Big Man-Little Ref

In the 1980s when I lived in Baltimore I tried my hand at news journalism and occasionally went to cover high school basketball. I concentrated on the summer league games since most papers wouldn't send a reporter to those and I might have the whole story to myself if something interesting happened. On one occasion I covered a game where an interesting incident did take place but I didn't submit anything for the next morning's edition. In fact this is the first time I've written it down.

Now or Never

Graceland, 1987

After being dumped by our respective girlfriends, Hans and I decided on the spur of the moment to drive to Graceland in August 1987 for the 10th anniversary of Elvis' death. Hans' mother had been a big Elvis fan and owned a lot of his old LPs that we'd made fun of as kids. They had cheesy photos of Elvis with his arm around some buxom girls or a picture of him in his military uniform driving a convertible with the caption, "A Date with Elvis." We thought it was ridiculous. But then he died and we changed our tune, so to speak.

Things We Used to Do

I guess I'm getting old when I start talking about the way things used to be. I suppose every generation could create one of these lists.

We used to go to the bank on Friday night to get pocket money for the week. Either that or we'd cash a check at a local grocery, liquor or other store. This was before ATMs and at a time when communities were small enough for the local grocer or liquor store owner to know a person personally and trust that his or her check was good.

Beer Graduate

I started drinking beer when I was 16 and I spent the rest of high school in hot pursuit of the foamy beverage. Because I was too young to be served in a bar, my friends and I usually bought six-packs from the groceries and markets which were known to sell to just about anyone over 5 feet 9 inches. We then drank can after can in somebody's parents' car or basement when the adults were away. It usually ended with some foolishness, uncontrollable laughter and often, vomiting. 

Loads of fun.

Charis T. Hutchinson

My sister, Charis is named after my father's aunt Charis (pronounced Kare-iss). Great-aunt Charis.

She was born in the last year of the 19th century and died in 1983, spending almost her entire life on Long Island, NY. She attended Smith College but didn't find any men at Yale or Harvard or Brown to marry. She undoubtedly met a few but she remained single, spending her whole life living with her father until he died in 1946. At that point she and her stepmother moved to Port Washington in Nassau County. (Aunt Charis' biological mother died when she was a teenager)

She had two brothers, one of whom was my grandfather. Her other brother, Harold was exposed to poisonous gas during World War I and along with a lifelong smoking habit, died at around age 50. Neither he nor Charis ever had any children. But they all got together at holidays and aunt Charis doted on her niece, nephew and eventually the grand-nieces and grand nephews.

Out of curiosity I once asked my aunt Ruth if there was ever a man in Charis' life and she said she thought she had heard something about some guy once when she was young. I asked if she'd heard it from her father (Charis' brother) and she said, "Oh, no. He never talked about things like that."

Charis worked for the State of New York in Manhattan and commuted by the Long Island Railroad everyday. When he was a young man, my father would visit them and he and aunt Charis had a system whereby each Friday she would walk on the train station platform to the last car where my teenaged father sometimes met and rode with her.

If I had to say something about Charis Tuthill Hutchinson it is that she was an interesting lady, probably due to the fact that she was college educated (a rarity for a woman in 1915-1920) and that the absence of children undoubtedly freed her to pursue a lot of extra-curriculars that most parents are unable to find time for.

The old saying, "The only interesting people are interested people," certainly applied to my great aunt Charis.

The King is born

I was born in 1961. That's also when Elvis Presley was at the height of his popularity.

To illustrate . . .

You may know that my parents were deaf and although they each had a usable voice, only those familiar with them could clearly understand them. That is, they could speak and be understood by their children, neighbors and some others who were close to them and communicated day-to-day with them. For most other times, they carried around pencil and paper (like most other deaf people back in the middle 20th century) to navigate and negotiate transactions with the hearing world.

Although I never confirmed this with them, I can only imagine that upon my birth they were visited in the hospital by someone from the D.C. department of vital records or something like that who asked for statistics like age and name of the parents, weight and race of the baby, etc. Presumably they passed a pad of paper back and forth in question-and-answer style so that this public health official could create a birth certificate.

After getting the statistics, he asked about a name and he asked my mother and father what they had decided on.

But instead of using pencil and paper, after they read his question they spoke in unison, "Elvis."

"How's that?" he asked. "Alvin?" and wrote down what he thought he heard.

At least that's what I'd like to think happened.

Top Draft Picks at Druid Hill Park

One of the rules in pickup basketball is first-come, first-play. That is, those who show up to the
basketball court first are the first to play. Generally there are a lot more players than there are courts to accommodate them, especially in urban areas so some method has to be arrived at to allocate the scarce resource.*

One day back in 1991 my friend, Don and I went to Druid Hill Park in Baltimore which had a reputation for some good basketball being played. We went on a Sunday just after lunch and the action hadn't really heated up yet. In fact, no games had started and that meant Don and I would get at least one game in. Had we shown up when there were games already in progress, the activity at Druid Hill Park is so heavy that it's likely we would have had to wait two or three games to get into one ourselves--if we succeeded at all.

Foul Language and Deaf Parents

Being the child of deaf parents brings a different set of experiences than that of children of hearing parents. Learning American sign language, for example or taking on adult-like responsibilities gives the offspring of deaf adults a unique view of things compared to growing up in an all-hearing household.

One fairly common experience among the children of deaf adults (CODA) is the early and liberal use of foul language. With parents unable to catch and correct this bad habit, children repeat what they've heard from the older kids at school or the playground and there is almost no barrier to repeated utterances around the house.

Post Civil Rights Reflections

Occasionally I'll meet a person who went to Catholic school or otherwise had strictly religious parents and who now feels permanently harmed by the whole experience. They talk about being fearful of the nuns commands or of attending all manner of religious services and performing associated rituals, giving the impression that they've never been the same. And they now reject the whole experience and call it a scar on their past. A similar set of cultural baggage is associated with Jewish motherhood; certain people (mostly Jewish women) complain of the guilt or other emotional trauma associated with having a Jewish mother.

The Alvin Award

After Larry Bird retired from basketball in 1992, I loudly declared to anyone who would listen, "The NBA will never name another white man its Most Valuable Player."

And boy was I wrong.

Chowder Head

I was in the staff cafeteria the other day and being that it was Friday, the soup was clam chowder. I normally don't like the soup there but I look forward to Fridays and clam chowder.

It reminded me of an incident when I was a young boy. It's really just a snippet of a memory but worth repeating for posterity.

A kid in our neighborhood--a bit older than me--used the term, "chowder head' to insult another kid. I suppose he was just repeating something he heard on a cartoon or some other television content. I don't remember much else except that at the time I thought it was the funniest thing I'd heard. You know how kids are: we get to giggling over something and just can't stop. I remember myself being doubled over in laughter for a long time

I repeated the phrase over and over and called as many people chowder head as I could get away with over the next day or two. Probably made an ass of myself but as I recall it sure was fun.

Call Me Al

In 1986 Paul Simon release a song called, "Call me Al." It has special meaning to me because although few people use that nickname for me today, some of those dearest to my heart call me Al. I had a geography teacher in 8th grade who called me Al and in that class was a person with whom I would form a lifelong friendship and whose family would eventually come to call me one of their own.

They call me "Al".

Jackson-Jackass, National Bo

In my neighborhood as a kid, there was a kid whose father was a real pistol. He was of the no-nonsense World War II generation and he had trouble seeing the foolishness that the second half of the century brought us, particularly among us teenagers. He made quips about popular culture and people in it some of which I carry to this day.

For example, he called Michael Jackson, "Michael Jackass" and thought he was real cute about it. This man watched Michael Jackson grow from a small boy into what he considered an eventual freak. He loathed almost anyone who was famous but had real some pet-hates that he wouldn't leave alone. Michael Jackson was one of them. 

I was at the age where when he said, Jackass instead of Jackson, I took it and ran with it. Everyone became fair game: Phil Jackass, Samuel L. Jackass, Bo Jackass and even president Andrew Jackass. 

It's awful of me to write this and I'm sure this term unfairly describes those mentioned above and the world population of Jacksons. I wouldn't say this to any of those I've listed above but I only include them here as examples. I never say it aloud but only mentally but it is a compulsion owing to my acquaintance of this particular schoolmate's father. Maybe writing this blog about it will rid me of the nasty habit.

The compulsion I had with repeating everyone's last name this way reminds me of another compulsion with substituting a word. I went to college in Baltimore in the 1980s and at the time the locally brewed rotgut beer was National Bohemian. This was in the days before micro-brews and artisan beers. National Bohemian and its sister brand, National Premium, were brewed and bottled en masse on the outskirts of the city. 

We referred to it so frequently in my day that we shortened it from the Baltimorese, "National Bo" to our local, "Natty Bo." 
Sometimes after an especially bad hangover, you'd call it Nasty Bo.

But the enduring name with me was Natty Bo. I became a habit and I began extending it to everything with National in its name. The pro-baseball's Natty League. Natty Aquarium. But then I got a job at the Smithsonian where almost every edifice is named the National Museum of  . . . (Natty Museum of . . . see? I can't resist).

French Misrepresentation in U.S. culture mid-20th century

When I was growing up I was exposed to stereotypes of a wide variety of people via popular media. These messages were of course untrue and unfair but some of them were so distorted and pervasive so as stick with me and many other kids of my generation for a long time. One of them dealt with the French, particularly French men. The juvenile American television, movies and cartoons I watched caricatured males from this country to the point of ridicule. I've met plenty of Frenchmen throughout my life who are no different from American, English or Australian men, but as a boy I was left with the impression that French men were weak, effeminate and overly emotional. 

Kids growing up in the U.S. in the mid 20th century were told repeatedly that the French man was a namby-pamby weakling. They were often either artists or chefs or some other occupation stereo-typically associated with women and they displayed this in their interpersonal behavior, for example when they cried if they heard the French song, 'The Marseilles'. 

Additionally, most French men in comedies, dramas or (especially) cartoons had what we might consider thin and very weak mustaches. While Americans had Mark Twain or Teddy Roosevelt mustaches, strong and thick and robust as the American west, the French either had pencil-thin mustaches or goatees or something that seemed to violate an American sense of virility.

This caricature of French males could have grown out of government propaganda just after the Second World War, perhaps because of the American GI rescue or maybe it came from some personal vendetta among those in Hollywood and other media production types. I suppose it grew out of a young America seeing France overrun twice in the first half of the century.

There were some notable exceptions to this unfair media stereotyping. One was the French-Canadian lumberjack type who appeared in several cartoons of the period. He was an unshaven, burly guy who wore a knit hat and plaid hunting jacket. Two other exceptions, the Pink Panther's Inspector Clouseau and Warner Brothers' French skunk, Pepe Le Pew, defied most of the messages that Frenchmen were lily-livered weaklings, although neither was terribly masculine like John Wayne or James Bond. And both perpetuated the bumbling idiot portrayal of French males to  American men.

 

The stereotype sometimes suggested homosexuality or hyper-sexuality (as we see in the Warner Brothers' Pepe Le Pew). I've nothing against French men or gay men but it reminds me of a bit of graffiti I once saw in a Baltimore restroom:

"Brian Murphy slept here with 4 french sailors and is still a virgin."

There were four of them.
They were sailors.
They were French.
And they still turned down Brian Murphy