The Think-Tank Stirs...

Right about now, the brain trusts at various television stations across the land will begin to ruminate, to get restless, to sow the seeds of what might bloom as greatness in the coming months ahead.

More often than not, these bursts of inventiveness will involve the weather department. Why?

Simple enough. Weather and Summertime Fun go together, right? I mean you gotta have weather in abundant perfection or you face serious depression, anxiety, navel swelling, apoplexy, and nervous neuralgia. Oh, almost forgot cheap, hauling your weather act around was cheap, as in it costs not a penny. Cheap is good. Free is better.

Heaven forbid it rain a bit before, during, or shortly after that Summertime Fun.

Talk is cheap. Sometimes, talk is torture:

"Don't tell me a shower will ruin my plans this weekend, Vince."

"That's right, we are screwed, hosed, flattened, crap out of luck, looks like we might get a passing shower late Sunday. It's all over, keep the kids in, that umbrella handy...and make a novena. Maybe we can turn this thing around."

If you suspect that's a stretch, let me suggest you weren't paying close enough attention to that nifty crosstalk. By the time my TV career ended - hard to keep it going when they throw you out - dealing with inane and innocuous, not to mention vacuous crosstalk was like slamming a Hummer's door on your thumb.

In The Beginning...

Way, way back, my former employer (no, I won't mention them by name, I took blood oath with myself, which is not easy to do.) and I together came up with the idea of The Weather From Your Place.

The thinking pretty much goes like this. Since your weather guy is the designated station goof, whether he really is or not, send him and let him do a buck and wing from that great American institution, the backyard cookout.

Hey, if the grille man hockey pucks a hot briquette down the weather guy's shorts, no problem, he can dance, scream, and head for the pool, the audience will love it. If he slips on spilled cole slaw and does a face first header into into the tomato patch, all the better, he loves to garden. Hell, you can't send out a serious news anchor and have that happen.

What we did, at the very, very least, was introduce the concept here.

While it may have been done earlier in other markets across the land, we did it first here. By here I mean all of the twenty-some counties of this television market.

Sure, could be some weather monkey like me, complete with hot dog suit, was doing the backyard cookout/weather live-shot out in Davenport, Iowa, but until this writer (and that station) undertook the practice in this area, it did not exist here. We were the first. I was the first. Others came to the idea after me. One in particular claims to have invented the practice. He's wrong. He knows it.

So, there we were, it was the first summer of going to viewers' homes on Friday evenings to bring you that all important weekend forecast.

While the following edition of The Weather From Your Place was just one among several dozen at least, it's easily the most memorable. Here's how we ended up where we ended up, which is somewhere right on the Luzerne/Lackawanna County line.

There was this guy at the station, an off-air person, seemingly a decent sort. He'd begged me to do the weather live from his girlfriend's house. Could be he was trying to score points. He was relentless. I caved, I said OK. "You got it, this Friday we'll be there, tell them to set it up on their end for us."

I have to tell you that the main reason I caved is that this guy had promised us nothing short of a Vegas review from his girlfriend's backyard.

Some of what he'd promised was an entire neighborhood turnout, catered and homemade food, and a really nice backyard. There were all sorts of specifics he kept gabbing about, but I'm guessing you get the idea. I recall him going on and on and on about homemade Italian sausage. We never saw a link. Figuring that it was at least a guarantee to look good, off we went.

"We" would be me and a well-known videographer of longstanding. No name, please.

He took off ahead of me to set up the shot. This was standard practice, since I had to get all my weather junk together back at the station, then just make it in time to hit the air live. Oftentimes, I'd literally step from the car, have a microphone shoved in my hand, jump in front of the camera, and hit air with no wiggle room at all.

On my way to the location, he comes on the two-way radio and informs me with some regret that there is no one there.

Come again?

He did.

There was no one there.

No one. Lights are off, driveway's empty, nobody home. The place is empty. No partying neighbors, as promised. No sizzling grill with tons of food for the entire block, as promised. No sign of life. I was so angry that I could chewed and spit nickels, or nails, or the head off of the dip who invited us. We needed a plan fast.

(Cell phones, while they existed, were scarce at the time. We still used two-way radio communication.)

I'm back on the two-way...

"Listen, here's what we do...knock on some doors, get neighbors out of their houses and into that backyard. Then we'll get the grille fired up. Beg the neighbors for something, anything, we can toss on the fire...drinks, we'll need drinks in their hands, it doesn't matter what, I don't care if it's pool water. I'll be there inside of twenty minutes and we'll pull this off, over."

He's back at me...

"First I gotta get this live shot established. I'm not so sure we can get out of here."

Meaning, of course, that we might be off the hook anyway. If we cannot make the shot work technically, we can fold the tent and go home. I like that idea. It'll really PO the bossman, the news director, but it takes the pressure off us. We can blame engineering, whose fault it would most likely be anyway.

Squeezing the live van into place, Captain Video takes out the main television cable line to the entire neighborhood, he rips it right off of the utility pole. But, by God, he gets the van where it needed to be to get the mast where it needed to be, allowing him to fire up the shot and get us on the air live. An auspicious start we've already had, this is just perfect.

My arrival was likely no more than four or five minutes, if that, before we went on the air. Short of a No Trespassing sign, absent armed security blocking our way, we weren't exactly getting that warm welcome here.

There was no time to waste. It was about as close as I'll ever come to military precision.

I told the now assembled neighbors, maybe a half dozen or so, to get that drink in their hand now, get lawn chairs now, get their butts into them now, and get happy fast now. Look like you're at a cookout, look like it's the best Friday ever, look like you're having the time of your life. I didn't ask, I demanded. I didn't see any options.

We splashed way too much fluid on the charcoal. It roared skyward. We threw a half dozen frozen pork chops on the grille. Someone tossed me an apron. Given the circumstances, I may have torn it off them.
Showtime!

I stood between grille and camera, spatula in hand, poked at the rock-hard pork chops, smiled my biggest TV smile through the wavy smoke from the grille's largely petroleum-distillate fueled new fire, and welcomed our audience to this week's Weather from Your Place!

And it worked.

It looked one good time in progress, like we'd just popped in on a backyard cookout and joined the fun while doing the weather. We talked to neighbors, loosened them up on the air, had a few laughs, and made it all look casual, natural, nonchalant, un-staged. It never came off as being last minute, it never came off as what it really was; a calamity prevented right before it happened.

Remember the girlfriend? She'd be the one on whose behest we'd come here. Somewhere in the middle of that half hour, she pulls in the driveway. Stepping from her car, she looked stunned. I don't remember speaking to her, which was surely intentional. I had several words for her, many of them not in the dictionary.

At 6:30, we thanked the assembled cast, then drove away. We never knew what happened. More accurately, we never knew what didn't happen or why it didn't happen.

We never found an answer to why all of what we were promised failed to materialize, or why no one was home at the place where we'd come to do weather from their place. We did hear, through back channels, that the family had no idea we were coming. Was it a practical joke?

Most parties involved know who they are. Not to worry, it was a long time ago and I'm not talking anyway.

Those watching at home probably thought nothing of it, at least nothing out of the ordinary. Through the wispy clouds of nearly twenty intervening years, it was fun.

In the there and then, it was The Live Shot from Hell.

A Little Slow on The Uptake...

So, there I was, sitting in sweats and sweating. Sick. Very sick. Doctor sick. Hospital sick.

Over the last 72 hours, night had become day, day was night, and there were plenty of odd and unidentifiable time anomalies in there as well. Sleep, while it did come, was fitful, uncomfortable, full of wall-to-wall weirder than weird dreams.

Familiarizing myself with both of our bathrooms to the extent I had was not in any planner for the new year.

Viral gastroenteritis sounds nasty. It is.

Like a good many other things evil, though, it did bring some good.

I got to watch inaugural coverage for hours on end. In the end, it was roughly nine hours of me and the TV.

And I had a revelation of sorts. I began to remember...

I remembered the day Jimmy Carter was inaugurated in 1977. That noontime, I sat transfixed while my 19" Philco B&W portable flashed scenes that made me feel pretty darned good about America. We were coming out of very difficult times.

That light at the end of the tunnel was, by golly, the light of a new day in the USA. I was young, 27. At that age, wonder and awe come without much effort.

Watergate and all of its blowback had divided a nation, a nation further polarized by the good intentions of a good man, Gerald Ford, when he pardoned the disgraced ex-president. Jimmy Carter, I thought, was the guy who was going to set things right with America.

Very quickly, all went into the tank, as history will attest. Without dissecting the presidency of James Earl Carter, Jr., we all pretty much know and accept that he didn't have a good go of it. Whether wholly his fault or not, his presidency was in tatters very early on.

It wasn't until this past week that a few lights went on and the Carter failure began to focus for me. It was during coverage of the Statuary Hall Luncheon for the new president that I realized how long one very telling characteristic about Carter had slipped right past me. Maybe it had simply bounced off of me a hundred times and never stuck once. Now, sitting and staring, it was poking at me, knocking to see if anyone was home.

Jimmy Carter failed as president mostly because he tried to be something he was not. The man worked overtime at portraying himself as someone, some person, who he was not at all.

It was the mention of sandwiches at Carter's Inauguration Luncheon. That was the menu in 1977 - sandwiches. From there, it got worse. In the Carter White House, booze was out, with the only exception being wine on certain occasions. The Carters made The White House a monastery. The nearby Georgetown Jesuits were bad boys compared to Jimmy and Roselyn.

Americans don't expect their president to act Amish. If the day should come when we do elect an Amish, then we're allowed weighty expectations of behaving Amish.

Americans want their president to, at the very least, act like they act. We might want a president to behave a little better than we do at times, to carry themselves with a bit more dignity than many of us can muster, but we want real people doing real things.

Americans don't want sandwiches at fancy affairs, and by and large, Americans drink during leisure.

Americans didn't like Jimmy Carter acting like he was better because he presented himself as a man of very modest means, humble, just plain folk. Leave the plain to the plain.

Jimmy Carter wasn't plain. He was no "good old-boy dirt farmer" borne of the red Georgia clay.

Jimmy Carter was a very wealthy man, an agri-businessman, whose family had made a fortune in peanut farming, peanut marketing, peanut wholesaling. He was also a nuclear engineer, Annapolis educated. Despite not being able to properly pronounce "nuclear," the man was one indeed.

I voted for Jimmy Carter because I believed him to be good and decent human being, which is something I continue to believe to this very moment.

Jimmy Carter's motives, most assuredly, were pure. He wanted to set that good example for the rest of us. He embraced the idea vigorously, that he should know better, act better, be better.

The problem was, Americans are better than he thought. They can spot the genuine a mile away. Jimmy Carter wasn't genuine.

And do any among us like judgmentally annoying tut-tutting and finger-wagging? No, we do not, it's not in us, it is clearly un-American to tolerate such unsought chastisement.

Given that he meant well changes nothing. We're still left with a president who failed to meet his promise. He was a man not comfortable in his own skin, which seems pretty apparent through that looking glass of time we all use so very often. He wasn't comfortable because it wasn't his skin, he'd assumed the cloak of someone else, probably one whom he believed to be a near perfect man. None are such.

Instead of trying as he did to hide his brother Billy, Jimmy should have brought him along wherever he went.

Thirty two years later and I'm just now getting it. I still like Jimmy Carter. He should have known better.

Drumbeats 'er No?

In a word, no. So far, no drums.

Though looking at a set longingly, I've yet to step up and count out the cash. And cash it'll be.

As mentioned in my last post, we trying with all we've got to drop the plastic habit, maintaining cards and their credit for only a few very select situations. Right now, I don't know what the heck those situations might be. What I do know is that me buying a new toy isn't one of them. A shiny new drum set qualifies as a toy. So, for now, no drums.

There has been, though, some progress. Thanks to a very talented drummer, who is also my nephew, the list of brands has been whittled down to where we now have one manufacturer in mind.

Before I drag home a set of drums - or get it delivered - and make an attempt at assembly, some room needs to be made clear for them. Surely I'll want to leave ample expansion space, for who knows when a gong, chimes, and a vibraphone might make a nifty addition. Could be one of us will stumble across a hammered dulcimer at a deep discount one day and just have to have it. Dare I even mention a great deal on a used glockenspiel?

Maybe while I'm making that room, I can check around for a "Drum Set Assembler" and see if there isn't one nearby. If you know of one, give me a yell. Thanks. The professional assembly of drum sets is probably an under served market.

For now, the only place I can see that drum set going is in our basement, or cellar, or whatever you prefer. How does that work? Is there a distinction between a cellar and a basement? If you collect wine in your basement, it then becomes a wine cellar. However, would you invite friends over for a fine Chateau Petrus Pomerol and white truffle pate down those creaky steps in your cellar? Perhaps that's when you''ll need to call it a tasting room. Do make sure to tell your wine friends that the feel of the room is rustic, too. Tell them that's what the cellars of Provence look like.

When I was a kid, we had a cellar. Now, I guess, we have a basement, if only because it's finished...sort of. While it doesn't have a dirt floor, our lowest level isn't exactly designed with that charming host or hostess who loves to entertain in mind. When Carol and I first began the hunt that ended with us buying this house, we used one criteria to eliminate several potential houses. The criteria was the "scary basement." And you'll just have to trust me here, we looked at some places that had really scary basements.

Among its many features, our basement has a low ceiling, or maybe that's a high floor. Anyone beyond 5'7" or so is likely to knock themselves senseless moving around down there, should they do so without being on the lookout for those pesky cross beams.

It's the principal reason there's no beer dispenser of any kind down there. My thinking all along has been that I'd go down for another pitcher of draft and do a meet-and-greet with a big piece of lumber. That wood's been there over a hundred years. My head isn't going to move it.

Putting drums in the cellar/basement might make it the music room, maybe we could call it a studio, or a conservatory. Lots of possibilities here, lots.

Now, about that likely location. The way I figure things, down there most of the neighbors wouldn't hear me loud and clear while I tried to learn how to play drums. Our township does have a noise ordinance or two. I don't need a citation.

Plus, I don't need anyone staring at me while I'm being the big (not to mention old) fool who thinks he's the world's newest drummer. Aren't most among us somewhat self-conscious when it comes to being on display doing something we're really not at all good at doing?

For now, I guess, I'll continue to save up and do my homework on what drum set suits me best. Probably, a kids' set would do just fine, a kids' set for a glandular child who's big for his age.

Now, Where Was I?

The holidays have again come and gone. Mine were a pleasant experience, I surely hope yours met all expectations. Failing that, there's always next year. And keep in mind that Parade Day is roughly a short two months away - and there really is only one Parade hereabouts. This leaves you ample time to get your ID and excuses in order for that summary citation on parade weekend.

Speaking of which, how do you feel about the fact that Scranton's parade does not make the Top Ten of St. Patrick's Parades nationwide? I find it remarkable. How could Scranton's annual Celtic version of Mardi Gras not make the list?

Like many, if not most Americans, our holiday spending was way down in 2008. I'd say we spent little more than 20% of what we typically spend, which is a sizable reduction in outlay. Better yet, we never touched plastic this season, it was cash only. We might have begun a tradition here, because we've yet to use a single credit card since October.

Also like our fellow countrymen and women, we got clobbered in 2008 financially. I'll skip the jokes, mostly because all the jokes do is mask the pain a bit. Those losses, and a few unexpected year-end expenses, turned us tight this time around. I don't think anyone noticed.

Gas went way down. Now, it's creeping back up. "Experts" say it will spike again, perhaps in 2010 and 2011. Regardless of "expert" observations, I remain absolutely convinced that the price of gas fell on demand, American demand. I believe that Americans drove the price back where it belonged by driving less, lots less. Oil producing nations lost money. Shucks, what a shame.

Those same oil producing nations hope Americans have a very short collective memory, that little by little they can crank up the price and we won't respond. I say we will respond, swiftly and deliberately. Americans have the resolve to do most anything, and we always have. Anyone who underestimates America's stick-to-it grit does so foolishly.

Carol's background is Orthodox, Ukrainian Orthodox, meaning Christmas is celebrated on January 7th.

I mention this for, as I write, Carol is un-decorating the tree. A beauty of a tree it was, given to us by a dear friend and neighbor as a Christmas present. Thank you, Marilyn. You're always in our thoughts.

As most in NE PA know, Christmas in January is an observance upon the Julian Calendar, as opposed to the Gregorian Calendar which is used in everyday life. It often occurs to me that Eastern Rite and Orthodox Christianity is a part of life in a corridor from, say, Forest City to Pottsville - pretty much a north to south end to end of Pennsylvania's Anthracite Fields. Draw a line between those two towns, then include an area about 50 miles either side of that line, and the awareness of "Russian Christmas" is solid.

Outside of this corridor, it diminishes seriously, so much so that many folks in other areas of this country have no idea of any of the traditions which reside here, the traditions we've known most of our lives, regardless of ethnic background.

How many people in Rapid City do you suppose even know what kielbasi is? Or halushki? And, please, no offense to Mrs. T, how many folks in Mobile know the extraordinary taste and texture of a fresh church-kitchen made pierogi?

This is true, I swear. Hard to believe, yet true. Not too long ago someone grumbled to me that you have to travel to NYC to get good kielbasi. I said, "Are you kidding me?" (Actually, I inserted a few "sentence enhancers" in my response.) The very thought that you can't get good kielbasi in these precincts is absurd. It's like saying you can't get a good chicken wing in Buffalo.

And you can't have a discussion of NE PA ethnic food without the spelling issue at least being mentioned. Kutsop's Market in Blakely spells it kielbasi. Which is certainly good enough for me. The Twardzik family in Shenandoah spells it pierogi, also good enough for me. (We'll leave the various and odd pronunciations of Shenandoah for another time.)

To close out this edition of Kielbasi Talk, let me say that as much as I love good smoked kielbasi, fresh kielbasi makes me gag. A hardship, perhaps, but I've learned to bear up under the burden.

Happy New Year!

Radio with Paul...Part #2

Tomorrow, Sunday, January 11th, it's my pleasure and privilege to be on the radio once again with Paul Stueber.

Gather the family and have a listen to WILK from noon to 2:00 PM.

See you on the radio...