woody park

Things have changed a lot since I was a kid.  A Coke and a Whistle Orange drink (if they even still make the stuff) cost more than a dime.  A pack of baseball cards doesn’t cost a nickel anymore.  A much smaller percentage of the population is walking around with a smoldering cylinder of paper filled with tobacco leaves in their mouths. 

And, I would like to believe that a lot of attitudes have changed.  Realities change, but people hold on to old habits and old attitudes.  They die hard, sometimes.  Sometimes, though, we just look up and they are gone.  One day we all saw Hugh Hefner wearing a Nehru jacket and we all wanted one.  Fortunately the trend died before I scraped together enough cash to buy one and the style died quickly and uneventfully.

I noticed the other day that a gun associated with a famous trial has gone up for auction and it appears that people have an interest in owning it.  While I would like to think that there are those out there who have an interest in it for historic reasons, I somehow don’t think this thing fits into the same category of Whig campaign buttons and memorabilia. 

One time I bought a fixer-upper in Lawrence, Kansas, that needed some serious rehabilitating and some rewiring.  My father was good at the former and expert at the latter, and he spent some time helping me get the electrical system safe for habitation.  One warm spring Sunday—very much like today—we were working on the house.  He came in from outside and asked me whether I knew that I had black people living in my neighborhood.  I said I did.  Then he asked me if I knew there were a hundred black people a half block down the street at a park called Woody Park.  I said I had seen them.  He asked me why I had bought a house in a neighborhood with black people.

I told him that it didn’t make any difference to me.

Dad had grown up in a time where attitudes were different and he had been born in the South.  He had a prejudice that I didn’t.  I went back to work and he went back outside. 

Later, I had a circuit completed and, although I had a good idea what I was doing—after all, he had taught me wiring—I started looking for him to check my work.  When I couldn’t find him anywhere I asked if anyone knew where he was.

“He’s down the street at the park with a bunch of black people,” I was told.

A half-hour or so later, he wandered back into the house. 

“Where have you been?” I asked.

“I recognized Woody,” he said.  Black guy I work with.  Helluva nice guy.  We drank a couple and shot the shit.  Nice bunch of folks.”

We didn’t say any more about it.  Dad just took his home-made tester—a couple of insulated 12 gauge wires from a piece of heavy gauge Romex stripped one inch on one end and connected to a Bakelite screw-in socket on the other with a 220 volt incandescent bulb in it— poked the bare ends into a duplex receptacle and checked my work.  The bulb lit at half-brightness, indicating 110 volts alternating current, so we were good.

There was no more mention of my choice of neighborhood.  It was okay from then on.  I don’t think he ever questioned the location of my house again.

And someday, there will be no one alive with any idea of what a Nehru jacket is or anyone who would have any interest in owning that gun.

the "pooch"

Yesterday I told you of another of my time travels—one of the journeys I have taken into the past.  Okay, it was a journey I took in the present and didn’t cross any time/space continua.  It was another trip to 44^th Street.  While I was driving up and down 44^th Street, I remember seeing the garage door of a neighborhood house partially open and partly ajar.  It was obvious the door was broken and didn’t work.  I would not open or close because the lower two panels were broken loose from the rest of the door and just hanging there.  I could see into the garage and there was no car there.

But, once upon a time, there was.  And, that is where my story about the pooch begins.

We had a couple of neighbors within a block of our house on 44^th Street who worked at the same place my father did.  One of them was in the large, fancy house at the end of the block, next to the school yard.  He was one of the “big wheels” as my father would say.  The other guy lived almost across the street from the bosses house, but his house was more modest, and, just coincidentally, it was the one whose garage door was both a door and ajar.

If my memory is good (and that is currently at question) the guy who lived in that house was named John, and he was just a few years older than me, but he and my father knew each other really well.  Dad told me that there was a “Pooch” in John’s garage.  I made a quip that I didn’t know John was a dog fancier and why would he keep a dog in his garage?

That kind of angered the old man and he raised his voice a bit and said something like:

“It’s not a dog you dumb ass.  It’s a car!”

Even back then, in addition to being a bit of a smart aleck, I was pretty sophisticated and had already reasoned that there was a Porsche behind that properly-functioning-at-the-time garage door.  Dad and I walked up to see it and it was an un-restored Porsche 356A in somewhat rough condition.  I believe John said he had plans to fix it up when he had the money.

When I drove past that broken garage door the day before yesterday, I probably would not have thought anything about it, had it not been for something I saw on CNBC last week.  They were at an automobile auction, which was to be one of the largest in the United States this year and they showed a Ferrari or some exotic sports car in mint condition that was to bring a price in the multi-millions of dollars.  Next to it was a 1950s vintage Porsche 356A, un-restored and in rough condition.  Robert Frank, who was the guy doing the report said that it was expected—despite its rust and deteriorated seat cushions—to bring $300,000 at auction.

Like Aesop, I need to end this story with some sort of moral, so here it goes.  On the way back down 44^th Street the night Dad and I looked at the 356A, my father made a comment about how John would sink money into the rust bucket and not have anything to show for it.  And, maybe that would be true.  However, if he had the foresight to keep it un-restored for 45 years, it may have been worth something. 

My dad was a wise man, but it is not always easy to predict what the future will bring.  As a matter of fact, I think I may have agreed with him that night.  I am going to be offering some advice tonight and I think I may keep this story in mind when I do it.  When I am asked to predict the future tonight, I will be able to say one thing with certainty:  you just never know.

escape from the old neighborhood

Yesterday I drove back into a neighborhood where I used to live to look at a house I saw for sale and the neighborhood where it is located.  It was more of an experience than I planned on.

First, the house was pretty solid and well built, but it is 75 years old and shows some wear.  I liked the house because it was dirt cheap and the pictures of the house shows it has two marble bathrooms and the interior walls are all covered with hardwood planks and not drywall.  The exterior is stone and it was, at one time, probably something special.  I am guessing someone with money lived there.

The house was two blocks from where my maternal grandmother and step-grandfather lived when I was a teenager, so I had some familiarity with the area.  I am guessing, though, by the events that occurred, I will not be calling the realtor for a showing.

Just before I got there, I saw a half-dozen police cars with sirens blaring and at high speed pass by a block from the house.  I later learned that there had been a double homicide about six blocks away from the house five minutes before I got there.  I continued to hear sirens as I circumnavigated the neighborhood and got a look at the exterior of the house and yard.  When I left the neighborhood, I saw half a dozen more police cars-- sirens on and speeding toward north and east.

I was only a couple of miles from where the North Forty-Fourth Street Sidewalk Surfing Association used to ply their craft.  Since I was a former member and a resident of 44th Street, I figured I would drive by the old homestead.

Forty-forth street has fallen into disrepair, but the trees along the side of the street have matured creating a park-like atmosphere, but some of the houses show signs of being anything but park-like. Our old house is there but it is forty years distant from me.

When I left the area, I had to wait for a light at 47th and Parallel and a couple of gentlemen who were also waiting for the light decided to call each other out and got out of their cars and started fighting. Some young man, who apparently knew one of them jumped into the melee and started swinging and knocked one of the guys to the ground.  Then the kid jumped into his car and left.  It was other-worldly.

As I drove home, I saw a car beside the road that had obviously went off the road and been demolished with a fire truck attending to it.  Another mile down the road, two more cars had collided and there was a tow truck gathering them up.

Two deaths; one melee and two wrecks later I was heading west and back home, away from the old neighborhood and toward the current one.  I guess the current neighborhood is where I will choose to stay.

But tomorrow I will tell you more about 44th street and the "Pooch."

andy pafko

My memory is not good, but I can remember when Andy Pafko died.  Well, it was just this week, so I can remember even with memory loss.  I don’t remember Pafko as a player.  He came up in 1943 and retired in 1959.  I would have been nine when he retired and probably have been collecting baseball cards, so I may have had one of his cards.  I don’t remember.

What I do remember, though, is that he was number one in the 1952 Topps series of baseball cards.  I would have been one year old when that card came out and was probably not chewing gum, yet, so I probably didn’t have one.  I know he was number one because my son collected some 1952 Topps cards when he was young and he and I did research on them.  The Pafko card, in good condition, is valuable because I read that kids that collected the 1952 series usually sorted them by card number and put a rubber band around their stack of cards.  Therefore, the edges of the Pafko cards were worn down by the rubber bands coming on and off and many of them fell into poor condition.

I recently wrote about a trip I took back to Alden Street, where I grew up, and I remember I had a corrugated box from the grocery store that was full of baseball cards when I lived there.  I think I used rubber bands, so I probably messed up some of my cards, but I don’t remember stacking them in numeric order.  I think I sorted them by year of issue and team.

It was popular, back on Alden Street in the 1950s, to trade duplicates of cards to other kids and I remember I was always the youngest kid on the block.  I remember going across the street and sitting on the front porch trading cards with some of the big kids.  I specifically remember one day they asked me to go home and get something and just leave my box of cards.  They said they would watch them for me.  When I came back I remember seeing a bunch of Ford Frick cards in my box that weren’t there before I left.  Frick was the Commissioner of Baseball.  I protested but the older kids told me I was wrong—that those Frick cards were in my box and I just didn’t remember. 

Back on Alden Street none of us had much money and I think that sometimes morality can be equated with poverty.  I think the prevailing morality was that no one was going to steal a card from anyone else, but there would be nothing wrong with trading, say, a Ford Frick for an Elston Howard or Mickey Mantle, if the young kid didn’t know better.

It was survival of the fittest and I was not yet fit.  Although the transactional difference at the time amounted to pennies, the actual cost may have been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars at today’s prices for some of those cards.

We were poor but I had a 20” Huffy bicycle.  I probably had a dime in a good week of discretionary funds and probably spent most of it on candy and baseball cards, but I would take clothespins and baseball cards and make the spokes of the Huffy sound like a motorcycle.  In retrospect, I probably went on a number of $25,000 joyrides, based on today’s prices for those cards.

The most grievous throwing away of money was exactly that—throwing money in the trash.  One of my chores on Alden Street was to take out the trash every night, put it into an old steel 55-gallon barrel and burn it.  When we moved from Alden Street, we had a lot of things that we decided to burn rather than move.  I distinctly remember taking my box of baseball cards and flipping them one-by-one into the fire in the barrel.  After all, I was fourteen years old and too old to play with baseball cards.  If you have the mint condition Andy Pafko card that sold for eighty-some thousand dollars or a Mickey Mantle rookie card that may have eluded the spokes of my bike, I may have helped make you money that day.  If all of us had saved our cards, they would be less rare and less valuable.

No, you don’t need to thank me.  I think there were a number of us who discarded our cards and made the ones that escaped the spokes or the fire that much more valuable.

almost, but not quite, crazy enough

It is starting to play over and over again, like a broken record.

Okay, most of you have probably never had a turntable and spent much time listening to vinyl records whose primary flaw was that a scratch or a bit of dirt caused the styli to skip and repeat the same passage time and time again.  The particular thing I am starting to feel we are hearing over and over again is that someone took a gun, went into his workplace and killed a number of people for no good reason.

We are now starting to hear of the background of the shooter and the picture coming into focus is of a guy with a series of warning signs that weren’t quite alarming enough for someone to prevent this from happening.

He was arrested three times but not convicted of anything, so he had no criminal record.  I can understand that part:  innocent until proven guilty.

The one that concerns me, though, is that he told police that he was hearing voices and that he thought someone was using a microwave machine on him.  He also told police that he had no history of mental illness.  I have a theory about people who are hearing voices in their heads and my theory is that they are crazy.

The one plus I see in this whole thing is that he tried to buy an assault rifle and was not able to because of a waiting period for a background check.  However, he was able to buy a riot gun, instead.  Although he was able to slaughter enough people with the riot gun and another gun he was able to take away from a guard at the crime scene, I can imagine how much more carnage this loony would have been able to produce with an AR-15.  Chalk up at least a small victory for gun control laws.

How many more times will maniac go into a school, a commercial place of business or a workplace and open fire?  This is not a rhetorical question.  I am going to answer.  It is going to happen again, and again.  Unfortunately this time some people knew in advance that the dude was crazy, but, apparently just not crazy enough for anyone to detain him.

The interesting thing about the particular workplace where this happened is that there were armed security people on site, but even that was not enough to prevent the killing.

Wayne LaPierre of the NRA says that the answer to school shootings is to put armed guards at all schools and arm the teachers.  I am thinking that the incident in Washington, DC shows that armed guards are not necessarily the solution. 

To me, armed guards and arming teachers sounds crazy.

Apparently, to some, it must not sound crazy enough.

err on the side of being right

There is one thing nagging at me in this whole Syria situation and that is that we need to see the conclusive evidence that Assad delivered the poison gas.  While he sounds to me like the kind of low-life that would do something like this, the fact that we warned him not to step across that line and he did, anyway, makes me wonder why he didn’t commit suicide in some way where he had more control.  When we warned him not to do it, he had to know that it was not an empty threat.  He seems to be more than able to slaughter his people with conventional weapons, so why did he use the gas?

The assumption that al Qaeda has a role in the Syrian opposition makes me wonder if they had something to do with this.  For example, did they have a way to deliver gas to an area the Syrian government was shelling to make it look like Assad did it?  After all, don’t the al Qaeda guys have a reputation for putting innocent civilians in harm’s way to try to give themselves a tactical advantage?  How do we know they wouldn’t try something like this?

I am pretty sure the President would not jump in with both feet if he was not pretty sure his feet were going to land on the side of being right, but I just have a bad feeling that something just doesn’t add up.  Perhaps it is because there was that thing in Iraq a few years back where Saddam had the weapons of mass destruction and our president at the time was cocksure that he had to act, and, well, you know the rest of the story.

This morning the Red Chinese were using that same argument and when I heard them saying it I figured I had to be wrong, but after weighing it all, I would like to have all of the facts.

If we have the evidence, then let’s throw the Tomahawks at them and then pass that evidence to the Russians afterward, but let’s make sure we have the evidence before we light them up.  Let’s not get dragged into something unless we have clarity.

11,346,595 people like mitt romney

I signed up for a Facebook account this week so I could monitor my granddaughter's daily doings.  Facebook gives me daily suggestions of who I might like.  Today one was Willard Romney.

11,346,595 people like him, which is currently 11,346,592 more than like me.

Needless to say I did not-- and do not-- like him.

I just had to get that off my chest.

turn on the WABAC machine, sherman. OK there I said it after all

Last week, before I time travelled, I went online and did some research.  As I examined my life, I knew it was necessary to go back to where I came from.  Up to now, life has been anticipation:  looking forward to what was going to happen; working toward a future.  Now, life is beginning to be a reflection, looking back at what was and trying to make some sense of it.  Oh, I still anticipate a future.  I have not stopped in the present with no plans for what will be, but where I came from and what I did now seems almost as important as where I am going.

A few years ago I went back to Alden Street and viewed the lot where the first house I lived in used to be, so I already knew the house was no longer there.  However, it was not just the place where I slept and ate, it was the neighborhood where I lived to which I needed to return.  In addition to the cradle where my infant architectural history was nurtured, I needed to wander among the other structures and places where I walked as a lad.

Because I had a couple of paper routes in the general neighborhood, I knew that the big houses across the street were where the rich lived at the time—an area called Parkwood—and I did some research.  What I found piqued my curiosity so I had reason to fire up the WABAC.

Parkwood was not a departure from other upscale areas of Kansas City, with winding streets that didn’t form the normal grids with streets at ninety-degree angles that I was used to.  Parkwood had streets that formed sweeping wyes with semi-triangular islands with flowers and bushes.  This was nothing out of the ordinary for me.  I had seen Westheight in Kansas City, Kansas; Mission Hills and the Country Club Plaza, so I figured this is just how all the upscale areas were built.  However, my research led me to Sid J. Hare.  Sid and his son S, Herbert Hare formed Hare and Hare, a landscape architecture company.  Parkwood was Hare’s first project of note.  Later Hare and Hare laid out Westheight.  J.C. Nichols saw Parkwood and Westheight and hired Hare and Hare to do a shopping area for him—the Country Club Plaza.  Many years later Hare did Mission Woods among a plethora of other things, including the University of Kansas, Wyandotte High School, Loose Park, the Truman Library, ad infinidum.  I have been to most of them and I see the similarities.

So, I set the dials on the WABAC machine and I travelled back to the day.

Parkwood had fallen into disrepair and become a bad area of town fifty years ago or more so I was expecting a ghetto.  I was surprised to see a number of the houses well maintained with yards trimmed and landscaping clipped.  The islands were all weeded and flowers were in bloom.  There were some houses in disrepair with elderly cars parked by them but I was surprised by the condition of the area.  There were four upscale-looking guys on the tennis court playing doubles and there were no cars around so I am assuming the walked there.  So far, so good.

I drove back down Quindaro Boulevard and was surprised to find a couple of blocks of new houses, some under construction, and drove west to 17^th Street and went south toward Alden.  For some reason, many of the streets in the old neighborhood are one way, so I had to drive around for a while before I could get myself where I could drive north down Alden.  I parked in front of the vacant lot that used to be the old homestead and took some photos.

A neighbor come out of her house and asked me if I was the guy who was going to cut down the tree.  I told her I was not a tree trimmer and explained that I used to live there fifty years ago and was taking photos of where I used to live.  She came out and talked to me for a while and I told her about where my old house was and the garage.  Her house, sitting next door to where I used to live was two years old.  There were three new houses on the block that were not there last time I visited.  I told her I was going to walk around the lot if she didn’t mind and she told me to be careful.  I’m not sure of what I should be careful, but she probably figured I was a doddering elderly person who might fall and not be able to get up.

Anyway, the yard that seemed so large when I was a child, seemed miniscule to my elderly eyes.  I walked to the middle of the back yard, where second base had been in our waffle ball games and looked toward where the outfield fence had been and then home plate.  I remembered it took a mighty swing to put that waffle ball over the fence when I was a kid, but now I could almost spit from second base and hit the outfield wall or home plate.  And, I have worked on construction sites where there were gentlemen who could put some serious distance between their lips and their spittle, their mucus or their sputum, and I was not a guy who could match their distance, or even spit very far.

I took some pictures of what was now so I could have the record to compare in my mind to what used to be.  Few landmarks were the same.  None of the yard was recognizable.  There was a large walnut tree where the house had been.  My knowledge of trees was that walnuts take a long time to grow, so the house must have been razed many years ago.  I was hoping, much like Ponce de Leon that I had found the wellspring of my youth, but though I stood among the ghosts of the past, I was still old.  I guess the problem was that nothing was the same.  Even the lay of the land was different.  The side yard, which used to be a serious enough slope we could use it for sledding in winter snows, had been dozed to a lazy grade.   The front door of the house was on the main floor and the back door in the basement opened to a level just below the level of the back yard.  Now the grade was more uniform.  The landmarks of my youth were gone and things were so changed that it was hard to determine the exact place they used to be.  After all, it has been fifty years since I walked these grounds.  A half a century can erase some memories.

I guess I wanted some moment of epiphany—some recollection that brought me back to a time when a young boy ran the width and breadth of this property.  It didn’t happen.  In one regard it was good to be back but it was almost like coming home to a place I had never been.  There were some good times I had in this house and in this yard, but there was no house and the yard, for all I know, might have been six feet below me, forever covered by the bulldozer’s blade.

It was melancholy to be home but just as good to be going.  It was home no more and the WABAC had other destinations to which it would take me.  It was time to travel again and I will detail those further adventures later.

a year in and what i know

Unexamined life is not worth living.  Socrates said that.  Okay, Plato said that but he was just repeating what Socrates said.  I am a year into this retirement thing and what I know is what I know, and what I know is that retirement has given me the chance to examine life.  My examination has led me to the conclusion that I have missed a lot during my lifetime because I was busy working.  I think I prioritized things in approximately the right order, but I think I put too much emphasis on and, consequently, too much thinking time devoted to my various jobs. 

In one regard, my career gave me the opportunity to have a meager amount of money saved so I could afford to retire in the first place, but it has taken me all of the first year to wind down.  I still find myself prioritizing life like I prioritized my time at work.  That is to say that there is never enough time to do everything one wants to do and some things have to be glossed over or relegated to the bottom of the pending file until the realization hits that there just isn’t enough time to do them.  There is always the feeling that maybe, had I spent another ten hours a week working that I would have gotten them done and one or two of them would have resulted in something worthwhile.

In retirement I have little trouble pushing those thoughts aside.  If it is important I will get it done:  If not, it will wait until tomorrow or next week, or next month.

In Wampeters, Foma and Grandfalloons, Kurt Vonnegut says the following about Socrates’ quote:

 

“Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?”

 

It is my opinion that, since our lives are viewed from the point of view of our own egos, we may not even know that some of our lives are clunkers.  My own life had its low points, and many things that I should have or would have done differently, I would like to think that my own life would stand the test, but now is the time to examine it.  And my first examination was to go back in time.  The next entry will be the detail of that time travel.  If I was a dog with a vast knowledge of history and physics and I had a geeky boy as a master whose name was Sherman, I would probably say, “Turn on the WABAC machine, Sherman.”  Since I’m not and I don’t I will just say, “Until next time…”

I stole this photo from Wiki.  It depicts

Mr. Peabody and Sherman entering the WABAC machine

 

bronco bama, part two

Over the weekend some rodeo clown at the Missouri state fair put on an Obama mask and stuck a broomstick up his ass while someone got on the public address system and asked if the crowd wanted to see Obama trampled by a bull.

Ha, ha.

It goes without saying that there are a lot of people in Missouri who hate the federal government.  It also goes without saying that there are a lot of people in the show-me state who are still upset about that emancipation proclamation thing, and are not fond of black people.  It doesn’t need to be mentioned that there are Missourians who don’t buy into this gay rights thing (the symbolism of the broomstick up the ass, in case you didn’t catch the humor).

The State and the State Fair have apologized all over themselves, as they should have, and they are telling us that someone hijacked the microphone and blurted out their own racist anti-American venom.  If so, it was just a breach of security, but I am hearing too many people saying that it was all done in good clean fun and no harm was done.  Unfortunately, I am detecting a lack of sensitivity here. 

They interviewed some hillbilly today that suggested that, and this is just a paraphrase that, “Last time I looked we still had freedom of speech.”

He is correct.  As a matter of fact we do still have freedom of speech.  Freedom of speech is when someone in the crowd wears an Obama mask, stuffs a broomstick up his ass and carries a sign that says “I hate queers, blacks and America.”

Or if someone carries a sign with a swastika with the words, “Seig heil.”  That would be some dumb-ass stuff, but freedom of speech allows a Nazi to do it.

It would also be freedom of speech if someone carried a sign that said “Down with heterosexual white people.”

When someone shows up to protest, they are protected by their first amendment rights, but hijacking the microphone and the event goes beyond freedom of speech.

Would it have been in good clean fun and would it have been freedom of speech if someone would have dressed a rodeo clown like Jesus Christ and shouted over the public address system:

“Allah Akbar!  Who wants to see Christ the infidel trampled by a bull?”

Well, maybe some would think that was just clean fun.