Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I read Yogi Berra’s It Ain’t Over last month, and when I came across this book, I picked it up.

Ted Williams is seven years older than Berra and played with the mostly unsuccessful Boston Red Sox for his career. This book delves into his life story, especially his early years, a little deeper than Berra’s book. His family life was a bit troubled when he was young, but Williams found an outlet in baseball and played pick-up games, and then some organized games at the neighborhood park, and then into high school and a minor league team before breaking into the majors very young–one of his nicknames was “The Kid.” He always had a good eye, and he worked at hitting, and he became very good at it (in case you needed me to say it, gentle reader). He talks about his troubles with the Boston press, and even in this, his own book, he comes across as a character who was a little prickly at best.

Like the Berra book, it’s almost an oral history more than an organized autobiography. It came out at a different time in his career as well: Williams played until 1960 and was mostly away from baseball for a decade until he got an opportunity to manage the Washington Senators. The book was written/told to at that moment: he’s about to embark on his role as manager. Berra’s book came out after he had over a decade of work as a coach and a manager and after he was a national celebrity for being Yogi Berra. So perhaps it’s not fair to compare them, but one cannot help it.

So, a good read with a ballplayer’s insight into the first half of the 20th century. Williams holds a bunch of records yet, and he lost several years of playing time as he was called up for both World War II and the Korean War. I probably have a bunch of other such books seeded amongst my stacks. I won’t dodge them now that baseball season is over.

I bought this book at ABC Books in 2022, and I paid $7.95 for it. Clearly, I was jonesing for some art books to browse during football games, as I was watching a lot of them back in those days. As it stands, though, this weekend’s two football game Sunday is probably an abberation in my current watching habits, but it did give me a chance to pad the annual reading statistics.

This is a large oversized coffee table book about an artist and illustrator who was most active during the early decades of the 20th century. Fred Maxfield Parrish was the son of an etcher/engraver/artist and was brought up in those circles. He had talent of his own and absolutely was in the right place and the right time. Whereas his father might have still been working on the Currier and Ives paradigm, but changes in printing technology allowed color, and the need for color illustrations for magazines exploded, and Parrish was right there to take advantage of it. He became a known name in the industry and by the public, and he got certain concessions in his contracts: The magazine could run the illustration one time, and he would then have reprint rights and he could sell the original. So he was making bank until radio and television came along and the long decline of magazines began, at which point he turned to watercolors for a couple of decades in retirement.

A good story, and as for the art–well, definitely what would come to be known as middlebrow stuff. Linear colored illustrations with some depth and thought behind them–he studied architecture and worked extensively to block his works to use the Golden Ratio. Better than the “high” art you get now, but they’re illustrations and prints, so more like watercolors than oil paintings.

Still, an enjoyable book and perhaps leading to some understanding about the business of mass art transitioning from the 19th into the 20th centuries. But it’s not like I’ll be able to use that in conversation as my cats have heard it all before.

This, too, is a fairly recent acquisition (May) which I flipped through during the Bears game on Sunday. Unlike the Okinawa book, the other languages used in the captions use the Roman alphabet, so I recognize them as Danish, French, Spanish, and German (and I can almost suss out the captions in some of them). And all the photos have the captions, and an end notes-type section includes further information about some of the photographs, although I admit I did not flip back to look at the photos as I read the extra material.

So: Denmark. Sounds interesting. It’s a relatively small country, a collection of islands and penninsulas between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. North of Germany, across the water from Sweden and Norway. It punched above its weight in history due to its location. It’s not a very tall country, as its highest point is only a couple hundred meters above sea level, and it has a variety of topography in spite of that. The photos focus on some of the more touristy old town areas and some of the rural areas. It looks interesting, but I do wonder how much it has changed since 1984 especially as Malmo, Sweden is just across the bridge.

I am starting to imagine that I will never have to choose whether to travel to Europe, but if I did, I might want to see Denmark.

Oh, and as a reminder, I must be on a Denmark kick as I did a little research on it in May when I found a Christmas card with a return address of Sundby, Mors, in a book.

Undoubtedly, Facebook will use this to surmise I like Danishes. And it would be right!

On Sunday, I did something I really haven’t done in a while: I watched a couple of football games. And since the one was the Chicago Bears game, which they won not because they deserved to win it but because the Raiders deserved to lose it, I had the opportunity to flip through some art and touristy books between plays (which is most of the three hours of the televised football game).

The first book was the book on Okinawa that I picked up on Saturday because it was still on my desk (as are the swords).

As I mentioned, it’s a set of glossy photo pages bound with an iron comb and with a thin plastic front cover. It’s designed for tourists and dates probably from the 1990s (as one of the photos has the date 1992 attached to it).

English captions are really an afterthought, as the book is written probably primarily in Japanese, but looks to have two other alphabets in the mix (Mandarin and Korean?) Not all of the photos have English captions, so although I could look at the photos, I didn’t know where most of them were taken or what I was looking at–a lot of stone monuments and shrines, but little to explain them.

So this was a quick browser for sure, and it shows the wide variety of topography that Okinawa has. Including white sand beaches which were quite stained when my grandfather visited. I often mention, either because I want to bask in reflected glory or because I respect what the other men of my family did, that three generations–my grandfather, my father, and my brother–were stationed on Okinawa during their time in the Marine Corps. I was thinking about giving this book to my brother for Christmas, but I will probably keep it and stack it atop the precarious pile of art books atop a couple of my bookshelves in the common area.

So that must be some kind of record; I bought it on Saturday, and I browsed it on Sunday. Maybe not–I probably did that plenty when I watched multiple football games the day after book sales in the past. But I will likely not watch multiple games again.