“No punishment, in my opinion, is too great, for the man who can build his greatness upon his country’s ruin.”
–George Washington
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“The idea that if you don’t want to believe something, you don’t have
to believe it, that’s really damaging and that’s going to last.”
— Lee McIntyre
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“Ongoing voter suppression and gerrymandering is a tell-tale sign that Republicans know their party has lost any hope of winning a majority of voters, and that the only way they can win an election is to cheat…
That strategy is not sustainable.”
—Heather Cox Richardson
Watch this short video I’ve posted the link to and it just might, as it did for me, have you longing to go back to the future…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYKVa5LpR1Q
The final result of today’s election may not be known by tomorrow. I know what I’m hoping for but my faith in the American electorate to do the right thing was shattered four years ago.
We’ve seen and know what a Trump presidency is and although the sentence “elections have consequences” is always applicable, that’s never more so than today.
I already have two ideas for tomorrow’s cartoon– one if Biden wins and one if Trump does. Coming up with a third if no decision is clear is hard to imagine right now but may be necessary.
Four years ago my faith in the American electorate was shattered. I hope it may be restored by how we vote as a nation today.
A layer of white snow outside my window this morning seems like a good sign.
GO JOE!
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We’re in extra innings. The good news this morning is my mailbox is no longer filled with “support me” emails and voter polls. I’m doing my best at this point to avoid any bad news and I hope you are too.
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Four Black Cats
I confess to being superstitious. It’s kind of scattershot. I avoid walking under ladders but don’t worry when a Friday falls on the 13th of the month. A few days ago I saw a black cat. Normally, not a big deal but it was an unwelcome omen. I was outside and it stared at me and I stared back at it and then the cat quite purposefully crossed my path. I was spooked and believed the cat might have jinxed the outcome of the election. When three other things I then read or heard took place they accelerated my angst. Bad things may happen in threes but in China four is an unlucky number.
The next troubling sign was an article on the site of a local eNewspaper. The Penobscot Bay Pilot reported on a mock presidential vote at a local high school. Faculty favored Joe Biden by a significant margin. Students backed President Donald Trump. That surprised and worried me.
On election day there were two other things. When I got up I opened an email from a friend who let me know that in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire the vote was already in. All five of the town’s votes were for Biden. You remember Dixville Notch. The village– population 12 in the last census — that garnered attention and notoriety for years by opening voting at midnight on the day of each presidential election and having all its registered voters complete their ballots a few minutes later so that the media could transmit the results in time for the morning news.
On Tuesday that seemed like a good start to my election day until I saw that the nearby town of Millsfield, New Hampshire had also opened its polling place at midnight and the vote there had been recorded in Trump’s favor by 16 to 5. Sure, a miniscule amount to feel apprehensive about but it didn’t make me feel at all secure about what it might augur.
And then the last thing happened a few hours later as I was driving to a doctor’s appointment. While listening to the news from the BBC on the radio I heard an interview with a woman who was asked to explain why she was a Trump supporter. “He cracks me up,” she chuckled and I thought of the quote attributed to Winston Churchill– “The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.” In five seconds this person most likely raised my blood pressure to the point that in the doctor’s office I felt the need to request a redo.
So, I felt a dread much like in 2016 that despite the polls and the odds on Biden winning and the Democrats taking the Senate and increasing their advantage in the House, the possible landslide I was hoping for might actually turn out to be like watching a sandcastle get washed away by a wave and now, even if Biden wins the presidency, it was.
Why do polls underrate Trump’s support? Four years ago I was stunned to discover that I didn’t know my country as well as I thought I did. This time I was just disheartened. How can it be that so many Americans voted for a man so awful and so lacking in so many ways? Were there Trump voters who intentionally mislead pollsters and why would they want to do that? Maybe the pollsters need to come up with a whole different set of questions and instead of asking people who they are going to vote for, approach getting at the truth of that with a different tactic. Here’s a short list of questions I’d ask. No, let’s just roll them into one…
Did you or do you ever watch Judge Judy, Dr. Phil, Jerry Springer, Maury, Duck Dynasty or mixed martial arts cage fighting on television?
If the answer is yes to one or more of these shows, I think we might have a good idea of your voting preference. Yes, call me an elitist. I can take it. A few years ago somebody did for much less. I subscribe to more newspapers and magazines then I have time to read. None of them I believe publish fake news. I drink wine and listen to classical music and I have faith in the power of government to do good and improve lives.
In this sad circus that I feel America has become Donald Trump is the ringmaster and we have underestimated his ability to get his followers under the big top. Most of all we don’t yet fully grasp how it came to be that so many Americans are thrilled to be there.
For now Nate Silver and his polling cohorts have been left looking like snake oil sales people in the parking lot. Many of the cars are pickup trucks. I don’t see a single Pruis. How did we get here?
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It has been said that a dog is the only thing that loves you more than it loves itself. Maybe that’s why Donald Trump doesn’t have a dog. He couldn’t stand having the competition.
The Bidens have two German shepherds– Champ and Major –so dogs will be back in the White House as well as decency.
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I’m tired. What a long week it’s been. What a horribly long four years it’s been.
When I lived on the kibbutz I was asked at one point to teach English as a second language to a class of 10 year olds. One kid was real trouble and he had his reasons. His parents had just divorced and weren’t very stable people to begin with. Their son exhibited a need for attention that disrupted every class. My daily solution was to have him leave. That solved my problem. It didn’t solve his.
I look at the election results and think of that boy named Erez, only he wasn’t a narcissistic bully. Erez was a disrupter and the other kids weren’t going to tell him to stop. That was the teacher’s job. The teacher was the adult in the room. Donald Trump and his presidency disrupted the country and the teachers in this instance should have been the Republicans in Congress. But how many adults were/are there in that room?
I could dismiss them and call them all cowardly and spineless but the scariest part of the last four years has been watching and listening to those representatives and senators who cheered Trump on along with the others who remained silent and enabled him. They were all teachers actually. They taught us how fragile democracy is.
I just discovered that the phrase “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” dates back to the 1500s. I wonder if history might call Donald Trump’s term as president the Baby Presidency. In the past four years he has turned a five-hundred year old idiom upside down. With this election outcome the baby has been thrown out of office but not the bath water. It’s still in the tub. Now, we need to repair our broken nation while figuring out how to keep that water from getting any deeper.
Sure, it’s true that Trump was and still is more symptom than cause of our disunity. We’re lucky he’s incompetent. He’s not really a Republican or a Democrat. He’s not really a racist or a fascist and he’s certainly not a businessman. He has no ideology. He is shallow and hollow. He’s an amoral opportunist and what he does best is get attention to fill his need for admiration. In our divided America he was given that chance and succeeded until now.
As a result of his presence we have been left more torn apart than before and Trump along with the ease with which lies and hate can be spread on social media has made putting us back together an enormous and more difficult task. Will Joe Biden be able to achieve it or even set us on a path that might make it possible? I don’t know but I do believe his could be an historic presidency by being a healing one when it is most needed. It’s going to be a tall order.
I don’t think I was a particularly good teacher of English all those years ago and I didn’t get my disruptive student to behave but I did the best I could and I kept order in my classroom. I did what was best for the majority of my students.
The majority of Americans who voted chose Joe Biden last week. He needs to reach out to those who didn’t because he governs us all but let’s hope for starters that despite our differences we all can appreciate that Biden will retrieve and be using a moral compass that had gone frighteningly missing in the White House inhabited by Donald Trump.
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It seems like years ago that I gave a series of talks in libraries in Maine that I called “Ten Reasons for the Decline of the Evening News.” Having spent close to 30 years working for ABC and CBS News I wanted to do it. I’ve condensed part of that talk to accompany today’s cartoon after seeing a column in the Los Angeles Times written by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with the heading “We may be a divided nation, but we’re united in not trusting the news media.” It bothered me. It bothered me because he was mostly right and it hurt. Whether it’s Tucker Carlson on Fox or Don Lemon on CNN, Abdul-Jabbar was correct to criticize their programs for being more like “pep rallies” than news broadcasts.
How did this happen?
A half century ago Walter Cronkite was called “The most trusted man in America.” Why has the Evening News and American journalism in general declined in how it’s perceived and trusted? And how did the news media go from being respected to becoming a target of criticism and attacks?
At the height of its popularity the CBS Evening News was watched by nearly 30 million people each night. Today, Cronkite’s viewership numbers are a distant memory. The total audience for all three of the major network television evening newscasts now is half of what Cronkite’s Evening news drew by itself fifty years ago. We have more choices for how and from where we may choose to get our news and entertainment and that’s the key reason we may question the validity of the “other guy’s” news. Call it the loss of shared experience and it has impacted way more than just network news. I believe it has contributed greatly to dividing us as a nation.
The watercooler is what’s become a lonely symbol for me of what’s changed, what I believe we’ve lost. The watercolor stands for the simple act of chatting with someone randomly about anything. It represents a time when we had more in common, when we interacted more face to face, when it wasn’t so easy to entertain ourselves in isolation.
What seems long ago now is when radio and television were often very shared experiences and our news was from newspapers that got thrown on the porch in the morning and/or the evening. We simply had fewer options in the past for entertaining and informing ourselves. For baby boomers like me when I see a family sitting at a table in a restaurant— the parents and the kids all looking silently at their cell phones or video screens –it’s always strange. Maybe I’m romanticizing togetherness and my own childhood but maybe not.
But it’s clear to me what’s the biggest reason for the distrust of the media today. It’s not incompetence on the part of the vast majority of journalists. It’s the political polarization in our country. In the early 1970s trust in journalism by Americans polled at about 70%. By 2016 it had fallen to little more than 30%. In between– in 1996 –the cable channels Fox News and MSNBC were launched but the loss of trust in the news didn’t start with their creation. The late Roger Ailes, who built Fox News into what it is today didn’t cause the political divide that exists in the country just as Donald Trump didn’t either. Our own political parties were diverging and Ailes just tapped into that and took advantage of it. Bias was delivered as if it was news– Fox on the right and MSNBC on the left.
The legacy network news broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC became lumped in with unapologetically slanted programming. And more significantly, if you were on either side of the political divide, you now had the option to only choose to get your news smothered in opinion from your side. Even if you weren’t all in with one side or the other odds are you moved further toward one the longer you were only exposed to it.
What’s particularly disconcerting is that so many people can’t differentiate between what is news and what is opinion and this has proven to be toxic. A study by the Media Insight Project revealed that a third of Americans don’t know the difference between a news story and an editorial and half of us don’t know what an op-ed is.
Has it always been this way to some degree? Maybe. But there’s a case to be made that media illiteracy is the new illiteracy and the reasoning skills people need to be able to discern what’s true and what’s false have been distressingly dulled and damaged by all media. In fact social media increasingly may more accurately be called anti-social media in my opinion.
These are obviously turbulent times in journalism but the lights in newsrooms are still on and that’s of course a good thing— the paramount thing. And for me and many other concerned observers here’s the bottom line for all journalism. It doesn’t matter if the network evening news goes away, or if newspapers are no longer published on newsprint. What matters is we continue to have independent, original and credible reporting that’s easily accessible and that the majority of us have faith in. If we continue as a country to lose that faith, darker times are still ahead.
Here’s where I disagree with Abdul-Jabbar who contends that the country is “united” in its distrust of the media right now. I and many of the people I know are not among those who distrust the media or blindly think there’s a blanket liberal or conservative bias. We know that there’s a lot of outstanding and essential work being done by journalists today and everyday and there are still many of us who know how to separate news from opinion and fact from fiction.
Yes, when the nation was more united many more of us believed the news we got to be accurate. objective and fair. We were even sometimes swayed to change our minds because of it. If we disagreed or questioned something, we didn’t call it fake and certainly didn’t consider its purveyors to be “enemies of the people.” Will we ever have a media and citizenry like that again? Once we did.
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You think this is going to be easy? As someone once said, “Doing nothing is hard because you never know when you’ve finished.”
I, like you, am stuck at home and wishing it were a year ago when we were untethered. Jo and I and our friends Cathy and Charles spent an incredible week in Paris about this time a year ago but I won’t complain. If staying put and being careful how I move around is what is necessary to control the pandemic, then so be it.
My life has not been nearly as disrupted as those of the majority of Americans younger than I am or those my age and not as well off to handle this. I’m saddened and angry that the U.S. response to COVID-19 by both the federal government and so many individual Americans will be remembered as a turning point when the nation failed to meet a challenge that required putting political expression and impatience on the sidelines and common sense and the common good on the field. Our country has made this worse than it needed to be.
Today (yesterday when you read this) is a beautiful and unseasonably warm day in Maine for November. The temperature is in the high 60s this afternoon. Typically, it would be somewhere in the 40s by now.
I’ve already made two separate mulching passes with my lawnmower in the past couple of weeks and will do another one after lunch so I can take advantage of being outside. When we moved here I raked and bagged my leaves. Now, I’ve been convinced by the “experts” that I should leave them in the beds and mulch those on the grass.
I don’t climb on a ladder and empty the gutters anymore. Haven’t done gutters… (Spellcheck wants me to change gutters to gutted. Ha! If one were to find any fish in the rafters, that just might be appropriate.) Haven’t done gutters for a long time after falling off a ladder that slid out from under me at my house in Los Angeles. I was lucky and only bruised a shin.
Gearing up for winter here isn’t such a big deal for me anymore but winter is usually over five months long in Camden, Maine. We hunker down without a pandemic. Some of our friends who don’t do Maine winter stayed here longer than they normally would but I’m not aware of any who haven’t returned to Florida or other residences to the south by now.
What’s going to be different about this winter of course is enduring it during the time of the coronavirus. One of my favorite things I enjoy when life moves indoors is small dinner gatherings with others who are Maine year rounders like us. Another has been breakfasts and lunches with my golf buddies. Don’t see any of those things happening right now despite the optimistic news about a possible vaccine being available soon.
The pandemic is only one of the national nightmares we’re waiting and hoping to see end soon. The other huge one reminds me of a child who won’t go to bed and then once he or she is in bed won’t fall asleep. I remember when my son was born my ex and I made a decision that we would not lower the volume of the house. We’d watch TV or play music or talk without lowering our voices. It worked. Gil quickly learned to fall asleep without us having to change our behavior.
The Republicans in the White House and the Congress remind me of parents who tip toe around the house once they’ve put their infants in bed. There’s a big shush going on in Washington because the baby won’t go to sleep. In a first in American history we’re changing presidents and diapers at the same time.
I’m willing to be patient and see him and the virus go away separately. I don’t care which we shed first. I’ll always have Paris but I never want to see Trump again. Until then I think I’m damn good at doing nothing! And I never thought after all these years I’d be a fan of Niksen!
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I came across this tribute to the late Alex Trebek in the New York Times:
“On ‘Jeopardy!,’ after all, there were not alternative facts, only actual ones. They did not change depending on how you felt about them or the person revealing them. Trebek was that rare thing in contemporary media: a voice of simple, declarative truth and trusted authority… He gave us, five days a week, a place to go where it was OK to know things.” (Joe Doggett, Beijing.)
It’s sad that a game show host would be held up as a beacon of truth in a time when truth has become abused and battered by so many who have made it clear that they deny reality. Science and knowledge have not been spared either. Despite Donald Trump’s defeat, our country is still in jeopardy and Alex Trebek’s passing is an ironic reflection point on all we’ve lost in the past four years and the job ahead if we are to regain it.
Diner is one of my favorite movies and it has my favorite all time game show scene. It involves the character Timothy Fenwick, Jr. played by Kevin Bacon and also the
GE College Bowl. Here’s a link to it…
Fenwick is the rare individual who doesn’t let on how smart he is but in Diner— in a movie —has his chance to allow only us seated in the theater to discover his secret. The scene has stuck with me ever since.
There are enough people who are the opposite of Fenwick to more than overwhelm the other Fenwicks of the world and especially, there are the many egotistical pompous windbags who seem to have a particular penchant for politics and inhabit both sides of the aisle in Washington and elsewhere. We could use more Fenwicks to pierce their gabardine.
But mocking “the elites” doesn’t preclude stupidity. During the run up to the election there was a pro Trump sign I saw a number of times that read “No More Bullshit.” It was easily the most puzzling message in support of the President I can imagine. If words could defy gravity, these signs would have been floating. A case for why we need to spend trillions on public education could not have been more concise. I thought of Fenwick and imagined that he would see this folly, too and could hear him cackling, “You bozos.”
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Sometimes I have an idea for a cartoon and after I create it realize it leads nowhere or I have nothing terribly important or interesting to add to it. Like today for example. The chips have fallen for Donald Trump? Let’s hope the rest is only theater.
So, Trump’s presence in today’s cartoon is just a cameo, like Alfred Hitchcock inserting himself into every film he made after he came to America or maybe Trump’s serving as an homage to the cartoonist Al Hirschfeld who etched his daughter’s name– Nina –multiple times into each of his cartoons. NAH… So, where am I going with this?
Well, let’s examine the chips that are actually being referred to in the expression “Let the Chips fall where they may.” They’re not potato chips or french fries or poker chips. They’re the ones created by chopping wood and the literal meaning of the phrase is not to worry about the fragments that fly off in the process of splitting logs with an ax. It’s the big things you need to concern yourself with and not the little ones. But that’s not always true. Sometimes it’s clear that you have to do both if you want to accomplish something.
In 1994 two Teach for America Corps alumni got the Houston, Texas school district to let them operate a middle school. They sought out students from low income families– nearly 100% of them African American and Latino-Hispanic –and enrolled them in what they called the Knowledge is Power Program or KIPP. To be participants meant a total commitment of time and effort on the part of the students– including attending class six days a week –and the buy in of their parents. The program had immediate success and improved test scores of its students dramatically. Today KIPP has been replicated in 255 schools across America.
In 1996 ABC News correspondent Carol Lin found this story and I got to travel to Texas to produce it. I had one of my favorite cameramen– the late Ronnie Ladd –and when we discussed how we were going to shoot our piece I told him that we needed to capture “moments.” We needed to see the little impacts that were creating the larger one. We shot hours of tape that we waded through afterward and we got what we wanted.
Like other stories that we were first to pursue for a national audience, this one sat on the shelf for a few months and then ran on the day after Christmas– not exactly a gift to me, Carol and the crew and more like one being returned. Although, I’m glad at least it had been opened.
The following fall 60 Minutes heavily promoted the KIPP story ahead of its first broadcast of the new television season. So it goes. Here’s a link to ours…
And how successful has KIPP been since its beginning nearly three decades ago? Over 90% of KIPP students graduate from high school and more than 80% of them go on to college. A little less than half get their degrees which sounds disappointing but it’s actually a percentage four times better than the national average for the college graduation rate of low income students. Knowledge IS power and KIPP is succeeding at helping thousands of kids acquire both.
And little things like buying a kid a desk lamp and an alarm clock can lead to big things like a degree and a successful career. It’s the kind of thing Americans should want to chip in to help with.
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PROBLEM SOLVED!
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One of my favorite jokes involves God and the lottery and a man who wants proof of the existence of the first and the spoils of the second…
Sam: “God if you exist, then show me. Let me win the lottery.”
Sam never went to synagogue but he did this time to make his proposal which was of course more like a challenge.
A month went by, then two, then three. Nothing happened.
After six months Sam returned to the synagogue. Sitting alone in the sanctuary, he expressed his disappointment and not a little chutzpah– by the way my classic example of chutzpah actually happened in college when I took a course from a professor who used only one book– his own –which hadn’t been published yet and so those of us in the class were essentially, his proofreaders.
But back to our tale of unrequited prayer and Sam’s disillusionment…
Sam: “So God, I guess I have my answer. You really don’t exist. All those who believe you do have been duped. I asked for a simple thing. And if you’re all knowing, then you knew I even planned to share the money with my relatives who I can’t stand. What’s it to you if you had let me win the lottery?
Suddenly, the sky darkened and roars of thunder and bolts of lightning could be heard and seen through the stained glass windows of the synagogue. An ear splitting voice bellowed from the ceiling and shook the walls.
God: “Sam, do me a favor and meet me halfway… buy a TICKET.”
I think if we change that last word to MASK right now the country would have a similar chance of affecting an outcome.
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Tiger Woods scored a 10 on a hole yesterday. Golfers have names for their scores on a hole– par, birdie, eagle, albatross, Those are the ones headed in a good even spectacular direction. Going the other way there is bogey, double bogey, triple bogey and an eight is sarcastically called a snowman. There’s really nothing after that level of humiliation with an appellation. To score his 10 Tiger only hit the ball seven times but three of those strokes propelled golf balls into a creek and those balls were unplayable as well as unretrievable and golfers are assessed a penalty of one stroke each time that calamity occurs.
Tiger Woods had never had a 10 on any hole before in his professional career. But what should not be overlooked is that after his unprecedented disaster on the notorious 12th hole at the Masters, Woods then proceeded to make birdies on four of the last six holes he played. He is after all the greatest golfer ever in the history of the game. His only competition is Jack Nicklaus and perhaps Ben Hogan and the greatest amateur of all time Bobby Jones.
I met Tiger Woods when he was still an amateur in 1996. Seeing that he was on the cusp of winning his third straight United States Amateur championship and that rumors were rampant he was about to turn professional I got ABC News to let me go to where the tournament was being held in Oregon.
My reporter was not a golfer and when she arrived just in time to see Tiger tee off in an early round match she was shocked. No, she wasn’t shocked like I was that he hit an iron from the tee much further than I had ever hit a driver in my life. No, she was momentarily stunned when the camera crew and I started walking down the fairway to follow Tiger and his opponent.
“You didn’t tell me we were going to be walking.”
I had found Tiger’s father and fervent apostle Earl Woods earlier and asked if we could interview his son after his match. Even then Earl was suffering from the heart problems that would kill him and was reclining on an elbow on the ground. He said he’d arrange it and back on the course we found Ely Callaway, the golf club manufacturer, and Phil Knight of Nike athletic shoes among the many in Tiger’s gallery who were more than willing to talk to us about their eagerness to shower him with money to endorse their brands.
After Tiger polished off his opponent he went straight to the practice tee and although there was a group of print sportswriters, I was surprised that we were the only TV camera among them. Earl had come through for us and I stuck out my hand to greet Tiger and instead of shaking it he crushed it. Despite the fact that he was much thinner and not at all muscular looking than he later became, his grip felt like I had put my hand in a vice.
My reporter did a fine job interviewing Tiger but it is the producer’s prerogative to ask some of his own questions and I did. Before flying up to do the story I had had a conversation with the sports information director at Stanford where Tiger was attending college. I asked him if Tiger liked school and if he thought he might like it enough to want to finish his studies before turning pro. His answer was that he didn’t know about Tiger’s career plans but he did know that Tiger was happy at Stanford.
So, I mentioned to Tiger that I had heard from the sports information guy that he enjoyed being in college and if that might be enough of a motivation for him to want to finish his studies before joining the professional golf tour. Tiger’s expression immediately changed and his answer was both icy and defensive. I’d touched a nerve.
“I’ve always liked school but that’s not what you guys in the media want to hear.”
He was looking straight at me so I was the guy representing the “you guys” and afterward I realized I had probably gotten too close to invading his private space by placing what I considered an innocent phone call to Stanford. On the spot I decided I would not try to shake his hand again.
The interview ended and one of the print reporters came over to me.
Print reporter: “Hey, thank you.”
Me: “Thank me for what?”
Print reporter: “You almost got him to crack. We’ve been here a week and none of us have come that close.”
During my career there were numerous times I wanted to elicit a response from someone beyond what the person I was interviewing might have wanted or intended to offer. News people learn how to ask the same question differently so they may ask it repeatedly in their efforts to achieve that. I wasn’t trying to do that with Tiger Woods or at least I thought I wasn’t.
The actual answer to my question came two days later when Tiger announced he was turning pro and signed a 40 million dollar contract with Nike. Meanwhile, I got back to Los Angeles and could barely open my right hand.
Here’s a link to our story…
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I wasn’t an avid Dragnet viewer growing up but Jack Webb’s monosyllabic shtick and Walter Schumann’s ominous theme music (The four notes in the cartoon sound like you think they do.) set the stage and the tone for what was then a black and white depiction of the law. The good guys and the bad guys were clearly delineated. There was never a hint that Sergeant Joe Friday strayed from anything less than perfect police procedures in solving crimes on his watch.
The world has become a grayer place since then and frighteningly more dark recently. Donald Trump may have done more damage to America in the last four years than any president in my lifetime but, as has been pointed out many times, he only reaped the whirlwind that others have been sowing for years.
I’m not sure if I was in the 1st or 2nd grade when I got my polio shot. What I do remember clearly was that I was the first one in my class, if not my elementary school, to be innoculated. Why? Because my mother was in a leadership position with our county’s March of Dimes. She made me do it. But virtually everybody wanted the Salk vaccine in 1954. The biggest fear parents felt at the time was that it wouldn’t be available quickly enough to protect their kids.
Eventually, polio was all but eradicated but there’s now a disheartening development. In 2016 there were a total of five cases of polio reported in the world. Last year that number had increased to 241. The countries where they occured are in Asia and Africa. America hasn’t had a case of polio since 1979 but stay tuned. This number of new cases of polio may not seem like a lot but it reflects trends that are worrying. Measles outbreaks in the United States for example are the highest in 30 years and the vast majority of cases have been children who were not vaccinated. But it’s not just because of the rise of the anti-vaccine movement that this is happening. As one infectious disease expert puts it…
“Vaccines are a victim of their own success. we have largely eliminated the memory of many diseases.”
It is also clear that more people are more skeptical of vaccines now and primarily base their opposition to them in the face of any and all evidence to the contrary.
“Science has become just another voice in the room. It has lost its platform. Now, you simply declare your own truth,” says the same infectious disease expert Dr. Paul Offit.
And here’s Trump back in 2012…
“I’ve seen people where they have a perfectly healthy child and they go for the vaccinations and a month later the child is no longer healthy.”
There’s an expression that goes “You can’t make this stuff up.” Unfortunately, Trump does and so do others like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who has been screaching this anti-vaccine gospel since 2005. With social media as its accomplice the anti-vaxxer movement has grown in numbers and it’s not just composed of back to the earth life stylers. It has become increasingly aligned with right wing conspiracy thinkers and others who hold that all innoculations are an infringement on their individual freedom.
So in the past week we’ve learned that there appear to be two promising vaccines that may soon be available against COVID-19. There figure to be more. How many of us will be willing to get in line to get one or the other or any more of them that may be coming down the pike? Will acceptance of a COVID vaccine be met with the same resistance by those– the anti-maskers –who have refused to accept any measures to control the coronavirus so far? And will those who have worn masks, socially distanced and quarantined when required be skeptics and wary in their own right and unready to become early adopters?
I told Jo I’m willing to get each and every vaccine that has been shown to work. I may have been pushed to the head of the line for a polio shot back in 1954 but I’m happy this time to voluntarily put myself there. Thanks, mom.
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TRUMP IS NO LONGER EVEN PRETENDING TO CARE ABOUT HIS JOB
(HEADLINE IN VANITY FAIR)
“It seems clear Trump has checked out. It’s not like this guy has shown a great interest in governing for four years, so to expect he will now accelerate the pace is a little fanciful. It’s pretty clear he feels wounded. Under those circumstances, the idea he’s going to pay more attention to the details of governance is ridiculous.”
— Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.
If you’re an ex president, one of the honors you might receive is having the Navy name a vessel after you. Aircraft carriers are both literally and figuratively the biggest tribute awarded and the list of carriers named for presidents includes the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, USS Theodore Roosevelt, USS Abraham Lincoln, USS George Washington, USS Harry S. Truman, USS Ronald Reagan, USS George H.W. Bush, USS Gerald R. Ford and the future USS John F. Kennedy.
An attack submarine is named the USS Jimmy Carter. He’s a Naval Academy graduate.The destroyers, the USS Roosevelt (named for Franklin D.) and USS Lyndon B. Johnson are also part of America’s fleet.
But there are recent presidents who don’t and probably won’t be accorded the honor– Richard Nixon who resigned the presidency in disgrace, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who didn’t serve in the armed forces and George W. Bush who, although he did, was also downright unpopular by the time he left office. And as for Donald Trump… well, let’s just say that being a president doesn’t automatically mean you get anything named after you. A Trump ship certainly would have its proponents but would likely need to include a tanning salon, a Burger King and a captain able to ignore an iceberg dead ahead who believes that it will just disappear before his boat hits it and creates a catastrophe.
A few years ago Jo and I took a trip to Nova Scotia. When we were in Halifax I learned that when it comes to disasters at sea that city is unrivaled. In 1917 two ships collided in its harbor. One of them was carrying 2600 tons of explosives. The blast that occurred leveled much of the city. It killed 2,000 people, injured another 10,000 and left 20,000 homeless. Until the United States dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 it was the largest man-made explosion in history.
However, Halifax had already staked its claim to being known as “The City of Sorrow” five years earlier in 1912 when the mother of all nautical tragedies took place. The survivors who had been aboard the Titanic were taken to New York. All who perished were brought to Halifax. There is a museum there today with items recovered from the ship –a pair of children’s shoes. a mortuary bag, separate menus for first, second and third class passengers found on the bodies of the victims. And there is a deck chair, one of only a few that were retrieved.
I’m attaching a link to a story I did in 1997 when James Cameron’s movie shattered box office records and demonstrated that the Titanic may have sunk a century ago but fascination with its cautionary tale has continually resurfaced ever since.
Something Cameron said in his interview with us didn’t get into our story but maybe should have. It was chilling. He stated that he believed our unconstrained reliance on and blind faith in technology are the equivalent today of heedlessly sailing on the Titanic. What do you think?
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In 2014 The Atlantic published an article by oncologist and bioethicist Ezekiel Emaneul with the cheery title “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” After coming across it the other day the first thing I did was check to see how old he is now. He’s 63 and was just named by president-elect Biden, who is 77, to the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
As you might expect, what Dr. Emanuel wrote six years ago has generated opposition to his appointment. Someone who claimed he’s soon going to stop getting flu shots is an odd choice to be part of a team hoping to vaccinate the entire country against COVID-19.
Sixty-three was the age I retired and came to Maine so today I’m 73 years old. Seventy-five is not a long way off and just before the beginning of the pandemic I got a wakeup call from my own oncologist who told me I was risking diabetes and that I didn’t need an additional morbidity along with my lymphoma. Since then I have lost 50 pounds, eat better and less and workout every day. I feel great and look a lot healthier.
Aside from the “Where did I leave my glasses?” moments I think my mental acuity is intact. I can’t make out what my wife is saying when her back is turned and I often can’t follow my golf ball after I hit it but overall I have no complaints and I’m not close to being ready to move out of our house because I can no longer get on a step ladder to change a lightbulb or lift the trash bags I take to the dump.
I don’t know how I’ll feel or be in two years but right now I think I’m in good shape and I’m not taking any expensive drugs or getting costly tests and depleting Medicare. In my view I’m not yet a burden to society or hopefully anyone else. But despite all this, there’s no way I would want to handle the duties of being in Congress at this point.
In 2019 Jimmy Carter, who is now 96, became the oldest living president in history. At that time he said that even at 80 he questioned whether he or anyone else should be handling the duties of the presidency. He called for an age limit.
So, how are we doing with that idea? Well, at the moment two 87 year olds–Sen. Chuck Grassey and Rep. Don Young are ill with COVID-19 and just under half of the Senate and one third of the House of Representatives are over the age of 65 and therefore in a more endangered demographic if they were to contract the virus. The just held presidential election marked the first time in United States history that the candidates from both major parties were over 70.
So, with the average age of the Senate being 63 and the House over 57 we have if not the oldest, one of the oldest Congresses ever. People over 65 comprise 16% of all Americans today and that percentage is growing. But we, Social Security and Medicare recipients are overrepresented in Congress just like the Dakotas, Rhode Island, etc. are in the Electoral College. Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House is 80. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader is 78. Yes, they are both still compos mentis just as Ruth Bader Ginsburg was but do we really want our most powerful Congressional leaders and consequential judicial appointments to be in their positions until they die?
Yes, McConnell has stacked the country’s federal courts with younger conservative judges but isn’t it true Democrats would have likely done the same with liberal appointees if they’d had the chance? Beyond being a matter of who’s too right or too left politically, there’s the issue of just plain growing too old in a position by being in it too long and becoming out of touch.
I think it was last year I watched a bit of a Congressional hearing dealing with the internet and it was apparent that our elected representatives were in over their heads. We may be living better longer but new technology and its uses are impacting living faster and with serious repercussions that government needs to understand and address.
I don’t know how many in Congress are tech savvy or even avail themselves of what have become the common ways we communicate with each other today using email and texting. I found an article in 2015 in which Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (now age 69) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (now age 65) claimed they hardly ever use– Schumer –or never have sent– Graham –an email.
I don’t believe being up to speed with a smartphone is necessarily a litmus test for whether you need to call it quits in office or certainly with life when you reach a certain age. The Beatles worried about turning 64. Dr. Emanuel has pushed it to 75. What do you think?
Here’s a link to Ezekiel Emanuel’s article…
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few years ago on Easter Sunday in the hilltop village of Belmonte in Portugal I said three words and Jo and I were immediately invited for lunch. Were they secret words like those you might have had to say at the door to enter a speakeasy during prohibition? No, not at all. Here they are…
“.אני שומע עברית”
Not much help, huh? Stick with me.
Actually, it was because of a secret that we had traveled to Belmonte in the first place. A hundred years ago a Jewish mining engineer named Samuel Schwarz had been the person to uncover it. In this little village was one of the last groups of Crypto Jews who are also referred to as Conversos or Marranos– Jews who hid their identity during the time of the Spanish Inquisition in the 14th century and converted to Catholicism to save themselves from execution.
As the centuries passed these Jews participated in all the Catholic rituals of baptism, weddings and funerals where they lived and they lived without synagogues, rabbis or religious texts. Their Jewish practices were minimal. They recited their prayers in Portugeese on their knees like Catholics but with the windows shuttered as they lit sabbath candles. The Jewish faith was passed on orally by the women in the families and Samuel Schwarz discovered that over time any awareness of Hebrew had been reduced to one word– Adonai –the word for God.
The non-Jewish community in Belmonte most likely knew of these clandestine rites taking place but did not interfere with those who observed them. It was only in the 1970s that any public display of Judaism began to appear in Belmonte and just 15 years ago that a synagogue was constructed. At about the same time a museum devoted to the Jewish history of this community was built and that’s what Jo and I had come to visit. We thought it would be open on Easter Sunday but we were wrong.
The museum was just off the town square and as we disappointedly walked across it I heard a conversation coming from inside a building we were passing. That’s when I said my three words– “I hear Hebrew” in Hebrew. Within seconds a door flung open and within a minute we were invited inside. There were about a dozen people around a table and it was only then when I saw a plate of matzoh that I remembered it was the week of Passover.
These were a group of the Jews of Belmonte and with them was a rabbi from Israel who visited them periodically. They had no rabbi of their own. I could speak Hebrew with him. He could speak Portugeese with them since he was originally from Brazil and there was one woman who spoke English so Jo wasn’t left out in the cold.
When I remarked that I was surprised that chicken wasn’t appearing on the menus of the places in Portugal we had been so far, I was brought a platter full of it and ate while listening to the rabbi tell me the stories of some of the others in the room and how they were awakening to their Jewish identities.
Some of our lunchmates in Belmonte
As we completed our meals Jo and I got an offer we could not refuse. Services were being held at the synagogue that evening and we were invited to attend. When we showed up for them another surprise. A woman who was entering just ahead of us literally slammed the door in our faces. We knocked and tried to explain ourselves to a man who came to the door but weren’t getting anywhere because of our language barrier.
The man left and we were about to ourselves. In all honesty I wouldn’t have been unhappy to have missed services but then another man appeared with the rabbi and we were cleared for entrance or sort of. As Jo began to step inside the door the guy with the rabbi raised his hand and pointed his thumb in the air. This wasn’t a thumbs up, however, It was a gesture I understood. Jo would have to sit upstairs in the balcony of the sanctuary with the other women. This was an orthodox shul where gender is separate and unequal.
Jo was seated fortunately, beside someone who spoke English and beside her was the woman who had closed the door on us who apologized and explained that although Jews feel secure in Belmonte they are still suspicious when strangers show up at the synagogue.
The service was long and I was relieved when it was over and we gathered in a community room– both men and women together –for coffee and pastry. But services weren’t really over, it was halftime!
The next morning we did the museum which was well worth visiting and found a kosher store where we bought a bottle of port we still haven’t opened. I think we should definitely do that next Passover and lift a fifth glass of wine at our Seder to the health and well being and amazing perseverance of the Jews of Belmonte.
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2001: A Space Odyssey was one of those films that had me totally mesmerized when I saw it the first time. I took our dog with me to our local drive-in when I went to see it for a second time. She just curled up on the front seat and I hope at least enjoyed the use of the Strauss music– Richard and Johann (always thought they were related but they weren’t).
I totally bought into Stanley Kubrick’s vision of the future back in 1968. There was no doubt in my mind that 30 years later by 2001 we would be exploring outer space in earnest. Of course at that point it was still another year until man landed on the moon but wasn’t progress inexorable?
I believed we were surely going to be traveling way beyond the moon by 2020. Hah! Now, the closest I think I’m ever going to get to planetary adventure in my lifetime is if I join the Planet Fitness that moved into the building that JC Penny vacated in Rockland.
Images stick in my head and one particular shot of the interior of the spacecraft in Kubrick’s film has and it’s the top one in today’s cartoon. Recently, I came across the bottom one of the inside of a Google server farm in Georgia. I made the connection instantly. Kubrick may have been off on his timing of when man would be zooming around in space, but he wasn’t wrong at all about how the technology that will likely get us there could look.
Guessing how something might look and when something will happen are totally different things on unpredictable timelines and although we– humans –have not yet strutted about any planet but our own, I don’t think there’s any doubt that uncountable descendants of HAL, the computer in Kubrick’s film which stages a mutiny and takes over the spacecraft from its human astronauts, are up and running on earth and in a slightly altered version of the words soon to be heard ad nauseum– “They see you when you’re sleeping, They know when you’re awake…” HAL by the way stands for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computers and I’m waiting for MIT to change its sports teams’ nickname from engineers to algorithms any day now.
I don’t think Kubrick would be at all surprised that today HALs are everywhere and have also had their processors linked to tragedy. This week the Federal Aviation Administration cleared Boeing’s 737 Max to fly again after being grounded for almost two years as a result of two horrific crashes. Pilots of those planes, who didn’t know how to override a software glitch that occurred during takeoff, couldn’t wrest back control of their doomed planes from their computers.
And as if I didn’t need to be reminded of HAL’s increasing omnipresence, I failed to grasp I was speaking with him just yesterday. Here’s the evidence…
I get automated phone trees all the time when I place calls. I have an Apple HomePod I talk to when I want to hear music in our living room. But I didn’t realize I was “chatting” with artificial intelligence yesterday and especially after it apologized for having to refer me to a “Live Agent.” The experience threw me. I wasn’t really upset, I just felt duped and a bit diminished.
In 2002 I saw that we were marking the 30th anniversary of the last time man was on the moon. I wanted to know why we hadn’t been back. One of the great things about my job at ABC News was when I wanted to know something and could convince my bosses that our audience wanted to know it too, I was given a green light to go find out. I believe a soundbite toward the end of the piece from the last man to have set foot on the moon in 1972, Gene Cernan, is worth a listen.
Here’s a link to that story…
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Although President Trump is ducking reporters, he will pardon a turkey on Tuesday at the White House and afterward he is expected to continue playing chicken with our democracy or golf.
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So, turkey sales are predicted to be down this year and that’s understandable. It’s more than just prudent not to go over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s or anybody else’s house this Thanksgiving and whole turkeys are not grown to be eaten by less than an extended family.
But here’s what may seem counterintuitive. Inquiries to the “Turkey Talk Line” are expected to be up. The TTL gets 100,000 calls, texts and chats in an average year from cooks wondering how much time is needed to thaw and cook their fowl butterball. Despite the likelihood of fewer turkeys in fewer ovens, it’s also assumed there are going to be more first time preparers who will be seeking help and reassurance.
Jo bought just a turkey breast and she’ll be serving all the trimmings with it. It’s only going to be us and I’m certain we’ll have more than enough to eat and still have leftovers. Of course it will be a bittersweet meal without any of our family and friends around the table but there was a Thanksgiving not so long ago when I actually didn’t get any turkey.
I have a bunch of cousins and three of them live within just a few miles of each other. They have been rotating hosting the family Thanksgiving since my parents, uncles and aunts have passed. Thanksgiving for everyone used to be in Reading, Pa. It was actually two nights worth– at my parents’ one night and at my uncle and aunt’s the other. When I lived in California I rarely made it back for the doubleheader and missed the good times.
Since Jo and I moved to Maine, The Imber family Thanksgivings are now held just outside of New York City. The last one we attended was when I whiffed on the turkey. There were two birds being served actually. One was traditional and one was deep fried. Now, with all the cousins and their kids and the kids’ kids and inlaws this was a large gathering– I’m guessing 30 people, possibly more.
The house we were in was large enough to accomodate everyone comfortably but when it was time to grab a plate and hit the buffet, I held back. I wasn’t in a rush. I was enjoying just gabbing and failed to notice that everyone else had filled their plates. Yes, by the time I grabbed my own at the buffet both turkeys weren’t skin and bones, they were just bones. Gone!
Hey, all the other food was great but turkey and family are Thanksgiving. At least we can still have one of them this week.
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“If you are someone who is in the highest risk category, as best as possible, don’t travel anywhere.”–– Anthony Faucci (Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases)
Jo and I are lucky. We don’t feel it’s necessary to travel for Thanksgiving this year. Jo’s older daughter and her husband and their two young sons bought a house recently not far from us. Since the two boys started school we have only been visiting them as well as Jo’s sister and her mother outside. On Thanksgiving we’ll be delivering pies Jo is baking to all of them. As I said, we’re lucky.
I understand others who feel it’s imperative that they travel or that their family members will so that they can be together on Thursday. Is it safe that they do? it’s a risk for them and possibly for everyone they might come in contact with. That those of us over 65 are at a higher risk of a worse outcome if we contract the coronavirus is not in dispute. That those who are young and healthy are not as likely to get terribly sick is also understood. Risk is one piece. Spreading the virus is another. If more of us take less risk, it’s logical we will reduce spread.
It’s a Thanksgiving like no other in my lifetime. There’s no place like home for the holidays has been turned upside down and inside out. The plea that the best thing to do for the holidays is not to go home has been heeded by many and rejected by many others.
With the news and the hope that vaccines that will protect us and bring an end to the pandemic are on the way, giving up the family Thanksgiving gatherings this year would not be as great a sacrifice if we were still in the dark and more pessimistic about when this contagion might end.
I know I’m lucky. It’s easy for me to be dismissive of those who are traveling or receiving travelers. There was a slogan at the beginning of the outbreak of the virus– “We’re all in this together.” I haven’t heard it being uttered as much recently. Instead, I believe we’re all doing what we think is right for us. Whether or not that’s good enough to prevent the spread of COVID and stem the number of lives being lost to it every day is pretty clear to me. It’s not.
Unfortunately, our nation had the wrong leadership at the wrong time to confront this tragedy. Unfortunately, the very concept of being willing to give up anything at all for the greater good of all has become one that is ridiculed as much as respected at this point in American history.
This demise of even basic agreement about what constitutes the common good isn’t all Donald Trump’s doing. It’s no longer even a Republican or Democratic divide. Selflessness is in short supply in America today and selfishness I’m afraid is in abundance. In the time of COVID-19 it may likely be recorded for posterity that we succeeded to meet its challenge scientifically but failed to do so as a society.
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“It’s not over till the fat lady sings.”
It’s for sure that Donald Trump is not going to ride nobly off into the sunset, but it’s all but certain he’ll be packing up his tanning lamp and heading for Mar-a-Lago by January 20th. What’s less likely is that he will ever concede that he lost being reelected for a second term as president of the United States to Joe Biden.
So, there will not be any closing aria from Brunhilde in Gotterdammerung. Trump’s “Twilight of the Gods” will still be one that surely befits the conclusion of Wagner’s Ring cycle. I’m afraid we’ll be witness to more chaos and destruction until he has been hustled off the stage and hopefully never granted an encore performance.
I searched for the origin of “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings” and was surprised to learn that the phrase hasn’t been around as long as I assumed. According to
The Yale Book of Quotations, the first recorded use of it appeared in a Texas newspaper in 1976 as a quote overheard during a college basketball game. Texas Tech had rallied to force a tie and overtime when someone in the pressbox uttered what now have become the immortal words.
I’ve always pictured the singer Kate Smith whenever I hear “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.” Why? Well, she may not have been an opera singer but she filled the stage. Back in the 1950s Smith had a daily television show that followed Howdy Doody. Her big hit and theme song was “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain and so I heard that a lot as I sat in front of our tiny black and white Magnavox TV after being part of the Peanut Gallery watching Buffalo Bob and Flub-A-Dub.
But there was another song Kate Smith performed that I still occasionally heard played. It’s God Bless America written by Irving Berlin and Smith actually introduced it to the country on Armistice Day in 1938. Much later she would appear at Philadelphia Flyers hockey games and sing it. That became such a part of the team’s lore the Flyers erected a statue of her outside the arena. The statue was removed a couple years ago when racist songs Smith had recorded early in her career came to light.
Until this week I knew of another place where Kate Smith’s recording of God Bless America was still played at least a dozen times a day. You’ve probably never heard of Roadside America. If you grew up in Berks County Pennsylvania you did and visited it as a kid and then took your own kids there when you were an adult. Roadside America was an indoor miniature village over 6,000 square feet in size and portrayed over 200 years of American history. Mainly, it was a gigantic model train set that a man named Laurence Gehringer started building in his house in 1935.
Every half hour or so the lights would dim and an American flag would be spotlighted on the wall and Kate Smith would sing God Bless America. This may sound like it was the height of kitsch. I never thought so.
I took Jo to see it some time ago. Now, we won’t be able to take our grandkids. The attraction had been struggling to stay in business for a number of years. Perhaps it had become a dated historical artifact that younger people could no longer relate to. Last week, citing the strain of the pandemic, Roadside America closed permanently. That’s certainly not a tragedy when compared with the past four years. Kate Smith, I’m sorry I’ve always thought of you as a fat lady. Donald Trump, I’ll never think of you as being anything other than our worst president.
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Just the two of us this Thanksgiving around our table that ordinarily would seat family and friends. We’re going to have a great meal and feel thankful that we are so fortunate.
By this time next year we hope that our table and your own will once again be as full of family and friends as it will be today of food.
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If you’re wondering where the safest place on earth might be right now during the pandemic Easter Island is right up there but it hasn’t been free of the virus. The latest information I can find is that as of a couple months ago it had recorded nine cases among its nearly 8,000 residents.
As for COVID-19 free nations, there are a bunch and all are islands in the South Pacific: Palau, Micronesia, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Samoa and Tonga. And two other larger countries that claim they have had no coronavirus so far: Turkmenistan and North Korea. Yeah, sure.
I’ve never been to any of these places and it’s unlikely I ever will but we actually know a couple who are living on Palau at the moment with their kids. I’m not sure they could return to Maine right now even if they wanted to.
Samoans or at least men of Samoan descent are on America’s front lines if you’ll excuse a pun and I know a couple of you who won’t. They have become a way overrepresented demographic in American professional football. About 50 players from Samoa– 3% of the league –have been on NFL rosters in recent seasons and over 200 more are playing college football.
But the country on the list here that makes me smile is Tonga. Years ago I edited a piece for ABC News that was about that country. I don’t remember much about it except for a sequence where the king of Tonga was serenaded by
a military band as he made his entrance to preside at an official event. They played the royal ceremonial music– The Village People Medley which includes In the Navy, Macho Man and of course YMCA.
It would be nice to be lounging on a beach right now sipping something with alcohol and listening to the waves and the birds but it’s not an option and I’d miss the squirrels and chipmunks performing their acrobatics on the trees outside my window. No Easter Island for me either. I’ll wait it out here in Maine and by next Easter– April 4, 2021 –maybe a lot of us will be vaccinated and, unapologetic pun intended, hope that the country has given Joe Biden a shot.
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I’m grateful for trips taken to destinations we were delighted to see. I’m hopeful we may soon be able to travel again, but I’m willing and able to wait it out.
Sing it Perry!!!
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It’s cyber Monday and I don’t intend to buy anything online today. Of course the day is young and I just realized I’m down to my last chapstick. That’s an item available at any supermarket checkout stand but now I’ll probably purchase six of them on Amazon to avoid the trip and that might just be a lifetime supply. Does chapstick have a “best use by” date stamped on it.
I’m happy to have the internet and its convenience most of the time, especially during our pandemic, but I do miss the way things used to be sometime. Actually, a sentence I try to avoid ever using begins, “Well, the way we used to do it…” So far I think I’m keeping up with the times although I don’t get the point of a lot of the commercials on television and am not a fan of the music that accompanies them or most new music in general. Am I showing my age or are the commercials and the music actually that bad?
Several years ago I had a column I wrote published in the Reading Eagle, the newspaper where I grew up and had my first summer job. I then offered a second one that was rejected and the editor was unequivocal about why.
“We don’t want to look backwards. We want to move forward.”
So here is that column if you’re in the mood for a little nostalgia on Cyber Monday. And a note about email delivery… I’m getting messages that a number of you are not receiving what I’m sending and some are accompanied by an explanation that your mailboxes are over stuffed with stuff. I’m guessing this may have to do with unsolicited advertising, offers, notices, etc. as we begin the holiday shopping season.
Imagine you’re in your car and on both sides of the road you’re traveling on there are billboards as far as you can see. At some intersections the billboards are even in the street and blocking you from turning to the left or the right. Welcome to Cyber Monday!
Nightmare on Penn Street
There was a time when downtown Reading, Pennsylvania had everything. Of course I’m thinking of a time long ago when it also helped a lot to be a kid to believe that.
Reading’s Penn Street was like a theme park to me back then in the 1950s. I grew up in a post WWll housing development outside of the city and could ride the bus downtown by myself and not worry that my mother would call the police and demand they form a search party.
As soon as I hopped off the bus I’d head for the soft pretzel cart in Penn Square and the vendor with the glasses and a smile who never said a word. His pretzels cost a nickel apiece and some days were fresher than others.
Occasionally, I came downtown to fold cardboard boxes at Imber’s— my grandfather’s store. At a nickel a box he vastly overpaid me. Mostly, my trips were just to have fun and wander into the “Five and Dimes”— Woolworths and Kresge’s —the precursors to today’s discount stores.
From baseball gloves at Kagan’s to Boy Scout uniforms at Croll and Keck, Penn Street was the place that had something for everyone and offered special attractions for me unlikely to be found anywhere today.
Take the fluoroscope at Farr’s shoe store at 5th and Penn, a tool intended to show how your shoes fit. This was a device that allowed you to look down and actually see the bones in your feet as you stood under its beam in a pair of new penny loafers.
Turned out that it was as unsafe as it was entertaining, maybe as bad as having a load of X-Rays at once but who knew? And who sued years later after they found out?
The only escalator in town was at Pomeroy’s, Reading’s multi story department store. It was wooden and creaky and wonderful to ride. Unlike today’s smooth metal stairways, it bumped and shook as it made its half vertical orbit between floors. When its stairs flattened out and disappeared there was a gap large enough between the moving wood and the stationary terminus that you could fit your hand in it if you didn’t know any better. One boy I went to school with did just that and lost pieces of several fingers. If it had happened today, he might not have had to work a day in his life.
And there was the treasure chest at the Crystal, the most popular restaurant in town. What a smart bit of marketing by the owners who filled a trunk full of small rewards for kids who had likely urged their parents to bring them to eat there. I got my first baseball cards out of the Crystal’s “Treasure Chest,” including one of the great Red Sox slugger Ted Williams. Too bad I have no idea what I did with it.
A kid could entertain himself up and down Penn Street. You could watch the trains as they squealed by at 7th and Penn eating a Coney Island hot dog right beside the tracks while waiting to get a haircut if the barber let you.
But some of my best times downtown as well as what turned out to be my worst were at the movies. Reading once had its share of movie palaces with the names typical of that era—the Astor, the Embassy, the Loew’s and the Warner. All are now gone along with the experience that came from buying a ticket to a grand theater as well as a movie.
And there was also the Park which was off limits to adolescents. If Penn Street had everything from A to Zeswitz— the music store where I bought my first record albums —then the Park Theater covered X. It was Reading’s home to the final years of burlesque as well as the early ones of Bridgett Bardot and later just porn.
My first memories of going to the movies include Mr. Roberts starring Henry Fonda and Jack Lemon and Guys and Dolls with Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra. My father took me. But what he never heard about was the time I missed a day of 6th grade to go to the movies without him.
Two friends of mine talked me into it although I can’t claim it took much more than them asking me if I wanted to join them. We were all Jewish and it was a minor Jewish holiday that was so obscure and insignificant an observance that only the most devout regulars at Kesher Zion synagogue showed up for morning prayer joined by us three kids playing hooky.
Our absence from school and appearance at the service was a sham. We were on our way to a double feature. On the theater marquee was a pairing that wasn’t exactly biblical. We had skipped class and bluffed God to watch “Frankenstein” and “Dracula” and I’m talking movie horror hall of fame original versions starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.
That night as I lay in bed I knew falling asleep would be tough. Frankenstein and Dracula were either going to show up in my dreams or in my bedroom and I was powerless to choose. I was grateful for the street light down on the corner. At least I wasn’t totally in the dark. But then a shadow streaked across my bedroom wall and I couldn’t move. I almost couldn’t breathe. Several more times the shadow seemed to lunge at me until I realized that it was created by each car that passed by outside and under the street light.
Yes, I paid for more than just the two movies that day and I’ve never watched either of them again.
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