All summer, I've been wasting my Sunday afternoons in the shady bits of Prospect Park. There's nowhere more shady—in every sense of the word—than the peculiar little corner known as the Vale of Cashmere. For Narratively, producer Emily Kwong and I dug into the Vale's history, for a short piece on WNYC.
If you liked it, thank Emily. She's a genius. I just like to talk.
Today, I make my Deadspin debut, with a meaty little story I've been wanting to write for the last few months. This is some of the best reporting I've ever done—the untold stories of Jack Lummus and Joe Pinder, the only two professional baseball players to receive the Medal of Honor during World War II.
The walls were plywood. The ramp was steel. On June 6, 1944, Joe Pinder fought seasickness in a cramped troop carrier, waiting to take his place on Omaha Beach. On March 8, 1945, Jack Lummus grew impatient in an Iwo Jima foxhole, after 36 hours pinned down by sniper fire. Both men had once made a living playing minor league baseball. Both would be dead by night.
Over 4,000 minor leaguers served the American military during World War II. While some major league stars spent the war barnstorming from base to base on service teams, minor league players were regular soldiers, no different from any other men who left behind careers to fight. Of those 4,000, only two were granted the Congressional Medal of Honor. As ballplayers, Jack Lummus and Joe Pinder were ordinary. As soldiers, they were special.
By the time Pinder made landfall at Omaha, less than an hour after the start of the Normandy invasion, the precisely planned assault had slid into chaos. The naval bombardment had failed to destroy the German guns, and the amphibious tanks designed to provide cover for the first wave of infantry had sunk just offshore. The beach was slick with American blood, and every new man who approached it faced a murderous combination of artillery, machine guns, and mines.
"Thousands of bodies were lying there," said Pfc. Buster Hamlett, as quoted in Russell Miller'soral history of the invasion. "You could walk on the bodies, as far as you could see along the beach, without touching the ground. Parts of bodies—heads, legs and arms—floated in the sea."
It doesn't get any more fun from there.
I've spent much of the last few weeks with my head floating around in an imaginary version of New Orleans, editing stories for Narratively's week on the Crescent City. We have some really lovely stories up there, none closer to my heart than the one I spent entirely too long working on, about a Storyville murder that has largely been forgotten. We'll see if I can fix that.
Ever since the first flatboat sailor came down the Mississippi, loaded with cash and rotgut whiskey, New Orleans has been wary of outsiders. On Easter Sunday, 1913, a trio of New Yorkers learned that lesson well, when they found themselves in the center of a gunfight that forever altered the nation's most famous red light district. Driving the chaos was a man named Charles Harrison, better known as Gyp the Blood.
After the shooting, Harrison got his picture in the paper, under the headline "Harrison Bad Man." The Daily Picayune described him as a cold-blooded killer with a cocaine habit and a sideline in white slavery, but the picture does not match the crimes. About thirty years old at the time, Harrison is shown as soft-featured, with a bulging nose and an awkward smile. In his left hand, this "man of evil days and black surroundings" clutches a small white dog.
"He was spruce," the Daily Picayune would later write, "even dapper in appearance, as far as clothes went, but his pale, smooth-shaven face, bulging at the eyes, caving into sunken cheeks and squaring into a brutal jaw, bore the cold, steely cast of unregenerate impulse to crime."
Gyp the Blood was a hardened criminal of the Lower East Side. Or perhaps he was a fake, a coward who killed a man to prove he wasn't scared. He was a dupe, tricked by his employers into throwing his life away. Or he was a wild man, whose itchy trigger finger caused a bloodbath, and ruined business for hundreds of law-abiding purveyors of vice.
In the photograph, all Harrison seemed to want was to show off his puppy.
If you like that, there's about 5,000 words more. Eat it up—it's juicy.
When Woody agreed to this picture, he was being polite. Barely.
When Woody agreed to this picture, he was being polite. Barely.
More writing for Bullett Mag. This time, I did a little research on long-ago Vietnam protests which roped in some of Broadway's leading lights—including a young playwright and stage actor named Woody Allen.
Seized with fears of a mass walkout, Actor’s Equity issued a warning that, “Despite what our individual feelings may be regarding the war, Equity cannot condone any unauthorized absence from performance.” Rather than skip work, a gang of actors took the morning off to lead a parade through Times Square. From the next day’s Times: “Led by Stacey Keach, the star of Indians, the crowd began to sing a new refrain in soft, almost subdued tones: ‘All we are saying is give peace a chance.’” You can almost smell the good vibes.
Not everyone was such a sport. Producer David Merrick pitched a fit when Woody Allen, author and star of Play It Again, Sam announced that he was walking out for the day. Merrick refused to cancel the play, saying through a spokesman that “there’s been insufficient advance notice to the theatergoing public,” and threatened the young Woody with a breach of contract. Nevertheless, Allen said he was ready, “to face the consequences whatever they could be, because I think my commitment is not to the theater but to the moratorium.” He skipped out of work that evening, leaving his part to be played by understudy Lawrence Pressman, later of Doogie Houser fame, and was never heard from again.
Taking advantage of his rivals’ dark theaters, Merrick chose October 15 to open a new play, The Penny Wars, a soft-hearted anti-war drama which the Times called “out of key and out of focus,” “melodramatic,” “doomed” and “a bore.” It closed on October 18 and has yet to be revived.
That's the last three paragraphs. Read the first three here. I'm sorry for spoiling the ending.
Play It Again, Sam really is a wonderful film, and would have been amazing to see live in 1969. It's revived periodically, which is a terrifying thought. I can't imagine anything more painful than two hours spent watching someone impersonate Woody Allen.
I'm planning a long post for either later in the week or later today about the history of the term "off off Broadway," and the fact that it is an indisputably awful mouthful. Look forward to it—my trenchant analysis and amateurish research will both amuse and disgust you.
In the meantime, I turned up a May 5, 1957 Times article which appears to be the first time the paper used the term. At the end of a long article complaining about the woes of Off Broadway producers:
One steady observer of off Broadway drama suggested that what was needed was off-off Broadway. As a matter of fact, there is a troupe that calls itself the "Way Off Broadway Players."
Since this was the Old Gray Lady's first use of the phrase, they had yet to settle on the house style, which calls for capital Os when it's used as a noun or an adjective—"An Off Broadway producer," "Off Off Broadway is flourishing,"—but teeny-weeny Os when it's serving as an adverb—"The play was performed off Broadway." Oh, and never hyphenate it.
Anybody who doesn't own the Times Manual of Style and Usage is a chump.
More interesting than these five decade old copy-quibbles is the fact that the complaints of Off Broadway producers have not changed at all—they are still caught between artistic ambition and the nightmarish realization that, "the path to quality is paved with producers' greenbacks."
A few quick figures illustrate the situation. In 1953, a play, "Climate of Eden," was opened for $500. Today the average cost is between $7,000 and $15,000, with $20,000 no longer unusual. The revival of "Johnny Johnson," which ran for seventeen performances, cost $40,000. One of the most experienced off-Broadway producers estimated recently that of approximately 600 off-Broadway productions in the last five years, not more than twenty had made a profit.
That forty grand, internet inflation calculators will tell you, is over $300,000 today. It's been a long time since producing off Broadway was cheap.
Various scourges are blamed. The producers of the '50s criticize the rent charged by theater owners—as high as $800 a week in Eisenhower-bucks—they rage about Actors' Equity wage demands—$40 to $70 weekly—and they complain that competition among the thirty or so Off Broadway houses has forced them to raise standards and spend money in desperate hope that their show will be a hit and transfer to Broadway. "Each producer," reporter Murray Schumach tells us, "clings to the hope that his project will be another 'End as a Man,' 'The Iceman Cometh,' 'The Threepenny Opera,' 'Way of the World,' 'Uncle Vanya' or 'Purple Dust.'"
Those titles reflect one thing about the Off Broadway of old that surprised me—a heavy reliance on "the vastness of literary public domain, where prestige is high and royalties non-existent." This was a day when new plays could find a home on Broadway, and didn't need to take refuge below Fourteenth Street. What was on stage might have been old fashioned, but the front of house headaches have hardly changed at all.
Front page art courtesy Brendan Leach.