Column: Rando thoughts on decisions, coffee and aging

 My big decisions in life have been easy: marriage, jobs, retirement, location. It’s the little ones I have the most trouble with: Where to have dinner, what to watch on TV.

 

I think we underestimate the power that our minds have over our bodies. Why else do they have placebo pills?

 

You can fix half of all technology problems by turning the device off and on again.

 

But when that doesn’t work and you call repair helpers, why does your appliance suddenly work when they show up?

 

In journalism, “experts say” often just means “I think….”

 

Ever notice? What seems obvious to you is not obvious to everyone else. You have to fight for it.

 

I think of the calories I saved over the decades by drinking my coffee black.

 

When you are young and wasting your time, it feels like a wonderful luxury. When you are old, it feels like dying a day early. I have a deadline to meet, and I don’t know when it is!

 

Never look at email before taking a nap. It may keep you awake. And don’t deal with tech support on the phone just before bedtime.

 

I do some of my best work on subjects I know nothing about. It reminds me of a history teacher who substituted in my algebra class. She knew nothing about algebra so crammed all evening for the subject. She gave a terrific lesson that I could understand. She started on the same level we did.

 

Eyewitness to history…without realizing it

When the air traffic controllers’ union announced a walkout on Aug. 3, 1981, I  did not take it seriously. I left their press conference on a Friday afternoon thinking:  “They won’t go on strike. That would be stupid!”

So, I left Washington, D.C., for the weekend confident that nothing would happen. I didn’t listen to the radio, read a newspaper or watch TV news.

 I returned for the Monday morning staff meeting at U.S. News & World Report. I was ambushed.

After others talked about the Middle East and the economy, the managing editor turned to me, the transportation writer.  “Tell us, about the air traffic controllers, Mike.”

“Huh,” I thought. But somehow, I bluffed my way through with a non-answer. Maybe the labor beat reporter bailed me out. I learned that not only had the controllers walked out, but the Reagan administration had fired them and permanently replaced with new workers.

When the unthinkable strike happened, I was assigned to go to the control tower at Dulles International Airport to see how replacement workers were handling the air traffic.

I was gladly allowed in as the administration wanted to demonstrate that things were going on just fine. And they were, apparently, though I did get a little uncomfortable when one of the novices took his eyes off the screen and turned to chat with me. “Get back on the screen!” I wanted to yell.

I have read recent commentaries that the strike was a turning point in American history. Private employers took a cue from the government’s tough stance and took a hard line against labor. Union membership declined, and businesses had the upper hand.

In fact, they were still talking about this disaster in 1995 when I covered the labor beat for the Kiplinger Letter and attended AFL-CIO conventions in New York.

Guess I was right: they made a mistake!

 

I have come across two Halifax County men who were air traffic controllers at the time of the strike. One was Boyd Archer, a supervisor of the controllers  who walked out. Boyd recalls having to work long hours when it happened. He says that the air traffic system never fully recovered from the event.

 

Another is Wayne Stanfield, who was chief air controller of the military radar facility in Fairfield, California. Wayne says a lot of the controllers he supervised were transferred to replace the striking workers.

 

 

 

 

Tracking a reclusive billionaire

 

As a reporter, how do you cover one of the world’s richest men if he lives just down the street but never comes out of his hotel?

That was my dilemma as the Associated Press correspondent in Las Vegas in 1968, while Howard Hughes lived there.

The once-dashing billionaire sneaked into town in 1966 and bought the Desert Inn hotel, where he ensconced himself in the top-floor penthouse.

After I took that job in 1968, I would often get a visit from a security guard delivering a one-sentence statement: “The Hughes Tool Co. today announced the purchase of the Frontier Hotel.” Period. I would write a 400-word story with background on the billionaire and the famous hotel. Easy! I loved it!

This famous man inherited wealth from his father, who owned a lucrative oil drilling business and later got richer himself in the airline industry. Before he became a recluse, Hughes made movies, hung out with attractive movie actresses and flew small airplanes himself.

Now in Las Vegas, somehow he had a screw loose. We learned later than he was terrified of germs and the people that carried them. Yet he lived a very unhealthy life, eating poorly and neglecting his own body. His personal staff consisted mostly of loyal Mormons sworn to secrecy.

His top aide, Robert Maheu, was a former FBI and  CIA agent who was once involved in plans to assassinate Fidel Castro. I’m not sure if Maheu ever saw Hughes in person.

As a hypochondriac, Hughes especially hated the underground nuclear testing that went on only 70 miles from Las Vegas. He brought in leading scientists to tell us that the explosions might destroy Hoover Dam. One of them was Barry Commoner, a leading environmentalist, who I remember interviewing. But Hughes’ efforts failed, and the tests continued.

I was never able to get Maheu or anyone else on Hughes’ staff to talk about anything substantive, even off the record, Neither could any other news media, as far a I could tell.

As a curious reporter, I would love to get a look at this guy. You couldn’t possibly get into his penthouse, whose floor was blocked off on the elevator.

A writer at the Las Vegas Review-Journal convinced me that Hughes must come out of that penthouse secretly some time. How could anyone stay sequestered for two years? Let’s take turns waiting for him in the parking lot.

They reality set in: That wold seem awfully boring for us and time-consuming to our employers, who wanted news copy.

Did he ever come out? After Hughes’ death in 1976, several wills were found, including one that left much of his money to the Mormon church and a young man who supposedly picked him up in a car and saved his life while he was wandering around in the desert.

This man never got any money, but years later a pilot claimed that he picked Hughes up from Las Vegas and took him to some location in the desert, where he had disappeared.

I was starting to believe this story, until a later AP correspondent who covered the “Mormon will” trial, assured me that the will was a fake and the story untrue.

So he must not have ever come out. I’m glad we never staked out the hotel parking lot!

 

The inside scoop on a B&B

I wasn’t keen on Pickett’s idea to open a bed & breakfast. Strangers would invade our house. I would have to stop leaving my shoes and socks in the living room. When I travel, I prefer hotels, where I don’t have to interact with people.

But what was I going to do? Forbid it? Then it would be, “So long, Mike!”

So our summer home in Cluster Springs opened to guests in 1988 as Oak Grove Plantation but later changed to Oak Grove Bed & Breakfast.  The visitors stayed in two rooms on the second floor but had to come downstairs to use the bathroom that we shared with them.

That isn’t what guests want these days, so she had a second bathroom built on the second floor. I remember helping Pickett clean the newly built sink just as the new guests arrived. That’s OK—I’m good on deadline.

In those days, people found out about us through guidebooks, a much simpler forum than today’s online reservation systems. We tried lots of gimmicks: a cooking class weekend, a wellness camp, family friendly activities.  Not much worked when we were trying to get people to come to a farm in the heat of July and August.

But she was bent on expansion: the former office was converted to the Library, lined with books and my grandfather’s 1880s typewriter. When a falling tree destroyed the little rental house next door, she remodeled it as a cottage for the B&B.

I can’t fix anything myself, but Pickett was great at recruiting repair and construction help, including Joe, a 52-year-old who was a preschool student of hers in Washington, D.C., 50 years ago.

Then we made the best of a bad situation. We were terrified spending most of the year on the 14th floor of an Arlington apartment building in 2000 when covid hit. We moved to Oak Grove temporarily but decided to stay.

Open year  around, we could get steady business especially in spring and fall, when the weather is better. A major source was VirginiaIinternational Raceway.

I’m not much of a host, but I’m an experienced professional busboy. I was good at helping out at breakfast and chatting with the guests. Some of the fascinating people we met were good sources for news stories. I was especially interested in a guy who rode a bike across the state. He wrote back that his visit was the highlight of his trip.

Best is coming across musical people who asked to hear me play the piano. I have accompanied several singers and made videos with one of them. She is coming back again this fall.

We often say, “We don’t travel a lot. People just come to us.”