Airlines back Laker

The hotel I stay at in San Francisco overlooks a cathedral which at night illuminates its oriel window and the effect, when you look out towards the streets plunging down like switchbacks into the Bay, is that of some distant planet lit up for Christmas zooming over the sea towards us.

Once when I was wakened by the siren of a police car, I stumbled over to the window and looked out and there was this circular flower in red and green and blue coming at me and I thought we'd had it. Any minute now, I figured, it would land on Nob Hill and disgorge its little army of space men, no doubt in cassocks and turnaround collars. 

What's even more odd as an American experience is that of being wakened by a church clock striking seven o'clock – in my case, more likely, ten o'clock. An Englishman who was staying with me there once staggered into my room and said, 'I just had a dream and thought I was in England. I wonder why?' I told him why and he was amazed. People, I notice, are always more amazed by what is missing in a foreign country than by what's there since, I'm afraid, we all assume that we were born and brought up in the normal place, the only normal place and any departure from the normal is, at best, bizarre; at worst, wrong. 

'Well,' I said, 'you don't hear striking clocks in America maybe because there are so few public clocks.' 

Which reminds me that once during the Second War, I had the job of dashing down to Times Square for the BBC and interviewing a sailor, any sailor, from the first British ship to berth in New York after crossing the ocean in convoy. I found one. I was required to get from him his impressions of America. After all, he'd been here for several hours. He was a dour, unimpressionable Lancashire man. He thought Times Square with all its garish lights blazing was 'not like Blackpool' and that was, more or less, the tone of the interview. 

'Well,' I said brightly, 'what do you think?' 'Well,' he began, 'the trouble is (that's a standard British opening)... the trouble is you can't tell the time. Where are the clocks?' And he looked at me accusingly as if I'd buried all the clocks with his arrival in mind. 'And another thing,' he said, 'there are no public lavatories.' Of course, he was right again. 'You know what a man said to me? I was standing in, is it Broadway they call it, and I was fair busting and I said to a man, "Ere, where's public lavatory?" And you know what he said? He said why don't you use an hotel? Well, you'd look daft walking into an hotel for that, wouldn't you?!' 

Well, daft or not, that's where you go. I'm sure, however, that the sailor's visit was spoiled for him not by distaste for the new things he saw, but by the absence of the things he took for granted. Since this interview was one of innumerable brave wartime demonstrations of the warm feelings between Britons and Americans, I don't think it was ever put out. 

You can live for years in America without noticing that church bells are a rarity. It's only when you get back to England and stay, especially in an old university town, that you wake up and hear 16 church towers taking about five minutes to clang out the news that it's nine o'clock. And then the effect on an American – as it was, by the way, on Mark Twain – is in this whole, ingenious and practical country, there is not a single pocket watch. Every hour the people line up and wait for the churches to tell them what time it is. 

Well, this past week, last Monday to be exact, things were different. In New York, at any rate. Just before five-thirty in the evening, it may have been... it may have been actually five-thirty, whichever churches that had bells rang them and from the sidewalk where a troop of pickets was carrying placards outside a struck newspaper building, there was, as the English poet put it, 'an universal shout'. The news carried on into the supermarkets, people's faces lit up like firecrackers. And cab drivers with radios leaned on their horns as if everybody in New York was getting married. And the word went on up to Harlem and strollers and pushers, collected round drugstores' doors and parked cabs, and boys carrying transistor radios. It could have been VE Day. 

It was in fact VY Day. The day the Yankees, the glorious city baseball team won not the World Series, not even their League Championship, but their division of their league. I realise this sounds a little anticlimactic but let me tell you the way things work. 

There are two baseball leagues, the National and American. Each of them has a western division and an eastern division. As they play along from April through September, they rack up, obviously, so many wins and so many losses. So by the end of September, there are four teams at the head of their divisions of the National and American Leagues. And the leaders are usually a few games ahead of their nearest rivals. The telltale figure is one in the last column of the league tables. Its heading is GB which means 'Games Behind' the leader. 

Well, in the National League, the Los Angeles Dodgers clinched their leadership almost a fortnight ago. Obviously if the leaders are five games ahead and they have only four games left, they are unreachable. So it was in the National League. Los Angeles clinched it in the western division and Philadelphia in the east. So then they... they play off the best of five games to decide who shall meet the champion of the American League in the World Series. 

In the American League, Kansas City clinched the western division but the eastern division is where the action and the fame and the scandal are. The New York Yankees were battling for the top spot with the Boston Red Sox. Somebody took a national poll a month ago and discovered that to most Americans who don't care much about baseball, there are only two famous teams – the Yankees and the Red Sox. 

Now, two months ago, the Bostonians were leaning back and chuckling and booking seats for the World Series. They were 14 games ahead of the Yankees. The Red Sox, a marvellous fighting team, then had a run of stumbles and losses. And the Yankees, who are always bickering among themselves and changing managers and whose fans are often caught between a cheer and a boo, started a winning streak. They brought the Red Sox lead down to three. Then they went up to Boston and, in five successive games, thrashed Boston four times. And Boston was now one game behind. 

In the past fortnight, night after night, the Yankees won and the Red Sox won. Next to the last game, Boston caught up. And so, for the first time since 1948, there has to be a play-off. And in the final game of the season, just like those golf tournaments where everything comes down to the last putt and, to the ignorant, everything looks fixed, the Yankees won by one run. That was the news that set off the hullabaloo of bells and cheers through the streets of New York. Now the Yankees play the best of five against Kansas City and Los Angeles does the same against Philadelphia and the two winners meet in the climax – best of seven – in what is modestly called the World Series. In other words, the American baseball championship. 

So, two weeks from now, I may be at a loss for words on anything but baseball. For in World Series week, a wise president lies low, usually in an armchair up against the telly. Whatever’s happening to Britain's wage and price tournament, no matter what Mr Sadat and Mr Begin may be doing, the whole country seems to be locked indoors facing a television set or clotted outdoors by booming loudspeakers. It's a time when baseball ignoramuses do a little guilty brushing-up and acquire sudden deathless loyalties to one team or the other. 

It's a time when people who really know the game croon and gurgle over the telly. For no game that I know – not soccer, rugby, cricket, not even golf – exhibits more of its peculiar tensions and subtleties over television as baseball does. Well, we have to wait and see and think of other things. 

And the first thing that crosses my mind when I shake my limbs loose from a nightly four-hour stretch watching baseball, is that America has a new hero and a very unlikely one at that. His name, Sir Freddie Laker. Now it's no news to anybody that he's on top of the world, almost literally, or that he's been a big success or that everybody who once cursed him now praises him – after all, he was knighted. In America, once he started his Skytrains to New York, businessmen, knowing men, advertising men, were fascinated by his gall and, I was going to say 'split' between two opposite opinions, but that suggests an equal division of opinion. There was no such thing. 

I should reckon that about 10 per cent of smart businessmen, retired usually, thought he'd started something that would frighten the commercial airlines. The remaining 90 per cent, airline executives especially, thought he was a maniac and a dreamer who would wake up to a whopping bankruptcy. The airlines were peeved that he'd been allowed to break the hard rule of IATA, the International Air Transport Association, the managers', if you like, trade association that all transatlantic fares on whatever airline shall be the same. 

When the queues developed and we saw news pictures of shaggy youths and jeans in granny glasses curled round potato sacks and other luggage at four in the morning, the doubters knew that we were seeing the end of this wild experiment. So now what? This week, the chairman of the holy Civil Aeronautics Board, 80 per cent of whose members a couple of years ago I'll bet were of the 'Laker is a maniac' school, now the chairman of THE presiding aviation body in the United States, the chairman has told the airline industry that he brought glad tidings. 

'Sir Freddie,' he said, 'has initiated an era of price-cutting which has enormously benefited travellers and the whole industry. Services have improved immeasurably, millions of people have benefited and, marvel of marvels, the regular airlines, following Sir Freddie's lead, are reported unprecedented high profits.' 

No wonder the 90 per cent of airline experts have suddenly discovered a hero in a maniac. No doubt about it, all the world loves a winner!

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.