TENNIS | July 9, First Wimbledon Tournament Begins

Report on the first Wimbledon Final (Men's
Singles) £26 in 1877 = c. $2,600 in 2017.*

July 9, 2017—This day in 1877 the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club at Wimbledon, a suburb of London, offered a tennis tournament.

The 21 men who showed up for the Gentlemen’s Singles were reduced to 11 on the first day, six the next day, and three on the third. The final, postponed for two days to allow spectators to to watch the Eton vs. Harrow cricket match, was rained out. On the rain date, July 19, about 200 spectators paid a shilling to see W. Spencer Gore, an Old Harrovian, the dominate William Marshall, a Cambridge tennis Blue, with a strong volley at net. But at the second Wimbledon in 1878, Gore lost out to challenger Frank Hadow, who had mastered the lob.

Tennis originated with the 13th-century French handball game (jeu de paume, or “game of the palm”), which led to an indoor racket-and-ball game called réal, or “royal,” tennis. This went on to become lawn tennis, which spread to the United States. In the 20th century, half of all tennis players in the world were American.

The All England Club was established in 1868 on four acres of meadowland outside London. Originally founded to provide a place to play croquet, the Club added tennis. In 1877, the Club announced in The Field:

The All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club, Wimbledon, propose to hold a lawn tennis meeting open to all amateurs, on Monday, July 9, and following days. Entrance fee, one pound, one shilling [one guinea].

The All English Club purchased a 25-guinea (about £26) trophy and drew up formal rules for tennis, deciding on a rectangular court 78 x 27 feet. It adapted the real tennis method of scoring based on a clock face—i.e., 15, 30, 40, game, decided that the first to win six games wins a set, and allowed the server one fault.

As the game gained in popularity, Wimbledon added:

• Lady’s Singles in 1884 (Maud Watson won). 
• The national men’s doubles championship, moved from Oxford.
• Mixed doubles and women’s doubles in 1913. 
• A Stadium in 1922 the Wimbledon Stadium was built. 
• Professionals to the competitions in 1968.

The Wimbledon Championships are today the only major tennis event still played on grass.

*Eric W. Nye, Pounds Sterling to Dollars: Historical Conversion of Currency, accessed Monday, July 10, 2017, http://www.uwyo.edu/numimage/currency.htm.

FDR AND WOODIN | Warm Springs, Georgia

Treasury Secretary Will
Woodin (L) and FDR.

John Reagan (“Tex”) McCrary, who lived from  1910 to 2003), ran a radio show for NBC from the RCA Building.

On August 12, 1949 he wrote to General Motors financial executive John J. Raskob (1879-1950) at 350 Fifth Avenue, the Empire State Building).

Tex McCrary enclosed a copy of Westbrook Pegler’s column for August 4, 1949 and a transcript of his own broadcast comments on Pegler's column. (The correspondence may be found at http://digital.hagley.org/raskob-1456.)

The correspondence is interesting from two perspectives.

Al Smith (L) and John J. Raskob (R). 

First, there is venom in Pegler's bite at Raskob for accepting a "bribe" from FDR. It was also a side-swipe at FDR himself. 

In the New York Journal American (syndicated by King Features), Pegler said:

[Al] Smith never told publicly the truth about the bribe of $250,000 which John Raskob underwrote as Roosevelt’s price for coming out of his convalescence to run for Governor in 1928. That was the year Smith ran for President.

McCrary reported on Pegler's column in a broadcast the next day:

Yesterday [Pegler] hit an all-time low in unsubstantiated slander. According to Pegler, John J. Raskob underwrote a bribe of $250,000 as the price of persuading the late Franklin D. Roosevelt to come out of his convalescence to run for Governor … According to Pegler, the $250,000 was milked from Raskob as a contribution to Warm Springs Foundation for Crippled Children. 

The other interesting aspect of the correspondence is the sweeping denial that Raskob wrote back to McCrary on August 16:

I know nothing whatever about the financing and operation of Warm Springs except that the late William Woodin, former Secretary of the Treasury, did head a drive for funds some years ago to which I contributed.

What is going on here? I have read elsewhere about Raskob's involvement with solving FDR's financial problems at Warm Springs. I consulted a new book by Kaye Lanning Minchew, A President in Our Midst: Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Georgia (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2016), and on page 74, it is all spelled out:

In addition to health concerns and his fear that 1928 might not be the year for the Democrats, Roosevelt hesitated to run for governor because of his heavy financial commitments at Warm Springs. John J. Raskob, a wealthy businessman who had recently been named chair of the National Democratic Committee, talked to Roosevelt on the phone on October 2. Following their discussion of Roosevelt's obligations to Warm Springs, Raskob wrote a check for $250,000. When Roosevelt refused the check, Raskob formed a committee to raise funds while committing $50,000 to the cause. Following that conversation, Roosevelt agreed to run for governor.

What there seems to be agreement on is that Roskob recruited Will Woodin to head the committee to pay off the Warm Springs debt. Woodin also served on the board of the Warm Springs Foundation. If Minchew's story is accurate, then Raskob was being disingenuous in his letter of August 16 (in other words, he lied or had severe amnesia). His suggestion to McCrary that Woodin was the man who knew was a safe one, since Woodin was entombed in his Berwick mausoleum 14 years earlier.

Even if Pegler's facts are correct, it is hardly fair to label FDR's agreeing to run for governor in return for assistance to the Warm Springs Foundation as a "bribe". The Warm Springs debt was an obstacle to FDR's running for Governor of New York State. I have read that FDR's mother Sara Delano Roosevelt said she would not give FDR any money for his campaign unless and until he paid off the Warm Springs debt. The committee's contributions to the Foundation removed this obstacle to FDR's running for governor.

What is peculiar about all this is Raskob's denial of any knowledge about the Warm Springs finances. Doubtless he was not familiar with every detail, but he had to be aware of the large size of the Foundation deficits. In 1928 Al Smith wanted FDR to run for governor so that New York State would be safe for Democrats. It was when FDR ran for President himself four years later that Raskob decided FDR was a dangerous radical and from then on perhaps he preferred not to take any credit for having helped him become governor.

WOODIN | July 2, Helen Wills Wins Her Final Wimbledon

Helen Wills

July 2, 2017—This date in 1938, Helen Wills won her final Wimbledon singles championship. The dominant female tennis player of the 1920s and 1930s, she perfected her powerful forehand by playing against men.

Wills was the first American woman athlete to become a global celebrity, although she did not make an effort to be famous. She was on the cover of Time magazine twice, in 1926 and 1929.

She played a strong game with grace, and she helped introduce knee-length skirts for women on the tennis court, thereby adding greatly to the mobility of the players and the visual appeal of women's tennis. Charlie Chaplin said that the most beautiful thing he had ever seen was "Helen Wills, playing tennis."

"Helen Wills, playing tennis."

Wills was helped in her success by the Woodin Gold Cup, an invitational challenge tournament for women that was sponsored by the Maidstone Club in East Hampton, New York, between 1926 and 1949.

Many Woodin Cup winners went on to become Grand Slam champions. In addition to Helen Wills, they included Alice Marble, Helen [Hull] Jacobs and Molla Mallory.  Helen Jacobs and Helen Wills were fierce opponents whose games were called "the battle of the Helens." Sarah Palfrey, Margaret Osborne duPont and Louise Brough were others who participated often in the Woodin Cup.

In 1949 the three Woodin Cups, valued at $30,000 each in 2017 dollars, were all retired. They were challenge cups (as opposed to permanent cups), meaning that if they were won three times by the same player or doubles team, they could be taken home. Brough won the singles championship in 1949, and she won the doubles championship with duPont. Both of Brough's cups were given to the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island, along with the smaller trophies given to all winners (a silver cup, 5 inches tall, with the Maidstone coat of arms on it). (Source: Phone interview with Nicole Markham, Curator of Special Collections, International Tennis Hall of Fame, July 5, 2017.)

In 1926, the year that the Woodin Gold Cup was created, Wills first traveled across the Atlantic to play tennis. She reached the final of the Wimbledon singles, but lost to England’s Kitty McKane. This was the only Wimbledon that Wills would ever enter and lose. She went on to win eight Wimbledon singles titles.

From 1927 to 1933, Wills (she added Moody to her name while she was married to Frederick Moody in the years 1929-1937) won an impressive 180 consecutive matches. In 1933, a back injury forced her to sit out the tournaments for two years. Returning in 1935, and winning Wimbledon, Wills said she would retire. Coming back in 1938, however, Wills defeated an injured Helen Jacobs to win her eighth Wimbledon singles title. The victory was the final major championship for her.

Born in Centerville, California in 1905, she grew up in the Bay Area. She won the Girl’s National Championship in 1921 and 1922, and then won her first U.S. Open (then called the U.S. National Championships) at 17, in 1923. Her record of eight Wimbledon singles titles was not broken until Martina Navratilova won her ninth Wimbledon title in 1990. Wills died in 1998 at 92.

WOODIN | Will's Daughter Libby – Beautiful and Talented

Detail of portrait of Libby Woodin,
courtesy of the Woodin family.

Elizabeth Foster (Libby) Woodin of New York City and East Hampton and William Wallace Rowe (Harvard '20) of Cincinnati announced their betrothal in early April 1922. Then she went on a trip to Europe on the S.S. Paris.

A beautiful photo of Libby appears in a magazine and may be viewed with a Getty Images watermark on it here: http://bit.ly/2sjZP9H.

A detail of a portrait of her obtained from the Woodin family also shows her appeal.

Libby Woodin's father Will Woodin was in 1922 president of the American Car and Foundry Co. He and his wife Annie Jessup (Nan) Woodin accompanied his daughter on the trip. The wedding took place in 1923.

When the great American actress Gloria Swanson (1899–1983) went in 1925 to Paris with her husband, Marquis Henri de la Falaise de la Coudraye, they chose the same ship.

Dining on the French ocean liner S.S. Paris was the height of luxury. The staterooms were supremely comfortable. The French Line brochures advertised its ships as morceaux flottantes de France, "floating pieces of France".

The S.S. Paris cuisine was so haute that legend had it that more gulls followed in its wake than that of any other ship. The French Line's success took off when a third ship joined the relay: the S.S. Île de France.

Gloria Swanson and her
husband, the Marquis de la Falaise.

The S.S. Paris was laid down in 1913 at Saint-Nazaire, France for the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. The builder was Chantiers de l'Atlantique of St. Nazaire. The ship's launching was delayed by the war until 1916, and it was not fully completed until 1921 because of wartime priorities and then postwar scarcities. When the Paris was finally completed, it was the largest liner under the French flag, at 34,569 tons. A short (2.5-minute) YouTube video shows the “Paris” in operation, 1921-39— https://youtu.be/u3853AWYAaU.

The end of the S.S. Paris was as spectacular as its commencement and life. The tragic burning and sinking of the ship in its LeHavre dock in April 1939 is shown in a shorter (1.5 minute) video — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98At2ve0BFU.

(This post will be incorporated into a book I am writing about Will Woodin, his family and his life.)

WEDDING | Eli Rinzler and Ana Bennett, High Falls, N.Y.

June 17, 2017—Eli Rinzler puts the ring on the hand of Ana Bennett at
Crested Hen Farms in High Falls, N.Y. Photo by JT Marlin.

We have been attending the wedding of Eli Rinzler, son of Alice's Wellesley '66 classmate Cinnamon Rinzler and Curry Rinzler, to Ana Bennett. Here are three photos from the ceremony.

1. Groom Eli on Saturday is putting the wedding ring on the finger of blushing bride Ana at the Crested Hen Farms in High Falls, New York. Eli's brother Sean was Best Man. Ana's Matron of Honor was her sister.

L to R: Charlie and Alice. Photo by JT Marlin.

2. At the reception, Alice is holding beaming Charlotte, who is called Charlie.

Charlie looks pretty pleased with the whole event and with Alice's attention.

3. Some of Eli's relatives and their friends gathered at the home of Curry and Cinnamon Rinzler in Woodstock, N.Y.

Back row, standing (L to R): Warren Boeschenstein, John Tepper Marlin, Cinnamon Rinzler (mother of the groom), Dan (husband of Dana), Karen Boeschenstein (also Wellesley '66), Terry Peard (Kit's husband). Front row, sitting: Kit (sister of Cinnamon), Chris (son of Kit), Dana, Alice Tepper Marlin, Curry Rinzler (father of the groom).

Alice (L) and Karen.

 4. Alice with Karen Boeschenstein, who, before she retired, served for many years in the Admissions Office at 
the University of Virginia.












5. John with Warren Boeschenstein, a retired professor of architecture at the University of Virginia.

BIRTH | June 18—On his 75th, McCartney Gets New Queen's Honor

Sir Paul McCartney, Companion of Honor

June 18, 2017—Sir Paul McCartney turns 75 today (three and a half months after me, but you knew that).

He got a nice birthday present yesterday from Queen Elizabeth II.

The Queen's actual 91st birthday is on Wednesday, but her official birthday was celebrated yesterday. So that's when she bestowed her semi-annual honors.

Sir Paul was knighted by the Queen two decades ago when he was 55 and she was 71. At 75 his knighthood is being topped up with a Companion of Honor award — the centennial of which is this month, by the way — for services to music, on the same day as J.K. Rowling won the award for her services to literature and philanthropy. Sir Paul said of the new royal distinction:

I'm very happy about this huge honor and with the news coming on my birthday weekend and Father's Day it makes it colossal!

Sir Paul was born in Liverpool, England. He is a big believer in magic in reviewing his life. When he was 14, his mother died of an embolism. This led to his establishing a personal relationship with John Lennon, whose mother had also died when he was a teenager.

McCartney and Lennon are responsible for most of the most popular songs on the Beatles repertoire. McCartney is a two-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the recipient of 21 Grammys. His Beatles song "Yesterday" is one of the most covered songs in musical history, and he has written more than 30 No. 1 songs. Other top-ten hits of his include "Hey Jude" and "Let It BeCome".

In trying to explain how he came to write songs and become part of the Beatles, Sir Paul turns to the language of alchemy, invoking both magic and chemistry:

Every time I come to write a song, there's this magic little thing where I go, "Ooh, ooh, it's happening again." I just sit down at the piano and go, "Oh my God, I don't know this one," and suddenly there's a song. ... Life is an energy field, a bunch of molecules, And these particular molecules formed to make these four guys.

MEMORIAL | Silvia Tennenbaum (1928-2016)

Silvia Tennenbaum, 1928-2016.

June 9, 2017—A memorial service for our former neighbor Silvia [Pfeiffer] Tennenbaum was held today, Friday, at noon.

Her tombstone was unveiled at the Green River Cemetery on Accabonac Road in Springs.

Present were her brother and her three sons and many other relatives and friends.

Silvia died last year on June 27 at 88 at the Bryn Mawr Hospital in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She had moved in 2014 from her home in Springs to the Quadrangle, a Jewish-affiliated nonprofit independent-living facility in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where she reportedly continued to follow her team, the Mets. 

At a reception following the unveiling at Ashawagh Hall, her eldest son, Jeremy, told us that the Quadrangle was founded by a couple of Haverford professors and that the Philadelphia area is heavily populated by nonprofit religion-based assisted-living facilities. It is close to where Jeremy lived, and he took charge of managing his mother's last years.

Jeremy reported that his mother was suffering from bleeding ulcers and pneumonia and asked that there be no intervention. "She was ready to go," he said. She had previously lost much of her mobility out of a reluctance to move around.

Two of Silvia's fellow Mets fans, who show in their
 hair their solidarity with Silvia and The Team.

Silvia had a defiance about her during her last decade of life in Springs, symbolized by the blue streak she put in her hair. 

Two of the women who came to the unveiling were retired Postal Service staff members at the Wainscott Post Office. They were grateful for the Mets tickets that Silvia subscribed to and would bring them in weeks that she couldn't use them. 

Silvia was born in 1928 in Frankfurt, Germany, daughter of a mixed-religion marriage between Lotti Clara Stern and Erich Pfeiffer-Belli. Perhaps because of the rise of Nazi-inspired anti-Semitism in Frankfurt, her parents divorced in 1930. (It turned out that the Nazis tended to leave alone couples with one Jewish partner and a Christian partner, but no one could be sure.) 

Silvia's brother.

Four years after divorcing her first husband, Silvia's mother married William Steinberg, a talented conductor. Together with Silvia, now eight years old, in 1936 the couple fled Hitler's German tyranny. Steinberg went to Tel Aviv, where he helped create the Palestine Symphony Orchestra. In 1938 he was recruited by Arturo Toscanini to assist him in running the NBC Symphony Orchestra. 

Silvia was a fervent Mets fan.

Silvia loved America. She graduated from New Rochelle High School in 1946 and attended Barnard, earning a BA with honors in Art History in 1950. As a new immigrant, she took to baseball as a way of embracing her new  homeland and followed the Brooklyn Dodgers until, through Walter O'Malley's teachery, they decamped for Los Angeles in 1957. (Ask a Brooklyn Dodger fan: "If you had a gun with only two bullets in it and were in a room with Hitler, Stalin and O'Malley, which one would you shoot?" The answer will be: "Shoot O'Malley, twice!") 

She switched her allegiance to the New York Mets and never for a minute ever left them.

Studying for an MA in art at Columbia University graduate school, she met and, in 1951, married Lloyd Tennenbaum, who was a student in mathematics and philosophy and became a rabbi. 

Meanwhile, Silvia's father, by then conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, became also a guest conductor of the New York Philharmonic and in the 1960s the family stayed in East Hampton during the summers.

The Tennenbaums moved for seven years to Lynchburg, Virginia, where Silvia gave birth to three sons. Her husband was eventually appointed rabbi to two congregations on Long Island's North Shore and the family settled in Huntington, New York. 

Million-dollar sale
of paperback rights.

There Silvia wrote her first book, Rachel the Rabbi's Wife (1978), a caustic roman à clef about the life of a self-important rabbi and a demanding congregation that believed in its entitlement to unlimited support services from the rabbi’s wife. The book was a huge success. Silvia told me she sold the paperback rights for a million dollars, and used the money in part to build on the property a studio where she liked to write. 

However, by 1981, when we became her neighbors, the couple had separated. Silvia retained the house. She was extremely welcoming and told us all about the merits of registering as Democrats in East Hampton.

During the next 33 years, Silvia continued to be outspoken and flamboyant. She had her front fence painted a bluish-tinged purple, not quite the same color as the streak in her hair.

In the 1980s, one of her letters to the East Hampton Star prompted a local resident to place in front of her house a sign, “Communist Headquarters”. A critic of Israeli policy toward Palestinians, she preferred not to be formally associated with the large Jewish Center of the Hamptons and instead affiliated with Sag Harbor’s Temple Adas Israel, the oldest synagogue on Long Island, led until 2014 by widely published Rabbi Leon A. Morris. 

Silvia's three sons, L to R, Rafe, David and (holding the "veil"),
Jeremy, with Rabbi David Geffen.

Silvia and her husband were divorced in 1986 (he was a few years older than Silvia and predeceased her by a decade). She had returned to Columbia, where she earned an MA in art history in 1983. Besides frequent letters to the East Hampton Star, she wrote for the New American Review and the Massachusetts Review. One story, “A Lingering Death,” was selected by Joyce Carol Oates for “Best American Short Stories of 1979.”  Her second novel, Yesterday’s Streets (1981), was a fictionalized account of her family’s life among upper-middle class Jews in Frankfurt, Germany from 1900 to 1936. In 2012, Frankfurt named this book its "Book of the Year”. 

She is survived by her three sons — Jeremy, David and Raphael (Rafe). She was buried at Green River Cemetery in Springs on June 29, 2016. Rabbi Daniel N. Geffen of Temple Adas Israel presided then and presided again over the unveiling, followed by a sharing of food, beer and memories at Ashawagh Hall.

Additional Comments

Silvia was generous. She gave us a few things she didn't need when we first became her neighbor. She was always responsive to our suggestions about improving our properties and planted pine trees between us after just one suggestion. We and others missed her greatly when she moved to the Philadelphia area.

Alice notes how much fun Silvia was to talk with. She always had an interesting individual point of view, and effectively marshaled facts, often little-known ones, to support her view. We enjoyed her hospitality when we first arrived and were beneficiaries of fertilizer generated from horses in her back yard. She also often shared lilacs from her prolific bushes.

See also: Announcement of her death, one year ago.