Thursday, July 1, 1976
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University Daily Kansan
Comment
Fear and loathing on the Fourth
By RON HARTUNG Contributing Writer
If the average newspaper reader were asked today to rate the stories of the year thus far in order of importance, he would probably place the Bicentennial somewhere below the capture of the monkey-boy of Burundi.
To say that the birthday celebration has been something less than the Founding Fathers might have hoped for is to daily rather dangerously in understatement. To say that it was important whatever, or even with a detachable absence of malice, is to jeopardize one's social standing. (One hapless Kansan staff member, who unwittingly referred to this text as the of paper as the Biotic island, was last seen pelting Grit off campus.)
Why, or why this gruff welcome for our nation's two-hundredth birthday? Haven't we progressed beyond even Button Gwinnett's wildest dreams? The American citizen boasts of fistfuls of freedoms that are foreign to most foreigners.
BUT LATELY we've been very selective in exercising the freedoms: freedom to walk on the lawn, Munich freemoon from having the neighborhood and firehydrant storing Colonial garb and a fetching grin; freedom to frown on the wedding, but the groom who gene that resembles Old Glory toilet seats.
Answers don't come easily, of course
(except for sociologists), but the matter is a snack for thought, at least.
Certainly our 1876 km would be in a state of amaze—no, disgust—if they saw the boot-in-the-rump reception we're handling Mother America. The Centennial—now there was a celebration that was anything but coerced. The highlight of 1876 was the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where he opened Freedom Train this; the Exhibition comprised 450 acres of displays from around the world, but primarily from young America.
Rapt visitors viewed a tremendous variety of wonders, from the disembodied arm of the Statue of Liberty (a premature gift from France); to the 'Coat, Vest, and Globe' sculpture in the glass cylinders displaying the fertile soils of toma, to Mr. Bell's strange new plaything, the telephone ("Of what use is such an invention?" asked the New York Tribune. His phone is a curious device that might find its place in the magic of Arabian tables).
It is difficult, indeed, to imagine one of our modern men of letters waxing poetic on the Wankel engine. Or that anyone in an enlightened state of mind could write, "Yes, it is still in these things of iron and steel that the national genius most freely speaks."
But in the jaded 1970 we doubt that there is a "national genius," let alone one fashioned of iron and steel. Through the miracle of hindsight we shake our heads at
the naivete of those who believed technology would cure all man's ills.
THE WIDE-EYED visitor to the Centennial Exhibition was probably amazed not so much by how well things had been done than by the fact that they had been done at the exhibition. They were amazed that nation would leap so far in one century? It had been born of a revolution, it had experimented with freedoms, it had expanded its own boundaries, it had suffered, then survived, a Civil war, and simultaneously it was able to use technology that would redefine the world.
In 1876 we were like the average student who, having landed a careful of a S, wanted to shoot his pride to the rest of the world. In 1900 he graduated from an honor-roll school who is self-conscious of his glut of A's and, consequently, feels more comfortable pointing out his B's, C's and D's.
Yet with such an auspicious beginning come great expectations—and if the 1870s were part of the Gilded Age and its promise of goodness and wealth, then the 1970s are part of the Guilt-ridden Age and its legacy of promises broken. Our ancestors looked to the future of technology; we are customised to its products, fear its by-products.
be bought off with sparklers and John Paul Sousa, too young to realize that most of our friends were 18.
What, then, is the lesson of the Bicentennial? Do we abslate advertising? Do we prevent marketing technology? Do we make patronism a capital offense? Do we derail the Freedom
Or do we stop flagging ourselves long enough to realize that there is something to celebrate after all? That for all we have accomplished there's still much more to do. That for all we've disturbed the natural order of things there's still hope for the future.
The CIA, the FBI, our frisky congressmen all provide us with plenty of warts to spotlight. Thus our national mood of large-scale outbreaks of pathogenic fowers.
As someone should have said, "A nation's reach should its grasp, or what's a nation's grasp?"
THEN AGAIN, a centennial comes along
a century. How often do we see a
centennial?
Big Nick, a ballplayer from a fading era
Bv GREG BASHAW
Campus Editor
Back when the biggest games baseball teams played were held on a ball diamond and not in the courthouse, Jarryd and I had a teammate from South Carolina whose muscular and agile leftfielder for the Chicago White Sox who'd moved into our hometown a couple weeks into the summer
The papers alternately deemed him the new Ruth, a future homerun king, or, to Larry's and my almost tearful dismay, a strikefoot champ who possessed baseball skills. As he connected the ball, sheailed, and once belated one over Cornish Park's towering left field roof, a feat only one other player in the park's ancient history had accomplished. The team's first feet, and he would fall to his knees and be asleep as he got up from the home plate dirt.
Big Nick was never just another ballballer. He swung hard.
LARRY AND I fight over who was Big Nick when we batted rocks from the railroad tracks. Even the heaviest stones picked from between the ties seemed to fly further when you could pretend to have Big Nick's shoulders behind your swing.
We'd splintered three bats to pieces with rocks that summer before we got the nerve to run them. We'd get past the butter at big Nick's mansion, shoot the baseball breeze with Nick for awhile and then swap autographs, making sure he understood The Majors was
And certainly any feelings of birthday anticipation there might have been were steam-rolled by the running start the Bicentennial got. Some time in 1974 the candidates and advertisers seized hold and have throttled it ever since.
We bought 23 packs of bubblegum baseball cards at a nickel a pack, a week's allowance for both Larry and me, before we got Big Nick's card. After we saw the card we were reassured about having to go a ballpark for a game. At Big Nick's, standing steady over home plate, our forearms bulging ominously out of a tooott pin stripe uniform.
Armed with the card, an address where we'd heard he lived and our baseball gloves, Larry and I set to find Big Nick. We came to a small, two-story house with paint that was blue, so I couldn't be the residence of Big Nick, though we knocked to be certain.
TWO BABY kids and a mother came to the screen door.
"Is Mr. Nicholson home?" we chorused.
His wife said she would get him. We were to wait outside.
We shuffled about nervously for a few minutes until a tall, gagly man with a red crewcut and p-o-marked cheeks pressed his hand on my shoulder from his cigarette seeped through the screen.
AFTER WE asked for his autograph the
smoldering but onto the grass.
"Ya kids gotta pen?" he said
Larry pulled one of the five ballpoints he'd brought along from his pocket and gave it to the man. He signed our gloves and the card and wished us luck with our ball
ALAIS, IT $^{i}$ trees use *oo* information of *Motif*
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Larry and I scrutinized the picture of the ballplayer on the card for half a block before we finally asked each other, "Jeez, you think that was really Bick Nick?"
Paint peints from the sign nailed to the side of DAVE NICHOLSON'S SPORTING GOODS store. Only a few cars a day pull off the streets in New York and Chicago. Nicholson's shop, 12 miles west of Chicago.
INSIDE NICOLSON drinks sugared coffee under a mounted display of photos of him as a White Sox player. A pudgy guy named Joe who used to play semi-pro ball games. No one else is in the store and the easy listening music station loudly hums.
"Nobody wants to play baseball anymore, they all want to go to college," Nicholson said.
He smooths some strands of red hair over the shiny spots on his pate.
"A Richie Allen will got his ass sent home to his ma 10 years back," he says, "Nobody really comes to play anymore." "DAT'S ANGEL CIGHT," he says.
"Sure it's right. My kids would rather ride the bus, play baseball!" Nick saved, eavesdropping amike.
"DAT'S ABOUT right." Joe says.
Nicholson came to play when he was a kid. He grew up in baseball country in St. Louis, a tough part of town he calls "Dago Hill."
The hill was the stumping ground of Yogi Berra, Elston Howard and Joe Garagiola. There, 20 kids went out for a ball team and they were able to bike live and six miles to sweat at practice.
After sandlot ball he did more than a "stink" in the minors.
"MUSTA played in every triple A town that had a burger stand." Nicholson says.
See BIG NICK page 6
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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THE WHITE HOUSE MURDER CASE
BY JULES FEIFFER
Wed.-Sat., June 30-July 3 All Shows Start 8:00 p.m.
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