Hometown

“Sometimes I just

Wanna go back to me home town

Though I know it’ll never be the same.”

    “Home Town,” Joe Jackson

My hometown of Fort Washington PA was what suburbs resembled before subdivisions, close enough for my dad to catch a commuter train to Philadelphia but rural enough that there were woods across the street from our house and farms within a couple miles.  There was no home mail delivery, so in fifth grade Terry Jenkins and I started a mail route.  For a quarter a week we picked up people’s mail.  Somehow everyone, including the postmaster, trusted us.  Back then, in an age before seat belts or helmets I’d ride my bike all over town.  Going downhill on Fort Washington Avenue, I could get the speedometer up close to 40.  Scary thinking about what would have happened had I wiped out. 

I reluctantly de-friended Pat Zollo, losing a link to my hometown, after he posted a particularly egregious anti-Muslim cartoon. Pointing out errors in the rightwing stuff he circulated proved tiring after it obviously had no effect on his views about the Middle East or the upcoming election.   I want to remember him as the ultra-cool adolescent.  On the other hand, my contact with Upper Dublin classmate Gaard Murphy Logan has increased.  Sharing my views on Romney, the girlfriend of my teenage dreams wrote, “What are we going to do if he actually gets elected?”  She and Chuck are off to Italy next week. 

I put on a Time/Life CD of 1956 hits that included the Dells’ “Oh What a Night.”  When I talk next month about Vee-Jay Records founder Vivian Carter, I’ll open with an anecdote about teenager Henry Farag first hearing the song on Vivian’s WWCA radio show and becoming hooked on doo wop music.  My favorite two 1956 songs are also on the CD, Fats Domino’s “My Blue Heaven” and Roy Orbison’s “Ooby Dooby.”

Chris Kern (a huge Joe Jackson fan growing up in Miller) recommended a column by Fred Clark defending his tolerance of LGBT people against those believing, based on certain biblical verses, in “the intrinsic immorality of sexual minorities.”  To Clark Jesus preached love and tolerance and was neither wrathful nor fearsome.  Paraphrasing something Lloyd Bentsen said about JFK in a debate with Dan Quayle, he answers critics with this response: “I know Jesus.  I pray to Jesus.  Jesus is a savior of mine..  And the person you describe, sir, is no Jesus.”  If he’s wrong, Clark says, then in the words of Huckleberry Finn, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”

Anne Balay reports that daughter Emma returned from New Zealand, where she was an extra in a “Hobbit” movie, with a cold, elfin eyebrows, and a desire to work in pictures. She recommends the new novel “Telegraph Avenue” by Michael Chabon (below)

about the families of two guys, one white, the other African American who own a vinyl record store.

A Jerry Davich column reported on a cross-burning on the lawn of a black family living in Portage.  Mentioning that he received much reader feedback, he printed two responses, including this garbage from one Debbie F.: “Perhaps this is a hate crime, one perpetrated by blacks as retribution for leaving a black neighborhood.  It is possible that one of their own is angry at them for becoming an ‘Oreo’, as if rejection of ghetto behaviors or success means your white.”  I responded: “Why did you run Debbie F's sarcastic piece instead of the many comments expressing sympathy for the family and outrage over the cross-burning?  My guess: to keep the controversy brewing.”  Agreeing with me was Amanda Verdeyen Gulley, who commented: “Accusing a black person of doing this has to be one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. People who live in Gary have WAY bigger things to worry about than some one who left. I still love you, but that broad is WAY off the mark. I think it's white people like that who just rub salt in that family's wound. To even think that another person of color did that is her own way of pretending garage like this doesn't happen.”

I sent this email to Bob Mucci, director of Liberal Studies master’s degree program: “As much as I support Liberal Studies, lack of funds, as you know, has forced you to piggyback onto undergraduate courses.  More attention, I believe, should be given to utilizing emeritus faculty willing to teach small numbers of grad students at less than the normal “$3,000.  Several grad students signed up for my second semester History Topics course, “Diaries, Memoirs, and Journals”), for instance, only to find it cancelled.  I offered to teach them for free, but by the time a way was found to implement this, the students had dropped the course. If a way were found to compensate emeritus faculty (say, $200 per student) for working just with grad students, I believe the quality of the Liberal Studies program would be greatly enhanced. And my guess is that distinguished faculty such as Ronald Cohen and Fred Chary would welcome an opportunity to participate.”  Mucci responded that he fully supports the idea.

All summer a humongous pokeweed plant with berries that birds consumed grew near where our ash tree had been.  Evidently the leaves are edible if cooked, but the root and berries are poisonous to humans.  Toni clipped off the branches, and then I dug out most of the roots, as well as two smaller ones behind the condo.

One question in the NY Times September 2 Sunday puzzle was “Honolulu’s Palace.”  When researching my U. of Hawaii master’s thesis on Governor Joseph B. Poindexter, I went to Iolani Palace often to make use of his papers housed there.  Commissioned by King David Kalakaua and completed in 1882 in an American Florentine style, it was the official residence of Queen Liliuokalani until she was overthrown by American planters and later kept prisoner in a small room upstairs.

In the NY Times magazine’s letters section John H. Steed, commenting on a previous article about poverty, wrote: “The prison population has risen to more than 2,3 million in 2008 from roughly 200,ooo in 1970.  Any attempt to implement government policies to combat poverty without acknowledging the relationship between our current criminal-justice system and social collapse seems futile.”

I was looking forward to a big sports night Thursday, but the Sox-Tigers game got rained out and the Bears totally sucked in Green Bay.