Category Archives: Engineering

Buddy Blattner, Member of the Greatest Generation, Pioneer of the Play-By-Play

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This week the world lost a buddy: my dad’s lifelong friend and Marine Corps pal, a mentor to hundreds of inner-city youths that he helped with sports programs and a once familiar voice to baseball broadcast listeners across the country. His name was Buddy Blattner.

A sports celebrity in his day—famous as a teenager for worldwide championships in table tennis, a stint with the New York Giants, where before the war he rivaled his teammate Johnny Mize in runs batted in, and the Philadelphia Phillies—he became known to radio audiences across the country. Starting in 1950 he called games for the St. Louis Browns, alongside Dizzy Dean, the Hall of Fame pitcher. They developed a style where Dean made the colorful commentary, while Blattner described the action in a form that has come to be known as the play-by-play. He told me, “At the time I was the only major leaguer to do baseball broadcasts.” By 1953 He and Dean were on television, broadcasting ABC’s Game of the Week.

When I interviewed Bud in September 2000 for my 2005 book, Dad’s War with the United States Marines, he explained how he learned the art. “In 1946 in the off-season I begin to practice commenting on games. I would take a recent game, recall about four innings and call the game. I would go over the commentary until I could make it sound better, more exciting or better description of the action. In those days, I did the commercial layouts, filled in my own background on the players and worked with just an engineer. I learned play-by-play and not in New York, but in St. Louis, which had a more forgiving atmosphere.”

From there he went on to broadcast for the St. Louis Hawks and spent two seasons reporting for the St. Louis Cardinals before migrating west to work for the California Angels. A measure of his contribution to his art is the fact that when he left he was replaced by Dick Enberg, who then joined the Angels’ broadcasting team and later became an institution in sports broadcasting as anchor for a new venture called ABC Sports.

I asked about his World War II experience: how he reconciled his fortunate position, coaching recreational activities for the troops on the island of Guam, with the nastier job of the guys in combat. Bud said, “We were where they put us. I didn’t want the war: not one of these kids wanted the war. I never felt self-conscious. You do what you’re told. We toured the forward area in a DC-3—Peleliu, Kwajalein–trying to hit a little spot of sand in an ocean that extended as far as the eye could see. If you chickened out you had a miserable life. Anybody who enlisted and spent a reasonable amount of time in service was a hero. My God, I never could have believed I would live.”

Bud still fondly recalled his days with my dad, Ben Green, at WXLI, the Armed Forces radio station on Guam, as one of the highlights of his tense but humdrum Pacific war experience.  Bud wrote and Dad produced a sports quiz program for the station. “Perhaps we could give away beer,” he said. “Whether the show was any good or not, we would be giving away the nectar of the gods.” With permission from headquarters to give away the beer, they created a show called “Sporting Chance.” Dad arranged for it to be broadcast before live audiences of 2,000 to 3,000 troops at theaters that existed all over the island. “It became the most popular doggone show on the island,” Bud recalled. “It was more difficult to write every week—there wasn’t exactly a research library or panel of experts to ask on these questions.” He noted that the winners and even the losers got cases of beer for their units for being part of the entertainment. The generals, admirals and the troops alike praised the new sound of WXLI, and the radio station’s beer ration increased. “Life on Guam had turned the corner,” Dad said. “This post-surrender duty, if you had to do it, wasn’t so bad.”

Let’s hope that Bud and Dad are now happily reunited. I’m sure they’re already negotiating with The Man Upstairs for an increased supply of beer for the troops.

For more of Dad’s and Bud’s hilarious adventures on Guam, read my World War II memoir and biography, Dad’s War with the United States Marines.

Staff Meeting at WXLI, by L. L. Rogers

More next time,

Peter

Peter

Peter H, Green

Green Design, Environment and…Murder?

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How could these well-intentioned goals lead to murder? If you’ve tried to get a zoning change lately, you may know what I mean.

Early in my design career, zoning hearings used to be routine procedures, in which a board offered minor regulatory adjustments and then rubber-stamped plans that would help a city or town create new jobs, increase the assessed valuation of the property within its boundaries and enable it to collect more taxes.

But beginning in the early seventies, someone turned up the heat in the hearing chamber. These formerly friendly, local meetings broke out in holy war. Zoning became an issue, and obtaining a change of land use from a local government gained all the furor, cost and intrigue of a hotly contested election campaign. Neighbors protested, saying the new project would use too much fossil fuel, eat up too much virgin forest and farmland and create too much dangerous traffic, noise and air pollution. The objectors were suddenly well organized and well funded: they brought legions of experts to zoning meetings—traffic experts, botanists, ecologists, zoologists and air pollution scientists. Developer’s forces countered with geotechnical engineers, fluvial geomorphologists, potamologists, entomologists,and hydrologists. It was after the third such confrontation that I began to think that maybe there’s something to it—other than futile blustering by stubborn residents who opposed any kind of change to their customary surroundings, people who did not share our team’s grand vision for improving it. For one thing, the more time went on, the truer seemed the environmentalists’ concerns. And for another, a few defeats handed to me at the bar of local approval soon brought home the fact that their efforts were futile: we were stopped dead in our tracks.

Then as I sifted through the wreckage of one particularly big setback I detected skullduggery. Someone had connived the young, wild-eyed environmental advocates into opposing the developers, but not for the reasons of environmental purity that the land developers claimed. We had planned our new town project to be a demonstration of good land use: with high densities to shorten walking distances, make residential property accessible to stores and shops, keep homes near jobs, make future mass transit stops accessible and preserve green space within the development. We soon learned that these kids had become the unwitting tools of larger forces—those that didn’t want apartments (and the lower income, racially mixed tenants they attracted) in the suburbs. Others joined in the fray: those that opposed competing businesses and those that just wanted everything to remain green, despite the fact that the land was not in a natural state—it had been farmed for generations—and to have their way, no matter what opportunities for economic growth and improved land use the community might lose out on in the process.

A third issue—and this was our Achilles heel—was that, despite our good intentions for better land use, our developer had selected a flood plain location, and this choice was due to the fact that the land was cheaper—for good reason: it was the least desirable and suitable for urban development. And over the years the true cost of making and keeping it suitable became apparent: it needed levees, pumping stations, drainage channels storage ponds, and a host of special engineering measures to create and maintain the basic conditions that exist at the outset on high ground. While the ability to protect from floods for long periods has been shown to be possible in entire countries, like the Netherlands, it has been less successful in New Orleans. Often the die is cast for urban development long before rational planning can be achieved, and then it is too late. While the premise of building on low land can be shown to be a fallacy, it is a romantic and seductive idea, one which many will defend. Hence the battle is joined.

It is this conflict between an immovable object (the city and its inexorable demands for growth) and the irresistible force (the river, Nature and the environment) that has fueled many costly urban battles, with casualties on all sides. It’s the stuff of conflict, and it has inspired many life histories and stories worth the telling. That’s what got me going in writing my new novel, Crimes of Design and how it came to be that an architect who loves to tell these stories and to write the histories of real people was inspired to create a murder mystery, set in St. Louis, during a flood of record rivaling the Great Flood of ’93.

More next time.

Till then, regards,


Peter

  • An architect who writes: what’s up with that?

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    Peter
    Welcome to “the green grapevine.” web log that is part of our new look for 2009. I figure with half a million people blogging around the world, perhaps one more can sneak in without doing too much additional harm. I haven’t read enough of those efforts, so I am more than likely to repeat all of their mistakes. Bear with me here while I report our little victories and defeats, funny encounters, random thoughts and a journal of my progress toward that elusive goal we all chase, self actualization.

    What is an architect and planner doing writing anyway? And he writes books also, you say. It’s a long story, starting with parents, a housewife and an ex-Marine, who were both writers and publicists, a grandfather who was a construction contractor and me, a person that just loves to tell stories. My choice of architecture was a matter of interest and aptitude, but it also had something to do with finding a “practical” way to earn a living. And for a long career I have designed buildings, planned development sites and promoted my firm, all activities that I still enjoy. My favorite among these, however, was always describing the projects and getting people excited about hiring our team. This resulted in millions of words cascading from my computer screen over the years. That’s a lot of writing practice when you think about it. Then, after a nostalgic trip to Annisquam, the scene of my sixth summer in 1945, I was aware that there was a story worth telling (see my Foreword ). When I stepped down a few years ago from my day job (temporarily, as it now seems), I had time to peruse some 400 letters that my dad had written home during World War II, some funny stories he wrote about his personal war with the Marine Corps and a script Mom wrote for Dad’s surprise “This Is Your Life” 48th birthday party. Then over the next year, the story, which I had only begun in fits and starts, poured out and became my nonfiction family memoir, Dad’s War with the United States Marines.

    The rest is the history that I’m here to tell you, if only in little bits and pieces. Once the writing was done, it was merely necessary to find an agent and a publisher. In case you haven’t checked lately, unless you’re the next Tom Clancy, literary agents rarely look at your work. That’s often because–despite your book’s readability and potentially wide appeal–you’re not hot enough to spark a bidding war over your next great novel with the five or six big publishers that remain in the English-speaking world. Most of those charming little presses like Borzoi Books and Doubleday, Doran & Co. have been snapped up by the great leviathans that today rule the commercial book world.

    But just as I was about to give up all hope, Roger Hayes, the published writer of a Vietnam war story (On Point, St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 2001), whom I met through my military clients in St. Louis, said, “Forget everything you’ve been told: just approach the publishers directly.” My search then began in earnest, and I discovered that, as small to medium-sized publishers were acquired on the demand side, even smaller firms were being created or still existed on the supply side. After a renewed Internet search and a new flurry of inquiries and submissions, on a day in May 2006 one of my e-mails brought an answer. I met Jim and Lynne Rock of the Seaboard Press, an imprint of an established publishing house, one of those boutiques that still do exist. The tender loving care that they invested in the publication of my work, especially their fascination with my father’s hand drawn sketches sent home in his letters for me, his six-year-old son, was far in excess of what I might possibly have coaxed out of Simon & Shuster, even if they had beat down the door to publish it. I was on my way.

    As the fall publication date neared, I put on my publicity hat and let the local press know that my dad had played a special role in the war’s history. On August 14, 2005 Harry Levins of the Post-Dispatch broke the story, on the anniversary of V-J Day, that it was my father who scooped the news of the Japanese surrender to the world sixty years earlier (See News and Reviews page) from his outpost at Armed Forces Radio Station WXLI on Guam. Other media attention was soon to follow: John Pertzborn interviewed me on KTVI Channel 2. From there, I dashed over to a downtown hotel, where Charlie Brennan was broadcasting a Veterans’ Day program on KMOX radio, raising money to provide phone cards for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He devoted the entire morning to interviews appropriate to the day’s celebration, including one with me about my book. In our lively exchange, Charlie couldn’t get over the fact that during the war we used to save bacon grease and other meat drippings in Mason jars and take them to the butcher. We were told that the government could turn them into explosives for our troops, although I still have no idea how they did that. (If you know, please post a comment.) That same day I held two other presentations and book signings in St. Louis and the book’s sales campaign was underway.

    This, then, is a brief explanation of of why an architect attempts to write books. You can be the judge of how well I’m doing. It has been a fulfilling and a wonderful experience, although I miss my friends back in the office.

    And my next book? It’s called “Crimes of Design,” a mystery about an architect who must turn sleuth to save his life, rescue his family and spare his beleaguered city. But this you can check for yourself back on my website.

    Good reading until next time,

    Peter