RobKirkpatrick.com

Those of you who followed my recreation of the 1969 baseball season would enjoy the Facebook page for Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging ’70s, the forthcoming book by pop culture historian Dan Epstein. I can personally attest that it’s a hugely fun book, and the author’s put together a FB profile that is in the process of goin’ viral with more than 600 fans in little over a week’s time.  The page has regular updates with links to great YouTube footage from the 70s, wonderfully tacky images from the era shared by fans, and frequent commentary from the author featuring his characteristic wit. 

Check it out. 

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Big-Hair-Plastic-Grass-A-Funky-Ride-Through-Baseball-In-The-1970s/321769914865?ref=ts

While grateful for all the attention I’ve gotten for my “other” two books from last year, I think my Cecil Travis book (published in a new Bison Books edition in ‘09 by the University of Nebraska Press) has somewhat gotten lost in the shuffle.  So check out the mini bio for this Washington Senators All-Star from the 1930s and ’40s that I contributed to the SABR Baseball Biography Project:  

http://bioproj.sabr.org/bioproj.cfm?a=v&v=l&bid=597&pid=14327

…Then, if you’d like to know more, click on the BOOKS link at the top of my site and pick your online vendor of choice.

- Rob

If you’re looking for a good book about the late ’60s – one that I didn’t even write – check out Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World by O.C. journalist Nick Schou:

http://us.macmillan.com/orangesunshine

Schou’s book just received a “four cannabis review” from High Times, author Mike Davis says this true story reads “like classic Thomas Pynchon,” and yours truly blurbed it by saying it’s a “wild ride of a story that seems straight out of Easy Rider or Zabriskie Point.”

Orange Sunshine is available now for pre-order on Amazon.

Valleys of Neptune, an album of a dozen previously unreleased studio tracks from Jimi Hendrix, is set for release in March from Sony/Legacy. Here’s Edna Gundersen’s piece for USA Today:

http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2010-01-11-jimialbum11_ST_N.htm?csp=34

I spoke to Gundersen in October 2008 for an article she did on Mark Oliver Everett’s memoir, Things the Grandchildren Should Know, which I published at my day job:

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2008-10-20-mark-everett_N.htm

Magic in the Night got a mention in a blog called Madmen, Drummers, Bummers and Indians in the Summer.  As far as back-handed compliments go, it’s one of the best ones you can get:

I have finished Rob Kirkpatrick’s “Magic in the Night”, which is one of the better Springsteen related books I’ve yet read. Kirkpatrick is about 97% less full of crap than most music critics, so kudos to him. 

Here’s the link: http://coxrox.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/three-more-that-snuck-into-2009/

(…with apologies to Public Enemy.)

I intended this to be a letter appearing in the Washington Post, but it doesn’t appear that they’ll be printing it, so I’m posting it here…

1969 vs. 1968?

In response to Carlos Lozada’s comments on my book in his article “2009 is over. But is it history?”, I want to clarify that I did not say I “might have called the book ‘1969: The Year After the Important Year.’” As I explain in my introduction, this was a joke made by a colleague, which I recalled to note the glut of books on 1968 and the gap that I sought to fill with mine.

Mr. Lozada argued that I “must outdo 1968” and incidents such as the Democratic Convention and the election of Richard Nixon. I take it, then, he does not see the significance of a year that witnessed People’s Park, the Stonewall Riots, the Manson Family killings, the War Moratorium, the Days of Rage, the occupation of Alcatraz, the public’s discovery of the My Lai massacre, and the killing of Fred Hampton? Or the importance of Nixon’s inaugural year, in which he escalated the war in Southeast Asia with covert bombings in Cambodia and drew lines in the sand with his famous “Silent Majority” address to the nation?

“When you need the Miracle Mets and the first modern ATM to boost your case, you know you’re in trouble,” writes Mr. Lozada. If he disagrees that the Miracle Mets (which he can reference 40 years later without needing to explain who they were) transcended the sports world, would he also question the importance of another event from baseball that year: Curt Flood’s announcement that he was challenging baseball’s reserve clause, thus signaling the onset of free agency?

If Mr. Lozada isn’t impressed with how the invention of the ATM changed the ways in which he conducts his financial transactions today, does he not believe that the maiden Boeing 747 flight, the first artificial heart implant, and the first computer network connection introduced major changes into modern life?  (Without that last item, I would not have found myself 40 years later reading Mr. Lozada’s article at home on my laptop.)  And, of course, there was a small technological achievement called Apollo 11.

While Mr. Lozada maintains I was applying the “Groundwork Argument” to substitute for a supposed lack of “historical moments,” I would suggest that recent History channel documentaries such as Woodstock: Now & Then and Sex in ’69: The Sexual Revolution in America (for which I was interviewed), as well as NPR’s humor piece on 40th anniversary “burnout,” seem to indicate others agree with my opinion that 1969 was indeed an important year with a unique legacy in America society.

Rob Kirkpatrick
Author of 1969: The Year Everything Changed

Here’s the article to which I’m responding:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/11/AR2009121102590.html

Last week I posted a link to a theologian’s blog, in which he listed 1969: The Year Everything Changed among his best books of the year.  Today, I just came across this posting on An Atheist’s Answer, where the book is listed as one of five nonfiction books to buy instead of the Bible:

http://atheistsanswer.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/good-books/ 

Wow.  No pressure there.

It had me wondering: If I made like John Lennon and declared myself “bigger than Jesus,” would the ensuing book burnings help drive sales?  Whatever helps move stock…

1969: The Year Everything Changed got an honorable mention of sorts in fellow Huffington Post blogger Laurence Hughes’s tongue-in-cheek list on The 10 Best Years That Are Books:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laurence-hughes/the-10-best-years-that-ar_b_397174.html

Nice idea re: 1964, but he must have missed Jon Margolis’s The Last Innocent Year.

And here’s 1969 in someone’s “best of 2009″ list – admittedly a more surprising inclusion, but also appreciated:

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2009/12/19/sam-stormss-top-10-books-of-2009/

Thursday, October 16, 1969

The New York Mets are World Series champions.

The Amazin’s overcame an early three-run deficit to beat the Baltimore Orioles 5-3 in Game Five and close out the series at home. Jerry Koosman pitched a complete game to earn his second series win, series MVP Donn Clendenon homered in his third straight appearance, and Al Weis hit a key game-tying home run, his first ever homer at Shea Stadium.

After hitting .215 in the regular season, Weis finished with a .455 series average.

The Mets fell behind in the third when Orioles pitcher Dave McNally smacked a two-run shot over the leftfield wall. Three batters later, Frank Robinson drove a towering home run over the centerfield fence for a 3-0 Orioles lead.

But it was the last time Baltimore would score in ‘69.

Koosman settled into a groove, and the Mets got on the board in the sixth when Cleon Jones was hit by a pitch and Clendenon followed with a drive that ricocheted off the upper deck in leftfield. At first, umpire Lou DiMuro ruled that McNally’s pitch had missed Jones’s feet before it hit the ground and bounced into the Mets dugout. But manager Gil Hodges emerged with a ball that bore the mark of shoe polish, and after inspecting it, DiMuro awarded Jones first. This enraged Baltimore manager Earl Weaver, as in the top of the inning, Frank Robinson had struck out after claiming to have been hit by a Koosman pitch.

With the Mets trailing by one, Al Weis sent the fans to their feet with his game-tying home run off McNally in the seventh. In the eighth against reliever Eddie Watt, Jones led off with a double high off the centerfield fence, and he scored the go-ahead run one batter latter on Ron Swoboda’s bloop single to left, which landed just in front of a lunging Don Buford to the delight of the enraptured Shea faithful. After Ed Charles flew out, Jerry Grote lined a hard grounder to Boog Powell at first, and when Watt mishandled Powell’s toss to first, Swoboda came around to score a key insurance run.

Protecting a two-run lead, Koosman made a mistake in walking Frank Robinson to begin the ninth. But Koosman got Powell to ground into a force play and retired Brooks Robinson on a fly to right.

Davey Johnson stepped to the plate next. I recount what happened next in 1969: The Year Everything Changed:

Second baseman Davey Johnson hit a deep fly ball to left that might have made many a fan hold their breath, but when Jones stopped moving backward and calmly settled under the ball just shy of the warning track, it was all over.

He collected the ball and brought his hands down as he practically knelt to the Shea grass in a solemn gesture. Veteran baseball writer George Vecsey wrote, “Shea Stadium was caught quivering as Jones sighted the ball, and the whole city erupted as he caught it, and the fans poured onto the field, and the New York Mets were the champions of baseball. There were a million exciting things happening and it was hard to focus on any one incident. But out in left field, if you had been looking there, you would have seen Cleon Jones, with fans racing over to pummel him, stop for a moment, drop quickly to one knee. Later, he explained his brief genuflection. ‘Someone was good to us.’ ”

The Mets, the laughingstock of baseball in their first seven years of existence, were now the best team in all of the land. All jubilant hell broke loose. Fans ran onto the field in celebration. Some collected dirt from the infield; others dug out home plate as a souvenir. It was just before 3:30 on that Thursday afternoon, October 16, and throughout the city, New Yorkers began their celebration. White-collar confetti danced downward upon spontaneous revelers. Strangers danced in the streets, young with old, black with white—one of the few moments of harmony during a year that had seen the nation divided by age and race.

Here’s an Onion article on an outspoken, oil-covered otter:

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/shell_executives_accuse_oil?utm_source=a-section

…which reminded me of an actual statement made by an oil exec in the aftermath of the Santa Barbara Oil Slick in February 1969:

Fred Hartley, the president of Union Oil, traveled to Washington to appear before a subcommittee on air and water pollution to testify on the episode, which he put off as “Mother Earth letting the oil come out.” Fed up with the outrage over the oil slick his company had created, Hartley commented, “I’m amazed at the publicity for the loss of a few birds.”

You can read more about the Santa Barbara slick, the infamous Cuyahoga River fire, the controversial People’s Park riots, and other ecology-related episodes from that year in 1969: The Year Everything Changed.