Michael Grant

graynation: stories from sovereign neighborhoods

2009-10-26T15:50:00.001-07:00

Editor's note: graynation has its roots in a project I started three years ago called Sovereign Neighborhoods. It was – is – a community memoir, written by the Class of 1961, Abilene High School. It is about being 10 and 11 years old in Abilene, Texas, in 1953 and '54, when kids still found their recreation mostly out of doors, before television and later computers started to pull kids out of their neighborhoods and into their living rooms. Our neighborhoods were well-defined, sovereign worlds in which we went to school, played, and found adventure. In graynation, the global version of Sovereign Neighborhoods, there are literally millions of memories and vignettes not present here, but it is time to publish the material we do have because a) it is fun, and b) people reading it may be inspired to send their own stories of life as kids in Abilene, or in communities around the world . . .

We moved into a new house at 1502 Green Street in 1953. The street behind us was Burger, and past that only pasture land. I remember the red dirt that would not come out of our clothes, especially white socks, and red ants that could sting like crazy.We then moved just across Catclaw Creek to 1517 Graham Street. Our “block” ran from North 12th Street to North 18th Street. I remember David Winkles lived on one end and Travis Cranfill at the other end, and so many others in between. Donna Day lived down the street and she had a piano. (My one wish in life that we could never afford) She and I went to the movies on some Saturdays and almost always went to the book store next to the theatre. I think I bought every Nancy Drew book that was published during that time. Can you imagine, I had 25 cents to spend. I went to the movie, bought a drink and Jr. Mints and still had money left over for a book. Sometimes we would venture across the street to Minters or Grissoms and try on hats. My mother would have had a hissy fit if she knew we did that!- Ann CoppedgeOur address was 1926 South 19th. Evidently Abilene wasn't prepared for all the "war babies" so the schools were overcrowded when I started to 1st grade. I went mornings only in 1st grade at Alta Vista and in 2nd grade I was an afternoon student. My husband says we were the Alta Vista Roosters but I don't remember that. He was a year and a grade older and was in the old building. First and second graders were in the new building and really didn't take part in much since we only went half a day. When I went to third grade Bowie Elementary was finished so I became a Bowie Bobcat.The community seemed to be a lot safer for kids in those days than it is today. I guess Mother drove me to Alta Vista and picked me up in 1st grade, (no school buses) but I remember walking home by myself in 2nd grade, and it was pretty far to our house. I always hurried so I wouldn't miss my favorite radio program--Big John and Sparkie. It came on at 5 or 5:30.-Holley PurcellIt was a late June evening in dry, dusty West Texas. The year was 1951. "Daddy, Are we there, yet? It smells like we are home," I asked my father as I stepped over my sleeping brothers and popped my head up between my father's head and the open window. Smelling the tell tale smell of the Paymaster Feed mill on Treadaway Street woke me up. "Yes we are in Abilene now, Sister. Just a few more minutes and you will be in your bed." From Highway 80 he would turn onto Treadaway, following it to South 20th Street, just a little further and turning right to 1933 Belmont Boulevard. Then I could smell the mimosa blooms that told me I was really home.
No one was hungry because Aunt Faye in Ranger had seen to that earlier in the day. Not only did we have a cowboy breakfast of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, eggs, bacon, orange juice, homemade biscuits, toast from homemade bread, milk and coffee, but as we were leaving in the late afternoon, she sent a sack of sandwiches along with peaches from her trees to eat on the road. We always loved to visit Aunt Faye and Uncle Kirk in Ranger.- Karen LusbyMy world was ending; I had to move from North Louisiana where my extended family lived way out west to Texas. I only knew about Texas from cowboy movies. When we finally got to our new home, Abilene, we lived in a rented house at 1641 North 21st St. My mother enrolled me in College Heights School. My new second grade teacher was Mrs. Morton. For the first time in my life I was in a new school that was really new. My classroom was in a new addition that had been recently opened. I didn’t get to know many people before school was out for the year. I do remember Allison Kay Tartt; it is hard to forget a pretty girl, even at seven years old. That summer my folks bought a house on the south side of town, at 818 Grove St.
-Larry Scott

San Angelo was my birthplace and for the most part my known universe. Then on an early spring day in 1952, I learned that my father was moving us lock, stock and barrel to a town called Abilene. I clearly remember hearing him say that the family and his new shoe store would fare better in this far off place.For an eight year old boy, moving was a fate worse than death. How could a person possibly survive a summer in a strange place and with no buddies to explore for good crawdad fishing holes?
San Angelo was my birthplace and for the most part my known universe. Then on an early spring day in 1952, I learned that my father was moving us lock, stock and barrel to a town called Abilene. I clearly remember hearing him say that the family and his new shoe store would fare better in this far off place.

For an eight year old boy, moving was a fate worse than death. How could a person possibly survive a summer in a strange place and with no buddies to explore for good crawdad fishing holes?
My father rented us a place on Jeanette Street, not far from South Junior. There were few kids my age on the block. So, my sister and I entertained ourselves by listening to music on the Motorola. There were nighttime serials along with frequent updates on General Eisenhower’s run for president plus how things were going in another far off place called Korea.- Dale Thorp

Stretch Cooking: Seeing "Pasta Pronto" again

2009-10-23T10:16:00.000-07:00

Somewhere along the way, I got separated from one of my favorite cookbooks, "Pasta Pronto." Then, lately, Karen has been whipping up a very mean Spaghetti Carbonara, and it reminded me of my old friend, and inspired me to look for it at Amazon. The book is out of print, but I bought a used one from an Amazon dealer for $5.95.

Italians have been masters of stretch cooking for hundreds of years, and "Pasta Pronto" follows that theme, with a twist. The author, William E. Massee, focuses on recipes that require little or no cooking, other than boiling the pasta, and that can be ready pronto, many in 10 minutes or less. "You just dump everything in a bowl," writes Massee. "You can do it all while the water boils."

In the book, the carbonara recipe is called "Trenette alla Carbonara," or, in English, "Noodles, Woodcutter's Way." What could sound better? That is one of two recipes I had remembered specifically over the years, with "Spaghetti a la Mode de Grand Mere," or "Spaghetti, Grandmother's Style." I was also partial to "Spaghetti alla Salsa di Tonno," or "Spaghetti with Tuna Sauce," which is really good, if you haven't tried it, and "Spaghettini alla Funghi," or "Spaghettini with Mushrooms: Fine spaghetti with mushroom sauce that includes bacon, garlic, cream, cheese, and parsley."

For Noodles, Woodcutter's Way, put on 6 quarts of water to boil, with a tablespoon of salt. Dice 4 ounces of lean salt pork, or 6 slices of lean, thick bacon. Melt half a cup of butter in a small skillet and lightly brown the salt pork or bacon. Dump one pound of trenette, or linguini, into the water and cook 5-6 minutes, until done but still firm. Have ready 2 eggs, lightly beaten, and 4 ounces (about a cup) of Pecorino Romano or Parmesan. Drain the pasta and dump into a warm bowl. Add the eggs and toss to coat the pasta. Add the butter and bacon and toss again. Add half the cheese and toss thoroughly. Add a few twists of freshly ground pepper and the rest of the cheese and toss once more.

I may like Spaghetti, Grandmother's Style, even better. Put the salted water on to boil (Massee estimates this will take a half-hour). Dice 2 slices of thick, lean bacon and 6 ounces of cooked ham in half-inch cubes. In a large skillet, slowly cook the bacon with the ham, until the bacon is crisp. Remove the meats and drain on paper towels. Cut three slices of French bread into half-inch cubes. To the bacon fat in the skillet, add a tablespoon each of butter and olive oil. Add the bread cubes and stir until slightly brown on all sides. Drain on paper towels. Cook spaghetti 8-9 minutes until done but still firm. Drain, and dump it into a warm bowl. Toss with 4 tablespoons butter and a quarter-teaspoon black pepper. Add bacon, ham and croutons and toss. Serve grated Parmesan on the side.

Besides the "pronto" recipes, Massee includes recipes for things like "Roman Beef Stew," "Chicken Tetrazzini," "Lasagne," "Veal Marsala," and several slow-cooked red sauces. Now all we need is some fall weather.

Media Literacy: Peering at 2059

2009-10-19T17:43:00.000-07:00

The Internet, after the alphabet, the printing press, and the telegraph, is only the fourth revolution in media history. The alphabet gave the media distance, or portability. The printing press gave it volume. The telegraph gave it speed. The Internet is turning the direction of information around 180 degrees, and eliminating hours in the day and the edges of the page. And computers continue to shrink information, moving information storage and retrieval toward the infinite.

That's where we are in 2009, riding the crest of a media revolution still in its semi-primitive stages. Now let's turn around, away from the past, and look from 2009, into the future, 50 years distant, to 2059. Using the differences between 1959 and 2009 as a reference, what is the media world of 2059 going to look like?

It will be faster, smaller, fuller. If visitors from 2059 swooped in, picked us up, and carried us forward to their world, could we survive? I doubt it. We would be literally in the dark. There will be visible evidence of media. No screens, no print, no hardware clutter, no snarl of cables under the desk! No download times!

But mainly, information will be moving too fast for us to see, and in strange forms we would not have thought possible in 2009. We will have learned to process two tracks of information at the same time. The tracks will be coded, informing our brain which is which, then woven together and delivered. Today, it would be like the CBS Evening News assigned one code, the commercials another code, and then the two merged and run at the same time. We would get 30 minutes of news and 30 minutes of commercials, and we would understand both clearly.

Only in 2059, it won't be the "CBS Evening News." In 2009, we already know what it feels like to find channels of information tailored to our specific interests and demographic profile. It started in the 1970s, when cable television introduced "narrowcasting." The growing number of channels made it possible, and a good business deal, to dedicate channel content to specific interests, such as news, sports, business, weather, shopping and music. Advertisers loved the new focus, because it enabled a more direct connection with their target audience, which saved money and, most importantly, increased consumer response rates.

But even the cable world needed a relatively large audience base, a Neilsen rating of 3 or 4, to stay in business. That meant 8 to 10 million provable sets of eyeballs to attract enough advertisers to stay in business (remember the First Law of Media).

The Internet is changing all that. This is just so fascinating. In the 15th century, the printing press turned the direction of media information flow around 180 degrees. No longer did people walk to a central place to hear a speaker deliver the news; the news was now sent out to them from a central place. It was the dawn of broadcast. Now, the Internet is turning the information flow around again, by 180 degrees. In the media-public delivery system, a circle has literally closed. We are living in the twilight of broadcast, and, as it turns out, going in to the information is the vastly superior system, as long as you can do it at the speed of light through Internet connections, and not on the back of a donkey.

By turning the direction of information around 180 degrees, the Internet is removing all that broadcast transmission expense, and moving narrowcasting into the next phase. No longer does media have to broadcast content out to consumers. Consumers come in to the content, which in the emerging media world is only a directory in a computer. The result is an incredibly cheap connection with an incredibly focused audience. In this world, an audience of 100,000 hits a day may be enough to be a great business deal both for the content provider and the advertisers. In this world, a single individual with a good idea, a computer, and an Internet connection, can create fabulous wealth with businesses like FaceBook, YouTube and Google.

Even as we speak, all of these businesses, connections, content, advertising, and wealth, are based on media codes. Right now, the time has come, after the thousands of years bringing us to the 2009 media world, with its speeds and access, for the reader to become aware of this strange, ironic, ominous screen between your eyes and this page, and of the media codes embedded in all the media content you consume. The greater the access of media to consumers, and the faster consumers can absorb content, the more powerful the codes become.

Above all, as this world begins the voyage toward 2059 and phenomena such as parallel information processing – all content, and all advertising, 24 hours a day – people need to acquire information and knowledge about the codes the media uses to attract us, inform us, persuade us, and threaten us. In professional hands, the codes have enormous power, and that power needs a check and a balance that only an educated, informed public can provide. In the media-public relationship of 2009, the power equation leans heavily toward the media side. When the public starts to understand the media codes, and the media starts to realize the public knows what the media is doing, that equation will start to change, just slightly at first, then more. After that, the public will be positioned to influence the equation at will, and the final great irony will arrive when the people, laughing and embarrassed, realize just how much media power they have, and where it comes from.

If media literacy and education projects do their job, then that awareness will have become part of the 2059 media world, and it will be a good thing. In 2009, media delivery devices were becoming quite small, and wearable, and there was success reported with research showing that a switch could be turned on or off simply by thinking about it.

That is a stunning direction, and if it is followed, by 2059, it is reasonable to suppose that the media delivery system could be a microscopic, internal coating on a key nerve in or near the brain through which the wearer connects with a media of choice, or two or three mediums – visual, audio, print – the wearer being capable of processing and understanding all three simultaneously – read, watch, listen – at any hour or any place without the slightest disturbance to neighbor, office colleague, seatmate, or sleeping spouse, unless the media might be an ancient Monty Python piece and laughter, spontaneous and disembodied, erupts.

In that world, it will be crucial that a person knows how the media works, how to turn the media off, and has the power to do it. People need to start thinking about this. Standing in 2009, at the exact center of this history, I am glad the ninth-graders of this world are going to be getting to 2059 only one day at a time.

graynation: Sovereign Neighborhoods

2009-10-19T08:29:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: graynation has its roots in a project I started three years ago called Sovereign Neighborhoods. It was – is – a community memoir, written by the Class of 1961, Abilene High School. It is about being 10 and 11 years old in Abilene, Texas, in 1953 and '54, when kids still found their recreation mostly out of doors, before television and later computers started to pull kids out of their neighborhoods and into their living rooms. Our neighborhoods were well-defined, sovereign worlds in which we went to school, played, and found adventure. In graynation, the global version of Sovereign Neighborhoods, there are literally millions of memories and vignettes not present here, but it is time to publish the material we do have because a) it is fun, and b) people reading it may be inspired to send their own stories of life as kids in Abilene, or in communities around the world.The project will be updated and re-published as new material arrives. We begin with Nancy Shoemaker . . .

My block, 1800 Chestnut, was the perfect place to grow up. There were playmates to find and adventures to be had in nearly every house on the block. Traffic was light and there were concrete sidewalks populated with horned toads. It was easy to learn to skate, ride a bicycle, and to find one's place in the social structure of the time. I had Kay Altman across the street, Bob Denham next door, Alice Fisher across the alley behind, and Teresa Smith one house away. There were others and I loved to play with all of them.
- Nancy Shoemaker

I went to Bowie. I started there in the 3rd grade and we lived at the very end of Sayles Blvd. It was a perfect place to ride our bikes all over, play football, baseball and walk to the Metro Theater. Linda Simmons moved in in the 4th grade and I was forever late getting home because I had to see one more show. She, Max Mossholder, my brother David and I used to do everything together. We would usually meet at Linda's house because her parents and ours were friends and would play croquet for hours.
- Barbara Stevenson

We lived on Sycamore Street, I believe it was off of East South 11th. When I was about 9 years old we moved to the South part of Abilene. I lived on Over St. which was one block south of South 20th. I went to Bowie Elementary (which was built in 1951) We moved into a brand new house and the only thing beyond our backyard was a pasture with horses in it. We put the lawn and trees in after we moved there.
When growing up, there was a vacant lot on the corner across the street, with mesquite trees and we would play and play and play over there. Play jacks on that cold front porch, ride our bikes and stay out late and watch the lightning bugs and sit on the front porch and enjoy the evening breeze. I would rather be outside than inside. But would of course go in to watch I Love Lucy.
- Edna Cole

At one point we had a “club” and built some sort of underground “fort” across the street from the school. To be a member of the exclusive club one had to be initiated. This entailed having hot wax dripped on your ankle. If the initiate yelled, you might not get to be a member. I’m sure the fort situated on a vacant lot covered a very small number of square feet, but to us it seemed massive, a complex of underground rooms in the darkness. It was probably no more than a few feet deep, covered with boards and metal, with dirt thrown on top. But it served its purposes to hide out and use when we had “clod fights.”
- John Odam

Our house was at 1118 Green St. Four blocks to the west of Green St. was Mockingbird Lane, and west of there was the Planet of the Unknown: BB-gun territory.
What we considered a good workout was chasing a DDT truck dispersing a cloud of toxic smoke for 16 blocks, while devouring an Eskimo Pie we had retrieved from the neighborhood ice cream wagon. DDT also went good with a Dreamcicle. After hosing down for 30 minutes in the back yard sprinkler, we made our way into the house for the best home-cooked meal in town. You were always welcome to stay.
Then it was out the doors for the neighborhood sunset. We played marbles, tops, yo-yos, kite flying, Red Rover, kick the can, while it was still light. As the sun set, it was hide and go seek, and the gathering of lightning bugs. On our backs, we could make a wish on a falling star, how far is far, how is there no end, I wish I may, I wish I might . . . “You kids get inside and clean up, it’s past your bedtime!!”
- Jerry Grider

Archives: A reunion to remember

2009-10-16T15:09:00.000-07:00

October, 2006 - I wasn’t sure I would go to my 40th college reunion. But I did, with my bride-to-be, and this morning I pulled on my new red Stanford sweats and went outside to drink coffee on the glider and think about the weekend.

Stanford University, Class of 1965. We had a good turnout, at least 300 (felt more like 500) alumni and spouses and in some cases kids, at the main party Friday night at the Sheraton across El Camino Real from the campus.

They call Stanford “The Farm,” because it was built on a farm – a very large farm – owned by Leland and Jane Stanford. The university was founded in 1891. It was beginning its 70th year when I and my ’65 classmates matriculated in 1961. Today, the university has passed more than a third of its existence since we left. Over the weekend, we meandered in the Quad among familiar stone buildings that had acquired not just the wear of middle age, but the splotchy patina of history, that you would expect to see on the porticos of Florence and Madrid. It placed in me a sense of awe, and respect, that had not been there before.

We munched and moseyed at the party with our own splotchy patinas, looking for a few old friends in a throng of old strangers, 99 percent of us connected in life by only one bond, names on a class list, not enough to allow us to remember each other.

But I didn’t go to see them. I went to see and be with classmates I did remember, brothers in the Class of ’65 who lived together in the old Delta Upsilon House on Salvatierra Street. There were 13 of us there. Dick, Joe, Paul, Steve, Mike, Tom, Rich, Ted, Terry, Bill, Dirk, Brooke and me. We came from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Texas, Washington, Santa Monica, San Francisco, Piedmont, and San Diego. During the weekend, we candidly reviewed our collective academic performance. Only one of us, Joe, graduated with any honors, something called “distinction,” he said, and he only did that because, he said frankly, “I gamed the system.”

My Stanford performance was the essence of marginal. The university has always striven to maintain a diverse population, and I have long suspected that was why I was admitted. To balance the brilliance, they needed a white male freshman from a lower middle-class family who attended Texas public schools. When I go back to Stanford, I have to hide my eyes from the things I missed as a student there. I go only to celebrate the experience of simply being there, which was still a true difference in my life.

We are now all professionals, a lot of lawyers, two doctors. Rich is a neurosurgeon at the University of Connecticut medical complex. I had not seen him in 40 years and probably didn’t talk to him more than 20 minutes total – he could only be at the Friday night function – but it was worth the trip.

There were a lot of old stories waiting to be told again, which is why I almost decided not to go. I didn’t want to hear the old stories of the hell raised in those days and nights of the early 1960s. They belonged to a place in my head that I have worked hard to get away from in the last 15 years, and I like 2005 so much, it didn’t make sense to go back to act out the drunken frat-boy indifference of 40 years ago.

Eventually it was curiosity – and something else – that made me decide to go. In the pre-reunion email chatter there was a lot of talk about the old stories and roaring thirsts and a special Saturday afternoon retreat at Zott’s, still there with the same plank tables and pitchers of beer from 40 years ago. But I wondered if the others might also, at this 40th reunion, have felt a shift forward, a preference for our seasoned 62-year-old selves in 2005, over the gifted under-achievers of 1963.

Then Saturday morning I was showing Karen the Quad, and we walked across it toward Memorial Church, and as we reached the arcade and the steps up to the doors, Sandy and his wife Anne walked out. On Sandy’s face was a look that could be interpreted as awe, gratitude, surprise. It was a look that belonged not to the old stories, but to a new story about interacting with an old place and, in Eliot’s lines about the end of our exploring, “to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.”

There were others of us, exploring. Across a distance we would spot them, the brothers, strolling the Quad as we were, looking this way and that, most of us eventually winding up at the Bookstore and joining long lines (the old grads got 10 percent off) to pay for sweats and t-shirts, many of them in small sizes for grandchildren.

Some of the brothers did make it to Zott’s Saturday afternoon. But I was both exploring an old place and celebrating a new one. I loved introducing Karen to the brothers and their wives, and they were happy to hear about our marriage coming in December. We thought about going to Zott’s, but we needed more to make our first trip to San Francisco together, in the new lives that we have. We drove up for lunch, and it was perfect. Driving back down, it was after 4 and we didn’t try for Zott’s. But that night, at our own special reunion party, I was talking to Brooke, who is the new president of the Washington state bar association, and he told me simply that it was “Perfect.”

There is a mood about “Perfect” that implies summation, something not to be improved on, and I was happy it was the word that a man like Brooke would use about the afternoon at Zott’s. I think the word might also be the best one to summarize the weekend. A college homecoming is not like a high school homecoming. In high school, it was the community that united you. In college, you must create your own family. I believe the people in families are like threads bundled together at the starting place, then each thread following its own direction, the threads spreading far apart, in all manner of directions, each picking up its own colors, then at the times they return to the bundle, sharing their colors with the others. When we were bundled again this weekend, as different as we were, I saw that each of the brothers had given me some of their colors. And I have given them some of mine. The ”something else” that made me go was wondering if I belonged. I found that I do.

Stretch Cooking: a comfort food mood

2009-10-15T15:06:00.002-07:00

We actually had a little cool snap around here recently. Temperatures dropping into the 50s. I’m not kidding. No rain, but some nice clouds and brisk winds. It all clicked on my comfort food switch.

There are tons of comfort food recipes that take some preparation, time, and effort. There are others that can be baking in the oven in 10 minutes. These are the recipes I like when you walk in the door after work on a blustery afternoon with hunger pangs and a thirst for Scotch.

You just need to have a few basics on hand. In the freezer, a stack of Porkyland corn tortillas. In the cupboard, a can of Hormel chili (no beans), a can of refried beans, a can of green chile enchilada sauce, and a bottle of Trader Joe’s red enchilada sauce.

In the refrigerator, you will have grated cheese such as the Mexican Blend variety from CostCo, a jar of salsa, and a package of Porkyland’s 10-inch flour tortillas. Wherever you keep them, you will have onions and tomatoes.

Last night I poured a Scotch and snapped off three corn tortillas from the Porkyland’s stack in the freezer. They really do just sort of snap off, very easily, one by one, when you place the tip of a dinner knife just between the edges of the top and second tortilla, and twist. I let these thaw while I opened the Hormel’s, got the cheese and Trader Joe’s red sauce, chopped a quarter of a medium onion, and pulled out a shallow, 8-inch Corningware baking dish.

I heated a skillet and poured a teaspoon of olive oil in the baking dish. I painted the tortillas on both sides with the oil, then softened them one by one in the skillet. I scattered some chopped onion in the dish, laid a tortilla in, smeared it with a big tablespoon of chili, then generously scattered onion and cheese over. I repeated the layer and finished the stack with the third tortilla. Over this, and down the sides, I poured the red sauce and scattered more cheese on top. I finished my Scotch while this baked for 30 minutes at 350, then chopped a tomato and dressed it with some salsa. I lifted the steaming tortilla stack onto a plate and scattered the tomatoes alongside.

Last Friday, getting home late, I took two of the Porkyland’s flour tortillas, warmed them in a skillet (no oil), and zapped some frozen chicken strips. I rolled the chicken, cheese and chopped onion into the tortillas, burrito-style, nestled them into that same 8-inch baking dish, poured green chile sauce over them, sprinkled cheese on top, and baked them, foil-covered, at 350 for 25 minutes.

Today, all the makings are sitting in their places, waiting for the next comfort mood to strike. Shouldn’t be long, but now it is the weekend, and I will probably cook. Maybe Spanish Porkchops tomorrow night. One of my favorites.

Media Literacy: Past and future

2009-10-12T08:21:00.000-07:00

I am standing in the year 2009, at the exact center of 100 years of American media history. Behind me, into the past, I am looking at 1959. When I turn to face the future, I am looking at the year 2059.

I can't imagine what America will look like in 2059. I can barely believe what it looked like in 1959, and I was there, 16 years old, in the 11th grade. When I tell you about it, I am truly a visitor from another planet. The cars had radios, but radio stations were few and far between, and they were all AM. My town had three stations, presenting a grab-bag of news, farm news, cooking shows, Arthur Godfrey, "The Breakfast Club," and music.

The music was an intriguing mix of standards and the new music, rock and roll. It was the most interesting shock, to hear a Vic Damone song end, and in the same breath hear a Little Richard song start. When the atmosphere was right, kids cruising in their big Chevys and Fords (gasoline was 13 cents a gallon) could bring in the real rock, and blues, stations, from New Orleans and Nashville, and the background static imparted a sense of distance, and adventure.

Most towns and cities had newspapers, and cities over 50,000 had both morning and evening editions, with strong local and regional coverage. The post office delivered Life magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Look. The library had many books.

Television still had a novel feel. My town had a station, that came on the air at 6 a.m. and went dark, after "Vespers," at midnight. All the content was black-and-white. Watching television in 1959 required some technical skill. There were two tuning knobs, a big one for the VHF channels 2 through 13, and a smaller one for the UHF stations at channel 15 and above. To watch television, you turned it on and selected a channel, almost always VHF. You adjusted the antenna, that sat on top of the television set, either a "rabbit-ears" or, if you had the money, a control knob that rotated an antenna on the roof of the house.

Then you adjusted the horizontal hold control, the vertical hold control, and the fine tune control, so the picture was fairly clear, no snow, and hopefully free of a double-image. To switch channels, you got up from the couch, clicked the VHF knob, rotated the antenna toward the new source, adjusted horizontal, vertical and fine-tune controls, and hoped for the best. Most shows were 30 minutes, so at the end of the half-hour, if you wanted to go back to the first station, you got up and repeated the process.

Our local station was an NBC affiliate. The other networks were CBS, ABC and Dumont, and if you had a good ChannelMaster antenna, sometimes you could bring in the Dallas and Fort Worth stations.

And for media, 50 years ago, that was it. The planet still turned under a relatively quiet sky.

But things were happening. Television was revolutionizing advertising. Elvis Presley and other rockers were revolutionizing not only music, but creating an extension of the culture that would become a culture unto itself. Entrepreneurs were developing a product called videotape. Hugh Hefner was developing a new magazine. Research and development people were thinking about wiring, not television affiliates, but homes themselves, with cable. A federal highway system, intended to move armies efficiently in the event the Cold War turned into a hot one, instead started moving people, and products, efficiently, from coast to coast.

And computers were starting to get smaller. In the quiet sky of 1959, after tens of thousands of years of human development, conditions were starting to appear, and fall into place, for a perfect storm of media codes.

It would take time. It took 50 years, one day at a time, no faster, to get from the bizarre world of 1959 to the autumn of 2009. It is the only way people from that planet could survive the trip. If you were on Earth in 1959, imagine visitors from 2009 swooping down, beaming you up, and carrying you forward to their planet, this planet, in the blink of an eye, and dropping you off in the current media world. Could a human brain survive, that could process information only at 1959 speeds? I don't think we could survive the hour. I think our brains would blow up.

As fast as this world is, and as fast as we can process information now, we still are in a primitive age. The Internet in 2009 is like television in 1959, or telephones in 1889. You have to know something about it, in order to use it. And the Internet, for a little while longer, is still totally primitive, basically a print medium with fascinating bells and whistles developed for sale by every entrepreneur who knows a little code.

Very quickly, though, the Internet is racing toward a convergence of print, video, and audio. What will happen to media then? Well, the television and computer screens will be one and the same, and the remote will also be a mouse, or whatever the mouse, or the "interface," evolves into. But what will that mean to us? Technology is so far ahead of the user, in 2009, that no one really knows. Next week: Looking at 2059.

graynation: Twenty-four months

2009-10-11T07:51:00.000-07:00

I just received a summary of my Social Security Earnings Record, and its first entry is for 1955, in the amount of $109. I was 12 years old. That summer, I worked for Abilene Reproduction Co. They printed blueprints, and other schematic documents, in a room filled with big machines that reeked of ink and ammonia.

It was my job to deliver the tightly-rolled-up documents to offices around town, mostly downtown, either on foot or on my bicycle. The secretaries gave me a lot of attention, which I enjoyed but was too young to fully appreciate. I liked the routine of being outside in the heat, then inside the cool office buildings, then outside again. It was a good job.

Since I was a delivery boy, I lobbied my mother for a motorbike. No, in 1955, that was not an unusual thing for a 12-year-old to do. Several of my friends had motorbikes or scooters. Gerald Williamson, my icon, had one. He let me ride it, or tried to. I couldn't get a grip on the clutch. I sat there on the sidewalk, engine screaming, Gerald screaming, "Let out the clutch!" I did, finally, and got under way, sort of.

Frank and Bruce Teagarden had Cushman Eagles. Many graynation men remember the Cushman Eagle as their last most desirable thing in the 12-year-old male world before the puberty tsunami swept through and replaced all male thought with the image of a leg protruding from a skirt. Frank, who was my age, had a black Eagle. Bruce, a year younger, had a pink one. They were the epitome of cool.

Johnny Richardson, who lived in the very next block from me, had a Vespa. This is the machine I lobbied for. There was no way, I knew, that my mother was going to put me, a mild-mannered church-going boy, on a Cushman Eagle. The Vespa was very cool, too – hell, anything with a motor on it was cool – but compared to the Eagle, it looked downright conservative.

Eventually, my mother caved, and she put me on a kind of motorbike – motorbikes had spoked wheels – called a Simplex. It was belt-driven, for Pete's sake. It had some kind of automatic transmission, or maybe because it was so slow it only needed one gear. I just turned the throttle, and down below a drivetrain slowly meshed, in a stately sort of way, and motion was achieved. YouTube being what it is, you can see an actual 1955 Simplex in action. As soon as I saw it, I remembered the centrifugal clutch, whirring away inches from my right thigh.

I rode it for about two months, without incident. Then seventh grade started, and I parked the Simplex in the school lot, and that afternoon it wouldn't start. Somebody had put sugar in my gas tank.

I haven't owned a motorbike since. On my SSN Earnings Report, it shows I didn't earn anything in 1956. I think that is the summer I went to camp. Then, 1957 shows a contribution of $92. That would be from Lucile Gerber, owner of Lucile's Flowers. In two years, I went from a bicycle-riding, secretary-delighting 12-year-old, to a hormone-besotted delivery boy for Lucile's Flowers, careening around Abilene in a green 1957 Chevrolet panel truck in which I could get rubber in all three gears. At the time, I don't believe I appreciated the rate of change. Looking at it now, it stuns me.

Archives: October, 2006 - When the Chargers played Martyball

2009-10-09T11:17:00.000-07:00

October, 2006 - Marty Schottenheimer is compelled to get his team to play mediocre football perfectly.

Yes, this is a complaint, but it is not the complaint of an ordinary sports fan. Sports fans are people who want to enjoy success without doing any work, and when they complain, it is with little or no license.

This complaint, which I am about to put into the record, is issued in behalf of a group of men who remember how it felt as a kid, whose goal was to play without making a mistake. We were tentative. We held back. We took our stance at the scrimmage line hoping the camera couldn’t see us. We stepped up to the plate scared to death of striking out. We prayed in the outfield that the ball wouldn’t be hit to us. We didn’t want our parents ever to come to the games. When we did get into the game, we may not have made a mistake, but with other boys, other athletes, flying around with reckless abandon, we stood out in our motionlessness, our mediocrity. In the game films, we never created a blur.

It may have been esteem, or confidence, or fear. It was deep, whatever it was, and it was a barrier between us, and what our performance might have been. How would it have felt, just to go out and play? Men like us wonder about that now, with a real regret. We might have won a letter, but we weren’t really on the team. We were a team of one.

Marty Schottenheimer coaches like he was one of us. We wonder: was he a kid like us? Did Marty Schottenheimer fumble at the goal line in the ninth grade and swear, never again? His mantra in 2006 is, “Control the football.” Do not drop the football. He grades his quarterbacks by how well they can not drop the football. His first offensive value is not scoring touchdowns, but controlling the ball.

To us old controllers, it is uncomfortable to watch. It is not fun for anyone to watch. You could stuff a few pillows, with the hair left on San Diego living room floors in the second half of the game at Baltimore.

If it’s hard on us, what must it be like for LaDainian Tomlinson? How does one ask LaDainian Tomlinson to play mediocre football perfectly? How does LaDainian feel, lining up in an offense dedicated to not dropping the football? The Union-Tribune had a contest to come up with a name for the Chargers defense, but it fizzled. The U-T was just focused on the wrong side of the ball. They should have asked for a name for the Chargers offense, and inside of 30 minutes someone would have emailed in, “The Mediocre Corps.” And of course, following naturally after that, the defense would have become “The Other Guys.”

Most of us old controllers weren’t very good athletes, so today we don’t imagine playing with the skill, speed and grace of an Antonio Gates. We watch players like him just as ordinary fans watch him, vicariously. He plays football the way we can’t, the same way Tony Bennett sings the way we can’t, Sean Penn acts the way we can’t, Andre Watts plays the way we can’t, Pat Conroy writes the way we can’t. What the controllers want to see, specifically, is Antonio Gates doing what we might have done, which is to make a play, any play, with reckless abandon. But when Gates goes downfield, he might as well be wearing a mink coat and high heels. Imagine Marty Schottenheimer coaching Andre Watts. No Mozart, no way. Nothing riskier than Sondheim, I don’t care what the tickets cost.

Dan Fouts was wonderfully ferocious. I would pay to have seen his reaction if a coach asked him to play Martyball. Philip Rivers is a young quarterback and has a way to go before being compared to Dan Fouts. But he is tall, appears to have a fierce streak, throws a tight spiral and is learning to throw to spots. Waiting at those spots would be Gates, McCardell, Parker, and out of the backfield Tomlinson and Turner. It would be interesting, and most entertaining, to see if Rivers turned out to be a quarterback that could light things up, and what would that do for the running game? It makes my teeth ache, watching him run plays drawn up by Charlie Brown.

This team is lightning in a Martybottle. All us old Charlie Browns, the men in my group, know it would be more fun to watch them lose recklessly, than win carefully. Of course, with this offense, you’re not going to lose many recklessly, with a defense like The Other Guys.

Stretch Cooking: losing Gourmet

2009-10-08T12:01:00.000-07:00

Hearing of the demise of Gourmet magazine delivers the same sense of loss as hearing of the death of Fred Astaire.

People who like to eat look at the pages of Gourmet Magazine the way that people who like to pretend look at Brad Pitt and Juliette Binoche on the screen. Movies let us experience star-studded stories bigger than ourselves, sometimes for entertainment, sometimes for escapism.

Gourmet, for one more month, at least, is that way. People who like to eat, also like to eat with their eyes, and Gourmet offered beautiful plates of that fare. It was stuff we might never prepare at home, but it was satisfying to look at the pictures, sometimes for entertainment, sometimes for escapism. The economy being what it is these days, and that effect on home dinner tables, establishes the mood for monthly Gourmet escapism, just as Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and those dazzling sets and silly plots provided a couple of hours of visual happiness to people trapped in the Great Depression.

Some critics discount Gourmet as elitist, yet I find evidence the magazine is tuned in to the times. I picked up the April issue this morning, the one with the strawberry tart on the cover that I wouldn’t attempt at home but was a great treat for hungry eyes. The very first recipe, on the “Contents” page, was “Ham and Rice Croquettes,” deep-fried nuggets whose purpose is to help use up leftover ham, which is a very stretch-cooking thing to do (the “Joy of Cooking” famously defined “eternity” as “a ham and two people”), and something I would cook at home in a heartbeat.

Editor Ruth Reichl’s column that month assumed a “renewal” theme, of spring goodness to soothe the sting of a hard winter “as dispiriting as the one we’ve just endured,” that collapsed on us from the skies and from Wall Street. She spoke of ham as “reassuring,” and of lemon and egg desserts as “spectacular (and inexpensive).”

There is also a reference to a Gourmet online feature called “Extreme Frugality,” a blog written by W. Hodding Carter of his experiences feeding a family of six for $550 a month. One of his first moves was to acquire some chickens, for eggs and occasionally for the table. I don’t know if Carter dispatches the chickens with a broom handle, as my grandmother Susie did, but it goes to show, with stretch cooking, some things never change.

In the meantime, I keep flipping back to the “Contents” page and looking again at the Ham and Rice Croquettes, which also incorporate parmesan cheese. I feel an impulse growing to go buy a ham, planning for a near-future brunch of Ham and Rice croquettes, soft-scrambled eggs, asparagus, and orange-beet salad with cilantro and feta cheese.

Speaking of ham, I was a visitor in a Southern household some years ago, and was privileged to a plate of the best baked ham I ever ate. My host said it was from a Southern cookbooks. She gave me the name, but I have never been able to find it. Is anyone out there familiar with a recipe that calls for baking a ham by starting it in a 500-degree oven for half an hour?

Media Literacy: Conflict - you could die laughing

2009-10-05T14:05:00.000-07:00

I couldn't help but laugh at myself for laughing at the people in the audience who were laughing at David Letterman's confession of sex relations with co-workers. It sounded so bizarre. But the people couldn’t help themselves. They are attenuated to hearing Letterman use the “conflict” media value to produce hilarity. When he tried to speak seriously about conflict, they couldn’t make the shift.

In media literacy studies, we learn the Human Reaction Package (HRP), which consists essentially of 12 media values – conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, sensationalism and curiosity – and a definition: news is any thing that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo. These values and definition can be found in any Journalism 101 textbook. I created the HRP to provide convenience and flexibility to the package, which drives all three media products: information (news), entertainment, and manipulation (particularly advertising).

The 12 values are not presented necessarily in order of importance, though most would agree that conflict is, in fact, the first value because of its ubiquity. Conflict is certainly felt by all people. We are born with it. Very soon after we are born, we understand that we are going to die. By age 5, children talk about dying. Life and death is the essential conflict. Because conflict is such a strong news value, in a news story in which someone has died, the death is always in the first paragraph.

Survival is another strong example of conflict, because survival means staying alive. Stories about staying alive, or how to stay alive, are very important to us. Stories about new treatments or drugs to use against diseases like cancer or AIDS are always big news. We see stories all the time about living longer by eating right or developing good habits of exercise. We see stories about global warming and other threats to planetary survival. When nine miners in Pennsylvania became trapped 300 feet underground, the media followed the story without interruption because people wanted to see the miners survive. When they did, it was the biggest story of the day. Survival is also a very strong value in entertainment media. One of the most popular shows in television for the past three years is in fact named “Survivor.”

People also pay a lot of attention to other kinds of conflict. The first mass media product ever created was a book about the conflict between good and evil. It was the Gutenberg Bible, printed in 1452, the first book ever printed using moveable type. The Bible is still the best-selling book in the world today. People are also very interested in good-and-evil stories such as crime and murder. Novels about crime and murder earn their authors millions of dollars. Crime and murder movies make even more money. Murders become particularly strong stories because they have in them both the life and death conflict and the good and evil conflict. Of course those are the two types of conflict that made the World Trade Center attacks the biggest news story of 2001.

The conflict between winning and losing is the key value in many different kinds of media stories. All sports stories are essentially conflict stories about winning and losing. In politics, election stories are all about winning and losing. Since we live in a democracy in which we send representatives to government to vote on important issues, stories about those issues are very much about the win-lose conflict. Those stories are also about the kind of conflict that exists when there are two sides arguing about how to best get something done.

There are many other kinds of conflict based on people being on two sides of an issue. War is a classic example of this kind of conflict. War also presents us a good example of a conflict about a conflict. This is the “hawks and doves” conflict. For several years, the Iraqi war has been an excellent example of this type of conflict.

There is also conflict where you might not expect it. Love is full of conflict. Shakespeare made a career of finding the conflict in love, “Romeo and Juliet” being a famous example. Anyone who was ever married, or even went steady, knows about conflict in love. This is another strong conflict value found in novels and movies.

Conflict is also a very dependable source of humor, as long as it is someone else’s conflict (people laughed maniacally at Lucy Ricardo, but could you imagine living in the same building with that woman?). Many sitcoms on television are based on a conflict that is funny. In a famous “Seinfeld” episode, Seinfeld mugs an old lady for a loaf of rye bread. We laugh hysterically. George’s fiancé dies after licking adhesive on envelopes. We laugh darkly, but we laugh. Now David Letterman admits sex with co-workers. Funny as hell, coming from him.

graynation: Sunday chicken dinner, and other amusements

2009-10-04T13:19:00.000-07:00

Every other month, Susie would fix fried chicken for Sunday dinner. I started to pay close attention to this when I was about three, which would have been 1946. After breakfast, she would go behind the swinging kitchen door, next to the water heater, and bring out the broom.

Seeing this, I would follow her out the back door and down some steps to the back yard. She had a chicken coop built onto the back of the garage, and there were always several chickens in residence. During World War II, and after, men in the area, mostly friends of her son, my uncle, Clyde, who was a cavalry colonel in the South Pacific, would visit the house, bringing Susie firewood, produce, meat and chickens.

Susie would go among the milling chickens, select one that I am sure she had already picked out days before, and grab it by the neck. She carried the chicken away from the others, then put its neck down on the ground, lay the broomstick across it, and put her foot on the broomstick. Then she reached down and pulled the chicken's head off. It never ceased to amaze me, how easily the chicken's head came off.

She lifted the broom handle and the headless chicken ran around for some moments, then fell over. She placed the chicken in a paper bag and carried it inside, at which point I lost interest. The rest of it involved routine stuff like scalding the chicken, pulling out the feathers, washing it and cutting it up for frying.

At 10, I was taken to Sunday school, no matter how much I protested, and at 11 Susie, her three daughters, and I, went to church, St. Paul Methodist, on the north side of the tracks. After church, we stopped by Mack Eplen's Restaurant, across the street from the First Baptist Church, that you could hangar a blimp in, and picked up a pan of rising yeast cloverleaf rolls.

Autumn afternoons were nothing like today. We had a radio, and a piano, and sometimes my mom or aunts would play the piano. Professional football teams played games on Sunday afternoon in the east, but nobody in Abilene paid much attention. Of course there was no television and no computers. Clyde was a polo player, and after the war we spent many Sunday afternoons watching teams play polo on fields south of town, where South 20th is now.

On other afternoons, I would play outside or listen to the radio. It didn't matter what was on, though as time went by, I really got attached to shows like "Sky King," "The Green Hornet," and "The Shadow." The radio provided a bit of foreshadowing. Sometimes, when a favorite show was on, I took my dinner into the living room and ate it listening to the radio.

Otherwise, we always ate as a family at the big dining room table. There was a story in The New York Times this morning about the benefits to children when families all eat together at the dining table. I suppose that is true, but I also witnessed quite a number of dysfunctional things that can occur among family members eating around a dining table. Susie's other memorable employment of the broom was to chase her daughters around with it once in a while.

There was also something about touching food that made it non-consumable, and this was most apparent on fried chicken night. I suppose kids today would have some vivid mental picture of where that golden chicken on the table came from, but in those days it was no big deal. It was just fried chicken, with cream gravy, the cloverleaf rolls, and green beans or black-eyed peas, a couple of vegetables like that. Susie always ate the back and the neck, which none of the others would eat, and at the end, there always seemed to be a leg left on the platter. Susie would say to me, "Why don't you have this last piece? Nobody's touched it."

It still seems important to me, not to offer anyone food that I have touched. I also know how to cut up a whole chicken – it's a lot cheaper that way – and to cut it so there is a pully bone to wish on at the end. The short bone got the wish.

A weather worthy weekend

2009-10-03T11:42:00.001-07:00

Click on the images for a close-up.

It looks like we won't have an Acorn Fever season at all, this autumn in Southern California. Now it is Oct. 2, and we have yet to experience that first cool snap that triggers the Fever. That snap is forecast to begin later today, with the arrival of a cold front coming down the coast from the Gulf of Alaska. If the weather bureau is right, tomorrow will be cloudy, cool and rainy at our house. Given the late date of this cool snap, it has a chance to endure for three or four days before temperatures warm again. This is key. When a snap like this hits in early September, it may be only 24 hours before the temperatures have gone back up into the 90s, trapping Southern Californians in the flannels they pulled on in the gray, cool dawn.

Now, in early October, we may have a few days to adjust. We can enjoy the warmth of our flannels, long enough to be willing to put them away, this time in the front of the closet, when temperatures climb again, into the 80s or 90s, by Thursday or Friday.

Meanwhile, as the weather forecasters focused on the north, a tropical storm named Olaf spun up off the southwestern tip of Baja California, and then headed north, straight for us. I pray for such events, but they are exceedingly rare, when tropical storms - what we call monsoon moisture - reach us from the south and east. As a weather freak, I was ticked off when the weather bureau said Olaf would be steered east, away from us, by the very system that was promising to bring us our first cool, rainy experience of the season on Saturday and Sunday.

It turns out that Olaf had some swagger, and sent streams of clouds into our area before the front from the north could do its steering work. By noon yesterday, there was talk of sprinkles. By 3 p.m., light showers were possible, and by 4, there was a mention of thunderstorms. At our house, east of downtown San Diego, all this talk amounted to about 47 wet dots where raindrops hit our flagstone. The sky, on the other hand, was alive with Olaf. The showers didn't hit the ground, but they were up there. "Virga" is what the weather people call showers that don't reach the ground.

These showers do unique things, however, with sunlight. I have lived at Alta Mira since 1992, and I have seen some amazing scenery in the sky. Yesterday, though, brought something entirely new, that Karen, who snapped these images, called "sun showers." I hope I am lucky enough to see something like this again, someday, in the skies west of our house. And this weekend, we still have a rainy Sunday to look forward to.

Archives: Baseball in a blizzard

2009-10-02T15:19:00.000-07:00

August, 2005: I had not been to the San Diego Padres’ new ballpark, which opened last year. Then last week, friends, and they are dear friends, gave us tickets and we went. The game – Padres vs. St. Louis – was a totally new experience for me.

Well, not totally new. I took a bite out of a bratwurst and momentarily considered placing it back in its plastic container and taking it to the city attorney to see if there were any laws against calling a very pale, cool to the touch length of dense protein colloid a bratwurst and selling it for $7.95 in a public place.

But I went ahead and ate it. No sense having the city attorney stalking the concourse, waving handfuls of dense protein colloid under the noses of employees, when I’ve eaten equally remarkable fare at any number of sports events in San Diego. No one who has spent several hundred dollars over the years on what stadium concessionaires call “Nachos” can speak too severely against the PetCo bratwurst.

What was new was the tenuous hold that the game of baseball had on the event. Since I last attended a major league baseball game – four years, at least – the half-innings of actual play seem to have become miniaturized intervals between promotions. Looking around the place, I thought about pinball machines I played as a kid, including one that was a baseball pinball game. Lots of lights flashing, and lots of noise effects, and, oh yes, the game itself.

That’s how this event felt. Many other new ballparks have opened recently in other big-league cities. If PetCo is the typical ballyard of the 2000s, baseball’s executives have engineered for real baseball the look and sound and feel of having a seat behind first base inside a pinball game.

But it was more comprehensive than that. The ultimate business model of entertainment media technology is to turn the outdoors into the indoors, the ominous “virtual reality.” You get a feel of that sitting outside at PetCo.

In the old days, 10 years ago, it was the difference between going to a live event and watching it at home on television. At the live event, the viewer enjoyed the freedom of subjective choice. At any moment, your eyes could go where they would, in the setting before you, to a player, to the dugout, to the sideline, to the stands, to the moon. Watching it on television, you lost that subjective freedom. The cameras and the screen objectified the view: you could only see what the camera was showing you.

At PetCo, there were constant video demands for your attention. It never stopped: screens and bright quick-cut montage visuals demanding attention from your eyes, enforced by booming digital-fidelity surround-sound commands from extremely high-energy speakers. Before last week, the loudest sustained noise I ever heard at a sports event was the crowd at Jack Murphy Stadium in 1984 when Steve Garvey hit the home run off Lee Smith to beat the Cubbies in Game Four of the NLCS.

That was a natural sound, the analog output of 45,000 throats, and lovely to plunge into and get squeezed and scoured by until you couldn’t breathe or feel, and eventually surface into the night air and survival, carrying with you out of the ballpark a sound you would tell about for the rest of your life, because there was a reason for it.

At PetCo, the sound was ear-ringing but couldn’t compete on the Garvey scale for loudness. As sustained sound, however, it was surpassing, and tireless, barrages of sub-woofing, subjectivity-gobbling sound scouring you not in a passage of glory, but with promotions, commercials, goofy quizzes, heavy metal riffs and aggressively mediocre humor shots. Just like TV. Visuals and sounds, objectifying space. On the field, interludes of miniature baseball. Beyond the outfield, a city skyline. Both were hard to see, through the digital blizzard.

Stretch Cooking: Chicken Fried Steak

2009-10-01T13:31:00.000-07:00

Some places you swear you’ll never forget, but I have. I can’t remember the name of the café in Cross Plains, Texas, where the chicken fried steak was so good. Cross Plains was 45 miles southeast of my home town, Abilene, and we would make the drive regularly to Cross Plains for chicken fried steak at this place.

There was one trip in particular. I was alone, except for a decent thunderstorm, which stayed about five miles behind me as I drove at moseying speed on Highway 36 out of Abilene toward Cross Plains. The country turns hilly down that way, green clumps of mesquite and red swatches of clay, intensified when there are storm clouds around.

Every few miles I would pull off on the highway’s wide shoulder – state highways in Texas are designed as linear viewing points – and drink in the color and texture, congratulating the random cattle for this fine home they had. Five miles ahead of a Texas thunderstorm is always a still, warm, zone, no wind, no sound, into which low thunder rolls from the dark cloud wall to the north. Heavenly. I would watch until the first fresh gusts arrived, running just ahead of the cold rain. Then I would get back in the car and drive on, five more miles, then stop again.

In this way I would reach Cross Plains, and the Café of the Forgotten Name so that I was just sitting and opening the typed menu when the thunder rose from rolling to roaring, the lightning and rain crashed, and the café became a cave where some of the best chicken fried steak in Texas was served. It was one of the luckier noontimes of my life. And now I can’t remember the name of the place.

Wait a minute. It was the White Castle. I would almost swear. I know, White Castles are tiny steamed hamburgers famed in the East. Besides, why would somebody in Cross Plains, Texas, name their place the White Castle? I couldn’t say, but I know there was a White Elephant in Eastland, up on I-20, and it had pretty good chicken fried steak too. And in Abilene, we had the Dixie Pig. Massey’s, in Fort Worth. Threadgill’s in Austin. The Alamo Café in San Antonio. Chicken fried steaks as big as dinner plates, covered in cream gravy.

People like me, with memories like those, don’t go too long without making chicken fried steak at home. I put the recipe in my cookbook, which is a collection of recipes I developed after I moved to California so I could eat, whenever I wanted to, like I was in Texas. My Texas pal Ray just last month sent off for the book, and now it has arrived, and it was so nostalgic for him because it’s all the recipes his mom cooked. He also, he said, was inspired by the chicken-fried steak recipe to head for Massey’s. Lucky duck.

If you have chicken fried steak at my house, you start with a round steak, about a pound and a half, three-quarters of an inch thick. Trim the fat and cut the steak into four pieces. Tenderize the pieces with a meat mallet. You can buy round steak pieces already tenderized, if you’d rather. Salt and pepper the meat, and give it a dusting of garlic powder.

Have ready a pie pan with flour in it, and another pie pan in which you have beaten two eggs and half a cup of milk. Heat a half-inch of oil (lard, Crisco, peanut oil) in a large black skillet on medium-high heat. Dredge the meat pieces in flour, then in the wet mixture, swishing it around on both sides, then back in the flour to coat. Fry the pieces until golden brown, about five minutes per side. Turn down the heat if the oil gets too hot. Drain the pieces on newspaper.

Gravy: Pour off almost all the oil, leaving a sheen of it across three-quarters of the bottom of the skillet. Set the heat at medium-high. Add three level tablespoons flour and stir constantly until the flour loses its raw smell. If the flour mixture is dry and crumbly, add a little more oil. When the flour is smooth and cooked, add two cups milk and stir constantly until the gravy thickens. Season with salt and generous pepper, and serve on the side. Choose your own side dishes. At my house, it might be mashed potatoes and green beans.

Media Literacy: the distant childrens' universe

2009-09-28T09:45:00.000-07:00

Children – that is, any person age 25 or younger – live in a world so different from the adult world that it could almost be described as a parallel universe.

This is nothing new. It was as true of my generation, in the 1940s, 1950s and into the 1960s, as it is today, except in the matter of degree. I am now 66. When I was 25 and younger, it was popular to say, “Never trust anybody over 30.” Yet we had to live with, and live like, the old fogies, because that is the only kind of living there was.

In America in the 1950s, American post-war mainstream culture, and the companies that marketed to it, was still adult-oriented, and in goods and services, movies and entertainment, the kids wore and watched and listened to the same things as their parents because that’s all there was. It was very much a youth culture that convened at the movies and in the hamburger joint parking lots, but the movie was "Three Coins in the Fountain," and Perry Como, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, Eddie Fisher and Patti Page sang practically all of the music coming out of the car radios. In the youth of that era, it set up the sort of angst that began to show up in movies like “Blackboard Jungle,” and “Rebel Without a Cause.”

That all started to change after 1954, with the arrival in the youth awareness of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, and with the spread of television. But compared to 2005, the 1950s in America might as well have occurred on another planet. Recently, in the comic strip “Zits,” Jeremy’s mom has asked him to take out the trash. Jeremy, not moving from the couch, says, “Ages 14-25, $94 billion in discretionary spending.” His mom counters by offering to freeze his allowance. In the last panel, Jeremy, dumping the trash in the can, says, “The retail industry respects me more than my parents do.”

That’s not generally true, but it is true in most cases that the retail industry pays at least as much (and frequently more) attention to children than their parents do. The kids are spending the $94 billion on things they want and have been manufactured, created, or organized for them. If parents researched their kids one-tenth as much as the retail industry does, millions of parent-child relationships would change.

In 1954, parents didn’t have to pay attention to what was out there; it was all the same. In 2009, parents can’t keep up with what’s out there, even the ones who try. When my kids were teenagers, I watched MTV regularly, because it was the best way to find out what was going on in my kids’ world. I also tried to watch “The Simpsons.” But I failed. Bart didn’t interest me as entertainment. Neither did MTV, though it was fun to mute the sound and play old Patti Page LPs while Madonna and Aerosmith tore up the screen.

I had it easy. I only had to check in on a few cable channels. Parents today, if they are to remain aware of the children world, have numerous cable channels, tons of magazines, and of course the Internet. All are swollen with opportunities aimed at the 8-to-18-year-old demographic. It gives kids today terrific power. They have the retail industry wrapped around their little finger, and the media furiously develops product that shows children in control of their, if not the, world. In their world, the 2009 kids find it popular to say to anyone outside that world, that is, anyone over 30, “Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.”

I have heard chatter coming from that world lately. At the college where I teach journalism and media studies, female students began to adopt anti-intellectualism as a tool of popularity. Apparently they would expend quite a bit of energy at their desks, affecting and maintaining an air of indifference. One student told me that when she raises a hand to contribute to the class discussion, the girls behind her roll their eyes at each other and say, “There she goes again.”

Then in the San Diego media, a story developed about a high school girl posing for artsy photos in a student-produced “literary” magazine. The girl was also a professional (though very much still at the portfolio-building stage) model. The story developed when her parents, who knew about her professional activities, became angry when the “lit mag” was published without their knowledge. Apparently the girl never told them about the project.

Shortly after that, being 16 years old and pregnant landed a teen idol named Jamie Lynn Spears (she is Britney's sister) on the cover of OK! Magazine. And that story inspired a teen-world reaction story on the front page of The New York Times. Talk about a fame party!

But that's another story. The story here is about three recent examples of activity in the parallel-universe youth world that give us fogies useful, if occasionally terrifying, information about that world. It is possible that kids in their youth world believe in their power, and that their power is greater than ours. They no longer are obligated to check with us, or to participate with us, and don’t expect us, or want us, to speak unless we are spoken to. More often these days, I get that feeling when I am speaking to them from the front of my classroom. Maybe educators should put the entire curriculum on YouTube and just go home.

graynation: being white in the 1950s

2009-09-27T08:41:00.000-07:00

I was saying a couple of Sundays ago that remembering the 1950s didn't make me feel particularly old, but remembering the 1940s sure did. I think that must be because the 1950s have a similarity to the world I live in now, whereas the '40s were truly the ancient times.

The '50s were the years when the world started to change from old – pre- 1950 – to new. In fact, the 1950s were tumultuous with change. The media and consumer driven world of the early 21st century can trace its roots directly to events of the 1950s. It's strange. To people with only a general attentiveness to history, the 1950s have receded into memory as a quiet time, a period of Eisenhower-era tranquility. The tumultuous 1960s by contrast certainly did what they could to enhance that memory. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author David Halberstam saw so much happening in the 1950s that he wrote a complete book, titled, simply, “The ‘50s.”

Cars, television, radio, music, suburbs, shopping centers, clothes, advertising, everything was changing. It is true that at the time, in Abilene, Texas, much of that change occurred with the force of a pebble dropping unheard into a distant pond, such as the unanimous Supreme Court decision of May 17, 1954, that ended the “separate but equal” doctrine of educational facilities for whites and blacks. That ripple would not reach Abilene for another decade.

Which means that I, essentially, grew up in an exclusively white community. Of all the strange things about life on that planet, I believe that, today, for me, remains the strangest. In Abilene, Texas, in the 1950s, there were separate facilities, wherever they were required, for the black population. Water fountains, restrooms, waiting areas, a part of town, all identified by the same label: “Colored.” Downtown stores, restaurants and movie theaters were closed to blacks, to whom the Abilene media commonly referred as “Negroes.” If it were socially necessary, newspapers of that time would airbrush photos to remove black people from the image before publishing it in the paper.

The education codes, unlike the social (written and unwritten) codes, didn’t say anything about any of the other races: Hispanic, Asian, Indian. Not many of them did, but any of those could attend white high schools and play white high school football. There were black Abilene teenagers in those days who were very good football players, like Robert Kelley and Louis Kelley, who played for the Woodson Rams, the Colored high school down in Colored Town on the east side below the railroad tracks. Woodson and black high schools in the other cities played in their own league. The Rams, whose colors were green and white, did play some of their games at the white stadium, Fair Park Stadium, but that was as close as the Kelleys or any of those high school kids could come to wondering what it would be like to go to Abilene High School, be an Abilene Eagle. White kids liked to go to the Woodson games because it was good football and Woodson High had a small but joyous band.

Those games were the only social contact I ever had with black kids. Then, in 1961, I was graduated from Abilene High and in the fall began my freshman year at Stanford University. Total culture shock. The biggest shaping event of my life. In 1969, after school and three years in the Army, I came back to Abilene and got a job at The Abilene Reporter-News, covering high school sports. Something had happened while I was gone. Desegregation reached Abilene. On the teams were kids like Kelvin Ceasar, at Cooper High, and Don Brown at AHS. Today, in Abilene, it's like segregation never happened. But one thought stays with me, as I sit here in my skin, in this place on the planet that I have arrived this morning in my 66th year. To change all that, to change my life completely, you would only have to change one thing about me. Make my skin black.

Archives: Johnny Gerhart

2009-09-25T10:50:00.000-07:00

April, 2006: Johnny Gerhart’s name came up again this week, in an incidental way. Oran Logan, a ninth-grade classmate of John’s at South Junior High School (Abilene, Texas, 1957-58) came into possession of scrapbook material that Oran’s mother had kept all these years. Among these was a page from the school newspaper, the “Coyote Howl” (coyote pronounced “ky-yoat,” in the West Texan dialect).

The page announced the results of student polling for ninth-grade class favorites. There were Friendliest Girl and Boy, Beautiful Girl, Handsome Boy, Most Talented Girl and Boy, Best All-Around Girl and Boy, Girl and Boy Most Likely to Succeed, Most Athletic Girl and Boy.

This page was circulated among an email classmates list. It was fun seeing again who won, and wry comments were passed around (“Bob Cluck was runner-up Handsome Boy?”).

Most of the comments, though, were about Johnny Gerhart, who was selected Boy Most Likely to Succeed.

It shows the power of even the unsophisticated to detect greatness. Not a single one of us in the hallways of South Junior in 1957-58 would have seen Gerhart coming down the hall and thought: “Harvard grad, double degree in English and French history and literature; at Harvard, he wrote for the Crimson (school newspaper); took a year off in 1963 to teach high school in Tanzania; a Masters and a Ph.D. in Public Affairs from Princeton; international educator and philanthropist; from 1969-98, a Ford Foundation representative all over Africa; president of The American University in Cairo, 1998-2002; named by Princeton’s graduate faculties as one of their 100 most notable alumni of the 20th century.”

Nope, we just saw Johnny, coming down the hall, on the short side, plaid shirt, Levi’s rolled up two laps, grinning and waving hello (I’ll bet he won Friendliest, too, but they couldn’t give two awards), just one of us. But we knew something. We looked at Johnny Gerhart and voted him Boy Most Likely to Succeed, hands down. How did we know he would be South’s most notable 1958 alumnus of the 20th century, 43 years before the Princeton vote?

That’s what the talk was about this week. It felt so good to us to find his name there. Johnny Gerhart died of cancer in July, 2003. We had hardly seen him in all those decades; he left Abilene, went to private school in Austin, then to Harvard and off on his international path of brilliance. But we didn’t forget him. We were among the first to see, somehow, the unforgettability that stayed with him wherever he went, among whomever he walked, from unschooled ninth graders to foreign kings. We felt included in a natural community with John at its center, the creator of the community, which is how, after his death, he was remembered by so many.

The eulogies and remembrances and stories were collected and now are maintained at the Website of “Alliance” magazine, “the leading magazine on philanthropy and social investment across the world." The first three tributes are from the president, the first lady, and the prime minister of Egypt. The rest, “Messages from friends and colleagues,” from all over the globe, scrolling down and down, are more informal and informative, filling in many blanks that our South Junior instincts knew were there.

Not a one of the 40 messages is from one of John’s South Junior classmates, a gap which I undertake to correct. Much of the affection is nothing new. “Always when we met again it was as if we were resuming a conversation that we had left off in mid-sentence.” Yep. That’s the way Johnny put us all first. “I have been lucky to know all kinds of wonderful, smart and original people,” says another. “But John was one of the very, very, very special ones.” No lie, as we used to say at South.

But he was also a collector of African art, and an expert bird watcher. I never knew that. He was also an expert storyteller, and I don’t remember that, but it makes sense. Many of his friends remembered John’s father, the Rev. Willis P. Gerhart, as anyone does in 1957-58 Abilene who met John’s father. There was no mistaking Rev. Gerhart’s intellect, or vivre, or fondness for good stories, or willingness to tell them. Being his son made Johnny mysterious. So austere a robed presence, commanding a towering white Episcopal church on South Sixth. Directly across from the church was a neighborhood grocery store, with wood floors and screen doors, owned by Eddie Baldwin’s father. Eddie was named “Friendliest Boy” in our poll. And just around the corner from these two lived Pam Oswalt, who was just gorgeous but, darn it, went to Lincoln Junior. That block on South Sixth must have been the closest thing to a vortex that Abilene had.

Now there are a couple of things about Johnny that the other messengers may not know. Wherever in the world he was, or whomever he was with, if Johnny saw a coyote, and called it a ky-yoat, he was only being true to his roots. Once a South Junior Ky-yoat, always a South Junior Ky-yoat. Secondly, a Ford Foundation colleague wrote about John and women: “His reputation for hiring smart, dynamic women was known throughout the Ford Foundation.”

When you went to junior high with Gena Jay (“Friendliest Girl”), Pat Wright (“Best All-Around Girl”), Crystal Ragsdale (“Most Beautiful Girl”) and Nancy Shoemaker (“Girl Most Likely to Succeed”) AND lived across the street from Pam Oswalt, you couldn’t help but take that appreciation forward. We haven’t forgotten Johnny Gerhart. And Johnny didn’t forget us.

Stretch Cooking: Some late, lamented freezer space

2009-09-24T10:58:00.000-07:00

For several years, we have had two refrigerators in the house, one in the kitchen and one on the back porch, which is enclosed but not air conditioned. The BPIB (back porch icebox) was an older model, with exposed coils. When we looked for ways to cut our electric bill, our eyes fell almost automatically, and sorrowfully, on the BPIB. Last week, the men came to take it away.

It puts a dent in stretch cooking strategies. I have lost half my freezer space. The back freezer is where I held the meats I bought at CostCo, sliced into cooking sizes, and wrapped for freezing. In there, for example, were 17 wrapped packages each containing two half-inch slices of pork loin from a whole loin I bought for $17.65, a dozen half-pound packages of hamburger, and some sirloin steaks. Not to mention a six-dozen package of Porkyland’s tortillas, which freeze beautifully.

How Karen got all that stuff into the kitchen freezer, I do not know. But it was FULL. Excavation is now required to find everyday meal items like frozen slices of Trader Joe’s sourdough. But we will adjust. Freezer items we tend to use every day – bread, fruit, black-eyes, green beans, etc. – will gravitate toward the front.

The vegetables are already cooked and frozen in plastic containers. They get eaten before freezer burn can start. I hate those containers, by the way. I hate washing them, they are hard to store, and they have a built-in bounce that drives me nuts. I tolerate them, though, because of the facility with which they keep black-eyes and other stretch goodies in the freezer until you’re ready to eat them.

Many people cook everything first, then freeze it. Many people belong to that part of the stretch culture that does once-a-month cooking. I am not among those. I do quite a bit of once-a-week cooking, and freeze half of it, if it is what I call freezable. You can freeze chili, for example, but not barbecue, either beef or pork. I would no more put barbecued pork shoulder in the freezer than I would throw it in the dirt outside.

So I freeze a goodly amount of fresh meat. I avoid freezer burn by wrapping the meat tightly in foil and placing the packages in gallon-sized Ziploc freezer bags. It is air, of course, that causes freezer burn. If you have any question at all about freezer burn, by the way, go here. Or to any other of the 370,000 results that Google shows for “freezer burn.” I tell you, there’s not an adjective astonishing enough to describe the Internet as a repository of information.

Media Literacy: Newspapers' online salvation: subscribers and multipliers

2009-09-21T07:31:00.000-07:00

I hope Nicholas Negroponte doesn't get mad if I quote two full paragraphs from his 1995 book, "Being Digital." I only do it because 1) I desperately want newspapers to survive their transition from newsprint to digital, and 2) I desperately want other Internet content to survive. It is history's greatest library, and it can only survive if the paragraphs that follow become reality. Here are Negroponte's words from 1995:

"It was through The New York Times that I came to know and enjoy the writing of the computer and communications business reporter, John Markoff. Without The New York Times, I would never have known of his work. However, now that I do, it would be far easier for me to have an automatic method to collect any new story Markoff writes and drop it into my personalized newspaper or suggested-reading list. I would probably be willing to pay Markoff the proverbial 'two cents' for each of his stories.

"If one two-hundredth of the 1995 Internet population were to subscribe to this idea and John were to write a hundred stories a year (he actually writes between one-hundred-twenty and one-hundred-forty), he would earn $1,000,000 per year, which I am prepared to guess is more than The New York Times pays him. If you think one two-hundredth is too big a proportion, then wait a short while. The numbers really do work."

Now that it is 2009, Negroponte's figures will need updating. The target percentage of the 2009 Internet population, to make the system work, may by now be one two-thousandth. It would be easy enough to do the math. But the key words in the two paragraphs are "two cents" and "subscribe."

In the old, traditional days of newspapering, subscribers didn't make the publishers rich. Advertising did. But the Internet is truly revolutionary because 1) between the media and the public, the Internet turns the direction of information around 180 degrees, and 2) it eliminates the old, traditional distribution costs, which was – still is – cruelly expensive. That's why advertisers have fled traditional newspapers. The cost for companies to do their own online advertising is a tiny, tiny percentage of the traditional distribution arrangement.

A third revolutionary effect, which Negroponte realized 15 years ago, is the multiplier effect. Since the Internet is global, immediate, and available for pennies to the masses, Internet businesses can attract millions or billions of visitors, and make billions or trillions by charging each visitor two cents each per visit. I realized this myself, in the 1990s, when one day I was trying to tie my necktie. For decades, I wished I could tie a Windsor knot. By then, I was familiar enough with the Internet to understand its reach, and the ease of that reach. So I decided to search.

My search engine at the time was Alta Vista. I searched "Windsor knot" and was presented with 37 returns for sites about Windsor knots. At that instant, I knew that the Internet was something of great power. Just now, Googling "Windsor knot," I am presented with 105,000 returns. This volume is possible because the information is only files in a computer, waiting to be accessed by a global audience whose only expense is access to the Internet.

Why should Windsor knot merchants spend a penny on advertising? So newspapers, and other traditional distributors of advertising, are left high and dry. If the advertising money tree has dried up, where can newspapers turn? Subscribers. It is truly revolutionary. Reading his book, I believe Negroponte thought it would happen naturally. But it hasn't. On the Internet, businesses give away information for free. This can't go on. On the Internet, the only businesses that advertisers will support is themselves.

What should transpire? A subscriber system. Every time an Internet user clicks into a Website, that site should receive two cents from the visitor. Every Internet user will open a subscription account of $30 a month (1,500 site visits) through a central payment system. The account will be debited two cents for each site visited. If the site is The New York Times, the fee will be charged to each story visited. The Times and the reporter will negotiate an agreement in which the reporter gets a cut of the two cents – let's say it is 50-50 – which means, in Negroponte's aging Markoff example, both the reporter and the newspaper will earn $500,000 a year from the reporter's stories. I am prepared to guess the arrangement would be acceptable to both parties.

Every content provider – this blog, for example – will receive two cents per visit. Popular blogs will realize considerable revenue, which is appropriate, and schlock blogs will wither, which seems equally appropriate. Internet surfers, when they are required to pay for it, will think twice about where they deposit their two cents, always wanting their two cents' worth. The result will be better Internet content quality. That will be a nice bonus. My only concern in writing this today, though, is the quality of the free, aggressive, well-staffed, well-edited press. Without that, this country is in danger of collapsing.

graynation: YouTube's window to the birth of rock

2009-09-20T07:44:00.000-07:00

I am starting to let YouTube consume far too much of my time, but I can't stop my brain from popping up with thoughts like, "I bet I can find 'Party Doll' on YouTube."

After that, what can a man do, but find out? And, of course, there it is. Then there's that menu of associated clips, and it includes "Searchin'," "Whispering Bells," and "Poor Little Fool." And "Click Clack!" I bet I haven't thought about "Click Clack" since the 20th century ended. But there they were, Dicky Doo and the Don'ts, and the acclaimed chorus: "And the wheels go oom-ba-la-la-la click clack, oom-ba-la-la-la shoo! Oom-ba-la-la-la every click clack brings me closer to you!"

And there goes an hour I could have been working on peace in our time.

I am going to blame my parents. They contrived to bring me into the world just at the right time to make me 12 years old when rock and roll came in and blew away the Perry Como Era. One spring night in 1955, a couple hundred junior high and high school kids sauntered into the Paramount Theater (tickets were 25 cents), as we always did on Friday nights, and we took our seats in our usual sections, our Paramount "turf."

The movie this Friday night was “Blackboard Jungle,” starring Glenn Ford and Anne Francis. Also in the cast were two young actors, Vic Morrow and Sidney Poitier. None of the kids in the theater knew anything about the movie; we were there because it was Friday night. First there was the black-and-white newsreel, then the cartoon, then the curtain fell in preamble to the feature. The effect was to set up anticipation, and in fact the crowd became quiet. There were two or three moments of relative calm. Then:

“One two three o’clock four o’clock ROCK!
“Five six seven o’clock eight o’clock ROCK!
“Nine ten eleven o’clock twelve o’clock ROCK!
“We’re gonna ROCK around the CLOCK tonight!”

It was music, very loud and urgent, and it thundered on into its first verse – “When the clock strikes one, join me hon” – but the kids in the Paramount Theater sat rock-still, stunned, staring at the rising curtain, transfixed by the energy blasting at them from Bill Haley and the Comets.

We knew there was something happening to music out there somewhere. We could catch snatches of it on local stations KRBC and KWKC, but we had better luck if we searched for stations in New Orleans, Oklahoma City and Nashville, that came in sometimes with remarkable clarity through a still-uncluttered sky. This was high-energy music that came from people with exotic names like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, and it didn’t sound at all like what we were accustomed to hearing from Gisele MacKenzie, Mitch Miller, Les Baxter, Perry Como, Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney.

We were intrigued by the new music, but it had come from somewhere else far away across the sky. Now we sat in our very own Paramount, with its big speakers and this high-speed music rocketing at us, and for several seconds we were frozen by it. Then we reacted. We jumped up and yelled and the cooler ones got into the aisles and danced in frenzy. It was a before-and-after moment that no one there would ever forget.

The title of the song was “Rock Around the Clock,” and it came to Abilene and all the other cities as a nice example of cross-media marketing. In the 1950s, the recording industry’s principal marketing outlet was radio. Listeners who heard a song on the radio might then go buy it at a record store.

But there were only 24 hours available in a day, and not many radio stations. In 1955, Abilene had only two, meaning there were only 48 music marketing hours available in any given day. Worse, the stations used much of their time to broadcast soap operas, news, and shows like “Farm Roundup,” “Mixing Bowl,” and “Arthur Godfrey.” Their music playlists leaned to proven artists and songs like “Hard to Get,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” and “Love is a Many Splendored Thing.” It would be years before enough radio stations existed to develop what came to be called “narrowcasting.” In 1955, on KRBC and KWKC, you took what you got, in a very mixed bag.

So “Rock Around the Clock” rode a movie into town, and the results were instructive to future students of cross-media marketing. “Rock Around the Clock” became the first example of this new music to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Magazine rating charts, and it did so very quickly, reaching No. 1 in June.

The movie was electrifying, too, about gangs in schools not only challenging, but intimidating and literally attacking authority. The teacher, Richard Dadier, played by Glenn Ford, wins in the end, the punk Vic Morrow is hauled away, and Sidney Poitier (a black kid!) leaves the bad guys and becomes a good one. The movie was so controversial that many communities would not allow it to be shown, including, of all places, Memphis, Tennessee.

But Abilene did, and kids who came out of the Paramount that night weren’t the same kids who went in. They came out in possession of a new kind of music, and they knew a new word: “daddio.” It was the first night in Abilene of a new extension of culture that would become a culture unto itself. It tickles me, talking to my kids and grandkids, and all my students, who now think of this culture as their own, to tell them I was there the night it was born. My God, I sound like one of the Three Wise Men.

Archives: People are reactionary - September, 2005

2009-09-18T13:19:00.000-07:00

September, 2005: Karen, my bride to be, has 25 years experience in organizational systems analysis. I am in media. We sit side-by-side these days and have interesting conversations.

She talks about what happens in organizations that need to change, and know it, but resist. It drove her crazy to be assigned a systems analysis within an organization or institution, discover the problem and report it, then watch while nothing happened.

"People and organizations really need to be afraid, or in pain, before change can occur," she said. It makes no difference, she says, how vitally the change is needed, to avoid institutional ruin, or disasters like Sept. 11, Iraq, New Orleans and pension funds. Not until after the fact will the people in charge go back to the pre-disaster analysis, recognize the truth in it, and then do something about it.

I tell Karen how people in my business, the media, constantly call for change in our newspaper and magazine pages. Long reports have been published in the last five years about what a major hurricane would do to New Orleans, with scenarios almost identical to what actually happened with Katrina.

"You know," I said, "the media could have published an in-depth report on teenagers, culture, violence and guns, with a scenario of multiple deaths in an armed teenaged assault on a high school, and no one would have read it."

We looked at each other, realizing we were in the same business. It is our job to bring useful, even critical, projections to people who don't pay us the slightest bit of attention, until something actually happens.

Not one, but two long reports, first in Scientific American (2001), and National Geographic (last October!) described what would happen to New Orleans when the big hurricane hit. The Geographic story was almost word-for-word with the actual Katrina stories in the national media last week. The Times-Picayune in New Orleans has published countless stories about the danger of under-maintained levees and the difficulty of getting federal money to fix them.

The media could have published a story about how easily a major wildfire could get started in San Diego, and how planning, equipment and policies would be no match for it, and no one would have done anything about it until after the Cedar Fire.

That fire, in October 2003, burned 2,700 homes, killed 15 people and roared through more than 273,000 acres, from Julian down to Scripps Ranch, and since then, there have been plenty of changes in planning, equipment and policies.

Before 1978, the media could have published analyses of air traffic control patterns in the San Diego area, with no change occurring until after Sept. 25, 1978, when a mid-air collision over North Park killed 135 people on Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182, two men in a Cessna, and seven people on the ground. Shortly after that, control patterns were changed that now send incoming airliners from the north all the way out to La Mesa before they turn around.
Presently there exists a scenario, developed and published by the state Office of Emergency Services in 1988, on the effect of a 6.3 earthquake in San Diego. I have written two stories about the scenario myself, one in this publication three months ago. So I ask readers: on what fault line is the scenario based? Where is the fault line located?

The disconnect is simple. The media sees stories in events that haven't happened yet. In the Toolbox, it’s called the Threat to the Status Quo. Readers and viewers don't see stories until they happen. Or, in Karen's case, they are scared to death. How do we change that? Somebody should write a story.

Stretch Cooking: nothing standard about Green Enchiladas

2009-09-17T14:58:00.000-07:00

September is traditionally one of our hottest months in Southern California; in fact next week the weather bureau is looking for temperatures in the 90s or 100s in the inland valleys of San Diego, where we live.

That’s not to say it’s not the right time for Green Enchiladas. There is no unright time for Green Enchiladas, which is one of the most reliable comfort foods known to man. There are certain days, though, that issue a particular call for comfort food, and many of them are associated with cooler temperatures.

I am thinking specifically of the day that Daylight Savings Time ends. Spring forward, fall back. On Nov. 1, a Sunday, we will turn our clocks back one hour. On Monday night, we will suddenly be driving home from work in the dark. I hate that. And on Nov. 2, even in Southern California, it’s likely to be cool, maybe even rainy. Monday, Nov. 2, is the date I have circled for Green Enchiladas.

You want to make them on Sunday, then Monday night just pull them out and run them into a 350 oven for 30 or 40 minutes, until they’re steamy-hot all the way through.

The smallest batch you should make, even for two people – or even one person, for that matter, in which case you may REALLY need Green Enchiladas – is that which will fill a 9 by 13 Pyrex baking dish.

Brown a pound and a half of hamburger in a black skillet, seasoning to taste with salt, pepper, garlic powder, cumin and a scant teaspoon of Gebhardt’s Chile Powder. Put it aside to cool.

Make the sauce. In a large saucepan, melt two tablespoons of butter. Over medium-high heat, add three tablespoons of flour and stir with the butter to make a roux. Cook the roux just long enough to take off the raw flour taste. Add two cups of milk and stir constantly until the sauce thickens. Turn down the heat. Add two medium cans of diced green chiles and three-quarters of a pound of cubed Velveeta. Keep stirring until the Velveeta is melted and the sauce is smooth. Take the pan off the heat.

Have ready chopped onion and grated cheese. Prepare the tortillas. You need good corn tortillas. I recommend Porkyland’s, which you can mail-order, but if you have a good tortilleria near you, go for it. You will need 9 or 10. Paint both sides of the tortillas with oil. In a dry skillet, heat tortillas one by one and make a layer in the bottom of the baking dish. I like to cut one tortilla in half and snug the straight edges up to the ends of the pan. Make a layer of hamburger, chopped onion, and grated cheese. Be generous with the grated cheese. Repeat the tortilla layer, then repeat the hamburger etc. layer. Put on a top layer of tortillas. Then pour the chile-Velveeta sauce over all, getting it into all the seams and corners. Sprinkle the top with grated cheese.

Bake in a 350 oven for 40 minutes. Or cover with foil and refrigerate, as I am going to do on Nov. 1, in anticipation of Nov. 2. When it is ready, cut it into six sections with a spatula. Make a salad of shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes, and good salsa, all mixed together, and serve on the plate with a section of Green Enchiladas. The only thing standard at your table on Nov. 2 will be the time.

Media Literacy: The new age of Incast

2009-09-14T08:41:00.001-07:00

The World Wide Web is only the Fourth Revolution in the 16,000-odd-year history of media.

The First Revolution was the alphabet, introduced into practical use around 1500 B.C. The effect of the First Revolution was to let information travel across distances. With an alphabet, people could put ideas, fables and histories on paper, or stone, or into clay, allowing the information to be carried, or distributed, from place to place.

The Second Revolution was the printing press, introduced in commercial form by Johann Gutenberg around 1450 A.D. The printing press provided the means to reproduce many copies – and exact copies – of books very quickly, as opposed to the old, “scribal culture” tradition of reproducing a book one copy at a time, which was very slow and very expensive. So the effect of the Second Revolution was to provide the media with volume. Many historians believe the printing press has been the most important invention in the history of humanity.

The Third Revolution was the telegraph, introduced in 1844 by Samuel Morse. The telegraph provided the media with speed. Before 1844, information traveled only as fast as a man on foot, a man on a horse, or a man on a steamship or railroad train. In 1844, it became possible to move information from Point A to Point B at more or less the speed of light.

The Fourth Revolution is the Web, which we may date from about 1995. The effect of the Web is to turn the direction of information around 180 degrees. In the old, and still dominant, “broadcast culture,” information goes from a central location out to the masses. It has been a very effective technology, but also a very expensive one, and very inefficient.

In the Web age – let’s call it “Incast” – the masses come in to the information. Web information, whether it is print, audio or video, is nothing more than files on a computer, accessible globally to anyone with a phone and a computer. Incast is ridiculously inexpensive and almost totally efficient. It is the first one-to-one marketing model in the history of media. Broadcast is so expensive that not many people become broadcasters. Incast is so cheap that practically anyone can go into the media business. The result is an enormous democratizing effect. The Fourth Revolution is the reason that a publication like this one can exist.

We are now on the crest of the Fourth Revolution, headed at global high speed toward an unseen destination. One result we do know is that eventually, print and television will merge. They already have, sort of. When you watch television news, at the end of a story you are told, “For more on this story, go to our Website at www.msnbc.com.” Very soon, the merger will be complete, and your television set will work like a computer, and your remote control will also be a mouse. When you watch a news story on this new television, there will be a link right on the screen. Click on it, and you go to the in-depth, “print” version of the story. Media students already are aware that in the new journalism, they are going to have to write for both print and television: the 90-second version (about 210 words) for television, and the 4,000-word version for print.

The TV version, meanwhile, will “wait,” since it is only a file in a computer, for you to go read the in-depth story, and then click back to the TV news, which will resume where you left it. It is difficult to imagine what that simple change will mean to the media-public relationship.

Right now, we are in a primitive stage of the new relationship, like people in the 1890s who suddenly had a telephone they could use. To use it effectively, they almost had to understand how to build one. Same with the Web, that has caused enough hair-pulling to fill a billion pillows. But the Incast business model is strong, only the fourth revolution in media history, and it won’t be long before we know more than we do now.

graynation: old enough to be historic

2009-09-13T16:34:00.000-07:00

Okay, so now I am feeling slightly old. The Abilene Reporter-News yesterday took great pains to report that Friday night's Abilene High-Cooper High football game marked the 50th anniversary of the first game played at Shotwell Stadium in Abilene, on Sept. 11, 1959.

I played in that game. I was a junior fullback for Abilene High, and we beat San Antonio Thomas Jefferson that night, 14-12. Fifty years! And I was already 16 years old! I had to check the score in my yearbook; I remembered it as 26-12, so you see how reliable memory is. I do remember the best player on the Jefferson team: Tommy Nobis, who starred at Texas and then Atlanta in the NFL. The best player on our team was David Parks, who was an All-American at Texas Tech and All-Pro with the 49ers.

In the yearbook, 1959 looks modern. Not personally. The way kids dressed at AHS in 1959, you could mistake it for a Catholic school. For boys, the uniform was Levis, a shirt, black penny loafers, and white socks. For girls, the uniform was a dress, black suede penny loafers, and white socks. But there are color photographs, and the school, which opened in 1955, looked modern. The cars had transitioned from the black humpmobiles of the 1940s to cars with long lines and wrap-around windshields.

It's the black humpmobiles that are in my mind today. If I played in the first game at the new Shotwell Stadium, it means I also played in the last game, in December of 1958, at the old Fair Park Stadium, where Eagle teams had played since the 1920s. I find my links to the first half of the 20th century are becoming increasingly awesome. I remember thinking what a strange life it must have been for my grandmother, who rode in wagons before cars appeared. My own life assumes the same strangeness, as I check in at Facebook, remembering a day when I lived in a house with a telephone that was on a party line. A "party line," kids, meant that your phone, and others in several other homes, shared the same line. I picked up the phone many times and heard other people talking. It WAS, I guess, sort of like Facebook. I remember what a big deal it was when we got a private number. It was 7973. Later it became 4-7973. After that, we heard that phone exchanges were coming. I was excited. I had been in big cities with phone exchanges like RIverside, KLondike, FEderal, and SEquoia. I was disappointed when the phone company said our choices would be ORchard and OWen. Ick. At least we got ORchard.

Then, in the same online edition with the Abilene-Cooper story (Abilene won, 49-37), was a story about the Abilene Candy Company burning down. When I was but a boy, in those days in the first half of the 20th century, the Abilene Candy Company made the Jo-Boy candy bar, which was like a Baby Ruth but with a pink center. I loved Jo-Boys and was so impressed that they were made in my home town. The company was still in business, making candy suckers for worldwide distribution. The photos with the story showed it totally engulfed. The building was on North 3rd St., in an industrial area east of downtown.

Downtown was still downtown then. Two hotels, the Windsor and Wooten. Three movie theaters, the Paramount, Majestic and Queen. Two high-tone department stores, Minter's and Grissom's. A drugstore with a soda fountain. Head-in parking, for the black humpmobiles. Texas and Pacific steam engines huffing through the middle of town. A Christmas Parade down Pine Street. No television. No air conditioning. Bottles of milk on the front porch. No traffic roar. So quiet a place, it seems, it was.

Then came the '50s, and modernization. A shopping center. A new stadium, that I played in, and they are still playing in today. That doesn't seem so long ago. But 1949 sure does.