My daughter Lauren was about six months old in March 1965 and we lived in Philadelphia.  There were a lot of awful things happening then  — kind of a storm of shit that battered us those years: including civil rights, Vietnam.  That winter, on March 25, Viola Liuzzo, a 40-year-old housewife and voter registration worker from Detroit, was shot to death by the Ku Klux Klan on an Alabama highway.  She was registering black voters in Selma with Martin Luther King and she driving a car with a black passenger.  That was her offense.

It’s not that any of us knew her personally.  But we knew who she was: part of the volunteer cadre of civil rights workers in Mississippi and Alabama who challenged racism, America’s great Original Sin.  You probably know that just fifty years ago — my adult lifetime —  our country was still segregated racially.  It was thoughtlessly, simply, legally, the way things were, and not just in the South.

Anyway, a couple of weeks before the Liuzzo murder Selma police conscripted and deputized all the young white men and town and led them to attack civil rights marchers at the Pettus bridge. the whole world watched and it was a huge outrage. 

JFK

Today another story out there about who killed President Kennedy.  Fifty years ago.  Like maybe who or what did it is still alive and ready to confess.  Or that finally confirming this or that version changes anything.  It's my sense that all these whodunit pieces in print and TV are created by people who weren’t alive when JFK was shot to death in Dallas.  That they have no idea what mattered and what the story was.  

They don’t know what they’re talking about.

Virtually every person conscious that day, November 22, 1963, every one of us remembers where he or she was when they heard.  Exactly.  I was in an English class at college.  The class ended abruptly.  Silent except for the sound of people crying.

There are not many moments where most of the people on this planet share an experience.  Pearl Harbor for my parents’ generation was like that, I gather.  Surely 9-11 and the planes flying into the Towers.   It is the electric minute, all of us with our fingers in the same plug, horrible and thrilling. If you are young now, and you imagine telling your offspring one day about 9-11, do you think you will talk about the conspiracy or the terrorists or some guy reading a children’s book to a kindergarden class?  I’m guessing not, rather that you’ll tell your children where you were and what you felt when you heard.  I’m predicting that what will stick over the next years is that instant of awful connection, of the burst of impossible information, that bite of the god-like fruit of pure knowledge, of suddenly, involuntarily knowing something you do not know how to know.  

why I no longer work for NBC News ever

Back then, early oughts, I was field producing live shots for the Today Show.  Not much money, but kinda fun way to spend an early morning.  Usually pretty good stories, and the glamor.  That too.  So one night in April the crew booker called from Burbank – this would be maybe 8 pm Pacific – said there was a Rasputin dog (my language, not her's) in Clear Lake and that Matt (Lauer, we're all on first names here) Matt wanted to interview the dog.  

Okay.  The story was that the dog, a 10 month old female mixed breed named Dosha, had slipped out of her yard collarless and been hit by a car.  And the responding police officer, seeing the animal as badly injured and in distress, had shot the dog.  In the head.  Put her down.  

Dosha's body, in an orange body bag, was put in the animal morgue cooler or something.  Whatever, a bit later, couple of hours I think, the shelter staff found Dosha standing up in the refrig, still in the body bag, and quite alive.  (The officer's a very bad shot, Dosha's vet whispered to me later.)  I have met this animal and can say that all things considered she was in pretty good shape and in a better mood than I would have been.  

So Matt wanted to do this story and I went to Clear Lake, arriving a bit after midnight Pacific.  We were to go live at 7:40 Eastern with dog and vet.

At the vet's office where the dog was and where we, the Today Show, had booked an interview with the vet, there were two satellite trucks.  One for me, along with two cameras, and one for ABC GMA.  Competition isn't unusual and I said hey to the GMA guys whom I knew and didn't think much of it.  However, a bit on when I told the Today Show producer in New York – a person sitting in a warm office with plenty of coffee and snacks – when I told her that there was an ABC crew in Clear Lake too, well, she went batshit.  She told me I represented NBC News! and was to tell the ABC crew that we, Today, had an exclusive.  I told her that I guess I'd do that but that it wouldn't work and that they'd think I was stupid.  But, you know, I went in where they were setting up and told the GMA producer that Today had an exclusive.  It went about as I said -- they thought I was a jerk and they continued to set up.

24 Hours to Life in Reno

First off, the statute of limitations on my crime has surely expired and one little inter-state move of a ‘quantity for sale’ of marijuana probably doesn’t matter as much now as it sure as hell did in 1970.   Second, jail is weird space.  If you haven’t been in, there’s no way to get it.  Time, logic, reality, and the very meaning of innocence is altered there.  This is the story of how one hippie first learned about the weirdness.  

This is July 1970.  The kid with me in the van knew about the dope I was carrying too, which could well have been a problem.  When I met him he was hitchhiking on I-80 outside of Salt Lake, headed west to Berkeley, part of the pulse of young folks toward California.  God bless them.  I picked him up.  He was a runaway, 16 I think, from Michigan.  We talked and smoked some of the dope and drove my green hippie van west, toward Berkeley, toward Reno.  

Now at that time — you have to imagine — the Interstate did not detour around every city and town it came to.  It went thru them on Main Street. In 1970 the Interstate had intersections and cross traffic and stop lights.  This story I’m telling surely would not have happened in later times. Because these days I would rocket right around Reno at Interstate speed.  Because nowadays I would not really ever have been in Reno, driving on the street.  Because  these days I would have dropped the kid at a freeway ramp and just gone on my small-time way down 395 toward Lee Vining and the back way to Yosemite. Because it was the Reno cop who had seen the bulletin about the armed robbery in South Lake Tahoe and it was he who, reasonably it turned out, figured that I and the kid were probably the armed robbers he was looking for and followed us down the street in the middle of Reno.  

Forest Fires

I remember being frightened, but I don't think I was ever as afraid as I should have been.  

Started fighting and covering wild fires in about 1973, first on casual crews out of the Forest Service station at Jerseydale, then for whoever would pay me to go watch and report back.  So, mostly then it was humungous campaign fires, the ones that totally blew out to burn down subdivisions and this and that thousand acres of timber.  Fires you could see from ten miles away when bowls of fire popped out of a ridge.  Not the scary part.

If you've been smoked by a campfire or fireplace sometime and done that hold-your-breath-and-dodge thing, that's the scary part, only on a wild fire there's no place to dodge.  The smoke suddenly blinds you and worst case there's no information about which way to run.  And it's always steep, so not so much run as scramble.  And you can't see.  Or breathe. Kind of a dry waterboarding I'd guess.  Pretty bad.  I never walk past a hillside of Bear Clover, as my suffering family knows, without thinking what a freaking misery it is in a fire.  Just a ten-inch-tall little plant, hardly worth looking at, that produces in fire a godawful dense oily smoke.  Makes my throat catch to remember it at all.

Dope

There was a try to legalize marijuana in California in 1972.  Voters whomped the initiative 2-1.  But it was fun.

The pro-dope campaign was run as straight as possible, all suit and tie.  Guy I dealt with there was a Brownell, grandson of Eisenhower's attorney general.   The public face of the pro-effort was intended to reassure straights that dope was not threatening.  1972.

On the other side of the straight-bent debate was my friend Keith Lampe.   Knew Keith in NY before I came out west.  Keith thought straights were never gonna vote for legal weed and that dopers had to be motivated to turn out.  Brownell and company stayed clear of him and he them.  But he mounted his own rump press conference campaign -- Mothers for Marijuana, Jocks for Joints.  Stuff like that.  Wonderful theater.

One day Keith called to say he and Arthur Okamura, a sculptor from Bolinas, were going to put on a stoned ping pong match... to prove that being high didn't interfere with judgment and reflexes or whatever, totally ridiculous in my experience, but whatever.  Anyway,  I was a TV reporter in SF and he, Keith, wanted me to be fair witness that Keith and Arthur were actually high and I was to do that by eating marijuana cookies with them half an hour before the press demonstration.  I was supposed to testify to the other reporter types that indeed, you know, the players were stoned.

I did eat the cookies, as did Keith and Arthur.  They played splendidly, I recall, very impressively, but I was way too ripped to do my part.  Could barely speak at all.  They were really good cookies.

Where's Barry?

Had a crush in highschool on a girl named Barry.   Mush have been my junior or senior year.  New girl in town.  Year younger than me.  And possessed of the kind of southern accent that can still poke a finger in my brain.  Wonderful.  Her voice alone just made me so happy and weak and stupid. 

Called her on a grocery store work break one weekend morning from the pay phone in the drug store on the corner.  When she answered with that fabulous, judgment-damaging accent, I said a lot of nice things from my heart -- nothing salacious, but, you know, personal, sweet and one hoped endearing.  Went on for a bit.

Then she said, 'that's very nice, but this is Barry's mother.'  Kind of thing you never forget.

I wonder where Barry is.

Tom's tired

Bear with me. This started when my friend Keith sent me a right-wing screed called "I'm Tired", an old fart doing an Andy Rooney number. You know, down with Obama, socialism, left-wingers, liberals, Muslims, George Soros and Michael Moore, and the main stream media; up with Fox and Tea Parties and so forth.

(One interesting thing is that Keith's version attributed the nonsense to "Robert A. Hall, the actor who plays the coroner on CSI if you watch that show." Actually, that would be actor Robert H. Hall who didn't write the piece, altho it is his picture that is attached. Never trust the provenance of anything that comes in a chain letter. Snopes is your friend. The real author's blog is linked in the first graf and he now includes a note exonerating the actor Hall.)

Anyway, I'm older than Robert A. Hall, and I'm tired too. I'm tired of a few old crotchety white guys embarrassing the rest of us with their silly, frightened, anarcho-libertarian rants.

Those Good Old Days

I am a Good Old Days contemporary and am here to say it wasn't just no sex. I'm afraid there also wasn't any dope and and there wasn't much rock and roll. Teendom in the 50s was a sad darn thing, I'll tell you. Don't know how we made it thru. Also, no mobile phones, no freeways, no jet travel, no In-N-Out Burger, no plastic of any kind, no FM radio, essentially no TV, no painless dentistry, no acne treatments, no xerox.... I could go on. Surely there will those who think it was a better, simpler time, but it is unlikely they were there, and I know my own children had a lot more fun and are healthier for it.

(cross posted from pal Roger Ebert's blog)

Dope for the little ones

I'm due to attend a meeting of a non-profit next week. they think I know how to get them in the news and I like what they do. But it reminds me:

I was working for a non-profit, doing some movies, and sat in on their Board meeting to make a report or something. Group, which did good deeds in public schools, had reached a fund raising agreement with Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Mail the specially marked ice cream carton top to Ben or Jerry and my organization gets 25 cents for its work with school children. Something like that. So I'm half listening as the ExDir reports that they've decided on a name for the Ben and Jerry boxtop promotion. It will be called 'Lids for Kids'. I woke up to tell them I thought that might not be a good name for the program.

Sometimes I wish it had gone through. Just to see what happens.

New World View

We did a renovation thing on the apartment by the Bay. Hired a recommended tile guy who turned out to be Cuban. Not his parents or relatives, born there. He sent Michel to lay the stone-- and a lovely job too. Michel is from Chile. (Op. cit) The crew that moved the bearing wall so we could have a normal-sized shower was from Bulgaria. The cabinets and counters, were built by East Oakland Chinese and installed by a Thai. We bought the flooring from a Russian and it was put down by a pair of Mongolians. This is the small job non-unioin construction work force in the Bay Area in the early 21st century. How cool is that.