Just a few months before I left the Berkshires and moved to Minnesota, a freak October snowstorm hit The Great Northwest and Minnesotans haven't shut up about it since.
I guess I can relate a little bit. It was was October 1986 when a blizzard unexpectedly hit the Berkshires, knocking out power and stranding people for days.
Somehow, with no emergency generator, WSBS in Great Barrington was the only radio station to stay on the air for the duration. We were a daytimer then with authority to broadcast at a ridiculous 3.9 watts at night, which would usually carry the signal all the way to the KMart across the street.
But when all the power was out, it carried quite a distance.
From about 7 in the morning on Sunday to about midnight or 1 a.m. on Monday, we stayed on the air to talk about it.
And, for the most part, unlike Minnesotans, that was the end of it.
Until today when I was processing some old reel-to-reel tapes that I had digitized and, to my surprise, one hour of the broadcast was one of the files that came back.
This was probably around noon or so, and includes the segment where NBC's Gene Shalit, stuck at his second home in Stockbridge, called.
Behold, radio the way it once was. Live reports of the end of the town locust tree, and details of the winner of the person to correctly predict the first freeze of the year.
My family -- Carolie and two-year old Sean (Carolie had yet to give birth to Patrick) -- were somewhere, but I didn't know where. Carolie is the daughter of a radio guy; she knew I had a job to do and she'd figure out how to survive. They huddled with some neighbors who had a wood stove.
It was 10 or 11 O'clock at night and the Berkshires were scared. And then, a power company truck came by the state highway out front, then another, and another, and another. They kept coming. The rest of Massachusetts had sent us some help. So I told southern Berkshire County that help was here.
As midnight approached, people were still calling. When they weren't, I pulled out the Old Farmer's Almanac and began reading stories. Finally, around 1 a.m., the Berkshires were asleep, and I signed the station off the air.
I miss radio. But I also miss the evidence that we were all once there. Finding this archive was a treasure.
Dexter Michael Collins arrived on October 2, 2020 late in the evening, accomplishing what no one else has on Planet Earth: he made me a grandfather.
The arrival of a new human in the age of a pandemic is alternately uplifting and frightening, particularly sprinkled with the realities of life ahead from climate change and the turn to a more authoritarian country. What will Dex's role in it be? How will he change the world for the better?
Those are all questions that will wait for he is like his father: slow to arrive and demanding once here. But, of course, it's not him. Babies change our routines and our priorities, but they also give us a new perspective on ourselves. Things about our upbringing that didn't make sense, suddenly start to make sense.
I'm here for all of it, as long as I can be, however.
We are not the type of people to push for our children to make us grandparents; we're happy with whatever decision people make with what works for them. So when we found out in the spring that Dex was coming, we were surprised.
Parenthood is hard to define. It is both joyous and heartbreaking as we watch our children navigate through the world and, inevitably, fly out of the nest and into it.
Dex has the luxury of two parents who'll put him first, will make the mistakes most parents make, question their ability to raise a kid, and one day watch the person that 6 pound 13 ounce baby becomes with a mixture of pride in him and satisfaction in themselves.
I occasionally get mail looking for help finding someone or wanting some information from a NewsCut post 10 or so years ago. And over the last 12 years, we've been able to solve mysteries and make connections using the power of the internet for good.
I first started chasing the question of Postcard Underground in 2012, when postcards for Gary Eichten , longtime Minnesota Public Radio legend, started showing up. I wrote the following on a blog, at that time the morning roundup of all things strange in the news.
My colleague, Alana, has presented us with a mystery that only the power of the Internet can solve.
It appears that for the last week or so, at least two postcards a day arrive for the recently retired Gary Eichten, all bearing the mark of the "Postcard Underground."
Today's postcards were from the same person: "Sue."
A Google search reveals no certain answers, although the blog of a woman in New England indicates she once received the postcards. Check the signature on the top card:
There are other websites all reporting the same thing: Postcards show up from someone who obviously is paying attention to the specifics of what's being lauded. And "Sue" is obviously behind them:
Somebody in the InterTubes knows who Sue is. Come forward!
Sue came forward. Sort of. She sent me a postcard about two months later. But she didn't reveal that much information.
We never were able to make much progress in uncovering the brains behind the Postcard Underground after Gary Eichten's retirement in January, when anonymous (except for first name) postcards started showing up every day.
We have found more examples, however. The Joint Religious Legislative Coalition, for example, got inundated last March. The organization, A Peace of My Mind, got them last summer.
The fact that the postcards arrive in bunches indicate an organized structure but how do they communicate and keep it such a secret?
In March 2017, Imesh Samarakoon appeared on a talk show on KPCC, the MPR sister organization in California, to talk about his effort to start an economic crisis team at UCLA for students in financial distress.
He made a logical deduction. Postcard Underground is based in St. Paul.
Based on the high concentration of Postcard Underground members in Minneapolis/Saint Paul, it seems like the organization is loosely based there. But since they have members all over the nation, they often send messages to projects all over the place.
But he struck out on the other, more obvious question: who are they? Along with how do they organize? Who makes the decision to bombard someone with nice postcards?
So he looked at the type of organizations that get the postcards.
Postcard Underground seems to be an environmentally minded group of individuals. I also suspect that the members in Minnesota are a part of Audubon Minnesota, since one of their postcards is from the Audubon, and many of the members are interested in birds (so many bird stamps!).
So I’ve taken a small step towards identifying the members of Postcard Underground. But I really wanted to nail the identity of at least one member.
He wrote that he thinks he was able to identify one member: "David" a Lutheran in Gilroy, Calif. But there the trail stopped. He never wrote another post.
Like those before me, I tried to figure out how the writers connect and communicate.
I noticed one sender from Minneapolis had included, inadvertently I think, her first and last name. I won’t out the kind writer, but her name was unique enough to turn me into a detective for about a week, leaving messages for at least half a dozen Minnesotans who are probably wondering just what’s in the Philadelphia water.
(If I did stumble on the right person, I’d love to hear from you. Maybe you’d consider letting me join the group — because who doesn’t want to be part of a secret society of kindness that cuts through the noise, especially when these days noise seems to be the country’s official language.)
And that's where the trail ends, near the end of this blog. An unanswered mystery that allows the act to speak for itself.
I'm reprinting some of my favorite NewsCut posts. This one is from May 31, 2019
I actually thought I had nothing left to say.
And then you all gave me the greatest day of my life on Thursday with the exceptions of the day I married a woman whom I can't wait to run home to every day, and the day the two greatest kids in the world were born.
For many years, on days I would struggle with things, I watched this -- one of the greatest moments in the history of television.
And I always thought, wouldn't it be nice to go out with such love?
It would be my preference you listen to the extended interview and then all 2 1/2 hours, but if you want to cut to the chase, then scroll on No. 3 to 29:40 and you'll pretty well get the picture. Let the love wash over you. And take note of the song that plays after.
After that, I got a chance to cry my way through my goodbyes to the staff of The Current, providing a wobbly bookend to the day, which started with a poor attempt to get through my remarks to the newsroom.
As I told my colleagues later, "this is what happens when you wait 27 years to tell people how much you love them."
Then it was a session with Jana Shortal and Carly Danek. And, again with the crying.
And then Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan read a proclamation declaring Friday Bob Collins Day in Minnesota.
Tomorrow is Bob Collins Day here in Minnesota. Lt. Gov @peggyflanagan presents the proclamation in the newsroom. Bob: “I dedicate this to all the bosses who tried to fire me!” pic.twitter.com/sOwTg1Bnwi
All that and two lengthy pieces from both Morning Edition and All Things Considered too.
It's going to take awhile for me to process what happened and at some point I'll write something meaningful, probably at my old blog, Stirrings From the Empty Nest.
Though I've made my living in the last 21 years online, I will always be a "radio person."
I don't read scripts when I'm on the radio (one of the reasons, I think, I was banned years ago from membership drives at MPR) and I never let show hosts tell me what questions they're going to ask, because I always figured if I can't tell the story off the top of my head with the words from my heart, then I'm not ready to tell the story at all, especially on a medium that should be nothing more than a conversation.
I wasn't sure how this radio career would end at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday. I trusted Mary -- as I've always trusted Mary -- to get us to the moment we needed to get to, and allow you to share it with us, just as radio intended.
And so it gives me a great satisfaction that the last words I'll ever utter on a radio station -- and the last words I'll write on this blog are the same: "I love you..."
Sara Meyer, the longtime producer and conscience of Minnesota Public Radio News, gave me a great book when I retired in May 2019. And the current virus quarantine is a great time to finally getting around to reading Joe Bonomo's No Place I would Rather Be, a history of Roger Angell's life writing about baseball for The New Yorker.
I was breezing along in the relatively early part of the book when this quote of Angell's hit me like a bucket of cold water.
"Baseball is stuffed with waiting."
We're now waiting for baseball, of course, and especially so for those of us who are ushers at the parks around the nation, Target Field in Minneapolis in my case. We live not only for the baseball, but for the social glue that the sport provides us.
I miss the kids at Target Field. They get me.
The game has certainly changed in recent years. Too many parks -- that is to say: all of them -- cannot stand the sound of silence. And so we are inundated with game hosts and contests and music and kiss cams and decibels -- so many decibels.
Major League Baseball has, over time, chosen to push the game itself farther into the background in order to save it. We can debate whether it's working, but I choose for now merely to pull the game back on stage.
I had to go Googling to find the quote that Angell used. It was simple lede sentence in a paragraph about the New York Yankees comeback in the American League Divisional Series in 2017 against the Cleveland Indians, the team for which I've lived and died since I was a boy, even though I never lived in Ohio (I explained it all here one glorious afternoon the year before for my day job at the time).
Take a bite out of this tasty writing:
The Yankees won again last night, completing a come-from-behind three-game sweep against the Indians, with a stunning 5–2 win in Cleveland. Now we Yankee folks can sit back and wait for the Nats and the Cubs to settle their thing tonight in Washington, and wait also for the Yankees and the Astros to begin their A.L. Championship best-of-seven series in Houston tomorrow.
Baseball is stuffed with waiting. The Yanks went ahead early, on a solo homer by Didi Gregorius in the first, and another Didi shot, with a man aboard, in the third—both struck against the Indians’ well-rested ace Corey Kluber, and setting up a long out-counting wait at my house and all over Yankeeland. The Indians were up against the obdurate veteran C. C. Sabathia, whose eight strikeouts in the first four innings imposed a stunned semi-silence on Progressive Field. Four successive singles and two runs in the bottom of the fifth restored the roaring and drumming for the moment, but the Yankees’ narcotizing David Robertson, and then Aroldis Chapman, soon had us counting outs again, while the re-silenced Indians fans waited for winter. Here, at my place, I was waiting and sometimes screaming for the FS1 announcers, John Smoltz and Matt Vasgersian, to stop their flood of heavy expertise and Googled-up stats and allow us to pick up and share some of the beautiful, complex silences of the game. For a sample, they could listen to Ernie Johnson and Ron Darling, over at TBS, who had done the Cubs’ home-game loss to the Nationals at Wrigley Field earlier in the day without self-importance. This won’t happen, of course, but I was offended by a stupid little joke between Smoltz and Vasgersian in the booth just before the Indians’ last at-bats, at a moment when compassion for the appalled home fans and their millions of Midwest companions seemed appropriate. They did not honor this.
Our last and best waiting was produced by Brett Gardner, the forever Yankee lead-off man, in his ninth-inning at-bat against reliever Cody Allen, with Aaron Hicks on second and Tod Frazier on first. I was ready for this, one of Gardner’s patented wait-and-foul at-bats—a series of short, left-handed slashes and bonking fouls that cause the man on the mound to shrivel and age before our eyes. My scribbles about this at-bat came at the bottom of a page in my notebook, and the accumulating twelve pitches and six successive fouls went off the bottom and up onto the top of the next page before Gardner’s single to right center scored Hicks, and, after a botch on the relay, Frazier as well, for the last runs of the year out there.
One question for us Yankee fans is whether Aaron Judge can pick up a smidgen of waiting from Gardner’s example. Judge struck out four times in the game, and a record sixteen times in the series, almost always on breaking pitches down and away, which he could not resist. He did this without the smallest complaint—no bat-slappings or glances to Heaven—and kept his sufferings to himself. All we can look for, with proper patience, is for him to lay off those pitches, to learn to wait.
Joe Girardi had told us to expect an outcome like this in his statesmanlike interview before Game 3, so let’s try a little joy abounding. Just after the game, I heard from my old friend Allan, away in Prague for a family funeral, who e-mailed, “From the fourth inning on I followed every pitch on the Internet. It is now getting on for 6 a.m., but I am the happiest fan in the Western world.”
Angell's citation of "the beautiful, complex silences of the game" is proof, as if any is needed, not only of Angell's ability to reach deep into your heart by assembling letters on a page, but his full understanding of his subject. The game, if we can ever peel away the sideshow again, is a soundtrack of beautiful silence.
I was thinking about this the other day when trying to fix some of MPR's old NewsCut posts (a server change wiped out all of the images on 12 years of my work) and was reminded of Reggie Deal.
Years ago, Deal, who is blind, was on a mission to visit every Major League ballpark. He could tell what was happening by listening to the ball and bat and the crowd. And the silence, sometimes.
For an aging Indians fan, 2016 was the closest one will come to knowing the feeling of winning a World Series. The Indians held a 3-games-to-1 lead over the Chicago Cubs in the World Series, proceding to lose three straight to the Cubs.
Photo: Evan Frost/MPR News
That made 2017 a year of desperation, and the loss to the Yankees as heartbreaking as the World Series, for we all knew a window had slammed shut.
I don't know if Angell recognized it too, but he recognized heartbreak among the Indians fans in that article, insisting that compassion seemed appropriate, even when no one else did.
Today would have been opening day at Target Field. My plan was to work the game, then fly tomorrow to my hometown for my mother's funeral on Saturday, flying back on Sunday so I could be back at the park when the Twins opened a series against the Indians.
None of that, just as the notion of the Indians winning the series in my lifetime, was meant to be.
So we wait for better times -- and baseball -- in silence.
Back when I used to be allowed on the radio to explain why public radio was worth your dime as much as your time, I talked too much about an era that had seemingly passed long before: the shared experience of a community listening to someone on the radio.
Most of us oldtimers in the business owe our careers to the person who spoke to us from the radio. For me it was Dave Maynard, Carl DeSuze, Gary Lapierre, Gil Santos, Larry Glick, and a handful of others on the once legendary WBZ in Boston, a station that the despicable iHeart Media has only recently turned into a repeater frequency, the better to hike profits and the corporate stock price, the community be damned.
Fifty-two years later, I have less an image of Bobby Kennedy lying on a hotel kitchen floor bleeding out, than I do a host on the radio telling me he was dead. Me and thousands of others sharing a moment together, a single voice separating us from our despair.
There was room for my 1,000 watt local station, too, which played the daily countdown of hits each evening. Whatever would be #1, we'd all be hearing it together.
Radio was America's glue, and I wanted a piece of it.
During the '80s and beyond, the corporate interests and listener wanderlust left that radio behind, mostly. Satellites and iPods, then the streaming internet, combined with "consultants" -- spit -- who told the people on the radio to shut up and play the music. How, we wondered, could we ever compete with a small device on which someone's entire music library was stored?
Here, have some more Freebird.
Local radio became the land of broken toys, cast into a corner, too old to play with, but still too close to our hearts to completely throw away for good.
And now here we are, shut into our homes for who knows how long, ordered to stay apart, longing for what humans desperately need more than toilet paper itself: human contact.
Each day we wake up to a startling revelation that we are in this alone. A grandchild born today, for example, cannot meet or be held by a grandparent for maybe another year. The loneliness is a wolf nearing the front door. You feel it. I know you do.
Enter the heroes.
Dave and Carl and Gil and Larry are gone from my life. But now I have Mary, and Jill, and Jade, and John, and Cathy and on the names go, through the employee roster -- for now, anyway -- of Minnesota Public Radio's Current and Local News Service.
And we're discovering -- or rediscovering -- the glue, holding us together.
All of the nation's local radio stations are somehow staying on the air in an abiding belief that you're important, with employees often in their own homes, unlinked from each other while linkng us. All of them mindful of the most important words on a radio broadcast license, operating in the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.”
On the news side, the necessity is obvious: the news.
On The Current, the necessity is reminding us that they are there... talking with us.
My friend Mary has always been particularly good at this since the day she convinced a program director to give her a shot.
Let's consider for a moment, her Listen to Looch segment from last August.
I start realizing we live in a world where a lot of people think that everything should be made for them. And that blows my mind. I love living in a world where everything is not for everyone. It makes it a lot more interesting. And anyone walking around with the expectation that, "Hey, this is all gonna be how I like it and how I think and how I —" you're in for like, a complete sh*t ride, you know? It's like once you accept, "No — I can learn something from someone who really does think different things than me" and I realize how impossible that's almost become on social media so, each day I walk in to do my job and put together four hours of music that I think are gonna touch on everything: emotions, thinking — everything.
That, if you didn't realize it, is a person sharing herself with you. That is personality. That is being vulnerable. That is the essence of being connected to someone else.
That's radio.
The irony of The Current and the Regional News channel once again emerging as a significant means of holding us together, is it comes amid a heightened disinterest by American Public Media management in local broadcasting. The Current has always been the poor stepchild of MPR. The local newsroom has been beset in recent years with budget cutbacks as money was redeployed to bigshot operations in California, projects that will earn it national attention and money, or podcasts, which, for the record, are worthy endeavors but have little ability to connect us to one another through a simultaneously shared experience.
We will grow lonelier still, but for the work of our heroes, who, also for the record, need us too.
It's a dark building now, with most people sent home.
It would be too easy to just shut up and play the music.
A studio is just you, a microphone, and the assumption that there are people out there who need to hear your voice, who need to share you with thousands of others.
But there is a need to share ourselves with each other, too.
"Oddly enough it's made this job feel important to me," Mary told me yesterday in a Facebook message.
We're out here. Listening. Loving you all. Loving each other.
Perhaps this is a condition of the aged, but I suspect people of a certain age tend to struggle trying to mute an inner voice when reading column's like Patrick Reusse's tribute to a sportswriter in Sunday's Star Tribune. The voice that asks, "when I'm gone, will anyone remember that I was here?"
I thought of Joe Resnick, a sportswriter who resigned himself to dying alone when he got cancer in 2016. He didn't think he was a big enough deal that people should notice.
People noticed.
I heard from friends from college who I hadn't heard from in 43 years. One -- our mutual best friend back in the day -- called Joe to read him the column.
About a week later, Joe died, leaving behind a world that still remembers him.
(Originally published November 11, 2016)
I haven't seen this guy since 1976, the day we graduated from Emerson College in Boston.
He's Joe Resnick, a kid from Brooklyn and, like most of us who palled around together at Emerson, he wanted to be a broadcaster or sportswriter and a fair number of us went on to do just that.
It was a relatively small crew of would-be journalists who were big sports fans at the school. We played Strat-O-Matic, went to Red Sox games at Fenway Park and played street hockey in the dorm or apartment -- Joe was a New York Rangers fan, as I recall, for it seemed he always had a Rangers jersey on , before wearing hockey jerseys was cool -- and we practiced our writing and learned not to be afraid of microphones and which camera to look into at a campus radio station or TV station that nobody watched or listened to, and eventually we graduated and went our separate ways.
Some of us kept in touch; some of us didn't. There was a future to get on with. There'd always be time for the past some other time in the future.
I'd heard over the years that Joe went off to the Associated Press and was writing about sports.
I'm at the time of my life where, more often than not, I learn what happened to some of those old classmates when I hear that they've died or are dying.
Joe, who became a bigshot in the sports writing world as a freelancer, is dying.
I learned whatever happened to him in a wonderful tribute to him today in the Los Angeles Times, which noted that millions of you have read his words, but few recognized him. His byline rarely appeared, another reason why a lot of people never knew whatever happened to him.
He's got Stage IV colon cancer now and when I read the story in the Times and looked at the picture, I had no idea I was looking at that Joe Resnick -- my Joe Resnick.
Until I looked at his eyes. When the rest of us withers, our eyes always stay the same. Joe's eyes always had a sadness to them with just the right amount of mischief.
He stopped showing up at the ballpark and he resigned himself to die alone in his apartment, apparently believing that people had forgotten him. He'd lost 100 pounds. He was too weak to answer the door when some people stopped by, Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke writes today. It was a small group of sportswriters, photographers, and other journalists.
They learned he was crushed by medical bills, and so they set up a GoFundMe page to help.
The anonymous sportswriter thought nobody was watching, but it turns out everybody was watching, admiring his work ethic, marveling at his persistence. The man with no byline had indelibly etched his name in the minds of those who watched him carve a lifetime out of simply showing up and doing his job.
The fund’s goal was $20,000 and it reached that figure in a few days, with contributions from sports executives to players to countless journalists. Donations ranged from $10 to $1,000. Love showed up in everything from personal calls from Vin Scully and Mike Scioscia and a voicemail from Doc Rivers, to countless texts from other sports figures. The fund is now at $22,250 and growing.
“He was taken aback, he had no idea people cared so much about him,” said Shepler. “He would go through the list of contributors every day not to see the money, but to see the names, he couldn’t believe so many people remembered.”
Dilbeck and Times staffer Dylan Hernandez came up with the idea of giving Resnick the BBWAA’s annual Bob Hunter Award for meritorious coverage even though he wasn’t a member. Within hours, the 50-person membership approved the honor. Within days, the plaque was engraved, and last week, 11 of Resnick’s friends surprised him with an impromptu ceremony around the hospital bed in the middle of his living room, where he is receiving hospice care.
The moment Resnick saw the plaque he began weeping. He held the thick wood memento close to his face and kissed it. He then pulled out an official BBWAA cap and jacket he had been saving all of his professional life, maybe just for this moment.
“Today is the first day I belong,” he whispered.
He began crying again, and soon everyone around him was red-eyed with the reminder that things many take for granted — a sense of permanence, a sense of place — were gifts to be honored and cherished. In opening eyes and hearts to these truths during his three decades in the shadows, the anonymous sportswriter had actually been writing the story of his career.
“This is the best day of my life,” Joe Resnick whispered, solitary no more, remembered forever.
Every office has a Joe Resnick, Plaschke writes.
"He’s the part-timer who shows up for work in an isolated corner desk every day, occasionally gruff, sometimes grumpy, but always there. He arrives earlier than the boss who barely knows him, stays later than the summer interns who are paid more, has statistics on everything and everybody. He’s the employee everyone actually thinks is full time until he admits he doesn't have insurance," he said.
He's the guy we let slip into the past and wonder whatever became of. He's the guy who makes us ashamed that we'd failed to be the friends we said we were.
He's the guy who reminds us that we can always be better people than we presently think we are.
My Dad didn't talk too much about his past, a feature that may well have something to do with the fact I don't know that I ever asked.
Since my mom's death a little more than a week ago, I've vowed not to leave a pile of junk for my family to pore through.
Things that seem important at the time they were squirreled away, aren't really that important. Did I really need a dozen or so annual Oshkosh AirVenture official programs? I think not. So out they go.
I do recall, however, an anecdote about famed Berkshire congressman Silvio Conte, who died back in 1991 (aside: he came to our wedding). Upon cleaning out his sizeable desk in Washington -- he was ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee -- they found an entire drawer filled with nothing but drawings and notes from his children and grandchildren, archived through his 32 years in Congress.
That seemed like a nice thing for people to find -- proof that they mattered.
In my den, the bottom drawer of my file cabinet is filled with drawings and notes from my children. Don't tell them; let it be a surprise in the not terribly distant future.
Over the past few years, my mother has sent back to me, things that she either saved during my childhood, or things I sent her during my adulthood. Most of them don't matter much to me. But they mattered to her and this was her way of saying these things mattered to her. This is the language the Collins clan speaks, what with sons not asking questions when they had the chance and all.
In the process of throwing stuff out today, I came across The Book of Myself, which I believe Carolie and I gave to my father one year for his birthday, to encourage him to tell his story.
My dad was big on diaries and documenting his day.
This book, however, asked a question on each page, the totality of which would be the Book of Himself if the person answered the question in the blank space provided.
My dad was not a big fan of following instructions, however.
On the page titled "One of my dad's strongest traits was..." he wrote:
"Transplated 30 boxes including Rutgers-Marglobe Tomatoes plus butternut squash. Repaired gas leak in greenhouse. Eileen went to Spags today."
"May 5, 1997," he added so that we would never forget the great butternut squash planting of 1997 in my family.
On a page on which he was to answer the question, "The Best Part About Marriage Is...", he reported that it was Monday January 3, 2000 and that it was "unusually warm outside" and that the person who had been renting my grandmother's trailer had brought him $375 for the rent. In cash.
Nothing says lifelong romance like some greenbacks you don't have to report to the IRS.
It's the most Greatest Generation diary in the history of the Greatest Generation.
Anyway, I was cleaning out a book case, denying my children and future heirs the chance to read about what was to happen at the 2009 Oshkosh Airventure, when I found these two pieces of paper tucked in the book.
My father's life. Or at least his childhood.
(You can click on the images and get a bigger version)
My father, you can probably tell, wasn't much of a storyteller. I don't know when this was written, but clearly it was a time when he wanted his story to be known, if not then, at some future date, perhaps. Now, for example.
As we clean out my mother and father's house for a last time, I'll be digitizing all the documents and photographs for whomever in the future might want them. Better, I suppose, than piles of shoeboxes and old albums.
I've got a few of those with my story, too, though one of my retirement projects is to get those reduced to the digital form.
I've lamented for years that my former employer ignored 20 years of my calls for its digital archive to be preserved before it fell to dust with web site redesigns and changing technology that made it valueless. The last dozen years of my life is tucked in there too with a blog whose archived future remains somewhat cloudy.
Then there's this blog too, which, of course, Google could decide to terminate at any time.
We are told that younger people today don't want any of their parents' -- or grandparents' -- stuff. The technology that allows us to capture every 7 seconds of our lives, is also the technology that makes it easier to delete it all.
History vanishes at an ever-quickening pace, making it harder for the future to know that we were once here.
When my kids were very young, they were subjected , over their strong objection, to the wanderlust of their father, who likes to find out where roads lead. These came to be known as "Dad's Dumb Detours", but it wasn't until 2005, when my mother was visiting a year after my father died, that I realized the source of this curiosity.
"I wonder where that road goes?" I said to her as we pulled out of a parking spot overlooking the Mississippi River in Hastings.
Nobody ever wondered what my dad saw in his wife. She was drop-dead gorgeous start to finish
In that same visit, we hit on many of her "loves". She loved going to the horse races. Her own father, who left her mother when she was young, lived a life of harness driving, horses, and hay.
Picking the ponies
Mom wasn't much for handicapping. She bet a horse if it had a nice name and usually came up empty. In her trip to Canterbury Downs, however, she did OK.
Displaying our winnings
Years later, I asked her what she wanted for Mother's Day. Growing up, all the siblings knew what was coming.
"I want good kids," she said.
"What else?" we'd plead, looking for a more realistic alternative.
She got her wish, although it took some time.
But that wasn't the answer I got the last time I asked the question. "I want to go to the horse races," she said. So we did. One of the last visits anyone made to Suffolk Downs.
She had dreams, she revealed while we flew a Piper Warrior over Sleepy Eye, Minn., that year. She said she always wanted to be like Amelia Earhart.
"Fly the plane, Amelia," I said as I took a picture of that moment.
A Piper Warrior is not easy for an 83 year old woman to enter. By then, it was too high a step for her to reach. But she wanted to fly with her son, so she backed herself into the wing and rolled herself up the wing and into the lone door of the aircraft.
We ended up landing at a small and quiet airport in Fairmont, Minn., where we sat on a bench surrounded by cornfields, snacking on crackers we found inside along with a refrigerator full of soda. A lone tractor in the distance was the only sound as she said the scene reminded her of growing up in Mt. Gilead in central Ohio. She seemed the happiest I'd seen her in years. Though she'd spent most of her life in New England, her inner child was at home on the prairie.
She never became Amelia Earhart, of course.
She graduated from high school -- Gold "F", which was a perfect 4.0 GPA at Fitchburg High School -- became a hairdresser and during World War II, met a man from Ashtabula, Ohio while at a dance at Whalom Park. He was stationed at Fort Devens before heading to England, where he was a medic at a B-17 base.
At their 60th anniversary in 2002, in lieu of a toast, I -- being a radio news talk show type -- interviewed them at the luncheon in their honor instead.
"What was the first thing he said to you at the dance?" I asked. But she would not answer.
Interviewing Mom and Dad at their 60th anniversary celebration (2002)
It was not until a few years ago when she called me one afternoon and explained why she couldn't answer the question in front of a restaurant full of people.
"He said to me, 'I can't dance with you; you're married," she said.
I didn't pursue it but she obviously wanted to get that off her chest. But, really, it was none of my business and I never mentioned it again, although I did recall at the time that when I called her to tell her in 1980 that my then-wife and I were divorcing, she revealed that she had been divorced too.
Arriving at 95th birthday celebration (2017)
These things have a way of working out. She and my dad were married for 62 years. When he died, we kids got to see the love letters he sent her constantly from England, where he documented his desire only to return to his bride.
He applied for the Officer Candidate School, not because he wanted to be an officer, but because he could return to the States and be with her. On November 22, 1943, he was notified that he made it into the program and would be coming home.
He never did become an officer, though he moved from base to base and she, of course, followed. She made hose clamps for bombers and fighter planes in a factory in Rockford, Illinois and was proud of the fact she made pretty good money doing it. They lived in New Jersey and New York for a time during the war and always remarked that the people of New York couldn't do enough for people in the service.
When I moved to New York in the '80s, I felt better about the city because of that.
A wartime letter. Click to enlarge
In her later years, she read all of her husband's wartime letters. Then, a few days later, would start reading them again.
She kept one other letter nearby. The one from his mother, pleading with him not to marry her, and citing whatever flaws she felt didn't meet her standards.
The love in those letters isn't something kids would typically recognize in parents; that's just the nature of things.
But I saw it in 2003, when she and my dad visited us for what turned out to be the last time together. Dad was pretty much blind and couldn't walk very well.
I emerged from my room and stumbled on them in the living room; he in the rocking chair, she on her knees tying his shoes.
Between the two of them, they provided a childhood that was perfect in so many ways. She got up early to take her youngest kid to hockey practice, and drove her daughter from one county fair to another in the summer, taught her kids to live on their own, and -- as a friend of mine described it -- "sat shotgun" for them all until the day she died.
Watching the Mississippi River go by in Red Wing 2005
She raised her kids and managed her home while working as a hairdresser in a shop dad built in the basement. She could garden with the greats and keep a grudge for years over a perceived sleight in the gladiola judging at the Lunenburg Grange Fair. She could play the piano even though her husband -- for reasons never fully explained -- painted it pink one year. She could live with the pain of burying her husband, her oldest son, and a granddaughter, and put a foot in front of the other, because "what else can I do?"
She loved the ocean and, in particular, a small trailer on a spit of land on Plum Island in Newburyport in which, somehow, a couple and their five children lived until being turned loose to explore each morning.
Twin sons, the last of the brood, did not stop mom from enjoying the beach
The trailer, beachfront property by then, was extorted from them by the brother of the local police chief who vandalized it until they sold it for $5,000, eventually giving each of the kids $1,000. I used it to buy my first car.
The multi-million dollar home that went up in the trailer's place, still stands.
In September 2016, she wanted to go to the beach one more time, so I took her back to the Parker River Wildlife Refuge (one of her favorite spots which we referred to as kids as "the other end of the island"), she couldn't walk well but we made our way up the boardwalk and there we sat for a half hour, looking out at a glorious past. (longer version here)
Before leaving the island, we stopped one more time to look at the spot where the trailer was. If she was bitter about it, she didn't let on.
Mom wanted to die in her house and got her wish. She was still in control of her faculties enough to be disgusted by the Boston Red Sox and worried about who would rake her leaves, and still winning at Rummikub, mostly because her visitors had been warned about the perils of beating her at any game.
Her father had helped build her home for her by taking down a piece of the barn. She and her husband lived there for 62 years, she raised her family there, and there was never a more stubborn Yankee than Eileen Collins. She was not going to leave that home.
And so her children did everything they could to keep her there against the advice of others, and, I hear, the scorn of a few. But she had more than earned the right to stay.
For Ruth Eileen Collins, the most inviting road was always the one that led her home.
As my mother in law's Alzheimer's progressed in the last few years, I never quite resolved a nagging question as the neurons continued to go silent, taking not only memories with them, but the filters that mask a side of people we may not have previously seen: Am I seeing what is part of a person or just the symptoms of an illness?
Oralie Thurston was as proper a Yankee as New England ever produced, a kind and thoughtful woman whose partnership with her husband, Don, set a standard in faithfulness and love; a woman who loved her church before it closed, wrote an endless convoy of notes and letters to friends and loved ones, and volunteered at the local hospital so a little less horribleness could infiltrate the lives of people in her northern Berkshire County on their terrible days. She was generous and kind and if you didn't know any better, you might think her a bit of a pushover.
When she had a dinner-time dispute with another guest at her first memory care facility last year, banged her cane on the table and shouted, "do you want a piece of this?" it might well have been the Alzheimer's doing the talking. Or it might have been an important glimpse into a hidden reality: Oralie Thurston, who died from the disease on Wednesday September 18, 2019 a little after 12 noon, was Yankee Tough.
Oralie was one of the few passengers who wasn't nervous when she went for a ride in my just completed airplane. She had, she revealed on the flight, taken many rides in a small airplane of a doctor friend in Vermont.
You didn't want to disappoint Oralie, a daughter of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. A withering glance or other hint of disapproval could make a person wonder if he had an ounce of goodness himself.
Walking into the hospital room in White Plains the day after Sean was born in 1985.
I knew that before I ever met her because I already knew her daughter, whom I met in the late '70s at WBEC in Pittsfield, where I was a news guy, and she wasn't. The story goes that at first we didn't like each other that much but, truth be told, that's not entirely correct.
Because she didn't have 40 hours in being an "FM disc jockey" (back then, being such a thing was the epitome of "cool"), the bosses made her help out in the newsroom, where she became the first of dozens -- hundreds, really -- of people in the radio business to experience my ability to be a dickhead, at least where news is concerned. And yet, she persisted.
We were a close group, those night people at the station, and we had our minimum wage fun. I'd sit in her studio from time to time to chat with her during her long album sets, and awhile after my then wife (the "marital mulligan" I call her) decided to have an affair with her boss and announce my role was no longer needed, we became a couple.
Oralie Lane and Donald Thurston
I'm not sure Carolie, who by then was working at a radio station in Middletown, Conn., ever told her mom that when she'd drive up to to visit her in Clarksburg on Saturdays, it was only after spending Friday night at my place in Cheshire, Mass. Oralie wasn't the type to like that sort of thing. Besides, there was another problem: I was divorced, or at least soon to be.
I suspect, whether she acknowledged it or not, this was a significant concern for Oralie when it was finally revealed that Carolie was dating a divorced guy she hadn't yet met. But as the story goes, when Carolie tells it anyway, one evening during conversation about it, Oralie said, "you love him?"
And when Carolie said "yes", that was that. She trusted her -- as much as a mother is allowed to trust the romantic adventures of a daughter.
I don't remember the first time I met Oralie or the equally friendly, if intimidating, Don. But I know I was met at the door of their home by welcoming smiles. It was always that way at the Thurstons. They met you at the door. They smiled and hugged and embraced you as if you were their own until one day, you were if you weren't already.
During any holiday, she set a place at her table for the elderly and lonely.
When you left, Oralie would stand in the driveway and wave. And God help you if didn't wave back. When the kids were born, a vanload of Collinses waved until we were down the road and out of sight just in case she was still watching.
The years were good to Oralie and her family until they weren't late in life. Don had Parkinson's and died in 2009. Oralie's memory started to go some years later and she moved into an assisted living facility in Williamstown, Mass., which was good enough until last year when she needed more of a daughter's attention, which her daughter courageously and unfailingly provided because Carolie Thurston Collins carries the strength and love gene of her mom.
Carolie got Thanksgiving with her, then Christmas, then Easter, then a last Mother's Day.
There was grace in the dying light. So much grace.
When death was imminent in the last few days, Carolie stroked her mom's forehead, played Moonlight in Vermont on the CD player, and waited. Nearly 10 days passed.
"She's getting her energy from somewhere," the nurse said.
On Wednesday afternoon, according to Carolie, Oralie, who abhored silence in a room, opened her eyes wide, scanned the ceiling, took a deep breath and was gone. Whatever she was seeing in her last moments from a dimension she made better in her 92 years living in it, she wanted a piece of it.
Nurses, aides, and managers at Woodbury Senior Living, and nurses from St. Croix Hospice stopped by to see her one last time. I wished they could have known her before her disease, I occasionally mentioned, but it was clear that, by whatever way comes with their expertise and insight in their chosen paths of helping people with Alzheimer's pass from this life, they did.
"Thank you for sharing her with us," they said in a way that wasn't rehearsed, but seemed to come from a place that was very much in the spirit with which Oralie lived and loved: with a whole heart unleashed.
When the funeral home came to take her away, the staff paused in the lobby to honor and mourn her.
When the van drove away, we waved. Just in case she was still watching.
I drive Lyft and I'm not exactly sure why. Sure, I need about $400 a month to pay for my Medicare coverage, which is pretty important because I'm not drawing any Social Security until at least next May, when I reach my Social Security full retirement age.
But I like stories and watching the human condition, and while I think MPR pretty much beat the enjoyment of writing out of me, I like these stories now in their anecdotal form -- the form where I don't have to do much work to tell them; the form where they are a mere springboard to bigger, occasionally deeper thoughts.
I didn't have any Minnesota Twins games to work last week or this, so I needed to get out yesterday and drive a little bit to make a few bucks, and two rides served as bookends to reach this big and deep thought: people need to grow up a little when it comes to relationships.
This is a pretty easy conclusion to reach even if strangers weren't hopping in the car. I'm watching my wife watch her mother die. The other afternoon, I watched her stroke her mom's forehead as she tried to get her to rest, and have a few minutes when she wasn't saying "help me."
It's hard to take anything else particularly seriously in those moments or for days afterward, which is probably why I have so little patience for the drama we insist on putting ourselves through with one another.
Like the woman I picked up at a hotel in Plymouth, for example, who didn't have time for niceties like "hello" when she hopped in. She was in the middle of a conversation with whomever she was trying to salvage a relationship with.
I only heard one half of the conversation, which lasted the entire 15 minute trip with few details other than she she cited a litany of grievances -- some real, some imagined, perhaps. She alighted with nary a "thank you" as she was still issuing her demands upon her exit.
Hours later, I swung by a park-and-ride lot for the State Fair shuttle buses to pick up a young man who had nothing to say when he got in the car.
"30th Avenue?" I had to repeat several times at increasing decibels before he pulled the earbuds out.
"30th Avenue?" I repeated.
"Yep," he said, reinstalling the plugs so that he could continue the conversation he, too, was having with someone with whom he was having a relationship.
His complaint was that the person at the other hand end of the line always talked about something with which he had no interest. He found that disrespectful of what he cared about, whatever that was, but I'm going to guess what he cared about most was himself. It was hard to tell whether he was ending his relationship or still saw embers of hope in it.
I never learned what it was he/she talked about too much but I did learn that it "didn't turn him on" and "there's much more to life" than whatever he had to listen to too much.
He/she must have said that he never said he loved him or her.
"My love is my actions, not my words," he said as we drove in the midnight darkness over the Lake Street bridge toward the destination that must not be named. He explained that all of his life -- I'm guessing 24 years or so -- people have told him one thing and done another, and let him down, so he was done with the meaning of words. He was telling her that her words meant nothing.
I was thankful for the darkness, which prevented him from seeing my rolling eyes.
I wanted to grab the phone and tell the secret caller that he/she should run, not walk, from this guy.
I wanted to tell my rider that my mother in law is dying, that my wife of 37 years strokes her forehead to ease her way into another place that may or may not exist, not that it really matters because life is the right now and the way we give of ourselves to people we love, asking nothing in return but the privilege of being in the presence of such love.
The young man who may never experience such moments was still issuing his own demands as he alighted.
Bob worked for Minnesota Public Radio for 27 years, until his retirement in 2019. He now lives to give baseballs to kids as an usher at Target Field, works on an airplane he is building, and a camper he bought for Oshkosh.
