Dad prays they’ll be old enough to ride without him then, so he can wait in the shade, sipping his lemonade and aging gracefully into the history of the place.
March, 1979
Machines That Work
THE OTHER DAY, I celebrated one of the major mechanical achievements of my life. It wouldn’t be exaggerating to call it a milestone, since it involved not only nuts and bolts and screws and washers but electricity as well. I think of electricity as a mysterious, dangerous monster, as malevolently intentioned toward me as toward James Thurber’s mother, who thought it would leak out of empty sockets and outlets and kill her in her rocking chair. Any mechanical job requiring the twisting together of copper wires demands bravery of me, as well as manual skill, for I never really believe I’ve flipped the circuit-breaker right or that it will really cut off the juice.
What I did was assemble and install a ceiling fan over my dining room table. Not one of those fast, hornetlike modern fans, but a quiet, sedate fan with big wooden paddles, the kind that made soda foun tains and grocery stores and hotel lobbies such inviting places before air-conditioning changed the am biance of our summers.
After a quarter-century of oblivion, those fans have made a comeback, first as quaint antiques in restored old houses or as graceful decorations in otherwise ordinary modern rooms. Now, though, more and more people are buying them for practical reasons. It has been learned that gentle movement of air about a room—the kind of movement those old-fashioned fans provide—decreases the need for air-conditioning. With a ceiling fan, you can set your thermostat at 82 degrees and enjoy the same comfort as if it were set at 74 degrees without the fan. Since the paddles of the ceiling fan are set horizontally, gravity doesn’t slow their momentum, which means the motor doesn’t have to work as hard as on modern, vertical fans, so the ceiling fan doesn’t use much electric power. About the same as a lightbulb, in fact. And that can mean a big saving on summertime electric bills. That’s what the brochure that the fan-store man gave me says, anyway.
I was so thrilled when I pulled the switch chain and the fan actually worked that my lady and I opened a bottle of wine and drank toasts to my mechanical genius and the gently turning paddles that stirred the air so sweetly. It was a pleasure to raise my glass to a machine that worked.
As we worked our way toward the bottom of the bottle, admiring the turning paddles so intently that we almost hypnotized ourselves, we talked quietly of machines that work—“work” in the sense of performing a useful function inexpensively and quietly without at the same time causing harm, either to people or the environment. We also agreed that a true machine-that-works ought to be fun to watch or use, and that it should be simple enough to be maintained and repaired by any reasonably intelligent adult.
The ceiling fan, we concluded, met all those criteria, and we drank another toast to it and tried to think of other machines still in common use that make the world a better place without hurting it at the same time. We came up with only two, and in the several days since my mechanical triumph I’ve been unable to add to our tiny list.
One is the bicycle. The basic purpose of the bicycle is the same as all the other modes of transportation that man over the millenia has invented: to move him from one place to another faster than he can walk. Most modern vehicles are perversions of that purpose. They move man from one place to another much faster than he has any business going, or at great cost, or they move him amid clouds of noise and poisonous fumes, or they move him in status symbols or sex symbols, or they kill him while they’re moving him, or they do all of those injuries.
But the bicycle remains pure. It moves man faster than he can walk, but in such a way that its rider can still look at the scenery, exchange pleasantries with those he meets, enjoy the sunshine and fresh air, and improve his body while he is traveling. The bicycle depletes no precious natural resource; it pollutes neither air nor water; it costs little; it requires no expressways or highways or parking garages. Changes in its design and mechanics over the years have been genuine improvements, not done for the sake of fashion or planned obsolescence. Properly cared for, it will last for generations, and it’s still a joy to behold and use.
The only machine that can match the bicycle and the ceiling fan for usefulness-without-penalty, I think, is the windmill. I’m not talking about the kind of windmill you see in postcards from Holland or Cape Cod, the kind that Don Quixote fought. Those machines were gristmills, most of them, and would qualify for our list if they were still used for that purpose, but they’re only tourist attractions now.
I’m talking about the kind of windmill you see along country roads throughout the Midwest and South west. That mill harnesses the region’s most plentiful resource—wind—to obtain the region’s most needed commodity—water. It does its job without depleting its energy source or dirtying the sky. It can be left untended for months or even years, requiring only a little oil or a new sucker rod from time to time. Its workings are so simple that a child can understand their principle, and a teenager, working with an experienced windmill man, can master their problems in a day.
A windmill adds dignity to an otherwise drab land scape. In flat country, its tower provides a height from which to gaze into the distance. Its work is beautiful to watch, and its sounds—the whir of the wind through the wheel, the “thunk-thunk” of the rod, and the splash of cool water into the tank—renew the soul. The windmill works in perfect harmony with nature, never taking more from the earth than she can yield healthily. It’s no accident that the water problems of windmill regions have increased in proportion to the replacement of that machine with electric and gasoline-powered pumps. Nature eventually will command the correction of that error, I think, and the windmill will return to its rightful places just as the ceiling fan and the bicycle have.
So, simple and noble three, Salud! And may your kin, if there be any, also increase.
April, 1979
The Old Scotchman and Me
ELSEWHERE IN THE TOWN of my child hood summers, people were worrying about the drought and polio and Joe Stalin and making ends meet. Maybe thoughts of the big world and its troubles passed through my mind, too, like the wispy clouds that swept across the hot, brilliant sky, bearing no rain. But never in the afternoon. During those torrid hours after lunch, when germs or whatever caused polio buzzed with the bees in the Virginia creeper outside the window, I was far, far away.
My mother would deny that. I was slouched on my bed, in my shady adobe room, she would say, wearing my Saint Louis Cardinals cap, aimlessly slapping an oily black ball into my first-baseman’s mitt, listening to the Montgomery Ward radio I’d got for Christmas. But she doesn’t know.
I was really at Yankee Stadium or Ebbets or Fenway or Wrigley Field or Comiskey or Sportsman’s or the Polo Grounds or Tiger Stadium, watching Joe Dimaggio or Jackie Robinson or Stan Musial or Ted Williams or Nellie Fox or Johnny Mize or Ralph Kiner. It didn’t matter which city it was or who I was watching. I loved all the parks and all the boys of summer, and I loved Gordon McLendon most of all.
He and I met on KVLF, “The Voice of the Last Frontier,” the Alpine, Texas, affiliate of the Liberty Baseball Network. I don’t remember whether we met by chance or somebody introduced us, and it doesn’t matter. He became my idol, rivaled in my worship only by Stan the Man himself.
If I couldn’t be Musial when I grew up, I decided, I wanted to be McLendon. In those days, when Saint Louis was the western border of the majors and the teams traveled by train, McLendon was a miracle of speed. One day his Game of the Day would be the Giants and Dodgers in New York City. Twenty-four hours later, he would be in Chicago with the White Sox and Indians. Then in Cincinnati with the Reds and Pirates.
And what games they were! Even when the lowly Browns played the lowly Senators, there was never a dull moment. The crowds were always huge and roared lustily with every pitch. The hickory met the horsehide with a crack that seemed to echo through the stands. Even the dog that wandered o
nto the field and interrupted the game was exciting. Sometimes it would take the cops forty-five minutes to catch him, and McLendon’s descriptions of his antics were funnier than Abbott and Costello.
Yeah, it might be better to be McLendon than Musial, I thought. Stan would have to retire someday, but the Old Scotchman would go on forever, spending his summers in the ballparks of America, hobnobbing with the greatest men who ever lived. Maybe he had already gone on forever. No telling how old McLendon really was….
Never did I suspect that the Old Scotchman was twenty-six, that he had seen only two major league games in his life, or that the roar of the crowd and the crack of the bat were coming to me from the Cliff Towers Hotel in Oak Cliff. From the basement, near the pay toilet.
He got the idea in the Pacific during World War II. “On whatever atoll we were, the troops would stop their work and listen to whatever game the Armed Forces Network was carrying that day,” he says. “I knew that major league baseball barely existed in the hinterlands of America. The only games we got to hear were the Ail-Star Game and the World Series. So I thought, ‘Why not?…’”
The way it worked was this: A Western Union telegrapher, who was really at some major league park, would teletype the bare-bones facts of the game to the Cliff Towers basement. McLendon would clothe them in the vivid color of his imagination, the alert excitement of his voice, a folksy manner, and sound effects and relay them over 458 radio stations to millions of kids, firemen, barbers, bartenders, cabbies, and cowboys.
“I wasn’t the first broadcaster to re-create games,” he says. “I had heard many, but they were pretty dull. You could hear the teletype in the background. The broadcasters’ descriptions were prosaic. They were just reading the facts off the wire. So I started asking the telegraphers to send along a little more information. Were there any fights on the field? Any celebrities in the crowd? So far as they could tell, was that pitch a curve, a sinker, or what? I started sending bottles of scotch and other little gifts to the ballparks for the telegraphers, and they started throwing in a little color. So I could say, ‘Dimaggio swings and misses! He looks disgusted, fans. Joe didn’t like that call.’
“Yeah, I had a few advantages over the live sports-casters. I could take more liberties to make it more exciting. If only twenty-five fans came out to see the Phillies, I could still have thirty thousand roaring.”
The bat that cracked so smartly was suspended by a string over the Old Scotchman’s microphone. He just tapped it with a pencil when the batter connected. The dog was always ready to run onto the field when ever the teletype broke down. “Sometimes it would be the dog, sometimes it would be a fight in the stands,” he says. “I made up all sorts of things to keep the fans with me while repairs were made.”
But McLendon was what made it all work. He was an encyclopedia of baseball lore, and his voice made boring contests as suspenseful as Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds.”
“I was something of an actor,” he acknowledges. “But I was an avid student of baseball. I did two hours of homework before every game, and I just loved what I was doing. Every game was an adventure. I couldn’t wait till I got to the ballpark.”
After spending the seasons of 1947-49 in the Cliff Towers basement, the Old Scotchman actually did journey to the ballpark. In 1950 he saw his third major league game in person, and for three more years he did half of his broadcasts from the scene and the rest by his teletype. Some fifteen hundred games in all, and if there was a difference among them, the live ones were probably less exciting.
Since those summers the Old Scotchman has built an empire of radio stations, then sold them one by one. He owns one of the largest drive-in theater chains in the country. He’s the third-largest stockholder in Columbia Pictures. In his spare time he lectures on international finance at economics seminars.
“But maybe I should have remained a sportscaster,” he says. “My devotion to baseball was rhapsodic. Every broadcast filled me with joy—a young man’s springtime joy. I don’t think I cheated the public by adding a little color to it. Do you?”
Not unless Huckleberry Finn is a fraud, too. And Dubble-Bubble, and watermelon, and circuses.
May, 1979
The Difficulty of Saying Thanks
AMONG THE TALENTS of Robert Folsom, mayor of Dallas, eloquence doesn’t rank high. Sometimes he’s only half a cut above Tank McNamara, the fumblemouthed broadcaster of the comic strip, who informs his viewers of the “norts spews.” But the mayor came up with a line the other day that has stuck with me because it is eloquent and true.
It was during Vietnam Veterans Week, an observance to acknowledge that once upon a time, long ago and far away, yes, there was a war, and, yes, there were Americans in it, and some of them even got hurt. Mayor Folsom was presenting the Presidential Certificate for Outstanding Community Achievement to a group of vets, most of whom had been paralyzed, maimed, or otherwise crippled in the conflict, and he pointed out that the nation has never really expressed its gratitude to the veterans of Vietnam for their sacrifices.
“Our inability to express that thankfulness is difficult to explain,” the mayor said. And that sentence stuck with me and has bothered me ever since.
American troops returning from World Wars I and II were greeted with ticker-tape parades in the cities and brass bands at small-town railroad stations. A grateful nation was ready to honor them, eager to fold them back into civilian society, open-handed in its generosity. I remember signs in the small businesses of my childhood: “The Proprietor of This Establishment Is a Veteran of World War II.” To be a veteran was an honorable thing, worthy of respect and admiration.
The Doughboys, after all, had saved the world for democracy and, the country thought, had fought the Great War—great because it was the biggest and was said to be the last. The Dogfaces had saved the world and democracy from an even more evil threat in an even bigger war. No one called it the last war, but we hoped it was, for the atomic age had blossomed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and another world war was an unthinkable risk not only to democracy but also to the world itself.
The action in Korea was less conclusive, but it wasn’t called a war. It was a “police action,” and an honorable one. The Americans and their allies drove the North Koreans and the Chinese back into their own countries and came home. They hadn’t saved the world for democracy, maybe, but they had saved South Korea, and the nation was grateful for that. It was still honorable to be a veteran and to join the American Legion and the VFW and march in parades and be patriotic. The country was proud of what Americans did in Korea.
But the veterans of Vietnam returned to no parades, no speeches, no music, because there was no victory to celebrate. Their reunions with their loved ones were sober and private.
They had fought their country’s longest war without ever understanding their mission, without ever knowing why they had been plucked from their lives and families and sent there. They hadn’t saved the world for democracy. They hadn’t even saved South Vietnam. They and the families to whom they returned didn’t even know what “save South Vietnam” meant. Who or what was “South Vietnam,” anyway? Diem, Khanh? Ky? Thieu? Was “South Vietnam” anybody other than whatever dictator American troops were propping up at the moment? Apparently not, for when the dictators and the Americans were gone, there was no more “South Vietnam.” We had fought our longest war for nothing.
Because of improvements in battlefield medicine and the technology of evacuation, more Americans came back alive than in the past, considering the number who went. But many who would have other wise died came back maimed—physically or mentally or both.
We couldn’t be grateful for their victory, for there was none. We had sent them to a war they couldn’t win, so they didn’t win it. But shouldn’t we have been grateful for their willingness to go, their willingness to serve, when their friends and neighbors on the draft boards demanded it of them? We probably were. Maybe we were, anyway.
So, if we wer
e thankful, why couldn’t we express our thanks? That, as the mayor said, is difficult to ex plain. But I think I know why.
In all our other wars, we knew who killed and wounded our young. The enemy did. But in Vietnam, we didn’t know who the enemy was. Was it the Viet Cong? North Vietnam? The U.S. government? Truth? Untruth? God? The devil? In our heart of hearts, we fear it may have been ourselves. We feel that through some sin or terrible mistake orhorrendous accident, we killed and maimed our own. It’s as if through stupidity or error we disfigured a beautiful child and can no longer stand to look at him, for to look is to suffer again the guilt and shame of our act.
It’s a terrible burden to bear, as crippling in its own way as the injuries of the battlefield. And we can’t ex press our thankfulness to the veterans of Vietnam because we haven’t yet asked forgiveness for the uselessness of their sacrifices.
June, 1979
Postage to Los Angeles
IT HAD BEEN an ordinary day, very like most days of the twenty years James Lucas has worked for the U.S. Postal Service, and the woman who stepped up to his window looked much like other postal patrons. She was in her mid-forties and, Lucas guessed, didn’t have much money. She said she wanted to mail something to Los Angeles and asked how much it would cost.
“What is it you want to mail?” Lucas asked.
“Him,” the woman replied. She pointed at the small boy standing beside her.
Lucas looked at the boy. He wasn’t smiling. He looked at the woman. She wasn’t smiling either. “Are you serious?” Lucas asked.
“Yes,” the woman said. “Can I do it?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “If you’re serious, I’ll check.”
“I’m serious,” the woman said. “I want to send him parcel post.”
In two decades of selling stamps and marking things “Fragile” and “Special Handling,” Lucas had never heard of such a thing. He asked his fellow workers if it’s legal to send a boy to LA by parcel post. They didn’t know, either. So Lucas checked his postal manual. “I guess you can send him,” he told the woman. “I don’t see anything here that says you can’t.”
The Time of My Life Page 6
