Bob is resolution-free in 2008
I am so proud of myself. Here it is, still January and I have
managed to break every one of my New Year’s resolutions. A new
record for me. I can resist everything but booze, sex, fast cars
and a vivid imagination.
Bob is resolution-free in 2008
I am so proud of myself. Here it is, still January and I have managed to break every one of my New Year’s resolutions. A new record for me. I can resist everything but booze, sex, fast cars and a vivid imagination.
I told you that I didn’t think that Nancy and I would make it to our 50th anniversary at the end of this year. Yesterday she comes storming in, “I just won the lottery. Pack your bags.” I screamed “What shall I pack?” She said, “I don’t care; just get out of the house.”
But I am used to rejection ever since I was a kid and the white boys in their fancy store-bought underwear always made fun of me. Luckily as I kept growing they mistook big, fat and ugly for tough. Big, fat and ugly were the only girlfriends I could get but they saved me in fights. Aye chee waa waa.
Read about Mary Jane Morton, who, as her obituary states, “relished a good argument.” She even relished a bad argument as I was on the losing end of a battle with her Aromas mule-like determination.
The first time I met Mary Jane it was like World War III all over again. She marches into my office and notifies me that I am going to give a speech at next week’s retired teachers luncheon at the Elk’s Club and that I was to wear something nice. Now I didn’t know who in the hell she was and here she was telling me I was going to do the one thing I hated most, talking in front of a group and, as for me, dressing up. Out of the question. Since the 1960s in San Francisco I have not owned a suit, sportscoat, tie or store-bought fancy underwear.
She came back in an hour, the next day and again the next day until I couldn’t stand it any more and said I would do it. Mary Jane Morton made our government’s torture tactics seem tame. If Bush had used Mary Jane we would have had found Osama’s hiding place within the hour of her interrogating a terrorist. Luckily my speech was so bad she never asked me again. I think I did to teachers what they had done to me … bore the hell out of them.
Ann Lausten as Fifty Cent Lance staffer Michael Van Cassell (and isn’t that just about the greatest name for a writer?) wrote upon her death that she was a stickler for grammar and accuracy. So whose copy is she assigned to retype? Me, the worst speller and not-so-gooder at the grammar either. Wasn’t a week would go by that she wouldn’t mumble something under her breath when she saw me or leave me a nasty note about my potty mouth copy. But I loved her and enjoyed when in conversation I could make her smile.
Ann was one of the most positively unique humans I ever met. Too bad God doesn’t make more Ann Laustens. But God has his hands full as in a little over a month he took Ann, Mary Jane and Becky McGovern. I can hear God now: “What have I wrought?” Aye chee waa waa.
Finally the death of the one I knew all my life. The Hollister daily newspaper, the Fifty Cent Lance, or as I knew it as a kid, the Hollister Evening Free Lance.
Every weekday at about 4 p.m. you would see the paperboy Schwinn by as he proudly tossed the paper on the stoop. Always a direct hit as in the 1940s and 1950s there was pride in a job well done. Luckily for me none of that ever rubbed off.
I was lucky that when I wrote my column for the Free Lance after the Weekly Sun went down for the last time it was at the peak of its hometown greatness. Mark Paxton was the editor and Wayne Norton the city editor. Paxton knew everyone and was, and still is, the county’s greatest source of local information. But it was Wayne Norton who I could best relate to as he reminded me of the old-time stereotype movie reporter who broke stories that shook City Hall with the aid of a sexy broad, a half-lit smelly stogie and a flask of cheap bourbon hidden in a desk drawer.
Wayne may not have had the sexy broad, cigar or flask but he did shake up City Hall and the Board of Supervisors.
So how did the Hollister Free Lance fall from being the nation’s best hometown newspaper? The owners forgot it was the Hollister Free Lance, not the Gilroy Free Lance or Morgan Hill Free Lance. The daily may be dead, but like Lazarus it can be resurrected. Just hire back Paxton, Norton and me and I guarantee the Hollister Free Lance will once again be something Hollister, including all the newcomers, would be proud of and want to read. What a concept: a hometown newspaper the hometown folks would want to read. Aye chee waa waa.
And no, I’m not so vain as to think my writing would help but I can still roll up a mean newspaper and I know about drive-bys. And I still have the old Schwinn. Extra shocks and I’m ready to roll.
