I have a bone to pick . . .

I have a bone to pick with people who talk about the "narrow-minded" and "repressive" and "un-diverse" education in parochial schools in the 1950s. I daresay most of them weren't even twinkles in their parents' eyes (especially if they were born after 1962 when I graduated from high school).


Just to take a few examples:

Arithmetic: we were expected to master the multiplication table up to 12x12 in 3rd grade, and short division in 4th grade. We were introduced to fractions, decimals, percentages, and the rudiments on geometry in 5th and 6th grades, and the practical applications of arithmetic in 7th and 8th grades. I have the books. One time in the early or mid 90s I took my eighth-grade arithmetic book to the office, and graduate engineers were astounded by what I was expected to know by age 14.

Reading: Our readers had stories about children all over the world, plus stories of life on the frontier, and folk and fairy tales from all over the world. I have the books.

Fourth grade geography: we learned about other lands and the children who lived in them; I can remember the pygmy hunter-gatherers of Malaya, Mongol children on the Siberian steppe, Indian children in the Andes, kids on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, USA, Inuit kids (Eskimos as they were called then) in Alaska.

About fourth grade-fifth grade, there were monthly publications in comic-book format called "Junior Catholic Messenger" and "Young Catholic Messenger." One year there was a nine-part series on various immigrant groups to America, and another year there was a nine-part series on human anatomy and physiology (they left out sex and reproduction because we didn't need to know that yet, we were too young; and because the philosophy of the school was -- note well! -- that it was our parents' job to teach that).

Fifth and sixth grades we learned the basics of world history and geography, and in seventh and eighth grades we learned the basics of American history. I have the books.

We had gym starting in fifth grade.

We had music all eight years. Besides teaching us the basics of reading music, the music books had classical melodies, folk tunes from all over the world, and folk dances. (I think it was in fifth grade we learned "La Cucuracha," of course a very clean version.) I have the books.

Of course we had religion all eight years, taught according to our ability to understand it, and we were expected to memorize it. Of course it was "packed" and drilled in, I think in the hope that as we grew up and survived our rebellious years (which our teachers knew we would have) we would remember it and could unpack it. I remember vividly being struck hard in my thirties by the very first question in the Baltimore Catechism: "Who made you?" "God made me." That popped into my head again and I said to myself, "That means Pop and Ma only helped!"

We got what I think was a superb foundation for life.

So please don't tell me how bad it was in the 1950s if you weren't there. Thanks.

First time since summer 1961

Twenty .38 special rounds through a Ruger Blackhawk
at a life-size silhouette target at 21 feet.
3 in the X zone
1 on the line of X and 10
1 in the 10 zone
7 in the 9 zone
5 in the 8 zone
3 in the 7 zone
none elsewhere, no misses.
I think I did pretty well!
I know I did better than I thought I would.
I'm grateful for the gun control Pop taught me when I was a kid! --
Aim carefully, pull gently.

A Curious Dream

I just woke up from a very curious dream, a mix of memory and fantasy.

I had been summoned to the office where I worked for some unspecified reason.  I dressed up very nice because it was hinted there were Important People that I had to talk to.  When I got there, the anteroom of the boss' office was full of people, most of whom I didn't know.  I tried to find out what was going on and how it affected me, but couldn't.

So I decided to go to my cubicle and do some work while I was waiting.  I had a hard time finding it, because it was tucked back at the end of a sort of maze, it was a tiny corner, and it didn't even have enough room for the computer I needed to work.  In its place there was a brand-new compact little machine that I had no idea even how to turn on, let alone operate.

I went looking for a snack and coffee, and wandered lots of empty halls until I found the snack bar.  It was tiny and underequipped, and there was little there for me.  While I was there, someone came and told me I had to report to the boss' office.  So I set out for it, looking for a toilet on the way, and couldn't find one.  When I got there, people were talking about their careers with the organization; the guy next to me got so upset that he couldn't talk any more, started crying, and slid out of sight under the sofa.

It wasn't my turn yet, so I went out, again looking for a toilet.  I wandered through what seemed like miles of empty halls lined with vacant offices.  I ran into an old pal of mine who had started at the organization about the same time I did.  We smiled, compared notes, and decided that there was no place for us here anymore, and we might as well retire and be done with it.  They weren't giving us the equipment we needed to do our jobs, and the young folks had no time or inclination to take advantage of our 30 years or so of experience.

That was where the dream ended and I woke up.

There were a lot of other little details, most unrelated.  The main  theme of it all seems to me that my time is up and it's time to move on . . . whatever that means.  It could be almost anything.

Little notes

I was delighted and surprised to see, at the Mass for the First Sunday of Advent, that Father wore violet vestments!

At my age, soon to be 68 (already 68 if you count conception), things go wrong.  I have trouble with back, knees, feet, etc.  I'm happily surprised on any day everything works right all at once.

One thing that helps me put up with all that is to simply remind myself that no matter how much I hurt, Jesus hurt worse.  The Morning Offering is especially helpful here too.

Speaking of which, the Morning Offering is one of my regular prayers.  Also Hail Holy Queen, the Prayer to St. Michael, and the Memorare.  Also meatless Fridays.  It's just easier for me to go back to the practices of my childhood.  Keeps life simple.

Trouble is that a tuna sub from Subway, or a veggie pizza from my favorite joint, isn't really a penance!
Hmmmmmm.

The Way of the Cross according to St. Alphonsus Liguori has become my favorite devotion.  I'm trying to memorize it so I can pray myself to sleep with it.  I can't imagine it doing any harm at all to meditate on the sufferings of Jesus.  We were purchased at a great price, says St. Paul.  (I think St. Paul.)

Call me Cyrano - II

Here is another lady who is special to me and for whom I pray.
When I was young I wanted to be Cyrano, or perhaps Wilfred
of Ivanhoe; but now I'm nearly 70, I'm just a worn-out old
teddy bear, so I keep these ladies in my heart and only sometimes tell them how much they mean to me.  Some of them don't like being told that.
But rather like Sister Martha said to Cyrano in Act V, I don't
need their permission to pray for them.

Call me Cyrano . . .

I forget when I first read Cyrano de Bergerac, but during my sophomore year in high school I gave the "No thank you" speech (in Act 2) in the state Catholic high school speech tournament.  I was a lot like Cyrano, fiercely independent, and an incurable romantic.  (I put that to the part of me of the Canadian French heritage.)

Anyway, when I was young I fell in love constantly, as boys-not-yet-young-men will do.  And like Cyrano, I was willing to give away my heart, but had no confidence at all in my own lovability.

So over the decades many many women have passed through my life.  Some have brought joy, some have brought trouble, but all have given me gifts from God, without which I wouldn't be exactly the same man today.  (Maybe someday I'll put up a gallery of my past heart-throbs.)

Here are some women who right now are special to me.  Some of them know it, some of them don't.  To some of them I am important, to some of them (I suppose) I'm not.  There are as many reasons they're special to me as there are women, because each one is herself, and has her own place in my life and in my heart.



They all need prayers (don't we all?!) , so I pray for them every day, and if you read this, I hope you will too.




The most important thing is that I am very grateful to each of these ladies, and ever so grateful to God for putting them in my life.

Being a churchgoing Catholic Christian has an almost infinite number of advantages; one in particular appeals to me greatly right now:

I know of about half a dozen people who don't like me or want nothing to do with me. Now this is somewhat sad, I admit, BUT --

I don't need their permission to forgive them or pray for them.

I don't need their permission to ask God to show me how I may have offended them so I can ask them to forgive me.

So I get the last word! . . . or, if you will, the last laugh. :-)

O My Jesus . . .

O my Jesus, forgive us our sins,
save us from the fires of Hell.
Lead all souls to heaven,
especially those most in need of Thy mercy.

I was taught very forcefully about 1956 or 57 that the state of another person's soul before God is none of my business.

So for whom am I praying? Lots of people, probably, none of whom I know, need to know, or want to know.

There's only one person I know who is in needs of God's mercy, and that's me.

Sobering thought, that.

The things you see on Facebook!

TEXT ON THE PICTURE:

You are an altar where my lover worships

Center of the heated wildness of me

yoni, sacred

gateway to and

of life and

pleasure, i

sing an image

of your textures

and colors.

this and i

are a temple

and a playground

a blossoming

mandala of

soft, folded

flesh

[Note: "yoni" is a Sanskrit word meaning vagina.]

COMMENTS on the picture:

DeliciouslyDeviant

December 8, 2011

2 people like this.

Jason A------

Has the told irony that the pic looks like a vajay-jay been lost lol

Monday [Jan 16?] at 11:20pm

DeliciouslyDeviant

Yoni = vajay-jay

Yesterday [Tuesday Jan 17] at 11:28am

Sarah P---

Oh Jason...

22 hours ago [11:52 pm Tue 17 Jan]

Bob W---- [me]

Looks like an illustration from a textbook on gynecology.

But I suppose it was meant to, hm?

22 hours ago [11:52 pm Tue 17 Jan]

Jaime S---- It's most likely the point. Woman. Strength. Artistic. Beautiful.

21 hours ago [12:52 am Wed 18 Jan]

Sarah P---

Oh yes Jaime girl. You got the point for sure!

21 hours ago [12:52 am Wed 18 Jan]

Bob W----

Well, I guess I didn't. Oh, well, mox nix.

20 hours ago [1:52 am Wed 18 Jan]

MY POST on the picture

4:46pm Wed 18 Jan me

Somebody posted a picture yesterday, a piece of artwork resembling female genitalia, with words like "gateway to joy," "secret of woman's power," "woman's strength," and so on (I don't remember exactly). I made a snarky comment to the effect that it looks like a page from a gynecology textbook.

After thinking about it, though, I have to say it's a damn piss-poor philosophy that defines a woman in terms of her genitalia and makes her an object.

There is far FAR more to a woman than that!

Stephen M-----, Andrew Y----, and Rachel M---- like this.

5:46 pm Wed 18 Jan Shane G----

More to everyone than the sum of their parts but modern man in his idiocy believes giving in to primitive desires and thinking is the right and acceptable way of thinking and progression....sure if ya want mankind to become animals but mankind is more than an animal.

5:46 pm Wed 18 Jan me

That's right, Shane.

6:45pm Wed 18 Jan Sarah P---

I would be that "somebody" you are refering to Bob and I feel that I need to set a few things strait here. First of all, to be honest you have misrepresented what was writen on this peice of art. No where in the picture did it say anything about women's power or strength. I believe the intention was to express pride in that which is most femine, I am not the artist so I can only guess, but that is what I took from it. I think it's unfair to say a philosophy that makes being a woman into some thing small was reprsented at all. Secondly, I did not post the photo although I would. I commented on it which linked it to my page. facebook often shows what you comment on as well. I keep a strict policy about not sharing my opinions about things like that unless asked. Especially when it is a differing view point from my own. I certainly have never sent out a status update to my entire friend list regarding another person's activities. If I am offended or unsure of what is intended by a picture or post I go direct to the source. And I would not refer to that person as "somebody". Lastly you have not mentioned at all that this piece of art work ( and that is what it is weither or not we agree or like it) mentions in very knid terms the ability of a woman to carry and bring life into the world. Obviuosly that fact was meant to be celebrated in the picture and there is nothing piss poor about that. To anyone reading this who may wonder who I am or how I feel about what defines me as a woman, I am Sarah P---. I am strong, smart and very proud to be who and what I am. I am not just woman, I am certianly more than that and please don't think for one second I would waist my time on anything that would reduce me to just genitals! But if that is what you would think based on my prefernce in art work so be it. But that truly would be having a piss poor philosphy. I will make sure in the future that my FB settings offer more privacy.

8:15pm Wed 18 Jan me

Sarah, you speak well, and I agree with you 90%!

In my own defense, I tried today to find the picture I saw last night, and I couldn't find it anywhere. (I started with your page because I recall seeing your name associated with the picture somehow.)

So I was quoting from memory, and obviously did a clumsy job of it.

"...you have not mentioned at all that this piece of art work ... mentions in very kind terms the ability of a woman to carry and bring life into the world. Obviously that fact was meant to be celebrated in the picture and there is nothing piss poor about that."

As they say, "My Bad"!! You're right!

It wasn't obvious to me at the time that that was in the picture, and of course relying on a day-old memory was a bad idea.

That said, I have to say in my own defense that I was taught very forcefully when I was young that a woman's body is almost sacred - because of her ability to carry new life - and that for a guy to defile or degrade that is a horrible thing.

(In this connection, I hold a grudge of sorts against Hefner, Flynt, and Guccione, who did their best to teach a generation of young men that women are objects, to be used for pleasure and then discarded. So when I see a piece of art that seems to objectify women, my temper rises.)

I think I know you fairly well, and what I know of you I like. Yes, you're strong and smart, and deserve to take pride in who and what you are (of most concern to me is that you're a fine neighbor and I'm glad you live nearby).

I had better quit; I keep hitting the wrong buttons here.

Anyway, in sum, thanks for calling me out and speaking your mind, Sarah. I respect that in you!

10:12 pm Wed 18 Jan Me – private message to Sarah

Hi, Sarah. I found the picture (finally, after another 1/2 hour of digging) and read the words on it and the comments. The words are:

You are an altar where my lover worships

Center of the heated wildness of me

yoni, sacred / gateway to and / of life and / pleasure, i /

sing an image / of your textures / and colors. / this and i /

are a temple / and a playground / a blossoming / mandala of soft, / folded / flesh

The whole thing seems to equate (or at least bring together) sexuality, sensuality, and sacredness. I suppose that's so, I don't know of myself; only what married people tell me.

Math, Carpentry, and Culture: a Facebook Rant

It's a mathematical axiom that through a point an infinite number of lines can be drawn. It's also an axiom that two points determine a line. But statistically speaking, the closer together those two points are, the less reliable are any predictions made from them.

In the real world, it's easy to lay a 10-foot 2x4 across two sawhorses six feet apart. Now try balancing the 2x4 across one sawhorse. Then try balancing it on a 1/2" rebar stuck into the ground. The smaller the base, the harder the balancing act.

The real-life analogy to this is that (all other things equal) we old folks have a longer, and therefore better, view of life and especially American culture than you young folks do. Culture is like the air you breathe: you don't notice it unless it changes or you have something to compare it to.

I grew up in the late 40s and through the 50s, and I can say that American culture has largely degenerated since then. I can smell the stink of it, but you young folks can't, because you grew up in it and don't know any better. You think it's fine and normal, I know it's rotten and abnormal.

On a lighter note --

One of my sisters and I regularly tackle the New York Times crossword puzzles. I was about to say that we're fond of doing them, but that's not accurate, because it's really a love-hate relationship.

One of the questions recently was: "Chilean cape"; answer, four letters.

The answer was HORN.

This is why my sister and I call the puzzle-makers "demented gonifs."

What went wrong ? - 2

In the spring of 1964 I left a job at the FBI, had a small part in a play at St. Anthony of Padua High School in Minneapolis (that's me there), and went to work in a tiny print shop.

Go back thirty years.

My mom went to work for the FBI in Milwaukee in 1934, and my dad went to work for the FBI in Philadelphia in 1938. They met in Washington DC in 1940, had their first date in January 1941, and were married on September 6, 1941, just before Pearl Harbor. Mom left the work force sometime in the spring of 1942 to be delivered of my older brother John, and Dad stayed with the FBI until 1970. I worked as a summer helper in the Minneapolis office in 1961 and 1962, then signed up as a full-time worker in the late winter of 1962-63. I swore an oath which (if I recall rightly is the same administered to all military personnel) to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, against all enemies foreign and domestic, and so on.

In 1964, St. Anthony of Padua was still an all-girls school, run by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet; most of the faculty were Sisters. How I got the job of designing the sets and supervising their construction, as well as having a small part, is a saga in itself, so I'll skip that. I will mention, though, that even as late as 1964, the girls tried to look older, demure, and "ladylike" for their graduation pictures.

(I have all the senior yearbooks for St. Anthony from 1960 through 1967, and to see the styles of photography, typography, and girls' fashion change over those eight years is an education in itself. I have to add that even as late as 1964, girls were wearing undergarments confining enough that they didn't jiggle when they walked, wiggling hips was not encouraged, and going braless wasn't even thought of yet.)

In the late summer of 1964 I went to work in a tiny print shop in downtown Minneapolis. There was the boss and me, and he hired me on the spot when he saw that I knew how to run and clean his small offset press. The pay was low, the benefits nil, the schedule erratic, and there were only two work rules: the printing had to be perfect, and it had to done on time. I could relate to that, because my maternal grandfather was a printer his whole working life, from about 1900 to 1955.

(He got cheated out of his union pension when he retired in 1955; they claimed he had missed a payment on it back about 1939 or so. My dad threatened legal action, and the financial secretary of the union laughed in his face. Grandpop and Grandmom lived in abject poverty on Social Security until they died young [72, young for their families) in 1959.)

I stayed at the print shop until the spring of 1968, and I learned a lot about offset and letterpress printing. They're probably dying arts now; I know letterpress printing is almost extinct, and it's a shame. You don't have to have a university degree to set type and pull proofs.

Between 1964 and 1968, I got some more schooling at the University. The first technical calculators, by TI, showed up in the University Engineering Bookstore in the fall of 1964; my recollection is that they cost $100; before that we used slide rules. We added, subtracted, did short multiplication and division by memory -- we had been expected to learn all that in fourth grade.

In 1965, I took a course in advanced composition, and I remember the teacher telling us that all papers had to be typewritten, and that we were expected to be able to handle the English language intelligently, so any error in spelling (aside from obvious typographical errors like t for r), punctuation, grammar, or syntax, would get a paper an automatic F. I took a course in modern poetry and drama from the English department, hoping we would declaim and perform the works, but no. We analyzed and picked them to death. It nearly bored me to death.

The year 1965 was the year I finally took -- and flunked -- the Army physical. People tell me now it undoubtedly saved my life. I lost six buddies to Vietnam.

I think I took only one quarter at the U during 1966: no money. From Christmas 1966 to Easter 1967 I grew a full beard, and finally my dad told me to shave it or move out. A beard on a young man was a political statement back then.

In the spring of 1967, after about six or seven years of dithering, doubting, questioning and wondering about the Faith -- i.e., was what I was taught as a child able to fit the complexities of the adult world? -- I walked up to St. Bridget's and had a long talk with the assistant pastor, Fr. Bill Ward (God rest his soul) and decided that it was and I would stay. Lewis and Chesterton had a lot to do with it too.

In the summer of 1967, a scuffle between some white kids and some black kids, after the Minneapolis Aquatennial torchlight parade, escalated into a full-scale race riot. A lot of people who thought "it would never happen here" were pretty surprised. Late that summer I went back to school full time for good and stayed till graduation.

And of course 1968 was the year Dr. King was assassinated, the riot happened at the Democratic convention in Chicago, I went to work at a little hotel in downtown Minneapolis and met a young woman I came to call "Princess."

And that was the fall that the two priests at the Newman Center at the U "came to work" in business suits and insisted on being called "George and Harry."

Revealing Picture of Me in a Swimsuit

Atlantic City, New Jersey, September 7, 1946

My Debt to Canada

Recently chatting with TH2, I realized that I owe Canada a big debt, and I know far less about Canada than I think I should. I have been aware for most of my life that Canada was originally New France, that the British took it over about 1763, and there have been tensions ever since.

In 1955 I went for two weeks or so to the Catholic Youth Center camp on Big Sandy Lake in northern Minnesota, where I first learned of the seven Jesuit martyrs, Jogues, Brébeuf, Goupil, Lallemant, and the others (and Kateri Tekakwitha who ended her short life in a settlement on the banks of the St. Lawrence). I have to add that the combination of woods and water (as opposed to prairie) seized my heart and imagination.

Probably the biggest debt I owe Canada is that one of my great-grandfathers, Jules Etienne Napoleon Gosselin, was born in Montmagny, Quebec, in 1852. I have no idea how he got to Osseo, Minnesota - founded by Pierre Bottineau - by 1885 to marry my great-grandmother Julia Chenevert, granddaughter of Pierre.

The next biggest debt is to my Uncle George's wife, my Aunt Rita, born in St.-Jean-Baptiste near Winnipeg, who has not only been very kind to me, but has been tart in her criticism of my schoolbook French ("You don't growl enough!")

Next comes a friend of some years' standing whom I met on Ave Maria Singles; she is a Winnipeg lady, bilingual (naturally), and who has been a wonderful chatting companion these year, and who is the inventor of Huey the Humourous Humerus and the co-inventor of Newfie Brewfie.

Then, in no particular order: Red Green, Geneviève Bujold (whose performance as Jeanne d'Arc I would love to see again), Céline Dion, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Robert Service, Thomas Costain, Louis Hémon, John Buchan (yes I know he wasn't really a Canadian), W. P. Kinsella; and so many actors and musicians I've liked but I had no idea were Canadians.

And, of course, TH2.

PS - the Maple leaf is from the tree in my back yard.

Letter to a high-school girl, part 4

You asked: "Did you go to college during the 1960's?" and "What was your college experience like in the 1960's?"

I was at the U of M on and off from 1962 to 1972. The first two years were like a continuation of the 50's, as I've mentioned. My impression was that things started changing in the fall of 1964, when the first baby-boomers hit campus. The "weekly silent vigil to end the Vietnam War" started then - a few people standing by the fence surrounding the Armory at 17th and University for one hour, noon to 1 pm, every Wednesday. They kept this up every day until the last US troops left Vietnam in 1975, by the way, and it was written up in the papers at the time.

I had a distressing experience at the Newman Center in the fall of 1964. The Newman Center (named after John Henry Newman, an important figure in the Church of England in the 19th century, who converted to Rome) had daily noon Mass, and one day they started singing the Gelineau Psalms to guitar (quite an innovation in itself) accompaniment. Now in the psalms the word "Y-h-w-h" is spoken out loud in full, and I was shocked, because to pious Jews that is the Holy Name of God, too holy to be uttered by mortal lips. (I learned that from learning about Judaism in high school and after.) If you ever look at a Hebrew Bible you will see the word
יהוה
often, and when a pious Jew reads Scripture aloud, he (or she) will substitute the word "Adonai" ("Lord") - which is why in Bibles you see the work LORD in small caps or italicized.

Anyway, this was the age of ecumenism, when people of good will of every faith were reaching out and trying to discover common ground. (There is plenty of it, I have to add. Your family is Lutheran, mainly, and I'm Roman Catholic, but what unites us is more important than what divides us, though the divisions are real and wide. And the Christian tree has its roots in Jewish soil.) So afte Mass was over, I went to one of the singers, a guy I knew from De La Salle, two years younger thanme, and I said, "Russ, the psalm contains the holy name of God that pious Jews will never say out loud - and if any kids from Hillel Foundation walk in here and hear that, they'll never come back, because it's offensive to them." And Russ said to me, "Bob, this is the way it's going to be around here, and if you don't like it you can get the hell out." So much for liberal tolerance.

I had another experience about 1968 or 1969, when a young black woman told me to my face I was a racist just because I was white. I could have told her about my fellow-workers at the hotel and our good relations there, but she had an "attitude" and it turned me off. So much for liberal open-mindedness.

In January 1969 (as I recall) a bunch of students (and some were not), mostly black, broke into the University administration building, occupied it for some time (some people say now only a day or so, but my memory is different), and trashed the place to the tune of dozens of thousands of dollars of damage. They refused to come out until the U met their demands, which included the creation of a Black Studies department funded by the U but administered by the Twin Cities black community. (The department did get started.) The general feeling on the part of a majority of the student body (as I recall) was that the University Police should just go in there and arrest them all. In the 1969 legislative session, the legislature slashed the U's budget request by about 1/3, and some of the legislators said in print that the action was deliberately punitive.

In the spring of 1970, US troops made an incursion into Cambodia, and there was a call for a nationwide "student strike," which many students and some teachers at the U took part in. I didn't. It was my last undergraduate quarter, and I wanted that degree and diploma. A few of the students in the theater department posted a "manifesto" condemning the war and the US involvement and especially the Cambodia incursion (fine) -- but claimed they spoke for the entire theater department, faculty and students. I went around posting up my own manifestos saying that they didn't speak for me. Sometime during the quarter, some of the self-proclaimed leaders of the strike in the theater department convened a big gathering in Scott Hall (the main theater) and demanded the theater faculty to shut down the theater department. I remember "Doc" Whiting, the department chairman, who had built the department almost singlehandedly during the 1930's and who had won accreditation for the BA program, plead with the students not to shut the U down. He had tears in his eyes as he told us that he had seen the intellectual lights going out in Europe in the 1930's (because of Nazism and Communism), that a university was parctically the only place where completely free speech was allowed and encouraged. He practically begged the kids not to do it. But they did it. I was working on my senior project at the time, designing furniture for a kids' production of "Don Quixote," and the scene shop was next to the Armory, which was a favorite target of the peaceniks' anger. When the students at UMD tried to burn down the armory on the Duluth campus, the U of M police ordered the scene shop closed, and I had to carry the furniture to another building, by hand with very little help. I couldn't force my crew to help me (nor dcould I give them bad marks), because the U authorities cooperated with the strike by saying that any student who "struck" would not be penalized. Well, I got everything done one way or another. I think the show opened on a Saturday afternoon and was to play two matinee performances. On the Saturday, the director told me he wanted some extra trimmings on the set and wanted me to coime in Sunday morning to do the work. I replied that I would be going to church, and he said "F--- church!" I didn't do what he wanted. So much for liberal acceptance of religion and my conscience.

In the winter of 1971, when I was in graduate school, working on my MA in theater, the legislature slashed the U's budget 2/3 (as I recall) and again made no secret that it was a punitive action. That made a big difference to me, because I was hoping for a career in academic theater, and with the budget cuts there were no new hires, and some cutting of staff. So there went nine years of work down the drain, so I thought at the time. I tried to keep on with the schooling, but I must have felt "What's the point?" and left the U for good in the spring of 1972. Not coincidentally, that was the last major upset on campus, when a great number of students did a sit-down in the middle of Washington Avenue, a major artery through campus and the bridge across the river. I realized then that my college career was over for good; part of it was that I was tired of studying, part was I was out of money, and part (as I look back) was that the U wasn't the same U that I had entered ten years before. It was all very depressing, and I remember the whole year of 1972 as sort of a gloomy dreary haze.

The world was a whole different place, so different from 1962 that I remember wondering where I fit in or even if I fit in. Well, I stuck at my job at the hotel until 1973, for lack of anything else to do, and in March 1974 I went to work for the Highway Department. Now this is kind of funny in a way, because I started in 1962 as a civil engineering student, got a degree and did graduate study in theater, but ended up working for the Highway Dept. and MnDOT for 27 years as a civil engineering technician.

You asked: "Looking back at the decade what are your feelings like about the 1960's?"

Looking back on it all, I feel it was a great change in American society, but not an improvement. We were a better nation when I was growing up. It was during that decade that the attitude "old is bad, new is good" crept into society and has stayed. It was then that Margaret Mead, the eminent anthropologist, said "This generation has nothing to learn from the past." I thought she'd lost her marbles. In the late sixties or early seventies, Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock, the main point of which, as I recall, was that the pace of change in society was speeding up, and pretty soon changes would happen so fast that no one could keep up with them. I think he was right.

But I did get a very solid and well-rounded education at De La Salle and the U of M, and I still use it, and no one can take it away from me. My Christian faith was solidified and strengthened by being challenged by half-believers and unbelievers. I discovered through reading, study, discussion, and being challenged that nothing on earth can disprove the truth of the Christian faith. The country has changed, but insofar as I have kept to the ideals of my boyhood and youth, I have not; which makes me an outcast in the Land Of Political Correctness. But that's okay, and to be expected, because this is exactly what Jesus warned would happen to His followers.

"God writes straight with crooked lines," says an old proverb. For instance, if I hadn't joined MnDOT, I would never have met your mom, and I would never have known you, and I wouldn't be sitting here writing my story for you. God knows what He's doing. He put me on earth in exactly the right time and place to experience what I did and be able to pass it along. Praise the Lord!

"Rejoice in the Lord, always, I say, rejoice!"

* * * * *

Well, A----, I could go on and write another book for you, but you wouldn't have time to read it and process it. You'll be short on time as it is, I've given you so much. Allow me to sort of play "crusty old Grandpa" for a minute - look over my bifocals and shake my cane at you and say, "Young lady, don't wait so long to start the paper." Seriously though, I know how hard-pressed you are for time and energy.

My best wishes to you and all the family!
Take care and God bless,
Bob

Letter to a high-school girl, part 3

You asked: "What were you doing when you heard about JFK's assassination? What did you think?"

I was working in the FBI office in downtown Minneapolis as a file clerk; the announement came over the intercom about 12:30 that Kennedy had been shot; and about 1:00 the news came that he had died. Of course it was a matter for the FBI. I recall thinking something like "Life will go on." I never bothered much about all the teeny details of Oswald and Ruby, or why Ruby shot Oswald (some say it was to keep Oswald silent about all he knew) - and in the years since all kinds of theories have been floating around.

* * * * *

You asked: "Did you participate in politics and if so what candidates did you support in the 1960's?" and "Did you serve in the Vietnam War? If you did in what capacity? Please share some notable experiences about the Vietnam War." and "Please share what your feelings are about the war now." and "Were you eligible for the Vietnam draft? Please tell about your experience with the Vietnam draft."

My participation in politics was limited to voting. Like everything else in the middle and late 60's, politics became very polarized, and that is still going on. In 1964 I would have voted for Goldwater. In 1968 I voted Republican (look up sometime the riot at the Democratic convention in Chicago). Ditto every election since, as best I recall. In general, I vote conservative (though neither major party has an exclusive grasp on good ideas - or stupidity).

I didn't serve in the war, but had many friends who did. Six of them are dead, killed in action; two came home as walking time-bombs and drank and drugged themselves to death later on, because they couldn't handle the horrors they experienced. (There is a contrast there between Vietman vets and WWII vets, but it's not relevant here.) NO ONE I know who served in combat in Vietnam came home whole in both body and soul.

My feelings about the war now are just grief, sadness, and loss. My best buddy, Phil, married Mary in November 1967 and was killed in Vietnam in March 1969. It took Mary five and a half years to put herself back together and remarry. I was with her a lot. The night before Phil shipped out, he stopped over to my house, and we sat on the back porch and had a couple of beers. He told me that since he was a first lieutenant of infantry, his chances of coming home at all were less than half, and his chances of coming home alive and whole were less than one in three. He asked me to take care of Mary if he was killed, and I promised I would, and I did the best I could. You don't forget stuff like that.

My thoughts about the war are that it was unwinnable. The regime in Saigon was corrupt and stayed corrupt, despite American efforts to shore it up, and as a consequence the South Vietnamese Regular Army was also corrupt and incompetent. The North Vietnamese Regular Army and the Viet Cong irregulars were far more disciplined and more effective. There is a book called Vietnam by Stanley Karnow, who covered the war as a journalist while it was going on, and went back to Vietnam years later, after the war was long over. One of the people he talked to was then-General Giap of the North Vietnamese regulars, who said to Karnow that the best allies the North Vietnames communists had were the student antiwar protests in the US and the growing public sentiment against the war. Many years after the war was over, Robert McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense at the time (and resigned in protest), wrote a book In Retrospect, in which he says that the Johnson administration lied to the public about the war. I have to add that the actress Jane Fonda, who was an ardent peacenik, made a trip to North Vietnam, and issued a statement condemning American involvement in the war. A few years ago she apologized publicly for that, but it's too late. To a whole generation of guys she'll always be "Hanoi Jane."

I was eligible for the draft, and registered on my eighteenth birthday in 1962. One way to stay out of the Army was to be in school, which is a lousy motivation to study, but a strong one anyway. I got called up in the spring of 1965, just after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident (look it up) when Johnson (who ran in 1964 on a peace platform) decided to "escalate" American involvement, and the Army needed lots of warm bodies. I went through the physical and, deciding that I was very likely a dead man, went home, packed everything, gave some things away, and sat down and waited for the orders to report. Nothing happened. Nothing happened all summer, because the Army lost my paperwork. Except for the print shop, I had no job, and not enough money for fun, but no one would hire me. In fact, one prospective employer told me, "Look, Kid, I know it's illegal to refuse to hire you, but why should I waste time and money training you in, just to have the Army snatch you away?" It was finally in late August that the notice came that I had failed the physical exam and was unqualified for military service. I was happy and sorry at the same time. My dad served in the Army in WWII, my Uncle George served aboard a carrier in combat in the Navy in the South Pacific, and I wanted to help our country. At the same time, I felt like I had a death sentence taken off my shoulders. Guys my age tell me now that flunking the physical very likely saved my life.

Letter to a high-school girl, part 2

Hi, A----,

Maybe I should apologize for giving you far more material than you can use, but on second thought, I won't, because one of the main tasks of a researcher is picking and choosing from the material available. You'll find that you always accumulate far more material than goes into the finished product.

Anyway -- you asked: "Did you have contact with or awareness about the Civil Rights movement?" and "What were your feelings and reactions like about the Civil Rights movement?"

The only contact I had with the Civil Rights movement was that one of my friends joined the "Freedom Riders" and went South to help with black voter registration. I remember that I tried to talk him out of it. If I recall rightly, I told him that yes, the cause was worthy, but I had a suspicion that white folks in the South were going to resent a bunch of "damn Yankees" coming down there and telling them how to run their own affairs. (Even as late as 1964, there were Southerners still fighting the Civil War, there was still a superior attitude on the part of Southern whites, and a long-lingering resentment against Northerners.)

My feelings about the whole business were (and still are) that confrontation rarely accomplishes any good. Granted that the black folks North and South were still victims of many injustices large and small, but the riots and protests were worse than useless because they reinforced white-racist stereotypes about blacks, and they set up (or increased) in young blacks' minds a sense of resentment toward "Whitey" and an attitude of entitlement (rather than justice). It was as if the attitude changed from "This is unjust" (as Dr. King said) to "You owe me!" as people like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam said.

* * * * *

You asked: "Did you have contact with or awareness of the counterculture (hippies)?" and "What did you think about the hippies of the 1960's?"

I knew about them and, at the same time, envied and had no respect for them. After all, the idea of sitting around all day, doing nothing but smoking pot, having sex all the time, and having other people feed them is a nice dream, but it's unreal. By the time the hippies came around, my values from the 40's and 50's (and a couple generations before that) were thoroughly internalized, even if I couldn't always put them into words. "Turn on, tune in, drop out" sounds like a nice slogan -- but! I have to note with a certain sarcasm that the hippie culture got its start in "sunny California" rather than in Siberian Minnesota.

(By the way, I think tattoos and piercings are barbaric. Can't stand them. "If it feels good, do it!" is a slogan straight from hell.)

* * * * *

You asked: "Did you have contact with or awareness with regard to the women's movement?" and "What were your reactions like towards the women's movement in the 1960's?"

I have to drop back a few years to the 50's and early 60's and say that women's undergarments were far more rigid and confining than they are now. Even Maureen, who I took to the prom in 1962, wore a corset (I didn't see it, but when she had to sit on my lap in the car ride home she wasn't cuddly). I didn't know girls were soft and jiggly until I was well into my twenties, when the girls on campus started wearing different undergarments, or none at all.

Now this gets us to the very center of the Christian teaching about sex. Sex is the privilege of the married, period, end of discussion! Naturally a normal healthy guy takes some pleasure in looking at gals in verious states of undress -- BUT that's the "old Adam" working, not the grace of God. So my reactions were very mixed, and again, it's the life-long fight within every human soul (male or female) between following the Lord or not following Him.

I am very blessed to have been old enough, and to have had definite views about modesty, that I could sense that the outward manifestations of the women's movement and the hippie movement, were in a lot of ways wrong. They were contrary to everything I had been taught, and what I was taught was right.

(One day in the mid-90's I remarked at work that I was raised with the belief that marriage-sex-children is a package deal. You want one, you have to take all; if you reject one, you have to give up all. My co-workers looked at me like I was from a different planet. Such is a symptom of the de-Christianization of America.)

I have to stick in here that the most hideous outgrowth of the women's movement, or feminism, or whatever, is the notion that women have the "right to control their own bodies." So, ignoring scientific evidence of the humanity of the unborn, and the fact that the baby is not part of the mother's body, we have now suffered the loss of at least fifty million unborn children.

I might add that I see on facebook almost every day young women wearing things that their grandmothers never would have dreamed of wearing, and their great-grandmothers would probably spank them for. One of the things that the women's movement helped diminish or destroy was the sense of modesty for both sexes. The "women's libbers" played right into the hands of Hugh Hefner and his allies, who taught a whole generation of American men that women are objects to be used. (I got it from a trusted source just last week that the most common cause of death of pregnant women is murder.)

By the way, this has been going on for ages. G. K. Chesterton (who I recommend to your attention) remarked about all this a hundred years ago. And while I'm on great Christian writers, I have to mention C. S. Lewis and his book Mere Christianity. It was one of the books that brought home to me that the Christian faith I was taught as a child is also complex enough to be intelligently accepted by an adult.

I have to add that one of the things I liked about the Highway Department was equal pay for equal work. At the hotel, the chambermaids got paid less than the housemen, even though their work was just as hard if not harder. I know, because when we got short of maids I had to be a maid and do sixteen rooms in one shift.

Letter to a high-school girl, part 1

A friend's daughter, a junior in high school, asked me to write her something about my experience of the 1960's. I was more than happy to do it.

Dear Ms. (or Miss if you prefer) J-----,

I was 16 in 1960, and graduated from high school in 1962. I have thought a long time about what it was like back then, and the simplest way I can say it is that the early 60's were really a continuation of the 50's (for instance, for dress-up occasions we guys were expected to wear a white shirt and tie, with sport coat and slacks, or suit, and "shinable" shoes). At sock hops we had records of rock-and-roll music (which was nothing like what's called rock today) but for the spring formal dances, live bands that played the "big band" sound of the 30's and 40's were obligatory. The way I remember it, everything seemed to change after President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and the Beatles made their first appearance on live TV about February 1964. They brought with them a new kind of fashion which we had never seen here. (Look up Twiggy and Carnaby Street.)

There was also the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and a very polarized election between Barry Goldwater (R) and Lyndon Johnson (D); the main issue was combating communism in Vietnam, which Goldwater supported and Johnson opposed before the election but changed his mind after he was inaugurated. That was the last election I was too young to vote in (for drinking and voting you had to be 21). Then there was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and after it, a lot of well-meaning college kids, including one friend of mine, went South on buses to help with voter registration of black citizens. (Some states in the "deep South" had poll taxes and literacy tests for voting, as I recall.) Some of those civil rights workers were murdered.

Anyway, what with the changes in music, art, fashion, and politics (I think rather enthusiastically accepted by the first of the baby-boomers who came to the University campus in the fall of 1964), things changed a lot. Now since I was two years older than the "boomers," I was a little more set in my ways even then, and didn't care for a lot of the changes -- which, by the way, I didn't really see as improvements. (If your mom shows you my facebook profile, you can see that I said about myself: "I am turning into a reactionary old crab. During the 1960s on campus I was a reactionary young crab.")

You asked: "What were your relations like with your parents, school, church and job back in the 60's?"

I got along fine with my parents. It was understood that as long as I lived in their house I obeyed their rules, and I did. They gave me very low-cost room and board while I was going to school; when I wasn't in school (summer vacations and breaks between quarters at the U) I was expected to be working and paying about 20% of my net pay towards the household. Pop was the only wage-earner of the family for many years while Mom stayed home keeping house and traking care of us six kids. Besides paying, I was expected to do a share of the house chores. The chores I had to do grew more or less because of the demands of school. (Pop and Mom graduated from high school in 1931, about the bottom of the Great Depression, and they were very strong on higher education, which they never had a chance to get.)

For high school I went to De La Salle, on Nicollet Island. I was in a college-prep curriculum, and I had no say about the courses. Again, it was "if you're here you obey the rules." I had four years of religion, English, math, social studies, science, two years of Latin, and two years of gym. After I graduated (in top 8% of my class) I was not quite used to the comparative liberty of the University. I was in a civil engineering curriculum, where certain courses were required for the first two years; but aside from that I soon realized that the profs and teaching assistants didn't care if I went to class or not - the responsibility of getting there, paying attention, and learning, was entirely on my shoulders. They graded tests and produced marks. If I flunked, tough; it was my fault. One prof told us that they intended to make it rough on us, and wash as many of us out as they could, because they wanted only the best getting engineering degrees from the U of M. That general position didn't change until after 1969 and 1970 (which I'll talk about some later on).

My relations with my Church were rather strained at the time. I went to a Catholic grade school, St. Bridget's, in north Minneapolis, and we had religion every day. There was also Mass every day before school, which was optional. De La Salle was (and is) a Catholic school. So I got my whole primary and secondary education before the Church council Vatican II (which wasn't supposed to change things but did). The reason my relations with the Church - and religion - were strained was that I was discovering that the outside world had moral compexities they never told us about in grade school. I was having growing pains, and was subconsciously (repeat subconsciously) wondering if what I had been taught as a child was enough for an adult. (I have to add that I didn't find the words for this until I was over forty. But it's something that happens to almost every young person, and - I have to add - if it hasn't happened to you and Emily yet, it probably will; but don't give up. Stay faithful. God will see you through it.) Anyway, for six or seven years I did almost nothing but go to church every Sunday - I had an intuition that if I quit that, the last thread of the rope would snap and I would drop off the mountain to my (spiritual) death. The spring I was 23, 1967, I got tired of sitting on the fence, so to speak, said to myself "this is stupid, I have to stay or go." So I took a walk up to the priests' residence of the parish where I grew up, and had a long talk with the assistant pastor, and decided to stay - and I've never looked back. If I had been more pious, I would have remembered the Bible verse about be ye hot or cold, the lukewarm I will spit out of my mouth. But I didn't. What I did remember was Mom or Pop saying, when I hung in the doorway, "For Heaven's sake, go out or come in, don't just stand there!"

I have to say a word about the Second Vatican Council, which the Catholic Church held in Rome between the fall of 1962 and the fall of 1965. The Council produced several pastoral documents, which were intended to develop Catholic Christian teaching and clarify it for the modern world. What happened in many cases was that a lot of people (including clergy, sadly) thought that the changes meant that everything was "up for grabs," and started changing things they had no business changing. Now even though I was having my own difficulties with the Christian Faith, I could see that some of the changes people were making, and thought the Council had allowed to change, were not okay.

(Insert: into a big stewpot throw big changes in the Catholic Church - and I suspect others as well; big changes in music, art, theater, and fashion; the growing unpopularity of the Vietnam war and resistance to the draft; the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement; the hippies and the drug culture; the "women's liberation" movement and the "sexual revolution". . . allow to cook and mix . . . and you have a hot and foul-smelling stew.)

In the summer of 1960 I managed a paper station in north Minneapolis. In those days, the morning Tribune and the evening Star were delivered in bundles by truck to many little steel sheds (maybe 12' by 20') all over the city. The station manager had to be there by about 4:30 in the morning to hand out the papers to the carriers, then do the paperwork, close the station, do the route for any carrier who was sick or lazy and didn't get a substitute. Same routine about 3:00 in the afternoon, except Sundays. Note well that the authority of being station manager carried with it the responsibility of making sure everything got done - this was the accepted, if unspoken, idea of the fifties and early sixties: authority and responsibility go hand in hand and you can't have one without the other. Authority without responsibility is tyranny; responsibility without authority is slavery.

In the fall of 1960 through the spring of 1961 I worked on the janitorial crew at De La Salle to work off my tuition. In the summer of 1961 I worked as a temporary helper at the FBI office in Minneapolis, and made enough money to pay my senior year tuition in advance. By the way, I met a lady there who I still see - we've known each other for 49 years and get better friends all the time. Those are the friends worth keeping.

In the summer of 1962 I worked at the same office again as a summer helper.

In the late summer of 1964 I went to work in a print shop downtown. The pay was low, benefits nil, but there were only two work rules: the printing had to be perfect and it had to be out on time. I loved it, and stayed there until the spring of 1968, when the shop went out of business.

In the spring of 1968 I went to work on the housekeeping staff of a little hotel downtown, and stayed until mid-summer 1973. The important thing about that was that the bottom-line staff was only about half white - the rest was a mix of black and Indian. There were absolutely no racial tensions that I knew of at that place. We worked toegether eight hours a day five days a week, we had to get along, and the only thing that mattered was getting the job done well. Almost all the housekeeping staff was poor people, black and white and Indian, from the North Side, and mixing and working with those folks shattered almost every preconception about black people that I had grown up with. (Remember my dad served in a segregated Army during WWII, and worked in law enforcement [so he saw people at their worst]; and there were no black people in my neighborhood when I grew up.) I learned really fast to take people as they were, not by what they looked like. Of course there were some bad apples, there are in every group, black or white. But if you go back to Dr. King's "I have a dream" speech, one of the best parts is where he says that he wants his children to be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

By the way, years later I wrote a novel about the hotel, which nobody would believe unless they'd worked it one.

(But this was not so on the university campus. Starting about 1968, the black students started making demands, and in January 1969 took over and occupied the University's administration building for a while; the U authorities caved in and granted most of the demands and handed out no punishments that I recall. And it was in the summer of 1967, I think, that there was a race riot in north Minneapolis that started as a fight between some black kids and white kids at the Aquatennial torchlight parade and escalated.)

Okay, on to the next question. More later.

A quick comment on comments

I received a comment the other day and, after some thought, decided to reject it. I like comments -- you know, screaming and adoring groupies who toss money onto the stage ;-} -- but this one I couldn't read. If I can't read and understand it I won't publish it. And there are the usual other reasons for rejecting a comment: incivility, cussing, etc. As Caveman (God bless him)

said, it's my blog.

I don't think I'm going to like this.

Alternative captions:

We are born naked, wet, cold, and hungry, and it's downhill from there.

What happened?!

What have I got myself into?

I don't like it here! I wanna go back!

Oh, shit . . . . .