Jesse,You Out There, Boy?

Do you know anyone named Jesse?  Neither do I.  I wonder why parents stopped naming their little boy babies Jesse. It really is a fine name that is easy to spell and easy to remember.  When you hear the name you probably think of either Jesse James or Jesse Owens, both of whom made their claim to fame way, way back in those other centuries.

It is my belief that Jesse James owes his notoriety in large measure to the alliteration of the two names.  After he robbed a bank or a train his name just rolled off the tongues of the lawmen.  "Yes, it was Jesse James who shot the engineer.  Jesse James."  If Jesse had been born to Ethyl and Ignatius Snodgrasse the lawmen would would have just said, "Yeah, it looks like it was Snodgrasse on the train shoot."

A case could be made for calling Jesse Owens the greatest athlete of all time.  In the 1936 Olympics, Jesse set five world records and tied a sixth, all in the space of about 21 minutes.  His long jump record stood for 25 years. One might surmise that the next 9,827 boy babies born after Owens dazzled the Olympic spectators (except you, Adolph) would have had  "Jesse" inscribed on the birth certificates.  Didn't happen.

Then there was Jesse Applegate who made his bones on the Oregon Trail by blazing a southern trail across the Cascade Mountains into the Willamette Valley thereby giving settlers an easier option than the dangerous Barlow Trail or the treacherous Columbia River. A southern Oregon river bears his name and his grave is the only interesting attraction in Yoncalla, Oregon.

So come on people, now, (remember that early '70s song by Jesse Colin Young?) let's all get together and do right by the name, "Jesse."  How about a baby boy, Jesse Jones? Or a Jesse Jerome (instead of Harry Jerome)? Does anyone have "Hesse" as a last name?  That would be cool.  Jesse Hesse.

Oh, wait...Holy sh--! JESSE HELMS. Yikes. OK. Class dismissed.  Enough with the Jesses. Stick with Johns and Jons and Michaels.  No more Jesses.

Funny You Should Ask

People like to laugh and will be attracted to anyone or anything that will make that happen.  I'm no exception and I consider my most precious asset to be that small pocket in my brain that is still functioning where I store funny memories. With so many of my body parts reaching their shelf life, I think it might be prudent to record some of the contents of that humor locker before the whole thing goes dark.

Fred Allen was one of the early radio comedians and wrote great material.  He once made reference to his agent by saying if the man's heart was crammed into the navel of a mosquito, it would rattle around like a bee-bee in a box car.

I quoted Sam Levenson once in a letter to a friend when my four children were young inmates in our home: Insanity is hereditary; you can get it from your children.

My sister Mary had some major surgery recently and in the recovery room as she began to come around the lead nurse leaned in close to her face and said, "Say your name." Mary said, "Your name."
It runs in the family.

I had the good fortune to have my life overlap with that of Dorothy Parker.  This is my favorite of her many contributions:

I only drink one martini,

I sometimes have two at the most;

Three I'm under the table,

Four I'm under the host.

My father, John Earl, was a funny man.  He was also a warrior who ran away from home at 17 to join the  army and his mother was so happy to see him gone she signed the papers to facilitate his underage enlistment (she came to live with us when I was growing up but that's another 103 blogs). In 1902 he found himself in the Philippine Islands fighting the fierce Moro natives and then, later, his unit was sent to China to take part in the Boxer Rebellion. He fought alongside Black Jack Pershing chasing Pancho Villa around northern Mexico and that army formed the core of the AEF that went to France in World War I. In all those adventures he took a liking to adult beverages and he claimed drinking caused him to fall victim to Syncopation which he defined as irregular movement from bar to bar.  A friend of his told me he once ran into my father at one of their hang-outs in Grants Pass called the Wonder Bur and said to him, "Hi, John, how's it going?" My father replied, "I've been having a little trouble with yers."  His friend said, "What's yers?"  My father said,"Oh, thanks, I'll have another Budweiser."

My friend, Bill Bowerman, the legendary coach of Track and Field at the University of Oregon and co-founder of Nike, was born funny and never got over it. The steeplechase race in track involves running and hurdling and at one of the hurdles there is a water pit that must be cleared by the runners.  One spring day Bill's attention was drawn to the pit where the water was covered by a floating mass of larva.  "Get me a jar from the grounds shed," Bill instructed one of his runners.  He then scooped the larva into the jar.

Bill had an army of track volunteers who acted as officials for putting on the meets and these fan-volunteers included doctors, lawyers and other professionals from the business community.  Many of them had offices downtown in a building with a large atrium that featured a rock-surrounded pond and it was there that Bill gave his captive larva their new home.  He was delighted to learn some days later that chaos ensued with screaming secretaries running about when the hatch became multi-winged frying creatures filling the air.

Let's see, there's more. Do you have another 14 hours?

by area

Who Thought That First?

If you ever imagined you had an original thought it probably wasn't. Consider all the creatures who have ever lived on this earth who could pass the classification test of being human.  Now suppose you could give name to and list all the thoughts all those individuals have had in their lifetime. Whoeeeeee.  That's a lot of thoughts, Pilgrim. So let's play a little game:  Guess who claims to have first thought the following:

Given that nearly half the citizens of the USA believe President Trump to be an inspired leader, who first thought people don't need facts to support belief?  Give up?  Julius Caesar, 74 (approximately) B.C. said, "Men willingly believe what they wish."  Somebody before Julius might have had the same thought (and probably did) but didn't have an army and followers who wrote down everything he said.

Who first thought accumulating great wealth doesn't guarantee great happiness? No, not Bill Gates.
Socrates. 459 B.C.  "Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods."

Who first thought, if it were not for my compulsion to devote my life to helping others to be successful and constantly sharing my acquired financial resources with those in need,  I would be a wealthy, serene, senior citizen, basking in the loving adoration of all whose lives I have touched?
Yes.  William Landers, November 1, 2019.

" I Want More."

The bullies in the cruel orphanage who forced Oliver Twist to go up after the evening meal and ask for more gruel inadvertently gave us a symbol of today's ultra-billionaires whose appetite for more gruel is never satiated. In this decade-long, top-heavy boom, the 1 percenters keep going back for more.  Unlike Oliver, who falls under the influence of the evil Fagin, they become Fagin, using their power of the purse to keep their good times rolling.

In the words of some prescient sage of another time, the rich are not like you and me. After getting more than would satisfy you and me, they want more.  Why would Tesla C.E.O. Elon Musk want to add to his accumulation of $23 billion by maintaining a work week of 80 to 90 hours?

"Elon, honey, do you want your eggs scrambled or fried?"
"Which is quickest?"

The distance between the wealth of the 1 percent and everybody else keeps growing but is not sustainable and the smartest of the upper group know it. An adjustment must come. I urge each of you to go on line and Google the Ted talk by Nick Hanauer, "The Pitch Forks Are Coming."  Don't miss this.

Bob Dylan gets the last word:

Yes 'n' how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn't see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind

Cop Tales

Ex-police officer, Lou Barrett, the charter member of our breakfast club, was the kind of cop you would want arresting you.  He starts you off with credit points for being human.  I know this from the stories he tells.

He and his partner spot a car pulled off to the side of the highway with the driver slumped over the steering wheel.  Lou knocks on the window with no response and so he opens the door and shakes the guy who finally comes around.  Lou tells him he was driving over 80 miles an hour and weaving all over the road until getting pulled over.  His partner says to the driver, "Who was that guy who jumped out of the car and ran across the field?

Long pause trying to remember: "Probably my brother but you'll never catch him because he's really fast."

Lou gets him out of the car and walks him around away from the edge of the highway and asks him where he was going.  The guy names a town about 80 miles in the opposite direction from the way the car is pointing.  Lou figures he has been there for awhile because he is pretty steady on his legs and he gives the guy bonus points for having pulled over and stopped driving.  But he can't leave him there with his car so he tells him he is going to give him a break and write him up for public drunkenness instead of DUI.

Lou said all the way back to the jail the guy is in the back seat singing, "A boy Named Sue."  Over and over.  The guy called out to Lou as they were leaving him in his cell, "I'll never forget you, officer, for saving my life back there."

Lou eats a large bowl of oatmeal with his black coffee every morning.  Over and over.

Confrontations With Strangers

The lubricating agent for social intercourse is civility.  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Christ addressed the need for civility by telling the multitudes to put aside, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.  If your cheek is injured, turn the other cheek"

Like so many things Jesus tells us to do, that one is hard. Just ask the guy currently occupying the White House. Or ask me.

Those of us who passed the finish line a long time ago spend an inordinate amount of time digging out little snapshots of incidents from the past; some for giggles, some for a deserved cringe.  Like what I call my probably 20-years-ago Dick Tracy episode.

I needed a refill of meds I was completely out of and so would have to wait for the pill guy to do his business.  No problem; I'll take my front section of the NY Times and go to Freddie's Starbucks and wait for the refill to be ready.  After dropping off the empty pill bottle at the pharmacy, I remembered we were out of the mints we always kept in the glove compartment so I rolled up the newspaper, stuck it in my back pocket and got in the checkout line to buy the mints.  As I cleared the checkout I heard the guy behind me say to the checkout girl, "He's stealing a paper." What?  This guy's talking about me? When I turned around the guy is embarrassed that I heard him and he won't look me in the eye. "Hey, Dick Tracy," I say to him while pulling the paper from my back pocket, "this is a paper I subscribe to and bring along to read while waiting for a prescription to be filled."

It's one of those "Gotch'ya" moments.  The poor guy looks around for some place in the store that doesn't include me, probably wishing he was in Anchorage, Alaska or any place but Milwaukie, Oregon. The checkout girl is confused, embarrassed and wondering how I knew the guy's name was Dick Tracy. It's plain that it's time to strike the set of this little social melodrama, so I leave.  Jesus frowns.

Looking back now I see my angry reaction to being called a thief (Newspaper headline: "Heist of New York Times in Fred Meyers Foiled By Alert Citizen") triggered an over-reaction.  Forget the Dick Tracy business: just turn around and say, "This is a paper I subscribe to" and leave.  I wish I had done that.

About This Girl I Knew

I was older but she was wiser.  Georgann tried to keep it a secret from me that she was smarter than I was and she made all her friends promise not to tell me.  Of course, I had figured that out 15 minutes after we first met.

As the cutest girl in Crow High School, she was a pom pom twirler who, after graduation, was recruited, along with three other girls from northern states, by an all Black college in Mississippi who needed white girls to dot the "i"s in their band's cursive spell-out maneuver.  I'm pretty sure that's true. Too far from home, she decided, and instead chose Southern Oregon College in Ashland for her continuing education.

There were distractions (fermented hops, the Applegate River) but she left SOC with an Mrs degree and pursued a banking career with First National Bank, soon to become Wells Fargo.  Fast-forward 10 years or so and Georgann has removed McNeal as her last name and replaced it with Landers.  She has immersed her daughter, Kathleen, in Catholicism at All Saints Elementary and Central Catholic High School and now points her toward Eugene and the University of Oregon.

Then a life-changing course explosion: The mature mother of one resolves to go back to finish that original quest for knowledge and she does exactly that.  She took to the rhythms of college classes like an alcoholic finding a key to the keg cellar.  Straight "A" all the way in Economics.  And then that walk across the stage in cap and gown to claim her Honors degree with a smile that lit the arena.

She retired as a Vice President of Wells Fargo Bank.