The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It’s the birthday of Austrian novelist and journalist Joseph Roth (books by this author), born in Brody, Ukraine (1894). His most famous novel is Radetsky March (1932), about the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg monarchy. He worked for many years as a journalist in Berlin, and wrote a book of essays, The Wandering Jews (1927), about the plight of the embattled European Jews on the verge of extinction. He wrote with particular fondness about the Jews of the shtetl, the small Jewish towns of Eastern Europe. He wrote: “The shtetl Jews are not rare visitors of God, they live with him. In their prayers they inveigh against him, they complain at his severity, they go to God to accuse God. There is no other people that lives on such a footing with their god. They are an old people and they have known him a long time!”

Today is the birthday of humorist and Southern Baptist minister Grady Nutt (books by this author), born in Amarillo, Texas, in 1934. He wrote several hymns and a few books, including an autobiography called So Good, So Far (1979).

It’s the birthday of baseball pioneer Albert Goodwill Spalding, born in Byron, Illinois (1850). He was a pitcher for the National Association Boston Red Stockings from 1871 to 1875, then became a pitcher and manager of the Chicago White Stockings in 1876. In that same year, he and his brother founded the sporting goods company A.G. Spalding and Brothers.

George Gershwin finished his opera Porgy and Bess on this day in 1935. The opera was based on a true story about a handicapped black man named Goatcart Sammy who’d been arrested in Charleston, South Carolina, for attempted murder.

It was on this day in 1901 that Vice President Teddy Roosevelt visited the Minnesota State Fair and, in a speech before several thousand people, outlined his view of America’s new role in world affairs: He used an old African proverb and said that “America must speak softly but carry a big stick.”

It’s the birthday of American humorist and newspaperman Eugene Field (1850) (books by this author), born in St. Louis, Missouri. Field claimed two birthdays, September 2 and September 3, telling friends if they forgot him on the first date, they could remember him on the second. Field is best known for his humorous, often sardonic poetry for children, like “Wynken, Blynken and Nod” and “The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat.”

Field’s mother died when he was six and his father sent him and his brother to Amherst, Massachusetts, to be raised by a cousin. Field was an exuberant, prankish boy who enjoyed whimsy. He had five chickens in Amherst and named them Winniken, Minniken, Finniken, Boog, and Poog. Fields had no patience for school and spent his youth in and out of boarding schools. He attended four colleges, studying acting and the law, without any success. His father died, leaving Field a small inheritance, which he spent every penny of during six months in Europe.

By 1875, he was back in Missouri, writing for the Saint Joseph Gazette. He fell in love with a 14-year-old girl. When the girl’s father said she was too young to marry, Field replied, “She’ll grow out of it.” They married when she was 16, instead, and had eight children. For the rest of his life, whatever money he earned, he directed it be sent to his wife, because he knew he would spend it frivolously.

Field wrote for newspapers in Kansas City and Denver before settling down in Chicago and writing a humorous column called “Sharps and Flats” for the Chicago Daily News, a position he would hold for the rest of his life. “Sharps and Flats” ran in the morning edition and featured Field’s cutting quips and observations about Chicago, which he called “Porkopolis,” because of its rampant materialism. He enjoyed comparing Chicago to Boston, once writing, “While Chicago is humping herself in the interests of literature, arts, and the sciences, vain old Boston is frivoling away her precious time in an attempted renaissance of the cod fisheries.”

Field enjoyed teasing children, often making faces at them when adults turned their backs. The whimsical, somewhat mean-spirited humor in his book The Tribune Primer (1881) — which suggested that children pat wasps, eat wormy apples, and put mud in a baby’s ears — became sweeter and more nostalgic, as he aged. In “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” a bedtime story, three children sail and fish among the stars from a boat that is a wooden shoe. The little fishermen symbolize a sleepy child’s blinking eyes and nodding head. The poem became an immensely popular fixture in the cultural lexicon. In the 1960s and ’70s, musicians like Cass Elliott, Donovan, and The Doobie Brothers all sang versions of the song, and in an early version of Lou Reed’s song “Satellite of Love,” the names “Harry, Mark, and John” are sung as “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.”

The three smokestacks at the Lansing Board of Water & Light in Lansing, Michigan, are known locally as “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.”

The popular video game Pac-Man (1980) features four ghosts to be avoided. Their names, “Blinky,” “Inky,” “Pinky,” and “Clyde,” are homage to Field’s poem.

Field’s poetry became a staple of school primers throughout the 20th century. More than 30 elementary schools in the Midwest and Southwest are named for him. About reading, he said: “All good and true book-lovers practice the pleasing and improving avocation of reading in bed [...] No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.”