The Rico Rizzos of Long Ago

I attended a rather well-to-do, suburban high school. It wasn't decadent but it was better than the average Columbus public high school at that time. I graduated in 1969. I was a terrible student so there was no college.  I had no trade skills either. I knew nothing about bricklaying, plumbing or carpentry. Of course I had no previous experience in any form of employment. Consequently I went straight into the American workforce looking for any employment available. I found a job transporting temporary manual laborers to job sites. Day laborers. Basically I was driving a van full of men who were all but unemployable, transporting them to various work locales where they would do physical labor for minimal wages. Most of these men were unemployable because of alcohol problems. Some were illiterate. Still others were simply bums. One was AWOL from the Army.

I worked this job as a kind of surreal bus driver for about eight or nine months. It gave me an education like none other. A couple of times, when I was done transporting these sad characters to their job sites in the morning, I would trek down to the local watering hole about noon where I would luncheon with a few of the guys who were not selected to work that day. "Lunch" generally consisted of something like a ham sandwich and lukewarm beer. The watering hole was not exactly a four star establishment. I got to know many of these dubious individuals. Some became friends. Mid afternoon I would drive back to the job sites and pick up the men, returning them to the central office where they would receive their day's pay.

In the fall of 1969, I saw the movie Midnight Cowboy at a drive-in theater. I was accompanied by a girl who I briefly dated at the time. One of the central characters of the movie was Rico Rizzo, a down-and-out man from the Bronx who I could have sworn occasionally sat in the back of the van I drove for work. At the end of the movie, Rico slowly dies. He succumbs to pneumonia caused by his own ignorance as well as social apathy for pathetic individuals like him. He died to touching music while in the arms of a pal, a penniless, young, naïve, Texas man he befriended during his travels as a vagrant of New York City.

The entire movie got to me, but the end scene ravaged me. Rico dying devastated me so completely that the girl I was with noticed the effect it had on me. "Wow, that really hit you," she remarked.

"Yeah." I responded, "I know Rico, or at leas I know someone just like him."

I watched the final scene of Midnight Cowboy on Youtube just a few minutes ago. It still gets to me all of these years later. I remember how I felt, sitting in that drive-in theater that long-ago evening, and the feelings that went through me.

I can still recall a few of the names of those down-and-out men from back then too, but oddly, I can't for the life of me remember the name of the girl I took to the drive-in.

A Hero Wannabe

I want to be a hero. I've wanted to be a hero all my life, beginning in childhood. A lot of people want to be heroes, I'm not alone. Just to be clear, giving blood, or social volunteering does not count. Such deeds are noble, but they aren't the acts of heroism I'm referring to. I think it was when Atlanta hosted the Olympic Games, some ordinary guy heroically moved people away from a bomb that had been planted in a public place. The police believed the bomb had been planted by the alleged hero in an attempt to make himself a hero. Not surprising; heroism can be a motive for crime. It turned out that the man did not plant the bomb. He would have been viewed as a hero except for the police errantly raining on his parade. Talk about bad luck.

A few days ago a small but powerful storm swept through my neighborhood. In my boundless wisdom, I went outside to witness it. The storm contained almost no rain but there were winds of up to 70 MPH. A huge tree crackled and fell a few doors away from where I was standing. It crashed on a condo's east side at the approximate site of that condo's patio. From where I was standing I could not see how much damage was done or if there were any injuries.

Fearlessly I quickly hurried over and fought my way through the maze of tree limbs and debris to where the condo patio had once been located. The patio fence was destroyed, as were a table and some chairs, but no one had been on the patio and there were no injuries. It was my chance, I could have been a hero, but no, the fates were against me.

So as luck would have it, I was not a hero, at least not an obvious hero. Still, when some of the residents gathered around the fallen tree a short time later after the storm had passed, I explained in a modest tone but in splendid detail how I had seen the tree fall and had quickly rushed over to check for casualties. I figured that if I could not be a full-blown hero, maybe I could be a limited one.

Naturally, no one was interested. I guess acts of near heroism don't mean much. Still, I yet have hope. In a half hour or so I'll be headed to a convenience store. Maybe it'll be in the process of being robbed and I can single-handedly apprehend the crook. Yeah, on second thought, I don't know if I want to be a hero that badly.

A Boyhood Entrepreneur

I will occasionally discuss my childhood business forays with those interested in the science of free enterprise. I'm talking about my early childhood business ventures, early childhood beginning even before I was old enough to earn six bits by mowing a neighbor's lawn. That was a long time ago and I must confess that sometimes I have wondered if my memory, combined with my imagination, have worked to distort the reality of those days. However I have recently uncovered childhood photographs, and I'm starting to think that I have been recalling those days accurately, though I must admit, those recollections might be a little hard to believe despite being supported by pictures.

My business partners at our lemonade
 stand (post dog turd incident)

In 1958, when I was 7 years old, a friend and I opened a curbside lemonade stand, selling a glass for a nickel. Little did we know until later was that our competition was a Kool-Aid stand up the street that had as its proprietors what were popularly known as "big kids"; i.e. 12 year-olds. They did not like out lemonade stand cutting into their business and so they trekked down the sidewalk and attempted to strongarm us out of business by putting dog turds into our pitcher of lemonade.

What the big kids did not count on was that as they were assaulting our business, a couple of teenage boys were making off with their entire pitcher of unattended Kool-Aid. What a break for us. All we had to do was fish out the turds from our lemonade supply and reopen our business, our nearby competition now gone. We did feel badly about selling tainted lemonade so we reduced the price to 2 cents a glass, which much to our joy, tripled our business.

Me as a casino/treehouse operator

A year later I had become a more sophisticated man of business as I began taking book on the school playground during recess. This prove highly profitable. So profitable that I soon opened my own casino/treehouse where buying into a game of Candyland cost the young gambler 10 cents, winning earned anywhere from 15 cents to a quarter, depending on the number of participants.

Perhaps the highpoint of my childhood business ventures came at the age of 10 when a thirteen year old neighbor boy shocked and horrified my friends and me by explaining to us the facts of life in graphic detail. Among other specifics, we were told that men prefer big boobs to small, and women prefer large penises to the more diminutive variety. We were also informed that for safety sake, a man should always use a condom. That final piece of information was immediately followed by an explanation of what a condom was.

My business associates and I (second from left) 

displaying our merchandise, oversized condoms.

When the shock of what we had just heard began to ebb, our young, business-oriented minds took over. What was to follow was an establishment that used colorful party balloons stretched to look like attractive condoms for the man of girth. Any 16 year-old customer immediately received a reputation not only as sexually active, but well-endowed.

Recent photo

A Political Opinion

I am very reluctant to write a political opinion for this blog. My thinking is that political opinions are just a little too controversial for it. I do not want to ruffle feathers. Then I stopped and realized that no one reads this blog so why not just write anything I want. So what follows is a political opinion.

I actually believe that I am a good person to write about America's current political landscape. I'm a good person to do this because I am non partisan; a real rarity. I have no allegiance to any candidate or any political party. However I'm not a great person to write a political opinion because I am not immersed in the political scene. I have some degree of knowledge, but I am not all-knowing.

Anyway, we are a little more than fourteen months from electing a new American president. One of the candidates is tycoon businessman Donald Trump. I find his candidacy curious, curious enough to be the subject of this blog entry. Right now, if the election were this afternoon, he would lose to Hillary Clinton by a relatively small margin. He would defeat all the other Republican candidates. His early success seems to come from making statements that make a lot of traditional Americans nod their heads in agreement. He speaks of curbing illegal immigration (with a wall along the Mexican border), reducing the national debt, a better national health care system, and many more improvements. He claims that the national government is "broken".

So far I have not heard much in the way of specific plans or strategies to combat these problems. Trump has proclaimed that Mexico will pay for the construction of the wall along the Mexican border. I heard him say that myself in an interview. He says that if Mexico doesn't fund it voluntarily, they will be tariffed into paying for it. The notion made me chuckle but I am not all-knowing so maybe it could work. Still, it made me chuckle, which is not a good sign.

Donald stated that he would repeal Obamacare and "replace it with something better". I am at best lukewarm on Obamacare. If I wanted to be elected president, I would probably say something like "I will repeal Obamacare and replace it with something better". I would add the last six words as a vague disclaimer because as unpopular as Obamacare may be, I would not have anything better to offer. I have this feeling that Trump has the same problem.

I once saw a candidate who reminded me a lot of Donald Trump. His name was Ross Perot and for a time he was a leading candidate for the U.S. Presidency. That was 1992. Then his popularity began to wane, he got cold feet, and abruptly dropped out of the race. But maybe Trump will be different. Maybe he'll stay in it to the end. Heck, maybe he'll be our next president. I doubt it, but maybe. If we do have a President Trump in 2016, I hope he not only knows what needs fixing, but also knows exactly how to make the repairs. So far I've heard only of what needs fixing. That's not enough to get my vote. If it were, I'd vote for myself.



  

My Favorite Days

I recently asked myself the question; what were my favorite days of my life? Before such a question can be answered, if it can be answered at all, there are some things that need clarification. For the sake of simplicity I am going to proclaim my "favorite days" as being the days I enjoyed the most rather than, say, days I might deem important. So, out of the running would be the day of my birth, for example. Also, one of the ingredients to be excluded is sex. Okay, there is my criteria.

After giving the question several hours of thought and reflection, I'm going to select two days.

July 4th 1963. The morning of that 4th of July the 12 year-old kid I once was laced on his Red Ball Jets and bicycled down to the local city park where there were games of physical skill where success was worth a silver dollar. One of the games consisted of throwing a baseball into a six inch pipe from about twenty feet. Over the course of an hour I lost my amateur athletic status, replacing it with three shiny silver dollars.

That afternoon some neighborhood pals and I blew up several plastic model cars with firecrackers, our voices deftly mimicking the cries of pain and terror from the imagined, ill-fated occupants. That was followed a few hours later by a dinner of hamburgers cooked out on a charcoal grill, with corn on the cob also on the plate. There was a big glass of pink lemonade to wash it all down. The day was capped by the front row viewing of the evening's fireworks display.

An hour or so later I wearily climbed into bed with several mosquito bites speckling my arms and legs, three silver dollars sitting on my dresser, and a grin stretched across my face. What a day.

August 18, 1987. A lifelong Ohioan, it was my fourth day ever in the state of California, the first three days encompassing the previous 72 hours. It was my first few days west of the Mississippi since a family vacation 25 years earlier. My girlfriend, Diana, who was to become my lifelong partner, and I were staying in the tiny town of Lee Vining, California, twenty miles east of Yosemite National Park. On the morning of August 18th, with the forecast calling for clear skies, we decided to drive up the long, winding, uphill highway to the eastern edge of Yosemite where we would hike the Tioga Pass Trail.

A view from the old mining cabin with the lakes
 below and the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the distance

At about noon we reached the parking lot just inside the boundary line of the park. We strapped on the small backpacks containing our water, lunches, and a small camp stove, and then started up the trail. The temperature was a wonderfully crisp 60, and the deep blue sky did not own a cloud. The trail began at 10,000 feet elevation and for the first few hundred feet it cruelly went up, but once we passed over the ridge, the alpine terrain leveled out. Before us sparkled two small, crystal lakes, and stunning greenish-brown meadows edged by the the rocky faces of Sierra cliffs. We had it all to ourselves, there wasn't a soul in sight.

We hiked alongside the lakes for a mile or so until we reached the remnants of an old mining cabin which needed photographing. We then meandered up to a snowy glacier to make an August snowball. About a half hour on down the trail we stopped for lunch at an overlook where we could gaze down onto the lakes. I cooked us some soup and tea and we sat back and relaxed in the utter quiet, the sunshine supplying a marvelously soothing warmth.

That evening, back in Lee Vining, Diana and I shared a pepperoni pizza and a carafe of wine on the veranda of our motel room as we watched the sun slowly slide below the horizon.

In the years to follow, Diana and I have returned to the Tioga Pass Trail on a handful of occasions, attempting to recreate that first hike best we could. It will always be a great place to hike, but there was something kind of magical about that day of August 18, 1987.  

A Heart For Gardening (By guest blogger Shannon Hayes)

Shannon Hayes

When I was a little girl I wanted to be a doctor. I liked gardening and nurturing flowers and vegetables, but more than anything I wanted to be a doctor. I think it was about my junior year in high school that I decided to work towards becoming a cardiologist. I'm not sure why I chose that specific field, but I did.

I always received good grades in school. I have been rightfully accused of being a nerd. When I graduated high school, I had my choice of universities to attend. I chose the University of Michigan, at least partially because the school has prestige, and I was offered a sizable academic scholarship.

I went through undergrad and pre-med without much trouble. I am not saying everything was easy, but there was never any doubt that I would make the grade. When I went into the cardiology program, I was an intern with Dr. Michael Lane; a highly respected cardiologist at the Ann Arbor Heart Clinic. One day we were examining patients, one of whom was a man in his early 50s who had a history of rather mild heart disease, specifically, partial blockage in a main heart artery. He was being examined because of recent chest pain. His name was John Kelton.

When Dr. Lane and I stepped into the examination room #4 where Mr. Kelton was waiting, I was struck by how youthful and physically fit he looked. I was an intern but I had already learned that the majority of cardiac patients were not exactly pictures of health. Anyway, Dr. Lane and I examined John... Mr. Kelton. We listened to his heart sounds and evaluated his recent diagnostic tests. He had undergone a stress test only a few months earlier and everything was normal. Because of the chest pain, there had been a blood test checking John's blood enzymes for anything that might be indicative of a heart attack. Everything looked normal.

John had a great sense of humor. When I placed my stethoscope to his chest to listen to his heart, I inadvertently set it on a shirt pocket holding two movie ticket stubs. John removed the stubs, gave them a quick glance, then jokingly said, "Leatherheads; great cast, terrible movie." He then flipped the ticket stubs up on a countertop.

When Dr. Lane could not hear John's a mild heart murmur through is stethoscope, Dr. Lane shrugged and said, "I guess my ears aren't what they used to be. I can't hear the heart murmur, but then, I can't hear half of what my wife says."

John made Dr. Lane and I laugh when he humorously replied, "Doc, that problem hearing your wife may not be due to your ears."

When we were done with the examination, John thanked Dr. Lane for his time, and then he turned to me and wished me good luck in my career choice. He said that I was sure to make for a fine heart doctor. Like many nerds, I do not befriend people quickly, or easily, but I liked John. He was a soft-spoken, personable man. I warmed up to him immediately.

The next morning I was scheduled to be with Dr. Lane again. I was looking at what was on the day's schedule when I heard from one of the nurses that John and died the night before. The nurse said that she had heard that Mr. Kelton had died in his sleep overnight and though there was not yet a confirmed cause of death, it appeared to be cardiac arrest.

For a moment I was in shock. This man, seemingly healthy one day, was dead the next day. It just seemed surreal. Had Dr. Lane and I missed something during the exam? If we had, I did not know what it could have been. Then I started thinking about not John Kelton the patient, but John Kelton the nice man I had come to briefly know, a nice man forever gone. The thought filled me with anguish.

Still, I thought I was going to get through the morning and my emotional trauma. Then Dr. Lane and I stepped into examination room #4 to visit a patient. There on that countertop were the ticket stubs that had been in John's pocket the day before. It was just too much and I lost it. Right in front of both Dr. Lane and the patient, my breathing went haywire and my hands started to tremble. I quickly excused myself and dashed into the women's restroom where I broke down and cried.

That was six years ago. I'm now about to go to Wahler Florist. I work there in their greenhouse as the horticulturalist. It is where I belong. The most beautiful roses in Michigan can be purchased at Wahler's, at least I think they are the most beautiful. I also grow cucumbers, bell peppers, and different varieties of tomatoes which I sell at a farm market. I have developed this very delectable tomato that I am quite proud of. I call it the Kelton Tomato. It has a pleasant, sweet flavor that's hard not to like.            



    

 

A Visit To Lake Hope

Today I drove the hour and a half to Lake Hope State Park. It is a small lake within a state forest nestled in the hills of southern Ohio not far from the tiny town of MacArthur. Over the last ten years or so I have visited Lake Hope about every other summer. When I was between the ages of 10 to about 15, our family drove from Columbus the 80 miles to Lake Hope perhaps three or four times. The lake now holds sentimental value for me. In fact, I have paid a call on Lake Hope more times out of pure nostalgia than I did as a kid sitting in the family station wagon. That doesn't seem quite rational but I guess there is nothing wrong with it.

Back in the early to mid 60s when our family would go to Lake Hope, my three sisters and I would play around in the water and do silly jumps off of the two diving boards located at the end of a wooden pier that extended about hundred feet out into the lake. Usually sometime during the afternoon we would meander to the snack bar and get hamburgers, potato chips, and a Coke. Once my dad and I rented a row boat and some fishing gear. We ventured out onto the lake for some fishing. I remember catching a little blue gill.

The snack bar

I'm not sure why I am so sentimental for Lake Hope, but I have my theories. During that period of my childhood I was not a kid who enjoyed sitting still. Consequently, I would occasionally get into trouble, almost always for minor kids' stuff like ripping a pair of pants or perhaps just getting dirty. This was true especially in the summer. The other three-fourths of the year I was in school, where I was pretty much an abject failure. A trip to Lake Hope meant that I would not have to worry about wear-and-tear on my pants, or altercations with dirt, or bad grades in school. Giving it a little thought, it is no wonder I reflect fondly on Lake Hope.

Unfortunately Lake Hope, specifically the beach/swimming area, is not exactly as it once was those fifty years ago. There are no longer diving boards at the end of a wooden pier. There is no longer a pier. And I don't think there is any spot in the confined swimming area that is deep enough to do any actual swimming. But the boat house is still there, and the little snack bar remains there too, although the best a patron can do is the purchase a lukewarm hotdog. But through all the years and all the changes, the laughter of kids can still be heard, and that's a wonderful thing. I know it's wonderful; I once helped provide it.