Okay, we made it to March. Pat yourselves on the back. There is only up from here to October. Judging from the comments to last month’s blog, my hatred for February is pretty much a universally held belief of the readership. Nothing like being on the same page. The other thing people wrote about was my gaffe in referring to Ed Norton of the Honeymooner’s as Ralph. Unforgivable so I won’t seek your absolution.
I’ll admit up front that I have never been a pop-tart guy. Too dry, not enough filling and the damned things were too hot when they came out of the toaster. Burned the roof of my mouth way too many times for a food product that simply wasn’t worth it. Pizza is worth a scorched roof every so often but never a pop-tart. It appears from sales of the things, which are in the billions each year, that once again, I am severely in the minority. Anyway, the guy who perfected, to the extent there is anything perfect about a pop tart, William Post, died at 96. Post ran a Hekman’s Biscuit Company baking plant in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Heckman’s eventually merged with Keebler whose elves are known to all. According to the story, Kellogg’s competitor, Post (no relation), was working on a toaster pastry. Kellog’s learned about it, wanted to beat Post to market and explained their concept to Mr. Post, asking if his bakery could come up with a prototype. Ever the optimist, he said he could do so in two weeks and thus began a rush to create an easy-eating breakfast food. To get it done, “I had to break every rule in the book,” Post said. In those two weeks, Post’s kids ate a lot of bad prototypes before they pronounced the finished product to be pretty good. Mr. Post then brought the recipe and process to Kellog’s and they became an instant hit. Post, the company, never got out its competitive product. Apparently, corporate espionage even exists at the breakfast food level. Kellogg’s initially did not give Mr. Post his due but has relented over the years and now acknowledges Mr. Post’s substantial contribution to a food source which undoubtedly adds to childhood obesity. Now Mr. Post is regarded as critical to the generation of the pop-tart, even if it is for a food product that I doubt has very much food. Post himself estimated that he consumed over 10,000 of the things in his life (strawberry was his favorite) which begs the question: how did he live so long? My guess would be the preservatives.
Carl Weathers. p/k/a Apollo Creed, has gone down for the ultimate count at 76. Although he will always be known for his work facing off against Sylvester Stallone as Rocky, he appeared in over 80 films and did a good amount of television. When he auditioned for the role of Apollo Creed, he was told that the person he would read with was the film’s writer. Weathers did not like the way the audition went and at the end, in disgust, said that he could have done a lot better if they had gotten him a real actor to read with. The movie’s writer, Stallone, hired him anyway, finding that he liked his fire and thought it would work well in the Creed character. Prior to acting, Weathers had been a marginal football player for the Oakland Raiders. He was cut by their then coach, John Madden, because he was “too sensitive.” He then sensitively played another year in the Canadian Football League. He had gotten a degree in theatre arts from San Diego State and put it to use doing some television, ultimately finding his way to the Rocky audition. The first Rocky film was loosely based on a fight between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner (the Bayonne Bleeder), who was thought to have no chance against the self-proclaimed, but aptly named, “Greatest of All Time,” but made it a fight in the end. So too, Rocky lost to Mr. Weathers’ character. In “Rocky II,” however, Rocky got his revenge beating Creed. In “Rocky III,” the two fighters agree to a third fight in private but we never learn of the results and in “Rocky IV,” Creed gets killed in the fight by Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) ending Weather’s time in the cinematic ring. He was able to shake-off the typecasting and appeared in many other films such as “Happy Gilmore,” with Adam Sandler; “Predator,” with Arnold Schwarzenegger and “Action Jackson” where he starred as Detroit Police detective Jericho “Action” Jackson. On television, he appeared in the Star Wars show “The Mandalorian.” He also appeared in Arrested Development and was the voice of Combat Karl in “Toy Story IV.” After getting the shit kicked out of you in the Rocky movies, being a voice on “Toy Story” must have seemed like easy money.
To me, Rock and Roll is about rebellion and fighting the machine, whatever the machine is. It provides adolescents with a way to break from their parents and become their own people. It is about angst and as Billy Joel called it, “righteous rage.” Anyway, the band that really set the bar for angst and rebellion was the MC-5 and its guitarist and founder (along with Fred “Sonic” Smith), Wayne Kramer. Mr. Kramer died at 75. It was Kramer’s and Smith’s ferocious guitar playing, anger and left-wing politics, borne of witnessing the Detroit riots and the anti-war sentiments that swept through the 60’s, that spawned the punk rock movement and bands like the Clash, the Stooges, the Ramones and others. Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, a friend of Kramer’s, said that the band “basically invented punk rock music.” Kramer was friends with John Sinclair who ran the White Panther organization, a left-wing group aligned with the Black Panthers. He managed the band and fueled the cutting edge that defined its sound. The band was signed to Elektra records and when it put out “Kick Out the Jams,” the big Detroit department store refused to sell it. The band took out a full page add excoriating the store and it reacted by stopping the sales of all Electra product. Electra subsequently dropped the band. Score one for the machine. The MC-5 played a concert in Chicago during the Democratic convention using electricity from a hot dog stand to power the amps when Chicago denied it power. Score one for the band. Kramer toggled between crime, jail, carpentry, and music for much of his life after the band broke up. You can tell he eventually changed and conformed, however, hoping that the RRHOF would admit the band. At one point referring to the MC-5 as the Susan Lucci of Rock and Roll. That, too me, is sad because he should have been the one guy to tell them where they could put their mainstream, corporate, conventional, conformist bullshit award. I won’t let that detract from what he did, however. Kick out the jams motherfuckers.
Dexter Romweber, the genius behind the Flat Duo Jets, died at 57. Long before the Whitestripes, Dex and a drummer hit the stage with a raucous rockabilly show. His classic album “Go Go Harlem Baby,” was re-released by Mr. White’s company who referred to him as “one of the best kept secrets of the rock n’ roll underground.” Rather than me waxing on, I reproduce here, Mr. White’s obit of Mr. Romweber:
A brick crashed through my window last night. Cat Power had wrote to me; John Michael Dexter Romweber had passed away, passed on, bill past due. He wasn’t a Rock N’ Roll musician, he WAS Rock N’ Roll inside and out, without even having to try, he couldn’t help himself. People toss that around a lot, but in Dex’s case it was actually true. To call him Punk would be like calling the Great Pyramid a sand castle. He was the type that don’t get 3 course dinners, awards, gold records and statues made of them because they are too real, too much, too strange, too good. Dex was a true tortured romantic, unfairly treated and broken hearted at all times but still hopeful. He was an electrical outlet, an old soul, a vampire, a cave man in a modern age, a WWI trench soldier, a different kind of American, out of luck living on the outskirts of town, lonely even when in a room of thousands. He ate dinner with Van Gogh, loaned your friend his last ten dollars, and exuded innocent love and naivety. He stared at the moon, communicated with Gene Vincent from another plane, while reading George Gurdjieff by thrift store lamp and all out of cigarettes at 3 a.m. He was forever getting the short end of the deal but anyone who spoke with him could only want him to live in peace and love with no way to know how to truly help him get there. He was one of my favorite people I’ve ever known and one of my most cherished influences. He once finished the last chord of a song during a concert, threw his guitar down, jumped off the stage at St. Andrews Hall in Detroit, and ran straight up to me in a theater of ten people at the back of the room and immediately started talking to me. I had never met him before that. I was 18. Over time he passed on secrets I’ll never tell, and brought tears to my eyes when he told me how proud of me he was. But I was proud of him first, and always will be. He was an uncle that I would ride my bike across town to see. They don’t make them like Dex anymore, not till we get our act together as humans. I know your pain is over now Dex and you are living in true romantic bliss. You deserve it more than any of us.
Sorry for your loss Josh.
On a more mainstream musical note, Country superstar, Toby Keith, died at 62. Keith was a prolific artist who put out 19 albums (including two Christmas albums) and had over 60 singles on the Billboard Country charts, including 20 number-one hits. He didn’t even get signed to a record deal until he was in his 30’s. He worked as an oil rigger, rodeo cowboy, and a semi-pro football player before making his way to Nashville where he played on the street. A fan of his got a tape to a record company executive who signed him to a contract and it was off to the races. Aside from a fortune in music, he headed an empire that ran restaurants, and he had a clothing company. Forbes pegged his wealth at over $500 million. His politics were all over the place (he was a fan of both George Bush and Barack Obama) and he claimed to be a conservative democrat. He was a fan of America and played all over the world for American troops. He feuded publicly with Natalie Maines, the outspoken singer in the Dixie Chicks (now just the Chicks) but at one point apologized for taking her on. He never lost his blue-collar bona fides and appealed to a broad swath of fans of both Country music and rock and roll. How do we like him now?
From punk to Country to bizarre, Mojo Nixon (Neill Kirby McMillan, Jr.) died at 66. Mr. Nixon explained to the New York Times that he was the voice of “the doomed, the damned, the weird.” Having chosen his stage name using a phrase Mojo and Nixon. For my money, mojo was best described by Judge Brient in Stratchborneo v. Arc Music Corp., 357 F.Supp. 1393, 1396 (S.D.N.Y. 1973) where he wrote:
What is Mojo?
An understanding of this litigation requires first that we define "Mojo". Mojo is a collective noun used to describe one or more talismanic objects believed to have power intrinsic to their nature, and believed able to impart power, or ward off evil or misfortune by being worn close to the body of, or possessed by, the person to whom the Mojo appertains. A simple example of Mojo would be a rabbit's foot. Other examples of Mojo, mentioned from time to time in the trial record, include such amulets as black cat bones, shrunken heads, lodestones, half dollar with seeds, four leaf clover, ashes, blacksnake skin, strands of hair and teeth. Mojo is often worn around the neck in a leather bag or carried on the person. Mojo may, in a pastoral society, be taken into the fields with the cattle.
Reliance on and belief in Mojo naturally leads to the conversational gambit, "Have you got your Mojo working?", or "I've got my Mojo working." A person approaching a crisis, such as an examination at school, would be sure to have his Mojo with him, and working.
According to the New York Times, Mr. Nixon defined it more as “unchecked sexual energy” and that is why he chose the name. Nixon he took From Richard M.; thinking there were no two words farther apart from one another. With songs like “Elvis is Everywhere,” “Destroy all Lawyers,” “Bring Me the Head of David Geffen,” “Orenthal James (Was a Mighty Bad Man),” “Don Henley Must Die,” and “Debbie Gibson is Pregnant with My Two-Headed Love Child,” he was on the fringe of rock n’ roll, most often heard on college, rather than mainstream radio. Once, at a club in Austin, Mr. Nixon was informed that Mr. Henley was in the audience. Not knowing what to do, he asked if Henley was really there and if he wanted to get into a fistfight. Instead, Mr. Henley, who according to the audience seemed to know all the words to the tune, got on stage, sang the song with Mr. Nixon, shook hands with the band and left. That prompted Mr. Nixon to say that Mr. Henley must “have balls as big as church bells.” He also asked rhetorically whether Debbie Gibson was in the house. She apparently was not. Mr. Nixon collaborated with Jello Biafra on an album released in 1994 entitled “Prairie Home Invasion.” He shifted away from live performances and had a radio show on the Sirius channel Outlaw Country entitled “The Loon in the Afternoon.” It was on an Outlaw Country cruise that he died of a “cardiac event.” According to the Facebook page for the movie “The Mojo Manifesto: The Life and Times of Mojo Nixon,” “after a blazing show, a raging night, closing the bar, taking no prisoners . . . Mojo has left the building.” Could there be a better way to go? If so, I can’t think of one.
The world is a less funny place as Richard Lewis died at 76. Lewis, who drew most of his comedy from his own neuroses, came of age with some of the great comedians of my life. Folks like Robert Klien, Richard Belzer, Richard Pryor, Elayne Boosler, Andy Kaufman and a few I have forgotten. He always wore black and often paced the stage with his notes laid out on the floor. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Englewood, New Jersey, he honed his standup but also appeared in movies such as “Anything but Love” with Jamie Lee Curtis; “Daddy Dearest” with Don Rickles; and the Mel Brooks movie “Robin Hood: Men in Tights.” He also did a lot of late night television having appeared on Letterman alone 48 times. Most recently he was in 41 episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” with the equally, if not more neurotic, Larry David. When he was first breaking into comedy, he was working in advertising and doing stand-up in New York at night. He found himself one day lamenting his lack of success, lack of sleep and overall frustration with his life to his friend and fellow comedian David Brenner. Lewis recounted to the Philadelphia Inquirer that Brenner asked him how much he needed to go into comedy full time. Lewis answered one thousand dollars. Brenner wrote him a check for a thousand and according to Lewis “I quit my job and I’ve never looked back.” That is a friend.
Lefty Driesell, the man who put Maryland Basketball on the map, died at 92. He was the first coach to win more than 100 games at four separate college programs – Davidson, Maryland, James Madison and Georgia State. He was known as the greatest program builder in college basketball. When he retired in 2003, he was the fourth winningest coach in Division I college basketball. He played college ball at Duke but could not get a pro contract. He went to work with the Ford Motor Company and played semi-pro ball. Ultimately, he got the offer to coach both football and basketball at his high school and convinced his wife he could make up the pay difference by selling the World Book Encyclopedia. No telling how many he sold but his teams did well and he eventually worked his way up to the college ranks. He is credited with coming up with Midnight Madness to demark the initial college basketball practice for the season. In the last of his 17 seasons with the Terps, he coached Len Bias, who was a local Maryland prodigy with all the promise a basketball player could have. Bias left Maryland after his fourth year as the consensus first-team All American. Two days after being the second overall pick by the Boston Celtics, he died of a cocaine overdose leaving his legacy unfulfilled and the hearts of basketball fans broken. I know people (yes you Dave) who still mourn Len Bias’ death. It cost Driesell his job at Maryland as he faced criticism that he may not have properly monitored his players. He went on to have coaching success at both James Madison and Georgia State. In 2003, Georgia State dedicated their basketball Court to him. In 2018 he was inducted into the basketball Hall of Fame. On perhaps his greatest day, July 12, 1973, he was surf fishing at Bethany Beach with a friend when they noticed flames coming out of a nearby resort. Driesell and his friend ran to the resort and he kicked a door in leading several kids to safety. The Fire destroyed several of the resort units. A Circuit Court judge said that Driesell was a hero because no one was harmed and the fire department didn’t arrive until 30 minutes after the fire started. Driesell said, "[d]on't build me up as any kind of hero. All we did was try to get the kids out.” Sounds like a hero to me.
Don Gullett, an ace pitcher for the Big Red Machine died at 73. Gullett was a gifted athlete who once scored 72 points in his high school football game and struck out 20 of 21 batters in pitching a perfect game. He was drafted out of high school and was in the bigs when he was 19. Gullett had a great fastball which was borne of throwing hay bales on the farm he grew up on. Willie Stargell once said that Gullett could throw a ball through a carwash without getting it wet. Gullett started game one of the World Series in 1975 and 76 for the Reds. In 76, the Reds beat the Yankees in four straight to become the World Champs. The Yankees owner, George Steinbrenner, not one to take losing easily, let alone in four games, paid Gullett’s price and signed him so that when game one of the 77 Series came about, Gullett started it for the Yankees. It started the Yanks off to winning their first World Championship since 1962. Johnny Bench said of Gullett: “he was a total athlete. He could hit and run like the wind and the nicest, nicest person.” A rotator cuff problem ended his career in 1980 and he went back to farming. He said it took him a few years to acclimate to his injury-shortened career. That said, it was a great one by any standard.
I love to eat. Anything. Good food, bad food, mediocre food. But I prefer good food. David Bouley, early of Montrachet and then of the Bouley restaurants, has left the kitchen at 70. He grew up on a farm in Connecticut and understood the necessity of good, fresh, ingredients to weave the many flavors into his dishes. He studied French, nouvelle cuisine and worked first at Montrachet before opening his own Tribeca restaurant simple called Bouley. There were several iterations of Bouley. There was Bouley Bakery and Market; Bouley Studio; and Bouley Upstairs. There was the Austrian themed Danube and the Japanese Brushstroke. His last iteration was Bouley At Home which had a test kitchen, a cooking school, a bakery, and an event space. It closed at the beginning of the pandemic. Nicole Bartelme described her husband as “a man who holistically experienced discovery. Relentless curiosity and questioning was his driving force—to be informed, to share and celebrate.” Not a bad life.
Talking about food… if you are a baker, you are lamenting the loss of Bob Moore, the founder of Bob’s Red Mill, who ate his last sourdough at 94. Fresh out of the army, he purchased a gas station because he thought it a good business venture. He sold that station and bought another which failed. He then moved to Sacramento and worked in the hardware department of Sears and eventually at a J.C. Penney auto shop. He read a book about a guy who restored an old mill who wrote that people were knocking down his door to get the product. Smitten, he started buying milling equipment and ran a successful family business selling milled wheat, grains and other products. He retired at 50 and enrolled in a Seminary in Oregon because he wanted to learn to read the bible in its original languages. While studying there, he saw an old mill that was set to be torn down and purchased it. That started Bob’s Red Mill. Ten years after opening it, an arsonist burned the place down. Moore re-opened in a year and built the company into a $100 million business. The product line runs the gamut from stone ground products, grains, wheat, bread and cake mixes, energy bars and even soup mixes. Large companies tried to buy him out but he eventually turned the company over to his employees through an employee stock ownership plan. Thus, by April 2020, the company was fully owned by its more than 700 employees because, Mr. Moore, who probably could not read the Bible int’s original languages, did understand its import and explained that he gave the company to his workers because it says, even in the English, St. James version, that you should “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” He walked the walk.
Helicopters to me defy logic. They shouldn’t be able to get aloft but they do. I have been lucky (I use that term loosely) enough to fly in a few and hated it, realizing, each time my feet finally touched the ground that I had cheated death. Anyway, my point is that helicopter pilots are a rare breed and those who flew rescue missions in Vietnam were a special kind of rare breed. Larry Taylor, who died this month at 88, stands out of that rare, special breed, as one of the rarest. He flew more than 2,000 combat missions in Vietnam, was engaged by enemy fire on 340 occasions and was forced down five times. That, in itself, warrants acclaim, but that was just his job. What wasn’t his job occurred on June 18, 1968. Mr. Taylor was supporting a four man, long-range reconnaissance mission when his charges were surrounded by over 100 enemy troops. A rescue mission by two other helicopters was abandoned as hopeless. Low on fuel and ammunition, he disregarded an order to return to base and along with his co-pilot James Ratliff, they executed a chopper maneuver that has never before been used in combat by that type of machine. They navigated the copter to a relatively secluded spot 100 yards from the four helplessly outgunned Rangers. Seeing the chopper, the Rangers made for it, jumped on the landing skids and held-on tight until the craft was able to land in a safe spot. According to his New York Times obit, the four rangers released their grip on the skids, saluted their rescuers and headed off into the jungle to safely return to their base. For his efforts, Taylor was awarded the Silver Star for Gallantry. One of the Rangers whose life he had saved, lobbied for years for him to receive the Medal of Honor, the highest award for bravery one can receive. On September 5, 2023, President Biden, in a ceremony at the White House, presented Mr. Taylor with that Medal of Honor. At the ceremony, he was asked what drove him to perform the rescue. In typically understated fashion, he stated: “It needed doing.” Thank God for the doers.
I won’t get political here but while I am on the topic of heroes, Aleksei Navalny, died, er, was murdered at 47. A staunch opposer of Putin, he did what many opponents of Putin did – perished. He did so with incredible courage and good humor in the face of what must have been incredible suffering. His would have been the interview to conduct. Hopefully his life will not be lost in vain.
Finally, it is tough to be a bird in New York. Not enough trees and even less open skies. Each year, some 230,000 birds are killed when they hit the windows of buildings according to the New York Times. Chalk up another one because we lost Flaco the owl to a building strike. Flaco was a famed owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo last February when someone messed with the netting that kept Flaco captive. His keepers were sure he would die in a matter of days because he would not know how to hunt for his food. Flaco proved them wrong flourishing in the wilds of New York City, feasting on the overabundant rat population. He was followed by many so New Yorkers were kept abreast of Flaco’s every move; that was until the end. As sorry fate for such a popular raptor. That said, I am certain that he would not have traded his year in the wild for an eternity locked up in the zoo. Even if it did mean splattering himself on some window. Ahh to be free.
Damn this was long. Blame it on the dead. Regardless of your politics, you have to admit that George W. Bush did one of the greatest things a President could do for us in moving Daylight Savings Time three weeks earlier than it was. Enjoy the extra vitamin D.
Lefty Driesell is the epitome of "peacock to feather duster." When Len Bias was crushing the ACC, Coach Driesell was the toast of basketball. After Bias died, there was an investigation of the Maryland program, which showed the sort of ugliness that would have been found in virtually any 1980s Top 25 NCAA Men's Basketball program. He was forced out at Maryland, and never returned to the same heights.
To his everlasting credit, I never heard Coach Driesell complaint that he was a victim of the Len Bias' death. I think he recognized that the death of Len Bias was a tragedy, first and foremost, for Len Bias and his family and that it would ugly for him to contend that he was a victim as well. I am confident that I never heard him refer back to his heroic actions saving those children, because I first learned of that story reading your column.
Thank you for yet another great column.
According to Andy Reid (of the KC Chiefs and formerly of the Philadelphia Eagles), Taylor Swift knows alot about poptarts. He claims that she baked lots of them for the Chiefs players when she started showing up at the games after dating Travis Kelce. So now we have Lucky Charms and Lucky Tarts.