Irish in America

 Being Irish in Colorado

(The Colorado Springs Sun, March 17, 1985)

One of my favorite stories ever. Sean, a kind, wise man who meant a lot to me, played bodhran in our Irish ballad group, The Bogsiders; the women were also from the Irish music scene, of which I was proud to be a part.

   There's a limit to the history of the Irish in Colorado.
   Molly Brown was Irish, which some say explains why Denver society treated her with snubs as chilly as a North Atlantic iceberg. The Irish patriot Maude Gonne was once spirited off from her Denver lecture schedule by Irish miners and treated to a day and a half in Cripple Creek and Victor, a detour she described in her autobiography as "the happiest days of my whole American tour."

   And it's rumored that Irish president Eamon De Valera's Spanish-born father is buried somewhere in Colorado, in an unmarked sheepherder's grave.

   But the fact is, the Irish tended to congregate in urban centers, and despite a handful of hardy pioneers, the Irish one finds in Colorado tend to be fourth and fifth generation Irish-Americans, transplanted here from their families' homes in Boston, New York and Chicago and far removed from their ancestral roots.

   But there are the exceptions.

   Kate McGuire Browning is only six years removed from Andersonstown, the Catholic inner city neighborhood of Belfast where she spent most of her young life. Married to Steve Browning, an Army helicopter pilot she met in Germany, she is celebrating her third St. Patrick's Day in America.

   Though many who come from the Six Counties would style themselves economic or political refugees, Mrs. Browning is more philosophical about her move.

   "I had a good job, but I just wanted to get away, just wanted to go somewhere different, try something out. It was just always what I wanted to do."

   That good job in Belfast, however, wasn't easy to find.

   "When you fill out an application form, first of all, your name is what gives you away," she says. "If you don't have an Irish name,  then they know you're a Protestant. And Andersonstown is Catholic, so your address gives you away. One girl and I were talking together about how hard it had been to get a job. I'd been a year out of school before I got myself a full-time job, working in a telephone exchange. This other girl, she was Catholic, and we were talking about how hard it was, and then this other girl, she belonged to Ian Paisley's church, and she said, 'Oh no, there's no trouble getting jobs, there's all kinds of jobs.' There's supposed to be equal rights and all, but you still can't see it a bit.

   "A Catholic person can apply for a job at the shipyard. There isn't much chance he'll get the job, and if he did take the job, he'd be doing it at the risk of his own life. For years and years, it's always been a Protestant firm. It's always been Protestants worked there. Harlan and Wolf is all Protestants working, and a Catholic daren't go look for a job there. It's still not safe. You go to the unemployment office and they've got all kinds of jobs, but the areas they're in, it isn't safe," says Mrs. Browning.

   Growing up in a divided society began to be difficult in the late Sixties, when the nonviolent Catholic civil rights movement was thwarted and militant nationalists utilized the bitterness of that defeat to start up the ancient war for freedom once again.

   "Up until I was about nine or ten, I had a Protestant friend, and we couldn't be parted," says Mrs. Browning. "It was around '69 when it started to get real bad, and I got up one morning and all of a sudden my friend wasn't there anymore, her parents had moved out. It was a mixed area where we lived, Protestant and Catholic, and we all lived along just fine. I guess the parents felt it was safer for them to move. It just got to the point where people were split up: Catholics were burnt out of their homes, Protestants were burnt out of their homes."

   Mrs. Browning had lost more than a friend in those difficult days. Seeing the local police stand by and even encourage the violence of the vigilante mobs against Catholic homeowners has left her with firm opinions about the situation.

   "The police over there are the Royal Ulster Constabulary. They're British, and, as far as the law goes, we don't get too much protection from them."

   Though the corruption of local police was largely checked by their disarmament and the substitution of the Army to perform their duties after those initial, chaotic days, the damage was done and the Army was no more welcome than the police had been.

   "It's not that the Catholic wants the Protestant out," Mrs. Browning insists, "It's not like that. They're all willing to live together. They just say that it's Ireland, that it doesn't belong to Britain, and we're entitled to have our country back. Britain has let go of so many other countries that they have ruled, and why not Northern Ireland? It'll go on until Britain pulls out."

   In this country, Mrs. Browning keeps her Irish heritage alive as she did when she was growing up, through preserving her culture in Irish dancing with the local Irish club. "I started doing solo dancing when I was about five," she says. "That was the normal thing at home, when kids start school, they start Irish dancing classes. I quit doing that when I was about ten or eleven and started playing camogie. You've heard of hurley? Camogie is the ladies' game. Even with the girls playing, it's pretty rough."

   Hurley, Ireland's national game, has been described by wags as "lacrosse played with pick handles."

   Ms. Browning also preserves her heritage in the oldest way, through her children, Aoife Fiona, 4, and Sean Padraig, the baby. "Aoife was a name I liked, and I always wanted that name for my first daughter, but I didn't know my first daughter was going to be an American," she admits. "When people see her name, they've got no idea what it is, and I think, 'God, poor kid, going through life.'"

   Eilish Rogers Argenzio's eldest son Cormac is 20, old enough to explain his Irish name to the confused, as his mother often has to explain hers.

   "It's a very old Gaelic name," she says. "It's not a diminutive of anything and there's no English translation. Eileen is not a diminutive of it, though people argue about that."

   Like her friend Kate Browning. Mrs. Argenzio came to this country with a military husband, Arthur, since retired from the Air Force. As a Dubliner and as someone who came over before the current round of Troubles started, however, her politics are more muted.

   "If I was in the North of Ireland, living, and was in a bad zone, I know I'd be up there doing something I shouldn't be doing," she admits. "But I'm not there. I'm here. I have never lived that. 

   "Even down in Dublin, where I lived, the Troubles weren't really bad up in the North then at all. We used to go up there on shopping expeditions. So I've never really come across the bad parts of it. I've never been that closely involved in it. I left in '64." 

   Still, she's not untouched by the controversy. "I'll tell you what really fires me up, is to hear an Irish person who lives in the North of Ireland, and they say to them, 'You're Irish. why do you feel that way?' and they say, 'I'm not Irish. I'm British.' That just fires me up instantly. If they feel that way, they should be living in Britain. That's Ireland they're living in."

   Mrs. Argenzio is still an Irish citizen and still very Irish.

   She, too, keeps her heritage alive by dancing, and Irish mementos are scattered through every room of her home.

   Despite the failing economy in what has been described as the northernmost Third World nation, she would go back to Ireland.

   "If Art said. 'Let's go back to Ireland, I'd go. Without my washing machine, without my dishwasher, without all the stuff that I have here that I wouldn't be able to afford at home. Things are so much more expensive over there. I have sisters-in-law there, and they have washers and dryers, but my mother doesn't, still. She does her own washing by hand and hangs it out on the line."

   The economic situation still drives the Irish out of their country as it has for hundreds of years. Her brother is in the process of emigrating to the United States. It is a long process.

   "He's a jeweler by trade," she explains. "And he had his own business at home, and he said he was making a living, but he just couldn't get ahead, no matter how hard he worked and how long he worked. He was always just making enough to get by, because things just keep going up and up and up. He applied over two years ago for a visa, and he was given a number, which means he was accepted for immigration, but now he has to wait for it to come up. He wrote last year and said they were processing 1981, which he means he hopes to be out here sometime this year, because he applied in 1982. He thinks by summer this year, but I think if he gets here by Christmas, he'll be doing good."

   For Mrs. Argenzio. the hardest part about living in the United States is missing family. Even with a brother in New York and another on the way, she has a mother and aunts who are growing older in Ireland. Though she gets homesick for Ireland, she's found it more economical to invite her mother to visit than to try to save the money to take her own family over there.

    She returned to Ireland with her sons, Cormac and David, for a summer in 1977. It was a sentimental journey, to say the least. "I didn't really get homesick for Ireland until I went back, and when I came back here, I had a terrible time settling down. I wanted to be here and I wanted to be there. It was really hard to settle down again, and I'd never been like that until I went back. Everyone said that, 'Wait until you go home, see what it does when you go home.' And I said. 'Oh, that won't happen to me. I'm very happy here, I love it here."

   "This is home, right here." Sean Sheehan says, sitting in his Denver house. "People say, 'When you going to go home?' A lot of the Irish say that, 'When you going to go home?' But when you're back there, and you're there two or three weeks, then you're ready to go home. We've lived here twenty-seven years. This is home. We don't have a home in Ireland."
   Sheehan and his wife Peggy came to Denver in 1957 from the small village of Ardagh in County Limerick; she was originally from Ballyhigh in County Kerry. Married in 1948, they had moved into the Sheehan home with his mother and father.

   When his parents died, Sean sold the house and all its furnishings and came to Denver, with the original plan to go into business with Peggy's brother, a plasterer. Drywall killed that plan before they arrived, but they came out anyway.

   "We were coming to the country of riches, where you could pick it up off the streets," Mrs. Sheehan laughs. "We found out different."

   The Ireland they grew up in was more the Ireland of postcards and the sentimental songs than the modern world of Eilish Argenzio and Kate Browning, and the rural West of Ireland was and still is very different from the urban centers of Dublin and Belfast, despite the fact that the entire island is only the size of Indiana. It was an enormous island a half century ago for the son of a roof thatcher.

   "There was no television," Sheehan says. "We didn't know what the rest of the world was like when we were growing up. There were radios, but they were few, they were scarce as automobiles. When somebody had a radio. people would gather at the house. That was a big thing, to have radio. That was something like someone having a Rolls Royce now."

   Automobiles were scarce and were often chauffeur-driven hackneys (rental cars) available for weddings or errands.

   "There was one hackney car," Sheehan says. "That was about the only car. I think the doctor had a car. but he had to cover an area that was, from one end to the other, about thirty miles. I could count the cars on one hand that were in our area, up to about 1935 or '36. You had to be very rich to have a car in Ireland."

   "I thought about America, when I was growing up." he explains, "that everybody drove to work in a big car with a suit and a tie. I thought there was no poor people, because very few people went back to Ireland. But when they went back, they'd hire a car or take their own cars back on the boat. And they'd go back and drive around in their fancy cars, and you thought, 'This has to be the place!' They've got TV now; they know what the Americans are like. We didn't have an idea about how American people lived."

   Even when they emigrated twenty years later, those childhood impressions remained strong. They still thought America was the country of riches.

   "Paddy told us we'd have to work very hard," Mrs. Sheehan says of her American brother. "But we couldn't believe that. He was out here (in Denver) eight years, and he had five more kids here and the one he'd brought with him. He went back to Ireland and rented a big house, as well he would with six kids and a husband and wife to live there. He rented the house, and he rented a maid and he rented a car. Well, wouldn't all that give you the impression that America had gold about the streets? And I wouldn't believe otherwise. He told us how you'd have to work hard ..." 

   "When we were growing up," says Sheehan. "You'd be lucky if you could go into Limerick for a day, never mind going overseas for a vacation. My father lived in the County Limerick. He was born and lived all his life there, and he was 72 years when he died. He was only out of the county once in his life. Of the county! That was to go to Queenstown, Cobh they call it now, with the Confraternity, the church group, on an excursion on the train. Where we lived, to go to the borders of Cork County was 10 miles, to go to the borders of Kerry was 15. And he was only out of the county one time."
   The Sheehans met when his Local Defense Force was sent to Kerry for maneuvers during World War II. Otherwise, they say, they'd never have married someone from a town over fifty miles away.
   Now, Ireland has changed, Ireland has joined the twentieth century, and they regret some of those necessary, inevitable changes.    

   "They're losing their brogues," Mrs. Sheehan says. "I have more of a brogue. Now, they're going to school and they're meeting so many Europeans and Americans. And the television."

   "They love to meet people and make friends with them," she says. "Whereas you can't do that in America, you can't go down the street and say hello and stand up and talk to them. Well, you can do that in Ireland."

   "But that's going out in Ireland, too," Sheehan says. "I think by the year 2000, it will have changed so much you won't know it.

   "I'll tell you a little story, a joke: This American is driving down this country road, and his watch had stopped. And he saw these couple of men standing by the ditch at the crossroads, and he stopped and he said 'What time is it?' And you know the answer the Irishman made to him? 'Why?'

   "Time didn't mean nothing in Ireland at that time. It does now, because they've got these factories, and they've got time clocks and they've got bills and they've got pressure and they've got everything like any other country has."

In which Vaska visits one of my favorite places

So here's my boy Vaska on the path through what used to be an Adirondack Great Camp. Or a pretty good camp. It never quite reached the status of Marjorie Merriweather Post's camp, but it was okay as far as plutocratic retreats go.

This used to be a wide-open area, and has, in the past quarter century, been taken over by small trees and brush. But let's explain, first:

We are about 10 miles back from anywhere, in a part of the Adirondacks where even being in the middle of "anywhere' isn't a whole lot.

Here's where we were:

Or, to put it in more global terms:

 

The point being that we started nowhere and then got a little more out of the middle of things.

But, when I talked about going out there later, everyone was familiar with the place and had a story to tell. Streeter Lake is a place that everyone goes, but in a protective kind of way. We live a quiet life to start with, and Streeter Lake is one of those place we go when we want life to settle down even more.

Check it out: I'm aware that city folks get a little freaked out by how quiet it is in the country. But here's a video that I shot out at Streeter Lake around noon. Earlier in the morning, the birds were challenging each other -- that is, at about 5 a.m., you hear the "Oh, I love you, baby" birdsong, but by around 10 a.m., the lovemaking is over and it's mostly "Hey! Whachoo doin' on my territory?" singing. 

Still, it's singing. As the sun gets high and the temperatures rise, everybody chills out and here is the result: It's like having noise-cancelling headphones on. The only sound is an occasional breeze and whatever the dog is up to. Crank your speakers to the max and dig it:

If you know a more peaceful place, feel free to share it, but I felt like I was in heaven. 

And so did the pupster, who was happy to find new things to smell and new place to explore, This is what hounds are bred for, and he was in his element:

The farther we got into the trails, the happier he became.

We got down to the lake itself, and he took a drink and then shrugged it off. But this is where I camped with my boys, back when they were tiny and we'd hike the six miles from the house to the lake.

Making that long hike to Streeter, without whining or asking to be carried or otherwise exhibiting evidence of being a baby, was a rite of manhood. And a very entertaining one.

The nine-year-old in that picture will turn 40 in just a few weeks. Meanwhile, despite his desperate clinging to hot chocolate in this picture, he did have the presence of mind to swim out into the lake and beckon his father with "it's warm once you get in," only to laugh and swim to shore, towels and fire once he had lured the Old Man into the chilly water.

Anyway, three decades plus a little later, here's the same spot, and much the same indeed,except that the dog is not as much into humorous deceit:

 One oddity of the place is that, although it is 10 miles back from any real roads, and far in the midst of the "Forever Wild" Adirondacks, this is a 4,000 acre tract that was once owned by a man who had made a fortune with potato chips.

The place had been a kind of minor example of the Adirondack Great Camp, and there was a time when there were buildings on the grounds, though they have all disappeared since. The only thing left is a codicil in the will that gave the grounds over to the state, and that is a small area that contains the family mausoleum:

Strangely, in the middle of nowhere, you come across this fenced area and these groomed grounds. There is apparently some kind of endowment that keeps it going, because it is absolutely spotless, amid absolute wilderness.

Tres bizarre, but in a kind of cool way. There was a time when Andy's groundskeepers would run you off the property, but he donated the acreage before his death and it's a great place to go back and just kind of hang out. Even with Andy and his family entombed on the property.

If nothing else, it makes Streeter Lake an outstanding place, when the sun goes down and there is no light but from the stars and the campfire, to tell Mark Twain's classic ghost story of the Golden Arm.

The boys asked for a ghost story and I said I knew one, but then I thought about how incredibly un-right it was to tell the Golden Arm when we were camped on a lake just across from a mausoleum, so I stopped, but they begged and begged, and like a fool, I gave in. Scared the living bejayzus out of them, as well it might.

Thirty-some years later, I still don't know if that was a really cool moment or a stunning lapse in parental judgment. Oh well, what the hell.

And nothing scares the dog, so we went over to Crystal Lake, which is next door. Now, Streeter is remote, but, somehow, you always run into one or two people out there. But the deal is, they stay on Streeter and you go over to Crystal and that way, everyone has some peace and quiet.

So Vaska and I walked over to Crystal Lake, where the water is, as the name suggests, incredibly clean and clear, and also warm.

We had a lovely swim and I think that next year, when we go back for the next reunion, we'll bring a tent and schedule a night at Crystal Lake.

 I don't think I'll get much opposition to the plan.

88 Books You Haven't Read All Of

Here are the Library of Congress’s list of 88 “Books That Shaped America,” and I like the fact that they didn't feel compelled to add 12 more or to cut 13 in order to hit a round number.

So how many have you read? And I'd count "read" to include (as in the case of Dr. Spock or the cookbooks), using the book but perhaps not reading it cover to cover, but not (as in the case of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz"), having seen the movie or (as in the case of "Atlas Shrugged" or "Uncle Tom's Cabin") having heard so much about them that you feel like you might as well have read them. But I'd count a play you've seen ("Streetcar" or "Our Town").

I'd have a higher score if I'd majored in American Lit or even English. And a much higher score if I counted the ones I fully intended to read, including some sitting on my shelf as I write this.

I had 28 (31.8%).

“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (Mark Twain, 1884)
“Alcoholics Anonymous” (anonymous, 1939)
“American Cookery” (Amelia Simmons, 1796)
“The American Woman’s Home” (Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1869)
“And the Band Played On” (Randy Shilts, 1987)
“Atlas Shrugged” (Ayn Rand, 1957)
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (Malcolm X and Alex Haley, 1965)
“Beloved” (Toni Morrison, 1987)
“Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” (Dee Brown, 1970)
“The Call of the Wild” (Jack London, 1903)
“The Cat in the Hat” (Dr. Seuss, 1957)
“Catch-22” (Joseph Heller, 1961)
“The Catcher in the Rye” (J.D. Salinger, 1951)
“Charlotte’s Web” (E.B. White, 1952)
“Common Sense” (Thomas Paine, 1776)
“The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” (Benjamin Spock, 1946)
“Cosmos” (Carl Sagan, 1980)
“A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible” (anonymous, 1788)
“The Double Helix” (James D. Watson, 1968)
“The Education of Henry Adams” (Henry Adams, 1907)
“Experiments and Observations on Electricity” (Benjamin Franklin, 1751)
“Fahrenheit 451” (Ray Bradbury, 1953)
“Family Limitation” (Margaret Sanger, 1914)
“The Federalist” (anonymous, 1787)
“The Feminine Mystique” (Betty Friedan, 1963)
“The Fire Next Time” (James Baldwin, 1963)
“For Whom the Bell Tolls” (Ernest Hemingway, 1940)
“Gone With the Wind” (Margaret Mitchell, 1936)
“Goodnight Moon” (Margaret Wise Brown, 1947)
“A Grammatical Institute of the English Language” (Noah Webster, 1783)
“The Grapes of Wrath” (John Steinbeck, 1939)
“The Great Gatsby” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925)
“Harriet, the Moses of Her People” (Sarah H. Bradford, 1901)
“The History of Standard Oil” (Ida Tarbell, 1904)
“History of the Expedition Under the Command of the Captains Lewis and Clark” (Meriwether Lewis, 1814)
“How the Other Half Lives” (Jacob Riis, 1890)
“How to Win Friends and Influence People” (Dale Carnegie, 1936)
“Howl” (Allen Ginsberg, 1956)
“The Iceman Cometh” (Eugene O’Neill, 1946)
“Idaho: A Guide in Word and Pictures” (Federal Writers’ Project, 1937)
“In Cold Blood” (Truman Capote, 1966)
“Invisible Man” (Ralph Ellison, 1952)
“Joy of Cooking” (Irma Rombauer, 1931)
“The Jungle” (Upton Sinclair, 1906)
“Leaves of Grass” (Walt Whitman, 1855)
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (Washington Irving, 1820)
“Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy” (Louisa May Alcott, 1868)
“Mark, the Match Boy” (Horatio Alger Jr., 1869)
“McGuffey’s Newly Revised Eclectic Primer” (William Holmes McGuffey, 1836)
“Moby-Dick; or the Whale” (Herman Melville, 1851)
“The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” (Frederick Douglass, 1845)
“Native Son” (Richard Wright, 1940)
“New England Primer” (anonymous, 1803)
“New Hampshire” (Robert Frost, 1923)
“On the Road” (Jack Kerouac,1957)
“Our Bodies, Ourselves” (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 1971)
“Our Town: A Play” (Thornton Wilder, 1938)
“Peter Parley’s Universal History” (Samuel Goodrich, 1837)
“Poems” (Emily Dickinson, 1890)
“Poor Richard Improved and the Way to Wealth” (Benjamin Franklin, 1758)
“Pragmatism” (William James, 1907)
“The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D.” (Benjamin Franklin, 1793)
“The Red Badge of Courage” (Stephen Crane, 1895)
“Red Harvest” (Dashiell Hammett, 1929)
“Riders of the Purple Sage” (Zane Grey, 1912)
“The Scarlet Letter” (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850)
“Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” (Alfred C. Kinsey, 1948)
“Silent Spring” (Rachel Carson, 1962)
“The Snowy Day” (Ezra Jack Keats, 1962)
“The Souls of Black Folk” (W.E.B. Du Bois, 1903)
“The Sound and the Fury” (William Faulkner, 1929)
“Spring and All” (William Carlos Williams, 1923)
“Stranger in a Strange Land” (Robert E. Heinlein, 1961)
“A Street in Bronzeville” (Gwendolyn Brooks, 1945)
“A Streetcar Named Desire” (Tennessee Williams, 1947)
“A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America” (Christopher Colles, 1789)
“Tarzan of the Apes” (Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1914)
“Their Eyes Were Watching God” (Zora Neale Hurston, 1937)
“To Kill a Mockingbird” (Harper Lee, 1960)
“A Treasury of American Folklore” (Benjamin A. Botkin, 1944)
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (Betty Smith, 1943)
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852)
“Unsafe at Any Speed” (Ralph Nader, 1965)
“Walden, or Life in the Woods” (Henry David Thoreau, 1854)
“The Weary Blues” (Langston Hughes, 1925)
“Where the Wild Things Are” (Maurice Sendak, 1963)
“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” (L. Frank Baum, 1900)

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/06/22/3671641/88-books-that-shaped-america.html#storylink=cpy

No looking in the corner for this one

(This column originally appeared August 4, 1989, in the Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, NY)

    When I was in college, one of the interesting things about our old campus was the strange little bits of sculpture and artwork tucked away in odd corners.
    In the Administration Building, there was a set of murals of the life and times of Christopher Columbus.
    One painting showed Columbus and these weeping Indians in a cell and was entitled "Bobadilla betrays Columbus."
    We didn't know who Bobadilla was, but he must have been a cad.
    Near the art building, there was a six-foot sculpture of a man, made of reinforcing rods.
    The rods approximated musculature, and the man's head was thrown back in a scream of inarticulate angst, while his hands tore open his stomach. Inside were gears and suchlike, with a little, tiny man in the very center .
    Oddest of all, though, was the mural in the Huddle. Wrapped around the end of the booths in the snack bar was a really ugly painting of grotesque football players hitting each other, while referees blew whistles and threw flags. As undergraduate artwork goes, this was really a wonder.
    I thought of all this awe-striking artwork the other day when I was over on the Plattsburgh State campus and saw the new giant head that is rising up between the library and the science building. I don't know much about sculpture, mind you. but I know what is big, and this is big.
    It isn't a record for macrocephalic sculpture, of course. Mount Rushmore is larger, but that is, strictly speaking, a statue of four giant heads, not four giant sculptures of heads.
    The heads of Easter Island are more separate, but still can hardly be classed as individual opera.  
    But the giant head of Ferdinand Marcos, overlooking a golf course in the Phillipines, is clearly the world-class giant head of all time.
    Still, for Plattsburgh, this is one big head, and that is important. Campus art these days has few restrictions, but it is supposed to be really, really big.
    Look at those two gingerbread men shaking hands: now. that's big! That's really big, really good campus art.
    Giant art is important in the high-pressure world of the modern undergraduate facility.
    When we were students, we didn't care about our futures and we weren't under the same pressures to get high grades.
    If we wanted to go wandering around campus, hunting up unusual things to look at and ponder, we could take an hour or two and go do it. If the dinky little lifesize heads and bodies we were offered were tucked away in a quiet grotto or down amid the crab apple trees somewhere, we had nothing better to do than go down and have a look anyway.
    Today, students need to be able to get at that art quickly. They are busy people and they need to just look across campus and there it is: A giant head. Two men shaking hands. Whatever.
    You look, and you see it. No time wasted, no one late to class.
    This is very American, you know, this efficient artwork. It started with the Statue of Liberty.
    We'd bring in all the wretched refuse yearning to be free, and, as their boats steamed into the harbor, we'd say, "Hey, there's Lady Liberty over there. We made her real big, so you wouldn't have to get off the boat and go have a close-up look. You can see her just fine from here. Now, go get your shots and find a job."
    I don't know what this really big head is going to actually look like when it is done. Right now, it looks like a giant-but-kind-of-flimsy jungle gym, but they wouldn't dare leave it like that unless they are going to really, really crack down on campus drinking.
    I haven't talked to the artist about all this.
    But my senior year, they decided to renovate the Huddle, and they covered over the grotesque mural of ugly football players that had been there for 15 years, and some enterprising campus reporter thought to call up the guy who painted it and ask him what he thought about having his artistic tribute to Notre Dame football destroyed.
    "I hated football,'' he replied. "I thought it was incredibly grotesque."
    Which doesn't have much to do with giant heads, except that it was nice to run into a campus artist who didn't have one.

(Note: This provoked an angry letter from the curator that may have provoked more laughter than the original column.)

 Being Stupid Can Be Taxing

(originally published in the Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, NY, December 6, 1988)

 So here's how it all started: A bunch of the guys in the Caucus were sitting around, trying to figure out how to get up some money.
   "Raise the tax on cigarettes, "says O'Malley, and Dutch hits him upside the head with a wadded-up empty pack of Camels.
   Dutch smokes two packs a day and figures the only way he'll ever turn a profit on his own taxes is to check into the VA with lung cancer.
   "What about a new statewide sales tax?" says Milstein. "Kick it up a penny. Nobody'll notice.'
   "The municipalities'll notice," says Callaghan. "Same thing with real estate. The locals'll raise holy Ned if we do any more hunting on their preserves. Nah, we need to tax something new. We need to tax something everybody has, but that they ain't paying any taxes on now."
   "The guys in my district are always telling me the next tax will be on the air they breathe," says Dutch. "It's worth a thought."
   "Manhattan'd refuse to pay it," says Milstein. "What they got to breathe ain't worth paying for."
   "I got something else in mind," says Callaghan. "Something almost as common as air. Something we're surrounded by every day. Something this state already has away too much of."
   "What's that?" says Dutch.
   Callaghan gets this big smile on his kisser. "Stupidity. Any shortage of that in your district, Dutch?"
   "In my district?" he asks. "There ain't no shortage of that in my immediate family! But how you gonna tax stupidity?"
   "Yeah," says Milstein. "You think the people downstate would get upset about paying for air which they ain't got, wait'll you try to tax'em for brains which ditto."
   "What're you gonna do, Callaghan?" says O'Malley. "Make 'em take a test or something? Who's gonna write the test?"
   Dutch whistles. "You think you got trouble with the Regents and the SAT's and all that? How you gonna write up a stupidity test that ain't culturally biased?"
   "Don't need a test," Callaghan says, still with the smile. "This is a tax people will pay without a test. They'll volunteer."
   "Right," says Milstein. "They'll just send in their money. They'll say, 'Here you go, I'm pretty stupid. Here's fifty bucks.' In a pig's eye. Callaghan! Who's gonna admit to that?"
   "They won't have to," Callaghan laughs."That's the beauty. We don't call it a stupidity tax. We call it a 'state lottery.' We tell'em, if they give us their money, we might give them a whole, bunch of money back. The more they give us, the more chance we might give them a couple or 20 million bucks. They'll be lined up out into the streets, fighting to pay their stupidity tax. We won't even be able to collect it ourselves, it'll be coming in so fast. We'll have to farm out the job to convenience stores, groceries, gas stations, every place you can think of. You start taxing stupidity, boys, you're talking about a major windfall, you know."
   Dutch shakes his head. "I don't know, Callaghan. You're talking about giving the money back?"
   "Bird feed!" Callaghan snorts. "We lay 20, 30, even 50 million bucks on one dumb schmoo in Queens, every other dumb schmoo across the state is gonna think he's next in line. That's the beautiful thing about this: The more stupidity they got, the more they pay! One pathetic jerk wins the money, there'll be 100 million other pathetic jerks lined up to pay us back and then some, the next morning."
   "So what are the odds on this thing, this big money?" O'Malley asks.
   "14 million-to-one," Callaghan says. "That's what weeds out all the smart people who shouldn't have to pay. I mean, a person with half a brain is automatically exempt from paying the stupidity tax, just by virtue of knowing what a sucker deal it is. You gotta figure, you got more chance of being hit by lightning. Twice. You got more chance of signing with the Knicks. You got more chance of meeting the Pope in an elevator."
   "Most of my constituents think they got a chance of being swept up in a UFO," Milstein admits. "14 million-to-one odds don't mean nothing to them. Meet the Pope, nothing. They think they still got a chance to meet Elvis."
   "I got to hand it to you, Callaghan," says Dutch. "A stupidity tax. That's really beautiful. It's the one kind of tax nobody's gonna wise up to."

Christmas on the Air

I've worked a few Christmases, mostly during my years in the newsroom, but the most memorable was 30 years ago tonight.

I had an evening talk show on KVOR-AM in Colorado Springs, which was just switching to a news/talk format. My show had begun that fall, which I remember because my time segment happened to be when the station in years past would have run the baseball playoffs.

That wouldn't have been a problem except that, for one thing, the station never came through with all the publicity they told me they were going to mount for this new program and, secondly, I had no producer answering phones in the control room, which meant that people were calling in to find out where the baseball game was and their calls were coming straight through to the studio.

So I'd be talking to an author about the ecological effects of Agent Orange on the people and wildlife in the Mekong Delta and I'd take a call and it would be someone asking when the ball game came on.

Later, as fall gave way to winter, that changed, so that, in the middle of interviewing someone, I'd get a call asking if Monument Pass was open, which was a reasonable question to ask our newsroom but not always relevant to the topic of the show.

I also had kids call in who had figured out that there was nobody screening calls and no 7-second delay, but, fortunately, they'd get so excited that they'd scream the F-word instead of just saying it, and all you'd hear on the air was a burst of incoherent noise.

And I would say to the program director that I really needed a call-screener, but, as with putting my face on the sides of buses, the answer was that, until the show was more established, they didn't have budget for that.

I'd done enough advertising work by then to know where publicity fits in the timeline of success, and I also knew that the quality of the show was suffering because of idiotic, irrelevant calls coming straight to the studio.

But I'd also done enough work in the world to know when the boss was going to get his own way regardless of whether or not it made good sense.

So Christmas comes along, and I get a few days off, because the station has bought a package of pre-recorded tapes of Christmas music and is about to become the community's Yuletide background sound for the week leading up to Christmas. And I had small boys and a wife and a home to go to, so it was fine with me.

Only the program director approached me a few days before the Christmas thing began and said they had miscalculated on something: The package ended at 6 p.m. Christmas day, the time my show would normally go on the air.

They could cobble something together, he said, but he wanted to let me know. And I said that I'd be happy to come in, because Christmas would be pretty much over at my house, and anybody who needed talk radio on Christmas Day really needed a familiar voice.

The problem was, I wasn't going to get any calls and I was going to be hard-pressed to line up a guest for a show that nobody was going to be listening to.

But the news director was letting his staff off for the night and he said he'd be happy to come be my guest. We'd sit and swap stories through the three hours, and if anyone called in, that would be a bonus.

So the program started and it was the two of us sitting there in the empty studio talking about the various holidays we'd had as kids and inviting listeners to share their favorite holiday story, and a little old lady called in to say how much she liked Perry Como and we talked to her for awhile and then we talked to each other about Christmas music, and TV specials and suchlike.

And then we got a call from someone who said, "I don't know what I'm going to do." And then he said it again, and then he said he was going to kill himself.

And then he hung up.

The plan for the evening had changed, and I told him he had to call back because it wasn't fair to lay this on me and not give me a chance to do anything about it. And the phone rang, and it was him again, and his voice was unnaturally low, the voice of someone in a deep depression, and he said he didn't want to talk to me because I knew too much about him already.

And then he hung up again.

He may have said something else, because, despite the depressed tone, I suddenly knew who it was: Steve, a regular caller who was a Biblical literalist who used to call me to debate Scripture.

And who, I knew, had a sister who had taken her own life.

So the show went from "What are your favorite Christmas memories?" to "Call me back, Steve." The news director was a gem -- he let me drive the bus while he just sat back and made calm, neutral comments of support.

And we went on for about half an hour, blowing off all the commercial breaks, blowing off the five minute Dan Rather commentary, and a young engineer came in, who was supposed to work later than night but had heard what was going on.

At some point, I said that, if Steve didn't want to talk on the air, I could understand that, so I turned over the on-air component to the news director and the engineer and went back into the control room. And they were champions -- they kept it low key and supportive and they didn't make any leading statements or say anything stupid and they were wonderful.

I was in the control room hoping Steve would call, but also going through the phone book looking for his church, which had a fairly generic name. I found one minister at home but he wasn't the right guy.

And then finally, nearly an hour after this whole thing had started, Steve called, and I hit the wrong button and hung up on him. But he called back, and he said he was all right now, and he thanked me for caring. And I made him promise to call me back in the morning and let me know he was really okay.

Which he did. Apparently, the problem was that he had fallen in love with a Jewish girl, so the people in his house told him he was going to Hell and they threw him out on the street as a sinner who they couldn't associate with anymore.

But he realized now that it was going to be okay, and he was going to be fine. And he thanked me again for being there.

Meanwhile, the news director and I had to explain to management why we had blown off all the commercials for over 45 minutes, including Dan Rather's commentary and the news at the top of the hour. And we explained it to them.

And the next time I went on the air, by golly, they had finally given me someone to screen my calls and hang up on anybody who shouldn't get on the air.

God bless us, every one!

Tales from the backshop

(This column originally ran in the Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, NY, March 24, 1996)

Today, the term "boilerplate" is usually associated with lawyers: It's those required blocks of verbiage that never change from one contract to another.
 
But boilerplate was a newspaper term in the days before offset printing, and it rose up to bite the Plattsburgh Daily Press a century ago.
 
On March 23, 1896, the Press ran a column headlined "Unfathomable Snobbery," about a young army officer harrassed until he resigned his commission by fellow officers and their wives for marrying the daughter of an enlisted man. It was, the story said, "a systematic persecution ... at the hands of the tabbies of both sexes who constitute our snobbish and ridiculous army aristocracy."
 
But there was a problem: The story had been revealed as a falsehood several weeks before, by a military writer who reported that the young officer was popular and happy at his post and had resigned for health reasons.
 
It was a terrible mistake for a paper in the hometown of Plattsburgh Barracks, and the redfaced Press included the facts of the case the next day in an editorial that contained an odd mix of explanation and self-forgiveness: 

"The article in question was a product of the syndicate system and did not come to the knowledge of any member of the editorial staff before its appearance," the editorialist wrote. "This explanation will be sufficient to relieve us of any imputation of intention to attack the social usages of the army."
 
But it wasn't sufficient in the view of the Plattsburgh Republican, a feisty little weekly ever willing to chortle publicly over such a delicious blunder by its larger rival:
 
"This apology ... naturally suggests an inquiry or two," the Republican scoffed: "Since no member of the editorial staff had any knowledge of this article, how then did it get into the Press...? Was it the office cat or the stock 'scapegoat?'"
 
The delighted Republican also ran outraged letters to the editor, calling it "scurrilous journalism ... of a character to make Ben Franklin turn in his grave and the shades of Faust and Gutenberg regret that printing was ever discovered," wrote an anonymous "Citizen," warming up for this indignant run-on sentence: 

"Our citizens feel ashamed of so unworthy an item in their only daily journal, for although that journal itself is an unworthy representative of journalism, printing its news after it is 24 hours old, yet in the absence of any other daily newspaper it has been tolerated, but it was not expected that it would add spite to its other weaknesses."
 
The second letter was suspiciously loaded with inside references to the operations of a newspaper: "A pall of mystery hangs over our great freight train-despatch daily," wrote the anonymous critic.
 
"Who done it? ... Was it Cock Robin? Or the Official Papster? Or the Bucksaw Editor? Alibis are in order...."
 
References to a "freight-train-despatch daily" and the "Bucksaw Editor" were slams at the Press for not including enough local writing. It's likely the article was boilerplate: Part of a long bar of lead print, typeset in New York City and sent to Plattsburgh to be cut to fit whatever holes in the paper needed filling. A feature article like this could be held to run anytime, and, in this case, had apparently been sitting around since before the follow-up story that branded it a lie. Then, when something that length was needed to fill the column, the story had been sawn off and put into place.
 
The Republican's editorialist merrily hammered the point home: "By the way, it has generally been understood that the Press's 'news' departments were filled with 'boilerplate' matter, cast in New York, but since when has its editorial pablum been created in the same manner, by a boilerplate 'Editorial Syndicate?' And where does the work of the 'Editorial Staff come in, since, as it appears, a handsaw is all that is needed to get the work of the editorial syndicate into shape for printing?"
 
Today, the technology has changed: Local media still rely on outside features, though they arrive through satellite dishes instead of trains, and it still happens that, for all the editorial controls in place, something occasionally gets through that oughtn't to have. And it still causes gleeful guffaws among media rivals when it happens.
 
Today, of course, those rivals are TV and radio stations, but the big difference is that we've all become too mature, professional and responsible to publicly ridicule the mistakes of our competitors.
 
Or maybe we've become too thin-skinned to risk having the tables turned.

(The media still decline to criticize each other with much in the way of élan, though there's no reluctance on the part of various web sites. The real trick is finding web sites that understand how these things happen. Recently, we lost one of the greats, Charlie Stough, and I would direct you to this remembrance of a funny, funny ink-stained wretch.)

 

 Court on child molesters: Don't ask, don't tell

The Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, NY    c.  June 28, 1998

Five out of nine Supreme Court justices agree: When it comes to sexual assault on children; what the school doesn't know can't hurt it.
 
Last week, the court ruled that a district can't be sued for damages in a sexual-harassment case, as long as administrators keep their heads firmly jammed into the sand.

The case concerned a girl molested by a teacher beginning when she was 13, a situation which advanced to sexual relations within a year.

When a police officer caught the teacher in the act, the parents sued the teacher and the district, reasoning that the district was responsible for its teacher's actions.

This is a lively issue in sexual harassment.

Common law holds that, if you give a person authority, you bear some responsibility for what the person does with that power, but the question is how much responsibility an employer has for unauthorized acts the employer is not aware of.

In this case, the court ruled that, unless the right person at the district knew exactly what was going on, the school could wash its hands of all responsibility.

Here are the facts, as laid out in the decision:

1. The district was required by the Department of Education, as part of its receipt of federal funds, to institute a policy on sexual discrimination (including harassment) and to make that policy known to employees and students. It did not do so.

2. While the child did not report the sexual contact, other students' parents had complained to the principal about suggestive and inappropriate remarks in the classroom. The principal met with the parents and the teacher and reported on the meeting to the guidance counselor.

3. The teacher had repeated sex with the student, apparently leaving school with her during what were supposed to be regularly scheduled classes.

Here is what the court ruled:

A. Not having the required policy or letting students and teachers know how to report harassment did not mean the district was indifferent to the issue.

B. The complaints about suggestive language didn't count, the court said. The parents had spoken to the principal instead of the superintendent, who was the district's Title IX officer, and the principal passed the information to the guidance counselor but not to the Title IX officer. Officially, then, the school did not know there was a problem.

C. Since only suggestive remarks were reported, the complaint "was plainly insufficient to alert the principal to the possibility that (the teacher) was involved in a sexual relationship with a student."

This is like ruling that a report of smoke pouring from a school is insufficient to alert firefighters to the possibility that the building is on fire.

To continue the analogy, it is like saying that calling the fire station to report the fire is not good enough, unless the fire chief answers the phone personally.

Finally, it is like saying that, if the school is required to put in an alarm system, but fails to do so, it still can't be blamed if children die in the burning building.

Whatever the legal logic of the court's ruling, it is asinine.

It is beyond outrage that the justices of the highest court in the land should exhibit such abysmal ignorance of the matter before them. It also reveals an appalling set of national priorities when the court brings in tekkies and webheads to explain the Internet so that they can rule wisely on the Communications Decency Act, but blunders ahead in this ruling without the most rudimentary knowledge of child molestation.

The court may rule that ice cream is boiling hot, but that will not make it so, nor can the court's absurd ruling in this case change what a school administrator ought to know. Of course the school should have been alerted to a risk, based on those other complaints.

Not every dirty talker is a baby raper, but nobody with any training in education could fail to recognize suggestive comments as a strong indicator of a potential hazard. It is impossible for anyone in education or human services to escape this information without a deliberate and concerted effort to do so.

These administrators did not want to know what was going on in their school, and that willful, hard-won ignorance has saved them.

There is a ray of hope in this otherwise horrific ruling.

The court said only that current law permits the "don't ask, don't tell" defense for those who fail to protect our children. It would only require a new law, not a constitutional amendment, to change that.

Congress must now break the conspiracy of ignorance that aids and abets child molesters.

Joining in the majority opinion  in 'Gebser v. Lago Vista Independent School District' were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.Dissenting were Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

That's me and my big brother, Rick, and my sister Fran, and Mom holding our little brother, Tony, and Pop, patting their dog, Puddles. I'm not sure exactly when this picture was taken, but, if it wasn't the last time we were together, it was close.

Mom and Pop were our mother's parents, but we called them "Mom" and "Pop" because that's what our uncle Teddy called them, and he certainly should know. And "Grandma" and "Grandpa" lived in Pennsylvania, not Connecticut.

Some few months after this picture was taken, a major storm hit Connecticut. Teddy was 13 and old enough to stay home alone while his parents had dinner with some friends, but, when the power went out, he called to let them know and they told him they'd come right home.

When Teddy called some time later to ask if they were coming, it caused some alarm, because they had left after his first call, and it wasn't that far.

Meanwhile, the librarian at the Mark Twain Library in Redding had seen odd lights on the ceiling of the apartment over the library and called for help -- they were from the headlights of a car that had been swept off an undermined bridge on the road just under her windows.

Pop was gone almost immediately, but Mom clung to a tree in the middle of the river for three hours while they tried to get out to help.

And thus it was that I suddenly found myself with a second older brother, my uncle Ted. My mother was 31 at the time, and I cannot imagine how it rocked her world. When the news came, she was told not to come to Connecticut yet, as the roads were impassable and the bodies had not yet been recovered.

There was a memorial service in Connecticut, and then a train trip to Chicago and a huge funeral, swelled by the family's connections in the Catholic community, with two nuns and a priest as siblings of the deceased. And then a second train trip back to the East Coast.

I cannot imagine.

But I went to visit my mother last week, and we drove up to Redding to have a look at the old homestead, seen in the picture.

And since I couldn't imagine, I didn't know what we were going to encounter.

For example, the bridge was a place I remembered because we used to play Pooh Sticks there, each dropping a stick off one side and then racing across to see whose stick would emerge first.

I'm sure this is not her first association with that bridge.

But there were many other memories around the place, starting with the many stone walls I saw in the woods well before we got to Mom and Pop's house. I remembered playing in the woods and climbing over many of those old barriers, including the time we were ambushed by a horde of yellow jackets and came screaming down to the screened in porch where Mom and Pop and our parents were sitting drinking from the colored, milled metal glasses that ended up at our house later.

Bad yellow jackets. Great glasses. Someone had glassed in the porch in the half-century since.

Someone had done a fair amount in that half-century, but, then again, not so much in recent years.

There was a swimming pool that was new to us, but looked like it hadn't been used in a couple of years, though the cover was in place and it only needed a good cleaning. And there was much construction material piled up. The garage and guest house, badly deteriorated, were being torn down.

There was nobody around, but there was a car in the driveway and it seemed logical that perhaps they'd gone to lunch. We walked around a bit, sharing memories, and then were rewarded when a front-end loader came up the drive, one man driving and another clinging on the side.

We explained ourselves, and they explained themselves. One was a son of the owner of the property, the other an employee, and they were in the process of fixing the old place up. The owner not only had purchased Mom and Pop's house, but the property across the way as well, so that he could preserve the quiet, forested atmosphere.

And he had done much of the restoration on the house without making many changes. The winding wooden staircase my mother remembered was still there, and the gabled ceiling on the second floor would likely still thump the crown of anyone who jumped on the beds up there.

We both left satisfied that our memories were in good hands.

ADDENDUM: Here's a link to a piece about the history of the storm as well as the accident itself. Note in the comments here that the NYTimes and my mother have a disagreement over the phone call. Having known both the Times and my mother for many decades, I'm going with her version of events.

Vaska's First Birthday

October 2 is Vaska's first birthday, and he's become a fine young man.

He began life as a puppy in Florida.

He was raised with the help of his Auntie Esme, a refined southern lady of truly excellent breeding, who taught him the gentle arts of muay thai and ground-and-pound.

 

At 10 weeks, he boarded a plane in Orlando, got out in Burlington and discovered that, somehow, the world had undergone some real changes in the intervening four hours.

 

He had arrived just in time for the annual Christmas photo shoot, which was taking place at a store next to where he went for his first meeting with his new veterinarian.

He quickly adjusted to the new climate ...

... as well as the rigorous pace of his new home.

 

 He immediately set about the task of making friends.

And by spring, he had some real pull within his social circle.

and had made quite a social splash.

Speaking of splashes, he has recently added a new skill to his repertoire, a signal of what the lad will be experiencing in the first few weeks of 2012.

However, it will take more than a minor surgical procedure to wipe the smile from his face.

Happy birthday to my constant companion and this man's best friend.

"The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself, too." -- Samuel Butler

A Minor Event of the (very) Late War

(Came across these documents while researching my next historical fiction, which is set in the War of 1812. In order to read between the lines, you must realize that dueling was illegal but not unknown. Consequently, the British [Canadian] reports have no qualms about explaining what these fellows were doing rowing out at dawn to an island in the Niagara, between the British and American lines, while the American report is couched in more discreet terms though I doubt the editor was much fooled. I would also suggest that Lieutenant FitzGibbon and his party of Irish misfits were anticipating Lee Marvin's fictional "separate command" by quite a few years and that there may have been a bit of laughter among the troops at the plight of these young gentlemen.)

Aquadog at 10 months

I've had ridgebacks for 25 years, and, in that time, I've known some who hated water and some who would go into the water up to their bellies and no further.

But Vaska has somehow become a swimmer, goaded on by his best friend, Bogey, and his other buddies, all of whom have no problem at all racing into the river after a stick. For a time, Vaska would act like a proper ridgeback, walking out until his feet threatened to leave the ground, and watching until the others came back within reach, then joining in the wrassling match as they came back onto dry land.

Life is too exciting, however, for such limitations. At the top, he joins in the race for the stick in the Connecticut River, along with Bogey, the chocolate lab in the lead, and Star, the yellow lab in second place. They're built for swimming and he's not, but he refuses to be left behind.

And here you see that he's certainly willing to join in the tussle over who would bring the stick ashore, and he doesn't wait until everyone is touching bottom to enter the fray.

But, while it took the excitement of a stick chase to get him in at first, he's now perfectly comfortable in the water under far more relaxed circumstances, as seen in this scene shot in the White River, with Guinness and Guinness's little blonde-haired mistress.



All this playfulness and non-ridgeback-style comfort with water, however, hasn't undermined the courageous lion-hunter's natural instinct for confronting danger.

I should have named him "Leiningen."