P.S. A Column On Things

Read The House

In 1979, my first year covering technology, I was seated at a table of people in their 60s during an evening function. Today I laugh because I thought they were old.

Something--perhaps the devil--moved me to tell a joke I enjoyed at the time. “What happens when you cross an onion with a donkey? Nine times out of ten you get an onion with floppy ears. The tenth time you get a piece of ass that brings tears to your eyes.” You could barely hear the uncomfortable shuffling of the sticks up their back ends over the sound of me digging a hole into which I could crawl.

All of which reminded Clark Smith: “Nobody cries when you chop up an oboe.” And as Lenny on Law and Order quipped, “The ill wind that no one blows good.”

Broadcast Style

One of the things I have to do now that I am offering a podcast version of the column is to write a script in “broadcast style,” based on the prose version.

For example, attribution goes at the start of the sentence. Use simple words. Spell out number s. Do pronouncers; the word read (red) for the past tense and read (reed) for the present and future. Make triply sure all pronoun references are clear; the reader can’t go back and find the identity of “he” or “she”. If it is a long item, remind the audience “Mayor Smith” or “convicted felon Trump.” Don’t say “quote unquote” unless ABSOLUTELY necessary.

I love doing it because it reminds me of getting my first job at UPI by filing the radio wire—which consisted entirely of repurposing prose into scripts. Of course on my podcast, there are no news readers who call and bitch about errors. So far my listener base is in the low double digits.

Paul On The Radio

Tom King's Computalk  was nationally syndicated on a talk-radio network in the 90s and 00s. I did two fill-in shows for him.

Short-time CMP unit First-TV had me launch a syndicated show, Life on Line Radio. Not many stations picked it up, and it was cancelled on May 25, 1997 when First-TV was shoved down the memory hole. Such were the wild-west days of the early Internet.

I participated in the memory-hole process. I had CDs of all 20 programs. and threw them away. Didn't save one.

Reincarnation 1

For most of my life I did not believe in reincarnation. As a man of science, I found it cute and amusing. Then, as I grew older, it began to fascinate me. Now, I do believe. It is the only possible explanation for some things.

The night I met my wife Vicki at a World Affairs Council wine tasting, we spoke for perhaps 90 seconds and exchanged business cards. She declined my offer of dinner, as she was meeting her girlfriend Melody. Thirty years later, I asked Melody if she remembered that night. “Of course I do. She wafted in on a cloud, and said, ‘I just met the most wonderful man.’ ” I wrote Vicki every day, literally, while I was in Oregon for nine months. And the rest, as they say, is history. Now I know, I don’t think, I know; this isn’t our first rodeo.

For years people have been telling me about the idea of a Soul Connection. It’s the same cast of characters in every life; you just switch roles. Now I believe that. I can’t wait, even though I won’t remember, which role I get next time. I should have known role-switching was the meaning of my recurring childhood dream that I had been a woman.

 

Comic Books and Me 3

The Tragic End and the Coda

I had complete runs of issues 1-100 of the first half dozen Marvel comics titles in good condition, if not mint. At least $1,000 worth, back when that was real money. It would be $8,000 today. I sold my duplicates for a few hundred dollars which I used for walking around money during freshman year at MIT.

When I came home for Christmas, I discovered that disaster had struck. We had lived in the house on Beech Street since 1958; the fall of 1970 was the first-ever flood, as the sewer backed up into the basement, where my comics were stored in cardboard boxes, oldest issue on the bottom. Thus my time with comics came to an end.

Coda: Mad

I did read one non-superhero comic book along the way. My dad’s childhood best friend, Jim Smith, was a completist and a hoarder...that is, a guy). He owned all 24 issues of the early 50s comic book version of Mad Magazine. I was already an avid reader of the magazine version. I read the comics over and over, and then lost them in the flood. I remember them still.

How important was Mad Magazine to me and my generation? I belonged to a group of four life-long friends at MIT who called themselves the UGI, short for Usual Gang of Idiots, the term used by Mad to describe its contributors.

Not to be continued

Voices In My Head

I carry constructs of other people inside my head.  I’ll bet you do too.

• I can hear my mom and dad and dad’s mom Gert.
• Dr.  Swenson who ran my high school radio station.
• Edwin Diamond, my college mentor.
• My UPI Bureau Chief, Don Davis
• My Oregon Journal boss Phil Adamsak
• College friends, Barb Moore, Clark Smith and Kevin Sullivan, with an occasional whisper from Michael Wildermuth and Sandy Yulke.
• Every woman I ever loved, either shouting or whispering.

Comic Books and Me 2

In 1961, my world (and that of comics) was turned upside down with the appearance of Marvel’s Fantastic Four. Heroes with problems, living in New York City. I read mostly Marvel until I left for college in 1970. What a decade it was. Marvel introduced a constant stream of new titles, every one of which I read. And, since boys are hoarders and completists, I had all issues published of all the Marvel titles, starting with issue 1 of the Fantastic Four. No plastic bags for me. Comics in a plastic bag were unimaginable. They were for reading. I read mine gently but I read them.

Beaumont Pharmacy, a block from my house, was the only place that sold comic books for miles around. Some of the most distinct memories of my youth involve crossing the street from the school to the pharmacy during the school year. I was more fanatical in the summer. Early on the morning, the comic books (bundled) were dropped off in front of the pharmacy early in the morning on Tuesday and Thursday. I waited by the door starting at 9:30 because some days the cashier came early and was nice enough to cut the bundle open and let me load up.

My mother, an English teacher, encouraged reading but felt comic books were beneath me. “You’re turning your mind into a wastebasket,” she said, as if that were a bad thing. A wastebasket full of facts (not just comics) served me well years later when I was a contestant on Jeopardy.

To Be Continued...

Comic Books and Me

I just discovered something amazing. I have written about a million words in this column. I have written hundreds of pages of memoir for my family. Nowhere have I ever discussed my long and storied history with comic books. I will now rectify that omission.

Reading

Reading, now a gendered activity, was universal in the 1960s. In my working class neighborhood, every boy and girl read. I was luckier than most because my house was filled with books and magazines. For those whose houses were literature bare, that’s why God invented libraries. Personally, I read every single Science Fiction novel in the Hollywood Branch of the Multnomah County Library. Also, I read comic books.

Comic Book Effects

I think we were supposed to see ourselves as superheroes. I know I did. I frequently dreamed I could fly, but was distracted by the mundane: figuring out routes that avoided high voltage lines. I found myself mostly doing loops over the playing fields at the nearby grade school. In the dark space beneath the stairs, where Steve and I frequently played, I had a camping lantern. I had a ring containing a big green glass gem. I would press it against the lantern, and intone “In brightest day, in darkest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might, beware my power, Green Lantern’s light.” I didn’t look that up on the Internet; I did it from memory and certain it is close, if not exact. I recited it about as often as a young Episcopalian repeats the Apostle’s Creed.

To Be Continued...

Podcast

Friends and family have been suggesting I start a podcast for the last 25 years. I wasn’t sure I had anything to say. For a quarter century I have listening to other people following in my footsteps who have nothing to say. Now, I join them. As New York Times columnist Russell Baker once put it, “Broadcasting the contents of empty minds is what most of us do most of the time, and nobody more relentlessly than I.” And a special note: my nephew Paul created the AI voice which intones the aphorism at the top of the show.

Teaching and Me Part 2

I had hoped and planned to teach English in high school. But at the school my daughters went to, I found the students smug and privileged. Their interest in learning began and ended with whatever it took to get into Cal or Stanford. Grades, not learning.  It’s easy to find the faculty lot—it’s the one filled with Honda Civics. The one with the Lamborghinis is the student lot.

Plus, after three decades a journalist, I expected to be able to teach writing to high school students. My master teacher said to me, “You can write. Can you teach it?”