When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton
answered, “because that is where the money is.” It is easy to see why a group
consisting mainly of bank robbers would be found mainly around banks.
What’s more interesting though is how a group that somehow winds up everywhere would originate from the same place—especially when they aren’t acting as a group but rather individually. It would be comparable to all the bank robbers in the country coming from the same town. We’d have to wonder what was in the drinking water.
Take the cities of Philadelphia, San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic, and the arid, sparsley populated area of Extremadura in western Spain. These three locations would have a profound effect in three distinct areas of human accomplishments based simply on the unusually high concentration of its citizens involved in those endeavors.<
Philadelphia
The mid 50’s saw the introduction of rock-and-roll, a new wave of music
that swept the nation. The cities you would expect to be at the forefront of
this wave were indeed in the lead.
New York City—home to tin pan alley—was pumping out new songs and
revamping old songs faster than you could say, “Tell ya ma, tell ya pa, I’m
gonna take you back to Arkansas.” Hollywood, always closely linked to whatever
the contemporary music scene was began replacing big production musicals with
low budget Elvis Presley movies. Blues singers in Chicago and Memphis as well
as country singers in Nashville were looking for ways to latch on to this new
fad called rock-n-roll while Detroit busied itself creating the Motown sound.
Singers and musicians flocked to these cities.
And then there’s Philadelphia. Prior to
rock-n-roll, Philadelphia’s claim to fame
was the Declaration of Independence, the Liberty Bell and Ben Franklin
and it’s safe to say that no one outside of Philadelphia was paying any
attention to Bob Horn’s Bandstand, which had been broadcasting locally since
1952.
But in 1957 Dick Clark, a young disc jockey, ex-weatherman and sometime host of the Bob Horn Bandstand, took over the show just as it was gaining national attention and suddenly Philadelphia became the center of the rock-n-roll galaxy and that was just a beginning.
In the next few years male singers were coming out of Philadelphia like meteors falling from the heavens on a summer night. Bill Haley had gotten the ball rolling but was soon followed by Frankie Avalon, Fabian, Bobby Rydell, James Darren and Chubby Checker.
These soloists were accompanied on Philadelphia’s march to the forefront of the rock-n-roll movement by groups like the Dovells, Danny and the Juniors, The Bluenotes, and Orlons who in turn opened the door to the Delfonics, Stylistics and O’Jays.
All from the same town, and sometimes from the same block and all born about the same time, these groups and individuals made Philadelphia the center of the music scene. The trend continued even into the 1970’s and spread as far away as Vietnam where Philadelphian Frank D’Angiolini created “The Bunker Five,” a group that performed for virtually all of the 1st Aviation Brigade units. The thing is no one could have seen it coming because there was no logical reason for the role played by Philadelphia in the rock-n-roll movement. Looking back it made sense but why and how it happened is hard to explain.
In the large scheme of things, the Dominican
Republic doesn’t even get its own island but has to share it with the
nation of Haiti. The people of the Dominican Republic have had many masters and
numerous forms of governments but rarely anything to claim as its
own—something they could shout out to
the world and say, yes, this is us, this is who we are and we are proud of it.
That was then and this is now.
In the
small town of San Pedro de Macoris, something happened, something much like
what happened in Philadelphia. Seemingly unplanned and for no particular reason
the city of San Pedro de Macoris started pumping out shortstops at an unheard
of rate.
In any given year in the last fifty years there
have been around 15-million high school students and another million or so
college students. A fair amount of these played sports, only one of which was
baseball and only one out of every nine playing baseball played shortstop. All
in all, the large number we started with (15 million) ends up being a very small number of shortstops who make it to
the major leagues.
During this same period the Dominican Republic has sent over 400 baseball players to the Major Leagues and just the small city of San Pedro de Macoris, which has never had a population of more than a couple hundred thousand has sent 76 players to play on American major league baseball teams—a fair amount of them being shortstops. The nearby island of Cuba, much larger in population and even with its own Triple-A minor league team at one time has never even come close to this number.
Extremadure
I’ve been aware of the story about Philadelphia’s
contribution to rock-n-roll and San Pedro de Macoris’ abundance of baseball
players—particularly shortstops—for quite some time and didn’t look upon it as
much more than an interesting coincidence, a quirky little tidbit of data, or a
topic for conversation when everyone got tired of talking about the weather.
I
was even ready to concede that other similar situations might exist—but so
what. And then I read 1434,The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed totally and Ignited the Renaissance.
I
had always enjoyed studying world history and was very familiar with most of
the Spanish adventurers:
Cortez,
who conquered the Aztecs in Mexico,
Vasco Nunez de Balboa, who along with Francisco
Pizzaro was the first European to cross the Isthmus of Panama and set sight on
the Pacific Ocean before he was arrested by Pizzaro and eventually executed,
Hernando
de Soto, who also traveled with Pizzaro, fought the Incas and then set out on
his own to explore Florida, the whole southeast and Mississippi River,
Don
Pedro de Alvarado, who succeeded de Soto when he died and went on to explore
and claim for Spain most of Central America,
Alonzo
de Sot mayor, who after many missions of conquest became the governor of Chili,
Pedro
de Val diva, the conqueror of Chili and founder of the city of Santiago,
Inez
de Suarez, a conquistador, mistress of Val diva, and heroin of the first battle
of Santiago in 1541 who personally beheaded seven native hostages to instill
the fear of God in them,
Francisco
de Orellano, the first man to sail the entire length of the Amazon River, and
Alva
Nunez Cabaña de Vice, who ventured into the unexplored territories of Texas and
New Mexico.
Like
the singers from Philadelphia and the shortstops from San Pedro de Macoris
these adventurers had one thing in common—they discovered, explored, conquered
and claimed for Spain virtually all of the Americas except the eastern
coastline of North America. Nothing remarkable there.
That
they all came from a tiny, arid, land-locked desert area in western Spain known
for not much other than the extreme poverty of its people is remarkable. They
grew up dirt poor with no ship in sight and went on to become world travelers,
explorers and conquistadors of a world most of Europe didn’t even know existed.
Santiago,
one of the first great cities of the new world, was officially named Santiago
de la Nuevo Extremadura in honor of both St. James and Extremadura—the city
from where all these great conquistadors began their journeys. In fact, Nueva Extremadura was the name originally given to the land bordering the
Rio Grande River
So what qualities did these singers, athletes and
explorers share that brought them all wealth and fame. The biggest single trait
seemed to be a burning desire to get the hell out of where there were. And
getting out seemed to depend on doing something that most of their fellow
neighbors weren’t doing.
The boys in Philadelphia were singing and playing
guitars before the days when you could find a band practicing in every suburban
garage. They had one goal in mind and that was to be the next Elvis Presley.
While most Dominican boys were working in the
fields, the renegades were off playing baseball—renegades at least until their
families discovered what a good
shortstop might be paid to catch ground balls. Their first hero was Ozzie
Virgil who in 1958 became the first Dominican ball player in the major leagues
when he signed with the Detroit Tigers.
As for the conquistadors who grew up never seeing
a boat and probably thought a new world and a new life could be found on just
the other side of the pyrannes, who knew what they were thinking—other than get
the hell out of Extremadura.
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