Oxymandias

My name is OzymandiasOzymandias Pharaoh Rameses II (reigned 1279-1213 BCE). According to the OED, the statue was once 57 feet tall., King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Percy Shelley (1818)

A column by playwright David Mamet about our present crisis mentions his Jewish grandparents and uncle who emigrated to America a century ago and overcame numerous calamities.  Mamet references Percy Shelley’s “Oxymandias,” about the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II, whose statue was taken from a temple in Thebes and the torso and head eventually brought to London. The column refers to rock pecked by daws, and I found out that a daw, short for jackdaw, is a bird similar to a crow.  “Oxymandias” was also the title of a “Breaking Bad” episode during which Bryan Cranston recited the entire poem to make the point about collapse following greatness, hopefully not the fate of America burdened by a total incompetent at the helm during the present pandemic.

Ray Smock has characterized the Trump presidency as the Era of Pandemonium and his most recent daily briefing as a defining moment. In a wacky, dangerous, and all too typical display, DT “wondered out loud if maybe disinfectants could be a cure. Maybe we could get UV light inside of people. Maybe injecting the right kind of disinfectant might kill this thing. Maybe we should look into these things. He wondered if anybody ever thought of this before. It was as if he just discovered the answer to the pandemic.”  Smock added facetiously: “I certainly hope that no one goes out and tries to drink bleach or inject some household disinfectant into their veins. But maybe we will see a run on UV lighting. And people on beaches this summer may get sunburned tongues trying to follow the leadership of our president.”

With 50,000 Americans having died from Covid-19 in little more than a month – more than perished during the Vietnam war – I’m more aware of obits than ever before.  Claudia Wright, 79, of Valparaiso passed away, and as usual there was no clarification as to the cause of death.  Her relatives enjoyed her wacky expressions, such as “Do you want me to stand on my head and spit golden nickels?”  Or, “Your ass sucks buttermilk through a straw.”  The obit stated that one of Claudia’s last requests was “for the sake of mankind, to make sure that the ‘idiot’ is not re-elected as U.S. president.  For those who knew her, you could probably hear her voice saying this.”

 Anthony Mallozzi

Upper Dublin classmate Anthony Mallozzi passed away, John Jacobsen informed me.  I had to think briefly which Mallozzi that was because Bill Mallozzi, another cool dude, was also in our class.  Anthony was a tall, handsome Italian-American born in Ambler and in retirement lived in Sellersville, PA, not far from where we spent our formidable years, just down Bethlehem Pike a ways. We were casual friends with buddies in common – Bob Elliott, Pat Zollo, Dick Garretson, John Magyar – but didn’t have any classes together since he was in Industrial Arts and I in College Prep.  He signed my yearbook: “Jimmy, to a real nice guy.  Don’t forget intramurals. Best of everything in what you do.  Ant.”  I have no recollection of intramurals but it must have been basketball a sport I was quite good at despite my diminutive size.  The yearbook gives Ant’s nickname as Lazard and contains these notes: “Let’s go down to Gert’s – always seen with his ’54 Mercury – prefers a certain blond – heading West first chance he gets – tries to be serious when it’s impossible.” His friends Carol and Joe Paulino wrote, “Barbara and his family meant the world to him, and he talked about his grandchildren all the time.”  I hope he made it out West before he settled down.

John Updike’s “Rabbit at Rest” ended similarly to how “Rabbit Run” opened, with Harry playing hoops with someone younger, in this case a one-on-one game of 21 with a black guy he nicknames Tiger. He had observed playground games in the slum neighborhood during walks and, despite a bad heart, had worn shorts and sneakers in case he got into a game. As the contest intensified, Harry was aware “of a watery weariness entering into his knees, but adrenaline and nostalgia overrule.”  At 18 apiece Tiger says, “You puffin’ pretty bad.  How about coolin’ it? No big deal.”  Harry declines, they trade buckets, and needing a basket for the win, the 58-year-old, Updike writes, “takes one slam of a dribble, carrying his foe on his side like a bumping sack of coal, and leaps up for the peeper.  The hoop fills his circle of vision, it descends to kiss his lips, he can’t miss.  Up he goes, way up toward the torn clouds.  His torso is ripped by a terrific pain.  He bursts from within; he feels something immense persistently fumble at him, and he falls unconscious to the dirt.”  In the hospital Rabbit’s last words to son Nelson: “All I can tell you, it isn’t so bad.”

At Rest

"Teaching is the greatest act of optimism," Colleen Wilcox

Former Gary educator Carmen Cammarata passed away at age 89.  After graduating from Froebel, Carmen served in the army for two years before earning degrees in Education from IU and Roosevelt University and taking a teaching job at Webster Elementary in Glen Park.  Former Webster student Robin Shannon recalled:

    He was the nicest guy.  I ran into him as an adult. It took a minute but once it came back to him he remembered this skinny little kid who transferred from private school.  He said I cried for two days until he gave me a lollipop.  He was an Italian guy in a school full of brown kids. He was super protective of us, never allowing racism of the 60s to gain traction within our hallways.

Using his student experiences at Froebel as a model, Cammarata took a multicultural approach to learning. After serving as assistant principal at Emerson, he became principal at Washington and later at Aetna and Kennedy-King in Miller. Alicia Skinner Kelley wrote, “He was an awesome person, teacher, and leader.  He was my principal at Washington Elementary at my first teaching assignment.  I was his assistant principal at Spaulding, and he taught me everything that I would ever need to know about Elementary Administration. All the principals considered Mr. C the very best.”  Natalie Stewart added: “He loved his job, loved talking about Froebel School, and Gary, the city where he was raised.” As caring as he was, Cammarata kept a tight reign on discipline during a time of rapid racial upheaval.  On Burns-Kish Funeral Home “Share a Memory” website Chip wrote: “Mr. C!  His sternness, bullhorn, and paddle helped make me the success that I am.”  Self-described problem child Ricky Ammons noted, “He taught us structure and respect.” T. Myricks summarized: “He had a non-nonsense approach that you appreciated because you knew it truly came from a place of love.”

Cammarata (right) is survived by wife of 68 years Mary Ann, two siblings, five children, 11 grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.  The Cammarata family, according to the Northwest Indiana Times obit, “enjoyed numerous trips touring the western states in their pop-up camper.  Upon retirement, Carmen and Mary Ann enjoyed trips to Italy, Russia, and Alaska.  He especially enjoyed his trip to Sicily to meet his cousins for the first time.  His summers were filled with the meticulous care of his house, yard, and cars.” R.I.P.
When Phil and Dave started school at Marquette Elementary in Miller, the principal, a Mr. Svetkoff, paddled kids, in fact made a public spectacle of it in front of other students.  It    so traumatized Dave that he once at age six walked all the way home, crossing a major artery.  We scheduled an appointment with Svetkoff, and he claimed that the teachers union contract gave him the right to paddle, that black parents wanted him to use the power (this was a time of rapid racial transition), and that we didn’t have to worry about Dave getting paddled.  We suggested that at the least he could carry out disciplinary action away from other kids, but he refused and actually seemed proud of what he was doing.  Not long afterwards, Phil and Dave started going to an alternative school in Glen Park.

In John Updike’s “Rabbit at Rest” Harry is watching the news in August 1989 when reports came on of Voyager II discovering volcanoes on Triton, one of Neptune’s 13 moons, and two Congressman dying in a small plane crash within a week, Lankin Smith of Mississippi and African-American Mickey Leland of Texas in Ethiopia. Other lawmakers, small plane travel being an occupational hazard, who similarly perished were Hale Boggs over Alaska (presumably, the crash site was never found) and Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania, whose widow, heir to the Heinz ketchup fortune, married Senator John Kerry.  Fleeing to Florida after his daughter-in-law confessed to sleeping with him (her idea, her husband being a cokehead at the time), Harry found an Oldies radio station that played songs from his youth: “Mule Train” by Frankie Laine, “It’s Magic” by Doris Day, “Vaya con Dios” by Les Paul and Mary Ford, and “Just a Giggolo” by Louis Prima – fitting in Rabbit’s circumstance.  Updike observes: “We’re all just bodies with brains at one end and the rest just plumbing.”

I re-watched the 1973 John Lucas-Francis Ford Coppola classic “American Graffiti” (1973) and discovered that Harrison Ford played a greaser who races John, the Fonzi-like character. Richard Dreyfuss, then 26, plays high school graduating senior Curt, as does Ron Howard (identifies as Ronny in the credits) as Steve.  Set in the year 1962, the film features Wolfman Jack spinning songs from my youth such as “Sixteen Candles” by the Crests and “Goodnight, Sweetheart” by the Spaniels from Gary, Indiana. The thin plot, such as it is, centers on whether Curt and Steve will go away to college or attend a local junior college. After Steve’s girlfriend leaves him and almost dies when Harrison Ford’s car flips over and explodes in flames, she begs him never to leave her and wimpy Steve forgoes his chance to attend a prestigious university (Boo!). As the credits roll, we learn that Curt becomes a writer, Steve an insurance salesman, and that John gets killed by a drink driver – pretty bogus and annoying since these are fictional characters.

Do the Right Thing

“Don’t worry be happy was a number one jam

Damn if I say it you can slap me right here.
    Public Enemy, “Fight the Power”

 

I vaguely recall seeing Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” (1989) at IUN but observed many things watching it again that I had missed or forgotten.  It opens with a saxophone rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and stars Spike Lee as pizza delivery man Mookie (after 1986 Mets hero Mookie Wilson), first seen wearing a Dodger uniform with 42 and Robinson on the back. Samuel L. Jackson is spot-on as a mellow, hip deejay who plays everything from jazz and soul to hip hop. Throughout the movie we hear Public Enemy on Radio Raheem’s boom box, which provokes the climactic riot, during which the crowd chants “Howard Beach,” a white neighborhood where a black man was murdered in 1986. There’s also references to Michael Stewart, killed while in police custody after being arrested for spray painting graffiti on a New York City subway wall.

 

“Don’t Worry be Happy,” referenced by Public Enemy, was a surprise number 1 hit in 1988 for Bobby McFerrin, who claimed the slogan came from Indiana guru Meher Baba (1894-1969), who was in vogue in the 1960s and whose following included the Who’s Peter Townshend.

 

Self-isolated for the better part of a month, I’ve been averaging a movie a day OnDemand. Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed” was disappointing except for a brilliant performance by Jack Nicholson as a Boston mob boss and strong performances by Matt Damon and Leo DiCaprio, who have such a resemblance to one another it was hard at first to tell them apart.  Much more moving was “Blinded by the Light,” about a young Pakistani immigrant, Javed Khan, living in England during the 1980s whose life is transformed after someone introduces him to Bruce Springsteen.  Set, like “Do the Right Thing,” in the late 1980s, it shows the racism Muslims encountered in Great Britain.

 

Two good movies about lonely people are “The Station Agent” with Peter Dinklage (of “Game of Thrones” fame) and Bobby Cannavale (so good in “Boardwalk Empire”) and “The Yellow Handkerchief” (2008) starring William Hurt as an ex-con and Kristen Stewart before the “Twilight” series.  I first saw Hurt in “Altered States” (1980), and he played a scarred Viet vet in the 1983 classic “The Big Chill.”   I’ve looked forward to any movie he’s in ever since although for the past dozen years he’s mainly wasted his talent in “Avenger”-type flicks.  Born in 1950, Hurt’s only eight years my junior.

 

In addition to TV watching, I finished John Updike’s “Rabbit Is Rich” and am deciding whether to tackle the sequel, “Rabbit at Rest” or start a 700-page Tom Wolfe novel that takes place at the end of the century, “A Man in Full.”  Updike summarized the Texas culture of “money, booze, and broads” with these words: “God didn’t go west, He died on the trail.”  Describing Harry’s elderly mother-in-law, Ma Springer, looking shrunken and bent at the Philadelphia airport, Updike wrote, “Her former look of having been stuffed tight with Koerner pride and potential indignation has fled, leaving her chin collapsed in random folds and bloodless.  Deep liverish gouges underscore her eyes, and her wattled throat seems an atrocious wreck of flesh.” Ma Springer uses a Pennsylvania German word, ferhuddled, that means confused or befuddled.

“What you lose when you age,” Updike wrote, “is witnesses, the ones that watched you from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.” My dad, Vic, died at fifty, Midge lasted till age 99.  Last year best childhood pals Terry Jenkins and Wayne Wylie died.  Grandstand nearly empty.

Through the magic of Facebook I’ve been getting likes on my posts from Kimberley McGrath, the daughter of high school classmate Susan McGrath and the sister of Maria, whom I met at a history conference in Montreal and have been friends with since.  Recently Maria posted an Alfred Camus quote that accompanied photos taken during a walk in the woods.  I commented: “As Camus wrote, even if the world is absurd, we must proceed as if our lives are meaningful.”  Kimberley responded, “Exactly.”

 

Robert Blaszkiewicz forwarded a post from Doug Ross recommending that people keep plague journals, something I’ve already been doing with my blog. Buying groceries at Strack and Van Til, I noticed disinfected shopping carts were ready for use, and additional hand wipes were by the door. The aisles were marked so as people would only go down them one direction. While there was a limited toilet paper supply, I did find a roll of eight and a three-pack of facial tissues.  About half the customers and staff were wearing masks, and shoppers were keeping a good distance from one another.  Tom from Toyota called with an offer to pick up my Corolla in regards to the airbag recall, then called to say my oil change was due in 800 miles and if I wanted them to do that plus rotate the tires.  Another call to suggest new tires, which I agreed to since a sale was going on and I trusted Tom, who’s been wit the company for over 30 years.  Next day I was able to pay the cashier by Discover card over the phone, and an hour later the car was back in the driveway. 

 

WW II vet James Forsythe, 95, of Crown Point passed away two weeks after his wife of 73 years Marge.  Growing up during the Great Depression from a family of eight that barely scraped by, he was drafted in 1944 at age 19 after failing to get into the navy and merchant marine. He served in England as a dental technician, met Marge while at Camp Atterbury in 1946 where he was a medical photographer, and served again in the Korean War.  He worked for many years for Indiana Bell and became active in veterans groups and Crown Point politics, serving two terms as mayor (1984-1991) after retiring from the telephone company. He was especially proud of leading efforts for the restoration of Crown Point courthouse (the Archives came into possession of nineteenth-century Land County land records when it had been scheduled for demolition).  Forsythe often dressed up as Abraham Lincoln for Fourth of July parades and, dressed as “Honest Abe,” recited the Gettysburg Address in front of the Indiana General Assembly.  Year ago, I was at the Portage library listening to a talk on Lincoln when a man arrived dressed as Abe and sat in the front row.  He never said a word and got up and left silently when it was over.  Could have been Forsythe.  NWI Times reporter Mary Freda wrote:

    James Forsythe always had a corny joke or silly song at the ready for any occasion, his children recalled. “There was always music, whether he was playing his guitar or music on the radio, or whistling – he whistled all the time, his daughter Margaret Wood said.

The obit added that Forsythe’s first job was delivering milk from a horse-drawn carriage at age 15 and that 77 years later, James, 92, was still jamming on guitar at Crown Point farmers market.

Homestead

“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of comfortable living from a small piece of land.” Abraham Lincoln

When President Abraham Lincoln signed the 1862 Homestead Act as the Civil War raged, opening up a half-million square miles of western land offering 160 acres to citizens settling on the land and farming it for five years, the American myth of a country of independent farmers had not yet died.  Nonetheless, most of the free land was inhospitable to small farmers and America was becoming an industrialized nation.  Forty years later in Homestead, PA, site of a state-of-the-art steel mill owned by Robber Baron Andrew Carnegie, the crushing of a strike by military troops demonstrated that the egalitarian dream had turned into a nightmare for the working man.

Although the word homestead is defined as one’s residence and adjoining land (I sometimes use the word as a synonym for home, especially when we lived atop a sand dunes on Maple Place), the word is commonly associated with old farmhouses and their outbuildings, such as the Buckley Homestead southeast of Lowell in Lake County or the old Bailly Homestead in Porter, site of the area’s first permanent residents, Joseph and Marie Bailly, and now part of Indiana Dunes National Park. In “Rabbit Is Rich” John Updike described the fictitious Albrecht Stamm Homestead built in the mid-1820s in eastern Pennsylvania and restored by a historical society.  Updike wrote:

    Even though a young hippie couple lives upstairs and leads visitors through, to Harry the old Stamm place is full of ghosts, those old farmers lived weird lives, locking their crazy sisters in the attic and strangling the pregnant hired girl in a fit of demon rum and hiding the body in the potato bin so that 50 years later the skeleton comes to light.

 

An example of Updike’s propensity to poke fun of ministers is seen in the depiction of Episcopalian cleric Archie “Soupy” Campbell, officiating at Rabbit son Nelson’s shotgun wedding.  He writes

    In a black cassock and white surplice and stole “Soupy” flashes his “What? Me Worry” grin, those sudden seedy teeth [but] the voice welling up out of this little man is terrific.  Soupy bats the eyelids between phrases, his only flaw.

The NWI Times Saturday Stumper crossword puzzle seems impossible to anyone but Toni, but I was able to help her for once.  A clue asked for the Avenue next to Reading Railroad in eight letters.  The reference was to Monopoly and the first letter O since the word across was Sacco (1920 anarchist).  Aha – Ontario, one of the light blue properties six spaces beyond Go and next to the Reading (which some Hoosiers pronounce as if one was reading a book).

Final Jeopardy on the category Historical Names was looking for a Hungarian-born editor who in 1904 said that a free press was a prerequisite for representative government. It had to be Joseph Pulitzer, but only one contestant knew it.  Another said Hearst, the purveyor of slanted news or “Yellow Journalism.”

Having finished my latest Shavings, Paul Kern sent a long email discussing, among other things, old colleagues and students as well as region high school sports events and other memories. He attended the 1975 state championship football contest where Valparaiso defeated Carmel 14-13 with star single wing tailback Mark Allen, one of the few African-American families living in Valpo at that time.  Allen moved from Cabrini Green at age 12 and after a football career at Arizona and the USFL lived in Valpo working in construction until he died at age 51. In the late 1960s Paul lived in Glen Park and recalled an Italian neighbor complaining about black students being bussed to neighborhood schools. He wrote: “His dire predictions of decline came true even though bussing was not a cause of the economic woes of Gary.  Neither one of us had a premonition of the global and technological changes that would devastate Gary.”  Being a couple years my senior, Paul has a few World War II memories, including seeing his father in uniform and on VJ watching a kid bang on an upside-down wash tub.

 

Paul Kern, seeing my post on Terrence Malick, said they were classmates at a small Texas boarding school and that he was then considered a genius and good guy. The most intriguing guy in my high school class was Bob “Buck” Elliott, who was witty and seemingly fearless. I first encountered him in a ninth grade.  When a new teacher called the roll, after the guy behind him said his name was Vince Curll, he claimed his name was also Vince Curll.  The next guy said his name was also Vince Curll, and the teacher, a big former wrestler, was dumbfounded on what to do. Soon the class was totally out of control, with a few students trying to pay attention amidst the chaos.  The poor teacher was gone within a month. At a party Buck went into a bathroom with a girl and asked guys to guard the door until they came out. He left it to our imaginations to decide what might have transpired.  In high school he organized a squad of male cheerleaders and knew how to charm most teachers, as well as the girls. I never much noticed homeroom teacher Mrs. Davis until he said she had quite a nice trim figure. He had a really cool mother, and at a party in his house I recall the Father of eleventh grader Fern McCullough barging in when he got wind that a daughter was there and supposedly rescuing her from the den of iniquity.  Elliott became a school principal, of all things, in Hawaii.  I’m sure he was a good one. He was confident and comfortable around everyone. At a reunion he regaled us with wonderful memories.

Commenting on one of my nostalgic posts was a woman with the same name as a childhood friend’s mother.  It turned out to be his kid sister Teena, who recalled playing hide-and-seek at night in our two-story garage during which her cousin hit someone over the head with a hammer. Teena was three years younger than I; when she was in seventh grade I drove her and a 13-year-old friend somewhere.  In my flawed memory (I have no memory of the hide-and-seek game) the friend asked me if I knew what a soul kiss was and I gave her one. She was cute and alluring but considered back then too young to date, like robbing the cradle, in the parlance of the time.  Likewise, Teena, a cute redhead now 75, would have been off limits.

From an obit I learned that Angela “Gigi” Morgan Medved of Valpo died at age 57. She was born in Gary in 1963, the year Democratic machine candidate A. Martin Katz, hand-picked choice of jailed Boss George Chacharis, was elected mayor and attorney Richard Hatcher won a seat on the city council. By the time Gigi graduated from Andrean, most white students had left Gary or, if not, sought schooling elsewhere. A coach and volunteer, Gigi, the obit read, “had a passion for cooking, the Chicago Cubs, hosting pool parties, and vacations to Clearwater, Florida.” How sad to die so young, in these times when friends cannot gather to mourn her passing until, hopefully, a later date.

I played five-person Acquire online.  Dave, the winner, had talked me through have to use Google Chrome to get to the Facebook site. I could see and talk with the other players, and gamemaster Jef Halberstadt held up tiles for us while others didn’t watch.

“Glory Road” may not be a great movie, but it tells a great story of Texas Western, a team with five black starters, upsetting a favored all-white Kentucky squad coached by a legend, in the 1966 NCAA championship.  On the team were two players from Gary, co-captains Harry Flournoy, an Emerson grad, and former Froebel star Orsten Artis, who subsequently became a Gary police officer.

Area Chinese joints were closed for business, but Wagner’s Ribs was still serving carry-out, seven days a week, eight hours a day, at least for the time being. Sunday was a beautiful day, brisk and sunny and at night a full moon shining between a couple clouds above the roof looking east from our homestead.

Tree of Life

“You can run all your life

And not go anywhere.”

   (Take Away This) Ball and Chain,” Social Distortion

 

Prior to playing “Ball and Chain” for his daily Facebook performance, son Dave wrote that he was feeling a little socially distorted, given the enduring self-isolation caused by the pandemic. In the background was a poster of his high school band LINT. Dave’s previous selection was “Stacy’s Mom” by Fountains of Wayne in honor of co-founder Adam Schlesinger, who passed away from COVID-19.  Also R.I.P., Bill Withers.  “Ain’t No Sunshine” with them gone.

 

Knowing what an acclaimed director Terrence Malick is, I watched “The Tree of Life” (2011), which I found rather pretentious and boring despite stellar performances by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain as the postwar parents of three boys.  Scenes depicting the formation of the earth reminded me of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”  Critic Roger Ebert loved tit and summed up the theme of all Malick movies in this way: “Human lives diminish beneath the overwhelming majesty of the world.” Maybe, but the flick could have used more action and some resolution.

My favorite reporter, Chesterton Tribune's Kevin Nevers, has been self-isolating with wife Meredith, Kate and Andie, and their cats for the past two weeks.  In “Thoughts on a Pandemic” he describes himself as “a tired hack who after 23 years at the Tribune has very nearly run out of words, so the slower pace of teleworking suits me just fine.” Erudite without being pedantic, Nevers incorporated the words paradigm and apparatchik, made reference to second mate Stubb on the deck of the “Pequod,” the whaling ship in “Moby Dick,” and wrote: “I’ve always been a homebody, so living in my pajamas and shaving once every five days come naturally to me.”  He described having beers with his best friend in his garage 12 feet from him with hand sanitizer between them.  He predicted that the pandemic will “mutate the DNA of our way of life [and] distort notions of personal space, norms of etiquette, forms of consumption, seismically shift the terms and structures of politics, and transform how we celebrate and grieve, woo and worship.”

 

In “Rabbit Is Rich” John Updike referred to America in 1979 “littered with pull-tabs and bottlecaps and pieces of broken mufflers.” Forty years later, it’s much worse – millions of plastic bags that will scar the earth’s land and seas for centuries.

 

In my current Steel Shavings magazine I wax nostalgic about playing Spin the Bottle at a party Ray Bates held, searching for used Fats Domino records at Montgomeryville flea market, giving girls back rubs (and sometimes having them be reciprocated) in home ec teacher Mrs. Davis’s homeroom, and being interrupted while parking in the Van Sant farm long dirt road by Chief of Police Ottinger. With plans for my 60^th high school reunion in possible jeopardy, this paragraph seems bittersweet:

    In 1980 I shared a smoke with Gaard Murphy and husband Chuck; in 1990 Sue Floyd asked me to dance to “Proud Mary” and I mistook Carolyn Aubel for Carolyn Ott and blurted out that I’d had a rush on her.  In 1995 I got Wayne Wylie (who never dances, wife Fran warned) to boogie with me to “I Wanna Be Sedated”.  Favorite math teacher Mr. Taddei came to the 40^th, Mrs. Polsky and Mr. Bek to the 45^th, and several first-timers to the 50^th, including Jay Bumm and Wendy Henry wearing, unbelievably, her Homecoming Queen tiara. In 2015 I trading senior Little League memories with Eddie Piszek, and deejay Fred Scott played hits from 1960, including The Twist” and “Go, Jimmy, Go.”

Shapeless Shadows

"The difficulty to think at the end of the day

When the shapeless shadow covers the sun.”
  Wallace Stevens, "A Rabbit As King of the Ghosts"

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) wrote the above lines, quoted by John Updike in “Rabbit Is Rich,” shortly before he died. Born in Reading PA, near where Updike’s novel takes place, Stevens told the publisher of Poetry Magazine that one morning he spotting a rabbit outside his bedroom window digging at bulbs and since then wake up worrying about the rabbit and wondering what it was having for breakfast.  The poem contains these lines:

      And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light

      In which everything is meant for you

     And nothing need to be explained

     Then there is nothing to think of

When the days run together, it’s difficult to know what day of the week it is. I used to conclude my day watching CNN or MSNBC but it is hard to have it on more than a few minutes, with news of the virus worsening daily.  Chris Cuomo, CNN host, has tested positive and reports on his deteriorating health from his home.







CNN and other networks told folks not to do April Fools day pranks, that they would be in poor taste given the pandemic.  Agreed.  I have stopped doing them even since I told Alissa when she was a kid that I had chopped a tree down that she liked and she started crying.  She got more than even with me in years to come.  Post-Tribune columnist Jerry Davich once wrote a column claiming he was running for mayor and many people took him seriously. Dave once claimed to be resigning from teaching, and it backfired as many students were very upset. Sam Love posted a clipping of an article he wrote 22 years ago for the IUN student newspaper about a mysterious odor coming from the Raintree Hall men’s room, even purporting to quote a student claiming that he goes over to Hawthorn to relieve himself rather then go in there.

I received an email from Chris Sakelaris, a 1960 Froebel grad, who once lived at Eleventh and Harrison prior to construction of the Slovak Club and recalled Gary Aldering Settlement and Dixie Dairy.  His family attended St. Anthony’s near Fifteenth and Van Buren, which, he said had a dozen or more pool tables in the basement and an elderly gent nicknamed Pops collected ten cents a rack for from players.

In “Rabbit Is Rich” Harry turns on the radio on the ride home from the Toyota dealership and hears “Stayin’ Alive.” Updike wrote:

    The Bee Gees are white men who have done this wonderful thing of making themselves sound like black women. It’s the John Travolta theme song.  Rabbit still thinks of him as one of the Sweathogs from Mr. Kotter’s class but for a while back there last summer the U.S.A. was one hundred percent his, every twat under 15 wanting to be humped by a former Sweathog in the back seat of a car parked in Brooklyn.

The news, circa 1979, comes on with stories about Skylab, Three Mile Island, long gas lines, and then this:

   A Baltimore physician was charged with murdering a Canadian goose with a golf club.  The defendant claims, the disinterested female voice twangs on, that he had accidentally struck the goose with a golf ball and then had dispatched the wounded creature with a club to end its misery. The voice concludes, “A mercy killing, or murder most foul.”

At the country club Harry brought up President Jimmy Carter’s so-called malaise speech, where he talked about the country’s crisis of confidence and that most people fear things are going to get worse, not better, in their lives.  As Harry concluded, “Nobody is going to the moon much these days.”

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I watched “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” on HBO.  The theater where I first saw it is closed down until further notice. It takes place in the fall of 1969, a time like 1979 and today when it seemed like an era was ending and shapeless shadows were covering the sun. The Age of Aquarius had given way to crazed hippies following the likes of Charles Manson. The Brad Pitt stuntman character picks up one of them, an underage teenager who calls herself Sunshine, labels cops pigs and believes the system beyond redemption and that all but her tribe are blind.

A dog across Sand Creek Drive barks every time a jogger goes by, even sometimes when I open the garage door, as far away as we are.  We don’t hear him when inside but it must be annoying to neighbors.  When we lived at Maple Place, a young woman who lived alone across the street from us sometimes left her dog out all night when she wasn’t home – to keep away burglars, I guess.  That damn dog would bark incessantly, every time a racoon or some other wild animal came within sight.  We’d complain and she’d not do it for a while but then fall back into doing it again.

I’ve enjoyed posting high school memories on Facebook and getting replies from former classmates.  Unlike college, we came from many different backgrounds; and although there were cliques, we ad friendships beyond them.  One of the most unique guys was self-proclaimed atheist Charles Thomas, who threatened to write an expose about the rest of us.  He lived in a farmhouse near Susquehanna Avenue and had goats or sheep, can’t recall which. Vince Curll and I would visit him.  His mother was really cool, and he had a younger brother who, I believe, had gotten a girl pregnant.  Charlie, as we called him, never dated, or socialized with any other student, so far as we could tell. His mother was naturally delighted to see us. Charlie never attended any reunions, but after he died a hospice care nurse who’d met him came to one, saying what a nice man he was and that she wanted to meet some of his friends.  Since Vince never attended reunions either, she ended up talking to me. I was vert tactful, said he’d been quite a character who loved getting a rise out of people, and gave her directions to the farmhouse where he’d lived.

The navy has relieved Captain Brett Crozier, captain of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, of command after he warned that the corona virus was spreading aboard his ship. Rather than wait for his warning to make its way up the chain of command, he distributed numerous copies, and the press got ahold of the story. A hero to his men, Crozier paid the price for ensuring that the navy would take action as soon as possible.

Sitting in Limbo

“Sitting here in limbo

Waiting for the dice to roll

Sitting here in limbo

I got time to search my soul”

    Neville Brothers

 

Dave made a list of his all-time favorite players on 30 MLB teams – refusing to include members of the hated Cardinals and Mets.  Most I couldn’t argue with such as Roberto Clements, Pudge Fisk, Kenny Lofton, Andre Dawson, and 1980 Phillies hero Tug McGraw.  Former or future Cubs included Ben Zobrist (KC), Mark Grace (Arizona), and Joe Carter (Toronto).  I was conflicted over Nolan Ryan and Pete Rose, terrific competitors but players I loved to hate.  My list would have included old-timers from my youth such as Ralph Kiner, Richie Ashburn, and Roy Campanella (Dave, to his credit, had Jackie Robinson for the Dodgers).

 

I compiled a list of vivid high school memories that fell into these categories: guys I hung with, memorable teachers, girlfriends, sports events, sock hops, senior play, homeroom, Friday assembly, sex education, and field trips. Regarding the latter, while taking a bus to New York City was eye-opening, my favorite excursion was when sexy French teacher Renee Polsky, who called me Jacques (which never failed to get a rise out of me) took us to see the play “La Plume de ma Tante” in Philadelphia.  Accompanying her was my homeroom teacher Miss Malkus, probably no more than a half dozen years older than the students.  As I recall, later that evening they were planning to catch a live show featuring crooner Johnny Mathis.

 

Regarding sex education, it fell to phys ed teacher Mr. Cunningham to conduct a few such classes to an all-male class.  He never strayed from using medical terms and succeeded in making a boring subject out of it.  Once when cut-up Dick Garretson said something suggestive under his breath, normally mild-mannered Cunningham grabbed him out of his seat and all but beat him up. I learned more about the subject from trial and error and an X-rated deck of cards Vince Curll had that depicted, among other things, fellatio. Once Vince and I double-dated and ended up in a rec room on adjoining couches.  Sneaking a glance at the other couple, I copied some of Vince’s moves, which back then we referred to as touching the bases.

 

Assemblies usually took place at the end of the week when we had other things on our minds. One afternoon, however, the Flamingos, a black doo wop group, entertained.  Singing acapella rather than with a band, they performed such incandescent numbers as “I Only Have Eyes for You,” in perfect harmony and with cool body movements. I can’t imagine why or how they arrived at Upper Dublin H.S. but they had everyone’s total attention. Our principal, whom we nicknamed “Sneaky Pete” because he often roamed the halls unexpectedly, pretty much left assemblies to his assistant in charge of discipline Mr. Wert, who once made the mistake of trying to lead cheers like at a pep rally because of a game that evening. Few students obeyed his exhortations despite threats to keep us until we showed some school spirit.

 

I had a minor role in “Meet Me in St. Louis,” our senior play, as an old man. What I remember best about rehearsals is developing close friendships, including with Judy Otto, Larry Bothe, and Mary Delp, a former girlfriend who I’d felt somewhat uncomfortable around since we’d broke up, like it had been my fault for acting immature.  On opening night, my hair was whitened and I was given granny glasses to wear.  After one scene I discovered to my horror that I had gone on stage in my regular glasses.  Probably nobody even noticed.

 

Sock hops following basketball games were more fun than formal dances because the dress was casual and the music more contemporary. One couple from near Ambler would do the dirty dig and we’d all gather around until a chaperone would notice and break it up. I fancied myself a good jitterbugger, especially with dancing partners Judy Jenkins and Pam Tucker.  The final number of the evening – usually “Goodnite, Sweetheart” or “Save the Last Dance for Me” – was a chance to hold someone tight and close to your body, a perfect climax to the event.

 

Although I attended football games and played on the golf team, my most vivid sports memories are watching basketball contests as an undergraduate cheering on John and Mike Magyar, neighbors from up the street who’d sometime shoot hoops at my place.  Though older, Mike was close to a foot shorter than John and was a scrappy jv sub who played with wild abandon.  Classmate Percy Herder starred for the varsity.  I caught several girls field hockey games coached by leggy Mrs. Rocchino, whom we suspected of having an affair with Cunningham. I loved watching LeeLee Minehart, Mildred Armstrong, and Kathleen Birchler take it to the opposition. Most unforgettable memory: an exhibition baseball team between students and teachers. Gap-toothed Biology teacher Mr. Gabauer (Ga-boo-boo) hit a towering drive way over the leftfielder’s head. Had there been a fence, it would have cleared it.  Rounding third, Ga-boo-boo ran out of gas, collapsed and was tagged out, his moment of glory gone.

 

I could go on and on about homeroom hijinks and memorable instructors (Latin teacher Mrs. LaVan being the worst, Edward Taddei (“taddy laddy”) the best. Looking back, why couldn’t I have taken Spanish rather than a dead language like Latin? LaVan once accused me of cheating on a test, saying someone near me had been looking at my answers.  I honestly had no idea what she was talking about. She’d whack me with a ruler when I’d turn around to flirt with Mary Dinkins. I learned later from guidance counsellor Mr. Dulfer that she tried to get me suspended for smoking a cigarette in a car leaving school. Taddei, on the other hand, was such a great math teacher I literally could remember everything he taught us, he made it so interesting. The unit on probability still comes in handy playing bridge. Taddei had a twin brother, and both were basketball referees.

 

I’ll restrict hanging-out stories to a merciful few. The Fifties was the heyday of drive-ins, both to eat and so-called “passion pits,” where once I had to listen to Ray Bates making out while my date insisted on just watching the movie. Pete Drake tried to sneak Ron Hawthorn and I in free by putting us in the trunk but then let us out within sight of an employee, who tried to shake us down into paying double. Jay Bumm drove a jalopy that was probably 20 years old; Chuck Bahmueller’s 40s road hog was lucky to get ten miles to a gallon and needed almost as much oil.

Other indelible U.D. h.s. memories: hearing about the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper in Mr. Lewis’ Algebra II class; the pungent smell of hoagies that Pat Zollo snuck out and brought back during lunch hour from an Italian joint in Ambler; goofing off at Molly Schade’s house while supposedly studying for Mr. Sisak’s stupid Civics final; after school trips to Flourtown with Bob Reller and Dick Garretson to pick up the latest WIBG Top 40 chart at a record store and then go bowling; H.M. Jones arranging graded test papers from best to worst and scaring A student Vickie Vroom by holding hers until near the tail end.

I’m rereading John Updike’s “Rabbit Is Rich,” which takes place in 1979, the twilight of the so-called Me Decade.  Opening words: “running out of gas.”  Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, now in his mid-40s, tells a friend, “I’m glad I lived when I did.  These kids coming up, they’ll be living on table scraps.  We had the meal.” Updike used the word ramifying, which I discovered meant spreading – an apt description of our present pandemic.