One Tall Glass of History with a Splash of Nostalgia, Please

Hey, gang.

On this Thanksgiving Eve, with its rapidly-dropping temps and suddenly high winds (at least here in the Northeast), why don’t we retreat back to summer for a spell?

And not just any summer.

Let’s turn back the clock nearly a century ago to the summer of 1927. Yeah, let’s spend some time hanging out with Charles Lindbergh and relive his historic, transatlantic flight from Roosevelt airfield (Garden City, NY) to
Paris, France.

And then maybe we can check in with the likes of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, the rest of Murderer’s Row. And better still, let’s grab a picture of the entire ’27 New York Yankees squad. (Depends on who you ask, but that team, coached by the legendary Miller Huggins, is widely regarded as the greatest Major League Baseball team ever assembled.)

And hey, while we’re at it, let’s hunt up Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly (a guy from Newark, NJ who thought it might be a good idea to sit atop a flagpole for a dozen consecutive days in June 1927) and maybe a couple of other famous Als, namely Capone and Jolson. The former, in the news virtually every day that summer, was the Prohibition era’s most infamous bootlegger. And the latter, a former vaudeville star, became the headliner in the first-ever talking motion picture – the very first “talkie,” photographed in part that summer, ultimately premiering on 6 October, 1927.

This incredible collection of watershed moments and landmark events (again, all having occurred during Summer 1927) is chronicled by American-born writer Bill Bryson in his non-fiction masterpiece One Summer: America, 1927. 

Bryson, born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, traveled to Great Britain in the mid-1970s, eventually met his wife, Cynthia, became an Anglophile, and today, he holds dual citizenship.

Countdown Day 27 belongs to you, Mr. Bryson. Thank you for sharing your literary chops with us!
(One Summer was first published in 2014 by Doubleday Books and is now available in paperback.)

Have a great night, everyone.

Catch up with you to talk “turkey” tomorrow!
JFish

 

Scroll to Top