Bonnie Jo Campbell - The Letter Parade

The Letter Parade
For the family and friends of Bonnie Jo
December 2006
This following interview is part of my ongoing effort to get onto paper the stories folks tell. -BJC
Loring Janes: Interview with an Urban Revivalist
Loring is my mother Susanna's gentleman friend; he lives at her house and splits some firewood to heat the living room and cooks meals with her and keeps the tractors and trucks running, and thinks about how to do things the best possible way. The two of them attend a number of annual folk festivals around the eastern U.S. and they take part in Kalamazoo Folklife Organization, for whose concerts Loring operates the sound board. When it comes to his music, Loring calls himself an Urban Revivalist and his skill is in singing and finger-picking on the guitar. One of the bands he used to play with locally was the The Lonestar Statesmen. He still performs occasionally (he performed a few years ago at the Kalamazoo Blues Festival), and it's especially fun to hear him perform the talking-style folk songs. Though he would rather tell me how to take apart my wood stove in order to seal up the air leaks or how to prevent my stake bed truck from rusting by oiling its bolts, or how to tune a certain kind of guitar, I convince him to tell me about some of the musicians he met during the years he was active in the folk music scene in Detroit and Chicago, from 1963 to 1973.
Meeting Elvis:
It was a perfectly freak thing. I walked into a coffee house in New York City, the name of which I don't remember and saw Buffy St. Marie sitting there with this dark-haired fellow with his back to me, playing the banjo. They were just sitting at the table jamming. And I walked over and said, "Hiya Buffy, Hiya Buffy," and, "Oh, you're him, huh?" That was Elvis in the sixties after he got out of the army and when he was trying to make a come back, because he kind of lost it all when he went in the army. In the 60s he was doing some interesting stuff trying to make a come back, but his day was gone. He spent the rest of his life in Vegas ... He was a pretty good banjo player. I think he was probably better at that than he was at the guitar. I was never real impressed with his guitar playing, but he always hired good guitar players so it didn't matter... It really was an inconsequential evening.
What were you doing in New York? Susanna asks. She's sitting at her desk with her feet up.
I was in New York working with Post, and we had an evening off, and I was checking coffee houses. I was playing with the band Friend and Lover. That was Cathy and Jim Post. I played bass, and John Friend played drums ...
Was the band named after the drummer?
No. Oddly enough, the drummer, who was Egyptian, was Yehya Khalil, which translated into John Friend. Chuck DeMeyer, he played keyboard. And Jim Schwall played guitar.
Doc Watson
I never actually played with Doc, not like we got on the stage and got paid for it. But he came to town in Detroit. We could date it exactly, because his grandson was born during the period of the gig. Between sets, he'd go to the telephone and call home and see if it had happened yet. And he was playing with his son Merle. Before this, the coffee house owner called me up, and said, "Have you ever heard of this guy, Doc Watson?" and I said, "Yeah, yeah." The coffee house was the Chessmate ... the owner (Morrie Widenbaum) was the Michigan state chess champion, he was the Bobby Riggs of chess... He calls me up and says, Doc Watson was on the way to the airport, and he got in a car wreck, and he's okay but his guitar isn't. Can he borrow a guitar? That big Guild, in the picture, I loaned him that. (Loring points to a photo of himself on Susanna's wall.) Doc said, I never thought I'd be able to borrow a guitar, much less a good one. He gave it back with new strings and everything. The guitar was really was really dumb, though—it didn't learn a thing.
It was early in Doc's career... Of course, he was already famous. First time anybody outside of his home neighborhood ever heard of him, Ralph Rinzler wanted to go down and record Clarence Ashley, and Clarence said, okay but you're going to have to put up with some of my neighbors. And so he had his neighbors there, including Doc, playing guitar. They recorded two albums of Clarence Ashley's stuff and they packed up the tape player and went over to Doc's house and recorded the Watson family at home, which came out on an LP with maybe twelve cuts, then a tape with maybe16 cuts, and then it came out on CD with maybe 25 cuts... They had a lot of tape, but there's only so much you can put on an LP. Most everybody in the Watson family plays about as good as Doc. It's just that they can see. Doc is blind. So they pump gas or they work at the tobacco plant, and Doc has to play guitar because he can't see. If Doc could see, he would be an electrician.
We went down to visit Doc Watson, before my kid was born. Susy and me got in the car and hit practically every state east of the Mississippi, and a few west, and we stopped and visited Doc and stopped and visited Gary Davis; and stopped to visit, you know, people in various places... Gamble Rogers, the guy with the three-legged Chihuahua jokes... He came up with these long rambling stories, he'd tell a story for two sets, and at the end of the set you'd try to recall if he'd played a single tune, and you didn't care, either. Same with Utah Phillips.
When Megan was little, one time Doc Watson was feeling her hair and saying, "I'll bet this is a real blonde," and Megan said, "See, there's my daddy over there, see?" and he said, "No, I don't see." She'd never met a blind person, and he had to explain that to her.
Reverend Gary Davis:
He came to Detroit to play a coffee house, and he played more than once, and naturally we were all impressed with his guitar playing. He was always more than happy to give guitar lessons, they were all five dollars apiece. For however long the lesson was, just give me five. And I thought, hey, he's a minister, and forget the guitar, why don't we use him as a minister. Susy and I had been thinking of getting married, and he was proud and pleased to slap us together.
I'd known Gary for three or four years. When the event was in planning, we called up Gary, and various other people to figure out how to do this. We couldn't go there because we'd have to goof around with New York licensing, and bringing him here was a problem because he was licensed in New York state, but we had a Michigan minister co-sign with him. So it all worked. And we got him some jobs. He played two weeks at the Chessmate, and something in Lansing, and Ann Arbor, and he went home, satisfied, with a goodly wad of money.
Susanna asks, Was that the occasion when your guitar got bumped?
No, that was earlier.... Gary was wearing my guitar and walked into a fire extinguisher, one of those big soda-acid things that hung on the wall and stuck out about ten inches? Bonk. Oops. ... Nothing significant. It's a proud little scar.
(Loring later gets out the guitar and shows me the ding.) Susanna says, "There was also the fact that his wife wanted him to only do gospel music."
Well, she was in New York, so that was not a problem. Bookbinder has a better story about that. Roy Bookbinder. He spent quite a bit of time down in Gary's basement getting guitar lessons. Gary'd be down there in the basement playing some nasty old blues and with his radar he'd hear his wife's keys in the lock, and he'd immediately switch over to the true religion.
He and his wife were living in a shack until that Peter Paul & Mary came out with "If I had my Way." He got all kinds of money from that. Hallelujah! Went out and bought himself a house.
Jose Feliciano
After 16-year-old Jose Feliciano played at our coffee house, we were all so discouraged we were going to take our guitars out in the alley and burn them. This kid was so great. But whatever happened to him? ... He's the Ray Charles of South of the border, the Hispanic Ray Charles. He's got a heck of a market, just not in the Anglo population. At this particular coffee house in Detroit, there was a clique of finger-style guitar players and any time he got somebody to play finger-style, we'd always be there. The place was called The Retort.
We saw Buffy (St. Marie) at the coffee house when she was seventeen.
Joni Mitchell
Actually she got me into Rolling Stone, said that I showed her the relationship between the various open tunings on the guitar. You learn certain fingerings so you can play melodies and things up and down the neck, and then you go to this tuning and move all those things over one string and there they are again, and this tuning, you move them over another string and there they are again. It was like a big soft plastic inflatable lightbulb went off over her head. Ah! She went on from there. She was always playing strange tunings. Her guitar work is more like a painting, it's colors, she's creating moods. She's impossible to play guitar along with, Joni, because playing these weird tunes and weird tunings, but it all fits and it's creating a mood, it's like painting—and she is quite good at that, too.
How did you meet Joni Mitchell?
I was playing guitar behind Chuck Mitchell. We went to Canada to play at the Penny Farthing, a coffee house, and we got there one night early and it was Hootenany night, and we walked in there and there's this tall skinny blonde up there, Joni Anderson, trying to make like Joan Baez, and I said, my god, what beautiful right hand position, and Chuck goes, my god, what beautiful legs, and six weeks later, they were wed.
Loring says Joni and Chuck didn't stay married long. He mentions the song "I had a King," in which there are lyrics: "I had a king in a tenement castle" and "I had a king in a salt-rusted carriage, who carried me off to his country to soon." Loring says that the king was Chuck and the "carriage" was the vehicle that he and Chuck Mitchell were touring in.
It was a nifty Porsche. But try to get three guitars and a few other things and all your luggage in a Porsche to go touring.... Joni's dad was a trumpet player, and one night when Chuck and I were doing something, and she comes up with wax paper and a comb and starts doing all these great trumpet licks.
Neil Young
Joni's roommate in Toronto was a lady by the name of Vicky Taylor who was also a singer, not much of a songwriter, but she was a singer. She was tall and skinny, with black hair cut just like Cher. They were roommates, and Joni moved away and she would provide floor space to other starving musicians who happened to be in town, in return for a little help with the rent, and at one point there was the Allen-Ward trio, a purely Canadian group, and Neil Young and me sleeping on her floor in our sleeping bags. Of course you probably don't want to do anything with this, but somebody had a bag of marijuana, ugly green stuff, and gave it to Neil and he'd never tried it before, and he got really bloodshot eyes and all and locked himself in the bathroom with a magic marker and did a four wall cartoon that, of course, would not paint over (if you did paint over it the marker would bleed through), and we did get pictures of it.
Neil's dad was a newspaper reporter and Neil's pretty much kept up the theme, but he just sings them instead of putting them in the Toronto Globe and Mail. I have to think his articles probably get heard by more people and for a longer period of time than his dad's did.
Jean Redpath
Susanna suggests Loring tell the story about the time Jean Redpath was staying over with him in Detroit.
It was a very nice afternoon. We had the table set and we were just sitting down to nice meal, and the tenants upstairs got into a fight and we hear all this screaming and thumping and banging, then all of a sudden pitter-patter pitter-patter pitter-patter all the way down the stairs into the basement, all the way up the stairs into our kitchen comes the wife, she's sobbing. Then thunder thunder thunder down the stairs and up the stairs and into our kitchen comes the husband. Susy's out in the kitchen with a cast iron frying pan, about to brain this guy. He grabbed his wife by the hair and he was going to drag her back down the stairs and take her home. Jeannie is sitting there all dignified and everything, and I think her comment was something like, "How very unusual."
She's a very impressively dignified straight sort of person with a wicked little sense of humor. One time we were in a restaurant some place, and the waitress was leaning over the next table presenting her derriere to Jeannie, who picked up a fork, and the manager sees it and says, "You wouldn't dare." No, she wouldn't have dared, but we all got a yuk out of it. And the waitress was totally oblivious.
Jeannie has recorded all the songs of Robert Burns. I think it was five LPs, three CDs, something like that.
Other Musicians
One thing you got to remember is you can't put your friends in the bank, so it really doesn't matter who you meet, who you know, who you hung out with. It's still up to you to put money in the bank.
You meet people when you're going down the road, and it doesn't really mean a thing. I met the Beatles at a party. Oh boy, four tired guys on the road, probably all wishing they could go to sleep instead. Met Dylan, was not impressed. It was just when he was going from his folk phase into his electric phrase, and he had just been through a particularly bad experience in Detroit. Because he does the first half of the show with his guitar, and then he comes out with his band and plugs in his guitar, and everybody starts stomping and yelling, "We want Dylan, We want Dylan." Finally the band leaves and Bob sits down at the piano and plays "Ballad of a Thin Man."
Loring says that this behavior was just "characteristic of Detroit." Susanna encourages Loring to tell the following story:
Before Dylan ever made his first record, there was this guy Bill Kahler who came from New York, and he was basically a bar musician but he was playing at this little basement coffee house one night, and he starts doing Dylan's "Hard rain's gonna fall," and all of a sudden all of these basement windows light up with a tremendous crack of lighting and peal of thunder and by the time he's done with the song, water is running down the stairs into the basement, and he starts singing, "How high's the water, Momma?" (Loring sings that line from "Five Feet High and Rising," a song made famous by Johnny Cash) but about that time we had to unplug the p.a. because a lot of stuff was running on the floor.
Susanna prompts Loring to tell the following story about Jimmy Post, formerly of Friend & Lover, and now a well-known folk musician and Mark Twain impersonator:
One time Jimmy Post was on tour some place and this rather cute young lady comes in the the dressing room and says, are you Jimmy David Post, and he says yeah (Loring pants lustfully here) and then she says, "Hi Dad." Turns out it was his daughter by his first wife, who he hadn't seen for twenty years.
What about the Jim Schwall guy you often mention and the Segal-Schwall band?
The Segal-Schwall band was a Roosevelt university project, and they promptly took a vacation from school and went out and played blues instead, and Corky Segal is a heck of a harmonica player. Jim Schwall is a most unpredictable guitar player, playing blues for tiny hands. There are chords I make all the time, he can't. But he gets by. He lives in Madison. He went back to school, and he got his PhD in music, and is teaching in Madison, and he's run for mayor twice. He still does a little bit of touring.
The first time Schwall moved to Wisconsin, I forget the name of town, but it was an interesting location. To get to his house you would turn right on a road that was going up a mountain, and suddenly you were on a road going down the mountain and around a corner to his house. One time, he was a passenger, Chuck DeMeyer was driving, no seat belts, and Chuck kind of misjudged a turn coming off of the big road and rolled the Volkswagen. Chuck got a broken neck and Schwall's head and torso were hanging out where the back window used to be. The car did not roll twice, only once, or they probably both would have been dead. Now Chuck plays with one hand. He plays keyboard. You can do a lot with one hand. Some place I have one of his recordings from not long ago on "Good Hand Productions."
"What about that guy, Andy Cohen?" I ask Loring. Susanna and I know Andy because he showed up showed up in Kalamazoo a few summers ago, driving a pink van shaped like a pig (or a piggy bank), pulling a medium sized trailer shaped like a pig, with a little pig wagon tagging along at the end. He spent a few days with Loring and Susanna, and he connected with Kalamazoo's anti-war protesters. The van itself was a protest of the Iraq war.
Andy was from Sharon, Massachusetts. Andy's first wife... You remember the gorilla Coco who does the signs? That was his first wife's sister. Penny and Jenny. Penny Patterson had the gorilla and Jenny had Andy... At the Earl of Old Town in Chicago. There I am playing this set and this little guy comes in with gargantuan guitar case. Sits at the front, smiling and smiling, and at the end of the set he says, "You play just like I do." And he drags out this gargantuan Kay guitar, and he started playing stuff, and it's all buzzes and fret rattles, and I couldn't tell what he was playing but I knew he was very fast. And I worked on him to slow down. I spent 25 years trying to get Andy to slow down. And he finally did it, and it was wonderful—he's really quite good.
I had to help him move a piano twice, a beautiful piano, with carvings up the front and the candlestick holders and the bell bronze frame, and we moved it out of a second floor apartment in Chicago to a first floor apartment in Chicago to a half-way-up place in Detroit. And then he left it there, didn't want to move it again.
Susanna says, what about that "horrible guy who ended up on the FBI's ten most wanted list?"
Oh, Eric Rosser. He was a very good piano player. He was a graduate of that school in Bloomington, Indiana—which is a fairly well regarded music school, and he played with Johnny Cougar (Mellencamp) for a while, and he was on the Jack and Diane album but he got really tired of the blue collar aspects of playing music. So somewhere there he got himself a couple of old school busses and cut the top off of one at the top of the windows and cut the other one off at the bottom of the windows, and grafted them together so there was lots of head room, and he cut a hole in the side where he stored his piano, and he'd pull into a town and flip out a stage. And then it had the thing that hung out over the driver like a camper, and plexiglass domes so he could lay in bed and watch the sky. It was kind of neat. Four miles to the gallon, and he had this gas can with a big paper mache pig's head with a big open mouth that he'd set up on stage next to his piano on the stage where he was playing. Feed the gas hog. Then I don't know, and we found him on the FBI's most wanted list and he was wanted for child pornography skipping bail and I think they caught him in Singapore or some place where he was advertising himself online, using his real name. I don't know what happened to him but he sure could play the piano.
Sad thing about a lot of the musicians I knew is that a lot of them are dead. Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield, Ted Lucas. Jim Schwall was commenting that his students asked, "What can you tell us about the Tower of Power horn section?" "Well, they're mostly all dead."
Traveling and then Settling Down in Kalamazoo
So you traveled and played from about 1963 to 1973. Do you miss it?
I certainly don't miss the road. Some people enjoyed it. I didn't. You know the old joke, musicians don't play for a living they drive for a living. I put a half a million miles on one Volkswagen in five years, and it only took three engines. It was a '56 beetle. (Loring has owned a total of 27 Volkswagens over the years.) Mostly it was by myself, just me with a couple of guitars, Toronto, Chicago, Chicago, Traverse city, Salem Virginia, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit. ... To play the kind of stuff I like to play, you can't stay in one place. You go to a different town and a different venue. You almost never make it where you're from. You go some place else and you're different. In Detroit there was a whole bunch of people doing the same kind of stuff I was doing. And none of us could get a job. Most of them are elsewhere now. Ricky Ruskin's in Washington, Chover's in California. Lucas is dead.
Before I moved here, I played a few times at the Canterbury Coffee House. It was nice because you could play here in Kalamazoo and then make it to Chicago before last call.
Didn't you have trouble with the Second City bunch in Chicago? Susanna asks.
That was one fun thing about playing at the Earl. The Earl had a four o'clock license--the Earl of Old Town--and right across the street was Second City, and they had a two o'clock license, and so a number of them would come over and heckle, and you had to put up with these people for the last two sets. So you got pretty good at improvising, fending off somebody else's obscure questions. High class hecklers. That was the David Steinberg era, pre-Belushi.
As a kid:
Loring was born in Chicago, but when he was a kid his family moved to Detroit, where his parents played in the symphony. His mother, Ruth Pauline Loring, played the harp; his father, Elmer August Janes, played bass trombone.
I was a Backstage brat at the symphony. Going to see Arthur Rubinstein perform was pretty good. I saw Segovia a couple of times. I got to shake his hand, and my hand disappeared in his hand. He had really big hands. He played a guitar with a two and a half inch wide neck.
I played piano, and then I got two fingers busted up in a bicycle racing accident, which kind of precluded playing the piano but not the guitar. The fingers are okay now, but the guitar had considerable advantages in the way of portability. (Your dad made you practice outside, didn't he? Susanna says.) Yeah. Dad got really tired of me doing the same thing over and over trying to get it right, and so he said, "Out there." (Loring points as his dad must have pointed.)
Nowadays
Loring has maybe a dozen guitars, some of which are in good playing condition, others of which are "works in progress." He has three autoharps, one that works. He's got a wooden flute that should be in a museum. He's got yards of vinyl records, miles of tape, yards of CDs. I asked him what he thinks happened to the Coffee House music scene.
The interest in the music isn't there. High school and college kids were your major audience, and they're just not interested any more. Notice our audience (at the KFO events) is getting whiter and whiter ... Which only seems to be up north here, because when you go down south there's all these great little pickers who only come up to your waist, you know, playing the heck out of their instruments. And daddy's sitting there playing rhythm guitar with a big smile. And the guitar case is open, of course, so you can throw money in. That's a given. The music is not dead everywhere, just around here.
Odee Acres
Loring has a bumper sticker on one of his guitar cases that reads, "Odee Acres." It refers to an event that was epic to us little rock-n-roll pot-smokers, our version of Woodstock. None of us actually went, however. It was out in some field, "in a cow pasture," Susanna suggests. Loring says it's almost to Bangor, Michigan. When I've looked on the Web there is no information about the event, which took place in the summer of 1976, the country's bicentennial, and thousands of people attended. Loring played an Odee Acres event (he thinks there may have been a series of Odee Acres events) with his (then) band, the WWFA (World's Worst Flatpicker's Association.)
Odee Acres was good. The Corky Segal band was there. The Jim Schwall band was there. Odee Acres Bicentennial Bluegrass Celebration. They had a pound of dope sprayed blue.
The WWFA was one of the few bands that got paid, Susanna says.
We got paid! But somebody was making the money go away from the front gate to the back office, and most of it disappeared. The headliner, whose name I should remember, the Cajun fiddle player, hmmm, it'll come to me. His big tour bus comes pulling in, saying, oh, you don't have the money? (Raspberry sound) Big tour bus pulls back out. A lot of people want to get paid before they play, not necessarily a bad idea. Odee Acres was organized by a bunch of people who used to hang around the Sound Factory in Kalamazoo, so that would be Tish Weber and Steve Corelli and those kind of people. People camped out, and there were drugs. Came back the next day and here's all these bearded, naked guys, standing around totally one-hundred percent sunburned, kicking around piles of burned beer cans. I think the name of the production company was Alison Wonderland Productions.
If anyone has more comments or info about Odee Acres, please send it along.
News and Notes and Letter excerpts:
Heather Schwartz, one of Matt's (Sheila's husband's) red-headed twins, has burst forth with a baby. Matt writes, "The baby and mommy are doing fine. She was 6 weeks early. Her name is Ryleigh Jade. She was 3lbs 5oz . The doctor said today that she'll probably be in the hospital for around 3 or more weeks." Unfortunately we've also lost a remarkable soul: Sam Desch, longtime occupant of 2 Garden Terrace has passed away at age 61 of ampullary carcinoma. Christopher found our only photograph of this attic-dwelling polyglot, Reiki-practioner, Scottish dancer, eater of Kim Chi, appreciator of Prince Charles, despiser of France and the modern medical establishment. The Lipsons are planning a Desch-a-thon, December 27th at Sonia's.
If any of you want to know more about what's going on around my place, you might want to check out my web-log. I make about an entry a week, it's at http://www.bone_eye.blogspot.com/ If you want to make comments on the blog, you have to sign up for an account--I guess that's to prevent spam from being pasted as responses. Also, my old computer died so I lost my old LP address list, so if you know anybody who wants to receive email version of the LP, someone to whom I've neglected to send this, just let me know. If you know anyone who would like to receive hard copies of the LP or Word versions by email, let me know.
Wayne Beebe writes from Tulsa: "I'm still travelling a bit, though it isn't the fun it used to be. Jan, my long-time companion and I went on a "Bike & Barge" trip to Holland in August. It wasn't as easy as it sounds. The wind took the place of hills. Sometimes it blew us forward , sometimes it blew in our faces. Also it rained about ten minutes of every half hour. We just gave up and rode and even picnicked in the rain." Wayne is a rather youngish 91 years old.
Carla Vissers writes from Holland, Michigan: Do either of you know what body sugar is? I saw it on Ideal Bite the other day. Apparently it's used for hair removal as an alternative to shaving or waxing or Nair-like remedies. I'm always amazed when I come across something I've never heard of before. Maybe I'll try it, as I seem to be getting hairier by the day. And also pimplier. Right now I have a really lovely rash of some sort covering my chest and creeping up my neck. It's a good thing I'm not trying to attract a man. I'm sure the rash is stress-related, and seriously, I'm worried about my level of stress lately. I've started to think maybe I'm one of those awful people who can't feel alive unless she's in the middle of some sort of drama and so creates drama where there needn't be any. Do you think I'm that kind of person? I can't stand those people!
Heidi Bell wrote from Aurora: As far as the importance of engaging with the world, I don't think it's overrated. In fact, I was just thinking that I need to be involved with kids in some way. We saw part of a horrific documentary about Romanian street kids at the Chicago Humanities Festival this past weekend (I can't remember the title of the movie), and it made me feel bad that I'm not helping kids in my own town in some small way.
Mike Campbell wrote from his trailer north of town: I worry about animals in this cold weather. There was a cat under my neighbor's car telling me to take it home. When I walked out to my back screen porch there was a giant bird. It took off too fast to see what it was. Lots of different footprints in the snow, too. Not sure what type of animals left them.
Nate Lipson sent reports on observations of Pagan holidays: I was desperately bored at the Cisco Network Academy class on Tuesday evening. I left early to shop at Trader Joe's, and to observe Halloween festivities in the Gaslamp district of downtown San Diego. I saw:
a plant covered with leaves, whose two feet were rooted in two planter pots.
a man dressed in a shower stall with water trickling over his head.
Borat, the journalist from Kazakhstan State Television, interviewing people on a busy street corner
a catholic schoolgirl wearing a skirt about three inches long, without panties
lots of nurses in slinky outfits--it's warm here now, and many young women like to show off
superheroes driving around in expensive sports cars
Horrific monsters inspired by "Lord of the Rings," which I've been viewing the past few days. I wish I had brought a camera.

I went downtown (Tijuana) on Halloween three years ago with a huge sombrero and a guitar, playing the persona of the Frito Bandito: "ay ay ay ay -- I am the Frito Bandito," to the tune of Cielito Linda. I expected older Americans who would get a kick out of it, and that bemused Mexicans would be amused by the reaction of those Americans. That Frito-Lay ad campaign made such an impression on me as a child, I forgot that it was retired way back in 1971, under pressure from the National Mexican-American Anti-Defamation Committee. So you'd need be at least 40 to remember it. No one got it. But I'm sure it would be a great persona for a party with Americans my own age. American inspired Halloween is taking root in Mexico.
Of course they've long celebrated the Day of the Dead in Mexico on November 1. We both have exuberant pagan celebrations coinciding with a minor Christian holiday. I'll hang out in downtown Tijuana on Wednesday after my wireless networking class, to observe those dead rituals. They really are macabre.
Sam Lipson writes from Jamaica Plain on the subject of Red Auerbach: Boston mourned the passing and celebrated the extraordinary life of a short Jew named Arnold this past week. Why the big deal? If you don't know what this guy accomplished you really should. He built the greatest dynasty in the history of professional sports. He created an ethic that placed team over individual so successfully that it became modern lore. He grew this idea into a way of life that produced a whole that was much greater than the sum of its parts. His players (24 of them) went on to become coaches, general managers, and team presidents to extend this legacy. He was the first coach to draft a black player in the NBA (1950), the first to put an all-black team on the court (1963), and the first executive in any major sport to hire a black couch (Bill Russell in 1967). Oh, and he won 9 World Championships in his last 10 years as coach. He then went on to win another 7 titles as General Manager. But he was mostly an icon. Infuriating, arrogant, all-knowing. He convinced opposing teams that he was so smart that you simply could not beat him. (Listen to some of the video clips and scan a few of the written tributes on the right-hand side of the page below. http://www.nba.com/news/auerbach_tribute.html) Go with the gods, Red. You have done well.
(Sam later adds: It was so satisfying to see this over-achieving philosophy outlast teams like the "Showtime" Lakers of Magic Johnson in the 1980s. I bet they still can't figure out how they lost to the ugliest and slowest team in the league.)
Writing News: The exciting news around here in fiction is that local boy Andy Mozina's fiction collection, The Women are Leaving the Men will be published by Wayne State University Press, and John Rybicki's new book of poems will be published soon by Northwestern University Press. Susan Ramsey writes: "I've got two poems accepted by Prairie Schooner, but, while they've finally released their Fall issue, I'm not in it, so maybe Winter will be out in April and maybe I'll be in it. Hard to say. Got three coming out in the spring Poetry East and one in the fall." As for yours truly (Bonnie) I have essays forthcoming in Fourth Genre, MacGuffin, and Blue Mesa Review, and Bark's new Anthology of Dog Humor, Howl, but so far no bites on any of my three manuscripts (story collection Winter Life, essay collection Donkey Basketball, novel Math Slut.) Ah, publishing.
Please send news, notes, other bits to bonniejo@iserv.net or to PO Box 52, Comstock MI 49041.
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