It really doesn't 'sound reasonable' ... but Max's beloved Hoosiers win the college football crown, while he and Merrily serve as heavenly hosts with beer and fried crappie for St. Pete, etc.

 If Max Moss was right, and there is a God, then I'll bet he showed up to work late today after spending the night downing Sterling beer with Max after Indiana University won the national college football championship Monday night.

Max, a lifelong Hoosiers devotee and proud alum, died in October of 2020, always thinking that only his Hoosiers basketball team, especially with asshole coach Bob Knight beating up players and throwing chairs, would find sports success.

Now the Hoosier football team, which barely held off a feisty Miami squad, are the kings of Bloomington, Indiana. I'd say kings of the world, but I don't have that authority. Anyway, as soon as the game clock ticked down, I thought of Max, who was my journalism mentor, my biggest fan and also one of my best friends from the last three-quarters of a century. I figure Max, Clarence, St. Pete, Gabriel and The Big Boss all watched the game together. Max chain-smoked during the game -- he already died of cancer, so what's the matter with few smokes in heaven? can't kill you twice -- and kept on making sure everybody had a Sterling beer. Or, he also had his beloved 7 and 7s on ice as backups. Max also likely passed out victory cigars to the guys, while his wife, Merrily, made sure everyone had drinks and she fried up crappie for the guys.

Former IU football coach Lee Corso, who is not dead yet, also was allowed to attend, since his health is bad and it kept him away from GameDay Monday night. He was just a guest of Max and God at this point, but he was watching the game and picking out his furniture for the future.

It was a great game and also an example of how things have changed in the NIL and portal era, since Coach Cignetti dumped the squad that was at IU when he got there two years ago and he went out, cash in hand and furiously chewing gum and glowering, and bought or recruited the best talent he could find. I do wonder what type of NIL money it takes to make a guy move from Berkeley, California, to Bloomington, Indiana?

Max Moss spent the evening watching his Hoosiers win the national football crown

I should also mention that here, on the ground of the U.S. (off the coast of Greenland), our dear "young" News Brother Jim "Flash" Lindgren and his red-hot wife Brenda Myers (who was my intern back in my sports writing days at the old Leaf-Chronicle and whose father, the late Forrest Myers, who likely nursed a 7 and 7 while sitting with Max) also are IU alums. Like idiots, they majored in journalism, which is a dead profession. Rob Dollar and I told you that was coming in our best-selling obituary to newspapering, "When Newspapers Mattered: The News Brothers and their Shades of Glory" available on amazon. He and I both were run out of journalism, finding out too late, that God had put a time limit on newspapering. Rob was jerked out of the newsroom with a bright, red noose on his throat. I was dragged to the curb by a team of Korporate horses' asses.

I'm sure there was wild, X-rated fun in the Flash Household. Or perhaps they spent the evening watching the game with their fellow Indianapolis Swedes (they are part of a group of Swedish descendants who get together frequently and play with each others' pickled herring.)

Just joking. I love the Flashes.

But Monday night was for Max. He sucked hard on a Winston red and threw the butt toward earth when the game ended.

I do mention that he had great company, but one of his friends, Bob Knight, wasn't watching the game with the angelic sports enthusiasts and their Big Boss.

When Knight died, he tried to make it through the portal and go to heaven, but no one wanted him and he went straight to hell.

By the way, I really do miss Max. He was like a big brother and he taught me many things about journalism, including the art of chain-smoking while stalking the sidelines with a camera in one hand and a scorebook in the other.

So, when you hit your knees tonight, I want you to pray that Max is enjoying this historic moment in sports.

Newspapers are dead, as 'paper' and people mean nothing to Korporate assholes; Atlanta's historic daily slaughtered at age 157

In looking for something new and of value to News Brothers and our apostles today, I was looking online for a good story about the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ending its 157-year print history and going fully digital January 1. Interesting, slight attention was paid to the human cost, not just in the newsroom, but in the pressroom and other things associated with putting out a newspaper.

I did find many stories justifying this mad butchery of an American institution, but most of them were behind paywalls.

I sure enjoyed a good Saturday night, waiting for my cohorts, to finish their stories so I could oversee Sunday's newspaper. NewsPAPERS are dead, you know, unless you had your head up your ass.

I admit to being old and in the way. And, at 74, most of my life has gone by. But my life, and it was my whole adult life, was dedicated to print journalism. You know, the kind of thing where you would print Aunt Bessie's obit, Uncle Elmo holding up a giant catfish, in-depth stories about the county commission, Little League ball scores, full-scale coverage of cops and courts, movie theater times, TV listings and maybe a nationally awarded columnist writing tales of real folks.

That kind of newspaper is dead now. Oh, there are a few print publications, like The Leaf-Chronicle, where you can read the latest press releases from Fort Campbell and the Chamber of Commerce honors on the front page.

Of course, getting rid of people who loved real print journalism was part of the motivation for sticking a flaming poker up my ass 18 years ago at The Tennessean.

You guys and gals -- even those who deserted journalism to go into public relations -- all loved old-fashioned newspapers. And now you are all fucked.

No going back, as my best pal, Colonel Dollar laments.

I have one request of the korporate amerikan assholes who killed print publications. Since there no longer are pages of paper filling up with ink as they roll through the presses, I wish those bastards would stop calling them "digital newspapers." There's no fucking paper involved in these soulless and cold on-line distributors of drivel.

Fuck them all.

Now I can get on with my day.

Love, Flapjacks

P.S. -- As an aside, I know that most of you have neither purchased nor read the book Colonel Dollar and I wrote that celebrated newspapering while forecasting the korporate assassination of the industry. "When Newspapers Mattered: The News Brothers and their Shades of Glory" remains available on amazon. Some assholes, who still had "newspaper" jobs, attacked me for writing something so pessimistic about their "profession." Most of them have since lost their jobs and are rotting in PR offices or on their front porches asking "Why?" through their tears and rotted teeth. We answer that question. By the way, when it was published, I gave a copy to Karen Brown, then top dog at Poynter Institute, which then was the most-respected newspaper think tank. She thanked me for the book and said Rob and I were "very brave" for taking on Korporate Amerika. I continue to pay for my stance and my beliefs. I know we have lost. And I can't believe most of you assholes haven't even read the book.

Photo by (I believe) Toby Tobler or Larry McCormack or the then-late W..J. Souza: Leaf-Chronicle Associate Editor Tim Ghianni waits for the last story for the front page of a Sunday morning newsPAPER. It could have been about a murder, a zoning issue, a sex scandal or an escaped monkey. Oh, meanwhile, he was waiting for Foston's or McReynolds-Nave and other funeral homes to drop off obituary information for free publication, sometimes taking up a page and a half, of the newsPAPER for free as a service to the community. If I needed more space to get all the obits in, I'd talk with Glover Williams and Ronnie Kendrick, and we'd go up a couple of pages, filling any excess up with a house ad if necessary. Meanwhile, across the newsroom, Jerry Manley designs the front page after one last edit, Rob Dollar checks in with the cop shop for information about a deadly wreck or a prostitution sting and Larry Schmidt and Ricky G. Moore work on the agate page to make sure bowling and Little League scores get in the newspaper.

Schmidt grabs a smoke, reads the scores, and begins his two-finger typing speed to grind out a local golf story for the jump page of the sports section. 1 a.m. beer or flapjacks await.

'Silver Hammer' would bet the farm on his Indiana Hoosiers as they humiliate Crimson Tide, head for NCAA football championship game

 No one would have been made happier by Indiana University's outright humiliation of Alabama on New Year's Day than my good pal and mentor Max Moss, aka "The Silver Hammer," as I christened him during the years spent together in Clarksville at what was the oldest newspaper in Tennessee, founded 1808. It's now the oddest paper in Tennessee and ditched all journalism credibility so as not to feel bad about being a piece of shit. That's an aside from an old man who learned from Max how to use a scale wheel and pica pole ("just jam it up Washer's ass and then twist," he advised me on my first day at the L-C.) That's not true, but I like it, so from now on it will be true history.

Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle Managing Editor Max Moss tells copy desk chief Jim Monday to tear up the front page and "fer chrissakes do it right this time, fat man." Jim, also the religion editor, told Max to "fuck off."  This photo is from the early 1980s. 

Max also taught me how to handle scorebooks and how to count "heds" aka headlines, an art that now is lost in the techno age where heads are made to fit but not necessarily made to make sense by the computer and its "operator" (formerly known as "copy editors"). He also taught me how to use a 35 mm and a 4-by-4 camera and how to soup film in the deep tank, print it wet on the enlarger, develop it long enough for the image to hold to the camera room. And, regrettably, how to smoke like a fiend. I quit for a year by September 12, 1974, when I went to work at the L-C. From the first day, it was apparent that I was the only person who had heard the tales of cigarette smoking being bad for you. Even fat old Jim Monday (guy on right) smoked back then and he was a burrhead with no beard and liked to spend free time at Trice's Landing or speaking in tongues at his Assembly of Cronar Church on Fort Campbell Boulevard. I kept in touch with Jim, as I really did like him despite all the true or false weird tales, until just after he died. I used to call him and say: "So, how're you doing, Fat Boy?"

Anyway, Max was my mentor, so when he offered me a smoke, I grabbed one of his Winston Reds. I began my typical obsessive behavior and smoked up to three packs a day until I quit at the turn of this century.

All of this is good-natured joking. But completely true.

I do remember that when I was associate editor, Max was managing editor, and I was in charge of Sunday's newspaper. Max would come in around 10 a.m. or so to review the opinion pages and to visit with me. One day, The News Brothers were filming our "Mission: Impossible" scene. It was just Rob and me in the scene. Jim Lindgren or Jerry Manley was holding the Super 8 mm movie camera I'd stolen from my Dad for filming. The scene focused on instructions/threats from The Big Guy, our publisher. In M-I fashion, the instructions had to be burned. Which we did, over a waste can. Rob burned his hand as well. Another scene involved our murder of "Newspaperman" Wendell Wilson. We all ganged up on Wendell (he was just the eyes in this scene, filmed from his viewpoint at his desk.) When I see it now, I marvel at the hatred in our eyes and how vicious our punches when we mimed hitting down at Wendell (I think it was Larry McCormack who was lying on the floor by Wendell's desk and filming "up" at us. I never felt as alive as I did when we killed Wendell. If it wasn't Larry filming it may have been the late, even then, W.J. Souza, but I doubt it.)

During these filmings -- we filmed on Saturday mornings and went to work at noon on Saturdays -- Max sat quietly in his glass-lined office, looking and smiling at the group of rascals.

Then he came out of his office and told me he needed to talk with me a minute. I had to close the door behind me. I thought he was angry. Nope. "Just make sure the fellas don't destroy the building," or something just like that, he said. I don't think killing Wendell bothered him, but he had feared that Rob and I would burn down 200 Commerce Street. Figuratively we did, of course, beginning our life's journeys that ended with us being labeled "unfit" for newspapers.

I could go on and on and I have, recollecting Max's influence on my life. The biggest thing he taught me was how to be an honorable journalist. He also told me I was the best writer he'd ever known (I remain proud of that, course I don't know who he knew). And he took me into his family, as every Saturday night we'd buy Whoppers with cheese and frostees and go out to the Moss Compound near the post. We'd sit there eating and watching Archie Bunker and Mary Tyler Moore, then wash it all down with a cold Sterling and head back downtown for the remaining 5 or 6 hours until the paper came off the presses.

Now, as I did mention at the top, he would be (and may be, as he was a devout believer in heaven) very proud after his Hoosiers took the Crimson Tide down, stealing their jockstraps and dignity on the way.

Max was a proud IU grad, and usually his Hoosier football sucked, but his pal Bob Knight continually bullied his way to basketball success. I thought Knight, who I knew, was a bigger asshole than Wendell Wilson, but Max forgave him. "That's just Knight being Knight," he'd shrug of the violent actions of the booger-faced asshole who coached the basketball team.

This all leads me back to the reason I posted this in the first place: I don't know what the Hoosiers will do as the football playoffs continue, but Max would have been so delighted. Hell, he probably is, as I note earlier. He probably fired up one of those Winston Reds (God allows smoking, as it can't harm you if you are dead, and asked Glover Williams for a can of Sterling, as the Hoosiers rolled. "Sounds reasonable, eh pardner," he'd say as Glover offers him a menthol cigarette as a change of pace.

I am hoping for continued success for Hoosiers football if only because it gives me the opportunity to recall, in 100 percent factual fashion, my relationship with "The Silver Hammer."

I still love you, old friend. I'm sorry you couldn't convince me it was fun to sit in a boat all day for one or two eight-ounce fish. Of course, it was fun to smoke out there on Lake Barkley, suck on a cold Sterling and laugh.

Phone call to Lewisburg's Manley estate: People say I'm crazy dreaming my life away, but with pals like Jerry, it's been a wonderful life so far

In November 1982,. Jerry "Chuckles" Manley, right, took a break from carousing to offer advice to, from left, Rob "Death" Dollar, Tony "Short, little asshole with a beard" Durr, Tim "Flapjacks" Ghianni. It actually is on the curb at the Roxy in Clarksville, after the world premiere of "Flapacks: The Motion Picture." Jerry, I believe, may have been drunk.

 “I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round. Sure do love to watch them roll…….”

The great John Lennon’s voice and his “Watching the Wheels” song from 1980 -- released about the time some deranged douche bag with a gun asked him for his autograph, smiled and shot him in the back -- played in my head when I talked with my longest-tenured journalism pal, Jerry Dale Manley. He is sometimes called “Chuckles” by those of us who love and maintain the Legend of The News Brothers. He doesn't like the nickname, bestowed on him in 1982 by News Brothers founders me ("Flapjacks") and Rob Dollar ("Death"). 

But he answers to it. "Chuckles, my ass," he used to spit out when we took attendance at pancake rallies, police raids and funerals. Actually, Chuckles skipped the funerals. I assume they reminded him of his future. 

“I’m just sitting here watching TV and looking around for something to eat,” Jerry said, in a sort of rhythm that brought to my mind the John Lennon song.

Now, it’s not unusual for John’s songs to spring into my consciousness as I go about these lazy, crazy fucking days of winter. A time when there’s no soda, no fresh fruit and beer, as Uncle Nat might have put it.  (You have to be my age to understand the Nat "King" Cole reference. Man he could sing. So could his daughter, Natalie. They both are dead.) 

Lennon’s music, either alone or with the others in the gang of four he drafted when he created The Quarry Men and The Beatles, plays in my mind a lot. Even more now that it’s less than a week from the 45^th anniversary of his death. I don’t do much to mark the bleak occasion. Maybe I'll pull out my copy of "Catcher in the Rye" and ask "Why?" 

I ask that about a lot of things as I break on through toward the other side. No one has the answers.

Anyway, I’m going way off the deep end, literally perhaps, and it happens most times when I get a chance to talk with Jerry, who has been my pal and wacky tobacky and beer and journalism mate for more than 50 years.

We began our friendship at The Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle and have maintained it through the changes in attitude, changes in latitude, changes in life in general.  The most difficult part for me of the friendship began two years ago this week, when his family had him incarcerated in a nursing home Memory Care Ward, a couple of miles from my house.

You may or may not remember that I visited him once or twice a week at the place where everybody doesn't know their name. At times, when I pushed past the vacant-eyed masses of loose clothes to get to Jerry's cell, I was neither recognized nor acknowledged. Other times he was as clear-headed as his roommate, who he picked up from his (Jerry’s) chair and twice pile-drived him into the rug.

I always took peanut butter sandwich crackers and their cheese-filled sisters and a Diet SunDrop, smuggled in my pants to give Jerry something to eat other than the cold gruel and two-day-old Oreos fed at the insane asylum. I began my year of smuggling into the locked and guarded nursing home wing with potato chips. They kept on making too much noise in my pants, kinda like my admirers used to do when I was young. So I switched to the crackers.   

I’d look Jerry's nuthouse roommate’s name, but it doesn’t matter, and I imagine he’s dead. Anyway, that act of throwing the skinny corpse-like old man to the floor slammed Jerry into a crossroads. They were either going to send him into state facilities, force him to pay thousands more a month for a single room or go home with someone.

His nephew, Steven, who just had throat surgery this Monday and can’t talk much, picked Uncle Chuckles up at the Vanderbilt nuthouse (where the nursing home had dispatched him after his violent wrestling maneuver with the guy who surely is dead by now), Bob is what they called him, but I think he was Milford.  He was a horseman who pissed his pants. Everybody did at the Memory Care Ward. Hell, some days I felt like doing that just to fit in.

“Steven really takes care of me,” said Jerry, when Steven handed him the phone. Most times that I call, Steven does the talking. I guess Uncle Jerry is sitting nearby watching "The Rifleman" or "Have Gun Will Travel." This time, though, Steven could not talk much because of his throat surgery the day before. He's been having throat difficulties for months. He assured me it wasn't cancer when I called last time. This time, he really couldn't tell me what the surgeons removed or repaired, so he passed the phone. His uncle seemed to be able to handle the phone real well, for which I was grateful and relieved. 

“Yeah, Steven had some surgery, can’t remember when, but they thought he was in good enough shape that they could finally send him home,” said Jerry.

I could hear the refrigerator door open. Steven no doubt was getting ready to begin on the “fried, Southern cooking. Breakfast food, I hope. I really like breakfast food” that is the staple for the old man and the younger man, who gave up his own freedom to take care of his beloved uncle.

Sometimes, not often, Jerry says they “go to the Shoney’s Family Restaurant nearby, where they serve breakfast 24 hours a day. I really like that. Breakfast bar.”   

I reminded Jerry of the many 2 a.m. nights when we – he, me, Rob Dollar and whoever else we could talk into it – would go eat flapjacks and eggs at G’s Pancake House on Riverside Drive in Clarksville. If the Cumberland was too high, they’d put sandbags outside their front doors.

“Man, that was great,” said my old pal, as his voice brightened with those memories. “Sounds like a great way to spend a day.”

But he knows he won’t likely ever leave Lewisburg again, let alone drive to Clarksville. Besides that, they’ve closed G’s and are trying to make Clarksville – which was a beautiful and historic "Queen City of the Cumberland," with the mixed Antebellum and comfortable-as-broken-in jeans neighborhoods that describes – into a prefabricated “Gateway to the New South.”

Obviously some Gen X college marketing major and transplant from elsewhere dreamed up that new nickname.  Hell, this was the city that for a couple of centuries played host to Tennessee's oldest newspaper, founded in 1808. Now it's just a weekly brochure promoting all that's good and filled with press releases from the Chamber and Fort Campbell.  (That's another story, as I spent 14 years at that paper.  If you are interested in what happened there, I'd recommend a book called "When Newspapers Mattered: The News Brothers and their Shades of Glory." Rob and I wrote it. Jerry bought three copies.)

With an almost-ghost of a newspaper and immature marketing that betrays a wondrous past, there are other striking changes. In addition to G's being gone, there are no greasy spoons, but all the modern chains of fat and special sauce that mostly weren't there when I lived and loved there. 

And hell, the Cat West, a strip joint at the state line, where we’d go bush-eyed in Oak Grove, Kentucky, is closed, too.  At the newspaper, trying to protect the sensibilities of our readers, we had a one-column spot on the upper left side of the front page where we put stories about the Cat West, sex crimes, drunken soldiers pissing on the Public Square, etc. When we laid out the paper -- I assisted Jerry in determining what went where -- we referred to that one column, above the fold, as "The Cat West Corner."   

I think the guy who bled to death after being shot just below his testicles by a stepson or whatever went there.  Fatal traffic wrecks, too, until the publisher mandated that we no longer cover them, so as not to upset the Chamber as it sought to recruit Japanese and Chinese industry. We still covered them. We'd just slip them inside and seldom used photos of body parts scattered on the roadway. The publisher would get upset with me and "welcome" me to the nice, red-velvet-butted chair in his office. "Ghianni's chair" was the unofficial name.  

Clarksville doesn't look right now. It’s all new development of disposable houses from Oak Grove to Fort Campbell to Clarksville. How disposable? Just watch the TV news when a hard rain’s gonna fall on the “Gateway.” Little Pink Houses get blown away and/or flooded easily.

Jerry and I talk some about the changes in the town we both loved. He seems to remember a half-century back pretty damned well. 

As far as Jerry’s health: “I’m as good as I’ve ever been,” he says. “No health complaints.”

He seemed a little perplexed when I asked how his latest test to see if his kidneys were filtering the poisonous shit out of his blood came out.

Steven had told me his uncle’s kidneys were down below 30 percent, and dialysis depended on regular testing. Jerry is pretty unaware that there is any kind of problem and does not remember the tests.

“I reckon they’re still working fine, given how much fried food I eat,” said Jerry of his kidneys. I didn’t ask him about the colon cancer his ex-wife told me he had a couple of years ago. Or about the diabetes that had his foot rotting there for awhile. I know that was true, as he showed it to me.

I softly asked about the dementia that put him in the nursing home, but he really didn't remember much about that. I didn't push it. Surrounded by the love of his nephew, he seems to be much better than he was when walking the halls of the living dead more than a year ago.

“I really feel good,” said my beloved pal, among the kindest, smartest guys I’ve ever met. A fellow who would take on any dare I threw at him. I'm glad he survived our friendship. I did, too, pretty much.

I asked Jerry if he remembered that last month he turned 74, just nine days before I did the same.  When we turned 30, oh, a decade or more ago, he and I threw our own big bash.

We bought the beer (well, actually, I did. Jerry still owes me for half of the keg and of the cost of the potato chips and stuff we put around to soak up the suds, pre-vomit, to keep everyone on their feet dancing until dawn.) Jerry, me, Rob and Greg Kuhl were the only ones who made it until dawn. Greg, who retired to become a full-time marathon runner in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, died years ago while out for a run. Heart attack. I think the death of his soulmate, his dog, Blue, was a contributing factor.

 Nobody threw up at the party in which Jerry and I put the old "30" mark on our youth. Editor Tony Durr almost wrecked his car by pulling on the windshield wipers other than the gear shift as he tried to leave. He had told me he wasn't going to come to the party because as our boss, he didn't want to see us being stupid or drunk. He came, got thick-tongued in his Cajun pronunciations and left. He finally found the gearshift, jumped a curb, let sparks fly, tore the lever grindingly into reverse and disappeared backward  into the rainy November night. 

Good thing his young, impressionable staffers weren't scarred by the guy I loved and referred to (to his face) as "the little, short assshole with a beard."  He was a great editor, though, as he pretty much put me in charge of the paper. He could easily have ended up in "the Cat West corner" the next day. He survived that, though not life itself. That's another story that you can find in the book mentioned above. 

As the party continued, Jerry and I noticed there was sweet smoke billowing from the basement of the party house. As both hosts and the guys we were celebrating, we only thought it our duty to keep going downstairs to make sure those folks were happy.

“I wish we could do a party like that now,” Jerry said.  “But I’m too old. Reckon you are too.”

Fact is, Jerry didn’t do anything unusual for his 74th birthday. He didn’t hear from or see his kids – he says he seldom does as “they have their own lives and are busy” – nor did he and Steven have a cake and eat it, too.

“Nah, we don’t celebrate holidays around here. Not even going to put a Christmas tree up. No kids around here.”

He and Steven aren’t alone in the house. There is Steven’s little, white dog. Last time I heard, the dog was named “Snow or something like that.” This week it’s “Hero or Zero,” according to Uncle Jerry. He loves the dog. 

All told, I loved my conversation with my pal, as he is mentally (or physically, at least) in a much better place than when he was beating the shit out of Memory Ward roommate Milford to keep him from pissing on his chair.

“I mostly just sit here and watch TV,” says Jerry. “We’re watching some old movie or show. I don’t know what it is. Don’t know what it’s about. It’s some kind of story where they have some fantasy heroes is it.”

What’s on TV doesn’t matter to him. “I just like sitting here watching it,” he said. “This really isn’t any good.”

It sounded like Steven was working to get some biscuits and milk gravy – Jerry’s very favorite entrée – together, so I let him go.

I’ll call back in a couple of weeks, bringing him some of my joyous Christmas spirit. Ho-ho, fucking, ho.

So, I hung up and sat here and decided to crank this out in a few minutes.

Sorry about typos, tense shifts, whatever. If that sort of shit bothers you, then you should not be reading this anyway.  You’re simply not qualified to walk among News Brothers. Like Chuckles, Flapjacks, Death, Flash and Badger.  There are a few more of you who aren’t dead or demented, or both, yet.  Goddamn Stranger’s been dead 35 years or more now. Badger 14.

As I sit here, I again sing that song by my late friend, John Lennon. It seems appropriate not just for Jerry, but for me.

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll ....

Well, they shake their heads and they look at me, as if I've lost my mind ...I tell them there's no hurry, I'm just sitting here doing time ....

I hope your holidays are merry and bright.

Love always,

Flapjacks.

 

'Enjoy every flapjack.' Brahma Bull, Champo, Dirt Man, Flapjacks ... An erratic old man clasps his cane and stumbles toward three-fourths of a century, hoping the next one is better

 As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small, by giving you no time instead of it all.

That’s the first line of my late friend, John Lennon’s, “Working Class Hero,” which takes a deep and ragged dive into The Beatle’s scarred but sacred soul by displaying details of a life that’s consistently disappointing while promising at the same time.

It’s one of my favorite songs, and I play it a lot, especially listening carefully on days like this one, when I burn the page on another year of life and look, perhaps not so gentle anymore, into that sweet night.

“I wish I could go back,” says my best college pal, Jim “Jocko” Mraz, when we talk about our four scholarly years in adjacent rooms in a pair of concrete-block dormitories at Iowa State University.

“Me, too, Jocko,” says Champo, aka me. “But I think they have blown up our old dormitory.  I wish we’d thought of that.”

True on both counts. Progress has eliminated our first dorm, about a mile down Welch Avenue from the campus in Ames, Iowa.

For two years we were in Storms Hall, then our whole floor – Hanson House -- was relocated to Larch Hall.

Primarily, I reckon, we were relocated to the new dorm in hopes of getting us to calm down after adventures like the infamous Vator Bowl and just our “don’t say no” attitudes and our rolling waves of laughter. At least figuratively, we blew up that dorm, or rather the minds out in university officials, residence hall execs and the friendly dietitian Mr. Smith, who fed me as many vegetables as I could eat in an attempt to fire up my metabolism and counteract damage wrought by alcohol and starchy dormitory food.

I did lose 70 pounds my sophomore year.

When we moved en masse from the second floor of Storms to the seventh floor of Larch to begin my junior year, our new head resident was a just-freed Vietnam infantry lieutenant whose job it was to keep us under control. He failed. Marty was a helluva guy.

He’s dead now.

So are a lot of my college pals or cohorts.

Nardholm and Uncle Moose, farm boys from the Western Iowa plains, top the list of the dead guys I miss most from those years.

And I’ve tried unsuccessfully to find Gomez, who I’m hoping is not dead.  He was in charge of the whole residence hall complex, and his love for me and Jocko no doubt kept us out of reach of higher authorities during our junior and senior years.

We cooked pheasant stew in Gomez’s dorm apartment for the world-famous Viking Fest, a huge fund-raiser for me and Jocko. But that’s a story for some day other than this.  Perhaps in a book I’m writing because I’m, at this age, adopting a new, perhaps fatalistic view on life’s remainders: Enjoy every flapjack.

There’s a little Zevon and a lot of me in that statement.  During my college years, it wasn’t uncommon to find me, Jocko, Carpy, Nardholm and maybe even Titzy enjoying the taste of very inexpensive eggs and flapjacks at all-night truck stops scattered through Central Iowa.

After I graduated, I was a newspaperman in a then-small town now-called, laughably, “The Gateway to the New South.”  I may or may not touch on those years in this little post, but it’s safe to say most Saturday nights ended up with us – me (then-dubbed “Flapjacks”), and my cohorts “Death,” “Chuckles” and “Badger” and “Flash” and even old Mayor Ted and his drunken police escort wolfing down flapjacks (you may call them pancakes, but you’d be wrong) at G’s on Riverside Drive. That was 40 years ago, and Clarksville, Tennessee, then was “The Queen City of The Cumberland.”

When I was in high school, my nickname was “Brahma Bull,” so named by the head football coach after I became a brutal tackler and almost killed myself and the guy I tackled and ruptured his spleen.

Again, this is a story for another day. When I got out of the hospital, I decided I didn’t like being mean on the football field. Didn’t suit me, so I eventually told the coach he was a son of a bitch and/or a piece of shit.  “Brahma’s Bull” became the name of a column I wrote for the school newspaper, where I was sports editor and also assistant editor.

Almost got suspended for allowing lines like “her once hairy, but now barren” in a feature about things heard on the school bus.  Dan, the editor whose dad was Hef’s partner in the founding of Playboy, also shared blame. His dad, a nice guy, was pretty dumb, as he told Hef, the Epstein-for-life fellow that there was no future in a magazine of naked young women.  

After a firm lecture from the principal and a threat to take the editorial reins from us, I pleaded the First Amendment.  Dan agreed with me.  We did promise to cease any ideas of writing about shaved vaginas in the school newspaper after that.

Back to today’s episode:

Flapjacks, as you know, have been recommended by the CDC as a great way to soak up alcohol and make you gain weight at the same time.  Health, as I’ve insisted -- even when I was smoking three packs a day to wash down a dozen beers and a half-bottle of scotch (I was washing away three years of misery and hanging on by my fingernails while barely surviving a near-fatal personal mistake) -- has always played a central role in my lifestyle.

Oh, by the way, the thing about Mayor Ted and his drunken police escorts isn’t true. But they all were friends of mine. And Mayor Ted was as concerned as I was about health. He’s dead now. Last time I spoke with him (before his death, at least), he had tapered off to a giant glass of lemonade and vodka, heavy on the vodka, every day.  He invited me to go up to Clarksville and join him, and I told him I would if he didn’t die before I got to it. He did, so I didn’t.

But this really still is supposed to be – at this point in the tale – about my college studies when I went by the name of “Champo,” a few years before “Flapjacks” took over my life. I answer to either and appreciate it when people take the time to figure out which one I am at that particular time. One of my newspaper colleagues, a round mound of a fine fellow, dubbed me “Dirt Man” for my contributions of gossip to his celebrity column 20-30 years ago.

For clarity, I mostly answer to “Tim,” although one time my Dad, a confused and mourning WWII vet was trying to use the “Dirt Man” nickname given me by the gossip columnist, when he called me “Dirt Bag.” A long and sad story that involves death and uproarious laughter in a funeral home viewing room that was presided over by my mother.   

The laughter was welcomed. I think Dad called me Dirt Bag, at least in his head, until he died. And that’s OK. He didn’t know what I called him.

Just a few months ago I (Champo, remember him?) tried to track down a college friend who I’ll call “Jack,” who worked with me when we almost booked The Rolling Stones for a million-dollar paycheck in 1972 at Hilton Coliseum. The Alumni Association told me “Jacky’s dead. That’s what I said.”  He died 15 years ago, apparently, unless he told the alumni association beggars that he was dead, so they’d stop their trolling for NIL money. I do just tell those caller/beggars – usually virginal students working a phone bank --that I am dead, before I hang up.

 I thought about Jack and me and our meeting with Iowa State University officials and how I had at least showered and put on clean jeans to hear their skeptical responses and see them shake their heads.

“No fucking way, you God damn derelicts,” I think was the way the facilities manager put it, as he gently let us down after he studied our plans for money, seating, security (I had become intimately acquainted with concert security, according to Ames jailhouse records.)  We even had a target date that was in the week or so The Stones had off after a pair of shows in Chicago.

“Hey, you, get offa my cloud,” was my response to the university asshole who insulted me. I fired up a hand-rolled and retreated into the bitterly cold afternoon. Jack had to call the promoters and report we weren’t able to book their act, because the university didn’t want outlaws (us, not necessarily The Stones) taking control of school facilities. It’s that old “inmates/asylum” thing, and I can relate personally to both sides of that ratio.

Jack and I never were close friends, but he was a scheming fellow and a technological genius for the early 1970s. I don’t think he even liked Keith and Charlie and the guys. Three Dog Night was more his style. Or the Cowsills. He just wanted to participate in a true pipe dream I’d concocted.  The thrill of the hunt.

“I’m sorry to tell you your friend died in 2010,” is how the Alumni Office responded when I tried to get Jack’s take on collegiate adventures for a book I’m writing. Some of this may reappear there.  Or perhaps not. You can’t always get what you want, even if you do actually try some time.  You don’t really even get what you need. Bupkis. When I hear that Yiddish word, I always think of Butkus, as in Dick, No. 51, Bears linebacker who said his happiest thoughts were of seeing a quarterback’s head bouncing, separately, down the field after he tackled him. I don’t think he was joking.

Butkus is dead, which is fine by me.  I was a Gale Sayers guy. He’s dead, too. “Hit your knees and pray for Brian Piccolo,” he said, or at least Billy Dee Williams said in the TV movie, “Brian’s Song.”  The 1971 version fired up the tears among those of us in Hanson House’s TV room. ABC made a politically correct version in 2001. Piece of shit.

Speaking of death and shit, I had the opportunity to tell Nardholm and Moose that I loved them when they were in their final days, but it hurt. Damned cancer. 

Killed my best friend Jocko’s lovely ex-wife Nola, who was a kind and generous human being.  Her sister, Rita, told me I was a true gentleman back when I was best man and she was maid of honor at the nuptials of Jocko and Nola. I had made sure that Jim was in the right frame of mind when he took the strut into the chapel singing “She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.”  

“When she comes!” I hollered back. “No, when you come!”

Joking. He was as sober as the two of us were for four years of higher education. And his mom, a wonderful Bohemian woman who loved me, woulda beat the ever-loving shit out of me if I’d let her son arrive at the church with glassy eyes and a sweaty bald pate.  

Fuck, Granny Mraz, who was a Hobe-hunter and made great Bohunk food, woulda kicked me in the giblets. It’s OK for me to use “Bohunk” as that’s how Jim referred to himself. In fact, conjure up the first line of Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung” and then sing these words instead of the real lyrics: “Sitting on a Bohunk (Bohunk), watching him shit, watching the flies. Yellow matter custard (custard), dripping from that God damned Bohunk’s eyes….” That was a song I wrote that was not used in the wedding celebration. (“Oh, Jocko, my friend, don’t you know they say I’m easy, you poor old sot, you see me while I pee.”)

 Our wedding pre-ceremony iced tea glasses, filled with vodka and ice and a dash of tomato juice and Tabasco back at the Marion, Iowa, motor inn, had mellowed us out and the main thing was I got Jim to the church on time. Remember when you were young and the hero was never hung? … Oops, slipped into John Lennon there for a second. What I meant to say was remember when we were young people and were told we could drink vodka and no one would smell it?

I slipped Jocko a fistful of mints, but Nola likely sensed alcohol was afoot when the groom was told “you may kiss the bride,’’ and he missed by six inches. Joking. He hit his target, demonstrating style and grace.  By the way, I was pretty sure they’d kissed prior to the pastor’s holy approval.

After the ceremony we drank beer in the barn while older family members sipped tea and ate spice cake and deep-fried Morel mushrooms in Stumpy’s big farmhouse.  The wedding party, sans the bride and groom who were in a nearby room at the motor inn, went for a swim in the pool that night.  

And I’m lucky that I’m able to stay in touch with Carpy, DVM Tom Carpenter, who plays golf by day and spends his nights smoking, drinking and shooting craps in a mob-operated gambling den at the northern outskirts of Las Vegas. None of that – except for the golf – is true. He’s a kind fellow, and I love him very much.

I’d be lying if I wrote that he met his wonderful wife at the Mustang Ranch, although I thought about it.

She’s a talented young woman who was a valuable banking officer, and she and Tom have lived a splendid life. They met at ISU and love their boys and grandkids.

One old friend, a Vietnam vet turned into an evangelist, and I spoke at least once a month for years until he told me I was going to hell.  I disagreed with him and told him to go fuck himself. We haven’t been in contact since. He’s probably proselytizing in a VA dementia joint by now if he’s not dead from his heart woes, fat ass or sanctimonious meanness.

Then there’s Jocko, who shared almost all of my adventures, at least when he wasn’t busy as an offensive guard on the Cyclones football team. We were a pair of well-known campus desperadoes, nice guys who pushed the boundaries of what could be considered good, legal fun.

When we talk, probably every two weeks or so, we do what old people do, we talk about our maladies and our medical treatments. We talk about his infusions and my attempt to walk again after spending much of the last year recovering from a pair of surgeries that were needed to rebuild my spine so I can walk upright and without pain.

I may have said once upon a time that “I hope I die before I get old.” But I didn’t mean it, God. I enjoy my life now and look forward to putting away my walking canes – my brother, who died a year and a half ago, hand-carved the first one, the second one is my dad’s.  I took it from the hospital after he died more than six years ago. My nieces gave me my brother’s cane, the one he used in his dream trip to Ireland a few months before he died, just last week. I also have Grandpa Champ’s cane. I am well-supported by my walker, but am transitioning to the canes.

I think I need a rack for my collection.

OK, so Jim – who sometimes uses a cane for hips compromised and replaced due to football injuries and who has other medical woes, as all of us old guys do – and I do warm up our conversations with updates about our maladies.

And then we laugh as we remember the long, sometimes strange and foamy, trips we’ve taken to get here.  

“Tork’s, 4 p.m.,” is the full content of a text I sent Jocko last Friday, a day when he wasn’t getting chemo.

“I’ll see you there,” he said.

“Carpy and Titzy and Nardholm might be with us, too,” I said, listing the names of the guys I referred to as my “Rolling Squad” back in the years when I was an honor student by day and an unafraid of authority or society rascal by night, especially beginning at 4 on Thursdays and breaking on through to the other side of the weekend. Party ended at dawn Monday. Shower, get to class.

Tork’s Pub, right across the street from the gym where I took naked steam baths and wrestled with Olympic champion Dan Gable, is gone. Dan was in the steam bath to make weight for his NCAA champion career. I was just a retired high school wrestler who wanted to sweat off the beer. We’d wrestle. I’d lose. I feel like I contributed in my own sweaty way to Dan’s championship Olympics and NCAA wrestling career and his subsequent career as the world champion wrestling coach at cross-state rival the University of Iowa.

Jocko tells me Tork’s has been replaced by a restaurant called Thumbs. I’ve not been back to Iowa since I went to visit Jocko, Nola and Rita, who was singing in the wedding of a cheapskate named “Soreny” a few decades ago. Soreny wasn’t among my closest friends – his greatest value as a pal was he kept track of where there was a special on beer each weekend.

He was scouting out dollar pitchers, because he was priced out at Tork’s where it cost $1.25, with every eighth pitcher free. Tork’s was a dark, rotting dive bar back when I celebrated my 18^th birthday there, on this date in 1969.

 I can’t imagine it didn’t take a lot of money to restore it to convert it to a restaurant. Maybe they blew it up, too. I’m sure we’d have done it if we could. Sure supplied enough very natural gas to the closed-off tavern.

“Fuck, it’s all gone so fast,” I say to Jocko, who is my oldest and truly best friend going back to our arrival in Ames, Iowa, in the autumn of 1969, when we finished a quart of gin together to baptize our new friendship.

“You’re going to be 74 on November 18,” he said, remembering doubtless birthdays that were forgotten even as we celebrated them.

“Hell, a year from now I’ll be 75,” said Jim. “I thought my parents were old when they were 75.”

“They were,” I say, by way of consolation to my buddy, who turned 74 in the summertime, when the weather was hot, when you can stretch right up and touch the sky. Or something like that.

I’ll not go farther into our relationship here, other than to say that he knows me better than most people do, and he still loves me, even as sunset gets earlier and earlier and the Northern Lights somehow become visible in the South.

“Nobody better give me a party when I turn 75,” says Jim. “I won’t go.”

“Let’s go back to Tork’s,” I said, knowing such transit would be only courtesy of some kind of time warp.  “Then afterward, you can call Mo. I’ll see if Blondie or Red might be around.” (I always used to ask them to marry me, a decent way to greet women who admired my reputation as “The Dancing Bear.” I’ll save that story, but I was famous and harmless campuswide.

Jocko laughed at the Tork’s mention.

I suggested we could eat on the house at any restaurant in Ames, a fast-running privilege we’d successfully negotiated for ourselves and our willing apostles all those years ago.

A friend of younger acquaintance but of same vintage, Jerry “Chuckles” Manley turned 74 a week ago Sunday.

He probably didn’t even know it.

Time is a clouded concept for Jerry, who has been my comrade since the mid-1970s, when we both set out in the newspaper business, public service and the populace’s well-being in our minds.  

“Follow the money,” said Hal Holbrook when he met Robert Redford in the parking garage in one of cinema’s best newspaper movies.

While he was giving clues to Redford, it turned out that corporate newspapers took “follow the money… and fuck the news” as the modern motto of “journalism. “Fuck the staff, too. Especially the old guys.”

On the subject of great newspaper movies:

 If you can get your hands on “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture,” you’ll get a taste of newspapering the Tim “Flapjacks” Ghianni way. And the way also pioneered by my great pal Robert Stanley “Death” Dollar, my personal sidekick, wing man, News Brother and sounding board since 1981.

Jerry “Chuckles” Manley, Jim “Flash” Lindgren (who just returned from a visit to Stonehenge) and Scott “Badger” Shelton, whose journalism expertise was showcased on 50-watt radio stations throughout the South, all played key roles in the film and in my life.

Scott’s been gone pushing 14 years now, again that damned cancer. Jerry’s perhaps dazed and confused.  Flash is boxing away one of those nasty muscular and neuro afflictions.

Rob has a pair of hippo valves -- or perhaps buffalo valves? – keeping his heart strong. He almost died the day they put them in. I know, because I was there and told the doctors they’d better fix him up as they rolled the almost-dead man out of his ICU room.  

 “Don’t fuck this one up,” I instructed the heart surgeon, who picked his nose with one of his blue-gloved hands while a nurse scratched his nuts. I figured Rob, who has been a huge pal for 44 years now, was going to die. I was glad when he did not. I’m still glad.

He celebrated his survival by purchasing a Mustang convertible which he runs at 100 mph on the Pennyrile Parkway in Kentucky. That’s not true, though. I sure do enjoy it when we tell each other stories about the raped and dead teenagers we saw as we covered the news together. And poor Chico, the pet monkey whose escape we chronicle, was eaten by dogs.

That sort of journalism idealism my friends and I shared was great for maybe 25 of the 35 years I spent as a newspaper journalist and the last 18 or so spent freelancing.

Around the turn of this century, they wiped idealism out of newsrooms. As well as idealists, particularly the ones who were 56, as I was 18 years ago.

Old cats like us were set free of the bond of dollar-centric “journalism,” if that’s what you call it these days.

I still have friends in journalism, and I love them. I just remind them to keep their backs and butts to the wall and mark their 56^th birthdays on their calendars, so they can begin packing their stuff early enough to avoid the embarrassment of cleaning out their space while younger, better-paid people fill the diminishing news hole while padding their resumes for work at PR agencies. Oh, that’s right, there is no news hole anymore. Digital news space is infinite, like the Black Hole. And AI has proven to be an admirable space-filler. When they threw me out the door, they offered me a piece of cake and an armed escort. I threw the cake away and joked with the gun-toting security guards as they carried my shit to the old, white Saab.

“I wish we could have another birthday party,” said Jerry the other day, when I reached him at his suburban Lewisburg fortress of solitude he shares with his nephew. They used to have a white dog, too, but I think it died. Jerry says he thinks the dog’s name was Snow.

Back in the autumn of 1981, when Jerry and I turned 30, we hosted an all-night birthday party. I think we were the last ones standing when dawn struck, about six hours before we had to get to work for the Sunday newspaper. Our pal, Rob Dollar, who was 25 at the time, left just before us, because he had to get to the police department to go through the reports for potential cop and crime stories. A pretty good, young guy, he’d abandoned a CIA career to come work with me. 

He's come to terms with that stupid decision now. We christened our decades of friendship by clasping hands and singing “rabbits running from a ditch, must be the season of the witch” just past dawn, as we left the party.

As for the last year, for that is what I annually write about when I do this self-serving salute, well, it’s been bad and good.

Bad because they spent eight hours rebuilding my spine, neck to butt, layering human bone and metal parts, spraying it with WD-40 and sewing the long incision shut. Apparently, I almost bled dry. And, especially, a delightful 2-3-foot scar, vertically maps out the territory where newspaper honchos planted their figurative daggers until 18 years ago.

I was apparently “critical” when things went wrong in the surgery, but I got over it.

For me, it’s also been delightful, as I can walk now, using canes or a walker, without the constant pain of the last couple of decades. I sometimes just walk without assistance, to build up my stamina, always with something nearby to grab before I plummet to the hardwood. I have done that. It’s a hard effort to climb back to my feet. Just like me, a hard rain is gonna fall.

My plan is to live another 30 years in order to get my money’s worth for the surgery that I’m still recovering from.

One of the worst things about this recovery is that I never see nor hear from anybody, for the most part, and I’m not getting out of the house much.

And I’m unable to call my brother, Eric, to talk about it or about our lives. He’s been dead a year and a half, and I’m pissed about that still. “’Scuse me!” I’ll shout when I kiss the sky and try to get Eric’s attention now. He didn’t really believe in heaven, but I suspect he’s glad he was wrong. Was he? I’ll find out in 30 years.

Speaking of heaven, that’s where he was reunited with his widow. Ann, perhaps the kindest person I’ve ever met was a great sister-in-law for almost 40 years. She died just a few weeks ago, so I can’t call her either. Fucking cancer.

I am lucky in that my wife, Suzanne, is around, because it allows me to heal at home, where I for weeks was barely able to make it to the living room. My range has widened, and the last 2-3 weeks I’ve been able to make it down to my office in Da Basement.

A great thing about the surgery is that I’ve regained two or three inches in height, which delights me when I look into the mirror and sing “a working class hero is something to be.”

Especially one who is learning again how to walk without pain into a planned three more decades.  

“If you wanna be a hero, well just follow me,” I sing from John’s “Working Class Hero.” When I look behind me and see my friends, all those listed above, laughing and lurching around like they are old men on canes.

Enjoy every flapjack.