Best of Intentions, Chapter 3

Ben and his friends are enjoying the Sunday afternoon double-header at Yankee Stadium against the visiting Cleveland Indians.  They are sitting out in the bleachers past the fence in right field.  Bob and Billy are guzzling beer and chowing down on hot dogs with mustard and sauerkraut.

Ben is moving back and forth in his mind between focusing on the game he loves and the beautiful woman who has recently entered his life.  He can't totally concentrate on one nor the other.  At one exciting moment in the game, all the fans around him, except him, stand up to cheer what's happening on the field.  Ben missed the play.  Joe DiMaggio had hit a triple to left center field, clearing the bases.  At that moment, he was thinking of Rita, who was better looking than DiMaggio.  But just a moment earlier, Ben was anticipating the at bat of the "Yankee Clipper."  

Also at that same moment, Rita and Miguel are in their American Airlines plane flying back to Mexico City.  Miguel is sleeping in his seat on the aisle.  Rita looks out the window, lost in thought, thinking of the man she met in New York.

Two rows behind them, a well-dressed passenger named Jon sits alone in his window seat, looking at a dossier titled, "U. S. Army Intelligence Report Number 5767."  Inside is a photo of a short, elderly, overweight man with grey hair combed on his right side plus a mustache.  The attached document reads:

Name:  Julius Karchevsky

Age:  60

Nationality:  Belarusian, USSR

Religion:  Jewish, non-observant

Education:  Ph. D. in Physics from Polytechnic in Zurich,    Switzerland; was classmate of Albert Einstein.

Politics:  Communist - an ally of Leon Trotsky; was part of entourage that moved with Trotsky from USSR to Mexico in 1937.

Experience:  He worked for fifteen years on scientific projects at various universities in the Soviet Union; many had military components.

Currently:  He is working on a top-secret research project at the National Autonomous University in Mexico; funded by the Mexican government.  Focus of project is unknown, but suspicious.  Needs to be further investigated.  

Jon closes the dossier and looks out the window.

Later that night, Ben and his friends are on board a train heading home to Oswego.  Bob and Billy are laughing, talking, and drinking beer.  Ben is not.  He's lost in thought, also gazing out the window of the train.

Some days later, Americans all across their country are listening to a radio broadcast which brings frightening news right into their living rooms:

Yesterday, September 1, 1939, Germany unleashed its blitzkrieg against Poland, a country not prepared to defend itself against mechanized warfare.  German Chancellor Adolf Hitler said, "Our strength is in our quickness and in our brutality.  Be hard and be without mercy."  Great Britain and France, because of their treaties with Poland, were forced into the war against Germany.  They will suffer greatly.  President Benes of Czechoslovakia said, "Freedom will never belong to those who will not die for it."

A week later, Ben is in his classroom at Oswego High School which is full of attentive students.  His demeanor is serious and he's trying to be objective.  Behind him is a map of Europe.

"As happened twenty-five years ago, in August of 1914, Europeans have started shooting at each other again.  The question for us is whether, like in 1917, we, the United States of America, should get involved.  Should young American men fight and die in Europe?  Or should those same young men stay home and stay alive, leaving Europe to the Europeans?  Who would like to comment?"

Many students raise their hands.

 

 

LA Coliseum

Today, September 18, 2016, will be the first home game (versus the Seattle Seahawks) of the 2016 season for the new Los Angeles Rams of the National Football League (NFL).  They will play their home games this year at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.  For the last twenty-one years (1995-2015), the Rams represented the City of St. Louis, Missouri.  From 1946 to 1994, the Rams played in Southern California, mostly at the Coliseum in Los Angeles.  The Ram franchise originated in the City of Cleveland, Ohio in 1936 and was named after the nickname of Fordham University in New York City.  They remained in Cleveland for ten years.  So the Rams now return to LA, where they have spent the majority of their eighty years of existence.

In August of 1972, on a trip to Los Angeles, I went to the Coliseum to watch the Rams play the Oakland Raiders in a preseason football game.  The experience reminded me of the many times I had watched sporting events on TV at this ancient and beautiful edifice.      

Construction started on the Coliseum in December of 1921 and was completed in May of 1923.  The Memorial reference is to the Los Angeles veterans of World War I. 

The inaugural event at the Coliseum was a football game on October 6, 1923 when the University of Southern California (USC) Trojans defeated the Pomona College Sagehens, 23-7.  The USC campus is basically adjacent to the Coliseum and the Trojans have played their home football games there ever since.  Such as the legendary movie star, John Wayne, the former New York Football Giant great, Frank Gifford, and the infamous Orenthal James (OJ) Simpson played football for USC on the turf at the Coliseum.  From 1928 to 1981, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Bruins also played their home games there.  I believe the first time I ever saw a football game at the Coliseum on TV (in the 1950s) was the annual end of season inter-city clash between USC and UCLA.

In the summer of 1932, the Coliseum (with a seating capacity of 101,574) served as the site of the opening and closing ceremonies for the Olympic games.  In addition, track and field, gymnastics, field hockey, and equestrian events were also held there.  The Olympics returned to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for the 1984 summer games.

As I previously mentioned, the former Cleveland Rams relocated to the Coliseum in 1946 (becoming the Los Angeles Rams) and stayed until they moved to nearby Anaheim, California in 1980.  The Los Angeles Dons of the defunct All-American Football Conference also played there from 1946 to 1949 before merging with the Rams.  In 1960, the Los Angeles Chargers of the American Football League (AFL) played in the Coliseum in their initial year of existence before relocating to San Diego in 1961. 

In 1958, the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team relocated to Los Angeles and played their home games at the Coliseum through the 1961 season.  Playing baseball in a traditional football stadium created some weird problems.  The left field fence was only 251 feet from home plate.  As a result, Baseball Commisioner Ford Frick ordered the Dodgers to install a 42 foot screen in left field to make a home run a little more difficult.  In the first week of the 1958 season, twenty-four home runs were hit over the screen.  Major League Baseball passed a subsequent rule requiring any future stadium to measure at least 325 feet down the left and right field lines.  The three Dodger home games at the Coliseum in the 1959 World Series (defeated the Chicago White Sox in six games) each had 92,706 fans in attendance, a Major League Baseball record.

In the summer of 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy delivered his acceptance speech for the Democratic Party presidential nomination at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. 

In January of 1967, the first NFL-AFL Championship football game (soon to be known as Super Bowl I) was played at the Coliseum between the NFL champion Green Bay Packers and the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs.  The Packers won 35-10.

In 1982, the Oakland Raiders moved to the Coliseum and became the Los Angeles Raiders.  They stayed until 1994 before returning to Oakland.

The Rolling Stones held a concert at the Coliseum in 1981.  Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band performed there in 1985.  Wrestlemania VII was held at the Coliseum in 1991.  It continues to be a venue for a multitude of events other than football. 

Long live this beautiful and historic stadium!  Good luck, Rams.           

Teacher

In the late 1990s, I was in a rut, professionally.  I had been a tax accountant at Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, Inc. (see my blog post of March 20, 2016 - JES) for about thirty years and I felt like I was just spinning my wheels.  I was getting more and more depressed (not clinically) about my daily routine of going to my office in the morning and looking forward to, not dealing with my daily work-related tasks, but with leaving the office at the end of the day, as early as possible.  What was the point?  A paycheck, of course, but there had to be more to life than a paycheck.

I started thinking about an alternative occupation that would inspire me to become passionate about what I did for a living.  I thought about the Robin Williams 1989 movie, Dead Poets Society, the story of a young teacher (Williams) in 1959 at a private boarding school in a rural part of Delaware full of bright students, eager to learn.  Williams inspires them with his unorthodox teaching methods plus his enthusiasm.  He has them stand on their desks to see the world from a new perspective.  He encourages them to “make your lives extraordinary,” using the latin phrase “carpe diem,” or "seize the day."

This gave me the idea of pursuing a teaching career at fifty plus years-of-age, a little unusual.  Williams had convinced me that teaching was a noble calling.  I started taking night classes at Queens College to earn enough credits to qualify for a teaching certificate from the State of New York.  I vividly remember two of my courses. 

The first course dealt with educational psychology.  It was divided between classroom lectures/discussions and a fourteen chapter textbook.  One topic we discussed was grading, for which there are different theories (such as grading on a curve or based on stringent rules).  The professor announced that our course grade would be based solely on two multiple-choice exams (50% each).  The first would be a mid-term based solely on the first seven chapters of the textbook, and the second, a final, would be based solely on the last seven chapters of the textbook.  To him, classroom attendance and discussions were not relevant to the final grade, even though the subjects we discussed in the classroom were completely different from those in the textbook.  The grade in this course as given by the teacher was, in my opinion, completely irrational.  The three months of material we discussed in his class was “irrelevant?”  The relevant grade was based solely on material in a book he never discussed.  This was a very strange approach to grading.

The second course was what is referred to as “practice teaching.”  I was assigned to an America history teacher in an Astoria, Queens high school.  Under his supervision, I would teach one of his classes during the week.  Unfortunately, I quickly caught on that he didn’t really want to handle this assignment.  I was forced upon him by my Queens College advisor and his high school principal.  My mentor basically ignored me, let me do whatever I wanted, without any comment, with one exception.  I was thinking of showing my class a scene from the classic western, High Noon (see my blog post of March 22, 2015), when ex-Marshal Will Kane goes into a church to ask the congregants for their help in dealing with a dangerous situation.  I wanted to use this scene as a way of discussing civic responsibility.  My teacher’s response was, “We are here to teach, not to show movies.”

I was also to observe my teacher during his classes.  He was an example of why so many don’t like to study history.  His methods were boring and delivered without any enthusiasm.  He never updated his lesson plans nor tried to do anything unorthodox.  This was at the advent of the personal computer.  However, he admitted to all with pride in his voice that, “I don’t even know how to turn on a computer.” What a role model!

In September of 2000, sixteen years ago, I finally got my chance to be a teacher.  I got a job teaching World History to sixteen and seventeen year-olds at an alternative high school in Brooklyn.  All these students had been “removed” in one way or another from their neighborhood schools.  I was not in Dead Poets Society, but instead was in the 1955 film, Blackboard Jungle, which starred Glenn Ford, Sidney Portier, and Vic Morrow.                           

In the latter film, Ford is a new, enthusiastic teacher assigned to an inner-city high school full of students, like Portier and Morrow, from poor backgrounds, some of whom are juvenile delinquents.  I remember Ford using an unorthodox method to try to stimulate his students, showing them a cartoon of Jack and the Beanstalk.  In the climactic scene, Morrow pulls a switch-blade knife on Ford in their classroom.

Like Ford and Williams, I tried to be innovative and create an interesting, stimulating atmosphere for my students.  I decorated my classroom with covers from very old issues of Sports Illustrated that I had saved.  I put up two identical maps of the world, one the traditional way, and the second one, “upside down.”  Like Robin Williams, I wanted to show my students that they needed to see the world from a new perspective.

Unfortunately, I discovered that most of my students had turned themselves off to what I would call “formal education.” They were bright, but thought that I had nothing to teach them.  What was important to them they could learn on the streets (even though many were functionally illiterate).  The only reason my students showed up, at least occasionally, was that the law in New York State required their attendance until age eighteen.  I found it fascinating that I was the most poorly dressed person in the classroom, even though I was the most affluent.  I was basically ignored, ridiculed, and threatened by my students.  I wanted out.  I quit after one month.  On my last day, the mother of one of my students asked what she could do to help her son who showed up at school irregularly.  I told her that she must convince him that what the school had to offer him was valuable.  A hard task for the turned-off.

However, here in Brazil, I am a teaching again and enjoying it immensely.  It is the best job of my life even though I receive the smallest salary of my life.  I give private conversational English classes, either in person or on Skype, to my eager Brazilian students who want to improve their English skills.  I enjoy teaching those who want to learn.  That is what a real teacher/student relationship should be.                 

 

The First Date

John was sitting back, relaxed.  He had made this flight from RDU to JFK many times, sometimes for work, sometimes for pleasure.  He liked sitting by the window, looking out at the marvel of a nature that had created such an unbelievable view.  Today, the flight was smooth, perhaps a good omen.  He looked at his watch.  The plane was about half way there.  He began to think about what may happen.  Should he have expectations or would it be better to just relax and take what comes?  It was the first Saturday in June.  The weather was supposed to cooperate.  That was no guarantee, but you can hope.

John had “met” Joanna on one of those Internet dating sites late last year, just before Christmas.  He had tried several sites, but she was the first one he felt could be the one.  He had a good life.  He had a good job at the University doing the kind of research he had dreamed of when he went to graduate school for his PhD in Biology.  He earned more than enough money.  He had a one bedroom apartment in a nice part of Chapel Hill.  He could buy a new car about every three years or so.  He had a few friends in the area he could hang out with when he was free, which sometimes wasn’t a lot because of the demands of his work.  But something was missing from his life and he was eager to find it.  Maybe today was the day.

Something about Joanna’s picture struck him.  She was not what he would call beautiful, but there was something there that he could describe as attractive.  He was forty years-old and not exactly a Cary Grant.  He couldn’t expect a Sophia Loren.  He was lonely.  He wanted to meet someone to fill the void in his life.  He hadn’t been able to find the right someone in central North Carolina so he decided to expand his search area.  New York was a good option, with an endless pool of possibilities.  He liked New York a lot.  It was an exciting destination full of many things to see and do.  Joanna was five years his junior.  She designed bottles for a beverage company and lived alone in a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village. 

John and Joanna had many things in common, especially a love of classic movies.  They were both avid viewers of TCM.  They were also subscribers of Netflix.  He preferred DVDs, she streaming.  John was a big fan of the Duke, John Wayne, his namesake.  Joanna adored Bette Davis.  As a result, they both envied Henry Fonda, who appeared with John Wayne in the 1948 Western classic, Fort Apache, and with Bette Davis ten years ealier in Jezebel, an ante-bellum drama.

After several months of exchanging emails, John and Joanna had recently had a few phone conversations.  He loved the sound of her voice.  She was just what he expected from the tone of the emails.  Joanna seemed a little shy at first, but once the conversation got rolling, she became an active participant.  John himself wasn’t a big extrovert, but he liked talking about things he liked to talk about.  The way she responded gave him the confidence he needed. 

John’s JetBlue flight touched down safely at JFK airport almost exactly on time.  As the plane taxied to the gate, he started getting a little nervous, but he had plenty of time to relax before they would meet at the restaurant he had chosen for their first date, Pastis, an iconic French bistro on Ninth Avenue near Little West 12th Street.  He’d gone there last year with some Department of Biology associates from New York University.  John loved the steak and french fries he had ordered.  He thought it would be a good choice for their first date.  The food was great, the ambiance was second to none, and the tables were not so big that they couldn’t have a nice conversation.

John walked off the plane pulling his one suitcase with wheels and entered Terminal 5.  Just like his previous times there, it was full of people arriving and departing New York.  He briskly walked through the building heading for the AirTrain which would take him to Jamaica Station.  From there, John would take the LIRR to Penn Station in Manhattan.  That would put him directly across Seventh Avenue from the Hotel Pennsylvania, where he liked to stay when in New York. 

After checking in and dropping his suitcase off in his relatively small room, John stepped out onto the streets on Manhattan.  He felt invigorated.  He wanted to enjoy the sights and smells of the city.  He walked all the way to Third Avenue and 50th Street to have a hearty lunch at Essa Bagel, which offered the best in the world.  They couldn’t be duplicated in Chapel Hill.  Maybe it was the water.  He ordered a hot plain bagel with cream cheese, Nova Scotia smoked salmon, and a slice of tomato.  Couldn’t top that!

Afterwards, John took a leisurely stroll to Central Park and found a bench to sit on and rest.  In spite of the hub-bub that surrounded him, his mind could finally focus again on the point of his visit to the Big Apple, Joanna.  Who was she and what did he know about her?  What did he want of her?  Did he think she would want him as well?  It was exhilarating and confusing at the same time.  John knew he looked forward to her emails and now to their telephone calls.  When he wasn’t busy at work, he missed the time they shared.  Did they have a relationship or was that something that could begin tonight?  What if things didn’t work out as he hoped?  What if she looked different in person, so different that he couldn’t stand looking at her?  What if she thought him a fool?  He guessed that’s what first dates are all about.

John strolled over to the zoo.  It was full of people, especially mothers and small children.  It made him think about having children of his own some day.  He would like at least one, maybe two if the first one worked out okay.  He wondered if Joanna wanted kids.  They never discussed children.  Whatever it was they had had not advanced to the having children stage. 

John made eye contact with a Snow Leopard.  It looked so peaceful and majestic, laying on its belly, surveying its world.  He wondered what it was thinking.  John hoped it wasn’t eyeing him for its next meal.  He also hoped there was more than one Snow Leopard living in the Central Park Zoo so he or she wouldn’t be lonely.

Eventually, John started walking, at a leisurely pace, back to the hotel.  He could feel his nervous energy aroused inside both his body and mind.  His wished the clock would speed-up and slow down.  When he got back to his room, he tried killing time by watching a classic movie on TV.  TCM was showing Love is a Many Splendored Thing with Jennifer Jones and William Holden, one of John’s favorite romantic films.  He adored both stars.  When he turned on the TV, Holden’s character had just returned by plane from visiting his estranged wife who refused to give him a divorce so he could marry Jones’s character.  Holden and Jones were both so very disappointed.

After the movie, John took his second shower of the day.  Then he shaved, which he had not done before he left home in the morning.  An hour before his reservation for two at Pastis he got dressed.  John decided to wear his navy blue sports jacket over a pink shirt.  He had on a pair of khaki pants and black shoes.  Thirty minutes later he jumped into a taxi for the trip downtown.  John arrived with ten minutes to spare.  A few couples waiting in line without reservations gave him a dirty look when he walked past them directly to the host.  He mentioned his reservation and asked if Joanna had already arrived.  She hadn’t.  He ordered a beer on tap at the bar as he waited to be seated.

As John sipped his beer, he was again filled with nervous energy.  Any second now, he would be face to face with Joanna for the first time.  He wasn’t sure how tall she was.  John hoped she wouldn’t be taller than he or very short.  Somewhere in the middle would be good.  How would she wear her hair which had been long in the one photo he had?  How would she be dressed?  Conservative or sexy?  Should they shake hands or kiss on the cheek?  What should he say?  So many thoughts!

Finally, one of the hostesses found him at the bar and escorted him to a table for two at the far end of the restaurant.  She advised him they would be on the look out for Joanna and would bring her to the table as soon as she arrived.  He took a gulp of beer from the mug he had brought with him from the bar.

As the minutes passed, John started getting nervous.  Was she being fashionably late or was she the type of person who was never on time?  Perhaps she was caught in traffic.  Perhaps she got lost.  He looked at the other tables near him and saw all the couples enjoying eating and talking.  John hoped that would be him and Joanna very soon.  Thirty minutes later, he ordered another beer and was truly worried about where she was.  She had called him at his home number a few times.  They never exchanged cell phone numbers.  He couldn’t be sure she even had one.  It never occurred to him he would need hers tonight.

As the minutes ticked by, John started worrying that she was standing him up.  It had never dawned on him that she would do this.  She seemed so excited about his decision to come to New York and have dinner together.  She had bubbled.  He was confident she was sincere.  But, now?

John felt a tap on his shoulder.  He turned hoping it would be Joanna.  Instead, it was the hostess saying he had a phone call and to follow him.  Since Joanna was the only person who knew where he was at this moment, he was sure it was her.  He didn’t know what to think.  He put the phone to his ear.

“Joanna?”

“Yes, it’s me, John.  Please listen and don’t say anything.  I’m not who you think I am.  I can never come.”

She hung up.  After a few seconds, so did John.  He was numb.  He paid for his two beers and left. 

William Holden

William Holden, the movie star, was born (William Beedle, Jr.) in 1918 in O’Fallon, Illinois, a small town in the southern part of the state near St. Louis, Missouri.  His family moved to South Pasadena, California when Holden was three years old.  After graduating South Pasadena High School, Holden started acting in local theater groups.  He was discovered by a talent scout for Paramount Pictures in 1937.

Holden’s first starring role was as a violinist turned boxer in the 1939 film, Golden Boy, with Barbara Stanwyck.  His career really took off after he was cast as an unemployed Hollywood screenwriter in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard in 1950 (see my blog post of November 1, 2015).  For this role Holden earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor (lost to Jose Ferrer in Cyrano de Bergerac).  Three years later in 1953, he won an Academy Award for his performance as an American soldier in a German POW camp during World War II in the film, Stalag 17.  In 1976, he received his third and final nomination for an Academy Award as Best Actor portraying a TV news executive in the film, Network (lost to his co-star, Peter Finch). 

In a movie career that lasted 43 years, Holden made many other memorable films such as Our Town, Born Yesterday, Executive Suite, Sabrina, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, The Country Girl, Picnic, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Horse Soldiers, The Wild Bunch, and The Towering Inferno.  Tragically, he died alone and intoxicated at his home in Santa Monica, California in 1981 (at the age of sixty-three, same age and year as Richard Boone) after “slipping on a rug, severly lacerating his forehead on a table, and bleeding to death.”  His body was discovered four days later.

In 1955 and 1960, Holden made two movies that were both filmed on location in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.  The first was Love is a Many-Splendored Thing with Jennifer Jones (see my June 5, 2016 blog post, Peck and Jones) and the second was The World of Suzie Wong with Nancy Kwan.

In the first movie, Holden portrays a married (but separated from his wife) American war correspondent who falls in love with a Eurasian medical doctor played by Jennifer Jones.  Her character was based on a true story written by Dr. Han Suyin (the woman of the story), whose father was Chinese and whose mother was Flemish.  Of course, Jones was not Eurasian, but American audiences then didn’t seem to care.  She was a great actress and it was just accepted that she was Eurasian in the film, with a little help from Hollywood make-up. 

In the second movie, Holden portrays a struggling American painter who comes to Hong Kong looking for subjects to paint to prove to himself whether he has any talent.  He meets and falls in love with a local prostitute, Suzie Wong, played by Nancy Kwan, whose father was Chinese and whose mother was British.  Nancy is Eurasian, but she was portraying a 100% Chinese woman in the movie.  I am of the opinion that to American movie makers and American movie audiences at that time Eurasian was more “acceptable” than Asian.  In reality, Kwan should have portrayed Dr. Han Suyin in the first movie, a Eurasian portraying a Eurasian.

The main theme in both films deals with a taboo, a white man romantically involved with a woman who is not white (see my August 21, 2016 blog post, South Pacific), in these cases, 50% Chinese and 100% Chinese.  The films attempt to break down such a taboo by having the protaganist, Holden, refuse to give up the women he loves, Jones and Kwan.  I think the films succeed because they create sympathy for the characters in love.  In addition, the films succeed because we get to see the beauty of Hong Kong.

In 1997, Chinese-American Director Wayne Wang (named after John Wayne) made a film called Chinese Box which starred Jeremy Irons (English actor) and Gong Li (Chinese actress).  It is also a love story (again set in Hong Kong, this time during the final days before the UK turned it over to the People’s Republic of China) between a British journalist (similar to Holden in the first above film) and the Chinese bar girl (similar to Kwan in the second above film) he is in love with.  There is still the everpresent issue of forbidden interracial love between a white man and a Chinese woman, but at least here the movie audience sees the reality of a fully Chinese actress portraying a fully Chinese character.  Progress is being made.