Rest in Peace, Le Grand Orange

You had to close down on opening day





The fight left you as the team you inspired as children
took their positions on the field
Your poster on their parents walls
Baseball card in back pockets
Never flipped for luck
Saw you almost hit .400 in the World Series
You could not carry your team on a broken shoulder
The Shea Stadium outfield fence took away your arm
as you made the catch, but not your bat
Never your bat
Later in your career you were called on in the seventh, eighth, ninth inning
to do one job
The crowd chanted your name, knew you’d come to the plate
You’d pinch hit a single, double, never a triple
(foot speed was never your top skill)
or the tip your hat to the crowd encore home run
When your career ended you cooked
You fed the hungry, the first responders
Anyone
You gave back to a city that embraced you as one of its own
Now, Rusty, we say goodbye, au revoir, thank you

Thomas Wolfe and the home thing

Back on Long Island for a visit. Just a visit. For a change there are no funerals to attend. The weather has been oddly glorious for early November. This morning, though, there was a dense fog and I went to Heckscher State Park to see how the Great South Bay would look. It was hard to see though the mist. Very eerie and quite cool. A mist formed over my glasses. Made me wish I’d spent more time down here in high school. Should have ridden my bike down there instead of the to the South Shore Mall to play video games. It would have given me some much needed serenity.

The presence of my Mother is at many turns I make. She worked at the Connetquot State Park, which looms large with my family. There’s a memory bench with her name on it by the hatchery, where the public cannot go. My Stepfather and I went there today. He’s struggling with mobility these days, as he ages. But he got out his walker and rolled himself there.

As I drive my rented Hyundai around Western Suffolk County, memories flood me more than usual this time. Mostly about all the places I did not go, and how much time I wasted not going to them. But there’s the place I cursed up a storm at a guy for taking my bike. There’s the building I where threw a solid punch at a guy and knocked his head back. And of course, the house I lived in under some torment. But my Mom is still all over the place, and me - well I deliberately tried to erase my presence, or at least my footprint - and I cannot put it back, nor do I want to.

Overall it has been a good and necessary visit. My Stepfather took us to dinner last night, I took him to lunch today. My Niece does not take any crap from by Brother, which is a good thing. Later, I’m taking my Aunt to dinner. After that, who knows.

I do not know what to say here

One of my friends posted a picture of the sleeve of 45, and I just had to find the song, to hear it.

This is my fault. I did not have to look but could not help myself.



I bear no malice toward Bob McGrath. He did some beautiful work on Sesame Street.

This though, I just do not know how the world works, and never will.

Who decides?

Dad, what were the seventies like?

This will tell you everything, Son.

She's uncertain if she likes him. But she knows she really loves him

With snorting head he gazes to the shore
Which once had raised a sea
that raged no more
Like the video films we saw



First thing I saw in my email was a link to his obituary. It had to be a hoax, I thought. Double checked and found the sad news. He and his family kept his illness close, and his final album had many messages to his fans in it. Typing the words David Bowie is dead is so surreal, it cannot be true.

Very hard to imagine a world without him in it. He's been around me for so long, I can't remember him not being close, although I never saw him play live. He's in the iPod, in the CD pile, in the Back Room vinyl. We have the music, the art he made for decades, and we thank him for that.

What happens when you move away from your things

In a random thought the other day, I was Facebook posting and thinking about my old pachinko machine. I received it as a gift sometime in the mid to late 1970's from either my parents or grandparents. They were inexpensive, due to the Japanese flooding the market with them at the time.

It was cool to have, trouble was it was very loud and then it broke so you had to reach around the back of the machine to advance the balls.

Looked up how much it would cost to replace a machine today and was rather shocked by how much they had increased in value. Then a friend piggybacked my post about things you owned in your childhood that was lost, and I may be able to find the book she was looking for. And I then made a comment to her about letting me know if she had a pachinko machine.

To my surprise and shock she and her husband own one. It's in their rec room, but does not work.

Then my wife found out her co-worker has a storage shed full of them, and may be willing to part with one at a reasonable price.

I am not sure how my son would react to having one of those in the house. Again, it is very loud, and the stimulation may flip him out. He's had some odd reactions to the skill crane in the grocery store so I may not be willing to put something loud and over stimulating around.

But it's a small world, you mention something you think is obscure and it pops up in the most unexpected places. I doubt my old machine is still in my step-father's attic, but I'm going to call him and find out if he knows what happened to it.

There's also a Rolling Stones concert shirt I owned which I last saw in the attic thirty odd years ago. Anyone have one of those lying around?

He is faster than anyone

Been in the back room for a bit tonight working on Arts Fest stuff, and dug out the George Harrison release from 1979. Had no idea there was a video for this song. Fascinating. I also have a picture disc single of the tune in the basement.

The sound from one of the speakers was messed up. Took off the grill and found a large hole in the woofer. The foam was dried up and it was all brittle. Went to a thrift store today and found a bookshelf speaker for six bucks that works. Yes I know, mismatched speakers. A temporary solution that works back here.

Monday headache

If I insist my son eat, sleep, use the toilet and try to communicate with the world in a meaningful manner I have to be nothing less than a brute.

I saw too much criticism of the updated Cosmos last night that made me call into question why we do anything else. Yes, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is not Carl Sagan. Yes, Fox is not PBS. No matter how much people want it by worshiping their past or surrounding themselves with fetish items from their teenage years, childhood is not coming back. I guess that last segment of last night's program, in which DeGrasse Tyson spoke of meeting Sagan as a seventeen year did not get across. It's why we move forward, or at least try to.

And no, I'm not going back to watch the original at this time, because, this old post.

The Boys of Winter

I was a bit young to remember the New York Jets Super Bowl win in early 1969. Joe Namath was always some player who was hurt all the time.

When I was eight, I saw this play live on television.



It was one of those moments you get hooked on a game, reeled into something by a miracle play. It was hard back then to follow a team from afar back in the era when there was only football on Sunday afternoons and Monday nights. There was no ESPN, no football networks. You watched what you could and read anything you could find from the newspapers.

The 1970's Pittsburgh Steelers were a team and franchise that I have great respect for. I do not know if there has been any team in my lifetime that equally embraced its fans while in their embrace. Maybe the Brooklyn Dodgers, perhaps the great teams of the Montreal Canadiens has such a profound effect on the city in which they played. The Green Bay Packers are a entity onto their own.

In his book, Their Life's Work, Gary Pomerantz documents the rise of the Steeler Dynasty though the lives of the players, and reports the impact it had on their lives today.

There's a lot of craziness to the game, and Pomerantz gives us a lengthy glimpse at the men who played hurt and risked their lives for the game they loved - and a couple of the endings are painful to read, even when you know the outcome and history. The book was published just before the death of L.C. Greenwood, leaving Joe Greene the last survivor of the famed Steel Curtain defensive line.

It's also about a family, The Rooneys, who have owned the team from its inception in the 1930's and went though some incredibly bad years on the field until it changed some of its scouting procedures and drafted some incredible players.

In 1974 the team drafted Lynn Swann, Jack Lambert, John Stallworth and Mike Webster. All four of these players are in the Hall of Fame. In 1964, the Cowboys had a draft in which three players made the hall. No other teams have come close.

Pomerantz has interviews with the great players, such as Pittsburgh icon Franco Harris the backups, like Steve Furness and the character of Frenchy Fuqua - who still will not exactly say what really happened during the Immaculate Reception. He wanted to tell Dan Rooney after it happened, but he told Fuqua to keep it to himself.



There were a couple of things I wanted Pomerantz to get into more: Gerela's Gorillas and more about Broadcaster Myron Cope and The Terrible Towel. Overall, this is a book that will does for football non-fiction what Roger Kahn's masterpiece The Boys of Summer did for the Brooklyn Dodgers. It's a must read for anyone with a casual interest in the history of the game during a time when the players were not isolated from their fan base. I think the ball hit Tatum first.