anniversary Archives - Page 11 of 15

JiFKa: the 50th anniversary of the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy

I watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, in real time.

A few years back, I asked What was the first public trauma – as opposed to a personal trauma, such as a death or divorce in the family – that you recall? And while not my first event, the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, when I was ten years old and didn’t understand what happened next – I was not yet seeped in Presidential succession law – was terrifying. The death itself was already scary enough.

It certainly didn’t help that Miss Oberlik, our fifth-grade teacher, told us the news, LEFT THE ROOM, for some reason, which got us talking among ourselves about the meaning of it all, and then she comes back and SCREAMS at us for not being quiet, like everyone else in the school (who, I suspect, hadn’t been ABANDONED by their teacher). I wondered later if she had gone off to compose herself after dropping that bombshell on us.

Like much of the nation, I was glued to the television that weekend. I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, in real time. Of course, I viewed the funeral, and John-John’s salute of his daddy.

Such a strange time, now that I look back on it. A lot of households I visited, especially after the shootings, had pictures on the walls, and the only ones that weren’t family members were of JFK and Jesus Christ. It was not my grief that I remember; it was the tears, seemingly out of nowhere, of many of the adults around me. And if not tears, then an overwhelming sadness that came like unexpected tidal waves.

The 50 cent piece, starting in 1964, bore Kennedy’s image, which I find, in retrospect, to be an amazing feat, changing coinage so quickly. Idlewild Airport in New York City – famous from the Car 54 Where Are You TV theme – was renamed for the slain leader, as was Cape Canaveral, though the latter was eventually switched back.

In 1964, the Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, generally referred to as the Warren Commission Report was released. It claimed that Oswald was the lone gunman, not involved in a conspiracy; and that the bullet that killed the President also wounded Governor John Connolly of Texas. One of the local newspapers had excerpts of the Warren Commission report, and I not only read them, I clipped them out of the newspaper, and put it in a three-ring binder, something I believe I STILL have somewhere in the attic.

Over the years, there are those who dismissed the report as a coverup, or at least as a lazy effort of accepting the FBI’s analysis as fact, rather than doing an independent investigation. The Oliver Stone movie JFK (1991), which my girlfriend at the time and I referred to as JiFKa, was about New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s belief that there was “more to the Kennedy assassination than the official story.” Conversely, at the end of his novel 11/22/63, Stephen King says he’s over 95% sure Oswald was the lone shooter, though his wife Tabitha believes otherwise.

The one time I got to meet Earl Warren, along with a number of my classmates in the early 1970s, I really wanted to ask the by-then retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court about this topic; instead, I asked him some arcane question about corporations as people, which was an issue back in the 1870s as well as the 21st century.

I still wonder, if only a little, what the whole truth of the matter was.
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CBSNews.com to stream 1963 broadcast coverage of JFK assassination, and/or one can buy the coverage on Amazon. I think not for me, thank you.

Five quotes from JFK’s 1963 Civil Rights address that still resonate today

How JFK’s Assassination Changed Media and the SIXTIES Generation.

Lee Harvey Was a Friend of Mine by Laura Cantrell [LISTEN]

The popcorn story

By demand from Island Rambles. I mean Shooting Parrots asked for it, but IR INSISTED!

When I was forced to get rid of my microwave by my lovely bride after we got married and moved in together, one of the things I most missed was making microwave popcorn. Now Carol would say, “Oh, you can make popcorn on the stove.” Well, no; maybe SHE could, and occasionally/rarely she did, but I could not, unless you considered creating a smoky and scorched pot, oddly filled with burnt popcorn AND unpopped kernels, “making popcorn.” I used the oil, even moved the pot as instructed but to no particular success, unless the goal was to make a mess without having a satisfactory culinary outcome. It’s OK to mess up a lot of pans if there’s a payoff, but without one…

I must have mentioned me missing this appliance at a gathering of her birth family, around Thanksgiving or Christmas of 1999. When we all got together for Mother’s Day the next year, they brought ME a box of microwave popcorn, which I accepted graciously. This was just the wrong response for them.

What I was SUPPOSED to do is kvetch, “But we don’t have a microwave! What am I to do with this?” At that point, they were going to then give us a brand new microwave from Unclutterer, which we could use in the new house, where we were going to move into the following week, and there would as room for it. Instead, I figured to just use the microwave popcorn at work.

Finally, the following weekend, they brought us the new microwave, as a first anniversary/housewarming present, disappointed that they did not have a little fun at my expense. Indeed, inadvertently, I had some fun at THEIR expense, and I wasn’t even trying.

AND, after very little practice, I almost NEVER burn the popcorn.

LISTEN: Buttered Popcorn by the Supremes

13 years of wedded bliss out of 14 ain’t bad

It was HER making room in HER house for MY stuff; it wasn’t ours.

I was flicking through the TV channels a couple of weeks ago and discovered there’s some new reality show about newlyweds that’s going to be airing soon. Couldn’t tell you the name of it – and truth to tell, wouldn’t bother to look it up – but the clips were full of Sturm und Drang because doesn’t that sound entertaining?

The running joke The Wife and I have is that we’ve been happily married 13 years; we’ve been wed 14 . The skill of fading memory makes that first 12 months not feel THAT bad. We didn’t argue as such. Still, it had its stresses, and most of it involved space.

I had been living in an apartment before we got married. Meanwhile, she had purchased a two-family dwelling in the early 1990s, and she was living on the first floor. When we got hitched, the task was to move all of our stuff into that half of the house.

First, we got rid of my microwave and much of my furniture for space consideration. The microwave was large and older, so she was worried about radiation or the like; interestingly, we donated it to soon to be former church. We didn’t replace it with a smaller model because she didn’t think we’d need it, and there was no counter space anyway. (I’d only been using mine almost every day.) I had purchased a nifty chair only a couple of years earlier – real furniture I bought, rather than bachelor make-do – and I was sad to get rid of it, though I did give it to a friend who could use it.

The furniture of mine we did keep was squeezed in here and there. My wife and mother-in-law were watching one of those HGTV home renovation guys. I happened to be in the room at the time. He suggested building “up, up!” So we had one dressing on top of another. It looked goofy to me, and I wondered if the floor could bear the weight. Other things were boxed up, inaccessible.

One of the surprisingly sage things our then-minister said in premarital counseling was that we ought to get a place of our own. I tended to agree, even before the fact, but she didn’t understand. She was making room in her closet for my clothes, wasn’t she? That was the point; it was HER making room in HER house for MY stuff; it wasn’t ours.

This is why, in the fall of 1999, we started house hunting, and actually moved into our current dwelling in May 2000, shortly before our first anniversary. The new house has its own series of problems – it’s over 100 years old – but claustrophobia at least isn’t one of them.

More to the point, it’s OUR house, and that has made all the difference in the world. There are ancillary stories about popcorn, and Scotland I’ll tell, but only if you ask.

Happy 14th anniversary to my honey.

Eight years of blogging

Boy, that summer of 2005, when I probably had no one READING my blog, I sure seemed to have had a LOT to say.

I started blogging eight years ago today, apparently without much forethought. because, in the lyrics of that Rufus featuring Chaka Khan song, “Once you get started, it’s so hard to stop.” I’ve managed to blog every single day here.

To be sure, occasionally it was just a single YouTube video, but even then, it almost always had a soupçon of contextual verbiage. (Here’s a question for you all – how does one type a ç from a standard US typewriter? The one in the previous sentence I cut and pasted.)

One of the ways I have maintained whatever level of sanity I have is that I don’t blog here nearly as often as I used to. Some days early on, I would blog here more than once a day. I’ve tried very hard not to do that anymore.

The table below shows how many times each month I wrote posts numbering greater than the number of days in that month. I didn’t start until May 2 of 2005; thus those Xs for January-April.
2005 X, X, X, X, 3, 10, 18, 28, 22, 17, 14, 8 = 120
2006 10, 5, 9, 4, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1 = 31
2007 0, 0, 3, 1, 1, 2, 0, 1, 2, 3, 1, 1 = 15
2008 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 3, 3, 0, 1, 0, 0 = 9
2009 0, 0, 1, 3, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 = 5
2010 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 = 2
2011 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 2, 1 = 8
2012 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 = 0
Zeros for 2013 thus far.

Boy, that summer of 2005, when I probably had no one READING my blog except my friend Fred and his wife Lynn, I sure seemed to have had a LOT to say.

Of course, what I’ve done, when I ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY had to write something else, when I have something set in this blog, is to try to post it elsewhere, perhaps my Times Union blog, especially if it was something specific to the Albany area, e.g., or the New York State Data Center blog if it involved geeky stats.

Since not writing at all has taken place now and then – life DOES get in the way – having a reserve of posts is a good strategy. I had eight fewer completed blog posts in the queue on the last Monday in February of this year than I did on the last Monday in January, whittling down my reserve from 31 to 23, and it’s pretty much stayed there. Now you might think 23 is good, but it’s not the stuff that I can, or want, to post in the next 23 days. It’ll be a post I’d rather put up on a particular day (Flag Day, the anniversary of my father’s death, ABC Wednesday, or the like).

What I wrote last year seems more likely now than ever. After I hit 10 years as a daily blog, a goodly run, it will become…not a daily blog. (Probably. Maybe. Who knows?) Certainly, I’ll write three or four or five times a week at least. Heck, in October of 2015, I might make it seven days a week for a couple of weeks, because the info contained therein will be of interest for only a few college friends I knew 40 years earlier. Yes, I know what I’m going to blog about in October of 2015. I don’t always know what I’m going to blog about in May 2013, but two and a half years from now…

One other thing: I used to timestamp my blog posts between 4:30 and 5:30 a.m., Eastern standard time, for no other reason than it gave the impression that I got up every morning to craft these words of wisdom. Now that I’m in my 60s, I’ve decided to post between 6:00 and 6:59; the minute part is determined by the minute when I publish. Since this is fed to my Twitter feed and my Facebook page, I theorize, correctly or not, that more people will see it. Of course, if I REALLY wanted more people in North America to see it, I’d post at noon, but obviously, this is not based on REAL rational thought.

It would have been mom and dad’s 63rd anniversary

In the late 1960s, my mother took to wearing a red wig, which made her look even more fair-skinned.

Did I mention that I was always appreciative of the fact that my parents were wed in 1950? It was always easy to remember how long they had been married; the math was easy. I was a five-day-early third anniversary present to them, my mother used to say.

I wish I could find this particular photo of my parents on their wedding day. Actually, there are a couple of them. One is of them cutting the cake, which is nice. The other, though, was one taken in the living room of my maternal grandmother. There’s the smiling, happy couple, plus Mom’s mother Gert, her aunt Deana, her uncle Ed, and her Uncle Ernie, all looking sullen. Also in the photo, Ernie’s wife Charlotte, looking like myopic people sometimes looked in photos, and their kids, Raymond, ten years to the day younger than my mother, and Frances, looking mildly bored as tweens (a term that didn’t exist then) were wont to do.

Fran was interviewed in 2005, as I noted here in 2010. Fran believed that my grandma’s family’s resistance to my father was because of his skin color. They were rather light-skinned black people, especially Deana and my mom, who probably could have passed for white.

Fran said: “My family on my father’s side was very much impacted by the racial notion of the time, so they liked it that my father married my mother because she was white. That was, you know, really acceptable. When my cousin Gertie — Trudy [my mom], they call her now — started to date the man who eventually became her husband, Les Green [my father], he was deemed too dark for the family. And I think my father and my Uncle Ed had to intervene and say, Listen, I’m not going to be able to ever speak to you again unless you stop this nonsense.”

The Yates clan eventually lived with the marriage, especially after the children came, but there was always hostility between my father and his mother-in-law, with my mother as the uncomfortable DMZ. I thought that it was the fact that he lived in a house that she owned, and that was an affront to his manhood, and that could have been part of it. But I’ve since realized it was also the lack of her acceptance of him. My sisters and I remember this to this day, although it happened at least 45 years ago: We’re eating dinner, and somebody asks my grandma if she wanted any peas; she replied, “I’ll have a couple.” My father, seated nearest to her, and the peas, proceeded to put TWO peas on her plate. (And people call ME a literalist.)

In the late 1960s, my mother took to wearing a red wig, which made her look even more fair-skinned. My favorite story from that period: My father was on a business trip to San Francisco, and my mother went along. While the guys were doing business, the wives were at lunch chatting about the issues of the day. Eventually, something about race came up. One woman said, “What do you think, Trudy?” My mother replied, “Being a black woman…” Apparently, the next sound heard was a bunch of jaws dropping.

Even after my mother came up to Albany to see my daughter, and visited my church, at least one member thought my mother was white, even though he had abandoned the wig decades earlier. This was, of course, after my father had died.

My parents were married 50 years, and 2 days shy of 5 months.

Photo of my parents and me – great shot of the back of my head – at my 1992 graduation from library school at UAlbany; taken by either Zoe Nousiainen or Jennifer Boettcher.