After a two-and-a-half-hour drive, it's only fifty minutes by air from Richmond International Airport to LaGuardia and New York City, a place which, whether viewed from 10,000 feet or ground level, resembles Lynchburg, Virginia (my point of origination), about as much my lamentable and long-defunct golf swing resembles Tiger Woods's.
A bizarre but appropriate analogy, since golf was initially what this three-day junket was all about -- spectator golf, that is, as devoted readers of this blog will recall that I wisely abandoned the sport for the fifth and last time about twelve years ago. (The Last Nine Holes, August 27, 2007)
When I inquired of my friend, Chandler A., if he was planning to attend the local debut of Nickelodeon icon, Sponge Bob Square Pants, at the Schewel store on Timberlake Road on Saturday, June 20th -- since his company owned the license to manufacture furniture-related products bearing the image of the wildly popular cartoon character, including the child's recliners we sell in our stores -- a promotion which, by the way, drew 1200 frenzied fans -- he responded with a resounding, "Heck no, Marc. I'm going to the U.S. Open with a couple of buddies. And, for a good customer like you, we just might be able to scrounge up another ticket (or two, when I mentioned that I had a son living in New York)."
Myopic (in more ways than one) and provincial, I had shunned the Big Apple for too long -- even after my older son, David, moved there upon graduating from college and established a career for himself as a free-lance television film editor. Finally, five years ago, my wife persuaded me to accompany her and some friends to the U.S. Tennis Open, awakening me (along with a reading of Robert Caro's classic biography of Robert Moses: "The Power Broker") to the scintillating and diverse attractions of the city like no other: skyscrapers, stores, restaurants, outdoor cafes, delis, museums, parks, riverfronts, pedestrian congestion, subway maneuvers, roller-coaster taxicab rides, charming urban neighborhoods, myriad entertainment options, the curious conjunction of extreme poverty and great wealth, and, everywhere I turned, so many people, of every size, shape, demeanor, color, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, dressed up in designer tee's and jeans or down in cheaper iterations of the same attire, or in basic black, glued to their cell phones and blackberries, in the midst of which one never feels out of place, unless he's wearing the traditional button-down collar and blue blazer of a dyed-in-the-wool Southern gentleman.
Friday afternoon, from a window seat aboard my Canadair Regional Jet, I enjoy a panoramic view of the City's environs, as the plane soars across Manhattan's vertical sprawl, a veritable legoland that is as awe-inspiring in miniature as it is full-blown, and heads up the East River and out Long Island Sound -- where the elegant homes of the suburban rich stretch below amidst lush green foliage bordered by small inlets and dotted with shapely swimming pools -- before circling back over scruffy, middle-class Queens to land and taxi past the familiar letters stuck like an afterthought on a grassy knoll: "Welcome to New York City."
My son is dutifully waiting at curbside -- in the venerable 2000 silver Taurus I sold him (for a pittance) five years ago when it came off a Schewel lease -- to transport me to the clean, moderately-priced ($135 a night) hotel, the Chelsea Savoy, located about seven blocks from his residence -- thus sparing me the arduous task of navigating the intricate bus-subway connections between LaGuardia and Manhattan, or, even worse, the thrill of a New York City taxicab ride, courtesy of a driver of indeterminate nationality talking incessantly on his cellphone in an indecipherable language, inattentive to the flow of surrounding traffic.
David lives in a $400,000 500-square-foot co-op in the West Village. His building, artistically-named "The Vermeer," is typical New York, spanning almost half of Seventh Avenue, rising twenty stories to a rooftop patio ideal for small summertime parties or romantic tete-a-tetes, and guarded by a hefty doorman, who eyes every non-resident suspiciously upon his entrance and then dials upstairs to confirm that he is indeed no uninvited interloper.
The ground floor of this institution is occupied by the Westside Market, 30,000 square feet of narrow, twisting aisles stocked floor to the ceiling with every variety of canned, fresh, frozen, or packaged food imaginable, through which David and I wend our way to a deli bar at the rear of the store -- gliding past a hot buffet of enticing prepared foods -- where I order the best $6.00 tuna sandwhich I have had since my last visit.
Our evening activity takes us by subway -- where I sit beside a young woman engrossed in the newest Hebrew best-seller -- to a New York landmark, but a fresh discovery for me, the Lincoln Center: a six-building three-city-block complex housing, among others, the Juilliard School, the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, and the New York Philharmonic -- a bona fide lifetime of culture for those of us from the hinterlands.
We arrive in the neighborhood early enough for dinner, and wander into a bustling Tex-Mex cafe called "Harry's Burritos," but ignore the signature dish and order a pair of uninspiring enchiladas. After this unsavory interlude, we stroll into Central Park and take a quick tour through the famous "Tavern on the Green," where in the open courtyard we stumble upon an all-black private party and a handful of energetic and overweight Baby Boomers "Doing the Hustle," before moving on to a small, shaded grandstand to watch a fiercely competitive game of coed corporate softball.
A few minutes before 8:00 PM, we rouse ourselves from the Park and make our way to our final destination, the Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont, to immerse ourselves in the three-hour revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "South Pacific."
While I am hardly a music aficionado nor a theater buff, a taste of Broadway a few years ago -- namely, "The Producers" -- ensnared me. Once exposed, who can not but delight in the stunning ambiance of those glorious, historic playhouses (of which the Vivian Beaumont is not one), the elaborate stagecraft, the interactive orchestra, the resonant voices, the perfected choreography, the vivid costumes, the perpetual energy, and the singular fact that he is witness to the finest actors, singers, dancers, and musicians in the world?
Since that epiphany, I have seen in recent years "Wicked," "The Putnam County Spelling Bee," "Jersey Boys," The Lion King," "Mama Mia," and "Rent." "Wicked" disappointed me; banished to the balcony, I could hardly hear the dialogue and the song lyrics. And my wife and I walked out of "Rent" at intermission because the plot was impenetrable and the songs forgettable. But, as for the rest, each was a marvel.
Having been stung by "Wicked," I now always try to purchase orchestra level seats close to the stage, and so, at 7:58 PM, David and I find ourselves two rows from the front but in the far right corner, a placement at first somewhat worrisome, until the thrust stage rolls back to reveal the thirty-piece orchestra, and we realize the style of the performance is virtually "theater in the round," assuring that we are never too from the action or the actors' nuanced facial expressions.
Critics have been unanimously effusive in their praise of this show, and I couldn't agree more with such encomiums as:
"It's been almost six decades since the opening of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic and its first Broadway revival, but the Lincoln Center Theater production makes the waiting -- to echo the James Michener source excerpt splashed across the front scrim: 'The waiting, the waiting, the timeless, repetitive waiting' -- worthwhile. From the seductive swell of a full orchestra playing the glorious five-minute overture to the poignant final tableau of love and reconciliation, this is ravishing theater." (David Rooney, Variety, April 3, 2008)
"I know we're not supposed to find perfection in this imperfect world, but I'm darned if I can find one serious flaw in this production." (Ben Brantley, New York Times, April 4, 2008)
"Simply wonderful. Bartlett Sher's masterly reinvention of Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific opened at the Vivian Beaumont last night with enough wattage to keep Lincoln Center alight for years." (Clive Barnes, Newsday, April 4, 2008)
"In this new production, director Bartlett Sher and a gifted, great-looking cast fully engage both the challenges faced by the characters and the romantic sweep of Rodgers and Hammerstein's ravishing score." (Elysa Gardner, USA Today, April 3, 2008)
Romance, intrigue, humor, and an unexpected (to those like me unfamiliar with the story) outbreak of a dated but universal racial prejudice are interwoven into a plotline that flows effortlessly from the opening sequence, in which the love affair between the sober middle-aged plantation owner Emile de Becque and the cheerful Little Rock naval nurse, Nellie Forbush, germinates and blossoms in the South Pacific heat during World War II, only to wilt when Nellie, true to her "insular Arkansas upbringing," realizes that Emile's two children are the offspring of his former marriage to a Polynesian woman.
Similarly, "Philadelphia's Princeton-educated Joseph Cable falls for Bali Ha'i island girl Liat but despairs of introducing her to life back home. The four conflicted lovers play out their drama while Liat's money-hungry mother Bloody Mary and enlisted man Luther Billis try to grease various wheels and while the war in the Pacific intensifies, eventually involving de Becque and Cable in a dangerous mission as the women wait." (David Finkle, Theatermania, April 4, 2008)
But, as one amateur reviewer wrote, "You don't go to 'South Pacific' for the story, or for the set [which boasts, at times, 'a breathtaking Pacific panorama, a huge spinning flatbed truck, a flashy war room, and World War II fighter plane' (Joe Dziemaniowicz, Daily News, April 4, 2008)]. You go for the songs, the wonderful, joyful, romantic songs" -- songs which captivated audiences and non-theater-goers sixty years ago and shot up the record charts, songs which suddenly prick some ancient musical memory deeply repressed in the consciousness of this most obtuse of auditors. Yes, even I remember (now) "Some Enchanted Evening," "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair," Bloody Mary," "There is Nothing Like a Dame" -- perhaps because my parents played them on a turntable fifty years ago.
These songs meld seamlessly into the storyline as integral components and natural developments; "presented like musical conversation, they sound fresh and exciting," (Joe Dziemaniowicz, Daily News, April 4, 2008) and feel "as natural as breathing." (Ben Brantley, New York Times, April 4, 2008)
When Brazilian Opera baritone Paulo Szot, as Emile, erupts with "Some enchanted evening, You may see a stranger, You may see a stranger, Across the crowded room," the grandeur is palpable, sending chills up the spine. And yet, when he calmly delivers the peroration, "Once you have found her, never let her go," the result is "a measured and honest consideration of love." (Ben Brantley, New York Times, April 4,2008)
Soprano Laura Osnes substitutes admirably for Kelli O'Hara, the revival's original Nellie, bringing to the Mary Martin role an "all-American eagerness" shaded by "a troubled, apprehensive guardedness." (Ben Brantley, New York Times, April 4, 2008) When she shampoos that man right outa her hair with "high spirits" and "plenty of sass," we are close enough to see the pain wrought by conflicted emotions and, later, the possible loss of her beloved Emile.
The Hawaiian actress, Loretta Ables Sayre, makes her New York debut as the avaricious Polynesian peddler, Bloody Mary, and is a show stealer. Short, pudgy, quick-stepping across the stage in her truncated stride, she renders "Bali Ha'i" and "Happy Talk" as "systematic acts of seduction" (Ben Brantley, New York Times, April 4, 2008), gazing steadily into the eyes of Lieutenant Cable, beckoning him, like the mysterious island, to "Come away, Come away, Come to me, Because, any night, any day, Bali Ha'i, it may call you," or tempting him with "You've got to have a dream. If you don't have a dream, How you gonna have a dream come true?"
Sixty years later, one moral of the tale still rings true, as Lieutenant Cable dissects in song the roots of intolerance: "You've got to be taught to hate and fear . . . You've got to be taught to be afraid, Of people whose eyes are oddly made, And people whose skin is a different shade. You've got to be carefully taught."
Dare I say . . . it was "some enchanting evening?"
Ah, but only a prelude to the next big event of this busy weekend -- Saturday, Day Three of the U.S. Open at the Bethpage Black Golf Course, Farmingdale, New York. Or is it Day Two, since a torrential downpour has washed away Day One, Thursday, after only three hours play, not only disrupting the players and the broadcast schedule, but also inciting the wrath of 50,000 ticket holders, who were left without recourse or refund, until the USGA, "threatened by the state Attorney General and skewered by NYC tabloids and talk radio stations, reversed course, and offered them entry on Monday, or a 50% refund had play concluded Sunday." (Damon Mack, Sports Illustrated, June 29, 2009)
Whatever day it is, my son and I bravely board the Long Island Railroad at 8:00 AM for a one-hour train ride to Farmingdale and a short ten-minute bus transfer to the golf course -- except for the one hour it takes us to check David's banned cellphone (about which he has been forewarned) and stand like cattle led to slaughter in a slowly-moving-quadruple-switchback line waiting to board said bus. And with gray skies glowering overhead, we still don't know if we will see any golf.
Some would question why a confirmed non-golfer (two, actually, counting David) would want to spectate a golf tournament -- to which I would reply, first, that just because I can't hit the ball doesn't mean I don't stand in awe and admiration of those who can, and, secondly, how many millions attend football, baseball, and basketball games who have gracefully hung up their cleats and tennis shoes forever?
This was my third professional golf tournament, having stood in the vicinity of the eighteenth green at Pinehurst in 1999 and heard the shouts trumpeting Payne Stewart's triumphant final putt, and having miraculously secured a position in a treeline barely twenty feet from where Tiger Woods hit a ball into a pond fronting the perilous fifteenth hole on the first day of the Masters in 2007.
Unless one is content to plant oneself comfortably in a grandstand overlooking a green and an adjacent tee box, and scrutinize successive threesomes or twosomes as they approach, putt, and drive, watching a golf tournament can be a strenuous exercise. At Pinehurst in 1999, my younger son Matthew and I were fortunate to fall in behind a twosome of Jon Daly and some other long-forgotten player; following them for almost eighteen holes replicated the experience of playing ourselves and facilitated us walking the entire course.
At the Masters two years ago, my mother and I made the mistake of trying to chase down some of the top players, which resulted in long and tiring hikes back and forth between various holes, fighting the monstrous crowds, seeing fewer golf shots, and losing entirely the feel of famous Augusta National.
Thus, when David and I finally locate the first hole -- it isn't easy -- we latch onto an international journeyman threesome teeing off at 10:30: Michael Campbell of New Zealand, best known for winning the 2005 U.S. Open, his only PGA Tour victory; Rod Pampling of Australia, winner of two tour events (and $11,625,000) in his ten-year PGA career; and Floridian Boo Weekley, also a two-time winner, but a crowd favorite, renowned for such antics as riding his driver cowboy-style down the first fairway at the 2008 Ryder Cup, running to a lake and starting to fish during a rain delay in a tournament on the Nationwide Tour, and telling talk-show host Jim Rome in 2007 that the wind on holes 16, 17, and 18 at Harbourtown was so fierce "it made your butthole pucker up."
Apparently, Boo's always a good interview. "It was so wet," at Bethpage, he said to a reporter, "I saw frogs climbing up the clubhouse walls trying to get out." (Damon Mack, Sports Illustrated, June 29, 2009)
I suspect also that a good deal of this man's popularity can be attributed to his fans' ability to cheer for him by booing.
What we see that day that we won't see on television (no matter how often the announcers repeat it) is how far and how straight these guys hit the ball -- almost every time -- and how difficult this course really is (or appears to be to one who hasn't seen very many): fairways that don't start until 175 yards from the tee box, and when they do, have been narrowed twenty-five yards by a freshly-grown first cut rough; deep wiry grass and underbrush when the player misses that first cut; sand traps lining the fairways and surrounding almost every green; elevated greens and doglegs producing a multitude of blind shots; small greens with imposing pin placements; 500-yard par 4's and one 600-yard hole.
We follow Boo and his partners for five or six holes, accompanied by a chorus of boos, which reaches a crescendo when the object of their affection birdies the par 5 fourth. In the gray overcast, we find it hard to follow the flight of the ball. We post ourselves 300 yards from the tee box, listen for the crack of the driver, gaze skyward in anxious expectation and repeated frustration, and then hear a heavy thump, signaling that the ball has landed somewhere nearby. From there, we traipse ahead to the green.
Weeks of rain -- which continues today in intermittent showers -- and three days of heavy pedestrian traffic have transformed the dirt paths around the course into unavoidable, soggy pools of black slime. Fortunately, I chose to wear tennis shoes, which I can clean in the bathtub of my hotel room, and short pants; while my socks end up so caked with mud that one washing doesn't suffice, at least my trouser legs are spared.
Not only is Bethpage Black long -- 7426 yards -- it's strung out like a caterpillar. With the tenth tee at the far end, the course loops back only once, making it difficult for spectators to cross from hole to hole, which, against my better judgment, David insists we do around midday, in order to see Tiger Woods.
Tiger's threesome -- the best of the day, as it includes Masters champion Angel Cabrera and British Open titleholder Padraig Harrington -- started from the tenth tee about the same time we arrived at the golf course, so he is playing the thirteenth hole when we decide to track him down. Besides the ubiquitous mud and the interminable distances, there is, of course, the problem of the crowd, since one-half of our 50,000 companions have the same idea as we do. We finally manage to perch ourselves atop a small mound which gives us a sliver of a view of the thirteenth green, a vantage point from which we are able to see Tiger sink a ten-foot putt for a birdie -- only the second birdie we witness all day.
I finally convince David that further pursuit of Tiger is a waste of time and energy, and, after a couple of $10.00 sandwiches and $4.00 drinks, we go out in search of an unencumbered threesome to follow the rest of the afternoon.
A reward of attaching oneself to one group for a number of holes is that -- no matter how obscure or well-known the players might be -- almost subconsciously, for a brief hour or two, a peculiar bond is flash-forged between player and spectator, the latter's emotions rising or falling with every brilliant shot or missed putt, any of which may stimulate casual banter between the two or, more likely, just one-sided conversation. Such is the case when David and I fall in alongside the unfamiliar trio of Chris Kirk, Craig Bowden, and Bronson Burgoon for six closing holes.
Burgoon, a youthful amateur from Texas A&M, quickly becomes the darling of some raucous fellows who have consumed too many $6.00 beers -- as have thousands of others that day, some of whom will earn a sour notoriety by heckling Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, and prompt tournament watchdogs to shut down beer service thirty minutes early, after 110,000 cups have been served, compared to an equal number of water and soda combined.
"Go Aggie," they shout, spurring him on with every swing, to which he responds with a sheepish grin and a half-hearted wave. We are within club lengths as he bravely thrashes out of the deep woods on thirteen (but still makes bogey) on his way to a back nine 42, seven over par. One of his partners, Chris Kirk, fares no better, losing a ball -- much to our amazement -- in the thick six-inch sawgrass on sixteen, in spite of frantic searches by all three players, their caddies, and several negligent officials and ball boys.
By 4:00 PM we have had enough of battling the elements. The ride home goes a lot faster -- probably because we are entertained by an affable fellow -- whom we actually encountered on the golf course gleefully flashing his cell phone ("You've got to know how to sneak them in.") -- who manages to recount his entire life story and that of his father -- a thirty-seven-year New York City detective -- to two visiting couples from Florida in the forty-five minutes between Farmingdale and Manhattan.
Safely ensconced in his dry apartment, David and I watch the remaining two hours of the U.S. Open broadcast on his 50" plasma HD television, before a final downpour mercifully ends play. We dine that evening with some friends of his at a quiet neighborhood Italian restaurant, and enjoy a pleasant meal, until the waiter pulls a New York surprise, smugly rejecting my credit card and condescendingly informing me that this is a cash-only establishment.
One live sporting event a weekend is enough for my media-oriented son, and so, even though it's Father's day, I am destined to fly solo for the last leg of this three-day whirlwind tour -- interleague play between the Tampa Bay Rays and the New York Mets at the new Citi Field in Queens. After a ten-mile run along the Hudson River Parkway (only three avenues from my hotel) and a satisfying brunch at the Comfort Diner, I once again board the Long Island Railroad (the Port Washington branch) for a twenty-minute train ride to Mets-Willets Point.
As one who loves the sport and follows the teams, players, and statistics religiously from Opening Day to the crowning of a World Series champion -- actually, a day of mourning for me, as it marks the beginning of a five-month dry spell -- I never forgo the opportunity to see a Major League baseball game, no matter who's playing -- although I would certainly prefer to see my beloved -- and hapless (this year) -- Oakland Athletics. (If you wonder, "Why them?" just read Michael Lewis's "Moneyball.")
Thus, the anticipation steadily builds as I pass through the impressive portico and make my up -- one, two, three levels -- to find my $90 seat (which, I read later, could be had for half that, as the Mets were desperate to fill their new stadium). I am hoping for something better, but this is New York; actually, even from the third deck, I am close to the field and have a sweeping view of all but the far right corner, where, in the sixth inning, Met catcher Jeff Schneider hits a home run off the Pepsi sign. (So I am told by a fellow behind me.)
Citi Field boasts all the amenities fans have come to expect of the current generation of ball parks, which was spawned by Baltimore's Camden Yards, and now includes Washington's Nationals Park and Philadelphia's Citizens Bank Park: a proliferation of food stations every one hundred feet serving typical beefy cuisine and beer and soda at inflated prices; patio dining and drinking above the bleachers in center field, where the two men sitting next to me migrate around the seventh inning; a fabulous scoreboard, employing the ultimate in techno-wizardry, displaying every relevant statistic, updated instantaneously, and featuring the obligatory animated diversions; and, of course, the playing field, a geometrical jewel, the luxuriant green outfield a pastoral garden planted amidst concrete and steel, mowed in alternating strips clearly discernible from my elevated seat, the sandy infield manicured in stark contrast, all accented by chalked batter's box and foul lines.
As the nine defenders race to their assigned positions, one wonders how they can cover this broad expanse. (They can't, of course.)
Finally, after a stirring rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" -- to be followed in the seventh inning by "God Bless America" -- it's time to "Play Ball."
This is an interesting match-up. Both teams are hovering around the .500 mark, a severe underperformance for the Mets, whose $135,000,000 payroll ranks second only to that of their crosstown Bronx rivals, while the upstart Rays, competing against those other New Yorkers in the fierce American League East, have come back to earth after their meteoric rise to last year's World Series. In all fairness, the Mets have been decimated by injuries to two of their star infielders, first baseman Carlos Delgado and shortstop Jose Reyes, and to two starting pitchers and two frontline relievers.
In order to stay focused on the game and to have source material for this blog, I decide to keep score, which I haven't done since I taught myself the methodology watching Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese broadcast the Saturday afternoon "Game of the Week" fifty years ago. On a scorecard, hits and outs are recorded using symbols to indicate the appropriate action and numbers to identify the fielder and the field position in play.
For example, referring to my scorecard, I see that, in the bottom of the sixth inning, with the Mets batting, Wright led off with a double to right field, and moved to third when Sheffield was thrown out, shortstop to first. Church walked, and then Schneider hit a home run to right field (the one I couldn't see), driving in Wright and Church. Valdez flied out to center field. Tatis, batting for the pitcher Stokes, struck out. The Mets scored three runs on two hits.
While to some baseball appears to be a slow-moving game with only occasional bursts of activity, therein lies its beauty. Turn away for an instant, and you miss the play -- which happens to me when Cora, leading off the bottom of the first, is suddenly walking back to the dugout, leaving me mystified and my scorecard displaying an embarrassing blank space, until, two innings later, the omniscient scoreboard comes to my rescue and informs me that Cora, in his first at-bat, fouled out to the catcher.
The game commences at 1:10 PM, and, with an expected duration of two-and-a-half hours, I am wondering how I am going to occupy myself during the five-hour interim before my scheduled LaGuardia departure at 8:30 PM -- a needless worry, as it turns out.
In the second inning, as the Rays (or is it the Mets?) are coming to bat, the field is mysteriously cleared, and remains so for about twenty minutes, to the increasing consternation of the fans. When play resumes, it is with three umpires instead of four, the home plate occupant having been stricken by some unspecified illness, which necessitates one of his comrades donning his protective equipment. A fellow in front of me offers as reasonable an explanation as any: "He ate a couple of Nathan's hot dogs."
By the time I get to the ballpark, the morning rain has stopped, and, as the game progresses, the cloud cover dissipates, unveiling a blue sky and a refreshing halo of bright sunshine. Around the sixth or seventh inning, however, the perverse weather pattern which has been afflicting the area for weeks blows in another shower, stopping play. This affords me the opportunity not only to lay aside my scorecard, locate a bathroom, and invest in a spicy Italian sausage (which looked too good to resist being eaten beside me), but also, upon my return to my sheltered seat, to observe the expertise of the field crew as, like soldiers in precise formation, they expeditiously unroll the protective tarp, and then repeat the process in reverse when the rain passes on an hour later.
The game itself is an extended affair. By the time the last out is made at 5:30, the Rays have scored ten runs on seventeen hits; the Mets, six runs on ten hits. A steady rotation of pitchers -- the Mets throw seven into the fray, the Rays only one fewer -- slows down the clock, as each mid-inning change involves two managerial trips to the mound, a long ride (or trot) in from the bullpen, and the requisite number of warm-up pitches. Each team uses three pinch-hitters, one of whom, for the Rays, oddly enough, is a pitcher, Sonnanstine, an American Leaguer who doesn't normally bat.
Needless to say, I see lots of action. The Mets twice take leads, 2-0 in the second and 5-4 in the sixth (after Schneider's home run), only to see the resourceful Rays storm back. In the seventh inning, the Rays play havoc with my scorecard, sending ten men to the plate, smashing two singles, two doubles, and a home run, scoring four runs, and taking an 8-5 lead they will not relinquish. The principal victim is rookie David Parnell, who is charged with all the damage, and fails to retire a single batter.
It's Father's Day -- and the scoreboard never lets any of the 25,000 in attendance (officially 39,000, but I never saw them) forget it, offering up sentimental trivia about each player's father as he comes to bat and broadcasting a mini-contest in which proud youngsters testify as to "Why My Dad is the Best."
Although none of my five children is with me -- two call during the afternoon -- I am not alone. The comraderie of a sporting event quickly envelops me like a cozy blanket, particularly here, at a baseball game, where the relaxed, leisurely pace is most conducive to one's striking up a conversation with a neighbor, initially about baseball -- the tribulations and successes of one's favorite team; individual batting averages, home runs, won-lost records; tall tales of ball games long past -- but soon drifting into personal revelations. For three fleeting hours on a Sunday afternoon, in the city of millions, a common interest in the greatest game makes friends out of total strangers.
There is no triple play on the field that day, yet as I sit on the Q48 bus to LaGuardia -- scorning a $25 limousine ride, I walk six blocks, hop on another bus, and transfer in Chinatown Flushing -- I reflect that I have experienced a three-day weekend just as rare: grand theater, the premier golf tournament in the world, and an ordinary, yet exciting, midseason Major League baseball game -- just three more reasons why New York City is a traveler's paradise, and Lynchburg, Virginia, by contrast, is a comforting place to come home to.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Master of Ceremonies
Twenty years ago I would never have envisioned myself where I stood last Friday, serving as Master of Ceremonies for a local non-profit fund-raising event and roasting thirty contestants in a History Bee -- proof positive that skills which one thinks are alien to him can, with boldness and practice, be acquired (excepting, at least in my case, those which demand a modicum of hand-eye coordination).
The best public speakers are those who, through some subtle combination of sparkling wit, provocative wisdom, and empathetic warmth, entertain as well as instruct, who effortlessly render their preachments as pure performance, who stalk their podiums and platforms like seasoned soliloquists -- attributes which explain the seamless transition of Ronald Reagan from thespian to politician and of any number of stand-up comedians from night clubs to the silver screen.
My own brief acting career was hardly a harbinger of future stage presence. Seeking an antidote to low self-esteem and a broader social network, with no prior experience, I tried out for the E.C. Glass 1965 Senior Play -- which, I believe, had something to do with Henry Aldrich -- surmising that, with ten male speaking parts up for grabs, I could surely land one of them. Alas, so did eleven of my classmates, and, when the music stopped, the gamesman left without a chair was none other than your faithful chronicler.
When the drama teacher, the legendary, ceremonious spinster, Ms. Virginia Wiley, apparently taking pity on this dejected outcast, offered me the consolation prize of serving as understudy to the lead, Russell C., a perennial star whose talents had won him the favor and company of a bevy of beautiful girls, I scorned the fruitless exercise of memorizing hundreds of lines and haughtily declined, preferring instead to work as Ms. Wiley's superfluous assistant.
I got my comeuppance two weeks later, however, when poor Russell was injured in a car accident and the starring role -- which, except for my stubborn pride, would have been mine -- devolved upon a close friend of mine, Macey R., who had another part and already knew most of the lines. (Don't ask who got his part; it wasn't me.)
Years later, another friend scolded me for portraying myself as the victim of this cruel turn of events, when, in fact, the one who suffered most was the wounded Russell C.
From then on, my feeble attempts at public speaking coughed and sputtered like the recalcitrant starter on the 1983 RX-7 I finally sold last month after innumerable towings and repair bills. I tried debating in high school but foundered under a plethora of detail and a lack of spontaneity. I muddled through a course at Washington and Lee taught by the venerable, voluble, beady-eyed William Chapin, but could never quite summon the poise and rhetorical polish to make effective, convincing presentations. I remember trying to roast a college roommate at his rehearsal dinner with some grotesque tale about his passing out in a bathtub -- only to see it drown in incoherence and pathos.
When drafted to toast my father in front of thirty Schewel managers at a semi-retirement luncheon held for him after his cancer diagnosis, I even butchered the tired story of the quick-witted, young grocery clerk who runs to his boss cursing the eccentric customer who wants to buy half a banana, is startled to realize the customer has followed him and overheard his deprecations, and adroitly recovers with the enthusiastic riposte: "And this fine gentleman wants to buy the other half."
My father was well aware of my reluctance to speak in public. When he received the ADL Torch of Liberty Award in 1988, one year before he died, he selected my brother Jack -- ten years my junior -- to represent the family before an audience of two hundred. Jack has an understated, creative sense of humor, and entertained us all with some witty tales of growing up in a household with the remarkable Bert Schewel.
While delivering the eulogy at my father's funeral -- which I wrote about two months ago ("The Power of Love," April 4, 2009) -- led me to believe that, if prepared, I could speak with candor, self-confidence, and relevance, my first real attempt at humor came a few years later at the behest of a very talented roastmaster, a physician friend who asked me to co-host a fund-raising event. I think he saw me as a straight-man foil to his biting commentary, a Southern Jewish counterpoint to the Yankee Italian persona he reveled in.
Not wanting to embarrass myself, I labored diligently, compiling over two thousand words of canned jokes, original quips, and provincial satire, most of which I couldn't use, because there was no opportunity for a monologue and my partner took up most of the time roasting me and members of the audience and auctioning off door prizes.
For source material, after quickly exhausting my own imaginative powers, I turned to a joke book (I now own four, although they have lately been displaced by the Internet, where, with the click of the mouse, one can find a joke on any conceivable subject plus pages of late-night Letterman and Leno humor) and to my father's archives -- a drawer full of speeches which he gave over a period of twenty years, wisely preserved by me when I moved into his office in 1989.
Since my sidekick was a Catholic and a gastroenterologist, three of my father's favorite jokes -- two of which he frequently told about a friend who was a proctologist -- fit the occasion.
"I was late getting here this evening," I said, "because a priest stopped me in the lobby. 'Aren't you Marc Schewel?' he asked. 'Yes, Father, I am, but I don't believe we've met.' 'We haven't,' he said, 'but I've heard a lot about you. Your name comes up in confession all the time.' "
"I found out how Dr. C. gets a lot of his patients. Last week he invited me over to his house for dinner and fixed me a drink consisting of Philips Milk of Magnesia, Welch's Prune Juice, and Smirnoff's Vodka. 'What's this called, Doc?' I asked, to which he replied, 'A piledriver.' "
And then, in a joke which dates itself, since the company mentioned is no longer around, I announced that Dr. C. and I were going into the furniture business together and would be forming a company called "This End Up."
Years later, in introducing Dr. C., I reprised and embellished an old joke I used that night. "Dr. C. is one of the few doctors I know who still makes house calls. Just yesterday he called his house at Wintergreen, his house at Smith Mountain Lake, his house on the north corner of Paddington Court, and his house on the south corner of Paddington Court."
And I thought this remark, which I lifted from a tee shirt given to me because of my fund-raising work for the United Jewish Appeal, captured the essence of Dr. C.'s profession: "After I finally convinced Dr. C. to increase his sponsorship to tonight's dinner, he retorted, 'Okay, Marc, I've upped my pledge; now, up yours.' "
I rarely turn to my father's files these days, although an occasional perusal brings back bittersweet memories. Many of his jokes were topical and timely, and even those that weren't don't read nearly as well as he told them.
Although my father could speak extemporaneously -- and comically -- on a multitude of subjects, I find it instructive that he wrote out his speeches -- or, more likely, dictated to a secretary who typed them up -- and that he saved them all for future reference -- two habits religiously adhered to by his successor.
Inventing jokes is no easy task -- it entails long periods of gazing at the four walls of one's office intermixed with bursts of inspiration -- and my father had a gift for it as well as applying the canned variety to attendant or recognizable individuals and to contemporaneous situations. He would seek out familiar faces in the audience and make them the object of such comments as: "I'm glad to see George here tonight; he always looks good in cheap clothes." Or,"George comes from very humble beginnings. One day I saw him with only one shoe. 'George,' I said, 'did you lose a shoe?' 'No' he said, 'I found one.' "
Schewels strategy of opening stores in small towns gave my father the opportunity to mock places like Williamston, N.C., "which is so small that the City Hall is over a car wash, so small that McDonald's has a sign that says 'only four sold,' so small that the Masons and the Knights of Columbus meet in the same building; they are called Mason-Knights."
As my burgeoning involvement with various non-profit organizations required that I speak or preside before large groups, I began to experiment with injecting my own brand of humor into the proceedings. Most manuals discourage the practice; not every one can tell a joke, or choose one to fit the occasion. While I am certainly no expert, I have developed a basic philosophy which usually serves me well.
Most audiences, at least initially, are conditioned to respect your presence, your willingness to risk your reputation to stand and deliver, and will be attentive to your message. Even if they don't find all (or any) of your remarks funny, they will appreciate your well-intentioned efforts to make them laugh -- especially if you employ a dash of originality.
I write out every speech word-for-word, including the jokes. A joke can rise or fall on the precise arrangement of the words used.
Any joke can flop, which is why I plan several. Chances are at least one will strike a chord with the audience. Besides, I don't have to make every one laugh; a few loud guffaws can arouse the whole crowd.
I try to keep my jokes short and simple. Stand-up comedians make their living off one-liners -- because they avoid hushed anticipations. When I resort to a lengthy canned joke, I edit it down to the fewest possible words.
Relish the moment. Like a runner's high, nothing invigorates me more than establishing a sensory connection with my listeners, knowing that I possess the power to affect their emotions, projecting a love for them that is reflected back upon me.
Speakers, especially those who are going to tell jokes, must be fearless, and never intimidated by deathly silences or the thought of failure. I have always regretted backing away from the following story I wanted to tell several years ago about George W. Bush when it was announced he was coming to the opening of the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Va.
"He was planning to fly by commercial airline to save money after signing off on his big tax cuts -- until he discovered that a round-trip ticket from Washington, D.C., to Lynchburg, Virginia, on U.S. Airways cost $4635, with intermediate stops in Pittsburgh and Charlotte.
"Then he decided to fly over on Air Force One. His team conducted a trial run at the Lynchburg Airport. The plane touched down safely -- but by the time it came to a full stop, it was in front of the Vines Center on the campus of Liberty University, where stood Reverend Jerry Falwell asking for a contribution to his newest faith-based initiative.
"Next, President Bush did what so many of us do when going to and from Lynchburg; he decided to drive. He directed the FBI to draw up the best route (at the time, the FBI was under fire for a series of egregious errors), and, wouldn't you know it, he ended up in Bedford, Massachusetts. On top of that, the FBI lost the speech he was supposed to give.
"Finally, the President decided he would fly in by helicopter -- until it was ascertained that the only helicopter landing pad in Bedford County was atop the roof of the Jefferson Forest High School." (At the time, it was common knowledge that the roof -- in fact, the entire school -- was in dire need of repair.) "Since landing there didn't seem too good an idea, I am sorry to report that George W. Bush will not be coming to Bedford, Virginia."
I did muster enough courage to tell this joke about Reverend Jerry Falwell (he was alive then) when I received a Chamber of Commerce Award at a breakfast held at Liberty University.
"I was really curious to see the new Thomas Road Baptist Church when it first opened, so I came to a Sunday Service. Afterward, I went up to Reverend Falwell and said, 'Reverend, you have a helluva fine church here.' He replied, 'Thank you, Marc, but I would appreciate it if you wouldn't use profanity in the Lord's House.' 'I'm sorry, Reverend,' I said, 'but I couldn't control myself. And that was a helluva fine sermon you gave.' The Reverend replied, 'Marc, please, I cannot allow you to talk this way in the Church.' 'Sorry, Reverend,' I said, 'but I just wanted you to know that I was so impressed with all I saw and heard today that I put $10,000 in the collection plate.' Dr. Falwell's eyes widened and he exclaimed, 'Marc, that is a damn fine contribution.' "
Finally, I try to prepare my remarks well in advance, to give them time to percolate, to roll around in my brain, to leave openings for sudden flashes of brilliance -- which came to me one week before a scheduled talk at the YWCA Women of Achievement banquet while I was sitting in Randolph College's Smith Hall, ostensibly listening to President John Klein's Inaugural Address.
The context of my opening lines is that, only a month earlier, Presidential candidate Barack Obama had visited Lynchburg and spoken at E.C. Glass High School. When the Democratic organizers had asked Jerry Falwell, Jr., to allow overflow parking at the Plaza, he had refused, supposedly for security reasons.
Thus, I explained to my audience, "This YWCA event had originally been slated for E.C. Glass High School. And, when it was announced that I was to be the keynote speaker, a very large crowd was expected, more than could be accommodated in the parking lot. The YMCA contacted Jerry Falwell, Jr., to ask if the overflow could park at the Plaza. Is anyone surprised that he refused?
"He might have relented if he had known that I, traditionally a Democrat, am voting Republican this year, along with two of my Democratic friends on City Council, Joan Foster and Bert Dodson. Why? Because John McCain has promised to buy up every bad mortgage in the United States, and City Council and I couldn't be happier about that. We are both investors in Bluffwalk -- and if there was ever a mortgage that needed a bailout, that's one." (Of course, after the election, the Obama Administration implemented several programs to assist imperiled mortgage-holders.)
"I see where Jerry Jr. finally broke down and agreed to let a representative of the Obama campaign appear at Liberty University. I thought I would be more likely to snow ski down Liberty Mountain in July than see a Democratic governor speaking on the Liberty campus." (Liberty is building an artificial year-round ski slope.)
"And finally, I'm only here tonight because the YWCA's first choice, Vice-Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, couldn't make it. She accepted the invitation but while driving down to Lynchburg from Northern Virginia, she took the Charlottesville bypass. Someone forgot to tell her it was the Road to Nowhere."
Sometimes a throw-away line gets the biggest laugh. When I received the NCCJ Humanitarian Award in 1999, I began my acceptance speech with the innocuous (and honest) comment that I had been on the committee that had selected all the honorees, including myself. It brought down the house.
Conversely, for the aforementioned YWCA dinner, I had composed a painstaking revisionist history of Lynchburg, inventing eight famous females who had made significant contributions to its past -- including my piece de resistance, Reverend Geraldine Falwell, "a true visionary, who launched her career on television, hosting the Old Time Good Smell Hour, a cooking show during which she shared her favorite recipes. She always delivered a moving prayer before partaking of her selected delicacy. One day a viewer called in and said, 'Geraldine, your prayers are a lot tastier than your dishes. Maybe you should take up preaching full-time.' And the rest is history."
Alas, not one of these cleverly-conceived mini-biographies elicited even a chuckle.
My most memorable engagement took place four years ago when I joined Governor Mark Warner, former Attorney-General Jerry Kilgore, and WSET anchorman Jeff Taylor at the Holiday Inn Select to roast local Virginia delegate Preston Bryant, a Republican who had bolted the party ranks to craft a budget agreement with Governor Warner which included a tax increase.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to skewer not just Delegate Bryant, but the other dignitaries in attendance -- as well as a host of local personalities.
"And what was I doing in that illustrious group? Well, Crisis Line (for whose benefit this event was being held) wanted at least one person at the podium who would pay his own way."
I chastised the Governor and Delegate Bryant for their tax increase, explaining to them that their compensatory sales tax reduction on food didn't do me much good, "because I don't buy that much food. I'm like a politician; someone usually buys me lunch and dinner. If you lawmakers really wanted to help the workingman, you should roll back the sales tax on furniture."
I announced that "our City Fathers have decided to name the long-awaited Crosstown Connector" -- which still hasn't been built and probably never will be -- "in honor of Martin Luther King. Of course, by then, it will be called the Martin Luther King VI Highway."
I told Delegate Bryant why his Republican comrade, State Senator Steve Newman, was boycotting the celebration. "He became very suspicious when he heard it was a gala event. 'None of them are getting married, are they?' he asked."
Since candidate Kilgore had proposed a statewide referendum on taxes (An absurd non-starter; who's going to vote for higher taxes?), I told him that "I conducted a poll of the audience prior to dinner and found only two persons who favored higher taxes -- and they were both sitting beside him. We could take care of that easily, however: just gerrymander them into Tennessee. These two fellows are too weird for Virginia anyway; they actually like roads, bridges, schools, and garbage collection."
I told Kilgore that our mayor -- who was under investigation for fraud and nonpayment of taxes -- was disappointed in his proposal to cap property taxes at five per cent. "He was hoping for a moratorium."
Then I turned to Governor Warner, "whom I had the honor of meeting tonight for the first time. It's not easy meeting a person of power and influence -- but he handled it well.
"Governor Warner, some people get you mixed up with that other Virginia Warner, John. In fact, I did a survey of the audience tonight and found out that fifty per cent voted for you because they thought you were John Warner and fifty per cent voted against you because they thought you were Marc Schewel."
And in a joke which didn't go over as well as I thought it would, in reference to our current mayor's problems, I said about Governor Warner (whom some suspected would run for President; he never did, of course) that there has been a lot of speculation as to what he intends to do after leaving office, and, therefore, "after our conversation over dinner, it gives me great pleasure to reveal tonight that in 2008 he will be following in the footsteps of past Virginia statesmen and announcing his candidacy for . . . Mayor of Lynchburg." (Former Governor Doug Wilder had recently been elected Mayor of Richmond.)
I cautioned Governor Warner not to get too excited about all the good press he had been receiving. "I know you were recently named Public Official of the Year by Governing Magazine, but that just shows what kind of year it's been. And isn't this the same magazine which named Ken Lay (remember Enron?) Executive of the Year in 2000, Michael Jackson (remember his youthful playmates?) Big Brother of the Year in 2001, and Martha Stewart Investor of the Year in 2002?"
Moving on to the guest of honor, Delegate Preston Bryant, I drew a connection between his efforts to rescue last year's budget and the evening's host, Crisis Line.
"An audit of Crisis Line calls from January 1st, to April 15th," I said, "disclosed that 3248 out of 6159 calls came from the General Assembly or the Governor's Office. Records also indicate that for 90 per cent of those calls Crisis Line's recommendation was: Jump off the Rivermont Bridge." (site of a couple of recent suicides)
And, satirizing a ridiculous and ill-advised bill to ban drooping pants, I sunk to a new low when I launched the following scatological diatribe: "Far be it from me to be so cheeky as to make any wisecracks about this bum bill. Briefly speaking, if you ask me, some of our legislators are just behind the times. As a furniture salesman, I've been fighting this problem for years. Because when you get past fifty, you get the furniture disease; your chest falls into your drawers."
When it came time to roast Delegate Bryant, I pounced on his reputation for being a smart guy, which had been supplied by his wife Liz, "an assessment I realized was as accurate as the weather predictions she used to make in WSET, where she is no longer employed.
"Delegate Bryant," I said, "you've made some mistakes this year. And if it's true that we learn from our mistakes, you'll be the best at your profession.
"One mistake was the picture of him his mother had plastered all over the walls of the Lynchburg Mammography Center where she works. When I asked her about this, she said, 'I look at boobs all day, and I thought Preston would fit right in.'
"Another mistake was collecting a spate of speeding tickets while cruising back and forth from Lynchburg to Richmond in your brand new BMW -- a habit which has once again brought you into conflict with your Republican associates. For while Steve Baril, candidate for Attorney-General wants to add one hundred state troopers to the law enforcement roster, you want to fire one hundred.
"I voted for you once, Preston," I said, "when you told me you were pro-choice. But I found out that meant you would choose between raising the income tax or raising the sales tax.
"Once again, Delegate Bryant proved how smart he was when he signed Grover Norquist's Taxpayer Protection Pledge. Only Preston thought that was a pledge to distribute condoms to college seniors throughout the Commonwealth." (a controversial issue at the time)
I applauded Bryant's actions on the House Human Services Committee, when, "after a bill to anesthetize fetuses prior to abortion was rejected, he introduced a bill to anesthetize lawmakers prior to each legislative session."
To illustrate Bryant's salesmanship skills in engineering the budget compromise, I closed with the story of the country boy who applies for a sales job at a big-city department store. It's too long to reproduce here; you can find it online at landbigfish. com / jokes / default. cfm under "Fishing for a Sale."
The History Bee is a concept I developed initially as an Executive Spelling Bee, in which any number of local businesses would put up $1000 to sponsor a participant, ideally the CEO, although most declined to appear on stage and designated a surrogate. Ticket sales covered most of the expenses of a cocktail buffet, and, thus with thirty sponsors, the beneficiary, the Alliance for Families and Children, would reap $30,000.
To make the event more entertaining, I volunteered to offer up humorous introductions (mini-roasts) of the contestants, based on brief questionnaires I asked them to fill out.
After loquacious physician and City Councilman Scott Garrett identified as his favorite event in history the first documented use of anesthesia at the Boston Medical Center in 1846, I told the audience that "when Scott was a practicing surgeon, he didn't use traditional anesthesia. Instead, he laid his patient on the operating table and started talking, without pause or interruption. In a matter of minutes, the patient had lost consciousness."
When Jimmy C., quotations manager for Ferguson Enterprises, submitted Winston Churchill as his favorite historical figure, I said that I indeed called Ferguson Enterprises and asked Jimmy for a quote. "His response was 'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, sweat, and tears.' "
Introducing George D., CEO of our local hospital, I said, "It was good thing for him that our teams were chosen at random. The doctors and insurance companies didn't want to sit down with him. Businesses and ordinary citizens were angry about the hospital's exorbitant rates. The only person who was satisfied with the work he was doing at the hospital was Chris T., Tharp Funeral Home."
And when Chris reported that his hobby was body surfing, I asked him, "Is that your body or someone else's?"
I said that retired history teacher, Marie Waller, couldn't lose. "Either she would win the History Bee or she could claim she had been defeated by a former student. It won't be the student, however, whom she was reprimanding for failing to learn the Presidents. 'When I was your age,' she said, 'I could name every President and Vice-President.' 'No big deal,' said the young man. 'When you were my age, there had only been sixteen.' "
In a joke that lit up both me and the audience, I questioned how well Greg K. was going to do. "I had obtained a copy of a history test he had taken in high school. When asked who Ferdinand Magellan was, he wrote, 'Ferdinand Magellan circumcised the world with a hundred-foot clipper, which was very painful to all men.' As for Socrates, 'he died from an overdose of wedlock, which is apparently poisonous.' "
And, of course, I had to compliment my assistant, Liz P., representing Schewel Furniture Company, for thinking like her boss. When asked for her favorite event in history, she correctly answered, "the birth of Marc Schewel."
About a year ago I was asked to present a brief history of the 110-year-old Schewel Furniture Company, as part of a local lecture series. Having worked in Downtown Lynchburg for thirty-five years -- and at the site the business has been located since 1958 -- and not willing to forgo an opportunity to add levity to the occasion, I opened with, and will close with -- a la David Letterman -- the top ten reasons why I love Downtown Lynchburg.
I love to drive fast, and am able to do so twice a day when I speed down those two one-way racetracks -- Church Street in the morning and Main Street in the evening.
I like to collect orange traffic cones -- and am always able to pick up a few every time I come Downtown.
Downtown Lynchburg is the only place where the City Fathers would spend millions of dollars to streetscape and beautify its main thoroughfare and then close it for some mysterious public works project.
In Downtown Lynchburg, a new restaurant opens every month -- and an old one closes. And usually it's the same one.
Downtown Lynchburg thinks retail. It's the only city I know where the streets are closed on Saturday for a Christmas parade.
Downtown Lynchburg brings people together -- like seven City Council members, six unpaid contractors, five impatient bankers, and twenty-five irate investors, including me, to meet with Bluffwalk visionary Hal Craddock, wanting to know where all the money went.
I own stock in two city planning consulting companies -- and Downtown Lynchburg keeps them in business.
I like the old Academy building just the way it is -- which is a good thing, since I am not likely to live long enough to see it look any different.
Only in Downtown Lynchburg would the City Fathers stick a fifty-foot metal pipe in the river, shoot a stream of water through it -- and call it a fountain.
And the number one reason I love Downtown Lynchburg is that you can't see the Liberty University logo on the top of Candler's Mountain from anywhere in Downtown Lynchburg.
The best public speakers are those who, through some subtle combination of sparkling wit, provocative wisdom, and empathetic warmth, entertain as well as instruct, who effortlessly render their preachments as pure performance, who stalk their podiums and platforms like seasoned soliloquists -- attributes which explain the seamless transition of Ronald Reagan from thespian to politician and of any number of stand-up comedians from night clubs to the silver screen.
My own brief acting career was hardly a harbinger of future stage presence. Seeking an antidote to low self-esteem and a broader social network, with no prior experience, I tried out for the E.C. Glass 1965 Senior Play -- which, I believe, had something to do with Henry Aldrich -- surmising that, with ten male speaking parts up for grabs, I could surely land one of them. Alas, so did eleven of my classmates, and, when the music stopped, the gamesman left without a chair was none other than your faithful chronicler.
When the drama teacher, the legendary, ceremonious spinster, Ms. Virginia Wiley, apparently taking pity on this dejected outcast, offered me the consolation prize of serving as understudy to the lead, Russell C., a perennial star whose talents had won him the favor and company of a bevy of beautiful girls, I scorned the fruitless exercise of memorizing hundreds of lines and haughtily declined, preferring instead to work as Ms. Wiley's superfluous assistant.
I got my comeuppance two weeks later, however, when poor Russell was injured in a car accident and the starring role -- which, except for my stubborn pride, would have been mine -- devolved upon a close friend of mine, Macey R., who had another part and already knew most of the lines. (Don't ask who got his part; it wasn't me.)
Years later, another friend scolded me for portraying myself as the victim of this cruel turn of events, when, in fact, the one who suffered most was the wounded Russell C.
From then on, my feeble attempts at public speaking coughed and sputtered like the recalcitrant starter on the 1983 RX-7 I finally sold last month after innumerable towings and repair bills. I tried debating in high school but foundered under a plethora of detail and a lack of spontaneity. I muddled through a course at Washington and Lee taught by the venerable, voluble, beady-eyed William Chapin, but could never quite summon the poise and rhetorical polish to make effective, convincing presentations. I remember trying to roast a college roommate at his rehearsal dinner with some grotesque tale about his passing out in a bathtub -- only to see it drown in incoherence and pathos.
When drafted to toast my father in front of thirty Schewel managers at a semi-retirement luncheon held for him after his cancer diagnosis, I even butchered the tired story of the quick-witted, young grocery clerk who runs to his boss cursing the eccentric customer who wants to buy half a banana, is startled to realize the customer has followed him and overheard his deprecations, and adroitly recovers with the enthusiastic riposte: "And this fine gentleman wants to buy the other half."
My father was well aware of my reluctance to speak in public. When he received the ADL Torch of Liberty Award in 1988, one year before he died, he selected my brother Jack -- ten years my junior -- to represent the family before an audience of two hundred. Jack has an understated, creative sense of humor, and entertained us all with some witty tales of growing up in a household with the remarkable Bert Schewel.
While delivering the eulogy at my father's funeral -- which I wrote about two months ago ("The Power of Love," April 4, 2009) -- led me to believe that, if prepared, I could speak with candor, self-confidence, and relevance, my first real attempt at humor came a few years later at the behest of a very talented roastmaster, a physician friend who asked me to co-host a fund-raising event. I think he saw me as a straight-man foil to his biting commentary, a Southern Jewish counterpoint to the Yankee Italian persona he reveled in.
Not wanting to embarrass myself, I labored diligently, compiling over two thousand words of canned jokes, original quips, and provincial satire, most of which I couldn't use, because there was no opportunity for a monologue and my partner took up most of the time roasting me and members of the audience and auctioning off door prizes.
For source material, after quickly exhausting my own imaginative powers, I turned to a joke book (I now own four, although they have lately been displaced by the Internet, where, with the click of the mouse, one can find a joke on any conceivable subject plus pages of late-night Letterman and Leno humor) and to my father's archives -- a drawer full of speeches which he gave over a period of twenty years, wisely preserved by me when I moved into his office in 1989.
Since my sidekick was a Catholic and a gastroenterologist, three of my father's favorite jokes -- two of which he frequently told about a friend who was a proctologist -- fit the occasion.
"I was late getting here this evening," I said, "because a priest stopped me in the lobby. 'Aren't you Marc Schewel?' he asked. 'Yes, Father, I am, but I don't believe we've met.' 'We haven't,' he said, 'but I've heard a lot about you. Your name comes up in confession all the time.' "
"I found out how Dr. C. gets a lot of his patients. Last week he invited me over to his house for dinner and fixed me a drink consisting of Philips Milk of Magnesia, Welch's Prune Juice, and Smirnoff's Vodka. 'What's this called, Doc?' I asked, to which he replied, 'A piledriver.' "
And then, in a joke which dates itself, since the company mentioned is no longer around, I announced that Dr. C. and I were going into the furniture business together and would be forming a company called "This End Up."
Years later, in introducing Dr. C., I reprised and embellished an old joke I used that night. "Dr. C. is one of the few doctors I know who still makes house calls. Just yesterday he called his house at Wintergreen, his house at Smith Mountain Lake, his house on the north corner of Paddington Court, and his house on the south corner of Paddington Court."
And I thought this remark, which I lifted from a tee shirt given to me because of my fund-raising work for the United Jewish Appeal, captured the essence of Dr. C.'s profession: "After I finally convinced Dr. C. to increase his sponsorship to tonight's dinner, he retorted, 'Okay, Marc, I've upped my pledge; now, up yours.' "
I rarely turn to my father's files these days, although an occasional perusal brings back bittersweet memories. Many of his jokes were topical and timely, and even those that weren't don't read nearly as well as he told them.
Although my father could speak extemporaneously -- and comically -- on a multitude of subjects, I find it instructive that he wrote out his speeches -- or, more likely, dictated to a secretary who typed them up -- and that he saved them all for future reference -- two habits religiously adhered to by his successor.
Inventing jokes is no easy task -- it entails long periods of gazing at the four walls of one's office intermixed with bursts of inspiration -- and my father had a gift for it as well as applying the canned variety to attendant or recognizable individuals and to contemporaneous situations. He would seek out familiar faces in the audience and make them the object of such comments as: "I'm glad to see George here tonight; he always looks good in cheap clothes." Or,"George comes from very humble beginnings. One day I saw him with only one shoe. 'George,' I said, 'did you lose a shoe?' 'No' he said, 'I found one.' "
Schewels strategy of opening stores in small towns gave my father the opportunity to mock places like Williamston, N.C., "which is so small that the City Hall is over a car wash, so small that McDonald's has a sign that says 'only four sold,' so small that the Masons and the Knights of Columbus meet in the same building; they are called Mason-Knights."
As my burgeoning involvement with various non-profit organizations required that I speak or preside before large groups, I began to experiment with injecting my own brand of humor into the proceedings. Most manuals discourage the practice; not every one can tell a joke, or choose one to fit the occasion. While I am certainly no expert, I have developed a basic philosophy which usually serves me well.
Most audiences, at least initially, are conditioned to respect your presence, your willingness to risk your reputation to stand and deliver, and will be attentive to your message. Even if they don't find all (or any) of your remarks funny, they will appreciate your well-intentioned efforts to make them laugh -- especially if you employ a dash of originality.
I write out every speech word-for-word, including the jokes. A joke can rise or fall on the precise arrangement of the words used.
Any joke can flop, which is why I plan several. Chances are at least one will strike a chord with the audience. Besides, I don't have to make every one laugh; a few loud guffaws can arouse the whole crowd.
I try to keep my jokes short and simple. Stand-up comedians make their living off one-liners -- because they avoid hushed anticipations. When I resort to a lengthy canned joke, I edit it down to the fewest possible words.
Relish the moment. Like a runner's high, nothing invigorates me more than establishing a sensory connection with my listeners, knowing that I possess the power to affect their emotions, projecting a love for them that is reflected back upon me.
Speakers, especially those who are going to tell jokes, must be fearless, and never intimidated by deathly silences or the thought of failure. I have always regretted backing away from the following story I wanted to tell several years ago about George W. Bush when it was announced he was coming to the opening of the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Va.
"He was planning to fly by commercial airline to save money after signing off on his big tax cuts -- until he discovered that a round-trip ticket from Washington, D.C., to Lynchburg, Virginia, on U.S. Airways cost $4635, with intermediate stops in Pittsburgh and Charlotte.
"Then he decided to fly over on Air Force One. His team conducted a trial run at the Lynchburg Airport. The plane touched down safely -- but by the time it came to a full stop, it was in front of the Vines Center on the campus of Liberty University, where stood Reverend Jerry Falwell asking for a contribution to his newest faith-based initiative.
"Next, President Bush did what so many of us do when going to and from Lynchburg; he decided to drive. He directed the FBI to draw up the best route (at the time, the FBI was under fire for a series of egregious errors), and, wouldn't you know it, he ended up in Bedford, Massachusetts. On top of that, the FBI lost the speech he was supposed to give.
"Finally, the President decided he would fly in by helicopter -- until it was ascertained that the only helicopter landing pad in Bedford County was atop the roof of the Jefferson Forest High School." (At the time, it was common knowledge that the roof -- in fact, the entire school -- was in dire need of repair.) "Since landing there didn't seem too good an idea, I am sorry to report that George W. Bush will not be coming to Bedford, Virginia."
I did muster enough courage to tell this joke about Reverend Jerry Falwell (he was alive then) when I received a Chamber of Commerce Award at a breakfast held at Liberty University.
"I was really curious to see the new Thomas Road Baptist Church when it first opened, so I came to a Sunday Service. Afterward, I went up to Reverend Falwell and said, 'Reverend, you have a helluva fine church here.' He replied, 'Thank you, Marc, but I would appreciate it if you wouldn't use profanity in the Lord's House.' 'I'm sorry, Reverend,' I said, 'but I couldn't control myself. And that was a helluva fine sermon you gave.' The Reverend replied, 'Marc, please, I cannot allow you to talk this way in the Church.' 'Sorry, Reverend,' I said, 'but I just wanted you to know that I was so impressed with all I saw and heard today that I put $10,000 in the collection plate.' Dr. Falwell's eyes widened and he exclaimed, 'Marc, that is a damn fine contribution.' "
Finally, I try to prepare my remarks well in advance, to give them time to percolate, to roll around in my brain, to leave openings for sudden flashes of brilliance -- which came to me one week before a scheduled talk at the YWCA Women of Achievement banquet while I was sitting in Randolph College's Smith Hall, ostensibly listening to President John Klein's Inaugural Address.
The context of my opening lines is that, only a month earlier, Presidential candidate Barack Obama had visited Lynchburg and spoken at E.C. Glass High School. When the Democratic organizers had asked Jerry Falwell, Jr., to allow overflow parking at the Plaza, he had refused, supposedly for security reasons.
Thus, I explained to my audience, "This YWCA event had originally been slated for E.C. Glass High School. And, when it was announced that I was to be the keynote speaker, a very large crowd was expected, more than could be accommodated in the parking lot. The YMCA contacted Jerry Falwell, Jr., to ask if the overflow could park at the Plaza. Is anyone surprised that he refused?
"He might have relented if he had known that I, traditionally a Democrat, am voting Republican this year, along with two of my Democratic friends on City Council, Joan Foster and Bert Dodson. Why? Because John McCain has promised to buy up every bad mortgage in the United States, and City Council and I couldn't be happier about that. We are both investors in Bluffwalk -- and if there was ever a mortgage that needed a bailout, that's one." (Of course, after the election, the Obama Administration implemented several programs to assist imperiled mortgage-holders.)
"I see where Jerry Jr. finally broke down and agreed to let a representative of the Obama campaign appear at Liberty University. I thought I would be more likely to snow ski down Liberty Mountain in July than see a Democratic governor speaking on the Liberty campus." (Liberty is building an artificial year-round ski slope.)
"And finally, I'm only here tonight because the YWCA's first choice, Vice-Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, couldn't make it. She accepted the invitation but while driving down to Lynchburg from Northern Virginia, she took the Charlottesville bypass. Someone forgot to tell her it was the Road to Nowhere."
Sometimes a throw-away line gets the biggest laugh. When I received the NCCJ Humanitarian Award in 1999, I began my acceptance speech with the innocuous (and honest) comment that I had been on the committee that had selected all the honorees, including myself. It brought down the house.
Conversely, for the aforementioned YWCA dinner, I had composed a painstaking revisionist history of Lynchburg, inventing eight famous females who had made significant contributions to its past -- including my piece de resistance, Reverend Geraldine Falwell, "a true visionary, who launched her career on television, hosting the Old Time Good Smell Hour, a cooking show during which she shared her favorite recipes. She always delivered a moving prayer before partaking of her selected delicacy. One day a viewer called in and said, 'Geraldine, your prayers are a lot tastier than your dishes. Maybe you should take up preaching full-time.' And the rest is history."
Alas, not one of these cleverly-conceived mini-biographies elicited even a chuckle.
My most memorable engagement took place four years ago when I joined Governor Mark Warner, former Attorney-General Jerry Kilgore, and WSET anchorman Jeff Taylor at the Holiday Inn Select to roast local Virginia delegate Preston Bryant, a Republican who had bolted the party ranks to craft a budget agreement with Governor Warner which included a tax increase.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to skewer not just Delegate Bryant, but the other dignitaries in attendance -- as well as a host of local personalities.
"And what was I doing in that illustrious group? Well, Crisis Line (for whose benefit this event was being held) wanted at least one person at the podium who would pay his own way."
I chastised the Governor and Delegate Bryant for their tax increase, explaining to them that their compensatory sales tax reduction on food didn't do me much good, "because I don't buy that much food. I'm like a politician; someone usually buys me lunch and dinner. If you lawmakers really wanted to help the workingman, you should roll back the sales tax on furniture."
I announced that "our City Fathers have decided to name the long-awaited Crosstown Connector" -- which still hasn't been built and probably never will be -- "in honor of Martin Luther King. Of course, by then, it will be called the Martin Luther King VI Highway."
I told Delegate Bryant why his Republican comrade, State Senator Steve Newman, was boycotting the celebration. "He became very suspicious when he heard it was a gala event. 'None of them are getting married, are they?' he asked."
Since candidate Kilgore had proposed a statewide referendum on taxes (An absurd non-starter; who's going to vote for higher taxes?), I told him that "I conducted a poll of the audience prior to dinner and found only two persons who favored higher taxes -- and they were both sitting beside him. We could take care of that easily, however: just gerrymander them into Tennessee. These two fellows are too weird for Virginia anyway; they actually like roads, bridges, schools, and garbage collection."
I told Kilgore that our mayor -- who was under investigation for fraud and nonpayment of taxes -- was disappointed in his proposal to cap property taxes at five per cent. "He was hoping for a moratorium."
Then I turned to Governor Warner, "whom I had the honor of meeting tonight for the first time. It's not easy meeting a person of power and influence -- but he handled it well.
"Governor Warner, some people get you mixed up with that other Virginia Warner, John. In fact, I did a survey of the audience tonight and found out that fifty per cent voted for you because they thought you were John Warner and fifty per cent voted against you because they thought you were Marc Schewel."
And in a joke which didn't go over as well as I thought it would, in reference to our current mayor's problems, I said about Governor Warner (whom some suspected would run for President; he never did, of course) that there has been a lot of speculation as to what he intends to do after leaving office, and, therefore, "after our conversation over dinner, it gives me great pleasure to reveal tonight that in 2008 he will be following in the footsteps of past Virginia statesmen and announcing his candidacy for . . . Mayor of Lynchburg." (Former Governor Doug Wilder had recently been elected Mayor of Richmond.)
I cautioned Governor Warner not to get too excited about all the good press he had been receiving. "I know you were recently named Public Official of the Year by Governing Magazine, but that just shows what kind of year it's been. And isn't this the same magazine which named Ken Lay (remember Enron?) Executive of the Year in 2000, Michael Jackson (remember his youthful playmates?) Big Brother of the Year in 2001, and Martha Stewart Investor of the Year in 2002?"
Moving on to the guest of honor, Delegate Preston Bryant, I drew a connection between his efforts to rescue last year's budget and the evening's host, Crisis Line.
"An audit of Crisis Line calls from January 1st, to April 15th," I said, "disclosed that 3248 out of 6159 calls came from the General Assembly or the Governor's Office. Records also indicate that for 90 per cent of those calls Crisis Line's recommendation was: Jump off the Rivermont Bridge." (site of a couple of recent suicides)
And, satirizing a ridiculous and ill-advised bill to ban drooping pants, I sunk to a new low when I launched the following scatological diatribe: "Far be it from me to be so cheeky as to make any wisecracks about this bum bill. Briefly speaking, if you ask me, some of our legislators are just behind the times. As a furniture salesman, I've been fighting this problem for years. Because when you get past fifty, you get the furniture disease; your chest falls into your drawers."
When it came time to roast Delegate Bryant, I pounced on his reputation for being a smart guy, which had been supplied by his wife Liz, "an assessment I realized was as accurate as the weather predictions she used to make in WSET, where she is no longer employed.
"Delegate Bryant," I said, "you've made some mistakes this year. And if it's true that we learn from our mistakes, you'll be the best at your profession.
"One mistake was the picture of him his mother had plastered all over the walls of the Lynchburg Mammography Center where she works. When I asked her about this, she said, 'I look at boobs all day, and I thought Preston would fit right in.'
"Another mistake was collecting a spate of speeding tickets while cruising back and forth from Lynchburg to Richmond in your brand new BMW -- a habit which has once again brought you into conflict with your Republican associates. For while Steve Baril, candidate for Attorney-General wants to add one hundred state troopers to the law enforcement roster, you want to fire one hundred.
"I voted for you once, Preston," I said, "when you told me you were pro-choice. But I found out that meant you would choose between raising the income tax or raising the sales tax.
"Once again, Delegate Bryant proved how smart he was when he signed Grover Norquist's Taxpayer Protection Pledge. Only Preston thought that was a pledge to distribute condoms to college seniors throughout the Commonwealth." (a controversial issue at the time)
I applauded Bryant's actions on the House Human Services Committee, when, "after a bill to anesthetize fetuses prior to abortion was rejected, he introduced a bill to anesthetize lawmakers prior to each legislative session."
To illustrate Bryant's salesmanship skills in engineering the budget compromise, I closed with the story of the country boy who applies for a sales job at a big-city department store. It's too long to reproduce here; you can find it online at landbigfish. com / jokes / default. cfm under "Fishing for a Sale."
The History Bee is a concept I developed initially as an Executive Spelling Bee, in which any number of local businesses would put up $1000 to sponsor a participant, ideally the CEO, although most declined to appear on stage and designated a surrogate. Ticket sales covered most of the expenses of a cocktail buffet, and, thus with thirty sponsors, the beneficiary, the Alliance for Families and Children, would reap $30,000.
To make the event more entertaining, I volunteered to offer up humorous introductions (mini-roasts) of the contestants, based on brief questionnaires I asked them to fill out.
After loquacious physician and City Councilman Scott Garrett identified as his favorite event in history the first documented use of anesthesia at the Boston Medical Center in 1846, I told the audience that "when Scott was a practicing surgeon, he didn't use traditional anesthesia. Instead, he laid his patient on the operating table and started talking, without pause or interruption. In a matter of minutes, the patient had lost consciousness."
When Jimmy C., quotations manager for Ferguson Enterprises, submitted Winston Churchill as his favorite historical figure, I said that I indeed called Ferguson Enterprises and asked Jimmy for a quote. "His response was 'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, sweat, and tears.' "
Introducing George D., CEO of our local hospital, I said, "It was good thing for him that our teams were chosen at random. The doctors and insurance companies didn't want to sit down with him. Businesses and ordinary citizens were angry about the hospital's exorbitant rates. The only person who was satisfied with the work he was doing at the hospital was Chris T., Tharp Funeral Home."
And when Chris reported that his hobby was body surfing, I asked him, "Is that your body or someone else's?"
I said that retired history teacher, Marie Waller, couldn't lose. "Either she would win the History Bee or she could claim she had been defeated by a former student. It won't be the student, however, whom she was reprimanding for failing to learn the Presidents. 'When I was your age,' she said, 'I could name every President and Vice-President.' 'No big deal,' said the young man. 'When you were my age, there had only been sixteen.' "
In a joke that lit up both me and the audience, I questioned how well Greg K. was going to do. "I had obtained a copy of a history test he had taken in high school. When asked who Ferdinand Magellan was, he wrote, 'Ferdinand Magellan circumcised the world with a hundred-foot clipper, which was very painful to all men.' As for Socrates, 'he died from an overdose of wedlock, which is apparently poisonous.' "
And, of course, I had to compliment my assistant, Liz P., representing Schewel Furniture Company, for thinking like her boss. When asked for her favorite event in history, she correctly answered, "the birth of Marc Schewel."
About a year ago I was asked to present a brief history of the 110-year-old Schewel Furniture Company, as part of a local lecture series. Having worked in Downtown Lynchburg for thirty-five years -- and at the site the business has been located since 1958 -- and not willing to forgo an opportunity to add levity to the occasion, I opened with, and will close with -- a la David Letterman -- the top ten reasons why I love Downtown Lynchburg.
I love to drive fast, and am able to do so twice a day when I speed down those two one-way racetracks -- Church Street in the morning and Main Street in the evening.
I like to collect orange traffic cones -- and am always able to pick up a few every time I come Downtown.
Downtown Lynchburg is the only place where the City Fathers would spend millions of dollars to streetscape and beautify its main thoroughfare and then close it for some mysterious public works project.
In Downtown Lynchburg, a new restaurant opens every month -- and an old one closes. And usually it's the same one.
Downtown Lynchburg thinks retail. It's the only city I know where the streets are closed on Saturday for a Christmas parade.
Downtown Lynchburg brings people together -- like seven City Council members, six unpaid contractors, five impatient bankers, and twenty-five irate investors, including me, to meet with Bluffwalk visionary Hal Craddock, wanting to know where all the money went.
I own stock in two city planning consulting companies -- and Downtown Lynchburg keeps them in business.
I like the old Academy building just the way it is -- which is a good thing, since I am not likely to live long enough to see it look any different.
Only in Downtown Lynchburg would the City Fathers stick a fifty-foot metal pipe in the river, shoot a stream of water through it -- and call it a fountain.
And the number one reason I love Downtown Lynchburg is that you can't see the Liberty University logo on the top of Candler's Mountain from anywhere in Downtown Lynchburg.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Smoke Detectors
Something strange is in the air.
Soothing and sweet, twitching the nostrils of the millions of Americans who at some time or another in their lives have blissfully inhaled, a cohort which numbers among its members (at least) two Presidents and excludes only the most steadfast unsophisticates, it wafts ominously through the bustling corridors of schools high and low, including our own E. C. Glass, blankets crowded courtrooms coast-to-coast like early-morning fog, shadows celebrities and sports heroes to their secluded residences and private parties, and incites whole countries to vicious gang wars, senseless violence, brutal killings, and widespread corruption.
I'm speaking, of course, of the pestilential plant, the wicked weed, the sinfully seductive substance known as marijuana.
Four tenth-grade girls are on their way to school one morning when one suggests that they detour to McDonald's, which, for those unfamiliar with Lynchburg geography, is about three blocks away. Instead of an ordinary Egg McMuffin or sausage biscuit, they purchase some pot -- in the parking lot, I presume, although not having frequented a McDonald's in ten years, I'm not sure what delicacies may be served up behind (or under) the counter these days.
An hour or so later, a teacher or administrator -- exhibiting some very talented and highly developed olfactory nerves -- detects the telltale aroma. A search reveals only one girl in actual possession -- according to an attorney friend consulted by another girl's parents -- but suspicion and proximity trump physical evidence and due process and earn all four the maximum penalty: a 365-day suspension -- never mind that only one girl confesses, two take the Fifth (Ammendment, that is), and the fourth vigorously professes her innocence.
That the latter boasts a straight-A report card, a sterling collection of track-and-field trophies, and an unblemished behavioral record is irrelevant; she is destined to spend a year rehabilitating herself at the Pride Center for delinquent youth -- unless a School Board Panel of Appeals, in a rare display of compassion and leniency, should decide to moderate her sentence.
She may have already been tested for drugs -- and passed -- in compliance with a peculiar and discriminatory school policy which subjects school athletes to random drug tests, but no other students. Apparently, smoking marijuana disqualifies one from playing football and basketball but not from participating in school plays, band concerts, or spelling bees.
For four years Amherst County High School student Peter Rose is "the perfect kid," to quote a local television station. He leads the school to two Group AA state football championships, throwing for 1133 yards, rushing for 1790, accounting for 40 total touchdowns, and winning state player-of-the-year honors his senior year. He carries a 3.0 grade-point average, his school's prom-king crown, and the Mr. Amherst County nameplate. A fabulous future awaits him as he prepares to attend Virginia Tech on a full scholarship and play defensive back.
That is, until the Amherst County Sheriff's Office -- determined to root out and punish all criminal elements in its jurisdiction -- launches an elaborate (and expensive?) undercover investigation into drug trafficking. A law enforcement officer posing as a student twice purchases a quarter-ounce of marijuana from Rose (and similar amounts from six other current and former students) and saddles him with two misdemeanor and two felony charges, the latter for selling marijuana within 1000 feet of a school. Within days -- the guilt of the accused a foregone conclusion -- Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer strips Rose of his scholarship, stating that it has always been contingent upon the recruit maintaining high standards of conduct in his community, in his school, and on the football field.
Why would a young man with the world at his feet test the treacherous waters of illicit entrepreneurship and risk it all? Why indeed -- except for the lure of some extra spending money, the same profit motive that drives this thriving billion-dollar international underground industry at every level of distribution. (A stand of 300 mature marijuana plants can produce $1,000,000 at wholesale. Marijuana sells on the street for anywhere between $50 and $200 an ounce, while a deadly ounce of tobacco retails for two dollars.)
At his sentencing hearing, Rose testifies that his family has always struggled financially (and while colleges like Virginia Tech will reap millions from the exploits of Rose and his teammates on the field, the players will continue to go uncompensated -- but that's fodder for another blog) and that he saw an opportunity to make some easy money by dealing drugs. A sympathetic judge reduces Rose's jail time to fifteen days and dismisses the felony charges, provided he completes one hundred hours of community service, undergoes a substance abuse assessment, and remains on good behavior. Rose has a chance to redeem himself and earn another college scholarship -- but not at Virginia Tech.
A friend of mine who is a local Commonwealth's Attorney derided the generous sentence, claiming that athletes are often shown favoritism. But I'm not so sure.
Consider the hysterical reaction to the photograph taken of Michael Phelps smoking a cannabis bong at a University of South Carolina house party -- which, while confirming that the fourteen-time Olympic gold medalist is indeed a pothead, appears to dispel the canard that marijuana is demotivating and performance-diminishing.
Finding such behavior "not consistent with the image of Kellogg," the 103-year-old cereal maker drops its sponsorship of Phelps. Although stopping short of termination, another sponsor, Subway, censures him. USA Swimming releases a public reprimand, withdraws financial support, and bans the swimmer from competition for three months. A politically-ambitious County Sheriff threatens an arrest, until he is bluntly reminded by the Public Defender's Office that in twenty-one years no one has ever been charged with drug possession based on photographic evidence and an admission of non-specific wrongdoing.
If there is a double standard in play here, it is not between athlete and non-athlete; it is between marijuana and alcohol. Four years ago, when Phelps was arrested for drunk driving, he was allowed to continue swimming and did not lose a single endorsement.
In the words of Orlando Sentinel sportswriter Mike Bianchi: "What's worse -- taking a bong hit at a college party or getting snookered and putting yourself and others at risk by getting behind the wheel of your Hummer?"
Meanwhile, a drug war rages south of the Rio Grande, ignited nine years ago when the Mexican government implemented a crackdown on major distributors of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines. Trafficking cartels, which had previously relied on bribery and corruption to maintain a peaceful co-existence, turned on the authorities and each other to protect their territories.
The violence kills 400 Mexicans a month, 10,000 since 2005, and now spills across the border like a wildfire out of control, to Vancouver, Phoenix, Birmingham, and Atlanta, the new staging ground for the drug trade, where 43 Gulf Cartel members are arrested -- to name only four of the 270 North American cities where Mexican cartels and their affiliates maintain drug distribution networks or supply drugs to distributors. (Randal Archibold, New York Times, March 23, 2009)
With anywhere from 25 to 50 per cent of the 15,000 metric tons (33 million lbs.) of marijuana consumed annually in the United States smuggled from Mexico, it seems only logical that peace-loving prohibitionists would tout the moral rewards and life-saving effects of smoking less pot. In fact, as recently reported in the Wall Street Journal, several anti-drug groups are now preaching the conscience-laden message that "every bit of marijuana someone smokes is giving more power and more money to the drug cartels in Mexico" and is increasing that country's death toll. (Ellen Gamerman, Wall Street Journal)
It's a fatuous argument, and easily refuted. First, aficionados of the weed contend that the home-grown brand is more organic, more tasty, more pure, and more sought after than the imported product. And rational thinkers like me understand that it's not the drugs that are causing this intractable problem; it's drug prohibition and all the deleterious consequences.
People have smoked marijuana -- the chopped flowers, leaves, or stems of the cannabis plant -- at least since 600 B.C., when the Chinese first recorded its psycho-active effect; and no amount of exhortation, demonization, excoriation, or incarceration is going to change that.
Readers of this blog may remember (One-Year Wonder, January 1, 2009) that my sole experiment with marijuana was an abject failure; never having smoked a cigarette, I was clueless as to how to inhale -- and thus speak with hardly a modicum of credibility as to the allurements of illicit drugs. I never even bothered to broach the subject to a college roommate of mine who spent fifty per cent of his junior and senior years on a glorious high induced by marijuana and the mystical melodies of Jefferson Airplane.
Therefore, I must assume that people smoke marijuana for the same universal reasons they drink alcohol -- which, not being a total prude, I have occasionally and moderately indulged in since the tender age of fifteen -- to release their inhibitions, to facilitate social interaction, to experience sensory pleasure. Or, for some, maybe it's just the taste.
Which is why government attempts to suppress the demand for marijuana by punishing users and dealers are about as hopeless as trying to eradicate speeding and can not succeed. According to psychopharmacologist Ronald Segal, the desire for intoxication in human beings is innate and as basic as other urges.
Some find intoxication in sports, sex, gambling, music, or religion, but "socially-approved ways of intoxication are unavailable or don't work for many . . . The lure of a chemically-assisted high is powerful in America, where many persons consistently and with society's blessing get intoxicated on alcohol or hourly fixes from cigarettes." (Stephen B. Duke and Albert C. Gross, "America's Longest War," pp. 218-219)
In spite of federal and state governments spending upwards of $60 billion annually on the War on Drugs and arresting more than 750,000 individuals every year for marijuana possession alone, there were still 14.5 million users of marijuana in the United States in 2007 compared to 14.6 million in 2002. One in four sixteen-to -seventeen-year-old youths used marijuana in 2007. An estimated 100 million persons (one-third of the U.S. population) have smoked marijuana at some time in their lives, including such notables as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Margaret Mead, Carl Sagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Bloomberg, and Newt Gingrich.
With the weed enjoying such broad and bipartisan popularity, the question arises: how and why have we reached the grievous state of affairs wherein we spend billions of dollars on repeated failures, sanction millions for participating in a relatively harmless activity, and inundate our courtrooms with thousands of non-violent malefactors?
Marijuana had been exempted from the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, in which Congress, responding to pressure from four interest groups -- physicians and pharmacists wary of drug addiction, pragmatic reformers, anti-vice crusaders, and missionary witnesses to the Far East opium trade -- authorized regulation of cocaine and opium derivatives. By 1922, the Act, modified by court rulings, had evolved into a prohibition law, eliminating legal sources of the aforementioned substances and, of course, spawning a criminal black market to supply them.
Enter one Harry Ainslinger, first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, established in 1930, after revelations of corruption in the Narcotics Division of the Treasury Department.
Eager to garner publicity and funding for his nascent organization, Ainslinger launched a crusade against marijuana, cleverly preying on the fears and prejudices of a gullible public to link the purported dangers of the drug to its principal users: Mexican migrants stealing depression-era jobs from white workers and black ghetto social outcasts and speak-easy jazz musicians. The press, particularly the Hearst newspaper chain, took up the charge, blasting marijuana as "a killer drug" which transformed the blacks and Mexicans who smoked it into sexual predators, madmen, and murderers. (Martin Booth, "Cannabis," p.182)
Speculation persists that DuPont petrochemical interests -- which saw hemp, a product of the cannabis plant, as a competitive threat -- were ardent, if silent, supporters of the anti-marijuana campaign.
Ainslinger and his accomplices were successful. In April 1937, Congress initiated hearings on the Marijuana Tax Act, summoning the Commissioner as its chief witness.
Ainslinger regaled his audience with thinly-substantiated narratives of heinous crimes drawn from his extensive "police-blotter" files -- including the case of a twenty-one-year-old boy who slaughtered his family with an axe. "The evidence showed he had smoked marijuana," said Ainslinger, failing to mention that the boy had previously been diagnosed as mentally unstable and afterward was found to to be criminally insane under psychiatric analysis. (Booth, p.184)
Meanwhile, Congressmen belittled or ignored testimony by Assistant Surgeon General William Treadway, who wrote, "As to social or moral degradation associated with cannabis, it probably belongs in the same category as alcohol," and by AMA representative Dr. William Woodward, who stated, "We are told that the use of marijuana causes crime, yet no one has been produced by the Bureau of Prisons to show the number of persons who have been found to be addicted to the marijuana habit." (Mike Gray, "Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out," p.80)
The Marijuana Tax Act took effect October 1, 1937. Constitutionally, Congress could not ban marijuana. Instead, it required any person cultivating, transporting, selling, prescribing, or using marijuana to be registered and imposed a levy of $100 an ounce on every transaction (this in the days when a new Ford Model-Y cost $205). (Booth, p.188)
In the early 1950's, with a new international enemy on the horizon, Ainslinger shrewdly sought to link marijuana to heroin, and both to Communism. He painted heroin as part of a Communist plot to poison American values; marijuana became the heroin addict's introduction to drugs, from which he graduated to more dangerous substances.
In 1951, a U.S. Senate Committee blessed the bogus "gateway" theory when it declared that marijuana led to the use of other drugs. Five years later, the Daniel Committee officially confirmed Ainslinger's worst suspicions when it concluded that "subversion by drug addiction is an established aim of Communist China."
In 1971, Richard Nixon declared drug abuse "public enemy number one." With crime the centerpiece of his domestic policy agenda, he identified not just drug dealing but also drug addiction as a major source of crime. Among his initiatives was the consolidation of a number of drug agencies into the supersized Drug Enforcement Agency, which was granted the extraordinary power to organize wire taps and postal inspections, to search without warrants, to confiscate property, to freeze assets, and to arrest on suspicion.
With each successive administration the War on Drugs intensified.
In June 1982, President Reagan announced, "We're taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts. We're running up the battle flag." The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 increased federal drug penalties, made it a federal offense to distribute drugs within 1000 feet of a school, and even criminalized owning a roach holder or a packet of rolling papers.
In his first televised address to the nation, George H. W. Bush proclaimed that "the gravest menace facing our nation today is drugs" and called for "an assault on every front" -- including drafting the U. S. military into his anti-drug efforts. In 1986 drug trafficking was officially identified as a threat to national security, and by 1989 Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had made interdiction of the Latin American drug trade a high priority mission of the Department of Defense.
In 1994, when Clinton Surgeon General Jocelyn Elder (whom he subsequently fired) made the "nutty" (to quote former drug czar, William Bennett) suggestion that drug legalization should be studied, Congress responded by getting tougher. The Crime Bill of 1994 established "criminal enterprise" statutes mandating drug sentences of from twenty years to life. The 1998 Higher Education Act disqualified students who had ever been convicted of marijuana possession from receiving federal aid for college -- even though no such disqualification applies to convictions for robbery, rape, or manslaughter. (Gray, p.21)
And yet it's all gone for naught -- all the threats, promises, preachments, penalties, legislation, and expenditures. Illicit recreational drug consumption remains constant. The supply is plentiful; the undaunted users merrily puff away.
The problem with drug prohibition is that it is inherently flawed. The strategy of restricting supply artificially inflates prices to a level which generates tremendous profits and continually motivates suppliers to enter and remain in the market, yet which is not high enough to deter use or suppress demand. Secondly, like the mythical hydra, the sea serpent that Hercules battled, the drug trade is self-reproducing. Stamping it out in one locale simply encourages new recruits or veterans to set up operations elsewhere.
Making war on marijuana users is no less problematic and has produced equally dismal results. In addition to the impossibility of stifling our permanent, insatiable appetite for intoxicating drugs, one is confronted by the improbability of a user ever being caught. Fifteen million Americans smoking a joint six times a year equates to 90 million annual usages; collaring 750,000 of them yields an arrest rate of 0.8% -- very long odds indeed.
Furthermore, drug laws attempt to prohibit conduct that is consensual and victimless; since no one is harmed, there is no victim to press charges or to testify at a trial. Consequently, to detect these crimes, law enforcement must resort to methods ripe for abuse, corruption, and the infringement of civil liberties -- like carrying on systematic surveillance, employing paid informants, or deploying undercover agents who set up entrapment operations.
In fact, drug prohibition has produced a host of harmful consequences which have impacted individuals and society in ways which its proponents could hardly have anticipated and which, even when confronted with the unpleasant truth, they refuse to acknowledge.
It has criminalized the three per cent of the American population hauled into court each year for pursuing what is, for the most part, innocuous, diversionary behavior. For minor convictions, many have suffered significant hardships: probation, mandatory drug testing, loss of employment, loss of child custody, loss of federal student aid, loss of voting privileges, and revocation of driving licenses.
It has undermined the moral message of the law by defining as a crime an activity practiced by a large portion of the public without punishment.
It has consumed tremendous amounts of physical and human resources -- making them unavailable for the investigation, prosecution, and incarceration of rapists, burglars, and murderers.
It has driven the drug business underground, where rival gangs regularly turn to violence and intimidation to defend their turf -- and kill innocent bystanders and potential witnesses in the process.
It has bred corruption in the criminal justice system, affording law enforcement officers myriad opportunities to trade influence for drug profits, by selling information on undercover and surveillance operations, by bartering favorable testimony at hearings and trials, by robbing dealers without fear of reprisal, and by fencing seized assets or drugs -- all of which engender contempt and cynicism for government institutions.
It has fed the money laundering industry -- which converts drug proceeds into spendable cash or usable assets, often enticing honest organizations and individuals into criminal activities.
It has fueled the growth of a prison-industrial complex -- quadrupling the number of those imprisoned since 1980 to 2,300,000, one in every 138 Americans, with federal prisoners leading the way, growing 90 per cent in the last decade, 55 per cent of whom are serving time for a drug offense, compared to 11 per cent for a violent crime.
It has intensified racial mistrust and hostility, sending blacks to prison at seven times the rate of whites, for longer average terms than whites who commit comparable crimes, and disenfranchising thousands of black drug felons. It has created lucrative incentives for drug dealers to saturate urban black ghettos, where substandard housing, pervasive poverty, poor health, and limited job opportunities make fatherless children, school dropouts, homeless people, and individuals facing bleak and hopeless futures avid customers for any means of escape.
It has eroded our Bill of Rights protections, as courts have upheld a multitude of egregious measures: search warrants issued on the flimsiest of suspicions; citizens accosted in cars, airports, trailers, or buses; wiretapping and eavesdropping applications granted as a matter of routine; undercover operations and putative conspiracies validated with a blind eye; judicial discretion sacrificed at the altar of mandatory minimum sentences; and assets forfeited without a criminal conviction, sometimes without a criminal charge.
It has stigmatized and stereotyped illicit drug users as moral pariahs instead of recognizing them as victims of medical, social, or psychological problems -- which discourages their seeking out medical care, forgos the health benefits of drug regulation, thwarts treatment programs that might help the drug dependent, and immerses non-violent drug offenders in the violent culture of prison society.
It has prevented access to therapeutic substances -- like marijuana, which, it has been demonstrated, can alleviate the nausea of chemotherapy, reduce the intraocular pressure of glaucoma, relieve surgical, migraine, and menstrual pain, control multiple sclerosis spasms and some epileptic seizures, and combat depression and insomnia.
The lure of its unconscionable profits has, at one time or another, substantially corrupted the entire governments of Columbia, Peru, Bolivia, and, most recently, Mexico, and sustained native criminal elements which have rent the social fabric of these countries.
And finally, argue the philosophers, drug prohibition is an infringement upon an individual's right to own property -- and assume the risks attendant upon that ownership -- and his right to make choices which may be harmful to himself, as long as those choices do not harm others. Drug users, anti-prohibitionists contend, do not violate others moral rights, and most never do harm to others (unlike users of alcohol or tobacco).
All these consequences might have some justification if marijuana were so dangerous to our well-being that it needed to be outlawed at all costs. But science long ago shattered that myth.
In 1938 New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, skeptical of Harry Ainslinger's exaggerated claims about the effects of marijuana, commissioned a pharmacological study, a clinical study, and a sociological study. The report, released in 1948, "concluded that marijuana was not addictive, did not seriously disturb mental or physical functioning, and did not lead to violence or harder drugs." (Gray, p. 85) To this assessment must be added its potential as a medicine and its value and versatility as a commercial crop.
Today marijuana is condemned and prohibited not because it is harmful but in defense of a specious public morality. "If health were the issue, tobacco and alcohol would have been banned long ago. To accept cannabis is a cultural decision, not a political one." (Booth, p. 401)
It's time to make that decision, to end our seventy-year-old exercise in futility and irrationality, to reverse a portion of this interminable war's destructive consequences, to disable forever the expensive and ubiquitous smoke detectors that invade our privacy. It's time to legalize marijuana.
Soothing and sweet, twitching the nostrils of the millions of Americans who at some time or another in their lives have blissfully inhaled, a cohort which numbers among its members (at least) two Presidents and excludes only the most steadfast unsophisticates, it wafts ominously through the bustling corridors of schools high and low, including our own E. C. Glass, blankets crowded courtrooms coast-to-coast like early-morning fog, shadows celebrities and sports heroes to their secluded residences and private parties, and incites whole countries to vicious gang wars, senseless violence, brutal killings, and widespread corruption.
I'm speaking, of course, of the pestilential plant, the wicked weed, the sinfully seductive substance known as marijuana.
Four tenth-grade girls are on their way to school one morning when one suggests that they detour to McDonald's, which, for those unfamiliar with Lynchburg geography, is about three blocks away. Instead of an ordinary Egg McMuffin or sausage biscuit, they purchase some pot -- in the parking lot, I presume, although not having frequented a McDonald's in ten years, I'm not sure what delicacies may be served up behind (or under) the counter these days.
An hour or so later, a teacher or administrator -- exhibiting some very talented and highly developed olfactory nerves -- detects the telltale aroma. A search reveals only one girl in actual possession -- according to an attorney friend consulted by another girl's parents -- but suspicion and proximity trump physical evidence and due process and earn all four the maximum penalty: a 365-day suspension -- never mind that only one girl confesses, two take the Fifth (Ammendment, that is), and the fourth vigorously professes her innocence.
That the latter boasts a straight-A report card, a sterling collection of track-and-field trophies, and an unblemished behavioral record is irrelevant; she is destined to spend a year rehabilitating herself at the Pride Center for delinquent youth -- unless a School Board Panel of Appeals, in a rare display of compassion and leniency, should decide to moderate her sentence.
She may have already been tested for drugs -- and passed -- in compliance with a peculiar and discriminatory school policy which subjects school athletes to random drug tests, but no other students. Apparently, smoking marijuana disqualifies one from playing football and basketball but not from participating in school plays, band concerts, or spelling bees.
For four years Amherst County High School student Peter Rose is "the perfect kid," to quote a local television station. He leads the school to two Group AA state football championships, throwing for 1133 yards, rushing for 1790, accounting for 40 total touchdowns, and winning state player-of-the-year honors his senior year. He carries a 3.0 grade-point average, his school's prom-king crown, and the Mr. Amherst County nameplate. A fabulous future awaits him as he prepares to attend Virginia Tech on a full scholarship and play defensive back.
That is, until the Amherst County Sheriff's Office -- determined to root out and punish all criminal elements in its jurisdiction -- launches an elaborate (and expensive?) undercover investigation into drug trafficking. A law enforcement officer posing as a student twice purchases a quarter-ounce of marijuana from Rose (and similar amounts from six other current and former students) and saddles him with two misdemeanor and two felony charges, the latter for selling marijuana within 1000 feet of a school. Within days -- the guilt of the accused a foregone conclusion -- Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer strips Rose of his scholarship, stating that it has always been contingent upon the recruit maintaining high standards of conduct in his community, in his school, and on the football field.
Why would a young man with the world at his feet test the treacherous waters of illicit entrepreneurship and risk it all? Why indeed -- except for the lure of some extra spending money, the same profit motive that drives this thriving billion-dollar international underground industry at every level of distribution. (A stand of 300 mature marijuana plants can produce $1,000,000 at wholesale. Marijuana sells on the street for anywhere between $50 and $200 an ounce, while a deadly ounce of tobacco retails for two dollars.)
At his sentencing hearing, Rose testifies that his family has always struggled financially (and while colleges like Virginia Tech will reap millions from the exploits of Rose and his teammates on the field, the players will continue to go uncompensated -- but that's fodder for another blog) and that he saw an opportunity to make some easy money by dealing drugs. A sympathetic judge reduces Rose's jail time to fifteen days and dismisses the felony charges, provided he completes one hundred hours of community service, undergoes a substance abuse assessment, and remains on good behavior. Rose has a chance to redeem himself and earn another college scholarship -- but not at Virginia Tech.
A friend of mine who is a local Commonwealth's Attorney derided the generous sentence, claiming that athletes are often shown favoritism. But I'm not so sure.
Consider the hysterical reaction to the photograph taken of Michael Phelps smoking a cannabis bong at a University of South Carolina house party -- which, while confirming that the fourteen-time Olympic gold medalist is indeed a pothead, appears to dispel the canard that marijuana is demotivating and performance-diminishing.
Finding such behavior "not consistent with the image of Kellogg," the 103-year-old cereal maker drops its sponsorship of Phelps. Although stopping short of termination, another sponsor, Subway, censures him. USA Swimming releases a public reprimand, withdraws financial support, and bans the swimmer from competition for three months. A politically-ambitious County Sheriff threatens an arrest, until he is bluntly reminded by the Public Defender's Office that in twenty-one years no one has ever been charged with drug possession based on photographic evidence and an admission of non-specific wrongdoing.
If there is a double standard in play here, it is not between athlete and non-athlete; it is between marijuana and alcohol. Four years ago, when Phelps was arrested for drunk driving, he was allowed to continue swimming and did not lose a single endorsement.
In the words of Orlando Sentinel sportswriter Mike Bianchi: "What's worse -- taking a bong hit at a college party or getting snookered and putting yourself and others at risk by getting behind the wheel of your Hummer?"
Meanwhile, a drug war rages south of the Rio Grande, ignited nine years ago when the Mexican government implemented a crackdown on major distributors of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines. Trafficking cartels, which had previously relied on bribery and corruption to maintain a peaceful co-existence, turned on the authorities and each other to protect their territories.
The violence kills 400 Mexicans a month, 10,000 since 2005, and now spills across the border like a wildfire out of control, to Vancouver, Phoenix, Birmingham, and Atlanta, the new staging ground for the drug trade, where 43 Gulf Cartel members are arrested -- to name only four of the 270 North American cities where Mexican cartels and their affiliates maintain drug distribution networks or supply drugs to distributors. (Randal Archibold, New York Times, March 23, 2009)
With anywhere from 25 to 50 per cent of the 15,000 metric tons (33 million lbs.) of marijuana consumed annually in the United States smuggled from Mexico, it seems only logical that peace-loving prohibitionists would tout the moral rewards and life-saving effects of smoking less pot. In fact, as recently reported in the Wall Street Journal, several anti-drug groups are now preaching the conscience-laden message that "every bit of marijuana someone smokes is giving more power and more money to the drug cartels in Mexico" and is increasing that country's death toll. (Ellen Gamerman, Wall Street Journal)
It's a fatuous argument, and easily refuted. First, aficionados of the weed contend that the home-grown brand is more organic, more tasty, more pure, and more sought after than the imported product. And rational thinkers like me understand that it's not the drugs that are causing this intractable problem; it's drug prohibition and all the deleterious consequences.
People have smoked marijuana -- the chopped flowers, leaves, or stems of the cannabis plant -- at least since 600 B.C., when the Chinese first recorded its psycho-active effect; and no amount of exhortation, demonization, excoriation, or incarceration is going to change that.
Readers of this blog may remember (One-Year Wonder, January 1, 2009) that my sole experiment with marijuana was an abject failure; never having smoked a cigarette, I was clueless as to how to inhale -- and thus speak with hardly a modicum of credibility as to the allurements of illicit drugs. I never even bothered to broach the subject to a college roommate of mine who spent fifty per cent of his junior and senior years on a glorious high induced by marijuana and the mystical melodies of Jefferson Airplane.
Therefore, I must assume that people smoke marijuana for the same universal reasons they drink alcohol -- which, not being a total prude, I have occasionally and moderately indulged in since the tender age of fifteen -- to release their inhibitions, to facilitate social interaction, to experience sensory pleasure. Or, for some, maybe it's just the taste.
Which is why government attempts to suppress the demand for marijuana by punishing users and dealers are about as hopeless as trying to eradicate speeding and can not succeed. According to psychopharmacologist Ronald Segal, the desire for intoxication in human beings is innate and as basic as other urges.
Some find intoxication in sports, sex, gambling, music, or religion, but "socially-approved ways of intoxication are unavailable or don't work for many . . . The lure of a chemically-assisted high is powerful in America, where many persons consistently and with society's blessing get intoxicated on alcohol or hourly fixes from cigarettes." (Stephen B. Duke and Albert C. Gross, "America's Longest War," pp. 218-219)
In spite of federal and state governments spending upwards of $60 billion annually on the War on Drugs and arresting more than 750,000 individuals every year for marijuana possession alone, there were still 14.5 million users of marijuana in the United States in 2007 compared to 14.6 million in 2002. One in four sixteen-to -seventeen-year-old youths used marijuana in 2007. An estimated 100 million persons (one-third of the U.S. population) have smoked marijuana at some time in their lives, including such notables as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Margaret Mead, Carl Sagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Bloomberg, and Newt Gingrich.
With the weed enjoying such broad and bipartisan popularity, the question arises: how and why have we reached the grievous state of affairs wherein we spend billions of dollars on repeated failures, sanction millions for participating in a relatively harmless activity, and inundate our courtrooms with thousands of non-violent malefactors?
Marijuana had been exempted from the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, in which Congress, responding to pressure from four interest groups -- physicians and pharmacists wary of drug addiction, pragmatic reformers, anti-vice crusaders, and missionary witnesses to the Far East opium trade -- authorized regulation of cocaine and opium derivatives. By 1922, the Act, modified by court rulings, had evolved into a prohibition law, eliminating legal sources of the aforementioned substances and, of course, spawning a criminal black market to supply them.
Enter one Harry Ainslinger, first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, established in 1930, after revelations of corruption in the Narcotics Division of the Treasury Department.
Eager to garner publicity and funding for his nascent organization, Ainslinger launched a crusade against marijuana, cleverly preying on the fears and prejudices of a gullible public to link the purported dangers of the drug to its principal users: Mexican migrants stealing depression-era jobs from white workers and black ghetto social outcasts and speak-easy jazz musicians. The press, particularly the Hearst newspaper chain, took up the charge, blasting marijuana as "a killer drug" which transformed the blacks and Mexicans who smoked it into sexual predators, madmen, and murderers. (Martin Booth, "Cannabis," p.182)
Speculation persists that DuPont petrochemical interests -- which saw hemp, a product of the cannabis plant, as a competitive threat -- were ardent, if silent, supporters of the anti-marijuana campaign.
Ainslinger and his accomplices were successful. In April 1937, Congress initiated hearings on the Marijuana Tax Act, summoning the Commissioner as its chief witness.
Ainslinger regaled his audience with thinly-substantiated narratives of heinous crimes drawn from his extensive "police-blotter" files -- including the case of a twenty-one-year-old boy who slaughtered his family with an axe. "The evidence showed he had smoked marijuana," said Ainslinger, failing to mention that the boy had previously been diagnosed as mentally unstable and afterward was found to to be criminally insane under psychiatric analysis. (Booth, p.184)
Meanwhile, Congressmen belittled or ignored testimony by Assistant Surgeon General William Treadway, who wrote, "As to social or moral degradation associated with cannabis, it probably belongs in the same category as alcohol," and by AMA representative Dr. William Woodward, who stated, "We are told that the use of marijuana causes crime, yet no one has been produced by the Bureau of Prisons to show the number of persons who have been found to be addicted to the marijuana habit." (Mike Gray, "Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out," p.80)
The Marijuana Tax Act took effect October 1, 1937. Constitutionally, Congress could not ban marijuana. Instead, it required any person cultivating, transporting, selling, prescribing, or using marijuana to be registered and imposed a levy of $100 an ounce on every transaction (this in the days when a new Ford Model-Y cost $205). (Booth, p.188)
In the early 1950's, with a new international enemy on the horizon, Ainslinger shrewdly sought to link marijuana to heroin, and both to Communism. He painted heroin as part of a Communist plot to poison American values; marijuana became the heroin addict's introduction to drugs, from which he graduated to more dangerous substances.
In 1951, a U.S. Senate Committee blessed the bogus "gateway" theory when it declared that marijuana led to the use of other drugs. Five years later, the Daniel Committee officially confirmed Ainslinger's worst suspicions when it concluded that "subversion by drug addiction is an established aim of Communist China."
In 1971, Richard Nixon declared drug abuse "public enemy number one." With crime the centerpiece of his domestic policy agenda, he identified not just drug dealing but also drug addiction as a major source of crime. Among his initiatives was the consolidation of a number of drug agencies into the supersized Drug Enforcement Agency, which was granted the extraordinary power to organize wire taps and postal inspections, to search without warrants, to confiscate property, to freeze assets, and to arrest on suspicion.
With each successive administration the War on Drugs intensified.
In June 1982, President Reagan announced, "We're taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts. We're running up the battle flag." The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 increased federal drug penalties, made it a federal offense to distribute drugs within 1000 feet of a school, and even criminalized owning a roach holder or a packet of rolling papers.
In his first televised address to the nation, George H. W. Bush proclaimed that "the gravest menace facing our nation today is drugs" and called for "an assault on every front" -- including drafting the U. S. military into his anti-drug efforts. In 1986 drug trafficking was officially identified as a threat to national security, and by 1989 Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had made interdiction of the Latin American drug trade a high priority mission of the Department of Defense.
In 1994, when Clinton Surgeon General Jocelyn Elder (whom he subsequently fired) made the "nutty" (to quote former drug czar, William Bennett) suggestion that drug legalization should be studied, Congress responded by getting tougher. The Crime Bill of 1994 established "criminal enterprise" statutes mandating drug sentences of from twenty years to life. The 1998 Higher Education Act disqualified students who had ever been convicted of marijuana possession from receiving federal aid for college -- even though no such disqualification applies to convictions for robbery, rape, or manslaughter. (Gray, p.21)
And yet it's all gone for naught -- all the threats, promises, preachments, penalties, legislation, and expenditures. Illicit recreational drug consumption remains constant. The supply is plentiful; the undaunted users merrily puff away.
The problem with drug prohibition is that it is inherently flawed. The strategy of restricting supply artificially inflates prices to a level which generates tremendous profits and continually motivates suppliers to enter and remain in the market, yet which is not high enough to deter use or suppress demand. Secondly, like the mythical hydra, the sea serpent that Hercules battled, the drug trade is self-reproducing. Stamping it out in one locale simply encourages new recruits or veterans to set up operations elsewhere.
Making war on marijuana users is no less problematic and has produced equally dismal results. In addition to the impossibility of stifling our permanent, insatiable appetite for intoxicating drugs, one is confronted by the improbability of a user ever being caught. Fifteen million Americans smoking a joint six times a year equates to 90 million annual usages; collaring 750,000 of them yields an arrest rate of 0.8% -- very long odds indeed.
Furthermore, drug laws attempt to prohibit conduct that is consensual and victimless; since no one is harmed, there is no victim to press charges or to testify at a trial. Consequently, to detect these crimes, law enforcement must resort to methods ripe for abuse, corruption, and the infringement of civil liberties -- like carrying on systematic surveillance, employing paid informants, or deploying undercover agents who set up entrapment operations.
In fact, drug prohibition has produced a host of harmful consequences which have impacted individuals and society in ways which its proponents could hardly have anticipated and which, even when confronted with the unpleasant truth, they refuse to acknowledge.
It has criminalized the three per cent of the American population hauled into court each year for pursuing what is, for the most part, innocuous, diversionary behavior. For minor convictions, many have suffered significant hardships: probation, mandatory drug testing, loss of employment, loss of child custody, loss of federal student aid, loss of voting privileges, and revocation of driving licenses.
It has undermined the moral message of the law by defining as a crime an activity practiced by a large portion of the public without punishment.
It has consumed tremendous amounts of physical and human resources -- making them unavailable for the investigation, prosecution, and incarceration of rapists, burglars, and murderers.
It has driven the drug business underground, where rival gangs regularly turn to violence and intimidation to defend their turf -- and kill innocent bystanders and potential witnesses in the process.
It has bred corruption in the criminal justice system, affording law enforcement officers myriad opportunities to trade influence for drug profits, by selling information on undercover and surveillance operations, by bartering favorable testimony at hearings and trials, by robbing dealers without fear of reprisal, and by fencing seized assets or drugs -- all of which engender contempt and cynicism for government institutions.
It has fed the money laundering industry -- which converts drug proceeds into spendable cash or usable assets, often enticing honest organizations and individuals into criminal activities.
It has fueled the growth of a prison-industrial complex -- quadrupling the number of those imprisoned since 1980 to 2,300,000, one in every 138 Americans, with federal prisoners leading the way, growing 90 per cent in the last decade, 55 per cent of whom are serving time for a drug offense, compared to 11 per cent for a violent crime.
It has intensified racial mistrust and hostility, sending blacks to prison at seven times the rate of whites, for longer average terms than whites who commit comparable crimes, and disenfranchising thousands of black drug felons. It has created lucrative incentives for drug dealers to saturate urban black ghettos, where substandard housing, pervasive poverty, poor health, and limited job opportunities make fatherless children, school dropouts, homeless people, and individuals facing bleak and hopeless futures avid customers for any means of escape.
It has eroded our Bill of Rights protections, as courts have upheld a multitude of egregious measures: search warrants issued on the flimsiest of suspicions; citizens accosted in cars, airports, trailers, or buses; wiretapping and eavesdropping applications granted as a matter of routine; undercover operations and putative conspiracies validated with a blind eye; judicial discretion sacrificed at the altar of mandatory minimum sentences; and assets forfeited without a criminal conviction, sometimes without a criminal charge.
It has stigmatized and stereotyped illicit drug users as moral pariahs instead of recognizing them as victims of medical, social, or psychological problems -- which discourages their seeking out medical care, forgos the health benefits of drug regulation, thwarts treatment programs that might help the drug dependent, and immerses non-violent drug offenders in the violent culture of prison society.
It has prevented access to therapeutic substances -- like marijuana, which, it has been demonstrated, can alleviate the nausea of chemotherapy, reduce the intraocular pressure of glaucoma, relieve surgical, migraine, and menstrual pain, control multiple sclerosis spasms and some epileptic seizures, and combat depression and insomnia.
The lure of its unconscionable profits has, at one time or another, substantially corrupted the entire governments of Columbia, Peru, Bolivia, and, most recently, Mexico, and sustained native criminal elements which have rent the social fabric of these countries.
And finally, argue the philosophers, drug prohibition is an infringement upon an individual's right to own property -- and assume the risks attendant upon that ownership -- and his right to make choices which may be harmful to himself, as long as those choices do not harm others. Drug users, anti-prohibitionists contend, do not violate others moral rights, and most never do harm to others (unlike users of alcohol or tobacco).
All these consequences might have some justification if marijuana were so dangerous to our well-being that it needed to be outlawed at all costs. But science long ago shattered that myth.
In 1938 New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, skeptical of Harry Ainslinger's exaggerated claims about the effects of marijuana, commissioned a pharmacological study, a clinical study, and a sociological study. The report, released in 1948, "concluded that marijuana was not addictive, did not seriously disturb mental or physical functioning, and did not lead to violence or harder drugs." (Gray, p. 85) To this assessment must be added its potential as a medicine and its value and versatility as a commercial crop.
Today marijuana is condemned and prohibited not because it is harmful but in defense of a specious public morality. "If health were the issue, tobacco and alcohol would have been banned long ago. To accept cannabis is a cultural decision, not a political one." (Booth, p. 401)
It's time to make that decision, to end our seventy-year-old exercise in futility and irrationality, to reverse a portion of this interminable war's destructive consequences, to disable forever the expensive and ubiquitous smoke detectors that invade our privacy. It's time to legalize marijuana.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
The Power of Love
Twenty years (and two months) ago -- January 26, 1989 -- my father died.
It was sudden, yet not unexpected. I had been to see him the night before, and, while each successive visit had undoubtedly marked a further deterioration in his condition when compared to the previous one, it had seemed so slight that I falsely envisioned him little changed from the day seven months earlier when back pain, a urinary blockage, and breathing difficulties had sent him first to the hospital and then into permanent seclusion in the house where I now reside.
For a confirmed hypochondriac who had never let a minor ailment escape the commiserations of family and friends nor the immediate attention of an extensive roster of on-call physicians, he had accepted his fate with courage and grace, and had functioned surprisingly well during his two-year bout with lung cancer: motoring to and from radiation treatments at Lynchburg General Hospital (where, incidentally, he was ministered to by the vivacious beauty whom I was later to meet and marry -- but that's another story); holding court at Oakwood Country Club's Memorial Corner; vacationing in Myrtle Beach; traveling to High Point and Atlanta to shop the Furniture Market (well, he didn't really shop much in those days; mostly he wandered through the halls looking for friends and socializing); entertaining enraptured audiences with his raucous brand of humor, now flavored with a dash of illness-induced gravitas; and even planning a summer cocktail party around his beloved pool, until the sobering reality set in.
His mobility was restricted to a wheelchair; he required the assistance of one of his full-time sitters to get into and out of the bed where he spent most of his time; he whispered through an unsightly breathing tube which had been inserted in his throat after the removal of an obstructive tumor -- a grievous situation for a man who loved to talk -- yet he was still the Bert Schewel I had lived and worked with (or for) for forty years. To this day, I am envious of the thick brown mane that crowned his noble visage until the end, a stark contrast to the thinning gray stubble beating a hasty retreat behind my overly aggressive forehead.
Often after these visits, when he looked no worse than a normally healthy man suffering from a bad case of the flu, I used to imagine him rising from his bed, yanking out his catheter -- he once lamented to me the sorry state of his sexual organ -- donning a well-worn dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up and the top two buttons loose, revealing a forest of wiry chest hair, striding briskly out the door in his spindly, bowlegged gait, firing up the newest iteration of the flashy convertibles that kept him eternally youthful, and cruising down Rivermont Avenue, his luxuriant locks blowing in the wind -- a bittersweet dream that continued to haunt me many months after his death.
Although one of his sitters later told me he was not passing fluid -- and indeed it was his lungs filling up that killed him -- she failed to warn me that any day might be his last. I may even have gone out of town that morning; for some reason, Reidsville, N.C., comes to mind, although I may be confusing the death of my father with that of my maternal grandmother, whose own occurred four years later, at the ripe old age of 94. Nevertheless, wherever I was, when I received the inevitable call, probably from my mother, that my father had died in bed, one hour after having been wheeled into the kitchen for his lunch -- he rarely missed a meal -- I hurried to his home, arriving just in time to see the body being rolled out the door on a stretcher.
While many persons, when confronted by the loss of a loved one, will find comfort in their religious beliefs -- in their faith in God and an afterlife -- my reaction was the opposite. The spark, the soul, the spirit -- the mysterious power that had invigorated the composite of chemical elements that now lay inert before me -- had expired, evanesced, dissipated into oblivion, at least in my mind, although true believers, whom I wholeheartedly respect, will protest that it lived on in some ethereal Neverland. For me, this life, as grand and glorious as it was, was over.
Except, of course, for the memories that persisted in the minds and hearts of those who knew and loved him -- and even of those to whom he was a total stranger, like the acquaintance sitting next to me at a dinner several years ago who regaled me with some elaborate, improbable tale about Bert Schewel -- the details of which escape me -- and then concluded with the trenchant comment, "And you know, I never even met the man," confirming once again that he was, indeed, a legend in his own time.
Gazing upon his lifeless form -- saddened, resigned, contemplative -- I saw a man who had made the most of the sixty-nine years which had been granted him, who had chosen not to waste for one minute the multifarious talents and exceptional abilities with which he had been blessed but instead to leverage them to realize his full human potential and to lead and encourage others to do the same, and who had faced the challenges and disappointments of life with the same good humor and enthusiasm with which he had savored its pleasures.
But beyond that, like an alarm clock jarring me to self-awareness, the moment sounded a wake-up call, as I reflected that perhaps at age forty, with mortality staring me in the face, it was time to recognize and accept some uncomfortable obligations which I had cavalierly avoided.
In many ways I have followed in my father's footsteps, though by no means filling his shoes, an utter impossibility: growing up in the same town, attending the same college, pursuing the same career, marrying a woman of the same Jewish faith (the first time), raising two sons and a daughter, and now living in the same house he and my mother built fifty years ago.
For two decades I worked for and with him, and witnessed his social interactions, community involvement, and business endeavors. He was a powerful, influential, and intimidating presence in my life. I admired and respected him -- like so many others did -- and at times foolishly and futilely sought to emulate him. The true measure of his preternatural genius as a manager, mentor, and parent was his unbounded confidence in me -- despite my immaturity, insecurities, and missteps.
But, ultimately, as I was serendipitously reminded this morning by a teacher celebrating the special nature of his Bat Mitzvah charge, we are all unique and different from one another. Even if he hadn't been "one in a million," I could never be the person my father was. In fact, once the superficialities are dismissed, our personalities are as far apart as New York and Texas.
He was extroverted, spontaneous, garrulous, and gregarious. I am introverted, reserved, introspective, and cautious. He never met a stranger, whereas, I, frankly, often forget the name of a person I have known for years.
He could take command of a gathering with an endless repertoire of irreverent humor and biting commentary -- like the evening Schewels opened its store in Roxboro, N.C., and he and Gus Zoref, a manufacturer's representative, traded barbs and ripostes for two hours, and I laughed so hard my sides ached -- while I struggle to make small talk.
He could captivate an audience with an impromptu recitation of jokes and stories -- like the night he roasted Best Products founder Sidney Lewis for his "Isro" hair style and congratulated himself for partnering with Mr. Lewis to donate $8,000,100 to Washington and Lee University -- while I stand speechless without a complete text in front of me (although I have improved in recent years, thanks to myriad opportunities to practice in front of my six hundred employees; I also believe I have inherited a healthy dose of his wit and a modicum of his impeccable timing).
Which is why, looking back and applying some retrospective self-analysis, I had been content to defer my responsibilities as a useful citizen and a prominent businessman to my father, who excelled and exulted in such avocations.
On the other hand, if I was to learn anything from this man in whose shadow I had walked for so long, it was that now it was incumbent upon me to sharpen, polish, and employ the talents and abilities I did possess to further my own growth and development and to benefit other individuals and organizations in the community -- in ways unique to me and totally different from my father.
I took up the mantle gingerly, of course, but it is significant that my fund-raising, community service, and public speaking activities -- careers may be too strong a word -- were launched the day after he died.
That evening, as the house overflowed with a steady stream of friends and neighbors who had come to pay their respects and express sympathy to the family, I accosted a contemporary of my father, Richard Samuels, now deceased, who had assumed the chairmanship of the Lynchburg Jewish Community Council when poor health had compelled my father to resign the position.
The Lynchburg Jewish Community Council raises money in the local Jewish community for Israel and related Jewish charities. My father had chaired this organization for twenty years, and, although the duties were hardly onerous nor time-consuming, they did require the chairman to solicit contributions, preside at committee meetings, supervise the record-keeping, co-ordinate an annual banquet, and, the most daunting to me, at that latter event, make a vocal, impassioned appeal for funds. Since I had the secretarial resources at hand to manage this miniature enterprise, it was only natural that I take the reins.
No doubt Mr. Samuels was shocked that I would make such an offer -- obviously no one had ever volunteered for such a job before -- but he quickly recovered his composure and joyfully acquiesced.
It was the first of my many forays into fund-raising, which I am still mindful of now, twenty years later, since no one has as yet come forward in response to my annual plea for a successor.
I was late arriving at my mother's because that morning I had retreated to my office -- next door to my father's, then vacant, as it had been for seven months and was to remain so for another five or six, until I garnered enough motivation to take down all his pictures and move in -- to compose a eulogy. Other than some brief remarks I had made at employee meetings, it was to be the first speech I ever gave before a large, unfamiliar crowd.
I had been thinking about what I wanted to say for some time, but, like a lackluster student hoping that the day of reckoning would never come, I had intentionally procrastinated.
Considering the oppressive atmosphere, I wrote it in a relatively short time, four or five hours, by hand, after which I dictated it to my assistant. I practiced it numerous times, almost memorizing it, because I did not want to break down when I delivered it two days later to three hundred mourners who filled the sanctuary and recreation hall at the Agudath Sholom Synagogue. (I did give a copy to my sister and asked her to be prepared should I falter; I believe tearful emotionalism detracts from rather than enhances talks like that.)
Subduing my stubborn trepidations, that day I spoke with a nascent confidence, first, because I cared passionately about my subject, so much so that I felt my listeners would be sorely deprived, deficient in knowledge, if they didn't hear it, and, secondly, because I realized that the audience, as in most settings, certainly at a funeral, was programmed to receive a meaningful message, no matter how simple or esoteric it might be, and thus disposed to be sympathetic and charitable towards the bearer of that message. Whereas I formerly regarded that audience as my enemy, I intuited that it was very much my ally, willing me to success, whether my objective was to teach, preach, or evoke laughter.
This eulogy pricked my consciousness about six months ago, when I attended a funeral at which a friend of mine spoke about the deceased, his own father, in words which eloquently and elegantly captured the spirit and substance of the man. After the ceremony, we agreed that they would stand the test of time, as I hope the following ones have, delivered January 29, 1989, to which I have, twenty years later, appended the somewhat pretentious title "The Power of Love."
And to those astutely critical readers who will no doubt seize upon my reference to the Almighty as contradictory at best, hypocritical at worst, I submit that it was merely an attempt to engage the sensibilities of the congregation and that this was, after all, a religious service.
"During the past six months, while Bert was seriously ill, the love that people felt for him frequently materialized out of thin air, and in the most unusual places.
"In August I took a trip to Myrtle Beach and stayed at the Sheraton where Bert liked to go on vacations. As I was riding the elevator up to my room, a bellman named Walter asked me, 'Aren't you Mr. Schewel's son?' I said, 'Yes.' He went on to say he had met Mr. Schewel on his many trips to the Sheraton, that he was a good friend of Mr. Schewel, and that he had heard that Mr. Schewel was sick. He said he wanted to take a trip to Lynchburg to see him and talk to him.
"Walter never made that trip, but I felt that the moment he told me he was coming he was absolutely sincere. A few chance meetings in a hotel lobby had made this man a close, life-long friend of Bert, which was how it was with everyone he met.
"About a month ago I was at a cocktail party having a conversation with Charles Hammer, the general manager of the Grand Piano furniture stores in Lynchburg. Charles and I talked about a few things we had in common, and then Charles asked me how Bert was doing. When I told Charles that Bert was not doing well at all, he said, 'I'm so sorry. I love that man. He did a lot for me and he is the best competitor I have ever known.'
"I have heard many fine things said about Bert, but that was the first time I had ever heard that one. It really got to me, and I thought to myself, what a wonderful compliment and a fine tribute, to be called 'the best competitor I have ever known.'
"Last Friday evening another of Bert's friends, Frank Murphy, the bartender at Oakwood Country Club, came over to the house to answer the door and to greet visitors. About nine o'clock, I went up to Frank and told him that it was getting late and that he ought to go home. Frank said he would go or stay, whatever we wanted. Then he said that Bert had done more for him than any person he had ever known in his life, and that being there at the house could not begin to repay Bert for what he had done.
"I do not know the circumstances he was referring to, but it doesn't matter. It is just another example of the many people who were touched by Bert in his lifetime, in ways that most of us will never know or comprehend.
"Walter, Charles, and Frank knew Bert when he was healthy -- vigorous, outgoing, genuinely interested in their lives and activities, and eager and anxious to help them in any way he could.
"But I want to tell you about another person who came to know Bert only after he was sick, confined to the bed, unable to perform simple daily functions for himself, frustrated, often angry, and demanding constant attention. Her name is Phyllis Barnes, and she is one of the sitters who stayed with Bert during his illness. Phyllis, too, came to love him, and the fact that she did so when he was incapacitated and couldn't do things for himself tells me a little more about Bert than the other incidents I have related.
"About two months ago I was sitting in the kitchen in my mother's house talking to Phyllis. That's when I learned that she has watched five members of her family die from cancer and expects to die from it herself.
" 'Some of them were good people and some of them were bad,' she said. 'It's very hard on everybody, both the patient and the family. But, you know, Mr. Schewel is such a good person. I've only known him for a little while, but I've really grown to love him. He is such a sweet man.'
"Bert couldn't do things for Phyllis like he did for Walter, Charles, and Frank -- or for many others we will never know about. He couldn't physically perform acts of love and generosity. All he could do was lie there and talk to her day after day, and give her a few instructions. But the goodness of the man was so strong that it shone through and enabled Phyllis to love him the way so many others have.
"Although love is what I want to talk about today, I want to digress for a moment and mention two other qualities about Bert that never ceased to intrigue me and made me realize just how extraordinary a person he was. Perhaps these qualities will amplify my final remarks on love and Bert's life.
"First, Bert had a prodigious memory. He read the entire newspaper every day and could recount the pertinent facts of every article. He always remembered people's names, and, of course, we all know he never forgot a joke.
"About a year ago Bert was asked to speak at a trade show seminar that was being held in Florida. He spent a day or two preparing some rather detailed remarks about furniture retailing, Schewel Furniture Company, and the nature of our business.
"There was a dinner the night before the seminar, and when he arrived at the dinner and looked at the program, he discovered that he was the keynote speaker for an evening of fun and laughter. Bert had several drawers full of material for occasions like this one, but, unfortunately, the drawers were in Lynchburg and he was in Florida. During the meal, he excused himself, saying he didn't feel well, went to his hotel room, made some notes, came back to the banquet, and delivered a rip-roaring and entertaining talk that was written up in a furniture trade journal as the highlight of the entire week.
"The second quality I will always remember was his tremendous creativity, which I became aware of while working with him for twenty years. He was visionary, innovative, and developed a host of concepts and ideas that were later copied by other people. He had a dream for many years of operating a large chain of stores, even before companies like Heilig-Meyers started acquiring and opening stores at a rapid rate. He saw the potential of the waterbed business at a time when many other furniture dealers were turning away from it. He introduced numerous products and services that made the company more profitable. He originated and refined many types of sales and promotions that were often imitated. He never lost his appetite for doing something new.
"In May, one month before he got really sick and had to spend some time in the hospital, he read an article about a family-owned department store in Emporia, Virginia, that was closing after ninety years in business. He had one of his friends take him to look at the building, and Schewels subsequently opened its 34th store. Sadly, he was not well enough to see that old department store transformed into what he really loved: a furniture store full of customers.
"When I knew Bert was going to die, I tried to think of some statement or belief or philosophy that could explain to me what his life was all about. I found it in a book called 'The Road Less Traveled' by Scott Peck. Many of you may have heard of or read this book; it has been on the paperback bestseller list for two years.
"In his book, Dr. Peck speaks of the spiritual evolution of individuals as a difficult and strenuous process by which they overcome their natural laziness, grow, become better human beings, enjoy the fruits of their growth, and give these same fruits back to the world and to other individuals.
"This laziness, which Dr. Peck calls 'the force of entropy,' is very strong in individuals. It is the inherent inclination in all of us to preserve the status quo, to cling to the safety of old habits, to take the easy path.
"When I talked about Bert's memory and his creativity, I was talking about qualities that counteract this inclination, this laziness. It's easy not to remember names or jokes or newspaper articles. It's easy not to innovate, not to try to change the way we do things. It's hard work to conquer this innate resistance to our spiritual growth.
"Dr. Peck goes on to say that the force that pushes us to overcome our laziness is love; love is the effort to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or anothers spiritual growth. It is through love that we elevate ourselves. And it is through our love for others that we impel them to elevate themselves.
"I believe this was the kind of love Bert projected on so many people, which in turn was reflected back upon him.
"I believe every person has an infinite capacity to love. But only a few have the strength, courage, and will to exercise that capacity to an exponential degree, to nurture the spiritual growth of the dozens of individuals they come into contact every day. It just takes so much energy to extend oneself beyond the realm of his intimate family unit and circle of friends.
"But I think all of us are here today because Bert Schewel was special -- someone unique. It is only fitting to ask 'What made him that way?'
"I believe he was special because he exercised his capacity to love beyond what most people do in their lifetimes. He would focus his total attention on any given person at any time and care about that person as if there were none other in the universe. He made each one feel like he was someone special.
"When you were with Bert, you felt better about being in the world that day and better about yourself.
"Every day in his life exemplified what man can accomplish in his struggle against the natural laziness that resides in all of us. He loved people every day because he had the boundless energy to work at it.
"And what is the ultimate goal of our spiritual evolution, of the constant pushing towards greater wisdom and greater effectiveness? Dr. Peck says the ultimate goal of man's spiritual evolution is to become God. And who but God has the energy to love each and every one of us as individuals?
"As we expand our capacity to love -- as Bert Schewel did, as he proved by his living that it could be done -- we grow closer to God.
"We loved him and we miss him. Let us remember him as a friend, humanitarian, and philanthropist, who touched so many people in his lifetime, and who showed what man can become as he approaches the goal of his spiritual evolution."
It was sudden, yet not unexpected. I had been to see him the night before, and, while each successive visit had undoubtedly marked a further deterioration in his condition when compared to the previous one, it had seemed so slight that I falsely envisioned him little changed from the day seven months earlier when back pain, a urinary blockage, and breathing difficulties had sent him first to the hospital and then into permanent seclusion in the house where I now reside.
For a confirmed hypochondriac who had never let a minor ailment escape the commiserations of family and friends nor the immediate attention of an extensive roster of on-call physicians, he had accepted his fate with courage and grace, and had functioned surprisingly well during his two-year bout with lung cancer: motoring to and from radiation treatments at Lynchburg General Hospital (where, incidentally, he was ministered to by the vivacious beauty whom I was later to meet and marry -- but that's another story); holding court at Oakwood Country Club's Memorial Corner; vacationing in Myrtle Beach; traveling to High Point and Atlanta to shop the Furniture Market (well, he didn't really shop much in those days; mostly he wandered through the halls looking for friends and socializing); entertaining enraptured audiences with his raucous brand of humor, now flavored with a dash of illness-induced gravitas; and even planning a summer cocktail party around his beloved pool, until the sobering reality set in.
His mobility was restricted to a wheelchair; he required the assistance of one of his full-time sitters to get into and out of the bed where he spent most of his time; he whispered through an unsightly breathing tube which had been inserted in his throat after the removal of an obstructive tumor -- a grievous situation for a man who loved to talk -- yet he was still the Bert Schewel I had lived and worked with (or for) for forty years. To this day, I am envious of the thick brown mane that crowned his noble visage until the end, a stark contrast to the thinning gray stubble beating a hasty retreat behind my overly aggressive forehead.
Often after these visits, when he looked no worse than a normally healthy man suffering from a bad case of the flu, I used to imagine him rising from his bed, yanking out his catheter -- he once lamented to me the sorry state of his sexual organ -- donning a well-worn dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up and the top two buttons loose, revealing a forest of wiry chest hair, striding briskly out the door in his spindly, bowlegged gait, firing up the newest iteration of the flashy convertibles that kept him eternally youthful, and cruising down Rivermont Avenue, his luxuriant locks blowing in the wind -- a bittersweet dream that continued to haunt me many months after his death.
Although one of his sitters later told me he was not passing fluid -- and indeed it was his lungs filling up that killed him -- she failed to warn me that any day might be his last. I may even have gone out of town that morning; for some reason, Reidsville, N.C., comes to mind, although I may be confusing the death of my father with that of my maternal grandmother, whose own occurred four years later, at the ripe old age of 94. Nevertheless, wherever I was, when I received the inevitable call, probably from my mother, that my father had died in bed, one hour after having been wheeled into the kitchen for his lunch -- he rarely missed a meal -- I hurried to his home, arriving just in time to see the body being rolled out the door on a stretcher.
While many persons, when confronted by the loss of a loved one, will find comfort in their religious beliefs -- in their faith in God and an afterlife -- my reaction was the opposite. The spark, the soul, the spirit -- the mysterious power that had invigorated the composite of chemical elements that now lay inert before me -- had expired, evanesced, dissipated into oblivion, at least in my mind, although true believers, whom I wholeheartedly respect, will protest that it lived on in some ethereal Neverland. For me, this life, as grand and glorious as it was, was over.
Except, of course, for the memories that persisted in the minds and hearts of those who knew and loved him -- and even of those to whom he was a total stranger, like the acquaintance sitting next to me at a dinner several years ago who regaled me with some elaborate, improbable tale about Bert Schewel -- the details of which escape me -- and then concluded with the trenchant comment, "And you know, I never even met the man," confirming once again that he was, indeed, a legend in his own time.
Gazing upon his lifeless form -- saddened, resigned, contemplative -- I saw a man who had made the most of the sixty-nine years which had been granted him, who had chosen not to waste for one minute the multifarious talents and exceptional abilities with which he had been blessed but instead to leverage them to realize his full human potential and to lead and encourage others to do the same, and who had faced the challenges and disappointments of life with the same good humor and enthusiasm with which he had savored its pleasures.
But beyond that, like an alarm clock jarring me to self-awareness, the moment sounded a wake-up call, as I reflected that perhaps at age forty, with mortality staring me in the face, it was time to recognize and accept some uncomfortable obligations which I had cavalierly avoided.
In many ways I have followed in my father's footsteps, though by no means filling his shoes, an utter impossibility: growing up in the same town, attending the same college, pursuing the same career, marrying a woman of the same Jewish faith (the first time), raising two sons and a daughter, and now living in the same house he and my mother built fifty years ago.
For two decades I worked for and with him, and witnessed his social interactions, community involvement, and business endeavors. He was a powerful, influential, and intimidating presence in my life. I admired and respected him -- like so many others did -- and at times foolishly and futilely sought to emulate him. The true measure of his preternatural genius as a manager, mentor, and parent was his unbounded confidence in me -- despite my immaturity, insecurities, and missteps.
But, ultimately, as I was serendipitously reminded this morning by a teacher celebrating the special nature of his Bat Mitzvah charge, we are all unique and different from one another. Even if he hadn't been "one in a million," I could never be the person my father was. In fact, once the superficialities are dismissed, our personalities are as far apart as New York and Texas.
He was extroverted, spontaneous, garrulous, and gregarious. I am introverted, reserved, introspective, and cautious. He never met a stranger, whereas, I, frankly, often forget the name of a person I have known for years.
He could take command of a gathering with an endless repertoire of irreverent humor and biting commentary -- like the evening Schewels opened its store in Roxboro, N.C., and he and Gus Zoref, a manufacturer's representative, traded barbs and ripostes for two hours, and I laughed so hard my sides ached -- while I struggle to make small talk.
He could captivate an audience with an impromptu recitation of jokes and stories -- like the night he roasted Best Products founder Sidney Lewis for his "Isro" hair style and congratulated himself for partnering with Mr. Lewis to donate $8,000,100 to Washington and Lee University -- while I stand speechless without a complete text in front of me (although I have improved in recent years, thanks to myriad opportunities to practice in front of my six hundred employees; I also believe I have inherited a healthy dose of his wit and a modicum of his impeccable timing).
Which is why, looking back and applying some retrospective self-analysis, I had been content to defer my responsibilities as a useful citizen and a prominent businessman to my father, who excelled and exulted in such avocations.
On the other hand, if I was to learn anything from this man in whose shadow I had walked for so long, it was that now it was incumbent upon me to sharpen, polish, and employ the talents and abilities I did possess to further my own growth and development and to benefit other individuals and organizations in the community -- in ways unique to me and totally different from my father.
I took up the mantle gingerly, of course, but it is significant that my fund-raising, community service, and public speaking activities -- careers may be too strong a word -- were launched the day after he died.
That evening, as the house overflowed with a steady stream of friends and neighbors who had come to pay their respects and express sympathy to the family, I accosted a contemporary of my father, Richard Samuels, now deceased, who had assumed the chairmanship of the Lynchburg Jewish Community Council when poor health had compelled my father to resign the position.
The Lynchburg Jewish Community Council raises money in the local Jewish community for Israel and related Jewish charities. My father had chaired this organization for twenty years, and, although the duties were hardly onerous nor time-consuming, they did require the chairman to solicit contributions, preside at committee meetings, supervise the record-keeping, co-ordinate an annual banquet, and, the most daunting to me, at that latter event, make a vocal, impassioned appeal for funds. Since I had the secretarial resources at hand to manage this miniature enterprise, it was only natural that I take the reins.
No doubt Mr. Samuels was shocked that I would make such an offer -- obviously no one had ever volunteered for such a job before -- but he quickly recovered his composure and joyfully acquiesced.
It was the first of my many forays into fund-raising, which I am still mindful of now, twenty years later, since no one has as yet come forward in response to my annual plea for a successor.
I was late arriving at my mother's because that morning I had retreated to my office -- next door to my father's, then vacant, as it had been for seven months and was to remain so for another five or six, until I garnered enough motivation to take down all his pictures and move in -- to compose a eulogy. Other than some brief remarks I had made at employee meetings, it was to be the first speech I ever gave before a large, unfamiliar crowd.
I had been thinking about what I wanted to say for some time, but, like a lackluster student hoping that the day of reckoning would never come, I had intentionally procrastinated.
Considering the oppressive atmosphere, I wrote it in a relatively short time, four or five hours, by hand, after which I dictated it to my assistant. I practiced it numerous times, almost memorizing it, because I did not want to break down when I delivered it two days later to three hundred mourners who filled the sanctuary and recreation hall at the Agudath Sholom Synagogue. (I did give a copy to my sister and asked her to be prepared should I falter; I believe tearful emotionalism detracts from rather than enhances talks like that.)
Subduing my stubborn trepidations, that day I spoke with a nascent confidence, first, because I cared passionately about my subject, so much so that I felt my listeners would be sorely deprived, deficient in knowledge, if they didn't hear it, and, secondly, because I realized that the audience, as in most settings, certainly at a funeral, was programmed to receive a meaningful message, no matter how simple or esoteric it might be, and thus disposed to be sympathetic and charitable towards the bearer of that message. Whereas I formerly regarded that audience as my enemy, I intuited that it was very much my ally, willing me to success, whether my objective was to teach, preach, or evoke laughter.
This eulogy pricked my consciousness about six months ago, when I attended a funeral at which a friend of mine spoke about the deceased, his own father, in words which eloquently and elegantly captured the spirit and substance of the man. After the ceremony, we agreed that they would stand the test of time, as I hope the following ones have, delivered January 29, 1989, to which I have, twenty years later, appended the somewhat pretentious title "The Power of Love."
And to those astutely critical readers who will no doubt seize upon my reference to the Almighty as contradictory at best, hypocritical at worst, I submit that it was merely an attempt to engage the sensibilities of the congregation and that this was, after all, a religious service.
"During the past six months, while Bert was seriously ill, the love that people felt for him frequently materialized out of thin air, and in the most unusual places.
"In August I took a trip to Myrtle Beach and stayed at the Sheraton where Bert liked to go on vacations. As I was riding the elevator up to my room, a bellman named Walter asked me, 'Aren't you Mr. Schewel's son?' I said, 'Yes.' He went on to say he had met Mr. Schewel on his many trips to the Sheraton, that he was a good friend of Mr. Schewel, and that he had heard that Mr. Schewel was sick. He said he wanted to take a trip to Lynchburg to see him and talk to him.
"Walter never made that trip, but I felt that the moment he told me he was coming he was absolutely sincere. A few chance meetings in a hotel lobby had made this man a close, life-long friend of Bert, which was how it was with everyone he met.
"About a month ago I was at a cocktail party having a conversation with Charles Hammer, the general manager of the Grand Piano furniture stores in Lynchburg. Charles and I talked about a few things we had in common, and then Charles asked me how Bert was doing. When I told Charles that Bert was not doing well at all, he said, 'I'm so sorry. I love that man. He did a lot for me and he is the best competitor I have ever known.'
"I have heard many fine things said about Bert, but that was the first time I had ever heard that one. It really got to me, and I thought to myself, what a wonderful compliment and a fine tribute, to be called 'the best competitor I have ever known.'
"Last Friday evening another of Bert's friends, Frank Murphy, the bartender at Oakwood Country Club, came over to the house to answer the door and to greet visitors. About nine o'clock, I went up to Frank and told him that it was getting late and that he ought to go home. Frank said he would go or stay, whatever we wanted. Then he said that Bert had done more for him than any person he had ever known in his life, and that being there at the house could not begin to repay Bert for what he had done.
"I do not know the circumstances he was referring to, but it doesn't matter. It is just another example of the many people who were touched by Bert in his lifetime, in ways that most of us will never know or comprehend.
"Walter, Charles, and Frank knew Bert when he was healthy -- vigorous, outgoing, genuinely interested in their lives and activities, and eager and anxious to help them in any way he could.
"But I want to tell you about another person who came to know Bert only after he was sick, confined to the bed, unable to perform simple daily functions for himself, frustrated, often angry, and demanding constant attention. Her name is Phyllis Barnes, and she is one of the sitters who stayed with Bert during his illness. Phyllis, too, came to love him, and the fact that she did so when he was incapacitated and couldn't do things for himself tells me a little more about Bert than the other incidents I have related.
"About two months ago I was sitting in the kitchen in my mother's house talking to Phyllis. That's when I learned that she has watched five members of her family die from cancer and expects to die from it herself.
" 'Some of them were good people and some of them were bad,' she said. 'It's very hard on everybody, both the patient and the family. But, you know, Mr. Schewel is such a good person. I've only known him for a little while, but I've really grown to love him. He is such a sweet man.'
"Bert couldn't do things for Phyllis like he did for Walter, Charles, and Frank -- or for many others we will never know about. He couldn't physically perform acts of love and generosity. All he could do was lie there and talk to her day after day, and give her a few instructions. But the goodness of the man was so strong that it shone through and enabled Phyllis to love him the way so many others have.
"Although love is what I want to talk about today, I want to digress for a moment and mention two other qualities about Bert that never ceased to intrigue me and made me realize just how extraordinary a person he was. Perhaps these qualities will amplify my final remarks on love and Bert's life.
"First, Bert had a prodigious memory. He read the entire newspaper every day and could recount the pertinent facts of every article. He always remembered people's names, and, of course, we all know he never forgot a joke.
"About a year ago Bert was asked to speak at a trade show seminar that was being held in Florida. He spent a day or two preparing some rather detailed remarks about furniture retailing, Schewel Furniture Company, and the nature of our business.
"There was a dinner the night before the seminar, and when he arrived at the dinner and looked at the program, he discovered that he was the keynote speaker for an evening of fun and laughter. Bert had several drawers full of material for occasions like this one, but, unfortunately, the drawers were in Lynchburg and he was in Florida. During the meal, he excused himself, saying he didn't feel well, went to his hotel room, made some notes, came back to the banquet, and delivered a rip-roaring and entertaining talk that was written up in a furniture trade journal as the highlight of the entire week.
"The second quality I will always remember was his tremendous creativity, which I became aware of while working with him for twenty years. He was visionary, innovative, and developed a host of concepts and ideas that were later copied by other people. He had a dream for many years of operating a large chain of stores, even before companies like Heilig-Meyers started acquiring and opening stores at a rapid rate. He saw the potential of the waterbed business at a time when many other furniture dealers were turning away from it. He introduced numerous products and services that made the company more profitable. He originated and refined many types of sales and promotions that were often imitated. He never lost his appetite for doing something new.
"In May, one month before he got really sick and had to spend some time in the hospital, he read an article about a family-owned department store in Emporia, Virginia, that was closing after ninety years in business. He had one of his friends take him to look at the building, and Schewels subsequently opened its 34th store. Sadly, he was not well enough to see that old department store transformed into what he really loved: a furniture store full of customers.
"When I knew Bert was going to die, I tried to think of some statement or belief or philosophy that could explain to me what his life was all about. I found it in a book called 'The Road Less Traveled' by Scott Peck. Many of you may have heard of or read this book; it has been on the paperback bestseller list for two years.
"In his book, Dr. Peck speaks of the spiritual evolution of individuals as a difficult and strenuous process by which they overcome their natural laziness, grow, become better human beings, enjoy the fruits of their growth, and give these same fruits back to the world and to other individuals.
"This laziness, which Dr. Peck calls 'the force of entropy,' is very strong in individuals. It is the inherent inclination in all of us to preserve the status quo, to cling to the safety of old habits, to take the easy path.
"When I talked about Bert's memory and his creativity, I was talking about qualities that counteract this inclination, this laziness. It's easy not to remember names or jokes or newspaper articles. It's easy not to innovate, not to try to change the way we do things. It's hard work to conquer this innate resistance to our spiritual growth.
"Dr. Peck goes on to say that the force that pushes us to overcome our laziness is love; love is the effort to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or anothers spiritual growth. It is through love that we elevate ourselves. And it is through our love for others that we impel them to elevate themselves.
"I believe this was the kind of love Bert projected on so many people, which in turn was reflected back upon him.
"I believe every person has an infinite capacity to love. But only a few have the strength, courage, and will to exercise that capacity to an exponential degree, to nurture the spiritual growth of the dozens of individuals they come into contact every day. It just takes so much energy to extend oneself beyond the realm of his intimate family unit and circle of friends.
"But I think all of us are here today because Bert Schewel was special -- someone unique. It is only fitting to ask 'What made him that way?'
"I believe he was special because he exercised his capacity to love beyond what most people do in their lifetimes. He would focus his total attention on any given person at any time and care about that person as if there were none other in the universe. He made each one feel like he was someone special.
"When you were with Bert, you felt better about being in the world that day and better about yourself.
"Every day in his life exemplified what man can accomplish in his struggle against the natural laziness that resides in all of us. He loved people every day because he had the boundless energy to work at it.
"And what is the ultimate goal of our spiritual evolution, of the constant pushing towards greater wisdom and greater effectiveness? Dr. Peck says the ultimate goal of man's spiritual evolution is to become God. And who but God has the energy to love each and every one of us as individuals?
"As we expand our capacity to love -- as Bert Schewel did, as he proved by his living that it could be done -- we grow closer to God.
"We loved him and we miss him. Let us remember him as a friend, humanitarian, and philanthropist, who touched so many people in his lifetime, and who showed what man can become as he approaches the goal of his spiritual evolution."
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