Minnesota State Fair-Heads of Butter

The Minnesota State Fair can be a little difficult to explain to non-natives.  It's big, gaudy, exhausting and something you simply have to attend at least ever few years.

Like most such events it got its start back in the mid 1800s as an Agricultural Fair.  Basically the kind of event you would attend to get recognition for growing some nice melons.  Judging from the slightly risque apparel of its now mostly urban attendees, that is still true.

As a Minnesota Ex-Pat my attendance requirements are slightly loosened, but I check in every couple of years, and still enjoy the older Agricultural roots of the Fair.  True, Machinery Hill has fewer combines and tractors every year, but there are still some things worth seeing.

Butterheads for instance.

Here's the deal.  Local farming communities select "Dairy Princesses".  The top dozen get to go to the Fair, and one of them gets to be "Princess Kay of the Milky Way".  All twelve are commemorated by having their likenesses carved in a big block of butter, which is kept on display for the run of the fair.  It is carved live, in a refrigerated booth as seen above. 

The young ladies get to keep the butterheads, and I guess some of them have a big corn feed to thank their supporters.  I have to admit, the concept of carving up the butterhead and eating it seems like some sort of pagan sacrificial rite, but farm folks do tend to be practical.

As an aside I should mention that a few years back during my Robot Carnie days we did exhibition fights at the Minnesota Fair.  A couple of special butterheads were made of a pair of local news personalities.  We were supposed to mount these on dueling robots and film it as gag footage for the station.

These things melt fast in August heat, so we only got them a few minutes before show time.  I was assigned the tricky task of mounting them on the robots, and was appalled to discover that these particular butterheads were not, in point of fact, solid butter.  No, they had been built around a cantaloupe.  This of course was frozen into an impenetrable ice ball that could not be skewered or drilled into with available equipment.

We ended up wiring them on rather precariously, and they slid off unceremoniously right away. 

Now I don't want to imply anything about the actual Dairy Princess butterheads.  I mean, this looks pretty official to me:

Probably the ones made for the TV folks were cheap knockoffs done when the master butter sculptor  had an odd minute.

Butter, and related saturated fats, are a recurring theme of the Fair.  Tune in next time when  the Largest Pig in Minnesota goes Missing in Action

The Charley Horse

I had known the tale of Old Hoss Radbourne for many years, but when I brushed up a little to present it as an inspirational blog posting I was surprised to find mention of the theory that Mr. Radbourne was the original source of the term "Charley Horse".

The phrase refers to a painful muscle cramp, usually of the leg.  There seems to be general agreement that it was a bit of baseball slang from the Radbourne era, with the first documented use being in a sports column from 1886.  But from there things get a little murky.

One would imagine that the pathetic sight of Charlie Radbourne spending hours getting his suffering arm to warm up would easily lend itself to the term "charlie horse", but the accounts linking Mr. Radbourne to the term actually mention a time when running the bases he had a leg cramp and started hobbling. 

Another explanation of the "charley horse" is that a ballpark-either in Chicago or a minor league park in the south-had an old draft horse named Charlie.  Just before the game a gimpy Charley would pull field grooming equipment around the infield.  The sight of "Old Charley" laboring so would lend itself to teasing any sore ballplayers with the term, especially one assumes anyone named Charles.

So which is the true origin?  Perhaps that is asking the wrong question.  Sometimes in etymology you can trace the course of a word as it flows down through time like a river.  Eventually you end up in a place-for instance 1880s baseball-where several streams come together, each making a contribution.  It becomes irrelevant to just designate one the true source as it takes their merging to create the stream in the first place.

Radbourne got his nickname "Hoss" for his solid work ethic.  He happened to be named Charley.  He suffered a great deal of pain for his heroic efforts.  No doubt he was occasionally compared to the broken down "Old Charley" dragging the infield dirt. 

Incidentally, there are many other terms for the same painful muscle spasm, or in some instances for a muscle contusion in the same region.  Here are my favorites:

Great Britain: Dead leg, Grand daddy, Chopper
Australia: Corked Thigh, Corky
Germany: Pferdkuss (horse kiss)
Netherlands: Ijsebeen (ice leg)
France: Bequille (crutch)
But Italy wins the prize, depending on what part of the country you are in a charley horse might be called:
Lopez
Dura (tough one)
Vecchia (old woman)
or my personal favorite: 
Morso de ciuccio (donkey bite)

Old Hoss Radbourne

A brief aside.  Not everyone is a serious baseball fan.  Yes, in particular I am thinking of my small but devoted following from Serbia who visit the site hoping for more pictures of dogs in silly outfits.  So a brief explanation is in order.

In the modern age if a pitcher wins 20 games in a season, or even if he just pitches over 200 innings, well, he is an anchor of the team, a guy who can demand and receive a salary of millions of dollars per year.  The very best of the bunch, winners of the annual Cy Young award sometimes win a few more than that.  The last player to win over 30 games was back in the 1960s, and that was considered a fluke.

Here are comments on this state of affairs, straight from Charles Radbourne:

##%%**!!!! PANSIES! What bunch of %%##!!! CREAMPUFFS!

I am of course acting as spiritual interlocutor, and censor,  for the long departed Mr. Radbourne, a rough hewn fellow who holds baseball records that are not merely unchallengeable, but inconceivable.

Charles Radbourne, nicknamed "Old Hoss" was born in 1854.  A remarkably strong young man he for a time worked at a slaughterhouse where it was his job to dispatch cattle by smacking them between the eyes with a 25 pound sledgehammer. 

His 11 year career as a Major League pitcher started in 1880, and is mostly remembered for his astounding 1884 season with the Providence Grays.  Providence was a troubled club, and actually came close to disbanding mid season.  One of their two pitchers, a disagreeable fellow named Sweeny, showed up drunk for his start in the July 22nd game.  Even drunk he threw well, but continued to drink in the dugout during the game and eventually was asked to leave, still leading 6-2.  He left all right, storming off the field and quitting the team.

With no other real options, Radbourne volunteered to pitch the rest of the season.  Think about it, in the modern era teams generally carry a five man starting rotation Providence had......Old Hoss.

Radbourne ended the 1884 season with some outrageous stats.

20 game winner?  How about a 59 game winner!  (60 games by some counts).

200 innings pitched?  Oh, lets try 678.  For that matter he was over 600 the previous year too with a two man staff.

Radbourne threw 73 complete games-out of necessity.  Some entire modern day teams go a season without one being thrown.

As to that magical 20 games won, why, Old Hoss at one point had an 18 game winning streak going.

At season's end Radbourne was 59-12, and Providence had captured the pennant.

Of course he paid a price, by season's end his arm was so sore that he could not raise it to comb his hair, and it took him hours to warm up to pitch, his first few efforts being pathetic lobs with no strength to them. 

But he went on to a fine career, ending up with a 309-194 record and an enviable 2.68 earned run average.

His post baseball career was short and unhappy.  The reigning Cy Young award winner for 2010 in the National League is a gent named Roy Halladay.  If he does as well this year he will be paid roughly one million dollars per win.  Charles Radbourne seems to have never been paid more than $7,500 a season.

In retirement he ran a pool hall, but was seriously disfigured in a hunting accident.  He died in 1897 at age 42, possibly of syphilis.

Burleigh Grimes and Charles Radbourne make an interesting pair.  Both determined, gritty pitchers of considerable skill, although that of Radbourne has to be regarded as being of near supernatural quality.  Grimes lived on into a long, slightly mellower retirement, but Radbourne died young.

Nobody will ever come close to his impossible 1884 season.  If, and I rather doubt it, there walks among us some heroic demi-god with an arm like Old Hoss he would never be given the chance to pursue these records.  His manager would be fired-or perhaps committed to a lunatic asylum-for even considering throwing a pitcher at this brutal pace.

Obviously Old Hoss has been recognized by election to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

As to whether he also was the origin of the term "Charley Horse", tune in next time.....

Wikipedia on Old Hoss
Someone ought to write a book about him!
A lengthy discussion of his career

Burleigh Grimes-An inspiration to us all.

As the 2011 baseball season winds down we fans of the Minnesota Twins are not a happy lot.  The shuttle bus from the Big League team to the Disabled List has been running full time this year.  One middle infielder, Alexi Casilla actually managed to come off the DL for one game, hurt himself and go right back to the DL.  I doubt this feat-up to the Bigs for a single dressing change-has ever been accomplished before.

Why some folks, in their subdued Minnesota Nice way, are even suggesting that the current team may not be tough enough.

In that light, and on the minuscule chance that any current ballplayers happen upon my humble blog, I thought I would give brief homage to a couple of players from the past. There was a time in baseball where things were a bit meaner and grittier, but even allowing for that a few guys stood out as Iron Men.  That is in the sense of jagged pieces of iron with liberal amounts of rust and probably infested with tetanus spores.

Consider the gentle ways of a certain Burleigh Grimes .

What are you starin' at?

Burleigh "Old Stubblebeard" Grimes was born in a small Wisconsin town in 1893.  He broke into the Bigs in 1916.  His signature pitch was the spitball, which would be outlawed in 1919/1920 after a poor fellow named Ray Chapman was killed by a thrown pitch. (Not a spitter by the way).  At the time of the ban a few pitchers were "grandfathered" in and allowed to keep using it.  Grimes was the last of these, throwing the final (legal) spitball in 1934.

If that were his sole claim to fame Burleigh Grimes would be no more that a delightful bit of obscure baseball trivia.  No, in addition to being allowed to throw an elusive, bodily fluids laden pitch, Burleigh hated batters.

Not off the field mind you, he was said to be a very nice man out of uniform.  But woe betide any batter who would dare to contest the notion that the strike zone and several feet in all directions around it was the sole property of Mr. Grimes.

In this rough and tumble era of baseball Burleigh would look daggers at a batter scuffling his feet to dig in to the batters box.  He would then bellow out "You comfortable there?  Good, 'cause that's where they're gonna bury you!" and launch one right at the batter's head.  Warnings? Fines? Ejections?  Nah.

On at least one occasion Burleigh was so mad at an opposing team that he threw at and hit, not the batter, but the player in the on deck circle!

But to reach the true Olympian heights of ornery you have to visit Burleigh in spring training late in his career.  This is an apocryphal story,but one that has the ring of truth to it. 

In a rather informal practice Burleigh's 15 year old son asked if he could step in and take a few swings against the Old Man.  Grimes Jr. then made the mistake of "digging in".

Burleigh did not flinch, uncorking a pitch that whizzed by the beardless chin of his son, who sensibly hit the deck.

"Burleigh", his team members admonished, "that was your own son!"

"Damn right" retorted Burleigh Grimes, "and if my own grandmother digs in against me she's going down too!"

 (see addendum)

Burleigh Grimes, Baseball Hall of Famer, passed away in a small Wisconsin town in 1985.  He is said to have been unrepentant.

Burleigh loads one up.

Addendum:  Sometimes the point at which myth and fact overlap can be difficult to bring into focus.  It has been pointed out to me that while Mr. Grimes was married several times, he is not known to have had a son.  So the the "brush back" anecdote seems to be false, or perhaps involved a bat boy or other adolescent hanger on.  Too bad, it had the ring of truth to it.  But if some stories are true while seeming totally implausible, the reverse must also on occasion be the case.


Up next:  Old Hoss

The Last Baby

(Note: this was written a few years ago, in my last weeks practicing Family Medicine)

I think this was the last one.  I am planning a job shift in a month or so, and do not have anyone else due.  Oh, I suppose I might deliver one of my partner’s patients when on call yet, and there is always the emergency “doctor on a plane” scenario.  Heck, maybe I will do the Doctors Without Borders thing one day, but they sure would not need me for the easy, fun ones.

It went well.  It was a second time mom a week shy of her due date.  The OB nurse tried to put a scare in me, saying she thought the baby was presenting breech.  But I had checked pretty carefully a couple of days ago and was confident that things were going the right way.  These new, young OB nurses are just not made of the sturdy timber that the old school had in them.

It was just a couple of hours of labor and a few pushes.  No drama, beyond the usual “It’s a Girl”.  No scary drop in fetal heart rate, no gushing blood, no stubborn placenta.

I suppose in the grand scheme of things I have earned it.

Hardly anyone still does OB the way we do.  If we are in town, it’s not our anniversary, and we are not deathly ill; we deliver.  It is the main reason I wear a pager on my right hip.  In fact, it’s the main reason I feel undressed without the pager.

This time I was awakened from a living room sofa nap.  Spouse and I had gone out to dinner.  We deserve it, having been stuck home with kids off of school this past week, and fretting more than necessary about our respective jobs.  Dinner was swell, and I had, gasp!, a nice glass of wine.

That was several hours earlier, so I drove in with no more than the customary apprehension.  Maybe there is another up side to the projected post OB future-if I am off call and want a second drink I am by George going to have it!

Delivering babies is one of those activities that has in it the elements of high drama.  Societies ancient and modern have always had an interest in the continuation of life.  So I guess I could write reams of stories about labors and deliveries I have participated in or heard about.

Once I had the mother of a young pregnant lady call me up and fairly matter-of-factly say that they would sue me if I did not induce labor.

Two times I have delivered a baby to a couple where the husband was terminally ill, in one case he was released from the hospital temporarily just to be at the delivery.  Later that year he died of leukemia.

One time I had an experienced mom, a very relaxed person you see, do crossword puzzles for the entire labor process.  Other times I have had apparently calm women absolutely lose control, and skittish teenagers manage things with a graceful stoicism. 

Many of the stories blur together, defying my attempts to separate the components.  After 700 plus deliveries that will happen.  The children I have delivered would more than fill up an elementary school if you could gather them all together in one place.  Of course, some of them are parents of grade schoolers themselves by now.  I guess if you went all the way back to the babies I delivered as a medical student, a few of them might just manage to be grandparents.

It is fun to deliver a baby when everything goes well.  There you are, a robed celebrant at a sacred event.  The beginning of a new life is magical, and by association the doctor becomes the wizard that makes the magic happen.  Naturally, all concerned are quite aware that the laboring mother is doing all the real work, and that babies miraculously appeared long before things got scientifically organized and technological.

But underneath the fun there is fear.

A certain amount of risk can be predicted, and thereby controlled.  Obviously high risk patients should be referred out to perinatologists, and they are usually happy to be so referred.  And many years of doing anything gives you a certain familiarity with the possibilities.  It does not pay to scare easily.

But there are also unpredictable events.  The fetal heart tones that drop off for no good reason.  The baby with big sturdy shoulders that do not want to budge once the head has made its grudging appearance.  The seemingly non descript symptoms that sound innocuous over the phone, but actually herald impending premature delivery.

If you like to worry about really big stuff, consider comets.  They fly around out there unpredictably, and Hollywood aside, there is not a darned thing we can do about them.  Every few million years a big one plows into Planet Earth and we get Dinosaur Extinction. 

Big, bad obstetrical disasters are like the rare Dinosaur Terminator comets that are flying around all the time, just not happening to hit us today.

I’ve done my best over the years.  I have but a single neonatal death, and the circumstances were unavoidable.  And while I suppose there could always be that belated filing of a malpractice suit, I think my record is clean.

So I close the book on Labor and Delivery adventures. And I am feeling pretty good about it.  Sure, I will miss the new parents telling me I did a good job.  And the brand spankin’ new babies are pretty cute.  But I have a dominant emotion as I consider the Last Baby.

Relief.

Addendum:  Since this was written I have indeed been called upon to deliver a couple of babies when their attendings could not be there in time, and in one scary case of stuck shoulders that needed a little more horsepower.

The instincts come back at need.  But I am in this aspect of medical practice still happy to be retired.

I no longer wear a pager.

The King and his Court

I think that only once in my life have I literally not believed what I was seeing.  By that I mean that the light was good, my view was unimpaired, there was no trickery involved, but the information that was being transmitted from my eyes to my brain was being rejected as patent nonsense.

It was in the late 1960s, and my dad took a couple of us kids to see a barnstorming softball team called The King and his Court.  The King was a certain Eddie Feigner.

Eddie was a World War II marine who in 1946 started a four man softball team that would travel about beating the pants off of local all star teams.  Eddie pitched and the other three were just there to fill out the squad.

Feigner could do things with a softball that defied belief.  For instance:

He started playing on adult softball teams when he was 9 years old.
He barnstormed from 1946 until a stroke sidelined him in 2000. 
During that stretch he is estimated to have played over 10,000 games, and to have won 9743 of them. 
He played games in all 50 states, 98 foreign countries, and at locations as exotic as Yankee stadium and the Great Wall of China.
While playing against a team of major league baseball players he once struck out five future hall of famers in a row.
He struck out 141,517 batters.  He threw 930 no-hitters and 238 perfect games.
He could throw a softball, underhand, at an estimated 104 miles per hour.

But it wasn't his speed that defied belief.  No, Eddie Feigner appeared to be able to make a softball do whatever he told it to.

Granted I may have been an impressionable lad back in the day, but I saw the King throw strikes pitching behind his back.  I saw him strike batters out while standing not on the pitchers mound, but on second base.  And for his signature finale....he put on a blindfold and threw perfect strikes without being able to even see home plate.  According to his meticulous records, Eddie accomplished this feat 8698 times, not counting the time he knocked a cigar out of Johnny Carson's mouth on the Tonight Show.

Softball has devolved in recent years.  It was once a serious game played with intensity, now it is generally speaking a pleasant way to pass the time while sipping a beer on the bench.  Or out in left field in more casual leagues.

So I think it is fair to say that Eddie Feigner was that rarest of things.  He was the best softball pitcher that ever was.  And more definitively, barring some future cyborg league, he was the best that ever will be.

Here is a newsreel clip of Eddie in his prime.  It does not do him justice.

The Honey War of 1839

Wondering about useless things can often lead in interesting directions.  After discovering the Treaty of Ouchy that ended the Italo-Turkish War I got to thinking...why Italo-Turkish, why not Turko-Italian.  Frankly I think the second version sounds better.  Is there some convention in these matters?

I have a theory on that but it will have to wait for another day.  Because in researching a list of 19th century wars great and small I ran across the Honey War of 1839, fought between the Missouri and Iowa.  Wisconsin was sort of involved as well.

It all started with some rotten posts.  Back in 1816 a fellow named J.C. Sullivan surveyed the northern edge of what would become Missouri.  It was a fairly casual effort, a line of wooden posts every now and then, and some ambiguous reference to a series of rapids that could have been on two different rivers.

In 1837 the state of Missouri wanted a more precise survey of their northern boundary.  They asked if their neighbors to the north wanted to participate.  This was in the brief two year period in which Iowa was actually part of Wisconsin Territory.  Wisconsin showed no interest in the project, seeing as how the area was in a matter of months going to become Iowa Territory.

Several different "lines" were drawn by the new survey.  The old posts could no longer be found and it was unclear which river rapids were mentioned in the original survey.  One version of the survey just happened to be nine and a half miles into Iowa, and included properties that could be taxed by whichever entity could claim them.

Missouri asked for the tax money.  The self identified Iowans refused.  So Missouri sent tax agents into the area.  The agents cut down three honey trees, the confiscated honey being a very valuable commodity on the frontier, and threatened the locals with action by the Missouri State militia should continued tax resistance be contemplated.

Well, cutting down honey trees and making threats.  As the saying goes, "them's fightin' words".

With continued grumbling from the Iowans a 600 man detachment of Missouri militia was eventually dispatched.  They came with six wagons of provisions, five of them said to be full of whiskey.  To their disappointment there was nobody around to fight, so they just drank the whiskey and went home, after at one point engaging in target practice against haunches of venison dubbed "Boggs" and "Lucas" those being the names of the respective governors involved.  It does not sound like a serious military operation in any respect.

Eventually the Iowans got around to mounting a belated armed response, although lacking a formal militia the best they could manage was a contingent of rustics armed with pitchforks and Revolutionary war vintage muskets.  This elite fighting force did manage to capture the sheriff of Clark County Missouri and briefly imprison him in the jail at Muscatine Iowa.  The Missouri troops had gone home by then.  It is beyond reasonable scholarly doubt that additional whiskey was consumed in celebration.

Cool heads prevailed, and the matter was referred to the Supreme Court.  Ten years later an unambiguous line was drawn pretty much where Sullivan put it in the first place.  This time they used iron posts.

Thus ended the Honey War of 1839.  It sounds like all concerned had a pretty good time.  There was no loss of life whatsoever, and the only casualties were, one assumes, a few bee stings and a larger number of hangovers.