That’s wonderful, Mike - thanks for posting. First, because I can always use reminders of the better angels of my/our nature. Second, because collectively it’s good to remember how valuable and life enhancing ‘simple’ games and pastimes can be: racial barriers being torn down through golf/at Cobb’s Creek back in 1924; or by Benny Goodman on stage in Chicago in 1935, playing jazz with Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson and Gene Krupa.*
It’s a lovely and inspiring thing.
Best of the holiday to you, Mike.
Peter
* PS: There was an excellent writer named Otis Ferguson, who sadly died during World War Two. He wrote a long piece in the New Republic in the mid 1930s about going out to listen to the Goodman Quartet one night in New York. After describing beautifully the music and the people and the milieu, he ended his piece with the following. I thought you'd appreciate it:
"The music seems more than audible, rising and coming forward from the stand in banks of colors and shifting masses—not only the clangor in the ears but a visual picture of the intricate fitted spans, the breathless height and spring of a steel-bridge structure. And if you leave at the end, before the "Good-Bye" signature, you will seem to hear this great rattling march of the hobos through the taxis, lights, and people, ringing under the low sky over Manhattan as if it were a strange high thing after all (which it is) and as if it came from the American ground under these buildings, roads, and motorcars (which it did). And if you leave the band and quartet and piano of the Goodman show and still are no more than slightly amused, you may be sure that in the smug absence of your attention a native true spirit of music has been and gone, leaving a message for your grandchildren to study through their patient glasses."