Stan the Man

I read in the news today that Stan Musial died. I was about to parenthetically identify him, but for this audience, that would be unnecessary. By the time we were old enough to be aware of baseball, Stan was already was the stuff of a legend. His career with the St. Louis Cardinals took us through our year of graduation. He retired at the end of the 1963 season at age 42, an age that was ancient for a professional athlete at the time. For us, of course, 25 was old.

It would be nearly another decade before major league baseball came to Dallas, as a result many of us became fans of the teams and players from major league cities elsewhere. The Kansas City Athletics were perhaps the closest team geographically, but St. Louis wasn’t much farther and the Cardinals had more panache during those years – Stan Musial certainly being one reason. He had many, many fans here.

Back in those days, major baseball stars were held out as not only sports heroes on the field, but also as paragons of virtue. When revisionist historians and biographers took over, along with the diminished reticence of the media to report unsavory private conduct of public figures, we found that so many of the heroes of that time had serious clay feet. By all accounts, Musial was not one of them. If he had been, doubtless that would have been discovered and reported.

 

In the half-century since he retired Musial mostly kept to himself. He was induced n to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1969, the first year he was eligible. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. Stan had been married to his wife Lillian for three weeks shy of 72 years, when she died in May last year.

Dreams

From the January 24, 1963 issue of Time:

"It is 14 years since the first Polaroid cameras began developing and printing their own black-and-white snapshots in a matter of seconds. Though photographers have been yearning ever since for someone to produce an equally swift, self-processing color film, most chemists agreed that the job was incredibly difficult. It seemed improbable that it would ever be accomplished.

"But the very complexity of the problem was what appealed most to Dr. Edwin H. Land and his colleagues at the Polaroid Corp. in Cambridge, Mass. This week they began to market the improbable. Polacolor, a self-processing color film. Now, just 50 seconds after the snap of a shutter, a surgeon can record a sharp color shot of a delicate operation; an alert military reconnaissance pilot can produce a revealing picture of an enemy operation; a doting parent can turn out a portrait of his child in remarkably accurate tints.
...

"Among the big users of Polacolor will be industrial and scientific laboratories, which often need to take quick color shots of a fleeting stage in a process or experiment. But of all Polacolor's potential users, it is the military from whom Chemist Land may get his largest orders. The ability to photograph the enemy in color and see the picture almost immediately will be of enormous advantage in many dangerous situations. No enemy of the U.S. is likely to enjoy this advantage for years; in spite of frantic efforts, says Land, the Russians have not yet succeeded in copying even black-and-white Polaroid film."

Polaroid was the choice for instant photos up until the 1990s.  Since then the digital camera has taken over.  But back in the mid-60s, and instant color photo was a dream, and as the story says, it accomplishment was highly improbable.

But accomplished it was.  As was the electronic calculator, which replaced the slide rule, and so many other technological wonders that were not even dreamed of then.

Not Our Parents' Church

Time magazine announced in its January 4, 1963 issue that Pope John XXIII was its Man of the Year for 1962. John, born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, is one of two Pope’s who have been so named since Time began publishing in 1923. The primary reason given for the accolade was his calling the ecumenical council know as Vatican II and the prospect of making some fundamental changes in how the Church is governed, its ministry, and its relationship with other faiths. The article explaining the choice begins:

"The Year of Our Lord 1962 was a year of American resolve, Russian orbiting, European union and Chinese war.

In a tense yet hope-filled time, these were the events that dominated conversation and invited history's scrutiny. But history has a long eye, and it is quite possible that in her vision 1962's most fateful rendezvous took place in the world's most famous church—having lived for years in men's hearts and minds.

"That event was the beginning of a revolution in Christianity, the ancient faith whose 900 million adherents make it the world's largest religion. It began on Oct. 11 [1962]in Rome and was the work of the man of the year. Pope John XXIII, who, by convening the Ecumenical Council called Vatican II, set in motion ideas and forces that will affect not merely Roman Catholics, not only Christians, but the whole world's ever expanding population long after Cuba is once again libre and India is free of attack.

"So rare are councils—there have been only 20 in the nearly 2,000 years of Christian history—that merely by summoning Vatican II to "renew" the Roman Catholic Church Pope John made the biggest individual imprint on the year. But revolutions in Christianity are even rarer (the Reformation was 400 years ago), and John's historic mission is fired by a desire to endow the Christian faith with ‘a new Pentecost,’ a new spirit. It is aimed not only at bringing the mother church of Christendom into closer touch with the modern world, but at ending the division that has dissipated the Christian message for four centuries."

The article goes on to explain the moment and significance of the Council and a great deal is devoted to the man himself.  It concludes with:

"‘The council may have an effect as profound as anything since the days of Martin Luther,’ says Dr. Carroll L. Shuster of Los Angeles, an executive of the Presbyterian Church. Boston University's Professor Edwin Booth, a Methodist and church historian, is so impressed by what Pope John has started that he ranks him as ‘one of the truly great Popes of Roman Catholic history.’"

While the dogma and theology didn’t really change, the outward rituals and attitudes sure did.

A Jesuit theologian I knew at Loyola University New Orleans metaphorically opined in the wake of Vatican II, that the Council of Trent in the mid-16th Century responded to the Reformation by digging a moat around the Church and raising the drawbridge. In the 19^th Century, Vatican I put alligators in the moat. Now, finally, the Church raised the bridge and got rid of the alligators.

Sadly, it was not to be John XXIII who presided over the implementation of the changes wrought. He died six months into the year at age 81, when he again made the cover of Time.

Read more: at this link at this link.  (You might have to have a subscription to read the entire article.)



Comeback

Thanks to Postmaster General J. Edward Day, the nickel made the greatest comeback of the decade with the increase of basic First Class Mail postage to 5¢ for a letter. The increase took effect January 7, 1963. Nickel Coke and Dr. Pepper had been things of the past for several years. Machines took 6¢ for a bottle, which were returnable. Bottled soft drinks were generally 6 oz., but 10 oz. were becoming more common.

Air mail postage went up to 8¢. Air mail was discontinued as a separate service in 1975, and separate postage for Par Avion letters was eliminated in 1977.

The Post Office, a cabinet department since 1789, became the United States Postal Service, a quasi-government corporation in 1971.

On New Years Day 1963, LSU defeated Texas in the Cotton Bowl, 13 - 0.