Memories – Page 4 – 19 Cent Notebook

UNANSWERED “NEWS” TIP

This is about a letter from a man ‘alleging to have information,’ as the saying goes. It was an unknown man –likely an old man. The man, forever nameless, the moment, forever lost, have been on my mind lately — for some unknown reason.

It goes back to a letter I received one day in the mid-Seventies. I was the Norwood Bureau reporter for the fledgling Daily Transcript suburban Boston newspaper. It, too, has been lost. About fifteen years ago, it vanished. It began in the early 1970s by collapsing four suburban weekies into one daily newspaper. Having never totally caught on with the reading public, struggling along lamely for years, it finally was converted into a weekly serving a far smaller area – and may, for all I know, have vanished altogether by now. Newspapers, in our time, regularly shrink or die. So it goes.

As the newest daily in the Boston area, the Transcript didn’t get a lot of attention. The residents of those four towns had resented the loss of their beloved weekly newspapers with their exclusive focus on their towns’ news. And their local news was thinned out in order to squeeze in the news of neighboring towns about which they cared little or not at all.

The towns were Dedham, Norwood, Westwood and Needham, all in southwest suburban Boston.

Back to that letter:

I forget if it was addressed exclusively to me. It would have been nice to know some reader was paying attention exclusively to my by-line.

But–it was more likely addressed to the Bureau office on Washington Street.

I think it came from one of the town’s nursing homes. This might automatically prompt some editors to dismiss it, suspecing it came from some soul suffereing dementia. The writer was, indeed, a resident in that nursing facility. The letter is lost but, as I recall, its author wrote, in longhand, something like this:

Dear Editor (or Reporter), I have some information I believe is newsworthy and that you might find very interesting. Please excuse my handwriting — I’ve got a touch of arthritis. But you can reach me at (was there a phone number? Just an address? Just his name ( forgotten) along with the name of the nursing home? Don’t remember.

I just know that I somehow felt, way back then, that I should “check this out,” as they say. I just had — a sense. It might have been sympathy for the hopelessly obscure of all “senior” facilities languishing away — and w riting unasnwered letters to editors.

Nonetheless, I felt I should check it out for two reasons: first, the writer, whom I believe was a male, might actually have something newsworthy to tell me. There was always that possibility, though the multitude of news tips go nowhere, r egardless of their source. Second: it’s not nice to ignore an elderly person looking for attention and maybe just a little company.

But also, how many times in my career as a reporter did I or other reporters or editors fail to follow up on a request for coverage of something or other–that turned out to be legitimate and important? Innumerable times, no doubt, during the busy course of multitudes of spinning news cycles in the history of the busy earth!

In truth, I suspected it wasn’t a “news” tip, as such, at all. I wondered if it was just one of those fabulous stories of the kind the elderly stand ready to pass on about their participation or involvement in some epical moment in Massachusetts, America, World, or just Personal History.

Everybody has a story.

If one lets one’s imagination range, the possibilities are infinite….

Perhaps this fellow was present when they exploded the Atom Bomb and saw some terrible flaw in the design andplanning that would one day, if left uncorrected, end civilization. Maybe he was a shadow Oppenheimer.

Perhaps he knew the identity of the men behind the deadly 1920 payroll robbery that got Sacco and Venzetti — innocent and, in the minds of millions across the globe, falsely accused — sent to the electric chair.

Perhaps he was a retired doctor who’d been a personal physician to H0ward Hughes.

Perhaps he WAS Howard Hughes.

Perhaps he was the doctor who delivered Elvis.

Perhaps he had good informtation about the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart and her plane.

Perhaps he had secret information about the Kennedy assassination. (Who doesn’t?)

Perhaps he knew the location of illegal uranium deposits and other nuclear waste buried under a nearby residential neighborhood.

Perhaps he was the grandson of a Scotland Yard Detective and had irrefutable, long hidden DNA evidence about the identity of Jack the Ripper.

Perhaps he played football with Jim Thorpe

Perhaps he’d once been a drummer for The Rolling Stones.

Perhaps he was a scientist whose theories about the causes of cancer had been unjustly supressed by a major medical institute.

Perhaps he was just an old man with nothing special for me, but who would have been delightful by a visit — from anyone! Especially a reporter.

Considering that, about that same period of time, I managed to respond to a call from excited Norwood parents who insisted their little daughters, currently trading off bouncing a ball in their backyard, were bound and determined to break the Guinness Book of Records for the number of hours spent bouncing a ball. Consider the absurd fact that I actually found time to write a dumb story about that utterly quixotic, silly parentallly-generated endeavor ( I don’t recall if the bouncing continued even past sundown).

Certainly, considering this, I could have found time to visit this poor man even if just pretending to check out his tip. I could have brought him an ice cream.

But I didn’t. The moment, the man, my reporter’s career, and whatever this guy had to tell me and whatever his human needs — are all long gone.

But, I’ll probably always wonder — if I should happen to hear of the collapse of a generations-old Norwood building with a long-ignored construction flaw, or the long-standing, long concealed poisoning of a Norwood water source due to the action of 1970s engineers, or the investigation and prosecution of individuals behind a decades-long suburban nursing home scam — or (why not?) the discovery that the illigitimate son of a member of the British Royal family lived out his last days in a Norwood nursing home — yes, I’ll always wonder…..

The moral:

Never as a reporter totally ignore even the most dubious news tip.

More importantly, never ignore the elderly and their stories.

And whoever you were, Mister I’ve-Got-Something-That-May-Interest-You, please forgive me. Your story probably died with you.

Or maybe, after being ignored, you simply wrote instead to the Patriot Ledger, the Boston Globe, The Boston Herald — or even the New York Times….and you had a huge story.! Huge!

No, not likely.

Whatever.

Wherever you are, whoever you were, these dozens of words are in your memory.

DISILLUSIONMENT

How shall I define disillusionment?

With an anecdote. A memory.

Summer, 1967. I’ve wrapped up work at a national park in east central California. I visit San Francisco for the first time with about a half dozen co-workers. It is the first time in the fabled city for most of us. We were excited during the long drive and we are excited now upon arrival.

We find our way to a deli-style corner restaurant in the heart of the city for an early dinner. There is nothing special or famous about the place. It might have been part of a California chain for all we know. But it’s bustling and a little noisy and feels special because it’s in San Franciso. The customers, most of whom are probably tourists like us, all seem equally excited to be there before their big night looking for Fisherman’s Wharf or the Cable Cars or some other attraction. The waitress is zany, friendly and memorable. A friendly older guy is sitting with his wife at the next table. They are most likely out-of-towners like us. He says to me that the waitress reminds him of the comedian Martha Ray. I’m thinking — well, maybe or maybe not and who but an old guy would be thinking about Martha Ray in 1967, but I appreciate the intergenerational comraderie.

Young and old and excited, we’re all together. The food comes and is nothing specials, but it’s not expensive and we’re all still excited, and we leave excited and I’m thinking I’ll always remember that place, that meal and that moment.

Some years later, I found myself in San Francisco again. As I sit here, I can’t recall if it was during an anxious California trip in 1969 which ended when my draft notice caught up with me and I had to rush back east to report for military duty — or if it was in 1971 when I was visiting my brother, then living in the San Franciso area, after my Army discharge up in Washington state. During each visit, San Franciso seemed less and less special, despite its abiding charm and many attractions. After my overseas military experience especially, I was feeling a little wizened and jaded and lonely and thinking of my old California co-workers and wondering where they were or if I’d ever see them again. One of them had been a summer of ’67 girlfriend, a lively Mexican-American girl. I’d lost touch with her. They were all gone.

For old time’s sake, on one of those visits, I found my way back to that same restaurant. Business was slow, it was quiet. It didn’t seem at all special — in fact, it seemed very somber and ordinary, as if it might be on its last legs.

I don’t recall the waitress (or waiter) or what I ordered.

But I do recall that there was a small bug crawling on the lettuce.

That’s disillusionment.

SORT OF ORANGE

This will be short (or was meant to be short); just long enough ( too long) to clear out the sunny remains of a week (a long week.). Not too many actual memories, just the moods, and the colors.

I’ve been north. I’m back south again. Long drive, back and forth, up and down, bridges and mountains and white-knuckled (speaking of color) moments racing along the Interstate among trucks and other steel rapters, some obviously under the control of people who loosely value their own and other people’s lives.

While driving, I got to have my nerves chewed upon by another little beast that popped up on my dashboard, i.e., a warning light that my coolant was low. A car has to get cooled.

This introduced me to the kindness of strangers at a big, busy Pilot truck stop plaza in Virginia where I just happened to stop, sensing an emergency, and where a young clerk offered to fill my coolant reservoir (which was down to the minimum) with some of her own coolant from a container she kept in her jeep.

“What color is it?” she asked (meaning the coolant), trying to determine if she had a right kind for my car.

“Sort of orange,” I said.

“I’ve got some,” she said. She came out to my car and filled the clear plastic orb of a reservoir for free, helped out by a male manager who did the actual pouring under the hood. I was so relieved. They wouldn’t take any money, just wished me a safe trip to Florida. I fueled up and moved on. Yes, happier, and believing again in humanity.

I’m going to write their bosses, the local Chamber of Commerce, everybody I can think of. I’ll tell them about the wonderful young folks who helped me. Too bad I got neither of their names. I just see them, though dressed darkly, as bright colors. Smiles and good wishes.

Had I stopped at the previous exit, or waited until the next one, would my circumstances have been so blessedly altered? The odds would have been uncertain, 50-50 at best — or, to name a color, gray. Color the encounter at Pilot in Toms Brook, Virginia as bright gold, several shades above orange, and precious. (And if there’s an actual Tom’s Brook, I hope it’s silver clear in an age of murky waters.)

Speaking (again) of color — colors that are sort of orange or sort of bright….My whole trip now, in some manner (almost suggesting a state of synesthesia), lives in memory as colors. As does all of life, in some sense, right?

That’s how I see the seasons, too — as do many. As colors. White for winter, of course, but also bare earth tones with gray skies. All the colors of spring flowers for Spring. Brown and gold for fall….(the leaves, you know), it makes sense to our senses which store such tones in memory. It’s inescapable, this “colors of the day” Judy Collins thing. Even for the color blind, inner colors must draw inside the lines of the bare white outlines in the blank pages of our mental and emotional coloring books.

But, I guess I’m getting colorfully carried away — but, frankly, feeling sort of blue this Florida Sunday afternoon. Dark blue. Couldn’t tell you why except in a thousand gray, imprecise words. So, never mind….

But there was a white external moment recently…. memorable…..

I ran into a little snow in Vermont, just a squall. But as the road covered over, leaving only tire tracks in whiteness, I got nervous. There were steep hills ahead. Were these going to be my driving conditions all the way to my next stop, which was a friend’s house, many miles off, in Rotterdam Junction, New York? White felt like black, or whatever color fear is. Night for day.

But the snow stopped. A plow truck came out. The sky afterwards was a swirling, misty mix of gray, white and blue. The journey continued, and, ultimately, all I had left, besides occasionally the radio and a view of the Green Mountains, was my green thoughts turning a rich deep, melancholy undefinable shade, as if they were absorting the late fall landscape in transition. Sort of orange. (Fear can be that color too, if orange fluid is running low and your car might overheat, and your inner emotional fluid is running low as well.)

On the bright side up there in Vermont, I had stopped being worried long enough to remember how snow’s whiteness transforms trees. It was beautiful. The white wouldn’t last, not this time. But it was lovely. It was so white. Pure white on the branches for a beatific moment.

I wrote here recently of longing for an autumn festival in a small town in Vermont. And here I was, passing through small towns in Vermont — and with no time to stop, really. And, after all, the OctoberFests were over. November was coming. November is darkening brown, deepening gold, the color of downed leaves, ready for burning, or those Thanksgiving greetings, of which I intend to mail a few this year. I love November, and I love Thanksgiving. I was born the day before Thanksgiving. I wish, as I think I’ve already said somewhere, that it was not so quickly buried under Black Friday.

My nothern memories — I cling to them, even as complex as they are….

After the Christmas lights (mostly red and green –and white and occasionally blue ond gold) vanish, the grime and the grim skies and salt-streaked windshields frigid moments holding cold steel in gloves under harsh gas station lighting, filthy snowbanks sealing souls in place for the long march toward March, then April, then Spring….Winter. …

But it’s life, this alternating palette of colors. You have to love it. There has to be a winter.

Back to Vermont, to that Vermont driving moment… as somber but bittersweet as the lingering Vermont foliage, dulled down from bright reds and golds to russett, no less beautiful, and perfect for my mood during that driving moment. October was passing. Another October. (I once did a TV essay on September. What color is September? Let me think about that.)

So now, November is here. Enough. Time to pull this half-baked loaf out of the oven. Time for that Coda that ends these rambling Sunday seasonal ruminations.

But I’ll add…

I seem to write a great deal about the seasons here; too much, perhaps. But then, in Florida, it is your mood rather than the perpetually green sub-tropical landscape (at least in South Florida) that more than anything marks the seasons, and the solar cycles and the subtle turning of the earth, the earlier sunsets, the longer, darker mornings, the Gulf, when you are fortunate enough to glimpse it, a perpetual blue-green.

But driving in Vermont, I could tell November was coming. And when the trees are bare up north, there are shadows, long, sinewy shadows across lawns and walls and roads. November shadows. And it is the month on the Christian calendar when we remember the dead. Our thoughts are draped fondly — in black.

There might even be another entry here called, “November Shadows.”

But for now, I’ll end just recalling the mood that was…sort of orange.

HELLO, OCTOBER

I wish I were wandering the tented lanes of an October Festival. I wish I could smell apple blossoms (no, that would be springtime), smell cidar boiling, purchase for fifty cents (benefiting school children) and sip some cidar with clove, lemon and cinnemon, see oak and maple and birch along the streets bordering the town green, buy seasonal fruit, bite into a sweetly tart fruit, yes, both sweet and tart; see mountains beyond the tent-tops and rooftops, and see a fountain and statue in the heart of town, see the leaves turning.

I have seen and been such places on October days, brown and gold.

But my heart was always just a little heavy in northern Octobers. And so, too, in southern Octobers.

Now, that’s a failure of gratitude. I must be grateful. Name that sorrow that overlays everything. I can’t. As sweet-smelling macadam is laid down over dirt country roads on sultry Mondays, I can’t for the life of me recall the ‘where or when’ of a memory beneath life’s black, hot layers of ordinariness. So be it. Go on remembering. It is 5:26 a.m.. Light is coming. I prefer the dark, the quiet.

So much wasted time. So many fears. So many wrong turns, delays. But that’s life. The black, winding road to the October Festival is just a road. I wish to arrive.

There are those journal entries where we write. “Another year, nothing changed.”

But we should be glad when nothing has changed.

The leaves are changing up there. Yes, a good change, a season defining marker of mountain time within northeastern time.

Here, in Florida, the same abiding green, but a breeze yesterday, today the humidity again. But it will change. I see sun out there. I must drive across the bay to Tampa, grateful for days and weather in stasis. There will be traffic. The wind moves slowly among the palm fronds at either end of the bridge. I will find a mysterous but welcome haze ceiling off the Bay’s horizons as I flow with the death-dealing traffic across the causeway. Is it October? Where is the Festival?

Time present and time past

Are both, perhaps, present in time future,

And time future present in time past.

Wrote the poet.

I’m no poet.

But here I am. Writing. October again.

Hello, October.

Everything will change, and feel like nothing has changed.

That’s life, that’s good.

But I wish, yes, I were alone, still healthy, maybe forty or thirty again, and walking up to a smiling woman in a flannel shirt to buy her jam, the autumn breeze blowing, the mountains in the distance. The leaves crackling.

At dusk, maybe someone in the village will invited me onto their porch.

We’ll have hot tea as night falls, contented strangers.

But, in a windowless wilderness of corridors stripped bare by an infinite regression of florescent tubes of brightness, I am, in my mind before this October dawn in a foreign place, working down a green bottle of something from a vending machine. That, not the wide beautiful porch overlooking the Festival is where I spend my mind’s time.

October is outside, feeling the same as this inside of imagined people in cubicles.

There are calendars on desks. Yes, it’s October.

But it might as well be January, or July.

October, come for me. Change me. Keep me grateful.

Come for me. Greet me, whisper “hello.”

It is 5:45 a.m. now. Greet me again at 5:45 p.m.

Take me back to the Festival.

Too soon, it will be, Goodbye, October.

So, Hello.

MEMORIES OF THAT GENTLE DESCENT AT SUMMER’S END

August 31, 2023. Woodstock, Georgia….

I knew it would fly, this summer, this year. Hot, so hot. Time in the hills and by the mountains of upstate New York. And the Mohawk. Gone. Memories now. Another summer gone. Another year going….

I write from Woodstock, Georgia (again), having made perhaps an extreme decision to go an extreme distance to be away from the first of the season’s Gulf of Mexico hurricane threats. A long drive, but some peace at the end. I’m always in search of peace.

I guess almost every Labor Day, whether I realize it or not, I think of Joe O’Donnell. He was my peer, an intelligent childhood neighbor who grew up, like me, on Neponset Avenue. We were never in any school class together, never really truly close friends, though friends for a significantly memorable period. I think he wound up a year ahead of me at the Catholic school after tonsil and adnoids removal in third grade caused me to repeat the year. So we weren’t classmates.

Joe always had a crewcut, always seemed a trifle more intelligent than his years. I watched him, at least once, be the victim of a bully. He seemed to brush the experience off. To this day, I harbor anger on his behalf for the bully whom I met some years back at a wake ( which is where people from the old neighborhood always meet over the bodies of fellow neighbors and chums). The bully had become a somber, probably harmless working class adult with a perfectly nice, even pretty, wife, although I did sense a certain hostility enveloping him — and me. He’d grown up poor with probably a poor family life. I’ll make that excuse for him. We all, most of us, grow up. He might have done a better job of it than me.

But back to Joe O’Donnell

Joe’s father had been a World War II paratrooper who’d spent time with a broken leg as a P.O.W. of the German’s. Joe, by contrast, was not paratrooper material, nor was I. Riding our bikes was about as daring as we got. We were once both on a youth basketball team and mutually fretted about not being called upon to play. But, inwardly, I knew I could hardly dribble the ball and had been spared humiliation and was masking my relief with false indignation. Joe, perhaps, the same.

Joe’s mother was a wonderful woman who, come to think of it, masked her emotions pretty well in order to deal with life’s challenges. I say this because I met her at a 1989 Catholic neighborhood reunion and learned how upset she’d been when a raised multi-pane porch window at the O’Donnell’s house slipped free of its hook-and-eye overhead latch while roofers hammered overhead and came smashing down on me, putting my head right through one of the panes, leaving a scatterring of broken glass on my head. I wasn’t hurt, or even upset. I was half amused. Perhaps I’d been nicked and perhaps there was a little blood. Mrs. O’Donnell came rushing out, obviously concerned. I asked, calmly,”am I cut?” She said, “you’re ears hanging off, now stand still.” And, paradoxically assured by this and the absence of pain, that I was fine, I stood still while she commenced to clear away the mantel of broken glass and lift the window to free me.

But at that meeting with her three decades later, I became aware that she’d been deeply upset by the incident. I assured her it was a non-event for me, and how much I appreciated and was reassured by her tough-minded intervention. It did not seem to ease her own traumatic memory and, perhaps, guilt. So, yes, Joe’s mom knew how to hide her true feelings, at least at the point of impact.

And now, as I come to think of it — why wasn’t Joe at that 1989 reunion? I believe I asked about him, and got no good answer why he was absent.

Again, about Joe, and as regards our friendship….

What is it that makes companions of people in their very early years other than proximity — people who will probably drift far apart when they move? Joe never moved — not for many years, anyway.

He seemed smart, but given to masking childhood’s typical petulance and easy emotions and tears, unlike his only younger brother Kenny or his young sister who were open books. In that sense, he always seemed a little older than his years. We were just kids who lived three houses and a short street crossing part. I don’t recall how we started hanging out together at maybe age eleven or twelve. What did Joe see in me? In him, I saw, as enumerated, a bundled up temperment that somewhat mirrored my own. Maybe that was the attraction — and the fact that you could have an intelligent, albeit still immature conversation on what we knew of the world.

Then, suddenly we were teenagers, probably both thirteen, still unathletic, perhaps only beginning to be interested in girls. There were no girls around that Labor Day weekend, though I was very interested in one. I never recall talking to Joe about girls, but we probably did. They were something else we were probably still a little afraid of.

And why do I think of Joe specifically at Labor Day? Because on our bicycles we rode from Neponset all the way out to the Blue Hills on Labor Day weekend on what I think was 1960. The Blue Hills were quite a distance, at least five miles. But I don’t recall anybody driving us there. Once there, we peddled all the way up one, probably the principle one, called Big Blue. It was not overly steep, that winding uphill blacktopped road, but still a bit arduous as he stood up to peddle and peddle and peddle, likely criss-crossing the road, on our very ordinary bikes of no particular brand.

It might have been the first year before full-fledged adulthood that I understood or cared about Labor Day’s significance as summer’s end point, and, accordingly, felt, again for the first time, that wistful sense of seasonal passage to fall and the end of unbridled childhood freedom and the looming return to classroom drudgery. For though technically now a pubescent teenager, I was still, in essence, a child who’d relatively belatedly mastered the balancing act that was riding a bike. It was still three years before I would be old enough — and more or less required — to “labor” for money, five years before I had a license to drive a car.

But it was still a time when summer was understood to be a period of unburdoned childhood freedom and, for me, that coming start of the school year registered an inordinate sense of dread, for I did not like school. (In retrospect, I sense that Joe O’Donnell, on the other hand, probably enjoyed school.)

It was warm. There were a good number of people out enjoying the weekend at the picnic areas we passed and at nearby Houghton’s Pond. But we peddled laboriously in tandem and in solitude on the shoulder of the two-lane road, for probably for over an hour, wondering when the ascent would ever end for us.

Then –suddenly — we felt ourself briefly to be on more or less level ground, still peddling gently for several yards. Then came our reward, a slow, steady downhill coast, riding about twenty-five yards apart, Joe in front…a slow, gently winding journey of –how long? Was it just a half mile? As much as a mile? It seemed, happily, very long, and cooling to us in jerseys and jeans we still called dungarees.

When it was over, I pulled up next to Joe and he said, like an adult, “it was a great feeling, wasn’t it?”

So, I guess Joe DID share his feelings. He did then, at least.

In our subsequent teen years, Joe and I drifted apart. He went off to Latin High School, the very best public high school in Boston and the oldest public school in the nation. I chanced to see him perhaps just once at Field’s Corner rapid transit (now MBTA) station, both of us either enroute or coming back from school (I was at Gate of Heaven in South Boston.)

I talked to him about the way famous authors’ stories we were being taught, as I recall, and how I disapproved of the method of the teachers. And he said, in that slightly sententious boiler plate adult way he had –“no, that is no way to enjoy a book.”

I presume he did well at school. He was bright. But somehow, I sense that science or math probably interested him more than literature, regardless of how it was being taught.

Flash forward….I learned he became an accountant….and flash further forward….

In 1999, six firefighters died in the burning of the Cold Storage facility in Worcester. Joe’s younger brother Kenny had become a Boston fire captain. I met him outside the church where the first of the six funerals for the men was being held. He was there with hundreds of other Boston jakes, paying his respects. I was covering the event as a Boston TV news reporter.

“How’s Joe?” I asked.

“He died,” Kenny said.

I was shocked. He would have been just a little over fifty, like me.

This was December. It had just been a matter of months. Pancreatic cancer. All very quick. Joe had become an accountant and a father. He was living up in New Hampshire. Kenny said he’d been fishing with him shortly before the diagnosis.

So I was doubly sad on that sad day of a funeral — for a fallen firefighter, and for Joe, now a figure in distant memory. I wondered, did he still have a crew cut? Did he still enjoy riding a bike? Obviously, he’d taken up fishing

But, again, almost without fail, I think of Joe on Labor Day. I pray for him. There must have been a widow and children. I pray for them, too.

And I suppose there are people enjoying the day all these years later in the Blue Hills where we made that little memory. I wonder if Joe recalled it as fondly as me — or recalled it at all.

So….time…..memory

Tonight, here in Woodstock, Georgia, I’m due to go to a high school football game. It’ll be some other kid’s memory.

The hurricane has swept off. Wind, a precarious life, a movie playing in the next room. I’m feeling it all, anxious, not quite at Labor Day rest.

What was that about boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past? (Fitzgerald)

(And I wonder as a matter of fact –why wasn’t Joe at that 1989 reunion with the rest of the family? Okay, he lived in New Hampshire and now had a family of his own. Distance puts up borders. But sometmes family borders go up, too. Was he keeping his distance for other reasons? His mother, now also deceased, told me (when I met her long after that reunion and when she again brought up her trauma over my head through the window) that Joe’s death deeply affected his ailing and seemingly tempermentally far more rugged dad. Again, hidden emotions.

And now I remember — she told me this at the father’s wake, for she’d lived on past both her son and her husband.

Rest in peace, Joe O’Donnell — and all O’Donnel family members.

Wishing Labor Day peace of mind — to workers, and to all of us who labor, compulsively, at remembering life’s little joys and sorrows at summer’s end and all through the year. They don’t always make for a Happy Labor Day, or peace of mind.

Let’s settle for gratitude. A grateful Labor Day. We’ve made it to another September. Go for a bike ride.

Amen.

SORRY, NIGHT GENT, WHEREVER YOU ARE…

For I missed your beautiful smile.

What –and who — on earth am I talking about? Well…

It occured to me last night — and I cringed at the memory — that there were embarrassing moment during my TV career when I had to cancel interviews with people I know were, for various reasons, eager to tell their story to a television audience — and this despite their trepidation about going before the camera. Often you’d find yourself gently pleading with them to put aside their timidity and consent to appear, only to be forced later to cancel out.

For some reason, I’m especially recalling the time working for Channel 7 in Boston when I was reporting on efforts to end dog racing in Massachusetts. Accordingly, I had set up an interview with a trainer at Wonderland race track in Revere, Mass. I was to meet him —and his champion greyhound, named Night Gent. This excited me. Yes, I love dogs, but more than that, viewers love seeing animals and they liven up a story.

Then, for forgotten reasons doubtless beyond my control and perhaps frivilous and unnecessary as often happens in TV (e.g., allegedly important “breaking news” somewhere), I was forced to cancel the interview. Thereafter, because the news cycle keeps turning, I wound up never doing the interview or the story.

The next day, I made a point of calling the trainer, apologized, and sheepishly asked if the cancellation had greatly inconvenienced him.

He was cordial and forgiving, but immediately noted, in a wry tone, that in order to make his celebrated canine ready for his close-up, “I even brushed his teeth.”

Boy, did I feel terrible! I’m sure old Night Gent felt even worse. What dog likes having his teeth brushed?

Come to find out: In 1986 (about the time I was going to meet him),Night Gent captured the Derby Lane Sprint Classic down here in Florida and was named to the All-America team. I believe he may even be in the Greyhound Hall of Fame. He was a super-star! I’d have brushed my teeth to have my picture taken with him –and, of course, feed him a biscuit or two.

But, alas, the moment, and Night Gent, have gone gently into that goodnight of dog racing, for the sport is on the wane and, at least in Massachusetts and other states, been banned outright, perhaps for good reasons.

I hope Night Gent‘s years in retirement were restful and rewarding, with naturally sparkling teeth. And that, first of all, they retired his toothbrush.

REMEMBERING JUNE 9, 1953

First, the prelude:

On June 7, 1953, an area of high pressure formed over most of the United States. This high-pressure air mass collided with a low-pressure mass that was centered over Nebraska, which created favorable conditions for severe thunderstorm development.

That from a historical meteorological account for that day found on-line.

No one in New England, not even meterologists, necessarily saw this far-off weather development as a threat to their region. But soon, the same historical account tells us knowledgeable people saw those meterological developments favorable to formation of a tornado. In Nebraska, that would not be unusual, especially in the summer.

But weather-watchers in Michigan might not have seen much to immediately fear in the forecast. The risk of tornadoes in Michigan is seen as minimal — not nearlyi so vulnerable as the prarie and the plains. But out of that weather system came a catergorized F5 tornado, the most severe, that slammed into Flint, Michigan the following day, June 8. It killed 116 and injured 844. It was the last tornado to date to end in more than 100 fatalities. It w as the worst natural disaster in 20th Century Michigan history. A total of eight tornadoes were reported in Michigan that day, the one in Flint being only the most deadlyi and devastating. There were other scattered tornadoes that day throughout Ohio as well.

I don’t know how much people in Massachusetts were paying attention to that disastrous weather news.

There was 90 degree weather in Worcester on June 7, 1953, then on June 8, the temperature dropped to 74 degrees. A warm air mass from the south moved up….The Flint, Michigan weather system was limping, apparently far from exhausted.

This whole combined weather system had severe characteristics known even to forecaster in 1953 to be dangerous. They lacked the kind of warning system we have today. But we now know that state meteorologists and other climate experts had put their heads together and considered issuing a a tornado warning. Apparently the decision was made not to overly alarm the public. After all, tornadoes in New England were extremely rare — sort of on the order of earthquakes.

It is 4:37 p.m., June 9, 2023. It’s estimated that at 4:25 p.m., seventy years ago from this very hour, winds began to swirl violently in an open field in Petersham, Mass out west of Worcester. They dug and left behind a visible trench. Those winds quickly comined into a giant roaring twister and began a deadly, destructive march through the towns of Barre and Holden, into Worcester, Shrewsbury, Southboro, Westboro. The cloud may have split apart at that point, one portion dipping south, but the remnant that continued east made it to the Fayville section of Framingham where air raid sirens were sounding and two people were killed in a post office along Route 9.

Then it was over. There had been light-bulb-sized hail, powerful winds, and now there was a trail of ruins.

In all 94 people were killed in the whole terrifying 84 minute episode.

I just recall, at age 6, being at the front door of my house many miles away in Boston’s Dorchester neighorhood as my brother Bill got out of a car, arriving home from his high school graduation outing. He was just feet away, the skies overhead were overcast and unstable and there was an ominous silence. The split second Bill briefly disappeared from view behind the thick trunk of a catalpa tree by our five-foot walkway, I was startled by something I was experiencing for the first time in my life — a crash of thunder unpreceded by any rumbling warning. Just –Bang!! Terrifyingly loud and close. Bill emerged from behind the tree having ducked slightly. My mother had reacted to the thunder with a little scream…

Then came the radio reports… Worcester, the city where my mother had lived and attended high school, had been struck by, of all things, tornado.

There are still people alive who remember. They’d have been children, like me, or teenagers, and be very old. I’ve spoken with many of them in many states, including North Carolina and Florida. They remember the destrucition. Like my memory of the mere turbulance at the far edge of the system, they could never forget the terror or the sudden altaration of their lives and the long aftermath. It swamped their memories as no violent weather event, thank God, has ever engulfed me.

It happened today. I’m remembering the dead. I’m always watching the skies.

MAY 30th

My father’s anniversary. William Douglas Wayland, only 54, nearly 55. Such a long seige of cancer surprising such a young man. It was, I’m now realizing, so terrible for us, who have now lost our sister and have a brother languishing in a nursing home, the very brother who came out of the house as I was clipping the hedges and said, “I think we’ve had it. They can’t find a pulse.”

It was the day after my triumph, a speech, a big speech. Dad never knew about that, me in front of 2000 people 69 years ago.

This day, this May 30th, a Tuesday, is waning. That was a Friday.

I’ve talked to Doug and Ron today. I’ve been told Bill saw a priest for communion. I saw to that. I’m so glad.

Family thoughts and all manner of thoughts going through my head.

I gave my speech in front of all the city, state and national dignitaries and with the assassinated President’s mother at my elbow as I spoke. Had his tragic death not occurred that November day in Dallas, there would have been no occasion for this speech, and so much in the world might have been different.

But it was, it did happen. I’ve wasted 42 years of my life drifting in a quasi-world of non-marriage marriage, of dissipation, of wasted talent. I’m 76 and can’t quite fathom that. Frozen in life, that must change. No pity, self or otherwise.

The following noon, 24 hours later, the bells were ringing at noon at the Mission Church down the hill from the hospital. My mother heard it. He went to God at noon. So much to think about.

That still, small voice, we must hear it, and those bells.

Dad, we are thinking of you. I’ve thought of you all this mostly idle day of my seventies.

It is 10:34 p.m. in Florida.

You were never here, Dad. But — you are here now….

A MAN NAMED RAY (AND THE WRITER NAMED JAMES)

I’ve salvaged this belatedly from a December 7, 2021 Facebook post regarding Pearl Harbor and a memorable Pearl Vet.

Remembering the man named Ray Walters. He was just one among the handful of Pearl Harbor veteran I met gathered around the flag pole out front of the Seminole, Florida VFW post back on December 7, 1991. These were guys who simply couldn’t make it out to Hawaii for the big 50th anniversary commemoration. I was doing a brief story about them for WTSP-TV, Tampa/St. Petersburg. Ray just happened to mention to me that he’d been at Scofield Barracks with James Jones, the author of From Here to Eternity which famously depicts pre-WWII Army life at Pearl and at Scofield which, to this day, is the Hawaiian Island’s largest U.S. Army installation and home to the 25th Infantry Division. It is 17,000 acres and adjacent to the U.S. Air Force’s Wheeler Field. It suffered collateral death and damage on December 7, 1941. The novel takes us up to that horrible Sunday morning the skies suddenly filled with Zeroes and stunned sailors, soldiers and airmen, some in the middle of breakfast, began dying in droves.

This fact of Ray’s friendship with the late author and my interest in books and authors intrigued me to the point where I decided to do a separate subsequent TV news feature story about Ray. It amounted to a study of the paradoxes and mysteries surrounding one solitary, perceptibly embittered human soul who was quite obviously shaped, or secretly psychically mangled like so many of that generation, by the severe experiences of war. After surviving the attack, Ray went on to fight with the 25th Infantry Division at Guadalcanal where he suffered a serious head wound. I forget how he spent his post-service life but I believe he’d had a good job from which he was now retired.

Ray shared a fascinating document with me (I still have a copy somewhere): an abundently friendly, newsy letter he’d received from James Jones in response to a letter Ray had written him, when the author was in Hollywood acting as a consultant on the movie version of Eternity, which is still considered an early 50s cinema classic. Perhaps you saw it, with Bert Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Borgnine, etc.. Jones offers a few generlized, wry, cynical pronouncements on the Hollywood crowd, then goes on to inquire of Ray if he had any information –those ten years after the war’s end — about the fate of any of their fellow Scofield Barracks vets. That included one named ( was it Angelo?) Maggio, whom Jones had heard might have died in the battle over the Pacific island of New Britain.

Yes, to my astonishment, there WAS a real Maggio. In the novel, that’s the name a young Italian-American soldier from the Bronx who is also major figure in the narrative. Did James Jones merely borrow the name and intend no parallel with the real-life Maggio? Fellow barracks mate Ray recalls a very wild, saucy and entertaining figure who bore more than a superficial resemblance to the fictional Maggio. He shared newsclips with me in which this real-life Maggio (who, in fact, survived the war), had subsequently sued Jones in a New York court for defamation in the wake of the novel’s publication and the movie’s release — a sad postscript, given the author’s solicitude for his fellow G.I. evident in that letter., (He certainly should have changed his character’s name; you’ll recall that Frank Sinatra earned his one and only Oscar portrayiang Maggio in the movie.)

Jones’s novel, by the way, does contain the standard disclaimer – all characters are imaginary and any resemblance to actual persons is accidental. It remains a mystery, therefore, why he didn’t work harder to distance the real and imaginary Maggios. Did he somehow intend the portrait as an affectionate tribute to his fellow soldier whom he believed was likely dead from combat? Strange. Perhaps Jones’s biographer deals with this.

Ray said he’d met up with James Jones a number of times in the post-war years. He’d collected, and showed me, all his (probably )first and (probably)signed editions of all Jones’s novels (including The Thin Red Line, which follows Pearl vets into the horrible Guadalcanal battle in which Ray almost died). Yet he had a curious take on his old friend’s literary career — that he didn’t understand why people had to write books in such “flowery language” about factual events that could be told far more simply. Plainly Ray was no lover of fictive literature. (I’d add, though, that Jones’s style in Eternity is on the purple and sausage-fingered side even for my tastes. In Eternity and Red Line, the writing is often downright awkward and peppered with tortured metaphors, e.g., “(B)elow him under the blows of the February Hawaiian sun the quadrangle gasped defenselessly.” But there is also a kind of primitive power and authenticity throughout, especially in descriptions of battle and its aftermath, which ring disturbingly true. Jones was also master of military detail which can be fascinated to the non-military reader, or, conversely, to millions of veterans, especially World War veterans, for whom it recalls a once lived reality. Jones’s 818-page novel ( unlike the movie) also only slightly fudges the darker, profane, libidinous, bibulous and exploitative side of soldiering, especially their ages-old interactions with prostitutes. In 1950 this might all have seemed boldly innovative. Eternity did, after all, win the first-ever National Book Award from critics.

Asked how Scofield Barracks soldiers regarded Jones, the budding author in their midst, Ray said, “to tell you the truth, we all thought he was a fag.” (Not an uncommon intra-personal assessment of the seemingly more delicate among men in the coarse, crude ambiance of barracks life — speaking from experience. It is perhaps notable that Jones offers accounts of homosexual activity in his trilogy of books about the war. He himself married, had children, projected, in on-camera inerviews available on-line, a classic male machismo and also turns up drunk a fair amount of time.)

But it was clear Ray felt a strong bond with Jones whose bonds seemed to grow stronger with literary types. He produced many, mostly forgotten books, enjoyed the praise of the likes of luminaries such as Mary McCarthy and Joan Dideon, lived much of his life in Paris, the darling of that literary crowd, wound up on Long Island with authors for neighbors, and died tragically early in his 50s from heart failure after many hard-drinking years, having more than once written of how the trauma and terror of the Pacific War left men hollowed out and broken, including perhaps, Jones himself. (The film version of The Thin Red Line makes vividly plain the dark Guadalcanal experience for terrified American and starving Japanese soldiers alike).

After doing my story on Ray, we had no contact. I don’t recall if he had children. He told me his wife had left him years before — gone off to “find herself,” he told me bitterly. He was a tall, substantial man, appearing youngere than his years. But no Bay Area vet I ask has any knowledge about him. It is most likely that he is gone, with James Jones and almost all the others.

One of the last things Ray shared with me was both intriguing and disturbing. He said just days before the Japanese attack, one Scofield Barracks soldier, consumed by an anxious premonition, went berserk, screaming that something terrible was going to happen. He was carted off, never heard from again. Then came the bombs and the death.

What on earth was that all about? Ray didn’t know, and went on wondering….He doubted, as do I, that that soldier had any special knowledge. And From Here to Eternity makes plain that well before the Japanese attack, Pearl Harbor soldiers and sailors knew war was coming. They just didn’t know it would come in that way, and directly to them. James records that the trauma of the attack left him and his fellows feeling caught up very intimately in history and civilizational danger and uncertainty.

Ray, wherever you are, thank you for your service and for the chance to tell your story. James, I pray for you and, through Ray’s letter, felt for a moment as if I knew you. I must get a copy into the hands of those who go on preserving your literary legacy.

And God Bless all Pearl Harbor vets, living and dead.

MOM AGAINST DARKNESS

Here’s a story for Easter, the Season of Light. I’ll call it Mom Against Darkness, after my late mother’s uneasy fascination with a famous 1948 magazine article called, “Man Against Darkness.” It was a Princeton scholar’s unsettling thesis that God and religion are illusions, that we’re basically riding a big dirt ball (earth) spinning in the night of space and that it’s time to get used to it and liberate ourselves accordingly. I confess I think that way sometimes. “I’m not the only one,” as the late John Lennon sang. Why else would his “Imagine” be so popular, even at high school graduations? No heaven, hell, or religion, hence, no wars, greed or hunger..yoo-HOO, ooh-ooh. Good luck, grads!

Of course, John L was romping in a dreamy Elysium. Mom was marching into a nihilistic Apocalypse. She was 55 in 1958 and subscribed to The Atlantic Monthly, that once fine journal destined to morph into a glossy monthly repository of trendy “progressive” twaddle. (My opinion.) For their 1957 centenary, Atlantic editors published a hardbound 100-year collection of “reflections on our national life.” In effect, their ‘greatest hits.’ I recently discovered Mom’s battered copy, autographed by the editors, with a penciled notation that she started reading it 1/10/58, doubtless going cover-to-cover. Mom was a reader. James Russell Lowell, Mark Twain, Walter Lippman – they’re all represented in the volume. But only the page number of the September, 1948 “Darkness” article is circled, with mom’s inked addendum, “I enjoyed this,” her note for posterity. What did she find so enjoyable in so dark a vision?

The opening paragraph would have caught her Catholic eye: “The Catholic bishops of America recently issues a statement in which they said that the chaotic and bewildering state of the modern world is due to man’s loss of faith, his abandonment of God and religion.” W.T. Stace, the author, adds, intriguingly, that he “ entirely agree with the bishops,” but for decidedly different reasons. In those cold, dark post-WWII, post Atom Bomb days, he believed our morals and ideals were “our own invention,” and the world around us “nothing but an immense spiritual emptiness.” (I see Mom reading this in her parlor rocking chair while my devout father is off at a Knights of Columbus, my teenage siblings rocking and rolling in those late 50s and me upstairs memorizing Baltimore catechism Lesson 5: Question: What is man? Answer: Man is a creature composed of body and soul, and made in the image and likeness of God….

Mom graduated from Worcester’s Commerce High, 1922 – no Princeton scholar. But she knew about darkness, being Irish-born, suffering bouts of Keltic melancholy, alternately rebellious and, retiscent, given to anti-clerical erruptions while writing light devotional verse for pious Catholic journals, all the time wondering if life really had any meaning, especially after my father died so young. She loved Robert Frost but, but, like him, was “aquainted with the night.” And here she was reading some guy telling us to “put away childish things and adolescent dreams, grasp the real world as it actually is, stark and bleak,“ give up our “romantic, religious illusions” or else “sink back into the savagery and brutality from which we came, taking a humble place once more among the lower animals.” Woe! Sounds like a joke that begins, “Nietzsche and Hobbes walk into a bar….”

So what was Mom thinking, reading this? Well, she loved toying with ideas, all kinds, but remained as skeptical of eggheads as she was of crowned and mitred heads. I believe she always wondered “why do the heathen rage?” (Psalms 1-12) In 1956, she wrote a poem called, “The Search” that ends with her in “His arms outstretched to bless!” Go figure.

“Darkness” author, Professor Stace, checked out of this “chaotic and bewildering” world August, 2 1967. Mom followed,August 5,1986. Maybe they’ve met by now. They’d have a lot to talk about. I’ll bet they know who rolled that big rock away from the tomb on Easter morning.