Tomorrow night, Joe Biden and Donald Trump will have their first debate — their first debate of 2024, that is. (They debated twice in 2020.) (They were to have debated three times, but . . .) I have some questions I would like to see posed to them, or would like to pose myself. I have them at the top of my column today, here. I have sundry other items as well, including a story about one’s phone, and one’s attachment to it. (To detach can be — gratifying.)
A little mail? For reasons I could get into, I had some cigarette slogans in a previous column. “Blow some smoke my way.” (Sounds almost indecent.) “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” Grammarians objected to that one, because “like,” strictly speaking, should have been “as.” The company took advantage of this.
One of our readers has sent me a couple of ads, including this one, from 1971:
Another reader writes,
My mother came here at age six and my father was born in upstate New York but didn’t speak English until he got to school, so they were sticklers about language. I can still remember the TV assuring us that “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should” and my parents murmuring “as a cigarette should.”
My mom especially hated pleonasms. When we wanted to annoy her — as opposed to the many times we annoyed her without intending to — we’d say, “I’m going to tell you the honest truth,” or, “It was round in shape,” or, “It was small in size.”
She also hated “[something]-wise.” Once, I asked her what she thought of the rabbi’s sermon “wisdom-wise” and she actually shuddered.
I love that.
In that same column, I had some photos of my hometown, Ann Arbor, Mich. A reader writes,
Thanks for the photos from your hometown. I come from the rural hamlet of Laurel, Oregon, which was settled in the 1850s. We have a church, a former school converted to a three-family apartment house, a community hall (not a grange), an old store, and a coffee shop. (Also a marijuana processing plant that we’d rather not mention.)
We live on part of my grandfather’s farm which he purchased in 1929 just before the Depression hit.
It’s good to have a hometown.
On Monday, I published a letter about Willie Mays in 1971. Here is a note from Quin Hillyer, the columnist, who grew up in New Orleans (about 2,200 miles from San Francisco, where Mays was playing):
Jay,
. . . That 1971 season by Mays was remarkable. I distinctly remember being seven years old and eagerly checking the box scores to see how the Giants were doing and to marvel that, day after day, Mays seemed to be the key player.
Here’s an almost mind-boggling set of Mays stats:
In 1971, he was 40 years old. There was less offense than there is now. Mays had had a string of injuries. But he led the National League in on-base percentage. His on-base-plus-slugging was .907, fourth in the league, and it would be good enough for top ten even now. He almost single-handedly willed the Giants to the NL West championship, scoring 82 runs and stealing 23 bases (on bad legs!) while being caught stealing only three times. In the playoff series against the superior Pirates (eventual World Series winners that year), his OPS was a stunning .989.
A-Mays-ing.
There are more letters about Willie Mays. I expect to publish them soon. In the meantime, thanks to one and all.