Category Archives: Places

A Christmas Story

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It was a scrawny little tree, bought from the remnants on the tree lot just a few days before Christmas.  It only took one strand of blue lights to decorate it, it was so small and spare of limbs.  My mother had put some strips of cotton on the limbs to simulate snow.

Outside, the real snow was shoetop deep and slushy. The little Illinois town was about to button itself up for Christmas and I hadn’t bought my parents anything.  I was fourteen.

We’d done a lot of shopping in the last two weeks, a whole lot of shopping.  But not for Christmas.

About two weeks earlier, I had dashed out the front door of our farmhouse, avoided tripping over Mac the dog, who liked to run with me to the school bus, climbed aboard, found a seat and away we went without a backward glance at the house—-

—that was a smoldering hole in the ground the next time I went back to that corner.

Augie Adams, an angular, friendly fellow who rented our pasture for his horses, greeted me that afternoon when I was summoned to the principal’s office from my PE class.  “Do you know where your mother is?” he asked me, a tension in his voice I remember but did not then recognize.  “She’s driving my dad around on his territory,” I told him—my dad was a district manager for a farm equipment company and still wasn’t allowed to drive because of a summer heart attack.  Augie immediately relaxed and then told me, “Your house burned down and we pulled her car out of the garage but we couldn’t find her.”

And that was how I learned just before Christmas that all I had was what I was wearing.

Just before Christmas.

My parents rushed to the school to pick me up and then we went out to see what there was to see. The fire department had no chance to save the house or the garage.  They did put out a pile of brush nearby.

My parents stayed with a farm family down the road. I stayed with a classmate in town that night and the next morning we headed to Decatur and to the Montgomery Ward store to start our lives over.  We found an upstairs apartment in a house in town.  The president of the student council at Sullivan High School came into study hall a few days later and gave me an envelope, saying, “The student council thought you could use this.”

Inside was a $100 bill.

All these years later, I think about what I lost in that fire—a baseball card collection that might put my grandchildren through college if I still had it: fifty years of National Geographics a spinster aunt had given me when she broke up housekeeping and went to live with relatives, a rolltop desk, a model airplane collection.  I think about the pictures and other things that were the family archives.  I think about my parents, who had survived the Depression and the Kansas Dust Bowl, and the World War, and now dealt with starting all over.

I don’t remember what I got that Christmas—maybe because what was under the tree was so secondary to what we’d had to get for the previous couple of weeks.

But I do remember that I had to get something for my parents.   And so that evening, maybe it was Christmas Eve—I don’t recall—

Dad gave me four dollars and I set out for downtown before the stores closed to find something.   And in Anderson’s Gift Shop, I found something kind of special—-remember, this was 1955—-liquid pencils.

(Ballpoint pens had only been around for about ten years by then and the first ones I had didn’t work very well. We were still a pencil and fountain pen family, as were many families.)

The liquid pencils looked just like the familiar yellow pencils we used at school but they had a ballpoint cartridge in them with black ink so the writing kind of looked like number two pencil writing.

So we had Christmas with that little tree. We probably spent part of Christmas Day having a big dinner (dinner was a mid-day meal then, supper was at night). I don’t remember but this was in the days when families still had a lot of relatives within 30 or 40 miles and holiday and weekend Sunday afternoons were often spent visiting Aunt This or Uncle That.

A few years ago, the alumni association back home asked me to emcee the homecoming banquet.  I asked the student council president to join us that night to let all of the old grads know what was going on at the “new” high school—which then was about fifty years old.  And when he was done, I repaid the student council for its Christmas present to me in 1955.   That hundred dollar bill all those years ago was the equivalent to about $800 now.  But I decided to round up the total a little bit and gave the council $2,000 for a fund to help some other students who might suffer a devastating loss in the future.

Sometimes a Christmas gift deserves a gift in return, even if it’s not for several decades.

This isn’t the stuff of a Hallmark movie.  It’s just a Christmas story and there’s a lot I don’t recall about that time—-I do remember that by New Year’s Day we’d gotten a 36-foot trailer to rent and had moved it out to the site of our old house, there to house my parents, my grandmother, me, and Mac the dog. My father and I spent New Year’s Day pulling buckets of water out of the cistern and dumping them on the coal pile in the basement that was still burning inside three weeks after the house burned.

We built a new house, the dirt from the basement filling the ashes-filled hole where the old house had stood. And we celebrated several Christmases there before Mom moved to a place in town. We had trees every year but I don’t remember them.

But I do remember a tree that was so forlorn in the tree lot that nobody else wanted it and what it meant with its blue lights and its cotton snow as my family rebuilt our lives as well as our new house.

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Christmas is a time for story-telling.  For remembering.  Perhaps you had—or will have in these next few days—-a Christmas of special meaning.  If you’d like to share that story, use all the space in the comment box with this entry.

 

 

Notes from the road

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(Abandoning the quiet street for a few days in search of adventure.)

Our recent trip to Colorado, via Kansas of course, featured a munchkin toilet, a Ferris wheel inside a store, a revelation of what’s in a cheeseburger (or so it seemed), and a place where dart-throwing is a game for sissies.  And, oh yes, we DID see some mountains this time.

We drove across Kansas, which we kind of like to do.  The Flint Hills in the eastern part, the wide open sky and countryside, the windmills lazily—most of the time—creating electricity, the scattered houses and small towns on the high prairie on the west side.

Whenever we make that trip, we cannot help but compare I-70 in Kansas to I-70 in Missouri.  We were at peace on the highway in Kansas. It’s smooth, quiet, and features FEW billboards.  We all know about I-70 in Missouri, a butt-ugly disgrace of sardinesque traffic cans that cram cars, trucks, bigger trucks, campers, RVs, pickups, motorcycles and Heaven knows what else into a tight space at 80 mph, with elbow to elbow billboards advertising everything from Ann’s bras to somebody’s porn shop.  Driving on I-70 in Missouri is a tiring slog through mile after mile of advertising sludge.  Crossing into Kansas generates an instant feeling of freedom.

If you make it to Goodland, about 18 miles short of Colorado, and if you stay at the Quality Inn, do not let the clerk give you Room 102.  It’s a nice room for normal-sized people.  But if you have to use the bathroom—-

That’s our tablet in front of the toilet to give you an idea of the scale of the fixture. The tablet is 8.25 inches tall. The, uh, facility must have been purchased from Munchkin Plumbing just down the road from Dorothy’s farm.  It’s good for a pre-schooler, probably. But for adults?

We will not elaborate. You can use your imagination.

Goodland’s a nice, small town known for having the largest easel painting in the world.  In fact, it’s a Van Gogh painting.  Van Gogh was never in Kansas but he was famous for his five paintings of sunflowers.  And we know what the state flower of Kansas is.

The easel is 80 feet tall (That’s Nancy underneath it for perspective) and is visible from the highway as you come into town from the East.  It’s on your right and easy to miss from a distance.

Kansas has two things that have come to symbolize the state, other than sunflowers.  It has windmills, 3500 of them.  And grain elevators.  One of those in Goodland reminds us of a great ship of the plains waiting to load its cargo.

A lot of first-time travelers to Colorado are disappointed when they don’t see mountains as soon as they cross the state line.  It takes a while before they start to rise against the western horizon. The traveler begins to see them about 45-50 miles from Denver.  But in July, we couldn’t see them at all from there and they were only vague shadows in the western forest fires smoke when we were as close as four or five miles.  Here’s the picture we used in our July 31 entry. It was taken from six miles away:

But the day after Thanksgiving, we drove out to the same area, or close to it:

Or, looking south:

It never quite looked like Colorado in July.  But it sure looked like it at Thanksgiving.

We went to Loveland one day, to a place that seemed to be a cross between Bass Pro/Cabella’s and Dick’s Sporting Goods.  We saw a woman walking around with her cat in her backpack, which had a clear plastic cover and air holes to give Puff air.

Can’t see the cat?  Look at the lower right, just above the right air hole and you’ll see two yellow eyes.  Several folks had their dogs with them. Not service dogs.  Just dog dogs. It’s part of Colorado’s laid-back culture.

The place had a Ferris wheel right in the middle. Big sucker.  We haven’t been on one in years so we rode it and got a good look at both stories of the store.

We expected Colorado to be Colorado in late November and early December—a few years ago we ran ahead of an ice storm all the way back home as far as Salina holed up for the night while the storm passed and then came the rest of the way to Jefferson City on a cold, wet day with cleared roads but ice and freezing rain on the trees and roadsides.  So we packed appropriate cool or cold weather clothes.

It was in the 60s or low 70s every day but one.  The day before Thanksgiving it was a raw, gray day in the low 40s. There were even a few tiny snow things in the air.

We had an eye-opening experience on the way home to Missouri. We stopped for lunch at a famous fast food place in Burlington, Colorado and learned:

Wow!  And all this time I thought those things were 100% ground beef!

Here’s another discovery from Kansas:   There’s a bar in Topeka that doesn’t seem to have much interest in dart-throwing.

 

Kansas was a place where a 6-foot-tall scowling temperance crusader named Carrie Nation stormed through the doors with an axe in her hand and started breaking up bars.

I don’t know if I’d want to spend much time in a place where there’s a lot of drinking going on and people are throwing axes.

But, you see, there ARE interesting places in Kansas.  Just don’t get in the way of an axe or, if you have bad knees, check into Room 102.

 

Why didn’t you go with them? 

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You promised you would.  Remember you said during  your pep rally, “We’re going to walk down—and I’ll be there with you—We’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.  Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women….’

You said “we” five times, and you promised to “be there with you.”

But you didn’t go, did you?   You just turned them loose then and you strolled back to the warmth of the big white house.

Sure was a funny way to lead.

Kind of like Jimmy Doolittle.  Remember how he watched fifteen B-25s take off from the security of the bridge of the Hornet?

And we’re all familiar with General Patton, commanding the Third Army from his bunker in London as his soldiers swept across France and into Germany.

George Washington, relaxing by the fireside at Mount Vernon, received regular reports on the fine living conditions at Valley Forge.

The examples are so numerous—-

Some of us are old enough to remember Martin Luther King telling his marchers who had traveled with him from Selma to Montgomery Alabama, “The battle is in our hands. And we can answer with creative nonviolence the call to higher ground to which the new directions of our struggle summons us. The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways that lead us easily and inevitably to quick solutions. But we must keep going.”  And I’m sure you remember that Dr. King, after speaking words somewhat more eloquent than yours, got into his long black Cadillac and drove back to Selma where he waited for reports of what happened in Montgomery.

Actually, the leaders in these and other situations never said, “I’ll be with you.”  But they were.  They were with those they commanded.

What might have happened if you had been a man of your word that day?  Could you have spoken to the crowd of “peaceful tourists” and urged them not to break windows, break down doors, assault security officers, vandalize offices, and force members of the House and the Senate to flee for their lives?

Would you have tolerated a noose and a sign that said, “Hang Mike Pence,” or would you have encouraged more respect for a man carrying out the constitutional duties of the Electoral College?

Could your calming presence have saved the life of Ashli Babbit?

Could you have prevented the arrests of more than 600 “tourists,” many of whom face significant time in prison or in jail while their families wonder what’s to happen to them if you had said as the crowd surged toward the doors and windows, “Wait!  We’re just here to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.  Go back out behind the fence and demonstrate out there.”

Oh, if only you had kept your promise.

“I’ll be there with you,” you said.

You’re no Jimmy Doolittle. Or George S. Patton.  Or Martin Luther King.

Or any number of other great leaders who led from the front instead of retreating inside their  nice, warm, safe quarters where they could do as you did(according to some accounts),  joyfully watch what you unleashed.

You expressed some concern a few days ago that the September 18h celebration of the January 6 insurrection was intended to make you look bad. What looked bad was the small number of people who gathered to celebrate the day,

Too bad you weren’t with them, either. Be comforted by the fact that you could not have looked worse on September 18th than you did on January 6.

But, once again, you weren’t in the front ranks. Others took all the risks and you watched it all on television. Again.

Once again you’re the man who wasn’t there.

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today.

Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

—or maybe, walk away.  You’re good at that.

Bicentennial

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A big weekend is ahead as Missourians celebrates its bicentennial—two-hundred years since President Monroe signed the proclamation making Missouri the nation’s 34th state, the second state west of the Mississippi.

But if all we do is look back, we’re ignoring a responsibility we have for creating the state that will celebrate its TRIcentennial.

The Maori people of New Zealand have an ancient proverb: Ka mua, Ka muri that translates into “walking backward into the future.”

That is what our bicentennial is about—walking into a future we cannot see while looking back on the historic and the familiar things that shaped the present, knowing that we have changed as a people during this journey and that our descendants will be a changed people, too.

Some who do not understand how different we are fear who or what our next generations will be—and out of that fear are making what surely will become futile efforts to confine that future to present, or even past, standards that often are not based on history but are based on the myths of history.

We cannot stop time and if we are realistic about our future as a people, we must recognized that those who gather to celebrate our state’s TRIcentennial in 2121 will be different in appearance, social relationships, political references and in a multitude of other ways we cannot anticipate no matter how hard we might resist.

We are honoring those first settlers of mid-Missouri. But the historical record shows how different from us they were.  We know the names of the men but it is harder to learn the names of their wives and even more difficult to learn the names of the slaves they brought with them. We know they were people of hope, of ambition, and hard work, qualities necessary to survive in a world where fire was an essential ingredient of life. We live in a world where fire is a disaster at worst and a mostly decorative feature of a modern living room at best.

In our world, our homes and even the furniture in them are not products of our own hands. We travel farther in an hour than they sometimes traveled in a week, more in a day than some of them traveled in their lives.

They were not the first Missourians.  In Montgomery County’s Graham Cave State Park, evidence has been found of human habitation 10,000 years ago, long before the Osage populated much of Missouri—and other sites in Missouri date back farther than that.

We are observing 200 years in a place inhabited for thousands of years. We should honor the memories of the ancient ones, too.

We celebrate the bicentennial of man-made boundaries that define where we are and a history that tells us who we have become. But if we look only back on what was and became what is, we are making a serious mistake.  Walking backwards into the future endangers those who will be that future.

Our responsibility is to turn and face that future, respectful of the past but unafraid of the changes that our descendants will make because they must remain, as the people of 200 years ago were, people of hope.

What we do today—what we ARE today—lays the foundation for the state and nation our grandchildren’s grandchildren will inhabit.

So the Missouri bicentennial gives us some choices to make.  Will we continue to follow the trails our ancestors established through extraordinary effort and the  inalienable truths and hope that they brought with them……or will we follow trails of fiction and fear too easily established these days, and too easy to blindly follow?

Will we be a people fearful of one another, often victims of those who would generate fear among us for their own purposes or  power…..or will we be a people who recognize there is nothing wrong with a different heritage, a different color, a different outlook on identity, a different faith?

Will we be people spooked into division, derision, and disrespect….or will we be a people of thought, who seek understanding rather than hostility, people who respect knowledge, and who trust our neighbors regardless of their differences from us?

Will we be the kind of people who choose leaders who  DEmand blind allegiance or the kind of people with wide-open eyes and minds who choose leaders who COmmand respect?

What kind of people are we going to be as we lay the foundation for the kind of people we want our grandchildren’s grandchildren to be?

A hundred years from now, our grandchildren’s grandchildren will gather around the then-weathered monuments we have put up to honor the bicentennial.

What kind of people—in what kind of counties, state, and nation—do we want to have gathered around those monument in 2121?

Our generations will take those first steps on the new trail that stretches before us—the steps that will determine what kind of people and what kind of nation will be here in 100 years. We cannot take those steps by walking backward into the future. We must be unafraid to recognize our grandchildren’s grandchildren will not be like us.  We have to lay a foundation that allows them to be better than us.

We have to create a trail that is broad enough for all and grows broader as it advances. We have to create a trail that is not darkened by division, derision, and disrespect but is brightened by intelligence, independence, and acceptance.

And we must begin building a foundation strong enough to support a  greater nation than we are today.

So let our celebration of the past be brief.  Let our steps today be steps that those celebrating the TRI-centennial of our Missouri will be as grateful to us for taking—as we are for the steps taken by those who were here first.

We will honor the yesterday by the honorable steps we take today into tomorrow.

(The State Historical Society of Missouri was designated by the Missouri General Assembly to be the lead organization for planning the bicentennial. Coordinator Michael Sweeney has worked with every county to plan some event or project celebrating the event. You can learn more about what’s happening statewide or in your area at https://shsmo.org/missouri-2021.)

Making a house a home

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(It might sound a little old-fashioned, but what’s inside a house—or rather, what’s inside those inside a house—make it a home.  Dr. Frank Crane explains the values that make a house a home.)

THE HOUSEHOLD GOODS

The walls of a house are not built of wood, brick, or stone but of truth and loyalty. Unpleasant sounds, the friction of living, the clash of personalities are not deadened by Persian rugs and polished floors but conciliation, concession, and self-control.

The curtains that screen the household gods from the eyes of the vulgar and the curious are not woven of lace, but of discretion.

The food of the home is not meat and bread but thoughtfulness and unselfishness for these keep joy alive.

The real drink is not wine or water, but love itself, which is the only known thing that is at once a food and an intoxicant.

The bed is not to be of down and white linen but of “a conscience void of offense toward God and toward man.”

The lighting is not to be of the sun by day or by electric bulbs at night but by loyal affection, shining always in dear hears, burning always in true hearts.

Your home is not where you layoff your clothes but where you lay off your cares.

The cellar of your house is not be filled with apples or rare vintage but with the memory of sacred intimacies, of little heroisms unknown to the world of sufferings borne nobly.

In the attic, you do no store old trunks, letters and gowns, but you keep there the kisses, sayings and glances that cheered you when you gathered them fresh, and are now a sweet sorrow when dried by time.

The house is not a structure where bodies meet, but a hearthstone upon which flames of souls which, the more perfectly they unite, the more clearly they shine and the straighter the rise toward heaven.

Your house is a fortress in a warring world, where a woman’s hand buckles on your armor at morning and soothes your fatigue and wounds at night.

The beauty of a house is harmony.

The security of a house is loyalty.

The joy of a house is love.

The plenty of a house is in children.

The rule of a house is service.

The comfort of a house is in contented spirits.

The rats and mice in a house are envy and suspicion.

The maker of a house, of a real human house, is God himself the same who made the stars and built the world.

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It takes a town to make a town

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(We want our city to be greater than it is, more than it has been to its own citizens and to those who visit or will visit it.  But the town has to WANT to be greater than it is and that means its citizens must want it to be more than it is, not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of generations to come.  It’s not a job to be left to the city council or the chamber of commerce. This observation, written by Dr. Frank Crane shortly after the end of the First World War and published in The Delineator magazine, remains valid today as he suggests we put—)

YOUR HOMETOWN FIRST

Work for your own town.

Beautify it. Improve it. Make it attractive.

The World War and the Treaty of Peace and the Protective Tariff and all such things are important subjects but what’s the good of cleaning up the world unless you sweep your own doorstep?

The city whose main street is dirty, sordid-looking, cluttered, uninviting, suffers much. Such a city wants to be cleaned, recreated, made a thing of beauty so that people will come from miles to see it.

The best advertisement of your business if the town you live in.

Towns get reputations as well as men. Make your town talked of all through the state. It will thus draw people. And where the people come, there is prosperity. It does not take money. It takes cooperation.

Get together. Organize for civic improvement. Develop the civic nerve.

Rid your town of one eyesore after another. Clean up the vacant lots and plant them in gardens. Make a cluttered yard a disgrace. Make public opinion too hot for those who will help.

It pays.  It will promote law and order. It will help in the education of your children. It will draw factories and other business enterprises to your locality.

Shiftlessness, untidiness, dirt and selfishness as shown in your streets and buildings react upon your people.

Such things make your boys and girls grow up hating their home town.

Make your home town a children’s paradise, something their memory will lovingly turn back to.

Look after your amusements, your parks, your playgrounds, your theatres and all other forms of communal enjoyment.

Make your home town happy.

It pays.

Racing’s Happy Warrior (updated)

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(We’ve decided to add a sports page to bobpriddy.net.  With some re-construction going on with the Missourinet web page and its sports section, we’ve decided to move our weekly racing summary reports to this page—-and expand it with sometimes keenly insightful observations about other sports and their participants)

We watched something remarkable happen Sunday at the Indianapolis Speedway—not from our usual perch on the back porch of the media center but from the forced comfort of our living room recliner—put there by recent surgery and by limits on spectators and reporters because of COVID.
There is a Missouri connection with Helio Castroneves, the man we call “racing’s happy warrior,” and his career at the Speedway that now includes him as the fourth man to win the 500 four times.  We’ll get to that in due course.

The phrase has been used in politics from time to time. When young Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated New York Governor Al Smith for the presidency in 1924, he called Smith “the Happy Warrior of the political battlefield.”  The same title was applied to Senator Hubert Humphrey during his time on the national Democratic tickets, and more recently it was affixed to Joseph Biden by Barack Obama in his presidential victory speech.

But there is no one in all of sports, at least today, to whom that title applies more fittingly than Helio Castroneves, and watching him celebrate his long-sought fourth victory at Indianapolis Sunday makes it clear why. 

Castroneves, fierce behind the helmet’s face shield, is animated and joyous when the hat comes off and the most instant issues of car and contest are set aside. Any INDYCAR fan has seen it many times.

What he did Sunday, however, is only part of the incredible story of the race.

Let’s begin with this:

Castroneves’ fellow Brazilian, Tony Kanaan, won the 500 in 2013 at the record speed of 187.433 mph.  Castroneves broke that record by more than three miles an hour.  190.690.

The first sixteen cars averaged more than 190 miles an hour. The slowest car to finish the full 200 laps, driven by2014 winner Ryan Hunter-Reay, still was two miles an hour faster than Kanaan’s record. RHR finished 22nd.  Will Power, the 2018 winner, finished 30th, three laps down, and was still faster than Kanaan’s record.

Let me put some personal context into this discussion.

When I was but a sprout, my parents and I went to the Speedway for the first time to watch the first day of qualifications for the 1954 race.  From our seats in the low wooden bleachers between turns one and two we watched Jack McGrath in his yellow Hinkle Special run the first officials laps at the Speedway at more than 140 miles an hour.

Sunday afternoon, I watched SIXTEEN DRIVERS run the full 200 laps and average more than 50 mph more than Jack McGrath ran on my first day at the track.

And how about this:  Castroneves was only 2.6 seconds per lap away from averaging 200.

Here’s another thing about this guy:  He has finished second three times by .2011 of a second, .2290 of a second, and .0600 of a second.  He has come within a combined total of less than one-half second of winning SEVEN of these races.

There a a few other remarkable things about what might have been (individual perceptions using individual standards will differ) the greatest 500 ever run.  This race produced the most remarkable finish in race history, beyond what we outlined earlier.

Al Unser Jr.’s .0423 of a second victory margin over Scott Goodyear in 1982 remains the closest finish; the  Castroneves-Palou finish ranks eighth at .4928 of a second.

BUT—-Until May 30, 2021, the closed first-to-third finish had been in 2006, when Sam Hornish Jr., beat Marco Andretti by .0635 of a second (now the third closest finish) and finished 1.0187 seconds ahead of Michael Andretti.  This year, the top FOUR drivers finished within 0.9409 of each other (Castroneves and Palou, then 2019 winner Simon Pagenaud, and Pato O’Ward.

A couple of the Kanaan race records survived the 2021 race.  His race had 68 lead changes involving 14 drivers.  The 2021 race had 35 lead changes involving 13 drivers.

The Missouri connection to his story:

Helio (the “h” is silent) was born Hélio Alves de Castro Neves a little more than 46 years ago.  His first taste of big-time open-wheel racing in the USA came in 1998 when he ran for Tony Bettenhausen Jr., with a best finish of second at Milwaukee. But it was when he drove for St. Louis trucking entrepreneur Carl Hogan in 1999,  that he began to arrive. He started third and finished second at Gateway International (now World Wide Technology International) just across the river from St. Louis, leading 38 laps—more than he had led in his entire season with Bettenhausen, in this car, a Mercedes-powered Lola owned by Hogan.

The next weekend, he won his first pole at Milwaukee. There are those who thought he should have won at least three times that year for Hogan but mechanical issues short-circuited those hopes. In those days, Helio had not yet combined the last two parts of his name into one.

He became Castroneves in 2000 when, after gaining some prominence, some reports in the United States referred to him either as “Castro,” or “Neves” and he wanted them to use his whole name.

Hogan folded his team for financial reasons at the end of the year but the young driver by then shown the kind of potential a man named Roger Penske liked to see.

He drove for Penske in 2000, picked up his first three wins, and in 2001 as a rookie at the Indianapolis 500, got the first of his now-four 500s.

In 2003, the last year Gateway hosted an INDYCAR race until the series returned in 2017, Castroneves led a 1-2-3 Brazilian podium sweep with Tony Kanaan and Gil de Ferran finishing behind him.

He lost his fulltime ride with Penske a few years ago when Penske decided to bring in some younger talent. He drove for Penske’s sports car team until it was disbanded last year after winning the IMSA Sports car championship. He was picked up by Wayne Taylor Racing for the Daytona 24-hour sports car endurance race.  He won it. But Taylor doesn’t run INDYCAR.

So IMSA competitor, Meyer-Shank Racing, which does run at Indianapolis, signed him.  Many people doubted an aging Castroneves driving for a small team such as Meyer-Shank, could contend for a win.  But Helio was fast throughout practices and was among the nine fastest qualifiers, an indication that he couldn’t be dismissed lightly.  He ran near the top all day, led a few laps, and didn’t go away.  And when crunch time came, he knew he could pass Alex Palou on the outside going into the first turn on the next-to-last lap and have his chance for that cherished fourth win.  He won by a half-second.

So that’s our connection to this remarkably talented, persistent, happy, warrior.  And anybody who has watched him climb the fence after each of his four wins at Indianapolis and especially who watched his unrestrained joy on Sunday has no doubts that he deserves the designation.

(photo credits: Bob Priddy, various times and places, and Meyer-Shank Racing Facebook)

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We would be remiss if we didn’t report that NASCAR ran its longest race of the year, 600 miles at Charlotte, its Memorial Weekend tradition, Sunday night.  Kyle Larson started first and finished first. He led 327 of the 400 laps. He averaged 151 miles an hour and he won by eleven seconds.

And that’s about all we can say about that race.

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The Brickyard

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We’re going to talk about a car race today. This is the weekend when we take a break from pithy political observations or discussions of historical events to talk about The Race.

Memorial Day Weekend, the unofficial beginning of Summer for many of us—–

And I’m not going to be where I love to be on Memorial Day Weekend.  COVID and “Cabbages” are keeping me in my living room, in front of a television set, instead of being part of the sounds and sights and spectacle that will be unfolding in Indianapolis.

At the Speedway, the Brickyard, down on the starting grid, headed to my usual observation post as Jim Cornelison sings “Back Home Again in Indiana,” moments before the engines start. For thousands of people NOT from Indiana, that song in that place is magic in itself.

Every year when I go to the Indianapolis 500, I look for a story with a Missouri connection.  I’m holding a couple in reserve—about the only Missouri native to win the Greatest Spectacle in Racing—and about a Texan whose road to the Speedway went through Missouri and one of its legendary race tracks.

Today, we have a story that turns out not to be a story but it’s a story anyway—about why they call the Speedway “The Brickyard.”

The first 500 was run in 1911 on a brick-paved 2 ½ mile track, a huge race track in its day, at a time when the mere thought of going 500 miles in an automobile in a day, let alone in seven hours and change, was beyond the imagination of most people.

But before there was the 500, there was the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the first race track to use that descriptive name.

And before there were cars racing at the track there were hot-air balloons and then motorcycles.

Charles Leerhsen, the author of Blood and Smoke: a True Tale of Mystery, Mayhem, and the Birth of the Indy 500¸ recounts that the first racing surface at the track was “two inches of large gray gravel laid upon the natural red-clay soil…followed by two inches of limestone covered with taroid, followed by two more inches of slightly smaller, taroid-drenched gravel, stopped off with another wo inches of dry white stones…each layer being steamrollered repeatedly to pack it down hard.”   (Taroid was a mixture of tar and oil.)  The result was supposed to be a smooth, dustless racing surface. Several competitors refused to run because of the track’s condition and those that did run didn’t come close to running at record speeds.  The meet was a disaster.

The first automobile races were held in August, 1909. The first practices showed the track surface was hardly solid, that the tires of the speeding (70-80 mph) were picking up rocks and throwing them back at trailing cars, which had no windshields and whose drivers were protected only by glass goggles.  Sometimes, entire chunks of the taroid surface were flung back. Leerhsen recounts that the pavement “eroded into a ditch two and a half feet deep and eight to ten inches across that led to one car to flip end over end twice, throwing the driver and the riding mechanic to their deaths. The next day, a car crashed through the fence, killing two spectators and a riding mechanic.

Clearly, a better racing surface was needed. Concrete was considered although its track record, so to speak, was inconsistent. There were brief thoughts of using creosote-soaked wood, or a new gravel-tar compound.

And this is where we thought we had a great Missouri story to go with the Indianapolis 500.  Leerhsen records Speedway President Carl Fischer was contacted by “a St. Louis man named Will P. Blair…the secretary of the National Paving Brick Manufacturers Association,” who convinced Fisher the track should be paved with bricks, 3.2 million of them.

I started looking for references in St. Louis to Blair or the National Paving Brick Manufacturers Association, but I couldn’t find anything.  Leerhsen later told me at the Speedway he could not recall where he found that information about the St. Louis connection.

Now, many years later, along comes Mark Dill, who has written The Legend of the First Super Speedway; the Battle for the Soul of American Auto Racing.  He identifies William P. Blair as an “Indianapolis-based representative of the manufacturers’ group, drawing the description from a September 8, 1909 article in the Indianapolis Star.

So there went a great possible story about a Missouri connection to the Indianapolis 500.  But I still have a couple left in the bank.

It took a little more than two months to put down all of those 9 ½ pound bricks.  The final brick laid was a gold-plated one, put down by the governor of Indiana. Although the brick was supposed to be guarded, it later disappeared and has never been found. As car speeds increased, the need for a smoother racing surface became obvious, especially on the turns.  Asphalt was added here and there, particularly in 1936 when some of the rougher turns were smoothed out. All of the bricks on the turns went under asphalt a year later and in 1938 all of the track was asphalted except for the middle part of the main straightaway.

That’s the way I first saw the track in 1954.  The entire front stretch was covered in 1961, the fiftieth anniversary of the first 500 (and the year young A. J. Foyt won the race for the first time) except for one three-foot wide stretch of the original bricks that marks the start-finish line. A special gold-plated brick was put in that yard of bricks to honor the fiftieth anniversary of Ray Harroun’s win in the first 500. That brick still exists although not as part of the track.

The yard of bricks remains of the original Brickyard. That yard of bricks has become one of the great ceremonial gathering places in all of racing worldwide.

The winning driver and his crew gather right after the race to “kiss the bricks” as Takuma Sato did when he won his first 500 in 2017. (He got to repeat the ceremony last year with a late-race pass of Scott Dixon and a crash by another competitor that led to a finish under a yellow flag that kept Dixon from a late attempt to regain the lead.)

And as Will Power did when he won his only 500 (so far) three years ago.

One of the bricks is not a brick-brick but one of the bronze bricks honoring a four-time winner of the 500.  The first such brick was put down to honor Foyt. Others have been added to honor the other two four-time winners, Rick Mears and Al Unser, Sr.

The 500 is rich in traditions but “kissing the bricks” did not begin in May.  In 1994, the Speedway decided to allow a second race to be held each year.  It was called the Brickyard 400—the 500-mile race is reserved for open-wheel racing in May.  The winner of the third Brickyard 400, Dale Jarret in 1996, decided with crew chief Todd Parrott to pay tribute to the track’s long history by going out to the start-finish line and kissing the bricks.  Their entire crew joined them, creating a tradition that somebody will continue on Sunday.

A lot of fans can kiss the bricks, too.  The Speedway has extended the yard of bricks into the plaza behind the pagoda and on days leading up to the race and on race day itself, it’s not uncommon to see dozens of fans turn their caps around, put down their coolers, and kneel down for their own ceremony.

This year is the 105th running of the Indianapolis 500 (it was not run in 1918 because of the war, and not run 1942-1945, again because of a war).  The race is never a “given” for anyone. Unlike golf, for example, where a tournament winner gains some exemption privileges, all 33 drivers have to earn their way onto the starting grid—by being faster than all other competitors. Past wins at the Speedway and past INDYCAR championships earn a driver no favors. Last year’s winner, Takuma Sato, starts on the outside of the fifth row Sunday, 15th.  And Will Power, just three years after his victory, had to push his car so hard that it brushed the second turn wall on his final qualifying attempt, starts 32nd, buried in the middle of the last row.

This is the first race in which the average qualifying speed of the 33 drivers is more than 230 mph (230.294), breaking a seven-year old record.  Just saying it in no way conveys what a person sees or the incredible skill and courage that is on display when a car roars past at almost 240 mph—-

—and turns left with the car’s accelerator on the floor. You have to witness it to appreciate it.

It’s hard to describe how fast those cars go.  But here’s an example: By the time the race is about twenty laps along, the cars are strung out pretty well.  If you’re sitting in the front straightaway grandstand behind the pits and you watch the entire field go past you and you follow the last car as it disappears into the first turn, you suddenly realize the leader already is back in front of you. Only forty seconds have passed.  It can be breathtaking.

Unlike last year, this year will have fans in the stands and in the infield—135,000 of them, all masked.  That’s a lot of people but it will seem like only a few.  In 2011, wen the centennial 500 was run, the crowd was so large that about one in every 100 people in the United States was at the track.

The generations are changing in this country’s biggest open-wheel racing series.

Scott Dixon, who turns 41 years old in July, starts first, his four lap (10 mile) qualifying speed only .04 miles an hour faster than Colton Herta, who was eight years old when Dixon won the 500 in 2008.

On the outside of the front row is Rinus Veekay, who won’t be 21 until September. He is the youngest driver ever to start from the front row. There are similar stories back in the pack of young drivers yet to reach their mid-20s, who will be competing with former winners and other mainstays of the race who are in their 40s.  In a few years, names such as Dixon, Castroneves, Kanaan, Hunter-Reay, Power, Carpenter, Montoya, and even Sato will be history, their winning cars cold and static in the Speedway Museum.

And the Brickyard will be the realm of today’s young lions.  And “Back Home Again in Indiana’ will still be magic.

(photo credit:  Bob Priddy)

 

The Constitution and the vaccine: and the danger of selfish people

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Drew Vogel was one of my early reporters at the Missourinet.  He has had a lengthy career as a nursing home administrator in Ohio and since his retirement from a fulltime directorship has held several interim positions.

There’s a special place in my heart for people who work in nursing homes.  And for those who have been working in the industry during this COVID era, well, I’m not sure I can measure the depth of my admiration. Drew has a blog, too, and last week he let off some steam about people who think it is their constitutional right to refuse vaccinations and put others at risk.

Drew has been on the front lines in the fight against disease.  And we all know that THE front lines have been our nursing home.

He doesn’t mince words about vaccinations and the selfish use by some of the Constitution to avoid the responsibility all of us have to each other.  Listen to this good man.

I have just ended an interim (temporary) assignment as administrator at a nursing home Near Dayton, Ohio.  I have done, without bothering to count them up, something like 13 interim assignments the past seven years.

 I joke that interim work is great because you don’t stay around long enough to get fired!

 In reality, I am lucky enough that I don’t need to work a permanent fulltime job.  But I do need to work – especially since my wife passed away last September.  Work is good for my psyche, my emotions – good for my soul. There is a dignity element also – although no one has ever accused me of being very dignified.

 This recent building was one of my best interim assignments.  The staff was great, hard-working, friendly and fun.  I feel like in those 3+ months I made some friends for life.

 The guys were very positive in their approach to long-term care, in spite of, or maybe because of, the fact that they had been through some adversity.

 The facility was COVID-free in the early stages of the pandemic last year until around Thanksgiving. Then there was a major outbreak.

 Ultimately, 75-100 total people – staff and residents – contracted the disease.  By the end of the year about 15 residents had died.  No staff died, but some got very sick.

 When I arrived in January two employees were off sick with the coronavirus, but the outbreak was pretty much under control. Temperature checks, questionnaires and masks were required to get in the door.  Only people with a purpose could come in. Vendors dropped their goods outside – food, oxygen, supplies – and the staff dragged them inside.

 When visitation resumed, visitors were first tested, masked and confined to a room that did not require entry into the building proper.

 In January, the first week I was at the facility, I received my first vaccination shot – Pfizer – and in February I got the follow up injection.  I was happy to receive it.

 However, even though it was free and had been proven to work, not everyone took the vaccine. 

 It is voluntary almost everywhere in America. In my facility some staff and some residents – or their families – said NO!

 The month of March went pretty well.  Then in April, over a couple weeks’ time, a housekeeper, a cook and a therapist tested positive and were sent home to quarantine. 

 Yesterday, my last day, a nursing assistant tested positive – with symptoms.

 The COVID-19 protocol was immediately initiated.  A text was sent to all staff to come in immediately to be tested; all residents were swabbed.

 As of when I left yesterday afternoon, two more cases had been discovered – both residents.  There may be more by now.

 Six cases in April and NONE OF THEM HAD BEEN VACCINATED! 

 No cases in April among people who had been vaccinated – people working side-by-side in exactly the same confines as the people who developed COVID-19.

 As the saying goes, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist ……………..

 I’ve always believed our Constitution is the world’s greatest document – at least the greatest created by a government.  It contains enumerable individual rights.  But those rights cease at the point they infringe upon the rights of others – like the right not to die because of another’s misconceptions, fear and/or puffed-up ego.

 In other words, I am an advocate of MANDATORY vaccines.  Don’t give people a choice.

 Think about it, we need a license to drive a car.  We need a license to cut hair, catch fish, or be a nurse.  Nursing home administrators must be licensed, so do stockbrokers, real estate salesmen and ham radio operators.

 The licensing list in unending.  So why not issue a license to people to go out in public only if they have been vaccinated.

 Radical thinking?  Damned right it is. And I’m aware it will likely never happen.

 But dammit death, like ugly and stupidity, is forever.

 Amen, Drew.  Perhaps one or two self-righteous defenders of their right to privacy at the expense of the right to life of others will read your words and recognize the selfishness of their attitudes.

 

 

Michael Collins

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He was the first person who could see where every human in the universe was.

Michael Collins was the Command Module Pilot on the Apollo XI mission that put the first two men on the moon.  For twenty-one hours he was alone in the CMP, Columbia, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Armstrong “were doing their small stepping and giant leaping” on the Moon, as he put it a year later in Jefferson City.  He had watched them leave in the Eagle landing module headed for the surface.  He could look out a window and see the Earth, the only other place with humans.

No man had ever been in such a lonely position as he was in July, 1969. For part of those 21 hours, he was behind the Moon, completely alone with no communications either with earth or with the two men on the surface.

Michael Collins died yesterday. He was 90.  Only one man remains alive who shared that experience: Ken Mattingly, now 85, who was the Command Module Pilot on Apollo 16.

Only four of the moonwalkers are still with us: Buzz Aldrin, 91; Dave Scott, 88; and Charlie Duke and Harrison Schmidt, both 85.  Six men who flew to the Moon but did not land are still among us—Mattingly, Tom Stafford, 90; Fred Haise, 87; and all three members of the Apollo 8 crew—Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, both 93, and Bill Anders, who is 87.

We remember Michael Collins for the day we sat about twenty feet from him (and the other two astronauts) at the Capitol on the first anniversary of the Moon landing.  NASA had put the Columbia capsule on a big truck and sent it on a tour of state capitols.  It happened to be in Jefferson City that day.  And the radio station I as working for decided to broadcast the events at the capitol.

One of my most cherished possessions is a photograph showing me at the station table with the three astronauts in the foreground. As I recall it, Governor Hearnes’ press secretary, Jerry Bryan, sent the picture to NASA and the three guys signed it.

All three had remarks that day but I thought Collins’ comments were the most meaningful—and prophetic.

“I was born in 1930 and with luck I expect to see out the end of this century.  And when I am thinking about it in 1999, I expect to remember the 1970s as a time when oddly enough, man was hesitant about pushing his frontiers back. And in 1999 we just simply won’t be able to understand that fact because by then it will have become clearly apparent that man does in fact have the capability to step out and explore his solar system and that is something we definitely should do.”

When Collins made those remarks, Apollo XII already had successfully landed on the moon the previous November. But Apollo XIII had become the program’s most famous failure in April.  The Apollo program was in suspension while the investigation of that flight went on and there would not be another Moon landing until January of ’71, with Apollo XIV.

More ominous, however, had been the announcement in January of 1970 that the twentieth mission had been cancelled. There already had been a decline in public interest in the program, despite the drama of XIII, by the time Michael Collins spoke in Jefferson City.  “Been there, done that,” in the short attention span public mind.

About two months after the astronauts were in Jefferson City, NASA cancelled flights 15-19 and then restructured the crews for what would become the last three flights to the Moon—numbers 15-17.

Those events give a special context to what Collins said on that hot July day at the capitol.

None of the Apollo XI crew ever flew in space again.  NASA wanted Collins to stay in the program but he had decided Apollo XI would be his second, and last, trip to space (he and John Young had flown Gemini 10, practicing maneuvers necessary for a Moon landing). But he left a few months later, with no regrets. He wrote in his first book, Carrying the Fire, “I know that I would be a liar or a fool if I said that I have the best of the three Apollo 11 seats, but I can say with truth and equanimity that I am perfectly satisfied with the one I have. This venture has been structured for three men, and I consider my third to be as necessary as either of the other two.”

He was the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs for a while but found “long hours…flying a great mahogany desk” was not a fit.  About a year later he became the third director of the National Air and Space Museum. He set a goal of having a building on the National Mall by the time of the national bicentennial, 1976.  The ribbon was cut by President Ford for the building on July 1, 1976.  A museum statement issued upon his death said, “That building and the museum it houses stand as a lasting legacy” to “an astronaut and statesman.”

His support for pushing the frontiers back, as he put it in Jefferson City in 1970 never waivered.  On the tenth anniversary of the first landing, he said, “It’s human nature to stretch, to go, to see, to understand. Exploration is not a choice really—it’s an imperative.”

In these times when we our vision is so often by terrestrial concerns and often-petty bickering about them, we need not forget his belief that within us is the need “to stretch, to go, to see, to understand.”

Perhaps if we look less at one another with suspicion and instead see one another as having those innate desires to achieve, we might find light.

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