Mentioning Mentia
“You’re listening to K double oh K, your source for talk radio in the metroplex. This is A Box Full of Minds and I’m your host, Katie Brigand. My guest this hour is Dr. Phil Gudenov, the author of Mentioning Mentia. Dr. Gudenov, thank you for joining us on A Box Full of Minds.”
“The pleasure is mine, Katie. Thanks for having me.”
“Our regular listeners will recognize Dr. Gudenov from previous programs. He’s a popular guest speaker and his last book, How Smart Is Smart Enough? spent 16 weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list. Tell us what motivated you to write this new book.”
“Well, Katie, as you know, Mentia is a pervasive problem in America, especially among people over the age of 50. Almost everyone has a family member or knows someone suffering from Mentia.”
“So true. Can you tell our listeners a bit about the causes of this debilitating condition?”
“Sure. So, there are known genetic markers associated with Mentia. If your parents or grandparents have ever been diagnosed with it, your chances of someday suffering from Mentia are significantly higher.”
“Mmmm. A frightening thought.”
“Exactly. No one should have to endure this disruptive attack on their central nervous system to say nothing of the social stigma that is so often associated with Mentia. I’ve written this book to inform people of the signs that indicate the onset of Mentia, what they can do about it if a loved one begins to exhibit these signs, and I provide information on the many healthcare professionals who have devoted their lives to conquering the disease.”
“Can you give us an idea what to look for if we suspect a loved one may be suffering from Mentia?”
“Absolutely. The top 10 signs to watch for are, first, remembering everything. They may have memory issues that will completely disrupt the normal flow of family life. Second, they may be constantly planning ahead and solving problems.”
“Oh, my.”
“Yes. Third, they may be very good at accomplishing tasks, especially familiar tasks. It’s almost like they’re a machine, just getting things done. Fourth, they always know where they are and may be acutely aware of the time. Fifth, their cognitive skills are heightened, they are keenly aware of the meanings of visual images and spatial relationships.”
“My gosh. It’s a little frightening considering just the things you’ve mentioned so far. And that’s not even the whole list, right?”
“Well, yeah, it’s frightening. And there’s more. Three more, no, four … the sixth sign of the onset of Mentia is an excellent command of both speech and the written word. Seventh, they seem to never misplace things, especially things they frequently use. Number eight, they may always exercise excellent judgment. Nine, they are driven to be extremely active in work and social life. And finally, their moods and personalities are utterly predictable.”
“My goodness, that’s a lot to consider. I’m just imagining how I would feel if my mother or father began to exhibit any or, God forbid, all of those symptoms, and I’m frankly terrified at the prospect.”
“Yes, Katie, the challenge can seem overwhelming. But, it’s important to remember that the medical community has made many advances in treating Mentia, and new breakthroughs are anticipated.”
“So, there are medications that have proven effective in alleviating symptoms?”
“Absolutely. Although we do not as yet have a cure, we do have some very effective drugs with a great track record of combating the symptoms and slowing down the progression of Mentia in most individuals.”
“You know, you mentioned the social stigma attached to Mentia. I know it’s politically incorrect in this day and age to think of Mentia sufferers this way, but I sometimes think of them as that cute old person who knows everything. Know what I mean? They’re just kind of cute, the way they insist on everything. I mean, I know I’m wrong to think of them that way, there’s nothing cute per se about this terrible disease, but surely I’m not the only one who sometimes thinks of them as cute or that little smarty pants.”
“No, Katie, you’re not alone. Unfortunately, we have a long history of these people being presented in a comical or even flattering manner in arts and literature. Sherlock Holmes comes to mind, and he’s just one of numerous examples I could mention, if I was the sort of person who liked rattling off lists of relevant data.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No. Well, yes, a little. What I’m trying to say is that before we understood the disease, we had a tendency to present it in all sorts of media as this benign state of consciousness. We even sometimes implied it was a good thing.”
“Mmmm, mmmm. How far we’ve come.”
“Exactly. No one is immune to Mentia. It can strike anywhere, at anytime. Surely all of us can recall elected officials who’ve gone off on tangents about global warming, tax reform, civil rights, and the like. Imagine the shame you might feel if you were related to one of those highly Mentive politicians. Or the shame they, themselves might feel if and when they returned to a normal state of mind.”
“It gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
“As well it should.”
“Dr. Gudenov, you mentioned drug therapies. Are there other things the average person can do to lessen the likelihood of Mentia?”
“Watch television.”
“Television. I hadn’t thought of that, but it makes perfect sense.”
“And when I say television, I don’t mean indiscriminate viewing of just any program. I mean reality television. The more commercials the better. Fortunately for us, social scientists in the ’90s realized that many TV programs were actually encouraging critical thought. You’ve probably noticed that all that sort of thing has been removed from current programming.”
“But, what of that dear old grandma or grandpa who insists on watching documentaries on DVD or VHS?”
Why Veterans Hurt
When I joined the Army as a 17-year-old, I expected to face many challenges and hardships as an individual — whether that meant getting yelled at or shot at or made to jump out of airplanes. What I didn’t yet understand was how much I’d put aside my individual concerns and focus on my fellow service members — or how much they’d do the same for me. The truth is that I had never been in such a supportive social environment in my life.
That might sound odd to people who’ve never been in the military. Getting chewed out for not having shoes shined hardly seems supportive to most people. But that’s just one part of the military experience. In the Army, it mattered to someone else whether my boots fit properly. It mattered to someone else whether I had been to the dentist recently. It mattered to someone else if I wasn’t where I was supposed to be at the right time. To be sure, all of this attention paid to my performance was in the interest of team performance, but it also meant someone was always there for me.
And then you exit the service. No more intrusive surprise health and welfare inspections. No more grueling runs and setting your speed to the slowest member of your group. No more morning formations. No more of the countless bureaucratic irritations of military life. Paradise, right?
Actually, for many of us, no. Gone, suddenly, is the cohesive structure that existed to take care of you. Gone is that strong sense of social security. Gone are friends from your ready-made peer group, who are just as invested in your success as you are in theirs.
News reports carry a lot of disheartening statistics about U.S. Veterans. (Like the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, I capitalize the word Veterans to be respectful.) Nearly a fifth of Veterans between 18 and 24 are jobless. Veterans suffer a 33 percent higher rate of narcotics overdoses than the rest of the population, and their suicide rate is slightly higher, too. People often react to this with pity, assuming that the cause is tied to trauma suffered while in the service.
But I suspect that the main contributor to adjusting to civilian life is something else entirely, and rarely is it because of battle trauma. Rather, when Veterans leave military service, many of them, like me, are leaving the most cohesive and helpful social network they’ve ever experienced. And that hurts. Most recent Veterans aren’t suffering because they remember what was bad. They’re suffering because they miss what was good.
One friend went from being a combat medic in the Army to a transfer student in the health field at a major university. He got good grades, but none of his efforts to connect with his new peers and replace the social cohesion he was missing worked. He nearly wound up dropping out of school. Simply put, he felt isolated and adrift. Another friend, a smart, capable Marine, floundered when discharged from the service around the time of her divorce. For a stretch she was even homeless. What rescued her was a stint with AmeriCorps, the federal community service organization, which gave her a job that led to full-time employment with a national nonprofit. AmeriCorps offered my friend three crucial things: a new mission, a new purpose, and a strong, supportive social network in which people were invested in one another’s well-being and success. That allowed her to get back on her feet.
Those who have served in the military are resilient, capable leaders. Veterans aren’t looking for a handout and certainly don’t want to be pitied. If civilian life could offer Veterans more of the virtues of military life — accountability, cohesion, a sense of purpose — I suspect you’d hear less about the “problems” Veterans face and more about the achievements that come from harnessing such vast energy, discipline, and public spirit.
Comfort Cravings
Fall is the tastiest season of all. Farmers market shelves are piled high with the bounty of the harvest, including two comfort food favorites — exquisite eggplant and butternut squash. But if you’re like me, you may be perplexed about what to do with the produce once it is sitting on your kitchen counter. Not to worry. We turned to the connoisseur of culinary curiosities, Andrew Zimmern, host of the Travel Channel series Bizarre Foods America, for expert ideas on picking and prepping the versatile and nutritious fall vegetables.
“Choose firm, smooth eggplants,” says Zimmern. “If you push with your thumb and the flesh gives slightly then bounces back, it is ripe. If an indentation remains, it’s past its prime. Buy firm, blemish-free winter squash and store in a very cool, dark place; it will keep all winter.”
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Homeless Pets Fly to Safety
Last year Chopper was a down-and-out Chihuahua from the rough-and-tumble back alleys of Sacramento, California. His tough life cost him an eye and landed him in county lockup (er, that would be the local pound to us humans).
With dozens of other Chihuahuas surrounding him, he had little chance of being adopted. That meant that big kennel in the sky for Chopper. “He came so close to being euthanized,” says Sharon Lohman, president and founder of New Beginnings, an all-volunteer animal rescue group in Merced County. “He had been sitting there for almost three months. They usually only have about three weeks.”
Now Chopper is a pampered pooch living in the lap of luxury — literally! — with a well-to-do family in Missoula, Montana. His favorite hobbies are hiking, swimming, and just plain frolicking with his new canine brother and sister — a pit bull and a blue heeler. And he was even featured on a local calendar from the Humane Society of Western Montana.
That’s all because the lucky pooch was airlifted out of the danger zone by Dog Is My CoPilot Inc., a nonprofit started two years ago by retired orthopedic surgeon and pilot Dr. Peter Rork. The organization, based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, works in conjunction with shelters and various local animal groups like New Beginnings to fly Chihuahuas, so numerous in the American Southwest border states that they are practically unadoptable, as well as a variety of other dogs and cats, to places where they are rare and sought after.
To hear Rork, 61, tell it, he owes a debt to the critters he ferries northward. That’s because saving them actually saved him. His new bride, only 41 years old, died in his arms after a sudden cardiac arrest in 2012. “Her death broke me,” explains Rork. “I would wake up and pour myself a cup of coffee and just sit there staring into the cup. The next thing I knew the sun was coming up.” Rork says he could not go back to being a doctor; his “heart just wasn’t in it anymore.” …
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In Sickness and in Health
My husband, Bob, has what you might call an allergy to doctors. “I used to measure my health each year by whether I could run the nearly 7.5-mile San Francisco Bay to Breakers race in under an hour,” he says.
So it was on a summer day in 2012 that I had to practically chase my 58-year-old spouse out of the house for a long-overdue physical exam I’d booked for him. (I’d set up my annual physical, complete with mammogram, for the same day.)
What precipitated the doctor visit for Bob was not a symptom — he was perfectly healthy — but rather a vague worry I’d been feeling ever since a good friend of ours was diagnosed with prostate cancer (out of the blue) a few months earlier. And I learned from just the briefest online search that Bob was nearing the age when prostate cancer surges. Dr. Patrick Walsh of Johns Hopkins University, considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on the disease, writes, “After age 60, prostate cancer seems to shift into high gear — and a man is three times more likely to develop it than a woman is to develop breast cancer.”
The American Cancer Society estimates that 232,570 women will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer this year. The prostate cancer number is almost the same, 233,000. Still, our awareness of the two is not at all equal. October, with its ubiquitous pink ribbons, has come to symbolize breast cancer awareness. Buildings across America, even the White House, light up in pink. NFL players, the epitome of male power and strength, sport the ribbon and don pink accessories to raise awareness. I’m guessing you didn’t know that September has a ribbon too — a little-seen light-blue ribbon that is the sign of Prostate Cancer Awareness Month. I certainly didn’t. But my understanding of the disease was about to grow exponentially.
You may well ask why planning the checkup had fallen to me, but it’s actually quite common for a wife to take on the role of health cop for her family. According to Gary Brice, executive director of the DeGraff Memorial Hospital McLaughlin Center in North Tonawanda, New York, most men don’t like to show weakness and most women “don’t have trouble admitting health problems.” He explains that women are also more familiar with healthcare in general after years of having pelvic examinations, as well as taking children to the pediatrician.
If distrust of doctors was a constant for Bob, he’d reinvented nearly everything else about himself about 10 years earlier. “At 50 everything changed in my life,” he says. At the time, the two of us moved from California to the East Coast after I accepted a promotion (I work in newspaper sales and marketing). For Bob, the move meant leaving behind a 30-year career in automotive service and going back to school. “I didn’t have the opportunity to finish college, so I went back and became the oldest kid in my class.” By 2012, Bob was in his personal prime time and working in real estate.
ON THE MORNING OF THE APPOINTMENT, I REMINDED BOB to be sure to ask for his prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level to be checked as part of the blood work the doctor would order. PSA is an enzyme made by the prostate and an elevated level is considered one of the most useful serum tumor markers for any malignancy. In fact, the majority of prostate cancers are found through the PSA test, not the dreaded digital rectal exam.
Funny thing about the PSA. Recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) urge primary caregivers against using this test. The argument is that PSA tests can give a false positive or detect slow-growing cancers that are unlikely to cause a problem during a patient’s lifetime. Treating these cancers can do more harm than good, argues USPSTF Chair Dr. Michael LeFevre.
Sure enough, his doctor had no plans to offer the PSA test because Bob had no family history of prostate cancer and there was nothing of note on the digital exam. But Bob insisted. “You don’t know my wife,” he said. The doctor reluctantly checked the box on the blood work order.
Much to the doctor’s surprise, Bob’s blood test showed an elevated PSA level. The doctor downplayed it as a likely false positive, and Bob didn’t even bother to tell me about it. “I didn’t want to scare you,” he says.
The doctor ordered a second test. The results were the same, and Bob was referred to a urologist for further evaluation. “I was still in denial even after the second PSA test,” he admits.
Turns out, that’s a common reaction, but at least this time he told me about it. “Research shows that many men do not get tested for prostate cancer, because they fear the effects of surgery they may not even need,” Dr. Drew Pinsky, the popular HLN host and himself a prostate cancer survivor, writes on his blog. “What concerns many males faced with prostate cancer is not the cancer itself, but possible incontinence, and [loss of] sex.”
The urologist performed a biopsy, where tissue samples of the prostate gland and the surrounding area were taken using a needle inserted through the wall of the rectum. He warned Bob that there could be complications from a prostate biopsy such as infection and excess bleeding. But the 30-minute procedure went without incident and Bob experienced very little pain. “It was exactly as the doctor described. And I had no issues afterward. I drove myself home,” Bob recalls.
A few days later, on my husband’s 59th birthday, we received the results, and the news was devastating. Not only were there moderately aggressive cancer cells concentrated on one side of Bob’s prostate, there were also cancer cells in areas outside of the gland. With evidence that the cancer had escaped the prostate, the urologist ordered a CT scan and a bone scan to see whether Bob’s cancer had spread even farther. The sentence spoken by the urologist on that fateful day woke me up to the serious situation we were facing: “There is no known cure for prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of the body.”
No known cure. Three of the most terrifying words I have ever heard. But it was almost worse when my ever-optimistic, upbeat husband confided to me, “I think we are in trouble.”
Should You Sue?
As Americans, we believe in justice. In the Pledge of Allegiance, we ratify that there should be “justice for all.” Our courts act as a guardian and interpreter of the Constitution and of our laws. Our judges and juries help keep our streets safe, our property secure, and our freedom intact.
Courts are also used to settle private disputes. And, because the right to a day in court is so important, America opens this opportunity to everyone. The courts charge modest filing fees but do not otherwise charge litigants to use its judges, personnel, and buildings. A filing fee of $250 does not come close to fully paying for the court to hear a case. The annual cost to the U.S. economy from civil litigation is estimated at $233 billion.
The ease of access to the courthouse enables our judicial system to provide a service that our public uses — often. More than 15 million civil lawsuits are filed every year in America, and that’s causing a strain on the judicial system.
And, despite the fact that the government subsidizes the costs of the courtroom itself, bringing a suit is a terrifically expensive endeavor. Lawyers typically spend hundreds or even thousands of hours by the time a case reaches the decision stage. An average civil case, start to finish, can cost each side to the controversy in excess of $100,000. For business disputes, the amount is frequently in the millions. Little wonder that it is said that litigation is a rich person’s game.
In one of the more colorful examples of what a win looks like, consider Buchwald v. Paramount, in which writer Art Buchwald and his partner Alan Bernheim sued Paramount Pictures over the 1988 Eddie Murphy movie, Coming to America. Buchwald and Bernheim claimed the story was their idea (a few years prior to the film’s release, they’d sent Paramount a treatment for a similar concept) and filed suit, asking for $6.2 million. After lengthy litigation, they were awarded $900,000. That sounds like a lot of money, but when all was said and done, they’d spent more than $2 million in legal fees.
Fortunately, there is an alternative to litigation, an option too few of us think about when we feel we’ve been wronged: mediation. Throughout the United States, pioneering lawyers, clients, and others are discovering that they can utilize the objective standards set and safeguarded by the courts without always having to suffer the risk, expense, time, and aggravation of litigating. Mediation is an effective and creative way to satisfy our interests. Sometimes, it can work even better than litigation.
Fortunately, there is an alternative to litigation, an option too few of us think about when we feel we’ve been wronged: mediation. Throughout the United States, pioneering lawyers, clients, and others are discovering that they can utilize the objective standards set and safeguarded by the courts without always having to suffer the risk, expense, time, and aggravation of litigating. Mediation is an effective and creative way to satisfy our interests. Sometimes, it can work even better than litigation.
Even though the results of litigation are uncertain, the right to start a lawsuit or defend yourself in court is vital to the very notion of due process under the law. But the sheer volume of lawsuits is threatening to undermine that right. In today’s climate of austerity, courts have not been able to hire needed judges to manage the extra workload. Simultaneously courts have been required to reduce hours of operation and lay off vital staff — even as record numbers of lawsuits continue to be filed. In January of this year, the 9,000-member New York County Lawyers’ Association (NYCLA) issued a report, “Courts in Crisis,” which warned that courts in the New York region were “dangerously close to the point where they cannot meet their constitutional and statutory duties.” Similar conditions exist nationwide. In some jurisdictions, you must wait months or even years to have your case heard.
As mentioned above, litigation is costly, but not just as measured in dollars. The lawyer does not do all the work. Clients must support the lawyer in presenting the facts, documents, and other considerations to the lawyer and to the judge and jury. Clients make frequent trips to lawyers’ offices and spend much time thinking — even obsessing — about their matters, frequently at the expense of other business, personal, and family matters.
A further aggravation is the frequent delays. It is said that “justice delayed is justice denied.” But as the NYCLA report found, delays are now routine due to hiring freezes, reduced court hours, and hang-ups at every stage of court proceedings, including “delays in obtaining files … , delays in trials, delays in motion practice, delays in obtaining decisions, and delays in the processing of papers.”
Additionally when all is said and done litigation is risky. Only 50 percent of parties can be successful. Put another way, if 15 million cases a year in the United States go to trial, each year there will be at least 15 million losers.
Despite the financial and opportunity costs, the delays, the aggravation, and the risks, clients frequently tell their lawyers, “At least I’ll have my day in court.” Ah, if only that were the case. More than 90 percent of cases settle before they go to trial — more often than not they settle “on the courthouse steps,” that is, shortly before trial. In those cases, clients will have already paid for much of the preparation, and have already endured the aggravations and delays associated with preparing for a trial.
So, why sue? When you tally up the costs, it frequently doesn’t make sense. Buchwald realized his mistake, but only after the ordeal was over. “When I got involved, I expected to be in a business dispute that I assumed would be resolved early in the game for a minimal sum of money and hopefully an apology,” he wrote. “One of the discoveries of a suit such as this is that it makes you hurt deeply, and you don’t forgive easily. [Another thing I discovered:] Do not count on any money in a lawsuit — this is as true if you win as if you lose.”
Are We Losing the Stars?
“If you see a car along that road,” Tyler Nordgren warned me, “don’t look at the headlights. It’ll ruin your night vision for two hours.” Nordgren and I had pitched our tents under the brow of Mount Whitney in the Alabama Hills, a field of boulders near Death Valley. We watched it get dark, and in the nighttime horizon, the sky was perforated by stars and streaked by the Milky Way. Or, to put it in approximate scientific terms, it was probably a class 3 on the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale, the 9-level numeric metric of night sky brightness.
Even so, we could still see domes of hazy light from 200-odd miles south in Los Angeles and 250 miles east in Las Vegas. That encroaching urban glow was like highlighter calling attention to the issue that Nordgren, a prophet whose cause is light pollution, wanted to illustrate for me.
“We’re losing the stars,” the 45-year-old astronomer said. “Think about it this way: For 4.5 billion years, Earth has been a planet with a day and a night. Since the electric light bulb was invented, we’ve progressively lit up the night, and have gotten rid of it. Now 99 percent of the [continental U.S.] population lives under skies filled with light pollution.”
Nordgren is an affable, engaging, and quotable Cassandra, an enthusiastic and patient teacher who loves his subject and wants you to love it, too. Those attributes, along with his book for a lay audience, Stars Above, Earth Below: A Guide to Astronomy in the National Parks, have pushed him to center stage of a small but impassioned movement to preserve natural night skies. When he is not lecturing at the University of Redlands, a California liberal arts college, Nordgren is a much sought-after itinerant preacher intent on bringing people revelation of the stars they have, almost everywhere, lost sight of.
Almost the entire eastern half of the United States, the West Coast, and almost every place with an airport large enough to receive commercial jets are too lit up to get a good view of stars. The phenomenon is illustrated by the first World Atlas of artificial night sky brightness. Based on spacecraft images of Earth in 1996-97, it shows a spectrum from black, representing the natural night sky, to pink, in which artificial light effectively erases any view of the stars at all. Green is where you lose visibility of the Milky Way. The map of the contiguous 48 states — and much of Europe — looks like a video-game screen showing a carpet bombing, the map a splash of green, yellow, red, and pink.
For roughly the past two decades, at least two-thirds of the U.S. population have not been able to see the Milky Way at all, and it will get worse before it gets better. …
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Jay Leno’s Garage
Jay Leno loves making people laugh and he loves cars. Those passions have shaped his life. After 22 years as host of The Tonight Show, he stepped down earlier this year but he’s working as hard as ever. When he isn’t traveling the globe performing stand-up gigs from Detroit to London and Rome, you can find him in his garage in North Hollywood getting hands-on with a multi-million-dollar array of perfectly maintained classic automobiles.
Leno’s affection for his four-wheeled collection — not to mention dozens of motorcycles — is on display every week in his hit Web series, Jay Leno’s Garage (nbc.com/jay-lenos-garage), on a YouTube channel that boasts nearly 1 million subscribers and draws 5 million views each month. Clad in his trademark denim shirt and jeans, Jay Leno drops one-liners on the series, but he also gets serious about his collection — whether he’s restoring a vintage Bentley, tooling down the highway in a classic Mustang convertible, or taking a souped-up Ferrari to the limit on a test track. He may be a famous face but that doesn’t keep him from rolling up his sleeves and going under the hood.
If you think driving around in one of his ultra-expensive supercars is an ego trip for Leno, you’ll be surprised to know him as I have. He’s among the least affected and most genuine celebrities in a town where the pursuit of fame can become toxic. If a kid happens to admire the Lamborghini Diablo Leno chose to drive for the day, Jay might just invite the kid to sit in the driver’s seat — with the car parked, of course. Whether it’s a car buff or a fan looking for an autograph, Jay takes time to chat.
His love affair with cars still takes a backseat to the real love of his life. Leno and his wife, Mavis, have been married for 34 years. What’s kept them together? Jay jokes, “Opposites attract. And when I come home late from the garage smelling of brake fluid, she knows where I’ve been.”
Leno was a high school kid in his hometown, Andover, Massachusetts, flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s where he won first prize performing a comedy routine for the restaurant’s talent show. Later, he moved to Boston, worked at Foreign Motors car dealership, and dreamed of owning his first set of wheels before eventually embarking on a career as a stand-up comic. After years on the comedy circuit, he snared the brass ring in 1992 when hired to replace retiring late-night host Johnny Carson of The Tonight Show. Ratings success brought him big bucks, millions of fans, and a range of awards.
Now, Jay is adding one more trophy to the shelf. He’ll be the first top-rated late-night TV host to receive the coveted Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, joining such past honorees as Richard Pryor, Carol Burnett, and Bill Cosby. “I’m a big fan of Mark Twain,” he deadpanned. “A Tale of Two Cities is one of my favorite books.” (The event takes place at the Kennedy Center on October 19.)
We sat down on stools in the kitchen area of Leno’s impressive garage. The sound of motors being tested was background music.
Jeanne Wolf: You’ve never kept your love of cars hidden, but it’s especially evident in your Web show, Jay Leno’s Garage. You’re really having fun.
Jay Leno: The cool thing about the website is that it goes around the world. I guess my favorite part is that people get to see cars in motion. In car magazines you just see still pictures. Also, I’m not competing with something I’ve already done. No sitting behind a desk.
JW: And you’ve got a lot of viewers.
JL: It’s done quite well actually, and I’m thrilled with that — especially considering that it is all sort of word of mouth.
JW: Is love affair too strong an expression to use about America and cars?
JL: It’s a lot different than it used to be. I think the love affair is sort of over. When I was a kid in the ’60s and ’70s, car culture was pretty much what social media is now. You had songs like “Little GTO” and “Hey, Little Cobra” and “409.” Nobody sings about cars anymore. I was born the day I got my driver’s license.
JW: What was that day like?
JL: Your dad would teach you to drive. And, then, on your 16th birthday, you’d get your license, and you take your mom’s car out and try to go 100. I remember I was in my mom’s Falcon doing 96 … 97 … 98 – just barely trying to break it. I don’t think kids do that anymore. Now when kids want to get away, they can Skype in their room and see things they’re not supposed to see. When we were kids you physically had to leave your house, and the car was what took you to where the girls were or where things were going on or where the hangout was. In a lot of ways, the iPhone and social media have replaced the car. So I think that the love affair has dwindled but the hard-core romantics will keep it going.
JW: So you’re a hard-core car romantic?
JL: I like what it represents. The automobile is a piece of industrial history in America. It’s had a huge effect on our lives. When Henry Ford created the Model T, it was sort of the iPhone of the day. Before that cars were really just a plaything for the rich. When you buy an old car and fix it up and you drive it, there’s a bit more pride because you know what it took to get it running. That’s part of the romance. Modern cars are harder to bond with because they don’t break down. I’d say the American car dream is still around, but it’s not as big a deal.
JW: What was the first car that you owned?
JL: It was a ’34 Ford pickup truck. I got it when I was 14. We had a 300-foot driveway, and I would just drive up and down the driveway for hours at a time. When I got it, it didn’t run. My dad said if I could fix it then it’d be my car. You sort of learned to respect the machine and how to make it work. That’s probably what really got me into cars. And that’s what has kept me involved in creating my own collection and building the garage.
JW: When you were doing well and you could pick any car you wanted, did you buy something high-end?
JL: I never really bought any luxury cars when I first became successful. I got cars that I liked. The first real luxury car I bought was for my dad. I always told him that when I made it big I’d get him a Cadillac. So I took him down to Woodworth Motors in Andover, Massachusetts. My dad being Italian sees this big white Cadillac with red velour upholstery and, of course, he wanted that. So I buy him this ridiculous, garish white Cadillac, and my mother was embarrassed to ride in it. When they were driving down the street she would sit in the passenger seat, and if they pulled up to another car and people would look at it, she would motion them to roll down the window and say, “We’re not really Cadillac people. Our son got us this.” It was hilarious.
JW: What was the first expensive car that you bought for yourself because you really wanted it?
JL: I got a 1954 Jaguar XK120. There was a reason. When I was 9 years old, I was riding my bicycle in our town — where nobody had fancy cars — and I saw a man drive a 1951 Jaguar XK120 out of a barn. It was a little two-seater roadster, and I was mesmerized. He called me over — Don Milligan is his name — and asked if I’d like to sit in it, and I said sure. The car is parked in the same barn as it was in 1959. He still owns it.
JW: Is it a good day when you’re sitting in this huge garage tinkering with a car or trying to get it to run better?
JL: I love the challenge. That’s what we’re doing with that steam car over there. The gray and red one is called a Doble steam car. It was driven by Howard Hughes. We’ve been trying to get it up and running. The metal is 100 years old and things crack, so it takes a lot of work.
JW: How did you find that car?
JL: Old cars find you. I get letters every week from guys in their 70s, 80s, 90s who say, “Oh, I’ve had this car all my life. I don’t have any kids. I want it to go to a good home.” I always promise them that I’ll never sell it, which I don’t. That’s actually how I’ve acquired most of these cars, and they all have some sort of fascinating story behind them.
JW: How many cars do you have in here?
JL: I think about 128 and 93 motorcycles. Something like that.
JW: Do any new cars capture your fancy?
JL: Oh, very much so! I like the technology. I’ve got a Chevy Volt in here. I’m interested in some of the hybrid stuff that’s happening. Cars used to get 8 miles per gallon. Now they have three times the horsepower, and they’re getting 30 or 40 miles per gallon. The auto industry is still innovative. All of a sudden you’ve got the Tesla. When electric cars first came out they were slow, but they got pretty good mileage. Now you have the Tesla, which is electric and sexy and fast and luxurious. It has all the benefits of the gas car without a lot of the drawbacks. So, once again, engineers are making new things work.
JW: How about driverless cars?
JL: I’m not against them. I see driverless cars now — only people are at the wheel. They’re texting or talking or doing their makeup, or a guy is combing his hair. At least if a computer is driving it’s paying attention. I would rather have a computer driving than those idiots I see out on the freeway who think driving is so boring they’re doing something else.
JW: Don’t you want to share your love of cars with the younger generation even if they are into social media?
JL: I meet kids that remind me of myself when I was 15 or 16. Every now and then I’ll get a letter from one saying they’d love to ride in a certain car, so I invite them over and we go for a drive. I like to let kids sit in a car and grab the steering wheel and kind of feel what it’s like. I remember when I picked up my McLaren, there were two kids at the dealership just watching us. I invited them in, and they took pictures and sat in the car. They’ll remember that their whole lives the way
I remember Don Milligan for letting me sit in his Jaguar when I was 9.
JW: How do you pick which car to drive from this huge collection?
JL: It’s generally whatever I’ve been working on that day. You say, “Oh, that one’s fixed?” Then you test it, and hope it will hold up. When you deal with cars – and many of these cars are well-over 100 years old – something is always breaking. To me, how I get there is always way more important than where I’m going.
JW: A lot of people remember a car as the first place that they got to make out. Did you have any four-wheel romances?
JL: My wife, Mavis, and I did get romantic in my ’55 Buick that I still have next door. So on our 25th anniversary we took the car out and went back to that place where we had parked. There are a million houses there now, so we ended up in someone’s driveway around midnight. Then, of course, it was “Ow! My hair!” And I accidentally hit the horn. Of course. The light comes on on the porch, and a guy comes out. We were more successful the first time, but the basic idea was there.
JW: Ever bought a car on some crazy impulse?
JL: One holiday we go down to buy a Christmas tree. It was some ridiculous price, and I complained to the guy, but he said it was free delivery. I said, “OK. Fine.” So I buy it, and he asked me where I live. I told him Beverly Hills and gave the address, and he says, “Oh. That’s two miles out of the delivery zone. It’s gonna be an extra $50.” I was so mad. So I told him to wait. I went to the Chevy dealer across the street and bought a truck on the spot, brought it over, put the tree in the back, and drove it home. I still have the truck. That was the last time I did something that stupid.
JW: As a celebrity, do you always get great service from the valet?
JL: I hate valet parking. I’ll always look for a place on the street. You ever read the back of a valet ticket? No responsibility for damage. And if your car is stolen, the police don’t look for it for 30 days because you voluntarily gave the key to someone else!
JW: We’re all wondering what you’re gonna do next.
JL: I’m doing what I like. I like being a comic. I like going on the road. It’s kind of fun now that I’m not on TV. People don’t see you everyday. I might do something on TV — I don’t know what. I’m not gonna do another late-night show or something like that.
JW: Does it feel different?
JL: I know that some people when they leave a TV show they don’t have a table at a certain restaurant or whatever, but nothing has changed for me. It’s not like I’ve lost all these perks that went with being the star on a TV show.
JW: People wonder why you don’t seem to get angry or you aren’t meaner. You really seem to be a nice guy.
JL: There’s enough meanness. I mean when I look at TMZ and I see celebrities having feuds and it’s just “Eff you,” “No, eff you!” I don’t get that. If you’re in show business and you’re doing well, just thank your lucky stars. Peoples’ lives are hard enough without having to see a lot of negative stuff. I think when people see you and you’re a comedian, the first thing you should do is be funny. They don’t want to hear you whine or complain. I mean, you’re a rich guy and you’re getting mad? Shut up.
JW: Where did that attitude come from?
JL: I think it’s probably a little bit from having Depression-era parents. My mom came to this country by herself when she was 11. It was rough for her, so I always try to keep that in perspective. When I started The Tonight Show, it was originally The Tonight Show Starring Jay Leno and my mother said, “Oh, starring! Mr. Big Shot!” She always used to make me feel so guilty. I changed it to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno just so my mother wouldn’t think I was trying to be a big shot. The real trick is to make show-business money and lead a normal life. I can’t impress anybody in show business, but I can fix a car. Then I go home and they say, “The big meatball is for Jay. Jay gets the big meatball!” That’s when I feel like a big shot.
A Look Inside Germany’s First Conquest
By coincidence, a Post article about Czechoslovakia, the first nation conquered by Hitler, appeared just as he was grabbing up his second.
“Nazi Germany’s First Colony” appeared in the Post on August 26, 1939, the day Hitler had originally planned to invade Poland (Read full article here). But his plans were pushed back, and the issue was still on newsstands when Hitler’s armies crossed the border into Poland on September 1. The ensuing blitzkrieg, which brutally crushed all Polish resistance, had little in common with the swift, bloodless conquest of Czechoslovakia.
The Czech republic had already been reduced when Great Britain and France allowed Hitler to occupy its borderlands in 1938. The next year, he returned to grab the remaining provinces of Bohemia and Moravia through threats of invasion. United Press reporter Edward W. Beattie Jr., who was in Czechoslovakia at the time, described the curious manner of the German invasion.
After bribing a taxi driver to take him toward Germany’s advancing forces, Beattie was startled when German scouts suddenly appeared, moving rapidly, coming down the road toward him: “When we met them head-on, the driver tried frantically to turn. It was too late. The unit began passing us. The officer in command leaned out over the side of [his] scout car. I thought he was going to ask for identification but all he said was: ‘From now on in this country, you drive on the right-hand side of the road.’ The occupation was as easy as that” (collected in They Were There: The Story of World War II, edited by Curt Riess, Garden City Publishing, 1945).
Step into 1939 with a peek at these pages from this week’s Post, 75 years ago:
There was no violence, no popular uprising, no guerilla warfare. The Germans simply took up residence in the capital city, Prague, and began appropriating what they wanted. Resistance was reduced to futile gestures, like the one Beattie recounted when he and other foreign correspondents had visited a nightclub. Taking advantage of their journalistic immunity, the reporters ordered the band to play “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” “Over There,” and other Allied songs from the First World War. In a scene reminiscent of the movie Casablanca, the songs made “a couple of dozen German officers at other tables [get] more and more restless.
“Finally two officers a short distance away pounded for silence,” Beattie wrote, “and one of them came over and demanded that we stop ‘insulting the German army.’ Later in the evening, when everyone was drinking pretty heavily, he drew me to one side and said, ‘You don’t think we like this sort of thing too much, do you? For God’s sake, let us try to make this occupation as decent as possible.’ (The army’s part in the occupation was decent in every way. Of course, the Gestapo and the S.S. arrived later.)”
Beattie’s observation was echoed by the Post’s foreign correspondent Demaree Bess: “Greater Germany has planted her first colony in the heart of Europe. Bohemia and Moravia … have become as much of a colony as any island in the South Seas. The Czechs have assumed the inferior status of natives. … [They] do most of the work and the Germans pull all the wires.” It was the Germans’ goal to turn the republic into an efficient workhouse and profit center for the German Reich.
In these early days, they were careful not to make their exploitation too obvious. As Bess wrote, the Germans still hoped to win the cooperation of Czech workers and industrialists. At least that was the intent of the new government the Germans set up in Prague. Their biggest obstacle, it turned out, was other Germans — the Gestapo, the S.S., and officials of the Nazi party.
Nazi officials descended on Prague with the sole purpose of enriching themselves. They were soon disrupting Czech manufacturing by raising production quotas while limiting managers’ profits. The Nazis were further disrupting the economy by ruthlessly exploiting the Jews.
“When the Germans entered Prague without warning last March, they made it clear at once that life would become intolerable for Jews,” wrote Bess. “Thousands therefore went to the German secret police to apply for permission to leave the country. They were told their applications could not be filed until they had made ‘satisfactory arrangements’ with a Nazi-controlled bank, which demanded full powers of attorney over their property.”
The full savagery of Nazi domination was still in the future. But already, under German rule, life was becoming miserable for the Czechs. Consequently, Bess reported, “I know of only one European country today whose people, in very large numbers, actually desire a general European war. That country is the German protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The Czechs say they have discovered that some things are worse than modern war.”
They were about to find out that modern war could be much, much worse.
Listen to President Roosevelt’s August 28, 1939 address to the Herald-Tribune Forum. In talking about the need for peace, he is already distancing himself from the old policy of peace by appeasing Hitler.
Listen to a radio speech on the BBC given on August 27, 1939 by Jan Masaryk, the former head of the Czech nation. He had seen his country betrayed by his allies, Great Britain and France, who allowed Hitler to seize first the border regions of Czechoslovakia, then the entire nation, rather than go to war with Germany.
Listen as Adolf Hitler justifies his invasion of Poland to an ecstatic Reichstag.
Meanwhile, as you’ll hear, Great Britain and France are hurriedly summoning their governments to respond to Germany’s aggression.
Love, Logic, and Bacteria
She did not just take her hand off the railing and put it on your face, the OCD voice said. Now you’re gonna get a disease. How could she do that?
But all she’s doing is showing you affection, the intellectual voice said. There’s nothing there. Can’t you see that? You’ll be fine. You won’t get sick. Your skin won’t get infected. There’s—nothing—on—the—railing. Look! There’s nothing there.
I took Shawn’s hand off of my cheek, ran off of the fire escape and into the bathroom. Washed my hands and cheek until I heard Shawn yell for me to shut the door when I was done. When I finished, I found her standing at the elevator; the down arrow button lit up. Not a smile, a kiss, or even an attempt to hold my hand when I approached. The whole walk to dinner was in silence. She wore this face, this slightly miffed face, and I knew for the first time she knew about my obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The setting sun was reflecting off of the tall Boston buildings. The quarter moon was lucid and rising through the reds, purples, oranges, and peachy colors in the sky. The relaxed air was filled with the scent of budding trees. But as we walked through Harvard Yard to the restaurant, I couldn’t stop wondering if perhaps I didn’t do as good a job hiding my OCD as I thought I did. Perhaps Shawn noticed my frequent hand washing, and how I kept my hands in my pockets when we walked in public. Maybe she saw how freaked out I got whenever someone sniffled, sneezed, or coughed near me. Maybe what I thought I hid she saw, and she just let it ride instead of bringing it up. Maybe all my obsessions were too much for her, and she hid that from me. My mind was reeling. The intellectual voice was buzzing around inside my head like a bumblebee, but all I could hear was the OCD voice hissing like a snake underneath, saying over and over, Shawn knows you have OCD.
We got to the restaurant, and sat at the table in silence. I was terrified to tell her about my OCD. The thought caused an overwhelming sense of fear to rise up and rush my head. I couldn’t quell the fear no matter how tight I tried to hold to reality. It kept coming with each step the waitress made toward the table. Shawn smiled at me with her stop-you-dead smile, leaned forward, and kissed me. Right then I was reminded of our first night together, five months ago. Me curled up against her as we lay staring out at the night sky, falling asleep in her arms, her falling asleep in my arms. An experience I hadn’t had with anyone before. Until Shawn I wasn’t able to fall asleep in the same bed with anyone. Until Shawn I hadn’t any idea how to fall asleep in a woman’s arms. Until Shawn I didn’t even know it was possible to wake up holding hands. But when her alarm clock woke me up and I felt her fingers still folded in mine and then turned over and saw that she was sound asleep, I knew right then, right there that she was here to be more than just my fiancée, more than my friend, or even the mother of my unborn child. She was a sacred gift from heaven that came to stop the crying in my soul.
You have to tell her, the intellectual voice said, because if you don’t you are going to lose her. I lowered my head to the table, and my eyes locked on to the waitress’s hands as she sat our plates down. Do it, Allen, just do it, the intellectual voice kept saying, but all I could do was stare at the raised red bumps all over the waitress’s hands.
Captain Technology
The jar of tomato sauce tingled hollowly as it smashed on the floor to the right of my cash register. Working in retail is not for the faint of heart; tomato sauce soaked my pants up to the knees. After I retired, this part-time cashier’s job had sounded like fun. It wasn’t. Even worse, heavy rain came the second I left work. I was ready for a shower, lunch, and a nap.
First, though, I decided to get all business out of the way and check my emails. My laptop’s screen flickered longer than usual as it connected to the Internet. Nothing happened.
“That’s funny,” I mumbled, “it was working fine yesterday.” I tried again with the same result. Captain Technology — that’s the code name I’d given myself — doesn’t need to resort to whacking the computer when it acts up. No, he hits the restart button. I did and got the same message, no connection. My inclination was to postpone the emails until after a nap, but I couldn’t. The Internet is a technological narcotic.
“Think the problem through, Captain.” I told myself. “The cleaners came this morning. Bet one of them knocked a cable loose from the main computer.”
I plodded downstairs to the home office and looked behind the desk. What I saw made my heart stop cold. There was a mass of tangled wires and cables, the unraveling of which would have been fit for one of the modern-day seven labors of Hercules. Captain Nemo would have ordered out his divers to do battle with this giant octopus. Too bad I was the only one home. It’s a good thing that Captain Technology is never intimidated.
“You can do this, Captain.” I said bravely.
I knelt on the floor and unscrewed and tightened every coaxial cable, Ethernet cable, and power cord between the computer, modem, and router. Captain Technology has become fluent in “technolease.” Restarting the computer for good measure, I confidently waited. Nothing.
The screen displayed a message that may as well have been in Greek. I was stumped. But, Captain Technology, like a farmer, always has a plan. I called the cable company for support. I should have put on my truss before calling.
First, the mechanical voice was running the gauntlet of recorded messaging.
“Hello! Thank you for calling Dynamic Cable. Due to the unusually heavy call volume, you may want to try your call again later. The current anticipated wait time to speak to a customer service representative is five to 10 minutes.”
Undaunted, I called the robot lady’s bluff and stayed on the line. I dutifully punched all of the numbers at the required prompts. The recording hadn’t underestimated the wait time. Incredibly, a live voice spoke on the phone.
“Hello, this is Jeff, and thank you for calling Dynamic Cable. I’ll be assisting you today. May I have the number that you’re calling from?”
“But, I just gave your company all of my information.”
“I know, and thank you, but for security reasons I need to ask for it again.”
I couldn’t tell whether he was smiling. I took a calming breath before repeating the information. My arm had grown tired from holding my mobile phone too long, so I went to adjust position. Somehow, Captain Technology hit the disconnect button. I looked at the computer screen. It still displayed the same no-connection message. The cable-and-wire octopus still menacingly guarded its secret. I paced to the kitchen, back to the home office, and then back to the kitchen trying to think.
There was nothing for it but to call back the cable company.
Things hadn’t improved. The call volume was still unusually high and there was the same long wait with the same bad music.
“Hello, this is Katelyn, and thank you for calling Dynamic Cable. I’ll be assisting you today. First, though, I’ll need to obtain some information from you.”
I was too tired to argue, so capitulated.
Katelyn deftly took my information. “OK, let’s address the problem.”
Her attitude was “can do.” Now we were getting somewhere. I unplugged while she pinged; I unhooked while she pinged. Still no connection.
“I think I see the problem.” Katelyn said. “Your modem is at end of life.”
“What, I just bought it a couple of years ago. That’s incredible. Do you know that my family had a refrigerator that ran for 45 years? And it was still running when we gave it away. We only gave it up because we got tired of defrosting it.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” Her tone implied she was irritated by being distracted from her script.
“I said we only gave up the fridge after 45 years because we got tired of defrosting it. The melting ice was too messy.”
“I’m sorry, I still don’t understand.” Her voice held a strained patience. “How did ice get into the fridge? Ice goes in the freezer.”
“Look, I’m just trying to figure out why the modem is at ‘end of life’ as you say. It’s only a couple of years old. You’re making it sound like a cancer patient.”
There was a pause and the sound of keys clicking. “No sir, our records indicate that we installed the modem six years ago.”
“What do you mean? I installed the modem, not Dynamic Cable.”
Another pause, filled in by an exasperated sigh. “Maybe you mean that it was the router that you installed.”
Maybe I wasn’t Captain Technology after all.
She unexpectedly perked up. “Before we go any further, I’ve just seen how we could save you $20 a month on your cable bill. The plan would still give you all of your present cable stations and high-speed Internet access.” She paused dramatically. “And you get a landline.”
I wanted to ask her if we could just address the Internet problem but took the bait. I’d been thinking about getting a landline. Having only a mobile phone didn’t feel right.
“Gee, I’ve kind of missed not having a landline.”
Her chuckle surprised me. “I hear that a lot from …” She caught herself.
“… from old people.” I finished for her.
“Oh no, sir, not at all. You sound very young.”
I let that go. “OK, I may be interested in the plan. What do I need to do to get a landline?”
She repeated the entire plan to me without taking a breath. It didn’t answer my question.
I tried again. “What does the phone plug into?”
“Into the modem, so that works out. You’ll need a new one anyway because there’s a special Ethernet for the phone line. It should take two to three days to ship out to you.”
“Two to three days without the Internet? That’s a long time.”
Katelyn didn’t answer, but Captain Technology had an idea.
“Katelyn, there’s a Dynamic Cable store not too far away. Can I take this old modem there, switch it out, and return it once the new modem for the phone gets delivered?”
“Why yes, I hadn’t thought of that. First, though, let’s complete the order for the new plan. Oh, by the way,” she slid in, “there’s a two year lock-in period.”
“Great, two years before the mast.”
“Excuse me, sir, two years what?”
“Never mind.”
The short run from the car to the cable store drenched me. My hair was plastered down like Alfalfa’s in Our Gang. Three ladies behind the counter looked me over as I came through the door. They were kind enough not to mention anything about the cowlick sticking up from the back of my head.
I placed the old modem on the counter. “How come things always bust on rainy days?”
“Can I help you?” one of the women asked as if she hadn’t heard what I said.
As I was describing the problem to her, the other two ladies were discussing stew recipes. My stomach growled. I’d forgotten about lunch. And that reminded me that my in-laws would soon be arriving for dinner.
I hurried home and whipped the modem together. One green light came on reassuringly. Trouble was that three other lights were blinking like a Christmas tree. If I’d been in a better mood, I would have thought they looked festive.
I got a hand towel from a kitchen drawer and dried off. The gleam from the fancy new coffee machine caught my eye. No, this wasn’t the time to take a break. My stomach growled again. Or the time to eat, it seemed. I’d need to suck it up and run the gauntlet at Dynamic Cable again.
Twenty minutes later, Denise from Dynamic was asking me to unplug the coaxial cable from the wall. My back was numb and sore from working behind the computer for so long. What I saw when I finally made it down to the floor was embarrassing. I’d forgotten to screw the coaxial cable back into the wall.
“Sure, I’ll do it right now.” I lied.
I screwed them together optimistic everything would work. After all, I had a new modem and everything was at last connected. The same message about there being no available Internet connection was staring at me. The cable-and-wire octopus seemed to smile sardonically. I longed for the tubes and diodes of my old TV.
“Ah, sorry, Denise, but nothing’s working.”
“That’s strange,” I heard tapping on her end of the line. I think she was growing tired of me.
I studied the cables again. One end of an Ethernet cable looked funny. One of the cleaners must have tugged it too hard when she was dusting. A new modem probably had never been needed. I felt bad. The thing may have been near “end of life,” but it wasn’t dead. I couldn’t worry about that now though. My wife was due home shortly and company was coming.
“Denise, one of these cables looks like it might be broken.”
Cutting the conversation short, I unhooked the cable, and ran back out into the rain. I raced to the big box store, found my way to the electronics section, and stopped. I was looking stupidly at a large rack of cables as water mixed with reconstituted tomato sauce puddled at my feet.
A young clerk walked over to me. “Can I help you, Captain?”
Captain? She at least could have called me by my full code name. I showed her the cable.
She plucked a replacement from the wall and went to ring up the order.
“Do you want to buy the warranty that goes with it?”
“Pardon me?”
“There’s a warranty that goes with the cable. If anything ever happens to it, we’ll replace it free.”
I was amazed. The store expected me to buy a warranty for a $15.00 cable? She had to be joking. I wanted to tell her so, but fell into the trap.
“How much is the warranty?”
“Two dollars.”
I politely declined.
Once home, I hurriedly plugged the new cable into the router and ran it into computer. The modem still only showed one green light with the other three flashing. They reminded me of distress signals. Captain Technology sat down at his desk in defeat. Surrender tasted bitter. I wasn’t even hungry anymore.
I picked up the modem to make a formal surrender. Wait a minute. Something about the router caught my eye. How come it wasn’t showing any lights? Embarrassed — even though I was alone — I checked the router’s power button. I hit the router’s power button. All was well. The Internet was restored.
Captain Technology had failed to see that one of the cleaners had inadvertently turned off the router.
The back door opened and I heard my wife’s cheerful, “Hello, honey, I’m home. How was your day?”
No War Here
When I’m interviewed as the Post’s archives director, I often find myself addressing the misconception that the magazine was a newsmagazine. Actually, it was more of a general interest magazine that occasionally ran feature stories on current events. It didn’t run headlines, and it printed very few photographs compared to, say, Life magazine. And because its production time was so lengthy, it might not be able to comment on a news story for several weeks.
So, when war was declared in Europe on September 2, 1939, five weeks passed before the Post made any direct reference to it. And it did so in an unusual editorial entitled “America.” In it, the editors declared World War a misnomer for what had just erupted in Europe. “It is, in fact, again what it was before — a European war.”
This editorial was the first of many to argue that the fighting in Europe did not, and should not, involve America. The Post editors, like many Americans, were still bitter about America’s involvement in the last war. “Twenty-two years ago,” they wrote, “we were [fighting] on the continent of Europe, saying to ourselves, and believing, that we had engaged in a war to end war. It sounds ironic now. Nevertheless, it is one of the romantic facts to be written down in history that we had no other purpose. We were defeated. We were defeated because it was not our war. It was Europe’s war, and the peace that was written was a European peace, laying down the lines for the next war.”
Not only had that war cost America 116,000 dead and 204,000 wounded, it had also involved $10 billion in loans to allies and post-war relief aid, which it had trouble getting back.
The Post was far from alone in its isolationist attitude. But over the next two years, the editors had reasons to reconsider the Nazi threat as they watched Germany conquer one nation after another and savagely abuse the vanquished nations. Shortly before Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, the editors conceded that remaining isolated might not be feasible; we could try to avoid the war, but the war would eventually catch up with us.
The “America” editorial proved farsighted on one point. It argued that during the First World War “the world’s center of political gravity shifted from one continent to another — that is to say, from Europe to America.” England and France were trying to hold onto the “star of world supremacy” while Germany was trying to seize it. In fact, the editors wrote, that star “is not there. It is here.” The Post had recognized America’s new global power, years before its victory in the war made it obvious to the world.
On another point, though, the editors’ conclusion wasn’t quite as perceptive. The editors didn’t yet see that America couldn’t hold onto “world supremacy” and not get involved in this war.
The World War They Knew
I’m interested in seeing how America’s media covers the 75th anniversary of World War II in the coming weeks. Or if they cover it.
In the U.S., we tend to think of the war as starting on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. But on that day our country was joining a war that had already been in progress for over two years. It had begun on the other side of the world in September 1939 when Adolf Hitler sent his army into Poland, prompting Great Britain and France to declare war on Germany. Those events lead, eventually, to the deaths of 407,000 American servicemen and women and the wounding of another 670,000. They also set the United States on the course that made it the first superpower of the modern age.
To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the war that transformed America, I will begin at the beginning, with material written when World War II seemed so far away. Each week in this blog, I will report the approaching war as readers saw it in the Post.
The great benefit of hindsight is that it can reveal historical events in their entirety. We can see strategies and actions that were hidden to people of the times. The disadvantage of hindsight, however, is that we tend to look at events in light of their outcome. Thus we see the war in the light of America’s eventual victory.
This view obscures the experience of Americans who lived through those years. They knew it as a time of doubt and worry, particularly in the early months of the war; they couldn’t be certain their country could survive.
We can only understand what Americans sacrificed and accomplished if we understand the burden of uncertainty and fear they lived under. We forget that many Americans worried of an imminent invasion by Japanese forces on the West Coast. Many feared the sudden appearance of German or Japanese bombers over their cities. And a lot of Americans expected the country would fall back into the Depression as soon as the fighting was over.
It was hard enough for a typical American to work a 48-plus-hour week in a defense plant, get by on four gallons of gasoline a week, face shortages at the grocery store, and plan their meals around the coupons left in their ration books — all while worrying about a loved one on the front line. It was even harder when they didn’t know whether their sacrifices would be wasted in a defeat.
In this series, I’ll be looking down the road toward war as Americans of 1939 saw it. I think this perspective can give a view into their world and a better appreciation of what they achieved.
The Passing of Our National (Extinct) Bird
One hundred years ago this month, a small gray pigeon with spotted wings became the most famous bird in American history. It achieved this distinction by one simple act — it died. And with it died the species Ectopistes migratorius. The passenger pigeon was no more.
The passing of a species is, of course, significant. But the loss of the passenger pigeon has taken on deeper meaning in our culture. The bird has become a symbol of what we have lost to time, a missing link to the wild abundance of early America. Other species — like the ivory-billed woodpecker and heath hen — have vanished, but they had not impressed Americans as the wild pigeon did with its endless flocks.
In the early 1800s passenger pigeons were so plentiful that when a flock passed over ornithologist John James Audubon, he heard the sound of “a hard gale at sea” and felt a surprising current of air from the beating of thousands of wings. As the birds came to roost, “a most magnificent as well as wonderful and almost terrifying sight presented itself,” said Audubon. “The pigeons, arriving by thousands, alighted everywhere, one above another, until solid masses as large as hogsheads were formed on the branches all round. Here and there the perches gave way with a crash and, falling on the ground, destroyed hundreds of birds beneath. … It was a scene of uproar and confusion.”
John C. French wrote in The Passenger Pigeon of Pennsylvania of a 2-mile-wide nesting ground stretching through 40 miles of unbroken forest near his Alleghany farm. Every morning pigeons would rise to fill the sky over a mile-wide valley, “eight courses deep at times, for about an hour, with the multitude of birds flowing westward, at the rate of about a mile a minute. … The roar of wings was like a tornado and the morning was darkened as by a heavy thunder shower.”
And yet, within a few decades, the passenger pigeon had become a rarity. As the 20th century began, the species was reduced to just a handful of birds being carefully tended by ornithologists.
Many Americans refused to believe the bird that had once crowded the skies from horizon to horizon was gone. Some were outraged when author and outdoorsman Emerson Hough made a passing comment in his June 4, 1910, Out-of-Doors column: “There have been no wild pigeons in America for many years.”
The comment prompted letters from Post readers who claimed to have heard about or personally seen flocks of passenger pigeons. Hough responded in October: “It is very surprising how general is the belief that the wild pigeon still exists in considerable numbers in different parts of the United States. Many newspaper stories announcing the ‘return of the pigeons’ appear. … Unfortunately they are not and cannot be true. The majority of the reports of wild pigeons … have come from writers who do not recognize the difference between the band-tailed pigeon and the passenger pigeon.” (“The Past Participle in Pigeons” October 15, 1910)
Hough left no room for argument or hope for a comeback.
He was just as adamant on a second point — humans were responsible for the extinction. His article added a new significance to the passenger-pigeon story. What had been a symbol of lost America was now considered a parable of American greed.
Hunters had assumed an endless supply, Hough wrote, and so slaughtered the pigeons without restraint. “In three years there were shipped from [Hartford] Michigan … 990,000 dozen pigeons — call it a million dozen, so you can remember it easily. They did not count them in less than dozens. This was from one part of one state alone. The town of Shelby, in Michigan, is said to have shipped a third more than did Hartford. It is said that in the heyday of pigeoning in Michigan, the town of Petosky shipped five carloads a day for 30 days,” which Hough calculated to be 14.8 million pigeons in one month.
“Everybody supposed that there would always be millions of them,” wrote Hough. “Everybody supposed that they must breed in immense numbers, six or eight young in a nest, at least. As a matter of fact, the bird was not prolific. It laid but one egg a year.”
Thirty years earlier, conservationists had warned commercial hunters of the inevitable end of this wasteful slaughter. But a Chicago wild-game dealer replied: “The pigeon never will be exterminated so long as forests large enough for their nestings and vast enough for their food remain. … The pigeon is migratory. It can care for itself.” Yet, Hough reported, the dealer’s shrinking supply of pigeon meat was already proving him wrong. The bird had practically disappeared the previous year, “almost at once.”
The suddenness of their passing was mystifying. Several readers wrote in to suggest the pigeons had simply migrated and forgotten to come home. There were no émigré flocks, Hough wrote. The birds had simply been slaughtered in a long frenzy of greed. Men had trapped them in nets, then dispatched them with clubs, boards, rocks, or pincers. Hough recalled one crazed trapper crushing birds’ heads with his teeth. “It was simply rapid butchery and that was all there was to it.” By 1883 they “had well-nigh finished their pretty work. … Fine — isn’t it? — what we practical, simple-minded Americans have done!” (“Regarding Martha,” June 21, 1919)
In 2014 we are accustomed to hearing warnings from conservationists and environmentalists. But 100 years ago, Emerson Hough’s ideas about preserving wildlife were relatively new, and unpopular. Readers often wrote him to complain of new and limited hunting seasons and expanded game preserves. Hough had no sympathy for them. He believed “future generations of Americans have been shamefully wronged by those who have preceded them.”
Throughout the early history of the United States, there had been little distinction made between ambition and greed. But years of “waste, extravagance, insatiate individual greed” as Hough expressed it, would eradicate valuable wildlife. Conservation was needed, he wrote, because, when Americans loved something, they tended to use it up. Given time, they would introduce everything they cared for to the past tense; not just passenger pigeons, but “our sports, our resources, our own country, our own species.”
The Line
Ricky stumbled upon _____ while digging through a pile of shoeboxes in the back of his grandmother’s closet. Can you imagine? Just sitting there amongst old clothes, letters, books that might have been her most treasured possession. The line between the meaningful and meaningless was almost non-existent to the outsider, though, and without her around to give them life through memory, through experience, they reverted back to being garbage.
This was after the funeral, the awkward meetings, handshakes, lipstick scars from kisses on the cheek. You’re probably too young to remember me. You’ve became a little man! Ricky walked upstairs to get away, slipped into his grandma’s bedroom. Her bed was still unmade from when they found her in it, already gone. With the sheets torn open like that, it was almost like the bed itself was grieving. Ricky walked over, let his hand hover over the sheets, but couldn’t bring himself to touch the bed, afraid it might suck him in, take him with it.
Ricky brushed the dust off of _____, held it up to the window so he could see it better. His grandmother’s house was always dark. The deep brown walls and cramped rooms had a way of swallowing light, killing any warmth that dare enter.
_____ was just the way Ricky’s grandma had described it to him when he was little. This was shocking, coming from a woman who did nothing but tell Ricky incredible stories that were obviously fictitious to anyone but a child. She once told him about the time she and her best friend ran off to join the circus. Literally, she said that they joined a traveling circus. Apparently, the two girls started training for the tightrope walk before deciding they should just go back home. Another story involved the ghost of a little girl whom she would see dancing around a tree in her backyard. Her father had the tree cut down, and the girl never returned. Ricky’s grandmother had lots of stories about ghosts. But they were stories. Just stories.
Ricky held _____ close to his chest, hidden under his arms, like a wound, like a lesion he was ashamed of. He walked downstairs to where his relatives were talking, drinking, the whole house feeling somehow sing-song, the voices blended like they did at church, when everyone sang together, melodic despite the untrained voice, all on different notes. Unknowing eyes might think it was a birthday party, not a wake.
Ricky found his dad talking to his cousin, who’s name Ricky could not remember. He would later remember it (Anna) as she would begin making regular visits to see Ricky and his father. Ricky asked no questions, even after she drove his father’s car into a median on the highway, nicking a car coming the other way. His father was killed instantly, his chest crushed. The driver of other car was decapitated, and Anna got away with only a leg injury, and a limp that followed her for the rest of her life. Anna never even told Ricky she was sorry for killing his father. He felt that she wasn’t actually sorry at all. It didn’t matter, though, neither was Ricky.
“How are you holding up, buddy?” Anna asked, using the appropriate phrasing. You don’t ask people at funerals how they are, because they’re obviously not good. Or, at least that’s what they want everyone to believe. You have to ask it in a way that shows that you’re asking in relative terms. I know you’re not doing well, but in terms of how bad you could be feeling, how are you?
“I’m…I’m okay,” Ricky said. He motioned with his head, trying to dismiss Anna, but she didn’t leave, and in fact leaned in closer.
“What have you got there?” Ricky’ father asked, cocking his head to see around his son’s arms, not even considering that it might be something Ricky wanted to keep secret.
Ricky slowly uncurled his arms, letting ____ drop into his hands, like he was presenting it to his father as a gift, like he was one of the Magi in the nativity scene they use to put up during Christmas. Two white, one black, always.
“Oh, I see,” Ricky’ father said, looking over at Anna, who was smiling. Children, how amusingly naïve. “Did you get that from your grandmother’s room?”
It hadn’t occurred to Ricky until that moment that he might be doing something wrong, that he might be stealing, that somebody else could have already claimed _____.
“Yes,” Ricky said, turning his shoulder to the room, hoping to better hide his treasure.
“Well, it’s very interesting,” his father said, mockingly uninterested, not bothering to try and hide his lack of understanding.
Ricky looked up at his father, confused, certain he was playing a game. “But look. Grandma told me about it, she told me stories. I didn’t think it was real.” Ricky placed ____ into his father’s hands, realizing now how small it seemed when held by a grown man.
His father hefted _____ into the air, catching it bluntly, smiling, trying to appease Ricky, who had to use every bit of will he had to avoid snatching it back from his father. “It’s cool, Ricky. But it’s just _____. Your grandma has plenty of shit like this in that closet of hers.” He handed _____ to Ricky. “Now go put it back where you found it, and come straight back down. I have a few people I want to introduce to you before they have to leave.”
Ricky took _____ back, this time not being as careful to protect it, regretting letting his father touch it, letting his father know that it was important to him, letting his father make it meaningless with a few words. Ricky kept telling himself _____ was important, it was important, it was important, but it was already gone, crossed over into meaninglessness. Such a thin line.
Ricky put _____ back into the closet where he found it, stacked books and shoe boxes back on top of it, hoping no one would ever find, that it would remain there forever, like a fossil, perfectly preserved.
He knew he would never see _____ again.
Years later, after his dad’s accident–another funeral, another party for the departed–Ricky asked his aunt about ______. She had gotten his grandmother’s house, which caused Ricky’s father to hate her until the day he died. Just as well; he seemed to hate almost everyone.
“______?” she said. Attentive. Kind. Fake. “I don’t remember seeing it, but this house is full of that kind of thing. I’ll keep an eye out for it, okay?”
“No big deal,” Ricky said, “Dad had mentioned it a month ago, so I thought I’d ask.” He looked at his aunt’s eyes, her smile, glad to still be above ground, to still have lungs that could hold air, a little too pleased that her abusive brother had died so violently; the closed casket, rumors, whispered details.
Ricky looked at his hand, her lips, cheeks, quivering fingers, all convincing. But her eyes, they gave her away. He wanted to tell her that he was the one that had once cared about ______, not his father. The only person it hurt was Ricky, himself. But he didn’t say anything, just let her have her spiteful victory.
Ricky walked out the backdoor, through the kitchen into the backyard, passing family, friends, or perhaps people that hated his father and were hoping to get a chance to see his grotesque body. Ricky could hardly tell the difference. They all acted the same, spoke the same, were the same.
Ricky planned to leave through the backyard, but when he got there heremembered that there wasn’t a gate. There was no way to leave. He would have to make his way back through the house to the front door. He breathed in the air, wondering if was the same air he had breathed in when he visited as a kid. As he walked back into house, he noticed something in the backyard. A tree stump. He remembered his grandmother’s ghost stories, but in haste, drew no conclusions.
Later, Ricky would say that he knew that was the last time he’d see that house, that he planned on getting into his car and driving until he found something new, something better. That’s a debatable point, but the truth is that he never did see the house. Even after a gas line explosion wrecked most of the house and killed Ricky’s aunt, the last of her siblings, in the process.
Ricky, a thousand miles away, let the phone ring, listened to the messages left by one of his cousins, the details of the explosion, and then updates on his aunt’s condition; then the bad news, and then, finally, funeral plans. He never called back, didn’t even consider the idea of coming to the funeral. He only briefly considered returning a call once, when his cousin mentioned that they had found _____ among the wreckage of his grandmother’s house.
“Must be worth a fortune,” his cousin said, trying not to sound too excited, to get ahead of herself, overplay her hand. As if value is a thing that can be changed by a couple of words.
The Healing: Victim of Brutal Beating Meets Attacker 25 Years Later
Back in the ’80s, Matthew Boger and Tim Zaal didn’t have much in common. But fate brought them together one horrible evening.
Matthew was a small-framed 14-year-old from outside San Francisco with a sweet smile and a soft heart. He was also gay, and when he told his mother, she couldn’t accept it. “Take it back,” she told him.
“When I wouldn’t, she threw me against the wall and told me to get out,” he recalls. “That’s the last time I ever saw my mother.”
Matthew hitched a ride to Hollywood and made his home in a park off Santa Monica Boulevard. “I lived in that park 24 hours a day, and I ate out of garbage cans,” says Matthew. “I’m not proud of it, but I did whatever I had to do to survive.”
Tim Zaal was a beefy 17-year-old middle-class kid growing up in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles. But after his brother was shot by a black man, Tim changed. For him, the incident became an indictment of anyone who was different. And it filled him with hate.
He made it to Hollywood almost every weekend as part of the mass pilgrimage of punk rockers that attended concerts in the area. It was a rough crowd. “Violence was a daily part of my life back then,” says Tim. “It was not uncommon to see people pulled out of their cars and beaten.”
One night in 1980, Matthew and Tim met in Hollywood. “I was at Okie’s Dog getting a hot dog,” recalls Matthew. “They had video games, and it felt like a safe place where I could escape my hell for a few hours.” But Tim and his hooligan friends considered the popular hot dog stand their territory. As Matthew remembers, there was a sudden, loud commotion from across the street. As he turned, he saw Tim shouting, “There they are. Let’s kill all the little faggots.”
“I saw the looks on their faces,” Matthew recalls, “and I said to all the other kids there, ‘Let’s run!’”
Matthew dashed down an alley, but Tim’s crew cut him off. They started kicking Matthew with steel-tipped boots, all the while high-fiving each other. Matthew screamed for help, but it only seemed to make Tim angrier. “So I kicked him in the head as hard as I could,” Tim says. “Then he stopped moving.”
Tim recalls being happy he had knocked Matthew out — until he realized one of the girls in his gang was screaming, “Stop, stop! I think you killed him!”
Panicked, they left Matthew in a pool of blood. “It became a secret,” recalls Tim, “one I never talked about for years. But it was always there.”
But Matthew wasn’t dead; he awoke, bleeding, battered, and alone. He crawled across the street to the park and bandaged himself with T-shirts. Finally he managed to get to his feet and walk to a drugstore where he stole first-aid supplies, then made his way to a McDonald’s for a burger. Nobody offered to help. “It was like I was invisible,” says Matthew. “Here I was, covered in bloody bandages, and nobody said a word to me.”
But the harrowing event did not break his spirit. “I knew then that I could not die on those streets,” says Matthew. “Because then they would have won.”
He wound up getting a job at that same McDonald’s. Flash forward three and a half years: Matthew had not only gotten himself off the streets, but back to school to become a hairstylist–and within a decade he was one of the most sought-after in Los Angeles.