In the grand plan, there was to be no uniform comment this season. However, uniforms have been so uniformly disgusting this football fall, that good taste requires some comment. This became glaringly apparent when Notre Dame, whose uniforms are about as traditional as they get, came out against Boston College in uniforms variously described as the GEICO creature, or in the words of Byron Calhoun, who notices trivia, like a horde of Peter Pans. While intended as a novelty getup to enliven the game between the only two Catholic schools in big time football, they caused even some Oregon fans to suffer gastric distress. Notre Dame has succumbed to this trend of departing from tradition a few times in recent years, which is a good reason to fire the coach and president of the school. Not to mention, Notre Dame barely won a game in which it was a solid favorite.
Before that, of course, Notre Dame had worn the same outfits almost since the time football players started using helmets. People probably thought they were too cheap to get new outfits. Pictures of Johnny Lujack in the 1940s show a uniform almost identical to what Tim Brown wore 40 years later and what Will Fuller wears today—gleaming gold helmets and pants with either navy blue jerseys at home or white on the road, with a minimum of decoration anywhere to be seen. And, once in awhile (usually to provide inspiration for big games) they pull out green jerseys. But that is part of tradition and quite acceptable.
During the last 70 years there have been occasional insults to the tradition, and each time God punished the Irish for their sacrilege. Back in the late 1950s, they abandoned the gold helmets for unpainted and very old-fashioned looking leather helmets. The players responded with some of the worst seasons in Irish history, including a 2-8 record in 1960. The only other major deviation from its legendary style was when the high school coach, Gerry Faust, changed the dark blue to a Blessed Mother blue, and was rewarded with four mediocre years, crowned by a 58-7 loss to Miami in 1985.
Notre Dame’s recent putrid performance broke the camel’s back, but it was hardly the worst uniform offense of the season. Closer to home, UM has set its program back light years by changing looks every other game so that the players don’t even recognize their own teammates in clutch situations, frequently passing the ball to the other team or tackling cheerleaders. Some of the looks have been just awful, but the worst was going to dark helmets on dark uniforms. The color was schwartzgrun—a black-green—probably with paint left over from the Luftwaffe, which used the same shade on Messerschmitts. It totally negated the effect of one of the most recognizable logos in sports—the green and orange “U,” which adorned their white helmets since the glory days of Howard Schnellenberger and Jim Kelly. The “U” stands out boldly against white, but virtually disappears on a dark background. Miami’s success disappeared with it.
Much as we admired coach Al Golden and hated to see him go, he frankly sealed his fate by allowing his team to dress like buffoons. It is hard to believe a man who came out of the Penn State program, with such unaffected and recognizable uniforms, right up there with Notre Dame, Alabama, Michigan and Texas, could have let the hot weather here affect his judgment.
Other local disgraces: FAU keeps switching its look. We saw them in dark blue helmets, then against Florida last week they came out in all white. Not bad, except there is no sense of the past, of tradition. They almost beat Florida, but only because Florida wore those stupid blue pants. You will never be accepted in modern society until you decide who you are, and what you look like. FAU appears hopeless.
Finally, the pros. This one is subtle. The Dolphins changed their color, ever so gently, but ever so stupidly. Back in the glory days they wore aqua—sort of a feminine color, but don’t mention that to Larry Csonka. The Dolphins made that shade formidable with the great, undefeated team and two Super Bowl wins. Who would ever change the look of success? Well, some fool at the Dolphins did, when the aqua changed to a lighter, almost flowery blue—same mistake Notre Dame made years before. And look at the result: coach fired, for a uniform change that has no rational explanation, and will haunt the team until Garo rises from the grave.
Do uniforms count? We are not alone. When Howard Schnellenberger took FAU from a startup to national recognition in record time, we chatted one day about the uniforms. We told him we liked them.
Thanks, I designed them, he said. It was about the time Miami, his former team, began screwing up its championship look—with uniforms that featured Arabian Nights slashes. We asked what he thought about the new UM look.
It’s awful, he said. And that said it all.
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Vanity Fair has a nice piece on the efforts being made by Miami Beach to avoid going under water. Unlike some people in Florida, the Beach’s mayor, Philip Levine, believes in climate change, and is doing something about it. Read the whole story, but the essence is that he is working with planners to attempt to deal with the inevitable rise of sea levels. South Florida is not Holland, where dikes can hold out water.
Our porous soil isn’t made for that. And even if the sea could be held back, a huge challenge given our storm-prone location, the water will literally rise from the earth to flood large areas. Some scientists, notably Harold Wanless, chairman of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami, thinks it is already too late, that even with a best case scenario, large sections of South Florida will be inundated before this century is out. Vanity Fair quotes Wanless: “[The developers are] building like there’s no tomorrow—and they’re right!”
Others are not as pessimistic, and the Vanity Fair piece names them. They trust that science will ultimately prevail in reversing the warming trend, if indeed it is caused by human activity. One way or the other, Mayor Levine is addressing the problem (he ran for election on the platform) and the platform is something of a platform itself—literally planning to raise the level of Miami Beach. One idea is putting the whole famous city on stilts. Sound fantastic? It is, but at least the mayor is involving experts who are climate change optimists to test the limits of technological imagination in attempting to deal with the problem.
The problem, alas, is not just Miami Beach. In this case no city built by man is an island, able to obstruct the forces of nature alone. To raise Miami Beach one needs to raise access roads to it, and where do those roads lead but to flooded areas, unless those areas also are being raised? We must not underestimate the power of human enterprise. Consider that historians observe that George Washington could move around no faster than Julius Caesar, until the industrial revolution changed everything and relegated horses to the entertainment business.
Still, there are obvious limits to man’s ability to harness nature. We still haven’t figured out a way to turn hurricanes away. They only made one Moses. And it seems that a South Florida problem requires a South Florida solution, and a South Florida solution requires that the leaders of state take an interest. So far, we see little interest from a governor who is obsessed with growth and doesn’t like to hear the words climate change. Instead, he encourages businesses to move to the state and pave over more land that within decades may be under water, if not all the time, often enough to make living and working there unrealistic.
The ideas proposed to slow global warming may not work. And some economists argue the cost of making them work is too high. But even the less expensive and obvious ideas are meeting resistance. Florida, with its sunshine, should be a leader in solar energy, which could cut the fossil fuel emissions drastically if cars and homes were powered by solar-produced electricity.
And yet, the Scott Administration, which is increasingly viewed as for sale to the highest contributors, is getting in the way of this common sense initiative. Attorney General Pam Bondi has joined lawsuits, trying to block the development of solar power companies in the state, and reduce emissions from the major power companies in Florida. It is no coincidence that the power companies, who have the most to lose if solar power achieves its potential, are major contributors to the Republican leadership in Tallahassee.
Without the realization that we are all in the same boat as the oceans rise, Miami Beach’s Mayor Levine is up a creek with a very small paddle.
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Veterans Day was designed to give this great nation something to divert the masses before we had air conditioning, the Internet and Republican primary debates. Although it grew out of World War I, Veterans Day was retrofitted to include other great wars, such as the Civil War. All over the country, we honor the brave leaders who have statues of themselves on horseback.
Those statues have individuality, depending on the pose of the horse. Exactly what it meant escapes us after all these years, but it had something to do with a horse's hoof being raised if the general had been killed or wounded. If the horse were rearing, it meant the general got thrown from his mount more than once. If the horse were upside down with the general underneath, it meant either the sculptor was drunk or the general had been sacked.
The idea of monuments to remember our veterans really caught on. At Gettysburg today there are more monuments than there were soldiers in the battle. And, we think it was George Will who observed that some visitors to that national park are overheard saying the battle could not have been that bad—there are no bullet holes on the monuments. And the monuments keep coming. The Vietnam Memorial, a classic of its kind, with its stark-black wall, now has replicas, which move around the nation.
We always thought the Iwo Jima flag-raising statue in Arlington, Virginia was the appropriate monument for World War II. But it seems that such a big war deserves more. We have read that individual battles have crusaders for their own memorials. Somebody wants a monument to the Battle of the Bulge, obviously in Washington, although the battle occurred in the snows of Belgium.
This abundance of memorials is a sensitive matter to the silent majority of us who are veterans of no wars. We don't have exact figures, but almost surely for every man or woman who actually stood in harms way, there are probably 10 who wore the uniform and did nothing. No campaign ribbons decorate our uniforms. It hurts when we see some of these old guys whose entire body seems to be made up of ribbons and medals. They look like walking Christmas trees.
Over the years, there is a special kind of stress that builds up. Sometimes at church they ask veterans to stand, even come up on the altar for a special blessing. They include everybody who was ever in the service, which is a lot of people. Those who were in battles, or meaningful military situations, deserve such recognition. But as our friend W.C. says, "I'm embarrassed to stand up. I never did anything."
We wonder if it would help if some politicians with nothing to do in Washington took up the cause of the Veterans of No Wars. Why not have an impressive memorial to the millions of us who went through sometimes rigorous training, studying to be forward artillery observers, jumping out of airplanes and such, and then were sent to the reserves for eight years, where, with minor exceptions, we did nothing.
Thus we propose a memorial featuring one unit to represent all those who underserved our great nation. How about a lifesize statue, or series of statues, for the 90 or so men of the legendary 446th Civil Affairs Company, Upland, Pennsylvania, Colonel (later general) Clarence D. Bell, commanding?
To be fair, this great outfit had members who had been in the Korean War and were in the reserves to get in 20 years for retirement benefits. But most of us had slipped between wars, too young for Korea, and out of uniform by the time Vietnam heated up. Commissioned through ROTC, we got six months active duty, which was basically all training, and eight years in the reserves.
The case of the 446th is especially poignant. In a war we would have been military government (although most of us had trained for fighting roles), which meant we would come in when the shooting was over and try to put towns and countries back together. As such, we were loaded with brass; about half of us were officers, and we would actually have been pretty good at our jobs if ever called upon. Our commander was a state senator, who built his political career on getting potholes filled during northern winters. We had doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, service station owners, a Mercedes Benz dealer, an industrial relations specialist, several law enforcement types, academics and two non-war correspondents.
We were, in short, one of the finest groups of B.S. artists our great nation has produced. We were perfect for running devastated countries. Among the skills we learned was one from a labor negotiator, who taught us that when under pressure, when people were screaming for you to do something—the best stall was to light a pipe.
“There is something about a man lighting a pipe that defies interruption,” explained Captain Piatt. “You can easily waste five minutes in that process, and if you can’t think of anything to say in that time, you don’t deserve to hold your job.”
Major Gleason was a college English professor who warned us with a cackle that any man found sleeping in the barracks during work hours would be “defenestrated.” From the Latin “fenestra,” meaning “window,” and “de,” meaning “out of”—thrown out of a window.
Our nominal job was public welfare officer—whatever that meant, but in reality we handled public relations—writing newspaper columns so that the public knew what great work we weren’t doing to protect the nation. From summer camp we wrote such classics as, “The General’s Martini,” “The Night We Boiled The Major,” “The Magpie At The 202 Club” and other pieces describing our daily activities. One day, we were taking a refresher course, shooting machine guns on a range, when a deer danced across our target area. A dozen machine guns opened up trying to hit the creature, which escaped unscathed. “Can’t Anybody Here Hit That Buck?” caught the drama of the moment.
We were dedicated patriots; nobody ever quit the 446th. Alas, the government quit us. At the height of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam (a time when young men were fleeing to Canada to avoid service), we were thrown out of the army. Our demise had been rumored for several years. Desperate efforts were made to justify our existence. At one point we were actually taught some Arabic, on the absurd premise that American forces would ever be active in the Middle East.
You can imagine the hurt. Not only did we do nothing, but also we were considered so useless that in time of war, the government sent us hiking. We have largely been forgotten, and now the boys are dying off. There ought to be something to remember us, like 90 life-sized statues in the National Mall, each in character. Captain Piatt would be the one lighting a pipe; we would be framed by a window. Horses are optional.
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Up and down the tracks you see the future—piles of ballast waiting to be spread for new rails; a clean new track appearing where none existed a week before; a street crossing closed for a weekend and reopened with a second track where before only one existed; and, 40 miles apart, whole streets being closed as the foundations for modern stations in West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale are being sunk. All Aboard Florida is underway.
Perhaps it is the inevitability of this new passenger train that has caused a decline in the noisy objections, which have been heard since it was announced several years ago. It was not so bad in the Miami Herald and Sun-Sentinel, where there was only an occasional letter opposing the new train. But Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast were different. The Palm Beach Post for months seemed to carry at least one letter a day attacking Florida East Coast Industries new high-speed passenger train from Miami to Orlando.
The project has been opposed on various grounds. Some, such as the interference with marine traffic, are valid. Others are not well founded. Some of the objectors are influential people, lawmakers and such, reacting to the sentiment of their constituents. We presume local talk radio was also filled with such rants.
It seems to have slowed recently. Maybe it’s because with construction visibly underway, opponents have given up. Or, more likely, it has begun to sink in that this train may not be the end of the world for the communities through which it will pass. If so, we can thank some thoughtful comments from business leaders who have stressed the long-range benefits of the train. What some people forecast as disaster may turn out to be the best thing for South Florida since, well, since Henry Flagler brought his railroad through almost 125 years ago.
Its detractors say the train from Miami to Orlando will never draw enough traffic to pay for itself. That’s a reasonable argument, given the state of passenger trains elsewhere in the country—few of which would exist without government support. Reasonable, unless you realize that the Florida East Coast people are obviously thinking of real estate development as well as passenger service.
We already see that happening in Miami, where a major commercial development is underway surrounding a new station—the southern terminus of the fast train. Already, Tri-Rail, a nice train on the wrong track, is planning to shift some trains to the new Miami station by way of an existing connection between the CSX tracks and the FEC in Dade County. That will make Tri-Rail into the heart of Miami (it presently ends far to the west at the airport) and provide an appreciably more useful service.
But that benefit pales compared to Tri-Rail’s ultimate goal of putting some service on the FEC’s new fast track all the way from downtown Miami to Palm Beach, and possibly beyond. Tri-Rail has already identified (and published) possible stations along that route. The realization that this will happen may have a lot to do with the quieting of objectors.
One of their major criticisms has been noise (although modern fast passenger trains don’t make much noise and what they do passes quickly) and a decline in property values along the route.
It may be sinking in that just the opposite should happen. Elsewhere in the country, where commuter trains are long established, property near stations is gold. Philadelphia, New York, Chicago and other cities with extensive commuter networks have seen apartments and office buildings spring up within walking distance or short drives from stations. In New York, Madison Square Garden is built over Penn Station. Philadelphia has Penn Center, a complex of office towers, restaurants and hotels stretching for blocks over underground tracks that were once at ground level. In the suburbs (a comparison appropriate to our local situation) homes that are close to stations have notably greater value than similar neighborhoods not as conveniently located near rail lines. It is already happening here, in downtown Miami and Fort Lauderdale, where there has been a rush of construction (too much, many think) within a few blocks of the new station underway near Broward Boulevard.
Our hunch is that this reality is not lost on developers—who are probably already moving on land near proposed Tri-Rail stations in Palm Beach County. That land, where developed, is often low use, light industry and a bit on the seedy side. That’s why such businesses are near rail lines, out of the public’s sight on property not suited for much else. It is a perfect opportunity for investors with vision. Certainly the planners at the FEC have understood this all along. The railroad has extensive land holdings all along its tracks.
It has taken some time, but the public seems to be getting the message, too.
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It was 1966, at a motel room in Wildwood, New Jersey. It has been almost 50 years, but you can still hear Vince Salandria's rumbling voice.
"Don't you see it, boys? Don't you see it? There's only one outfit who could have pulled this off."
Salandria was talking about the assassination three years before of President John F. Kennedy. He had contacted Gaeton Fonzi at Philadelphia magazine to point out discrepancies in the Warren Commission Report, which concluded that a lone nut had murdered an American president. We happened to be working with Fonzi on a light piece on Wildwood called "The Workingman's Riviera." I had an interest in the Kennedy assassination and tagged along when Gaeton took time from our barhopping to meet Salandria. Very few people had challenged the conclusions of the Warren Commission Report, but in truth almost nobody had read the 26 volumes of evidence in the report. Salandria, a Philadelphia school board lawyer, had read it all and what he was telling us that day is that the only outfit who could have pulled this off—by that he meant the killing and the cover up—was the CIA.
What Salandria showed us that day was largely the glaring physical contradictions between the president's wounds and the Warren Commission's conclusions. It was enough to convince us both that more than one person shot at the president. Shortly thereafter, Fonzi confronted Arlen Specter, the man who came up with the 'magic bullet' theory for the Warren Commission. That theory was crucial to blaming a lone gunman. At the time, Specter was an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia, and later a longtime U.S. Senator. Unprepared for Fonzi’s detailed questions, he could not explain his own theory.
Fonzi was off on a journey that led him to write The Last Investigation, a book that was the first to connect the accused killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, to the CIA. We know it well. It first appeared as two long articles in our Gold Coast magazine and Washingtonian magazine.
Gaeton Fonzi's book was a landmark in the long examination of JFK's murder. His work is cited in virtually every important book on the subject, including one just out. David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard traces the career of Allen Dulles, who headed the CIA until President Kennedy removed him. Talbot presents strong evidence that Dulles and his network of spies were behind the murder, and behind them was a group of some of the most influential businessmen in the country. Their common bond was a hatred for President Kennedy, whom they regarded as soft on communism—basically a traitor.
Talbot's work would not surprise Gaeton Fonzi, who died three years ago. He spent five years on government payroll when the Kennedy investigation was reopened in the mid-1970s. He connected Oswald to the CIA as a low-level operative set up to be blamed for the crime. At the time, investigators referred to a "rogue" group within the CIA as responsible for the crime. But Fonzi knew the highly placed CIA men he connected to Oswald could not have acted without approval from the top—and the top was Allen Dulles.
Talbot’s book is mostly about Dulles' tawdry career before JFK. He was the brother of John Foster Dulles, secretary of state under President Eisenhower. Allen Dulles had been a spook since World War I. Under him, the CIA became its own government, free to bribe and murder foreign leaders, and even protect Nazis who should have been tried for war crimes. The CIA found the Germans’ experience useful in fighting the Communist threat. In that atmosphere, murdering a president would be a challenging exercise, but only they could get away with.
In a sense they did. The whole intelligence crowd and the men who supported them are all gone. Safe from justice, they might even enjoy the recognition today.
An aspect of Talbot’s book we appreciated was his indictment of the media for its negligence in the JFK investigation. He points out how friendly the CIA was with key elements of the press. Fonzi sensed that decades ago, when his dramatic piece on Arlen Specter in Philadelphia was ignored by local papers, and years later his book initially was dismissed by many critics, who at the same time praised shallow (and many think CIA backed) books, such as Gerald Posner’s Case Closed, which supported the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone.
For reasons difficult to fathom, the disinformation goes on to this day. Even as most of the country, and the world, accepts the idea that JFK’s death was a conspiracy, key elements of the media refuse to accept the obvious. Even Chris Matthews, who wrote a book on President Kennedy—and as a liberal broadcaster should relish the right wing being blamed for his murder—continues to occasionally refer to Oswald as a lone nut. He recently ridiculed the Investigation of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in the 1990s.
Garrison, it turns out, was on to something—at least Robert Kennedy thought so. Garrison was brushing against the CIA, and events relating to the crime. Robert Kennedy suspected the CIA from the start. But Garrison’s investigation was infiltrated by spies and discredited by much of the media. You can thank Allen Dulles for that.
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It appears that gun control will be an issue in the upcoming election. We say this because Hillary Clinton says so, and is already bringing it up in her primary campaign. She may even have some emails on the subject. We hope so. It gives the Republicans a chance to spend a few million dollars to find out.
Our position on guns is clear. Guns don’t kill. People do. So if you shoot all the people, problem solved.
In Florida, if someone introduces a bill allowing you to shoot everybody, it would probably pass. What would not pass is a bill saying that crazy people should not be allowed to shoot people. The second amendment does not speak to that. But polls sure do. As recently as Tuesday’s Sun-Sentinel, a poll conducted for the University of South Florida said 85 percent of those surveyed favor mental health screening before a person can buy or receive a gun.
That is a pretty lopsided poll, but consistent with studies elsewhere. You would think such attitudes could be easily translated into law. If that happened, there would be very few guns out there. There are basically three categories of people who possess handguns. One is law enforcement people who sometimes need to shoot the second category—bad people who need guns to protect themselves if something goes wrong when they are committing a crime. The third category, which may be the largest, is people who are crazy.
These are the people who think they need a gun to protect themselves from category two criminals, which doesn’t happen very often, and when it does it is often somebody shooting somebody without any real good reason, except maybe they are drunk, and then claiming self defense under Florida’s “stand your ground” law.
If these people really feel threatened, they are at least a little paranoid, which is a form of mental illness, depending on the degree of paranoia. If there’s someone who read about a mass shooting, and immediately ran out and bought a gun (often another gun, because they think that government is going to take their guns away, so they need to own several of them), then they are seriously paranoid, which does qualify as crazy. And if they think they need to own a military assault rifle for protection, then they are seriously crazy.
One way or the other, such people would have a hard time qualifying for a gun if they had to pass a mental health test and explain why they needed a concealable handgun or an assault rifle. They would be refused the purchase of a gun on the grounds they were crazy. In summary, most people who wanted to buy a gun would be deemed crazy, and therefore couldn't have one. This is such a basic concept that it would make a good book.
Problem is somebody already wrote it. It is called Catch 22.
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While Gov. Rick Scott is in New York urging businesses and people to move to Florida, people in Florida are wondering where they will go when the state disappears under the waves. The timing could not be more ironic. The governor makes these recruiting trips when something as predictable as high tides give South Florida a foretaste of the kind of flooding that climate experts say is only going to get worse, possibly much faster than originally thought.
The page one story in Tuesday's Sun Sentinel reported that South Florida may have passed the point of no return for some cities—even if the current emissions of greenhouse gases gets no worse. Now, we are not scientists, as Republicans like to say, but most of our faculties are intact and that is enough to note that floods are getting worse and more frequent, and roads we haven’t seen flooded in 40 years are now routinely covered by storms or high tides.
Just around the corner from where we sit, a small canal (actually a natural branch of a river that has been canalized) flooded for a day. The current there does not seem very strong, but it was enough to erode about 10 feet of the bank and start crumbling part of the roadway. In just one day. It was a mini-version of the erosion that took away part of A1A along Fort Lauderdale’s public beach when Hurricane Sandy (which did not hit close to Florida) caused unusual tides to hammer the road.
The Sun Sentinel story provides some scary statistics. It says that even extreme cuts in greenhouse gases would preserve by 2,100 high ground in Fort Lauderdale now occupied by only 17,555 of the city’s 165,521 residents; Boca Raton would do somewhat better, losing only about 25 percent of the land now occupied by humans.
And Gov. Scott goes to New York to ask more people to come here. To accommodate them, many South Florida officials seem happy to approve high-density projects in areas already prone to flooding. Even small plots of open land, which can accommodate vegetation to absorb water, are paved over to worsen the situation by channeling more runoff into rivers and canals.
We wonder if part of the urge to build on the part of developers stems not so much from ignorance, as from the unnerving knowledge that if they don’t move fast they may be too late. Are they thinking they have an expensive piece of property where they can only preserve their investment by building as much as they can and sell out as quickly as they can? Before laws or simple old-fashioned morality will force them to tell prospective buyers that their highrise water view may someday be straight down at parking lots where their cars sit half submerged.
Not being scientists, we have no authority to wonder if the destruction of a section of A1A by a hurricane a thousand miles away might be repeated sooner rather than later on a much larger scale, perhaps totally wiping out a beach road and sending water into the lobbies of hotels and condos where the smell of new construction is still fresh.
The answer from people who are admittedly not scientists: bring more polluting people and build while you can. And consider cranes on houseboats.
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The news arrived via the media. The Sun Sentinel reporter told my wife, Peggy, that our daughter was one of three kids picked to meet the pope at Miami International. She doubted him. She thought Julie was one of a bunch from her school who would be at the airport—some minor role in greeting the Polish pope. No, said the reporter, only three and he wanted to know all about Julie.
Turns out he was right. The late Father Timothy Hannon, pastor at Fort Lauderdale’s St. Anthony Parish, had been asked to pick a mainstream kid from his school to be among three children greeting Pope John Paul II when he arrived in the U.S. Naturally a priest from Ireland (we used to call him Canon Hannon from Shannon) picked a kid with an Irish name and Irish freckles. Julie was 9, in the fourth grade.
And so it came to pass, one September morning in 1987. Julie, wearing a new Blessed Mother blue dress, was there at the bottom of the ramp when the pope’s plane pulled in. President Ronald Reagan, also a widely known figure at the time, was also present with his wife. We were in a grandstand 50 yards away, closely watched by 10,000 secret service guys. It had been an exciting day for the school and our neighborhood. Tom Adler, our neighbor, gave Julie some marketing advice.
“When you get close to the pope shout ‘Coca Cola’ and you’ll never have to work for the rest of your life,” he said. Julie was just old enough not to do that. Instead, she said whatever they had told her to say, which was, “Welcome to Florida,” or something like that. The pope told her she had a nice smile, which she did, despite missing a few front teeth. It was a busy day. Julie talked to reporters from everywhere, and at the request of Kevin Boyd, managing editor of the late Hollywood Sun, she wrote a personal account of her day. We scooped the Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald big time. Late in the day, as we drove home, Julie fell asleep.
The next day, a thousand miles away at Notre Dame, one of his roommates asked Mark McCormick what his little sister was doing the day before. Mark, who had sort of forgotten about the event, thought that question odd. “Well, she’s on the front page of the Chicago Tribune,” the roommate said.
That was true. Not just the Tribune, but also just about every paper in the country carried the same photograph. For weeks friends around the country were sending copies of the front pages of their local papers. It was a day to remember, and last week when the current pope made his highly publicized rounds of Washington, New York and Philadelphia, Peggy was glued to the television. She was watching Pope Francis excite much of the country, but she was seeing memories.
Meanwhile, in Washington, Julie McCormick Donovan took her children, ages six and four, to be among the crowds gathered to see the pope drive by. She sent a cell phone video of the kids pressed against a formidable fence as the entourage passed by. You can hear her say, “Look for the little car. There it is!”
We acknowledged receipt of the video with a memory. “You had a better view last time.”
The Republican debates, which started well, showed a decline in audience the second time around. At this rate the show will be cancelled before its first season is complete. Can this program be saved? The answer is yes, and here’s how.
First, the entrance of a dozen or so candidates needs some cosmetic help. Their appearance should be accompanied by a trumpet playing “My Old Kentucky Home” which is the only other place you will find such a crowded field. Instead of jockeys, who often don’t speak English, each candidate should be escorted by a scantily clad young woman, similar to those who hold up the signs indicating the round at minor boxing events. We hope they still do that; we haven’t seen a live fight since Joe Frazier beat Oscar Bonavena in the Garden in 1966.
Anyway this should get the audience aroused, but it is just a start. The big problem in the first two debates is that the candidates, when not insulting each other, say things that are either true or not true. The average person has no way of quickly verifying if Carly Fiorina was a good president of Hewlett-Packard who just had the misfortune of hitting a bad economy and an unhappy board of directors, or was as incompetent as Donald Trump says she was. It takes days to sort that out, as with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s claim that Donald Trump gave him money to land a casino in our state. Who knows? In politics both sides can be right.
It is easier to say that Donald Trump, when pouting as he does a lot, bears a strong resemblance to Benito Mussolini, who was once a supporter of Adolf Hitler but was slightly less ethically challenged and still wound up being hung upside down. Hitler, always posing as a humble leader, wore a plain military uniform without rank. Mussolini was less inhibited, sporting snappy outfits, and because he did not have Trump’s hair, fancied unusual hair pieces, such as a fez with glittering insignia.
We digress. Back on topic, the scantily clad women would have a role in bringing transparency to the debate. They would stand behind the candidates, and be equipped with one of those technical devices that suggest untruth by reading a person’s voice and body language. When an untruth, or partial deception, registers on their registrars, an enormous klaxon would sound and the women would hit the candidate in the face with a cream pie. Some of them would need a lot of pies.
Perhaps a better idea would be to have the candidates sit in swings above a vat of water, as in carnivals where one throws a baseball, and if it hits the bull’s-eye, sends the swinger falling into the water. Each time the untruth register goes off, a wild cackle like the witch in the fun house would sound, and the candidate would be plunged into the water, only to be jerked quickly back up, dripping and ready for the next dipping. Alternatively, a bucket of iced Gatorade would sit above each candidate’s head, and the deceptive statement would send it pouring down upon them.
And because Americans love a winner, and instant gratification, we will not wait for the networks to give us an opinion. Instead we will have the audience decide by cheering at the end, or doing a wave, or whatever. And one of the scantily clad women will present the winner with a Mussolini hat. Non-shrink, of course.
When Gaeton Fonzi moved to Florida in 1972, he took the state seriously. He got into boating, got his captain’s license and spent many hours over the next several decades maintaining a sailboat, and occasionally even using it. He once made it all the way to the Bahamas, but when returning to Miami he encountered the gulfstream and wound up in Palm Beach, and was happy to be there. He also eventually got into distance running and knocked off a marathon or two. He also played tennis, and liked to write about it.
It was tennis that almost brought Jimmy Evert into his life. Gaeton’s wife Marie decided it would be a hoot to buy Gaeton one lesson from Chris Evert’s father as a Christmas present. Chris at the time was young in what would be an illustrious career. It was a touching idea, and of course Jimmy Evert did not think so. He explained to Marie that one lesson for a 38-year-old man wasn’t exactly what he did for a living. He did not have to explain that he worked with young players, such as his own kids, getting them ready for Wimbledon.
Marie knew that, of course, but she can be persuasive, and she explained that it would mean a lot to her husband. She probably did not tell Mr. Evert that Gaeton would likely write an amusing article about it. The Fonz was known for hard-hitting investigative pieces, such as his stories in Philadelphia magazine that helped prompt the publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, the powerful Walter Annenberg, to sell the newspaper and leave town. Or, after Fonzi came to Florida, his work on the Kennedy Assassination that has gone a long way toward convincing most of our countrymen that JFK was killed by a government conspiracy, and not by a lone nut. But he also had a delightful touch on shorter, less earth-shattering topics, such as growing up above the Hudson River in New Jersey, dreaming of becoming Joe DiMaggio.
As fate would happen, the tennis lesson never happened. According to Marie, the lesson was scheduled twice, but both times canceled because of rain. It must have been summer. Marie lost interest in pursuing the matter, and we feel sure Gaeton was not nuts about wasting a great teacher’s time in the first place. Since Gaeton left us two years ago, and Jimmy Evert just recently, that will remain a lesson untaught. There is scant evidence that the history of tennis would have been altered in any event.
Now an Evert family story that did happen was some 20 years later. One of the qualities of Jimmy Evert and his wife Colette was that they never let daughter Chris’ fame affect their lifestyle much. For a while you might even call them the first family of Fort Lauderdale, but they remained a low-key couple, faithful to the values they grew up with. Their kids all went through St. Anthony School, which was within walking distance of their first home.
Their five kids were long gone from the school in the early 1990s when our mother-in-law, well into her 80s and not well, came to live with us. She wasn’t up to attending Sunday mass, but Catholic parishes have a program that brought communion to the homes of the sick. For several years a very pleasant woman who showed up faithfully week after week performed this duty, cheering on our mother-in-law throughout the process. The communion bearer’s name was Colette Evert, mother to a champion, wife of a legendary coach and provider of a lesson in humility, grace and kindness.
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