What A Car !

Of all the automobiles I've owned in my lifetime, I rank my two-door Model A coupe, the one with the kapooka-kapooka-kapooka sound of the motor running that matched the beating of my heart, far and away my favorite.  You need heat, open the vent to the engine room.  Need more room while watching the submarine races with a friend, pull straight up on the gear shift between the driver and the passenger and it swings up next to the steering wheel. Brakes?  Stomp a floor pedal with your right foot and it presses friction pads against a spinning drum.  Hope for the best.  From time to time braking will elicit loud screams from the riders.  Some models had a two-passenger rumble seat that opened up in place of a trunk (the height of cool).  Mine didn't have a rumble seat.

I bought it for $75 while still in high school and in 1949 it delivered me to the University of Oregon. After the 1950 Christmas break, my friend Del Weaver rode back from Grants Pass to the University with me.  Between Grants Pass and Eugene there are lange mountains and the highway was old 99 with its two killer lanes. On the day we headed north a horrendous snow storm struck the state and at the first mountain pass the state patrol stopped traffic, allowing only cars with chains to proceed.  Chains? Model A coupes don't need chains.  As soon as the patrolman was distracted with new arrivals, we swooped around the back-up line and continued our now very exciting journey.

It was going OK, a little slipping, a little sliding, and then we came to the next mountain pass and traffic has slowed way down. "This is bad," I told Del.  "Because if we ever stop on this uphill grade, we are dead."  Our decisions so far had been brilliant and it was time for another one of those. I swung out and passed any car we caught up to and our luck held (a few close ones with oncoming traffic) as we hit the summit.

The long downhill we saw had cars stacked up,  stopped cold. Apparently there was a wreck somewhere down the line.  With those primitive Model A mechanical brakes I had no way of stopping and traffic was oncoming on my left.  The only choice I had was the right hand shoulder and I took it, screaming past the stalled traffic now on my left, honking my pathetic horn (uga, uga, uga), with Del making strange gurgling noises and trying to grasp straps and bars that didn't exist.  People ahead of me who had left their cars were diving over banks off the shoulder to get out of my way.  Keeping traction was my only hope and we finally,got to the bottom of the hill.  We slipped past the fender-bender that had our lane blocked and found clear sailing the rest of the way. I recall the people we were passing seemed shocked and surly. 

Del observed that it was difficult to over praise the cool decision making shown by two determined scholars finding their way home.

The Throne

 I just read an account of the toilet seat (with lid) from Adolph Hitler's private bathroom at Berghof, his Bavarian retreat in the Alps, being sold at auction for $18,750.  At the end of World War II, a soldier named Ragnvald Borch was one the first Americans who entered Hitler's bunker and while his buddies looted all the good stuff, his only sad prize was Hitler's toilet seat.  He shipped it home to New Jersey where it hung in his basement until his son recently put it up for auction.

 It is rumored that the anonymous buyer of the Fuhrer's only throne was in fact Stephen Miller, the recent adviser to ex-president Donald Trump and designer of the administration's policy for separating parents from their children. According to a source close to Miller, the seat that once supported the Fuhrer as he contemplated important movements and that later hung in that New Jersey basement for 75 years, will now become a picture frame for the owner's favorite ruler and will hang (with proper lighting) in the Miller's master bedroom.

To obtain the tax write-off allowed for designating his bedroom a National Monument,  Miller will open his home to the public for one day (April 15) every year.

Streets Of Broken Dreams

My hometown, Portland, Oregon, is a mess.  It had an international reputation for its great restaurants, but the Coronavirus screwed that up when indoor dining went south.  Portland had a reputation for compassionate treatment of people down on their luck, so hundreds (maybe thousands) of life's punching bags came to River City to sample its hospitality.  They didn't leave.

Activities of right-wing terrorists and incidents of police brutality in cities across America with racial overtones brought protesters into the streets and local thugs joined the party using that army of marching protestors as a cover for vandalizing and looting Portland buildings.  Portland government response to the civil disorder was one of pathetic weakness and disorganization.

The traumatic impact on the economy dealt by the raging spread of COVID-19 only compounded the homeless issue. Portland's metro area today is blighted by hundreds of homeless encampments that continue to defy any way to deal with their existence.  Campers converted neighborhood lawns into public toilets and stole anything that wasn't bolted down.  Then they leave behind stinking mounds of garbage when they move to new plots.

So I take in all this civic distress from my third floor apartment overlooking the MAX Light Rail line that facilitates my occasional escape from cell 309.   Our departed Commander in Chief would say it is what it is, and maybe he would be right because no one has come up with a plan to solve the growing disaster.  It is not fair to ask Portland property owners or local businesses to pick up the tab for supporting these squatters and their friends from Floyds Knobs, Indiana.  It's a national problem and needs to be addressed as such. 

As for me, I'm alright, Jack.

Can You Handle The Truth?

You may or may not be familiar with Niccolo di Bernardo Machiavelli, a citizen of Florence, Italy, circa 1500. Let's call him Bernie.  When the Medici Family took control of Florence, Bernie was a political activist who sought a way to make himself viewed favorably by the new regime. So he wrote a book he titled,  The Prince.  It focused on advice for any ruler (Prince) who wished to be successful in maintaining his power.

Bernie gets a bad rap from critical historians who accuse him of being an immoral, brutal, atheist. He was only reporting what he observed over the decades of watching rulers come and go.  The honest, compassionate, rulers would go.  The brutal, lying, dishonest rulers would come.  Bernie was not judgmental, he was a truth teller.  And down through the centuries The Prince and a later work of his, The Art of War (not to be confused with the Sun Tzu book of the same title) became Bibles for despots.  His basic belief was that individuals and nations will always act in ways that serve their own self interests and if lying, brutal, immoral, behavior is necessary to make that happen, so be it.  It is better to be feared than it is to be loved, he wrote.

The recent travails of the 45th president of the United States brought Bernie to my mind.  Donald Trump doesn't read books (he got part way through The Art of The Deal because he wanted to see what his ghost writer wrote about him) but his mentor, Roy Cohen, did find Bernie's books the perfect texts for his pupil's education. It was said Adolph Hitler also kept The Prince on his night table.

So we need to give Bad News Bernie a break here in judging his character.  He was kind to his wife and both dogs while being generous to a fault. Yet he kept his prescient manuscripts at the top of the best sellers list. 

I Love A Mystery

It was broadcast on the radio at 8 PM every Monday through Friday.  I Love A Mystery, the story of Jack, Doc, and Reggie in their continuing perilous 15 minutes of adventures.  Each segment ended with a breathtaking threat to the lives of one or the other of the trio or maybe all three. Virginia, Bill, and Mary would never miss a date with Jack, Doc and Reggie to hear how they dodged the latest peril. 

Each of those characters had a distinctive voice so you always knew which one was talking and sound effects were an important feature of the program.  When the boys were lost in a bat cavern you could hear the swooshing of wings as the terrifying creatures swirled around our heroes.  And their voices would echo in the cavern.  Every sound coming out of the radio had a role to play in guiding your imagination.

We were not allowed to turn the volume up on the radio because our parents believed that would use more electricity.  Like bright lights use more juice than dim lights.  Perfect sense.  So the three of us would huddle around the speaker to listen to the harrowing adventures of Jack and his sidekicks.

Those three guys got into some god awful fixes but always managed to escape in the nick of time.  Their sponsors, Oxydol and Ivory soap were replaced by Fleishmanns Yeast and then the program just went off the air.  I'm not sure TV was any better than what our imaginations provided through the magic of all those sound effects. 

Happy Birthday To Me

At 4:15 AM on February 4, 1930 in LaGrande, Oregon, Eunice Elizabeth  Ramsdell Landers gave birth to a boy child who was blessed with the proper number of appendages and good hair.  The driver of a truck delivering fresh produce to the hospital claims to have seen a shooting star pass overhead at that precise moment and it coincided with the greatest financial depression our nation had ever experienced.  That baby boy, William Charles Landers, was destined to have absolutely nothing to do with the recovery from that cataclysmic event, but he didn't start it.  It was the stock market crash a few months earlier that did the damage.

After 91 years, one is tempted to ask, "Well, what happened since that seminal event?"  Paraphrasing Johnny Carson assessing the quality of his programs over the years,  there were peaks and there were valleys.  On this anniversary of my arrival I will share a couple of random memories that made me laugh out loud. 

It was in the middle '70s after the collapse of the Portland Storm football team (let's forget that one) and I'm driving to make a sales call on Dufer High School in the high central plains of Oregon.  My radio is playing country western music and the disc jockey ques up Bobby Bare's newest recording:  Drop Kick Me Jesus Through The Goal Posts Of Life.  Yes, I laughed out loud.  Bobby never made it big with that one (or any other one) but on that dull drive to a dull school he went to the top of my charts..

In those radio days of the 1940s, Fred Allen along with Jack Benny (This is a stick-up. Your money or your life. Benny:....long pause, I'm thinking, I'm thinking) were huge stars. I read a Fred Allen biography and in it he discusses the importance of choosing the right agent to represent your interests.  "Don't select an affable, good natured, grandfather type", he writes, "choose a vicious bulldog. Take my agent: if you crammed his heart into the navel of a mosquito, it would rattle around like a bee bee in a freight car."

Twenty-four hours in a day; 365 days in a year; 91 years in a life (so far). Laughter ensued.

Making Do-2

My post titled Making Do malfunctioned and went out without the concluding limerick. So this post will complete that one.  As it turned out the malfunction was a true blessing.  I sent the post out to my blog group on regular email and got a tremendous response from old friends that I have printed out and saved. Yes, yes, a blessing.

This place where I live is okay

If you like doing nothing each day

Excitement is rare

'til you fall down the stair

"Don't move him, just let him lay".

No harm in the fall has been done

I'm up, I can walk, I can run 

 That drama is through

We need something new

Or it's back to the jigsaws for fun.

(Acknowledgement of truth:  There was no fall.  I just needed a rhyme for "rare")