This film no longer grabs me

By all rights, “American Graffiti” should be one of my favorite movies. It’s about teenagers cruising the streets and coming of age  in 1962 Northern California.

The timing is close. I graduated from high school in 1959 about 90 miles from director George Lucas’ home in Modesto. It was filmed mostly In San Rafael, 10 miles from where I lived in El Cerrito. I even went several times to Mel’s Drive-In in Berkeley, part of the local chain shown in the movie.

At the film’s release in 1973, I really enjoyed it. I liked the nostalgia for a bygone era, familiar songs of the time and satisfaction of having moved beyond that silliness.

Watching it again 52 years later, I hated it. How could these stupid kids simply ride up and down the street in cars and agonize over who liked whom and who didn’t? Who cares? I hated the drama of teen-age romance. Maybe because I had struggled through it later as a parent.

And why was the star character really agonizing over whether to stay in town or go to college? Of course he should leave town. His parents needed to give him a talking-to!

What I did like about watching this idiocy is that I must have moved on from the first time I saw it. This movie may have been about my era but not about me. I did not cruise up and down Macdonald Avenue in nearby Richmond (Calif.)  on Saturday night. . . I’m not sure who did.

Well, maybe I did once or twice.  When I was 17, I took three of my 15-year-old friends to a movie. When we left the show in our car, one kid  insisted on going back to the theater to pick up a girl. When I refused, I let him out but the theater manager wouldn’t let him back in,  so he walked aimlessly on the streets. The rest of us cruised the street until I picked him up again and we all went home in silence.

This was fun? Not for me. The kid I let out of the car told me several years later: “The only reason we hung out with you was because you could drive a car.”  Thanks a lot, buddy! I should have left him on the sidewalk.

Another problem I had with the era: what ever happened to the real-life cruisers and drag racers? Did the boys skip college or vo-tech training  and have kids and become “ditch-diggers,” as my parents threatened me? Did the girls get pregnant and have a messed-up life afterward?

I could not identify with any of the characters. I guess I liked Lucas’ “Star Wars” better. Fantasy can be better than reality.

 

""We have no openings. Thank you."

 Job search professionals  tell you to forget about money when seeking employment. Just find something you love to do.

That’s easy to say, but what if you have a family and need a steady income? When I was between jobs for five months at age 50, I reached out in all directions.

In fact, I interviewed with the epitome of the business establishment in one morning and its arch-enemy, organized labor, that afternoon.  That shows you how nonpartisan I can be: a hired gun. A mercenary!

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce (publisher of Nation’s Business) and the AFL-CIO News were literally across the street from each other.

Well, it was hard to be two-faced and bluff my way through, especially on the same day. The word from the chamber: “Your test article just didn’t hum.”  From the AFL: “You’re a nice guy. Not tough enough.” What? They wanted Tony Soprano?

That’s OK. They were both out of business a few years later. Probably because they didn’t hire me.

I have friends who have proudly made lists of all of the publishers or employers who rejected them. Here’s a tiny part of  mine:

San Francisco Chronicle: “I like your resume, but I would have to give you a pay cut. You won’t like me anymore.”

AP San Francisco: “I have been ordered to hire a black and a woman, and you don’t look like either one to me.” ( I did work here several years later without having  race or gender surgery. They had already hired one of each.)

Philadelphia Bulletin: “You are a lousy headline writer, but we’ll take you anyway.” I didn’t like this blunt talk and declined a job offer.

San Francisco Examiner: “I realize you have come a long way for this interview, but the managing editor isn’t here.”

National Association of Realtors: “We require everyone to take a spelling and grammar test.” (I felt like a fifth -grader.)

An international consultant: “At what rate is the yen trading today?” When I couldn’t answer, he walked out without saying a word.

AARP Bulletin: “I had high hopes for you, but you haven’t supervised anyone in years.”

USA Today: “You have a great background, but we can’t find a place for you.”

U.S. Commerce Department: “I hope you can write speeches as well as your predecessor.” (I read them and they were agonizingly boring. I dropped out.)

Student Loan Marketing Association: “I would just love having an editor around to talk to. Of course, we often work very long nights.”  Bye!

Washington Business Journal (after I trimmed my resume to hide my age): “Exactly what years did you work there?” “Oh, I don’t know. Before the next job, I guess.”  Rejected again.

Kiplinger Letter: “We’d love to have you! When can you start?” Bingo! I found a great job. I stayed there for 17 years before retiring in 2009.

 

 

 

 

A lage start as a jazz musician

 For decades I played piano just for myself, hammering out melody and chords from a “fake book” of jazz standards. If someone came into the room, I would stop.

I wasn’t getting any better. So my friend Ron Worthy invited me eight years ago to join a group of accomplished jazz musicians at the basement of someone’s home in Washington, D.C.

Every week, a drummer opened up his house to two trumpet players, a saxophone player, guitarist, bassist and Ron, a professional pianist. This was a pure, private jam session, the kind you hear about but never see.

I got to fill in on about every third song. It was an enormous thrill comping out chords to this great music. But these guys were too good for me. I couldn’t keep up.

I had heard of classes in the Virginia suburbs where you pay a jazz musician to assemble a group to learn to play together. I wasn’t sure I could get into Jazz Workshop in Tysons Corner, Virginia, at first, so I decided to go to Blues Alley and see the leader, Paul Pieper, play guitar in a group.

I was watching intently, hoping to chat with Paul, when I accidentally knocked over a glass on the small table and it shattered on the floor. The lady sitting next to me was Paul’s wife. As we commiserated over the broken shards and an attendant swept them up, I told her why I was there.

Somehow I was able to get into his next class quickly. Was I good enough to stay? Could I really  learn to play accompaniment chords differently than on a solo?  But  Pieper liked my playing on the easy “Summertime” and I participated for a year with this group. So thrilled, I wrote a front-page article in the Senior Beacon newspaper about these classes.

But after I took a summer break, my schedule didn’t work for the next fall, so I joined another group, Jazz Band Master Class, hosted by Jeff Antoniuk in Annapolis, Md. Despite the 45-minute drive on Saturdays, I really enjoyed this group.  Then the big moment arrived. I had only been there a few weeks and they were going to perform at Twins, a prime jazz spot in D.C. Did I want to join them with so little practice? Does a hungry dog want a piece of steak?

This was the thrill of a lifetime! A bunch of my friends came, two of them driving an hour to see me. (I guess that’s why the club let us play there.) Antoniuk introduced me as the newest member and too eagerly, I stood up. “Sit down, Mike!” he admonished me.

I felt like Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson and Thelonious  Monk combined. One friend was recording my improvised solos and they weren’t bad at all.

I would have kept this up, but the pandemic came, the club closed for good and a jazz group practice over Zoom became impossible. Meanwhile, we moved to southern Virginia.

That didn’t end things, though. The new Tunnel Creek Vineyards opened near Roxboro, N.C. and I asked if I could sit down and play their nice grand piano. When I plunked out a song, the owner, Larry Dale Holler, liked it.n“I used to play at Twins Jazz in D.C.,” I said. “Can you come back on Saturday?” he said. When I played there during the pandemic, Antoniuk  told me, “You are one of only 10 jazz musicians in the world with a job.” I gave most of my earnings to a foundation helping unemployed jazz musicians.

I stayed only a few months because my 80-year-old hands couldn’t play for hours as the job required. Now I just play for friends and B&B guests at our home.

But not just for myself anymore.

 

 

 

Memories of my dad: mostly good

 

We weren’t particularly close, but these were some of my recollections of Philip Doan this Father’s Day. Was he Atticus Finch or Homer Simpson? I’m not sure. (Maybe I was Bart Simpson?) A few examples:

--Eating forbidden cookies in a box and then running away as he chased me. Finally, he ran out of breath. “Let’s forget about this,” he said.

--Angry about his micromanaging my chores, I “inadvertently” positioned a hose to squirt water into an open car window. Whoops!

--Thrilled when he set off illegal fireworks on the Fourth of July outside our motel in Olympia, Wash. When the explosion was much larger than we expected, he made us get in the car and flee before the cops came. Homer Simpson would have done that.

--Getting a boxing lesson from him when I was about 10. I landed a right hook on his head and he immediately declared the lesson over. Oh that felt good!

--Forced to go with him to a record store and listen to a record of Mario Lanza singing “The StudentPrince.” I  loved it. When he asked what I thought, I said, the way a teenager would, “It was OK, I guess.”

--Him recruiting me to appear in the opera “La Boheme” at the L.A. Shrine Auditorium. I was a non-singing 10-year-old street urchin stealing food from a vendor.

--Hearing that he intervened when I signed up for study hall in the 12th grade and got the counselor to enroll me in physics instead. Atticus Finch would do that.

--Taking us at my birthday parties to a submarine, a bowling alley and an ice skating rink.

--Hearing that he boasted to my uncle about what an obedient teen I was. My uncle responding, “Well, what about the time he let that broad drive your car and they crashed into a traffic island on Arlington Boulevard?” I knew I shouldn’t have told my cousin about that!

--Forcing me to get off my butt and find a job the summer I graduated from high school and wanted to loaf. He liked that I found one in San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin district, probably a dangerous place for a 17-year-old at night.

--Traveling around the country with him on trains, his true passion, for a month when I was 19.  He loved to sing “The Wreck of the Old 97” but never got to visit the site in Danville.

--Seeing him angry with me when I refused to cut in line at the White House tour. I think he always wanted a more aggressive son.

--The time a fly ball from Ken Aspromonte’s  bat was heading for my head at a San Francisco Seals baseball game. As I ducked, my Dad  stuck out his hands and caught the ball and the crowd applauded. I still have that ball!

-- Climbing within 500 feet to the top of a Sierra Nevada mountain peak with him, when he had trouble breathing and lay down. After I prayed for him, he declared, ‘You’re a good boy, Mike.” And we made it back down.

--In a nursing home, finally getting up the courage to tell him I loved him. He seemed to like it, but maybe it was too late.  By then his memory was mostly gone and I don’t know if he really got it.

(Drawing by Ron Miller)

 

 

 

 

 

Waiting for the Axe

I have this irritating tendency to let other make the decisions I should have made myself. Best example:

On the way to Europe for a vacation, I stopped to visit the New York headquarters of The Associated Press. As a 28-year-old editor in the San Francisco bureau, I was given the rare opportunity to meet with the top man, General Manager Wes Gallagher.

“What would you like to do?” the great man asked me. “Uh, be a writer or an editor,” I said indecisively. “Well, which?” he asked impatiently. “Uh, editor,” I responded, as if flipping a coin.

“We need editors in our Washington and New York bureaus. Would you be interested?” he asked.

“Yes,” I responded, unconvincingly.

San Francisco was a great place to live. My family was  there, and I loved all of the famous sites. But this was an opportunity. I had learned to grab them when they came.

So within a few months I was off to Washington and an editing job. Within two years, I was “night editor,” actually running the afternoon news desk, which edited and cleared most of the Washington news  for morning newspapers. In 1973-1976, that included an awful lot, especially Watergate and the Vietnam War.  Why would they pick someone so young? Because the news desk was filled with old, jaded news veterans, just hanging on until retirement. It  was a heady position, but after four years I was burning out. I wasn’t writing anything myself.

The head of the congressional staff had offered me a job on Capitol Hill and I stupidly turned it down. I told him I had promised to be an editor.

Then in late 1976, I was unhappy that I wasn’t getting overtime when others were getting extra pay working late. I turned down an offer by the union leader to accompany me into the bureau chief’s office to complain. I just went myself.

I made my case to Marvin Arrowsmith, well respected but ailing man running the bureau. For years he had been the White House correspondent and looked particularly distinguished, more like a president than a newsman. As he aged, his hands shook and he seemed like he was too old for the job.

With his hands folded, he said, “I need to tell you this. We are making a change in the night editor by year’s end.” I was being fired from that lofty position! What a shock! What was I going to do?

I can’t remember being more upset about anything, ever. I had no family there. Not many friends. This was my whole life. Arrowsmith swore me to secrecy, and I unwisely agreed, keeping it bottled up. I complained to my doctor about  chest pains.

Finally, over Thanksgiving dinner with strangers, I passionately unburdened myself, probably ruining this great meal for all of them. I started going to church (where, fortunately, I met my future wife.)

Because I couldn’t get overtime, I had built up a lot of compensatory time off, and I took it on a trip to visit family in California. Nursing my wounds, I was awaiting a call from my friend Jack Smyth, who looked over the January schedule for me.

“They’ve assigned you to the Hill,” he told me. Meaning Congress. Really? The whole bureau had a shakeup, and Arrowsmith himself retired.

The first week I got back, I sat in the front row across from Jimmy Carter’s inauguration as president.  I covered confirmation hearings, rushed around visiting famous people. The place was alive with interesting young people. And I got bylines. Then I was assigned  to Treasury, which launched my business writing career.

Why didn’t I agreed to leave that position earlier? Why did I wait for other people to make decisions for me?

 No more.

 

 

 

America 250. Me? Defy the King?

 

 Was that me? Signing the Declaration of Independence? Really?

It must have been a dream. No, no, it wasn’t!

It was in a play. A musical. “1776.”

Until I started this article, I had forgotten that “1776” was my dad’s favorite musical. A professional opera chorus singer, he hated pop music and most musicals. But for some reason, he loved this one.

We went to see it live together in San Francisco in about 1970 and watched the movie together another time.

Then, over 45 years later, after he was gone, I was in it. My only other theater experiences until then had been in the Prizery Summer Theater, coached by Chris Jones. I heard about this show being put on in 2016 by the McLean Community Players when we lived in Northern Virginia, and I wanted in.

The musical has been called “the unemployed old actors’ dream show.” Well, at age 74, I was just right for the part of Caesar Rodney, the cancer-stricken delegate from Delaware who rode all night on horseback to sign the precious document.

I know something about this great man. He was a big hero in Dover, De., where I had lived in 1963-65.

I didn’t have many lines, but I sang in a few choruses. The highlight, of all things, was the makeup. Each night a lady kept making me look more sick and ghostly than in the show before.  The last night, I thought I heard people in the audience gasp as I went on stage. (The photo shows me before makeup was applied.)

It was during our first rehearsal of the signing that the whole idea of the show sunk in. For weeks we had been debating the merits of the revolution. Could we win a war? Could we run the new country ourselves?  Were we going to accept slavery to placate the South?

Then, in our first physical run-through of the actual signing, we each carefully signed our names. The chairman called each name, and he announced, “Delaware. Mr. Caesar Rodney.”

 In acting, you are supposed to immerse yourself in your character. Here I was, defying the King of England! Revolutions never worked before. Usually the rebels were executed. I might die. But this principle was more important!

So as I got ready to affix my signature, I was deeply moved—I think to tears. Now I knew how they must have felt. I picked up the quilt pen and proudly but solemnly signed it. For myself. And for my dad!

What brave men these founders were! They did this for us!

Could I have done that?  Man, I just don’t know!

 

 

 

No More School Reunions for Me

School reunions can be nail-biting experiences. Apparently the 50th high school reunion is a time for making amends. At mine, as soon as dinner was over, a woman walked up to me.

“Hi. I’m Claudia. Do you remember the time you sat down after the Pledge of Allegiance in the first grade and you crashed to the floor instead of finding your chair?”

“Yes,” I said. “It still hurts,” I lied.

“Well, I pulled the chair out from under you.”

“Really? Why?”
 “I don’t know,” she said and left.

I guess that was an apology, though she didn’t say so.

We didn’t stay long afterward because my wife didn’t know anybody. A few days later, I got a phone message from probably the most popular guy in high school. I was puzzled because I barely knew him at all and didn’t mix in his circle.

I called him back. “I want to apologize for beating up on you in the 12th grade,” he said. Huh? I barely remembered. Well, yes, he and another guy in physics class bet each other on whether they could make this shy, reserved student mad.

While the teacher wasn’t looking, they slapped me on the back of the head. The guy who bet on making me mad won. Of course, the teacher raised hell. But I soon forgot about it, writing it off as a prank by stupid kids, which it was.

For apologizing, I guess Mr. Popular felt better about himself, but I didn’t really like it. I didn’t recall being a victim of bullying in school but now felt like one.

Then came my 50th college reunion at the University of California at Berkeley, an enormous university, which was a great place to learn about journalism in the 1960s but not that good for making friends. I knew no one at the quite small reunion. Not a soul!

Then I compared high schools with one stranger. When I told him I went to El Cerrito High, he said, “Oh, so did my wife. I’ll have you talk to her.” She walked up and I didn’t recognize her, but she told me her name. Amazed, I said, “Wow. I took you to the senior prom!”

“No, you didn’t,” she said. “I went with the man who is now my husband.”

“Yes, you did,” I insisted. “How could I forget that!”

Then she said, “Oh, that must have been in my junior year. I went with my husband in my senior year.”

Her husband had been listening. Suddenly, the two left and had a heated conversation away from the crowd. Were they already a couple when I dated her?

He was furious because she never told him about me. I was steaming because she didn’t even remember me.

I skipped the next reunion.