My Way With The Subway

We need to celebrate people in our society who get their concept vision right and then maintain the integrity of their accomplishment and resist the temptation to monetize small changes to increase profits. I applaud the owners of the Subway Sandwich franchise who have done that.  Their moderately priced offerings are fresh and delicious but the satisfaction of eating the sandwich can be enhanced if you know the secrets I have discovered by years of experimenting.

First, always order the full 12” option because the cost difference for the 6” one is minor and the fabrication process just results in a better product working with the longer bun.

The designers of the sandwich cleverly made the connection of the upper bun and the lower bun (let’s call it the  "hinge”) a good solid bridge that allows the backstopping of limitless additions to your basic meat or veggie option.  I prefer cold cuts (baloney in my mind) and then I load it untoasted with stuff. Cheese. Lettuce. Tomato. Onion. Cucumber. Olives.  The fabricator slams it all in there because that hinge withstands the pressure of the final folding over and the tight wrapping that keeps everything together.

Here's the final secret:  Do not eat it as if it’s a hotdog.  It will be cut in half so start at the cut end but take the first bite at the opening of the top and bottom bun.  Bits of all that stuffing will be pressing out along the length of the bun so by taking small bites you seal that edge, pressing everything against the hinge.

Now you have a sealed torpedo (or submarine) that you eat while always slanting slightly in, compacting the add-ons against the core ingredient and the hinge.  If you’re up to it, repeat the procedure with that other half or put the other half in the fridge for later.

Trust me.

Russellville Lives CF

                                                                                              Charles Foss

As a child Charlie Foss didn’t know what he wanted to be when he grew up and then he grew up and it came to him. Like all of his friends in that southern town of Sportsburg, South Carolina, he was smoking cigarettes at age 13 but it didn’t stunt his growth as he grew to be 6’ 3” by the time he graduated from high school. He was a good student and was accepted for admission to the prestigious Yale University where, in his Sophomore year, he made a life changing decision: more about that later.

Early in his life his family was what he called stay-at-home Episcopalian but later they began attending church on a regular basis and Charlie became involved in those ecclesiastical activities. Those early 1960s were troubled years for everyone in America including students. The assassinations, the Vietnam protests, the Civil Rights marches were all contributing influences that led to the dramatic life changing decision Charlie made in his Sophomore year at Yale: he would devote his life to the church by becoming an Episcopal priest.

About that same time, one morning after a night of drinking and smoking with fraternity brothers, he found a burned hole in his favorite shirt and that day Big Tobacco lost another one.

After leaving Yale, Charlie was working in the Fourth Ward Clinic in Houston, Texas in a run down ghetto, heavily African-American and Hispanic. The clinic, established by The Church of the Redeemer, a charismatic Episcopal parish, was the only healthcare for 10,000+ people in the shadow of oil-rich central Houston.  The supervisor he reported to was a young woman named Gwendolyn Frieson.  Although Charlie and Gwen had separate parents, they both shared the same DNA that guided them into working 60-hour weeks and living in a 35-resident mansion rented to the clinic for a dollar a year.  Like wild flowers that can grow out of cracks in concrete, romance can flower from long days and nights of two people working together to bring comfort to other lives. After a year and a half they married on Texas Independence Day, 1974, before over 1,000 people followed by a reception for 450 thrown by an African-American congregation near the clinic.  In the years to come Charlie and Gwen replaced themselves with a son and a daughter, and eventually three grandchildren.

Gwen gave up an offer of a PhD program at Columbia or a chance to set up a baccalaureate  nursing program in Madras, India to marry Charlie and within a year he started his seminary training.  After obtaining his PhD at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, he started working as an assistant Rector at St. James by-the-Sea Episcopal church in La Jolla, California.  It was frustrating to the young priest to bring fresh eyes to old rituals and have his ideas given no consideration because, “This is how we’ve always done it.”  But Charlie persevered.   And he was among a limited number of Episcopal priests who also played the pipe organ.    

His last 14 years before retiring after 30 years as a priest was spent as Rector of an Episcopal church in Rock Hill, South Carolina where it all began.  The small brick building was graced with a magnificent stained glass window a patron had purchased from a well known artist in New York City.  It was installed by a team of German craftsmen and when hurricane Hugo came through in 1989 the window survived even though bricks were blown off the building.

Charlie’s sermons were originals from the pulpit on Sunday morning.  He had not spent hours composing and rewriting and polishing phrases.  The words just came from his inner vault of beliefs applied to the moment. His preaching was well received by his congregation because his style was “down home” but it came from a solid Christian philosophy that had marinaded in his soul for decades.  His pleasant baritone voice carries tones of South in the mouth which adds to the charm of his delivery.

It did not surprise me to learn a favorite hobby of Charlie’s is gardening.  You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to discover his connection with plant culture and his fascination with the mysteries of the human comedy.  

Charlie and Gwen’s lifelong rituals of volunteering their service to various charitable programs has continued while living at Russellville Park.  That includes working both in church activities as well as general public projects such as Schoolhouse Supplies, the organization that collects and disperses school items for needy students and office staffs all around the Portland Metro area.

If Russellville Park has an epicenter where spiritual and intellectual thoughts combine it could well be in apartment 227E.

       

                                                                  

Russellville Lives TM

                                                                                                     

                                                                       Taka Mizote

Award-winning author Daniel Brown (The Boys In The Boat) has written a current best seller,  Facing The Mountain. It is a true story of Japanese American heroes in World War II.  Taka Mizote and her sisters, Aya Fuji and Lily Kiyokawa could have stepped out of the pages of Daniel Brown’s manuscript.  

Taka’s parents were in that wave of Japanese immigrants who came to America at the turn of the century in the 1900s, searching for a life better than the one of hopelessness in Japan.  The immigrants took low-paying jobs building railroads, working crops,  mining. But working for poverty level wages, Taka’s parents saved enough to take ownership of a 50-acre farm near Hillsboro, Oregon and send a daughter, Kate, to Oregon State College.  The American dream.

Then December 7, 1941 and the attack at Pearl Harbor that would change the lives of the Iwasaki family forever.

 Taka’s father had been aware of the growing hostility between Japan and America but the events in Hawaii brought a terrible shock to him and his family. Laws prevented Taka's parents from ever becoming American citizens, but she and her seven siblings were all born in America and so were citizens.  Be proud of your American citizenship, her father told them, and do everything you can to support your country.

Taka dreaded going to school the Monday after the attack, wondering how her classmates would treat her.  It turned out they treated her with kindness as the American citizen she was.  In most of America that was not the case.

Because of the curfew imposed on her family, Taka could not attend graduation with her classmates at Hillsboro High School but received her diploma through the mail.  The Iwasaki family soon was ordered to leave their farm and join other Japanese Americans in a temporary holding facility at a relocation center near the Portland stockyards (an old Civilian Conservation Corps’ camp).  A friend and neighbor leased their farm and took good care of it until the end of the war.

The family later was moved to a camp in Idaho, where they lived until the war ended. Oregon State Freshman Kate was given help transferring to Hamline University in Minnesota, where she earned her degree.

Taka did not let the horrendous dislocations of the war years define her life. Right from the start she set her mind to consider the relocation camps to be like the summer camps she had gone to as a young girl. She knew the war would end someday and she was encouraged to pursue an education until that happened.  She attended the College of Idaho for three years and then transferred to Pacific University, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Reading was difficult for her because she had never had adequate training in reading skills from the start.  In high school and college she read only what she had to and it wasn’t until later working with students in the reading lab at Madison High School in Portland that she discovered the important role reading played in a person becoming truly educated.  Japanese Buddhist’s have a word for Taka’s enlightenment: Satori.  It was a career-changing experience as she trained to become a teacher.

Cancer took her daughter Laurie Jean in 1967 and her husband Jimmy passed away in 1976.  That was when she started her life in the schoolhouse as a counselor's secretary at Madison High school. She started working with emotionally handicapped students and a couple of years later  opened a class for those students while working for the Gresham Public Schools.  When a job teaching first grade for the Powell Valley School opened she began a 17-year mission of insuring that those young scholars would have a solid foundation in the skills of reading.

Then Taka retired. She lived in a retirement community in NE Portland for six years before moving to Russellville with her sisters Aya and Lily in 2014.  It's a long winding trail of laughter and tears from her apartment on Russellville's second floor to those pathetic raw-board shelters provided her family by the government of the United States.  Her country.

Taka's two brothers and her late husband, Jimmy Mizole, served in the highly decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team.  During the course of the war, 18,000 Nisei soldiers fought in that proud company of warriors.

 The treasure Taka has brought to her life is daughter Marilyn Jane Sholian and Marilyn's husband, Jeff, who gave her granddaughter Katie and grandson Peter.  The gifts that keep on giving.

Russellville Lives GC

                                                                                      Gerry Caldwell

The Oregonian newspaper in 1991 published a picture of Oregon Governor Barbara Roberts watching a CNN TV report showing Desert Storm General Norman Schwarzkopf visiting an army postal station with an American soldier.  The caption read:  Oregon's Governor asks, "Who's that General with Gerry Caldwell?"  That may be apocryphal but maybe not.  Gerry Caldwell knows a lot of people and a lot of people know Gerry Caldwell. 

Born in 1940 and raised in Portland, Oregon, Gerry experienced the city's 1940's Jim Crow rules for African American citizens when Black musical superstars would perform in Stumptown but were refused lodging there.  They instead were housed in private homes in Northeast Portland and on one enchanted evening Gerry's parents hosted Lionel Hampton. 

You could call Gerry gregarious, but you just couldn't call him tall.  So at Washington High School he satisfied his love of football by becoming the team's manager.  It set a lifelong pattern of making friendships while making himself an indispensable player wherever the action was.  After high school one day he was downtown when the sky opened to a cloudburst so intense that Gerry ducked into the first doorway he could find to escape the deluge.  It turned out to be an army recruiting station and the start of 28 years of service in the regular army and reserve units.  He found himself in Vietnam advising Vietnamese troops before the actual beginning of American combat engagement.

While stationed in Japan, Gerry went with some buddies to a Lionel Hampton concert and got seats down front.  At the end of the performance a runner came to say Lionel wanted to see him backstage.  After all those years he remembered Gerry from that home stay.

He was in the Reserves when he got a job with the First National Bank as a bookkeeper and became friends with the bank's president.  That friendship led to his becoming the first Black manager of a branch in Portland.

Gerry considers a top highlight of his life to be the parade he put together from scratch for the 1977 Trail Blazers after they won the NBA national championship.  The First National Bank was a team sponsor and when it came down to the last two games and it was apparent Bill Walton's gang might actually pull it off, the need for a parade became clear,  The bank president told the Blazer management and Portland's mayor that if anybody could organize an overnight parade it was his man Caldwell.

He got an 18-wheeler flatbed truck from the Rose Festival's Starlight parade and cut red tape with the help of his friend the police chief to park it overnight near the train depot.  He got a high school jazz band with the help of a  school band director friend.  He got a friend connected with  Raz Transportation to bus the bandsmen back from the parade's end.  He pulled it all together and Portlanders lined the streets and went nuts cheering their team.  Hey! Who's that guy sitting on the flatbed with his legs dangling off the end?  

Forty years ago Gerry was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and now lives with his wheeled chair. But oh what memories he has of all those friends who shared his ride on that magical merry go round, grabbing the brass ring on every circuit.

  

A Sentimental Journey Part II

Together again after 31 years, Bill Landers and Karen Mauldin remembering generations of student strivers to whom they brought comfort and joy in the classrooms of America.

A few dings on the fenders and a couple of suspect timing belts but plenty of Premium High-Test in their tanks.    Look out world.

A Sentimental Journey

 

Slipping away to go back down the starry midnight trail to the enchanted forest of old memories is something all of us no-longer-young citizens do from time to time.  We're allowed.  Making that trip in real time rarely happens but a few weeks ago it did for me.  I sold my Jostens sales territory to Brian Coushay 31 years ago and recently he invited me to lunch where he told me of a special gathering of old and new Jostens representatives (reps) that would take place in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. It was to honor the retirement of Karen Mauldin.

Karen Mauldin.

 In the fifteen years I ran a Jostens territory, Karen and I developed a friendship that had a dimension beyond the purely business dealings. Lots of laughs and then one day when I got old I decided to retire.  And who flew in from Minnesota on her own dime for my retirement party?  Yeah, the girl herself.

I, like every salesman who has ever worked for Jostens in the last 44 years,  knows Karen as the Queen of the hive who ensures that when the annual accounting is made, every comb is overflowing with honey.  To understand the respect the sales reps have for her you need to know Jostens mission statement: it is organized to recognize student achievement in the high schools of America. Products associated with graduation. Apparel with school identification.  Class rings.  Academic award certificates. Athletic awards. Everything designed to connect the individual student to the school.

In this kind of operation lots can go wrong. Size, color, wording and on and on.  The plants depend on the reps to send in accurate specifications for each individual. And the plants are not allowed to make errors even if human beings design and produce the individual products in plants scattered around different parts of the nation. And each plant has people like Karen Mauldin who control the levers that route the individual products to the right school to the right student.

 Karen Mauldin spent 44 years as the liaison between the plant and the sales reps and she made that crazy circus work: the clown car discharges its load just before the elephant picks the car up and the man on the flying trapeze  grabs the swing in the nick of time.  That interaction between Karen and the hundreds of reps was an annual wild buffalo stampede that tested the minds and the physical endurance of all parties concerned.

But every year, somehow, it worked and every Jostens rep knew that girl in Minnesota juggling the active chainsaws was a big part of why it worked. And the positive effect it had on their settlement check. So, on August 8th in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho a group of reps brought Karen out to a foot-stomping, shouting celebration of her retirement.  War stories were told and she was forced to admit the truth to the rumor she kept a dartboard in her home to which she would affix pictures of certain reps and power launch her darts. Then the presentation of an Apple watch from her NorthWest cult members.

I don't travel a lot these days but I wouldn't have missed that Hidey-ho in Idaho for a million bitcoins.

Russellville Lives RH

                                                             

                                                              Robert Hensel

Let's see, will it be easier to tell you what Bob Hensel hasn't done in his life or what he has done? First you need to know that he and Apple's Steve Jobs share one characteristic regarding their work ethos: perfect is the only acceptable standard.  And Bob is nicer to people than Steve was.

He carries the Methuselah gene, a gift from his parents at the time of his birth in 1946,  making him a young 75 today.  His paternal aunt checked out at 103. It's approaching Bob's third year at Russellville Park and his ownership of two parking spaces in the east garage will tip you off to how his interior timing belt is programmed.

See, Bob Hensel is all about machinery, whether it's a piece of equipment the size of a railroad boxcar that is designed to make multiple thin threads or a device to stamp out microphones the size of a grain of sand.  How about his collection of six vintage Volkswagens to which he gave loving care and took to car shows where he won a roomful of trophies?  Is that a toothbrush he's using on those wheel spokes?

Bob will confess to not being Albert Einstein in elementary and high school, but he did enjoy his wood shop and metal shop classes.  Particularly metal shop. When he graduated in 1964 the first thing he did was travel to Europe and spend 10 weeks riding a bicycle on a 1,000 mile adventure with a diverse group of cyclists . While in Europe he was notified that he must register for the draft and he knew Vietnam was not his cup of tea. So he signed on to a six-year enlistment in the Air Force Reserve where he was classified as an aircraft engine mechanic.  It left him time to get a job as an apprentice machinist where he acquired more skills to add to his personal tool chest.  The war in Vietnam ended as did his hitch in the reserves, so he moved around to a lot of different jobs before enlisting in the United States Air Force and reserves where he served for 22 1/2 years. 

Those years in the Air Force gave him opportunities for learning high tech computer application and aircraft maintenance.  Using the G.I. Bill at the end of his enlistment he entered college and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Technology in Manufacturing.  Those post-Air Force years were a parade of jobs working with different companies as his expertise evolved, building and installing complicated machinery.  Bob's affinity for making high-tech machinery behave took him all over the world, from England and Germany to the exciting industrial culture of Hong Kong.  His "been there" pins fill a map of planet Earth's industrialized nations.

Now Bob Hensel's relaxed second life at Russellville is devoted to the search for the perfect cars  to occupy those two  slots in the east basement garage and to his enjoyment of building incredibly complicated models of houses and machines, from cars to helicopters.  Walk by his #245 apartment and look at the model car he built displayed on the shelf outside his door.  All wood.  Tiny little parts that move.  All put together with precision by that master machinist inside the apartment, plotting his next acquisitions of perfect machines.