provides for lectures or other presentations that allow the parish and the wider community to examine the pressing issues of our time through the lens of contemporary theology. *
I came to know the work of James Alison when my third stage men’s book group began reading his introduction into the Christian faith for adults — Jesus the Forgiving Victim — which follows on from the insight into desire associated with the great French historian and philosopher René Girard. It is a fascinating book, unlike almost any other I’ve come across on faith, which focuses on the non-moralistic nature of Christianity. Grace, not laws or morals, is the theme that he explores through twelve insightful essays.
It was that focus that led the parish to invite Alison to speak to the nature of our polarized times, and how to move beyond judgment of those who hold different opinions, who belong to different tribes, who look different from us, and who may be trying to do us harm. Alison is well situated to discuss this topic, as he is also known for his firm but patient insistence on truthfulness in matters gay as an ordinary part of basic Christianity in the Catholic church and beyond, and for his pastoral outreach in that sphere.
*Full disclosure: I am a member of the Memorial Lecture Fund committee at St. Alban’s.
NOTE: I am on a writing break and have been taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. However, this new post is built around the deadline of an upcoming event, and the book that led us to invite James Alison to speak.
Each month I have a goal to read five books on a variety of topics and from different genres. Here are the books I read in February 2022. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on More to Come. Enjoy!
How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (2021) is a groundbreaking book by poet and author Clint Smith that asserts that slavery is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. Smith’s well-researched work takes the reader to landmarks and monuments across America, places where guides, local citizens, and activists tell stories to those who visit. Some of the stories are true. Some are willfully false. Others take less than complete information to try and point towards truth. Smith works to understand what these places mean today, what we’ve told ourselves about them, and how that impacts the way we live. He treats old places as having value as spaces of reflection and he treasures the stories and memories of elders who are not that far removed from those who were enslaved. Memory — it has been said — is a poet, not a historian. In a book I’ll return to again and again, Smith shows why we give thanks for the poets and the stories they bring to life.
Jesus and the Disinherited (1949) by philosopher, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader Howard Thurman is best known as the book that Martin Luther King Jr. turned to for inspiration before he led the Montgomery bus boycott. In chapters on fear, deception, hate, and love, Thurman “demonstrates how the gospel may be read as a manual of resistance for the poor and disenfranchised.” Nowhere is that more evident than in the chapter on hate. Thurman notes that in the end Jesus rejected hatred “not because he lacked the vitality or the strength. It was not because he lacked the incentive. Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father. He affirmed life; and hatred was the great denial.” As Dr. King demonstrated, Jesus and the Disinherited can be a life-changing book.
War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2003) by Chris Hedges, is an important book I returned to read again as Russia was threatening the invasion of Ukraine that ultimately came later in February. I noted then that in Hedges’ words, a war in Ukraine will be a “mythic” war, where those involved will seek to imbue events with meanings they do not have. Hedges writes on the “very nature of war itself, its causes and consequences, and the physical, emotional, and moral devastation it leaves in its wake.” While he asserts that humility, love, and compassion are the only chances for the human race, war — a deadly addiction — is hard to shake. I wish he wasn’t so right. This is an important read for our times.
Why Old Places Matter: How historic places affect our identity and well-being(2018) by Thompson M. Mayes, a long-time friend and former colleague, is a series of 14 essays. Some address the more practical reasons we preserve old buildings, such as sustainability, economics, and community. But the ideas that most intrigued Tom — and that get to the heart of why these places seem to matter so much to people — were captured in the essays on memory, continuity, and identity, positioning old places in people’s lives in a much more fundamental fashion than the ways in which we often talk about the past and design our preservation laws. Tom’s book is as vital and timeless as the old places we love.
The End of the Beginning: Being the Adventures of a Small Snail (and an Even Smaller Ant) (2004) by Avi is a delightful children’s book that takes the reader through the multiple adventures — and the occasionally snappy wordplay — of Avon, a small snail, and his friend Edward, the ant. Avon loves to read about adventures. But having never been on one, he decides that he needs to go in order to be happy. Avon and Edward explore parts of their world, such as the end of the branch where Avon lives, that they had never visited before. Along the way they meet many different creatures. And they decide that even tiny adventures can broaden one’s worldview.
Enjoy reading!
More to come…
DJB
The Weekly Reader series features links to recent books and articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy.
While on a blogging break, I’m taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. Let’s stop celebrating a past that never existed. Instead, let’s understand and honor the one that did. — which is used in a portion of the following piece — was originally posted on October 5, 2020.
Our recollections need a reckoning and a reimagining. A reckoning with the history that did happen and a reimagining through recovered stories with hope for our collective future.
America has spent centuries denying the fundamental role slavery played in shaping our country. Our capitalistic economy, the way we shaped our cities and countryside, our unwieldy way of electing a president, America’s uneven system of justice, thoughts on what constitutes the public good, our constitution … so many aspects of life in America were shaped, at their core, by that history. Slavery “is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it.”
At some point it is no longer a question of whether we can learn this history, but whether we have the collective will to reckon with it.
Smith’s is a well-researched book told with a poet’s ear for the story. Which is as it should be. He takes the reader to landmarks and monuments all across America, places where guides, local citizens, and activists tell stories to those who visit. Some of the stories are true. Some are willfully false. Others work with less than complete information to try and point towards truth.
The reader visits Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and Whitney Plantation — two Southern historic sites taking different approaches but, nonetheless, working toward a fuller understanding of our past. Smith, a Black man, visits Blandford Cemetery during a Sons of Confederate Veterans event, where the participants’ polite but strained conversations mask their indifferent and sometimes hostile attempts toward a full understanding of the past. He is in Galveston for the Juneteenth celebration, a story that until recently wasn’t known to many white Americans. Angola is the site of a former slave plantation turned prison, where incarcerated Black men work long hours in the fields in a system akin to slavery. The readers join Smith for a tour of Manhattan to learn about New York City’s difficult and tortured slave history.
As a historian and preservationist, I was exhilarated and challenged by How the Word is Passed. Exhilarated that a writer of Smith’s talent and background would take on public history in such a thoughtful and respectful way, while recognizing the importance in saving the places where history happened. Challenged by the realization yet again of how far we have to go just to a true examination of the past.
Jamestown, Virginia
In reading this book, I was reminded of when I first stood at Jamestown as a history-enthralled 11-year-old. The picture of the 17th century ruin of the church tower, abutted to the 1907 Memorial Church, is seared in my mind. I also remember the water lapping at the nearby shore, serving as a reminder that the people at Jamestown had the most tenuous of toeholds on this continent in those early years.
While I didn’t know it at the time, the narratives of life in early 17th century Virginia — told by the guides, the plaques that lined the walls of the 1907 church, and the books I devoured — were incomplete and sometimes egregiously false. White Christian Europeans were the focus. If they were mentioned at all, Native Americans, along with the enslaved African Americans who began arriving against their will at Jamestown in 1619, were small, dependent actors; impediments, if you will, to the greater story of the colonists and settlers and the shaping of what it meant to be an “American.”
Those Europeans were not home. They were the outsiders. Yet we are still fighting over how to interpret their presence in what would become Virginia.
Today, thanks to the scholarship of historians, works like the 1619 Project, the explorations of archaeologists, and the education efforts of groups like Preservation Virginia, the interpretations at Jamestown are more richly textured, recognizing the various layers that make up this iconic place in American history. Something worth understanding happened there in the early 17th century. There are stories worth telling and people worth remembering in part for the significance they bring to our lives today. But because history is not what happened, it is a story about what happened, we need to be thoughtful and as truthful as possible in how we craft our narratives of remembrance.
In his remarkable first work of nonfiction, Clint Smith has shown us a way forward. He visits places with hard and misunderstood histories. He listens intently to the stories of the historians and guides and asks meaningful questions that draw out conversations. He works to understand what these places mean today, what we’ve told ourselves about them, and how that impacts the way we live. He treats old places as having value to our life today, as spaces of reflection. He also values the stories and memories of elders who are not that far removed from those who were enslaved.
Memories are important because of the gaps that exist in the story of slavery. Smith quotes David Thorson at Monticello who said, “I think that history is the story of the past, using all the available facts, and that nostalgia is a fantasy about the past using no facts, and somewhere in between is memory.”
Memory is a poet, not a historian. Clint Smith is also a poet. In this book I’ll return to again and again, he shows us why we give thanks for the poets and the stories they bring to life.
More to come…
DJB
NOTE: Here are other posts on More to Come examining the need to tell the fuller story of our history:
Image: Discussion on the life of the enslaved at Belle Grove, a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation that has worked to tell the fuller story of all those who lived, worked, and died there. Photo credit: Belle Grove.
I am on a writing break and have been taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. However, this new post — which consists of a few words and some pictures — is of a personal nature that I wanted to share in a timely fashion.
Providence, Rhode Island, is one of the country’s underappreciated gems. We arrived by train last evening in order to hear our son, Andrew Bearden Brown, sing the role of the Evangelist tomorrow afternoon in the St. John Passion with the Schola Cantorum of Boston and the Providence Baroque Orchestra. Very cool!
UPDATE: Andrew did a fantastic job and received a rousing ovation at the end of the concert!
As is my habit in the morning, I woke up early, stretched, and then took to the streets of downtown Providence. The city is very walkable — Candice and I walked from the train station to our hotel last evening — with great architecture all around. Thanks to the work of preservationists, city government, business leaders, and others, downtown has had a renaissance. On this trip I saw more early-morning dog walkers, which suggests that downtown living is growing in popularity, and some of the empty parking lots have been filled in with new infill construction. Updated with more pictures after we took a self-guided walking tour of downtown mid-day.
The historic arcade in the early morning hours before shoppers have stirredProvidence has a wealth of wonderful architectureThe historic Hotel Providence, our location for the weekend.
Grace Episcopal Church, the venue for the St. John Passion…and mere steps from our hotel
Grace Church (Episcopal) interiorGrace Church (Episcopal) rear organModern addition to Grace Church (Episcopal) looking out“The Women” mural in downtown ProvidenceSkylight in the Emery Majestic Theatre – now home to Trinity RepDetail on the Turks Head BuildingThe Providence Public Library – one of the gems of the cityBeneficent ChurchA good reminder…Westminster StreetAmbrose Burnside – who is better remembered for his facial hair (and giving the world the word “sideburns”) than his military exploits.
And did I mention that Providence is one of the great food cities in America? Forbes magazine once called it the country’s best food city per capita, and we agree. In our first 15 hours in town, we’ll have eaten two great meals (at North and at Ellie’s) and tonight we have reservations at one of our favorite Providence restaurants, Gracie’s.
While on a writing break, I’m taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. Isolated minds. Dead hearts. — which is used in a portion of the following piece — was originally posted on November 23, 2020.
Author, philosopher, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader Howard Thurman begins the powerful chapter on hate in his seminal work Jesus and the Disinherited with a vivid image of hate relentlessly pursuing the hated, crushing down on those who have been cast off and repudiated.
Hate is another of the hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the disinherited…
Famously known as “the text that Martin Luther King Jr. sought inspiration from in the days leading up to the Montgomery bus boycott,” Thurman’s work both shaped the civil rights movement and changed our nation’s history. It is a short, but profound read which will stay with me for a long time.
As Vincent Harding writes in the Foreword, Jesus and the Disinherited “was the centerpiece of the Black prophet-mystic’s lifelong attempt to bring the harrowing beauty of the African American experience into deep engagement with what he called ‘the religion of Jesus.'” In chapters on fear, deception, hate, and love, Thurman “demonstrates how the gospel may be read as a manual of resistance for the poor and disenfranchised.” Nowhere is that more evident than in the moving chapter on hate, where he focuses on the conspiracy of silence around the function and meaning of hatred, and how it has an especially severe impact on the disenfranchised.
Hatred often begins in situations where there is “contact without fellowship,” writes Thurman. There are no overtures of warmth and genuineness. It is easy, he asserts, “to have fellowship on your own terms,” something that any one of us who grew up in the segregated, Jim Crow South can easily see. It is unsympathetic understanding breeding ill will. Hatred becomes a source of validation for us and for our personalities.
While hatred has the ability to bring us much satisfaction, Thurman writes that Jesus knew that ultimately hatred destroys “the core of the life of the hater.” It guarantees an isolation from one’s fellow humans.
Hatred cannot be controlled once it is put in motion.
A mentor wrote about evil and hatred following the attacks of 9/11. “This past week has shown two of the ways that evil can affect human beings,” he said. “It isolates the mind and kills the heart.” Thurman saw that in the Jim Crow South. We’ve seen it not only in 9/11, but in events as recent as the horrific murder of George Floyd. We have long since reached the point in our civic lives where we can be easily overwhelmed by evil and hatred. It is all around us.
Thurman pivots from hate to love by writing that “Jesus rejected hatred.”
It was not because he lacked the vitality or the strength. It was not because he lacked the incentive. Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father. He affirmed life; and hatred was the great denial.
We need to nurture empathy so that we are better equipped to appreciate the challenges others face. It is difficult to remain stubborn when you bring in your heart and are empathetic to the needs of others. According to recent neuroscience,empathy is hardwired into all mammals. Our default — our authentic self — is to have the courage and strength to help others. But the forces that want to isolate our minds and kill our hearts is very strong. Those forces are working on us to suppress our authentic selves in the hope that we will only focus on our needs and our grievances. That force is pushing us to hate others.
Thurman writes that we have to move toward love in action rooted in concrete experience. “No amount of good feeling for people in general, no amount of simple desiring, is an adequate substitute.” Once we have defined our neighbor, “then the moral obligation is clear.” In the story of the Good Samaraitan, Jesus uses
… sure artistry and great power to depict what happens when a man responds directly to human need across the barriers of class, race, and condition. Every man is potentially every other man’s neighbor. Neighborliness is nonspatial; it is qualitative. A man must love his neighbor directly, clearly, permitting no barriers between.
Love your neighbor as yourself. It was no easier in Palestine 2000 years ago than it is today in a polarized America with the world reeling from an immoral war. Yet we must try.
For every man there is a necessity to establish as securely as possible the lines along which he proposes to live his life.
As Martin Luther King demonstrated, Jesus and the Disinherited can be a life-changing book.
More to come…
DJB
NOTE: Here are other posts on More to Come examining hatred and love.
While on a writing break, I’m taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. Where the journey begins — which is used in a portion of the following piece — was originally posted on June 29, 2020.
As I was preparing to give a talk to a preservation planning seminar at the University of Virginia late last month, I took the time to reread Why Old Places Matter: How historic places affect our identity and well-beingby my long-time friend and former colleague Thompson M. (Tom) Mayes. I returned to Tom’s book because it is a great place to consider and understand the variety of factors that come into play as we save old places.
A key reason for me is that old places help us feel that we belong.
In writing the 14 essays in Why Old Places Matter, Tom spent time on some of the more practical motivations and outcomes, such as sustainability, economics, and community. But the ideas that most intrigued him, and that seemed to get to the heart of why these places seem to matter so much to people, were captured in a cluster of the essays that were about memory, continuity, and identity. These ideas are fundamental.
Memory. Old places help tell our stories.
Continuity. Old places give us a chance to feel a connection to the broad community of human experience, a community that exists across time.
Identity. Old places help us understand that our lives are not insignificant — that what we do will have an impact on the future.
Memory, continuity, and identity are deeply important to people, positioning the importance of old places in people’s lives in a much more fundamental fashion than the ways in which we often talk about the past and in the way we design our preservation laws. It was that point of view that I wanted to share with the students. As I did so, I placed it in the context of my personal journey and the stories that matter to me. Such as my origin story, which takes place at Union Station in Nashville.
Union Station is a Nashville landmark. As one approaches on Broadway, it looms alone on the landscape, like Mount Monadnock or a butte in Monument Valley. It is a beautiful old pile of a building in what is known as the Romanesque Revival style. The lobby is designed to showcase the power and opulence of the railroads at the turn-of-the-twentieth century.
The building’s history as a key Louisville & Nashville Railroad station is worth remembering. Its architectural and decorative features add to what makes it important. Yet all of that wasn’t enough. By the early 1980s, the building was threatened with demolition. Abandoned and deteriorating, Union Station was just another eyesore from a bygone era.
Places with imposing presence, with designs built for the ages, places that once served noble purposes, are — from my perspective — worth the effort to find a new use in today’s world. But for some, what is seen as the push for progress is worth the loss of the buildings and landscapes that provide continuity with the past. No, Union Station wasn’t going to be saved because of its railroad history and grand architecture alone. It became a landmark in so many minds — providing the motivation behind the effort to save it from the wrecking ball — because of the building’s innumerable, varied, and deeply personal connections to people in Middle Tennessee.
Former New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp states it succinctly when he wrote that “the essential feature of a landmark is not its design, but the place it holds in a city’s memory.”
Emotions, stories, and memories flow through Union Station like so many trains. Emotions, stories, and memories like mine.
Union Station was incredibly busy in the years before the advent of the automobile, taking men, women, and children to places near and far, creating memories on a daily basis. Many were traveling for pleasure. But others — like African Americans riding in segregated cars during the Great Migration of the 20th century — were looking for a better life or, at least, a different life from the stifling restrictions of the Jim Crow South.
My father had an early encounter with Union Station when he joined the Navy during World War II. The station was never as busy as it was in those years, shipping young men and women like Tom Brown to bases and ultimately battlefields all across the globe.
My parents were part of the post-World War II marriage boom that begat the well-documented baby boom. Both were from the small town of Franklin, a rural farming and commercial center south of Nashville that grew in the early 20th century thanks to the connections made possible by the Interurban Railway, where Granddaddy Brown served a stint as a conductor. My father had just graduated with his engineering degree from Vanderbilt and was enrolled in a training program that led to his life-long career with the Tennessee Valley Authority. Mom, then a couple of years beyond her high school graduation, married my father on June 30, 1950, in downtown Franklin’s First Baptist Church just blocks away from their family homes. Before moving first to Columbia and soon thereafter to Cookeville for my father’s first major position with TVA, Tom and Helen Brown had a honeymoon to take.
Luckily for them, my father’s sister lived in Chicago. That meant that my parents came to Union Station — like so many honeymooners, soldiers, professionals, laborers, and families before them — and boarded a train bound for the Windy City. There’s a signboard behind the hotel check-in desk today that is from this era. I look up and see the same schedule that my parents saw as excited newlyweds, ready to begin their life’s journey together. The same schedule with those evocative Southern train names: The Azalean, The Humming Bird, Pan-American, The Georgian, Dixie Flyer.
One day in 2015 while at lunch (at Murfreesboro’s City Cafe, naturally), my father started talking about that train ride again, and he told me that he and mom left at midnight on “The Georgian.” When my father was last in Union Station, he took a picture of the train schedule. Sure enough, plain as day, you can see that the Georgian leaves Nashville at 11:59 p.m. on its way to Chicago.
Historic Train Schedule from Nashville’s Union Station
I’ve heard stories my entire life about the theatre shows they saw in the city, the food they ate at the ethnic restaurants that was so foreign to their Southern palates, and their visit to Comiskey Park to see the White Sox. The facts from the trip have been filled in through the years, but the memories always originate with that train ride from Union Station. It is what makes it such a vivid part of my origin story.
Old places matter because their materials and appearances connect with human souls through emotions and memories. For some, those places may be mountains or streams. For others, buildings, neighborhoods, and streetscapes are involved.
The story of the saving of Union Station, like similar accounts of preservation successes in communities big and small, has thousands upon thousands of personal stories intertwined with the brick, stone, marble, and mortar. Stories and memories hold these places up, literally and figuratively, embedding the connections from the past into our lives today and in the future.
Everyone has an origin story, and many revolve around places. Because of the power of stories, Union Station remains today as a touchstone for innumerable individuals and families.
Emotions and stories flow through places, like the train leaving Union Station with two newlyweds bound for Chicago and a life unimagined ahead.
More to come…
DJB
NOTE: Here are other posts on More to Come examining why old places matter.
I am on a writing break and have been taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. However, this new post — which comes entirely from the work of a historian I admire — arrived in my email inbox on March 4th, my birthday. I felt it was a gift I wanted to share with my readers.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson writes a daily newsletter entitled Letters from an American. It usually arrives in the early morning hours, calmly summarizing major events from the day’s news and placing them in the context of American history. In something of a surprise, she quickly became one of the most successful individual authors of a paid publication on the newsletter platform Substack. She is the opposite of the right-wing and mainstream media journalist, working at the level of conversation, not soundbite. Her followers and subscribers (including me) are devoted.
Every day, people write to me and say they feel helpless to change the direction of our future.
I always answer that we change the future by changing the way people think, and that we change the way people think by changing the way we talk about things. To that end, I have encouraged people to speak up about what they think is important, to take up oxygen that otherwise feeds the hatred and division that have had far too much influence in our country of late.
Have any of your efforts mattered?
Well, apparently some people think they have. Last week, President Biden’s team reached out to ask if I would like some time with him to have a conversation to share with you all.
On Friday, February 25, I sat down with the president in the China Room of the White House to talk about American democracy and the struggles we face.
Dr. Richardson noted that it was an “amazing time to be able to talk to the President.” Vladimir Putin had just attacked Ukraine, the president was preparing to give his first State of the Union address, and Biden “had just made the historic announcement of the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for a seat on the Supreme Court.”
In this thoughtful 30-minute conversation, held before a crackling fire in the White House, Richardson and Biden focus on how the president “thinks about America in this pivotal moment, to put the specifics of what he does in a larger context.” There are many wonderful segments, one of which involves the president telling how historian Jon Meacham came to help pick the portraits for use in the Oval Office.
Historians offering guidance to a president. What a wonderful thought.
In my books, (Richardson writes) I have argued that throughout our history, America has swung between the defense of equality outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the defense of private property outlined in the Constitution.
Our peculiar history of racism has meant that every time it seems we are approaching equality before the law, those determined to prevent that equality have turned people against it by insisting that government protection of equality will cost tax dollars, thus amounting to a redistribution of wealth from those with property to those without. That is, if Black and Brown Americans, and poor people, are permitted to vote, they will demand roads and schools and hospitals, and those can be paid for only by taxes on people with money. In this argument, an equal say in our government for all people amounts to socialism.
With this argument, those defending their property turn ordinary Americans against each other and take control of our political system. Once in power, they rig the system for their own benefit. Money flows upward until there is a dramatic split between ordinary people and those very few wealthy Americans who, by then, control the economy, the government, and society.
This point in the cycle came about in the 1850s, the 1890s, the 1920s, and now, again, in our present.
In the past, just when it seemed we were approaching the end of democracy and replacing it with oligarchy — and in each of these periods, elites literally talked about how they alone should lead the country — the American people turned to leaders who helped them reclaim democracy.
We know these leaders from our history. Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt all have entered the pantheon of our leaders because of their defense of democracy in the face of entrenched power. But all of those presidents became who they were because they rose to the challenge of the pivotal moments in which they lived. They worked to reflect the increasingly loud voices of the majority of the American people.
James Buchanan, William McKinley, Herbert Hoover, and Donald Trump did not.
And now President Biden stands at another pivotal moment in our history. What he does in this moment will reflect what the American people demand from hisleadership.
Thank you, Heather Cox Richardson and President Joe Biden, for such a wonderful conversation. As one commentator wrote, Richardson’s “letter is my nightly north star. So happy to see you recognized by President Biden for the invaluable and trusted role you are playing as you interpret our living history.”
And she did it while wearing sensible shoes to the White House!
More to come…
DJB
*I have copied much of Heather Cox Richardson’s letter into this blog, because she always encourages her readers to share the information. But I encourage you to go to her site, read it there, and subscribe.
While on a writing break, I’m taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. Ideas. Relationships. Adventure. — which is used in a portion of the following piece — was originally posted on June 26, 2017.
I love to read. Avon — the small snail in Avi’s children’s fable The End of the Beginning: Being the Adventures of a Small Snail (and an Even Smaller Ant) — also reads every day. He is a kindred spirit. Books tell him “All about the things that creatures did when they went on adventures.” Having never been on an adventure, Avon decides that he needs adventures in order to be happy. When a passing newt hears his sigh, he encourages Avon to “go out and seek some adventures.”
Avon replies that he doesn’t know how.
“Remember lad,” said the newt, “if it’s going to be tomorrow, it might as well be today. And if it is today, it could have been yesterday. If it was yesterday, then you’re over and done with it, and can write your own book. Think about that.”
This delightful children’s book takes the reader through the multiple adventures — and occasionally snappy wordplay — of Avon and his friend Edward, the ant. They explore parts of their world, such as the end of the branch where Avon lives, that they had never visited before. They meet many different creatures. And they decide that even tiny adventures can broaden one’s worldview.
We are too often tied to our own branch, trapped in our own limited perspective.
If I were restricted to three words in any commencement speech, they would be: Ideas, Relationships, and Adventure. Ideas are the basis for change, for re-invention, for, yes, intellectual capital. Relationships have to do with outstanding people working in harmony and openness, where everyone feels empowered, where all members feel included and at the center of things, where they feel competent and significant. And Adventure has to do with risk, with a bias towards action, with curiosity and courage.
The challenge for organizations and their leaders is, as Bennis states it, to “create the social architecture where ideas, relationships, and adventure can flourish.” That isn’t easy, especially in light of challenges facing us today, but those who “choose to succeed must have the strength to persist in the face of setbacks, even failures.”
Think about how this idea fits in with the fable of the snail and the ant. Avon had the idea that he wanted to travel and see the world. Avon and Edward built a good relationship. They had success and failure, but they stuck to it. Together they had adventures untold (for a snail and an ant).
So don’t just sit there and read about others. Create your own adventures. Explore!
More to come…
DJB
NOTE: Here are other posts on More to Come examining the joy and wonder of adventure.
MORE TO COME... 