R.I.P. Ray Weatherholt.

Ray Weatherholt died the other day at the age of 80, presumably from COVID complications. I never became altogether close to Ray, but always found him to be a genial human being of superlative integrity who enjoyed fooling people with a carefully crafted gruff exterior.

As a founding faculty member from 1967 at Floyd Central High School, Ray was among the last of a dwindling cohort. I’m told that after retirement from his job, he continued teaching others in various ways, officially and unofficially. It’s the mark of an old-school educator.

Ray did me a good turn once, and I never properly thanked him for it. Allow me to explain.

I had Mr. Weatherholt for biology at the start of my sophomore year. It was a required course, and he ran it as a self-pacing class, which I found to be a very big challenge given that (a) I could be a tireless bore-ass, and (b), biology, science and mathematics interested me not a single jot. Less than zero.

Humanities and history defined me, even then.

Consequently I sat in sophomore biology and did nothing for almost the entirety of the semester’s first half. The only clear memories I have of this class are watching the turtles in the big tank next to where we sat, and the listening to the FM radio playing a steady diet of Top 40, including Ambrosia's "Holdin' on to Yesterday” over and over again; to be fair, there might have been a Spinners tune in there, too.

The good turn?

Ray said absolutely nothing about my non-existent work habits to me or to my mother, his fellow faculty member at FC, until the official date came to send home progress reports, at which point he tersely yet accurately savaged me by noting in a single sentence my completion of a scant week's worth of work during the whole of the school year to date.

He was right, and it would require herculean measures for me to pass biology, entirely unacceptable for an athlete who should know better.

I was in big trouble, but also strangely appreciative.

You see, it's awfully tough being a teacher's kid. Her faculty friends constantly reported to her about my activities, and this was a source of consistent resentment to me as well as periodic embarrassment.

This incessant adult surveillance, while mostly well-intentioned, made rebelliousness harder than it should have been ... and I was all-in for rebellion. After all, the legendary Weekly Wad had appeared earlier the same calendar year.

Ray, on the other hand, stayed quiet and allowed me all the rope I needed to hang myself -- and I did exactly that.

Well played, sir.

Fortunately, everyone involved seemed to learn something from it. I learned that bad news coming all at once actually could be far worse for the serenity of my home life than the drip-drip-drip of teachers' lounge bulletins. And, I’d have to devise coping mechanisms for getting through tasks I detested, at least sufficient to pull Cs and remain eligible to have a life.

More happily, my parents and guidance counselor conspired to a consensus, finally displaying a level of reality-based understanding that Roger had no apparent aptitude for biology, science and mathematics at the supposed higher level of overall intelligence indicated by those ridiculous standardized tests.

I was quickly yanked from Ray's class and thrown into another self-pacing setting, this time for rudimentary students. Fine by me. I loved it. Good friends were there, and I even got a C in the end, because even I could grasp the utility of an open book test.

R.I.P., Ray Weatherholt. You were much appreciated, and you made a huge difference in countless lives, even if my revelation came for all the wrong reasons.

ON THE AVENUES: The Weekly Wad lives on in the minds of malcontents.

Not so long ago I expended quite a few words to explain why I try to keep high school memories at arm’s length. At the same time, formative experiences undoubtedly took place back then, and so for me, it’s not hypocritical to analyze them even while remaining supremely vigilant to the distortions of spectacles with rose-colored lenses.

This column is about the Weekly Wad. It is old and new, all at once. The original iteration was published in the pre-merger New Albany Tribune on March 24, 2010, and was repeated here in 2013 and 2017. However, I’ve rewritten it to better reflect the lessons that I learned as a prime instigator of this particular episode.

As before, the column is dedicated to the memory of the late David Roark, whose boundless wit so enlivened those times.

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From time to time an older friend observes that my meek and unobtrusive writing style – as displayed over forty or more years in letters to the editor, a beer appreciation newsletter, internet blogs and occasional newspaper and magazine columns – can be traced back to those baby steps of ours in 1975 with the Weekly Wad.

I’m not entirely sure they mean this reference as a compliment, or if I even do, but as always thanks for reading. A writer without readers is a mere diarist, destined to be read when dead, and not before.

For the record, the inaugural Weekly Wad was an underground “newspaper” of four crudely mimeographed pages. A dozen Floyd Central High School male freshmen (and one gal, maybe two) collaboratively wrote and “published” the Wad by purloining paper and supplies from the audio-visual department, running off 200 illicit copies after school, and distributing them free of charge to a subscriber list made up of friends we trusted not to tattle on us.

In retrospect, this strikes me as a tad naïve. Are marketing and bragging separable?

This first Weekly Wad is best remembered for its front page illustration depicting our buzz cut school principal wearing a Nazi armband and giving the requisite Hitler one-armed salute.

Eventually each of us was compelled to have a private audience with the head man, listening as he expressed disappointment over the illustration, given the fate of his cousin, “a good Christian boy” who died in Europe during World War II while fighting the Nazis.

(Later, when the original column was published in 2010, this same principal had retired and become a member of the school board, enthusiastically voting to shutter New Albany’s inner-city schools. Suffice to say that I did not support his various, perennial candidacies for seats on the board, the last of which came at the age of 119 or thereabouts; furthermore, for this and another highly personal reason occurring in 1986, I find myself serene with regard to our uninformed but accurate instincts 45 years ago. Too bad it couldn’t have been in color.)

Another feature of our first born publication was an open advocacy of beer consumption on the part of a motley, fuzz-cheeked collection of adolescents still six years shy of legal drinking age.

There also were a few unflattering references to fellow students and teachers, and a music review of a group long forgotten, or elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or neither – maybe both.

These pot shots at fellow students, at least the ones I authored, constitute the single biggest lesson I learned as the Weekly Wad’s editor. This is because we chose not to sign our work. Our names were not listed, and to be frank, I wrote a few hurtful and stupid things. When the furor died down and a settlement proposal came forth from above, it was stipulated that an abandonment of anonymity was necessary if we intended to continue publishing.

The school adfarm-near-me/">ministrators were absolutely right. It is from this single teachable moment that I’ve derived my subsequent hostility to pseudonyms and diversionary tactics. Say and write what you will, and stand behind it by signing your name.

Or, conversely, shut the fuck up.

---

Floyd Central’s corridors were teeming with excited readers the day following release, and we were basking in notoriety, when one of our distribution associates was collared by the dragnet. After a brief round of water boarding, he was coerced into a full confession, sans Miranda rights.

In short order, the entire staff was taken into custody. Parents were called, suspensions were plotted … and then the scandal became more bizarre than I'd ever imagined.

Much to our surprise, our folks (two of whom were teachers, including my mother) took the case and turned it full bore against the adfarm-near-me/">ministrators, who became stunned and confused, like ducks hit on the head.

Our parents strenuously argued that for 15-year-old kids to seek creative literary and journalistic outlets apart from the pre-ordained official curriculum surely denoted an abject failure somewhere in the chain of educational bureaucracy, and in addition, we should be rewarded for our initiative rather than punished for purely incidental illegality.

We were writing, after all; very poorly in fact, but doing so on our own time, seeking self-expression, and refraining from painting graffiti on the walls or toilet-papering the superintendent’s house.

(Those feats would come later, once we had driver’s licenses.)

To be sure, there was the small matter of materials we’d appropriated in the name of the revolution, so after a cooling-off period, cursory wrist-slappings and assorted pieties intended to channel our youthful energies into more conventional directions, we were permitted to remunerate the school corporation for its dead trees and resume our journalistic careers, so long as we had a faculty advisor and refrained from further A-V pilferage.

The late Michael “Mick” Neely providentially agreed to sponsor the “new” Weekly Wad, circa 1976, My mother continued to allow me to use her 1950’s-era manual typewriter to compose screeds against cafeteria food, undemocratic decision-making processes, and turncoat hall monitors.

These were cut up with scissors, pasted into place, and when an adult was available to play taxi, taken to a long-departed business in downtown New Albany called Pronto Press. Our allowances and odd job monies were pooled to pay for these sporadically released opuses, which decreased in frequency as we advanced toward graduation.

A final farewell issue planned for the autumn of 1977 was completed and printed, but never released owing to the possibility that the athletic department might object to the strident tone of a Mike’s wickedly funny expose on individual versus team sports.

It has become known as the Lost Wad, and occasionally pops up on EBAY at vastly inflated prices.

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Throughout the 1980’s, during my tenures as part-time clerk at the late and lamented Scoreboard Liquors by night and substitute teacher by day, periodic revivals of the Weekly Wad were staged.

Most were undertaken with the connivance of my primary co-conspirator Byron, whose colorful accounts of high life in low places appeared under the rubric “And Now for the Truth,” which I believe we lifted straight from a Herbert W. Armstrong religious tract.

My favorite episode detailed an unfortunate incident with a loaded taco on a crowded Market Street during Vodka-Thon, an informal annual walkabout through the bedlam of Harvest Homecoming’s Saturday night booths; armed only with plastic cups of Stolichnaya passed through the shadow of a Rose’s Lime Juice bottle, rendering the most ambulatory of gimlets, we would tour the streets.

During this second Weekly Wad era, with the subject matter turning toward topical downtown New Albany issues like the construction of the ludicrous canary yellow canvas-topped waterfront amphitheater, I first took to referring to the Wad’s newsroom as occupying an opulent suite high atop the glittering Elsby Building.

More than anything else, these developments foreshadowed written endeavors to come.

When the NA Confidential blog was founded in 2004, it stemmed from an escalating personal interest in the downtown area. Recalling my nascent explorations into this somnolent topic during the late eighties, I came quite close to naming this very blog the Weekly Wad before changing my mind at the last minute.

It is stupefying and quaint to consider the history of an underground newspaper in that dusty, pre-wired era when the genial Gerald Ford was president.

Kids today build interactive (and profitable) multi-media empires at the age of three. My generation had subversion in our brains, larceny in our hearts, and the traditional restrictions of pre-electronic paper-trail discourse to keep us out of serious trouble.

If the internet had existed then, we’d probably have been incarcerated.

For me, there's still time.

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Recent columns:

September 3: ON THE AVENUES: If you really want to be my friend.

August 27: ON THE AVENUES: Structural racism, white fragility, and my old school.

August 20: ON THE AVENUES: When love and hate collide – or, my father and the governor.

August 13: ON THE AVENUES: In My Merry Oldsmobile.

ON THE AVENUES: Structural racism, white fragility, and my old school.

In my previous life as a thoughtful and periodically fashionable essayist, one forever attuned to local foibles and frivolity, there’d be so very much to write about, right about … now.

Alas, those days are gone.

For example, I might be considering the ham-fisted, forced resettlement of the kulaks – wait, wrong word; I meant “residents” of Riverview Tower as part of a yet-to-be-revealed master plan for the structure’s implosion, annexation, luxurious playpen refurbishment for the enrichment of our design and engineering caste, or all three, quite spectacularly.

But I can’t comment.

Conversely, taking cues from my old, discredited ways, I could be considering the ongoing, benumbed silence of the city's leading element, this glaring absence of our local Democratic Party’s ruling elite from virtually all major questions of the day during the past six months, from pandemic disarray through racial and social justice protests, not to omit the indie business segment’s increasing problems, rampant vehicular mayhem on city streets, and the Tree Board’s leading role in rampant deforestation.

Seeing as none of them have uttered a peep, I’ll happily follow suit. My lips? Think of them as seals.

It’s just water under the justice's I-64 bridge, and in spite of all that’s going down – and I mean WAAAAAY DOWN given the GOP death cult’s cocaine-fueled subterranean spiral – in this failed city, tucked inside a failed nation-state, located on a rapidly failing planet where Mother Nature is belching rather viciously in our general direction, traffic on the bridge in question stands to be disrupted for years to come, and of course if we’d bothered setting up the city to accommodate multi-modal transportation options, these disruptions might not be so damaging, but we haven’t, and they will be.

As yet our “leaders” are not unlike clams, and accordingly, you won’t hear a word from me.

After all, I’m retired. It's someone else's job to try locating a pulse. Many of you, at least the minority capable of rational thought, are wearing pandemic masks. I’ve chosen to double insulate, augmenting my contagion-containing fabric with a free-expression-free, anchor-logo chain mail muzzle, and it’s quite cozy.

There’s a void in the coverage area, but maybe the News and Tribune will fill this gap in truth-telling, because as we all know, laughter really is the best medicine, especially when reading Pastor May’s weekly old white guy theocracy sermon.

---

So much for the preamble. Last week’s writing therapy session was long even by the standards of this admittedly wordy weekly column.

ON THE AVENUES: When love and hate collide – or, my father and the governor.

It’s very strange what you remember, and what you don’t. At times, it can be downright debilitating. The ghosts wobble, but they don’t fall down.

And yet it was short in the sense that undertaking to distill one’s formative youthful experiences into words, whether 3 or 3,300, is at best a challenge, and probably impossible. Those weeks and years of external stimuli, so very long ago, burrowed artfully into a still developing brain. A handful of episodes stand out in the memory, but detailed contact tracing is almost impossible.

Hence my fascination, five decades later, at what it meant to be propagandized with blatant racism as a youth during George Wallace’s presidential campaigns, although it must be noted that by the time of my father’s enthused espousal of the Alabama governor’s cause in 1968, I’d already been exposed to the contagion of racism for the entirety of my eight years of life.

It matters not one bit whether the exposure was overt, because that’s what structural racism is all about. It's pervasive. Here’s one definition of many, courtesy of the Urban Institute.

Throughout this country’s history, the hallmarks of American democracy – opportunity, freedom, and prosperity – have been largely reserved for white people through the intentional exclusion and oppression of people of color. The deep racial and ethnic inequities that exist today are a direct result of structural racism: the historical and contemporary policies, practices, and norms that create and maintain white supremacy.

At the Urban Institute, we examine how structural racism continues to disproportionately segregate communities of color from access to opportunity and upward mobility by making it more difficult for people of color to secure quality education, jobs, housing, healthcare, and equal treatment in the criminal justice system.

I can’t argue. Structural racism is irrefutable, and the inescapable corollary is this: “White people need to accept that they’re racist. All white people.” Here’s Kelli Maria Korducki with more at Medium:

Very few people would call themselves racist, and getting called out on racist behavior tends to elicit defensiveness. This reflex is so culturally ingrained that its scripts are practically punchlines: “I don’t see color.” “Some of my very best friends are Black” …

… In her bestselling 2018 book, White Fragility, the author and academic Robin DiAngelo argues that one of the functions of White privilege is to advance the myth that racism is an individual sin, as opposed to a collective indoctrination. “[T]he way we are taught to define racism makes it virtually impossible for White people to understand it,” she writes. “Given our racial insulation, coupled with misinformation, any suggestion that we are complicit in racism is a kind of unwelcome and insulting shock to the system.”

By framing racism as the scourge of an ignorant few, White people skirt the uncomfortable work of interrogating the perks of their own Whiteness and confronting the structures that uphold those perks. White privilege allows White people to believe that because they grew up poor, or have Black friends, or are descended from European immigrants who were once viewed as non-White, they themselves are exempt from White privilege — and, by extension, innocents in the perpetuation of racism.

DiAngelo proposes that we instead think of racism as a worldview that’s inevitably formed, and reinforced, by a racist society whose institutions deem Whiteness as a neutral standard. Instead of imagining themselves on either side of a bad/good binary of racist or not racist, she suggests that all White people reimagine themselves as occupying a movable position on a continuum of racism.

It probably isn’t possible to totally escape that continuum, she says; racism is so deeply embedded in society that it informs every facet of our experience and perspective. But by moving away from the binary framework, DiAngelo writes, White people can free themselves from the question of whether or not they are racist and instead ask themselves whether they are actively challenging racism as they go about their lives.

I’m quoting others today only because my own words haven’t yet come to me fully formed. Listening and learning is like being back in school, or stumbling through a new language. I’ll get there eventually. Until I do, I'll turn to those who are better than me at making the case.

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Did you know that 110 years ago, the youthful Marx Brothers had a vaudeville routine called “Fun in Hi Skule”?

As an observer notes, it might have been called “Fun with Ethnic Stereotypes,” with the brothers and other actors portraying Germans, Italians, Jews, and the Irish. Jokes also were directed at gays.

At least no one wore blackface.

My most recent high school reunion was the 40th, which took place in 2018. I’ve attended at least a portion of most previous get-togethers, but two years ago I didn’t. My interest waned in the run-up, and that’s unusual for me as someone with an interest in history and a strong desire to record it.

I plead extenuating circumstances as they pertain to the lesser of two reasons for being a no-show, and that’s because I was uncharacteristically busy.

Pints&union was in the run-up to launching, and there were things that needed to be done. The pub’s prospective opening made me nervous, even if I wasn’t the owner. You'll recall that I'd been entirely out of the food and drink game for three years, and getting back into the swing of things at my advanced age took effort, albeit more mental than physical.

Another factor was lingering annoyance with my 35-year reunion in 2013, when I hosted a segment of the gathering at Bank Street Brewhouse. It transpired that an actual friend, with whom I’d spent much quality time during school daze (both high school and university), arrived at BSB loaded, whether literally or figuratively, and went out of his way to embarrass himself and me in front of my staff members, one of whom proposed to clean my friend's clock.

I was tempted to give him permission.

To be sure, everyone has bad nights. What's more, his ingratitude shouldn’t have mattered. In point of fact, he always was something of an asshole, which goes a long way toward explaining our friendship, given that I was (and remain) an asshole.

However, by 2016, it had become abundantly clear that my friend was in fact a born-again Trumpian bile spewer, filled to the brim with MAGA, outspoken and abrasive on the typically anti-social media platform of Facebook.

That ghost of George Wallace, yet again flatulent.

And this became a problem for me in 2018 as the class reunion approached. Facebook made crystal clear which of my former classmates were in sync with my values in socio-political terms, and which had spent the intervening decades gulping the toxic Kool-Aid.

The accounting kept coming back to me. I was not looking back in anger. It wasn’t about malice. None of it made me mad. We're all individuals, and while I found myself in disagreement with many of them (not all, of course), I tried to bear in mind that it was just a disagreement. This helped.

However, it was harder to escape the sadness.

Granted, the high school experience is ridiculously romanticized and vastly overrated. It was more pain than pleasure for me, and really, you'd have to be applying several coats of rose-colored revisionism to celebrate those often maddening, frustrating years.

And yet, in spite of it, I look back on people and phases with satisfaction and even affection, hence the morose melancholy gripping me in 2018. In the end I didn't attend the reunion, precisely because I'd prefer to remember these folks the way they were, not grapple internally with what they had become.

It's as simple as that.

In high school most of the kids were apolitical, ignorant, and many times politically incorrect. On the whole, we shared the same goals, trying to make sense of adolescence and impending adulthood, figuring out what would come next, out there in the real world – as I understand it now, a world filled with racism, intolerance, greed and naked ambition.

I'd rather remember them the way they – we – were.

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Recent columns:

August 20: ON THE AVENUES: When love and hate collide – or, my father and the governor.

August 13: ON THE AVENUES: In My Merry Oldsmobile.

August 6: ON THE AVENUES: Surrender.

July 30: ON THE AVENUES: Guys.

The Way We Were.

Lately I'm reminded of why I declined to attend my 40th high school reunion in 2018. Maybe I'm finally ready to be honest about it, even if I'm cognizant of it not mattering, in the least, either way.

For one thing, I was busy.

Pints&union was in the run-up to opening on August 1, and there were things that needed to be done. It made me very nervous, because you'll recall at the time that I'd been out of the food and drink game for three years. Getting back into it at an advanced age took effort, more mental than physical, and obviously none of us are as spry as we used to be.

But while it was a valid consideration, it's only a part of it.

Another aspect was lingering annoyance with 2013, when it was my great pleasure to host a portion of the reunion at Bank Street Brewhouse.

It transpired that one of my actual friends from high school arrived loaded (literally or figuratively) for bear, spent the evening complaining about mixed drink prices (at a brewery), harassing my staff (one of whom came to me and said if my "friend" didn't leave him alone, he'd have to begin throwing punches) and being an all-purpose tool.

My 'friend" embarrassed me greatly, and then, as it happened, the very same guy proved to be an avid, unapologetic MAGA-ite, which leads us to the third and most important factor in my (admittedly entirely personal) disaffection, this being the presidential election results in 2016.

In short, via the helpful medium of Facebook, I had a front row seat to observe the extent to which certain of my former classmates as yet were on the same wavelength as me in political terms, and which ones had gulped down the Trump Kool-Aid and become raging reactionaries, white supremacists, religion-obsessed theocrats, and, in short, stranded way out in right field somewhere.

And yet it wasn't anger with this state of affairs that convinced me to avoid the reunion party in 2018. None of it made me mad. We're all individuals, and while I disagree with them, it doesn't mean any more than that -- a disagreement.

Rather, it was sadness.

Granted, the high school experience is vastly overrated; it was far more pain than pleasure for me, and really, you'd have to be applying rose-colored revisionism to an epic degree to celebrate those years.   

This being said, I look back on various people and phases with satisfaction and affection, hence the melancholy gripping me in 2018. I didn't show up because I'd prefer to remember them the way they were, not grapple internally with what they'd become.

It's as simple as that.

In high school most of the kids were apolitical, many times politically incorrect, mostly sharing the same goal of making sense of adolescence and trying to figure out what would come next, out in the real world.

I'd rather remember them -- us -- this way.

I don't even hold a grudge against the high school (and college) friend who made life miserable for me that evening at BSB in 2013. It's who he is, and actually, it's what he always was, an asshole, which is what drew us together in the beginning because I was, too.

We remain "friends" on Facebook, but I don't follow him, thus sparing me from an endless series of auto-erotic Trump mash notes, conspiracy memes and "all lives matter" bromides.

Unfollow, but remain "friends." It's mental health for our time, and maybe 2023 will be different.

To New Albany's Joe Dean, it was string music. For me, high school basketball was a mixed gym bag.

Sectional champs, 1978.

Last night, Floyd Central beat New Albany in boys basketball for the first time in 15 years, a span of time comprising 20 consecutive losses. There are hundreds of potentially interesting topics to be spun from this sporting news, but I like to pick my spots, which in this instance is the opportunity to recall my own underachieving career in high school basketball.

These lightly edited and updated thoughts have appeared at least twice here previously, most recently in March of 2014. They may not be particularly edifying, but at least they're honest.

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ON THE AVENUES: String music?

It has been 39 years since my final basketball game as a member of Floyd Central’s varsity.

I'm occasionally reminded of this ancient factoid, like when a Facebook friend request came to me from my former coach, Joe Hinton. I duly accepted the request, and thought it very nice of him to ask. We didn’t always see eye to eye back in the day, but it’s been long, long ago.

One quite tumultuous time, we were on entirely different pages. It was late in the basketball season during my senior year, as my decidedly non-illustrious career was fast approaching a merciful conclusion. At a practice session just prior to the 1978 sectional, the coaching staff revealed the official tournament roster, and the list didn't include my name.

Granted, the omission was mostly deserved based on purely inconsistent performance, and yet I was annoyed at what I perceived as a slight, responding with a two-hour concentrated display of faux "go team" enthusiasm and contrived, vaudevillian, entirely mock "rah-rah."

This apparently was mistaken by the coaching staff for a death bed conversion to team spirit, if not genuine depth of feeling. The following day, I was reinstated to the roster. It never dawned on me to pursue a career in acting, or I might be portraying Josh Dallas’s father on television by now.

Happily, or so it seemed, I'd neglected reporting this turn of events to my father. Unhappily, his old friend (Hinton) already had done so, which may have been the devious intent from the beginning. The whole off-and-on scenario did little to improve matters on the home front.

As the late Gomer Pyle once said: “Surprise, surprise, surprise."

---

Almost 40 years later, I can't attribute truly coherent motives to my teenage ambivalence about sports, these ultimately meaningless games being just about the only form of communication between a father and his son. The father was an ex-Marine who had traded athletic opportunities for three years as a gunner on a Navy ship in World War II, and he was keen – perhaps overly so – to see his son succeed at basketball and baseball.

However, the son just wasn't wired for this kind of pressure, at least during those hormonally-charged years, and surely it is indicative of my fundamental disconnect that while I always enjoyed the essence of the games themselves and still do, my favorite book about sports was (and remains) Jim Bouton's Ball Four, which celebrated the timelessness of baseball while exposing the vacuous and inane nature of jock culture.

Bouton spoke directly to me, fervently and personally. I fancied myself a thinker, not a sweat hog. I'd have gladly settled for "thinker and lover, not a fighter," except that I hadn't been able to convince any girls of my credentials, and in truth, doubted whether any such talent existed.

So, it came back to me and my brain, together against the world. It should suffice to say that locker rooms were mind-free zones, and brains in sports were the object of lingering suspicion unless one happened to be an otherwise semi-literate point guard who could remember the plays and run the offense.

There I was, kicked off the senior-dominated basketball team and then placed back on it, contemplating yet again how it came to be that we were such persistent underachievers as a squad, utterly failing to capitalize on the rosy potential predicated by all observers, including my still simmering dad … and understanding, as I always had, that it all owed to a lack of cohesion.

In other words, too few of us liked each other off the court, and this distaste had a way of being glaringly obvious on the court, to Joe Hinton's fuming dismay.

Our sectional draw was a breeze. We were lumped into a bracket with smaller rural schools as a result of one or the other cynical maneuverings common to the political byways of the purportedly pristine Indiana state sport of basketball, which naturally had much more to do with smoky hotel room maneuvers at the national political party conventions of the 1920's than the farmyard ideal preferred by so many fans.

The cheering section probably knew better, but worshipped all the same.

We won the sectional and advanced to play Scottsburg in the Saturday morning game at the Seymour Regional the following week. The Warriors, from a school far smaller than ours, had nonetheless soundly thrashed us at home a few weeks earlier.

In today's parlance, Floyd Central had "match-up" problems with Scottsburg, which is to say that they had one of their finest teams ever; though not demonstrably better at every position, the Warriors played as a team, something we couldn't match.

I knew there would be little playing time for me, and at that point, it no longer mattered. Amid much hoopla and a special pep rally, we boarded the bus on Friday afternoon for the 40-minute drive, an early evening shoot-around, a buffet meal and an overnight stay at the Days Inn.

At this juncture, two worlds were set to collide.

While some of my best high school friends were athletes, only a few of them were on the basketball team. I mostly ran in different circles, and at various times, yes, there was beer involved, though seldom if ever during the basketball season. Ambivalence aside, I tried to play it straight as often as possible.

But for the Saturday regional festivities, a few of my heartier-partying friends had reserved a room at the very same hotel where the team was staying – only my buddies called it the Daze Inn, and planned to treat it accordingly.

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Floyd Central unceremoniously exited the tournament in the morning session, and Scottsburg advanced to meet Clarksville in the evening finale. I'd like to remember that in defeat, we came together as a team and grasped an eternal cliched truth or three, but from my perspective, all I felt was pervasive relief that finally, at long last, the ordeal was over.

There was a post-game chat and showers, and we returned to the hotel to eat and waste a dilatory afternoon playing euchre before riding back to the gym on the bus and watching the championship game, which was to be our last solemn obligation as a dysfunctional unit.

You've probably already guessed what happened next.

I promptly stole away from the ennui, and by the time the bus exited the Daze Inn parking lot several hours later, I was completely and blissfully smashed.

The bathtub in the party room was filled with canned beer and ice, and a story already was making the rounds as to how the designated underage beer buyer with his older brother's ID had run into a few of our teachers at the exact same package store and exchanged earnest pleasantries with them at the checkout counter.

Me? I was just happy to shed the weight of expectations and get myself dazed, even if remaining as clueless as always with respect to how the future would play out, although perhaps my vocational path forward in the beer and brewing business already was being plotted amid the plodding.

Eventually one of the assistant coaches dressed me down outside in the hotel courtyard when he saw that I held a smoldering Swisher Sweet in my hand. Did I really want to be kicked off the bus and suspended for smoking?

No, not at all, and I snubbed it out, because I'd already decided that my final act of courageous defiance against The Man (which one, exactly?) would be to drink a beer on the team bus in route to the evening championship game, and this I proceeded to do -- already crazily intoxicated, strategically seated all the way in the rear, a Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull artfully hidden in my gym bag, top popped discretely, and chugged quickly before hiding the empty again for the post-game ride home with my parents.

I'm neither proud nor ashamed of these recollections.

I did what I could with what I had at the time, and if awarded a time-travel "do over," probably I'd have worked harder at sports -- not for anyone else’s satisfaction, but for my own.

In retrospect, my work ethic was there all along, if latent and inchoate; it took a while for it to emerge fully formed, later in life. So be it. In truth, the thing I miss most about high school is singing in choir, not playing ball. I didn't know it then, but I know it now.

I'm forever hopeful that in the cosmic scheme of things, the ability to learn from one's youthful angst and missteps is what matters most. If not, I may be in serious trouble.

To this year's high school basketball players, my best wishes. If you're lucky, you'll forget all about it very, very soon.

R.I.P. Mick Neely.

Word began circulating this morning that Michael "Mick" Neely has died, and his son's words are apt.

Yes...the heavens became a lot more fun and the choirs of angels are letting it rip. My dad is there now and everyone is smiling, singing and laughing more than ever. Dad went there exactly 78 years, to the day, after he got here and he made this world a far better place, for sure. The greatest man I ever knew or will know.

There is no calculus for determining the influence this man had with generations of students, not just in music, but in life. Along with the late Bob Youngblood, Mick was a tremendous formative influence on me.

Mick warned each graduating class of choir members that if they didn't continue singing, it would be something sorely missed later in their lives. He was right. I've never known teamwork and camaraderie like that since, and likely won't experience it again.

Goodbye to a great, great man. He was Mr. Floyd Central to many of us. Our thoughts are with his family.

R.I.P. Bob Youngblood, 1943 - 2016.

For those who didn't know Bob, he was a teacher at Floyd Central for more than 30 years. Speaking personally, he had a tremendous impact on my life.

Bob died yesterday after suffering a brain aneurysm earlier in the week, and to be perfectly honest, it's a bit much for me at the moment.

Words don't often fail me, but this is different. When they return, I'll write more, and also update this space when funeral arrangements are announced.

Finally, a basketball coach says something interesting.

I haven't cared much for the topic of high school basketball for about as long as the period since Floyd Central's last sectional title, which came when the Berlin Wall still stood.

The announcement itself was about to pass unnoticed ...

Floyd Central names Todd Sturgeon boys basketball coach, by Justin Sokeland (Courier-Journal)

Floyd Central hired former college coach Todd Sturgeon as its new boys’ basketball coach during Friday’s meeting of the New Albany-Floyd County Schools board of trustees.

 ... but I kept reading, and despite the cliche-ridden utterances commonly emitted by the basketball coaching profession, guess what? Two very interesting observations were forthcoming.

(Sturgeon) also wants his team to mirror the discipline and toughness of college teams such as Virginia, Wisconsin and Butler.

“Those are the teams that reflect what I would like to put on the floor,” Sturgeon said. “We have an outstanding academic school, so I would like to think we would play a team reflective of that, that we will play intelligent basketball and also tough basketball.

“My biggest focus is changing the mentality. I think we need to practice more and play fewer games. We have an AAU culture in American basketball right now that Floyd Central, in particular, has suffered from. We just have to roll up our sleeves and get to work, concentrate on getting better today. If we get better at the fundamental things, we’ll see large improvements in the win-loss columns.”

Sturgeon's incoming analysis yields an under-utilized asset (intelligence) and posits a plausible fix: Combine intelligence with attention to a culture change of stressing fundamentals.

For the first time in a quarter-century, my curiosity is piqued.

Can someone please remind me to pay attention this fall?

Lieberman is guided elsewhere following another disastrous FCHS campaign.

According to the News and Tribune, "The Mark Lieberman era at Floyd Central High School has come to an end after one season."

It is noted that in his one season at FCHS, Lieberman "guided" his team to a 5-18 record. I always enjoy the use of this word in such a context, given that ...

v. guid·ed, guid·ing, guides
v.tr.
1. To serve as a guide for; conduct.
2. To direct the course of; steer: guide a ship through a channel.
3. To exert control or influence over.
4. To supervise the training or education of.

I'd prefer writing it this way: "Lieberman presided over a 5-18 record."

Apart from the unsightly blemish on the departing coach's record, it gets even worse for hill people with this stunner:

The Highlanders have not won the Hoosier Hills Conference title and a sectional championship since 1989.

Dude: A quarter-century?

I'll freely admit to caring very little about high school sports, especially since class basketball poisoned the well, but as a product of the 1960s- and 70s-era FCHS basketball program, it gets a little embarrassing to acknowledge this Pittsburgh Pirates-level streak of futility even after the numerous valid qualifications and extenuating explanations are duly read into the historical record.

Duly read, duly noted. Back to apathy. Ciao.

ON THE AVENUES: String music?

ON THE AVENUES: String music?

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

It has been 36 years since my final basketball game as a member of Floyd Central’s varsity.

I was reminded of this ancient factoid in the rear view mirror because a Facebook friend request recently came to me from my former coach, Joe Hinton. I duly accepted the request, and thought it nice of him to ask. We didn’t always see eye to eye back in the day, but it’s been long, long ago.

One quite tumultuous time, when we were on entirely different pages was late in the basketball season during my senior year, as a decidedly non-illustrious career was fast approaching a merciful conclusion. At a practice session just prior to the 1978 sectional, the coaching staff revealed the official tournament roster, and the list didn't include my name.

Granted, the omission was mostly deserved based on pure performance, and yet I was annoyed at the slight, responding with a two-hour concentrated display of faux "go team" enthusiasm and contrived, entirely mock rah-rah, which apparently was mistaken for a death bed conversion, if not genuine depth of feeling, resulting in my reinstatement to the roster the following day.

It never dawned on me to pursue a career in acting, or I might be portraying Josh Dallas’s father on television by now.

Happily, or so it seemed, I'd neglected reporting this turn of events to my father. Unhappily, his friend (Hinton) had already done so, which may have been the devious intent from the beginning, and the whole off-and-on scenario did little to improve matters on the home front. As Gomer Pyle once said: “Surprise, surprise, surprise."

---

Three and a half decades later, I can't attribute truly coherent motives to my teenaged ambivalence about sports, these largely meaningless games being about the only form of communication between a father and his son. The father was an ex-Marine who had traded athletic opportunities for three years as a gunner on a Navy ship in World War II and was keen – perhaps overly so – to see his son succeed at basketball and baseball.

However, the son just wasn't wired for that kind of pressure, at least during those hormonally-charged years, and surely it is indicative of my fundamental disconnect that while I always enjoyed the games themselves and still do, my favorite book about sports was (and is) Jim Bouton's "Ball Four," which celebrated baseball while exposing the vacuous and inane nature of jock culture.

Bouton directly spoke to me, fervently and personally. I fancied myself a thinker, not a sweathog. I'd have gladly settled for "lover, not a fighter," except that I hadn't been able to convince girls of my credentials in the former, and in truth, doubted whether any such talent existed, and so it came back to me and my brain against the world.

It should suffice to say that locker rooms were mind-free zones, and brains in sports were the object of lingering suspicion unless one happened to be an otherwise illiterate point guard who could remember the plays and run the offense.

There I was, off the senior-dominated basketball team and then back on it, contemplating yet again how it came to be that we were such persistent underachievers, utterly failing to capitalize on the potential predicated by all observers, including my still simmering dad … and understanding, as I always had, that it all owed to a lack of cohesion. In other words, too few of us liked each other, and this distaste had a way of being glaringly obvious on the court, to Joe Hinton's fuming dismay.

Our sectional draw was a breeze. We were lumped into a bracket with smaller rural schools as a result of one or the other cynical maneuverings common to the political byways of the purportedly pristine Indiana state sport of basketball, which naturally had much more to do with smoky hotel rooms at the national party conventions of the 1920's than the farmyard ideal preferred by so many fans.

They probably knew better, but worshipped just the same.

We won the sectional and advanced to play Scottsburg in the Saturday morning game at the Seymour Regional the following week. The Warriors, from a school far smaller than ours, had nonetheless soundly thrashed us at home a few weeks earlier. In today's parlance, Floyd Central had "match-up" problems with Scottsburg, which is to say that they had one of their finest teams ever, one better than ours at almost every position.

I knew there would be little playing time for me, and at that point, it no longer mattered. Amid much hoopla and a special pep rally, we boarded the bus on Friday afternoon for the 40-minute drive, an early evening shoot-around, a buffet meal and an overnight stay at the Days Inn.

At this juncture, two worlds were about to collide. While some of my best high school friends were athletes, only a couple of them were on the basketball team. I ran in different circles, and at various times, yes, there was beer involved, though seldom if ever during the basketball season. Ambivalence aside, I tried to play it straight as often as possible. But for the Saturday regional festivities, a few of my heartier partying friends had reserved a room at the very same hotel where the team was staying – only my buddies called it the Daze Inn, and planned to treat it accordingly.

---

Unsurprisingly, Floyd Central exited the tournament in the morning session, and Scottsburg advanced to meet Clarksville in the evening finale. I'd like to remember that in defeat, the team came together and grasped an eternal truth or three, but from my perspective, all I felt was pervasive relief that finally, at long last, it was over. There was a post-game chat and showers, and we returned to the hotel to eat and waste a dilatory afternoon playing euchre before riding back to the gym on the bus and watching the championship game, which was to be our last solemn obligation as a dysfunctional unit.

I promptly stole away, and by the time the bus exited the Daze Inn parking lot several hours later, I was blissfully smashed. The bathtub in the party room was filled with canned beer and ice, and a story already was making the rounds as to how the designated underage beer buyer had run into a few of our teachers at the exact same package store and exchanged pleasantries with them at the counter.

I was just happy to shed the weight of expectations and get myself altered, even if clueless as always with respect to how the future would play out.

Eventually one of the assistant coaches dressed me down outside in the courtyard when he saw that I had a smoldering Swisher Sweet in my hand. Did I really want to be kicked off the bus and suspended for smoking?

No, not at all, and I snubbed it out, because I'd already decided that my final act of courageous defiance against The Man (which one?) would be to drink a beer on the team bus in route to the evening game, and this I proceeded to do, already crazily intoxicated, strategically seated all the way in the rear, a Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull artfully hidden in my gym bag, top popped discretely, and chugged quickly before being hidden again for the ride home with my parents afterward.

I'm neither ashamed nor proud of these recollections. I did what I could with what I had at the time, and if I had to do it over, I'd have worked harder at sports than I did -- not for anyone else’s satisfaction, but for my own. Seems that the work ethic actually was there all along, though latent; it just came later in life, and so be it.

In truth, the thing I miss most about high school is singing in choir, not playing ball. I didn't know it then, but I know it now. I'm hoping that in the cosmic scheme of things, that's all that matters. If it isn't, I may be in trouble.

To this year's basketball players, in a tournament or out, and whether in high school or college: If you're lucky, you'll forget all about it very, very soon.

(The preceding was posted at NAC in 2008 and later appeared as a newspaper column in truncated form. This is the revised, full-length version)

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: The Weekly Wad? It was a modest start.

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: The Weekly Wad? It was a modest start.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Another weekend of commemoration has arrived. For the class of 1978 from Floyd Central High School, it is our 35th anniversary reunion. 

Over the years, I’ve written quite little about my high school memories, perhaps because they were sufficiently grim to compel an active suppression of as many as possible.

Anyhow, aren’t present times stressful enough without reliving past traumas?

This isn’t to be construed as negativity toward my classmates, most of whom I’m quite fond. It’s just that for many of us, teenage years are not unlike wartime conscription, in the sense of extreme emotional turbulence shared in proximity to others by sheer geographical accident. None of us exactly “chose” to be attending school together. Later in life, these choices tend to broaden. 

The following column about the Weekly Wad originally was published in the Tribune on March 24, 2010. When signposted at the blog, I corrected an oversight, which is repeated today: The column is dedicated to the memory of the late David Roark, whose boundless wit so enlivened those times.

---

Not so long ago, an old friend observed that my meek and unobtrusive writing style – as displayed over thirty years in letters to the editor, a beer appreciation newsletter, Internet blogs and finally newspaper and magazine columns like this one – can be traced back to baby steps at the Weekly Wad.

I’m not entirely sure he meant it as a compliment.

For the record, the inaugural Weekly Wad was an underground “newspaper” of four crudely mimeographed pages. A dozen Floyd Central freshmen collaboratively wrote and “published” it in 1975 by purloining paper and supplies from the audio-visual department, running off 200 illicit copies, and distributing them free of charge to a subscriber list made up of friends whom we trusted not to tell on us.

The first Weekly Wad is widely remembered for a front page illustration depicting our principal as wearing a Nazi armband and giving the requisite Hitler salute. Seeing that he’s now on the school board, and recently voted for neighborhood school closings, the mature adult in me is resisting the temptation to draw obvious parallels.

Another feature of our first born was an open advocacy of beer consumption on the part of a group still well short of legal drinking age. There were a few unflattering references to fellow students and teachers, and a music review of a group long forgotten, or elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or neither – maybe both.

Floyd Central’s corridors were teeming with excited readers when one of our distribution associates was collared by the heat. After a brief round of water boarding, he was coerced, sans Miranda Rights, into a full confession. In short order, the entire staff was taken into custody. Parents were called, suspensions were plotted … and then the scandal became even more bizarre than before.

Much to our surprise, our folks (two of whom were teachers, including my mother) took the case full bore against the somewhat befuddled administrators, arguing that for 15-year-olds like us to seek creative literary and journalistic outlets apart from the pre-ordained curriculum surely denoted abject failure somewhere in the chain of educational bureaucracy, and that we might better be rewarded for educational initiative rather than punished for illegality.

After all, we were writing, albeit poorly, and not painting graffiti on the walls.

There was the small matter of materials we’d appropriated in the name of the revolution, and so after a cooling-off period, cursory wrist-slappings and assorted pieties intended to channel our youthful energies into more conventional artistic directions, we were permitted to remunerate the school corporation for its dead trees and resume our journalistic careers, so long as we had a faculty advisor and refrained from A-V pilferage.

Belated thanks to you, Mr. Neely, for agreeing to sponsor the “new” Weekly Wad, circa 1976, and to my mom for letting me use her 1950’s-era manual typewriter to compose screeds against cafeteria food, undemocratic cheerleader selection processes, and turncoat hall monitors. These were cut out with scissors, pasted into place, and when an adult was available to play taxi, taken to a long-departed business called Pronto Press in New Albany.

Our allowances and odd job monies were pooled to pay for these sporadically released opuses, which decreased in frequency as we advanced toward graduation. A final farewell issue planned for the autumn of 1977 was completed and printed, but never released owing to the possibility that the athletic department might object to the strident tone of an expose on individual versus team sports.

It has become known as the “Lost Wad,” and occasionally pops up on Ebay at vastly inflated prices.

Throughout the 1980’s, during my tenure as part-time clerk at the late and lamented Scoreboard Liquors, I staged periodic revivals of the Wad. Most of these were undertaken with the help and connivance of my primary co-conspirator Byron, whose colorful accounts of high life in low places appeared under the banner, “And Now for the Truth,” which I believe we lifted in its entirety from a Herbert W. Armstrong religious tract.

My favorite episode detailed an unfortunate incident with a loaded taco on a crowded Market Street during Vodka-Thon, an annual walkabout through the bedlam of Harvest Homecoming’s Saturday night booths, when we’d be armed only with plastic cups of Stolichnaya previously passed through the shadow of a Rose’s Lime Juice bottle to produce the best ambulatory Gimlet in town.

During this second Weekly Wad era, with the subject matter turning toward topical downtown New Albany issues like the stone-deaf construction of the canvas-topped waterfront Trinkle Dome, I first took to referring to the Wad’s newsroom as occupying an opulent suite high atop the glittering Elsby Building.

More than anything else, these developments foreshadowed endeavors to come. When the NA Confidential blog was founded in 2004, it stemmed from an escalating personal interest in the downtown area. Recalling my nascent interests in the topic during the late eighties, and how these peeked through the nebulous haze, I almost named the blog the Weekly Wad before changing my mind at the last minute.

It’s stupefying and quaint to consider the history of an underground newspaper in that dusty, pre-wired era. Kids today build interactive web sites at the age of five – that is, if they haven’t already abandoned the Internet for sophisticated journals of cultural critique disseminated by their handheld mobile devices.

My generation had subversion in our brains, and larceny in our hearts. If the Internet had existed then, we’d probably still be in jail.

R.I.P. Ed Ehalt.

In addition to being kinfolk of my late father's, Ed Ehalt was the "driving" force behind one of the most entertaining episodes in the history of Georgetown, a place where very little generally occurs.

Driving is to be taken literally, because in late winter of 1971, when Floyd Central's famed Superhicks advanced to the state finals in basketball, Ed drove his tractor all the way to Indianapolis in support of the cause. We was adored for it by the faithful fan base. Do any tractors remain in today's FC's 10-star exurban school district?

A Purple Heart vet of WWII, Ed was a garrulous, crusty, friendly, bow-legged lifelong horse lover, and at my father's wake back in 2001, his reminisces of their adolescent misadventures were the highlight of the gathering.

He'll be missed.

(photo credit)

What do you remember about the snow storms in 1977 and 1978?

It's finally white outside.

I certainly remember the consecutive yearly blizzards while nearing the end of my high school career, and our being out of class for around three weeks in both 1977 and 1978.

It’s hard to believe, but I was a Floyd Central varsity basketball player at the time (it’s even harder to believe that I could dunk, though these days such antics are restricted to doughnuts), and the school cancellations had almost no effect on the sports routine. Few if any practices were missed as a junior in 1977, and it seems that at least some of the games were played, although others were postponed.

My recollection of 1978 is that ultimately, the issue was less about snowfall than a coal shortage and high energy prices in the midst of Jimmy Carter’s famous “malaise.” Consequently, we continued to practice in daylight right after school at Georgetown Elementary, where there were still windows, so that the electricity could be spared at FCHS. The games we played on our home court were also right after school, so the gym wouldn’t have to be heated at night.

But … am I on the right track here? Something about these memories doesn’t jibe.

What puzzles me in retrospect is why we didn’t get back to school sooner. Apart from the not unexpected phenomenon of the basketball program’s tail wagging the dog (how times have changed at FCHS!), there are memories of getting out, driving around, socializing, grocery shopping.

More recently, there was the massive snow dump of 1994, when we were somehow able to keep the pub open after about ten inches and had a great business day, in the process unfortunately missing the single best Rich O’s photo opportunity ever when my pal Kevin and his brothers-in-law drove their snowmobiles over and parked right outside the door atop the mound created by the industrious “Mr. Plow.” But the '94 snow was gone within days.

Given the panic-stricken standards of today, the current snowfall constitutes the apocalypse. I believe there was a time not so long ago when the White Terror earned its sobriquet. On the other hand, quite a few beers have passed in the interim.

If I start telling stories about walking miles through snowdrifts, you can give “last call.”