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Morta Sotto Il Carro

Maybe she slipped and fell. Or maybe, in the early evening, just around sunset, she just didn’t see it coming. You know, little kids are always running around, playing, especially in groups. A group of children playing in a city street. Nothing unusual about that. Maybe tag. Maybe something else. It’s not as if it mattered. You can imagine, in your minds eye, a squealing group of little people tearing around a corner, maybe behind a parked wagon or something, yelling their heads off, not paying much attention other than to the moment. Kids are like that. In the moment. It’s not as if they have much else to think about–assuming they were a little lucky. Their awareness is is, not so much reflection. It’s why most of us remember being kids with some fondness. All we had to do was be a kid, and, especially in those days, there were no rules.

I imagine this little group of wild people was shouting in some amusing mixture of English and Italian. Some of them had been born over there. Some here. They probably all spoke Italian, somehow mutually intelligible, especially if their parents came from the South. Dialect you know, and barely comprehensible to us now. “Vieni qui!” Get over here! That much we would have understood. It is the categorical imperative of childhood. Works in church, school, at home, or playing. Anywhere a few were gathered. Laughter and love. And energy. Lots of it. Like small car, big engines.

Anyway, one of those kids was named Concetta Delia. She was eight years old (or maybe six, or maybe five), or so the newspaper said. And she would forever be. She, Concetta, was of another time. The Great War had not yet begun, so she was still part of the nineteenth century. Literally. Italy was still ruled by a King, Victor Emmanuel III. Italy, the nation-state, was barely half a century old. If Concetta knew anything about this stuff, she was in one of those odd moments when Kings and Presidents (and the occasional Emperor) decided the fate of some abstract nation, while little kids, as usual, played in the streets. But, now, increasingly city streets, which too were also an artifact of two centuries: a country lane meeting paving for the first time. A place for horses and manure now yielding quickly to automobiles, “power wagons” and grease stains. It happened slowly and then all at once. The race into the contemporary world had begun. And it claimed its casualties, as any race would. Concetta Delia was one of them.

Concetta’s parents were Pietro and Maddalena, then in their early thirties. I have no photos of them. I wish I did. They were my maternal great grandparents. I was fortunate to know them as an elderly couple when my Grandmother, Francis Villari, would take me to visit them at 809 Cross Street, “down the house,” as we always said, in South Philly.They were always very sweet to me–I was about 5 or 6 years old. Little did I know that Francis, my Grandmom, had a little sister, Concetta because, very confusingly, there was in the 1950s another Concetta, the only one I ever knew. She too was my Grandmom’s younger sister. There were two Concettas: one survived childhood. The other did not. Until this year, I had absolutely no idea. It’s funny. Italian families are inveterate talkers–communicative as songbirds–but they hide their secrets well. I learned that lesson as a kid. When to talk, and when to shut up. I don’t think I ever learned it well enough, but I got the idea. Some stuff you didn’t talk about. Concetta was obviously one of the things you never talked about. Never tell anyone outside the family, that sort of thing…….

It’s funny, you know. Because my Grandmother, Frances Villari, did sometimes let drop details about her childhood. I remember her telling me she had had scarlet fever. And I’m pretty sure she mentioned typhoid too. In Philly, that would have been during an outbreak in 1911 when the city’s water got polluted by a broken main in a pumping station and the city drew on the Schuylkill River, in which, upstream, God only knew what you toxic waste you got. Not for nothing did we call Philly Water “Schuylkill Punch” when I was a kid. . Anyway, Grandmom told me about this stuff, but of a dead little sister. Nothing. Maybe because I was just a little kid myself, and she didn’t want to frighten me. Hell, I was then no older than Concetta had been.

Concetta Delia

Article from May 9, 1914 Harrisburg Daily Independent (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) <!— –>
https://www.newspapers.com/nextstatic/embed.js

And if that wouldn’t frighten the Hell out of a little kid, what would. Especially one who had a trolley line running in front his West Philly home. Trolleys, albeit horse drawn, had been in that area since the 1870. In South Philly,electrified street cars had come in by the late 1890s. My guess is that they still probably looked something like this, maybe a little smaller.

You have to have some sense of what kind of neighborhood this part of South Philly was. It was sort of at the southern fringe of civilization. That doesn’t mean it was bad, but it was not exactly Parkside either. If you went about 3 miles South of 8th and Kimball, you would have hit an undeveloped part of the city known as The Neck. It was marshy, kind of ramshackle and home to Philadelphia’s resident colony of pig farmers, who made a living supplying the city’s 9th Street market with pork producer, including offal. It was not exactly a source of civic pride, even in 1914. It had the reputation as a place you went and got your ass kicked. So I’d guess Concetta lived in a place which was the bottom of the ladder of upward mobility for Italian immigrants, which her sister Frances certainly saw in her lifetime. Suburban Penfield, where Frances died at 94, was another world from pig farmers and The Neck. So these guys were one step up from The Neck. They were lucky to be there. Remember, they left Italy behind.

The Neck, a somewhat optimistic view

10th and Kimball, looking East. No, it isn’t a Hopper painting, but you see where he got the inspiration

Since the accident virtually happened on their doorstep, they would have known immediately. Probably a banging on the door, followed by screaming and shouting, in Italian, the neighbors. I can imagine Maddalena and Pietro running out into the street. And oh Lord, what did they see, Their child, Concetta, beneath the wheels of a trolley. It is almost obscene to try to imagine with a gathering crowd, people shouting, the driver frantic, my Great Grandmother and Grandfather in some frozen state of hysteria and shock. What do you do? I’m sure the trolley driver was petrified and would not move the car, because, as the story says, they called for a jack to raise the car off Concetta. God only knows how long it took for the jack to get there, to raise the car, and to extract the child’s lifeless, broken body. She was taken to Pennsylvania Hospital, at 8th and Spruce. That’s less than a mile, but it must have seemed like another planet. My guess is by motorized ambulance, but, really who knows? It could have been horse and wagon. My Lord, they may have physically carried her there, frantic. Only God knows now. I imagine the scene in different ways, each progressively more ghastly. Concetta was pronounced dead at Pennsylvania Hospital.

And now, I know almost nothing more. What I do know, from looking at the parish death register, is that little children died this way. Another three year old in February (1915?) “morto sotto un carro di transporto all’Ospedale Pennsylvania.” (dead under a transport cart, Pennsylvania Hospital) You can imagine the WASP doctors’ heads shaking. Why don’t they watch their children more carefully? Italians. What can you expect? You can fill in the mental blanks. They never change, do they? What can you expect from immigrants?

So a million questions run through my mind? Did anyone sleep for days after? Was there any kind of wake (did that even figure in death rituals in Italy then)? When was the funeral mass? There must have been one, no? How on Earth did they pay for it? How did they get the little girl to Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon? As the crow flies, it must be 6 or 7 miles, but you’d have to get across the Schuylkill River–in 1914, how or where where? There were ferries, true enough, and at least one bridge, but that was to West Philadelphia. Was there a procession, which even then was a tradition among Italians in America? Who bought the grave? Was there some kind of mutual aid among Immigrants there? You can see what Baldi Funeral Home looked like in 1908. I can’t imagine the child got that treatment, you know? High-end Edwardian. Probably a little more like the photo at the very bottom. How did they get out to Yeadon to visit the grave, because they must have. You know, Italians are not allergic to graves. How long did they mourn? She died on May 8 and was buried on May 11, which seems remarkably hurried. Or maybe it wasn’t.

My God, I know nothing about my own people. I don’t even know if I am asking sensible questions. I do know I have been thinking about this almost since I first ran across it. The story haunts me. My ignorance haunts me. The world as it was before I was haunts me. Draw your own conclusions. Who am I?

And speaking of haunting, the Delia ultimately moved to 913 Cross Street (https://thisgameisovercom.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=1090&action=edit), again, nearby, less than a mile walking today. It was a bigger house and the family was growing. Another daughter, born in 1917, was again named Concetta, whom I knew as my Aunt Connie. And I am told by a church archivist in Philadelphia, Elissa Torre-Lewis, who has been of great help to me, that the practice of preserving the name this way was not uncommon. Another cousin, a Delia, told me she heard stories that Concetta lived upstairs on Cross Street, and occasionally came down to the first floor to make her ghostly presence known.

I never did see the second floor of that house in all the time I went down to South Philly to visit. Not once. Now I know why. But the next time I get out to Holy Cross, I’m going to find Concetta and leave a flower. Because I now know where she resides. In aeternum, amen.

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Qvam Pinus, Father

No. That’s not what you think it means, if you think it means anything at all. And this otherwise adolescent recollection has a serious point, especially with the way political life in the United States is evolving. I suppose I’m going to come across as a complete reactionary, but it’s not as if I care any longer. I am in the process of accepting my fate.

You must remember that the events I am recounting stretch back to the Dark Ages, AD (ok, CE if you feel better) 1967 or so. They involve the sensibilities and humor of adolescent males at an exclusively male Catholic school. In case you haven’t guessed, sensibilities change. While I still find some of this deeply amusing, you had to be there, I suppose. And the point I want to make is, again, serious. You may disagree. That is your privilege.

I had started one of these “bare, ruined choirs” things, but dropped it. I figures no one really cares what happened to the Church I grew up in unless they are at least 70, and maybe 80. And even then, I don’t know many who actually care. So instead I will simply say that love of the Latin language, amor linguae latinae, has been one of the apparent casualties. Oh, yeah. There are some schools where it is still taught–I insisted my son study Latin in high school, which I am sure did a great deal for male bonding, especially when some of his friends insisted on telling him it was “a dead language.” That is not only facile, but incorrect, as any educated person knows. The common figure is that 60 percent of words in English are derived from a Latin root by borrowing, if not direct descent. Which explains why we tended to crush the English SATs back then in a way that the publics (US version) did not. Their loss. And that is trivial. But education is in a bad way in USAmerica, so to Hell with it.

I would have studied Latin no matter where I went to high school, cause my Mother wasn’t about to see me run wild with the heathen (not to mention heathen women) at Lower Merion HS. So it was Catholic one way or another. And in those days, that pretty much meant Latin. The only questions I think was how much and at what level.

Now may Dad, God rest his soul, graduated from West Catholic High School in Philly in 1937. That was no some fancy ass place, and he had his Latin war stories for me. His favorite was “E et noli reddire.” This was to put me in my place when failing to translate “Go and do not return” satisfactorily, as he once did. Yes, imperatives, negative imperative, weird irregular verb form, all that stuff. I’m sure he never said that to anyone flying a B-17 in 1941, but it was what it was. I remembered how obnoxious quoting Latin could be when Robert Oppenheimer apparently said to Lewis Strauss before his security clearance hearing, “Nos morituri te salutamus.” which Strauss supposedly didn’t understand. Supposedly the Roman gladiators addressed the Emperor (really, te?) before the fun and games in the Colosseum (artist’s conception, below) If you haven’t read the transcript of the security committee or seen the Sam Waterstone TV series (I haven’t bothered with the recent movie) you’ll have to look it up. Heh. Maybe it’s apocryphal (more Latin). Anyway, Strauss didn’t much like Oppie, and this, if it happened, didn’t improve things.

Latin was the lingua franca of the Pre-Vatican II Council (1962-1965) church and even if you spoke it badly, you were expected to get by on formal occasions. I heard amusing stories about whitebread Philly types getting around in the Belgian Congo in the 1950s by using some Latin with a priest (Habes-ne uxorem? Olim, sed non nunc: roughly, “Are you married. Not any more.”), and I know until quite recently you could still go to Rome and study Latin with an American priest in “boot camp” form (he has since passed on). There is still a Pontifical Academy for Latin (https://www.pontificiaacademialatinitatis.org/) although, hah, hah, its text is in Tuscan (Italian). But in those days, even as the Roman Catholic Church was losing its Roman Imperial soul, you could still expect to do Latin in a Catholic high school. I knew people who did it in college at Villanova, but I opted for Castillian (Spanish) as, perhaps, a shade more practical. Or, as we said, “relevant.” As an Anglo doing Mexican history, “cultural appropriation” is now more fashionable than “relevance.”

So, here we were, fourteen years old for the most part, and beginning our journey in Latin with the Piarist Fathers at Devon Prep. I doubt any of them were trained classicists and we never got the reconstituted Classical Pronunciation. It was, well, ecclesiastical pronunciation, of which which I thought Keewees Romanus Sum (Civis Romanus Sum) was some sort of put on. So, for the real toffs (I didn’t know any Harrovians then, thank God), we weren’t for real. And, to an extent, our first two years were sort of watered down. Oh, we learned the basic grammar and all that, which was quite enough, cause Latin is, like modern German, an inflected language–the form of the word would change with case, number, gender, that sort of thing. And of course the damned adjectives had to agree, so the possibilities for screwing up even basic stuff were numerous. My first sentence: “Livia puella est.” Followed by (I think) “Livia pulchra est.” Ok: Livia is a girl. Livia is a pretty girl. Hey man, it was 1965. What do you expect? This was an all boys’ school and the priests figured they had to hook us one way or another. The life and adventures (chaste) of pulchritidinous Livia beat talking about Roman plumbing. Cause we all were immediately trying to figure out how to hit on Livia. In Latin. Use your imagination and pretend you are a fourteen year old guy. And so it went. Until Year III.

You didn’t have to go on after Second Year, but I think maybe between 5 and 10 of us did. And all of a sudden, Livia the Hot was gone. In her place was some guy named Cicero and another one inauspiciously dubbed Cataline. Very bad news. We had gotten watered down Caesar in our Second year (“Gallia omnia divisa est in partes tres?), but not in the original. All of that suddenly changed.

My first two Latin teachers were Piarist fathers nicknamed Stubby and Dizzy. The nicknames were quite appropriate, Stubby was a Polish priest with an unpronounceable name (to us) who was short, squat, and gentle. I never saw him get angry–and it wasn’t as if he had no provocation from us. I think it was because all of us realized–even the idiots–that he was something special and endearing. His name was Fr Soczowka, Sch. P. He was followed directly Second Year by Dizzy. Stubby, then Dizzy.

Diz, of course, was another matter. He came by his moniker honestly.

He seemed distracted, addled, occasionally made no sense when he spoke, and was kind of crazy. By name, Fr Julius Olszewski, Sch. P. he was generally placid enough other than for his enigmatic sayings (“Make round on 29”–I have no idea) and occasional eruptions when we were screwing around (always) (“I will give you such a kick that your head will turn around and you will never suppose”). He also took great exception to being called Dizzy, which is understandable. We did get as far as De Bello Gallico, at least a watered-down version. It proved useful in providing names of various barbarian tribes into which we divided as teams playing pick-up basketball (I never got beyond the Suevi, who stunk), so there was that. Also, iacta alea est and crossing the Rubicon and, well, that kind of literary thing. No one got hurt and we learned ablative absolute and subjunctive verb forms Besides, we were reading both volumes of Brinton, Christopher and Wolff in two years of Western Civ, so we had some idea of what was going on. Two years. Literally Plato to NATO. I’m still working off some of that from half a century ago. No regrets, by the way. In any event, there was once a jock strap war in his class. Yup. I’ll leave it to your imagination.

Latin II with Diz

In Latin III, the fun came to a halt, for a while at least. First, we got a stone serious teacher. His name was Stanislaus Swiatek, Sch.P. He didn’t screw around. He was genial enough, but nobody messed with him. He was, colloquially, Stan, although no one dared call him that to his face. He was wiry, medium height, curly hair but balding, fingers stained by nicotine, and a raspy smoker’s voice to accompany it. He radiated “no bullshit”, and lots of stories circulated about his exploits in 1956 when he may have eaten a few Russians alive in Hungary. I could–and can–see it. He was a tough central European customer down to the soles of his feet. And then came Cicero and Cataline.

We got a serious text, none of this schola bona est crap. Uh uh.

“Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? Quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia?”

A colloquial modern informal translation of this might be: “Dude. Cataline. How long do you plan to torque us around?” That’s not strictly accurate, of course. “How long will you abuse our patience, Cataline. How long will this madness of yours continue to make fools of us? And to what end will your unbridled arrogance be on display?” That’s a little better, probably not for purists, but you get the idea. Cicero (106-43 BCE), a famous Roman statesman, consul, and source of adolescent nightmares second only to Calculus, was here denouncing his rival, Cataline, whom Cicero claimed was part of a plot to overthrow him as consul. And Cicero (Kickero to the toffs) saw Cataline off, as in put to death. I think that appealed to Stan, cause he grinned wickedly when he worked through the speech with us. And he emphasized (I realized in retrospect), that Cicero was going for the kill by insisting that “nos eludet” should be rendered as “make sport of us”. For a guy whose native language wasn’t English like Stan, that was something, because the root of the Latin verb “eludere” was “ludus” or game. So if you wanted to be coarse about it, there was a sense in which Cicero was accusing Cataline of “screwing around” with a central Roman institution of governance–disrespectfully–, you know, playing cat and mouse with the Roman Senate. I remember venturing (as if it were yesterday) that “mock” would be a better choice. Stan wasn’t having it. “Salvucci. He is brigand (yeah, Stan used that kind of vocabulary and diction).” As if to say, “Kid, you may may mock me, but Cataline was toying with someone well above him. He had it coming.”

See, what you got, even as a dense kid, was some idea of the power of language to shape reality. In a way, to create reality. While your Mother may have crassly seen Latin as a means to a 730 in the English SAT (yeah, our class had an 800, but it DC, not me) you were getting a far more subtle lesson. And, yeah, the idea that a traitor was going to be held responsible for his actions–big time–rubbed off too. You may not have gotten all the details, but slowly, there was an accretion of the notion of responsibility, especially public responsibility. You know: “Salus populii suprema est lex.” The Highest Law is the Good of the People. Oh, yeah. Lessons from a dead language. You think Trump or his henchpeople (there, better?) ever learned them? I doubt it. And then there was subjunctive mood (now largely lost to English), tense sequence, periphrastic, deponent and, mirabile dictu, other horrors. And don’t tell me this stuff didn’t stick. It did. It has

Oh man, you are too serious, as one of my less beloved classmates informed me a few years ago. Yeah, well, that’s life. Some are. And some aren’t. But if you think all it was was Sallust, Livy, Nepos, and Pliny the Elder (and, on my own, with assistance from the Assistant Head, Fr Magyar, or “Wheels” as he was fondly known, for part of senior year, Tacitus, Germania, guess again. This was high school and we were, well, never lost for creative ways of messing around. You had to let off steam somehow, because in those days, it was all steam. A different world, believe me. Everything was punishable by expulsion. And our Head, an austere Hungarian we called “Nose” (guess why), didn’t mess around. And we knew it.

Well, Stan was not in the best of health (he died from heart problems in 1971), and at some point in the year, he was replaced by Father Kalman Miskolczy, Sch.P., a tall, lean, red haired guy with a distinct bump on his forhead which produced the cruel but universally held (even among the lay faculty) nickname, “Ripple.” (Dizzy got similar deference: the then current pop-song saw to that.) There was also a cheap sparkling wine of that name in those days, so I guess that helped, although most of us looked for beer. Oh boy. Ripple was something else, and he was comic relief (inadvertant) to Stan’s intensity.

********

Some of this is hard to explain, and we certainly didn’t sound very serious. But you try reading Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis. If I’m not mistaken, Pliny the Elder met his end investigating the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 73 AD, so he is regarded as a serious classical scholar. The work is one of the largest surviving extant classical texts. In a way, it was a bit odd. Pliny the Younger (his nephew) actually provided extrabiblical evidence for the existence of Christians (and historical existence of Jesus Christ) in his Epistulae (as did Tacitus, Suetonius, and quite a few others) , but I guess the textbook got his uncle, the Elder and the natural history, and so did we. On very rough inspection–now years removed–it looks a little easier to construe than some of the stuff we were doing. But, I mean, having teenage boys reading long passages on Roman flora and fauna, or, for God’s sake, clouds, was almost certain to result in wandering minds. Wandering minds, then, led to mischief. And mischief, with Ripple, usually led to catastrophe.

“Pinaster nihil est aliud quam pinus silvestris minor altitudine et a medio ramosa, sicut pinus in vertice. Copiosiorem dat haec resinam quo dicemus modo. Gignitur et in planis. easdem arbores alio nomine esse per oram Italiae quas tibulos vocant, plerique arbitrantur, sed graciles succinctioresque et enodes liburnicarum ad usus, paene sine resina.”

Ok, I thought I’d take an honest pass at this without looking at a translation to figure out why this particularly passage set off the wildest convulsion (there were several) in Latin III under Ripple. I’m not going to do this literally, but basically, it is a description of a type of pine tree. Y’all remember, The Pines of Rome, and justly celebrated they are. Older Philadelphians may remember that Respighi’s theme was the sign-off music that WFIL-TV used in the 1950s back in Philly, back when television was “a vast wasteland,” unlike now, unending font of cultural metaphors it has become. But that obviously wasn’t what flipped us.

Qvam Pinus!!!

“Pinaster is nothing other than a variety of wild pine, somewhat less bushy than usual in the middle than at the tip top. Let us say, it gives off a copious resin.”

Oh, oh. I’d say use your imagination, but since you’re well beyond juvenile sniggering, I guess I better help out, because I am not well beyond juvenile sniggering. “Pinus”, of course, bears a deadly homonymic resemblance to the English word “penis.” (NOT in Latin, of course). And if you want to start a riot in an all male Catholic school of the 1960s you might think of a discussion of the penis led by a sort of out-of-it-Hungarian who was a figure of fun anyway. Add to that “bushy” (Oh my God) followed by, do you believe it, “copious resin.” Surely, you don’t require any more assistance? Oh man, we were, and I remember this vividly, off to the races.

I can still hear the voice of one of my classmates (initials RH) shouting out, “Aw, father, quam pinus.” And Ripple smilingly obliging with “Yes, qvam pinus!” Followed by another, shouted somewhat more brazen (initials JS), “Hey, Father, heh heh, are you quam pinus?” “Yes, Yes, qvam pinus!” Followed by an explosion of laughter, grinning and shouting of “quam pinus?) directed at each other, inevitably followed by–you knew this was coming–“copious resin.” I do think Ripple lost control of us for at least ten minutes, as we accused each other of being “quam pinus” “sine resina”. You had to be there, believe me. This was a class which ended up with several National Merit Scholars of various degrees, all of whom were dissolved in laughter, with poor bewildered, befuddled Ripple trying to figure out what the Hell was so funny. And finally losing it too, realizing something was going on , and he had to put a stop to it. “Quam Pinus, Father!” Yup. Devon Preparatory School. Pietas et Litteras. Anno Domini 1967. Laudetur Iesus Christus.

It’s a shame, really. At that point, at least some of us could pretty much read medieval Latin texts on sight. You know, descriptions of kids skating, festivals, which was nothing in comparison to what we had been basically compelled to do. We might have been able, but we were silly kids and did silly kid stuff. I didn’t know–how could I–that there was a huge body of Latin literature–mostly of a religious nature, such as sermons from the Spanish Empire in later centuries, that nobody, to my knowledge, had really worked through for any reason. Then.

But wait, let it never be said that while on I was on right track, I followed the wrong train. Or maybe that’s just what my career about. Check this brand new volume out. OUP, no less. Like Marlon Brando, I followed the Econ, my Rod Steiger, a one way train to Palookaville. Had I followed Stan, I could have been a contender. Congratulations Professor Laird. You wrote the book I should have written, not something about debt, woolens, or–God forbid–the importance of factor endowments in Mexican economic history.

Quam pinus, Salvucci. Better, as they said on the walls of Pompeii, Magister spado es.

Late Night Reflections on Coming Home

I rarely burn the midnight oil. At the tender age of 74, there is some sense of security in turning in earlier. Silly, right? I am retired, so I don’t have to be anywhere most of the time the following day. So its not as if insomnia would prejudice the following day, and therefore require an adequate margin of error to pass out. And for years I was a night owl, somehow thinking that if I convinced myself of seriousness, well, that was a reasonable marker of ability–or a substitute–or, at the very least, some evidence of bona fides.

People who come from my background are never quite sure. If you have any measure of success, it isn’t easy to assume it’s the product of talent. But, Hell, if you outwork everyone else, there is the consolation of effort. Well, dammit, it’s not as if I didn’t try to figure that damn problem out. If intuition fell short, busting a gut was a reassuring substitute. After all, the cliches about genius, inspiration, persperation–even if you suspected they were rationalizations or the mere condescension of the successful (piece of cake, old boy), were a compensation of sorts. Yeah, someone else may have had all the advantages, but you had the never-say-die of a good American soldier. You take the hill, or you expire trying. At least honor was a kind of success.

So, here I sit now, and my honest reaction is: did you really believe all that bullshit? You know, the kind of academic naivete that said your work spoke for itself. Merit was its own reward and immediately recognized. A good book got a good review, right? Only losers complained about the incestuous ethics of the various guilds we populated. That connections, or legacies, or a nice ass really mattered. You were never a victim of circumstances or a product of timing. Hell, it was all marginal productivity, as the econ say. Sooner or later, a good day’s (or night’s) work would be rewarded. Right. And that you were out to change the world for the better. Not mere ambition, but an existenialist-infused mission loaded with Sarter, Marcel, Camus, and them guys. How noble.

The worst part about growing up is the first time you realize that the conceit is what keeps most of us in line: tame, dedicated, emollient, and complaisant. Don’t make waves–make an effort. You’ll see. And yet at some point all watch a perfectly mediocre effort rewarded, or Hell, a consideration confused with a qualification. It is the bane of the white male in this society, convinced of his handicap while others condemn his priviliege. What privilige? I worked to get here. What the Hell did you do? There were no “moves” or “sandbags” or “wires.” Everyone was equally considered. Your readers were all logical, rational, open-minded and empirically driven, right? Others did politics or ideology. You did science in your immaculate search for truth. Right.You never suffered from bad faith. The jerk across the hall in your dorm did. And went to work on Wall Street.

Some years ago I watched a very able junior historian get driven out of the profession by a senior scholar who set himself up as accuser, judge, jury, and executioner. The case was notorious in its time, and I was tangentially involved as a witness in which two contending groups of scholars tried to outdo themselves in ill-mannered vitriol. It was my first clue thar big time academics could be a blood sport, long before race, class and gender stole the limelight. In retrospect, this was about the pretty traditional rules for the evaluation of documentary evidence with a good deal of ideology and some perhaps less noble motives thrown in as well. There are times I wonder if the affair was attributable to some form of male menopause? Really? Yes, really. The older guy was hooked up with some von Hotty German-type. Maybe it wasn’t going so well.

I also became aware, slowly, that we had colleagues who thought if they threw enough politically supercharged terms around often enough–repeatedly, and maybe with no adequate grounding in anything resembling a fact–well, that was ok. Their hearts were pure. They were on the side of the people. Even if their heads were full of crap, no matter. I received an outraged lecture on something called “dualism” from some equally obscure guy who managed to convey the impression that I must be arguing in favor of some sexual perversion. Amusing now, but at the time, I was a bit peeved. One discipline’s relative prices was another’s out-and-out theft. A pointless exchange? Absolutely. But this is how we identified our heros and villains. And yes, there were the fast-track Gods and Goddesses. What ever happend to them? Our deities have a damn shot shelf-life. Maybe the next generation’s will do better.

The Hell of it was, it took me some forty years to wake to all this crap. And, oddly, the catalyst was somehow Donald Trump and a move from Texas to bring things into focus. You know, this American way stuff–all the mythos of the land of the free and the home of the brave–somehow collapsed under the weight of this brutal clown and his antics, not to mention that corruption, lies, and simply thuggery of the crowd with which he has surrounded himself. Venal? Jesus, is there any question? Corrupt? Does the proverbial bear do it in the woods? Misogynist? Cruel? Delusional? Debased? Hell, evil? Yes evil. As someone said to me, every word out of Satan’s mouth in Paradise Lost was a lie. Go, Trump, and do likewise. Repeatedly. And demand the fealty of your followers. And the abysmal assent of the good third or so of Americans who think, well, this is all ok? Really? And you wonder why I sit here and question virtually everything I believed or was taught since the 1960s? You see, we have come to a moment of great clarity: the lies that brought us Vietnam were awful, but hardly unique. The ambitions of the unpalatable Nixon, the grandiose ambitions of power compounded with the lies and criminality of Kissinger, just a warm up. I barely remember Joe McCarthy, but I sense the same casual relation to truth, ethics, integrity–the same contempt for decency. And worse, the same naivete about some of his Wisonsin constituents (I taked to one in college) who told me he was a “good man.” So you see see, this hideous moral dyslexia that now afflicts us is really not so new. It was there all along, waiting for yet another opportunity to present. Is this the real America? I don’t know.

I sit here at 2AM, considering the balance of my career, back from extensive wanderings in America, exposed to people of all sorts, forced to consider the myths that our diverse populations share. And wondering, in all honesty, if I haven’t been part of the con job that got us to the point. You know, suitably credentialed, educated, socialized, bought off even, because that’s what the purpose of the entire exercise was? I am not being hard on myself. Maybe just honest for a change. My generation was supposed to change America. You know, the flower children, the Aquarians, the truth-tellers. I wonder now, Was this all simply what we told ourselves we were doing, not much different from the generation that came before us? It’s a Hell of a conclusion to come to.

We just found a novel way to fail, convinced that we were different, superior, and the avatars of the change that would revolutionize America. You remember The Greening of America. Phew. What tripe.

Whatever happens, our successors gotta do better than this. With Trump in the saddle, that shouldn’t be hard……..after all, blaming the Boomers is clearly running out of material. Like I said, I’m 74. Do the numbers.

This is Paoli

No, I’m not Ed Murrow. God knows, we could use him at this point. But I spent so much time reading about Murrow and his boys in Europe that I sort of wish I could go back and get my cred validated. I also remember him as a little kid on CBS, although, as you may know, that did not end well. Funny that. In case you labor under any illusions about CBS having any backbone, well, they had Murrow, which was as close as it got. He had backbone. I don’t know, maybe Fred Friendly. The suits, forget. They worried about offending the little people who bought the crap that the advertisers paid good money for to keep subversives like Murrow on the air. And business, even then, was business. So don’t kid yourself. Between Joe Carthy and Roy Cohn and Donald Trump and (fill in the sleazeball here), I’m not sure there’s much difference. Oh yeah. McCarthy hated Commies and Trump appears to work for them. Sorry.

But the Paoli stuff does represent something different. I’m home, sort of, for the first time since 1981. Well, I didn’t live in Paoli, but I did live in Wayne from 1978-1981, down the road a piece. And well before that, I’m your basic Philly kid with the usual infusion of suburban finishing school (Penn Wynne) and education (Devon Prep, Villanova). Yeah, tnhat ultimately put me on a different path, but I never dreamed I’d end up living here after, what, 8 years in California and 35 in Texas, not to mention nearly two in Mexico. So I’m extra imperium Hispalensem for the first time in a while, effectively. And it feels weird.

Boy, does it feel weird. I wake up in the morning and it’s 30 degrees. I know that this is gonna last more than two days. My Representative in Congress isn’t some lunatic member of the Freedom Caucus (Chip Roy), but Chrissy Houlahan who graduated from Stanford, MIT and the USAF. The Chipster never served, his obnoxious faux patriotism notwithstanding. I believe you would call him a chicken hawk, but he’s no longer my problem, thank God. Texas is no longer my problem, basically, and thank God. Thank God period. We survived.

What’s weird is that I did go to high school out around here, so am basically familiar with the area. Or with the area as it was from 1965-1969. As you can imagine, it is rather different. The area was much closer to rural then, and it seemed far removed from the Philly neighborhoods in which I grew up. That was the idea, basically. To get the kid out of the city before he could turn into some kind of hoodlum. No danger, really, but my Mom worried and my Mom’s worries had away of becoming mine. So off I went to Devon and the Main Line, which wasn’t Shipley or Baldwin then, although today at 28K (I think) a year, I’m not so sure. That’s not really my concern either, since I’m basically out of touch with the school, although not the Piarist Order who ran the place. They are different things, believe me. One I still find admirable, the other less so. That’s another story, and eventually, I’ll get to it. Lots of changes in the world since 1969, many of which I don’t much like.

For one thing, my family, my immediate family, is basically gone. I miss them. A few days ago I found myself thinking I hadn’t spoken to my Dad in a few days. Yeah. I’ll say. Like 20 years’ worth. It was strange how much my subconscious was prompting me to find out how he was doing, a kind of psychological muscle memory that says he’s here even if he’s not. That really sucks. And it’s happened with a few other people too, including my maternal grandparents–whom I adored–and a favorite uncle, Stan the Man. They were good people, and the approach of the Christmas holiday reminds me of the rounds we would make back then. Boy, what a blast. My Grandmother cooked for thousands every week and Christmas was one long party season with a lot of old-fashioned Italian cookies that I can’t even begin to think of making. Forget the protein or the gravy. Yeah, I’m playing to stereotype, but I don’t care. There are a lot of ghosts here, I won’t kid you. How I make my peace with them is gonna be an interesting process.

To give you just one example, I’m itching to go to Mass at St Donato’s church in West Philly again, which is in the throes of a Mother Cabrini revival. Seriously. I havent seen the film, but Hell, the entire place is a second class relic (I think: I have to ask Jim Maule, my guru on Catholic sacramentals). But one small thing. My neighborhood and school are no longer Italian-American. Now, as half-Sicilian, I was never surprised to find the most intriguing hints of mixed ancestry in the Salvucci DNA. I sort of think I come by my affinity for bop and swing honestly, through some mysterious, osmotic process. But I a m a realist. You don’t just walks around my old Haddington neighborhood saying–hey, bro , I get it. It doesn’t work that way, whatever some of my idiot liberal (mostly WASP) friends think. I am now an outsider in a Black neighborhood, and that’s just a fact. So, like, no, I don’t walk up to 6613 Haverford and say, hey, bro, I was here before you were. Right. Maybe I would be joyfully received, but, somehow, I doubt it. And I don’t blame the folks around there. White folks are an acquired taste in some places, and I’m not stupid enough to ignore that. So how I’m gonna go over to St Donato’s and say, “I’m back” without doing some Archie Bunker meets George Jefferson routine is a good question. You think I’m a racist? I can tell you didn’t grow up in a city, and a lot of my friends didn’t. They think (academics, mostly) that I am some kind of quasi-bigot. Know what? I don’t care, but I’ m no fool either. This is juist an artefact of my life between various worlds, and reentering one of them has its challenges.

You don’t care? Fine. I’ll live. Sooner or later , you find out who your real friends are. And guess what, religion, color, nationality–all that Trumper shit–doesn’t cut it. It’s a tough time to try to go home again.

But I’m gonna try. And you’ll be the first to hear.

Give ‘Em What They Want

This is gonna be short, as the Four Tops used to sing. Look. If the average American really wants to find out what the US was like before the New Deal, let them. If “Obamacare” is a problem, Hell, let the Republicans defund it. Let people see $4,000 a month premia. And then tell them this is the vision that Trump and his boot lickers have for them. Let the Democrats buy some airtime–if they can find a network with the stones to sell it to them–and say “You really want to find out what it was like in the days of William McKinley? Ok, we’re gonna give it to you?” Meanwhile, let what’s left of the government get back to work, even if Trump and Project Neanderthal want to blowup the FAA, the USDA, the FDA and on and on and on. Go cold turkey. Plenty tariff and no vaccine. Let people find out what Musk meant when he said people were gonna hurt a little bit. Hell, he is getting paid 5 percent of US GDP, so he should have some insight into your most intimate desires. You dig? For once?

I think it’s time to let people live out the reality of a movie like A Day Wiithout A Mexican.

Ain’t seen it? I’m gonna try to post it or some part of it on my Facebook page: the sewer that we all bathe in. See what it’s like, for real.

Learn something. I dare you. It’ll be a first.

https://tubitv.com/movies/100040436/a-day-without-a-mexican?start=true&tracking=google-feed&utm_source=google-feed

Have a blessed day.

Texit

This is going to be one of the tougher things I will try to write. As they say, stuff is complicated. I’ve been in and around Texas ever since Berkeley, which is now going on nearly four decades. It sure ain’t 1980 any longer, when I left Philly as the City of Champions, not the Butt of Jokes. That’s where the current chapter really began. It is now at an end, but I’m not even sure where to begin. Few regrets, but then again, as Frank sang, too few to mention. Yeah, I did it my way. I’m not here to settle scores–that I will do privately. In the unlikely event that one of my admirers is reading this, you were warned.

I owe Texas a great deal. Things that were never going to happen in California happened here. We bought a home and had two lovely if obstreperous children, now a lawyer and a classical musician. In California, we learned the hard way that prestige doesn’t pay the rent and tends to attract false friends. We went broke, got disgusted, and left. It was our decision. And looking at the mess California has become, you’re not going to convince me we made a mistake–Nobel Prize parties and all. Even if Texas has changed in very unpleasant ways.

Not everyone can pick up and move. But we can, I think And so we are going. Back to the Motherland. Not Philly proper. But our to what used to be the Western suburbs. I always thought of Paoli was some kind of terrestrial Mars where the Main Line (the Paoli local train) ended. It is in Chester Country, if you keeping score which does not have the cachet of Montgomery Country or the fame or patois (dubious) of Delaware County. But it is green, a Hell of a lot cooler, temperature wise, and we can see old friends. It is also North of the Mason-Dixon line. We have had it with South. I don’t Demonize the South–it does a good enough job all by itself. Lots of Pennsylvania is admittedly not a whole lot better, but the part to which we are removing is a bastion of the world I grew up in. And thanks to the Disaspora, pretty good Mexican food as well. First things first. We checked. El Limon in Wayne is already a goto, and the waitress is from the state of Mexico. She was thrilled with my Spanish–desperation will do that to these poor guys.

Why has Texas changed? I don’t know. When we got here, Mark White was Governor and Lloyd Bentsen was US Senator, a far cry from the crap people here routinely elect now. My state senator is an imbecile named Donna Campbell, and Chip Ahoy aka Roy is my Representative. Both of them make me sick. About Hot Wheels, a term that even Texans use for Greg Abbott, the less said, the better. Go ahead, be scandalized. Reality has a way of reducing certain inhibitions. And it gets worse, but why dwell on it? I once listened to a debate in which John Cornyn, our Senator, took place. Corn Dog is also an idiot, although not really evil, as far as I can tell. Just stupid. It’s been a long fall from John Connally, as disgusting as he was. Nobody thought Connally was stupid. Quite the opposite. Repulsive, but clearly pretty bright. And a survivor. Literally. Remember 1963? I do. Which is probably why I am going home. I hate to see a generation’s worth of progress vanish. And have no desire to go back to the 1850s, which is where Texas is headed.

And in Texas politics,at least, that is what has changed. The current crop of Texas Republicans is utterly repulsive. And by and large, mean, lazy and stupid. They mirror the change in the Republican Party, which was once respectable, and for whose candidates I sometimes voted. Never again. I have plenty of problems with the pronoun-addled Democrats, whose seem to have lost the plot sometime around Reagan, as my older relatives started to peel away. I suppose Texas, which is now minority-majority, was destined to go the same way. Except the old majority really has nothing to fear from the new one. The Latinos vote Republican and seem to dislike Black people even more than the crackers do. American populism a beautiful thing. It works, even as it’s screwing people over. Not my problem, as they say. I fought the good fight and ran the good race. Now I will go home to enjoy–I hope–the balance of my time on this Earth.

Vicente Fox actually said this!

Many of my concerns are parochial. You don’t care if the University of Texas turns into a dung heap–again. And I guess I should not either. But you know, silence is consent, so we vote with our feet, loudly. Besides, as Texans joyfully remind us, there are plenty more Californians where we came from, and they’ll do just as well, if not better. Property ain’t as cheap here as it was years ago–better not be, because we have got to finance this errand into the wilderness somehow. But unless disaster strikes, we will survive. And if we don’t, well, life goes on don’t it? That’s the one thing you do find out sooner or later.

Nobody is irreplaceable.

Bye for now. More to come when I ain’t a feared of my neighbors up North. But as Concrete Charlie said to an opponent, “This Game is Over!”

Idiocracy

Yesterday, August 27, 2025, really must be counted as one of the worst days of my life.

Because the Mets swept the Phillies? Honestly, I really couldn’t care less. Baseball, like. getting to the ocean, used to be one of the things that made Summer what it was. That hasn’t been true for some time now, so whether Keith “I snorted the first baseline” Hernandez thinks the Phillies are overrated is more amusing than anything else. Keith should know. He has a New York kind of nose for hype.

Because my alma mater, Villanova, is still recovering from some internet terrorism called swatting–I still don’t know what “gaslighting” is or how it differs from bullshitting, but small matter. Here I thought “swotting” was something Oxbridge types did before they covered themselves in Triple-Starred Firsts (“highly coveted” don’t you know). Nope. Nor Swatties, which is slang for the nerds who attend Swarthmore College (and, yes, We Wildcats salute you. Until lately, you were celebrated for a faculty that complained when your football team had a winning season. That was infra dig, right? Holy God, Weirdo. Get a Life.) So there is swat, swot, swattie. An irregular verb of the millenial sort. Got it? No? Well, me neither.

Because our Dear Leader, aka Agent Orange (a chemical herbicide used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War (1962-1971) to clear vegetation and destroy crops, and it contained the highly toxic contaminant dioxin), reputedly syphilitic and feeble of mind, not to mention devoid of any redeeming human quality, decided to station National Guard troops in Our Nation’s Capital? And guess what–cut carjackings? Which the Democratic Mayor of DC was hard pressed to critique, although like Mussolini (who???), Trump will now take over Union Station and make Amtrak run on time. Yeah, fascism works if the rule of law is an inconvenience. And it is. Ask Hyman Roth and Michael Corleone, with whom Trump has certain affinities–other than brains. Getting into some identity hissy fit over fascism is really sort of lame when there are so many other reasons to detest it. Like 100 million people killed (a new estimate of civilian casualties proposed by Cormac O Grada with Princeton University Press, publisher to the stars, so how can it be wrong?) during the Wars to End All Wars. Aww, that’s DWM history and so boring. Quite. Here. Read a book. You know how to do that. Sort of like Betty Bacall teaching Bogie to whistle. But try not to move your lips.

Well, no.

Because of ANOTHER Mass Shooting (ho boy, here come the tasteless puns). Well, yeah, this one did sort of bother me. Because it involved Catholicism and kids and, apparently, gender confusion. Wait. Aren’t those synonymous? Ouch. You mean Fr McGillicuddy cavorting with brown-limbed acolytes behind the rectory? Again? No, not quite. But the stench of the scandal is somehow always there. Trust me. As a Cradle Cathlick, I’d know. And I can’t wait for some son of a Texas dentist to further torment the innocent with tales of how this was all just a hoax. Right? You know. Alex Jones. Sandy Hook. That sick bastard.

So many to choose from. The fact that children–for God’s sake–children were cut down at a Mass by some disturbed wacko with a gun is bad enough. This was precisely what made the abuse scandal so wrenching. You know, “Suffer the little children come to me for such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Any murder of any number of any kind of people is awful. But here you were talking about 2d and 4th grade age kids supposedly giving God thanks for the opportunity to journey a little further, and not just in academic stuff, but in understanding what it means to be a community. In my youth, they said “People of God” and that didn’t mean some “Christian” bigot who paraded their virtue around, reeked of sanctimony, and could have taught the Pharisees a trick. Uh Uh. It isn’t about hate. It’s isn’t even about the Ten Commandments, which those sickos on the right have appropriated for their political use. It is about what Christ taught in the Sermon on the Mountain. Love one another.

That doesn’t mean you have to like someone or the principles by which they orient their existence–or if their values are different. But you do concede the same bundle of civil rights and duties to them as you do to anyone else. And as long as they observe the law (and the law is not inevitably lawful when it is trying to deprive people of their wellbeing–which we have to face in America) and don’t harm you, their actions are private whether you happen to like them or approve off them of not. I understand that these questions become horribly complicated in implementing in the real world, but for God’s sake, we try in good faith and with an open mind to do so. If not, YOU are the problem, not the dudes across the street who cohabit in some arrangement of which you do not approve. Is that so damned hard to understand. Isn’t that what Christ taught us?

So yeah, it was a very bad day. A terrible, horrible, bad day. It suggested to me that the moral rot at the heart of our political class is no accident. It is a reflection of what we do or do not value.

Cardinal Newman says it starts in small things. What are they? You’ll know. Start with a little civility in your daily life. Be surprised how far we’ve fallen. I don’t do politics. Fine. Do something nice for someone you don’t really like, or even a total stranger. We can start there. You can carry a Cross in public later. Christ started small too. He sweated the big stuff later.

Syriana + Quark= Our Neighborhood (*)

Last night, I watched Syriana for the nth time. Maybe after n+1 times I will finally be sure I have figured out what the Hell was going on. And having Bashir from Deep Space Nine as an Emir really doesn’t help. I keep looking for Quark. Oh, well.

Looking for Quark. The Ferengi as metaphor for the Trump “Administration.” Why do I think USA Americans deserve it? Really, no one deserves this fascist humbug. It is, really, demoralizing. But meanwhile, consider the Ferengi. I’ll be damned, but they got it right, Don’t let their get-ups fool you. There’s latinum in them there lobes. You just got to think about it.

Never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity. That’s one of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition (ROA). You never heard of them. Good God, Donald Trump lives by them. He could have written them if he were literate. Or coherent. Or lucid. But small matter. Like, consider his daughter, Ivanka, For someone whose nickname is Princess Sparkle Pony, she’s done pretty well for herself. Doing what? Damned if I know, but her net worth (not net of her putative squeeze, El Jaredo, thank you) is somewhere in the neighborhood of God knows. A shagload, as the Brits say. Mucho dinero. Some guesses put her up around a billion. I think that’s impossible, but I don’t know why. I believe in some stranger stuff, even before breakfast. Anyway, Ivanka has a lot of latinum. And she got it by being The Donald’s Daughter. Nice work if you can get it. Donald gets it. A lot of it, apparently. Remember. More is good….all is better. Another Ferengi pearl (ROA).

If you don’t know, by the way, the Ferengi were the inhabitants of a mythical exoplanet, Ferengar, where the First Beautitude is Screw Your Neighbor Before You Screw Anyone Else (ROA). The Ferengi are motivated by greed, plain and simple. They do what it takes to make money. And the rest, well, is integrity (, about which no one cares. Remember, a Deal is a Deal…until a better one comes along (ROA). The Donald couldn’t have said it better himself. Ask any number of countries trying to figure out US commercial policy. If it’s Tuesday, it must be Tariffs. Or not. say I am exaggerating? Ok. Here we go, in real-Trump Time

The Chronicle of Trump-Tariff Making

Nov. 25, 2024 – Less than three weeks after his election victory, Trump announced on Truth Social plans to place 25% tariffs on all imports from Canada and Mexico, citing an alleged failure to secure their respective borders with the U.S.

Jan. 20 – Trump signed a memo calling on Cabinet members to “assess the unlawful migration and fentanyl flows” from Canada, Mexico and China. Afterward, officials should “recommend appropriate trade and national security measures to resolve that emergency,” the memo said.

Feb. 1 – Trump ordered 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, as well as 10% tariffs on imports from China. The White House said the tariffs would take effect on Feb. 4.

Feb. 3 – Trump announced a one-month pause of tariffs on Canada and Mexico after reaching agreements with each country that included commitments to bolster border enforcement.

Feb. 27 – Trump affirmed plans to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico when the one-month delay expires on March 4.

March 3 – Speaking at the White House, Trump reiterated plans to move forward with a fresh round of tariffs the following day. Within minutes, the stock market tumbled. The S&P 500 closed down 1.7%, its worst trading day since December.

March 4 – Tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico and China took effect at 12:01 a.m. ET. A near-instant trade war broke out. China and Canada each responded with retaliatory tariffs, vowing additional measures. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum slammed Trump’s tariffs but said she would hold off on retaliatory measures until after a conversation with him.

March 5 – Trump ordered a one-month delay of auto tariffs after a request from the “Big 3” U.S. automakers: Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, the parent company of Jeep and Chrysler.

March 6 – Trump signed executive orders temporarily pausing tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods compliant with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, a free trade agreement.

March 9 – Canada selected new Prime Minister-elect Mark Carney. In his acceptance speech, Carney addressed Trump’s tariffs on Canada and the threat posed by Trump, calling the events the “greatest crisis of our lifetimes.”

March 11 – Ontario Premier Doug Ford threatened to impose a 25% surcharge on electricity from the province sent to U.S. customers in response to earlier U.S. tariffs on Canadian goods. In response, Trump threatened to double steel and aluminum tariffs specifically for Canada.

March 12 – The U.S. imposed 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports. Trump opted against doubling the levy for Canada after an agreement was reached and Ford pulled back his threat to impose the electricity surcharge. Canada announced retaliatory tariffs on about $20.7 billion in U.S. goods.April 2 – Trump announces “Liberation Day” tariffs, but Canada is excluded from a steep set of so-called reciprocal tariffs as well as a universal 10% tariff on nearly all imports.

April 3 – Tariffs of 25% on vehicles imported into the U.S. took effect. Mexico and Canada make up the top two U.S. trading partners for both finished motor vehicles, accounting for nearly half of all U.S. imports, according to an analysis of data from the U.S. International Trade Commission by Cato Institute, a right-leaning think tank. Carney slammed the policy, saying it signaled the end of a “system of global trade anchored on the United States.”

April 9 – Canada slapped 25% retaliatory tariffs on non-USMCA compliant vehicles from the U.S.

April 15 – In an effort to ease tariff-related business impacts, Canada issued a six-month pause on levies for U.S. goods that are used in Canadian manufacturing, processing and food and beverage packaging, as well as those used for public health and national security initiatives.

April 28 – Liberals won the most seats in Canadian parliament, cementing the party’s hold on power and Carney’s role as prime minister. In a social media post early in the day, Trump suggested that Canadians should vote for him in order for Canada to become the 51st state.

May 6 – Carney visited Trump in the Oval Office, telling him Canada is “not for sale” after Trump repeated his assertion it should become the 51st state.

May 28 – Two separate federal courts invalidated some of Trump’s steepest tariffs, including 25% tariffs on Canadian goods. The rulings centered on Trump’s unprecedented invocation of the International Economic Emergency Powers Act as a legal justification for levies.

May 29 – A federal appeals court moved to temporarily reinstate the tariffs outlawed a day earlier.

June 2 – Trump ratcheted up a tax on all foreign steel and aluminum from 25% to 50%.

June 16 – At the G7 summit in Alberta, Canada, Carney and Trump said the U.S. and Canada would reach a trade deal within 30 days.

June 27 – Trump said he would suspend the U.S.-Canada trade talks as a result of Canada’s plans to move forward with a tax on U.S. technology companies.

June 29 – Carney said trade talks between the U.S. and Canada had resumed after Canada retracted its plan to tax tech firms.

Now, look here. I’m trying to stay polite. And avoid obscenities. Try to run ANY relationship on a yes/no, she loves me-she loves me not system. Through darts at a board that is divided into On and Of. Use a random number generator. Meanwhile, your partner–in anything–is gonna give up trying to plan or to produce anything (sex, drugs, rock’n roll) because it takes time to get any nontrivial operation going, let alone to execute it well.You know, “Sent for you Yesterday, Here You Come Today….If You Can’t Do Better Well Just Stay Away.” (Johnny Mercer lyrics) Who the Hell knows what’s going on? We’ll just stop until the smoke clears. With Trump, the smoke never clears. A Deal is a Deal….Until a Better One Comes Along. You can’t run a hotel that way, let alone 17 trillion dollar economy.

Trust is the biggest liability of all. Dammit. Didn’t Elon Musk, sometime compadre of Trump, say “Trust no one. Even no one.” Now that I think of it, that weirdo Musk must have some Ferengi blood in him. Here’s what AI “thinks” (see, over 70 I am, but modern)

Imagining Elon Musk as a Ferengi running a government is quite intriguing! Ferengi are typically all about profit and capitalism, so it would be interesting to see how Musk’s entrepreneurial spirit would influence government policies. He might prioritize technological advancements and infrastructure, focusing on space exploration, renewable energy, and perhaps even a universal basic income funded by profits from his businesses.

However, given the Ferengi’s notorious rules of acquisition, there could be a lot of negotiation and deal-making involved in governance. Policies might revolve around maximizing profit for the state, and there could be a strong emphasis on privatization of services. How do you think the citizens would respond to such a government? Would they thrive under this system, or would there be pushback against the profit-first mentality?

For the answer, look at TESLA stock.

Whoops. Guess the Great Disruptor got his disruptors busted. Oh, well. The real world does tend to have its challenges, and magical thinking typically is not a good strategy.

When in Doubt Lie (ROA) Yeah, that’ll work. Works for Trump. Works for Elon. Works for the entire Republican Party. Just lie. Brazen it out. Do what a Ferengi would do. And remember, A Wealthy Man Can Afford Anything But a Conscience. (ROA)

Welcome to Syriana/Quark/MAGAWORLD.

And if it isn’t familiar, go back and watch DSN. Especially Little Green Men You’ll be just where you need be. Along with the other stupid Earthlings Quark swindles.

The Cathedral Isn’t Telling

I live in San Antonio, Texas. It’s ok. Everyone has got to live somewhere. So why not here? But occasionally I wonder just what the Hell I am doing here. Today was one of those days.

I always admired the opening line of Mario Vargas Llosa’s brilliant novel, Conversation in the Cathedral (1969). “At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” Let’s not beat around the bush, right? That would appear to be the Big Question. Not just for Peru, mind you. But for all of us everywhere. When did things get so loused up? Of course, in the United States, that’s $2,181,658.90 Question (in 1955, The 64,000 Dollar Question. I used Measuring worth (https://www.measuringworth.com/dollarvaluetoday/result.php?year=1955&amount=64000&transaction_type=WEALTH) and considered that beloved quiz show’s payoff as a prize (wealth)). You can call it the 2.2 million Dollar Question. I don’t know too many people who don’t look around at the current mess (choose one) and don’t wonder. Lord, when did things get so screwed up? Of course, someone out there will complain (probably some PhD) “it’s a process, not a moment” but I don’t really care. Today, driving around the Alamo City, it really hit me.

Why today? I’ve been here over 30 years. How to paraphrase, is this day different from all other days?

You got a minute?

Well, part of it is the Buc-ee’s lawsuit. Huh? Wait?

https://www.foxcarolina.com/2025/06/02/buc-ees-suing-sc-company-over-armed-beaver-merch/

Ok. This is sort of Song of Bernadette territory: for those who believe, no explanation is necessary, for those who do not, well, va fungool. Buc-ee’s is a South Texas icon, a combination mega gasoline/pissoir/junk food/ apparel place that sells some concoction called “beaver nuggets.” Stifle yourself if you are from the Northeast because the beaver here is chaste, if not quite innocent. Oh, yeah, we know to those libtards, beaver means something durty, but we are God-fearing people here in the South, so praise the Lord. If you want the Bucc-ee’s story, here it is. https://buc-ees.com/about/ Read on, because it is worth it, I swear.

Anyway, the home of the Christian Beaver is suing some outfit in South Carolina (well, not Rhode Island) for trademark infringement of Buc-ee’s camo, rifle-toting underwear, or something. Now why in God’s name any sane human being would want to wear this crap is utterly beyond me. But it’s Texas, and yahoo, and MAGA and the South.. So there you go. If you want proof that Amurica is emulating Texas, look no farther. A Beaver will lead you. Swear to God. Follow the Beaver. And the money.

By touch and feel you will know trademark infringement

Yup. Touch and feel.

Forgive me, but I found this, well, disconcerting. Like, seriously? I know America was screwed up, but Buc-ee’s level screwed up? And just wait. Bucc-ee has expansion plans. To Arizona, Arkansas, Wisconsin, Ukraine. Maybe instead of Wawa back home in Pennsylvania, you visit Bucc-ee’s for ammo, beer, and some cool gear. Oh. Dear. God. Domine, ades me nunc.

But wait. As the Popeil’s Pocket Fisherman ad says, there’s more.

This is election season in Texas. Man, you ain’t never seen anything like an election in Texas, believe me.

The worst thing you can be in any Texas election–and I’ve watched more than a few–is a Liberal (pronounced: LiberOwl). You know, “Too Liberal for Texas” is the ultimate put down, like a candidate is some sort of squirelly pedophile who reads books and drinks white wine. And knows George Soros but not His Savior. And who gets outside money from California, New York, and other places where they spend too much time reading and ciphering and not playing football or other manly pasttimes. And hugging trees (cut ’em down) and loving criminal illegal immigrants (instead of DEPORT THEM IMMEDIATELY! as signs on IH 35 urge, which is basically the campaign slogan of some evil slug named Huffines) who inhales and defecates Bitcoin and is always running for something.

This is, however, not a statewide election. This is for The Alcalde of San Antonio–The Mayor. But why is that of any concern.

Ever since I got here, I could never really figure out what the Mayor of San Antonio did. Here’s what I can find

  • Emergency declarations
  • City-wide ceremonial duties
  • Signing documents like city charters

That’s it? Hell. Anyone could do that. Even me. The City Manager runs the city. The Mayor is window dressing. Why would anyone want the job? Search me. I guess if you are ambitious, you get some visibility and name recognition, but that isn’t always a good thing. When I got here, the Mayor (1981-89) was Henry B Cisneros, aka, The Aztec God. He had a taco named after him. He taught a course at Trinity for which he got a lot of money and for which he apparently never prepared. He couldn’t even be bothered to name Trinity when he was on the Today show. He called it “a local college.” The then-President of Trinity hit the roof and told people “We’re getting out of the Henry business,” supposedly. So the Aztec God lost the gig. Hey. He was lucky. Rumors abounded in the medical community that Henry C took a shot to the, uh, area of the family jewels administered by his spouse because was fooling around with a certain Linda Medlar. But Henry did end up Secretary of HUD under Bubba Clinton, who, God knows. never held chick difficulties against anyone. So, Henry, instead of climbing up the greasy pole of politics was defeated by, well, his greasy pole. But he was the first Hispanic Mayor here, which counted for a lot then. These days, no one would really care. Henry C is a back number. We’ve moved on. Progress! We now have an all Hispanic (Ortiz Jones is Filipina) field, I guess–at least the ones who matter, Gina Ortiz Jones and Rolando Pablos. And this, my friends, motivates my disgust. In a state that seems to glorify brainless slander as a campaign tactic, this one takes the pastel.

Ms Ortiz Jones is a former Undersecretary of the Air Force. I have no idea what that means. More importantly, I guess, she is lesbian. Why the Hell this has any bearing on her qualification for a largely symbolic job escapes me, but apparently it does. I have also seen her campaign signs defaced in a most creative way: Ok. Wait for it: “Vagina Ortiz Jones.” Childish right? Adolescent right? San Antonio right? Frankly, I don’t care about her perferences one way or another. But it is a big deal. It is a big deal because her opponent, Rolando Pablos, seems to play it that way. Pablos, a former Texas Secretary of State (God knows what that means) who is getting beaucoup money from all sorts of mouth-breather organizations, is a Republican whose slogan is “Family First.” Now what the Hell does that mean? Deport families first? Hey, these days, you never know. What does the Mayor of San Antonio have to do with families? Other than sign proclamations saying families (meaning?) matter? Big deal. Actually, someone suggested to me that this is Rolando’s way of playing dog-whistle politics. You know. A lesbian can’t have a family? Not like Rolando. Rolando also says he is a real Latino. Hmm. Like uber family-guy Henry Cisneros? Whose Spanish was not as good as mine at one point? And you wonder why I feel sick?

Pablos will win. Lots of money behind him. The mouth-breathers will win. God bless Texas.

Sick.

Look, dammit. This is your country going down the drain. And Texas is leading the way. I’d like to simply say nothing. I’d like to simply say “Hey, that’s what they want.” But I won’t do that.

This crap makes me sick. We have real problems here: widespread poverty, medically uninsured residents, a surfeit of interpersonal violence and a rapidly detriorating quality of life that’s made a once-charming place like Austin unliveable. Really. Why do so many people want to come to Texas? You tell me. Because right now, all I can think about is wanting to leave. When did this place get so screwed up? When did politics here start being about nothing other than horsecrap?

You tell me. I’m all ears. Does any of this matter? I don’t know.

Habemus Villanovam

Richard J. Salvucci, Villanova ’73

Don’t worry. I’m not about to try to bask in Pope Bob’s reflected glow–although I may be one of a very few. I’ve had my differences with Villanova for fifty years. I studied there. I taught there briefly and then went on to greener pastures. I have occasionally suggested that they might be doing something wrong. And, in fairness, I have also said more than once when I thought they had done something very right (or is that Wright, as in Jay?). At the moment, I am laughing myself silly at Vanillanova’s good fortune (that’s what we called it in my time). Lightning struck, and damn, “tolle, age.” Fr President is all togged out as an Augie on national tv and people are falling all over themselves to climb on the bandwagon. Who, really, can blame them? Not me.

Leo XIV was just out of synch with me, but I can’t imagine he didn’t cross paths with a few teachers and friends. No one has volunteered yet, and, no, I did not teach him–although I did teach one former member of the Board of Trustees who clearly helped hook up Wall Street to Villanova, which is at the bottom of this story, really. Pecunia non olet, dude. That’s very old Italian for “show me the money”.

I went to Nova from 1969 through 1973, and turmoil was our constant companion. In those days, Villanova was a commuter school (and I was a commuter), symbolized by the huge parking lots on Route 30 where impressive Villanovarei are now situated. It’s quite a change, really. In fact, my Villanova, the Pope’s Villanova, and today’s Villanova are not at all the same. A lot of water under the bridge in 50 years and therein lies the story.

Villanova in the 1970s was probably not all that different from Villanova in the 1950s, the major change being the admission of women (nuns and sisters) as undergraduate students to something other than nursing in 1969 (Summer Sessions were coed back into the 1940s, as far as I can tell). There were still a lot of Augustinians around–although their numbers were by then already dwindling, but except for a few new facilities, like Falvey Library, notwithstanding, I guess it was mostly unchanged. The hideous Kennedy Hall had been thrown up in the late 1960s (it is now gone, no?), but you could still look out over Corr Hall across what one of my teachers called Via Rongione (insider joke) from the library, Corr being one of the original campus buildings from 1847. Nova was changing, but there was still a lot of the old place left–in spirit, in ethos, and in stubbornly pre-Tridentine outlook. Yeah, we sang Kumbaya at Mass (if we went, and many didn’t), but sleeping with a girlfriend was still a novelty–unless you had been together for more than the now requisite 25 minutes. But I digress. For once, I really don’t want to say much about the Church and sexuality. Oh, it was there, and a couple of priests were well into the “taste and see” style of Catholicism. One or two were particularly shameless about it, but it really was one or two (of whom you could be sure).

Intellectually, Villanova was hit or miss. You could get a fabulous education, or you could graduate functionally illiterate, especially in business. Now, now. This was the era of the Bartley Bums and Commerce and Frolics, and the business school, run in my day by “Pocono Phil” Barrett OSA. Here they are, just for reference, a holdover from the days when Villanova was an Augustinian fief, Fr. Bartley and Fr. Barrett. Not exactly great minds, but what the Hell. Who said accountants needed to know from James Joyce or quantum mechanics? Probably true, but Bus Ad was a standing joke. The Villanova School of Business (VSB), as it Six-Sigma proudly styles itself

lay well in the future, and I never got to know Al Clay, its first secular Dean, until I taught there in Economics from 1978-1980. My impression is that the standing of the program rose with the S&P in the 1980s, which would make plenty of sense. I think you’d have to do some serious digging to come up with pre-2000 Endowment figures, although my impression is that 1980 was a break point of sorts. As late as 2024, the University’s financial statements listed about 1.4 billion in investment assets. In 2005, that number was only 241 million. From what I can see, Villanova (yay!) still basically runs off tuition and fees, and all I can think is that that had to be even truer in the 1970s, let alone before. By contrast, Notre Dame (boo!) has over 20 billion in what it calls “endowment pool” and makes a point of stating endowment income provides more revenue than student fees.

So, not to put too fine a point on it. Notre Dame has the money, but we got the Pope. My guess is that Villanova wants both the money and the Pope, so you can be damn sure they’re gonna be out callowly realizing the value of the Sacred Asset faster than you can say Santo Subito. I know. Such a cynic. Guilty. Villanova’s stash is growing by leaps and bounds, but bets that Pope Bob really adds incense to the censer?

Villanova in the 1970s was a sort of microcosm of middle class Catholic America. There were the antiwar types, the hardcore Nixon Republicans, the strivers, the upwardly mobile wannabe, the intellectuals, the frat kids, some lower middle class types, the jocks and every possible permutation thereof. We had some wonderful teachers and scholars, a lot of them in the humanities, and our share of very dead wood, but, who doesn’t? Lots of social justice warriors and a lot more just trying to get through. Aspiring pols and an oddball contingent. It was tranquil, for the most part, but creative people can never leave well enough alone. David Rabe, in his pre Jill Clayburgh days did “Pavlo Hummel” and “Bones” in the Veysey Theatre. He always struck me as some kind of dour oddball trapped on a campus of conventional people, but he was a name. I had a philosophy teacher, Jack Caputo, who became a world reknowned Heidegger scholar. He was amazing, and the same philosophy class included Bill Atkinson, who is up for canonization. Yeah. Me in the same room with a posible saint. I know. Not likely. And there was track and field with the Irish flyboys, going back to Ron Delany and Don Bragg who took the Gold in the Rome 1960 pole vault. I’d see Marty Liquori training and Davey Wright working in the library. But for all that, there was a downside. Villanova was a wannabee in an educational oasis of Penn, Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr and Haverford. We might have been a King of the Big Five, but those insufferable bastards were always the Big Four where the Smart People went to think. Villanova? Forget it. And they let you know it. Villanova was, for them, I think, a glorified high school. Honestly, they really weren’t wrong, but give it a rest, why don’t you?

Penn may have been the best Ivy League school in Philly, but it was, like, serious, in a way Nova was not. Why? Hey. When I went to Nova, there were still books in the card catalog (I’m old) stamped “On Church Index.” How the Hell could a Catholic university be serious? “You don’t believe all that stuff,” a Harvard graduate once said to me? “Stuff” like The Resurrection, or, Hell, some Ontological Proof out of Aquinas? Or, yuck, that Guadalupe fable (no, in fact, not that one). Surely, you’re joking. Never mind that I had to translate Cicero for some schlub when I was in grad school at Princeton. Villanova was “priest ridden.” And, by extension, so were you. A chip, you say? Yes, a rather large one.

I once was talking to a fairly well known faculty member from Bryn Mawr about a reading list in history. She seemed a bit astounded that I had read anything (I was already Nassau-certified by then…..). “But,” she sputtered, “have you discussed them?” No, I thought, I only look at the pictures. That crap never really stopped. A faculty member from Penn’s history department basically ignored me whenever he saw me until I got a job at Berkeley. All of a sudden, I became a person. And the source of an announcement to his seminar. Tacky, right? And then a guy at a place in Connecticut (a Swarthmore alum) who told me he and his homies would go over to Nova as an “infra dig”–white boy talk for slumming. He said that with a knowing smile like, “we all know, right?” Yeah, we certainly do. There’s more, especially from Belichick’s alma mater, but they now could spend their time explaining him and his barely-legal girlfriend and not insinuating that Catholicism must be some sort of genetic intellectual disability.

Look, we can do this crap all day. Now that Nova has had Rhodes scholars, respectable alumni in every walk of life from investment banking, to politics, to the military, I assume it will no longer be necessary. Hey, I went to grad school with someone who is a Dean there, and I know how smart she is, and Princeton-educated too. Until Leo XIV comes out and says he’s not going to ordain women (all by hisself, right?), and then it will all start again anyway, right? Hell, I’m not sure even the Pope could do that motu proprio, but I am not a canon lawyer. But then again, that has never seemed to stop a torrent of mind-bending ignorance from people who should know better, so why should it now?

Hey, it doesn’t really matter, does it. Leo XIV is Villanova ’77.

         When old age shall this generation waste,

                Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

         “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Quite. RJS ’73

Suicide Hill

When I was a little kid–oh, oh, here we go–we made do with the “toys” that Mother Nature gave us. Since I was a little kid in an urban environment, 66th and Haverford in Philly, toys were frequently trees, hills, pot holes, walls, dog defecating grounds, abandoned beer bottles, and various swearing neighbors, usually male Italo-American, who referred to us as ” you goddamma kits.” We’d scheme up new ways to combine these objects into some sort of race game, usually, sometimes accompanied by violence and kidnapping, but often just a lot of screaming and shouting until it got dark enough to get called home. Or just knew it was time. We usually had colorful nicknames for people and objects, especially oddly shaped characters with names like Hotsy, Ax-Face, or Monkey-Mother. By their markings you would know them, sort of like Lumpy in “Leave it To Beaver.” They all made sense, and even if hurtful by contemporary standards (what wasn’t), beat Hell out of Alexander, Julio, Donald, or Leonard. “C’mon Hotsy, you dimwit! Your ugly sister is calling you.” Cruel, but, alas, efficient. “Mr. Man, you left your car door open,” usually shouted to some poor shlub half a block away as some subset of vandals made off with some what were otherwise worthless possessions. The fun was in watching the guy turn around and come sprinting back toward us, whereupon we’d drop his stuff in the street and scatter. I don’t recall anyone getting nabbed, or, Thank God, any coronaries. There were always vaguely older adults (probably in their 30s) red faced and shouting, usually some novel obscenity which we rapidly appropriated for our own use. This was how street kids got educated in profanity. I’ll spare you details.

There were two principal forms of diversion, only one of which veered into the truly dangerous. That involved Suicide Hill, about which more later. The other was the around the block opposite-way relay, which was a killer too.

Picture 55 Buicks and two-tone Pontiacs. Here you have Suicide Hill. Stopping is optional

Suicide Hill (aka Media Street): Stopping is Optional, Dude. Photoshop in a ’55 tu-tone Buick and you are there. The Overbook IADC was to the left. Triangle Park and St Callistus are at the end of the line.

The Parcourse for Working Class Kids: A Stitch in Your Side is Better Than a Knife in Your Back

Let’s start with the round the block opposite way relay. Normally, this involved two kids who detested each other. The starting point was usually around 66th and Haverford, although it could be on Haverford Ave itself. Somebody with a cap gun was the starter. Bang! You’re off. Now, the two reprobates proceeded in the opposite direction, usually, stupidly, at full clip. The idea, of course, was to see who got back to the starting point first. Whoever lost got beat up. Now Media Street, if you observe the photo above, was a bit of a hill. So naturally, the kid running up 66th Street and hanging a left on Media got the benefit of the downhill. The other kid was screwed. Mostly, you picked the fat out of shape kid to get screwed so you could wack him when he lost. Nice, huh?

The run along Edgmore Road was flat, Democratic but absolutely disgusting. A good part of it ran behind the Overbook Italian American Club (no longer in existence, since they all became Republicans with Reagan). There were bocce courts up there, and the old Sicilians used throw their Di Nobili cigar stubs over the wall, where they came to rest as sort of turd-like objects. At the same time, every dog in Haddington used the same stretch as a toilet. And, finally, the club stacked its empty beer bottle cases out there behind a fence.

Now, you know, this delightful blend of stuff sat out there all day, just cooking away in the hot sun attracting flies. Man, even if you had gotten the downhill boost, you had to confront this stuff–no one ever thought to detour into the street, probably because you would have had to dodge traffic. Anyway, if you were the kid condemned to the uphill climb, you had to negotiate the picturesque wasteland of Edgemore Road. On a hot day, in the the Summer, in the evening, the stale beer, dogshit and Di Nobili cigar butts made for a cloud of gas hanging there that could have violated the Geneva Convention against the use of chemical weapons. You were running, so you couldn’t really hold your breath. And if you inhaled, well, you probably wanted to hurl because it stunk to Kingdom Come. So you’re running along, probably hot and sweating, with the urge to wretch, only to confront the uphill portion of Suicide Hill, where you’d probably get a stitch. Where you either stopped, cried, threw up, or continued down 66th Street to the finish line. There you were probably greeted by the other runners runner yelling “You lost, Suckah”. No shit. Then a hail of fists, rocks, dirt bombs and God only knows what else came raining down on you.

And you wonder why that neighborhood produced a lot of recruits to the Marine Corps? Even the winner had been lucky to survive, and if you were all having a great day, a Red Car cruising up Haverford Avenue (Philly’s finest) would slow down to observe the festivities, maybe hurl and insult or two, drive away laughing. Why would anyone do it? Look, you think you had a choice: if you lost you got beat up. If you refused, you got beat up. I always figured you got beat worse if the other hoodlums were fresh, although they could get pretty stoked waiting for the loser to appear. I must admit, I was the loser more than once. I knew what was coming and usually picked up a board or a bottle or something with which to defend myself until some adult came screaming out of one of our homes yelling we were all going to end up in Reform School. Right. In my case. Presentation BVM and Devon Prep. Bonnner and Tommy More were worse.

But the real “fun” began when we had “race day” on Suicide Hill. To this day, I have no idea how someone didn’t get killed or seriously injured–or if they did, I managed to miss it. Now, none of us had bikes, I think, but we had wagons, those scooter things with two wheels, and a few other cobbled together contraptions with wheels. You got up to the starting point at 66th and Media and aimed down toward Triangle Park. If you had surplus kids, you stationed them to do watch duty at the Stop Signs at Media and Edgemore, which would basically give you at shot at the Haddington LeMans race if they waved you through (there was this one homicidal kid who went to Dobbins Vo Tech who routinely tried to wave people into oncoming traffic. I remember hearing he didn’t make it though Nam, which didn’t exactly surprise me. He probably got fragged).

Honestly, I was usually too damn scared to race down Suicide Hill, but others weren’t. Oh. My. God.You either got shoved forward shoved at the top of the Hill or kicked off yourself and you were off down Media Street. Everyone screaming, kids running into each other (or into parked cars), or flipping when they hit a crack in the street (or a not-quite level manhole cover). Since the turn out for this was usually sort of akin to a pre-adolescent drag race, kids from as far as Lansdowne Avenue would come and watch. Join in, sometime halfway through the race. If you had to suddenly stop at the stop sign, chances are you got creamed, because you had to head for a curb or a car, or a hydrant or some damn immovable object. I do remember one occasion where a couple of the participants ended up in Saint Callistus Parish parking lot where I think they took out a couple of Knights of Columbus who retaliated rather swiftly. No sense of humor in a 1957 Catholic Pillar of the Church. I think I remember a bunch of kids getting in hot water for that particular misadventure, but since I just stood around and waited, eh….

Now, imagine trying to pull that off in 2025. This was nearly 70 years ago. No supervision. No safety equipment. No Neighborhood Watch. I know some kids got banged up sometimes, but I broke MY ARM playing football in grade school, not racing down Suicide Hill. Think about it. You were safer involved in disorganized city mayhem than you were in organized CYO football.

Are you surprised? It figures. We had our own skins in the game. The wannabe “NFL Coaches” didn’t. And, of course, the Catholic Church watched over us benignly.