Kenneth Cohen
speaker
48 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Kenneth Cohen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And so once was after the 1918 season, when baseball players, Babe Ruth had just won the World Series with the Red Sox right before he would be traded to the New York Yankees and the Red Sox would go a very long time before they went again. And all baseball players after the end of the season were told they had to find essential work because World War I was still going on.
The country was actually recovering from a flu pandemic in that year. And so many baseball players signed to play for factory baseball teams and claimed that they were doing factory work as part of their essential work. Babe Ruth signed with Bethlehem Steel, which was run by a guy named Charles Schwab, who's Name is familiar for all sorts of other reasons now.
And so he played baseball for a factory team in a six-team league where each team represented a Bethlehem Steel-owned factory. Factory workers at the time complained about Ruth showing up at the factory in patent leather shoes, dress pants, and a silk shirt.
But when he toured the region with a team, kids came running out as they still do not necessarily aware of the politics behind their heroes actions. One youngster in Scranton, PA got this baseball and he could have gotten it at that time or he could have gotten it in 1921 when Babe Ruth against Major League Baseball rules,
organized a barnstorming tour of Major League Baseball players who played little town teams all across the eastern half of the United States in an early assertion of player rights at a time when baseball players were in a system that gave them very little in terms of rights to negotiate their contracts, ask for trades. There was no such thing as free agency.
And so either way, whether this was in 1919 or 1921, this ball captures a really important moment, certainly in the life of the child who had this signed by their hero, but also in Babe Ruth's relevance to American history more broadly.
So the answer is it can be either. Most of our items come from a donation where we do not pay. People think the Smithsonian is sort of loaded, but we're not. And so on the open market, especially today when you're talking about pop culture materials and the collecting market and the auction market is...
like a runaway train, very few museums and cultural institutions can afford to pay open market prices for these items. So we try to get in touch with people before things hit the market and talk to them about our ability to preserve items and hold them for the American public in perpetuity for the future.
And so most of our items are donated and then on occasion we are able to purchase things on the market.
Oh, man. So that was, you know, before my time at the museum. It was donated in 1993. The guitar first appears in Purple Rain in the movie. And only after Prince's death, when the curatorial staff at Paisley Park, his home, came to the Smithsonian and wanted to determine the history of the example in our collection, because there are other cloud guitars.
We took that guitar, we actually CAT scanned that guitar to look beneath the top layer of it and discovered that there are six layers of paint and that the guitar's body and neck were built by repurposing other smaller parts, some of which reflect the curves and lines of much older violins, like sort of 18th, 19th century violins.
And so the guitar, I think, symbolizes Prince's ability to combine and repurpose styles to express his own unique individual identity. You think about his costumes that sometimes pull elements from the Edwardian era around 1900, right, with high collars and ruffled shirts that were popular actually even in earlier periods.
and then he couples that with this electric guitar that keeps changing color and evokes late 20th century pop music but also violin scrolls from 200 years earlier the guitar i think is a statement about how we all pull from the past when we present ourselves today it's almost like the yellow cloud guitars prince's way way more innovative response to retro fashion you know it's you you want to bring back bell bottoms or high-waisted jeans come on here's how you make yourself timeless really
Our Kermit the Frog is certainly one of the first ones, if not the first. Kermit the Frog sort of premieres in 1955 on a very short program called Sam and Friends that Jim Henson led. It was a five minute show on Washington DC's NBC affiliate station that ran in the evenings. There were all kinds of crazy characters in there. There was a snake named Icy Gunk.
There was a French rat, spoke in a French accent named Pierre. You know, and so there were these little short segments of these guys sort of doing wacky things or having wacky conversations. The original Kermit has split ping pong ball for eyes. The green comes from one of his mother's discarded jackets. And there's a sleeve because sort of operated the early Kermit like a sock puppet.
And the sleeve is made from a leg of Jim Henson's jeans. the muppets which evolved from salmon friends these are a group of oddballs um and and over time henson really became very conscious and intentional in embracing that characterization his shows become a lot about being accepted for who you are no matter what you look like
It's a great question because, you know, I think the way entertainment museums have evolved, they often get viewed as sort of halls of fame where really what you're enshrining is the celebrity or the accomplishments of the performer, whether it's an athlete or a musician or an actor. And that's not how we go about building the collection at the Smithsonian.
We are looking for things that sort of reflect broader American history. Now that might be an amazing accomplishment or achievement. You know, we also have a soccer jersey from the US Olympic soccer team in 1948 that lost by a larger margin than any other Olympic soccer team ever.
because that item sort of tells a story about American history and the place of soccer and American culture in a particular point of time. And so the same sort of rules can be applied to the puffy shirt. I mean, Seinfeld, the show, often gets famously tagged as being a show about nothing, right? Have you ever, have you heard that? In fact, that comes from a line in the first episode
The show actually, it's a misnomer because the show actually mined human foibles and frailty for like comic gold. You think about the puffy shirt for an example, it's about Jerry's hubris that episode really. He's trying to look the part of somebody famous when he goes on the Today Show. He's trying to be a big shot, right? And trying to make a statement.
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