All of you that stop by twinstrivia.com from time to time know that I have followed baseball for a long time. Back then when I had some extra money I would spend it on baseball cards and some of it went towards a subscription to the Sporting News, the best place to get baseball news back then. Oh, but how things have changed since the sixties.
Hard copy newspapers and magazines, radios and even televisions are on the way out and the Internet is in. Everyone gets their baseball news by reading about it via the internet on newspaper sites, magazine sites, baseball team sites, baseball blogs and even baseball books via their phones, tablets or computers.
Recently I was using my computer and the internet to do some research about the Minnesota Twins in the 1966 Sporting News and ran across this article in the April 16 edition on page 56 that “caught my eye” and I could not resist making a copy of it to share.
As it turns out they did not even get the spelling of her first name correct in this article. In checking the byline she used for her writing she went by Kathie and not Kathy as noted above. In June of 1966 Kathie Dibell appeared on the TV show “What’s My Line” and the panel made up of Phyllis Newman, Tony Randall, Arlene Francis, and Bennett Cerf did not guess her occupation as a sports writer for Associated Press. Miss Frances opened the questioning and said that she must first repeat Bennett Cerf’s pun on Miss Dibell’s name. He said “when she comes into “da room” she rings “da bell”. Oh….
Note that some of the words like comely and distaff that are used in this story are no longer commonly used words. As I have gotten older I have become less and less fond of change but sometimes change is good, this is one of the good ones.
Yikes. We think we have made progress in the 55 years since this news item appeared, but we still have a long way to go.
On the bright side, John, it was 67 years ago today that Henry Aaron hit the first of his 755 HR’s in a game against the St. Louis Cardinals in 1954. That was the year of Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Amazing what history reveals; like being nowhere and everywhere all at once.