Pat McNees

Breaking's debut, Paris Olympics 2024

• Throw-down in Paris (Jonathan Abrams, Bedel Saget and Umi Syam, NY Times, 8-5-24) More than 50 years since its inception, breaking debuts as an Olympic sport in Paris, where B-boys and B-girls will vie for gold and glory. Watch video of basic "steps."
     "The Olympic battles, which are set for Aug. 9 and 10, will be a watershed moment for a dance form conceived and cultivated by Black and Hispanic youth in the Bronx during the 1970s, when they boogied at basement parties and park jams to the break beats played by hip-hop architects like DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash.
     "Back then, breaking’s fundamental movements provided escapism and expression, competitive and spontaneous physical performance breathed to life by the dawning genre of hip-hop. Breakers danced to make a name for themselves and earn respect in their neighborhoods.
• The origins of breaking, the newest Olympic sport (YouTube Video, 6 min., CBS Sunday morning, 6-30-24) Breaking (not "breakdancing," apparently), an acrobatic dance style with its roots in New York's hip hop culture, is making its Olympic debut in this year's Summer Games in Paris. Correspondent Luke Burbank talks with Victor Montalvo (a.k.a. B-Boy Victor), who will be competing for breaking gold; and with founding members of the b-boy group New York City Breakers, who came up with some of the sport's original moves in the Bronx back in the late 1970s and early '80s.
• Paris 2024: The move breakers just can't crack (YouTube video, Le Monde, 8-8-24) Over two years and three countries, Le Monde followed dancers from France to Taiwan to Laos who set out to conquer a move long considered impossible: the double airflare. Monkey King works toward mastering it. You have to watch this. Imagine a fellow twirling on one fore-arm (not one leg).

• Video from Best Moments of Break Dance 2023 (Red Bull One World Final, 2023 Breaking Zone)
• The Notorious IBE 2012 | Red Bull BC One All Stars Vs. Team France. This was earlier in breaking history and there seem to be more in-the-air steps than in the 2024 competitoin, which surely deserve praise from the eagerly watching audience.
• Lawksam's Best of Breaking 2023 video compilation(notice how different the audiences are, in his case happily rowdy, always cheering good moves and here doing a little together-breaking)
• Video of champion breakdancers (video, Break Dance World Championship 2024) I'm not sure I'd call it dancing, but it DEFINITELY take strength, skill, and a lot of practice and muscle-building! Short clips of various competitive break dancers break dancing.
• B-Boy Lil Zoo (in Russia?) (video of another b-boy)
• B-boys – Subcultures and Sociology (Grinnell College) Academia's take. B-boy dance forms (breakdancing) are composed of distinct breaking movements, such as toprock, downrock, power moves, and freezes.

     Traditionally, B-boys performed to the tune of rap, Hip-Hop, and computerized beats with a distinctive 'scratch' or over dubbing sound. B-boy dance forms (breakdancing) are composed of distinct breaking movements, such as toprock, downrock, power moves, and freezes. Traditionally, B-boys performed to the tune of rap, Hip-Hop, and computerized beats with a distinctive 'scratch' or over dubbing sound.
• How Breaking Went From a Street Dance to an Olympic Sport (Sarah Kuta, Smithsonian Magazine, 4-22-24) This summer, 32 athletes will compete in what’s commonly known as breakdancing, a dance sport that combines athleticism and artistry. When the International Olympic Committee announced the 2024 Paris Games would include breaking for the first time, not all athletes danced with joy.
• United States' B-Boy Victor breaks his way to bronze medal (video, NBC Sports, Olympics, #Paris2024) Victor toppled Shigekix in the bronze medal battle, 3-0, to earn the first breaking Olympic medal for the U.S., a bronze.

• B-Boy Victor takes center stage in Olympic breaking debut vs. Shigekix (video, NBC, Olympics, #Paris2024)
• So, how does Breaking work at the Olympics? (video, Olympics #Paris2024) What do you think?

• Paris 2024 Olympics: Breakdancing makes its debut at 2024 games (YouTube video, France24) Born in the United States in the 1970s, the dance style quickly took storm thanks to its highly entertaining "battles". How will competitions be run in Paris? FRANCE 24's Natalia Ruiz Giraldo, Cedric Ferreira and Leo McGuinn report

• Once Sidelined, Breaking’s B-Girls Now Throw Down at Center Stage (Jonathan Abrams, NY Times, 8-9-24) Women are competing in breakiaring in greater numbers and, thanks to better training and more opportunities, with more dynamic moves. (H/T Nancy Kane)

• #breakdancing YouTube shorts show what breaking looks like
• Paris Olympics: What to know and who to watch during the breakdancing competition (Associated Press, 7-12-24) A roadmap to follow for breakdancing's debut at the Paris Olympics

• The First Tango in Paris Made a Stir Worth Remembering (Jaimie Seaton, Smithsonian magazine, July/August 2024) As breaking makes its debut at this summer’s Olympics, take a look back more than a century when another dance rocked the City of Lights  (H/T Paula Stahel)

Selection from
STARTING OVER: The Life of Herman Ernst Sheets
his memoir, written with Pat McNees

"Although Oskar [Kraus] was one of the more famous members of the family, my grandmother continued to think of him as her idealistic and impractical younger brother, always in need of her unsolicited advice. As I recall, she summed up his friends, efforts, and accomplishments like this:

“First Oskar gets interested in and spends most of his career writing about Brentano. He could have picked someone noncontroversial to spend his time on, but no, he has to pick Brentano, the only professor to ever be expelled from the University of Vienna. And why was Brentano expelled? Because in 1894 he decided to argue that the Pope was not ‘infallible,’ a remarkably stupid thing to do in Vienna, the self-appointed capital of the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire.

“Next, what does Oskar get involved in? He supports hiring at the University of Prague some controversial civil servant from the Swiss Patent Office who isn’t even a lawyer. This Einstein wants to change all the laws of physics! First of all, no one understands anything he talks about. Everyone knows about Newton and the apple, how does he refute that? I don’t even think Oskar believes what Einstein is saying.

“Then Oskar gets involved with all those Czechoslovak nationalists. You know, like that former professor, Tomáš Masaryk, and his like-minded friends. The fact that both Masaryk and Oskar studied in Vienna with that expelled Professor Brentano clearly indicates that they have no practical sense. Also, anyone with any sense knows that the biggest tragedy of the Great War was the break-up of the Austrian Empire into all these silly little countries with no history and no culture!

“And as for his friend Albert Schweitzer, well at least he is not controversial. He has a lot of degrees and is well intentioned, but, like Oskar, has no practical sense. He is off in Africa so no one has any idea what he is doing or who he is.

“And finally, Oskar makes friends with Bertrand Russell in England. What good is a friend like him? He’s the most controversial person in the universe. What can you say about a mathematician who thinks he is a philosopher?”

~From Chapter 1, “Life in Germany and Czechoslovakia.”
(2007) Click here to order STARTING OVER: The Life of Herman Ernst Sheets

from BACK JACKET COPY:

Hermann Chitz's life, which began quietly in 1908 in the Kingdom of Saxony, was to span a century and two continents. He escaped to America from Hitler's Europe; his parents, assimilated Jews, stayed behind. With a Prague doctorate and patent in hand, he landed in New York in 1939, and changed his name—starting over as Herman Sheets.

In wartime he worked on critical aspects of the atomic bomb that would end the Second World War. In peacetime he directed research and development for Electric Boat's nuclear submarine program. At the peak of his career, in a single year, his wife died unexpectedly and he was fired for displeasing Admiral Hyman Rickover.

As a single parent, with three of his six children still at home, he started his career over again at the University of Rhode Island. Not until his own children were educated and launched did he remarry and take on an expanded family. This is the remarkable story of an immigrant, inventor, ocean engineer, technical consultant, and family man who consistently turned difficult transition into new beginnings.

Click here to order second-hand copies of STARTING OVER

The Amazon page shows an image of the paperback cover

On the Amazon page you can read a brief excerpt about Herman's chapter about working with Admiral Herman Rickover

SELECTIONS FROM THE MEMOIRS OF DR. THOMAS McNAIR SCOTT
the late Philadelphia pediatrician-researcher-educator

The following paragraphs are extracts from the memoir My Century by Thomas McNair Scott, the late pediatrician, medical educator, and medical researcher (reprinted here by permission). Tom's son, Robert, hired me to interview Tom and write his memoir. I spent two weeks in Philadelphia interviewing him and as you can imagine it was fascinating. Tom was in his 90s.

"Delivering babies in the poor parts of Dublin was quite an experience. You went into the room, drove out the chickens, and delivered the baby. Very often the new father would ply you with whiskey. I managed to escape the whiskey. On the first delivery I made, instead of a baby I found a rare condition called a hydaditiform mole, a cancer of the placenta. I was very proud that I recognized it and called the hospital for help."

***
"My fellowship at the Thorndike was to end in June of 1931, but in the spring of that year the recently founded American Pediatric Society held its annual meeting in Atlantic City. Child care as a separate discipline was introduced to America in the mid 19th century by Abraham Jacoby, a German doctor, practicing in New York. Noting the poor care that children were receiving, Jacoby had made the care of children the basis of his practice, initiating such things as pasteurization of milk and immunizations. He must have taught other doctors to follow his example for he was appointed professor of child health at the New York College of Medicine in 1861. From this beginning arose the group of doctors who became pediatricians, but the first pediatric organization in the United States, the American Pediatric Society, wasn't founded until 1928. I had enjoyed my six months' training in child health at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in London very much so I decided to go to Atlantic City to attend the pediatric meeting. I traveled down from Boston by train, more than an eight hour journey. While at the meeting, I fell in with some students from Johns Hopkins and, seizing the opportunity, I asked them if I could hitch a ride with them to Baltimore. Thus it was that I took part in the discussion of cases at the weekly 'Grand Rounds' with Dr. Edwards A. Park, one of the country's leading pediatricians.

"Shortly after I returned to Boston, I received a letter from Dr. Park, asking if I would be interested in a job as the resident in the pediatric outpatient department. It seems that the resident he'd chosen for Outpatient care had come down with tuberculosis and had been sent to a sanitarium. I quickly replied to him that I was very interested but that I had had only six months' experience in pediatrics. He took me anyway."

***

"Medical knowledge and treatments have changed since the days I was a resident at Hopkins. When I entered pediatrics, for example, the standard of medical care called for treating cases of infants with pneumonia by bundling them up and sending them with devoted nurses to sleep in the fresh air on the roof. Also, at that time, many children had mastoiditis from middle-ear disease, which then required emergency surgical intervention, mastoidectomy. Now both of these diseases are treated, and indeed prevented, with antibiotics, but in those days there were no antibiotics.

"There was a real resistance to change when I was in training. Medicine had a nihilist mind set. While Fleming had discovered penicillin in 1927, and had shown that it killed bacteria in the petri dish, nobody in clinical medicine had taken notice of it. Although Salvarsan, an arsenical, had been shown to cure syphilis in 1903, no other advances were made in the control of infectious diseases until 1935, when Domack discovered Sulfanilimide with its powerful therapeutic antimicrobial action. Then, with the Second World War coming on, clinical medicine rediscovered penicillin and Flory initiated full scale production of the antibiotic, which became available for U.S. Army use only, in the early 1940s. The Army used it to cure syphilis, which was prevalent during the war. After the war, penicillin became widely used and the mindset changed.

"Attitudes toward pediatric patients have also changed. In the 1930s, when I was a resident, children were kept in the hospital for a very long time, to get over whatever illness they had. Their parents were rarely allowed to visit, only once a month, for fear they would introduce infection into the hospital. In addition, in a study of hospitalized infants who were cared for in every way except that they weren't held, most of those babies failed to thrive and many of them died. That study called attention to the importance of touching and love in the care of infants. In the 1950s, a knowledgeable psychiatrist at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, John Rose, realized that strict visiting rules were a mistake. Thinking that the nurses might object to any change in their routines, he persuaded them to try parental visiting three days a week. The nurses, soon realizing how much more quickly the children recovered, and how much burden having the parents there took off them, came to Dr Rose and asked, "Can't we have it every day?" This major change was not recognized as a real therapeutic advance at the time, and Rose died of complications from diabetes shortly after daily visits became routine at the Children's Hospital. But in my mind, this was a major advance in child care, which subsequently has became standard practice through out most of the world.

"We often discovered things as we worked. Cardiologist Helen Taussig, for example, ran the cardiac clinic for Dr. Park. She saw numerous babies with Tetralogy of Fallot, who were blue at birth for lack of oxygen, because their veins and arteries were transposed. She suggested that if one could surgically switch the vein and artery, these 'blue babies' could be saved. Dr. Blalock, a surgeon at Hopkins, was persuaded to try this operation. It was successful, and the baby being operated on turned from blue to pink. This procedure, the Blalock-Taussig operation, introduced cardiac surgery for babies and Dr. Taussig became known as the blue-baby doctor."

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These excerpts from the book STARTING OVER (2007) originally appeared on the Pat McNees website

In 2024 I moved them to the blog 'Telling Your Life Story' so readers could comment on them.