October 14, 1961: "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" Is Published

October 14, 1961: The Death and Life of Great American Cities is published by Jane Jacobs. It changes the way people looked at American cities.

She was in the process of defeating New York City planning boss Robert Moses over his proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, between the Holland Tunnel and the Manhattan Bridge, which would have done to Greenwich Village, Tribeca, SoHo and the Lower East Side what his Cross Bronx Expressway did to The Bronx: Destroyed them.

Jane Isabel Butzner was born on May 4, 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Her brother was a federal Judge. She and her sister moved to New York for work during the Great Depression. Getting a job as a stenographer, Jane also made some money as a freelance writer. She loved that Greenwich Village, where she lived, was laid out before New York's 1811 street grid plan, and thus not only didn't follow it, but deviated from it in interesting ways.

In 1943, she got an article published in a magazine, about how Scranton had declined economically. That led to her being hired by the U.S. Department of State, to write for the Office of War Information. That led to her meeting Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr., an architect who was designing warplanes for Grumman Aircraft. They married the next year, and had a daughter and 2 sons.

Henry Luce, boss of Time, Inc.,. hired her for his magazine Architectural Forum. She began to write about the poor response to urban blight after World War II. She was invited to speak at Harvard University, and that led to her being transferred to a higher-profile Luce magazine, Fortune. She spent three years conducting research and writing drafts on "urban renewal," citing "slum clearance" as being as big a problem as slums themselves. In 1961, Random House published the result, as The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

In 1962, she resigned her position with Luce to become a full-time author, and concentrate on raising her children. In 1968, in fear of their sons being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, which they had been participating in demonstrations against, the Jacobses moved to Canada, to The Annex, a neighborhood adjacent to the campus of the University of Toronto and home to many of its students and faculty. In 1971, she helped kill another potentially neighborhood-destroying highway, the Spadina Expressway. It came to be seen as a watershed moment in local activism in Toronto.

She opposed the separation of Quebec from Canada (successfully) and the "megacity" concepts for Toronto and Montreal (unsuccessfully), yet supported the separation of Toronto from Ontario, to form a separate Province (which did not happen). She died on April 25, 2006, in Toronto, at the age of 89, having done much to preserve the 2 largest cities in North America. (Or 2 of the 3 largest, if you count Mexico, and thus Mexico City, as part of "North America.")

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October 14, 1961 was a Saturday. Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi was born.

Among the notable college football games played that day were these:

* Number 1 University of Mississippi, a.k.a. Ole Miss, beat the University of Houston, 47-7 at Hemingway Stadium (now Vaught-Hemingway Stadium) in Oxford, Mississippi.

* Number 2 Iowa beat Indiana, 27-8 at Iowa Stadium (now Kinnick Stadium) in Iowa City.

* Number 3 Alabama beat North Carolina State, 26-7 at Denny Stadium (now Bryant-Denny Stadium) in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

* Rivalry: Number 4 Texas beat Oklahoma, 28-7 at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.

* Rivalry: Number 5 Michigan State beat Number 6 Michigan, 28-0 at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor.

* Number 7 Ohio State beat Illinois, 44-0 at Ohio Stadium in Columbus.

* Rivalry: Number 8 Notre Dame beat the University of Southern California (USC), 30-0 at Notre Dame Stadium in South Bend, Indiana.

* Number 9 Baylor were upset by Arkansas, 23-13 at Baylor Stadium (later Floyd Casey Stadium) in Waco, Texas.

* Number 10 Maryland were upset by North Carolina, 14-8 at Byrd Stadium (now SECU Stadium) in the Washington suburb of College Park, Maryland.

* Rivalry: West Virginia beat the University of Pittsburgh, 20-6 at Pitt Stadium in Pittsburgh.

* Rivalry: The University of Virginia beat Virginia Military Institute (VMI), 14-7 at Foreman Field in Norfolk.

* Rivalry: Wyoming beat Colorado State, 18-7 at War Memorial Stadium in Laramie, Wyoming.

* Rivalry: The University of Utah beat Brigham Young University (BYU), 21-20 at Ute Stadium (later Robert Rice Stadium) in Salt Lake City.

* Among the service academies, Army beat Penn State, 10-6 at Beaver Stadium in State College, Pennsylvania; Navy beat Cornell, 31-7 at Schoellkopf Field in Ithaca, New York; and Air Force beat the University of Cincinnati, 8-6 at Nippert Stadium in Cincinnati.

* Rutgers beat Bucknell, 21-6 at Memorial Stadium (now Christy Mathewson Memorial Stadium) in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. RU advanced to 3-0 on the season, and finished undefeated at 9-0.

* And, Rivalry: Princeton beat the University of Pennsylvania, 9-3 at Palmer Stadium in Princeton, New Jersey.

Baseball season ended 5 days earlier, when the New York Yankees beat the Cincinnati Reds in Game 5 to win the World Series. The NBA season started 5 days later. The NHL's entire "Original Six" were in action:

* The New York Rangers lost to the Montreal Canadiens, 3-1 at the Montreal Forum.

* The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Boston Bruins, 3-2 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.

* And the Chicago Black Hawks and the Detroit Red Wings played to a tie, 3-3 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit.

In New Jersey high school football, East Brunswick, then in only its 1st season of varsity football, later to be my Alma Mater, lost to Bridgewater-Raritan of Bridgewater, Somerset County, 14-0.

And in English soccer, North London team Arsenal went to Lancashire, and played Blackburn Rovers to a 0-0 draw at Ewood Park in Blackburn.

June 22, 1972: Hurricane Agnes

Pittsburgh, flooded by Hurricane Agnes

June 22, 1972: Hurricane Agnes hits the Northeastern U.S. It kills 128 people, and becomes the costliest hurricane in American history to that point, causing $2.1 billion in damage. (In 2022 money, $14.7 billion.) In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, over 43,000 buildings were destroyed.

Since New York City and Washington, D.C. got hit, Agnes was more publicized that most hurricanes. But it did its biggest damage in Northeastern Pennsylvania, in the Reading area, in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area, and the Lehigh Valley of Easton, Allentown and Bethlehem. The Delaware, Susquehanna and Lackawanna Rivers all well overran their usual limits. Ironically, their Congressman at the time was named Daniel Flood, but he did lead the relief efforts for the hurricane in Congress.

Across Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh got flooded. The Chesapeake region, including Maryland and Virginia, was also hard-hit. Before any of those places, it hit Florida, causing damage from the Keys all the way up to Jacksonville.

Unlike with George W. Bush and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, no one faulted President Richard Nixon for his response. He was still thinking the election he had to run in might be close, and he needed Pennsylvania's 27 Electoral Votes. He ended up winning every County in the State, except Philadelphia. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30, including November 7. Had the hurricane happened a few days before the election, it probably wouldn't have ended up making a difference.

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June 22, 1972 was a Thursday. There were only 2 scores, both in Major League Baseball. The Chicago White Sox beat the Milwaukee Brewers, 5-2 at Milwaukee County Stadium. And the Houston Astros beat the Cincinnati Reds, 9-5 at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. Pete Rose went 3-for-4. Johnny Bench went 1-for-4. Each of them also had a walk and an RBI.

March 18, 1965: The Scranton Banana Truck Crash

March 18, 1965: Eugene Sesky, a truck driver taking bananas from Port Newark, New Jersey to the A&P supermarket terminal in Scranton, Pennsylvania, crashes at the bottom of a hill, just a couple of miles short of his destination, on Moosic Street at Irving Avenue.

A few weeks later, a Greyhound bus, starting in Ithaca, New York and running to New York City, went up that hill, in the opposite direction, as Moosic Street becomes U.S. Route 307. One of the passengers was a 22-year-old New Yorker and folksinger named Harry Chapin, returning home from a gig at Ithaca's Cornell University.

The old man sitting next to him told him about the tragedy. Harry turned it into the song "Thirty Thousand Pounds of Bananas," and put it on his 1974 album Verities and Balderdash, which also includes his best-known song, "Cat's In the Cradle."

Harry Chapin.

I couldn't find a photograph of Eugene Sesky,

only of his grave, which seemed inappropriate to post.

Having heard the story secondhand, at best, Harry got a lot of details wrong as he wrote the song. Sesky was 32, a U.S. Army veteran, and an experienced driver for the Fred Carpentier truck line, so he wasn't "a young driver, just out on his second job." And when he saw that his brakes weren't working, instead of just sitting there in the cab, saying, "God, make it a dream!" he got out on the running board, and waved to the oncoming cars to get out of the way. He died a hero: Although 16 people, most of them in cars, were hurt, Sesky was the only one who died. He also hadn't "lost his head, not to mention an arm or two, before he stopped." The photo above shows that the crash was gruesome enough without adding those incorrect details.

In concerts after releasing the song, Harry would joke that he had trouble finding an ending for it. He said there were 4 different endings. The 1st was a 1923 novelty song: "Oh, yes, we have no bananas!" But his band didn't like it and said, "Harry... " And the audience, familiar with the story, would yell back, "It sucks!" To which Harry, who encouraged singing along with his songs, would say, "Why is it that, every year, you get better at that part?"

So he wrote a second ending, in the style of country music, and again had singalong parts, and ended with the entire crowd singing, "...of bananaaaaaaaas!" According to Harry, that did not persuade his group, and, again, they said it sucked.

To the crowd, Harry would say, "Now, I knew I was in trouble. I said, Chapin, if you can't win with choral magnificence like the second ending, and you can't win with indigenous humor like the first ending, and you don't want to mess with disco bullshit, no matter what, it left only one other option: A quietly qualitative understated Caribbean ending." And he sang an old commercial jingle: "I'm Chiquita Banana, and I'm here to say... "

But the band, without actually saying so, decided that this also sucked, and started playing his first hit, "Taxi," in disco style, with bass guitarist and bass singer Big John Wallace singing it. After one verse, Harry would tell the audience: "Are you gonna tell 'em, or do I have to? Boys... " And, harder than ever, they would yell, "It sucks!"

And so, for the 4th and final ending, Harry went back to the beginning, and told of the old man telling him the story, with the last repetition of the word "bananas" again being dragged out, until the band simulated the sound of a crash. That's the version that ended up on the record.

Of course, Harry would also be killed in a motor vehicle crash, at an age not much older than Sesky, and was no hero in the process: His license was already suspended. Harry had become a hero in raising a great deal of money for hunger relief. But in writing a song involving food, he did no one any favors, least of all the man who was both victim and hero.

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March 18, 1965 was a Thursday. This was also the day that Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov conducted the 1st spacewalk, and the Detroit Red Wings got 10 goals from 10 different players. I have separate entries for those events.

Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. There was 1 game played in the NBA: The Cincinnati Royals beat the Baltimore Bullets, 113-110 at the Cincinnati Gardens.

There were 2 games in the NHL:

* The Montreal Canadiens beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 4-1 at the Montreal Forum.

* And the Detroit Red Wings beat the Boston Bruins, 10-3 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit. The Wings got goals from a record 10 different players. I have a separate entry for that event.

* The New York Rangers and the Chicago Black Hawks were not scheduled.