CONFESSIONS & CAMOUFLAGE

            I have a confession to make. For over a decade I flew false colors so to speak. And worse, it was my own daughter that I used for cover.

           

            It started small. Whenever Wife and I went into a supermarket I noticed the line of rides for very young children just outside. There were little horses that galloped up and down. Miniature trucks that rumbled over imaginary highways. Motorcycles and rocket ships. Each cost a quarter for a few brief minutes. I looked at them and wondered who would waste money on such things.

            Then Wife had Daughter and I found out. It’s amazing how much happiness one could buy for a quarter. The little rides are more expensive now; fifty cents last time I looked. Still pretty cheap for a child’s laughter.

            Then, about the time our tiny lady bug grew into a little girl, we discovered merry-go-rounds. We liked the big ones best with their powerful steeds with flaring nostrils that pranced in endless circles to music box drums and pipes. Daughter would sit in front of me, my arms around her as we went up and down, up and down. Pretty soon as she grew she graduated to her own horse.

            When the ride ended we’d hop off our horses and run to the booth and buy tickets for another go-around. Wife, usually sitting on a bench watching us, would roll her eyes and shake her head. But we were too fast for her! “What a nice dad,” people would say.

            Well, I have a confession to make. I enjoyed those years-ago merry-go-round rides as much if not more than Daughter. Certainly more than macho males are supposed to. So I used Daughter as cover. “She wants to go again,” I’d call to Wife who would frown. But only a little frown. Worked every time.

            Don’t ride merry-go-rounds much anymore. Not since Daughter became a young woman making her own way in the world. But there are other things I still enjoy. Just takes a bit of camouflage. When I was a boy I enjoyed toy soldiers. Still do, only now they’re called “military miniatures” to be painted and displayed in a china hutch.

            Comic books. I still have several only they’re no longer comic books. They’re “valuable collectibles” now. But I never cared much for Superman, Batman and the rest of their ilk. No, my favorite superhero was Scrooge McDuck.

When I was a boy Scrooge and Donald and the rest of the duck gang were drawn by a genius named Carl Barks. (“Unca Carl” to us fans.) When Unca Carl retired he and his wife settled in Temecula, California where as it happened, we lived. I never bothered him of course. But every so often I would stand in our backyard and gaze across the valley toward his home and murmur, “I am not worthy, I am not worthy.”

When I was a boy I also enjoyed toy trains. But no more, now I am a model railroad hobbyist. And I have a splendid layout. My trains cross high bridges over turbulent rivers and pass Lilliputian forests and stop at towns where my attention to detail is astounding.

Admittedly my layout exists only in my imagination but maybe someday. Meanwhile occasionally I grow silent and look into the distance. Wife will ask, “What are you thinking about?” But I’m not thinking. I’m putting in a new railroad station on my layout. One with little people and tiny baggage waiting for the next train.

Dad out.

         

                  

GONE TO THE DOGS

            First, a course correction. On my last DAD blog I announced that on Daughter’s advice, I would blog on a regular schedule (namely Mondays & Thursdays). “You have to be consistent!” she put it. But after I turned off my computer she informed me that Tuesdays and Fridays are much better days!

            I don’t know if that’s true. But I do know that like Custer at the Little Big Horn, in our home I am outnumbered. Wife is a female, Daughter is a female, the family cat is a lady cat, even Daughter’s pet snake is a girl snake. Best I just agree. Tuesdays and Fridays it is.

            Now, as I was wondering about celebrity dogs in my last blog. Back in ye olden days two dogs, Rin Tin Tin and Yukon King (SERGEANT PRESTON OF THE YUKON) had their own radio shows. How the heck does a dog star in a radio show? Answer: stand-ins. Both Rinty and King used human stand-ins, guys who stood in front of microphones and barked, growled, woofed and yipped.

            Whether they did their own barking on their TV shows is another matter. On the other hand Cleo, a basset hound who looked like Tallulah Bankhead (look her up on Wikipedia, kids) was bilingual, speaking both dog and human. True, no one in the cast of her 1950s TV show PEOPLE’S CHOICE could hear her; only the viewing audience. But throughout every program she kept up a stream of observations, wise cracks, etc.

OK, OK, her dialog was actually “voiced” by human Mary Jane Croft. But at least TV dogs like Cleo (and eventually Rinty and King) had to show up for work! And sometimes that work was hard. Take Roy Rodgers’ dog Bullet. Do you know how fast he had to run just to keep up with Roy’s horse Trigger?

In 2010 Bullet’s mounted remains sold at auction for $35,000. But at the same sale the also stuffed Trigger fetched $266,000. Even on his way to the Great Doghouse in the Sky poor Bullet couldn't catch a break.

Some dogs enjoyed all the perks that come with being a celebrity. Stretch Bloodhound in his role as “Duke” on TV’s BEVERLY HILLBILLIES wasn’t required to do much more than look sleepy. Yet he was able to retire at age thirteen with I’m sure a fairly decent pension. And silent movie star Strongheart never traveled without his staff of retainers (manager, valet, press agent and “personal representative”). Strongheart incidentally is one of only three dogs to rate their own star (the others being Lassie and Rin Tin Tin) on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Meanwhile let us shed a tear for those dogs who obtained maybe a pinch of fame but for whom true superstardom was not their destiny. Give up a woof for Rex the Wonder Dog and a yip for Lightning the Dog. And of course Ace the Wonder Dog who played Rusty in 1945s THE ADVENTURES OF RUSTY and Phantom’s sidekick Devil (sidedog?) in 1946s THE PHANTOM. Good doggies all.

Dad out.

LASSIE EXPOSED

This time I’m gonna write about dogs because you can’t go wrong with dogs. People like dogs. And people like movies so I’ll write about movie dogs. Enough blogs seething with righteous indignation. Write about fun things, Dad!

            OK. Oh, and something else. Daughter (who knows all things) tells me I should post on a consistent schedule so my readers (and both of you know who you are) know when to look for me. So from now on I’m aiming to post on Mondays and Thursdays. 

Now, on to…Lassie! And being Hollywood I’ll start with a whiff of scandal.

LASSIE WAS A DRAG QUEEN!

Well, sorta. Every movie and TV Lassie has actually been a male and not the lady dog he portrays. (And yes I know, lady dogs are called bitches. But I can’t, I just can’t. I mean we’re talking Lassie here.) There are two schools of thought as to why this is. The first is that male collies don’t shed as much as lady collies. The second is that being the, ah, heroine “she” should have a larger presence while saving Timmy from the well. Which brings up something else:

TIMMY NEVER FELL INTO A WELL!

When Jon Provost (TV’s Timmy from 1957 to 1964) wrote his autobiography he titled it (tongue firmly in cheek) TIMMY’S IN THE WELL! But in fact Timmy never fell into a well. Into deep pits, raging rivers, pitch-black mines, icy lakes and grasping quicksand, yes. Face it, he was a clumsy kid. Thankfully there was a Lassie or two or three to haul him out.

Yes, it’s true. A LOT OF DOGS PLAYED LASSIE!

Among them: dogs named Baby, Spook, Boy, Howard, Mason, Lassie Jr., Hey-Hey, Dakota, Mire and Pal. Pal seems to have carried a lot of the load, starring in seven Lassie films beginning with 1943’s LASSIE COME HOME. Pal also went on the road to meet and greet fans at dog shows, county fairs, rodeos and the like.

Of course they had to use several dogs. If the original Lassie (Pal, 1943 movie star) was still making personal appearances (and yes, “Lassie” does to this day, often for a line of pet food) he’d have to be in dog years seven hundred years old!

Next Monday we’ll investigate other dark secrets of Hollywood canine celebs. Who was Cleo with the soulful eyes and sexy voice? Why was Duke replaced on the BEVERLY HILLBILLIES? There were two dogs who starred in popular radio shows. How the heck does a dog star in a radio show?

Until then, Dad out.                     

                       

CHARGE OF THE OLD SOLDIERS

            Most neighborhoods had a kid like, oh, let’s call him Bobby. 

He was the kid who, while maybe not wealthy per se, was still a little better off than you. At Halloween he trick-or-treated in a store-bought costume while you wore a threadbare sheet with scissors-cut eyeholes. At the movies he bought the big tub of popcorn which in a spirit of noblesse oblige he might (or might not) share with you.

But the most infuriating thing about Bobby was the power one kid had over the rest of the kids. When they played basketball he called the shots. Because he owned the basketball and if he didn’t get his way he’d just take it home and nobody got to play.

In case you ever wondered what happened to Bobby (and his bratty sister Brenda) they grew up to be hard-core republican congressmen and women. Now a clutch of them have the people of the United States over a barrel. They want their way and if they don’t get it, well they’re just going to take their basketball and go home.

In their wake the national government has been crippled, parts of it sputtering to a halt. People can’t get into national parks and monuments. That’s sad. Head Start kids can’t get into class and workers can’t be paid the money they earned. That’s tragic.

Recently a few men refused to put up with it. World War II veterans they came to the capital of the nation they had defended. Looking at their craggy faces I was reminded of a book/movie titled WE WERE SOLDIERS ONCE AND YOUNG. Upon their arrival they were told they could not visit their own monument.

They didn’t return to the bus. Instead they lined up in wheelchairs and on crutches and canes and charged, pushing aside the barricades. If any national park rangers resisted I suspect they didn’t resist very hard. Even a few congressmen, sensing a photo-op, came out with appropriately sympathetic expressions.

When Daughter (who is of voting age) asked me what could be done about all this I had to tell her I don’t know. I only wish we had congressmen/women like Jefferson Smith. In congress Smith’s pet cause was a camp for poor youngsters “in the Western outdoors.” Asked for his philosophy he answered, “…looking out for the other fella.”

Unfortunately Jefferson Smith was a fictional character played by Jimmy Stewart in the 1939 movie MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON. If he were to exist today I imagine House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, would find him quaint and probably a little laughable.

I’ve only met one congressman in the flesh. He was a rock-ribbed, hard edge republican on a quick district visit to show the flag. After a staff-written speech he stood briefly in the parking lot while people asked him questions. Some he answered; some he didn’t.

I had a question. While I asked he looked at me for maybe three seconds, then through me for three seconds as if I wasn’t even there. Before I could finish my question he turned away without a word and, surrounded by aides in expensive suits, got into an expensive car. Today he is retired with a nice pension. His son (of the same name) runs the family business now, so to speak.

I’m sure I slipped from his memory within moments. But thirty years later I remember his arrogance. That’s what voters do. We remember. Something some congress people might want to remember themselves.

Dad out.

VIDEO GAME MAYHEM

               In the first 24 hours of GRAND THEFT AUTO V’s release nearly twelve million of the games were sold. Like it or not ultra-violent video games are here to stay and the bloodier the better. While neither Wife nor Daughter (the gamers in the family) have yet to buy GTF they enjoy some violent games. But generally their games are set in post-apocalyptic worlds where they blast spidery/monster thingies into multi-colored goo. 

In any case a hue and cry has been raised concerning ultra-violent games’ possible influence on younger players. (Actually Daughter is the family expert on gaming, violent or otherwise. See http://www.gamesr4fite.com.) But meanwhile I find myself wondering if ultra violent games do influence impressionable players?

Pop quiz! What two things do Richard Speck, Charles Whitman and Charlie Starkweather have in common? Answer one: all three were young American males who felt no compunction about snuffing out the lives of fellow human beings. And two: none of them had ever played a video game, violent or otherwise, in their lives. In their time transistor radios were about as high tech as the average American got.

On the other hand Dr. Fredric Wertham, if he were here, would argue that video games do indeed influence America’s youth and not in a good way. There were no video games in his day either. But there were comic books. And crime and ghost story comics, insisted the good doctor, were a direct cause of young people committing violent crimes across the nation. Even Superman was suspect.

So in 1954 he wrote a book titled SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT. In period magazines and newspapers there are photographs of earnest adults burning stacks of comic books. Barely twenty years had passed since the Nazis had burned books they didn’t like either.

Yes, movies and television shows are becoming more gory, excessively and unnecessarily so. But that’s not new either. Take movie director Herschell Gordon Lewis (Please!). No, he is not studied at the University of Southern California’s film school. He made a few soft-porn movies (GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BARES). They didn’t do all that well. Then he discovered gore.

Not just splattered blood gore. Slice and dice, rip and tear, dismember and disembowel gore. Movies so gory theater managers refused to show them because patrons vomited on the seats and floor. So throughout the 1960s and early 1970s Lewis showed them in drive-ins, movies like BLOOD FEAST, COLOR ME BLOOD RED and his magnum opus, GORE-GORE GIRLS made a fortune (all lost in bad investments). 
    

Have we become more violent as a society? Maybe not, maybe we just have better technology. In 1881 the infamous gunfight at Tombstone’s OK Corral claimed only three lives, nothing compared to today’s mass murderers. But then Wyatt Earp and his brothers only had primitive six-guns. Now if Doc Holiday, instead of a borrowed shotgun, had a modern AK47, well… (Incidentally Earp contemporary John Wesley Hardin murdered 44 men before he himself was gunned down. So serial killers aren’t new either.)

Maybe violent games are a bad influence. Do violent kids become violent adults? I don’t know but I offer this: Lincoln Park in West Seattle, Washington is haunted by the ghosts of numerous outlaws, enemy soldiers and even a few space aliens. I know because years ago I personally shot them with my cowboy cap pistol. And I don’t even step on bugs if I can avoid it.

Dad out.

THEY CAME OUT OF THE WOODWORK

           They came out of the woodwork almost immediately, the haters. Even as Nina Davuluri was crowned Miss America their venomous tweets were already seeping into the internet. They hurled names like mean children throwing rocks at a bird sitting on a limb. “Terrorist!” “Anti-American!”

“I am disgusted,” screeched one, “that a true 100% American did not win.” Never mind that Davuluri was born in Syracuse, New York which makes her as American as Mickey Mouse and hotdogs. A graduate of the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Science degree and a straight A GPA, she is considering becoming a physician as is her father.

But none of that matters to the haters. What matters to them is that in her features can be read her heritage of Mother India. Never mind that she was born in Syracuse. “Demand to see her birth certificate!” howled one tweet.

Which brings me to a man I know who was not born in Syracuse. He is a Sikh, born in the Indian Punjab, inheritor of a great warrior tradition. When India was the Jewel of the British Empire the Sikh cavalry regiments with their great stallions and pennants fluttering from nine-foot lances were the backbone of the Anglo-Indian Army.

The man looks every inch the Sikh he is, bristling black beard, obsidian eyes, precisely wound turban. He is married to an Indian lady and they follow the ways of their forbearers. But I doubt that he would have made much of a warrior. Better he be what he is, a small-town veterinarian.

I only saw him lose his temper once and that was at us, Wife, Daughter and me. Daughter, who loves all living things, had rescued an abandoned cat. The cat was terrified. And coated with dirt, its matted fur alive with crawling things. We brought it to the veterinarian. He looked at it and then at us.

“HOW LONG HAVE YOU HAD THIS ANIMAL!” he roared.

“About twenty minutes,” squeaked then eleven-year-old Daughter.

Reassured that we had not abused the shivering creature on the examining table, he apologized, carefully examined the cat, prescribed some things and told us to go home and give the cat a good bath. Then bring it back to begin its shots.

Daughter came back again and again, sometimes dragging me along. Soon she was appointed official-comforter-of-frightened-staying overnight-animals. Occasionally she did little chores for which he gave her a couple of dollars. And because she was truly interested, he eventually allowed her to watch while he performed minor surgery on hurt animals.

We worried for his safety in the aftermath of 9/11. Haters can be found in small towns too. But we needn’t have. No one called him hateful names or scrawled hateful things on the walls of his pet hospital. The parade of hurt and sick animals to his clinic continued unabated.

And why not? True, he in his turban and his wife in her graceful sari looked a little exotic compared to us in our J.C. PENNEY jeans and shirts. But they were and are as American as us. As American as my ancestors who fled starving Ireland only to find NO IRISH NEED APPLY signs in Boston store windows. As American as Nina Davuluri of Syracuse, New York who has just been crowned Miss America.

Dad out.
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TEX AND I IN NEW YORK

Standing on Fifth Avenue in New York City I craned my neck upward and wondered how the hell they get the toilets to flush on the ninetieth floor! Think of the water pressure it must take! A moment later a postal worker trundled a wheeled bag through a door. In a regular town a letter carrier’s route is horizontal. Like house to house, you know? But in mid-town Manhattan it’s…vertical.

            I’d flown in that morning on a 747, the first time I’d flown in a plane big enough to have its own zip code. I was on assignment, an interview. Talk, talk and back the next day. No time to see the Statue of Liberty. 

            I defy anybody not to be overwhelmed the first time they see New York City. But then the tallest building in the town I was living in at the time was only three stories tall which made me pretty easy to be overwhelmed.

            Standing outside the hotel I saw my first real-life New York doorman. He wore a crisp white uniform with enough gold braid for a South American general. Two generals!  I wasn’t sure what the protocol was. Was I to tip him when he opened the door?

            I was rescued by a friendly voice behind me, a colleague who wrote for a paper in Texas. He wrote elegantly, his prose graceful, each word carefully chosen. But when he spoke it was with a Texan twang strong enough to hang laundry on. "Don’t worry," he assured me, “lessen they call you a cab or somethin’.” The interview was the usual pantomime, the subject doing his/her best to look excited as I asked the same questions the previous five journalists had asked. Afterward I met up with my Texan friend in the lobby. With a little spare time I wanted to see the Statue of Liberty. Too late, closed for the day.

The hotel concierge, hearing Tex’s drawl, sort of sniffed and suggested that we “gentlemen” might enjoy a nearby music club known for its western ambiance. Maybe he thought we’d be more at home there. In any case we walked the four blocks (to the concierge’s horror. Apparently people don’t walk in New York, they “cab.”) to the club.

A band on a small stage was laying waste to a perfectly respectable Hank Williams tune. The floor was filled with twenty-somethings in jeans and Stetsons drinking beer out of long-necked bottles. Tex (who hated being called that) ordered us a couple. When the crowd heard his west Texas twang they were entranced. “Say something else,” they pleaded. 

But when I took out my credit card to pay it brought down the house. “Look,” someone cried. “It’s got a stagecoach and horses on it!” Well, yeah, we (Wife and I) happened to bank at Wells Fargo. So?

“I reckon,” yelled Tex, “they figured that when the automobile got invented the Wells Fargo folks burned the stages, turned the horses loose and went out of business.” In any case neither of us had to pay for a beer the whole evening (kind of wasted on me since I don’t really care for beer).

The next morning, I boarded a plane home with an I (Heart) NEW YORK coffee mug for Wife (no Daughter yet) in my camera bag. The 747 roared into a cloudbank. I peered out the window searching for the Statue of Liberty below. But all I could see was cloud. To this day I still haven’t seen the Statue of Liberty.        

                  

Dad out.

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