We doff our coonskin caps (oh, yes, we have them somewhere) to the late Fess Parker, television’s Davy Crockett in the mid-1950s, and I point you to this remembrance by Lisa:

In the ultimate example of following your market, Fess Parker moved on to making wine. And his low-priced Rhone style wine even has his face on it. It’s the ultimate Baby Boomer gift. You had the cap. Your parents bought you the lunchbox. Now get the wine.

Not that Fess Parker was a dilettante. His wines are winning awards and getting great notices, even from that ultimate wine arbiter, Robert Parker (who is not related, but probably secretly wishes he was cool enough to be!). Fess Parker’s son, Eli, the chief winemaker, was named 2006’s Andre Tchelistcheff Winemaker of the Year at the San Francisco International Wine Competition. It should be noted that, in this age of fallen heroes, Fess Parker never did anything to tarnish his hero image, staying happily married to the same woman for over 50 years and producing a close and loving family that included eleven grandchildren and one great-grandchild who, according to CNN, spent as much of Fess’s last days with him as they could.

Eli, incidentally, is more formally Fess Elisha Parker III. Every generation, I reckon, ought to have a Fess.

As part of her ChicagoNow debut, E. M. Zanotti asserts “I once had my boobs ogled by John McCain,” and provides what she describes as “photographic semi-evidence”:

Oh, he was looking, all right. Guaran-damn-teed, as we used to say. Consider this video capture, previously seen here:

At least the man has some redeeming social value.

Once in a very blue moon, someone will ask if there was any aspect of Oklahoma history I find troubling. Most of the time, I suspect, they’re looking for Dust Bowl and/or Grapes of Wrath commentary. That’s not what they get, though.

In this piece, I refer to “Oklahoma’s infamous Senate Bill One.” I might go so far as to say “heinous.” Steve Lackmeyer fills in the details:

The state had taken its own steps toward creating Jim Crow laws in 1907. Several attempts had been made prior to statehood to codify Jim Crow rules into the constitution. But opposition by President Theodore Roosevelt stymied such efforts, which including the writing up of about 50,000 words, exhaustive debate and committee discussions on the matter.

Roosevelt proclaimed statehood November 16, 1907. Lawmakers made segregation their first order of business when they convened at Guthrie’s City Hall from December 2, 1907 to May 26, 1908. Senate Bill 1 went through the overwhelmingly Democratic body, 37-2 in the Senate, 95-10 in the House — showing that the issue was bipartisan. The law required separate facilities for blacks in public transportation, public education and other public places and situations. In response riots erupted in Taft and other black communities.

Doug Loudenback has an extensive history of Jim Crow in the Sooner State.

What reminded me of this was this piece in the Gazette which explores the stories of emancipated slaves in Oklahoma, collected by the WPA in 1937. The one that stung was this one from Alice Alexander, born 1849 in Jackson Parish, Louisiana; she’d literally walked here, hoping for education. When the WPA came calling, she was 88 years old.

“We come to Oklahoma looking for de same thing then that darkies go North looking for now,” she said. “But we got disappointed. What little I learned I quit taking care of it and seeing after it and lost it all.”

So much promise we offered; so little we delivered.

Brief descriptions by JC of the last few First Ladies:

Nancy Reagan was America’s nagging mother, what with the “Just Say No” program. My mom would have suggested “just say no thank you”, but that’s another matter.

Barbara Bush was America’s grandmother, offering lemonade and cookies (careful of the lactose intolerant, you see), and reading to the kiddies at the public library. Full disclosure, she did in fact read to my kids at the library one time).

Hillary Clinton was best described by P. J. O’Rourke as “America’s Ex-Wife”, and that pretty much sums it up.

Laura Bush was an actual librarian, and did the official unveiling of the statue of Dr. Seuss. C’mon, that’s neat.

Michelle Obama strikes me as a playground monitor, an officious overpaid representative of the state who got the job through political connections.

If the pattern holds, the next FLOTUS ought to be pretty spiffy.

Women, we are told, really go for bad boys, and you can’t get much badder than this:

Mussolini’s mistress, Clara Petacci, recorded intimate details of her affair with Il Duce in her journal. Her newly published diary reveals Mussolini as a sex-addicted anti-Semite who found Hitler “very likeable” — and who occasionally suffered from impotence.

Those diaries were published for the first time last week, to the considerable consternation of one of Mussolini’s descendants. “This woman would be convicted of stalking today,” says Alessandra Mussolini, Il Duce’s granddaughter. She insists that “not a word” of what Petacci wrote about her grandfather is true.

This is not to say that little Benito was exactly faithful or anything:

Mussolini was as obsessed with sex as he was with his own power. Until the day of his removal from power, July 25, 1943, he had “a woman brought to him every day, every afternoon,” as his valet Quinto Navarra recalls. The women were recorded in the guest book as “fascist visitors.”

“There was a time when I had 14 women and took three or four [of] them every evening, one after the other,” Mussolini said. But now, he insisted, Claretta was the only one. “Amore,” he said, “why do you refuse to believe me?”

Despite this, they were together until the end:

When the miniature Salò Republic came to an end in April 1945, Mussolini offered his mistress the option of fleeing to Spain, but Petacci declined. A short time later, she was hanging upside-down next to Il Duce above the Piazzale Loreto in Milan, shot by partisans. A passerby is believed to have said: “One thing you can say for her: She did have nice legs.”

(Via Common Sense & Wonder.)

“I’ve got so much on my plate,” said Anna Nicole Smith in 2003 of her busy work schedule, “that I’m probably gonna die at 37 like Marilyn.”

She was 36 at the time. Anna Nicole, I mean.

She would have been 42 today. I have to think she’d still be with us if she were still just plain Vickie Hogan from Texas, although she was never really “just plain.”

The reference comes from Dr. Johnson:

“Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.” Boswell: “Lord Mansfield does not.” Johnson: “Sir, if Lord Mansfield were in a company of General Officers and Admirals who have been in service, he would shrink; he’d wish to creep under the table.”

DaTechguy expands on this idea:

I didn’t shrink but I felt the way a man feels when his work is being done by someone else, and that is I believe more than any other reason why Veterans Day and Memorial Day have basically become retail holidays.

When we see a serving soldier we are reminded that there are a small group of men and women who are doing our work for us. They are part of a community that if you are not a part of it you may not understand.

This has been the price of the all volunteer army that was born in the desperate attempts of college students to avoid service in the 60’s. For decades our popular culture looked down upon these men, our movies have and still paint them as “broken”. Even after Sept 11th our popular culture still never caught up with the average man who recognized that maybe just maybe there is something more to the soldier than someone who is looking to pay for college.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that a man in sin will avoid signs of God because it reminds him of his current state. I think a similar thing has happened to Veterans Day and Memorial Day. We don’t want to think about it, we don’t bother to attend. It is safer to simply shop, because if we look at Veterans Day and Memorial Day for who they honor and what they do we look at ourselves and remember what we have not done.

This is not, I hasten to add, a call for a return to conscription. But I remember draftees from the early 1970s, and while you could tell that they definitely wanted to be somewhere else, they weren’t about to let the rest of us down. When you’re called by something bigger than yourself — well, first you have to realize that it is bigger than yourself. Not everyone possesses this level of awareness: the newspapers are full of stories of people who couldn’t imagine anything more important than themselves.

And then I read about someone like, say, Tim James, and all the headlines melt away.

At the 2004 dedication of the National WWII Memorial, that old soldier Bob Dole said:

What we dedicate today is not a memorial to war. Rather, it is a tribute to the physical and moral courage that makes heroes out of farm and city boys and that inspired Americans in every generation to lay down their lives for people they will never meet, for ideals that make life itself worth living.

Mark that: every generation. Yesterday my oldest grandson turned ten. Will he someday put on the uniform, take up a weapon, as I once did? I don’t know. I’m not going to try to talk him into it. But I’m not going to try to talk him out of it, either. Not everyone is cut out for that kind of life, and that’s fine; I figure, so long as he’s not creeping under the table, it’s all good.

“It wasn’t me who started that ol’ crazy Asian war,” the song goes. “But I was proud to go and do my patriotic chore.”

And yes, I suppose it was a chore, in the strictest sense of the word: first we take care of business, then we can sit back and swap stories.

Some people will look at that word “proud” and grimace. “How can you possibly feel any pride in what you did?” Well, I did it well, and at the time, it seemed like exactly the right thing to do. Thirty years later, it still seems so.

No regrets from this former Army man; I wore the green, like so many others my age, and fortunately, most of us came back from where we’d been.

You don’t have to spend any time remembering me today, but please do think of your friends and mine, your relatives and mine, who took on this “patriotic chore” themselves. And say a prayer, if you would, for those who didn’t come back.

(Originally posted 11/11/2002.)

In November 1989, I was running a FidoNet echo and reading a lot of others. And a chap named Wolfram Sperber dropped into INTERUSER, and we dropped everything, because he was there, man. I saved his story, and it’s followed me through half a dozen computers since then, which is a neat trick considering I was running a Commodore 128 at the time.

Twenty years after the fact, live from the Berlin Wall, via dozens of dial-ups from all over the world, you get to read a little piece of history here.

Atypically for an all-American bullet-headed not-even-slightly-Saxon mother’s son, my favorite novel for the last four decades and odd has been Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, which I discovered in high school and which I still reread once a year or so. I admit up front that I was scared spitless when they made a movie out of it, but Tim Fywell’s film was true to the spirit of the book, and Romola Garai won me over as the young Cassandra Mortmain, described thusly at the end of the third paragraph: “I am no beauty but have a neatish face.”

Like hell.

(Photo from InStyle Australia, 11/07.)

In my lifetime, I’ve had one pie thrown at me, which puts me one behind Ann Coulter, and many thousands behind the late Soupy Sales, who took his first pie in 1950.

For your dining and dancing pleasure, we present the redoubtable Mr Sales not being hit with a pie, but demonstrating the fine art of filling time and singing (well, lip-synching to) his big hit “The Mouse.”

To those who are puzzling over the phrase “big hit,” well, it did make #76 in Billboard in 1965 (as ABC-Paramount 10646), and some name-brand pop technicians were on hand: Charles Calello, who arranged all those 4 Seasons hits, did the charts and led the band, and the song itself was written by Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell, who later that year would rework a Bach minuet into “A Lover’s Concerto” for the Toys, which reached #2 with the help of yet another Calello arrangement.

Iowahawk remembers Norman Borlaug:

I have many times driven Iowa Highway 9 through Cresco IA, where a modest sign welcomes you to the hometown of Norman Borlaug (oddly enough the sign also cites the 4 Navy admirals who were born there, as well as “the first airline stewardess”). The sign is in keeping with the modesty of the man himself, who grew up on a small farm outside Cresco. People joke about the flat, boring expanse of cornfield that is Iowa, and Cresco is among its flattest and corniest precincts. People joke that Iowa farmers only talk about the weather and corn. It was this weather and plant-obsessed farmer from the most boring, flat, corn-carpeted part of Iowa who is responsible for saving the lives of a billion, perhaps several billion people.

Gregg Easterbrook wrote in the HuffPo a couple of years ago, when Borlaug received the Congressional Gold Medal:

Do you know Borlaug’s achievement? Would you recognize him if he sat on your lap? Norman Borlaug WON THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE, yet is anonymous in the land of his birth.

Born 1914 in Cresco, Iowa, Borlaug has saved more lives than anyone else who has ever lived. A plant breeder, in the 1940s he moved to Mexico to study how to adopt high-yield crops to feed impoverished nations. Through the 1940s and 1950s, Borlaug developed high-yield wheat strains, then patiently taught the new science of Green Revolution agriculture to poor farmers of Mexico and nations to its south. When famine struck India and Pakistan in the mid-1960s, Borlaug and a team of Mexican assistants raced to the Subcontinent and, often working within sight of artillery flashes from the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, sowed the first high-yield cereal crop in that region; in a decade, India’s food production increased sevenfold, saving the Subcontinent from predicted Malthusian catastrophes. Borlaug moved on to working in South America. Every nation his green thumb touched has known dramatic food production increases plus falling fertility rates (as the transition from subsistence to high-tech farm production makes knowledge more important than brawn), higher girls’ education rates (as girls and young women become seen as carriers of knowledge rather than water) and rising living standards for average people. Last fall, Borlaug crowned his magnificent career by persuading the Ford, Rockefeller and Bill & Melinda Gates foundations to begin a major push for high-yield farming in Africa, the one place the Green Revolution has not reached.

Yet Borlaug is unknown in the United States, and if my unscientific survey of tonight’s major newscasts is reliable, television tonight ignored his receipt of the Congressional Gold Medal, America’s highest civilian award. I clicked around to ABC, CBS and NBC and heard no mention of Borlaug; no piece about him is posted on these networks’ evening news websites; CBS Evening News did have time for video of a bicycle hitting a dog. (I am not making that up.) Will the major papers say anything about Borlaug tomorrow?

Borlaug died last night at his home in Dallas. He was 95. The Washington Post does have a staff story, as distinguished from something copied off the wire services.

(With thanks to Michelle Malkin.)

One of several recently-surfacing photos of Sarah Heath, class of ‘82, Wasilla High School. Apparently there were a few leftover yearbooks; this one got autographed by Wasilla’s favorite daughter and donated to a youth group, which then auctioned it off on eBay, raising $651.50 for their mission trip.

I am told that the book contains ten pictures of Sarah, and five of Todd Palin.

I’d just like to point out that I’ve been to Molly Murphy’s, but not once have I ever set foot in a T.G.I. Friday’s.

The recent death of CompuServe Classic disturbed me greatly, partly because I had no idea it was still alive through half of 2009, and partly because when I first read the article, I couldn’t remember my old account numbers.

I first signed onto CIS (CompuServe Information Service, which nobody wanted to type all the way out in those days) back in 1985, using my trusty Commodore 64 at a startling 300 bps. At the time, I was 72030,117. I dropped the service after a few years, but returned in the 1990s as 73142,1451, this time with an actual MS-DOS machine. Lots of acquaintances over the years, and one actual friend: Dawn Eden, whom I met in one of the service’s music forums circa 1995. We lost touch shortly thereafter, but reconnected, thanks to this screwy blog stuff, several years later.

I don’t have a whole lot of memorabilia from those days: I’m pretty sure I no longer have my copy of CIM (I put off switching to WinCIM as long as I could, but then I put off Windows as long as I could, which explains this) in the Big Box O’ Defunct Software. I did turn up in my archives the text of a couple of emails from Roger Ebert — we had some brief discussion of Bad Movies — and, from ‘94, what purported to be CIS addresses for Penn and Teller. (I was a major Penn fan in those days, since he’d been doing a column for PC/Computing magazine, which was usually about computers and/or Uma Thurman.)

Of course, anyone who remembers CIS also remembers the alternate version: CI$. At six bucks an hour, the tab piled up quickly. Worse, in the Eighties, they charged you according to your modem speed; those hotheads with 1200-bps modems paid twice as much as the plodders like me with 300.

If you’ve wandered by here and wondered “Why the hell is this guy on the Internet?” you’ve just read one of the reasons.

Now this is kind of nifty: a scan of a 1962 (or thereabouts) flyer from Cincinnati Bell that introduces / coerces / foists off [choose one] the wonder of “All-Number Calling.” No more pesky letters!

As a resident of Oklahoma City’s WIndsor exchange, I liked those pesky letters, but for the last forty-odd years the phone company has been making the prefixes, and the locations to which they were assigned, essentially meaningless.

I’ve written on this subject before, but somehow it keeps popping up. And this time, it brought with it a recollection of Allan Sherman’s mockery of the concept, which was called “The Let’s All Call Up AT&T And Protest To The President March.” It went something like this:

Let us wake him up in his slumber.
Get a pencil, I’ll give you his number.
It’s 3 1 8 5 2 7 3
0 8 7 4 2 9 dash!
5 1 1 4 9 0 6 7
4 0 8 5 2 hyphen!
1 1 4 6 2 0 5
7 9 hyphen dash 0 3.
And now that you’re on the right road,
Don’t forget his Area Code.
Which is 5 1 8 2 4 7 9
0 5 hyphen dash 9 4.

Do not try to sing this to the tune of either BEechwood 4-5789 or that song about Jenny.

Food for thought:

Today we remember how Charles Lindbergh had his shoes inspected for bombs before climbing into The Spirit of St. Louis, how Lewis & Clark took nothing but pictures and left nothing but footprints, how Casey Jones passed his Federal Railroad Administration licensing exams, and how the battle stations on the Monitor and Virginia were certified OSHA compliant.

Bless you, Tam.

This is enough, I think:

You and I must make a pact
We must bring salvation back
Where there is love, I’ll be there

And in the end, this, much more than the circus of his later years, is what I’m going to remember about Michael Jackson, gone too soon at fifty.

Now I’m going to go crank up Off the Wall. The man knew how to work a groove.

I never had a picture of Farrah Fawcett hanging on the wall: at the time of Charlie’s Angels, I thought myself too cool for that sort of thing, and besides, she didn’t speak to me hormonally, if that’s the phrase.

Which is a shame, since apparently she was just as nice as you’d hope a Texas girl would be:

[S]peaking as one who was a girl in the Seventies, her Angel heyday, it wasn’t that we wanted to be her. We wanted to be her friend. Because, in spite of her sexiness, what Farrah projected was a lot of niceness. Of course, if she’d been transported to your high school, she would have been the most popular girl. But she would have been nice to the Math Geeks and let the unpopular girls sit at her table in the lunch room.

Which is really about all you can ask for, come to think about it.

Although it doesn’t hurt if you look like this at fifty-seven:

Aside to Ryan, and by extension to many of us: This is why you shouldn’t wait so long.

(Photo by AP/Chris O’Meara at the MTV Video Music Awards, Miami, August 2004.)

At one of those humongous book outlets, I snagged something called The World’s Worst Weapons by Martin J. Dougherty (New York: Metro Books, 2007), and it reinforces my belief that we’re not all that efficient at killing each other.

“Worst” seems to be beyond cavil for at least some of the entries: by the time I was issued an actual M16, they’d supposedly fixed the tendency for the plastic barrel shroud to crack in cold weather, but the rifle’s resistance to dirt was as lousy as ever. (Are the AR-15s like that?)

Dougherty gives good understatement, too. On the Italian Glisenti M1910 pistol, he says:

The detachable left side of the weapon was meant as a convenience. It tended to detach itself when the weapon was fired, however, and this was not a well-liked feature.

I suspect, though, that Tam has read this, and perhaps has already decided that the guy is talking through his nunchaku.

If you’re Joe Cocker, you might need a translator.

(From Boing Boing via Pop Culture Junk Mail. Ain’t it high time you went?)

Not that anyone is noticing anymore, but Pioneer, the last manufacturer of LaserDiscs, is giving up the fight: production has ended on the three current LD machines, none of which are sold at retail in the States but which still sell in small quantities in Japan.

Pioneer dropped its American LD business in 1999, which suggests a pattern of some sort: the last Betamaxes sold by Sony in the US date to 1993, but Japanese models continued until 2002, and video professionals can still find Betacam units.

Yours truly wrote in 1998:

By the late Eighties, most dealers in laser had been pushing the product as “like a CD for video,” despite the fact that the videodisc had existed as a retail product long before the CD. Once CDs began to catch on, Pioneer began producing combination players that handled both LaserDiscs and CDs, which may have been what kept the format going during the inexorable rise of VHS tape. Serious video collectors continued to buy laser when they could, but the mass market was firmly committed to cassettes.

Now, of course, the DVD is here, and it really is “like a CD for video,” and it offers more options than even the fanciest LaserDisc, at a lower price. Assuming DVD doesn’t falter — which assumes, among other things, that it doesn’t trip over Bizarro World marketing ideas like the incompatible pay-per-view Divx discs — it will take over as the format of choice. Of course, I’ll still be playing my LaserDiscs on my current Pioneer player, which conveniently sits on the same shelf as my Beta VCR.

Digital Video Express, of course, was a colossal failure. My LD player, eleven years older now than it was then, is still operating. And, come to think of it, the Betamax still works.

(Via Gizmodo.)

The blessed fog of forgetfulness has settled over most of the therapy sessions I had in the late 1980s, though I haven’t yet cleared out all the memories about that one afternoon with the Holtzman inkblots, ostensibly an improvement over the workaday Rorschachs. Think “frustration coming to a sudden boil” — and a story very much like the story of this T-shirt design at Woot:

The irony could’ve killed him, if the boredom didn’t get him first. Here he was, a “snowman” in a “snow globe” full of “snow”, and he’d never touched real snow in his life. He’d never know how it feels on his plastic skin. He’d never construct a stalwart snow fort, or whiz a lethal snowball through the air, or catch the lacy flakes on his tongue. All he could do was watch it fall. And wonder. And wish someone would come by and shake his globe, just so he could pretend for a moment that a blizzard raged around him as powerful as the one inside him.

The mere fact that I could see something like that in an amorphous blob of whatever suggested, to me and maybe to the therapist, that I was seriously screwed.

This does not mean, incidentally, that I am today frivolously screwed.

Is this the beginning of a whole new meaning for an old word?

We then walked to Macy’s to see their Holiday Light Show and Organ Concert. I remember going back in the late 70’s with my mom, back when it was Wanamaker’s. It was so high tech back then. And now it seems so analog.

“Analog” = “low tech,” I suppose.

Still, I’m going to hold on to some of my “analog” artifacts, if only because under the spreading sweetgum tree in the middle of spring, it’s a lot easier to read a book than to scroll through a PDF file.

The commenter known as Three Legged Bunny offered this summation of Detroit’s happier times over at Cold Fury:

The postwar scramble gave us the 50s dreamland — the best years for American autos no matter how you cut it. Detroit was really spilling blood, gunning at each other via styling boards, and the aftermarket builders — the pioneers of hotrodding — were building onramps to the future in terms of both styling and performance.

Then came the 60s and companies like Packard, Studebaker, and Kaiser — Studebaker offered four-wheel disc brakes as early as 1963, by the way, and Kaiser was happy to sell you a motherfugging fast blown factory engine — fell down dead. Not so much competition, and they got lazier. Styling went straight to wide-track bloat — T-birds porked out dramatically, for example. Muscle cars were a subset, a cool zit on the inflated ass of the overall auto business.

By the 70s there was no styling, no performance really, no nothing. Product from Motown just plain sucked rancid bone.

The chronology is a little off here — neither Kaiser nor Packard survived into the 60s — but the description is fairly apt. The blown Kaiser six, which first appeared for 1954, put out 140 hp (SAE gross), 25 more than the standard version, and five more than Ford’s Y-block V8 of similar displacement. The public, however, had pretty much decided they’d rather have a V8. And Studebaker’s Avanti was so far ahead of its time, it outlasted the company by a couple of decades.

That said, what happened in the Seventies is not so much the fault of Detroit as it was the one-two punch of Washington, which was busy setting emissions standards, and the insurance industry, which really hated muscle cars and set about doing their best to make them unaffordable. Detroit, it is true, did take the cheapest way out whenever possible, but at no time, I believe, did they deliberately set out to make shitty cars; they built to whatever price point could be sustained while still meeting the letter of whatever regulations came down the pike. Not a recipe for great cars, but not really an example of corporate malfeasance either.

Every issue of Popular Mechanics since 1905 can now be searched using Google Book Search, which prompted this observation from Michael Bates:

In light of the proposed auto bailout, the August and September 1959 issues (“Should you buy a foreign car?” “Which foreign car is best for you?”) are worth a look.

This stung. It was right around then that my father disposed of the old Ranch Wagon and started squeezing the five of us into a teensy Ford Anglia two-door, a vehicle I do not recall fondly. For one thing, the odometer (five digits, no tenths) quit working somewhere around 26,898 miles; for another, the starter was engaged by pulling a spring-loaded knob on the dash, and eventually the spring deformed enough to make the knob inoperable. Zero to sixty was debatable; in fact, we weren’t quite sure the thing could even reach sixty. The small size had two advantages, though: relatively low fuel consumption, at least compared to the big wagon, and having to sit so close together somewhat compensated for the wholly-inadequate heater. At least he could have gotten the four-door, which bore the more galactically-oriented name Ford Prefect.

Rich Appel tosses this out in the current Hz So Good newsletter:

July ‘65 was when the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” — a song about a man doing manly things, a song whose appeal was decidedly male — was #1, and went on to be, arguably, radio’s #1 song for that entire year.

My theory? That was the last time testosterone tipped the scales at contemporary radio. The following year, the ultra-macho “Ballad of the Green Berets” racked up impressive 45 sales, but radio’s biggest hits were decidedly for the girls: the Association’s “Cherish,” Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” the Righteous Brothers’ “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration.” The next seven years brought us #1s-for-the-year by Lulu, the Beatles (“Hey Jude”), the 5th Dimension, Simon & Garfunkel, 3 Dog Night, Roberta Flack and Tony Orlando & Dawn. See what I mean?

Was “Satisfaction” the last 45 lots of teen boys could proudly buy before the album age began and 45s became uncool?

Gawd, I hope not, if only because it was the first 45 I ever bought, and I wasn’t even a teen yet. (I turned twelve that year.)

But a larger question now gnaws at me: while I don’t doubt that boys’ and girls’ tastes in Top 40 didn’t exactly coincide in those days, does it make any difference? I remember taking the school bus fifteen or twenty miles each way, and we’d kill time with our own no-budget Motown Revue. (I did a pretty mean Diana Ross back then.)

And the last time I bought a current hit on 45 was … 1987. Same year I bought my first CD player, now that I think about it.

From Vent #226, 25 December 2000, incorporating a memory from 1973:

The old Boston Public Library scowled down on Copley Square, and the interior, all rosewood walls and gooseneck lamps and murals, was a scary sort of place for a kid away from home. And around the corner was the library’s annex, which struck me at the time as a domestic version of those modern soulless bunkers you’d see housing the proletariat in Eastern Europe. In between was a courtyard, seemingly miles, even years, away from the noises on Boylston Street, stuck in the Twilight Zone between the old and the new. I was twenty years old and very uneasy about everything, but here, for a few moments each weekend, I found a measure of peace.

If you saw that and wondered what that peaceful place might look like today, Blair Humphreys will show you. It hasn’t changed all that much, and I’m happy to see that it hasn’t.

I’ve been on edge for a couple of days, but I never had to face anything this frightening:

One Sunday night in late November of 2002, I woke up in the middle of the night with a strong premonition that I had forgotten to do something very important. I was a bit terrified… it seemed to be something VERY important. My mind raced as I thought and thought and thought. As I thought, I began a breast self-examination; it was a procedure I rarely, if ever, did. And that’s when I found it.

And even when you’ve won, you question your victory:

[T]he tough thing about surviving cancer is that you are never quite sure. Each appointment you keep with your oncologist for six month check-ups unnerves you. But then you come back down to earth, and you realize that any moments you get to live life are simply gifts beyond your deserving; and you feel driven to make a difference so that you can show yourself and God that your survival was an important and worthwhile thing. I tend to live life in an attitude of gratitude and have faith that any travesty I am experiencing is there for some greater good. When I forget this, then my friends and family remind me. And, it’s made all the difference.

I’ve stared down the Reaper before, but never quite like that. I think, though, I understand the gratitude: none of us knows exactly when the bell will toll, but each day it doesn’t probably should be considered a blessing.

The storyline went something like this:

Clara Luper had studied Dr. King’s work in Montgomery, where a twelve-month-long boycott of the bus system brought an end to segregation in Alabama public transit. In 1957, her play Brother President, about Dr. King’s work, was presented in Oklahoma City with a cast of members of the local NAACP Youth Council, to which Luper was an advisor; the following year, she was able to present the play in New York.

The tour bus had taken a northern route to the Big Apple, where the children experienced for the first time the joys of non-segregated lunch counters. They came back through the south, where Jim Crow still held sway, and they vowed to do something about it. In her book Behold the Walls, Luper remembered it this way:

“I thought about my father who had died in 1957 in the Veterans’ Hospital and who had never been able to sit down and eat a meal in a decent restaurant. I remembered how he used to tell us that someday he would take us to dinner and to parks and zoos. And when I asked him when was someday, he would always say, ‘Someday will be real soon,’ as tears ran down his cheeks. So my answer was, ‘Yes, tonight is the night. History compels us to go, and let History alone be our final judge.’”

And so it came to pass that Clara Luper and a dozen children walked into Katz Drug Store in downtown Oklahoma City and ordered thirteen Coca-Colas, and not to go, either. White customers left. A crowd gathered, mostly hostile. Luper and company stood their ground. Epithets were hurled. Finally, still thirsty, they abandoned their quest for the day.

The next day, all the children were back, and a dozen more besides, and they had but a single thought on their minds: “Let’s go back downtown.” They did.

History shows that they prevailed. Devona Walker interviewed some of those children for this morning’s Oklahoman, including Clara Luper’s son Calvin, who noted:

Momma always put on this front as if nothing ever bothered her. As if nothing ever got her scared. But I think she did that for us, just to keep us from getting scared. I think she thought that strength would rub off on us.

She was right, too.

This wasn’t the first sit-in at a drug-store lunch counter — there had been a peaceful demonstration the previous month in Wichita — but the Oklahoma City sit-in drew national attention, perhaps because Katz was a national chain. The most immediate result: Katz headquarters in Kansas City ordered that their soda fountains in all their stores would henceforth serve all customers, period. Jim Crow, for once, had been plucked; the wicked old bird would never be the same again.