Old Books from my Library #3: Prejudices: Third Series

     It seems almost too easy to write about H.L. Mencken. Not to mention unnecessary. I mean, well, duh, who doesn't already know? 
     Lots of people, no doubt. And besides, awareness is not the issue. Even the most ardent fan, aka me, can benefit from the occasional prod, a reminder to dive back into the oeuvre. The fact is, that Henry Louis Mencken is one of those rarest of writers whose work defies time or place, someone worthy of constant study, whose life and work merits continual  contemplation. I'd say if I had to list my favorite authors, I'd rank them as 1. Samuel Johnson; 2. Dante Alighieri; 3. H.L. Mencken, and those three alone could easily occupy me between retirement and the grave.
     The Mencken books I use most often are not his most popular: "The American Language" plus its two supplements are valuable and unique reference works, true acts of scholarship, providing a deep dive into our nation's language and, by necessity, history and rituals. They are joined by Mencken's "A New Dictionary of Quotations" which I find useful when I am trying to find thoughts on subjects beyond the commonplace bruited about in Bartlett's and online. 
     I could have revisited his marvelous trio memoirs, "Happy Days," "Heathen Days" and "Newspaper Days," the latter consisting of the best illustrative story that a budding journalist could receive. (Applying to the city editor of the Baltimore Morning Herald the day after his father's funeral, Mencken, 18 and with no newspaper experience whatsoever, is told to go away, but looks so crestfallen that the editor has pity on him and tells him he may return the next day to see if anything is needed. He does, every day, for the next two weeks, with no result, until the 14th day, when he is told "Go out to Govanstown, and see if anything is happening there. We are supposed to have a Govanstown correspondent, but he hasn't been heard from for six days." And so his career began. 
     But for our purposes today I decided to flip open "Prejudices: Third Series." A handsome book, published in March of 1923, making it nearly a century old.  Which would make it dated, for most other writers, who have trouble offering up something relevant the moment it's published, never mind a thought that rings true 96 years later.   
    I did so, I should add, without any preconception of what is in it. I wasn't looking for a particular passage, just began on the first chapter, "On Being an American," confident that my efforts would not be in vain. Mencken's genius is such that his direct, sharp, pointed prose is certain to offer up gems in the first shovelful.  
    He did not disappoint; I never made it past the first chapter. I didn't have to.
    Are you puzzled by the Paul Ryans and Lindsey Grahams of our country? Once moral men who abandoned every one of their supposed values in order to service the liar, bully and fraud currently occupying the Oval Office? Not to forget all the Chris Christies and the other bootlickers and lackeys who traded whatever reputation they might have once had for a brief bask in the orange glow? How could that happen? Mencken explains that on page 18:

     Here is a country in which all political thought and activity are concentrated upon the scramble for jobs—in which the normal politician, whether he be President or a village road supervisor, is willing to renounce any principle, however precious to him, and to adopt any lunacy, however offensive to him, in order to keep his place at the trough.

    In that first chapter, "On Being an American," Mencken makes observations which even today's band of TV fireballers are too narrow to imagine and too timid to articulate even if the could. Yes, we are a nation of immigrants, Mencken agrees. But who were those immigrants who established our country?

     Third-rate men, of course, exist in all countries, but it is only here that they are in full control of the state, and with it of all the national standards. The land was peopled, not by the hardy adventurers of legend, but simply by incompetents who could not get on at home, and the lavishness of nature that they found here, the vast ease with which they would get livings, confirmed and augmented their native incompetence....

     Mencken was not perfect, but a man of his era, and therefore prone to the same faults—his own prejudices, a leaning toward the eugenic claptrap popular at the time. And he certainly suffered from pro-German myopia that kept him on the sidelines when Mr. Hitler arrived. But even a man given to contempt took the spin that Donald Trump puts on immigration now—that Mexico is not sending her "best people"—and gave it a novel twist that seems a far more accurate shade of reality: that none of our forebears of any nationality or race were the best people:

     The truth is that that majority of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants since the Revolution, like the majority of Anglo-Saxon immigrants before the Revolution, have been, not the superior men of their native lands, but the botched and unfit: Irishmen starving to death in Ireland, Germans unable to weather the Sturm und Drang* of the post-Napoleonic reorganization, Italians weed-grown on exhausted soil, Scandinavians run to all bone and no brain, Jews too incompetent to swindle even the barbarous peasants of Russia, Poland and Romania...the average newcomer is, and always has been simply a poor fish.

     PC? No. An intriguing and possibly spot-on observation? I suspect so. That's something of the attitude embraced by Australians—"We're ALL dregs!"—and it's a shame that Americans, so desperate to scrape together some shred of self-respect by elevating themselves above any random stranger, can't do the same. 
      I could go on quoting Mencken all day, claiming that we need him now more than ever. Then again, we always do. One more example, from the same essay the previous quotes are taken from.  He is arguing that the traditional attitudes of the European peasant "are, with a few modifications, the habits of mind of the American people." Enjoy:

     The peasant has a great practical cunning, but he is unable to see any further than the next farm. He likes money and knows how to amass property, but his cultural development is but little above that of the domestic animals. He is intensely and cocksurely moral, but his morality and his self-interest are crudely identical. He is emotional and easy to scare, but his imagination cannot grasp an abstraction. He is a violent nationalist and patriot, but he admires rogues in office and always beat the tax-collector if he can. He has immovable opinions about all the great affairs of state, but nine-tenths of them are sheer imbecilities. He is violently jealous of what he conceives to be his rights, but brutally disregardful of the other fellow's. He is religious, but his religion is wholly devoid of beauty and dignity....He exists in all countries, but here alone he rules—here alone his anthropoid fears and rages are accepted gravely as logical ideas and dissent from them is punished a a sort of public offense.    

     I don't want to minimize the danger or crisis of the Trump administration, and certain aspects are, I believe, developments new and unwelcome in the wide sweep of American history: a president openly courting our enemies while glibly alienating our friends, a president consciously whipping up hatreds in a bald, brainless, shameful attempt to bolster his own popularity among his duped followers, a president suffering from a blend of staggering ignorance bolstered by bottomless self-regard. That is all true, an enormous magnification of whatever corollaries can be found in past presidents, and an augury of worse to come. But still, in many respects, the Trump tragedy is not so much a new disaster as a reversion to past patterns of operation, as Mencken so vividly reminds us. We've had this Carnival of Cretinism before. There might be some small comfort in that: as bad as this is, we have endured it in the past and survived. Maybe we can do so again.  

* Sturm und Drang = storm and strife

Old Books from my Library #2: Secret Chambers & Hiding Places

     We are not only the champions of our books, pressing particular titles on friends who might benefit from them, but we are also their protectors. A book is hardy, but also a vulnerable confection of paper and cloth binding, ink and photos and marble endpapers. A book should be shelved securely but not too tightly, guarded from bright sunlight, insects and careless tots.
     I consider myself as fierce a guardian of books as can be. But the human vessel is flawed, and once I lapsed. When we moved to this old farmhouse in Northbrook, one book, separated from the others, ended up in a box of magazine story notes stored in our basement. Our wet basement. Our wet basement that sometimes floods.
    The waters had subsided and drained away. I was drawing soggy sheafs of papers out of a sagging cardboard box when I came upon "Secret Chambers and Hiding-Places: The Historic, Romantic & Legendary Stories & Traditions About Hiding-Holes, Secret Chambers, Etc." by Allan Fea.
     I had bought it for an article on secret rooms and hidden passageways I had written for Games magazine—that's why it was with the notes. I can't convey the grief that cracked across my heart when I lifted the spongey, dripping, swollen thing.  My fault.
    Ironically, that story was the first time that I had used an electronic search, a set of  a dozen newspaper story titles on CD-Rom discs at Northwestern library, finding news articles about pot-growing rooms hidden in Cook County Forest Preserve buildings. I remember being so enamored with the possibilities that I called the company that sold the discs. It might be a trick of memory, but I recall the set being $3,000, but they might have been $3,000 apiece. I remember ordering my next computer, a Dell, without a CD-rom port thinking, "What's the point?" It was early 1992. 
     The Secret Chambers book was ruined, the cover warped and twisting back. The thing to do was throw it out. But the book was also published in 1901 on fine, ragstock paper and, frankly, I hadn't the heart. It was my book, I was responsible for it, and I had to save it, or at least try. I fanned the book open, then inserted typing paper between the pages and clamped it shut, under pressure and started searching, eventually coming up with Grimm Book Bindery of Madison, Wisconsin, a company in operation since 1854.
     It was, I recall, a lot of money to repair—$100 is the figure that sticks in memory—but I took it as penance, punishment to expiate the sin of being careless with a book. I mailed the volume away, and was thrilled with the result, it's deep blue cover embossed in letters of gold.
     I've never consulted the book since then, but doing so now, it is as I remember it, with chapter headings such as "Chapter XI: Mysterious Rooms, Deadly Pits, Etc." and "Chapter XIII: "Concealed Doors, Subterranean Passages, Etc."
     Who wouldn't want to read those?
     In all honesty, reading the book can be fairly heavy lifting—one story after another of the details of sliding panels in old English manor houses now long gone. Not a lot of narrative arc, as we wordies like to call it. 
     The book's main focus is British history, particular its bloody religious persecution, and the necessity of "priest's holes" where closet Catholics could stow their clerics and sacramental objects when the soldiers came busting in, sometimes staying for days at a time, ripping down paneling and searching for what had to be particularly well-concealed refuge (sustaining the terrified and starving priest during these long searches was a challenge, sometimes surmounted by tiny holes, where a hollow reed could be inserted and broth or marmalade blown through). Hiding places used by architects of the Gunpowder Plot are examined at length.
     The famous flight of Charles II after Cromwell's victory in 1651 is, regrettably, given short shrift, with Fea referring readers to his book on the subject, "The Flight of the King." More is made of his brother James II's peregrinations, involving secret staircases and dead-of-night escapes. And some attention to the travels of various Jacobites.
    Because these hiding places were, needless to say, hidden, they sometimes acted as time capsules, and it was not unknown for them to be found, containing clothing of a century past, strewn across an unmade bed in a precipitous flight long ago.  An example:

    A weird story clings to the ruins of Minister Lovel Manor House, Oxfordshire, the ancient seat of the Lords Lovel. After the battle of Soke, Francis, the last Viscount, who had sided with the cause of Simmel against King Henry VII, fled back to his house in disguise, but from the night of his return was never seen or heard of again, and for nearly two centuries his disappearance remained a mystery. in the meantime the manor house had been dismantled and the remains tenanted by a farmer; but a strange discovery was made in the year 1708. A concealed vault was found, and in it, seated before a table, with a prayer-book lying open upon it, was the entire skeleton of a man. In the secret chamber were certain barrels and jars which had contained food sufficient to last perhaps some weeks; but the mansion having been seized by the King, soon after the unfortunate Lord Lovel is supposed to have concealed himself, the probability is that, unable to regain his liberty, the neglect or treachery of a servant or tenant brought about his tragic end.

    You can read the book free on-line, by the way. Or buy a reprint for $15 or so on Amazon. The Grimm Book Bindery remains in Madison, and I phoned Charles Grimm, fifth generation book binder, to check in with him.
     "We get quite a few damaged books every week,' he said. "A fair amount of them Bibles." Though more and more they are repairing old and worn children's books.
     "Boomers are moving on in life and want to leave stuff for their grandchildren," Grimm said.
      While hurt books are common, soaked ones are not. 
     "Water-logged, not too often, thank God," he said.  Grimm suggested that if a book does become soaked, the best thing to do is what I did: put sheets of paper between the pages and press it while the paper absorbs the water.
    ""One the pages start sticking together, the real horror begins," he said.
     This is Grimm's busy seasons right now—they have to bring on extra staff. Can you guess why? I couldn't. No, not because of heavy rain. Rather, because of text books being reconditioned for school in the fall.
      "Text books are shot and rebinding text books is not nearly as expensive as investing in a new copy."
       Which raises an interesting question: why, with newspaper and magazines struggling to survive, do text books continue to be both very costly and prevalent? Because not every child in America has an iPad yet? That must be it. A topic for another day.
   

  

Old Books from My Library #1: "Amusements for Invalids"

"In which I assumed all responsibility for what was to take place." 

     I need a new series here while I'm on the mend, and given the necessity of spending most of the day on the sofa with heat packs bunched under my neck, I've had to come up with something easy to write and, I hope, pleasant to read. 
     Toward that end, I've struck on a week I'm calling "Old Books from My Library." Titles that I've cherished for decades, which you've almost certainly never heard about. This seemed the most apt way to begin.

      Hospital stays used to be epic adventures of weeks and months. Now they can be very quick affairs. The first surgeon I consulted about my neck said the work could be done out-patient, and only as the full scope, danger and delicacy of the situation emerged did the surgery become more complicated and I ended up spending nearly four days at  Northwestern Memorial.
      Back in the days when long stays were the rule, there was a species of books intended to be given to convalescents. I used to have a nice little collection of these books, mostly from the 1920s and 1930s, filled with jokes, some quite racist, and puzzles and Boy Scout quality projects to be completed abed.  
        One is "Speaking of Operations," a 1926 effort by now-forgotten humorist Irvin S. Cobb. It's still quite readable and— file this under the "Change, How Nothing Does"—there's a bit, complete with illustration, involving the ritualistic pre-surgery indemnification. A doctor quizzes the patient, making "a few inquiries of a pointed and personal nature" and then "immediately after that he made me sign a paper in which I assumed all responsibility for what was to take place the next morning."
       Another is a large volume called, naughtily, "Fun in Bed,' a 1932 carnival of distractions edited by Frank Scully, replete with short stories and jokes. Now that hospital stays are measured in hours, I got a kick out of a section in the book titled "My Diary." It begins "My First Day" and ends, optimistically, "My Eighteenth Day."
     The book was a great success, leading to "More Fun in Bed" and even "Fun in Bed for Children," which begins with a note "For Mother and Father": "This book is intended to answer the small patient's questions: 'What can I do now?')
      My copy of Scully has flown, along with a few others. I took giving my collection away to convalescent friends—they seem to strike the proper tone of uniqueness and thumbing your nose at illness. I gave "Fun in Bed" to Roger Ebert when was recovering from his surgeries at the Chicago Rehab Institute. He adored books, already had about everything in the world he wanted already, and I told myself that he'd enjoy the arcaneness of the thing, its instruction on how to make birdhouses and sealing wax novelties. Maybe he even did; he impulsively grabbed a copy of Sherlock Holmes he had been reading and inscribed it to my boys. He was that kind of guy, more generous on his worst day than most people are on their best.
      One book that I could never bring myself to give to anyone, for obvious reasons, is "Amusement of Invalids" by Mary Woodman, subtitled, "Countless Ways of Turning Dullness into Happiness," published by the Frederick A. Stokes Company. It begins in a pleasingly direct manner that has more than a whiff of self-promotion. The Preface, in its entirety, reads:

     An illness is an irksome business, but it need not be made a time of thorough misery by indulging in absolute inactivity. There are a thousand and one ways of banishing monotony and deriving pleasure from misfortune, as is plainly shown in these pages.  If, among your friends, there is one who has the misfortune to be an invalid, send him or her a copy of this book. It will be the means of providing many rays of sunshine.

    Today we have Netflix for that. But this book, published in 1929, gives the rudiments of working leather and cutting silhouettes, doing beadwork and learning to sketch. The complexities of stamp collecting are explained, along with more dubious arts such as palmistry and understanding a person's character through the study of handwriting—quite the fad in the 1920s. The bedridden are encouraged not only to learn to play the banjo, but to attempt to construct one himself abed.
      There is a chapter on how to listen to the radio: "When you have fixed up your set and have recovered from the first shock of delight, study the subject of wireless more deeply."Chapter 21 is about making fancy boxes. 
     A commercial imperative runs through the book. Woodman not only expects you to pass the time productively, but to profit from your activities. Those bead necklaces and candies you're making? Sell them! ""They can be turned into a source of revenue, and naturally, there are not many ways in which an invalid can make easy money." 
    "Here is a chance for all invalids to improve their mental value in the commercial world," she writes. The apex of this, for me, is chapter IV, "Fretwork," where the indefatigable Woodman instructs her invalid to set up a stepladder next to his sickbed, clamp a work surface to it, and set to making fretwork—decorative lattices of wood—using drills, saws and files.
     Chapter XXII is entitled "How to Write Poetry," and as writing decent poetry is a tremendous, almost impossible, challenge, even among established poets,  it caught my particular attention. The chapter contains a phrase certain to shatter the heart of the stoutest blogger today—"Payment for acceptable verse rules high..." I think maybe she meant "runs," or perhaps that's a British usage.
     Flowers, love, absence or death are dismissed as potential poetic topics, being hackneyed themes "done thousands of times" and of little interest to modern editors. 
     The trickiness of rhyme is addressed—"thought" rhymes with "dough" but not with "cough," despite appearances. Alliteration is a poet's friend, "Artful Aids to Beauty" and Mighty Mimic of Mankind" are offered with approval as examples to "be studied carefully."  Poetic license seems to consist of the occasional contraction, "over" into "o'er."
      The book was first published in Great British—the chapter after poetry, on using your recovery to become a professional short story writer, has the large checks sent by grateful editors in pounds instead of dollars. I tried longer than I should have to find any kind of biographical information on Mary Woodman, and bumped into several reviews, from publications such as The Trained Nurse and Hospital Review. She was taken seriously. The March 10, 1930 Yorkshire Post & Leeds Intelligencer decrees, "Anyone who has to look after a not too seriously ill invalid will find some useful suggestions in Amusements for Invalids."
    Otherwise, a brick wall. The British Library has a "chat service" where, mirabile dictu, you are instantly connected to an actual researcher. He provided me with a list of Woodman's books held by the British Library, from "Efficient Housekeeping" to "100 Varieties of Sandwiches: How to Prepare Them" to "How to Make Artificial Flowers."
     But did not, however, answer my question about Woodman's life (now that I think of it, maybe I was interacting with some form of artificial intelligence). He (or should it be it?) did refer me, as a certified hard case, to what they call a Reference Enquiry Team. I appealed to them for whatever biographical scrap they could uncover. They have promised to respond within five business days. They've got two left. 
     Until then, time to move on to the current world. 
     Lest we smile to much at Woodman's quaint suggestions, a regular reader this morning offered me the following unsolicited advice. 
     "Learn a magic trick," Steve Temkin urged in a text. "There's no shortage of available online instruction and you don't need anything more than a deck of cards or some coins..." He offered some suggestions for books or videos.
    No need. I have my Woodman at hand. 
    Admittedly, I approached "Chapter IX--Tricks With Cards" with a shiver of dread--I am notoriously bad at magic tricks. Were there anyone who read or remembered my second book, "Complete and Utter Failure," they would know it begins with my humiliating attempt to perform a simple trick as a small child. Let's just say it was not my forte.
     Despite this handicap, I tried to learn a few magic tricks before my first son was born, out of the perhaps charming, perhaps unhinged notion that of course magic tricks were necessary skills a new dad should have at his disposal to captivate and delight his offspring. I failed utterly. 
    This was no different. I gingerly navigated downstairs and secured a pack of cards, and sawed through passages like "Take any odd number of cards which is a multiple of three (e.g. nine, fifteen, twenty-one, twenty-seven). Deal them face upwards in three heaps, asking a spectator to note one card and to tell you in which heap it is. Pick up the heaps, with the indicated heap between the other two, and repeat the process twice. When you spectator points to a heap for the third time, you may know that his chosen card is the middle one of the heap..."
      To no avail. 
     Still, I hope by now the attraction of old books is clear. I could select half a dozen novels published this week and none would offer an image as poignant as Woodman's 1930s invalid, propped on pillows on an iron bed. The windows, open to admit a breeze, relay the sirens and horns and hubbub from the busy street below, while our patient, tongue in the corner of his mouth with concentration, goes at fretwork with a wood file. Nor of myself for that matter, sitting unusually straight in my office chair, thickly ruffling through a pack of cards, failing utterly to clutch at the magic that has eluded me all my life.

Rabbit vs. squirrel

     Do-overs are rare in photography. If the Hindenburg explodes while you're still loading film into your Speed-Graphic, well, tough. It's not like you can show up at Lakehurst the next day and hope for a second chance.
      So a couple weeks ago, when I missed out on taking documentary evidence of the rabbit vs. squirrel struggle over seeds scattered beneath the bird feeder outside my kitchen window—amazement rendered me inert—I never dreamt a second chance would occur. 
     But occur it did, Saturday, with my younger son announcing that they were back at it, and I sprinted to the window in time to photograph some of the action. Had I been thinking I'd have switched to video, to capture the distinctive hopping behavior of the bunny. But I'm satisfied that I got something. 
     There may be scientific literature on combat between rabbits and squirrels, but I'll be damned if I can find it. I did run across a charming 2008 children's tale, "Rabbit & Squirrel: A Tale of War & Peas" by Kara LaReau, illustrated by Scott Magoon, where the two, both gardeners, come to blows over a dispute involving missing vegetables: 

     "You've ruined my garden, and my house!" cried Rabbit, giving Squirrel a push. "You are my sworn enemy!"
     "Well, you've ruined my garden, so you deserved it," said Squirrel, giving Rabbit a push. "You are my sworn enemy."

From "Rabbit & Squirrel" illustration courtesy of Scott Magoon

     The only other rabbit/squirrel conflict I could find is alluded to in Watership Down, Richard Adams' improbable best-selling 1972 leporine epic. The despotic General Woundwart "fought rats, magpies, gray squirrels and, once, a crow" before finally flinging himself at a dog, with the expected result. 
    Otherwise, rabbits and squirrel are mostly on their own, with rabbits by far better represented in popular culture: rabbit ear TV antennas, the Playboy Bunny, a popular vibrator. The once-common euphemism for pregnancy, "The rabbit died," referred to the Friedman test, where a woman's blood was injected into a rabbit, with certain changes in the rabbits' ovaries revealing if she were pregnant. Though rabbit didn't die, it was killed, to check its ovaries to see if the structural changes were present that would be caused by hormones in a pregnant woman's blood. So, pregnant or not, the rabbit ended up dead. A common occurrence—rabbits are one of the most hunted mammals in North America, and some species are considered endangered. 
      Literature clearly favors rabbits—Flopsy, Peter Rabbit, Pat the Bunny, to name a few. Watership Down isn't even the only rabbit-o-centric best-selling novel—John Updike did a series of five Rabbit books (thought that was just the nickname of his main character, Harry Angstrom, given in childhood for "a nervous flutter under his brief nose.") 
     Rabbits also have a significant presence in TV and movies—with Captain Kangaroo's Bun E. Rabbit on the small screen,  to cinema's Harvey, Roger Rabbit, and the killer rabbit in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."  
     Not to forget the top bunny of them all, star of both TV and the movies, Bugs (whose character, some readers might not realize, was a loose take-off on Groucho Marx).  

Laqan kachina

     Squirrels are are far more marginal. No culture has a Christmas Squirrel. Although, the Hopi Pueblo do have a squirrel kachina spirit, Laqan, who, almost needless to say, is known for its "noisy and aggressive behavior" and would "frequently spread gossip, instigate trouble between other animals, or annoy others with their rudeness and bossiness."
     Sounds about right.
     Though to be fair, Native-Americans also honored squirrels as caretakers of the forest, and viewed them as messengers. And despite squirrels twitchy, aggressive, rat-like demeanor,  rabbits seem to carry more disease, including rabbit fever, and in general are greater pests, particularly in Australia.
     I've already gone on record with my hatred of squirrels, and am not surprised that the odious animals are relegated largely to second-tier cartoons: Scrat, the voracious squirrel who I suppose could be considered the star in "Ice Age," Rocky, the Flying Squirrel, from the early 1960s Cold War parody cartoon "Rocky and Bullwinkle," certainly has the intellectual advantage over his dim-witted companion. Not to forget Hammy, voiced by Steve Carrel, in "Over the Hedge," a modest 2006 effect. 

Rupert

      Sick of this yet? I know I am. It's like Vietnam; I've gone in full of good intentions and now can't find my way out. 
     Patience, we're almost there. But I can't let the subject drop ("Please, do, Neil," you're no doubt thinking. "There's always tomorrow.") without mentioning "The Great Rupert," a truly strange bit of black and white B-movie treacle starring Jimmy Durante. The film that hinges on a talented squirrel who befriends a family of down-and-out vaudevillians. Watch this clip of Rupert doing a Scottish jig. Really, take a look. And we think we live in strange times now.
    Ready to cry "uncle"? But wait. Aren't you curious to know how "The Great Rupert" was received at the time? Movie-goers might have been less sophisticated in 1950, but they weren't dolts, right? 
     Or maybe they were.
     "The Great Rupert," now at the Palace, may not be the year's most humorous film..." begins Bosley Crowther's review in the April 14, 1950 New York Times. "...nor is it the last word in slickness, so far as script and production are concerned. But within its acknowledged limitations of the modest, low-budget comedy, it is a wholly ingratiating item."
     Not having viewed the entire movie, nor willing to do so, I'm in no position to argue. The worst thing Crowther calls the "The Great Rupert" is "a little stiff and vaguely amateurish." Which, now that I think of it, is exactly how I'm feeling at the moment. Maybe I—and you—will have better luck tomorrow.

Chicago wowed in 1969 by both moon landing and by watching it on TV

From A Trip to the Moon, a 1902 French film by Georges Méliès.

     This piece ran in the paper last Sunday. As a curious sidelight, after it was published, while looking for moon-related articles to post here, I noticed that I had written a story commemorating the event 20 years ago. While far shorter, the 30th anniversary not being the big deal that 50 is, apparently, it contained a few tidbits that I've worked into the story here, so you're getting a richer stew than the Sunday readers. Interesting, both pieces end with the same quote. When I saw it during my research a few weeks back I instantly thought, "That's the ending," and I guess that's as true now as it was in 1999.

     Sunday, July 20, 1969, was a special day at White Sox park — “Homecoming Day” with Nellie Fox, Al Lopez and “his old gang of cliffhangers,” who’d won the pennant 10 years earlier, returning to be honored between games of a doubleheader against Kansas City.
     The presence of the heroes of 1959 and the sunny, warm weather helped swell the crowd to 17,420, though almost 5,000 of those were unpaid thanks to free tickets given to “A” students.
     There was also that business on the moon that day. News came in the seventh inning of the first game that the Eagle lunar lander had set down on the Sea of Tranquility at 3:18 p.m. Chicago time. Play was halted and the exploding scoreboard set off in celebration. 
     Chicago was in some ways the same, in some ways quite different 50 years ago, when, the necessity of baseball notwithstanding, the city and world were transfixed by the first man to land on the moon. Chicago was more crowded — 3.3 million people, 20 percent more than today. Construction on the John Hancock Building was completed, the Sears Tower not yet begun.

      If you remember the moon landing as a huge, jubilant public celebration, you are mistaken — that was Aug. 13, when the three Apollo astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins, stopped in Chicago for a tickertape parade. Two million packed downtown for it. Never one to leave anything to chance, Mayor Richard J. Daley had requested the visit on July 11 — five days before the Saturn 5 rocket even took off from Florida.
     The day of the landing, the Loop was almost deserted.. Only a few people clustered around TVs in store windows. "Did they see God yet?" asked a little girl. First, it was a Sunday. Second, the moonwalk originally was supposed to take place at 1 a.m. Chicago time.
     Third, and most importantly, the historic event was happening on the moon. Everyone on earth had the same perspective — as viewers glued to television sets. About as many households had TVs then — 93 percent versus 97 percent now — though the tendency was still to gather with family or friends to solemnize the event and experience history together. The biggest public event was 3,000 people gathering at the Adler Planetarium to watch the landing on their televisions. 
     Perhaps the most common emotion was amazement. Remember, older Chicagoans had memories of the Wright brothers’ first powered flight not quite 66 years earlier, in 1903. So the astonishment was as much about TV’s ability to convey it as with the landing itself.
     ”We were all there, bound together by the miracle of communication that intertwined all the other miracles of technology that marketed man’s first step on a celestial body,” the Chicago Daily News said in an editorial. 

     ”The medium reached its electronic apogee Sunday night by bringing in a picture — a live, moving picture — of astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin walking on the surface of the moon,” Sun-Times columnist Paul Molloy wrote. “There has been nothing like this in the full history of broadcasting.”
     Not that television was alone in patting itself on the back. The Chicago Tribune ran an editorial, headlined "The Tribune's Own Great Feat," suggesting that its coverage of the landing was an event equal to the landing itself.
    But television had the advantage of near-instantaneous coverage. In Northbrook, dozens of moviegoers left just before the end of "Goodbye, Columbus" to watch TVs in the lobby.
     Imagining the hundreds of millions around the world watching, Molloy suspected that “many had to be repeating over and over again: ‘Am I really seeing this? Is it really happening?’”
     That was the reaction of Kathy Slatek and her friends from Morton West High School. ”It was hard to believe it was live,” said Slatek, who was 15. “I couldn’t make it sink in that it was really happening.”

     Steve Dmytriw, 16, and friends from Tuley High School “sat awed” watching TV in their backyard and talked about whether they’d make the journey, given the chance.
      ”I’d go,” Dmytriw said.

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Flashback 1999: Just enough space here to squeeze in Buzz Aldrin

Buzz Aldrin's footprint on the moon (NASA)

     Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and I'll share here the story that ran last Sunday in the paper on what Chicago was like on July 20, 1969. Until then, I realized that one of those Apollo 11 astronauts who walked on the moon, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, called me on the phone once, or make that twice, responding to an article I had written about the moon missions.

     Buzz Aldrin called this week. Twice. Which was not the amazing part. The amazing part was that I tried to duck the calls, telling his handler that I had just, the day before, talked with the Apollo 8 astronauts, so unfortunately my column's quota for 1960s space nostalgia was used up for the time being.
     Even as I was doing it, as politely as possible, I was watching myself, stunned at how fast the incredible becomes mundane. In a flash.
     If Plato showed up at your door this morning, you would of course be thrilled -- excited that he came in, sat down and talked about the ideal city all morning. Splendid. You serve him coffee on the good china.
     Even more incredible, he shows up again the next day. A life changing experience. Four hours on reality. You videotape it.
     The following day, again with the Plato. He talks about education. You phone up a few friends and tell them to hurry over.
     But by the fourth day—I guarantee it— you'd find yourself waking up and thinking, "I sure hope that Plato guy doesn't show up today. I've got a lot of errands to run."
     That's how people are. Not that I wasn't interested in talking to the second man to step on the moon. But I figured, he's busy, I'm busy, why waste both our time if the conversation isn't going to end up in the newspaper?
     But I took the calls from Aldrin anyway. You sort of have to. That's why those space guys do so well in business. When a fellow who has been to the moon calls, you talk to him, even if he's only promoting his plan to put tourists into space.
     Thank goodness Aldrin wasn't selling vacuum cleaners. We already have six at home -- seriously, six vacuum cleaners, of varying configurations and power, if you count Dustbusters. Don't ask me why, ask the wife. Still, if Aldrin were selling vacuums, we'd have seven.
     Instead, he has a program called ShareSpace. He wants to get the space shuttles privatized, build hotels in space, and start flying "citizen explorers" up to those hotels. There aren't enough rich people who'll pay huge ticket prices for a quick trip to space, so some seats will be apportioned by a kind of lottery; you pay $10 or $20, you get a shot at getting on a flight.
     He talked about it at great length, the way that semi-retired guys who are in the grip of passions will. There would be side benefits.
     "By bringing down the cost of access to space, we open up exploration to much more affordable means," he said. "Once you have spacecraft in orbit, it is relatively easy with low-thrust engines to journey to the moon and to Mars. Recycling reusable spaceships is the key to reducing the cost barrier."
     OK so far -- I wouldn't bet my money on it happening, but then I thought cell phones were a fad. His main purpose seemed to be to get those "citizens" into space for their own good. The science was secondary. Aldrin, who has visited the North Pole and the wreck of the Titanic, sees putting people in space as the next logical development in the adventure travel business.
     I have trouble with that, just as I had trouble with the Apollo 8 astronauts calling the moon landing a political gambit first and a scientific quest a distant second. Did he, I wanted to know, agree with that? That we school kids had been duped into believing humanity was learning something by all this? What good was going to the moon?
     "The value, as I've been trying to tell people, of the space program, of Apollo anyway, was not the rocks that were brought back, but that people were excited about it," he said. "There was a sense of involvement, something that touched them, affected their lives. People remember where they were when there was the landing on the moon. That's an enrichment of people's lives."
     So the whole thing was entertainment? A really, really expensive pageant to get Americans to feel good about themselves and forget for a while the nasty old Soviet Union and that terrible war in Vietnam.
     "I wouldn't want to call it 'entertainment,' " he said. "I would call it participation in historic activities, in events of significance. If you witnessed the Hindenburg airship explode, if you listened to the radio when Pearl Harbor was attacked, these were catastrophic events, major events in history. So many times the news is about adverse events happening, but occasionally there were achievements of great success."
     We went into space to generate good news. Lovely. And now, one of the space pioneers wants to see that every stock trader with $ 50,000 to burn can get an 8-by-10 glossy of himself in a jumpsuit, giving the thumbs up, floating around his hotel lobby, grinning like an idiot.
     Just like that pesky dead philosopher always showing up at your door, there can be too much of a good thing. I think that space travel will lose value once people flock to it as a lark, the same way that mountaineering has lost a lot of its cachet
     And now we're talking about going to Mars. Why bother?
              —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 6, 1998

Buzz Aldrin on the moon with the American flag (NASA)

Yasso bars: addictive, in a good way

Drew Harrington, left, and Amanda Klane met in kindergarten in Easton, Mass.
and went on to found the Yasso brand of frozen Greek yogurt treats.

     Most columns get written then slapped immediately into the paper. This one lingered. I first wrote it, oh, in early June, but kept bumping it for other things. With the country falling apart in big chunks, the time never seemed right to stop and deliver a panegyric to a frozen novelty product. Every time I read it, I thought, "I can do better than that." That happened half a dozen times.

     Then I went into the hospital, a week ago yesterday, and so unleashed my seven-part "The Joys of Summer" to keep the EGD faithful entertained while I went under the knife, a process which, rest assured, I will describe to you when I'm good and ready. So I turned this in, instructing my boss that he was to decide if it were worth printing. He decided it is, apparently, and I was rewarded with a number of readers expressing gratitude, several running out immediately and trying Yasso bars themselves and giving enthusiastic reports. Except of course for those who hate everything I write and let me know after every column under the charmed notion that their opinion carries value beyond the comedic (I've taken to playing Robert Glomb's voicemails for my wife and son, to our general delight at a sneer so intense we sometimes worry the poor man will strangle. Or maybe that should be "hope.")

      Anyway, this ran in the paper Monday, and will be my last column for a while. There's a tug-of-war between my wife, who wants me out the full six weeks the doctor recommends, lying on the sofa, eating Yasso bars and watching old movies, and me, who would return tomorrow,  though I sincerely believe that my wife would crack my spine back open with her bare hands, if I actually try that. So let's assume, in the spirit of compromise that makes healthy long-term marriages, we'll end up splitting the different and  I'll be back in the saddle by August.  In the meantime, well, I'll come up with SOMETHING here. I always do.

     Most diets fail. Know why? Because you can only suffer so long, shunning carbohydrates and nibbling celery. The world drains of color, life loses savor, and you slip back into your bad old ways.
     Not that I am suggesting that anybody diet, or try to be thin, or that being thin is better than being fat. Oh, no no no no. I’m not falling into that trap. Nowadays nothing is better than anything else, at least on the superficial level bruited about in newspaper columns, and this one does not engage in fat shaming or any other kind of shaming. It’s a free country, or was. Do what you want.
     I want to be healthy. I lost weight a decade ago after being diagnosed with sleep apnea and unable to breathe at night without a mask, which I hated. The doctor, exasperated, finally let slip that if I lost 30 pounds, it might go away. I did, and it did.
      My diet worked in part because I realized that I had to reward myself, to place daily metaphorical carrots to keep me eating real ones.
    Credit two products:
     One is Fresca. I drink one almost every day. It’s like a gin and tonic, only no gin. Or tonic. Or calories.
     And the other?
     Yasso bars.
     Now reading the above, you have one of two reactions. Either, “God, I LOVE Yasso bars! I think I’ll have one right now.” Or “Heck, Neil, what’s a Yasso bar?”
     Let me tell you.

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