Not That You Asked (9780307822215) Page 21

  Uncle Bill died that week.

  It still hurts me to write that. Uncle Bill must have died disappointed, even though it is unlikely he would have accepted the $500 if I’d offered it to him.

  Even though it cannot really be compared, Cary Grant’s death reminded me of Uncle Bill and my unpaid debt to him. I waited too long again.

  I wish now that I’d done something with the idea Cary Grant gave me on the telephone four years ago. He must have been just a little disappointed every time he watched me.

  Song of the Unsung Heroes

  Some of the best writing in a newspaper is often on the obituary page. I read the obit page of my newspaper, not because of any morbid fascination with the predictability of the eventual demise of each of us, but because it’s interesting and because I feel an obligation to spend at least a few minutes considering the life’s work of some people who have contributed more than their share to our fragile civilization.

  The obituaries that move me the most are those that relate the substantial accomplishments of persons I’ve never heard of. It makes me feel terrible that I didn’t know of the good things these people did while they were alive. The very least I can do is read of that person’s accomplishments with respectful attention.

  This thought came to mind when I read that Sidney Cohen died in Los Angeles. As a doctor, Sidney Cohen had done extensive research on the effect of drugs on the mind. He didn’t do television commercials telling kids to stay away from drugs; he did the hard work. He set out to prove exactly why drugs should be avoided. Commendable as preaching the evils of drugs may be, it doesn’t compare in importance with the work of someone who sets out to define, specifically, why drugs are bad to take. When someone says “Why not?” we’ll know because of Dr. Cohen’s work.

  “Man,” Dr. Cohen said, “has the capacity to be more than a flower-picking primate. We need more thinking, not less, and a society that does not value trained intelligence is doomed.”

  They ought to engrave that great line on Dr. Cohen’s headstone.

  How many of you ever heard of Gordon B. Sherman? Not me. Not until I read his obituary. Mr. Sherman created the chain of Midas muffler shops but he turned out to be more maverick than businessman. He originally worked for his father’s automobile-parts company. His idea for a muffler chain caught on and he became president of the company with his father as chairman of the board.

  When Midas profits began to drop off, Gordon started fighting with his father, Nate. It turns out that Gordon was contributing company money to all sorts of good causes. He gave money to Ralph Nader, for example, and he also sponsored a group of Chicago businessmen whose goals were to help the poor, end discrimination and improve the environment.

  Gordon’s father objected and Gordon was forced out of the company. Eventually he moved to California and became a photographer and music teacher.

  It’s not the kind of story that comes to mind when you think of Midas muffler.

  A headline that read THE REV. J. JOSEPH LYNCH, 92 caught my eye. As an omnivorous newspaper reader, I suppose I’ve read Father Lynch’s name a hundred times over the years. He was a Jesuit priest and one of the world’s greatest experts on earthquakes.

  Although religion and science are uncomfortable bedfellows, Father Lynch was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was once president of the New York Academy of Sciences. When there was an earthquake or the threat of an earthquake anywhere in the world, it was Father Lynch all the reporters called for information.

  So many of us prattle on with more opinions than knowledge that we can’t afford to lose as genuine an expert in any field as Father Lynch was in his … or as Dr. Herbert Friedmann, who died in Laguna Hills, California, was in his. Dr. Friedmann knew more about birds than just about anyone ever has.

  He once wrote a book about the cowbird, describing how devious it is. The cowbirds, he wrote, know how to trick other birds into raising their young for them so they won’t have to bother.

  Hail to you all and farewell! Farewell, Sidney Cohen and Gordon Sherman. Farewell, Father Lynch and Herbert Friedmann. It would be a better world if all of us did as much with our lives as you’ve done with yours!

  Dinner at Eight

  We were invited to dinner at Miriam and Jack Paar’s house the other night. One of the things I noticed about the handful of well-known people I’ve met is how interesting they are in person. You can usually see how they got there.

  Jack Paar is as good at the dinner table as he ever was on the air and, as I sat there listening to him, I had this crass, commercial thought. I thought about how much good material he was throwing away on his guests. A director could have taped the dinner and made a show out of it. Which, come to think of it, wouldn’t be a bad idea.

  I suppose any performer throws away a lot that could be sold. There are people who’d pay to listen to Vladimir Horowitz when he was just amusing himself on the piano or pay to sit in the bedroom while Luciano Pavarotti sang in the shower. Not that Jack plays the piano or sings.

  The Paars are great hosts. I don’t look forward to having to pay them back by inviting them to our house, though, for several reasons. Not only are they better hosts than we are but I suspect that Jack is a better host than he is a guest. He’s itchy. A host can be itchy and move around among his guests but a guest has to pretty much stay put.

  There’s no doubt some people are natural-born hosts and others are natural-born guests. Jack is a host.

  There are several things a good host does. When we arrived most of the sixteen other guests were already there. Jack greeted us before we were three feet inside the door, making us feel as though he’d been waiting for us to come. I’ve gone places where I’ve thought I was in the wrong house.

  “Hey,” Jack said, grabbing our arms, “I want you to meet some folks. Some of them you already know.” He introduced us around without missing a name, making everyone feel special in the process.

  Paar has an infectious enthusiasm for life. You have a good time when you’re with him because his attitude is catching. He genuinely wanted us to see his friends, his new house, his daughter Randi and his grandson Andy. Particularly, he wanted us to see his grandson Andy.

  At dinner I sat next to Peggy Cass. She’d be on my all-star list of people to sit next to at dinner. She’s still limping from a medical disaster I hate to retell because it makes me think about it again. She had cartilage trouble with one knee and entered a New York hospital to have a fairly routine operation to fix it.

  The surgeon went into the good knee in error. Realizing his mistake, he took Peggy back into surgery and did the joint he should have done in the first place. It left her unable to walk for months.

  Peggy sued the doctor and won more than $400,000. A judge reduced it to $200,000 but she’s still so mad she won’t accept that.

  After dinner, we left the table and Jack took me down into his basement. He wanted to show me the little battery-driven tricycle he’d bought his grandson. The basement looked like a cement-floored gymnasium with almost no clutter at all. It was perfect for a grandson’s indoor tricycling.

  The Paars’ home could have been a picture in a magazine. Everything was in its place. The Christmas tree wasn’t even dropping its needles. We could never make our house look like that. Their house is bigger and grander in every way but I know the answer. It isn’t the house, it’s the occupants. The only way we’d ever get our house looking like the Paars’ would be to have them move in for a year.

  We’d swap. I’d bring over my old newspapers, the magazines I’ve been meaning to read, the ticket stubs I’ve saved as mementos of old Giant games, the one new pigskin glove I can’t throw away and some of the papers the kids wrote when they were in the third grade. I’d spread stuff like that around their living room and have the Paars’ house looking like our house in no time.

  Meanwhile, they’d make ours look like a page from a magazine.

  Not Even Skin Deep<
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  Three of the women in the room I was in recently while the Miss America Pageant was being televised were better-looking than most of the contestants.

  The winner, Kaye Lani Rae Rafko, was attractive but not nearly so good-looking as Fawn Hall. At least six of the young women parading around pretending to be modest while they exposed as much of themselves as the committee allows, were several hundred yards short of being beautiful. During the bathing-suit display, all but three of the girls looked better from the back than from the front.

  The Miss America contest proves one thing: The best-looking women no longer enter beauty contests. All the Miss America contest decides is the best-looking girl among the kind of girls who enter beauty contests.

  We didn’t turn on the television set until late and didn’t watch all of the pageant even then, but we got a good look at all the girls. It was interesting that none of the women watching where I was objected to the men watching. None of them said, “Turn that thing off.” I think that was because none of those women looked bad in comparison with the contestants. And the guests were certainly a lot brighter.

  The Miss America Pageant officials may not know it, but it has become a comedy show. People in their living rooms sit around doing more laughing than ogling. Most of the laughter comes during the so-called talent contest. The performances range from pitiful to not bad. Few are what anyone would call good. The new Miss America did a pretty fair and athletic hula dance that gave viewers a lesson in anatomy. One of the pop singers was quite good, but there were a lot of performances that could only be described as laughable. One poor girl tried to do some kind of ballet but couldn’t get her feet three inches off the floor in her most determined jump.

  “I couldn’t even do that good,” some kind soul next to me said, but that was not the point. My friend hadn’t volunteered to do it in front of a television audience of millions. The Miss America contestant had volunteered and, in so doing, showed a confidence in herself that she had no business having.

  There’s something terribly wrong about the whole idea of the Miss America contest the way it’s run now. All they’d really have to do to pick a winner is parade the girls out on a stage in their bathing suits and let the audience or a panel of judges decide which girl had the prettiest face and shapeliest body.

  They don’t do it that way. To make it into a television show, they’ve had to find a way to stretch it out. They pretend the competition involves the girls’ minds as well as their bodies. Spare us the talent competition and the little talks the girls give! Just let us look at them and we’ll decide who Miss America ought to be in about five minutes.

  Atlantic City has turned out to be a fitting place for the Miss America contest. The Jersey Shore, from Sandy Hook to Cape May, is 125 miles of some of the prettiest oceanfront in the world. Nowhere have people moved in and destroyed the beauty of nature in a more thorough way than in Atlantic City. The gauche gambling casinos form a solid facade that hides the magnificent ocean shoreline from all but a few people who have rooms with a view. The hotels are all got up like the Miss America contestants. You sense there’s beauty hidden there somewhere, but you can’t see it for all the gilt and falseness.

  There are people who go to Atlantic City for a weekend and never get any closer to a look at the Atlantic Ocean than the slot machine in the lobby nearest the boardwalk. Watching a little of the Miss America contest, I had the feeling we didn’t get to know anything more about those girls than the gamblers got to know about the ocean.

  Happy Birthday, Miss Jordan!

  Miss Edith Jordan

  Market Square

  South Paris, Maine

  It’s great to be able to write to wish you a happy one hundredth birthday on January 15. I’ve read about a lot of people one hundred years old but I’ve never known anyone who was before.

  When you were a teacher in grade school at the Albany Academy in the 1930s you must have been five times as old as I was. You aren’t even twice as old as I am now so I feel closer to you.

  I say I know you and I do, even though it’s been half your life since I’ve seen you … fifty years. Once you know a person, though, you don’t forget. I’ve certainly never forgotten you.

  I suppose I’d be surprised at how you look. I have a perfect picture in my mind of how you looked when I knew you and I’m happy with that. You were never Miss America, but you always looked the way a teacher ought to look.

  When I see my old school friends, we often talk about you. Did you know that? Except for our parents, you were the first real authority in our lives. We were lucky. You were so direct, patient and fair.

  Are you still stern? You were quite stern, you know. You didn’t stand for a lot of horsing around. You were the sternest teacher I ever had but all the kids liked you anyway. A lot of teachers think they can get in good with students by being nice and easy in class but a teacher can’t fool students. Kids know when they’re being taught and when they aren’t.

  I wish I’d been a better student. You were a better teacher than I was a student. My mother always had a lot of excuses for why I wasn’t doing well in school.

  “He’s the youngest in his class,” she’d say.

  “He’s a very shy boy. He works best when he’s alone.”

  My mother was wrong, though. It was because I was dumb, although you never made me feel dumb.

  Do you think teachers are as good as they used to be? There are so many jobs that pay more money than teaching does that a capable person has to be a martyr to stick at teaching. When you were teaching jobs were scarce and a good school had its choice of teachers. Teaching was one of the few jobs an educated woman could get, too.

  A lot of people work their whole lives to make enough money to retire on. You did better than that. You worked your whole life to make enough memories to retire on. If you live to be 150, I’m sure you won’t run out of memories.

  A mother and a father who bring up children sensibly and well take great satisfaction from that. A good teacher has that same satisfaction multiplied a thousand times. Somewhere in the world, someone is doing something because you got them started doing it that way thirty, forty or fifty years ago.

  To tell you the truth, I can’t remember anything specific you taught me. You had one section of the sixth grade and Miss Potter had the other, but classes didn’t move around. One teacher taught everything to one class all day. About every forty-five minutes, you’d switch from geography to arithmetic or spelling.

  It’s good to hear of someone who went north to retire. I notice the temperature in South Paris, Maine, was minus 8 degrees this morning. It proves Florida or Arizona isn’t the only place older people live and thrive.

  I was thinking maybe you could get a job doing public relations for the state of Maine. Florida is always pushing itself with pictures of sun and sand and saying what a great place it is for old people to live. You’re living proof that Maine is good for the health.

  Last summer I went back to the Academy for a reunion. The old school is doing very well and it’s seventy-five years older than you are.

  Lonnie

  Lonnie is an institution in the building where I do a lot of my work. He shines shoes but that’s only a small part of what he does. The best thing Lonnie does is keep everyone’s spirits up.

  The other day I had a good talk with Lonnie while he fussed over making my shoes look better. We settled some world problems and straightened out our own company. As I climbed down off the chair Lonnie has mounted on a platform so he doesn’t have to bend over much, I said, as you’d say lightly to a friend, “Thanks, Lonnie, you’re a good man.”

  “Well,” Lonnie said philosophically, “we’re all supposed to try and make things better, aren’t we?”

  That’s what Lonnie does in the small piece of the world he has carved out for himself. He makes things better. He makes everyone he meets feel better and he makes their shoes look better. If all of us did as much, it would be a better world
. He not only does his job but he throws in a little extra.

  Lonnie is black, gray-haired and lame. I’ve been guessing that he’s about seventy years old. His left foot is in a shoe with a four-inch lift on it and he doesn’t use his left leg much. When he walks, he lifts it off the floor from the hip and swings it forward. It doesn’t seem to be able to move by itself. He parks his car, a car with special controls for the handicapped, in front of the building and it’s a tough job for him to make his way inside. Still, Lonnie is strong, with muscular arms and shoulders.

  He has a good-looking face with prominent bones. He gets to work about 7:30 A.M. and leaves, to avoid the traffic, about 4:00 P.M. In between, he shines as many as thirty pairs of shoes. Lonnie gives every customer the feeling it’s his privilege to be working for him.

  A shine is apt to be interrupted half a dozen times by people passing the open door behind him who yell, “Hi, Lonnie.”

  “Hey, there, Mr. Edwards,” Lonnie will yell back, often without looking up. He knows almost every voice in the building.

  Yesterday Lonnie shined my shoes again.

  “I’ll be packing it in in April,” he told me.

  “Leaving here?” I asked, shocked at the thought of the place without him. “Why would you do that?” I asked.

  “I’ll be seventy-five in April,” Lonnie said.

  “But you’re strong and healthy,” I said. “Why would you quit work?”

  “I want to do some things,” Lonnie said. “Fix up my house. Do some things.”

  “Can’t you fix up your house and still work here?” I asked.

  There seemed to be something he wasn’t telling me.

  “Oh, I could,” Lonnie said, “but I want to go back to school.”

  “That would be great,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to do that too.” I wondered what courses Lonnie was thinking of taking but decided not to ask.