April 2021

Sprung Before Spring

We got our Corona virus shots in February, waited 14 days and got on a plane, for the first time in almost a year, to sunny Florida.  For most of March, we avoided the madness of the crowds on the beaches, staying mostly isolated in the Keys.  It was definitely nicer weather and great to be by the sea.  Restful, yes but, no less working on our new venture with daily Zooms, calls and writing.  It was heaven for the puppy (now five months old and twice the size on the return trip.)  She went to the dog park every day, became a café dog, frequenting restaurants outside with us and had a back yard to romp in.  

So, it was a fine trip, but the last day reminded me of the stories my dad used to write about his trips in the 15 years he wrote the Weinberg House Organ.  First his, then ours.

PY-O-MY LETTER/Weinberg House Organ 
April 11, 1955
…I was particularly impressed that with the fact that traveling is a lot more difficult today  – or seems to be – than when I practically lived on the road throughout the nineteen thirties and forties.  There seem to be more people traveling.  Plus, the people at the ticket offices, reservation clerks, etc. seem less interested and eager to please, less competent and and less reliable than the Dependable Dans of years ago.  You need a reservation for everything.  Besides this, I have become a real “Patsy” for getting into complicated situations.”

He went on to describe how he had made reservations months ahead and had confirmations for the rental car and reminded them by phone the week before.  When they arrived (in Florida), there was no car for them.  There were no cars available for weeks.  

So, stranded with my family at an airport eight miles from nowhere at 8pm, I worked up my blood pressure enough that I got a real jalopy from a competitor.  You know the kind.  You step on the brake and nothing happens.  Next time the brakes take hold and wildly and you practically go through the windshield.  Next day, we were lucky and found a 1955 Chevrolet convertible that had showed up unexpectedly.  I thought my car troubles were over.  I was wrong.  About the fourth day, I went out to the parking lot of our apartment hotel

And took the keys out of the glove compartment (because we only had one set of keys and it seemed simpler) and started to drive into town to see some old friends.

He tells the story about how he had taken the wrong rental car from parking lot, and on the way reached down to turn on the radio they had been listening to and there was none.  Long and short, he had taken a different car from the lot, although it was the same make, model and color as theirs.  He was resigned to having lost the car when a lady called and told him she had taken his car by mistake and she’d be there in an hour.  She showed up four hours later.  The next day he lost the keys in a grocery store and it took a couple hours to find them in the aisle where he had been sorting out the baking mix display.   And that was only part of the frustration.

Who says history doesn’t repeat itself?  65 years later, also on a Florida trip, we wound up stranded at the airport at 10pm after I went to the rental agency that I had a long-time reservation (and computer confirmation from) and found out they didn’t have a car for us and the puppy who had been a delinquent because she was too big for the case that had to go under the seat.  Of course, no hotel nearby would accept a dog (even as adorable as ours) so I scrounged and found a fly-by-night rent-a-car company that would rent us a car only if I paid the exorbitant rate for three weeks in advance.  I couldn’t argue at that point.  So I drove a few miles around the airport maze and picked up my patient partner, and our puppy who had been breathing airport fumes for over an hour.  The car was small and fitting all of us and the bags was a midnight puzzle.  

And, like my dad, I thought our car problems were over and we drove more than an hour to our rented house.  No problems…until the day we left.  We had scheduled a trip to visit the Everglades en route to the hellish airport in Miami.  

We had plenty of time.  Then we heard that awful clickety-click in the rear left tire.  Flat as a pancake.  We called Triple A.  They didn’t come as promised, so, with calm resolve, I emptied the trunk, got out the flimsy spare tire and horribly- designed jack and started to change the tire.  I almost had it up off the ground when the stubby tow truck guy arrived and told me I was doing the jack upside down and he’d use his.  He did.  I put all the stuff back in the trunk and we took off.  Realizing that if we were to drop off the puppy at friends (because no dogs were allowed on the short hike we had planned for the Everglades) we might be pressed to get to the airport.  And coupled with the fact that the tire warning light came on, we stopped at a dog and people-relieving park and headed to return the car at the office near the airport.  These fabulous folks refused to meet us at the airport (“the rules.”)  We had to find the office and use some influence for them to take us to departures.  By then, it was kind of close.  And after the airline hassled with us about how this now-huge dog couldn’t fly in her new larger container, and we had to wait for the supervisor to begrudgingly approve, we wound up the last people on the plane with no place to put our carry-ons and lived happily, but stressed ever-after. (I left out the embarrassing part about being so fermished that I left my cell phone in the bucket at TSA and had to tangle with the bureaucracy to get it back.)

I wish my dad were around.  He’d have loved the story!

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It’s NOT Just Racist

Marilyn Katz, long-time Chicago activist political strategist, essayist, film maker and organizer (and a Py-O-My letter subscriber) wrote this opinion piece published this week in the Chicago Sun-Times.  It’s a perspective we must understand:

Make no mistake: The Atlanta massacre was a hate crime. Seven of the eight victims were the world’s most frequent and perhaps oldest target of hate crimes — women.  

It is heartening to see demonstrations across the nation, led by Asian women and supported by all, protesting the xenophobia that has created an uptick in crimes against Asian Americans.

It should, however, be said that whether or not Asians specifically were targeted in the Atlanta area spa attacks on March 16, it was a hate crime, with seven of the eight murder victims being the most frequent and perhaps oldest target of hate crimes — women.

Eternally blamed for a fall from grace by virtually every religion, but particularly in Judeo-Christian culture and teachings, women have long been shunned and often murdered for non-conforming ideas or behavior. 

We were — and are — stoned for “infidelity,” for loving the wrong person, for refusing to bend to a husband or a father.  We were the vast majority of the estimated 50,000 people burned at the stake as witches not only in Salem but throughout Europe and Africa. We are burned and otherwise killed today for “dishonoring” the family in India, Afghanistan and Africa. We are considered to be temptresses by the fact of our very existence by Orthodox Muslims and Jews, and sexualized, raped and murdered by occupiers in every war — as the “the spoils of war.”

While more men are killed each year throughout the world — in wars, gang fights, robberies and by each other — women are killed almost exclusively by men. According to the United Nations and other world agencies that monitor health and homicides, nearly half of all women killed are not killed by a stranger but by their intimate partner.

According to the UN Study on Homicide, in 2019 approximately 87,000 women were killed world-wide, with 50,000 women a year dying at the hands of intimate partners and family members, mainly through domestic abuse or “honor killings.”

Overall, homicide is committed largely by males, with most of the victims being other males. In 2017, males made up 84% of all offenders and 78% of all homicide victims; However, 78% of all intimate partner homicide victims were female. From 2003 to 2014, the Centers for Disease Control found that approximately 55% of female homicides for which the circumstances were known were related to intimate partner violence.

But it’s not just intimate partners who bear the brunt of male ire. According to Human Rights Pulse, six women are killed every hour by men globally and one in three women are affected by gender-based violence in their lifetime. And it is not just in “less developed nations.” It is easy for many to dismiss these numbers as “about the other” when we read about the hundreds of women who disappeared from the factories of Juarez or those who’ve been the victims of gangs in Honduras or the sex traffickers of Eastern Europe.

And as the uprising of the women in Britain tells us, the United Kingdom is no exception, with one woman killed by a man every three days. That rate of femicide has remained unchanged for over a decade.

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Opening Day

It’s the most hopeful we’ve been about the White Sox for at least 15 years.  Every opening day reminds me of Bill Veeck, my hero, then mentor, friend and TV partner.  He hasn’t been at any ball park for 35 years, but his spirit is always around.  Now that I am six years older than Bill, was when he died, the last lines of his wonderful 1962 book, Veeck–As in Wreck: The Chaotic Career of Baseball’s incorrigible Maverick, make more sense than ever.

Veeck and collaborator Ed Linn quote the end of a letter from Hall of Fame pitcher Early Wynn:

To me and all the other players, you’ll always be the No. 1 executive of all time…but the most important thing is that you enjoyed it. It’s the same thing about all the prizes you gave away at the ball park.  You enjoyed seeing someone stand at home plate and discover that he had just won two dozen live lobsters or a barrel of chocolate-covered butterflies.  You weren’t the only one who laughed.  We all did.

My answer [wrote Bill] has always been: Sometime, somewhere, there will be a club nobody wants .  And then, Ole Will will come wandering along to laugh some more.

Look for me under the arc-lights, boys.  I’ll be back.”

For me and millions of others, he never went away.

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It’s the Internet, Stupid

That’s the title of a piece I wrote a few years ago as a chapter of in the book I used as a text for college classes (to read the whole chapter, email me).  Now that we are head-over-heels involved in designing and trying to launch a new streaming video company, I’ve come to realize that if it’s not online, it doesn’t exist…particularly for anyone under 40.  I/we used to say “If it’s not on TV, it doesn’t exist.”

That’s still true in certain ways (selling packaged goods, sports, political elections ,etc.)  but the Internet is where any current or archival information must live.  Televison is mostly watched by those of us over 50.  Millions of kids all over the world don’t have a television.  Yes, they watch TV programs but only online.  Most never watch The News on TV.  Facebook is the most popular place for news about the world.  It might be frightening to us tele-dinosaurs, but we need to understand it and deal with it if we care about reaching audiences now. 

As nearly always, Marshall McLuhan had it right.   Though he never experienced the internet, some 40+ years later, his predictions are eerily accurate.  In Gutenberg Galaxy , the author and media theorist imagined our current technology-dominated world.  

Computers could enhance retrieval obsolesce mass library organization and offer speedily tailored data.

McLuhan called it “The Global Village in which technology would spread information to anyone and everyone.”

Years later in 1962, he wrote in Understanding Media:

Since the inception of the telegraph and radio,  the globe has contracted spatially into a single large village.  Tribalism is our only resource since the electro-magnetic discovery.  Moving from print to electronic media we have given up an eye for an ear.

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Wow! An edition of the Weinberg House Organ with no mention of politics, global pandemic and with three of my heroes, Louis Weinberg Jr., Bill Veeck and Marshall McLuhan.  Don’t conclude that I’m living in the past.  I feel more alive and vital every time I’m with the grandchildren who can safely be with me.  Finally.  

(Look for the Montana kids, Oliver and Eliza, next month).

I wish you a healthy happy fun and productive April and beyond.  Seeya on May Day.