King Harry has them all fired up. From Henry V, Shakespeares words in the cold morning air are inspiring.

A few days ago I discovered, and listed in my little piece about becoming a septuagenarian, a list of twenty things to do while you are still alive. I kind of enjoyed listing them. As I recall I had not done any of them and only regretted not doing one of them. I am looking at another mag, this time the Atlantic mag, and on their inside cover they have another list of twenty that I should not miss. I will list them and see how I do this time:



Go to the NFL Pro Bowl

Walk the red carpet at a movie premier

Master Japanese cooking

Stomp grapes

See the Tony Awards, live

Spend Christmas on a tropical island

Fly around the world

Go camping and live off the land

Own a room with a view

Go on a safari

Visit an active volcano

Pay the toll for the car behind you

Test-drive a supercar

See the Terracotta Warriors

Shave your head

Drive across the Seven Mile Bridge

Discover a planet

Get a degree in enology

Spend a weekend in Las Vegas like a high roller

Go to the Olympic Games

Again I strike out on all of the above. In this list though there are a couple I might like to do. They are 'go on a safari', and the other is 'see the Terricotta Warriors' in China. Lord, Lord, what is it I wonder would I include on my personal list of things to do while I'm still here and in decent enough shape to do them? Anyways, take out a Visa card and demand a big credit line and the card company will be happy, in case you get the Jonseys to do one on the list.

Before the girl on the right and I started to hang out together, she spent a lot of time with the girl on her left, her sister. I met her thirteen years later and we're still spending a bit of time together fifty-one years and a bunch of months later. My point is, time sure does fly, doesn't it? We have laughed a lot through the years, a lot of it directed at ourselves.

We have a butterfly bush in our backyard and other flowering beauties that right now are outdoing themselves in the midst of an oppressing heat wave (up to 98 forecast for this week). The butterflies of many species are flittering all over the place. To get to my garage I must walk close to the bush that is now full of blooms and butterflies. They show no fear of people and it is a hoot walking throught them. It reminded me of a short little nothing poem I wrote several years ago about one of the main visitors, an eastern tiger swallowtail.

THE BUTTERFLY
(the flight of the eastern tiger swallowtail)

It slews,

it yaws,

it sideslips

It meanders

In a less than straight

Path to the nectar

While
It’s beauty, it’s grace,
It’s vulnerability

Flies
Straight to my heart.

I like to listen to interviews and I like a good song. I ran into a site that combines both in short nicely done pieces that are a pleasure to listen to. It's a part of the NPR family called American Routes. I feel fortunate to have discovered it. Only this morning I listened in on and learned some things I didn't know about the personalities and their music life. I listened to people with backgrounds as diverse as Nancy Wilson, Studs Terkel, and Bonnie Raitt, to Johnny Cash. All very different, but for this show, with music as the lynchpin. Check out their archives.

http://www.americanroutes.org/

THE SEPTUAGENARIAN

Well I went and did it. I became, without any fanfare, a septuagenarian. It's the first decade I have entered where it occurs to me that I might not be around for the next. I herewith paraphrase something I read recently, I have used up all the time allotted me and will embark upon borrowed time. Sometime this decade I and my septuagenarian body will coincide with that table that insurance companies spend so much time compiling. What, me worry? Of course not. That's a lie. Of course it concerns me. If I thought it would do any good I would spend an allotted time each day considering it, but it won't. Instead I will forget about something that's way out of my hands and instead perhaps go over the imaginary list of things I want to do before I depart this premises. Which reminds me of an ad I saw in a magazine just a day or two ago. Now if I still have it....Yes I do. It's an ad in Harpers mag right on the inside cover for Visa credit card. Apropos because you would need lots of bucks to fund this list. Maybe that's the idea. You think so? Duh. I still like to say that. Sorry.

The list goes like this:

THINGS TO DO WHILE YOU'RE ALIVE:

Go to the Olympic Games
Tour MoMa with a personal guide
Visit an uninhabited island
Write a screenplay
Run with the bulls in Pamplona
Go scuba diving in Belize
Take your parents on a vacation
Experience Mongolia's Naadam Festival
Bungee Jump
Read and finish Moby Dick
Swim in all five oceans
Celebrate Mardi Gras in New Orleans
Ride the Orient Express
Visit the Taj Mahal
Drive on the autobahn
See Iguazu Falls
Heli-ski in British Columbia
Play Pinehurst No. 2
Ski first tracks at Deer Valley
Go to the Super Bowl
Find peace, love and understanding

O.K. there's the list, obviously for the A-List folks, the elite among us. Have I done any of them. No sir, not one. Matter of fact, there is only one I would like to do, and that is Ride the Orient Express. Maybe while I was on the trip I could read a little Agatha Christie to add that little touch. It would be fun either way.

So to the point of this little essay. I've turned seventy, is it more significant than any of the others? No, not really. It's certainly no more fun than turning sixteen and getting my drivers license, a big birthday for guys. Or turning 21 and being able to do something adults can legally do, a touchstone of a guys life, being able to drink alcoholic drinks. Now that was really an anticlimax for me, I didn't then and still don't much care for the hard stuff, no loss. One day in December 1955 was probably my luckiest day, I married a girl who became a fine lady and who helped me grow up somewhat. I shared my birthday for a long time with my mother-in-law who liked me a little bit, that was fortunate. We shared a liking for chocolate covered jellied candy, and we also shared a birthday cake for many years. Birthdays are fun usually, but their prime function is not being the opportunity to consume vast quantities of chocolate cake, but the marking of the passage of time. Like all commodities, scarcity makes them more valuable. As the September Song says, the days dwindle down to a precious few and certainly Hogey must certainly have been correct. So becoming a Septuagenarian is nothing significant but worth marking, so now I will hopefully blunder my way as I seem able to do to the day I will wake up happy to have become overnight an Octogenarian, and wonder if I could possibly survive into my nineties. It's the way of the humans, we almost all of us think this way.

I saw this headline in the New York Times this morning.

Bush Signs Law to Widen Legal Reach for Wiretapping

I know it is a sign of the times. I don't know if I'm for or against such a measure. On the face of it and considering my political leanings I am firmly against it as it curbs our constitutional freedoms.

But has the wiretapping to date been effective in keeping the 'terrorists' in check? My problem and I'm only speaking for me is that I no longer trust what the politicians tell us are the facts or their interpretation on those facts, especially a government under siege by politicians blowing hot air this way and that way, none of which I truly believe. It makes the government under siege look cold and unapproachable. They are saying we are right, you are wrong, and this is what we will do like it or not.

Woe is me, woe to all of us. I love this country and its freedoms. We need a savior to ride up on a white horse, and be someone who would talk truthspeak, but I think they are in short supply, at least it appears so at the moment.

P.S. Would we even believe the truthspeaker? You can only spread out the fertilizer so often and only so thick and everyone stops listening and believing.

A hut set on the FOUNDATION of a FORD in 1936.


Several years ago I wrote a letter to the Ford Foundation about the possibility of them funding the restoration of Hannibal Missouri ala the work the Rockefeller foundation did for Williamsburg Virginia many years ago. I think Sam Clements (Mark Twain) is the epitome of Americana and a great figurehead for what a person can become in this country. Hannibal is a great dissapointment for anyone visiting there expecting to see some vestige of Aunt Polly or old Huck and his pal Tom. It is mostly a run down town with a few souvineer shops. I thought it would be a project worthy of a foundation with deep pockets to take on to bring the town back to what it may have looked like in the days of Mark Twains youth. Well I did send the letter and I did get an answer. Yeah you're right; thanks but no thanks.

I just discovered the reason on Shorpy's site. Perhaps I sent it to the wrong Ford Foundation.

This is for all those who want to travel, but don't want to leave the comfort of their homes, and what video on the internet was made for.

Vacancies are few. Can you imagine sleeping in this? I would think I was in a you know what. I am a bit claustraphobic anyway.

I am finishing up another in the Toby Peters series written by Stuart Kaminsky. This one is entitled SMART MOVES. As all of his books featuring Toby this one is set in the forties. As in all of his adventures Kaminsky works in notables of the day. This time it is none other than Albert, frizzy head himself, Einstein, and the baritone, actor Paul Robeson running afoul of trouble and needing Toby Peters help extracating themselves, actually Einstein is the one needing protection and Paul gets sucked into the trouble.

As in his other books Kaminsky manages to work in some historical events along the way. In one scene he has Toby attending the Paramount theater in New York when Tommy Dorsey and his band appeared on-stage after the feature film starring Bob Hope finished. He finds himself nearly the only male in the audience of young teen-age girls waiting for Dorsey's band singer to appear. The band singer, of course, was Frank Sinatra and the girls went wild. It was the first time something like that happened in those days. It was not unlike the girls screaming when the Beatles appeared back in the sixties.

He adds other pieces of history as the story proceeds. The Toby stories are not expected to be taken real seriously, but to be enjoyed as you are transported back to those days of the forties.

From American Heritage. Com. I miss the lunch counters of stores like these and some drug store chains. They are from another day I understand, but I still miss them them.





Why Woolworth Had to Die
By Joshua Zeitz


Ten years ago today, on July 17, 1997, F. W. Woolworth announced that it was closing the last 400 of its “five-and-ten-cent” stores, laying off 9,200 workers and drawing to a close 117 years as the flagship retailer of downtown America. “Woolworth was 100 years ago what Wal-Mart is today,” the historian Robert Sobel pointed out to The New York Times. It had once seemed to be a store that would last forever.

Frank Woolworth opened his first dry-goods store in 1879, in Utica, New York. His first sale was a five-cent shovel—the most expensive item he had. Later that year he opened a larger store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and with business booming, in 1880 he raised his price ceiling to ten cents, thus ushering the term “five-and-ten” into the American lexicon. In 1910 the Woolworth lunch counter made its debut, at the 14th Street store in Manhattan, and in 1912 the fast-growing business subsumed five competing chains to build an empire of 596 stores nationwide, with $53 million in annual sales (equal to $1.1 billion today).

Woolworth, who died a very rich man in 1919, wasn’t the only entrepreneur to build a retail empire as America urbanized and gained wealth. By the turn of the century, with work hours on the decline and real wages rising, millions of ordinary people were patronizing not only Woolworth but also department stores such as Macy’s and Filene’s, where they could find a wide variety of goods at low prices. Even farm families remote from cities and towns came to rely on the stores. Rural free delivery and parcel post, two services introduced in 1896 and 1913 respectively, enabled anyone to purchase by mail order.

But fundamentally, the rise of chain stores like Woolworth took place in cities. On the eve of the Civil War, less than 20 percent of Americans qualified as “urban,” a category that then included all persons living in towns with a population of at least 2,500. By 1920 more than half of all Americans lived in towns or cities, and the number of people living in cities of at least 8,000 had jumped from 6.2 million to 54.3 million. In this new environment, Woolworth became an anchor of the downtown business district.

It didn’t happen overnight, though. As late as 1930, working-class city dwellers still did most of their shopping at corner groceries and mom-and-pop stores, where they often were allowed generous credit. A survey in 1926 revealed that chains accounted for 53 percent of grocery stores in the upscale Oak Park suburb of Chicago but just one percent of stores in the working-class towns of Joliet and Gary. The Depression changed all that, as mom-and-pops found it harder to extend credit and customers found the lower prices at chains like Woolworth impossible to resist. A survey in 1939 showed that 91 percent of lower-income shoppers were now paying cash for their purchases, having evidently abandoned the old neighborhood store for the cheaper, cash-only chains. Woolworth was a prime beneficiary.

Yet even as the downtown chains spread, the groundwork was being laid for their slow but steady death. In the 1950s and 1960s America’s suburban population grew by more than 40 million, led out of the cities by cheap, quality housing and a massive federal highway construction program. By 2000, shortly after Woolworth boarded up its last stores, an outright majority of Americans were suburbanites. Firms like Woolworth had trouble adapting their cut-rate downtown model to the new suburban shopping centers that sprang up around the country. The company stuck to an updated version of the old five-and-ten even as postwar affluence brought a higher standard of living to many of its customers. So it couldn’t compete with new outlets designed for the shopping centers and malls, like Kmart, Target and Wal-Mart, all three of which came into being in 1962 and offered more household goods at bargain prices. By 1970 those “big-box” budget retailers, to be joined later by new discount franchises like Toys “R” Us, Circuit City, T. J. Maxx, Office Depot, and Best Buy, outsold traditional department stores as well as five-and-tens and rang a final death knell for the downtown business districts that Woolworth had long dominated.

In 1993 Woolworth retrenched, closing 1,000 of its stores. The company shifted resources to its more competitive franchises, like Foot Locker and Champs Sports, and gave the Smithsonian its most valuable piece of memorabilia, the lunch counter where four black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, had staged a landmark civil rights sit-in in 1960. The writing was on the wall. “Closing of the Woolworth stores is long overdue,” a retail consultant remarked in 1997. “Today’s Woolworth store was just not viable.” By then, the company was losing as much as $31.5 million per quarter.

Several weeks after its 1997 announcement, Woolworth auctioned off all its display cases, store fixtures, soda fountains, and furniture. It was the end of an era.

The internet abounds with video these days. I remember when my wife and I first became members of the internet community back in 1997 watching a video was an adventure. Streaming video was not so much a streaming stream, but a jerking, jumping film that your patience would give up on long before the video was finished. Now days it is like night and day. The videos, most of them anyway, look good, don't start and stop along the way, and sound good. Video has also become a big business item, Youtube sold for lots of money, bought by Google I think. This is all preface to a couple recommendations to add to your daily business of staring at the also refined flat monitors we use mostly now. Charlie Rose, an interviewer I think is tops, has been on the tube for a long time now, but he's on at or after 11:30 at night, a time when I am dozing and not at my most receptive. I have had to copy his show from time to time, but that is not really a remedy. But now Charlie has released thousands of his shows for us to view at our leisure. I am loving it. Check him out at charlierose.com.

Another great resource is C-SPANs series on American writers and American presidents, available to view whenever you are in a history kind of mood. If you're interested in writers, presidents, or just about anyone on Charlie Roses show you should be loving these things.

WHERE IN THE HECK ARE THOSE PESKY LITTLE BEES?

I love running into these old, I repeat old buildings that are still in business. This mill is so old I don't think it could be fixed up. Any construction boss would say they would have to tear it down I am sure. But the business still runs and things are looking pretty neat, just old.

What the devil is going on here Tom Batiuk? I was misdiagnosed ten years ago and told I had two years to live, and I can tell you there was no good humor in any of it. I can also tell you there is no humor in the plight of Lisa and Les. Comic strips, I thought, were supposed to be exactly that, comic, funny or maybe a little surreal, but certainly not real life with real nightmare scenarios. Each time you wrote about Lisa and Les I expected you would employ an out for their dilemma. Perhaps a new experimental drug, or at least put her cancer in a forever state of remission, but no you seem determined to kill her off. For crying out loud Tom give us a break from real life and save Lisa.

Independence Day 2007. Freedom USA style works. If we lose it we won't lose it on a battlefield, but by a politicians ineptness. Study what your representatives stand for, and don't let them get too comfortable in the job.

THINGS I ALWAYS WANTED TO DO




I always wanted to sail a sleek craft propelled only by the wind and my knowlege of seamanship dreaming deep thoughts, but alas like all dreams they are only that. I probably could realize the dream except it costs a lot of money to own a craft like that. Oh and probably I would have to, or at least should like to be on the water; I don't, it causes me unease. And the part about being alone, that's a lie also, I really don't like being alone for too long. So all in all I guess I will just keep this as a reverie when I feel a little yearning for the deep blue and stay ashore where I belong.

I was taken aback while watching the video documentary FOG OF WAR, a film about Robert McNammara, defense secretary under Kennedy and Johnson, when he was recounting the Cuban missile crisis, and later after a meeting with Fidel Castro, he made a gesture with his thumb and forefinger very close together as he said several times, "We came this close", to bringing the temple down on our heads. I was not unaware of how close we came to blowing ourselves up as all of America was, but it brought a chill to me as if it was a new revelation. This little video of Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, in the later years of his life feeling the weight of what he had wrought. But I suppose if he hadn't done the deed someone else certainly would have.

I saw this and thought immediately of my poor suffering wife (editor). Whenever I write an essay or any other blurb I tend to run on and on and on and on, you get it; and she always comes behind me and tries to clean it up. She usually starts by eliminating several hundred adjectives. To my wife the editor I tip my hat if I had one.