When my cousins Todd and Pete Heino and I were little kids in Massachusetts, we thought the most fun thing in the world to do was looking at the 1,500 page Baseball Encyclopedia and looking up baseball players from the 1800s like Munn and Wall who had one or two at-bats in their entire career and then disappeared. But whose memories were still preserved. This because Todd and Pete’s father, Gilbert, went out and bought us this huge book and we devoured every page of it. This childhood experience now has a lot of meaning, in ways I never thought, regarding a speech Bill Gates made to Congress several days ago about the decline of American education.
As long as the culture and news media of the United States continues to consider being smart as an aberrant “geeky” thing on par with halitosis, this country is in deep trouble. How would one turn the culture around? Hitting bottom somehow might do it, but it’s the long way around. — Raja, at the Agonist, March 8, 2007 – 7:37am
Raja asks a very important question. One response is this:
Don’t treat intelligence like halitosis.
Or, treat the lack of intelligence the way we treat halitosis.
Or here’s another concept.
Treating intelligence like a disease is the way American society has treated all young girls in the United States since the country’s inception.
And look at all the good that’s done.
Look at all the good that did for Alice Paul.
Clark Terry answered this question by moving from the U.S. to France … permanently. But that’s not the solution.
Rachel Carson answered this question by saving every shore and wading bird native to the United States from extinction from DDT and being pilloried for doing so. To this day.
Keith Olbermann is an interesting study on this subject because he is a true sports geek/fanatic and he is also a true American history geek/fanatic.
Mr. Olbermann is a rabid student of American history. Which includes the history of American sports, including baseball.
Mr. Olbermann is a lot like my cousin Todd Heino, who got the big green, five pound Baseball Encyclopedia for a present when he was 12 years old and proceeded to memorize all 1,500 pages of it within a few months. Including the career records of such late 19th century luminaries such as Munn … and Wall … and Lip Pike …
Steven Jay Gould is another example of a very smart person who was a devoted childhood sports fan and a scientist and did all of it together … out of the sheer love of knowledge …
I offer these examples of people who at a very early age were bitten and smitten by the bug of knowledge, by the wood tick of books at the library, who craved turning pages and sucking in the words printed on them like a sand flea at sunrise on Aucoot Cove on Buzzards Bay in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts.
When this connection dies … when someone like my cousin Todd Heino, who memorized the 1,500 page Baseball Encyclopedia at the age of 12 just because he wanted to and thought it was funny … who scored 650 on the math SAT … who is now a civil engineer …
When we stop expecting and encouraging little kids like my cousin Todd to appear in the gene pool …
What does that say about us ?
P.S. Munn had a lifetime batting average of .000 in two at-bats.
P.S.S. Wall also had a lifetime batting average of zero.
But Lip Pike was a star !!!
