One Summer: America, 1927

by Bill Bryson

Levine’s two greatest personality faults were a pathological inability to be square with anyone—he seemed sometimes to be lying simply for the sake of it—and an equal difficulty in distinguishing legal activities from illegal ones. He had a fatal tendency to alienate and often cheat his business associates. In consequence he constantly ended up in court. It was legal problems that would prove his undoing now.

Trump

is a telling fact that the man who made more money out of baseball than almost anyone else was an enterprising Englishman named Harry Stevens, who came to America as a young man around the turn of the century, fell for baseball in a big way, and hit on the best idea of his life—namely, that fans might enjoy a hot snack in the course of a game. He experimented with various combinations of hot sandwiches and found that sausages in a roll kept warm longer than anything else he tried. He secured the right to sell his “red hots,” as he rather generously called them, at the Polo Grounds and almost at once began doing brisk business. It was Stevens’s products that the cartoonist Tad Dorgan called “hot dogs,” in jocular reference to their supposed principal constituent. Stevens loved the term, and by the 1920s hot dogs were indelibly associated with baseball games all across the nation, and Stevens had the concession operations at all three New York ballparks and others as far afield as Chicago.