Today in History: Sept. 29

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One hundred years ago today, American newspapers reported that John D. Rockefeller (above) had become the first individual to be worth more than a billion dollars.

Rockefeller’s 247,692 shares of stock in his Standard Oil Co. were now worth close to $499 million, after an increase in their share price the previous day. The article concluded that this amount, when combined with his possessions “in various banks, railroads, enormous blocks of national, state, and municipal bonds, [that] brings his total up to the billion mark.”
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Today in History: Sept. 28

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The Norman forces led by William, Duke of Normandy, landed at Pevensey in Sussex, in the south of England, 950 years ago today.

A few years later, the event was depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, the enormous (230 feet long) artwork that commemorates the Norman invasion and victory at the Battle of Hastings. (Seen above.)

* * * *

“The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It falls into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor.”—John Updike, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” October 22, 1960, The New Yorker

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Jimmy Breslin Is Not Finished

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

About a dozen years ago, his columns began to be the sort of column that one’s editors classify as “occasional,” the sort written on the death of an acquaintance or because the writer needs to release a memory so it can release him.

In November 2004, he quit abruptly, quit writing his regular column, quit in the headline, which read in full: “I’m Right—Again. So I Quit. Beautiful.” Jimmy Breslin’s final column for New York Newsday on November 2, 2004, predicted a John Kerry victory in the U.S. Presidential election that day and closed with the image of him going to bed early so he can “rise in the darkness and pursue immediately an exciting, overdue project.” Thus, since he considered himself to be otherwise occupied, he was through with writing a column and he ended with, “Thanks for the use of the hall.”

He was 74. He had earned the right. Almost six decades in the newspaper business? He wrote for almost every newspaper and helped start New York magazine. He won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. He had earned to right to quit with the newspaper running banner headlines, a week-long countdown to his final goodbye column, and a special section devoted to his work, but he chose to simply announce in a column that there would not be another one, that the space was now available for someone else.

On Sunday, The Daily Beast published the first new work from Jimmy Breslin in more than a decade, a 2500-word work of what is being called “autobiographical fiction” entitled “Trumpet Lessons, Life Lessons.” The online magazine has been re-publishing classic Breslin columns for the last several years; John Avlon, the editor-in-chief, is a Breslin fan.
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