This picture reminds me of the high-school girl who organized a protest in Norwich, CT three and a half months before the invasion. I was impressed by her resolve and courage, and, being retired with "nothing better to do," I drove through the snow storm as soon as I read about her plans in the morning paper. There were just a few of us there, but her youthful indignation was the catalyst that got me out of my own indulgent and slothful "retirement rocking chair" and out on to the streets.

( Here's the old Norwich Bulletin article that I just now found in the detritus of my hard drive. )

Our First Earth Day Maypole (40 ribbons - over 30 feet tall)



New London Earth Day is no more. Over the past several years, we did a few good things (three successful Earth Day celebrations, advocating for preservation of city parks, organizing a public forum and high-level press conference to oppose the Broadwater Liquified Natural Gas barge in Long Island Sound and proposing the creation of a New London Sustainable Community Initiative committee to the City Council. When the Council approved our proposal, we then recruited qualified New London residents to be members of this important citizen task force. The City Council has officially appointed our candidates and they are now working to make New London, CT a more environmentally sustainable community.

After our small committee (at last count we numbered only six) did all the hard work of getting this initiative off the ground, somehow our sails were left luffing in the wind and we all eventually moved on to other things. The wake for this organization will be joyously celebrated at some local pub in the near future for all past members of New London Earth Day.

Honestly, this is a true story!



It's an understatement to say that I like kites. The walls of my home are covered with all kinds, from antique, hand-painted Japanese fighter kites and bamboo/tissue Indian fighter kites, to various large cloth mandalas and old stick/paper dime-store kites (remember dime stores?).

I have bunches of discontinued mylar and aluminum rod Vic's fighter kites, along with some very cool, two-string acrobatic kites that (I swear) can break the speed of sound just before they auger into the ground at the end of a not-so-successful power-dive (one of which is affectionately called "The Killer" ... it actually broke a friend's arm about a hundred years ago).

But, you know(?), in a way, my favorite kite of all time has been the Fantazma Gordo made by Gayla. You could buy these at any grocery/drug/gasoline/toy/department store back in the seventies (and maybe into the nineties ... I don't recall seeing them anywhere recently). They were all plastic, very cheap, ready-to-fly (string included) and they were just great if you wanted to just fly your hopes high on the spur of a moment.

They would launch from your hand in the slightest of breezes (you wouldn't even need to get out of your lawn chair) and they would fly almost straight up above your head. You could reel them in right back into your hand (again, never needing to leave your lawn chair).

( click here for my Unbelievable, but True Fantazma Gordo Story )

Lately, for some reason, I've been thinking alot about Mary Ruth Gunn.



I'm only guessing, but, I think this picture was taken sometime around 1992 (my beard was alot fuller and a whole lot browner back then).

Mary Ruth was one of my first real friends. She was much older than I and I got to know her when she started to accompany my flute solos in high school. We would practice at her house and then go down into the basement and shoot pool and talk and talk and laugh and tease each other and so on. But, in hindsight, I realized that Mary Ruth was being my first real mentor in Life. She would engage my mind by steering conversations into areas of philosophy or life situations; she would lend me books, saying "You really should read this, Douglas!" (I still have a never-returned copy of G.K. Chesterton that she lent to me).

( Long, long memories of Mary Ruth and a very important letter from her (1965) )

I am (was?) the kid in the back row, third from right (i.e., including the teacher) wearing the geeky white shirt and suspenders (of course!)

I'm not sure, but our class just might have been the only class to go all the way from Kindergarten (Kinder Garden!) to graduating from High School at this one school in Gary, Indiana.

At any rate (dv/dt?), a lot of water has certainly gone under the bridge and over the dam since then, right?

When I was in my teens, I memorized pi to 50 digits.  

I thought it would impress the chicks.

I was wrong ...

And, now, alas, in the declining years of my Life, I can keep my recitation up for only about 14 digits.

Pfizer!  Where are you when you're really needed, huh?

(grin?)(sob?)

I was, perhaps, five years old. Susan, who lived about three houses up the block, must have been about 4 years old. We started walking down Maple Avenue together and, after about a block or two, she suggested that we get a hamburger and soda at the tiny diner that used to be on the corner of Shelby Street and Oak Avenue (this had to be around 1949 or so).

Well, I, being older and much wiser, replied "But Susan! We don't have any money!" Susan, being ever so much cleverer than I, came back with "But Douglas! We can always BUY some money!" (which, of course, made perfect sense to me, right?).

So, we ambled the few remaining blocks and went to the restaurant, ordered our feast and sat eating to our fill, when the waitress came up to us and told us that we had to pay the 75 cents (or whatever a meal for two cost back then).

Oops! Uhhhh! Well, hmmmm .... (The waitress was already asking for our names and phone numbers ...). Gee! All these years, when I think of this, I can only guess how cute we must have looked with our innocent guilty faces and how that waitress must have really fought to keep from laughing.

Anyhow, when our parents came to get us and they had finished lecturing us, I just got on with Life and forgot about it - until the next day, when Susan was finally let out in the neighborhood with a note pinned to her coat that said "Susan is NOT allowed to play with Douglas!"

I've never forgotten that. I've never gotten over it. After all, it was HER idea, not mine!

I should have learned a very important lession that day (but, of course, I didn't!).

Still trying to get down more memories from my youth in Gary, Indiana. There was a policeman named Eddie Moore who was a friend of our family and he used to bring my brother and me neat things like spent cartridges and, once, a bullet that had flattened on the sidewalk after he had shot it through a rabid dog. For 1950's small boys this was really, really neat, but now I wonder that I didn't catch rabies myself.

Sadly, he and his partner were answering the call involving a domestic dispute. He went to the back door of the house and knocked. Coming up the basement stairs, was a man with a German Luger and he fired at Eddie, hitting him three times. Eddie immediately emptied his service revolver into the guy and, shortly after, they both died.

It was pretty sad for the whole city. His wake was one of the first to which I ever went and it was very ironic that the body of the man who shot him was in the next room of the funeral home, so that the families and friends of both men were grieving in the same place at the same time. I'll never forget looking at the killer's relatives and seeing the sadness and confusion in their eyes. I think that's one of the first times that I learned that things are not as simple as they are depicted in the news or on television; it's not always a case of just the good guys and the bad guys.

After his death, Eddie's widow was the crossing guard at the southeast corner of Wirt for many years . I remember that she used to always joke around with the kids, but, if any car zipped through HER crossing when she had signaled "STOP," she would curse after them while she slammed her wooden stop sign into the side of the passing car, leaving nice creases, scratches and dents (I saw this many times, but I never saw a car stop ... her demeanor always spurred them on to get the hell out of there ... FAST!).

There's a small bit of confusion (well, for me) in that Al Shanahan (source of many tidbits of history of those years in Gary) related several years ago that an Officer John Moore and his partner responded to a family disturbance at a home located on South Hancock Street, almost in back (East) of the old Miller Bowling Alley (Stack Bros). Officer Moore went to the back of the house, and then down a few steps to the basement apartment. He was shot through the closed door, without warning, and died almost instantly. His partner was Officer George Venture. That sounds real close to my recollection of Eddie and makes me wonder if perhaps Eddie was the middle name of John Moore (I go by my middle name, too, and sometimes causes confusion) or whether there were two Officer Moores who died under almost identical circumstances.

At any rate, it was a sobering experience for this young kid.

There's an old water tower about two blocks from my old Gary home (up at the end of Indian Boundary (a name that has another story in history)).



When you climb up to its top, you get the best view in the world of Lake Michigan, particularly on a warm, summer night.

( Are you wondering how to get to the top? )

I grew up in Gary, Indiana between 1944 and 1962. For all of my childhood, my home was a small white house at the corner of Vanderburg Street and Maple Avenue, lying only two blocks from Mighty Lake Michigan. Our Dad excavated the semblance of a back yard (two small, terraced patches of lawn) from the Omnipresent Sand that shaped almost every aspect of our Lives.



When I was a kid, there were only about 4-5 houses on the east side of Vanderburg, while the west side of our street was dominated by a towering sand dune next to a funky swamp (where we would pretend to smoke cigars by lighting up cat-tails ).


(painting by my father done about 50 years ago; this spot is now flat with houses)

Maple Avenue ended about 50 feet along the south side of our lot. Well, more accurately, it was buried by the skirts of another huge sand dune (these dunes were around 150 feet tall). It was a great place to grow up and, when I wasn’t soaking in Lake Michigan, you could probably find me atop one of the dunes, perched up in the limbs of some cottonwood or maple tree reading a book.

Recently, viewing an aerial photograph of this area (if you use the link, you might have to then click "Aerial Image" in the map's upper-right corner), made me cry out “Where are all the sand dunes?!” (though, hopefully, some might still remain under the extended canopy of trees pictured in the linked photo). Usually, we don’t realize what we lose because of overpopulation and greed, until it’s all gone.

( Click here to read the actual memory of John the Peddler )

When I was growing up, there were several activities that were officially banned by higher authorities (i.e., adults) as potentially harmful to our bodies.


(from Bruegal's Children's Games)

The top verboten game was BUCK-BUCK! One guy (sorry, but I don't ever remember the girls being so stupid to do this) would lean up against a tree, his teammate would bend over and put his shoulder against the first guy's belly, the next teammate would bend over and grab the second guy's waist, and ditto, etc. until your team presented this long (we used to have about 6 to 8 kids on a team) line of backs to the opposing team, who, one by one, would run as fast as possible and leap-frog over the last bent-over guy onto the backs of the other team - the object being to make the first team collapse by the force of each leap and/or by the sheer weight of the entire second team. I remember this as great, great fun and VERY competitive (and, again, I don't think I'd let my own kids do this...hmmm (hmmm #2 - maybe THIS is why I have had a bad back the last decade or two)).



Also, I remember playing mumbly-peg where you and your opponent stood facing each other starting with your own two feet right next to each other. You then flipped a knife off your fingertip towards one side of your own feet (but I don't remember the exact rules...can anyone help me here?). Your opponent and you would take turns throwing the knife as close to your own feet as possible. With each successful throw, you would have to stretch your stance out to meet the edge of the knife. The person who ended up not being able to reach their own knife throw would lose the game (i.e., even if you could do the splits, there's a limit to how far you could reach).

Obviously, if you were able to stick the knife into the ground very close to your own foot, you would win the game over a person who, being more cautious (and, perhaps, smarter) would prefer to not risk throwing the knife into his own foot.

(Of late, my memory certainly isn’t what it used to be. So I thought, for a while, I should devote some journal entries to random events from my own distant youth.)



In a much earlier posting here, I talked about my tattoo. In that 2001 blurb I wrote:

“I grew up in Gary, Indiana in the 1950’s. Like most people from my generation, we had our A-bomb drills every week, when the air raid sirens would howl and all of us kids would dive under our school desks in the properly tucked posture. I remember, as a young boy, looking up every time an airplane flew over … hoping it wasn’t a Russian bomber (in INDIANA of all places). The McCarthy hysteria seemed to be particularly rampant in the Midwest. We kids were taught not to trust our neighbors - you never knew who might be a Commie intent on taking over the world.


Unlike others of my generation, however, as I said, I had the privilege of growing up in Gary, Indiana. The authorities were sure that the first place in the U.S. that the Russians were going to bomb would surely be our own precious steel mills. This fear reached such a great height that they – now I’m not fooling you here - they took every kid in the city and tattooed their blood type on the side of their torsos. I still have mine here as my own badge of living with all that hysteria. Think of it – isn’t all of this a hell of a way to raise innocent kids?”

(end of quote)


(My Tattoo)

( Further reflections upon my tattoo (and also from another Hoosier (a bit older than me)) )

I'm remembering from when I was in High School (Gary, Indiana circa 1958-1962) the various PADDLES that the teachers used to build our character.

Vice-principle Ertel had a big leather strap cut out in the shape of a paddle that he would uncoil and whop down on the desk that would make you pee in your pants (don't know if he ever used it; just the sight of it had me saying "I'm very very sorry - I won't ever ... EVER! ... do it again").

Miss Lab (drama/music - required for all - ah, but we all know the two-part harmony to Tell Me Why-eye, the sky is Blue) would break a ruler over your open palm - sorta stung, but it was real easy to laugh it off (a rite of passage, that if you failed, you would have to transfer to another state in order to get away from your jeering classmates) - thus her's really wasn't very effective.

Coach Nabhan had the biggest, meanest paddle (well, more of a CLUB, actually) which would put you out of commission for a bit and would quell any back talk for a while, but...!!!

!!!for me, the scariest, deadliest, most painful, and most universally feared paddle was Coach Hatrack's - a sleek, smallish formula-one paddle with holes drilled in it so that it could travel faster than the speed of light and render your backside and your machismo self-esteem to jello with his expert and rapid application. We were very well behaved in his class, indeed.



Part of the psychology involved the positive reaffirmation of these repeated rites of passage was that you got to sign each paddle after it had been applied to your backside. Somehow that made it all right(?)

Just a note, though; these teachers were some of the best I had - it was just the way it was back then. All this probably doesn't have much meaning to the younger set... but I know I never laid a hand on either of my two sons, so I guess it taught me SOMETHING positive.

Well, yesterday was a day full of trips to various doctors and related errands. It was also a day busy with searching the web for ideas on how to conduct a local campaign to Save the Environment, along with trying to fix various plumbing problems (with mixed results - after 33 years of leaks in the basement, I'm almost to the point of thinking about considering calling in a plumber).

Last night, I was so tired that I fell asleep right after firing off one last strategy email to our New London Earth Day folks (see earlier post about latest protest), so I forgot to post here. Somehow, though, the World will still go on, even if I missed posting one day, right?

Anyhow, this morning I remembered that yesterday was December 4th. December 4, 1969 was the day that I started working at a job that I stayed with for 31 years, until retiring in 2000. Over my glass of pomegranite/cranberry juice, I got sort of nostalgic, remembering that back then I was a young 25 years old partnered with a good wife and several cats, recently indoctrinated in the fields of Mathematics and Biomedical Engineering, and my trusty slide-rule (no laptops back in 1969).



Relatively speaking, back then, I was full of Innocence and Optimism. I had yet to learn many, many tough lessons in Life about how things don't always go the way we (naively) plan and, more importantly, I've learned a few lessons about myself, too (I'm still learning).

Still, back on that day, Life was good.

In spite of all the bumps and wrinkles along the way, it still is (if we just stop for a second and experience it).