In some ways, you’re right, though. Dad loved acronyms. In this case, it was mom’s idea to make sure only she and I knew what it meant. (Other than Dad, of course.) Since they died a month apart, it’s just me.
The more obvious “SEE” – Special Event Entertainment – didn’t need to be a secret. There were reasons with TAMI that didn’t apply to SEE. Copyright reasons – and the bullshit story warp we now are able to read as people die off. It appears “last man living” just takes all the credit. But the clock is ticking on that one.
Instead of wanting to disappear and disappear and disappear, I want to appear, and appear, and appear; to take up all the space, all the oxygen, all the room, and all the righteousness that I have turned over to any other human being, alley-cat, tailgating car, or man who endlessly professes his dying love to me. I will take up the room I was denied.
Yes, and I will take up more than that.
With each breath I take I will be alive, and beyond ignoring, or dismissing; and you will gasp for breath as you try to breathe in the air that I’ve already turned into CO2.
A really excellent talk on by Ethan S. Rafuse on McClellan and Lee, and the gentlemanly/outdated West Point notions they brought to the Civil War. (Which, by the way, didn’t hamper Robert E. Lee from fighting in the way it did McClellan.)
As a University of Missouri alumnus – where I was born – as well as serving as Park Ranger at the Harry S. Truman National Memorial Site, I like his nod to technology at the beginning of his talk. My father would most definitely approve.
“The Civil War –“
(“Looks like we got an issue with the Clicker, here.”)
(“Alright…”)
“Either Duct tape it or slam it into something. One of those two will make it work.”
This sets up perfectly a lecture titled: “We always understood each other so well.”
[GEHH aside]
And also makes me take a little curve into the virtuoso performance of James Whitmore in Samuel Gallo’s
“Give ‘Em Hell, Harry!”
which, of course, my Dad filmed just in time for the 1976 elections and then unveiled in “Whistle Stop Campaign” fashion. While not an exacting historical record, it gets wholly deserved recognition for bringing focus back onto Truman’s legacy.
[snip]
“…’Well, Congressman, while I am most grateful of your concern for me and your possible influence with the Almighty, from what I know of the man, He’s got a helluva lot more important things to do –”
“And sign that, ‘God’s humble servant, Harry S. Truman.’ “
” …and sign that God’s Humble Servant –“
“You wanna cut ‘helluva lot?’
“Fine, Rose, cut it out —
” –doesn’t matter, cut it out, if it makes it easier for you –“
“Doesn’t matter. If it makes it easier, cut it out.”
“Alright. Now the next one is going to Senator Bishop of Colorado —
‘Dear Senator,
not only would I not appoint John L. Lewis, Ambassador to the Soviet Union —
… but in every other flamboyant excess, Bill Sargent is the Don King of the showbiz hill. So it figures that a Beatles’ reunion has been a bubble on his Barnumesque brain almost from the acrimonious day in 1970 when they first went asunder. If the Beatles were again to come together—especially with today’s breakthroughs in satellite-fed transmission for closed-circuit—promoter Sargent could be back into the seven figures. By his own account, Bill has, at 48, made and blown a million on seven different occasions. He has also accrued two heart attacks.
As of now, the Beatles seem more likely to provide Sargent with Coronary No. 3 than Fortune No. 8. Which perhaps says more about their lawyers than their current prestige. The Liverpool Four have not only altered the drift of popular culture for their contemporaries—the boys are now approaching their middle 30s—but have also turned on a younger generation that digs them only by hearsay. Marvels McCartney: “When these kids come up to me for my autograph, I feel like their Uncle Paul.”
None of this was lost on a shrewdie like Sargent, and his feel-out bid in 1974 was $10 million. This January the ante was sweetened to $30 million, and in February to $50 mil.
… The son of an Oklahoma oilman, Bill shined shoes at 9, specialized in electronics in the Navy and numerous colleges (none of which he graduated from) and patented a Pay-TV system back in 1959. His claimed credits include the first TV fight of Cassius Clay, Richard Burton’s Electronovision Hamlet of 1964 and last year’s filmed version of James Whitmore’s Truman reenactment, “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry.” Sargent also hyped some spectaculars that never happened, like an Elvis Presley dramatization of the life of Rudolph Valentino. Along the way Bill accumulated two wives, five kids and several homes. But he and his second wife, an ex-airlines stew, along with their young daughter now rent modestly in the lower Beverly Hills.
Bill’s shop, though, is an imposing suite in L.A.’s Century City, known facetiously as Kellogg Hill, because of its disproportionate population of flakes. But when the trade scoffs at Sargent, he snaps: “They have a beautiful record for being wrong here.” At the same time, he concedes defeat in bringing the Beatles together by his original target date of July 5, 1976. The obstacle, he says, is McCartney, who starts a 20-city U.S. tour next week and is not about to risk diminishing its box office by allowing announcement of the comeback of the Fab Four.
… It is true that the four of them have spun off in centrifugal directions, musically and philosophically (see pages 16-19). And a reunion might be as poignant as baseball Hall of Famers sloppily getting together for Old-Timers Day. But a top-level rock functionary reports: “I know for a fact that George, John and Ringo have talked among themselves about a reunion, and their attorneys say it is possible. But,” he adds, “they would rather go with someone less carnival-like than Sargent.”
Bill doesn’t buy that. “I’m a professional winner,” he crows. “Just about the time everybody counts me out, I bounce back.”
”
A couple of small notes:
Dad’s dad was not an Oklahoma Oilman, he was an electrician, which is how my Dad learned it; despite besting his father at it. (That doesn’t mean he didn’t say it, however.)
Dad knew he was being an annoying ass, and I think he knew he wasn’t going to get the Beatles back together, at least the way I remember it, and I remember it well. Dad was looking at me when this (awesome) photo was snapped. It was mostly great publicity.
I think that it’s awful that in 1976, “People Magazine” is still calling Muhammad Ali “Cassius Clay.” It was indeed his name at the time referred to in the article – Dad’s 1959 Pay-Per-View fight between him and George Logan – but that is, almost without exception, noted in articles or mentions. Here the article doesn’t even use the name Muhammad Aliat all.
L-R George Logan (L) & Muhammad Ali (R) “punching” Dad (center)
with me and wires: his favorite things
PC Twins – Candice & Cassidy w mom’s old car
Richard Pryor Live in Concert original movie poster
Crab Dolly Patent (dad, of course)
BS presents – TheatroVisioN – Give Em Hell Harry with James Whitmore
Mom on a little rocking horse – playground
For some, it was hard to square his loud-mouthed, profane humanity with his genius.
That, for me, was never the problem.
We were so much alike that I certainly told him to go to hell with all the brilliant cussing skills I had learned so well from him and, I think, bested him at.
I remember the first time I told him to go to hell, in fact.
It stood out, because at that point I didn’t cuss.
I was very young and very “good;” only six years old at the time, in fact.
I remember – and can gauge my age – because we still lived on Palm Drive in Beverly Hills. (We lived there less than a year before moving to Stanley where we stayed through splitting our time between his Park Ave apartment in New York and our small stint in Upper Saddle River before the well ran dry again and we finally had to pack up all the places and I, at ten years old, became the only adult in the family.)
Anyway, we were wiring a “chandelier” of some kind over the big table in the huge dining room, me running the last wire through the ceiling with my “spidey sense perfection” as he called it, up on his shoulders, was almost through the drilled hole above when he lit a cigarette, made me lose the end of the little red plastic bump I had so carefully threaded through the wall up through the ceiling above, only to have him snap at me for him screwing the whole operation up.
Using his big head of wavy red hair like the horn on a saddle and his shoulders as a spring board I vaulted right off him onto the table, looked him in the eye and said,
“Go to hell.”
Then turned on one toe, hopped off the huge wooden table and started off, head high, when I heard him slap the table hard with his big hand – the way everyone who knew him remembers he did in his constant, big-ness that encompassed all sight, movement, and certainly sound –
and laughed his ass off.
“Come back here, you little monkey,” he beamed, arms open wide for me to jump back up into, which I did, whispering the response he so loved into his ear in the middle of our bear hug, “No, daddy, I sloth.”
I had had a “chinning bar” from the age of toddler until I went off to college and we were still at “Number 5” when the “monkey”/”sloth” thing started, so I couldn’t have been older than 3 years, and was almost surely 2. Mom and I walked to the library every weekday and we had gotten some book on Strange Animals. I remember the Lemmings especially; the picture of them all jumping off the side of a cliff. Except I remember it as Lemons jumping off the side of a cliff. You know, Lemons.
suicidal lemons
Jumping off a cliff. Anyway, the book also had Sloths in it, and although I have no specific memory of them at all, I know I would just hang by my little legs upside down on the bar a lot, and one night Dad called me a “little Monkey” to which I responded, “No, Daddy. I Sloth!”
Anyone who knew him would understand how he would eat something like that up, and especially how he would hang onto it as one of many little back-and-forth type lines he loved to collect with friends. If you were close to Dad very long there was probably at least one little inside joke that also served as short performance art between you. One of his closest, longest, and truest friends and Dad had a pretty good little 5-line joke they readily did for friends on whether God was black or white.
(Of course Joe won. Dad would have never continued it if the underdog position didn’t win. God was black. “Hell, it’s only fair,” Dad said when he told me about the little routine they had worked out. He was so pleased with it that he, of course, had to tell me before he and Joe were able to show me.)
“You’re a Monkey!”/”No, Daddy, I Sloth!” was, till the very end, something we said to each other almost every time we saw each other for the next 30 years.
That was my damn daddy.
And I want to wish the man who loved me, annoyed me, and raised me in the oddest way imaginable, a happy birthday!
We loved each other, and my mother – all three of us so interconnected that no force, even ourselves – could ever break that bond. Mother left the cussing to me, but although she shunned it herself, I discovered quickly that she also approved of my minimally applied directed cussing at my father.
It filled a much needed void which was not her forte.
(My mother rarely cussed, the closest thing to an actual cuss word she used even semi-regularly – the only one that wouldn’t turn everyone’s head with shock – was “bloody.” She and Dad had spent about a year in England, staying mainly outside London in a beautiful old country house where she was bored out of her wits, as her journals attest, and other than her diaries and a few pictures, the only souvenir she brought back to the states was the co-option of “bloody” into her vocabulary. The perfect non-curse word, curse word. She occasionally said “damn,” which usually elicited some shock, I’m sure she said “shit” a few times in her life, but that was rare enough that I can’t remember a specific, and if she ever said “fuck” I would have died of shock on the spot.)
Dad said “fuck” every other word. He also played up the Okie Colloquialisms in California, and it was smart. He was, when he wasn’t too full of himself, a genius at self promotion.
Instead of wanting to disappear and disappear and disappear, I want to appear, and appear, and appear; to take up all the space, all the oxygen, all the room, and all the righteousness that I have turned over to any other human being, alley-cat, tailgating car, or man who endlessly professes his dying love to me. I will take up the room I was denied.
