"Five Minutes of Fire": Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle

<v Speaker 1>I'm Jason Colvin, I'm d Graves.
<v Speaker 2>Give us five minutes and we will give you the fire.
<v Speaker 1>Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Surely You Can't
<v Speaker 1>Be Serious Podcast Special Edition five Minutes of Fire. We
<v Speaker 1>are here talking about the lyrics of We Didn't Start
<v Speaker 1>the Fire by Billy Joel. We're covering only five minutes
<v Speaker 1>at a time, which is about to link with the song,
<v Speaker 1>so it works out kind of nicely. So please join
<v Speaker 1>us as we dive into some new lyrics today.
<v Speaker 2>All right, guys, so here are the topics that we're
<v Speaker 2>going to be covering today.
<v Speaker 1>Little Rock Kasternak, Nicky Mantle, Jason, what can you tell
<v Speaker 1>me about Little Rock, Arkansas?
<v Speaker 2>I feel like I'm stealing this one from you, that's
<v Speaker 2>all right. This is about the Little Rock Nine, which
<v Speaker 2>were a group of black students that enrolled at Little
<v Speaker 2>Rock Central High School in nineteen fifty seven. On May seventeen,
<v Speaker 2>nineteen fifty four, the US Supreme Court issued a historic
<v Speaker 2>Brown versus Board of Education that declared all laws established
<v Speaker 2>segregated schools as unconstitutional. So by nineteen fifty seven, there
<v Speaker 2>were nine black students that have been selected by the
<v Speaker 2>NAACP to enroll at Central High School in Little Rock,
<v Speaker 2>Governor Orville Babas called out the National Guard to prevent
<v Speaker 2>these students from enrolling. Babas claimed that the white supremacists
<v Speaker 2>were on their way and he was just watching out
<v Speaker 2>for their safety. Well, that caused Dwight Eisenhower to get
<v Speaker 2>involved and said, you guys, get out of the way,
<v Speaker 2>because these students can enroll. And so that began the
<v Speaker 2>integration of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. Okay, tell me
<v Speaker 2>about Pastornak.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, So Pastornak refers to Boris Pastornak, who was a
<v Speaker 1>poet in the Soviet Union. His family was from Russia.
<v Speaker 1>His father was actually a great painter illustrator for Leo
<v Speaker 1>Tolstoy novels. They were high society, hung out with Rachmaninoff
<v Speaker 1>and other kind of elites of the day. But ultimately
<v Speaker 1>the revolution happened and he at the time thought it
<v Speaker 1>would be a good idea. But his family soon realized
<v Speaker 1>that the elites were not well regarded their in the
<v Speaker 1>Soviet Union anymore, and his mother and sisters went to
<v Speaker 1>Germany for some medical procedure and decided not to return.
<v Speaker 1>He and his brother, who was an architect, however, stayed.
<v Speaker 1>But as you may or may not know, it was
<v Speaker 1>tough to be an intellectual and elite and a literary
<v Speaker 1>person in the Soviet Union back in those days. And
<v Speaker 1>so this novel that he had been working on for
<v Speaker 1>probably forty years at the time, called Doctor Javago, which
<v Speaker 1>he believed was completely in line with what happened during
<v Speaker 1>the Russian Revolution, was not well regarded by the literary
<v Speaker 1>elite that the Soviets had working for them, and they
<v Speaker 1>refused to publish it. Well, and he gets a knock
<v Speaker 1>at the door and the Italian Communists Society says, hey,
<v Speaker 1>we'd love to publish your novel, and Italian and brilliant
<v Speaker 1>Pastornak says, well, that's perfect, because if you publish it,
<v Speaker 1>then the Soviets will see how great it is and
<v Speaker 1>they will welcome me with open arms. It could not
<v Speaker 1>have been more wrong. The novel gets published, the Soviet
<v Speaker 1>Union does everything it can to stop it from getting published,
<v Speaker 1>but it still ultimately comes out it is not in
<v Speaker 1>line with what their version of history is, and so
<v Speaker 1>that upsets them. But ultimately he wins the Nobel Prize
<v Speaker 1>for it. He's asked to come out to Germany to
<v Speaker 1>accept his Nobel Prize, and the powers in the Soviet
<v Speaker 1>Union say if you go, you better buy a one
<v Speaker 1>way ticket, so he does not go. So then a
<v Speaker 1>cartoonist creates a cartoon that has two Siberian prisoners and
<v Speaker 1>one of them says, I won the Nobel Prize. What
<v Speaker 1>are you in prison for it? He wins the Pulitzer
<v Speaker 1>Prize for that cartoon the next year.
<v Speaker 2>Oh wow.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. So Pasternak has a friend who is a writer
<v Speaker 1>who is arrested for his views. He turns into apostle
<v Speaker 1>Peter and says, I don't know this guy. I don't
<v Speaker 1>know this guy. Please, I don't know this guy. Please.
<v Speaker 1>He's terrified and he makes such a fuss about it
<v Speaker 1>that Stalin actually calls him on the phone and says,
<v Speaker 1>what are you freaking out about? And he's like, please,
<v Speaker 1>don't do anything to me about it. He's like, dude, man,
<v Speaker 1>stand up for your friend, and hangs up the phone
<v Speaker 1>on him. Wow. He is reported to have been on
<v Speaker 1>a death list, but Stalin thought he was just such
<v Speaker 1>an imbecile that he took him off the list because
<v Speaker 1>he thought he was an idiot. So ultimately the book
<v Speaker 1>becomes a movie in the United States, a very famous
<v Speaker 1>movie starring Omar Shariff and the CIA and MI six
<v Speaker 1>order thousands of copies to be distributed as a way
<v Speaker 1>of propaganda. Wow, what have you got for me? On
<v Speaker 1>Mickey Mantle?
<v Speaker 2>Can you see how these lined up for me?
<v Speaker 1>Here? Pretty tricky? How you did that? I wonder how
<v Speaker 1>we got out of order earlier?
<v Speaker 2>So Mickey Mantle big number seven for the New York
<v Speaker 2>Yankees baseball player. I'm gonna get that out of the way. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>aka the Mick or the Commerce Comet. Played his entire
<v Speaker 2>career with the New York Yankees from nineteen fifty one
<v Speaker 2>to nineteen sixty eight. This was my dad's favorite baseball player.
<v Speaker 2>I was almost named Mickey in honor of him.
<v Speaker 1>Wow.
<v Speaker 2>Widely considered to be the best of the hitters and
<v Speaker 2>fielders and overall athletes of the time. Warn in Spavnaugh, Oklahoma,
<v Speaker 2>his dad trained him every day to switch hit and
<v Speaker 2>would get mad at him if they were playing like
<v Speaker 2>a pickup game. If he saw his son and the
<v Speaker 2>guy he was facing was pitching right handed and he
<v Speaker 2>didn't switch hit, and his dad caught him big trouble.
<v Speaker 2>He hit for power and average from both sides of
<v Speaker 2>the plate. Was a sixteen time All Star, seven time
<v Speaker 2>World Series Champ, three times al MVP. He won the
<v Speaker 2>Triple Crown in nineteen fifty six. And that's a major thing.
<v Speaker 2>Best average, most home runs and most RBIs for the
<v Speaker 2>entire season. Also known for the nineteen sixty one home
<v Speaker 2>run chase. If you saw that movie by Billy Crystal
<v Speaker 2>called sixty one, where Roger Marris actually bested in by
<v Speaker 2>hitting sixty one homers in nineteen sixty one, man All
<v Speaker 2>finished with only fifty two. Known for his winning personality,
<v Speaker 2>fast living, hard drinking, and infidelities, died of liver failure
<v Speaker 2>due to alcoholism in nineteen ninety five.
<v Speaker 1>I always feel a little bit awkward about that when
<v Speaker 1>I'm having a beer at Mickey Mantle's here in Oklahoma City. Okay, guys,
<v Speaker 1>that does it for today's episode. Join us next time
<v Speaker 1>for five minutes of fire.