Throwing cups at umps

Dream – 10/30/2008

I am at a baseball game … a Cincinnati Reds game and am in the upper deck looking down at the field. The umpires are being driven around the warning track behind home plate on golf carts.

People think it is funny to throw cups down onto the umpires. A big guy to my left tosses a cup that has very little beer left in it down on the umpires. I’m not sure it even hits anyone. I think he is a doo-doo head.

A pre-teen boy to my right sees this and tosses two cups … one of them containing a great amount of liquid. He laughs as he throws them.

I grab hold of his arm and tell him that was wrong. He gets upset and asks how come I picked on him. I take him to the usher to have him perhaps booted out of the ballpark.

I start to think. Why did I do something with him and not the other guy? Cause the kid was smaller? I wonder.

No, it was because what he did was way worse than the other guy. The other guy tossed down a paper cup that wasn’t going to get anyone wet and wasn’t going to hurt anyone. The kid threw down a practically full cup of soda or whatever it was.

He should not compare himself to the other guy anyway. He needs to compare his behavior to that behavior he ought to display. Anyway, that was my thinking.

Wandering Warren Avenue

We moved from the big city of Milwaukee into the fine suburb of Wauwatosa when I was in kindergarten. Dad signed for the house on April Fools Day in 1969, and as I recall him telling us, the house was purchased for $25,000, a pittance compared to what real estate prices did at the end of the 21st century.

We must have moved in a short time later as I know I only spent a few weeks of my kindergarten year in my new school.

There were a few differences between my old school and my new school.

At Neeskara, on the west side of the city, our class shared restrooms with a class of deaf kids next door. I remember knocking on the boys’ room door once, and hearing nothing, walked in. One of the deaf kids from next door looked up from the toilet a little surprised and a little embarrassed. I have a feeling I was almost as embarrassed as he was. I quickly shut the door, and returned later.

At Lincoln School in Wauwatosa, I shared a locker with Jim Hollenstein, who ended up going to school with me all the way through high school. They didn’t usually share lockers, but there were no others available, it was almost the end of the school year, and we really didn’t take much to school in kindergarten.

At Neeskara, I was considered something of a class clown. I was the idiot who got in trouble by peeking out the door to see if the teacher was coming back when we were supposed to be resting on our mats. My friend, Danny, who lived across 45th Street from us, always wanted to fight. Not because he didn’t like me or anything. That’s just apparently what his favorite pastime was … fighting. We didn’t see anything wrong with it. We were just playing.

My fighting days ended when I got in trouble for smacking a younger kid at Danny’s birthday party once. I forgot what this kid did, but it must have been pretty awful. Maybe he tried to grab a piece of cake I had or a balloon or something like that.

At Lincoln, I got labeled a brain as I proved that I could indeed count all the way to 200 while we were standing in line waiting for school to start one day.

I got rides to and from Neeskara. We lived a good 12 blocks or so from the school and we were fresh off some riots less than two years before determined to be racial in nature down the street a ways that were part the bloodiest night in Milwaukee history. I remember once my dad coming to pick me up from school, and he was late enough that I was still standing outside the school on Hawley Road when my teacher left the building. She wondered if someone had forgotten about me. But Dad pulled up in his new forest green VW hatchback as she was standing there … or briefly after she went on her way. I can’t quite remember.

But at Lincoln, I walked. It was about five measly blocks or so through a middle class neighborhood. No busy streets, just lots of sidewalks, trees and fine, upstanding families for the most part who cut their grass, threw out their trash and made sure their houses didn’t fall into disrepair.

I had two younger brothers at home by then and Mom needed to stay home with them while Dad took the radical hatchback to work. We only had one car and Mom was a housewife during the week, and nurse on weekends.

The first day of school, though, Mom dropped me off. She explained very carefully how I was to get home. I was to walk one street north from school, turn left and go until I saw the house … about four blocks. OK, I can handle this, I figure. One street, turn left and go home. Easy enough.

So, when school ended that day, I went north to the first street, turned left and walked. After a few blocks, I started to notice that this didn’t seem to look like what I remembered Mom driving past on the way to school in the morning. I looked around and looked for the next street. But I couldn’t see one. This block was the longest block I’d ever been on. There were no cross streets to look at street signs and determine if I was on Hillcrest Drive as I should have been.

This 5-year-old started to get a little nervous, when I turned around and I saw this little girl walking behind me. I recognized her from my class. In my mind to this day, I can still see her in a white, flowered dress and short blonde hair. Although I have no clue what her name was, and I think she moved from that house soon because I don’t ever remember seeing her again. I waited for her to get up to me and asked her politely if she knew where Hillcrest Drive was. (See! Guys do ask for directions.)

She said she didn’t know, but that her mother ought to know. So we walked to her house, which just happened to be the next house. It was a red, brick home set back from the street a little bit. The girl’s mother asked me if I knew my phone number.

And I did, of course, being the brain that I was. So, she called my mom to find out where I lived. Once she got off the phone, she explained that I had turned one street too soon and landed on Warren Avenue, which didn’t have many cross streets coming through that area.

Fortunately, I was only about one more block from the next cross street, 81st Street. So, I made my way down to that street, took a right and only had one more block to go before I could see my house on Hillcrest Drive.

I had to explain to my poor, sweet mother the difference between one “street” north of school and one “block” north of school. There’s a big difference, Mom.

I think of that little blonde-haired girl once in a while and wonder who she was. I’d like to thank her. If it weren’t for her, I might still be wandering Warren Avenue in search of my home.

Of the Marine Bank and not much else (1983 Part 4)

I started working for the Marine Bank in Milwaukee when I started attending the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. It was early in 1983. I had just transferred schools, just moved back in with my parents, thanked my dad for co-signing a loan to pay for tuition, and needed a job. My aunt and my cousin worked at the bank, and I got a job in the mail room.

I processed mail, delivered interoffice mail to bank branches and picked up stuff. I’m never sure exactly what I was picking up. Mostly receipts and canceled checks I guess. They were in metal boxes with locks on them.

I enjoyed driving to the different branches in suburban Milwaukee. It was nice to be on the road, stopping at fast food restaurants and such as they generally gave you plenty of time to get from one destination to the next.

Most of the time I spent at a building about half a mile from the main office building, which was housed in a rather tall building for Milwaukee. Then, I got switched to corporate headquarters and had to use the freight elevator to get huge dollies full of boxes and stuff from the service entrance to the mailroom, where it could all be sorted, then delivered to the various departments.

Well, the place demanded dress shoes as I was near corporate people. But mine were somewhat worn and trying to get a head start on a linoleum floor to push that heavy load up the ramp to the mailroom proved a bit of a pain sometimes. I had to have one of the maintenance guys help me once. He was some body building pro wrestler type who looked kind of mean. I didn’t like thinking I was going to be squashed by a load of boxes rolling back on top of me. But then I didn’t like having to ask him for help either. I finally did because it had to be done. I wore tennis shoes from then on and had no problems whatsoever.

Then, for a time, I drove the big blue van back and forth between the two downtown buildings. We transported people as well as used hand trucks to pick up shiny metal boxes from place to place on a schedule that was rather tight. Not too much time for tomfoolery.

We had a mailroom Christmas party once where some of the guys who worked there had an air band. I won a bottle of wine andtwo wine glasses in a raffle just after telling my friend that I never win anything.

Mostly, though, I remember some of the people I worked with.

There was a deaf guy in the mailroom who ended up committing suicide. There was “Shaky Jake,” an older messenger with a shaky hand. There was the short dude who was my boss who spent his evening hours introducing a band called “Rocket 88,” which played rock and roll oldies. There was a guy who got fired a few months after he started cause he was stopped speeding at some unreal speed. There was the guy who said that wearing “protection” was like taking a shower in a rain coat. Then there was the guy I hung out with a couple times who lived in a somewhat suspicious area of town with his wife and his guitar. The guy who was a drummer in some local bands andgrew up with my cousin. I had actually met the guy several years before at my aunt and uncle’s summer home in Hancock, Wis., and was scared of him cause he had really long hair. By this time he was balding. And others, of course.

After a while, I picked up work at the Milwaukee Sentinel as a scoretaker in the sports department, and eventually to a part-time reporter. By the time I left the bank and all its wonderment behind, it had been bought by Bank One.

Of Crazy TV Lenny, Trees Falling in the Forest and more (1983 Part 3)

A continuing look down memory lane by checking out old desk calendars I found not all that long ago:

My second semester of my sophomore year in college included a change in majors … from the 14,892 I thought about at Madison to Mass Communications (Radio/TV) at Milwaukee. Even though I was a sophomore, I had to take the freshmen Mass Comm classes since I hadn’t taken any yet.

I wish I could say I recall a lot from those early Mass Comm classes. But I don’t think my professors are around anymore, so I wouldn’t be hurting their feelings to say I don’t recall much.

Some of what I do recall are the hands-on types of things we did. Playing DJ and recording our own radio commercials in the Mass Comm radio studio was pretty cool. I did mine as a play off some commercials we used to hear back in the day. There was a guy called Crazy TV Lenny out of Madison, who used to do these real loud, fast commercials spouting the bargains you could get as his stores. So my parody was Crazy TV Lenin. I did this whole Soviet thing (it was still the Soviet Union back then). I slowed the reel-to-reel tape down when I talked into the microphone. So, when you played it at normal speed later, it sounded almost like you were one of David Seville’s chipmunks. I also know I played the Split Enz’s “I See Red” at the end, a Communist reference.

I also wrote a series of radio and/or TV spots for Miller Genuine Draft using Doors songs behind the voice over. And I wrote a script for a radio play on the history of the Doors, even so much as timing every portion of every song to the second. It was a lot easier to do the work when it was something I was interested in.

Then, there was TV Production. Everyone in class had to produce a TV news broadcast, using people in class to do the various parts of the show, from the anchor to the weatherman to each camera position, and the guy who typed the graphics onto the TV screen. Wow, what a lot there is to direct. We had one guy who was hilarious as a weatherman, and everyone wanted him to do it. He’d put on a scarf and pretend he was being blown about, and other tomfoolery. A black guy, he used to tell us he went to tanning salons now and then just to freak the white people out.

In one class, I had to write a letter to the editor. I wrote to one of the local sportswriters and told him I thought he did a great job. I later found out that this guy was the professor’s son’s best friend. I had no idea! No, really!

Other than that, it was a lot of theory, a lot of the FCC and stuff like that.

One of my favorite classes that semester, though, was a basic philosophy class. It was quite interesting, although I thought I failed the final exam right up until the time I got my report card in the mail. I think I may have had a B or B+ average heading into the final. In the final, we were asked to discuss certain philosophies, who purported to philosophize in such a fashion, and when they lived and crud like that. I had no idea. I could discuss the ideas, though. So, I talked about each viewpoint, said what arguments could be made for and against each viewpoint, and left it at that. No names, no dates, no nothing. I do recall that one of the questions was that old tree in the forest one … you know, if nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? My answer was “it doesn’t matter.” Of course, I did expound upon that statement, explaining why. And I also explained the two viewpoints on the matter. But I thought because I hadn’t mentioned the names of the dudes who were the main dudes known for such things, I was cooked. But neigh, I was not. I got an A for the final grade. I almost went back to the professor to ask him what I did on the final that was so right. But then I thought that he might have seen he had made a mistake and given me a grade that I wasn’t supposed to get. So, I didn’t go back.

Holy cow! I just realized I forgot to put one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen … in fact I do have to rank this No. 1 on my all-time concert list … on the 1983 Part 2 post where I listed all sorts of concerts I went to. On St. Patrick’s Day 1983 at the Milwaukee Eagles Club, I saw Those XCleavers open for the Bus Boys. That was the best show ever. The Bus Boys were awesome. They did some tunes in “48 Hours,” the Eddie Murphy/Nick Nolte movie. And it was the firts time I’d seen the local band, Those XCleavers. Very excellent also.

Runaway Lawn Mower

Dream – 2/3/2008

I’m on a riding mower in my front yard. It’s getting dark and it is hard to see. I can’t believe it is dark for that time of day; too early to be this dark, I think. I need to turn on the yard lights. I put the mower in park, get off the mower.

I go to turn the lights on that will illuminate the yard. I am at the house on Hillcrest Street. As soon as I turn the lights on, the mower starts to slowly roll away form me down the street. I run down the driveway and into the street to try to stop it.

It was in park. It should not have moved.

It starts going in circles and across the street into the neighbor’s driveway. It almost crashes into their garage. I finally catch it and ride it back home. I start cutting the grass in the backyard. There is plenty of light to see.

Newspaper Reporter Meets the Mean Guy

Dream – 1/31/2008

I’m a newspaper reporter and get a call from a guy who says I need to meet him at a restaurant or else something bad will happen. He says he has information for a story maybe.

I take my daughters and my girlfriend to the restaurant. We sit at a round table with the guy. He looks like the bad guy from “The Incredibles,” Syndrome. He has evil in his eyes.

The restaurant has closed. We lie down on top of the table with a blanket over us. I need to protect the girls from him. He is up to no good.

I feel a sharp blade scraping against my calf. It is him. I wake up.

“Stop! In the name of Jesus!” I yell to him and I say to this dream as I do not want to dream this anymore.

I don’t dream of this anymore and go back to sleep, this time peacefully.

Baseball Bat Flies into Cinnamon Roll Icing

Dream – 1/30/2009

 

 Sitting in the outfield bleachers at a major league baseball game. Frank Robinson of the Cleveland Indians, wearing those garish all-red uniforms of the mid-1970s, hits the ball (left-handed) very far, over the fence for a home run. But the bat also flies out of his hands as he swings and the bat flies over the outfield fence and  bounces on the blacktop beyond the fence but in front of the concession stands and scoreboard. The bat bounds through an open door at the side of the concession stands and just about hits a guy who is putting icing on cinnamon rolls.

The top of the barrel of the bat gets stuck vertically into a whole tray of icing. I run in to get the bat. I make sure nobody is hurt and I want to return it to the game. I pick it up and hold it up. The whole tray of icing sticks to the bat, so I hold the bat over my head and the tray begins to slip off and fall to the ground.

One of the icing cups remains, as a plastic ring attached to it, where you pull to open the cup, is wrapped around the bat barrel. So the final icing cup hangs there on the bat.

I go to an usher by the fence and ask him who I need to talk to in order to return the bat. He seems agitated that I asked him. But he motions me to an old  security guy in a golf cart. He is sitting  just inside a gate in the fence with a few others. I ask him if they need the bat back and he says no, keep it. Cool.

Mystery Job Application

Dream – 1/24/2009

There is a job available for someone who can solve mysteries. I go to take a test. It is in a building that resembles a house. One of my daughters is with me.

A man who looks like Darius Rucker, the lead singer for Hootie and the Blowfish, hands me a piece of paper and a pen. The paper is colored, the pen is black. I lie down on a bed on my side. Others are working in this room. Some on beds, some on chairs. Some are working for the company, some are taking the same sort of test I am taking.

I open the paper. There are animal characters and people characters drawn on it. They are in a restaurant/bar.

On the right side, there is a blank section. There are places for characters to be drawn by me. There are also blank lines, where you are to write questions that you would need to ask to solve the mystery portrayed in the drawing. You have to fill in the clues by drawing characters and by asking questions.

One of the characters has been drawn for you near the blank lines and one of the questions has been written in for you, to show you how to do it.

The mystery has something to do with a man who had come into the restaurant/bar, had something to drink and left. He did something or something happened to him, which is what we are trying to determine.

The one question that has been filled in already is: “What else does this man like to drink?”

We need to ask other questions, and get answers to them, in order to solve the mystery. We also have to draw some more characters on the paper.

I draw some cat-like creature standing at the bar ordering a drink. I think I am not a very good artist, so this will not look very good. I figure the other people taking this test are probably better artists, so I will have to win the job by coming up with really good questions.

But after looking at what I drew, I think it’s not too bad. My daughter thinks so, too.

Some male employee walks in the door and chats with the room moderator (The Hootie guy, who happens to be black). The new man, who is white, says “Hi” to the room in general. Some people respond by saying “hi.” I think he is just saying hello to the employees in the room, so I don’t respond.

The room moderator gives me a disappointing scowl. Oh darn. maybe I just cost myself the job.

Then, we have to go outside of the building to look for clues and ask questions.

Of the Milwaukee Music Scene, the 21 Bus and More (1983 Part 2)

Moving ahead with the transition from living in a dorm at a Big Ten University in a state capital to living at home and taking a bus to classes at a commuter school in a big city…

Registration for UWM (the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee) took place Jan. 11-12. Here I was in the middle of my sophomore year of college, having just moved back into my parents’ house, left a Big Ten university (Wisconsin) and started taking a city bus from the safe and sound suburb of Wauwatosa, through the city of Milwaukee and into the fashionable and somewhat trendy East Side to the commuter school with a bad Division III men’s basketball team (sorry guys, but it was) and a nationally renown men’s soccer team.

As I registered for classes, I’m not sure I knew what else UWM had at the time except for a library named for the Israeli premier, Golda Meir, who actually grew up in Milwaukee.

The bus rides on the 21 bus (North Avenue) bus were usually uneventful, even if we did go through a few seedy neighborhoods … or at least they sure seemed seedy to me. One time, after a particularly long winter day at school, I was riding the 21 bus home. We hadn’t gone all that far from UWM when I leaned my head up against a window and closed my eyes for a little rest. It was in the evening, and there were not a lot of people on the bus at the time.

All of a sudden, I heard (and felt) this loud BOOM right near my head. It startled the poop out of me (well, not quite). But it did scare me pretty bad. I jumped and looked around, thinking someone was shooting at me, or the bus. Some guy a few seats back started to laugh. So, I figured the shooting was out of the question.

I took a look at the window next to me and noticed the remnants from a well-thrown snowball. What a relief!

I tried to make friends with people who drove to school and hitch rides with them when possible. But mainly it was Rob Adams and I taking the 21 to school every day.

That time period was big for local music scene. It was post-disco, but there were still several “disco” clubs around. They just had morphed into non-disco music joints inside these nice big halls. And the music was pretty cool. A mix of hard rock, ska, new wave, power pop and such, not to mention the Violent Femmes were pretty new at the time. Check out this review of a compilation  CD made of Milwaukee musical artists of about this time and a little before:  http://www.answers.com/topic/history-in-3-chords

Jan. 29: Colour Radio. This was a band that included guitarist Jim Eanelli, who had been with the Shivvers, a band I followed big time when I was at the University of Wisconsin. Jim and the Shivvers parted ways over “philosophical” differences and he hooked up with a couple other guys. This was heavily synth, guitar stuff. Kind of Cars-like, I’d have to say. But with a little darker undertone. Check out these posters: http://milwaukeerockposters.com/images/posters/colour-radio_6-17_racine.jpg and http://milwaukeerockposters.com/images/posters/colour-radio-4-16century.jpg

May 21: Those XCleavers were a power pop/new wave/rock sort of thing that was very popular in the area back then. You can see them doing a song during a reunion concert on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_5pvD2EPD0

June 4:  The Beat and Bow Wow Wow at Alpine Valley. This was the only concert I ever went to at Alpine Valley, an outdoor music venue southwest of Milwaukee a ways. This was fun. My old college roommate wanted to dance at his seat and they told him he couldn’t. So he went off to a vacant area of seating and danced there. I think it rained. Maybe it didn’t.

July 31: Rocky Koelpin and the Otters. I went here with a girl named Birgitte, who was from Switzerland I think. She was a friend of my friend’s girlfriend. I think she’d been an exchange student at one point and was back to visit. Anyway, she was very cute. I did my friend’s girlfriend “a favor” by taking Birgitte out and showing her the town. We almost didn’t get in to see the Otters due to ID issues. We were both 18 … actually I was 19. And 18 was the age of admittance to such bars in Milwaukee back then. But her passport said something like “09-07-64″ or something like that. Since this was the end of July, they figured she hadn’t turned 18 yet. But in many other countries, they put the day of the month first, followed by the month and the year. So, “in American,” her birthday was 07-09-64. or something like that. Anyway, I explained it to the bouncers and they actually believed me. Either that or they just let it go because they thought I came up with an ingenious way to get a 17-year-old very cute girl into a bar. Whatever the case, she really was legally OK to be in there. So no laws were broken. Rocky played a Doors cover song and some TV theme song … maybe “Leave it to Beaver” or “My Three Sons” or something like that.

Aug. 27: Madness. A bunch of us drove from Milwaukee to Chicago for this one. Many of us had never really been to Chicago for much. I’d been there to see the King Tut exhibit about six or seven years before. But this was the first time for many of us without parents. A couple guys who went to Northwestern University drove. We went to the Avalon Ballroom for the show.  Or at least I think it was a place called the Avalon. Maybe it was something else.

Nov. 1: Numb Jitters at Teddy’s. This was a band of guys who went to UWM and we hung out with once in a while at school. I remember the guitar player once was playing (it may have been this show) where his finger started bleeding. You could see a big spray of blood all over high white pick guard. They played ska and they played pretty fast. We would dance for all three sets, and be absolutely drenched in sweat when we were done. And it would be all of us … all the guys, whatever women came along, whoever else was there. The dance floor was always packed when they played.

Dec. 8: Violent Femmes at UWM. This was first time I saw the Femmes live. Went there by myself I think. It was very good. At the end, they invited the two local newspaper music writers to come on stage and play typewriters to the beat. The one guy threatened to smash his typewriter on the stage.

Football Toss at the Wedding Reception

Dream – 1/17/2009

At the wedding reception. Everyone has left except my immediate family. It’s night and we’re outside throwing footballs around the yard. We are at a southern plantation-type house and yard.

Dad throws to me. With a football in one hand, I answer a cell phone call with my other hand. It’s my youngest brother. He asks me who the guy was who had the snow blower or lawn mower. I think it was the preacher, I tell him.

I am now walking in the yard toward my brother, who is sitting in the driver’s seat of a red sports car. The door is open. Someone throws me another ball as I have both hands full. I try to catch it.