Champo and Jocko: A tale of friendship, chasing the devil in pink long johns and bunny ears and, surprisingly, reaching age of replacement parts

Four decades ago, when he stood on his head, among the shards of broken whiskey bottles that had been tossed against the wall, he probably never even thought he’d be at the point where he’d be getting a new hip.
When we slalomed down the steep hills at The Ledges, Jack Purcell’s or Chuck Taylor's for skis, coming precariously close to the edge of the bluff over the Des Moines River, I don’t imagine his hips even bothered him.
Of course when the floods came from the spring thaw, we couldn’t slalom any longer. We just would find the closest cliff from which to leap into the churning, angry brown water, enjoying our favorite compound or concoction … and drift away … bound from Boone to Des Moines in our boxers and Hanson House T-shirts.
I think it was around that time Nardholm discovered the top of a chimney, protruding from a burned-down log cabin, made a dandy outdoor toilet. A conspicuous throne, high above the woods.
But this isn’t about Nardholm, although I sure like that guy. I’ll call him a kid, as the last time I saw him he was a year younger than me. I understand he still is.
Nardholm, Titzy, Carpy, Capt. Kirk and before them Dennis Eggers, Schultzy, Jay-Dub, Hondo (aka Creamjeans) and Dogshit joined our adventures. Mule. I think even Wizard and Holtzy were involved sometimes. In fact, I may have ridden with them to Juarez, where I got lost in the rain when it was Christmastime too.
Occasionally Uncle Moose would join in, too, although he was mostly down on the farm in Red Oak, because his dad was dead and he needed to tend to the critters and the corn on weekends. Damn, though, he was a tough hombre when it came to full-speed, aerial chest-butting. Now he’s fighting cancer. That’s another story.
This one’s really about the reason I was in Juarez and why I was slaloming down hills in that altered state of Iowa.
For Jocko and Champo (me), life was not to be savored like fine wine but gobbled like a dozen 10-cent greaseburgers. After all, there was a war out there those days. And some day we were bound to grow up. Perhaps I still will.
Jocko did, though. Kind of.
While I’ve been a journalist and continued my allegiance to life’s sometimes tattered edges as well as The Beatles and Stones and international adoption, Jocko has been a successful inside salesman for a couple of companies, beginning with Rapid Roller, the Chicago company across the street from the bar where I watched the Cubs beat the Pirates in 23 innings one day.
He moved on to EverPak or something like that in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, decades ago, but we had mostly lost track of each other, life got in the way. There were reasons. But no use crying over spilt Mad Dog 20/20.
I sure wish I’d been there when his Granny died. She’s the one who made us some Bohemian Rhapsody fried chicken the morning or early afternoon when we reappeared after sleeping in a boat … don’t know whose, but it was handy up in Antioch, Ill., the summer or two before he got married.
And I wish I’d been able to turn to him when similar sadness and personal and professional disasters hit my life. But while we weren’t together, I know we always loved each other.
It was telling that when I took him to see 'Easy Rider' – I’d already seen it a half-dozen times – he came out imitating Jack Nicholson and I had memorized the Dennis Hopper lines.
Now he’s gotta get a new hip.
I’m worried as well as more aware of my own mortality. Fact is, I’m going in for an MRI this week to check out the after-effects of a wreck last summer on my still-concussed brain.
Who would have thought the two young men – Jocko and Champo -- who greeted countless dawns with parched eyeballs focusing on test patterns while waiting for the morning farm report or Howdy-Doody reruns -- would live long enough to wear out our body parts?
It’s not too surprising that death reunited us a few months ago. His ex-wife, Nola, who I remember as a beautiful, leggy pompon girl for the Iowa State Cyclones, died after a horrid battle with cancer.
I contacted Jocko to express my remorse and, in the process, help him laugh. I did, too, as we talked about how we prepared for the wedding ceremony all those years ago.
I was the best man and he was the groom, of course. By the time we got there, I guess it’s good Nola could tell us which was which. For some reason Jocko and I had arrived a bit, shall we say, dazed by the hours of preparations. Lotta stress, man.
During the laughter and tears of that telephone reunion, Jocko told me he was getting his hip replaced in the middle of February. So, as time has gone by, I’ve picked up the phone and called. He doesn’t answer. One trait we shared was that while we both ran with the devil – sometimes wearing pink long johns and bunny ears -- and generally made our friends laugh, we were highly private people, in a peculiarly public fashion, confidantes to each other and few outsiders.
I’ve been calling a few more times in recent days. He’s not answering. Why would you want to hear from people who are calling to make fun of you for being old?
But each time I dial, I think of the two of us, walking into parties, where people would instinctively put on that old Carly Simon song. Yes, we watched ourselves gavotte.
Hard-core scholars at Iowa State University, I remember Friday nights. Saturday nights. Usually Thursday nights were reserved for our favorite team sport. We called it “Rolling.”
With a simple hand-over-hand motion, I would signal the night adventures should begin. Pretty harmless adventures, at that. Beer occasionally played a part. By the way, Sundays were reserved for pizza crust soup -- my personal specialty -- and warm Van Merritt beer while watching Maverick reruns.
Heck, guys like Sly Stone and Dennis Wilson and Mike Love even played roles in our adventures. Too many tales to tell.
I was kind of the Rolling Team captain. This wasn’t an approved intercollegiate sport – Jocko couldn’t have participated if it was, as he was on a football scholarship. No. 63’s biggest accomplishment was breaking up a fight involving Tommy Nobis of LSU and some scurrilous Iowa State Cyclone back during the 1971 Sun Bowl, in El Paso.
I was proud ... and lucky … to see him perform so honorably. I had been released by the border guards in time to see the game. To this day, I can’t figure out why every time I crossed the border from Juarez into El Paso, I was detained by the guards. They always apologized afterward. But it did make the border crossing a hassle and kept me from getting to the Sun Bowl with much time to spare.
The fact I was toting a black velvet painting of Jimi Hendrix I bought for $2 in the market outside the donkey show joint slowed me down further.
Probably the greatest and still under-known anti-war protest ever staged at Iowa State came on the Sunday we were recruited to play Viet Cong for full-scale ROTC maneuvers. Seems a massive blizzard had kept the scheduled foes from making it from Iowa City (where the University of Iowa is located), so the top enlisted ROTC man on campus, “Admiral Bruns,” asked me if I could round up a few fellows to be the enemy.
I went two doors down, carrying a bottle of Gordon’s completely dry martinis, to hold under Jocko’s nose to stir him awake. Then we rounded up our comrades, a gang of reckless Cong, ready to die to train Uncle Sam’s next crop.
The maneuvers – observed for the record by real-life Army guys -- were and remain top-secret. Even 40 years later, all I can tell you is that if snowballs had been hand grenades, those gun-toting ROTC men were just so much body fluids and bones along the creek bed.
Sadly, some of those ROTC troops soon found out that the real Viet Cong had more than snowballs in store for them.
I salute and remember the snowy battle we waged and their final bayonet assault on our snow tunnel whenever I’m at the Wall in D.C. I remind their ghosts that I sang Beatles songs at them as they plunged their fake bayonets into my heart. I guess I should mention that the contingent of Cong that day dubbed themselves "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." I'll tell the rest of that story one day. It was wonderful to be there.
Here is where I should get more into the adventures of two young men who didn’t mind wearing tie-dyed underwear on their heads to impress the ladies.
But I’m getting tired. I mean I’m not young any more. My old running buddy’s getting a new hip tomorrow morning.
Soon, we can go slalom out at The Ledges again. At least in our dreams.

Life's lessons aren't always pleasant: A final conversation with a good newspaperman discarded after loyalty went unrewarded

A few months ago, as a way of expressing sorrow at the death of a former colleague, I wrote this blog. I didn’t post it at the time because I wasn’t sure it was appropriate. But today, as I sat in my basement, I decided that the fellow would have liked this. I will refer to him as “Kevin” in this dispatch. May he rest in peace and make sure St. Pete sticks to deadlines.

At the time, I wasn’t sure why I was meeting the former colleague.
It’s not that we’d been particularly close for some time.
And I feared that he was going to try to sell me one of his phone plans, as I‘d heard that was one of his enterprises since he was shooed out the door by the newspaper to which he had given his life.
I was aware that he had personal problems, at least one of them unfairly publicized. Nobody’s really mentioned that in all the wonderful things they’ve said about him in the days since he dropped dead of a heart attack. But we all have personal problems.
Those who know me best know I’ve confronted many a demon and have come out the better man on the other side for the most part. I “swapped” demon stories with Kristofferson once and I think even he was amazed.
So Kevin’s more recent problem certainly wasn’t something we’d talk about unless he asked for advice, which I didn’t anticipate to be the case.
I had no interest in it and I’m nonjudgmental unless you are preaching the virtues of bland, uninspired, bottom-line information sharing (I believe that is a form of what once was referred to as journalism) or if you shoot somebody more than once in the head and then gut him, sternum to scrotum. I’m not sure which of those types of people ranks lower in my esteem.
I viewed my departure -- from the newspaper that Kevin loved and lost -- as perhaps one of those innocent Iraqi civilians probably felt after a few hours of water boarding by some of my Green Beret friends. I’d embraced the freedom, despite the big question marks about the future. I knew I had to feed a family and pay bills. I no longer felt like I was suffocating beneath a tsunami of dishonesty and the back-stabbing disrespect of even people I thought had once been good journalists… friends even.
At least I got out with a modest buyout that enabled me to go about getting established as a freelance writer and a part-time college educator.
It was our difference in opinion as to our employer, or at least some of the people and policies, that perhaps drove me and the guy I’m calling “Kevin” here apart years ago. He was so loyal that he was blinded and eventually blindsided by that employer. I think that broke the heart that eventually ceased beating a week or so ago.
But one thing I always liked about Kevin was his interest in music, a passion of mine, and his love and depth of knowledge in some types of the art form that exceeded my own by a long ways. He also had an affinity for the work of Elvis’ original guitarist, Scotty Moore. And since Scotty had become a friend of mine over the years, that was one thing Kevin and I could discuss. I also was a friend of Bobby Thompson, Vassar Clements and Josh Graves, all of which I guess raised me in Kevin’s rankings.
It was his love of music that brought us back together, almost three years after we’d had any contact other than an occasional e-mail.
I’d read his blog about country music and sent him a note saying I enjoyed an entry. He responded with a request for coffee sometime.
OK. The last time I’d seen him, we weren’t necessarily friends. I was being held up as the poster boy of the kind of journalist no longer wanted. And I had politely, always, resisted what newspapering had become while I continued my refusal to partake in the back-stabbing and bending over that it apparently took to succeed any more. I may be right, I may be crazy… Actually, I guess there’s little doubt as to both of those qualities.
I’d been in newspapering for almost 35 years and if I had anything to show for it -- other than slow aches in my heart when I thought of some of the stories I covered, bodies and splattered brains seen, innocents and innocence lost -- it was that I could sleep at night, at least when the caffeine wore off. I tried to treat people fairly.
Kevin instead had chosen to embrace, for the most part, the newspaper. Now I’m not saying he was wrong. He had his motivations. And besides that, from where I sat, at least he had earned his spot on that up-elevator through hard work and misplaced loyalty.
And while I’m not sure if he fully bought into what had become of newspapers, he represented that hellish and heartless descent to me.
He also shaved off his beard, wore ties and pretty much excused or made excuses for the hierarchy. And once, when an otherwise good employee used profanity, in exasperation, in an e-mail about a story running late, Kevin exploded and said he was going to report that to the big shots. Let me be specific here: The big shots in this story are not the big shots, necessarily, still involved at the unnamed newspaper. They’ve either moved on, been farmed out or been decapitated while, out of corporate habit, bending over.
I knew Kevin was a better man than that and that he knew better. But he loved his job, for the most part. And that is to be admired.
I had loved my job sometimes during my life.
And he loved the newspaper. I wish I had that same love for the newspaper at which I was his colleague, but it didn’t deserve it. It did deserve loyalty from me while I was employed there, though. Loyalty and respect are not the same thing. But I would never bad-mouth an organization and still accept their paychecks.
Where in the past we could discuss things as more or less equals, he became, to me at least, the voice of rigid authority.
I do not like rigid authority. So, as is my nature, I rebelled in the only way I could. I did the right thing, at least as I perceived it, whether it bothered anyone or not.
I tried to work hard, earn my pay and as much as possible steer clear of the man who actually loved the newspaper that was losing its spine after long losing its soul. I do not back talk my bosses unless they are attacking someone I love or someone who is my charge. I must amend that to add that I do back talk my boss now and my son keeps telling me to quit sitting in my office cussing at the guy with long, white hair.
After the early years, in which I called him Kevin, I began to call him “Mr. (Insert last name here).” Sometimes I called him “Boss.” It was not said sarcastically. I just couldn’t call him Kevin any more, but as I was collecting a paycheck, he was one of the bosses and I did as I was told, at least most of the time, unless someone was going to get hurt. Or I had moral objections.
So, when I left my final shift in corporate journalism, I shook hands with Kevin, kind of like Jake saying goodbye to the prison guards while being released at Joliet.
The phone call from Kevin came about three or four months ago or so. I do keep a fairly busy (thankfully) schedule, so it was a month or so before we could get together.
He was going to be in my part of town after some sort of job-search seminar.
You see, perhaps two years after I left the newspaper, more or less on my terms, he had been escorted to the door. It was a part of a purge of many of the old hands, a talented and loyal bunch who’d invested their lives and hopes and dreams at that newspaper.
I much preferred my prior newspaper locales, but I actually had dreams at the newspaper where I worked with Kevin, too. Until one of the bosses, similarly put to pasture, told me my dreams and goals “didn’t matter.” I also had been told I was “too old.”
As for Kevin’s job loss, well, I’m not sure if his problems had anything to do with it. I doubt it. For all I could find out, it was a simple matter of streamlining, of cutting out the people with institutional knowledge in favor of the younger people who matched, more perfectly, the demographic. Upper middle-class white shoppers who like second-hand lace panties and Taylor Swift music seemed to be the target.
But even though I didn’t have a lot of affinity for Kevin at the time I heard he had been let go, I viewed what happened to him as a betrayal by his “family.” Here was a good man who had sacrificed, perhaps even bent over a little too much, because he believed in the ultimate product.
He believed in putting out a good newspaper with correctly written headlines and good attributions.
He believed in working hard to make sure that happened.
Yes, I regarded him as a corporate guy, but his elevator to the top already had begun its descent by the time I left. If he couldn’t see it coming, I could.
Still, he believed in the product. And he believed in treating people fairly.
Pretty good traits for a guy who I had come to regard, at least for a time, as just another corporate puke.
Well, there’s not a lot of sense in dwelling any longer on this.
When he and I met, it was over iced coffee at a local bread shop. We joked a little about the days we’d worked together.
Then he said “Tim, I think it’s probably my fault for the fact we somehow drifted apart. I did and said things, or maybe I didn’t say things when I should have. But I’m sorry. Really sorry.”
That’s really all it took. It’s not like he was the epitome of what had happened to my beloved newspaper industry. It was just a guy who said he had made some bad choices. Heck, I’ve done that myself.
And I really felt badly that he had been betrayed by something he believed in.
So we finished out the long afternoon drinking iced coffee and talking about Scotty Moore.

Retired fireman Neil Starke, 90, offers words of encouragement and kindness from the North Woods while vile cretins fan flames of hate

Neil Starke has no idea how much it mattered to this cynical and sometimes sour soul that he wrote that note.
Constant blood-drenched, hate-filled news reports have me mentally replaying the too many times when I have seen bodies on the ground, bullets in the head.
Or bodies of young women I knew burned up in a car, the only thing that didn’t turn to black ash was a Bible.
Or a teenage murder victim in a casket while a mom who remains my friend, these almost three decades later, wails so hard my heart still hurts to think of it.
The day the Klan protested the newspaper I worked at and I had to interview the puss-filled venomous Imperial Lizard or whatever.
Or picking up a phone at 4:30 a.m. and hearing James Earl Ray, calling from Brushy Mountain Pen, wanting to talk with one of my reporters. “Charlie’s not in yet, you ignorant, murderous asshole…” I’d say. Or at least think. It was 13 hours until I’d be home and be able to wash away the filthy leavings of speaking with this vile slug. I think of those frequent, not-brief-enough conversations with Dr. King’s killer often, even more frequently as the day that honors the preacher who changed the world approaches.
We Shall Overcome?
Maybe. The hate in our country flared up in Tucson the other day. Pure horror. The fruit of a country teetering on hate’s brink where people believe they have the constitutional right to violently disagree.
A land ruled, apparently, by the spiteful, soulless principles of Beck, Limbaugh on one side and the increasingly irrelevant posings of Olbermann on the other.
I got nasty habits. Take tea at 3, but I don’t watch that crap. Why does anyone? Perhaps because they need to know how to think?
The hate is growing in this country where a future wannabe president espouses the targeting of certain states and congressional districts – like Gabby’s in Arizona – for “takeover.” Of course, Sarah says it’s the media’s fault.
Perhaps, in most fetid fashion. Because “the media” nowadays is not the media of the Huntley-Brinkley-Cronkite-Sevareid bunch or the many fine newspaper reporters. Remember newspapers? Used to be the source of information rather than maps and diagrams and internet links to bra sales.
Guys like Seigenthaler, Battle, Russell – and, I flatter myself, Ghianni -- staked their reputations on what was in newspapers.
Of course that was before editors began having their reporters “tweet” at their readers (or is that twit on their readers?) to make flimsy publications lively. Before shopping for shoes, finding the best price on third-hand edible underpants, the best worm-free sushi and viewing Nicole Kidman’s breasts became the morning’s dose of “reality” delivered in a plastic sack.
OK. Gone off track again. But back to the subject of dumb twits (or words that rhyme), return with me now to the thrilling paragraphs above and the discussion of the gun-toting moll of hate and division whose very white followers and her own ghost writers want to take back this country from the likes of you and me. Yes, I thought this land was my land… Not anymore, eh, Chico?
Oh yeah, I’m white enough. But, you know, I’m no WASP. Too many vowels in the wrong places. (Talk about wrong places, let me tell you where I’ve been in my life and what I did there. Nah, not today.)
I used to think the followers of the shotgun-toting reality star and John McCain’s gift to America were restricted to WWII veterans, the so-called Greatest Generation that as they enter the doddering years have turned out to be the Gang that Can’t Think Straight. A deadly mob of faltering heroes in stained trousers, pulled up over their bellies, who wear flag lapel pins and believe this woman is “smart.” (I actually believe it’s a hankering for the return to their testosterone-fueled days of five-day passes to Tokyo bath houses and Brussels brothels.) She would have been a hot commodity in those joints. Right at home, too.
Anyway, I felt horrible last week when I heard the news about the shootings in Tucson. But I felt more horrible that it didn’t overly hit me in the gut.
Sad, sure. Vile. For sure. A product of the hate in our land fueled and fanned by the few who are ruining what the country was supposed to stand for. Remember that old “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” thing? Don’t you think that 9-year-old girl had a right to grow up and flourish in this country?
But then again, what about the boys and girls, perhaps twice her age, who occupy those caskets that roll down the cargo belt at Dover AFB? Give Peace A Chance? Yeah. Sure.
Another story, of course. But dead is dead. A bullet to the head is just as deadly when fired by some wacko in the wild, wild (radical right) west as it is when coming from the rifles of Osama’s Pakistani pals.
Anyway, I lament the fact that the news out of Arizona didn’t bother me so much. It has come to seem almost routine in this cruel divided and divisive land.
Of course, my own senses are somewhat numbed because of a life spent as a newspaperman. Before the corporate slaughter, I may have been the last one left… I don’t know.
In my life, there are faces and places I remember. Rapists. Murderers. Burned corpses. Plane crash victims. I’ve been to the field where bodies lay. The killing fields.
One of my reporters once wrote a story about how a murder victim was skinned. Another story revolved around the sexual assault and murder of a young woman … and the tools for the assault and the murder were, respectively, a wooden mixing spoon and a steak knife.
I’ve stepped, or so I was told by police, on the brains of a wreck victim at 3 a.m. on the bypass. Which bypass? Doesn’t matter. The bypass from life?
I have held the moms of teenagers who lost their lives senselessly. I’ve described the scattered bones of a beautiful high school junior as they were dragged out of the woods by blue-tick hounds.
And these things don’t turn me cold. But they make me put up a barrier, a way of dealing with calamity as only newspeople (remember them?) do. Perhaps there was laughter when the exploding cigarettes filled the newsroom with smoke and noise. But there were tears later, over a long, deep breath of nicotine while watching the bats converge back into the downtown church steeples.
And I’ve written before about my personal mood of late. And it’s not that good.
The economy.
“Friends” who don’t come through when I need a pal or a plate of eggs.
Wars that I abhor and don’t understand. Big O: please explain this “floating” promise to bring the troops home.
The “holiday” experience of my friend Rob Dollar’s 4-year-old great-nephew who was hospitalized for ear infections and for a time was in dire straits (the condition, not the Knopfler band).
The cancerous bladder and kidney of an older fellow (yes there are some older fellows left) I like to joke with when they occasionally find me in church. I’m easy to spot: the nice old man with the pony-tail and the Jerry Garcia necktie.
The fact that some kids are mean to my own kids, partly, I believe, because my children came from Romanian orphanages where the closest thing to silver spoons were the fingers with which they ate their nasty, slushy meals.
The list goes on. I was reading a book recently where a guy I admire described one of the worst events in his life that occurred when he fell off a tree while vacationing in Tahiti. He suffered a concussion and other injured-noggin woes.
Hell, I can’t get to Tahiti. I’m still suffering from the concussion and related noggin woes caused by the famous T-bone a mile from the place I like to call home.
All of this leads up to why I’m so glad (I’m glad, I’m glad, I’m glad) I have made a friend in the Northern Woods, a 90-year-old retired fire investigator named Neil C. Starke. Remember him? He was at the top of this story.
One of my regular delights each year is to write a story for a well-regarded national magazine about the kindness of people who, through simple, heart-driven acts, help others. We’re not talking about lung transplants here, but simple random acts of kindness.
Folks nominate others and then I track down those who did a kindness. It is heartening. Here is part of the tale that I wrote about Mr. Starke:
When the phone rings at the 90-year-old retired fire captain’s house in rural Wisconsin, Neil C Starke answers, smiles and, when he hangs up, counts his blessings.
“I have several neighbors living within three miles of my home. Every day I get a call asking some question of me or telling me about something or someone.
“They’ll ask things like ‘what did you have for breakfast?’ Or they’ll call when they are on their way to work to say ‘Just wanting to make sure you didn’t oversleep.’ ”
Starke, who worked for 34 years as the captain in charge of the Oshkosh Fire Prevention Bureau, began getting these calls not long after his wife of 57 years, Gladys, died in 2002.
He says Randy and Becky Gramse and Jon Barthel, are the ones who most frequently call his house that’s 12 miles outside Wautoma.
Starke, who spends some of his free time trying to lift the spirits of area nursing home residents, can’t overstate how important those calls are and that he even looks forward to them.
Without saying so, he knows what they are really doing is checking up on him, making sure he’s OK. But since he’s an independent sort, they don’t want to put it in those terms.
Course, he’d be disappointed if he didn’t get those calls now.
“I think they know I’m onto them now,” he says, as he prepares to sample a bit of the strawberry pie brought over by Donna Goldsmith, another neighbor.
“You can’t imagine how good I got it,” he says. “People are always talking about how good heaven is. I feel like I’ve had a little heaven here on earth.”
The editors, top-notch pros, cut some of that out for the magazine – I always write long, as you likely notice today --but they left the heart of it in.
And when the edition of the American Profile magazine came out, I was asked to send e-mails, including the link to the story, to the seven different subjects of the acts of kindness to make sure they’d seen the magazine.
Problem is, of course, most 90-year-old retired firemen living in the deep woods don’t spend a lot of time on the internet.
So I called Mr. Starke (pronounced “Starkee,” kind of like Richard).
During the course of the half-hour that followed, we talked about many things. I told him about my family and my dreams. He talked about his most recent visits to the nursing homes, to cheer the old people. He talked about the dreams he already had fulfilled.
He had remembered I had just had a car wreck before our last conversation. He asked about that and the flood.
And we talked about the Wisconsin Badgers – one of the players, I can’t remember which – began as a pee wee player on the firefighter-sponsored team in Oshkosh and Mr. Starke used to go to all the games.
I told him I was pulling for his Packers this year. And also described my own ramblings across Wisconsin, either to baseball games in Milwaukee when Henry Aaron played there or to football camp in Eagle River or cruising through the Dells with my mom and dad and my big brother, Eric. (He is much nicer than I am in general -- even if the girls always liked me better, for good reason.)
I smiled so hard during our conversation that my dimples, which disappeared in recent weeks due to frustration, deepened and ached.
I told Mr. Starke that I wished he was 10 minutes away instead of 10 hours. I’d be over for a piece of pie and a cup of coffee.
He told me the same, adding that the fact I wrote about him in a national magazine was the highlight of his year, among the highlights of his life. People from all over the country who had forgotten about him as their lives progressed, had read the story and called.
“You made my 90th year,” he said.
“You made my 59th, Mr. Starke,” I said.
“Neil,” he said. “My name to you is Neil. Mr. Starke was my dad.”
A few days later, a note arrived in the mail.
It included the letter he put in his annual Christmas card that listed among his year’s highlights the phone call he got from a nice young man at a magazine and his hopes that a story would appear soon.
He had forgotten my name at that point. And when he saw the story, after he began getting the calls, he wondered how to get in touch with me.
And then, in the handwriting of an older, established citizen, he wrote an addendum on that Christmas letter:
Dear Tim,
Your call was answer for what I was searching for. How to contact you and express my thanks.
The Lord provides all for me. It was a pleasure visiting with you.
Again thanks, Neil.
It was my pleasure. Thank you, Neil, for allowing me into your life and reminding me that most people -- despite the hate and rhetoric and handguns -- are, indeed, good.

Skipper and Rick Nelson help me say farewell to a difficult year that was no 'Garden Party'

I don’t think there are any pictures left of the New Year when my old friend, Skipper, appeared as both the Baby New Year 1983 and Father Time.
Nor do I have pictures of the last meaningful night I spent with Skipper. It, too, was a New Year’s Eve, but it was the end of 1985.
Ricky Nelson’s “Travelin’ Man” was playing on the radio in Skipper’s Royal York Hotel apartment/room as we packed.
The great and under-appreciated rock singer – who has been bestowed posthumous News Brothers honors largely because of my memory of that night and the 80-plus-year-old man I was helping – had just died that day in a plane crash. (In his final show, Dec. 30, in Alabama, Rick and the Stone Canyon Band ended with Buddy Holly’s “Rave On.” As he left the stage, he hollered to the crowd: “Rave on for me!” – a plenty good “final words” sentiment to earn New Brothers status.)
On that New Year’s Eve, Skipper was going to move out of his room and, eventually, into the first of many nursing homes he’d occupy until he died and donated his gnarled body to medical science.
He’d been keeping the room in the Royal York for the better part of the last two years without ever really living in it. He’d been staying with his wife, Rose or Onion or Jasmine, some such name, out in the Clarksville, Tenn., projects. I called her “Mrs. Skipper.” Nice woman.
When they married, she kept her apartment and he stayed at the old hotel. He would usually go see her on Saturday nights and stay until after Sunday dinner. That was about all the domestic bliss he could stand, I think. Her too, I imagine. I think it also had something to do with her having approval to only have a single person living in the cramped government flat.
It also was easy for him to walk to and from docs and the pharmacy at the Royal York. And besides that, the damned old flop had the aroma of busted dreams and stale testosterone … or was that rotting flesh? … from all the old guys who lived there.
Anyway, as countdown continues on this year -- and I will be glad when it’s done -- I stop to remember Skipper. Oh, the old arthritis gnarled former Merchant Marine and carny -- who claimed to have served spaghetti to Al Capone and to have witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor from his apartment terrace -- has been a part of many adventures.
There were times when the News Brothers needed an old salt to take with them to Camelot, where cops could be plied for information over drinks and then began buying drinks for us so we’d keep them company. Skipper sometimes was there with us when we got plenty of good news stories from loose-lipped lawmen.
We’d get off at maybe 1 in the morning and go get him. Call a half-hour before. Usually we’d make these arrangements a day or two in advance so he could rest up for what would be a 3 a.m. or later night. I remember he always had his black wingtips glistening for those forays into the night.
Anyway, this is supposed to be about New Year’s. Not much really to say about the Father Time/Baby New Year photos, other than that they likely provided a lot of good cheer for people in Clarksville who had come to look up to Skipper as something of a celebrity after I had the good fortune of becoming his friend and writing about him occasionally. Perhaps he felt he too had the good fortune of meeting me and my buddy, Rob “Death” Dollar. But the pleasure was mine. I loved the little guy. I still miss him all these years after that final donation to medical science, that strange fraternity where docs and insurance co-ops play dice to see who gets the most money out of Americans. Snake-eyes for me.
Back to Skipper.
Sometimes, if I was going out in pursuit of a column or just going for a ride, I’d pull my old Duster with its bad brakes to the front of the hotel and ask him to hop in. Took him to Guthrie, Ky., to meet Reuben Toliver, preacher and barbecue king. Drove out to the Mennonite bakery for donuts and apple pie.
Took him down to the river where he and my pal, Rob, and I liked to skip rocks. We called him Skipper because he had been an old salt and he was covered with tattoos of naked women and snakes. Actually, age had distorted those tattoos. They could have been pictures of all the dead presidents for all I could tell.
But I’ll tell you, if you ever bet on rock skipping – and there are few people who ever have – Skipper earned his nickname name.
Little fellow, probably 4-10, could flat-out SKIP those rocks, particularly if we took him to the shallows of the Red River, over near Port Royal. If he wasn’t wearing his teeth, he’d tease us with the Andy Griffith theme.
The wagers were usually small, a pack of menthols or a pot of coffee. Sometimes it would be eggs over-easy from Raissa’s café, in the lower level of the Royal York.
When I made mistakes in life, and I have been known to do just that, Skipper was usually the first one to console me: “It’s too damn bad. But I knew you shouldn’t do that in the first place. Just didn’t think I was the one who should say that. We all need to make our own mistakes.”
Talk about a shoulder to cry on.
Anyway, I’ll write more about Skipper some other day if I haven’t already. But on the last meaningful day with him -- for he was going to share a room with his wife, Rosie or Pearline or whatever her name was -- at the nursing home once they cleared out a corpse or two – I took my dinner break and shuffled through the light snow from the newspaper building in downtown Clarksville to the hotel.
A life in four small boxes. He had a little black-and-white TV with tinfoil subbing for rabbit ears that he used to watch baseball and Matt Dillon and Death Valley Days reruns.
He had seven pair of socks and seven white T-shirts, for that’s what he wore most of the time. He had two pair of well-pressed trousers, including the ones he was wearing. He had sweaters he wore over the T-shirts in the winter. He had an old pea-coat Rob and I bought him at the Mustard Seed. One blue Hawaiian shirt.
He had a stack of Zane Grey westerns as well as a copy of Ginsberg’s “Howl” he liked to read out loud. He said he met Ginsberg and Kerouac at City Lights out in San Francisco when he was working out of that port. Truth? Didn’t matter. Ever. Just the love.
Skipper had a few other things, like a few News Brothers pictures, including the ones from the New Year’s paper of a couple years before. A yellow alarm-clock radio played Ricky Nelson songs while we packed and talked.
We hauled the boxes down and into the elevator and out to a car, where a kindly fellow was picking him up to run out to Opal’s place for the night. The nursing home check-in would come first of the week, contingent on the right combination of people dying.
“This will be it, Tim, son,” Skipper said, as he hugged me. “Won’t ever be the same again.”
And it wasn’t, although I admit there was the one time Rob and I borrowed Skipper from the nursing home, without permission, and took him back down to Camelot. One last ride to beat the devil.
Anyway, I think of Skipper today because he was like the grandfathers who had long since died. He was full of tales, both tall and short. He doubtless stretched the truth, if there was any to begin with. For all I know his worldy adventures of warring and whoring and praying to outrun the devil occurred in his head while he spent his whole life in the hotel. Didn’t matter to me one way or the other. I believed him. Sometimes you gotta believe in something. Or serve somebody.
But he loved the News Brothers, particularly me and Rob, because we loved him. No question about it. In fact, when I moved from Clarksville a few years later, I made one last stop.
I visited his final nursing home destination, and rolled him out into the common area, where we smoked and tears streamed.
“This is goodbye, Tim,” he said, or words similar. “Thanks for being my friend. Now you go out and have a good life.”
And it has been. Skipper is long dead. But he’s with me always, like so many of the great and warm-hearted people who have shared my life.
I am just thinking of him today because the New Year’s Eves with Skipper were some of my life’s best. They weren’t wild celebrations of parched-eye extremes and “how’d I get here?” awakenings.
I guess I’m thinking of those New Year’s Eves with Skipper to cheer me, because 2010 has been the worst year of my life.
Oh, there were more traumatic years, with the deaths of loved ones.
But from start to finish, this was a year of horror and despair. If it wasn’t for my memories of Skipper, my long-time friendship with Rob, who would listen to me rant, the kindness of my old managing editor Tony Kessler (perhaps the nicest bald distance runner and hockey dad you’ll ever meet), the loyalty of the musician (and sometimes reporter) Peter Cooper and my family, I don’t know if I could take it. Oh yeah, bless the rest of the News Brothers and a few special Facebook confidantes, for they have done me more good than they know.
There actually have been many who have expressed concern and kindness, so I don’t want to run a list of names. They know who they are. The ones who really didn’t and don’t care know who they are as well. And they have their reason.
And, thanks to this social media crap – and I am a believer and avid user – I was reacquainted with my old college running mates.
Captain Kirk, the Vietnam Navy veteran who played professional softball and hustled pool to pay his way through Iowa State, has been with me in almost daily dispatches since we “rediscovered” each other. Cappy almost got me killed when he hustled a heroin dealer one night after I had served as the set-up guy at the pool table. I think that incident occurred at the bar where mentally challenged twins – back then we called them retarded, with no ill intended – wore cowboy hats, plucked on Gibsons and sang Hank Williams songs every Tuesday night.
Carpy, the famous veterinarian who shared some college adventures, is now practicing in Southern California where he has perfected the art of running long distance races while neutering prairie dogs. He’s a good guy. Although I think of him as a good kid, as he was and I suppose still is, four years younger than me.
And Jocko, well, he’s Jocko. Killing animals, drinking beer and laughing during our phone conversations while he relaxes in the farm country of Iowa. His ex-wife, and I was their best man, died this year. I let time get in the way of saying goodbye. You can read about these people and more by going back through my blogs of this horrid year.
It’s been a year in which I felt like my old friend Muhammad Ali, in his later years. Didn’t matter which way I turned: I was getting clubbed, figuratively and literally, by luck, by the economy, by friends who really weren’t and have subsequently lost that title for good by simply not caring. (Note: You can crap on me a few times, but if you crap on my family when they need help, you are scratched from the list permanently. Dead to me). Other uppercuts and low blows came from the whims and rages of nature and by a Scion that ran a red light and left me still concussed.
And then there is the fact I’ve been underemployed and fighting for pennies in a cruel economy. There are the Bulls and the Bears. And then there is this economy, which could be described by what bears do in the woods.
So, in a random manner, let me start by saying that the first part of the year was OK. Oh, I’d lost another part-time contract job, but that wasn’t new. The economy is that way. And I’ve been fortunate enough to find other jobs, thanks to people I respect and who apparently respect me.
Then came May 1-2, 2010, the days that changed my attitude about people and nature and along the way came to despise the Corps of Engineers (“hey, if we just go home and sleep, maybe this flood won’t happen, so we don’t need to monitor the dams,” is the way it seems to have occurred.)
Anyway, my little house is far from the dams. But the weather guys said that 24 inches of rain fell in the 36 hours or so in my neighborhood. When they showed the instant maps of neighborhoods on TV, you could almost see me and my family bailing out the house.
Of course I wasn’t alone. And though the total repair and replace cost was insurmountable, we were able to get back into something of a lifestyle relatively quickly. It was a lifestyle cluttered by piles of books and CDs and albums jammed into every available space in the upstairs of the house.
You may have read it before. Here’s a brief summary of the events.
“Dad, I’ll get the records first!” said my daughter, Emily, as she sloshed through the rising water in the basement – which actually was the living room, my office, library and the music room as well as utility room and garage – and grabbed armloads.
She is my daughter, damn the Romanian passport and parliamentary adoption decree, and she wisely started out with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones as she began clearing the shelves. Next came Dylan, Cash, the Dead, Neil Young, Tom Petty, Kristofferson. Hell, by the time she was done, we’d even rescued Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Met Herb once when he came to Nashville. Good guy.
That was just the vinyl. I didn’t raise stupid children. I mean, they may not always be perfect, but they know their old dad -- a very old man – loves his vinyl albums.
The CDs and then the books followed, with an assembly line rescue that began with Emily and then went to me, to Joe and to Suzanne before settling in on the main floor of our home.
I didn’t even lose many. I mean there may have been a random Los Lonely Boys or Tracy Lawrence CD that got too wet to salvage, but most recordings – I keep about everything, as evidenced by the fact I still had Tracy and Los Lonely Boys to lose when the water rose – were OK. There were a few hundred cassette tapes that got water-logged and tossed.
The books came next. A few had to be thrown out, soaking wet. But those that survived were carried upstairs and stacked around the living room, where peculiar combinations like Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” rested atop a copy of the Associated Press Stylebook, the Bible and the Qu’ran or Koran…. I should probably look in the stylebook for preferred spelling.
I could continue to tell you about the flood, about how I coped with it by writing nightly blogs that included my own regular basketball adventures with The Big O while Bob Dylan and Magic Johnson watched.
Or I could talk about the huge pile of furniture and floor, carpet and drywall and appliances that had to be torn out and left in the driveway. The whole basement had to be gutted, as the water wicked up the drywall.
I could talk about the limp-handed insurance company that tried to sell me flood insurance, after collecting premiums for 20 years and declining to help at all in my family’s recovery.
And then there’s the great work of FEMA and how it has restored my “faith” in government.
Yeah, Uncle Sam: Thanks for the $400 or whatever I was allowed to pay for the lost clothes dryer. Surprised you could spare that much to help me when you are busy killing civilians in foreign lands. I think you could have spared one burst of ammo into an empty building and helped me more than that.
But I’m OK. I do understand, though, the bitterness of the real and still homeless and hopeless flood victims. Every time the Big O’s boys make an air strike on civilian populations in Pakistan, that’s several million dollars less for the good of the country itself. Oh well, at least you haven’t declared “Mission Accomplished,” Big O. And you may not like country music, but could you please help Nashville? There are rows of homes in North Nashville and Bellevue that are still unoccupied. I’m OK, though I could likely fuel many fires with the amount of paperwork I had to file in quintuplicate in order for each appropriate official to have copies on which to stamp “No.”
Ahh, but that’s enough about the flood. I’ve tried to move past it. Well, actually I was forcibly moved past it by a dozen feet or so when a car ran a red light at full speed and T-boned me as I was making a pleasant little turn on the green arrow after returning some flood recovery rental merchandise to the Home Depot on July 4.
My car was totaled and I’m still suffering from the after-effects of the bad concussion. Almost no money changed hands so far thanks to the diligence of the insurance industry.
Dizzy, bad headaches and sudden bursts of anger at the establishment are some of the symptoms. Well, those angry bursts were part of the deal before the year I hate took place. You gotta serve somebody.
I could go on, but it would bore you. Also, I’d prefer you read my blogs. For example, I could have easily lived with the physical destruction of the flood and even the wreck if it hadn’t been for the fact my cat, Pal, died.
Yes, I’d rather have the one little cat than all of the material stuff that I lost.
Oh he was old and he had cancer and he had earned the right to die. But I held onto him as he went on. The only good thing about the flood is that his litter box had been moved from the old former basement/utility roof to my bedroom during the course of repairs.
Pal didn’t have to struggle downstairs in his last few months. And he could easily get onto the bed and talk to me.
Damn, though. I wasn’t ready for him to die. I don’t want any more pets. They break your heart.
I have to admit that I was far better off than many of you out there who had to deal with the flood. At least I could get to the upstairs, where the kitchen and bathrooms and bedrooms are. And my family was safe.
I didn’t need help. I’m OK. But there are so many who did and do. I’ve been wondering when they are going to get some of the bucks from the fund-raising concerts.… I mean, how much did anybody get from shows put on by good-hearted souls Vince Gill, Keith Urban and Garth Brooks? I don’t know anybody who got any help to speak of. I’m sure there are happy stories out there. But no one has told them to me. I guess the people who could afford to pay the scalpers’ prices of $500-$1,000 for the $25 Urban and Garth shows have plenty to be happy about.
People, my family included, learned that the only aid we can rely upon lives inside our four walls. It’s a wonderful life if you have family to depend on.
But I am lucky as I face down this horrid year. I do have a loyal family and friends. And I do have my pride and my honesty and my ethics.
I am sure the next year will be better for a lot of us.
I don’t fool myself that the war will be over and that cancer will be cured.
I do not believe that the Big O and the vile bastards of Congress will go dancing hand-in-hand through the Rose Garden for the good of the American people.
I do believe, however, that the good guys will win, eventually. And, as my long time friends know, I am a good guy. I befriended both John Glenn and the Lone Ranger. John Wooden thought of me as a grandson. John R. Cash liked me enough to give me his final interview slot, except he died before he made it home from the hospital.
No, I’m not perfect. Skipper would tell you that.
But I’m pretty damned proud to have made it through this year -- and the almost six decades before -- by staying true to principles that would have held back so many korporate ass-kissers from reaching their levels of success in journalism, my profession, and elsewhere. At least I can sleep at night.
I always kidded Skipper that he reminded me of “Popeye,” you know the sailor man who ate spinach and hollered “I yam what I yam.” Me too.
So, as this year of the damned passes, I think again about that New Year’s Eve when I loaded up Skipper’s belongings in his Royal York Hotel room.
Rick Nelson’s hour of death tribute was in full force on the radio. And the deejay – it may even have been Jimmy in the Morning working a late shift -- cued up “Garden Party” with the line:
“But it's all right now, I learned my lesson well.
You see, you can't please everyone, so you got to please yourself….”
I smiled, unplugged the radio and helped my old friend down to the car that was going to haul him toward eternity.

1982: Murders of children, trailer park rapes & blood-slick roads take holiday as News Brothers spread Christmas cheer and anger Big Guy

“Have a Damn Nice Christmas.”
Makes you feel like breaking out the hot chocolate and singing about that Wenceslaus fellow feasting on Stephen or whatever.
That Damn Nice holiday sentiment nearly cost me my job back in the winter of 1982. Fortunately, I was able to make The Big Guy, our publisher blink. Perhaps the dollar signs I’d help him earn blinded him temporarily, long enough for me to back out his door, put on my yellow fedora and fire up a smoke.
Hell, for all I remember, and sometimes that isn’t much, The Big Guy maybe even smiled. At the very least he jangled the change in his pockets and nodded, blankly, thinking “How in the world can I get back to Carolina and out of this institution....” He was from that state populated by basketball and Biltmore and his prize, upon retirement, was to get back to the mountains and drool.
Call me naive or innocent (few do, you know), but I was surprised by the fuming anger of The Big Guy, as I didn’t understand what was so wrong with this sentimental greeting. I even sent one of the cards to my mom, and she didn’t object. She was willing always to have a Damn Nice Christmas right up til she died. I think she hung the card on the Christmas Tree. Still she had been a journalist, so I suppose she got it.
That greeting that was broadcast around Clarksville came during the heady early days of the fraternity of nicotine-stained journalists who came together with purpose and pride and along the way became known as the News Brothers. Blue-collar journalists, telling blue-collar stories to a blue-collar (and Army-drab-collar) town.
Most people liked it when we wished them a “Damn Nice Christmas” 28 years ago.
After all, wasn’t that the last line from It’s A Wonderful Life? Jimmy Stewart looks into the camera, eyes twinkle as the bell tinkles and says: “Attaboy, Clarence: Have a Damn Nice Christmas!” Listen closer next time, as that part of the line gets drowned out by all the joyous singing.
In the weeks and months leading up to delivering the holiday greeting to The Big Guy, our publisher, I’d been helping to guide what came to be prize-winning coverage involving the deaths of two beautiful and innocent young people. Of course, we weren’t looking for recognition. We just were looking for the truth. And justice. And, when the adrenaline and nicotine wore off, perhaps some sleep.
Kathy Jane Nishiyama and Rodney Wayne Long still stir nightmares in sections of my soul scarred and raw by their monstrous murders almost three decades ago. There still are the sweats on cold nights.
Children, really. Promise extinguished. Forever frozen as “mug shots” that ran daily on the front page with eerily parallel dispatches about the mysteries, searches, chases, savagery and mourning.
The newspaper wasn’t large in staff, but the staff was large in heart. We were pretty young ourselves, though our own innocence had been washed away by years of covering trailer-trash murders and gunfights involving prostitutes, transvestites, serial killers and soldiers. Our photographer would show us some of the not-ready for prime-time shots he got of bodies and bullet holes. Even I was shocked by one of a fatal wound right below a guy’s testicles. He not only bled out, but his once-proud – to him I’m sure -- private parts were making the photographic rounds of police departments and newsrooms.
Sure there was gallows humor. When you are making $150 a week and aswirl in bodies, sometimes you just had to laugh when you saw the photograph. Sorry. But it’s true.
The Kathy Jane and Rodney stories touched us and I’ll tell you much more about them some other time.
Suffice it to say that for the most part, we worked around the clock to tell those stories, to cover the deaths and the get to know the families of the teen-age victims and the killers. Some of the finest police coverage ever by my dear friend, Rob “Death” Dollar, with the occasional assist by me and by our vigilant Baptist wordsmith, the near-legendary Frank “Wuhm” White, a successful businessman and downtown roof owner. Another story. Another night. For this is Christmas.
Long-time copy desk pal Jerry “Chuckles” Manley, a semi-portly boy with a reddish beard, edited the copy with expertise and with at least one keen eye while Virginia Slims smoke made the other eye run. His sidekick, “Flash” – a fresh-from-school news virgin – aged every time he helped copy-edit those stories and write a headline about a body found or a gleeful, boasting killer.
My boss Tony Durr – whom I still love and miss a couple of decades after he killed himself in a lonely Alaska Coast Guard barracks after washing out of journalism and a half-dozen marriages -- pranced around the newsroom, excited by the grisly coverage and his occasional assist and /or attempt at deflecting the slings and arrows of upper management .
Sure, great coverage of two murders that occurred at about the same time in the same Southern town. “Things like that aren’t supposed to happen here in Clarksville,” barked one police officer who enjoyed back-shooting dope-smugglers, pimps, throat-slicers, chicken thieves, father rapers and other everyday perpetrators and predators.
Sixteen-hour work days could be punctuated by cigarettes exploding in the newsroom. Yep, we booby-trapped the open packs on our desks with “loaded” cigarettes. There were those who never wanted to admit they smoked by buying their own. Wives would object if they openly indulged. So they bummed and as a result I loved watching them jerk around in their chairs, gasping when the smoke cleared, the frayed cigarette pursed between Lee Oswald lips.
Seems pretty juvenile, but then again, so does rubber vomit.
But this is a story about Christmas 1982 and the card. You remember the Christmas card, don’t you?
It actually seemed like a great idea, guaranteed to raise a smile, in the wake of all that had gone on in the news. And besides that, Rob and I were coming off the success of the movie we’d produced and directed, written, whatever the word might be, and even starred in ... along with “Flash” and “Chuckles” as co-stars and others who occasionally dropped in to take part. Half the town’s police force and firefighters and charitable organizations were involved to some extent. Even the mayor and the first American to circle the globe participated.
“Flapjacks: The Motion Picture” -- with its intricate plot revolving around news events, along with its slapstick and satire poking fun at journalism (we didn’t realize we were the last generation of practitioners of that profession at the time), law enforcement, pop culture and current events -- holds up to this day.
With all the pie-throwing, gun-slappping, confetti-flying, car-chasing and finger-flipping scenes, it also really is a portrait of my life at the time. I could have called it “Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine,” after the Doors album, because it came out of my head – and out of Rob’s – as we went along, coping with the disaster and death we’d been covering.
We’d meet for coffee at 7 a.m. on Saturdays with a “script” for the day’s shoot, film for a few hours, then wash the shaving cream from the tossed pies or the sideshow elephants turds off our sneakers, go to the newsroom with a couple fresh packs of smokes and put out prize-winning newspapers well into the night and next morning. I was associate editor, so the night shift, the result of our collective labors could easily be blamed on me. But I took great pride in the movie and, more so, in the great journalism the staff was committing, against all odds.
OK, you may be wondering what this all has to do with Christmas.
You see, "Flapjacks: The Motion Picture" played until dawn in an abandoned theater in the city and raised a few hundred bucks that went to a homeless agency, the fire department’s Christmas toy drive and the Police Department’s children and widows’ fund.
Even the newspaper hierarchy was pleased by the movie that came a month before Christmas ... some young staffers, after all, had done this on their own time, made headlines in Clarksville and in the corporation for raising money for charity ... and at the same time won journalism awards.
Of course, with all this holiday cheer floating around, Rob and I decided the best thing a group of guys can do is put together a Christmas card to thank our friends and to express our belief in peace on earth and goodwill to all mankind.
It in turn would reappear the following December on our planned News Brothers calendar, again a fund-raising proposition. More on that too another day, as I’m sure you are anxious to get out and shop for some children who really don’t care what you give them, as long as they get something. See the loaded cigarettes or rubber vomit section above for last-minute ideas.
When we weren’t immersed in the most heinous of murders, driven to drink (and sometimes getting a ride home) by the human carnage we’d witnessed, we got further involved in charity.
We wore our shades to give blood and to visit dying children. There even were plans under way for a News Brother Basketball Tournament, that we were going to host at one of the local high schools, again to raise money for charity.
There was nothing complex about the Christmas Card. We’d wear our News Brothers’ best – bits and pieces of the tuxedoes we’d worn in the days of the “Flapjacks” premiere.
Rob, Chuckles, Flash and I showed up in our finery. Our clerk, a pretty woman named Neesa, was good enough sport to show up to don the top half of a Santa costume and expose what were and likely still are damn nice legs.
Fresh from the photo shoot, Rob and I dashed to our favorite printer and ordered a few dozen postcard-sized copies of that picture, with the phrase “Have a Damn Nice Christmas” printed below the picture.
Delighted by the result, Rob, in his white top-hat and I in my yellow fedora immediately distributed these cards around town.
We started out in the old Royal York Hotel, a high-rise former swank joint that had degenerated into a flop for widows, widowers, lovable losers, liars and murderous drifters. Many of them were our closest friends. “I was so tough my spit would bounce,” one of my friends told me when I wished him a happy 83rd birthday. Again, another story.
We went up the elevator – it was one of those you drove yourself by pulling on a lever – and stopped at each floor, sliding a card beneath each door. “Gunsmoke” reruns blared from the TV sets in 90 percent of those rooms.
We then left a stack at the desk to be distributed in the lobby.
In the next hours, we wandered the streets of the city, handing them out, sliding them into the mail slots for county and city officials. It was sort of a Charlie Dickens scene we were creating in the cold, snowy Clarksville night.
We even saved one in case Chico the Monkey ever came back from the dead. I still have that one. Just in case. That too is another story and it actually took place later. I have told you about that tragedy before and likely will again, as Chico’s death haunts and delights me to this day.
Then, spreading Christmas cheer, we went to the newspaper complex, going from the press room to the advertising offices, to the camera room, to the job shop, sliding cards beneath doors and leaving them on desks.
The last one, and we didn’t hesitate, went beneath the office door of The Big Guy, our publisher.
“He’ll like this,” said Rob.
“Yeah,” I said. We didn’t really think he’d mind one way or another, as long as he could jangle the change in his pockets as loudly as possible.
Perhaps he was angry by the Chico coverage. Maybe it was my long interview with a drifter named W. Robert Cameron. I’d caught him while he was resting along a railroad siding, taking a breather from his mission of hitchhiking to Austria.
Maybe it was Rob’s steady stream of stories about death and destruction –”No more wreck stories” we were commanded after about the 24th traffic fatality involving a drunken soldier in six months. Not good for the Chamber image, I suppose, in hindsight. Especially at Christmastime.
“Tim, uhh, this is The Big Guy, uhhhh,” was the voice the next morning when I picked up the Flap phone, one of those blue plastic contraptions that I kept next to the Mr. Potato Head collection on my associate editor's desk. “Could you come down here and see me.”
I still didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t sound angry. Just self-important.
“Uhh, Tim, uhh, could you close the door and, uhh, sit down.” I noticed he was jangling his change harder and faster. I wondered if I should offer him a loaded cigarette.
He held up the card. “This is wrong,” he said, sounding like a sinister Walt Disney. “You do not put ‘Damn’ and ‘Christmas’ in the same sentence. You guys have gone too far. Do not give any more of these out.”
Once I explained that half the town had them, he stood up and walked across the room. He was jangling wildly. The rosewater scent of his hair spritz filled the tiny confines.
“Tim, uhh, you are a great newspaperman, uhh, but this is too much. Do you have any of them left?”
I nodded. “Sure. How many more do you want? And I can order more.”
He stood there, in silence, nodded to the door and then said “don’t do this again.”
I looked at him and smiled.
“What?” he said, in a benign bark.
“Big Guy, Have a Damn Nice Christmas.”
He shook his head. “You too,” he muttered. “You too.”
I ambled back upstairs to the newsroom, where Rob greeted me. He put on his top-hat, fired up a Kool and we went for coffee.
A dozen hours later, about five blocks from the newspaper, a house caught fire. A guy dressed like Santa Claus, apparently en route to a party, stopped.
By the time Rob and the Fire Department got there, a soot-covered Santa Claus, with a handicapped woman slung over his shoulders, walked from the fiery house.
He handed her over to the rescuers and anonymously disappeared into the night.
At first we didn't know the name of the Good Samaritan with the jiggling belly and the soot-covered white beard. Had he been the real Santa Claus? I’d like to say there were flying reindeer involved.
But after the story went viral, appearing on the front pages of newspapers all over the world, Santa stepped forward, visiting us at the newspaper office the next day.
It was Christmas Day, and we were wearing our tuxedoes, and the rescuer, David Rodriguez, was wearing his Santa suit. A high school choral teacher, he had been delivering toys to underprivileged children and came across the fire after taking a wrong turn on his Chrstmas rounds.
That wrong turn really led to what always will be something I regard as a wondrous Christmas miracle.


The follow-up, detailing Santa Rodriguez and his anonymous heroism was a great lead story on a holiday that should revolve around generosity, love and peace. As papers rolled off the press early the next morning, I carried one outside, onto Third Street, where a little snow was falling. Rob was standing out there, with our old friend, Skipper, the old carny and merchant marine who once served spaghetti to Al Capone. Rob had rousted him from his room at the old hotel. It was cold. Boy was it cold.
We shared nips of cheap brandy and wished each other a great holiday: “Have a Damn Nice Christmas.”
Skipper looked up as Tony, Jerry and Jim arrived. He handed them the bottle of cheap brandy.
Skipper, who wasn’t wearing his teeth, looked up to the sky and began singing “Silent Night” in his amazing Irish tenor.
With that beautiful voice echoing off the old buildings around us, I looked to Rob and the others and smiled. “God Bless us every one.”

Ron Santo's life centered on the promise of spring; his death sparks memories of Grandpa Champ, friends, war & shoe-store monkey

The kind third baseman’s death exposed raw pieces of my soul.
No. 10. Ron Santo. A picture in mind’s eye of vitality and happiness, a part of my youth, of my life and dreams, gone.

Ron Santo baseball card and the man working the corner for the most-lovable baseball team ever.

 
Perhaps it is not really a raw feeling, but simple melancholy that set in, a realization of how many years have gone and how many miles I still need to trek to find, even find out, what I’m looking for during this sometimes savage, other times honey-slathered journey.
All I can tell you is Ron Santo’s death Thursday, Dec. 2, sent me swirling in “Hey-Hey and Holy Mackerel” memories that included not just this great player and captain of the Chicago Cubs -- my life’s ball club -- but also had me thinking about the brightness of spring dreams, the renewal, when the waiting ‘til next year is done and fresh hope thrives. That’s the real truth behind baseball’s allure and life’s promise.

Ron Santo clicks his heels on the way to the locker room during the ill-fated 1969 Cubs' pursuit of glory that was stolen by those damned Mets.

But in addition to Ron Santo, I also thought of my first baseball hero, my Grandpa Champ, dead 36 years. He used to take me to see the Detroit Tigers play when I would visit his house at Walnut Lake in the summers. It was always a big deal. If the Yankees were in town, that made it just right. Grandpa was a big Tigers fan, knew Ty Cobb and the early guys from the days he would finish up his shift at the Nash plant and wander to Navin Field, later Briggs Stadium, when he was a young man.
He was by all accounts a great ballplayer back in Clayville, N.Y. Only his busted-up fingers kept him from pursuing a career in baseball rather than as a thresherman and later a factory line foreman. Ran for sheriff once too.
Grandpa Champ didn’t live in the past. He had a great appreciation for the players who delighted me as an 8 or 10-year- old. Stormin’ Norman Cash, Al Kaline, Jim Bunning (yes the politician with the click-heels demeanor was a fine pitcher), Dick McCauliffe, Phil Regan, Charlie Maxwell, Dick Wertz, Bill Freehan.
And when I met many of them at Howard A. Snope’s shoe store in Grand Rapids, Mich., where I lived for awhile as a grade -school kid, they all were good fellows. Howard A. Snope (I may have his name wrong, but he was a nice, bald guy and we got our school shoes there) was a part-time pool-hustler, with a table in the lower level of his store. He may have been a yo-yo champion as well. Can’t remember. Perhaps I’ve gotten the whole thing blended in the time machine that is my cluttered and concussed mind.
Snope, or maybe it was Swope?, also had a STORE MONKEY. Can’t remember the name, but I know it wasn’t Chico, a monkey I encountered later in life. That’s a whole different story, though.
When the Tigers came into the store to sign baseball cards and help the old pool shark or yo-yo hustler sell shoes, the monkey roamed freely. Everybody’s got something to hide, they say, but me, well I just let the monkey climb my shoulders. From that point on I always wanted a monkey … at least until the sad tale of Chico getting run to the ground and much worse by the dogs years later.
Anyway, Grandpa Champ first got me interested in baseball mainly because it was the soundtrack of summers at Walnut Lake, which then was intensely rural, where deer and wildcats roamed freely. He even convinced us one night there was a bear out there. Never saw one, though. Now that is an upscale suburb of Detroit. I doubt the little four-room house he and my Uncle Les built even exists any more. In reality, that is. In my mind, it is always there, especially on days like this, when I ponder what it means that Ron Santo has died.
Not all games were on television back in those Walnut Lake summers. So when they were just on the radio, that was the entertainment. We’d sit and listen to the Tigers. Van Patrick and later Ernie Harwell described the game, in detail. My imagination, as a youngster, embellished and thrived on the mental pictures of what was said. Meanwhile, we’d generally be playing poker.
I don’t play anymore. But back then, Grandpa Champ, who went out west at age 16 to work the threshing crews beginning in British Columbia and working as the wheat harvest moved Southeast, spent a lot of time teaching me and my brother, Eric, and cousins, Marc and Jeff, the tricks of the game.
And no, this wasn’t some soft chump of a Grandpa who would let his 6 and 8- year-old grandchildren win. He played for keeps. Matchsticks? He wanted them. Plastic chips? He raked them in. Got pennies, boys?
So on the occasion we did win a hand when we were listening to the Tigers it was a real victory, doubly so if Kaline made a spectacular play in the outfield or hammered the winner across. (Santo, by the way likely fueled young minds similarly during his two decades as the radio voice of the Cubs after his multi-generational career in the infield and as a pizza salesman.)
Of course when the Tigers games were on TV – usually the televised ones were day games – Grandpa watched them. Crippled by arthritis, he’d sit in his lounge chair, his pipe or cigar going, uttering the occasional “Gawd Gawd Gawd” at his team. Really angry by a bad relay, he’d punctuate it with a “damn.” Not too loud or Grandma would say “Oh, George!” while frying up his afternoon lunch of scrambled eggs, dosed with a blanket of black pepper, and a can of kippers on the side.
So you’re asking what this has to do with Ron Santo? Well those summers and the monkey in the shoe store were a part of the reason I fell, deeply and forever, in love with the Chicago Cubs.
When I was 11, we moved to Chicago. Among the first things we did for recreation was go to Wrigley Field as a family. Grandpa would go with us when he visited Chicago.
It also was a place of my liberation. As I got old enough to take the train into the city or bum a ride with a pal, the friendly confines became a place to escape with buddies, 13 or 14 or 15…. Easily old enough to buy an Old Style in the left field bleachers.

Ron Santo with his friend and teammate, the immortal Ernie Banks, drove the Cubs to near-glory and heartache in the summer of 1969. Two of the most lovable players in the history of the game.
 
Now, those bleachers are the place yuppies go to be seen -- or to cause the Cubs to lose their only chance at a pennant in the last several decades.
Back then, and we are talking the late mid-to-late-1960s, the bleacher bums were blue-collar souls, working stiffs who had the night shift. Daytime was the only time they played ball in the beautiful confines before the bastards who govern Korporate Amerika succumbed to the TV schedulers and insisted lights be put in at Wrigley.
I may be oversimplifying, as is my right as a human being, but basically the Cubs had to put lights in if they were going to have home games in the World Series, which had begun being played at night because of network TV revenue. Otherwise, they'd have to play World Series Games away from the field built by chewing gum's success. Gasp... even perhaps at Comiskey?
(Hey, who else remembers taking the transistor radio to class in elementary school and listening to the World Series when all baseball was played --- as it should be – beneath the sun? Listened to the astronauts take off and land also.)
Anyway, I never understood why the Cubs succumbed to that blackmail and installed lights at Wrigley. It wasn’t like they ever were going to be in a World Series, anyway.
I am one of those fans who have cheered for them for five decades. They are my team. I don’t get to see a whole lot of their games. But they are in my heart and in my soul or however that Rod Stewart song goes.
But this is supposed to be about the now-dead Ron Santo.
And the summer of 1969.
That was the year that the Cubs were destined to win the pennant, rolling through the season.
Jack Brickhouse, the announcer for WGN at the time – he later became a friend – would sing “Hey-Hey and Holy Mackerel, no doubt about it, the Cubs are on their way” on the radio and television after the Cubs dropped the Dodgers or the Giants. Unfortunately they didn’t beat the Mets often enough. More details on that later.
I got to know Jack a little bit because I would go up on the ramp to his press box to meet him when I was a kid. Later, I befriended “Clarksville’s Marilyn Monroe,” a large and wonderful spinster named Mary Harris, who ran the almost males-only club known as the tobacco board back when that was the king crop. Miss Mary was always there for me when I needed fresh tomatoes or a cuss-filled dose of Clarksville history.
She was an old woman by the time we met. And her cousin used to come to Clarksville, Tenn., to spend summers with her when he was growing up. His name: Jack Brickhouse.
Miss Mary cut my columns about Clarksville from the local newspaper, The Leaf-Chronicle (named for the aforementioned tobacco leaf) and sent them to Jack. He’d write me notes or even call me. “Any friend of Mary’s is a friend of mine,” he’d say.
“Hey-Hey!” I’d say, with a laugh.
Both of them are long dead. I know later-comers to the Cubs worship Harry Caray. And that’s fine. But to me, I knew Jack Brickhouse and Harry – while quite an entertainer – was no Jack Brickhouse. Course Harry’s got the bronze statue.
There were days in the 1960s’ bleachers when I would cheer my Cubs and curse at Pete Rose, who loved every second of it, even the beer showers presented by anonymous donors. Of course, the Old Style was just so much mist by the time it reached the ball field beneath the ivy.
As those as old as me know, every time someone with a blue hat and pinstripes pumped one over the fence Jack hollered “Hey-Hey!”… or “Holly Mackerel.” (Harry added “Holy Cow” to the North Side vernacular later.)
During the 1969 season, at the games’ ends, Jack’s recorded song “Hey-Hey and Holy Mackerel, no doubt about it, the Cubs are on their way…” pumped through the speaker system as the boys took their bows and ran to the clubhouse, beneath the left field bleachers.
Ronnie Santo, their captain, would jump up and click his heels all the way to the lockers.
Ernie Banks would laugh and cheer his teammates. If they’d played two that day, he’d say “Let’s play three.” I love Ernie Banks, too.
Fergie Jenkins, Randy Hundley, Billy Williams.
My friend, Jimmy Hart – I wonder what happened to him? – and I would finish our jobs at the park district and head down there as frequently as possible. Catch the tail end of a double header or go spend Saturday and Sunday there. We’d go in my 1965 Falcon or on the train.
Jimmy once stepped on my prized aviator’s sunglasses – they were in our cooler box – which really bothered me, as everyone knows how much I like my shades.
Yes, you could sneak a cooler into the games then. It’s not like now when all sports are controlled by the fellows with the screw the public rules and mentality of their hero, war profiteer and Korporate cheerleader Shotgun Dick.
It was a sport in which Golden Glovers made 50 grand. You could watch them smoking cigarettes in the dugout, perhaps tossing ‘em in the dirt by the on-deck circle. If they struck out, it might be worth picking the smoke up and finishing. After all they still were suffering the hangover from the night before.
Jimmy Hart broke my sunglasses on Billy Williams Day, a great occasion for a great man. It was standing room only, and Jack stopped by to chat with us during the seventh inning.
But this is supposed to be a story about Ron Santo.
You see, if Ernie Banks was the soul of the Cubs – and he earned that with his glove, his bat and his spirit – then Ron was the heart.
On either end of the infield, these were the team’s giants. Not those Giants. Lowercase giants. Uppercase HUMAN BEINGS.
Anyway, I got to know these boys, my boys of summer, a little back then. It was before the days of high security and Arab terrorists and American wackos with fertilizer and hate. There were no security guards with Tommy Guns, Tazers and Poisonous Snakes by the player’s entrance and exit outside the stadium. Perhaps a single beat cop with a checkered headband, but that’s about it. And he’d be as eager for fun as anyone else.
Get there early enough; a kid like me could talk to Fergie Jenkins, Billy Williams. Ernie would pass by and say “it’s a beautiful day for a ballgame. Let’s play two.”
Here comes Don Kessinger or “Hello Mr. Hickman.”
Likewise Ron Santo would stop and talk to the middle-class American dreamers who still had their lives ahead of them.
Of course we know what happens in this story.
The Cubs did not win the pennant.
The Mets – you know with Tim McGraw’s pop (who I met a couple of times and liked) hollering “You Gotta Believe” – came from deep in the race and ran the Cubs into the ground in September. Damn Art Shamsky, Cleon Jones, Tommie Agee….
Anyway, I was only 17. I graduated in 1969 from Deerfield High and I had gone to Iowa State by the time the horrid end to the season came. I sat and watched, when I could, the games in the dorm recreation room. Or I listened to them. I watched the Cubs swoon.
Those were the least of my real concerns, of course. I was out on my own. I was among new people, no friends came with me, living in a new place. I was worried about the draft and the war in Vietnam. I was meeting Black Muslims and Panthers. I learned that Jimmy Hart had gotten married and was quickly to become a father back in Chicago.
But when the season was over, there was no back-biting among the Cubs. Ron Santo and Ernie Banks still smiled.
They said that phrase which has been uttered every season since: “Wait ‘Til Next year.”
In the years since then, of course, baseball has remained a poetic passion for me, although the rules guys need to cut down on the length. Nine innings needn’t go four hours.
Although I like the violence of football as well, partly because at a time in my life I became very good at dishing out that violence before it began to disgust me.
And as the Cubs were swooning in 1969 I was deep in the pursuit of life, which sometimes led me into strange corners from which I’d escape as I pursued my tomorrows.
I can’t remember if that was the year I went backstage with the Vanilla Fudge. That may have been 1970. That was another big turning point for me.
That year, 1969, remains stitched on my yellowed Deerfield High School letter sweater. Was looking at it the other day thinking I need to throw it away. Haven’t yet, though probably will. Still got my letter jacket, too.
Anyway, all of these thoughts and recollections came flooding when I heard Ron Santo had died.
I thought of my Grandpa. I thought of my cousins. I remembered the monkey in the shoe store.
I thought of my old pal, Jocko. He was a Chicago White Sox fan, but he drank warm beer with me – 69 cents a six for Van Merritt out in Iowa in 1969 – and consoled me. Or at least helped me laugh about it before we headed over to Tork’s Pub to initiate what we later would christen “Rolling,” as good a team sport as any young man could want.
That’s another long story and perhaps I’ll tell it soon. But When Ron Santo’s death was reported, I thought about Jocko, who recently lost his ex-wife to cancer. I was their best man. They still loved each other. I’ve been thinking and writing about death a lot lately, it seems. And so often cancer plays a role. “Gawd” damn cancer.
My friend and marathon running buddy, Tom Carpenter, a world-renowned dog and cat doc in SoCal, reminded me that Jocko once played against Ron Santo in a charity basketball game. Jocko was virtually chased from the game for being too rough with the captain.
(Tom … or “Carpy” as I still call him … I believe is the guy who talked Bob Barker into ending broadcasts with his plea to “have your pets spayed or neutered.”)
Lucky Billy Williams didn’t use one of his bats to tee off on Jocko’s sweaty, bald skull on that day. He did like them high and inside, after all.
There were plenty of laughs, still are, as I sit here writing this.
In 1969, there still was the endless highway of life ahead for me. So I could console myself that the Cubs would be back, that I would be able to cheer them on for decades as they continued to be winners.
But the promise was short-lived. The following year, I was in the draft lottery. I pulled a high number, but some of my friends went. Some of them died. I protested and cried.
There were so many things that were going to happen by this time in my life, by that I mean by today.
I mean, don’t trust anyone over 30 turned to don’t trust anyone over 80….
I’m 59 now. I was 42 years younger back when Ron was clicking his heels.
Those years have been good, for the most part. Bad and ugly at other times.
But that’s life.
Still, when I learned that Ron Santo had died, I knew I wasn’t quite where I was figuring I’d be by this point in my life. My late friend John Lennon sang “life is what happens while you’re busy making plans” or something like that.
He was right, of course. He didn’t plan to be gunned down 30 years ago this coming Wednesday. That may be the subject of another story, another day.
But this is about the Pizza Man, Ron Santo, No. 10, the third-baseman who embodied what the Cubs were all about.
Back when he was playing, I just knew that by now my novels would be published and I’d be a natonally recognized newspaper columnist. Some of that happened earlier than reckoned. Some of it has not happened, thanks to the economy, Shotgun Dick, the times, the death of legitimate newspapers, whoever and whatever you want to blame.
But if there’s one thing Ron Santo and his pal Ernie Banks taught me, it was patience.
Wait ‘Til Next Year.

I read the news today, o boy: surveying the Fourth Estate so it can be auctioned off at a bankruptcy sale & God save the Queen

It was one of those perfect autumn days, where the sweat trickled slightly beneath my Paul McCartney conquers Nashville T-shirt and there was a skip in my step. Or was that a stumble?
Doesn’t matter. At 59, at least I’m glad I’m not drooling. Hold it, let me wipe my lip.
So, I was in a good mood, which is probably my excuse. You see I didn’t tell all the aspiring journalists that the news business, a calling for me, is dead.
Oh, I know it will continue to function in some manner and I’m glad to share my wisdom now before being relegated to “relic” status.
Well, truth-be-told, Korporate Journalism already bestowed me that honor. I wouldn’t back down from my own nicotine-stained newsroom ethics. Seems they didn’t translate well in the age of “information centers,” where back-stabbers play king of the mountain till they are heaved onto the rag pile.
On this happy day, though, I’d been talking with some aspiring journalists about the tools of the trade: how to interview, how to interact, how to get good quotes, how to spell names correctly, how to always tell the truth, how to provide the most-important information to the public.
These are not necessarily things deemed important these days, but perhaps this younger generation will find a way to incorporate these basic tools into the age when the latest news will flash on the back end of the person walking in front of you, or however it will end up working.
I suppose it’s sad, for a guy who is striving to feed his family and the like, that I am so passionate about this truth and accuracy thing. That coupled with belief that journalists are serving the public … I’m not just a relic: I’m a dinosaur.
Surely, the journalists know what is important to the readers, the American Public, citizens of what I like to call – at least during my happy days – The Greatest Nation On Earth That Still Does Not Believe Health Care and Education are Rights. Yes, there are major flaws here.
Oh, I’m a proud U.S. citizen. My grandparents came through Ellis, and disappeared with Vito and the rest into Little Italy before eventually moving to Buffalo where Grandpa Ghianni worked on the railroad, all the livelong day.
And I firmly believe in the Fourth Estate, that the news organizations present the important material, educating and enlightening the public. However, I’ve been told that the Fourth Estate was sold at auction by bean-counters, trend-spotters and the leeches that run American business, industry, the government and the War Machine. Speaking of which, one day, back when I was a student at Iowa State university, some great philosopher once told me: ”I don’t need your war machines I don’t need your ghetto scenes ….”
OK, colored lights may hypnotize, but you know when I was speaking to the young people I found them both encouraged and encouraging. They were attentive and delightful. They wanted to know the little tricks. They wanted to talk about stories. I can’t remember when I was their age. I mean, I really can’t. Perhaps it is because of that concussion from the T-boner last July 4. Perhaps it was that night backstage with Vanilla Fudge back in 1970. More likely it is age.
Anyway, the day was good and fruitful. And, as is my habit when I get home from anywhere, I first look at the local newspaper web site and then at the television station web sites, scoping out the news, trying to glean just what is important, like, for example is it time to finally build one of those tornado and bomb shelters in the garage floor?
That’s the big commercial these days on the news. Meteorologists can’t yet frighten us with the blizzards – I think my old comrades Jocko and Capt. Kirk are breaking out the sled dogs up in Iowa as I write this – but down here in Nashville, it’s still tornado season.
Oh yeah, it’s also flood season here. Always is, especially when the Corps of Engineers closes up shop and refuses to answer the phone during the height of the 500-year flood. Thanks for your diligence guys. Maybe you should go over and help North Korea with its infrastructure problems. Hey, there’s another reason to build one of those sub-garage-floor bomb and tornado shelters… Thanks Commander Sick or whatever your name is, you crazy bastard.
By the way, when you watch those tornado and bomb shelter commercials, do you wonder the same thing I wonder: These little shelters are dug into the garage floor, beneath where you park your car. Unless you always park outside, that means the first thing you have to do when North Korean artillery starts shelling the suburbs or a tornado spins down the street is unlock those garage door – warped from that aforementioned floodwater -- and back the 1985 Saab out into the driveway while two-by-fours, bricks and bicycle and body parts zip past your head?
Back to the news. There was nothing really new on the sites, so I climbed from my little Fortress of Solitude, Da Office, The Flap Cave, Champo’s HQ to the living room and turned on the television.
Time to watch Brian Williams or (name your favorite anchor here, but remember Walter Cronkite is Dead and Dan Rather is still asking Kenneth about the frequency.)
But I really don’t watch just one channel. I am a clicker fellow, beginning with the local news and running through the national and back into the local. (I have my local news favorites and they know who they are… in case they want to offer me work. )
Anyway, on both local and national news on that otherwise balmy day, I found out that a Tea Party princess was going to be competing for the championship “silver chalice” or whatever it’s called, on Dancing With the Stars. I’m not against that show, because I’ve never watched it. For all I know it is highbrow entertainment.
So this was the big news of that day, the stuff that would enlighten me. They were talking about Bristol Palin. I mean isn’t it enough that we have to put up with the constant stream of books her mom writes? Or actually, perhaps, hires people to write. (Dear Sarah: I’m apparently desperate. I think your politics are vile. But, well, how about, you know, hiring me to ghost-write the next tome, about how you are going to be president of the Greatest Country on Earth that During Your Administration Will Ban Health Care and Public Education?)
Already told my pal, The Big O, to start slipping some of the butter knives into his luggage each time he flies back to Chitown.
Course Sarah won’t miss the butter knives. She only uses them to gut polar bears and rally her following of semi-comatose old men, members of the Greatest Generation, her supporters, now known as “the Gang that Can’t Think Straight.”
Back to the news today, o boy, about a lucky man who made the grade...
Nah. That’s the wrong story.
The news outlets did mention that there were some GIs killed in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, this is happening so often now that it’s just “filler copy.” You know, these guys are dead, with photos. No mention of the hopes and dreams that died fighting to save the warlords and their poppy fields from the maniac who serves as president. My friend the Big O told me that “Karzai” means “Crazy” in the strange language they speak over there, English that is learned in England and translated in a boiler room in Bangladesh.
Speaking of England: Do you really care to have a daily update on the pending nuptials of the prince and his shack honey? I mean they seem like nice kids and they will do well. But, I don’t really care. (Prince Bill: Send me an invitation. I think you need to have me work for you and make sure the story is told without any sort of self-serving liberal slant.)
Love grandma, by the way. As John, Paul, George and Ringo once told me: “Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl but she doesn’t have a lot to say.”
She should work in the news business.