Time Capsule, 1950. (An excuse not to do taxes)

Cash got bored with us. He’s in the living room.

Millie is sleeping against the tax files and I don’t want to wake her. And I don’t want to do taxes. It’s on my want-to-do list though, somewhere after “Go to a rock fight.” Right before “Get a spinal tap with no anesthetic.” So, I’m looking at my coffee cup and thinking time for a blog. 

The time capsule. It was a tin Folgers can, the kind you opened with a windup key and it went “whoosh” when the key started, filling the space around it with an aromatic coffee smell. The can held an actual pound of coffee unlike today’s fake ll.3 oz. cans. I’m drinking Folgers Black Silk as I write this, and recalling how, when Folgers was still in KC you’d drive anywhere near it in downtown and it was like being suffused in a giant “whoosh” Folgers can opening; even if you didn’t drink coffee you had to like that “waking up” smell.

I wrapped it in oilcloth and taped it…

Anyway, back about 1950 I filled a Folgers tin with various boyhood items and buried it. I guess I was saying goodbye to childhood in anticipation of teenage years. But I made a map so I could come back in fifty years and dig it up. Seventy years ago. The map is gone but the can may still be there in my grandmother’s side yard. The house exists. I saw a For Sale sign in front of it a few years back, and entered it; some men were working inside, circle saws shrieking. The place had shrunk as all our childhood haunts have downsized. I probably could have found the coffee can with a metal detector, but the thought of getting permission from the seller, and the various utilities and their little dayglo marker flags was unappealing and I left.

It was full of totems. Indian head pennies, wheat cents, a Mercury dime with that thing on the back that looks like an axe. A Lone Ranger Atom Bomb ring—really, there was such a thing and I had one. Talk about shoehorning one premium in with another one, reminds me of an account we had at a little Iowa ad agency. A bank. The president was an old guy and strange. He’d bought about a thousand spoons because he thought people would play them. Like the spoon lady (check her out, she’s great!) But he was wrong. So he told us to use them as premiums in ads. Six spoons for starting a checking account. No crazier than a Lone Ranger Atom Bomb Ring, actually. Their tagline was “The oldest bank in town.” Somehow it got changed to “The oddest bank in town” with the advent of the spoon ad. I had nothing to do with it. 

More items in the can: some decoders. A Radio Orphan Annie decoder that decoded Ovaltine come-ons but we repurposed it to code certain words and teacher descriptions at grade school. Diecast toys. A dime-sized itching powder tin, empty. Arrowheads. My best swirly-color shooter marble. I might have to go back and dig that can up in the dark of night. Maybe not. It’s right off of 39th and Troost where drug deals go down. I was at a car wash near there and a guy tried to sell me a video camera, new in box, ten bucks. Back to the Lone Ranger ring. If you sat in a dark closet, took the plastic finned piece off and put your eyeball up to the little radium-filled scope thing you could see…stuff. Radioactive stuff. Maybe I could find the can with a geiger counter. You had to pay fifteen cents and a boxtop and wait weeks to get this thing that would maybe burn your eyeballs out. Thank goodness it bored me so I only looked at it maybe twice. Attention deficit can be good.

Hey, we got through January. Soon it’ll be the year birthday of the scourge. Maybe come summer we’'ll all be vaccinated and back to, uh, normal. Whatever that is. Bless you all—I hope the best for you and us. Hang in there, good people. G

Nothing says 50’s like bulbosity and seafoam green.

(This is a politics-free zone but I have one word for 2021 so far: JesusChristoManassusKenworthLoadaSchistDropForgedMotheramaCarambaBananaDingDong. And Whoa. That’s it. Speechless. Words fail.)

That lovely seafoam and forest green sculptural scooter above is a British Maico and it sold for around $600 in the early fifties. Fifteen to twenty grand might get you a nice one today. Reminds me of a Hudson Hornet. And that color! It’s Ike on the golf course, homemaker in her all-electric kitchen, Marshall Plan, More Doctors Smoke Camels pastel and proud of it soft two-tone GREEN. It was a tossup for me whether to go bull-baiting, cop head-turning red for my 1949 cruisemobile Ford, or this Seafoam Green. Guess I’d rather be red, thanks, and no turning back. If I rob any banks or payday loan storefronts it’ll have to be with my ’03 Chevy pickup. But that particular green was a thought for awhile. And it has nothing to do with what follows—I just liked that Maico is all.

Good color, green. We got married here thirty-three years ago. Seems like last week.

Haleakala Volcano, early a.m

History. Thirty-three years ago today, F and I got married in Maui. It was at a small, charming church in Kihei, the Keolahou Congregational Church, by the Reverend James W. Pifer, a portly gent who was featured in that night’s production of Fiddler on the Roof at a Maui playhouse.

A good friend on the island, Tim Morrow, gave us a furnished condo at Kaanapaali Plantation for the length of our stay. He was in the process of selling it, and shortly before we arrived an NBA player said he wanted it, and he wanted it immediately. Tim said wait a couple or three weeks. It’s a wedding gift to some friends of mine, for their stay on the island. NBA guy says no deal, now. Tim says no deal then, sorry. NBA guy waited. We didn’t know about this until afterward or we’d have made other arrangements.

This same friend had been an ad agency owner in Chicago years before, and one of his stories involved taking a horse up to a prospective client’s office in an elevator. Tim was flamboyant, fun and generous. I had spent a lot of time with him years before when I’d been interested in partnering in a Maui agency that was floundering (not his, anything he turned his hand to flourished) but it was not to be.

Freddie and I had a beautiful time on Maui, and what a way to start our life together. In these crazy times, it’s even more of a pleasure to look back on those idyllic days and nights. Reminds me of a Sinatra song, some of which went: Like painted kites, those days and nights, they went flyin' by, The world was new beneath a blue umbrella sky. Whoa, getting nostalgic here. Heck that’s okay. Thirty three years. Think it’ll stick?

That parrot picture to the right was taken in Lahaina and the bird guy says, “Don’t panic, it’s organic.” But the birds were polite to the newlyweds. We spent a lot of lazy hours on the beach, cooling off now and then in that azure blue Pacific. The little pic above left was taken on Haleakala at sunrise. Cold up there in the early a.m. Shoot, I want to go back right now, but they’re having covid problems like anywhere else—on a lesser scale, though, thanks to careful attention to CDC guidelines and a strict mask and gathering law. We did go back a few years ago and it was just as Edenic as it was before. Like they say, Maui No Ka Oi.

HHRs, Deer Season, and a Houseful of Books

Darrel down the road got a nice buck with a .243 Winchester. Freddie got one with her HHR. Darrel has a hunting license, F has a driver’s license. Used to be hunting meant, well, hunting. These days they come to you. Thank goodness, she wasn’t hurt, but the HHR, well, different story. November and December in Kansas are peak times for deer crowds. My own HHR is a bit retro. I love those laker wheel covers, but they won’t stay on. They skip down the road looking for a windshield to pock. So I don’t use them. Underneath are smoothies with baby moons. Also retro. And the shoebox Ford has spinners just like the one I had in high school. It stays in the garage during deer time.

 Moving inside, the house is full of books, stacks everywhere. Fiction, poetry, literature, every subject and genre imaginable. I see A Field Guide To Mammals, a book on pens, another on Winsor McKay (Early Works). What compelled us to get those? We are both hungry readers, lookers, ingesters. The stairs need to be negotiated carefully so as not to topple stacks on every riser. Shelves are bowed with weight. Maybe we can sell them. If we can part with them.

 I finished Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 866 pages. If you put it in a stout bag and waded into a crowd, swinging it, you’d take out dozens before you could be stopped. Don’t worry, I’m not going to review it, other than to say it’s well-researched and offers a satisfying bibliography and index. It won the National Book Award. Oh, and the National Book Critics Circle Award but be wary of anything critics do in a circle.

Tattered and tired at the end. The book was, too.

 I read it partially because my stepfather worked on The Manhattan Project. I thought it might help me to understand him better; it didn’t. One cannot choose one’s parents, or one’s step-parents. Roof, three squares, can’t complain. Nor did I begrudge him that pastime, that major blasting device. It did serve to end an awful war. Why do politicians want war? No book explains that to my satisfaction.

 I finished it. Don Rickles would say, “Whaddya want, a cookie?” My hand seized up into a useless claw innumerable times just holding the thing up in front of my face as it sent me off to dreamland at night. That benchpress volume was better than Ambien or Valium, probably.

 I used to finish all books once started; it was, I suppose, a superstition. Good or bad, finish the sucker. Then, years ago, after three or four bad ones, I threw Hillbilly Elegy across the room. I don’t have enough time the rest of my life for this shit. All writers write bad stuff, even the greats. (Except for Thomas McGuane and Joan Didion. If they did, it never reached print.) But Jeezo Capeezo, don’t charge money for them.

 Books to avoid in my opinion are anything by pundits, celebrities, past presidents, presidents’ wives, or anything about politics, except, of course, those wondrous fears and loathings by Hunter Thompson. (Only the names need be changed and those books are quite contemporary.) But so many thousand books are published every month that hundreds are quite good. Sadly, you have to waste time and money on ones that aren’t, to find them. And don’t depend on Pulitzer winners; half of those are incomprehensible. Edgar finalists can be pretty good; it’s how I discovered Nick Pizzolatto.

 And speaking of good writing, here’s a rather awesome newsletter that’ll take you into the labyrinths where the minotaur and forbidden knowledge live. It’s by J. David Osborne, one of the world’s great thinkers: he’s a teacher, publisher, a prolific writer (By The Time We Leave Here We’ll Be Friends and many other strolls through fascinating horrifica), and philosopher. You will come away wiser.

 Merry and Happy to you all. (Never seen chestnuts roasting on an open fire, though, could be a New York thing) May the New Year bring Covid relief and better times for all. Nugget: the very measures that may keep us safe from Covid, will probably help us avoid the common cold. Cool.

 Here endeth the holiday offering. Your friend, g.

The Great Phantom Plaza LeMans Race (and other harmless pranks of the sixties)

My copy of his 1962 Doubleday classic is a bit dog-eared…

Don Branham was a Hallmark cartoonist, writer and artist of some note back in the sixties and a very funny man. He was one of a loose herd of Kansas City stars who were attracting attention nationwide, tumbling out of the strictures and straits of the Ike years and daring to have fun with the mores of the time.

He lived in a comfortable stone home off Rockhill Rd. near The Country Club Plaza; it was one of a line of homes, perhaps a block or two, that were built by the WPA in the thirties. I’d not really noticed them until he moved into one of them and now they’re etched in my mind as part of a time that held exciting possibilities for me and the arts community. For reasons I can’t recall I’d been summoned to Don’s home that sparkling Saturday afternoon, and when I arrived it was to a chaotic scene.

Workmen were installing something on the front porch which stretched across the front of the house and it seemed to involve mirrors. Two workmen were doubled over with laughter and Branham was shouting directions from the front door. I believe he was wearing a colorful surf-themed bathrobe and PF Flyers but that old liar, memory, may be embellishing. As I approached he shouted for me to hurry and see this assemblage of approximately three foot diameter convex and concave mirrors mounted on the porch pillars and the ceiling of the porch.

“Non, non, mes amis, the mirrors must be higher!”

Between bursts of laughter the workmen were conferring over several more mirrors laying in the yard. Sorry, but I cannot explain any of this. The best I can do is Branham told me that if I looked through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars he handed me, directly into the first convex mirror I would understand. It had something to do with an early warning device to see people coming to the house from the sidewalk out front. We drank a lot of beer that day and when I left I was convinced that Don was a genius on the order of Copernicus but with a sense of humor. I still am.

About this time, I had done a collage at the Art Institute and Lou Greeley smuggled the piece into The Nelson Gallery between two stretched blank canvases. Canvi? We were painting from original masters in a supervised setting. The collage was a nice piece on cardboard and Lou affixed doubled tape to four corners and placed it on a wall between two Manets. It remained there for over a week. So, thanks to Greeley’s rogue curation I was in The Nelson-Atkins in KC. Limited time engagement.

I may still have this recording. The phantom races could occur again, but in Resume Speed, Kansas…

We had a small second floor apartment on the Plaza and two honking large speakers, which, when coupled with a Garrard turntable and Missouri bourbon, were capable of magnetically sucking the landlord and various howling tenants to our door in a frantic knot of jabbering savagery. James Brown at the Apollo on the turntable would mobilize these malcontents in seconds. It was easy for them to determine the source, until one night Lou and I played a 33rpm record called Racing Cars by Fortissimo, a compilation of hog-snorting Mercedes groundshakers.

The record was made up of nerve-jarring revs and shrieks of various supercharged beasts of the raceways. An odd feature was the needle was placed near the center of the red vinyl record and it moved outward. The explanation was that absolute fidelity could be achieved by this. And you could just about smell the exhaust, fuel mixtures and burnt rubber as these rocket sleds gunned for a while, then took off.

We placed the speakers in the open windows facing outward to the street, cut the lights, dropped the needle at the record’s center and cranked the sound up to brain jelly. It was maybe eleven pm. Lights snapped on up and down the street. People emerged. The KCPD cruised by. The soundscape-splitting boom of race cars seemed everywhere. People were in the street searching for the source of the freakish noise but when the shrill sound of burning rubber hit the air, they leaped back onto the sidewalks and hugged building fronts. The demon noise was bouncing off every surface from there to Ward Parkway. There was no way to trace it and it was terrifying.

We turned off the sound and strolled among the throng. The story we got after salting it a bit was that LeMans racers were using Plaza streets for practice.

Firebreathers at LeMans in the 1950’s…

One man who claimed to have seen one of them swore it was a Ferrari. And we did have a Ferrari-driving LeMans racer in KC, Masten Gregory, so we added him to the tale. Two more nights of the Fortissimo LP, and photo-journalists were stationed at strategic locations, as were some beefed-up police interceptors, motors running.

It never happened again, but the rumor was be ready at 2am, Friday or Saturday night. The phantom drivers never appeared. Masten Gregory’s alibi was solid; he was in Monaco on the nights of the Plaza practice runs. And Greeley and I were with him.

Amping up the pranks, so to speak, after that, caused us to cross various lines, commit felonies, become drop-forged case-hardened criminals, of course. And the man you see today is just a shell of his former fun-loving self. But I learned to weld in the joint and am now a law-abiding sculptor. Greeley was selling played-out Alaskan uranium claims in Amsterdam last anyone heard. And a Van Gogh is missing in the Netherlands.

More soon. Enjoy the holidays! (Covid—think of it as house arrest, a breather from Uncle Larry’s political analyses)

I went down to the Westminster Infirmary...

I don’t think it was quite this antiquated, but close…

In 1957 I was at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. It’s where Winston Churchill* gave his landmark Iron Curtain Speech and it’s where I contracted the H2N2 influenza which was, as they say, going around. It, too, was a pandemic but on a much lesser scale than this scourge straight out of Revelations 6. Boy is it going around. 

The word infirmary brings to mind Dylan songs and weird scenes from foreign movies with skeletal people hacking and wracked with pain. But that’s where I was, the infirmary at Westminster, not St. James or Juarez, and when I awoke one day, at the foot of my bed was a surreal scene; backlit from an open window, gauzelike curtains floating in the breeze, were some spectral figures. My father, mother and stepfather. I recall thinking I must be dead as nothing less would bring these people together.

“What are you doing here,” I croaked.

My mother, always one to cut through the bullshit, said, “They said we’d better come. Your temperature was over a hundred and four.” At least that’s what I remember. So it caused them to drive the 150 miles, in separate vehicles I’m sure. I won’t speculate as to mood ie: relief, terror, anticipation. But they came. That was nice.

At any rate, the fever broke and I went on to a life of various accomplishments and/or disappointments. I remember sleeping in the trunk of my primered 1949 Ford during Hell Week at Westminster while my fraternity pledge colleagues dutifully scrubbed bathroom floors with toothbrushes and submitted to similar humiliations. I needed my sleep. I also didn’t wear a freshman beanie—such a rebel.

Maybe that exposure to a badass virus has given me some immunity—that and drinking bleach as That Guy suggested. Small amounts. With salt and lemon. But then that guy is lagging behind in electoral votes as I write this. The other guy, the one who put his arm around his granddaughter on national TV and said, “This is my son Beau, no stranger to politics,” is leading. And some are ticking off the points in Revelations 6 with furrowed brow and tight mouth lines.

Indigenous Peoples Month reading…

November is Indigenous Peoples month. Which I’m sure brings them a wave of joy and forgiveness for “the other peoples” having drawn up over 400 treaties and then having broken Every Single One. Well, what’s a government to do when oil or gold or real estate value is discovered where the Indigenous Peoples were force-marched to settle down? Some treaties were broken out of sheer boredom I imagine. What do you want to do today, Seth? I dunno Hiram, break some treaties?

Well, shoot. Custer Died For Your Sins. It’s a book, an Indian Manifesto, by Vine DeLoria. It’s instructive. He wrote it in the sixties and updated the foreword in 1987. He blasts stereotypes and analyzes the differences between the Indian “plight” and that of Blacks and other minorities, with irony, wit and a bit of sarcasm. I’d say this book is not for everyone, but it is. It sure is. Deloria, a Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux Indian, attended rez schools, escaped to various universties and received masters degrees and a law degree; this isn’t his only book, it’s one of more than 20, many of which advocate that the U. S. government own up to its promises and responsibilities. In that respect, Custer Died For Your Sins is for everyone. It’s got a nice index in the back, and the pages from Abernathy to Zimmerman make for some very interesting reading. You owe yourself this actual history in essays. Especially this month.

Another super nonfiction book, Lasso The Wind: Away to the New West by Timothy Egan, exposes some little known massacres (of whites by whites, among other ones) and the boondoggling and scraping bare of the west that never was The West. Mining that left huge lakes of pure poison that gain gallonage by the month and will overflow or are overflowing. (Anyone for Revelations 6?) And so on and on and on. The writing is captivating, and the facts are incontrovertible.

Hey, I’m not taking any morality stance; I’m among the guilty. So no chastisement here except maybe me on me. The covid has me in a bitchy mood. Oh, my phone just gave off a little signal; it says that JB just won the presidency. Well, maybe a new clean slate? A great Hope? Could be we’re fresh outa those but why be cynical? Especially heading into the holidays of November and December. Happy. Merry. Gobble. All that. All I want is a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun. And a new electric Hummer (for the ecosystem).

*The first known use of the term “OMG” was in a letter to Churchill over 100 years ago.