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HAIL and FAREWELL to the former Texas Western (now U of Texas - El Paso) basketball coach Don Haskins who has died at age 78. His decision to start five black players in the 1966 NCAA title game against an all-white Kentucky squad helped complete the integration of college basketball.
There were many other schools that featured black players before: the University of San Francisco (with Bill Russell, K.C. Jones and Hal Perry) started a majority-black lineup in its back-to-back 1955 & 1956 championship teams.
And Loyola of Chicago won the 1963 NCAA title with four black starters.
It was only the Southeast that integration had not yet reached by 1966. After the Texas Western 72-65 victory, that changed.
The 2006 film Glory Road detailed their story; Jerry Bruckheimer commissioned the film after talking to one of the players on the losing Kentucky squad .... future NBA coach Pat Riley.
WEDNESDAY's CHILD is named Bella the Cat - an Arizona kitty who slept in a spare tire under her owner's truck, but is doing fine ...... after a 75-mile ride.
HISTORICAL NOTES - in New York's Little Italy: the site of the immigrant-founded Banca Stabile will serve as a museum to the region's history; more than seventy-five years after the bank folded.
FOLKS - if there is a Drinking Liberally chapter within a reasonable distance from your home - pay them a visit, even if you can not attend with any regularity. Or, when traveling, seek a chapter to visit. In the words of Al Franken, "You'll be glad ya did".
ART NOTES - Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt's work Black Box is on display at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. through December 14th.
SIGN of the TIMES - the host of a fake news program on a comedy cable channel nonetheless merits an In Praise Of editorial in Britain.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY has a 25 Things Pop Culture Taught Us This Summer feature.
SEPARATED at BIRTH - Nathan Johnson (one of three men arrested in the Kill-Obama plot) and musician, celebrity ....well, Kevin Federline.
 
THIRTY YEARS AFTER the poisoning death of Bulgarian broadcaster Georgi Markov - by a Ricin-tipped umbrella in London - newly-opened files may point to the identity of his killer.
DIRECT DESCENDANTS? - film stars Jane Fonda and Mischa Barton.
 
AFTER MANY YEARS of wrangling, a monument to gay Holocaust victims is finally being unveiled in Berlin, Germany.
BUSINESS NOTES - the Washington Post's Steve Pearlstein describes "a con game in pinstripes", warning us that "These people are not your friends".
ART NOTES - a career retrospective of the works of Zap Comix creator R Crumb is at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania through December 7th.
MUSIC NOTES - in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Bossa Nova music - Milton Nascimento releases an album this month, along with the son and grandson of Bossa Nova's greatest composer, Antonio Carlos Jobim.
DIRECT DESCENDANTS? - film star Grace Kelly and model/TV star Heidi Klum.
 
ARCHITECTURE NOTES - Manhattan's venerable Beacon Theatre - where the Allman Brothers have performed 180 times - is undergoing an extensive renovation; leading to a re-opening in February for its 80th year of operation.
BUSINESS NOTES - the world of Islamic finance - with prohibitions against interest and speculation - results in firms having to rely on "creative financing" in a modern economy.
YOU MAY BE FAMILIAR with the LolCat phenomenon - funny photos of cats with deliberately mis-spelled captions. Well, this one:
...may be the best one of all (use this link to see the full-size image).
......and for a a song of the day ........................................ an unlikely songsmith to emerge in the 20th Century was Cole Porter - whose grandfather was the richest man in the state of Indiana. J.O. Cole was upset that his daughter first sent her son to Worcester Academy at age 14 (wanting him to stay in Indiana) and then (after graduating from Yale) that young Cole had left Harvard Law (where he was roommates with future Secretary of State Dean Acheson) to enter its music school. Along with other parts of his life, this story has never been verified, but Porter said that the school's dean (Ezra Thayer) had advised him to do so; saying that his talent for music dwarfed his potential anywhere else.
That talent was displayed as an undergraduate at Yale, where he composed 300 songs (some of which, including the football song, are still played nearly 100 years later). But his first efforts on Broadway (circa 1915) were failures, and he became part of the American expatriate Lost Generation in Paris; selling songs and living off an allowance from his family. Although officially listed as part of the French Foreign Legion during WW-I, he did only minor work for the Duryea Relief Fund. In 1919 he married a wealthy American divorcée (fully cognizant of his sexual orientation) and they led the good life in Europe through the 1920's.
Yet he continued to write and two composers helped convince him to try again. One was Richard Rodgers who heard his work in Venice and was puzzled as to his lack of notoriety on Broadway. The other was Irving Berlin, who recommended Cole to the producers of the Broadway play "Paris" (appropriately enough) and the Porters returned to the US in 1928. That play proved a success, with "Let's Do It" becoming the first classic that Cole Porter was ever to write. And for the next thirty years, Cole Porter wrote music for scores of Broadway plays (including "The Gay Divorce", "Anything Goes", "Can Can" and - something of a comeback for him in 1948 - "Kiss Me Kate"). He had luck in Hollywood as well, with Fred Astaire films, then "High Society" and "Les Girls".
It sounds like a "Behind the Music" twist, but at age 46 in 1937, Cole Porter was thrown off a horse and was in severe pain the rest of his life. He was one of the first who underwent electro-shock therapy, and eventually had one of his legs amputated. Further depressed by the death of his mother (in 1952) and his wife (in 1958) he never wrote after 1958.
But wotta catalogue. Just a few of his songs that became classics include "What Is This Thing Called Love?", "Love for Sale", "Anything Goes", "You're the Top", "Begin the Beguine", "I Get a Kick Out of You", "Just One of Those Things", "I've Got You Under My Skin", "Too Darn Hot" and an unlikely hit in Don't Fence Me In that was for an unreleased film that came into the public eye a decade later via ..... Roy Rogers.
Cole Porter died of kidney failure in October, 1964 at the age of 73. An instant choice for the Songwriters Hall of Fame he was profiled in two films: "Night and Day" (a quite sanitized 1946 film starring Cary Grant)
.... and the 2004 film De-Lovely that -
despite being critically panned - I truly enjoyed despite some flaws. One of the highlights was seeing many contemporary singers (Robbie Williams, Diana Krall, Sheryl Crow, Natalie Cole and others) appearing in period dress throughout the film, singing those tunes.
Of his songbook, Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye (fair-use extract below) - from a 1944 musical revue - is my favorite love song of all.
A great instrumental version by John Coltrane is at this link ...
... try a vocal version at this link - the Eurythmics' Annie Lennox.
Everytime we say goodbye
I die a little
Everytime we say goodbye
I wonder why a little
Why the gods above me
Who must be in the know
Think so little of me
That they allow you to go?
When you're near
There's such an air
Of spring about it
I can hear a lark somewhere
Begin to sing about it
And there's no love song finer
But how strange, the change:
From major to minor
Everytime we say goodbye
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