(Please consider expressing whatever enjoyment you gain from reading by clicking on the "Donate" button above and contributing a dollar, 50 cents, a little more or a little less to my PayPal account. Writing is my life's work -- how I pay the bills. I hope you'll consider a financial donation. Regardless, thank you for reading! -- Ted Sillanpaa)
It's the type thing that could only have happened in a small town.
Knowing it could, really, only have happened in Eureka doesn't make me feel a great deal better.
Nearly 20 years later and I feel like a moron.
I'd gone through a messy divorce after I'd fouled up a marriage taking my wife for granted and investing all my time in my two sons and hobbies that most 34-year-old men wouldn't have time for after a long, hard day at work.
I was 35, raising two kids (having a blast) and divorced. After a self-imposed, six-month ban on even thinking of how women fit into my post-divorce life, it occurred to me that I'd never really dated.
Damn! I knew I should've paid more attention to my wife. I cared about her and I lost her to a one-eyed truck driver who carried a big knife in his boot ... because I didn't pay enough to attention to her in the final months of our 13-year marriage.
I was working out every day at Cal Courts to burn off the stress of life reimagined for my kids and I. I wasn't the single guy cruising the only health club in town trying to pick up women. I worked. I raised my kids. I went to the gym.
My frame of reference for this new life stemmed solely from work, the gym and being a dad.
Working out at the only health club in my hometown meant that I was seeing the same women all the time. And, the only place I'd ever see women was at the gym.
I knew that I wasn't ever going to be good at the bar scene. It was 1989 and Club West and The Ritz were Eureka hot spots for people much younger than I was. The fact that I hadn't had a drop of alcohol since about 1981 made making the bar scene a questionable decision for me, too.
The last time I picked up a woman, all I had to do was walk across the Eureka High School girls' gymnasium floor and ask her to dance. We danced. We dated. We got married. Then, she met the one-eyed truck driver.
In month eight of my six-month, self-imposed ban on thinking about women -- I saw the most beautiful female I'd ever seen at Cal Courts.
I'm not exaggerating, OK? She was beautiful.
She had long, dark brown hair that fell all over the place in long, loose curls. She had near perfect, dark-complexioned skin. Brown eyes. Stunning smile.
She was, I decided, exactly the female I'd want to date at this point in my life. The last thing I wanted was to get seriously involved with a woman. Well, the last thing I wanted was to be divorced, but that ship had sailed. So, if was going to date -- why not imagine it being with a woman who fit the simple-minded physical requirements every man keeps stored away in his mind?
Plus, the amazing creature frequented the only place I went outside work and home. So, she was perfect. Her being a club regular made her more attractive.
On the most surface level ... the woman with the long, dark hair and pretty smile was ... perfect. She was erotic.
I know. Eureka. I was 34. What did I know from erotic? She was small-town erotic. She was also exotic -- to a man who only knew the women at Cal Courts. A man defines exotic and erotic for himself.
No pick-up line I'd ever used would work with this woman. I couldn't walk up and say, "Do you wanna dance?" or "Hey, would you like to go to the winter prom with me?"
Then, one day, I noticed she was looking at me.
I'm not that guy who thinks every woman is looking at him. I've never imagined being that guy who thinks he brings to the table the things that attract women's attention.
I'd been married awhile so, really, I figured that I was invisible to women.
The first time I saw her looking at me, I turned away. Thus, I broke the first law of displaying mutual attraction. I learned over time that making and maintaining eye contact is the first step.
She wasn't one of the women who waltzed around the health club loving all the attention she got. She seemed impervious to it or innocent. I couldn't decide, but I liked the idea of her ignoring the men crusing the health club looking for women.
Our eyes met a few more times from across the club. I smiled. She smiled.
Oh, yeah, this took weeks. I saw her all the time, but it took weeks to get from, "Is she looking at me?" to "I think she might be interested in me," to "Oh, there she is ... I'm gonna go talk to her ... "
Then there was a period of talking myself out of going to talk to her. It's hard to be 35 years old with the social skill set of a 14-year-old boy.
One Sunday afternoon, her and I were the only people in the club. I built the nerve required to approach this lovely brunette.
I decided I would say something like ... ah, I had a whole thing planned. I'd say I'd seen her at the gym a lot, joke about working out alone on a Sunday, then introduce myself and then ... then ... then, I hoped she'd take over the conversation.
I finally managed to be in the same part of the weight room she was in and walked up to her. That was a victory, honest.
She looked at me and smiled. A second victory!
"Hi ... I've seen you around here ..."
Oh, God! She'd seen me see her around there. What an idiot! I trashed my plan and cut directly to introducing myself.
She was shy. Comfortable enough talking, but shy. I thought that'd make it easier for me because I was incredibly bashful.
I could've sworn she was slightly thrown by me approaching her.
I figured she was put off by the sweat running down my face or something. But, it felt, to a guy who hadn't really done that type thing, like she was surprised yet pleased that I would approach her like men were always approaching women at Cal Courts.
She introduced herself. Her name was Heather and ... I didn't catch her last name because all I could her was my heart beating in my ears. She had a Latino last name, I knew that much.
Oh, I had some moves.
"Interesting last name! My family came here from Portugal and changed their last name from Rodriguez to Rodgers. How do you spell your last name?"
It didn't come of my mouth as smoothly then as it easily as it springs to mind today.
Still, bells and whistles were going off in my head. She was still standing there, smiling. And, she spelled out her last name. I listened carefully.
I maintained eye contact, a little like Charles Manson explaining himself during his probation hearings, I'm sure.
She spoke softly and I couldn't hear much. I only heard myself saying, "Yippee! Hooray! I can't believe it!"
I decided I'd take my small victories and leave with a smile on my face.
She didn't give off any sort of, "Don't ever dream of talking to me again, jackass" vibe. I took that to be a definite go-ahead to spend days and days contemplating what I could do next to know her better.
It didn't take long to realize that we'd talked for five, six minutes but I didn't know anything except her name and that she spoke the same language I did.
When I'd last dated, tons of things were givens. We were all the same age. We had roughly the same backgrounds -- kids at Eureka High School, right? What was there to learn?
Ah, I couldn't sweat what I didn't know so I looked this woman up in the phone book. There it was Heather With the Latin Name I Could Spell ... in Eureka. I scribbled down her number as I sat, alone, at my kitchen table.
She didn't blow me off when we'd met. The worst thing she could say to an invitation to a movie was ... oh, I thought of lots of terrible things that could happen if I actually even got her on the line. Who was I kidding?
I telephoned any way.
Heather sounded legitimately happy to hear from me. Well, given that I hadn't called a woman out of the blue in decades I supposed she sounded happy. She sounded happier than my ex-wife had the last time I'd spoken to her.
The small talk I practiced went OK. I steered clear of stuff I was really interested in like, oh, my sons and my custody case. She wasn't hard to talk to but I still didn't have a ton of chatter in my brain so I cut to asking her if she'd be interested in a movie, maybe dinner.
"Yeah ... sure ... I mean ... when?"
There was extended silence as though she was thinking things through. Cool. I was in no hurry. As long she started by thinking enough to agree to go out because ...
I was king of the jungle! When she said, 'yeah..." I ruled my world. The black clouds disappeared. The sun came out! All I needed was a marching band to play the Lovin' Spoonful's "Do You Believe In Magic?"
Only in Eureka could a small-town Dating Doofus who couldn't even imagine speaking to a woman wind up on a date with the woman he chose first, a gorgeous woman, an exotic, erotic woman who would get him back into dating shape.
I rocked! Where was that marching band, baby?
"Oh, how about Thursday night?" I said, returning to earth long enough to remember that I worked Friday night and that my kids had games all weekend.
Silence from the other end rattled me, but nothing could have prepared me for ...
"Aww! Thursday? I can't! I've got lots of homework ..."
A college girl? OK. Cool. Men my age dated college girls all the time ... in the movies and stuff.
"My parents don't like me to go out on weeknights either ..."
College girls go out when they feel like it.
I'd asked a high school girl on a date.
My euphoric self-talk turned to something like, "You incredible jackass! She's not even 18 years old? No wonder she seemed naive and surprised and ... her parents don't like her to go out on weeknights???"
To my credit, I kept myself from crying out, "Please, tell me you're at least 18!"
Hey, I know lots of men with solid reputations who wouldn't have blinked at the idea that she was young ... a girl who looked like a woman. They'd have focused on the "Yeah, sure ..." and the "Aww ... I can't."
I had a prize catch on my line and she was hooked. All I had to do was be patient, reel her in on a weekend ... and be able ignore that her parents didn't like her going out on weeknights.
My not immediately suggesting a weekend night threw her, I'm sure. I don't think many guys who asked her out and had her accept stammered about the date and time.
Boys were surely falling over themselves to date her any old night she was free.
Briefly, I hoped that I seemed like a cool, sophisticated adult who lived life on the edge and thought she was more woman than girl. Ideally, she'd think, I had lots of women and if she couldn't make it, too bad. Maybe I'd impressed her as some type of swinger as I talked my way off the phone.
So, I felt beyond stupid? So, I felt like a complete jackass? She could at least have a good opinion of me.
I tried to believe that knowing a girl bursting with beauty and sexuality would date me was just a good thing. Finding out that she was 17 would turn the whole deal into a tawdry memory and a complete loss for me. I really needed a win.
First time out of the box ... landed the woman o' my dreams ... except she was a girl.
Time passed. I stayed away from Cal Courts at the times I typically had noticed Heather working out.
I had this vision of shooting baskets with my sons, then 10 and 8, and a girl closer to their age than mine walking up and saying, "What about dinner?"
"Dad ... you were going to dinner with my friend Bobby's sister!"
Six months or so after the phone conversation, I noticed a tour group forming in my newspaper office lobby. High school classes often killed a day touring the newspaper plant.
Of course she was in the high school tour group! Of course!
Still just ... you know ... gorgeous ... based on what I could see from hiding and peeking at her from around the door of the conference room.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Eureka Memories: Traumatic gym class divided otherwise really happy kids
(Please consider expressing whatever enjoyment you gain from reading "Eureka Memories" by clicking on the "Donate" button above and contributing a dollar, 50 cents, a little more or a little less to my PayPal account. The blog is 100 percent financially self-supporting so if you find value in the work, I hope you'll consider a financial donation that will help me continue to present my work to you. -- Ted Sillanpaa)
First rule of gym class ... don't complain about gym class.
Second rule of gym class ... it could be a lot worse.
Take, for instance, the popular game that is now judged so anti-social and violent that it is outlawed in most schools. Consider, the game of dodgeball as it was played at Eureka junior highs and at Eureka High School in decades past.
Dodgeball.
The people who enjoyed and were good at the game were athletes, not bullies. So, we preferred to call the game War. (Well, lots of the athletes were incredible bullies, too. I wasn't. We just called it War at Winship in my youth because we didn't rightly know what smearing a queer had to do with our game. We were blissfully naive.)
War was everything that I loved and lots of people hated about gym class in Eureka.
The physical education instructor would choose two team captains. He always chose from the same pool of athletes, so I would get more than a fair share of chances to choose a team made up of elusive kids who could throw accurately and spot a ball in the corner of their eye and catch it just before it hit them.
I loved the strategy of selecting a team. Friendship didn't come into play until we picked the best players. Get 7, 8, 9 players into the process and then being somebody's friend played a role in your selection or whom you chose to select.
Life was simpler in the 1960s and 1970s when all we knew about games is that we played to win. People who didn't try to win in gym class had grades that reflected their lack of interested in becoming triumphant at any cost.
My closest friends were captains and, for the time, sensitive young men. We weren't the athletes who were bullies. We didn't need education code revisions to insist that we treat others like we wanted to be treated. Still, we never paid any attention to the fact that the same kids wound up picked last or nearly last every time we chose teams for War.
Gym class taught us lessons about a chain being only as strong as its weakest link.
Knowing that you were being forced to stand in line waiting to be chosen because you weren't very good at a game you didn't like had to have been traumatic.
We were sensitive kids, but ... we weren't going to pick a kid too early just to help him feel better about himself.
The two teams spread out on opposite sides of the basketball court. It would've been safe and civil if we'd put a team on each baseline under the basketball hoops in the full gym. It was, literally, war with teams using half the gym and throwing the volleyballs from one sideline to another. There was no time to react and anybody with a strong throwing arm, and hands big enough to grip a volleyball, could do some serious damage. (Even to the kids who stood with their backs slammed up against the gymnasium bleachers.)
I loved War, perhaps, more than any other gym class activity. I didn't question the barbarism because the kids who were treated in a barbaric manner never complained. If they complained, the bullies just made their miserable experience even more miserable.
It didn't make sense to announce that one hated War and hated being hit by the ball and didn't like to throw a ball at other people. Somehow such a statement would've been interpreted in my youth like this:
"Please. Please! Give the 7 biggest, strongest guys the volleyballs and let them stand right up front and, please, make them throw the balls at me ... full speed ... all at once. And, don't forget to aim at my head!"
The P.E. teacher would say the same thing before every War game.
"Gentlemen ... we're aiming for the waist down."
The P.E. teacher must've figured that comment meant he avoided being subject to a lawsuit. We all ignored him.
The target was always the torso. If that meant the slightly angrier, more aggressive War specialists missed the discussion of anatomy where it was explained that the head wasn't part of the torso ... too bad for the easy targets.
I wasn't a headhunter. Unless, I got a chance to take out one of the bullies who was a headhunter. If team captain types turned on one another, it seemed to please the coach and the other kids. Honest.
When I became a P.E. teacher at Cutten School in the 1980s, I let different kids pick teams. I'd have the athletes/bullies sit out sometimes so that the others could enjoy the game. It wouldn't have been hard to make War fun for everybody, but P.E. teachers in the 1960s and 1970s were, arguably, less sensitive than most kids in their classes.
Distance running is trendy now. At Winship in the 1970s, I didn't know anyone who like running "The 600."
Before the class activity and after calistentics, we had to jog through the parking lot, around the island with the redwood tree in the middle and back. It was about 600 yards.
We all hated it. The fact that some gifted distance runners, usually bookish types who weren't good at games, took it as their moment to shine didn't help. We loathed The 600. We'd finish the run gasping for air, even those of us who were involved in team sports.
How on earth could a jog of 600 yards have seemed so inhumane? My son's 15 and he runs 2, 3, 5 miles -- for fun or to stay fit for organized sports. My daughter, 13, decided to follow her brother's lead for a couple weeks and ran a mile a day -- easy. The old man bitched like an old lady about a 600-yard run. Running was hard and running wasn't cool. So, we despised it.
Eureka High P.E. teachers made things easier by making us run around that area where basketball courts existed directly across from the gym. It was a small city block, not nearly 600 yards. We still griped and griped.
We laughed once, too.
Mark Parris was a tall, quiet, but truly funny kid from Winship. He said things we didn't expect. Did things no one else thought of and was, if a kid can be such a thing, pithy.
Mostly, Mark was funny. He was funnier than I ever remember him being by sheer accident, though.
The run around that tiny block at EHS required we file past the cement post that was used to help block the school driveway with a chain after school hours.
The posts on either side of the driveway were about hip high to most kids -- maybe a little higher for some. A little lower for taller kid like Mark Parris.
Kids likely jogged by those cement posts for 25 years thinking, "I should jump over that thing." I say it was likely because history indicates that high school boys had a boundless ability to come up with stupid ideas. And, trying to jump a cement post while jogging was about as stupid an idea as one can imagine.
Mark Parris was an A student and more thoughtful than most. Then, one morning, he decided to jog at the cement post, put both hands on top and try to vault it ... legs spread wide ... to impress us and make us laugh.
He made us laugh.
Little is funnier to a group of teen boys than to see a friend slam his crotch directly into a cement pole. I was there. I'm absolutely certain. It wasn't just the sight of Mark Parris slamming his crotch into the cement pole that was hysterically funny.
Boys know that nothing hurts like getting hit, ah, down there. I broke into tears and moaned for nearly a half hour once ... when struck in the nether region by a plastic baseball tossed gently in my direction. It hit a soft spot. Mark Parris slammed his boy body parts into a cement post.
It has been over 35 years and the story makes me smile more every time I tell it. I've only told it 100, 200 times.
The question that went unasked when playing War was, "Why are we playing a game where we try to hurt each other?"
The question I had about running 600 yards was, "Why are we running at all?" I'm not sure a P.E. teacher of that time could've explained cardiovascular fitness to me or anybody else. Not that jogging 3, 4, 5 minutes was a cardio workout. We ran because, you ran in gym class. You played a game. You took a shower.
Who didn't despise school square dancing?
Oh? We all hated it?
Square dancing was to some just as traumatic as being chosen last for War was to others. I dreaded the long walk toward a long line of girls to find one whose eyes didn't shout, "Don't ask me! DON'T ask ME to dance!"
In my square dancing youth, every girl's eyes seemed to be shouting that at me. And, I was in the middle of the pack of boys girls could tolerate, I figured. There were guys girls wanted no part of ... ever.
Square dancing was supposed to teach social skills. However, just forcing a group of boys to each pick a girl and ask them to square dance doesn't do anything but reinforce to the cool kids that they stayed together because they were superior and to remind the rest of us that we didn't understand anything about ourselves, our primal urges or the other sex.
Winship was nightmarish for me. I had worry warts on my hands. The only reason I never had a girl refuse to dance with me is that I was a good judge of where I stood in the social order and asked girls in their gender's corresponding order to dance.
Square dancing actually taught interactive gender diplomacy.
I would never in a million years have rushed over to ask Brenda Anderson or Rene Rosenberg to square dance. Never! I decided who was in which league and they were way out of my league. So, I'd leave room for the popular dudes to get to the popular girls and get on with it.
If P.E. teachers wanted to teach social skills, they could've let us pick partners and then shook the couples up so that the popular boys had to dance with girls not their equal in the brutal high school societal structure. Brenda Anderson or Rene Rosenberg would've had to dance with me and found it was tolerable to dance with a guy too nervous to speak to them. Maybe, I'd have found Brenda Anderson a chatterbox and not just a girls I thought was prettier than any girl at Winship.
But, teachers just stood there and started the record player.
Nothing happens in gym class these days, you know? It's all different. It's like a free period to most kids who balk at games and don't care what the P.E. teacher says.
My son insisted that 98% of the kids in his middle school class refused to run the mile ... ever. The mile run at Green Valley Middle School became my son trying to run down a magnificently conditioned eighth-grade girl who could run like the wind. The other kids walked.
"I would've caught her in the final 400 yards today," he once said, "but, I had to weave in and out of the kids who just walk."
Last year at his private Catholic high school, he complained that P.E. class was wasted walking around the track.
"I feel like an idiot. If I walk, I hate it. Today I ran the entire 15 minutes and ran past a girl who give me trouble for showing off," he said. "I'm just getting a workout in. What should I do?"
I told him it could've been worse. He could've had to ask her to square dance with him.
First rule of gym class ... don't complain about gym class.
Second rule of gym class ... it could be a lot worse.
Take, for instance, the popular game that is now judged so anti-social and violent that it is outlawed in most schools. Consider, the game of dodgeball as it was played at Eureka junior highs and at Eureka High School in decades past.
Dodgeball.
The people who enjoyed and were good at the game were athletes, not bullies. So, we preferred to call the game War. (Well, lots of the athletes were incredible bullies, too. I wasn't. We just called it War at Winship in my youth because we didn't rightly know what smearing a queer had to do with our game. We were blissfully naive.)
War was everything that I loved and lots of people hated about gym class in Eureka.
The physical education instructor would choose two team captains. He always chose from the same pool of athletes, so I would get more than a fair share of chances to choose a team made up of elusive kids who could throw accurately and spot a ball in the corner of their eye and catch it just before it hit them.
I loved the strategy of selecting a team. Friendship didn't come into play until we picked the best players. Get 7, 8, 9 players into the process and then being somebody's friend played a role in your selection or whom you chose to select.
Life was simpler in the 1960s and 1970s when all we knew about games is that we played to win. People who didn't try to win in gym class had grades that reflected their lack of interested in becoming triumphant at any cost.
My closest friends were captains and, for the time, sensitive young men. We weren't the athletes who were bullies. We didn't need education code revisions to insist that we treat others like we wanted to be treated. Still, we never paid any attention to the fact that the same kids wound up picked last or nearly last every time we chose teams for War.
Gym class taught us lessons about a chain being only as strong as its weakest link.
Knowing that you were being forced to stand in line waiting to be chosen because you weren't very good at a game you didn't like had to have been traumatic.
We were sensitive kids, but ... we weren't going to pick a kid too early just to help him feel better about himself.
The two teams spread out on opposite sides of the basketball court. It would've been safe and civil if we'd put a team on each baseline under the basketball hoops in the full gym. It was, literally, war with teams using half the gym and throwing the volleyballs from one sideline to another. There was no time to react and anybody with a strong throwing arm, and hands big enough to grip a volleyball, could do some serious damage. (Even to the kids who stood with their backs slammed up against the gymnasium bleachers.)
I loved War, perhaps, more than any other gym class activity. I didn't question the barbarism because the kids who were treated in a barbaric manner never complained. If they complained, the bullies just made their miserable experience even more miserable.
It didn't make sense to announce that one hated War and hated being hit by the ball and didn't like to throw a ball at other people. Somehow such a statement would've been interpreted in my youth like this:
"Please. Please! Give the 7 biggest, strongest guys the volleyballs and let them stand right up front and, please, make them throw the balls at me ... full speed ... all at once. And, don't forget to aim at my head!"
The P.E. teacher would say the same thing before every War game.
"Gentlemen ... we're aiming for the waist down."
The P.E. teacher must've figured that comment meant he avoided being subject to a lawsuit. We all ignored him.
The target was always the torso. If that meant the slightly angrier, more aggressive War specialists missed the discussion of anatomy where it was explained that the head wasn't part of the torso ... too bad for the easy targets.
I wasn't a headhunter. Unless, I got a chance to take out one of the bullies who was a headhunter. If team captain types turned on one another, it seemed to please the coach and the other kids. Honest.
When I became a P.E. teacher at Cutten School in the 1980s, I let different kids pick teams. I'd have the athletes/bullies sit out sometimes so that the others could enjoy the game. It wouldn't have been hard to make War fun for everybody, but P.E. teachers in the 1960s and 1970s were, arguably, less sensitive than most kids in their classes.
Distance running is trendy now. At Winship in the 1970s, I didn't know anyone who like running "The 600."
Before the class activity and after calistentics, we had to jog through the parking lot, around the island with the redwood tree in the middle and back. It was about 600 yards.
We all hated it. The fact that some gifted distance runners, usually bookish types who weren't good at games, took it as their moment to shine didn't help. We loathed The 600. We'd finish the run gasping for air, even those of us who were involved in team sports.
How on earth could a jog of 600 yards have seemed so inhumane? My son's 15 and he runs 2, 3, 5 miles -- for fun or to stay fit for organized sports. My daughter, 13, decided to follow her brother's lead for a couple weeks and ran a mile a day -- easy. The old man bitched like an old lady about a 600-yard run. Running was hard and running wasn't cool. So, we despised it.
Eureka High P.E. teachers made things easier by making us run around that area where basketball courts existed directly across from the gym. It was a small city block, not nearly 600 yards. We still griped and griped.
We laughed once, too.
Mark Parris was a tall, quiet, but truly funny kid from Winship. He said things we didn't expect. Did things no one else thought of and was, if a kid can be such a thing, pithy.
Mostly, Mark was funny. He was funnier than I ever remember him being by sheer accident, though.
The run around that tiny block at EHS required we file past the cement post that was used to help block the school driveway with a chain after school hours.
The posts on either side of the driveway were about hip high to most kids -- maybe a little higher for some. A little lower for taller kid like Mark Parris.
Kids likely jogged by those cement posts for 25 years thinking, "I should jump over that thing." I say it was likely because history indicates that high school boys had a boundless ability to come up with stupid ideas. And, trying to jump a cement post while jogging was about as stupid an idea as one can imagine.
Mark Parris was an A student and more thoughtful than most. Then, one morning, he decided to jog at the cement post, put both hands on top and try to vault it ... legs spread wide ... to impress us and make us laugh.
He made us laugh.
Little is funnier to a group of teen boys than to see a friend slam his crotch directly into a cement pole. I was there. I'm absolutely certain. It wasn't just the sight of Mark Parris slamming his crotch into the cement pole that was hysterically funny.
Boys know that nothing hurts like getting hit, ah, down there. I broke into tears and moaned for nearly a half hour once ... when struck in the nether region by a plastic baseball tossed gently in my direction. It hit a soft spot. Mark Parris slammed his boy body parts into a cement post.
It has been over 35 years and the story makes me smile more every time I tell it. I've only told it 100, 200 times.
The question that went unasked when playing War was, "Why are we playing a game where we try to hurt each other?"
The question I had about running 600 yards was, "Why are we running at all?" I'm not sure a P.E. teacher of that time could've explained cardiovascular fitness to me or anybody else. Not that jogging 3, 4, 5 minutes was a cardio workout. We ran because, you ran in gym class. You played a game. You took a shower.
Who didn't despise school square dancing?
Oh? We all hated it?
Square dancing was to some just as traumatic as being chosen last for War was to others. I dreaded the long walk toward a long line of girls to find one whose eyes didn't shout, "Don't ask me! DON'T ask ME to dance!"
In my square dancing youth, every girl's eyes seemed to be shouting that at me. And, I was in the middle of the pack of boys girls could tolerate, I figured. There were guys girls wanted no part of ... ever.
Square dancing was supposed to teach social skills. However, just forcing a group of boys to each pick a girl and ask them to square dance doesn't do anything but reinforce to the cool kids that they stayed together because they were superior and to remind the rest of us that we didn't understand anything about ourselves, our primal urges or the other sex.
Winship was nightmarish for me. I had worry warts on my hands. The only reason I never had a girl refuse to dance with me is that I was a good judge of where I stood in the social order and asked girls in their gender's corresponding order to dance.
Square dancing actually taught interactive gender diplomacy.
I would never in a million years have rushed over to ask Brenda Anderson or Rene Rosenberg to square dance. Never! I decided who was in which league and they were way out of my league. So, I'd leave room for the popular dudes to get to the popular girls and get on with it.
If P.E. teachers wanted to teach social skills, they could've let us pick partners and then shook the couples up so that the popular boys had to dance with girls not their equal in the brutal high school societal structure. Brenda Anderson or Rene Rosenberg would've had to dance with me and found it was tolerable to dance with a guy too nervous to speak to them. Maybe, I'd have found Brenda Anderson a chatterbox and not just a girls I thought was prettier than any girl at Winship.
But, teachers just stood there and started the record player.
Nothing happens in gym class these days, you know? It's all different. It's like a free period to most kids who balk at games and don't care what the P.E. teacher says.
My son insisted that 98% of the kids in his middle school class refused to run the mile ... ever. The mile run at Green Valley Middle School became my son trying to run down a magnificently conditioned eighth-grade girl who could run like the wind. The other kids walked.
"I would've caught her in the final 400 yards today," he once said, "but, I had to weave in and out of the kids who just walk."
Last year at his private Catholic high school, he complained that P.E. class was wasted walking around the track.
"I feel like an idiot. If I walk, I hate it. Today I ran the entire 15 minutes and ran past a girl who give me trouble for showing off," he said. "I'm just getting a workout in. What should I do?"
I told him it could've been worse. He could've had to ask her to square dance with him.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Eureka Memories: Carnival atmosphere all summer, every summer
(Please consider expressing whatever pleasure and enjoyment you gain from reading "Eureka Memories" by clicking on the "Donate" button above and contributing a dollar, 50 cents, a little more or a little less to my PayPal account. If you find value in the work, I hope you'll consider a financial donation that will help me continue to present my work to you. -- Ted Sillanpaa)
Butler Amusements was to Eureka kids in the 1960s what Nintendo is to youngsters of today.
Butler Amusements was the outfit that operated and, I assume maintained, the rides and attractions at the dozen or so carnivals that popped up in Eureka every spring and summer for decades.
Well, there were likely other carnival crews that set up at the Redwood Acres Fairgrounds, the parking lot at what was Disco before it became Bazaar before it morphed into Beno's and Pay Less before it became "that county office building on Highway 101 headed toward Arcata."
Butler Amusements is the only name that springs to mind, however.
Carnivals popped up in empty lots, too. Whenever a carnival hit town, it was an attraction. When my kids and I see carnival workers who look like escapees from a prison road crew piecing together the Ferris wheel and pint-sized roller coaster at the Westfield Mall in Fairfield, they ask things like, "Who would ever go ride those rides? They're not fast. They just spin in circles and ..."
I used to interrupt my older sons when they'd go off on the inherent stupidity they perceived to be involved in enjoying two-bit carnival rides.
I'd tell them about how my mom would take me to the carnivals in Eureka all the time to ride the rides, play the games and eat cotton candy. Mostly, as I recall, to eat the cotton candy, the popcorn, ice cream and to drink the most sugary soda a fat kid who lived for such delicacies could ever imagine.
There's no real way to make a little carnival interesting to kids who'd spent the morning playing life-like video games on a 64-inch, high-definition television. There was little to be said for spinning in tight circles for three minutes on some sort of whirly gig ride when the kids can entertain themselves with a mind-boggling, rockin' stereo sound system that fits in the palm of their hand.
The carnivals like the one that used to set up in a vacant lot on Broadway, headed out of Eureka to the south, were exotic and entertaining to us. Of course, we also got all geeked up to buy a vinyl LP with 3 "Herman's Hermits" hits and 7 or 8 intolerable tunes by the same group. Most of us thought the world started spinning backward briefly when we got our hands on a circular piece of vinyl with two Elvis Presley songs on it.
My kids make their own music collections on their space-age, hand-held sound systems. They'll never listen to "Meet The Beatles," and suddenly wince, "Why is Paul singing 'Till There Was You,' on here! That song's from 'The Music Man.' "
If we'd had iPods, we'd never even have been exposed to the music Col. Tom Parker forced Elvis to sing in those fer-schnizzly bad movies The King made to avoid competiting for radio air time with the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys in the 1960s. (I did like "Follow That Dream," however.)
The dozen or so Eureka carnivals were exciting because ... there wasn't much to do in Eureka so we all turned out for every carnival. In Eureka's heyday, we made nothing into something because it seemed that we all did it together.
The carnival that was part of the Redwood Acres Fair every June was better than the carnival in the Bazaar parking lot because there were thousands of us at Redwood Acres.
The Humboldt County Fair carnival was the best, for people who enjoy bigger, better rides, than the carnival in the vacant lot on Broadway. More people meant more friends and more fun and ... there was an exotic selection of food in Ferndale. Give me a chance to eat a dog on a stick and follow it with pink popcorn and an ice cream swirl and I'd forget the rides. After the merry go round ended, it wasn't a long walk to the exhibit hall where they were selling homemade cookies.
This carnival that sets up in my new town is ... empty. The only thing more depressing that all the carnival lights and the roaring heavy metal music blaring into the night two blocks from Macy's is the sight of 6 or 7 teenagers wandering aimlessly and alone inside the carnival gates.
We had to line up behind more than 6 or 7 kids to even take a shot at throwing ping pong balls trying to land one in a goldfish bowl to win the goldfish inside. (Most traumatic existence, all-time, ever: Goldfish who lived in a carnival gold fish bowl.)
We could've bought a goldfish at Fin N' Feather for a quarter. But, we'd spend over a buck to stand for a half hour trying to bounce a ping pong ball into a fish bowl filled with water. If we did win the fish, we'd bitch and moan about having to carry it around the carnival.
Every game was rigged. I'm certain my mom, all parents, knew that. They didn't tell us, all the time. It seems like each of my friends and I individually figured out how different games were fixed to make it near impossible to win, but we did it over years and on our own. If our parents said, "You can't really win that game ... " we'd have just argued.
We threw darts at under-inflated balloons that were impossible to pop. Then, when we did pop a balloon, we'd learn that the accomplishment meant we didn't win one of the many colorful stuffed animals, but rather bought us a chance to pop 2 more balloons to win ... a 3-inch tall stuffed tucan.
The sounds of the carnival distracted us from the games that, really, almost nobody could win. I was a baseball player. I could do nothing if not throw a ball straight and hard, hitting whatever target was placed before me. When my mom tried to talk me out of taking 50 cents to try to knock down milk jugs, I completely ignored her.
"I throw strikes mom!"
The logic of a 9-year-old Cutten League baseball pitcher.
The music, the laughter, the screams from teens riding what seemed to be death-defying rides hadn't given me a chance to pause and watch how the game with the milk jugs worked. So, when I finally got to the front of the line I had talked myself into really wanting a big, stuffed, brown monkey. Really! I wanted that monkey!
When the carny reached down under the counter that separated me from the milk jugs and came up with three, heavy, old, 16-inch softballs ... I died a little on the inside. Heck, I could throw any kind of baseball straight. But ... gee whiz ...
I couldn't even get my hand around a softball 16 inches in circumference. I was too young to even know what circumference meant so I just turned to my mom, with my wee, chubby hands grasping the huge, heavy ball.
"Dammit! See? Next time you'll listen to me!"
Well, I wouldn't actually listen, but I wouldn't knock down those jugs with those monster softball balls either.
The games got easier when we got older and understood how to beat them ... er, understood when we had a chance to beat them. I figured out the dart game angle. One of my basketball-star buddies figured out how to shoot lopsided basketballs through a hoop that a ball could barely fit through that was atop a 13-foot high pole. (A regular basketball hoops fits a basketball and has plenty of room the spare. Honest.)
We were even able as we aged to ignore the sleazy barkers who would say anything to get us to stop and try the games.
When I started double-dating at carnivals, my Becoming A Man card was always at risk. Karen liked the rides ... all the rides. I hated spinning in fast circles. I didn't like going high off the ground. I never got sick to my stomach when I was a tub o' goo waddling around from food seller to food seller. I'd become nauseous the minute I saw the Tilt-a-Whirl.
I had to make sure that I performed with some measure of grace as we'd stroll past the barkers. By the time I was 15, at the carnival with a girl I wanted to impress, I always envisioned this to be the ideal interaction with a carnival barker:
Barker: "Hey! Mr. Letterman's sweater! Afraid you can't knock down the milk jugs in front'a yer girl? She wants a pretty stuffed animal, right? You afraid to win her one?
Me: "Shut the f$#@ up! Nice fingernails, by the way."
The attraction to the girl who, through sheer coincidence wound up being my only date to any carnival ever, was that she didn't care if I won the stuffed animal. She, inexplicably, liked hanging around with me and accepted I was a gigantic candy ass. So, before every carnival, I also envisioned responding something like this:
Me: "Look ... you sit in yer trailer with 5 other guys every night getting drunk, but I'm going home with her because she likes ME! Take that 10-cent stuffed giraffe and stick it up yer ..."
Whoops! Sorry. I fogot. Every memory about everything from my youth is golden...warm and fuzzy...loved those glorious Eureka carnivals. Loved them!
II'd waste time pointing out to Karen, her brother Berk and his date Merijean, that there was simply no way those carnival rides could be safe. I gave the same speech about stoned carneys using unsafe equipment to put together a big wheel that was going to take them around and around in a giant circle 60 feet off the ground.
"Good luck with that! Count me out!"
My friends laughed and went on the ride.
It wasn't as easy to maneuver the carnival when I ran with my pack of boyhood buddies. If one guy wanted to ride, oh, the Tilt-A-Whirl ... we rode it. I'd make it clear I hated the Tilt-A-Whirl, but I'd go on it.
There was a measure of pride to be maintained in the pack. Conversely, there was a measure of grace for a young girl to attach to a sensitive boy willing to admit he was afraid of the rides.
The carney's were not to be trusted. I knew that. Nobody believed me.
At Redwood Acres, when we were in ninth grade, we had a particular blast on the Tilt-A-Whirl because a bunch of cute girls had gone on and paid attention to us. I'm sure a march across frozen tundra would've been a blast in 1970 if pretty girls paid attention to us in the process.
I even forgot that wave of nausea that hit me just looking at people in a half-shell shaped seat that spun in circles on a big, wooden platform that was also spinning in circles.
When kids went to carnivals in Eureka, where the same carnival workers would stop multiple times every summer, we got to know some of the workers. The guy running the Tilt-A-Whirl that night in ninth grade was a carney we loved to laugh about.
That became a point of concern after we'd riden the T-A-W five, six times and were entering for one final spin before closing time. We were ... ninth graders ... big swingin' doinks at Winship Junior High, baby! We'd actually talked to cute girls from Zane. We were bullet-proof when we loaded up, just the six of us, one last time.
Somebody, I don't know who, said something about the carney running the ride. The carney looked crestfallen, then he looked ... really angry. I gave him my ticket and he gave me a stink-eye to end all stink eyes. I realized this wasn't a teen blonde carney trying to talk 9-year-old Teddy into winning a goldfish.
I felt the carney literally slam the T-A-W gate against my rear end, hard, and stomp about to lock my pals into the ride. When he slammed that thing we held on to into my lap, he did so with malice aforethought. My ride-mate Dave Lovfald was a good dude. Quiet. Unassuming. He likely didn't see the fear in my eyes.
The guy cranked up the Tilt-A-Whirl. No music. Something was wrong. There had been music all night. We were going faster, too. I started to tell Lovfald that we're supposed to start slow, then speed up and ... he had his head back with his eyes closed.
Somebody in our crew shouted, "Is this as fast as this thing goes? C'mon, buddy!"
The carney was in my line of sight and his eyes narrowed. He pushed down on one button and pushed forward on what appeared to be a gear shift to his right.
We started spinning faster and harder and in more erratic circles than I imagined a two-bit carnival ride could ... I threw up a little in my mouth. Nice.
I hung on tight. Lovfald woke up. A group of older kids stopped by the Ferris wheel and were just watching us spin out of control. A voice came from another friend and I shouted, "Shut the f^%%$ up! Shuddup!"
My friend apparently didn't realize we were at the mercy of the carney who we'd pissed off on the way into the ride and then angered further by challenging his willingness to crank the ride to warp speed.
There was quite a crowd of people around by the time we got off the ride, dizzy, dazed, confused. It tended to attract a crowd when the Tilt-A-Whirl man let one group of riders go out of control for 10 minutes. Still ... still ... one of my friends said something to the carney on the way out ... we weren't necessarily all that self-aware at age 14.
Me? I just wanted to puke. But, we still had to find a phone to call for a ride and ... the nearest pay phone was a long walk west on Harris Street to the Safeway at the corner of Harris and Harrison. I remember nothing, nothing, but driving home in Jerry McKeown's Oldsmobile station wagon with my head hanging out the window.
Mrs. McKeown shouted, "Oh, Ted ... I don't want you throwing up in my car!"
I wasn't thrilled at the idea either.
"So, you boys have fun? We always had so much fun at the carnival when you kids were little!"
Mrs. McKeown was insufferably upbeat, which made her lovable.
"Teddy, you win anything?"
On that night, I didn't bother to explain that the games were rigged. I just took slow deep breaths out the window.
"We don't play games much," was all I could manage.
"These carnivals ... I loved going to them with my girlfriends when we were little."
Oh. OK. I loved them when I was a kid, too. As a teen, I rethought the love of the carnivals that marked the beginning, middle and end of summer in Eureka for decades.
Butler Amusements was to Eureka kids in the 1960s what Nintendo is to youngsters of today.
Butler Amusements was the outfit that operated and, I assume maintained, the rides and attractions at the dozen or so carnivals that popped up in Eureka every spring and summer for decades.
Well, there were likely other carnival crews that set up at the Redwood Acres Fairgrounds, the parking lot at what was Disco before it became Bazaar before it morphed into Beno's and Pay Less before it became "that county office building on Highway 101 headed toward Arcata."
Butler Amusements is the only name that springs to mind, however.
Carnivals popped up in empty lots, too. Whenever a carnival hit town, it was an attraction. When my kids and I see carnival workers who look like escapees from a prison road crew piecing together the Ferris wheel and pint-sized roller coaster at the Westfield Mall in Fairfield, they ask things like, "Who would ever go ride those rides? They're not fast. They just spin in circles and ..."
I used to interrupt my older sons when they'd go off on the inherent stupidity they perceived to be involved in enjoying two-bit carnival rides.
I'd tell them about how my mom would take me to the carnivals in Eureka all the time to ride the rides, play the games and eat cotton candy. Mostly, as I recall, to eat the cotton candy, the popcorn, ice cream and to drink the most sugary soda a fat kid who lived for such delicacies could ever imagine.
There's no real way to make a little carnival interesting to kids who'd spent the morning playing life-like video games on a 64-inch, high-definition television. There was little to be said for spinning in tight circles for three minutes on some sort of whirly gig ride when the kids can entertain themselves with a mind-boggling, rockin' stereo sound system that fits in the palm of their hand.
The carnivals like the one that used to set up in a vacant lot on Broadway, headed out of Eureka to the south, were exotic and entertaining to us. Of course, we also got all geeked up to buy a vinyl LP with 3 "Herman's Hermits" hits and 7 or 8 intolerable tunes by the same group. Most of us thought the world started spinning backward briefly when we got our hands on a circular piece of vinyl with two Elvis Presley songs on it.
My kids make their own music collections on their space-age, hand-held sound systems. They'll never listen to "Meet The Beatles," and suddenly wince, "Why is Paul singing 'Till There Was You,' on here! That song's from 'The Music Man.' "
If we'd had iPods, we'd never even have been exposed to the music Col. Tom Parker forced Elvis to sing in those fer-schnizzly bad movies The King made to avoid competiting for radio air time with the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys in the 1960s. (I did like "Follow That Dream," however.)
The dozen or so Eureka carnivals were exciting because ... there wasn't much to do in Eureka so we all turned out for every carnival. In Eureka's heyday, we made nothing into something because it seemed that we all did it together.
The carnival that was part of the Redwood Acres Fair every June was better than the carnival in the Bazaar parking lot because there were thousands of us at Redwood Acres.
The Humboldt County Fair carnival was the best, for people who enjoy bigger, better rides, than the carnival in the vacant lot on Broadway. More people meant more friends and more fun and ... there was an exotic selection of food in Ferndale. Give me a chance to eat a dog on a stick and follow it with pink popcorn and an ice cream swirl and I'd forget the rides. After the merry go round ended, it wasn't a long walk to the exhibit hall where they were selling homemade cookies.
This carnival that sets up in my new town is ... empty. The only thing more depressing that all the carnival lights and the roaring heavy metal music blaring into the night two blocks from Macy's is the sight of 6 or 7 teenagers wandering aimlessly and alone inside the carnival gates.
We had to line up behind more than 6 or 7 kids to even take a shot at throwing ping pong balls trying to land one in a goldfish bowl to win the goldfish inside. (Most traumatic existence, all-time, ever: Goldfish who lived in a carnival gold fish bowl.)
We could've bought a goldfish at Fin N' Feather for a quarter. But, we'd spend over a buck to stand for a half hour trying to bounce a ping pong ball into a fish bowl filled with water. If we did win the fish, we'd bitch and moan about having to carry it around the carnival.
Every game was rigged. I'm certain my mom, all parents, knew that. They didn't tell us, all the time. It seems like each of my friends and I individually figured out how different games were fixed to make it near impossible to win, but we did it over years and on our own. If our parents said, "You can't really win that game ... " we'd have just argued.
We threw darts at under-inflated balloons that were impossible to pop. Then, when we did pop a balloon, we'd learn that the accomplishment meant we didn't win one of the many colorful stuffed animals, but rather bought us a chance to pop 2 more balloons to win ... a 3-inch tall stuffed tucan.
The sounds of the carnival distracted us from the games that, really, almost nobody could win. I was a baseball player. I could do nothing if not throw a ball straight and hard, hitting whatever target was placed before me. When my mom tried to talk me out of taking 50 cents to try to knock down milk jugs, I completely ignored her.
"I throw strikes mom!"
The logic of a 9-year-old Cutten League baseball pitcher.
The music, the laughter, the screams from teens riding what seemed to be death-defying rides hadn't given me a chance to pause and watch how the game with the milk jugs worked. So, when I finally got to the front of the line I had talked myself into really wanting a big, stuffed, brown monkey. Really! I wanted that monkey!
When the carny reached down under the counter that separated me from the milk jugs and came up with three, heavy, old, 16-inch softballs ... I died a little on the inside. Heck, I could throw any kind of baseball straight. But ... gee whiz ...
I couldn't even get my hand around a softball 16 inches in circumference. I was too young to even know what circumference meant so I just turned to my mom, with my wee, chubby hands grasping the huge, heavy ball.
"Dammit! See? Next time you'll listen to me!"
Well, I wouldn't actually listen, but I wouldn't knock down those jugs with those monster softball balls either.
The games got easier when we got older and understood how to beat them ... er, understood when we had a chance to beat them. I figured out the dart game angle. One of my basketball-star buddies figured out how to shoot lopsided basketballs through a hoop that a ball could barely fit through that was atop a 13-foot high pole. (A regular basketball hoops fits a basketball and has plenty of room the spare. Honest.)
We were even able as we aged to ignore the sleazy barkers who would say anything to get us to stop and try the games.
When I started double-dating at carnivals, my Becoming A Man card was always at risk. Karen liked the rides ... all the rides. I hated spinning in fast circles. I didn't like going high off the ground. I never got sick to my stomach when I was a tub o' goo waddling around from food seller to food seller. I'd become nauseous the minute I saw the Tilt-a-Whirl.
I had to make sure that I performed with some measure of grace as we'd stroll past the barkers. By the time I was 15, at the carnival with a girl I wanted to impress, I always envisioned this to be the ideal interaction with a carnival barker:
Barker: "Hey! Mr. Letterman's sweater! Afraid you can't knock down the milk jugs in front'a yer girl? She wants a pretty stuffed animal, right? You afraid to win her one?
Me: "Shut the f$#@ up! Nice fingernails, by the way."
The attraction to the girl who, through sheer coincidence wound up being my only date to any carnival ever, was that she didn't care if I won the stuffed animal. She, inexplicably, liked hanging around with me and accepted I was a gigantic candy ass. So, before every carnival, I also envisioned responding something like this:
Me: "Look ... you sit in yer trailer with 5 other guys every night getting drunk, but I'm going home with her because she likes ME! Take that 10-cent stuffed giraffe and stick it up yer ..."
Whoops! Sorry. I fogot. Every memory about everything from my youth is golden...warm and fuzzy...loved those glorious Eureka carnivals. Loved them!
II'd waste time pointing out to Karen, her brother Berk and his date Merijean, that there was simply no way those carnival rides could be safe. I gave the same speech about stoned carneys using unsafe equipment to put together a big wheel that was going to take them around and around in a giant circle 60 feet off the ground.
"Good luck with that! Count me out!"
My friends laughed and went on the ride.
It wasn't as easy to maneuver the carnival when I ran with my pack of boyhood buddies. If one guy wanted to ride, oh, the Tilt-A-Whirl ... we rode it. I'd make it clear I hated the Tilt-A-Whirl, but I'd go on it.
There was a measure of pride to be maintained in the pack. Conversely, there was a measure of grace for a young girl to attach to a sensitive boy willing to admit he was afraid of the rides.
The carney's were not to be trusted. I knew that. Nobody believed me.
At Redwood Acres, when we were in ninth grade, we had a particular blast on the Tilt-A-Whirl because a bunch of cute girls had gone on and paid attention to us. I'm sure a march across frozen tundra would've been a blast in 1970 if pretty girls paid attention to us in the process.
I even forgot that wave of nausea that hit me just looking at people in a half-shell shaped seat that spun in circles on a big, wooden platform that was also spinning in circles.
When kids went to carnivals in Eureka, where the same carnival workers would stop multiple times every summer, we got to know some of the workers. The guy running the Tilt-A-Whirl that night in ninth grade was a carney we loved to laugh about.
That became a point of concern after we'd riden the T-A-W five, six times and were entering for one final spin before closing time. We were ... ninth graders ... big swingin' doinks at Winship Junior High, baby! We'd actually talked to cute girls from Zane. We were bullet-proof when we loaded up, just the six of us, one last time.
Somebody, I don't know who, said something about the carney running the ride. The carney looked crestfallen, then he looked ... really angry. I gave him my ticket and he gave me a stink-eye to end all stink eyes. I realized this wasn't a teen blonde carney trying to talk 9-year-old Teddy into winning a goldfish.
I felt the carney literally slam the T-A-W gate against my rear end, hard, and stomp about to lock my pals into the ride. When he slammed that thing we held on to into my lap, he did so with malice aforethought. My ride-mate Dave Lovfald was a good dude. Quiet. Unassuming. He likely didn't see the fear in my eyes.
The guy cranked up the Tilt-A-Whirl. No music. Something was wrong. There had been music all night. We were going faster, too. I started to tell Lovfald that we're supposed to start slow, then speed up and ... he had his head back with his eyes closed.
Somebody in our crew shouted, "Is this as fast as this thing goes? C'mon, buddy!"
The carney was in my line of sight and his eyes narrowed. He pushed down on one button and pushed forward on what appeared to be a gear shift to his right.
We started spinning faster and harder and in more erratic circles than I imagined a two-bit carnival ride could ... I threw up a little in my mouth. Nice.
I hung on tight. Lovfald woke up. A group of older kids stopped by the Ferris wheel and were just watching us spin out of control. A voice came from another friend and I shouted, "Shut the f^%%$ up! Shuddup!"
My friend apparently didn't realize we were at the mercy of the carney who we'd pissed off on the way into the ride and then angered further by challenging his willingness to crank the ride to warp speed.
There was quite a crowd of people around by the time we got off the ride, dizzy, dazed, confused. It tended to attract a crowd when the Tilt-A-Whirl man let one group of riders go out of control for 10 minutes. Still ... still ... one of my friends said something to the carney on the way out ... we weren't necessarily all that self-aware at age 14.
Me? I just wanted to puke. But, we still had to find a phone to call for a ride and ... the nearest pay phone was a long walk west on Harris Street to the Safeway at the corner of Harris and Harrison. I remember nothing, nothing, but driving home in Jerry McKeown's Oldsmobile station wagon with my head hanging out the window.
Mrs. McKeown shouted, "Oh, Ted ... I don't want you throwing up in my car!"
I wasn't thrilled at the idea either.
"So, you boys have fun? We always had so much fun at the carnival when you kids were little!"
Mrs. McKeown was insufferably upbeat, which made her lovable.
"Teddy, you win anything?"
On that night, I didn't bother to explain that the games were rigged. I just took slow deep breaths out the window.
"We don't play games much," was all I could manage.
"These carnivals ... I loved going to them with my girlfriends when we were little."
Oh. OK. I loved them when I was a kid, too. As a teen, I rethought the love of the carnivals that marked the beginning, middle and end of summer in Eureka for decades.
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
Support pours in for Justin-Siena's new baseball coach
There has been an outpouring of support for new Justin-Siena High baseball coach Allen Rossi on this site in the last few days. Former players, willing to attach their names to the praise, are extolling the virtues of the head man returning to the Braves' top job after five years away.
The letters of support for Rossi can be found in the "Comments" section of the story about Justin-Siena baseball that appeared here in June.
Rossi wouldn't be a high school coach if he didn't have critics. A couple wrote here, anonymously, to complain about things they allege that he did on the field and off. It's admirable that former players would rally to his support.
It's unclear how all those former players heard about two isolated anonymous citics or brief online conversations I engaged in to make sure those critics realized that their voices will be heard in this space.
A piece appeared here in June detailing my experience with the Justin-Siena baseball program in the spring of this year, when my freshman son split time between the JV and varsity. Beyond that piece and online conversations with folks who responded to it, no attention has been paid to the school or the baseball program.
To be extra clear:
1) My son transferred to a public school in June at roughly the time Allen Rossi was going through the hiring process. My son's decision had nothing to do with Allen Rossi returning to the job he did well for so many years at Justin.
2) Allen Rossi contacted me via e-mail to ask me to give my son his best wishes for success at his new school. We wished Rossi nothing but good things for Justin-Siena's baseball program.
3) Anyone who thinks the June story was about my son, missed the point or chose not to get the point. So, I won't be engaging in a debate over the value of playing wiffle ball at varsity baseball practices with the former player named Travis who wrote.
I'm compelled to urge those writing in support of Rossi to write to Napa Valley Register, too. Their views of Rossi would reach a bigger audience of Napa Valley baseball folks and such positive and high praise would run in total in the newspaper. (Anyone writing with criticism of a high school coach would have trouble getting their stuff printed online or in the newspaper pages.)
Some who wrote in support of Rossi blasted those who were anonymously critical. The Napa Valley, I realized quickly, isn't a place where criticism or even questions about prep sports are welcome. So, if folks want to use this spot to share their feelings ... they're welcome. I'd prefer names, but if folks remain anonymous I will still respond.
I appreciate folks paying attention to this site and hope they'll check it to see if anything beyond the one story about Justin-Siena baseball is appealing to them.
(Contact Ted Sillanpaa at tsillanpaa1956@gmail.com)
The letters of support for Rossi can be found in the "Comments" section of the story about Justin-Siena baseball that appeared here in June.
Rossi wouldn't be a high school coach if he didn't have critics. A couple wrote here, anonymously, to complain about things they allege that he did on the field and off. It's admirable that former players would rally to his support.
It's unclear how all those former players heard about two isolated anonymous citics or brief online conversations I engaged in to make sure those critics realized that their voices will be heard in this space.
A piece appeared here in June detailing my experience with the Justin-Siena baseball program in the spring of this year, when my freshman son split time between the JV and varsity. Beyond that piece and online conversations with folks who responded to it, no attention has been paid to the school or the baseball program.
To be extra clear:
1) My son transferred to a public school in June at roughly the time Allen Rossi was going through the hiring process. My son's decision had nothing to do with Allen Rossi returning to the job he did well for so many years at Justin.
2) Allen Rossi contacted me via e-mail to ask me to give my son his best wishes for success at his new school. We wished Rossi nothing but good things for Justin-Siena's baseball program.
3) Anyone who thinks the June story was about my son, missed the point or chose not to get the point. So, I won't be engaging in a debate over the value of playing wiffle ball at varsity baseball practices with the former player named Travis who wrote.
I'm compelled to urge those writing in support of Rossi to write to Napa Valley Register, too. Their views of Rossi would reach a bigger audience of Napa Valley baseball folks and such positive and high praise would run in total in the newspaper. (Anyone writing with criticism of a high school coach would have trouble getting their stuff printed online or in the newspaper pages.)
Some who wrote in support of Rossi blasted those who were anonymously critical. The Napa Valley, I realized quickly, isn't a place where criticism or even questions about prep sports are welcome. So, if folks want to use this spot to share their feelings ... they're welcome. I'd prefer names, but if folks remain anonymous I will still respond.
I appreciate folks paying attention to this site and hope they'll check it to see if anything beyond the one story about Justin-Siena baseball is appealing to them.
(Contact Ted Sillanpaa at tsillanpaa1956@gmail.com)
Eureka Memories: '70s theater scene all boys watching girls and waiting ...
(Please consider expressing whatever pleasure and enjoyment you gain from reading "Eureka Memories" by clicking on the "Donate" button above and contributing a dollar, 50 cents, a little more or a little less to my PayPal account. If you find value in the work, I hope you'll consider a financial donation that will help me continue to present my work to you. -- Ted Sillanpaa)
---
In the 1970s, the Eureka and State theaters were places to see and be seen.
My pals and I were at Winship Junior High School from 1968-1971 when the coolest of junior high cool kids filled those big, beautiful theaters in the early 1970s.
Oh, my friends and I went to the theater a lot then, too. They sold tickets to goofballs and dorks, too.
The Eureka Theater's box office, outside the actual theater, was surrounded by glass-cased posters of coming attractions. On weekend nights when a new movie hit town, the line of theater-goers would stretch south past the old Eureka Library and wrap around and down Seventh Street to where Bill Beasley Sporting Goods was initially located.
It took one ticket-seller a long time to sell a thousand tickets at $1.50, $1 and 50 cents a pop.
There was electricity in the air when we knew a big, blockbuster type film was debuting. If the line was really long, and it sometimes stretched 3, 4, 5 blocks, we knew the Eureka Theater might sell out before we got to the front of the line. No matter how long the line, we jumped out of the car and left whichever parent had driven us to pull away in silence.
"No! No! Don't wait!" the son of the parent driver would shout. "Just go! We'll get in. It never sells out."
The parent would sigh and drive away. We all knew the theater sold out quite often, but if we saw Mary Sue Ludtke or some other pretty girls in line ... come hell, high water or sending an emissary to try to get us cuts further up in the line, we were getting into the theater.
On nights when word started to filter back toward us that the place was getting close to full, we argued over which of us would have to find a pay phone and call their mom or dad to come right back down and pick us up. They'd pick us up, but there was verbal hell to put up with all the way home.
It was 1970, 1971 ... so, no, we didn't hop on our bicycles, put a sack lunch in the basket and peddle to the theater to watch cowboy movies. We didn't ride a bus either. (We would have if there'd been an evening bus service in Eureka. Our parents would've, most certainly, strongly suggested we explore that option.)
I knew kids who walked from the Jacobs Junior High side of town, a healthy trek just to see a movie, and then walk home in the dark.
That walk gave trouble too much time to find kids. Thus, my friends and I wanted no part of a long walk in the dark from the Winship part of town. We didn't want any part of a long walk from anywhere at any time really.
A star player on the last Jacobs Junior High baseball team ever fielded made the walk to the theater in 1984 or so, but didn't make it back. The kid and some pals from his rough neighborhood had encountered a teen on a bicycle around 10 p.m. on a Saturday night. The baseball player knocked the kid off the bike, smacked him around and made the bike his own until police eventually tracked him down. Since a friend and I coached that last team, we were the guys who eventually found our star locked up in juvenile hall.
That former Jacobs baseball player wound up in prison for murder in his 20s. I took it as a lesson to all parents who insisted their kids walk long distances in the dark. Eureka wasn't as safe as we like to remember it being.
The State Theater had ticket windows at each of two street entrances. No lines, really. Well, there was a line so long for "Love Story" that my friend Dennis Bills and I had time to come to the realization that it was a movie for girls and couples. We joked that we looked like two fresh-faced guys out on a date nate. We didn't know enough in 1970 to realized that men dated one another frequently in other parts of the United States.
In the 1970s, movie theaters showed films twice each night. A double feature was still common, so we were still decades away from today's practice of having dozens screens showing a given movie dozens of times a day. Friday or Saturday nights at 7 or 9:15 ... or we weren't seeing that movie that week.
The action was inside the theater where cool boys and pretty girls coupled up. Packs of boys would sit near packs of girls to begin the early stages of the mating process.
My friends and I didn't know anything about the mating process, beyond that we longed to be part of it. We liked to ogle hot girls and make fun of guys no better than us, but just a step or three further up the social ladder at our school.
We'd routinely give one another hell for scanning the crowd inside the theater to obviously, looking for the prettiest girls or a couple that we figured would be worth watching once the lights went out.
"I'm just looking at the paintings on the wall, asshole! Geezus! Shuddup! This is classic art you prick."
We were looking at girls. Always.
Junior high kids in my youth saw, without question, some of the worst movies ever made. Once boys and girls coupled seriously enough to have long-term (3 months?) relationships, they'd go to the movies every single weekend. It was the one of the few places to be together in the dark. We didn't worry about the hundreds of other people in the dark with us.
Once I escaped terminal dorkdom and had a girlfriend I really, really liked ... I mean a girl I like LIKED ... I spent more than a few mid-week nights convincing my mom that "J.W. Coop" and "The Culpepper Cattle Co." were indeed quality films worthy of her paying for me to take Karen McKeown to a double feature.
I distinctly remember my mom, who was really hip, saying, "Oh, you just wanna go so you two can kiss!" And, I remember turning in an acting performance that surpassed any from either film.
"Are you insane? Kiss? In the theater? With people there? Just because my sisters did that crazy stuff doesn't mean ..."
Kids don't bother hiding that type thing today. They are more forward, more aggressive now. My youngest son was invited by the hottest girl in his middle school to go ice skating. Then, she offered him his first kiss the same night. Then, a few days later, she broke up with him saying, "We don't have enough in common."
It took me and my friends months, years, from the time we wanted a girlfriend and a kiss to actually get a girl and then think about the kiss and then have them dump us.
In most all cases in the 1970s, getting the kiss and subsequent kisses involved going to the Eureka or State theater.
It was never as easy for us as it was for the popular guys. Popular guys were all about getting a girl and then getting everything she'd give him. The story of Winship's top eighth grade athlete receiving oral sex from a homely, stoner chick at the Eureka Theater became legend in 1970. We gathered that his friends were pretty busy with their own girls for that to have gone down in a packed theater.
My friends were ... different. We wanted a girl and we wanted that first kiss, but if we could keep busting each other's balls and make it hard on one another to get those things ... tough luck for the one of us who happened to land a spot in the dark with a girl.
Amy Waldsmith called me on a Friday night in the summer of 1970 to ask if I would take her and her friend Cindy McManus to the Eureka Theater.
I'd never been to a movie with a girl and Amy "liked" me. She mostly, though, wanted to go to the movie and knew my mom was quick to give me rides. She'd met my mom when she invited herself to sit with me at a baseball game in Arcata and then belched, "I'm going to need a ride home."
My mom said, "That girl is a slut. What kind of girl gets dropped off in Arcata and then finds a ride with a boy?" She wasn't an Amy fan.
Imagine her response when I told her that it was the type of girl I wanted to go to the movies with at the last minute on a Friday night.
"What about Berk and Jim? You gonna send them home now?" my mom wondered as I ignored two grea friends and lobbied for the complicated process of getting the three of us and two girls to a movie in less than 20 minutes.
"Nah ... send 'em home? They're comin' the show! Please?!?!"
I was a mama's boys so I got my way. I was also, on the night, an idiot.
Amy had already had lots of boyfriends and, I was certain, lots of kisses and kissing. I was a novice feeling my way around, but I felt fairly good about the possibility of her grabbing me and kissing me during the movie, thus getting the painful process of me working up the nerve to touch her, then kiss her, out of the way.
I didn't stop to consider what Berk Brown and Jim Tyler would do while they were at the theater while I was with Amy.
Of course! They would sit four rows behind us and throw candy at us, make fun of me and otherwise act as human deterrents to my getting anywhere near Amy.
"C'mon Ted. Psst! Ted! What're ya waitin' for?"
They laughed and laughed. Amy's friend laughed. Amy even laughed. I didn't laugh.
(Amy and I laughed about it together eight years later when we got married.)
For all the warm, wonderful memories of Eureka that have crossed my mind lately, thoughts of the hoppin' theater scene in the 1970s brings to mind the most heartbreaking night of my young life.
My first for-real girlfriend Karen's family was leaving Eureka for San Diego after school ended in 1972. I was a sophomore in high school. How it happened I remain unsure, but I had fallen absolutely in love with her.
Oh, yes, I was in love? We were in love. We were great friends and she made me laugh, took my shit and the kissing thing went great. Love.
How much in love?
Beyond the first kiss and holding hands, I never made an effort to pursue a physical relationship with her in the six, seven months we dated. All that time spent in the theater wishing girls would look our way and I stopped thinking about getting to second base and beyond because I suddenly found virtue in waiting until I was married.
Did I mention that I was 15 years old?
On the last night Karen was in Eureka, we went to a double-feature at the Eureka. We sat back there kissing, in the back row of a near empty theater, for over 3 hours. I knew I'd spent many years hoping I could get lucky with a pretty girl at the theater, but that night my heart was breaking. We kissed like we'd never see each other again ... because I figured we wouldn't.
Not every memory of Eureka warms my heart.
---
In the 1970s, the Eureka and State theaters were places to see and be seen.
My pals and I were at Winship Junior High School from 1968-1971 when the coolest of junior high cool kids filled those big, beautiful theaters in the early 1970s.
Oh, my friends and I went to the theater a lot then, too. They sold tickets to goofballs and dorks, too.
The Eureka Theater's box office, outside the actual theater, was surrounded by glass-cased posters of coming attractions. On weekend nights when a new movie hit town, the line of theater-goers would stretch south past the old Eureka Library and wrap around and down Seventh Street to where Bill Beasley Sporting Goods was initially located.
It took one ticket-seller a long time to sell a thousand tickets at $1.50, $1 and 50 cents a pop.
There was electricity in the air when we knew a big, blockbuster type film was debuting. If the line was really long, and it sometimes stretched 3, 4, 5 blocks, we knew the Eureka Theater might sell out before we got to the front of the line. No matter how long the line, we jumped out of the car and left whichever parent had driven us to pull away in silence.
"No! No! Don't wait!" the son of the parent driver would shout. "Just go! We'll get in. It never sells out."
The parent would sigh and drive away. We all knew the theater sold out quite often, but if we saw Mary Sue Ludtke or some other pretty girls in line ... come hell, high water or sending an emissary to try to get us cuts further up in the line, we were getting into the theater.
On nights when word started to filter back toward us that the place was getting close to full, we argued over which of us would have to find a pay phone and call their mom or dad to come right back down and pick us up. They'd pick us up, but there was verbal hell to put up with all the way home.
It was 1970, 1971 ... so, no, we didn't hop on our bicycles, put a sack lunch in the basket and peddle to the theater to watch cowboy movies. We didn't ride a bus either. (We would have if there'd been an evening bus service in Eureka. Our parents would've, most certainly, strongly suggested we explore that option.)
I knew kids who walked from the Jacobs Junior High side of town, a healthy trek just to see a movie, and then walk home in the dark.
That walk gave trouble too much time to find kids. Thus, my friends and I wanted no part of a long walk in the dark from the Winship part of town. We didn't want any part of a long walk from anywhere at any time really.
A star player on the last Jacobs Junior High baseball team ever fielded made the walk to the theater in 1984 or so, but didn't make it back. The kid and some pals from his rough neighborhood had encountered a teen on a bicycle around 10 p.m. on a Saturday night. The baseball player knocked the kid off the bike, smacked him around and made the bike his own until police eventually tracked him down. Since a friend and I coached that last team, we were the guys who eventually found our star locked up in juvenile hall.
That former Jacobs baseball player wound up in prison for murder in his 20s. I took it as a lesson to all parents who insisted their kids walk long distances in the dark. Eureka wasn't as safe as we like to remember it being.
The State Theater had ticket windows at each of two street entrances. No lines, really. Well, there was a line so long for "Love Story" that my friend Dennis Bills and I had time to come to the realization that it was a movie for girls and couples. We joked that we looked like two fresh-faced guys out on a date nate. We didn't know enough in 1970 to realized that men dated one another frequently in other parts of the United States.
In the 1970s, movie theaters showed films twice each night. A double feature was still common, so we were still decades away from today's practice of having dozens screens showing a given movie dozens of times a day. Friday or Saturday nights at 7 or 9:15 ... or we weren't seeing that movie that week.
The action was inside the theater where cool boys and pretty girls coupled up. Packs of boys would sit near packs of girls to begin the early stages of the mating process.
My friends and I didn't know anything about the mating process, beyond that we longed to be part of it. We liked to ogle hot girls and make fun of guys no better than us, but just a step or three further up the social ladder at our school.
We'd routinely give one another hell for scanning the crowd inside the theater to obviously, looking for the prettiest girls or a couple that we figured would be worth watching once the lights went out.
"I'm just looking at the paintings on the wall, asshole! Geezus! Shuddup! This is classic art you prick."
We were looking at girls. Always.
Junior high kids in my youth saw, without question, some of the worst movies ever made. Once boys and girls coupled seriously enough to have long-term (3 months?) relationships, they'd go to the movies every single weekend. It was the one of the few places to be together in the dark. We didn't worry about the hundreds of other people in the dark with us.
Once I escaped terminal dorkdom and had a girlfriend I really, really liked ... I mean a girl I like LIKED ... I spent more than a few mid-week nights convincing my mom that "J.W. Coop" and "The Culpepper Cattle Co." were indeed quality films worthy of her paying for me to take Karen McKeown to a double feature.
I distinctly remember my mom, who was really hip, saying, "Oh, you just wanna go so you two can kiss!" And, I remember turning in an acting performance that surpassed any from either film.
"Are you insane? Kiss? In the theater? With people there? Just because my sisters did that crazy stuff doesn't mean ..."
Kids don't bother hiding that type thing today. They are more forward, more aggressive now. My youngest son was invited by the hottest girl in his middle school to go ice skating. Then, she offered him his first kiss the same night. Then, a few days later, she broke up with him saying, "We don't have enough in common."
It took me and my friends months, years, from the time we wanted a girlfriend and a kiss to actually get a girl and then think about the kiss and then have them dump us.
In most all cases in the 1970s, getting the kiss and subsequent kisses involved going to the Eureka or State theater.
It was never as easy for us as it was for the popular guys. Popular guys were all about getting a girl and then getting everything she'd give him. The story of Winship's top eighth grade athlete receiving oral sex from a homely, stoner chick at the Eureka Theater became legend in 1970. We gathered that his friends were pretty busy with their own girls for that to have gone down in a packed theater.
My friends were ... different. We wanted a girl and we wanted that first kiss, but if we could keep busting each other's balls and make it hard on one another to get those things ... tough luck for the one of us who happened to land a spot in the dark with a girl.
Amy Waldsmith called me on a Friday night in the summer of 1970 to ask if I would take her and her friend Cindy McManus to the Eureka Theater.
I'd never been to a movie with a girl and Amy "liked" me. She mostly, though, wanted to go to the movie and knew my mom was quick to give me rides. She'd met my mom when she invited herself to sit with me at a baseball game in Arcata and then belched, "I'm going to need a ride home."
My mom said, "That girl is a slut. What kind of girl gets dropped off in Arcata and then finds a ride with a boy?" She wasn't an Amy fan.
Imagine her response when I told her that it was the type of girl I wanted to go to the movies with at the last minute on a Friday night.
"What about Berk and Jim? You gonna send them home now?" my mom wondered as I ignored two grea friends and lobbied for the complicated process of getting the three of us and two girls to a movie in less than 20 minutes.
"Nah ... send 'em home? They're comin' the show! Please?!?!"
I was a mama's boys so I got my way. I was also, on the night, an idiot.
Amy had already had lots of boyfriends and, I was certain, lots of kisses and kissing. I was a novice feeling my way around, but I felt fairly good about the possibility of her grabbing me and kissing me during the movie, thus getting the painful process of me working up the nerve to touch her, then kiss her, out of the way.
I didn't stop to consider what Berk Brown and Jim Tyler would do while they were at the theater while I was with Amy.
Of course! They would sit four rows behind us and throw candy at us, make fun of me and otherwise act as human deterrents to my getting anywhere near Amy.
"C'mon Ted. Psst! Ted! What're ya waitin' for?"
They laughed and laughed. Amy's friend laughed. Amy even laughed. I didn't laugh.
(Amy and I laughed about it together eight years later when we got married.)
For all the warm, wonderful memories of Eureka that have crossed my mind lately, thoughts of the hoppin' theater scene in the 1970s brings to mind the most heartbreaking night of my young life.
My first for-real girlfriend Karen's family was leaving Eureka for San Diego after school ended in 1972. I was a sophomore in high school. How it happened I remain unsure, but I had fallen absolutely in love with her.
Oh, yes, I was in love? We were in love. We were great friends and she made me laugh, took my shit and the kissing thing went great. Love.
How much in love?
Beyond the first kiss and holding hands, I never made an effort to pursue a physical relationship with her in the six, seven months we dated. All that time spent in the theater wishing girls would look our way and I stopped thinking about getting to second base and beyond because I suddenly found virtue in waiting until I was married.
Did I mention that I was 15 years old?
On the last night Karen was in Eureka, we went to a double-feature at the Eureka. We sat back there kissing, in the back row of a near empty theater, for over 3 hours. I knew I'd spent many years hoping I could get lucky with a pretty girl at the theater, but that night my heart was breaking. We kissed like we'd never see each other again ... because I figured we wouldn't.
Not every memory of Eureka warms my heart.
Monday, August 08, 2011
Sensitivity to others' feelings is not same as being politically correct
(Please consider expressing whatever pleasure, insight or other value you gain from reading my work by clicking on the "Donate" button above and contributing a dollar, 50 cents, a little more or a little less to my PayPal account. If you find value in the work, I hope you'll consider a financial donation that will help me continue to present my work to you. -- Ted Sillanpaa)
I'm told that the word "faggot" is to members of the gay community what the n-word is to members of the black community.
hat
So, while I generally feel that words only have the power that we choose to give them, I'm backing away from my use of "fag" and "faggot." I didn't really know what the words meant when I first heard them in junior high in 1970, so they were quickly added to idiot, moron, dumbass and other words my pals and I used to indicate our real or mock displeasure with one another.
If my recreational use of those words cut to the soul of the gay community, I can find other words to use. I would never, ever, use the n-word to describe a black person. My mom used racial slurs for effect to get a laugh, like so many who grew up in the 1940s and into the 1950s. She told me that I wouldn't use the n-word to describe a black because it was wrong.
Her motto was, "Don't do as I do. Do as I say!"
As I came to develop my own racial sensitivity, I referred to folks as black or African-American. It didn't matter if I grew up talking about "colored men" or "negroes" who were my big league baseball heroes. I wanted to be sensitive to people -- all people of all colors.
I'm adopting the same attitude toward the homosexual community. It doesn't matter if I know I meant no harm, wasn't even referring to gays. I'll no longer use the f-word. There's no limit to the thought and energy I should expend to be certain I'm not hurting someone's feelings.
My decision to steer clear of what minority groups feel represent stinging epitaphs is not a matter of my being politically correct. People who confuse being sensitive to the feelings of others for being politically correct are wrong.
Way wrong.
If Native Americans decide that athletic teams shouldn't be called Indians or Redskins, the decision to change the team names is an example of being politically correct. Native Americans still cheer for the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians. So, those Native Americans who forced Stanford University to switch from Indians to Cardinal are just being overly sensitive.
If sports teams' nicknames were a big problem to Native Americans, the NFL and Major League Baseball would have responded by ridding themselves of Redskins, Braves and Indians.
A group in Mendocino County pushed to have Squaw Rock, a local landmark, officially renamed.
It's hard to imagine anyone feeling real pain over a landmark named Squaw Rock. Changing the name is an example of being politically correct.
Political correctness is pushed to the limit now. However, Americans who confuse being PC with showing the proper amount of sensitivity to other Americans need to rethink their positions.
It's not an over-abundance of political correctness that resulted in my children growing up without hearing such common schoolyard taunts as, "retard" or "M.R." It's the result of society slowly coming to realize that developmentally challenged human beings have feelings and that we are wrong to reach a point where we're mocking a peer by using a phrase that compares them to a developmentally or learning disabled American.
We don't have to give words more power than they actually carry. But, we do owe it to one another to be as sensitive as can be to each other. And, if you're incapable of being sensitive, admit that you don't give a damn. Don't blame your willingness to ignore others' feelings on the pressure to be politically correct.
I'm told that the word "faggot" is to members of the gay community what the n-word is to members of the black community.
hat
So, while I generally feel that words only have the power that we choose to give them, I'm backing away from my use of "fag" and "faggot." I didn't really know what the words meant when I first heard them in junior high in 1970, so they were quickly added to idiot, moron, dumbass and other words my pals and I used to indicate our real or mock displeasure with one another.
If my recreational use of those words cut to the soul of the gay community, I can find other words to use. I would never, ever, use the n-word to describe a black person. My mom used racial slurs for effect to get a laugh, like so many who grew up in the 1940s and into the 1950s. She told me that I wouldn't use the n-word to describe a black because it was wrong.
Her motto was, "Don't do as I do. Do as I say!"
As I came to develop my own racial sensitivity, I referred to folks as black or African-American. It didn't matter if I grew up talking about "colored men" or "negroes" who were my big league baseball heroes. I wanted to be sensitive to people -- all people of all colors.
I'm adopting the same attitude toward the homosexual community. It doesn't matter if I know I meant no harm, wasn't even referring to gays. I'll no longer use the f-word. There's no limit to the thought and energy I should expend to be certain I'm not hurting someone's feelings.
My decision to steer clear of what minority groups feel represent stinging epitaphs is not a matter of my being politically correct. People who confuse being sensitive to the feelings of others for being politically correct are wrong.
Way wrong.
If Native Americans decide that athletic teams shouldn't be called Indians or Redskins, the decision to change the team names is an example of being politically correct. Native Americans still cheer for the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians. So, those Native Americans who forced Stanford University to switch from Indians to Cardinal are just being overly sensitive.
If sports teams' nicknames were a big problem to Native Americans, the NFL and Major League Baseball would have responded by ridding themselves of Redskins, Braves and Indians.
A group in Mendocino County pushed to have Squaw Rock, a local landmark, officially renamed.
It's hard to imagine anyone feeling real pain over a landmark named Squaw Rock. Changing the name is an example of being politically correct.
Political correctness is pushed to the limit now. However, Americans who confuse being PC with showing the proper amount of sensitivity to other Americans need to rethink their positions.
It's not an over-abundance of political correctness that resulted in my children growing up without hearing such common schoolyard taunts as, "retard" or "M.R." It's the result of society slowly coming to realize that developmentally challenged human beings have feelings and that we are wrong to reach a point where we're mocking a peer by using a phrase that compares them to a developmentally or learning disabled American.
We don't have to give words more power than they actually carry. But, we do owe it to one another to be as sensitive as can be to each other. And, if you're incapable of being sensitive, admit that you don't give a damn. Don't blame your willingness to ignore others' feelings on the pressure to be politically correct.
Eureka Memories: People, open space, unique sensitivity made Eureka special
(Please consider expressing whatever pleasure and enjoyment you gain from reading "Eureka Memories" by clicking on the "Donate" button above and contributing a dollar, 50 cents, a little more or a little less to my PayPal account. If you find value in the work, I hope you'll consider a financial donation that will help me continue to present my work to you. -- Ted Sillanpaa)
Tree swings.
Homemade bicycle ramps.
Forests where most towns had buildings.
The clerks at the stores who knew shoppers' names.
Those are the things that made growing up in Eureka special.
My youngest children are growing up in the San Francisco Bay area. They can go shopping at their choice of department stores, so I can't make the case that they're missing much not having shopping at Daly's or Bistrin's.
The kids can pick and choose hamburger joints. They've have just exactly the number of intimate conversations with the person who cooked or served their burger as I had conversations with the workers at the Fresh Freeze, Deb's or Arctic Circle. Kids stopped hanging out at burger joints in Eureka before I even hit high school in 1971. My children aren't missing anything.
So, much as I've enjoyed sharing memories of Eureka, it doesn't necessarily seem like the buildings and the businesses separated growing up there in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s from growing up anywhere right now.
My kids, however, will never enjoy a tree swing. They don't live in a house bordered by forest filled with stumps, fallen trees and a little stream.
There's no one like Gary Grannis to drag a long, thick rope down to a tall tree for them. They don't have a friend who will climb that tree and secure the rope. They won't go looking for a piece wood to use as a seat for the swing.
There's not a forest within walking distance of where my kids live. It's a healthy drive to the nearest forest, really.
The swing we so enjoyed right outside our front doors sent us swinging out over a little gulch. We started by swinging off of a steep, little hill and wound up swinging and spinning far out over the top of trees and lush, green ferns. Before we lost momentum, we stop ourselves back safely on the hill.
We all liked the big swings at Sequoia Park, but we loved our tree swing. Whenever I'd see Gary dragging the rope to the forest or, better, when I'd find the swing hanging from the tree with no one around -- I was euphoric. It felt like I'd gained admission to the finest amusement park.
That reminds me, the forest was so filled with things to do that we'd lose ourselves. I once climbed a tree I'd seen bigger kids climbing. I was alone. Getting up was easy. Getting down seemed impossible. I was 7 years old, stuck far up a redwood tree ... and calling to my mom to come and help me down.
The city dismantled the most memorable little rides from my years playing at Sequoia Park. The swings, the big slides and more were judged unsafe. There were no judges of the risk versus reward involved in riding that tree swing for hours. Thank God.
I was in my back yard one afternoon throwing a rubber baseball against the wall. I heard what sounded like a groan, maybe a cry. I walked into the woods and saw Brian King, a neighbor kid from around the corner, laying flat on his back at the bottom of the big hill below the tree swing.
"I slipped off," he said, trying to catch his breath and wiping tears from his eye.
I was old enough to help the younger boy, off the ground and up the hill. He'd never been on the swing because, well, not just anybody could jump on that tree swing. There was a protocol for earning the chance to swing on it just any old time a kid felt like it.
There were obviously no official rules, but the 2, 3 older kids didn't let me just get to swinging over that gully all by myself. They were willing to tolerate my presence, so they told me how to secure the seat between my legs and how to hold on tight. They showed me how to avoid having the swing stop swinging with me hanging out over the gully.
Brian King didn't know what he was doing.
Knucklehead.
I felt, suddenly, like one of the older boys. One thought crossed my mind watching the neighbor kid limp away from the tree swing, "Serves him right."
My older pal Rocci Barsotti was the most creative play pal a kid could have. Yes, we had bicycles. Yup, we bought 'em at Western Auto or Bill Beasley's. Whoopee!
Those bikes weren't so special. Heaven knows those stores weren't.
Rocci's ability to take a couple bricks, maybe a big rock, and some pieces of wood and turn them into ramps for kid bicycle daredevils was special. I'll forget where we bought the bikes well before I'll forget how much fun we had riding them.
The bicycle ramps kids all over town would piece together made Eureka special. There aren't many plots of land where my kids live with wood, bricks, big rocks or anything else they'd need to build a bicycle ramp. Even if there was, there's not a quiet enough street to allow kids to really enjoy wildly, recklessly, mindlessly speeding their bikes off the ramps and into the air. Even if there were, somebody would run them off because it's not safe to jump and fly through the air on bicycles.
I thought I had to be the only kid who had that much fun riding a bike. We'd built a ramp to jump from and a ramp to land on, well before Evil Knievel became an internationally-known daredevil. Lots of kids did that type thing, and more, in Humboldt County then.
Rocci thought of places to race on bikes that required more than just speed. He devised a way to make riding our bicycles as fast as we could around Gary Grannis's square driveway an absolute blast.
The square driveway was only built for two cars, so ... it took ingenuity for Barsotti to turn it into a raceway for a kid like me.
Rocci theorized that there was some peril in riding as fast as we could as closely as we could to the very edge of the slightly raised driveway. I imagine, he realized there was peril when I tried to copy him and zip around the square driveway faster and faster. I remember, still, having my front tire slip off the cement, drop hard onto the grass and send me ass over tea kettles into the big bush by the Grannis mail box.
So, we'd race around that driveway 2 or 3 at a time and stay as close as we could to the edge. It was more fun that I can make it seem, I'm sure.
We all remember every store, clothing and grocery, we ever frequented in Eureka.
So?
Just remembering that Cutten Market or Shears/Kacy's/Murphy's existed isn't a particularly meaningful memory. Children are growing up with easier access to more competitive prices now. They don't, however, know the clerks and baggers at any grocery store. They won't walk in to a department store to buy school clothes and have a clerk say, "Oh, you've grown since last year! Your favorite Hush Puppies are in stock!"
I knew all the clerks at Cutten Market and Shears/Kacy's/Murphy's. My pals and I ran around Cutten for years. The clerks knew us as well as we knew them.
Still, that's not really memoriable either. We couldn't have cared less about the clerks. We wanted to get away from adults. I didn't realize how special the intimate relationships with people who served us in Eureka stores was until I was a parent myself.
My older sons and I lived in Cutten, down the street from Murphy's Market. The younger of the two older boys was in third grade at Cutten School. He walked the mile from there home. Typically, he'd make the walk while I was at work. One afternoon, I'd come home early.
A full hour after school got out, he still wasn't home. I'd lost his mom, but I didn't want to lose him. It was what I perceived as a more dangerous time -- 1989. I hopped in the car and went to look for him.
I drove the route from the little shack duplex to Cutten School and back -- three times. I circled off Walnut Drive to drive down Cypress Street. Then, I drove down by the old slaughterhouse where 2 giant, mean dogs kept me from ever daring to take a shortcut home as a kid at Cutten School. I couldn't find my son.
In desperation, I stopped at Murphy's Market. My kid didn't have any money, so I held out little hope he'd be in the store.
I walked in and saw the tall, big-haired blonde woman who was always so friendly to my kids and I. I was an adult in 1989, so I wasn't the one with the intimate relationship with her. She just knew that I was a single dad with polite sons who helped me shop.
She saw me enter the store and looked up from her customer.
"Hi! He's right over there," she said, pointing at the magazine rack where my son was sitting on the floor cross-legged reading a college football preview magazine. He might as well have been sitting in our living room.
"Hey, Trent! Your dad's here," she shouted down the aisle.
He paid no attention.
"He stops in here almost every day and looks at the sports magazines," the clerk said. "It's so cute. He's not hurting anybody and he always puts the books back exactly like they were."
She assured me he caused no trouble, making sure I wasn't too mad at the boy. Mad? I was happy that my biggest parental problem, thanks to the clerks who knew my boys, was that my seven-year-old son was unusually interested in sports magazines.
My youngest kids wouldn't be allowed to sit on the floor at the nearby Safeway or Raley's. If they did, they'd be kicked out of the store. In Eureka, in Cutten, no sweat ... life was a little slower and folks had time to care a little more time and my older sons were in the best of hands at any business anywhere near our home.
So, the businesses and clubs and TV shows of our youth were important. The memories are important. They aren't what made Eureka, or Humboldt County special, though. Not really. The people, the pace of life, the extra spaces we had before everything was paved over and built up is what some of us remember most.
Tree swings.
Homemade bicycle ramps.
Forests where most towns had buildings.
The clerks at the stores who knew shoppers' names.
Those are the things that made growing up in Eureka special.
My youngest children are growing up in the San Francisco Bay area. They can go shopping at their choice of department stores, so I can't make the case that they're missing much not having shopping at Daly's or Bistrin's.
The kids can pick and choose hamburger joints. They've have just exactly the number of intimate conversations with the person who cooked or served their burger as I had conversations with the workers at the Fresh Freeze, Deb's or Arctic Circle. Kids stopped hanging out at burger joints in Eureka before I even hit high school in 1971. My children aren't missing anything.
So, much as I've enjoyed sharing memories of Eureka, it doesn't necessarily seem like the buildings and the businesses separated growing up there in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s from growing up anywhere right now.
My kids, however, will never enjoy a tree swing. They don't live in a house bordered by forest filled with stumps, fallen trees and a little stream.
There's no one like Gary Grannis to drag a long, thick rope down to a tall tree for them. They don't have a friend who will climb that tree and secure the rope. They won't go looking for a piece wood to use as a seat for the swing.
There's not a forest within walking distance of where my kids live. It's a healthy drive to the nearest forest, really.
The swing we so enjoyed right outside our front doors sent us swinging out over a little gulch. We started by swinging off of a steep, little hill and wound up swinging and spinning far out over the top of trees and lush, green ferns. Before we lost momentum, we stop ourselves back safely on the hill.
We all liked the big swings at Sequoia Park, but we loved our tree swing. Whenever I'd see Gary dragging the rope to the forest or, better, when I'd find the swing hanging from the tree with no one around -- I was euphoric. It felt like I'd gained admission to the finest amusement park.
That reminds me, the forest was so filled with things to do that we'd lose ourselves. I once climbed a tree I'd seen bigger kids climbing. I was alone. Getting up was easy. Getting down seemed impossible. I was 7 years old, stuck far up a redwood tree ... and calling to my mom to come and help me down.
The city dismantled the most memorable little rides from my years playing at Sequoia Park. The swings, the big slides and more were judged unsafe. There were no judges of the risk versus reward involved in riding that tree swing for hours. Thank God.
I was in my back yard one afternoon throwing a rubber baseball against the wall. I heard what sounded like a groan, maybe a cry. I walked into the woods and saw Brian King, a neighbor kid from around the corner, laying flat on his back at the bottom of the big hill below the tree swing.
"I slipped off," he said, trying to catch his breath and wiping tears from his eye.
I was old enough to help the younger boy, off the ground and up the hill. He'd never been on the swing because, well, not just anybody could jump on that tree swing. There was a protocol for earning the chance to swing on it just any old time a kid felt like it.
There were obviously no official rules, but the 2, 3 older kids didn't let me just get to swinging over that gully all by myself. They were willing to tolerate my presence, so they told me how to secure the seat between my legs and how to hold on tight. They showed me how to avoid having the swing stop swinging with me hanging out over the gully.
Brian King didn't know what he was doing.
Knucklehead.
I felt, suddenly, like one of the older boys. One thought crossed my mind watching the neighbor kid limp away from the tree swing, "Serves him right."
My older pal Rocci Barsotti was the most creative play pal a kid could have. Yes, we had bicycles. Yup, we bought 'em at Western Auto or Bill Beasley's. Whoopee!
Those bikes weren't so special. Heaven knows those stores weren't.
Rocci's ability to take a couple bricks, maybe a big rock, and some pieces of wood and turn them into ramps for kid bicycle daredevils was special. I'll forget where we bought the bikes well before I'll forget how much fun we had riding them.
The bicycle ramps kids all over town would piece together made Eureka special. There aren't many plots of land where my kids live with wood, bricks, big rocks or anything else they'd need to build a bicycle ramp. Even if there was, there's not a quiet enough street to allow kids to really enjoy wildly, recklessly, mindlessly speeding their bikes off the ramps and into the air. Even if there were, somebody would run them off because it's not safe to jump and fly through the air on bicycles.
I thought I had to be the only kid who had that much fun riding a bike. We'd built a ramp to jump from and a ramp to land on, well before Evil Knievel became an internationally-known daredevil. Lots of kids did that type thing, and more, in Humboldt County then.
Rocci thought of places to race on bikes that required more than just speed. He devised a way to make riding our bicycles as fast as we could around Gary Grannis's square driveway an absolute blast.
The square driveway was only built for two cars, so ... it took ingenuity for Barsotti to turn it into a raceway for a kid like me.
Rocci theorized that there was some peril in riding as fast as we could as closely as we could to the very edge of the slightly raised driveway. I imagine, he realized there was peril when I tried to copy him and zip around the square driveway faster and faster. I remember, still, having my front tire slip off the cement, drop hard onto the grass and send me ass over tea kettles into the big bush by the Grannis mail box.
So, we'd race around that driveway 2 or 3 at a time and stay as close as we could to the edge. It was more fun that I can make it seem, I'm sure.
We all remember every store, clothing and grocery, we ever frequented in Eureka.
So?
Just remembering that Cutten Market or Shears/Kacy's/Murphy's existed isn't a particularly meaningful memory. Children are growing up with easier access to more competitive prices now. They don't, however, know the clerks and baggers at any grocery store. They won't walk in to a department store to buy school clothes and have a clerk say, "Oh, you've grown since last year! Your favorite Hush Puppies are in stock!"
I knew all the clerks at Cutten Market and Shears/Kacy's/Murphy's. My pals and I ran around Cutten for years. The clerks knew us as well as we knew them.
Still, that's not really memoriable either. We couldn't have cared less about the clerks. We wanted to get away from adults. I didn't realize how special the intimate relationships with people who served us in Eureka stores was until I was a parent myself.
My older sons and I lived in Cutten, down the street from Murphy's Market. The younger of the two older boys was in third grade at Cutten School. He walked the mile from there home. Typically, he'd make the walk while I was at work. One afternoon, I'd come home early.
A full hour after school got out, he still wasn't home. I'd lost his mom, but I didn't want to lose him. It was what I perceived as a more dangerous time -- 1989. I hopped in the car and went to look for him.
I drove the route from the little shack duplex to Cutten School and back -- three times. I circled off Walnut Drive to drive down Cypress Street. Then, I drove down by the old slaughterhouse where 2 giant, mean dogs kept me from ever daring to take a shortcut home as a kid at Cutten School. I couldn't find my son.
In desperation, I stopped at Murphy's Market. My kid didn't have any money, so I held out little hope he'd be in the store.
I walked in and saw the tall, big-haired blonde woman who was always so friendly to my kids and I. I was an adult in 1989, so I wasn't the one with the intimate relationship with her. She just knew that I was a single dad with polite sons who helped me shop.
She saw me enter the store and looked up from her customer.
"Hi! He's right over there," she said, pointing at the magazine rack where my son was sitting on the floor cross-legged reading a college football preview magazine. He might as well have been sitting in our living room.
"Hey, Trent! Your dad's here," she shouted down the aisle.
He paid no attention.
"He stops in here almost every day and looks at the sports magazines," the clerk said. "It's so cute. He's not hurting anybody and he always puts the books back exactly like they were."
She assured me he caused no trouble, making sure I wasn't too mad at the boy. Mad? I was happy that my biggest parental problem, thanks to the clerks who knew my boys, was that my seven-year-old son was unusually interested in sports magazines.
My youngest kids wouldn't be allowed to sit on the floor at the nearby Safeway or Raley's. If they did, they'd be kicked out of the store. In Eureka, in Cutten, no sweat ... life was a little slower and folks had time to care a little more time and my older sons were in the best of hands at any business anywhere near our home.
So, the businesses and clubs and TV shows of our youth were important. The memories are important. They aren't what made Eureka, or Humboldt County special, though. Not really. The people, the pace of life, the extra spaces we had before everything was paved over and built up is what some of us remember most.
Wednesday, August 03, 2011
Eureka Memories: Groceries with a smile -- Handee Market & the Park Store
(Please consider expressing whatever pleasure and enjoyment you gain from reading "Eureka Memories" by clicking on the "Donate" button above and contributing a dollar, 50 cents, a little more or a little less to my PayPal account. If you find value in the work, I hope you'll consider a financial donation that will help me continue to present my work to you. -- Ted Sillanpaa)
It's safe to say I do 90% of my grocery shopping at Safeway now. The other 10% is probably done at Raley's.
Boy, I miss the old days up in Humboldt County when I didn't even know anybody who shopped at Safeway. Remember when people shopped at the nearest neighborhood grocery store? And, how about those tiny little stores where we'd stop as kids for baseball cards, candy and soda?
Cutten Market was where my mom did all her shopping. It was barely a mile from the house and, ironically, I wound up working there as a 17-year-old scab. The people we'd known for years, the clerks, tried to unionize in 1974. My mom got me a job. The people picketed for months. But, they didn't unionize and Cutten Market survived for years afterward.
I used to enjoy the toy section and the magazine section. It was a big deal when the new series of sports hobby cards arrived. And, for some reason, even the most insipid toys drew my attention. I had no interest in paddle ball because the rubberband always broke. Still, when I bought rubber ball for 29 cents to throw against my back wall, I always considered the paddle ball for 89 cents, too.
I liked that people knew us and that my mom, for some reason, got away with parking on the wrong side of the street if she only needed to run in and buy one item. Johnny Sandretto was a cool dude, as the original owner.
The Park Store, owned by Rex Bohn's family, was my favorite store ... all-time, ever. They carried every kind of sports card and Rex's dad would tell me if the new shipment of Topps cards had the new series or whether it was just another couple boxes of cards I'd been buying for a month. I've previously mentioned my summers-long addiction to Goosecicles -- cherry or blueberry.
Bohn's dad, I think his name was Herb, seemed like the nicest guy around. When my kids see an old shopkeeper from a movies based in the 1960s, they wonder if anybody was ever as caring and concerned as the movie shopkeepers seem to be. I tell them there was, at least, one guy -- Mr. Bohn.
If a store on Alliance Road in Arcata can be exotic, then I found Alliance Market (is that the name?) very exotic...mysterious. It was a small grocery store that my aunt and uncle frequented...but, also a store my cousin and I could visit for candy and other treats.
Being a Eureka kid, I thought it was cool that log truck drivers would stop there and hang out. I hated walking to school, but I walked to Alliance Market a lot.
Bonomini's Market is one I'd think I'd have frequented, but ... even though I lived in Pine Hill briefly, I rarely visited it. It would've ruined my image of the Bonomini males as baseball heroes if I'd seen them working in a grocery store, I think.
In 1966, Pine Hill Market opened a little restaurant -- a snack shack of sorts. They started selling hamburgers and fries. I remember, as a chubby 10-year-old, finding the idea of my adult sister buying six hamburgers for $1 mind-blowing. Then, I had my mom drive me to Pine Hill. We bought six burgers...and they were the size of a 50-cent piece. Still, how far ahead of its time was that market? Safeway and Raley's are selling full meals for families on the go now.
Oh, I hated the folks who opened Shears Market in Cutten. It was a couple blocks for Cutten Market...and closer to my house. I thought the interlopers were going to run Cutten Market out of business. Then, I realized that the great, big parking lot was never full. So, Shears Market became the best place to race bicycles -- circa 1966. When we realized the parking lot lights allowed for night riding...we acknowledged that there was room in Cutten for two stores.
Then, Shears became...something else...and it's Murphy's Market now. By the time I was living alone with my two oldest sons (they were 8 and 10 then), we did all our shopping at Murphy's in Cutten. Safeway was a couple miles away, but I knew the people at Murphy's.
There was a tall, blonde woman who just adored my then youngest son. He'd go hang out up there and read sports magazines. She'd visit with him and got to know as much about him as I did. Whenever he was late getting home from school, I'd start the search at Murphy's. If anybody knew where Trent was, it'd be that blonde woman. (And, I feel terrible not remembering her name.)
Handee Market still open on F Street in Eureka? It was about the last of the neighborhood markets. It saddened me to acknowledge that nobody could find competitive prices there, but the owner was a guy named Dale and I know lots of us looked for reasons to buy something...anything...at Handee Market. I know my kids thought Handee Market was as magical as I used to find Cutten Market.
Never a fan of that big market in Trinidad and I don't know why. We'd go to the beach and then stop for a soda and, I don't know, I felt like an outsider.
Now, it's Safeway and Raley's. Then...Raley's and Safeway. My loss.
It's safe to say I do 90% of my grocery shopping at Safeway now. The other 10% is probably done at Raley's.
Boy, I miss the old days up in Humboldt County when I didn't even know anybody who shopped at Safeway. Remember when people shopped at the nearest neighborhood grocery store? And, how about those tiny little stores where we'd stop as kids for baseball cards, candy and soda?
Cutten Market was where my mom did all her shopping. It was barely a mile from the house and, ironically, I wound up working there as a 17-year-old scab. The people we'd known for years, the clerks, tried to unionize in 1974. My mom got me a job. The people picketed for months. But, they didn't unionize and Cutten Market survived for years afterward.
I used to enjoy the toy section and the magazine section. It was a big deal when the new series of sports hobby cards arrived. And, for some reason, even the most insipid toys drew my attention. I had no interest in paddle ball because the rubberband always broke. Still, when I bought rubber ball for 29 cents to throw against my back wall, I always considered the paddle ball for 89 cents, too.
I liked that people knew us and that my mom, for some reason, got away with parking on the wrong side of the street if she only needed to run in and buy one item. Johnny Sandretto was a cool dude, as the original owner.
The Park Store, owned by Rex Bohn's family, was my favorite store ... all-time, ever. They carried every kind of sports card and Rex's dad would tell me if the new shipment of Topps cards had the new series or whether it was just another couple boxes of cards I'd been buying for a month. I've previously mentioned my summers-long addiction to Goosecicles -- cherry or blueberry.
Bohn's dad, I think his name was Herb, seemed like the nicest guy around. When my kids see an old shopkeeper from a movies based in the 1960s, they wonder if anybody was ever as caring and concerned as the movie shopkeepers seem to be. I tell them there was, at least, one guy -- Mr. Bohn.
If a store on Alliance Road in Arcata can be exotic, then I found Alliance Market (is that the name?) very exotic...mysterious. It was a small grocery store that my aunt and uncle frequented...but, also a store my cousin and I could visit for candy and other treats.
Being a Eureka kid, I thought it was cool that log truck drivers would stop there and hang out. I hated walking to school, but I walked to Alliance Market a lot.
Bonomini's Market is one I'd think I'd have frequented, but ... even though I lived in Pine Hill briefly, I rarely visited it. It would've ruined my image of the Bonomini males as baseball heroes if I'd seen them working in a grocery store, I think.
In 1966, Pine Hill Market opened a little restaurant -- a snack shack of sorts. They started selling hamburgers and fries. I remember, as a chubby 10-year-old, finding the idea of my adult sister buying six hamburgers for $1 mind-blowing. Then, I had my mom drive me to Pine Hill. We bought six burgers...and they were the size of a 50-cent piece. Still, how far ahead of its time was that market? Safeway and Raley's are selling full meals for families on the go now.
Oh, I hated the folks who opened Shears Market in Cutten. It was a couple blocks for Cutten Market...and closer to my house. I thought the interlopers were going to run Cutten Market out of business. Then, I realized that the great, big parking lot was never full. So, Shears Market became the best place to race bicycles -- circa 1966. When we realized the parking lot lights allowed for night riding...we acknowledged that there was room in Cutten for two stores.
Then, Shears became...something else...and it's Murphy's Market now. By the time I was living alone with my two oldest sons (they were 8 and 10 then), we did all our shopping at Murphy's in Cutten. Safeway was a couple miles away, but I knew the people at Murphy's.
There was a tall, blonde woman who just adored my then youngest son. He'd go hang out up there and read sports magazines. She'd visit with him and got to know as much about him as I did. Whenever he was late getting home from school, I'd start the search at Murphy's. If anybody knew where Trent was, it'd be that blonde woman. (And, I feel terrible not remembering her name.)
Handee Market still open on F Street in Eureka? It was about the last of the neighborhood markets. It saddened me to acknowledge that nobody could find competitive prices there, but the owner was a guy named Dale and I know lots of us looked for reasons to buy something...anything...at Handee Market. I know my kids thought Handee Market was as magical as I used to find Cutten Market.
Never a fan of that big market in Trinidad and I don't know why. We'd go to the beach and then stop for a soda and, I don't know, I felt like an outsider.
Now, it's Safeway and Raley's. Then...Raley's and Safeway. My loss.
Eureka Memories: Humboldt National Bank, Bill Beasley's & Other Big Business
(Please consider expressing whatever pleasure and enjoyment you gain from reading "Eureka Memories" by clicking on the "Donate" button above and contributing a dollar, 50 cents, a little more or a little less to my PayPal account. If you find value in the work, I hope you'll consider a financial donation that will help me continue to present my work to you. -- Ted Sillanpaa)
Crocker Anglo Bank.
That was a going concern in Humboldt County in the 1960s when I was little and thought it would be noteworthy and of great import if I could ever land a job at a bank. I subsequently had no interest in working at a bank, but I found out it wasn't that noteworthy or important.
Humboldt National Bank was run by O.H. "Bud" Marcellus and my then father-in-law E.K. "Wally" Waldsmith. They had nice offices upstairs in the building on the corner of 5th and ... kitty-corner (catty-corner?) from Firestone. Knowing Mr. Waldsmith and having my girlfriend, later my wife, working at Humboldt National took the luster off the banking industry.
Now my first ex-wife, I realized almost immediately and believe to this day that Amy could've run a bank simply based on what she learned starting as a vault teller afternoons after school in 1973. She was that bright and banking, it turned out, wasn't rocket science like I figured it was when I used to drive by Crocker Anglo in my mom's 1964 Nash Rambler.
The things we remember when, really, we often can't remember anything important.
We bought the boxy, brown Nash at McCrea Nash Rambler ... across the street from the Eureka Inn ... where the parking lot for the Eureka Theater was when I was a teen ... when the Eureka Theater was one of two theaters in town. I don't know why my mom bought a Nash, nor why she later popped what little she could afford for a 1965 Dodge Lancer mini-station wagon.
I do remember when what seemed like every high school and junior high kid in town went to the Eureka or State theaters. If there was a big Hollywood blockbuster showing on the one screen at what was the original, stunning Eureka Theater -- there would be a line stretching from the box office out front -- surrounded by posters for coming attractions -- all the way around the right hand side of the theater, past the library building and down 8th (7th?) Street to old Bill Beasley's Toys and Hobbies.
No...I mean really old Bill Beasley's Toys and Hobbies -- before it really took off as a sporting goods store and the Beasleys moved it up E Street to a bigger storefront.
I didn't really have access to the cash to shop for toys at Beasley's, but I was fascinated by the KIEM TV/KRED AM radio studio on the corner of ... 6th and E ... I never really had to learn street names or numbers in Eureka because I learned how to get around town paying attention while I sat in the passenger seat and my mom drove.
If we drove by at night, we could see the KRED disc jockey talking ... live ... on the air. And, it was a cool thing and I guess remains a reason my friends and I all later agreed Eureka was boring.
Before Hartman Field, across from Sequoia Park, became Kennedy Field No. 2 -- back when that old green painted redwood fence was wildly cool -- it was called Parkside Field. I lived on a dead end street in Cutten, across the canyon from the park. When I was in my backyard throwing a rubber ball against the wall on summer nights I could hear the lion at the park roar and I could hear the Parkside p.a. announcer:
"Now batting, No. 7 Jim Smith ... Mike Edwards on deck ... Joe Jones in the hole."
The slow pitch softball was the size of a basketball, well it was really big, back in the 1960s. So, my pals and I thought slow pitch was for really old men and girls. We loved the fast-pitch softball at Parkside, though, gosh ... it was like having a minor league baseball team in the area to me. Rockin' R had kick-ass teams and I could play a Eureka Midget League game at Kennedy Field (which was a site for a go-kart track in the early 1960s, then became a Little League field with unreachable fences in about 1965) and then go watch those fastpitch guys play.
I grew up hearing fastpitch players tell baseball players that they couldn't possibly hit fastpitch. Then, my baseball-playing friends and I played fastpitch and found out ... like any pitching ... a pretty good hitter can hit it, but if you run into really good pitching (like Bob Cinkel) it's a big, big, big problem.
Later, slowpitch softball guys (who had moved on when fastpitch disappeared) argued that slowpitch was hard to hit and that a bunch of young guys couldn't just form a team and win games. Art Johnson's Sox was the big team in Eureka and they were really good. I wasn't the type to get into a boasting match. But, in about 1984 ... a team I was on finally played Art Johnson's Sox and we won a close game -- and I remember the day I sat in the bleachers at the green Kennedy, er, Hartman...Parkside...whatever...hearing a couple Sox guys bragging.
Art Johnson's Sox had really good players -- my point is that only in a really small town could winning a slowpitch softball game in 1984 reminded a 27-year-old shortstop of something he heard years and years before. I was sure the Sox would've beaten us like a drum 9 times out of 10, but we won the one time...so, technically, they bragged and shouldn't have.
Growing up in Eureka was complicated sometimes, especially if you stayed into adulthood.
I'll bet one of the dads of one of the Art Johnson's Sox guys worked at Crocker Anglo.
Crocker Anglo Bank.
That was a going concern in Humboldt County in the 1960s when I was little and thought it would be noteworthy and of great import if I could ever land a job at a bank. I subsequently had no interest in working at a bank, but I found out it wasn't that noteworthy or important.
Humboldt National Bank was run by O.H. "Bud" Marcellus and my then father-in-law E.K. "Wally" Waldsmith. They had nice offices upstairs in the building on the corner of 5th and ... kitty-corner (catty-corner?) from Firestone. Knowing Mr. Waldsmith and having my girlfriend, later my wife, working at Humboldt National took the luster off the banking industry.
Now my first ex-wife, I realized almost immediately and believe to this day that Amy could've run a bank simply based on what she learned starting as a vault teller afternoons after school in 1973. She was that bright and banking, it turned out, wasn't rocket science like I figured it was when I used to drive by Crocker Anglo in my mom's 1964 Nash Rambler.
The things we remember when, really, we often can't remember anything important.
We bought the boxy, brown Nash at McCrea Nash Rambler ... across the street from the Eureka Inn ... where the parking lot for the Eureka Theater was when I was a teen ... when the Eureka Theater was one of two theaters in town. I don't know why my mom bought a Nash, nor why she later popped what little she could afford for a 1965 Dodge Lancer mini-station wagon.
I do remember when what seemed like every high school and junior high kid in town went to the Eureka or State theaters. If there was a big Hollywood blockbuster showing on the one screen at what was the original, stunning Eureka Theater -- there would be a line stretching from the box office out front -- surrounded by posters for coming attractions -- all the way around the right hand side of the theater, past the library building and down 8th (7th?) Street to old Bill Beasley's Toys and Hobbies.
No...I mean really old Bill Beasley's Toys and Hobbies -- before it really took off as a sporting goods store and the Beasleys moved it up E Street to a bigger storefront.
I didn't really have access to the cash to shop for toys at Beasley's, but I was fascinated by the KIEM TV/KRED AM radio studio on the corner of ... 6th and E ... I never really had to learn street names or numbers in Eureka because I learned how to get around town paying attention while I sat in the passenger seat and my mom drove.
If we drove by at night, we could see the KRED disc jockey talking ... live ... on the air. And, it was a cool thing and I guess remains a reason my friends and I all later agreed Eureka was boring.
Before Hartman Field, across from Sequoia Park, became Kennedy Field No. 2 -- back when that old green painted redwood fence was wildly cool -- it was called Parkside Field. I lived on a dead end street in Cutten, across the canyon from the park. When I was in my backyard throwing a rubber ball against the wall on summer nights I could hear the lion at the park roar and I could hear the Parkside p.a. announcer:
"Now batting, No. 7 Jim Smith ... Mike Edwards on deck ... Joe Jones in the hole."
The slow pitch softball was the size of a basketball, well it was really big, back in the 1960s. So, my pals and I thought slow pitch was for really old men and girls. We loved the fast-pitch softball at Parkside, though, gosh ... it was like having a minor league baseball team in the area to me. Rockin' R had kick-ass teams and I could play a Eureka Midget League game at Kennedy Field (which was a site for a go-kart track in the early 1960s, then became a Little League field with unreachable fences in about 1965) and then go watch those fastpitch guys play.
I grew up hearing fastpitch players tell baseball players that they couldn't possibly hit fastpitch. Then, my baseball-playing friends and I played fastpitch and found out ... like any pitching ... a pretty good hitter can hit it, but if you run into really good pitching (like Bob Cinkel) it's a big, big, big problem.
Later, slowpitch softball guys (who had moved on when fastpitch disappeared) argued that slowpitch was hard to hit and that a bunch of young guys couldn't just form a team and win games. Art Johnson's Sox was the big team in Eureka and they were really good. I wasn't the type to get into a boasting match. But, in about 1984 ... a team I was on finally played Art Johnson's Sox and we won a close game -- and I remember the day I sat in the bleachers at the green Kennedy, er, Hartman...Parkside...whatever...hearing a couple Sox guys bragging.
Art Johnson's Sox had really good players -- my point is that only in a really small town could winning a slowpitch softball game in 1984 reminded a 27-year-old shortstop of something he heard years and years before. I was sure the Sox would've beaten us like a drum 9 times out of 10, but we won the one time...so, technically, they bragged and shouldn't have.
Growing up in Eureka was complicated sometimes, especially if you stayed into adulthood.
I'll bet one of the dads of one of the Art Johnson's Sox guys worked at Crocker Anglo.
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
Youth baseball stories aren't what they seem; Solano, Napa has top players playing across the country
It's nearly impossible to read a newspaper sports section online or in print without reading about some baseball team winning a championship, often a state or national championship. There are multiple sponsoring organizations holding national championship events for players of all ages and, really, it takes a long, hard look at things to determine if the championship actually carries any weight.
For instance, the Little League World Series that makes its nonsensical appearance on national television this month, doesn't mean much in regard to showcasing the best young baseball players in America. Little League long ago stopped being the predominant youth baseball organization in America.
The Little League all-star team that won the Solano-Napa counties championship would have trouble competing with a good tournament team. Many of the area's top 12-year-old players don't even finish their Little League careers locally before moving to play for travel teams that play in tournaments throughout the region and the country.
The Fairfield Daily Republic featured a nice story about 12-year-old Tyler Reames, a Fairfield star who helped the Lamorinda Monarchs win the AAU 13-U national championship in Florida recently. (The story about Reames' considerable accomplishments appears at http://bit.ly/qaC22P.)
Readers would guess that young Reames and his mates are the best team of players aged 13-and-under in the country. Readers might be wrong. There are dozens of organizations who charge entry fees, rent stadiums and hold national championships. Reames played with Lamorinda at the baseball complex at Disneyworld.
My son celebrated his 12-year-old baseball season playing for the Lamorinda Baseball Academy at a 98-team national tournament held in Cooperstown, N.Y. A baseball businessman in Cooperstown hosts 98 different teams every week in the rural home of the Baseball Hall of Fame. So, clearly, Disneyworld and the Cooperstown, N.Y. tournament outfit makes a healthy profit on giving young players a national spotlight.
We just have no idea how big the spotlight is or what succeeding in the spotlight means.
As baseball players grow older, the most important tournaments are hosted at the homes of Major League Baseball spring training complexes. Games aren't played near an amusement park and don't come with a trip to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame. The games are played on practice diamonds in front of a few parents, some coaches and loads of college and big league scouts.
My son's Nor Cal Baseball 15-under team played in a big, national tournament co-sponsored by Rawlings in June. There were games at a number of spring training camps. It's really handy for scouts who deal with Rawlings and, of course, with sponsoring organizations who field teams.
There were concurrent tournaments in Arizona, at the same sites, for players from 18 years old on down. So, arguably, the showcase for the top high school players in the nation was held in near private in Arizona.
So, what does it mean if a town team wins an American Legion baseball championship? The Napa 17-and-under Junior American Legion team finished second in the California tournament. Fairfield boasts a thriving Legion program. Clearly, though, the best players in the country were in Arizona in June (and in Chicago in July, followed by a tournament in Florida) while Legion tournaments that draw media attention were being hailed as state championship competition.
It's confusing, isn't it? Over time, let's sort out the different levels of baseball competition ... the value of a national championship teams have to pay to win ... and whether or not baseball is best served with top players traveling the country or with them playing close to home with their best pals.
For instance, the Little League World Series that makes its nonsensical appearance on national television this month, doesn't mean much in regard to showcasing the best young baseball players in America. Little League long ago stopped being the predominant youth baseball organization in America.
The Little League all-star team that won the Solano-Napa counties championship would have trouble competing with a good tournament team. Many of the area's top 12-year-old players don't even finish their Little League careers locally before moving to play for travel teams that play in tournaments throughout the region and the country.
The Fairfield Daily Republic featured a nice story about 12-year-old Tyler Reames, a Fairfield star who helped the Lamorinda Monarchs win the AAU 13-U national championship in Florida recently. (The story about Reames' considerable accomplishments appears at http://bit.ly/qaC22P.)
Readers would guess that young Reames and his mates are the best team of players aged 13-and-under in the country. Readers might be wrong. There are dozens of organizations who charge entry fees, rent stadiums and hold national championships. Reames played with Lamorinda at the baseball complex at Disneyworld.
My son celebrated his 12-year-old baseball season playing for the Lamorinda Baseball Academy at a 98-team national tournament held in Cooperstown, N.Y. A baseball businessman in Cooperstown hosts 98 different teams every week in the rural home of the Baseball Hall of Fame. So, clearly, Disneyworld and the Cooperstown, N.Y. tournament outfit makes a healthy profit on giving young players a national spotlight.
We just have no idea how big the spotlight is or what succeeding in the spotlight means.
As baseball players grow older, the most important tournaments are hosted at the homes of Major League Baseball spring training complexes. Games aren't played near an amusement park and don't come with a trip to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame. The games are played on practice diamonds in front of a few parents, some coaches and loads of college and big league scouts.
My son's Nor Cal Baseball 15-under team played in a big, national tournament co-sponsored by Rawlings in June. There were games at a number of spring training camps. It's really handy for scouts who deal with Rawlings and, of course, with sponsoring organizations who field teams.
There were concurrent tournaments in Arizona, at the same sites, for players from 18 years old on down. So, arguably, the showcase for the top high school players in the nation was held in near private in Arizona.
So, what does it mean if a town team wins an American Legion baseball championship? The Napa 17-and-under Junior American Legion team finished second in the California tournament. Fairfield boasts a thriving Legion program. Clearly, though, the best players in the country were in Arizona in June (and in Chicago in July, followed by a tournament in Florida) while Legion tournaments that draw media attention were being hailed as state championship competition.
It's confusing, isn't it? Over time, let's sort out the different levels of baseball competition ... the value of a national championship teams have to pay to win ... and whether or not baseball is best served with top players traveling the country or with them playing close to home with their best pals.
What's a writer worth these days? Something more than nothing, right?
It feels like having linked this site to my PayPal account amounts to me begging for donations to the Help Pay Ted's Bills fund. Really, the idea is to see if I can generate some income doing the same work I've been paid to do my whole life.
That button to the upper left that enables readers to kick me a dollar or two or 20 should say something other than "Donate." Readers used to routinely pay to read what I wrote in newspapers. Times have changed.
I'm trying to keep in mind that while I need to ask people to consider paying me for any value they get from my work, I also have to work even harder to remember that there are huge voids in media coverage in communities around here. So, there actually could be some value (50 cents? A quarter?) in the work you read here.
There isn't a writer in Humboldt County who can write about the history of the Humboldt Crabs summer college baseball program. I can write about it because I grew up following the club, then writing about it for years.
Since I shop at a Wal-Mart, it seems like I can address the controversy of a Wal-Mart moving into my hometown in Eureka -- over the loud protests of folks who feel Wal-Mart will ruin everything up there.
There's no place in the Napa Valley for an opinion on a news event that might cast the business community in a negative light -- and, honest, sometimes somebody needs to ask hard questions about tough topics and not just cater to advertisers.
When the high school football summer workout season starts, I can go out and talk to players. There's no need for me to wait for the advertising director to tell me when the special football section runs. I can go find stories about, well, someone other than coaches who tend to repeat themselves ... as soon as they put on pads.
Solano County is not lacking for columns about the good, old days. There's a lot to be said about generating copy that makes us smile about television in the 1970s or what Fairfield and Vacaville were like in 1967. It just seems like there's more to living and being in Solano County in 2011 than thinking about "I Dream of Jeannie" and the old bowling center on North Texas. Isn't there?
I'm a sports dad and a guy who coached for decades. So, I can determine how there can be a national championship event featuring 12-year-old baseball players that runs concurrently with a different national championship tournament for 12-year-old players. There are lots of national championships and World Series events sponsored by different organizations. I can actually find out if a 12-year-old pitcher in Fairfield is one of the best his age in the U.S. or whether his folks just paid a ton of money to get him on a team that paid a ton of money to enter a tournament that they subsequently won against average competition.
I'm sure that what you read here is worth a buck or two, once in awhile.
Convincing myself of that will be an ongoing challenge.
That button to the upper left that enables readers to kick me a dollar or two or 20 should say something other than "Donate." Readers used to routinely pay to read what I wrote in newspapers. Times have changed.
I'm trying to keep in mind that while I need to ask people to consider paying me for any value they get from my work, I also have to work even harder to remember that there are huge voids in media coverage in communities around here. So, there actually could be some value (50 cents? A quarter?) in the work you read here.
There isn't a writer in Humboldt County who can write about the history of the Humboldt Crabs summer college baseball program. I can write about it because I grew up following the club, then writing about it for years.
Since I shop at a Wal-Mart, it seems like I can address the controversy of a Wal-Mart moving into my hometown in Eureka -- over the loud protests of folks who feel Wal-Mart will ruin everything up there.
There's no place in the Napa Valley for an opinion on a news event that might cast the business community in a negative light -- and, honest, sometimes somebody needs to ask hard questions about tough topics and not just cater to advertisers.
When the high school football summer workout season starts, I can go out and talk to players. There's no need for me to wait for the advertising director to tell me when the special football section runs. I can go find stories about, well, someone other than coaches who tend to repeat themselves ... as soon as they put on pads.
Solano County is not lacking for columns about the good, old days. There's a lot to be said about generating copy that makes us smile about television in the 1970s or what Fairfield and Vacaville were like in 1967. It just seems like there's more to living and being in Solano County in 2011 than thinking about "I Dream of Jeannie" and the old bowling center on North Texas. Isn't there?
I'm a sports dad and a guy who coached for decades. So, I can determine how there can be a national championship event featuring 12-year-old baseball players that runs concurrently with a different national championship tournament for 12-year-old players. There are lots of national championships and World Series events sponsored by different organizations. I can actually find out if a 12-year-old pitcher in Fairfield is one of the best his age in the U.S. or whether his folks just paid a ton of money to get him on a team that paid a ton of money to enter a tournament that they subsequently won against average competition.
I'm sure that what you read here is worth a buck or two, once in awhile.
Convincing myself of that will be an ongoing challenge.
Eureka Memories: Media plays along to diminish how Crabs' glory has faded over time
(Please consider expressing whatever pleasure and enjoyment you gain from reading "Eureka Memories" by clicking on the "Donate" button above and contributing a dollar, 50 cents, a little more or a little less to my PayPal account. If you find value in the work, I hope you'll consider a financial donation that will help me continue to present my work to you. -- Ted Sillanpaa)
For a kid who grew up idolizing every member of the Humboldt Crabs summer baseball team from 1964 to 1973, I caught more hell for how the club was covered as a newspaper sports editor than anyone in that job before or after me.
One minute going to Crabs games at old, old, old Albee Stadium in Eureka and then the Arcata Ball Park is the highlight of my life, the next I'm getting telephone calls at the Times-Standard and hearing, "You're killing us! We can't get fans out here if you don't do bigger stories and run more pictures of the Crabs!"
My history with the Crabs, following the truly great teams, paved the way for the trouble I caused myself as a sports editor of the Times-Standard in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the mid-1960s, I saw the Crabs play the Alaska summer college teams that featured Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver and other future big league greats. The Goldpanners and Glacier Pilots would visit Humboldt County. The Crabs would spend time playing up in Alaska. The Crabs were routinely a featured opponent in the famous "Midnight Sun" game that the Goldpanners play to celebrate the Summer Solstice each year.
Grand Junction, Colo. had one of the best summer college teams in America that would come west to play the Crabs. Then, the Crabs would play Grand Junction and the Boulder, Colo. Collegians on their way back to the National Baseball Congress tournament in Wichita, Kan. The Crabs were loaded with the best college players on the West Coast and they played those teams that had simply fantastic collegiate talent.
The Crabs would bring starters from UCLA, USC, Fresno State, Stanford, Cal and other baseball powers to play and work (part-time jobs) in Humboldt County from June to late July. It was a glorious time for a North Coast baseball fan.
The Bellingham, Wash. Bells and the old Fontanetti's teams from San Jose weren't even close to the best teams I watched the Crabs play -- but they were better than 95 percent of the teams the Crabs were playing when I worked at the Times-Standard. And, they appear to be better than most of the teams the Crabs play currently.
I couldn't, as the newspaper guy who presented for readers the people and events most important on the area sports landscape, games against the Redding Oaks or the Fairfield Indians as big games. When my co-workers and I did the work to find out who played for the visiting teams, we'd report that a group of junior college players or older guys who play in night-time rec leagues were headed to meet the Crabs. That was a far cry from the days when the best players in the country were playing in old Albee Stadium or at the Arcata Ball Park.
I knew the Crabs weren't playing the really great summer college teams. When the Crabs were no longer willing or able to travel to Alaska, Colorado and the national tournament in Kansas -- teams stopped traveling to play them in Humboldt County, too.
I grew up watching the Crabs with guys from Pac-10 starting rotations -- the ace pitchers from USC, Cal, Stanford, etc. There was a Crabs team that lost three infielders, a catcher and two starting pitchers who were drafted...played one weekend in Arcata...then signed professional contracts. It was 1976, maybe 1977. What great talent they had.
There were local guys who could play with anybody and did -- for many, many years. So, while the college stars came and went, My buddies and I became big fan of Humboldt County guys like Bob Bonomini, John Costa and others who were there for years.
Times changed, obviously. My friends and I couldn't stay home and watch the San Francisco Giants on television every night all summer. We didn't have video games or the ability to rent movies to watch at home. We went to Crabs' games because they provided the best entertainment around. Now, the entertainment value has evaporated and alternatives are available.
The talent the Crabs had by the time I was in charge of providing media coverage simply didn't compare to the talent they had when they deserved to be the lead story, with a big "picture," whenever they played. The Crabs started playing adult rec league teams who clearly couldn't compete with the Crabs younger college players.
The Crabs appear to be playing collections of junior college players from different places now. That's a step up from playing former minor leaguers and teams filled with guys who were high school stars a decade back. Still, if junior college baseball players attracted our attention then College of the Redwoods, Solano Community College and Napa Valley College wouldn't have spent decades playing in private, right?
So, I caught hell for not covering the Crabs I was watching like the great Crabs teams who played great opponents that I saw growing up. The Crabs folks sort of expected the newspaper to help market what had become an inferior product.
Seemed like the right thing to do then, but I'd have made a lot more friends if I'd treated the Crabs of 1999 like the Crabs of 1969. Instead, I did what I thought was my job and wrote about the opposition and that the Crabs were no longer attracting NCAA Division I stars.
The media does market the Crabs now and -- why not? They're not stealing prime newspaper space from other major local sports events. I noticed a Humboldt Steelheads' game covered by a staff writer. I wonder what type of crowd the all-local Steelies draw. The club is operated by the Crabs, so I'm amused by the manufactured rivalry between the two teams.
What I came to learn was that the Crabs fans changed as the team changed. My son and his pal were born and raised in Eureka and were fortunate enough to spend two years pitching in the Crabs bullpen. I only saw my son and his friend pitch a couple times, but I realized that the Crabs fans had no idea that they were Humboldt County guys.
Crabs fans, clearly, didn't know that a guy like lefty Hans Smith was a collegiate long reliever, not Fresno State's ace. They didn't care. They cheered for the Crabs uniforms and they were cheered by the atmosphere at the Arcata Ball Park. My son and his friend wouldn't have earned spots on the Crabs rosters of the 1960s and 1970s. The pitching was far too good to have room for two good local arms.
I finally figured all this out over time. We stuck to covering the old Humboldt Eagles Connie Mack League team and the local American Legion teams on par with the Crabs. I remember one week for catching hell that my son was mentioned in a Crabs game story, then catching hell for only having a 5-inch Crabs story ... when my son had one of his best games in the two years he played for the team. It was clear that I wasn't going to win in regard to the Crabs.
I suppose I was too close to the Crabs as a fan to appreciate and adjust quickly to what the team has become over the last few decades. Seems like folks are pleased with the newspaper coverage of the team now.
Times have changed, that's all.
For a kid who grew up idolizing every member of the Humboldt Crabs summer baseball team from 1964 to 1973, I caught more hell for how the club was covered as a newspaper sports editor than anyone in that job before or after me.
One minute going to Crabs games at old, old, old Albee Stadium in Eureka and then the Arcata Ball Park is the highlight of my life, the next I'm getting telephone calls at the Times-Standard and hearing, "You're killing us! We can't get fans out here if you don't do bigger stories and run more pictures of the Crabs!"
My history with the Crabs, following the truly great teams, paved the way for the trouble I caused myself as a sports editor of the Times-Standard in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the mid-1960s, I saw the Crabs play the Alaska summer college teams that featured Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver and other future big league greats. The Goldpanners and Glacier Pilots would visit Humboldt County. The Crabs would spend time playing up in Alaska. The Crabs were routinely a featured opponent in the famous "Midnight Sun" game that the Goldpanners play to celebrate the Summer Solstice each year.
Grand Junction, Colo. had one of the best summer college teams in America that would come west to play the Crabs. Then, the Crabs would play Grand Junction and the Boulder, Colo. Collegians on their way back to the National Baseball Congress tournament in Wichita, Kan. The Crabs were loaded with the best college players on the West Coast and they played those teams that had simply fantastic collegiate talent.
The Crabs would bring starters from UCLA, USC, Fresno State, Stanford, Cal and other baseball powers to play and work (part-time jobs) in Humboldt County from June to late July. It was a glorious time for a North Coast baseball fan.
The Bellingham, Wash. Bells and the old Fontanetti's teams from San Jose weren't even close to the best teams I watched the Crabs play -- but they were better than 95 percent of the teams the Crabs were playing when I worked at the Times-Standard. And, they appear to be better than most of the teams the Crabs play currently.
I couldn't, as the newspaper guy who presented for readers the people and events most important on the area sports landscape, games against the Redding Oaks or the Fairfield Indians as big games. When my co-workers and I did the work to find out who played for the visiting teams, we'd report that a group of junior college players or older guys who play in night-time rec leagues were headed to meet the Crabs. That was a far cry from the days when the best players in the country were playing in old Albee Stadium or at the Arcata Ball Park.
I knew the Crabs weren't playing the really great summer college teams. When the Crabs were no longer willing or able to travel to Alaska, Colorado and the national tournament in Kansas -- teams stopped traveling to play them in Humboldt County, too.
I grew up watching the Crabs with guys from Pac-10 starting rotations -- the ace pitchers from USC, Cal, Stanford, etc. There was a Crabs team that lost three infielders, a catcher and two starting pitchers who were drafted...played one weekend in Arcata...then signed professional contracts. It was 1976, maybe 1977. What great talent they had.
There were local guys who could play with anybody and did -- for many, many years. So, while the college stars came and went, My buddies and I became big fan of Humboldt County guys like Bob Bonomini, John Costa and others who were there for years.
Times changed, obviously. My friends and I couldn't stay home and watch the San Francisco Giants on television every night all summer. We didn't have video games or the ability to rent movies to watch at home. We went to Crabs' games because they provided the best entertainment around. Now, the entertainment value has evaporated and alternatives are available.
The talent the Crabs had by the time I was in charge of providing media coverage simply didn't compare to the talent they had when they deserved to be the lead story, with a big "picture," whenever they played. The Crabs started playing adult rec league teams who clearly couldn't compete with the Crabs younger college players.
The Crabs appear to be playing collections of junior college players from different places now. That's a step up from playing former minor leaguers and teams filled with guys who were high school stars a decade back. Still, if junior college baseball players attracted our attention then College of the Redwoods, Solano Community College and Napa Valley College wouldn't have spent decades playing in private, right?
So, I caught hell for not covering the Crabs I was watching like the great Crabs teams who played great opponents that I saw growing up. The Crabs folks sort of expected the newspaper to help market what had become an inferior product.
Seemed like the right thing to do then, but I'd have made a lot more friends if I'd treated the Crabs of 1999 like the Crabs of 1969. Instead, I did what I thought was my job and wrote about the opposition and that the Crabs were no longer attracting NCAA Division I stars.
The media does market the Crabs now and -- why not? They're not stealing prime newspaper space from other major local sports events. I noticed a Humboldt Steelheads' game covered by a staff writer. I wonder what type of crowd the all-local Steelies draw. The club is operated by the Crabs, so I'm amused by the manufactured rivalry between the two teams.
What I came to learn was that the Crabs fans changed as the team changed. My son and his pal were born and raised in Eureka and were fortunate enough to spend two years pitching in the Crabs bullpen. I only saw my son and his friend pitch a couple times, but I realized that the Crabs fans had no idea that they were Humboldt County guys.
Crabs fans, clearly, didn't know that a guy like lefty Hans Smith was a collegiate long reliever, not Fresno State's ace. They didn't care. They cheered for the Crabs uniforms and they were cheered by the atmosphere at the Arcata Ball Park. My son and his friend wouldn't have earned spots on the Crabs rosters of the 1960s and 1970s. The pitching was far too good to have room for two good local arms.
I finally figured all this out over time. We stuck to covering the old Humboldt Eagles Connie Mack League team and the local American Legion teams on par with the Crabs. I remember one week for catching hell that my son was mentioned in a Crabs game story, then catching hell for only having a 5-inch Crabs story ... when my son had one of his best games in the two years he played for the team. It was clear that I wasn't going to win in regard to the Crabs.
I suppose I was too close to the Crabs as a fan to appreciate and adjust quickly to what the team has become over the last few decades. Seems like folks are pleased with the newspaper coverage of the team now.
Times have changed, that's all.
From afar, it's hard to take Humboldt Crabs seriously
The Humboldt Crabs are the North Coast's summer college baseball team. It's the oldest such baseball program around. In the Eureka-Arcata area, the Crabs are treated like a professional minor league baseball team.
Solano County baseball fans would be surprised to know that the Crabs get loads of media attention, have games broadcast on the radio and that they routinely play the Fairfield Indians and Solano Mudcats. The two Solano County teams play men's adult league baseball at Allen Witt Park in Fairfield, a park without any bleachers.
Crabs fans take the club completely seriously. Much is made of the league the Crabs play in. When even the Fairfield Indians or Solano Mudcats go north, hundreds of fans turn out to cheer on the home team and heckle the visitors who got a day or two off work to go play baseball in Arcata.
There was a time when the Humboldt Crabs attracted the finest college players from the best college programs in the United States. The Crabs would routinely have stars from UCLA, USC, Fresno State, Stanford, Cal, etc. Now, the Crabs are made up of mostly underclassmen from less prominent baseball schools with the core of the team being the locally-produced stars who couldn't crack the lineup for decades when the Crabs were truly an attraction to national-level stars.
The Crabs' league affiliation changes a lot, probably because they play 95 percent of their games at home. A couple quick road trips in recent seasons gives the appearance that whatever league they're in now is for real and legitimate.
As has been the case since the Crabs simply became a local show for fans isolated hours and miles from an alternative form of summer sports entertainment, this year's league tournament is set for Arcata. No other team in the league could draw a big enough crowd for the league tournament to make any team any money. In Arcata, the tournament will draw 1,000 fans a day, maybe more.
Typically, the tournament field is unraveling. Teams that qualified for the event have dropped out. The media up there is treating it like a bit of a scandal, but it's more a matter of the expense of players from hours and hours away not wanting to foot the bill to travel to Arcata for a second time in just a couple of months.
There was a time when the Humboldt Crabs would've been as entertaining, facing the finest summer college baseball teams in the west region, as any level of baseball. Now, after spending a lifetime following for and cheering for the Crabs, folks who've gotten away from Humboldt County see the club is a local attraction for local fans and little more.
One wonders how much interest there would be in the Crabs summer college club if folks on the North Coast knew that they were playing collections of junior college players, men's adult teams, etc. A Solano County team representing Solano Community College went north and plastered the Crabs in July. Only folks who follow SCC baseball would know where that team came from. There was no explanation made available to Crabs' fans.
I miss what the Crabs were in my youth and hope that, someday, they can be taken seriously again.
Solano County baseball fans would be surprised to know that the Crabs get loads of media attention, have games broadcast on the radio and that they routinely play the Fairfield Indians and Solano Mudcats. The two Solano County teams play men's adult league baseball at Allen Witt Park in Fairfield, a park without any bleachers.
Crabs fans take the club completely seriously. Much is made of the league the Crabs play in. When even the Fairfield Indians or Solano Mudcats go north, hundreds of fans turn out to cheer on the home team and heckle the visitors who got a day or two off work to go play baseball in Arcata.
There was a time when the Humboldt Crabs attracted the finest college players from the best college programs in the United States. The Crabs would routinely have stars from UCLA, USC, Fresno State, Stanford, Cal, etc. Now, the Crabs are made up of mostly underclassmen from less prominent baseball schools with the core of the team being the locally-produced stars who couldn't crack the lineup for decades when the Crabs were truly an attraction to national-level stars.
The Crabs' league affiliation changes a lot, probably because they play 95 percent of their games at home. A couple quick road trips in recent seasons gives the appearance that whatever league they're in now is for real and legitimate.
As has been the case since the Crabs simply became a local show for fans isolated hours and miles from an alternative form of summer sports entertainment, this year's league tournament is set for Arcata. No other team in the league could draw a big enough crowd for the league tournament to make any team any money. In Arcata, the tournament will draw 1,000 fans a day, maybe more.
Typically, the tournament field is unraveling. Teams that qualified for the event have dropped out. The media up there is treating it like a bit of a scandal, but it's more a matter of the expense of players from hours and hours away not wanting to foot the bill to travel to Arcata for a second time in just a couple of months.
There was a time when the Humboldt Crabs would've been as entertaining, facing the finest summer college baseball teams in the west region, as any level of baseball. Now, after spending a lifetime following for and cheering for the Crabs, folks who've gotten away from Humboldt County see the club is a local attraction for local fans and little more.
One wonders how much interest there would be in the Crabs summer college club if folks on the North Coast knew that they were playing collections of junior college players, men's adult teams, etc. A Solano County team representing Solano Community College went north and plastered the Crabs in July. Only folks who follow SCC baseball would know where that team came from. There was no explanation made available to Crabs' fans.
I miss what the Crabs were in my youth and hope that, someday, they can be taken seriously again.
Wine industry drives Napa Valley, attracts controversial illegal immigrants
(Please consider expressing whatever pleasure or insight you gain from reading by clicking on the "Donate" button above and contributing a dollar, 50 cents, a little more or a little less to my PayPal account. If you find value in the work, I hope you'll consider a financial donation that will help me continue to present my work to you. -- Ted Sillanpaa)
A study shows that 12 percent of the population in Napa County are there illegally. The debate going on over the results of research featured in the Napa Valley Register indicates that residents are talking around the actual issue.
The Register story reported that:
"Alicia Jaramillo, president of the Napa County Hispanic Network, said ... that Napa’s number would likely be higher than most. With agriculture as the county’s main economic engine, a high population of undocumented immigrants is to be expected, Jaramillo said. Other wine growing counties, however, fell short of Napa’s double digit figures."
The debate among residents in Napa centers on the damage immigrants here illegally do to the economy, job market, etc. Or, it focuses on the value the immigrants provide by working hard, paying taxes, etc.
Immigrant workers flock to the Napa Valley to work the vineyards. They don't head here for the weather or access to fine dining. So, if there's an issue with 12 of every 100 Napa area residents being in the valley illegally, it would center on the Napa-based businesses that employ immigrants in the United States illegally.
Go ahead and read all 100-plus comments about the Register story. It's available at:
http://bit.ly/o1cjdM
Try to find a resident who specifically mentions that the industry that drives the Napa Valley economy is the industry that attracts, then employs illegal immigrants.
The immigrants are here. They're working jobs that the average unemployed American doesn't necessarily fight to get. Teenagers and out-of-work sales folks rarely fight for jobs in the vineyards.
U.S. immigration laws are easily circumvented.
The problem that can be addressed, should be addressed, is how Napa Valley businesses so easily hire the immigrants who cause such a stir among Napa Valley residents.
There's not a word in Register about how many of the 12 percent of said immigrants work the vineyards. There's no mention of which wineries routinely hire immigrants lacking official documentation. Seems odd, doesn't it?
Blame the government.
Blame the immigrants here illegally.
Just make sure we all agree that there are Napa Valley business folks attracting the immigrants, giving them work (which they do very well and very faithfully) and then keeping them in the valley.
Residents who have a problem with information in the study on immigration have a problem with the wine industry in the Napa Valley.
A study shows that 12 percent of the population in Napa County are there illegally. The debate going on over the results of research featured in the Napa Valley Register indicates that residents are talking around the actual issue.
The Register story reported that:
"Alicia Jaramillo, president of the Napa County Hispanic Network, said ... that Napa’s number would likely be higher than most. With agriculture as the county’s main economic engine, a high population of undocumented immigrants is to be expected, Jaramillo said. Other wine growing counties, however, fell short of Napa’s double digit figures."
The debate among residents in Napa centers on the damage immigrants here illegally do to the economy, job market, etc. Or, it focuses on the value the immigrants provide by working hard, paying taxes, etc.
Immigrant workers flock to the Napa Valley to work the vineyards. They don't head here for the weather or access to fine dining. So, if there's an issue with 12 of every 100 Napa area residents being in the valley illegally, it would center on the Napa-based businesses that employ immigrants in the United States illegally.
Go ahead and read all 100-plus comments about the Register story. It's available at:
http://bit.ly/o1cjdM
Try to find a resident who specifically mentions that the industry that drives the Napa Valley economy is the industry that attracts, then employs illegal immigrants.
The immigrants are here. They're working jobs that the average unemployed American doesn't necessarily fight to get. Teenagers and out-of-work sales folks rarely fight for jobs in the vineyards.
U.S. immigration laws are easily circumvented.
The problem that can be addressed, should be addressed, is how Napa Valley businesses so easily hire the immigrants who cause such a stir among Napa Valley residents.
There's not a word in Register about how many of the 12 percent of said immigrants work the vineyards. There's no mention of which wineries routinely hire immigrants lacking official documentation. Seems odd, doesn't it?
Blame the government.
Blame the immigrants here illegally.
Just make sure we all agree that there are Napa Valley business folks attracting the immigrants, giving them work (which they do very well and very faithfully) and then keeping them in the valley.
Residents who have a problem with information in the study on immigration have a problem with the wine industry in the Napa Valley.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)