The Runners Up Club

Alfred Russel Wallace: The Spiritual Evolutionist

The naturalist whose contemporaneous insights into “the transmutation of species” may have shared top billing with Darwin had he not gone off - script, refusing to boot god entirely from his theory of evolution.

Howard K. Smith: An Anchorman For Our Time

The post-war era found most Americans turning to the famously well-trusted "Uncle" Walter Cronkite on CBS for their eyes on the world, while the gloriously opinionated Howard K. Smith, his ratings rival, was Edward R. Murrow's truer heir, and progenitor of today's primetime news anchors.

Greg Norman: Prophecies Fulfilled

The likable Australian golfer's frequent appearances in the runner-up slot raises questions about the perils of catastrophic thinking and self fulfilling prophecies in sports. But also lessons in flipping the script in life.

Catherine Littlefield Greene: The Heart of the Gin

A Rhode Island aristocrat who became a widowed plantation owner in the Reconstruction Era South may have been more instrumental to the invention of the cotton gin than Eli Whitney.

Beech-Nut Baby Food: Bad Apples Spoil the Barrel

A long-standing Mohawk Valley food company forfeited any chance to upend rival Gerber’s at the top of the baby food market in a case of spectacularly wrong-headed and unethical management.