Made In America - Bill Bryson [177]
Rather less fashionable but no less influential was ouija. (The name is a portmanteau of the French and German words for ‘yes’.) Ouija, in which devotees place their hands on a small pointer that glides across the board picking out letters and numbers in response to questions, was invented sometime in the nineteenth century (accounts vary considerably both to year and place) but found a ready following in America in the 1920s, to such an extent that the Baltimore Sun appointed a Ouija Editor. As a popular entertainment ouija had faded by the 1940s, though occasionally it popped back into popularity and even sometimes into the news, as in 1956 when the descendants of an heiress named Helen Dow Peck discovered to their horror that she had left her considerable fortune to a John Gale Forbes – a person of whom she apparently knew nothing – because his name had been revealed to her during a session with a ouija board almost forty years before. Fortunately for the descendants, no such person could be found and they got to keep the money.23
The final component of this home entertainment trio of the 1920s was the one that proved the most durable: the crossword puzzle. At first called a word-cross, the crossword puzzle was invented in 1913 by an Englishman employed by the New York World newspaper, but it didn’t catch on in a big way until a small publishing company called Simon and Schuster published a crossword puzzle book in 1924. As with mahjong and ouija, it quickly became a national passion, to such an extent that the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad put dictionaries in its passenger compartments for the benefit of crossword-addicted travellers – but unlike the first two its popularity has never faltered. Today solving crossword puzzles remains the most popular sedentary amusement in America besides watching television.
At about the same time that crossword puzzles, ouija boards and mahjong were seizing America’s attention, baseball became known as the national pastime, though it had effectively been that for the better part of a century.
No one knows where or when baseball was first played. It has often been suggested that the game evolved from the English children’s game rounders. Baseball and rounders do have unquestionable similarities – in both the batter hits a pitched ball and then sprints around a base path – but the difficulty is that the Oxford English Dictionary can find no citation for rounders before 1856, by which time baseball as both a sport and a name was firmly established in American life. (No one seems to have explored the possibility that rounders may in fact be derived from baseball.)
What is certain is that baseball’s antecedents go back to well before the Mayflower. Cricket, played since the sixteenth century in England and commonly in America until the nineteenth, appears to be the grandfather of all bat and ball games, but many others followed in both Britain and America over the next two centuries – tipcat (or kitcat), bittle-battle, stick ball, one old cat, two old cat, three old cat, and base or base-ball, among others*30 All involved the same principles of striking a ball with a stick or paddle and trying to traverse a defined path before being caught or thrown out by the fielding side. The first mention of baseball is found not in America but in Britain, in a children’s book called A Pretty Little Pocket Book, Intended for the Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly, published in London in 1744.24 But ball games by this time were already well rooted in America. The first mention of a bat in the context of American play is in 1734, and there are many references throughout eighteenth-century America to ball games and their implements. The Boston Massacre, for instance, was provoked in part by someone waving a tipcat bat in a threatening manner at the British troops, and soldiers at Valley Forge are known to have