Harleys, Cars, Girls & Guitars

Joe Maddon's Hometown

I was falling asleep on Interstate 80 after about two hours of driving through the mountains in Pennsylvania during my road trip to Illinois, so I hit the exit for coffee and donuts at Hazleton. 

"Why does the name of this town sound familiar?" I wondered. "Aha!"

The Chicago Tribune has published many an article about Joe Maddon's charity work in his hometown.

So, I decided to try to find some markers commemorating what must be Hazleton's most famous boy. I stopped at the Dunkin Donuts and asked the local boys for some guidance.

"Any signs or monuments for Maddon around town?"

They directed me to the high school. I found the sign in the pic there.

Madden has become quite the matinee idol in Chicago. He unexpectedly took the Cubs to the National League Championship Series last year, just short of making the World Series. He's a laid back 60s hippie. The young players on the team seem to idolize him as a father figure.

I attended a Cubs' game at Wrigley. When the Cubs were about to take the field, the PA announcer intoned:  "And now, let's hear it for Joe Maddon's Chicago Cubs!"

I wonder how long the honeymoon will last for Maddon in Chicago? Lou Piniella and Dusty Baker were celebrated as saviors who would end the curse, too. But, the media and the fans turned on both when they failed to deliver a championship.

For now, Maddon is riding high and pulling down $5 million a year in the most glamorous job in Chicago. A great life story for a boy from a small coal mining town in Pennsylvania.

I'm a small town boy... Watseka, Illinois, population 5,500. Hazleton boasts about 25,000 souls. Back when I was a kid, I would have considered that a big city.

My Hometown is Really Lazy!

Watseka, Illinois (pop. 5,500 and always declining) made the cut and is now recognized as one of the Top 10 Laziest Places in Illinois. I spent the first 16 years of my life there, and I can vouch for that. What would you do in Watseka if you wanted to do something?

Given the style of the cars on the street, I'd say this pic was taken in the mid-50s. Not much has changed since then.

Life really was incredibly quiet and laid back in Watseka. The town is all of about 15 miles from the Indiana border, and its culture is equal parts Illinois and Indiana hillbilly. I loved living there until I was about 16 years old and then I was desperate to get the hell out to some place where something was happening.

I'm not sure how the laziness of Watseka was measured. Unemployment seems to be a key indicator. 

That's not a reliable index. Many of my homeboys, now and when I was growing up, combine subsistence gardening, hunting and fishing with itinerate jobs like pouring concrete to make a living. Drug dealing has always been a big source of income. Getting stoned and drunk is a major form of recreation. A lot of homeboys buy, fix up and resell old cars and motorcycles. Cash is king and a lot of stuff goes on under the table.

A civil service job is a big deal. There are few employers.

That said, people in Watseka mostly focus on raising their kids. Little League and school athletics are very important. The only thing that breaks up the monotony is the occasional disastrous flooding.

Cornfields surround the town. Everything is flat.

You don't really need a lot of money to live in Watseka, since you can buy a decent house for around $40,000 or less. People spend a lot of time fixing up their houses and caring for their lawns.

I usually take a drive through town when I take the trip home. My mom long ago moved to Kankakee, which makes the "Lazy" list at number 11. 

Reaching the Same Place the Hard Way

Despite my best efforts to render myself unemployable with a degree in English literature, I landed in a honey pot after my graduation from the University of Illinois in 1971. The Center for Advanced Computation hired me to be purchasing manager for the ILLIAC IV project. The ILLIAC series of supercomputers were quite famous because one of them made an appearance as HAL, the rebellious computer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Getting hired onto this project, building the most advanced parallel processing supercomputer of its day for NASA/AMES, was an incredible opportunity that I did not understand. My only defense is that I was 21 years old.

The university also offered to send me back to school (for free) to get a degree in computer science. Quite the perk, huh? I considered this opportunity "boring."

My immediate boss was a black woman named Vivian. This was back in the beginning of the quota era, and she was a quota hire. It didn't take long to discover that she was functionally illiterate, unable to read the specs for the tech components we were buying, and, thus, absolutely incompetent. I had little choice but to do her job for her.

The ILLIAC IV project was funded by DARPA, the Department of Defense's R&D bureau. We were at the tail end of the Vietnam War and the campus was consumed by anti-war furor. And, my team was building a computer primarily intended for weapons testing for the war machine! (The supercomputer did have other purposes. It was used for experimental testing of 3D displays and for environmental planning and analysis, and a host of other purposes.)

The director of the project and most of the professors involved in the theoretical and construction work eventually rebeled against the project and tried to prevent delivery of the finished computer to NASA/AMES in protest against the war, an effort obviously doomed to failure. You can't take millions in R&D funding from DARPA and then refuse to give the bureau its product.

Amusingly, I was aching to be in the middle of the intellectual, artistic and political action, and I didn't realize that I was, right there in that institute out in the middle of the cornfields in Illinois. I thought that the action was happening somewhere else, but the great dramas of the day were playing out in front of me and I was one of the actors. I yearned to be in glamorous New York City or San Francisco, and I was bored with living out there in the flatlands.

Dealing with the incompetent quota hire especially pissed me off. Vivian, beset by personal problems and embarrassed by her incompetence, only showed at work about half the time. Her job fell entirely to me. This was a dilemma that I faced three times in my career, and it took me a long time to understand how to handle it. At the age of 21, I was consumed with the stupid belief that fairness should prevail. I didn't understand that it might be better to manage the situation strategically.

What I learned through repetition of this scenario is that the incompetent quota hire ultimately fails and has to be replaced, and that I should wait out this inevitable failure after which I would get the lead job and salary. The contemporary political situation left management no choice but to hire and try to manage with the quota hire. They weren't any happier with the situation than I was.

After a year of working on the project, I fled to what I hoped would be a life of glamour and music in San Francisco. All the problems that I thought I'd fled came along for the ride with me. I hoped to escape a lifetime of working in tech back in those days because I considered that field gray, boring and nerdy. (Indeed, it is in a lot of ways. It is also quite lucrative and innovative.)

I couldn't escape my fate. I had to have a job, even in San Francisco, and with my now established tech qualifications, where else could I go but back to the burgeoning computer field? So, I found myself sitting in business offices dealing with the opening round of the entry of PCs into the marketplace.

There was no escaping my fate.

As I look back upon this era of my life... well... I'm bewildered at my own blindness. Had I just stayed at the University of Illinois and earned my free degree in computer science, and exploited my experience with the ILLIAC IV project to the max, I would have acquired credentials that would have enabled me to earn a great living anywhere in the world.

Later in my life, I did indeed develop those abilities, but there was a lot of unnecessary bloodshed and travail along the way. Everything that I needed was right there at the University of Illinois in the midst of the cornfields.

And the blues clubs of Chicago were only a 2 hour drive away!

I took a long, circuitous (and painful) route to get to the same place. Why I had to do that remains a mystery to me. 

White Student Union at University of Illinois

This is pretty funny. A group of students at my alma mater, the University of Illinois, have put up a Facebook page called Illinois White Student Union. 

The university, of course, has been preaching the sex, race and class ideology for 50 years, so it finds itself in the strange position of attempting to tell white kids that they shouldn't do what everybody else is doing.

The official administration line is that this page is racist.

Good luck to the kids with this one.

The Jungle Doodle

I was thinking about the city as a jungle. On Facebook, I talked with a woman who chided me for labeling the office a "nice jail." She told me that the office has its uses, and she's right. The office, during my working life, was the jungle where things got sorted out. And I gained a lot from knowing how to maneuver in the office.

The anonymity of a huge city like New York is often presented as a negative... and it is... but it is also a positive. A guy with good tech skills can't be blacklisted. There's always another employer. Nobody knows you. You have the freedom to try out some things about sex that you might prefer not to have broadcast around your little home town out in the Styx.

I liked being out all night in NYC, and I often worked the midnight shift. The city becomes quiet. Only the maintenance and critical workers venture out. I could drive my car right up to the skyscraper where I worked and park.

I spent my life in such great cities, primarily Chicago, San Francisco and New York City.

It was a great adventure. If it were possible, I would have spent all my adult life in any one of those towns. It seems to me sometimes as if I have done everything and been everywhere. 

Comrades! My Personal Five Year Plan!

If I learned anything from decades in publishing, advertising and multimedia, it was that a snazzy graphic logo announcing that you're going to do something or that you might produce a product is the most important part of any plan! So, since I announced my personal Five Year Plan this morning, here's a draft of my Five Year Plan graphic logo, which shows how hard at work I will be:

See? The hard work never stops here at Chez Howlin' Steve!

I only have 10 to 15 years of good health left. So, it's time to leave behind my artistic legacy. I'll be producing at least 5 new CDs of original songs and standards. I'll probably release the CDs on iTunes and in a physical CD format. And, I'll be writing a book, which I foresee marketing online in e-book format. Of course, I'll be illustrating each of these works. Below, a brief description of each of the 5 CDs I've planned.

Tiny But Mighty 

A collection of songs entirely about my late wife and artistic partner, Myrna. These will probably be all original tunes. It is long past time to tell her (and our) story.

Watseka in My Rear View Mirror

Songs about my teeny-tiny hometown in east central Illinois, including songs about my family and friends and the long gone characters from my past.

Dirty Blues

The dirty blues is a distinct sub-genre of the blues. Bessie Smith was probably the best known dirty blues artist. Some covers, some originals.

My Favorite Hymns

Just as the title says, my renditions of my favorite hymns. How can this co-exist with the "Dirty Blues?" Never been a problem for me.

Standards

I love the Great American Songbook standards, among them tunes like "September Song."

Other CDs that I'm planning include songs about the odd and interesting characters I've known in my decades in Woodstock, and perhaps a CD of country standards.

Get out your credit cards!

Before I Fell

Below, a pic of me when I was 17 or 18 years old (circa 1967 or 1968), taken by Richard Anderson, the sole professional photographer in my hometown of Watseka, Illinois back when I was a kid. Dana, his son, was my best friend. An all too common refrain... Dana died six months after Myrna died in 2004.

I used the Auto Tone function of Photoshop to restore this photo. It had faded to sepia over the years. My mother gave me the pic on my most recent journey home.

I attended the University of Illinois in Champaign during the summers when I was 16 and 17 years old. As usual, this produced good and bad outcomes. I was so far ahead of everybody intellectually and artistically in my hometown that I was going nuts for lack of stimulation. I had already decided that I wasn't going to marry my high school sweetheart and settle down to a life of children and duty in a farmhouse out in the cornfields.

I played in the university orchestra and jazz band. For the first time in my life, I encountered musicians who could keep up with me, even challenge me. In the dorm at night, I listened for the first time to Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis and the Lovin' Spoonful. Going home in the fall to a town where nobody was interested in my musical explorations felt like dying.

The Berkeley Anti-War Caravan stopped by during one of those summers, and I got an earful on the impending disaster that was the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. I met radical Jews from the East and West Coast. Passionate political, literary and theological discussions raged all night in the dorm lounge. This was my introduction, as well, to wild, radical women of various ethnicities. My hometown girls looked awfully dull and uninteresting upon my return home.

Upon my return home one early fall, I wrote a series of anti-war articles for my hometown newspaper. This drove a stake into the heart of my relationship with Watseka. All my uncles and all the men in town were World War II veterans and staunch patriots. The notion that the U.S. could be committing a horrible mistake... well, that wasn't a permissible idea. Several of those men offered to give me a sound beating, but decided against that when they considered that I was a three sport all-conference athlete, as well as a street fighter with a reputation.

And, of course, I discovered vice and fast women during my summers at Illinois. Dana had already greased the skids by showing up one Friday night for our usual endless drive around Watseka with an awful bottle of apricot schnapps that got me mildly buzzed. I discovered a bar that didn't card minors in Champaign and drank as much cheap beer as I could afford on most summer nights. One of those wild women introduced me to marijuana and sex.

Thus began a decade long era of disintegration in my life that continued through my years in San Francisco. I held myself together enough to get my B.A. and to succeed at a job, but beyond that everything fell to pieces. I gave up on my aspirations as a classical musician and recast myself slowly into a blues, folks, country and jazz musician. I even changed instruments, converting from trumpet to guitar. (I've played piano since before I can remember.)

My commitment to the Catholic Church fell by the wayside, too.

If I had it all to do over again?

I would not leave the Church. My best path in life probably would have been to have earned a degree as a church organist and choir director, but I didn't even see that as a option at the time. The Vietnam War was the disaster that I predicted, but I take no pleasure in being one of the first to recognize that.

My falling out with my hometown probably was unnecessary. Took decades for me to understand that the problem wasn't Watseka... it was me. I needed a larger stage than my teeny-tiny hometown. My fellow townsmen tried to support me in my intellectual and artistic endeavors, but they were in over their heads in even trying to understand where I was headed.

There is no second chance. I've lived an extraordinarily exciting and adventurous life. The end is coming for me, and there is no time for regrets.

A Proper Baloney Sandwich

Yeah, if you have some class, you might spell it "balogna" sandwich, but I hail from a solid hillbilly background, so I go with "baloney" sandwich. When I was a kid, Aunt Wilma often babysat me and my sisters and lunch was almost always a baloney sandwich on Wonder Bread topped off with Heinz ketchup. The baloney was Oscar Mayer. We're talking cheap nutrition.

Wonder Bread became the running joke of the hippie era, for good reason. This product is the epitome of empty calorie processed food. All the nutrition of the wheat germ has been stripped away, discarded or resold for animal feed, and what is left is a sort of foam with none of the crunch (or crust) associated with good whole grain bread.

Of course, kids love it. I did when I was a kid. The bland flavor is easy on the taste buds. Salt is the primary flavor conveyed to the palette. And heavy crust just slowed down the action.

My hillbilly family loved heavily processed convenience foods. Veterans brought this food preference home from the battlefield rations of WWII. Processed convenience food was the women's liberation of the 1950s. Mom was liberated from the kitchen! No need to spend hours prepping natural, whole foods and cooking them! 

Two or three slices of baloney between two slices of Wonder Bread and you've got a quick sandwich that a child can throw together. 

The packaging in the pic above seems quite different from the packaging I remember from the 50s. Processed meats, and processed foods in general, were thought to be superior to what we now call "natural" foods. Despite what you've been told via feminist ideology, women were already moving en masse out of the domestic sphere into the working world in the 50s.

So, processed foods and TV dinners were thought of (and advertised) as wonderful "time saving" devices that freed women from domestic labor.

Ketchup as the condiment for a baloney sandwich seems to be a controversial subject. In the world of the Jewish immigrant in New York City, the dominant condiment in the deli was mustard. Of course, the tangy, funky flavors of the deli... sauerkraut, mustard, kosher pickles and meats marinated in brines... were completely foreign to the hillbilly tongue. The blander, sweeter, saltier taste of ketchup also appealed more to kids.

The baloney sandwich with ketchup was daily fare throughout my childhood and adolescence. I'm not complaining. It was filling, cheap and easy to put together. My mother was somewhere between an adequate and lousy cook, depending on whether she wanted to put forth the effort.

The hippie era ushered in an obsession with whole, unprocessed foods. When I moved to San Francisco, I frequented the great food markets and learned how to cook with whole, unprocessed foods, and I'm glad I did.

Haven't eaten a baloney sandwich on Wonder Break with ketchup for decades. I'll have to give it a try one day to see what I think of it.

Cousin Vicky Was Wild

Uncle Jim was already a heavy drinker before he shipped off to fight in WWII. He returned a full fledged drunk, beset by demons. His job as an Army Ranger was to infiltrate behind enemy lines and cut throats.

"Those people don't know how to live," was my father's general assessment of my mother's hillbilly family.

Grandpa was a drunk, too, a melancholy, withdrawn drunk. My only memory of him was of a ghost sitting all day in his recliner, downing one can of beer, then picking up another. The death of his son, Benny, in a training exercise during the Korean War, gutted Grandpa. 

Cousin Vicky never had a chance. By the time she was 14, she was already a heavy drinker like her father. She was, unfortunately, also the apple of Uncle Jim's eye, a stunning chestnut haired beauty, built (as they say) like a brick shithouse. He bought her a souped up Chevy when she turned 16.

I was in love with Vicky and terrified of her. She had a crush on me, too, so I was among the first to take a ride in the Chevy. Central Illinois is flat and wide open, with straight aways on country roads that stretch out endlessly... a perfect place for Vicky to open up that Chevy. She laughed at me for being terrified as the speedometer pinned above 100.

I remember her beautiful hair streaming back in the breeze from the open window of that Chevy.

I found out about the accident when I saw the Chevy, engine compartment crushed into the front seat, being towed down Main St. in my teeny-tiny home town. This was not a surprise.

The rest was a nightmare. Aunt Pat sat in a folding chair at the intersection of two coffins , one for Vicky and the other for her baby, throughout the wake wailing and begging God for mercy. I don't even remember the baby's name.

Two children survived. Cousin Kathy somehow lived through the 100 mph collision with the tree, being thrown through the windshield and bouncing down the highway on her face. Cousin Jimmie was the only child who did not take that fateful joy ride.

During my recent trip home, my mother and I drove past the crash site. Nothing remains to commemorate that bloody, bitter day. Even the tree that took the impact is long gone. 

Aunt Pat surprised us all by leaving $100,000 to Cousin Kathy when she died. How she amassed that fortune... who knows? My aunt worked in the most menial of jobs. For a long time she was a laundromat attendant. I visited Aunt Pat from time to time in her squalid, barely furnished apartments. A lifetime of mourning and praying for forgiveness had twisted her face and head into an odd boxlike shape. She offered me lunch when I visited, usually bologna on white bread.

Cousin Kathy used her inheritance to buy an ostrich farm in Minnesota where she lives with her husband to this day.

Mom says she's happy and that her husband is a good man. I hope that it is true.

Visit to Renovated Wrigley

My box seats directly behind home plate in the second deck at Wrigley Field provided me with an incredible view of the playing field and the new video boards. I visited for the first time last Wednesday, and caught a great game between the Cards and Cubs. Unfortunately, the Cubbies blew the game in the top of the 9th inning, 6-5! Below, my view of the field.

Those new bleachers in left and right field change the stadium dramatically, too. They rise considerably higher than the old bleachers. With the addition of the video boards, Wrigley is now more enclosed. The park is no longer quite as open to views of the Gold Coast apartment buildings on the Near North Side.

So, do the video boards improve or detract from the fan experience at Wrigley?

The stage for the game is much more compressed and focused by this enclosure of the stadium by higher bleachers and video boards. For dramatic purposes, I think this renovation is a roaring success.

I think that the change is entirely positive. I'd brought along my iPad to follow the stats and player information during the game, but the iPad proved to be unnecessary. 

The left field video board provided individual player stats for batters and pitchers, and provided instant replay on questionable plays. Each time a batter walked up to the plate, a picture of his face along with his stats was displayed. Same for a new pitcher entering the game. With the instant replays, the fan receives all the basic info a TV watcher at home is used to getting.

In addition, the left field board relayed the type and velocity of each pitch. The Cards' pitcher, Michael Wacka, was a master of changing speeds. His fastball topped out at 98 mph, and his changeup bottomed out at 88 mph. Cub batters flailed comically at that changeup.

The right field board displayed each team's lineup as in a box score. At times, each player's batting average was displayed. At other times, his batting line for the current game was displayed, as in 1-2 (or "one for two"). The batting line for the next player up for both teams was highlighted in yellow... a great bit of info!

And, then there's the old iconic scoreboard in center field that displayed the line scores for every game in the majors, along with ball and strike counts and number of outs. However, that scoreboard doesn't display a composite score for the game! I had to calculate the game score by adding up the inning scores! Funny! None of the three outfield boards displayed the composite score, or the standard run, hits, errors line. All that info was displayed in a non-linear fashion on the centerfield board.

Very little crappy kids' video was displayed on the left field video board. On unfortunate exception was one of those animated "chase around the stadium" things, and that was awful. 

Most of the non-game related video was useful and informative. As the game began, a light rain was falling, so the TV weatherman did a bit on the upcoming weather forecast that was displayed on the left field board.

If only Pedro Strop had not thrown that batting practice fastball to Johnny Peralta, blowing the game for the Cubs, my experience at renovated Wrigley would have been all positive.