Michael Thomas, author. (“Green Monday”.)
Nanci Griffith, noted folk singer.
While Ms. Griffith often wrote political and confessional material, her best-loved songs were closely observed tales of small-town life, sometimes with painful details in the lyrics, but typically sung with a deceptive prettiness. Her song “Love at the Five and Dime,” for example, tracks a couple’s romance from its teenage origins when “Rita was 16 years/Hazel eyes and chestnut hair/She made the Woolworth counter shine” through old age, when “Eddie traveled with the barroom bands/till arthritis took his hands/Now he sells insurance on the side.”
The song was a country hit in 1986 — but for Kathy Mattea, not for Ms. Griffith. Similarly, while Ms. Griffith was the first person to record “From a Distance,” written by Julie Gold, the song was later a smash hit for Bette Midler.
Ms. Griffith sometimes affected a folkie casualness toward mainstream success. She told Rolling Stone in 1993 that she didn’t mind that Ms. Mattea had the hit version of “Love at the Five and Dime”: “It feels great that Kathy has to sing that for the rest of her life and I don’t.”
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Donald Kagan, historian. I never met him, but he sounds like someone whose books I want to read.
Professor Kagan was considered among the country’s leading historians. His four-volume account of the Peloponnesian War, from 431 B.C. to 404 B.C., was hailed by the critic George Steiner as “the foremost work of history produced in North America in the 20th century.”
He was equally renowned for his classroom style, in which he peppered nuanced readings of ancient texts with references to his beloved New York Yankees and inventive, sometimes comic exercises in class participation, like having students form a hoplite phalanx to demonstrate how Greek soldiers marched into combat.
A strong believer in the timeless virtues of Western civilization and the need for countries to project power in a lawless world, Professor Kagan was often categorized as a conservative. He more or less agreed: He called himself a “Harry Truman Democrat,” but by the late 1960s he had come to believe that the Democratic Party, and much of the academic world, had drifted too far to the left.
He was hard to pin down, though. He disliked Richard Nixon and, more recently, Donald Trump, but he was a fan of Reagan, whose commitment to a strong military and willingness to confront the Soviet Union seemed to him to embody the Greeks’ “mental and intellectual toughness in confronting the human condition.”
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Professor Kagan fell in love with Cornell, especially the collegiality of its faculty. But in 1969, when armed Black students took over an administration building, demanding the creation of an Africana studies center and amnesty for fellow students who had been disciplined for an earlier protest, the university’s decision to negotiate with them struck him as a capitulation to violence. Months later he decamped for Yale. The crisis at Cornell was, he later said, the worst experience in his life.
Though he at first admired Kingman Brewster, Yale’s president, for his stand against campus radicalism, in 1974 Professor Kagan publicly criticized him after the university canceled a speech by William Shockley, a Stanford physicist and Nobel Prize winner who believed that Black people were genetically inferior. Professor Kagan strongly disagreed with Shockley’s views, but he believed the university should be exposing students to challenging points of view.
In response to that criticism, Mr. Brewster asked the historian C. Vann Woodward to write a report about campus speech, and later adopted many of its proposals that lined up with Professor Kagan’s views.
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Professor Kagan’s passion for ancient Greece informed another of his great loves: sports. He liked to say that one root of his contrarian nature was that as a child in 1930s Brooklyn, he was a Yankees fan in a sea of Dodgers caps. Among his greatest moments, he said, was the year Yale asked him to serve as acting athletic director, a job he relished even as he continued to teach history.
He saw baseball as a Homeric allegory, one in which a hero — the batter — ventures from home and must overcome unforeseen challenges in order to return. That view set up one of his most celebrated articles: a withering review in The Public Interest of the columnist George Will’s book “Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball” (1990).
“This is the fantasy of a smart, skinny kid who desperately wants to believe that brains count more than the speed, power and reckless courage of the big guys who can play,” Professor Kagan wrote.
I sort of remember the name of Ms. Griffith, from my earliest days listening to country music when I graduated from high school in 1978 or a bit later. She was sort of a folk singer type, I think. There were a bunch of them around in that era, along with the large number of rock and roll bands, who dominated the timeframe. Back then, I liked most types of music, with playing saxophone leading me towards jazz like the ever popular Chuck Mangione, and such.
As for Professor Kagan, I never heard of him, but he sounds like the type of man that everyone should meet, and would never forget him. Of course, todays generations lean against such men, rather desiring to support those who tell them what they want to hear, and enable those who make smooth the pathways they have to tred, instead of allowing them to walk the path of life the way it is meant to be walked, in all of it’s rough and tumble reality, to make them strong and fit to stand firm against the world, and to bring forth the next generation, stronger still, and able to go further than us the previous generation.
While we look at the WWII generation as the greatest generation, and in some ways they certainly fit that mold, in some ways, they fall woefully short, for they wanted to make things easier for the next generation, and in doing so, what has followed ever since, has been a succession of less able and less strong children. Oh, there are many of us who are able to withstand the gale, who have been strengthened by our faith in both God and the founding fathers faith in the Constitution. But you can see for yourself the disappointment of each successive generation, as a whole, and the weakening of America and her shining light on a hill, that shines a bit less bright every decade. I still have hope, I see that there are many who still hold the light of freedom and faith. My only regret is that at the age of 61, I don’t think that I will be around to give my children a better nation than I received.
Kagan’s students were devoted to him. A High School classmate who went to Yale described them showing up to one of Kagan’s public debates (I think with William F. Buckley). He called them “Kagan’s Pagans” and I’m pretty sure they called themselves that.
Thank you, Borepatch and pigpen51.