Yankees Ticker Tape Parade, from Yahoo! Sports
Being in New York, I can’t ignore the fact that many of my students are out today.
It’s not swine flu. More like Yankee Whooping Cough.
Today the 27-time World Series Champion New York Yankees received their hard-earned reward with a ticker tape parade up lower Broadway to City Hall, the so-called “Canyon of Heroes.” I was at the last such event, in 2000, and the excitement and frenzy are an experience to remember. There was a chance I could’ve gone to the 1994 parade for the New York Rangers, but a final exam was scheduled that day.
Still, it got me thinking: what’s with all this office paper out the window? Why does the wanton destruction of perfectly good paper products constitute a proper tribute to a champion?
Thank the Statue of Liberty for that. That’s right. Lady Liberty is the copper culprit that began the tradition of the ticker tape parade.
On October 29, 1886, the first ticker-tape parade was held to celebrate the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. The banks, brokerage houses and businesses on lower Broadway celebrated by taking the used ticker tape from their adding machines and stock tickers and tossing them out the window on the crowds below. Nobody planned it—the brokers probably thought it was a convenient way to get rid of the trash. Nonetheless, a tradition was born.
From then on, the city fathers saw the popularity of such events and created a tradition of honoring military triumphs, foreign visitors, space voyages and sports championships. Since 1886, there have been 180 paper-strewn triumphs down Broadway. Most have taken place before 1963, and are much rarer today.
In the beginning, mostly military and political heroes were honored. Admiral George Dewey was honored for his service in Manila in 1899. Teddy Roosevelt got one in 1910 after he returned from Africa with enough animal carcasses to fill a natural history museum—which is exactly where they went. 1945 was a busy year: if you had at least two stars on your uniform, you went under the tape. Eisenhower, de Gaulle, Nimitz, Halsey, and General Wainwright (from Corregidor) each received a parade.
In the late 1940, 1950s and early 1960s, however, the city decided to go apeshit on these things. If you were foreign, had a crown, or some elected office, you got a parade.
Any tinpot dictator of a moth-eaten republic got a parade.
Presidents of places like El Salvador, Ecuador, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Guinea…parade, parade, parade, and parade.
And what of the champion sports teams of New York of this era? The New York Giants got one in 1954, for winning the National League pennant. For the Pennant! It was in September and the World Series hadn’t even started yet! As for the Yankees, champions in 1923, 1927, 1928, 1932, 1936-1939, 1941, 1943, 1947, 1949-1953, 1956, and 1958, they would not receive a parade for their effort until their World Series win of 1961, almost 40 years after their first trophy for the city. That’s real gratitude, for you!
After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, cities across America became very wary of open car parades in crowded cities, especially places with high rises that provide such perfect vantage points for snipers. The ticker-tape parade became a rarer occasion, often exclusively used for space exploration, military triumphs and sports champions. Recent non-sports parades celebrated Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, and war veterans of Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf.
Hope all my kids enjoyed themselves downtown. Today, thanks to computers, there’s no real ticker-tape at a ticker-tape parade. Most of the paper is either confetti provided to offices by the city, or scrap paper that has been shredded in office shredders—don’t look up or you might get a staple in your eye.
I just hope my students can do something great to earn their own parade one day.
November 9, 2009
This Day in History 11/9: The Fall of the Berlin Wall
Twenty years ago today, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall, the most visible and hated symbol of the Cold War, came tumbling down as the East German government flung open its borders. The opening of the Wall was the beginning of the end for Communism in Eastern Europe, as (mostly) peaceful revolutions swept across the continent, bringing down regime after regime until the great bear itself, the Soviet Union, dissolved in 1991.
Today, most kids have never even heard of the word Communism or anything like a Cold War. Yet try to be a child seeing these events unfold. For my generation, those that witnessed the end of an era, we couldn’t even believe it was happening.
For most of our lives, we thought that the great conflict between East and West, the Cold War, the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union had reached a meandering stalemate that could last forever. If the rivalry did heat up, it was usually every four years during the Olympic Games.
I was a precocious kid, and even at that age a rabid anti-Communist. Most of my friends used words like “Commie” and “Russkie” pretty casually, but I knew the evil they contained. When Katerina Witt of East Germany won the gold medal in figure skating in 1988, I left the room. I screamed at my parents that I refused to listen to an anthem from a Communist dictatorship. No one booed louder when Nickolai Volkoff sang the Soviet national anthem before wrestling for the WWF (now WWE).
Christ, I made Alex P. Keaton look like Nancy Pelosi.
Yet even I, the great red-baiter that I was, had the inevitable shrug most had when confronting the Soviet menace. They were there, and they we there to stay. As long as they don’t move from where they are, and no sneaky stuff with Typhoon submarines, then I guess we can coexist. It was even a buzzword of the Brezhnev-era Kremlin: “peaceful coexistence.”
Then I heard about what was happening in Poland. Yes, I was a wierd kid: the Solidarity movement of Lech Walesa fascinated me.
I mean, here was a situation that, to a true lover of Marx and Lenin, made absolutely no sense: a “worker’s republic” refusing to let a group of shipyard workers from Gdansk organize into a labor union. A labor union is the crux of all Communist ideology, and it was turned on its head as Solidarity formed to combat unfair conditions laid down by Warsaw’s Soviet satellite regime. The authorities fought back brutally, enforcing martial law from 1981-1982. Yet the movement survived, and it worked to undermine, and eventually destroy, the Polish dictatorship.
The Polish revolution worked because of a gap in the Soviet clinch on power. By the 1980s, the Soviets were in economic freefall, and badly needed Western capital and technology just to keep up. Thus, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev began a program of gradual liberalization of the economy (perestroika) followed by a loosening of the authoritarian political landscape (glasnost). On top of this, Moscow basically allowed its satellites to do what they wanted. There would be no repeat of the crackdowns of years past–this time the Red Army will not interfere.
The result was a flood of anger and resentment. Reform movements were going on all over Eastern Europe, mostly among grassroots groups looking for bread-and-butter changes: better housing, higher wages, better working conditions, etc. The people’s republics simply grew so stagnant that they were completely divorced from the reality of the people, and rebels like Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa were considered heroes.
Yet we never thought that wall would ever come down. And it did, thanks to massive demonstrations, public media attention, and an East German government willing to say “enough is enough”, and replace the autocratic Erich Honecker with the more pliant Egon Krenz, who summarily threw open the borders to allow East Germans free access to the west. That hated wall, that son-of-a-bitch wall finally came down.
As with most things, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism seemed inevitable now. Today, we are stilling dealing with the aftereffects of the Revolutions of 1989, both good and bad. But for kids like me, who never thought it was going to happen, the Berlin Wall was a moment we could never forget. Like the clamoring hordes in Boston in the 1770’s, no one was silencing the will of the people anymore.
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