These are stories written down when the mood strikes and I remember them. As I read them over, some are my favorites, some are boring. Best to skip around.
Marty Workman, Ed Derika, myself and a few others were at the lunch table. Marty was sitting next to Ed. Marty looked at the mashed potatoes on his plate and decided it would be more interesting to see if they stuck to the wall when thrown, rather than eating them. So he winged the potatoes at the wall, and sure enough they stuck.
The lunch room monitor was a big nasty tank like lady. She caught this out of the corner of her eye, and was pretty sure she saw Marty do it. She storms over and yells "Who did that!" in Marty's face. Marty calmly replied that he thought they were always there. This made the tank lady even madder, demanded again to know WHO did it!
Marty looks at the lady. Marty looks at Ed. Marty looks back at the lady. Grits his teeth, looks at Ed, looks at the lady, face contorted in the pain of one facing a serious ethical dilemma, finally stares the lady straight in the eye and says "I refuse to rat on my friend."
With that the lady literally yanks Ed out of his seat and starts dragging him away. Ed's totally flustered, saying no no, Marty did it, and Marty's looking grim, says, "I tried to cover for you Ed". Ed's telling the lunch lady Marty did it, but that just makes it worse, now, not only guilty but looking the coward trying to blame his noble friend. Ed didn't get back from the principal's office til after lunch.
Penny was my high school girlfriend. We were walking home from school one day, and she wanted to see what it was like to be blind, so she was going to walk with her eyes closed, holding my hand.
Well I didn't believe she really had her eyes closed, so as a test a steered her into a lamp post, which she hit, because I was wrong. OK, ok, for the women reading this, I was a jerk.
Penny didn't see the humor in the situation and was furious. She made the worst threat a woman can make. She said she wasn't speaking to me anymore.
Still thinking it was all a bit funny, despite the bump on her head, it just popped into my mind to make a counter threat. I told her I wasn't listening to her anymore. I explained how this absolutely cemented a one-way communication between us, I could talk and she could listen, but she wasn't talking and even if she did I wasn't listening.
I just babbled on about whatever the rest of the way to her house. Boy was she mad, but couldn't say anything because of her threat.
Which reminds me of a very influential series of books in my life. These were Gamesmanship, Lifesmanship, and Oneupsmanship by Stephen Potter. Gamesmanship was subtitled how to win without actually cheating. Very funny stuff. Recommended reading.
I messed around a little with card tricks when I was 14 or so. And for some reason the thought crossed my mind that the ultimate card trick was to fan a deck of cards, have the person pick a card, and immediately guess it.
With any normal magic trick there is always some manipulation, or marking, or something, that is used to let the magician identify the card.
In my ultimate trick, there is nothing. Pick a card, I tell them what it is.
How can you do such a perfect, pure trick? Luck.
I figured it I showed this trick to every new person I met, eventually I would get lucky and someone would be totally amazed by the trick. So I started.
All through high school, and into college, I kept showing people my trick, always explaining after the fact why it didn't work, but always knowing that eventually someone would be blown away.
It happened in my early 20s in a hut part way up the Matterhorn. There was a deck of cards. I had sort of given up on my quest, but there was a deck of cards, nothing else to do, and Kevin hadn't seen the trick, or non-trick if you prefer.
So I told Kevin I could do the ultimate card trick. Told him to pick a card, he did, I told him, with total confidence as I always did, that it was the queen of spades. No reaction. I asked him, "well?"
He showed me the queen of spades, but still absolutely no reaction.
I was beside myself, I'd waited 8 years for this to happen : "Aren't you impressed?"
"No, there's some trick to it..."
My mom used to like to take in stray dogs, cats and the like. I don't remember too much about them, except they never stayed that long for some reason. Probably because my dad didn't really like pets.
One day there was a golden/green parakeet in the apple tree in our back yard. My mom decided to see if she could catch it. We had a parakeet cage from failed parakeet pets of the past. So she tiptoed very quietly and very calmly out towards the bird. When she was fifteen feet from the bird it suddenly flew up, right to her, and landed on her shoulder.
She walked in the house and the bird came too. Stayed for a number of years. We called it Goldie. It informed us its name was Chipper. OK.
We never locked the bird up, but it went in its cage at night. It also nested in other parts of the house, including in the back of the book shelf, making a nice nest in an old volume of the complete works of Shakespeare. Chipper digested some pretty heavy reading material.
Chipper would usually be riding around on someone's shoulder. Loved to peck at my mom's earings. Loved glasses. Used to terrify the neighbors when they came to visit, if they wore glasses. Chipper would try to land on them.
Chipper woke me up in the mornings, got to be a pain sometimes. Damn bird walking around on your back with its clawed feet. Would also share my breakfast, land on the table, walk on the plate wading in the too-much maple syrup I had on my french toast, take a few nibbles.
Once when I was sitting in the bathroom, Chipper landed on the full roll of toilet paper on the hanger. Then tried to take off, but the paper rolled backwards towards the wall, taking the bird with it. So Chipper was stuck, flapped his/her (we never knew, probably her because of the nest building?) wings, and ran, almost made it and rolled back. Kept doing this and doing this, starting to build up a pile of toilet paper on the ground. I was dying of laughter, eventually the bird had unrolled so much paper it fell through the space between the wall and the roll. Wasn't hurt, because it fell on a large soft pile of toilet paper.
When I came home from school, my mom would meet me at the door. She would come to the door, with Chipper on her shoulder. Chipper would actually fly outside to me and then walk back in the house with me. Did this for years. But then one day, a big truck came rumbling down the street, scared the bird, and she took off. We'd found her before after outside adventures, but she flew away from the truck all the way down the street. Never found her again. Cried, and wondered if she'd adopted some other family and brought them as much happiness as she had ours.
Kevin was my best friend in elementary school. He wasn't actually in my classes, as he was a grade behind, but we were close to the same age, as I was probably about a grade ahead of my age. (I skipped kindergarten. That was the peak of my academic career.)
We played a lot of stick ball, with a square painted on a wall for a strike zone, a broom stick for a bat and a rubber ball. We had two fields, Yankee Stadium and Ebbett's Field. Yankee Stadium was behind the school with plenty of room to hit the ball, like the real Yankee Stadium. Ebbett's field had a fence in closer, like the real Ebbett's field.
It was always the World Series, and I was the Yankees and he was the Dodgers. He was winning in the seventh game once, and it was the last inning, and I had two (imaginary, because that's how you play stick ball) runners on. It was at Ebbett's Field. I had two outs. And hit the next pitch over the fence.
Kevin was a good friend, as excited about the drama of the finish as I was.
And the pros talk about living their dreams in the real World Series, but its hard to imagine it could get any better than that.
Growing up my dad was always a Dodgers (that's the Brooklyn Dodgers for those of you born after 1960) fan, and I was a Yankees fan. He was broken hearted when they moved to L.A.
When I reached college age, I began to think my dad had always been right. The Dodgers had soul, the Yankees were a mercenary baseball machine. This thought bothered me for most of my adult life.
At around the age of 50, I was eating sushi with Mary in a restaurant in Boston, and a guy sitting next to us was wearing a Yankees hat. So I started talking NY and baseball, and told him about how I thought I'd missed out not routing for the soul of Brooklyn, the Dodgers.
He said five words that lifted the weight of the World off my shoulders: "They left, the Yankees didn't."
I've since enjoyed routing for the ongoing mercenary baseball machine as the Yankees continue to win. Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantel, the tradition continues. Yeah New York! Yeah money!
Maybe you don't understand baseball in the 1950s. It was big, really big. It was the only game in town. The other major league sports were trivial by comparison.
When the World Series started, America shut down. We'd all listened to those squawky transistor radios in school. The teachers didn't mind, except for a few, I don't know what they were thinking, lady teachers. The men teachers, and most of the women teachers were as interested as we were in how the games were going.
I spent one summer almost entirely at a Putt-Putt miniature golf course. Putt-Putts, if you know, positioned themselves more as a golfer's putting course. The holes were all fair, and the putts ran true, and thought was given to providing good but challenging ways to get in the hole.
I got really good. I mean really good. Maybe the height of my athletic career? I shot a 28 one day, almost always broke 36.
The next year, maybe I was 16 or so, I took up real golf and went with my friend Sid to the Salisbury public course. The guy paired with us didn't look too happy with playing with a couple of kids.
Sid and I hacked the ball down the fairway, probably got on the green in 8 or 12 or something, and was 12 feet from the hole. One putted. The guy was impressed with that shot.
Did that on the first 6 or 7 holes, a lot to get to the green, drain a great putt. Shot 100 plus a lot, but one-putted most of the greens.
And so many years later I married Mary, and bragged to her about my prowess at miniature golf, and she beat me! How devastating. Turns out, she's really good at putting, and somewhere over the years my touch with the putter has left.
My dad liked to get up early, get going. He got to work at 7am. I take more after my mother, sleep late, stay up late.
My dad believed, like many apparently do, that the correct way to play golf is to get up before dawn and get to the golf course when the dew is still on the grass.
So that's how he taught me, and at our public course what you did that early was wait for one to two hours to be able to play. My dad told me one of the advantages of getting there that early was the short wait.
It was only when I started playing with my friends that we discovered that you could get to the golf course around 11 or 12, and make a much more enjoyable day of it, with usually a shorter wait as well.
18 was the legal drinking age in New York. The Spring after my 18th birthday I played golf at Bethpage, and after the round realized I could buy a beer. But I knew I looked young for my age.
So I took out my draft card, driver's license and college id, and laid them all out on the bar as proof, and ordered a beer.
The bartender was in his seventies or maybe eighties, hunched over, moved real slow. Looked at me, glanced at the ids, looked at me, and said in a slow old creaky voice : "I don't care sonny, you're too young to drink."
I had a Coke instead.
So here's the biggest moment of a boy scout's life. The National Jamboree, held in Colorado Springs, 1960. We had a Jamboree troop composed of the kids who were going from Levittown.
It's 4 or 5 days. First we have to set up camp. We've got this big gateway thing to put up. Hard ground, huge posts. We need a post hole digger.
Madden is the scout master. He's a drill sergeant sort of guy, wants to lay down the rules.
Here's the rule. No one leaves camp until the gate is up. We don't have a post hole digger. We want to go borrow one. We can't leave until the gate is up. But we need a post hole digger. We can't leave.
First two days of the experience of a life time for the Levittown scouts was spent in camp because we didn't get the gate up.
Finally, two guys snuck out of camp, borrowed a post hole digger, dug the holes, and we got the gate up.
Of all the things at the Jamboree, patch and neckerchief trading was the biggest for many scouts, including myself.
What a lesson. Here's how you build up your collection.
You start with a bunch of your own troop patches. They have a certain value. The heavily embroidered multi-colored patches are worth the most. National patches are also worth a lot, such as previous year Jamborees.
You make one-for-one trades of your patch for ones of equal value. Now you've got a selection.
Then you make a three-for-one type trade for a really fancy patch.
Then you make a four-for-one type trade to get four patches for your fancy one.
If you play the game well you can wind up with a lot of nice patches.
My cousin Carol, who was a little older than me, was marrying Butch, from Union Springs Alabama. Butch had never been up North, let alone in the "big city". I was maybe a senior in H.S., and had spent a fair amount of time in the city, so it was decided I would take Butch on a sight seeing trip to New York.
I was suave and sophisticated. Butch was Alabama country. He's looking up at the buildings and amazed. I'm being cool like only a 17 year old can.
Next we're going to the Empire State Building, which was at the time, and had been for quite a while, the tallest building in the World. Butch says, "wow, wouldn't be amazing if someone jumped off!" I explained to him how no-one had jumped off since the early 1930s and it was impossible.
He said, yeah, but wouldn't it be neat. I explained again how it couldn't happen. I told him about the fence at the top, and the guards that wouldn't let you get to the fence.
He still went on about maybe someone jumping, and wouldn't it be neat if we saw someone jump.
I told him even if someone did jump, the building is tiered and those that jumped in the past rarely reached the street level.
We turn the corner to the Empire State Building and there was crowd gathering. We got closer and there was a blanket thrown over a corpse and blood and flesh splattered everywhere.
It was the first guy to jump off the Empire State Building in thirty years, and he made it all the way to the street.
My grades in H.S. were OK, not great, but I did real good on the science/math parts of the SAT (aptitude tests used by college admissions) tests, getting a perfect 800 in advanced math and a 785 in physics. (To be fair, the advanced math was easy that year, and a perfect score just put one in the 97th percentile. The physics score was actually better.)
And my parents, or rather probably my mother, had decided Brown would be a good school to go to, which was OK with me, so I applied for early admission, no scholarship, and got in, but with a caveat. The admissions people were happy with my math and physics smarts, but thought I was real weak on writing. I don't remember how bad the English SAT score was.
I had to agree to take their remedial writing class. The rules were, it was one semester, and if you got a B or better you were out, otherwise you did it again. I took it for three semesters.
Funny about teachers. The first semester was a woman who was into creative, expressive writing. I finally understood what she wanted by the end of the semester and wrote an essay about my father, and how he was so well liked, but that was because he reflected what other people wanted to see, and that you never really saw him. I talked about the hidden sadness. She loved it. I got an A. But too little too late, had to take it again.
Next teacher was a very logical man, wanted very precise writing. But still fresh from the previous semester, I wrote emotional flowing essays, all of which failed in his class. By the end, I was writing logical well-thought out essays, but again too little too late.
Got it the third time. Those classes were good for me, and maybe the best, education/career wise, that I took in college.
But I started this story thinking about religion and right and wrong, and how my views have been the same for so long. The first teacher had us write an essay on good and evil. And I wrote that there was no such thing, it was all relative. And I thought I did a good job.
I got a failing grade because I didn't write about the difference between good and evil. So I had to rewrite it, making my points clearer, about how good and evil is all relative, human defined, sort of the oneness of the Universe sort of thing, and no such thing as absolute good and evil.
The teacher had me in for a conference to discuss my second failed attempt. She said I had to write about good and evil. I said I did, I expressed my views on the topic. She got all upset and said in exasperation, "how can you lead your life like that?!"
So finally settling down to math courses. Was taking a course on advanced algebra with a text by Hernstein, which, curiously enough, was the math course that did Mary in, in her college career.
Very egotistical teacher, insisted we do not read, that's do not, read the text, but instead learn from his lecture notes. But my style was always to cut or sleep through class, and then study the text just before the exams.
The teacher didn't like my attitude.
Final exam is for all the marbles. A take home, open book exam, with a bunch of difficult proofs. The teacher told us not to read the text book however. That is, the assigned text book for the course we weren't supposed to read.
But I did anyway. Turns out half the questions on the exam were proofs done in the body of the text book. So, I read the book and put in the proofs. And proved the other ones.
The professor was furious. Gave me an E. No comments on any of the proofs, purely subjective grade. In math. A subjective grade. I went to meet with the professor, he hated me. Said he'd give me a passing grade if I promised to get out of the math department for good. I said I wanted to stay in math. So he gave me an F instead. Difference between an E and a F? an E meant you failed but could retake the course. An F means you can't retake the course.
Meanwhile, I was taking a course in romantic poetry, Keats, Shelly, Byron, Blake, I really liked Blake, Wordsworth and those sorts of guys. The professor was one of those extraordinary professors whose class was filled with kids not taking the course, and who always ran over the time limit, and nobody ever moved. Great teacher.
I remember one lecture on understanding. He drew a curve of depth of understanding versus grade achieved in a poetry course. Grade increased as understanding did, up til a point. After that, the more you understood, the worse your grade got.
He was interested in having us really understand.
I'd written what I thought was a great assignment on Wordsworth. Got a B+ and a meeting. He said it was very poorly written arguments, but he read it three times to try to understand the point I was getting at. Once he understood, he thought my analysis was excellent. So he couldn't give an A, thus the B+. Imagine that, a professor willing to wade through some student's lousy English to try and understand what the student was saying.
He's the one who inspired me on Nietsche. One lecture he was talking about the tension between religion, philosophy and the agonizing realizations that atheism must bring. He said only one person ever fully grasped the tension between them, and that was Nietsche. A pause. And he went crazy. End of lesson.
Post script : I learned afterwards that teacher was fired. Why? Some students were really worried about their grades and what would be on the final and stuff like that, and went to see him. He told them he didn't care how they did on the tests, he wanted them to understand the poetry. They pressed on. He got frustrated and said the test is meaningless, here, he said, take a look. It means nothing.
Professor showing the students the test before the exam? Scandalous. Fire the bastard.
Brown had a good hockey team, the games were fun, all the excitement packed into a noisy relatively small arena.
We had two outstanding characters. I don't remember their names, but one was a guy who was relatively short, but very stocky, and prematurely bald. (He looked a lot older than a college kid, he was the one who always bought the beer.) He was our bull. When someone needed to get hurt, we'd send this guy out.
The other was the exact opposite. Our best scorer and star of the team. He was a figure skater. Tall, angular features, very preppy, lots of class. Looked more like he belonged figure skating than playing hockey, but very quick and very good. Never lost his cool, always a gentleman.
One game, the opposing goalie whacked him with his stick, blatantly, but the refs missed it, but the fans didn't. And Leon (was that his name?) seemed to have lost his cool, and circled back towards the goalie.
The whole arena went quiet. The players all stood still, It was just Leon with his stick in hand skating slowly right at that goalie. He looked pissed.
The ref put his whistle in his mouth, Leon got closer, the goalie started to step back in fear, and Leon just twitched his stick, didn't pick it up, just a little fake. The goalie fell down trying to avoid the blow that didn't come, the ref took his whistle out of his mouth, Leon skated back to center ice and the place went crazy.
We hated Cornell. They had an agricultural school as well as an Ivy league one, and they were close to Canada, so they would recruit hockey players to their agricultural school, and then compete in the Ivy League. Didn't seem quite fair.
They recruited a guy who was the best goalie in college hockey. He had some phenomenally low goals against average, when he came to play us at Brown. He later went on to become a pro, and established all sorts of NHL records as well.
This guy was so good, that the game was packed with people that wanted to see him as well, not just our team.
What happened? Brown 8 Cornell 0. We pummeled him. It turns out that it was the one blight on his otherwise fantastic college career.
So I saw one of the best hockey goalies ever give a performance that was probably the worst performance I'd seen watching college hockey.
In college, I climbed a lot with our outing club, and we had safety rules as to who could go and who couldn't. We were planning a trip to West Virginia to go caving for a change. Not wimp walk through the cave stuff, but technical caving with ropes and rappelling and all. And prussiking.
Prussiking is how you climb a skinny climbing rope to get back out of a cave. You stand in slings tied to the rope with a very clever prussik knot. It binds on pressure, but is easy to loosen and slide up the rope. So you alternate standing in one sling and the next moving them up the rope.
We did training in a tree. Only those could go who were able to prussik up the tree. We were all pretty good, and only Ross had trouble with it.
Ross had been on rock climbing trips before with us. He was an accident, not just waiting to happen, but continuously happening. He always came back all beat up and bruised.
But none of us had a car, and Ross had his dad's big station wagon, so we decided Ross could go.
Hell Hole rotted up from below. A giant domed cavern grew and grew under ground, until at 186 feet tall it broke through a farmer's field. And that was the way into the cave. From the top of the dome.
Art, the best caver amongst us, spliced two ropes together, twice, giving us two 300 ft ropes. We lowered them in the cave and rappelled down. No problems. And walked around exploring the giant pile of bat shit on the floor of the cave.
Time to prussik back up the ropes. Cherry and I were up, but Art and Ross were still down there. Art went up on the parallel rope with Ross.
Ross got to the splice after a long time, but couldn't get the knots over it. Art was working his and Ross' knots. Ross was getting pretty tangled up.
Art struggled and struggled with Ross. Finally Art, whose was a pretty strong guy, lots of one-arm push ups and the like, gave up and came up.
He had given everything he had, a normally jovial sort of guy was physically shot, and just stopped when he got in sight of us. In a weak voice, asked us to pull him out the last little bit. Amazing to see such a strong guy completely and utterly exhausted.
Now what? We tried to simply haul Ross out, but we couldn't budge the rope. Too much weight, too much friction over the wall that made up the upper parts of the trip down.
So we got Ross' car, drove it into the field and were going to use it to pull Ross up. We got the car in placed, but it had started to snow, and the tires slipped when we tried to pull the rope.
So we made a road out of pine boughs. It worked! the car started to move and up came the rope. For a bit, and then the car simply died.
But we had gotten Ross to the higher part, where there was a wall to touch. With Ross with his feet on the wall, and us pulling from above we were able to get him to just where we could see him. And no more.
It turns out we had tied our pack on the end of his rope, to haul out later, and it had gotten jammed somewhere.
So we went down the little bit and Ross' slings were wrapped so tight it was impossible to untie them. We had to cut him loose. Who knows how he got them that way. The whole adventure took over 24 hours.
Came back the next day and rappelled down to get the pack. Got Ross' car fixed, and that was it for caving.
The lead rock climber climbs above the belayer holding the safety rope. The rope is threaded (snap linked in actually) through carabiners as the leader progresses, so if the leader falls, he/she will drop to the last carabiner and the same distance below.
The second, holding the belay rope, must now stop a fall of what could be ten to fifty or more feet. It's called a dynamic belay. It takes some practice.
Our plan for teaching climbing at Brown was to find a tall (40-50 feet) tree, and haul a heavy weight up the tree. Then the practicing belayer would have a second rope, with about 20-30 feet of slack in it, going up through a sling in the tree and attached to the weight.
We'd cut the weight lose, and the belayer would have to stop it before it hit the ground.
The belayer has the belay rope wrapped around his/her waist, and is tied to a tree so the force of the faller doesn't pull him/her into the air.
The tree we wanted to use was in a public park in Providence. We knew we'd get in trouble doing this, so we went to the head of parks in Providence and told him our plan and asked for permission. He thought it was cool and wrote a letter giving us permission.
So armed with our letter, old climbing ropes, a big old heavy radiator and a volkswagen, we went to the tree and set it all up. It worked great and we were all doing well catching the falling radiator.
Then, as expected, the police showed up, ready to put a stop to it. So I went over the patrol car with my letter and started explaining it to them. They were fascinated.
Now Dan was the next to try it. He laid out 25 feet or so of slack in the belay rope and someone drove the volkswagen tied to the weight to get the weight up in the tree.
They didn't know anything about rock climbing and I was explaining to the police how you stopped the fall by wrapping the belay rope around your body.
Dan was ready, with coils of slack at his feet. Cherry was ready to pull the slip knot on the Volkswagen to free the radiator. I was with the police car, where there was the anxious expectation of a circus crowd.
The weight started down. But Dan, like captain Ahab of Moby Dick fame, had his foot in one of the coils of rope. The belay rope tightened, but around his ankle instead of his waist : whoop : up he goes feet first towards the tree, held down by the restraining rope, instantly suspended upside down between the two.
I'm gaping in horror, hoping he's OK, as the policeman calmly remarks "oh, I see, you wrap the rope around your leg like that."
Dan was OK.
2004 Jan 01 : Cherry and George overlapped with us at Michael's house in Norfolk, and she brought a copy of Guy and Laura Waterman's book, Yankee Rock & Ice, which I either didn't know about, or had forgotten about.
I used to climb with Guy sometimes at the Gunks. He was a Nixon speech writer who dropped out of the establishment, married a younger woman, and bought a house and some land in Vermont and lived without many modern conveniences.
His sons used to hang around the Gunks as well. Johnny Waterman became a pretty good climber, and eventually met his end climbing on Mt. McKinley, now called Dengali. Billy Waterman was pretending to be a hobo and lost his foot when it got run over by a train in a rail yard.
I just heard from Cherry that Guy recently died, and he did it Indian fashion. He simply walked off into the woods when he knew his time had come. Don't know much more than that.
Other friends have died as well. Kevin Bein was killed in a climbing accident in Europe. He was the one mentioned in the card trick story when Cherry, Kevin and I were climbing the Matterhorn, which we failed to get up, which was embarrassing, because it was supposed to be easy, but maybe not when we tried because it was still in Winter-like conditions.
I enjoyed climbing with Guy except for one thing. His idea of a good day's climbing was to get up before dawn, hit the rock at first light, and climb, climb, climb all day. I, in general, preferred a more leisurely start.
Reading his book was very nostalgic for me. It brought back a mix of emotions. But in particular it brought a sense of failure and loss, which might be strange, considering I'm mentioned in the book a number of times as one of the elite climbers of the day.
When I was climbing, there were a number of mentors and steps. First, someone I don't remember introduced me to climbing on a small outcropping in Rhode Island's Diamond Hill state park. He thought I was a natural, and I loved it.
From there we started an active Brown Pembroke Outing Club (BPOC) group dedicated to rock climbing. Through Tom Parr, a Brown graduate student who received his undergraduate degree at MIT, we hooked up with the MITOC, which led to eventually being taken up my first 5.8 at the Gunks by Willie Crowther.
There was always a fair bit of competition in climbing. I remember how hostile the other MIT climbers were when I, and unknown to them, made it up hard climbs at Quincy Quarries that they failed on. It was only Crowther, who wasn't threatened by my emerging ability, that remained friendly.
I had decided to try to become part of MIT's Advanced Rock Committee (ARC) organization, which graded climbers. I was already leading on my own, but to get their certification to lead within their group, I first had to be a qualified second. So I started up a climb (5.6) with one of their leaders. It turns out he couldn't make it over the crux second pitch. So I offered to do it. He reluctantly said OK, not wanting to rappel down, and I made it up easy, he was pissed, and failed me on my second qualification. That was the last I had to with the ARC.
I must admit, the competitor in me enjoyed these moments of irritation I created for the MIT climbers.
Shortly there-after, we met Kevin Bein and Al Rubin from the Harvard Mountaineering Club. Kevin pushed my standard further, introducing me to climbs and climbing at the top range of what was being done. He was also a much friendlier competitor than the MIT types, and a real pleasure to work on hard climbs with.
He was also accident prone. He took a 50 foot fall to the ground on a very easy climb when he grabbed a belay ledge and the whole ledge came down. He was in the hospital for a few weeks, lost a lot of weight, and found that he could do almost twice as many one-arm chin ups.
Not too long after, he was leading Criss Cross, a hard 5.9 with some contorted moves and found that each position put him in pain and to relieve the pain he moved to a different position, which created more pain, and in the process of trying to relieve first this pain, then that, wound up on top of the crux.
It wasn't the only time Kevin was in the hospital. Once in a car with a bunch of friends he grabbed someone's metal water bottle, and they said don't drink it! And Kevin, being Kevin, quickly gulped down as much as he could. Except it wasn't water, it was gasoline for the small climbing camp stoves.
Kevin was a good friend of both Cherry and I, and it was Kevin that Cherry ran off which led to me living with Ann. No hard feelings, all still friends.
But I think, in retrospect, it was Sam Streibert who really might have broken up my marriage to Cherry. I was very excited about my developing skills in rock climbing, and had met Streibert who was famous for his Connecticut climbs with John Reppy at Yale.
In Streibert I found a climber of my own temperament, and one who would push me further. I really wanted to pursue climbing with him. Which pissed Cherry off, because she wanted us to be a climbing couple. Big fight ensued, I continued to climb with Steibert, Cherry hooked up with Kevin who wanted to climb with her.
The years spent climbing with Streibert were some of the best of my life. We did all sorts of hard things, just below the leading edge of the sport. We were a notch down from Stannard, the premier climber in the Gunks, and chasing his leads.
Streibert was a perfect partner for me. We were competitive in the best sort of way. I remember once driving up to New Hampshire and seeing this big boulder by the side of the road, driving by it and commenting that it probably hadn't been climbed. Quickly decided to stop the car and both of us took off at a mad sprint in an effort to get the first ascent.
It's the climbs with Streibert that led to the mention of my name in Yankee Rock and Ice. We got credit for putting up the first 5.10s in Connecticut and New Hampshire, and opening up the world of vertical ice climbing at Frankenstein cliffs in New Hampshire.
These were exciting times for me.
What was good is we were equally matched in our abilities, although I like to think I was a little better technically. But he was clearly the one who had the drive, energy and ambition that brought us to where we were.
Intimidation was probably our finest climb, with 6 sustained pitches of 5.9 and 5.10 climbing on Cathedral in New Hampshire. It was a typical effort. The first pitch was one of the hardest, first Sam, and then I would try. After a number of attempts, I finally made it up the difficult layback, over the nasty bulge and up to the belay. Sam led next, them me. I was exhausted by the end, and Sam had to help me over the crux moves of the last pitch, which he led. So there you have it, I made the break through on the hard first pitch, Sam's stamina got me through the end of the climb.
In the Gunks, we were going for second ascents of Stannard's various routes. Probably my best lead was the second ascent of Comedy in Three Acts, which was upgraded to 5.11. But we were most famous for trying the second ascent of Foops, an 8 foot ceiling that Stannard had freed after a 150 or so attempts.
At the end of one season, I finally made it to the lip of the roof, only to fall off trying to get up on the easier rock above. Didn't get there again that season.
At about that time Henry Barber arrived, climbing with Bob Anderson. They started doing absurd numbers of 5.10s each day. They heard of our efforts on Foops, and Barber went and got the second ascent.
He was an unknown to me. A high school kid with a foul mouth and a course in-your-face competitive attitude. He said his goal was to be better than Stannard. His partner, Anderson, said his goal was to be better than me. Both easily reached their goals.
Like the small-minded embittered MIT climbers I had pissed off early in my career, I was pissed. Barber and Anderson took the joy out of climbing for me.
I didn't like being passed by an upstart, and I didn't like how John Bragg, who was getting better as well, although John was a nice guy and occasional climbing partner. I also liked Bob Anderson and did some climbs with him and even did some work with him on an academic paper on the economics of oil paintings.
So reading the book, I read of Barber's continuing exploits, and Bragg's work, and remember the feeling of complete control I had on some of Ragged Mts overhanging rock and its clear to me I could have stayed in the game and continued to be a force with Streibert.
The party continued without me, and I feel a little sad.
On the other hand, my fingers were getting sore, the knuckle joints don't work well to this day, and I was very much into seeing what I could do in the real head-to-head competitive world of bike racing.
I wouldn't want to take the bike racing experiences out of my life. But interestingly, they followed the same pattern. I had a little talent in a sport with a very small following (bike racing was very small in America in the 1970s), so I was, as in climbing, one of the larger, but not largest, fishes in a very small athletic pond. And the sport grew around me, with bigger fishes coming in, I got relatively smaller, and didn't like it and moved on to concentrating on the business world and putting my talents to work in software, which had just been a means of sustenance up to that point.
And here I am today. One of the larger, but not largest, fish in the small computing pond of logic programming.
Cherry and I lived either upstairs or downstairs from Denny and Jo Carol on Monument Sq. in Charlestown. Denny was working on his PhD in political science or something at Harvard, and was a serious distinguished sort of fellow. Jo Carol was a perfect counterpoint, a wild and crazy Southern girl without that much education. Denny loved her, his proper up-tight family didn't.
A year or so after they or we had moved, I was at work and the guards at work told me two guys in suits were looking for me, but wouldn't say who they were. I joked, probably the FBI.
Later that afternoon they showed up, two very serious, tough looking guys, didn't say much, just flashed a badge and said "FBI, we want to ask you a few questions".
Sat down in my office, and this one guy makes a big show of sitting his hip towards me and with his elbow moving his jacket so I could see this monster gun. These guys were very intimidating.
Said they wanted to talk about Denny, he'd applied for a high level government job and they were doing a security background check on him. So I'm telling them what a nice guy he was and stuff, but they kind of hemmed and hawed and finally got around to what they were really looking for.
They wanted to know if Jo Carol fooled around or not. Can you imagine, these two tough guys with their badges and guns, intimidating the hell out of me, just to gossip about wild and crazy Jo Carol. What a job.
(Jo Carol when we knew her was very devoted to Denny, not even hints of fooling around.)
And she had these stocking tops. Where she lived in the South was close to factory that made yarn. The yarn all comes out white, and then package it up and then they dye it. To hold the ball of yarn together, they would put it in the top of a nylon stocking. I don't know why, but that was what they did.
So a by-product of this factory was tops of stockings, all dyed the different colors of their yarns. And the locals all collected them, for stuffing pillows and what not.
Jo Carol had tons of them, and she used them to improvise a couch, like one is prone to do as a student. She had a mattress on the floor, covered in stocking tops. You just plopped down in the middle of all these brightly colored things.
And if you got a little high, or even if you weren't, then it was fun to throw them in the air and watch them fall back down, and the ceiling had a rough sort of paint and some stuck, making the place look like a cave with technocolor stalagtites (the tites go down).
The apartment was just refinished when we moved in and the owner was very proud of the work he had done, creating more up-scale apartments in typically down-scale Charlestown.
But not exactly suiting to Cherry's and mine more hippy tastes.
So we asked if we could repaint the place, and the landlord said sure.
So we did. But we didn't want to be conventional, so we painted the walls white, and then penciled in two big blobs, like in a lava lamp, that didn't respect boundaries of wall, ceiling or closet door. Then painted one blue and one yellow. Covered most of two walls and about a quarter of the ceiling and half the closet door.
It looked really neat.
Well Cherry was more the hippy than me, and when we split up, Cherry stayed in the apartment drifting more hippyish and I moved in with Ann drifting a little more conservative. And I paid the rent and kept Cherry going. So the landlord knew the situation, and dealt with me as the responsible one.
Finally Cherry moved to New York, and then the landlord went to inspect the apartment. He went balistic. He calls me up, furious, and he was dead certain that I, the responsible one, probably had no idea of what that crazy hippy woman had done to his apartment. So he told me in no uncertain terms.
I was total sympathy, who would believe she could have done such a thing!
I was with Ann just a day or so when a rapist, who had been there before, came through the window of Ann's apartment. She didn't live in the upscale part of Charlestown.
He had a mask, we could only see part of his face, and he left on seeing me there.
Called the police. It's like they hadn't seen any police shows on TV or something, they put their fingers all over the kitchen knife he had held as a weapon. They didn't really care much, didn't seem they though there was much point as they wouldn't catch the guy.
A couple of days later Mike&Jimmy called (singular because they seemed like one person) from the Charlestown police. They wanted us to come to the police station and identify the rapist, who they were sure they caught.
They said, is that him? and we said, we thought so, but couldn't be sure, although seeing him gave me a shiver.
So then they said, I'm going to show you a bunch of pictures and I want you to pick him out. So we did.
The alert lawyers reading this should be jumping up and down, saying that's illegal! You can't show someone the suspect, identify the suspect for them, and then have them pick the suspect out of a bunch of pictures.
Mike&Jimmy told us this story, this guy was borderline moron, had been a sex problem ever since he was of age, and they almost got him last year after he'd raped a nine year old girl. Had the whole case built and ready to go to court, but the parents moved the girl out of Charlestown and decided the trial would be too traumatic and she didn't testify and they had to let the child raper walk.
How frustrating to be a cop, to have the bad guy, a guy who does real bad things, and let him walk.
So now they had him, and weren't going to lose him again.
So comes the trial, and Mike&Jimmy coach us on what happened. They told us that we would be asked if we picked him out for the first time by going through police photos, and we were to answer yes. They made sure we understood. We did.
And the DA puts us on the stand and asks us if we identified him from the photos, and we said we did.
Summarizing to this point : the police wanted to get this guy, and they cheated on the evidence to get him, and we the witnesses were involved, and the DA was involved.
It was just business as usual for them.
And he had a public defender. And the guy used an alibi as his defense. He was at a Red Sox's game. His girl friend (the town pump according to Mike&Jimmy) testified how they were there, what the score was, who played, and how he'd brought her little brother as he was such a nice guy.
So the DA called as a witness the Red Sox's scheduler who testified the Red Sox not only didn't play that day, they were on the road.
And the public defender made this stirring closing final argument : you remember the woman (Ann) said she had cats, well, where were the cats?
I suspect he was in on it too.
So did we do right? Should we have blown the whistle on the cops and DA and whole system? And let a known rapist walk again? Or put the guy who had threatened our lives away for a long time. And save the next woman from a surprise visit through the window from this guy.
O.J. trial comes out years later, and people are asking incredulously, if the defense was really implying that there was a conspiracy between the cops and the prosecution and all those involved in handling the evidence in the O.J. trial. Like that's nuts.
Mark Firman (was that his name) said that's the way they did business.
That's certainly how they did it in Charlestown.
They're keeping bad guys off the street the best they can. Right? Wrong? What if they knew O.J. did it, but didn't have the evidence to put him away? Let him walk? Plant the glove and nail him?
Business as usual? but O.J. didn't have the public defender Ann's rapist did.
Alice of the amazingly large breasts and I went skinny dipping on a secluded beach on Plum Island, when along comes this small plane. It starts flying really low over the dunes. Alice was just at the water's edge coming back to the beach, I was up on the beach. I was watching the plane. The pilot was watching Alice. He was coming lower and lower, but didn't level off just over the dunes, but was on gradual crash course, I could see his face, just staring at Alice, not a clue as to how low he was, I start waving like crazy, he suddenly breaks out of his trance and yanked up on the yoke and away. The hazards of skinny dipping.
I worked at Draper Labs, formerly the M.I.T Instrumentation Labs, for the first nine years of my working career.
Draper was my first job, and where I learned my work ethic. I had been looking for a job and couldn't find one. A friend of mine, Orin Anderson, asked if I knew how to program. I said no. He said that wasn't a problem, and he'd teach me. He was a manager at Draper and hired me.
We got to work around 10 or 11, took two hour lunches to work out at the gym, but stayed til 6 or 7.
Except Thursdays in Winter, when we got to work a 6 AM. That was because we wanted to make it to the N.H. ski slopes by 9.
Life was tough.
But we got a fair amount done, the work was fun. We were sending men to the moon. But I certainly wouldn't call government work high pressure.
These were the hippy years. I often showed up at work wearing cut-off jeans and a tee shirt. Barefoot. No problem.
I mention this because, pay close attention, there was a guy who was fired from Draper for not meeting the dress code. (We're talking obscenity here.)
However, my outfits did get me in trouble. These were the antiwar years and Draper also built cruise missles. Actually they specialized in inertial guidance systems, which is how they were in both the moon and missile businesses.
There was a big protest in front of the lab one day, and the guards wouldn't let me in. Took a while, even with my badge, to convince them I worked there.
Which leads to funny politics. Lots of pressure on the labs to stop doing military work. It was the M.I.T. Instrumentation Lab then, and lots of people were saying it was inappropriate for a University to be involved so heavily in defense.
So the lab was getting work in more peaceful areas, diversifying. But the protesters kept protesting.
So, M.I.T. decided to divest the lab, and it became Draper Labs instead. And they drew up a huge document that basically said Draper and M.I.T. would have all the same relationships they always did, with the one exception that the very top management of Draper would be independent of M.I.T.
So it appeared like the protesters won, but they didn't. M.I.T. was just as deeply into work at Draper as it always won, and, now that Draper wasn't officially part of M.I.T., it didn't have to pursue those pansy non-military projects anymore. So it actually let M.I.T. get deeper into military work.
Draper Labs was named after Doc Draper who I guess invented inertial guidance and made a name for himself inventing inertial gun platforms for ships in WW II. Apparently these turned around our ability to fight off waves of Jap Zeroes, as they provided a stable platform for the gunners to shoot from.
He was quite a character, lots of folk lore. He was a shriveled sort of old man when I worked there, and wore a beret and drove a convertible sports car, like an MG or something. He always parked it backfirst, and the story goes this was a quick get-away habit he got into when he was running bootleg liquor during prohibition which was how he paid for his M.I.T. education.
Another story, like the time the gunners ran when the planes game and Doc went and took the guns himself and started shooting and the admiral was all upset trying to get him back to a safe place.
So to Apollo. The lab management was downplaying military work, and upplaying Apollo work, and in general trying to keep public relations good and avoid conflicts with the large anti-war, anti-military sentiments of the time. This meant not letting Draper speak to the press too often.
Anyway, they land on the moon. In celebration, a truck full of Champagne shows up at the lab. In about a half hour everyone was drunk, and Draper gets on a table and starts making a speech with the cameras rolling and all.
He said he was proud of his roots, proud of the way the lab has always worked with the military, and Apollo was great, but he was proud of the missiles we built and our role in keeping America strong. It was great. The professional managers were all trying to get him off the table, all hiding their heads.
We were working on the optical backup navigation system for Apollo. It was pretty cool, the astronauts could navigate to the moon and back using a sextant, just like the ancient mariners.
One of my jobs was to program in mission trajectories and output graphs of the earth and the moon at different stages to show what landmarks were available for sextant sightings.
This was before computers with graphic screens, and the pictures were drawn using a pen and ink plotter.
I got the trajectories wrong on one mission, and at work the next day was presented with an entire roll of graph paper. It started out with a big picture of the earth, and small moon, as it should. The next picture the earth was smaller, the moon was bigger. All good so far.
The moon got bigger and bigger, and then started getting smaller. Uh oh.
The moon and earth got smaller and smaller in each picture. After about half the roll, the earth and moon were just tiny dots, but the plotter plotted all the continents and lunar landmarks anyway, digging holes in the paper where the earth and moon were.
I became good friends with Dana Densmore at Draper. One of her claims to fame was being listed in Playboy magazine as one of the ten most dangerous women in America. She was the head of Cell 16, the Boston militant feminist group and a black belt in Tae Kwon Do.
But she wasn't really like that, just a nice person trying to make it through life like the rest of us.
I went with her a couple times to her informal workout, organized by her friend Jane and her (Jane's) boyfriend, both also black belts.
I learned some things. First is don't spar with the yellow belts. They're much better than you but don't have enough control to avoid hurting you.
Second is, everyone should spar with a black belt sometime in their life. It's a mind opening experience.
I had done OK sparring with the other beginners, and had frustrated the yellow belt enough that I got hurt, so I was feeling like I was doing pretty good when I started sparring with Jane. The next thing I knew her fist was in my stomach up to her wrist, and I never saw it coming. And more amazing, it didn't hurt because her technique spread the force out, but if we were fighting for real...
And then I sparred with her boyfriend. You see those big roundhouse kicks in Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies and think they'd be easy to block. Well we were sparring and he was facing me and then he spun around and the next sensation I had was his instep laid flat across my spine. I never saw it coming. To this day I don't understand how his foot got there.
And if fighting for real? Rather than a flat instep with force distributed across my back, it would have been a knotted ball of his foot breaking my spine. shivers and chills...
I did get the upper hand on Jane once, when she wanted to play my sport, which was bike riding. She wanted to get in better cardiovascular shape. So we started up Belmont Hill, where we always started bike training rides. Jane was a big woman, great strength, but not necessarily good strength to weight ratio needed for hill climbing.
She was going slower and slower up the hill. But she's not the sort to quit. She kept pushing the pedals, slower and slower. Finally, without ever taking her feet off the pedals, she keeled over sideways onto someone's lawn. Like the little tricycle guy in the old Laugh-In TV show.
We knew Tom Parr from the geology department at Brown, and his old MIT buddy was Orin Anderson. Tom used to think up crazy stunts, and Orin would do them.
Tom and Orin were working at Draper when I was looking for a job. Orin asked me if I knew how to program. I said I didn't. He said, that's not a problem, we'll teach you.
He explained it like this: You write a program and one of two things happens. Either it works or it doesn't. Usually it doesn't work, in which case you fix it. Sometimes it works, in which case you change it.
I've been doing that ever since.
Orin was as ugly as you can get, but in a pleasing sort of way. He was prematurely bald, but had a ring of hair he let grow long in the style of 60s. He had a broken nose.
He wanted to be a jet pilot and fight in Viet Nam. He started down that course. Everything was a go, he was intelligent and athletically gifted. But his nose wouldn't fit in the face mask, so they told him he couldn't be a military pilot.
So he became an anti-war activist instead.
A number of years later I wound up working at McDonnell Douglas for a few weeks and saw the fighter planes taking off. I'd never seen them up close before. What a rush. I'd have bombed orphanages and stuff too if I could have done it from one of those.
Orin decided to get into car racing in the formula V class. These were Volkswagon chassis and engines, but souped up and very light, so they moved right along. The big thing being, everyone, theoretically, was driving the same type car.
We were in the pit for him at one race, and our job was to let him know his position on each lap of a twisting road course. He finished the first lap in 12th. Next he was 11th, then 10th. A position better each lap. 9th, 8th, 7th, 6th........we were counting cars 1,2,3,4,5,6 no Orin, 7,8,9,10,..... no Orin. He'd wiped out in a ditch full of mud. Car and him completely covered, but neither seriously damaged.
Orin like to push the limits in street driving as well, but didn't want to break the law. So he would drive around Boston at the speed limit, 30 mph. Never 29, never 31, always 30. Around corners, between cars where there wasn't enough space, zig-zagging through traffic. Always at 30. Terrifying.
When Orin learned to ski he rented some skis and went up to the top of the mountain on the expert slope. He crashed a lot and his skis kept releasing, as they're supposed to. When he got to the bottom he figured out how the bindings were adjusted, and set them so his foot couldn't come out, no matter what.
Then he went back up to the top of the expert slope. And that's how he always skied.
He finally decided to quit Draper and become a ski bum in
There were automatic doors on the Stop and Shop where Orin always shopped. He learned the door's timing precisely. He knew exactly how fast he could walk at the doors and have them open just in front of his face.
It was pretty amazing to watch. Orin would walk straight at the doors without slowing down, with his hands swinging casually at his side, and the doors would open letting him pass through with about an inch to spare.
One day the doors were broken. Orin didn't know and was doing his trick. BAM! straight into them. Put another wrinkle in his nose.
Cherry was big into the music of the 60s, and found out about all sorts of cool concerts. There was a place on Berkeley St in Boston that was an old warehouse that was the in place for new music. A stage and just a wooden floor for the people. No seats, nothing.
Probably the biggest band we saw there before it was big was Led Zeppelin. Was it cool? All I remember is it was very loud, and I don't think I like Robert Plant that much, but its cool to be able to say I saw them when. Since, of course, I believe them to be the greatest pure Rock and Roll band ever.
Also saw the Jeff Beck group there. I liked them better. And some other notables of the time but I can't remember who.
That place also used to show underground art films as well, so it had music, beers, and funky movies. I remember the watermelon movie, which was about racism. Just one horrible thing after another being done to watermelons. Funny until you see the analogy. And the one with the apple stripping, the music of the stripper, and then each frame was an apple with a little more of its peal off.
The other notable small time concert was Jefferson Airplane. Saw them in a very small night club type place in Boston. All I remember is how cool the drummer's arms looked making these swooping circles down on the drums.
We saw the Cream in concert, liked them then, still like Eric Clapton. Also saw Janis Joplin and Big Brother.
Saw the Rolling Stones after they were big in a huge place in Rhode Island. It was awful. They were microscopic and the sound system was just noise. So we listened to this din for however long the concert went, watching some very small people a long way away who we were assured were the Rolling Stones.
There was an active Snipe (two person sailboat) fleet on the Mystic lakes in Winchester. There were two boat clubs on the lake, the exclusive Winchester boat club, and the more working class Medford boat club.
So we joined the Medford boat club and bought a used Skipper Snipe. The Skipper was cool because it couldn't be swamped, and was built in Denmark or Sweden or somewhere like that.
Michael came up with the name, the Gnome. And we started racing.
Initially we were well behind the other boats, but after a number of races we started to get the hang of it. We were on our second circuit and right in the middle of the fleet, full in the race, Michael and I were working smoothly in the boat.
We're coming about at the mark, right in the midst of it, our best race so far. Michael smoothly released the jib on port, shift to starboard, sat on the gunwale, pulled in the jib, and in one smooth motion leaned back to hike out and slip his foot in hiking strap.
But his foot missed, and whooops, a clean back flip out of the boat.
Big dilemma for me, continue in the best race so far, or go back and rescue my crew.
Winchester had a representative town meeting government. Neighborhoods would elect town meeting representatives, and the town meeting acted as the legislative branch of town government. A board of selectmen was the executive branch.
My neighbor urged me to run, as they had trouble filling all the seats. So I ran with the campaign slogan "if nobody else wants it, I'll do it". Good enough, I won.
It seemed like a microcosm bigger politics. Some observations:
All a legislative body can answer is yes/no questions. That's what a vote is. This was actually quite frustrating as we worked over the town budget. There was no ability to make trade-off decisions.
So we could make individual yes/no votes on individual budget items, but not have any big picture input.
So a regular at town meeting was our representative to the state legislature. He was always there pointing out what he had done for the town lately.
There was an old bridge over abandoned railroad tracks in town. The bridge needed repairs.
Our state rep knew of an obscure state law that provided state funds for situations regarding abandoned rail road tracks. So he was able to get state funding to repair the bridge, so the town didn't have to pay for it.
So you can see how it goes. He saves the town some money. He could do that because he'd been in state government long enough to know all these bits and pieces. So the town pols appreciate that and work for his re-election.
The general electorate is really none the wiser. All they see is lots of �elect this guy' stuff, but its all there because the locals are working for him, and they're doing that because he is working for them.
You see Ted Kennedy, barely able to talk straight sentences through his alcoholism, probably guilty of manslaughter, get re-elected year after year. Why, because with his seniority he's better able to bring federal money into the state, and those in the state that directly benefit turn out to actively work to keep him in office.
The job of town selectman is a thankless one. These guys are up late hours, dealing with all sorts of various issues, like this restaurant's liquor license, the budget, park space, etc. Lots of boring reading, lots irritating people.
And no salary. Strictly volunteer.
The year I was involved in town politics, the selectmen vying for re-election were spending around $10,000 each on their campaigns.
This was in the 1980s. $10,000 for a chance to do a real pain-in-the-ass job. Why?
Strangely, all the selectmen were also in the chamber of commerce. And you know what a top priority of town government was? Revitalizing the downtown Winchester business district.
Town funds went into fancy lights, brick sidewalks, commercial court yards, etc. etc.
There were lots of families in town. Most people I know really wished we had a town swimming pool. But we got bricks downtown instead.
Because someone who wants a pool isn't going to spend $10,000 of their own money to get elected to a position that will let them help make that happen.
So you watch that happen in Winchester and suddenly understand the how and why of millions spent on national campaigns.
The people working on the town government issues had little use for those with personal complaints.
There are always trade-offs, like where the low-income housing should go, or if a bike path should be built, or a dead-end street connected.
When the residents on the dead-end street come out and start pitching their case to the town meeting, well, we're all working at this stuff, and they don't do anything for the town except protest when its their little bit of turf.
Absolutely no sympathy.
Moral : if you want to get something done in the town, you have to be involved in more issues than just your own pet project. Politics is scratching each other's backs. The more backs you scratch, the better chance you have of getting your own scratched.
Dom diVincenzo and I coached youth soccer for a number of years. Both our sons were on our teams.
When I told Michael, he was real excited. Wow, my dad's coaching my soccer team. But then a cloud came over him and he said with all seriousness, "but dad, you don't know anything about soccer."
I told him not to worry and not to let the other kids know that.
But I learned. We got training. It turns out the International Soccer Federation, or whatever it was called had a meeting and decided to help third World countries develop better soccer programs.
Well, in soccer, the United States was a third World country.
So they developed a technique for teaching soccer, and trained the top coaches in the World to teach it. That was the 'A' level.
They taught the top American coaches. The 'B' level.
They taught those below them, etc. The program was designed to ripple down to the youth soccer programs.
We had the coach from the local junior college come to Winchester to train us how to coach. We were the 'E' level. It was good stuff.
Dom and I made a good team. I understood the drills and what we were trying to accomplish. He knew how to get the kids to stand in straight lines.
Michael's progress was interesting. He wasn't the most athletic kid on the team, and usually played uninspired soccer. But occasionally he would get this spark in his eye and go after the ball with clarity of purpose. When he got that way he dominated the field. And then it would pass.
I don't know what made it come and go. I guess its like that for all athletes, sometimes you're in the zone, and sometimes not. But when he was on, he was unbeatable.
The best moment came one year when he was playing goalie. Someone had told him a trick for stopping penalty kicks, how to leave more net open on one side to get the kicker to kick for it and to dive for that open area as he's kicking.
One day the moment happened. It was the closing minutes of the game. It was a close game. The other team got a penalty kick. The best, coolest, most athletic kid (and popular) on the other team was making the kick. But Michael had his trick up his sleeve, and he was in the zone.
The other kid slammed a powerful kick into the wide open half of the net, and to his and everyone else's surprise, Michael was there with the save.
Michael and I signed up for scuba lessons at the Woburn Y. We got to see some neat stuff, like all the hair in the drain in the middle of the deep end of the pool.
One of the exercises was introduced by the instructor telling us there was a trick to it. It was a game to teach us to be comfortable under water without our masks.
The game went like this, we all stood in the shallow end of the pool and the instructor took all of our masks to the deep end of the pool and dropped them in.
Our mission was to scuba to the deep end, find our mask, put it on, clear it, and scuba back. First one back wins.
You could tell by the looks on the faces of the other students that no one saw any trick to it. Except Michael. Could have been a cartoon with a light bulb going off in his head.
The instructor said go and Michael was off like a shot.
I, and the others were all murking about, picking up goggles, holding them close cause you can't see clearly under water without them, trying to find ours, and eventually finding them and swimming back.
I was about in the middle of the pack getting back, but I knew Michael had figured something out and had expected him to win. But he wasn't there.
Gradually the others game back, but no Michael.
We were all back, and Michael was still swimming around. Eventually he came back too.
So here's the trick. You pick up the first pair of goggles you see, hold them on and now you can see clearly to find your own. Michael understood that.
Only trouble was, the first pair he picked up was his own.
I had a Rubik's cube that was solved, and Diana at the age of four or five said she could solve the puzzle. I told her it was hard. She said she could handle it.
So I just made one rotation, and she put it back.
Then I did two, no problem, and three no problem.
She was full of confidence and wanted to try a harder one.
So we did four and she made a false move and it just started getting more and more scrambled.
She studied the cube, assessed the situation, and said "dad, we're going to have to peel the colored stickers off and put them back on to get it right again."
It's seems there's always courses around that promise various sorts of spiritual enlightenment. Orin went to the Silva Mind Control weekends and said they were good, but was irritated because he thought that sort of information should be free to everyone.
So we tried it. It has a bold premise, it promises to teach psychic functioning and if you don't believe you're doing psychic things at the end you get your money back. Well it's a rip off because it turns out that everyone's psychic. It's sort of like promising that you can see at the end.
They use simple bio-feedback to get your brainwaves to beta frequencies around 7 cycles per second, which is where meditation happens. This speaker makes low beeps at that frequency. You learn to relax and let your brain frequencies get in sync with the speakers.
Then you learn to visualize. You can see things, imagine things, and things happen when you do. At the end they teach you how to "see" people's ailments.
The final tests work in pairs like this: one person thinks of a person with some medical problem, called a case. The reasoning is medical problems have deeper vibes associated with them. The other person meditates, and when ready is told the name of the person. The one meditating then tries to visualize the person with the problem and determine what is wrong with them. After a few tries it becomes surprisingly easy.
But the results are strange. One case I was given turned out to be a person with a heart problem. When presented with the name I got an instant and perfectly clear vision of the person's upper arm with what looked like the bone inside curved in an unnatural way. I told this to the person giving me the case, saying I thought it was a problem with the arm. The person had some sort of hose inserted in their elbow that went to the heart.
They also taught that if you visualize a result you want in life, it will often happen. They call it active visualization. Goes by the name of prayer in many other circles. It works. But there's something strange going on...
I had some amazing results with it. Most spectacular was the neighbor's daughter was having a bed wetting problem, well past when it shouldn't have been a problem. I went back to my house, visualized the end of the problem for the girl.
The neighbor reported the girl had no problem that night, nor any night following.
Lee was the boyfriend of a woman living in our house. He was diagnosed with leukemia. He was given a relatively short time to live. A couple of us from the Mind Control class visualized his leukemia disappearing.
Next doctor's visit the doctor apologized, said there was no sign of leukemia and they must have misdiagnosed it the first time. Maybe, but sound the Twilight Zone theme anyway.
I have a ton of stories. None good enough to convince a skeptic, but plenty good enough for me to know something was happening.
But here's the other side. I was in bad state, I honestly don't remember what, but all I know is I had been in a state of turmoil for four or five months. I suddenly remembered Mind Control and visualized the turmoil settling. It did, almost instantly.
But why did I wait five months? It got me thinking, maybe the whole thing was backwards. Maybe we are drawn to visualize when we psychically know change is about to happen.
Because it is hard to visualize some things, to force images of outcomes you think you want, but may just not be in the cards.
See Reflection.
I was riding my bicycle to one of the Mind Control classes. It was when I was racing and totally believed that a bike has a right to a portion of the road. I did not ride in the grit on the side when a car came up, I held my line on the good pavement. Besides, the grit causes flats in the racing tires.
I heard a car coming up behind me and a voice in my head, it was really just like that, a voice said get over in the grit. I answered it, no, I don't ride in the grit for cars, it has to go around. The voice said get in the grit. I said no. It said it a third time, louder in my head, so I moved over in the grit, wondering why. I had never moved over for a car since I started racing, which was a couple of years.
As the car overtook me I looked and it was giving me a wide berth, as cars do. It wasn't even close to where I was. I felt foolish and started to get back on the pavement and was almost hit by the wide trailer the car was towing.
But Reflection again, why did that happen? It happened when I was learning about psychic functioning. I needed to learn about it then. Haven't had a similarly dramatic experience since.
Ramona was an ex-Silva person who branched out on her own, wanted to do more psychic things. She was into real psychic stuff. It's a mix of showmanship and the real McCoy.
She did a reading of the Winchester house. Hadn't seen it, didn't know where it was. Was just getting a reading on the house. She looked puzzled, and said she saw lots of pieces of bathrooms.
The house had 5 half baths, 1 half shower, and 1 full bathroom.
So, this was a woman who taught how to use active visualization to change things. She was undoubtedly a powerful psychic. She was big, an imposing presence of a woman.
She used visualization to lose weight. It just didn't work. She did all sorts of amazing things, but she couldn't lose weight.
I think that's the key. She couldn't lose weight because she simply wouldn't be her if she did. Her size was very much a part of her.
She thought she should lose weight, she wanted to lose weight, but those desires went against the grain of the reality of her imposing presence. So it didn't happen.
I decided I could teach the Mind Control meditation, diagnose illness thing in a flash to anyone willing to try. So I showed Barbara, who was living with us at the time, how. She very quickly and naturally reached a deep meditative state.
I gave her the case I was thinking of, which was a heavy one. It was the brother of someone we knew who was a cop who was murdered in his home.
Barbara's face, remember the person doesn't know anything of the case, just a name, her face became frozen in fear. She was going through some horrible experience. I couldn't get her out of her state. It seemed like minutes before she came back. She was feeling the horror. She was terrified by the experience.
I didn't mess with teaching people like that anymore.
I did Tarot readings for a while. They were a lot of fun. I knew the layout and just interpreted from a book. So there wasn't any editorializing going on, just this card in this position means this stuff.
What was fun was doing them for other people I didn't know very well. I'd do a reading and it didn't really make sense to me and I'd ask them if it made sense and they'd say "oh yeah".
Mal and Betty, the neighbors were over, and we always had a good time together. Betty told me to read for Mal. Mal didn't want to. She talked him into it, so I did a reading. We're all having a drink or two, laughing having fun, and in that spirit I did the reading.
The cards told a story of betrayal, mistrust, broken loyalties.
Mal had just left the agency, he did government-sponsored psychological work for the needy, he had always worked for, for more fame and money at a private institution. I had listened to him rationalize why it was OK to leave these people who were part of his team for the big bucks, but clearly he was agonizing over the decision.
The cards spelled out his entire inner turmoil, the self doubt and shame he felt about his decision. He got up and left a very depressed person. The party was over.
I stopped reading cards after that.
When we bought the Winchester house, Sharon helped us look. We had the idea of getting a big old house and having other people live with us. We called it cooperative, but independent living. Not really a hippy commune, but not really nuclear family either.
There were six adults at the peak. We usually shared the evening meal and took turns cooking.
Once when it was my turn, I told everyone I was going to make a special treat, dinner like my mom always made for me. I told everyone they couldn't come in the kitchen, because it was a surprise.
The first thing I did was saute an onion. My mom didn't actually do that, but I did because it fills the house with wonderful cooking smells. Everyone noticed, said it smelled delicious and couldn't wait.
Finally it was time for dinner. They all sat at the table, and I served them. Each their own TV dinner.
I used to play go with Craig, who was also 4 kyu. (Amateur ranks go from beginner around 20 kyu to 1 kyu, a strong amateur, to 1 dan to 6 dan an amateur who could consider progressional play. The Professional ranks start from there.)
Craig went to San Francisco and there was a visiting go professional from Japan there, so Craig signed up for a lesson. The pro gave Craig a 9 stone handicap (the largest handicap) and they proceeded to play.
The pro was very quiet during the game. At the end, Craig lost by 10 points. He was feeling pretty good, to have only lost by 10 points to a professional player. So he starts fishing for compliments. The pro didn't say much. Craig insisted, wanting to know if that wasn't pretty good for him to stay within 10 points of the pro at a 9 stone handicap.
Finally the pro relented and explained: "For me to have won by more than 10 points would have been rude; for me to have won by less than 10 points would not have indicated my true strength."
Wow. Craig was destined to lose by exactly 10 before a single stone was played.
The pro then swept all the stones off the board, reconstructed the game from memory, picked a few key points in the game, ran down alternate scenarios Craig might have played instead, and that was the lesson.
Diana was in sixth grade or so and told us that we should use recyclable materials for our packing of products for our Amzi! company.
I figured some teacher had filled her head with all sorts of "green" ideas, but didn't want to say that and asked her why.
She said because lots of people think that's important these days and we might increase sales.
I didn't feel much after my Dad died, but I did have the distinct impression he was around. Still do from time to time.
It was almost a month later when, I forgot why, I was driving by myself in upstate New York. Something about seeing the orange and black license plates that I grew up with triggered my grief. I pulled over and cried and cried.
I commuted with him to New York on the Long Island Railroad one summer. The train was at the station and I started to hurry.
He told me, "Never run for trains."
My Dad spent part of his youth growing up in Poughkeepsie N.Y. The drink, called a chocolate milk shake or a chocolate malted in most of the country (and a cabinet in Rhode Island) was called a chocolate frosted when he grew up.
When I was in college in New England, he'd always insist that the drink was a chocolate frosted, and would always order one, and the person behind the counter would never know what he meant. He'd get frustrated and have to explain how to make it. He wouldn't call it anything else.
I was driving myself around Poughkeepsie and stopped in a diner for something to eat. The guy behind the counter was about my Dad's age.
An inspiration : I ordered a chocolate frosted. The guy just beamed.
Mom was doing well in Florida on her own, but finally had two small strokes, one of which wiped out her short term memory.
It's a strange thing, she's not like old people who gradually lose memory and become dull. She's still mentally sharp at 89, but its like the memory unit was cut out with a knife. It's just not there.
She's physically fit as well. Just the memory thing, but you need that bit to function, so she's in Otterbein. I guess it's good in a way. Dealing with an aging parent most people have to cope with all sorts of nasty disabilities and diseases. At least in mom's case she's got an ailment with some humor in it.
So they have this fish fry once a year at Otterbein which is a big local event. You pay a few bucks and get all you can eat of fried fish sandwiches. You wait in line for the first one in one building, and then out in the tent you get all the seconds you want.
We went to get my mom at 1:00, hoping to catch her before the normal lunch. She was in her normal lunch room where they were served the fried fish sandwiches.
We said lets go to the fish fry. She said great, but she'd been there before and there was some problem. She'd waited in line and then something happened and she had to come back to the dining room to eat instead.
"So you didn't get any fish?" we asked. "No" she said.
We asked her again to make sure. She hadn't gotten anything to eat.
So she brought her sandwich and we went and got tickets and waited in line. She didn't need a ticket because she was a resident.
She'd finished her sandwich by the time we got to where they served the fish. She no longer remembered she'd just eaten, and wanted to get some fish at the fish fry.
The woman serving the fish told her to go to the tent. My mom wanted a sandwich. The lady told her no. My mom was totally confused.
I asked the woman what the problem was. She explained that you only got firsts in this line and you had to go to the tent for seconds. And this was the third time my mom had tried to get seconds in this line.
I take her golfing once a week. It's really interesting what she knows and doesn't know.
She still swings at the ball like she always did, and hits it a long way. And surprisingly, her pitching, chipping and putting is better that it was a few years back when she was playing well in Florida. Of course, she gets her share of bad shots as well, but did once shoot half her age for nine holes which is pretty good. And just missed a hole-in-one, so close we were all surprised the ball didn't go in.
She remembers golf etiquette, and holding the pin and who goes first and all that. But she can't remember whose clubs are in her bag (hers) even though they have her name on them. She's said someone put strange clubs in there.
It's probably because she bought these clubs after she had her stroke. They're not the clubs she played with for most of her golfing days.
She can't tell the difference between a putter and a pitching wedge. She can't remember which clubs to hit when, but hits them pretty good when she does.
But except for the memory her mind is sharp, her play is good, and we both have fun.
We had some friends over for Thanksgiving in Newton, Bruce Lynch and his current girl friend, Marty. Marty was something, she would tell everybody multiple times that she had an IQ of 160 or whatever it was. She was very smart. She made that clear. Got a book published with a $200,000 advance, got made into a movie with Julia Roberts, "Dying Young." But that's not the point of this story.
We got every dish in the house dirty. And drank a number of bottles of wine. Finally Bruce and Marty went home and Mary and I were in the midst of the disaster in the kitchen.
Now here's the rules, Mary cooks and I clean. And she'd cooked the Thanksgiving meal, so by all rights I had to clean this horrid mess. But I decided to see if I could get out of it with a game of chance.
"I'll flip you for who does the dishes" I says to her.
She says, mind you she'd had her fair share of the wine, "sure."
But there's a twist I says, we have to flip this cork. If it lands on end, you win and I do the dishes, if it lands on its side, you do the dishes.
Incredibly she says "sure." But she wants to drop the cork.
Now we have a hard linoleum floor, there's no way, so I say OK, but its got to be from a reasonable height.
"No problem" says she, and proceeds, from waist high to drop the cork on the floor.
Plop. Right on its end. Never bounced. Never wobbled. Just stood straight up.
The worst part of this story is, she knew she would do it. I thought I was hustling her, but she was hustling me.
(Try it sometime. It can't be done. We've tried it many times since, the cork always bounces and falls over. Can't get it to stand up even with a very low drop to a hard floor.)
She can do that sort of thing, she's got a bit of natural magic in her.
We flew to San Diego to visit Mary's parents, and the flight was awful. I just started feeling worse and worse on the flight. Just a little nauseous when we got there.
Her dad picked us up, and he's a bit of a wild driver, fast starts and stops, quick turns. Mary was in the front seat, talking with him, I was in the back and felt like I was going to loose my cookies. I said so, and he, without missing a beat, whipped his hand into some nook of the car, pulled out an airplane barf bag, handed it to me, and continued to drive and keep up his conversation with Mary.
Business as usual I guess. Felt much better after filling it up.
My mother's father married my father's mother, so they were step-siblings. No blood relation, but definitely a strange relation.
My father's mother, Mary had my father when she was 16. The father was also named Ralph Merritt, after my father. He would have been 17 I figure. Mary had Dan, my uncle, a year later.
Kids didn't know much then. Mary asked the doctor how the baby was going to come out. She really didn't know. The doctor said, "You silly girl, it will come out the same way it went in."
They moved to Poughkeepsie for around 5 years, I think. Then Ralph Sr. went on his way and Mary and her two kids moved back to Brooklyn to live with her parents, but one had died. I think Grandpa Louie (her father) was actually her step father. He acted as father to the two boys.
Meanwhile, my mom's parents, Wilbur Beach and I don't know my grandmother's name, were living in Darien Connecticut, on a farm that would be worth a zillion dollars today. Wilbur was doing quite well with a financial advertising business on Wall street, and lots of money in the stock market.
One of Wilbur's great experiences was when a benefactor at the company he worked for funded a trip to Europe for him. He traveled about Europe and learned more about the World than was common in his day.
My mother didn't like her mom, not much good told about her. She remembers her mom raising her to "be a lady" and being told what a lady does and doesn't do, and being told that someday she might meet the queen (of England) and she should be prepared. My mom never wanted to "be a lady" the way her mom wanted her to be.
Apparently her dad didn't like her mom either, and he started carrying on with some floozy in the city. My mom remembers her mom going after her dad with a long sharp kitchen knife.
Clever grandpa had avoided some tax consequences by putting the Darien farm in his wife's name. They got divorced, she sold the farm and died of some unknown to me illness in her forties.
My mom lived with some friends and finished her last year of high school and then moved to the city to be with her dad.
Well, the floozy in the city was Mary, my dad's mom. She was apparently quite something and a looker as well. She was arrested on Coney Island beach for indecent exposure, pushing the limits of acceptable swimwear.
So Wilbur married Mary. And Ralph met Peg and they got married too.
Neither thought much of their missing parent. My dad never talked about Ralph, my mom never talked about her mom except in the way in which a rebellious teenage girl would talk about her mom. It's interesting, she never knew her mom as an adult, and even today at 89 years old thinks of her mom with teenage resentment.
Russell wrote this in an e-mail, he has a copy of the newspaper article on Ralph Merritt Sr. death in a car accident.
Keep me posted about the Cherokee nation. I'm a little dubious about the family connection, but one of the great advantages of a black sheep grandfather is that it keeps the possibilities open. I did dig out the NY DAILY NEWS' account of granddad's death, by the bye when his ride crashed into a post on the Pulaski Skyway. The car wreck made page 8 of THE DAILY NEWS for Apr 1 [April Fool's] 1935, with a gory picture on page 25. "Ralph Merritt, 40, also of Palisades Park, a passenger in [Herbert] Ehrlich's car, suffered a possible fracture of the skull and internal injuries. At Jersey City Medical Center it was said he may die." The kicker is that because he lingered in the hospital for a few days, by the time he died his death wasn't newsworthy -- so no details on his recent life. He shared an apartment with Ehrlich at 1 W. Harriet St in Palisades Park, but even the local paper, THE NEWARK EVENING NEWS, didn't have much to add: "[Ehrlich and Merritt] were on their way home early yesterday [Sunday] after a dinner at Hotel Douglas of the Paint Salesman's Association, of which Erlich [sic?] is a former president. As they were about to leave the Pulaski Skyway, Jersey City, to drive down the east side ramp to Tonnele Circle, a tire blew out and the car crashed into a steel abutment. Erlich was killed instantly and Merritt taken to the Medical Center where he is suffering from a fractured skull and internal injuries."
No obit for Ralph. Erlich was "an active Republican, defeated as candidate for the Board of Education." So we can speculate. Grandma's fella who starts life as a ragtime piano man ends up at a Paint Salesman dinner consorting with Republicans. What a world.
Just spent a week in Norfolk helping Michael with the boys while Ana was visiting her sister in Bolivia. Michael had an interesting book on birth order which I read bits and pieces of, which basically indicated that later borns are born to rebel.
So I was reading the boys a nighttime story, the old Uncle Remus stories that you can't get anymore because they're racist except I don't see how, and Michael had found a copy at a used book store Web site.
Being first born I had a goal of finishing the story. Diego kept interrupting, wanting to do this or that, I wanted to push on with the story. And Juan did too. The first borns pursuing a goal, the latter born advocating anarchy and chaos, and fun.
Michael was going to sleep in Juan's bed so the boys were both in Diego's. Post-story the evening was progressing and the boys were fooling around, but we'd already had to deal with tired kids who had been up too late the night before, so I went up to quiet them.
I told them they had a choice, either be quiet, or I would separate them into different beds. Diego wasn't buying it. Juan the first born explained the rules to Diego. I made it clear those were the choices for Diego.
Diego simply responded, "But I want to play." He rejected the options I gave him, he rejected the authority, he rejected the rules of behavior.
He simply had a different way of looking at things and wanted to follow his heart.
As a kid I grew up watching cowboy movies, with stars like Gene Autry, Roy Rodgers, Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger. They told the story of the old West, and it was good.
Sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s there was a revolution in Hollywood and they came out with cowboy movies that told it like it really was. Clearly the cowboys weren't as clean cut, well groomed, with neatly pressed clothes as they were portrayed in the movies I grew up with. Clearly they didn't have the crystal clear concepts of right and wrong portrayed, where the law was always good and the criminals always bad.
These new movies showed cowboys with long unkempt hair, often needing a shave, wearing more rugged sorts of clothes. They showed the honor of outlaws like Billy the Kid, and the cowardly evil of sheriff Pat Garret.
These cowboys were cool. They looked right and they understood a deeper morality of good and evil that transcended organized law and order. The new directors were right. This must have been more what it was like, and I realized the cowboy movies of my parents days were just fantasies supporting the values of "the establishment", that hated set of phony values our parent's generation had foisted on the World.
Into the 1980s they started making more cowboy movies. I watched Kevin Costner giving high fives and other contemporary male bonding behavior as Wyatt Earp getting ready for the OK Corral. Yuch. That wasn't cowboys, that was just a superposition of current California attitudes on the great Western myths, designed solely to appeal to the youth of the day.
In summary. The cowboy movies of my parent's generation were inaccurate, reflecting the morals and values of their day rather than truth. The cowboy movies of my children's generation are inaccurate, reflecting current morals and values rather than truth. The cowboy movies of my generation accurately portrayed the incredible solidarity between the hippy revolution and our early Western brethren.
A little reading into the old West reveals an interesting fact. Very little is actually known about it. These pioneers didn't write much down, and didn't take many pictures. There are only a few sources of information and they were generated by individuals out to make a quick buck telling stories that, you guessed it, reflected the morals and values of the day.
Bat Mastodon and Wyatt Earp are well known because they happen to be the individuals glorified in some reports of the day, usually written by Easterners.
But it doesn't matter. Emerson said the facts of history are irrelevant. All that matters is what history means to us today. The three generations of cowboy movies are important and good, not because of what they say of cowboys, but of what they say of each of those generations.
One last point is the difficulty one has in seeing one owns bias. I can easily see the bias in the films of my parent's and children's generations, but, although of course I was joking above, I really wasn't.
I think its like accents. Nobody thinks they have an accent, and don't recognize an accent in others who talk like them.
It's why the conservatives are so alarmed at the liberal bias in the media, and the liberals don't know what they're talking about, thinking the reporting is accurate.
As we watch the war in Iraq, the liberals are all upset at the incredibly biased reporting on conservative Fox News, but the conservatives think it's accurate. And visa versa for CNN.
I suspect this is why international relations are so hard. We just can't see our own biases and how they color our view of the World.