David's blog: Remembering

Sunday, July 22nd, 2007

An old punch bowl and 1969 television

Yesterday evening was the annual Dayton Gay Men's Chorus progressive dinner, of which I hosted the first course, hors d'oeuvres, which gave me an occasion to use my grandmother's 18-piece Williamsport Crystal Punch Service of polished Prescut crystal by HazelWare®,

My friend Bob
pouring punch
into my
grandmother's bowl

which came to me in its original box. As near as I can tell, the punch bowl and its accessories are worth $10 or $20 on eBay, but this one is of course more valuable than that to me because it was my grandmother's.

Unless you're a collector of HazelWare or Prescut crystal, the punch bowl may not be of much interest to you, but you might be interested what was used to cushion it inside its box, namely a couple sections of the Dayton Journal Herald newspaper of Tuesday, April 1, 1969. That date is less than a week after the birth of my sister, so I wonder what use my grandmother put the punch bowl to that week after which she'd have carefully packed it back up. She used a couple different sections of the paper as cushioning, but rather than share the whole trove with you at once, I'll follow my grandfather's tradition and save it for multiple blog entries (no, he didn't have a blog, but he could cut up a single Bun Bar and make it last for a week or longer).

What I saw when I lifted the punch bowl out of its box was the top half of page 35, the TV listings for April 1, 1969. This pre-dates my own TV viewing memories but only barely. These were the days when every city had only a handful of stations and when every house had an aerial on its roof. Our house (and probably many others) had an antenna that could be rotated by means of a control kept atop the TV console because different stations (particularly the distant Cincinnati ones) came in better with the antenna in different positions. The Dayton newspapers listed both Dayton and Cincinnati stations, although during prime time the choices on Dayton and Cincinnati affiliates of the same networks were duplicates.

So what were your prime time viewing choices in Dayton, Ohio, on April 1, 1969?

	2 WLW-D	5 WLW-T	7 WHIO-TV	9 WCPO-TV	12 WKRC-TV	22 WKEF
7:30	Mod Squad	Jerry Lewis	Lancer		Klas. Family Easter Special	Jerry Lewis
8:30	Julia		Red Skelton		It Takes a Thief
9:00	First Tuesday Couldn't find this show on imdb.com but the JH had it marked as one of the "Day's Best," featuring an interview by Sander Vanocur with Clay Shaw		Red Skelton		It Takes a Thief
9:30			Doris Day		N.Y.P.D.
10:00			Ironside	60 Minutes	That's Life
11:00	News w/ Sports	News	News w/ Sports	News	News	Trails West
11:30	Tonight		Perry Mason	Movie	Joey Bishop

Basically you had three choices although sometimes Dayton and Cincinnati affiliates pre-empted or varied from network offerings, though you did get an extra half hour of prime time. No PBS (though it would be founded later that year) and of course no Fox or WB or UPN.

In addition, the newspaper also lists channel 16 WKTR-TV as having "movies" (but doesn't name them!), channel 26 WSWO as having Canadian hockey and channel 19 WXIX as carrying the Joan Rivers Show (I loved Joan Rivers when her Late Show helped launch the Fox network but had no idea she had an earlier show). All three of these channels were independent stations launched in 1968 and 1969. WKTR and WSWO I don't remember, and Wikipedia reports they were both off the air by 1970 (perhaps because all they showed were these untitled "movies"), but WXIX is what my sister and I tuned in after school to watch snowy repeats of shows like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeanie.

The idea of television being in color was still a novelty since the Jerry Lewis Show is noted in one of the previews as being "in color." It seems the Journal Herald didn't employ its own television writer, relying instead on the syndicated services of Richard K. Shull, an Indianapolis-based writer who died just this year. One obituary notes that Shull was noted for his acerbic wit, a wit that's apparent in his preview of the April 1, 1969 episode of the Doris Day Show; he says, "this episode isn't all that bad. Miss Day has some good, light comedy moments." Not quite what you'd call high praise, but I checked out the first season of Doris Day's show once from the library and I think Shull's analysis is accurate.

Saturday, April 14th, 2007

Seven years ago I was still working as IT director for an educational publishing company and had worked there for 17 years. Much of my time there was good and enjoyable, but by the last few years, when I'd risen to the point where I reported to the president and was part of the executive team, it was often rather mind-numbing.

Today I happened to run across some old backup CDs and discovered the following notes from a meeting held in July 2000, the year before I left. I don't particularly remember this specific meeting, but I do remember many meetings held over the years with highly paid consultants hired to re-engineer the company using whatever corporate buzzwords or acronyms were in vogue at the time (TQM is the one I remember most, following by "thinking outside the box").

Read and enjoy, or skip past the bullshit.

Meeting 07/05/2000

Start of process over next 2 to 3 months

Bill's thoughts on organizing values

value creation for customers, employees, shareholders
reward employees for contribution
become more flexible and adaptive, using continuous learning and improvement
increase work collaboration amongst divisions
grow value of company at 15% per year
integrity and ethical management

New strategic operational structure

strategic team to set corporate goals and make strategic decisions apart from operational concerns

Miles Kierson, consultant with JMW Consultants (Stamford CT), will act as moderator

Bill looked for outside experts on organizational development
How to create new leadership and management style

Miles gave overview of his company, which does two major things:

Organizational transformation: companies with a goal for the future that requires a different structure to get there
Break-through projects: e.g., work in Canada with oil company alliance extracting oil out of oil sands and need to do a $2 million project for $1.8 million

100 people, in business for 18 years, offices in Connecticut and in London. He's been consulting for 20 years. Worked for CSC Index. Alan H used to work there also. Miles has been at JMW for 2 years now.

Concept: background and foreground conversations

foreground are what you say normally, out loud ("Oh, yeah, that sounds great")
background are what we don't normally say out loud but think in the background ("Is he out of his mind?")

It's important for this process to get more of what we think out on the table.

Miles' activities:

Meetings with Bill F, at least once a week
Two 2-day offsite meetings of strategic team (probably next month and the month after)
Two 2-hour on-site strategic team meetings
Two 4-hour operational group meetings
Individual discussions with all managers
Collaborative design of the process
Coordinating organizational communication

Deliverable of this process:

A vision of the future that we'll have created together and to which we'll be committed and alignedA clear set of strategies on how to meet the goals we've set (a specific plan for the next year, something less specific for beyond that, and a process for continually reviewing the plans)
We'll all know our roles in the plan and will be organized as teams that can work together effectively.
We'll have gained skills and insights about ourselves and begun a process to develop ourselves as leaders of this company.

"There's always room for more 'straight' talk." If we don't have "straight" talk, it will impede our progress and minimize our success. Improving straight talk involves our willingness to increase the background thoughts that we're willing to say out loud.

Doesn't that last bit just kill you? Imagine a roomful of white executives all wanting to keep their jobs, thinking about what they could say that would pass for "straight talk," unable to say what they really thought, which would be along the lines of "what bullshit!" Or perhaps some of them really bought into this stuff, but I know I didn't. Looking at my calendar for the day of this meeting, I see I spent 5 hours of an 8-hour day in meetings. Mind numbing.

A year after this meeting, I'd be gone from the company, involuntarily, but I'd also be going to Europe for the first time and back in school. I should have quit long before and done something different, but I was still scared of change, despite having gone through some. I'm not quite so scared any more.

Friday, April 13th, 2007

Seven years ago
I had a letter
in Savage Love

Exactly seven years ago today Dan Savage told me I was an idiot. I'd sent Dan an e-mail on February 17, 2000, asking a question about my closeted live-in boyfriend, and Dan saved it for a special "Closet Cases" column. Well, my relationship ended in flames, and I was an idiot, but I never thought to write Dan to tell him he was right. I figure he wouldn't have been surprised.

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

I saw an old friend, Scott, at a party last Saturday and was reminded of a trip we took several years ago with a group down to Keeneland, to see the races. I'd posted photos from that trip the next day on my old website, but they never made it to this site, until now.

Saturday, September 2nd, 2006

I start to remember in shards, pieces of glass that rip my skin and leave marks. I find tight little cuts all over: one on my left breast, grazing the nipple, and one that starts just below my left eyebrow and turns across my nose to the light brown line of my upper lip. Another is on my back, burning from the base of my spine over the soft roundness of the right cheek of my behind. Yet another one, trying to scab, unable to heal, is buried on my scalp. These are the memories like a broken bottle, memories I can't speak because the glass gets caught in my throat, ripping it, too. I circle these glinty flashes from above for days, weeks, before I can find a way to sit down with them alone in my room, in front of the computer. From my lofty perch they appear minor, mere scratches; it is only when I look closely that I seem them for what they are: self-mutilations and battle scars.

My last blog entry was in part about some bad writing I'd come across, so perhaps it's appropriate that this one be about some writing I am really liking. I'm reading Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, by Rebecca Walker. I'd never heard of Rebecca Walker until I took an English class where I read stuff by her mother and learned about feminist criticism and third wave feminism (which is where Rebecca Walker's name came up) and gender studies and other stuff. Doing research on Alice Walker for a project, I found that she'd been married to a white Jewish civil rights lawyer in the 1960s and that their daughter, Rebecca, had written an autobiography. I didn't have time to read it then, but I do now.

I've only just begun to read it, and though I'm not black, white and Jewish, nor a woman, nor have I lived in the South or New York City, I, like Walker, was born in the 60s and grew up in the 70s, and I remember Big Wheels and Baby Alive and Bubblicious and reading Forever by Judy Blume. And I remember having the right answers to teachers' questions in class and learning slowly that that didn't endear me to the other kids, and I remember having to deal with kids who wanted to beat me up, and I remember having crushes on boys who weren't interested in people like me. And I remember my parents divorcing and my mother needing comforting and being among my father's relatives who didn't know my mother or understand her. And I remember spending lots of time quietly observing people around me, trying to figure out the right way that I was supposed to act and respond.

My childhood wasn't horrible, and not all my memories are shards of glass, but I definitely get what Walker is saying, for I do have bits of broken bottle from the past inside me. She's done a lot of work extracting some of hers. I've done some, but a strategy I've used, for good or for bad, is that of leaving some of the glass alone. Certain pieces have worked their way down inside me, and I can walk around now without even being aware that they're there. Once in a while, though, at unexpected times, say when I shift in a chair while reading a book, a piece of glass inside me moves, and I remember.

Sunday, January 25th, 2004

For my ENG341 class, we have to write memoirs about teachers who taught us something about teaching. (That we have to write memoirs and that the subject of our memoirs is so tightly guided is an issue for another time.) We could write about someone from our college days, but I'm choosing to follow the advice of my ENG101 TA (for whom I also had to write a memoir), which is that one shouldn't write memoirs about events in the past few years because the significance of such events hasn't yet gelled. Besides which I also don't want to write about people my ENG341 instructor or my peer reviewers might know.

That leaves high school teachers since I really don't remember much about my elementary and junior high teachers. High school was not a fun time for me, despite everyone at the time saying that these would be the best years of my life. Thank God everyone at the time was wrong.

I did have some good experiences in high school, though, one being AP History, taught by Mr. Seewer (who got his doctorate after I graduated and who I understand has retired in the last couple years). I dug out my old Fairborn High School yearbooks from 1983 and 1984 and scanned a few pics. I'd remembered that we had to write an essay every Friday and that each week a lucky student got to use Mr. Seewer's Commodore to type up his or her essay, but I didn't remember this picture of Bob Stemen typing on (or as the yearbook caption reads, "programming his report into") the computer.

More fun high school reminiscing later.

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2003

Today is old photo day. The photograph on the left is of my maternal grandfather and his twin brother, who were born in 1905. For as long as I could remember it hung in my grandparents' bedroom. My mother lent it to Wright State so they could scan it for their historical archives. They left it in the frame, glass and all, because apparently trying to unframe old photographs is a dangerous proposition.

A family whose old photo I found in a library book

The other photo was a surprise. I'd checked out The Flying Nun (aka The Fifteenth Pelican) from the downtown library. (Why? On a whim since I'd seen in the credits of a Flying Nun episode on TV Land that the series was based on a book.) I had to request it from storage (which is easy to do over the web site -- they'll even have it waiting for you at the front desk to pick up). It was an original copy from 1965. Out of curiosity I pulled out the card from the back pocket and found this old photo. There's nothing written on it to indicate who the people are. I put it back so if by some coincidence you recognize them and want the photo, you can check out the book to get it.

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