Today in History: June 2

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Babe Ruth of the Boston Braves announced his retirement from baseball on this date in 1935.

By the end of the 1934 season everyone, Ruth included, knew that he was just about finished as a ballplayer, but he had ambitions to be a manager. Teams regularly mentioned him as a possible future coaching or managerial candidate, but they seemed to do so more to make their future prospects sound interesting rather than spend what it might take to hire him or the time to educate him about team operations.
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Not Angry

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Angry, barking angry. “Ass-hat angry,” neither of my grandfathers would have called it, because neither of my grandfathers ever said “ass-hat.” The kind of angry that both of my departed grandfathers in the hereafter would have been forced to come up with pretend back-country colloquialisms to describe their grandson, also known as me. That frustrated and angry.

The story has a happy ending, of course. And the anger departed the moment it was expressed at the anonymous Newark-ian who knocked me over. It was a night in which Jen and I discovered that there are no short-cuts on the path to meeting good people.
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Today in History: June 1

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Forty-two years ago today, Dr. Henry Heimlich published his first article about what came to be known as the “Heimlich Maneuver.” Many lives (including mine) have been saved by this method since he published his insights.

Dr. Heimlich, now 96 years of age, lives in an assisted-living facility in Cincinnati. Last week, he saved the life of one of his fellow residents, an 87-year-old woman who was seated beside him at dinner, by employing the Heimlich method. He claims that it is the first time he has had the chance to use the procedure in real life in his entire life, but he has said similar things in the past about other incidents. With a physician’s specificity over words, the incident may have been the first time that the doctor employed the method himself in a restaurant on a fellow diner with whom he was seated. Regardless, she was saved from choking by the doctor most associated with saving people from choking.
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