So long, Clarke

Somehow, I hadn't heard about Clarke Thomas' death Feb. 21 and missed the obituary that appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It's a shame to lose him. He was a bit of a contradiction: a kind, thoughtful and gentle person, and a great newspaperman at the same time.

He spent 43 years in the business, in Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma before coming to Pittsburgh and editing the editorial page. Although he retired some time ago, he kept writing for the P-G as senior editor until very recently. He published a book, "Front-page Pittsburgh," in 2005.

Clarke went with a group of environmentalists from Pittsburgh to Siberia in 1994. While there, the journalists at the Kuznetsk Worker in Novokuznetsk sought help from him and the P-G. They were searching for a sister newspaper in the U.S. to teach them how to survive as a business independent of government. Interest at the Post-Gazette was not high for such a project, so Clarke contacted us at the Observer-Reporter. That's how our newspaper's Siberian adventure began, and how so many journalists, students and teachers were able to experience life in another country from 1996 to 2004.

When environmental journalist Rita Stachovich came her for the first time in 1997, her first request was to visit Thomas, and to give him presents and thanks for making possible the relationship that helped save her newspaper. We had a delightful dinner at the home of Clarke and his wife, Jean.

I kept Clarke posted on our business in Novokuznetsk over the years, and he became a regular contributor to the charitable organization I formed – Books for the World – which in 2000 sent more than 17,000 books to schools and libraries in Novokuznetsk.

I will always remember Clarke as an example of this simple truth: Sometimes even the smallest acts of kindness and consideration can result in great achievements.

Fathers, Part 3

(The house at 220 Madison St., Lynchburg, Va.)

The younger A.H. Burroughs started his practice in Lynchburg, not far from where he was born in 1859, in Leesville. He became the city’s solicitor, and eventually the Commonwealth’s Attorney. He and his wife, Florence, began raising children and in 1895 built a handsome Victorian-style home on Madison Street.

Meanwhile, another Lynchburg resident by the name of James Bonsack, just a few months younger than Burroughs, was making his way up in the world in another way. In 1881, Bonsack received a patent for his invention: a cigarette-rolling machine. Ever since the Civil War, cigarettes had become a popular way to smoke tobacco, but all were still rolled by hand. Bonsack’s machine could do the work of 48 human rollers.

The inventor retained A.H. Burroughs as his attorney and investor and formed the Bonsack Machine Co. It would take more than 10 years to improve the machine’s function and reliability, but once it was put into use by the American Tobacco Co., the number of cigarettes produced quickly passed the billion mark.

Burroughs quickly amassed a fortune, and in 1899 moved his growing family into a new home at 220 Madison more resembling a castle. The couple’s last of seven children was born in that house in 1904. They named him Alfred Parker Burroughs, in honor of two Episcopalian ministers, Dr. Alfred and Dr. Parker.

If the wealthy attorney, in choosing that name, had any hope that his son would follow his grandfather’s spiritual path, he was in for a disappointment.

Fathers, Part 2

Who knows if the Rev. A.H. Burroughs, the “marrying clergyman” of Franklin County, Va., had time to spend with his children, so busy he must have been riding the circuit and marrying all those couples. Little evidence can be found about the man until late in his life, when a remarkable incident gave him entry to history books.

In “Booker T. Washington and the Adult Education Movement,” Virginia Lantz Denton wrote of Washington’s tour of the South and a certain stop at a train station in Greenville, Tenn., in the fall of 1909: “Rev. A.H. Burroughs came to the station to see the group’s departure. He told Washington that he was from the Burroughs family in Franklin County, Va., Washington’s former owners. Washington turned to the crowd and exclaimed, ‘Why, Dr. Burroughs and I belong to the same family.’ As the train pulled out, Dr. Burroughs exclaimed over and over: ‘What changes time does bring. Just to think of it. The great man once belonged to our family. I’m proud of him, sir – mighty proud of him!’”

His father had worked the land with the human beings he had bought and owned. A.H. Burroughs had chosen a much different path – following the Lord. And his son, also named Ambrose Hammett, would likewise go in a completely different direction – the law – in search of luxury and the filthy lucre his father’s sermons most likely warned against.

Fathers, Part 1

Even with slaves doing the heavy work, farming was a hardscrabble existence for landowners in the hills of western Virginia before the Civil War. Near Hale’s Ford, James and Elizabeth Burroughs (left) owned 207 acres, but less than half of that was arable.

The place was called a plantation, but the Burroughs were neither wealthy nor affluent; their equity was of the human variety: about a dozen slaves. One of them was called Jane, who, impregnated by a white man from a neighboring plantation, gave birth to a boy on April 5, 1856. He would be known as Booker T. Washington (below right), who would one day become a great educator and founder of the Tuskegee Institute.

Elizabeth bore James 14 children. When war came in 1861, most of the boys went off to join the Confederacy, some of them never to return. The ones who came back stood on the porch of the big house in 1865 as the Emancipation Proclamation was read to their family’s slaves, among them 9-year-old Booker.

“All of the master’s family were either standing or seated on the veranda…” wrote Washington in his 1919 autobiography. “There was a feeling of deep interest, or perhaps sadness, on their faces, but not bitterness… They did not at the moment seem sad for the loss of property, but rather because of parting with those whom they had reared and were in many ways very close to them.”

Among those standing on the porch was returning soldier Ambrose Hammett Burroughs and his 6-year-old son, the boy to whom he had given his own name and who had grown up in all these years of his father’s absence.

At his death in 1861, James Burroughs’ estate was listed at just over $7,000, about $5,000 of that being the value of his slaves. With their freedom, not much was left, and the plantation would disappear, just as Hale’s Ford would evaporate from maps.

Jane and her son, Booker, would leave immediately for West Virginia, where he would work in the mines before leaving to begin his education at the age of 16 at the Hampton Institute.

The confederate veteran A.H. Burroughs would go on to earn a doctorate in theology and become the “marrying clergyman of Franklin County,” for the more than 3,000 couples he would unite.

His son would take a much different path.

A new story

Men can’t help but think that fathering children is a good thing; it’s nature; it’s the way our brains are built. And so, after the children are born, it’s only natural that men should think that being a father to them, for the rest of life, is a good thing, too, and should be joyous. We men are expected to cherish those monumental moments: the births, the graduations, the marriages. And we are expected to be proud and happy, and often we are. But just as often, we feel a twinge of regret. Regret, that we have not had a closer relationship with our own fathers. Regret, that we are not emotionally closer to our children. We think of all the child-parent activities we begged off from and feel shame for not having been the dads we could have been, or should have been.

Some dads seem so close to their kids. They are the weeping dads, the huggers, the ones who always seem to be with them or on the phone with them, in regular communication about the simplest things, long into the offspring’s adulthood. Sometimes, I envy their bonds, their mutual dependency, because it has always been different in our family.

I learned fatherhood from my father; he learned it from my grandfather, who learned it from his father. It goes back much farther than that, but I know the history back to the 19th century, which is when this story begins.
As always, I know how this story starts, but not exactly where it’s going or when it will end. Please feel free to comment about your own experiences with fatherhood. The comments are just as interesting as the story.
This one starts tomorrow. We’ll call it “Fathers.”

Today's gripe

I've been gone for a few days, mooching off my Florida family and applying golf therapy to my sore back...

There's no excuse for a four-putt green. To all of you non-golfers, let me explain. When you land your golf ball on the putting green, the idea is to put the ball in the hole, usually in two strokes. If you are far from the hole, your first putt gets it close enough for your to sink it on the second putt. Occasionally, you screw up and don't get your first putt close enough to the hole, and then you miss the second putt. This is murder on your score.

But putting four times on the same green is beyond screwing up, beyond unlucky; it's a hint that you have no business being on a golf course.
On Friday, I four-putted three greens – three of the first five holes I played that day.

But of course, I have an excuse. I haven't been playing golf that long. In fact, I only started playing in 1962.

Gone fishin'

I'll be out of this blog until Monday, March 9. Hope you're still around when I get back. Actually, I won't be fishin' anything other than my errant golf balls out of a pond teeming with alligators on the golf course in my father's backyard in Florida. I woke up last Sunday, looked at the couple of inches of snow that had fallen overnight, and decided to cash in my frequent-flyer miles and go mooch off the family.

On another matter, I failed to mention previously that "Enter, With Torches" will not be available in bookstores, other than those in the immediate vicinity of Washington, Pa., so if you plan to buy it, please do so online. And if you hurry up, you can get the discount. (End of hideous, shameless self-promotional commercial!)

The Farmhouse, Part 13

So many of the young men who sought refuge and recreation at the farmhouse in those few years are not around to remember it. Several members of the Skull House died young. One collapsed and died while jogging; one took his own life; one was killed in a bar fight, and all within a few years of graduation.

Two fraternity brothers are missing. Maher returned to the Middle East just before the Yom Kippur war and was never heard from again. Abbas Bayat was believed to have been back in Iran at the time of the revolution in 1979.

Warren Dodge, Abbas’ happy-go-lucky roommate, went on to become a flight attendant, the perfect occupation for his buoyant personality. Warren was aboard TWA Flight 800 when it took off from New York bound for Paris on July 17, 1996. He was one of the 230 souls to perish when the plane exploded and fell into the Atlantic off Long Island.

Izzy, Maher’s heavy-smoking and unlikely roommate, died of natural causes not too long ago. At about the same time, Big Bob killed himself.

Richard, who had tempted Death by screaming at the sky from the top of the silo in the middle of a thunderstorm, became a stone mason and fathered three daughters. A fall from scaffolding seriously injured him and left him in constant pain. He ended his own life more than 20 years ago.

Most surprisingly, Ted survives. He started on heroin while still in college and battled the addiction for many years.

After our wild college days, many of us settled down to be productive citizens and fathers. Chas finally replaced that silver tooth with a white one, married, and formed his own manufacturing company. He has sailed his boat several times from New York to Bermuda, but sticks close to home these days so that he and his wife can care for their daughter, who was paralyzed in a swimming accident while away at college.

About five years ago, when Chas returned to this area for a funeral, he drove out toward Marianna to see the old farmhouse. He told me he wasn’t sure that he saw it, though, and that he couldn’t find the driveway up which we had hauled so many armloads of wood during hell week so long ago.

I took a drive there a few weeks ago and had no better luck. If there is still a barn, silo, and house on the hill, it is too obscured by vegetation to see it now. Perhaps the whole place burned down many years ago. Regardless, it is as inaccessible to us today as are Maher and Richard and Warren and Abbas.
Houses, no matter how old they may be, are temporary. Just like the lives inside them.

THE END

The Farmhouse, Part 12

Late one night, state police and narcotics agents quietly crept up the long driveway toward the lighted farmhouse on the hill. They surrounded it, then knocked on the door. The sole occupant of the house on that night put aside his textbook and warily cracked the door. The narcs burst in, handed him a warrant and began turning the house upside down. After two hours, the search ended. All that was found was a partially-smoked joint and a few seeds inside a shoe in the closet. Nevertheless, the student was cuffed and hauled off to the pokey.

The bust was very much a bust. Everyone in the fraternity knew that the narcs must have been after Ted, who had become quite big in the drug business. But Ted wasn’t at the farmhouse that night; the nabbed student unlucky enough to be using the quiet house for study could barely be described as a social smoker; in fact, he was the son of a judge in a neighboring county.

The unfortunate student would get off lightly, but the bust was the end of the farmhouse, as far as the Skull House was concerned. The Skulls had been careful to be sure that the house was rented in the names of several individual students, and not the fraternity, but the college administrators weren’t stupid, and holding onto the farm could jeopardize the fraternity’s existence on campus.

Ted, meanwhile, continued to do business, and although the narcs could not catch him, something else would: a bullet in the abdomen. In a drug deal gone bad, Ted was shot through his side, the bullet somehow missing vital organs.

To our amazement, Ted was able to march with us at graduation. It wasn’t his physical condition that surprised us, but his academic achievement. Ted’s grade-point average was even lower than mine, and he had hardly attended any of his classes the whole semester. We imagined that the college, faced with having to deal with him for yet another semester, decided it was best he be graduated and be done with forever.

Whatever became of the farmhouse and the characters who frequented it in those years? There’s both mystery and tragedy in that answer, which you’ll have to read about tomorrow.

Today's gripe

It's annoying enough to witness drivers completely ignoring the rules of the road; it's disturbing when those drivers are the ones who are supposed to be enforcing those rules, or at least setting a good example.

Case in point: the County Sheriff's patrol car today that I had to brake for as the driver rolled through a stop and pulled in front of me, then failed to use his turn signal at the next intersection.

The Farmhouse, Part 11

As we progressed through our junior year, Chas and I noticed how our pledge brother, Ted, had veered away from us. Chas and I were derelict goofs; how else would you describe people who arranged their class schedules so as to be free at 11:30 a.m., when the reruns of “Bewitched” were aired daily? Sure, maybe we would drink a pony bottle or two of Rolling Rock while watching the program, but at least we weren’t constantly high, like Ted, who was rumored to be supplying half the campus with marijuana and who knows what else.

At the end of the second semester, Ted took off for Arizona, returning a month later on a Harley chopper. He moved into the farmhouse, where Maher was already living. Poor Maher didn’t have enough money to return to Lebanon or enough desperation to stay with Uncle Beirut in Detroit.

Unbeknown to his fraternity brothers, Ted started cultivating pot at the farm. I suspected as much when I stopped at the farmhouse in September and found a colander smeared green in the dry sink on the back porch. We also suspected that Ted had himself moved onto far more dangerous drugs. He had become alarmingly thin and was almost never comprehensible.

We knew he was headed for a crash, and we felt helpless to do anything about it.

You asked for it

Over the past three years, some of you have suggested that we publish some of my serialized stories in book form. "I'd buy it," some of you wrote. Well, here's your chance.

If you haven't noticed the ad at the upper right of this page, take a look. You can order "Enter, With Torches" online, and it's cheap, comparatively. I've given the stories a slightly different treatment, added a few things and a whole lot more photos.

This book is for you, loyal followers of the G.O.E., but not for you alone. It's also for this newspaper, the Observer-Reporter, which could use a little help right now. As you well know, newspapers are going through some pretty tough times, and this newspaper is not immune. In the past couple of weeks, I've lost 7 valuable professional employees from the news department to retirement and layoffs.

The O-R, like everyone else, has to find new ways to make money so it can continue to employ us. This is one of them. I won't make a cent from this book, but hopefully, the good company that has employed me these past 36 years will. This may sound corny and sentimental, but I owe an awful lot to the company that has paid me regularly all these years and given me the opportunity to express myself, in print and online, and expose it to the consequences of my opinions.

So, criminy! Buy the book, and when it's sent to you in April, turn off your computer for a while and read it. And while you're at it, buy another for a friend.

The Farmhouse, Part 10

If you read “How to Break an Ankle” on this blog last year, then you might recall my friend Richard. He was the guy from my hometown outside New York who shared my apartment during the summer of 1969, attending summer school and annoying all the neighbors on North Avenue with his melancholic, feedback-punctuated electric guitar solos blasting through open windows.

Richard had been in a deep, self-destructive funk since breaking up with his longtime girlfriend and was in the habit of medicating himself with gin and whatever drugs he could get his hands on. We tried to keep a close watch on him, because his behavior seemed suicidal.

Richard and I took our amplifiers, guitar and bass to the farmhouse for the party in July, and that night forced the others to endure our renditions of the Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” and “All Along the Watchtower.” The music was loud and not good, and the reception cold, which made Richard even more depressed and surly. By the time the thunderstorm struck, we had quit playing. The lights flickered and went out for a while, and we lighted the house with candles. Then someone asked where Richard had gone.

Not finding him inside the house, I walked around it, dodging the large, stinging raindrops. No cars had left the driveway, so I figured that the only place he could be was in the barn. As I headed there, lightning flashed, and in the blue-white strobe I saw him ascending the ladder of the silo.
I screamed for him to get down, that there was lightning, that he’d be killed, but he ignored me. The rain came slashing in the gusty wind, and after each crack of thunder I heard his crazy laugh. I saw him through the splatter of the storm, standing at the top of the ladder, head thrown back. “This is just like ‘Night on Bald Mountain’!” he yelled. (The Mussorgsky composition was his favorite classical piece. He liked to smoke hashish and listen to it over and over again, for hours.)
Frantic and sure that he would be electrocuted, I ran back to the house (“Maybe he’ll listen to someone else,” I said,) and then back to the silo with a few others. “Richard, please!” we hollered over and over again, before giving up and retreating. There was nothing we could do.

When the storm subsided, we heard him come in the back door, whistling and humming and acting annoyingly normal. I remember his profile in the living-room doorway, arms akimbo, water dripping from his elbows, the lighted kitchen behind him.
He could not see us glowering in the dark.

Edgar Sawtelle

Seldom have I felt cheated at reaching the end of a long novel, and David Wroblewski’s “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” is long. Too long.

Early in the reading, I snuggled into this book and felt comforted by the author’s poetic phrasing and graceful storytelling. I can’t recall another work in which the characters of dogs were so well developed, or in which the thought processes of dogs were so well drawn and explained.

Unfortunately, the human characters in this novel are much weaker, their behavior most often incomprehensible. Midway through the book, the author seems to wander off, just as his title character does. The wandering goes on for more than 100 pages before descending into melodrama and a hyperbolic climax that is too disappointing to be even laughable.

This might have been a great little book had the writer spared us his attempt at a 20th-century Hamlet and what he must have figured were the obligatory tornadoes, fires, ghosts and murders. The Wisconsin farm, and all of its beauty, life, love and heartache, would have been enough.

The Farmhouse, Part 9

Washington & Jefferson College was still all-male in 1969, and so we had to import women for party weekends. The Skull House seniors had, well, seniority, and thus first dibs on the bedrooms of the farmhouse, so Warren and Abbas and their classmates bedded their dates there and pretty much monopolized the place. Once they graduated that May, the farmhouse became more accessible to the rest of us, especially those of us compelled to attend the summer session.

No one had farmed the land for years, and so the hillside fields had grown up with berries, poke berry, wild rose and sumac that began to hide the farmhouse from the road far below. No other house was even visible from the top of the driveway; we could make as much noise as we wished, and no neighbors could hear us.

It was a perfect place for parties. One blistering July afternoon, we drank and sprawled on blankets in the yard, speakers set in bedroom windows blaring the Rolling Stones. A dozen of us piled into and atop a Jeep wagon for a jaunt through the more open fields across the road. Plowing a sea of waist-high grass at the edge of a shallow ravine, the Jeep’s right front wheel dropped into a hole. Riding on the roof, I felt the radio antenna whip down my face and my chest as I and another person flew into space and down into the ravine. Uninjured because of our relaxed state of inebriation, we lay there laughing, looking up at the vehicle so ridiculously posed with its left rear wheel lifted like a dog’s hind leg at a fire hydrant. Had the Jeep not come to an abrupt stop but had instead rolled into the ravine, we would have been crushed to death. This did not occur to us at the time. Years later, we would shake our heads and wonder at the vastness of our stupidity.

That particular hot day would end in a typical July thunderstorm, and with someone else tempting Death in an even more bizarre and stupid manner.

Today's gripe

I've often complained about the parking meters here in Washington. Don't let me do that again. This past weekend, we were in Philadelphia, where the predatory meter people patrol seven days a week, until 8 p.m. You get all of 7 and a half minutes for a quarter in Philadelphia meters. So, if you're planning on visiting the Old City and maybe having lunch, be prepared with a roll of quarters, because you'll need 24 of them for three hours!

Questions and comments

Q: My great grandfather had a long career in the newspaper industry. In his obit the final sentence reads: "It is with genuine appreciation of his early effort and his long career in the profession that the local newspaper fraternity writes “30” after the name of Samuel Longood." Could you please tell me the significance of the term “30” in the newspaper industry? - A.L.

A: Back when I started newspaper work in 1971, all articles were written on typewriters. I was told to end stories with " -30- ." It signaled that it was the end of the story and there were no other pages. No one could tell me why we used -30- then, and no one can tell you why now. Nobody knows for sure. But here's a link to an article from the American Journalism Review that will help you.

The Farmhouse, Part 8

Late in April 1969, as we approached the end of the semester and final exams, I became desperate about my coursework and felt a need for long hours of uninterrupted study. It was impossible to do this in the Skull House, with another class of pledges running likes hounds through the halls, day and night.
They were an odd mix young men: the Kahuna, Big Bob, Little Bob, Maher and Izzy, to name a few. Maher Abugazzaleh was a Palestinian who received “Care packages” containing the most bizarre pornography from a relative in Detroit known as Uncle Beirut. “What sort of woman would have sex with a pig?” Chas often asked, his lips twisted in disgust. Strangely enough, Maher became close friends with his pledge brother Izzy, the chain-smoking, gravel-voiced Jew. Despite their animated arguments about Middle East politics, they would eventually become roommates.

At any rate, the Skull House was no place to study, and the college library was not much better for a student like me, who saw it as a place filled with tens of thousands of distractions, all lined up neatly on shelves. And so I packed my books, a toothbrush and a change of clothes and headed for the farmhouse.

The house was cold and the lighting – from bare ceiling bulbs – was stark, but there was little to distract me, once I had poured a bowl of milk for the cat that one of the brothers had adopted. Sometimes, no one showed up at the farmhouse to feed it for days. But the mice were plentiful.

I pored over my botany and Spanish texts and my copy of James Joyce’s “The Dubliners” while the house rocked and creaked in the spring gales. Noises, like the banging of a loose door on the barn, kept distracting me. An intermittent rain splattered drops on the siding that I mistook for gravel crunching under tires, sending me anxiously to the window several times.

The farmhouse had little personality; it held no evidence of the humans who had occupied it for perhaps a century other than the few jars of canned fruit in the cellar. I walked with a cup of coffee through all the rooms, reassuring myself of my solitude but feeling no sense of the eerie. Edgy I might have been, but not because of shadows and spirits within the house. I was more fearful of the forces outside – the weather, and the murdering thieves that might be attracted by my burning lamps shining from the distant hill.

When my eyes grew heavy, I turned out the lights and curled under a blanket on the couch. No sooner had I dropped off than I woke with fur on my lips. The cat had curled around my face for the warmth of my breath. I threw it to the carpet, but time after time, it returned to sit on my neck and purr, only to be hurled again.
I did not banish the cat to the cellar, though. Too tired to rise and too unwilling to listen to its pathetic cries all night, I let it stay. Better to battle the cat, I thought, than to fall into nightmares of murdering thieves.

The Farmhouse, Part 7

Hustled from the farmhouse in the dark of night, our captors drove us back to town. “God, do you pledges stink!” they kept saying. We hadn’t showered in a week. We still had the odor of smoked oysters about us.
We entered the new fraternity house in the quad like skittish, beaten dogs and were ordered to strip. Then we were led, naked and blindfolded through “stations” in the house, where brothers, some of them drunk, some of them intoxicated with the opportunity for sadism, conducted exercises vaguely intended to instill in us trust for our soon-to-be brothers.

Some of these exercises were disgusting, but harmless. Take, for instance, the brick drop. We were ordered to stand on a chair and then handed a string and told to tie it to a certain part of our anatomy. Then we were handed a brick – a rather large and heavy one – and told to lift it upward. As we lifted the brick, it was apparent to us – blindfolded as we were – that the string attached to our anatomical part was also tied to the brick. Then they ordered us to drop the brick.

You can just imagine how fearful we were and how detached from reason were our brains, having been deprived of sleep and nourishment for so long. We dropped the bricks, which thudded to the floor, unaccompanied by any part of our anatomy. We gasped; they laughed.

At one station, we lay on our bellies on the floor and were told not to move. If we moved, we would be beaten. WHACK! A rolled-up magazine struck my back. Chas and Ted must have flinched at the noise. WHACK, WHACK! And then we were pummeled from head to foot. When we left that station, we probably looked as if we had fallen asleep while sunbathing in the nude.

Eventually, it was over, and we were inducted and endowed with all the secret, spooky information of the Skull House, and welcomed as brothers by our tormentors.
I suppose that we were meant now to feel a special bond with these people, one as strong as family, having endured so much. As I stumbled up the stairs toward my room and awaiting bed, I felt relief, but also bitterness and resentment.

We would never again respect those members that had taken such glee in our suffering. We could not see who was beating us with magazines, but we knew them by their voices, and their behavior would not bring them closer to us but rather create a distance that would last forever. Chas and Ted and I vowed that no one in our house should ever be subjected to that kind of hazing again.

And they were not, although we can’t claim all the credit for that.

The Farmhouse, Part 6

In order to keep us alive enough to move furniture, scrub pots and detail their cars, the brothers fed us soup. If we performed our tasks well enough, they promised to even heat it for us. The younger brothers, especially the ones who had pledged immediately before us, were the cruelest and most sadistic. But they supervised us in shifts, and sometimes we were left in the care of older, mellower members.

Warren and Abbas were seniors and the oddest and most unlikely roommates. Their night with us was a respite from hell.
Warren, blond and balding, possessed the enthusiasm and outlook of a cruise-ship activity director. A cheerleader and font of optimism, Warren dressed for fraternity parties as if he were headed to a picnic at the beach – T-shirts, flip-flops and those really tight, small bathing trunks they wore in the 1950s.
Abbas came from a wealthy family in Iran, then ruled by the Shah. He had been educated in proper English boarding schools and spoke with a patrician British accent. He dressed impeccably and as if he were a member of the royal family. He enjoyed fast cars and the company of fast women and was similar to Warren only in his sweet and affable nature.

Warren and Abbas amused themselves by quizzing us in the Greek alphabet and fraternity facts and trivia. Correct answers earned us bits of food and hours of uninterrupted sleep. We had been reduced to dog-like behavior. We would never forget their relative kindness to us.

When the shift changed, the hell resumed. One night, we were given smoked oysters for supper, but we had to place them in our underwear and do calisthenics before we were allowed to eat them.

Time was blurred. We seemed never to be more than semi-conscious. I became alarmed one day when I discovered that my urine had turned dark brown.
“This is such crap!” we muttered among ourselves and considered walking out of the farmhouse and out of fraternity life forever. But the fear of being labeled as cowards kept us there, along with the fact that we had been kidnapped and were being held captive. But we could have quit at any time, and we were taunted with this often.
On about the seventh day, I found myself telling the Pledge Master an outrageous lie: that I suffered from epilepsy and without my medication, more sleep or food, I was likely to experience seizures. I did not have epilepsy, and even as I spoke I wondered how this ridiculous lie could be tumbling from my lips.
The Pledge Master told me to quit the bullshit and get back to work. He could not tell me what I needed to hear – that Hell Night, the conclusion of our ordeal, was just a few hours away.

Comments and questions

C: I subscribe to the OR & the Post-Gazette. I also daily look through the OR On-line. I also look at/read 12) a dozen - or more papers on line. ie the NY Times, Chicago Times, Phoenix, and also papers in San Diego. LA, the Navaho-Hopi Nation, Wheeling, WV, and many others. Is it fair that I read these papers on line for FREE ?, given the expenses of these organizations? Surely not!!! I've been doing it for a long time for FREE. But know what? I think it's just wrong, I should be paying..."something." Somehow, you guys must establish a cost for all of this wonderful on line information that is available to ME..for FREE. The future..in whatever form...cannot be free!!!!! You and your industry must establish a billing system and a cost. Hey, maybe it's only 5 cents or 10 cents a day.It should be a daily charge, not how many I times I look at the site each day. But you newspaper guys/editors/owners...must get it done. NOW is of the ESSENCE! - J.A.

A: Charging for content online does not work at the moment - few people seem willing to pay for news online. We do get income from our online edition in the form of advertising, which is based on traffic; the higher the traffic, the more we can charge for advertising. If we made you pay for the content, the traffic would fall off dramatically, and with it the ad revenue.
But that does not mean that our content is not valuable, and that you won't ever pay for it. When we, as an industry, can come up with an easy way for people to pay for our content - like the micropayments your describe - we will have a much better chance for survival.

The Farmhouse, Part 5

A late-January thaw had melted much of the snow; what was left lay on the hillside and fields in an icy crust after the weather turned frigid again. We marched from the farmhouse toward the woods beyond the barn, each step slow and difficult as our feet broke through the crust.

Time after time, we gathered armloads of firewood and carried them back to the house, then returned to the woods, scooping up snow an ice along the way to melt in our mouths. Our fingers and toes hardened and numbed. “Faster, you worthless peons!” came the cry.

In the fading light of afternoon, we carried wood from the road up the deeply rutted red-dog driveway, several hundred yards to the farmhouse on the hill. When the piles were finally moved, they marched us – hungry, exhausted, frozen and dehydrated – back to the house. Visions of Clark bars and Three Musketeers danced in our heads.
Kicking off our boots on the back porch, our Pledge Master appeared in the kitchen doorway, munching on one of our secret candy bars.
“Thought you could pull a fast one on us, huh?” he said, showing us a trash can filled with the rest of our hidings. “We found everything that the mice didn’t get to first. For your deceit, no supper for you tonight!”
And just for good measure, he led us in another long session of calisthenics, before banishing us to the cellar.

Next morning, our tormentors slept late. We found a candy bar that had escaped their search, but it had done little to relieve our hunger. Bright sunlight streamed in through the high, dusty cellar windows and splashed upon cobweb-covered shelves. Jewels of reflected sunlight caught my eye. On one shelf I found broken glass and three or four Ball jars and rusty lids, and behind them three or four full jars of canned fruit.
“How long do you think these have been here?“ I whispered.
“Who cares? Open them!” Chas answered.
“If the seals have broken, the botulism could kill us,” Ted opined.

Hunger overruled judgment. We chose the jar with the most recognizable fruit, wiped the dust from it and screwed off the ring. The flat cap was stuck, so Chas worked on it with the claw of a hammer. The rim of the jar cracked when the cap came off. I scooped the broken glass from the thick syrup and we fished out the sweet, soft, yellow apricots with our fingers and devoured them.
The fruit did not kill us, but in the coming days we wondered if the brothers would.

The Farmhouse, Part 4

Our hell week began with the traditional “pledge meal,” supposedly intended to fortify us for the tough week ahead. We walked a gantlet of brothers screaming in our ears things like, “You are the lowest bottom-feeding suckers of slime!” and “You are the dingleberries in the hairy crack of ignorance!” Entering the party room of the new fraternity house, where our dinner was to be served, we were first led in an especially long session of calisthenics, during which we were pelted with eggs and gobs of mustard. Insults continued to be shouted above the blaring rock music.

At last, they seated us at a table. We were each given a large raw onion and told to eat it as we would an apple. When we had finished that “salad course,” our “entrée” arrived. Cans of Alpo dog food were emptied into bowls and then smothered in a gravy of Pepto Bismal.
The room rocked with uproarious laughter each time one of us, pale and splattered in bright yellow, gagged and then vomited in the waste cans placed beside us for that purpose.

When they had tired of this amusement, the brothers threw us into ice-cold showers. After we dressed in dry clothes, we underwent another hellish exercise session before being hustled into a car and driven to the farm. While our masters drank and warmed themselves by the fireplace that evening, we scrubbed the filthy wooden floors, over and over again. Eventually, we were allowed to sleep – on the floor – but were wakened every hour to perform more push-ups and jumping jacks.
When dawn arrived, I felt a sense of satisfaction that we had made it through the first night, and perhaps the worst of it. We feasted on bowls of dry cereal and then the Pledge Master told us to prepare ourselves, because the “hell” of hell week was about to begin.

The Farmhouse, Part 3

My pledge brothers and I grew close in our semester-long ordeal. Ted, who lived down the hall from me during our freshman year, had come to W&J with the intention of going on to medical school. At first, he was a serious student who spent most of his time at the library or in his room. He wore neat slacks and V-neck cashmere sweaters and listened to Johnny Mathias records. By the end of the year, however, he had changed. I think marijuana had a lot to do with that. And by the fall of 1968, his hair was long and stringy, his eyes bleary, and he was always saying, “Far out, man.”

Chas was gregarious and never in a bad mood. His laugh was infectious. A combination of natural athletic talent and the privileges of being raised in a well-to-do New England family and attending the best schools made him an excellent skier, swimmer and sailor, none of which he took seriously. Like me, he did not take his studies seriously enough. He disdained pretentiousness and embraced the proletariat. When a front tooth went bad, he replaced it with a silver one because it was cheaper than gold or a false white one and just as functional. Rather than buy a new belt when his only one broke, he held up us pants with a length or rope or an old extension cord.

From what we had heard, the worst things about hell week were the deprivations of sleep and food. We couldn’t prepare much for lack of sleep, but food was another story. One night during finals, when all members of the fraternity were holding their monthly meeting, we were excused to go to the library but instead drove to the farmhouse. The doors were locked, but standing on Chas' shoulders, Ted was able to open and climb into a window. We raced through the house, hiding candy bars, bags of nuts and pepperoni sticks in the corners of closets, under sinks, in the floor joists in the basement ceiling, in flower pots and taped behind the headboards of beds.
We felt good. We knew that we might be tortured, but we would not starve.

How were we to know that every pledge class before us had tried the same trick?

The Farmhouse, Part 2

My miserable academic performance as a freshman prevented me from joining a fraternity until the fall of 1968, my sophomore year. When you are asked to join a fraternity, you become a pledge and are subjected to humiliating servitude at the hands of the membership for an entire semester in order to prove your worthiness to become a brother. At the end of the semester, pledges undergo “hell week,” which may or may not include sadistic torture, after which the survivors are inducted and immediately take on the role of sadistic torturers of the next pledge class.

I and two of my classmates whose academic performance was equally miserable comprised the pledge class of the fraternity known informally as the Skull House in the fall of 1968. The name came from the skull and crossbones of the fraternity’s insignia.

Previously, pledges did not live in the fraternity house until they became members, which meant that they could occasionally escape persecution in the confines of their own dormitory. But we three moved into the new fraternity house right along with our masters and were thus enslaved continuously.
For the brothers, pledges were the people who shined your shoes, ran your errands, cleaned up your messes, and amused you by doing push-ups and jumping jacks every time you ordered them to.
“Pledge!” one of the brothers would yell.
“Yes Sir?”
“When my alarm rings every morning, I want you to come to my room and tell me if the surf is up or if it is calm before I open my eyes.”
“But Sir, there is no surf in Washington, Pa.”
“That’s not my problem, pledge!”
That sort of nonsense went on all the time.

In those days at W&J, final exams for the first semester occurred after Christmas vacation, and then there was a week-long break in the end of January before the second semester began. We pledges were told that our hell week would take place during the semester break, and that we would be undergoing most of it at the farmhouse.

We had heard horror stories about hell week and dreaded its arrival. At the same time, we were anxious for our servitude as pledges to be over and done with. In our elevated state of anxiety, we made preparations for the tribulations that awaited us. We knew there were things we could do to make our hell week less grueling, but doing them would mean a daring and dangerous break-in of the Skull House’s sacred hideaway.

The Farmhouse, Part 1

Fraternity life, as several generations of Washington & Jefferson College students knew it, came to an end in the fall of 1968. That’s when 10 of the 11 fraternities were compelled to give up their off-campus houses and move into the 10 identical buildings constructed by the college in the area between Beau and Wheeling streets. Phi Gamma Delta, the only exception, was already housed in a building on campus.
More than half of W&J’s students were members of fraternities at the time, and many of them had lived in and taken their meals in old Victorian houses scattered around town. By design, the fraternities lost much of their independence with the move.

The college had good reasons to gather the fraternities onto campus. Neighbors of the frat houses complained about loud music, juvenile behavior and raucous parties, and the houses, outside the jurisdiction of the college, were poorly maintained and fire traps.

Some would say the new structures resembled artillery bunkers. Each was equipped with a kitchen, party and living rooms, and an apartment for a house mother. The houses were grouped so tightly that it was possible to throw, say, a water balloon, from the window of a room in one house through the window of a room in a neighboring house.
The new facilities were clean, functional and convenient, but fraternity members accustomed to hiring their own cooks and regulating their own premises bristled at the new and sterile arrangement. They felt as if the personality and identity of their brotherhood had been stolen, and that they were now under the constant watch of campus security.

The disgruntled seniors in one of the fraternities concocted a remedy for the situation: a home away from home. They brought before their membership a proposal to rent a farmhouse about 15 miles from Washington. The house could be used by the brothers to escape the pressures of campus life and as a refuge for study. It was also argued that such a remote retreat, away from the scrutiny of the dean, would be ideal for conducting initiation activities. It would also be a great place to party and to shack up with girlfriends.

And so, that December, an old farm high on a hill, long vacant and just beginning to give in to the beatings of the elements, received new life.

A new story

My friends from college like to joke that they would love to reminisce about the old days at W&J if only they could remember them. It is true that I have lots of blank spaces in my memory of 1967-1971, but a few recollections remain. Some of them have to do with fraternity life.

In the late 1960s, Washington & Jefferson College was all male and the majority of students belonged to fraternities. The situation is entirely different now, and maybe that's not such a bad thing. Despite the associations with partying and hijinks, fraternity life had a dark side.

When the college moved all fraternities into new and identical buildings on campus, mine found a way around the new restrictions by renting a retreat in the country - an old farm near Marianna. It was necessarily a secret place. It's time to tell some of those secrets.

As with all of the stories, this one is true, although my memory is hardly perfect, some of the names have been changed, and although I know how this one begins, I do not know how or when it will end.
We'll call this one "The Farmhouse." It begins tomorrow.

Count your blessings

Some of you around Washington may remember Misha Zelenchukov, the Russian journalist who has visited here several times as a guest of this newspaper and of Jon and Kathy Stevens. Misha started his journalism career as a police reporter for our sister newspaper in Siberia, the Kuznetsk Worker. He then moved on to television but lost his job a couple of years ago. He's now working as a security guard at a furniture factory. No longer able to afford his apartment in Novokuznetsk, he's now living in a village outside the city, in a house with no running water and heated by a coal stove.

Misha wrote to the Stevens recently and wondered how they were faring in this harsh winter and trying economic conditions. There's something to learn from the comparisons. A few excerpts from from Misha's letter:

"Such cold (minus 42 F) was last week in my region. Each day I must go beside the small shed, where I store the reserves of coal, and bring the minimum of three buckets of coal to the house..."
After running out of coal in January, he purchased 2.5 tons for $150 U.S.
"This is expensive sum for me. To me they again detain wage. I did not obtain wages for three weeks of November and entire December...
"To have a house in the village - this is much work each day. I must clean snow, pump cold water from column (well), drop snow based on the roof... I do not buy firewood. I guard furniture factory and I take wooden withdrawals from the garbage. Large problem - to attend toilet during the terrible frost. Toilet - this is small house in the vegetable garden, it has thin walls and does not have heat inside. Cold makes my visits to the toilet short and rapid...
"There was last week terrible cold... water in the pump froze and for several days I could not pump water..."

"If you please, report to me about the weather and economic situation in your city."

Language, please

Try as I might, I've never been able to become fluent in another language. But I keep trying.

I've been working at Russian for almost 15 years and still can hardly speak it, so you'd think I'd give up by now, but I can't seem to quit. My bathroom reading is exclusively Russian, and this month it's short stories by Chekov.

The great thing about reading literature in another language is that you can sometimes experience a different perspective on the human existence. Our view of the world – our experience in it – is limited by the language with which we can express that experience. Reading in an another language can reveal interpretations of our world rooted in very different and ancient cultures.

Take this morning, for instance. I stumbled on a word: gori. In the context of the sentence, it meant "sorrows," but I stumbled because there are so many words in Russian with the same root: gor. There are gora (mountain), gorets (to burn), gorlo (throat) and gorky (bitter), and gorney (heavenly), just to name a few. The interesting part is when you begin to see a relationship among some of these words.

Connect the words and you see mountains reaching up toward heaven, and streams flowing from those mountains like tears of grief. Goryouchiye sleozi means "scalding tears."

We look at mountains and see majesty and strength and challenge, because our language, our culture and heritage have always described them in this way.

Reading in other languages is indeed a mind-expanding exercise.

Today's gripe

My doctor has a sense of humor. I go to see him every year or two, just to make sure I'm not at Death's door, or to complain about my aching back, and he always asks, "What the hell are you doing here?" Then he looks at my chart and has himself a good laugh.

"You first came to me with a back problem in 1980," he said with a chuckle earlier this week. "And you had an MRI in 1988 – you must have been the first person on the East Coast to have one. "And now you're back here already complaining that it still hurts. Maybe you should give it some time."
Hardy har har.

So, he sends me for an x-ray and another MRI. He called me yesterday with the results.
"I've got good news for you and bad news," he said, trying to keep a straight face, I'm sure.
"The good news is that you're not going to die from this. The bad news is that you're going to be miserable until you do."
Yuk yuk yuk.
He said I should learn to live with the pain and avoid surgery, at least for now.
"Hey, this will give you something to be grumpy about," he suggested.
Ho ho ho.

Weird history

For many years, I have relied upon Earle Forrest's files when doing historical research. Forrest worked at this newspaper from 1920 to 1962, all the while meticulously clipping stories and putting them in manila envelopes. Four filing cabinets are filled with many hundreds of these envelopes, organized alphabetically by subject. Forrest was a tireless chronicler of local history and that of the Old West, and his files are a treasure.

All you need to do to find something interesting is to open a drawer, reach in and pull out an envelope at random, as I did yesterday. Neatly typewritten in the left hand corner of the envelope was, "Flying Saucers Found in Washington County."
The caption under the above photo that appeared in The Reporter on April 17, 1950, read: "Shown above is a peculiar, many-sided kite-like object found early Saturday near Donaldson Crossroads. The object, which has alternating sides covered with a reflecting silver coat, spins in the air and dangles a small flashlight below so that the light will be reflected. It was found in the rear yard of a home owned by George Sepelak. Shown holding the object are Arthur B. Day, Strabane, and Mrs. Sepelak."

The headline on the article accompanying the photo read, "Flying Saucer Kite Lands In This County." How the reporter and editor of this newspaper suspected that the object might be from outer space is mystifying, given that it was adorned with a U.S. Army Signal Corps number, other numbers and initials written in pencil, a two-cell battery and a bulb.

Whine, whine, whine

C: I think your paper is a sham. The only people that buy, I repeat *BUY* your newspaper are busybodies that are less concerned about the news in whole and more worried about who’s doing what to who so they can gossip on Sunday to the other busybodies. People that are not savvy with technology and cannot read all the *CURRENT* local, worldwide news on the internet or have it text messaged to their cell phones. Your paper is nostalgia and nothing else. You should run a whole paper dedicated to only statewide police reports and court hearings. Your paper has mostly copied AP reports from yesterday’s aired news that is outdated and boring at best. I think even the current busybodies know that your organization is a poorly run, lazily operated any how. When was the last time that your paper reported something prior to a police reporting or hand feed information? Where are the investigative reporters of the past in your organization? I could do your job very, very easily. - T.

A: Perhaps you should consider reading newspapers on a regular basis. Doing so might make you literate and able to more effectively communicate in the English language.

Student Teacher, Part 14

In June, Alice and I packed our things into a U-Haul truck and, towing the Pontiac, moved to Florida. We found a nice house to rent in Lighthouse Point, with a catch: We had to move out and into my parents' house every time the owner came from New York on vacation.

Alice found work as a fashion artist in Miami, but I had no such luck. I interviewed for a teaching position in Dade County, but the interviewer cut me short. They were looking for chemistry and math teachers. "No offense intended, " she told me, "but you English teachers are a dime a dozen."

I applied for all kinds of jobs, at theaters, furniture stores, warehouses. I answered an ad for a clerk in a liquor store. The manager asked me about my draft status, as all of them did, and I told him I was 1-A. "Look, kid, I want to hire someone who's going to be around next week."

In the fall, when the bill to renew the military draft was stalled in Congress, I found a part-time job in the circulation department of the Fort Lauderdale News. From there, I jumped to the Sun-Sentinel as a copy boy, and then became an intern reporter. But I was all the while thinking about teaching. In June, I went north for an interview at a school in Frederick, Md., and another in this area. While here, I stopped in at the Observer-Reporter for an interview as well. Alice and I were tired of Florida and wanted to live somewhere besides someone else's house.

I did not get a teaching job but did take a position as sports writer at this paper. And I never left. Back then, when teachers were always the lowest paid white-collar workers, I figured my financial future was brighter as a journalist. The joke was on me. In mid career, I envied teachers my age who were making far more money and building pensions and planning early retirement. But I never envied their work.

From time to time, opportunities arise for me to stand in front of a classroom full of kids. I have taught Junior Achievement classes in economics, instructed elementary students in Russian language and culture at Citizens Library, and I've enjoyed talking about journalism to classes of middle and high school students in many area districts. It's great when you can jump in and teach for a couple of hours and then go back to doing something much less demanding, like editing a newspaper.

I do not regret the course I took, because I doubt that I would have had the strength to face a classroom of kids every day. Thanks to those who can, those good teachers who inspired me, and inspired my children, and continue to do that every day.

THE END

Student Teacher, Part 13

As the term went on, I felt more comfortable with my slow class than with the bright one. And if I could offer more to kids who struggled with academics, maybe I should be teaching ones who had severe problems – those in special education classes. A master's degree in special education seemed like a reasonable goal. But there was a problem: What graduate school would accept me?

My grade-point average was miserable, and my scores on the Graduate Record Exam even worse. I wasn't quite myself the day of the exam. I had been partying Friday night and overslept, waking around 7:45 a.m. Saturday morning. The exam started at 9 a.m., more than 30 miles away at the University of Pittsburgh. I threw on some clothes and jumped in the car and made it to the examination room at 8:55, but I hadn't even brushed my teeth or combed my hair, and I had to stumble through the 4-hour test without so much as a cup of coffee.

Syracuse University was the first to reject me, quickly and tersely. In the end, only the University of Idaho was willing. Apparently so desperate for grad students, they never even asked for my GREs or my transcript. But Moscow, Idaho, seemed so far way, not just from Washington, Pa., but from all of civilization.

May had arrived, and I would soon leave my classes to Miss Tygart to finish out the year. Maybe she could coax some effort from these seniors sliding through spring. "Can you stay a little longer?" some of the kids asked. "Why?" I asked. "Just to watch you blow off your assignments and sleep through class? I'm graduating. I'm otta here."

But I still had no idea what to do. Inquiring about teaching positions at another local district, I was told not to bother to apply unless I could coach a sport. The only sports I had been any good at were hockey and lacrosse, and although they are popular now, no school in this area had one of those teams in 1971.

Some of my students did not deserve to pass, but I was pretty sure they would. A bunch of losers graduated that spring, and I was the first of them.

Whine, whine, whine

C: EXCUSE ME!! January 20th was a monumental day in our country's history. Your front page gave a huge spread to a STEELER SHOPPER and a single wide column article to our next president. Obama's inauguration had nothing to do with being Democrat or Republican.--it was all about being an American. I do believe that your priorities should have been re-thought. And yes, I am a Steeler fan! - E.S.

A: The big difference between newspapers and television is that television reports the news live, and newspapers give it to you the next day. The paper you receive on the morning of, say, Jan. 20, was put together on Jan. 19. That's why the inauguration of Obama was reported in today's newspaper, not yesterday's.

We do, of course, publish an online edition, which does report live news, as we did throughout the day yesterday.

Save us from Macbeth

The Associated Press offered this news item today:

BRADENTON, Fla. (AP) - Tragedy nearly struck a group of Florida actors when authorities say a loaded gun was accidentally used during a dress rehearsal...

Hmmm. The actors were so bad that the only way they could stage a tragedy was with real bullets.

Student Teacher, Part 12

For every little success experienced in the classroom, there were two failures. For every pupil inspired, another was alienated, and still another discouraged. Perhaps it was because I was young and still a student, filled with a student's ideas of how things should be taught and learned, and not a grownup experienced in what methods work and which ones don't. At any rate, the kids I could not reach are the ones I remember most often.

Of course, there was Russell Karp. I may have been able to push him to the margins, to reduce his disruptive influence on the class, to tone down his antisocial behavior, but I could not reach or teach him.

A new kid started in my first class in March. Distressingly thin and always looking as if he'd not slept the night before, he spoke in slurred monosyllables, if at all. The seat of his corduroy jeans was flat, almost as if his backside had been surgically removed. No matter what commotion was going on in the classroom, he sat expressionless, staring at a fixed point. On the rare occasions that we had eye contact, I detected no one at home. After his first week at school, I began to suspect drug use. I decided to bring it to the attention of the principal the next time I saw him behaving in a strange manner, but I never saw him again. He was absent one day, then another, and then he was gone, almost as unnoticed as when he arrived.

So many of my students could not be interested, in anything. I remember a girl with brown, straight hair and a pale complexion, plain and ordinary in every way, dressed so as not to be noticed, speechless, emotionless and completely devoid of any self-esteem. Had she looked bored, I might have known where to start, but she looked nothing. I thought she needed extra attention, but when I gave it to her, she seemed mortified.

Toward the end of the term, I asked Miss Tygart what was up with the girl. "Cindy?" she asked, squinting as if to recall her face. "Cindy is 'present.' Perhaps her time will come later in life."
What sort of a life could there be without youth?

Student Teacher, Part 11

Whatever the seniors in my English classes were listening to back in 1971, it wasn't the Beatles. I plugged in the phonograph and held up the White Album. No recognition.
"Certainly, you've heard 'Rocky Raccoon,' " I said.
No comprehension.
Placing the needle on the record, I sat behind my desk and watched them listen.

Now somewhere in the black mountain hills of Dakota
There lived a young boy named Rocky Raccoon
And one day his woman ran off with another guy
Hit young Rocky in the eye Rocky didn't like that
He said I'm gonna get that boy
So one day he walked into town
Booked himself a room in the local saloon.

Rocky Raccoon checked into his room
Only to find Gideon's bible
Rocky had come equipped with a gun
To shoot off the legs of his rival

His rival it seems had broken his dreams
By stealing the girl of his fancy.
Her name was Magil and she called herself Lil
But everyone knew her as Nancy.

Now she and her man who called himself Dan
Were in the next room at the hoe down
Rocky burst in and grinning a grin
He said Danny boy this is a showdown

But Daniel was hot-he drew first and shot
And Rocky collapsed in the corner.

Now the doctor came in stinking of gin
And proceeded to lie on the table
He said Rocky you met your match
And Rocky said, Doc it's only a scratch
And I'll be better I'll be better doc as soon as I am able.

Now Rocky Raccoon he fell back in his room
Only to find Gideon's bible
A Gideon checked out and he left it no doubt
To help with good Rocky's revival.

Smirks. Titters.
"I thought we were supposed to be studying poetry," one of the girls said.
"Shut up, raccoon face!" one of the boys answered.
"All right, settle down!" I shouted. "This is a song, but is it also poetry? If this is a poem, is it a lyric poem or a narrative poem?"

And so they were led through a lesson in poetic construction, using an amusing ditty chock-full of literary devices. Beyond the introductory seven lines, "Rocky Raccoon" falls into the most standard of poetic forms. The rhyme scheme is A,A,B,C,C,B in the quatrains, of which there are five, with two couplets. Aside from a couple of deviations for musical effect, the meter is as rigid as in any Wordsworth effort: alternating dactylic trimeters and tetrameters.

Is "Rocky Raccoon" a good poem? Of course not. But it went down easier than "The Waterfall of the Eglantine." And before long, I had them all writing about their cars and the prom and "Mannix" in iambic pentameter.

Today's gripe

It's getting to be a regular thing...
I come in here at 8:30 a.m., and on the police scanner I hear the dispatcher telling police they've received a call from parents about a teenager who refuses to go to school.

I'm not kidding you. How can this possibly be a police matter?
What's next? I can hear it now:
"Please respond to 123 Maple Street, where a female, age 9, is refusing to eat her lima beans..."

Student Teacher, Part 10

Now about that writing assignment…
You have to understand that this was 1971. The Red Guard had rampaged through China, severing ties to the past and destroying all that was traditional, and a much milder version of that was happening in America. We were the Baby Boomers who stood proudly on our side of the Generation Gap, thumbing our noses at our conformist parents and what they held sacred. They had God, country and family values; we had drugs, free love and communes. They had the classics; we had self-expression.

In my art courses in college, we learned nothing about drawing, or anatomy, or painting and sculpture technique. We were just told to create, and that whatever we expressed was good. We did learn silkscreen printing, however, which came in handy for printing anti-war posters and clenched fists of T-shirts.

So, maybe you can understand why, instead of instructing my classes to write an analysis of their favorite epic poem, for example, I told them to just express themselves. Write whatever you want, I said, as long as it is original, and three pages, double-spaced.

One girl in my dull class of smart kids had shown enthusiasm and talent for writing, but I was disappointed by her submission. "Mannix" was a popular TV show at the time, and she had written a screenplay for an episode.
"Why couldn't you come up with your own characters, rather than borrowing ones from television?" I asked her after class. "Try to be more imaginative."
She was hurt by the criticism, but not discouraged. "I'm going to Hollywood, and I'm going to write scripts, and this is the way it's done," she said defiantly.
Her script was good, probably just as good as anything else on "Mannix" at the time, and probably way better than some of the stuff churned out for TV today. For all I know, she probably went to Hollywood and made it big.

One of the flirts in the front row of my slow class surprised me. Knowing full well that she could get away with it, she wrote an essay on the etymology and usage, historical and contemporary, of a particular word in the English language, a vulgar Anglo-Saxon epithet… oh, we're all adults here, right? She wrote an essay all about the word fuck.

It's just as well that my adviser, Miss Tygart, never offered to help me read their papers.

Shhhh. Editor asleep

C: I have become aware over the years that little geography is being taught in the schools. I came to that conclusion through simple conversations with students who have no idea of locations within our nation of states, rivers, cities within states, etc.
However - oceans.....now that's a great big old mistake.
The beautiful Hot Shot photo submitted by the Oliverios who, while traveling through New England, took a sightseeing cruise off the coast of Portland, Maine, and saw this fisherman pulling in his catch from the Pacific Ocean. When did they move Maine to the Pacific side, and how come no one told me??? - L.M.

A: Zzzzzz. Huh? Oh, you and your details...

Sometimes, it's hard to get angry over a mistake this outrageously stupid.

Whine, whine, whine

C: You need to expand the business section and have at least a weekly listing of ALL stocks and mutual funds. - G.M.

A: Hey, Rip VanWinkle, wake up! Sometime after you fell asleep, way back in the mid 1990s, we dropped our Sunday stock listings of complete NYSE and mutual-fund transactions. I think I can count the complaints we've received about that on my toes, the reason being that this information is old and useless to almost all investors.
Criminy! Even the Wall Street Journal stopped publishing complete listings.

We do publish daily quotations, including the top 500 NYSE stocks; that's much more than the Post-Gazette does daily. The P-G still published 6 pages of stock agate on Sundays, however, which is a phenomenal waste of newsprint.

In order to survive, newspapers must do what they do best and give up the things – like printed stock transactions – that the Internet does much better. We do offer our readers complete stock and mutual-fund information on our Web site, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Student Teacher, Part 9

Leafing through the 12th-grade English book, and the section on British poetry, my heart sank. The poets represented gave me chills. I moaned their names: Alexander Pope (oh no!); Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Lord, have mercy on us); William Wordsworth (that's him on the right, need I say more?).

Who had compiled this torturous text, anyway? Here was an anthology of the most blithering, boring and incomprehensible poetry ever to come out of quill pens. If my kids had so much trouble with "Great Expectations," how could they stay awake through even six stanzas of William Blake?

Stalling, I gave my classes a writing assignment. I tracked down Miss Tygart and asked her, "Is it OK to supplement the unit on poetry with some additional material?"
"What sort of poetry do you have in mind?" she responded.
"I'm thinking of Dylan Thomas, W.B. Yeats, perhaps some contemporary British poets."
"Well, I suppose that would be acceptable, as long as this material doesn't stray from traditional metric and rhyme schemes."

I had a plan. I came in early every day and kept the mimeograph machine in the teacher's lounge humming. The kids could carry their English textbooks to class, for the sake of appearance, but I'd provide them with all the poetry they'd need to read. And they wouldn't have to read it all; they could listen to it, on a phonograph. The "contemporary British poets" I had in mind did indeed write in rhyme and meter, but their work was not printed in anthologies but rather on vinyl.
I was thinking of The Beatles.

Student Teacher, Part 8

"OK, imagine that all of you in this class are on a school trip, a really big school trip to a place far enough away that you have to fly," I told my kids when we were finally done with "Great Expectations."
"You're flying over the ocean, and something goes wrong and the plane has to crash land on an uninhabited tropical island, and the pilots – the only adults with you – are killed, but all of you survive. No one will be coming to rescue you, because world war has broken out. It's just you kids, no one else, on this island. How do you think it would go?"

The discussion that followed was lively, even raucous, at least in the "slow" class. The smart class was more restrained, less impulsive, more inclined to consider the inconveniences of such a situation.
And then I told them that this was what their next book – "Lord of the Flies," by William Golding – was about, except that all the marooned kids are boys. Then I made them read the first chapter in class.
"It gets even better," I told them before the bell. "I guarantee that you will love reading this book."

They did, for the most part. There is no easier book to force into the heads of teenagers than "Lord of the Flies," especially if you can get them to recognize the similarities between what is happening on the island and what is happening in their school, and maybe even in their country.
Toward the end of the unit, I had Russell Karp leading the class in a chorus of "Kill the pig! Spill his blood!" Hearing this commotion, the principal called me out into the hall and asked me what the hell was going on.

"Lord of the Flies" was fun, and made teaching seem not so bad after all. But the next and final unit of the year seemed sure to throw my internship into reverse: British poetry.

Student Teacher, Part 7

Russell Karp knew better than to swear, or to get physical. He wasn't stupid. Had he been determined, a rebel with a cause, it would have been one thing, but the boy had no ambition or motivation other than the pleasure of watching his classmates and his teachers – and his student teacher – squirm with anxiety and fear.
It was something about the flush in his cheeks, the depth of his eyes, that betrayed hostility, a seething anger. Yet he often played the class clown.

I rushed my classes through "Great Expectations," intent on getting through with it as quickly as possible regardless of whether the kids had read it or not. Better material lay ahead. And all the time, Russell competed with me for the attention of the class.

As a diversion, I asked my students to do some creative writing. "If you could be doing something else right this minute besides sitting in this classroom listening to me, what would you wish to be doing, and where?" I gave them 15 minutes to write; Russell laid his pen down after five minutes and thumbed through an issue of Hot Rod magazine.
"Who would like to read his or her essay?" I asked.
Russell waved his arm and began to read: "If I could be someplace else this minute, I would be sitting in my car across the street from this school, watching this place burn to the ground."

Every night, I would complain to my wife about Mr. Trouble, and in the teacher's lounge I quietly sought advice. The football coach, who also taught driver's ed, was always there during my free period. He listened to my griping with knowing nods and shrugs of his shoulders. "Ignore him," he said.
"Ignore him?"
"Just ignore the bastard," Coach insisted. He wants your attention, so don't give it to him until he behaves."

I was highly skeptical of this advice but tried it anyway. I pushed Russell Karp to the margins, looked through him and beyond him, made other students the center of attention. His influence on the rest of the class began to fade, and although he was still Trouble, things were better. Eventually, I would be able to turn back to him, give him a different kind of attention, even share a joke. But it was never easy, an I never understood the anger in those eyes.

Student Teacher, Part 6

As my second class flowed in from the hall, I gazed out the window and saw Miss Tygart, bundled in overcoat and head scarf, slowly making her way across the slushy parking lot toward her car. Abandoned, I did my best to look like someone comfortable while in command.

Midway through taking attendance, control began to slip away.
"Karp?" I read from the ledger.
No answer.
"Mr. Karp?" I repeated. "Russell Karp?"
Giggling. Snorting. Heads turning toward the center of the room where sat a tall, muscular boy, with a vicious grin. The previous day, I had assigned him the name Trouble.
"Oh, yeah, here!" he said. "But I'd rather not be!"
Guffaws all around.
The lesson on Chapter 6 began badly and deteriorated from there. These were the not-so-bright kids, and few of them had even read the Cliffs Notes, let alone the book. Writing some of the names of characters on the blackboard, I detected mischief and quickly turned to see some paper missile flying across the room. Feeling desperate, I tried to conjure up some image of teachers from my own schooling who had captured my elusive attention, and an idea occurred to me. These kittens needed to be captivated by a ball on a string. I had to make myself a diversion.

So, when I began to summarize the chapter, necessary because no one had read it, I walked around the room, pausing every so often at someone's desk, perhaps grabbing someone's notebook or one of their books and examining it as I spoke, picking up the waste can and moving it, behaving in a confusing manner inconsistent with front-of-the-room teaching. This, I knew, would only work until the kittens became bored and began chasing and tumbling again, but it got me through to the end of the period.

But what about tomorrow? And the next day? What could I possibly do to get these kids interested in their schoolwork? How could I handle the truly defiant students, like Russell Karp? As it would turn out, getting them interested would be much easier then dealing with Mr. Trouble.

Student Teacher, Part 5

Next day, after taking attendance of the first class – the smart ones – I noticed something missing.
"Has anyone seen Miss Tygart?" I asked, attempting to mask my anxiety.
Scanning the innocent, wondering faces, I detected a few smirks. Someone snorted. A giggle rose and burst like a bathtub bubble.

On my own, I plunged ahead into Chapter 6. Brown-noser and Perfect may have actually read the chapter. Most others had probably just scanned the Cliffs Notes. Most of my questions were answered by deadly silence, punctuated by the metronomic tick of the clock above the blackboard. Toward the end of the period, my patience began to wear thin.
"Look, you're being asked to read only one chapter a night," I said. (Groans. Rolling eyes.) "You people are in for a big surprise when you get to college. Some book like this, you'll have maybe three days to read it." (Contagious yawning.)

The merciful bell rang, and in the clamor for the door I shouted "Chapter 7!" at them in complete futility.

With a free period between my classes, I made my way through the rapids of the crowded hall to the teachers' lounge for coffee and a smoke. I'd hoped to see Miss Tygart there and to get some reassurance that she'd be in my next class, the more unruly of the two, but she wasn't. In fact, for the next three months, I would rarely see her again. Occasionally, I would glimpse her in the teachers' lounge, sitting in a corner away from the smokers, eyes closed, slowly rubbing her temples. She would monitor only a handful of my classes for the rest of the semester.

"She's practicing for retirement," the shop teacher told me with a chuckle one day as we sipped lukewarm coffee from white disposable cups stuffed into brown plastic holders. "She's got one foot out the door."

Student Teacher, Part 4

The din of the high school hallway subsided, the last student in closed the door and melted into her chair, and suddenly I had my first view of a class from the front. A jury of 28 awaited the opening arguments.
This was different than the view from the back, where I sat the previous day watching Miss Tygart conduct the two classes, the first composed of the smartest kids, the second much slower, but both taught at the same speed with the same materials. That first day, I was regarded with furtive glances and giggles from the girls, and totally ignored by the boys. Each time Miss Tygart slowly and painfully swiveled on her good hip and turned to write something on the board, I watched the boys punch one another in their arms or swat each other on the back of the head, and the girls pass notes and sticks of gum.

The view from the back was of behavior; the view from the front was of personality. Taking attendance, I began to learn their names, but I learned much more from eye contact, posture, dress, and demeanor, and in just a few seconds I had most of them pegged. Going down the rows I thought I could capture each personality in a single word: Sneak, Brown-noser, Cheerleader, Bully, Bullied, Slut, Spaceman, Brain, Dreamer, Smoker, Jock, Prude, Trouble, Pet, Lonely, Princess...

On that first day, I felt somewhat protected. When I turned to write on the board, Miss Tygart had my back. "Keep your hands to yourself, William!" she interjected sharply.

I had spent most of the previous night reading the first six chapters of "Great Expectations," so as to stay at least a few pages ahead of the students. But it quickly became obvious that the only people in the room, in either class, who had read Chapter 5 were Miss Tygart and her student teacher.
"So when the convicts are captured, one of them tells the police a lie, that he had stolen the food when Pip had actually brought it to him," I told my class. "Why did the convict lie?"
No response. The mouth-breathers stared at me as if I had been speaking Icelandic.

This was going to be even harder than I thought.

Student Teacher, Part 3

Early in February 1971, driving to the high school for my first day as a student teacher, I worried about a number of things: Was teaching really what I wanted to do with the rest of my life? Did I know enough to teach English literature to kids only four years younger than I? Was Miss Tygart some sort of vixen hungry for a student teacher to seduce? I worried, too, about the cost of commuting in my gas-guzzling Pontiac, which would burn a gallon of fuel to school and another gallon back.

The high school was low and long and made of yellow brick, its windows decorated with faded construction-paper snowflakes. Inside, the foyer smelled of floor wax, mimeograph ink and a slight hint of vomit. One of the secretaries walked me down the hall toward Miss Tygart's homeroom, past closed classroom doors from behind which came the noise of slamming books, barking teachers and the screech of chalk on blackboard. I put my hand on the knob and looked through the window into an unoccupied room save a solitary figure seated in a dark corner, partially obscured by the American flag.

"Excuse me. Miss Tygart?" I inquired.
Startled, the figure reached for a heavy wooden cane and struggling to her feet, stepped out of the shadow with slow, twisted steps, as if one leg was considerably shorter than the other, and with the trace of a grimace clouding her face. She was a diminutive woman with thick glasses and short, wavy hair just beginning to gray. She wore a no-nonsense white blouse and a long woolen skirt that ended between her knees and her corrective brown Oxfords, and no suggestion of jewelry or makeup.
"I'm sorry, I have a free period and I was just resting my eyes," she said in a quiet, formal voice. "Bit of a migraine, I'm afraid."
"Oh, please, sit back down," I offered. "I'll pull up a chair."

We discussed some of the details of my internship, and then I asked her about the coursework.
"We're reading 'Great Expectations' by Charles Dickens now," she explained. "Surely you've read it. The children are a bit unenthusiastic, as usual, but perhaps you'll be able to inspire them better than I."
"Ah, yes, 'Great Expectations,' " I said, as if recalling fond memories of the novel, which I had not read. "I'm a little rusty with that one and will have to reread some of it."
"Oh, I'll lead the discussion today, and you can take over for me tomorrow. You'll have the whole evening to refresh."

Sweat began to form on my back and the palms of my hands. I thought: "Great Expectations" is what, 550 pages? Maybe I should just get up now and run out the door. It's not as if she can catch me.

Complaints and comments

I received a phone message yesterday from a subscriber angered by "front-page photos every day" of weeping Palestinians. Her point was this: Israel is being hit by rockets constantly, and we don't publish photos of weeping Israelis climbing out of the rubble; and if these Palestinians in Gaza are harboring these terrorists, then they deserve what they're getting.

A: First of all, almost all the death and destruction is happening in a small area of Gaza. Sure, rockets are being fired into Israel, but they go all over the place and usually don't hit anything or kill anybody. Yesterday, a house was hit, but no one was injured. It would be pretty difficult for a war photographer to guess where one of these rockets might strike in that they can reach about half of the country. And why would a war photographer be in Israel when all the fighting is in Gaza?

Secondly, there are about 15,000 Hamas militants in Gaza. They've taken over Gaza, and the residents there - 1.5 million of them - have little to say about it. Many of them support other factions in Palestinian politics, and many of them want nothing to do with politics or war at all. Most of them are innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire between Israel and crazy Hamas, fighting a proxy war for Iran.
There is a terrible human cost to war. Sorry, but it's our job to tell that part of the story too.

Student Teacher, Part 2

The requirements for Pennsylvania Teacher Certification were a certain number of specific education courses, most of which I had taken, and a semester of student teaching. I hadn't really considered being certified, but my professor gave me the hard sell. He must have had a quota to fill, or perhaps he did not want to renege on a promise to an area high school. Whatever the reason, he played the Fuller Brush man to my naïve housewife.

"No job can be as satisfying as enriching young minds," he said, scooting his desk chair toward me so that our knees nearly touched. He was still wearing a 1950s haircut and nerdy, metal-rimmed glasses. He never unbuttoned his suit coat, which had chalk dust on the elbows. His face was fixed in a permanent smile.
"You'll find student teaching surprisingly easy, and fun!" he said, grasping my forearm, just to be sure I didn't bolt from the room.
"I don't know, " I hesitated, thinking about being forced to dress like an adult and get a haircut. But I said, "Teaching two classes a day, five days a week sounds like a heavy load, along with all the other courses I have to take here, and my part-time job."
"Oh don't worry about that," he laughed. "You're just assisting your mentor teacher. You'll probably be just observing her most of the time. She'll handle all the paperwork and the testing and the disciplinary problems, if any."
"What sort of disciplinary problems?" I asked.
"Oh nothing serious, of course. These aren't city schools, they're country schools! Kids being late because of farm work, that sort of thing," he lied.
"Well, I really…"
"Great!" the professor said, jumping to his feet. Then it's settled. I'm sure Miss Tygart will be very pleased that you will be assisting her. I'll call her immediately. She's a lovely woman, Miss Tygart," he said with a knowing wink. "I can see that you two are going to get along just fine."
"Yeah, well, you know I'm, like, married," I said in a bit of a huff.
"Ha-ha-ha, well, she isn't!" he exclaimed, as he brushed me out of his office.

Student Teacher, Part 1

We were just kids when we married in the spring of 1970, I being 21 and Alice, only 20. My parents had suggested that we wait until I finished college, but we were too anxious and impulsive to listen to reason.

After our one-night honeymoon at the Pittsburgh Hilton, we moved into an apartment on East Wheeling Street, and on Monday morning, Alice returned to her job as a fashion artist at Horne's department store, and I to my part-time work as a salesman at Reichart's Furniture Warehouse. Our combined weekly gross income was not even $100, and so our housekeeping was based on frugality. Our meals were designed not with taste or nutrition in mind but rather cost. We ate Tater Tots and Mrs. Paul's Fish Sticks a lot, as well as hot dogs and baked beans, tomato soup and crackers, and the very cheapest cuts of meat – fatty pork and "breakfast steaks."

Shortly after classes resumed in September, the angst began to set in. What was I to do come graduation? The Vietnam War raged and the military draft loomed, following me around like a dark cloud above my head. What would I do come May if not the Army? I had some interest in art and the theater, neither of which would pay the grocery bills. Graduate school was a consideration, but my grades through college had been atrocious, and I was sure no decent school would accept me.

Christmas, our first away from our families, was bittersweet; finding a tree and decorating it in our own style, establishing tradition for our own future family, was romantic and energizing; being away from our parents, brothers and sisters on Christmas morning for the first time ended our childhood completely and forever. We roasted what turned out to be a pathetic excuse for a turkey. The money for the turkey the tree and some gifts came from selling my guitar.

When the diversion of Christmastime had passed, it was time again to consider the future. Maybe the war would end, we hoped. Maybe I should think of a career, I gulped.
So in January, I visited the office of one of my professors, who had suggested the benefits of teaching in the public schools. Confronting every day a classroom full of surly, disinterested children was a scary thought, but not nearly as scary as the Viet Cong.

A new story

In the early days of January, 38 years ago, I found myself confronted with making a career choice, deciding what to do for the rest of my life. I hadn't a clue what to do.

Many people my age were thinking about not what was best for themselves, or how much money they could earn, but what good they could do for society. We were under the impression that we were somehow different from our parents, and that we could change the world. We were young and dumb. Some of us never got over being dumb.

At the time, I had no interest in journalism; instead, I chose a more familiar path, through an environment I had trudged the previous 17 years.
Our next story follows that path. As with the previous serials, I have an idea how this one starts and where it ends, but I don't know how long it will take to get there. Because all of this this happened 38 years ago, I can't possibly recall conversations verbatim, but I will do my best to reconstruct them based on what exists in my faulty memory. What happened is real, but names of most characters are changed so as to prevent embarrassment to any of them still walking this Earth.

We'll call this one "Student Teacher."
It starts Monday.