These go to eleven

Here is your open thread for February 5, 2020.

Today is the birthday of Nigel Tufnel:

Henry Louis Aaron turns 86 years old today. Hank Aaron started his baseball career in 1951 with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro Leagues before getting signed by the Boston Braves.

In 1956, Aaron hit 26 home runs and won the National League batting title with a .328 average, but he still couldn’t stay at the same hotel or eat at the same restaurants as his white teammates the following year at spring training. In 1957, Aaron hit 44 homers and drove in 132 runs, winning MVP honors for the National League and leading the team to a World Series championship. In the spring of 1958, in other words, everybody clearly understood that Hank Aaron was freaking Hank Aaron, but even so, he still couldn’t stay at the same hotel or eat at the same restaurants as his white teammates in spring training. This went on for years.

The luxury hotel the white players stayed in, by the way, was called the Dixie Grande, because white America wasn’t even trying to hide this business. Black players lived and ate in a boarding house next to a funeral home across town.

Hank Aaron hit more than 200 home runs for the Braves and played on six All-Star teams before he was ever allowed to stay in the same hotel as the white players and coaches. Even then, in 1961, players had to eat in a separate room lest the hotel’s other white guests should be horrified at the sight of black and white teammates dining together.

February 5 is also the birthday of art collector, heiress, and devoted baseball fan Joan Whitney Payson. In the 1969 National League Championship Series, Hank Aaron hit three home runs and batted .357, but his Braves still got swept by Mrs. Payson’s Miracle Mets.

Oscar-nominated actors Charlotte Rampling, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Laura Linney all share a birthday today. (I would cast them all — along with Glenn Close, Amy Adams, and Annette Bening — in the boozy, biting, award-season comedy “It’s An Honor Just to Be Nominated.”)

Prolific TV-scriptwriting machine Stephen J. Cannell was born on February 5, 1941. Cannell churned out an astonishing quantity of low-brow detective shows and cop shows and things like The A-Team. But he also created some quirkier gems like The Rockford Files and Tenspeed and Brown Shoe. My favorite Cannell idea was a low-budget Canadian anthology series called Scene of the Crime, a crime/mystery show with an ensemble cast of old-pro character actors who took on new roles every week (one week you’re the killer, the next you’re the cop, the next you’re the victim, etc.). I’d love to see someone give that format another shot.

February 5 is the birthday of the late legendary session drummer Hal Blaine, who basically played with everybody on everything. So today, like every day, is a good day to listen to “Be My Baby.”

Two-time UK Prime Minister Robert Peel was born February 5, 1788. His Principles of Policing would be a vast improvement on most of what we think of as policing over here in America.

The United States Air Force misplaced a 7,600-pound nuclear bomb on February 5, 1958. Oops.

The Immigration Act of 1917 became law on February 5, 1917. Decent people today regard this as a shameful, racist stain on America’s honor and a tragic betrayal of the great principles embodied in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Senior White House Adviser Stephen Miller and 81 percent of white evangelicals regard this as a script to be re-enacted a century later.

Evangelist Dwight L. Moody was born on February 5, 1837. Moody’s vast influence on American white evangelicalism is indisputable, but the substance and meaning of that influence is murky at best. I’m of two minds about Moody’s legacy. And sometimes, when I’m reading more about his work, I find I’m of three or four minds about it.

In the Episcopal Church, February 5 is the feast day of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. I doubt anyone, anywhere, actually plans to hold a feast today in their honor, but it’d be cool if we did.