Overall Picture: Tehachapi News

Does anybody have a fresh can of Bab-O?

One day more than 60 years ago I came home from the store with a pound of margarine that simply amazed my mother. To understand why, you need to know that in those days dairymen had enough political clout to get a law passed that prohibited margarine manufacturers from giving their naturally white product the artificial yellow color that made it look like butter. Since most people back then didn't care to spread what appeared to be lard on their bread, the margarine makers included in each package a separate packet of yellow vegetable dye that the consumer could stir into the white margarine.

But the margarine I brought home that memorable day had a pellet of coloring inside the plastic bag of margarine. The slightest squeeze broke the pellet. Then a few seconds of massaging the package turned the margarine into a lovely, uniform yellow. No more dumping the margarine and the dye into a bowl and tediously mashing it to obtain the acceptable butter color.

My wife doesn't remember as much as I do about white margarine and other products that have disappeared from store shelves. That's because she's younger than I am.

These days she buys a kitchen cleanser called Comet which she has learned to hand me when I ask for Bab-O, the cleanser we used when I was a kid. I haven't seen it for years so I plugged Bab-O into the Internet the other day to see if it's still on the market. The results were unclear. Several websites offered Bab-O but I couldn't tell if their Bab-O was recently manufactured or if it is simply left over from the old days. I saw one reference that led me to believe that Bab-O is currently being made by some outfit in Chicago. Does anybody know for sure what happened to this product? It's probably not as good as later cleansers like Comet but I still prefer the name Bab-O.

Speaking of the old days, we still use the term “soap opera” in reference to real-life situations that are long on drama but short on substance. Family squabbles in particular tend to fit well into the soap opera genre. But most people today don't know what the original soap operas were. In the 1930s and '40s they were 15-minute daytime radio programs aimed at injecting some excitement into the humdrum lives of so many stay-at-home moms of that period. They were mostly sponsored by companies that sold Chipso, Rinso, Dreft and other laundry products that have faded into the past.

When I was in school I delivered handbills door to door. I still remember hearing soap opera dialogue, consisting heavily of whining and moaning, coming from every house I passed. I still can't believe how much laundry soap those dramatized nervous breakdowns could sell.

I think the reason why a lot of good old product names have been junked along the way is because we didn't used to have so much market research. Now we have focus groups, subliminal research and all kinds of other snoopy ways to test consumer reaction to various product names. Also, a new name provides manufacturers with an excuse to advertise the most dynamic word in merchandising, which is “new.”

Not long ago I bought a so-called new version of my favorite coffee. I finally concluded that the only thing new about it was that you got less coffee in the new can but you paid the same old price.

Pass the salt' has become an obscene phrase

Whenever I watch football on TV it seems there is always a commercial showing athletes eating canned soup with expressions of ecstasy. The advertiser must have to pay these guys a pretty penny to keep them from spitting out the tasteless gruel as the camera rolls. More likely, the guys are able to smile because they aren't consuming the soup as it comes from the can, totally without zest or character of any kind. If they are actually scarfing the sponsor's product without making bad faces I suspect it has been worked over to the nth degree by real chefs who know how to season stuff.

I haven't found an edible can of soup on supermarket shelves in years even though I keep trying. I'm a Trader Joe's addict but I have to be honest and admit that even Joe's canned soup is pretty bad, so I hope the guys at Albertsons won't throw me out the next time I show up. Instead of blaming the people who sell these insipid soups or even the folks who make it I want to take a moment to abuse the health nuts among us who put table salt in the same category as cyanide. While I'm at it, I might as well vent my spleen on the so-called nutritionists who try to eliminate all fats and oils from our diets as well.

Salt has become an obscene four-letter word because it is supposed to raise blood pressure. Since my blood pressure has been in the four-figure range for most of my life I'm pretty sparing with salt. I'm willing to assume that my doctor probably knows what he's talking about on this subject. Fortunately, I have learned that there are many things you can use to pep up food without loading it with salt. How come soupmakers don't know this? Whenever I make my world famous High Octane Bean Soup or my Gringo Chicken Tortilla Soup my wife and kids never complain about the sissy taste. They are more apt to be drenched in sweat before they are halfway through a bowl. Yet the salt content is almost non-existent. Put enough jalapeno peppers in anything and most people won't have a clue as to what other ingredients are missing.

Since I'm already boring you with my culinary complaints, bear with me while I carry on about low fat products. Author Nelson Algren once warned against eating at any place called Mom's. I have extended this advice to eating anything labeled low fat. Some of it isn't bad but you won't know until you try to eat it. My least favorite low fat item is ground beef. I always look for the packages with the highest fat content. In my opinion, the low fat meat turns into particle board as you cook it. When I make my exquisite hamburgers I always grill them so that the fat drips out. But while it's dripping away, the grease gives the burger a heavenly flavor without hanging around to clog your arteries.

No doubt you're outraged by my politically incorrect approach to cookery and I suspect you have excellent arguments to refute what I say. I don't want to hear from you about this so stop your sputtering.

Remembering a great writer from the past

A few months ago the news media gave a lot of attention to the passing of author Norman Mailer. I believe he wrote more than 40 books during his career but I was able to wade through just one, although I also read a couple of his short stories. Maybe if I had read more of Mailer's stuff I could understand why he was so highly regarded in some circles.

I suspect, however, that a lot of Mailer's fame had more to do with his colorful and often insulting nature than from his ability to put words on paper. For some reason, a lot of arty people seem to think bad behavior is evidence of great talent. I feel the same way about another recently-deceased literary lion named Hunter Thompson, who appeared to enthrall intellectuals mostly because of his legendary consumption of drugs and alcohol. Why didn't I think of that? Perhaps if I had put away more hooch after I wrote my only book a few years back it wouldn't have been such a flop, but I doubt it. You need a better press agent than I can afford to turn a common drunk into an icon.

I don't expect every competent writer to be a normal person. In fact, being a little loony can even be an asset to an author. One of my favorites, mystery writer Raymond Chandler, was a big-time boozer, doing some of his best work while deeply under the influence. Another writer whom I consider one of the best American authors of the 20th century, Ross Lockridge, Jr., inexplicably committed suicide just as it became clear that his first and only book, Raintree County, was going to be a blockbuster. He killed himself in the midst of hoopla from Hollywood that big stars including Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift would bring Raintree County to life on the screen.

I doubt that hardly any of you have read Raintree County or even heard of the book and that's no reflection on your literary IQ. It's because the book first came out in 1948, was over 1,000 pages long and the subsequent movie version was so hokey that it surely must have put off a lot of potential book buyers. Even so, Raintree County became a best seller, then sank from view like most best sellers eventually do. But the book has been re-issued recently, perhaps as proof that great talent will usually rise again. Buy a copy and you'll understand what I'm saying.

Nobody knows for sure why Lockridge ended his life at the very moment he was at the top of his game. From the day it came off the presses, many of the most respected critics were calling Raintree County the Great American Novel. Major studios were clamoring for the movie rights. Under these circumstances most authors would have become euphoric, built huge ski lodges at Aspen and spent the rest of their days in riotous living. So what happened to Lockridge? Why did he apparently feel that his life was no longer worth living so soon after he delivered his priceless manuscript to the publisher?

I think one reason might have been that Raintree County is an exquisitely detailed piece of work, one that would drain almost anybody's creative juices for all time. A chronic depressive, Lockridge could have been overwhelmed by the haunting sense that he could never again produce anything that would approach Raintree County. It's possible he couldn't stand the thought of being a one-book sensation. It's sad to imagine that somebody so talented might have confused quantity with quality and failed to realize that one masterpiece like Raintree County would be more than enough to assure literary immortality.

Whatever happened to the Red Menace posed by the Chinese?

For most of my life I've been told that the Chinese represented a dire threat to America. The communists under Mao did kill Americans in the Korean War and they treated their own people even worse. Being a Chinese official during the years after Mao took over wasn't exactly a walk through the park. Even Mao's widow was under sentence of death for awhile.

Then somebody dragged out the ping pong paddles. Seemingly out of the blue, the evil Chinese invited American ping pong players to visit China and bat a few balls around. I doubt that we'll ever know the full story but not long afterward American President Richard Nixon went to China, not to play ping pong but to establish what have proven to be our most valuable foreign connections of the latter half of the 20th century.

I'm as mad at Nixon as you are about Watergate but his opening of relations with the Chinese could make him the greatest president since Abe Lincoln. Even though the Chinese aren't leaning on the Iranians as hard as we would like right now, they are perhaps the most valuable allies we have. A lot of us wondered why President Bush wasn't treating the North Koreans as roughly as he was treating Iran over the nuclear issue but the answer is coming clear. Bush didn't have to. The Chinese were better able to straighten out the North Korean problem and they appear to have done it.

Just last year our granddaughter from Pensacola went through the 12th grade at a high school in Beijing, learning to speak Chinese and rubbing elbows with the local populace. When she picked up her diploma, her parents and her aunt and uncle from Inyokern were there in Beijing, discovering that the inscrutable Chinese are about as hard to figure out as the residents of South Pasadena.

Communists? Are you kidding? Our kids reported that China has become the most fiercely capitalistic place on earth. The people of China have put away the sayings of Mao and have bought into the good life, western style, in a big way. They still ride bicycles by the millions but now they have to look out for their middle class friends plowing through traffic in their new automobiles.

Where this will lead in the years ahead is unclear but there is a growing suspicion that the Chinese as enemies might have been a lot better than having them as competitors. Although China has extensive coal deposits and a mature nuclear industry, their energy needs are growing so fast that they are nearly as responsible for high gas prices in Tehachapi as the sheiks of Araby. While official relations with China no longer focus on weapons of mass destruction, they are just as heated when it comes to pirated CDs and DVDs. My son-in-law told me that in dealing with the aggressive street merchants of Beijing he became convinced that he could buy any of the latest American movies for next to nothing. It appears that the only place where the Chinese remain heathen is in Hollywood.

I'm not complaining about this and it's not because I don't own any copyrights that are being violated in the far east. Humans are naturally competitive. How much better it is that we compete in selling cars and other consumer goods than in shedding blood. It's turning out that Americans and Chinese are mirror images of each other. I can live with that. The rest we can argue in the courts.

How do you keep up with the PC police?

In my long life I have lived through many irritating trends in human affairs but none have earned my contempt as much as the movement known as Political Correctness. This is mostly the invention of liberals who want to censor other people without being accused of censorship.

A few years ago, some starry-eyed professor at the University of Missouri put out a thick book of words and phrases that he decided were offensive to somebody. By the time millions of Americans got through laughing at this idiocy, a lot of the bad words in the professor's silly book had become acceptable and many previously-good words had become bad, according to other humorless liberals. Today, a politically correct dictionary would have to be updated every morning.

I wasn't a bit surprised that somebody recently objected to my reference to my fellow Irish-English Americans as Micks and Limeys. After writing a humor column for nearly 30 years, what really surprises me is that it has taken this long for somebody to turn me in to the Political Correctness police. I'm sure that reflects the intellectual honesty and common sense that has long pervaded our community.

Now that I have once again uttered the infamous M and L words, let's consider their meanings. Sons of Erin became known as Micks because so many were named Michael, which I hope isn't a word on somebody's no-no list. I haven't checked with Mickey Rooney but I doubt that very many Michaels have gone berserk when referred to affectionately as Mickey, or Mick for short. To be fair, I'm sure there must be a few people of Irish descent who are ashamed of their lineage and consider it obscene to be reminded. To them I apologize.

Now let's take up the hateful word Limey. This began as a tribute to somebody in the British navy who long ago found the cure for a terrible ailment suffered by thousands of seafarers known as scurvy. Years before science identified vitamins and their roles in good health, some English genius figured out that scurvy was caused by the lack of something in the kinds of food that would remain edible on long voyages. Now we know it was vitamin C that was lacking. As a result of this fine intuition, the Brits began including limes in their ocean-going food supplies. Sailors who frequently sucked on limes didn't get scurvy. Soon limes became a staple on ships of many nations. Uncounted thousands of seaman subsequently were spared the ravages of scurvy, thanks to a nation of people who came to be known as Limeys because of their humane discovery.

The biggest problem with Political Correctness, outside of being a barrier to honest discourse, is that fashions in acceptable speech keep changing. When I was growing up, my cohorts and I were monumentally insensitive about most things but we knew that referring to a homosexual as “queer” was beyond the pale. Now we have a TV program about homosexuals with the word queer in the title and I don't hear anybody squawking.

Maybe it's a good thing this old Mick is on his way out before he gets more liberals' shorts in a knot.

Some shocking revelations from the family tree

I'll bet I'm the only guy on Dennison Road who got to choose his own name.

My birth certificate refers to me as Edward William Barnett. After my father and mother were killed in separate accidents, I was declared surplus property and the ladies at the orphanage went about trying to unload me on some unsuspecting family. For reasons I still don't understand, they succeeded and I ended up with a wonderful couple named Mead.

It's customary for an adoptee to take his adopters' surname, which I did, but I made an additional request. Tired of hearing my frustrated teachers yell “EdWARD!” whenever some other kid did something despicable that seemed more typical of my behavior, I asked that my middle name become my first name. I then appropriated my new father's middle initial, J, which doesn't stand for anything. I looked forward to becoming just plain Bill. How was I to know that my doting adoptive mother would fondly refer to me as Billy J. and that it would be taken up by the entire town?

I had to join the Navy to finally get away from that odious moniker.

Having been orphaned at the age of eight, I didn't know a lot about my birth parents which later on bothered my kids. My daughter Carol, our science teacher, recently was able to draw a bead on my mother's background which, to our consternation, went all the way back to a man named James Chilton who arrived in this country on a ship called the Mayflower. Knowing the checkered background of most Puritan Pilgrims I begged her to stop her search before it revealed even less admirable people.

Then she went to work on tracing my father with almost no results. This caused her to hire a geneologist who soon discovered why Dad was so elusive. At some early point in his life his actual last name of Bennett had been misspelled into Barnett.

Finding this glitch was the key to unearthing all kinds of biographical information, some of it painful, such as the fact that like my mom, my dad was Ulster Irish all the way back to the 1700s. I have always hoped to discover some respectable leavening in my background but it is not to be. This has been disappointing to my second-generation German wife. Based on my appearance and overbearing nature she has long believed me to be at least partly German.

On the upside, a little genealogical research can be properly humbling because almost everybody's ancestors include some you wouldn't want hanging around your place today. Public records show that my dad's parents divorced not long after he was born and both married other people. So far so good. But then they moved into adjoining houses and had more kids with their new spouses. Is that kinky or what?

My advice to you is don't shake your family tree too hard. Having a bunch of Micks and Limeys fall out could be the least of your embarrassment.

Trash can dog has disrupted our household

Several months ago somebody in Tijuana heard strange noises in a dumpster and I ended up paying the price.

Let me start at the beginning. My granddaughter and her husband run a business in San Diego. One of their employees, who has family in Tijuana, came to work one day with a miniature Chihuahua girl weighing something less than 2 pounds. She said the dog had been found in a garbage container. Knowing that our granddaughter has a tiny Yorkie that lives better than most people, the employee thought Nikki might adopt the Chihuahua pup as a companion to Lily. Instead, Nikki brought the Tijuana foundling to Tehachapi where she placed it in my wife's lap. That was dirty pool and I don't mind saying so. One look into that tiny face and my wife went stone deaf when I listed all the reasons why we don't need another pooch, especially an assertive little creature who learned to fight for survival from day one.

We quickly discovered that with the speed of light, Baby Jane could turn off the charm and become a fiend, like some human females I knew when I was younger and more foolish. She would curl up on my wife's neck, exuding affection. The next moment she would be chewing one of my shoes. Strangely, in my wife's eyes, this psychotic behavior only endeared her even more. Her needle sharp little teeth worked like a shredder. I soon began wondering if I could sell her to the Cleveland Wrecking Company.

When Nikki left Janie on our doorstep, it was my understanding we were to find a good home for the little dog. I mean somebody else's home. I was astounded that my usually-truthful wife now denied later that any such arrangement was ever mentioned. This is maddening to me because nearly everybody who has met Janie wants to adopt her. That would be best for everybody inasmuch as old people aren't the most ideal parents. I'm sure you agree. If not, keep it to yourself. I don't need your sassy mouth on top of everything else.

The biggest snag of all, as I saw it, was that Baby Jane is an illegal alien. She doesn't even have a green card. Surely that would make a criminal of anybody harboring her since she has no legal right to be in this country. If you're from immigration I'm only kidding.

A couple of weeks after Baby Jane arrived to disrupt our household my wife showed the first signs of disenchantment when she discovered that Janie had chewed a hole through our carpet. I figured that was a good time to surreptitiously contact the women at the Tehachapi News office who had gone bonkers when I brought Janie in to meet them earlier. Sure enough, within seconds after I had announced the little dog's availability I heard from Jo. While my wife was still gaping at what Baby Jane had done to her carpet, I spirited the delightful demon out of the house and over to the News office.

A few days later I heard from Jo that Janie was doing just fine in her new digs. Apparently she had quit being destructive because somebody told me Jo's house still looked fine. At least from the outside.

Technology is getting beyond this old dude

In the play “A Streetcar Named Desire” a character named Blanche says something to the effect that she has always depended on the kindness of strangers.

I think I know what she means. For most of my life I have depended on the wisdom of family and friends to get me out of one tight spot after another, especially when it comes to making gadgets work. If they had a contest to pick America's Mr. Fixit I would surely come in last. I can spell pretty good and I can savvy a financial statement about as well as any amateur but when it comes to anything mechanical or electronic, forget me.

The most recent proof came just last month when my expensive new camera quit working. Our tribe had made a day trip to explore the old Ridge Route, the original highway that went directly from Los Angeles to Bakersfield. It was built in 1915 and went along the crests of the San Gabriel and Tehachapi Mountains. It was mostly abandoned when the Ridge Route Alternative, Highway 99, opened in 1933. But the old road has cast a spell on thousands of history-minded Californians like me who occasionally pick our way through rocks and broken concrete to pay homage to what one author refers to as the road that united California.

I had taken several shots along the seven miles of the Old Ridge Route that were open to nitwits like us when the camera shutter simply locked up. I tried everything I could think of to jar it loose, even violating one of my holy principles by reading the owners manual. But it was no use. I put the camera away until I could get home and dump the problem on my neighbor Paul who had made the camera work at the start, right after I had taken it out of the shipping box.

In almost no time, Paul was at my door clicking the shutter like crazy. He said the camera was fine but it wouldn't take pictures on a filled-up memory card. They had told the fancy camera not to do that when it left Tokyo. When Paul explained this I realized anew that he is exactly the kind of guy Blanche was talking about.

The camera debacle was nothing compared to the aggravations I have been suffering from my computer, more specifically the Internet. Years ago, when I was browbeaten into the computer age, I got along fine with e-mail and all that stuff. Then every smartass in creation began trying to disable everybody else's computers via the Internet. For awhile, the Norton anti-virus program kept these pests at bay but during the past year I have been plagued by a multitude of hacker attacks. I have added two more anti-virus programs, which I think are referred to as firewalls, and I have had my machine cleansed by professionals twice in the last six months. But the onslaught continues. Part of the problem, perhaps the biggest part, is that klutzes like me have no idea how to maintain these virus protections. The instructions on the screen may be clear to Bill Gates but they only confuse me.
I was heartened the other day when I read of proposals to junk the Internet as it is and replace it with something less prone to disruptions but it will take years to accomplish. Meanwhile I am greatly impressed by an existing piece of equipment that gets around the worst failings of the Internet. It's small and inexpensive as well. It's called a telephone.

Overall Picture: Oregon campers catch and hogtie Peeping Richard

I hope you're paying attention when I tell you the most interesting news isn't found in the New York Times or on the Fox News channel. For my money, the really neat stuff comes off the pages of community newspapers around the country. That's why I regularly check local papers on the Internet. If I hadn't done that last week I couldn't warn you to be on the lookout for a fast-moving guy with a posthole digger and a worried look on his face.

This poor wretch was described in the Curry Coastal Pilot, published in Brookings, Ore., as the unidentified cause of 40,000 people losing phone service when he tried to place a fence post right over a critical telephone transmission line serving the Southern Oregon and Northern California coasts. Since the authorities knew right where the misguided hole had been bored and could easily determine who owned the property, I can't buy that “unidentified” baloney. My take on this major news break is that the authorities were trying to save the knucklehead from a lynching. That I can buy.

The Brookings fence post digger was a victim of circumstances but according to Oregon's Beaverton Valley Times, Peeping Richard deserved the vigilante justice he got. Richard, who turned out to be a portly man of 65 years, was hiding in the bushes ogling females using a campground latrine when he was detected and apprehended by male campers. Rather than saddle anybody with the tedium of keeping an eye on Richard while everybody waited for the police to haul him off, they tied poor Richard firmly to a tree.

But that wasn't the worst part. While Richard was tied up, probably in great discomfort, he endured tongue-lashings from the female campers, according to the Times story. In the midst of this torment, Richard proceeded to make things worse. He told the ladies that he had been a peeper for the past 15 years and he thought of it simply as a hobby. Whatever happened to stamp collecting?

Things didn't go much better for some other Oregonians in Lake Oswego who found themselves mixed up in dueling weddings. Their hometown paper, the Lake Oswego review, reported that the two weddings took place at the same time in neighboring houses. One wedding party complained to police that their music was being drowned out by music from next door. The article indicated that the cops made some kind of diplomatic arrangement and both weddings went on peacefully.

Ending musical wars seems to be one of the lesser talents of the Lake Oswego police department. One of its local detectives became a popular hero a short time ago when he doggedly went through old unsolved case files and sent some blood-stained evidence to the state lab for DNA testing. The results fingered a 49-year-old local man who is now facing charges for killing an elderly couple 27 years ago.

Back in Beaverton Valley, the Times gave a lot of space to actress Sarah Jessica Parker's visit to a local store to promote her line of perfume. Whoever wrote the story fell under Sarah's spell, emphasizing that her beauty and charm moved a lot of perfume out the door.

I can't imagine that Peeping Richard knew the gorgeous Sarah was coming to Oregon or he wouldn't have wasted his time skulking through the bushes to get his jollies. Why didn't he get a legal eyeful of Sarah instead? I don't know why the Times didn't explore that angle. Readers hate loose ends.

Older reporters need reminding of readers' ages

I keep reminding myself that the vast majority of living Americans don't remember most of what I remember about national and world events. That's because I'm 80 years old and this year's college graduates, for instance, are 24 years old on the average. In fact, more than half our present population was born after January 1972. This is important for me to keep in mind because in my writings I tend to refer to the past as if everybody lived through it like I did.

College graduates in the class of 2007 were mostly born in 1983, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. They have no first hand recollections of the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam conflict, the glamorous heyday of Marilyn Monroe or the matrimonial adventures of Liz Taylor. For these recent grads, the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King took place in a distant age.

My first on-the-spot memory of national issues goes back to the election of 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt ousted Herbert Hoover from the White House. The only reason I recall that campaign is because my mother, an ardent Republican and Hoover supporter, worked in the Iowa State Capitol in Des Moines. After the Democrats took over in the wake of the Roosevelt landslide, her job disappeared. Even a 5-year-old understood what had taken place and why. Today the typical 24-year-old is apt to be hazy as to whether Hoover came before or after Lincoln.

I bring this up, not to make you feel ancient, but because I believe the generational gap can be more of a plus than a problem in the news business, so long as everybody recognizes that the gap exists. Older journalists have the first-hand background to provide historical context when covering current events. Budding reporters, on the other hand, are more likely to be sensitive to the fact that young people have limited real time awareness of what we oldsters consider the recent past and therefore give more background information in their reportage. They fill in the blanks, so to speak, for their own age group. Although the legendary Walter Cronkite never got too old to keep up with the times in his reporting, I think good editors will always try to make sure their staffs represent a balance between the old and the young.

A couple of years ago I wrote a nostalgia piece about country musician Spade Cooley who murdered his wife near Tehachapi. Because this happened several decades ago, I should have foreseen that many readers would have no idea who Cooley was, even though he had been an entertainment giant in the early days of TV. I mentioned this to my local friend, Dick Baxter of Stallion Springs, who has just written a book about his colorful career as manager of show business luminaries, including the late Dale Rogers of western movie stardom. Although Dale and her husband Roy, often referred to as “King of the Cowboys,” have been gone for less than 10 years, Dick is surprised at how fast their public recognition has faded, mostly because such a big segment of the population has been born since Roy and Dale were marquee headliners.

“More and more when I mention Dale Evans somebody asks me what he did,” Baxter told me sadly.

Overall picture: Luxury cars are expensive to fix, research shows

It's a good thing I'm too old to look for work. That's because I no longer understand much of the reasoning that seems to pass for wisdom in the business world these days.

I don't like generalities either so let me get to the point. I read that luxury cars cost a fortune to fix after even low-speed thumps. We're talking about the powder puff fender benders that occur in parking lots where speeds are between 3 and 6 miles an hour. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety tested 11 luxury 2007 models and came up with some pretty hair-raising results. Like, they found that taking the kinks out of an Infiniti G35 caused by a 6 mph tap are likely to cost over five thousand bucks. That was after a nose-to-nose hit. The repair price drops to only a little more than a thousand smackeroos if your Infiniti takes a love pat on the rear corner.

If that seems like a bargain you've overlooked some automotive history. For comparison purposes the study tossed in an ugly old 1981 Ford Escort and bunged it up the same way. This produced a repair cost of $86 to make the Escort look as bad as new after a full frontal collision at a crawl speed of 6 MPH. A rear corner hit on the old Escort didn't cost a nickel because it didn't do any damage.
How come the el cheapo Ford came out so well when it cost so much to fix the expensive Infiniti? The researchers said the Escort had bumpers made before bumper standards were relaxed 25 years ago. The article didn't explain why the government relaxed the standards but the IIHI test results strongly suggest they shouldn't have done that. We now have scientific evidence that light bumpers lead to heavy costs at the body shop.

Commenting on these tests, spokespersons for luxury car manufacturers offered some baffling responses as to why their cars are so much more fragile than a lowly 26-year-old Escort. The Mercedes-Benz guy laid it right on the line when he said the low speed crash test results did not reflect his company's “holistic approach to occupant safety. This philosophy influences vehicle design and development even down to the front bumper.” Say what?

Other factory reps complained that the tests did not assess vehicle safety and looked only at repair costs. They went on to charge that it was hard for the tests to replicate the low-speed crashes that typically occur on the road. I don't get that. I would think a bang is a bang is a bang whether accidental or on purpose. See why nobody would hire me?

On the chance I might run out of retirement funds and really need employment, I'm trying to improve my attitude and stop assuming that if something sounds crazy it probably is. Logic doesn't seem to have much place at the top levels of government or industry these days so I have to go with this flow before I send out my job resumes. For example, my old brain just won't wrap itself around the idea that a flimsier bumper makes a safer car.

Perhaps if I understood the meaning of current buzzwords like “holistic” I might yet learn to ignore common sense. Can you help me on this? I don't believe the Mercedes guy will return my calls.

Overall picture: Drifting down the Ohio was a special treat

My wife and I are back from Louisville, Ky. where we put our grandson into an institution for life. The institution is called marriage and the quality of the lady he wed makes it pretty certain he'll stay there for life. Our unruly grandkids do have a knack for picking classy mates.

Normally I would rather suffer an ingrown toenail than travel 2,000 miles to attend a wedding, but I have to admit this one was different than most. Different meaning better. Immediate family members all chipped in to pay the costs of the nuptials with the bride's parents doing the heaviest lifting, financially speaking. I guess there is no way to get married anymore without spending a bundle. I have, in the past, hinted at the benefits of elopement but I guess you can't even do that on the cheap anymore.

What made Andy's wedding a pleasure even for a curmudgeon like me is that most of the costs went toward entertaining the guests rather than for a glittering ceremony with Hollywood trappings. It was a simple, tasteful affair at an old-time church a mile or so from the Ohio River. The Lutheran minister who hitched the kids was a delightful young lady who won my undying respect when she told me she had attended seminary in Iowa. I'm sure God likes that as well.

After the ceremony we all headed for a large cruise boat that took some 80 wedding guests nearly 20 miles down the Ohio and back, feeding us royally enroute. The next evening, close relatives of the bride and groom were back on the water in a 70-foot houseboat owned by the bride's parents. This time we had more opportunity to relax and enjoy the sights along the Ohio. I have driven across and flown over the Ohio River on previous trips but this was my first opportunity to see how much it differs from other rivers in the heartland. The most glaring contrast stems from the absence of levees and other flood control structures characteristic of the Mississippi, for example. At least in the Louisville area, beautiful homes line the river's heavily-forested banks. This startled me because I know the Ohio has an ominous reputation for flooding. I'm sure that's why nearly all the riverside homes look pretty new. They might look even newer by the time I get back there.

The Ohio seems to attract more recreational boating than other large rivers in the east. Taking a small boat out on the Mississippi is not for the faint-hearted because of the big river's dams and heavy barge traffic. The Ohio seems pretty tame by comparison although it carries a pretty good load of barges.

Without doubt the highlight of our trip to Andy's wedding was spending time with members of my late brother's family from Massachusetts who made the considerable effort to be there. They and our kids, none of whom are kids anymore, get along the way all cousins should, perhaps because they had so little contact due to distance and expense during their growing up years. They are making up for that now.

In spite of the discomfort and aggravations of air travel these days we wouldn't have passed up the Kentucky excursion for anything. Now we're getting our strength back so we can marry off another grandchild in Hawaii next summer. Excuse me while I go look for a soft cushion to put on the airline seat.

Memories of the opening of school in the heartland

I'm stuck in a time warp when it comes to the beginning of the school year. When I was growing up in the cornbelt back in the 1930s and '40s, school let out near the end of May and picked up again the day after Labor Day. If you think that was to give us hoodlums a longer summer vacation you're wrong. It was done so that kids would be available to help on the farm during the relatively short growing season in that region.

These days it seems like our grandkids don't get much of a summer break. They're in class until the middle of June and head back again in August, well before Labor Day. The reason this is important to us is that we have made it a point to take the kids on summer trips in our motorhome. Today's short vacations haven't given us much window for long jaunts, such as across the continent. We have done this in the past but only through the tightest of scheduling.

The short-vacation dilemma is worse than ever now because we have only two grandchildren still in public school. The older four are now married or otherwise tied up in their own adult activities. The two younger ones always seem to be booked for summer activities of which we are not a part. I'm sure these are worthy activities but I can't help feeling that the younger ones are getting the short end by missing the kind of RV trips with Grandma and Grandpa that have become unforgettable memories for the older kids.

We didn't take major summer trips when I was a boy. Farm people were tied to their crops throughout the good weather, town dwellers had jobs and businesses to run while the sun was shining, money was tight, roads weren't great and recreational vehicles were still way off in the future. World War II rationing made long-distance travel even more difficult. But even before then, during the late 1930s, a 200-mile summer trip was noteworthy enough to get mentioned in the local weekly paper. In 1938 my dad took us back to Washington, D.C. for a reunion of his World War I outfit. I was a local celebrity for months afterward.

One unexpected result of having four to six weeks more vacation than kids get today was that we actually looked forward to the start of the new school year. In Iowa that was when “country kids” arrived to finish their education in town after eight years in one-room schools out in the sticks. Unless you were there you can't fully appreciate the impact of this infusion of ninth graders. After tolerating classmates going back to kindergarten, we suddenly had a fresh crop of pretty girls and handsome boys to freshen our social lives. The downside was that the country kids were usually superior scholastically, wiping out the rest of us on the grade curve until they got dumbed down to the level of the town kids.
Keep in mind that family farms were still the norm in that era, when the average farm size was much smaller than it is now. Through greater mechanization, farm consolidations and road improvements which make it possible for many farmers to live in town, the rural population throughout mid-America has since plunged, leading to the demise of country schools. Going into the ninth grade no longer offers delightful surprises.

I have been in California for so long that I'm not even sure when summer vacation starts and ends in Midwest schools these days. All I have are my memories of how it used to be and I'll take those over the current truth every time.

Overall Picture: Some 'progress' mostly irritates us older people

If you're like most folks, you wonder how you ever survived without the innovations that keep flooding into our lives, including computers, cell phones, cars that park themselves and so on. I hate to rain on your parade but the primitive technology that arose in the last few years of the 19th century in many ways had a lot more impact on the way people lived than the complicated stuff we have to contend with today. And it was a lot easier to deal with.

My mom and dad were born in 1895. From the beginning they had telephones, electric lights, indoor plumbing and, before they finished grade school, had ridden in automobiles and seen airplanes fly. It's true they started out with iceboxes instead of refrigerators but in their nearly 60 years of marriage, I don't believe they ever bought any new invention that came with an owners manual. Common sense was all you needed then. I like to think of their era as the customer friendly period of American life.

Dad bought a new car every couple of years after I came along, mostly because, as a newspaper publisher, he had a sweet advertising trade deal with a local car dealer. That was before the IRS got snotty about such things. Back then, I'm sure the dealer never had to show Dad what buttons to hit each time he picked up a new model.

How things have changed, and not necessarily for the better. My wife and I recently turned in a leased Mercedes that I never could fully operate. I don't mean to offend you Germans but the endless electronics on our Mercedes were either beyond my understanding or they quit working entirely, like the time the radiator fan module burned out on a 110-degree day in Las Vegas. If I slowed down below 30 I was in a world of hurt. How I wished for my father's 1937 Ford on that occasion. Come to think of it, I believe I would do fine with a '37 Ford as my everyday wheels.

I've sniveled to you before about the miseries I run into with my computer. I accept these frustrations because I realize you can't put the history of the universe on a quarter-inch chip using the technology of my youth. But why should you need a master's degree to operate a toaster?

I think that what separates me from the younger generation in coping with the new digitalized world is that I grew up being able to see what was going on inside stuff.

But an integrated circuit is, to quote Winston Churchill's description of the inner workings of the Soviet Union, a riddle wrapped inside an enigma. Anyone born since 1985 has genes that enable them to know when to junk a piece of electronics or how to shake it it to get it going again without looking at the innards. I'm used to the old days, when you could watch mechanical parts moving around. If the whatsit was rubbing against the thingamajig you knew immediately that a moderate tap with a hammer would make things right. The last time I tried that with my HP photo printer I found out it's a new age.

It seems you can't pick up anything simple any more. I tried to buy an old-fashioned meat thermometer the other day but even these things have gone high tech. I'm back to just making sure the juice isn't running red. It works for me.

Overall picture: Mountain trip peeled back the years for me

Being the grandfather of high-achieving kids has its downside. They are living reminders that I was a slow starter when I was their ages. One of my grandchildren is manager and part owner of a good-sized business in San Diego, another is going to become a mechanical engineer in a short while, his brother is a Coast Guard sea marshal while my 18-year-old Florida granddaughter will leave for the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis this month. When I was several years older than these kids are now I was toiling as night cook in a little Italian restaurant. It took me a while to get traction.

I enjoyed some quality time with our budding Naval officer at our desert hideaway at Inyokern last month. She and her mother wanted to spend a day in the High Sierras so we drove to Lee Vining and went up Tioga Pass as far as Olmsted Point where you get a spectacular view of the backside of Half Dome which looms over Yosemite Valley. They had just returned from China, where my granddaughter had graduated from high school. They were fresh from visiting the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and other exotic Chinese attractions but the craggy Sierra Nevada Mountains of California meant even more to them.

The Sierras have always exerted an emotional tug on me as well, especially the east slope which is a steep and spectacular wall of stone as compared with the gentle slope on the west side of the range. Whenever I drive up Highway 395 I wonder what early pioneers must have thought as they looked at this lofty barrier to the productive inland valleys and coastal regions of the state. It will always amaze me that over many decades of the 19th century so many inexperienced eastern immigrants crossed the Sierras in their primitive conveyances with so little tragedy. These days I would have a cow if my car broke down within a couple of miles of Bishop.

Driving Tioga Pass always gives me an opportunity to play the part of the old timer and describe what that road was like the first time I traveled it. The year was 1948 and my car was a well-used Studebaker. The Tioga Pass road, if you were generous enough to call it a road, was unpaved and one lane wide in those days. When you met somebody coming the other way you both had to squeeze right as far as possible, even in spots where there was no place to squeeze.

The eastern end of that prehistoric Tioga Pass road, where it plunged steeply toward Lee Vining and Mono Lake, was a narrow rocky ledge along the side of a high cliff, as narrow and unimproved as the rest of the road. Late one evening, as I was heading west toward the San Joaquin Valley, a carload of terror-stricken tourists heading east refused to pull any closer to the yawning canyon edge to let me pass. I had to pull onto loose rock which blew one of my tires.

As the sun disappeared, I was frantically changing wheels while totally blocking the road but nobody came along. I wasn't sure if that was good or bad. Twilight across the high peaks must have been beautiful that night but I don't recall enjoying it much. I might have liked it a lot more if I had known that 60 years later I could bore you with this pointless anecdote and get paid for it.