Spring Fever: For Any Season

By Randolph C. Shaw

A compilation of the author's own vast personal experiences, investigative reports and news coverage, mixed with outlooks and observations of life from ancient authors to present. Enjoy!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780988734302

Book preview

Kingsley

Let Us Begin

It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. An when you’ve got it, you want –oh, you don’t quite know what it is you want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!

-Mark Twain

Do noble things, not dream them all day long: And so make Life, Death and the vast Forever, one grand, sweet song.

-Charles Kingsley

I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance; to live so that which comes to me as seed goes to the next as blossom and that which comes to be as blossom, goes on as fruit.

-Dawna Markova

Never miss a good chance to shut up.

-Will Rogers

One of My Bloopers

Occasionally I get asked if I’ve ever made a big mistake or serious blunder while broadcasting news and, of course, I answer, no. But, since no one ever believes that, I will share with you a personal blooper that has unfortunately followed me over the years.

I had only been anchoring network radio news for the Mutual Broadcasting Company in the Washington, D.C. area for a matter of days when a story developed from United Airlines. The company had just hired its first woman pilot. She had logged extraordinary hours of flight time and was not only vastly experienced, she was said to be drop-dead gorgeous. She had been a beauty queen at the Kentucky Derby.

Some 15-seconds had been allotted for that final story in the five minute newscast, but when I looked up at the clock, only six seconds remained. Dead air is forbidden so I performed... the dreaded ad-lib.

Finally tonight, I said authoritatively, United Airlines has announced it has hired its first woman pilot... a former Kentucky Derby winner!

I don’t remember the pilot’s name, but I’m still so very sorry.

-Randolph C. Shaw

My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened.

-Ramon Montaigne

There are basically three kinds of men:

The ones that learn by reading,

And the few who learn by observation.

The rest of them still have to pee on the electric fence and find out for themselves.

-Will Rogers

Lessons Not Taught

One of the great lessons seldom effectively taught in college is the lesson of humility. It is usually the first of a long series of lessons we learn in our post graduate course, when the cold, cold world is our instructor. This was subtly suggested in a newspaper cartoon.

It pictured a young woman in cap and gown, armed with her college diploma and a sufficient amount of self-satisfied dignity. Confronting her was the grim visage of the old world himself, who remarked rather casually, Well, what do we have here?

You evidently don’t know me, replied the slightly pained young graduate; I am Virginia Cordelia Smith, A.B.

The real world replied, My dear girl, come with me and I will teach you the rest of your alphabet.

-George Walter Fiske

Sometimes I look at my children and say to myself, ‘Lillian, you should have remained a virgin.’

-Lillian Carter (mother of former President Jimmy Carter)

Mistakes

There are six mistakes of life that many of us make, said a famous writer, and then he gave the following list:

*The delusion that individual advancement is made by crushing others down.

*The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected.

*Insisting that a thing is impossible because we ourselves cannot accomplish it.

*Refusing to set aside trivial preferences in order that important things may be accomplished.

*Neglecting development and refinement.

*The failure to establish the habit of saving money.

-Southern Bulletin

There are few positions in life in which difficulties have not been encountered. These difficulties are, however, our best instructors, as our mistakes often form our best experience.

We learn wisdom from failure more than from success. We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do. Horne Tooke used to say that he had become all the better acquainted with the country from having the good luck sometimes to lose his way. Great thoughts, discoveries, and inventions have very generally been nurtured in hardship, often pondered over in sorrow and established with difficulty.

-Paxton Hood

The Right Attitude

Remember to keep the right attitude no matter what. We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.

They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of his freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

-Viktor E. Frank

If the heavens were paper and all the water in the world ink, and all the trees were turned into pens, you could not even then record the sufferings and the horrors.

-Rabbi after liberation of Nazi death camps – 1945

The Priest Who Saw Hell

Over the years, there have been wonderful opportunities to travel with or interview U-S presidents, congressional leaders, prime ministers and leaders of foreign lands. But the one interview I cherish most captured my heart and soul, left me totally amazed and emotionally drained, and involved an unassuming parish priest in Dallas, Texas.

It wasn’t even an interview in which I had given much credence and had it not been for the fact I had very little to do that day, I wouldn’t have bothered with it. But I would have missed the story of a lifetime. Thank goodness it happened in spite of my attitude toward it. And it was an attitude adjustment that came almost instantly when I came face to face with Father Francis Joseph Gabryl; the most unforgettable person I’ve ever met.

We sat down to talk about his long tenure as a priest in a small room at St. Pius X parish. It was 1978 and he was celebrating his Golden Jubilee; 50-years in the calling of God. But he had experienced the stench and horror of death from the fires of hell, first hand.

He grew up in Wadowice, Poland about 35 miles southwest of Krakow. He was among a few young boys who knew early on they were destined to become Catholic priests.

Gabryl must have been a smart student because he says he was asked by some of his teachers to help another classmate, Edmund, who was failing in several academic areas. The two became friends.

He told me one day he was invited into Edmund’s small apartment where he was greeted by the boy’s mother, Emilia, and a new addition to the family, a little baby boy nick-named Lolek. He told me how funny he thought it was, because he had seen Emilia several times before, but never knew she was pregnant. She was, as he put it, a rather large woman. So the baby boy came as a real surprise to him.

The boys were friends for years. Gabryl later left town and headed to Krakow to study theology. He wouldn’t know for decades Edmund had died of scarlet fever when Lolek was only about nine years old.

The small but stout priest would lean toward me when I asked questions because he was deaf in one ear. He says he had been warned during the early 1940’s he was being followed by the German Gestapo. He says they suspected him of being in the underground and passing information to the general Polish population from British broadcasts during the Nazi occupation. He never said if that was true.

In 1941, he was arrested and mercilessly interrogated by the Gestapo. They beat and tortured him. One ear was bleeding so badly he would never hear out of it again and many of his front teeth had been knocked out from the numerous blows to his head. He blamed some of his poor eyesight on the beatings, as well.

The Nazis decided to send the priest to a little prison camp about 40-miles from his jail cell in Krakow, near the pre-war German-Polish border. The camp was called Auschwitz. And if that hell on earth wasn’t enough, he was later sent to Dachau just outside of Munich, Germany. He managed to survive the two most notorious concentration camps in history.

The priest spoke softly as he recalled how his body was used in various medical experiments. He was one of thousands of human guinea pigs. In the wake of beatings and near starvation, the Nazis attempted to give him typhus and malaria. At one point, he says, they strapped his feet into boxes filled with ravenous mosquitoes. They literally ate part of him alive.

German doctors would conduct massive experiments on their captives, including using a decompression chamber, tuberculosis experiments, trying new medications and testing the effects of hypothermia.

Other Polish prisoners kept the good priest alive by giving him small pieces of raw potatoes when he was in isolation and hungry. His face looked so thankful for that, even now, as he remembered some of the friends and total strangers who helped save his life.

There was also the forced labor; building roads, working in gravel pits or draining marshes.

Dachau served as the central camp for Christian prisoners. According to Catholic records, at least three-thousand religious, deacons, bishops and priests were imprisoned there.

The father told me he had been marked for death. A guard pointed his finger at him and he knew. The priest thought it was coming one morning toward the end of April, 1945. He heard gunfire. He thought to himself some poor souls are being executed outside right then and his turn was coming any minute. He prayed.

He says there was a lot of confusion. Moments later, many people were trying to figure out why they couldn’t see any Nazi guards or tower gunners. Where had they gone?

The commotion grew and Gabryl wound up outside where he saw some troops headed toward the prison camp. They were Americans and everyone was about to be freed. Thousands of half-crazed, half-naked, starving prisoners were liberated. The joy was indescribable. The thankful tears fell.

Gabryl says one soldier told him he was from Texas. He says he didn’t know what that meant or where it was, but he promised that soldier he would go to Texas one day. He did. But, he did much more than that.

After the war there was much for him to do in his homeland. More than 12-thousand priests had died or been killed in concentration camps and he says there were only a few hundred priests left. So they worked hard to rebuild and recover. It took several years.

But, in 1951, Gabryl kept his promise and arrived in Texas following an invitation from the Dallas Catholic Diocese. And there he stayed, giving back for decades to thousands who never knew his full story or the promise he made. He touched the lives of countless numbers of people around the world and so did that little boy who used to hang around him in Poland. Remember Lolec? He became a Polish priest too, later a bishop and then the leader of 600-million Catholics around the world. Lolec’s real name was Karol Jozef Wojtyla. You may have known him as Pope John Paul II.

Father Francis Joseph Gabryl finally went back to Poland from the United States upon retirement. He died there on November 27, 1985. I met him for only 90-minutes back in 1978 and I’ve never forgotten him. There must be a special place in heaven for those who experienced the fires of hell here on earth.

-Randolph C. Shaw

The world must know what happened and never forget.

-General Dwight Eisenhower (while visiting Nazi death camps in 1945)

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

-Albert Einstein

By the time a man is wise enough to watch his step, he’s too old to go anywhere.

-Billy Crystal

When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.

-Cherokee Nation saying

You Hurt, Suffer and Can’t? Nonsense!

Illness knocks a lot of nonsense out of us; it induces humility, cuts us down to our own size. It enables us to throw a searchlight upon our inner selves and to discover how often we have rationalized our failures and weaknesses, dodged vital issues and run skulkingly away. For only when the way straightens and the gate grows narrow, do some people discover their soul, their God, or their life work.

Florence Nightingale, too ill to move from her bed, reorganized the hospitals of England.

Semi-paralyzed and under the constant menace of apoplexy, Louis Pasteur was tireless in his attack on disease.

The great American historian Francis Parkman is a triumphant prototype of all such conquerors of pain. During the greater part of his life, Parkman suffered so acutely that he could not work for more than five minutes at a time. His eyesight was so wretched that he could scrawl only a few gigantic words on a manuscript, yet he contrived to write nearly 20 magnificent volumes of history.

Even pain confers spiritual insight, a beauty of outlook, a philosophy of life, an understanding and forgiveness of humanity – in short, a quality of peace and serenity that can scarcely be acquired by the owner of pure horse flesh. Milton declared, Who best can suffer, best can do. The proof is his ‘Paradise Lost’ written after he was stricken blind.

-Louis E. Bisch

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, day and night, to make you ‘everybody else,’ means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

-E.E. Cummings

He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away.

-Raymond Hull

Pope John Paul’s First U-S Visit

No one had ever given me a feeling of awe in my coverage of the nation’s capitol, until an assignment came to cover the first U-S visit of the pope. It happened in October of 1979. Pope John Paul II became the first pontiff to visit the White House.

But it wasn’t all the pomp and ceremony I remember; it’s the looks on the faces of the thousands upon thousands of people who came just to catch a glimpse of him, just to be near him. They carried the faces of love and inner peace.

His presence somehow gave out a feeling of calm and comfort. His face and the look in his eye, with a little glint of a sparkly smile, drew people to him like a magnet. You could not see him and not feel instantly impressed by his spirit.

The pope visited Washington, D.C., also making a stop in Chicago where he celebrated mass at Grant Park. Chicago had the biggest Catholic archdiocese in the country and was home to the biggest Polish community.

But it was in Boston, at a mass on Boston Common, where I found the most bizarre and wonderful reaction to Pope John Paul.

The crowds everywhere were extraordinary. Some 400-to-500-thousand people were on hand to see the pontiff say Mass on Boston Common. He would be celebrating his first Mass in the United States. Thousands more lined the motorcade route from Logan Airport to the common.

It drizzled all day long, but by the time the pope arrived, it poured.

The crowd was dripping wet from rain, but they stayed for the entire Mass. The rain was beating down but no one moved. They heard the pope’s message: I want to meet you and tell you all – men and women of all creeds and ethnic origins, children and youth, fathers and mothers, the sick and the elderly – that God loves you; that He has given you a dignity as human beings that is beyond compare. The crowd loved him and loved his words.

Pope John Paul II became the second-longest serving pope in history and the first non-Italian to serve since 1523. He was one of the most travelled world leaders in all of history. He visited 129-countries.

He was a poet and philosopher and served as a role model to people of all faiths. He was very special and everyone who ever saw him or heard him could feel it. Maybe his older boyhood Polish friend, Father Francis Joseph Gabryl, a longtime Texas priest, tutored him well.

-Randolph C. Shaw

If you’re ridin’ ahead of the herd, you might want to look back every now and then and see if it’s still followin’ ya.

-Will Rogers

The Origin of Wisdom

It is not enough to have books, or to know where to read up for information when we want it.

Practical wisdom for the purposes of life must be carried about with us, and be ready for use at call.

It is not enough that we have a fund laid up at home, but not a farthing in our pocket: we must carry about with us a store of the current coin of knowledge ready for exchange on all occasions else, we are helpless when this opportunity for action occurs.

The experience gathered from books is of the nature of learning; the experience gained from actual life is of the nature of wisdom; and a small store of the latter is worth vastly more than any stock of the former.

-S. Smiles

Always, be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.

-Judy Garland

The Media

Television is not the truth. Television is a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We’re in the boredom killing business.

-Paddy Chayevsky

Television: A medium – so-called because it is neither rare, nor well done.

-Ernie Kovacs

If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.

-Mark Twain

More Bloopers

Back during the Ford administration, I was driving down the Potomac Parkway on my way to work at WAVA All News Radio, just outside Washington, D.C., when I heard a colleague’s voice over the car radio. He was a man with an extremely deep voice; a physical trait which some critics claim diminishes one’s mental ability. He always failed to dispel that theory.

In those days, if a bulletin came down the UPI or AP wire services, you would rip the paper directly off the machine, read it to yourself and then read it immediately on the air. But the wire machine was mechanically unpredictable. Often ours would incorrectly print random letters for some unknown reason and it was doing it again this day. In this particular case, the letter g was inadvertently being replaced by the letter k.

Our illustrious and I’ve decided to keep him ‘un-named’ anchorman saw an ‘urgent’ message concerning the president’s whereabouts, printed errors and all, and read it, ‘as is’, into his radio microphone.

President Gerald Ford is in China at this hour, he read confidently, and is currently at a museum to view artifacts from the Mink and Chink dynasties; the Mink and Chink dynasties? Oh, that’s not all.

One of the worst errors witnessed in this particular gentleman’s short career was the assassination attempt of President Gerald Ford by former Charlie Manson follower Lynette Red