Narrowly escaping the threat of death at the hands of the barbarous Nazis, Freud was reunited in freedom with his personal belongings, including his longtime couch. Today most patients sit in chairs facing the therapist, who interacts freely with them instead of remaining out of sight taking notes. But the couch, in tribute to the man who contributed so much to our understanding of the mysteries of the unconscious, has remained the symbol of the psychotherapeutic process.
LOCATION: Freud Museum, London.
Footnote
*The notion that Freudian analysts remain impassively silent throughout a therapeutic session, allowing the patient to babble on endlessly without interruption, is a misconception. The myth may have originated with an American who had gone to Vienna to consult the famous psychiatrist. Freud supposedly said almost nothing during their sessions, and when the American returned and reported his experience, his listeners assumed silence was an important feature of Freud’s approach. However, it seems the real story was that the good doctor had found this American patient’s free-associative ramblings so excruciatingly boring that he was simply unable to come up with any helpful comments.
THE HOOF OF FIRE HORSE
NUMBER TWELVE
DATE: 1890.
WHAT IT IS: The hoof of a horse that was cut off by the wheels of an engine it was drawing while racing to a fire.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: It is a complete hoof, four inches high, with a diameter of about 6 inches and a shoe about 6 inches.
In the annals of animal-heroism stories, all sorts of four-legged and winged creatures have aided people in times of emergency and distress. Legend has it, for example, that one night in ancient Rome the raucous honking of the sacred geese in the Temple of Juno woke up a patrician named Manlius and caused him to leap out of his bed and run to the edge of the Capitol, where he found a ferocious Gaul army scaling the fortress. The increasingly clamorous geese awakened other Romans, who came to help Manlius successfully repel the invaders. And during the Battle of Verdun on June 4, 1916, Commander Raynal dispatched his last homing pigeon with the desperate message: “We’re still holding out but we are under attack by gas and smoke. It is very dangerous and urgent that we get out of here. … This is my last pigeon.” The pigeon, named Le Valliant, flew over battlefields and arrived, badly poisoned, at its destination, where it died shortly after delivering its crucial message.
Sometimes, animals selflessly—as we humans understand the word— carry out a task that saves human lives even when it ultimately results in their own demise, such as Le Valliant, or the anonymous late-nineteenth-century horse that in early morning darkness pulled a company of firefighters to a blaze, only to suffer a mishap on the way that made it an enduring symbol of bravery.
Fire has always been a menace to humans. Early humans found that flames could be used to cook meat or keep warm, but they were plagued by the consequences of reckless handling of fire. Firefighting was apparently a vital concern of early civilizations, as many societies organized special groups to combat the potential hazards unwanted fires posed.
In ancient Rome, for example, special lookouts on the street would shout out an alarm when they spotted a fire, whereupon large squadrons of men wearing battle gear and carrying hatchets, mallets, hand pumps, and other equipment, as well as fire officials, investigators, and physicians, would come rushing by foot and chariot to the fire scene. In colonial times in America—where dense forests led to the construction of wooden buildings—firefighting was a community effort in which human chains would pass buckets of water to dousers at the front, with another chain passing the empty buckets back for replenishment. The statesman and philosopher Benjamin Franklin recognized the need for organized fire companies, and in 1736 formed America’s first volunteer group of firefighters, the Union Fire Department.
In the early nineteenth century, hand pumps with hoses handled by several firefighters simultaneously shot water onto fires, but around 1830 these were replaced by steam engines, which pumped out heavier water flows. As cities grew ever larger in the nineteenth century, organized fire departments sprang up; London, for example, had its first official public fire department in the mid-1860s, and it often fought fires in buildings several stories high. Before the age of power-driven vehicles, the heavy engines had to be drawn to the fire scenes, and to this end, firefighters employed horses to pull the carts on which these were mounted.
Which brings us to this story of four-legged heroism in the late nineteenth century, before the age of the gasoline engine, its protagonist an intrepid horse with no name. The horse is known only by the number assigned to it, perhaps designating its hitching post assignment at the fire station.
Richard Hayne was an elderly resident of 1011 Sixth Street, Southwest, between K and L Streets, in Washington, D.C. After his wife had died just over a year earlier, Hayne, who lived alone, had taken to drinking rum whenever he had the chance, and was so careless in the way he carried around his coal-oil lamp that several times police officers who walked his beat had to come to Hayne’s house to make sure he went to bed safely. Indeed, a small fire had once broken out in his house; Patrick Hurley, Hayne’s next-door neighbor, lived in constant fear that one day Hayne would start a larger fire that would spread to nearby homes.
Richard Hayne had been out drinking and returned shortly after midnight on the morning of March 28, 1890. Not long after, police officers Cook and Kelly discovered Hayne’s house in flames, and sent out an alarm over call box number 415. Minutes later Patrick Hurley’s worst fears were realized: his own house caught fire.
After Fire Horse Number Twelve's hoof was severed as he was rushing to a fire, it was recovered and became a symbol of bravery to Washington, D.C., firefighters.
The District of Columbia Fire Department’s Engine Company Three responded to the alarm. At about 1:30 A.M., as the company’s hose carriage and engine were racing to the scene, a collision between the vehicles occurred at the steam railroad crossing at First and C Streets, Southwest. In the accident the wheels of the heavy engine ran over the left foot of horse number twelve, which, with another horse, was drawing the hose carriage. The accident severed the hoof of the horse.
Unaware of the animal’s injury, the firefighters continued on feverishly as horse number twelve—along with the other horse—pulled the engines more than half a mile on the stub of its injured leg.
The firefighters employed their hoses at the scene and within minutes of arriving had the fire under control. Hayne’s house had been burned to the ground, and in the rubble firefighters found Hayne’s charred body. Next to it was a key, a silver dollar, and a pipe; Hayne had probably fallen asleep smoking. Patrick Hurley’s house was destroyed, but all the inhabitants escaped safely.
At the scene the firefighters made the gruesome discovery of the horrible injury to the leg of horse number twelve. The firefighters were flabbergasted that the horse had raced for more than half a mile on the cobblestone street on the exposed bone of the stump where the hoof had been torn off. Somebody went back to the scene of the accident and retrieved the sheared hoof.
Had horse number twelve not carried on after the accident, the men of Engine Company Three would not have been able to reach the fire scene promptly, the fire may have spread, and more lives could have been lost. The steed had performed its duty nobly, but the injury was irreparable, and it was immediately put out of its misery. District of Columbia Fire Department Chief Parris was quoted by the Washington Evening Star as saying, “Never since I have been in the fire department, and I have seen twenty-five years’ service, were my sympathies so appealed to as last night when I ordered that horse killed. Truly he had more grit and sagacity than any horse I ever saw.”
To honor the horse’s courage and devotion to duty, the fire department entered the horse high on its Roll of Honor. The department also had a tangible reminder to firefighters, as well as the public and all posterity, that firefighting is a dangerous enterprise in which both humans and four-legged cre
atures can be heroes—a sad but honorable souvenir, the severed hoof of fire horse number twelve.
LOCATION: National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.
“TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL
GAME”
DATE: 1908.
WHAT IT IS: The original handwritten draft of the lyrics to the famous song.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The lyrics are written in pencil on a sheet of paper that measures 9⁷/₈ inches long by 7¾ inches wide. Two small illustrations, one by the verse, the other by the refrain, adorn the page.
On a summer day in 1908, twenty-nine-year-old Jack Norworth stepped into a New York City subway car and turned an ordinary train ride into a journey to immortality. For on this day he conceived “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” the song that became a paean to baseball, a musical shrine to the game, a timeless ode that captured baseball fans’ passion for the sport. Pretty good work, one might say, for a guy who had never before been to a baseball game!
Despite his lack of baseball knowledge, Norworth was no novice when it came to music. A professional vaudeville performer and former blackface comedian, he was also a successful songwriter, and songwriters of his day were always looking for new trends to write about. So when he traversed the elevated tracks on the subway that day, it was not unusual for something that had caught his attention to end up being set to music.
When Norworth spotted a sign among the cluster of advertisements in the subway car that invited people to come see a baseball game at the Polo Grounds—the upper Manhattan stadium that was the home of the New York Giants—Norworth assumed no one had ever before written a song about the national pastime. If he could come up with something, it just might catch on!
By the time his thirty-minute uptown train ride was over, Norworth had batted out the goods—a verse and a refrain. Verses in this era of popular music were typically far less melodious than their refrains and tended to be forgotten over time, but they set up the refrain, the musical and lyrical essence of the song, which was repeated over and over and which normally contained the words in the song’s title. Norworth’s verse told about a young woman named Katie Casey, an avid baseball fan (“Katie Casey was baseball mad / Had the fever and had it bad”), whose beau calls her on a Saturday to invite her to a show. She declines, then adds, “I’ll tell you what you can do”—and the song launches into the rollicking refrain, “Take me out to the ball game.”
Norworth took his subway-scribed ditty to his sometime musical collaborator, Albert Von Tilzer, a former shoe salesman who was the manager of the York Music Company, a Tin Pan Alley music publisher. The thirty-year-old Von Tilzer, who had never set foot in a baseball stadium either, came from a musical family. His brother Harry, a composer, had already scored big with such hits as “A Bird in a Gilded Cage” (with Arthur J. Lamb) and “Wait Till the Sun Shines Nellie” (with Andrew B. Sterling). Another brother, Jack, was Albert’s partner at York. Albert rose to the challenge of setting music to Norworth’s lyrics, composing a melody that was at once catchy, bouncy, singable, infectious, and highly memorable.
Lyricist Jack Norworth conceived "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" on a New York City subway and even adorned his original lyric sheet with a couple of illustrations.
A vaudeville singer, Norworth himself tried out the song at Brooklyn’s Amphion Theatre, but it met with a cool response. In a discussion with his collaborator, Von Tilzer, he attributed this to his bungled and deadpan delivery of the lyrics. A few weeks later he performed the song again at an engagement at Hammerstein’s Victoria Theater in Manhattan. This time it caught on, going over well the first night and growing more popular every night thereafter.
Meanwhile, the song’s publisher, York Music, went to work promoting the tune. Publishers in the young but burgeoning music industry typically dispatched song-pluggers to department and music stores to introduce their new tunes and to persuade the singers and band leaders who performed in theaters, clubs, restaurants, and hotels to put the company’s songs in their acts. At the time, the piano was a common household item, played for fun and amusement by folks of every social stratum, and people avidly purchased the sheet music of popular new songs.
But in 1908, when “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” was published, an exciting new form of entertainment was capturing the public’s fancy, and music publishers were quick to hop on the bandwagon and share in the public’s craving for amusement—not to mention grab a piece of their pocketbooks. Songs were, after all, entertainment too! This new form of entertainment was something called the motion picture, which Thomas Edison had introduced to the public back in 1894. At first the kinetoscopes, as they were called, featured short scenes of people doing amusing things and were considered a novelty, but not long after, story films began to be made, and these grew in popularity with the public each year.
If songwriter Jack Norworth, pictured above, had followed his father's wishes and pursued a career in the merchant marine, the world of baseball would never have had its immortal anthem, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game."
The films were exhibited in nickelodeons—auditoriums or theaters that were actually converted stores, penny arcades, or the like—so named because the admission price was five cents. By 1908 there were thousands of nickelodeons spread across the United States exhibiting motion pictures, whose production increased each year to fill the public demand. The nickelodeons were open almost all day, and when the films weren’t playing, local singers were busy introducing Tin Pan Alley’s latest releases. But rather than just passing out sheets of a song and leading the audience in singing it, the song-pluggers also had a gimmicky tool: illuminated glass slides depicting the story of the song lyrics that could be projected onto a screen. Music publishers hired special companies to produce these slides and distribute them around the country. Following the projection of the illuminated slides, during which a recording of the song would be played or a singer would perform the song, usually to the accompaniment of a piano, the singer would lead the audience in singing the new song. Rounds and rounds of crooning provided entertainment for the audience members and—it was hoped—left them scrambling to purchase the sheet music to that infectious new tune.
Illuminated slides were made of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” with hired actors playing the characters in the verses. These were no doubt widely distributed and probably helped boost the song’s popularity. Soon “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” was sweeping the country. Vaudeville singers everywhere were singing the tune, and one night so many performers on Norworth’s bill used it that he had to scratch it when he himself came on. But the song’s popularity also had a profound personal affect on its lyricist. One night while he was at Proctor’s Fifth Avenue Theatre, a singer on the bill, Nora Bayes, came to his dressing room to say that she liked the song and to ask if she could include it in her act. Norworth consented and not only had another promotional vehicle for “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” but—just one week later—had a wife as well.
Norworth eventually found out he hadn’t written baseball’s first song. In fact, baseball songs dated back to the mid-nineteenth century, with such pre- and post-Civil War ditties as “The Baseball Polka” and “Home Run Polka.” In the wake of the success of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” a spate of baseball numbers followed—including efforts by such acclaimed musical scribes as George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, and John Philip Sousa—but none enjoyed the success of Norworth and Von Tilzer’s tune, nor endured over the years as it did. Even Von Tilzer’s brother Harry, as well as Norworth and his wife, Nora, in a cooperative effort, tried penning new baseball songs, but these too fell far short of “Ball Game.” It seemed there was only one song that could swell the hearts and lungs of baseball fans, and that was “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
Baseball derived great promotional benefits from the jaunty song that everybody seemed to know. But if Norworth’s father had had his way, the world might never have known the song that was to become a baseball classic, f
or he had strenuously objected to the starry-eyed show business aspirations of his son. Norworth’s father had successfully urged Jack, who was born in Philadelphia on January 5, 1879, to embark on a naval career. To the world’s benefit, however, after six years an illness cut short Jack’s marine vocation—he had become a quartermaster—enabling him to make a successful attempt at breaking into vaudeville as a blackface comedian.
Eventually, Norworth would retire from vaudeville as this form of theater itself grew outdated, but his royalties from “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” would continue throughout his lifetime.* Indeed, like many songs of its era, “Ball Game” made more money for its authors—and their heirs—years later than it did at first because of the later development of the recording industry and radio, and because such a classic song is always reincarnated by future artists.
When “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” became a hit in 1908, a musical composition’s main source of income was from sales of sheet music. It wouldn’t be until the following year, 1909, that a revision of the U.S. copyright law provided a statutory royalty for recordings of two cents per song sold in a “mechanical reproduction”—that is, records, which at this time were chiefly in the form of cylinders. This so-called mechanical royalty was split equally between the publisher and the writer. If there was more than one writer, they would split this share, in equal terms for the composer and the lyricist. (This royalty rate remained in effect until January 1, 1978, when the new Copyright Act of 1976 took full effect.)
Jumbo's Hide, Elvis's Ride, and the Tooth of Buddha Page 29
