[The Poet]

On this day in 1972, the US Supreme Court ruled against Curt Flood in his case seeking to become a free agent, reaffirming the 1922 decision that baseball was a sport and not a business, and was thus exempt from anti-trust law. Remember this the next time you drop a few hundred on a pair of plastic seats. Flood, a star player with the Cards for a decade, never played again. Speaking of judicial matters, in 1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed as spies for allegedly providing atomic bomb secrets to Soviet agents. They denied these charges until the end. In the meantime, Klaus Fuchs, a physicist who had actually confessed to such espionage, was in England's Wakefield prison, from which he was released in 1959 after serving less than 9 1/2 years of a 14-year sentence.

On a cultural note, and to return to our 5 cents theme, in 1905 about 450 people attended the opening of the first Nickelodeon in Pittsburgh PA. Remember THAT the next time you drop 15 bucks to see the newest billion-dollar blockbuster . . . and an additional 6 bucks on a nickel's worth of popcorn.