On The Train

When I was four years old I took a train ride from Camden, New Jersey, to Ft. Wayne, Indiana, that was perhaps the most important journey of my life.

My father had snatched me from my mother after their divorce and decided to change our name so she couldn't find me. He also decided, after he was drafted into the US Army Air Corps in 1941, to give me temporarily to my Indiana uncle and aunt, who had also changed their name from Bonanno to Bowman as part of the plot to keep my mother from tracking me down.

I remember the train ride vividly, particularly one episode that today, 67 years later, is as clear in my mind's eye as the computer screen in front of me as I write this. The 700-mile trip on the Pennsy Railroad train was an over-nighter. Within the first hour I was transfixed as I looked out the window at the dogwood lined Appalachian Mountains. My dad caught me looking and told me that in a few minutes we would be going around a hairpin curve. I asked what that was. He explained that I would be able to see the train's engine as it looped around, going in the opposite direction of our car. I remember thinking that was impossible. But moments later I saw the engine and several cars of our train across a deep chasm, heading toward the next curve. I was enthralled and pretty sure in that moment I would one day be a railroad engineer.

Years later, when I related the story to my dad, he replied that he had not been on that train ride with me. He had asked a friendly stranger to "look after" me. Over the years I had turned that stranger into my dad, perhaps not believing that any father in his right mind would put a little boy on a train by himself for a 700-mile trip to be handed off to relatives he had never seen. I wonder what ever happened to the stranger and I am grateful for his kindness. I cannot imagine that scene repeating itself in today's culture.

Gorgeous George

One of the startling truths my dad shared with me as a 12-year-old boy was that professional wrestling was fake. That revelation stung me about as deeply as it must a five-year-old who finds out there is no Santa Claus.

Wrestling was as popular those days as baseball or football in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, where I grew up. Since I had been let in on the secret I saw it as purely entertainment. Still, many of my buddies and a lot of adults remained unwavering believers. They swore wrestling was for real and they'd point to the blood pouring from a competitor's head after being struck with a ring stool or catching a sharp elbow too sharply in the mouth as indisputable evidence of its authenticity. So, when Gorgeous George came to town in the early '50s, zealous fans -- wild-eyed, umbrella-toting women and crazed, fist-waving men -- paid good money ($5 ringside) to scream expletives at the blonde, flowing haired man in the ermine-collared robe and diamond earrings. 

I was reminded of Gorgeous George this week in Bob Dylan's autobiographical book, Chronicles Volume I. Dylan, then a young star, encountered the wrestler-showman at the Minneapolis National Guard Armory. Dylan, who was on stage when George made a grand entrance, was thrilled when George recognized him and paused to nod and wink at him in an encouraging way.

I, too, was awed by the man as I watched him on the small black and white TV set in our living room. There were many heroes and anti-heros in pro wrestling in those days, guys with names like Goliath, The Strangler, The Twister and The Bone Crusher. But none put on a better show than Gorgeous George. Actually, he was a mediocre, 5-foot-9, 200-pound, little known athlete before he decided to remake himself into a flamboyant, effeminate, irritating villain. His entrances changed the wrestling world and his antics were credited with a sudden boom in the sales of TV sets. 

He was, I believe, the first wrestler to come down the aisle with music blaring over the loud speakers. His theme song was the unlikely Pomp and Circumstance. He was accompanied by women tossing red roses, mammoth body guards, trainers, valets, managers and who knows what else. As he made his way to the ring (a journey that took 10 times longer than any other wrestler), he would respond to the mounting jeers and boos with his own taunting and threatening jesters that would cause the weakest in the crowd to cower and the bravest to yell even louder. 

As he slowly climbed into the ring, tossing his curls back away from his face, he would be handed a large and garish perfume atomizer that he would then ceremoniously spray in his corner and toward the crowd. As the boos rose to thunder he would walk across the ring and spray his opponent. By now the crowd was more like a mob than an audience but George seemed undaunted as he walked about the ring waving and blowing kisses.

I don't know his actual win-loss statistics but I know Gorgeous, whose real name was George Wagner, won more bouts than he lost. He even won a couple of championships, much to the chagrin of most fans, who continued to pay hard earned cash in hopes of seeing his face ground into the mat by a "real man."

I imagine that any number of athletes (Mohammed Ali? Dennis Rodman?) and entertainers (Liberace? Little Richard?) learned a thing or two by watching old Gorgeous George footage. I'm surprised his story has not been made into a movie. If that happens, I can't wait to see who plays the lead role.

The Intimacy of Boxing

Somehow the conversation got around to boxing. We were three couples -- 60 and 70 somethings. One of the men mentioned that he had developed a friendship with a former prizefighter at their gym. He said the guy was quite personable and well-read. I tried to imagine such a man in a boxing ring.

"Did you guys ever box as a kid?" I asked. Our friend Ron said he had, as a college student in a boxing class. They matched the fighters by height, Ron said, and he was paired up for the semester with a guy exactly his height (a six-footer), but who unfortunately was 40 pounds heavier than he. Ron did not pursue the sport further after earning a passing grade in the class.

I recalled boxing as a grade schooler in CYO matches at the school I attended in Ft. Wayne, Ind. -- St. Andrew's Academy. I was a little kid but was quite tenacious and willing to take a punch to the head and keep going. I won most of my fights by running at my opponents and flailing them with punches. The momentum I got from running across the ring gave me plenty of confidence and probably intimidated my larger foes.

My dad and my Uncle Joe both had boxed a lot as kids. In fact, Uncle Joe was a professional prizefighter for a couple of years and had won a half dozen bouts but quit the sport when he was asked to throw a fight to make a path to a title fight for a guy that the handlers thought had greater potential and star quality.

As I think back to my short stint as a boxer (it ended when I was battered and bruised in a Silver Gloves match against a kid I knew and thought was a push-over), I remember that I hated and loved it at the same time. I hated it because every time I strapped on the gloves and stepped into the ring I was full of terror and felt sick. I hated it because I did not like the feeling of having my bell rung and I especially hated receiving a solid punch to the stomach. I loved it because I felt great when the cigar-puffing men surrounding the CYO basement gym cheered me on and referred to me as The Whirlwind.

I think it was good for me to have the experience of being all alone in a small, roped-off area with a mean-looking, muscular kid who wanted to pound me into submission. There is nothing like surviving that nightmare. And, as strange as it may seem, I also enjoyed the intimacy of it. I remember the first thing I would do after winning a fight was to hug the loser. And when I lost, the winner also did the same for me. There is a comaraderie in boxing that is unparalleled in any other sport. No one -- none of the screaming people at ringside, none of the girls who tried to talk us out of fighting, none of the boys who never tried the sport -- can fully understand the empathy, the connection, the respect that occurs between two boys who have just spent several minutes beating each other about the head and body with the rage of mistreated San Quentin inmates.

The New Yorker Cover

The recent New Yorker magazine cover cartoon featuring Barack and Michelle Obama dressed as Muslim terrorist and Black Panther respectively, with a framed portrait of Osama Bin Laden on the wall and an American flag afire in the fireplace, has stirred the Internet blog pot with chili pepper ferocity.

The liberal magazine's editor, David Remnick, later explained that the cartoon was intended as satire, making fun of all the rumors and gossip surrounding the presumptive Democratic candidate for President of the United States.

Well, satire is a hallmark of journalism and can go a long way toward inspiring people to think about important issues in fresh ways. Problem is, when an editor has to explain the satire days after it has been published, something has gone wrong. The New Yorker could have pulled this off without so much misunderstanding, angst and protest had it explained the cartoon in a page two box in the same publicaiton. Even that, however, would not have totally mitigated the the potential damage. Remember, not everyone reads the fine print.

Newspaper and magazine editors -- at least the good ones -- regularly work hard at finding ways to prompt people to think seriously and deeply about the issues of the day. In doing so, they sometimes take chances, becoming so provocative that they push the envelope out beyond the comfort zone of most readers. The New Yorker editorial staff said it discussed this cover long and hard and concluded that it needed to be published to call attention to the scandalous and slanderous comments swirling around the Obamas, who in six months could be America's First Couple. In other words, the editors knew they were taking a chance. This one backfired.

Yes, we can see it clearly now -- a respected national magazine holding the mirror up to the rest of the news media in an effort to demonstrate how preposterous those images are. However, the imagery was simply too volatile, too over-the-top (as Al Gore put it). Good newspaper and magazine editors are well-schooled in the essential elements of libel and slander law, are experts on what makes news and are some of the best-informed, most well-read people I have ever met. But taste is something that is not easily learned and this cartoon was tasteless -- particularly without an attendant detailed explanation of its meaning and purpose.

By the way, let's not forget that this was not the first case of bad taste in Presidential political coverage in America this season. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has endured more than her share of crude and sexist commentary. The New Yorker recently ran an article in which it told of some of the ways the media have aimed their poison arrows at Sen. Clinton. One television commentator said she was "...looking like everyone's first wife standing outside the probate court."

A close friend of mine said she fears the New Yorker cover of the Obamas will be our (Democrats) "new Nader." I hope not and I respectfully disagreed. Those who favor Sen. Obama are not likely to change their minds as a result of this single cartoon. Those who have not yet made up their minds? Could be another story, but I don't think it will have enough impact to decide the election in favor of Sen. John McCain.

The lasting effects are likely to harm the Obamas far less than it will Muslim-Americans, who have once again been stereotyped as America-hating terrorists. And, yes, the New Yorker itself has made some enemies who before were good friends. That is sad because more than ever in history, we need intelligent, thoughtful, responsible and respected media. The New Yorker has heretofore fit that description but now, at least for a while, its stature has been tarnished by good civic intentions that went way wrong.

Potholes and Patriotism

Day laborers sat in the brown grass under spare trees and on sidewalks in the shadow of whitewashed buildings near the Fruitvale Goodwill shop where I had just dropped off a donation of clothes and suitcases. I wished I had more money and some work for the men at my apartment but I didn't. So, I drove on, shaking my head no when two men waved at me. 

I turned onto 35th Street, a long thoroughfare that runs up the middle of a corridor of Oakland that connects the flatlands and Fruitvale BART station with Holy Names University and Merritt College up in the hills. I had made this run many times but on this hot July morning I began to notice how ragged the street was. I followed the path of a white pickup truck as it swerved sharply to dodge a deep hole. I realized that this was a street of dangerous potholes connected by occasional short strips of flat asphalt.

I observed that the street was also narrower than I had remembered and in the entire five miles I traveled there were no grocery stores except a few neighborhood corner stores, where a gallon of milk costs as much as a gallon of gasoline and over-priced sugary and salty snacks are plentiful. 

As I drove north, past a corner decorated with balloons and fresh flowers to commemorate the fatal shooting of a young man just days earlier, things began to change dramatically. The street suddenly widened to four lanes lined with well-trimmed trees as I approached MacArthur Boulevard. I decided to count potholes as I proceeded through Redwood Heights with its $750,000 homes. There were none to count.

I thought of the time I saw Jerry Brown, then Oakland's mayor, talking to a group of women dressed in smart tennis outfits and sipping lattes in a tony restaurant. One of them teased him about the potholes in her neighborhood. The mayor teased back, "What you do about those potholes is you drive around them." It was a good joke but I noted that he also asked the woman where she lived. My bet is that before those women gathered for their next Saturday breakfast a city crew would visit their neighborhood and patch up those potholes. Now, as I continued my drive, it was obvious that no one in the lower part of 35th Street had seen a city crew in years.

So this is my Oakland today -- a diverse community rich in many cultures but also a city that reflects one of the most glaring maladies of an ailing America -- the widening chasm between the haves and the have-nots. The juxtaposition of one choppy and neglected street against the smooth and well-attended boulevard on the hill is repeated time and again throughout the land. And it seems to me this is an ominous sign -- as ominous as the widening hole in the ozone. We need to heed these differences. We must. Those of us living along the smooth streets need to start raising hell about the potholes and collapsing infrastructure in the other part of town. We need to raise hell because if we don't, there is anarchy or worse waiting around the corner. More importantly, we need to raise hell simply because it is the right and the American thing to do.