Last Team Standing Read Online Free Page B

country, each composed of three “reputable, responsible men, familiar with local conditions.” (Women were barred from serving on draft boards because members were occasionally required “to check registrants for physical defects.” The ban was lifted in 1967.) Each draft board was more or less autonomous, free to determine, without interference from Washington, which draftees were to be deferred and which were to be inducted. Inevitably this decentralization led to idiosyncrasies: A draft board in Wisconsin, for instance, was far more likely than one in New York City to consider a cheese maker “necessary in his civilian activity.”
    On October 16, 1940, “R-Day,” more than 16 million men registered with Selective Service. At courthouses and libraries, in church basements and elementary school gymnasiums, they completed forms that required them to disclose all sorts of intimate information. Each registrant was asked about his education, occupation, family, health, and criminal record. He was asked whether he conscientiously objected to war, whether he was an ordained minister (or studying to be one), or whether he was in the armed forces or a state legislature (all grounds for deferral). The boards then classified each registrant into categories ranging from 1-A (fit for general military service) to 4-F (unfit), and assigned each a serial number. A lottery would be held to determine the order in which registrants would be called.
    Each draft board was limited to no more than 8,500 registrants. To be on the safe side, 9,000 capsules were put into the glass bowl from which Henry Stimson selected number 158. According to the
New York Times,
6,175 men had been assigned that serial number by local draft boards nationwide. They would be the very first men inducted. In New York City alone, the
Times
reported, the 158s included “a Cody, a Chan, a Re and a Weisblum.”
    After the ceremonious first draw, the rest of the capsules in the glass bowl were randomly selected and opened by more ordinary bureaucrats. The next four numbers drawn were 192; 8,239; 6,620; and 6,685. The process lasted into the next morning.

2
Keystoners
    I N 1794, WHEN GEORGE WASHINGTON WAS PRESIDENT, the Pennsylvania Assembly passed “an Act for the prevention of vice and immorality.” Among other things, the act banned “disorderly sports” on Sundays. Pennsylvania was just one of many states with such “blue laws,” so named either for the color of the paper on which they were originally printed or because “blue” was then a disparaging term for the puritanical.
    In the early twentieth century, many states relaxed their blue laws to permit Sunday baseball. By 1920, teams in Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, St. Louis, and Washington were all allowed to play on the Sabbath, but teams in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh were not. Connie Mack, the venerable owner and manager of the Philadelphia Athletics baseball team, bitterly opposed Pennsylvania’s antediluvian blue laws, albeit on fiscal, not philosophical, grounds: “We cannot meet our payrolls playing on 77 weekdays at home,” he complained.
    In defiance of the blue laws, Mack scheduled a home game for Sunday, August 22, 1926. An “unusually subdued” crowd of 12,000 watched the A’s play the Chicago White Sox at Shibe Park that afternoon. Mack’s team won the game but he lost the ensuing court battle. In September 1927, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the state’s blue laws by a vote of 7-2. The courtruled that Sunday baseball was an “unholy” form of “worldly employment.”
    The blue laws applied to professional football as well, which necessarily made it difficult for the National Football League to do business in Pennsylvania. Nonetheless, two teams tried. The Frankford Yellow Jackets, based in a neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia, joined the league in 1924