Notes on No. 756 plus two years

Two years ago today Barry Bonds hit home run number 756.

Has it only been two years? It seems that both the game and society have moved so much past him so quickly.

Selig and the MLB honchos made good money on the home run derbies of the late 20^th and early 21^st century and then became so righteous as more news of steroids and perhaps juiced balls became more common.

Now the writers who used the stories to keep baseball in the news and beat writers and commentators employed will arrange to keep him away from Cooperstown forever (or at least a long time).

While some of these people want to put Pete Rose there, a man who bet on a team he was managing, they get so outraged about a man who cheated only in order to improve performance. They even seem to keep putting pressure on the Commissioner’s office to re-admit Rose even though it is Cooperstown’s rule, not MLB’s rule which keeps Rose out.

They will probably win on the Rose matter sooner or later.

And maybe the relative quiet with which Bonds and number 756 have disappeared from our consciousness is a good sign that his feat was ephemeral and had only of momentary significance derived from his perceived, non-sanctioned (at least officially) use of steroids is really in order.

Lizie Borden took an ax

Today, August 4, is the anniversary of the death of Lizzie Borden’s father and step-mother. [If you have never heard of the incident – and I didn’t until I was grown – and have missed the resultant doggerel (below), it was big news in 1892.]

In the mid-1990s I heard a similar piece of doggerel (also below) about a Mr. O. J. Simpson who was also accused and later acquitted of a highly-publicized double murder.

Both of these bits of verse have historical errors [e.g, there is no proof of the death order of the Bordens and it was never confirmed that there was anything other than a eater-waiter relationship between O.J.’s ex and Ronald Goldman] and the latter does not seem to have lasted in the public memory, but likely the memory of the crimes for which both were acquitted will linger for some time.

Lizzie Borden took an axe

And gave her mother forty whacks.

When she saw what she had done

She gave her father forty-one

O.J. Simpson took a knife

And hacked away his ex-wife’s life

When he saw what he could do

He butchered up her boyfriend too.

Jane Hathaway obit

Jane Hathaway, foundation director, condor advocate,
figured in Commerce Bank scandal

LOS ANGELES [October 18. 1998]

Jane Hathaway, the bank secretary at Beverly Hills’ Commerce Bank who first came to public attention by testifying against and helping convict her boss in the 1972 California Dream banking scandal, died in a Los Angeles nursing home Sunday of complications from cancer at the age of 71.

Hathaway helped convict her long-time boss Milburn Drysdale after his California Dream Landscapes Finance Company and related ventures were revealed as little more than a complicated Ponzi scheme based on fraudulent premises which Drysdale and associates helped devise. She later became an advocate for preserving the California condor also twice sought election as a Republican to the California Assembly.

She was originally a co-defendant with Drysdale, but her attorneys were able to obtain separate trials and won her acquittal. The testimony revealed in her trial helped lead to more charges against Drysdale who was eventually convicted of 27 charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Drysdale died at the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas in 1977.

After unsuccessful campaigns for the California legislature in 1976 and 1978, Hathaway went to work in 1980 as Executive Director for the Daisy Moses Foundation, which had been founded by J. D. Clampett, the oil mogul who was Drysdale’s primary victim. Clampett, who lost an estimated $30 million and control of Mammoth Pictures as a result of Drysdale’s crimes, had said he never believed Hathaway guilty at all and paid for her “dream team” defense. Hathaway left the Moses Foundation in 1988 to become director of Biddle Bird Watchers Society. Elly May Clampett, J. D. Clampett’s daughter and granddaughter of Daisy Moses, replaced her at the Moses Foundation.

She met the late P. Casper Biddle, the famed condor advocate and founder of Biddle Bird Watchers in the early 1960’s and became a devoted follower. She left the Biddle Bird Watchers after events following Biddle’s 1993 death led to the dissolution of the Biddle Society.

“If it weren’t for such devoted people as Professor Biddle and Jane Hathaway,” there wouldn’t be any condors left here,” said state senator Diane Kong, frequently described as the legislature’s leading condor advocate. ‘That woman was amazing. She should have been a professional lobbyist.”

“She was the nicest and most helpful person I met in California,” Clampett said from his retirement home in Tennessee. I would have never known what that man [Drysdale] was doing to me if it hadn’t been for her and she stopped things before I was wiped out.”

Services are pending. Golden West Funeral Home in Beverly Hills is handling the arrangements.