Living The Dream

 My friend Jim Grelle lived one segment of his life as an international celebrity who could run one mile faster than all but three or four other young men on planet Earth.  At one time he held the world record for breaking four minutes in the mile more times than any other runner.  He was not only swift of foot but swift with spotting what was funny in this field of dreams we all share.

While in college he often raced in shoes his coach Bill Bowerman had constructed, searching for a perfect blend of lightness and durability. Bowerman's experimental creations would never win a blue ribbon for sleek beauty and in fact some of them were laughingly ugly with odd ends of material sticking out and glue smears leaving strange birthmarks.  Once in a race the runner next to Jim at the starting line looked down at jim's shoes and said to him, "What the (expletive) are those things?"  "Those things," Jim replied, "are what will get me back here before you do."

Jim's racing years were the adventures we lesser mortals fantasize about. Performing before thousands in cities around the world.  He and his Oregon teammate Bill Dellinger were entered in a meet in Rio de Janeiro and the day after their events they went to the beach before their evening flight home.  As will happen on a sunny beach in Rio the two athletes encountered the girls from Ipanema who invited them to chat and in the course of the afternoon one of the girls asked the boys which of them was fastest.  Both claimed that honor and so the girls said there must be a race to determine the truth.  One of them drew a line in the sand and said they should race to the water where the first runner in would be declared champion.

One of the girls had a scarf with which she started the race and off they went.  Now these two Olympians raced all over the world for fan approval (and some discreet folding currency), but this was for the approval of the girls from Ipanema.  As they neared the water Dellinger saw Grelle was a step ahead and he made a mighty leap for the water.  Don't look.  His speed propelled him skidding stomach-first on the wet, hard packed sand, well short of the water, and it removed skin.

End of the sand castle with the girls from Ipanema.  All the way home on the airplane, Dellinger rode with both hands pulling his shirt away from his body. Grelle's compassionate commiseration didn't help the second placer.

New York, New York

 My first job after graduating from the University of Oregon in 1954 was at the newly opened Bon Marche department store in Eugene, Oregon.  After a few years I had become a department manager and would fly into New York  every three months for seasonal buying, working with market agents in the chain's national resource center.  I became friends with one of the agents (can't remember his name but let's call him Al) who told me about a department manager from Texas who had never been to the big city before and inquired about places to eat.

Al said, "I took Tex to a place where he could get a taste of some traditional New York cuisine and told him to order the bagel and lox.  He did and he loved it.  So much so that all the time he was here he kept going back for more."   On Tex's last day he thanked Al for introducing him to bagel and lox but he had one question, Al said.  "He asked me to clear something up for him.  He wanted to know, which was the bagel and which was the lox?" 

Shead A Tear

 Life is about acquiring and losing.  Early on we learn the lessons of acquiring: the nippled bottle, the largest piece of pie, the affections of someone special, tokens for trading, the elements of knowledge.

Acquisition's binary twin is loss.  The lessons of loss are hard to forget:  innocence, overreaching, pride, ignorance, dereliction, cowardice, bad timing, dumb luck.

And now perhaps our most profound collective loss is Portland, Oregon, my home town -- pulled down from the penthouse to the outhouse by the curse of those binary twins. From its western pioneer days, Portland enjoyed the reputation for being a special home of the mystical spirit of the Oregon Trail that embodied courage, robust adventurism, freedom, and creative determination.  It attracted people to its borders from across the nation (more than some Oregonians were comfortable with) and Portland, its major metropolis, over the decades acquired the characteristics of the proverbial shining city on the hill. One admirer called it First Cabin on Spaceship Earth.

It's all gone.  The crashing loss appeared to occur almost overnight, but the first warning signs of trouble were the uncontrolled encampment the homeless (an unfortunate name for a multi-layered combination of people who are mentally ill, drug users, criminals and those who are just plain broke).  The city leaders never dealt with the issue and the problem exploded into what is now a major disaster.

The criminal element who vandalized downtown Portland were not harshly dealt with and taken off the streets. The hideous jungle of plywood covered storefronts in Portland's core has brought commercial activity to its knees.  One jewelry  store closed its doors after 46 years downtown.

It's past time for some tough action against the perpetrators who have destroyed our city. I'm too old to lead the charge and I've seen no evidence of any courageous man (or woman) with a plan rising up to save Stumptown.  Where have you gone, Tom McCall?  We badly need you.

So, Where's My Pulitzer?

 When any element of the media is awarded a Pulitzer Prize, they waste no time letting you know about it.  I plan to have The Methuselah Report do the same.

Loyal readers may recall my posting on December 13, 2020, titled What's The Thing With The Ring?  It had to do with an interview I saw of Bill Gates on TV.  I noticed whenever Bill answered a question he would cross his right hand over to his left and start fiddling with his wedding ring,

Sometime later I saw Gates again on the CNN Jake Tapper show and he was not wearing a ring.  I speculated in my posting why that would be and my last option was perhaps not all was well in the Gates family relationship.  I further wrote that if Jake Tapper was doing his usual highly professional job he would have asked Gates, "So Bill, what's up with you're not wearing the wedding ring?"

He might have broken a major news story about splitzville in the home of the world's fourth (for awhile anyway) richest man.  In the meantime, seeing as how this blog is distributed to a global audience, and that I raised the speculation way back when, I've got a legitimate reason to wonder: where's my Pulitzer? 

We Don't Get Overs

 When you're running life's marathon and you still can't see the finish line, you try to take your mind off how tired you are by thinking of other things.  Such as what you would have done differently at particular times in your life.  Some anthropologists believe your earliest behavioral patterns chart the course you will follow for the rest of your life.  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Would you name your kid "Wolfgang"?) was reportedly playing Turkey In The Straw on his little violin when he was just 3 years old.  And he did OK in music for the rest of his life.

In the exciting hours of another fun-filled day in this Russellville commune, I think back to an event that took place in Cove, Oregon on my Aunt Helen's ranch when I was probably 4 or 5 years old. I had wandered down to where pigs were kept in an enclosed area and I remember thinking it might be fun to ride a pig.  Picking out one big porker as a prospective mount I eased up beside him and jumped on his back and grabbed for his ears to hold on.  The pig took off as if shot from a cannon and I went flying.

Instead of figuring out a better way to ride a pig, I wrote it off as not worth doing.  And I think of other times in the years that went by when I gave up a failed mission when I should have kept riding the pig. I'll try to remember that in another lifetime. 

Mamas and Monarchs

 My friend Lou Barrett's long career as a police officer ended when his heart sent him a message that it was time for him to retire.  He survived the malfunction of his principal organ but took its advice and turned in his badge.  We often meet for breakfast and Lou's experiences as a law officer always have relevance to the current events of the day.

Such as domestic violence.  Lou contributes time now supporting a shelter for women and children who are victims of domestic abuse and his interest in that issue evolved from his years of dealing with it on his job. 

Early in his career in California perpetrators of domestic abuse could not be prosecuted without the cooperation of the spousal victim and in a large percentage of the cases, he says, the victim would not agree to testify, either from fear of future abuse or from a belief that the abuser was remorseful and would change.

Lou said it was not unusual for an officer to get hit on the head with a frying pan when trying to arrest an abusive spouse. Many women, he says, are convinced they can change the behavior of a violent spouse.

Yeah, right.

German anthropologist Hinrich von Stuben  in 1903 reported in a leading scientific journal in Berlin,  the results of his 12-year study of butterflies and their relation to human female behavior.  His study found that in a flight of 10,000 Monarchs, 7,468 of them will flit around and land on beautiful flowers while 2,532 of them will flit around the beautiful flowers and then land on a cow pie.

The Morning Show

 If you lived in Eugene, Oregon in the late '60s and early '70s, there is one daily ritual you shared with 90% of the other residents of Lane County: you listened to the Morning Show on KUGN radio with its crew of announcers that included Wendy Ray, Russ Doran, Dale (Uncle Fuzzy) Reed, Fred Webb, and Dick Cross. All five of those personalities had a humor persona that was off the charts and the material they did from 6:00 AM until 9:00 AM each weekday morning with weather, traffic reports and general commentary on local and national news dominated the airwaves of their big power broadcasting licence.

Off the air that crew was a congenial clique of friends that would get together from time to time and the interaction of those talents made for a rolling tsunami of laughter.  My friendship with Wendy Ray who was the radio voice of the Oregon Ducks for football, basketball and track, got me a seat in the room with the KUGN bunch and those were the funniest and most entertaining events of my life.

Once we were at a new barbecue restaurant that a couple of African-American guys opened near the University of Oregon campus.  Their grand opening had filled the dining room with mostly friends and family of the owners and we had comp invitations from the management in trade for extra radio advertising on KUGN.  After an opening round of salads the server cleared the plates and said to us, "Keep your knives."  Fred Webb looked around the room and said to the server in a frightened voice, "We're expecting trouble?"  

So many of the times it was, "You had to be there."  The re-telling loses the spontaneous spark of the moment with its interaction of the comments from the various individuals.  Some wives were along at a seafood restaurant one time when Joyce Ray asked the lady server if her snapper was fresh. Joyce never got an answer to her question because the table was completely breaking up.

Roll the credits...