Memorable Feats Remembered : For Some ‘Firsts’ and Record Holders, Fame Lingers Past 15 Minutes

Almost everybody knows that Jackie Robinson was the first black player in major league baseball. Nearly everyone knows that Sandra Day O’Connor is the first woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. But what does the name Steve Newman do for you?

He was the first man to walk alone around the world.

And there are many other individuals who did something first, people who had their Warholian 15 minutes of fame for distinctions sometimes of a dubious nature, sometimes revolutionary, sometimes profoundly forgettable.

Newman, of Bethel, Ohio, took four years for his global stroll, and he got more than 15 minutes of fame out of it.

“Andy Warhol was wrong,” Newman said. “If I wanted to be boring, I could live on this for the rest of my life. It is not a 15-minute thing.” He says he got a $100,000 advance for a book about his trek, which he completed in 1987.

He also gets invited to speak three or four speeches a week at $1,000 a throw, which he says is “like being paid for being Marco Polo.”

A Stationary Excellence

Less flashy was the achievement of Fred Muermann of Chetek, Wis., who very quietly grew a cornstalk 22 feet and 3 inches high, recognized in the Guinness Book of World Records as the tallest ever.

And a wee one named Gordon, entirely oblivious to the honor at the time, was the first person born on television, according to “Famous First Facts,” a reference work containing many such nuggets. His delivery by Caesarean section at Colorado General Hospital in Denver on Dec. 2, 1952, was televised on 49 NBC stations as the high point of an American Medical Assn. meeting.

The first marriage of two members of Congress took place on Jan. 2, 1976, in Topeka, Kan., when Andrew Jacobs Jr. of Indiana married Martha Keyes of Kansas. They have now since divorced.

The first nun to be mayor of an American city was Sister Carolyn Farrell, a Sister of Charity, BVM. She was elected to the City Council of Dubuque, Iowa, in 1977, and became mayor in 1980.

She didn’t mind the to-do, but the Roman Catholic Church did mind clerics seeking public office and she didn’t run for reelection.

Benefits of Recognition

Carolyn, as most people call her, says the name recognition she achieved helped her pursue her goals of social change.

“Basically, I’m still an activist and a feminist,” the 52-year-old nun said. She has been in the convent for 33 years.

Next month she is going to the Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Policy at the University of Minnesota for seminars on reflective leadership, leadership in spirituality and ethics, and women in leadership.

Innovations in technology and space travel came thick and fast in the last two or three decades, but lesser triumphs haven’t lost their allure.

The pilots of the Voyager, Jeana Yeager and Dick Rutan, made history in December, 1986, when they flew around the world nonstop without refueling. The rigors of the preparation undid a romance between them. They parted as friends.

Kanellos Kanellopoulos very nearly re-enacted the myth of Daedalus when the real-life Greek bicycling champion flew farther than anyone else in a man-powered plane last April 23. By pedaling the 72-pound aircraft on a 74-mile flight from Crete to Santorini and crashing into the sea just 10 yards offshore, Kanellopoulos broke earlier records of 37.2 miles and 22.5 miles.

Peripatetic Adventures

While performing his low-tech feat, world-walker Newman encountered some appropriately primitive adventures along the way.

He was attacked in Morocco, he said, by a man with a scar running down the side of his face and one eye missing.

“I hadn’t seen the movie, but I did a Crocodile Dundee. I pulled out a bigger knife and he ran,” Newman said. Bandits with machetes set upon him in Thailand, he said, and he fended them off with an umbrella. In Africa, 13 wild boars treed him for a night.

Now engaged to be married to the girl almost next door, the 6-foot-2 Newman says he will go on using his feet as a means of meeting people and writing about them.

“Eventually, I wanted to become a novelist, but I want to do more walking stories,” he said. His journey, incidentally, cost 19 cents a mile, compared, he notes, to $3,000 a mile in a spacecraft.

“People took care of me, so the whole trip cost only about $4,000,” he said.

String of Firsts

Eva Shain may agree that Andy Warhol’s sense of time was wrong. Back in 1977, she became the first woman to judge a world heavyweight championship fight, Mohammed Ali vs. Ernie Shavers. She is still in the business. Although her expertise was not needed, she was a judge at the 91-second world heavyweight title fight between Mike Tyson and Michael Spinks.

She still gets calls about her headline-making appointment in 1977. It was a surprise to her. “I thought I was doing the undercard. It wasn’t until I got there that I found out I was doing the championship fight.”

A feature on her then appeared in The New York Times and she received two proposals in the mail mail, although she has been married for years to ring announcer Frank Shain (the ring announcer in the movie “Raging Bull”).

Eva Shain appeared on “What’s My Line” and “To Tell the Truth” as well as other television shows at the time.

Firsts seem to beget firsts. She was also the first woman inducted into the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame, the first woman to judge a fight on an aircraft carrier (the Lexington in Pensacola, Fla.), and the first woman to work professional fights in New Jersey, her home state, and in Texas.

Fallout Shelter Stunt

The Thomas Powners and their three children in 1959 endured two weeks in a fallout shelter for the nuclear family, reportedly aided by “a copy of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover,’ tranquilizers and whiskey.”

Thomas Powner, who worked at Princeton University at the time and is still a teacher, said several scientists asked him if he would consider doing the stunt for the family.

Powner recalled that his wife, since deceased, had second thoughts, but they went ahead. They were paid, he remembers, about $600.

“Actually, there was only one bottle of whiskey. We only had a few drinks, but there were lots of books and we read a lot,” he said.

Like Eva Shain, the family’s picture was on the front pages when they came out of the shelter. They appeared on television shows of the time, “Who Do You Trust?” “The Dave Garroway Show,” “The Henry Morgan Show.”

They also made some commercials afterward and his wife traveled extensively on behalf of the U.S. Civil Defense campaign, a campaign now all but forgotten.

Classes Hear Story

Powner, now 58 and remarried, said his students always know about his “sheltered” past and he retells the story for each new class.

In the sporting world firsts are numerous, obscure and remembered more by the statisticians than by the record holders. Larry Doby was the second black player in the major leagues, the second black manager and now, at 64, is community relations director for the New Jersey Nets of the NBA.

Asked who was the first black player to hit a home run in a World Series game, Doby said: “I don’t know. Jackie, I guess.”

When informed that it was none other than himself, he laughed.

“Me?” he said. “I guess because I’ve been the second so often, I’m always surprised to hear that I was the first at anything.”

He did remember, however, that he hit it off the Boston Braves’ Johnny Sain in the third inning of the fourth game.

And who was the first professional baseball player?

Alfred James Reach, an outfielder for the Philadelphia Athletics of the National Assn. From 1871 until 1875, he played in 82 games, but his name is in the record books because in 1874 he received the princely sum of $1,000 for playing in 14 games.

There is no explanation of why the other players seemed to play gratis.