Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 1/14/2011

1/14/1942:
With America now at war, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis gives President Franklin Roosevelt a letter asking his advice on whether or not to cancel baseball for the coming season. FDR answers immediately, "I honestly feel that it would be best for our country to keep baseball going. There will be fewer people unemployed and everybody will work longer hours and harder than ever before. And that means that they ought to have a chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work." The president also recommends increasing the number of night games. Each major league club will be permitted to play 14 at home, an increase of 7 over previous years.

Birthdays:
Smead Jolley b. 1902
Sonny Siebert b. 1937
Fred Arbanas b. 1939
Gene Washington b. 1947
Terry Forster b. 1952

Packers Fact:
The Packers and Bears are long-time rivals, but at one point during the Great Depression in the 1930s, Chicago owner George Halas borrowed $1,500 from Green Bay to meet his team's payroll.

“The important thing in life is not the victory but the contest; the essential thing is not to have won but to have fought well.”

—BARON PIERRE DE COUBERTIN, founder of the modern Olympic Games

ON DETECTIVE WORK, DEEP

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POLICE: CRACK FOUND
IN MAN’S BUTTOCKS

headline on myfoxdc.com

WOMEN’S VOICES

Kate Walbert, fully flexing the literary muscle she developed in The Gardens of Kyoto, Our Kind, and Where She Went, unfolds a sensitive multigenerational story of the Townsend women. The common threads that hold this novel together, from World War I England to present-day New York, are Florence Nightingale, women’s suffrage, and other feminine rights and desires. Surely Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton are dancing in their graves to see a worthy successor in Walbert, with her nuanced perspectives and perceptions, strong heroines, marvelous dialogue, and captivating story.

A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN, by Kate Walbert (Scribner, 2009)