by Greg Proops
Right Field: REGGIE JACKSON (1946–)
Reggie had his own candy bar—the “Reggie” bar—hit three consecutive home runs on three pitches in the 1977 World Series, and was a great slugger but holds the record for striking out. He called himself “the straw that stirs the drink” and his manager Billy Martin called him “a born liar.” Interfered wildly and hipped a ball into the outfield and got away with it in the 1978 series. It took years for baseball to let him even hang around after he retired.
Center Field: TY COBB (1886–1961)
“The Georgia Peach” was a sociopath with uncontrollable anger issues who regularly beat up teammates, fans, and black people. Carried a gun and supposedly sharpened his spikes so he could cut players when stealing. Liked to drag bunt down the first base line so he could spike pitchers. The one player we can all agree was ferocious. “[Baseball] is no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out,” said Ty. Truly a bad apple. Definitely a bad peach.
Left Field: BARRY BONDS (1964–)
Go ahead and boo and sneer, and jeer and yelp, and whine and wheedle. He could drive a ball anyone else in history would have hit foul for a screaming line drive home run and then stand back and marvel at his creation like Rembrandt watching his masterpiece dry. Best hitter ever. Most controversial player ever. Well, he did what he was asked to do. In twenty years, history will bear The Smartest Book out.
Utility: PETE ROSE (1941–)
He will always be Charlie Hustle. But because he was also a gambler, he is banned for life. Unspeakable hairdo. Total winner.
PITCHERS
EARLY WYNN (1920–1999)
Wynn threw at guys’ heads when they did not wear helmets. Someone said to him, “You’d put your own grandmother on her ass if she tried to dig in against you.” Early responded, “Grandma was a pretty good hitter.”
BOB GIBSON (1935–)
Not only would Gibson not speak with the players on the opposing team, he would not speak to his own teammates on the days he started. Played for a time on the Harlem Globetrotters barnstorming team. Hated it because they clowned and didn’t try to win.
CARL MAYS (1891–1971)
Mays threw sidearm and also at guys’ heads. Playing the Indians, Ray Chapman was up and crowding the plate. Mays unleashed one and hit Chapman on the temple. The ball made a such a loud noise Mays thought it hit the bat, and it came back so hard he fielded it and threw to first. Chapman was unconscious and later died. The only fatality caused on the field in Major League history. Mays did not show remorse.
RELIEVERS
RICHARD “GOOSE” GOSSAGE (1951–)
Goose Gossage threw hard. Up and in, baby. Duck or be killed.
RYNE DUREN (1929–2011)
Wore giant Coke-bottle-lens glasses. Threw as fast as hell. Would come out of the bullpen and throw the first warm-up pitch over the catchers’ head. Hitters hated him. Drank like an alcoholic fish. Gave an umpire the choke sign during the World Series on TV. Got sober but left a wild legend.
Designated Hitter (1973–)
Hate the designated hitter and interleague play, ads on the video screens, crappy loud music, and John Kruk on ESPN. Oh, and jet flyovers.
MUSIC II
Glam
Glam rock is the most underrated and shallowest of all rock genres. Possibly the goodest. Folk rock is a bit serious, country rock more than a bit rednecky, progressive rock is simply way too top-heavy with elves, and hard rock has an excessive amount of Jethro Tull and not enough Aerosmith. Glam brought for one shining hour men in feather boas and makeup swanning around making twelve-year-olds scream.
ELECTRIC WARRIOR
T. Rex, 1971
That is what rock is supposed to be. Marc Bolan of T. Rex delivers the short sexy warlock stuff right to the edge of the enchanted guitar forest for you to wonder on. Mr. Bolan had a bad car wreck and went to meet the fairies way too early, but he is undeniably what makes glam tick. He is a boy who wants a girl, but he also wants to write poetry naked in a forest being chased by nymphs. Trippy flying saucers, cloaks full of eagles, sexy vampire bites, dangerously exciting gong banging—it is all there, like a romantic novel with drums. Produced by the acute Tony Visconti, who went on to collaborate on thirteen albums with Bowie, the sound is scaled down and the mood is get me-some-mescaline-and-mascara, I-need-a-hug-on-the-fur-carpet. Wear a giant hat while you do your nails and listen, then throw the file down and rock out. By the way, we don’t dance, we dahnce.
TRANSFORMER
Lou Reed, 1972
Lou Reed was given electroshock therapy as a teenager to quell his homosexual impulses. His parents did this, as parents so often do, for the child’s own good. Lou Reed found himself in New York after college and met John Cale, the classically trained multi-instrumentalist. Sterling Morrison was an old school friend of Reed, and Moe Tucker, the lady drummer, was their buddies’ sister. She played standing up, and the weirdest art band of all time was formed. When Paul Morrissey, the director who worked with Andy Warhol, saw them at the perfectly named Café Bizarre playing songs about drugs and kinky sex to a room full of tourists, it was game on. The Velvet Underground is the most famous band that never sold any records. Though it has been said and attributed to Brian Eno that everyone who bought an album started a band. Lou Reed brought the avant-garde to rock as well as the underground of heroin, hustlers, and homosexuality. Transformer has four Velvet Underground songs on it, which informs its tough, startling, fluid sexual sensibility. Bowie and Mick Ronson, the guitarist and producer, tried like mad to serve Lou to the male-dominated rock public, and “Walk on the Wild Side,” a semi-rapped, midnight jam about drag queens, male hustlers, and fellatio references, was a solid hit and is still shocking. But Lou Reed was a sensitive poet type, and his raw flame of honesty, along with the drone, pop, and fuzz, wasn’t meant for mainstream. Transformer has rock ’n’ roll and art and sadness and all manner of ambiguity. “Perfect Day” is a love song or an ironic put-down or both. Singular in his bold vision and poetry, Lou Reed is a fearless master and drugged-up lunatic. America never wants to reveal its complex underbelly, but that is precisely why we are at all interesting. Lou Reed gives poetry to the hidden class. Lou Reed is your detached, hip, jaded friend taking you on a tour of tenements full of burning mattresses and mad love for life. Light up a fag. Any kind.
WOMEN WITH A CAPITAL W
History is a series of lies written by icky white guys who beat their maids. That is why it is so often about how great icky white guys are. We attempt to make this book smarter by including Women who made the world better. They are strong, vital, and fabulous because they had to be.
FLORYNCE KENNEDY (1916–2000)
If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
—Florynce Kennedy
Grass-roots organizing is like climbing into bed with a malaria patient in order to show how much you love him or her, then catching malaria yourself. I say if you want to kill poverty, go to Wall Street and kick—or disrupt.
—Florynce Kennedy
Florynce Kennedy was an American treasure civil rights hero. She wore a cowboy hat and pink sunglasses and took no prisoners. Hilarious, contentious, and bigger-than-life. From organizing a boycott of a Coca-Cola plant in the ’30s for not hiring black drivers to being a lawyer for the Black Panthers, antiwar activist, abortion champion, and a founding member of the National Organization for Women, she never took no for an answer.
As a lawyer, she helped defend the Black Panthers against charges of conspiring to blow up stores and triumphed. It was the longest political trial in the history of New York. Try this on, groove kittens: she sued the record companies for jazz giants Billie Holiday’s and Charlie Parker’s back royalties and won.
Daughter of a Pullman porter, she graduated from Columbia Law School in 1951, just one of eight Women that year and only the second black Woman allowed to do so. She had confronted the dean in 1948 on whether she was being denied admission because she was
black, and the dean told her no, it was because she was a Woman. Go figure.
She sued the Catholic Church for having tax-exempt status and spending money on anti-abortion campaigns. She organized a group to sue the state of New York over their strict abortion laws. New York liberalized them. But law was too corrupt, and the system too stodgy for her. She wrote in her memoir Color Me Flo: My Hard Life and Good Times, “Handling the Holiday and Parker estates taught me more than I was really ready for about government and business delinquency and the hostility and helplessness of the courts. Not only was I not earning a decent living, there began to be a serious question in my mind whether practicing law could ever be an effective means of changing society or even of simple resistance to oppression.”
Her activism was vital in matters of race, war, and Women’s rights. She spoke and wrote, picketed, organized, and galvanized all through the decades. She brought groups together. Florynce founded the Feminist Party in 1971. How is that for feminist? They immediately threw their support to that other icon, the first black female member of Congress Shirley Chisholm, who was running against Richard Nixon for president.
Florynce Kennedy fought for the poor and for unity between gender and races. That may be why she is not included in many history books. Gloria Steinem said, “She understood what Emma Goldman understood: there has to be laughter and fun at the revolution, or it isn’t a revolution.” As Florynce described herself, “I’m just a loud-mouthed middle-aged colored lady with a fused spine and three feet of intestines missing, and a lot of people think I’m crazy. Maybe you do, too, but I never stop to wonder why I’m not like other people. The mystery to me is why more people aren’t like me.”
If only, Ms. Kennedy. Most people wearing cowboy hats don’t have the cojones to wear pink shades and speak truth to power.
ADA LOVELACE (1815–1852)
The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.
—Ada Lovelace
An enchantress of numbers, Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer, a hundred years before the computer. Sly.
Ada Lovelace was the only legitimate child of the famous poet Lord Byron. Yes, that Lord Byron, the debauched, drinky bisexual member of Parliament and adventurer, the one described by one of his lovers as “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” His wife, Annabella, a calculating Woman whom Byron called the “Mathematical Medea,” thought he was deranged and split the scene. They never saw him again. Her mother forbade his mention, and they lived in the country. But Ada always kept a place in her heart for Byron and was buried next to him. She thought of herself as a poetical scientist.
Ada was quite ill as a child; she spent a whole year in bed with the measles. The staunch Annabella was determined that Ada should not be the insane maniac her father was and made her lie still for hours at a time to learn self-control. Anne also brought in tutors of math and science for the same reason—to drive away the fiery moods—and Ada was an adept pupil from early on. Her teachers were eclectic and a who’s who of free thinkers from the age: William Frend, a social reformer; William King, the family’s doctor; and Mary Somerville, a Scottish astronomer and mathematician. Mary Somerville was a hit in 1831 when she published The Mechanism of the Heavens, a translation of the five-volume Mécanique Céleste by Pierre Simon Laplace. She was published by the fantastically named Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (indeed). She was also one of the first Women to be admitted into the Royal Astronomical Society and has a crater on the moon named after her. But back to young Ada.
Ada was obsessed with machines as a child, designing boats, inventing a steam-powered flying machine, and even writing and illustrating a book called Flyology. As a teen, she had an affair with her shorthand tutor and had her coming-out in society. The tutor was fired, and Ada was given the nineteenth-century cure for having a healthy libido: horseback riding. At eighteen, she attended a soirée where the mathematician Charles Babbage was showing his Difference Engine, an advanced calculating machine. She immediately dug it and struck up a working relationship with him.
In the meantime, she married and had three kids. Her husband became the Earl of Lovelace, which gave her her awesome name. She eventually reconnected with Mr. Babbage while he was working on his Analytical Engine, a newer, more complicated animal. This is where the story really heats up. Babbage gave a talk on his engine in Turin, and Luigi Menabrea, a mathematician who later became prime minister of Italy, wrote up the speech in French. How sexy is this story so far? Our Ada then translated and added her own notes. The machine used punch cards, but Ada saw much more than calculating potential—she saw the poetic potential. “Again, it [the Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations . . . Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”
Ada was right, of course, and the notes were wholly her own. She died quite young but is rightly recognized as a visionary in the field of computing and mathematics. Now there is an Ada Lovelace Day, something Mr. Jobs will never get.
WILMA MANKILLER (1945–2010)
I’ve run into more discrimination as a woman than as an Indian.
—Wilma Mankiller
Prior to my election, young Cherokee girls would never have thought that they might grow up and become chief.
—Wilma Mankiller
Wilma Mankiller has the most fearsome name in this book. She was a Cherokee activist, educator, author; the first Woman ever elected chief by any major American tribe; and hands-down super hardcore.
Born to a family of eleven in Oklahoma, her great-grandfather had been part of the Trail of Tears, the forced relocation of the Cherokee tribe from the Carolinas and Georgia in the 1830s. Her family had been given a depressing tract of ground called Mankiller Flats.
The family eventually ended up in San Francisco, where the government had promised her father a job. They found out they were stuck in crappy public housing in the sleazy Tenderloin district. The shock was a strain she called her own “trail of tears,” but she met and married a man and had two daughters. It was the Indian occupation of Alcatraz in 1969 that changed her life. The occupiers claimed the island “in the name of Indians of All Tribes”; they were seeking to call attention to the horrible treatment of Indians by the U.S. government. Wilma started visiting and raising money. She shuttled to the Indian Center that was the command post during the nineteen-month protest.
She wrote that she gained a sense of pride during the Alcatraz occupation: “It changed me forever. Throughout the Alcatraz experience and afterward, I met so many people from other tribes who had a major and enduring effect on me. They changed how I perceived myself as a woman and as a Cherokee.” Justine Buckskin, who worked at the center, was helpful to her; she “extended a hand to me at a time I really needed it. So, when I think about women’s rights organizations, I think about women extending a hand to other women.”
Ms. Mankiller moved back to Oklahoma and took up the cause. She took an entry-level position with the Cherokee Tribe leading campaigns for new health and school programs, like Head Start. Wilma got in a horrible head-on collision and suffered terrible injuries, but she persisted. She got a job as economic stimulus coordinator for the Cherokee Nation, emphasizing community self-help. She founded the community development department of the Cherokee Nation and, as its director, helped develop rural water systems and rehabilitated housing. She was working hard and all the while going to college, so the tribe’s principal chief, Ross Swimmer, selected her as his running mate in his reelection campaign in 1983. Their victory made her the first Woman to become deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation. Along the way she met feminist icon Gloria Steinem an
d they became friends. Ms. Steinem got married at her house.
She ran for chief after succeeding Ross Swimmer and won her second term with 83 percent of the vote. She had loads of health issues and died early of cancer but not before receiving a Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Clinton.
Nothing could stop her. Not divorce, poverty, illness, or loss.
PETRA HERRERA (c. 1875–c. 1942)
One of the thousands of Women who fought in the Mexican Revolution, Ms. Herrera fought in men’s clothes, led a male unit to victory, and when she didn’t get the credit, she put on Women’s clothes and led an all-female unit into battle.
Whole villages were swept up by revolutionaries Pancho Villa and Zapata’s rolling army, taking Women and children along with them. Often not of their own will or for their own good. They foraged and cooked as they went, and one reporter described the revolutionary Carranza’s camp as appearing like “an immense picnic.”
The Women who fought in the Mexican Revolution were known as soldaderas, and during the chaos of the revolution, they faced terrible abuse and inhuman conditions. Petra, disguised as a man with the name “Pedro Herrera,” established herself as a leader and also was good at blowing up bridges. She was there to take names. Eventually, she revealed her gender by wearing braids and became a captain in the rebel army. Villa loved his own reputation as a ladies’ man and would not allow soldaderas into his elite cavalry unit the Dorados, or “Golden Ones.”