This Game Is Over, Salvucci Sez

We Deserve The Truth, Dammit

Back in the Fall, I said to a friend of mine that I was afraid we were spiraling out of control in the United States. That we were headed toward violence. That I prayed to God there were still a few grownups left in the house. And that I had never been as depressed by what I had seen going in America. I lived through the Cuban missile crisis, scared to death. I lived through Watergate, angrier than Hell. And I lived through the disgrace of Reagan’s murderous intervention in Central America. I didn’t feel as if I could face my friends in Latin America. Oh, guess where most of my friends live? You’re not surprised, are you. I left Southeastern Pennsylvania 40 years ago. I have notional loyalties there, but my heart is somewhere else. And it ain’t in Texas.

Anyone who had spent much time reading the history of the twentieth century, or who had lived in Latin America–not visited–but lived–would’ve understand why I and more than a few of my remaining USA-friends were growing increasingly apprehensive.

There was–and is, by the way–the Pandemic. It’s not over, but that’s not for today. The sheer incompetence with which the Trump administration handled events–the denial, the lying, the self-deception, the partisan chest pounding, and the callous disregard for human life–was enough to make anyone sick, whether they claimed to be “very political” or not. I often wondered how some people would’ve reacted to the Nazi take-over in Germany. “Oh, sorry, I’m not interested. I’m not very political.” Not a good look is it?

And then there was the famous violation of “norms.” While it was never entirely clear who established the political norms that the Trump Administration was said to be violating (I had the amused suspicion that The Atlantic Magazine may have codified them), it was pretty clear that if, by violation of norms, the President of the United States would say or do anything in pursuit of maintaining his clique of gangsters in power, blood relations or no, then he’d do it. Subvert the Justice Department. Why not? Corrupt the Judiciary? Ok. Destroy the professional bureaucracy needed to manage a complex country in the midst of severe financial and ecological crises? Hell, yes. And most of all, whip its ignorant supporters into a frenzy of misogyny, racism, jingoism, all in the name of “Making America Great Again.” Sure. Go ahead. As JR Ewing once famously said, “Once integrity is gone, the rest is easy.” Welcome to America as Nightmare Theater. Enjoy the ride, if you can. Trump will keep the right people out of the country, and he’ll be sure that the right people get to hold on to their wealth, because, after all, that’s why he was President. It’s not as if he stood for anything palatable.

One of the particularly disgusting features of this little odyssey is its complete predictability. Early on in the sideshow, I can recall having one of those typically feckless FB conversations with a very old friend of mine, Gabriel Haslip Viera, who is a distinguished student of the Caribbean and knows a little history, or at least much as a PhD from Columbia University is likely to get from our mutual dear friend, Herb Klein. Gabe and I go back to the 1970s, and while we don’t agree on everything, our disagreements are of the old-fashioned, “Well, I take your point” kind. Both of us were deeply worried about Trump, and one of us, I don’t know who, brought up Hitler and the Reichstag. The thread went something like, so when do you thing Mr Trump is going to pull his Reichstag act? Who knew, other than there was pretty certain to be one, because Trump was Trump. Well, you would’ve thought we took the name of God in vain, especially in some quarters. I had to laugh the other night when I saw [ that the Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff apparently said “This is a Reichstag moment,” (Gen.) Milley told aides… “The gospel of the Führer.”

What can you expect from pigs but grunts? It was like watching the assault on the Capitol on January 6. Was I surprised? No. Trump and some of his minions in Congress had done everything but tell these lowlifes to go out and kill someone. Liz Cheyney’s reported reaction to Jim Jordan, “SOB, you fucking did this” is exactly correct. What the Hell did you expect? I used to tell some of my academic colleagues, “You play with rats, you get bit.”

Congressperson Cheyney, of course, has raised the 64,000 dollar question. “You did this.” You did this can, of course, be susceptible of diverse interpretation. I don’t think Jordan was actually out there with the creatures of the night looking to lynch Mike Pentz, was he? But then again, to create an atmosphere in which violence and insurrection is possible, what exactly do you have to do? Stroll down the land with a clench fist raised in sympathy with “the people” as one United States Senator actually did? Isn’t that encouraging rioters by signalling “I’m with you”? Or is simply encouraging not enough? I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not really certain how one becomes a co-conspirator in an insurrection, so perhaps a lawyer could explain this to me? Or if you give a tour to a group who show up as rioters a few days later–after you helpfully point out means of ingress and egress, you know, soft spots in the otherwise impregnable defenses of of the Capitol, well, are you just as culpable as the dude who used as flagpole as a deadly weapon? I don’t know.

I do know one Big Thing. We need to get to the bottom of this. Insurrection is no joke. It’s not a day of fun and games for bored Know Nothings. Or their facilitators, whether they are in the Legislative or the Executive or the Judicial . It is a federal crime, and it has to be rooted out and prosecuted. The people behind what happened–all of them–have to be exposed, tried, and if appropriate, convicted. The people engaged in this rebellion have to know that their civil existence in at stake. They have to know that you make a deliberate choice to exclude yourself from civil society if the rules of the game don’t suit you and you try to change them extra-judicially. Permanently. It’s not going to stop otherwise. Look at Texas. Look at the failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War.

The Republican Party has here–and elsewhere–undertaken a program of deliberate rescission of voting rights. The right that makes democracy ostensibly operative. That’s because they know they can’t win in a fair fight. So they don’t scruple about arranging an unfair one. Reality–the correspondence of existing things to their perceived status–no longer matters to them. It’s about power and wealth and holding on to them by any means possible. In Latin America, they used to call it the death rattle of the ruling class.

Welcome to Latin America.

Act accordingly. And wake the Hell up. Or it will happen again. And next time we may not be so lucky.

Come Fly With Me

The average market capitalization of Virgin Galactic Holdings over the past five years was approximately 2.8 billion dollars. If we look at the economic cost of Project Mercury over its life, and using the “Measuring Worth” internet site, which is fairly sophisticated, and convert 1965 dollars into 2020 values, we come out with roughly 8 billion dollars. Tomorrow, when a gazillion more or less sophisticated talking heads–probably less–are waxing eloquent over Mr Branson’s achievement, the Virgin’s market capitalization will probably jump to 14 billion dollars are so.

Think about it.

Not to take anything away from Mr Branson–it may not have been Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight of 60 years ago, but we’ve all seen what can go wrong with these stunts–it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the cost of getting up into the wild blue yonder has really come down. In 1965, they figured it cost roughly 383 million per flight to get a dude into space, a la project Mercury. Virgin Galactic is currently asking 250 thousand per seat. Yeah, you got that right. Basically zilch in Project Mercury terms. So the next time someone tells you prices never come down, they only go up, you might want to gently correct him or her. John Glenn never had it so good.

Now, I know, Glenn and Shepard had space capsules, for Heaven’s sake. Glenn was taking a wild ride on an Atlas Missile that could have well blown up. Hell, it’s general purpose was to rain nuclear Hell down on the USSR, and it looked it. Clunky, kludge, mean, smoking at every orefice. By comparison, Branson’s buggy looks like a modified Cessna riding a rocket engine. Not only does it not radiate testosterone from its phallic bluntness, but it even carried two women. What is this world coming to? Next thing you know, we’ll have a MickeyD on Mars, for those Big Mac Attacks that sneak up on you when you’re looking wistfully back at Planet Gaia. Just wait.

Anyway, you immediately notice that there appears to be a lot less overhead associated with Virgin than there was with NASA. I always had the impression that NASA and its appendages had more of a relation with the military than I wanted to think about, and if there was any part of the government that knew had to spend money, well, they didn’t call it Pentagon capitalism for nothing. Branson, as far as I know, has got none of that. I don’t think his Mission Control is set up for interplanetary travel quite yet. It’s more like a high tech theme park for high rollers, Astro Hertz or something. They put you in the driver’s seat, and, oh, the wonderful places you will go.

But there’s another, I guess, more serious point to be made about the declining cost of fly me to the moon. NASA and its crew cut military pilots and German scientists could only take so much technology off the shelf. Not being an expert in this stuff, I can only interpret some of the horrendous screw ups that occurred as evidence of just that. Branson’s earlier efforts involved a few lives. As late as the Space Shuttle, people were working at the frontiers of technology, and when you’re out there, the costs are high. Rockets explode. Capsules have short circuits and go up in flames. People (like Gus Grissom) die. I don’t know how close we really came to losing Apollo 13, but whenever I read sensational stories about Russian cosmonauts who ended up on a one-way trip to God knows where–and may still be going half a century later–I tend to think were may have been good, but we were also lucky. I could never understand the idea of sending an elementary school teacher into space for grins. Christa McAuliffe would’ve stood a better chance in the classroom, for a change. At least you can see it coming.

I can’t tell you exactly how much technology Virgin Galactic has been able to make use of as a result of not being a pioneer, with all due respect. I assume that whole business of command, control and communication is now pretty much “routine” as opposed to what it was back in the exciting days when you wondered if a capsule coming down in the ocean would ever respond, let alone sink. Someone told me once that a high-end laptop has more computing power that we used to send guys to the Moon. If that’s true, well, go back and read the story of the first moon landing and the malfunctioning computer that made the last 30 seconds to one small step exciting (little did we know). I’m not saying it doesn’t take guts, brains and a lot of nerve to go up in Branson’s Beautiful Balloon. But it’s nothing like what had to be done from scratch years ago. And for that, you can thank the military-industrial-aerospace complex. Branson ought to be giving some of us free rides. After all, in some ways, he’s getting one.

So when you hear all the grousing from certain quarters about government overreach, how the government is the enemy, builds bridges to nowhere, and all that, you might want to think again. About the Internet; civilian airliners, especially from Boeing; GPS, and now, for God’s sake, affordable space travel. It’s not a joke. The worst kept secret in economics–and even some big names like Ed Phelps seem to miss it–is how much the government and its economic spillovers have contributed to a rising civilian standard of living in the United States, and the world, in the last century.

You have a degree in Entrepreneurship? Oh Goody. Now all you need is for someone to show you the money and make sure the property rights in your creation are secure. And then, you too can be a “self-made” person. Just like Richard Branson. Maybe Branson will turn ought to be another Wilbur or Orville Wright. But it’s not like anyone is going to know for at least another century, so for God’s sake, let History decide.

My apologies if this is sort of a duplicate. Technical difficulties here.

Prisontation BVM

Man, some stuff you never forget.

In my mind’s eye, I can still see it. There was this kid, a ratty little dude with short black hair. He was wearing our regs, maroon jacket and gray slacks. He was sort of bent over with his hands raised over his head as if to fend off an incoming blow. Which was real enough. Behind him stood an irate Sister of Mercy, who was in the process of bringing down a corkboard over his head. As she connected, the damn thing fragmented into three of four pieces. The kid went running down the aisle as if he had been shot out of a cannon. The rest of us sort of ducked to avoid the shrapnel. The nun was bellowing something about the kid getting a month’s detention.

Who knows what the Hell he did? Maybe he flashed Sister (known usually as S’ter) the Bird? All I can tell you is that at least two of my classmates ended up in prison, two ended up dead (there was overlap), and various others in adjacent classes got indicted, murdered, God only knows. And all of this in a nice suburban Catholic school that opened in 1954 and was gone by, I guess, 1985. Sic transit gloria mundi. Welcome to my grade school. A training ground for Vietnam. My theory was that parochial school was like prep basic for the Marines. That’s why so many Catholic kids enlisted in the Corps. How could it have been any worse?

You know, it’s really no mystery to me why so many Catholics of my generation have, as they say, “lapsed.” I love that term. It’s like the validity of product date somehow expired; having Sister Mary Godzilla only worked to keep the mojo going for so long. Then you’d stop going to Mass and taking the sacraments, unless something else intervened. Like, maybe, a Catholic secondary school or, even a university. Somehow I don’t think so. Even the lifers I know have mostly fallen away–another term of apostate art–when Agustine and Aquinas had ostensibly replaced the Baltimore Cathechism as the basis for your faith, or when you no longer thought about your immortal soul as a spotted milk bottle (mixed metaphors much?). Well, it seems not to have worked that way. PPSD–Post Parochial Stress Disorder is a powerful thing. It takes more than a few good Jesuits or Augies to cure it. Frankly, they sometimes suffered from it too, and their example only served to make your case worse. In my case, I’m not sure watching Phil Berrigan and Liz McAllister at a Villanova study date in 1970–did they or didn’t they, only their confessor knew for sure–much helped the cause. Or knowing the head of your secondary school, a tough as nails Hungarian, took off with his secretary the year you graduated (1969). You know, you were raised in this amazingly rules-bound culture, and clerical nookie was definitely breaking all the rules. It didn’t help strengthen your faith, even if it really had nothing to do with it. Huh? The 60s didn’t help? No, they certainly didn’t, especially when you started out in the pre-Vatican system.

In any event, parochial school–Prisontation ICBM, I called it–surely didn’t help. Nor did the Sisters of, hold my beer, Mercy. I started life as a child of Saint Donato’s, 65th and Callowhill, which was Italian and familial and stuff, even if the Cabrini nuns belted you if you spoke Italian. That really wasn’t an issue for my assimilationist parents, so unlike Lino Gruglio, who may have lost a set of canines in my presence for swearing in Tuscan, I never got whacked. I can still recite the St Donato’s song, word for word. I won’t try your patience, but “Hail to the Blue and Gold, Colors So True”. Prisontation had a song, but I’ve represssed it. Louie, Louie tends to come to mind, cause we thought it was dirty and chanted it to the Girls’ Choir practice when the minders were distracted. Honest to God. It goes well to the melody of Tantum Ergo. Try it some time.

Now, I’m not really sure why Prisontation was such a nasty place, although I think that it was cafone had something to do with it. Now, cafone is not a nice word among Italian Americans of a certain generation: it literally means “peasant” or something close, but to me, it meant loud, vulgar, ignorant, probably nouveau, stuck up, and, God forbid, maybe even some mixed Irish-Italian family suffering from terminal identity disorder. There were a lot of nasty cafone kids at Prisontation, many with serious behavioral disorders. For some reason, a lot of them were the offspring of builders’ families, probably because they had a few bucks and could afford to live in Greenhill Farms rather than Penn Wynne, the other side of Haverford Road that was once part of, I believe, the old Morris-Wister estate. They, as my Mom said “put on airs.” The girls thought they were too cool for us (the opposite of the contemporary “hot”) and their brothers were bound for Malvern Prep, Notre Dame, or prison. Sometimes all of the above. A few were genuine thugs, and one got rubbed out in what I’m sure was probably a drug related collections problem.

The ones who weren’t thuggish were generally not too bright. There was one kid, known as Hornet, who came to a very bad end. Poor guy. When we were having open review for “Diocesan Exams” once, there was a question about William Penn’s religious affiliation–Philly, right? The guy sitting next to Hornet slipped him a note telling him Penn was a Member of Tribe (of Israel). We had a lay teacher that year who scared the Hell out of most of us. Well, she asked Hornet, right, and he pipes up with “A Jew.” William Penn. Oh, man. She hit the roof because she thought Hornet was being deliberately disrespectful, and not just ignorant, and started yelling at him and threw him out of the room. This also happened when another kid (deliberately, I think) mispronounced Chicago as “Shee-Cah-Go” (accent first syllable). Another bold, brazen article who got banished, loudly. Of course the rest of us were laughing ourselves silly, and when you got 43 miscreants in a room, things will get out of control. This warder went around whacking kids with a yardstick until a respectful silence prevailed. This was about 1963 or 64, and that’s the way they rolled in those days.

The other thing about cafone kids was they didn’t take religion seriously enough, which I’m sure they got from their uber-cafone parents. And if you had to take anything seriously in Catholic school, it had better be religion. All the way from “Who Is God?” to “Why was Cardinal Mindszenty holed up in the American Embassy in Budapest.” I could write a book on the theology of parochial schools in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, but it would be too depressing. Better I tell you about Hornet’s wisdom on Mindszenty. We were told by Sister that the Russians kept a car fueled and running outside the American Embassy, just waiting for the Cardinal to step out, since he had sought asylum there. So the nun asked us why it was they kept the car with the motor running (who knew)? Hornet’s bold sally: “To keep the heat on?” Holy God. You would have thought, well, God knows what, but once again teacher flipped on the poor kid, yelling something about this wasn’t a joke, this was a man of God, etc., etc., etc. So Hornet made the All Hall Squad again that day.

Now, by the time puberty struck, many things were getting, er, kind of touchy and if there was anything the Archdiocese liked less than Communism it was Sex, especially with women. Well, like who else were you going to have it with, other than a girl, right–or vice versa? At this point, let’s leave the horrible stuff out of it, because honestly, it never got anywhere near me, and I was truly shocked after years of being around priests to read the accounts. So, we’ll stick to the usual kind of vaguely risque stories–not the felonious assault part. Our class in Sex Ed consisted of Sister writing in HUGE letters on the blackboard (remember those?) “SEX IS SACRED.” Oh, oh. Now what? And she looked defiantly at us, as if daring some smart-ass to say something stupid.

Right. Count on Salvucci in a jam.

I don’t know what possessed me (this has happened several times in my life), but I turned to the young lady next to me, on whom I sort of had a crush anyway, and volunteered, “Do you want to go light a candle?” She burst out laughing, and, oh, you know, the “what’s so funny” inquisition began. When I repeated what I said, the nun got incandescent and threw ME out into the darkness, where I cooled my jets until school let out. Whereupon I was informed I was stuck with two weeks’ detention, and an automatic markdown on my conduct grade. I knew my Mom and Dad were going to be thrilled, although to tell the truth, I heard my father laughing as he repeated the story to a couple of his brothers the following Sunday morning at one of my aunt’s in West Philly. But to me, it was all business.

Some day I’ll tell you my State Department interview story. It’s even better. I didn’t get the job, obviously.

Of course, much of what sounds so ridiculous would not be viewed as amusing today. Sticking people with AHD in closets (where they continued to bop away and pretend they were airplanes) isn’t very funny. Pasting an asthmatic kid with an eraser loaded with chalk dust–we nicknamed one of the nuns Art Mahaffey because she really had an arm–as a way of maintaining order isn’t funny. Treating someone who couldn’t read aloud like a dunce when it’s quite possible the kid was dyslexic isn’t funny. Teaching by terror in general is really not a great idea.

And I’m afraid the whole idea of using religion as a method of immigrant social control under the guise of education really failed. People now tend to think that the Catholic Church’s problems in America started with birth control, and maybe they did. But I have to tell you, I can’t think of anyone I knew who was determined to stay in the Church who was going to let that birth control stop them. Sooner or later, if you looked around, you could find a confessor who didn’t think that, or any number of other ostensibly serious slap n’ tickle offenses was really a big deal. When you tangled with one of those types, you made sure you avoided them in aeternam. Believe me, you could. I could. And did.

But the damage was done, because unfortunately, there really wasn’t much substance to a lot of people’s faith. You know, you could have a PhD and maintain 3rd grade sensibilities about Catholicism, because that’s where they were formed. People fell away because they were losing nothing in a world that required SOMETHING. Their world view or system of ethics or even their sense of what was or wasn’t sacred had nothing to do with what they had been taught as kids. And once even educated people began to realize the games that the Vatican played with politics, sexuality in general, even with high finance, you weren’t likely going to scare them back into attendance by tales of fire and brimstone. Give a kid a physics book, and the odds were about 50-50 you’d end up with an agnostic, at best. Yeah, some people found the hand of God in mathematics, but they had to work at it. I may think self-creating universes sound a lot like Aquinas’ uncaused cause, but ontological proofs don’t get you through the night. I know. Faith does, and that’s an entirely different matter. I’m afraid what matters to me now is mostly self-taught and makes me a “cafeteria Catholic,” as if any sensible person could read the Syllabus of Errors and be anything but. Did any Vicar of Christ rescind the syllabus when I wasn’t looking? I didn’t think so.

Problem with the Church is that it always wants to “civilize” the heathen. The heathen usually have other ideas, and sooner or later, they act on them, or they die trying. Like Galileo said, “Eppur si muove.” If he didn’t say it, he should have. Si non e vero, e ben trovato. That I got courtesy of Saint Donato’s, not Prisontation ICBM.

A Modest Proposal, Finally

“In 2003, the San Antonio Symphony was again plagued with financial difficulties and canceled the last few concerts of the season. The Symphony declared bankruptcy, and the board of directors spent the 2003-2004 season reworking the Symphony’s business plan” Yes, that was nearly twenty years ago. It resides in memory because, as some of you may recall, another unwelcome viral guest, the known principally by its acronym SARS (but today, more accurately called SARS-Covid) had made its appearance in 2002. I’m not going to say that people didn’t take it terribly seriously, at least here, but I had friends in the orchestra who were accustomed to making dubious jokes about its spread among section plays of a certain ancestry. No, Trump did not invent “Wu flu,” although its consequences, plainly, have demonstrated what happens when you stupidly politicize a public health issue. We hadn’t quite advanced to that stage of political ignominy yet in the United States. Yet.

I can’t remember if SARS had much to do with the financial problems of the Symphony back then, although the Symphony had already enjoyed a history of financial problems. I was, however, a lot more involved, because I was then the parent of two aspiring musicians, both of whom ended up studying with symphony players. One of them, my daughter Rosie, is now a freelance classical bassist living in Berlin. So, in a manner of speaking, I came by interest in the Symphony’s finances honestly. A lot of the players were frustrated, and my daughter’s teacher, a brilliant player from Curtis, was actively involved in the negotiations. He was not happy. It was already becoming apparent that classical music in the United States was in for a rough ride, and that, perhaps, there were questions as to whether or not what was then regarded as a quintessentially white, European art form had much future in a part of the country where the emerging majority, may or may not have been called white, but their roots were in Latin America, not Europe.

I remember being really frustrated, not to say irritated by the discussion, because after living in Mexico and spending significant time in Latin America, I really hadn’t noticed that “classical” music had no audience. Actually, in Mexico, it seemed to be quite the contrary, and while it certainly wasn’t popular music, well, the Boss Jocks at WFIL 56 didn’t exactly spin Rachmaninoff to an eager audience either. So, you figured, why would it be that people in San Antonio or the Southwest wouldn’t support symphonies? Other than quoting Oprah Winfrey about blacks not liking classical music–I’ll let the irony sink in once more about generic people of color in America–nobody could give me much of an answer. “Ah, it’s a working class town,” some savant cautioned me. Well, sorry, but I came from a working class family in Philadelphia that listened not only to jazz and pop, but to opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra too. I won’t say that Eugene Ormandy was a household deity or anything, but I don’t think we were exactly unique in regarding him as part of the panoply of civic institutions. So, long story short, my reaction was “this discussion is ignorant, patronizing and misleading at best.” At worst, it was vaguely racist, and I don’t throw that term around lightly.

So, well and surely ticked off, I wrote a piece whose intent was satirical. It was to suggest that San Antonio, by virtue of its proximity to Mexico, was remarkably well positioned to support a symphony orchestra if only the city leaders exercised a little imagination.

Welp, I sent it everywhere I could think of here, including the underground press. No one would touch it. I sent it to Nexos in Mexico thinking it might give someone a laugh. Nada. Now people who read it were really complimentary, it circulated among some of the orchestra people, and yeah, a couple thought it was hilarious. It was intended to be funny, but I guess no one got the joke. There were no blogs in 2003. You couldn’t inflict your half-baked ideas and crummy prose on some captive audience, much less a volunteer one. So, alas, you put such ephemera aside, chalking their production up to experience. Teechur writers, as Gore Vidal called us, get accustomed to rejection pretty quickly anyway. Or you don’t last.

In any event, now that I am retired, and having stumbled across of a copy of the text of the piece, I figured, “Hey, why not?” I’m not touching a word of it, and I’m going to make sure that my colleagues in Mexico get to read it. It proves that we are dos paises nunca distantes. Or something like that. You can download it here.

symphony-scan Download

Downa Shore

You knew this was coming. No Philly city-kid life in the 1950s and 1960s could possibly be complete without it. You were inevitably part of the great chain of land-breathing creatures whose ancestors emerged from the cheap seats on Big Ships. And as soon as they could possibly afford to, they went back to the sandy fringe of the Jersey shore (Jersey, dammit, not Maryland) to sleep on damp sheets, get basted in greasy crap called Coppertone (“Tan don’t burn, get a Coppertone tan”), lay on the beach, get sunburned (Coppertone, surprise, didn’t work), dig holes in the sand (until other amusements drew your attention–more anon), get tossed around in the waves, eat hot dogs for lunch, collect seashells, see your parents half naked, and then go back to whatever mildewed bed-sit for an outdoor shower, some mystery dinner, and then an evening stroll on the Boardwalk. Stuff happened there: food, fun, the occasional movie, lots of people watching. Then back “home” rinse, sleep, repeat, only to start another day. If your family was hip (mine wasn’t), maybe a morning bike ride. If you were lucky, sunshine. If none of the above, rain, comic books, boredom, and the drone of the AM radio stations that excitingly drifted in from Long Island, or even, at night, some place called Canada. If you were working class, you maybe got a week. If you were fortunate, maybe two. And then there were those few, construction-money scented , indeed, blessed beings who had a place downa Shore for the Summer. Like as in June through August. Damn: Memorial Day through Labor Day. I knew one or two of them after we moved to the verdant suburb of Penn Wynne in 1960. But never before. Hell, you got a week and thanked God for it. We always went to Ocean City (New Jersey, NOT Maryland), but a lot of the South Philly contingent hit one of the flavors of Wildwood, Ventnor, or Margate. Almost never Cape May, except for one memorable summer to which I will return. A lot of firsts generally happened downa shore. They mostly had to do with rituals of childhood and adolescence. Be patient, and I’ll cop to a few.

Now be aware that there are many possible narratives, all necessarily age-adjusted. I’m gonna be conflating about 18 years of them. So don’t get confused. And pay attention, lest you think I was chugging Schmidts while still in diapers. Actually, it was Valley Forge (raw Schmidt’s), and that had to wait until 1967 when I was sixteen and a hotshot.

Getting downa shore before the Atlantic City Expressway (1964) generally entailed a romp through backwoods South Jersey, the Pine Barrens included. You took the Ben Franklin Bridge (before 1957) and then the Walt Whitman, which avoided lovely Camden, but included any number of motels out of Psycho (all since gone, I’m sure) along the Back Horse Parkway. As a bonus, you got to stop to take a leak in Cecil. These little garden spots had local constabularies whose agents would gleefully stop you (or my Dad), as well as the odd service station that specialized in fixing some mysterious ailment called vapor lock that I’m sure was induced by stifling heat, too much traffic, and the Jersey Devil. It was rural then, dotted with little amusement spots (See Little Mexico. We never did) and fruit and vegetable stands. At some point, as you escaped the Pine Barrens and their weird denizens, known as Pineys (you could’ve made Deliverance there), the soil started to change and the air perceptibly cooled. Maybe around Absecon, you’d start to smell decaying marine life, which was not exactly the same as the sea. I remember the great relief that greeted Somer’s Point and the Causeway across Egg Harbor Bay (Little Egg Harbor, I think), “are we there yet” no longer ticked off your parents. Cause you were there.

I should mention in passing that I think Ocean City was founded by Methodists, and the town was dry. That sort of made Somer’s Point a kind of Subic Bay fleshpot, with lots of booze stores (“Package Goods”), road houses, like Bayshores, the Dunes, Tony Mart’s, which were off limits to respectable people, but always jumping with college kids and other dissipated types by night. I was too young then, but, eventually, like the song says, I found out. A nice Catholic girl who had driven down to Ocean City with me and a few friends years later cheerfully announced “Here’s where we leave our morals.” I wouldn’t have known, at least then.

We usually settled into some dank rental, inevitably going out to the ACME to stock up on exactly the same stuff we ate back home. Exciting, right? But then, if you were lucky, you went down to the sea in your father’s old Hudson or Buick. You had to find a place to park because you never could afford to be near the beach. But you could now see it, and then hear it: The Sea! As we got a little more affluent, my parents stayed in a place called the Garden District–which I take it is wildly unaffordable now, but was still modest then. By then I was learning trumpet, and the landlord, a sax player, would drop by, critique and even jam some. But, again, this is getting ahead of ourselves.

Going to the beach as a little kid was always wild. You got to see your parents half undressed (and my Dad’s ulcer surgery scar, that really freaked me out), you ate sandy hot dogs, you avoided the water for at least an hour after eating (“cramps”–what kind of cramps you gonna get standing in water no higher than your knees?) and worked at excavating, shell collecting, and intermittent runs into the ocean under the watchful eye of your Mom (my Dad just wanted to sleep, poor guy) and some impossibly blonde lifeguard, sort of a Jersey Beach Boy type. Normally, there wasn’t much excitement, unless the surf was rough, or some idiot overestimated his (always his) swimming ability. At which point all Hell would break lose and the somnolent white boys on the stand turned into quasi-Olympians paddling out to get said idiot out of trouble. I never saw anyone drown, but there were a few close calls, and that was enough. Even when I took to body surfing, I made sure to know where the cross currents were. A few abrasions, unwanted doses of sea water. For the most part, it was tame. We’d loiter until the tide came in, and then back to the chateau. An outdoor shower awaited you, usually cold as Hell, and then a chance to clean up. Mostly, then, you went up to the Boardwalk for dinner, although I do remember a sit down restaurant once or twice over the years.

Ocean City opened my palate. I learned to eat pizza at Mack and Manco (it was Mack and Manco then, see) which had just opened. In fact, I think 1957 was a kind of breakthrough year. I ate pizza, saw The Curse of the Demon (which scared me half to death–I still can’t watch the damn thing), and learned the words to Patti Page’s “Old Cape Cod” which was like a summer version of White Christmas-dawn to dusk. My Dad, God love him, would indulge me in all sorts of arcade games on the Boardwalk, but sometimes we’d just walk en famille and watch the phosphorescent waves crash up again the pilings by Fisherman’s Pier. Look, I’m sure the normal tensions of family life had some tendency to get magnified under close quarters for a week, but the release from routine, work, “the pain in the ass innocent bystanders” who populated your life, obviously compensated for my parents. And I got to eat salt water taffy.

I inevitably enjoyed myself.

One year, 1961, we did go to Wildwood Crest to stay at a property a great uncle had rented for the summer. That was really memorable because, for the first time, a kid saw the outside world intrude on fantasyland. For one thing, we went to the beach in Cape May, and I got to see the harbor defenses and the bunker that had gone up to protect the coast during World War 2, which still wasn’t twenty years in the past. I asked my Dad a lot of dumb questions, and I recall he told me that he thought a German U Boat had gotten into the Delaware Bay, which just around the other side of the point. As if that wasn’t enough, I distinctly recall Jack Kennedy making an address about Berlin. Well, I wasn’t wrong. That was July 25, 1961. And man, he scared the Hell out of me. He made it very clear that a lot of young men might find themselves in harm’s way if worse came to worse. Do remember we had a draft. I may have only been 10, but virtually every male member in my immediate family was a veteran of World War II, some wounded and decorated multiple times. My Dad and I watched the speech in complete silence, along with a couple of friends of my cousin, who were definitely draft age. They exited immediately afterward, I guess to get a stiff drink. I asked my Dad if there was going to be a war. “Let’s hope not, Rich. Let’s hope not.”

https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKWHA/1961/JFKWHA-045/JFKWHA-045

I can see all of it, the furniture, the cottage, the black and white tv, and a grim-faced Jack Kennedy. And an equally grim-faced Dad. The holiday was over for that year. We went home soon after. I thought about that night a lot for the rest of the summer.. In October, the Russians set off an ostensible 100 megaton bomb in some God-forsaken part of Siberia. The Summers were warm and memorable, but the winters, man, they were cold, dark and long. You had to go downa shore to stand them. Or, at least, I did.

The Ides of Texas Are Upon You (Sorry)

Full Disclosure: don’t submit this for serious publication anywhere, even in your local newspaper. These are all back of envelope calculation. The numbers are pretty crude and I haven’t revisited their sources. This is just more a kind of Saturday in Summer WTF meditation. Read at your own risk.

Ok. When I last checked, I figured that “defense spending” accounted for about 5 percent of Texas’ state product (just as a ratio). If we guessed a reasonable fiscal multiplier of 2, we might get this all the way up to 10 percent. That’s a pretty big number, given that the state product of Texas is around 1.7 trillion dollars (around 10 percent of US GDP, roughly, which is huge). Now, Texas’ “exports” are about 17 percent of Texas’ state product, and a third of them go to Mexico. So, we’re talking, what, 5 or 6 percent as a ratio, or more or less what defense spending adds up to. Again, very crudely, figure a similar multiplier. So, at a first pass, defense spending and exports to Mexico might account for 20 percent of income (production) in Texas. Again, that’s a lot.

Now here’s the thing, Texans are reputed to hate government. Hell, “government overreach” is nearly a four-letter word. And, believe me, so is Mexico (six, actually). To paraphrase Winston Churchill, never have so many owed so much to so little–especially to so little little they have so little regard for. An outsider (believe me, you can live in Texas for 30 years and still be an outsider) might be forgiven for thinking the locals are a little confused. And that’s being kind. An outsider from the evil Northeast (waving my hand) may be thinking there’s more than a little hypocrisy in the Lone Star State. We love the sin, but we hate the sinner. Not very Christian, is it?

In any event, there are bigger fish to fry. Texas, you may have noticed, is a red state. As in Trump Red State. I don’t want to make too much of this, but I had the impression that Donald Trump really didn’t understand (among other things) economic theory. Trump was one of the exports good, imports bad guys. A mercantilist, in other words. Now, that’s ok. The left of the Democratic party, which professed to detest Trump, has it’s share of mercantilists too. I never could quite understand why they and The Donald couldn’t get along. Except, apparently, in Texas, where the “natural” Democratic constituency of Hispanics, Latinos, whatever in South Texas, is called the Red Wave by some. It is, justifiably, considered a big problem. What’s wrong with these people. Don’t they know that “people of color” have this mystical abstract almost Louis Hartzian love of Liberalism? Ha. Tell them. They–imagine–may well keep Texas from turning Blue. Traitors. Why aren’t Texas Hispanics naturally Democrats? Funny you should ask.

When I worked for Barack Obama, I made a lot of phone calls. Because I will talk to anyone in almost any language I have a chance of speaking, I made a lot of calls to people of the Spanish-speak. Urging them to vote for my man Barack. Sure enough, some were sympathetic and pledged their vote. But, would you believe, some of these people had their own ideas about politics, and their vote wasn’t necessarily going to El Negrito. Oh, my. You never heard that phrase? That was Texas-Latino talk for Obama. I bet you can figure out what it meant. If not, call me. I’ll straighten you out.

That was my first inkling that those people down there along the border weren’t necessarily Democrats, People of Color they might be. Oh my. Republican Mexicans in the Valley. Nobody told the DNC about these people. Especially the people in Texas–with names like Castro or Cisneros–whom you would’ve expected to raise the alarm. No. They had careers to make, didn’t they?

Meanwhile, I watched, awestruck, as another Negrita went to Central America the other day to tell our brothers in Honduras, Guatemala, Salvador, who knows, “Don’t Come.” Except this wasn’t any negrita. This was the Vice-President of the United States. Was iot the right message? Of course it was. Was she the right messenger? Dude, unless your head is stuck in Wilmington or Delco, God forbid no. Imagine the GOP spots in 2022 with Mamala telling the bros “Go home.” That’s just brilliant isn’t it? And even if the people in the Valley are secretly in agreement, well, they can cluck and say “Those white Democrats aren’t our people.” Right. As if some Republican is? Never mind. We’re talking politics, not logic. And on this one, Biden screwed up big time. Really big time. And if you’re one of the people who has the ear of an ear of an ear, you might want to say something. Like, our expat in Texas says you screwed up. For what it’s worth.

Let’s try this again. Henry B Gonzalez, whom I liked and admired, and with whom I corresponded extensively, voted AGAINST NAFTA. Why, in a state, with such large connections to trade with Mexico, would he do such a thing? Economic theory, something else Democrats don’t much like, suggests an answer. People vote in their own interest. And if they’re going to lose by trade and immigration, then they will vote against it. Labor in America is the “scarce factor” and trade punishes the scarce factor. No kidding. Henry B’s people were going to compete directly with the goods (and people) that NAFTA brought into Texas. Of course he opposed it. Henry B may have been crazy, but he was no fool. Texas may be resource abundant, but in economic terms, it is labor scarce. Just because labor appears to be powerless changes nothing. This is Latin America, in case you didn’t know. A white oligarchy, not a popular democracy.

So now we wonder why “those people” in the Valley don’t vote on the basis of some mystical connection to the great community of People of Color? You mean money is thicker than blood? Imagine that, if you can. It takes far less than a PhD. Sometimes I think a PhD keeps otherwise intelligent people from getting it. Like many of my colleagues.

Meanwhile, I keep wondering why we can’t just get on with it and start by renaming Ft Hood “Ft Jesse Benavides”? And telling people that Joe Biden sends his greetings. And that there is plenty more where that came from if people are willing to listen. And they will listen if they have something other than abstract nonsense to sell them. It may work in Austin. It won’t work in Mission, TX.

Wake up. You’re going to lose the House in 2022 and the Presidency in 2024. You’ve been warned. Texas is sending you a message: beware the Ides of Texas.

Bring Back the Reserve Clause. Save MLB

C’mon man, are you serious? Bring back the reserve clause to major league baseball? Are you nuts? Well, not exactly. Next you’re gonna want to see the airlines reregulated. Well, from time to time, especially when confined to a miserable modern airport, the thought has crossed my mind. But I digress.

When I started college teaching, 1978 more or less, I had a brilliant, but rather eccentric office mate. He held a Phd in Economics from Virginia Tech, and had been a student of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. Virginia Tech was considered Chicago East at the time. My office mate, may he rest in peace, was a true product of the VPISU Economics department. He was dogmatic as Hell, believed in the Market the way I believe in God, and never let the facts stand in the way of a good economic argument.

Well, I left Villanova, where I started out, for the greener, but ultimately deceptively greener fields of what David Lodge called Euphoric State. That’s the subject of a future post. Here we gotta stick to baseball and the reserve clause.

I’m pretty sure the incident in question occurred after I went to California, because I heard about it from my former Chair, a good guy who deserved better faculty members than me and my office mate. It seems my late colleague, because he had won some sort of well deserved teaching award, had been invited to the VIP reception after graduation. Oh, oh. Bad move. He was really smart, but, well, not housebroken. And you know how that goes.

Apparently one of the guests at the shindig was a certain Paul Owens, GM of the Philadelphia Phillies. Owens was what they used to call “a good baseball man.” That means he was a hopeless reactionary, mainlined Wild Turkey, and probably made Cardinal Spellman look like a hopeless panty-waist. More importantly, he had been brought up in the days of what Major League Baseball called “the reserve clause.” I’m gonna explain this in brief for my younger readers. If you’re over 60, feel free to skip ahead. I’m going to defer to https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Reserve_clause

The reserve clause was a clause in player contracts that bound a player to a single team for a long period, even if the individual contracts he signed nominally covered only one season. For most of baseball history, the term of reserve was held to be essentially perpetual, so that a player had no freedom to change teams unless he was given his unconditional release

That changed with Curt Flood. Flood, an outfielder for the Cardinals from 1958–1969, was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies after the 1969 season. Flood was outraged, both because he had put down roots in St. Louis and because the team hadn’t even told him about the deal; he found out about it over the radio. Instead of submitting, Flood challenged the trade in the courts with the backing of the MLBPA. This time, the players were acting together and refused to be bought off. The suit eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where Flood and the players lost.

Although the players lost the Flood case, they were still able to make progress. In the 1972 strike, they were able to convince the owners to accept binding arbitration for contract disputes. Several players then tried to refuse to sign contracts, play through one season under the reserve clause, and then demand free agent rights in arbitration. The owners, understanding that the reserve clause was under threat, were able to convince several players to relent, but in 1975 both Dave McNally and Andy Messersmith played through the season without a signed contract (actually, McNally retired partway through the season, then refused to accept a proposed salary increase in order to see his case reach arbitration).

Arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled for McNally and Messersmith. In essence, Seitz ruled that since the owners had written the contract, it was their responsibility to spell out its terms exactly. Because the reserve clause didn’t explicitly state that it would be applied to the season played without a signed contract, he had to accept the players’ interpretation that the clause only extended for one season and not in perpetuity. The owners challenged Seitz’s ruling in court, but it was upheld, ending over 80 years of the reserve system.

Now, my office mate, being a good free market guy a la Virginia Tech, had no time for stuff the restricted competition, of which the reserve clause in baseball was a shining example. Owens, steeped in the whiskey-sodden traditions of MLB, thought that baseball depended on the reserve clause, and he hated free agency, aka, “the free market.” He had distinguished company. Sparky Anderson, the long-time manager of the Reds and the Tigers, detested free agency. He thought it was ruining baseball in the 1990s, and bailed out of the game, saying he couldn’t stand what it had become. Oh, God, Sparky, if you could see it now.

Now, Villanova lore has it–I wasn’t there, you see–that my office mate and Paul Owens tangled at the post graduation reception over the reserve clause. I’m sure Owens was three sheets to the wind. My office mate didn’t need liquor to be outrageous. Ownes apparently told my office mate that baseball needed the reserve clause because it spent so much in training and grooming young players–only a few of whom would ultimately make it to the Bigs-that the reserve clause made perfect financial sense. My office mate, LOL, proceeded to tell Owens that this was precisely the justification that the Soviet Union used in its refusal to let skilled Jewish scientists and intellectuals emigrate to the West. In other words, Owens, red-white-and-blue American baseball man, was a Commie. Much merriment ensued.

I take it there was a scene. On graduation day. Between an Honored Guest of Villanova –and some smart-ass VU pointy head economist who was a libertarian. I only heard stories about it, but, damn, I wish I had been there. The two of them deserved each other, but, nisi sed bonum. I missed out on a great time. Years later, I got my revenge on Owens, who had come down to field-managing the club after firing somebody, at Candlestick Park. I stood up and called him every name I could think of, much to the chagrin of my sweet wife, who was my date, not to say of the San Francisco Giants security people, who were getting ready to remove me. Payback, Owens, is Hell. I called him every name I could think of, in honor of my office mate (strictly speaking, at this point, he was still alive). At one point, going out to the mound, Owens stopped, looked around, and he stared straight at me. I gave him the finger. It felt good.

Now, what has all of this to do with economics, the reserve clause, and saving baseball?

Glad you asked.

Look, I don’t claim any expertise in baseball. I’m just the average fan. I’m always astounded at how much real students of the game know. I don’t consider myself a real student of the game, although I’ve watched my share. In fact, I guess all I do is follow the Philadelphia Phillies. That is hardly the same as being a serious fan. And even there, it’s been years since I’ve listened or watched every game. Probably the last season was 1980, which is when my life got turned upside down and I left Philadelphia. Probably for good. Anyway. I watch baseball when I can these days. And I follow the Phillies via the Inkwire. That’s about it. Too many other things call, and the caliber of the Phillies play is not such as to give up some more productive use of my time–like going to the head. Honestly, they stink.

I think back to when Ryne Sandberg managed the Phillies in the early 2010s. He was a HOF player and a true pro. I remember him trying to do base running drills with one of the teams he manged. The players didn’t like it. Ok. Maybe Sandberg, as good as he was, wasn’t cut out to be a manager. It happens. But then consider what Mr. Philly, Larry Bowa said–and Bowa flopped as a manger in Philly too

“When Ryno came up, I thought he was going to be a good player,” Bowa said. “But did I think he was going to be a Hall of Famer? No. He worked. A lot of Hall of Fame guys have natural ability. He had the ability and he worked. I think he thought if he worked that hard, why can’t everybody work that hard? He was shocked at not everybody, but some guys that were on the fringe. He’d look at them and say, ‘Why don’t you work harder?’ That bothered him a lot.”

Yeah, I get it. I looked at a lot of my students, especially the undergraduates since 2010. You’re not stupid, I thought. But you’re lazy and lack motivation. And I can’t give that to you. Nor can I give you the fundamentals you didn’t get in grade school. A lot of my students couldn’t do stuff that I had learned to do by the time I was in junior high. Spelling, grammar, organization, thinking in a straight line. Forget it. They were hopeless. And I couldn’t give them the fundamentals that they didn’t have. It was too damn late. You need five years of Sister Marie Suzanne. And you’re not about to get it. Frankly, they don’t pay me enough. They expect a scholar and a babysitter? Forget it. It’s not happening. Sister Marie Suzanne didn’t have a professional reputation to worry about. I did.

But then I watch the state of modern baseball. Oh my God. I watch the Phillies (among others) make mistakes that Little Leaguers shouldn’t make. Where is the play? What are the rules? How many outs are there? Do I cut off the throw from the outfielder? Where do I throw the ball if I do? How does a catcher block a low pitch? And on and on and on. They may be better athletes, bigger and stronger, but they play stupid, as if no one ever bothered to teach them the fundamentals. And then I wonder.

The idea idea behind the reserve clause, an “exclusive services contact”, was that you spent an awful lot developing players knowing full well very few would make it. But when they did, you had their services for the duration. Maybe that was–and I think it was–an abuse–but any decent economist can explain why an exclusive services contract exists. You invest a great deal in some raw talent. Most don’t make it. But you are compensated by the few who do. Economists call it monitoring your dependencies. And, alas, it makes more than a little sense.

I sometimes wonder how much teams spend these days in actually developing their players? Do they figure they can’t hold on to them that long anyway (I think maybe 12 years max, both minor and major leagues), so there’s a limit to how much you want to spend developing a player? I don’t know. I’d welcome someone coming in here and telling me this is complete nonsense, like most economic theory is. Go ahead, make my day. Otherwise, I’ll keep wondering if the reserve clause was really as bad an idea as the players made it out to be. Meanwhile, enjoy your next bat flip. That, they can do.

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

[Note: I apologize to early readers for so many typos. It’s true. You really see what you think is there. Not what is there. Like a lousy umpire calling balls and strikes]

Joe Villari

In the 1940 Census, he is listed as the head of household at 912 Tree Street, Lower Moyamensing, Philadelphia PA. His wife, Frances, was a bit younger. Both were born in Italy (my Mother, Maddelena Villari, seemingly did not know her Mother was not born here, because she told me otherwise); Joseph in 1895, Frances in 1900. He arrived as a 16 year old at Ellis Island in 1911, after boarding a ship in Naples. I remember holding the woolen cap of his U.S. Army uniform, in which he served from 1918 to 1919, when he was sent to Camp Greenleaf, Georgia. The army record is surely accurate. I remember Grandpop (and I had only one, since my paternal grandfather died before I was born) telling me about the time that he and some army buddies scoured the streets of Chattanooga, TN, looking for a plate of spaghetti. I figure that Camp was no more than 20 miles away over the Tennessee line. If that was the worst that happened to Joe during his hitch, he didn’t have it so bad. He was naturalized in 1919.

He was not an educated man, although he was literate in that he could read and write. He got as far as third grade in Sicily, and Grandmom, the seventh. I was never quite able to figure out the details, but, God love them, they had an arranged marriage in Philadelphia, and they were inseparable until the end–over 50 years of marriage starting in 1922. I can remember Grandmom getting exasperated with Grandpop, usually starting out with “Joe!” But I never saw them fight. I never saw him really angry with her, or with anyone, for that matter. They were a big part of my world growing up–Hell, they were my world growing up. And I was lucky. Day care in extended Italian families was all part of the deal; and for me, it worked out wonderfully. I had four parents.

For a cabinet maker and a seamstress, they didn’t do too badly. They had three daughters and an income that would have been worth over $50,000 today in 1940. I remember when Grandpop died, my father, “Lou Larkins”, helped settle the estate. Dad was not the communicative type, but he was stunned at what Grandpop had been able to do. “Rich, I don’t know how the Hell he did it,” which was more or less a direct quote, a it being a stash of US Savings Bonds, that astounded my Dad. Yes, they raised a family, and yes they owned three homes in their lifetime. But they had no real expenses other than food, clothing, and shelter. Their family was everything. And I mean everything. And they were raising it in a country of genuine opportunity, genuine mobility, and, for what it’s worth, genuine democracy of which Franklin Delano Roosevelt was their patron saint. You may say, correctly, “but your grandfather was listed as ‘white’ on the census form”. Other Sicilians, like the ones who got strung up in Louisiana, were less fortunate. That was the extent of Joe’s white privilege. The rest was work, and I saw it, so don’t be giving me any crap. Maybe that country no longer exists. I frankly don’t think it does. But that does nothing to diminish what two very modestly educated immigrants achieved.

Joe’s life was uncomplicated. He went to bed around 8 or 9 PM. He rose at 4 AM. He commuted by trolley, subway, and the Ben Franklin Bridge to RCA Camden where he worked as a cabinet maker until 1960, when he retired. His big entertainment was the Friday Night Fights on our RCA (naturally) cabinet tv. He tended his garden in the front of the house–the rosa bushels (“rose bushes”) and enjoyed a glass or two of wine with spaghetti, bracciole, or some close substitute every night in the kitchen. The wine came from Tomasello in Hammonton, NJ, in large glass jugs. Vintage Tuesday, probably. He re-bottled it in a Four Roses Whisky bottle and after dinner, usually smoked his pipe on the front porch, depending on the season. Until he was well into his sixties, I never saw Grandpop in Church. That was for Grandmom, and I guess he had a good bit of that bred-in -the-bone anti clericalism that Italian men often had. In fact, the only real dispute I remember between him and Grandmom was over some building project at Saint Donato’s that Monsignor Pasta (Honest to God, could I make it up?) was dunning the parishioners for. I don’t know how much was involved, and I was a little kid. But I got the impression he thought Monsignore should keep his hands out our pockets. As he got older, and mortality dawned, he’d go on Sundays, usually dressed beautifully in a suit and box coat that would’ve done Luca Brasi proud.

Joe was stout. His English was a thing of beauty, and his son-in-law, Stan the Man, compiled quite a Joe Villari Concordance. When he finally moved out to the suburbs in the early 1960s, Grandpop set up a real vegetable garden that was in production all summer long. His deadly enemies were the “habbits” (rabbits) and them God-damna squirrels. What little profanity he used he saved for his varmint foes, although “managia” and “pada Madonna” did make an occasional appearance. Sicilian he saved for card games with his buddies, and I couldn’t understand a word. Of course, wine, laughter, and the less-than-transparent rules of the game, “Abriscula” (Briscola for Tuscan purists) didn’t help. Man what a character he was. When he was decked out in his rumpled farming clothes, deeply tanned, and grinning from ear to ear, he was a sight. If I managed to make an appearance, I’d be greeted with a boisterous “Reechee old boy!” I’d give anything to hear that again. It was no accident I took “Joseph” as my Confirmation middle name. In my own weird adolescent way, I thought he’d be with me forever. My friends fussed over Joe and Frances–“Such handsome people,” one said. Damn right. Dignified, hard-working, unassuming, you name it. How could you not love them?

When I say that Joe and Frances were generous with their family, I’m not exaggerating. In their house in West Philly, I can remember a time when Mom and Dad, yours truly, and an aunt who had taken ill (with her husband) were all in residence. Yeah, it was a big house, but Joe’s attitude was his entire family should be there. And on the major Catholic holidays–Christmas, Easter, New Year’s–everyone was there. We had these massive family dinners laid out in the kitchen, spilling over into the dining room, with turkey, spaghetti, soup, nuts, salad, fruit, pies, cakes, beer, wine, whiskey, more or less like in the Godfather holiday meal scene, sans fisticuffs. The benign Philadelphia presence of broadcaster John Facenda (our Walter Cronkite) was always hovering in the background on Channel 10, to the point where he was–as in so many other Italian families–more or less an honorary guest. These were all day affairs, at least, starting sometime early in the morning and stretching into the night hours. And always with Grandmom intoning “Nobody’s eating!” although Grandpop did a good imitation. Yeah, there were all the usual frictions. Probably even more I had no inkling of. But with Stan the Man and Joe Villari around, you really didn’t have to pretend much that we all liked each other, because sure as Hell, everyone liked them, and some kind of transitivity seemed at work.

I didn’t just like Grandpop. As a little kid, I worshiped him. In the summers, I guess when he was on vacation, he’d take me to the park to play horseshoes. He’d get me crackers and a soda. I think he let me win a lot, because I remember once I didn’t and started crying. God, he was so upset, but really amused at the same time. We’re talking about an event that probably occurred 65 years ago, so if you think his kindliness didn’t make a Hell of an impression on me, guess again. In 1960, he retired from RCA. I remember the surprise party the family gave him, the shocked look on his face as he came through the door on Haverford Avenue. That night, for the first time in my life, I got to stay up past midnight, all thanks to Joe, who joined me in watching Science Fiction Theater before the tv station signed off. Now you want to win a kid’s heart: let him win at horseshoes and stay up past midnight. It’s not complicated,

1960 was, in a lot of ways, a really critical year. Over Grandpop’s objections, my Mom and Dad moved just across the City Line to verdant Penn Wynne, which is today some kind of fairyland suburb that enjoys all the virtues of diversity, inclusivity, political liberalism, a Great Public School, you know, all that stuff that owns the Libs. Back then, it was nothing special, and some of the neighbors openly feared the integration of the neighborhood by Eyetalians (I first heard dago and wop on the mean streets of Lower Merion, for God’s sake). I think my Mom was worried I was in training to become some kind of city hoodlum, which seems laughable now. So for a while, I saw less of Joe (and Grandmom). I got yanked out of Saint Donato’s, where I was happy, and sent to Presentation BVM, where I was not. But in the meantime, not to be deterred, Joe found a nice stone house with a back back yard (i.e., potential farm site) in Penfield, a ten minute walk from where we had moved, albeit in Delaware County, far less distinguished than Montgomery Country. Who cared? We were practically reunited. Thank God. Suburbs or not.

I spent a lot of time at that house, particularly after school, in the years leading up to high school. Joe and I watched a lot of afternoon tv, which, in those days, seemingly included a lot of news. The news was not always good , with Cold War vibes, albeit leavened with Jack Kennedy’s press conference humor (and you wonder why Trump made so many of us ill?). There was also a good dose of Bull Connors’ dogs in Birmingham mauling Black people on film, great afternoon fare. Which we all watched in stunned and disgusted silence. I can say–and I’ll swear to it–I never heard a racist word in any language come out of Joe’s (or Francis’) mouth. Grandpop solemnly told me that Democrats were for the working man (him) and Republicans were for the bosses (them) and that was that. I think I unconsciously absorbed that assumption being around them so much. Joe had been out of work for three years during the Great Depression. He would’ve wondered how the Hell anyone with a brain in their head could have classified that as voluntary unemployment based on rigid money wage. Meanwhile, Grandmom, a crack seamstress, went out to work, sending her three daughters to be monitored by her mother on Cross Street in South Philly. You detect any running themes here: family, taking care of each other, a kind of gentle class consciousness based on decency and a peasant Catholic culture–if not rigorous church attendance? We do for each other. That’s a given. We’re loyal to each other. That’s a given. Coppola got a tart and aggressive version of it right: never take sides against the family. Besides, why would you want to? It wasn’t enforced by guns, dammit. It was enforced by an unself-conscious and implicit understanding of this was how the world worked. And, maybe until 1960 or thereabouts, it did.

Mercifully, Joe Villari died suddenly in 1978. He never suffered, and he was literally in the arms of his daughter and son-in-law, who frantically tried to revive him. His death almost killed my grandmother, who simply withdrew from life for a time. I remember running my fingers through his beautiful head of white hair at his wake, not quite comprehending what had happened. My Mother kept numbly repeating “He was so good to us.” I said goodbye at his graveside, in the bitter February cold, and walked away. I went back to his house and got plastered. Life was never the same.

The ship that brought 16 year old Joe to Ellis Island

Dick, This is Woodrow. Did I Wake You?

(The following is a text written 21 years ago on the occasion of a commemoration of Woodrow Borah, the Shepherd Professor, Emeritus, at Berkeley. I didn’t go, but someone–who knows, delivered it. It is verbatim. Borah once called me on a Saturday morning at 10:00 A.M. The title was his memorable opening sally. I had been up since 6:30 A.M. writing lectures.)

woodrow-borah-march-24-2000 Download

Lou Larkins

“Are you always that conventional?” Oh, man, what a line. My Dad, Louis Richard Salvucci, used it on a cute chick he saw on the 31 trolley in West Philly. I’m not sure how he got her number, but he asked her out. By phone. Party line–and you gotta be ancient to know what that was. Said cute chick told Louie she had no idea who he was, so how could she date him? Well, I’m here, and said cute chick was one Madeline Villari. My Mother. This was, what 1946 or 1947. So she went out with him. Sly dog.

When my Mom told me that story–and I was well beyond the age of reason–I never quite looked at my Dad the same way. Dude. You laid that line on a woman, otherwise known as my Mother? Shame on you. I wish I had thought of it first.

Let’s get something straight. Of all the people I wish I could get back in my life, my Dad is the numero uno. Maybe he’d be surprised, but maybe not. He was a deeply sensitive guy who rarely showed emotion. Which is why from the time he was in high school until the time he left us, his stomach was always killing him. He was under few illusions about life, but he never tried to push me one way or another. Probably because he knew what getting boxed in meant. He wasn’t about to do that to me.

He came from a big immigrant family originating on the Abruzzo-Lazio border, San Donato Val di Comino. I can’t remember off hand if he was one of 12 or 13, but he was next to the youngest. His own father was one of 17, which Lou never believed. No surprise, I was a singleton, a classic example of regression to the mean. I should be able to rattle off dates and stuff, but I can’t, other than 1937. That one mattered because that was when his father became a naturalized citizen. He, Alfonso, was an Italian emigrant and remained so, which meant my Dad was born–1919– unknowingly, an Italian citizen himself. God love him, he bequeathed dual nationality to me and my family. I stare at that EU Passport and figure, worse comes to worse, I’m gone. I owe you, Louie, once again.

I have an early shot of Louie, probably from the late 1920s, standing in front of Saint Donato’s parish school. Yeah, they named the parish after the town, since probably 75 percent of the families I knew started out there, with names like Cedrone, Antonelli, Gallo, Rufo, and Camilli. I know they didn’t realize that their ancestors had been decidedly tight back in the old country, and that there was a lot of inadvertent cousin marriage in West Philly. I always thought Italian Americans were crazy; but they were inbred, not nuts. In retrospect, it explains a lot of the stuff I saw or sensed. I often wonder if any of these families understood why ” ‘it’ just runs in the family.” “It” would make for an absorbing psychosocial history. Anyway, Louie is there, dressed in a dark suit, and staring fiercely at the camera. He must have been born serious, or pissed off, or both. In his high school yearbook, West Catholic 1937, there he is, a good looking guy–heh, heh, you devil–but described as “quiet, unassuming, workmanlike.” Boy, that was Dad. Was there ever a better description?

Now, Louie should have graduated in 1936, but a duodenal ulcer nearly finished him off (I know he was found, passed out, in a pool of blood, in the Men’s Room at West–and no, I never asked too many questions), which resulted in big time surgery in about 1953, by my guess. He had a Hell of a scar on his belly, and no, he didn’t have war stories, because even the Army wasn’t that desperate. He did war work that involved him stamping a lot of papers for “copper” bound for the “Manhattan District” in Chicago. He told me he figured it out after the War, copper being a codeword for uranium. He recalled on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, he was hanging with his friends in front of a garage in West Philly when the broadcast was interrupted by the news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. You want to know how hard is is to think like a real historian? He told me that the first thing they all asked was “Where the Hell is Pearl Harbor?” and they had to go find a map. So when you think you can understand the behavior and mental world of some Genoese dude who sailed the ocean blue in 1492, please remember that we can’t even easily access the head of one of our own post-Enlightenment types in 1942.

Dad was a Swing Kid. And he played tenor saxophone. God did he love the Big Bands, especially Goodman. But interestingly enough, his saxophone heroes were Lester Young, Chu Berry, and Coleman Hawkins. At his funeral, one of his old friends told me his was the first guy in their circle to bring around Bird’s recordings. Dad saw Tatum live and told me I’d have to wait a bit before I got what Billie Holiday was doing. You do get where I’m going here, right? White boy from West Philly? I never heard him talk about Bud Freeman that way, and as I got older, I realized his love of early Getz was pure Lester Young–although I never pushed that angle with him. After all, he liked George Shearing too–and so did I. He played “Body and Soul” for my Mom once over the phone. Wildly romantic, no?

But, alas, Lou Larkins (I take it that was his “stage name” –I have no clue, but I did hear it once as a kid in West Philly coming from his friend Mike Renzulli)–did not follow music, or woodworking or electronics, or any one of a number of the manual arts at which he was truly–and I mean truly–gifted. Boy, when I compare my fumbling efforts to get a can open with my Dad doing plumbing on the home we moved to in 1960, I feel sort of foolish. Geez, Pop. I got your stomach. How come I didn’t get your craftsmanship? He could fix most anything, cars included. And he actually was, for a time, one of the first generation of people who could operate an IBM mainframe. He actually did contract work for Lawrence Klein and Morris Hamburgh of the University of Pennsylvania in the 1950s on the monsters that his employer, Oscar Mayer, rented out when they were idle. He’d take me down to the plant at 36th and Gray’s Ferry in Philly at night and let me punch cards while he wired panels. How the Hell he taught himself that is beyond me.

If there was ever a guy less suited to industrial accounting, it was Louie. He hated it, but he went to Penn at night in the 1950s to learn. He took care of his family, even though I know he would have sooner jumped off the Walt Whitman Bridge than go into the office. He had that sense of duty that so many of his generation did. You know, no one said this was gonna be fun. I had to grow up before I figured out how admirable he was, because there was no way a guy that creative should have suffered through the profession he did. When he’d take me to the Philadelphia Zoo, and we’d watch the big cats yell for their raw meat and purr (really) afterward, he was genuinely happy. When we went to the Franklin Institute and and he showed me how stuff ticked, he was genuinely happy. When we went to see the resurrected JATP together, he was happy. Or to see Ellington. Or Buddy. Or when he was entertained by Stan the Man, who was making some politically incorrect crack down the Shore, he was happy. Listening to Sinatra on a Friday nightwith Sid Mark and a glass of sherry and a cigarette made him happy. I know, cause I was there. We watched the 1960 Presidential debate together. We watched the moon landing together. We watched the Tonight Show together. We watched David Susskind together. We watched Bill Buckley together. I won’t say we never argued, especially as Vietnam and puberty were becoming twin curses. But he was always cool, and he never had to say much. And he didn’t.

I know he thought I put too much pressure on myself, but he never scolded. I had to laugh when he caught me with a bottle of wine in my car. His only question: “Who’s the joy juice for?” Since he liked the girl I was dating (so did I–we are happily married), his only words were “Be careful.” For a guy who must have spent most of his time not doing what he would have rather done, he was remarkably cool, if not necessarily tranquil. There was no bitterness that I can see now. Hell, he took things out on himself. Lou was no saint, but he lived a remarkably spiritual existence. Dad introduced me to Augustine and Thomas a Kempis. I know he felt that God had abandoned him somewhere along the way. But unlike most of us, he blamed himself, not God. “If thou art neither hot nor cold, I will vomit thee out of my mouth.” If he had a favorite saying, that was it. Think about it. When Dad retired, he became a daily communicant. It was no deathbed conversion. Something sustained him, and quite possibly, it was his faith.

I’d like to say Dad was happy in retirement, but I don’t think he was. When we came to visit, especially after we had kids, that visibly changed. We’d go down to the Franklin Institute again and ride the Conrail engine–Dad, me, and Martin. Or we’d go somewhere, maybe out to a train museum in Lancaster County, and just have a good time. For a bit, he’d be distracted, and his very personal version of the tragic sense of life would dissipate. That was nice to see. I didn’t know that the last time I hugged him–and told my Mom to stop yelling at him for some damn thing–that our next encounter would be in the same hospital, Fitzgerald Mercy, via which I entered the world forty or so years earlier. He was, unfortunately, on the way out.

Woody Allen supposedly said 80 percent of success in life was showing up. By that standard, Lou Larkins was, unbeknownst to himself, a great success. He showed up. Every day. I miss him. Every day.