Miracles (NY Chronology) & Non-Miracles (Chicago Public Library)

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:41 PM -0500 10/29/03, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>    Here's yet another--a double this time--without money or credit.  These
>are the "miracles," mind you:
>
>THE NEW YORK CHRONOLOGY
>by James Trager
>New York: HarperResource
>2003
>
>Pg. 304 (1906):  The "hot dog" gets its name by some accounts from a cartoon
>by Chicago cartoonist Thomas Aloysius "Tad" Dorgan, 29, who shows a dachshund
>inside a frankfurter bun (see Feldman, 1867), but New Haven vendors have
>reportedly been selling frankfurters from "dog wagons" to students
>at Yale dorms
>since 1894.
>
>Pg. 703 (1971):  The Big Apple gets that name as part of a publicity campaign
>organized by New York Convention and Visitors Bureau president Charles
>Gillett, who revives a nickname first popularized more than 40 years
>ago by _Morning
>Telegraph_ reporter John J. Fitz Gerald (who had heard it used at New Orleans
>by black stablehands in reference to New York's racetracks).  The name of a
>popular dance in the 1930s, it was used by jazz musicians of that era to mean
>New York City.
>
>    There are a few errors.  TAD was from San Francisco, not Chicago.  But in
>these brutal few months, where Bruce Kraig gets credit for my "hot dog" work
>and his own book promotion is incredibly wrong, where my "Big Apple" work is
>either forgotten or ignored by the New York Public Library, the New-York
>Historical Society, the Gotham Center, and former mayor Ed Koch,
>these are miracles.
>
Other minor errors in these reports:  (i) "Fitz Gerald" consistently
spelled "Fitzgerald"; (ii) use of the present perfect in Trager's
first paragraph falsely implying that those legendary Yale food
wagons have been continuously purveying hot dogs for over a hundred
years up to this afternoon.  Unfortunately, they were closed down
some time between 1896 and 1975, although anymore there's a nice
non-dog wagon that sells Moghul food.

Larry