History Book - Organs at the old ball game

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Monday, April 25th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next, the WORLD History Book. Today the 75th anniversary of a perilous voyage. Also 30 years ago this week, Los Angeles was ablaze in riots.

But first, the start of a baseball tradition. Here’s WORLD Associate Correspondent Harrison Watters.

CLASSICAL ORGAN MUSIC

HARRISON WATTERS, ASSOCIATE CORRESPONDENT: In the early 1900s, pipe organs began moving from churches into public spaces like movie theaters and sports arenas—including Chicago’s hockey stadium in 1929. After the more efficient electric Hammond Organ was invented in 1935, the instruments were added to other venues, including baseball stadiums. Here’s music historian Jesse Strickland from his documentary on baseball and organ music.

JESSE STRICKLAND: On April 26, 1941 organist Ray Nelson became the first to play an MLB game entertaining fans at the cubs cardinals game at Wrigley Field.

But Nelson could only play before and after the game because he couldn’t play copyrighted music during the live broadcast.

In 1942, the Brooklyn Dodgers hired organist Gladys Gooding, who set the standard for the style and tone of ballpark music.

STRICKLAND: Not content to simply be background noise she would often play songs as commentary to the game like the one time she trolled the umpires with three blind mice after a bad call, which is just brilliant, or playing sad songs after the Dodgers lost.

While many ballfields switched to recorded music by the 1990s, a few, like Wrigley Field, keep the organ playing at the old ball game.

From baseball to sailing, seventy-five years ago this week, six Scandinavians set out on a bizarre expedition.

TRAILER CLIP: By crossing the Pacific for 5,000 miles I will prove that Peruvians were the first to settle Polynesia.

Audio from the 2013 film Kon-Tiki.

Thor Heyerdahl was a geologist honeymooning in the Polynesian Islands when he met a village elder who said his ancestors came not from Asia but from the East, led by a man named Tiki. The name reminded Heyerdahl of a South American legend about a sun king/god named Con-Tiki, whose people were massacred and the survivors forced to flee by sea to the West. Despite pushback from scholars and anthropologists, Heyerdahl decided to test his theory by making the journey himself.

Simon Whistler with Highlight History explains…

SIMON WHISTLER: After scrounging up from various sources a little over $22,000 for the journey, he then went searching for a few people to accompany him, placing an ad stating: “Am going to cross the Pacific on a wooden raft to support a theory that the South Sea islands were peopled from Peru. Will you come? Reply at once.”

Heyerdahl and five other Scandinavians built a 45 foot-long raft of balsa logs named the Kon-Tiki. They filled the bamboo cabin with rations, and set sail on April 28th, 1947. They survived several storms, rough seas, and persistent sharks to run aground on a reef in the Polynesian islands 101 days later.

While most scholars agree that the Polynesian Islands were actually settled by people from Australia and Asia, Heyerdahl’s journey raised interest to look deeper. In 2020, geneticists from the University of California discovered strains of ancient South American DNA in some Polynesian gene pools. Regardless of where the settlers of Polynesia came from, they were courageous men and women who exercised creativity and courage to find a place in the world, much like their descendants.

We end today with the not guilty verdict that sparked the 1992 Los Angeles Riots.

30 years ago this week, the police officers who beat Rodney King after a high speed chase were acquitted of all excessive force charges. Within hours, the news and a video of the beating sparked violent riots. Enraged African Americans in South Central L.A. burned and looted stores in Koreatown as owners fought to defend their property.

Three days into the riot—with dozens of people dead and injured—Rodney King gave an impromptu press conference. He tearfully asked the residents of L.A. to get along.

KING: I mean, we’ve got enough smog here in Los Angeles, let alone to deal with setting these fires and things. It’s just not right. It’s not right.

Governor Pete Wilson called in the National Guard to quell the violence, ending the riots six days after the verdict. Three months later a Federal court indicted the police officers who had beaten King.

Just months before his accidental death in 2012, King spoke with Oprah Winfrey. His body may have still borne the scars of the beating, but he said he’d experienced healing of the heart.

KING: I did have hate for the cops for a time, but I know the way my mom had raised me because if I walk around bitter and mad I'm doing the same thing they did to me. And that's not the way, that's not the way generations are supposed to leave the next generation.

That’s this week’s History Book.

I’m Harrison Watters.

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