Month: June 2017

My Year Among the Savages

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

My Indian name was Running Horse. My son’s name was Straight Arrow. We were both members of the Blackhawk Tribe. My son being about ten years of age, someone had suggested that we join the local chapter of something called the Y Guides, a program loosely overseen by the YMCA. It was a father/son thing and we knew a few other families with boys that age and so I thought we would give it a go. Tommy got to pick our Indian names. I got mine because at the time I was jogging. Not sure where he came up with his, although considering he chose politics as his career, where one meets fewer straight arrows than some other career choices, it’s kind of ironic.

The overall “council” was composed of small tribes of about 10 boys and their dads scattered across the southwest Chicago area. Each little group was encouraged to meet once a month at a member’s home. There would be little projects we could work on, some snacks, a beer or two for dads, that sort of thing. There were no uniforms like in scouting, which made it easier.

The first meeting was in one of the dad’s basements in September. This particular dad liked to decorate his basement with posters featuring nude women with breasts that defied the laws of gravity, not to mention their proportion to the rest of their bodies. The boys got to the basement before the dads and it seemed to me they were being unusually quiet. What they were was transfixed by such magnificent displays of fictional female anatomy. We got them out of there over their grumbling and had a little talk with our knuckleheaded host, who insisted that boys had to figure this stuff out at some point. Not at ten years of age, we assured him.

Each meeting also featured a story by the tribe’s “sachem” or wise man. Ours was Pat Rohan, who never disappointed. Among our favorites was the touching story of a young Indian brave and his forbidden love for an Indian maiden; both swam to the middle of a lake to be together and drowned. Pat called the story “Lake Stupid.” It killed the ten year old crowd.

They held a Christmas party for the whole council, where each boy got a present from Santa, always the same item like a backpack or a flashlight. The gifts weren’t wrapped, but dumped out on a table and bulk issued to each tribe, with all of the Christmas magic of a military supply dump. The party resembled one of the rings of Dante’s Inferno, with about 120 little madmen screaming, running, shouting, and crying, as some of them told others the truth about Santa. And Santa himself looked pretty hammered, fake beard drooping and pillow augmented stomach lopsided.

And all the more experienced dads kept talking about the coming of the great spring pilgrimage to somewhere called Camp Pinewood.

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Camp Pinewood is a YMCA camp facility just outside of Muskegon, Michigan. It was one of the longest three days of my life. We arrived by car, me, my son and another father and son combo after a four hour ride. It started out well enough. A lunch of hamburgers, then a sort of rally with camping songs and exhortations by the staff to “enjoy and be safe”. Off to our little cabins we went. When we got there, I noticed that the cabins windows were just square holes cut into the walls. No glass, no screens, just air. And we were about to find out that we were in the middle of mosquito central. There was no plumbing either, save for a communal toilet and shower point about 100 yards down a hill. Fun at 2 a.m.

But it was still daylight and the fun was beginning. You had your choice of swimming, sailing, archery, fishing, or the rifle range. My son wanted to try fishing, but on the first cast the reel flew off the rod and hit the water. No problem for dad, I waded in and retrieved it. That was when I discovered the leeches on my feet and legs. The lake was leech ridden, which may be why no one was swimming. Thanks for the heads up.

After de-leeching with help of a cigarette, we decided on archery. That was when I noticed that most of the dads were gone. I was to learn later that the main reason the dads looked forward to Pinewood so eagerly was that they could dump junior off at the camp and head into town for a three day bender. So when we got to the archery range, we discovered arrows flying in almost every direction. No staff, no dads, just heavily armed kids turning the range into the Little Big Horn. Unlike Custer, we beat a hasty retreat.

What staff were on hand manned the rifle range, which I guess was the greater of two evils. Here kids were popping away at targets with .22s and pellet guns. I gave them credit for at least getting all the ammo going in the same direction.

We got eaten alive each night by clouds of mosquitos, arose about 4 a.m.to the sounds of the returning dads, who were mostly trashed.

Finally, the finale. The last night featured a visit from the Great Chief himself. There was to be a giant bonfire, which the now sobering dads built all day into a 14 foot high pile of wood. From the top of the woodpile ran a wire which sloped downward from a nearby tree. On the wire, at the tree end, was an oversized wooden arrowhead on a pulley that would allow the arrowhead to be lit afire, then roll down the wire until it hit the woodpile. This was to be the coming of the Great Spirit.

Logs for seating were placed all around the woodpile and at about dusk we began gathering at the site, awaiting dark and the arrival of the Great Chief. We heard the distant drumbeats first, coming from the lake. Then the low chant, indistinguishable at first, but clearly men’s voices. As they came closer to shore, we could see a man standing upright in a canoe, arms crossing his bare chest, the canoe paddled by two others. He was clad in a full chieftain headdress, his Indian loin cloth straining under a most impressive beer gut. Two more canoes followed.

It was the Great Chief himself, actually a neighbor of mine who shall remain nameless in this story, and he and his natives were chanting away. Finally we could make out the words they were chanting: “I want a beer, I want a beer.”

Up the hill they came, the Great Chief scowling and holding his folded arms across his chest. The loin cloth was beginning to lose the battle with the beer gut and his underwear band was showing. Thank God for the underwear at least. And as he reached the center of the circle, someone lit the arrowhead and pushed it with a stick. Now flaming, it slowly headed toward the giant woodpile. And as the flaming Great Spirit reached the pile, the entire woodpile exploded into about forty or fifty burning logs, each one flying out from the center. Dad’s instinctively grabbed their sons and ran backwards as the burning logs landed in and among us. No one was hurt, somehow.

As it turns out, the crew building the log pile wanted to make sure of a good ignition and so were pouring kerosene on the wood pile most of the day. I guess as the beers went down they sort of lost count of how much fuel they added, because they got the kind of ignition one usually associates with a launch at Cape Canaveral.

We packed up for an early escape on Sunday morning, glad to be out of there. The other dad and I talked all the way home, shaking our heads in disbelief and marveling at the entire experience known as Camp Pinewood. We never returned to the group and my son turned to scouting, which was run by moms and run as a pretty tight ship.

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I don’t mean to disparage the many good works of the YMCA, which provides affordable housing, recreation opportunities nationwide (their ranch in Colorado must be seen to be believed) and fun camp experiences for thousands of kids each year. I guess if anything, my Y Guides experience was one where the best intentions, left without leadership, can go off in some pretty weird directions. Clearly the inmates were running the asylum.

Men do a lot of things well when it comes to forming young lives. I have always been impressed by the many good volunteer coaches in all sports who dedicate countless hours to teaching their game. I have known scoutmasters who dedicate whole vacations to scouting. But when a void in leadership occurs, when we all hesitate to raise our hands and take on the job, invariably the wrong guys will fill that void and take us places we never thought we would go. Chaos follows in their footsteps.

You can draw all the comparisons you like on this one.

 

The Best of Old Men

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

“How I long for to muse on the days of my boyhood

Though four score and three years have fled by since then

Still it gives sweet reflections, as every young joy should

That merry-hearted boys make the best of old men”

-from the Bard of Armagh, as recorded by the Clancy Brothers.

The three small boys awakened on one of the best days of the year for small boys, and that would be in the woods of northern Wisconsin, where their little family shared a summer home with the rest of their dad’s family. For most boys, as it was for me in my youth, there are too many days in the year where school duties run the house. Too many days of obligation, of homework and tests and a hundred kinds of anxiety. The cottage days, like Christmas morning, were important and wonderful days. Days that tasted like freedom. Days filled with swimming and fishing and boating and campfires. Little boys are made for such days.

That morning, like most cottage mornings, they would awaken to the sounds of water lapping at the shore, of birds singing, and they would be drawn to the water. When you live in a city, awakening to a lake carries its own magic appeal and something in you urges you to get closer to the water, to be part of the lake, to see little minnows, hear the croak of a frog, catch the jump of a gamefish, and take in the sun dancing off the surface. But that morning would contain an added surprise.

For there on the shore was a lone bottle and inside the bottle some sort of note. Excitedly they extracted the note, only to find it wasn’t a note at all, but a map, the edges burnt and ragged. The map indicated an island and on the island the location of a buried treasure. An adventure was afoot! They got their dad and showed him the map. He thought it might be the island in the lake right in front of them and agreed that they should set sail in the family pontoon boat at once and see it they could find this mysterious treasure. Probably left by pirates.

Fairly bouncing with excitement, they boarded, while their dad fired up the engine, docking at the nearby island a few minutes later. Following the map, they soon came upon some white stones which formed an arrowhead and pointed to a spot on the map where buried treasure lay. Digging away as fast as excitement would allow, they soon unearthed the treasure chest. And inside was an incredible trove: fake gold coins, gaudy costume jewelry, play money, eye patches, bandanas, some toy pistols. A true haul of wealth for the imagination of little boys who at that point had bought in 200% to the adventure.

Of course, it was their dad, my son-in-law Luke McKee, who cooked it all up the night before, not even telling his wife. He was recreating the magic someone had created for him as a small boy, I guess. And here’s the beautiful thing about this: you get one chance and one chance only to get this magic right. They wouldn’t fall for it a second time, or if they were older and more cynical. It was exactly the right magic at exactly the right locale and exactly the right ages and it was a memorable bit of parenting genius.

The “Treasure Hunters”, Luke, Tim, and Sean McKee

——————

Grandpa Hayes wasn’t really our grandfather, but we called him that. My family rented a cottage for many years from the Hayes family, and both families grew close. Grandpa Hayes was a retired master pressman, once called all over the world to fix newspaper presses. I only knew him in his last years, but he fascinated me and my brothers with his tales, practical jokes, and outright whoppers.

He had us convinced that old Daniel Boone had somehow made it to Sister Lakes, Michigan, and showed us the tree in which were carved the words: “Dan’l Boone kilt a bar here.” We bought into it. He told my brother Gil that a large flat rock he had found was, in fact, an unfinished tomahawk that some wild Indian didn’t get around to finishing. Gil hung onto that rock for years. He had a hundred stories.

He was an inventor of sorts. When we needed worms for fishing bait, he had developed this device that featured a metal probe at one end and a t-shaped wooden handle at the other. You plugged it into the wall socket, shoved the probe into the ground and the night crawlers came zooming out of the ground to get away from the current. It was as fascinating as it was dangerous. He nailed the heads of large bass caught by his son or grandson to a tree, creating this ghoulish monument which we treated as if it were a sort of holy shrine. If you can recall the famous “Injun Summer” cartoon from the Tribune that they run every year in the fall (or don’t run, depending on the political correctness climate), that old man in the cartoon would be Grandpa Hayes.

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The merriest of all dads is a fellow named Pat Rohan. He is in his 60’s now, and shows absolutely no sign that he intends to grow up, God bless him. Pat is my friend and former neighbor on the south side of Chicago, and he moves through life as if it were some sort of amateur hour contest in which the guy with the zaniest idea wins. He is a true local legend, especially on Spaulding Avenue, where he once re-created an Irish Pub, complete with faux-thatched roof, for a block party. One year, with the rest of us obsessing about weed control and good sod, he dug up his entire back yard to create a miniature moto-cross range for radio controlled model cars. His garage will never fit a car inside, but is filled with pieces and parts for a lifetime of outlandish projects yet to come.

Pat doesn’t have a lot of formal education, but I have seen first-hand that he is a conceptual genius. He has the ability to look at a broken device, a construction project, or fabrication need of any sort and see the solution. Once in the early days of my business we were trying to build out a call center, and we needed to find a way to bring voice and data wires down from the ceiling in twelve different locations in a large empty room. Logistical and engineering genius that I am, my solution called for lots of expensive custom wire molding  and looked to cost about $20,000, which we didn’t have. Pat looked at it for about 2 minutes and came up with the solution on the spot. Run plumbing PVC pipes down from the ceiling, hide the wires inside and paint it to match the décor. The solution ran less than $250 and looked great.

Most of us don’t think of heating our home as a hobby, but Pat loved it. One year he had married the gas fired furnace with a wood burning Franklin stove. When the wood gave out the furnace kicked in and the damn thing actually worked, although a strong wind could push wood smoke down the stack and into the kitchen. But he liked the wood smoke smell, so it was a winner.

He and one of his brothers added a second story, complete with diving board, to a pontoon boat in Michigan, but I don’t recall that working out quite as well. He once invented a way to modify my little 5 horsepower fishing motor to accept fuel from an outside fuel tank, using, of all things, a condom. It worked well. He has built theater sets that could rival professional works.

His high holy days are Halloween and St. Patrick’s Day. His costumes take him weeks to fashion, look as uncomfortable as all hell, and he could care less, as long as it gets a laugh. His kids and grandkids worship him for his always unpredictable projects and his unconditional affection for all of them.

Pat with his grandkids

 

There is a world of good dads and granddads out there, each fathering in his own way; I believe there are far more good ones than bad ones. But the really great dads and granddads seem to have the ability to think like a child, to generate delight, to play to imagination and whimsy and to take the time to be silly. That’s where the art of fatherhood moves into the neighborhood of genius.

May we all strive to become the best of old men.