It’s Friday, and that means Open Mic Day
Today is Open Mike [sic] Day at Green Valley Moments.
Comments have been closed in the past after Friday’s session. A suggestion has been made that the “mic” be left open for comments indefinitely beyond the usual closing time. No problemo. Fire away! Enter your topic in the form of a comment, or feel free to comment on some other person’s topic.
February 24th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
Zippers and Zappers of Nostalgia
Nostalgia for some is zip and to others it’s zap (read sap).
I’m a zapper, and the death of Curt Gowdy, the famous sportscaster, brought back many fond memories.
To a kid growing up in a very small town in Oklahoma, listening to sporting events on the radio was god. During the World Series I always wanted to play hooky to listen to games in the afternoon but I didn’t.
Of course, during those depression years we would all huddle around the radio at night to listen to FDR’s fireside chats.
That was before Gene Autry gave us “never is heard, a discouraging word” from “Home on the Range.” Easier said as a rich cowboy actor and singer, than as a poor telegraph operator when Will Rogers discovered him in the Claremore, Okla. train depot.
The first time I remember hearing Gowdy was his broadcast of baseball games in Oklahoma City, which had a team that was a farm club of the Cleveland Indians.
Curt also did the commercials. Strangely for a kid reared in a strict, fundamentalist Baptist home, the commercial I seem to remember was for a beer. I can still hear Curt’s voice touting “Silver Fox, made from the choice of the brewer’s hops.”
Except I’ve never known anybody who could remember a beer, probably marketed only in Oklahoma, called Silver Fox. But I also seem to remember Curt’s nickname eventually became “the Silver Fox.”
But I’m pretty certain. It’s somewhat like my memory of going to school in New York during my Navy years and there being four pro football teams playing there. For years when I brought up the subject in guy talk everyone thought that simply wasn’t true. Then one day in a business meeting with a former New Yorker, I put forth my memory and he ticked off the names.
They were the Bulldogs, Dodgers, Giants and Yankees, and somewhere in an old scrapbook I have ticket stubs from the Bulldogs’ games.
But sometimes I am a little too much taken with my half-vast memory.
In 1982 Doubleday asked me to write a book about Washington lobbying, using my success stories as case histories. (And where were these guys when I finally did have books to publish?)
So I sat down at my typewriter at home and started. But as a former newspaper reporter I knew it was best to check the facts even if I was writing about events in the recent past.
I was shocked to find how wrong I was on votes in Congress on the issues where I had a client interest. So when I started writing my novel, “The Christmas Hour,” in December of 1997 I researched one issue in the book almost every day for a year and a half.
Back to Curt, I didn’t even know he was from Wyoming until I was visiting there once and saw a park named after him.
As with Bill Stern and Mel Allen, Curt Gowdy will always live in my memories of those wonderful days of radio when with their words and a lot of imagination, I could in my mind’s eye see exactly what was happening on the baseball diamond or football field.
Not always exactly as it was happening.
When I was on the staff of the Naval Hospital in San Diego in1949, the city leaders created a New Year’s Day event called the Harbor Bowl.
The teams selected to play were Nevada and Villanova.
Nevada had a quarterback named Stan Heath who was the leading passer in college play that year. Villanova had a bunch of big old boys who were sons of Pennsylvania and West Virginia coal miners.
A few plays into the game a Villanova defensive player charged through the line and hit Stan. An ambulance came out on the field and took Stan to a hospital.
That was the game so far as fans were concerned with the great passer out, and it eventually ended with a score of 27-7 Villanova. Not to Bill Stern, who was calling it on the radio. I had brought a little radio with me and until the very end, Bill would have had his listeners thinking it was the game of the year.
One year when the Cardinals were in the series it was quite cold for a game in St. Louis. Whoever was calling the game was describing something players were wearing under their uniform tops called a “turtleneck” sweater.
I thought that was really cool. But it was years later when I started skiing before I ever owned one.
Were the players really wearing turtlenecks? What I can’t remember is ever seeing any photograph showing one wearing a turtleneck but that doesn’t mean this tidbit, too, wasn’t just created by a kid’s imagination.
As we moved on from radio to television we did not need those great voices to paint word pictures because the cameras did that for us.
That is not all good. As a friend, an Olympic gold medal winner, said to me last week in discussing the Winter Olympics in Torino, “Why don’t those commentators just shut up. How many opinions and technical details do we need to know when all those pretty pictures are right there on the screen?”
That won’t change. And with appropriate respect to our current sports commentators such as Bob Costas and Al Michaels or anyone else you can name, in my opinion they just don’t make them anymore like those old radio guys.
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February 25th, 2006 at 9:43 pm
Bode Miller Postscript
Today in his last of five shots at medaling, Bode Miller screwed up on his first run and comes home with none, after being touted to the world as the man with the best chance to bring back five golds for the U.S. team from Torino.
In one post-race interview Bode said he had just come to Torino to have fun. In another he said he hadn’t been boozing it up the last two weeks while competing.
Take your choice. I hope it isn’t too contradictory of my previous Open Mike post if I take the latter.
When world-class drinkers sober up, the world always changes. Married people, for example, sometimes find when sober they could care less for a spouse of years. The world looks different in many ways to a sober person vs. a drunk one, and weight loss is not unusual.
Bode was said to be down in his weight in Torino. And maybe, just maybe, as a sober skier with such a tremendous buildup he decided he did not want to be that monkey at the top of the flagpole with you know what so fully exposed.
Maybe when we see the made-for-TV Bode Miller movie that’s sure to be coming in the next few months, we might finally know the truth.
March 3rd, 2006 at 4:44 pm
Move Over Andy Rooney, It’s My Turn To Be A Grouch
Move over Andy Rooney, you curmudgeonus old coot. You’ve had decades to gripe to us every Sunday night from the prestigious pulpit of CBS’ “60 Minutes” program. I have a few gripes of my own.
You know what I’m sick and tired of, Andy? Grouches.
Now, who could not love Oscar when he comes out of his garbage can to grouch on “Sesame Street?” After Kermit the Frog, Oscar is my favorite character on the show. Moi? I’ve just never been much of a Miss Piggy fan.
Especially, I’m annoyed by guys such as Andy, who get rich being professional grouches about nitpicking subjects that usually don’t amount to a hill of beans.
It’s not enough that we have to hit the “mute” button on our remotes every Sunday night while Andy grouches, but now they’ve added another Andy grouch piece on my very favorite TV program, “CBS Sunday Morning.”
Andy, now something like 86, many times has mentioned his service in the Army during World War II.
Early on, an Internet bio says, Andy served in England with an artillery unit but was then transferred to work on Stars & Stripes, the military newspaper. I assume he and Bill Mauldin, the great cartoonist who started with Stars & Stripes, were big buddies back then.
That gives him some credentials as a dogface, but apparently his sole combat experience was when he and several other correspondents flew in American bombers on a mission over Germany.
And I bet Andy would, if he thought of it, love to do a “60 Minutes” segment on how LBJ got a medal serving in the Navy during World War II when he flew on a mission in the South Pacific.
I give Andy credit for several hours of bravery on that flight. But of course he came back to a base with an officer’s club or a town with a pub, hot food and a room with sheets on the bed.
Wait a minute, that’s not right. I don’t think Andy was in any officer’s club because he never rose above the rank or corporal or maybe sergeant.
However, in the tradition of Richard Nixon I will not extend my grouchiness to what Andy did in the war. After all, everybody can’t be a great hero like Sgt. York, Audie Murphy and Vernon Baker, only African American to receive the Medal of Honor (from President Clinton in 1997) in World War II.
A few years ago the National Society of Newspaper Columnists held its annual meeting at one of those high-end hotels on the north side of Tucson.
Andy, who also writes a newspaper column, was the speaker and received the Ernie Pyle Award from the NSNC. I guess they didn’t know about my brilliant columns or they would have given the award to me.
When the dinner was over, I hoped Andy would go to the group’s hospitality suite and I could ask him at what point in his life did somebody lick the red off his lollypop.
Instead, old and bent, he stalked out of the room where the dinner was held looking as grouchy as ever.
Recently someone sent me an email about one of Andy’s weekly grouch sessions. It was about what we can do to reduce our deluge of junk mail.
A sidebar here, as they say in the newspaper business.
When I spent 12 years with one of the largest international public relations firms, a client was the junk mail industry. Some smarty, possibly one of my associates, came up with a fancy new name for the group, “Direct Mail Marketing Association.” Probably got a raise for it.
The junk mail group’s Washington lobbyist was a tall, beautiful blonde who couldn’t tell the difference between the Capitol and the White House.
But she had this bright little guy who was her sidekick and carried her briefcase while she schmoozed with the association bigwigs. His name was Gary Bauer, the righteous right-winger who ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000. I think Gary was going to law school at night when I knew him, and obviously night school paid off.
One of Andy’s tips was to take the letters, brochures and applications from the credit card companies, put them in the enclosed self-addressed, stamped envelopes and send them back.
Andy’s thesis was that these credit card companies, usually big banks, are stuck with paying the return postage.
Brilliant. I can see this little trick is going to make a huge dent in the profits of Capital One or Chase, which probably did more than $10 billion each in credit card business last year.
Thanks, Andy, for telling us how to stick it to the big boys
I think I missed Andy’s segment that week because I would like a tip on what to do with all those catalogs coming every day from L.L. Bean, Sierra Traders and the Pottery Barn.
What I do is take a big magic marker, black out my name and address and throw them in the trash. This costs me, because I get so many catalogs a magic marker lasts only about a week.
I’m going to end this diatribe with one more grouch
If I’m going to be stuck with that stack of junk mail catalogs every day, why can’t I now and then get one from Victoria’s Secret?
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Note: Grouchiness also invaded the comics in today’s (3-3-06) Arizona Daily Star. Check out “Zits.”
September 16th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Hotel Reviews and Reservations…
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…
September 27th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
Best Coffee Shops…
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…
October 18th, 2007 at 6:16 am
Black Coffee Facts and Interesting Coffee Resources…
Sorry, it just sounds like a crazy idea for me
…