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.

The Book is Dead

My wife and I spent another fruitless evening searching through our house for a book—a book that I know we own—without any success.  There is nothing new about this; we haven’t been able to see the library for the books in the way for years.  I know we have reached critical mass; I can name several books of which I have purchased a second copy just because I can’t find the first copy.  Now, I doubt that I could find either of them.

I suppose that my wife and I could take a week or two off and spend that time sorting and shelving books.   That assumes that we could find enough shelf space for the books (an absurd impossibility).  There doesn’t seem to be any way to reduce the number of books.  Any book that I am willing to part with, my wife cherishes, and vice versa.  And if we take a load of books to the used bookstore, we usually return with about as many as we take.  When I jokingly suggested to my wife that we hire a librarian, she didn’t laugh, but looked pensive.  We finally decided any likely candidate would run away screaming.

And now, the books seem to arrive at our house on their own.  Not a week goes by without some publisher sending a history book to me at work, in the hopes that I will require my students to purchase it.  Or a colleague, desperate to clear his own office, gives me a book.  Even students give me books--I’ve actually had a student give me a book that I evidently had previously sold to the used bookstore here in town.   I used to be appreciative of these gifts, but I am beginning to understand that people are actually seeking me out as the last moron on the planet who actually prizes paper books.

Someone should have told me I was running a no-kill shelter for books.

Lately, I have discovered a new problem at my house.  Evidently, I have turned into a collector of book covers.  I love to read hardbacks--I love the feel and heft of a good hardback.  A well-crafted spine with a beautiful engraved cover is my favorite form of art work.   But I hate to read a book with a book cover on it.  I invariably take the paper cover off and put it somewhere safe while I read the book.  By the time I finish the last page of the book, I am already thinking about the next book I want to read and forget to put the cover back on the book.  The result of years of this is a massive collection of book covers that will wait in vain for all eternity to be reunited with their appropriate books.

This is a problem that may be slowly vanishing.  It is becoming apparent that the book—the traditional paper printed book—is dead.  On the news tonight, it was reported that the 1 in 5 Americans has not read a book in the last two years.  Couple this with the news that most books sold today are sold as eBooks, and it is obvious that the day of the printed page is over.  Someday, a video documentary will record that the last thing an American actually read off a piece of real paper was the number on a  lottery ticket.

Almost a third of Americans own an electronic form of reader.  It seems that eBooks are preferred by almost all categories of readers, and not just for school or business: a majority of people reading in bed prefer an eBook.  The number of people currently reading an eBook is 300% higher than just two years ago.  Penicillin didn’t catch on that fast.

Book stores are closing across the nation.  The only chain bookstore here in town (I don’t count the t-shirt shop that Enema U calls a bookstore) is mostly deserted except for the people standing at the Nook counter or drinking Starbucks.  At this rate, in a century or so, if you were to look up the word ‘library’ in Google Dictionary, the definition will probably be:  “Li-brar-y (n) warehouse of material not yet scanned.”

And I guess in my own way, I am slowly contributing.  My iPod has 45 audio books on it and 2 songs.  (If you are wondering, one is Rebel Rouser and the other one isn’t.)

Mayor Herbert Cartwright

Previously, I have written about a couple of grand old hotels:  the Flagship in Galveston, and the Shamrock Hilton in Houston.  Thinking it over, I really should write about one more, old lost Texas hotel, the Jack Tar of Galveston.  Sadly, all three are gone now.

Where the Shamrock was a giant relic of a bygone generation and the Flagship was a grand lady killed before her time by a hurricane, the Jack Tar, at least when I ran her, was a wild old drunk with the delirium tremens.   She had endured her share of hurricanes, a memorable fire, and far too many years where owners didn’t put enough of the profits back into maintenance.  If there is a heaven for hotels, then the old Jack slid through the pearly gates dead broke, battered, bruised, singed, and screaming, “What a ride!”

There are a thousand stories about the old Jack Tar.  The Texas Rangers took four rooms and had a combination stake-out and drunken party, a desperate owner ignited a dozen fire bombs for the insurance money, the Ku Klux Klan objected to the cooks in the restaurant, and the Bandido Motorcycle Gang tried to take over the bar—these stories come to mind—and these were events just during the years I ran her.  I will never forget standing in the giant ballroom and watching through the huge plate glass windows as a hurricane whipped the Gulf of Mexico into a white-capped frenzy.  And my nightmares will never stop replaying the memory of when the 70 mph winds of that hurricane blasted a seagull right through that window directly at me.

The hotel was a relic of a forgotten time, and so was one of our tenants.  Herbert Y. Cartwright had been mayor of the island during its rip-roaring gambling days.  His actions made headlines across Texas and he was profiled In Time Magazine, but to the town, he was “Thanks a Million, Cartwright.”  He was notorious, at least until the late 1970’s, when he was mostly forgotten and lived alone in one of the older rooms of the hotel.  Penniless, his bills were paid by a few local businessmen who were still grateful.

The Mayor knew a few stories about the wilder days, when gambling, prostitution, and even liquor by the drink were all illegal throughout the state, but an ongoing and open secret on Galveston Island.  Mayor Cartwright fought the state police for years and got away with it.    Occasionally, I would take a “surplus” bottle of wine to the mayor and listen to his stories.

Salvatore "Big Sam" Maceo with pianist Carmen Cavallaro 

and Galveston Mayor Herbert Cartwright

The Balinese Room was a famous nightclub built on the end of a pier extending out over the Gulf of Mexico.  Besides good liquor, a great meal, and entertainment from the likes of Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, or the Marx Brothers, you could also engage in a little illicit gambling.  For 64 nights in a row, the Texas Rangers ran down that impossibly long hall connecting the street with the nightclub, only to find that by the time they reached their goal, not only had all the gambling paraphernalia been hidden in secret compartments, but all the guests would stand and sing as the band would strike up “The Eyes of Texas.”

According to Mayor Cartwright, when the Lipton Tea Company sent a buyer to Houston to purchase land for a new site, he was lured to Galveston by the Mayor and a few friends.  By the time he was wined, dined, (and supposedly bedded) for a few days, he had signed a contract to build the new plant in Galveston.   And it is still there.

Eventually, the pressure from the state politicians got to be too much: a political embarrassment in Austin, Galveston had to be closed down.  The Texas Rangers pushed the County Sheriff until he was shocked (Shocked!) to discover that the town he had grown up in had rampant, wide open gambling and prostitution.  It took a while, but eventually, the gambling dens were closed and the prostitutes were driven out of the houses and back into the streets.  While no one even tried to stop the liquor, the golden age of Galveston was over.

Mayor Cartwright told me about the aftermath of the closures.  Someone had to take the blame, so the Texas Legislature had a Senatorial Hearing to investigate the island’s corruption.  Even though most of the senators could have testified firsthand about the situation, they subpoenaed Mayor Cartwright.  Under oath, he was asked to explain why the town had never shut down the vice.

“Didn’t you know that Galveston had whorehouses and casinos?” asked the senator.

“Of course I did,” Cartwright answered.  “I’m the mayor.”

“Then why didn’t you stop it?”

Mayor Cartwright’s answer made the front page of every newspaper in Texas.  Hell, it may have been the start of the Libertarian Political Party in Texas.

“God knew what was happening in Galveston, “Mayor Cartwright answered.  “If he didn’t want to shut it down, why should I try?”

The Glass Insulator

We have weather!  In southern New Mexico, this is an event worth shouting about.  Usually, we are noted for the absence of weather, at least as most people would understand it.  We have summer for about 7 months, almost a whole month of very mild winter, and then the rest of the year is taken up by a totally unpredictable, but generally mild, season that could either be spring or fall.  The only real difference between the two seasons is whether plants are dying or coming back from the dead.    Right now, several desiccated plants seem to be turning green, so it must be spring.

In the last week, we have had hot weather, a violent dust storm, the thermostat dropping below freezing, a fair sunny sunrise, and a brief hail storm (well, one side of the town had hail, the other side had snow, so let’s compromise and say it was snailing).  The other six days were fairly normal.  I drive to work with the car’s heater turned on and drive home while enjoying the car’s air conditioner. 

The dust storm was spectacular.  At one point, it got so bad that the highway patrol shut down the interstate to California.  (And the town rejoiced!)  Visibility was reduced to about 150 feet and it seemed as if all of Arizona was flying over to Texas.   I have heard stories about topsoil blowing away my whole life, but I never hear about anyone receiving anything but dust—red dust.  Where does the topsoil get blown?

Several years ago, a dust storm did bring me a treasure, or at least something shiny.  I was hiking in the desert outside of Alamogordo when a dust storm blew up.  I decided immediately to cut the hike short and headed downwind.  While this direction was longer, it would take me to the highway, which I could easily follow back to my truck.  Trust me, you don’t want to hike in a dust storm unless you are damn sure which way you are heading, and you never want to head into the wind.  My route was going to add a couple of miles to my hike, but there was no possibility of missing the highway.

Before I found the highway, I found something else: about half an acre of glass insulators.  You know what I am talking about: the heavy glass gumdrop thimble doohickeys that used to be on top of every telephone and electrical pole.  There had to be more than a gazillion of them:  Clear ones, white ones, green glass ones.  Some were in crates, but most were just piled on the ground.  One huge mound of them was over forty feet long and over twenty feet high.  Many of the wooden crates bore dates back to the early 1950’s.

This elephant’s graveyard for glass insulators was not that far from the highway, but the lay of the land prevented anyone from seeing it from the road.  Once I got back to town, it didn’t take too long asking questions of the locals to find the man who owned the land and the insulators.  It seems that at one point in the early 1950’s, a massive increase in size and operations was proposed for White Sands.  Hundreds of miles of electrical lines were planned.  Then the project was cancelled right about the same time that the technology of transmission lines was improved.  The insulators were simply left in the desert and mostly forgotten.

The man who owned the property had exhausted all possibilities of disposing of the insulators and for a small fee, sold me the “mining rights” to the entire collection.  For about a year, I was in the insulator business.

It turned out that the market was truly limited.  When I showed one of them to the manager of a glass recycling plant, he all but chased me off the property with a stick.  The glass was heavily leaded.  Nor was any utility company interested in buying forty year old technology. 

But there were lots of people who actually collected these things.  Searching around the mounds, I had about a dozen different types and colors.  I loaded up the truck and started making the rounds of antique stores, flea markets, and souvenir stores all over the south half of the state.  It was surprising how many of the silly things I sold.  And anybody who didn’t want to buy any still got a case to sell on consignment.  And if they wouldn’t accept that, I gave them a few, told them to try and sell them with my compliments.  If they needed more, they had my card.  I must have moved a ton of them. 

There is a lot of talk this week about market prices of oil—whether the price is set on the international market, the effect of increased production, etc.  The price of something is set by the perception, not the reality of supply and demand.  Consider a hypothetical case.  You enter a room filled with 30 hungry people and announce that you have a bag with hamburgers in it, but you do not have enough for everyone.  Trust me--- you’re going to make a profit as you sell your hamburgers.

But as you are selling them, you recount your burgers and discover that instead of 29 burgers, you have 31.  Without telling the group the actual numbers, you announce that you have made a mistake and have more than enough for everyone.  Since you have created the perception of a surplus, you will be lucky to sell half your burgers—you will probably lose money.  While the reality is that supply increased only 7%, the perception will have a far more dramatic impact on the price.

After about six months, that is the way it was with the insulators.  I totally saturated my market and distribution fell dramatically.  When people thought they were scarce, they were collectable and valuable.  When people thought they were common, nobody wanted them at all.  I was out of the insulator business.  While I had made a tidy profit, there was no repeat business.

It has been twenty years, and I still regularly see those things all over town.  The History Department secretary had one as a paperweight until just recently.  She had no idea what it was or where it came from. One day, she decided it was ugly and shoved the highly valuable antique in the closet!  I still have one in my backyard, myself.

My mining rights have expired and it has been about twenty years.  If someone wants to start up the enterprise, for a small fee, I can furnish a map and the real name of the town.

Speed Racer

Cleaning my desk the other day, I found an antique.  A picture of a pinewood derby car my son and I built for the Cub Scouts.  What’s-His-Name and I learned a lot from that car.  One of the things we learned was that we didn’t particularly like the Cub Scouts.

Actually, we built two cars.  I have no idea what happened to the first car, but looking down at the photo of little chunk of blue painted wood, the whole story flooded back, and for a little while there, I had an eight year old boy standing next to me.

When What’s-His-Name joined the Cub Scouts, I remember going to the meetings at the elementary school lunch room.  I wonder how many hours I have spent squirming around trying to fit a grown up ass into those little midget chairs?  If you have small children, before they start elementary school, find yourself a good folding chair you can drag along to such meetings.  If you can get away with it, take a hip flask.

That boy was excited.  A moose hunt in Alaska wouldn’t have excited that boy half as much as sitting on the floor of a school cafeteria trying to tie a square knot.   His ratio was about 5 granny knots to every square knot, but we were both proud of them.  I never told him that was about my square-to-granny ratio, too. 

Then they announced the pinewood derby competition.  We had a month to turn a $2.50 kit into a prize winning racecar.  The rules were fairly simple.  Each boy had to build it himself, under supervision of his father.  There was a weight limit, a maximum length, and a few other assorted rules that escape me twenty years later, but that was about it.

What’s-His-Name had a lot of fun putting that model together, and I can honestly say he did it all himself, while I hovered overhead.  And I can prove it, too.  That car was as ugly as a mud fence and as slow as a lame Mississippi mud turtle.  The nails holding those wheels on were as crooked as a congressman.  We were both proud of that car, but it came in dead last.  And even my son could tell why.   His was the only car in that competition that had been made by an actual cub scout.  The rest of those cars were perfect.  They were fast, perfectly balanced, and beautifully painted.  One father told me privately that he had paid $200 for his son’s car.  About the only thing most of the actual scouts had done was put their cars on the track.

I can still remember the look my son gave me when that race was over.  He was only eight, but he clearly understood that we had been snookered.  We had been played, and neither of us liked it. 

Eleven months later, What’s-His-Name was nine, and we bought the second pinewood derby kit.  And while my son certainly helped build that car, he had a little help.  The “advising” team had a total of 7 advanced college degrees.  It was probably the first pinewood derby car in history that had the weight placement plan calculated by a nuclear physicist.

There was absolutely no problem with the wheels that year.  My son and I had put the nails on a jeweler’s metal lathe and insured they were perfectly round and a perfect match for the wheels that had their cores filled and re-drilled.  The underside of the nail heads had been polished mirror bright.  You could spin one of the wheels on that car and it would turn for an amazingly long time.  And the tread of the tires had been slightly cambered so that only a portion of the wheel actually made contact with the track, thus reducing friction.  His mother, the Doc, helped him paint the car.

Needless to say, What’s-His-Name won.  That car ran like a scalded dog.  And my son could have made a tiny sum that night.  Several fathers wanted to buy it, but he didn’t want to part with it.  He still has it.

My son and I both learned something from those races.  The children aren’t always the childish ones  when fathers and sons play together. 

Joe Foss and Saburo Sakai

I have previously written a small anecdote concerning Colonel David Hackworth.  After that blog was published, I received enough mail about the Colonel to have written a book about his exploits.  I can only say that the Colonel lived large.  Hopefully, pretty much the same thing will happen this week when I tell my small story about General Joe Foss.


Where do you start with a man like Joe Foss?   Governor of South Dakota, Commissioner of the American Football League, past president of the NRA, and Brigadier General of the Air National Guard.  Probably the best place to start the story is to mention that during World War II, Marine Captain Foss received the Medal of Honor for his victories with the "Cactus Air force" at the Battle of Guadacanal.  A fighter "Ace" early in the war, Joe Foss was a natural leader, and more important, a man who made friends everywhere he went.

Almost twenty years ago, I was invited to a dinner honoring the Marine Corps’ birthday.  The guests of honor were General Foss and Saburo Sakai, the top  surviving Japanese ace of the war.  Actually, this wasn't my first meeting with the famous Japanese ace.  About fifteen years earlier, I had had a lunch with Sakai in New York.  I was working  for Bantam Books and we were publishing his autobiography, Samurai, so I  got the opportunity to talk with him at length about his experiences in the war.

Amazingly, in 1993, Sakai remembered me from our earlier meeting.  There must be a shortage in Japan of geeky guys who stare with their mouths open.   

Inscription Reads: Never Surrender

It was a wonderful evening.  Both men related their experiences of the war and each man complimented the other.  When Sakai was asked who he thought was the greatest aviator of the war, he immediately answered, "Joe Foss."  Joe was smiling, but I'm still not sure what that twinkle in his eye meant.  Both of these men were entirely at peace about the war, and Sakai was actually a Buddhist acolyte by this time.  While neither would have wanted to actually harm the other, it was sort of a shame we didn’t have an F4F Wildcat and a Mitsubishi Zero standing ready at the airport.  The town may have missed an opportunity to have a hell of an airshow.

I had come to this dinner prepared.  Years before when I was cleaning out the attic of my father's house, I had found a mint condition Life Magazine from June 7, 1943.  The cover featured a smiling Captain Foss, America’s top Ace, wearing the Medal of Honor that Franklin D. Roosevelt had just hung around his neck.  Of course, I had kept the magazine—when that magazine was printed, it had cost a dime-- to me it was priceless.

Years later, I was hoping that General Foss would sign that magazine, and if he did, I wanted the signature to be perfect.  I had borrowed a Parker Fountain pen that had been manufactured during the war.  I wanted a period pen for that antique magazine.

Finally, the opportunity presented itself.  I walked up to the general and handed him the magazine and pen, while I politely asked him for his autograph.  As General Foss accepted the magazine, I wondered what he was thinking about as he looked down at a picture taken of himself from fifty years earlier--a time when he had just received his nation’s highest honor.

General Foss smiled.  "Wow!  I haven't seen one of these in years," he said as he autographed the Life Magazine just below his own photograph.  "They don’t make pens like this anymore."

Maybe the most remarkable thing about that truly remarkable man was that he honestly believed he was just an ordinary man.

Educational Embarkation

The budgetary crisis of New Mexico finally sifted down the budgetary maze of state government until it has reached that branch of bureaucracy heretofore known as the Department of Higher Education.  From now on, we will just refer to them as those Bozos in Santa Fe.   For years, the formulae by which universities have been funded was been based on the number of students enrolled in our classes.  If more students take biology than journalism, the biology department is allowed more funds (assuming the football department doesn’t need them) than Journalism.

Similarly, if more students go to Enema University than the Southwest School of Livestock Grooming, then… well, actually, the money will either go the school with the biggest sports program or to school in the home town of the state senator who introduced the governor to his current mistress… but you get the idea.

At least, that is the way it used to be.  Now, higher education will be funded by how many students we graduate.  Not necessarily educate--just get out the damn door robed, capped, and brandishing a diploma they may not be able to read.   Trust me, if we get paid for every student who leaves a classroom, regardless of what they learn while actually in the classroom, the administration will remove desks to discourage loitering.

Even as I was thinking that our educational ship was sinking, the radio suddenly announced that another Costa cruise line ship had failed to reach its intended port.  The poor cruise line companies may have trouble filling their ships for a while.  That’s when I had the inspiration!  Let cruise ship lines run the university.  If the state wants to sell a 4 year passage through the campus, even an Italian cruise line could do that better than a bunch of academics.

If you think about it, most of the campus buildings could easily be converted to resemble a cruise ship experience.  We have a pool and lots of dining areas, and the library would be a great place to have a book club after we clear out most of those ugly bookshelves.

I can just picture the advertising:

YOUR EDUCATION COULD BE A FOUR YEAR VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY!

A campus full of possibilities makes the perfect retreat!  Throughout your four year stay, whether you love activity or crave tranquility, the University of Carnival Royal American Princess offers everything you could need for a relaxing, rejuvenating retreat, including a wide variety of freshly prepared cuisine and innovative experiences all designed to help you escape completely.

Fresh, flavorful cuisine cooked with passion and care.  At any hour, wherever you go on your University of Carnival Royal American Princess campus, our chefs are busy baking, grilling and sautéing the ingredients of your next meal. Bread and pastries are baked fresh three times a day, and sauces are prepared by hand.

We have Dining Options to match any mood!  On tonight's menu? A signature U of CRAP pasta – served with freshly-prepared sauces. Or perhaps grilled halibut, perfectly complimented by a chilled glass of chardonnay.  Another night, it could be homemade Italian pizza by the pool. That's the beauty of dining at U of CRAP-–there's always something to match whatever your mood might be.

And you never need cash—just charge it to your prepaid CRAP Card®!

As a student, you have your choice of Anytime or Traditional Dining!  A sumptuous variety of dining options awaits you on every voyage. University of Carnival Royal American Princess offers you the choice of Traditional Dining with fixed time and seating, or Anytime Dining with the flexibility to dine when and with whom you choose.

Campus Activities?  Find your passion. Take a class on cooking, ceramics, photography and more. Shop our duty-free liquor store or log on to the web with your complementary iPad—preloaded with textbooks if you wish to read them. For something physical, take an exercise class at the gym, practice your putt on the green, or get a massage at the spa. It's all here, exclusively at University of Carnival Royal American Princess.

There are endless ways to spend your days at U of CRAP. Even if you never leave the campus, you can always find something new to do.  Visit our boutiques: we have had years of experience selling T-shirts, sweats, and hand bags.  Designer brands and duty-free combine for a great shopping experience. Plus, get great college promos on jewelry, T-shirts and souvenirs to match your major.  We are more than ready to sell you CRAP merchandise.

Our multi-million dollar Arts Center has what you want in entertainment!  Movies, music, shows, and plays!  Want something more relaxing?  Get pampered from head to toe for an hour of bliss or the entire day. Or spend some time limbering up with a personal trainer in our world-class gyms.  We even have an indoor equestrian center!

Cards, Bingo, slots and more!  Whether you've got a favorite game or you're just a beginner, everyone is welcome when the chips are down. We have partnered with a nearby Native American reservation to bring you the finest gambling experience while earning a degree in Anthropology with a concentration in Native American Studies.  Advanced students can qualify for a B. S. in Statistics.

And forget those quaint old dorm rooms.  At University of Carnival Royal American Princess, you can book a luxury suite.  Queen-size bed.  Separate sitting room with convertible double sofa bed and dining area. Large balcony.  Two televisions.  Personal computer.  Refrigerator and wet bar.  Walk-in closet.  Bathroom with corner tub (equipped with whirlpool jets) and multi-directional brass-fitting shower.  Aproximately 1,329 square feet, including balcony.

All this may seem a little radical, but why not?  Even Costa Cruise Lines couldn’t put Enema U aground as fast as the state legislature.

Rapping-Tapping at My Chamber Roof

I can remember the dilemma of being a teenage boy in the sixties.  While I had an almost unlimited amount of time, I had neither a car nor a girlfriend.  So I got a job bagging groceries at a local grocery store.  Through hard work and perseverance, within a year I had been promoted to checker/stocker, made fifteen cents an hour over minimum wage, and got both a girlfriend and a car.  And then had no time to enjoy either.

That might be the story of most men’s lives.  We trade our allotted time for the money to better enjoy the time we no longer have.   Come to think about it, retirement is not that far away.  Once again, I will have more time than money.  Is that what they really mean by a second childhood?

Working at that grocery store taught me more than I learned in high school.  I have always enjoyed learning by doing.  (Even today, I have discovered that I have learned—and understood—more about history by teaching it than I ever did as a student.  If I had it to do over again, I would just skip that student phase and go straight to the faculty stage.)  I learned that if it was a hot day, bag the grapes on top and as you carried the groceries out to someone’s car, you could eat a few of the grapes.  I learned not to put groceries in the back seat of a car until someone was holding the damn dog—and still have the scars to remind me.

Mostly, however, I learned that I wanted a better job.  And the grocery store chain I worked for had a better job, if I could just find a way to be part of it.  The inventory crew—that’s the job I wanted.  They paid thirty-five cents an hour more than I was making as a checker.  (If that doesn’t sound like much, remember that you could buy a gallon of gas for thirty-five cents and the gas station attendant would put it in your car for you, check your oil, and give you a free glass.)  The problem was that the inventory crew worked the graveyard shift.

Four nights a week, Wednesday through Saturday, the inventory crew would be locked inside a grocery store after it closed at 9:00 PM.  By 6:00 AM, the entire store would be inventoried.  Every member of the crew worked 36 hours a week but got paid for 40 hours.  This was a great job, but I was still a junior in high school and the summer vacation did not start for two months.  Still, I wanted that job.  I wanted the money—I wanted that job.  I could sleep in July or sometime.

Somehow, I convinced both my boss and my parents to let me do the job. Sometimes, I could grab a few hours sleep after school and before work, or take a short nap before school started in the morning… but by Saturday morning, there was simply no denying it: by the time I got home I was bushed.  Luckily, I could sleep the whole day, then go to work that night fairly rested, and start the week—and the whole process--all over.

By May, the summer vacation was close.  And God knows I needed it.  Between the demands of my girlfriend, school, my girlfriend, and chores around the house—I was averaging about 4 hours of sleep a night.  And to get that much I had to regularly sleep through my English class.  Luckily, Texans have very little need for grammar.  (You can tell by reading my blog.)

One Saturday morning, I came home exhausted, climbed the stairs to my attic bedroom, stripped off my clothes down to my religious underwear (Holy! Holy! Hole-y!) and fell into bed unconscious.  I immediately slept the sleep that only comes to the very innocent or those with no conscience.  Like Republicans.

I didn’t get to sleep long.  My attic bedroom was directly beneath the cedar shake shingles that covered the entire house.  This being Texas in May, the shingles were covered with tiny little bugs.  The kind of bugs that woodpeckers love to eat.  I had probably been asleep for about an hour when that damn peckerwood woke me up.   TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP!  The damn bird was directly over my head.


Have you ever been trapped somewhere between being awake and being completely asleep?  It’s like your brain is coated with molasses or you have been reading Jane Austen while stoned.  I have no idea how many times that morning I stood on my bed, beat on the ceiling to scare off that woodpecker, only to have it come back five minutes later and start the entire process over again.

TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP!  TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP!  TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP!

Finally, that damn bird woke me completely up.  I ran over to my closet and grabbed my .22 rifle, a loaded clip, and ran down the stairs screaming obscenities at the top of my lungs.  Down the stairs, across the living room hall, out the front door and into the front lawn.  I turned around and looked up… there was that damn woodpecker.

The rifle came up just as the bird lifted off the crown of the roof.  He was no more than six inches off the roof when I shot that son-of-a-bird brain.  His wings folded, and he fell down onto the roof line, bounced, and rolled down the back of the roof.  I immediately improvised a combination war and victory dance as I waved the rifle over my head and screamed my victory cry.

I don’t know how long I did this before I noticed my audience.  This was Saturday morning in May.  The neighbors were mowing their lawns.  At least they had been until a nearly naked teenager fired a gun and began screaming obscenities.  None of them had probably even seen the bird; God alone knows what they thought I was doing.

I quickly ran back inside the house, slammed the front door and leaned backwards on it.  It was at this point I was able to smile and nod my head towards the gathered ladies of my mother’s church group.  In my haste down the stairs, I hadn’t quite noticed them on my trip through the living room.  They were a little harder to ignore on my way back up the stairs.

Not only did my mother remind me of this story approximately twice a week for the rest of her life, but I think it was the main topic of conversation when I introduced my future wife to my mother.

Cajun Night

Thirty years ago, I was the Resident Manager at the Flagship Hotel on Galveston Island.  As I have written about before (and even before that), the Flagship was built on top of a pier extending out over the Gulf of Mexico.  You could even make an argument that the hotel was really a ship, since not only was she built entirely over water, but a few years before, a Governor of Texas, seeking reelection, had named the hotel as an official ship in the Texas Navy.   This was a signal honor that the hotel shared only with a couple of ferry boats and a beached submarine that had last tasted sea water during World War II.  Though small, the Texas Navy is far superior to any competing service offered by such states as Nevada, Iowa, or New Mexico.

Though profitable, the hotel changed hands frequently.  Every new owner was convinced that he could quickly double the profits of the inn, yet within six months he would eventually realize that he had overpaid for the property and that the only way to recoup his money was to resell the hotel.  As in many other professions, the only way to amass a small fortune in the hotel business was to start with a larger one.

Our current new owners had decided that what the hotel desperately needed was a first class restaurant--an eatery that would bring people from all over the island to dine in our large restaurant, enjoying the beautiful views of the waves crashing on the beach.  Accordingly, the hotel hired a rather famous Cajun Chef from New Orleans.  While the General Manager and I would continue to run the hotel and the bar, the new chef was to be given a free hand to manage the restaurant as he wished.

Despite the new chef’s reputation, I first realized that the hotel might be in for some trouble when the chef and I had a small disagreement over the keys.  The chef and his crew would arrive at the hotel every morning about 5:00 AM and begin prepping for the new day.  First thing every morning, the chef would come to me and I would give him the large collection of kitchen keys.  There were about two dozen keys for the pantries, liquor cabinets, walk-in freezers and refrigerators, which were all kept locked up at night.  There was a small fortune in that kitchen.

Within the first two weeks, the chef managed to lose this set of keys four times.  If we could not immediately find the missing keys, all the locks had to be changed, each time.  Even the new owners were getting a little annoyed at this cost.  The morning after the fourth set of keys vanished, when the chef arrived for his keys, the key rings were firmly fastened to a large metal ring a foot and a half in diameter.  While the chef was very unhappy with me, he took the key ring.  And within a week, he had managed to lose it, too.  

The chef never lost the next set of keys.  These consisted of a normal ring of keys welded to a six inch length of chain.  The other end of the chain was welded to an eight foot long piece of 2” water pipe.  The pipe had been painted with red and white stripes to resemble a barber pole.  It was heavy, cumbersome, and took two men to carry.    I promised the chef that if he managed not to lose it in the next few months, I might cut the pipe in half.  The chef was furious, but the owners backed me, and the new key ring-pole stayed for months.  As it turned out, that pole outlasted the chef.

The new chef made a lot of changes to the menu.  Shrimp Etouffee, blackened catfish, jambalaya, and gumbo were added to the menu. The restaurant was redecorated in a style that the General Manager and I privately called “Wrought Iron Whorehouse.”  And a small fortune was spent advertising the changes.  Unfortunately, despite the fact that our bartenders could now produce an excellent sazerac cocktail, the business in the restaurant did not dramatically improve--certainly nowhere near enough of an increase to justify the cost of the remodeling or the salary of the new chef.

Now, the summer was almost over.  Beach hotels start an inevitable decline in the fall until business revives with the arrival of Spring Break.  By now, our chef was desperate to prove himself and seized on an idea: an All-You-Can-Eat Cajun Night for the Friday night at the start of the Labor Day weekend.  The general manager and I thought this was a horrible idea, but the chef had been given a free hand.  We were astounded when the trucks began delivering the food for this dinner.  There were mountains of red potatoes, baskets of corn on the cob, and huge amounts of red beans and rice, but none of this compared to the thousands of pounds of live crawdads.  (Or as we say in Texas, “Mud Bugs”.)  Thousands and thousands of them crawling and snapping their miniature claws in large mesh bags that filled every storage place in the kitchen to capacity.

Within hours of the bags’ arrival, those damn crawdads were all over the hotel.  I suspected some complicity from the bellboys, but I couldn’t blame them.  The situation was hilarious to everyone but the chef.   I think the chef boiled about a thousand pounds of the critters as the sun set, in preparation for the horde of anticipated patrons.  Unfortunately, the patrons stayed away in droves.  We may have sold 25 pounds of crawdads that evening.  Maybe, but probably not.

The chef was surprised, but he had a new plan.  The next day, Saturday, he had the kitchen set up banquet tables on the sidewalk fronting the hotel.  He offered Cajun food to the throngs of people roller skating and walking along the seawall.  As it turned out, very few people want heavy Cajun food on an extremely hot day.  Another hundred pounds may have been sold. 

The manager and I pitied the poor chef, but we had other things to worry about.  Chief among these worries was the sign on the roof.  In large fluorescent looping script, the illuminated sign read “Flagship” in blue light.  Or it would have if the damn “L” hadn’t gone out.  We were getting more than a few phone calls along the lines of:  “Hello?  Is this the looovvvee boat?”

Late Saturday afternoon, as we stood there on the roof of the hotel examining that damn sign, the General Manager suddenly pointed at the water seven floors below and asked, “What the hell is that?”

There was a hundred foot long red lumpy oil slick floating out from underneath the hotel.  And there were strange little yellow dots in the red slick.  “I think,” I said, “that is about 2000 pounds of crawdads mixed with a few hundred ears of corn.”

The chef had decided to destroy the evidence of his culinary stupidity by walking out onto the loading dock and dumping the unsold crawdads, both living and boiled, into the bay.  I suspect the chef did not know that the crawdads would float.  Still, he probably would have gotten away with this subterfuge if the tide hadn’t been coming in.  The crawdads began washing up onto the beach below the pier.

Almost immediately, we began receiving phone calls from guests concerned about the strange mess on the beach.  “Don’t worry,” the front desk lied.  “This is a marvelous opportunity for you to observe a rare natural event.  Red tides only occur once or twice a year.”

The General Manager and I were both elated and terrified.  We were elated because the chef was toast.  He had cooked his last meal.  Terrified because at any minute we were going to get a phone call from the Health Department.  You can’t dump a ton of fresh water crustaceans into the bay without somebody noticing. 

Actually, it turned out we could.  Maybe it was because it was Labor Day weekend.  Maybe it was because the sun set only a few hours later and everyone was staring at that damn sign.  Whatever the reason, we got away with it.  By morning, most of the evidence was gone.  What happened to it?  Well, about midnight, I took a flashlight and went down the stairs from the end of the pier and walked out onto the narrow beach under the hotel.

That beach was alive, but not with crawdads.  There was a constant clicking and snapping noise.  As I moved the flashlight back and forth, I could see an army of sea gulls, crabs, and rats devouring everything.  Everywhere I looked, all I could see were teeth and eyes illuminated by my flashlight.  It was a sight that Dante could have used for a new level of Hell.  By morning, the tide going back out removed most of the remaining evidence.

As it turned out, Cajun night was popular after all.