Bryce Zabel's FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH

No Virtual Cards, Please

First off, let's give a shout-out to the intrepid Internet explorer in the  United Kingdom who, while looking for an image of Blackbeard the pirate, found this site earlier today. In hunting us down, this person became our 120,000th distinct hit in the months this blog's been up and publishing. I know there are sites that get 120,000 hits a day and more, but here at For What It's Worth where we average more modest numbers this seemed worth mentioning...

Our second shout-out goes to our friends in Norway celebrating Norwegian Constitution Day. Thanks to Wikipedia this is the first year I've been able to say that on my birthday.

Oops, did I say the B-word? Yes, it's today (and, no, as a citizen of Hollywood I defend my right not to tell you the exact year) and so I looked up the date on Wikipedia. If you haven't done that for your own birthday you should try it. Here's what I learned:

I share the day with Bill Paxton (who I just enjoyed in this week's Tivo'd episode of "Big Love"), Sugar Ray Leonard, Bob Saget, Trent Raznor, Enya... and, this was a shocker, the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini! Who knew? Given our current stand-off with Iran this is, well, it's still largely irrelevant information.

Lawrence Welk, Tony Randall and Frank Gorshin died on this day but that doesn't really count, I think. We don't usually pay much attention to the days people died unless they died badly: John Kennedy on November 22 and John Lennon on December 8 come to mind.

There have been some cool landmark events, too. In 1775, the Continental Congress banned trade with Canada, an event now known in the U.S. as "Bill O'Reilly Day." In 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown versus the Board of Education which struck down "separate, but equal" in schools. In 1973, the Watergate hearings began on TV, and a year later the LAPD raided the Symbionese Liberation Army headquarters in Los Angeles in a bloody shoot-out that killed six. And they made same sex-marriages legal in Massachusetts two years ago.

Here's another one that a friend just sent me. It turns out that back on May 17, 1915 Chicago Cubs pitcher George "Zip" Zabel went in as the relief pitcher with two outs in the first inning and wound up with 4-3 19-inning win over Brooklyn in what, to this day, remains the longest relief job ever. Yes, Zabels have a lot of staying power. My birthday, my name, that's one I've got to remember.

So far this year I have received a mass-and-volume birthday card from my mother-in-law, a former assistant, my stockbroker, the gang at the dental office and virtual cards from a small collection of friends and acquaintances, including a notable cartoon one from my friend, Nancy, that sang to me. Another animated card was Shtick Figure Man which was very funny, too. My Florida pal, Peter, actually gave me a gift certificate at iTunes which got converted into the new Springsteen CD. My friend Marco sent me one that looks like a ransom letter that said: "Have a happy birthday or I will move in next to you."

As a kid I used to love my birthday. It came at the end of the school year and always meant summer vacation right around the corner. These days, not so much. Although, by happy coincidence, my good friend and mentor, Bill Asher and his wife, Meredith, are in town and we're having dinner. Bill directed on "I Love Lucy" and produced "Bewitched" and showed me how to run a show on the first one I got on network television. Bill was also at parties where JFK and Marilyn attended, but that's another story, and one only he can tell.

My plan this year was to go climb a peak in the Santa Monica mountains just so the day would stand out. But that idea got scuttled in the normal deadlines and commitments of life.

Maybe, in honor of Norwegian Constitution Day, I'll celebrate with a bite of Lutefisk if I can find anyone who can make the stuff.

{Photo by Anders Brownworth}

Happy Valentines Day!

Meet my valentine, Jackie. We've been married since, well, we don't have to get into that now, but long enough to have three kids, two dogs and a house. We met in the Los Angeles mayor's office when we were both reporters. I was a CNN guy and she was working radio at the time.

Here we are at the 2001 Emmy Awards which were held after two cancellations because of 9/11 issues. She's carrying a purse we got in New York right after the attacks. I was pretty damn proud to be her escort that night.

Hope you and your valentine have a great day and night and as much happiness as we've had together.

New Year's Resolutions

Hmmm... let's see... I guess achieving World Peace would be good. 

I heard a local talk show host say that the #1 resolution people make is to spend more time with family and friends. Yeah, that's good, too. One thing's for sure. Nobody ever died and said, "If only I'd spent more time on the Internet and been a better blogger."

Have a great 2006! May your blogging be fruitful but don't forget the personal touch. Later...

Macs and Ducks and Chrismukkah

Well, I hope you had a Merry Christmas or a Happy Hannukah (however you spell it) and that the New Year looks good from where you're sitting.

My big holiday gift was an Apple iMac G5. I had a lot of anxiety about leaving the PC world after twenty years, but my fears were unfounded. Now that I'm up and running, this gleaming white beauty seems to live up to Walter Mossberg's review calling it the "gold standard" of computers. It's truly fantastic, and I'll probably rave more about it later. For now, let's just say I'm happy.

And, on the subject of things to be happy about, let me also take a moment to send a shout-out to the Oregon Ducks who play the Oklahoma Sooners in the Holiday Bowl this Thursday in San Diego. The Ducks, you may recall, went 10-1 this season, losing only to USC, and ended up ranked #5 in the BCS ratings, even though they got screwed in bowl invitations. But, hey, I'm not bitter. San Diego is a great place for all my friends who live in Eugene to come for a few days of R-and-R in the Southern California sunshine. Go Ducks!

Also, I just got a copy of the final version of the Blackbeard mini-series I wrote, starring Angus Macfadyen as Blackbeard and Richard Chamberlin as Governor Charles Eden. I'll have details later, but it has the feel of a good old-fashioned pirate movie (and that's a good thing).

Speaking of movies, lots of new reviews on the Movie Smackdown blog, check 'em out if you have the time. Syriana -vs- Traffic... Rumor Has It -vs- The Graduate... Walk the Line -vs- Ray... The Family Stone -vs- National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation... Rent -vs- Philadelphia... Jarhead -vs- Three Kings...

Happy New Year all... what's your resolution??

Heavy Wind Advisory: The 1962 Columbus Day Storm

Mostly, I remember the green walnuts. That's my most vivid memory of the 1962 Columbus Day Storm that slammed Oregon during my childhood. Kids don't think in terms of damage to infrastructure. For me, it was wondering how I was ever going to get the green hulls off the walnuts which had been prematurely blown off our trees. The buyers wouldn't take them if they didn't look right and the spare change I made off those walnuts supplemented my meager allowance. I wasn't old enough to get a real paper-route and start making the serious bread.

Natural disasters are on everybody's minds these days. We argue about whether we had enough notice and whether people did the right thing once they had it. Well, we had practically no notice about this one and what notice we got vastly understated the danger and once the danger hit there was no FEMA to come to the rescue or blame for botching it.

Columbus Day Storm / October 12, 1962

It was a Friday and as the day started the air was unusually calm so when the Weather Service started talking about some wind gusts coming off the tail of Typhoon Freda out in the Pacific -- gusts up to 60 mph -- nobody really believed them. This was 43 years ago, mind you, and we trust the weather forecasts a great deal more today than we did then. So while people had warnings about Katrina and had the ability to act on or ignore them, we really had nothing.

I was in grade school -- Peter Boscow Elementary School -- and every day I walked the four or five blocks there and back. I remember on the way home that a wind gust came out of nowhere and blew me off my feet. Literally. We got a lot of rain in Hillsboro, Oregon back then, but winds like this I had never experienced.

As finally recorded, the gusts of the Columbus Day Storm reached 160 mph in some places and the entire coast was slammed by hurricane force winds. I've seen this storm called the "Biggest Extratropical Cyclone of the 20th Century." In less than 12 hours, up to 15 billion board feet of timber was blown down in California, Oregon and Washington combined. Let me put that in perspective. That number exceeds the annual timber harvest for Oregon and Washington at the time.

There's a wonderful web page where people who remember the storm have their memories posted. Reading some of their stories certainly evoked a lot of thoughts of my own. In the Willamette Valley, where I lived, it's said that the undamaged home was the exception and the damaged home was the rule. That was certainly true of our home.

I remember watching our front yard tree fall down before my very eyes as I stared out the window. It hit our roof and, at that point, I think my dad hustled everybody into the basement. I remember the power being out for several days. Mostly I remember walking out the next morning and being shocked. Most of our roof tiles had blown off. The tree was in a bedroom. Several other trees in the backyard had blown down.

And, of course, the walnuts were everywhere. An entire fall season's worth of walnuts were on the ground in a single day and it was my job (and my brother's) to salvage as many as we could. I remember crying about how my favorite tree, the one I would always climb when we were playing outside, had blown down and was being cut up for firewood. The back yard never looked the same after.

You go to Hillsboro today and there really isn't much evidence that the Columbus Day Storm ever happened. Probably most of the barns you'll see in the area were built after 1962 because the older ones were all destroyed. The biggest storm to hit after, though, was the economic one that happened when all the hi-tech companies like Intel and Hewlett-Packard moved offices into the area decades later, turning that little town of 6,000 that I grew up in into a city ten times as large.

Every year at this time, my mind always turns to the Columbus Day Storm. These days we debate whether we should even celebrate Columbus Day, of course, and the actual date shifts to fit federal calendars. Six years after the storm, in fact, President Johnson shifted from a firm date to the second Monday in October. But I remember the exact day. It was October 12. If you lived in Oregon back then, you'll never forget.

On Freedom

If you want to read a great book about what price others paid for our freedom, try reading 1776 by David McCullough. You won't take what we have for granted if you do.

"The year 1776, celebrated as the birth year of the nation and for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was for those who carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too, they would never forget."

"The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom."

1776, by the way, is being made into a mini-series by HBO. Have a safe and happy 4th of July.

Father's Day

He grew up in the Great Depression, fought the Japanese in World War II, and came home and married Mom. He taught American History in high school, paid his bills on time, lived simply, had a few heart attacks but still managed to live a long, full life. He wasn't perfect, but he tried to be a good man and he kept our family afloat and safe. He died a few months before 9/11.

Harvey Zabel (1922-2001)

 

Since 1984