I recently posted some photos of a kayaking trip I took off the coast of Washington (San Juan Islands). Someone responded that she wished she was an adventurer like me. I said that I didn’t put myself in that category and she replied that she hadn’t meant like a Sir Edmund Hillary or Jacques Cousteau, but up there, for an amateur.
I’m not even sure I would consider them the epitome of the genre. If my yardstick was living on the edge, millions of dollars in sponsored equipment and ample time on the champagne lecture circuit wouldn’t do it. I have met the real adventurers and they don’t have sponsors. They don’t even have addresses. They are the guides of the out-there variety.
I first encountered a diluted version of the breed when I started rafting the West Virginia whitewater rivers. I talked with some guides and learned that they summered there as raft guides and wintered on ski patrols in Colorado. At the time, that seemed footloose to me.
I was beginning a family then and this struck me as a radically nomadic life. But, Aspen and a relatively short drive to Pittsburgh aren’t exactly the far corners of the earth. I had yet to meet the truly free spirits.
The first one might’ve been Chewy. I nicknamed him that because he resembled Chewbacca from “Star Wars.” He was the assistant guide on a week-long kayak trip I took in Glen Canyon (UT).
Toward the end of the week, I commented to the lead guide that I had thought I knew how to pack light, but had learned something from Chewy. He wore the same things all week, as far as I could tell. “Those are his clothes,” was the reply.
“I know they’re his. Or, at least I assumed that.”
“No, those are his clothes. His only clothes.”
That was pretty accurate. Aside from what he wore on that trip, he owned a parka. During warm and moderate weather, that resided in the trunk of a friend’s car.
The guided trips and Chewie were based in Page, AZ, which is 300 miles from either Phoenix or Las Vegas. Which is to say, in the high desert and the middle of nowhere. Between trips, which supplied meals and a tent to Chewie, there was maybe a day in Page to clean and restock equipment. On those occasions, Chewie slept in the barn with the kayaks.
Chewy declined to talk about himself. The other guide said that the young man had been part of a strict Mormon family up north and it became too much for him. Chewie was essentially hiding out.
He had no house or apartment, no car, no anything. Everything he owned, he wore. He might’ve had a toothbrush. I know he didn’t own a razor. That’s life on the edge. The closest I came was when I went off to college and carried all my possessions in a laundry bag.
Francisco was a more sophisticated version. He was the guide I had on a kayak trip on the Sea of Cortez off Baja Mexico. He was an extremely personable Chilean and had been a lawyer, TV news anchor and a few other glamorous things he told us about in entertaining fashion.
Ten months a year, he lived out of the kayaks on the tours. There, he cultivated the guests for the other two months when he would travel the world from one to another, availing himself of their hospitality. He was a charmer and few could resist.
The true nomads strike me as the ultimate adventurers. But, I’ve always been too dug in to see myself living that way. Maybe now that I’m coming up on retirement. Nah.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
Heaven on earth for hounds
“I know you’re not big on repeat locations for vacations.” I braced myself. “But, I’d like to go back to Asheville. We spent most of the time at the Biltmore and I felt like we shortchanged the town.”
Relief. No, make that jubilance. I don’t usually do encores. There are way too many things out there to see and experience in this world. But, Asheville would be an exception.
Not for whatever reasons she has. I’m an outdoors gear and clothing hound. To me, Asheville is a Mecca.
That’s where the footprints of REI and Mast General Store overlap. In other words, heaven on earth to anyone with a hankering for the great outdoors and unplumbed limits on the credit cards.
REI is the quintessential store for the hounds. Not only do they carry depth in the major lines, but they’ve private-branded some good stuff. True, I can shop there online any time I feel like it. But, there’s nothing like hefting the stuff.
If you have REI, why do you need Mast? What Trader Joe’s is to Kroger, Mast is to REI. While their web site reflects a somewhat conventional approach, the store is funkytown. That’s where you find the esoteric brands and products.
So, I agreed to the "concession" of a repeat, and got points for that. Points are good.
Relief. No, make that jubilance. I don’t usually do encores. There are way too many things out there to see and experience in this world. But, Asheville would be an exception.
Not for whatever reasons she has. I’m an outdoors gear and clothing hound. To me, Asheville is a Mecca.
That’s where the footprints of REI and Mast General Store overlap. In other words, heaven on earth to anyone with a hankering for the great outdoors and unplumbed limits on the credit cards.
REI is the quintessential store for the hounds. Not only do they carry depth in the major lines, but they’ve private-branded some good stuff. True, I can shop there online any time I feel like it. But, there’s nothing like hefting the stuff.
If you have REI, why do you need Mast? What Trader Joe’s is to Kroger, Mast is to REI. While their web site reflects a somewhat conventional approach, the store is funkytown. That’s where you find the esoteric brands and products.
So, I agreed to the "concession" of a repeat, and got points for that. Points are good.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Bumper sticker of the day
"Honk if I'm paying your mortgage." I wonder if there's a "Honk if I helped buy your car." Or, "Honk if I paid off your student loan" (Sallie Mae bailout).
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Confessions of a fast food purveyor
With fast food under attack, I cannot help but feel some responsibility for the blight. Yes, in the mid-60s, I played a role in advancing its cause and am coming clean about it.
It was the end of my senior year in high school and I was on the cusp of having to finance a college education. My job at an auto parts store was winding down and I needed additional income. So, I took a job at Gino’s.
That was an east coast burger chain. In addition to burgers, we carried the KFC franchise.
A newbie, I drew the worst shift, four to close. While close could be midnight or one, depending upon the day, you were there long after the sign was turned off for an extensive cleanup. That was a messy and arduous task. Coupled with the dinnertime rush, this was not the desirable tour of duty.
It was different back then. You had to have the menu and prices memorized so you could ring up orders quickly. Also, you needed the ability to make change, God forbid.
The employee pool was almost all teenage guys. In our case, it was understandable. In an inner city location, only the swift and strong would survive. Attacks by irate customers and gang clashes enveloping the facility weren’t infrequent.
When I started there, the layout was the original walk-up design. That is, there was no eat-in area. You walked up to the windows and ordered to-go.
But, as McDonald’s or whoever initiated the “glass cube,” we modified our building. While this is now commonplace, it was a new concept at the time. The first couple weeks, we had to use masking tape to put big Xs on the windows to make them noticeable. People were walking into and through them.
The construction once provided an unanticipated mode of communication. Approaching busy times, we built up inventory of some items; burgers in the heater box and shakes in the freezer. One night, the shake man had allotted too much lead time. An unhappy customer returned to the window with his shake and a two-by-four he had picked up in the construction area. Without a word, he used the shake to drive a nail into the board. Point taken.
While most of us were callow teens, George was a lifer. That is, he was around 25, an anomaly among us at the time. What kind of guy did this at that age when there were good factory jobs around? George did most of the chicken frying. One night, someone asked him for the time. He turned his wrist to check it. It was the wrist that held a pot of scalding fat. They had to take him to the hospital.
I was called off the bench (or the window) to make chicken. You dumped raw chicken parts into a tub of beaten eggs. Then, you transferred them to a tub of the Colonel’s mixture of flour and the secret herbs and spices, and tossed it around. I’m guessing one of the secret ingredients was pepper, because that induced sneezing. And, obviated the need for the egg mixture, if you must know the truth. I haven’t eaten fried chicken since then.
Another one of the dirty secrets was what happened to the leftover chicken. During cleanup, you stripped the meat and dumped it into a pot in the heater box. It contained meat from prior days, along with barbeque sauce. It was the pork barbeque for succeeding days. How long that witch’s brew fermented, I couldn’t tell you. I never knew it to be cleaned out, just added to. There were probably prehistoric bird parts at the bottom. Kind of the La Brea Tar Pits of fast food.
Rush hours brought on tension and short tempers. We applied condiments to buns with caulking guns. They were the weapons of choice in settling our issues. After the hectic dinner hour, it wouldn’t be unusual for a window man to greet you covered with stains of special sauce or catsup.
The managers were old guys. Some of them as advanced as their doddering thirties. Sentenced to a life of corralling feral teens, their attitudes were generally grim resignation. Bud was the exception.
He had recently mustered out of the Marines and was over-the-top and all full of false bravado. Bud was extremely dismayed by our failure to be impressed by the hourly accounts of his exploits in a stateside motor pool. He was unable to distinguish between his changing oil and others raising the flag at Iwo Jima. We had signed on to make a lousy buck an hour, not take a course in pseudo-macho for the inadequate. We didn’t need his theatrics or abuse. He provoked the fast food version of fragging.
One night, Bud had ridden Nick particularly hard. Not a good move, since Nick was already "apprenticing" in collecting high-interest/short-term loans. During cleanup, Nick went into the basement and broke the valve on a large tank of bug spray. The roaches were plentiful and robust, and not to be trifled with. We needed the heavy ordnance.
Nick quickly came up and told Bud that something was wrong in the basement. Bud called him a few choice names, as was his custom, and descended the steps. George locked the door behind him. Bud whipsawed George on a daily basis.
The opening crew found him the next day. He was alive, but a little green around the gills. Not as roach-like as we thought. We never saw him again.
Who we did see, on occasion, was Gino. That was Gino Marchetti, whose name we bore. Gino was at the end of his legendary career as a defensive lineman for the Baltimore Colts. He and Alan Ameche (another Colt) started Gino’s and built it up to over 300 units. It was later purchased by Marriott and became Roy Rogers.
Gino was huge, especially by the standards of those days. He would show up unannounced and stomp around inspecting things with little more than a grunt or two. Sometimes, he’s thrust a mammoth paw into the fry tray and stuff a wad into his maw. A charmer.
Our odd hours tended to separate us from family and friends, drawing us closer together. We’d work to the wee hours of the morning and then go out to play after work. It was my first exposure to the “night people.”
It’s a term I would recognize much later in the field of mental health. People afflicted with some forms of mental illness tend to stay up late and sleep late. Now, many spend their nights on the internet (find an acrimonious posting in a chat room or social networking site and chances are good the time stamp is after midnight). Back then, it was on the streets, where we’d encounter them.
It was a whole other world out there that most people didn’t know about. And, could sleep better for not knowing. The city was somewhat like the mutant section of town in “Total Recall” at those hours and we had many weird adventures. Fodder for another blog.
The chain grew quickly and they were strapped for resources. I was among those tapped to do training for opening new stores. There was the standard procedure stuff, but I tried to add the practical. I recall one of my first assignments in Allentown (PA). I advised the new window recruits to dive into the stainless steel shelves under the counter when a gang fight broke out for protection against stray bullets. They stared at me blankly. Allentown wasn’t Philly.
The end of the summer approached and I prepared to go off to college. The district manager showed up one day and the store manager asked me to join them in his office. They wanted me to go into the management training program. I politely declined, saying that I was on an engineering career path (subject for another blog). I can look back and know that I left the door open for Dave Thomas. Hope he was grateful.
So yes, I shoulder some of the blame for the porkier profile of the average American. But, a lot of lessons learned and experiences that can’t be duplicated.
It was the end of my senior year in high school and I was on the cusp of having to finance a college education. My job at an auto parts store was winding down and I needed additional income. So, I took a job at Gino’s.
That was an east coast burger chain. In addition to burgers, we carried the KFC franchise.
A newbie, I drew the worst shift, four to close. While close could be midnight or one, depending upon the day, you were there long after the sign was turned off for an extensive cleanup. That was a messy and arduous task. Coupled with the dinnertime rush, this was not the desirable tour of duty.
It was different back then. You had to have the menu and prices memorized so you could ring up orders quickly. Also, you needed the ability to make change, God forbid.
The employee pool was almost all teenage guys. In our case, it was understandable. In an inner city location, only the swift and strong would survive. Attacks by irate customers and gang clashes enveloping the facility weren’t infrequent.
When I started there, the layout was the original walk-up design. That is, there was no eat-in area. You walked up to the windows and ordered to-go.
But, as McDonald’s or whoever initiated the “glass cube,” we modified our building. While this is now commonplace, it was a new concept at the time. The first couple weeks, we had to use masking tape to put big Xs on the windows to make them noticeable. People were walking into and through them.
The construction once provided an unanticipated mode of communication. Approaching busy times, we built up inventory of some items; burgers in the heater box and shakes in the freezer. One night, the shake man had allotted too much lead time. An unhappy customer returned to the window with his shake and a two-by-four he had picked up in the construction area. Without a word, he used the shake to drive a nail into the board. Point taken.
While most of us were callow teens, George was a lifer. That is, he was around 25, an anomaly among us at the time. What kind of guy did this at that age when there were good factory jobs around? George did most of the chicken frying. One night, someone asked him for the time. He turned his wrist to check it. It was the wrist that held a pot of scalding fat. They had to take him to the hospital.
I was called off the bench (or the window) to make chicken. You dumped raw chicken parts into a tub of beaten eggs. Then, you transferred them to a tub of the Colonel’s mixture of flour and the secret herbs and spices, and tossed it around. I’m guessing one of the secret ingredients was pepper, because that induced sneezing. And, obviated the need for the egg mixture, if you must know the truth. I haven’t eaten fried chicken since then.
Another one of the dirty secrets was what happened to the leftover chicken. During cleanup, you stripped the meat and dumped it into a pot in the heater box. It contained meat from prior days, along with barbeque sauce. It was the pork barbeque for succeeding days. How long that witch’s brew fermented, I couldn’t tell you. I never knew it to be cleaned out, just added to. There were probably prehistoric bird parts at the bottom. Kind of the La Brea Tar Pits of fast food.
Rush hours brought on tension and short tempers. We applied condiments to buns with caulking guns. They were the weapons of choice in settling our issues. After the hectic dinner hour, it wouldn’t be unusual for a window man to greet you covered with stains of special sauce or catsup.
The managers were old guys. Some of them as advanced as their doddering thirties. Sentenced to a life of corralling feral teens, their attitudes were generally grim resignation. Bud was the exception.
He had recently mustered out of the Marines and was over-the-top and all full of false bravado. Bud was extremely dismayed by our failure to be impressed by the hourly accounts of his exploits in a stateside motor pool. He was unable to distinguish between his changing oil and others raising the flag at Iwo Jima. We had signed on to make a lousy buck an hour, not take a course in pseudo-macho for the inadequate. We didn’t need his theatrics or abuse. He provoked the fast food version of fragging.
One night, Bud had ridden Nick particularly hard. Not a good move, since Nick was already "apprenticing" in collecting high-interest/short-term loans. During cleanup, Nick went into the basement and broke the valve on a large tank of bug spray. The roaches were plentiful and robust, and not to be trifled with. We needed the heavy ordnance.
Nick quickly came up and told Bud that something was wrong in the basement. Bud called him a few choice names, as was his custom, and descended the steps. George locked the door behind him. Bud whipsawed George on a daily basis.
The opening crew found him the next day. He was alive, but a little green around the gills. Not as roach-like as we thought. We never saw him again.
Who we did see, on occasion, was Gino. That was Gino Marchetti, whose name we bore. Gino was at the end of his legendary career as a defensive lineman for the Baltimore Colts. He and Alan Ameche (another Colt) started Gino’s and built it up to over 300 units. It was later purchased by Marriott and became Roy Rogers.
Gino was huge, especially by the standards of those days. He would show up unannounced and stomp around inspecting things with little more than a grunt or two. Sometimes, he’s thrust a mammoth paw into the fry tray and stuff a wad into his maw. A charmer.
Our odd hours tended to separate us from family and friends, drawing us closer together. We’d work to the wee hours of the morning and then go out to play after work. It was my first exposure to the “night people.”
It’s a term I would recognize much later in the field of mental health. People afflicted with some forms of mental illness tend to stay up late and sleep late. Now, many spend their nights on the internet (find an acrimonious posting in a chat room or social networking site and chances are good the time stamp is after midnight). Back then, it was on the streets, where we’d encounter them.
It was a whole other world out there that most people didn’t know about. And, could sleep better for not knowing. The city was somewhat like the mutant section of town in “Total Recall” at those hours and we had many weird adventures. Fodder for another blog.
The chain grew quickly and they were strapped for resources. I was among those tapped to do training for opening new stores. There was the standard procedure stuff, but I tried to add the practical. I recall one of my first assignments in Allentown (PA). I advised the new window recruits to dive into the stainless steel shelves under the counter when a gang fight broke out for protection against stray bullets. They stared at me blankly. Allentown wasn’t Philly.
The end of the summer approached and I prepared to go off to college. The district manager showed up one day and the store manager asked me to join them in his office. They wanted me to go into the management training program. I politely declined, saying that I was on an engineering career path (subject for another blog). I can look back and know that I left the door open for Dave Thomas. Hope he was grateful.
So yes, I shoulder some of the blame for the porkier profile of the average American. But, a lot of lessons learned and experiences that can’t be duplicated.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
End of an era
Nancy Minson died yesterday. About 20 years ago, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given six months to live. She obviously fought it off much longer. No surprise to me.
She was one of those relatively rare people who recognized problems of the community and did something about them. She conceived solutions and drove them to fruition. We didn’t always agree on these matters, but I highly respected her for the contributions. She accomplished more than I care to list. She advocated for gays, Jews, the mentally ill and others in need of it. No easy routes for her.
A couple months ago, a friend of mine from high school emailed me a few names of classmates and asked what my recollection was of their defining moments. Her theory was that that’s how we primarily remembered each other. She also asked what her defining moment was in my mind. As incentive, she offered her perception of mine. I didn’t want to know it.
With this lurking on the fringe of my mind, Nancy’s defining moment emerged. I’d known her for almost 30 years, so there was a lot of material to work with.
But, we originally met as classmates in Leadership Cincinnati in the early 80s. Programs like this select active leaders from different segments of the community and educate them on the bigger picture over the course of a year or so. There’s also the benefit of cross pollination.
One of the sessions spanned a weekend. On Saturday night, after the program, we sat around in the lounge of the posh hotel where we were staying and discussed the subject matter of the day.
More accurately, a couple wealthy women were holding forth on the state of the lower strata of society. One of them finally turned to me and said that I was being quiet. What did I think?
I was being quiet because they had little idea what they were talking about. There’s nothing to be gained arguing with such people.
In this case, they rendered an inaccurate analysis of the indigent population, and how they should be housed, fed, clothed and educated. Of course, not in their neighborhoods (Indian Hill and Hyde Park) or with their money. They assured us they had intimate knowledge of these people and were quite comfortable with them.
I politely suggested that possibly most of our group lacked first-hand knowledge and could benefit from interfacing with the population in question. She replied that she was certain I possessed that kind of knowledge, with the clear implication that I was a member of the great unwashed. Lucky guess.
Admittedly, my direct contact was of limited scope. I worked my way through college as a store detective for a department store in the area. Arresting them tends to produce interface. That led to me volunteering for working with the youth on weekends.
After college, I worked on a plan to serve that community with mass transit. And then, as an organizer with the Youth Collaborative, with the goal of lowering the dropout rate. Maybe not intimate knowledge, but more than you get at the Camargo Country Club.
So, late that Saturday night, I invited the group to accompany me to a neighborhood bar in one of the depressed areas and we could discuss the issues with the locals. That should be no problem, if everyone felt comfortable with them. There were about 40 in our class. Three took me up on it, and Nancy was one of them.
Nancy fervently advocated positions on issues. But, she was willing to stare the truth in the eye, factor that in and do something about it. To me, that defined her.
Tomorrow is her funeral. Yesterday was the end of an era in Cincinnati.
She was one of those relatively rare people who recognized problems of the community and did something about them. She conceived solutions and drove them to fruition. We didn’t always agree on these matters, but I highly respected her for the contributions. She accomplished more than I care to list. She advocated for gays, Jews, the mentally ill and others in need of it. No easy routes for her.
A couple months ago, a friend of mine from high school emailed me a few names of classmates and asked what my recollection was of their defining moments. Her theory was that that’s how we primarily remembered each other. She also asked what her defining moment was in my mind. As incentive, she offered her perception of mine. I didn’t want to know it.
With this lurking on the fringe of my mind, Nancy’s defining moment emerged. I’d known her for almost 30 years, so there was a lot of material to work with.
But, we originally met as classmates in Leadership Cincinnati in the early 80s. Programs like this select active leaders from different segments of the community and educate them on the bigger picture over the course of a year or so. There’s also the benefit of cross pollination.
One of the sessions spanned a weekend. On Saturday night, after the program, we sat around in the lounge of the posh hotel where we were staying and discussed the subject matter of the day.
More accurately, a couple wealthy women were holding forth on the state of the lower strata of society. One of them finally turned to me and said that I was being quiet. What did I think?
I was being quiet because they had little idea what they were talking about. There’s nothing to be gained arguing with such people.
In this case, they rendered an inaccurate analysis of the indigent population, and how they should be housed, fed, clothed and educated. Of course, not in their neighborhoods (Indian Hill and Hyde Park) or with their money. They assured us they had intimate knowledge of these people and were quite comfortable with them.
I politely suggested that possibly most of our group lacked first-hand knowledge and could benefit from interfacing with the population in question. She replied that she was certain I possessed that kind of knowledge, with the clear implication that I was a member of the great unwashed. Lucky guess.
Admittedly, my direct contact was of limited scope. I worked my way through college as a store detective for a department store in the area. Arresting them tends to produce interface. That led to me volunteering for working with the youth on weekends.
After college, I worked on a plan to serve that community with mass transit. And then, as an organizer with the Youth Collaborative, with the goal of lowering the dropout rate. Maybe not intimate knowledge, but more than you get at the Camargo Country Club.
So, late that Saturday night, I invited the group to accompany me to a neighborhood bar in one of the depressed areas and we could discuss the issues with the locals. That should be no problem, if everyone felt comfortable with them. There were about 40 in our class. Three took me up on it, and Nancy was one of them.
Nancy fervently advocated positions on issues. But, she was willing to stare the truth in the eye, factor that in and do something about it. To me, that defined her.
Tomorrow is her funeral. Yesterday was the end of an era in Cincinnati.
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