The movie “United 93,” about passengers trying to take back one of the airliners hijacked on the morning of 9/11, was released nationally on Friday. All the reviews and talk shows described it as a highly charged event, so very personal to the survivors, and difficult for anyone to watch.
I looked at the full-page ad yesterday (Friday) morning, in The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. And I said, “Uh-oh.”
The ad showed the image of an aircraft, taking off, its landing gear still down. At its wingtips were V-shaped vanes, that immediately identified the aircraft as an Airbus product.
The United 93 flight was not an Airbus, but a Boeing 757. What a terrible gaffe. A major movie company does its best to re-create in detail the awful events of United 93, trying to honor the heroism and deaths of those people who defied the hijackers, and then puts the wrong aircraft in the ads distributed to the national print media.
This morning, Saturday, the ad in The New York Times showed the same airplane, but with the vanes airbrushed out. So I wasn’t the only one (how could I be?) to catch the mistake. But it is still an Airbus, one of the short-range versions, in the ad. You can’t airbrush an entire aircraft out of a movie ad, and there wasn’t time, apparently, to recreate the ad with a 757.
The ads should have been pulled entirely. As it is, in tomorrow’s Times, look for the ad either to be pulled, or for more airbrushing. This morning, the aircraft in the ad has a single set (two wheels, side-by-side) of left and right landing gear. A 757 has dual sets of main landing gear.
April 29, 2006
April 27, 2006
Invasion of the Word Snatchers
Four score and seven years ago, there didn’t seem to be near as much plagiarism in this country.
Call me Ishmael, but I think it’s on the rise.
The latest is the case of the Harvard sophomore, Kaayva Viswanathan, who was profiled in The New York Times just last week. Only 19, she had published her first novel, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.” This week, she is in the news because numerous passages in “How Opal” bear eerie likeness to passages in two earlier novels, “Sloppy Firsts” and “Second Helpings,” by Megan McCafferty. (If you ask me, she should have lifted McCafferty’s titles as well, but that’s another story.)
How did it happen? It happened like it always happens, one little white lie at a time, on this mortal coil with its myriad valleys and vales of tears. Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.
The author said she loved “Sloppy Firsts” and “Second Helpings” and just didn’t realize how she might have internalized their words. How true, that the world might little note, nor long remember, what McCafferty said there. It very well could have been any port in a storm, when in the course of human events it became necessary to really hustle to beat a publisher’s deadline. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, except when you are a college freshman who is five chapters behind on her first novel, with term papers and midterms staring you in your pretty face, a face that could launch a thousand ships, if only the seas were calm, and the tradewinds fair.
Or it could have been money. Filthy lucre. Money is the root of all evil. She was paid $500,000 for “How Opal,” which means she wasn’t going to have to furnish off her apartment with a two-room Roebuck sale. Temptation, thy name is avarice. Greed is a heartless tyrant, when it has you by the loins, and truth a lonely hunter.
Whither honesty? To be, or not to be, that is the question. In what degree of mind does it happen, that the route to happiness is seen to be paved with the golden tiles of another’s words? Might it not be that others have traveled that route exactly, with nothing more than surcease to gain?
O wretched occurrence! Such was the fate of young Viswanathan, when forward stepped that traveler who, on stopping by a prose freshet on a snowy evening, perceived ineluctably to have encountered that very freshet on journeys prior.
Yet, hope springs eternal. The sun also rises, on the bad and the beautiful, from purple mountain majesty across the fruited plain, in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Yea, though we the people walk through the valley of the shadow of having no self-respect at all, Karen, my spousal unit, in the thunder that comes at dawn, looked up from reading all the news that’s fit to print and cried, “Tomorrow is another day!”
Call me Ishmael, but I think it’s on the rise.
The latest is the case of the Harvard sophomore, Kaayva Viswanathan, who was profiled in The New York Times just last week. Only 19, she had published her first novel, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.” This week, she is in the news because numerous passages in “How Opal” bear eerie likeness to passages in two earlier novels, “Sloppy Firsts” and “Second Helpings,” by Megan McCafferty. (If you ask me, she should have lifted McCafferty’s titles as well, but that’s another story.)
How did it happen? It happened like it always happens, one little white lie at a time, on this mortal coil with its myriad valleys and vales of tears. Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.
The author said she loved “Sloppy Firsts” and “Second Helpings” and just didn’t realize how she might have internalized their words. How true, that the world might little note, nor long remember, what McCafferty said there. It very well could have been any port in a storm, when in the course of human events it became necessary to really hustle to beat a publisher’s deadline. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, except when you are a college freshman who is five chapters behind on her first novel, with term papers and midterms staring you in your pretty face, a face that could launch a thousand ships, if only the seas were calm, and the tradewinds fair.
Or it could have been money. Filthy lucre. Money is the root of all evil. She was paid $500,000 for “How Opal,” which means she wasn’t going to have to furnish off her apartment with a two-room Roebuck sale. Temptation, thy name is avarice. Greed is a heartless tyrant, when it has you by the loins, and truth a lonely hunter.
Whither honesty? To be, or not to be, that is the question. In what degree of mind does it happen, that the route to happiness is seen to be paved with the golden tiles of another’s words? Might it not be that others have traveled that route exactly, with nothing more than surcease to gain?
O wretched occurrence! Such was the fate of young Viswanathan, when forward stepped that traveler who, on stopping by a prose freshet on a snowy evening, perceived ineluctably to have encountered that very freshet on journeys prior.
Yet, hope springs eternal. The sun also rises, on the bad and the beautiful, from purple mountain majesty across the fruited plain, in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Yea, though we the people walk through the valley of the shadow of having no self-respect at all, Karen, my spousal unit, in the thunder that comes at dawn, looked up from reading all the news that’s fit to print and cried, “Tomorrow is another day!”
April 21, 2006
The boy most likely
Johnny Gerhart’s name came up again this week, in an incidental way. Oran Logan, a ninth-grade classmate of John’s at South Junior High School (Abilene, Texas, 1957-58) came into possession of scrapbook material that Oran’s mother had kept all these years. Among these was a page from the school newspaper, the “Coyote Howl” (coyote pronounced “ky-yoat,” in the West Texan dialect).
The page announced the results of student polling for ninth-grade class favorites. There were Friendliest Girl and Boy, Beautiful Girl, Handsome Boy, Most Talented Girl and Boy, Best All-Around Girl and Boy, Girl and Boy Most Likely to Succeed, Most Athletic Girl and Boy.
This page was circulated among an email classmates list. It was fun seeing again who won, and wry comments were passed around (“Bob Cluck was runner-up Handsome Boy?”).
Most of the comments, though, were about Johnny Gerhart, who was selected Boy Most Likely to Succeed.
It shows the power of even the unsophisticated to detect greatness. Not a single one of us in the hallways of South Junior in 1957-58 would have seen Gerhart coming down the hall and thought: “Harvard grad, double degree in English and French history and literature; at Harvard, he wrote for the Crimson (school newspaper); took a year off in 1963 to teach high school in Tanzania; a Masters and a Ph.D. in Public Affairs from Princeton; international educator and philanthropist; from 1969-98, a Ford Foundation representative all over Africa; president of The American University in Cairo, 1998-2002; named by Princeton’s graduate faculties as one of their 100 most notable alumni of the 20th century.”
Nope, we just saw Johnny, coming down the hall, on the short side, plaid shirt, Levi’s rolled up two laps, grinning and waving hello (I’ll bet he won Friendliest, too, but they couldn’t give two awards), just one of us. But we knew something. We looked at Johnny Gerhart and voted him Boy Most Likely to Succeed, hands down. How did we know he would be South’s most notable 1958 alumnus of the 20th century, 43 years before the Princeton vote?
That’s what the talk was about this week. It felt so good to us to find his name there. Johnny Gerhart died of cancer in July, 2003. We had hardly seen him in all those decades; he left Abilene, went to private school in Austin, then to Harvard and off on his international path of brilliance. But we didn’t forget him. We were among the first to see, somehow, the unforgettability that stayed with him wherever he went, among whomever he walked, from unschooled ninth graders to foreign kings. We felt included in a natural community with John at its center, the creator of the community, which is how, after his death, he was remembered by so many.
The eulogies and remembrances and stories were collected and now are maintained at the Website of “Alliance” magazine, “the leading magazine on philanthropy and social investment across the world." The first three tributes are from the president, the first lady, and the prime minister of Egypt. The rest, “Messages from friends and colleagues,” from all over the globe, scrolling down and down, are more informal and informative, filling in many blanks that our South Junior instincts knew were there.
Not a one of the 40 messages is from one of John’s South Junior classmates, a gap which I undertake to correct. Much of the affection is nothing new. “Always when we met again it was as if we were resuming a conversation that we had left off in mid-sentence.” Yep. That’s the way Johnny put us all first. “I have been lucky to know all kinds of wonderful, smart and original people,” says another. “But John was one of the very, very, very special ones.” No lie, as we used to say at South.
But he was also a collector of African art, and an expert bird watcher. I never knew that. He was also an expert storyteller, and I don’t remember that, but it makes sense. Many of his friends remembered John’s father, the Rev. Willis P. Gerhart, as anyone does in 1957-58 Abilene who met John’s father. There was no mistaking Rev. Gerhart’s intellect, or vivre, or fondness for good stories, or willingness to tell them. Being his son made Johnny mysterious. So austere a robed presence, commanding a towering white Episcopal church on South Sixth. Directly across from the church was a neighborhood grocery store, with wood floors and screen doors, owned by Eddie Baldwin’s father. Eddie was named “Friendliest Boy” in our poll. And just around the corner from these two lived Pam Oswalt, who was just gorgeous but, darn it, went to Lincoln Junior. That block on South Sixth must have been the closest thing to a vortex that Abilene had.
Now there are a couple of things about Johnny that the other messengers may not know. Wherever in the world he was, or whomever he was with, if Johnny saw a coyote, and called it a ky-yoat, he was only being true to his roots. Once a South Junior Ky-yoat, always a South Junior Ky-yoat. Secondly, a Ford Foundation colleague wrote about John and women: “His reputation for hiring smart, dynamic women was known throughout the Ford Foundation.”
When you went to junior high with Gena Jay (“Friendliest Girl”), Pat Wright (“Best All-Around Girl”), Crystal Ragsdale (“Most Beautiful Girl”) and Nancy Shoemaker (“Girl Most Likely to Succeed”) AND lived across the street from Pam Oswalt, you couldn’t help but take that appreciation forward. We haven’t forgotten Johnny Gerhart. And Johnny didn’t forget us.
The page announced the results of student polling for ninth-grade class favorites. There were Friendliest Girl and Boy, Beautiful Girl, Handsome Boy, Most Talented Girl and Boy, Best All-Around Girl and Boy, Girl and Boy Most Likely to Succeed, Most Athletic Girl and Boy.
This page was circulated among an email classmates list. It was fun seeing again who won, and wry comments were passed around (“Bob Cluck was runner-up Handsome Boy?”).
Most of the comments, though, were about Johnny Gerhart, who was selected Boy Most Likely to Succeed.
It shows the power of even the unsophisticated to detect greatness. Not a single one of us in the hallways of South Junior in 1957-58 would have seen Gerhart coming down the hall and thought: “Harvard grad, double degree in English and French history and literature; at Harvard, he wrote for the Crimson (school newspaper); took a year off in 1963 to teach high school in Tanzania; a Masters and a Ph.D. in Public Affairs from Princeton; international educator and philanthropist; from 1969-98, a Ford Foundation representative all over Africa; president of The American University in Cairo, 1998-2002; named by Princeton’s graduate faculties as one of their 100 most notable alumni of the 20th century.”
Nope, we just saw Johnny, coming down the hall, on the short side, plaid shirt, Levi’s rolled up two laps, grinning and waving hello (I’ll bet he won Friendliest, too, but they couldn’t give two awards), just one of us. But we knew something. We looked at Johnny Gerhart and voted him Boy Most Likely to Succeed, hands down. How did we know he would be South’s most notable 1958 alumnus of the 20th century, 43 years before the Princeton vote?
That’s what the talk was about this week. It felt so good to us to find his name there. Johnny Gerhart died of cancer in July, 2003. We had hardly seen him in all those decades; he left Abilene, went to private school in Austin, then to Harvard and off on his international path of brilliance. But we didn’t forget him. We were among the first to see, somehow, the unforgettability that stayed with him wherever he went, among whomever he walked, from unschooled ninth graders to foreign kings. We felt included in a natural community with John at its center, the creator of the community, which is how, after his death, he was remembered by so many.
The eulogies and remembrances and stories were collected and now are maintained at the Website of “Alliance” magazine, “the leading magazine on philanthropy and social investment across the world." The first three tributes are from the president, the first lady, and the prime minister of Egypt. The rest, “Messages from friends and colleagues,” from all over the globe, scrolling down and down, are more informal and informative, filling in many blanks that our South Junior instincts knew were there.
Not a one of the 40 messages is from one of John’s South Junior classmates, a gap which I undertake to correct. Much of the affection is nothing new. “Always when we met again it was as if we were resuming a conversation that we had left off in mid-sentence.” Yep. That’s the way Johnny put us all first. “I have been lucky to know all kinds of wonderful, smart and original people,” says another. “But John was one of the very, very, very special ones.” No lie, as we used to say at South.
But he was also a collector of African art, and an expert bird watcher. I never knew that. He was also an expert storyteller, and I don’t remember that, but it makes sense. Many of his friends remembered John’s father, the Rev. Willis P. Gerhart, as anyone does in 1957-58 Abilene who met John’s father. There was no mistaking Rev. Gerhart’s intellect, or vivre, or fondness for good stories, or willingness to tell them. Being his son made Johnny mysterious. So austere a robed presence, commanding a towering white Episcopal church on South Sixth. Directly across from the church was a neighborhood grocery store, with wood floors and screen doors, owned by Eddie Baldwin’s father. Eddie was named “Friendliest Boy” in our poll. And just around the corner from these two lived Pam Oswalt, who was just gorgeous but, darn it, went to Lincoln Junior. That block on South Sixth must have been the closest thing to a vortex that Abilene had.
Now there are a couple of things about Johnny that the other messengers may not know. Wherever in the world he was, or whomever he was with, if Johnny saw a coyote, and called it a ky-yoat, he was only being true to his roots. Once a South Junior Ky-yoat, always a South Junior Ky-yoat. Secondly, a Ford Foundation colleague wrote about John and women: “His reputation for hiring smart, dynamic women was known throughout the Ford Foundation.”
When you went to junior high with Gena Jay (“Friendliest Girl”), Pat Wright (“Best All-Around Girl”), Crystal Ragsdale (“Most Beautiful Girl”) and Nancy Shoemaker (“Girl Most Likely to Succeed”) AND lived across the street from Pam Oswalt, you couldn’t help but take that appreciation forward. We haven’t forgotten Johnny Gerhart. And Johnny didn’t forget us.
April 20, 2006
A long way, baby
Wow. The San Diego Union-Tribune has won the Pulitzer Prize. Wow. It’s all I can say.
It is a personal reaction. I worked for the old San Diego Union, the morning paper, for 20 years. When I first reported for work, in the summer of 1972, the Union, and her sister the Evening Tribune, were still in the “old building” downtown, at the corner of Second and Broadway. We parked on the street in those days and went down every two hours to feed the meter. The desks were crammed in so tight, you had to climb into your chair like a fighter pilot into a cockpit. We used typewriters. On the copy desk were scissors and paste pots. In the wire room, the teletypes of AP and UPI brought word in from around the world in a measured, contrapunctal rhythm I can still hear in my bones.
I am fortunate to be just old enough to have rubbed elbows with the last of the glamorous old school of journalists, the green-eyeshade, red-eyeball guys. Not old enough to have actually known a rewrite man or, the mother of all wishes, to have become one, but old enough to work with some people who did.
Those guys felt about journalism the way Texans feel about the Alamo. Hell, all of us out on the city room floor would draw swords for journalism. But the Union, in 1972, was not a very good paper. There are editors from that era who are still alive and can give you the story from inside the managers’ cloakroom. My recollections, the source of my “Wow” reaction this week, all come from the floor, or the street.
The Union didn’t command much respect, in my experience. I dreaded going to press conferences, and watching other reporters feign surprise, and inquire with an evil grin, “What’s the Union doing here?”
Ask somebody else about the politics and the policies in those days. My impression, and it is my own impression, from the reporter’s side, came to be that the Union was the morning newspaper for a bubble world, inside which mostly good news happened, nobody in the community was accountable for anything, God was a Republican, and if people wanted bad news, or news about Democrats, why, they could buy the L.A. Times.
In everyday reporting life, it worked this way. I was assigned one night to cover a speech being given by a major Marxist intellectual at UCSD, where Herbert Marcuse was on the faculty. “Give me a 12-inch story,” said the night ACE (assistant city editor) as I headed for the door. “No quotes.” The Marxist talked for more than two hours. When I stood up to leave, I was surprised my body parted easily from the chair.
Back at the office, I pounded out 12 inches, no quotes, gave it to the ACE. A minute later, he called me over. “Take out this, this, and this,” he said, checking grafs that summarized topics the speaker had touched. I rewrote to six inches, handed it back. A minute later, he called me over. “Take these out,” he said. With a limp resignation that was rapidly becoming familiar, I took the copy, went back, typed three short grafs of the barest information (he was there, he spoke, he left), and that was the story in the paper the next morning. My job that night was to prove that the Union had sent a reporter to cover the speech.
We formed a softball team and named it “The Sacred Cows.” When no one in management complained, I had an impish moment of supposition that no one in the Union front office knew what a sacred cow was.
Otto Bos, a damn good reporter, who covered City Hall, was our star pitcher. We had a lot of good players, and good reporters, at the Union in the old building, but we always knew we were outnumbered by the sacred cows. “It’ll get better in the new building,” we liked to say.
We moved into the new building in Mission Valley one autumn weekend in 1973. In one of those impossibly strange turns of events, the very first paper published in the new building was headlined by the death of publisher Jim Copley. After a time of transition, Helen Copley took the active reins of publisher.
Which brings us to Jeannette Branin, who must be mentioned by anyone passing around credit for this Union-Tribune Pulitzer. If you ask me, it started with her. Jeannette was a platinum blonde with black eyes that flashed and a gorgeous, throaty laugh that rippled out in smiles across the newsroom several times a day.
Jeannette had a heart of gold and steel. As Helen was becoming publisher, she called reporters in by groups for an informal hour of give-and-take. In her group, Jeannette stood up and, in her respectful, Kansan matter-of-fact way, head tilted slightly, said, “Mrs. Copley, do you know that your newspaper has sacred cows?”
That is not an exact quote. Someone in that group may remember it exactly. It was all over the newsroom before the end of the day. After that, things did start to get better. I know, sometimes it has been hard to tell. Of course a little local competition always helps. And now the Union-Tribune has won a Pulitzer. Wow.
It is a personal reaction. I worked for the old San Diego Union, the morning paper, for 20 years. When I first reported for work, in the summer of 1972, the Union, and her sister the Evening Tribune, were still in the “old building” downtown, at the corner of Second and Broadway. We parked on the street in those days and went down every two hours to feed the meter. The desks were crammed in so tight, you had to climb into your chair like a fighter pilot into a cockpit. We used typewriters. On the copy desk were scissors and paste pots. In the wire room, the teletypes of AP and UPI brought word in from around the world in a measured, contrapunctal rhythm I can still hear in my bones.
I am fortunate to be just old enough to have rubbed elbows with the last of the glamorous old school of journalists, the green-eyeshade, red-eyeball guys. Not old enough to have actually known a rewrite man or, the mother of all wishes, to have become one, but old enough to work with some people who did.
Those guys felt about journalism the way Texans feel about the Alamo. Hell, all of us out on the city room floor would draw swords for journalism. But the Union, in 1972, was not a very good paper. There are editors from that era who are still alive and can give you the story from inside the managers’ cloakroom. My recollections, the source of my “Wow” reaction this week, all come from the floor, or the street.
The Union didn’t command much respect, in my experience. I dreaded going to press conferences, and watching other reporters feign surprise, and inquire with an evil grin, “What’s the Union doing here?”
Ask somebody else about the politics and the policies in those days. My impression, and it is my own impression, from the reporter’s side, came to be that the Union was the morning newspaper for a bubble world, inside which mostly good news happened, nobody in the community was accountable for anything, God was a Republican, and if people wanted bad news, or news about Democrats, why, they could buy the L.A. Times.
In everyday reporting life, it worked this way. I was assigned one night to cover a speech being given by a major Marxist intellectual at UCSD, where Herbert Marcuse was on the faculty. “Give me a 12-inch story,” said the night ACE (assistant city editor) as I headed for the door. “No quotes.” The Marxist talked for more than two hours. When I stood up to leave, I was surprised my body parted easily from the chair.
Back at the office, I pounded out 12 inches, no quotes, gave it to the ACE. A minute later, he called me over. “Take out this, this, and this,” he said, checking grafs that summarized topics the speaker had touched. I rewrote to six inches, handed it back. A minute later, he called me over. “Take these out,” he said. With a limp resignation that was rapidly becoming familiar, I took the copy, went back, typed three short grafs of the barest information (he was there, he spoke, he left), and that was the story in the paper the next morning. My job that night was to prove that the Union had sent a reporter to cover the speech.
We formed a softball team and named it “The Sacred Cows.” When no one in management complained, I had an impish moment of supposition that no one in the Union front office knew what a sacred cow was.
Otto Bos, a damn good reporter, who covered City Hall, was our star pitcher. We had a lot of good players, and good reporters, at the Union in the old building, but we always knew we were outnumbered by the sacred cows. “It’ll get better in the new building,” we liked to say.
We moved into the new building in Mission Valley one autumn weekend in 1973. In one of those impossibly strange turns of events, the very first paper published in the new building was headlined by the death of publisher Jim Copley. After a time of transition, Helen Copley took the active reins of publisher.
Which brings us to Jeannette Branin, who must be mentioned by anyone passing around credit for this Union-Tribune Pulitzer. If you ask me, it started with her. Jeannette was a platinum blonde with black eyes that flashed and a gorgeous, throaty laugh that rippled out in smiles across the newsroom several times a day.
Jeannette had a heart of gold and steel. As Helen was becoming publisher, she called reporters in by groups for an informal hour of give-and-take. In her group, Jeannette stood up and, in her respectful, Kansan matter-of-fact way, head tilted slightly, said, “Mrs. Copley, do you know that your newspaper has sacred cows?”
That is not an exact quote. Someone in that group may remember it exactly. It was all over the newsroom before the end of the day. After that, things did start to get better. I know, sometimes it has been hard to tell. Of course a little local competition always helps. And now the Union-Tribune has won a Pulitzer. Wow.
April 17, 2006
A very Grand Canyon
Karen and I were in Arizona last week, at Sedona and the Grand Canyon. It was our first time since our marriage in early December to take some time off together. We called it our “practice honeymoon.” A real honeymoon is planned for, not taken just because I was off during spring break. We are thinking about Vancouver for our real honeymoon.
We wanted to be alone, mostly, while we were gone, but it was difficult. The Grand Canyon and Sedona both were aswarm with tourists. The words “Oooo,” and “Ahhhh” are universal, but instructions to pose, stop, turn around, come, and go, and go, crisscrossed the viewpoints in an international torrent. The Grand Canyon is so easy to get to in the 21st century. Buy a tour package, hop a plane in Tokyo, Frankfurt, Delhi or Sao Paulo, transfer to a tour bus in Los Angeles, and you’re there.
It was also spring break all over the globe. Young people at dawn complaining about the hour, and the cold (you could tell by the tone) in all the languages.
But the canyon commanded. In two days, Karen took 300 photos and I took five. And it was cold, at dawn and sunset, and very windy sometimes. We saw the canyon from Hermit’s Rest to the Desert View Tower, zipping back and forth in Karen’s convertible with the top down and sweatshirt hoods up. At our last sunset at Mather Point, we got some good light and a photo of our shadows close together on a white rock face, personal petroglyph evidence of our presence at the ancient place.
Thanks to Karen’s attention to detail, and my age, I became the possessor of a lifetime Golden Age Passport that will get me, her, and our family, into any National Park free of charge for the rest of my life.
We spent three days at Sedona, meant to be a retreat at a lovely bed and breakfast right on Oak Creek, but again it was difficult. I wish we could have visited Sedona before the jet age and the arrival of elbow claustrophobia. You can’t get into the great outdoors anymore, or into a Sedona café for dinner, without a reservation. But just as at the canyon, the beauty of the place commanded. We are already laying a plan to go back to Sedona next January, just after New Year’s, when maybe we can see more and hear less.
We wanted to be alone, mostly, while we were gone, but it was difficult. The Grand Canyon and Sedona both were aswarm with tourists. The words “Oooo,” and “Ahhhh” are universal, but instructions to pose, stop, turn around, come, and go, and go, crisscrossed the viewpoints in an international torrent. The Grand Canyon is so easy to get to in the 21st century. Buy a tour package, hop a plane in Tokyo, Frankfurt, Delhi or Sao Paulo, transfer to a tour bus in Los Angeles, and you’re there.
It was also spring break all over the globe. Young people at dawn complaining about the hour, and the cold (you could tell by the tone) in all the languages.
But the canyon commanded. In two days, Karen took 300 photos and I took five. And it was cold, at dawn and sunset, and very windy sometimes. We saw the canyon from Hermit’s Rest to the Desert View Tower, zipping back and forth in Karen’s convertible with the top down and sweatshirt hoods up. At our last sunset at Mather Point, we got some good light and a photo of our shadows close together on a white rock face, personal petroglyph evidence of our presence at the ancient place.
Thanks to Karen’s attention to detail, and my age, I became the possessor of a lifetime Golden Age Passport that will get me, her, and our family, into any National Park free of charge for the rest of my life.
We spent three days at Sedona, meant to be a retreat at a lovely bed and breakfast right on Oak Creek, but again it was difficult. I wish we could have visited Sedona before the jet age and the arrival of elbow claustrophobia. You can’t get into the great outdoors anymore, or into a Sedona café for dinner, without a reservation. But just as at the canyon, the beauty of the place commanded. We are already laying a plan to go back to Sedona next January, just after New Year’s, when maybe we can see more and hear less.
April 06, 2006
Death of an icon
Gerald Williamson is dead, at 63, of pancreatic cancer.
Gerald and I went to school together, first at Central Elementary School, at South Third and Peach in Abilene, Texas, and later at Abilene High School, class of 1961.
We were never best, or even good, friends. I would have liked to be his good friend, but I couldn’t get up to his level. In the past 40 years, I had seen him maybe twice, at class reunions. I knew nothing of his life, his family, if he had any children, what he did for a living, what were his successes, and his failures.
Yet his death shocked me. I have lost other childhood friends and classmates, including Dub Galbraith, who was in fact one of my very best friends. Each was heartbreaking, as is Gerald’s, but Gerald’s death is different. It is a shock, because Gerald was an icon.
With his death comes new information, for me, about icons. I realize now that the death of an icon always comes with a unique shock, a puff of unbelievability at the news. Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Lucille Ball, Bob Hope, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Princess Diana, Eudora Welty, Jonas Salk. We place a certain stake in icons to live forever. When they don’t, it is a blow. A shock.
Gerald Williamson was an icon. My icon. The first icon I ever knew. Most of us have a private icon in our past, someone we knew who had something we didn’t, but wished we did. We may not realize it, as I didn’t, until the icon dies, and the shock of the news surprises us, as I am surprised.
This world of mine is not the same without Gerald. I am newly vulnerable. Someone whom I tagged for immortality is dead. When death can fell an icon, what chance do the rest of us have?
It doesn’t matter that Gerald never knew what he was to me, or that my terms were so easy. Gerald was a Little League hero. He rode motor scooters, first a Vespa, and later a kind of motorbike called a Simplex. He let me ride, or try to ride, the Simplex one day. I turned the throttle. The engine screamed, and Gerald yelled: “Let out the clutch!” I sat there grinning, immobilized by the specter of doing something wrong.
Even in grade school, Gerald was very handsome and he had a beautiful wide grin. He had a perfect flattop. He was very funny, and made Three Stooges-like sounds and motions with his voice and his hands. He had a certain indifference to the conventional, that to a tentative little Methodist boy looked impossibly worldly. His mother was Dora, and she was funny. His father was Speedy, and he looked like Hank Williams. His address was 790 Ross. I don’t remember his phone number. I would not have taken it on myself to call him. What would I have had to call Gerald Williamson about?
Karen said she had a childhood icon, too. She also said that childhood icons tend to peak early, which I think is right. But for us, they are forever icons. Gerald and I went to different junior high schools and we played each other in football. In a ninth grade game, I ran over him. I was already in the end zone, but I ran over him anyway. Later I learned that he had told someone it was the hardest he had ever been hit. Sixty-three years old now, and I savor that still. I had made a mark, probably my first.
Gerald and I went to school together, first at Central Elementary School, at South Third and Peach in Abilene, Texas, and later at Abilene High School, class of 1961.
We were never best, or even good, friends. I would have liked to be his good friend, but I couldn’t get up to his level. In the past 40 years, I had seen him maybe twice, at class reunions. I knew nothing of his life, his family, if he had any children, what he did for a living, what were his successes, and his failures.
Yet his death shocked me. I have lost other childhood friends and classmates, including Dub Galbraith, who was in fact one of my very best friends. Each was heartbreaking, as is Gerald’s, but Gerald’s death is different. It is a shock, because Gerald was an icon.
With his death comes new information, for me, about icons. I realize now that the death of an icon always comes with a unique shock, a puff of unbelievability at the news. Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Lucille Ball, Bob Hope, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Princess Diana, Eudora Welty, Jonas Salk. We place a certain stake in icons to live forever. When they don’t, it is a blow. A shock.
Gerald Williamson was an icon. My icon. The first icon I ever knew. Most of us have a private icon in our past, someone we knew who had something we didn’t, but wished we did. We may not realize it, as I didn’t, until the icon dies, and the shock of the news surprises us, as I am surprised.
This world of mine is not the same without Gerald. I am newly vulnerable. Someone whom I tagged for immortality is dead. When death can fell an icon, what chance do the rest of us have?
It doesn’t matter that Gerald never knew what he was to me, or that my terms were so easy. Gerald was a Little League hero. He rode motor scooters, first a Vespa, and later a kind of motorbike called a Simplex. He let me ride, or try to ride, the Simplex one day. I turned the throttle. The engine screamed, and Gerald yelled: “Let out the clutch!” I sat there grinning, immobilized by the specter of doing something wrong.
Even in grade school, Gerald was very handsome and he had a beautiful wide grin. He had a perfect flattop. He was very funny, and made Three Stooges-like sounds and motions with his voice and his hands. He had a certain indifference to the conventional, that to a tentative little Methodist boy looked impossibly worldly. His mother was Dora, and she was funny. His father was Speedy, and he looked like Hank Williams. His address was 790 Ross. I don’t remember his phone number. I would not have taken it on myself to call him. What would I have had to call Gerald Williamson about?
Karen said she had a childhood icon, too. She also said that childhood icons tend to peak early, which I think is right. But for us, they are forever icons. Gerald and I went to different junior high schools and we played each other in football. In a ninth grade game, I ran over him. I was already in the end zone, but I ran over him anyway. Later I learned that he had told someone it was the hardest he had ever been hit. Sixty-three years old now, and I savor that still. I had made a mark, probably my first.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)