Creative History

  On February 9, 1889 in front of a crowd of 1200 bemused bedouins, none of whom had any idea what the Hell they were watching--in the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza and beneath the gaze of the sphinx--the Chicago White Stockings and a team of professional all stars called the All Americans played a baseball game amidst the shifting sands of the Egyptian desert. This was part of Albert G. Spalding’s World Tour of Baseball which had begun in October of the previous year and would stretch into April, nearly until opening day, of the 1889 professional baseball season.  The World Tour included stops in Australia, Hawaii where baseball was played before half-naked natives and their indigenous king, England where games were watched by an aging Queen Victoria, Ceylon modern day Sri Lanka in front of groups of Buddhist monks, and Italy where baseball games were played by American major leaguers before papal emissaries outside of the Vatican in the shadow of the Roman Colosseum....

  The media called it the “Fight for America” and like almost every single major prize fight ever since with high stakes involved, and even higher public interest, the bout was dubbed “The Fight of the Century”--the Fight of the 19th Century that is!   Ten thousand dollars and some would say the future of what it even meant to be called an “American” were on the line that day when on February 7, 1849 at a farm in Maryland, located forty miles from Baltimore on a desolate snow covered island, what the press called “The Fight for America” and what the public referred to as “The Fight of the Century” took place in front of less than 200 spectators, mostly gamblers and former fighters themselves, because at that time boxing despite its underground popularity, and its popularity as a legitimate sport in the United Kingdom, was illegal almost everywhere in the United States of America. It was definitely not an auspicious place or time of year to hold an outdoor boxing match...

  On December 31, 1907 editor of the New York Times Alfred Ochs organized a New Year’s Eve celebration in front of his newspaper’s renowned headquarters at Times Square in midtown Manhattan. Thousands gathered that frigid winter’s night to watch a ball drop down a specially designed flagpole at 11:59 p.m. to welcome in the new year of 1908.   Millions of people from around the world have gathered at almost exactly that same spot every year for one-hundred and fifteen years to do almost exactly the same thing ever since. Though the ball itself has been updated many times over the course of the last century in accordance with advances in lighting technology-- the original ball was made of wood and iron and was covered in incandescent filament “Edison”light bulbs, and the current ball that will be dropped to welcome in 2023 in front of an estimated 1.1 million people is made entirely from Waterford Crystal and is covered in  over 32,000 LED lights--the actual event of...