Category Archives: economics

by | 20 May 2026 · 6:31 am

Edison and Arctic Light, 1879

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 170-173:

Collins was befuddled. It was true that he had never tested the lamps in San Francisco, but in Menlo Park he had seen with his own eyes how brilliantly they worked, illuminating Edison’s lab with a “light greater than three thousand candles.” Why weren’t they working now? De Long put Melville on the problem. After taking Edison’s device apart, the engineer concluded that it must have gotten doused during the turbulent crossing of the Bering Sea. He dried out the apparatus, then tried uncoiling all its wires and reinsulating them, but it was no use: Not even Melville, the Jeannette’s crafty Vulcan, could get the thing to work.

A few days later, Dr. Ambler told De Long of a curious dream he’d had about Edison’s lamps. In the dream, Sir John Franklin, the long-lost British explorer, had come aboard the Jeannette for a tour. Dr. Ambler led Franklin all over the ship and told him excitedly about Edison’s electric lights, an invention that, of course, wasn’t even dreamed about in Franklin’s day. But Franklin bluntly interrupted him. “Your electric machine,” he said, “is not worth a damn.”

“I begin to fear that Franklin is right,” De Long wrote. “Edison’s light is irretrievably worthless. Time enough has been lost in trying to make this machine of use.” Perhaps it was Edison’s fault, but De Long placed much of the blame on Collins. In any case, the lamps had “gone ‘where the woodbine twineth,’ ” as De Long put it—which was to say, into the junk pile of oblivion. Disgusted, he told Collins to box up the lamps and stow them in the hold. Collins was despondent, his mood as black as the unlit Arctic.

And so the days grew shorter and colder—and the natural light ever more feeble. The sun slowly slipped from the polar skies. On November 16, it left altogether and would not return for several months. Spermaceti candles and oil lanterns would have to suffice. So much for Thomas Alva Edison and his company’s pledge about “lighting the North Pole.”

For the next seventy-one days, the Jeannette would be cloaked in darkness.

…

On the night of October 21, 1879, Edison was experimenting with a filament made from carbonized sewing thread. A vacuum bulb fitted with the new filament was arranged on a small platform in the lab. When power was supplied, the lamp burned, unflickering, for an hour, then two hours, then three. Edison, having grown tired of the experiment after slightly more than forty hours of steady light, ramped up the power until the filament finally sizzled and burned out.

“The electric light is perfected,” Edison crowed to the New York Times. Although this wasn’t quite true, his incandescent bulb was now well on its way to reality—and already it represented a quantum leap over the arc lamp system he had sold to De Long. His company had also made significant improvements in the reliability of its dynamos: The model Edison provided for the Jeannette expedition had caused endless problems for his customers, but after he overhauled the design, subsequent generations of his dynamo had proved admirably dependable.

By November, having applied for a patent for his incandescent lamp, Edison tried out a new filament made of carbonized bamboo. It burned true for more than twelve hundred hours. By December Edison was making public demonstrations and taking his first commercial orders. “We will make electricity so cheap,” he said, “that only the rich will burn candles.”

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by | 17 May 2026 · 12:17 am

Mare Island Navy Yard, 1879

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 105-107:

Captain De Long scrutinized his weather-beaten ship in the golden California light, going over every valve and fitting, every strake of her long hull. He wondered where her weaknesses lurked. Were there rotten timbers? Leaky seams? The smallest flaw could mean his death, and the deaths of the men who would serve with him in the Arctic. The Jeannette had survived the trip—had performed admirably, in fact—but he knew she was not ready for the coming battle with the ice. There was still much work to be done, and only a few months in which to do it. To withstand the pressures of the pack, the Jeannette would have to be reinforced in a way that no Arctic-bound vessel had ever been reinforced before.

For most of the month of January 1879, the ship lay moored at the Mare Island Navy Yard, near San Francisco, awaiting inspection from a specially appointed board of naval engineers. Mare Island was the only Navy shipyard on the West Coast, a place where new vessels were sometimes constructed and where the existing ships of the Pacific Squadron routinely came in for maintenance and inspection. It was a complex of foundries, pipe shops, machine shops, pitch houses, sawmills, smokestacks, and derricks clustered around a floating dry dock, all of it set on a marshy island where the Napa River emptied into a remote estuary of San Francisco Bay.

Each morning, the bell announced the start of the shift, and the crews of tradesmen—carpenters and coppersmiths, tinsmiths and teamsters, plumbers and painters, caulkers and coopers—went about their smoky, cacophonous work. Mare Island was the western outpost of America’s burgeoning might, the well-equipped repair shop of her still tiny but soon to be ascendant Navy, which was slowly converting from canvas to steam, and from wood to metal. Perched atop the headquarters building was a copper-sheathed statue of an American eagle, the huge bird cocked at an angle toward the water, as if to bid farewell to the nation’s ships as they ventured to the far reaches of the Pacific.

Many great ships had been launched or overhauled at Mare Island—brigs, monitors, corvettes, schooners, sloops of war. But the shipyard’s most storied fixture throughout much of the nineteenth century was the old Boston-built fifty-four-gun frigate the USS Independence, which, according to one Navy historian, was for nearly seventy years “as much a part of the Mare Island waterfront as the seagulls.”

Among the warships moored beside the yard, the slender Jeannette looked fragile and unobtrusive. When Navy engineers commenced a formal study of her, they were not impressed. To withstand the ice, they thought, the Jeannette still needed a considerable amount of work—on her hull, especially. How this exploring yacht, as the Pandora, had survived three journeys in the Arctic was a mystery to them.

Of course, these men were paid to be cautious, and they knew their recommendations would carry little consequence within the Navy hierarchy, especially since Bennett would be covering all expenses. Still, the engineers’ assessment was sweeping: Decks would have to be ripped out, they declared, bulkheads constructed, new boilers installed, coal bunkers rearranged, the entire hull reinforced with additional layers of planking. They talked of adding ambitious networks of beams and braces. As their checklist of repairs and renovations kept growing, they envisioned a price tag as high as $50,000.

De Long was shocked, even though he knew many of the repairs were necessary, and even though he and his men would be the beneficiaries of the contemplated improvements. He saw deep trouble in the engineers’ recommendations. “We must stop them,” he wrote, “or they will ruin us.” While Bennett rarely blanched at a bill, De Long believed it his duty to make sure the engineers did not concoct unnecessary repairs in order to swindle the faraway—and notoriously profligate—publisher. “I consider your interest identical to my own,” De Long wrote Bennett not long after his arrival in California. “I am laboring to keep down expenses with as much zeal as if I were to foot the bills instead of you.”

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by | 15 May 2026 · 12:31 am

Centennial Exhibition, 1876

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 55-57:

Throughout the first week of July 1876, the week of America’s hundredth birthday, the nation’s attentions were focused on Philadelphia. Not only was the City of Brotherly Love the place where the Declaration of Independence had been signed a century earlier; the city was hosting a world’s fair, which, on this sultry summer week, was drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the globe. The Centennial Exhibition, host to thirty-seven nations, was situated on a campus of nearly four hundred acres in Fairmount Park, across the Schuylkill River from Philadelphia. It was America’s first world exposition, and by summer’s end nearly ten million people would have come to gawk at the nearly thirty thousand exhibits nestled inside the fair’s 250 pavilions and halls. The grounds were so sprawling that a newly devised elevated rail system—an early type of monorail—was used to shuttle crowds back and forth between two of the most popular buildings.

The crowds had come to be dazzled, and they were not disappointed. Among the many new creations on display were the Remington typewriter, an intricate stringed apparatus called a Calculating Machine, and a curious gizmo that a bearded Scotsman named Alexander Graham Bell was calling his “telephone.” (Bell would read from Hamlet’s soliloquy at one end of the hall, and attendees at the other could plainly hear the inventor’s voice issuing from a little speaker. “My God, it talks!” exclaimed one prominent visitor, Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil.)

All summer the exposition had been the talk of the land. James Gordon Bennett had been to the fair several times, and he’d made sure his best reporters stayed in Philadelphia to work the grounds and cover the comings and goings of dignitaries from around the world—the lords and monarchs, the authors and artists, the scientists and railroad magnates. The Herald ran Centennial Exposition stories every day—in fact, by special arrangement, thousands of copies of Bennett’s paper were printed on an enormous press right on the grounds. Young entrepreneurs like George Westinghouse and George Eastman could be seen at the centennial, hungrily prowling the exhibits for ideas cross-fertilized with other ideas. The twenty-nine-year-old Thomas Edison was there, too, showcasing a strange little device called the electric pen. Another brilliant American inventor, Moses Farmer, drew crowds with his electric dynamo, which he used to power a set of artificial lights—called arc lamps—that blazed through the Philadelphia night.

There were other puzzlements and oddities. At the Japanese pavilion, a miraculously fast-growing pea plant called kudzu was unveiled to an unsuspecting Western world. Elsewhere, the crowds could gaze upon new works by Rodin, listen to concerts played on the world’s largest pipe organ, or marvel at the immense handheld torch of Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Lady Liberty (the rest of her was still under construction in France). It was here, at the Centennial Exhibition, that the American masses were introduced to a new condiment called Heinz ketchup, to a fizzy sassafras concoction sold under the name Hires Root Beer, and to the perfect novelty of a tropical fruit, served in foil with a fork, known as a banana.

BY FAR THE most popular attraction of the exposition, however, was Machinery Hall, a cavernous greenhouse structure that covered fourteen acres—nearly three times the square footage of St. Peter’s Basilica at Vatican City. The hall was a temple to machines of all kinds, and it thrummed and whirred and whined with the operation of countless pumps, turbines, generators, lathes, saws, and ingenious new fixtures of tool-and-die equipment. The floor was packed with aisle after aisle of inventions—most of them American, many of them revolutionary. There was, for example, the Line-Wolf Ammonia Compressor, a contraption for making ice. There was the Brayton Ready Motor, a practical early prototype of the internal combustion engine. There was a seven-thousand-pound pendulum clock manufactured by Seth Thomas that was calibrated to control twenty-six other clocks interspersed throughout the hall. There were new kinds of locomotive brakes, new kinds of elevators, and improved versions of the rotary cylinder press.

But the most extraordinary thing about Machinery Hall was the great motor that powered everything else. The Grand Central Engine, sometimes simply called the Centennial Steam Engine, was the largest engine in the world. Weighing more than 650 tons, constructed by the brilliant American engineer George Corliss, it supplied free steam power, via a network of underground shafts totaling a mile in length, to the more than eight thousand smaller machines on display throughout the hall.

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by | 8 May 2026 · 7:33 am

Robbing a Bank in London, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 356-357:

SNEYD HAD MOVED from the Heathfield House to the New Earls Court Hotel only a few days before. Though the little hotel was just around the corner, on Penywern Road, the weekly rent was cheaper and the accommodations a little nicer. Besides, Sneyd thought it prudent not to linger too long in any one place—especially after his aborted jewelry store stickup in Paddington.

The hotel was a four-story walk-up, with Doric columns and a blue awning covering a cramped vestibule; it was near the Earls Court tube stop and Earls Court Stadium, where Billy Graham had recently conducted a series of wildly successful crusades. For another week, Sneyd remained faithful to his usual nocturnal schedule, keeping to his brown-wallpapered room all day, receiving no calls, and taking no visitors. “He was nervous, pathetically shy, and unsure of himself,” the young hotel receptionist, Janet Nassau, later said. Feeling sorry for him, Nassau tried to make conversation and help him out with a few currency questions. “But he was so incoherent,” she said, “that nobody seemed able to help him. I thought he was a bit thick. I tried to talk to him, but then I stopped myself, I was afraid he might think I was too forward—trying to chat him up.”

For Sneyd, a far bigger worry than the peculiarities of British money was the fact that he scarcely had any money at all; his funds had dwindled to about ten pounds. But on June 4, the same day he called the Daily Telegraph journalist Ian Colvin, Sneyd worked up his courage and resolved to finally dig himself out of his financial straits.

That afternoon he put on a blue suit and pair of sunglasses. Then, at 2:13 p.m., he walked into the Trustee Savings Bank in Fulham and stood in the queue until, a few minutes later, he approached the till of a clerk named Edward Viney. Through the slot, Sneyd slid a paper bag toward the teller. At first, Viney didn’t know what to do with the rumpled pink bag. Then, on closer inspection, he saw writing scrawled across it.

“Put all £5 notes in this bag,” the message demanded. Viney caught a faint glimpse of the man’s eyes through his shades and realized he was serious. Glancing down, he saw the glinting nose of a revolver, pointed at him.

Viney quickly emptied his till of all small denominations—in total, only ninety-five pounds. Sneyd was displeased with his slim pickings, and he leaned over the counter and craned his neck toward the adjacent till. “Give me all your small notes!” he yelled, shoving his pistol toward the teller, Llewellyn Heath. In panic, Heath backpedaled and kicked a large tin box, which produced a concussive sound similar to a gunshot. The noise startled everyone, including Sneyd, who leaped away from the counter and sprinted down the street. Two tellers took off after him, but he lost them, ducking into a tailor’s shop, where for five minutes he feigned interest in buying a pair of slacks.

At Trustee Savings Bank, Edward Viney surveyed the premises and realized that the robber had left his note behind, scrawled on the pink paper bag. When the bobbies arrived, Viney handed them the bag—upon which, it was soon discovered in the crime lab of New Scotland Yard, the robber had left a high-quality latent thumbprint.

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by | 6 May 2026 · 12:07 am

James Earl Ray’s Family

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 336-337:

AT FBI HEADQUARTERS during the first week of May, the search for James Earl Ray appeared to be going nowhere but backward—back into the creases of Ray’s biography, back into the mix of stunting environments and stifling influences, back into the genesis stories of a lifelong criminal. By relentlessly interviewing and reinterviewing Ray’s family and acquaintances, the FBI had hoped that some stray piece of information would break loose, some random fact that would lead agents to Ray’s hiding place. But the strategy didn’t work. Instead, the FBI men, with journalists following close on their heels, began to assemble something altogether different: an exceedingly strange and sad portrait of a man who’d grown up in a cluster of depressed towns along the Mississippi River, in the heart of Twain country. It was a severe story, a heartbreaking story—but one that was thoroughly American.

The Ray clan had a hundred-year history of crime and squalor and hard luck. Ray’s great-grandfather was an all-around thug who sold liquor to Indians off the back of a wagon and was hanged after gunning down six men. Ray’s beloved uncle Earl was a traveling carnival boxer and convicted rapist who served a six-year prison sentence for throwing carbolic acid in his wife’s face.

Throughout James Earl Ray’s life, the despair was panoramic. The family suffered from exactly the sort of bleak, multigenerational poverty that King’s Poor People’s Campaign was designed to address. Living on a farm near tiny Ewing, Missouri, the Rays were reportedly forced to cannibalize their own house for firewood to get through the winter—ripping it apart, piece by piece, until the sorry edifice fell in on itself and they had to move on, to a succession of equally shabby dwellings up and down the Mississippi.

The Ray children, predictably, were a mess. John, Jimmy, and Jerry were all felons, but that was just the start of the family’s disappointments. In the spring of 1937, Ray’s six-year-old sister, Marjorie, burned herself to death while playing with matches. The two youngest Ray siblings, Max (who was mentally disabled) and Susie, were given up for adoption after Ray’s father abandoned the family in 1951. A decade later, Ray’s kindhearted but overwhelmed mother, Lucille, then fifty-one, died in St. Louis from cirrhosis of the liver. Two years after that, Ray’s eighteen-year-old brother, Buzzy, missed the bridge in Quincy, Illinois, and plunged his car into a slough of the Mississippi River, drowning himself and his girlfriend.

Then there was Melba—perhaps the saddest and most disheveled of the Ray children. An emotionally disturbed woman who shouted obscenities at strangers and spent much of her time in mental hospitals, Melba made local news a year before, in 1967, when she was found dragging a painted, seven-foot cross down a major street in Quincy. “I made it to keep my sanity,” she said, by way of explanation. “After what happened to President Kennedy and the war and all, I had to turn to Jesus.”

Melba, when interviewed, said she hardly knew her older brother James Earl. “He liked being clean,” she dimly recalled. “He always kept his hair combed.”

As the FBI agents took note of the misery that pervaded the Ray family history, the biggest question mark was Ray’s father. Who was the patriarch of all this pathos? Whatever happened to the man? On prison forms at both Leavenworth and Jeff City, James Earl Ray had consistently declared his father “deceased,” noting that he’d died of a heart attack in 1947. But soon the FBI learned that, on the contrary, Ray’s sixty-nine-year-old father was alive and well and living as a recluse on a little farm in Center, Missouri, not far from Twain’s childhood home of Hannibal.

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by | 23 April 2026 · 12:06 am

Assassin’s Lair, Memphis, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 145-147:

JUST ONE BLOCK west of the Lorraine, on South Main Street, stood a tumbledown rooming house run by a middle-aged woman named Bessie Brewer. The sign in front of the soot-darkened brick building at 422½ Main blandly announced APARTMENTS/ROOMS beneath an advertisement for Canada Dry’s Wink soda—THE SASSY ONE.

A resident of Bessie Brewer’s rooming house would later describe the place as “a half-step up from homelessness.” Its long corridors were narrow and dark, with blistered walls and cracked linoleum floors that smelled of Pine-Sol. Mrs. Brewer’s establishment was a haven for invalids, derelicts, mysterious transients, riverboat workers, and small-time crooks—rheumy-eyed souls who favored wife-beater T-shirts and off-brand hooch. Mostly white middle-aged men, they blew in on wisps of despair from Central Station a few blocks to the south and from the nearby Trailways and Greyhound terminals.

The guest rooms were upstairs on the second floor, above a grease-smeared joint with striped awnings called Jim’s Grill that sold Budweiser and homemade biscuits and pulled-pork BBQ. Rich smells from Jim’s kitchen curled upstairs, coating the flophouse tenants in a perfume of charred carbon and year-old frying oil. The tiny rooms, furnished with scuffed Salvation Army furniture, sweltered through the heat of the afternoon, even though many of the windows were crammed with ventilation fans that vigorously thunked away. For eight bucks a week, Mrs. Brewer’s tenants were satisfied with what they got and rarely complained. Among the long-term guests in her establishment were a deaf-mute, a tuberculosis patient, a schizophrenic, and an unemployed drunk who had a deformed hand. A homemade sign on the wall near Mrs. Brewer’s office admonished, “No Curseing or Foul Talk.”

AT AROUND THREE o’clock that afternoon, Eric Galt spotted Mrs. Brewer’s shingle on South Main and pulled the Mustang up to the curb alongside Jim’s Grill. A few minutes later, Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill, looked through the grimy plate-glass windows and saw the Mustang parked out front.

Galt had apparently been casing the neighborhood for the past half hour or so and noticed something: some of the rooms at the back of Mrs. Brewer’s rooming house enjoyed a direct view of the Lorraine Motel. He observed that while a few of the rear windows were boarded up, several remained in use; their panes, though dingy and paint smudged, were intact.

Galt stepped out of the car, opened the door at 422½ Main, and climbed the narrow stairs toward Bessie Brewer’s office. At the top of the stairs, he opened the rusty screen door.

Galt rapped on the office door and Mrs. Brewer, her hair done in curlers, opened it as far as the chain would allow.

“Got any vacancies?” he asked.

A plump woman of forty-four, Mrs. Brewer wore a man’s checked shirt and blue jeans. She had been the rental agent at the rooming house for only a month. The previous manager had been forced to leave after a sordid incident that was covered in the local papers: apparently, he’d gotten into a quarrel with his wife and ended up stabbing her.

Mrs. Brewer appraised the prospective tenant. Slim, neat, clean shaven, he sported a crisp dark suit and a tie and looked to her like a businessman. She wondered why such a well-dressed person would show up at her place—and what he was doing in such a raw part of town. “We got six rooms available,” she said. “You stayin’ just the night?”

No, Galt replied, for the week.

Mrs. Brewer promptly led him back to room 8, a kitchenette apartment with a refrigerator and a small stove. “Our nicest one,” she said. “It’s $10.50 a week. You can cook in there.” Galt glanced at the room without venturing inside and shook his head: this room wouldn’t do. The window was on the west side of the building, facing Main and the Mississippi River. “No, see, I won’t be doing any cooking,” he mumbled. “You got a smaller one? I only want a room for sleeping.”

Mrs. Brewer studied Galt. He had a strange and silly smile that she found unsettling. She described it as a “smirk” and a “sneer,” as though he were “trying to smile for no reason.” She padded down the hall to 5B and turned the doorknob, actually a jury-rigged piece of coat-hanger wire. “This one’s $8.50 for the week,” she said, throwing open the door.

Galt stuck his head inside. The room had little to recommend it—a musty red couch, a bare bulb with a dangling string, a borax dresser with a shared bathroom down the hall. A little sign over the door said, “No Smoking in Bed Allowed.” The ceiling’s wooden laths peeked through a large patch of missing plaster. Yet one attribute immediately caught Galt’s eye: the window wasn’t boarded up. A rickety piece of furniture partially blocked the view, but with just a glance he could see the Lorraine Motel through the smudged windowpanes.

“Yeah,” Galt abruptly said, “this’ll do just fine.”

Mrs. Brewer did not bother to mention that her last long-term tenant in 5B, a man known as Commodore Stewart, had died several weeks earlier and the room had not been rented since. She was happy to fill it again, but being naturally suspicious, she was a little surprised by how quickly her new guest had made up his mind.

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by | 22 April 2026 · 12:13 am

Beale Street Blues, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 103-105:

THE MARCH BEGAN. King, Abernathy, Lee, and Lawson locked arms in the front, and began walking, as police helicopters whirred overhead. They left Clayborn Temple and slogged along Hernando Street for a few blocks, jerking and halting, trying to find the right pace. Then they turned left onto Beale, the avenue of the blues, and marched west, in the direction of the Mississippi River.

In the rear, no one bothered to form orderly lines. The kids were jostling and shoving, sending forward wave after wave of people stumbling and stepping on heels. “Make the crowds stop pushing!” King yelled. “We’re going to be trampled!”

Soon they passed W. C. Handy Park, named for the prosperous bandleader and composer who first wrote down the blues and shaped the form into an internationally recognized genre. As it happened, this very day was the tenth anniversary of W. C. Handy’s death, and someone had laid a wreath beside the bronze statue of the beaming bluesman standing with his trumpet at the ready.

But this Beale was a faded version of the street that the Father of the Blues had known; had he been alive to see it now, he would have despaired at its mirthless state. In Handy’s heyday, it was the Main Street of Negro America, a place of deep soul and world-class foolishness, of zoot suits and chitlin joints, of hoodoos and fortune-tellers, with jug bands playing on every corner. The street smelled of tamales and pulled pork and pot liquor and lard. Day and night, Beale throbbed with so much authentic and sometimes violent vitality that, as Handy put it in one of his famous songs, “business never closes ’til somebody gets killed.”

For more than a century, blacks from across the Mississippi Delta came to Beale to experience their first taste of city life. Workers came from the levee-building camps, from the lumber and turpentine camps, from the cotton fields and the steamboat lines. The only confirmed studio photograph of Robert Johnson was taken on Beale—a ghostly image of the long-fingered bluesman posing in a fedora and pin-striped suit with his well-worn guitar. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and B. B. King came here to play some of their first city gigs. The South’s first black millionaire, Robert Church, made his real estate fortune on Beale. Black doctors, black photographers, black dentists, black insurance companies, black mortuaries, black newspapers, hotels and restaurants “for coloreds only,” African-American parades as a counterpart to the all-white Cotton Carnival—Beale was a place where the concept of “separate but equal” had one of its more spirited and convincing runs.

“If you were black for one Saturday night on Beale, you’d never want to be white again,” the Stax Records legend Rufus Thomas once quipped.

By the spring of 1968, however, most of the great clubs and theaters—the Daisy, the Palace, the Monarch, P. Wee’s Saloon, Club Handy—were boarded up or gone altogether. Though there were still reputable businesses closer to Main, much of Beale had become a drab drag of busted concrete and liquor stores and pawnshops, populated by winos and petty thieves. As King tramped west on Beale, past Handy’s statue, separate was most assuredly not equal. The blues was on its sickbed, it was said—a moribund music, an era dead and gone. Now a column of proud but anxious men carried signs in the direction of city hall, headed for an uncertain future.

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by | 21 April 2026 · 12:23 am

Memphis ‘Walking Buzzards’, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 75-77:

FEBRUARY 1, 1968, was a rainy day, the skies leaden and dull. On Colonial Road in East Memphis, the spindly dogwood branches clawed at the cold air. A loud orange sanitation truck, crammed full with the day’s refuse, grumbled down the street, past the ranch-style houses, past the fake chalets and pseudo Tudors, where the prim yards of dormant grass were marred only by truant magnolia leaves, brown and lusterless, clattering in the wind.

At the wheel of the big truck was a man named Willie Crain, the crew chief. Two workers rode in the back, taking shelter in the maw of its compacting mechanism to escape the pecking rain. They were Robert Walker, twenty-nine, and Echol Cole, thirty-five, two men who were new to sanitation work, toiling at the bottom of the department’s pay scale, still learning the ropes. They made less than a hundred dollars a week, and because the city regarded them as “unclassified laborers,” they had no benefits, no pension, no overtime, no grievance procedure, no insurance, no uniforms, and, especially noteworthy on this day, no raincoats.

The “tub-toters” of the Public Works Department were little better off than sharecroppers in the Delta, which is where they and their families originally hailed from. In some ways they still lived the lives of field hands; in effect, the plantation had moved to the city. They wore threadbare hand-me-downs left on the curbs by well-meaning families. They grew accustomed to home owners who called them “boy.” They mastered a kind of shuffling gait, neither fast nor slow, neither proud nor servile, a gait that drew no attention to itself. All week long, they quietly haunted the neighborhoods of Memphis, faceless and uncomplaining, a caste of untouchables. They called themselves the walking buzzards.

The truck Walker and Cole rode in—a fumy, clanking behemoth known as a wiener barrel—was an antiquated model that the Department of Public Works had introduced ten years earlier. It had an enormous hydraulic ram activated by a button on the outside of the vehicle. Though the city was in the process of phasing it out of the fleet, six wiener barrels still worked the Memphis streets. These trucks were known to be dangerous, even lethal: in 1964, two garbage workers were killed when a defective compactor caused a truck to flip over. The faulty trucks were one of a host of reasons the Memphis sanitation workers had been trying to organize a union and—if necessary—go on strike.

Having completed their rounds, Crain, Walker, and Cole were happy to be heading toward the dump on Shelby Drive—and then, finally, home. They were cold and footsore, as they usually were by day’s end, from lugging heavy tubs across suburban lawns for ten hours straight. The idea of wheeled bins had apparently not occurred to the Memphis Sanitation Department. Nor were home owners in those days expected to meet the collection crews halfway by hauling their own crap to the curb. So, like all walking buzzards across the city, Walker and Cole had to march up the long driveways to back doors and carports, clicking privacy gates and entering backyards—sometimes to the snarl of dogs. There they transferred the people’s garbage to their tubs while also collecting tree cuttings, piles of leaves, dead animals, discarded clothes, busted furniture, or anything else the residents wanted taken away.

Now, as Crain, Cole, and Walker headed for the dump, their clothes were drenched in rain and encrusted with the juice that had dripped from the tubs all day. It was the usual slop of their profession—bacon drippings, clotted milk, chicken blood, souring gravies from the kitchens of East Memphis mingled with the tannic swill from old leaves. Plastic bags were not yet widely in use—no Ziploc or Hefty, no drawstrings or cinch ties to keep the sloshy messes contained. So the ooze accumulated on their clothes like a malodorous rime, and the city provided no showers or laundry for sanitation workers to clean themselves up at the end of the day. The men grew somewhat inured to it, but when they got home, they usually stripped down at the door: their wives couldn’t stand the stench.

Walker and Cole died horrible deaths.

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by | 10 April 2026 · 12:32 am

Japanese Little League and Yakuza

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 130-132:

There remained one sticking point to this collaboration: Yomiuri’s special interest in Kansai Little League coverage. There were some in the Little League community who wished for Yomiuri to not only continue coverage but increase its involvement. Musashino Little League’s Mitsuyasu in particular lobbied for Yomiuri kingpin Shōriki Tōru to lead Little League Japan, and bemoaned Fuji-Sankei’s involvement. But Mitsui’s long-term plan was to work with Fuji-Sankei, and Fuji-Sankei did not want to get involved in a media struggle for coverage rights in the Kansai. When Fuji-Sankei president Shikauchi insisted on full nationwide rights, Mizukami told Hoshino he should make the trip down to Yomiuri’s Osaka offices to negotiate their withdrawal, allowing Mitsui and Sankei to handle Little League nationwide. Hoshino packed his bag for what he thought would be an overnight trip. He ended up spending almost a week there.

One might think that Hoshino would have to spend most of his time and energy convincing Yomiuri to defer to Fuji Sankei, but that decision was not fully Yomiuri’s to make. Before he even approached Yomiuri, Hoshino first had to engage certain underworld elements. At the height of their influence in the 1960s, Japan’s idiosyncratic yakuza gangster world had its origins in two broad arenas with significant overlap: bakutō (gambling) and tekiya (carnie). The tekiya traditionally made their money by organizing and operating quasi-legal protection rackets for street and carnival sales stalls. One profitable variant in the post–World War II years were corporate-level extortionists known as sōkaiya who specialized in disrupting the annual stockholder meetings unless their demands were met. Japan’s yakuza are known for their haughty profession of right-wing or ultra-nationalist postures. One imagines that making the rounds of corporations on behalf of a youth sports team about to represent Japan in an international competition presented an appealing opportunity for them. Although surely not a major money maker, yakuza had apparently made a racket of skimming a healthy portion of funds solicited from businesses in support of Little League. If Fuji Sankei and Mitsui Bussan were going to take over sponsorship of Little League in the Kansai, their support systems would have to be brought aboveboard and questionable connections with the criminal underworld would have to be severed. But in the murky world of accommodations of convenience and unspoken but implicit understandings, an unexpected departure from the cozy tekiya fundraising arrangement would have ripple effects.

In short, Hoshino knew that Yomiuri could not act pre-emptively without the understanding and consent of its associates. To do otherwise would incur the ire of yakuza and expose their organization to irritating and embarrassing harassment that was the yakuza métier. It would be a question of saving face. One thinks of the lampooning scene in comic filmmaker Itami Jūzō’s 1988 A Taxing Woman’s Return in which a local gangster boss intimidates office staff and citizens at a local tax office, all based on the absurdly reverse assertion that he was himself being harassed.16 If Yomiuri had dropped Little League sponsorship without first consulting and gaining the yakuza padrone’s acquiescence, then their whole organization would have been subjected to the charge of insulting or undercutting the yakuza’s pride.

So, Hoshino went to talk with the tekiya boss first, traveling as instructed to a desolate train station in the less-populated areas in the middle of rice paddies between Osaka and Kyoto. On his retelling, Hoshino joked that he felt like he was being kidnapped when several henchmen sauntered around him and then spirited him away in a four-door coupe to the gangster boss’s home, where he ended up staying as a nervous house guest for three or four days. It was a harrowing week, and he had to approach, as he put it, “many scary people” to extricate Little League from this legally questionable fundraising system. Hoshino’s negotiating strategy was simple: ingratiate himself with the boss and then appeal to his ego by asking for his help to convince Yomiuri to allow Mitsui and Sankei to control national coverage. After three or four days of negotiation, while being a not fully willing house guest, Hoshino succeeded. At that point, the tekiya boss took the lead in visiting the Osaka Yomiuri offices, with Hoshino in tow, to “advise” Yomiuri that Fuji Sankei and Mitsui were, so to speak, taking over the Kansai Little League franchise.

Mitsui Bussan and Fuji Sankei became official sponsors for both the 1970 All-Japan and Far East tournaments held at the Higashi Fuchū grounds, and Sankei gave the tournament good coverage in its media network. Hoshino arranged for the players to be billeted in U.S. military barracks and fed at the commissary at nearby Fuchu Air Station, a communications hub for U.S. military in the Far East. Hoshino himself bunked there during the two weeks prior while making tournament arrangements, and then as chaperone for the players during the tournaments that featured teams from the Marshall Islands and Taiwan.

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by | 1 April 2026 · 3:33 am

When Scots Profited in Poland

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 152-154:

But Poland was not always a victim nation. In the early Middle Ages, the Christian kingdom of Poland united with the pagan Grand Duchy of Lithuania to form the ‘Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth’, and for several centuries the Commonwealth dominated east-central Europe. It was a strange, ramshackle structure, in many ways archaic but in other ways curiously appealing to the political ideals of our own democracy. The Commonwealth, ruled by an elected king, was multi-ethnic and in general tolerant of differences. Ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Tatars, Ruthenians, Germans, Lithuanians, Belorussians, Armenians and Jews managed to live together, culturally distinct but united in loyalty to the Polish Crown. The diversity of faiths – Catholic Christian, Orthodox, Uniate, Lutheran and Calvinist, Islamic and Judaic – caused no serious problems until the Counter-Reformation began to impose a dominant Catholic identity upon Poland.

And Poland became rich. From the fifteenth century on, the demand for Polish wheat to feed the rapidly-growing populations of the Netherlands, northern France and England began to make profits for Polish landowners. It was now that the Polish connection with Scotland began. From the early sixteenth century, carefully recruited groups of Scottish settlers sailed across the North Sea and the Baltic to Danzig (Gdańsk) and fanned out across the basin of the Vistula river. Along its tributaries, they founded small, tightly structured colonies which organised and financed the transport of grain down to the Baltic. Their numbers are disputed, but the Scots who joined these colonies over their two centuries of peak prosperity, most of them from the east and north-east coast of Scotland, must have been counted in the tens of thousands.

It was Scotland’s first planned stride into the outside world. And yet this episode was until recently almost completely forgotten by Scottish historians – although well remembered by the Poles. Scots enjoying the Crown’s protection became generals, bankers and even potentates – Alexander Chalmers from Dyce, near Aberdeen, was several times mayor of Warsaw. The traveller William Lithgow, from Lanark, who walked through Poland in the early seventeenth century, wrote that ‘for auspiciousness, I may rather tearme [Poland] to be a Mother or Nurse, for the youth and younglings of Scotland who are yearly sent hither in great numbers . . . And certainely Polland may be tearmed in this kind to be the mother of our Commons and the first commencement of all our best Merchants’ wealth, or at least most part of them.’

But by the early eighteenth century, the Commonwealth was growing weaker. On either flank of Poland, new and hostile states were emerging. The duchy of Muscovy expanded to become Russia of the Tsars, consolidating central power over what is now European Russia and pushing eastwards to grasp the infinite wealth of Siberia. To the west, small and backward German princedoms along the Baltic coast now merged under the new and formidable kingdom of Prussia.

The Polish Commonwealth was really a ‘pre-modern’ state. Central authority was weak, regional diversity was wide and political influence lay in the hands of the nobility. The new Russia and Prussia, by contrast, represented a very different and ‘modern’ model of power. These were grimly centralised and authoritarian states, intolerant of ethnic or religious diversity and – above all – obsessed with the training and equipping of large professional armies.

Culturally, the Polish Commonwealth considered itself more civilised than its big neighbours, whom Poles regarded as primitive. In return, the despots of Prussia and Russia loathed the relative freedom of Polish society, regarding it as a threat to their own strictly controlled systems of government. In addition, both had historical reasons to resent Poland. On the Prussian side, the Teutonic Knights had been defeated by the Poles in the fifteenth century, frustrating their drive to conquer the whole Baltic region. The Russians had suffered repeated Polish invasions and political interference in earlier centuries, in the times of Muscovy’s weakness, and saw Poland as a deadly rival for control over Ukraine and Russia’s western borderlands.

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