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captainsblogMonday was a cold but sunny day here. It echoed one much like it on Long Island, 34 years before.
Eleanor and I had flown to New York for a weekend of Meet the Fam- my mom (dad had passed earlier in the year), oldest sister and her family. I knew all along I would be proposing that weekend, and thought about going big popping the question at the top of the World Trade Center. We even had reservations in the hotel between the Towers.
Smart move, letting Sandy talk me out of that one. “Take her to Jones Beach,” she said. it’s really pretty, and quiet, and I think she’d like it.“
She did. And while my sister did make it to the wedding the following September and only a few weeks past our first anniversary, we will always love her for that suggestion. She’s part of the glue that's held us together for 34 years from that sunny morning.
Then last night, I snagged an invite to a Zoom call featuring Bob Costas. Yup, that's me in the corner:
He’d been invited to speak at a virtual event for a book launch, chronicling over 150 years of Buffalo baseball history. The major league portions of that history add up to fewer than 10 years, even if you count this year’s Blue Jay In Exile residence. But he mostly shared stories about the sport on general, and games and events he was at. The price of admission was free, but any price would have been more than paid for by the sheer joy of hearing Bob doing an impression of Tom Hanks doing an impression of Vin Scully talking to Bruce Springsteen, when all of them were at the Obamas' awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Robert Redford. His Hanks was a perfect Hanks and rolled right into a perfect Vin. (As opposed to, say, Scott Baio doing an impression of James Woods doing an impression of Randy Quaid talking to Ted Nugent during the award of the Medal of Freedom to Lou Holtz? Hard pass.)
Other stories included Stan Musial bringing Big Macs to Bob's house; him naming one of his kids "Keith Michael Kirby Costas" on a bet with Kirby Puckett; and the 19 inning Yankee-Red Sox marathon game he once covered (the kind that won't happen anymore with the ghost runner rule put in for extra innings), and how his director fed him two fans of opposite genders and fandoms- he said they didn't know each other in the fourth inning and were engaged by the 17th;)
----
And then there have been the stories throughout the past few days of the Former President Trump legal team securing no victories but several cases of COVID. The losses included a unanimous SCOTUS beatdown of the first case to reach them, with not even Justice Handmaid dissenting from the refusal to hear the case. Apparently the theory over in Parlerland now is that Fidel Castro got to the three Trump judges on SCOTUS. He must be out haunting with Hugo Chavez.
But wait... who’s the third Christmas ghost?
----
And with that, good day, and have a pleasant tomor-row!
Eleanor and I had flown to New York for a weekend of Meet the Fam- my mom (dad had passed earlier in the year), oldest sister and her family. I knew all along I would be proposing that weekend, and thought about going big popping the question at the top of the World Trade Center. We even had reservations in the hotel between the Towers.
Smart move, letting Sandy talk me out of that one. “Take her to Jones Beach,” she said. it’s really pretty, and quiet, and I think she’d like it.“
She did. And while my sister did make it to the wedding the following September and only a few weeks past our first anniversary, we will always love her for that suggestion. She’s part of the glue that's held us together for 34 years from that sunny morning.
We did visit the towers that weekend, along with the hotel we stayed in (also destroyed in the later tragedy) and the Winter Garden of an adjacent building that has survived. Sandy also got us tickets to a musical. Since I proposed on Pearl Harbor Day to a woman whose first date with me was Terry Gilliam's Brazil, it was only fitting that we didn't go to see no singin' Cats or somethin':
Here's the Who's Who:
Fyvush Finkel was the only cast member I recall anything about, then or until I did some looking this weekend; several of them have continued in either performing or producing, although Ron Taylor, who voiced the legendary FEED ME! line and the rest of Audrey II's dialogue, died of a heart attack in 2002. Ashman and Menken would of course go on to Disney stardom; Tichina Arnold's the only one who joined the later film cast, and she remains active in a Cedric show on HBO.
----
Yesterday brought a much sadder reminder- one for which I have now corrected a recollection of why I was where I was on the night of December 8th, All Those Years Ago.
That night 1980 was NOT a Sunday, when I was typically copy editing at The Cornell Daily Sun. I wasn't even on the copy desk the night before, which WAS my usual Sunday night; my dear friend Amy was. But I was down there; I can't remember why. I don't see a story or column of mine in the December 9 issue of the paper, but it was near semester end and we were a pretty close knit group.
In a far corner of the newsroom was an alcove with two AP teletype machines and a UPI photo transmitter. You heard the clickety-clack as you came up the stairs and it was a constant presence, especially as you responded to the bellows of composing room foreman from the second floor- "NIGHT EDITOR! WE NEED COPY!" or "SCHROEDER YOU APE!" The first night I staffed as a sophomore two years earlier, one of the compet managers- possibly Rodion Iwanczuk- gave us our first tour and showed us the alcove. "If you ever hear a bell go off, that means a big national story is breaking. Tell the managing editor right away! But don't worry- it never does."
It went off that very first night. It was 1978- Jimmy Carter had just brokered the Camp David peace accord between Israel and Egypt. But true to the prediction, that bell never again went off in my hundreds of nights down there....
until the MONDAY night that was December 8, 1980.
We were among the first in the country to know. No Internet to speak of back then; Ithaca had no over-air television stations either based there or that could reach it, and its primordial cable setup was just the three networks from Binghamton and Syracuse. I assumed the local radio stations had something about it (friends from WVBR I still have from back then had graduated, but they just passed on an audio of Keith Olbermann, who was back in town that night, bringing the news), but we usually had no radio playing in the newsroom anyway. Most of the country learned during Monday Night Football when Howard Cosell, of all people, made the announcement.
We were a cynical bunch. Our newsroom motto was "NEVER BELIEVE A RUMOR UNTIL IT'S OFFICIALLY DENIED," next to a photo of Nelson Rockefeller flipping off Congress captioned "I AM CURRENTLY DEAD." A month earlier, I'd been tasked with calling law professors about whether Carter would try to pre-emptively name SCOTUS replacements for Brennan and/or Marshall and got a tongue lashing from them for suggesting that anyone would be so brazenly political.
But that night, with that news? Twenty-something cynics in their twenty-somethings collectively went to pieces. Even the toughest customers on that newsroom floor were in tears. We struggled with the basics of our craft- particularly the HOW? and the WHY?
I still do.
This is the best we could do as the news came in close to midnight:
Until this week, I'd never noticed a strange irony in that night's production: our associate editor and lead columnist had a long-written piece about a local co-op grocery that ran on the editorial page as it had been laid out before the news. Its title? The name of the first song in tribute to John Lennon that my favorite radio program played this week on the anniversary's morning:
I heard from the editor-in-chief from that year the other night; he thought about changing the editorial you see there, but it was too late and he had no words just yet. Here's what he went with for the morning after the morning after:
He said the other night that he wrote that feeling "you have to say something and really there was nothing to say."
My reply: "There still isn't."
----
As for the present....
Here's the Who's Who:
Fyvush Finkel was the only cast member I recall anything about, then or until I did some looking this weekend; several of them have continued in either performing or producing, although Ron Taylor, who voiced the legendary FEED ME! line and the rest of Audrey II's dialogue, died of a heart attack in 2002. Ashman and Menken would of course go on to Disney stardom; Tichina Arnold's the only one who joined the later film cast, and she remains active in a Cedric show on HBO.
----
Yesterday brought a much sadder reminder- one for which I have now corrected a recollection of why I was where I was on the night of December 8th, All Those Years Ago.
That night 1980 was NOT a Sunday, when I was typically copy editing at The Cornell Daily Sun. I wasn't even on the copy desk the night before, which WAS my usual Sunday night; my dear friend Amy was. But I was down there; I can't remember why. I don't see a story or column of mine in the December 9 issue of the paper, but it was near semester end and we were a pretty close knit group.
In a far corner of the newsroom was an alcove with two AP teletype machines and a UPI photo transmitter. You heard the clickety-clack as you came up the stairs and it was a constant presence, especially as you responded to the bellows of composing room foreman from the second floor- "NIGHT EDITOR! WE NEED COPY!" or "SCHROEDER YOU APE!" The first night I staffed as a sophomore two years earlier, one of the compet managers- possibly Rodion Iwanczuk- gave us our first tour and showed us the alcove. "If you ever hear a bell go off, that means a big national story is breaking. Tell the managing editor right away! But don't worry- it never does."
It went off that very first night. It was 1978- Jimmy Carter had just brokered the Camp David peace accord between Israel and Egypt. But true to the prediction, that bell never again went off in my hundreds of nights down there....
until the MONDAY night that was December 8, 1980.
We were among the first in the country to know. No Internet to speak of back then; Ithaca had no over-air television stations either based there or that could reach it, and its primordial cable setup was just the three networks from Binghamton and Syracuse. I assumed the local radio stations had something about it (friends from WVBR I still have from back then had graduated, but they just passed on an audio of Keith Olbermann, who was back in town that night, bringing the news), but we usually had no radio playing in the newsroom anyway. Most of the country learned during Monday Night Football when Howard Cosell, of all people, made the announcement.
We were a cynical bunch. Our newsroom motto was "NEVER BELIEVE A RUMOR UNTIL IT'S OFFICIALLY DENIED," next to a photo of Nelson Rockefeller flipping off Congress captioned "I AM CURRENTLY DEAD." A month earlier, I'd been tasked with calling law professors about whether Carter would try to pre-emptively name SCOTUS replacements for Brennan and/or Marshall and got a tongue lashing from them for suggesting that anyone would be so brazenly political.
But that night, with that news? Twenty-something cynics in their twenty-somethings collectively went to pieces. Even the toughest customers on that newsroom floor were in tears. We struggled with the basics of our craft- particularly the HOW? and the WHY?
I still do.
This is the best we could do as the news came in close to midnight:
Until this week, I'd never noticed a strange irony in that night's production: our associate editor and lead columnist had a long-written piece about a local co-op grocery that ran on the editorial page as it had been laid out before the news. Its title? The name of the first song in tribute to John Lennon that my favorite radio program played this week on the anniversary's morning:
I heard from the editor-in-chief from that year the other night; he thought about changing the editorial you see there, but it was too late and he had no words just yet. Here's what he went with for the morning after the morning after:
He said the other night that he wrote that feeling "you have to say something and really there was nothing to say."
My reply: "There still isn't."
----
As for the present....
I’m finishing this post off at our mechanic’s. This is the fourth workday out of the past five that I’ve been here for what should be routine stuff- brakes and new snow tires. It’s not their fault; the damn German engineered car has such picky parts, it takes forever to get them in. At least these guys don’t hose me as badly as the Mercedes dealer does; they don’t sell Smart cars anymore (nobody does in the US), and they treat us like their smelly cousin Eddie relatives any time we go in there. Fortunately, I haven’t had to go anywhere the past few days. Had one appointment in the office and have been cranking out work mostly from home. I did just get a referral that might have me heading to Rochester in the next day or two, so this better get done.
The nights of those anniversaries went nicely this year. Howard Cosell is long gone from Monday Night Football, but the Bills were on it this week and spanked the 49ers in a game that got moved from San Fran to Arizona on account of COVID. It's kinda weird that the Bills didn’t have a game on Sunday. Even weirder is that they will play on Sunday afternoon only once more all year- at most. The remaining schedule is: Sunday night, Saturday afternoon, another Monday night, and a final game still scheduled for 1:00 Sunday but with playoff implications and subject to being flexed into Sunday night. That's not even accounting for COVID reschedulings, which have thus far given the team an early Monday night game and probably the first Tuesday game in its history. Hey, long as they’re winning, I’ll take it:)
Then last night, I snagged an invite to a Zoom call featuring Bob Costas. Yup, that's me in the corner:
He’d been invited to speak at a virtual event for a book launch, chronicling over 150 years of Buffalo baseball history. The major league portions of that history add up to fewer than 10 years, even if you count this year’s Blue Jay In Exile residence. But he mostly shared stories about the sport on general, and games and events he was at. The price of admission was free, but any price would have been more than paid for by the sheer joy of hearing Bob doing an impression of Tom Hanks doing an impression of Vin Scully talking to Bruce Springsteen, when all of them were at the Obamas' awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Robert Redford. His Hanks was a perfect Hanks and rolled right into a perfect Vin. (As opposed to, say, Scott Baio doing an impression of James Woods doing an impression of Randy Quaid talking to Ted Nugent during the award of the Medal of Freedom to Lou Holtz? Hard pass.)
Other stories included Stan Musial bringing Big Macs to Bob's house; him naming one of his kids "Keith Michael Kirby Costas" on a bet with Kirby Puckett; and the 19 inning Yankee-Red Sox marathon game he once covered (the kind that won't happen anymore with the ghost runner rule put in for extra innings), and how his director fed him two fans of opposite genders and fandoms- he said they didn't know each other in the fourth inning and were engaged by the 17th;)
----
And then there have been the stories throughout the past few days of the Former President Trump legal team securing no victories but several cases of COVID. The losses included a unanimous SCOTUS beatdown of the first case to reach them, with not even Justice Handmaid dissenting from the refusal to hear the case. Apparently the theory over in Parlerland now is that Fidel Castro got to the three Trump judges on SCOTUS. He must be out haunting with Hugo Chavez.
But wait... who’s the third Christmas ghost?
----
And with that, good day, and have a pleasant tomor-row!