Once upon a time, during a Christmas season many years ago (it was 1963), the Chicago bureau of United Press International and UPI's National Broadcast News Department, normally shortened to "national radio." celebrated Christmas with a festive office party--the company may even have picked up the tab-- and although I have forgotten the specific details, if I ever had a firm grasp of them, that is a party that haunted me for years after.
In that season, the Chicago bureau and national radio were housed in what was then the Uptown Savings and Loan Building, across Michigan Avenue from Tribune Tower, having moved earlier in the year from offices in the old Daily News Building on West Madison. Those of you who watched the sitcom in which Bob Newhart played a psychologist, Dr. Bob Hartley, will remember the Uptown Savings building as the one in which Bob had his office and into he which walked after meandering around the area north of the Loop in the opening sequence.
Into the basement of that same building a few months after we moved in came one of Chicago's great characters, William "Billy Goat" Sianis, who set up a saloon. Billy Goat had also moved from West Madison Street, where he had had a saloon across from the Chicago Stadium. Generations of Chicago newspapermen had trod into Billy's after (or before) covering the Bulls or the Blackhawks or Sonia Henie or Jersey Joe Walcott or Gorgeous George or whatever other act was playing the Stadium, and they had become friends with the proprietor.
Billy was a Greek immigrant with a pet goat and a gift for furnishing columnists with copy, especially on slow days, and with their complicity he gained a measure of fame. One episode alone was enough to insure his newsprint immortality: eighteen years earlier, in 1945, Billy had tried to take his goat, Billy Jr., into Wrigley Field to watch a World Series game, and the two were thrown out. In retaliation, Billy (Sr.) put a hex on the Cubs, which he never lifted and which has continued in effect through every long northside baseball season since. Later, when John Belushi and the Second City gang made it to "Saturday Night Live," it was Billy Goat's they satirized in their "hambooga, hambooga, hambooga...Pepsi, Pepsi, Pepsi" routine (according to Tribune columnist Dave Condon, Billy Goat's was the home of the meatless hamburger).
As you can imagine, we Unipressers upstairs were overjoyed to have Billy Goat's in the basement, and we made good use of it from the start--we invested more there than in the savings and loan, certainly (Dolores Deasy, the teetotaling UPI receptionist spent the first dollar in the place, and that dollar was destined to hang above the cash register--may still even be there). Because of its proximity, the joint was the hands-down choice for the Christmas party in that year when we were new neighbors. Alas, four of us on national radio had to work that night from four to midnight (or thereabouts), and we would miss the party.
In other circumstances, one or more of us might have called in sick. But we weren't entirely stupid. In fact, we were Unipressers, and resourceful, and we hadn't been at our typewriters long that evening when we came up with an idea that would allow us both pleasure and business.
Each night, one editor would be in charge of assigning stories for the five-minute world in brief (wib) broadcasts we sent out most hours and editing and filing them. Another would be in charge of the 15-minute world news roundups (rup) that we sent about every three hours. Two writers would write for both editors. But on this prelude to the holy season, if all of us shared the writing of every wib and roundup, we agreed, we could get the newscasts out and spell each other in going to the party.
And that's what we did. Two of us at a time went down the back elevator, hustled through the parking garage, squeezed through a half door that was designed for deliveries and jumped three or four feet to the floor of the tavern. We'd have a couple of drinks and a sandwich and go back up to let the other two party for a while. It was a wonderful system.
The broadcast stylebook admonished broadcast writers to use what was called the "bar stool method" of writing. Just tell the story to your typewriter as you'd tell it to the guy on the next bar stool, the lesson read. Trouble was, we got to the point at which the typewriter no longer understood what the hell we were trying to say.
The drawer of the main desk held a pair of scissors, however, and we had paste, and a file of the wibs and rups that had gone out earlier in the day, and even if we couldn't write we still had some manual dexterity and skills we'd carried with us from kindergarten. With a newscast coming up, one person would clip a story from the third wib while another was hacking at the fifth and another choosing an item from the seventh or eighth. One of us would paste everything on a sheet of copy paper, do a little penciling and hand it to the teletype operator.
It was only the next day that we realized that what we had done might have gotten us into some trouble. Had a client called to complain about getting the same stories hour after hour, or had one of the managers gone through the report critically the next day, or had someone noticed all the pasted-up copy in the bundle of raw copy. Or? There were too many "ors" to think about with the heads we were carrying around, and so we went about our work as if nothing out of the ordinary had gone on, and, blessedly, no one questioned us.
But the guilt was there, festering. My own Ghost of Christmas Past. And I never told the story. Not until more than 30 years later, when I was having dinner at the home of Tom and Adele McGann one night. Tom had been one the top editors on national radio and became a good friend. Caught up in good will and reminiscence, I confessed what we had done. Even then, I was hesitant.
Tom laughed. "You think you were the only guy who ever did that?" he said.
I was deflated. But, at last, I was absolved.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Forty years and a new world
Barack Obama’s election as President of the United States was a thrilling moment for me, and I was electrified by his eloquent words to the tens of thousands of people in Grant Park who celebrated his victory Tuesday night and the millions of us watching on television.
As I listened to him, I thought back to the tumultuous week of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and that small army of young people, members of the Youth International Party—“Yippies,” they were called—who had come to Chicago from all over the country to have their concerns heard by the delegates. Their protest was aimed primarily at the prolonged war in Vietnam. But they also targeted the undemocratic way in which Democratic presidential candidates were chosen, a government that seemed to ignore its citizens, and the national shame of denying civil rights to black citizens. In sum, they wanted to call attention to the great gap they saw between what America was meant to be and what it was.
The Yippies gathered night after night to try to march on the International Amphitheatre, the convention hall, only to be met by police wielding nightsticks and spraying Mace. The police attacked them indiscriminately, beat them, and threw them into paddy wagons. The only retaliation by the media-savvy Yippies was the repeated chant, “The whole world is watching. The whole world is watching.”
I was working summer relief in the national broadcast news department of United Press International and wrote the convention story all week. After midnight on Thursday, the last night of the convention, I walked down Michigan Ave. to the Conrad Hilton Hotel, the main convention hotel. Yippies had struggled with police for control of streets around the hotel, and many were camped in Grant Park, across the street.
Only a few of the blue-helmeted Chicago police were around when I got there, and they stood in the doorways of the Hilton checking room keys and convention credentials and occasionally exchanging light banter with some of the youths who had been their antagonists for five nights.
I entered Grant Park through a line of National Guardsmen about the same age as the Yippies. The young men and women still left in the encampment were subdued and gathered around a campfire. With them were a few newsmen, some curious onlookers and a handful of delegates wearing buttons of the two unsuccessful peace candidates for the Democrats’ presidential nomination, Sen. Eugene McCarthy and Sen. George McGovern. The Yippies were singing around the campfire. I could hear the anti-war song “Where have all the young men gone?” as I neared their clearing. And then, over and over, they sang the anthem of the civil rights movement, “We shall overcome.”
It was the memory of those Yippies that held my imagination late Tuesday night as I watched and listened to Barack Obama speaking in that same park. Was his election not clear evidence that so much that they were protesting has been washed away over the past 40 years? Was it not a sign that the gap between the America that was meant to be and the America that is has narrowed greatly?
Of course, we have not fully become what we ought to be. But listen to those voices together, the Yippies singing in counterpoint to Obama’s repeated refrain of “Yes we can.”: “We shall overcome. Yes we can.” We know that now.
And listen for the echo of the Yippies’ chant: “The whole world is watching.”
As I listened to him, I thought back to the tumultuous week of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and that small army of young people, members of the Youth International Party—“Yippies,” they were called—who had come to Chicago from all over the country to have their concerns heard by the delegates. Their protest was aimed primarily at the prolonged war in Vietnam. But they also targeted the undemocratic way in which Democratic presidential candidates were chosen, a government that seemed to ignore its citizens, and the national shame of denying civil rights to black citizens. In sum, they wanted to call attention to the great gap they saw between what America was meant to be and what it was.
The Yippies gathered night after night to try to march on the International Amphitheatre, the convention hall, only to be met by police wielding nightsticks and spraying Mace. The police attacked them indiscriminately, beat them, and threw them into paddy wagons. The only retaliation by the media-savvy Yippies was the repeated chant, “The whole world is watching. The whole world is watching.”
I was working summer relief in the national broadcast news department of United Press International and wrote the convention story all week. After midnight on Thursday, the last night of the convention, I walked down Michigan Ave. to the Conrad Hilton Hotel, the main convention hotel. Yippies had struggled with police for control of streets around the hotel, and many were camped in Grant Park, across the street.
Only a few of the blue-helmeted Chicago police were around when I got there, and they stood in the doorways of the Hilton checking room keys and convention credentials and occasionally exchanging light banter with some of the youths who had been their antagonists for five nights.
I entered Grant Park through a line of National Guardsmen about the same age as the Yippies. The young men and women still left in the encampment were subdued and gathered around a campfire. With them were a few newsmen, some curious onlookers and a handful of delegates wearing buttons of the two unsuccessful peace candidates for the Democrats’ presidential nomination, Sen. Eugene McCarthy and Sen. George McGovern. The Yippies were singing around the campfire. I could hear the anti-war song “Where have all the young men gone?” as I neared their clearing. And then, over and over, they sang the anthem of the civil rights movement, “We shall overcome.”
It was the memory of those Yippies that held my imagination late Tuesday night as I watched and listened to Barack Obama speaking in that same park. Was his election not clear evidence that so much that they were protesting has been washed away over the past 40 years? Was it not a sign that the gap between the America that was meant to be and the America that is has narrowed greatly?
Of course, we have not fully become what we ought to be. But listen to those voices together, the Yippies singing in counterpoint to Obama’s repeated refrain of “Yes we can.”: “We shall overcome. Yes we can.” We know that now.
And listen for the echo of the Yippies’ chant: “The whole world is watching.”
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Election Day, 2008
Another exquisite day here, and sunshine and blue skies may well get voters to the polls. Obama is unlikely to win Loozerana. But Mary Landrieu will keep the Senate seat for the Democrats.
At about 8:30, clutching the latest New Yorker to read in line, I swung by the school where we vote. A line outside was fairly long but didn’t discourage me, and I headed toward the end when two neighbors came out. “There’s no line at our precinct,” one said, and she was right. I flashed my driver’s license, signed the book, and one of the judges pointed to the voting booth. I was in and out in about 10minutes.
Another judge asked, “Are you related to Larry Lorenz?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you his brother?”
“No, I am he.”
“Well, you sounded just like him.”
Turns out she was a student of mine more than 20 years ago. I remembered her name but would not have recognized her, even to ask if she were her sister.
“You taught me ‘the medium is the message,’” she said. “I’ll never forget that.”
How nice it is to be remembered for something.
At about 8:30, clutching the latest New Yorker to read in line, I swung by the school where we vote. A line outside was fairly long but didn’t discourage me, and I headed toward the end when two neighbors came out. “There’s no line at our precinct,” one said, and she was right. I flashed my driver’s license, signed the book, and one of the judges pointed to the voting booth. I was in and out in about 10minutes.
Another judge asked, “Are you related to Larry Lorenz?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you his brother?”
“No, I am he.”
“Well, you sounded just like him.”
Turns out she was a student of mine more than 20 years ago. I remembered her name but would not have recognized her, even to ask if she were her sister.
“You taught me ‘the medium is the message,’” she said. “I’ll never forget that.”
How nice it is to be remembered for something.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
The Fertile Palins
Talking about Sarah Palin, someone asked this week, "Have you seen the names she saddled those kids with?"
Well, yes. But the McCain Campaign, which does most of her public talking for her, reports that Sarah and Chad used a certain logic when they named them. The McCain campaign has reported that the children were named for places or situations related to their conception. It occurs to me, that it was in these situations that children came to be:
Track: Sarah reacted Todd on the track around the Wasilla high school football field, and when she caught him, they made love on the cinders and conceived Track.
Bristol: The couple were under the influence of a few nips of Bristol Cream Sherry following a moose hunt.
Piper: She was named after the plane in which Sarah and Todd flew united after being aroused by shooting grizzly bears from the air.
Willow: The two had just come down from a willow tree from which they were shooting at Sarah's brother-in-law or, as they told it, looking at Russia in order to gain foreign policy experience.
Trig: Sarah and Chad had exchanged sines and cosines one evening while helping Track with his math homework and became so excited that they went off on a passionate tangent. [Or, if you believe those horrible liberal commie pinkos in the Obama campaign, Bristol and Levi conceived him while they were studying math together. The McCain campaign argues that that does not add up.]
Well, yes. But the McCain Campaign, which does most of her public talking for her, reports that Sarah and Chad used a certain logic when they named them. The McCain campaign has reported that the children were named for places or situations related to their conception. It occurs to me, that it was in these situations that children came to be:
Track: Sarah reacted Todd on the track around the Wasilla high school football field, and when she caught him, they made love on the cinders and conceived Track.
Bristol: The couple were under the influence of a few nips of Bristol Cream Sherry following a moose hunt.
Piper: She was named after the plane in which Sarah and Todd flew united after being aroused by shooting grizzly bears from the air.
Willow: The two had just come down from a willow tree from which they were shooting at Sarah's brother-in-law or, as they told it, looking at Russia in order to gain foreign policy experience.
Trig: Sarah and Chad had exchanged sines and cosines one evening while helping Track with his math homework and became so excited that they went off on a passionate tangent. [Or, if you believe those horrible liberal commie pinkos in the Obama campaign, Bristol and Levi conceived him while they were studying math together. The McCain campaign argues that that does not add up.]
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Our Sunday Drive
With Hurricane Ike now heading toward Texas rather than Louisiana, we can plan on staying home on the weekend ahead. Two weekends ago, we had to flee Gustav, and it was not a pleasant journey.
That Sunday, September 1, was a beautiful day for a drive. But not with one million or more other people on the road.
Still, my wife and I thought we might get away over the Labor Day weekend ahead of Hurricane Gustav. Even as the forecasters pinpointed the Louisiana coast as Gustav's target, I thought (hoped? prayed?) the storm might edge farther west, into Texas, and spare New Orleans much of anything more than heavy wind and rain. But Saturday's late forecast and the mayor's evacuation order persuaded me to struggle the plywood out of the shed and onto the picture window and get packed.
We left early Sunday morning, I in my car, with maps, suitcases, cooler and sacks of provisions, my wife Kathy in her station wagon with our older son, our two golden retrievers and one cat and our son's two cats. Despite the opening of all four lanes on some of the interstate highways out of New Orleans – that scheme called "contraflow" -- the roads were clogged with cars, pickup trucks, vans, and at least one aged, multi-colored stretch limousine, inching along, stopping, inching. Once in a lane, a vehicle stayed in a lane, unless it could force its way to the shoulder. The highways through Mississippi have few exits, and individual drivers or groupings of family or friends sometimes parked on the side of the road to let the engines cool or to eat, drink and relieve themselves with only a vehicle to give them some privacy.
I became reacquainted with U.S highways. As a boy, I often traveled through Illinois on U.S. 51 in the back seat of my father's 1940 Studebaker Champion to visit grandmothers. Yesterday, I was in the front seat, and out of the city, beyond Lake Pontchartrain, I led our little caravan onto U.S. 51 rather than take the badly clogged I-55 toward Jackson, I picked up U.S. 51 off I-12, and took it to McComb, then turned onto U.S. 98 to Hattiesburg. There, sad to say, I left the 1940s and took the I-59 entrance into the 2000s. A bad choice; the interstate was rush-hour packed all the way from Slidell, La. to Birmingham, our destination.
In one stretch, traffic was moving fairly well, in between the blockages, and we made about 40 miles in one of the many hours of our exodus. But throughout the rest of the trip to Birmingham, in both Mississippi and Alabama, I-59 was often so jammed. that we hop-scotched between it and the nearly parallel U.S. 11. We would have been better off staying on the old road, I think now. Despite the stop signs and occasional red lights, we seemed to make better time. The driving was less frustrating, anyway.
A Google directions search had told me that the distance to Birmingham was 340 miles and the driving time five hours and six minutes. We got on I-10 in downtown New Orleans at about 7:30 a.m. We pulled in under the motel portico in Birmingham at about 10:30 that night. A fellow who walked up to the reservations desk just after I, told me he had started from Kenner, a New Orleans suburb, at just about the same time. He had taken a somewhat different route, but without the romance of revisiting those two-lane U.S. highways.
I don't remember a radio in that Studebaker. But I have one in my car and kept it on New Orleans' WWL, a news-talk station, that gave us capitve evacuee listeners hour after hour of information.
News conferences by public officials from the governor and members of his crisis team to parish presidents and their crisis teams filled too much time. I had gotten up at 4 a.m., and the news conferences nearly put me back to sleep. Gov Bobby Jindal, with his rapid, clipped monotone delivery, was the worst. On television, he uses a signer so the deaf will be able to understand him. For those of us who hear, he should have an interpreter to complete the words and sentences he leaves unfinished and to articulate the words he swallows. Beyond that, he loves detail, and this listener nearly nodded off while he ticked off the exact number of first responders coming and from which other cities, the exact number of National Guard forces on duty, the exact number of helicopters deployed and from which bases. And on and on.
Jindal was scheduled to be a speaker at the G.O.P convention, I believe, but given the crisis, he probably will not. Too bad. The nation will miss wonk to the tenth power delivered like an airline stewardess mindlessly rushing through the emergency procedures. I am rather sorry, in fact, that he will not be vice president and never be heard from again.
Many of the same officials called in for interviews by the hosts (closing mantra: "Thank you so much for giving us your time; and the inevitable inane response: "No problem"). Each hour, we had top-of-the-hour CBS news blocks with cuts from the same news conferences and interviews, followed by five minutes of local news with -- guess.
WWL-TV's chief meteorologist gave updates from the National Hurricane Center, and he assumed that we who were on the road gave a fat millibar about the the latitude-longitude coordinates. ("Bring back Jindal," the droopy-eyed driver yelled at the radio.) Sandwiched in among all that was a steady diet of rants by my fellow travelers calling in to vent their frustration at being parked on Mississippi interstates and to recommend improvements to the genius who dreamed up contraflow.
And the cliches. The endless parade of cliches. In harm's way. Keeping a close eye. Not out of the woods yet. The very latest.
Why am I listening to this? I asked myself at one point. And I thought of the old joke about the guy beating himself on the head with a hammer who, when asked why he did it, explained that it felt so good when he stopped. Of course I knew why. I needed to know what was going on out there with that storm so threatening that it forced me from my home. No matter how boring it was, how soporific, how repetitive, I needed to have it.
Somewhere long ago I came across Oliver Wendell Holmes' 1861 essay "Bread and the Newspaper," which eloquently emphasizes the importance of news to the public, especially in crises. That came floating in to me somewhere between the meteorologist and the governor. "Everything else we can do without," Holmes wrote. "Only bread and the newspapers we must have." How much worse it would have been, fleeing from the unknown in that Studebaker without a radio.
We finally arrived at our destination, a Birmingham motel, along with hundreds of our neighbors, to judge from the Louisiana license plates in the parking lot and the trash the travelers had tossed in the parking lot.
Some sat around the pool watching their children splashing about, but from what I heard in the hallways, the rest of us spent hour after hour switching the television channels back and forth to CNN and MSNBC and The Weather Channel. We swore at the information we knew to be wrong, the mispronunciations, the cliches and the hype of "breaking news" and "the very latest." But we listened and watched.
And we had the map out, plotting what would turn out to be a much less grueling trip home.
That Sunday, September 1, was a beautiful day for a drive. But not with one million or more other people on the road.
Still, my wife and I thought we might get away over the Labor Day weekend ahead of Hurricane Gustav. Even as the forecasters pinpointed the Louisiana coast as Gustav's target, I thought (hoped? prayed?) the storm might edge farther west, into Texas, and spare New Orleans much of anything more than heavy wind and rain. But Saturday's late forecast and the mayor's evacuation order persuaded me to struggle the plywood out of the shed and onto the picture window and get packed.
We left early Sunday morning, I in my car, with maps, suitcases, cooler and sacks of provisions, my wife Kathy in her station wagon with our older son, our two golden retrievers and one cat and our son's two cats. Despite the opening of all four lanes on some of the interstate highways out of New Orleans – that scheme called "contraflow" -- the roads were clogged with cars, pickup trucks, vans, and at least one aged, multi-colored stretch limousine, inching along, stopping, inching. Once in a lane, a vehicle stayed in a lane, unless it could force its way to the shoulder. The highways through Mississippi have few exits, and individual drivers or groupings of family or friends sometimes parked on the side of the road to let the engines cool or to eat, drink and relieve themselves with only a vehicle to give them some privacy.
I became reacquainted with U.S highways. As a boy, I often traveled through Illinois on U.S. 51 in the back seat of my father's 1940 Studebaker Champion to visit grandmothers. Yesterday, I was in the front seat, and out of the city, beyond Lake Pontchartrain, I led our little caravan onto U.S. 51 rather than take the badly clogged I-55 toward Jackson, I picked up U.S. 51 off I-12, and took it to McComb, then turned onto U.S. 98 to Hattiesburg. There, sad to say, I left the 1940s and took the I-59 entrance into the 2000s. A bad choice; the interstate was rush-hour packed all the way from Slidell, La. to Birmingham, our destination.
In one stretch, traffic was moving fairly well, in between the blockages, and we made about 40 miles in one of the many hours of our exodus. But throughout the rest of the trip to Birmingham, in both Mississippi and Alabama, I-59 was often so jammed. that we hop-scotched between it and the nearly parallel U.S. 11. We would have been better off staying on the old road, I think now. Despite the stop signs and occasional red lights, we seemed to make better time. The driving was less frustrating, anyway.
A Google directions search had told me that the distance to Birmingham was 340 miles and the driving time five hours and six minutes. We got on I-10 in downtown New Orleans at about 7:30 a.m. We pulled in under the motel portico in Birmingham at about 10:30 that night. A fellow who walked up to the reservations desk just after I, told me he had started from Kenner, a New Orleans suburb, at just about the same time. He had taken a somewhat different route, but without the romance of revisiting those two-lane U.S. highways.
I don't remember a radio in that Studebaker. But I have one in my car and kept it on New Orleans' WWL, a news-talk station, that gave us capitve evacuee listeners hour after hour of information.
News conferences by public officials from the governor and members of his crisis team to parish presidents and their crisis teams filled too much time. I had gotten up at 4 a.m., and the news conferences nearly put me back to sleep. Gov Bobby Jindal, with his rapid, clipped monotone delivery, was the worst. On television, he uses a signer so the deaf will be able to understand him. For those of us who hear, he should have an interpreter to complete the words and sentences he leaves unfinished and to articulate the words he swallows. Beyond that, he loves detail, and this listener nearly nodded off while he ticked off the exact number of first responders coming and from which other cities, the exact number of National Guard forces on duty, the exact number of helicopters deployed and from which bases. And on and on.
Jindal was scheduled to be a speaker at the G.O.P convention, I believe, but given the crisis, he probably will not. Too bad. The nation will miss wonk to the tenth power delivered like an airline stewardess mindlessly rushing through the emergency procedures. I am rather sorry, in fact, that he will not be vice president and never be heard from again.
Many of the same officials called in for interviews by the hosts (closing mantra: "Thank you so much for giving us your time; and the inevitable inane response: "No problem"). Each hour, we had top-of-the-hour CBS news blocks with cuts from the same news conferences and interviews, followed by five minutes of local news with -- guess.
WWL-TV's chief meteorologist gave updates from the National Hurricane Center, and he assumed that we who were on the road gave a fat millibar about the the latitude-longitude coordinates. ("Bring back Jindal," the droopy-eyed driver yelled at the radio.) Sandwiched in among all that was a steady diet of rants by my fellow travelers calling in to vent their frustration at being parked on Mississippi interstates and to recommend improvements to the genius who dreamed up contraflow.
And the cliches. The endless parade of cliches. In harm's way. Keeping a close eye. Not out of the woods yet. The very latest.
Why am I listening to this? I asked myself at one point. And I thought of the old joke about the guy beating himself on the head with a hammer who, when asked why he did it, explained that it felt so good when he stopped. Of course I knew why. I needed to know what was going on out there with that storm so threatening that it forced me from my home. No matter how boring it was, how soporific, how repetitive, I needed to have it.
Somewhere long ago I came across Oliver Wendell Holmes' 1861 essay "Bread and the Newspaper," which eloquently emphasizes the importance of news to the public, especially in crises. That came floating in to me somewhere between the meteorologist and the governor. "Everything else we can do without," Holmes wrote. "Only bread and the newspapers we must have." How much worse it would have been, fleeing from the unknown in that Studebaker without a radio.
We finally arrived at our destination, a Birmingham motel, along with hundreds of our neighbors, to judge from the Louisiana license plates in the parking lot and the trash the travelers had tossed in the parking lot.
Some sat around the pool watching their children splashing about, but from what I heard in the hallways, the rest of us spent hour after hour switching the television channels back and forth to CNN and MSNBC and The Weather Channel. We swore at the information we knew to be wrong, the mispronunciations, the cliches and the hype of "breaking news" and "the very latest." But we listened and watched.
And we had the map out, plotting what would turn out to be a much less grueling trip home.
A beginning
Having been mired in Civil War New Orleans for most of today, I thought I would start a blog in 21st century New Orleans.
Why? Exercise: to force myself to write something every day.
This is the start.
Why? Exercise: to force myself to write something every day.
This is the start.
Friday, August 18, 2006
On the Road in Europe
While I was teaching in Innsbruck in the summer of 2006, I took advantage of a long weekend to rent a car and drive to Leiberstung, Germany, in the state of Baden-Wurttemberg, the village of my Lorenz ancestors. On the way there, I took the route that the young woman in the Hertz office told me I must take, the scenic route over the Alps. On the return, I decided to travel south, along the Rhine, through France. It was a memorable trip, as I wrote at the time.
I got an idea for a new reality TV show on my way back to Innsbruck.
Ordinary drivers like me are put in cars in countries they have never been in before and whose languages they do not speak. They are provided cheap road maps and told to travel from one spot to another—say Leiberstung, Germany, to Innsbruck, Austria--using off-expressway routes wherever possible.
We viewers will watch them trying to read local direction signs while speeding along at 120 km/hr with a Mercedes a half a car length behind and, following the lead of the Mercedes, winding up on those expressways. We will sympathize with them as they get off the expressways to see a city and become hopelessly lost. We will hiss and boo as they travel miles in one direction only to decide that they have been going in the wrong direction. They may use a basic phrase book that includes “Where is…?” in the local language. Of course, they will not be able to understand the answers unless they come across someone on a bicycle or hanging laundry or filling a tank with gas at a service station, who will say (with a touch of superiority), “Do you speak English?”
We will delight in their mishaps in restaurants. When ordering a meal, they will never be quite sure what they are asking for. And when they nod their heads when the waiter asks a question, we will laugh hysterically, because we will know that he will return with a bottle of the most expensive wine or with a piece of meat that, a week or so ago, could have been part of a cow or rabbit or bottom-feeding fish, and whatever thick brown liquid it is slathered with resembles something that the diner saw earlier in the day bubbling in a roadside ditch.
If there were a show like that, I think I could be the first contestant.
On Saturday morning, just before boarding the ferry at Greffern to cross the Rhine from Germany to France, I decided that I ought to get gas. In one town, a portly gent said there was no gas station in his town, but he was sure the next town had one, or so I took him to say. I couldn’t find one there, however, and a fellow coming out of a tennis club told me, ach, nein, I would have to go to a town about 7 or 8 km. down the road, past the ferry, the Rhinfahre.
I could go on with the twists and turns. I did get gas. And I found my way to the ferry after taking one wrong turn and asking directions from a muscle-bound body-builder who gave me excruciatingly detailed and repeated directions in rapid-fire German. What I got from his hand motions was that I when I came to a point in the road when I could go either left or right, I should go left. I did, and I got on the ferry, and within just a few minutes it carried me and full load of others to France.
When I got off and followed the other drivers straight ahead, I saw a gas station off to my right at the first intersection. C'est la vie.
Road signs showing me the Rhine River route were in front of me, but I didn’t get a good look at them because the Citroen driver behind me honked as soon as the light changed. I wound up on the expressway on the way to Strasbourg. I still regret not driving through the French countryside. From what I saw on the horizon, it is dotted with exquisite little towns built around medieval churches.
From a distance, Strasbourg looked to be worth a stop. But my turn off of the expressway put me in heavy traffic, and I could do little more than go with the others into the city. I wanted to experience coffee and pastry in an outdoor café, but there were no parking spaces, so I just kept turning right until I found the entrance to the expressway heading south.
When I get to Switzerland, I told myself, I will get off the expressway. But about two kilometers outside of Basel, the traffic stopped in the heat of the mid-day sun, moved half a car length or perhaps one or two lengths and stopped again, until a little more than an hour and half later I pulled to a stop in the shade of the customs station. A 30-something customs agent with an odd little wiggle of beard came up to the car. He waved away the passport I offered.
“Will you be traveling on Swiss highways?” he asked.
“I’m going to go to Liechtenstein,” I said. I had made that decision during the long wait.
“Then you will be traveling on Swiss highways. Thirty euro, please.”
I gave him a bill. He returned with a decal, which he put on the
windshield of the car, and my change: a coin that he said was 50 Swiss francs.
“How do I get to Liechtenstein?” I asked.
“Go toward Zurich and get off at Vraarroop,” he said, smiling.
“How?”
“Go toward Zurich and get off at Vraarroop.”
“Vraaroop” was not on the map. Not even a close approximation.
I had told myself not to complain to the customs officer but I had to say it—though with what I think was a smile. “Do you know how long we have been waiting to get here? How long the line is back there?”
“It is the city of Basel that has caused the delay, not the customs,” he said. “Not the Swiss customs.”
I smiled and waved goodbye and drove half a block and stopped. He was right. It was the city of Basel. Its traffic was clogged by its version of Boston’s Big Dig, and it took me another half hour or more to go just one more kilometer, where the highway opened ahead of me.
I had thought about stopping somewhere in France to have lunch, but had hesitated. What I had left of that long-ago 8 o’clock in the morning French class from a Hungarian refugee priest was little more than Je ne sais pas. I had no dictionary to help me distinguish between pate du foie gras and la plume de ma tante. And I was never quite sure how close one of those little towns might be to the highway, though, in hindsight, after that long wait outside of Basel, that distance would not have mattered.
Now that I was on the road to Vraarroop, however, I was hungry, and when I saw the ausfahrt for a rest stop with restaurant and rest rooms, I ausfahrted. And I lucked out—our reality show fans might think this a set-up—but a woman at the information booth inside spoke English, and with a cultured British accent. She patiently wrote the directions: follow the signs to Zurich, to Chur, then to Vaduz and Feldkirch. I did not ask about Vraarroop.
I picked up a Swiss cheese sandwich and a bottle of water in the shop across the way, and I was off again. I had some misgivings about turnoffs along the way, usually with a BMW or a Porsche on my bumper, but I kept going, and soon enough I was in the principality of Liechtenstein.
Where to stay? Without a guidebook to Liechtenstein, I picked a sign at random in Vaduz and wound my way up a hill to the Sylva Hotel. A notice on the door in German and English told me to knock on the door of the house behind, and when I did, a pleasant, well-fed woman a few years older than I told me the hotel was open but the restaurant was closed. She showed me a room: clean, well-appointed, and at a reasonable price. She quoted me Swiss francs, which Liechtensteiners also use, then translated into euros. It was nice to hear that some currency is valued lower than the dollar. A restaurant would be open within a walking distance of five minuten, or another, 10 minuten, she told me.
The one five minuten away was open, diners were eating on the patio, and the waiter, in his late teens or early 20s, seemed eager to use his English, so there would be no misunderstanding. I ordered—and got—a glass of a reasonably priced Liechtensteiner wine. He brought it in a cruet, and poured about half into a small wine glass. Later he came back and poured more. He had probably been a very good altar boy. I had a salad I put together at the salad bar and finished with a beer.
“No, not Liechtensteiner,” the waiter said when I asked about the beer. “We have no brewers here, I think.”
“But the wine?”
“Oh, yes. We have a very good winery.”
I left him the 50 Swiss franc coin.
After a good night’s sleep, at least until 5 a.m., when church bells summoned someone – Liechtensteiner monks? – to Mass, I was up and packed. And although the restaurant was closed, the hotel’s guests -- I and two women who had had the room next to mine -- had waiting for us a breakfast of coffee, rolls. jam, sliced ham and sliced Swiss cheese.
Then I was off to Feldkirch, just up the road from Vaduz in Austria, with a turn to see the sights along its car-width streets – the standard for streets in small European towns. From there, I angled onto the highway back to Innsbruck.
Next time I’m over that way, I want to spend more time in Switzerland, though preferably not in a line of traffic. And I’m going to carry a map so that I can find Vraarroop. The first trip was entirely too real.
I got an idea for a new reality TV show on my way back to Innsbruck.
Ordinary drivers like me are put in cars in countries they have never been in before and whose languages they do not speak. They are provided cheap road maps and told to travel from one spot to another—say Leiberstung, Germany, to Innsbruck, Austria--using off-expressway routes wherever possible.
We viewers will watch them trying to read local direction signs while speeding along at 120 km/hr with a Mercedes a half a car length behind and, following the lead of the Mercedes, winding up on those expressways. We will sympathize with them as they get off the expressways to see a city and become hopelessly lost. We will hiss and boo as they travel miles in one direction only to decide that they have been going in the wrong direction. They may use a basic phrase book that includes “Where is…?” in the local language. Of course, they will not be able to understand the answers unless they come across someone on a bicycle or hanging laundry or filling a tank with gas at a service station, who will say (with a touch of superiority), “Do you speak English?”
We will delight in their mishaps in restaurants. When ordering a meal, they will never be quite sure what they are asking for. And when they nod their heads when the waiter asks a question, we will laugh hysterically, because we will know that he will return with a bottle of the most expensive wine or with a piece of meat that, a week or so ago, could have been part of a cow or rabbit or bottom-feeding fish, and whatever thick brown liquid it is slathered with resembles something that the diner saw earlier in the day bubbling in a roadside ditch.
If there were a show like that, I think I could be the first contestant.
On Saturday morning, just before boarding the ferry at Greffern to cross the Rhine from Germany to France, I decided that I ought to get gas. In one town, a portly gent said there was no gas station in his town, but he was sure the next town had one, or so I took him to say. I couldn’t find one there, however, and a fellow coming out of a tennis club told me, ach, nein, I would have to go to a town about 7 or 8 km. down the road, past the ferry, the Rhinfahre.
I could go on with the twists and turns. I did get gas. And I found my way to the ferry after taking one wrong turn and asking directions from a muscle-bound body-builder who gave me excruciatingly detailed and repeated directions in rapid-fire German. What I got from his hand motions was that I when I came to a point in the road when I could go either left or right, I should go left. I did, and I got on the ferry, and within just a few minutes it carried me and full load of others to France.
When I got off and followed the other drivers straight ahead, I saw a gas station off to my right at the first intersection. C'est la vie.
Road signs showing me the Rhine River route were in front of me, but I didn’t get a good look at them because the Citroen driver behind me honked as soon as the light changed. I wound up on the expressway on the way to Strasbourg. I still regret not driving through the French countryside. From what I saw on the horizon, it is dotted with exquisite little towns built around medieval churches.
From a distance, Strasbourg looked to be worth a stop. But my turn off of the expressway put me in heavy traffic, and I could do little more than go with the others into the city. I wanted to experience coffee and pastry in an outdoor café, but there were no parking spaces, so I just kept turning right until I found the entrance to the expressway heading south.
When I get to Switzerland, I told myself, I will get off the expressway. But about two kilometers outside of Basel, the traffic stopped in the heat of the mid-day sun, moved half a car length or perhaps one or two lengths and stopped again, until a little more than an hour and half later I pulled to a stop in the shade of the customs station. A 30-something customs agent with an odd little wiggle of beard came up to the car. He waved away the passport I offered.
“Will you be traveling on Swiss highways?” he asked.
“I’m going to go to Liechtenstein,” I said. I had made that decision during the long wait.
“Then you will be traveling on Swiss highways. Thirty euro, please.”
I gave him a bill. He returned with a decal, which he put on the
windshield of the car, and my change: a coin that he said was 50 Swiss francs.
“How do I get to Liechtenstein?” I asked.
“Go toward Zurich and get off at Vraarroop,” he said, smiling.
“How?”
“Go toward Zurich and get off at Vraarroop.”
“Vraaroop” was not on the map. Not even a close approximation.
I had told myself not to complain to the customs officer but I had to say it—though with what I think was a smile. “Do you know how long we have been waiting to get here? How long the line is back there?”
“It is the city of Basel that has caused the delay, not the customs,” he said. “Not the Swiss customs.”
I smiled and waved goodbye and drove half a block and stopped. He was right. It was the city of Basel. Its traffic was clogged by its version of Boston’s Big Dig, and it took me another half hour or more to go just one more kilometer, where the highway opened ahead of me.
I had thought about stopping somewhere in France to have lunch, but had hesitated. What I had left of that long-ago 8 o’clock in the morning French class from a Hungarian refugee priest was little more than Je ne sais pas. I had no dictionary to help me distinguish between pate du foie gras and la plume de ma tante. And I was never quite sure how close one of those little towns might be to the highway, though, in hindsight, after that long wait outside of Basel, that distance would not have mattered.
Now that I was on the road to Vraarroop, however, I was hungry, and when I saw the ausfahrt for a rest stop with restaurant and rest rooms, I ausfahrted. And I lucked out—our reality show fans might think this a set-up—but a woman at the information booth inside spoke English, and with a cultured British accent. She patiently wrote the directions: follow the signs to Zurich, to Chur, then to Vaduz and Feldkirch. I did not ask about Vraarroop.
I picked up a Swiss cheese sandwich and a bottle of water in the shop across the way, and I was off again. I had some misgivings about turnoffs along the way, usually with a BMW or a Porsche on my bumper, but I kept going, and soon enough I was in the principality of Liechtenstein.
Where to stay? Without a guidebook to Liechtenstein, I picked a sign at random in Vaduz and wound my way up a hill to the Sylva Hotel. A notice on the door in German and English told me to knock on the door of the house behind, and when I did, a pleasant, well-fed woman a few years older than I told me the hotel was open but the restaurant was closed. She showed me a room: clean, well-appointed, and at a reasonable price. She quoted me Swiss francs, which Liechtensteiners also use, then translated into euros. It was nice to hear that some currency is valued lower than the dollar. A restaurant would be open within a walking distance of five minuten, or another, 10 minuten, she told me.
The one five minuten away was open, diners were eating on the patio, and the waiter, in his late teens or early 20s, seemed eager to use his English, so there would be no misunderstanding. I ordered—and got—a glass of a reasonably priced Liechtensteiner wine. He brought it in a cruet, and poured about half into a small wine glass. Later he came back and poured more. He had probably been a very good altar boy. I had a salad I put together at the salad bar and finished with a beer.
“No, not Liechtensteiner,” the waiter said when I asked about the beer. “We have no brewers here, I think.”
“But the wine?”
“Oh, yes. We have a very good winery.”
I left him the 50 Swiss franc coin.
After a good night’s sleep, at least until 5 a.m., when church bells summoned someone – Liechtensteiner monks? – to Mass, I was up and packed. And although the restaurant was closed, the hotel’s guests -- I and two women who had had the room next to mine -- had waiting for us a breakfast of coffee, rolls. jam, sliced ham and sliced Swiss cheese.
Then I was off to Feldkirch, just up the road from Vaduz in Austria, with a turn to see the sights along its car-width streets – the standard for streets in small European towns. From there, I angled onto the highway back to Innsbruck.
Next time I’m over that way, I want to spend more time in Switzerland, though preferably not in a line of traffic. And I’m going to carry a map so that I can find Vraarroop. The first trip was entirely too real.
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