What's My Line?

I was five years old when my dad bought our first television set in 1950. It was a 16-inch Westinghouse in a big mahogany cabinet with solid doors that closed over the screen when we weren't watching. There were just two stations on the air, and programming began every afternoon about 4:30 p.m. Because we were in the Pacific time zone, we saw programs from New York either live (three hours earlier), on film or delayed on kinescope (filmed live off the TV screen). There was no videotape.

Sunday night was always a big night for TV in our house. By the mid-1950s, we were avid fans of Ed Sullivan's variety hour and Jack Benny on CBS, and the Dinah Shore and Steve Allen hours on NBC.

But what I remember most was a little panel show called "What's My Line" that played at 7:30 p.m. our time, live from New York. It featured people I didn't know -- an actress named Arlene Francis, a journalist named Dorothy Kilgallen, a publisher named Bennett Cerf and a news broadcaster named John Daly. The point of each show was to have the panel guess the occupation of the contestants and identity of a mystery celebrity.

They all talked in what my dad called a high-falutin' way. Very articulate. Very witty, in a New York way. No slang. I was too young to know why I liked the way they talked so much. But now I realize, after a lifetime of working with words, that I admired them because they spoke the English language so well. They came from a generation that prized elegant repartee and wit. Network radio, in its heyday during the 1930s and 1940s, was known for this style of speaking, and What's My Line carried that tradition into television. It's ironic, isn't it, that a lesser-educated generation, with many fewer college-educated people than we have now, was attracted to high-falutin' speaking and made shows like What's My Line very popular. The show ran in primetime on CBS from February 1950 to September 1967.

Imagine my surprise and joy when I discovered several months ago that the Game Show Network on cable television is showing kinescopes of What's My Line at 2:30 a.m. every day. I have been recording every episode, and there they are: Arlene, Dorothy, Bennett and John, as if they never went away. Speaking so well, making witty remarks and bad puns.

The kinescopes are an amazing time capsule of the 1950s and early 1960s. I had forgotten that the show attracted "mystery guests" of every stripe. I've watched the panel try to guess the identity of celebrities such as opera star Helen Traubel, boxer Ingemar Johansson, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, historian and poet Carl Sandburg, and teen-idol Fabian. Meantime, they also giggled and punned their way through guessing the occupations of the guy who made horse feedbags, the champion woman wrestler, the toilet tester and the thimble maker.

What's My Line probably couldn't succeed today. The prize was small ($50 if the panel was fooled), the pace was rather slow and the decibel level was very low. But I think what would really make it fail is our modern lack of appetite for well-spoken use of language on television. Our 21st Century ears just don't get it. Too high-falutin'; just ain't worth our time.

A Beach on a Windy Day

Some friends here in Texas have asked why we're moving to Whidbey Island. So remote from the urban life we've led for most of our lives. So damp. So far away. So....boring.

Yes, all true. But if you'd been there on this clear, chilly day last November, on this north Whidbey beach, looking out at the Straits of Juan de Fuca and the Pacific Ocean beyond, Vancouver Island to the northwest seemingly close enough to touch, a lonely American flag planted in the sand up just a few yards, you would understand.

Nothing to do but think and see and hear. And be amazed.

Forever Blowing Bubbles

By my count, I've lived through five economic "bubbles." They really were the Days of Wine and Roses, weren't they? Didn't we have a good time? But why does each hangover seem to hurt more and last longer?

First there was the post-war bubble in the late 1940s and 1950s fueled by the G.I Bill of Rights and Eisenhower's interstate highway construction project. Everybody was either going to college or pouring concrete, courtesy of the federal government.

Then came the guns-and-butter Johnson bubble of the 1960s when we fought a war in Vietnam, fought another war on poverty and sent humans to the moon in less than a decade to beat the Soviets to the punch. So much money to spend, so much to protest, so little time.

And then there was the Reagan bubble of the 1980s when we cut income taxes, dramatically increased defense spending and deregulated savings and loans. Of course the S&Ls promptly used their freedom to do a Thelma-and-Louise and drive off the cliff. But hey, it was such a fun time and Nancy's red china in the White House really was beautiful.

Next we had the tech bubble in the Clinton 1990s. While Bill and Monica were diddling, the child wonders from Harvard were using the Internet to create a "new paradigm" in the economy. I always thought paradigm was a strange word, and I figured that nobody really knew what it meant -- especially those who threw it around a lot. In the 1998-2001 period, I was among those who had serious doubts that technology could revolutionize ingrained economic patterns overnight. In most meetings, however, those of us felt that way were hooted down by the bright young things who knew a new paradigm when they saw one. They had no patience for dinosaurs living in paper caves. Unfortunately, the new paradigm evaporated along with the phantom profits from initial public stock offerings as the the Nasdaq stock market crashed to earth.

Finally we had the housing bubble of the Bush Two years. Isn't it ironic that the smartest, shrewdest, most cunning people in the world -- those working on Wall Street -- fell under the sway of the oldest economic myth in the book. The myth, of course, is that housing prices can only go up. Talk about a new paradigm! Apparently none of them had read about the Florida real estate bubble in the 1920s or the California real estate bubble in the 1990s. These smart people thought they had solved the problem: they eliminated all risk in the real estate marketplace by tossing mortgages around like hot potatoes. And of course they were much too smart to be caught holding the hot potatoes when the music stopped, weren't they?

Bubbles are such fun things. They make us giggle. Too bad they eventually pop.

Pitchforks

As I prepare to move to our little 3-acre "farm" on Whidbey Island, I've been considering the purchase of a pitchfork. Is there a handier hand tool on a farm than a pitchfork? They have been around for at least the last millenium to pitch hay, dung, leaves and what-have-you. Pitchforks have also become a symbol of hard work and physicial labor, the kind most citified folks don't do much any more. The artist Grant Wood created the greatest tribute to the pitchfork in his famous "American Gothic" painting:

The more I study this painting, the more I realize how the lowly pitchfork has also come to be a weapon of mass destruction. Take a good look at the grim expression on the farmer's face, guarding the homestead with his fork's tines newly sharpened. No out-of-town jasper in a pinstriped suit from Citibank or BofA is going to foreclose on this farm. If he tries, he may receive a few holes in his well-stuffed gluteous maximus. The pitchfork has also served as a WMD for villagers seeking Dr. Frankenstein's monster and French peasants looking for Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. And we've been hearing a lot of pitchfork references in the current anger over the economic meltdown.


The pitchfork does seem like an appropriate weapon to use against hubris, doesn't it? Why shouldn't those who ate cake while the rest of us were seeking bread be stuck in their rears with a big fork? At least metaphorically.

Harry and Esther

In my post a few days ago about "seeing through" the current financial fog, I mentioned my paternal grandparents, who raised three sons during the Depression and lived their lives with dignity. Their names were Harry Waldemar Anderson and Esther Emilia (Olson) Anderson. Both were born of Swedish immigrants in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the 1890s. Harry's father was a locomotive engineer; Esther's father loaded iron ore on cargo ships in Lake Superior. Both their fathers were alcoholic, a fairly common occurence at the time given how dreary, hard and short life was for working men then.

Harry left home when he was just a boy, sleeping for awhile in the back of a saloon and earning coins by cleaning out the spitoons. Later, he and a friend tried a vaudeville song and dance act which didn't draw much applause. Then he met Esther and decided he had to get a decent job if he was going to persuade her to marry him. He got a job as a railroad bookkeeper which sent him to Minneapolis. In 1916, Harry and Esther eloped and my father was born in April, 1917. The picture above is of Harry and Esther with my father and his younger brother Kenneth sometime around 1922.

Harry worked for the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railway Co. off and on for almost 40 years. There were layoffs -- a lot of them -- in the 1930s, but he always managed to go back to work when times got better. He retired in November 1955, right after this 65th birthday. And he lived happily in retirement for another 22 years.

Harry and Esther were married for almost 58 years before she died in 1974. When his job with the Milwaukee Road transferred him to its western terminus in Tacoma, Washington, sometime in the early 1920s, Harry and Esther bought a new two-bedroom, one-bath house. Nothing fancy, but it did have a cellar, an attic and a garage. Behind the garage, Harry cultivated his vegetable garden. He raised corn, beans, tomatoes, cucumbers and carrots from the day they moved in until the day he died in 1977. We all enjoyed the bounty of that garden all year, which my grandmother canned and stored in the cellar. Her dill pickles were a particular family favorite.

Theirs was an unprententious life. One set of good china for use only on special occasions. Linoleum on the kitchen counter tops. One car, usually a Chevrolet purchased new and kept for at least a dozen years. No long vacations, just an occasional week in Reno after the kids were grown. But they also had no debt, a lesson they learned in the Depression. They never bought anything new until they had saved enough to buy it. Their lives weren't easy, but somehow they had control over them. Never foreclosed. Never bankrupt. Never homeless. All three sons grew up to be successful men. They had a lot to be proud of, but they were much too Midwestern and Scandinavian to boast. All they'd ever say was that they did the best they could. And that's saying a lot.

Harry and Esther with my brother Ron in 1964

Who Knows Where The Time Goes?

The first Judy Collins concert I ever attended was in Seattle in the summer of 1968. I remember it only vaguely, given the effects of marijuana smoke and cheap wine at the time aggravated by the haze of more than 40 years. But I still hear her soprano voice in my mind's ear, so sweet, crystalline and pure. It was before she recorded her big hits "Both Sides Now" and "Send in the Clowns." She was singing a lot of Dylan then, as well as Leonard Cohen and an unknown songwriter named Randy Newman. She was gorgeous in voice, body and spirit. A true woman of her times. As I think about it now, I can see how we actually thought we were changing the world in the late 1960s. So naive.

This reverie comes about because last month we visited some old friends in Santa Fe and attended a Judy Collins concert at the beautifully restored Lensic Theater near the historic plaza. Of course, it was sold out. A few minutes after 8 p.m., she strode on stage, guitar in hand and with only her pianist to accompany her. Her silken hair is gray now but still very long. The voice is amazingly the same, with only a slight loss of upper range in tribute to advancing age. About half way through, she sang "Over The Rainbow," which I thought was an odd choice for a singer so bound to her own times. She reminded us that the song was written in 1939 for "The Wizard of Oz." And then came the killer: She told us she loves the song because she was born in 1939. That means Judy Collins turns 70 this year. Is that possible? She reminded us that if you remember the 1960s you weren't there. We laughed. Then, as we looked around the audience, we noticed how old everyone looked. Sure, we were mostly 60s people still dressed in jeans and flannel and camouflage jackets. But the hair, what there was of it, was so gray and Judy was one of the few who had kept her figure. Nonethless, we looked pretty damn good for our age, given how things turned out. And we take comfort that Judy's still singing about better worlds we can build.

Seeing Through The Fog

The last eight months have put us all into a financial fog. Having recently retired, I am acutely aware of the damage done by the Wall Street geniuses paid all those millions supposedly to make money for all of us. We now know for whom they were really working. My comfortable retirement plan is now on a diet, and the future is a lot foggier. Thank you Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, George W. Bush and all the others who took us all for this ride. May you live long and prosper . . . not.

The more time that goes by, however, I begin to see through the fog to the brighter horizon beyond. What's clear to me is that our whole nation grew morbidly obese in the past couple of decades. We ate too much, bought too much, borrowed too much. Now our national health is in such bad shape that we may soon die if we don't change our ways. So it's starting to feel good to me to be on a financial diet, to watch my pennies. It feels responsible and morally correct, the penance required to get through a hangover.

I think a lot about my grandparents these days, the Depression generation. They managed to raise three sons during the 1930s, even though my grandfather was laid off repeatedly from his railroad job. Somehow they paid the mortgage, kept food on the table by growing their own vegetables and chickens, and for a time lived off the coins their boys brought home from selling newspapers on streetcars. They had no luxuries, no savings and only one pair of shoes each. Even so, they shared what they had with neighbors and relatives who had less than they did. They lived their lives with a quiet dignity and integrity, and I greatly admire them for it.

I hope that, as we all navigate the troubled waters of our own day, we find the strength within ourselves to live as well as they did.

Like a Seagull Awaiting Low Tide

We bought our little house just outside Coupeville in the summer of 2007. The plan was to retire to beautiful Whidbey Island by the end of 2008. We planned, we saved, we dreamed. But good dreams always take a long time to come true, don't they? Here we are in March 2009, still waiting to move in.

The remodeling of our circa 1963 country house continues, and the end seems finally in sight. We have been beset by one of the snowiest winters in Whidbey's collective memory, as well as the inevitable delays and complications that come from working with multiple subcontractors at the same time.

For me, it has been a lesson in acquiring patience. Spending one's career in daily journalism and corporate management, as I did for 36 years, makes a person impatient and a bit uncharitable when it comes to delays and a slow pace. When retirement occurs after all that rush and multi-tasking, you're left feeling sidetracked. Where's that morning kick that comes from three phones ringing at once and deadlines in half an hour? My withdrawal therapy has included frequent naps and a sudden interest in reading books I've had on the shelf for years.

I've been making frequent trips to Whidbey Island from our current home in Dallas, just to see the progress and talk with the electricians, plumbers, cabinet makers, brick masons and others. That has really helped me learn a lesson: I cannot will this process to accelerate. It is a communal effort by many people. My principal role at this point is writing checks.

As I was leaving the island last week, I stopped to watch a group of seagulls feasting on mussels attached to the pilings at the local wharf. Every day, the gulls wait patiently for this moment, when the low tide finally uncovers their meal. There is nothing they can do to speed up the receding tide. Just wait and know that when the moment finally arrives it will be delicious.