October 16, 1946: The Nuremberg Executions & Gordie Howe's Debut

Göring, at the far left (or so to speak)

In the year 1947, America was able to do fun things again. In that year, we desegregated baseball, established network television, began watching Howdy Doody Time on said television, invented the microwave oven and the transistor, and began looking for UFOs.

But first, in 1946, we had serious work to tend to: Punishing Nazis.

October 16, 1946, 80 years ago: Ten Nazi war criminals, convicted of crimes against humanity, are executed by hanging at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany. They included:

* Joachim von Ribbentrop, age 53, Adolf Hitler's Foreign Minister.

* Julius Streicher, 61, Nazi Germany's top propaganda publisher.

* General Alfred Jodl, 56, Chief of the Armed Forces, who had signed the surrender papers on V-E Day.

* Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, 64.

* Hans Frank, 46, Governor-General of occupied Poland.

You may have seen the "Hitler Rants Parodies," based on a scene from the 2004 film Downfall, starring Bruno Ganz as Hitler. Christian Redl played Jodl in that scene, and Dieter Mann played Keitel.

As for the other 2 Generals that Hitler had asked to remain in the room: Hans Krebs, played by Rolf Kanies, and Wilhelm Burgdorf ("Mein Führer, this is an outrage!"), played by Justus von Dohnányi, both committed suicide in the Bunker on May 2, 1945. Krebs was 47, and Burgdorf was 50.

Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, not named, also remained in the room. He committed suicide in the Bunker the day before. He was 47, and was played by Ulrich Matthes. Also not named, but remaining in the room, was Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery. He escaped on May 2, but saw the Soviets closing in, and committed suicide. He was 44, and was played by Thomas Thieme. SS leader Heinrich Himmler committed suicide in British custody on May 23. He was also 44. He did not appear in the scene, but did appear in the film, and was played by Ulrich Noethen.

Not among the condemned, but scheduled to be so, was Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, the highest-ranking Nazi official to have survived V-E Day. He had made an appeal, asking to be shot as a soldier instead of hanged as a common criminal, but the court refused. So he committed suicide with a potassium cyanide capsule the night before he was to be hanged. He was 53. He also was not in the scene, but was in the film, played by Mathias Gnädinger.

October 16, 1946 was a Wednesday. Actress Suzanne Somers was born.

With the World Series having ended the day before, with the St. Louis Cardinals beating the Boston Red Sox in Game 7, there was only one sporting event on this day. And it is the NHL debut of Gordie Howe. The 18-year-old native of Floral, Saskatchewan wore Number 17, instead of the familiar 9 that he will start wearing the next season. The right wing scores against Walter "Turk" Broda, and the Detroit Red Wings play the Toronto Maple Leafs to a 3-3 tie at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit.

The goal will be the 1st of 786 that the man who becomes known as Mr. Hockey will score for the Wings, going on to win 4 Stanley Cups and becoming the greatest player the game has ever known, and I don't want to hear about no Number 99: Gordie was better. We lost him in 2016, at the age of 88.

October 16, 1901: Booker T. Washington at the White House

October 16, 1901, 125 years ago: Fresh off the publication of his memoir Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington, leader of what is now Tuskegee University in Alabama, is invited by President Theodore Roosevelt to have dinner with him at the White House.

The South was outraged. The Memphis Scimitar called it "the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States." Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina -- known as Pitchfork Ben for his declaration as Governor that, while Grover Cleveland was President, Cleveland "is an old bag of beef, and I am going to Washington with a pitchfork and prod him in his old fat ribs" -- said, "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that (N-word) will necessitate our killing a thousand (N-word)s to get them back in their places!"

Today, outside of their respective home States, Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington are remembered, while Ben Tillman is not. And if the Memphis Scimitar, and its successor the Memphis Press-Scimitar, are remembered today, it is for the August 17, 1977 headline, "A Lonely Life Ends on Elvis Presley Boulevard." The combined paper folded in 1983.

No record of what was said at the dinner has surfaced, but in 1903, composer Scott Joplin wrote his 1st opera, A Guest of Honor, speculating about the subject.

Sheik, Russia and Roll!

To the tune of the 1954 rhythm & blues classic "Shake, Rattle and Roll," the "cleaner" (but no less sexist) Bill Haley version rather than the original by Big Joe Turner:

Get out to that rally, and rattle those MAGA fans.
Get out to that rally, and rattle those MAGA fans.
And don't let 'em know that you're Vlad Putin's man.

I said, Sheik, Russia and roll!
I said, Sheik, Russia and roll!
I said, Sheik, Russia and roll!
I said, Sheik, Russia and roll!
Well, you never do nothin', but shake America's soul!

Wearin' those blue suits, your hair done up so weird.
Wearin' those blue suits, your hair done up so weird.
And Mohammed bin Salman is glad your checks have cleared.

I said, Sheik, Russia and roll!
I said, Sheik, Russia and roll!
I said, Sheik, Russia and roll!
I said, Sheik, Russia and roll!
Well, you never do nothin', but shake America's soul!

I'm like a bug-eyed cat, screamin' in a groc'ry store!
I'm like a bug-eyed cat, screamin' in a groc'ry store!
You said you'd stop inflation, but it's still growin' more!

I believe you're doin' us wrong, and now I know
I didn't have to change this verse, and now I know:
The more I work, the faster my money goes!

I said, Sheik, Russia and roll!
I said, Sheik, Russia and roll!
I said, Sheik, Russia and roll!
I said, Sheik, Russia and roll!
Well, you never do nothin', but shake America's soul!

Sheik, Russia and roll!

October 15, 1986: The Mets-Astros Death Struggle

October 15, 1986, 40 years ago: Desperate to win Game 6 of the National League Championship Series at the Astrodome, the Mets do not want to face Houston pitcher Mike Scott – a Met-killer both as a Met and an Astro – in a Game 7, especially in the Astrodome, where Scott is far better than he is on the road.

The Mets use that sense of desperation to score 3 runs in the top of the 9th to force extra innings. In the 14th, the Mets make their first bid to win. After Gary Carter opens with a single, a walk to Darryl Strawberry puts 2 runners on with nobody out. After Knight forces Carter at 3rd, Wally Backman drives a single to right. When Kevin Bass' throw to the plate sails high over Alan Ashby's head to the screen, Strawberry scores.

But with 1 out in the bottom of the 14th, and the Houston fans with their heads in their hands, Billy Hatcher shocks everyone with a line-drive home run off the left field foul pole. It was the 1st earned run allowed by the Mets bullpen in the entire series. Hatcher went 3-for-7 in the game, and his homer meant the Astros would be kept alive for at least one more inning. (This presaged his heroics in the 1990 World Series.)

Both teams fail to score in the 15th, and the game goes to the 16th inning, the most innings in baseball's postseason history at that time. The Mets appear to take control of the game once again, this time coming up with 3 runs in the top half of the inning. The rally begins with Strawberry receiving a gift double when Hatcher and Bill Doran misplay his towering fly ball with 1 out. When Knight follows with a single to right, a poor throw to the plate by Bass allows the tiebreaking run to score, just as it had in the 14th. Jeff Calhoun then relieves Aurelio Lopez and uncorks a walk, two wild pitches, and a single by Lenny Dykstra to bring in 2 more runs, putting the Mets up 7–4.

But as they had in the 14th, the Astros refuse to go down without a fight in the bottom of the 16th. Jesse Orosco strikes out Craig Reynolds to open the inning, but a walk and 2 singles later, Houston has a run in and the tying run on base. Orosco induces Denny Walling to hit into a force play at 2nd for the 2nd out, but Glenn Davis singles home another run, bringing the Astros within 7-6.

The tying run is on 2nd, the winning run on 1st – a run that Met fans do not want to allow to score. So damned smug all season long, Met fans are now are freaking out over the possibility of facing Scott in the Dome in Game 7, and their magnificent 108-win season, their "inevitable" World Championship, going down in flames.

But Orosco strikes out Bass, ending the game. He throws his glove in the air, foreshadowing the end of the World Series. As the pitcher of record when the Mets took the final lead, he is was awarded the victory, marking the 1st time in postseason history that a reliever won 3 games in a series.

Despite a .189 batting average, the lowest average ever recorded by a winning team in a postseason series to that point, the Mets have their 3rd National League Pennant. Until 2015, it was the only one they'd clinched on the road.

My Grandma watched Major League Baseball for about 75 years, first as a Dodger fan in Queens and Newark, then as a Met fan in the New Jersey towns of Belleville, Nutley and Brick. I asked her once what her favorite game of all time was. This is the one she chose, without hesitation.

I can't say that I blame her. It wasn't a "heavyweight title fight," with big punches going back and forth. It was more like a middleweight or welterweight fight, with lots of jabs, until finally one fighter finished off a "death of a thousand cuts" and the other fell. It was an epic.

How epic was it? In 2010, the MLB Network listed this game at 5th on their list of MLB's 20 Greatest Games -- limited in scope, due to the availability of surviving videotape, to 1975 onward.

*

October 15, 1986 was a Wednesday. The same day, after being down 3 games to 1 in the ALCS, the Red Sox complete one the greatest comebacks in Playoff history by defeating the California Angels 8-1 to win the American League Pennant.

The game caps yet another heartbreaking failure for Angels skipper Gene Mauch‚ who in Game 5 was 1 strike away from reaching his 1st World Series in 25 seasons as a major league manager. He had previously been a part of the Phillies' collapse in 1964, a tough last-weekend Division loss for the Montreal Expos in 1980, and the Angels' 2-games-to-none choke against the Milwaukee Brewers in 1982. No manager ever managed longer without winning a Pennant. After the game‚ 2nd baseman Bobby Grich retired after a fine career with the Orioles and Angels.

The Angels' inability to win a Pennant was beginning to be called "The Curse of the Cowboy." Gene Autry, Western movies' "Singing Cowboy," was their 1st owner, and still owned the team at this point. There seemed to be no reason why he would put a curse on his own team, but maybe he was the one who was cursed.

In the midst of the illness that would end his life the next year, Autry sold the Angels to the Walt Disney Company in 1997. Disney changed the team's name to the Anaheim Angels. The team finally won their 1st Pennant in 2002, and then won the World Series, ending the curse. But maybe they've started a new one: They've been to the Playoffs a few times since, but still have only the 1 Pennant.

The Mets and Red Sox winning Pennants on the same day -- with the Sox having beaten the Yankees out for the Division en route to doing so. This was a bad day to be a Yankee Fan, and the Yankees weren't even directly involved. Over the next 12 days, it would get worse.

October 15, 1966: The Black Panther Party Is Founded

Bobby Seale (left) and Huey Newton

October 15, 1966, 60 years ago: The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense is founded in Oakland, California, by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Its core practice was its open carry patrols. That is, the open carrying of firearms, calling the patrols "copwatching," designed to challenge the excessive force and misconduct of the Oakland Police Department.

From 1969 onward, the party created social programs, including the Free Breakfast for Children Programs, education programs, and community health clinics. The Black Panther Party advocated for class struggle, claiming to represent the proletarian vanguard.

In 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described the party as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." The FBI sabotaged the party with an illegal and covert counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance, infiltration, perjury, police harassment, all designed to undermine and criminalize the party.

The FBI was involved in the 1969 assassinations of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, who were killed in a raid by the Chicago Police Department. Black Panther Party members were involved in many fatal firefights with police. Newton allegedly killed officer John Frey in 1967, and the Party's Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver, led an ambush in 1968 of Oakland police officers, in which two officers were wounded and Panther treasurer Bobby Hutton was killed.

Cleaver's collection of essays, Soul On Ice, was published in 1968, and was practically a sacred text for what became known as the Black Power movement. However, while many found the movement, and the Black Panthers, to be liberating, the book's essays were written in prison, and included details of the crimes that put him there. Cleaver was an excellent writer, but, at the time, he was not a good person.

Party membership peaked at around 5,000 in 1970, and gradually declined over the next decade, due to vilification by the mainstream press, and infighting, largely fomented by COINTELPRO. The Party dissolved in 1982.

Newton was murdered in Oakland in 1989, by another black activist. Cleaver became a Mormon and a Republican, and died of cancer in 1998. Seale, who became one of the Chicago Eight, is still alive. If he is still alive next Thursday, he will reach his 90th birthday.

What would all of today's white right-wing "open carry" advocates say if they saw a bunch of military-looking black men with big guns on the streets? Probably, "Mommy!"

October 15, 1966: Bill Russell Becomes the NBA's 1st Black Head Coach

October 15, 1966, 60 years ago: The Boston Celtics open the NBA season by defeating the San Francisco Warriors, 121-113 at the Boston Garden. Rick Barry scores 41 points for the Warriors, but, as usual, the Celtics have a more balanced team, led by 29 points from Sam Jones.

Bill Russell scores only 8 points, but he had other things on his mind. Namely, he was now a player-coach, the 1st black coach in NBA history, and, unless you count Fritz Pollard of the 1st NFL Champions, the 1920 Akron Pros (and the NFL was hardly a major league at that point), the 1st black coach in the history of North American major league sports.

That this happens on the birthday of Willie O'Ree, who became the 1st black player in the NHL in 1958, and in the building he also called home with the Bruins, is interesting, but not especially relevant to Russell's story.

The Celtics would fall to the Philadelphia 76ers in the Eastern Conference Finals this season, but Russell would lead them to the NBA title in 1968 and 1969 -- making him the most recent player-coach to lead a team to a World Championship.

Alas, while Bill Russell is still one of the Top 10 players in NBA history, he didn't do so well as a coach when he didn't have Bill Russell as a player: With himself playing, his coaching record is 162-83, for a winning percentage of .661; otherwise, with the 1974-77 Seattle SuperSonics and the 1987-88 Sacramento Kings, he's 100-122, .450; overall, 341-290, for a winning percentage of .540.

October 15, 1966 was a Saturday. Among the other NBA games played that day was the Chicago Bulls making their debut. Guy Rodgers scored 36 points, and they beat the St. Louis Hawks, 104-97 at the Kiel Auditorium. For most of their history, the Bulls will be at least good, and, at times, historically good. 

October 15, 1951: "I Love Lucy" Premieres

October 15, 1951, 75 years ago: The pilot episode of I Love Lucy airs on CBS. The title explains the plot: "The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub." Fred (William Frawley) and Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance) are celebrating their 18th wedding anniversary, and Lucy (Lucille Ball) and Ricky Ricardo (Desi Arnaz) want to do something nice for, and with, them. Lucy and Ethel, as the title suggests, want to go to a nightclub, but Ricky and Fred want to go to a fight card at Madison Square Garden.

(Ricky was the leader of a band that played Latin music, as he, like his portrayer, was a native of Cuba. Like Ricky, Fred had been an entertainer, a vaudeville performer. By this point, he was the Ricardos' landlord, but still Ricky's best friend from their vaudeville days.)

They come to an agreement. A stupid agreement. They set each other up with dates. Except all of Lucy's old boyfriends are married or otherwise busy, and Ricky, upon Lucy's claim that it was an American tradition, had long ago burned his "little black book." They end up calling the same woman, an old friend who "has connections to all the women in town." Since Ricky called her first, this friend tells Lucy, and so the couples are set up with... each other. Except Lucy and Ethel are in disguise. And Ricky and Fred don't recognize them at first. But Lucy gives them away, and she and Ethel get dragged to The Garden.

It was 1951: Lucy, a woman, and Desi, white but not Anglo-Saxon or Protestant, could be stars and executive producers; but the female lead character could not "win." Not until The Honeymooners debuted, anyway.

Not yet 3 years old, Tony Thomas must have seen this episode (and others) at some point, and, when he became a TV producer like his father Danny and his sister Marlo, based half the episodes of Three's Company on it (and those others).

I Love Lucy aired for 6 seasons, concluding on May 6, 1957. It was produced by Desilu Productions -- run by the couple themselves, Lucille Désirée Ball and Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III. Never before, and not again for a long time thereafter, did either a woman or a non-white-and-Anglo person have that much power over the production of a television show. And the only reason the show stopped is because their marriage broke up.

The show became beloved on reruns, including, in the New York market, on then-independent station WNEW-Channel 5. But the show was very predictable. I can sum it up in 30 seconds:

Ricky, in his Cuban accent: "Lu-cy! I'm home!"

Lucy: "Ricky, can I be in the show?"
Ricky: "No, Lu-cy, you can't be in the show. Fred, you're cheap!"
Lucy: "Ethel, you gotta help me get into the show!"

Ricky: "Lu-cy, you got some 'splaining to do!"

Lucy: "Wahhhhhhhh!"

Actually, "Lu-cy, you got some 'splaining to do!" is one of those quotes that everybody presumes was said, but never was. A few times, Ricky told Lucy, "Explain yourself!" And while, on the other great CBS sitcom of the 1950s, The Honeymooners, Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden threatened to send Audrey Meadows' Alice Kramden to the Moon a few times, sometimes with the dramatization, "Bang! Zoom!", he never combined the two.

My guess is, like so many other non-quotes -- James Cagney's "You dirty rat!", Mae West's "Come up and see me sometime," Johnny Weismuller's "Me Tarzan, you Jane," Cary Grant's "Judy, Judy, Judy," Humphrey Bogart's "Play it again, Sam," William Shatner's "Beam me up, Scotty!" -- someone thought they heard it a particular way, and included it that way in a parody, and that's what people ended up remembering.

One time, one of Lucy's scams worked, so Ricky decided to get back at her, and he said, "Now, we're Igual-Pascual. That's Spanish for 'Even-Steven.'" (Actually, the Spanish form of "Steven" is "Estéban.")

Still, along with its CBS contemporary, I Love Lucy is one of the most beloved sitcoms of all time.

I Love Lucy ran until 1957, canceled because the Arnazes' marriage broke up. From 1962 to 1968, Lucy starred in The Lucy Show. And from 1968 to 1974, CBS aired Here's Lucy. Unlike her 2 previous shows, on this one, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr. played Lucy's on-screen children. The reason the later shows also ran 6 seasons was not a coincidence: As she owned her own production company, Lucy wanted to make sure there were enough episodes to make money in syndicated reruns before she quit.

In 1986, ABC gave her a 4th sitcom, Life With Lucy. She insisted on complete control, and got it. But she was 77 years old, and practically deaf. Even worse, she was culturally tone-deaf. She hired her old writers, and they were no more in tune with the times than she was. Nor was her old friend Gale Gordon, who had been her co-star in The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy.

She couldn't rely on Frawley, who died in 1966; Vance, who died in 1979; or Desi Sr., who was ill, and died within weeks of the show's debut. Nor did she ask Desi Jr. or Lucie to take part.

The show bombed. It got so bad that Audrey Meadows, the other great sitcom redhead of the 1950s, was asked to come out of retirement and play Lucy's sister. (She had recently come full circle by playing a tart-tongued mother-in-law on Too Close for Comfort.) That didn't work, either: It was the 8th episode to air, on November 15, 1986, and it was the last, with 5 episodes left in the can, never to see the light of day. After 35 years and 1 month, an era had ended.

The network canceled the show, and they couldn't even tell her. They had to tell her husband, Gary Morton, a comedian she'd married in 1961, and had produced her later shows with her, and let him tell her.

This was not the show-biz equivalent of Jack Nicklaus winning the Masters at age 46, or Gordie Howe being a legitimate NHL All-Star at age 51. This was Joe Louis coming back and getting knocked out of the ring by the up-and-coming Rocky Marciano, or Muhammad Ali getting pounded by Larry Holmes. A little more than 2 years later, on April 26, 1989, she was dead.