John Delach

May, 2016, No. 133 of 500. Revised January 2024

Are you familiar with the expression, “Six, Two and Even” or as it is also stated, “6 – 2, & Even?” It’s cloaked in mystery and the key to solving it is missing.

I first encountered it when I discovered Foley’s, the Irish sports bar on East Thirty-Third Street across from the Empire State Building. Shaun Clancy, Foley’s proprietor adopted this expression to encourage people to come and enjoy life at his saloon, “Foley’s NY Pub & Restaurant, An Irish Bar with a Baseball Attitude where Everything is 6-2 & Even.”    

Shaun explained to me that many people who know this expression trace first hearing it back to the life-long Red Sox manager, scout and coach, “Walpole” Joe Morgan. From 1988 to 1991, Morgan managed the Boston Red Sox and brought with him a down-to-earth; tell it like it is personality. When fired by Haywood Sullivan and other Sox executives, he left them with these parting words: “Your team is not as good as you think it is.”

How unique was Morgan? For about ten-years while he was in the Red Sox organization, he had an off-season job working for the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority driving a snowplow each winter earning him a second moniker: “Turnpike Joe.”

Shaun shared this about Morgan: “Joe used it as code for any questions he didn’t want to answer or felt the asker didn’t need to know. It started at his first news conference when some of the writers were asking questions to try to make Joe look stupid so he used the phrase. No one called him out so he continued to use it.” 

Rory Costello wrote about Morgan for the Society for Baseball Research:

Almost 20 years after he left the Red Sox, people still remember a Morgan catchphrase, “Six, two and even.” Many fans were baffled by what this meant – even Joe himself didn’t really know. Humphrey Bogart used the line in The Maltese Falcon, but Morgan picked it up from his old minor-league manager, Joe Schultz (who was also full of little sayings).

Morgan told Costello: “(Schultz) used to say, ‘six, two and even’ all the time and when I asked him what it meant, he’d just shake his head. It wasn’t until I was out of baseball about 15 years that I met this old guy, he was 94, who was a bookmaker in the 1920s.” He explained that it refers to betting odds on horse races.

A number of horse racing folks will agree that it refers to the odds on a pony in a given race: Six to one to win, two to one to place (finish second) and even money to show (finish third.)

But others believe it has a more sinister nature describing when the odds on a horse to win a race drop from six to one down to two to one and finally to even just before post time signifying that the so called “smart money” has jumped on that nag and the fix is in.

That would explain why Humphrey Bogart’s used the term in the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon? I read that Bogart changed what was written in the script and I was able to locate a Warner Brothers’ document with the notation:  “FINAL VERSION (2nd re-make)” of that script. The term, 2^nd re-make, referred to the fact that the Bogart film was the third version of the film. The first version opened in 1931, a the second in 1936.

In the 1941 film, Bogart played detective, Sam Spade. In a confrontational scene with Joel Cairo, (Peter Lorre) and Kasper Gutman, (Sydney Greenstreet), Spade turned to an un-named character simply referred to as “the boy” and, according to the script I perused, he was supposed to say: “Two to one they’re selling you out, son.”

Instead, Bogart changed the line and said: “Six, two and even, they’re selling you out, kid.” Perhaps Bogart believed this more forceful term revealed that the kid was being set up and trumped the more mundane of two to one odds?

There is also a Dick Tracy connection to this expression. For two years in 1961 and 1962, the same Chester Gould, who created the comic strip in 1937, produced an animated version for television. On the show whenever Tracy or one of his assistants finished their wristwatch telephone conversation, they signed off with: “Six, two and even, over and out.”

Perhaps, like Joe Morgan, Gould liked the rhythm of the expression? Curiously, Gould used it to describe a more level playing field where circumstances are as they should be, the planets and stars are in alignment and Mother Nature is at peace. “Six, two and even, over and out” in Gould’s use translates to “all is well.”

The mystery of its origin remains unsolved. If you have a theory, I can direct you where to express it.

My own preference echo Shaun Clancy’s when he used it to invite people to come and enjoy life at his saloon. Unfortunately, the Covid pandemic and the quarantine in the spring of 2020 killed Foley’s. Shaun had no alternative but to permanently close his saloon.

Mike Scott and I lost our place to meet in the City, Shaun, Papa John, his father, Tom Cahill, the waitresses, bar tenders, the place where everybody knew our names and where everything was: Six, Two and Even.    

Piece No 84 of 500 “He Failed to Negotiate a Curve”

May 2015, Revised and edited in January 2024

John Delach

“He Failed to Negotiate a Curve.”

Such a poetic remark, that I lifted from The New York Times obituary as the cause of death for Joe Don Looney. Joe Don, a former football star died while maneuvering his motorcycle along a winding road in East Texas. He died the same way he lived; chaotically.

Memories of his comet like life and death were reawakened recently. Twenty-six years after Joe Don’s death, he still retained the power to co-op his father, Don’s obituary.

Despite the elder Mr. Looney having lived a long and successful life first in sports then in the oil patch, his passing at 98, was trumped by Joe Don’s eccentricities.  

Don Looney, (the father) born September 2, 1916, starred at Texas Christian University and was named MVP of the 1938 National Championship team that finished 11-0 beating Carnegie Tech 15-7 in the Sugar Bowl. Don went on to play three years in the NFL before joining the Army Air Force where he continued to play football with his base’s team known the Randolph Ramblers. After the war, Don embarked on a successful Fort Worth based career that included many civic, industry and charitable honors. When he passed, Don was the oldest living former NFL player and the last living member of TCU’s 1938 team.

When it came to football, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Unfortunately, it must have bounced too many times that most obits found it necessary to reference the son, Joe Don, in his father’s last earthly recognition. Once again Don was usurped by the life and crimes of his only son.

Joe Don played for Pascal a high school in the Fort Worth area where he gained fame as a senior beating rival Arlington Heights on a thirty-five-yard run in the fourth quarter to make the final score, 14-12.

In 1962, he was a bench warmer at Oklahoma University. OU was losing to Syracuse with five minutes left to play. Joe Don took it upon himself to walk up to his legendary head coach, Bud Wilkinson, to announce, “If you want to win the game, you’d better get me in there.”

Stunned, Wilkinson was speechless so Joe Don inserted himself into the game, told the quarterback to give him the ball and bolted for a sixty-three-yard touchdown for an Oklahoma 7-3 victory. A magnificent runner and punter, Joe Don led the Sooners to a berth in the Orange Bowl.

Things went badly the following year. Wilkinson kicked Joe Don off the team following a smack down delivered by Looney to an assistant coach.

Despite this incident, the New York Football Giants picked Joe Don as their first-round draft choice in 1964. He lasted a grand total of 25 days with the team before the Giants traded him to the Baltimore Colts. This is how I described his tenure with the Maramen in my book, 17 Lost Seasons:   

It was said of the 6-3, 230 pound back, “He can run, he can punt, he can block, but, most of all, he can run.” It also should be noted that Sooners’ head coach, Bud Wilkinson had cut the 21-year-old handsome Texas native mid-way through his junior year at the request of his teammates. Joe Don had run for 852 yards in 1962, averaged 6.2 yards per carry, scored 62 points and led the nation with a 43.4-yard punting average. When Wilkinson cut him the following year, the coach was quoted as saying, Joe Don was, “…a bad influence upon other members of the team, was indifferent about practice and discipline.”

“We’re not interested in the past,” responded head scout and former head coach, Jim Lee Howell when asked why the Giants drafted this product of four colleges in two states as their number one choice. Question: Didn’t anybody from the Giants think about contacting Bud Wilkinson, the Sooners’ world class head coach to ask just how screwed up Joe Don was and how much he lived up to his last name?

Perhaps it was the fact that his dad had played for the Eagles and served as an NFL official? Joe Don’s career with the Giants lasted twenty-five days during which he refused to participate in workouts and slept, on occasion, 22 hours a day.

The Giants traded him to the Baltimore Colts for cast-offs. Even though he helped the Colts to win a division championship, head coach Don Shula refused to let Joe Don punt: “I was afraid to put Looney in the game to punt because I didn’t know if he would punt. He might do anything.”

At his next stop with the Detroit Lions coach Harry Gilmer told Joe Don to go into the game and tell the quarterback to call a screen pass. Joe Don replied to his head coach, “If you want a messenger boy, call Western Union.”

From there he went to the Washington Redskins where he punched out an opposing player. The army sent him to Viet Nam where he began his love affair with automatic weapons. He then wound up in India under the tutelage of a peculiar swami who prophesized the world as we knew it would implode in the mid 1990s, the anti-Christ would make his appearance and guns would be used for currency. (The story that Joe Don punched out the swami’s elephant may be an urban legend.)

Joe Don believed he was prepared for the end of all things. He lived alone in Alpine, TX off the grid with his automatic assault guns in a solar-heated dome without electricity or a telephone.

The principal feature at his funeral service was some fellow playing Stardust on a piano.

Joe Don could have done worse than to be sent off to the sound of Hoagy Carmichael’s soothing hit melody.

Sometimes I wonder why I spend

The lonely nights

Dreaming of a song.

The melody haunts my reverie

And I am once with you.

R.I.P. Joe Don Looney, if possible.        

As I near publication of my 500^th piece, I have revised my inaugural  piece that appeared on October 16, 2003 as Piece No.1 of On the Outside Looking In, called “An Incredible Story.”

James Muri passed away on February 3, 2013 and his obituary ran in the NY Times on Feb. 10. Ninety-four at the time of his death, 71 years earlier, when Mr. Muri was only 23, he was part of a failed attempt to sink the Japanese fleet at the battle of Midway on June 4, 1942.

The battle of Midway was the major battle that turned the tide of the war in the Pacific. It was fought over three days that early June. Prior to the battle, American cryptologists had broken the Imperial Japanese Naval Code, but only in part. They knew the next invasion would come at a location designated, Area AF. But great controversy evolved about where AF was located. The brass at the Pentagon were sure it was the Aleutian Islands, but the code breakers at Pearl Harbor were sure it was Midway Island. They won the day when they sent a message to Midway via a secure underwater telephone cable that the island garrison was running out of water and told the commander in charge of Midway to broadcast it back to Pearl in plain, un-coded language. Sure enough, The Japanese intelligence operatives advised Tokyo that AF was running out of water.

Every force available was geared up for action. The navy only had three carriers operating in the Pacific; the Yorktown, the Enterprise and the Hornet. Despite the enormous risk of loss, all were committed to the battle. But the islands that comprised Midway itself, one named Sand, the other Eastern, constituted a fourth and an unsinkable aircraft carrier from which to launch strikes against the Japanese fleet. A ragtag and eclectic collection of airplanes and crews were dispatched to Midway to go into harm’s way.

First Lieutenant James Muri of the Army Air Corps piloted a B-26 Marauder light bomber. Designated airplane No 1391, Muri had named it, Susie Q, after his wife. He and his crew were at Hickam Field in Oahu, awaiting orders to join other bombers from his squadron in Australia when he and three other B-26 captains still at Hickam were ordered to fly their airplanes to Midway and report to the navy. On arrival, they were informed that their bombers were going to be used as torpedo attack planes. One can only imagine the look and feeling of incongruity on their faces as they received their orders. These army pilots had as much idea as to how to attack a ship as they did attacking an iceberg and the use of torpedoes was completely alien to them. Nevertheless, an order is an order no matter how insane it is. To make matters worse, the launching system for the torpedo was jury-rigged under the bomb bay.

For the record, crews never trained in naval warfare were ordered to make torpedo attacks against a superior enemy in airplanes never designed to fly in this manner without any real practice. Brilliant! Only the military could have come up with such a mission, even granted the critical nature of the battle.

Lt. Muri and his crew took off at dawn on the morning of June 4 and joined the other aircraft flying toward the reported position of the Japanese fleet. As they drew close, they were attacked by a number of the excellent Japanese fighters, the Zero, whose pilots were protecting their prize possessions, the four aircraft carriers that they called home. Shot up, Muri pressed on and tried to launch the torpedo. It jammed, but somewhere during his attack, it fell into the water.

The captain of the carrier Muri attacked saw the danger and ordered an emergency turn into the wake of the torpedo speeding toward it. This presented Muri with the only choice of flying down the carrier’s deck, front to back which is precisely what he did.  His obituary included his description of this experience, “The guns were all pointing out. It was the safest place to be. I always said we could have touched down if we lowered the gear.”

Without the weight of the torpedo, the B-26 finally outran the pursuing Zeros and made it back to Midway, shot up with a badly wounded crew. They say that any landing you can walk away from is a good landing and the wreck that landed at Midway that afternoon validated that theory. The crew counted over 500 bullet holes before they gave up with half the airplane to go. Every man survived; a miracle into itself.

Of the sixty-two airplanes that took off from Midway on June 4, 1942, thirty-three were lost, all without scoring even one hit on any ship in the Japanese fleet. Then, in the blink of an eye, dive bombers from the Navy’s carriers found the fleet and sank three of the four Japanese carriers. The war in the Pacific turned just like that. The last Japanese carrier succumbed two days later. Midway was a victory in spite of all of the things that went wrong that could have prevented it from being so. Walter Lord called it in his book, Incredible Victory.

Martin Caidin, an American World War II aviation historian included the exploits of Lt. Muri in his book called, The Rugged, Ragged Warriors. He ended the book with an affectionate description of what was left of Susie Q: “On the side of the Midway airstrip, several men swathed in bandages, went out for a long look at Old 1391. The Marauder stood at an ungainly angle, her skin punctured and blackened. She was a wreck. They say it is possible for an airplane to look tired. This one looked it.”

RIP James Muri

June 2019 Revised. January 2024

The New York Football Giants 1966 season turned out to be an absolute disaster, the worst in team history. Entering Week Ten their record was 1-7-1 as head coach Allie Sherman led his boys into DC with their new back-up QB, Tom Kennedy. Three weeks earlier the Giants had plucked Kennedy from the minor league Brooklyn Dodgers of the short-lived Continental League. Kennedy was something less than a stellar addition to the Giants roster, but he assumed the starter’s role after Gary Wood, the team’s other sub-par QB, hurt his shoulder.

 Frank Litsky reported in The New York Times on Saturday, “The Redskins have lost three in a row, but Sonny Jurgensen’s passing will probably make them well.” Jurgy already had 18 touchdown passes, rookie Charlie Taylor had developed into a fast, dangerous receiver and the Giants had been reduced to playing three rookie linebackers, Mike Ciccolella, Jeff Smith and Freeman White who was supposed to be a tight end. The Skins were scheduled to start two former Giants in their backfield, Steve Thurlow, and the bizarre, Joe Don Looney.

Sunday, November 26 produced, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

The Good:

The Giants scored 41 points, the most they would score all season.

They out gained the Redskins 389 yards to 341.

They had 25 first downs to the Skins 16.

Joe Morrison caught two TD passes from Wood for 41-yards each.

Homer Jones caught a 50-yard TD pass from Wood.

Wood ran one in for 1 yard.

Aaron Thomas caught an 18-yard TD pass from Kennedy.  

The Bad:

            The Redskins intercepted the Giants five times and scored on a 62-yard fumble recovery,

            a 52-yard punt return and a 62-yard interception.

The two teams scored 16 touchdowns, ten by the Redskins and six by the Giants.

The Ugly:

Bobby Mitchell scored the final TD for the Redskins by running the ball for 45-yards. Mitchell had last played as a running back in 1961 with the Cleveland Browns. Normally a flanker back, he shifted position due to injuries to the other running backs. Redskins head coach, Otto Graham, told reporters after the game, “He doesn’t even know the plays from that position.”

Kennedy started, but the Redskins defense befuddled him with blitzes and fake blitzes leading to three interceptions in the first half. The sore shouldered Wood replaced him, but finally had to give way to Kennedy again in the fourth quarter.

This opened the door for Kennedy to engineer a bizarre play that led to an all-time scoring record. With seven seconds left on the clock and with the ball on the Giants 22-yard line, Kennedy intentionally threw a fourth down pass out of bounds to stop the clock. His excuse was that he thought it was third down which begs the question: With seven seconds left on the clock and your team down 69 to 41, just exactly why are you stopping the clock?

Graham ordered Charlie Gogolak to kick a 29-yard field goal. When asked if his motive was to embarrass the Giants, Graham replied: “Hell no, I didn’t know anything about records. I wanted Gogolak to try a field goal. He hadn’t had a chance all day and he missed two against Cleveland last Sunday. I’m not one to run up the score on anybody.”

But new records they did set: It was the first NFL game with a total combined score of over 100 points. The total of 113 points was 15 more than in another game involving the Giants, a loss in 1948 to the Chicago Cardinals, 63-35.

The Redskins scored the most points ever scored in a regular season game, one shy of the 73 points the Chicago Bears scored against the Redskins in the 1940 championship game.

The 16 touchdowns scored set a record for most scored in an NFL game.

The Redskins 10 touch downs and Charlie Gogolak’s 9 PATs tied a record. If Charlie had made his first, another record would have been broken.

The New York Times also reported that the Redskins lost $315 in footballs that went into the stands. In this era before nets behind the goal line, 14 Duke footballs, then manufactured by Thorp Sporting Goods costing $22.50 each, became fan souvenirs. The Times article pointed out that the Duke is named after Wellington Mara, the Giants president.

Coach Allie Sherman wasn’t happy either. “I guarantee you this is never going to happen to a team of mine again.”

He was right, but then again, that’s a tough score to replicate. But the Giants did try. The next week in Cleveland, they lost to the Browns 49 to 40. At home against Pittsburgh, they crumbled to the Steelers 47 to 28 before ending the season with a milder 17 to 7 loss to the Dallas Cowboys in Yankee Stadium.

That game ended the season with a dismal record of 1-12-1.

Truly, the season of our discontent.

“There was no ship big enough to master the Atlantic Ocean. This included the Queen Elizabeth and I remember this one time when a big wave washed over the ship and took one of the lifeboats on the upper deck as if it was made of paper and smashed it into pieces. The North Atlantic and the Australian Bite were the two roughest bodies of waters that I was ever in.

“There were also many scams that were perpetrated on board the ships. Most of the fellows involved were from Belfast, but some from Dublin. One scam involved jackets. In summer, we wore white jackets, in the winter, navy blue jackets. They would go ashore with two jackets. They’d meet with fellows who wanted to come to America and give them one of the jackets. This was enough to get them on board and their buddies would arrange for places for them to hide for the five-day voyage. Nobody would know.

“The ship was that big. I came to understand how difficult it could be to find someone. I knew a fellow by the name of Peter Fox from Ballinamore and his uncle told me he had signed on to work on the liner. Even so, between the size of the Queen Elizabeth and time off between voyages, it took me three months to find him.

“If you were a Tourist Class passenger, you’d never see the First-Class passengers. Likewise, if you were Cabin Class, you never mixed. It was completely and utterly separate. The ships were constructed in sections. Separate blocks that were joined together and separated from each other by big steel doors cut into the bulkheads. Passageways connected each block, but if there was fog or a big storm, the crew would close those doors or the captain could close them automatically using switches on the bridge. The crew could open them manually by pulling the handle located on each door. If any section went on fire, they could shut off that area and flood it without any effect on the balance of the ship. This way the captain could secure the ship so that if anything hit it they could seal off that section.

“One of the most dangerous places on a passenger ship was the gangplank. A lot of people would be injured or killed coming up the gangplank late at night, especially fellows coming home drunk. The problem climbing up was at its worst at high tide when water lifted the ship way up above the pier. Then the angle between the pier and the ship would be very steep making the climb difficult to make even if the fellow was sober. In the old days the piers were made of wood and if a person fell into the water, they could climb back up onto the pier using the timbers for support. But then the newer piers were concrete with straight walls and no handholds. Unless a person was a fantastic swimmer, he would drown.

“The order to abandon ship had its own dangers. The ship would be stopped at sea, but the waves would affect the ship and it would swing from side to side as the waves came in. The life boats would be lowered on cables connected to the ship. At the bottom of the cables were hooks and, as soon as the boat hit the water, the crew had to unhook the cables and row as fast as you could away from the side of the ship. Otherwise, the next wave would smash the life boat into the side of the ship.

“I had moved to New York and I went down to the pier to watch the Queen Elizabeth sail to England for the last time. It was very sad. The British should never have sold the ship. There will never be another ship like the Queen Elizabeth again. The workmanship was magnificent and nobody could afford that degree of service ever again. There were nearly two crew members for every passenger carried.

“The plan was to turn the ship into a tourist attraction based in Florida, but when this plan fell through, C.Y. Tung, the Chinese shipping magnate bought the Queen and had it towed to Hong Kong for conversion to a floating school. Renamed, Seawise University, the old queen caught fire during the conversion and rolled over onto its side in the harbor. A terrible sight, the ship remained there for several years before being cut up for scrap.”