Ramblin' with Roger

The whole Ford Memoirs Behind the Nixon Pardon thing led to an interesting, and for Ford’s legacy, a rather sad court case. In HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS, INC. v. NATION ENTERPRISES, 471 U.S. 539 (1985), Time magazine had an exclusive right to excerpt from Ford’s memoirs. Nation magazine wrote a news story of 300-400 words about it. Normally, that wouldn’t be an issue (fair use), but since they focused on the Nixon pardon, which was the only thing that anyone really cared about, it led to the resulting lawsuit.

On one hand, I felt sorry for the man. Ford had two offers, from the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions, to play professional football when he graduated from Michigan in 1935… Ford could have gone league. “I wish I could’ve played one year for either the Lions or the Packers…”. If he had, maybe he wouldn’t have been so easily painted as a klutz by the press and most notably by Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live. (I read on AOL that Chase is now saying very nice things about Ford.)

On the other hand, he was responsible in large part for the success of two members of the GWB administration, one current and the other recent. He made a rising young administrator in the Nixon cabinet, Donald Rumsfeld, his chief of staff in 1974. In 1975, when Rumsfeld moved to the Pentagon to become the nation’s youngest secretary of defense, Ford appointed a still younger White House staffer, Dick Cheney, to succeed him. Had Gerald Ford been still alive, I might have called this piece, “I blame Gerald Ford”. But it’s still hard for me to speak ill of the dead.

When I was growing up, our family always got JET magazine. On the last pages were the black (or R&B) music charts. More often than not, there was a song or two or three from James Brown on the singles charts and and an LP on the album charts. Peculiarly, many of these songs I had never heard of, let alone heard, because there was no black radio stations that I can recall in my hometown. This was particularly true when I was younger, before he had most of his big crossover hits.

So, if you look at some of those Billboard books of the top pop artists, James Brown will appear in the top ten, even though he had a relative dearth of pop hits, compared with his total output. However, he had a MASSIVE total output.

James Brown came to Albany in the mid-1980s, and I didn’t go, and this during a period when I was attending concerts. It was largely that his shows – like Bob Dylan at the time, now that I think of it – were considered very inmconsistent. One show, he earned his nickname of “The Heardest Working Man in Show Business”, while the next show, he seemed to be mailing it in. For the life of me, I can’t remember what category JB’s show that year fell into.

The thing is that she says it when surprised, like a veteran user would. Of course, what surprises her may differ from what surprises others. Carol sometimes keeps her earrings under her pillow – no, I don’t know why – and Lydia discovered them, and came up with the retort.

It’s our inclination to discourage her, we get over the fact that, for some unknown reason, I find myself stifling laughter when she does it. Bad daddy!

We want her to be sure she knows the given names of her mother and me, which she does, without actually calling us by our given names. She’s only tested that idea once. Interestingly (to me), she stopped when I started calling her “daughter” instead of her name.

This is Lydia’s first Christmas where she is starting to understand this Santa Claus and presents gig. Her mother and I are trying to limit the amount of things she gets, buy she’s got grandparents and aunts and uncles. Even before the big day, she’s been receiving lots of STUFF, so we’re busy trying to regulate the volume she has at any one time, lest her toy box explode. At the same time, we appreciate the kindness and wisdom of these folks who had children before we did, so it’s a balancing act.