Living Mirage

“Don’t tell me I lost a step

Criss-crossed in the wrong direction”

         “Missed Connection,” The Head and the Heart

 above, Joshua Tree National Park; below, The Head and the Heart

Joshua Tree; photo by Amanda Marie Board

Chelsea Sue and Amanda Marie

WXRT has been playing a couple tracks from the upcoming Head and the Heart CD “Living Mirage, including “Missed Connection” and “Honeybee,” written by Jon Russell at Joshua Tree National Park where I took 98-year-old Midge on our last jaunt together. Perhaps the album title emanates from a mirage or optical illusion Russell encountered while walking through the wondrous park. “Honeybee,” both a love song (rare these days) and a confessional, contains this verse:

But here we are 

After all the misses and confessions

To the scars

That we never really owned as ours

Alissa called to say she and Josh are coming down from Michigan two weekends in a row, to see James in the Portage senior play and the following Friday to attend the Dave Davies concert with me at Hobart’s refurbished Art Theatre.  I told her I was listening to Weezer’s Teal album that contains “Africa,” “Take On me,” and “Happy Together,” all of which we heard Weezer perform a couple weeks ago.  She’s been playing The Head and the Heart, whom we saw last year at 20 Monroe in Grand Rapids.

scenes from Appointment with Danger, Original Gangstas

In Mary Beth Blake’s VU Sociology class for the final time as students discussed their recent trip to Gary, I found myself straining to hear what they had to say. In the main they were soft-spoken, but if I were still teaching, I’d need a hearing aid.  One young woman from the Region used the phrase “Scary Gary” to describe her preconceptions but admitted that it did not seem so frightening as she had thought.  They were pleased with how much time Mayor Karen freeman-Wilson spent with them, as well as Tyrell Anderson of the Decay Devils at Gary’s long abandoned Union Station. Mary Beth started class showing a scene from “Appointment with Danger” (1951) that took place there.  I mentioned that Peter Aglinskas has a monthly Film Noir series at VU for those who enjoy crime movies of that genre. I brought up “Original Gangstas” (1996) starring James Brown, Pam Grier, and former Gary and Kansas City Chiefs football star Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, that has a scene inside the ruins of Union Station.  I mentioned how little home rule the city of Gary enjoys, hampering mayors and that past projects they touted such as the airport and Genesis Center (Richard Hatcher), casinos (Thomas Barnes), and RailCat Stadium (Scott King) failed to generate satellite shops, restaurants, and stores.

At Chancellor Bill Lowe’s suggestion I interviewed Joe Medellin, a human resources executive at Arcelo Mittal in East Chicago and member of the Chancellor’s advisory board.  Because of the upheaval on the third floor of the library, home of the Calumet Regional Archives, Samantha Gauer filmed us on the Instructional Resource Center’s set.   Born in 1951, Joe grew up on Massachusetts Street across from IUN’s new Arts and Sciences Building; his mother Carmen still lives there.  His father, who has passed away, worked in U.S. Steel’s tin mill for 30 years. Joe attended Franklin Elementary, Bailly Middle School (when black students were first bussed in), and Lew Wallace, where he was a star pitcher.  Obtaining a partial baseball scholarship to Valparaiso University (tuition was just $3,500 a year), he majored in Business Administration and worked at U.S. Steel for $2.75 an hour to help pay for college.  He attended IUN his senior year, as VU accepted the credit).  In the mid-1980s Joe earned an MBA at IUN and recalls Economics professor Leslie Singer as brilliant but nearly impossible to keep up with when lecturing.  Nearing retirement, Joe hopes to do volunteer work for the Special Olympics and the Calumet Regional Archives.  He is responsible for our obtaining the massive Inland Steel collection.

 Pope Francis throwing wreath into sea to honor drowning victims at Lampedusa, 2013

Ron Cohen gave me a bunch of New York Reviewsthat he had was done with.  The January 17 issue contained an article by Francesco Cantu, whose book “The Line Becomes a River” I’ve been reading titled “Has Any of Us Wept?” After describing the effect on families and children that Trump’s inhumane border policies have caused, he broadened the scope to the immigration crisis in the Mediterranean.  He brought up a 2013 visit by Pope Francis to Lampedusa, a small Italian island just 70 miles from Tunisia that is a central destination for migrants, 20,000 of whom have perished trying to cross the sea. Cantu described a homily Pope Francis delivered there:

  He referred to migrants not as undifferentiated “others” but as family, saying: “These brothers and sisters of ours were trying to escape difficult situations to find some serenity and peace; they were looking for a better place for themselves and their families, but instead they found death.”

  Standing on an altar assembled from remnants of wooden refugee boats, Pope Francis looked out over the port of Lampedusa and asked his audience, “Has any one of us grieved for the death of these brothers and sisters?  Has any one of us wept?”  In asking his listeners to consider who is responsible for this loss of life he describes “the globalization of indifference” through which our societies have become numb to the suffering of others.

New York Review evidently runs a Personals contest and printed these two runners-up:

DUBLIN, (IRELAND)

L. Cohen is dead so I’m free

Femme, Irish, just gone 63

Cool, classy, and svelte

My ice just might melt

For gentlemen callers like thee

Second runner-up was less lyrical:

HOT BLOODED BLONDE with brains longs for equally lonely heat seeking missile. Educated, analyzed, eccentric 71year-old NYC widow looking for male counterpart.

Here is the contest winner:

MY SON TOLD ME that certain butterflies drink the tears of turtles.  It was a metaphor for dating in Maine. (Post-masculine straight male, 50.  Midwestern nice. Yes to banter, yoga in non-yoga clothes, hapless hope)

Women's Place

“When the working day is done

Oh, girls they wanna have fun”

         Cyndi Lauper, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”

In 1983 Cyndi Lauper, now 66 ,burst onto the American music scene with a debut solo album, “She’s So Unusual,” that contained four top-five hits, “Time after Time,” “She Bop,” “All Through the Night,” and “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” “She Bob” gained notoriety from mention of “Blue Boy,” a gay porn magazine, and contained these lyrics:

Hey, hey they say I better get a chaperon
Because I can't stop messin' with the danger zone
Hey, I won't worry, and I won't fret
Ain't no law against it yet, oh she bop, she bop

An advocate for LGBT rights, Lauper won a Tony Award in 2013 for composing the score for “Kinky Boots,” which Toni and I enjoyed on stage in Chicago.

Grand Rapids, MI, was the latest venue for Trump’s rant-fest, as he baselessly claimed total exoneration of collusion charges and threatened to close the Mexican border totally due to yet another alleged caravan of immigrants from Central America seeking asylum.  Knowing no Lanes would be attending, I was curious when I received a jpeg from Alissa titled Trump rally.  She wrote: “So many hateful idiots in red hats out today. But proud so see the resistance is strong in Michigan.”  One sign greeting Trump read, “Keep your hate outta my state.”

For at least a hundred years American popular culture has been youth-oriented. During the 1920s high school girls emulated the Flappers and “It Girl” starlets in films and popular magazines. When women entered the work force in large numbers during wartime, government propaganda featured the slogan “For the Duration,” a double-edged message that implied they’d give up their jobs and become housewives once the war was won. Public health officials worried about unsupervised “latch Key” kids.  Teenage girls readily found work in pool halls, greasy spoon restaurants, and bowling alleys where  men, their elders feared, were liable to prey on them. According to William K. Klingaman’s “The Darkest Year: The American Home Front, 1941-1942,” V-Girls (Victory Girls) as young as 12 dressed to look older and sought excitement from men in uniform.  After  ajourney across America, British-born observer Alistair Cook, reportedon the V-Girl phenomenonin “The American Home Front: 1941–1942”:

   To their families they are often known as high-spirited daughters full of the joy of life.  To the soldiers they are  known as broilers, dishes, bed-bunnies, popovers, free-wheelers, touchables, Susies, teasers, [and] free-lancers.

Among the consequences were a rash of war babies and a venereal disease epidemic. Prostitutes complained that V-Girls were horning in on their business.

 lesbian gets tattoo during World War II

Jackie Gross and Catherine Borsch arrested in 1943 for violating Chicago's cross-dressing ban

In “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America” Lillian Faderman wrote: “The social upheaval of the war threw off balance various areas of American life. Troubling questions of life and death confronted many young women directly for the first time, and ‘normality’ and concepts of sexual ‘morality’ were seen as far more complicated than they appear during more ordinary years.”  Geographical and social mobility enabled gay and lesbian experimentation and made easier opportunities for heterosexual relations as well. Wives whose husbands were overseas experienced loneliness but more freedom than any other time in their lives. Those who sought employment often, to paraphrase Cyndi Lauper, wanted to have fun after their working day was done. Some had been pressured into marrying their boyfriends before they went off to war and were not ready to settle down.

If war deprived servicemen of constant female companionship, it exposed them to fleshpots both stateside and abroad.  In his autobiography “Weasal” East Chicago native Louis Vasquez wrote about his amorous adventures with a hairdresser named Renee while in uniform in France. After I published the manuscript as a special issue of Steel Shavings,historian Archibald McKinlay embellished his adventures in a Timescolumn that infuriated me but that Vasquez apparently loved.  Titled “The Lamented Lover,” the article  revealed as much about the author’s imagination as the reality of Louis’ experiences.  McKinlay wrote:

 Renee had more on her mind than coiffures.  She helped him with his French and a great deal more.  Weasal became the war’s first literal P.O.L.: prisoner of live.  After de-flowering the over-age altar boy, Renee held Weasal virtually incommunicado for a solid week.  She gave him a crash graduate course in French, exploring empirically the complete etymology of the term amour, with special emphasis on lab work. While his friend Clark stumbled around Le Mans using hand signals, Renee plumbed the very depths of Weasal’s ability to learn.

 When Weasal finally broke loose from Renee, he became the second coming of Don Juan.  He tore a swath through Gaul that made Sherman’s march to the sea seem like a parade and inspired the French imploration “pour l’amour de Belette!” When he was shipped home,  throughout France grateful females paused for 30 seconds and lay motionless in their beds with arms outstretched in mute salute.

 Barbara Wisdom

Barbara Wisdom will report on “A Slave in the White House” during April’s book club meeting.  Employed in the White House beginning at age 10 during the James Madison administration, Paul Jennings wrote a memoir on which the book is based.    Jennings never mentioned his mother’s name, only that she was part native American and impregnated by a itinerant merchant. First Lady Dolley Madison’s father was a Quaker who sold his slaves, moved to Philadelphia, and subsequently went bankrupt.  A social climber, Dolley regarded him as a loser and had no scruples about exploiting slave labor when she married the much older Virginia politician regarded as the “Father of the Constitution.”

Anne Balay spoke at Smith College about her book on LGBTI long-haul truckers, “Semi Queer.”  She wrote:“I did my first book talk about Steel Closets, as a promising new scholar in the field of queer and labor studies, at Smith in 2014. This will then be my last talk as a scholar hoping to leverage myself into an academic career. I believe in the power and impact of my writing, and I will find a way to keep doing it, but academia can kiss my aging but always uppity ass.”  Anne is hoping to do a book about sex workers if she can find the time and resources. 

Leslie Mann and Megan Fox

What little I know about sex workers beyond the exploitation of immigrant women tricked into prostitution is that both in the past and the present there are those who turned tricks from time to time due to economic necessity or, more recently, worked for escort services to support themselves in college or to maintain a more affluent lifestyle.  In “This Is 40” (2012), one of my favorite movies, Megan Fox plays such a person, causing boutique owner Debbie (Leslie Mann) to believe her employee is stealing from her until Fox (Desi) admits that she admits to occasionally moonlighting as an escort.

Speaking to VU sociology professor Mary Kate Blake’s class about early Gary, I stressed that the “City of the Century” was both similar to other Calumet Region industrial cities undergoing rapid growth during the early twentieth century, such as Whiting, Hammond, and East Chicago, but that each had its own unique characteristics.  U.S. Steel’s half-planned “different type of company town” (from Pullman, Illinois) left unskilled immigrant laborers to fend for themselves on the southside, whose Red Light district, “the Patch,” contained over a hundred saloons, many with prostitutes on the second floor. A number of women began their path toward upward mobility by running boarding houses whose row-to-row cots sometimes were shared by two steelworkers on alternate12-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week shifts.

At least a half dozen students hailed from the Region. Being used to 75-minute classes at IUN, I was amazed how quickly the 50-minute class flew by.  I was peppered with questions about race-relations in the schools, mills, and neighborhoods. Someone asked about the Ku Klux Klan in Gary during the 1920s; students were familiar with its presence in Valpo and that the Klan almost purchased VU until the Lutheran Church rescued the nearly bankrupt institution. In Gary the hate group dared not operate openly but supported Republican mayor Floyd Williams, a segregationist.  I briefly discussed the 1927 Emerson School Strike and the 1974 steel industry consent decree, which compensated African-American workers for past discrimination and led to large numbers of women hiring in.  I promised to return in a week when they will have read my Eighties Steel Shavings.   In addition to discussing the drying up of industrial jobs, I’ll compare Hoosier stepchild Gary and Indianapolis under Mayor Richard Lugar (1968-1976), the lack of Gary home rule (weakening the power of mayors), and grapple with the role of race as an explanation for Gary’s decline.

James Wallace

  Toni Dickerson addresses group on lack of black IUN faculty, 2018; Times photo by Carmen McCollum

At a Diversity luncheon hosted by IUN director James Wallace I was seated next to one of the award recipients, Black Student Union (BSU) president Toni Dickerson.  A Social Work major, Toni (like my wife, named after her father) attended Marquette Elementary School in Miller, as did Phil and Dave until we became disgusted over the paddling of kids for minor offenses.  I told Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson how pleased I was that she will be speaking to Mary Kate Blake’s VU students next Friday when they tour Gary. It was great seeing former Arts and Sciences dean F.C. Richardson, honored for his role as BSU faculty adviser 50 years ago when a Black Studies program was established.  He gave me such a big hug that his name tag ended up on my sweater.  Ron Cohen nominated Richard Hatcher for an award and daughter Ragen, Second District state representative, made a pitch in support of an anti-hate crime bill that included gender identity.

left, Eric Degas; below, Chuck Degas

The featured speaker was NPR TV critic Eric Deggans, author of “Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation” (2012), the subject he chose to discuss.  An Andrean and IU graduate whose father Chuck Deggans wrote a Post-Tribcolumn and hosted a radio show on WWCA called “Deggans Den,” Eric excelled that eliciting audience participation after showing media associations of white as good and black as evil and examples of situational racism. One clip involved a Minneapolis TV station claiming that Mayor Betsy Hodges flashed a gang sign while posing with community activist Navell Gordon, identified as a convicted felon.  Hodges had been critical of her city’s police, some of whom circulated the bogus story.  It reminded me that some years ago a nearby school district considered banning paraphernalia showing the IU logo since it was similar to a gang sign. IU caps wore at a certain angle were especially suspicious. 

Scapegoats

“No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.” Edward R. Morrow

Scapegoats are those blamed for the wrongdoings or mistakes of others.  According to the Bible, Jewish priests during Yom Kippur sent goats into the wilderness bearing the sins of the people. Leviticus 16:8 states: “And Aaron cast lots upon the two goats: one for the Lord and the other lot for Azazel.”  Azazel is evidently a fallen angel, according to Jewish tradition, and there is a Mount Azazel in the Judean Desert where demons of old supposedly dwelled.

In “200: The IU Bicentennial Magazine” is an article by Kelly Kish entitled “Reds among the Cream and Crimson.” Three law professors got in hot water for signing a letter on July 29, 1946, advocating that candidates of the Communist Party be included on the state voting ballot.  While the governor and Board of Election Commissioners agreed, with one candidate receiving 900 votes, law professors Bernard Gavit, Fowler Harper, and Howard Mann found themselves Red-baited by the American Legion. Under pressure from IU Board of Trustees president Ora Wildermuth, a rightwing segregationist from Gary, IU president Herman Wells held hearings to determine whether the three law professors or any other faculty were promoting “any communistic, un-American, unpatriotic or subversive philosophy.”  During the 30-hour investigation Wells and the Board of Trustees heard from 29 witnesses. Professor Harper’s testimony concluded:

  I wish only to affirm that I am not a political sympathizer with the Communist Party nor have I ever been in sympathy with its political philosophy, practices or objectives. I believe with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that the “ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas,”and I support the right of all Americans to use the ballot to express their political convictions.

Most Board members believed the episode to be “a tempest in a teapot.”Its report found no evidence of communism among students or faculty.  Regarding Harper, Gavit, and Mann, they noted that all three were war veterans and concluded : “Each earnestly asserted his profound admiration for the Constitution and the American way of life.”

The Postwar Red Scare hysteria died down after Senator Joe McCarthy’s demagoguery was exposed as a fraud in 1954 but remained a tool in reactionary politicians’ arsenals until the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. Kelly Kish interviewed me regarding an IUN professor, Saul Maloff, who was terminated during the 1960s due to pressure from Bloomington and an anti-communist IU Trustee and may write about the case in a forthcoming issue.  Listening to Professor Abdul Alkalimat quote Karl Marx and openly advocate socialism during the Black History Month celebration, I pondered what his fate might have been had he uttered those words 70 years before, when freedom fighters Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois, whom Abdul Alkalimat praised as Black Studies pioneers, were ostracized as subversives.

 IU President Herman Wells meets with SDS students in 1969

Other articles appearing in“200: The IU Bicentennial Magazine” were “IU’s Original Squirrel Colony,” “A Look Inside IU’s Post-WWII Trailer Towns,” “A Big Bang” (about a 1957 chemistry demonstration gone awry, injuring 16), “Protesting the Student Fee Hike of 1969” by former student leader Paul Helmke, who led an 11-day strike, and “Hidden IU: The Scandal that Led to the Resignation of Reverend William M. Daily, IU’s Third President.”  After serving for six years beginning in 1853, Daily was accused of lewdness and drunkenness and forced to resign.  The Methodist minister went on to serve with distinction as a hospital chaplain during the Civil War.

 John Beecher

In the Journal of American History Rien Fertel reviewed “Here I Stand: The Life and Legacy of John Beecher” by Angela J. Smith. A poet and activist who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, Beecher (1904-1980) served in the merchant marines during World War II and in 1948 took a position as a Sociology professor at San Francisco State.  Two year later, he was fired for refusing to sign a state-mandated loyalty oath. Blacklisted, he became a civil rights correspondent and activist and founded a publishing house that was the forerunner to Ramparts Press. While Beecher was covering Freedom Summer, Alabama governor George Wallace branded him a communist on NBC’s Today show. He taught at various institutions before finally being reinstated in 1977 by San Francisco State. Calling Beecher a twentieth-century abolitionist, Fertel concluded: “His great-great aunt [Harriet Beecher Stowe] would no doubt be proud.”

In “Slaughterhouse Five” time traveler Billy Pilgrim is at his son’s Little League banquet. Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “The coach, who had never been married, was speaking. He was all choked up.  ‘Honest to God,’ he was saying, ‘I’d consider it an honor just to be water boy for these kids.’”  As a former Little League coach, I could identify with the sentiment even as I laughed at the awkward way it was conveyed.  Captured by Germans, Billy next traveled ahead 23 years to Ilium, Ohio, where he was an optometrist on the way to a Lions Club luncheon. Vonnegut wrote:

  He was stopped by a signal in the middle of Ilium’s black ghetto.  The people who lived here hated it so much they had burned down a lot of it a month before.  It was all they had, and they’d wrecked it.  The neighborhood reminded Billy of some of the towns he had seen in the war. The curbs and sidewalks were crushed in many places, showing where the National Guard tanks and half-tracks had been.

  “Blood brother,” said a message written in pink paint on the side of a shattered grocery store.

 Members of Congress during State of the Union speech

Trump’s State of the Union address mixed patriotic platitudes with veiled threats should he not get his way regarding funding for his damn wall.  Republicans rose to cheer as he praised capitalism and equated socialism with the failed regime in Venezuela.  Women legislators were dressed in white, symbolic of women’s suffrage established by the Nineteenth Amendment, passed by Congress 100 years ago, and ratified within a year.  Trump got the most applause when he congratulated the record number of women members of Congress.  Ironically, the backlash against him motivated many to enter politics. Ray Smock wrote:

    A nice tradition was started by Ronald Reagan in 1982, when he had one hero in the gallery, a government worker, Lenny Skutnik, who helped save victims of a plane crash in the icy Potomac River basin. That plane crash was two weeks before Reagan's address. The tragedy was on everyone's mind and Skutnik was a true citizen hero of the moment. Since then every president has had a few “Lenny Skutniks”as the gallery heroes are sometimes referred to by the more cynical types in DC.  Trump, in good demagogic style, likes to keep the crowd on its feet applauding, and turning to the gallery for heart rending stories works like magic on TV and Trump knows it. These addresses are high political theater. Trump puts on a show. But this one went overboard in time and in a disjointed presentation. 

  The speech had all the earmarks of Stephen Miller, the rabid anti-immigrant aid in the White House, and the stuff on foreign policy, including the president's withdrawal from the INF Treaty with Russia smacks of John Bolton. I guess Trump needed to look tough on Russia, but I am sure Putin is laughing once more at how this treaty withdrawal works to his advantage, not to the advantage of the United States.  Some of the lines were terribly bad: We should have peace and legislation, not war and investigation. Or if that one didn't inspire you, how about: Greatness or Gridlock or Vision or Vengeance.

Post-Trib columnist Jerry Davich has weighed in on the controversy swirling around Democratic governor of Virginia, who first admitted being in a 25-year-old racist photograph and a day later denied it. He did admit to playing Michael Jackson in black face for a lip synch contest. Davich wrote:

  I’ve never dressed in blackface as a prank. I’ve never draped a white sheet over my head to pose as a Ku Klux Klan member. And I’ve never been photographed or video-recorded doing anything in my past with such racist, prejudiced or racially-insensitive intentions.  The same can’t be said for Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who is clinging to his public office despite nearly unanimous calls for him to resign over a racist photo in his 1984 medical school yearbook.  But I’ve done so many other stupid, clueless, regrettable, insensitive things when I was much younger. Nothing with blackface. Yet acts that would leave me red-faced if they were captured on photos or on video and resurrected today

Dennis Wood wondered on Facebook if this were an isolated incident or part of a pattern, adding, “What has the man's behavior been like since then? I think that would be more telling of his attitudes.” If indeed it was an isolated incident, I would not insist that he leave office.  A rightwing group, upset over the Governor’s position on abortion, publicized the yearbook photo, which may have been a fake.  Already the group is spreading unverified allegations against the Lieutenant-Governor, an African American. The Attorney-General, meanwhile, admitted he had worn black face and a wig to perform as a rapper he admired. During the mid-1980s Phil performed as James Brown in a lip synch contest but not in black face, unlike another contestant.  Should such an action destroy someone’s political career?  I don’t think so.

 Mary Kate Blake; below, mural by Felix "Flex" Maldonado

Valparaiso University Sociology professor Mary Kate Blake invited me to speak to her students in six weeks on Gary.  I gave her copies of my Eighties Steel Shavings(volume 38, 2007) for her students, which contains interviews with laid off steelworkers and the 1986-87 USX lockout.  It also includes my oral history of the Richard Hatcher administration during the Mayor’s fourth and fifth terms (1981-1987), as he coped with the effects of deindustrialization and the drying up of federal help during the Ronald Reagan presidency. Blake is assigning several chapters of “Gary’s First Hundred Years” and sought my advice concerning a Gary tour for her 19 students. I suggested visiting the old Union Station (which the Decay Devils spruced up), Gary Library (to see Flex Maldonado’s history of Gary mural), the Progressive Community Church urban gardens at 656 Carolina, across from abandoned Emerson School, and the Aquatorium in Miller. She knew about the Urban Legends exhibit in Munster that will be at the Gardner Center beginning on Friday. Blake is familiar with the VU Welcome Project and has solicited Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette’s advice.

At bowling I rolled a 465 series with a high game of 178.  Dick Maloney, carrying a 136 average, had a 200 game despite being unable to see the pins.  We started the afternoon tied with Pin Chasers and won 5 of 7 points, same as they did.  George Leach saw our old auto mechanic Frank Renner’s name in the Steel Shavings I gave him and said he worked at Frank’s garage during the 1970s.  Frank and wife Peggy probably averaged close to 70 hours a week at his shop and gave his regular customers special treatment.  When our Mercury Comet was getting old, I’d ask him to alert me if a job was going to cost much more than $200; otherwise we’d get a new one.  He’d keep the bill to $200 no matter how long he worked on it.  He kept that car on the road until it finally rusted out.  Frank’s one passion outside work was snowmobiling in Michigan on winter weekends. After his first heart attack, Frank was unable to obtain decent insurance, and when he suffered another one, Peg was afraid he’d lose his business, such was the sad state of health care in the country he put such faith in.

This from Ray Gapinski:

  A kindergarten student was having trouble putting on his boots, and asked his teacher for help. Even with her pulling and him pushing, the boots still didn't want to go on. Finally they got both boots on. She grimaced when the little boy said, “They're on the wrong feet.”

  Sure enough, they were. The teacher kept her cool as together they worked to get the boots back on - this time on the correct feet. The little boy then announced, “These aren't my boots.” 

  The teacher sighed and pulled the boots off.
  The boy then said, “They're my brother's boots. My Mom made me wear them.”

  The teacher felt like crying, but she mustered up the strength to wrestle the boots back onto his feet. “Now,”she said, “where are your mittens?”

The boy replied, “I stuffed them in my boots.”

Here is Jim Spicer’s witticism of the week:

  This guy goes to his barber, and he’s all excited. He says, “I’m going to go to Rome. I’m flying on Alitalia and staying at the Rome Hilton, and I’m going to see the Pope.” The barber says, “Ha! Alitalia is a terrible airline, the Rome Hilton is a dump, and when you see the Pope, you’ll probably be standing in back of about 10,000 people.”
  So the guy goes to Rome and comes back. His barber asks, “How was it?”
“Great,”he says. “Alitalia was a wonderful airline. The hotel was great. And I got to meet the Pope.”
  “You met the Pope?”said the barber.
  “I bent down to kiss the Pope’s ring.”
  “And what did he say?”
  He said, “Where did you get that crummy haircut?”

 

Baseball great Frank Robinson passed away at age 83.  Growing up in Oakland, he was a high school classmate of Bill Russell, outscoring him in basketball.  He was National League MVP in 1961 while playing for the Cincinnati Reds and then American League MVP in 1966 with the Baltimore Orioles, leading the league in batting average, RBIs, and home runs and elevating the Orioles to their first World Series championship. Robinson became the first African-American baseball manager, first with Cleveland and then with four other teams, including the Orioles.