Lower Manhattan is much as I remember it from last year’s visit. Unfortunately, check-in at my hotel is, too. As with last year, I’m at the M Social Hotel (the former Millenium Hilton – and that’s not a typo; it was intentionally spelled with one “n”) across from the World Trade Center. This is a neat hotel and you can’t beat the rates, but getting checked in can be an adventure. The guest lobby is on the third floor. As I get in the elevator, a guy probably in his mid-40s who’s also on the way up says, “How long you been waiting?” I told him I’d just arrived. Turns out he’s been waiting a couple hours to get checked in.

The good news is that this year, the lobby’s not under construction. The bad news is that, like last year, there’s a long line. There’s exactly two clerks working check-in, and there are all kinds of problems: IT issues, rooms not ready, you name it. A lot of people are sitting at tables or on couches waiting for issues to be resolved. At times some of them are vocal about it. There’s a young couple that’s flown in from Turkey, and they’re very unhappy; the female half of the couple marches up to the counter, loudly protesting, almost in tears. Another frustrated guest issues a few four-letter words to one of the clerks about the lack of personnel up front. The guy I was on the elevator with is in front of me, and at times he turns and gives me a sardonic look. I’m tired, of course, and I need something to eat and something to drink, and after about 20 minutes the standing there with my bag’s strap digging into my shoulder gets to me. I start to wonder a little bit if I’m going to be sitting around like some of these other poor souls, waiting and waiting and waiting. Last night’s reading comes back to me. How would Marcus Aurelius handle it? I can’t control the circumstances, but I can control how I feel about it and I can control my response to it, and no matter what happens, this moment will pass. Float with it. 

As it happens, after a half-hour’s wait, I’m up at the counter checking in, and it all goes well. Not only did the “why not?” upgrade offer I took a chance on pay off (to what the clerk promises is a great room), but the clerk throws in a drink voucher to thank me for my patience, and she calls me “dear” three or four times throughout the transaction. (I get the impression she’s very thankful I’m not yelling at her. I feel for her and the other staffers who are having to deal with a mess that likely stems from management issues.)

With happy relief I go to the elevator. The room number starts with 30. The last button on this elevator’s panel is 30. “Top of the house, Ma!” I chortle as the elevator zooms up, Willy Wonka-style. Then up on 30 and to the end of the hall, and I open the door…and have my breath taken away by a corner suite. The sitting room looks north, with views toward City Hall and the Woolworth Building. The bathroom is between the sitting room and the bedroom around the corner. On one side, the view north is toward Midtown. The view west is toward the World Trade Center. I’m overwhelmed. I’m just some kid just up from the country, grew up in a tiny rural town, and here I am with an amazing corner room on a high floor of a fancy hotel in lower Manhattan. It’s too good, too much. I’m too happy.

None of that, however, is going to make up for more urgent needs. I walk a couple blocks up to Walgreens for some provisions, then head back. Before going back to the hotel for the night, there was one more thing. Last year, I visited the World Trade Center memorial and found some names that were significant to me, in particular the flight crews of American 11 and United 175. I’d been haunted, however, that I’d forgotten to find Father Mychal Judge at the memorial. This time, I didn’t leave until I did.

Back in the room for the night, I got cleaned up, scarfed down some food, caught up on things (including the outcome of the Preakness, whose victor made me think of Robert Vaughn), and took lots of photos from up on high. But I also knew I had an early report time next morning, so I didn’t stay up too late. Somehow I eked out about four hours of rest.

Then the day dawned. I wasn’t prepared for how beautiful it would look: the orange glow over the horizon out one window; through another, warm light reflecting off One World Trade Center’s curtain of glass. This huge city, and yet this moment of quiet beauty and wonder. What a blessing to see this, to have this moment.

I didn’t want it to end. But a day was waiting on me. One last check of everything, one more elevator ride. Out in the lobby is the hotel’s flag from September 11, 2001, now preserved behind glass. (Last year I wrote about this hotel’s association with that awful day and how it’s haunted me.)

Then out the door, up to the subway station and Houston Street, then over to Varick and 7 Hudson Square. Into the lobby and the security desk. Why is it every time I check in at ABC, I get nervous and own-goal myself? All set, I wait for my friend Dennis to meet me in the lobby.

It doesn’t take long, and Dennis brings me up to the multi-purpose room where the editing and other magic happens. There’s my friend Gary, who’s happy to see me again. The next four hours or so are a blur, as Dennis does updates and fixes for Good Morning America while Gary manages things, and I observe all of this while devouring one of the delicious cranberry muffins that’s been brought in for our enjoyment. (The guys don’t know this, but what keeps me coming back are these muffins.) They practice their trade the way skilled, experienced hands do them: what seems intricate to the layperson is quickly dispatched with quiet precision, then it’s on to the next task.

Fortunately, there’s not a whole lot to fix today (and when I have a chance to help clarify where a fix was needed, I get this little thrill! Yes! I got to help out in big-time teevee!), and that leaves plenty of time to talk shop. At points visitors drop by, including the weekend executive producer. At another point, we visit the control room to take care of an errand. This, really, has become why I like to visit: the people, all of whom are very kind and welcoming to an interested outsider who works on the fringes of this business. Last year, and in 2024 at the old ABC campus on 66th, so much of why I was there was to see the place and go everywhere we could. Now, it’s different. As much as I like looking around, I’ve seen it. I’m here because Dennis and Gary are my friends and I don’t get to see them enough. And, as I tell Gary, I keep coming back because I learn stuff (including, this time, such valuable life skills as who to channel when leading a labor negotiation). I can then take that back and use it for what I do with the students. It’s an ongoing education, and it’s always worth the effort to get here. 

The morning passes quickly and we have a lunch date to keep, so Dennis and I head out and catch the subway up to Lincoln Center, then cross over to 66th. Two years ago, this was where my first visit to ABC took place. There was a tall office tower in the middle of ABC’s campus. Now, almost everything is gone. There’s about eight stories left of the office tower, and even that’s not long for the world. The site is surrounded by plywood sheets with diamond-shaped Plexiglas windows, but there’s not much to see; just rubble. I see a strangely intact brick and wish I could levitate it over the fence as a souvenir. Dennis takes several photos over the fence and from the opposite side of the street, while I amble down the sidewalk and try to peer between the gaps. In what had been the office tower’s lobby, I see shattered windows and what’s left of an escalator. It’s sad to think that two years ago this place was alive, functional, busy. Now it’s a wreck, and soon what’s left will be hauled away. The old, landmarked portion that once housed Durland’s Riding Academy remains, and I hope it’ll find new purpose, but everything else is gone. Soon the only reminder that anything television happened here will be the street sign reading “Peter Jennings Way.” 

As I wander along, I see an older couple, obviously tourists, looking through the fence and trying to piece together the scene. I don’t ask where they’re from, but their accent sounds kind of German. They see me and ask what was going on here. I tell them that this is where the ABC Television Network used to be. We strike up a brief conversation and they ask me where I’m from. I’m up from South Carolina, I tell them. They start telling me about the places down my way they’ve been, most of them in the Lowcountry. I’m in full Southern charm mode by this point, nodding and smiling and laughing a little. The man goes on in a little bit of detail, gets hung up on remembering where this one place was, and then the wife says in this weary way, “Do you think she really wants to hear all this?” The interplay between them is a hoot. We wish each other well and part ways, I catch up with Dennis, and then it’s off to our lunch date at P.J. Clarke’s. As we’re walking along we’re alongside a family group with a couple pre-teen kids who are trying to top one another with gross-out bodily function humor of the sort pre-teens will do. The mother suggests something that’s kind of a tongue-twister. It’s all I can do to not suggest the “cottonpickin’ finger-lickin’ chicken plucker” routine. Instead, I kind of laugh to myself at a scene that’ll never play out.

There’s a table waiting at P.J. Clarke’s, and already there is our friend Gady. With him is his lifelong friend Joel, whom I met last year when I was up to visit Gady. I knew we were going to meet up with Gady, but I didn’t expect Joel, so that’s very much a treat. They’ve got a lot of stories to tell, since Gady worked at CBS for more than five decades and Joel worked at NBC for a long, long time. A little bit later, Gary joins us. The next hour and a half are a fun blur of stories and history and remembrances of folks from back when, and laughter and the enjoyment of sharing good company over a good meal. I try to take the scene in as best I can, knowing how rare a treat this is, that back home this kind of thing doesn’t happen. Memento mori. 

Regrettably, the time comes. There’s a train leaving Penn Station at a quarter after 3, and my name’s on a ticket for it. There’s handshakes and hugs, a request from Joel to come back soon, and I head off to begin the long journey home. As I wait at the subway station, it’s oddly still. Fifteen minutes ago, there was fun and there were friends. Now I’m alone, and it’s too quiet. My heart is full of love for the guys I was just with, and I ache for having left them; yet I also know there are folks (and critters) back home who need me. It’s an exquisite agony, the simultaneous joy and ache of having people you care about in so many far-apart places, knowing you’re blessed to have them but knowing that blessing comes with an ache, and for a moment I’m verklempt. But soon the train is here, and I’m quickly at Penn Station. There’s a picket line of striking Long Island Railroad workers outside the entrance. Then past the Garden and into Moynihan Train Hall, where I stop in the Walgreens and get a couple supplies for the trip, and then wait for the boarding call.

Soon enough, down we go to the track. This time, it’s a regular train back to Baltimore instead of an Acela, but I’m in no hurry; the nice thing about the trip from here on out is that I have no deadlines to meet. The three hours pass without anything of note, and it’s back to the BWI station. I get Supercar out of hock, program the moving map, and follow the directions south. I’m very deliberately making the transit past the District of Columbia on a Sunday evening, hoping the traffic will be a little less, and the transit east of town works well. Where things do back up is in northern Virginia, and there’s a lot of stop-go-stop for at least 45 minutes. Once we’re past Quantico, things open up and I make Thornburg in good time. 

All was going well…or so I thought. The directions in the moving map were supposed to take me to a Holiday Inn Express. Instead, they take me to a little shopping center in the corner of a Food Lion parking lot. I’m rather perplexed by this, and for a moment wonder if the hotel actually exists. I pull over into a parking space to sort things through and find out that, yep, I’ve been pranked by a whopper of a map issue. (Cue Lewis Grizzard saying “We been ho-axed!”) I figure out where the hotel is, set course, and inside about five minutes I’m there. It isn’t the most inspiring location; there’s at least two semi trucks parked in the small lot, and there’s a lot of clientele between this hotel and the adjacent hotel, but it’ll do. I finally find a place to park, get my bags and stuff, and check in. It takes a couple minutes to get a clerk, and when I do get my room, it’s on the first floor…right next to the breakfast lounge. I can hear the television from the lobby through the wall. At least it’s a short hike, though, and for my purposes this room will be fine. I get cleaned up, eat something, catch up on computer chores, and turn in.

The next morning I’m up bright and early, ready for the rest of the journey home at my own pace. I refuel the car and set out, taking the bypass around Richmond, and then into North Carolina. There’s a brief stop in Fayetteville to visit a hobby shop I hadn’t visited in about a decade, and then on toward South Carolina, resisting the urge to travel east to Kinston and commune, at least in spirit, with Vivian Howard. I content myself with a wave as I fly past on 95.

At the state line, there’s the now-obligatory stop at South of the Border (and by this point in the drive, obligatory because I need a restroom stop), and I amble around one of the shops for a little bit, soaking in the ambience of a bygone roadside era I knew way back when, and buying a couple suitably tacky souvenirs. After that, it’s back on 95, then to 20, and then the first signs of Columbia start to materialize. Then north on 77, a stop for fuel, and then my giant circle closes as I take an exit toward Winnsboro and the last miles home, and the folks and the critters who are glad to have me back. 

Others have ably told Savannah’s story, and this is as good a jumping off point as any for the many resources out there. My own memories are of when the ship was at Patriots Point in the 1980s and early 1990s. The museum had designs on being large back then, and as opportunities came along the museum took them. Savannah was one such opportunity. There were ambitions for parts of the ship to become hotel and recreation space, exhibit space and so forth. For more reasons than I care to go into here, that never happened. Savannah was also a white elephant in a collection of fighting ships, and who’s going to be interested in a big merchant ship when there’s a larger ship next door with airplanes parked on top, right? I remember being aboard Savannah and having the ship pretty much to myself, which was eerie and kind of sad. The ship never got the TLC she needed, which is a shame because hers is a huge, historic story. But, for the kids (big and small) who made up most of the museum’s clientele, Savannah was a plate of broccoli while Yorktown and that collection of zoomy airplanes was a king-sized Happy Meal.

There was yet another wrinkle: Savannah still had a nuclear reactor on board, and that obligated the museum to a carefully-regulated regimen of inspections and other requirements. (I have copies of all that paperwork, so…yeah, it wasn’t small.) When you realize that ships of any size are maintenance hogs as it is and that museums only have so much budget to go around…you sort of understand why, when Savannah was due for drydocking and hull inspection in 1994, the museum gave the ship back. The Maritime Administration did what needed doing, and then Savannah was sent to slumber in the James River Reserve Fleet. They couldn’t just sell Savannah for surplus, not with the reactor and all. To make a long story short, Savannah ended up in Baltimore for upkeep, the reactor was pulled out a couple years ago, and now last details are being worked out so that the project can formally end this December. After that, MarAd can dispose of the ship like any other surplus hull.

The preferred outcome of all this would be that Savannah is preserved as a museum. A lot of interior and exterior work has been done throughout this process that would make it a turnkey project. The reactor is gone, of course, but the ship feels like a living thing again, right down to the ship’s music system being back in working order, playing music the passengers would have heard back in the day. Modifications have been made in machinery and reactor spaces that make them the perfect setting for science exhibits (you can walk through the containment vessel!). Not to mention, there’s so much furniture and art still aboard. The ship’s a time capsule in all the best ways. It’s the polar opposite of what happened with poor old United States, where so much was just gone (and butchered) and the ship was a shell. Savannah‘s ready to go, thanks to a lot of work and a lot of people who have cared.

That’s the most-wanted outcome. Savannah, Georgia wants the ship and seemed like a lock until a wrinkle came up that may or may not be resolved by December. There’s interest in keeping the ship in Baltimore but a permanent berth there will be a couple years in the making. And, unfortunately, the owner of the current pier wants the ship gone in December. Some things need to happen fast to get Savannah an interim berth. Otherwise, it’s entirely possible the ship goes back to the James River Reserve Fleet, a lot of loving work goes to ruin, and the ship ends up sold for scrap or reefed. The Association has a video in which Jim Delgado spells out the stakes, and when Jim Delgado speaks, it’s worth listening. This is important enough that I’ll let you watch it before we continue.

All of this means that all of us have a lot on our minds, including the possibility of the unthinkable…and while I’ve got too many memories of what happened to the Big U for me to not not worry, today is a chance to see the ship again, be amazed by what’s been done, and have a grand time in the company of folks who love this ship as much as I do.

Once you’re aboard, you’ve stepped into another era. Someone once described the ship as a cross between Star Trek and Mad Men, and it’s apt. This ship is alive in a way I’ve never seen before, and members of the Association and people involved in the decommissioning are on hand, telling stories and sharing information. One gentleman is telling stories of his days in the nuclear Navy. When he talks about his own interview by Admiral Rickover, I immediately stop and listen in. This gentleman’s interrogation by the Kindly Old Gentleman wasn’t the wringer that others went through (and there’s tons of Rickover stories here), but no way was I going to miss a firsthand account. 

After a little bit, we’re summoned into the ship’s lounge for a presentation about the ship’s status and future, and then there’s a few moments for some Association business. We get to see the video that I linked above. There’s a moment when a lady whose father served aboard Savannah donated a plaque she found in his collection, commemorating the ship’s port call in South Korea. And then it’s time for lunch in the veranda bar. There’s deli sandwiches, boxes of pizza, what looks like spaghetti or lasagna in big aluminum pans. It’s a really generous spread. I help myself to a big slice of cheese pizza and a can of root beer, then plop down at a table. I never thought I’d have a meal aboard this ship; yet here I am, and life is good. After that, I roam around the deck just aft, then come inside and buy a few things from the souvenir shop, do a little more exploring and take some pictures.

Out aft of the bar, one of the docents is talking with someone and I join the conversation, sharing recollections of the Patriots Point days and how much better things look now. Off in the distance, we can see what’s left of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, and after all I’d seen and read from far away, the reality was chilling to see in person. 

The docent and I head down one deck, and we happen into a former crewman who’s helping out today. One thing leads to another, and this gentleman gives me a private tour of the ship. We spend probably the next 90 minutes going anywhere and everywhere, from former cabins and dining areas and the kitchen spaces, to the reactor spaces (including a walk through the reactor containment vessel) and engineering spaces.

There’s also a visit to the control room, where they will let you touch one button, and it’s a lot of fun to mash:

Along the way, my guide’s telling me stories and sharing anecdotes, at one point proudly pointing out a bracket he was told to make and that’s still there. We have the best time going through everything, and I’m listening and asking questions and cracking the occasional joke, and knowing the ship as well as he does, I get to see some things the average visitor doesn’t. It just couldn’t have gone better.

We end up back in the purser’s lounge, resting after more of a workout than we realized, but it was so worth it. After talking for a little bit, it’s time for me to depart. I give him profuse thanks for the tour, then head toward the gangway. As I leave the ship, I pat her on the side and tell her to keep her courage. I seriously want to go aboard the Liberty ship John W. Brown, moored across the pier, but time’s not on my side right now. I’ve got to get to the train station for the next leg of the journey, and after shotgunning a bag of M&Ms and a Coke Zero, I set off.

Back through the tunnel, toward the airport, to the train station from which I departed last June. I park the car, grab my messenger bag, and head trackside. I park myself on a bench and get caught up on messages. A little wren flits around near my feet, scavenging for little bits of stray food. I talk to the little one for a moment; it’s nice to have a friend while I’m so far from home. A northbound train pulls up, and most of the people waiting trackside board it. A few moments later comes my ride. When I booked this trip, I decided to live a little and try out the next-generation Acela, and here we are.

As it turns out, I don’t have a seatmate on this ride, and so I can sort of relax. We’re slow leaving Baltimore, but out on open stretches we get to going pretty fast, and between that and the pretty nice seats it’s a pleasant ride. There aren’t as many stops with the Acela, and between that and the faster speed you do notice it’s a shorter trip time-wise. Not mind-bendingly fast, of course, but the ride is less of a time sink.

Along the way I write in my travel journal and listen to some music. I hadn’t much been in the mood to listen to music on this trip, but now that some pressure was off, I felt like it. Since it’s a train trip, I had to start with “Driver 8,” and followed it with “Can’t Ignore The Train” – realizing that I’d heard the train and couldn’t resist its call to a wider world, and here I am speeding toward the big city. Then the recently-reissued 10,000 Maniacs Unplugged album took me the rest of the way, and not having listened to it in forever, I’d forgotten how good that record is. Natalie and the guys made my heart full, serenaded me the trip long, until we disappeared into the tunnel leading to Penn Station. From there, guided by muscle memory, I threaded my way to the subway station and a ride to my hotel downtown.

More to come….

Although there’s been some changes in recent years, you still don’t see as many gimmicks as you would in other golf broadcasts. It’s still kind of a throwback. In the opening montages, you don’t see these tough-guy hero shots of golfers backed by edgy music; you’re much more likely to see gauzy beauty shots of the tree-lined road to the clubhouse, of Amen Corner, of the stone bridge at 13 over the tributary of Rae’s Creek. Even the commercials are lower-voltage corporate image spots instead of attitude-driven, in-your-face hard sells. All in all, the final round is a soothing broadcast to have on in the background, and it’s also the last surviving example of a kind of broadcast I grew up with. It’s what sports broadcasting used to be, before we traded in our Vin Scullys and Jack Whitakers for sportscasters whose main selling points were attitude and volume. Yes, it could seem stodgy and stuffy, more than a whiff of “don’t upset Grandpa,” but there was a dignity to how they handled their duties, a dignity that’s missing in so much in modern media, let alone modern life.

This year, the tournament takes place against what’s been going on at CBS in general. As it’s been impossible to ignore, what’s left of CBS has been swallowed up by yet another conglomerate that’s making deep cuts. CBS Radio News will soon be no more. The Broadcast Center, I’ve heard from reliable sources, seems more and more like a ghost town. Television City and Black Rock were sold off a while back. As sad as it is to see play out, CBS has been little more than a brand in a portfolio for a long time. The network that Mr. Paley and Dr. Stanton brought to greatness really started to ebb in the mid-1980s, a victim of changing times and changing philosophies in the business and financial realms, and downhill has rolled the snowball since. It’s a longer story than I care to write here, and the story has been told many times over by now, anyway. 

Yet there are times, like this weekend, when I think about what’s now a lost world. Really, not just for CBS, but for the broadcast industry in general, and the audience as well. The changes in television, the booming music and flashy graphics, the explosion of options, shorter attention spans, the constant need to monetize everything…it’s rare when a broadcast is allowed to be the pleasant company you enjoy on a lazy weekend afternoon.

All of this came back to mind, not only because of today’s broadcast, but because I recently watched again this clip I first stumbled across about 15 years ago. It uncorked a lot of memories (and if you read the comments on the original YouTube page, you’ll see I’m not alone):

That’s the end of the 1983 Talladega 500, which CBS aired on July 31, 1983. So many things come back from my memories: Don Robertson’s voice announcing the billboards, the lengthy credit roll over still-store images, the peerless voice of Ken Squier, and the way CBS would end these kinds of big broadcasts with wistful music. (In this case, it was “Rising Star,” the love theme from the movie The Electric Horseman. CBS used cuts from that soundtrack for several years on its NASCAR broadcasts, including the main theme under the starting grid. CBS Sports liked using soundtrack cuts, such as Chuck Mangione’s “Children of Sanchez” for some big events, or Lalo Schifrin’s theme to St. Ives for golf tournaments. But, I digress.)

Now even that seems like a thousand years ago, even though it’s only been four decades. And so many of the people in that credit roll from Talladega are no longer with us. So many folks in that recruiting video are also gone now. But, really, all of it’s a lost world. The voice of Don Robertson speaking for Pontiac and Sears? Pontiac’s gone now, and the once-mighty Sears is all but dead, victim of modern corporate techniques. Don Robertson died a few years ago. So did Ken Squier. 

But there’s something else. That long closing credit roll gives what’s due to a lot of hard-working people who made possible that telecast you’d just watched. They were the people that made all that hard work and coordination happen, and made it look so effortless. Many of them had been at the network for decades, built lives and careers around CBS, and represented so much institutional and technical knowledge that would be impossible to replace. You can get an idea of what that world was like if you watch this video, which CBS produced in the 1980s while seeking the next generation of technicians and other broadcast specialists. (And happy coincidence: you can tell that much of the location footage was taken while CBS was setting up to cover a race at Talladega.)

For some people, that tape is an interesting artifact. For me, though, it has an emotional punch. Not just in what I remember from that era, and not just nostalgia for a time I missed. It’s because it makes me think of people I know. One of my friends is a CBS retiree; he worked there for more than 50 years. His wife also used to work at CBS. Last year I went up and spent the day with him. He told me stories, shared artifacts, showed me clips that he worked on and told me the stories behind them. Those stories told of teamwork, of craftsmanship, of a pride he still felt in the work he did. It was a privilege to hear those stories firsthand. And it made me a little sad that I missed it all. To this day I can hear the voices of CBS announcers that I remember, see little visual cues or characteristic qualities in a promo, and it takes me back, makes me smile…and makes me ache, even more so since some of the people who helped make that history are my friends. It makes me ache for an era that’s long gone, but it also makes me ache because the people who made all that happen are fewer with the years…and with them go so much history, so many memories, so many stories. And it makes me realize I need to get back and spend more time with my friend and his wife while I can, not just because I love the stories, but because they’re sweet people of whom I am very fond.

Progress is inevitable, I know. The strange new media landscape makes so much more possible. (Heck, I’m the beneficiary of that, since it means I’m now executive producer of a program we produce at work. And I assemble that program on a ridiculously small and ridiculously powerful laptop computer, running an editing package that cost me nothing to download, and yet can do in a second the kinds of effects my CBS retiree friend would spend untold hours doing in sessions at Broadway Video back in the day.) The networks that dominated television 50 years ago are now competing for eyeballs and clicks with hundreds of other outlets. It says everything when NBC’s centenary is coming up and it’s barely registering, let alone that its anniversary promo would make you think most of the network’s history took place after 1984 (blink and you’ll miss Dave Garroway). And I’ve found out the hard way that modern corporations really aren’t interested in legacy or tradition unless it can somehow be monetized. 

And yet, this one Sunday a year when, by decree of the venue, a sports broadcast is allowed to breathe…it makes me think of what we once had, what we once took for granted, and what’s vanished.

I didn’t wait for the obvious question. “We’ll take it,” I said. We needed a truck, having been without one since somebody in a minivan tried to create a middle lane during a traffic jam and totaled ours several years before. I hated having to rent a truck when I needed to haul something, and a truck was on my list of things to get.

Two days later we went back over, bringing lunch from a favorite drive-inn near my hometown. After we’d had a pleasant lunch with my parents, we went into the yard where my new old truck was waiting. Dad handed me the keys and an envelope full of paperwork, we took some photos to commemorate the moment, and then off we went. I’d barely made it out of the driveway before the tears I’d been holding back started to fall, and hard. I must have cried for the first three miles of the trip home.

For as long as I’d been around, squarebody Chevrolet trucks like this one had been a part of our family. To sit in one took me back to countless childhood memories of Saturday mornings, getting a biscuit and a big glass bottle of Dr. Pepper and riding around wherever the road took us, or going to work with Dad at the sawmill, the occasional Saturday I’d ride the mail route with him, or countless errands near and far. These trucks were as much a part of my childhood as the little church up the street or the Sears catalog. And now, the last of the family’s squarebodies was coming home with me.

Like all the family’s trucks, there was no mistaking it was a work truck. Dad’s trucks were always the lowest trim level (Custom Deluxe, which meant anything but), nothing power in the interior, no air conditioning, no fancy trim. This one was the same, the kind of truck that shaped my feelings about what pickup trucks should be. I know some folks like their big shiny trucks with the fancy trim and plush interiors and full-power everything, but I’d never want one like that. This one looks at you and says “Let’s go get a load of lumber or some concrete blocks and get to work on something, and I won’t care if I get a battle scar or two.” It’s a truck that cuts the crap, and that’s the kind of truck I love.

Although the 90-minute voyage to our homestead went without any drama, it was obvious the truck had some issues. Some I could smell (what’s with the smell of gasoline around the filler door?) and some I’d found out (no functioning horn). It also didn’t have a heater core, though Dad had one inbound through the local Carquest. There was surface rust on the top of the bed. The engine tended to flood out. A trailer neck had bashed into the tailgate a few months before, leaving a big dent. As they say, the bones were solid, but it was a fixer-upper.

Before I could do anything else, of course, I had to get square with the county and the state. The property taxes on a 33-year-old truck weren’t that much, which was good. Of course, I canceled out that luck by going to the DMV on the same day the statewide computer system decided to crash, and hard. After a long wait, I went home, new license plate in hand. But then Dad’s home county didn’t get a notification and kept sending him tax notices. It got resolved, but along the way it was every caricature of bureaucracy come to life.

Now with the official stuff done, it was time to start fixing what needed it. I’d done minor repairs before, but one major repair effort with my Cavalier that ended in disaster had left me gun-shy about trying anything new. On the other hand, it wasn’t easy to find people who could fix a vehicle whose technology was this old-school, and even that would cost more than I had. And, I mean, I had some tools – in fact, Mom had given me a huge tool kit she’d won in a local drawing she’d randomly entered, so I was set. Why not see what I could do? When the heater core came in, I looked up some instructions on how to do it, then screwed up my courage and dropped the heater box. Inside the box was a mouse nest (abandoned, thankfully). Everything got very thoroughly cleaned, the heater core got installed and connected, and with heart wedged between adenoids I started the truck to see if the repair took. Somehow, it had.

From there, the other little chores got done: fixing the horn, polishing the paint, then grinding the rust off the top of the bed and repainting it. Most of what I did in the first couple years was accessible stuff that didn’t require too much risk. I didn’t yet feel comfortable doing more intense projects, but I was also allergic to paying someone to do it. Not only am I not rich, but I just don’t like paying someone to do a job that I can do myself with a clear set of instructions.

The truck was going to force my hand, anyway. One summer day we went to get some building supplies and barely made it home. The engine was stumbling out, and a couple times the truck died on the highway. Somehow we made it home and got unloaded, and then the truck just sat for a while as I did some figuring. Bad sending unit? Bad gasoline? Dirty fuel tank? Carburetor problems? Fuel pump? Everything seemed questionable, and the more I looked, the more I figured a general overhaul was in order. So the whole fuel system got redone, from cleaning the fuel tank and changing the rubber lines to installing a new fuel pump and charcoal canister.

Then came the real fun: rebuilding the carburetor. I had visions of things going really wrong there, of a rookie mistake causing a stuck throttle. But, good student that I am, I did my homework and ordered the correct parts and supplies. After a couple evenings of work, the old Quadrajet was in better shape than it had been in years. Getting it dialed in once reinstalled was an adventure, but two years and several thousand miles later it’s proven reliable.

Since then I’ve done more projects. I replaced the water pump and flushed the cooling system. The transmission has a new gasket and filter. The rear differential, which was covered in gunk from a leak, got serviced (and few things are worse than the smelly glop that is aged, dirty gear oil). I rebuilt the power steering pump. The electrical circuit from the battery to the starter and alternator was rewired, and the alternator got overhauled, too. Last year I finally replaced the window rubber in the doors, and the cab is nicely weatherproof now.

Along the way I’ve found all kinds of surprises, such as the battery cable with a length of electrical tape covering a couple inches of missing insulation. When I replaced the shock absorbers, I compressed the old ones to see how shot they actually were. One of them was still compressed when I took it to the scrap metal bin a few weeks ago, so it’s no wonder why the poor truck rattled my fillings whenever we hit a bump. I’ve found things that made me wonder how the truck got this far, and yet we keep going.

I’ve kept a list of all the things I’ve done for the truck, and all the systems I’ve fixed, one at a time. Most all of it has been done with that set of tools Mom gave me the day I brought it home. It’s been an education, and mostly a fun one. Sometimes I’ve inflicted setbacks on myself (I learned the hard way the difference between inch-pounds and foot-pounds on a torque wrench) but I’ve always worked my way through it.

And that’s the thing: it’s only been me doing all these things. Call it a Generation X-er’s instinct that nobody’s going to help you, call it autodidactism, or call it whatever you may, but no one else’s hands have been doing the work. Thus far at least, it’s worked. Fortunately, a Squarebody with a small-block engine is not only easy to work on, but since they’re common as dirt just about anything you’d need is widely available.

Maybe if I were more enterprising and outgoing and visionary I’d have chronicled the adventure and turned it into something educational. I mean, I work around television in my day job, and I love Vivian Howard, so…maybe I could have my own series and everything, an automotive version of Kitchen Curious. (Imagine me, a purposeful smile on my face, one of the cats in my arm, as I stroll out of the house and head purposefully toward my workbench! Imagine the vigorous string music behind the gorgeous drone shots of the local Advance Auto Parts store! Imagine me strolling the aisles of the hometown Harbor Freight with a mechanic friend who’s telling me about the merits and demerits of floor jacks versus bottle jacks! Imagine me having interesting and informative and artistically-captured conversations with auto body repair instructors and junkyard owners! This concept sells itself! Somebody get the teevee people on the phone! Somebody round up some funding sources and let’s get this going! Y’all know where to find me.)

I haven’t kept a spreadsheet on how much I’ve spent fixing up the truck. Maybe it would be fun to know, but I really haven’t minded any of the money I’ve spent on it. Some of it is an investment in my own education, in the skills I’ve picked up as I’ve done all this work. But the real value is in keeping this truck on the road, not only for its usefulness, but as a link to where I came from.

Sometimes I’ll have fun with the fact that I own it, calling it the Rolling Energy Crisis (I mean, it has the aerodynamics of a brick and it gets 11 miles per gallon with a tailwind) or the Herkimer Battle Jitney. But underneath it all, I know how much I love that big ol’ truck, that sometimes I can’t believe I actually own it, and how it’s a reminder of so much that I left behind in yesteryear, and of so much that will never leave me.

My parents implored Santa to do something about it, and the following Christmas I got a portable cassette recorder.

Over the years to come, I would make many tapes on that machine and the several that would follow when they inevitably broke. But the very first tape I made with that first tape recorder it is an interesting artifact. On Side A, there’s a few moments from Christmas morning: me goofing around and Dad’s voice commanding me to bring something to him; me giving a couple of inventories of my haul from Santa. Then there’s an extended cut from the next day, when Dad thought it would be hilarious if we secretly recorded Sunday dinner at my grandparents’ house, and so we conspired to hide the tape recorder on a nearby shelf. In the moment, it was funny, for we played it back about an hour later to our astonished family (at one point my grandmother, hearing herself say something kind of harsh, did a spit-take worthy of Danny Thomas). Now, with half the people at that table now dead, it’s a precious artifact. It’s the only recording I have of my great-grandfather’s voice.

Side B, though, has a time capsule of a different sort. After I got home from Sunday school, I turned on the hand-me-down cabinet-model stereo in my room (which didn’t have a cassette deck, alas), placed the tape recorder next to the speakers, and recorded the last 45 minutes or so of that week’s “American Country Countdown.” That’s interesting in a lot of ways. In the previous installment I talked about country music being what I grew up with, so the eleven songs that led the week’s chart are a good idea of what the typical week in my fourth-grade life would have sounded like.

For the uninitiated, “American Country Countdown” was the country music version of “American Top 40.” Like AT40, it most often aired on weekends. It was hosted by the super-cool Bob Kingsley, who had one of the best radio voices I’ve ever heard (seriously, listen to some of this for a little bit and I dare you to not keep listening), and who was so good at telling you the little stories that gave you a glimpse into the artists and their hit songs. As the best DJs could, back when radio was an art form, Bob had this way of making you feel like you were a couple friends spending a few hours together on a weekend morning. (I came to appreciate this even more about a decade later, for one of my responsibilities working Sunday mornings at the radio station was playing “American Country Countdown.” By then it arrived at the station as a package of four CDs. Each segment within an hour was a separate track, and I’d pause the CD player after each track to do our local breaks. At the start of 1993, our program director figured out how to integrate the “Countdown” discs into our automation, and that was the beginning of the end of my young radio career. But, I digress.)

I wish I could say my recording was perfect, but it’s far from it. (I keep hoping the complete show will surface someday, either through one of the video/audio sites or that I’ll happen across the LPs on an auction site; regardless, if anyone reading this has the whole program, please let me know, for I’m interested.) It’s straight off the speaker, and that means you get background noise. My folks were wanting me to get finished so we could go over to my grandparents’ house for lunch (where Dad and I pulled our prank). You can hear me opening and closing the door to my room, and my voice calling out to my folks, trying to buy time. (I was a completist, even then.) At one point you can hear me trying to sing along to the David Frizzell song. On the other hand, I had the foresight (or laziness?) to keep the commercials and IDs intact, and those speak not only of a bygone era in radio production but also of local businesses that are gone with the wind.

But, what are we waiting for, right? Let’s get into the songs that led Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart for the week of December 18, 1982. (The full rundown is visible here, if you like. There’s some stuff on there that’s pure gold, and some stuff that didn’t age well, but that’s the nature of time capsules, no?)

Up five notches (as Kingsley would say) to number 11 is Johnny Lee and Friends, with an enhanced version of “Cherokee Fiddle.” For some reason, I loved this song a lot as a kid, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the chance to capture it on tape was the reason I wanted to record this program. One of Johnny’s friends on this version is reportedly Charlie Daniels. Say what you will about Charlie (and I have about his later years), but the man was a musical genius, and without peer on the fiddle.

At number 10, up three notches this week, is Rosanne Cash with “I Wonder.” It’s…well, only vaguely country music (to borrow a line from William Poundstone, curved lines and considerable imagination must be used). It’s closer to “Linda Ronstadt with Nelson Riddle” than “Loretta Lynn with Conway Twitty.” On the other hand, it’s Rosanne freakin’ Cash, who is awesome and is welcome to do whatever she wants.

Number nine is one of the first George Strait songs I remember, that’s now a deep cut. “Marina Del Rey,” up two notches this week, has George pining over a beach weekend he’s just spent with a mysterious lady. It’s lovely, evocative, haunting. George Strait knows how to select good songs and interpret them just right; in this one, you feel both ecstasy and ache. I can’t think of a bad George Strait song, but without question this is one of his best.

Bob leads into this week’s number eight song (up one from last week) by mentioning that David Frizzell (brother of Lefty) plays a bit part in the new Clint Eastwood movie Honkytonk Man. (As did several other real-life country artists, including beloved Marty Robbins in a scene made even more poignant by the fact that Marty died one week before the movie’s release.) It wasn’t David Frizzell’s first go-around with Eastwood, for he had contributed to the soundtrack for Any Which Way You Can. Clint helped make Frizzell’s first solo album a reality, and it’s from that album that we get “Lost My Baby Blues.” Frizzell’s voice was perfect for songs about getting drunk after getting dumped. (The same album also gave us the immortal “I’m Gonna Hire A Wino To Decorate Our Home,” without question the greatest song title in history. Young me missed the point of the song, loved the over-the-top mental imagery, and bought the single.)

Continuing that theme is Merle Haggard, whose “Going Where The Lonely Go” advances five positions this week. It’s a typical solid song from Merle Haggard in the early ’80s. He was reliable, one of the human gods on the country music Olympus of my childhood. Like Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and George Jones, Merle Haggard had just always been there, reliable as my dad’s Chevy truck.

Reba McEntire, some time before she became a Southern-fried queen of all media, is up four notches with “Can’t Even Get The Blues.” Even in this early track you get a glimpse of the exasperated Southern-fried sass that would become her trademark.

Hank Williams Jr. gets topical with this week’s fifth-place song, “The American Dream.” Bocephus takes on professional athletes signing million-dollar contracts (one wonders if Nolan Ryan’s ears were burning), well-dressed televangelists mooching for donations (“they want you to send your money to the Lord, but they give you their address”), and Democrats complaining about Reagan’s budget cuts, all while the rest of us are making hard choices about what we can afford. Hank was a few years away from fully embracing the outsized Bocephus character of “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight,” but for those who knew his albums’ deeper cuts, nothing to come stylistically or politically was really that much of a surprise. The post-chorus bridge incorporates the first line of “Hail to the Chief,” which is reprised at the end with Hank saying “Hail to the chief.” (The version we get here ends with that, but another version has Hank pausing for a moment before laughing and saying “Hail, yes. Heh-heh-heh!”)

My brother, then in his mid-teens, was becoming a full-blown Hank Jr. fan about this time; the macho Southern outdoorsman aesthetic of Hank’s music really resonated with him, and a few months later Mom took him to see Bocephus when he performed at the (now-demolished) Greenwood Civic Center. He also had all of Hank’s albums, and when he would do the driving he’d play Hank’s cassettes, and I thus got exposed to a lot of his late ’70s and early to mid-’80s work. Some of it is cartoonish, some of it has not aged well at all, some of it is outright gross (seriously, “Fat Friends” should never have existed), some of it goes places you wish it hadn’t, but if you know where to look there’s some really nice, sensitive and sometimes outright gorgeous stuff in there.

Kenny Rogers was white-hot in the early ’80s and it seemed like everything he touched turned into a best-seller. In his lead-in, Bob mentions that Rogers attributes much of his success to having an ear for good songs that he knows will become hits. That continues this week, as “A Love Song,” written by Lee Greenwood, is up four. Mom didn’t like Kenny Rogers and thought he acted like a conceited showboat, but even as a kid I could appreciate that he was a reliable hitmaker with mass appeal, and even if I wasn’t necessarily a fan I couldn’t deny that some of his stuff was just plain good. (“Love Will Turn You Around,” which he had taken to #1 earlier in the year and was used as the theme to Six Pack, may be slickly-produced, but…my word, that groove. It’s a particular favorite.)

Number three this week is John Anderson, up three on the charts with “Wild and Blue.” Lots of fiddle, lots of steel guitar, lots of John’s twangy, yodeling voice encompassing the ache and frustration at the song’s heart. It’s a great version of a great song, but within about three months it’s going to be lost in the super-colossal shadow of a breakout hit from the same album.

Aw, son. Jerry Reed’s up two this week as “The Bird,” one of his reliable comedic turns, moves into second place. Reed leaned so much into his goofy comic persona with his songs and on-screen appearances, but, my word, the man was an outright genius with a guitar.

Bob leads in to this week’s number one song by telling us that for his hit songs, Earl Thomas Conley – who, from Bob’s description, sounds like kind of an introvert – gets inspiration from things that he’s learned in his life. Each song is, in a way, Conley saying “Well, if you liked that, here’s another side of me.” It’s something that Conley expects will be happening the rest of his life. With that, up one notch to take this week’s title is “Somewhere Between Right and Wrong.” And wherever that may be, this song makes it sound like a rockin’ good time.

And after the fade-out and Bob’s closing remarks, my efforts to stall for time with my parents gave out and the recording abruptly ends.

Many more tapes were to come in the months and years ahead. I have many of them, and sometimes I’ll listen to them. The sound isn’t the greatest, but the memories are vivid. I’d never dare let anyone else listen to them, but I wouldn’t trade them for anything. It doesn’t seem like it really was that long ago, and it’s strange how these sounds can bridge the decades I’ve lived, and yet some of the things I captured – like these eleven songs – make me glad I got to experience the times I’ve lived.

The first of my many adventures came the day after graduation. A friend of mine who spent a half-century at one of the big television networks has an amazing collection of rare materials that he collected throughout his career. He’s now at the point where he has to figure out what to do with it, and I agreed to come up and have a look.

But there’s a catch: he lives near New York City. And right now, I don’t feel like flying anywhere. To make a long story short, I drove to his home not far from Manhattan. It was a long drive, yes, but the drive through the New Jersey suburbs wasn’t anywhere as bad as I thought it would be, and the time I spent with my friend and his wife, and lunch at a local diner with one of his lifelong friends (another network veteran) was most enjoyable. When it was time to leave, I could not believe it when I looked out the window of my car and saw the Manhattan skyline off to my left. It was surreal, but it was really happening.

One of the better parts of driving versus flying is that it let me do things my own way, not tied to any schedule but my own. This gave me a chance to spend the night in Camden, where I could wander around the refurbished RCA factory that evening, and spend part of the next morning wandering around the battleship New Jersey, now very nicely preserved as a museum ship.

Across the Delaware were some stunning views of Philadelphia. It’s a city I love, for a lot of reasons. But a couple times I looked down the waterfront and thought of a landmark that’s no longer there, and my heart ached just a bit. Afterwards, it was over to Bala Cynwyd and a quick visit with an old friend, and then back home, with one more night en route to give my aging carcass some rest.

I didn’t have that long to be idle, for late the next week I was off to Huntsville for further business: a meeting with a former student who’s now one of the senior folks at a television station there, and a visit to the Space and Rocket Center the next morning with a couple friends. It was my first visit to Huntsville since 1988, and a lot has changed at the Space and Rocket Center since then. As long as I could stop thinking about how long it had been, it was an enjoyable visit.

A couple of weeks, themselves full, passed before it was time to set out yet again. My friend who works at ABC in New York invited me up to spend another morning with him as he worked on Good Morning America. As if that wasn’t enough, ABC has decamped from its longtime West Side campus to a new facility at Hudson Square, and my friend offered to show me around the place. How could I say no?

This time, I wasn’t doing all the driving. I’d only have to take myself as far as Baltimore, and Amtrak would do much of the rest. So last Friday, bright and early, I made the I-77 to I-81 trip for the third time in 11 months, and it never gets any shorter. Happily, I was spared lengthy delays en route and made much better time than I anticipated. The next morning, I packed a smaller bag for an overnight trip, drove to the train station next to the Baltimore airport, and prepared to ride the rails.

I’ve traveled by rail a few times before – the Alaska Railroad from Fairbanks to Anchorage, and New Jersey Transit from Port Jervis to Penn Station on my first trip to New York a long time ago – but it’s the first time I’d traveled by Amtrak. On a whim I bid on an upgrade and, for a few dollars more, ended up in a Business Class car that was less than half full. The trip was about three hours and went without incident. Had I not been kind of keyed up, it would have been a good chance to take a nap. Instead, I listened to some music and wrote a little in my journal, looked out the window and occasionally took some video footage of the passing landscape, footage that I may edit into a little film if I can get myself to follow through.

The scenes outside got busier, the skyline I’d seen from my car last month came into view, and before long we disappeared into darkness and emerged into the station. Up an escalator and into Moynihan Train Hall, a lovely adaptation of an old building for a new use. I’ll never know what it was like to emerge into the old Penn Station (although I do know what it’s like to emerge into the depressing current one), but what I saw as I came up the escalator gave me an idea of what the old one was like. I got a quick bite to eat, and then realized I had to kill a couple hours before my hotel was ready for check-in.

You would think I’d be resourceful enough to figure that out. Unfortunately, it’s mid-June. Prime tourist season. On a Saturday. The sun is out. And it’s hot out. Hot. We were in the throes of the heat dome, in a concrete and asphalt canyon. I tried to figure out where to go and what to do, and decided to default to what I knew. Thus began an ill-advised hike the 15 blocks to Rockefeller Center, where I knew I could fritter away the time before my 4 p.m. check-in. At 42nd Street, I took a side trip to pay my regards to Patience and Fortitude.

This was made all the more interesting by a very large tour group of teenagers from another country, and I had to weave my way past and through them to get to my next stops. Seven blocks later, the Channel Gardens beckoned, and ahead of me the familiar monolith of 30 Rock.

I wheezed through the revolving doors into that dark, glorious lobby with all its glorious air conditioning. Down into the concourse, I hoped to find a place to sit and rest…only to find there were none, except for the patrons of various eateries. After a while I gave up, figured I could catch the subway downtown, and vamp there until 4 p.m. But the subway entrance I was promised on the map wasn’t there; construction on that corner blocked off the entrance. After running myself ragged, I took shelter in a building’s public concourse, and then bought a bottle of water in the building’s coffee shop. A cheery barista rang the sale up for me, and we traded lighthearted comments about the hellish conditions outside. It didn’t take me long to drain the bottle, and I soon yielded my seat to a family and headed onward.

Finally, a subway station! Unfortunately, the entry area was cramped, with few turnstiles, and some of the folks exiting the line weren’t exactly using situational awareness. I didn’t realize I was standing in the path of the cashier’s window, and a guard instructed me to move away. By this point, tired and fed up, I semi-hollered that I was waiting for the people leaving the turnstiles to figure out what they were going to do. I paid my fare and went onward. It was the first time I’d lost my temper with anyone while visiting Manhattan, and I felt kind of badly about it. On the other hand, it’s Manhattan, the place where the F-word is used the way most people use “and.” In the grand scheme of things, it’s a minor sin.

The E Train took me south, and after my stop, I emerged at a place I’ve known about all my life, but whose meaning forever changed one awful morning.

My hotel was right next to the World Trade Center site. Professor Mondo had mentioned it after his visit a few months back, and when I saw some surprisingly good rates I booked my stay there. After a little homework, I realized it was a hotel that’s etched into my memory for another reason: on the afternoon of Sept. 13, 2001, CBS aired some footage from inside its ruined, dust-covered lobby, showing the abandoned computer screens still going, and the flashing warnings at the control consoles near the check-in desk. That scene, its own version of Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” has haunted me ever since. (You can see that footage at approximately 15 minutes into this link. It’s not in the original context in which I saw it, but it’s the same images.) And now, here I was, in the very building where it happened.

As it happens, the hotel is being renovated. The lobby was closed, and we were shunted to a side entrance. The check-in desk was now on the fourth floor, in what looked like a repurposed meeting room. And there was a line out in the hallway. The two clerks on duty were obviously swamped, and not all the rooms were ready; the two men in front of me were very unhappy about this, and were trying to demand some kind of compensation. I braced for similar news and was already trying to figure out how I would handle it, but my room was ready to go. Back around to the elevators I went, and I punched the button for my floor…only to realize it was an elevator where you have to present your keycard to select your floor. I realized this just as the other passenger in the elevator was about to help me. We kind of chuckled about it, and I used my standard line about “they do that just to cross up those of us who are up here from the country.”

Once inside my room, I collapsed on the bed. I was soaking wet, sore, tired. But the view out my window was not what I expected. Directly ahead of me was the Oculus, One World Trade Center…and the first of two giant square holes, their outlines ringed in black. There weren’t any words for it, and throughout the evening I’d keep coming back to that view.

After cooling down for a while, I changed shirts and set out again. The memorial was my first stop…all the names along the outlines. It really reminded me of my first visit to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, and how nothing about the scope of the lives lost had ever really got to me until I saw the size of the Wall and how small the names were. That’s all I can compare this to. You have to see it to really get it.

Down into the Oculus I went, both to look around and to find a bottle of water, which I finally found at a Hudson News store. There wasn’t much time to drink it, or much of a place to relax with it. (Tourist season, remember?) Instead, I hoofed it back up and out. I’d wanted to visit the Brooklyn Bridge, since a very dear friend of mine grew up in Brooklyn, and…well, I was nearby. Unfortunately, everybody else in the entire world had the same idea that afternoon, and the pedestrian lane of the bridge was solid humanity. I noped out and headed for a Duane Reade store, where I bought provisions for the evening.

Then it was back to my room for a much-needed shower that almost made me feel like a human again. I spent the evening looking out the window at that unforgettable view, doing a lot of thinking about what happened there, and how everything forever changed that day. I was simultaneously amazed by what was before me, and haunted by the horrors that had played out here nearly a quarter-century ago. And since Fate has a wicked sense of humor, just before bedtime I learned that we’d bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities. Tomorrow was going to be interesting. But I got out a book I’d brought and did some reading, hoping to get my mind off things. It worked well enough.

I had a decent, if truncated, night’s rest, beating my alarm by about an hour, and was up and out by 5:30. My friend was expecting me at 6:30, and I wanted to give myself some extra time in case anything happened en route. I left the hotel, wandered through the World Trade Center site and took some photos, and then started walking north. Even in the early morning hours, it was getting hot and sticky, and by the time I got to Hudson Square I was spent. The front desk checked me in, my friend came down and greeted me, and up we went to start the day’s fun.

For the next three hours I got to see professionals at work, and there’s kind of a vicarious thrill that comes with it. You’re watching this stuff happen in real time, and yet the people you’re with have done this so much and for so long. It makes me think of really good doctors performing surgery, responding to the unexpected with calm wit and trained hands. The breaking news from the night before threw a curveball into the proceedings, and it was interesting to be there when the network went to a special report. But it got done.

After the morning’s duties were done, my friend and I went just about everywhere we could inside ABC’s new facility. To say it’s impressive is an understatement, and in some places I felt I’d stepped ten years into the future. It made me wish we had something similar where I work, but since I don’t have anywhere near the resources Disney could pour into this facility, it ain’t happenin’ soon. Oh, well. But as much fun as the tour was, it was as much fun to spend time with some of the folks my friend works with. I learned long ago that the people who like what they do are eager to share what they know with you, if you’re genuinely interested in it. It’s opened many a door, and many a friendship, for me, and this trip reminded me of how valuable that is. Now, when I come to New York, it’s not for a tour so much as it is to be with friends again, friends who happen to work in the teevee business.

Noon came and went, and we had to part ways. For me, it was one more ride on the E back to Moynihan Train Hall, and then the train to Baltimore. I had a quick bite, spent some time writing in my journal, and then off to the very full Amtrak 87. It was scorching hot outside, and our take-no-crap conductor reminded us all at every stop to be safe and stay hydrated if we were getting off. The heat also messed with our progress, and outside Aberdeen, Maryland we were stopped for about 20 minutes due to heat issues. In due course, though, we were on our way, and I was back at BWI soon enough. From there, it was a not-too-lengthy drive to my hotel for the night.

The final morning of this trip, I was up in plenty of time to get ready, and then I headed east to Norfolk and a visit to the battleship Wisconsin, now moored as a museum ship at Nauticus.

There’s not as much to see on the self-guided tour as there is aboard New Jersey, but I also got to see some areas aboard Wisconsin that I couldn’t see aboard New Jersey, either. It was already getting really hot, and less than an hour later I was headed back across the river for Newport News and The Mariners’ Museum.

This was kind of a sentimental journey. The last time I was at The Mariners’ Museum was August 1991, when my family took a vacation to Newport News so I could do some research about s/s United States. As will tend to happen, a place gets frozen in your mind as it was the last time you saw it. Since then, the museum has changed a lot, and it’s going through some renovation now. It’s not a bad thing, and indeed there were a good many things I remember from back then that I was happy to see again. Maybe, though, it isn’t the changes that sadden you as much as the realization of how much time has passed. What seems like yesterday was nearly 34 years ago.

Driving through Newport News itself reminded me of this. I remember when we crossed the James River Bridge that first day back in 1991, and how I looked down the river at Newport News Shipbuilding and then down the waterfront, to the Big U languishing down at the CSX coal pier. USS Enterprise was in the shipyard, in the midst of an overhaul, and that I wasn’t expecting to see. Now Enterprise is at that yard again – that huge cube of an island can’t be mistaken for anything else – but this time, it’s the long goodbye. A few hundred yards away, though, a new Enterprise is under construction in a graving dock.

It wasn’t the ships that I was really thinking about. It was the time that had passed, how 34 years is the blink of an eye, and how no one knows where the time goes. That’s what was really in my head as I took one last look behind, then set a course for Emporia and then the long drive back to home, and the future. I got home later that night, much to the gratitude of two cats, one of whom was relieved to finally have his Emotional Support Human back home.

And after a month or so of travel, I’m thankful for all I’ve been able to do and see, but I need the rest. There may be short trips here and there over the next month, but none of the multi-state extravaganzas for a while, although I am hoping there will be a conference in the cards for me come September. For now, though, I need a break, and there’s plenty for me to see after here.

Here’s the November 24, 1958 Life magazine. I really should have done this one last week, I know, but better late than never. This is a favorite: on the cover is the awesome Kim Novak with a cat, billboarding a story about Bell, Book and Candle. I love Kim Novak, I’m a cat mom, and Bell, Book and Candle is among my favorite movies (and sometimes the older of our cats, who tends to stay close to me like a familiar, gets called Pyewacket – but, as any cat parent knows, any cat accumulates about 50 names in addition to their official name). What’s not to love?

Well, okay…as we’ll see, there’s not much to the story about Bell, Book and Candle. But we can still have some fun with this issue. Let’s commence:

It’s 1958, so we’re going to see recurring themes. Remember, in this era America was under a constant cloud of cigarette smoke and floating on a sea of booze. Here you see the oft-forgotten Kool penguin mascot – in the first panel, the poor little one is in peril. If you can actually feel pity for a cigarette mascot, I do here.

Meanwhile, King Sano cigarettes – with the fancy new filter, because filters were the big new thing – has as its mascot former diplomat John S. Young. “Time and again, in today’s tense situations, I see important people under pressure lighting up this new ‘soft smoke’ cigarette,” the ad quotes Young as saying. Hey, we’re dealing with the H-Bomb and guided missiles, the new space race, the Middle East, Berlin, the Congo, Quemoy and Matsu, and this smoldering situation in Vietnam…but hey, if it means boom times for the coffin-nail business, it’s all for the good, right?

It’s after hours at the agency and the boys at Sterling Cooper are letting their crew cuts down! And not only did they get Hughes Rudd to stop by and tickle the ivories, but their piano has a gigantic hand emerging from it. I’m especially amused by the line “Clear Heads Agree Calvert Is Better,” when nobody’s head is going to be clear after a while.

(And any booze under the “Calvert” brand reminds me of what racer Buddy Shuman reportedly told a woman who wondered how he got the courage to drive a car so fast on track: “I take ‘er through the straights and Lord Calvert takes ‘er through the turns.”)

Get plenty of Planters Cocktail Peanuts for the holidays. That can remained more or less the same into the 1980s. I remember this because we always had a can in the snack cupboard. My dad ate them a lot, and they were the definition of store-bought peanuts when I was a kid. The first time I tried dry-roasted peanuts, on a visit to my grandfather’s summer home, I thought they were exotic.

The ability of flooring to hold up to high heels was an important selling point in the ’50s and ’60s. There’s one in particular I remember where it implied a woman was jumping up and down on the flooring, on the points of her heels. Which you can completely see happening. (And you wouldn’t at all see someone like that being taken away for their own safety.)

Reader’s Digest Condensed Books were such a staple for so long. My grandfather’s summer home was lined with them. He never read them, I don’t think, but he’d just pay for them when Reader’s Digest would send them for approval. Now, of course, you can’t give them away.

The dream/fantasy scenes in the Maidenform ads never fail to crack me up (and bring to mind the MAD Magazine version that mashed up a Maidenform ad with Nude Descending A Staircase). And, of course, once you’re back from your space-age makeover, get back to work in the kitchen with all your spiffy General Electric appliances. The man of the house is gonna need something to settle all that Calvert Reserve from the office party.

“I dreamed I got out of a Chrysler automobile in my Maidenform bra! The only hooter holster with The Forward Look!”

And a neat, space-age decanter for Old Forester, just in time for the holiday season. It reminds me of a Palmolive bottle for some reason. And once it’s drained (which, if your husband’s a Sterling Cooper employee, won’t take long) it would likely make a dandy vase for the happiest flowers in town. hic

Okay, there’s a ton of automobile ads in this issue. Which is appropriate, since the cars of that era are best measured in gross tonnage anyway. Let’s handle most (if not all) of them now:

Holy crap, were the Lincolns up to 1960 these massive ingots of automobile. I’ve been aboard aircraft carriers before and these give me the same impression of overwhelming size. And yet I am captivated by them. Of course, the real challenge if you own one of these monsters now is finding parts for it. (Contrast this with what the Lincoln Continental became for the first half of the 1960s: one of the most beautiful automobiles ever.)

If the USS Lincoln is beyond your means (or perhaps too spendy), there’s always Mercury. It’s interesting when you compare how cars looked in 1950, still trying to get accustomed to a postwar world, then to sort of a happy medium in the mid ’50s…only to become rolling Las Vegas by 1959.

By comparison, the 1959 Ford, which would seem like wild styling any other year, is positively sedate by comparison. Then again, you could always buy this heartbreaking work of automotive genius:

The “Olds sucking a lemon” look is toned down for 1959, but the E-Car is already suffering headwinds and has only a model year left after this one. Somebody in our hometown had a ’59 Edsel that, when he was done with it (or when it was done with him), he just parked it in his back yard. By the time I was of age, the weeds had started to grow up around it and the paint had oxidized and all that. One day when I was 9 or 10, I got to sit in it for a minute when nobody was home. I wanted so much to buy that car and fix it up. Obviously, it didn’t happen. (There were reportedly many offers made to him for it and he refused to sell. Eventually it was hauled away, and I have no idea where it ended up. I probably wouldn’t want to know, anyhow. But I’ve had a soft spot for the 1959 Edsel ever since.)

If all that’s going on at the House of Henry, then what’s the General up to?

Wide-Track Pontiac for 1959! The choice of my father’s father, who loved them big ol’ Pontiacs. Art Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman became well-known for their Pontiac ads, which artistically enhanced the “wide track” effect and made Pontiacs seem four lanes wide.

Meanwhile, over at Chevrolet:

The famous “bat wing” Chevy for 1959. Cadillac’s fins went upward to their highest for 1959, but Chevrolet extended them outward. There’s a story – and I’m not sure how true it is – that the 1959 Chevy’s radical departure from the boxy 1958 design was because the Chevy designers found out about Chrysler’s “Forward Look” and this was their response. The outcome was a car whose looks you either love or hate. My maternal grandmother’s response was the latter. When my grandfather brought home the family’s new 1959 Biscayne sedan, she said, in a quote that has lived through the generations: “Hewie, that’s a biscuit and you’re gonna eat every bite of it!”

Oh, and on the adjoining page is a story about people learning how to hunt, sometimes with tragicomic results. It includes this picture:

Yep, some farmer had to paint COW on the side of a cow. Note that it’s in Pompano, Florida. I used to live a couple miles from there. There weren’t any cows there, let alone room for them. There’s probably rows and rows of houses there now.

Theme song for the article:

But the real action at GM is taking place in the GMC Truck Division, with Operation High Gear in full swing:

I’m having fun imagining a race like this at the then-new Daytona International Speedway. Especially with the high banks and everything. Wheeee!

There’s a GMC truck for every need! Pickups! Delivery vans! But this is the one I really like:

It looks like somebody who’s resigned themselves to having to wear braces, but they’re kind of philosophical about it. “Oh, well, it could be a lot worse,” sighs the new D860. Automotive designs of the ’50s were so expressive.

Meanwhile, here’s another word from the folks at Dodge:

It (and an ad that repeats claims that Listerine would eventually have to retract) is adjacent to part of a story about Brigitte Bardot’s sister, who has a beauty all her own:

And that is adjacent to a story about fashionable flooring from Johns-Manville! Asbestos is the wave of the future!

Back to what the folks at Chrysler are up to, though. The infestation of beetles from West Germany has disturbed the automakers enough to prompt countermeasures:

What’s not mentioned is that Chrysler had wanted to enter the European market, and did so by buying part of Ford’s share in Simca (which Henry Ford II, when he wasn’t fictionally sitting awkwardly in a race car, was said to have regretted). That, and the name instantly makes me think of Latka’s girlfriend on Taxi. I can’t see it without imagining Andy Kaufman pronouncing it.

Studebaker (whose motto is starting to become a more insistent “what have we got to lose? We’ve gotta try something!”) is thinking along similar lines, and brings us the cute little Lark:

The Lark (which was a reworking of some existing designs) sold well the first couple years. Unfortunately, when Ford (with the Falcon) and GM (with the Chevrolet Corvair and Pontiac Tempest) got in on the act, sales dropped. Soon after, so did Studebaker.

But if you really want to go places:

The Boeing 707 is here! And American Airlines invites you to fly on the big, fast new Jet Flagship! (This page has some history on this exact airframe, and you can see another image from the same photo shoot that yielded the picture in this ad. You’ll see that some retouching was involved. You’ll also find out about its unhappy ending.)

Boeing’s in on the act:

Given her expression, I can’t help wondering if he’s said something highly inappropriate. I also can’t help wondering if that’s his wife, or, ah, “his wife.” It’s the late ’50s, so…the odds are decent, on both counts. (That’s not a typo at the bottom, either: there was a Boeing 720, a slightly downsized 707 variant meant for airlines that wanted to serve shorter routes. It was a stopgap before something like the beloved workhorse 727 was ready.)

But this week Life also brings us the other side of aviation:

The fiery aftermath of an accident at New York’s Idlewild Airport (now John F. Kennedy International). A Super Constellation on a training flight became uncontrollable when a propeller malfunctioned during takeoff. The plane smashed into the empty Trans-Canada Viscount seen here, only about 10 minutes before passengers would have boarded. Believe it or not, nobody was killed. (Read more about it here.)

What else is in the news? The famous Boston political boss James Michael Curley died, and Life covered his sending-off. It was a big deal in Boston.

King Hussein of Jordan, 23 at the time, eluded an attempt by Syria to take him out. Given that my memories of King Hussein are of an older statesman trying to broker peace, it’s always jarring to see him as a young man.

The Hope Diamond was sent to the Smithsonian Institution…by registered mail, insured for $1 million (which came to fees of $145.29 for postage, registered mail service and insurance). Harry Winston, it was said, felt sending it by the post office would avoid the ballyhoo of armed guards, couriers and so forth.

There’s supposed to be a curse associated with the Hope Diamond. When I was at the museum a quarter-century ago, there was a long line waiting to look at it. I knew of the curse and, even if I’m not really superstitious, didn’t feel like waiting in line to tempt fate.

Holy cow, now there is a news flash! I really must stop wearing my monocle while reading these things.

Brief story about a leopard cub taken in by a family in Uganda. It was all fun and games and cuteness and sweetness until the leopard’s instincts started to come in, and the little cub wasn’t so cute any longer, so…off it went to a zoo. (Reminder: don’t mess with nature.)

The leopard’s story is in between a Botany 500 ad (yes! It did exist outside the game show universe!) and a Schick electric shaver ad. Where Remington famously shaved the fuzz off a peach in its commercials, Schick instead uses analogies to cactus quills and toy balloons, promising it can handle any kind of skin.

The Polaroid Land Camera! A miracle it was for the day: pictures in only 60 seconds. Now it seems so quaint.

Next to it is a piece about Amedeo Modigliani, who work was encountering a renaissance. There’s several of his works, but many of them are nudes, and although I don’t have an issue with that, we do try to be a family blog.

T. S. Eliot, now 70, has a new wife and a new play, The Elder Statesman. (Maybe he’s also got the Hotpoint 6-Cycle Washer, too!) They threw an afterparty, and given that I think of Eliot as writing rather heavy work, it’s odd to see him so happy:

In between material about The Elder Statesman, you can read about the exciting underwear that may get you a Love Letter. Or you can order the World Book Encyclopedia in time for Christmas. I’ll always insist one of the wisest things my parents ever did was buy a World Book set when my brother and I were really young. I grew up with World Book, seemed to always have a volume pulled down off the shelf, and it made me want to go out and learn more and see the world. So much that I have, so much that I have done with my life, I owe to that. I am grateful.

And you can’t have T.S. Eliot without having a cat around, as we see here. Around him, you can shop for a Sheaffer pen set (which is interesting, given that I’m a Parker 51/61 fan) and delicious Cracker Barrel cheese from Kraft. (That’s much better if you say it in the mellifluous voice of Ed Herlihy.)

It’s Beefaroni night! “Fixed just as Italian children might be eating it near Rome.” Yeah, I’m certain. Because you know that 11-year-olds are daydreaming about being on the Via Veneto.

Or you can always make them Plantation Ham with martinis made with Seagram’s Golden Gin. Notice how the ham is a pretext to make martinis. Heck, the entire decade seems like a pretext to make martinis.

An Alpha-Bits ad, which brings to mind two favorite gags:

1. “Brian! There’s a message in my Alpha-Bits! ‘Oooooooooo!'”
   “Peter, those are Cheerios.”
2. “Raymond…I could have eaten a box of Alpha-Bits and CRAPPED a better interview!”

Next door is the start of an article about Eileen Farrell, who had a long and versatile career and just seems like she was a really neat person.

The article about Bell, Book and Candle is…well, after the cover, it’s a letdown, though we do get some neat pictures. The one at the top right, with Gillian and Pyewacket, is a keeper. (“Witch and helper” might describe a picture of me and Smokey, who is often my Pyewacket.)

Another reason I love Bell, Book and Candle: Ernie Kovacs.

“S.O.S. Pads! See us at the Kitchen Debate next year!”

The Army’s big mirror was a big solar furnace done as an experiment, made of 356 mirrored sheets. That’s prospectively at least 2,492 years of bad luck if they break. eek.

And it’s helpful the Vitalis guy is also an underwater salvage expert, because, as it happens:

Life looks into the realm of people trying to cash in on underwater salvage. One of them has an idea to raise the wreck of the liner Andrea Doria, which had gone down a couple years before: just seal the portholes and pump air into the hull. He’s even got a proof-of-concept model, which he demonstrates for Life‘s inquiring eye:

Not only do I love the look on his face, but look at the model playing the part of Andrea Doria: it’s the flat-bottomed Revell model of s/s United States. (Note: if an “ingenious plan” has been rejected by a big salvage firm, there’s likely to be a reason. Maybe he didn’t use Vitalis?)

Now that we’ve handled much of the news, let’s have a drink! I miss the way advertisements used to have original art in them, but something like this ad is just so darn evocative:

Meanwhile, Carling’s Black Label gives the strong impression that the people who produce television programs are getting gassed while they’re doing it:

Maybe you’d prefer an entire stadium full of orange juice?

Or if you can’t come out and say “Honey, I need you to buy me a sewing machine” (because, after all, it’s 1958 and your full-time job is to stay home and tend house), here’s ways you can hint for it, like you’re a 9-year-old who leaves a Red Ryder BB gun ad inside your parents’ magazines:

Let’s have more booze! Here, it’s as if Roger Sterling was channeling Old Scratch at the end of The Devil and Daniel Webster.

Ancient Age always cracks me up, for the only alcohol in our house growing up was a small bottle of it kept at the very back of a cabinet, on a high shelf. It had been a gift from my dad’s boss, who usually gave everyone at the sawmill a bottle of booze for Christmas. Dad, being a strict teetotaler, almost always gave his to someone else. This one, he had kept. It was there for the sole purpose of making the cough medicine our old family doctor taught my parents to make (part bourbon, part honey). Many was the night my brother or I, having contracted some kind of horrible respiratory illness as we tended to in our young days, would be sleepless and sore, our throats raw from terrible persistent coughs. One treatment from the bottle of booze medicine would soothe our throats and get us to sleep.

Something delicious:

The thing I love most is how they really dolled Elsie up. Given that I grew up in the country and had many occasions to be around actual cows, it’s a hoot.

This looks like a nightmare in the ad, but, oh, would I be all over it like that little kid in the corner:

Alas, at my age, I now know I’d be in the same predicament that our Buster Keaton-esque mail carrier would be in here. But if I could meet Speedy, that would be nifty. (It’s a shame we lost Speedy when he fell off that fishing pier so many years ago.)

And you know that Patti Page is a stickler for perfect spark plugs! (She wrenches her own Oldsmobile, ya know. While wearing the gown. That’s why the car’s in the studio.)

Okay, it’s not the Carousel, but what can be?

“Can you bring me my Chap Stick? My lips hurt REAL BAD!”

“Children, in a time before Ikea, we had these things called furniture manufacturers! And they built furniture that was meant to be passed from generation to generation! But, then….”

And, in the spirit of the approaching holidays, we close with an appeal for you to give booze…

…and cigarettes. Because, after all, it’s 1958.

Yesterday I had the urge to go back in time, and a URL in my browser’s history popped up and took me to the Sept. 23, 1957 issue. It has an amazing picture of Suzy Parker on the cover:

Suzy Parker was a top model of the day, her name immortalized in a Beatles tune. I first became aware of her because she modeled for Revlon and sometimes appeared in the live commercials on The $64,000 Question. Later she was married to Bradford Dillman, who I remember most for playing Dirty Harry’s officious superior in two movies.

I mean, look at her. Wow.

This week in September 1957 brought more than just a look into Suzy Parker’s world. There was a neat feature in which a photographer took modern-day photos with one of Mathew Brady’s cameras. I was especially interested that the famously grumpy John Foster Dulles was an agreeable sitter, for a comparison with William Seward’s portrait.

There’s a big feature about the American court system, featuring portraits of prominent jurists.

If you’re into duck hunting, there’s a photo feature on favored hunting sites:

Robert Frost went to England:

…and quiz show champion Charles Van Doren reflects on his experiences as a winner on Twenty One and whether the quiz show craze helps or hinders education. Two years later he would testify before Congress about how the whole thing had been rigged. It’s interesting to read this piece, knowing what was to come and knowing how his life was going to change after his confession.

As another sign of the quiz show craze, here’s this ad that fulminates against the federal electric utilities. (This post goes into the campaigns of America’s Independent Electric Light and Power Companies, and features some really strident ads that imply that government utilities are but the vanguard of creeping socialism that will take away your freedoms, your Bible, etc.)

In consumer goods, Columbia was promoting its big new stereophonic systems under the “Listening in Depth” campaign. I mean, look at that glorious monster spread over two pages. Columbia Records backed this campaign with a really awesome LP that featured samples from various stereophonic albums, but also had some bespoke tracks. (The special version of Duke Ellington’s “Track 360” started with the sound of a train traveling from the left channel to the right channel. If you’re wearing headphones, the train travels through your head. It’s fun!)

Not to be outdone, RCA is not only promoting its own sound systems…

…but is also promoting the washer-dryer systems it’s producing through its partnership with Whirlpool.

And let’s not forget Philco. Otherwise, they might make various threats. (As they did when they complained NBC’s Today program being broadcast from the RCA Exhibition Hall was unfair competition; as they did when Philips tried to do business in the United States, which prompted the birth of the “Norelco” brand name. Although many, many years later Philips bought what was left of Philco, and that’s why you see “Philips” more and seldom see “Norelco.” So there.)

Schlitz urges you to go bowling! Enjoy a Schlitzframe! Have some Schlitzfreshment! Be a Schlitzer! Get Schlitzfaced!

Colgate reminds you that the real reason you’re striking out on the romantic scene isn’t your personality, your clothes or any other cause except your HORRIBLE BREATH:

Mutual of New York can not only set you up with affordable insurance, but also with inspiration for song titles!

Conn – the same folks who brought you Mr. B Natural (and all the important debates pertaining thereunto) – promises that you’ll be playing music the very first day! (But Conn very carefully doesn’t promise how well you’ll play.)

Chrysler Corporation is promoting The Forward Look, although it conveniently elides any commentary on what will happen if your car ends up being possessed. Or any guarantees about its durability should it be stored in a below-ground time capsule for 50 years.

While these guys are eyeballing each other’s cars, Sputnik is only a couple weeks or so from being sent into orbit. (And to add to the quiz show craze, that same comparison is the opening scene to the movie Quiz Show. Which – as if that’s not enough – prominently featured another Chrysler product!)

If you need an outboard motor, throw renowned all-around lovable guy Carl Kiekhaefer some business:

All this, however, means I’m burying the lede. The big story is Little Rock, the integration of Central High School, and the role of Gov. Orval Faubus. Life sent a photographer down, has this lengthy up-close piece about Faubus, talks to his family.

Meanwhile, real people are suffering. The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth was beaten with fists and a chain; Dorothy Counts was threatened and gave up her attempt to attend a Charlotte school; a bomb exploded in the library of a Nashville school because a young Black student had been enrolled there.

Life‘s editorial page examines the events of the week. The second piece got my attention, and it’s why I’m writing about this today. And it’s not because of the legal aspects of it. It’s because the last two grafs touch on the role of the human heart.

It’s interesting to reflect on this same passage 67 years later. For the past few weeks, we have been sorting through the aftermath of the 2024 election. There are those who feel vindicated. There are those who feel distressed. As nauseated as I am by what modern political discourse has devolved into, I’m in neither camp. Instead, historian that I am both by inclination and training, to me it’s the cycle repeating itself. It’s nothing new. Yes, the methods and the media have changed, but the fundamentals haven’t.

Something else that hasn’t changed: the fact that it comes down to what’s in the heart and the conscience of each of us. No election, no referendum, no regime can alter the reality that each of us must answer to ourselves – can we live with the person we see in the mirror? – and we also have to answer to an authority higher than any governor or president or king or overlord, and someday we’ll have to answer for how we treated one another in this life. We have to answer to that voice in our heads that keeps us from being able to sleep if we’ve wronged somebody else. Some folks will be able to meet that test. Other times, though, I’ve felt like the traveler in this song, unable to believe the inhumanity humans willingly visit upon other humans:

We hear a lot about the horrible things that happen. News, as I teach my students, isn’t when the river remains within its banks. But what we don’t see anywhere as often are the little acts of kindness, charity and goodness that take place when nobody’s looking. Yes, the people who say horrible things and do cruel acts and scream the loudest are going to get the attention, and to some extent they’ll set whatever the perception is. But what we don’t see are the everyday acts of goodness: the extended hand, the kind word when it’s needed, the gentle moments of human connection that remind us we’re all occupants of this same life and this same little marble that’s drifting somewhere in the great vastness of space.

I don’t get to choose my students. I have to take who comes my way, no matter their race, creed, color, background, politics, identity…you name the variation and I’ve encountered it in my classroom in some way, shape or form. I’m obligated to set all that aside and treat every one of them the best I know how. That’s not only as a professional, but also as a human being. I have to be able to look back on my day and not regret what I said or what I did. That, and I have never discounted the possibility that God sent someone my way because there was something I needed to learn from them.

Anybody who thinks they know how the next four years, let alone the next decade, will go is fooling themselves. Nobody knows. Some of it will involve things that are in our hands, but so much of it won’t be in our hands. What is always within our hands, though, is how we treat one another. I’d hope that underneath all the loudness and tumult that hearts haven’t hardened, that there’s still a fifth column of decency that remains at work, even if we seldom hear about it.

Or, as a couple of more recent observers would remind us: be excellent to each other.