THE DAY CLARK GABLE CAME TO TOWN

What happened to me between that warm summer day when I was eleven or twelve, and the day nine or ten years later when Wallace Beery strolled into the bar where I was having a drink?

Or the day Don Ameche somewhat breathlessly walked up to the jeep where I was operating the public address system and asked me if this was where "the jocks were playing."

Or when my big brother Franz jumped up from the table where we were eating, and asked popular bandleader Joe Reichman for his autograph?

What happened?


Gable was passing through my hometown on his way from Glacier Park back to Hollywood when my chum Jimmy Todd and I happened to run into Jimmy's father coming from the Montana Hotel. “Clark Gable is in the lobby and you may be able to see him if you get over there,” he told us.

Get over there we did. And there he was sitting at a ridiculously small table in the worn-at-the-edges lobby writing postcards. It was a hotel with a storefront lobby, and rooms upstairs you walked up to, which probably were offices at one time. I was a little embarrassed by it--as I was with so much of my Kalispell, Montana hometown when I saw tourists.

One of Gable's postcards I happened to see was addressed to Carole Lombard--or did I just fancy that? There were only two or three other people there, watching him in respectful and somewhat awed silence. It added to the specialness of the
occasion.

When it looked like he was about ready to leave, Jimmy and I skipped outside where we had seen his sporty canary-yellow, two-seated, convertible roadster crouching at the curb. I'd never seen such a car; so Hollywood it was. The top was down, with California license plates, and it gleamed in the summer sun. Its curves were mesmerizing.

It was one of those cars with those huge wheels, with gloriously white sidewall tires. I don’t know whose idea it was, but Jimmy had a pencil and we proceeded to pencil our initials on those tires. When he came out something possessed us to point out what we had done; we didn’t truly know what to expect.

But by golly he flashed that famous Gable grin and said, “That’s neat, Buddies!” Buddies! Then we asked him for his autograph, while others stood and watched--admiring us, I was sure. He asked us our names and scribbled out autographs on hastily produced scraps of paper.

Then, this Great Man, who'd transported me in “Mutiny On The Bounty,” “Call Of The Wild,” “San Francisco” and other unforgettable movies shook our hands, and hopped in his roadster. When he started it up it growled, and then settled into a sound like a snoring lion sleeping off gorging on an antelope. It was a fitting departure, and I was sure as he drove away he waved and said, “So long, Buddies!”

This was too much. This we needed to tell others about. We headed for the one place we knew we could probably find people to tell--the soda fountain down on the corner. We walked in proudly and began going up to people saying, “Shake the hand that shook the hand of Clark Gable,” proudly showing them the autographs. People were more excited by the news that he had been in town.

Now it so happened that one of the soda jerks was a girl I'd had my eye on for sometime. The only trouble was--apart from the plethora of troubles a kid on the cusp of his teens could have with such delicate matters--she was a couple of years older than I was. About to enter high school! A big difference during those years.

When I showed her Gable's autograph I was ready to bask in the glory of the moment: she obviously envied it.

“What’ll you take for it, Tommy?”

I was almost knocked off my stool, and couldn't come up with an answer right away. But I enjoyed the feeling of having her so interested in me. Finally, I decided the fitting exchange for such a treasure was something I'd never had enough money to buy. The thought of getting a kiss from her had crossed my feverish mind, but only for a moment.

“How about a double chocolate malted milk shake?” Mary Jane suggested. That was something as out of reach for me as, well, Mary Jane almost.

I greedily tied into the milk shake she had made--but now I'd lost my cachet as far as she was concerned. She was staring--much too affectionately, I thought--at the autograph. Maybe, I'd settled for too little.

Oh, well, I comforted myself, maybe she'll see my name on the autograph and it will remind her of me.

It was in 1944 when I was sitting in a bar and restaurant in Santa Monica, which I was told by a rather excited patron was owned by Wallace Beery. "Oh?" I responded, totally unruffled. Oh, I was so cool!

You may be too young to know or remember who Wallace Beery was--one of Hollywood's Top 10 box office stars in the 30s. I remembered him especially for his role as Long John Silver in Treasure Island. And who should walk into that bart but--you guessed it!--Wallace Berry. Heads turned, as they will even in Los Angeles, but I deliberately resisted the impulse to do the same.

I sat looking straight ahead, sipping my drink. I wasn’t going to join the gawkers! There was something demeaning about it; as if an admission of a lower status. As if I was admitting I was nothing but a hick from the sticks of Montana. I'd had enough of that.

Ditto with Don Ameche. He'd made his film debut in 1935 and by the late 1930s, he had established himself as a leading actor. But I remembered him most as a major radio star, especially when he played opposite Frances Langford in The Bickersons, a comedy series about two married people always at one another's throat.

Well, I was sitting in a jeep running the public address system in a baseball field in Coronado, just up the Strand from the Amphibious Forces base where I was stationed. A local team was playing a team of jockeys in some sort of benefit game. One of the jocks’ sponsors was Ameche, and up he walks.

“Is this the game the jocks are playing in?” he asks. Dashing, romantic Don Ameche, star of radio and screen! For a moment I had the feeling of some sort of equality between us. Even such a trivial thing as asking me for information seemed to put me in a new place with this celeb.

Did I ask for his autograph as I had with Clark Gable? No way. I effected the manner of a person accustomed to having such people in his life every day. I had the distant manner I would show any stranger, and carefully avoided doing anything that would suggest that I knew who he was. Or that I was deferring to him; or was a fan gone ga-ga over him. I quietly said, “Yup.” And that was it.

In a convoluted way I was trying to tell myself I wasn’t inferior--not even to Don Ameche or Wallace Beery. I was trying to be strong by not refusing to put myself in thrall to anyone. I was the anti-hero, like those movie cowboys I watched at the Saturday afternoon movies (when I had the 10 cents for a ticket). They would sit nobly but silently on their horses refusing to kowtow to anyone.

It wasn’t that I didn’t recognized the high status of celebs/ Oh, I did. That's the problem. I was fully aware of who they were, while resisting the desire to just stare at them, and enjoy that awesome feeling that comes when you are in the presence of someone or something great. I wasn’t about to allow that to make my behavior any different from how I would act around non-celebrities. I was above all that!

To admit their greatness, their celebrityhood, or whatever it was that made them stand out, was for me an admission that I was inferior.

I also held those who kow-towed to "important people" as beneath me. And when others who I held in high regard did it, I would be disappointed.

As I was the night my Big Brother sought an autograph from orchestra leader Joe Reichman--and Big Brother went down a notch or two on my admiration scale.

It was 1945 and Franz and I had met up at the famed Biltmore Bowl in L.A. He was there for a radio broadcasters meeting; I was on shore leave, and we were going to fly to Montana next day.

Eating dinner where the Oscars were handed out, and serenaded by the Joe Reichman Orchestra, with a floor show, no less, was way beyond what this simple 20-year-old lad from the Montana boondocks would have dared to expect. It took some effort and attention for me to muster the nonchalance that would show others this was no big thing for me.

Reichman recorded 80 sides between 1934 and 1942. He was also a favorite of Franz's wife Helen. And when the orchestra took a break he walked up the tiered aisle in our direction. He was going to walk right by us.

Suddenly, Franz jumped up right in front of him, pen and paper in hand, and asked him for his autograph. Franz told him about Helen and Reichman smiled and graciously signed. Then he spotted me and came to the table with a big smile, his hand extended. He was asking to shake hands with me!

It must have been my Chief Petty Officer uniform, I thought, and people in L.A. were much more friendly toward servicemen than people in San Diego. No one else had stopped Reichman, or seemed particularly impressed as he walked by. Some even paid no attention to him.

I shook his hand, trying hard to act like it was the sort of thing I did most any day.

Here's the first offer of a viewer's post for us to ponder, author unknown. Viewer notes: "Oh, the possibilities of expanding ideas of doing under-the-table and black market pee-dealing..or urine sample scalping in front of theaters on opening night...."

THE JOB - URINE TEST

(Whoever wrote this one deserves a HUGE pat on the back!)

Like most folks in this country, I have a job. I work; they pay me. I pay my taxes and the government distributes my taxes as it sees fit. In order to get that paycheck in my case, I am required to pass a random urine test (with which I have no problem). What I do have a problem with is the distribution of my taxes to people who don't have to pass a urine test.

So, here is my Question: Shouldn't one have to pass a urine test to get a welfare check because I have to pass one to earn it for them?

Please understand, I have no problem with helping people get back on their feet. I do, on the other hand, have a problem with helping someone sitting on their butt - doing drugs and/or not being a citizen , while I work. . . . Can you imagine how much money each state would save if people had to pass a urine test to get a public assistance check?
I guess we could title that program, 'Urine or You're Out'..

Pass this along if you agree or simply delete if you don't. Hope you all will pass it along, though. Something has to change in this country -- and soon!!!!!!!


My comment: What would count as passing the test? How would we know when someone did, or didn't, pass the test?

MORAL PRINCIPLES VS. MATERIAL INTERESTS

Upon opening a collection of that old misanthropist Ambrose Bierce's fables, the very first one caught my eye:

A Moral Principle met a Material Interest on a bridge wide enough for but one.

"Down, you base thing!" thundered the Moral Principle, "and let me pass over you!"

The Material Interest merely looked in the other's eyes without saying anything.

"Ah," said the Moral Principle, hesitatingly, "let us draw lots to see which shall retire till the other has crossed."

The Material Interest maintained an unbroken silence and an unwavering stare.

"In order to avoid a conflict," the Moral Principle resumed, somewhat uneasily, "I shall myself lie down and let you walk over me."

Then the Material Interest found a tongue, and by a strange coincidence it was its own tongue. "I don't think you are very good walking," it said. "I am a little particular about what I have underfoot. Suppose you get off into the water."

It occurred that way.

Sound familiar? To me, it connects with what seems to have become the way so many things are going on in our fair American democracy.

But wouldn't it be great if this led people to think about their moral principles? How well are they understood? What reasons do we have for embracing them? Most especially, how can we satisfactorily resolve those conflicts without sacrificing our principles? When is compromise a good thing, and when isn't it so good?

Critical thinking like that actually strengthen your principles. But fair warning: it can also lead you to change them. Maybe even adopt new ones.

Are You Sitting Too Much?

Here's one for you to ponder. And the sooner the better!

The Associated Press recently reported that "Scientists are increasingly warning that sitting for prolonged periods — even if you also exercise regularly — could be bad for your health. And it doesn't matter where the sitting takes place — at the office, at school, in the car or before a computer or TV — just the overall number of hours it occurs.

"Research is preliminary, but several studies suggest people who spend most of their days sitting are more likely to be fat, have a heart attack or even die. . . .

". . . in a study published last year that tracked more than 17,000 Canadians for about a dozen years, researchers found people who sat more had a higher death risk, independently of whether or not they exercised.

"We don't have enough evidence yet to say how much sitting is bad," said Peter Katzmarzyk of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, who led the Canadian study. "But it seems the more you can get up and interrupt this sedentary behavior, the better."

"Figures from a U.S. survey in 2003-2004 found Americans spend more than half their time sitting, from working at their desks to sitting in cars.

"Experts said more research is needed to figure out just how much sitting is dangerous, and what might be possible to offset those effects."

Lara Lohan, senior editor at AlterNet, has some tips for dealing with this dreadful news:

Answer your morning emails via your handy smart phone while walking to work, be sure to glance up when crossing streets
Interrupt colleagues often and in person
Try to find crowded places to eat where there is standing room only
Ask your local pub to replace the tables and chairs with treadmills
And if you can't possibly trade in your desk job for a mail delivery route, try not to get too discouraged about the heaps of bad health news these days. Yes, something will surely kill you, but you don't have to take it sitting down.

LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE F-WORD

Advice to parents: Don't let your children read
this--unless you are prepared to answer their
questions why adults treat sex as dirty.

Do you think this country went through a sexual revolution back in the 60s and early 70s? Apparently there are people--I don't know how many--who think we did. But I wonder. . .

I have trouble thinking something fundamental in our attitudes toward sex hasn't changed. Something lurking in the way people talk about sex. It's the age-old association of sex with dirt and violence.

"Love hath built its temples in places of excrement," Montaigne once observed. Can you think of a better way to degrade sex? It's like building a playground over a leaky sewage treatment plant.

I had a sister I used to think of as the crypto-fascist in the family. One day in her house I used the word “fuck,” and she blasted me. “If you want to use language like that, Mister, do it in the bathroom!” So I went in the bathroom and shouted, “FUCK.”

But why the bathroom? Because that’s where we get rid of dirt we don’t want to have around, according to Murray Davis ("Smut"). Not all dirt, you see, is dirty. Dirty dirt can embarrass you: it’s not supposed to be seen or heard in polite company.

Dirty talk requires washing out your mouth--or having someone do it for you, as parents supposedly used to do with their children. “Gutter talk” is another label for it; “filth,” is a favorite, as is “garbage.” The English language has over 1,000 words for copulating and some 1,500 synonyms for our genitals.

Jesse Sheidlower--an editor at Random House at the time--put together a dictionary of "every sense of fuck, and every compound word or phrase of which fuck is a part," which he found in use in the U.S. From "absofuckinglutely" to "tit-fuck," it runs over 200 pages. He titled his book, "The F Word."

As one writer observed, sexual functions and body parts must be extremely important to us. Yet, the most direct and unambiguous words for them are called dirty and banned from public, "polite," company.

And so we resort to those god-awful euphemisms: “doing it,” “having sex,” “getting it on,” “being intimate,” "hooking up," on and on. What are people referring to when they talk about “having sex”? What, indeed, do people mean by “sex”? Bill Clinton isn't the only one who thinks oral sex is not sex. A lot of young people don’t either. Some people don’t think masturbation is sex either, and when they say there’s no such thing as safe sex, they never mention it.

Am I the only one who thinks that this doesn’t sound like people who are comfortable with sex?

Back in the early ‘60s, Edward Sagarin brought out “The Anatomy of Dirty Words.” It was a serious scholarly work, but like "The F Word," you can have a lot of fun reading it.

For example, how we carefully use the word “balls.” Many people are named “Ball,” but no one is named “Balls.” Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Ball are not known as “the Balls.” Expressions like “she is on the ball” or “he carries the ball” are positive, but not “he carries the balls.” Yet when you say “he’s got balls” and “she’s got balls” you are being complimentary (in a sexist sort of way). California's governor recently assured us his chief aide--"governess," people call her--"has balls."

But of all the proscribed sexual words, “fuck” still remains supreme. In one version or another, the word is known in all cultures; it’s hated, feared, revered and loved, but not free of its taboo. It is the four-letter word. Even when we see it written as “f- - - ,” or referred to as the "f-word," we know right away what is meant. (The New York Times at one time used to print “sex” as “s-x.,” and we all knew what it referred to.)

So why can’t the full word be used? No other word in the English language, Sagarin thought, is so readily understood without being explained . . and it’s still not decent.

Here's a dude telling his buddies what he did the night before:

“So I finish my fuckin’ work for the day, get home and like shit, shave, shower, shampoo and shinola, get in my fuckin’ car and you know pick up my fuckin’ girlfriend. We eat at like one of those fuckin’ roadside places, you know, a fuckin’ beer and fast food joint, then we pick up a fuckin’ six-pack and like go to the fuckin’ motel and we have you know like sexual intercourse.”

Ånd what about the first-grader, looking at how his classroom had been trashed over the weekend, pointing at his desk and blurting out, "Look! Someone wrote 'fuck' on my desk"?

"You can read!" his teacher says in wonderment.

And what are we to make of “mother-fucker”? A comedian once said he had once thought “mother” was only half a word. “Mother-fucker” is found in most West African languages, and was brought to this country by slaves. But when I first heard it in the Navy, it was used by whites. I was appalled--probably because of its connection with the incest taboo. And when my fellow Swabbies used the word, they meant nothing good by it. But no one thinks someone is being accused of fucking their mother when it’s used these days. Do they?

Then there’s the use of “fuck” as a violent expletive--as in “fuck you,” “fuck off,” “don’t fuck with me,” or “he fucked her over.” Here is the word most clearly and closely associated with sex used to express something bad, violent, wrong, undesirable. It's a popular way of attacking someone. When someone tells you, “Fuck you” there’s no mistaking that.

Is it only coincidental that the word is one of the more violent epithets that we have? Why isn’t “don’t mess with me” as good as “don’t fuck with me”? Or “get lost” not as good as “fuck off”? I have to admit when I am really angry there seems to be no other word that says what I want to say. Why is that? Is there some sort of hidden connection with sex that makes fuck-epithets more powerful, more violent?

Sexual language is widely associated with male power. When men suffer the horrors of what clinically is called erectile dysfunction, it is commonly referred to as impotence. No potency, no power. Right? Fucking-- usually meaning penile-vaginal intercourse--can be an exercise of power over a woman by a man “Ken fucked Barbie” is okay, but “Barbie fucked Ken” can have a jarring effect, though people may not be quite sure why that is.

Why is calling someone a prick a common way for dumping on them? (And note it is “prick” and not “penis.”) Sex in our society, some still claim, is penis-oriented. So Sagarin invited his readers to imagine a society in which calling someone a prick is considered complimentary.

He would be a well-rounded personality, firm, have a great sense of rhythm, with an excellent sense of direction. He is firmly determined, unbending and inflexible once he has set out to accomplish something. But he could still--if he is perfect--withdraw at will into himself without losing confidence that he can regain his full stature.

He must be a man of stature, gregarious, well liked but never imposing himself on others. He rises to every occasion, a true pillar of society, but power is only a means to an end. For he aims to please, and because of his remarkable self-control he terminates his encounters with others only when mutually agreeable.

If women are still having trouble with the male orientation in the way we treat sex--not just in the way we talk about it, but the way we do it--why is it that depictions of an erection are so forbidden, but soft ones are not?

To call someone a cunt or a prick is to say something very malevolent indeed. Or can it be argued that the genital- and fuck-epithets are purged of all sexual meaning--like “bloody” as an epithet is purged of all association with blood?

Why are our favorite expletives sexual? While the alleged sexual revolution was supposedly underway, there was another movement calling into question our reliance on schools for educating people. “Skools,” their critics called them; dangerous unhealthy places--especially for the young (sound familiar?). In some quarters “skool” was a dirty word. It could replace “fuck”--as in “skool you,” or “don’t skool with me,” and “skool off, will ya?”

Nope. We don't appear to be ready to give up sex as dirty dirt, and with it all those fucking--er, dirty expletives.

Putting My Life Into My Writing

About 20 years or so ago I decided the time had come to pursue writing seriously.  I would become a writer.  A free-lance writer as it turned out--reporting mostly on medicine for those throw-aways you may have seen in your doctor's office.  

The docs, harried as they are, pay little attention to them beyond items that bear directly on their practice. 

Assignments were not easy to come by; pay was wretched--sometimes I wasn't sure I'd be able to pay the rent.  And my writing was confined mostly to what editors wanted.  

But I wanted to write on what interested me, not as a hack or journeyman--which is not to demean them in any way: most reporters are hack writers, though that doesn't keep them from being excellent journalists with their own style. But when you work for another, you're limited in how much of you goes into your writing.  Your writing is in your life, but I wanted to put my life into my writing.  

Ah!  There's that old ego that Zinsser mentions.  Philosopher David Hume warned, however, that it wasn't easy to talk long about yourself without indulging in vanity.  Still, Montaigne noted that it was customary to allow oldsters "more freedom to prate and more indiscretion in talking about oneself."

Well, I decided to write my memoirs  

But that, too, proved not to be what I saw myself doing as a writer.  It suffered too often from the academic/scholarly kind of writing and thinking (and feeling) that I'd been indulging in as a professor.  And I was still confined to a pre-set format--chronology--and solely about me. 

So now I'm pulling out all the stops; you can expect to see a wide--or wild--range of topics, nonfiction and fiction.  I will not be pushing a cause, grinding an axe, getting on a hobby horse and writing it to death.  Though sometimes you may think I get on my horse and write off in all directions. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)  In some ways, my blog is my declaration of independence from topics, formats and styles that I have adhered to in the past.  If things tend to get giddy at times, I hope you will bear with me.

More than just put up with me, however, I hope the writer in you will be galvanized into writing back.  You will note that you are able to comment after each posting.  I do want to hear from you; maybe have ongoing exchanges; maybe even dialogue. Tell me--and others--what you think.  I look forward to seeing what you have to say.  

And so we begin. . . And what can be better than beginning with sex?  I mean talking about sex.  Well, I really mean talking about talking about sex.  (The distancing should help keep this a family blog. (Uh huh. . . .)