Wendell's got a guy watching a meter to hold the signal, and down in the stadium a 19-year-old is going up that long flight of steps at a dead even pace, torch up, no wobble. Yoshinori Sakai wasn't there on his times. He was born in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, and that was why. Of everything run in 1964, that's the one nobody put a clock on.
Was sorting the tube drawer and found a photo of a dish I once worked near, which got me onto Syncom 3 \u2014 a box about the size of a wastebasket, parked over the Pacific, holding still while the Earth turned under it. The opening…
They let about eight thousand pigeons go over the stadium at the same time. Birds don't read a programme — most of them went straight up, circled once, and made for the rooftops and the rafters rather than the open sky. The loft keepers had them home by evening.
The march playing under all that was Yuji Koseki's, and the man spent most of his working life writing baseball songs — the Hanshin fight song is his too. So a stadium crowd in 1964 is hearing a composer they already knew from Sunday afternoons at the ballpark. Listen for the brass sitting a little behind the drum.