Today in History: August 4

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Some achievements in sports are noteworthy for being firsts or lasts or mosts, and other achievements are more trivial, are simply items in the news that make people remember something about any given August 4, or perhaps the August 4 that took place in 1982.

Among fans of the New York Mets, Chicago Cubs, Philadelphia Phillies, and Montreal Expos, the date August 4, 1982, and the name Joel Youngblood will forever be linked. He awoke that day an outfielder for the Mets and went to bed that night an Expo. Now, many baseball players have been traded mid-season; it is happening right now. Youngblood got a hit for two different teams in two different games in two different cities in one day, however, and he remains the only player to have ever accomplished this.
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A Muse to a Talent to Amuse

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

From 1995 till 1997, I wrote a humor column titled “The Gad About Town,” for a great weekly newspaper in Sullivan County, New York. (It, the newspaper, still exists, and so do I apparently.)

“The Gad About Town” held the distinction of being the only column in the newspaper that did not generate even one response letter from our readers. Another editorial columnist, a sweet, genial, elderly man, wrote the most innocuous pieces each week, yet he received the most vituperative letters from readers who took exception with everything he wrote. I admired that this only amused him.
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Today in History: August 3

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

What are Standards?
 
Forgotten vaudeville songs and show tunes rescued from the sheer music pile by great singers and the masters of jazz.
 
There is no superior. There is no high and low. The beautiful thing is, you don’t have to choose, you can love it all.
 
Those songs are there to help you when you need them most.
 
You can stumble into them anytime, like the noise and benediction of any basement dive.—Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, p. 432

Tony Bennett is 90 today. If he has ever penned as poetic a definition of the compositions that comprise music’s Great Songbook, the Standards, as Elvis Costello has above, it does not much matter, as Bennett’s voice is one of the three or four one hears in the jukebox of one’s mind when any number of titles from that Songbook are mentioned.
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