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Those Old Time Kid Movie Saturdays

January 4, 2011

At age 5 in 1943, I discovered Batman at the Studewood Theatre in the Heights.

It wasn’t the greatest job of acting, costume design, plot line, or driving literary narrative ever put up there on the big silver screen, but for me, at age 5 in 1943, the movie serial “Batman” was just about all I could think about for the twelve weeks it ran every weekend as a cliffhanging, ongoing story at the old Studewood Theatre in the Heights. In an oh so different day and time, millions of American kids my age and older were allowed to leave home alone every Saturday and make it over to our neighborhood theaters for a double feature, cartoon, and serial. We would be gone three to four hours on our own each Saturday – and nobody had to worry about us getting abducted or killed in the process. If we could negotiate crossing a few busy streets without getting hit by a car, we were going to be OK.

I had about a six block walk from our little house on Fugate Street to the Studewood Theatre on Studewood Avenue in Houston. It was no big deal. And I would not have missed “Batman” for anything, as long as my folks would spring for the nine cent movie ticket and extra dime for pop corn and coke. And I was so smitten by the benevolent power of Batman that I could hardly stand the thought of all those things the bad guys tried to do to kill him.

"HOLY BAMBOOZLEMENT, BATMAN! DO YOU REALLY THINK THE KIDS WILL BELIEVE US IF WE KEEP MAKING MOVIES IN THESE CRAPPY COSTUMES?"

We believed in Batman – no matter how corny he looks today by comparison to what Hollywood has done to generate a stronger, more virile attire for this great fighter for truth and justice over the years that have since followed 1943. Back then, all I had to do was spot that Batman logo on the outside movie poster slot to start melting under the power of the cape crusader who awaited us all inside the movie house.

For me, Batman was just the highly emotional start of a long string of Saturday movie heroes and villains that would parade before my eyes each week through the 1940s and into the early 1950s. After Batman, the rest came my way via the Avalon Theatre on 75th near Lawndale in the Houston East End. Our family move to Pecan Park in 1945 simply did a relocation job on the same kind of experience that had started for me personally at “The Stude.”

Over the years, my favorite serials included: The Purple Monster Strikes, The Crimson Ghost, King of the Rocket Men, King of the Forest Rangers, The Daughter of Don Q, The Phantom Rider, and a second Batman serial that wasn’t nearly as powerful to me as the first one of years earlier.

On these Saturday movie excursions, we also got a western each week, featuring stars like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, but also including lesser known heroes like Eddie Dean, Lash LaRue, Sunset Carson, Rod Cameron, Allan “Rocky” Lane, Wild Bill Elliott, Bob Steele, Jimmy Wakely, Tim Holt, The Cisco Kid, Zorro, Tito Guizar, Joel McCrea, and Randolph Scott.

Along with the westerns, we would also get a comedy or detective movie starring people like Boston Blackie, Charlie Chan, Sherlock Holmes, Abbott and Costello, The Bowery Boys, and a host of others whose names no longer ring any bells – not even with me. Throw in Bugs Bunny and we were looking at one quarter spent for the best entertainment package a kid ever bought at the movies for admission, pop corn, and a coke.

As I’m often given to say in declarative form: Those were the days, my friends!

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2010 in review

January 3, 2011

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

Madison Square Garden can seat 20,000 people for a concert. This blog was viewed about 65,000 times in 2010. If it were a concert at Madison Square Garden, it would have performed about 3 times.

 

In 2010, there were 327 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 456 posts. There were 907 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 328mb. That’s about 2 pictures per day.

The busiest day of the year was April 12th with 711 views. The most popular post that day was MLB Teams: Rename Some; Realign All!.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were mail.yahoo.com, mail.live.com, sz0024.wc.mail.comcast.net, webmail.aol.com, and mail.aol.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for united states map, map of united states, map of the united states, jerry lee lewis, and united states.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

MLB Teams: Rename Some; Realign All! October 2009
5 comments

2

My Top Ten Early Rock ‘n Roll Hits August 2010
16 comments

3

Jimmy Menutis: Houston Heart of Rock ‘n Roll August 2010
37 comments

4

Did Ty Cobb Get Away with Murder? March 2010

5

Happy New Year, Friends! December 2009
5 comments

 

Thanks to all of you for supporting The Pecan Park Eagle in 2010. I look forward to reaching even more of you in 2011.

We will continue to focus most on matters of interest to the history of Houston and Harris County in the new year, but we shall also continue with our fairly frequent factual and psychological explosions and implosions over local sports and our occasional presumptive excursions into literary license and parody.

Meanwhile, have a nice first Monday of the year, everybody!

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College Football Playoffs: A Very Simple Model

January 2, 2011

Dem Frogs Made All the Cockroaches Proud!

First of all congratulations to the TCU Horned Frogs of 2010 for once more fulfilling the ancient warnings of former UT Coach Darrell Royal; “Like cockroaches, it’s not what the Horned Frogs come in and haul away that hurts, it’s what they fall into and mess up that causes all the pain.”

Yesterday the Frogs of TCU fell into the “Granddaddy of ‘Em All,” the Rose Bowl and messed it up for Mighty Wisconsin, the Big Ten, and all other supporters of the big time power school football system that stands in the way of all little guy schools from ever having anything more than the once-in-a-purple-moon chance at winning big that fell to little TCU on the first day of 2011. The system still succeeded in keeping TCU away from the main banquet hall and the so-called national championship game. Those exclusive seats were reserved for two of the undefeated good old boys of Auburn and Oregon at a site and date down the road.

It’s time for taking the bowl setup and converting it away from the total snoozer they’ve ll become and reinvesting a few games with the fervor of a playoff. Here’s a simple model for doing a 16-club playoff, using the best paying bowls as the way to get there. For models, I am using the 16 top rated BCS clubs from 2010 and this past month’s calendar to set the thing up. The leftover bowls can simply fill their dance cards with all the “bowl eligible” 6-6 clubs they can dig up. They will be no worse off under this new plan than they were under the dull and deadly system in place now.

Round One: Friday & Saturday, December 17-18, 2010:

Friday, Dec. 17

(1) Insight Bowl, Tempe, AZ ($3.25m) #1 Auburn vs. #16 Alabama (Bama gets a second chance)

(3) Holiday Bowl, San Diego, CA ($2.075m) #3 TCU vs. #14 Oklahoma State

(5) Pinstripe Bowl, New York, NY ($2.00m) #5 WIsconsin vs. #12 Missouri

(7) Chick-fil-A Bowl, Atlanta, GA (3.35m)  #7 Oklahoma vs. #10 Boise State

Saturday, Dec, 18

(2) Alamo Bowl, San Antonio, TX ($3.125m) #2 Oregon vs. #15 Nevada

(4) Champs Sports Bowl, Orlando, FL ($2.225m) #4 Stanford vs. #13 Virginia Tech

(6) Sun Bowl, El Paso, TX ($2.05m) # 6 Ohio State vs. #11 LSU

(8) Outback Bowl, Tampa, FL ($3.4m) #8 Arkansas vs. #9 Michigan State

Round Two, Friday & Saturday, December 24, 25:

The surviving eight clubs play each other down to the four who will meet in two major bowls on New Years Day, 2011.

Round Three, Saturday, January 1, 2011:

These two bowls will determine our two finalists.

Round Four, Saturday, January 8, 2011:

The National NCAA Football Championship Game.

Notes: Don’t get hung up on the payoffs listed above or the actual dates of play. The schedule could be adjusted to accommodate equitable payoffs and rotating participation by bowls that ante up from year to year – and the schedule of games could be worked away from Christmas the NFL as much as possible. The point of this exercise is simply to show that a playoff system is workable. Teams that win have to play more games, but, of course, they get a bigger payday for winning than they do now. Pro rata pay to other NCAA schools could also be included as another incentive for general support.

Bottom Line: We could have a system that generates interest – and not just a regeneration of power and money for the few who now control college football with the BCS and traditional bowl game set up.

What’s your preference? Change? Or the status quo?

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The College Football Bowl System Sucks Big Time

January 1, 2011

The Cotton, Orange, Rose, and Sugar once meant everything on January 1st!

Years ago, before we knew any better, New Years Day meant the coming of college football’s “Big Four” bowl games, the contests that would pretty much help those lucky elitists with a vote pick the next national champions of college football, based on the results of whatever happened on New Years Day. Well through the 1950s and early 1960s, we were all a lot younger and far more naive about these things – and the television network-corporate sponsor money had yet to take over the major bowls and to proliferate, mutate, and water down the significance of bowls to the point of making sure we had at least one game on the tube every evening for nearly two-thirds of all the days in December leading up to New Years Day.

We had to have a bowl game for every brand of corn chip, car company, and insurance giant in the nation. It didn’t matter a rat’s ankle that few beyond the parents of the players involved cared about the outcome of these games, all a college needed to get into one of these bowls was a group of fans who “traveled well” and a “bowl eligible” regular season record that contained, at least, an even number of wins and losses on the game outcome tally sheet.

Who could ask for anything more?

From about 1970 through 2010, the new system brokers have been readjusting the significance of these bowl games with the infusion of new power and big money as the corporate payoffs to the most desirable colleges (those with the biggest free-spending travel alums and largest dent-makers in the home television shares market following.)

Bigger money bumped the Cotton down a few notches, replacing it with the Fiesta as the new “Big Four” companion to the Rose, Sugar, and Orange. A new system also came into play for making the computer a participant in picking the two most likely candidates for participation in a post-season national championship game. This Bowl Championship Series (BCS) set-up even found a way to throw a rope around the wealth so that the annual big game rotated annually from of the “Big Four” bowls to another – while also making sure that all the power schools had the best chances of getting selected every time.

Once in a while, a TCU or Boise State comes along and is welcomed by the BCS crowd with all the enthusiasm of a River Oaks host for a couple of cockroaches at a dinner party. In this case, it isn’t politically correct for the BCS hosts to call Orkin. All they can do is try to place the intruder at a dinner table where he is most likely to get smashed by the other invited guest. Today, January 1, 2011, the TCU cockroach is seated at the Rose Bowl, right across the table from Wisconsin. – Darrell Royal of UT tried to warn the world about TCU years ago. Now, here they are again – about to fall into the BCS-Rose bowl and maybe mess things up for one of those fine old monster-size Big Ten schools.

TCU-Wisconsin will likely be the only bowl game i watch. All others, including the Cam Newton-Auburn Anointment Bowl that’s set for about a week from now against Oregon have no interest for me. All these meaningless games just suck for wont of any real competitive goal connected to winning.

Hey, Deafened Ears in the Halls of Corporate Television Power, do you have to lose your entire audience before you see the rich valley of genuine opportunity that you’re missing? Before it’s too late, overhaul the bowl game system into either a 16 or 8 team playoff system that culminates in a truer national championship game. – Skip the elitist exclusion of schools like TCU and UH. Make it so that winning gets you a chance to be voted high enough in the poll to be included in the playoff mix.

Whatever you come up with will never be perfect, but it will be a damn sight better than this boring mess that now passes for the dud-filled icing on the college football cake.

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Houston’s Biggest Sports Stories, 2010

December 31, 2010

Once again, its New Years Eve. I can’t really improve on the piece I wrote last year about this annual date we all have with hope for better days to come. Having said that, here’s a link to “Happy New Year, Friends” from 12/31/2009:

https://thepecanparkeagle.wordpress.com/2009/12/30/new-years-eve-icons/

2010 was a little bit a year on the downside for Houston sports. I couldn’t begin to pick the biggest poison for all of us because they all ache worst for those whose hearts are buried deepest with a particular sport or team, but these disappointments come to mind:

Rice: The Owls basketball team did what they always seem to do most often – and that’s suck big time and often on the “L” column side of the C-USA standings. Coach Wayne’s Graham’s baseball team again beat up on the C-USA competition, but ultimately failed to qualify for a trip to the College Word Series in Omaha. The football team had a losing record, but they beat UH in the Bayou Bucket and also ran up a couple of stratospheric scores against the competition late in the season. Sadly, Rice still only draws about 15,000 fans a game for football and could really benefit from greater community support at the Rice Stadium gate.

UH: The Houston Cougars finally qualified for the March Madness tourney for the first time in this millennium under former coach Tom Penders, but their one-and-out showing was not enough to save the man’s job. James Dickey was now taken over the basketball program as head coach as has Todd Whitting taken over the helm in baseball as head coach from Raynor Noble. Football at UH, of course, was rocked when Heisman hopeful OB Case Keenum was lost for the season in the Cougars’ third game against UCLA. It was mostly downhill from there, with an encouraging substitute performance by freshman QB David Piland.

TSU: One of the bright spots this year came compliments of the TSU Tiger victory in the Southwestern Athletic Conference championship game. The Tigers are back and hoping for a resurgence in their baseball and basketball programs as well.

St. Thomas University: STU has resumed competitive basketball as the Celts. At least, they are playing again.

Houston Baptist University: The Huskies are off to a disappointing 1-10 start in basketball.

Pearland: What a year for this big little Houston area city! The Pearland little league baseball team made it all the way to the finals of the American Division Championship game in Williamsport, PA. Then the Pearland (HS) Oilers won the 5-A, Division 1, state football championship. Not much room for any downsides in this little neck of the Houston woods.

Houston Dynamo: The soccer team didn’t win anything this year – nor have they been able to work our a “done deal” on public support for a downtown stadium to house professional soccer in Houston, 2011 should be a pivotal year for the future of this struggling sport in our town.

Houston Aeros: I have no idea beyond my dim awareness that they seem to have found a level of mediocrity that spares them the spotlight from all of us barely casual fans. I can’t even call myself a fan. I’m just a guy who reads the sports page – and one who will check out anything there that looks like the standings in some area of competition.

Houston Rockets: The “Waiting on Yao Ming” show seems to have found a curtain with the recent news that the Chinese giant  has once more gone down for the season with another foot injury. Where it goes from here may lead to the same medicine that came suddenly to the baseball Astros in late season via the “addition by subtraction” route. Sometimes we cannot find our new way until we give up all hope in the old way. The Rockets have to let go of Yao to find their new way.

Houston Astros: 2010 was a disappointing year from a win-loss standpoint, but things did get better once the club let go of Roy Oswalt and Lance Berkman and started working overtime on a commitment to youth. Of course, Drayton McLane’s decision to sell the club is the big factor effecting the future of the Astros. I, for one, will be disappointed to see Mr. McLane go. We were fortunate in Houston to have him with us as long as we did.

Houston Texans: Very disappointing. To go from a 9-7 finish in 2009 to a double digit loss total in 2010 is pretty awful, no matter how close the boys came to winning. It doesn’t matter. The ancient Greeks had a name for this sort of thing in their theaters too. Any play that ended with a dagger to the heart was called a “tragedy.”

Houston Babies: Under the management of Bob Dorrill, the Houston Babies enjoyed the completion of their third straight season of vintage league, 1860s era base ball, playing a barnstorming schedule of games against other clubs, like the Richmond Giants, the Montgomery County Saw Dogs, Katy, and the Boerne White Sox. One hope for 2011 is that these groups will agree upon the establishment of a regular season schedule of league games for the spring and fall playing periods. There is no disappointment among vintage ballers. It is a game that springs directly from everything that made base ball beautiful in the first place. All we do is get together and carry forth what makes the game of ball in pastoral meadows the curative tonic that heals the ailing human spirit.

That’s if for me in 2010. If you have a favorite moment from Houston sports over the past year, please write about it here. The Pecan Park Eagle welcomes your comment.

Til tomorrow, if there is one,  take care. Stay safe. And don’t be stupid.

Happy New Year, Everybody!

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That First AFL Championship Game

December 30, 2010

January 1, 1961: A half century ago - and I was there to see it.

It was January 1, 1961 and, ah yes, I remember it well!

In their first year among the other founding partners in the new American Football League, the Houston Oilers were preparing to take on the Los Angeles Chargers in the first ever new professional football conference’s championship game at Jeppesen (now Robertson) Stadium on the University of Houston campus. And I was there with my girl friend, Sandy, to take it all in. We were young and fresh out of UH as new Cougars on the Houston job market back then, but we were able to obtain affordable tickets on about the north end 20 yard line in the preferred sun-at-our-backs west grandstands – in spite of that now seemingly dire financial fact.

What was the bare bones of that money fact? Well, as a 1960 psychology graduate, and waiting on an affordable opportunity for graduate school at Tulane, I was getting paid $339 a month as a full-time family case worker at what was then known as DePelchin Faith Home and Children’s Center here in Houston. Sandy was doing what most young women did with college training in 1960. She was not working as a teacher or nurse, so she had taken a job as a legal secretary. Of course, this was the era in which guys were expected to pick up the tab on all social outings, anyway, and, make no doubt about it, going to see the first AFL championship game of a half century ago was 99% my need and idea. Our female partners back in that day simply did not speak up and say, “Hey, Boob! Why don’t you make sure we get tickets for that first major sport championship game in Houston history!”

January 1, 1961: Our Game Faces Were On! You also dressed up for big games back then.

The game was great and quite exciting. The weather started brisk, but seemed to heat up with the action on the field before the 32,183 capacity crowd that showed up to view the biggest sporting event to that time in Houston history. “Old Jepp” was the Oilers’ home field during the 1960 inaugural season under Coach Lou Rymkus as Quarterback George Blanda and LSU Heisman Trophy Winning Running Back Billy Cannon led the baby-blue-sky adorned Oilers through their half of the first major championship season. Now all the men in blue had to do was knock off the visiting impostors from the West Coast to grab hold of the big boast that our Houston would be the permanent home to the first AFL football kings.

For those who stayed home that day, the first AFL championship game was being televised over ABC-TV with Jack Buck handling the play-by-play and George Ratterman and Les Keller handling the analyst/color roles. Forget instant replay and watching the game on a VCR later. There was no such thing back in 1961. You either saw it live or missed it completely.

The pre-San diego Chargers gave the Oilers all they could handle.

The Oiler offense sputtered in the first quarter as the Chargers’ Ben Agajanian banged home field goals of 38 and 22 yards for a 6-0 Los Angeles lead.

A 17-yard TD pass from George Blanda to Dave Smith early in the second quarter drew first blood for the Oilers, pulling the club ahead, 7-6, but that advantage failed quickly when Agajanian kicked another field goal from 27 yards to put the Chargers back on top by 9-7. A George Blanda field goal of 17 yards would put the Oilers ahead at halftime by 10-9.

The afternoon and our Houston fan appetite for winning went into halftime with a decided hot flash for the idea of winning it all.

#20 Billy Cannon racks up another gain on the ground.

The Oilers added some breathing room in the third quarter when QB George Blanda capped a drive hitting receiver Bill Groman in the end zone from 7 yards out for a 17-9 expansion on the lead. LA came back with a drive capped by a Paul Lowe dive run that again narrowed the Charger deficit to a single point at 17-16.

Going into the fourth quarter it was still anybody’s game at 17-16 Oilers and we all began to feel that curious teeter-totter between joyous hope and dreadnought fear of something going terribly wrong. Fortunately for Houston fans, the realization of dreadnought fears was little more than the hint of Houston’s future back in 1961.

Late in the fourth quarter, with the ball on the 12-yard line down near the south end zone, Oiler QB Blanda dumped a little pass off to RB Billy Cannon on the right side. Cannon took it on the fly and poured his heels into g-force traction. He took off down the sideline, coming our way on the other side of the field, and leaving all pursuers in the dust. Just as he once had done to Ole Miss while at LSU in 1959, Billy Cannon had stunned a foe and done the deal.

Our 32,183 voices roared as one. With little time remaining in the game, Houston now led 24-16 and we were on our way to our first citywide celebration of something that felt like a world championship.

After the game, many of us went to Valian’s for pizza. What better way to commemorate a championship. We poured pepperoni and anchovies all over the thing.

Now I’m just glad to be around long enough to remember things that happened in Houston a half century ago.

In spite of all the bad things people have learned to say about you since that time, Bud Adams, thanks for acting upon a dream that made big league sports in Houston available to the rest of us. And thank you, “Old Jepp,” for lasting this long as a daily reminder of Houston’s salad days in big time sports. It will be too bad for local history if UH decides to take apart all of your architectural exterior in the construction of its new venue on your current site.

Happy New Year and Fondest Memories, Houston! – And remember too – our best days are still out there – still yet come! Let’s all try to hang around for the party, OK?

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Biggest Sports Story of 2010!

December 29, 2010

Which is your pick of the litter?

My own pick of the biggest sports story in 2010 may not be yours so let us hear from you as a comment to The Pecan Park Eagle. My only guidelines for even considering our options for the year were these: (1) It could be anything that had anything to do with an athlete or sport of national or international renown; and (2) It had to be something that came to mind without the help of Google or any printed form of reference. The underlying supposition here, of course, is that, if we have to look it up for a name, fact, or anything else, it could not be that big of a deal and (3) It was perfectly OK to simply consider the question from an American sports fan’s perspective since that’s what I am. I would expect Brazilians to vote something like 100% on this matter in favor of their country’s 2010 first win ever in soccer’s 2010 World Cup matches.

Along my way down memory lane, I ruled out several things, many of which would only be deemed of superior importance to the participants and fans of a particular geographical area:

(1) The biggest sports story of 2010 was not Alabama winning the NCAA Division 1 football championship for 2009. Once you get fifty miles away from from Tuscaloosa or Birmingham, Alabama, the shrine of Bear Bryant begins to lose the glow of its elephantine self-importance to the cry of neighboring war eagles.

(2) It also was not the New Orleans Saints playing and winning their first Super Bowl in history. The Saints even getting to the big game was about as random as the storm named Katrina that first inspired national sympathy for the team’s achievement. After all, the club had been trying to get there for over forty years. Wasn’t it about time they succeeded, anyway – storm be damned upon their city or not?

(3) It was not the NCAA Division 1 basketball champions for 2010. I cannot even recall who that was. Had I gone to that school, or had I lived in that area of the country, I’m sure I could tell you – or even make a case in behalf of my alma mater.

(4) It was not the total collapse of Tiger’s Wood’s reputation, marriage, privacy, financial empire, or golf game, but Tiger and sweet old Jessie James, the ex-husband of actress Sandra Bullock, ran a neck-and-neck tie for the most disingenuous apology for 2010.

(5) It was not Brazil winning the World Cup, notwithstanding the power of the Brazilian vote or the American soccer lobby vote. Any big win in  soccer in any year will ever be the major thing that happens on my calendar – and my attitude is not parochial. The world’s view of the support is. Soccer in the USA will continue to be the “sport” which allows our kids to break into sweat while they are growing into the desk jobs they will occupy for the rest of their lives as adults working for Chinese-owned companies on American soil.

(6) It was not the Texas Rangers reaching the World Series for the first time under the brief leadership watch of President Nolan Ryan, nor was it the patched-together Giants winning the 2010 World Series for the first time since their 1958 move to San Francisco. (See previous thoughts on the 2010 success of football’s New Orleans Saints for further explanation.)

(7) It was not the TCU Horned Frogs going undefeated in the 2010 NCAA Division 1 football season and qualifying as a BCS participant in the Rose Bowl a few days from now against Wisconsin. TCU had to win all twelve of their games and be perfect enough in that way to receive any kind of invitation to the dance, even though they have no chance of winning the big prize, a national crown in football. Under the present system, TCU could repeat this year’s performance for the next ten years running and still be denied an opportunity to play for the national championship.

None of those things are my pick for the biggest sports story of 2010. My pick is more like a loaded gun that has now been cocked and aimed at 2011 – and maybe at several years to come. My choice is the Philadelphia Phillies of Major League Baseball signing starting pitcher Cliff Lee and ending up the year with arguably the greatest collection of four ace starters in baseball History. With Cliff Lee, Roy Halladay, Cole Hamels, and Roy Oswalt manning four of the five starter spots in the Phillies pitching rotation, what are the odds of that club now taking most of the three-game series they play next season? And how often do you think the Phillies may head to the ninth inning with a league to protect next year? Man! If closer Brad Lidge has his head and his arm in shape in 2011, he has a chance to set a stratospheric record for saves pitching behind this group.

You may disagree, but my pick is the greatest pitching show on earth that now sets up its tent in Philadelphia next baseball season. I can’t wait to see how the best staff on paper now performs on the field of actual play, where the real results are determined.

Please check in with your own opinions. Maybe your memories are more far-reaching than my own.

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The Art of Time Framing Our Lives

December 28, 2010

“The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.” - Salvador Dali

I still remember the first time I embraced this thought. It was June 1950, the day after North Korea’s invasion of South Korea. I was only 12 years old, but I was also a product of my generation. We didn’t need a political conference in Washington to discuss what this action meant. Even we kids knew what it meant. – It meant war, even if the official description of our United States military “police action” presence on the Korean peninsula was never updated to “war” status over the next three years of hostile fire action and the loss of American lives.

I remember thinking: “It’s 1950. Five years ago, in 1945, we were all celebrating the end of of World War II – and I was just a little kid. Hey! Five years from now, in 1955, I’ll be 17, almost 18, and going over to fight in Korea too.” It didn’t happen because the “war” didn’t last long enough to wait for me, but today we have a war blazing in Afghanistan that is using up the lives of young Americans who also were little more than small children when the thing started for us nearly ten years ago.

Where does it all end? It doesn’t. Like Old Man River, it just keeps rolling along.

I’ve never written on this subject prior to this morning, but my real subject here is not war and peace, but something I’ve always called out to myself as “time framing.” Time framing is simply a way of seeking another timeline perspective on the events of our lives. Why do it? Beyond its prurient pleasure payoff, it’s a way of time-altering our perspective on the events and scope of our lifetime experience for the sake of improving our more limited experience of things in the actual moments these occur.

It’s a way of drawing from, and learning from, the generally similar and our pretty-much-the-same past personal experiences as each applies to what is going on in our lives now. In other words, it’s something that may help us learn the lessons of history as they apply even to each of us in a moment of pain, threat, or risk, especially.

1939: "Gammy and me." My maternal great-grandmother and me at her place in the country near Beeville, TX. She was born in 1857, four years prior to the start of the Civil War- and she was once a big everyday part of my early life.

I will turn 73 years old this coming Friday, December 31st, and I make no apologies for my years. As far as I’m concerned, we are all here on borrowed time. When you time frame my first 72 years back to the last day of 1937, my actual natal day, we find that there has been something approaching a 98% turnover rate in the actual faces of Earth’s living, breathing residents since that moment.

Time frame it further. Do this one with your own age too. This past summer, on July 4, 2010, and we Americans were all celebrating the 234th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, that date alaso meant that I personally had been around for 30.77% of this nation’s formal history since that starting date.

Here’s a more personal time frame: I graduated from St. Thomas High School in Houston in 1956. That was 54 years ago this past May 2010. If I now slide the older me at 72 back to 1956 for an encounter with the 18-year old me that owned that year, what does the younger me think of the older me? Based upon my memories of him, younger me is thinking: “Man! If this old cat is 72 in 1956, that means he graduated from high school back in something like 1902! – What the the heck did people like him know about anything back in 1902?”

And what does the 72 year old me say to the 18 year old me? I don’t know. Maybe something like: “Age humbles. It teaches us what we were unwilling to learn earlier. It is a voice that only gets heard once we outgrow the ideas that (a) we are exempt from the laws and truths that apply to others; (b) we don’t need any teachers outside our own experience; and (c) our education begins once we open up to the wisdom of our elders. The elders can’t teach us everything, but they may help us skip over some bad spots on the road.”

Ask yourselves as you time frame – in whatever way you do it – who were the important teachers in your own life? If you cannot find any, you probably are not looking hard enough. Everyone we meet is our potential teacher at any age – whether we like like the lesson they bring to us or not.

At any rate, have fun getting ready for New Year’s Eve. It’s one of the great places for both celebration and reflection on this river of no return we all travel.


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Baseball’s 1st Performance Enhancing Chemical

December 27, 2010

 

There’s a difference between mind-altering and performance enhancing chemicals in baseball. Alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine have been around forever – or for what passes for the beginning of forever in most professional baseball circles, the 1876 start of the National League. These for-sure items, and a little stray loco weed thrown in to boot, may have altered some outlooks for quite a few players from the dawn of the baseball clock, but none ever proved to be “enhancers” of improved results on the field in the long run.

As we’ve sadly learned in recent years, a few true performance-enhancing drugs, hormonal producers like HGH and others, have slipped into use to produce stronger and faster healing athletes over the past two decades, apparently, that have literally made a major mockery of the record books, especially on the power-hitting side of the ledger. Now, while we are still in the legal-cultural side of trying to figure out what to do with the players and records involved, I thought it might be a little dark-sided fun this morning to take a look at where this problem began in the narrative of baseball fiction.

It started in the 1949 movie, “It Happens Every Spring,” starring British-born actor Ray Milland as the second most unathletic actor to ever take on the role of a baseball player in a film. (The worst miscasting came later, in 1957, when some other doe-doe Hollywood studio stupidly starred Anthony Perkins as Jimmy Pearsall in the movie, “Fear Strikes Out.” No one before, since, or probably forevermore will ever do a worse job than Perkins, but Milland gave Tony a pretty good run.)

The movie just played again this morning on cable. So, with the help of the DVR, I was able to capture these critical stills from the show itself. The one in the top here is the alleged quote from Einstein on the way scientific breakthroughs change our view of things. Interesting idea, but that is hardly what happened in the movie, “IHES.”

What happened is that a college professor, then a major league baseball team, and finally a major league team owner and a complicit university  were all able to parlay an unethical performance-enhancing substance into a revitalized college teaching and research career, a major league pennant, and an endowment subsidy for scientific research at the professor’s university, thanks to the gratitude of the team owner who bathed in the windfall of secret scientific breakthrough.

Here’s how it happened:

 

Simply soak a small sponge rag in the wood-reppelant fluid and place the wet rag in the glove behind the hole. A little contact between the ball and the liquid mix made the next pitch impossible to hit. The ball would literally jump over a swinging bat to avoid getting hit on its way to the catcher's glove. In the movie, nobody ever checked the glove.

 

In the movie, a chemistry professor’s months of experimentation is destroyed when a home run from a student baseball game crashes through the window of his laboratory and destroys his material in their beakers. While cleaning up the mess, the professor learns that he accidentally has discovered a wood repellant substance. While rolling the baseball that caused the damage down the surface of the research table, he sees that the ball simply guides itself around anything made of wood.

Professor Milland cannot make more of the substance that causes this wood repellant behavior because it is all a result of the accident and the confluence of chemicals that randomly came together. As a baseball fan, however, Milland immediately recognizes how he could use the stuff he is able to collect in a few bottles to help his favorite St. Louis club win the pennant.

 

"Mike Kelly" threw a ball with more hops than Barnum's fleas.

 

Milland takes an immediate secret sabbatical from his college post and journeys to St. Louis. He manages to get through all resistance from the club owner and manager by striking out the entire St. Louis club in practice. Signed to a pitching contract as “Mike Kelly,” Milland then pitches St. Louis to a pennant that is won on the last day of the season with his own bare-hand catch of a line drive up the middle. Kelly had pitched this last game on his own because his catcher-roommate and the manager had used up his special baseball concoction the night before, thinkng it was hair tonic.

Milland had told his roommate that these mystery bottles contained hair tonic to head off curiosity about the secret substance. It was the only time in the movie that Milland suffers a penalty for lies or deceptions, but the setback proves temporary. Forced to win a game on his own, Milland succeeds, but suffers a career-ending injury from the last-out catch. The St. Louis owner then learns of Milland’s college background and decides to build a new science building for the university – under the condition that Milland is forgiven for his deception and made chairman of the science department. Milland also gets the girl, who also happens to be the daughter of the college president.

The movie doesn’t cover how St. Louis fared in the World Series without Ray Milland/Mike Kelly, but we are left to presume they also won that one too, even without performance-enhancing assistance.

So, what’s the harm here, anyway? St. Louis got another pennant. The St. Louis club owner and fans were made happy. And major league baseball and all the other fans never even knew what hit them. It just goes to show you what’s possible when you secretly have the only pitcher in baseball who can use a little liquid stuff to make any baseball totally unhittable.

 

 

 

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The Night Before Christmas

December 25, 2010

6:39 PM, Friday, December 24, 2010: Astro Santa Arrived Today and Quickly Found a Home. ... But, How Did He Get Here?

There he is, snugly and quickly nestled into the McCurdy baseball pack. Surrounded by several ghosts of Astros Seasons Past, and another guy we know as Brownie Claus, Astro Santa appears to be right at home. He appears at home because that’s exactly where  he is – tight at home as though he had been here at least forty-five years or so.

But how did he get here? Here’s the answer in parody, but it is still the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

 

Twas the night  before Christmas, I drove back to our house,

From a long day of visits, with my family and spouse.

We stepped on the porch, which we left fairly bare,

And we sighted a package, now placed there with care.

“To: Bill McCurdy From Darrell” is all a note said,

So we took it inside, it was light as sliced bread.

And placed by the tree, as we scurried to bed.

But I just couldn’t sleep, toss-turning, instead,

As visions of sugar plums danced in my head.

There was only one balm for this nettlesome clatter,

And that was to get up and settle the matter.

By opening the box, and checking it out.

I’d then get some sleep; no mysteries about.

Away to the tree, I flew like a flash.

Tore open the package, in a one-gift-wrap bash,

What my eyes soon beheld, was a thing of pure beauty.

“Astro Santa,” so christened, prepped  a life of love’s duty,

To give to the kids, in the name of God’s Love,

A beat only found – in a ball and a glove.

So, thank you, friend Darrell, for your major part,

In feeding the soul – of this old kid at heart.


Thank You and Merry Christmas, Darrell Pittman!

Your grateful friend and baseball colleague, Bill

Darrell Pittman: As Good a Man as There Is.

Astro Santa Close, with Christmas Ghost of Roy Oswalt in Background,

 

“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.” 

 


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