Jeremiah Horrigan's Open Salon Blog

Making peace with the Point

Sun, 27 May 2012 22:05:49 -0400

"My days of old have vanished tone and tint. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. . ."

On a charisma scale, Mr. McGovern was pretty close to zero. He was my high school geometry teacher. His personal syllabus allowed no essay questions. A yes-no, right-or-wrong kind of guy.

Mr. McGovern wasn't much taller than many of his gangly charges. He wore an unfashionable crew cut and had piercing blue eyes. He stood ramrod straight. Though he didn't suffer us fools patiently, at least he never raised a hand against any of us, though he must have been tempted.

One stifling spring day in 1965, without fanfare or explanation, Mr. McGovern broke his classroom routine to play a recording -- an LP, as I remember -- of a man giving a speech.

The voice was wobbly and cracked with age. Mr. McGovern stared at the portable record player as if the voice of God were coming from it.

He gave no reason for his action, hoping perhaps the speech would itself prove self-explanatory.

It wasn't.

We were callow schoolboys, as immune to the grand, martial cadence of the old man's shaky words as we were to the emotions they were meant to conjure. When it was over, Mr. McGovern looked shaken. He cast his blue eyes about the room to see if the words had had their desired effect on us. His answer was obvious. No. I remember leaving his room feeling -- for no apparent reason -- that I'd somehow let Mr. McGovern down.

***

I'm guessing now, but that spring day was probably the first-year anniversary of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's death. I'm also guessing that Mr. McGovern was a military man who’d been moved to introduce us to something he valued by playing what was even then one of the most famous speeches of the time: MacArthur's farewell speech at West Point on May 12, 1962.

This tiny sliver of schoolboy memory stabbed at me one day about seven years ago at the end of a long, hot day that found me wandering the grounds of what is formally known as the United States Military Academy at West Point.

I'd gone there as a pilgrim of sorts, not sure what I was looking for and even less sure what I would do with it if I found it. I’d been dispatched there by an enlightened editor who told me to take a walk there and come back with a story.

I thought at the time that Joe knew a bit about my history, and by giving me the assignment, he hoped that he had effectively rubbed two storylines together that would culminate in some sort of narrative conflagration that would be interesting to the reader. The peacenik goes to the Point.

As I said, Joe was an enlightened editor. He knew I was conflicted about the military, had been all my life. And he knew conflict was the basic element of any good newspaper story, even one without an evident news hook.

Aside from this editorial backgrounder, what you've already read and what follows below is the result of that pilgrimage, the day I spent wandering West Point looking for something I didn't have a name for. If Joe was looking for fireworks, I must have disappointed him. I discovered something vastly more important about the Point and about me that day, something that I think is a fitting subject for Memorial Day.

***

Colleagues over the years had urged me to visit the Point. They predicted that whatever prejudices I held would melt in the majestic presence of the Point's awe-inspiring grounds, its crenellated towers, its fabled history.

I'd spent the day walking all over the vast campus, feeling quite the outcast. I'd been impressed, yes, but not moved.

Then, near the end of the day, at the edge of a vast greensward called The Field, I found myself in a sun-spattered shrine, standing in the thin afternoon shadow of the old man himself, Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Around me were seven low, stone slabs on which were carved excerpts from MacArthur's farewell speech.

“ My days of old have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were”

I sat on the smooth stone bench inside the small courtyard and found my thoughts turning to my own dream of things that were, and was surprised to discover that the words of an old warrior had brought a tear of recognition and unexpected thoughts of reconciliation to a life-long pacifist.

“... the soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of wars.”

My father was a veteran of World War II. He enlisted in the Navy at the age of 17, though he hated the sea and could barely swim. He never talked about those days while I was growing up. He wasn't that kind of patriot.

My father expected me to join the service and in a sort of "yeah, sure" way, so did I. The war at hand was Vietnam, a war fought mostly by young men my age who didn't have the luck or the means to escape the draft.

But I did have that means and with my father's blessing, I began attending Fordham University in 1968.

My conversion to the anti-war cause was typical of millions of baby boomers. I became "radicalized." I questioned authority, joined peace marches, let my hair grow, smoked dope. To my father's great dismay, I'd become a rebel with a cause, and a cause of great concern.

Every night, the TV brought news of the Vietnam dead. Scores of dead Americans. Hundreds of "Communists."

We were winning, the generals told us. I wasn't convinced.

Safe, symbolic protests soon lost their appeal for me. I wanted to do something. Almost anything that promised relief but didn't threaten life.

I fell in with a small group of people who were similarly impatient, similarly eager for action. In short order, I'd become what the news media of the day liked to call a draft board raider. And in August 1971, I was caught with four friends trying to destroy and steal draft board and Army Intelligence files from the federal building in my hometown of Buffalo, N.Y.

We hadn't intended to get caught, but caught we were, and looking at a possible 15 years in federal prison.

I was too naive to share my father's fears for my future. Instead, I felt overjoyed. I'd finally found a non-violent way to serve my country.

I got lucky again when we came up for trial. An enlightened federal judge allowed us to put the war on trial.

Nevertheless, we were convicted. The judge sentenced us to a year in prison, then suspended that sentence. We wept and laughed for joy.

A year after our trial, my father died of cancer at the age of 48, but not before he joined me in speaking out against the war.

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

I'm not used to telling war stories about myself. For the past 10 years, I've had the honor of telling other people's war stories in this newspaper. And I've found that though "issues" — may differ, at some essential level, every war story is an anti-war story.

Remembering some of those stories, and my own, I heard the echo of MacArthur's words reverberating in my head.

He spoke of "a great moral code — the code of conduct — and chivalry of those who guard this beloved land"

A great moral code. Wasn't that what I thought I had a corner on back in my green days?

"The soldier, above all men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training — sacrifice."

The willingness to sacrifice. Wasn't that what I arrogantly thought was missing from war protests of the time?

MacArthur's speech, it turns out, was a love song to the common soldier, not to the generals or the politicians or their unelected cronies whose faces filled our TV screens then as now -- with counsels of patience, predictions of imminent victory, promises of democracy on the march.

Listen to the love song of Douglas MacArthur, as he describes the effect of West Point's code — Duty, Honor, Country — on those who take it to heart:

"They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion for those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high, to learn to laugh, yet never forget to weep."

Sitting in the old soldier's shadow, I thought of Mr. McGovern, and of my father, of wars just and unjust. MacArthur's are words every real teacher — every father — yearns to tell student, son or daughter, in times of peace or war.

And for keeping such words alive, this old war protester owes a debt of gratitude not only to the old soldier who spoke them, but to the fabled academy that carved them in stone.

Some snapshots of a beautiful woman

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:05:05 -0400

Let me tell you about my mother.

She is 84 years old and she is beautiful.
She's been that way all her life. Let me show you:

Here she is sitting on a picnic blanket, looking up at my adoring father, the the guy behind the camera. They're not married yet, she might still be in her teens. She's looking up at the camera. Her long, wavy black hair falls to her shoulders. She's smiling what used to be called a Pepsodent smile. Her lips look curiously black in the Brownie's stark pallete. She was a country girl from DuBois, PA when my seafaring father met her while on leave from the war. You can't see it here, but she had a figure that made secret sinners of every man who caught sight of her.

Here's another one, taken maybe 18 months after they were married:

Same dazzling smile, big bright eyes staring at the camera, but staring with a different knowledge. That fat bald thing on her lap -- the incarnation of that different knowledge -- is me. I look like every other baby in the world, except to her and the skinny young man sitting next to her. That day, Dad must have got someone -- maybe my Uncle Joe -- to use the Brownie. Dad's wearing a loud sweater and sharply creased, baggy slacks. Steel-rim glasses and hair combed into a shiny pompadour -- the very picture of a sharp-dressed man, circa 1950. He's clutching me around the ribs, grinning like the devil. I'm guessing he was tickling me. I'm reaching for the sky, laughing.

I draw one conclusion from this photo: I was loved.

Here's another shot, taken no doubt with a big Speed Graflex by the roving photographer at the old Town Casino, Buffalo's once and future snazzy night club.

They're sitting in a curved, high-backed banquette at a tiny table-for-two. Smiling, of course. Eyes alive with possibility -- not lit by booze, they didn't drink. Even without me in the picture, any fool can see these two were in love.

Flash Cube forward to the daisy-yellow and avocado-green '70s. The nine of us kids sit on the battered living room couch, trying our best to look like we all just loved sitting on top of each other. Pasted-on grins beneath lank, longish hair from the three boys, the six girls wearing everything from dresses to diapers. Mom perched on the edge of the couch, smiling bravely.

I'll stop right here with the picture show. I've got shoeboxes full of photos curling up on themslves, as if hiding their secrets. Fact is, I don't need photos to prove my mother's beauty. The evidence doesn't lie there, it can't really be photographed. The truth of her beauty lies elsewhere, stashed away in lock boxes of memory, where no one is trying to fool the cameraman with smiles pasted-on or otherwise.

I have no photos of the pain she struggled with when her oldest son got himself busted in a very public display of highly illegal anti-war outrage. No record exists of her daily visits to my dad's hospital bedside as he lay dying of cancer. None of us took photos of the year-long vigil she kept at my comatose sister Mary's bedside.

All I ever wanted to do those days was comfort her, assure her, make her smile again. But I couldn't.

She was a widow before she was 50. On her own and desolate, victim of a heartless "financial consultant" whose subsequent death provided a sense of justice but no return on her bogus "investment." There were day-to-day struggles, money problems, kid problems that I could do nothing about, being enmeshed in my own set of similar struggles. But on those rare times I reached out in the name of somehow helping her with a long-distance phone call, it was always she who wound up helping me, she who made me feel better when I finally hung up the phone.

Eventually, she made new friends, found new ways to connect with people, not least of all her rebellious oldest son and his new family. Miraculously, though our ways were odd even to people our own age, she never offered advice, never suggested a more conventional path, never withdrew her attention or love. If we asked for help, she gave it, without question or expectation of payback. We did everything but conform, and she barely seemed to notice.

After a discrete 25 years or so, she married again, and married a good man who takes good care of her, as she cares for him.

So. I misled you in the beginning, suggesting that my mother's beauty is something a camera can catch. Words aren't much better, except as they get to go deeper into those lock boxes. Yes, she was and is a beauty. But I think you can see, without any more evidence, exactly what I meant when I started this story. And why I had to tell you about her.

originally published May 8, 2009

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What a teenager's "prank" tells us about the man he's become

Thu, 10 May 2012 21:05:43 -0400

Amid the furor surrounding Mitt Romney’s admitted take-down of a fellow student at Cranbrook Academy 50 some years ago, one thing stand out starkly. It wasn’t what Romney admits doing as a teenager but how he responded to and explained his acts only a day or so ago.

I'm not surprised to learn that John Lauber, Romney’s victim was a closeted gay man. The atmosphere at such privileged educational institutions as Cranbrook virtually reeks of homophobia, a product of teenage confusion, fear, projection and ignorance. Countless young men who are now Romney’s age, myself included, have fallen into the trap of queer baiting. It’s inexcusable but inescapable in the battened-down world of an all-boys school where the need to establish rank and avoid social ostracism is paramount.

Was he a bully? Pretty obviously. But the bullying charge doesn’t shock or surprise me, though it may resonate deeply, as it should, with those many young people and their parents who have made bullying a political rallying cry for gay and straight students alike.

What stands out most painfully for me, for any man who sees his own twisted teenage history reflected n the Washington Post’s report is Romney’s assertion that he doesn’t remember what he did, at least not in quite the detail that his fellow bullies do.

I don’t believe that’s possible. And if it's possible, if Romney isn’t lying, I’m all the more appalled by his response to that report.

Reading the report sent me back to my own school days at Canisius High School, an exclusive all-boys Catholic school in my hometown of Buffalo, N.Y. I arrived there as a transfer student in junior year in 1966. I was the new kid in class, as dorky and self-conscious as any other high school junior, hyper-aware of all my failings, real and imagined.

Chief among my real failings was an obvious lack of athletic ability. It did not go unnoticed. One kid in particular appeared to have my number. But then I noticed this kid – we’ll call him Jim – was already preoccupied with teasing and taunting another student we’ll call Charles.

Charles was an especially gawky looking kid. He seemed unaware of this, which gave him an impenetrable air of innocence that, while increasing his his vulnerablity, might also have saved him from realizing how often his interactions with his "friend" Jim were tainted by contempt.

In Charles, I recognized how I could escape being similarly scrutinized and tortured by Jim. All I had to do was join Jim in teasing Charles. There was a pecking order at school, and I was intent on not joining Charles at the bottom of that order.

I won’t go into the tawdry details, other than to say my scheme worked. I escaped Jim’s ridicule and made Charles pay for it. I knew it was wrong then and I probably confessed it in the confessional. But I never confessed it to Charles, to my ever-lasting shame.

Over the years, I’ve thought about what I did to Charles. I don't like to be reminded. I’ve tried to find comfort in the possibility that circumstances, self-protection and even prep-school tradition drove me to hurt him and excused my actions.

But the truth is I enjoyed psychologically toying with – bullying – the young man who’d unwittingly saved me from being becoming an exile.

If I didn’t behave as righteously as I wish I had, all I can say is this: I’ve never forgotten what I did. Nor have I forgiven myself.

And that’s my point about Romney’s response to the news story. He admits he tackled John Lauber and took a pair of scissors to hair that he judged to be somehow “wrong.” He brought the terrified young man to tears (a further schoolboy indictment of his manhood). And now, confronted by the story, Romney says he doesn’t remember the incident.

I don’t believe that. I can’t believe that. And that’s the best light I can put on his response. Because if he did remember his actions, Romney would have to feel shame for what he did.

Instead, he explained his behavior by admitting --sheepishly --to “participating in a lot of hijinks and pranks” as a young man.

Hijinks?

What kind of man – not teenager – confronted by such shameful deeds, claims he can’t remember the particulars of what he did? Other members of the pack that helped Romney take Lauber down remember only too well what happened. Several told The Post they’ve been haunted by what they witnessed and by their silence, participated in.

But the man who would be president can’t quite remember what happened, though he’s certainly, you know, sorry if some of those pranks “might have gone too far.”

Can anyone believe those are the words of a man who feels remorse for what he’s done? Lacking any evidence of remorse, of shame, I can only stare at Romney’s photo and wonder what recognizably human feeling resides beneath that ever-smiling visage.

The football draft? It used to be a lot simpler (a re-post)

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 22:04:31 -0400

The multi-million-dollar melodrama that the NFL Draft has become used to be a simpler affair. Time was, any two skinny kids could run the pro football draft. I know, because me and my brother Joe did exactly that about 45 years ago.

I was 14 and Joe was maybe 12. Lord knows we weren’t qualified to run the American Football League draft, but we ran it anyway.

Single-handedly.

I swear.

A bit of background first. The AFL was The Other League, the upstart brainchild of millionaires like Lamar Hunt and Bud Addams and Ralph Wilson, guys with tons of money who had not been allowed to buy NFL franchises of their own.

Millionaires aren't used to rejection. So they got together and started their own eight-city league, much to the scorn of the solons of the NFL.

The early years of the AFL were predictably rocky. But slowly, the teams started catching on in cities like Buffalo and San Diego and Denver. Contrary to the NFL’s fondest wishes, the AFL refused to go away. It even prospered.

Most ominously for the NFL, the AFL owners were willing to put their money where their teams were, which meant that for the first time ever, NFL team owners had to bid for the services of hot college prospects. Capitalism had been visited upon the NFL owners and they didn't like it one bit. The AFL “stole” any number of big-name college stars in its early years, and they did so under the auspices of a secret college draft.

That’s where Joe and I came in. Although painfully skinny (our combined weights barely equaled that of a tackling dummy’s) we made up for it with our blinding speed. We had what’s now called certain “intangibles,” such as the fact that we were willing to work for the occasional hot chocolate and the possibility of seeing former President Harry Truman.

It also helped that our father was the PR director for the AFL. It was he who volunteered us for the job of running the draft.

Here’s how it worked: Joe and I would hang around the league office on Fifth Avenue until one adult or another, after taking a phone call from a team rep, would write down a name of a college player and the team that had just selected him. He would then hand off the slip to one of us, and we would take off down Fifth Avenue to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where we’d hand off the selection to another bunch of adults. They’d take our secret messages and send us back on our way to Fifth Avenue, where the process started all over again.

We ran all day and into the night. And no one but a select few knew.
I have no idea why running two kids around Manhattan was deemed necessary or even wise. But this I can say: it sure kept things secret.

Nor do I have any idea whose names we delivered. You could say that information was out of our hands.

The thrill of running the draft that day was in knowing we had this unique and secret mission that required us to dash through city streets clutching in our hands the fate not only of college prospects but of entire football teams and the league itself.

We were superheroes with secret identities that day. No one knew, would even guess, that those two annoying kids zipping past their plodding city selves held the fate of thousands in their hands.

It didn’t even matter that we never saw Harry Truman that day. The former president was the Waldorf Astoria’s most prominent resident in those days. But even if he’d been out for a stroll, I doubt we would have stopped to gawk and I think he would have been OK with that if he’d known the full story. A former president, of all people, would surely have understood the importance of our mission that day.

Saying good-bye to the Gentleman from Arkansas

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:04:14 -0400

Levon Helm, drummer, singer and songwriter for The Band, died Thursday at 1:30 p.m.

I'd sing him a song, but I can't sing. Hours after his death, I heard a song on the radio that he sang not too long ago. To me, it's his elegy. I've wrapped my memories of him around the lyrics to that song. It's the best way I could figure to mark a sad occasion and commemorate the kind of man I believe he was:

“There’s a sorrow in the wind / Blowin’ down the road I’ve been / I can hear it cry while shadows steal the sun . . . “

When you put on a Band album, his are the songs that stop you in your tracks and make you grin (c’mon, Jemima, surrender) and make you want to dance on a wood-plank floor under an endless Western sky the way they did in the square dance scene from “My Darling Clementine.” If the Beatles were pot and the Stones were coke, The Band was moonshine. Moonshine is a distilled spirit, and no one distilled the spirit of the day more purely than Levon Helm.

“But I cannot look back now / I’ve come too far to turn around / and there’s still a race ahead that I must run. . . “

After The Band broke up, sadly and acrimoniously, Levon took what might be called a re-mastered Band on the road in the early ‘80s, without guitarist Robbie Robertson. His tour barely rated a “Random Notes” notice in Rolling Stone. The Band was done, kaput, the wise men of the industry decreed.

But no one told Levon, or if they did, he didn’t believe them.

I first met Levon on the eve of that tour. I was more fan than newspaper reporter and more nervous than I care to remember. I knocked on the door of his spacious log home on a leafy lane in Woodstock at 3 p.m. No response. I kept a’knocking. Levon finally came to the door. He’d been asleep. I was still learning musicians don’t live in a five o’clock world.

I’d never met anyone as gentlemanly as Levon. He put me instantly at ease. He wanted to know about me. About my family. He took me on a tour of his property. We watched silently as a deer and her doe came out to a salt lick he had in his yard. I left his smiling presence feeling like I’d made a friend. And convinced I didn’t have a story. I’d done all the talking.

“I’m only halfway home I got to journey on / To where I’ll find the things that I have lost / I’ve come a long, long road still I’ve got miles to go / I’ve got a wide, wide river to cross . . .”

The industry honchos didn’t know it, but Levon was just getting re-started. His solo sales weren’t great, but he never stopped recording or touring. He wrote his autobiography. Gave Robbie what-for. Kept playing for all he was worth.

Then came the bad news. Throat cancer. He couldn’t sing.

But he could still drum, and then some.

I spoke with him again during those dark-seeming days, at a home-town gig in 2000. Levon Helm and the Barn Burners. I say dark-seeming days because the darkness I’d been anticipating never materialized. He played a rollicking set with a crackerjack crew of young guns. His daughter Amy broke a few hearts with her singing that night.

The place was barely half-full, even after his road manager papered the hall.

After the show, he almost convinced me that he remembered me. He was still the gracious, friendly guy I’d met 20 years before. Having pocleted my press pass for the evening, I’d only wanted to say hello and thank him for a lifetime of music. But he was eager to speak, even though it hurt to do so. Mostly, he wanted me to understand what a pleasure and a blessing it was to be playing in a band with Amy.

He didn’t need to explain. He radiated with fatherly pride. Gave her all the credit for his recovery.

I left the place feeling honored by his attention and feeling like a thief for stealing words from him that he could put to better use someday in a recording studio. His wan pallor and gravelly voice told me he didn't have many words left to him.

Levon Helm was an easy man to underestimate, as I the next dozen years so dramatically demonstrated.

Those were the years of the Rambles, inspired by the traveling music shows of his Arkansas youth, each one an unforgettable experience for anyone who ever witnessed or participated in one. Single-handedly, Levon was showing anyone who’d ever doubted his resilience that he was back, and back with a vengeance, re-defining what it meant to be a star after the stadium gigs are gone, doing it on his terms, doing it generously by sharing the stage with friends and family. Doing it without even leaving his own backyard. The three-straight Grammys were icing on the cake of a career that had outlasted and bested entire record companies.

And then the bad news returned. The worst news.

His family left this message on his website Tuesday:

“Levon is in the final stages of his battle with cancer. Please send your prayers and love to him as he makes his way through this part of his journey.”

“I have stumbled I have strayed / You can trace the tracks I made / All across the memories my heart recalls / But I'm just a refugee won't you say a prayer for me / Cause sometimes even the strongest soldier falls”

After all the journeys he shared with all the people who ever heard him sing his song, the Arkansas gentleman has left us standing in a station, watching helplessly as that inescapable mystery train pulls away.

“Wide River to Cross” by Buddy and Julie Miller

Here's a link to Levon's version of this song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm2_7o8DGtI

He didn't write it himself, but he was a great interpreter as anyone can tell you who's heard his version of Dylan's "When I Paint My Masterpiece."