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Record W1988974644 · doi:10.1353/nin.2005.0008

Roly and the Alderman: A Small Boy and the Black Sox

2005· article· en· W1988974644 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
John Christgau

Bibliographic record

VenueNine · 2005
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicAmerican Sports and Literature
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNewspapernobodyHistoryYardWhite (mutation)Art historyMedia studiesArtSociology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In search of his 50th home run, Babe Ruth arrived in Chicago behind a fifty-piece brass band.1 For three straight days in front of huge crowds, some of whom paid as much as $4 for scalped tickets, Ruth tried his best to get number 50.2 On a 1-1 count in the third game, he got "partial hold" of an Eddie Cicotte pitch and "lofted it far into the corner of right field." He had already rounded second base before the ball finally dropped at the foot of the Comiskey Park flagpole, "several yards foul."3 On the next pitch Cicotte struck out Ruth, and the "Tarzan of the green diamond," as the newspapers were calling him, left town still in search of number 50. Babe Ruth's departure from Chicago meant fans had nothing to distract them now from daily allegations in the newspapers that baseball was crooked. For a year rumors of a 1919 World Series fix between the Chicago White Sox and the Cleveland Indians had been everywhere. Now fresh rumors had surfaced that a game between the Chicago Cubs and the Phillies had been fixed. The failure of baseball officials to investigate the allegations was irritating. "Scandal talk has spread... all over the country," Chicago newspapers reported.4 The rumors placed baseball in a bad light. Fans everywhere were anxious, losing patience, and "wondering if there [was] truth to the rumors."5 Nobody was more upset than ten-year-old Roland Gehre in the north Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. Born in 1910 into a German family of singers and musicians, "Roly" was a small child but restless and willful. His father, who played piano for silent pictures, liked to bring little Roly with him into the dark theaters. But it was a struggle for his father to keep up with the melodramatic screen action of stagecoach robberies or swashbuckling pirates, and he often stopped playing so that he could just watch the action. Once, when the piano had fallen silent, Roly jumped to his feet and shouted in German "Spiel, Papa! Spiel, Papa!"6 Keep playing! Not yet three years old, the boy already wanted life to have some measure of entertainment and song to it. [End Page 94] One day not long after, Roly spiked a fever, turned clammy, and could not find the energy to get out of bed.7 None of his mother's home remedies had any effect. Finally, his mother summoned her brother Eugene Nusser, who was a handsome and influential Chicago alderman from the 34th ward. Tall and thin, with deep-set dark eyes, thirty-three-year-old Alderman Nusser was a staunch Republican who had once been a cigar maker in Wisconsin. He was never without a stogie smoldering in the V of his fingers, especially when he hosted huge political gatherings in the basement of his big house on North Avers.8 His height, his good looks, and his cigar gave him the appearance and aroma of power and decisiveness. He would know exactly what to do now about little Roly's fever. Polio By the time Uncle Eugene arrived, Roly was beset with convulsions. Uncle Eugene swept his nephew up in his arms and rushed him to the hospital. The diagnosis was polio. It was weeks before he could come home. Then there were months of treatment, during which the whole family took turns applying hot compresses and massaging Roly's limbs. Roly had to learn how to walk again. But the only lasting effect of the disease was one reedy leg, which made him limp slightly and limited his speed and agility. Meanwhile, with the eventual arrival of six siblings, the refrain among the Gehre and Nusser families became, "Roland will haben!"9 Whatever Roland wants, he gets! It wasn't just a reference to the entitlements of his...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.851
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.176
Teacher spread0.168 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

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Citations0
Published2005
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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