Then.. (6)

In this episode of Then and Now, the host, John Schomo, discusses various anniversaries and birthdays for the upcoming week. He mentions significant events such as Dr. King's last sermon, the signing of the NATO Treaty, Hank Aaron's home run record, the founding of the first settlement in Ohio, and the surrender of General Lee in the Civil War. Schomo also compares the scandal that derailed Gary Hart's presidential campaign in 1988 to the current political landscape. He then moves on to discuss the men's Final Four basketball tournament and updates listeners on a bracket challenge. He highlights North Carolina State's remarkable journey in the tournament and draws parallels to their 1983 team coached by Jim Balvano. Good day, everybody. Hope you're having a good one out there, wherever you may be. This is another episode of Then and Now. I'm your host, John Schomo. We have a lot to get to today. So let's start with some anniversaries for the upcoming week, anniversaries and events, starting with Wednesday, April 3rd. It's the anniversary of Dr. King's last sermon, if you will, his last speech, the famous mountaintop speech in the temple in Memphis, Tennessee that happened on April 3rd, 1968. Some birthdays for April 3rd, Marlon Brando, the wonderful actor, this is the 100th anniversary of his birth. He was born on April 3rd, 1924, most known probably to most of you for playing Don Corleone in The Godfather. Eddie Murphy, the great comic actor, is 63 on April 3rd. Alec Baldwin, who's kind of been through it lately, is 66 on April 3rd. And Virgil I. Gus Grissom, the second American to fly in space, was born on April 3rd, 1926. Gus Grissom flew twice in space, once with Project Mercury, once with Project Gemini, and he was one of the first three-man crew aboard the Apollo 1 spacecraft when the fire killed the crew on January 27th, 1967, a great national tragedy there. We move to April 4th. On April 4th, 1949, the NATO Treaty was signed, the North American Treaty Organization, North Atlantic, pardon me, Treaty Organization in Washington. The signing took place there on April 4th, 1949. NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is a military alliance, it's an alliance on many other fronts as well, but it's a military alliance of us and our allies, mostly European allies. On April 4th, 1968, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. On April 4th, 1974, Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves tied Babe Ruth's all-time home run record, hitting his 714th home run off Jack Billingham on opening day down in Cincinnati. That was April 4th, 1974. We move to April 5th. The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, right here in Akron, Ohio, began producing, wow, inflatable rubber tires, imagine that, on April 5th, 1923. I think that worked, don't you? The Fox Television Network debuted, the fourth of our four major over-the-air television networks. The Fox TV Network debuted on April 5th, 1987. On April 5th was the birthday of former Firestone High School graduate and astronaut Judy Resnick, Akron native, born on April 5th, 1949. Judy flew in space in the mid-1980s on a space shuttle mission. She was aboard the Challenger when it exploded and the crew perished, including Judy, on January 28th, 1986. What a sad day that was. We move to Saturday, April 6th. That's the date on which the United States Congress declared war on Germany in 1917, and we began to get our troops ready to go over there. Burt Leilevin, the Hall of Fame pitcher, maybe the best curveball ever, Burt Leilevin will be 73 years old on April 6th, world champion with the 1979 Pirates. Julie Ertz, great American soccer player with Team USA, Julie Ertz turns 32 on April 6th. April 7th is the anniversary of the founding of the first settlement in Ohio that was Marietta down on the Ohio River, founded on April 7th, 1788. W.K. Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan, born on April 7th, 1860, he basically invented breakfast cereal. And Adrian Beltre, newly minted Baseball Hall of Famer, will be 45 years old on April 7th. April 8th, the 17th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on April 8th, 1913. It was the direct, it enabled us to directly elect our United States Senators instead of having the state legislatures choose our United States Senators. And on April 8th, 1974, Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's home run record, hitting number 715 in Atlanta versus the Los Angeles Dodgers off the really good pitcher Al Downing, a great moment for baseball, and as Vin Scully said, a great moment for America as well. Betty Ford, great First Lady, wife of President Gerald Ford, Betty Ford, born on April 8th, 1918. The great John Havlicek, native of southeastern Ohio, Ohio State basketball great, and eight-time world champion with the Boston Celtics, John Havlicek, born on April 8th, 1940. John Lennon's oldest son, Julian, will be 61 on April 8th. And finally, April 9th, on April 9th, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, ending, for all intents and purposes, the American Civil War. On April 9th, 2001, PNC Park, new home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, open, had the first game there, April 9th, 2001. Five-time major champ, the late Spaniard Seve Ballesteros, was born on April 9th, 1957. And Lil Nas X, Nas, is 25 on April 9th. Okay, that is our birthdays and events for the week. We move now, and we got a lot of topics to deal with today, I got to tell you, it's packed. So let's get started, let's get the political stuff out of the way. Now, I've got a comparison to make between 1988 and our present day that is just stunning to me. Those of you of a certain age will remember the 1988 presidential campaign. The assumed frontrunner for the Democrats as the campaigning started was Colorado Senator Gary Hart. He was very erudite, good speaker, handsome guy, knew the issues, you know, would have been a formidable presidential candidate. Well, there was a certain picture taken of Gary Hart, Gary Hart standing by a boat with his arm around a young woman, not his wife, he was married, the young woman's name was Donna Rice, for the record, and the name of the boat was Monkey Business. And that was enough to totally derail and eliminate Gary Hart from the presidential race in 1988. The Democrats eventually nominated Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, not as strong a candidate as Gary Hart probably would have been, and Dukakis, as you may remember, lost the 1988 election to Vice President George H.W. Bush. Okay, that picture was enough to derail the Gary Hart candidacy. You might know where I'm going here. All right. We fast forward to 2024, and I think I have this set of facts right. I'm sure I'll hear from you if I don't. So I laid it out very carefully in a 10-step process here, and I'm going to read what I wrote. All right. We have currently the presumptive nominee, presidential nominee of the Republican Party Hawking Bibles for $59.99, not $60, $59.99, that contain the founding documents of the United States of America, as well as the scriptures, and has an American flag embossed on the cover. So much for separation of church and state, I guess. He's telling them to raise money, which will go to his legal defense, in a trial where he is charged with falsifying financial records regarding paying hush money to a stripper so that his sexual encounter with her didn't become public. The encounter occurred just after his third wife had given birth to their son. And he's selling $59.99 embossed Bibles to pay for it. That's just astonishing where we've come since 1988. At least this time he was holding the Bible right side up, I would have to say. Okay. Enough of that stuff. Let's move on to more pleasant realms. Let's talk about some basketball, shall we? Boy, it's been great watching some basketball recently. Let's first start with the men. The men's Final Four will take place on Saturday evening in Glendale, Arizona. The championship game will be Monday night, April 8th. The four teams, Saturday at 6 o'clock, North Carolina State, the Cinderella team once again, takes on top-seeded Purdue, Purdue's first Final Four since 1980. And at the 849 game, the second game Saturday evening, this is Eastern time, by the way, the Connecticut Huskies, defending champions, one seed, take on fourth seed Alabama, the Crimson Tide, in their first Final Four ever. Those games, by the way, will be televised on TBS, not CBS, TBS. I do want to look at North Carolina State's run this year and compare it to one they made years ago. First of all, though, I want to tackle our bracket challenge. Thanks to all of you who signed up and played our bracket challenge. At the moment, as we sit here and record, the leader is Sean Rohr from Talmadge High School. That's the good news for Sean. The bad news is he's maxed out. He doesn't have any teams left in the Final Four, so he has maxed out his points. Tied for second are your humble host, who has Connecticut still as the only team remaining, and Hall of Famer Nikki Kammerer-Yates, who has both UConn and Purdue remaining. So to win this thing, I need North Carolina State to get a win as well as UConn. A UConn win would knock Sean out, and a UConn-Purdue combination in the championship game would give the title to Nikki. So I have a feeling that might happen, but you never know. Okay. And again, thanks to everybody for playing. That's been fun to follow. North Carolina State this year has just – it's a remarkable story. Three weeks ago, they were 17 and 14. I'm recording this on a Tuesday. Three weeks ago Tuesday, they had a game in the first round of the ACC tournament in Washington, D.C. They played Virginia. They would have to win five days in a row to qualify for the NCAA tournament. A Virginia player missed a free throw in the final five seconds of the game, and a North Carolina State player threw in a 40-footer off the glass to tie the game and send it to overtime, where the Wolfpack prevailed over the Cavaliers and got to go on to Wednesday. Well, they won Wednesday. They won Thursday. They won Friday over Duke. They won Saturday over North Carolina and won the ACC tournament championship. So they get in. They get the league's automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. This reminds me of so much of the 1983 North Carolina State Wolfpack. Those of you who are old enough to remember, the coach of that team was the late, great Jim Balvano. Kevin Keats coaches North Carolina State this year, by the way, and he's probably saved his job. I'm sure he has. If they had lost that Tuesday night game against Virginia, they might have let him go, but not now. Anyway, Jim Balvano's team, I just remember these guys so well. Derrick Wittenberg and Sidney Lowe at the guards, Thurl Bailey, Lorenzo Charles and Kozel McQueen started on the front line. Their sixth man was Terry Gannon. You may have heard Terry Gannon call golf on NBC. He does a great job. Terry Gannon was their sixth man, sharpshooter. He was 59% from three-point that year. It was the first year of a three-point line in the ACC. The rest of the NCAA didn't have it at first. They did not use it in the tournament that year. So that North Carolina State team had to win the ACC tournament to get a bid. They were 17-10 in the regular season. They beat Wake Forest in the first round of the ACC tournament by one point. They beat North Carolina, James Worthy, Michael Jordan, etc., Brad Doherty, 91-84 in overtime in the semifinals. They beat Virginia, Ralph Sampson, 81-78 to win the ACC tournament and get a bid to the NCAA tournament. They won the NCAA tournament that year. They beat Pepperdine in the first round in two overtimes, 69-67. They beat UNLV, 71-70. They won over Utah handily. In the regional final, they once again beat Ralph Sampson's Virginia team, 63-62, to get to the Final Four. They beat Dominique Wilkins and Georgia, 67-60, in the national semifinal. And they beat the heavily favored Houston Cougars, 54-52, on the improbable putback of an air ball by Lorenzo Charles at the buzzer, which left Jim Valvano running around the court looking for somebody to hug. It was miraculous, and it was amazing to watch. Well, here we are again. Can they do it again? They would have to probably beat two number one seeds in Glendale this weekend to do it. We have seen it before. I'm sure our friend John Ellis, North Carolina State grad, must be over the moon with all of this stuff, and not just because of the men's team. How about that for a segue? The women's Final Four starts Friday evening right up here in Cleveland, Ohio, at Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse. Friday at 7 o'clock is North Carolina State Lady Wolfpack will play the South Carolina Gamecocks, the number one team undefeated team, at 7, followed by the marquee matchup Iowa and Caitlin Clark taking on Paige Beckers and Connecticut at 940. Those games will be on ESPN. They paid a ton of money to get those games. The game, as I record this, last night between LSU and Iowa, the rematch of last year's national championship game, had over 12 billion viewers, according to the first numbers coming out on viewership last night. That would be a record for women's basketball. We'll see if the women's Final Four exceeds that record or not. It may. The ticket prices are going through the ceiling. I saw something here this afternoon where the ticket price to get in will be over $800 for the cheapest seat to get into the Final Four Friday night up in Cleveland. Higher price than the men's ticket, by the way, although it must be noted the men are playing in a football stadium, there are about 60,000 tickets for sale. In any event, this is unprecedented, it is marvelous for the game of women's basketball, and the games have been riveting, to say the least. That game last night between Iowa and LSU was tremendous, by the way, and the second game wasn't bad either, UConn versus Southern Cal. They have stars playing, they have tremendous camaraderie, the game is fun to watch, and as long as they paint the three-point lines correctly on the court, we'll have a great Final Four up here in Cleveland. Okay, baseball season is underway, switching gears once again. Shout out to my Pittsburgh Pirates, 5-0, first time they've started 5-0 since 1983. Will they keep going? Well, they won't go undefeated. There's 157 more games, there'll be some up and downs, but I'm cautiously optimistic, as I said in my preview last week, that the Pirates will be pretty good and may be pretty interesting to follow this year. Ronald Blanco of Houston, never heard of the guy, pitched a no-hitter Monday night. It's the earliest no-hitter by date in Major League history. Here's some fun facts. The Astros have Major League Baseball's last four no-hitters. To compare that with a couple of other franchises that we love, the last Cleveland Indians pitcher, Indians-slash-Guardians pitcher to throw a no-hitter was Len Barker, his perfect game on May 15, 1981. It's been over 40 years. Our Pirates, the last no-hitter thrown was a combined no-hitter for the Pirates at Three Rivers Stadium in 1997. So, you know, not everybody gets to throw a no-hitter like every other year, like the Astros apparently do. It's the 17th no-hitter for the Houston franchise. They are tied for fourth most all time, even though they just started in 1962. The Dodgers have the most at 26. Chicago White Sox, believe it or not, are second with 20. The Red Sox have thrown 18 no-hitters in their history. And four clubs now are tied at 17, the Giants, Reds, Cubs, who have been around forever, and the Astros. So that's really quite astonishing. We'll keep watching and keep enjoying our baseball games. Just a question here. What is going on with Diddy? They raided both of his houses, one in California, one in Florida. It seems like it's been 10 days ago or so. And mum's the word. I haven't heard a thing about it since. I'm getting some Jeffrey Epstein vibes, unfortunately. I don't think that's going to end well for him. The eclipse, the eclipse, there will be a total eclipse of the sun here in Northeast Ohio on Monday afternoon, April 8th. Everything's shutting down. My wife doesn't have to go to work. Schools are out. There won't be any sporting events that day for high school teams or anything. The reasons for those things that may sound a little strange to you is they're expecting so many visitors here to Northeast Ohio, flogging the roads and highways and, I'm sure, bars and so forth, that everything's pretty much shutting down for the day. So, get your viewing glasses and let's hope for a sunny day, not a cloudy day like we're apt to get here. The eclipse will be Monday afternoon. The next one will be long after we're all gone. So, hopefully, we get to watch it. Next week in this segment – and that's a long segment this week – next week in this segment, we'll tackle a Masters preview, among other things. The Masters – geez, a tradition unlike any other – will be played starting next Thursday, April the 10th, I guess it is. April 10th or 11th. April 11th will be round one. And we'll go through a Masters preview on next week's podcast. Okay. Before we get to three good questions this week, I want to give you the answers to the questions from last week. So, let me go ahead and get those here and do them. The first question was – and I'll have to dig out my paper from last week here. Hang on just a second. All right. Here's the question. Who were the only Major League Baseball pitchers to win 300 games, strike out 3,000 hitters, and have a sub-3.00 earned run average? The answers were the big train, Walter Johnson, the Washington Senators great in the early 1900s, and a pitcher I saw live at least six times, Mets Hall of Famer Tom Seaver. Didn't just play for the Mets. I did see him pitch for the Reds a couple of times as well and the White Sox once. But Walter Johnson and Tom Seaver are the only two pitchers to achieve those milestones. Thank you, Jeff, for the question. The second one was my question to you all, and nobody got that one right. Well, Jeff kind of did, but, you know, so we'll give him some credit here. The question was, who was the last University of Michigan offensive skill player to get drafted in the first round of the NFL draft? The last skill player, that's quarterbacks, running backs, receivers. You have to go back to 2005. The 2005 NFL draft, the fifth pick of the draft to the Cleveland Browns was wide receiver Braylon Edwards from the University of Michigan. That's the last time that school up north player, position player, skill player, if you will, on offense was picked in the first round of the draft. So, boy, that's a stunning fact, I think. That's probably not going to last. I think McCarthy, the quarterback, probably will get picked in the first round later this month. We'll see. All right. Anyway, let's get to the questions for this week. The first two we're going to kind of combine. They were on the same topic, the awful Baltimore Bridge incident. Casey from THS. Hi, Casey. Hope you're doing well up in school there. I asked my thoughts on the Baltimore Bridge incident. My brother-in-law, Mike, asked, could tugboats have stopped the Key Bridge collapse? Well, first of all, what a sad and tragic event that was. Six people lost their lives. We should not lose sight of that. Could have been far worse, but for the heroic actions of the people at either end of the bridge who cleared the bridge of traffic just before the ship rammed into the support. Could tugboats have stopped the collapse? I've done a lot of reading on that. Mike and I have gone back and forth and texted and talked about it. Seems like, yes, they could have, but that's not the usual methodology that they use in the harbor there. Tugboats were used to get the ship out of dock, but as is the practice usually there, the tugboats then disengaged, figuring the ship could see itself out, I suppose. Second guessing, we could second guess all day and night and say, boy, if they had just left the tugboats attached, they could have avoided that tragedy. Yeah, they could have, but that's not the usual procedure there in Baltimore Harbor. So, that's a pretty big second guess, I thought. But anyway, Casey and Mike, thanks for the questions. Appreciate that. Let's hope for the best and hope they can get the channel cleared and get some ship traffic going back and forth into Baltimore Harbor. The economy really depends on that sort of thing. There's a lot of things coming through Baltimore. It's the fourth busiest harbor for business in the United States. So, we all have a stake in having that get better right away. Okay, third question is from my friend Don Duffy. My thoughts on climate change. Well, I think it's fairly obvious to anyone who sees it with a clear mind that climate change is real. We are experiencing it here. We've had 13 straight months of the warmest month on recorded record. That's implicit there, but on record. And I think it's undeniable that the Earth is warming slightly. The mistake that was made by, you know, Al Gore has been a hero to the climate change advocates, but he didn't, and he didn't coin the phrase, I don't think. They called it global warming for a long time, which allowed people who don't really believe it or don't want you to believe it to say on the first snowy day or the first sub-zero week that you get, aha, this is really global warming, isn't it? And it kind of diminished the effect of the movement, I believe. Climate change is the correct movement. It's extreme climate change that the currents are changing. The waters are warming in the oceans, et cetera. And that's having an effect on our climate. And it's going to continue to have an effect on our climate until we do something about it, and I hope we do for sure. But thanks, thanks, Duff, for the question. Appreciate it. You can send your questions in at our email address, which is on the slide for the show. Three good questions, spelled out, T-H-R-E, threegoodquestionsatgmail.com. That's threegoodquestionsatgmail.com. Send in your questions. There's a lot going on. We have a lot of room for that at the end of the show every week, and it makes the show better to hear from you guys and get your input. So, threegoodquestionsatgmail.com. That's about it for this week. Hopefully, you and yours stay safe. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll get with you next week on another episode of Then and Now. Have a good one. Goodbye, everybody.