J.D.’s Columns

Estelle Gary, Indiana       During the last great spasm of the American steel industry, a thousand of us worked under one roof in Gary, Indiana, turning sheet metal into refueling lines for the Strategic Air Command and prototypes for America's infant space program.      Five days a week I fought sunrise traffic from a flat in southside Chicago to the parking lot outside Door South #l6, where I inserted a card in the time clock then faced a mountain of long, thin wall steel tubing. By fitting sizing dies onto twenty-foot hydraulic rams I pulled one tube inside another until the mountain dwindled to four tubes. Those were left for the next day, as a reminder to the time-study finks in neckties that the union was running the job.      Repetitive tasks are a machinist's yoga. While the machinery whirls the mind cruises. Instances when attention to the job disappeared entirely are chronicled by circular scars on...

Somebody No Water Bamboo      The sun was in late Leo/early Virgo the first time I saw San Francisco Bay. I came out of Chicago in a pickup truck, with my motorcycle took-to-pieces and wrapped in a tarp in the back. Everything else I owned was stuffed all around me in the front seat.      I start coming up the east side of the Bay, and I know that this is where my home is going to be because I hit Fremont on a Sunday afternoon and right there by the freeway is a full-tilt drag strip with hundreds of far out cars and right overhead are real gullwing gliders cruising out over the Bay and landing beside the drag strip.      I score a little house to rent in Menlo Park, by the cemetery. I unload my stuff into the house, put the motorcycle together. In just a couple of days, I score a job as veterinarian's assistant for a crusty old dude on El Camino in Mountain View. It turns out I don't mind shoveling dog manure, bu...

Secret Service Confidential      I usually feel a bit disengaged from Presidential campaigns because neither the Democratic nor Republican Party has ever convinced me that their candidates are at all interested in working people, an equitable redistribution of wealth, or an end to war. I believe in peace, non-violence and several other political concepts that don’t seem to mesh well with managing a for-profit government. Therefore, I am an informal member of the Birthday Party, whose platform is “Nobody for President” and whose button features a coat and tie with Nobody wearing them and slogans like “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” “Nobody cooks like Mom,” “Nobody cares when you’re down and out,” and “Nobody is minding the store.”       But I do enjoy watching political candidates on television, particularly during the glad-handing crowd scenes after the speeches, because I like to play “Spot the Secret Service.” It is not a di...

    The White Mountain Mountaineering Club         A few years back, Sir Edmond Hillary, first white boy to make it to the top of Mt. Everest, slipped off to the great base camp in the sky. I noted his passing with interest because, had certain events turned out a bit differently, Eddie and I might’ve been closer pals. As fate would have it, my career as a conqueror of challenging terrain was short and not all that sweet.         I was an eighteen-year-old hick with a high school diploma when I boarded the Number 45 train in Alliance, Nebraska, bound for fame, fortune, and college in Medford, Massachusetts, the tweedy almost Ivy League. Determined to become a famous lawyer of the Clarence Darrow school, I'd spent months at the mirror, practicing how to grasp the lapels of my suit coat, just so, while looking over my spectacles at the adoring jury. It was a muggy midnight in the middle of Iowa before I d...

Packrat                                                                                                           (There was one street in North Fork, Idaho, one saloon. A hardrock miner named Rollie wove this tale between double shots of Jim Beam. His daughter drank with us. She said her mother made Rollie remove the hardhat once a week, so she could wash it when it started leaving stains on the pillows.)      "I once was the smartest fellow...

 I used to write a cowboy poem each Christmas for my pal Lyle. Lotta folks in this little town are stringing lights around their porches, so I figure this is legal.....     The Buckaroo Fez  The weather had changed on the high desert range. And the coyotes were yodeling tunes In a symphony hall of black canyon walls Lit by a sliver of moon.  Inside a line shack sat Shorty and Jack, Rocking in fireside chairs. Two buckaroos for the Diamond Bar Two, Bearded and grizzled as bears.    Shorty McGhee turns to Jack and says he, "Pard, this book has my lariat twisted. It’s a history of hats and everything that Fits on the noggin’s been listed. There's snap-brim fedoras, and stovepipes more o' Those things worn by big city shiners, And bonnets and skullcaps and things with ear flaps That shade the cowpokes in China,   You got teenagers’ beanies, crowns made for queenies And helmets pounded from tin, Caps made of beads and swampy old reeds And some tha...

On Cranberry Sauce      Chances are pretty good that, in the next week or so, readers will find themselves seated at holiday tables and confronted with gloppy, ridged, cylinders of a lovely, red, tart substance. I speak of the traditional (at least among us trailer trash) butter dish full of canned cranberry sauce that somehow is able to escape from its container intact, year after year. So, in honor of the season, let us study Cranberries Without Underpants.       There are two basic types of cranberry on this planet.  The smaller cranberry, originating and still cultivated in Europe, grows on a bush, has a single seed and has been given the botanical moniker, Vaccinium oxycoccos, which comes from the Latin “vacca”, meaning cow because, apparently, cows like to eat them. Oxycoccos refers to the sharp leaves of the plant.        Our North American table variety is Vaccinium macrocarpon, from “...