Favorite Seasonal Publishers' Binding: Halloween Edition

If Tam O'Shanter'd had a wheel : and other poems and sketches

by Grace Duffie Boylan
Binding design by Blanche McManus (Signed binding: B.Mc.M)
New York, E.R. Herrick, 1898.
pba02560, from the Richard Minsky Collection, W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library

and Witches!

Finding joy in Muddville: The Literary Mystery of Casey at the Bat

A Treasury of Humorous Poetry (Dana, Estes and Co., 1902)

The crack of the bat is certainly a sound that many associate with summer. And what better way to celebrate that than with a little poem. But not just any ordinary poem…but with the legendary and beloved baseball poem, “Casey at the Bat”.

Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat”, despite being memorized by generations of American kids, is considered to be a modern literary mystery, its origins clouded with a bit of intrigue about where the poem came from, and just who wrote it.

“Casey” first appeared in the San Francisco Examiner in 1888, and it was first made popular that same year by the actor, comedian, and baseball fan, DeWolfe Hopper. Hopper made it a national sensation when he declaimed it in a New York theater in August, 1888 in front of his beloved New York Giants on the day his dear friend (and Hall of Fame pitcher) Tim Keefe had his nineteen game winning streak stopped.

Hopper went on to recite it countless times on the Vaudeville circuit, on radio, and even as a short film in 1923. It also became famously attributed to Victorian baseball legend Mike “King” Kelly, but Kelly was not the author, but rather like Hopper, recited the poem (poorly, in fact) before audiences. With Kelly and Hopper, by the turn of the 20^th century, “Casey” had become part of the modern American cannon.

Our beloved “Casey” first appeared in a hard cover book fourteen years later, 1902, in the volume, A Treasury of Humorous Poetry: Being a Compilation of Witty, Facetious, & Satirical Verse Selected from the Writings of British & American Poets. Dedicated to one of America’s greatest satirists, Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) and edited by Frederic Lawrence Knowles, it was published by Dana, Estes & Company. Knowles inclusion of “Casey” was logical, but unfortunately, the poem was misattributed to one “Joseph Quinlan Murphy”, an error which was soon corrected, by striking Murphy’s name from the author index in front of the book and properly crediting Thayer in the poem index at the rear. The copy featured here is the original uncorrected printing and is part of Hoole Special Collections Library’s Rare Books collection.

Miscredited "Casey" from Hoole's copy, page 299.

Today we are more than reasonably sure that Thayer was in fact the author of “Casey”. Thayer graduated from Harvard in 1885 and was hired by William Randolph Hearst as the humor columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, a post he held from 1886-1888. On June 3, 1888, Thayer signed his name as “Phin” to the very last piece he wrote for the Examiner, a poem entitled “Casey,” adding to the confusion over who actually wrote the poem. It is also said that Thayer denied having written the poem for some time, than later recanted.

(Corrected 1919 edition from Google Books)

At his Harvard class reunion in 1895, Thayer recited the poem himself, lending further credence to his place as the author of this beloved poem.

“Casey” lives on in many forms, an American legend, memorialized in a 1927 movie, Walt Disney cartoons, and a commemorative postage stamp, as well as books, and ballads that respond to “Casey” by numerous authors. The following are just a few noteworthy performances of and homages to “Casey at the Bat”, by Hopper, Disney, James Earl Jones, and Jackie Gleason.

Celebrate Poetry in all its forms...

The Game of Giza by George Edwin Starbuck

From the George Edwin Starbuck Papers,
The W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library, The University of Alabama.

April is National Poetry Month. We'll celebrate with the witty, wry, and dangerously funny George Starbuck, whose papers are housed at the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library.

George Starbuck was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1931, to a migrant academic family. In his mid-teens, he studied mathematics for two years at the Cal Tech. He also attended the UC Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and Harvard, but took no degrees.

He was an agricultural worker, a military policeman, and a fiction editor at Houghton Mifflin in addition to directing two of America’s finest graduate programs in Creative Writing -- the University of Iowa and Boston University.

Starbuck taught English and poetry for twenty-five years at the State University of New York at Buffalo, then at the University of Iowa and Boston University. He gave poetry readings in nearly every state as well as abroad. Due to illness, he took early retirement in 1988. He was the distinguished chair holder in poetry in 1990 at The University of Alabama.

While at the State University of New York, Buffalo, in 1963, he was fired for refusing to sign the required loyalty oath. He initiated a challenge of New York’s Fineberg loyalty oath law and was successful when the Supreme Court of the United States overturned that law. Also in the 1960s he was an anti-Vietnam War organizer and activist.

His first book, Bone Thoughts (1960), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. He subsequently received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Prix de Rome of the American College of Arts and Letters, and other awards. He was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome and later at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy.

White Papers, his second book, set a standard for charged, edgy American political poetry. His next, Elegy in a Country Church Yard, is the world’s widest concrete poem. Desperate Measures tackled, with fine Byronic insouciance, everything. Talkin B.A. Blues is a book-length rhyming picaresque in rhinestone-sourdough style. In 1982, Atlantic Monthly Press and Secker and Warburg (London) published his new-and-selected poems, The Argot Merchant Disaster. That book won The Nation’s Lenore Marshall prize, among others, for best book of poetry. He published two small books with bits Press: Space Savers Sonnets and Richard the Third in a Forth of a Second.

He was honored with the Aiken-Taylor Lifetime Achievement Award at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1993. He passed away in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1996 after a twenty-one-year struggle with Parkinson’s disease.

Two posthumous anthologies, Visible Ink and The Works, both edited by Elizabeth Meese and Kathryn Starbuck, were published by The University of Alabama Press.

Celebrate the written word with the man who X.J. Kennedy once said, "makes the American language roll over and whistle, "Dixie."

Robert Loveman: Poem, Song, and a little Jewish History Too!

On Valentine's Day, who better to talk about than a guy whose name screams all things romantic. A poet with a name like Loveman? You couldn't make this stuff up.

Robert Loveman (April 11, 1864 - July 9, 1923) was a well-known 19th and early 20th c. American poet. He is largely unknown today but in his time, he was widely read and appreciated.

And like so many who came before and after him, he arrived in Tuscaloosa to study at The University of Alabama. The year was 1888.

While living in Tuscaloosa, he resided with the Friedman family in their beautiful home on Greensboro Avenue, now known as the historic Battle-Friedman House. Bernard Friedman, one of the earliest Jewish settlers in Tuscaloosa, was in business with the Loveman family of New York and Dalton, Georgia. The Friedmans and Lovemans were also related through marriage.

Battle-Friedman home (Then known as the Alfred Battle House, built 1835)
(silver gelatin print by Sydnia Keene-Smith, ca. 1929) and accessible at http://www.lib.ua.edu/digital

While Loveman's time in Tuscaloosa was short, it was productive. It was during his years at The University of Alabama he wrote his famous "Rain Song" poem, inspired by the gardens surrounding the house. That poem later served as the inspiration for the famed Al Jolson song "April Showers."


Loveman's song "Georgia", with music by Lollie Belle Wylie, was the official state song of Georgia before 1979 (when it was replaced by "Georgia on My Mind"). A biographical study by our namesake, William Stanley Hoole, It's Raining Violets: The Life and Poetry of Robert Loveman, was published in 1981. The image of the sheet music above is from the Wade Hall Sheet Music Collections.

The Loveman materials featured here are a recent gift of Carole Wellington, the great granddaughter of a dear friend of Robert Loveman, Dr. Robert John Henderson. Dr. Henderson was a professor at the Georgia State Teachers College. Thank you, Ms. Wellington!

These items are a welcome addition to the Hoole Library collections on Loveman which include published materials and a manuscript collection. (Finding aid accessible at http://www.lib.ua.edu/content/findingaids/pdf/ms_0879.pdf)

Advertisment for Loveman's books

Letter and envelope from Mr. Loveman to his friend Mr. Loach.

Title page of The Blushful South and Hippocrene
by Robert Loveman (Lippincott, 1909)

Here is the original recording by Al Jolson from 1921.



Here is an especially lovely version of April Showers by none other than the Velvet Fog himself, Mel Torme.




The Loveman materials are featured in the exhibit, Campus meets Town meets all Around: Glimpses at Tuscaloosa's Jewish Community from the Hoole Library Collections held in conjunction with the 7th Annual Jewish Cultural Festival, held each year in Tuscaloosa. The exhibit is in the lobby of the Hoole Library, and features interesting information about the Jewish community -- on campus and in the city itself dating from the 1860s to the present. Here's to Loveman and to Love!