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Baseball Signs of the Times

3/31/2021

Nancy Churnin
Story Snoop

Who introduced the signals for ball and strike, safe and out in baseball?
William Klem, an umpire who took credit for creating the signs for strikes and balls in 1906, a practice that became standard in 1909, was inducted in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1953 for changing the game of baseball with that brilliant addition to the game of baseball.

But did he deserve the credit? On August 20, 2019, the Major League Baseball Umpire Association itself called this claim into question (https://mlbua.com/press-single?id=134).
It turns out that there was another umpire, Francis O’Loughlin, who had used hand signals during that very same 1906 season. But here’s the kicker. In a Washington Post article from that time, after spraining his voice, O’Loughlin “employed [William] Hoy’s mute signal code.”
William Hoy’s mute signal code? That’s right. William Hoy, a Deaf player who started his 14-year major league career in 1888, had taught umpires signals, including American Sign Language gestures for safe and out, so he could play the game he loved. Local newspapers covering Hoy’s games described and at times sketched how he would watch his third base coach hold up his right arm for a strike and his left for a ball after each pitch.

Now, even William Hoy fans don’t claim he was the first to use hand signals, mainly because he wasn’t the first Deaf player in baseball. That honor goes to Ed Dundon, a pitcher who used hand signals both as a player from 1883-1884, followed by pitcher Tom Lynch, who played one season in 1884.

But while Hoy was the third Deaf player in professional baseball, his career was longer and encompassed eight teams in four leagues (the now defunct Players’ League and American Association as well as the ongoing National League and the American League). That’s a lot of umpires and players who would have observed the use of Hoy’s hand signals.

Why is it important to give credit where it is due? For many in the Deaf community, Hoy brings pride as someone who didn’t “overcome” a challenge of being Deaf, but used the gift of being Deaf to change the game of baseball for the better. To overlook the contributions of Deaf players to baseball feels, to many, like giving white musicians credit for playing the jazz that Black artists created. Today, Steve Sandy, a Deaf historian and friend of the Hoy family, continues a campaign to get Hoy inducted in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, where he would be the first Deaf player honored there.

Steve Sandy is acknowledged as a key resource source for The William Hoy Story, How a Deaf Baseball Player Changed the Game (illustrated by Jez Tuya, Albert Whitman & Company) and the co-writer and co-producer of an independent film about Hoy called The Silent Natural. If you’d like to help his efforts, visit the Hoy for the Hall page on nancychurnin.com for the address of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and write a letter on his behalf.

https://youtu.be/sMAE8R0E2_o
Learn more about William Hoy in The William Hoy Story, How a Deaf Baseball Player Changed the Game by Nancy Churnin, illustrated by Jez Tuya (Albert Whitman & Company). Check out the resources, including video of the real William Hoy, a free teacher guide and Readers Theater play, the Hoy for the Hall project and more.
https://mobile.twitter.com/cammillerfilms/status/1097574123071569921?lang=en
https://youtu.be/vUyXyp_yWkI

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A Renaissance Man—4,000 Years Before the Renaissance

3/28/2021

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Jim Whiting
The Running Encyclopedia

The Renaissance began in Europe in the 15th century and marked the change from the medieval period to the modern world. Towering figures such as Michelangelo, Galileo, and especially Leonardo da Vinci were known as Renaissance men because of their talents and lasting achievements in several important areas of knowledge. They were also accomplished musicians, public speakers, athletes, poets, and so forth. And they were expected to do all this stuff without breaking a sweat.

You could give the same title to an ancient Egyptian named Imhotep, who lived about 2600 BCE. He was the vizier, the most important government official, during the reign of Pharaoh Djoser. He served as the high priest of the god Ra and was an expert astronomer.

Imhotep designed and oversaw the building of the first major pyramid in Egypt. Located at Saqqara, at the time it was the world’s tallest structure. He innovated the use of stones rather than mud bricks to build it, and it was that added strength that enabled the pyramid to rise so high. He is also credited with the invention of several devices that facilitated the construction.

Many people believe that Imhotep, rather than the Greek Hippocrates who lived more than 2,000 years later, is the real “Father of Medicine.” In an era when most physicians relied on magic spells and appeals to the gods, Imhotep prescribed dozens of effective down-to-earth treatments for illnesses and injuries.

He is credited with ending a seven-year famine in Egypt. He advised the pharaoh to make sacrifices to Khnum, the god of the annual flooding of the Nile River, and thereby provide desperately needed water to farmers. On a more practical level, he invented an improved irrigation system to carry water to the crops even if the river level was abnormally low.

In addition to these accomplishments, an inscription at the base of one of his statues notes that he was “Chief Carpenter, Chief Sculptor, and Maker of Vases in Chief.” In his little spare time, he wrote poetry and dispensed philosophical advice.

Imhotep can also boast of two accomplishments that eluded even Leonardo da Vinci. He was deified after his death and worshipped for many centuries, an honor accorded to hardly anyone besides the pharaohs. And today the comic book community gives him the credit for founding S.H.I.E.L.D., the Marvel Comics espionage and crime-fighting agency that became the basis for blockbuster movies such as Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America.

A statue of imhotep in the Louvre, one of three statues all with the same pose. Photo taken by Dr Nigel Hawkins. Wikimedia Commons

Egyptologists ascribe to Imhotep the design of the Pyramid of Djoser (the Step Pyramid) at Saqqara in Egypt in 2630 – 2611 BC. Wikimedia Commons

Jim Whiting has written a book on another great Egyptian leader -- Ramses the Great who lived about 1350 years after Imhotep. He fully lived up to the "Great" part of his name. His reign lasted for 67 years, the second longest in Egypt’s 3,000-year history. He had dozens of wives and more than 100 children, outliving many of them. He was a military leader who expanded the borders of his country. That resulted in decades of peace and prosperity for his people. He ordered huge statues of himself to be erected all over Egypt. For more information, click here.

MLA 8 Citation
Whiting, Jim. "A Renaissance Man - 4,000 Years before the Renaissance."
     Nonfiction Minute`, iNK Think Tank, 8 Feb. 2018,
     www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/
     A-Renaissance-Man-4,000-Years-Before-the-Renaissance.

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Harriet Quimby: America's First Lady of the Air

3/22/2021

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Cheryl Harness
She's historical!

A 1991 United States airmail postage stamp featured Harriet Quimby

  Do you know about Harriet Quimby, Pioneer Aviator? In her time, the early 1900s, flying was still so new and dangerous. Every flier risked death whenever he climbed into a cockpit. I say ‘he’ because flying had mostly been a guy thing. That was especially true in Harriet’s time. People thought only a very bold, unladylike female would sign up for flying lessons. Or travel the world taking photos. Or hang around film studios, writing screenplays for silent movies. Or drive her own car. OR become America’s very first woman to earn a pilot’s license, as Harriet did, on August 1, 1911. Harriet did ALL of those things AND wrote newspaper stories about her adventures!

          Like other early fliers, Harriet showed off her skills at very popular airshows. High above the crowds, pilots swooped through the sky in their tiny aircraft, difficult to manage in the windy air. When Louis Blériot made the first flight from France to England, in 1909, it was in a plane measuring 25 feet, 7 inches, wingtip to wingtip. The wingspan of a small plane today might be 36 feet and it weighs more than three times as much as Blériot’s 507-pounder!

Beautiful Harriet Quimby, in her purple satin flight suit, was famous. But she wanted more: If only she could match Mr. Blériot’s feat, she’d be the first woman to fly across the stormy English Channel. So, she borrowed one of Mr. Blériot’s little wood-cloth-and-wire airplanes and had it shipped to Dover, England. At dawn on April 16, 1912, Harriet soared up into the clouds, heading for France, 22 miles away. No GPS, radar, or radio. Just her watch and a compass. After an hour of freezing fog in her face, Harriet flew down out of the clouds to see France’s sandy shores. When she landed, people came rushing from all directions.

          Alas for Harriet. Alas, alas for those on the doomed Titanic which disappeared under the ocean 27 hours before her flight. The terrible news overshadowed her accomplishment. And how could Harriet know that she had but ten weeks to live? On July 1, 1912, the crowd at a Boston airshow heard her screams as she fell from her little airplane to her death. And alas for us if we let time and tragedy overshadow how cool and brave she was: Harriet Quimby, First Lady of the Air.

Harriet Quimby with the Moisant monoplane in which she learned to fly.

Excited fans carry Harriet Quimby after her successful English Channel flight

Cheryl Harness has written a book about another heroic woman, Mary Walker. She was one of the first women doctors in the country. When the Civil War struck, she took to the battlefields in a modified Union uniform as a commissioned doctor. To find out more about Cheryl's book, click here.

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Malala and Motivation

3/19/2021

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Vicki Cobb
Master Chef of Kids' Hands-On Science

Just the thought of Malala Yousafzai brings tears to my eyes. If you don’t know who she is, you should. In 2015, at the age of seventeen, she was the youngest person to ever receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

From the time she was eleven, she had a single purpose: to fight for the right to an education for every girl and boy on the planet. As a Pakistani, where women live life in the shadows, she has faced many obstacles in expressing her beliefs. In October of 2012, when she was fifteen, she was shot in the head on her school bus, the target of assassination. The Taliban claimed credit for this diabolical act. Miraculously, she survived without serious impairment. But the brutality of the Taliban did not stop her; neither did an earthquake, a flood, or the lack of financial resources. She continued to speak out on behalf of education for all.

I’ve read her memoir, I Am Malala. She is like the child in the fable The Emperor’s New Clothes who speaks unvarnished truth with the impeccable logic of the child who does not understand political correctness.

“If the [the Taliban] come, what would you do Malala? ...If you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there will be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others...with cruelty...you must fight others but through peace, through dialogue and through education...then I’ll tell him [the Talib] how important education is and that I even want education for your children as well... that’s what I want to tell you, now do what you want.”

Like the, Diary of Ann Frank, you cannot escape the voice of a young girl who cares about her hopes and dreams for her future and that of the troubled world.

“I speak not for myself but for those without voice... those who have fought for their rights... their right to live in peace, their right to be treated with dignity, their right to equality of opportunity, their right to be educated.”

How can we motivate students to fight for their own interests in acquiring an education? How can we inspire them to do the hard work needed? Maybe they need to hear Malala speak.

Here, in the United States we have both the right and the availability to education, yet so many kids don't take advantage of it to make something of themselves. What lesson can we all take away from Malala?

Yousafzai at Girl Summit 2014

Malala shares some quality time with the Obama family.

Vicki Cobb's classic book, Science Experiments You Can Eat has been updated and enlarged and was released in July of 2016. You can also see Vicki's new winking caricature on her website.

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In Your Great Grandmother's Kitchen

3/16/2021

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Laurence Pringle
The Octopus Hugger

Today we are time traveling. So, here we go: back a hundred years, and into your great grandmother's kitchen! O.K., now we're in 1918. You may be thirsty after the trip, so let's see what's in the refrigerator.

Ooh, ooh, I don't see a refrigerator! But there's a tall box-like thing, made of wood. Let's see what's inside. Ah, good, inside this lower part there's a glass bottle of cold milk. Also, meat, eggs and other food. Open the top door and we see: a big square block of ice!

Your great grandma uses an ICE BOX to keep food cold, and safe from spoiling. She doesn't have a home refrigerator. In 1918 there is no such thing! Instead, all over the United States, nearly every house, apartment, hotel, and restaurant uses an ice box. Everyone depends on ice. Cutting ice, storing ice, and delivering ice is a big, vital business.

If you saw the movie "Frozen," you may remember how it started, with dramatic scenes of men using saws to cut ice, and lifting heavy ice blocks with iron tongs. In the early 1800s, that is how ice was harvested in the U.S. In the 1820s, horse-drawn saws were invented. As the ice business grew, each winter countless thousands of men and horses worked on frozen ponds, lakes, and rivers.

Millions of tons of ice were stored in huge, windowless ice houses. They were insulated to keep melting to a minimum, so ice was available year round. Ice from the United States was even carried by sailing ship as far as India, China, and Australia. Of course, what mattered to most people was resupplying ice in their home ice boxes. Ice is probably brought to your great grandma's street in a horse-drawn wagon. Then an iceman carries a 60 pound block of ice into the kitchen to replace the ice that has mostly melted.

People depend on their ice boxes. But sometimes a warm winter ruins the harvest. Ice companies are desperate. They scramble to get ice from northern, colder places. An ice famine is scary. In the early 1900s, inventors tried to make something more reliable. Their work led to the kind of refrigerator you have in your kitchen today.

When we go back to 2018, you might see an icebox in an antique shop. Maybe it was once in your great grandma's kitchen.

The ice trade around New York; from top: ice houses on the Hudson River; ice barges being towed to New York; barges being unloaded; ocean steamship being supplied; ice being weighed; small customers being sold ice; the "uptown trade" to wealthier customers; an ice cellar being filled; by F. Ray, Harper's Weekly, 30 August 1884 via Wikimedia Commons.

Women delivering ice from an ice wagon during World War I. Wikimedia Commons

Ice being stacked inside a warehouse at Barrytown, NY on the Hudson River. Wikimedia Commons

In his book Ice! The Amazing History of the Ice Business, Laurence Pringle discusses northern areas of the East and Midwest that were sources of ice and gives details of ice harvesting and storage by focusing on one lake--Rockland Lake, "the ice box of New York City." And he writes of those vital but sometimes controversial workers who delivered the ice to customers. Laurence Pringle worked closely with experts and relied on primary documents, including archival photographs, postcards, prints, and drawings. For more information on the book, click here.

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Baseball Signs of the Times

A Renaissance Man—4,000 Years Before the Renaissance

Harriet Quimby: America's First Lady of the Air

Malala and Motivation

In Your Great Grandmother's Kitchen

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