The Leishmans lived at 8801 Fairway, which was directly across the street from our house.
During each of the four years that I was an undergraduate at Michigan I came home for the Christmas holiday. A very unusual event occurred in one of those holidays. I think that it was the first one, 1966, but it might have been 1967. During the fall I had been alerted by my parents that my cousin and my classmate at Rockhurst High School, Terry Cernech, was getting married. The bride, Debbie Leishman, lived directly across the street from my family’s house in Leawood. They wanted me to be an usher at their wedding.
Terry, who lived nearly twenty miles away in Sugar Creek, had met Debbie during the production of a musical that featured performers and crew from Rockhurst High School, which both Terry and I attended, and Debbie’s high school, Notre Dame de Sion, a Catholic preparatory school for girls. Strange as it might seem, I had absolutely nothing to do with them getting together.
Terry and I were seniors when the play was staged. Debbie was a year or two younger. I am therefore pretty sure that she was still in high school at the time of the wedding. Terry was in college. His Facebook page says that he “studied at University of Notre Dame.”
The ceremony might have been held here at St. Ann’s church in Independence.
If there was a bachelor’s party, I was not invited, or maybe my parents neglected to tell me about it. I am pretty sure that the wedding ceremony was at a Catholic Church. Since the Leishmans were not Catholics, I am quite sure that the ceremony was not at our parish, Curé of Ars. So, I figure that it must have been held at the Cerneches’ church, St. Ann’s in Independence, MO, Harry Truman’s home town. I am almost certain that Terry went to grade school at St. Ann’s school.
So, why did the happy couple choose December for this occasion? Well, it probably wasn’t for tax reasons—both the bride and groom were full-time students. Everyone knew the answer, of course. In the language of the day, they had to get married.
Terry’s brother John was the best man. Before the ceremony he talked for a while with my parents. He said that he had been up all night talking with Terry. According to John, his brother had ingested a large amount of “Dutch courage” to prepare himself for the big event. John was dubious about the whole situation.
My job as usher was trivial. People sat where they wanted. I don’t recall that I had to wear a tuxedo or any other kind of costume. My real responsibilities began at the reception where I discovered that no one in the Leishman household was talking to anyone on the Cernech side. My dad did not get along particularly well with either Terry’s father, my Uncle Dean, or Mr. Leishman. So, I was drafted to pass messages between the two patriarchs. I do not precisely recall any particular message, but the flavor of most of them was something like the following:
“Tell that son of a bitch that if he thinks that he is going to …”
“He said what? Tell that worthless sack of shit that that will never happen until hell freezes over.”
“That’s NOT what we agreed on! You tell that two-faced bastard …”
“That’s it. I’ve had enough of that asshole. Just tell him to shove it.”
Needless to say, I sanitized the messages a bit before I delivered them. For a while I found this farce slightly amusing, but eventually it wore me down.
The marriage did not last very long. I don’t know what became of any of the Leishmans. Terry remarried; in 2021 he lives in Springfield, MO.
I did not die from it.
During the exam period right before Christmas, in December of 1967 (I think) I came down with influenza. When I have recounted this story, I called what I had the Russian flu. However, apparently the disease, which started in November in Michigan and Florida, was actually popularly known as the Hong Kong Flu. I somehow got through my exams, but I was completely wiped out. I slept through the entire plane ride to KC, and then I spent another day or so in bed at my parents’ house. This was my last real illness until my tuxedo-wearing cat Jake gave me cat-scratch disease in the mid-eighties.
A different member of my high school class, John Williams, also got married and had a son while he was going to college. He invited me to attend a play that his younger brother was in. This must have happened either over the Christmas break in my senior year or during one of the summers. John was driving, and for some reason his wife was not there.
At some point John was talking about the toddler. When I asked him a question, I mistakenly called the kid “your brother”. At least three of my acquaintances fathered children while I was in college, but I never actually saw any of them. I was so immature and aloof that I could not internalize the fact that people my age were reproducing.
One baby that I did see was Dr. Colburn’s youngest daughter. When the child, whose name escapes me, was baptized, I stood in for the real godfather, who could not make the trip to Ann Arbor. The event occurred in September of either 1968 or 1969. This was the last baptism that I ever attended.
In 2020 I discovered evidence of two events that I am quite certain that I never attended. I found these two football tickets among my dad’s possessions after he died in 2011.
They did not even call it the Super Bowl.
I have no recollection at all that he had attended one of the most famous football games of all time, the 1969 Super Bowl. This was the game between the New York Jets, quarterbacked by Joe Namath, and the Baltimore Colts, led by Johnny Unitas. The Colts, who had defeated the Cleveland Browns 34-0 in the NFL1 championship game, were heavily favored, but the brash Namath guaranteed that the Jets would win, and they did.
In fact, it was not a close game. The defense of the Jets completely stymied Unitas and the Colts, who were held to a field goal in the fourth quarter. The final score was 16-3.
The game was played in the Orange Bowl in Miami, FL, on Sunday, January 12, 1969. I would have been back in Ann Arbor by then. I have no recollection that my dad went to this game. Of course, it had no effect on me; I was probably either at a debate tournament, returning from one, or busily preparing for one.
I wonder if my mom also attended this game. My dad often traveled on business, and some of those events included entertainment for the local salesmen. If this was part of the company’s annual convention, then my mom also probably came. In that case, they would have probably needed to get someone to stay at the house with Jamie, who had been a teenager for eight days when the game was played. Surely this would have been a topic of discussion over the holidays, but I have no memory of it whatsoever.
I definitely do remember the other game.
Michigan played against Southern Cal in the Rose Bowl in my senior year. I watched this frustrating nail-biter at home in Leawood. I am pretty sure that both of my parents attended, but I don’t remember if they left Jamie with me (I was twenty-one, and she was almost fourteen), or if someone stayed with us.
Southern Cal was undefeated. Michigan was coming off of its best game ever, the upset of undefeated Ohio State in Ann Arbor. I had missed that game because of a debate tournament in Chicago.
Both teams in the Rose Bowl had very stout defenses and unimaginative offenses. The game was tied 3-3 at the half. The only touchdown was a thirty-three yard pass from Jimmy Jones to Bob Chandler. Southern Cal won 10-3..
The backs of both of these tickets have diagrams of the seating in the stadiums. In both cases the tickets are on about the twenty-five-yard line, a little less than halfway up. Those are very good seats! Note that the price of the Rose Bowl ticket was only $8.
My two fondest memories of Jamie occurred, I think, during one of the breaks from college. The first one was in 1966, the year that Barry Sadler’s song, “Ballad of the Green Berets”2 topped the charts. We invented a dance to accompany this song. It involved standing at attention next to one another. Then one of us would stand on tip-toes for a beat while the other squatted. Then we returned to attention. On the following beats we reversed roles, and so on until we could not keep straight faces any longer.
At some point when I was not paying attention Jamie learned to play the guitar. She had a Bob Dylan songbook that contained the words and music for a dozen or two of his early songs. A few times we made music together; she would play the chords and I would sing. I can carry a tune, the songs were in a key that stayed in my range, and I could do a passable imitation of Dylan’s voice. We should have recorded one of these songs—I had a tape recorder. It would be fun to hear what we sounded like.
1. The NFL and the AFL had not yet merged. The first four Super Bowl featured the champions of each league.
2. This horribly unimaginative song tied “California Dreamin'” as Billboard’s top song of 1966. Surely this was the worst song ever to become so popular. Sadler was a medic in Vietnam. His one hit made him a lot of money, but his life subsequently went quickly downhill. In 1979 he was charged with second-degree murder and pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in Nashville. He went to prison for thirty days. In September of 1988 he was shot in the head in a taxicab in Guatemala City. He died early the following year.
From the front 8800 Fairway looks pretty much the same as in 1962, but two bedrooms and a bathroom were added to the back. My parents paid $35,000 in 1962. It is now worth $894,000.
We moved from Prairie Village to Leawood at some point during the summer of 1962. This allowed me to walk to and from Rockhurst High School. My sister Jamie went to first grade at Curé of Ars1 school, a brand new parish and school that was about 1.3 miles southwest of our house.
Boy Scouts: I was still in my original troop (#295) during the summer of 1962. I went to Camp Nash with that troop during the summer. By the end of the summer I needed only one merit badge to attain the rank of eagle.
I learned from the weekly bulletin at church that a new troop would be forming at Curé of Ars, #395. I signed up as one of the founding members. Most of the fathers running the new troop were former members of St. Ann’s parish in Prairie Village.
One scout in particular, Rob Runnels, was very disappointed to learn that he would not be the first eagle scout in the new troop. He was at least a year behind me.
I finished the requirements at some point in my freshman year. I needed only to go before a Board of Review of three officials from other troops. I don’t know why, but they did not like my attitude. They dressed me down for being, I guess, too flippant. Eventually they approved me after I promised to help someone else achieve the rank. Many guys quit immediately after becoming eagles, but that was never my intention.
I went to Camp Nash in 1963 with Troop 395. I was either Senior Patrol Leader or Junior Assistant Scoutmaster. Rob was the other one.
The neighborhood: Our new house was (and still is) in a very nice neighborhood. All the bedrooms were a little larger than those of our previous dwelling, and we also had a family room, a dining room, a fireplace, a double garage, a basement, a patio, central air conditioning, a patio, and a huge backyard. Oh, yes, it also had an attic fan that my dad insisted on running instead of the air conditioner all night all summer.
My sister quickly made friends with a girl her age name Trudy Shirley, who lived a block south of us. For some reason when Fairway crossed 89th St., the name of the road changed to Meadow Lane, which is the street that Trudy lived on.
Two boys who were one year my junior lived on Fairway. Sal Dasta was, I think, the nephew of Vincent Dasta, who had a construction company in KC and donated a lot of money to Rockhurst High School. He donated so much money that the football stadium was named after him.
Sal did not go to Rockkhurst. He went to Bishop Miege, the same school that my sister attended seven years later. The Dasta family moved at some point while I was in high school. I never spent much time with Sal.
The Cipollas lived in the house on the far right. They also owned the lot that now has a big house with large trees on it.
I spent a lot of time at John Cipolla’s house for all four years that I was in high school. His parents owned the house on the east side of the street on the corner of 89th St. They also owned the vacant lot next door. They had a daughter who was a year or two older (and a decade or two more mature) than I was. Everyone called her Sugar; I don’t know if that was her name or a term of endearment. Here are some of the reasons that I spent a lot of time at John’s house, and he spent virtually none at mine:
A regulation basketball goal on a large driveway with a powerful set of spotlights.
A swimming pool.
An entire vacant lot large enough to play touch football or softball on. It included a backstop.
High-quality balls of all kinds.
An arcade-quality pinball machine.
A set of weights and barbells.
Tumbling mats.
Like this, but more room.
A 9′ perfectly balanced pool table with leather pockets, overhead lighting, a set of excellent cues, and enough room on all sides. It supposedly came from a pool hall.
A half bath in the basement with a sign that said “We don’t swim in your toilet; please don’t pee in our pool.”
A sister with huge gazoingies, but she was seldom around.
A subscription to Playboy. I might have forgotten to mention this one to my parents.
There was also a beautiful set of golf clubs in the garage. They were there the first time that I visited him, and they had not moved a millimeter by my last visit.
John was adopted (and he knew it), but his parents treated him like the Dauphin. He had had polio as a child, but it did not affect him much when I knew him. He was not a great athlete, but he was OK at pretty much everything except sprinting. His parents had put in the swimming pool to help his therapy, and he was a good swimmer.
John’s was very similar to the one featured here. He did not play by sense of smell, but he was unbeatable.
Guys were always gathered at the Cipolla house. In bad weather we usually shot pool or played pinball. John was quite good at both of these activities. A guy whose last name was Joyce lived on 89th St. He was the first non-adult I had met who smoked. He was a pretty good shot at pool, almost as good as John. I was not nearly as accurate as they were, but I taught myself how to control the cue ball. I was competitive in everything except nine-ball, and I was quite good at a game that we called “table billiards” that was played with a cue ball and three colored balls.
One of my proudest moments was when some guys whom John knew from school showed up to play touch football. I was one of the last guys chosen, but I scored several touchdowns because I was much better than I looked. As usual, no one guarded me when I went out for a pass.
John and I occasionally went to the mall together. I remember that once he deliberately cut himself on the hand. He then walked into the Christian Science Reading Room and asked the lady at the desk for some MercuroChrome. I don’t know what she said, but he was giggling when he returned.
On another occasion we were going up an escalator together. On his left was another escalator going down—like an X. At the crossing point he reached over to a unsuspecting lady on the down escalator and mussed up her hair. I could not believe he did that. I don’t deny that I probably laughed. There was not much she could do.
John’s dad’s name was Frank “Chips” Cipolla. The family pronounced the last name sih POE lah.I later learned that cipolla means onion in Italian, and it is pronounced chee POE lah. Chips owned Monarch Electric Co. My dad told me that his business was sketchy. Actually, he did not use the word “sketchy”, but I don’t want a severed horse’s head to appear in my bed.
While I was away at college I learned that John had put a loaded shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I had never seen that shotgun. I wonder what other goodies he had that I never learned about.
During the last year or two of high school another guy my age moved in next door. He went to the other major prep school in the KC area, Pembroke Country Day. Their students were called the Daisies by guys at Rockhurst. I don’t remember the fellow’s name, but he was allergic to grass, and so he stayed inside almost all the time. He was an avid chess player, and he subscribed to chess magazines. Whenever I was around he cajoled me into playing chess with him. He was not very good. Any of the guys in Rockhurst’s chess club would have destroyed him.
Music: I began to become interested in popular music around the eighth grade. By the time that the Beatles arrived in 1964 I had become somewhat obsessed. Like most of my classmates, I listened to Don Armstrong (“DA the DJ”) on WHB nearly every evening.
Unlike my classmates I created my own list, which I called WAVE’s Prime 29, every week. I typed it out and saved them all for years. It was good typing practice, and it paid off any time anyone played “Name it and claim it” and a few decades later when Trivial Pursuit became the rage.
At some point my parents bought me a pool table for Christmas. It was not in the same league as John Cipolla’s. It was only a six-footer, and the top was warped in one corner. Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time in the basement shooting pool and listening to my records. I must have listened to Highway 61 Revisited at least one hundred times.
I listened to some of my mother’s records, too. I liked the French music and the Russian music, but I had no use for her Broadway show tunes. My dad, by the way, had no records. He was tone deaf. The only music he liked was monks chanting.
Sports: I followed all sports. My favorite was football, but it was obvious that my two touchdowns in the eighth grade would probably be the apex of my football career. My parents bought me a backboard and basketball hoop. My granddad helped mount it on the roof over the garage. It wasn’t quite high enough, and the rim broke fairly soon. So, practicing on it was probably counterproductive.
I spent a lot of time in the backyard trying to improve my golf swing. my dad had a copy of Ben Hogan’s book, and I modeled my swing on his. I did not follow his advice on the waggle, which had fallen out of fashion since he retired. I still have the book fifty-five years later.
I never got to be very good at golf. My swing was pretty good, but with my puny build I had to swing very hard to get reasonable distance. Moreover, my pitching and putting were not reliable, to say the least.
For a handful of years I spent a week during the summer at my uncle’s house in Kelly, KS. Those adventures, including some golf outings on a rather unique course, are described in Part 3.
Vacations: My dad liked to spend his allotted vacation time in, of all places, Cass Lake, MN. I am not sure why. We went there three or four times, and we always stayed in a cabin at the same place. The name of the place was Journey’s End or something like that. We had access to the lake, but we seldom used it. We rented a boat a couple of times, but my dad was not a fisherman, and he did not know how to swim.
Maybe the idea was to escape the heat of Kansas City. My recollection is that the weather was quite good on these trips. Nevertheless, I remember that in Iowa we once stayed in a motel that did not have air conditioning. The manager brought a tiny fan into the room. It did not help. The heat did not bother me; it seldom does. However, the rest of the family suffered.
Instead of water sports my dad and I played golf almost every day. The local course had sand greens like the one in Seneca, KS, that we played on when we visited Fr. Joe in Kelly. We played there a few times, but mostly we drove to other places in the area that had traditional courses.
Perhaps I should mention that my dad was not a good golfer. For one thing he was left handed, but he played golf right-handed, the opposite of Phil Mickelson. He had no power, and his ball always sliced. He was not a bit scientific. It annoyed me when he asked me what he was doing wrong. I wanted to say, “Well, your grip keeps you from snapping your wrist properly. Your stance prevents you from twisting your hips, and you always swing outside-in. You should fix all of those things first.” Instead, I just mumbled “I don’t know.”
His short game was much better than mine, however. So, we kept on playing for years. I don’t know if he enjoyed it. I enjoyed being on a golf course, but I usually ended the round in a bad mood.
Usually we drove up through the center of Iowa to Minnesota, but once we must have taken the western route through Nebraska and South Dakota. At my insistence we stopped at Wall Drug, the biggest tourist trap ever. I wonder what Wall Drug would have done if someone asked a clerk where they kept the aspirin.
We stayed overnight in Rapid City, which I thought was a pretty nice place, mostly because I found a radio station that played rock and roll music. The next day we went to Mount Rushmore. I think that we then drove up to North Dakota before we turned east to my dad’s favorite spot.
More than once we also drove up to Bemidji, where Jamie and I gaped at the huge statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the blue ox and the singularly unimpressive source of the Mississippi River. Bemidji also had a rather nice golf course.
For the life of me I cannot remember what else Jamie did on these trips.
They take education seriously in the Shawnee Mission school district.
Driving: During the summer of 1964 I took the drivers’ education course at Shawnee Mission East High School.2 I walked to the classes. It was the first time since kindergarten that I attended a public school. The rest of the students all knew one another.
At least one of the instructors was a (football, I think) coach at SME. On our first practice drive I was in a car with him and two girls. One of the girls went first. After driving very slowly and carefully for five or ten minutes she came to an abandoned railroad track and proceeded to cross it. The instructor was in the passenger’s seat in front with the window rolled down and his arm hanging out. As we crossed the track he smashed his fist down on the top of the car and announced “We just got hit by a train.”
The girl driving the car was paralyzed with terror. The other girl had to take over the driving while we were still on the track.
I passed the driving test without too much difficulty, and I received the highest score on the written test. It was fun to listen to the other students asking one another who was Wuh-VAH-duh.
I got my driver’s license on my sixteenth birthday. That fall I had a very minor accident in the parking lot of my dentist’s office. I did not do the right thing, and, for the first time in my life I could have (probably should have) gotten in a lot of trouble. However, by that time I had attended mass a truly incredible number of times and I had amassed a large number of prayers and indulgences. My guardian angel looked after me.
Amusements: At some point I learned how to play bridge. I don’t think that they taught me. Who would have been the fourth? I think that I must have read Charles Goren’s book on bridge that was on the bookshelf in the living room. Then I must have played with three of my high school friends a few time, although I have no memory of the specifics. It would be easy to get a foursome at Dan Waters’ house, and I went there several times.
I remember that once John Williams and I went to Worlds of Fun to hear the Shadows of Knight, the group that scored with Gloria. They were awful.
I went to a few movies with other guys from school. The school showed The Mouse that Roared, which was pretty good. I was very impressed by Peter Sellers, and the board game Diplomacy that the diplomats played in Grand Fenwick intrigued me. I discovered that there was a real Diplomacy game and brought it with me to Ann Arbor.
Twice I went to movies by myself. On the yearly Jesuit holiday one year I walked up to the Ward Parkway Mall to watch West Side Story. That was weird; I was the only person in the theater. The other occasion was to see Dr. Strangelove, my favorite move of all time. For some reason I could not persuade anyone to go with me.
The most memorable time of all of these years was when a bunch of us went to the American Royal auditorium in KC KS to see the greatest wrestling card in the recent history of KC. A few preliminary matches (one with midgets!) preceded the two headliners.
Bob Geigle and Bob Brown
In the second-to-last match the North American Tag-Team Champions Bob Geigel and Bob Brown (two local wrestlers) against Dick the Bruiser, the heel of all heels, and Cowboy Bob Ellis, the all-American good guy complete with white cowboy hat. Heels never paired up with pretty boys, and Geigel and Brown always cheated. So, for one night Dick the Bruiser became the world’s ugliest pretty boy. This may have been the only time ever that the Bruiser and the Cowboy teamed up.
Since it was a title match, it was best two falls out of three. The NATTC was a local belt, and so Geigel and Brown had to win the third fall, which they did through some illegal tactic that I don’t remember. They couldn’t let this belt leave the KC area unless Bruiser and Ellis were scheduled to return soon, which was highly unlikely.
What I vividly remember was that during the second fall Bruiser was lying helpless on his back with his head lifted a few inches off the mat. Brown went over to him and tried to push the head down with one foot. It did not budge. Then—I swear this actually happened!—Brown stood on his forehead for a few seconds while Bruiser used his massive shoulder muscles to keep his head off the canvas. Then, of course, Cowboy Bob came to the rescue.
The final match between WWA World Champion Gene Kiniski and local hero the Mongolian stomper was easily the best wrestling match I have ever scene. Kiniski wiped the floor with the Stomper in the first fall. The second fall started the same way, but then the support of the local crowd revived the Stomper, and he pinned the champ. Nobody got too excited. Everyone knew that each guy would
In the third fall the Stomper again overcame early difficulties to gain control. He had Kiniski in an airplane spin, which was the prelude to his finishing moves. The crowd got very excited, but somehow Kiniski’s boot hooked on the top rope causing the Stomper to fall on his back, and Kiniski landed right across his shoulders.
It was the most beautifully choreographed maneuver that I ever saw. 1-2-3 the match was over. Kiniski won, and the crowd was in an uproar.
Food: My mother was a great cook. Her meals were nutritious and delicious. We had my favorite, fried chicken, nearly every week. Dessert was not always provided, but sometimes my mother would bake apple or cherry pies that were to die for. I also admit to consuming a substantial amount of potato chips and cokes.
We seldom went to restaurants. Instead, my dad decided that we would enjoy steak dinners every Saturday nights. If the weather was decent, he would grill them, and I certainly cannot complain about the results.
My parents really provided a wonderful environment for my sister and me. It met or exceeded the lifestyle of wholesome suburban kids on TV.
1. The curé of Ars is better known as St. John Vianney. Curé just means “parish priest”. It always struck me as very strange that whoever came up with the name of the parish in Kansas used the French word for priest but the English word “of”. The Catholic Encyclopedia says that during the last ten years of his life (which ended in 1859) he heard confessions for sixteen to eighteen hours per day. I doubt that many of the twenty thousand who flocked to Ars every year were dancers. J.V. refused absolution to all who engaged in “paganic dancing.”
2. There is a town named Shawnee and a town named Mission. Shawnee Mission is the name of the postal district and educational district that includes those towns, Overland Park, Prairie Village, Leawood, and others. As of 2018 27,648 students attended classes at the district’s five high schools, five middle schools, thirty-four elementary schools, and six instructional centers. Over 400,000 people now live in the district, more than in Wichita, the largest city in Kansas.
I flew home to KC. In those days the airlines had student-standby rates that were very affordable. My parents picked me up at the Municipal Airport, which is right across the river from the downtown area. Landing from the west was a terrifying exercise in dodging skyscrapers, but it was actually more dangerous to land from the east. If you overran the runway even a little, you might end up in the Missouri River. All my records and my AR speakers also made it home, but I don’t remember how.
I had nothing scheduled for the entire summer. My parents lined up one task for me—painting our house. I planned to just hang around until I got drafted, and I also hoped to play a lot of golf. I also watched the mailbox closely.
My report card for my last semester at U-M (the first time) arrived shortly after I did: I got an A (speech self-study), a B (Russian lit), a C (anthropology0, and a D (linguistics). I was greatly relieved not to see any E’s or I’s (incomplete). Michigan issued E’s where everyone else issued F’s. So, as expected, my very first semester’s average was my best, and my last semester’s was my worst. But it was good enough.
My diploma arrived a few days later. I finally got a chance to look at my transcript a couple of years later when I applied for jobs. Nothing on it indicated that my excess hours in math would have affected my graduation. Maybe I could have dropped the Russian and linguistics classes and still graduated. I needed to enroll in four courses to be a full-time student, a requirement for intercollegiate debate, but nothing prevented withdrawals. Of course then I would have had to explain to the parental units why they had to pay for four courses when I only really took two. That might not have been too pleasant. I think that it all worked out for the best.
I wondered to myself how in the world I managed to get a B in that Russian lit class. Clearly those papers that I saw people turning in must have been voluntary and clearly not much attention was paid to attendance at the recitation sections that I completely avoided. I must have also aced both tests.
There was one other possibility. Perhaps the professor was both a caligrapher and a Detroit Tigers fan. Maybe he really gave me a D, but it was misinterpreted as a B.
I also received an envelope from the Society of Actuaries with my test results. I was astonished to see that I scored a 6, which was the lowest passing score. I somehow passed the probability and statistics test without answering a single statistics question!
I received nothing from the Selective Service in June, July, or August.
As a freeloader I could hardly complain about painting the house or any other mundane chore—mowing the lawn, trimming bushes, weeding the roses, etc.— that I was asked to do. I probably grumbled to myself while I was doing them.
My dad’s company provided him with a membership in the Blue Hills Country Club, well to the south of us and on the Missouri side. Dad was a VP in the sales department and was expected to entertain agents and other business associated. The club had a swimming pool and a golf course, but the only feature that interested me was the golf course, which I was allowed to play on for free. I took advantage of that feature as often as I could. I sometimes played with my dad on weekends and with my mother on weekdays. A few times my dad took a day off, and all three of us played.
Occasionally I played by myself. I was very careful not to impede or hurry anyone. I was a courteous guest.
Summers in KC are hot. On one such day I was playing by myself, as always carrying my clubs. I finished the front nine with an indifferent score and bought a coke. I then walked over to the tenth tee, from which point almost the entire back nine was visible. I was surprised to discover that no one at all seemed to be playing. This was puzzling. There was no indication of a special event.
With the course to myself I played three balls. This was strictly prohibited, but if I saw anyone approaching I would just stop doing it. I certainly would not be holding anyone up. Even playing three balls, I could play faster than any twosome in a cart.
I finished the round and walked past the clubhouse and the putting green. The assistant pro, Rick, was doing some maintenance on the putting green. I called to him and asked where everyone was. He said, “Are you kidding? It’s 106° out here.”
I honestly had not really noticed. In those days I had almost infinite tolerance for heat. I almost never wore shorts.
My sister Jamie had just finished the eighth grade. She was a lot more socially active than I ever was. She could also play the guitar. She had a book of Bob Dylan songs, and I could do a passable imitation of the Nobel Prize winner. When I sang in my own voice I always went off-key at the break, but I could pull off the songs in her book pretty well using my Dylan voice. I remember “The Times They are a-Changing” and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man” in particular.
The letter from selective service came in September. It did not begin with “Greetings,” as was commonly reported, but with “Greeting:”. I had to report for my induction physical at a building in downtown Kansas City on Monday, October 5, a day that will live in infamy. My mother drove and dropped me off. I did not see her again for eight weeks.
The exam was a complete joke. There were a few dozen of us. About 30 percent of the guys were carrying briefcases or satchels with documentation of some real or imagined ailment. All (or at least nearly all) of these people were declared 4-F. I suspect that fifty years later not many people realize how widespread this practice was. More than a few doctors were willing to attest to very questionable ailments like bone spurs.
The rest of us passed. Some people found out that they were color blind. Other than that, the doctors (or whatever they were) basically counted our limbs and stamped us Grade A if we were not missing any.
A common misconception was that they rejected men with flat feet. If I had amputated my toes (some people did!), mine would have resembled Donald’s or Daffy’s. Here is how the foot examination went: We all lined up facing away from the doctor. He called out “Raise your left foot; right foot; thank you.” The pause for the semicolons was no more than two seconds. Many guys never even got their left foot raised.
Arlo Guthrie and the movie Stripes claim that they asked about ever being arrested. If so, I don’t remember that.
They measured me at 6’1″, 145 pounds. I told you that I was skinny.
There were maybe twenty or thirty of us. I expected to be taken to the nearest training location, Fort Leonard Wood, about 200 miles from KC. Instead they flew us to Fort Polk, LA, which was 680 miles away. The base had an airfield, which was where we landed.
I remember that one guy announced that he wanted to be a butcher. He thought that this would be a good way to avoid going to Vietnam. The sergeant who was escorting us advised him that that would be terrible duty, and he should try for something else.
Heretofore I had led a quite comfortable existence that was rather easy to comprehend. The next eighteen months and five days would unquestionably be the most bizarre of my life.
Bob Dylan released the album John Wesley Harding around Christmas of 1967, in the middle of my sophomore year of college. I bought it shortly thereafter, and I probably listened to it a thousand times over the ensuing decade.
I never thought too much about the title track. I knew that Bob Dylan was familiar with Woody Guthrie’s “The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd.” I also knew that the last name of the famous outlaw was Hardin, not Harding. Dylan, or at least someone associated with the album, surely knew this last fact. So, the mistake must have been deliberate.
I did not really think any more about this until I recently watched a televised biography of the real John Wesley Hardin. The portrayal made it quite clear that JWH was one of the most ruthless, cold-blooded, and prolific killers in all of the west. Moreover, he did much of his killing while still a teenager. He was arrested at the age of 24, and he was sentenced to spend 25 years in prison. While there he wrote his autobiography, in which he claimed to have killed roughly forty people. Nobody doubts that he killed at least two dozen.
Here are the lyrics to the three verses of Dylan’s puzzling song:
John Wesley Harding
Was a friend to the poor
He trav’led with a gun in ev’ry hand
All along this countryside
He opened a many a door
But he was never known
To hurt a honest man.
The documented examples of JWH helping poor people, are few and far between, especially if you don’t count his many cousins. He spent most of the eight years after he left home on the run from the law. He definitely was seldom unarmed. When he opened a door, it was often to escape the law. He also used windows. He would just as soon kill a man as look at him, honest or crooked. No one ever accused the young JWH of having a strong sense of honesty.
It was down in Chaynee County
A time they talk about
With his lady by his side
He took a stand
And soon the situation there
Was all but straightened out
For he was always known
To lend a helping hand.
There is no such place as “Chaynee County.” The only Cheney County is in Washington, and JWH never visited there. He was married twice, but he spent very little time with either wife, and he certainly never took a stand with either of them. He often did lend a helping hand to his relatives, but usually the hand contained a knife or a gun. The closest that he came to having a job was his participation in a cattle drive.
All across the telegraph
His name it did resound
But no charge held against him
Could they prove
And there was no man around
Who could track or chain him down
He was never known
To make a foolish move.
The telegraphs definitely announced the $4,000 reward offered by the state of Texas for his capture. He was convicted of murder and, in a separate case, manslaughter. The evidence that he was involved in dozens of crimes is overwhelming, even if one discounts all of the bragging in his autobiography. He was tracked down by Texas Rangers in Pensacola, FL. After his conviction he tried to escape from prison many times, but he was never successful. He was released after seventeen years for good behavior. He did, however, escape several times prior to his capture in Florida. He made many foolish moves. In fact his whole early life was arguably a foolish move.
So, what in the world was Bob Dylan trying to say in this song? It is tempting to conclude that he was satirizing Guthrie’s homage to the two-bit thug of the twentieth century by praising one of the most notorious thugs of the nineteenth century. However, nine years later Dylan himself wrote “Hurricane,” which is squarely in the “trial by folk song” genre. In general it is “a foolish move” to read too much into Bob Dylan’s poetry, at least everything after the first two albums. He was a musician and a poet, not a crusader or a storyteller.
Here is what the Nobel Prizewinner had to say about this song.
I was gonna write a ballad on… like maybe one of those old cowboy… you know, a real long ballad. But in the middle of the second verse, I got tired. I had a tune, and I didn’t want to waste the tune, it was a nice little melody, so I just wrote a quick third verse, and I recorded that… I knew people were gonna listen to that song and say that they didn’t understand what was going on, but they would’ve singled that song out later, if we hadn’t called the album John Wesley Harding and placed so much importance on that, for people to start wondering about it… if that hadn’t been done, that song would’ve come up and people would have said it was a throw-away song.
So, Dylan evidently got tired of the song halfway through writing it. However, he still liked the melody, which is certainly superior to Guthrie’s. So, to forestall people from thinking that the whole thing was junk, he made it the title track. Maybe someone should appropriate the melody for a story worth telling. Here’s a start: “F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote no books ’bout the poor.”
I could find no recordings of “John Wesley Harding” by Bob Dylan anywhere on the Internet. The cover versions are decidedly not to my taste.
So, Andy Kaufman might still be alive, eh? I don’t know whether I would like to see him at age 64 or not. Maybe it is better to think of him as having died at the same age as Mozart.
I was watching Saturday Night Live when he first performed the Mighty Mouse bit. The feeling that I experienced is difficult to describe. The only thing that comes to mind is the words of Bob Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man: “You know something is happening, but you don’t know what it is.”
The same could be said of his stint as self-proclaimed Intergender Wrestling Champion. The best jokes, in my opinion, are also the longest. This one, which went on for months, culminated in his feud in Memphis, TN, of all places with Jerry “the King” Lawler. Incidentally, the King, who had a heart attack this year, promptly responded to the dubious news of Andy’s return by challenging him to a rematch at the next Wrestlemania.
The only other joke of this nature that I can remember was Pat Paulsen’s presidential campaign. Every week on the Smothers Comedy Brothers Hour a film clip would be shown in which the candidate got off the plane in a new city and held a press conference. He always began the event the same way: “Gee, it’s great to be in _______, where there are real people, not like those phonies in Los Angeles.” In the very last episode he landed at LAX and heartily proclaimed: “Gee it’s great to be back in Los Angeles, where there are real people, not like those phonies in the rest of the country.” It was only funny if you had seen all of the other shows.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus had the same appeal. The Spanish Inquisition sketch was so outrageous that it made you wonder if you had actually seen what you remembered. When the cardinals showed up unexpectedly in subsequent episodes, it was not funny in the way that people were used to. It was new and special for us who were there at the creation, or at least the first viewings in the U.S. If you recognized that Cardinal Fang (Fang?) was, in fact, Terry Gilliam, so much the better.
It was probably just the fact that I was young that made moments like these seem so magical. There were other examples, too. My reaction to The House of the Rising Sun, Highway 61 Revisited, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Cheap Thrills, and the White Album was similar. Watching the movies Z, Midnight Cowboy, and Blow-up also had a strong effect on my psyche. It wasn’t Uthat I just enjoyed them. I felt a strong bond to something unique that seemed to be transforming the culture.
I was wrong, I guess. They were just comedy bits, pop songs, and films. They certainly did not change the world. Even so, what a great feeling they engendered! Youth, as they say, is wasted on the young.
2. This horribly unimaginative song tied “California Dreamin'” as Billboard’s top song of 1966. Surely this was the worst song ever to become so popular. Sadler was a medic in Vietnam. His one hit made him a lot of money, but his life subsequently went quickly downhill. In 1979 he was charged with second-degree murder and pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in Nashville. He went to prison for thirty days. In September of 1988 he was shot in the head in a taxicab in Guatemala City. He died early the following year.
