Gen. Doubleday didn't invent baseball

It is the birthday Union General Abner Doubleday (1819), who is credited with firing the first shot in the Civil War at Fort Sumter, and also registering a patent for the cable car railway that still operates in San Francisco. He may be more widely remembered, however, for something historians say he didn’t do: invent baseball. The story of Doubleday’s invention of baseball persisted for generations, perpetuated by a 1905 baseball commission’s report that came to that conclusion. Recent scholarship, though, calls that story a myth and presents evidence that the principal source for it was highly unreliable. Nevertheless, the Baseball Hall of Fame is located in Doubleday’s boyhood home of Cooperstown, New York, and a baseball stadium and a minor league team are named for him. Doubleday did publish two important Civil War volumes: Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie (1876), and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg (1882).

Allen Ginsberg 'Howl'ed in San Francisco

It is the birthday of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (1926), who wrote the epic poem Howl (1956), which he first read publicly on October 5, 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. After Ginsberg’s friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti publish it, the work caused an uproar for explicit depiction of sex acts but was eventually ruled not obscene in court. The poem includes stories about Ginsberg’s Beat friends Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr and others. Here is a recording of Ginsberg reading the first part of the Howl.

Jim Jones' followers drank the Kool-Aid

It is the birthday of cult leader Jim Jones (1931), who was best known for leading a mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978. The suicide, accomplished with cyanide-laced grape-flavored drink, followed the Jones-ordered murder of California Congressman Leo Ryan and others who had come to investigate Jones’ cult. Jones had been the founder and leader of the socialist Peoples Temple in San Francisco, and was politically well connected and prominent in the region, figuring in the mayoral election of George Moscone in 1975. However, in 1977, Jones abruptly left San Francisco for Guyana ahead of a pending exposé in New West magazine that contained allegations from former Temple members of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. The incident gave rise to the popular phrase “Drinking the Kool-Aid,” referring derisively to adherents to a philosophy without critical examination. Purists note that Jonestown victims drank Flavor Aid,  a less expensive powdered drink, not Kool-Aid.

Happy birthday, Eadweard Muybridge

It is the birthday of Eadweard Muybridge (1830), who is remembered for his pioneering work in motion picture photography. His series of photographs of animals and humans to study their movements are iconic in the history of photography. Muybridge also was a bookseller when he moved from England to San Francisco in 1855. Here is an interesting biography about Muybridge that reveals much more of his background.

Happy birthday, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

It is the birthday of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919), who founded City Lights Bookstore (the first U.S. all paperback bookstore) in San Francisco in 1953, published Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and befriended Jack Kerouac, with whom he bonded. Both were Thomas Wolfe fans, both went to Columbia University, both lived in France and both spoke French to their mothers. Ferlinghetti spearheaded the naming of the alley next to his bookstore Jack Kerouac Alley in 1988. He was a mentor of Beat poets and writers of the 1950s, including Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, William S. Burroughs, Michael McClure, Bob Kaufman, and Diane diPrima, though he always considered himself the last of the Bohemians instead of the first of the Beats. Here is a video posted last year about Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Gary Snyder, the Thoreau of the Beats

It is the birthday of poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder (1930), who became associated with the Beat generation of San Francisco in the 1950s and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975 for his poetry collection Turtle Island. Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti called him the Thoreau of the Beat Generation. He is described as the poet laureate of deep ecology. Writer Jack Kerouac was inspired by Snyder's dedication to backcountry living to make Snyder the main character in The Dharma Bums (1958). Snyder studied Japanese and Chinese culture, Buddhism, rural life, naturism, and Native American culture. He traveled extensively in Japan and China. He is 83 years old and lives on a hundred acres in the Sierra Nevada foothills in Northern California. "Nature is not a place to visit," he told an interviewer from the London Review of Books last year, "It is home."

Gregory Corso, youngest Beat poet

Gregory Corso

It is the birthday of the youngest Beat poet, Gregory Corso (1930), who grew up living on the streets in the Lower East Side of New York, did prison terms in New Jersey's toughest institution, audited classes in Greek and Roman literature at Harvard (where he passed as a student until he was found out) and was befriended by Archibald MacLeish (then a dean at Harvard), who let him stay at Harvard as a poet in residence. He met Allen Ginsberg in a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, where he entertained the patrons with his poetry, and eventually became part of the circle of Beat poets. Corso collaborated with the likes of Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. He hung out with them in Paris and Tangiers and San Francisco. "Corso's a poet's Poet, a poet much superior to me," wrote Ginsberg. "Pure velvet ... whose wild fame's extended for decades around the world from France to China, World Poet." As a child, Corso had been told by his gruff father that his teenaged mother had abandoned the family and returned to Italy. Some 67 years later, he learned she had been abused by his father, put the baby in the care of Catholic Charities and fled to New Jersey, and eventually started a new family. Corso and his mother were reconciled in his later years and developed a good relationship before his death in 2001.