Good evening, 919 Gang. Last night
Dick Daniels wrote beautifully about his 55+ years of knowing the late Jerry Schultz.
JOHN GILMORE writes:
Jack:
I forwarded today’s 919 to Carol Schultz. Her response:
“Just
finished crying over Dick Daniels’ tour de force of his tribute to Jerry. Thank
you and thank him.”
REBER: With Dick’s
permission, I forwarded his post to Jerry’s daughter, Barbara. Her reply:
“I
just want to thank you both for being so wonderful to my family and to the
memory of my father.
“Mr.
Daniels (it’s hard to call you ‘Dick’ even though I’m all grown up 😊), what you wrote about my dad is so moving and touching and
though I cried my brains out while reading, it warmed my heart more than I will
ever be able to put into words.
“Thank
you both for your loving kindness and remembrances of my father.”
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BERNIE HUNT
writes:
Nine
years ago today, I died. Obviously, I got better.
Friends
and followers of my adventures know that, and others can intuit it.
I owe
my Lazarus-like renewed lease on life to the wonders and devotions of American
medical science, which is still among the best in the world – for all its
shortcomings.
Had I
been in Uttar Pradesh or Uzbekistan at the time, or even under the care of the
vaunted Swedish, British or Canadian health-care systems, I might not now be
capable of writing this. Indeed, I probably would be moldering in some forlorn
corner of a foreign field that might have been forever England.
I was lucky enough to be in the California
desert town of Victorville when the Grim Reaper knocked on my door and was
repelled.
I had just finished a speech
to the Victorville Rotary club about work I’d done for Rotary International at
a Botswana orphanage for children of parents who died from AIDS. Witnesses
later told me I turned white, keeled over backwards, and hit my head on a table
as I fell.
Medical
members of the club were on me instantly, divined the situation, and began
pounding my chest with CPR. Meanwhile, a quick-witted waitress ran to seek aid
from the local paramedics' organization, which was holding a training session
in the same hotel.
They were with me immediately,
swapping the helping fists of CPR for the electric-shocks of a defibrillator.
“I
think he’s gone,” one of my Rotary good Samaritans told the
paramedics.
I had,
apparently, died -- flat-lined, gone code blue – given up the ghost. But my
ghost, evidently unwanted elsewhere, hovered about awaiting developments. I had
no appointment in Samarra.
The
paramedics hit me three times with their electric-shock paddles, restarting my
failed heart and sending blood once again coursing through my body and powering
up again what passes for my brain.
I
recall none of this because I was, as I said, dead. But about two hours later I
woke up in a Victorville hospital with a crowd of doctors and nurses about me
and a searing burn pain in my chest.
Within
the next 24 hours I was given an angioplasty to determine what was wrong, and
then an emergency triple-bypass.
I had the best of medical care
at Victorville’s St. Mary Medical Center, a major trauma center for that neck
of the desert. I celebrate it every day of my renewed life – never more so than
today, the anniversary of my death and resurrection.
Many
people helped me that day. I bow to them metaphorically every day. But this day
of all days every year, that bow is profound.
As a genealogist, I have
traced my ancestry back at least 10 generations in some family lines. I know
life-and-death statistics of many of those ancestors. And I know that the
average lifespan of my foremothers and forefathers was around 70 years.
I
shall be – if I live until then – 76 in January. I’ve beaten the odds.
Six
months after my miraculous recovery from death, I was invited back to be a
guest speaker at St. Mary 's fundraising dinner. After I related my
life-and-death tale, I was asked if I'd had any religious experience at the
time.
St.
Mary's is a Catholic hospital of course, so I could not really say what
actually had happened to the devout audience there. But I'll tell you:
have a slight memory of a long, dark tunnel
that I seemed to be entering. As I got deeper into it, I noticed a faint
glimmer -- the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. It grew bigger and
bigger as I headed toward it. As I neared the light, I saw a gathering of
people there.
Was it
my deceased family members waiting to welcome me to the next world? Was it the
fabled god and his hosts of angels? They were just dim faces in a crowd. But as
I drew closer, I saw it was 72 virgins.
And
then the doctors woke me up.
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JOHN MARTIN writes:
Mike
Wallace had a decent side. I met him in 1975 on the sidewalk outside CBS News
in New York, where I had come for a job interview. I didn't get the job but he
was gracious and friendly the dozen or more times we ran across each other in my
26 years as an ABC News national correspondent in New York and Washington.
In
2002, I retired and started teaching national reporting at Columbia. One night
we bumped into each other at a dinner. He asked "What are you up to?"
I told him and he immediately said, "I'll come to your class!" He
came to our seminar twice and was terrific.
I
consider myself lucky to have known Mike Wallace. His 21 news Emmys were
evidence of a hard-charging journalist. Faults? You bet. Generous, too. I'm
looking forward to seeing "Mike Wallace Is Here."
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REBER:
The past two days we have seen a photo that appears in the press box at Del Mar
Racetrack.
DAVID
FARMER writes:
One
of the people shown in the picture of celebrities and U-T photogs was Barney
Ross. I'd heard of him because a friend of my family was a boxing fan. I looked
up Ross on Wikipedia and was deeply impressed by his life story.
Born
Dov-Ber "Beryl" David Rosofsky in 1909, Ross endured a rough
childhood in Chicago. He turned to boxing to earn a living, and compiled a
startling career, winning championships as a lightweight, light welterweight
and welterweight (135, 140 and 147 pounds). He won 72 bouts and lost four.
Ross
became an important symbol to Jewish Americans for his unwillingness to bow to
superior strength. He was never knocked out, sometimes taking severe punishment
but never going down, as a matter of principle.
Unlike
other celebrities of his time, Ross insisted on serving in combat. The
140-pound Marine won the Silver Star for carrying a wounded soldier to safety
on his back. That man weighed 230 pounds.
There's
much more to the Ross story (beating drug addiction, inspiring a movie and a
book about his life). I recommend that you look it up.
STEVE
BEHRENS writes:
The
reference to Jack Dempsey in the Del Mar photo reminded me that Dempsey came
aboard my dad's ship, the USS Nashville, during World War II. My dad had photos
to prove it, which I now have. Today (August 31) would have been my dad's 98th
birthday.
CHUCK BOYD writes:
The Del Mar photo of
Stan Griffin, Charlie Sick and Ed Neil, three of my former bosses at the U-T,
and a co-worker, Roger Wrenn, drew my attention, as I have worn a
double-breasted suit a time or two before.
The second photo of Bing Crosby beating a typewriter - and a sports deadline
from Del Mar - also brought up hats I have known, owned and worn.
The Panama-style hat on the head of the man standing next to Crosby looks
like one I bought a few weeks ago at a beach resort in North Carolina, close to
the Outer Banks (OBX). The rest in the photo were wearing straw
"boaters."
It was a sunny day, I had left my wide-brimmed Tilley "sun hat"
at the motel and I really needed to shade my head and the tops of my ears.
My most recent time
wearing a boater was in a movie called EMPEROR, filmed in Savannah, about an
escaped slave who gets involved in a slave revolt in Harper's Ferry, Vir., set
in 1859. My period outfit was 100 % wool and we filmed outdoors in mid-nineties
temps. The hat really was cool and saved the hot day for me.
The movie still has not been released so I hope to see that I am included
in the editing process.
I am looking good in
the new HBO series The Righteous Gemstones, popping up in enough scenes that my
friends watch my "Where's Waldo" appearances in the background!
Tracking the
impending storm as "Hurricane: Picture of Dorian Gray" plods its way
towards South Carolina.
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MIRIAM
RAFTERY writes:
In answer to Dean Calbreath’s
question, the Guardian ran a piece on some of the reasons why word
pronunciations change over time. There are even names for various forms of
mispronunciation, such as “metathesis” and “affrication.” You can read them all
at this link:
Here are some
of my favorites:
Words that used to begin with "n"
Adder, apron and umpire
all used to start with an "n". Constructions like "A
nadder" or "Mine napron" were so common the first letter was
assumed to be part of the preceding word. Linguists call this kind of thing
reanalysis or rebracketing.
When sounds swap around
Wasp used to be waps;
bird used to be brid
and horse used to be hros.
Remember this when the next time you hear someone complaining about aks for ask or nucular for nuclear, or even
perscription. It's
called metathesis,
and it's a very common, perfectly natural process.
When sounds intrude
anatomy can make some changes more likely than
others. The simple mechanics of moving from a nasal sound ("m" or
"n") to a non-nasal one can make a consonant pop up in-between.
Thunder used to be "thuner", and empty "emty". You can see
the same process happening now with words like hamster, which often gets
pronounced with an intruding "p". This is a type of epenthesis.
Ch-ch-ch-changes
Your grandmother might not like the way you pronounce tune.
She might place a delicate "y" sound before the vowel, saying tyune where you would say chune. The same goes for
other words like tutor or duke. But this process, called affrication, is happening,
like it or not. Within a single generation it has pretty much become standard
English.
What the folk?
Borrowing from other
languages can give rise to an entirely understandable and utterly charming kind
of mistake. With little or no knowledge of the foreign tongue, we go for an approximation
that makes some kind of sense in terms of both sound and meaning. This is folk
etymology. Examples include crayfish, from the
French écrevisse
(not a fish but a kind of lobster); sparrow grass as a variant for asparagus in
some English dialects; muskrat (conveniently musky, and a rodent, but named
because of the Algonquin word muscascus
meaning red); and female, which isn't a derivative of male at all, but comes
from old French femelle
meaning woman.
REBER: There is a word I grew up with (in Missouri) but forgot until decades
later when a young lady was leading our tour group through Missouri’s Meramec
Cavern. Pointing to a formation, she said they were “sketty straws.” I’m sure
that word zoomed right past most of the people in that group, especially the
foreigners. But in my youth, we Missourians often ate “sketty and meatballs.”
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REBER: I don’t
expect many (if any) of you to remember the fellow, but in 1961 the Evening
Tribune had an employee named Lyle LaFaver. Days he was a copy boy. Nights he was my
companion on a tour of San Diego beer joints. Here’s a story about Lyle:
P.O.
Box 2239
Ramona,
CA 92065-0938
United
States
