Friday, February 2, 2024


REMEMBERING ROD

            This is a day for remembering – remembering the call that informed me he had died on this day two years ago, and for peering back in time to 1963.  That was the year he was born, a healthy eight pounds, thirteen ounces in a small Catholic hospital in Paris, Texas.  St. Joseph’s Hospital is remembered now only by a placard.  So to, is he.  Two bronze placards atop the marble mausoleum tell of the man buried there, in a Catholic Church he helped build in Honduras, just steps from the pristine beach where the assure blue waters of the Caribbean lap gently over the bleached sand.

            He was my son, the third of my five children.  And like the waves of the Caribbean, memories lap softly over me this day.  I recall his first outing.  It was just him.  His two siblings were spending a week-long sleepover with grandparents in Fort Worth.  We bundled him in a soft blanket, put a bottle of milk in a plastic warmer, and took him to the only movie theatre in Paris at that time.  To Kill a Mockingbird was playing.

            There was a line outside the ticket office.  We paid our fifty cents each and walked inside.  Most who stood in the line did not enter with us.  They went instead to a wooden staircase on the side of the building that ascended to the theatre balcony where the outside door was marked “Colored Only.”  Jim Crow laws were still enforced in Texas in 1963.  Later that year, Dr. Martin Luther King would stand before a quarter-million people on the Washington Mall and declare he had a dream that one day all of us would judge each other not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character. 

            No work in American literature better depicts the brutal unfairness of segregation than To Kill a Mockingbird.  It should be required reading for every American student.  We were so moved by the movie that we left only long enough to warm another bottle and return minutes later to watch it a second time.  Four-day old Roddy Scott lay cradled in our arms, sound asleep, through both showings.

            Sleep well, my son, sleep well.

              

 

Monday, February 27, 2023


 OUR GALILEO MOMENT

Covid 19 almost certainly resulted from a leaked virus experiment at the Wuhan Laboratory in Wuhan China.  That is the conclusion of scientists at the Department of Energy and investigators at the FBI after nearly three years of research; results that were leaked to the Wall Street Journal.  Worse, the researchers suspect the virus was engineered in the Chinese lab.

Thank God for leaks.  Covid claimed more than a million Americans and nearly eight-million people worldwide.  Victims of the virus are still dying.  These victims and their families deserve the truth.

The conclusions of the American researchers are a win for common sense and another black eye for the American media.  Led by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and trumpeted by reporters and anchors at CNN and MSNBC and the legacy networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, those who dared suggest China was at fault were derisively dismissed and denounced as racists.  Worse, their views were banned from Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.  Call it America’s Galileo moment. 

There was widespread support of such censorship by mainstream media outlets.  To their credit, Facebook and Twitter have since revoked those bans, but not before the damage to our sacredly held freedom of speech, enshrined in the second amendment, had been done.  Worse, this comes after the American media has suffered yet another embarrassing episode for paralyzing the Trump Administration in its early months with near constant headlines about the former president’s alleged involvement with Russia.  That story has since been debunked.  For its erroneous reporting, both the Times and the Post were jointly awarded journalism’s most coveted honor, the 2018 Pulitzer Prize.

Facts and truth are stubborn things.   

 

Thursday, November 24, 2022

 Baseball Memories                                                

Watching Ken Burns’ superlative documentary, Baseball, these past few weeks has transported this octogenarian back to my wonder years in the post-war 40’s.  On any summer day but Sunday, unless it rained, kids from all over Peacock Park in Fairmont, West Virginia would scramble down the dirt path to the holler below my Aunt Alice’s house where someone had laid out a scruffily defined baseball diamond.  The bases, including home plate, were defined by an X dug by someone’s shoe heel.  Most days we played until lunch and often returned in the afternoon.

My playing prospects were generally uncertain. I was a scrawny first grader when I initially descended to that holler. And worse, I was a girl, the last to be chosen and only then if my cousin John Freeman or one of his friends picked me in a show of sympathy or if there weren’t enough kids to fill out a team. Either way, I was quickly banished to the outfield - my throwing skills being imprecise, my catching skills even more lacking.  But I could hit.  And I could run. 

Money being scarce in those days, baseball gloves were shared.  So were bats and balls.

When we got home after a day in the holler Aunt Alice would be sitting on her wooden stool in the kitchen.  I can still see her there as if it were only yesterday, kneading bread dough or stirring whatever was cooking for the evening meal.  A radio would be blaring out the play-by-play whenever the Pittsburgh Pirates took the field.  It was from her I learned to love the game.  For that I will always be grateful.

In 1956, the summer between my junior and senior year in high school, we returned to Kansas City, where, for a buck and a quarter I would sit along the first base line in the old Blues Stadium and see the likes of Mickey Mantle, Billy Martin, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto come to bat when the Yankees were in town. Defending in right field was Harry “Suitcase” Simpson, a tall, gangly alumni of the fabled Negro League who became my favorite on the old KC Athletics.  Sadly, he is the only A’s player I can even recall.  In those days, the Athletics were mostly a major league farm team for the perennial pennant winning Yankees.

While a sophomore at the University of Tulsa trying hard to win a place on the school newspaper’s roster, I covered an appearance by St. Louis Cardinal veterans Enos Slaughter and Pepper Martin.  Martin was once a charter member of Dizzy Dean’s “Gashouse Gang.”  Enthralled and regaled by their twangy accounts of baseball past only deepened my love of the game.

Moving to Texas in 1960, I switched my allegiance from the Pirates to the Cardinals, a move forced by practicality, since St. Louis was the only team broadcast I could find on my transistor radio.  While the ballplayers played, I would take the sprinkled starched shirts from the refrigerator to iron while being treated to the best baseball play-by-play team ever – Harry Caray and Jack Buck, and for a couple of those years, the gregarious and funny Joe Garagiola. Years later I met Garagiola when I was fortunate enough to be seated between him and astronaut John Young at a ceremony honoring Gus Grissom at Spring Hill State Park in Indiana. He was even funnier in person.  And Garagiola came with an appetite that rivaled his sense of humor.  At his insistence we both went for seconds in the buffet line.  I could finish only a small portion of my second serving.  Garagiola pointed to my plate and asked, “You want any more of that.” When I nodded no, he reached for my plate and quickly cleared it.  Then made another pass at the buffet line returning with yet another heaping plate.  Despite that hearty appetite, Garagiola maintained his playing days weight well into his later years.  Oh, to be endowed with such a compassionate metabolism!  

The last time I played baseball I was 65.  It was on a makeshift ball diamond at my son’s home in Indiana during a family reunion.  Armed with a new bat, fresh off a rack from Walmart, I approached the plate and with shouted encouragement from my teammates, mostly grandkids, I hit the second ball thrown.  Up, up and away it went.  Outfielders scurried after the ball while I lumbered around the bases, slowed by bad knees, a couple dozen extra pounds and a regrettable abhorrence for exercising regularly.  I jubilantly crossed home plate thanks more to the benevolent slowness of the rival players than my baserunning skills.  But it remains among my greatest moments close behind the birth of my children and grandchildren.

My fondest baseball memory though, takes me back to an early spring morning in Joplin, Missouri when I was nine.  For Christmas I had received a baseball bat and ball.  No gifts were more welcomed.  As I tossed the ball in the air to take a swing as it descended my mother walked over.  She started pitching the ball to me and went darting after it if I managed to connect bat to ball.  She was tall and lithe.  I had never seen her run, or throw a ball, or catch a ball.  From my earliest memory she had gray hair and always seemed older than mothers of my friends. It was only after she passed away that I learned she had been a star basketball player in high school in rural West Virginia and for a time, played women’s semi-pro basketball.  She had simply never mentioned it. Katherine Mary (my mom) is the reason I feel such a connection with Kevin Costner playing catch with his on-screen dad in Field of Dreams.  It’s a scene that never fails to summon tears.

It’s been half a century since I last attended a major league baseball game.  To sit in the stands today would require mortgaging the house and maxing out the credit card just to buy a hot dog and soda.  So, I’m content to remember sitting on the first baseline in the old Blues Stadium for a buck and a quarter and watching Mickey Mantle hit a towering ball to right field and Suitcase Simpson stretching out his long arm in hopes of turning a sure double into an out.

Saturday, June 13, 2020

A Problem of Pigmentation

     In this summer of America's troubled discontent, we should all be urged to view the 1967 film classic, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.  During his impassioned summation of the problem he is facing, newspaper editor Spencer Tracy looks out at his white daughter and the man she intends to marry, a prestigious Black doctor, played by Sidney Poitier and declares simply that "what we have here is a problem of pigmentation."
     Screenwriter William Rose encapsulated the challenges his young lovers would face in a world with little tolerance for interracial marriage.  And our struggle as a nation, then and now, is mirrored in that short phrase.
     If, as Christians, we believe what the Bible instructs us, that all men are created in the image of God, it absolutely amputates the argument by those among us who harbor bigotry in their hearts that a dark complexion makes a fellow American somehow inferior to an American with a lighter complexion.  Biblical teaching underscores the simple truth of Rose's screenplay.
     As I watch the protesters marching through the streets of our major cities, night after night, I wish we could channel some of their energy to secure racial accord and equal treatment, and use it to bring about meaningful change to elevate the poorest among us to a better economic future.
     It begins with education.  I live in a suburb of Indianapolis.  Inner-city schools in Indianapolis are failures.  Children attend but only a fraction leave school at the end of the day with anything gained.  These schools are a poor investment for the children who have the greatest need.  Most are African-American.  Less than a third of these children are reading at grade level by third grade.  It is a sad indictment of every Hoosier, nee, every American that we have allowed this to happen.
     School boards should be petitioned to approve school choice.  Most of our poorest children are born to single mothers who must struggle to support them, often with low paying jobs. The obstructive teachers unions should be shunted aside.  Our children are priority one.  But salaries for inner-city teachers should be raised to attract the brightest teachers. These professional educators could become the biggest catalyst for the implementation and success of education reforms.
     Microsoft, Dell, Apple and other computer makers could step forward and insure that every child in our inner-city schools has a digital device on which to learn.  Stop the tokenism of big tech.  Step up and take responsibility for a country that spawned and fostered your success.
     Institute school uniforms.  Give each child a level learning field.  No child should go to school in clothes that might invite ridicule from other classmates.  Dignity is as important for the smallest among us as it is for adults.
     And finally teach history, unvarnished and accurate.  However disturbing it may be, our history is the base upon which we can build a future that secures the underpinnings of our republic and serves as a guide to not repeating the mistakes of our past. 
     

Friday, January 25, 2019

A SHAMEFUL DISPLAY OF POWER...

     As a retired journalist I was appalled this evening when I turned on the news to see video of a dozen FBI agents in full military garb, carrying automatic weapons, rushing into a Florida home to arrest a political operative charged in the Russian collusion investigation being conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller.
     Why appalled?  Because this is the United States of America, not a third world country or an autocratic dictatorship where such behavior is common place.  Whatever our political persuasion, no American should tolerate such a scene.
     The subject of this pre-dawn arrest was a 69-year old man with a long record of being a sleazy political operative but not of any past criminal behavior according to news reports on CNN and Fox News.  He is charged with lying to investigators, witness tampering and obstruction of justice.  None of the charges involves any act of violence.  However egregious, all are white collar crimes. And yet he was apparently considered such a threat to society that he appeared in court with his ankles and wrists shackled.  The federal judge did not seem to share the special counsel's fear of the man because she allowed him to be set free on a $250,000 surety bond, a type of bond where the accused does not have to put up any cash, but could be sued if they renege on paying off the bond plus interest.
     If he is found guilty of the charges, I fully agree he should face appropriate prison time.  No one is above the law.
     If being a sleazy politician is criminal then I was a witness to such criminality as a reporter for an Evansville television station.  Covering a polling place in that city's inner city in the 1970's, I filmed Democrat poll workers handing out five-dollar bills and pints of liquor to African-Americans in return for their vote.  No arrests followed the airing of that bit of political chicanery.  It must have worked, because the democrat mayor, the late Frank McDonald, remained in power until he chose to retire from city hall.  Next I saw a campaign manager for McDonald's successor, the late Russell Lloyd, ordering workers in the county clerk's office in Evansville to sell tickets to the annual Republican Lincoln Day Dinner on county time, something assuredly against the law in Vanderburgh County.
     Both men served successful terms as Evansville mayor through the 1960-70's.  No one was arrested or charged with a crime.  In fact, the son's of both men followed in their father's footsteps and were elected Evansville mayor for multiple terms.
     I was born just twenty years after women procured the vote.  I followed with horror the blood letting era that won civil rights and equal rights for both people of color and women in our country.  Ours is a democracy that has withstood many challenges and changes in our relatively short life as a nation. But viewing the arrest of a political sleazeball in a manner befitting the most violent criminal is terrifying.  The FBI was only following orders.  It is the people with unbridled investigative and political power that I hold accountable.  They are the ones we should fear most.