Wonder Woman, MJW

  Imagine my amazement to find that one of my comic book legends from 1941 now lives on the second floor of Russellville Park's East building.  She no longer wears those over-the-top skin tight spandex outfits but rather chooses to wear a less flamboyant attire befitting an 83-year-old Grandmother.  She goes by the name MJ Wallace now.

Mary Jean Wallace lost Pat, her husband of 65 years, in 2020 and after selling their home in S. E. Portland, she elected to start her new life in the Russellville Park retirement community.  Let me tell you a few things about her old life that validates the moniker of "Wonder Woman".

MJ is a native Oregonian who has lived in the Portland area all her life. She attended Grant High School where she didn't achieve celebrity for her ability to run faster than other girls because schools in those years had almost no programs for girl athletes. 

She and Pat designed a family of three boys and two girls and when you ask her what you do to keep that boatload afloat she will tell you, "Just about everything." That's what MJ and Pat Wallace did: just about everything.  The 18th century economist Adam Smith who is credited with drafting the theory of capitalism would have loved MJ and Pat. They were entrepreneurs whose clock had no hands and their determination to achieve economic stability was relentless.

The two of them operated a small motel on Barbur Blvd.  That's a twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week adventure of cleaning rooms, doing laundry, maintaining the physical plant and greeting the public.

They ran a first call funeral service (Pick up the newly deceased and deliver to the designated funeral parlor).  One client had a relative who showed no consideration for their client by dying in San Francisco instead of Portland.  The client had a fear of flying so chose MJ and Pat's service to transport the body back to Portland. Another time they wanted to upgrade their hearse and found one they liked in L.A. whose owner agreed to a swap for theirs.  They drove it to L.A. but seeing it would be late night by the time they arrived, elected to park in a rest stop until morning.  They crawled in the back and slept.  The sun woke them up in the morning and they rose to finish the trip but heard terrified screaming from outside where people had been looking in the back window.  How to finish a journey, laughing all the way.  Once they got a call to pick up a body in San Francisco that had to be back in Portland for the funeral service just days away.  Middle of the night in the Wallace home: Pat calls out to all five kids, "O.K., everybody up and in the car, we're heading for San Francisco."

They ran a sporting goods store (Gateway Pro-Am Sports) for 35 years.  They won contracts for high school athletic uniforms by delivering for the late ordering coaches in a matter of days instead of the big companies' promised deliveries weeks later.  This was accomplished by MJ running her sewing machine putting on the special patches and emblems until 2:30 am, night after night.

All this while keeping a family of seven fed and parented (is that a word?). Here is a direct quote from MJ Wallace:" I HATE COOKING !"

When she was in her late 70s and Pat in his early 80s they got jobs as bag checkers for events where  hordes of people entered through gates.

That's not enough?  On her 40th birthday MJ joined a party that scaled Mt. St. Helens and camped on the spot where the Old Girl blew her top. Some time later.

On her 70th birthday she dived out of an airplane (joined by a guide) to see what that felt like.

On MJ's 80th birthday she went zip-lining with family.

Her 90th birthday is just around the corner so MJ is narrowing the options for her "event."  Hint: " Hey, Elon Musk, hold a spot for Wonder Woman on one of your coming shots into outer space.  Round trip please."

Over the years MJ ran 13 marathons.  When Father Time whispered in her ear that her running days were over, she defiantly walked 11 more.

MJ participates in exercise classes five days a week and she doesn't use a walker.  She's a delight to chat with about any subject you might choose because she's probably been there or knows somebody who has.

Perilous Roads

 As the Biblical Apostle Paul learned while traveling on the road to Damascus,  there are sometimes pot holes and perils along the way.  He was beaten with rods and stabbed by Gentiles so you just couldn't call it a fun outing for him. I felt Paul's pain on a recent journey of my own from my apartment in Russellville to the Gateway Shopping Center.  It is just short of a mile and I try to walk there every day even though I usually don't buy anything.  It's all about exercise in my attempt to maintain my Adonis-like body. 

While on that walk I had a frightening encounter with a deranged woman who, I believe, mistook me for one of her ex-husbands.  The poor dear had been down some hard hiways and taken serious hits leaving her with a dental inventory of three.  And there was a definite limp in her mobility.  She came rushing toward me, screaming obscenities while recalling various unforgivable transgressions in our previous relationship.  Both claw-like hands were wind-milling toward my face and I managed to stop them by shoving the shopping bag I was carrying into her face. That held her off momentarily.

The last thing I wanted to do was get into physical combat with Crazy Cathy, so I made a tactical retreat into the speeding traffic on 102nd Avenue, waving my arms in a "PLEASE STOP" signal.  It worked,  Both north bound and south bound lanes slowed to a stop as I sprinted to the other side of the street.  She didn't follow.  I'm pretty sure she wasn't an ex-wife.

You can appreciate my choice to be run over by an eighteen-wheeler rather than mixing it up with Crazy Cathy.  I'm certain the Apostle Paul never had to contend with anything like that on his way to Damascus.  At least if he did,  it didn't make it to the King James Version of the Bible.

Friends

A friend told me this is national Friend's Day. I thanked her because she is a "Say-Hi" friend where we know each other's names but I wouldn't drive her to the airport nor would she drive me. But her casual mention of Friend's Day started me thinking about friends.

In almost ten decades I have acquired a lot of friends (and lost a few). A major engine of friend acquisition is shared circumstance: school, church, jobs, armed forces,  But next to family, your reservoir of friendships is what flavors the quality of your life.  It's a complex interaction of ever changing temperatures that adds the spice to social intercourse. 

 Words matter; spoken and unspoken. They are the binding mortar of friendship that can cut as well as mend.  My oldest friend is Darryl Pollock. He can run faster than me but I'm better looking. Who is smarter has yet to be resolved.  We met in high school and agreed on things that made us laugh as well as the importance of playing football.  We've outlived most of our classmates but it draws us closer to the other survivors.

Darryl lives in a nice neighborhood in Bend, Oregon and a daily ritual is to sit in his garage with the door up and give a wave to anybody who happens to be walking or driving pass his home.  He thinks of them as drive-by friends and Darryl has lots of them.

Friends deserve more than one day a year.  Like Mother's Day and Father's Day it should be every day.  So, on this Friend's Day,  choose some words carefully, and send them to a friend.

This Old Man

 Roger Angell died last May 20th at one hundred and one years of age.    He was possibly the best writer ever published by the New Yorker magazine where he worked as an editor for a good share of that publication's long history.  Almost as a sideline, his love of baseball led him to become the greatest writer ever of that classic American sport.  He actually knew Babe Ruth as well as the hottest stars in today's pennant races.  Roger is in the Coopertown Baseball Hall of Fame.

I have admired Angell's writing for years and my friend Josie Larson, knowing of my high regard for Roger Angell, sent me copies of a piece he had written for the New Yorker in 2014 entitled:  This Old Man. It is now included in a book published by Doubleday ($26.95): This Old Man, All in Pieces.

Here is some of the best advice you will ever get:  Buy the book!  If you are still seventeen,  never mind.  But everyone else will pass up one of life's true treasures if they don't let Roger into their mind.  Particularly if they are with me in God's waiting room, nervously anticipating the call, "Next."  It is Roger Angell at his lifetime best: insightful, funny, profound, touching.  Roger hits all the bases as he knocks a slider out of the park.

Trust me.

Meet Gene McKinney

Gene and Mary Ellen McKinney have been residents of the West building at Russellville Park for about a year.  Gene appears much younger than his 84 biological years and his life in the last half of the 20th Century is a personification of America’s in that same time period.

When Gene was born in 1937 it was only 34 years earlier that the world was stunned to learn that a couple of brothers at  Kitty Hawk, North Carolina had made a powered air flight for the first time ever.   And today, if Gene possessed a million or two dollars of disposal income, he might be able to book passage on a 15- minute rocket ride to outer space.  Gene’s working life was in the telecommunication business and his first job as an adult was installing rotary dial telephones for American Telephone & Telegraph (AT & T) that put Tilly the telephone operator and her massive board of tangled cables out the back door.  Replacing old technology with new technology was what kept Gene involved in America’s quest to lead the world in communication technology.

You’ve never heard of some of the installations Gene’s teams made because you don’t know what a “hot box” is.  Ask the engineer of that 100-car freight train streaking through the Columbia River gorge and he will tell you it has to do with the wheels on all those box cars and flat-bed container haulers,  The load weight rests on an axle attached to the wheel and the axle turns in a box filled by fibers soaked in an oil based solution that controls the heat generated by the turning axle.  If the oil fails the heat creates a “hot box” that can make the wheel lock-up and possibly derail the train.  So Gene’s team wired in sensors along the track to detect any hot boxes that needed attention.

The yearly advances in technology had sent thousands of workers to join Tilly on the sidelines and in 1989 At&T offered thousands of their employees a plan to leave the company.  At age 52 Gene elected to take a lump sum buyout that included lifetime health care and drug coverage.  As years passed and health care cost went crazy, Mary Ellen and Gene knew they had made a good decision.

The two met in 1956 and married a year later.  They raised a family of three boys and a daughter.  Their oldest son, Mike, grew to be a 6’3”, 237 lb. football tight end who played at the University of Oregon for coach Rich Brooks.

Gene’s working life gave him an up close and personal view of the disappearance of Tilly’s massive obsolete equipment to his daughter’s  3” x 5” cell phone that could do everything but fry an egg.  From 1937 to 1989 it was a trip of wonders for both Gene McKinney and his home, America.

The Wind Was At His Back

My friend Kenny Moore died five days ago.  He was 78 years old.  Few people who come and go through this intimidating lifetime journey possess the amazing package of brilliant talents, both mental and physical,  that fueled the fierce fire that burned inside the lanky graduate of North Eugene High School, in Eugene, Oregon.  He had a way with words and I first saw that touch of his in a piece he wrote for the Eugene Register Guard.  The young phenom, Steve Prefontaine, was scheduled to run in an AAU meet on the East Coast and the RG asked Kenny, who was in the area of the meet at the time, to cover the race.  Pre came in second to a world-class runner (don't remember his name) and  Kenny wrote, "WCR crossed the finish line in (time) and turned to see the future rushing toward him."  What a terrific line.

We became friends.

Kenny was a key member of Oregon's 1964 and 1965 NCAA's Track & Field Championship teams.  Coach Bill Bowerman admired Moore's toughness and nothing showed that more than his participation in the steeplechase, possibly track's most grueling, demanding races at 3,000 metres with hurdles to clear.

In 1967 Moore won the National Cross Country Championship.  In his second Olympic appearance he just missed winning a medal in the marathon and it is insightful to realize that a person who possessed  the magic of word manipulation was also the rare human being who has experienced running 26-plus miles while the pounding madness in his mind is demanding that he stop the pain but he wills himself to increase it even more.

And then to experience the exquisite joy of realizing that of all the billions of human beings on the planet Earth, only three could catch him if he ran away.  And you have the gift to tell those other billions of people how it felt. 

How fortunate I am to have called that remarkable man my friend.  For a truly rewarding experience read BOWERMAN AND THE MEN OF OREGON, Kenny's masterful biography of his college coach.

In addition to his enormous talent, Kenny Moore was a compassionate citizen of the world who listened to his better angels and made his community of friendships richer for having known him.

Let the Follow Spot Shine On Me

Here's what my friend Marilyn Bruner did: she talked me into joining Curtain Call, an organization of wannabe actors who put on stage plays for the entertainment of their fellow residents. Some of these folks, like me, can't remember what they had for lunch so memorizing lines for a play is out of the question.  Also, choreography for moving people in wheelchairs or walkers around on a stage is too scary to imagine.  Obviously, modifications to traditional stagecraft is a must.  

 I'm glad I listened to Marilyn and joined her band of thespians,  even though my original vision of doing the musical, Singing In the Rain with me in the Gene Kelly role didn't work out.  I have been warmly welcomed to the cast.  We do the theatrical productions by sitting in chairs in front of the audience and reading our lines from binders.  Remember radio?  I know, I know that sounds crazy to you but it works.  I was in the audience for their last performance and the crowd loved it...foot stomping applause.

We're currently rehearsing a play that does a takeoff on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was written by Marilyn and who knew the girl could make dialog sing? It's years later after Prince Charming left Snow White at the altar and although she has put on a few pounds and some smile lines, she still owns those hug-me-now eyes.  Oh, yes and that name change: Silver Gray. She now tends bar and owns the Last Chance Saloon in the small town time forgot: Arid, Arizona.  It's all about the return of Prince Charming (who is not so charming) and those height challenged Hi Ho, Hi Hoers.  Each actor is assigned a character and the practice begins.  It is harder than you might think to get the different characters to say their lines so that it creates a seamless flow of dialog.  Ever try herding cats?

It's a genuine fun exercise with lots of laughter intermingled with kindly commands from the director to pay attention to the cues.  Cry your eyes out Broadway.