27 December 2006

Not Everything Was For Sale This Christmas

He uncovers a rare gem and shares it with the artist

By Jerry Crowe, Times Staff Writer
December 25, 2006

Not everything was for sale this holiday season.

A Claremont man, for instance, discovered in an old box a rare, vintage recording of an immensely popular and critically acclaimed artist, spent hours digitizing it to improve the sound quality and transfer it to CD, ignored advice from friends and co-workers to auction it off to the highest bidder and happily handed it over to the company that signed the artist more than 50 years ago.

He did this, he said, out of respect for the artist and the artist's equally revered subject.

"I just wanted to do what was right," he said.

His name is Jim Governale and the recording is of word-painter extraordinaire Vin Scully's over-the-air description of the final inning of the Dodgers' 5-0 victory over the New York Mets on June 30, 1962, at Dodger Stadium, the only known surviving audio account of the first of Sandy Koufax's four no-hitters.

The recording was made by Governale's uncle, Dave Fantz, who was 14 years old and sensed Dodgers history in the making when he fed a tape into his father's reel-to-reel recorder. About 40 minutes long, it picks up in the bottom of the eighth inning and carries through Jerry Doggett's postgame interview with Koufax.

The Dodgers were thrilled to receive a copy last month.

"This is really, truly a gift he's giving to the club," team historian Mark Langill said. "The magnitude of this is monumental, historically and emotionally."

No commercial video recordings of Koufax's no-hitters are known to exist, and no audio accounts of his second and third no-hitters have surfaced. Scully's poetic description of the final half-inning of the great left-hander's perfect game against the Chicago Cubs in 1965 was preserved only because Scully phoned the radio station in the eighth inning and suggested that it record the ninth.

As Scully is well aware, Governale's recording could have wound up just as easily in an online auction as in the Dodgers' hands.

"Some of my canceled checks from 40 years ago are up on EBay," Scully said. "It's really a joke."

Up to his neck in holiday preparations — he has 16 grandchildren — Scully had not heard Governale's recording when contacted for this article.

But he planned to listen and was touched by the gesture.

"I have it and I will treasure it," he said of the recording. "What will be the highlight for me is that Jerry Doggett, whom I loved, is on the CD. I've heard me, so that's that. But to be able to hear Jerry is really precious for me."

The Dodgers, Langill said, plan to post excerpts of the recording on their website starting this week.

Governale, a 40-year-old father of four and an on-air personality at a Glendale radio station, discovered the recording 16 years ago, after his grandfather died. His grandmother gave him a box of old tapes, and a newspaper clipping on the outside of the box indicated that it contained a recording of a Koufax gem.

Though a self-described "huge Dodger fan," Governale also is a procrastinator. He said he didn't actually listen to the recording until about 10 years ago, when he brought it into work, cleaned it up and burned it onto a CD.

"It was a real special recording and one of the first things that came to my mind was, 'I really want Vin Scully to hear this,' " he said. "In the back of my mind, I thought, 'One of these days I've got to mail this to Vin Scully.' "

But he didn't realize it was a rarity until about five years ago, when he contacted Cooperstown and was told the Hall of Fame did not have a copy.

That's when Governale's friends and co-workers weighed in.

Sell, they said.

He thought about it.

Through a co-worker, he contacted a copyright lawyer.

In the end, though, he believed that profiting from the recording would be unseemly and diminish his joy in sharing it.

"I just wanted to do what was right by the Dodgers and Vin Scully and Sandy Koufax," he said. "It would mean more to me to honor the two of them by just doing the right thing, rather than just to sell out. To me, it seemed like a way of cheapening the recording and cheapening the find if I were to sell it."

His co-workers, he said, thought he was "a little nuts."

But his uncle, who had been consulted, was not surprised.

"That's just the way Jim is," Fantz said from Denver, where he is an executive at a healthcare company. "He talked to me about it and I think it took me about a nanosecond to agree with him. It's just a stroke of luck that I happened to turn on the recorder that day, and that the recording has preserved all this time."

Also fortunate, the Dodgers might add, was that it wound up in the hands of Jim Governale, a true-blue fan and an honorable man.

19 December 2006

National Debate - Who Needs It?

Martin Kaplan is associate dean of the USC Annenberg School, where he directs the Norman Lear Center (learcenter.org) questions whether we really need a "national debate":
But what would a national debate on anything really look like? How would it be any different from what we're already doing now? Imagine the elements of a national debate on Iraq, and then ask whether what's going on today fits the bill.

  • Analysts offering opposing views on television shows?
  • Dueling Op-Ed pieces?
  • Senators and representatives making floor speeches?
  • Presidential candidates staking out positions, and critics taking them on?
  • Magazines and journals offering thoughtful, conflicting takes?
  • A take-no-prisoners brawl in the blogosphere?
  • Public opinion polls? You can't go to the restroom without tripping over a new one.
  • Thousands of people in the streets? Well, it's not like the Vietnam era — without a draft, it won't ever be — but plenty of cities have seen plenty of passionate marchers.
We have that right now, right?
So why, despite all appearances of actually having a national debate right now, do people keep insisting that we mount one?

Perhaps it's because the mainstream media are too timid to declare the difference between right and wrong. Imagine if journalism consisted of more than a collage of conflicting talking points. Imagine the difference it would make if more brand-name reporters broke from the bizarre straitjacket of "balance," which equates fairness with putting all disputants on equal epistemological footing, no matter how deceitful or moronic they may be.

There's a market for news that weighs counterclaims and assesses truth value. It just hasn't kept up with demand. No wonder Jon Stewart has such a loyal audience: He has a point of view, and it's rooted in the reality-based — not the ideology-based — world.

Anyone who's watched a presidential debate knows how useless they are for deciding our country's direction. The coming presidential primary season, which will stretch for more than a year, will be the scene of multi-candidate cattle calls in which entrants will moo canned messages, spring scripted attacks, ignore interlocutors' questions and declare inevitable victories.

The debates are also useless for finding common ground. There are no points to be scored with nuance. We're a nation of 300 million, which means there's one political party for every 150 million points of view. Politicians behave the way they do for a reason: Wedge issues work. Bipartisan consensus is a mug's game. The base is what counts. Swing votes win elections. Food fights win ratings.

Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has been calling for a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates across the nation. I'd like that. I'd also like a pony, an end to racism, a cure for cancer and a date with Scarlett Johansson. The actual Lincoln-Douglas debates drew huge crowds and galvanized public attention; Newt's would make C-SPAN, and maybe Fox, but most people would get them in 12-second snippets. Besides, it's tough to imagine Newt and his opponent (John McCain?) actually coming up with anything that they haven't broadcast in the news-and-gasbag venues to which they already enjoy full access.

Maybe we don't need a national debate. Maybe what we really need are leaders with more character, followers with more discrimination, deciders who hear as well as listen and media that know the difference between the public interest and what the public is interested in. National debates nicely fulfill the circus part of the bread-and-circuses formula of modern public life. Like psychoanalysis, national debates are basically interminable. And in our postmodern era, they do a nice job substituting for the hard work of actually figuring out what's true and what's good.
L.A. Times