Do You Believe In Miracles?

 Tom Blanchard played 11 years in the NFL as a punter and backup quarterback (if all other QBs were out of commission). Tom could really hammer his punts. His last three years were with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the current NFL champions.  Tom retired to Grants Pass, Oregon (my home town) and my sister who still lives there sent me a clip the local newspaper ran about him.

Tom was injured when his shoe cleat caught on the worn field cover of Portland's Multnomah Stadium in 1970, causing his knee to painfully twist and buckle.  His replacement was a young quarterback from San Francisco named Dan Fouts who took the next snap from center and launched a sixty-yard bomb that brought the stadium fans to their feet. Fouts went on to win the game against Cal (31-24), the first Oregon victory over a California conference team in 10 years. From that dramatic start,  Fouts would lead the Ducks for every game in his remaining three years.  But for one magnificent night later that year, in the Los Angeles Coliseum against the Bruins of UCLA,  Tom Blanchard wore Superman's cape.

UCLA showed the Ducks no mercy.  At one point they hit Fouts and knocked him out cold.  Now,  that would be a concussion-ending night for the Oregon star but then it only brought Tom Blanchard into the action.  It was not a promising situation.  Going into the fourth quarter the Ducks were trailing by the score of 40-21 and UCLA had called off their rottweilers and were clearing their bench.  With just under four minutes remaining Blanchard hit Bobby Moore (who would evolve to Ahmad Rashad) with a pass which Bobby took to the endzone.  On UCLA's first snap after Oregon's kickoff, their second string QB fumbled the ball and  Oregon recovered.  A couple of plays later Blanchard connected with Moore again and with just minutes left in the game the score was UCLA 40 - Oregon 35. 

Many fans had left the game early in the fourth quarter.  Now UCLA was in full panic mode as they lined up for what they knew would be an Oregon onside kick.  That desperate attempt to keep possession of the ball rarely works but on this magical night in the City of Angels the ball went the necessary 10 yards, bounced around in a frantic scrum that left Oregon in possession.  Now, in the dwindling minutes, it was UCLA defending the Zone of Doom at their backs.

On Oregon's first touchdown of the fourth quarter Blanchard had taken a hard hit on his right shoulder just as he delivered the pass to Moore.  But with Dan Fouts still hearing canaries,  Blanchard returned to the game and got the critical next score. Now, with the game on the line, Tom didn't think he could handle the ball with his injured arm so Fouts had to answer the call.  Which he did.  Dan drilled Greg Specht in the endzone for the Oregon win.   The Ducks went for a two-point conversion but didn't make it so they took their 41-40 miracle and put it in the records book with golden ink.

Ask me about the post-game Oregon locker room. My, oh, my. Bring more towels.

Molasses Misfortune

 It would be a bad way to go.  It is the 15th day of January in the year 1919 and you have just picked up a copy of the Boston Globe newspaper to read the latest post-war news from Europe.  You will never read the Globe that day because you have suddenly joined 170 of your fellow Bostonians who have been swept away by a Tsunami of millions of gallons of fiery hot molasses syrup; enough to fill three and a half Olympic-size swimming pools.  Twenty of your fellow riders of the sweet surf will perish along with you in the disaster.

Molasses was a key ingredient for manufacturing munitions needed in the war effort America had waged in Europe. A plant in Boston had fashioned a steel tank into which the molasses was stored and a tanker from Puerto Rico had brought another 2.3 million gallons of the syrup that topped off the tank.  The problem was in the tank's construction.  From the start it had leaks and the engineering was faulty for containing the weight of the millions of gallons of molasses that were pumped into it.

Soon after the tanker deposited its load the tank split apart sending that Tsunami of syrup on its deadly flow, swallowing horses and people in its gravity-driven rush. Like the stench of the Boston Red Sox's deal almost a year later that sent Babe Ruth to the hated New York Yankees, the smell of molasses stayed in Boston's North End neighborhood for decades.

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.