Forward March

I'm not a big fan of the E-Mail FORWARD. That is not to say I don't read them, that I don't think about them, that I don't send them. By the time I'm done here, I know many of you will have dropped off the page in disgust, but that's okay, too. We'll just have to "AGREE TO DISAGREE."

(I hate that cliche. What does it really mean, anyway? )

Here comes a list of my pet peeves about FORWARDS: (Please add the phrase "as Paul sees it" at the head of each protest.) (Oh, and like the 5th estate that employed me for three and half decades, I'd fight to the death to defend FORWARDS.)

1. I don't like True Believer Forwards. Someone sends me something from some self-proclaimed GURU who has seen the light and knows it all. If I join the person who sent the Forward in fervent submission, there will be three of us, and so on, and so on until we become some scary religious or survivalist sect. We will rule the World. Come on, who really wants to do that?

2. I don't like most single position political thought forwards. They assume I'm either fo' or 'agin em. And I'm sorry that just isn't true, and it makes me mad. And I would venture to say there are no PURE Democrats, Republicans, Conservatives, Radicals, etc.

I'll bet you there isn't an adult on the planet that hasn't spent a few minutes being a Libertarian.

My best days as a journalist were when I got two calls at the end of the day....one chewing me out for being a "flaming" Socialist followed by a call from somebody labeling me an "evil" Republican.

(So I don't like 'em, yet once again I defend them. We need to be exposed to how people are living and thinking.)

3. I, without shame or apology, hate the Guilt forwards. "Pass this Forward on to six of your friends (soon to be enemies) within the next ten minutes or you will be visited by locusts and fire ants. ( And damned if they don't show up.) Please just let Karma take it's own course.

But you know what? There are FORWARDS I like. I like the quirky, humorous, make my day FORWARDS. I like a lot of the clever, ironic, funny videos that come from REAL, REAL LIFE. I like some of the jokes. But mostly I like the FATEFUL forward that illustrates everything I've been saying lately.

"GIVE US AN EXAMPLE, THEN, PAUL!

In a couple of "nut shells" I've been comparing this economic mess we're in, with the later and post stages of the great depression.

AND as an offshoot of THAT thinking, I've been sharing some photos and notebooks illustrating life as it may have been in the 50's. AND, as an extension of that vein, I've slipped in a few light hearted thoughts about getting less young.

Without naming names, there are some of you who will read this I KNOW have been to THIS mountain.

At a given advanced AGE in our medically sophisticated society, all men, and some women are HIGHLY advised to get something called a Colonoscopy. (The root word Colon offers some clues.)

I like to be informed and prepared before being experimented on. So, I did some research before showing up for my FIRST Colonoscopy. And then when the prep nurse asks, "Do you know what is about to happen here?"

I cleverly reply, "yeah, you're going to blow smoke up my A__!" Hardy guffaws follow.

Hardly scientific language you say? Well that's what I would have thought had I not gotten this FORWARD from my younger sister BRENDA.

TOBACCO SMOKE ENEMA (1750's to 1810)

THIS IS VERBATIM UNCENSORED TEXT FROM THE FORWARD'S CAPTION. READ IT AT YOUR OWN RISK: "The tobbaco enema was used to infuse tobacco smoke into a patient's rectum for various medical purposes, primarily the resuscitation of drowning victims. A rectal tube inserted into the anus was connected to a FUMigator and BELLOWS that forced the smoke towards the rectum. The warmth of the smoke was thought to promote respiration, but doubts about the credibility of tobacco enemas led to the popular phrase, " BLOW SMOKE UP ONE'S ASS."

Okay, maybe I added a little emphasis.

I've been looking FORWARD to crafting this posting.
What do you say in a FORWARD to a BLOG posting about FORWARDS?

Squeak!

Well I got quite a response to my last posting regarding a whole bunch of issues, not the least of which is the case of "THE OUSTED MOUSE."
First I thought it would be nice to show you the piece I played to lure Mickey out of the house. (I DO NOT guarantee it will work in all households.)

As much relief as Mickeys leaving brought to our home, you need to know Peggy has locked herself in the bedroom and stuffed towels under all ingress and egress possibilities. You see Mickey leaving? Apparently we're talking about a "deadbeat" mouse here. Mickey clearly left Minnie and the kids behind.

So....I've since beat the stockers into the grocery store this morning to clean them out of all mouse traps and bait. ( If you've got some rodents you want to eliminate? Bring 'em on over. I've got you covered.)

I've drawn up a map of all feeding and trapping locations so they can be constantly monitored.

Well, anyway, one of the responses I awoke to this morning came from my Brother-In-Law Jerry Clark. The Clarks are a large clan and it seems they've just had one of these monster get togethers.

You should know that Theda and Jerry cranked out a lot of double XX Chromosomed Homo Sapiens. These are all very bright, sophisticated, well educated, athletic, clever women. But, as Jerry relates it, when a mouse decides to join the party? Every women in the house jumps up on a chair screaming.

(That includes my sister Theda who should never jump that high at her age.)

I also heard from Cousin Judy in Florida...discovering my mother made flour sack dresses for her and her sister when they lived in Chicago. She's got pictures somewhere. ( If I'm not mistaken Judy once held the World's Record for shorthand taking....a skill I guess you'd want to hide these days, eh?)

Judy contributes the Reinertson look of 1952 up top. Pictures of flour sack dresses still to come.

I hear from Cousin Sharon...that her dad....Bill Woolen....kept travel expense logs just like Dads back in 1954....and it looks like we all had to stay at the same motels.


The older you get, the smaller the World gets.

EEK!

I've been stalling hoping at least one of my two sisters could come up some of those great pictures of them in their "post depression era flour sack dresses."

As I continue the "tap dance," Brenda reminds me that we raised chickens in the back yard for eggs and meat. ( Try getting that, plus burning all your trash in your home made backyard incinerator, past the HOA committee. We lived 9 miles southeast of Downtown LA.)

I still suffer mild trauma from watching dad ring a chicken's neck, and tie it up on a clothes line to led the blood drain out of the carcass. I think I was about 6 years old.

But ANYWAY, Brenda, in remembering the chickens recalls Mother demanding she be with Dad every time he went to get chicken feed. She wanted to make sure the cotton feed bag had the right design on it for dress making.

And then my sister Theda comes up with this contribution.




Theda, by her own admission, is the family pack rat. She recently came upon dad's expense book of a trip (for five) from Bell, California to Lawrence, Michigan in August of 1954. SEVEN GALLONS OF GAS FOR $1.75 IN BELL....a total of auto expenses to Holbrook, Arizona of $19.20.

The depression may be over, but Dad isn't taking any chances. On the next page you'll note he fed us breakfast in Prescott for 81 cents. That's not a typo. My guess is he went into a tiny grocery store, found some week old sourdough, a pound of cheese and we all sat around some picnic table and chowed down.

By 1954 a lot of motel chains had swimming pools. Remember the average person's car in 1954 had been manufactured sans AC. That pretty much meant the Reinertson kids begged for a pool, but seldom, if ever got one.
Did you catch the room rate up there in Holbrook? Yeah that's $3.57. ( No king size beds, no mini-bar, no microwave.)

But you know times have changed and so have we, don't you think?

Once the girls got out of their flour sack dresses, they slowly get a little "uppity," don't they. No longer satisfied with just getting to vote, they start looking for all kinds of equality.

And to their credit they've opened doors for themselves in the classroom, in the office, in the operating room, in jet airplanes, on TV, in the gym, on the field. But?

I've been married more than once, and that's important to the telling of this story.

In fact I've been married three times, once for 4 years, once for 7 years and now for 20 years. I was first hitched in 1967 just as I nailed down a teaching job in California.

My wife and I had just moved into a second story apartment in Long Beach, California, about a half hour drive from my job in Downey.

I'd not really timed it before I got a call from the Principal's office telling me I had an emergency phone call. I race to the phone to hear a hysterical woman (later identified as my wife) say, "YOU HAVE TO COME HOME RIGHT NOW!"

"Why, my dear!"

" BECAUSE THERE IS A MOUSE IN THE HOUSE AND IT WON'T LET ME OUT THE FRONT DOOR."

All the office people around me were doing their best to squelch their guffaws. I guess they'd been there.

I was, for some strange reason, allowed to travel home early to save my damsel in distress. (It took a half hour) There she stood, BROOM in hand, fiery eyes taking up most of her head, demanding immediate action.

There would be no waiting for the placement of traps or poison. I can't remember how we did the little devil in, but I know it died on the spot, and we survived the crisis and moved on.

Details are less clear in my mind with my second wife. We were comfortably settled into our home in Denver. I don't think in her case the fear factor was as high as wife number one, but the fury was fierce. I'm pretty sure SHE did the "DOIN' in."

Clearly common in both cases was the BROOM, and the less than subtle hint that I wasn't doing enough to save the day.

So I'm home today, two days after some surgery, ordered to take it easy....and.....?

"PAUL WE'VE GOT A MOUSE IN THE HOUSE. GET DOWN HERE AND HELP ME!"

Well, to her credit, Peggy let me at least go to the garage and see if I had any mouse food, and I did. I placed it under the leg of a table where she'd seen the little fella travel, and felt I could then get back to some post operative maintenance.

But then I kept hearing things? There was loud banging, and wood on wood sounds. I traveled downstairs to see that Peggy had been moving the furniture.

It didn't take long to sort out the motive because there she was holding......??????



The BROOM.

The furniture had been arranged to guide Mickey right out the front door should he surface from his new spot in the closet.

Well now you're going to have to hear it from Peggy to believe this. I'm going to tell you what happened, but you'll be skeptical until she at least says, " well, yeah, that might have been part of it."

You see, standing just a few feet away from Peggy's mouse canal sits the piano. So, I say, "Paul, the piper, will just saunter over there and ,

play the dude a tune."

I picked this scary little "halloweeny" piece titled "OOGA BOOGA BOOGIE."

And you know as I played, I saw a surprise in Peggy's eyes as Mickey just carefully crept right through her arranged path and out the front door. HONEST, IT REALLY HAPPENED. Didn't it Peggy?

Credits to all three women. I'm pretty sure not a single one of them yelled, EEK!

I still want to see those flower sack dresses.

Nice Shirt

This is one of my favorite shirts. Why? Well, it is all cotton. It is subtlety colorful. It fits. But none of that is really important. What is important? What is important is that almost every time I wear it publicly? Some one utters something like, " so, what are you using for drapes?"

Today this shirt set me to thinking about the economy, and how we are all coping what we hear is the "worst recession" since the great depression. I was born a little after the depression ended, but my parents didn't readily give up the habits they'd developed during that era.

I can't remember my dad buying anything retail until I was a teenager. He would show up at the local grocery store early in the morning when the bread truck finished it's delivery. He knew the driver would have a few loaves of sourdough left and dad would take those loaves home for pennies.

At about age ten, and I was going through a pair of socks a day, he saw a Sears and Roebuck ad for kids socks for 50 cents a piece, or something like that. He dragged me into the car and we drove to downtown L.A. to buy 50 pair.

But what really impresses me in reflection, is how inventive that generation became in order to survive. Long after THE DEPRESSION, I was working at General Mills tossing around flour sacks of all kinds. One of the more interesting products was La Pina Flour (with a tilde over the 'N'.) The flour was packed in these very colorful cotton sacks. (not unlike my drape shirt) La Pina (with a tilde) is essentially used to make tortillas and other Mexican and South West food staples. And had you looked around in a crowd in the 30's and 40's, you'd see people wearing shirts and blouses that looked a lot like La Pina (with a tilde) sacks.

My memory isn't so sharp that I can confirm this, and while my mother listens to me from Heaven, she refuses to answer my questions. I'm almost sure she made a few a those shirts and blouses for us early on. If not out of La Pina (with a tilde) sacks, something like them.
(If I'm making all this up in my mind my sisters will quickly amend this posting.)
(Lucky for me Peggy is on the phone with my mother-in-law, Esther, who confirms she made flour sack dresses for Peggy and her sister when they were toddlers.)

Seems to me people were making things (maybe clothes) out of burlap potato sacks, too.

So say, with this economy that is as bad as the Great Depression, why don't we start making clothes out of flour sacks. Well folks, we're too late. I started looking around the Internet to make sure I wasn't making all this up? There were quite a few BLOG postings from folks my age and older reminiscing about their flour sack shirts and skirts. But then...as I continued to surf, I discover there are a whole bunch of people, all over the World, manufacturing flour sack clothing of all kinds. (I saw one for 20 dollars with a vegetable sauce recipe on the front.)

Quite a few of these products are coming from the Far East. So if you figure in the labor costs, it is pretty clear you'll be able to buy them over the Internet cheaper than making them yourselves.

(I mean how many Enchiladas can you eat in a week?)

So I guess what I'm saying is we need to come up with something like "flour sack" casual-ware if we are going to be able to tell our grandchildren about living through the "GREATEST RECESSION since the GREAT DEPRESSION" ( Let me tell you, they no longer buy the, "In my day we walked ten miles to school in the snow, up hill both ways." We need a hook, something that expresses who we are, and what we're going through.

So, got any ideas!

Plateaus

Been off doing a little homework, battling digital technology, mowing the lawn, and taking some notes on some great stories I'll share when they reach their denouements. But in the meantime you may wonder about the portrait with the glasses down on the bridge of my nose?

Those of you my age, give or take a half a decade, live in a similar world. We wear glasses, and to make sure we can read what ever comes our way? We've got glasses all over the place....prescription glasses ( bi-focals, progressive lenses), reading glasses, sunglasses, magnifying glasses. I can occasionally get confused and grab the wrong pair for the purpose. But, fully alert, a quick switch can save the day. But today?

I woke up from a blissful nap remembering a promise to myself.

"Today I'm going to go hose down and sweep the front porch before some visitor gets caught and devoured in the giant spider web I've been ignoring."

So I grab some glasses off a bookcase by the front door, drowsily pop them on, and head out. What I grabbed was a pair of bi-focals forgetting how to use them. From the very minute I stepped over the threshold, those bi-focals turned the entire front yard into a series of small plateaus that would disappear the minute I stepped down on them.

In about five minutes I woke up from the nightmare, found the right pair of lenses, and got on with the job.

That's my odd allegorical approach to setting the stage for a series of postings on coping with a distorted economy. How can we keep our feet on the plateau. These will not be learned treatises with quotes from Adam Smith, etal. Instead let us gather for a few snippets of strange to fully bizarre adaptations to the fix we're all in.

Do you know what "co-ops" are? If you live in a world of agriculture you'll have one answer. If you live in the broadcasting or publishing world? A co-op is a way for media to keep their advertising clients still contributing to the economy. So it goes like this. A sixty second, commercial (half page three color ad) costs "blah, blah." In a tight economy, an ad exec. may say to a struggling client :


"You can't stop advertising! That would be un-American. THINK CO-OP. Why don't you just get somebody to share a sixty second spot with you. And then you'll just pay "blah,"and the other guy will pay the other "blah."


Well, let me tell you, that can lead to some strange "bedfellows."

I was reminded of this practice, and the attached pitfalls, doing some coaching and voice over work for a TV spot. I was doing it for a breakfast restaurant Peggy and I haunt. I knew the owner was doing it on a shoe string, but had no idea how short that string had become.

After I'd given a few tips to the creative team from the restaurant, it was decided I should read the tag to the commercial. To my surprise? I read a few words about the restaurant, and to fill the gap in the 30 second commercial I found myself talking about a simulated sky diving operation. These guys aren't just sharing sixty seconds with their "blah" and "blah"! They are splittin' 30 secs.

And what do they have in common? Let's see...the guy who owns the sky diving operation occasionally eats at the restaurant.?

And the guy who owns the restaurant? Well he offers discount coupons for the sky diving at the cash register?

But, hey, they do need to advertise, and they are certainly not the strangest of bedfellows you'll run into.

I'm in my car, thinking about co-ops a few days ago, and on comes a spot about Harley Davidson Motorcycles....it's hard to believe Harley won't survive this recession...but here they are in a CO-OP commercial with.....? Go ahead a take a few guesses.

A very large private law firm, which, if we believe the commercial copy, goes out of its way to protect the interests of Harley riders. Now you know who to call, eh?

When we're all in pain, somebody needs to look for the irony and humor that comes with that pain. And without your permission I'm volunteering to take on that responsibility.