conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Notable, Social, Studies with the genre: Children's Books, History?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The House That George Built'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for this book.. End with the sentence ' He sipped the beer, sucking foam from his upper lip as he set the glass down.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The House That George Built
  Puffing slightly, Henry Louis Mencken paused outside of George's Restaurant. He'd walked a little more than a mile from the red-brick house on Hollins Street to the corner of Eutaw and Lombard. Along with masonry, walking was the only kind of exercise he cared for. Tennis and golf and other so-called diversions were to him nothing but a waste of time. He wished his wind were better, but he'd turned sixty the summer before. He carried more weight than he had as a younger man. Most of the parts still worked most of the time. At his age, who could hope for better than that?
  He chuckled as his gloved hand fell toward the latch. Every tavern in Baltimore seemed to style itself a restaurant. Maybe that was the Germanic influence. A proud German himself, Mencken wouldn't have been surprised.
  His breath smoked. It was cold out here this February afternoon. The chuckle cut off abruptly. Because he was a proud German, he'd severed his ties with the Sunpapers a couple of weeks before, just as he had back in 1915. Like Wilson a generation before him, Roosevelt II was bound and determined to bring the United States into a stupid war on England's side. Mencken had spent his working life taking swipes at idiots in America. Somehow, they always ended up running the country just when you most wished they wouldn't.
  The odors of beer and hot meat and tobacco smoke greeted him when he stepped inside. Mencken nodded happily as he pulled a cigar from an inside pocket of his overcoat and got it going. You could walk into a tavern in Berlin or Hong Kong or Rio de Janeiro or San Francisco and it would smell the same way. Some things didn't, and shouldn't, change.
  Mencken had voted for Roosevelt II once, and regretted it ever after. But if arguing politics with a bartender wasn't a waste of time, he didn't know what would be. He sipped the beer, sucking foam from his upper lip as he set the glass down.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Did they remember him in Philadelphia? In Boston? In New York, where you needed to go if you wanted to get remembered in a big way? No and no and no, and he'd played, briefly and not too well, in both Philly and Boston. Did they remember him in Mobile and in Madison, in Colorado Springs and in Wichita, in Yakima and in Fresno, in all the two-bit towns where being remembered constituted fame? They did not. And it wasn't as if they'd forgotten him, either. They'd simply never heard of him. That was what stopping one rung shy of the top of the ladder did for you—and to you.
  But this was Baltimore. Here, George Ruth was a hometown hero in his hometown. A superannuated hometown hero, but nevertheless...Mencken pointed to the bat on the plaque again. "Is that the one you used to hit the I Told You So Homer?" he asked.
  He hadn't been a baseball fan these past two-thirds of his life. But he was a Baltimorean. He knew the story, or enough of it. In the 1922 Little World Series—or was it 1921? or 1923?—the Kansas City pitcher facing Ruth knocked him down with a fastball. Ruth got up, dusted himself off, and announced to all and sundry that he'd hit the next one out of the park. He didn't. The Blues' hurler knocked him down again, almost performing a craniotomy on him in the process.
  He got to his feet once more...and blasted the next pitch not only out of Oriole Park but through a plate glass window in a building across the street on the fly. As he toured the bases, he loudly and profanely embellished on the theme of I told you so.
  A famous home run—in Baltimore. One the older fans in Kansas City shuddered to remember. A homer nobody anywhere else cared about.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Every Broadway chorine thought she could start in a show. Every pug thought he could have been a champ. And every halfway decent ballplayer thought he could have been Buzz Arlett. Even a nonfan like Mencken knew his name. Back in the Twenties, people said they were two of the handful of Americans who needed no press agent. He came to Brooklyn from the Pacific Coast League in 1922. He belted home runs from both sides of the plate. He pitched every once in a while, too. And he turned the Dodgers into the powerhouse they'd been ever since. He made people forget about the Black Sox scandal that had hovered over the game since it broke at the end of the 1920 season. They called him the man who saved baseball. They called Ebbets Field the House That Buzz Built. And the owners smiled all the way to the bank.
  Trying to be gentle with a man he rather liked, Mencken said, "Do you really think so? Guys like that come along once in a blue moon."
  Ruth thrust out his jaw. "I coulda, if I'd had the chance. Even when I got up to Philly, that dumbshit Fletcher who was runnin' the team, he kept me pitchin' an' wouldn't let me play the field. There I was, tryin' to get by with junk from my bad flipper in the Baker Bowl, for Chrissakes. It ain't even a long piss down the right-field line there. Fuck, I hit six homers there myself. For a while, that was a record for a pitcher. But they said anybody could do it there. An' I got hit pretty hard myself, so after a season and a half they sold me to the Red Sox."
  A line from Gray's "Elegy" went through Mencken's mind: Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest. A mute (or even a loudmouthed) inglorious Arlett tending bar in Baltimore? Mencken snorted. Not likely! He knew why that line occurred to him now. He'd mocked it years before: There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the imaginations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.
  Mencken poured down the rest of the beer and got up from his stool. "Thank you kindly, George. I expect I'll be back again before long."