A stop last Saturday at Wolfe Cemetery in Georgetown.

We took a low-intensity road trip last Saturday.

A Saturday morning outing to Hemlock Cliffs, with an unexpected side order of unsolved murder.

On the way back, I'd yet to become aware of the locally famous story of William Dessie Messamore. This didn't come until later in the evening, when there was time to research. I can't recall ever hearing this tale, but it's possible my dad and his friends might have regaled me with it when I was a kid. 

For the return trip, we decided to stop by Wolfe Cemetery on the western edge of Georgetown for a visit with my parents, who are buried there. They always were adamant about having a simple veteran's grave marker, nothing elaborate or ostentatious. 

Diana and I always agreed with this course, and found the graveside scene on Saturday to be peaceful and appropriate. 

I wasn't up for a scientific survey, but most of the grave markers at Wolfe Cemetery are on the conservative side. This is in keeping with my recollections of the townspeople. Some are more expressive, and there's nothing wrong with that. After all, you can't take it with you.

Cemeteries always make me think. Will our lives and work be remembered? I'm not sure it matters. Thirty-five years ago, I walked along the Appian Way while visiting Rome. 

Crumbling 2,000-year-old memorials bore the names of tremendously important people who've been forgotten for almost as long. Gazing at them, lost in reverie, I soon realized the significance of the here and now -- namely, autos zooming past my vantage point on the narrow one-lane road. I opted for life, and repaired to the nearest bar for sustenance.

I may have known what my parents' grave at Wolfe Cemetery would look like, given I'd seen it previously. But I didn't know my reaction would be one of peacefulness and equanimity. We can't live forever, and their resting place seems, well, right. Maybe it's time for my wife and I to have that chat, too. 

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

"A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he can’t escape from."
-- William Faulkner, from Light in August

1.

This is a story about dead folks, or more accurately a dead era, although it might be said that anything this dead has no damn business being so very much alive, right now, in the year 2020. The retelling itself has proven difficult, and a definitive rendering eludes me.

I’ve read all about humankind’s past pandemics and those famous plagues of old, and assumed these lessons were clear to me, but the part they don’t teach you is the way seismic public health crises peel back the layers of your soul – or, in my case, what passes for one. Atheist with souls? Nah, surely not.

To begin this beguine, let’s go back to the beginning.

2.

These many years later, the way I remember it is that much of my father’s self-worth revolved around good, old-fashioned hard work.

In another place at another time, he might have been an enthusiastic Stakhanovite, a term originating in the Soviet Union to describe “workers who modeled themselves after (epic farm-near-me/">mining hero) Alexey Stakhanov. These workers took pride in their ability to produce more than was required, by working harder and more efficiently, thus strengthening the Communist state.”

We’re Americans, of course, or so we are told by the looters, and it’s all bound up into a different set of precepts. Unraveling these many motivations decades after the fact wouldn’t be easy in the best of times – and as you may have noticed, these aren’t.

It remains that my father was ideally suited to socialism. He just never realized it. A military veteran, working man, salt of the earth, the common folk, Joe Six Pack; my father was eternally suspicious of concentrated wealth and hoity-toity, over-educated elites.

By his own admission drawn to the underdog, he did not cheer for the New York Yankees or US Steel. My father died in 2001, and yet I can imagine him turning the air blue upon learning that Greg Fischer proposed to award Amazon half the city of Louisville (and a state park to boot) in order to lure the company’s headquarters to Louisville.

Conversely, and the hard part for me to accept, is that my father quite likely would have been enamored of Donald Trump’s bait ‘n’ switch brand of cynical populism. That’s because he always was drawn to charlatans, like a moth to the light fixture.

Ross Perot was great, at least until he proved to be an utter flake. Ronald Reagan? A godlike figure, except when those two presidential terms concluded, my father was disillusioned when he realized the rich had gotten far richer; trickle down, but treasure up.

Before them, there was another recipient of my father’s political affections, a passionate straight talker who spoke to the people, not the snobs, and understood what needed to be done to make the nation great again.

He was George Corley Wallace (1919-1998), seeker of the presidency from 1964 through 1976, although most convincingly in 1968 and 1972.

3.

My unanticipated journey through childhood days began innocently enough with a book, the title of which aptly conveys the essence of its content: Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future (James Shapiro; 2020).

The second prompting came during a chat with a friend, who mentioned a 1968 television appearance by Wallace, soon to become a presidential candidate as an independent: "Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: The Wallace Crusade" (1968).

I watched the episode, and was strangely disquieted. Something began to stir. Concurrently, I started reading another book called Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America (George Yancy; 2018).

At this point, little things began nagging at me. Something was troubling, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Perhaps it was the culmination of six months spent largely at home, contemplating humanity, pandemics, racism and presidential politics – numerous strange disturbances coming together at the crossroads amid tumultuous news cycles.

Soon it became clear that the specific flash point came with the introduction of Wallace into the narrative; moreover, it flared after watching the Alabamian in peak crusading form on "Firing Line." Watching it made me physically uncomfortable, something uncharacteristic for a history buff with a customarily strong stomach.

It became apparent that I needed a more comprehensive refresher course on Wallace and his epoch, which came courtesy of a PBS "American Experience" documentary film titled "George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire" (2000).

It took far longer to absorb than the three-hour running time because at the start, I couldn’t endure more than five minutes at a sitting. I studied the bathroom mirror. Could someone please explain why I was having such a visceral reaction to this?

4.

George C. Wallace was a four-time Alabama governor whose failed presidential candidacies in 1968 and 1972 functioned as grandiose overtures to the ensuing civil rights flip-flop of America’s two main political parties.

Wallace, who began as a New Deal “liberal” in relative terms, became etched in the minds of Americans as a racist bogeyman; his presidential platforms were swallowed whole by Richard Nixon and co-opted into the emerging “Southern strategy.” Black America subsequently deserted the erstwhile Party of Lincoln for the Democrats, now the presumed defenders of social justice, while Republicans scooped up the South’s (shall we say “reactionary”) electoral votes.

The ambitious Wallace’s political career was like an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. He told his children only two things mattered in life, money and power – and he didn’t care about money; friends remarked that Wallace’s muse was the thrill of the campaign chase, and he became bored quickly when relegated to the day-to-day grind of governance.

And yet in 1958, when Wallace mounted his first Alabama gubernatorial campaign, he did so as a populist champion of all poor and working class residents, black or white, only to be badly beaten in the Democratic primary (the race that mattered; at the time, a Republican was lucky to get 35% of the vote in the fall).

A humiliated Wallace had an epiphany in 1958, and it brings us full circle, back to the opening exchange from the "Firing Line" of 1968.

Buckley … highlighted Wallace’s 1958 gubernatorial campaign against John Patterson, a race which Wallace lost and which led the young politician to claim that he would never again be outmaneuvered on the issue of segregation. Moderator C. Dickerson Williams had his hands full as Wallace attacked numerous peripheral details of Buckley’s comments, such as whether he really uttered terms like “out-segged” or whether he picked his teeth with a dirty toothpick, as the New York Times supposedly claimed.

“Out-segged.”

Hearing these words on a 52-year-old broadcast that I’m sure I didn’t watch as an 8-year old nonetheless struck me like a baseball bat to the cranium. On the face of it, they’re perfectly accurate words in the context of the discussion, but upon hearing them, I immediately guessed that something important was missing.

Wallace denied Buckley's attribution, openly sneering: “There’s no such expression as ‘segged’ in the vocabulary of southerners. I have never heard of the word ‘seg’ or ‘segged.’”

Duh. Of course he hadn’t.

Wallace was telling the whole truth; as you may already have guessed, and as the documentary film corrects the normally accurate Buckley, what the failed candidate actually said was this: “I was out-niggered, and I will never be out-niggered again.”

This may seem like a minor point given the slur. However, Wallace had already mastered the sort of coded language and dog whistles that have remained a valued component of the right wing’s wink-wink, nudge-nudge vocabulary to the present day. Buckley afforded Wallace a euphemism, but should he have done so?

Consequently, this had the effect of reminding me that the “N” word was explicitly forbidden in our household during the days of my habitation there.

As an ex-Marine, my father was a walking encyclopedia of creative profanity, but he doubled as family censor. THIS obscenity was okay to use in front of your mother, sparingly, but never THAT one. And the “N” word? Not at all; never. Soap, meet mouth.

Have I mentioned that my father was a strident, outspoken, sign-planting supporter of George C. Wallace in 1968 and 1972?

Ding, ding … ding.

Clearly this accounts for the dissonance in my Swiss cheese of a soul. Now, what’s to be done with it?

5.

I was born in a New Albany, Indiana hospital and spent the first 25 years of my life in or near the presumably anodyne settlement of Georgetown, less than ten miles away from the city, situated a few hundred feet above the Ohio River flood plain.

My guess is townies at the time would have denied Georgetown was a “sundown town,” just a law-abiding Mayberry clone utterly devoid of diversity even before white flight suddenly animated dozens of new subdivisions to sprout like noxious weeds, filling the former pastures of farms, all of it exploding into existence in the wake of Louisville’s 1975 desegregation order.

By then Wallace was in a wheelchair, crippled by the assassination attempt, with his national political career over and my father decamped to adoration of Reagan. After all, the GOP had cribbed all the disabled southern governor’s notes.

But this isn’t to say that my father was racist in any overt sense. He preached equality in matters like sports, although conveniently overlooking the realities of life off the basketball court or baseball diamond.

Dig deeper, and naturally it gets more complicated. My father was, in fact, an ordinary white guy in America. He was a muddled mixture of the admirable and indefensible, usually meaning well, sometimes revealing more than he’d intended, as when he would deny opposing biracial marriage – but shouldn’t they be thinking about the indignities those poor children will have to endure?

These indignities arose from my father’s and his coterie’s misplaced insistence that a biracial child was any of their business in the first place, all of which is to say that yes, my father was racist; he had to be a racist because I am, too, and this, to me, is an inescapable fact, part and parcel of hegemonic structural racism in America, hence the necessity of reading Yancy’s book.

"Racism, in short, is a way of being — exhibited by all white people, progressive and otherwise — that grants more freedom and benefits to whites at the expense of blacks and other people of color."

Am I deferring my own responsibility to listen and learn by somehow blaming my father for my upbringing? I don’t think so. I’m just trying to come to grips with it. Racism is society-wide. It’s endemic, shared and historical. On the surface, my father was better than some, and not as good as others. There’s not a lot to SEE here, such is the annoying and regrettable commonness of the topic.

To reiterate, my father doubtless would have explained his attraction to a populist demagogue like Wallace in non-racial language; obviously, they’re dog whistles precisely because they’re suggestive and implied, not overt.

He’d have said Wallace was a truth-teller who’d make American great again (half-century symmetry, anyone?) and would fight for the underdog. But my father and his buddies, well, they weren’t really underdogs, were they?

How could they be, given the eternal certainty, and those coded-language promises, that Blacks always would remain conveniently beneath them? To be blunt, that white Americans would always have a cushion between themselves and rock bottom: Black America, kept right where it belonged.

I’m angry with my father now, all these years later, not because he was a racist; as I’ve noted, it seems entirely reasonable to me that all whites are racist. Rather, it’s the one point of his that I always previously admired, and find now to be lamentably misplaced, this being his perception of the supposed underdog’s struggle.

Wallace wasn’t an underdog. He wasn’t really shielding the common white folks from mistreatment at the claws of evil central government, or the coming decades-long cancerous neoliberal pillage. Rather, Wallace was reassuring them they’d always stay a step ahead of Blacks, and so what if most of society’s wealth still somehow found its way straight to the 1%?

Maybe the poor would hit the lottery, and move up to the shining city on a hill where the accumulators of capital reside. But they wouldn’t move down THERE, below the (wink wink) invisible and therefore fully visible color line.

If the true underdogs are society’s most vulnerable, did the likes of Wallace really care for them at all? And while my father may have cared, he still supported Wallace and accepted the latter’s shell game. How do we explain this contradiction?

Later, when we both were older, I’d suggest to my father that he should take a closer look at the failure of exploitative robber baron capitalism as the root cause of certain of these maladies. Occasionally, it seemed that I was making headway against those headwinds, although in the end, he may have decided it was easier to humor me by listening, then enlisting with the next populist to appear.

6.

I can’t entirely account for the rise of this crushing angst, and it might well be the case that there’s nothing noteworthy about any of it, at least in the sense of these attitudes being common to a generation now passed.

And yet, as I’ve noted, a quick scroll of your social media feed will reveal the passing of the generational cohort, but not the diseased attitudes. They're very much still with us.

In 2016, dozens of commentators mentioned George Wallace’s racist and white nationalist legacies in the context of Donald Trump’s narcissistic theatrics, and as a well-read and informed individual, I shrugged and looked away. Of course, I recall thinking, but doesn’t everyone know it, and aren’t we past THAT?

Actually, no. Approaching the conclusion of Season Four of Aryan Nation: Trump Remixes the Racist Classics, we remain mired in it.

7.

My father's been dead for a while now. Our relationship was extremely complicated. We were very different people in many ways, and all too much alike in others. Most of the time it's nothing to dwell on, and I think we parted in 2001 with considerable mutual respect. We both gave ground. We both came around.

I'd use the word "love" if I could, but it isn't something he'd have said, so the notion seems superfluous. We were far tighter at the end than the beginning, and for this much I'm genuinely grateful.

Perhaps what I have learned the past few days while struggling to finish this demented jigsaw puzzle, all the while wearing a self-imposed blindfold, is that evidently I tried to bury quite a lot about those Wallace years as they pertained to my father – and to me. I buried it as deep as I could for as long as the memories would stay put, safely subterranean.

Maybe my boxing up of these memories and feelings, to be hidden in a dusty corner of the noggin, was a form of self-protection, with George Wallace merely a peripheral indicator. That’s because at the tender age of eight, I was an eager co-conspirator of my father's Wallace fetish, if for no other reason than the hope, so often forlorn, of this enthusiasm somehow making him happy.

My father was capable of a strange, unpredictable bad temper. He kept it inside the house, to our trepidation, and his contemporaries probably wouldn’t have known. When I was a kid, I'd try to figure out what was eating him, and couldn’t, so it became my habit to conclude that it was directed at me. My father erupted, then just as quickly erased the memory of his distemper.

It would seem that I didn’t.

Once enrolled in university, and intent on becoming the sort of intellectual calculated to irritate my father, it finally occurred to me that his anger likely stemmed from undiagnosed PTSD, a by-product of World War II; seeing as three years during your late teens on a leaky boat lobbing shells at people you couldn't see, until they came your way in kamikaze planes, is the sort of trauma calculated to stay with you.

Then, deciding the war was to blame, it compelled me to try to protect my father from his ghosts. It seemed terrible to me that one would go to war at 17, and be afflicted by the experience for decades afterward. Maybe he’d been shaped by these factors to be receptive to Wallace and his ilk.

52 years later, with the idiocy of racism and white privilege flaring all around us amid a deadly pandemic, tanking economy and global climate crisis, there remains sufficient depth of feeling – some level of feeling – about my father that out of nowhere exposed previously suppressed anger about the bill of goods my father peddled with regard to Wallace, as opposed to what Wallace really was about, and whatever part of all this involved me – or didn’t.

What’s the answer? I don’t know.

8.

It is well documented that during Wallace’s twilight years, in a dogged pursuit as vigorous as any of his campaigns for public office, he made an apparently sincere effort to atone for his mistakes. If his purported religious awakening was genuine, then the word “sins” might be more fitting.

According to Wallace’s friends, he finally understood that what he had done in order to possess political power caused great suffering to others, with his own accumulating illnesses and pain abetting this revelation. Wallace asked for forgiveness, and remarkably, Alabama’s Black voters supported his final runs for the governor’s office in the early 1980s.

A Black attorney who had figured in Wallace’s early period as judge during the 1950s responded to these entreaties by saying yes, he could forgive Wallace, but no, he could not FORGET what he'd done.

In another striking convergence, the late John Lewis – beaten by Wallace’s state troopers on Bloody Sunday in Selma at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a 19th-century Confederate general, politician and Klansman – also forgave the governor.

Forgiveness from Wallace’s victims in the play’s final act alone attests to the seemingly distant role of William Shakespeare in all this, although I think the Bard of Avon is twice applicable.

I’m not the first to see familiarly dramatic Shakespearean aspects of tragedy as pertaining to Wallace’s story: a lust for power, deals with the devil, the ironic cruelty of an assassination attempt leaving him crippled and in agony (but not killing him), and of course these later efforts to achieve forgiveness and redemption as intended to snatch his tattered soul back from Satan.

Also, like Oedipus in ancient Greece, Wallace’s ambition and arrogance carried both the seeds of success, and his own destruction.

My personal nod to Shakespeare comes with an early 1970s recollection that somehow has stayed fresh in my memory, perhaps as the perfect summary of how tense the relationship with my father was at the time.

I’d taken to checking out LPs of Shakespearean plays from the library, and trying to follow along, reading them while listening. My father came into my room one day, projected his finest facially contorted dismay, and ordered me to get ready for baseball practice by turning off “that shit.”

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.

---

Recent columns:

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

August 6: ON THE AVENUES: Surrender.

July 30: ON THE AVENUES: Guys.

July 23: ON THE AVENUES: These overdue mask mandates should help us separate the bad actors from the good.

In defense of an award-winning song: "On The Atchison Topeka And Santa Fe."

Over at Five Thirty Eight on the occasion of the Academy Awards, writer Walt Hickey had not-so-flattering things to say about the "worst best original songs in Oscar history," among which was "On The Atchison Topeka And Santa Fe."

A version is included above for your listening pleasure.

Vocal by The Sentimentalists (later to be known as The Clark Sisters) on Tommy Dorsey's version of the popular Oscar-winning tune from "The Harvey Girls." Four different recordings of the Johnny Mercer-Harry Warren song reached the national top-ten single sales chart: Judy Garland (who sang it in the movie), Dorsey, Bing, and, with the #1 chart-topping version, Mercer himself.

CD audio, originally issued on 78rpm: Victor 20-1682 - On The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe (Mercer-Warren) by Tommy Dorsey & his Orchestra, vocal by The Sentimentalists, recorded May 26, 1945

Courtesy of MusicProf78 on Facebook

I haven't watched an Academy Awards telecast since John Wayne's final appearance in 1979, and in truth, drinking Miller Lite, touring Ken Ham's ark or reading the "Collected Works of Jeff Gahan" (written by Mike Hall) sound like way more fun than sitting through the Oscars.

But I'd like to defend the virtue of "On The Atchison Topeka And Santa Fe," which to my ears is far superior to any acclaimed Disney soundtrack excerpt of the last 30 years. This song is weirdly symbolic to me, even if it was recorded 15 years before I was born.

In short, there is an exuberance to music like this from the period when WWII was drawing to a close. Granted, the end was not yet nigh; Hitler was gone, but the war in the Pacific had yet to conclude. Hiroshima and Nagasaki would not become household names until August.

And yet, at the time, America surely seemed to be atop the heap, although if we go deeper, it can be seen that this dawning age of well-ordered preeminence was remarkably brief, and a mere historical blip. The situation changed, and quickly.

In the mid- to late-1960s, only 20-something years after Dorsey's version of "On The Atchison Topeka And Santa Fe" was recorded, I was listening to it in company with the other songs on my father's LP collections of the Swing Era. We always listened to them on Sunday mornings over a big breakfast. To my dad, this was church.

For better or worse, he was populist to the core and at the time, much troubled by the Vietnam War, hippies and societal dislocation; in truth, the wealthy fat cats weren't giving the little guy a fair shake, but hadn't he served three years in the Marine Corps for just a little bit of fairness?

I don't think my father ever put all these pieces together. He had strong feelings about injustice, but lacked a consistent framework to express them. It doesn't really matter. The point I'm trying to make is that only two decades after the war, songs like "On The Atchison Topeka And Santa Fe" already had become mile markers for him. When he heard them, all those great things once again were possible.

Circa 1987, Gore Vidal spoke briefly and eloquently about the reality of the period.

The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie “answers” questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.

It's 2018, and Dorsey's recording of "On The Atchison Topeka And Santa Fe" will be 73 in May. The problem isn't so much that "they don't make 'em like this any more," although this is certifiably true.

To me, the real problem is the likelihood of someone reading about the song, and being unable to imagine what a passenger train is, having never experienced one. No wonder we've gone to hell in a hand basket.

Saying goodbye, and resuming the journey.

April 1, 2017.

We drove out to Georgetown yesterday morning, and I don't mind saying that it's a strange feeling to have both your parents in the trunk of the car.

My father died in 2001, and it was my mother's decision to keep his ashes with her at the house they shared in Georgetown. When mom began discussing her wishes with regard to her own passing, she was characteristically specific, with one major exception.

They'd purchased a burial plot at Wolfe Cemetery, on Georgetown's west side, and she acquired a veteran's government-issued headstone for them to share. However, she wouldn't commit to whether the ashes should be buried in the plot, by the headstone.

This was left up to me -- bury them, scatter them, keep them ... whatever.

As a sanity mechanism, human beings are quite capable of laughing through tears, When I first saw the fine wooden box containing my mother's ashes atop a table at the funeral home, I was reminded of the aftermath of my father's wake 16 years ago.

We drove back to the house, and I picked up the container holding my father's ashes and carried it into the house, setting it on the kitchen island counter next to the sink.

My mom walked in and didn't skip a beat.

"No, not there," she said, as though surprised by her son's failure to appreciate a hitherto unknown point of etiquette pertaining to urns, remains and their proximity to dishwashing zones.

"Then where?"

For once, she wasn't certain.

"I'm not sure. Maybe over there on the shelf?"

Granted, it's not something we think about every day. Eventually my dad's ashes were moved to a corner of the living room, along with the American flag provided by the VA for his wake, as folded in a display case. The items remained right there until 2014, when the house was sold and mom moved to Silvercrest.

Getting back to the point, my parents were pragmatists, and seldom made frivolous expenditures. In this spirit, it seemed appropriate to me to bury their ashes together in the place they'd originally chosen. Yesterday this was done.

It also was the best place, with an adjacent shade tree and enough distance between grave and highway to ensure peace for reflection. To my mind, a crisp early April morning was ideal for dispelling jitters by walking around the cemetery.

Springtime is all about renewal, and the many familiar names on the tombstones weren't depressing or funereal at all; rather, they brought back cherished memories of childhood, sports and school.

These were people who influenced me when I was a child. I looked up to them. They're gone, but many of them as yet exist in my head -- and my heart.

I thought about those chairs in Our Town, Thornton Wilder's play. Throughout my mom's final illness and death, I found myself thinking back to origins, about my youth in Georgetown. In physical terms, I've never lived very far from the place I grew up, though my consciousness has tended to reside thousands of miles away.

This has been by choice, and that's likely the way it will stay, but yesterday I may finally have started making peace with the past. We're all making a journey, and we'll all come full circle in the end. There's plenty of spirituality to be found in this life, whether or not one subscribes to a religious perspective ... and each to his or her own.

It has been a sad, exhilarating, challenging, rewarding, moving and numbing year so far. Life goes on, and so do we.

Or, as he was known to my friends, Rog Sr.

Circa 1952.

Roger George Baylor was born in 1925 and died in 2001, making him 35 years of age when I was born in 1960.

His death predated the inception of this blog by three years, and it occurs to me that I've never written "long form" about him in this venue. I won't today, either. This is because our relationship was complicated, to say the least. It would require a book, so maybe some day I'll write it. It's a bit much for now, and has been for 55 years.

At root, my father was very passionate, but could not express his positive emotions save for sheer physicality, first through sports and then by blunt force hard work in the great outdoors. Music soothed him -- a bit, and then usually only on Sunday.

It was music, not church. If memory serves, his all-time favorite was “Sentimental Journey,” and nothing better describes his customary mood, looking back through the years, than this choice of ditties.

It was as though each morning he awoke (very early, a lifelong dairyman's habit) and confronted the world's existential indifference by coming out swinging, then dropping from exhaustion hours later. But maybe these really were internal struggles, and absent a formula for talking them out, into the open, he chose instead to try battering them into submission, or at least keeping them safely at bay.

Come to think of it, the preceding paragraph might just apply to his son, too, except that my chosen weapons have been words and ideas, not sweat and musculature.

Growing up, our inability to mesh was frustrating. My father and I were just enough alike, and also just enough different, to spend long periods utterly at odds. The word "love" wasn't ever spoken in my house, and I mean this literally. In material terms, life at home was easy for me. Psychologically, it was a challenge at times.

However, in the end, father and son both made concessions. We came to respect each other, and to regard our differing proclivities as complementary.

I'm satisfied with that.



Roger G. Baylor joined the US Marine Corps in 1942 and put in two and a half years as a gun striker and shellman at the 5-inch guns aboard the battleship USS Washington, Pacific Theater. He was called back to service during the Korean War, but remained stateside.

He personally experienced kamikazes, though not all threats to life and limb came from the enemy. During my father's time on the battleship, it collided with another American ship (ironically, the USS Indiana), and once rode out a major typhoon.

World War II interrupted my father's promising career in baseball, though back home after the war, he gave it a belated shot, eventually playing briefly in 1949 for the Kingsport Cherokees of the Appalachian League. At 24 years old, he was over the hill for a Class D league, lowest of the low minors, and yet how many players even make it that far?

In 2011, Ten years after his death, sporting immortality finally came for Roger G. Baylor when his minor league baseball statistics appeared on-line for the very first time.

The batting average was only .213, but more than half his hits went for extra bases, and that's good. Had baseball worked out for him, I probably wouldn't be here.

When Bettye Sue Allen arrived in Georgetown, Indiana to teach at the high school, she was fresh out of the University of Kentucky, and in a strange new place.

She made friends with the late Alda Coakley (later Cecil), who also was good friends with my father, and Alda proved to be the matchmaker who brought my parents together.

My father is seated to the left, with Alda on the right. The venue is the Wonderland in Lanesville, Indiana -- later the Circle Bar, and now the liquor store. The time was the early 1950s, and the fellow dancing has just invented the photo bomb.

Two years ago, I posted this picture on social media, and a comment made by my friend and colleague Jeff Gillenwater comes closest to summarizing the ups and downs of my relationship with my father, though you must speak British to "get" it.

Figures; the old man was a Rocker, you turned out a Mod.

That's all I have for now. My father didn't do Hallmark, and neither do I. He'd be the first to understand exactly why it is impossible for me to produce one of the glowing, feel-good written testimonials to fatherhood on the occasion of Father's Day.

He'd expect no more than facts. It was what it was, and nothing else. It wouldn't bother him.

It doesn't me, and it shouldn't you.

London fog, Skinnay Ennis and my old man.

It's foggy out this morning, and every time this happens, I think of an old song.

I grew up listening to this tune and hundreds more from the same period via my father's swing era compilation albums. These were absolute staples of Sunday morning relaxation, because he didn't go to church. Whatever his religious beliefs, preachers simply didn't fit into them; the great outdoors, tinkering and memories of youth did.

Music like this was in his head when he joined the Marines at 17 in 1942, and it remained there through three years in the Pacific and afterward, until he died. He honored his past each Sunday morning. As rituals go, it's one I respect quite a lot, and it's worth remembering on Veterans Day.

When I was a kid, London fog was a cliche, and something to be regarded a as atmospheric in a figurative sense. A new book examines the literal aspects of London's former fogginess: "London Fog: A Biography," by Christine Corton.

Grey and dreichy: How London so often used to be (The Economist)

 ... London, in its river basin ringed by hills, has always had what the Scots call “dreich”; cold, wet winter mists that in early November led to flights being cancelled at Heathrow. Pea-soup fogs were quite different; they were so polluted with soot from domestic and industrial coal fires that people coughed up black mucus. As the Times put it in 1853, London’s fogs converted “the human larynx into an ill-swept chimney”. In 1921 a sample cubic inch of air contained 340,000 sooty particles. One of the last great fogs, in 1952, was so thick that a performance of “La Traviata” at Sadler’s Wells was cancelled after fog seeped into the theatre. No one could see the stage.

Now, back to the "Foggy Day in London," as performed by Hal Kemp and His Orchestra, with Edgar Clyde "Skinnay" Ennis, Jr., on vocals.

For all I know about the big bands, one thing I didn't know until today is that Ennis died from choking on a bone while dining.

With that, it's off for a foggy walk.

Keith Olbermann on Tommy John surgeries ... and all about Steve Dalkowski.

To put it mildly, this story goes all over the place.

Let's start with a commentary yesterday by Keith Olbermann on ESPN: Video: All The Tommy John Surgeries Are A Good Thing. Olbermann's consideration of an increasingly common surgical procedure closes with a reference to the legendary pitcher Steve Dalkowski.

And who was Dalkowski?

Delving into the Dalkowski depths, by Steve Treder (The Hardball Times)

... He is a figure from the deepest heart of baseball legend and lore. In his every aspect, of electrifying performance and of gargantuan struggle, on and off the field, he appears far more plausible as an invention, as a character of baseball fiction inhabiting the same imaginary universe as Ring Lardner’s Jack Keefe, Bernard Malamud’s Roy Hobbs and George Plimpton’s Sidd Finch, than as historical reality.

Dalkowski's legend probably dates to Pat Jordan's classic piece from Sports Illustrated in 1970.

The Wildest Fastball Ever

... Stories of Dalkowski's speed and wildness passed from one minor league town to another. Inevitably, the stories outgrew the man, until it was no longer possible to distinguish fact from fiction. But, no matter how embellished, one fact always remained: Dalkowski struck out more batters and walked more batters per nine-inning game than any professional pitcher in baseball history.

In the 1980s, Jordan penned a follow-up essay in Inside Sports, picking up the Dalkowski story at its lowest ebb, as described here in SI, circa 2003:

Where Are They Now? Steve Dalkowski, by Pete McEntegart

 ... Soon he was in the California fields, picking cotton and sugar beets, beans and carrots. Dalkowski's drink of choice was cheap wine, which he would buy when the bus stopped on the way to the crop field. Often he would place a bottle in the next row as motivation.

Dalkowski doesn't remember much of the next 30 years. He suffers from alcohol-related dementia, but the gaps in his memory don't start until about 1964. "I keep trying and trying to remember," he says. "But I don't."

In the course of reading about Dalkowski, it occurred to me that there is an oblique point of convergence with my father's brief baseball career, in that they both played at Kingsport, Tennessee, eight years apart; my dad in 1949, and Dalko in 1957.

For this incredibly strange reason, I stumbled via Google across the byline of Vince Staten, former Louisville-area barbecue specialist and columnist for the now degraded Gannett paper. As of 2009, Staten also was in Kingsport.

Steve Dalkowski - The Real Nuke LaLoosh

Steve Dalkowski, the fastest pitcher in baseball history, and the wildest, spent the 1957 season with the Kingsport Orioles.

ON THE AVENUES: Killer Diller.

ON THE AVENUES: Killer Diller.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

The last surviving member of Glenn Miller’s “civilian” orchestra has died.

Paul Tanner, a trombonist with the Glenn Miller Orchestra who became a prominent jazz educator at UCLA and created an unusual electronic musical instrument heard on the Beach Boys' classic 1966 hit "Good Vibrations," has died. He was 95.

Paul Tanner’s last performance with Glenn Miller came 71 years ago, prior to the bandleader joining the Army, where he formed a new military aggregation to play for the troops in Europe. Miller died in a plane crash in 1944, and 22 years later, his former employee played on a Beach Boys hit. By then, I was 6 years old, and can remember hearing “Good Vibrations” on the radio.

Will the circle be unbroken?

Mostly I grew up listening to big band records like those of Glenn Miller. They weren’t the original 78 rpm recordings, but the long-playing compilations that began appearing during the 1960’s as original listeners grew older, and a lucrative market for nostalgia came into being.

My father, who served three years in the Pacific during the war, had no musical aptitude of which I’m aware apart from singing Marine Corps boot camp anthems while mending barbed wire fences on the farm, but it didn’t stand in the way of his favored weekly ritual of playing World War II-era songs on Sunday morning.

It was music, not church. If memory serves, his all-time favorite was “Sentimental Journey,” and nothing better describes his customary mood, looking back through the years, than this choice of ditties.

Like so many of his wartime generation, my dad adored the music of Glenn Miller, who was a veritable hit-making machine from the mid-1930s through his death. At the age of 10, I could reel them off by heart: In the Mood, I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo, American Patrol, Tuxedo Junction, Elmer’s Tune, Moonlight Serenade and Chattanooga Choo Choo, among others.

As for the latter, Miller’s big band era counterpart Artie Shaw – an irascible, erudite and unrepentant curmudgeon who died at 94 in 2004 – once said, “Glenn should have lived and Chattanooga Choo Choo should have died.” Shaw’s bon mot reflects a certain annoyance among jazz and swing purists that Miller’s work was overly commercial, and it may have revealed the clarinetist’s own dissonance; he, too, led a military band into war zones (Pacific Theater), but survived into old age, seldom revered. Miller never had to face the post-war shift change in popular music taste, which already was killing the big bands before the war killed Miller.

In short, James Dean wasn’t the first American cultural icon to die young and stay pretty.

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For the longest time, I was unable to square my dad’s attachment to this music with those three years of duty as a Marine gunner aboard the USS Washington. How can music elicit nostalgia about the dangers of combat on the front lines? What’s more, how could such sweet and innocuous music ever have transferred psychologically to a battlefield in the first place? Isn’t fighting about anger? For soldiers in Vietnam to have the Doors, and during the Gulf War to be thinking about Metallica, makes perfect sense – but Moonlight Serenade?

At some point, I finally understood that nostalgic memories like my father’s almost always exclude what was bad about the past, all the better to focus with total recall on what was good; seeing as the whole idea back in the day was to get home alive so there’d be the time needed to grow old, it strikes me that nostalgia usually references the strength, vitality and unlimited horizons afforded youth. Those are the things we miss the most.

While I try to resist the nostalgic temptation, it’s clear that when more of life lies behind you rather than ahead, you understandably enjoy the reverie of recalling when the chronology (joyously) was the other way around, even if nothing can be done to facilitate a reversal at this late date. Hence the old, outdated music, from Genesis to Replacements, still spinning in my own head today as I try to make sense of my 1980s travels in the East Bloc, almost a quarter-century after the Wall came down.

At least it was just a “cold” war.

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The central point here is that thanks to my non-musical father’s musical obsessions, I carry the legacy of the big band period with me always, and when I say “with me,” it’s purely literal in addition to metaphorical. He couldn’t have known it, and I wouldn’t have been able to explain it as a child, but music has been a constant presence with me for as long as I can remember, in spite of my not possessing a shred of vocal or instrumental aptitude apart from frightening the cats while singing while in the shower.

Does whistling qualify as music?

And so music plays in my head every single day. Glenn Miller had a hit song called Juke Box Saturday Night, but with me, it’s Juke Box All the Damned Time. Music plays in my dreams, and the random song generator pops into place when I awaken. In my personal episode of Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone,” it’s a given that when the music finally stops playing, I’ll soon die. Thus, it’s axiomatic that the music … the show … must go on.

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At some point during my teens, it was a late summer’s night in Southern Indiana. The windows were open, it was warm outside but with a slight nip in the air, and leaves just on the cusp of turning were rustling amid a breeze in the woods. The song in my head as I lay in bed was “Manhattan Serenade,” in all respects a forgettable pop song, circa 1942, as performed by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra with Jo Stafford on vocals.

For whatever reason, something just clicked. Surely it was a coincidence. Probably I was ready to contemplate mortality in some way I hadn’t previously, to imagine an anonymous song, a lost era, a pastoral scene and my own tombstone in a cemetery filled with hundreds of others – the whole, huge, meandering procession of history; somehow grafting the chairs lined up in “Our Town” onto my brief lifespan, the unfulfilled hopes and dreams, the fears and uncertainties arranged like books on a shelf, and basically, momentarily, glimpsing a small bit of the finality of death.

It was confusing, wistful and melancholy. Oddly, it wasn’t debilitating. Rather, it may have been my first exposure to the quality known as the elegiac; by definition, a sacramental summary of what has passed, offered by the living looking backward.

The whys and wherefores are not clear, only that it’s something about Paul Tanner’s wire service obituary, following on the heels of a recent week delving into the Glenn Miller CD archive, while thinking about where we’ve been and where we’re going, and the music still playing all the while. It rouses the elegy gene, and here we are, ruminating ... in the elegiac mood.

Moonlight Cocktail? Need a few.

For the record: Kingsport TN, 1949.

A couple months ago, I was surprised to discover that research into the dusty archives of lower-tier baseball had advanced to the point where my father's name appeared for the first time ever on the Internet site www.baseball-reference.com, albeit without statistics.

Nonetheless, there it was: In 1949, for the Kingsport Cherokees of the Appalachian League, Roger G. Baylor played in at least a few baseball games. He was 24 years old, surely over the hill for the lowest of the low minors; then again, he'd put in three years in the Marines during WWII before turning 21.

I looked again tonight, and incomplete numbers now are posted: http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/player.cgi?id=baylor001rog

It may have been "D" league, and his batting average was only .213, but more than half his hits went for extra bases, and that's not so bad. Finally, ten years after his death, my dad enjoys numerical immortality on the Web. It is a very strange world, although one that I continue to appreciate.