YANKEE REDUX — SNOW DAYS

Winter was long and cold this year in Patagonia. Spring is finally here. The wild apples and plums are blooming and the Spanish broom in budding. But the accumulation of snow on the mountaintops is incredible for this time of the year, and the mountain lakes are so brim full that their beaches are practically non-existent.

Winter in my corner of Patagonia

I was just thinking about how, here, in Patagonia, we’re all breathing a sigh of relief that sunny days are ahead, while back in my home town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, friends and relatives are enjoying the blue-and-gold days of autumn, but already bracing for the coming winter, which can be as inclement as winters in Patagonia.

Some years ago, I reflected on my mixed feelings about snow. In the dead of Patagonian winter, the sound of heavy winter rain would often awaken me when it transitioned into snow. The rhythm of it on the galvanized metal roofing of my cabin in the mountains in Patagonia. The sound of it, gentle, deceivingly soothing if I didn’t know what it meant. Muffled, it sounds, drumming rather than pattering, thumping now and again as well, plopping as rain turns to wet snow and slithers off the branches above the house to fall like a heavy cream pie on the roof.

I raise myself on my elbow, draw back the curtain over the window next to my bed and peek out. It won’t be dawn for another few hours and from this angle, all I can see are the undersides of the boughs of the ancient beeches that surround the house, towering over it, to the east, south and north. With the waning moon behind the clouds, it’s hard to tell the state of affairs: rain, rain mixed with snow, or just snow—the dangerous kind, heavy and wet.

I hear three or four soggy, weighty plunks on the roof and know I can no longer hope for rain. It’s snow, no question. Kneeling on the mattress to get a better look, even in this pre-dawn darkness, I can see how the Spanish broom and smaller trees—laurels and junipers—are hunkering down under the crushing burden of a very wet and heavy snow.

Back then, I would almost immediately get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach and start getting anxious. Better charge the battery on my laptop, charge up the flashlight batteries. Oh, and my cell phone. If the land lines are down, the cells are all we’ll have. I get up as quietly as possible so as not to wake up my wife and pad barefoot into my studio, where I plug in various and sundry chargers and devices. I then go back to bed. I try to relax and go back to sleep. I look at the luminescent hands of the alarm clock. Four a.m.—too early to start the day. But who can sleep? I lie there staring into the darkness, trying to gauge the weight and type of the snow. The worst, I conclude, heavy as lead. Like industrial quantities of lemon ice-cream piling up on the branches of the trees in the windless pre-dawn hours. That means downed power lines, snapped phone cables, blocked roads. It means days of work lost, clients upset, deadlines missed.

I’ll never get back to sleep this way, so I decide to change focus, to think about something else, or to think about this but in a different light. I think about when I was a little boy. Oh, how I loved the snow back in Ohio! I wanted it to snow always. Back then, when I was small and, in fact, until I was middle-aged and moved to Patagonia, I was a snow fanatic. I knew when it was coming, had an intimate relationship with it. I even fancied I could make it snow, so intimate was the bond. I literally had a nose for it. Could smell it on the air, the same way I could smell frost, before it came.

When I was in my forties, I traveled back in Ohio, alone, for a visit with my folks in October. It was the last time everybody was still well —my father, Whitie, and my mother, Reba Mae, and my aunts and uncles, my little brother, whom nobody would ever have guessed would be dead less than a decade later. Nor would my sister and I have guessed that we would be each other’s only immediate family by then. The last time, in other words, when things would be normal and going “home” would just be that, going home.

Ohio had been having that crisp, gold and blue weather of Midwestern autumn. October blue days, Reba Mae used to call them. A gorgeous, euphoric kind of weather in which it seems nothing could possibly go wrong. Cloudless, china-blue skies, the tawny wheat still in some fields, waiting to be harvested, the cornfields just hard dry dirt and raw stubble now, strewn and studded here and there with missed ears and scattered kernels of sun-parched maize, the soft maples already standing stark and stripped against the azure sky, their silver and golden foliage lying like fine lingerie passionately shed at their feet, the sugar maples putting on the last act of their fiery red-leafed show before also letting fall their autumn hues, the oaks looking plucked and sparse with just a single dark-reddish-brown leaf still clinging here and there to their branches, as if trying hard to withstand the temptation to simply let go and allow a random autumnal breeze to carry it drifting down to the ground, where  grey and red squirrels scrambled to collect acorns for their winter hibernation.

Autumn in Ohio. Photo by Bren Haas 

Paying my respects to my native land—this particular rural land solely of which I am a citizen—on the day before I was to return to Argentina, I had gone for a drive in a borrowed car on the familiar back roads of West-Central Ohio. In the auric autumn-light of late afternoon, alone on the Buckland-Holden Pike, I had been privileged to watch a large white-tailed buck, his head holding high his impressive rack of antlers, bolt from the open field where he had been grazing on abandoned corn, make a dash ahead of my on-coming car, vault the seven-strand fence in one impressively graceful leap, gallop and skitter across the pavement, so close I fancied I could see the white of his startled eye, and jump the fence on the other side of the road, before cantering off into a nearby woodlot, where he disappeared from view. It was a sign, I thought, a blessing, an omen: Life was good.

That night, after supper with my parents, in the house where I had been brought up from age twelve, and where they would live for more than forty years, I went for a last-evening walk around town, stopping off at the Alpha for a couple of drafts, bellied up to the gorgeous old African mahogany bar that was owner Bill Gutman’s pride and joy, before trekking the mile or so back home. When I came out of the Alpha, I noticed the weather was changing. My light windbreaker was insufficient for this new twist and I shivered when I exited the homey warmth of the stuffy bar onto the main drag of town. There was a strange, frigid breeze out of the north and the sky was fast clouding over. The air seemed charged and somehow “electric” and, walking home, when I looked back from where I had just come, the streetlamps of Main Street were casting that eerie orange glow, so typical of winter nights, against the clouds.

It was only October 22^nd, but when I breathed in the night air, the scent was unmistakable. Even after twenty years of living in Buenos Aires, my rural Ohio nose knew right away what that indescribable fragrance was. Snow!

When I got back, Reba Mae was dozing in front of the TV and Whitie was in the kitchen dishing himself up a sundae of chocolate ice-cream, peanut butter and Hershey’s chocolate syrup.

“Hey, Dan!” Whitie said when I waltzed in through the back door.

“Hey yourself, Dad, how’s it going?”

“Okeydokey. Want some ice-cream?”

“No thanks. Hey Dad, know what? I think it’s going to snow tonight.”

“Snow!!” he cried, so loudly that it jolted Reba Mae out of her nap in the living room. “No way, Dan. It’s October, for chrissake! Hell, you aren’t gonna get any snow around here till Thanksgiving at least.”

Whitie had never been a fan of snow, but his last job before he retired had been as a route salesman for a local cheese manufacturer and after sixteen endless winters of slipping and sliding around on rural Ohio roads and city streets in a truck loaded with twelve tons of cheese, he had grown to unequivocally hate snow. “Look at that white shit comin’ down out there,” he would say when it started snowing. I didn’t get it. For me snow was about the most amazing and beautiful thing on earth.

“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “The air sure smells like it.”

“Smells like it?” he grinned dubiously, “Aw, com’on now, Dan, don’t try an’ bullshit your ol’ man."

“No, really, Dad, I can smell it on the air.”

“Naw, never happen. November, maybe. Christmas for sure. But October? I think you and your schnozz have been in South America too long."

“Okay, Dad, if you say so. But I’ll tell you what, if it doesn’t snow tonight, it’s gonna miss a helluva good chance.”

“Nah, not to worry, Dan. I’d wager good money on it.” Strong words for the Whitie, who had a reputation for being more than just careful with his money.

“Actually, I’m not worried,” I said. “I’d kind of like for it to snow.”

“Well, yeah, because you’re leaving tomorrow, and going back to sunny South America, but the rest of us have to stay here and put up with it after you’re gone and it’s too damned early for it to start snowing already, damnit.” He was so adamant that I half expected him to forbid me to ‘make it snow’. 

An early snow in Wapakoneta, Ohio

But in the morning, we awoke to a four inches of pristine white covering everything. It was beautiful. But I wasn't anxious for my father to get up and see it.

When he did, he was almost furious. Whitie took this miraculous autumn snow personally—a personal affront—and blamed me for it. I had wished it on him!

“You drive,” he said, holding out his car keys to me with two fingers in a gesture whose disdain was only thinly veiled. “I had sixteen years of driving a truck on this white shit. Any time I can let somebody else do it, I will.”

I shrugged, smiled and took the keys. I opened the garage door and then climbed into the big Mercury Grand Marquis and started it up. I had tried to explain to Whitie on numerous occasions that these modern, fuel-injected, computerized cars didn’t have to be warmed up like the cars of the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties that he grew up and matured on. But it was no use. It was easier not to try and fight his routines or soundly developed opinions. His rule of thumb was a warm up of at least ten minutes, so ten minutes it was. His house, his car, his way.

As the exhaust from the big Merc billowed white into the unseasonable chill of this October morning, I went back into the house, retrieved my luggage from the room I had shared as a boy with my kid brother, carried it out to the garage, popped the trunk and loaded it in. It was all decided: We would go right from the pancake breakfast to the airport. “Hard telling how long it’ll take us to do sixty miles in this damn weather,” Whitie said.

Reba Mae and I got into the car and waited. We knew this ritual by heart. We had been participants in it ever since our family was a family. The rest of us would sit in the car and wait while Whitie ran his checklist. Holding his one hand under the spigots in the kitchen and bathroom and tightening the faucets with the other hand he would do the check, a liturgy as strict as that of any religion: “Left faucet off once…off twice…off three times. Right faucet off once…off twice…off three times.” And so on throughout the house checking windows, appliances, anything that might run or leak or in any way operate uselessly while he was gone. Off one, two, three…Closed one, two, three…obsessive/compulsive by the numbers.

My mother and I sat there, saying nothing, waiting patiently, or impatiently but wordlessly, for him to be done. We knew the drill. We waited for it to be over.

Finally, he was visible, at the back door of the house: “Door locked once…twice…”

And as usual this was the point at which Reba Mae’s patience wore thin. She rolled down the window on the backseat passenger’s side, where she was sitting in order to let Whitie sit up front with me and she called out to him, “Norman, will you please come on and get your butt into the car sometime today so that we can get going.”

“Noooowww, Mother,” he said as he approached the car, “don’t go being a dybbuk.” Then he climbed in beside me and said, “Take ‘er away, Dan.”

Already the snow had stopped, the morning turning crisp, a good ten degrees under freezing. The snow crunched and squeaked, a frozen powder, under the tires of the Merc as I backed it down the driveway and onto the road. The county snowplow hadn’t been by yet, but some neighbors had already laid tracks on the road. I followed them and coaxed the Merc gently up the hill to the Hamilton Road Bridge.  These big eight-cylinder engines were entirely too powerful for snowy streets and if you gave them too much gas you just spun the tires and went nowhere.

As I turned left onto Hamilton, I saw in my rearview mirror how, although it was still early on a Saturday morning, the county snowplow was already crossing the bridge and turning onto our road to do its work. When we were kids, we loved to watch the snowplow, and it was the same kind now as it was back then, a big five-ton dump-truck the back-end tipped slightly to keep feeding rock salt into a hopper and feeder that scattered the salt on the pavement, the front-end fitted with a huge blade, set skewed toward the passenger side of the cab so as to throw the snow off to the side of the road. Effective, efficient, a powerful tool with which to keep things open and moving.

The main streets of town, as we cruised through it, were also already cleared and salted. This was a Northern town where people were used to handling snow. Everything was geared to snow’s not being a problem: Even as it snowed, the streets were being cleared. Cables were mostly underground and those that weren’t were over open terrain and were tested and approved for use in heavy snow and high winds. This was Ohio, with its rich rural and industrial tradition.

When we arrived at the K of C Hall, ceded on this occasion to the Lions for this annual fundraiser, its blacktopped parking lot was also cleared. And the machinery used was still in evidence: An aging John Deere tractor with a scoop on the front sat parked off to one side. It almost certainly belonged, I speculated, to a volunteer from the Knights of Columbus, the Lions or both, and he was just as certainly now inside getting his just due—all the pancakes and sausage he could eat, with plenty of hot coffee. There were already quite a few cars parked outside. It was a farm town. People here were early-risers.

Inside we were greeted by the warm sweet and spicy smell of hot buttered pancakes, warm maple syrup and pork link sausage. Drifting above it all, the aroma of brewing coffee, and the cheery salutations:

“Hey, Norm! How are you Reba? Did you guys order this weather?”

"Not me, Charlie,” Whitie responds. “I hate this shit and it’s too damned early for it.”

“Why, it’s just enough snow to be pretty, Whitie!” Another familiar face cries.

“Pretty my ass!  Not if you have to drive in it, it’s not,” Whitie responds.

“Well, you don’t because you retired, so have some pancakes and stop your bitchin’,” says someone else, and then in a sunny tone, “Hey! Is this Dan? Hey Dan’el, how ya doin’? Haven’t see you in a coon’s age!”

It never changed. You went away twenty years, came back, and it seemed like they were all still there. Robust, red-faced, thick-waisted men, being jolly and friendly on a Saturday morning, wearing bibbed aprons and serving up breakfast to their neighbors to raise funds for charity. It was the very best of small-town life. Reliability, solidarity, efficiency. This wouldn’t change, I was thinking—hoping.

Early winter in west-central Ohio

But it was on that snowy autumn morning that it came home to me that, even if the traditions survived, the faces wouldn’t. These men were mostly of Reba Mae and Whitie’s generation, World War II and Korea vets who would soon be gone. Even now, my generation was there too, Classmates, Vietnam vets, who were doing the grill work ceded to them by their elders, who now did the greeting and the dishing up and the ticket-taking.

My generation and theirs dropped by the table to say hi as we enjoyed our pancakes and coffee. They all wanted to know the same thing: “Did I order this weather?” Whitie responded—not without certain acrimony—that, yes, I had… “It’s all his fault,” he would say, pointing an accusing finger at me. Said he could smell it, if you can believe that”. They also wanted to know how South America was treating me. “Brazil, wasn’t it?”

“No. Argentina.”

“So, what do they speak down there?”

“Spanish.”

“So where was it they speak Portuguese?”

And that sparked other inquiries. Was it true that we were going into summer there now and didn’t that seem funny somehow? Huh, Christmas in the summertime, imagine that! But at least you didn’t have to drive in the snow, huh?

It was funny: After all these years, it wasn’t just my family I started missing as soon as I took the plane and headed south. It was this—this place, my town, what it meant, how it felt when I sought it out in my heart and held it cupped in my two hands like something ever-cherished.

On snowy nights, I’ll sometimes think about this, especially about that unique October morning, as I’m standing in the darkened kitchen of my house in Patagonia, gazing out the window at the snow that is gathering on the lawn under the Patagonian beeches. I’m thinking how all of that, which once seemed so permanent, so inexhaustible, is now gone: Whitie, Reba Mae, my Little Brother Dennis, friends and relatives who have passed on, the house I spent my teen years in, people and landmarks I thought of as anchors in my life and keys to who I was, my very links to that town and the land around it.

I’m also thinking of the snow, how it’s a test of individuals and of peoples. How you cope with snow, whether you can love it in spite of itself, whether a people has the solidarity to live with it and make it work for them. I remember that morning, when it snowed in October and surprised everybody. But how everybody in that small, rural-Ohio community knew just what to do, knew there was no use complaining, knew that what you did if you were from that town was clear the roads and parking lot in time for that pancake breakfast you had been planning for months.

Patagonian winter scene

I feel bad, I’m thinking, about how I can no longer see snow like I did when I was a kid, that it’s no longer just pretty. It means grownup things now, especially here in remote Patagonia—hours, a day, a week waiting for the electricity to be restored. Translation clients in Buenos Aires,  Houston or Madrid being incapable of understanding how anybody, anywhere, can be without power for a week, but understanding one thing for sure, that it’s not a problem they are going to stand for ever again. Trying to make it the two kilometers down to the main road in my four by four pickup to leave tracks for my neighbors and me to follow before it gets too deep to move at all, because heaven only knows when the local municipality will get around to sending a road grader out this far. Hoping against hope that no branches break and fall on the telephone lines because repair orders are already normally backed up for weeks on end, hoping the snow will turn to rain, hoping the sun will come out, hoping this won’t be the worst winter ever. Wishing that things were like “back home”, where everybody knew what to do and did it, immediately and without complaint.

Even as I’m thinking this, I hear the UPS alarm on my computer upstairs and know the electricity is gone. With aerial lines, one broken beech bough is enough to knock out an entire sub-station. I climb the stairs with a flashlight and shut down the UPS and my computer. I go to bed to wait for daybreak. There’s nothing else to do.

Lying there still unable to sleep, I think about how this may actually be good in its own way. It’s a more real world. Here, the snow is just the snow and you are just you. It teaches you self-reliance. You cope without expecting anything of anyone else. Whatever you do to cope with Nature, you do on your own. In the meantime, there are no false hopes, no misunderstandings, no thinking anything or anyone is permanent. There’s just you and how you handle what comes at you for as long as you are still breathing.

There’s something to be said for that, and it doesn’t make the snow any less beautiful. On the contrary, it is a thing of beauty that is indifferent to your condition or your problems, which are all of your own making. It just is what it is, and how you live with it is all about who you are. The beauty of it is all its own. It’s up to you to take it or leave it.

 

A BEAUTIFUL CHILD

I had a very strange dream last night. I know that by telling you this I’m breaking my wife’s No Dreams Rule, but perhaps some of you can relate. If not, I apologize in advance to you (and to her).

So here goes…

I’m sowing a miniscule garden. It’s at the bottom of a twilit ventilation shaft between two multi-storied buildings. The wall on the other side of the shaft is blank concrete with a dirty grey whitewashed surface. The patch of ground I’m working on is an ad hoc “patio” between the buildings. My place has a sliding glass door that gives onto it. But the buildings are so close together that the space is nominal. The garden patch is about the width of the handle of the hoe I’m using. Widthwise, the length of the hoe handle will span the garden in either direction.

On a tiny strip of concrete bordering it, I’ve arrayed a trowel, a small watering can and a number of envelopes of seeds. There too, trying hard to stay out of my way, but at the same time, not wanting to miss a thing that is going on, is a delicate, pretty little girl. She looks to be about five or six. She isn’t dressed for gardening. She looks more as if she were on her way to Sunday school. She has on a belted, cranberry-colored coat. Below it, a fringe of lovely blue dress with a crinoline underskirt is visible. She’s also wearing dark leggings and shiny patent-leather shoes with straps and silver buckles.

The little girl’s dark hair forms long, corkscrew curls that reach past her shoulders and is tied back at the temples by a large pink bow at the back of her head. She has a bright, open face, with large, intelligent eyes, the color of which is an almost mahogany brown. Their expression is intense and wiser than her years might indicate. Her facial complexion and the skin on the backs of her hand are the color of a burnished buckeye, a rich, luminous brown. She is really a quite beautiful child.

Although, as I say, the little girl is working very hard to stay out of my way, it is also clear that she is very excited by the project of a garden in such a squalid, joyless little place. It is also clear to me that she’s my ward. I’m responsible for her. I can tell that she is already imagining what that drab, ugly patch of ground will look like once the seeds I’m planting sprout, grow and start to bloom into a stunning, multi-hued bed of vibrant, floral joy.

But in order to be allowed to stay, she has to put up with my grim, joyless concentration on the task at hand. And on my ill-humor, my own lack of imagination to already see the future as she, in her innocence, already does. She must cope with my lack of hope and faith that make sowing these seeds a last-ditch exercise in futility rather than an expression of an inner confidence and of the certainty that beauty will triumph. As such, she is forced to repress her overwhelming joy, to tone down her bubbling enthusiasm, to mask her certainty that planting a flower bed in such a lugubrious place is an act of unshakeable faith in a brighter, more beautiful future.

As I toil without anything like happiness or hope, I’m constantly barking at the sweet little girl to stay out of the way and let me finish “my” work. She is virtually vibrating with her enthusiasm and desire to be part of the project. But she is aware that, with me in charge, the price of her being here is for her to hide and suppress any outward manifestation of her almost uncontrollable excitement.

She stays on the sideline, smiling and almost visibly tremulous with emotion, waiting for me to finish making meager furrows with the trowel and sprinkling in the seeds, before raking the loose soil over them with my hoe.

“There!” I say finally. “Finished.”

I take my tools and duck backwards through the sliding door into the gloom of the ground-floor flat, leaving the little girl alone in the “patio”—such as it is. The point of view momentarily shifts and the focus is on the little girl. Alone at last, she is now beside herself with happiness in the newly-planted garden. She squats at first, surveying my handiwork from the concrete strip that I have marked as her “in bounds” territory. But then, she can no longer resist the temptation, gets down on her hands and knees, and gently starts to caress the cultivated earth.

With her tiny hands, she pats each ridge where the seeds have been sown. She leans close and whispers to them, murmurs and coos. She tells those seeds, tucked into their warm berth beneath the soil, how beautiful they are and how much more beautiful they are all going to be once they’ve grown and are in bloom. 

She picks up the little watering can and starts to sprinkle the soil, seeking to nurture the seeds, so as to ensure their health and progress. She knows that water is the key, the fountain from which all life springs. Not too much, mind you. Not enough to drown the tiny seedlings. Just enough to make them grow and flourish, strong and healthy.

The whole while that she is doing this, the pretty little girl keeps talking to her seed friends. She keeps telling them encouragingly that she loves them, that she will never abandon them, that she will be back every day to visit them and to water them.

But then, suddenly, I am back. And I’m angry, intimidating, asking her just what the hell she thinks she’s doing and why she always has to make a nuisance of herself.  “Didn’t I tell you to keep out of there? Well, didn’t I? What have you got to say for yourself?”

At first she stands with her head down, letting my overwrought tirade wash over her like a cold, heavy rain. But as I go on and on, as if that tiny patch of miserable dirt were the last shred of anything I still possess, she eventually lets the watering can fall to the ground and looks up into my face. Her eyes are filled with tears and incomprehension. They look wounded, full of sorrow. They reflect hopes dashed, love betrayed, joy choked and murdered.

Quite suddenly, my anger melts into remorse. I am awash in deep regret. And then, looking into her dark, wounded eyes, I’m feeling everything she is. I am not talking about just “knowing how she feels,” but rather, feeling it first-hand—the humiliation, the incomprehension, the frustration, the fear and pain. It is the terrible, shattered sensation of a cruelly broken moment of happiness.

Just as suddenly, I am gripped by a revelation. It is the lightning knowledge that the little girl is not “my charge”. Rather, she is an integral part of me, a piece of my very own soul, one face of my own inner child.  I am she and she, I. We are both victims of my inability to resolve issues of the past, to enjoy the miracle of each moment of life. She is a better, more innocent, more perfect me. She soars above petty frustration, futile remorse and crippling pessimism.

In short, she is the best of me, and as such, the part of me that I consistently bully, repress and abuse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

OLD SCHOOL DRUMMING

 I recently joined a Facebook group called Old School Drummers. I did it at the invitation of a friend and former fellow drummer, Mark Paulus of Lima, Ohio. 

I also did it against my better judgment. Mainly because I haven’t been anything like a real drummer in decades. But then, again, if you’ve ever been a drummer, it’s something that stays with you for the rest of your life.

Truth be told, I can still read the music and hear the licks in my head, even if my hands and feet stubbornly refuse to reproduce them with anything close to accuracy. And I have instant recall of the feeling of being at the top of my game—never great, surely, but good. Maybe even very good. 

Every day, I find myself lamenting the fact that I ever stopped playing. I know that if I’d continued, still today I would be as good as I was way back when. Perhaps better. But after having stopped for several decades, having timidly taken it up again is, I suppose, self-indulgent. I will clearly never be even a shadow of the performer I once was. Playing now will never be anything but a salve to help relieve the sorrow of having neglected and lost something once so hard-earned, precious and vital to me.

But, okay, it is what it is. No crying over spilt milk. And here we are. Starting over, like a false toddler learning to walk again. 

In the end, I decided to take up my friend’s invitation to join the group, because, as I say, the acute memory of what it’s like to play and play well makes me conversant on many of the subjects that this group generates. Even though, I can’t, like many of the other older members who never quit, post videos of myself cookin’ on the drum kit at age seventy-something. The reality is that, if I were to post myself playing, the proverbial jig would be up!

People talk about all sorts of things on the OSD site. It’s a highly populated and very active community. Drumming, it seems, is something we’re really passionate about. It’s incredible the range of topics members find to discuss. There are all sorts of opinions about which drums are the best and why. The size, weight and quality of drumsticks. Which bass pedals and hi-hats are most effective. Why one brand of cymbals is better, brighter, mellower, etc. than another. And, by the way, what’s the best way to clean cymbals…or should you clean them at all? How to best restore pearl finish and metal hardware. Best drum heads and why. Drum tuning and how it affects sound quality. Different configurations of drum kits and why one might be more effective than another. Ways to get around symptoms of aging like arthritis and hand and wrist pain and still keep drumming.

Dan (middle) with fellow Wapakoneta High School
drummers Jane Siferd and Mike Krebs.

And then the more obvious discussions about who “the world’s best drummer is/was.” Which groups from which eras were the most outstanding in the worlds of jazz, hard rock, soft rock and fusion music. Which learning aids are the best to buy. And then there are myriad videos of great drumming to wow us and bring back memories of some of the greatest old school drumming ever heard.

So anyway, the other day, there was a sort of “remember when” post that featured a pair of VeriSonic hollow aluminum drumsticks from the nineteen-sixties and asked if anyone remembered them. I did. Quite well. I immediately recalled when we got them in at Porter's Music Store, where I worked in Lima,  from age sixteen through eighteen. We had them in a special display in all sorts of sizes, from light jazz sticks to thick 3S sticks used for marching band. I also remember that, for a little while, the Wapakoneta High School drum section I was in had them in the school team colors of red and white—red shafts, white tips and butts.

They came in a variety of colors—all with white tips and butts: metallic red, green, blue and gold being the most popular. Most of the Facebook Old School Drummers reacted with laughing face emojis. Some said they’d remembered seeing them but never bought any. Others said they’d bought a pair but never could see the advantage or didn’t like the sound they produced. One guy said he’d had a pair and that they’d lasted him about ten minutes. Most, obviously, being old school, thought them an absolute travesty. If sticks weren’t oak, maple or hickory, they simply couldn’t be considered sticks. 

But I can still recall how trendy we were in the sixties. It was a time when the new generation was out front and emerging, an era when even many older middle-class people were trying to keep up with the trends, wanting to be cool and hip. It was the Age of Aquarius. The New Age, when liberal was the height of cool and conservative was the enemy Establishment. Clothes, music, art and writing were all embracing the trendy nature of the times. If it was new and cool, we wanted it. So would I try aluminum drumsticks? Hell yeah!

So, here’s a funny story. I had just bought myself a couple of pairs of VeriSonics. One pair metallic green, the other gold, if I remember right. I wasn’t convinced they were what I needed for my work as a nightclub musician. I felt good old hickory lent itself better to jazz and fusion music. But in my “sage” seventeenth year, I had a theory about why the VeriSonic sticks were better for concert work than traditional wooden sticks. They were, I reasoned, identical, and so, perfectly balanced, with perfectly molded and matching tips. That meant, I told myself, that they were much better designed, scientifically speaking, for the absolute precision required by symphonic band and symphony orchestra work.

No matter how much I sought to reason and justify my trendy purchase, the truth was unavoidable. I’d bought them because I thought they looked cool as heck. The rest was just window-dressing.  

With fellow scholarship-winner Dave Stroh

Well, shortly after I got the new aluminum sticks, I won a scholarship to attend the renowned Ohio University Summer Music Workshop (now known as the OU Music Academy).   It was a summer music clinic for supposedly gifted young musicians. (I mean, most of the kids I met there, ages fourteen to seventeen, were indeed musical prodigies, but that only served to make me wonder what the hell I was doing there).

I ended up doing well, however, being chosen in performance challenges to be the head percussionist for both the symphony orchestra and the symphonic band. Personally, I think it was because I was the only percussionist with broad knowledge and ample experience playing tympani (kettle drums), on which the others failed to impress, but who knows?

The orchestra was directed by talented Ohio musical educator Charles Minelli. It was my first experience with a real symphony orchestra. I thoroughly enjoyed it, mostly sticking to tympani for challenging pieces of classical music including the Grieg Piano Concerto, which featured my new friend from Cleveland and extraordinarily talented pianist Curtis Jefferson, Cesar Franck’s Symphony in D Minor, and Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, among others.

But it was in the symphonic band that I felt most at home, since I had been playing in local and all-area concert bands since junior high. The man in charge of the band was probably the most renowned of the instructors at the workshop—Lt. Colonel William H. Santelmann, US Marine Corps (retired), who had been the twenty-first director of "the President's Own" First Marine Band, which was founded at the end of the eighteenth century and one of whose directors had been “the March King”, John Phillip Sousa. The colonel's own father, William F. Santelmann, had been the band's nineteenth director.

Lt. Colonel William H. Santelmann

Santelmann was an incredibly talented and highly intimidating conductor. I doubt any other director could have gotten what he did out of a symphonic band made up of high school teens in the short couple of weeks that he had to work with us. I had seen him absolutely demolish several of my peers in the band during the days of rehearsal leading up to the closing concert, and I wanted to make sure I was never on the receiving end of his fury.

Anyway, all went swimmingly, with me performing at the top of my game, also mostly on kettle drums, while meticulously keeping the rest of my section in check as well. But during the last rehearsal before the event, I decided to play the snare drum part in Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. And, of course, I broke out my lovely gold VeriSonic sticks for the occasion.

It was as we were playing the climactic crescendo to The Great Gate of Kiev that, for the first time, the colonel's ice-cold eyes locked on me, and he suddenly cut the band off in mid-crescendo snare roll. You could have heard a pin drop—and might well have heard me peeing down my leg, had I not quickly gotten my panic under control—when he stared me down and said, "Young man, are those knitting needles that you are using?"

I laughed. He didn’t.

"No sir," I said, recovering a bit. "They're balanced aluminum sticks for a cleaner, more even sound."

I think I half expected him to say, "Oh, how interesting. May I see them?"
Instead, he gave me the most withering of glares and hissed, "Newfangled trash. I hope you have a traditional hardwood pair with you, or you can leave now and not come back."

Luckily, I did.

Yes, the colonel was indeed, old school.

 

YANKEE REDUX – MICHIGAN DAYS: SIDETRIPS

 

A week each summer was such a short time to be in northern Michigan, especially when I would gladly have stayed all summer long. And I wanted to cram all of the living I could into those seven days.

Lake Manistee (Photo by Thomas Harvry)

Still, I was in two minds about our side trips—always the same ones, one to Traverse City, and the other to the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes—since both involved a lengthy are-we-there-yet car ride that took up precious early morning and late afternoon time at Lake Manistee, where I could have been fishing or swimming or enjoying the woods or running around trying to find my backwoods idol and Buckeye Rustic Resort owner Morris Butcher. But once we got to our destinations, my sister Darla and I (and later our little brother Jim, when he grew old enough to join the fun) would turn suddenly ecstatic. These excursions generally came about mid-week, one after the other. In Traverse City, we usually lunched at a sandwich shop of my thrifty father and even thriftier grandfather’s choosing. But for the dunes, my mother and grandmother would get up early and pack a picnic, which never lacked a large supply of pressed ham and cheese sandwiches on Wonder Bread liberally slathered with delicious butter, potato chips, potato salad, a thermos of coffee and another of Kool-Aid (grape, if I had anything to say about it) and some homemade cookies (usually peanut butter or chocolate chip).

Although the population of Traverse City couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen thousand back then, it seemed to us, who came from a small Ohio farm town, like some bustling exotic port city, especially since we were usually there about the time of the yearly Cherry Festival when the city came alive with thousands of visitors. Traverse City is known as the cherry capital of the United States and at that time of the year, it was always peopled—in addition to the very “Middle-America” local population and American tourists—with colorfully dressed, Spanish-speaking migrant workers, whom my Grandma Alice referred to as “Gypsies” (even referring to the language they spoke as “Gypsy”, so that for years afterward, whenever I heard Spanish spoken or heard the word Gypsy, I immediately imagined the migrants I had seen year after year in Michigan).

We thought Traverse was the big city.

Traverse City took its name from the eighteenth-century French trappers and explorers who called the long voyage across the mouth of the huge bay on which the city would later be built “la grande traverse” (the long crossing). The first settlers in the area, then, referred to the body of water—separated by a peninsula from the vast freshwater sea of Lake Michigan—as Grand Traverse Bay. And the village that they would erect on its shores in the mid-nineteenth century would eventually be known as Grand Traverse City, later shortened simply to Traverse City. 

It began, humbly enough, as the enterprise of a ship’s captain from Illinois named Boardman, who bought land at the mouth of a river where it flowed into the western branch of the bay and founded a sawmill there, obviously with the idea of shipping lumber on the great lakes. He gave his surname to the river on which settlers were to build their homes, attracted by the sawmill and the excellent surrounding land. Besides being the cherry capital, the area has long had abundant other farming and is a major Midwestern vineyard region as well.

Traverse City , Boardman River

Captain Boardman would later sell his sawmill to the progressive partners of Hannah, Lay and Company. The firm invested strongly in the lumber operation and it was around and fueled by that business, in the 1850s, that Traverse City began to grow.

For us, it was just a pleasant outing, walking around the city, buying tiny souvenirs, saltwater taffy and baskets of shiny red and scrumptious black cherries—some of which we were allowed to eat as we walked (“but not too many, because they’ll make your belly ache”), and the rest of which were saved for making pies back at the cabin. We gaped at the stunning views of the bay, with its turquoise strip of water in the shallows along the shore that sharply contrasted with the navy blue of the sudden drop-off.

Drop-off! That word on my father’s lips had a mesmerizing effect on me.  When you swam in a place like that, he warned, you wanted to swim parallel and stick close to the shoreline, in the “green” waters, because it got deep “right now” at the drop-off.  The sound of the word conjured up images of lost ships and deep-sea monsters, of dark places the sun couldn’t penetrate and of hidden whirlpools that would suck you down to unknown depths from which there was no return. As I got a little older, I sometimes imagined mermaids with the dark, pretty faces, flashing eyes, long dark tresses and pierced ears of the “Gypsy” girls I’d seen in the port, saw them take me by the hand and lure me to the drop-off where I would gladly follow them, at the risk of mortal peril, because their beauty was so irresistible. The colors of the water kindled my imagination and filled me with wonder since it was hard to believe that something so Technicolor-beautiful could exist in nature.

Thirty years afterward I would wonder if Grand Traverse Bay had ever really been as spectacular as it had looked to me as a small boy. Probably not, I figured, because nothing is as big, as awesome, as indescribably wonderful when we grow older as it was back then, is it? But on going there on a whim when I was already past forty, I proved myself wrong. The contrasting turquoise and navy blue waters of Grand Traverse seemed just as incredible then as when I was nine or ten. I couldn’t help thinking it must surely be one of the most beautiful bays in the world.

Reba Mae, Grandma Alice, Whitie, Darla and Danny
aboard the "City of Petosky"

Only once did we vary from the dual-destination Traverse City/Sand Dunes side trip and go on a different kind of adventure: a Mackinac Island ferry boat voyage on Lake Huron. The great Mackinac Bridge—the world’s third longest suspension bridge, which today links Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas—was still on lead engineer David B. Steinman’s drawing board at the time, so ferries were the only way to get across the Straits of Mackinac between the non-contiguous peninsulas, if you didn’t want to drive all the way around. So a fleet of nine ferries was constructed with a total capacity of nine thousand vehicles per day, which signified major progress in northern Michigan land communications. But we just went for the ride. 

Grand Traverse Bay

The lake journey was part of one of our earliest Michigan trips. I must have been three or four at most. But I still recall the strange, scary sensation of our driving the cars on board the boat, and then the exhilaration of standing on the nodding deck, the breeze in our hair, the sky so blue and clear and the spray of the waves misting our faces. I also recall an old man with very long, very white and carefully parted and combed hair and a face like a leather mask, who held aloft pieces of bread in his gnarly fingers for the lake gulls that, amid their excited screeching, would swoop down and deftly snatch the offered treat from the man’s hand. It was a beautiful day and it remains in my memory as a real adventure, as exciting as any trans-Atlantic voyage.

Before the days of the white man, before the times of written history, the Annishnaabeg people told the story of a great forest fire on the sunset side of the great freshwater sea that they called meicigama. It was so intense and extensive that many animals perished. But a mother bear was determined that she and her two cubs would survive. She pushed her cubs into the great waters and the three of them began to swim toward the shore of the rising sun. But the way was long and arduous, and though the mother bear called to her young as she herself struggled to make the great crossing, the exhausted cubs lagged ever further behind.

Vintage Souvenir postcard, Sleeping Bear Dunes

 Eventually, the mother bear arrived on the opposite shore, and there, looked anxiously back hoping to see her babies right behind her. After a while, she climbed up onto one of the high bluffs beyond the shoreline, and there settled down to wait and watch, but her cubs were nowhere to be seen. Still, she waited, never giving up hope, and finally, she slept, a sleep so deep that nothing could awaken her. And so, there rose a wind, that gently began to cover her with a blanket of sand until the land took on her shape and paid homage to her love, determination and bravery. And witnessing all of this, the Great Spirit paid tribute also to her cubs, causing two islands to rise from the great waters of meicigama.

This was how the region’s Native Americans (dubbed Chippewa by the French) explained the formation of the Sleeping Bear Dunes and the Lake Michigan islands of North and South Manitou, which, since 1970, have formed part of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore Park. 

Back when we used to go there, it wasn’t yet a Federal park, nor was it yet the huge natural tourist attraction it is today—even more so after being declared Good Morning America’s 2011 pick as the “Most Beautiful Place in America.” It was never crowded, but there were always people there who knew the area and never missed a chance to go and enjoy a day of climbing and the magnificent views to which you were treated once you reached the summit. Back then too, you could still make out the bear where she slept under a grassy knoll overlooking Lake Michigan (a landmark that, so I’m told, has since eroded to almost unrecognizable remnants of the natural effigy). The “infrastructure” was pretty much limited to a parking lot and a wooden building where souvenirs were sold. Everything else was the incredible natural beauty of the dunes towering more than 400 feet above us and inviting us to explore them.

Sleeping Bear Dunes (Photo by Kerry Kelly)

You climbed the dunes barefoot, digging in with your toes, the sun-kissed sand scorching the soles of your feet. Dad, Mom, Grandpa and Grandma, my brother, sister and I, all of us, were suddenly children on the dunes, laughing and panting and scrambling as we made the strenuous climb. We kids would always climb to the top two or three times over, just for the pleasure of the descent—a descent that was sheer abandon, since these were mountains of sand unbroken by rocks, or other obstacles, so that getting back down was a simple matter of throwing yourself off of the top and rolling, sliding, tumbling back down to the bottom.  But on the last ascent, we would linger in the desert-like dream world of sand and razor-sharp grasses at the top, taking in the awesome landscape below with its peacock blue inland lakes and the huge, horizon-less, deep-blue expanse of meicigama (the big waters).

I never can recall a drive back to Manistee from the Dunes. After such an amazing and exhausting day, we kids always fell fast asleep in the backseat of the car and stayed that way until we once again turned in at the Buckeye Rustic Resort.

It was after just such a day, when I was, perhaps eight or nine that we arrived back at the resort an hour or so before sundown. I didn’t wake up until Dad pulled the car in next to our cabin. I was sleepy and grumpy and my hair, ears and clothes were full of scratchy sand. I dawdled outside the cabin for a while, dumping sand from my pockets and picking it out of my ears, vaguely depressed that the following day would be our last full one at Lake Manistee.

But just then Morris Butcher pulled up in his dusty, battered Ford station wagon. The tailgate was open and the backend was loaded with garbage cans into which he had been depositing refuse from the different cabins. Seeing me standing there, he took his ever present corncob pipe from his mouth and spontaneously asked, “How’d you like to come with me to the dump and see the deer?”

“Deer?” I asked.

“Yep. That’s where they hang out this time o’ the day.”

I nodded and smiled enthusiastically.

“Well, all right, Danny, then go quick and tell your mom. Tell ‘er we’ll be right back...maybe an hour.”

I started to go, but he stopped me: “But listen up now, son, whatever you do, don’t tell your granddad! Why, hell, if Murel goes along, the way he runs his mouth, there won’t be a deer for miles around. Scare ‘em off just like he scares all the fish!”

I ran and asked my mother if I could please (please, please, please, please!) go, and since it was Morris I was going with, she finally acquiesced. So off I went, sitting up front with Morris, on the bench seat of his station wagon.

After a short drive on the main dirt road, we turned left onto a much narrower one—more a track than a road and so hidden in the underbrush and forest that you would never have seen the turnoff if you didn’t know where to look. We wended our way back through the birch and pine forest, made magical by the slant of the waning sunlight that filtered through the trees and highlighted this bit or that of foliage while casting the surrounding areas into penumbral gloom. The Ford pitched and jostled over the rutted, unkempt lane, the garbage pails clunking and clanking in the rear, until we finally pulled to a stop beside a large, open garbage tip. The smell of rotting fish heads, innards and other organic debris was overpowering. I held my nose, a gesture that drew a chuckle from Morris. When he’d finished emptying his pails and stowing them back in the station wagon, he took his Missouri Meerschaum from his mouth, tapped the tobacco out of it against his heel and shoved it into the hip pocket of his well-worn dungarees.

“Okay, Danny,” he said, “from here on, we go on foot, and quiet as Indians, okay?”

Morris led and I followed, trying to show just how quiet I could be and attempting to walk, as I’d been assured Indians walked, with one foot placed straight in front of the other. We negotiated a path so faint that I’d never have seen it without this old woodsman as my guide. At one point, Morris turned to me and placed a finger to his lips to indicate complete silence. Then he histrionically shoved his short, thick index finger into his mouth to wet it, held it up, pointed in the direction the wind was blowing and then indicated, with that same finger, the opposite direction. We were going to head upwind, his hand signals were saying.

We hiked briefly along a short ridge. Through the trees, I could see the sunset reflected in an irregularly shaped lagoon, the edges of which meandered in and out of the forest and were lined with dead trees that had rotted at the roots over the course of a hundred flood seasons but remained dramatically upright, colored stark grayish white, like bleached bones. Finally, we came to a kind of blind,  crudely erected using tree boughs and brush, that afforded a clear view of the lagoon shore, and there we hunkered down to wait.

“Where are they?” I asked in a barely audible whispered.

Again, Morris touched a finger to his lips and pointed in the direction of the lagoon. As if on cue, a family of white-tailed deer made their cautious way down out of the woods to the edge of the water to drink: first an old stag that stood alert, head raised, sniffing the air and twitching his long, mule-like ears, massive antlers spotlighted in the sun’s last rays. Then with a snort he seemed to let the others know the coast was clear, and along they came too, a younger buck with less elaborate antlers, a young doe and a little fawn. Warily, they waded a few steps into the shallows, stretched their long necks downward and began to drink.  

It was a magical moment, an almost religious experience of communion with nature, in which we had faded into the surroundings and were thus privileged to share this intimate day’s-end moment with these stunning creatures. It was a Michigan experience that would remain with me forever, a place to go in my mind whenever all else failed to convince me that life was beautiful. 

 

YANKEE REDUX – FIRST STRIKE

Doing some historical research on organized labor one day, I suddenly recalled, in very vivid detail, when I first heard the word “strike”. I can’t remember the political details involved, but I assume it was during a prolonged strike (one hundred fifty-six days) by electrical workers at Westinghouse plants all over the United States that took place in 1955-56. I would have been about six years old at the time.  

My pristine little home town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, was located about twenty minutes south of the once thriving industrial city of Lima (pronounced “lie-mah” not “lee-mah”, although it was indeed named after the Peruvian capital). Or, better said, perhaps, Lima is located twenty minutes north of Wapakoneta—since the founding of our town pre-dates that of Lima by a couple of decades. It lies about halfway between Cincinnati and Toledo on Interstate 75. The land where both towns were built all originally formed part of the Hog Creek Reservation, the traditional tribal homeland of the Shawnee Nation, wrested from their hands through a series of broken promises, ignored treaties and forced relocation operations, in which these noble natives were “invited” to make a new life for themselves in Kansas on the distant opposite side of the Midwestern region.  

Oil origins - early Lima sour crude sweetening stills

Back in its day, Lima was best known for its oil industry—boasting, as of the early twentieth century, one of the largest oilfields in the United States and one of the country’s largest oil pumping operations (the Buckeye Pipeline), as well as a major refining and petrochemical operation (which continues to function today, almost a century and a half after its founding).  

Such was the Lima oil boom that John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, headquartered at the time in Cleveland, decided to set up refining operations there and to open a major office. Rivalry ran high between JDR and the Lima oilmen. Some historical reports suggest that when at first they resisted his attempts to buy them out,  Rockefeller, whose vast family fortune could easily take the hit, started a price war to force their hand. Whatever the case may be, Standard Oil, known locally as SOHIO (Standard Oil of Ohio) when I was growing up, was to become a Lima institution. 

But oil wasn’t all that Lima was about. It was home to one of the country’s most important locomotive builders, its most important builder of school buses, a major steel foundry, one of the country’s most important military tank and amphibious vehicle construction plants, and the Westinghouse Small Motors manufacturing division, among other industries. This last business, Westinghouse, as I mentioned before, was where I first learned the word “strike”.

Back when I was a little boy, I-75 was still being built and the only way to drive into Downtown Lima from Wapakoneta—unless you wanted to come in from the west and cross the entire West Side—was either on the North Dixie Highway or on what we called “the back way” along country roads. But both of these routes took you through the grimy, industrial area known as the South End. There, the highway ran past endless fields of enormous oil storage tanks and industrial plant gates. The air was usually thick with the sulfurous stench of sour crude and ammonia from the refinery and by night was eerily lit by the sullied orange flames of the operation’s venting towers.

Black Legion members in ludicrous attire

The South End was also home to some rough neighborhoods and some even rougher slums. Although when I was growing up there never appeared to me to be a lot of surface racial tension between blacks and whites in Lima, the city had a bad reputation for racism dating back to when my father, Whitie, was a kid. That was when Lima was a major center for an infamously violent branch of the Ku Klux Klan that was known—ironically enough—as the “Black Legion”. It was, regrettably, a homegrown Ohio racist organization that originated as the “Black Guard”, the armed band of black-hooded thugs whose original job it was to protect KKK officers and their families. In a city with an estimated population of around fifty thousand at the time, the KKK openly held a parade in the center of Lima in 1923, a year after my dad was born, that drew a crowd of a hundred thousand.

Against this background, Whitie grew up in a mostly white enclave of the South End during the hard times of the nineteen-twenties and thirties—an era in which the natural grit of both he and his older brother Red got well-honed living there. Neither of them were guys you wanted to mess with, even before they went off to train and fight during World War II.

Lima Petrochemical in the South End

But Red and Whitie were educated in a bi-racial environment and while they weren’t exactly chummy with the African American kids they went to school with, neither were they hostile. Living daily, blacks and whites together, they weren’t imbued with many of the prejudices and irrational fears of the majority of the people in all-white Wapakoneta. For Whitie, the South End was home and we always felt fairly at ease when we traveled through it with him.

That was not the case with our mother, Reba Mae, who had grown up in the all-white conservative rural community in and surrounding our town. She had nothing against blacks, inheriting her mother’s tolerance for all rather than her father’s open and virulent racism. But she was indeed permeated from childhood with the fear-mongering that was common in many carefully preserved white communities back then. And if we kids accompanied her on a shopping trip to Lima, we knew that when we passed through the last “friendly territory”, crossed an old concrete abutted bridge and started entering the South End, she would invariably begin to almost literally prick up her ears, sitting forward, tense in her seat, gripping the steering wheel hard at ten and two and murmuring, “Are your doors locked, kids? Answer me. Are your doors locked? Roll up your windows. Danny! Lock your door!”     

Switchyard at Lima Locomotive  

So there was always a certain apprehension when we drove through the smoky, oily, steely South End of Lima. But on this particular day there was something new. 

I think Whitie was driving us all to downtown Lima for a dinner of hamburgers, fries and frosted malts at the Kewpee sandwich shop—a kind of busman’s holiday for Whitie, since he was, at the time, part-owner of the Teddy Bear Restaurant, back then, the go-to place for hamburgers, fries and malts in Wapakoneta. I was, as usual, on my knees on the backseat of Whitie’s ’49 Ford, my nose pressed to the window, because I always liked to be watching once we passed the Westinghouse plant and the car climbed the tall bridge over the railway-yard below, to take in that gritty, grimy industrial view—which today promised to be more wintry, grey and thrilling than ever. I especially liked to observe the long rows of air ducts on the roof of the massive locomotive works building, looking for all the world like so many large rusty tin hens come to roost in a row on the soaring heights of the structure far beneath the bridge.

Today, however, something else caught my attention first. Directly across the street from the Westinghouse plant, the sidewalk outside of the factory parking lot and the tarmac on the other side of a tall fence, within the lot, were lined end to end with scores of men. Conspicuous by their absence were women and children. The men inside and the ones outside were grimly facing one another. It wasn’t hard for me to tune into the mood that was very apparently unpleasant and hostile. I noticed that my mother and father were purposely looking straight ahead as we drove by very slowly, directed by traffic cops around the part of the crowd outside the fence that had spilled off the sidewalk onto the pavement, but I gawked unabashed at the scene.

A number of the men on the outside of the fence were uniformed police officers, most holding long clubs at port arms with both hands—one gripping the butt, the other palming the tip. A few of them were carrying riot guns instead. Others on the outside of the fence were men in plain clothes. They mostly wore overcoats against the day’s dank chill, the brims of their felt hats pulled low over their eyes, so much so that their indistinguishably colorless grey clothing also resembled uniforms. And some of them, too, were carrying clubs.

On the inside of the parking lot fence, men stood pretty much shoulder to shoulder as well, but in less uniform style. They came and went and milled about and spelled each other at the fence. Some warmed their hands at a few metal drums from which yellow-orange flames sometimes leaped, others shared steaming coffee from metal Thermos flasks, and still others stood with their fingers laced through the diamond-shaped wires of the chain-link fence, staring down the men outside, their faces challenging and angry. Some of the men inside also wore overcoats and hats pulled low. But others were wearing leather bomber jackets or denim and sported billed caps with ear tabs, ball-caps or snap-billed tweed cloth caps. There were men carrying hand-lettered, poster-board signs nailed to two-by-fours. A few, I recall, had their heads bandaged in gauze underneath their hats.

As we advanced past the scene, I heard my mother mutter to my father, “I wonder when this is going to be over so people can get back to work.” Whitie said hard telling, but probably whenever the damned union got its way...or when the company’d had enough and run that bunch of goldbrickers out of there. I leaned over the seat between them and asked what was going on.

“It’s a strike,” my father said.

“What’s a strike?” I asked.

And that question got me my first abbreviated and editorialized lesson on labor relations.

My parents’ view was pretty much the norm among conservative business owners, small and large, in our area of the country. Indeed, Whitie identified completely with a factory-owner in our town who, when threatened once by his workers with unionization, told them that he was a wealthy man. He didn’t need a job. They did. He treated them fairly, he claimed, and said that if they wanted to unionize, to be his guests, that he would simply shut the place down, put a for-sale sign on the door and send them home. Result: The workers practically lynched the union activists who had tried to organize them, and sent them packing.  

In short, from what I gathered, the guys on the outside of the fence who were defending corporate interests were the "good guys", and the ones on the inside of the fence defending their livelihoods and their families’ lifestyles were the "bad guys". They were anti-American, socialists who wanted to undermine the American economy. I remember feeling afraid of the strikers, being glad they were being contained behind the fence, inside the parking lot, by the “good guys” with the clubs on the sidewalk outside.

It would take me years to figure out that this wasn't always—hardly ever, in fact—the way things actually worked. And it wasn’t until, as a professional musician, I became a union member myself, that I really began to think about the anti-union prejudices I’d been brought up with and to realize that, whatever certain big-labor unions had morphed into, the idea behind unions had started out, and often continued to be a good one: people standing together, without discrimination, to defend themselves and others against helplessness and exploitation.