Growing Old Without Fear

I opened my mother’s china cabinet as I made arrangements for her 90^th birthday party.  “Oh, no,” she said.” “The china is for something special!”

 

Was she holding out for 100? Well, she almost made it.

 

Fortunately, I have eight years to go to 90, but I learned from my mother, Agnes Doan, that it isn’t all bad.

 

She started boasting about her age when she reached 90, proud to still be around.

 

Her book group always met at her house so that she wouldn’t have to travel.

 

The church assigned a friend for her, knowing most of hers were gone.

 

Employees at the supermarket were very helpful. But they panicked when a can of vegetables fell from a shelf on her head. She got special attention again when she fell harmlessly off a stool at a slot machine and hit her head on the casino floor.  (They were afraid of getting sued.)

 

Best of all, she was considered an expert when it came to the history of Placerville, Calif. She had lived there since 1910 except for about 50 yers in the SanFrancisco Bay Area.

 

Her family had settled in Placerville, 9 miles from the gold discovery site, at the height of the Gold Rush in 1851. The family mined for gold and opened a hardware store and a bank. That should have made them rich, but the next generation lost both businesses by making bad loans.

 

She enjoyed being asked to talk about her experiences. She also complained bitterly when a news article omitted my grandfather’s part ownership in a clothing store on a its 100th anniversary.

 

What was her secret to long life? Genes, I suspect. (I hope.) She was quite religious and had a positive attitude about life.

 

Well before she died in 2008 at age 98, I asked her if she worried about death. “I never think about it,” she said. Neither do I.

 

Postscript: Now we serve my mother’s china to our guests. We tell them we use it only for something special: them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sports Scandals of Yore (And a Revolutionary War Book)

 

What’s this? A Scandal? If it’s not politics, it must be sports.

 

So much money is involved that the temptations are staggering.

 

The latest involves the highest-paid player in baseball, Shobei Ohtani, who is both one of the greatest pitchers and one of the greatest hitters in the sport.

 

Ohtani’s  interpreter and close friend ran up such huge gambling debts that he used $4.5 million of the star’s money to help pay them off. Whether Omani gave him the money or the interpreter stole it is in dispute.

 

Now that’s not a lot of money for a player with a $700 million contract over 10 years with the Los Angeles Dodgers. But sports betting is illegal in California, and it makes the player vulnerable to shady characters.

 

The incident brings back memories of so many scandals of the past:

 

—Lance Armstrong secretly took performance-enhancing drugs to win seven Tour de France championships. I felt cheated.

 

—All-time great Pete Rose bet on baseball, including wagers on his own team. Rose never admitted it—until he wrote his own book. That inflamed Hall of Fame voters, who still won’t let him in.

 

—In the “Black Sox” scandal, Chicago White Sox players were paid to blow the 1919 World Series. “Say it ain’t so, Joe” is a famous quote. Well, he couldn’t.

 

—Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Mark McGwire used steroids in setting records for home runs. I was sickened by McGwire’s congressional testimony: “I’m not here to talk about the past.” Really? Why else are you there?

 

—The New England Patriots stole the other teams’ signals. Sorry! I have never seen anything wrong with that. If your signs are being stolen, you need to come up with a better way of hiding them.

 

—The NFL suspended Tom Brady for getting the Patriots to partially deflate footballs used on offense to make them easier to grip. I’m not shocked, shocked, shocked.

 

—The New Orleans Saints paid players a bounty for injuring opponents. That sounds criminal.

 

—Gaylord Perry and others moistened the baseball with saliva or jell to make it do weird things. Though he admitted it, Perry made it to the Hall of Fame anyway.

 

With sports betting now legal online and, in most states, look for more scandals to come.

 

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Subhead: New Info About an Old War

 

I really enjoyed local author William Guerrant’s book: “Let a Pillar Arise: A Novel of the Revolutionary War,” published in 2022. We talked about his book recently at the Halifax book club.

 

The book covers the war in North Carolina and the Crossing of the Dan, in which Patriots were able to keep the British from marching into Virginia. Besides battles, it tells fictional stories of local people who took both sides in the war. One was a British spy in Halifax County who pretended to be a Patriot. One true story in the book I had never heard before: A militia formed by pro-British men in this country thought they were reporting for duty to a British commander. But it was really a Patriot colonel, Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee, who welcomed them. Completely fooled, they were about to be captured, but a melee broke out and many of them were killed.

 

Guerrant lives in Keeling, (Pittsylvania County), where he grew up on the family farm. After a life of practicing law, he returned to the farm in 2010. I asked him what prompted him to write this book: “I’ve been interested in the Revolutionary War events that occurred near here (the Race to the Dan and the Battle of Guilford Courthouse) for a long time. I started out researching a possible history of the Cowpens.”

The Battle of Guilford Courthouse was a turning point in the war. Though neither side won the battle, the British were so badly crippled that it wasn’t long until they surrendered at Yorktown. I have rarely read a war book that makes the battle plan and logistics of the fighting so clear.

 

No Politics in This Space

 

A political operative? What’s that? I guess someone behind the scenes who makes things happen.

 

I had been an editor at several Republican and Democratic national political conventions but had never gotten my own hands dirty in politics.

 

I had my chance in the U.S. Senate race in 2014 in South Dakota. I knew next to nothing about the state, but a friend, Larry Pressler, asked me to help his candidacy.

 

Pressler had served as a Republican senator there from 1979 to 1997 This time he was running as an independent.

 

At first I only ran his Facebook page, but I thought it would be fun to hit the campaign trail, so I flew to Sioux Falls on my own dime. Retired as a journalist, it was now OK for me to work on a campaign and take sides.

 

I had never seen Larry so vibrant as in a political campaign. I remember him visiting an event where tractors were on display and being thanked profusely for getting a woman’s mother federal benefits.

 

The big break came when one of the polls showed Pressler running neck and neck with Gov. Mike Rounds, a Republican, and Democratic Rep. Mike Weiland. Suddenly, his candidacy was national news. Larry’s biggest selling point was his reputation for honesty. During the Abscam investigation of Senate corruption, he was the only member of Congress in a sting operation to flatly turn down a bribe.

 

I think my biggest contribution was in contacting the FBI agent who led the probe and helping persuade him to come to South Dakota to campaign for Larry. He paid his own way out and gave at least one speech, but poor health forced him to leave the campaign, and he died a few years later.

 

Perhaps the oddest moment came in an appearance at a Sioux Falls library. As we sat down to hear the speeches, one of the candidates disclosed that he had a weapon—maybe a gun—with him. Apparently, the library scanners can detect overdue library books but not weapons. I was appalled, but most of the people there took it in stride.

 

Pressler lost the election to Rounds, hurt particularly by his support for President Obama in a very Republican year nationwide.

 

So for two weeks I was a “campaign operative.” Does that qualify me as a political expert who will pontificate about the national issues of the day? Not in this column. Nope!

 

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Subhead: Party Time in the Capital

Sports fans have the Super Bowl. Churches have Easter. The Washington media have several big dinners. Presidents often attend, making self-deprecating jokes to endear themselves to the press. Liquor flows, and so do unfortunate remarks.

 

I was at a Washington Press Club dinner that made national headlines in 1985, when a drunken John Riggins, Washington Redskins’ running back, slid under the table. Nearby was Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. “Come on, Sandy, baby. Loosen up. You’re too tight!” he is said to have uttered, though I didn’t hear it.

 

At another, I had the more serious honor of helping carry James Brady and his wheelchair to the head table when I was the club’s secretary. Brady had been partially paralyzed in the shooting attack on President Reagan.

 

The challenge for members of these groups has been to invite the most prestigious guests to impress their bosses. This has gotten even worse now, when they are expected to bring rock stars and movie stars as well as politicians.  I hated this, hesitating to beg news sources for favors.  What would they want in return?

 

My favorite guest was Rep. Millicent Fenwick, the cigar-smoking congresswoman who was the inspiration for Lacey Davenport, a character in Doonesbury. Another who accepted my invite to the White House Correspondents Association dinner was the deputy Treasury secretary, but he bowed out at the last minute. The Treasury’s public relations director, Anne Dore McLaughlin, sent her husband, a Roman Catholic priest, in consolation. My bosses, who were looking forward to the other guy, were disappointed when the priest sat down.

 

But he made good conversation even if he wasn’t well known. Within a few years, the priest became one of the most famous TV pundits of the era. He was John McLaughlin, host of the McLaughlin Group!