November 22, 1963

Nov17

“The President has been shot!” exclaimed a workman poking his head into the room where I was interviewing a local clergyman. I don’t remember how either of us responded, though I might have blurted out “Oh, my God!” despite the presence of a man of the cloth. There were no details. I needed to get to a radio quickly, but to my dismay the clergyman picked up the thread of our conversation and continued with whatever it was he wanted to impart to me and ultimately to our readers. I tried to hurry it along but I was not self-assured enough to suggest we postpone this all for another day. I sat there jiggling my feet and scribbling notes until I was finally able to flee to my car. The radio told me the President was dead.

For us in northern California, there followed a weekend of mind-numbing television, watching the same footage over and over again until that Sunday morning when we watched, live in real time, the assassin himself gunned down in the police station.

I was women’s editor of a small daily newspaper, The Roseville Press-Tribune. As such, I wrote a daily column – along with everything else in my one to two-page section. On the Tuesday following the assassination, the paper ran my column. Today, the newsprint clipping is yellowed and stained from being pasted in a binder, but here’s what I wrote.

“For those of us ordinary everyday Americans, for those of us who do not live near Dallas, Tex. or Washington, D.C., those of us who spent the past weekend glued to our television sets, the momentous, horrifying, unreal events that transpired will never be forgotten. The events themselves will be transcribed in history books. But those of us who watched this history taking place will probably remember the events through a haze of varying impressions.

“There was the initial shock, the disbelief, and then the horror that came with acceptance that the truth was indeed true. As the realization sank in, there came sadness. No matter how you felt politically, it could be only monumentally sad to see the film tapes from the networks’ files that showed a smiling, confident, alive President speaking in past interviews and to know this man no longer smiled, no longer spoke, no longer lived.

“There were the impressions we had as we looked at the picture – destined to appear in future history books – of the oath of office being administered to a new President by a no longer obscure woman judge in the cabin of a plane. The look of the man who had wanted once to be President – but not this way. The look of his wife standing beside him. And on the other side, the look of a widow – a dazed, heart-rending look. As women, we tried to imagine her pain, and of course we never could fully duplicate it. We couldn’t because we are not the wife of a President assassinated in a senseless, misguided act. We didn’t hear the shots ring out or hold the dying form of the man they hit. We did not have to explain to two uncomprehending children that a man had killed their daddy.

“But we could try to feel her pain because we knew the truth was true. The President had been assassinated, and through the medium of modern communications we watched and shared a widow’s grief. And we watched, before our eyes, another killing, equally senseless and insane. We spent the weekend by our television sets and wondered, ‘What will happen next?’ It was a weekend filled with impressions. There was the admiration of a woman who displayed amazing strength. She held her children’s hands, and the camera swung in close so we could see again the dazed, sorrowful look of the woman and the quizzical, curious look of the children.

“There were the impressions as we watched the unending line of mourners file past a flag-draped coffin. “It is the Face of America,” said the television commentator, and you thought how right he was. It was the sorrowing Face of America which was all faces. It was light faces and dark faces, thin faces and full faces. It was faces of rich people, poor people, middle-income people. It was all people. It was our people. It was us.

“’How could this thing have happened?’ we wondered. We wondered because we are ordinary, everyday Americans. We are not assassins. We are people who know that in this country, if we do not like the policies of the present administration we are free to work and vote for candidates with other policies. And while the assassination of the President sickened us and made us seethe with anger, we are people who know that we cannot retaliate by reaching out and killing back, killing the man we think was responsible for the President’s assassination.

“We are ordinary, everyday Americans, and we’ll mourn a long time. Not only for a President who died but for our country and ourselves.”

When I wrote that I thought the assassination of a President would be the most horrific public event I would witness in my lifetime. Little could I imagine what others there were to come.

(Photo – John F. Kennedy Presidential Museum and Library, Boston)

Attacking Paul Bunion

Nov9

My father used to tell me – probably at the same time he was saying “Puns are the lowest form of humor” – that trying to be funny by using incorrect spelling or punctuation will just make people think you don’t know better. So at the start, I do know how to spell Paul Bunyan. This piece is about bunions – mine – one of which is now gone.

Many people have bunions, men as well as women. They’re those knobby bones on the inside of the foot just below the big toe. They are hereditary, and not, as I used to think, a result of my being pigeon-toed as a child or having engaged in five years of ballet training. Within my own family, a daughter who was not pigeon-toed but danced on her toes well into her late twenties, has bunions. But another daughter, likewise not pigeon-toed, rebelled early on and dropped out of ballet before ever getting on her toes. She, too, has bunions.

According to the Mayo Clinic, bunions form when the big toe pushes up against the other toes, forcing the big toe joint in the opposite direction, away from the normal profile of the foot. “Over time,” they say, “the abnormal position enlarges your big toe joint, further crowding your other toes and causing pain.” In addition to heredity, they also blame shoes that are too tight. And I’d add, how about pointed-toe spike heels?

My worst time with bunions was as a high school cheerleader during basketball season when bouncing down on the gym floor caused excruciating pain. In those days when no one’s parents ever picked up kids at school, I remember practically crawling home in agony after a game. It was evidence enough to convince my father to take me to a foot doctor. All I remember of the visit was that there were two procedures available: One required the patient being off her feet for six weeks, another requiring six months. Never in my life have I had such a window. And so I’d lived with my bunions, just buying wider and wider shoes.

But now my feet presented another swell development, a “hammer toe” next to the big toe that arched itself up into a 90-degree angle that rubbed against any shoe I wore, causing calluses and more pain. So time for surgery. If you live long enough, you get to take advantage of medical advances, such as bunionectomies done as outpatient surgery with the patient walking out in a special boot which she wears night and day until the bones have healed. The surgeon says four to six weeks. I’m pushing for less than four.

When I started this blog, I swore I would not be writing things like “what I had for lunch today.” This piece comes pretty close to that. Please excuse.

Hurry It Up Down There, Will You?

Nov1

Four pigeons were lined up on a rooftop, three looking down, one on the far end pacing in circles. Several were overall charcoal gray in color so I had to look closely to determine that they were indeed pigeons; their companions’ coloring was more pigeon-like, pearl gray and white. What were they waiting for? Oh, there – a water fountain, two-tiered in the front yard of a house on the hill where the dog and I walked. The fountain water was flowing from the upper level to the lower one and back again. Two or three pigeons were splashing in the water, drinking, bathing or whatever. The ones on the roof were waiting their turn. And the pacing one, what was he waiting for? I could only guess. But perhaps that’s why they put him at the end of the line. I was reminded of that less-than-classy sign some people put near their swimming pools: “We don’t swim in your toilet. Please don’t pee in our pool.” I laughed at the thought and walked on.

Ky-ote? Ky-o-tee? Whichever, They’re Here

Oct22

The coyotes are out in force just now in our corner of northeast Los Angeles. A neighbor saw five or six walk brazenly down his street in broad daylight before disappearing down into the canyon below his house. The other evening, another neighbor a few doors away banged loudly on a saucepan while my daughter’s two terriers were barking up a storm. I thought she was complaining about the barking and rushed them inside. Turns out she was trying to discourage several coyotes from approaching any farther up the canyon onto her property. Someone else reported a coyote coming up on her deck and peering through the sliding glass door at her. She shouted and banged on the window until it left. So the pre-dawn cacophony we’d attributed to poorly restrained neighborhood dogs must have been a pack of coyotes.

To a couple of transplanted Easterners, it’s all pretty creepy. I’ve seen evidence of the animals ever since moving here eight years ago – mostly signs on trees for missing cats – but this is the first year I’ve actually encountered any. One morning as I walked my fortunately larger-than-a-coyote dog we stopped in our tracks and stared at a creature. A dog? A coyote? I spoke to a man stopped in his car. “Excuse me,” I said. “I moved here from the East. That is a coyote, isn’t it?” He assured me it was and suggested I change my intended route. The creature and my dog seemed equally curious about one another, but I took the man’s suggestion. Another evening we encountered a smaller coyote and again I hesitated to identify it. A neighborhood dog walker assured me it was a coyote. “A young one,” she said.”He hangs around this corner a lot. He’s probably been banished from the pack for some reason.” “Aww,” I said, “poor thing.” “Don’t even think of befriending him,” she said. Los Angeles County has laws prohibiting feeding coyotes and certain other wild animals, and we’re cautioned against leaving pet food and water outside at night.

As coyotes become increasingly comfortable with us, they become bolder – and more dangerous. Small dogs, cats and even young children become prey. And recently, a man in Colorado walking to work in the early morning was set upon by three coyotes who bit and scratched him for about two minutes until he managed to fight them off with his flashlight. Wildlife experts advise you try to make yourself as big as possible when encountering a coyote: Big shouts, big claps, big arm waves, bright lights. And don’t turn and run; rather, back away slowly.

I thought it might be interesting to add coyote sounds to this post so I went to soundboard.com and clicked on the first entry. Three dogs and one husband leaped up from their naps and into full alert mode. “What was that??” “Never mind; it was just me,” I said. “Go back to sleep.” I’ll let you find coyote sounds on your own.

This Leg

Oct21

This leg was once able to swing effortlessly up on a ballet barre. Or over my head while I balanced on the other one. Along with its partner, this leg could clear the back, not just the seat, of a chair set in the middle of the ballet studio for giant leaps, a somewhat useless skill for a female dancer. And when my father in his increasing impoverishment was quick to accept my half-hearted offer to quit ballet, I went on to other pursuits. Then this leg and its twin were able to reach over my curved back so the feet could touch the back of my head during a cheerleading jump. It could do the splits. And in college, this leg danced with a tall Norwegian man whose skill, and mine, caused others to step back, relinquish the dance floor and watch in admiration.

This leg walked in grade school and high school and college graduation ceremonies and into job interviews, and when I began working on newspapers, it took me out on assignments and then rested under the desk while I wrote my stories. Once, when I’d climbed to the roof of an old mansion designed as a castle, the rest of me froze at the top and had to be coaxed down by the photographer accompanying me. He held onto my legs and guided my feet down the iron bars imbedded into the castle walls.

This leg supported feet in pointed-toe shoes with spike heels whose metal core caused crescent-shaped indentations in people’s linoleum floors so that hosts began requesting women leave their shoes at the door.

This leg walked down an aisle and carried babies. It helped children learn to walk and ride bicycles and drive a stick shift. It walked alongside a long succession of big dogs on walks up and down hills, and it climbed innumerable ladders in many rooms of many houses that we owned so I could paint many walls. This leg dug holes for planting plants in many gardens, and followed behind wheelbarrows hauling gravel for paths and topsoil. We were hard workers, this leg and I.

And now, in my eighth decade, this leg is rebelling. When I try to get it to accept its share of my weight, it registers its agony. “Maybe arthritis,” the doctor says. One of the forms he has me fill out contains lists of activities and asks if I do them: vacuuming? Of course I vacuum. Why doesn’t it also ask rug shampooing? Or window washing? Or, for that matter, sightseeing or trawling through art museums? How about tromping around the ruins of Rome and Pompeii.? This leg and I have been through a lot.

Now, I struggle with crutches and curse my awkwardness.

The newspaper had a story about an 80-year-old woman who slipped on the ice in her horse corral, lashed her legs together to stabilize the hip that broke in three places and dragged herself through ice and mud the 40 yards back to her house. It took her four hours, and once she got inside the first call she made, before 911, was to her daughter 30 miles away, telling her she needed to come to feed the horses.

I want to be that woman. I want to be like all those impressive old women I read about, women in their 80s and 90s who keep going in spite of the accumulating years. Women who stare down old age and dare it to get in the way of what they want to accomplish. Who refuse to accept the stereotypes of old age. Who would not own a rocking chair if you paid them…

Damn! When will that pain pill start to kick in?

I’ll Tell You a Story if You’re Old Enough

Oct14

There are reasons why older people ought to hang out with one another. I mean aside from when your eyebrows need tweezing and there’s a long gray hair growing out of your chin. Your older friends’ eyesight is not any better than yours so they can’t see those things either.

Furthermore, you don’t have to feign interest in such things as blogging and tweeting and the existence of Facebook. And let’s not even go there when it comes to popular music and that truly strange art form known as rap. You can’t understand any of the words and have a feeling that it’s probably better that way.

More important, though, is the matter of historical context. Increasingly, I am noticing that I draw blanks from younger people at certain points in the stories I have been telling for years. Like the time I mentioned that my husband had spent his career at the former Bell System. The young person to whom I imparted that information said, “What’s that?” “That,” for any young person reading this, was the nationwide telephone system whose efficiency was admired around the world and whose breakup in 1984 mystified the company’s counterparts overseas. “If it’s the best telecommunications system on earth, why on earth change it?” was the headline on an ad at the time in which the company tried to explain itself. My husband, who had a hand in creating that ad, said the company caved because an antitrust suit was threatening to drag on for years. And AT&T wanted to be able to compete in the marketplace that was changing the telephone business. Things such as those that now enable blogging and tweeting and the like.

Recently, when I told some younger people that I had grown up in New Jersey, one asked why I did not talk like the Sopranos. Well, for one thing, most people in New Jersey do not talk like the Sopranos. But the question offered an opportunity for me to tell the story of the remedial speech course I was encouraged to take in college.

I enrolled at the University of Missouri where my Nebraska-born father was happy to send me, perhaps in the hope that I would lose some of my New Jersey accent and also because it was cheaper even for an out-of-stater than the Ivy League. At the time, back then in the Ice Age, all freshmen were required to take a speech test. As I recall, it consisted of standing in front of a group and speaking a little about where you were from and what brought you to the university. As I’ve told the story, a fellow before me was wearing bib overalls. That’s probably an embellishment but it enabled me to add, in an aside, that in those pre-hippie days I had never seen a person wearing bib overalls. He related in what I considered a “country” accent that he was from a small town in Missouri and had come to major in agriculture.

I smiled to myself as he spoke. My New Jersey home was just across the river from New York City, a place we New Jerseyans began making our way to as soon as we looked old enough to get away with lying about our age. The drinking age then in New York was eighteen, unlike New Jersey’s twenty-one. So I considered myself the ultimate sophisticate. Of course I would breeze past this silly test, but that farmer fellow needed help.

So yes, he passed and I failed. The speech professors trolling for students asked me to stay behind. “We think you would benefit from our course,” one said. I exploded. “This is so unfair! Just because I’m from a different part of the country.”

“Well,” the other professor said, “didn’t you come here for an education?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“When you leave here, don’t you want to sound like an educated person?”

“Yeah,” I said again. “What do I sound like now?”

“You sound like a gun moll.”

Now when I tell this story, I get blank stares at the end from younger people, which is disconcerting since it makes the punch line fall flat. I guess you had to grow up reading Dick Tracy in the comics to know that a gun moll is a gangster’s girlfriend.

I did take the course and learned to watch the pronunciation of certain vowels. I also spent four years in Missouri and then moved back and forth across country several times. Once in San Francisco I was being considered for a job in television because, the interviewer said, I had no noticeable regional accent. I chuckled to myself at that one.

Younger people probably aren’t aware that consumer interest – car loans, credit cards, department store accounts and such – once was tax deductible on a person’s income tax. A daughter who just learned this was shocked. “What was the rationale for that?” Probably a ploy, I said, to get us all hooked on buying on credit. And look where that got us.

So another of my stories to retire. Back in our younger days, we filled out our own income tax returns, and sometimes we were audited. For one of those audits, my husband gathered up all the statements we had accrued in the year and took them in to an IRS office to present to the auditor. “Where does it show the interest?” she asked. “I’ve never had a credit account.” Oooh boy, my husband thought, we are in trouble here. And we were – until we settled with them.

I have been thinking lately that I need to retire these old stories and find new things to talk about. But I tell you, I refuse to do it in a tweet.

Thank you, Mr. President

Oct11

Dear President Obama:

I’m writing to thank you for nominating Janet Yellen as chairman of the Federal Reserve. I was worried before when it looked like you would nominate that other guy. You may have seen my name on a petition or two about that. But you came through and so I will not have to relegate your cardboard effigy to the study closet. It will continue to stand by my desk as it has since December 2008 when my daughter sneaked into our house and set it up by the Christmas tree. After the holidays, we moved it down to the study. During the dopy “birther” business, Ed hung a copy of your official birth certificate around your neck.

Alison received the life-sized cardboard cutout as a gag gift at an office holiday party, one in which people are allowed to switch presents with other people if they wish. But everyone knew this gift was earmarked for Alison’s mother and off limits. I must admit there have been times during the past five years when I have considered moving it to the closet, but I figured an awful lot of the problems you were dealing with were not of your making. Honestly, I don’t know how you can remain so calm in the face of the nonsense. Perhaps, in the privacy of the residence or on vacation in Hawaii you are able to scream and curse and throw crockery about. I know I would.

But I remain, as I assume you do, hopeful. About a lot of things (health care reform, ending wars, a return to civility, etc.) but most of all right now an end to the Never-ending Great Recession. Yes, I know the experts say it ended some years ago. But if that’s so, why do we still have so many people unemployed and under-employed and why has the gap between the rich and poor become a chasm? And everyone’s in a bad mood. I hope that new leadership will help give the Fed a more pro-active role in developing policies to alleviate some of that.

Now let’s just hope the crazies don’t derail the confirmation.

Sincerely,

Patricia Nieder

Remembering Bill Eppridge

Oct10

Bill Eppridge died, and the obituaries were justifiably effusive in praise of his photojournalism artistry. Our little group that hung around Max’s, the bar and grill across from Missouri’s J-School, always knew he was destined for greatness. Didn’t he win first prize in a National Press Photographers Association competition while still in school, as well as being named College Photographer of the Year two years running? (We always wondered what he did with two sets of encyclopedias.) The rest of us sat drinking beer and eating Max’s delicious and economically priced hamburgers while reassuring ourselves that we were never going to “quote, prostitute our talent,” but Bill would be roaming the room, the always–present camera in hand on the chance a promising picture presented itself.

After college he was an intern at Life magazine and then went to work for National Geographic until returning to Life where he remained until that magazine’s demise. He also worked for Time and Sports Illustrated. He was at Life when he volunteered to cover Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968. Kennedy won the California primary and had just delivered his acceptance speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when he was shot by a lone assassin in the hotel kitchen. Bill’s haunting photo of the senator sprawled on the floor, his head cradled by a distraught busboy, became an iconic image, one of many in that violent chapter in our nation’s history. The obituaries say the death of Bobby Kennedy, whom Bill had grown close to, marked the rest of the photographer’s life. He covered other political campaigns, including part of George McGovern’s presidential run, but it was never the same.

Bill’s book, A Time It Was – Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties is on display in our home library and his photo of the last issue of The New York Herald Tribune coming off the press is part of a journalism-themed coffee table I decoupaged many years ago. We look at it every day as we drink our morning coffee and read two newspapers. Our journalist daughter has dibs on the table when we die, but I wonder if she and her friends will recognize some of the images: the pressmen in their paper hats, the hands of a page makeup guy arranging metal type, the linotype and teletype machines, and of course the newsroom with rows of desks and typewriters. That was a time as well.

In an impetuous move that became symptomatic of much of our life together, Ed and I decided to marry two months before my graduation. Bill and another old J-School friend Mort Engleberg took pictures. You know how wedding photographers frequently take pictures of the bride and groom waving from inside the car? Bill’s photo was shot from beside the car to show all our friends waving to us. Brilliant, and much more meaningful.

We admired Bill’s career from a distance, losing touch with him and the others from Max’s. A few years ago we read of the death of an especially revered editor at The New Yorker and realized it must have been our old friend Pat Crowe. For thirty years we lived across the river, fourteen miles from Manhattan, and didn’t know he was there. That’s very sad. My daughter says that thanks to Facebook her generation will not lose track of friends from college and other times in their lives, and I suppose she’s right. At this point in my life I will have to wait for obituaries and the nostalgic reverie they engender.

[Wedding photos, Herald-Tribune photo: Bill Eppridge]

Strawberry Dreams

Oct9

There’s something insidious about the Internet. Well, actually, there’s a lot insidious from the threat of identity theft on down. But what I have in mind this time is the way ads stalk you and pop up at the most inconvenient times.

An example: You’ve checked a site that sells fancy dipped strawberries, and in fact have returned several times to the site trying to decide just which fancy dipped strawberries to send as a gift. Then as the never-ending Great Recession continues, you decide to check a site for bankruptcy lawyers, just in case it comes to that. Up pops an ad for fancy dipped strawberries. It is a morality lesson right before your eyes. If you hadn’t spent a lifetime being tempted by such things as fancy dipped strawberries, you would not be possibly in the market for a bankruptcy lawyer.

The morality lesson continues when you switch from looking for a lawyer to checking your email where you find the United Farm Workers urging your support for strawberry workers in California. The workers protested unsafe working conditions and won, the UFW says, but now are being discouraged from unionizing to assure further protection. And I just contributed to their woes by buying those fancy dipped strawberries. So we can add guilt to my sin of avarice.

My daughter explained how those pop-up ads work but my short term memory loss that comes with old age deleted the information almost immediately. Something about cookies, I think, and there are good cookies and bad cookies, unlike in real life where cookies are both good and bad – good tasting but bad for the waistline. But probably very nice with fancy dipped strawberries.

We seniors ̶ isn’t that a wonderful term? makes you feel like you’re back in high school ̶ apparently suffer short term memory loss because we don’t get enough sleep. Or the right kind of sleep, the kind that helps store short term memory. A friend sent me a test (on the Internet of course) in which you look at two groups of faces and then report whether you remember ever seeing those faces before and, the hard part, where you’ve seen them. I scored 100 percent on the first part and exactly at the average mark (for old people) on the second. That explains why here in Los Angeles I keep seeing people who look vaguely familiar but can’t tell where I’ve seen them. They could be actors I’ve seen in movies or on TV – or someone from the supermarket.

The people who devised the faces test say I could improve my short term memory by sleeping more soundly. And that, I’ll bet, would come by not thinking about the Great Recession With No End. Or strawberries.

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