Frank Zarnowski - American Work-Sports: A History of Competitions for Cornhuskers, Lumberjacks, Firemen and Others

Also by Frank Zarnowski and from McFarland

The Pentathlon of the Ancient World (2013)

American Decathletes: A 20th Century Whos Who (2002; paperback 2011)

Foreword by Bil Gilbert

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-0-7864-9126-1

2013 Frank Zarnowski. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover image: Postcard showing a man riding a bucking bronco with spectators in the background, 1910 (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-19089)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

For Sarah, Rachel and the Wallin family,
and to the memory of Bil Gilbert

Bil Gilbert wrote this foreword in September 2011, four months before his unexpected death in January 2012.

Among other things, American Work-Sports is a very aptly named book. It represents an impressive amount of work and it is a serious book which illuminates important aspects of American history and culture which have previously been much and unfortunately neglected.

But it is also a book which was born out of sport and playfulness. I think I am uniquely qualied to comment on its origin since, from the time it was only a gleam, so to speak, in the authors eye, I have been involved with it as, if not a godfather, at least as a doting uncle.

To support this immodest claim: Dr. Frank Zarnowski and I met by accident some fty years ago. He was a young economics instructor at Mount St. Marys Collegenow a university in central Maryland, just south of the Mason-Dixon line. I was a bit older, beginning to be a published journalist and essayist living a few miles north in Pennsylvania. It is surprising that the two of us have been such close friends for so long because temperamentally and vocationally we are a fairly odd couple.

As an economist, specics and statistics greatly engage Zeke. (After all of these years I cannot reprogram myself to think, write or speak about Dr. Frank Zarnowski.) As for myself, as a writer whose subjects often have to do with American social and natural history, I lean toward the general and speculative. Also, our lifestyles have always been quite different. Zeke was, as he has remained, a bachelor withhow shall we put ita large and varied social agenda. Ann, still my wife, and I were preoccupied with four young children and the always-changing but present menagerie which has traditionally been part of our household: dogs, cats, horses, burros, foxes, raccoons, ferrets, crows, hawks, owls, etc., etc., etc. When he came to dinner as young bachelors want and need to do, Zeke was politely tolerant of the kids and other creatures, but was obviously outside of his comfort zone. On the other hand we did and still do share a common, and in some respects, uncommon interest in sports. We have both played and coached a variety of more or less organized games, sometimes together, sometimes as competitive rivals. We are conventional followers and fans of our athletic superiors: e.g., we have spent a lot of time arguing about the relative merits of Zekes St. Louis Cardinals and my Detroit Tigers. But most important, we are both fascinated by what might be called the sporting culture. The last word is used in its largest sense, i.e., to describe the ancient memory bank or source of what Richard Dawkins called memes, which have been accumulating for many centuries.

Zeke and I have been meeting for a two- or three-hour, almost weekly, lunch for about 30 years. (Inexactitudes annoy him. The above one may drive him to the les where he keeps old expense records, and keep him there until he is certain we started these meetings thirty-one years, seven months and eleven days ago.) Whenever they began, food has always been incidental to conversations. Sometimes we gabbed about ordinary things, war, peace, politics, money, sore backs, good and bad colleagues. But much of the time we have talked about current and historic athletic eventsunderrecognized and overrated ones; comic and suspect performers. We were always alert for unique sporting happenings. And those we found were brought back to entertain at the lunch table.

During the 1980s many of these athletic tidbits which I thought were lunch-worthy came from the early and mid19th century because I was working on books which had to do with this period. Among others there were the goose pull, a competition between men on horseback who in a full gallop tried to pull down geese with greased necks who had been hung from limbs; oyster swallowing, through the nose; and contests between laborers who were breaking up rocks for the bed of the rst national highway.

As Zeke and I pondered these seemingly disparate entertainments we began to think that, in fact, there was a connection. Many of them were ad hoc, on-the-job games which made use of the materials, tools and skills of working men andless oftenwomen. The more we talked, joked and generally considered the phenomenon the more signicant it seemed to be in regards to American culture, past and present.

In, say, arbitrarily 1850, athletic recreation of the sort we now think of as true sport was largely restricted in this country to a very small group of afuent and leisured people who lived within a few hundred miles of the Atlantic Ocean. Then and there the gentility genteelly punted and paddled, croqueted, lawn bowled, sailed, skated, and sometimes ran and swam a bit. However, for the great majority of Americans the sporting menu was minuscule in comparison with the present one.

When Abraham Lincoln was rst elected president of the United States, baseball was in its infancy. Basketball, football, softball and the modern Olympic games had not been invented; nor had roller skates, sneakers, ski lifts, etc. Golf, tennis, soccer and a good many other amusements would not be imported from Europe until later. There were a few professional boxers, runners and strong men. But by contemporary measure they were not paid much, attracted small crowds, and were not invited to White House dinners. And 24/7 sports radio and TV were more than a century away.

Beyond the obvious technological reasons, there were good socialin the broadest sense of that wordreasons for this apparent lack of interest in what is now thought of as sporting activity. In 1850 the majority of adult Americans were manual laborers. Typically they worked longer and harder days and weeks than we do now. And when they got off the job they were not inclined to spend their free time vigorously running, jumping, throwing, catching, lifting, pounding, hitting. Even if there had been such things it seems unlikely that our sporting ancestors would have joined an after-work softball league or exercise club. Taking off your shoes, sitting in a rocking chairif you had oneon the porch with a refreshing beverage was, understandably, more the style of the times.