I sent my late mother on her last major trip just a couple weeks before 9/11. These were primarily motorcoach trips. But that last trip, with Riley's, was to Alaska and a portion was via air. She did a number of trips with Utopia and Riley's. She really had done the whole "circuit" by the time of the Alaska trip. She had also gotten to an age where it was going to be prudent to slow down, stay at home pretty much. An occasional jaunt to Alexandria for the three of us would be fine.
Have I slowed down too much to handle Las Vegas? I'm quite sure not, but the yearning isn't great. Nevertheless I have special memories. The first time was in a party that included Gary Lembcke, who until Kevin Loge was the No. 1 career scorer in Morris basketball. Gary was the person who planted my long-time interest in "Las Vegas, baby."
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| Your blog host in Las Vegas, Nevada, about 1990 |
I mean, the digital age had not yet dawned, and writing was generally not a popular pursuit. Up until personal computers, people thought writing to be a chore. If you actually enjoyed it, as I always did, you frankly stood out as special. We all want to be special with what we do.
My mother pushed me hard to develop my literacy when very young. I elected to take typing as a junior in high school, a very essential step. If you wrote something in those days, typing was done as a separate step. You practically had to be an athlete to pound away at a manual typewriter. I remember when the first "Macs" came out and the manual said on page 1, "A Mac is not a typewriter."
Truer words were never spoken. Let me count the ways. One difference that stood out is that you could correct and erase mistakes so cleanly and effortlessly, whereas I was a pre-digital newspaper guy who would submit an article so full of cross-outs and re-writes, it'd be an ungodly mess. A "typesetter" would then handle your work. It's so outdated as to be jaw-dropping to consider now.
How special were we?
Us journalists considered ourselves as having a special mantle. Some of this feeling was pushed along by the events of the 1960s, the need for journalists to act like "cowboys" in so many areas, to confront ossified people in power who were full of s--t. Or so we were convinced. I would stay up very late at night, come in ridiculously early and of course work on Sunday, because it wasn't just a job, it was like a mission.
In college we were encouraged to be a little schizophrenic about "advocacy journalism." My, we'd never admit we embraced it, but wink wink, why were we assigned reading about it? A close cousin was "interpretative journalism." Seriously, I remember a whole textbook with the name "Interpretative Journalism." A lot of that looks wayward now. But I cannot avoid the feeling of some nostalgia.
Today I am highly enriched by writing - I wouldn't be Brian R. Williams if I wasn't - but it's more restrained and mellow. No need to rip the mask or pretensions away from all those ossified folks any more, not that there aren't still a fair number out there. However, young men are no longer being conscripted to face the specter of death in foreign jungles, and people with black skin can eat at lunch counters everywhere. My formative years were in a quite different world, contrasting ever more with the new norms that the younger folks take for granted.
Oh, a huge development is the democratization of the media. Writers aren't in such an exclusive or restrictive niche - I mean, everyone seems to write now. The electronic tools give any capable writer the means to reach an audience with thoughts that are important, that can have impact. And of course it's progress 100 percent.
And let me add: When "electric typewriters" came along, it wasn't that much of an improvement! We made corrections with "white-out." Is it true that the mom of Michael Nesmith of the Monkees invented that? White-out came and went as an innovation, just like fax machines.
Transitory "breakthroughs"
It's embarrassing to remember how we saw faxing as rather a miracle.
At the newspaper, "negative scanning" devices for processing photos from photographic negatives seemed so innovative at first, but it came and went. Digital cameras arrived and seemed very limited at first. But then strides were constantly made. Goodbye to photographic negatives, now the stuff of museums.
I chuckle as I remember when faxing was new. We had a machine installed in the ad manager's office at the Sun Tribune. I worked late so I often ripped items off the machine, and very early in the experience I discovered a "news item" from the Pat Buchanan campaign for president. It turned out this was the high water mark of his presidential aspirations. I felt a sense of drama looking over this fax transmission, as I thought "this is history in the making." A breakthrough for the conservative commentator as politician? It was an illusion.
I went to Las Vegas about twice a year for a stay of 4-5 days. Naturally I worked very late the night before departing, trying to be a sort of indefatigable hero. Yes, writers were special. I suppose I put that burden on myself. I did advance work for the time when I'd be absent from the paper. That should not have been necessary. And then I ate very little, by design, over the time leading up to the time of plane departure from the Twin Cities.
After my trip with Lembcke, my companion for such experiences was Art Cruze, like Gary a member of the Morris High School Class of 1973. I'm sure people who observed Art and I thought we were gay - this was not the case, as we were "buddies." Nothing wrong to be gay of course, although back then, that segment of the population was not nearly as liberated.
Art was a radio professional in advertising. I was what the late Steve Cannon of WCCO Radio would call an "ink-stained wretch." Cannon had an amazing run at 'CCO. Remember his character Morgan Mundane? Or Backlash LaRue?
No famous pawn shop yet
Ronald Reagan, "Poppy" Bush and Bill Clinton were the presidents when I made my Las Vegas trips. No one had ever heard of "Pawn Stars."
I remember on one trip, Art and I were offered first class seats even though that wasn't the arrangements. So we sat up in front in the less-congested setting, and I found the stewardess - excuse me, cabin attendant - was going to offer me all the alcoholic drinks I wanted. Yes, one after another. Well, I wasn't driving.
Alcohol consumption was quite unbridled at that time. Comedians like Johnny Carson got laughs with drunk jokes.
Superlative entertainment
Art and I were in "Vegas baby" at the time of a big national dentists convention. We attended a show at the Tropicana, as I recall, where the house comedian had rather a field day with all the dentists around. He interviewed some dudes at a table, two of whom apparently really had the names "Amos and Andy" (like the old "Negro" act). He then worked their names into a little improvised song at the end of his routine, sung to the tune of Helen Reddy's "Keep on Singing."
Oh, but this comic, good as he was, was kind of a warm-up for when Art and I took in Bill Cosby at the Riviera. Yes, Bill Cosby in all his pre-prison glory. Isn't that amazing? Cosby was totally at the top of his form for the show, as he dove into dental humor most successfully. With sound effects. It was side-splitting at times.
As many trips as I took to Las Vegas, I probably should have more stories like this. I'm a little hard-pressed. Is it a case of "what happens in Vegas. . .?" You know the rest. Maybe there's a fog from excessive sipping of cocktails, like the day when I won a huge bet on a USFL football game and I sat at the bar of the old Stardust, next to an affable gentleman wearing a straw hat who said he was a mortician in Markham IL. He was getting "lubricated" too.
The USFL, to refresh, was one of those attempts at a new springtime pro football league. It had Herschel Walker. I believe my bet was on the team coached by George Allen. That SOB would want to push his team past the pointspread.
Popular Morris area cook George Haugen was called up on stage by comedian Don Rickles in Vegas. Back home, I photographed George with the souvenir bottle of champagne he was given by Rickles in appreciation for "toughing it out" in the act. For sure, Rickles would exploit Haugen's Korean ethnicity.
Art and I fit the mold of Midwesterners who felt it was time to run a little wild when in the great escape place of Vegas. We got what we wanted out of the experience. It was therapeutic for us "adventurous" media people. We felt we were an entitled class, perhaps worthy of being looked up to, by all the people in their "boring" jobs. A little effete, yes.
Remember, my mom essentially made me a writer. I hope I can handle the English language to her satisfaction, as she surely observes from heaven.
Addendum: Mom on the way to Alaska was in a restaurant with her Riley's group, asked for oatmeal and was answered in the negative. Then several days later en route back, they were in the same place when the waitress came over, remembered Mom, bent down and said to her as if in confidence "I've got your oatmeal!"
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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