Welcome to Montgomery County--NOT!

When I was the Resident Manager of the Flagship Hotel in Galveston, some of the many problems I had to put up with were the conventions that we scheduled.  Conventions maximize profit: the rooms are all full, the bars are at capacity, and the restaurants are packed.  On the other hand, a convention booked at a beach hotel is not there to do much work.  The average patron after a week of heavily organized frivolity is sun-burnt, hung-over, sick, and too broke not to leave for home.  This is not a recipe for happy guests. 

Some conventions were fun.  Others were an adventure in combat anger management.  In 1971, the Veterans of Foreign Wars had a convention in Houston that was attended by Governor Reagan and Vice-President Agnew.  Thousands of students laid siege to the hotel, protesting the war.  Except for the rather humorless Secret Service agents, I thought the whole affair was great fun--in part because I was the only college student at the protest who was getting paid.  But, I was only a lowly security guard in those days--you have a different view when you are management.

Undoubtedly, one of the worst conventions the Flagship ever hosted was The Telephone Workers of America.  This group of miserable, angry drunks (What is the collective noun for a gathering of assholes?  A toilet?  A hemmorhoid?) held its convention at Halloween.   We had more fist fights—in costume--than a Golden Glove bout.  One drunk in particular created havoc by making an endless series of obscene phone calls to every room in the hotel.  Somehow, even in his inebriated state, he had figured out that he could call room-to-room without the assistance of the hotel operator.  No amount of pleading from his wife and friends could convince the large and violent drunk to stop making the calls.

Like most of the staff, I was in costume, dressed as Dracula--complete with a large flowing black cape.  I opened the door to his room with my passkey and stepped in, loudly announcing in my best Tex-Transylvanian accent, “Good Evening!”  As everyone stared at me, wide-eyed and frozen, I walked over and removed the handset from the drunk’s hand, yanked the receiver wire out of the wall, and left with the telephone.  No one in the room moved or said a word until I was back in the hall, with the door securely shut behind me.  I have always wondered how much the drunk remembered the next day.

The worst convention—by far—was the Texas Peace Officers convention.  I would not do that convention again without… hell, I have no idea.  Combat pay?  Personal protection provided by Delta Force?  None of that would be enough.  Part of the problem is that the police do not believe that rules are written for them.  As one sheriff put it, “You can’t break the law when you is the law!”  That seemed to be the general attitude of pretty much everyone at that convention.

There was an enormous amount of drinking, which was followed by an equal amount of puking, retching, gagging, and upchucking.  Most people, when they drink, pass through familiar stages of inebriation: loud, obnoxious, intelligent, handsome, and finally, invisible.  With the police, it is angry, screaming, rampaging Cossack, and finally, crack shot. 

As I have previously explained, the Flagship was situated on a pier over the Gulf of Mexico.  Every room was over the water.  So, when a group of East Texas policemen (including quite a few local cops) managed to force open the door to the roof so they could conduct some target practice at 3:00 am—evidently the Balinese Room a quarter a mile away was the target—other guests in the hotel couldn’t help being aware of the situation.

“Is that gunfire I hear?” asked every phone call to the front desk.  “Is someone shooting?  Should we call the police?”

“The police already know about it.” I answered.  “With any luck, any second now they will shoot themselves and fall off the damn building into the water.”

NO!  Of course I didn’t answer that.

“No!” I actually said.  “That is the sound distant thunder makes when it comes rolling in from the sea.”  I doubt that I was believed.  What I was actually counting on was that the idiots on the roof were too drunk to reload.

The first night of the convention, the deputy sheriff from Montgomery County, Texas staggered out of the bar, stumbled and fell.  A tiny little Spanish .25 automatic fell out of his sock, hit the floor, discharged and fell apart as the receiver, slide and spring all bounced in different directions.  The anemic little toy had punched a neat hole through a nearby window, just inches above a local police lieutenant’s head. 

The lieutenant was a little pissed.  As he grabbed the deputy by the neck, he said, “I hope for your sake that you are a cop.”

The Montgomery County Sheriff was very angry at the cost of replacing that window.  As it turned out, he got a lot angrier.  The hotel had a parking problem when it was at full capacity.  Because of this, the local fire marshal required us to keep the spaces directly in front of the hotel’s doors empty at all hours.  He had ordered that appropriately marked red sawhorses block these spaces at all times.

That night, the sheriff came back to the hotel late, and not finding a close parking space, had moved the sawhorses, parked his squad car, and then moved the sawhorses back in place.  By the time he had finished this chore, the lobby bellman had alerted me, and I was waiting at the front door.  I was very polite, he was very drunk, and found my request to move the car hilarious.  He didn’t even answer me as he got in the elevator and went to his room.

I didn’t live in Montgomery County, and didn’t want to.  I did live on Galveston Island, and did know what the fire marshal would do if he found that fire lane blocked.  I doubt the sheriff had reached his room before I had called the tow truck.  The wrecker driver thought the whole affair sidesplitting.  The sheriff’s car had rotating lights, an official paint job, radios, and a shotgun in the rack between the seats.  And I had it towed away.

The next morning, the lobby was full of policemen from all over East Texas, each of them laughing his ass off while waiting for the sheriff to come to the breakfast the convention was hosting.  When the sheriff finally stepped out of the elevator, the lobby was quiet for a few seconds, then the gathered cops started laughing.  The sheriff, realizing that he was the object of the gathered mirth, looked out the glass doors and figured out the joke pretty quickly.

Furious, he marched over to me.  “Where the hell is my car, boy!” he thundered.

I told him the car had been towed, and gave him a business card from the wrecker company. 

“You better get my car back, boy!” he yelled.  Every word was punctuated by him stabbing me in the chest with his finger, his red face just inches from mine.  “You better get it back now, boy!”

“No sir.” I answered.  The gathered police were roaring with laughter.  I was wondering if any of them would try to stop the sheriff if he was to draw his gun and try to shoot me.  Or would they just laugh harder?

“YES YOU WILL!”  By now, the sheriff was screaming.

“No sir.” 

“That’s an official po-lice car,” shrieked the sheriff.  “Just what the hell were you thinking, boy?”

By now, the finger poking was getting painful, but I had an answer.  Calmly, but loud enough for every law enforcement official in the room to hear me, I said, “I thought it made up for every parking ticket I ever got.”

The last thing that sheriff said to me as the room erupted in laughter was very quiet, and very close to my ear.  “If I ever catch you in Montgomery County, boy, you’re a dead man.”

That was almost 30 years ago.  I know exactly where Montgomery County, Texas is.  I still haven’t been there.

Sugar and Spice?

One of my granddaughters is visiting this week.  I have two:  The Munchkin and the Submarine.  The Munchkin is five years old and I have written about her before.  The Submarine (so called because she is always wet on both ends) is only five weeks old and her mother threatens a restraining order if I write about her.  Obviously, it is the Munchkin who is visiting.

It is amazing the things you can learn from a five year old girl.   Maybe the world just looks different when you are only three feet tall.  Maybe little girls are just special.  Or maybe, I’m listening to every single word she says because she is so damn cute.  Whatever.  Here are the things I have learned this week.

Sideways kissing is “dirty kissing.”  This probably needs some explanation.  Remember in the movies when the actors would mash the sides of their faces together and kiss with just  the corners of their mouths?  I think in the 1930’s, Jeanette Macdonald and Nelson Eddy had a patent on this technique.  This is dirty kissing and according to the munchkin, it is really, really dirty.  Until this week, no one outside of Hollywood ever thought about doing such an idiotic thing, but since we learned it was dirty, the Doc and I have gotten rather good at it.  We’re still working on the dirty part.


If you want boys to eat something, it has to be gross.  It must be something like Dirty Diaper Stew or, my sons’ favorite: Monkey Blood Chicken.  With little girls, this doesn’t work.  Every meal is a negotiation and the menu will accept very few new additions unless you have the guile of a diplomat. Clam chowder only became acceptable after I explained that it was the favorite meal for mermaids.

With other foods, I had mixed results.  Evidently, mermaids do not eat anchovy pizza.  Mushroom risotto is really gross, but mushroom rice is okay.  Onions are horrible unless we pull them from my garden, while any food whose name includes the word ‘berry’ is wonderful.  It is a lot easier to eat broccoli if you call it “baby trees.”

Little girls are very clean.  We swim every day, and the Munchkin wants a bath after swimming—a concept that would have never occurred to a boy.  And the changes of clothes!  I once made the boys loin cloths out of old towels and a length of rope.  That was the only clothes they wore one summer.  The Munchkin, however has at least four changes of clothes a day.  And painted toenails.  And painted fingernails.

Yesterday, the Munchkin asked me to put up her hair so she could go swimming.  I know what she meant, but honest to God, my first thought was to use duct tape.  My second thought was to send her to ask Grandma, the Doc.

When little boys play, you lose a couple of kitchen spoons to the sand pile in the corner of the yard while they slowly bury their toy cars (so years later they can become guided missiles when a lawnmower hits them).  When little girls play...well, I was shocked the other day when I came home to the carnage in the den.  As best as I can reconstruct it, Barbie and Stacy were driving a pink corvette to their fashionable Malibu beach house, when suddenly, Ken (a clandestine member of al Qaeda) detonated a roadside IED.  The blast decapitated Stacy while mussing the long blonde hair of Barbie.  Sadly, several ponies and a unicorn were also killed.  Strangely, the bomb blew the clothes off of everybody.

Do all little girls sing to their toys?  And to the birds?  And the cats?  I don’t remember the boys singing this much.  I heard a lot of muttering under their breath.  (I once heard What’s-His-Name promise his brother that they were going to push me into the pool as soon as I was in a wheelchair.)

I have to be careful what I write.  In a few years I hope to have both of those little girls visit at the same time.  I’m going to buy each of them a pony.

The Spirit of ‘76

My good friend and personal bartender, Chuck, has been researching the favorite drinks of the Presidents.  It turns out that several of these drinks actually sound pretty good, and we are slowly working our way through them.  Chuck is working on his own bartender’s guide, and when he is ready, I’m sure he will share it with you.   But his research has reminded me of several anecdotes about presidential drinking I thought I might share.

Stories of Ulysses Grant’s drinking are legendary—and mostly apocryphal.  Don’t get me wrong, Grant had a well-exercised elbow, but every drinking anecdote from the nineteenth century—and earlier—was attributed to the man.  But there is one story that is both undeniable, and yet rarely remembered.

Grant lay dying of cancer of the throat, caused at least in part, by the 10,000 boxes of cigars that had been sent to him by admirers.  Unconscious and close to death, Grant was sprinkled with holy water by a minister who pronounced him converted and baptized.  As a doctor forced a little brandy between the lips of the dying president, he suddenly regained consciousness.

“It is Providence!” exclaimed the minister.

“No,” said the doctor.  “It was the brandy.”

While Grant may have had the reputation, in fact the president who drank the most may have been James Buchanan.  When he took office, he replaced the funereal Franklin Pierce. (Actually, that is a little unkind, as Pierce and his wife watched their son Bennie die when he was crushed to death in a train accident while en route to the inauguration.  Pierce blamed himself, believing that God was punishing him for the having the hubris to run for office.  The Pierces’ four years in the White House were indeed a long and unhappy funeral.)

Buchanan wasted no time in telling the purveyor of spirits to the White House that small bottles of champagne were no longer required.  “Pints are very inconvenient in this house,” he told them, “as the article is not used in such small quantities.”  Supposedly, the amount of wine and spirits consumed during his term could have quite literally filled a cellar.

Buchanan used to stop off at the distillery of Jacob Baer on the way home from church to purchase a ten gallon cask of “Old J. B. Whiskey.”  Not only did Buchanan regard this as a fine whiskey, but he made no effort to disabuse White House guests who believed the initials meant it was his own private label.

President Harry Truman also enjoyed a few drinks while in the White House--actually, more than a few.  First thing every morning, Harry had a shot of Wild Turkey, followed by a glass of orange juice.   Later, just before dinner, Bess and Harry would have an Old Fashioned.  Shortly after the couple moved into the White House, Bess ordered their usual drinks from the butler.  While the President and his wife finished the drinks, the next night they requested that the drinks be made a little dryer.  “They were too sweet,” Bess complained.  So the butler carefully made the drinks with much less sugar, but the following night, the Trumans still requested that the drinks be made still drier.  Peeved, the butler added a little ice to two glasses and then filled them to the brim with straight bourbon.

“Ahhh” said the President.  “That’s the way we like an Old Fashioned.”

When Jimmy Carter was president, his brother Billy was the most famous alcoholic in the country.  He peddled “Billy Beer”, played the drunk on television, and once publicly asked faith-healer Ruth Carter Stapleton to cure a hangover. 

When asked his favorite drink, Billy answered quickly.  “Bourbon” he said.  “All southerners drink Bourbon.  Never trust a scotch drinker, they really prefer bourbon, but they are just putting on airs.  My brother Jimmy used to drink bourbon, but when he decided to get into politics, he switched to scotch.”

Very few of our presidents have been teetotalers. President Rutherford B. Hayes’ wife was known as “Lemonade Lucy” because she refused to allow alcohol in the White House, and George W. Bush swore off alcohol before he ran for the office.  Abraham Lincoln rarely drank, and sent the numerous gifts of alcoholic beverages he received to nearby military hospitals.

The vast majority of our founding fathers enjoyed a good drink.  During George Washington’s administration, the happy hour began at 3:00 in the afternoon and continued through dinner.  Why is John Hancock’s signature so large on the bottom of the Declaration of Independence?  He may have been feeling no pain.  He was an alcoholic beverage dealer. George Washington himself was at one point the largest distiller of bourbon in the country.

The history books leave a lot of interesting details out today.  Have you ever wondered why the Mayflower (a ship that up to that point had been used mainly to ship beer to France and return to England with wine) dropped off the pilgrims in Massachusetts during the winter?  The original destination was Virginia, but the ship ran out of beer—a surprising fact when you consider that the ship left England loaded with more beer than water.  The colonists started making spruce beer just about as soon as they got ashore.  If they left these details in the history books, maybe students would pay more attention.

There are lots of little stories like this.  Johnny Appleseed gave out apple seeds and seedlings so the pioneers could make hard cider.  Patrick Henry was a bartender.  At the first Thanksgiving, no one ate cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, or pumpkin pie.  They did, however, drink beer, wine, gin, and brandy.  During the early colonial period, tavern owners enjoyed higher social status than preachers.  One of the first buildings at Harvard was a brewery to provide beer for the students.  Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in a tavern, and at Monticello, made his own beer, bourbon, and--according to the Hemings family—his own slaves.  Possibly under the influence—since the surviving records show the household used over 400 bottles of wine each year.  

Our country was pretty much founded on alcohol.  The bill for a celebration party for the 55 drafters of the US Constitution listed 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, 8 bottles of whiskey, 22 bottles of port, 8 bottles of hard cider, 12 beers and seven bowls of alcohol punch large enough that "ducks could swim in them."  Not counting the punch, that’s about 3 bottles of booze each. 

The 4^th of July is less than two weeks away.  What better way to celebrate the anniversary of our country than to reenact this party.  Please invite me.  Please leave the ducks out of the punchbowl.

Don't Sing For My Supper

Let me start by saying that I love Mexico.  I teach Mexican history, I have spent a lot of time in Mexico, and I intend to spend a lot more time in Mexico in the near future.  I love Mexican food, Mexican beer, and Mexican novels.  Frankly, I love almost everything about Mexico…except mariachis.

Boy, I feel better.  Who knew confession felt so good? 

I hate mariachis.  How in the world did this silly tradition get started?  You find a handful of really bad musicians, dress them up like Zorro’s gay cousins, and let them play very old music in a restaurant full of people trying to quietly enjoy a meal while conversing with friends.  Why would anyone think this is a good idea? 

And the noise!  Five mariachis can turn a quiet neighborhood restaurant into a deep-fried steel mill.  Do tacos taste better if you beat a bass drum with a cat?  There is a damn good reason why they don’t play French horns at French restaurants.

We are not talking chamber music here.  There is the obligatory large bass guitar (a guitarón) played by the smallest member of the group.  Then, there are one or more violins--out of tune, a high pitched 5-string guitar that sounds like a ukulele but is called a vihuela, and at least one loud and slightly off-key trumpet.  If Gabriel ever does sound his horn, very few people in Mexico are going to show up--everyone will probably just think that “Juan” is warming up for his next gig.

Only a Mexican restaurant does this to you.  If you go to a steak house, you don’t get five guys dressed up like John Wayne singing “Get Along Little Dogie.”  And I have never yet been to a Der Wienerschnitzel and had a couple of blondes in lederhosen sing the Horst Wessel song while goose stepping around my table.

This is similar to the Inverse Democracy Rule of Jukeboxes.  If there are 100 people present and 99 of them want a little peace and quiet, they can be overruled by one idiot with a quarter.  So it is with mariachis--if the table next to you slips the band a few bucks, everyone is subjected to the music. 

Wait, I get it!  It is actually musical extortion.  If you pay these pirates, they go away.  How much would it cost to have them go and play in the kitchen?  Or the parking lot?  And why do we, the paying customer put up with this?  We should take air horns with us to the restaurant and every time they start bellowing “Guantamera” we fight back with equal noise.  Worse still is that old tourist favorite, “La Cucaracha.”    Singing a song about a cockroach (even if it is actually a song about Pancho Villa) is rarely encouraged at most restaurants.

It really doesn’t matter what the words are, since at such extreme volume (the performers are literally screaming at your table) the songs all sound the same.  Also, they are extremely repetitious, too.  It is sort of like heavy metal for people without electricity.

Yes, I understand the history of the music.  I know the tradition started in Jalisco in colonial times, I know that is a rich tradition for hundreds of years… but do you have to play it at my table?  

An Attic With a View

Way up a mountain in the piney woods of New Mexico, The Doc and I own a cabin on the edge of a national forest.  I have briefly mentioned this cabin when I talked about abrief experiment with a wood burning hot tub.

Usually, when someone says they have a cabin in the woods, when you get there you discover a condo with a view of a pine tree.  We own a cabin (a hovel, or possibly a shack) where you cannot see or hear another human being.  Wildlife abounds, including a black bear that makes a regular circuit around the neighborhood.  I’m not exactly afraid of that bear, but I do have a healthy respect for him.  The bear holds me in what can only be called open contempt.

Actually, the bear has solved one of life’s great philosophical questions:  Does a bear shit in the woods?  From deep experience, I can answer:  “No.”   He prefers to shit on my deck—frequently--and with deep satire--on the welcome mat.

Recently, The Doc and I made our annual spring cleaning journey to the cabin--dusting the corners, replacing the mouse traps, and sweeping out the collection of bugs that miraculously can find their way into a closed cabin, but can never find their way back out.  So, it was time to clean out under the kitchen sink, sweep out the storage closet, and poke in all the nooks and crannies of a cabin built over 60 years ago.

Cabins collect history; each and every vacation home becomes the owners’ personal family museum.  When you purchase a new television, where else does the old one go?  And the old sleeper sofa that is exactly like the one Lucy and Desi had eventually gets transported to the cabin, and rests through eternity under the strange Mexican blanket you purchased a third of a century ago.  The binoculars with a small crack on the edge of the right lens, the massive electric can opener, the vacuum cleaner that won’t (and I bet half the fondue sets ever made) can all be found either at altitude or close to a beach.

There is a large collection of VHS tapes in that cabin, right next to the box full of cassette tapes of old-time radio programs.  Few things are as memorable as sipping wine from the last surviving wineglass (from a set of four) while listening to The Shadow on a snowy night with the only illumination coming from a fireplace. 

From a cabinet next to a kitchen stove so old it was made by General Motors, The Doc pulled out a treasure from a bygone era: a tall round quart can of furniture oil, sold by the Fuller Brush Company.  I haven’t seen a can like that in fifty years.  It is funny how an object from your past will throw you back in time to a memory so fresh that it seems to play like a movie being projected on a screen just behind your eyes. 

A long time ago, a can just like that was a favorite toy of my brother and me. We played in the dirt next to the driveway, making an improbable town of cigar box  houses and heavy Tonka trucks.  For some reason, the only inhabitants were green plastic toy soldiers, (many of whom, as they lived their lives in our town, felt the need to crawl up and down the various streets).

My brother had taken an empty furniture polish can. like the one pictured, and used an ice pick to poke a hole through the can along the bottom rim.  This was the town’s water tower.  When you opened the lid on top, water would pour out the hole on the bottom, giving our town… well, a flood.  As I remember it, very few residents of our towns actually survived.  And suddenly, I can remember it clearly, the gritty feel of the sand, the boxes still smelling of cheap cigars—I can still picture the faces of the toy soldiers and feel the molded edges of the plastic in my hand.

It could be that the vacation in a vacation home is the ability to travel back in your own personal time, to leave the now and return to then.

The Purple Martin School of Football

Working at Enema U is like eating fish; enjoy the meat and try not to choke on the bones.  My wife, The Doc, is always telling me that I would enjoy movies more if I had a “willing suspension of disbelief.”  If you work for the state, you need a willing suspension of logic and reason.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my job.  I know of nowhere else in the world where I would be paid to read books and tell stories to people who have each paid extraordinary sums to hear me talk.  (You can get a front row seat to hear Paul McCartney perform for less money than it costs to hear me explain the causes of the Mexican American War.  'Maybe I’m Amazed'.)

Years ago, for unknown reasons, our state legislature decided to start a bad football team.  Inadvertently, they attached a small university to this team.  For years, the university tried to stay out of the way of the team, teaching quietly in some corner of the campus not currently needed for the newest set of offices for the coaches.  Now, suddenly, our football program seems to be dying.  All the other teams have quite literally taken their balls and gone home.   Our ball-less coaches, like our teams, are at a total loss.

Even as I write this, the university’s top administrators, Moose and Squirrel, are meeting with the legislature in Santa Fe.  “Save Our Host!” they plead.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t look good.  It seems that all the other universities  decided to reform the various athletic conferences, and as they took turns choosing who got to play ball with them, we just stood there smiling nervously.  They picked the fat kid who looked like three grapefruit in a sock.  They picked the short little kid who threw like a girl.  Hell, they even picked the girl.  Eventually, the only kid who hadn’t been selected was us, the short fat girl who couldn’t even throw like a girl.  No one wants to play with us.

Most people would admit defeat.  (Why not--our football team has been setting an excellent example for fifty years.)  Enema U could either drop down a division, drop football, or perhaps even decide that the primary mission of a land grant university in a poor state (so poor that even our cocaine addicts can only afford to buy rich people’s snot) is to actually focus on education.  Most people would do just that, but not Enema U.  We have a PLAN.  Other teams will want to play with us if we have a better stadium. 

Now, don’t jump to conclusions.  We don’t need—at least I sure hope we don’t need—a bigger stadium.  We can’t even fill the one we have half-way.  We can’t fill it even though we let the students in for free. 

No, the stadium needs…something else.  If we fix the bathrooms, other schools will want to play with us!  So the university has asked the state legislature for $3.5 million dollars to fix the stadium bathrooms.  What in the world did we do in there that takes $3.5 million dollars to fix?  I know plumbers are paid better than professors (and deserve it — they get rid of what we are full of), but that must be one hell of a leak we have in there.  If we are selling that much beer, I don’t see how we could be losing so much money.

I did the math, and I have a suggestion.  If we get the $3.5 million, don’t fix the bathrooms.  Put the money in blue chip stocks and just spend the income the fund generates each year.   There are few home games, and low attendance.  We could easily afford to give every fan at the game $5 in exchange for a promise to just hold it in until they get home.  That’s not even counting the money we will save on water.  Eventually, when we finally drop football, we’ll still have the $3.5 million.  Who knows, we might buy a few books for the library.

Besides the bathrooms, the university is also asking the legislature for an additional $2.5 million to refurbish the press box.  One shudders to imagine what is wrong in there, but it must require the services of the Ghostbusters.  Still, even after we chase the evil undead hell-hounds out of the press box and back to the College of Education, there would seem to be more than enough remaining money to install a steam room and a wet bar.  Possibly, even a brass pole for the cheerleaders.

Naturally—and I bet you saw this coming—I have a suggestion.  Actually, it’s pretty much the same suggestion.  Let’s invest the $2.5 million, too.  At an average of 6 home games a year, we could afford to bribe the reporters, forever, over $20,000 a game to just stay home and falsely report that we win the games.

About the only other way we could win is to put snipers in that press box.

Public Transportation?

In a time so long ago that there were three television networks, most Americans trusted their president, and I traveled exclusively in the back seat of my father’s Oldsmobile, I remember standing up in the back seat of that car and playing the “License Plate Game” with my brother.  We would look for out of state plates and the very rare foreign car—while we had not yet heard of Toyota or Nissan, occasionally we would see a Volkswagen.  And I remember seeing lots of government vehicles.

Government vehicles came in two flavors: either they were olive colored Army Jeeps and huge 4x6 trucks or Chrysler sedans for what we still quaintly called civil servants.  Those Chrysler sedans were modestly inexpensive, and plain.  Hell, they rarely had air conditioners and almost all of them were either hospital green or khaki brown.  I asked my dad why the government bought all their cars from Chrysler.  “Because they last forever,” he said.  “They rarely break down, and they are easy to repair.”   I can remember wondering why we owned an Oldsmobile if Chryslers were so good.

Actually, for the time, those Chryslers weren’t bad cars.  The only real quirk with them was the weird lug nuts on the right-hand wheels.  Chrysler reasoned that since the right-hand wheels were rotating in the same direction as the threads on the lug nuts, eventually, the vibration would loosen the nuts and the wheel might fall off.  So, Chrysler reversed the threads on the nuts on the right side of the car.  In the case of a flat tire, if you didn’t know this, you could heave on that tire wrench until your vision turned black and your intestines were lying on the side of the road, but that nut wouldn’t budge.  Tens of thousands of people learned this bit of automotive trivia the hard way.  (One of those was my son, What’s-His-Name, not The-Other-One.  I bought him an old Jeep when he was 16.  While trying to do a brake job, the poor kid worked half an hour trying to remove a wheel before I suddenly remembered to tell him about those reverse threads.)

Eventually, Chrysler noticed that Fords and Chevrolets weren’t littering the ditches of every highway in America and stopped manufacturing those reverse thread nuts and bolts.  Then for years, tens of thousands of people gave themselves a rupture because they hadn’t learned that Chrysler had made the change.  It’s a wonder that Chrysler isn’t a slang word for hernia.

Still, for government vehicles, those Jeeps and Chrysler sedans were wonderful.  They didn’t cost much, were built tough, economical, and easy to repair.  A mechanic with a screwdriver and a half-inch wrench could disassemble the entire engine.  I think the only nut under the hood bigger than a half inch was the engine mount.  I’m not a mechanical genius, but even I could rebuild the transmission on a Jeep—just stack the gears so the biggest ones are on the bottom and the little ones are on top.

Unfortunately, this is not the way our government buys vehicles today.  Now, I could be wrong (there’s always a first time for everything), but it seems to me that the average federal vehicle today is a four wheel drive Suburban being driven by a petite woman.  Where the hell is she going that she needs to drive a three ton truck with seats for 8?  And if you see them get out of this massive four wheel drive truck at a gas station—this land yacht drinks gasoline faster than grad students quaff beer—she is invariably wearing high heels.  I would be willing to bet this woman has never driven off road in her life.

In the last few weeks, I have noticed a new trend: the federal government has started to buy Jeeps again.  Not for the Army--they use incredibly expensive Humvees that evidently aren’t suitable for combat.  Why this is an improvement is probably a military top secret.  No, for the transportation needs of the office-bound bureaucrat, the government is now purchasing those new 4-door Jeeps that look like giant station wagons.  While the original Jeep was small, versatile, and cheap, the new 4-door version is an expensive boxy car suitable for soccer moms who couldn’t quite afford a Lexus.  These vehicles are big, heavy, and designed for the rugged challenges of a slightly muddy mall parking lot.

Government vehicles aren’t cheap anymore, either to purchase or operate--and I don’t see many old government vehicles on the road.  They all seem to be built in the last few years and to have cost more than the average civilian vehicle.

When did our civil servants become our public masters?  Does cost no longer matter to anyone but the poor taxpayer?  Even as our masters drive to work in air-conditioned luxury, they are busily designing public transportation systems for every community larger than a highway truck stop.  Even my home town has a shiny new public bus system.  Every day, I see the buses driving around town with about a maximum load of 5 passengers.  There is no way that bus system is earning enough money to pay for the fuel they use, much less the cost of running a fleet of modern buses.

I have a small suggestion.  Let’s take the name of every poor taxpayer riding around in those nearly empty buses and give them one of those government Suburbans and 4-door Jeeps.  The reduced cost of maintenance and operation will be enormous.

Then force the bureaucrats to ride the bus system.

The Semester Ends With Student Distress

There is an old and probably apocryphal story about a professor addressing his class.  “Your final exam is scheduled for tomorrow at 9:00 AM.  All of you must attend.  There is absolutely no possible excuse for missing the test.”

From the back of the auditorium, a student asked, “What about sexual exhaustion?”

The professor answered, “In that case, you could still take the test with your other hand.”

The semester is over at Enema U.  In many ways, this is a relief.  I like my students, I love my classes, but you have no idea how peaceful the town has become.  With umpty thousand students having left for home, the average age of the town has probably doubled.  Listen!  I don’t hear a single car driving down the street at twice the speed limit--and it will stay that way until the next batch of donuts comes out of the fryer and the local cops race to Dunkin’ Donuts.

The last two weeks were somewhat painful for some students as they tried desperately to finish a term paper, assigned months ago, that was shortly due.  It is incredibly painful when you start the term paper 24 hours before it is due.  One of my students even documented the pain on Facebook.

An exchange like the one shown must make a lot of students rethink the whole idea of “friending” their professor.

I cannot tell you how many emails I have from students wanting to know why they got a C in my class.  Most of them say something along the lines of, “I did the math, and my grades average out to an ‘A-.  Why did you give me a C-in your history class?”

Usually, I write back with something along the lines of, “While you obviously deserve a C- in Math, I only teach History.”

My favorite anxiety story this semester involves a student who sent me an urgent email two hours  before the final exam.

Dear Professor

I am in your 343 History class and I will be taking your test this morning at 8am.  I’m assuming the spicy salsa I ate from the school cafeteria is responsible for my frequent burning bowel movements.  With that being said I was wondering if one of those movements are to occur during the test would I be allowed to leave the classroom?  What should I do?  Signed, distressed student.

It just so happened that I was awake and reading my email.  I immediately answered.

Dear Distressed:

This, too, shall pass.  You, however, may not, if you miss the final.  Sit by the door and do what you have to do.

America: The Home of the Tree and the Land of the Nailed

My brother tells me he is reading a new book about trees, American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation by Eric Rutkow.  He is reading it on his Ipad, which I guess saves a few trees.  I doubt if I will ever read this particular book, though it does look interesting.  One of the nice things about being a historian is the incredible number of great books that are given to you.  Students, friends, and publishers (hoping you will require their book in a class of 100 students)—everybody gives me books.  And while I love it, I freely admit that I am slightly behind in my reading.  Say… about eight decades.

I’m not reading about trees right now, but I have been thinking about them since my brother told me about that book.  Specifically, I’ve been thinking about trees and American history.  As Americans, we have always been influenced by our trees; trees made Americans different from the very start.

First, we had an abundance of wood.  By the time the first colonists came to North America, Europe was running low on trees, and had been for centuries.  European houses used masonry, cut stone, and large timbers.  Construction with these materials required huge amounts of skilled labor.  The way the timbers were used required precision cuts, with pieces fitting together with complex dovetailed joints that needed skilled carpenters.

The first colonists didn’t have enough skilled craftsmen and labor was precious.  Food production was far more important than construction.  A successful pioneer was a jack-of-all-trades, and while he might have lacked skills, he had abundant wood to use.  At first, some pioneers tried to copy stone construction using wood, sometimes even cutting chunks of wood to resemple large stones.  Look at some of the drawings of those early houses.  You find what should be stone tops of columns, cornices, and mantels all imitated in wood.  You'd even find some chimneys made from wood daubed with clay.

As Americans, we used wood at a rate that would've been impossible in deforested Europe. That meant we also needed nails.  These were still the rough cut square nails that man had been using for roughly 3000 years.  We made them in impossible quantities even though they were difficult to make, and so valuable that they could be used as a primitive form of money.  Thomas Jefferson used to make nails for profit when his soil was too depleted to plant crops; he even bought a nail cutting machine from France to help him make nails more efficiently.

Nails were so valuable that when early colonialists moved westward, they used to burn their houses to recover the nails in them.  They were sure to find more wood wherever they moved.  Have you ever heard the expression, “Dead as a door nail?”  Door frames took such a physical pounding every time the door was opened or closed that these rough pioneers would bend the nail over after they drove them through the frame.  This bending made the nails useless for any future use.

And we made more and more nails.  From 1776 to 1851, we cut the cost of nails again and again.  Eventually, America could make a nail for less than the tax alone on European nails.  Then the United States started producing wire nails, and the world changed again:  it was the “nail revolution”.  Today, we make about 2 billion pounds of nails a year.

About the time we started making wire nails, Chicago sprouted as our new gateway to the west. In 1833, Augustine Taylor built St. Mary's church in nearby Fort Dearborn. He managed to put up a 36’ by 24’ church for the incredibly low price of $400, using only unskilled carpenters.

What Taylor did was to eliminate the old mortised beams and fittings. He replaced them with light 2x4s and 2x6s set close together. He used studs and cross-members. He held the whole thing together with nails -- no joints. Regular carpenters swore it would blow away in a high wind.  They were wrong.

Old-timers called this "balloon construction" because the finished building seemed as light and insubstantial as a balloon.  Experienced carpenters spoke of these new buildings with contempt, but the term stuck. These buildings were like balloons, or maybe more like woven baskets. They were light, flexible, and tough. Structural stresses were spread throughout the structure.

So the first baptism at the new St. Mary's church was disturbed by the sound of hammering next door: Taylor's idea had caught on.  And Americans began cutting up trees in record numbers.  Living in your own home became a cornerstone (wood carved of course) of the American Dream.

Ever-ready with a new product, Chicago supplied western settlers with pre-fabricated balloon-frame structures. The Lyman Bridges Company of Chicago, with three warehouses in the heart of the lumber district, sold buildings of "any style, size, or number" on "short notice" to western settlers. Shipped by rail, the building kits contained milled lumber, building plans, roofing shingles, window frames, doors, hardware, and chimneys. The smallest, one-room house measured ten by twelve feet, while the largest home had two stories with eight rooms, pantry, china closet, hall, bathroom, and four closets. Prices ranged from $175 for the one-room house to $3,500 for the eight-room model.

Yes, I remembered of all this during the last week.  I also remembered as a child a baffling mystery I had about trees.  And now, we are back to books.  When I was in the third grade, my mother gave me a copy of Captains Courageous.  I read that book in a fevered rush.  I am still reading about tall ships and the men who sailed on the oceans. 

I can remember reading about those tall, tall masts.  Then I would go outside and stare at the twisted gnarly live oak trees of Texas.  Why didn’t the books explain what kind of machine they used to straighten those trees?

News From Enema U

It has been a busy month at Enema U.  As the semester ends almost as slowly as a faculty meeting, the Administration has waited until the last few weeks to make several important announcements.  All year long, the powers-That-Be are about as impetuous as a stalagtite, then at the end of the school year, they suddenly wake up.  This is the safest time of the year to make such announcements as most of the faculty is too busy meeting with frantic students answering their desperate questions:

Q.  What do I have to do to get an ‘A’ in this course?

A.   Pray your professor develops amnesia.

Q.  Will the book be on the test?

A.   No.  Unfortunately, none of the textbooks I wanted was available on Kindle, so no one actually bought them.

Q.  What do I have to do to get an ‘A’ in this course?

A.   Invent a time machine, go back about 25 years and introduce your mother to smarter men.

Q.   You teach Mexican history; can you tell me what Cinco de Mayo is all about?

A.   Many years ago, in Mexico City, the Cananea Consolidated Condiment Company exploited the poor Mexican workers, forcing them to labor long hours for small pay.  Every day, the workers would earnestly pray that God would smite the evil Yanqui-owned company.  One day, following a violent earthquake, a giant hole in the ground opened up and swallowed the company’s warehouse.  Even today, tourists gather to stare down into the mayonnaise-filled sinkhole.

Q.   Why did you give me an ‘F’?

A.   I don’t give grades, you earn them.  If I had grades to give away, I would reserve them for the living.

STOP.  Enema U has reached the ultimate in “Distance Education” with the announcement of STOP, a new “Self-Taught Online Program”.  As we all know, the real obstacle to learning is always the professor.  It was bad enough in the old days, when a student was actually required to attend class, attempt to sleep at uncomfortable classroom desks, try to find at least one book in the library that had not been previously colored in by the football team, and ignore the pedantic old fool at the front of the room droning on about something so boring it couldn’t even make YouTube. 

You would think that online classes would have been better, but unfortunately, the professors still posted lectures, notes, and PowerPoint slides—BORING!  Obviously, the problem was still the professor.  Now, with the new STOP system, after the student’s tuition check clears the bank, the Registrar’s office will email each student a specially prepared list of study topics for the student to Google. 

The STOP system has several related benefits.  For every ten professors eliminated from the faculty, Enema U will be able to hire an additional basketball coach.  All of the janitorial staff agrees that the buildings are much easier to keep clean now that no one goes into them.  Several classroom buildings are being remodeled to handle the expected increase in administration personnel.

WIC.  Enema U’s athletic program has decided to remain in the Western Idiotic Conference, even though with the recent departure of the Olympian College of Cosmetology the only remaining member of the conference is the Idaho Academy of Sheep Rustlers.  Only a few years ago, we ponied up several million dollars to join this conference, and have transferred over $4 million dollars every year from academics to athletics since we joined.  Now we find ourselves pretty much alone at the party.  And our date is ugly.

Wait!  There is a method to this madness.  Enema U has worked out a deal with the Sheep Rustlers whereby we will each win the football conference every other year.  In the off years, we will each win the basketball conference.

Even in the years where we don’t win the title, we can still tell the alumni that we came in second while the Sheep Rustlers came in next to last.  Alumni will believe anything and still give money.

SALARY RAISES.  The state legislature has generously given the university faculty and staff their first pay raise in almost 5 years.  Exactly how much of an increase was a difficult decision for the state legislature, but they finally granted us a 2% raise.  Then they raised the tuition on the students and told them it was to pay for the faculty raises.  I don’t think the students believe this, since their tuition goes up every year, but it’s nice to know the administration wants the students to think of us from time to time.

Everyone is getting a cost of living increase of 1%.  The administration has already used up all the other bigger numbers raising our parking fees, retirement contributions, and insurance premiums.  (We still get a special price on season tickets for sporting events—it’s only slightly higher than season tickets for the general public.)

The other 1% will be divided up among the faculty and staff.  While several plans were discussed, eventually it was decided that the most equitable method of distribution was by Scavenger Hunt.  All the employees will be divided into teams and given a list of items to locate.  First successful group back gets the raise.

Unfortunately, here is the list:

•    A graduating football player
•    An academic department that can recite from memory its mission statement
•    A best-selling academic publication
•    An edible cafeteria meal (food from the athletic dining room not allowed)
•    A graduating Liberal Arts student who has found a job in his major

Great Moments in Education

Probably nothing in education is original, every teacher is, consciously or not, repeating something he heard from one of his own teachers.  If our students do this, we call it plagiarism.  When we professors do it, we call it academia.  Usually, the system works just fine; I honestly believe that most of my lectures are my own creation.  Still, occasionally, even as I speak the words, I can hear in my mind a professor from thirty years ago saying the same thing.

A great example of this is the story of Victoriano Huerta, one of the many, many presidents of Mexico.  This was a man who was without a doubt, a whirling son-of-a-bitch—that is, a man who is a son-of-a-bitch no matter how you turn him.

Mexico suffered through a very long dictatorship under Porfirio Diaz, a man that ruled Mexico for so long that the peasants of Mexico began referring to him as Don Perpetuo.  Only after he was 80 years old did he finally start to lose his grip on the country, and the man who pushed him out of power was Francisco Madero, a genuinely good man.  Madero was not your typical Mexican hero: he was a vegetarian, believed in mysticism, and even stranger, he was elected in a free and fair election. 

In a lot of ways, poor Francisco Madero was the Mexican equivalent of John F. Kennedy.  Relatively young, he represented a dramatic change in the character of the office of the President, and sadly was assassinated before he could accomplish much while in office.  Madero was murdered by Huerta, who seized power and made himself the President of Mexico.  For our story, we needn’t bother with all the terrible things he did while in office, but the violence of what eventually became known as the Mexican Revolution was staggering.  Without a doubt, President Victoriano Huerta was evil incarnate.  Hell, look at the best two pictures we have of the man.  No one would have bought a used car from this guy.

After Huerta was run out of power (and Mexico) he eventually came to the United States.  He traveled by train to Texas, intending to sneak back into Mexico and restart the violent and bloody revolution, but was arrested and placed under house arrest on Fort Bliss, in El Paso.  Eventually, he died of liver disease.  (Did I mention that he was also a fall down drunk?)

Huerta was buried in Alameda cemetery in El Paso.  There was absolutely no way that the new Mexican government wanted the body back: it would have been like the United States asking for the return of the body of Benedict Arnold--not likely to ever happen.  So the former President of Mexico is buried in El Paso, Texas, where he is likely to stay until hell freezes over.

“If you want to visit the grave…,” said Professor Charles Harris to his class many years ago.  “…it is customary to take him a beer.  Be sure to run it through your system first,” I said to my classes many times over the years.

Obviously, I did as Professor Harris told me, and actually went to Huerta’s grave and appropriately warmed up the beer before I left it on his grave.  And I told all my students.  And one of my students now teaches high school in El Paso, and he told his students. 

And ten of those students were arrested last week for urinating on the grave of Victoriano Huerta.  Guys, if you are reading this, you should blame Professor Harris.

Oh, don’t bother looking for the grave of Benedict Arnold.  He was buried at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Battersea, London, England.  Coincidentally, his body was “accidentally” moved to an unmarked grave.  Probably saves them cleaning up a hell of a mess.

We’re Upset At Photos?

The Army has been in the news this week, with the Pentagon condemning soldiers for taking pictures of dead insurgents in a manner that that is “disrespectful, politically incorrect, and potentially beneficial to the propaganda efforts of the Taliban.”

More than likely, I am once again proposing the nut point of view, but I disagree with all of this.  Taking those objections in reverse order, do the Taliban really need us to come up with ideas for their propaganda?  People who treat women as chattel and forbid them any form of education, allow honor killings, destroy a nation’s art works, and ban all forms of music do not exactly need inspiration from the US Army to come up with ideas for propaganda.  And why would we expect the Taliban to tell the truth?  Anyone who condones the stoning of rape victims might just be willing to lie.

And exactly what are we afraid of?  People who proudly film the decapitations of innocent civilians are hardly going to be shocked with US soldiers posing next to dead insurgents.

Pictures of both battle and the victims of battle are as old as photography.  Matthew Brady took hundreds of such photos.  We have pictures from the Crimean War, and every war where soldiers could take a camera.  There is nothing new about any of this.  Actually, these pictures have been recorded for thousands of years before cameras.  There must be thousands of paintings, sculptures, and engravings all proclaiming the same message; “They are dead and we are alive.” 

The Bayeux Tapestry is full of such scenes.  The image shown is the death of King Harold.  King William respected Harold and even stripped the knighthood from the soldier who decapitated Harold’s lifeless body.  Respect or not, the tapestry was produced to show the triumph of William.

After the stress of combat, soldiers need a catharsis, a release of tension, a dramatic statement that they are still alive.  It has been this way since the beginning of time--history records enumerable examples.

In 1916, a young Lt. Patton survived a gun battle at a farm house in Mexico.  He tied the body of one of Pancho Villa’s officers across the hood of his Ford Model T and drove it back to General Pershing.  In normal circumstances, this would not be considered rational behavior, but Patton had just shot the officer in a desperate gun fight that was reminiscent of a Wild West shootout.  

There are stories of soldiers urinating into rivers that mark the boundaries of enemy territory.  Epic stories of soldiers on wild drunken leaves after long periods of battle, and endless stories of eccentric behavior from soldiers stationed for long periods of time on the front lines.  A group of American fighter pilots in World War I actually kept a lion for a pet. 

This kind of behavior is the norm, not the exception.  As a country, if we want to spend time thinking about politically incorrect behavior, we should be thinking about the war, not the behavior of young men after a battle.

Bad Luck to Cheat Tourists

In 1986, I cleverly managed to break my left leg.  I had a little help in the form of a nice shiny Buick, but after it ran away, I was left lying on the ground in the alley behind my store.  I had absolutely no doubt that the damn leg was broken, my foot was pointing in the wrong direction.  Eventually, I managed to attract a little attention and someone called for an ambulance.

My wife, the Doc, finally caught up with me in the emergency room.  I will never forget the kind and loving words she spoke to me as I lay in agony, waiting for an operation.  “I guess this means our trip to China is off,” she said.  This was not exactly the kind of bedside manner that I had been hoping to receive--I think this is a special version she reserves for family. 

Yes, we had reservations to travel to Hong Kong and China, and yes, it was our first vacation in quite a while.  As I lay on that gurney, I knew we were still going to China, even if I had to send that busted leg as checked baggage.  And we did go to China; I limped along with a cane, hurrying to keep up with my wife the best I could.  Having a bum leg wasn’t that bad in some ways--at least we got to pre-board all the flights.

In other ways, having a busted leg was extremely difficult.  While in China, we were taken on a tour of a traditional farming village, and they had huge piles of rice drying on the roads we walked down.  Weeks later, when that cast was finally cut off, they found some of that raw rice under it.  And walking through the crowded streets of Hong Kong was painful as the crowds pushed and rushed all around us.  Crossing the street at the intersections was a nightmare.  Cars don’t stop at red lights; instead, drivers speed up and honk their horns while the pedestrians run for it.  I did my best.

Maybe this traffic explains why the people of Hong Kong are incredibly superstitious.  Many of the stores and shops we visited sold good luck charms and amulets.  A news story in the city at the time told of someone who had spent over a million dollars to purchase a custom license plate for his car with the single lucky number “8.”  Looking at the traffic in those streets, I was almost ready to buy my own good luck charm.

The Doc and I had been warned that the only places to change money safely was at banks and the hotel, but eventually, on our last day in Hong Kong, my wife and I forgot about this chore before we left the hotel, remembering just as we had managed to cross the street safely.  Neither of us wanted to take the time to cross back to the hotel, and we were standing directly in front of a money changing shop--exactly the kind of store that we had been warned to stay away from.

“What the hell,” I said to the Doc.  “We’re not going to change much money, and even if they do charge a little more, it’s worth it not to cross that damn street.”   Wrong!  Wrong!  Wrong!

The shop was exactly the size of a single car garage (it even had one of those roll down metal doors that covered the glass windows and doors).  Inside was a single desk, a few file cabinets and a man eager to wait on us.  The price he quoted really wasn’t bad: it was almost the same as the rate the hotel gave us.  I asked a lot of questions, but he assured us we had the exchange rate correct, so I began signing American Express Travelers checks. 

As the money changer started counting out the bills, it was immediately apparent that the pile of currency was short…a lot.  I will skip most of the conversation for the next few minutes.  He wanted to charge us a “tax” and we knew that Hong Kong was famous for not having taxes.  The conversation got very loud, very angry, and eventually ended when I grabbed my travelers’ checks back and used my cane to rake everything off the money changers desk.  Not speaking Chinese, we probably could not fully appreciate the screamed insults as the Doc and I left the store.  Judging by the faces of the people gathered on the sidewalk around the store’s entrance, we were missing a masterful performance.

The Shangri-La Hotel was very polite, even accepting the travelers’ checks despite the fact that they had not been signed in their presence.  We had lost a little time, but we eventually got to enjoy our last day in Hong Kong, a town where you could (and my wife did) buy anything.  I especially enjoyed my shopping.

Much later that night, I took my purchases back to the currency exchange shop.  While the shop was closed, the traffic on the sidewalk was fairly steady and I soon gathered a good sized crowd of laughing onlookers and advisors as I worked on that metal roll-down garage door.  Every single wheel was super-glued into the track on both sides of the door.  The locks on the bottom of the gate were filled with glue.  By the time I finished, that door would just barely rattle--I had used a dozen tubes of super glue.

The last bit of work actually required a lot of help from my happy onlookers.  While I had gotten someone in the hotel to write out the Chinese characters I wanted, it turned out that I had no skill in actually drawing them on the door with the black marker I had purchased.  But my impromptu helpers did the job for me.  In large letters, the door said, “IT IS BAD LUCK TO CHEAT TOURISTS.”

The Doc and I left the next morning by bus for the airport.  As we drove away from the hotel, that shop was the only store on the street still closed, despite the small army of workmen trying to raise the gate.