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)