the 26th day of september in the year of 1936...


IS THE DAY UPON WHICH I WAS BORN...
TODAY IS THE 26TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER in the year of 2014, which means that I have now been alive for a total of twenty-eight-thousand four-hundred and seventy days and am now  seventy-eight years-of-age. 


  The older I get, the more I am humbled by the fact that I have lived as long as I have. Along the way, I have learned about many things, from the meaning of baseball to the nature of human beings, from the love of my children and grandchildren to the value of having good friends.  I do not claim that I have produced an uninterrupted series of amazements, because I haven't.  There are many things I wish I had never done, many more that I wished to have accomplished did not mostly due to my own lazily derived ignorance.  I have often winced; if I'd only made another choice, or had another chance, perhaps I would have been a better man or a bit wiser than I have turned out to be.  Sometimes I completely missed the point, or didn't see the truth of what was happening around me.  But this is not an apology.  It is the nature of living a life and there is no going back.  It's too late to deepen the insight, alter mistaken or naive judgment, erase the language that hurt someone else's feelings.  You can only vow to never make that error again and start fresh the next day.


  Over the decades, I've played baseball as a professional and once was a Lutheran Minister, along with having been in business and eventually becoming a writer.  In a way, it has been a rather unusual journey and my writing has become a public diary, a recording of where I was and what I witnessed and who I met along the way.  In the meanderings of my life, I have remembrances of the public events of my time: World War Two and Korea and Vietnam and Watergate, riots and assassinations and political betrayals, along with Nine-Eleven and Iraq and the emergence of ISIS.  My own ignorance has forced me to know more about history and has given me a crash course in how it was that I got to be me, and to enable me to begin to make connections among a variety of subjects; a march with Martin Luther King brought me knowledge about Malcom X and Stokely Carmichael; an education  informed me of Faulkner and Hemingway and Plato and Socrates; my own inquisitive nature brought me jazz and the blues and the history of Sparta and the music of Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte and Miles Davis.




  I wanted to know how the world worked and how I fit into it.  I wanted to know something about the people I met and  about the places I had been, events I had attended or a new idea I wanted further to explore.  Then I wanted to pass on what I had learned to others: Who I was when I learned what I now know and the people who have helped and loved me along the way, as well as my own large stupidities and small triumphs; and yes, most of all, how fortunate I am to have the family I have and friends I have grown to know in the life that I have been fortunate enough to live...

in zapata country with johnny...


I FIRST MET JOHNNY OWENS IN THE MID-1970s...
SHORTLY AFTER MY WIFE AND I HAD DIVORCED.  He was  a Professor of History at the University of Houston.  One morning at the local gathering place for early morning coffee called The Avalon Drug Store on the corner of Kirby Drive and Westheimer Road, he told me that he was he was about to be on his way to what he called Zapata Country in order to study the life and legend of Emiliano Zapata, the proud man who became the revolutionary leader of the 400 citizens of Morelos in order to use the law to settle their grievances against the government of Mexico back in 1909.  Johnny, who was aware that I was  somewhat depressed over my recent divorce and by the fact that I could no longer see my 2 children on a daily-basis, invited me to tag-along with him,  mentioned how attractive the women in that particular portion of Mexico were, and since I was unemployed at the time and would not mind the company of a good-looking woman or two, I immediately said Yes.


  The village of Tepoztlan was about 60 miles south of Mexico City, among the mountains of Morelos.  Behind them other mountains rose, big and broad-shouldered, with darkened silhouettes of still more beyond.  Each day, as Johnny and I walked to town, they became as familiar as the road itself.  I quickly learned that this was where the legend of Zapata lived.  To the village residents, Emiliano Zapata wasn't simply a character in a movie, a figure in a mural, or a name in the history of the 1910-1920 Mexican Revolution.  He had lived, he'd fought, he'd died here. I would soon learn that in that fine, tragic 1952 version of the great revolutionary leader that Marlon Brando played in Viva Zapata, the movies got it right.  Viva Zapata might be of limited use as literal history, but was absolutely true as legend.


  The town of Tepoztlan has existed since about the time of Jesus, and was dominated by the Aztecs for a century before the arrival of Cortez.  Today it is laid out in the same basic design as it once was.  The great mounds of chilies, corn, beans, tomatoes, and chocolate; the ceramics  and masks: Were all sold in virtually the same way in Aztec times, under the same colorful arrangements of tents and poles.  After lunch on our second day in Tepoztlan, we walked under the hot, scoured Mexican sky to the center of town to meet with a woman by the name of Valentia Perez in a small cafe called El Cirelo, where we ordered coffee.  Valentia had been in the town of Chimaneca on the 10th day of April in the year of 1919, which was the day that Zapata had been assassinated at the age of 39.   She was a a 10 year-0ld girl back then and was now a woman 66 years-of-age, with a finely-chiseled face and dark-brown eyes and cascades of curled salt-and-peppered hair.


  Valentia began telling us the entire  story of that day by saying that in March of 1919, a colonel in the government army named Jesus M. Guajardo agreed to join forces with Zapata, defecting with guns, ammunition, and more than 100 men.  Zapata was suspicious but intrigued.  He decided to meet with Guajardo, made arrangement for delivery of arms and men, and told Guajardo that he would soon be a general in the Zapata army.  Guarjardo then invited Zapata to a fiesta in Chinameca, where the could celebrate the new alliance.  Ignoring the rumors of a trap, Zapata came to town on April 10th.


  Leaving most of his troops standing guard down the road, Zapata entered the hacienda with 10 of his officers.  Guajardo's men were standing guard on the patio, their weapons in the present-arms position.  A bugle sounded 3 times as Zapata passed through the gate, and on the 3rd note, Guajaro's men raised their rifles and fired at Zapata and his men.  Zapata turned his horse, his pearl-handled pistol still in his holster, stood in the stirrups with his arms out thrust and then crashed to the ground.  His companions fell with him.  His bullet-riddled body was then draped over a horse  and then taken to Chaulta, where it was unceremoniously  dumped on the floor of the Municipal Palace for all to see.  Valentia ended the story with tears in her eyes.  She then paused and gave a small smile.  "That is where the legend began," she said.  "Many said he was still alive.  He was said to have gone to Nicaragua or Arabia to fight for freedom there.  Others said that he was close to home and could be seen back in the hills dressed in white peasant clothes and riding - not the sorrel on which he had been killed- but a fine, white horse of happier days...All of Morelos followed him.  Right to the end.  He was the revolutionary master of these mountains..."


  We then walked with her and soon discovered that the name of Tepoztlan doesn't explain the beauty of the place, or its moods, or its ghosts.  Valentia said that sometimes they all appear after the sun has vanished, and you can walk at night with no sense of menace that stains the night in almost all the cities of el Norte.  On the dirt roads of the lower town, we saw strangers pass in the dark and murmur hello.   Somewhere, but never seen, dogs were barking, and the odor of jasmine thickened the air.  We walked along a small rutted road, gazing up at the black silhouette of the mountains, the wind shifted subtly and a cloud acquired the gleaming texture of mother-of-pearl: still, beautiful, perfect.  A lone dog howled.  And I swear that up on the ridge, high above this dark valley in Morelos, I saw a fine white horse...


  ...And when I asked Johnny if he had seen it too, he said Yes  and Valentia smiled and wispered Viva Zapata...  

my man godfrey, the man I both treasured and adored:


MY FAVORITE LINE IN LITERATURE WAS WRITTEN BY...

RAFAEL SABATINI IN A BOOK CALLED SCARAMOUCHE: "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad," was the opening line; and my Father insisted that I memorize this rather simple sentence when I was 12 years-old.  Earlier in the day, he had made me trudge through the snow to the neighborhood library and back to our house in order for me to obtain the book, remove my galoshes and soaking-wet coat, go into my bedroom and memorize the opening line, return to the living room, where he had been waiting patiently on the sofa, in order that I recite the words to him; and when I came to the finish of my rather bland recital,  he then informed me that if I lived by these words, always remembered them, my life would be good, in that the world was  indeed mad and laughter would be my only salvation for the mayhem which lay ahead in a life I had yet to live.  It would be a code, he added, by which I could not only live a rather good life but would give me the pleasure of chuckling at both myself and others for all of the mortal sins and minor misdemeanors that I would see all of mankind commit along the way.


  At the time, of course, I thought he had gone utterly mad.


  They turned out to be words of enduring wisdom.


  His name was Godfrey John Julius Albert Daugs.


  And I had the rare pleasure of being his Son.


  Everything about Godfrey John Julius Albert Daugs amazed me: his smile, his elegant  manner, the features of his face, even the powerful singing voice which he produced with ease and joy at the drop-of-a-hat, and the fact that even after a hard day's work, he always came home looking clean and freshly scrubbed.  My Dad attended every one of my baseball games as I grew from a young boy into early manhood, called me Rabbi from the stands, in spite of the fact that we did not happen to be Jewish, and that word alone would always make me laugh.  His style was urban and and I was proud to be at his side.  I loved that part of him.  Loved, too, that he seemed to be proud of me, as well.  He was a man of wit, wisdom, and courage: all combined to make me admire him even more; but just about the best thing of all things about him was, of course, was the sound of his own infectious laugther.


 
  Part of his appeal was based on another fact:  He was that rare sort of human being whom everyone seemed to adore, men and women alike, a genuinely gentle man who gave the impression of loving everyone he had ever met.  He also told some of the greatest stories I have ever heard.  He cared about words, and it showed in the way he talked. I can still hear his voice still coming to me across the decades, filled with love and energy, insistent that the world must be challenged and all life embraced.  He never hesitated.  He lifted no phrases out of cheap movies, the ones where other fathers on the big-screen gave advice to their almost-perfect children on how to a life.  The quality of of his words were of the tough-minded decency of a man with a code of honor.  He challenged me to be a good father and trustworthy man as I grew older; not to impose my will, directly or indirectly, upon other people; to never point a finger  of suspicion at anyone else, because one day that finger could be pointed my way; and insisted that I not be blind to the needs of others - but also direct my attention to common interests and to the means by which those needs could be resolved.  But the simplest words, the ones I treasured the most,  were: I love you, Dick.




  Years later, after Nixon, Ford, and Carter had given way to Reagan, and George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and George W. Bush: after the horrors of of Cambodia and Vietnam and AIDS had had become the new plague - after all had changed from the year of 1975, when my Father had died at the age of 72, I was walking alone on a pre-dawn morning along the shores of Georgica Beach out in East Hampton.  People walked by, some gave me a nod, but nobody stopped to converse, it was too early in the day for that. 


  It was the 18th day of February in 1995. 


 The same exact day upon which my father had been born back in 1903. 




  I was alone in the emptiness of cross-cutting memory of the 40 years he had now been absent from my life and the sadness I felt each-and-every day because of it.  And because he had known the midnight as well as the high noon of life, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he had given me his strength to overcome the despair of his loss in my life.  That thought in itself had brought a smile to my face.  


  It was in that brief smiling moment of memory that in the distance, I saw a plume of smoke coming from a small but elegant house.  A stand of of tall trees stood on either side of the lane leading up to it, a burgundy-colored and freshly-polished Jaguar was parked in the circular driveway in the front of it.  I came a bit closer and squinted.  It was then that I  was almost certain that I saw a man standing up there on the front porch, looking down at me in through pre-dawn darkness, tossing me a hale-and-hearty laugh.  For a moment-or-so, I thought that I had seen the image of my Father and that he was tossing a laugh my way as:  A gift of laughter...in honor of his birthday; and whether it was real or imagined, it brought the sound of laughter to my own lips, and was a most wonderous way to celebrate the birthday of a man that I both treasured and adored...  

my sluggish  journey toward the gates of eden without the booze:

OVER THE YEARS I HAVE LEARNED...

THAT THERE ARE LIMITS TO THE MYTH of the hard-drinker.  One Sunday night, a black-tie party was held in a luxurious apartment on Central Park West in the City of New York.  People dropped in.  The night rolled on, full of laughs and drinks and good conversation.  It lasted until well after midnight.  The first time I had an inkling that I might have a drinking problem came on the following morning when I arrived at Interboro Institute on West 56th  to teach my writing class along about 10AM.  I thought I was sober, seeing things clearly and thinking lucidly, but I was still half-drunk.  I slurred my words and wobbled when I walked.  Finally, a fellow professor by the name of Francine Waxman came into my classroom, stood facing me and said, I think you ought to go home.  I was mortified.  Francine was a part of the faculty saloon fraternity too, and happened also to be the woman I was dating at the time; she wasn't objecting to the drinking itself but the obvious fact that I couldn't hold my liquor.  I put on my jacket and she stepped even closer to me and whispered, You should never come to work like this again! 


  And I didn't.


  I did not think that was enough of a reason to stop drinking, however.  As in most things, you need rules of conduct, and insofar as I was concerned, I had simply made a minor mistake.  I never drank in the morning prior to going to work.  I did drink most evenings, but so did most of my friends.  That wasn't unusual.  On weekends, there were festivities to attend.  In the city at an upscale party.  Out in the Hamptons at a charity event in the evening or at the East Hampton Bar and Grill on North Main Street in the afternoon.  After all, saloons and bars and social events all served as a clearinghouse for news and gossip.  If you were a stranger at any of these occasions, you  went up to another individual with a drink in your hand in order to break-the-proverbial-ice, it was the socially acceptable thing to do.  As a matter of fact, it was  almost a must for upper-class camaraderie.


  Late one Sunday evening I was aboard the Hampton Jitney on my way back from the Hamptons to New York City, and for some unknown reason I thought about one of my literary heroes, Ernest Hemingway, the great bronze god of American literature, the epitome of the hard-drinking macho artist; who one morning in July of 1961, put a twelve-gauge shotgun under his jaw and pulled the trigger.  His writing, his life, his courage, his drinking, were all part of the heroic image.  Suicide was not.  Suicide, I believed at the time, was the choice of a coward.  And yet, when I arrived back in the City of New York, I immediately went to a place called Extra-Extra on East 42nd Street and ordered a drink in memory of Hemingway; then gave a lecture on the following morning to my writing class on what a magnificent writer Ernest Hemingway was.


  That year, as spring turned to summer and summer became fall, I found myself in the back room of a bar called Jimmy  Armstrong's Saloon on the corner of West 57th Street and 10th Avenue.  It was Friday evening.  I was there with 5 other professors from Interboro.  We all ate hamburgers and drank beer and whiskey.  We talked politics.  We made jokes.  We argued about the comparative merits of Jets versus the Giants.  We talked on, drinking more, laughing louder.  Then it was time to go.  Mitch Paul, a fellow professor, called for the check.  Mitch stared hard at us, his smile gone, his eyes suddenly deep under the furrow of his brow.


  You know what? he said.  All of us are nothing more than cowardly drunks!


  I laughed, thinking he was joking.


  He wasn't.


  The problem is, he said,  none of us have the balls to quit.  We all think that we're hot shit, just because we can teach kids.  Fuck it! he added, standing up abruptly.  He then walked out the door.


  The rest of us did the same in stone-cold silence.


  I took a cab to my apartment on West 44th and went to sleep.


  Mitch walked to his apartment on West 61st and took a dive out of his bedroom window.




  The price I was paying for drinking was very large, but for a long time, nobody presented me with the check.  I still didn't realize that I was losing my way, so I made no attempt at repair.  It was as simple as that.  Those of us who had been there with Mitch on that godawful night cut down on drinking, stayed away from Armstrong's for a week or so,  worked hard, then resumed the old Friday evening pattern of drink and conversation without Francine Waxman, who had the courage to stop drinking on the night that Mitch had taken the dive, begged me to stop drinking too; and when I politely refused, she broke-up with me.  So I found solace in drinking more and telling many tales of my adventures out in East Hampton, which were, by then, beginning to erode at a rather rapid pace, due to depleting lack of funds and the high cost of booze in the City of New York; and me pretending that I was wealthier than I actually was.


  Due to the aforementioned lack of funds, after 13 years in the City of New York, I moved to a town in the East Bay Region of the San Francisco Bay Area called Brentwood in 1999, went to work for a newspaper, The Brentwood Press, and the pattern resumed.  At a bar, I could believe that my life was a delight, so I hunted down a place 2 blocks from where I worked by the name of Cap's Oak Street Bar and Grill.  On New Year's Eve of 2002, the newspaper tossed a party.  I was at the crowed bar with editors and writers and the remainder of the staff.  Everybody was drinking.  We all thought we were witty.  We exchanged stories.  We were supposed to having a good time.  There were balloons.  There were funny hats.  There were noisemakers.  I suddenly felt as if the air was slowly going out of me.  I wanted to be back in New York City.  If this was a play, I wanted a better script.  So  I went into the Men's Room, returned to the bar, and sipped my drink.  The band started to play.  The singer was perfectly groomed and perfectly dressed and he began to sing Frank Sinatra tunes, beginning with "Lulu's Back in Town" and "I Did It My Way." A few celebrants snapped their fingers.  I stared into my glass, at the melting ice and the vodka-logged lime.  And I whispered to myself, I don't think I can do this anymore. 



 
  I finished my drink and walked out of the bar.


  I didn't join Alcoholics Anonymous or seek out help, I just made an attempt to ease-off a little.  My goal was provisional and modest.  A few days without drinking.  Then a month.  The month stretched into  6 and the 6 into 1 year. I now saw more clearly what liquor did to people.  In the City of New York I had met unemployed writers and actors: all broken by booze.  I recalled some of the final tortured stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald and felt surges of pity, for Fitzgerald, for folks like Mitch Paul, for other friends.  I paused and gave thought to the asinine remarks and stupid lapses in grace which I had made while drinking; and realized that I now had more time than I'd ever had as an adult for lucid thought.


  On one recent morning July of this year, I went for a long walk through a small park in my new Sacramento neighborhood and gave thought to how much booze I had downed since that New Year's Eve night back in 2002.  Over the past 12 years, my count was this: 6 Irish Whiskeys at a bar in San Francisco on Saint Patrick's Day in 20013 with an old dear friend by the name of Barbara; 6 shots of Johnnie Walker Black Label  at Christmas and Thanksgiving; and 12 glasses of beer to beat the summer's heat.  It was not a record of perfection, but I realized that I loved my life, with all its hurts and injuries and failures, and the things I now saw clearly without the blur of booze...


  ...Although I am not yet completely through the gates of Eden, I am on my way and doing OK...

a small remembrance of  harry morgan of dragnet and m*a*s*h:


ONE FRIDAY IN THE FALL OF 1955, I WENT TO SEE...

THE MOVIE "STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND" STARRING James Stewart and June Allyson, but came away from it remembering only the kindly face of the guy who played Sergeant Joe Bible, the flight engineer.  I watched the way he walked, heard the tenderness in his voice, saw the wry smile, sharp sense of humor, and imagined him as the wonderful uncle that every kid should have.  For some odd reason, the man's face  and mannerisms enthralled me.   That same year, I went to see another James Stewart movie called The Far Country, with a cast that included Ruth Roman, Walter Brennan, Corrine Calvet, and John McIntire; and there he was again as a character named Ketchum.  My trouble was, I had yet to catch his name.  It was not until the year of 1963 that I found out who he was; as I caught a glimpse of him on the television show, Have Gun - Will Travel, starring Richard Boone, and he was playing Sheriff Ernie Backwater. 


  His name was Harry Morgan.



 
  I now had a name that I could attach to that good-natured face; and that was around the same time as I had seen him on the television show The Untouchables, playing the gangster Bugs Moran; as well as witnessing his face on the big screen in How the West Was Won, where he played Ulysses S. Grant.  I then happened to cross the path of a fellow by the name of Buck Grady, who had opened a shoe store on Main Street  in Fremont, Nebraska called Buck's Shoes.  I was in town to celebrate the 2nd year anniversary of my graduation from Central Lutheran Theological Seminary in 1962; and one summer morning, I walked past the shop and stopped short.  In the window was a large photograph of Harry Morgan as General Grant and another one of him as Bugs Moran.  I went inside the store and introduced myself to Mister Grady, and asked why he had the photographs of Harry Morgan in the window of his store.  It turned out that Buck had gone to high school with Harry back in 1933, when Harry still had the last name of Bratsburg, that the both of them had been on the statewide debating team which had happened to win the state championship that year, and that the two of them had kept in touch after Harry had gone off to the University of Chicago in 1935 to study pre-law but turned to acting, instead; then departed for the City of New York,  where he joined The Group Theater formed by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strassberg.


  Harry was in the original production of Clifford Odet's play The Golden Boy along with Karl Malden and Lee J. Cobb, did you know that? said Grady.


  No, sir, I answered.


 
  Are you a fan of his?Grady asked.


 
 Yes, sir, I said.


 Good for you, he replied.  Harry is the finest friend that a man could ever have. 


  In a way, that is exactly what I thought he would be.  Over the years I had watched him playing sheriffs, judges, soldiers, thugs, and police chiefs; then officer Bill Gannon on Dragnet, always standing next to Jack Webb, who had a craggy face that reminds me of a current television detective by the name of Lt. Joe Kenda - Homicide Hunter on the ID Channel; and seemed fond of always saying: "My name is Friday - I'm a cop."  Dragnet was aired from 1967-1970 and then disappeared from view.  I missed seeing Harry's face and  his wry sense-of-humor.  As for Jack Webb's ever-present furrowed brow, not so much.


  In 1974, Harry popped-up on the small screen once again.  This time on a show called M*A*S*H.  He was a guest star and his name was now General Bradford Hamilton Steele, in an episode called: The General Flipped at Dawn. By 1975, a fellow by the name of McLean Stevenson had left the show and Harry replaced him, probably due to his wonderful portrayal of Bradford Hamilton Steele in 1974;  playing Colonel Sherman T. Potter, a good-humored and caring father figure, who took care of the people under his command.  On his first day as the commander of the Korean hospital camp, when he became aware that the men under his command were engaged in a covert moonshine-operation, instead of reprimanding them, he said: "Had a still in Guam in World War Two.  One night it blew up.  That's how I got my purple heart."  He remained on the show until it came to an end in 1983; and when the final two-and-one-half hour episode aired on February 28th of 1983, entitled Goodbye, Farewell and Amen, it became the most watched television show in history with a 77 million viewership. 


  Harry, who had been nominated for an Emmy 9 times, won it in 1980 for playing Sherman T. Potter of the 4077th M*A*S*H unit.  When he passed-away in December 0f 2011 at the age of 96, his M*A*S*H co-star, Mike Farrell, who played B.J. Hunnicutt, said of him: He was a wonderful man, fabulous actor and a dear and close friend since the first day we worked together.  As Alan Alda said, he did not have an unadorable bone in his entire body...At a press conference when our show ended, someone asked Harry if working in M*A*S*H made him a better actor.  Harry replied by saying: "I don't know about that, but it made me a better human being."  It's hard to imagine a better one...


  ...It sure is, Mike...