Category Archives: Presidents

Deputy Marshall Ronald Reagan

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Portillo’s is a (mostly) local chain specializing in hot dogs, Italian beef, burgers and the like, and across its various locations, thematic decorations from the ’20s to the ’60s. The food is good and the decorations interesting, so every few months we go to one of the locations, two of which are fairly close.

Last weekend Lilly and I visited the one on Illinois 83 in Elmhurst, a bit out of our usual orbit. Before ordering, I was waiting while Lilly was in the restroom, and taking a look at some of the items on the walls in that part of the restaurant. Off in one corner is a framed picture of Ronald Reagan in a western outfit, wearing a badge that says Deputy U.S. Marshall. My guess would be it’s a publicity shot from Law and Order (1953).

On closer inspection, I noticed that it’s autographed. I’m not familiar with Reagan’s handwriting, but I’ve no reason to think it isn’t his. “Dick” must be Dick Portillo, who founded and still owns the chain.

To Dick –

If I don’t make it acting, I’ll try the hot dog business.

Ron

The Presidents Day Blackout

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At 5:10 p.m. the electricity flickered, went out, returned for a few seconds, then went out for about 50 more minutes.

Time to be dramatic: Blackout! NW Suburbs Without Power! Family of four plunged into uncertainty of powerless, dimly lit Monday evening! Forced to eat dinner and play a board game by candlelight!

But it wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t that cold today, so the house didn’t even lose that much heat. There was no obvious reason for it — no windstorm or ice buildup on power lines. Just one of those things.

Only three of us were here, since Lilly was visiting a friend at the time. I checked the block and everyone else’s power was gone as well, though the lights outside the school behind our back yard were still glowing. Lilly reported later that Twitter had informed her that some undetermined local area was dark — her friends were tweeting about it, I guess, but it couldn’t have been too large an area, since her friend (about a half mile from us) didn’t lose power.

Our TV and Internet were gone, but how can that be a bad thing for a few minutes, especially that fine silence where the TV used to drone? We discovered that our camping lantern, which contains four D batteries, has actually been a container for dead batteries for a while now. But we have about a half-dozen candles, and so ate our Japanese curry-rice by their light. Good thing the rice had cooked by the time the juice went off, though we could have boiled pasta and had curry-pasta.

Ann wanted to play a game: Sorry! As we prepared the table to set it up, the power came on again. I told her we could still play, and she still wanted to play by candlelight, so we did, though her mother was watching TV in the same room, so it wasn’t quite the throwback experience it might have been. Her yellow men edged our a victory over my green ones, four home to three home.

Thursday Salmagundi

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While working on an article the other day, I came across a press release that said in part: “Seminole Classic Casino, the first Native American Casino in the country, today celebrated its grand re-opening…. Seminole Gaming CEO Jim Allen provided welcoming remarks and historical background of the casino, while Good Times television personality Jimmie ‘J.J.’ Walker warmed-up the crowd with Tribal and 1970s trivia.”

Jimmie Walker. Now there’s a name I hadn’t heard in a long time. I hope the Seminoles paid him a reasonable amount. Even has-beens have to make some kind of living. 1970s trivia? Such as, “What was Jimmie Walker’s catchphrase?” I’m not going to repeat it here. If you know it, you know it. If not, leave it be.

Snippet of recent conversation:

Ann: “Lance Armstrong, he’s the one who went to the Moon?”

Me: “No, that was Neil Armstrong. He was a test pilot, astronaut and explorer. Lance Armstrong is a guy who can stand riding a bicycle for hours and hours.” (Link includes salty George Carlin language.) (And if you’re going to sit on a bike for that long, maybe you need the drugs.)

I was toying with the idea of reading only books that I already own this year. Got a fair number on the shelves that I haven’t gotten around to, after all. But I was at the library the other day and that notion flew out the window. I was looking for The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey  (Candice Millard), which is about TR’s expedition to one of the remotest of the Amazon’s tributaries in 1914, but it was checked out, so I checked out 1920: The Year of Six Presidents by David Pietrusza.

Not that there were six serving U.S. presidents in 1920, unlike the four emperors of AD 69. Just one: Wilson, a shadow of his former self by then. But the book promises to track TR (odd, since he was dead by 1920), Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and FDR and their involvement in the 1920 election. I’ve only read a few chapters. So far, not bad, but Pietrusza has a few annoying writing tics, and I’ve spotted a couple of small errors. The Armistice did not, for example, take place at 11:11 am.

I’m going to stick with it for now, because 1920 was a pretty interesting year in this country, besides for the election of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge: the last of the Palmer raids and the Red Scare, the beginning of Prohibition, the Wall Street bombing, the final push to secure women’s suffrage, and the first commercial radio station on the air, whose first broadcast concerned the results of the election. Among other things.

I just looked up salmagundi, long a favorite word. Never looked into its origin before. I’d have guessed it was one of those words the English language picked up in British India. Sounds like it, doesn’t it? “Sahib, the salmagundi is served.”

But no. My American Heritage New College Dictionary tells me it’s from French, salmigondis, and before that, origin obscure. Just another one of the French food words, then. Maybe next time I’ll call a jumble like this a gallimaufry, another good word that needs more use, also with a Frenchy origin.

Honour’d and Blest be the Evergreen Pine

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Bitter cold this morning. At about 6 a.m. both Yuriko and I heard a loud pop from the direction of the back yard. I thought it was something hitting the something else nearby, she thought it was an “explosion.” She was right. The night before I’d neglected to take in some of the soda cans that had been chilling on the deck, and one of them exploded. Even now bits of frozen soda linger on the planks.

As usual, the Atlantic has gathered together a remarkable set of photographs about a theme – in this case, the inauguration yesterday. I was surprised by how fast it was up, since I first looked at them at about 8 p.m. last night (some have been added since then). That’s a lot of pictures to upload and, especially, caption.

I was glad to see Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter looking (pic 22) so remarkably hale. The Clintons were also there, as to be expected, and I can understand why the ailing George HW Bush wasn’t in attendance. What’s up with his son, who also wasn’t there? We can give him the benefit of the doubt and say he wanted to be with his father. Or maybe he figured, eh, been to too many already, which would probably include his father becoming vice president and president, his own inaugurations, and the 2009 inauguration.

Just before 11 a.m. yesterday, I made sure both of the girls were with me to watch a bit of the event, even though it was really just for show, the actual swearing in having occurred in the Blue Room of the White House the day before. Just for show, but important. It’s churlish to begrudge any president the rituals of inauguration, whatever you think of his politics. A highly visible and ritualized transition, even if it’s a second-term transition, helps maintain the stability of the government. President Adams might have been peevish in not attending Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration, but at least he didn’t try to stop it.

Noisemaker, Noisemaker, You Have No Complaint

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Pauline Phillips was still alive? Maybe I was confused by the fact that Eppie Lederer’s been dead a while. I think both of them were in the San Antonio Express-News in the late ’70s, and I would have been hard-pressed to say who was who after I’d read the columns. That notion would probably have aggravated the sisters, and their editors, and in fact anyone who believes readers care about bylines, which they do not, but that’s source amnesia for you.

I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have admitted reading Ann Landers and Dear Abby back in high school, but I did sometimes, and intermittently for years afterward. They were windows into worlds where people had problems I had no inkling of, back before people-with-weird-problems became a staple of 24-hour television.

Pictured: a recent moment of ordinary interaction between Ann and I, which for some reason I liked when I saw it. I didn’t know Lilly was taking the picture when she took it.

Speaking of things supposedly gone, I recently bought a box of chocolate cupcakes under The Snack Artist brand, which belongs to Safeway. They look and taste exactly like Hostess Cupcakes, down to the Jack Lew signature squiggle on top, except they’re a bit flatter. So I’ve done my little part to confirm that as far as consumers of insanely sweet snack cakes are concerned, not much was lost with the demise of Hostess. (Jobs were destroyed, of course, but that’s another matter.)

Back again on Tuesday, after MLK Day and the 57th Inauguration ceremony, which is different from the number of swearing-ins, since not all holders of the presidency began their terms on March 4 or January 20. This is the seventh time that the constitutionally specified inauguration day falls on a Sunday, with the public ceremony the held next day. James Monroe set that precedent in 1821 after checking with John Marshall, who signed off on the day’s delay.

The last time was on January 21, 1985, during an intense cold spell that affected much of the country. Heavy snow had fallen in Nashville, and I didn’t have to go to work. I didn’t have a TV at the time, so I listened to the event over the radio. It was so cold in DC that the swearing in was in the Capitol Rotunda.

My Fellow Americans

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There’s been a run of presidential birth centennials lately, and by lately I mean since 2008. LBJ was born on August 27, 1908, Ronald Reagan on February 6, 1911, and Richard Nixon came into the world 100 years ago today. Later this year we’ll see the 100th anniversary of the birth of Leslie Lynch King Jr., better known as Gerald Ford (July 14).

One more centennial this decade: JFK in 2017. That one’s a little hard to wrap one’s mind around. Die young, stay pretty. After that, no more centennials until 2024, both the elder George Bush’s and Jimmy Carter’s.

I have wispy memories of Lyndon Johnson as president, but Nixon’s the first president I really remember. You might say Nixon’s the one. I remember hearing about him, of course, and seeing him in the papers and on TV from time to time, and the way he’d start by saying “My fellow Americans…”

The time he announced he was releasing transcripts of the tapes he’d made stands out; I have a vague impression of him looking sweaty and less than sincere under the lights. He came off that way a lot. I think that particular speech stands out because I was visiting a friend’s house when that speech came on, and they had a color TV, which we did not.

In the summer of ’73, Uncle Ken and Aunt Sue — good Democrats, they were — visited us in San Antonio, and I think it was my brother Jim who asked them what they thought about President Nixon. I remember Ken’s answer clearly: “He’s guilty as hell.”

At the Movies With Lincoln

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Lilly didn’t want to go to the movies by herself on Saturday. Her mother and younger sister were going to one picture she didn’t want to see, and I was going to another, and we each offered to take her to our respective multiplexes to see something else of her choosing. Hastily texted friends couldn’t make it, so she stayed home.

Maybe it’s a function of being a 15-year-old girl. I don’t ever remember being reluctant to park myself alone in a movie theater. If I’d never gone to the movies by myself, particularly in my early 20s, there’s a lot of worthwhile ones I might never have seen. One of my early experiences along those lines was seeing a revival of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Broadway Theatre in Alamo Heights when I was younger than her — too young to really appreciate it, but I was wowed by the spaceships. Of course, going alone would defeat the purpose at some movies, such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I went to see Lincoln. Been meaning to for a while. Aside from a few quibbles, such as (especially) the business about the soldiers reciting the Gettysburg Address and the stretcher that had Mrs. Lincoln and her black servant attending the debate in the House regarding the 13th Amendment, along with some lesser odd details, it’s rousing good historical fiction, about as good as you’re going to get in a movie.

Branson Leftovers

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Back again on Sunday, as the long Thanksgiving weekend peters out. We will be home for the occasion, since just the thought of going anywhere is tiring.

Branson is full of shows, but Joseph beat everything else I saw for sheer spectacle. Joseph is a South & Sight Theatres production, whose specialty is elaborate stagings of Bible stories, but “elaborate” hardly does it justice. The theater’s enormous, seating about 2,000, with a large stage that accommodates massive sets, large troupes of actors (including live animals, such as goats and camels), and impressive lighting and effects. The sets alone for Joseph—fittingly evoking ancient Egypt much of the time—would be worth seeing all by themselves, but fortunately not all of the effort went into sets and effects. The script tells the story of Joseph well, both in song and dialogue.

Christopher James, emcee on the Branson Belle showboat, told the trip’s best joke. I forget the exact wording, but it was a line about knowing better than to shine a bright light on stage, since too many of the audience would respond by getting up and heading toward it.

Indeed, at some of the shows I was a youngster compared to most of the audience. Such shows were heavily spiked with ’40s and especially ’50s nostalgia. But the showmen of Branson are preparing for the future. At one point, we had to wait for a few minutes outside a theater as the audience emerged from a John Denver tribute show. That is, a show spiked with ’70s nostalgia. The audience looked much younger than at most of the other shows—roughly my age.

No presidents were from Branson or are buried nearby, unless you count Harry Truman up in Independence, Mo. But I did see one presidential item: a bronze of the elder George Bush, as a young naval aviator, at the Veterans Memorial Museum.

We also visited the College of the Ozarks, which is a few miles from Branson. It’s a private Christian school whose students pay no tuition, but rather work for the school 15 hours a week. The fruits of all that work are many: among other things, we saw the greenhouses that grow orchids, a crafts building, the small hotel that the school runs, and the school’s restaurant, where we had Sunday brunch, done as a large buffet. The food was really good. Much of it is raised by students on the college’s farm.

Speaking of food, I had breakfast at a number of other places during my visit, and none of them—not even at the College of the Ozarks—offered grits. I was puzzled. I thought Branson would be south of the Grits Line, but maybe I’m wrong about that. Biscuits and gravy were widely served, but not grits. Odd.