In 1972, Greg Mitchell was an editor at Crawdaddy, the proto-rock magazine, when someone called his desk. “It was some fast-talking manager, who said, ‘I’ve got this hot act. We’re getting a big press entourage, taking you all up to Sing Sing prison,’ ” Mitchell recalled. The act was playing for the inmates to début his new band. “I thought, Well, I don’t care about this guy, but I get to go to Sing Sing,” Mitchell said. He and Peter Knobler, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, rode along in the band’s van. The manager was Mike Appel. The act was Bruce Springsteen. Nobody else showed up. “Greetings from Asbury Park” came out soon after, and Mitchell and Knobler wanted Springsteen for Crawdaddy’s cover. “The staff revolted: ‘You can’t put him on the cover, it’ll kill the magazine.’ So we ended up with Loggins and Messina.”
Afterward, Mitchell became the editor of Nuclear Times, the disarmament magazine, despite having no nuclear background other than some extravagant atomic-bomb drills in junior high in the fifties. “This air-raid signal would go, and you would go out in the hallway,” Mitchell said. “They would call out, ‘There are four casualties in Room 203!’ And these kids would carry stretchers around with fake injured on it.” Nowadays, he covers both music and nukes. “I am really the perfect boomer for this,” he said. “It’s duck and cover and rock and roll.”
Mitchell’s latest duck-and-cover project is a documentary, now airing on PBS, called “The Atomic Bowl,” which details a New Year’s Day football game put on by the U.S. military in a killing field in Nagasaki, a few months after America dropped the atomic bombs. The makeshift stadium was outside the charred ruins of a middle school, where a hundred and fifty-two students and thirteen teachers had been killed; the walls had messages, from dying kids to their parents, written in blood. The military convened marching bands and appointed a Navy lieutenant, Bill Osmanski, a fullback for the Chicago Bears, to captain the Isahaya Tigers, and a Marine Corps lieutenant, Angelo Bertelli, a Heisman-winning quarterback at Notre Dame, to lead the Nagasaki Bears. A few locals attended and watched in baffled horror. The Tigers won, 14–13.
The other day, Mitchell was at Poster House to check out an exhibition called “Fallout: Atoms for War & Peace.” He wore a green button-down and frameless eyeglasses. At seventy-seven, he was the oldest person there; a couple of museumgoers occasionally asked him nuclear-culture questions. The exhibition documented the nuclear industry’s rebranding after the bomb. A company called General Dynamics offered propaganda prints, whose brutalist beauty and cryptic, utopian slogans (“Worlds without end,” “Basic forces,” “Weather control”) reminded Mitchell of “Severance.” “No tiny numbers, though,” he said. Some people used to collect the posters. “It was like baseball cards,” he explained.
Baseball is another perfect boomer intersection. “I played on a joint Nuclear Times–The Nation softball team in Central Park in the eighties,” Mitchell said. “And I wrote this book about coaching my son in Little League that, amazingly, was optioned by Tom Hanks, who was gonna play me.” Forty years ago, he wrote about the eeriness of attending a Hiroshima Carp baseball game, in a stadium right next to ground zero.
He paused in front of a booklet called “PROTECT AND SURVIVE” with fallout-shelter instructions. “We had canned food stored down in a concrete basement, but we never did have a fallout shelter,” Mitchell said. “We just liked to buy in bulk. I grew up in Niagara Falls, which was a major missile base, a major Air Force base, practically the chemical-producing capital of the country. We used to think, Wow, we live in such an important city, we must be one of the top ten targets for the Soviets! It was almost pride.”
No one talked about Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and Mitchell has found himself drawn to stories that have been willfully forgotten. The Atomic Bowl was big news at the time, but, aside from a few accounts, including from the writings of William W. Watt, a soldier turned poet and professor, and the images of Shunichi Mori, a local newsman whose two children were killed in the blast, memory of the game disappeared. “Was there a sense of shame?” Mitchell said. “Or was it simply the usual ‘We don’t care about Nagasaki’?” Researching the film, he discovered a similar military event, also erased from memory: the Nagasaki Miss Atom Bomb beauty pageant.
“The son of Angelo Bertelli was in Sonic Youth—Bob Bert,” Mitchell went on. “His father never talked to him about it, ever. Literally, the only thing was, years later, Angelo Bertelli had one quote about how he and Osmanski had agreed to end the game in a tie, and Osmanski kicked an extra point to win it. It still rankled him. That was the takeaway: It should’ve ended in a tie.” ♦
