The great poet Lord Tennyson said that in the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of … baseball? Why not? I’ve seen where some of my snowbird connections have been attending spring baseball games and seem to be enjoying themselves in the sun. The name Roger Maris, the North Dakota sports hero, comes to mind today. Who doesn’t know that in 1961 he hit a record breaking 61 homeruns. Too bad for that asterisk attached to the number in the record book meaning he accomplished it in a longer season than the one in which Babe Ruth hit his 60. That fact never seemed a plausible reason to deny Maris’s entry in the Baseball Hall of Fame. I needed to look up the name of the pitcher; it was Tracy Stallard of the Boston Red Sox, who faced Maris that day.
Another baseball item that year reported the death of Ty Cobb, the long-playing Detroit Tigers outfielder who earned a host of MLB records. Another event occurred at Fenway Park in Boston when the first major league baseball all-star game ended with a tie score after the game stopped in the 9th inning due to rain.
I set out to do some “cherry picking” for other news of importance happening in 1961. There was plenty. East Germany erected the Berlin Wall and the first death of someone trying to cross it occurred. The wall stood for some years and claimed the lives of 138 more East Germans. I remember Tom Brokaw’s live reporting in 1989 of the fall of the wall, the historical fate of every border wall.
The space race filled the newspapers. U. S. Astronauts Alan B. Shepard and Virgil Grissom rocketed skyward but did not orbit, however the Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin did circle the earth one time. This was the period of the Cold War so Russia continued to show its might with the detonation of a 50 megaton hydrogen bomb which was the largest man-made explosion in history. The U. S. sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba failed which further intensified U. S. and Russian relations.
The outgoing president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, gave his final state of the union speech where
he warned the country to beware of the growing “military-industrial complex.” In spite of his warning, it has grown unimpeded. It was this year that American involvement in the Vietnam War began with the first American helicopters arriving in Saigon accompanied with about 400 service members to operate and service them.
It doesn’t seem this long ago that Patsy Cline sang “I Fall to Pieces” and “Crazy,” although the song of the year then was “The Theme from Exodus.” Everyone’s favorite book, or at least it was for a lot of us, was the Pulitzer Prize winning “To Kill a Mockingbird.” In many rankings of best books today it still heads or is near the top of the list.
One event in 1961 that only those tourists visiting Sweden might appreciate was the raising of the Swedish warship VASA from the harbor at Stockholm. A few years ago I and other members of my family visited our Swedish relatives and toured the restored ship in its permanent museum mooring in Stockholm. Its existence demonstrated the mismanagement of a ruler who should have stayed out of its construction. You see, it never got out of the harbor since it capsized on its maiden voyage. The ship’s architect designed and built it according to seaworthy plans, but the king wanted the biggest, baddest warship in the world and altered the design to add one more deck of cannons to the ship. Top heavy. Capsized. In the drink for 334 years.
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