memories – Page 26 – Life In A Word

There’s Something About Mary

Mary Tyler Moore passed away over a week ago and I’ve been thinking about her ever since. Countless actresses come and go, but then you have those who make indelible impressions with one or two jaw-dropping performances. Audrey Hepburn, Julie Andrews and Maureen O’Hara, just to name a few. Meryl Streep. And Mary Tyler Moore.

There’s something about Mary. I read her filmography from start to finish – a span of sixty years of television and movies – and came up with two roles of any significance to me: Mary Richards in The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977), and Beth in the film Ordinary People (1980). But I think most people would agree – those performances alone land Mary Tyler Moore in an acting class by herself.

Moore first became a familiar name as Laura Petrie in The Dick Van Dyke Show in the 1960’s, but that was a little before my time. On the other hand, The Mary Tyler Moore Show was a weekend staple in my house. At an age when my father still controlled the TV remote (er, TV channel – no remotes back then), my brothers and I were treated to CBS’s Saturday night “killer lineup”, which included The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Carol Burnett Show.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show included memorable opening credits, if only because the theme song was so infectious (“…you’re gonna make it after all…”), as was the final scene where Mary spins and smiles and throws her hat into the air at a busy Minneapolis intersection. That throw – and Mary Tyler Moore herself – is immortalized in a bronze sculpture you can find at that very same intersection today.

In 1980, just as I was heading off to college, Robert Redford directed the Best Picture winner Ordinary People, one of the most gut-wrenching, powerful, “real-life” dramas I have ever seen. Timothy Hutton burst onto the Hollywood scene with an Oscar-winning performance as Conrad, the younger of two sons in a tormented Chicago family. Judd Hirsch was also nominated for an Oscar (losing to Hutton) for his portrayal of the determined therapist who counseled Conrad back to stability. But it was Mary Tyler Moore’s turn as the heartless and unforgiving mother Beth that stole the show. Her performance was so counter to the sunny demeanor of Mary Richards, I wondered if she was tapping the energy of some real-life bout of depression. That was the breadth of Mary Tyler Moore’s acting talents. I’ve only seen Ordinary People a couple of times but the scene where Donald Sutherland tells Beth he no longer loves her still haunts me. Moore’s silent, crestfallen reaction to that statement could’ve coined the phrase “verbal slap in the face”.

I am even more taken by Mary Tyler Moore when I read some of the details of her life. Clearly, she tried to embody the positive demeanor and “independent woman” of Mary Richards, but she did so in the face of significant personal tragedy. She dealt with alcoholism and smoking addiction, drug overdose (her sister), suicide (her son), and years of diabetes. She took up the baton to promote diabetes awareness and animal rights. Moore was even tougher and more outspoken than her little/big screen roles would suggest.

The theme song of The Mary Tyler Moore show begins with “Who can turn the world on with her smile?” Scroll back up to that first photo. Talk about ear-to-ear! And I can’t help but smile back, even as we now say goodbye to Mary.

Some content sourced from IMDb.com.

Demise of the Department Store

In today’s headlines the Wall Street Journal turns to Sears – the aging department store chain – which will close 150 locations in the next several months. Sears will also sell its iconic Craftsman tool brand (to competitor Stanley/Black & Decker) in a longer-term “fix-it-and-return-it” strategy intended to strengthen the company. Clearly these events feel like the beginning of the end for Sears, and the end has been coming for a long time. The day Sears shutters its last store will be a sad one – as if a slice of the proverbial American apple pie is lost forever.

In the defining years of baby-boomers Sears was the retail destination (and catalog) of choice. Sears Roebuck and Company – as it was originally known – bridged the gap between America’s small-town general stores and today’s elaborate shopping malls. As recently as 1989 Sears was still the largest retailer in the United States. In a world dominated by Wal*Mart, Target, and The Home Depot it’s hard to picture Sears atop the department store heap just a few decades ago.

The Sears store where I grew up – on the west side of Los Angeles – is not one of the 150 due to close its doors this year. That makes me happy. My Sears store is forever embedded in my childhood memories. It was where my mother clothed me and my four brothers. It was where my father bought appliances and a workshop full of Craftsman tools (most of which I’m sure he still has today). It was the brick-and-mortar embodiment of the Sears “wish book” – the wonderfully large and colorful catalog filled with 1960’s kids’ Christmas dreams. Last and perhaps most significantly, Sears was the location of the “Portrait Studio”, for which my family dutifully dressed up and posed every Christmas. One of my all-time favorite photos has all of my brothers standing smartly around the Sears-store Santa Claus, while I’m sitting in his lap bawling my two-year-old eyes out.

Sears would enter my life again somewhat unexpectedly, when I was in college studying to be an architect in the 1980’s. On several trips to Chicago my classmates and I visited the Sears Tower, the distinctive stair-stepped black skyscraper in the center of the Windy City. The Sears Tower was completed in 1973 as the tallest building in the world, and the first to use a “bundled-tube” structural design. Forty-three years later it is still the second-tallest in the Western Hemisphere (behind the recently-completed One World Trade Center in New York City).

Today’s Wall Street Journal article about Sears – which you can find here – includes dozens of reader comments more insightful than the article itself. The comments yearning for Sears’ glory days are clearly written by my peers. The comments blaming Sears’ demise on Amazon and other on-line retailers are largely from younger writers. In one particularly stinging but accurate account, Wade Harshman writes, “I still like the brand. I just don’t like waiting in line 20 minutes to buy a wrench because the one Sears rep is wrestling with a 1980 IBM machine and trying to sell an extended warranty on a $5 extension cord.”

If you Google “Sears Department Store”, you get the following up top:

It’s a sad statement when all four sub-links of the initial hit point to marked-down prices as the way to get you to buy at Sears. Then again this is senescent brick-and-mortar shopping we’re talking about. Montgomery Ward disappeared in 2001. K-Mart and J.C. Penny hang by a deteriorating thread. Even Macy’s reports “dreary” holiday sales, poised to close (another) 68 stores this year. Could Bloomingdale’s or Saks really be next?

Think about Sears and the disturbing/inevitable (take your pick) headlines of retail closings the next time you click your way to another on-line purchase. Future generations of shoppers may not even understand the meaning of “department store”.

Sourcing the Christmas Spirit

The holiday season often feels like a sprint to the finish. From the moment the Thanksgiving table is cleared, my brain shifts to the list of “essential tasks” preceding Christmas Day. In no particular order I know we will a) put up a tree, b) hang the lights, c) decorate the house, d) write and mail greeting cards, e) send packages to distant family members, f) shop for the Christmas dinner, g) bake cookies, and of course, h) purchase gifts for the family. We don’t always get everything done. Some years – like this one in fact – no lights get hung. Other years no cookies get baked. There’s never enough time, the calendar mercilessly counts down the days, and just forget about intentions of healthy eating at any point in the process.

Thankfully all of this Christmas prep includes a few heartwarming activities. My family and I always seem to find time to drive around the neighborhood to see the lights. We don’t trim the tree until the week before Christmas, choosing from more ornaments than we have branches. We watch several of those cheesy Hallmark Channel movies, with the formula love stories and terrible acting and without-fail-happy-endings. We keep egg nog in the frig and candy and cookies on the kitchen counters. We tune our car radios to round-the clock holiday music stations. We never miss Christmas Eve church.

More than twenty-five Christmases celebrated with my immediate family leads me to this conclusion: the spirit of Christmas is not born from the “prep list” I talked about above, nor even from the heartwarming activities I know will take place year after year. Rather, the provenance of the spirit is moments that become memories, and memories that last far longer than the Christmas season itself.

I have a favorite Christmas memory from my childhood. A neighborhood near where we lived staged an annual decorating contest between its several streets. Not only were the houses fully adorned with lights and ornaments, but the streets themselves had Christmas themes, so decorating was consistent from sidewalk to sidewalk. I remember one street decorated primarily with candy canes, another with bells, and still another with angels. They even changed the street names for the season (i.e. “Candy Cane Lane”). You always knew which street won the competition by the huge blue ribbon hanging from the first lamppost. After touring every last street of this neighborhood, my brothers and I spent several hours at a nearby mall, purchasing gifts with the precious-few dollars we’d saved as kids. Finally we’d join up with my parents for a late-night dinner out. This memory of an evening of family fun stands the test of time – more than forty years ago by my estimate – and always brings a smile to my face. This memory seems uniquely mine, as if dozens of other families didn’t tour those decorated streets or shop at that busy mall.

I have an equally favorite Christmas memory from recent years. To slow down the events of Christmas morning, my wife and I created a trivia contest for our kids. They stand at the top of the staircase outside their bedrooms and we start the questions. Correct answers earn them a step down the staircase (closer to the gifts). Incorrect answers cost them a step backwards. The trivia delayed the inevitable, but the first to reach the bottom stair won the privilege of opening the first gift. It’s a tradition we’ve carried on for years, and a memory that will stay with me long after children stand at the top of our stairs on Christmas morning.

Let’s not kid ourselves. The Christmas season will always be hectic as long as there are gifts to buy and greeting cards to write and family members to visit. But there will also be moments – some planned and some not. And memories – some fleeting and some longer-lasting. It is those memories that without fail bring you comfort, joy, and Christmas spirit.

Patriot Games

Tomorrow a chessboard will be auctioned off in New York City, with an opening bid somewhere north of $75,000. For that kind of money you’d picture a one-of-a-kind treasure beautifully crafted from the finest materials; perhaps inlaid with gold. The chess pieces themselves would be intricately carved ivories or bronzes. On the contrary, the auction block chessboard looks like most others: alternating light and dark wood squares with nondescript wooden pieces. Not much to look at – unless you know its epic history.

In 1972, in what was later dubbed “Match of the Century”, American Bobby Fischer and Russian Boris Spassky met in Reykjavik, Iceland to play a total of twenty-one games of chess over a three month period. The match recognized history’s eleventh World Chess Champion, with Fischer emerging as the eventual winner. With the title Fischer claimed a purse that in today’s dollars would be almost $1.5 million. The chessboard in tomorrow’s auction was used in Fischer/Spassky games 7 through 21, replacing a stone board used for the earlier games.

The significance of the Fischer/Spassky match goes entirely beyond the crowning of another World Chess Champion. In the 1970’s the United States and its NATO allies, and Russia (then the Communist-ruled U.S.S.R) and its Eastern Bloc allies, were in the throes of a “Cold War” that defined the post-World War II tension between dominant world powers. The sociopolitical cultures of these “western” and “eastern” countries could not have been more different. Thus the chess match was seen as an allegory; especially with Fischer – the first American to ever compete for the title, taking on Spassky – the current World Chess Champion and one of five consecutive Soviets to hold the trophy dating back to the 1940’s. It was as if a feisty newcomer was speaking loudly for the first time. As former world champion Garry Kasparov described the outcome, “… the lone American genius challenges the Soviet chess machine and defeats it.”

The Fischer/Spassky competition attracted more worldwide attention than any chess match before or since. All twenty-one games were televised (though the third game had to be illustrated with move-by-move graphics since Fischer insisted on temporarily moving away from the cameras). In the years following the match, “Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess” became the best selling chess book ever published. The opening scene of the James Bond film “From Russia With Love” depicted a chess match with moves patterned after Spassky’s . Chess became supremely popular among American kids (maybe because Fischer was already playing in national championships at the age of fourteen).

I have a personal connection with the Fischer/Spassky match, as shown in the photo above. I learned chess at an early age thanks to the determination of my grandfather. He insisted on a game every time we were together, and most times he beat me. Today I have one of his chess sets as a precious keepsake. But my grandfather also urged me to participate in a school-wide chess tournament, and the trophy you see was the result. From then on my grandfather teased me by saying he wouldn’t play anymore unless it was for the trophy.

Notice the date of the school tournament; inside the same year as the Fischer/Spassky match. By wonderful coincidence I was competing at a time when chess was most prominent on the world stage.

My chess game never really matured from those grade school years – and Fischer and Spassky likewise descended into relative obscurity – but a marked impression was made by watching their 1972 match on television. Now whenever I see a chessboard I’m reminded the game is not just kings and queens surrounded by their armies. The successful bidder at tomorrow’s auction will hold an emblem of history – from a time when the world’s chess pieces were as divided as never before.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Banana Rant

Let’s start with a song today; or at least a verse from a song. See if you remember this little number:

Jack, Jack bo-back, Banana-fana fo-fack. Fee-fi-mo-mack, Jack!

The song? It’s “The Name Game”, that annoying rhyming chant that should stick in your brain for the next several hours. Here’s another one:

Day-O! Day-O! Daylight come and me wan’ go home!

The song? It’s the “Banana Boat Song”, made popular by Harry Belafonte.

I mention these songs because they’re happy on bananas. And I hate bananas. Let me rephrase: there is no fruit, vegetable, or otherwise consumable item on God’s green earth more singularly unappetizing to me than bananas. I only have to think about the taste of a banana and I consider tossing my cookies. Bad news for me though – supermarkets, songs, commercials, movies and desserts ensure my world is constantly bombarded with the yellow fruit. Bananas are as prevalent in the urban jungle as they are in the real one.

I blame my growing-up years, now that I think about it. My first bike was a 1968 Schwinn “Lemon-Peeler”- the one with the “banana” seat. What in God’s name was I thinking? I could’ve had Schwinn’s “Pea-Picker” (green) or Schwinn’s “Cherry-Picker” (red) but no; I had to opt for a “Banana-Peeler” (as it came to be known). It horrifies me to realize I sat on a banana for a good chunk of my childhood.

My Saturday mornings included “The Banana Splits Adventure Hour”; that silly animal rock band I somehow found entertaining. Disney crushed me with “The Jungle Book”: King Louie eating bananas every time he was on-screen and even singing about them. (I will never sing about bananas.) Finally, I can’t shake those Chiquita banana commercials, the ones with Miss Chiquita dancing and singing: I’m Chiquita banana and I’m here to say… catchy little jingle. It’s like the media was conspiring to force me to like bananas.

Fruit was a requisite item in my school lunches back then. Oftentimes my mom would put a banana in my school lunch instead of an apple or an orange or grapes. My protests went unacknowledged at home so I gave bananas away at school, to anyone who showed interest. Not that I got anything worthwhile in return. Bananas have little value in the American high school.

All of the above pales in comparison with one ghastly horror-film-worthy banana-filled-memory. Coming into the kitchen one morning before school, I found my mom busily frying bananas on the stove. I rubbed my eyes in disbelief but the image didn’t go away – banana slices sizzling and popping in an oil-filled pan. Seriously? Aren’t bananas bad enough the way nature made them? Couldn’t I opt for a bowl of sliced bananas and oranges instead, where enough shredded coconut on top blocks out the banana taste? Apparently not. Mom just had to be adventurous. I can still picture that plate of thin, dark, hot, greasy banana slices next to my more redeeming breakfast items. Gag. It’s a forever-imprint on my brain.

Even the concept of “acquired taste” failed me with bananas. For example, I used to hate tomatoes (and yogurt repulsed me even more), but somewhere in my food journey I actually learned to enjoy them. Now they are staples in my diet. Not so bananas. Bananas are as choke-worthy today as they were in that frying pan forty years ago.

If I must eat bananas there’s only one way they’re going down the hatch – in banana bread. I actually like banana bread. That’s probably because the dozen other ingredients win the battle and effectively expunge the banana taste. It’s like Fig Newtons if you hate figs. Or Oysters Rockefeller, with enough broiled cheese and spinach to effectively kill the oyster.

Opinion: bananas foster, banana splits, banana cream pies, and banana pudding are all outstanding dessert choices as long as you leave off the bananas.

Facts: 100 billion bananas are consumed every year across the globe. Americans alone account for 27 pounds/person/year, which equates to 108 bananas! You’ll find bananas on the list of the “World’s Healthiest Foods”. The Latin word for banana translates to “Fruit of the Wise Men”. California even has a Banana Museum for crying out loud. (17,000 items!)

None of that moves me. Gwen Stefani may sing B-A-N-A-N-A-S on “Hollaback Girl” and shirts or sweaters may tempt me at Banana Republic, but I will never put “like” and “bananas” into the same sentence (er, except this one). But hey, call me if you’re hungry. My 108 bananas are all yours.

Thirst (for) Knowledge

Water.

Two parts hydrogen compounded with one part oxygen. Transparent, odorless, and tasteless, yet we can’t survive more than a few days without it. If not for oceans, lakes, ponds; rivers, streams, and creeks; and a whole lot of underground aquifers, we humans would be in a heap of trouble. With due respect to Harry Potter, water is the elixir of life.

It’s fair to say most of us don’t drink enough water for optimal health. The long-held belief that eight glasses a day is sufficient has been replaced by the following formula: your body weight in pounds, divided by two, expressed in ounces. For most of us that means even more than eight glasses. Gulp.

Somewhere along the way of several years of working out, I developed the habit of drinking small amounts of water during exercise, instead of chugging just before or just after. On the treadmill for instance, I take a slug every time I complete a kilometer. In the cycle class I drink every time the instructor says to pick up the bottle. In a road race I never pass up the tables of water cups. No question; the body works better with a regular intake of water. Or at least a splash to the face.

Whenever I know I’m not drinking enough water I recall two vivid memories where I reached full-on dehydration status. The first occurred as a child, when I was driving in the desert with my family. I let the day go by way too long without taking a drink, and before I knew it my throat was so parched I could barely speak. The heat of the day surely made it worse. I pleaded to my grandparents to stop at a gas station (or anywhere with a halfway sanitary drinking fountain), which we eventually did, and I’m sure I took in a quart or more to quench my thirst. Here’s a little irony: my desert dehydration is a fond memory because I can still hear my grandfather’s distinctive voice, saying, “need to wet your whistle, do ya?” That was over forty years ago.

My second “parchment” occurred just short of the summit of Pikes Peak here in Colorado Springs – the first time I climbed it. Pikes Peak is the highest mountain in the southern Front Range of the Rockies, at just over 14,000 feet. Using the popular Barr trail it’ll take you five or six hours to get to the top. Despite recommendations to carry a lot of water I only brought one 12-oz. bottle in my pack, which I refilled at a campsite halfway up the mountain. I was getting by okay until the very last mile, when I ran out of water and my body literally began to shut down. The combination of the effects of dehydration and altitude was devastating. I could only walk a hundred yards at a pop, taking a seat on the rocks each time to recover for several minutes. Mercifully I was close enough to the summit that I finished the hike, but not before realizing I’d been woefully unprepared. In extreme circumstances the body demands a lot of water. Certainly more than half your body weight in ounces.

If an elixir is defined as “a magical or medicinal potion”, then water qualifies in my book, and especially here in the high altitude of the Rocky Mountains. It took a few years for me to gain a little thirst knowledge, but now my water bottle is my constant companion. On that note, I think I need a drink!

Sentimental Utensil

My wife and I were cleaning out the kitchen a few weeks ago when we came across a rather strange-looking device. It could be described as a combination between a small pair of metal tongs and some kind of slicer. We racked our brains trying to figure out what it was for. Eggs? Nuts? Ice? Bewildered, we wondered if it even belonged in the kitchen.

I showed our gadget to a couple of friends but they were as confounded as I was. Then I turned it over to my ever-resourceful sister-in-law. She took it to a a couple of kitchen stores and asked several friends, all to no avail. Finally she showed the device to her hair stylist – who sent a phone video to his girlfriend – and voila! – mystery solved. Turns out our little mechanical metal friend is a butter cutter.

I don’t blame you if you’re still confused. Not only did I wonder why (as in, why do you need a butter cutter?) or how (as in, how do you use the darned thing?), but also when (as in, when did people ever use one of these?).

I’ll get to the why in a minute. As for the how, a butter cutter is used by holding the blade perpendicular to a stick of butter, pressing the base down into the stick, then pushing down on the blade. The push down and spring back of the blade produces the “pat” of butter you sometimes get with a dinner roll at restaurants. Move on down the stick and you can churn out butter pats to your heart’s content.

As for the when, it turns out our butter cutter is vintage. It was popular back in the 1950’s. If you simply must have one for your kitchen, go here. But my research also led me to ask which, as in which one? It turns out there are several butter cutters for your consideration:

Here’s another vintage model – a bunch of pats all at once!

An updated model – regurgitates pats one at a time.

The Rolls-Royce of cutters. How thick do you like your pats?

No comment. This one is simply disgusting.

Remarkably, there are lots of butter cutters out there if you search long enough. Some claim to also work on rolls of cookie dough. Others claim to also cut potatoes into chips. But the more models you find, the more you’re inclined to ask why? Why go to so much trouble to cut butter when a perfectly ordinary kitchen knife will do just fine (and with far less mess?). That earth-shattering question is actually covered at unclutterer.com, a blog about “getting and staying organized”. Check out the hot debate and the wealth of reader comments here (from people who clearly have too much time on their hands).

My own take on why is more satisfying. The more I thought about our butter cutter, the more I realized I probably inherited it from my mother. Along with other kitchen items, she probably tossed it into a box as I was heading off to my first apartment so many years ago. And thinking about it even more, I can picture my mother using her butter cutter when I was a kid, leaving a perfect little pat beside the crescent roll that was positioned carefully on the bread plate beside each place setting at the dinner table. Because that was my mother. She was all about the dinner table. Everything had its place, even the pats of butter. And there’s an element of grace that comes with the butter cutter that would not be found in simply using a knife.

Laugh at the pointlessness of a butter cutter if you must. But I will cherish mine instead, as well as the vintage memories that spring back every time I use it.

Rings of Summer

Over the next two weeks, the world will be witness to the greatest gathering of athletes and sports mankind has to offer. The XXXI Olympiad -that’s 31st for you non-Romans – will be hosted by the city of Rio de Janeiro. (Just saying “Rio” reminds me of “FedEx” – it’s simply not the whole enchilada). I must admit I didn’t realize “Olympiad” refers to the four-year period between Olympic Games – not the Games themselves. Count backwards by fours and you’ll realize the first modern Olympic games was held way back in 1896.

You may say, non-sports-fan that you are, there is nothing seventeen days of sports competitions can do to stir your soul. But I urge you, put away the electronics and have a look, even if only for an hour or two. A moment will be there and you don’t want to miss it.

The first Olympic Games I remember well was 1976 in Montreal. As a fourteen-year old, I was captivated watching Nadia Comaneci – also fourteen (!) – as she won three gold medals and scored seven perfect 10.0’s in women’s gymnastics. I love this trivia item: the gymnastics scoreboard could only hold three digits, so Comeneci’s perfect scores were expressed as “1.0”. For anyone who watched, it was one of the most electrifying performances in any sport and in any Olympics. It was a moment to remember.

The second Olympic Games I remember well was 1980, but only because the United States boycotted the events due to Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan at the time (which is ironic given America’s involvement in that country today).

That brings us to 1984: the XXIII Olympiad in Los Angeles. I was a senior in college, working a summer internship in Southern California. I was witness to a city transformed. The Games were hosted in a revitalized Coliseum (the same venue where the Olympics were held in 1932). Ronald Reagan was President and opened the Games in person. Sports venues were spread across the city, and the coincidence of several competitions on Fridays caused most businesses to shift to 4×10 workweeks. American flags were everywhere. The Olympic spirit was alive and well in the City of Angels.

I distinctly remember the torch relay at the L.A. Games, passing through the neighborhood where I grew up; John Williams’ glorious musical composition at the opening ceremonies (where dozens of white grand pianos were played simultaneously); Mary Lou Retton’s golds in women’s gymnastics; and Carl Lewis’s golds in track and field. I also remember the women’s 3,000 meter run, highly-anticipated because America’s Mary Decker was racing South African sensation Zola Budd. The two collided mid-race, Decker went down, and she never finished the race (Decker’s anguished face as she lay on the track is one of the Olympics’ classic photos). There were moments in L.A.

Here’s one more Olympic moment which may surpass any I’ve mentioned above. It was the women’s marathon. I don’t even remember the city or the year or the woman who won the gold. But I do remember the woman who won the bronze. As she entered the stadium for the final meters of the race, she looked over her shoulder and saw… no one. The bronze was hers. She raised her arms in triumph as she finished that final lap, crying in apparent disbelief. The unbridled joy and tears on her face as she crossed the finish line is a moment I’ll never forget.

The Olympics. Rio de Janeiro. Starting tomorrow. Watch. A moment will be there and you don’t want to miss it.

The Aging of Independence

Ten years from now – this month – the U.S. will celebrate its 250th birthday. That’s remarkable to me considering I still have vivid memories of America’s bicentennial back in 1976. To put it another way, I’ve been witness to more than 20% of the entire history of the United States. We really are a young country, aren’t we?

Earlier this week my wife and I were driving back to Colorado from California, after a week of vacation at the beach. Passing through Utah we reached a small town called Cedar City. There’s nothing remarkable about Cedar City. It’s the home of Southern Utah University and almost 30,000 residents. But the name stirred a memory in the deep recesses of my brain. And then it hit me. Cedar City was part of a contest the Los Angeles Times newspaper sponsored when I was a teenager – a creative way of celebrating the nation’s big birthday.

The contest (if my vague memories serve me correctly) took place over fifty of the fifty-two weeks that year. Each week The Times published a trivia puzzle consisting of a jumbled American city name and a couple other facts you had to figure out about the locale or surrounding state. As the contest went on you realized The Times was picking one city from every state in the union. You cut out and completed each puzzle by hand, and at the end of the contest submitted the whole pile to The Times, to be included in a cash drawing. Our family’s World Book Encyclopedia – not the Internet that was still twenty years from reality – helped me with the research.

I didn’t win The Times contest but I know I learned a lot about our country in the process – including a few details about little Cedar City, Utah. Needless to say we are a remarkably diverse collection of states, towns and people; especially for a country so young.

America’s 150th birthday – the “sesquicentennial” – was honored back in 1926 when Calvin Coolidge was president. You can find Coolidge’s celebratory address to the people here. One passage in particular resonated with me: “Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics, every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken.” Powerful words then, but I wonder if today’s leaders would be so bold as to make the same statement? Look no further than the current presidential election: the Constitution and the Declaration are being called into question like never before.

Ten years from now the U.S. will celebrate its “sestercentennial” – fully 250 years of glorious independence. Philadelphia is already campaigning to be the host city for the national celebration. 2026 won’t be a presidential election year nor an Olympic year, but the fireworks and pageantry will surely be brighter. Let’s hope another decade brings not only renewed pride and optimism in America, but also a sense that we are – states, towns, citizens – “united” once more.

Grim Reader

While visiting my parents last week, I was delighted to find a few dusty old children’s books on a quiet corner shelf in the family room. The books carry sentimental value because they once occupied a shelf in my grandparents’ house. They were the same books my father read when he was a child. And as we grandchildren were expected to be “seen and not heard”, these books were our refuge, stoking our budding imaginations with dozens of characters and places we longed to be a part of.

One book in particular – The Illustrated Treasury of Children’s Literature – stands out as a literary beacon of my childhood. The stories within included Aesop’s Fables (i.e. The Hare and the Tortoise), the tales of Danish author Hans Christian Andersen (The Emperor’s New Clothes), and the works of The Brothers Grimm (Rumpelstiltskin). The collection oozed with fantasy and adventure and innocence.

I reread a few of these stories last week and came to an unquestionable conclusion: The Brothers Grimm were a couple of messed-up dudes. On the one hand the Grimms authored Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Rapunzel, which Disney sanitized and gave a more positive spin. But more likely, you know the Grimms for their famous “fairy tales”, like Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood.

Fairy tales. Doesn’t the term conjure up images of enchanted forests and candy castles and magical sprites? That’s what I thought too, but Hansel and Gretel would vigorously disagree. These kids endured a nightmare on par with today’s R-rated horror flicks. Take ten minutes and read their story (you can find it here). The only detail I recalled was the house in the forest; the one made of cake and candy and spun-sugar glass. But this time around I couldn’t get past the other aspects. Within the first three paragraphs we read that H & G’s mother’s solution to a lack of food is to abandon her children in the forest. Even after they find their way back to the house the mother finds another (more successful) way to leave them behind. Later on, an old woman holds the kids captive in the candy house and prepares to “slaughter and boil” (and eat) Hansel. Gretel gets to watch. But the kids surprise the old woman by pushing her into the oven, and then she burns to death. A celebration ensues.

Little Red Riding Hood (which you can find here) is no less violent. A little girl in red may sound adorable but the story is really about the murderous wolf. Not only does the wolf consume LRR’s grandmother, he has LRR herself for dessert. And it doesn’t end there. A huntsman happens by, recognizes the wolf, decides not to shoot him because “maybe the grandmother is inside”; then cuts open the wolf and pulls out the grandmother and LLR alive and intact. Seriously?

The Treasury introduction says “eight, nine and ten is the fairy tale age”. The Treasury also says “many a child will haul the volume from the shelf and spend countless happy hours…” are you kidding me? This is gratuitous violence disguised as bedtime stories!

I used to cringe at the thought of my young children watching a PG-rated movie. Not anymore. There are over half a million copies of The Treasury out there in the world. I need to find them all and have a bonfire. Those Grimm images go to the grave with you!