Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin

by Calvin Trillin

  “Who is Jacob Schiff that he should be embarrassed by my Uncle Benny Daynovsky?” I said to my wife when I read about the Galveston Project in The Provincials.

  “You shouldn’t take it personally,” my wife said.

  “I’m not taking it personally; I’m taking it for my Uncle Benny,” I said. “Unless you think that Jacob Schiff’s descendants are embarrassed by my moving to New York instead of staying in our assigned area.”

  “I’m sure Jacob Schiff’s descendants don’t know anything about this,” my wife said.

  “And who are they that they should be embarrassed by my Uncle Benny Daynovsky?” I said. “A bunch of stockbrokers.”

  “I think the Schiffs are investment bankers,” my wife said.

  “You can say what you want to about my Uncle Benny,” I said, “but he never made his living as a moneylender.”

  I’m not quite sure how my Uncle Benny did make his living; I always thought of him as retired. As a child, I often saw him during Sunday trips to St. Jo—trips so monopolized by visits to my father’s relatives that I always assumed St. Jo was known for being populated almost entirely by Eastern European immigrants, although I have since learned that it had a collateral fame as the home of the Pony Express. Until a few years ago, Uncle Benny was known for the tomatoes he grew in his backyard and pickled, but I’m certain he never produced them commercially. A few years ago, when he was already in his eighties and definitely retired, Uncle Benny was in his backyard planting tomatoes when a woman lost control of her car a couple of blocks behind his house. The car went down a hill, through a stop sign, over a median strip, through a hedge, and into a backyard two houses down from Benny’s house. Then it took a sharp right turn, crossed the two backyards, and knocked down my Uncle Benny. It took Uncle Benny several weeks to recover from his physical injuries, and even then, I think, he continued to be troubled by the implications of that sharp right turn. One of his sons, my cousin Iz, brought Uncle Benny back from the hospital and said, “Pop, do me a favor: Next time you’re in the backyard planting tomatoes, keep an eye out for the traffic.”

  “First that car makes a mysterious right turn, and now he’s being attacked by a gang of stockbrokers,” I said. “It hardly seems fair.”

  • • •

  “There’s something very interesting about the Schiffs listed in Who’s Who,” I said to my wife not long after our first conversation about the Galveston Project.

  “I think you’d better find yourself a hobby,” she said.

  “As a matter of fact, I’m thinking about taking up genealogy,” I said. “But listen to what’s very interesting about the Schiffs listed in Who’s Who: The Schiffs who sound as if they’re descendants of Jacob Schiff seem to be outnumbered by some Schiffs who were born in Lithuania and now manufacture shoes in Cleveland.”

  “What’s so interesting about that?”

  “Well, if Jacob Schiff thought people from Kiev were embarrassing, you can imagine how embarrassed he must have been by people from Lithuania.”

  “What’s the matter with people from Lithuania?” she said.

  “I’m not sure, but my mother’s mother was from Lithuania and my father always implied that it was nothing to be proud of,” I said. “He always said she had an odd accent in Yiddish. I’m sure he must have been right, because she had an odd accent in English. Anyway, Who’s Who has more Lithuanian Schiffs than German Schiffs, even if you count Dorothy Schiff.”

  “Why shouldn’t you count Dorothy Schiff?” my wife said. “Isn’t she the publisher of the New York Post?”

  “Yes, but why is it that she is publisher of the New York Post?”

  “Well, I suppose for the same reason anybody is the publisher of any paper,” my wife said. “She had enough money to buy it.”

  “Only partly true,” I said. “She is the publisher of the New York Post because several years ago, during one of the big newspaper strikes, she finked on the other publishers in the New York Publishers Association, settled with the union separately, and therefore saw to it that the Post survived, giving her something to be publisher of.”

  “Since when did you become such a big defender of the New York Publishers Association?” my wife said.

  “My Uncle Benny Daynovsky never finked on anybody,” I said.

  “Maybe that passage in The Provincials was wrong,” my wife said when she came into the living room one evening and found me reading intently. “Maybe Schiff gave the money to the Galveston Project just because he wanted to help people like your grandfather get settled.”

  “I’m glad you brought that up, because I happen to be consulting another source,” I said, holding up the book I was reading so that she could see it was Our Crowd, which I had checked out of the library that day with the thought of finding some dirt on Jacob Schiff. “Here’s an interesting passage in this book about some of the German-Jewish charity on the Lower East Side: ‘Money was given largely but grudgingly, not out of the great religious principle of tz’dakah, or charity on its highest plane, given out of pure loving kindness, but out of a hard, bitter sense of resentment, and embarrassment and worry over what the neighbors would think.’ ”

  “I don’t see what you hope to gain by finding out unpleasant things about Jacob Schiff,” she said.

  “Historical perspective,” I said, continuing to flip back and forth between the Jacob Schiff entry in the index and the pages indicated. “Did you know, by the way, that Schiff had a heavy German accent? I suppose when it came time to deal with the threat of my Uncle Benny, he said something like, ‘Zend him to Galveston. Zum of dese foreigners iss embarrassink.’ ”

  “I never heard you make fun of anybody’s accent before,” my wife said.

  “They started it.”

  “My Uncle Benny never associated with robber barons like E. H. Harriman,” I said to my wife a few days later. “When it comes to nineteenth-century rapacious capitalism, my family’s hands are clean.”

  My wife didn’t say anything. I had begun thinking that it was important that she share my views of Jacob Schiff, but she was hard to convince. She didn’t seem shocked at all when I informed her, from my research in Our Crowd, that Schiff had a private Pullman car, something that anyone in my family would have considered ostentatious. When I told her that Schiff used to charge people who made telephone calls from his mansion—local calls; I wouldn’t argue about long distance—she said that rich people were bound to be sensitive about being taken advantage of. “One time, he was called upon to give a toast to the Emperor of Japan, and he said, ‘First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen,’ ” I said.

  “It’s always hard to know what to say to foreigners,” she said.

  “What about the checks?” I said one evening.

  “What checks?” she said.

  “The checks Schiff had framed on the wall of his office,” I said.

  “I can’t believe he had checks framed on the wall of his office,” my wife said.

  “I refer you to page one hundred fifty-nine of Our Crowd,” I said. “Schiff had made two particularly large advances to the Pennsylvania Railroad, and he had the cancelled checks framed on his wall.”

  “Did he really?” she said, showing some interest.

  “One of them was for $49,098,000,” I said.

  “That is kind of crude,” she said.

  “Not as crude as the other one,” I said. “It was for $62,075,000.”

  “I think that’s rather embarrassing,” she said.

  “I would say so,” I said, putting away the book. “I just hope that no one in St. Jo hears about it. My Uncle Benny would be mortified.”

  1975

  THE SPORTING LIFE

  “I believe it was the legendary Grantland Rice who wrote, ‘For when the one Great Scorer marks / Upon his pad just how you played / He cares not if you won or lost. / He rates the deal your agent made.’ ”

  My Team

  Benno Schmidt, Jr., the new pre
sident of Yale, has been described in the press as a “renowned constitutional-law scholar who is an expert on the First Amendment, race relations and the New York Rangers.” The man he will replace, A. Bartlett Giamatti, has been described as “a professor of English and comparative literature and an expert on Dante, Spenser and the Boston Red Sox.” It’s no wonder I’m never asked to be the president of a major educational institution: I don’t have a team.

  I used to have a team. When I was growing up, the Kansas City Blues were my team. They were in the American Association, along with the Minneapolis Millers and the Milwaukee Brewers and the Toledo Mud Hens (the league patsies) and several other teams that Schmidt and Giamatti don’t know the first thing about.

  Because I grew up in Kansas City, people assume that the Kansas City Royals are my team. Not so. My loyalty to the Kansas City Blues was so pure that their demise ended my interest in the national pastime. Oh, sure I could have skipped to the Kansas City Athletics and then to the Royals. I had opportunities. “It’s the big leagues,” everyone in Kansas City said when the Athletics came in to replace the Blues.

  “Big leaguers don’t ditch their pals,” I replied.

  I could see myself running into one of the old Kansas City Blues someday—Cliff Mapes, maybe, or Eddie Stewart, or Carl DeRose, the sore-armed right-hander I once saw pitch a perfect game. Or maybe Odie Strain, the no-hit shortstop. “I guess you follow the Royals now,” Odie would say, with that same look of resignation he used to wear when the third strike whisked past him and thwocked into the catcher’s mitt.

  “No,” I’d say. “I don’t have a team. My team’s gone.” A smile would spread slowly across Odie’s face.

  Meanwhile, I don’t have a team. I can just imagine my appearance before the presidential search committee of, say, the Harvard trustees. I’m being interviewed in a private room at the New York Harvard Club by a former secretary of defense, an enormously wealthy investment banker, and an Episcopalian bishop. So far, I feel that things have been going my way. I have analyzed Dante’s The Divine Comedy in constitutional terms, concentrating on whether any movement from purgatory is federally regulated travel under the Commerce Clause. I have transposed the first ten amendments to the Constitution into Spenserian stanzas, although not in a pushy way.

  I can see that the committee is impressed. The former secretary of defense, who at first seemed to be concentrating on some doodling that resembled the trajectory of an intercontinental ballistic missile, is now giving the interview his complete attention. The investment banker has slipped me a note that says “Hold onto Humboldt Bolt & Tube. Sell Worldwide Universal short.” The interviewers are exchanging pleased glances and nodding their heads. Finally, as the interview seems to be coming to an end, the investment banker says, “Just one more question. What is your team?”

  “Team?” I say.

  There is a long silence. Then the bishop, in a kindly voice, says, “You do have a team, don’t you?”

  “Well, not exactly,” I say.

  “No team?” the bishop says.

  “I used to have a team,” I say, “and I still turn on the tennis now and then, just to hiss McEnroe.”

  The bishop shakes his head sadly.

  I am beginning to get desperate. “I know the University of Missouri fight song by heart,” I say.

  But they are gathering up their papers, preparing to leave. The former defense secretary is carefully feeding his doodles into a paper shredder.

  “But why do I need a team?” I say.

  Nobody pays any attention, except the bishop who says, “We need a regular guy. Presidents who aren’t regular guys frighten the alumni.”

  “But I am a regular guy,” I say. “I owe the Diners Club. I had a dog named Spike.”

  “Regular guys have teams,” the bishop says.

  Desperately, I begin to sing: “Every true son so happy hearted, skies above us are blue. There’s a spirit so deep within us. Old Missouri, here’s to you—rah, rah. When the band plays the Tiger …”

  But now they are at the door. Suddenly, the investment banker walks back to where I’m sitting, snatches his stock tips off the table, and marches out with the rest of the committee. I sit stunned at the table as a club steward comes in to straighten up the room. He glances down at my résumé, still on the table.

  “Kansas City, huh?” he says. “You must be proud of those Royals.”

  “The Royals are not my team,” I say. “I don’t have a team. If I had a team, I’d be the president of Harvard.”

  1986

  Baseball’s Back

  Yes, baseball’s back. Once more our sporting passion’ll

  Embrace this game, this hallowed pastime national.

  We’ll fill the stadium our taxes built

  Because the owner threatened he would jilt

  Our city, which might die, it was implied,

  Without this centerpiece of civic pride.

  We’ll cheer our heroes when ahead or losing,

  Forgetting tales of date rape, drugs, and boozing.

  We’ll cheer the way they hit and catch and pitch.

  We’ll cheer the agents who have made them rich.

  So, greedy owners, pampered jocks, you all

  Are welcomed once again. Okay, play ball!

  1993

  Chinese Golf

  As if we didn’t have enough contention in the world, a Chinese academic, Professor Ling Hongling, has gone and upset the Scots by claiming that golf was invented in China.

  I know what you’re thinking: This is going to remind the Russians that they used to claim they invented baseball, which will provoke the English (who really did invent baseball but got tired a long time ago of arguing with people from Cooperstown) to talk about having invented ice hockey, which will enrage the Canadians (who hardly ever get mad) and provoke the Lithuanians into claiming the invention of darts, and that will lead into a sort of chain reaction of claims and counterclaims until—powee!—World War III.

  I wish I had some reassuring words about that possibility, but I have to report that—according to a piece in the Toronto Globe and Mail by Carl Honoré, which is where I read all about this—the Scots are as angry as hornets. Scottish tabloids have referred to Professor Hongling as “a nutty, Oriental professor” and an “Eastern bogeyman,” the Globe and Mail article says, and Bobby Burnet, golf historian to the Royal and Ancient Golf Club in St. Andrews, is quoted as calling the whole business “a load of malarkey.”

  It is only a matter of time, I think, before some Scottish golfer gets mad enough to point out that Professor Ling Hongling’s name sounds more like a Ping-Pong match than a round of golf.

  Writing in the Australian Society for Sports History Bulletin—a journal, I should admit, that I might have missed had the alert Honoré not pointed the way—Professor Hongling concluded from pottery depictions and murals and other evidence that a game very much like modern golf was played in China around the middle of the tenth century, five hundred years before the Scots claim to have invented it. It was called chiuwan, or hitting ball—which, you have to admit, is a more logical name for the sport than golf, even though, during my brief fling at it many years ago, I often missed the ball completely.

  Burnet tried in the Globe and Mail piece to explain away the pottery and murals: “If you take any kind of patterned plate or blanket or stained glass and play around with it long enough, you’ll soon find a man holding a club and hitting a ball towards a hole.” Being an open-minded person, I tried this theory with an old patterned plate, and it didn’t work: After looking at the design for twenty minutes (some of that time squinty-eyed), what I thought I saw was a man in an undershirt eating a herring. What I’m saying is that Burnet’s attempt to explain away Ling Hongling’s murals may say less about the history of golf than it does about Burnet, or me.

  As I understand Ling Hongling’s theory, he believes some early traveler to China brought golf back to Europe, the way Marco Polo is said to have b
rought back to Italy what Italians came to call pasta and the way more recent travelers from the West have brought back hot tips on how a government can get rid of students who are demonstrating for democracy in large public squares.

  As you might imagine, this early-traveler theory does not have a big following in Scotland, where, according to The Globe and Mail, “Golf sits snugly alongside clan tartan, whiskey and haggis as a symbol of Scottish ingenuity.” I should say right off the bat that I have tasted haggis—it is described in my dictionary, rather discreetly, as a pudding “made of the heart, liver, and lungs of a sheep or a calf minced with suet, onions, oatmeal, and seasonings and boiled in the stomach of the animal”—and if the Scots are worried about somebody else taking credit for inventing it, I think I can put their mind at rest on that score.

  I think they’re also overreacting in talking about the threat this may represent to the industry that is based on foreigners going over there to play golf on Scottish courses. Rich Americans and Japanese do not go to Scotland, wearing funny costumes and lugging golf clubs, because they believe that golf was invented by the Scots; they go there because they like the whisky.

  I do believe that if the Scots will just calm down, we can ride this one out. I think it should start with Bobby Burnet apologizing for the harsh language he’s used about Professor Ling Hongling. They should meet like gentlemen, perhaps over a round of hitting ball.

  1991

  On the Marketing of Yankee Grass

  A South Jersey grass farm that has supplied turf to Yankee Stadium since the 1960s plans to sell officially licensed grass in the form of sod or seeds.

  —Associated Press

  You too can have a yard with sod

  Like sod upon which A-Rod trod.