Smile! You’re on Candid Camera

      A poster board about a foot square has the word “oil” on one side and the word “all” on the other side.  A man is showing first one side and then the other side of the card to another person.  A first grader learning to read?  No, a Candid Camera victim.

  

  The Florist Friar joke set me to thinking about the television show from the olden days—Allen Funt’s Candid Camera.  The “all—oil” stunt was a regional joke.  Allen (or one of his crew) found some southerners who were willing to explain the difference between the two words.  It was funny because in the South, the two words are homonyms—“awl”.

     It seems the crew tried that in New England where they got the “duh” reaction—“ohl” and “erl”?  Any “joik” knows the difference.

       The secret of Candid Camera must have been the actors’ ability to engage folks on the street.  I imagine if I stopped someone and asked them to explain the two words on this big oversize card, that person would whip out his cellphone and punch 911 and have the guys in white jackets on their way. 

     Some of the Candid Camera stunts were quite complex, such as the one where the Volkswagen sitting on the street pulled apart and the front half went off leaving the rear half parked at curbside.   But the ones I remember best were quite simple once you got the victims to go along.

      They were a version of the old “gossip” game we sometimes played in the classroom.  We would form a circle.  The first person would whisper a story or something to a second person who would whisper it to the person next in the circle.  On it went until it got around the circle.  The last person in the circle would repeat what she heard out loud.  Rarely did the last person’s version have any semblance to what the first person said.

    In the Candid Camera version, it was joke-telling.  The willing victim would sit in a booth and listen to one of the Candid Camera actors tell a joke.  The actor would be replaced by another victim who listened to the initial participant repeat the joke. The first victim would be replaced by a third participant who became the listener, and so on.  Eventually, someone would not get the joke.  Then that poor person had to try to tell a joke he didn’t understand.

      Here are the two jokes I remember.  A knight on a quest wanders through the forest searching.  He is gone for days when he nears his goal.  The sun drops in the west, the rain and fog moves in, and his poor horse succumbs to exhaustion and exposure.  The knight shoulders his luggage and wanders on in the dark and the storm.  He sees a light ahead and heads for it.  It is a castle.  He knocks at the gates and seeks aid.  Could they sell or lend him a horse so that he might complete his quest?   The gate keeper replies that due to famine, plague and wars, the horse population is zero.  Just then this huge dog walks up to the gate to see what is going on.

    The knight asks, “What about that dog?  I could ride him.”

    The gate keeper looks first at the dog, then  out through the dark at the mud and rain and says, “I wouldn’t send a knight out on a dog like this.”

    Warning!  If you don’t get it, don’t try to tell it!

     The second one, the story of the Ambitious Baker:  The young baker found that if he sliced his bread loaves, they sold much better.  The problem was that slicing each loaf added to production time and labor costs.  So he thought if he could invent a way to slice two loaves at the same time, it would speed things up, lowering costs while improving sales.  So he invented the way to slice two loaves at once.  Well, if you could slice two loaves at once, why not three?  And he brought that thought to reality.

      Three loaves at a time?  Why not four?  But this time there was a problem.  He could not find a knife with a long enough blade to do four loaves at once, though he looked far and wide.

One day, he and his wife were vacationing in a town in a faraway land.  They had wandered through museums and shops when they came upon a little shop with a knife display, and there it was!  The perfect knife, the blade just the right size to slice through four loaves of bread.

       The baker turned excitedly to his wife and said, “Look Dear!  A four-loaf cleaver!”

     You can imagine how those two jokes could be butchered by someone who didn’t get the punch line.  Candid Camera viewers found the butchery humorous.

      A good friend, who shall here be mercifully nameless, once tried to tell a joke at a Lions meeting.  It was about a guy named Opporknockity.  He had a fine ear and could tune any stringed instrument perfectly without the use of the oscilloscope. He specialized in pianos.

     Once a famed pianist, a perfectionist, scheduled a concert in town.  He specified that the piano must be tuned just prior to the concert, and Mr. Opporknockity should do the tuning.  It was arranged and on the day of the concert, Opporknockity finished tuning the piano and decided to stay on to listen to the concert, being already on the premises and having paid no admission.

     In the middle of the concert in the middle of a piece, the pianist suddenly stopped and punched a key two or three times as he turned his head in dissatisfaction.  Then he saw Opporknockity in the audience.

     “Mr. Opporknockity, please come tune this F key.  It has gone out of tune, I’m afraid,” the pianist said.

    Now the punch line as my friend said it:

      “I’m sorry, I don’t tune the same piano twice.”  A pause.  Weak applause.  No laughter, except for me.

     The real punch line:  Opporknockity rose from his seat and announced proudly, “Sorry, but Opporknockity tunes but once.”

     I don’t know if my friend ever realized he missed the punch line.  I didn’t have the heart to tell him.   

   Sometimes the punch line is right.  It’s the joke that didn’t get set up properly.  This happened at school once.  The joke has to be cleaned up to be politically correct.  It refers to an Eastern European ethnicity supposed to suffer from less than normal intelligence.    

      The teachers who partook of the school lunch (best deal in town) sat at a table next to the doorway. One teacher took tickets from each student and teacher who came through the lunch line.  A student asked the ticket-taker,

       “Hey Mr. Finn, what did the (Eastern European ethnic) do with his first half dollar?”

      “I don’t know, Steve.  What did he do with his first half dollar?”

      “Married her!  Ha, ha, ha!”

      Suppressed laughter at the teacher table soon burst forth in to full-blown guffaws. Many of us had heard the joke.  The punch line was correct.  It was the joke that wasn’t told right.  

       What did the (Eastern European ethnic) do with his first fifty-cent piece?

     

     Isaac Asimov wrote a book of jokes and how to tell them.  Maybe I should write one on how not to tell them.  Meanwhile, don’t forget to smile.  You may be on Candid Camera.

Prairie Fire

Many years ago in the olden times in Merry Olde England, there lived a priest who felt it was his calling not only to save souls but to beautify the environment for his parishioners and himself in those somewhat brutish times.  Like the priest in Romeo and Juliet he was in charge of the garden.  His aesthetic method involved flowers.

    It was great to have the sanctuary decorated week after week with seasonal blooms, pleasing to the eye and the nose as well.  Even his fellow clergymen found it uplifting to have the communal table festooned with blossoms at meal times.

    But then it got to be too much.  When the local dray man exited the church grounds after stacking a load of firewood he had delivered to the brothers to find his draft horses’ collars decorated with leis, he decided enough was enough. He remonstrated with the priest, but to no avail.   After visiting with some of his fellow tradesmen who were influential in the community at the time, they agreed to consult secretly in violation of the open meetings laws.

      The lot fell upon the blacksmith, Hugh, a huge man, the biggest man in the community, to visit with the good father.  Following his instructions, the blacksmith called on the priest who attentively listened to this not-so-gentle giant, one of the sheep of his earthly fold.

    Voila!  The problem was solved. From that point forth, the priest confined his floral creations to the church and its grounds.

     Moral:  Only Hugh can prevent Florist Friars.

    Oh well.  This week we had a gas fryer. 

   Make that a grass fire.  It all started a couple of weeks ago when a friend asked if she could use our burn barrel.  They had a bunch of old papers, insurance, investments, etc. that contained personal information useful to identity thieves. The papers should be destroyed.

      She further related an experience of another neighbor who had hauled a bunch of old paperwork to the landfill, only to be called a few days later by another neighbor who reported that she had retrieved a bunch of documents from the landfill, in violation of the many signs on the premises forbidding scavenging.  The scavenger found the papers of historical significance.  The discarder felt her privacy had been invaded and wished she had pursued other means of discarding personal documents.

    Lesson learned, our friend decided burning would be preferable to shredding due to the large number of documents.   So on Monday she called and wanted to know, as there was little wind, would it be a good day to use our burn barrel.  Yes, fine, but there wouldn’t be anybody here.  I would get the hose ready.  She thought I was joking, but I assured her I wasn’t.

    So, I connected the hose to the faucet, a nozzle to the hose.  I didn’t turn the water on, fearing I would forget and when it gets cold at night, it would freeze and cause lots of damage.  I took off to help the Lions pack and deliver food baskets to the less fortunate among us.  The Goodwife went to her Alzheimers’ meeting—the support group, not the sufferers’ gathering.

     About an hour and a half later, my cell phone rang.  A fire up at our place our friend reported.  At first I thought she was joking.  After all, I had left the hose at the ready.  And the fire department had been there two times previously in past years putting out fires I had started.

      She was on her way to our place as she called.  She said she didn’t see any smoke.  Then she said, “Oh my gosh!” and I knew it wasn’t a joke.

   I leapt from the pickup I was packing with food boxes and jumped into my own pickup.  Up the hill I raced.  I, too, saw no smoke until I got nearly home.  The gate to the neighbor’s pasture was open and soon I saw four fire trucks, three pumpers and the spare tanker.  In the yard was an ambulance with two EMT’s and the Emergency Management Service boss lady’s SUV.  One of the EMT’s was spraying a little water around my firewood stack.  It suffered little damage.

     The fire circled the firewood pile, took to the ditch, crossed the fence and started in on the pasture.  By the time I got there, the fire fighters had it all but out.

     My friend had tried to stamp out the little blaze that escaped the bottomless barrel.  He realized that wouldn’t work, so he grabbed the hose.  Nothing, so he ran to turn on the water, and ran back.  Still nothing.  He went to check for kinks.  None.

      By then the water had reached the end of the hose, but the fire had reached his car and was under it.  So he moved his car.  By then the fire had reached the wood pile and beyond.  The 100 feet of hose couldn’t reach that far.

    So he found another section of hose, took off the nozzle, added the new hose, but by then the fire had gone under the fence and was out of reach of 150 feet of hose.  He called his wife who called 911 who sent the fire department.

     Nothing got hurt, really.  The plastic garbage can got a little hot and deformed a bit.  Thank goodness for the fire department.

      My reputation as a fire bug in the community will be a cinch.  If I come home some day and find my fire barrel missing, I will understand.

      My friend felt really bad (and exhausted after all the running he did).  As I pointed out, the fire department knew exactly where to go.

     The truth is they have been in the neighbor’s pasture many times, not just three.  The reason, there is an electrical substation that serves the town.  Many wires come and go from the substation.  In times past, a windy day would cause lines to swing and get too close to one another.  There would be an arc and the sparks would ignite the dry grass.  The dry grass is nearly as volatile as gasoline.  A light breeze will send flames racing across the land.  Little wonder that wild fire was a huge worry to the settlers of the plains.

     

      Notice the snow still in the terrace bottoms.  The smoldering items are cow pies.  I realize again how important cow “chips” were to the settlers when they first came to the treeless prairie.  They burn slow and hot.  A couple of them in your kitchen range would fry your bacon and more.  Here they will smolder all night.  They won’t be much of a problem, though.  The grass fuel is gone and the pies don’t pop or spark.

      So all is well that ends well.  The moon slowly rises in the east over the burn scar. . . .

Hit the Deck

     December yoyo’s right along.  The weather yoyo’s anyway.  A week ago, it hadn’t been above freezing for four days.  My walk-in refrigerator, the multi-tasking garage, turned into the walk-in freezer.  Even the home brew froze, not hard enough to break the bottle, but froze right enough. 

     The forty year old Coleman ice chest, full of carrots and daikon (oriental radish, “oriental” is probably politically incorrect, my apologies) had to come into the house proper every night.  A plastic jug of water in the cooler, if there’s room, keeps things from freezing, but things will still freeze after a couple of days in the garage when it’s down around zero.

    This Friday, it topped out at 60.  I missed the opportunity to clean and defrost the freezer.  Put the freezer stuff in the pickup in the garage.  Take your time with the defrosting.  Nothing would thaw out.  Last week that was.

     This week the garage has shifted from freezer to refrigerator again.  It’s nice enough to work outside, so time to hit the deck again. 

      I have two problems with building the deck.  Number one, I don’t know what I am doing.  Number two, it’s severely expensive. 

     Number one has been partially solved.  Some of the problems now, what to do with the 4 X 6 posts supporting the “veranda”.  The Goodwife says the aluminum wrap I usually use looks too cheap.  Plus, the posts are pressure treated which means they contain a lot of copper which reacts with and corrodes the aluminum.  You can buy column wraps made of metal (very expensive) or composite material for $150 and up per post.  There are ten posts.  I’ve ordered steel wraps which will be bent for me.  Cost, about $40 per post.

     The posts and post supports are all done.  Posts sit on post supports anchored to concrete. 

      Stairs.  I’ve never cut stair stringers.  I spent a lot of time on the internet trying to figure out how to lay out the stringers.  I think I have that down.  (Dangerous thoughts, those)

     Yesterday, I planned on getting the deck beams, 2 X 8’s doubled, in place.  I set out tools including saw.

    Then I realized I needed to get rid of some bushes that would be under the deck.  That took a couple of hours.  When I set a test 2 X 8 in place, I discovered I had not aligned the post supports very well.  The supports are somewhat adjustable, but I had to remove the posts to do the adjusting.  Bottom line, I didn’t get very much done, getting only two beams in place.

     Future problem, the bird feeder and the satellite dish have to be relocated, as the post they now cling to grows up through the middle of the deck.  The bird feeder is no problem, but the dish is.  After I get the dish remounted, probably on the nearby post, it has to be aimed precisely to get the satellite signal.  It’s a two-person job.  The Goodwife will be hollering numbers through the window, numbers she sees on the tv, as I make minute adjustments left and right, up and down to the dish.  I can’t do that until I get the post wrapped.  Oh well.  We shall overcome.

     Meanwhile it was a nice day—on the south side of the house, and I was outside again.  Even at sixty degrees, it wasn’t too nice on the north side.

Bill’s 80th Birthday Party

     On December 2, 1933 Gladys asked the doctor, “What is it?” 

     “You have a healthy boy,” the doctor replied.

     Never one to shy away from saying what she was thinking, Gladys said “Throw him in the lake.”  So the story goes.

    It was the middle of the Great Depression.  Bill was the fourth child.  He already had two older brothers and an older sister.  He brought nothing new to the table except another hungry mouth to feed during the hard times.

      Since that day, Bill has made sure that folks know he was not thrown in the lake.  For his birthday, his daughter solicited stories from friends about experiences they shared with Bill over the past 80 years.  She wanted 80 stories to go with his birthday, but she got more than a hundred.  The stories range from extreme gratitude to extreme aggravation.

     In one story, Bill passed a pickup on the side of eastbound I70.  Shortly he came upon a young man walking, so he stopped and picked him up.  The guy, just out of high school, was fleeing a court appearance in his hometown in Colorado.  He set out in his old pickup and when it ran out of gas, he set off on foot going he knew not where to do he knew not what.  Bill stopped at a café, fed the kid, convinced him to return to face the judge and make a new start in life.  Bill bought a bus ticket and sent him on his way home with the assurance that when things were going better and the kid decided he wanted his pickup back, he could come get it at Bill’s place.  Bill loaded the pickup on his trailer took it to his house. We happened by Bill’s house when the kid’s grandparents came by some weeks later to take the pickup home.  Needless to say, the grandparents thought Bill was an Angel sent by God.

      Not so a roofing crew many years ago.  One summer noon when young Bill didn’t show up for dinner (dinner was always the noon meal in this part of the country), C. W. set out to find him.  C. W. didn’t have to look high and low for him, just high.  He was spread-eagled on a roof in the noon day sun, where members of the crew he had been pestering all morning had nailed his shirt cuffs and pant legs to the roof (yes, Bill was still in shirt and pants) and then left to enjoy their nooning.

     Here is one of the sixteen memories I recounted for the occasion.  The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

One week after I got my pilot’s license, we took off with three Cessnas and one Beechcraft to fly to Carlsbad New Mexico.  Rudy S’s Uncle Jake and the Cavern City Lions hosted us.  We visited the Caverns and had an all around good time.  Jerry B. left his pipe in Dalhart, TX because he was taking in the scenery of the short skirted fuel gal on a step ladder fueling 4441Romeo.  We planned to leave on Sunday but had to stay and leave Monday due to a blizzard and high winds in Kansas.  Barney, Roger, and Rudy got home easily because the Bonanza didn’t have to make a refueling stop and got home before the wind came up.  But we Cessna blokes had to fuel in Dalhart (and retrieve Jerry’s pipe).  We flew in high winds and dust until we got to Tribune.  On the south side of the highway, dust was rising up in big canyons.  On the north side of the highway, there were snow drifts and no dust.  But still plenty of wind.  Adrian’s alternator wasn’t working, so he shut of his radios and was out of contact with us.  In his plane was Dave B. and Melvin D. (maybe, can’t remember for sure).  In Bill’s plane, Jerry clung to the seat while John F. went to sleep.  In my plane, I tried to calm Dennis B. by telling him I could land in a stock tank with the head wind we had.  A Volkswagon bus slowly passed us on Highway 27 below as we fought the headwind between Sharon Springs and Goodland.  Dan S. took it all in stride pretty well.  Denny was all for calling Mardel when we landed at Goodland to come get him in the car, but when we refueled, he crawled back in and flew home with us.  George Ross, pilot tester, saw me in the terminal in Goodland and allowed that I was really testing my week-old pilot’s license.   Bill led the way home from the Goodland refueling stop and landed on runway 30—in the mud.  Bill called the rest of us and told us to use runway 36, which we did—cross wind landing.  Adrian landed on the nose wheel—as usual. Bill’s crew backed 4441R into the hangar and closed and locked the door while Bill was still sitting in the plane filling out the log book.

    Here is what it looked like on December 2, 2013 where we celebrated Bill’s birthday at the Mexican restaurant: 

     And on Saturday December 7, 2013 at the official celebration:

        Happy Birthday, Bill!  We'll schedule you in for December 2, 2023 for your 90th, as you requested.

November Progress

      Halloween turned into Thanksgiving and house projects crawled along.  Surprisingly, it was warm enough at times during November to do some outdoor painting.  The foundation always provided a great place to clean paint brushes.  With latex paint, put a little water in a brush-sized can and work the excess paint out on the cinder blocks.

     The result isn’t always unifying and pleasing to the eye, but it sure gets rid of the paint.  This foundation project actually began in the basement looking for paint to touch up some of the scars on living room walls and paint for the new sheetrock on the stairway where the handrail went in.  The success rate finding the right paint was 50% successful—I found one of two cans with the right color.  But, it turned quickly to 0% ,since the inch of paint in the bottom of the can had turned to silly putty.  That led to cleaning out the paint can storage area.  There was quite a bit of exterior white paint and the weather was nice, so. . . .

    Then I ran out of paint.  I will have to buy a quart to finish, when it gets warm enough again.   I don't know where I will go to clean out the brush.  Inside, another handrail went up over the stairs coming in from the garage (currently the only convenient way to get into the house).

    And the main entry way needed weather proof flooring (not to mention an end to a dirt-trap cold air return).

     Then it was time to go be thankful with hostess and host.

 And guests:

Enjoy the nice weather

Check out the livestock

Check out the live trap

Even indulge in a little Black Friday shopping (another live trap?)

And be thankful.

Life Before Television

    So what did we do in those old days before television?  There was radio.  It might have been Wednesday night that we had to listen to “The Lone Ranger” with Tonto and Silver and Scout and silver bullets, etc.  “Who was that masked man?”  “Hi yo Silver away!”  And the famous theme song, Dum ditty, dum ditty, dum dum dum.

     When Tonto and the masked man didn’t want to be followed, they had a way of covering their tracks.  That was all good and well on the radio, but later when I watched them on tv, they were dragging tree branches or bushes behind their horses.  A macular degenerated centenarian could have followed that trail.  Oh disillusionment!  That ranks up there with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

    I remember “Big John and Little Sparky” every Saturday morning.  “When you go out in the woods today, you’d better not go alone. . . Today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic” or something like that.  I can’t remember a single episode of that show.

     On Sunday mornings, we listened to the Sunday funnies while we ate our bacon and eggs.  Sometimes we got the funnies, second hand from Grandma and Grandad, but we never had them when the program came on the radio.  Somebody (Bob Lilliy?) read the funnies from the Denver Post and listeners were to follow along with their own paper.  We were stuck with whatever our imaginations could come up with.  The Funnies were followed by various Sunday morning evangelists. 

      A few of the other radio shows I remember listening to: 

Jack Benny (Rochester’s raspy voice, Dennis Day’s tenor voice);

The Great Giltersleeve (Willard Waterman’s laugh, his “LeeRoy!”);

Fibber Magee and Molly (“Taint funny Magee”, the famous closet that spilled its contents every time it was opened);

Queen for a Day (maybe.  Jack Bailey?  Three poor ladies vied to see who was the most miserable and that one got crowned Queen for a Day which came with a bunch of prizes.);

Art Linkletter (People are Funny?);

A quiz show like $64000 Question, the name of which I cannot remember;

At least one summer, we got hooked on Stella Dallas (couldn’t listen during school because it was a daytime soap);

Hit Parade (Saturday night? Giselle McKenzie, Dorothy Collins—lots of others).

      There were other shows we listened to every morning on KOA, Ivan Schooley, who read the news as well as spun a few discs.  Part of the news was the most recent traffic deaths ending with the death count so far that year and the advice to “Drive Careful.”  Of course there were the tragic times when we recognized those named in the report.

  Pete Smythe also filled the morning air.  He probably deserves his own column, he did so many things, playing the piano along with creating and acting his fictional characters and playing a few records.

       We probably read a few books.  I remember wanting to know how to read so I could read comic books on my own.  But there were other evening pursuits.

    I remember Grandma teaching me to play Chinese Checkers with marbles and a homemade board made by drilling holes in a fiberboard.  Someone gave us a set of games with checkerboard and sets of cards such as Old Maid and Crazy 8’s.  The Old Maid game wore out pretty soon because someone (me?) in a fit of anger crumpled up the old maid card when he drew it from another player.  Thereafter, you would have had to been blind not to see which card not to draw. 

     We played other card games such as Solitaire (Grandma taught me that one, too) and Double Solitaire, if that isn’t a contradiction which required two decks and two players.  We also played Brains or Concentration.  Endless games of Monopoly are associated with snowy days when there was no school.  We might start a fire in the “cob-burner” in the “closet” behind the chimney upstairs.

      We played a lot outdoors, too if it was clear and not too cold.  I remember the shop being converted to an indoor baseball field with rubber ball and lath bat.  We never broke a window, and there were lots to be broken in the old school house converted to a farm shop.  We also had many a basketball game in the shop with a tennis ball and a one-pound coffee can nailed to the wall serving as the goal.

    In the warmer weather, we had a few outdoor baseball games with the piano students who came to get lessons from Mom.  And we could play basketball under the light when we inherited Cousin Keith’s old backboard and netless hoop.  It was fastened to the most sliveriest 6x6 post ever.  Layups were discouraged because the post and backboard were fastened to the south end of the old red barn and near the yard light on the meter pole.  If you did a layup, you couldn’t follow through without getting a huge splinter or crashing into the barn wall.  We played a lot of “HORSE” relying on trick shots to win.

      We also learned a game called “Smearum” when we went to Crook to watch a football game. (I may be wrong about where we learned it.)  It was like baseball’s workup, for when you didn’t have enough players for two teams.  As I recall, one person had the football and everyone else was on defense.  You could play in pretty cold weather.

      Once or twice we had weather conducive to ice hockey.  The snow melted and filled the wheel ruts with water.  A cold snap froze the water and we “skated” on it with sticks and a puck.

     We also spent a lot of time trying to devise a lethal arrowhead for our toy bow and arrow.  That stemmed from an indoor pursuit, listening to 78 rpm records on the Stromberg-Carlson radio-phonograph.  One of those was a two or three record set of Robin Hood.  Robin had a whistling arrow he could use to signal his merry men.  Of course he was a crack shot with the bow and arrow.  We weren’t.

     The radio is probably another subject entirely unto itself, we had so many memorable records.   

     For indoor sports, we had a “playroom” filled with our games and toys, such as they were.  We had Tinkertoys from which we could make buildings, windmills, tractors, implements, trucks. . . .  We had all the pieces named, knobs, wheels, short sticks, medium-size sticks, cigarette size sticks, long sticks, and one between cigarette and long sticks, the name if which I don’t remember.

      Once in a while we turned the basement into a skating rink.  We fastened the old clamp on skates to our shoes.  When the clamps failed, you wrapped old shoe strings around the skate and your shoe toe.  An untied shoe lace led to more than one accident.  We could go around in a circle, the stairway defining the west end and the brick chimney the east pylon.  A trip up the steps to use the bathroom could be exciting.  You couldn’t take the time to remove the skates.  Try walking up steps with wheels strapped to your feet.

      There were some other less innocent pastimes, such as the indoor clod fight we held upstairs using wooden blocks for clods.  No casualties among the participants, but the woodwork suffered several nicks form the aerial assault.

     Maybe the real question should be, how did we have time for television?

Gene Amole

 One-word-intro.

     I must have been eight or nine years old when we got our first television.  Coming down the lane in the school bus, we could see Dad up on the roof tying to erect an antenna.  And there in front of the dining room’s east window stood a pretty good size tv, a console sitting on four legs with the ability to swivel right and left.  I think one of the first shows we watched that night was “My Little Margie”.

    In this tv business, we had followed Alexander Pope’s advice, “Be not the first by whom the new is tried, nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”  My first tv experience occurred in a cold, unheated upstairs room that I seem to remember we had to access from an enclosed outside stair.  It belonged to Haldo Kjosness. 

      We had gone to church, gone home to eat our roast beef dinner, then loaded up and went back north to Haldo’s place.  I don’t remember much about the tv except that it was pretty cloudy, or “snowy” as we used to say in those olden days.  What I remember the most was lying on a calf skin on the floor.  It was furry and soft just like it was on the calf, except it was clean.

     I also remember spending the night in Denver with Aunt Dell and Uncle Wilbur.  They had a tv with good reception.  We watched Lawrence Welk (I think) and Bears’ baseball.  I wasn’t in to baseball much in those early days, but I loved the commercials between innings.  Most of them were Hamms ads with an animated bear bouncing around doing funny things in fantastic background scenery ("from the land of sky-blue waters"). “Hamms the beer refreshing, Hamms the beer refreshing.”  I can still hear it.

     The other tv experience I had before we got our own set was at Aunt Ruth and Uncle Walter’s.  They lived about 30 miles from Colorado Springs and got KKTV Channel 11 very well.  Later KRDO out of Pueblo would be added.  I remember watching “Blinky the Clown” every afternoon, and sometimes an hour long Western, Roy Rogers maybe?

     On Saturday there was the CBS Game of the Week, baseball with Dizzy Dean and Buddy Blatner, and later Diz and Pee Wee Reese.  They didn’t always break for a commercial between innings.  Sometimes they made the commercial right from the booth.  I can still picture the Diz holding up a six pack of beer between him and Pee Wee and extolling the virtues of that brew and encouraging all of us to enjoy a cool one while we watched the game.  Was it Falstaff?  Schlitz? Pabst Blue Ribbon?  Uncle Ricky always claimed Diz and Pee Wee indulged in some of the product during the game.  Would that explain some “Dizisms”?  “Brother, he threw him a ripple.”  “He slud into second.” “The pitcher is taking his ‘pliminary pitches.”

     Once, Diz was the mystery guest on “What’s My Line”.  One of the ladies, Arlene Francis or Dorothy Kilgallen, mask still on during Mystery Guest appearances, said, “You sound too intelligent to be Dizzy Dean.”  When the masks came off, there sat Dizzy Dean.  The lady fell all over herself apologizing, but Diz didn’t seem to mind.  Maybe he didn’t understand the slight?

      The Channel 11 news came on about 6 p. m.  Sometimes John Bartholomew came on with an opinion piece which always ended with, “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”  I guess that excused his weird (I thought) opinions.

    Another weirdo who voiced his opinions on tv was Gene Amole.  He was on Channel 2 I think. After much tinkering with antennas, we settled for a two-antenna system, one antenna pointed southwest towards Colorado Springs, the other northwest toward Denver.  The Denver stations never came in quite as well as the Springs ones, but if we wanted to watch NBC we had to watch Denver Channel 4.  Anyway, two guys I thought must be crazy and didn’t have enough to do were John Bartholomew and Gene Amole.   

     Some years later, I would become a Rocky Mountain News reader.  Gene wrote a regular column for the News.  I don’t remember how often his column appeared.  I read quite a few of them.  His trademark was the one-word introduction.  They were very effective.  It piqued your interest and the first thing you knew, you had read the whole column.  The one-word intro did just what it was supposed to do, bait the hook that caught you.

     I can’t remember many of the things he wrote, except one that tickled my fancy and my sense of humor.  Geno, like many a writer, was bemoaning how the slobs were undermining our English language.  This time it was those bureaucrats and technocrats who created new nouns and verbs by adding a preposition in front of a verb or noun.  One word that I remember him complaining about was “inservice”.  As a teacher who attended many a crummy inservice, that one struck a chord with me.  Some others I seem to remember were “downturn” and “outsource”.    He had several others I can’t remember.

   He ended that column with a little advice for those English degenerators:  They can just go “upstick” it!

    In the end, Gene “blogged” his death.  His blog platform was The Rocky Mountain News.  When he and his doctors decided the end was at hand, he wrote several columns about his experience of dying.  For a guy who had a reputation for hating change, he broke a lot of new ground.

     So let us raise a Schlitz or Hamms or Falstaff or PBR to those old tv pioneers, Gene and John, Diz , Buddy and Pee Wee.

      As for those bent on upscrewing our language (think texting):

Upstick it!  (Old Diz excepted)   

   

Fair Weather Works

     In the desert we have become the last few years, any moisture finds the welcome mat out. So Tuesday’s half inch drizzle fell on grateful grounds. 

     But coming on the heels of the switch back to standard time, where the afternoon turns into evening in the afternoon, such days are hard on us Vitamin D addicts.  Plus, the skid steer was sitting in the circle drive waiting to go to work on the cement steps and porch.  The attempt to get the cement work removed on Monday afternoon, before the predicted wet weather, fell victim to the time change.  Darkness fell and the steps didn’t.

     Wednesday to the rescue.  It dawned clear and afternoon temperatures reached the 60’s.  On with the outdoor work.

     Steps to the basement and from the garage into the house have never had handrails.  Well, we aren’t getting any younger, you know.  The weather had cooperated enough earlier in the week to do the staining and varnishing outdoors.  Newell posts had to be installed on cement floors in both cases, necessitating drilling holes in concrete to secure support plates.  Wednesday morning was a perfect time to do that in the garage.

    I added one step and reduced the risers from seven inches to five inches in the garage.  The addition of the “mop handle” (British slang for handrail) will make this entrance to the house pretty accessible.

       The steps wait for the remover.

    Thirty minutes later, the work is done. The destruction work that is.  Quite a bit of cleanup had to be done, a couple of yards of dirt to remove.

    And the ruts.  The skid steer didn’t do the yard any favors.

      Fair weather held out through the weekend, so out with the wheel barrow, and the ruts got filled, the north foundation got a kinder gentler slope, and the south ditch got a temporary dirt pile.

    Two yards of dirt gone, time to cover up the wound left by the porch removal.

     Metal flashing, two strips of ¼” Styrofoam insulation, and a 10” siding piece cover a lot.  It was warm enough to apply a coat of metal primer to the flashing.   Two holes in the block foundation got a little masonry work.  A coat of blue ought to make the scars disappear.

     The house is now accessible only through the garage.  But the welcome mat is still out.