The Rocket's Red Glare

The bombs bursting in air...Who doesn't love fireworks?  Americans will seize on any occasion to celebrate it by setting off explosives, the bigger and more spectacular the better.  With the new year almost upon us, out fellow patriots will be preparing their arsenals for the midnight hour when they will light the sky with pyrotechnic devices (thank you China) and shattering the night's silence with explosions designed to scare away the evil spirits of the old disgraced year and welcome in the fresh new promise of pleasures galore.

My old friend William O. Bassett lived for whatever occasion allowed him to blow up the night with fire and thunder.  If it had a fuse, he had a match.  The Bassets and the Landers were driving from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine one time (that's another story) and passing through South Dakota Bassett spotted what to him was a little slice of Heaven: a giant year-around fireworks warehouse filled with stuff you could use for dam removal.  He filled his cart with some serious ordnance and in Minneapolis I had a friend who had access to a shipping dock where he worked. We sent Bassett's war chest home by UPS (Forgive us our trespasses).

So after our trip the Bassetts are holding a New Year's party, the climax of which will be a midnight presentation of South Dakota's finest.  The street in front of the Bassett's home is ablaze with strings of exploding firecrackers, sky bombs with spreading arcs of light.  Then a super rocket shoots straight up into the night sky, seems to circle around and then sails directly down to land on a neighbor's roof.   YIKES ! We race down and knock on the owner's door.  Not home. Back to Bassett's for a ladder.  Back to the target house.  Rocket's dead.  No damage (maybe a little black smudge but who would notice?)

Happy New Year ! Where are the sparklers?

Speaking of Rings

 One of the consequences of hiding in your apartment from the dreaded coronavirus attack, compounded by being older than springtime, is you spend an inordinate amount of time remembering episodes from various times in your life.  Like when I was working as a sales agent for Jostens of Minnesota, preying on high school students to sell them some or all of our product line: rings, caps and gowns for graduation, announcements, and other accessory items.

I'm in the main hallway at Benson High School in Portland, Oregon where I have set up my portable store (a four-foot-long display box showing samples of our class rings). It's between classes before the lunch break and coming down the hall to my station is a young lady who, by her attire, I judge to be trouble walking.  "Ooo," she says to me, "I love rings."

I say, "I don't think you are supposed be here during classes."

She laughs and says, "You're probably right.  What's new about class rings?"

I tell her, "Well, the new thing this year is a feature we call "Select-a-side" which means whatever your favorite activity is, we can put symbolism related to that activity on the side of your ring.

She giggles and says, "I'll bet they wouldn't put my favorite activity on a ring."

Just then the lunch break sounded.  Saved by the bell.

What's The Thing With The Ring?

I think I have mentioned in previous postings that I have great admiration for Bill Gates.  Everything about him, to me, registers as significant evidence of a man with a brilliant mind using the fruits of his achievements for the greater good of a humane society.  I watched him today on CNN's Jake Tapper show discussing the coronavirus pandemic to which he has focused large amounts of his personal involvement and resources from his charitable foundation.

Watching him on TV over time,  I noticed a small facet of his body language: when responding to a question he would engage his right hand with his left hand, and fiddle with his wedding ring. Being an admirer of him I imagined he was subconsciously acknowledging that all his good works came equally from his wife, Melinda.  The more likely explanation is that it is simply a nervous tic using the ring as something to fiddle with.

But today on the Tapper show his right hand would still engage with the left but...NO RING.  Where is Bill Gates's wedding ring?  Did he have a rash and his dermatologist wrote him a prescription for Terbinafine and told him not to wear the ring until the rash was gone?  Did he lose weight making a resize necessary?  Is everything still OK with him and Melinda?  If Jake was doing his job at his usual high degree of professionalism he would have said, "Hey, Bill, what's the deal with no wedding ring?"  Now we're all just left to wonder.

The Only Thing We Have To Fear

Later this month, Christmas Eve will find me awaiting the annual Holiday for the 90th time and I can compare this one with only one other: Christmas 1941.  Both days find the citizens of America facing a threatened future under siege from a devastating enemy attack; one by powerful allied military armies and the other by microscopic organisms that, while unseen, prove to be equally as deadly.

Seventeen days before Christmas 1941, Japanese aircraft made their tactical attack on Pearl Harbor causing awful damage to American warships and military installations. While it was a shocking blow to an unprepared nation, key facts of the raid would prove critical to the final success of the American response.  The battleships damaged in the raid were not the aircraft carriers that would make the difference in coming sea battles with Japanese forces.  Also, the Japanese raiders failed to destroy the storage farms of petroleum fuel.

While the attack was greeted with wide celebrations in Japan, naval Marshal General Isoroku Yamamoto had a more prescient assessment of the attack: "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve," he wrote.  He was right.  America rose up under the masterful leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt.  He organized the massive mobilization of the nation's industrial power while communicating with the souls of individual citizens. I remember sitting around our radio, Mama and Daddy and my two sisters,  listening to the calm voice (I can still hear his tone) of the President focusing our attention to the mission that would lead us to victory. He united the nation as it had never been before.  And never has been since.

What a difference in America today.  We find the gifts under the tree to be sour apples and spoiled dreams with over a quarter million of our fellow citizens dead from the silent enemy.  Other millions of children without food to eat. The economy in free fall. After the original attack there was no calm voice of a leader to unite us in a massive counter-attack with organizing plans and challenges to individual citizen warriors. We do have a lot to fear.

I still have the official card that identifies me as an air watch volunteer (Mama and me during a four hour shift once a week) to identify (we went to silhouette classes) any Japanese bombers we feared were coming in those early war months.  None of their aircraft got through on our watch.

I'll take Christmas 1941 over this one.  There'll be bluebirds over, the white cliffs of Dover, tomorrow, just you wait and see.

                                                           

Update to September Skin Report

Since I posted that skin story last September, yesterday I had a visit with my dermatologist and learned some additional information.  So this update.

One thing the almost 350 million people who voted in the last election (even those in cemeteries) would be in full agreement on is the importance of personal hygiene. The guy in the elevator who didn't think that was important gets dagger looks from his fellow lifters.  Americans spend billions of dollars every year on soaps and cleansing lotion, paying tribute to the quest for an immaculate persona and the eradication of unpleasant odors.

It is said that Samuel Johnson, author of the first English dictionary, while celebrated for his erudition, avoided bathing for long periods of time. Seated in an eating establishment one evening, a lady at the next table addressed him saying, "Sir, you smell." "No, Madam," he replied, "you smell, I stink."

My grand niece, Drew Saylor, who is a dermatologist, agees that soap should be confined to breakfast dishes and underwear but not skin.  She tells us soap washes away beneficial oils and microbiome produced by the body.  Eliminate soap and at a minimum you avoid dry skin and, she thinks, there's a whole world beyond that. 

 Amazon will send you three bars of Cetaphil non-soap cleanser for $9.00,  Imagine this: after 90 years I end up shilling for Big Pharma.

NFL Observation

Sunday night football, November 22, 2020.  LA Raiders vs Kansas City Chiefs.  Sideline shot of Raider's coach Jon Gruden wearing required face mask, speaking on his phone, holding play-calling sheet in front of mask so opponent spys can't read his lips.  NFL always entertaining.

Palouse Perils

 I watched my Oregon Ducks play the Washington State Cougars in Pullman last Saturday.  The minute the game came on I rose from my couch and went to put on a sweater.  Memories of Pullman, Washington in November lowered my body temperature by 10 degrees.  Pullman is in the Palouse, a unique geographical area of rolling hills like giant sand dunes that welcome icy blasts of weather from the polar regions that my Aunt Helen, who knew that country, described as having nothing between you and the North Pole but a barbed wire fence with the top strand down.

Sending young scholars to play football in Pullman in November could be classified as a crime against humanity.  Extreme cold causes materials (including live creatures) to contract and become brittle.  Engagement in any activity that involves violent collisions will make a person feel as if they are in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon where shattered parts of your body are flying all around.

In the first half the Oregon team fell behind by two touchdowns and a field goal.  Shattered pieces of players were everywhere on the frozen tundra.  The Coug players were unaffected by the temperature because their trainers stick a long needle into their brains and turn off the hot/cold switch.  As the game went on the Oregon players became numb to the alien environment and fought back to win the game by a couple of touches.  As Oregon QB Tyler Shough took a knee to end the game, all he could think about, along with his teammates, was that locker room with those skin-ripping hot showers.  Who needs soap?

I suspect two years from now it will be difficult to get players from that game, still on the team, to willingly board the chartered aircraft headed for the Palouse.        

Give 'em Hell, Harry

In five days voting citizens of the United States of America will decide whether incumbent President Donald John Trump will be given another four year term or whether he will be replaced by Joseph Robinette (would you name your kid Robinette?) Biden, Jr.  The high anxiety result of next Tuesday's vote took me back to Monday, November 1, 1948, where I sat in the  classroom of history Professor Daniel L. Gadke.  Professor Gadke was a longtime iconic teacher at Willamette University known for his deeply conservative political beliefs and his love of rhododendrons.  The Willamette campus today is richly adorned with the magnificent rhododendrons he had planted over his years at the University.

Common knowledge of the race between Democratic President Harry S Truman (the "S" was his name, not an initial) was considered all but over with Republican challenger Thomas L. Dewey's wife having already chosen the new drapes for the Oval Office. After the cabal of close advisers to Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the bum's rush to his vice president for being too far left in his politics, the little (5'8") senator from Missouri, Harry Truman was chosen to run with Roosevelt in 1944.  Roosevelt had small regard for Truman and they rarely met together right up to Roosevelt's death in 1945

There was something about Dewey that was a bit off-putting. He was too slickly perfect (some newspaper critic once said he looked like the splendid little guy you put on top of your wedding cake. The zinger stuck). Harry focused his campaign on the Republican do-nothing congress and took his "Give 'em Hell" rant on a train ride across America.  He addressed his fellow citizens from the rear platform of the train's last car.

As class ended that November Monday, an almost-giddy Professor Gadke announced to our class, "When we meet again on Wednesday we will be blessed with a new Republican administration." 

Forty-eight hours later a thousand rhododendrons lost their leaves.    

Penalty: Delay of game

I've shuffled my life's problems into two separate packages: those I can make some effort, however feeble, to control and those I can identify but not influence.  The latter include global environmental regulations that are necessary to make human life on our planet sustainable, the behavior of political officials to act responsibly for the best interests of their constituency,  and making the trains and buses of Portland's Tri-Met operations run on time. 

The former category includes maintenance of my mental and physical health, the nurturing of my relationship with friends and relatives and the pursuit of satisfying activities to fill hours not spent sleeping.  Television and reading are active players  in this last life-plan.

I just just turned off the lights and left the stadium seat in my living room where I was watching a football game. It was mid-way through the 3rd quarter with the LA Rams 9 -- SF 49ers 21.  I declare the season over.  Advertising fatigue wins.  I get it. The Covid-19 virus has shut down live fan viewing in the nation's NFL stadiums with a consequent loss of millions in ticket sales so to support the operation TV advertising has to carry the load. Sorry, coach, I can't play this game.

Rams run three plays, don't make ten yards, punt.  Here come the commercials, one after another. Back to live action. Niners make a first down, then run three plays and punt. The commercial train is back. Rams run two series, punt. Car ads. Pills for joint pain. Cute kids throwing food around. On and on.

I can't do it.  There is no game flow.  Just a tsunami of repeating commercials that have nothing to do with entertainment.  Hello, Netflix.

Hey, Joe and Kamala, after you solve global warming, dead economy, racial strife and the Covid 19 epidemic,  let those people in America who have enough money left to buy a ticket find their seats in a stadium so TV can look in with their advertising share of the action adjusted back to normal. And find some way to outlaw teams using the prevent defense.

Who Said That?

 Who doesn't admire a line of words that stick in your mind and magically recreate a dramatic scene or sequence of scenes that never get out of date?  Secure in a timeless vault in your mind.  This came to me when I saw Jaws on Turner Classic Movies and, of course, that classic line, "You're going to need a bigger boat."  I did some research on how the line got into the movie and turned up a delightful vignette. 

Stephen Spielberg was a little known director when he took on the troubled production of the movie jaws in 1974. It was his third movie as a director.  The producers rented a huge barge to hold all the camera gear and props used in the filming that was all on water (the crew named the barge SS Garbage Sale). The cost-cutting producers hired a small boat to push the barge around and it was inadequate for the job.  Everyone picked up the phrase, "You're going to need a bigger boat." and it was used on the set when anything went wrong from breakdown of equipment to late food delivery.

In the movie after the first sighting of the shark, the Brody character ad-libbed the crew's line, "You're going to need a bigger boat" and they kept the line in the movie.

Other great lines came to mind. "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn " was Clark Gable's Rhett Butler's reply to his manipulative wife, Vivian Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara's pleading, "What's to become of me?" in the 1939 movie, Gone With The Wind.  The curse word, "damn" in a movie shocked the nation but became a movie classic.

Whose heart doesn't beat a little faster upon hearing Humphrey Bogart say to the gorgeous Lauren Bacall in the 1943 Casablanca, "Here's looking at you, kid?"

Listen to Don Vito Corleone in the 1972 movie, The Godfather: "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse."

Bette Davis in 1950's All About Eve: "Buckle your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night."  

There are so many more from wonderful flicks: Dr. Strangelove. Taxi Driver. Wizard of Oz. On The Waterfront.  Sunset Boulevard.                                      Name your favorites.

Trick or Trick

 Scroll back to October 31, 1943. Halloween night.  It doesn't require a Sherlock Holmes to discern that the 5-pack of Goblins crossing the Redwood Highway just west of Art Schneider's machine shop is up to no good. The Frame brothers, Harry and Bob.  The Wardrip brothers, Lee and Bob.  And Billy Landers.  Heading to their first strike.

Harry and Lee were the same age, 15, two years older than the Bobs and me (Billy).  The Frame family had recently moved to Jerome Prairie but the Frame brothers had known the Wardrip brothers from some years back when they all lived in the same community. So any friends of my friends were friends of mine. Harry in particular was a good friend to have because he was a big kid who carried a certain swagger that suggested messing with him might be your least best option.

Bob Wardrip told me at school that morning that there was a plan for the five of us to do some Halloween business that night so I met up with them after telling my parents I was going trick or treating with Bob and Lee.  At the Frame home I learned Harry and Bob had no interest in treating but they showed real enthusiasm for tricking.  Their first target was their uncle who lived next door to Art Schneider's machine shop.  They were not fond of their uncle and the plan was to tip over his outdoor privy.

The object of our disaffection was not a single traditional outhouse.  It was, insted, a toilet hole in the ground that the uncle had surrounded with large packing boxes stacked two high with an opening on the side  to a jerry-rigged seat board. The raiding party looped around through the field in back of the house and approached the strange structure.  Harry instructed us to surround the boxes and on his signal push everything over and in.

Like many best laid plans, this one had flaws. At Harry's signal boxes started going every which way and I felt a push to my back that sent me spiraling into the hole as a box hit me on my head driving me down. The loud banging of the structure coming down triggered a big yard light to go on and a furious uncle came out the back door of the house screaming ugly words at the fleeing raiders. The box that hit my head covered me up and I just hunkered down with my heart racing in its attempt to leave my chest.  Uncle stomped around, still cursing and after awhile returned to the house.  I feared he might return as I fought my way out from under the box and crawled out of the hole.

My shoes had paid the price of trespassing in troubled waters and I lit out for home where I pondered the deep conundrum, in the final accounting, who is the trickster and who is the trickee? 

Skin, It Keeps Our Insides In

 James Hamblin stopped taking showers five years ago. And he didn't keep it a secret (maybe he didn't have to, ha, ha). No, listen, James is a serious dermatologist who studies skin and has written a best-selling book about what he believes is true regarding our largest organ: our skin. The book is CLEAN (Riverhead Books).

Hamblin believes we are all nuts to be making a ritual of daily scrubbing off the precious bodily fluids our bodies are courageously producing for us to protect our remarkable outer wrapping.  And if you're a fan of long words that are hard to pronounce, Hamblin has a seemingly endless supply as he instructs us about the composition of human skin.  He tells us a lot about our skin that we probably could get along fine without knowing.  Such as mites in our face.

Yes, Susan, your face is a veritable zoo of various microscopic organisms that includes mites who burrow into your pores and feast on your past-their-shelf-life skin flakes. What would we do without those little rascals in there eating for us 24/7?

James has a light writing style that deals with a lot of complex science in a truly easy to understand flow.  Early on he removes an elephant in the room regarding personal hygiene: it is OK, he tells us, to take soap and water to what he refers to as the "bits"-- that is, under arms, groin and feet. Thanks for that, James.

It's a good read that will give you a great supply of material to brighten your conversation vault.  Keep a watch to see if there is a reduction in your water bill.

Scrambled Eggs

This place where I live feeds a lot of people every day. One breakfast option is to go through a free bar for coffee, bagels, muffins, oatmeal, or scrambled eggs.  I say to the guy in charge of breakfast production, You must spend a lot of time breaking eggs every day.  No, I'm told,  egg breaking time is a matter of a few minutes.  There's this big blender that liquefies a couple dozen eggs, shells and all, after which they strain out the shells and bring the heat. 

I'll bet you didn't know that.  I'm sticking with poached.

Smoke

 smoke (smok) n A suspension of particles in a gaseous medium.  Like when the place where you live is in flames day after day and the resulting gaseous medium is the only option you have for continuing an exercise essential to staying alive: breathing.

Somewhere along humanity's march to future adventures, smoke became associated with, among other things, romance: 

"I dim all the lights and I sink in my chair, the smoke from my cigarette climbs through the air, the walls of my room fade away in the gloom and I'm deep in a dream of you.  The smoke makes a stairway for you to descend. You come to my arms, may this dream never end..."

Or:

"They, asked me how I knew, my true love was true? I of course replied, something deep inside cannot be denied...Now, laughing friends deride, tears I cannot hide, I just smile and say, when a lovely flame dies, smoke gets in your eyes."

If not romance-connected, it can be a dire warning:

 "Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette. Keep on smoking 'til you smoke yourself to death.  Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate that you hate to make him wait but you've got to have another cigarette."

If you are the platoon leader making an assault on an enemy emplacement you call on a smokescreen to hide your advance.

If you are a Chicago gang member you  hide in an alley waiting to smoke a member of a rival gang.

Pick-up line at meet market: "My friends over there wanted me to come tell you they think you're smokin'.

Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em (disambiguation).  Slang for "Do what you want if you've got the means." Origin: World War II overseas officer telling his troops,  "Smoke 'em if you got 'em" (cigarettes were hard to get) meant take a break.

If you are an elderly Pilgrim staring out your Russellville apartment window, day after day, at the dim outline of a tree that is all of ten yards away, hoping it will not explode into flames, then you acknowledge this is atonement for some long ago indiscretion.

There were, indeed,  many trespasses and now so little time to seek forgiveness.  Send more smoke. 

Sing, Sing, Sing

Who doesn't like mob singing?  From "Happy Birthday to You" to "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" there is something feel-good about joining others in a united, harmonious expression of shared goodfellowship pretending our off-key creation is akin to the magic of an angel choir.  My bad notes take cover in my neighbor's true pitch.

Few probably remember sitting in a movie theatre just before the main feature and following the bouncing ball as the words scroll across the screen.."sweeeet Car o line..."  Hey, it was more fun than watching commercials for the snack bar.

Churches offer opportunities for lovers of group vocalizing, but those writers of hymns who had been spiritually moved to please the Heavenly Host with the fervor of their lyrics never seemed to know when to still their quill and give the organist a break.  It's not irreligious to admit that going into the 14th verse of "Onward Christian Soldiers" causes the most devout members of the flock to clutch the pew in front of them for support.

One of life's small but intense pleasures is watching my Ducks play football in Autzen Stadium and no matter whether my favorite lads are ahead or behind as the third quarter ends,  I'm going to be jacked-up when Otis Day & the Knights appears on the Jumbo screen and crash into "SHOUT."  Listen to 40 or 50 thousand partially sober fans give Otis thundering backup.  Spine chilling. Sometimes the officials will delay the start of the fourth to let Otis and his gang finish.

Ever been to a Cubs game in the seventh inning?  "Take me out to the ball game, take me out in the crowd, buy me some peanuts and cracker jacks, I don't care if I never get back..."

OK, everybody,  grab your mouse and join me on three...one, two three:

"You are my Sunshine, my only Sunshine,(see the little ball bouncing) you make me happy when skies are grey, you'll never know dear, how much I love you, please don't take my Sunshine away."

A New Star In The Cosmos

 If you have access to the Hubble telescope tonight, check out a new shining star that will be bringing a special brilliance to our harmonious universe.  Its name is Lawrence Alden Aschenbrenner.

Larry departed his long run on this small planet yesterday morning and what a legacy he designed in those 90 years. When most of us confer with our better angels, how much inconvenience their counsel will create is alway figured into the resulting decision.  With Larry it was always, "We'll do the right thing."

He and his wife, Katie, brought together a family of Ted, Dan, Connie and John. His larger family of school classmates, professional colleagues, client admirers, and ordinary friends would fill his beloved University of Oregon football stadium.

In his childhood years Larry was the proverbial preacher's kid with seemingly endless escapades of harmless mischief but that Methodist environment of his home marinated Larry's moral core into a life-long mission of crusading for social justice for every citizen.  From his at risk adventures in Jackson, Mississippi (he called it the most racist city in America) giving legal assistance to African Americans at the height of the '60s and '70s Civil Rights movement, to his advocacy for Native Alaskans rights in Anchorage,  Larry Aschenbrenner fought the good fight.

Through all his serious career in righting what he saw as wrong, he had a rollicking fun-factor in his German heritage and would recite Casey At The Bat with or without a pint of beer to lubricate his delivery whatever the occasion.  He was just a great companion and his was a magnificent life.  Star light, star bright...

The Name Game

A sociological study conducted by the Harvard School for Serious Studies in 1996 found there to be a vague correlation between a person's name and success or failure in his/her life pursuits.  They put all names into three major groupings: Unfortunate Names, Common Uninteresting Names, and Exotic or Captivating Names.  The study focused on the first and third categories explaining it was counter- productive to deal with all the Mary Joneses and Jim Smiths because they led ho-hum lives and didn't merit wasting resources and the time of researchers.

In the Unfortunate Name group the findings of the researchers can be summed up by two or three examples.  A baker, Norman Shitt, moved from job to job and had issues with schools trying to deal with his children's social relationships with their fellow students.

Researchers found a deputy sheriff in Arkansas whose parents, Harold and Amy Head, named him Richard.

A number of females, most of them from southern states, having Squatt as a surname, were found to have consistent tendencies to marry young (some at nine or ten years of age) apparently as a way to get a name change.  It was found that two of the Squatt girls married twin brothers named Downs.

In the third category the researchers agreed the most success-connected name ever was attached to the American President, Abraham Lincoln.  No other name was close for positive association.

In sports a football player had the perfect name: Joe Montana. Did they say perfect?  Perfect.

In pornongraphy-tainted journalism the perfect name goes to National Inquirer publisher, David Pecker.

The best lawyer name ever goes to the mouth-piece for recently seven-back-holes-drilled Jacob Blake, B'ivory Lamarr.  Whatever case B'ivory is associated with will give him a lock-down jury when the court introduces them to (drum roll) B'ivory Lamarr.  That name sings.

There are so many more names out there but so little space left in my allotted allowance.  Let me know any I missed. 

A Road Too Far

Bernard Daley was an immigrant who was born in 1858 and came to America with his parents where he lived the American dream.  He became a medical doctor, opened his practice in Lakeview, Oregon. Became a rancher, a banker, and a businessman who accumulated a large fortune.  In 1922 Dr. Daley established a foundation, the Daley Fund, that paid the expenses of every graduate of Lakeview High School who chose to attend four years in any of Oregon's institutions of higher education.  

In 1962 the institutional executives of Oregon's public colleges and universities elected to hold their annual meeting in Lakeview to honor Dr. Daley on the 40th anniversary of his gift. There are three ways to get to Lakeview, Oregon: Walk.  Ride a horse or bicycle. Use a car.  For Arthur Flemming,  President of the University of Oregon, Lakeview was beyond his walking range and he owned neither a horse or a bicycle, so that left an automobile. Arthur did not drive, so as the professional Executive Secretary of the U of O's Alumni Association I was selected to drive him to Lakeview.

Gene Lewis, a pal of mine from my fraternity days, lived in Lakeview and was delighted to learn I would be there on a late Friday afternoon.  President Flemming joined his fellow executives after we checked in to our motel as did I with brother Gene.  We retired to a cowboy bar & grill. (Walls decorated with displays of Indian arrowheads and at the bar each stool was a saddle.) After a few thousand old frat stories and an equal number of beers, Gene and I closed the bar at 2:30 AM and he dropped me at my room, where it was my plan to sleep until 9:00 or 10:00 AM and then treat myself to a fine Western Buckeroo breakfast.

                                                       Wrongo in the Congo

A note was on my door.  Dr. Flemming let me know he had arranged for me to be with him at breakfast (8:00 AM) and at the day-long meetings (down and down I go, round and round I go).  It gets worse.  Arthur invited the President of Oregon State University to ride back with us. Of course,  that meant little Willy could drive him on over to Corvallis (another 50-plus miles). Not good.  NOT AT ALL GOOD.  We left Lakeview for the 242 mile drive to Eugene in the late afternoon and I had no trouble staying awake at the wheel for the first 14 miles out of town.  From then on it was down and gritty.

The one terrible fear that gripped me was the newspaper headline in the Portland Oregonian I kept reviewing in my mind:  Presidents of University of Oregon and Oregon State University Die In Tragic Car Plunge Off Cascade Mountain. Driver of car, William Landers, uninjured and found peacefully sleeping in the tangled bodies of the two presidents.

A few sleepless years later I pulled into the driveway of Dr. Flemming's home, painfully aware that less than two miles away, across the Willamette River at 315 Van Duyn Street was a king size bed and a world-class pillow.  OSU's President chose to ride with me in the front seat to Corvallis where I fought to stay alert in his driveway, knowing that sleeping there would be bad form.

Corvallis, Oregon is way down my list of favorite Oregon towns, but on one of its quiet residential streets, in a pinch, a guy can grab a couple winks with no trouble.  Lakeview's not high on my list either.

Who Remembers John McKay?

In 1948 Oregon football coach, Jim Aiken, had put together a juggernaut team composed of many WW II vets from all across the country. If Aiken challenged you to a duel you could be certain one of his handlers had loaded your weapon with blanks.  Jim liked to shave the odds but that '48 team with Norm Van Brocklin went to the 1949 Cotten Bowl after getting shut out of the Rose Bowl when a tie with Cal was decided by the University of Washington voting for the Golden Bears.  That decision by the Dawgs still resonates with Duck fans.

John McKay was a star running back on that Cotton Bowl team.  After Aiken was asked to leave Oregon, new Athletic Director Leo Harris hired Len Casanova to replace him.  Casanova brought McKay onto his staff in 1950 and after nine years, his talent as the offense coordinator was recognized by other programs including USC. which hired him as an assistant in 1959. They appointed him head coach the next year, after which he would go on to win four national titles.  McKay considered Casanova his mentor and his affection for Cas lasted throughout both their lives.

When you are the head football coach at USC, it's like being King with a really good army.  After Cas retired as Oregon's Athletic Director in 1969, I went with him to LA where Oregon would play the Trojans in the Coliseum.  Friday before the game, McKay invited Cas to have lunch with him and I tagged along. We went to a restaurant-bar across the street from the USC campus and it was apparent this was a royal gathering place. McKay had a round table on a raised landing in the back of the room and it was obvious only John and his guests ever dined there.  After lunch we went back to McKay's office (no tab for the lunch ever came to our table).

Did I say office?  Let's define it as a large,  impressive reception chamber. One side of the room was dominated by a window overlooking the practice football field two stories below. On the wall behind McKay's massive desk at one end of the room was a huge oil painting of O. J. Simpson. A number of comfortable chairs surrounded a low table in the center of the room where we sat and I remember John telling Cas, "If you can't win at USC you should find another line of work."

John's son, JK, came into the room and after introductions said to his dad, "I need new tires for my car so is it OK to charge them to you." "How about using your Rose Bowl ticket money for your tires?"  Rose Bowl ticket money?  You mean wealthy USC alums might pay generous money to players for their Rose Bowl tickets?  Shocking!

John McKay would move on to coach the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and USC  replaced him with another Oregon coach, John Robinson. We know about O..J. but what happened to that oil painting of him? The frame looked expensive.

Let's Hear It For Bill Gates

 I watched that Sunday CNN guy whose name I can't spell interview Bill Gates today.  Bill Gates.  What an exceptionally fine man he is. Look at his face (you can't hide what's on your face). High intelligence. Friendly. He is obviously comfortable being Bill Gates.  Watch him respond to questions and he might reach up and readjust his glasses. Also,  he has a habit while talking of reaching over with his right hand and twisting his wedding ring.  Is that a way of touching bases with Melinda?

If I could get every living American to line up according to the contributions he/she has made to their fellow humans on the planet Earth, brother Gates would be very close to the front of the line.  The remarkable accomplishment of his entrepreneurial creation of Microsoft has been topped by the amazing impact his philamprothy to international causes has had.  

Gates has also used the excellence of his mind to consider problems in our national life and offer intelligent opinions that could solve them.  Of course, this gift from Gates can only be valuable if there is someone smart enough to recognize its worth.  He recognized the coronavirus threat years before it happened but his warnings went unheeded.  The brilliance of Bill Gates's mind has not been a secret for many years and why political leaders would not seek his counsel is hard to understand. Maybe some important clout-meister will come along in the next few months and see the light.

Order In The Court

I must admit that I have never made a plea before the Supreme Court of the United States of America, but I do have a close friend who has done that. His name is Lawrence Alden Aschenbrenner and his issue before the court concerned the native tribes of Alaska whom he represented.  In his career, Larry stood before the Supremes three times. 

That lofty bar of justice is not like the court where you are defending some poor miscreant for driving while seriously drunk.  No, no. To work in that historic room you must have been sworn in as a credible practitioner of the mystic codes of jurisprudence. In 1966 Larry was sworn in by Chief Justice Earl Warren after being sponsored by Oregon U.S. Senator Robert Packwood in a class of five other attorneys that included then Attorney General of the United States, Bobby Kennedy.  Packwood introduced Aschenbrenner to Kennedy which allowed Larry to check off one more box in his bucket list: Have a chat with President John F. Kennedy's brother.

So my lifelong friendship with Larry Aschenbrenner has given me two separations of personal contact with a President of the United States, John F. Kennedy.

The Wayward Bus

In my senior year of high school I turned 18 on February 4, 1948.  This made me eligible to get a chauffeur's license which I did because the principal of the high school, Frank Thomas got me a job driving a school bus. The principal liked me because I played football, was his student body president and was not a trouble-maker. My route to pick up and deliver young scholars to the schoolhouse conveniently followed the roads leading to my home seven miles west on the Redwood Highway.  After my last student was safely delivered to his/her home I would park the bus in a field across from where I lived and then retrace the route the next morning.  With a $50.00 payday that was one sweet deal.

My young bus riders were enthusiastic fans of the driver (me) because every after-school day was race day between our bus and a bus driven by another Frank Thomas favorite student that went south and east of town.  Grants Pass at that time had 6th street with four traffic lanes going through the center of town; two going north,  two going south and both of us had to go south through town where two lanes became one to cross the Caveman Bridge. The race was on to challenge that bottleneck.

Another factor affecting the race was all the citizen drivers who were desperate to not get stuck behind a school bus that stops at every mailbox to let some kid off.  They, too, joined the race to the single lane bottleneck at the Caveman bridge.

Those busses were real rattlers, big yellow hulks that let you know they were coming.  As the two drivers jockeyed for lanes to arrive first at the bridge, the occupants of both busses were wildly into the action with stomping feet and pounding on the metal side panels under the windows.  Not to mention  screaming at the driver by both boys and girls to go faster.  Rolling pandemonium. YeeHaww!!!  Some days we won.  Other days we lost (some citizen stopping in my lane to park). Those appointed rounds were never dull.  Hell riders to the bridge.

The House Buys A Round

Recalling my brilliance in winning the gown order at Glide High School triggered another memory of the Glide High School Principal, Norm Bergstrom. Years after the gown incident, Norm retired and bought a small motel south of Roseburg, Oregon.  One day Georgann and I got a late start from Portland on a trip to visit relatives in Grants Pass and south of Portland I realized we couldn't make it to southern Oregon before late night, I suggested it might be fun to stop for overnight at Norm's motel.  I hadn't seen him in years. 

Norm was working the reception desk when we checked in and he was delighted to see me.  He invited us to come back for cocktails after we got settled in and we found his living quarters behind the office to be large and nicely furnished. Norm introduced us to his wife and took drink orders.  Georgann would have preferred wine but none was offered so we both chose mixed drinks.

We talked about old times in the school house and I asked Norm how he was enjoying retirement in the motel business. "Bill," he said, "Life is good for Alice and me because we can handle everything needed in the small number of units we have.  I'll tell you one good side benefit; we never have to buy liquor because people are always leaving partially filled bottles in their room.

Arrgghh!!!

Timing Is Everything

I worked for years as a salesman for Jostens of Minnesota calling on high schools to sell graduation gowns, announcements, diplomas and school rings.  It was a competitive business with other companies offering the same products and Jostens paid me no salary,  just straight commission on what I sold.  My assigned territory was southern Oregon and one week I was working all the schools north of my home in Grants Pass.

I had a 9:00 A.M. appointment with a Principal at a school in Sutherlin and on my arrival I was told my man was ill and would not be in his office that day.  My next appointment was two hours later in Roseburg and when you work on commission time is money so you don't waste it.  I would use the time to make a courtesy call on another school in the area. Entering the administration office the Principal's  secretary announced me and when he came out of his office he had a strange look on his face. He said to me, "How do you people do that?  I had no idea what he was talking about but I made some innocuous comment and he continued, "The Herff Jones salesman was supposed to take our senior gown orders two hours ago and he apparently forgot the appointment so I'm giving you the gown business.  Meet me in the gym and I'll get the seniors down there."  The seniors arrived with their Herff Jones order forms filled out which I gathered up to transfer to our forms.  Then I thanked the Principal for his business and headed down the road to my next appointment without a clue as to what just happened.

I found out later that an hour before I arrived in his office he had called my boss in Portland and told him he was giving the gown business to us and to have me make an appointment to take the orders.  Then I walk in his door.

You don't have to be a great salesman if your timing is excellent.

Max

Max Coley, whose mother was a full-blooded Cherokee, was a better than average running back in college.  He would not have looked out of place bare chested astride a galloping horse.  Max coached running backs and quarterbacks for Len Casanova at the University of Oregon where he and I became friends.  We investigated after hour establishments from time to time and I grew to appreciate his deep knowledge of the game of football.  One Saturday morning I called Max to suggest we go to a track meet that afternoon and he said no, he didn't think so because he didn't really enjoy sports where people didn't hit each other.

At a scrimmage in 1969 Max was putting in plays for the next game.  Jim Fegoni was the center who would form the huddle and Max would lean in over Fegoni's back and call the plays he wanted run.  Sometimes when Fegoni left the huddle he would take a chop step back and plant his cleated foot right on top of Max's foot.  Ouch.  After the play Max would collar Fegoni and tell him, "DO NOT CHOP STEP OUT OF THE HUDDLE".  Fegoni would do fine and then he would forget and drill Coley again.  The third time it happened Coley limped up and confronted Fegoni. He placed his hands on the kid's shoulders and looked him in the eye saying, "Jim, I think I now know why the Italians lost the war".  Fegoni,  not blinking,  replied,  "How'd the Indians do, Coach?"

Max went on to a long,  successful professional career in the NFL and was Terry Bradshaw's coach at Pittsburg in those great Steeler years.

A football Memory

Senior year. One of our early games after the Grayback pre-season training camp was against Myrtle Point High School on their field, about 70 miles from Grants Pass. We would make the trip in one of our ancient yellow school buses that had all the comfort of a railroad boxcar with benches. Coach Ingram never embraced the idea of football as a fun activity for young scholars to engage in; he saw it as a character building opportunity that required the players to observe a disciplined regimen of physical and mental commitment. And that long bus trip was an opportunity to study your book of plays and concentrate on the game plan.

Yeah, right.  Larry Aschenbrenner is going to sit quietly on a bouncing bus for more than three and a half minutes before sneaking up the aisle and sticking a paper match in somebody's shoe sole and setting it on fire for a "hot foot"? Or maybe tying somebody's shoe laces together? Or instigating plots with others to keep the laughter rolling to the distress of the coaches?

Our high school is three times the size of theirs and the game in a pouring rainstorm is essentially over by the end of the first quarter. With about one or two minutes left in the game Ingram has cleared the bench of back-up players and on the last play of the game our third-string quarterback calls a pass play to show our coaching staff why he should be a starter. His pass connects and the receiver is off for the end zone.  Whoever is running facility control for Myrtle Point figures the game is over and he throws the master switch for lighting. The field plunges into total, deep-in-the-coal-mine darkness. People are shouting as chaos ensues.  In just a few minutes the lights come back on and we see our receiver lying flat out on the grass in the end zone.  He had run full speed into the goal post.

The kid came around without major injuries.  But we never got to kick the extra point.

The Face of Safe

                                                             

In every historical decade there is opportunity for creating a solution to what 99.99% of your fellow voyagers haven't yet realized is a problem. The prescient opportunist is then rewarded with fame and fortune.  "What if I could pick up a device at the Happy Hour Bar & Grill and tell you I was working late at the office?" Alexander Graham Bell said to his wife. "What's new about that?" she replied.  But Alex saw the future and he owned it. Just as Orville Wright did.  And Bill Gates. And Steve Jobs.

Like those visionaries, I've seen the future but my opportunity to get there has been roadblocked by the Grim Reaper. So I'm handing off my insight to whomever wants to seize the brass ring and throw it in the slot.

Think face masks.  The current pandemic we are experiencing is just a shot across our bow.  New and improved coronas are in Mother Nature's pipeline and always will be so the future opportunity is how to confront that reality with a creative solution.  That is, make the face mask a fashion statement that will become as important to the individual as his/her other clothing, underwear and outerwear.  Forget that thing that hangs on your ears or drops a plastic shield down from a headband.  Think total head conversion with a helmet that when worn covers everything from your neck upward. It won't be cheap but it will be a must-have device with a patent worth $billions. You will go to a salon to have your faceshield (get a copyright on faceshield) designed and fitted. Much high concept research and development is required here but everything is doable now or could be with engineering.

A mould of your head will be created in ubiquitous Headquarters Salons with whatever equipment is required.  Simulated skin needs to be developed and the client can choose tan coloring or any other tones desired.  Natural blemishes away.  Hair to clients specification like any wig construction.  More high tech development for air vents, filtered with openings from the back.  The faceshield will be designed in two parts for ease in putting it on and taking it off.  The front and back sections will be joined by a new-easy-to-use, sealing system.  Identification chips in the headpiece will be a requirement.

The eye holes will be prescription ground if necessary and fit over nose like glasses.

Voice and hearing is technically enhanced when face is closed.

So lots of research and development would be required to make this work but concerns about safety from the virus is the future reality.   

No, no, don't thank me. Just take my idea and buy yourself a yacht.

Disunion Solution

One thing we can all agree on in 2020 America is that there is little we can all agree on.  And a nation so divided will not endure while that is the case.  Statues have become the focal point of the division in our country where if you topple my Robert E. Lee I'll unhorse your Ulysses S. Grant.  No iconic figure, apparently, is safe from an attack by some mob of true believers and our nation's pigeons are distraught.

Everybody relax, I have the solution that might bring a springtime of peace and perhaps even create an environment of tranquility between the brothers and sisters of our homeland.  How many of you remember lava lamps?  Yes, lava lamps.  We must replace every statue of a person with a giant lava lamp with its mesmerising globs of glunk floating upward to vanish and then be replaced by a new glob of a different shape rising from some mysterious vault that never empties.

A person can watch a lava lamp for hours in peaceful fascination as anxieties float away like the rising globs.  And pigeons have no place to perch.  The initial cost of creating all those giant lava lamps  as well as the labor cost of the operation will be borne by placing a tax on caramel corn.

Solving national problems isn't difficult.

Sign Man

There are four floors of apartments in this place I call home.  The hall on each floor is a square passage 1/7th of a mile long so walk seven halls and you've done your daily life-sustaining regimen.  If you choose halls on different floors you are able to do a walk-by of all your fellow inmates and among that group of brothers and sisters is the Sign Man.  I've never met him up close and personal but I admire his door-posted signs.  Cum'on memory, do your duty:

Don't knock and disturb me.  The voices in my head have told me to sharpen my knives.

Don't whine to me, I didn't vote for him.

See, I told you this would happen.

Get back to me and I'll tell you who did it.

Shove it under the door.

I was told there'd be a handbasket.

A Pillow To Dream On

I skipped the graduation ceremony at the University of Oregon in June of 1954 but that didn't invalidate my Bachelor's degree in History that landed me a job as an executive trainee with the Bon Marche department store that was opening in Eugene, Oregon.  I would be the assistant to Ralph Robinson, Divisional Manager for domestics (bedding, towels, yardage, notions) and women's lingerie. My pay was not quite as much as that paid most school custodians and in all the years I worked there no one ever asked me to explain the American cultural influences generated by post-Civil War policies of the federal government.  So much for my B.S. in History.

But I learned to fold towels to make attractive displays and how to make buying plans for trips to resource markets. And as an executive trainee I could work off-the-clock hours without overtime pay.  Not to mention learning the techniques for circumventing certain policy rules that were not beneficial to Divisional Manager Robinson's bonus objectives.  Like the price tags on merchandise that carried a date indicating how long a particular item had been in the store. Ralph's bonus was penalized for old merchandise so his assistant could work after hours in the warehouse making new tickets to put on old merchandise.

And then there was the pillow crisis.  One day the State of Oregon pillow inspector (What? You didn't know Oregon had pillow inspectors?) came through and took one of our pillows to be inspected by a lab. A week or two later the report came back and it wasn't good.  Among a number of unfortunate contents in our pillow, some of the feathers contained traces of urine.  Apparently the New York pillow resource we used purchased feathers from Europe where citizens would sell the feathers from their own bedding to the feather buyers who would then use those feathers in their pillows.  So we took our pillows off the sales floor, which had a serious negative impact on Robinson's bonus.  He got on the phone to New York and told the feather merchants to send him the best pillow ever made that would pass an inspection.  The new pillow came to us by air and on the inspector's return he got it for the lab which gave it a glowing report.  Our pillows came back onto the sales floor.

Best of all, Ralph gave me the test pillow and I enjoyed years of peaceful sleep on America's finest goose down urine-free pillow.

Leo's 20 Year Crusade

The University of Oregon hired its first professional athletic director, Leo Harris, in 1947.  A successful administrator of a large school district in California, he had played football at Stanford and coached both football and basketball at Fresno State.

Leo Harris had the solid build of a football guard and his administrative style was a gruff, take no prisoners assault on roadblocks to his objectives.  He looked a bit like Jimmy Hoffa with a similar demeanor except Harris was open and honest.  There was never a doubt of what he meant in the decisions he made. The athletic program he took over in Eugene was in shambles. Financially depressed and faced with old facilities for the major sports of football and basketball, the challenge to the new administrator was daunting. Doing a triage audit of all the problems, he pinpointed the football stadium at Hayward Field as his number one priority.  It may have been historic but in the family of big time collegiate sports it was an embarrassment.

Harris created a secret piggy bank and no contribution to Porky was too insignificant to be dropped in the slot. Head coaches (much to their dismay) to save travel expenses, were required to call alumni and ask to surf their couch on recruiting trips.  He limited the football coach as to how many players he could take on away games (Leo loved the early years when the same players played both offense and defense). He scheduled football games with the major powerhouses in the country (Ohio State, Miami, Penn State, Nebraska and on and on) to get a piece of those huge stadium gates.  On those Saturdays it was always skinny David facing a giant Goliath and unlike the Biblical David, David's sling shot for Oregon rarely dropped the giant (at Ohio State players filled double rows of benches and their offense featured three enormous fullbacks taking turns crashing into Oregon's defensive line).  All elements of Leo Harris' conduct of Oregon athletic affairs were colored by the central focus of feeding Porky. 

And so it went, year after year, with Porky putting on weight until one fine day Leo Harris grabbed his sledge hammer and said,  "Thank you, Porky, for your years of loyal service but your work here is done." Leo had his $1,000,000 nest egg and now he sold 1,000 seats for $1,000 each (giving a 20 year licence to buy tickets for the best seats in the stadium.) The special section was filled with chair-back seats covered with a roof that held powerful electric heating units. Naming the stadium for alumnus Thomas J. Autzen brought in $250,000 (way too cheap) and the finished cost of the magnificent facility was $2.5 million. Unbelievable!

On September 23, 1967 the Colorado Buffaloes spoiled the opening of the stadium with a 17-13 win over the Ducks led by QB Eric Olson.  The years that followed buried that loss as Autzen earned its reputation as one of the premier football arenas in the nation.

For me it will always be LEO HARRIS STADIUM, Home of the Ducks.

Dealing With It-7 Where There's Smoke

                                          

Strauss Walker, John's cousin, lived in Los Angeles and rode a bus to Grants Pass to visit the Landers one summer.  In the course of their lives, he and John had developed an extremely close friendship.  At the end of his visit, John drove Strauss to the bus depot along with Eunice and Ella Maude.  There was much hugging and Strauss was tearing up a bit as he held Ella Maude and told her how he would miss her.  She too was shedding tears as she told him she also would miss him.  They all waved as the Greyhound pulled away and Ella Maude caught Eunice's sleeve and asked, "Who was that man?"

Our long term couch surfer had become a member of our family. Brought home like a stray cat by John, he seemed to fit our particular environment with his wit, his guitar playing of pub songs rendered with a nice "This ain't no good life, but it's my life" feeling. He had suffered infantile paralysis as a teen ager and it left him with a hump-back slonch-wise walk but after you knew Don and enjoyed his cheerful personality you never saw the disability. Don earned his keep by managing Ella Maude and he often said he marveled at how her mind worked. He would compliment her on her rock collection (Grandma picked up rocks from the fields around the house) which she kept in a corner of her room.  The rocks had no special features. They were just rocks.

One afternoon John was taking a walk and Don was reading on the couch when he thought he smelled smoke. When he investigated he found it was coming from Ella Maude's room but when he tried to open the door it wouldn't budge.  He put his shoulder to it and managed to get it open a few inches so he could look through the gap where he saw Ella Maude across the room with a maniacal look on her face. She had set fire to a wad of newspapers and it was a chest of drawers she had slid over to block the door.  Don was screaming at Ella Maude who selected one of her prize rocks and like Babe Ruth lobbing one in from deep center field, she drilled McDougal right between the eyes.  He dropped like a pole-axed ox but the day was saved by Eunice who had returned from the chicken house and with an adrenaline fueled lunge,  moved the door enough for her to get in and stomp out the fire.  

Don rallied and helped Eunice with Ella Maude while she cleaned up the mess.  The two of them removed the door from the middle bedroom. A close call.

Don moved on and a year or two later so did Ella Maude to the Granite Hill cemetery out River Road from Grants Pass. Many years later curiosity prompted me to visit the cemetery and I brushed the dirt and twigs from her stone marker.  I did notice the leaves on the tree overhanging her grave were kind of crinkled and strange looking. 

                                                              Roll the credits

                                                     Editor                      Jeffrey Landers

                                          Key Witness                       Bill Landers

                                                Catering                        Russellville Park

                                               Best Boy                         Methuselah

                William Tell Overture Music                       Lone Ranger

                                                   Drugs                         Grants Pass Pharmacy

                                                        

                                                            ############

                                                              

Dealing With It-6. Run, Grandma, Run

                                              

Eunice was the first to notice that she hadn't seen Ella Maude for awhile.  Not in her room. Not anywhere outside that she could see. "Have you seen your mother?," she asked John. He hadn't seen her and now Eunice was increasingly concerned. John said, "Let's give it a couple or three weeks and see if she shows up."  Eunice had just told him that they had better call the Sheriff's office when the phone rang.  It was the police station in Grants Pass and they had Ella Maude.  She had told them a disturbing story and the policeman asked Eunice and John to come into the station.

She had carefully timed her move when nobody saw her leave the house and she crossed the Redwood Highway, where she flagged down an eastbound car (she knew which direction to go) and told the driver she was fleeing from a threat to her life and needed to get to the police.  The story she told the police was that she had not been given food for three days. After the police established that the old lady was in no danger of being murdered (they probably understood why she might be) they sent her home.

From time to time Grandma would make another run for it and a policeman (who Eunice and John were now on a first-name basis with) would call and say, "Grandma's back."

At another placement in cosmic time Ella Maude might have won fame in Vegas as a standup comic because her timing was dead on. Dinner time became her favorite venue.  John was known for misplacing things (he was always losing his cane) but when his false teeth went missing from his night stand jar where he put them at bedtime, it became a three or four day mystery.  Then his mother made her appearance at dinner one evening with those choppers wedged in her mouth, sticking out in a bizzare face-mask from hell. Virginia almost went under the table laughing, as did Bill and Mary. John, of course, exploded with a lot of new words and Eunice lost it.  "Good God," she gasped as she sprung up and snatched the teeth out of Ella Maude's mouth.

Another dinner with a slow start and no dessert.  You think that's hard to top? Don't leave.

                                                     (To be continued)

Dealing With It-5 The Pot Is Boiling

                                                  

Ella Maude Landers was programmed to always keep the pot boiling.  At 5' 4" and probably not close to 100 lbs., she was in good health and active for her 87 years. Virginia asked our mother once if it was old age that made Grandma act the way she did and Eunice replied, "No, she's been like that as long as I've known her." Over a lifetime of loading her disruptive tool kit, she had learned how to discover other people's sensitive buttons and her timing at pushing them was exquisite and creative.  Particularly on her son, John Earl. 

It's dinner time around the large round table in the dining room and Eunice lets Ella Maude know by calling into her bedroom (once Bill's bedroom). Ella Maude makes her appearance  wearing a pair of her son's long-john underwear as a pullover sweater, her head through the back flap and each arm down a leg. This leaves the rest of the garment forming an attractive cape down her back.

Let us hear from her son: "Jesus Christ !" as he kicks back out of his chair and storms outside. Another successful mission accomplished.  Or at another dinner Grandma might go into the kitchen and return with a can of Bon-Ami scrubbing compound and shake it liberally on her hamburger patty, take a bite and announce, "My, you don't know what a difference that makes."

Grandma had some classics that she would return to with satisfying effect.  One of Eunice's church friends might be visiting and Ella Maude would say to her, "I couldn't help noticing that lovely locket you're wearing.  I had one that was exactly like it right down to the color of the side stones.  One day it just came up missing."  The implication being that the lady had sneaked into Ella Maude's room and stolen it from her jewel box. And of course, it could work for clothing, purses, whatever the target might be showing. 

One of her favorites acts earned the name, "She's gone again."  To which Virginia, Mary and Bill would offer up a prayer: "Please, God, let it be true."

                                                                                (To be continued)

Dealing With It-4 Ella Maude

                                                       

The new house had three bedrooms.  John and Eunice took the front one with Bill in the middle and the two girls in the back one. John's new friend, Don McDougal, who he met at the Wonder Bur Tavern in Grants Pass and invited home for dinner, had been surfing the living room couch for a number of months.  More about Don later.  Eunice was the glue holding everything together and she had an apparently inexhaustible reservoir of tolerance for difficult circumstances.

On a sunny summer afternoon a massive addition to that reservoir occurred. John's mother, Ella Maude, had lived with John's family in La Grande until his accident on the railroad that sent him to Portland.  Then she was sent to live in Baker, Oregon with her older son, Bill Beckwith.

The big Buick came roaring into the driveway, much too fast.  A blast of the horn brought everybody in the house out the front door to see the driver, John's older half-brother Bill Beckwith, opening the trunk of his car and removing a huge suitcase which he placed next to the porch.  Without a word he opened the Buick's passenger-side door to escort Ella Maude Landers,  John's and Bill's 87-year-old mother, to join the family members. He came face-to-face with John and said, "I'm bringing her back, John. I can't take her anymore." Then he returned to the Buick and did a power back-out of the driveway and a gravel throwing exit onto the Redwood Highway as he headed back to Baker, Oregon.

The only one in the gobstruck group left standing outside the open door to the house who seemed completely at ease with the situation was Ella Maude.  There was no hugging.  Adding Ella Maude to

 the family dynamic was like putting a dollop of Ex-Lax into an omelette but that wouldn't become apparent until later.  

                                                                   (To be continued)

Dealing With It-3 Disaster

                                                     

                                                           

The master plan for the neophyte farmers was to raise chickens like Major Karl's (White Leghorns) and harvest their eggs to sell to a middle-man marketer with whom Major would connect them.  A couple of milk cows would graze in the six-acre pasture and the pig pen would be home for a couple of oinkers preparing for their date with the hired bacon and sausage maker.

Major Karl supervised construction of a large chicken house with salvage lumber from a small shut- down saw mill he knew about. He hired a couple of workers to assist him and the chicken house started to take shape.  One day Eunice took the children into town for some ice cream treats while she shopped  for a couple of items. It would be the family's last connection to anything related to fun for the next few months. On their return as they approached the house they saw the terrible sight of a smoking pile of black embers surrounded by the concrete foundation that now etched the outline of what had once been their home.  The shock of shattered lives was dealt with by John's and Eunice's concern for their children.  Hard times.  Hard times.

The chicken house construction crew had spotted smoke coming out of the roof and rushed up to the house to find the entire top of the structure in flames.  They managed to get Eunice's upright piano and a sectional book case out of the house before it collapsed.  Faulty wiring was blamed for the fire.

How John and Eunice managed to find money for insurance premiums in those Depression years is amazing but they did.  And like a Phoenix rising from the ashes of its predecessor, a grand new, three bedroom house with indoor plumbing (goodbye outdoor privy) and a kitchen with a breakfast-nook appeared a few months later.

So we have a glorious happy ending, right?  Uh, not exactly.

(To be continued)

Dealing With It-2 Cast of Charcters

                                                             

                                      

It's unfortunate that the family's move to Grants Pass was too early for TV cameras to track the drama of those Landers Family adventures.  You wouldn't need scriptwriters because the dialogue just bubbled up from the interactions of the individual players.

John Earl was in his forties when the first daughter, Virginia Helen, made her appearance in 1927 followed by William Charles in 1930.  Mary Ella filled out the cast in 1932.  John had been a warrior. He ran away from home when he was 17 to join the US Army and his mother, Ella Maud Landers, was so overjoyed to see him gone she signed the papers for his underage enlistment.  He celebrated his 18th birthday in the Philippine Islands as a part of the United States' deployment to put down the Philippine Insurrection of 1902. While there he went with a detachment of soldiers sent to China to join other European nations putting down the Boxer Rebellion.

John returned to America where he used money he had stashed playing poker to attend a couple of years in college in Kansas then signed up again in the Army under Black Jack Pershing to chase Pancho Villa around northern Mexico.  It was this General Pershing army that formed the core of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) that went to France in World War I.  By then he was a top Sergeant in his regiment.

Eunice Elizabeth Ramsdell was in nurse's training when she and John were married in Cove, Oregon on the 21st of June, 1922.

Virginia was a top student who took violin lessons and became an accomplished player.

William (Bill) was a particularly fine looking boy who was intellectually advanced above his school peers. Good hair.

Mary was last kid who was blessed with a friendly demeanor that set the tone for sibling harmony.

John's mother, Ella Maud, was sent by God to test the forbearance of all the other dwellers on the planet Earth.

Couch surfer Don McDougal became a beloved semi-member of the clan.

Editorial note: This series makes no attempt do be a definitive account of all those family years on the Redwood Highway.  The intention is to give a snapshot of one of the more entertaining periods that features a family member who had a bag of tricks that never emptied. The full appreciation of her force field is difficult to capture with words.

Stand by with the cameras.  Something big is about to happen.

                                                            (To be continued)

Dealing With It -1 Southerly Migration

Only those of us with a low Social Security number will remember going to the Saturday matinee in anticipation of viewing the short thriller that preceded the featured movie.  It was a continuing drama designed to bring us back to spend our dime to find out how the protagonist escaped the terrible fate awaiting him/her at the end of last week's episode. 

But while these episodes are brought to life from that other century,  I will give them a Twenty-first Century TV series format where it was like you were waiting each week to see what mischief Tony Soprano was up to. This will be a series about the family I grew up with.  The series name is, Dealing With It.  There will be seven episodes. Followers of this blog may have no interest in reading about my family so go back to your TV and watch Coronavirus news until July 9 when I'll be back with non-family episodes.

                                                      

                                      Dealing With It-1      Southerly Migration

                                                                                                              

In 1937 my parents, John and Eunice Landers, moved our family from La Grande, Oregon to a six and a half acre farm seven miles west of Grants Pass, Oregon, on the Redwood Highway. Here's how our southerly migration came to pass...

John had been friends for years with Major Karl. Major (his name, not his rank) lived outside Grants Pass, Oregon where he raised egg-laying chickens on a three acre farm.  He was the brother of the wife  of John's older step-brother, Bill Beckwith. Major sold John on the plan to buy a farm and live on the bounty of the land (eat what you can, what you can't eat you can.) Major promised to teach him everything he needed to know about making that work. 

A year and a half before the move John had suffered a serious accident while working as a railroad switch tender for the Union Pacific Railroad.  One night he swung off the engine to throw a switch and his pants leg caught on a hose hook causing him to be swung under the engine and having it run over his right leg. It was, of course, a bloody mass of flesh and bone which the doctors planned to amputate but John ruled that out and so he was sent to St. Vincent Hospital in Portland where he came under the care of one Dr. Dodson. A year later, after multiple surgeries,  John, with his cane, walked out of St. Vincent where Eunice awaited him in their new 1937 Dodge touring car. The railroad had settled his claim for 10,000 Depression-era dollars.

"Eunice," John said, "Let's pack up and move as far away as possible from the Union Pacific Railroad.  Let's go see Major Karl."

                                                         (To be continued)

Crime Pays

I was attending the University of Oregon in 1950 when I received a phone call from my older sister, Virginia, calling from Grants Pass. "Did you have a little problem with the Portland Police last summer?" she asked me. Oh, that.  "As a matter of fact we did have a small misunderstanding, but why do you ask?" She told me she had intercepted a phone call from the Multnomah County Court instructing me to appear before them the following month regarding my arrest for minor in possession of alcoholic beverages last summer.  She gave me the date and the place to appear and said she had not mentioned this call to our mother.  How do you put a dollar value on an older sister?

I was on the down-state football All-Star team that played in the inaugural Shrine All-Star game in 1948 and as a player I received two complimentary passes to all future games. So the next summer I thought it would be fun to attend that year's game and see all my teammates from the year before. I invited a friend from Grants Pass to attend the game with me and we drove to Portland in his car. After the game there was a get together of former players from both teams that my friend couldn't get into, so we agreed to meet at a later time that night.  I fell in with a bunch of guys who had played against us from the Metro All-Stars and one thing led to another and we all thought it would be a grand idea to buy a case of beer and go up above Grant High School and pop some caps. I stressed I had to be back to our meeting place at the appointed hour and away we went.

Do police show up when clueless young boys gather in a neighborhood and drink beer and make noise and pee in people's bushes? Yes they do. I remember this big policeman greeting us and saying, "Well, well, look at this. A bunch of little juvenile delinquents."  Short story: My new friends ratted me out as the beer buyer and I was incarcerated at the 2nd & Pine police station and then released at 2:30 AM.  Missed my ride home.  About $1.50 in my pocket. A little tired and a bit hung over. Time to walk from downtown Portland to where I could start hitch-hiking home to Grants Pass. It's not easy being young and stupid.

Showed up for my appearance to rat out the beer seller. A clerk told me to stop at the desk on the way out to pick up my check.  Check?  Round trip mileage from Grants Pass to Portland. Yowsa! A big wealth infusion for that poor college boy. Crime pays.

Whoop, whoop !

The best Reuben sandwich on the planet Earth is served along with two carrot sticks and a scoop of terrific potato salad plus a slice of dill pickle at the Goose Hollow Inn, in Portland, Oregon. Thank John Elwood "Bud" Clark for that and for making his tavern a beloved institution in the Rose City, right up there with Powell's Books. In 1967 Bud opened his tavern and over the years built a diverse clientele of Portlanders that included doctors, lawyers, mill hands, college students, artists, anarchists, you-name-it.

I became a regular in 1975 and when a movement started as a joke in 1985 to run Bud as a candidate for Mayor of Portland, I signed on. The joke turned into serious business as patrons of the Goose were organized into an army of canvassers who spread out through the city to carry the word about our favorite bar-keep.

I was working a district in southeast Portland when I entered a large trailer park and knocked on the door of one of the units.  The door flew open and I was confronted by a plus-size matron who cut loose on me with a loud dose of her displeasure at being disturbed.  Her anger grew more intense until she finally paused to catch her breath which gave me a chance to say to her (as a way of giving her more fuel for outrage) "I suppose asking to use your restroom is completely out of the question?"  I stepped back expecting a bigger explosion but her demeanor suddenly changed. In a calm, almost kind voice she said to me, "Do you really have to go?" I stuttered out something like, "No, no I'm OK...sorry to have disturbed you and be sure to vote for Bud Clark."

She apparently did because Bud won in a landslide and went on to serve two terms before retiring from public life. His victory made national news and he even appeared on Johnny Carson.  Johnny got Bud to demonstrate an unusual verbal tic: sometimes, for no apparent reason, Bud would add a little, "Whoop, whoop!" to the end of declarative sentences; it drove many of his staff members nuts. We must forgive that small idiosyncrasy because Bud Clark created the world's greatest Reuben sandwich.

Hello Halls

Memories of hiking the forest trails that are within walking distance of downtown Portland (Stephen Wright says everything is within walking distance if you have the time) are fading as the virus plague dictates I must not leave this building I call home. I know exercise is as important as food and water to keep me in the race (my doctors agree) and so I improvise.  My front room is now a gym where I lift bar bells, do body lifts (bent over a stool with legs held down by heavy coffee table)  squats, sit-ups, back arching. And last, The Halls.

My resident building is a huge square, five story structure with a courtyard in the center. Apartments open to the outside and to the overview of the courtyard inside. Each four-side hallway is 1/7th of a mile so you make seven loops and you've walked a mile. It could be tunnell-boredom if you let it but the trick is, don't let it.

Each apartment has a small shelf next to the door and residents decorate their shelves in various ways that make a small bit of interest for the stroller.  Some of these are quite elaborate (mine is very simple: a round disc of wood cut from a log with bark still on the edges. In the center I have printed with my wood-burning tool: METHUSELAH REPORTS WORLD HEADQUARTERS).  Whoever selected the carpet for the hallways gets two thumbs up.  The pattern flows vertically ahead of you as you walk with no horizontal lines that would create the feeling of "breaking barriers".

My apartment on the third floor is almost at the end of one hall so every day I leave my apartment and go left to the next hall, then the next hall, then next hall that brings me to the stairway and elevator.  At this point I am one hall short of a complete loop for 1/7th of a mile.  But now I go down the stairs to the second floor and do three loops.  Then I take the elevator to the fifth floor and do two loops.  Then I go down the stairs to the fourth floor and do one loop.  That leaves me one hallway short of seven loops.  I make that up by going down the stairs to Three and walking that hall to my door.  Seven loops, Willy boy,  And another fun-filled journey generating almost more excitement than one aging citizen can deal with.

The Grayback Boys

In the 1940s all Oregon high school principals were ex-coaches. Simple reason: academic teachers did their post-grad college studies in their academic disciplines while coaches did theirs in administration.  School boards hired administrators to run the schools.

Frank Thomas was Principal of Grants Pass High School when I was a student there in the late '40s and he had a belief that the way to assure getting voters to approve school budgets was to have winning athletic teams.  In my freshman, sophomore and junior years our football teams were not winners. Scores against traditional rivals Medford and Klamath Falls would be like 72-0 and 56-0. The final humiliation came my junior year when we lost to Roseburg for the first time in 30 years.

So Frank Thomas hired the Roseburg coach, Mel Ingram, a full-blooded Native American graduate of Gonzaga University where he had been an all-star letterman in three sports.  Coach Ingram was not soft-spoken and he detested losing.

His first move was to gather together prominent leaders of the business community and pick their pockets for some serious dollars.  He then took volunteer work crews to the Grayback campground in the Siskiyou mountains that had been constructed by Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) in the 1930s.  The CCC barracks were swept clean and filled with cots.  Refrigeration was brought into the kitchen of the mess tent and stocked with food. The playground became a football practice field and the beaten-down Grants Pass High School football players were rounded up, put on a bus and shipped off for two weeks of boot camp hell.

Reveille was at 6:00 AM for a turnout to calisthenics led by a coach (coaches of all the sports were in camp) then a fallout to breakfast. And what a breakfast! The full Monty.  Bacon, eggs, fried potatoes pancakes, milk, OJ.  Most of us had never seen such a display of food. And every meal was like that.

After breakfast came chalk talk with open playbooks and coaches explaining the new system (T-formation). Mel Ingram officiated college football games for the Pacific Coast Conference on Saturdays and he brought back innovations he saw there in both offense and defense to incorporate into his own schemes. At 10:00 we would put on pads and scrimmage until noon. The first couple of days were fairly light drills aimed at getting everybody into shape but then things got serious.

After lunch it was more chalk talk until 3:00 when we would suit up again (slimy wet pads from the morning sweat) and get back to full speed hitting.  Twelve days of that.  Not everyone made it through to the end.  One night a car might go down the mountain taking a drop-out to Grants Pass and in the morning there would be an empty cot in the bunk house.  My bunk mate, Shifty-hips Pollock, was a running back who dazzled the creatures, particularly the turtles, who watched our drills from the surrounding forest (his time for the mile today at his home in Bend, Oregon is just under forty-five minutes).

The team Mel Ingram led off the mountain went into the season of 1947 with no fear of any opponent. A loss to Marshfield (Coos Bay) killed a chance to go on to the state playoffs.  However, the next year the Grants Pass Caveman went all the way to win the state championship, starting long years of winning seasons. Today's football Cavemen play their home games on Mel Ingram field.

And Frank Thomas kept passing his school budgets, which led to construction of a spectacular college-like campus for the high school.

A Different America

The enemy that united America in the early 1930s was the continuing collapse of the national economy: unemployment, extreme poverty, hopelessness.  All across the nation young men were drifting from their family homes, hitting the road to somewhere, looking for something better.  And it created a culture in the country of a willingness to give support to those migrant rovers whenever possible.  Like providing a meal or shelter from a storm.  My mother, Eunice Landers, never turned away a hungry drifter.

Like Wiley Omohundro.  In his early 20s, Wiley was a lanky, tall kid from Michigan who came to our door one day and asked mother if she could spare some food. Wiley might have been a bit slow but he had a friendly, smiling face and he, of course, immediately won over my mother. She prepared Wiley a big fried chicken sandwich on home baked bread with a large glass of milk and while Wiley put that away she listened to his backstory.  Wiley hung around, doing odd jobs and eating for a few months (mother named him Wiley O'Imhungryo). He split wood. He cleaned irrigation ditches.  He went swimming in the Applegate river.

He helped mother can peaches where she taught him to not squeeze the fruit to get it into the jars.  He told her about helping his father move chickens from one chicken house to another one night and how his father told him to hold these three chickens by their legs and not let them go and how he got confused and just let them go and how his father yelled at him.  That was Wiley.

One day Wiley hit the road, never to be heard from again.  The clouds of war were gathering so Riley probably had a military future, hopefully in the commissary.

The New Normal

Sitting on my couch I dozed off while watching a rerun of Singing In The Rain and experienced the most vivid...I guess you'd call it a dream, instructing me how to prepare for the future after Coronavirus.  I knew I had better write down the instructions because I don't trust my memory.

Here is what I did as instructed:  cut a tea bag open and dumped the contents into a cup.  Added a  pinch of hair from my recent self-given haircut (retrieved from the rug), then 3 TRUTH BUDS purchased from the country fair in Eugene, Oregon in 1974. I boiled water from the bucket of collected rainfall on my balcony and poured it into the cup.  After two hours I drained the water  and spread the mixture on a baking sheet where I shaped it to look like the Andromeda galaxy.

You may find this hard to believe but it is absolutely true even though trying to describe it is difficult.  When I viewed the baking sheet of dried tea leaves the next morning the spiral galaxy had taken the form of a cursive The Prince, suggesting to me I should take my volume of The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, published in 1532, and lay it open on the table. Something moved the pages, perhaps a breeze from the wings of a butterfly in some far off sylvan glade, and this passage seemed to glow on a page: Nations and individuals will always do what is best for their own self interest.  

Now doesn't that suck?  The freaking new normal is going to be just like the old normal.  And pretty much the same as the normal back there in 1532. Who said The past is prologue?

Burn The Game Film

The Oregon Ducks have had glorious days playing football since that first game against the northern powerhouse Albany College whom they took to the woodshed, 41-12.  When good old boys sit around and fish out particular plays from long-ago games, one contest nobody wants to remember is the Liberty Bowl of 1960 (I have trouble making my fingers work here).

Playing in Bowl games is important to football programs because it is a valuable recruiting tool to show young prospects that your program is successful.  So when Oregon was invited to play in the second year of the Liberty Bowl against Penn State they agreed even knowing it was not really a prestige venue.

As an administrator in the Student Union I was  assigned to look after Oregon's rally squad of six girls for the trip.  We arrived in New York early on game day and since we did not have to be at the Philadelphia Memorial Stadium until the middle of the afternoon, I agreed to accompany the girls on a short walkabout in the Big Apple before taking the train down to Philly.  When we returned to the Penn station where we had left our luggage in lockers, we discovered two of the ancient storage units wouldn't open.  The locks, somehow, were jammed.

Desperate times, desperate measures.  I sent the girls on the train while I stayed to get the lockers opened.  I gave them money for cabs in Philadelphia, not knowing that the city had, the night before, experienced the largest snow storm in decades and everything was shut down.  The stadium was a giant bowl of snow ice cream, the seats covered under enormous drifts.

Meanwhile, back in New York, I began a frustrating quest to find help getting into the jammed lockers. It was the middle of the third quarter before I got to the game to find the two non-uniformed rally girls crying.  The playing field had been cleared of snow as well as a few seat benches at the top of the stadium.  There were no fans.  Bobby Darin, who was hired to sing at half-time was sitting with the few Oregon fans on the cleared benches. I thought I heard him humming, "Please, God, get me out of here."

Penn State 41. Oregon 12.

It was getting late by the time we arrived back in New York.  "OK, girls, we're running low on money so vote on this: A couple of rooms for the night or we go to The Village Gate and see Nina Simone in which case we spend the night trying to sleep in chairs at the United Airlines boarding gate. Six to 0 for Nina.

The high point of the entire disaster for me was at the Salt Lake City airport on our way home.  We were all seated next to the crew cabin in our game day clothes, when the pilots left before a new flight crew took over.  As the lead pilot went by us he told his co-pilot, "Tell them to check the framis (whatever the part was) on number two.  It didn't look right coming in."  When the new crew came in, one of our girls caught the Captain's sleeve and said, "I think you should check the framis on number two.  It didn't sound right when we were landing."  The pilot jumped back and just looked at her in shock before going into the cabin.