Crows, Pete Rose, Ufos: And Other Pretty Pieces

By Marvin E. Mengeling

Follow along as the author searches for the funniest word in the English language. Be there when he is offered a job by Chicago Syndicate Boss Sam Giancana. Discover his plan for getting Pete Rose into the Hall of Fame. Read about his joke writing experiences involving Bob Hope, about why he loves golf but never plays, and about how he came within minutes of joining the Army Secret Service. Written with a sense of mischief and fun these 28 essays are usually humorous, sometimes bizarre, invariably informative, and always entertaining. Personal experiences are a springboard for discussions on a wide variety of topics including gambling, violence, sports, UFOs, intelligent crows, and the meaning (?) of life. In 2002, Mengelings book on Ray Bradbury, Red Planet, Flaming Phoenix, Green Town, was published by AuthorHouse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456760939

Marvin E. Mengeling

Follow along as the author searches for the funniest word in the English language. Be there when he is offered a job by Chicago Syndicate Boss Sam Giancana. Discover his plan for getting Pete Rose into the Hall of Fame. Read about his joke writing experiences involving Bob Hope, about why he loves golf but never plays, and about how he came within minutes of joining the Army Secret Service. Written with a sense of mischief and fun these 28 essays are usually humorous, sometimes bizarre, invariably informative, and always entertaining. Personal experiences are a springboard for discussions on a wide variety of topics including gambling, violence, sports, UFOs, intelligent crows, and the meaning (?) of life. In 2002, Mengeling’s book on Ray Bradbury, Red Planet, Flaming Phoenix, Green Town, was published by AuthorHouse. Now happily retired from university teaching, publishing, and administrating, Marvin E. Mengeling lives and writes for fun in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with wife Frankie (the poet), son Tom (the photographer), and Katrina (the cat). Daughter Brenda Jo and husband Michael are medical researchers at the University of California Davis. And so it goes.

Book preview

Contents

Preface

What’s In a Name?

Pete Rose and the Hall: Let’s Make a Deal!

WHEEEEEEE!

O That Reptilian Brain!

Send Not to Know

Lucky Loser? You Bet!

Gleason, Bacaud, and the Funny Dancer

Upgetum

Katzenjammer Capers

Mr. Know-It-All

A Scientific Investigation Into a Linguistic Matter

of Some Importance

O Brave New NBA World!

Basketball in Eden

Don’t Be A Fool!

Don’t Be a Fool—Again!

Strange You Should Ask That

The Strange Affair of the Missing Hyphen or

Who Put the Ugly Gnomes in Mr. Irving’s Story?

Just Say No?

The Hooters Have It or Knock! Knock! Hooter’s There?

No, I Won’t Take a Number Please!

Yankee Doodle Dandy

Twangs A Lot!

Who Wants To Be Buddy Sorrell?

Size Matters

Golf: A Subtle Helix

The Crapshoot?

Caws & Effects

About the Author

This book is dedicated with much love and sincere thanks to wife Frankie, son Tom, and daughter Brenda Jo for their constant love, support and patience. Also, thank you for tolerating so much of my nonsense over the many years. You deserve medals. And thank you to my upgetum Mother, with apologies for the knife and gun incidents.

He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad.

Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

"In this world…you must be, oh, so smart, or, oh, so pleasant.

Well for years I was smart.

I recommend pleasant."

Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey, by Mary Chase

Preface

Recently I read a Sunday New York Times book review in which the writer reminds us that just because something has happened to you doesn’t necessarily make it interesting. Indeed, we are all largely servants to our egos and find our own experiences of far greater interest and concern than the experiences of others. It is, after all, only human nature to feel this way, and that’s why, being ego-driven too, I find the contents of this book very interesting indeed. But the reader is not me, and that’s why I use personal experiences chiefly as a springboard from which to dive into subjects of perhaps more general interest (sports, gambling, violence, for example) which may help a reader or two momentarily set aside their relative but understandable absence of interest. Also, I have tried to inject some humor here and there to help ease the pain of focusing outward.

As the title of this book suggests, over my lifetime I have been interested in and involved with a wide variety of subjects. Because I have never had any subject grab and retain my primary interest and focus for an extended period of time I have sometimes suspected I might have a minor case of attention deficit disorder. Depending on personal experience and reading, new areas of interest always came along.

In no particular order let me list some of the many subject areas that have at one time or another captured my fancy, many of which are reflected in the pages of this book: Literature (taught American literature over 30 years on college level); Sports (lettered in basketball in high school and college); Psychology (intended to make it my college Major); Cosmology/Quantum Physics (would have become an astrophysicist if not for serious deficiency in math ability); Biology (won an undergraduate scholarship in this area); Popular Culture (devised and taught many pop culture classes, including science fiction); Politics (was once a speech writer for and advisor to a Congressional candidate); Art (would be an artist according to high school yearbook); History (took nine college undergraduate and graduate courses in it); Sociology (had a college Minor in it); Show Business (write jokes; always wanted to do standup); Comic Strips (gave many professional talks, taught courses, was hour guest on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Jean Feraca Show); Motion Pictures (have hundreds of films in home library), and on it could go.

I’m also interested in religion but I never write about it (or politics) because I never write to proselytize about subjects people take seriously. I write mainly for the fun of it and for me religion and politics are not fun to write about. Never argue with a crazy person has long been a maxim by which I have tried to live, and believe me when I say that about religion and politics people, including myself, are emotionally crazy. Of course we crazies think of ourselves as rational and wise in these areas. The crazies are the folks who disagree with us.

Long ago I took a tip from a lyric line in Paul Simon’s song The Boxer: A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. (Expect this line to be a leitmotif, turning up here and there throughout the book.) I recognized the futility of attempting to convince anyone of anything they don’t want to believe. That is why none of the pieces in this book are seriously argumentative. They are written out of a sense of mischief and are meant to be fun to read, even though some are also meant to be informative in one way or another (just can’t get over all those years of being a teacher), and that’s why they occasionally begin with a personal experience from which I then generalize. They are not formal essays. They are not creative non-fiction. They are not strictly memoirs. Nevertheless, every personal experience and conversation described (excepting Upgetum!) is as true as my trickster memory can make it. Of course some names have been changed to protect both the innocent and the guilty.

Although I have read and studied hundreds of excellent formal essays over the years (for example, books of professional essays are common rhetorical tools in many introductory college writing courses), I have written none myself since 1956, my freshman year in college. Since then I have written research papers, dissertations, administrative studies and reports, poetry, personnel evaluations, political speeches, shopping lists, jokes, book reviews, love letters, a book, many articles of literary criticism, and all sorts of other stuff—but no essays, formal or otherwise. Then I retired in 1999, and because many of the types of writing I had previously pursued were no longer necessary for career advancement I decided to try my hand at informal personal essays, a type of writing that was new to me and about which I didn’t feel a sense of staleness.

So off and on over the past ten years I have been writing the sorts of things found in this book. Intending from the start to eventually collect some of them into a personally published volume, I felt few inhibitions and indulged myself by making up the rules of structure, content, and style as I went along.

I have followed no principle of arrangement, including chronological order of composition or grouping according to subject matter. The essays are arranged according to what felt right to me at the time.

Some of these essays have been updated since the time I originally wrote them, but only when I felt new, pertinent information needed to be added. Sometimes the update is done in the text itself, sometimes in a Note at the end.

The Preface is the only part of this book that I felt compelled to write; I had no fun writing it. Except for a final note or two (or three), let it end here.

Reminder: Novelist Virginia Woolf once wrote about the authors of personal essays Never to be yourself and yet always—that is the problem. Indeed, in his book The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay, Carl Klaus reminds readers that in the personal essay the personal I is a textual stand-in for the author—a fabricated thing, a character of sorts. And so it goes.

Note: A big thank you to my son Thomas for taking the photographs that appear on the front and back covers. Also, thanks to the guys in the locker room at Kolf Sports Center. Their good-natured and helpful reactions to my often silly sounding and provocative questions were a big help to me when writing some of these pieces.

The essay A Scientific Investigation Into a Linguistic Matter of Some Importance was first published in Verbatim: The Language Quarterly, Vol. XXXI, No. 4. Wheeeeeee! was contracted to be published by Verbatim but has not yet appeared. Basketball in Eden has been slightly altered from the version published in the 2006 Winter/Spring issue of Decus: The Magazine of Rockford College.

What’s In a Name?

Once upon a time when I was a callow and know-it-all young fellow, I worked in a toy factory warehouse with another young man—let’s call him Tony—who was invariably cheery and friendly but seemed far from being the brightest elf in our little Santaland. Tony was likeable enough in most ways, so it was only behind his back that the rest of us referred to him, somewhat derisively, as our town’s Great Philosopher, this because (with what Nathaniel Hawthorne once described in a short story as the smile of a crafty nincompoop) Tony would reply to virtually all questions requiring any degree of thought or reflection: It kind of makes you wonder, don’t it. He always declared this; he never intoned it as a question.

Now an old man, Tony is still living in that little town and despite cancer of the prostrate problems is still smiling and boosting the same philosophy. Unlike the Great Philosopher, I moved from both warehouse and town, only to find the cocky surety of my youth peeling away as my experiences in the wider world increased. Not only didn’t I know everything, I came to realize I knew extremely little with any certainty, and today feel that perhaps Tony’s ambiguous response to most questions is probably the most accurate one, if only we’d admit it. The more I heard, read, saw and experienced, the more I figuratively scratched my head and came to realize that in Tony I had unknowingly been dealing with some sort of wise fool. Indeed, the more I have wandered the more I have wondered.

Right now, for example, I wonder why Tennessee’s professional football team is called the Titans. I realize that many high school and college teams have this same tired moniker. The teams at my local university are Titans all. But I wonder why any school or organization would consciously choose (after, one assumes, some sort of fan/student voting and executive deliberations on alternate possibilities) a name for their team that is historically associated with losers.

A few years ago the new Baltimore franchise (formerly the Cleveland Browns, named after their first coach, football genius Paul Brown) was renamed the Ravens, ostensibly in honor of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, arguably the most famous poem ever written by an American. Granted, Poe lived in Baltimore off and on and died there in 1849 under mysterious circumstances, but really, a professional football team named after a poem? It all becomes more appropriate, though, if we know that Poe’s raven is an omen of defeat for the poem’s narrator, and that, as ornithologist Bernd Heinrich points out in his book Mind of the Raven, these somewhat ominous looking birds are extremely intelligent and often use expert teamwork to win out in the competition for food over seemingly more powerful predators like eagles, hawks and wolves. Intelligence, productive teamwork, and an omen of defeat for those who meet them—yes indeed, Ravens is a good and proper name for a football team. And, to paraphrase Poe, your opponent from out that raven’s shadow that lies floating on the field, shall be lifted Nevermore.

But Titans? The intelligences that made the final decision on this name were either unaware or just didn’t care that in Greek mythology (do they teach such stuff in Tennessee schools?) the most powerful of that bunch of immortal giants called Titans was Cronus, who incested with sister Rhea, who then birthed the Olympians (Zeus and his bunch), but not before Cronus had first castrated and exiled his own father Uranus. Then, afraid his own offspring would rise up and overthrow him, Cronus swallowed them whole right after each was born, until Rhea got tired of producing kids who ended up groceries. After the birth of Zeus, she gave Cronus a stone and told him it was the new baby. Apparently not having the intelligence even of a raven, Cronus swallowed both story and stone, thus giving son Zeus a chance to live and bulk up a bit. To make a long myth short, Zeus and his brothers and sisters (we’ll skip the part about how and why Cronus spit them up) challenged the Titans to a fight. Apparently there was no guarantee of a return bout in the contract, so after the Olympians won they imprisoned the Titans in a hellish place beneath the earth called Tartarus. Could any of this possibly explain why my local university football team—Hail Titans is their fight song—has been mired in the bottom half of the conference standings for most of the past thirty years, and why the men’s basketball team has won just one conference title—shared, actually, with another university—in nearly as long?

So there we have it, like it or not. The Titans lost the only fight they ever had. Their leader was a father-castrating, child-devouring, mentally challenged giant best described as a sorry loser. Eventually, of course, titan with a small t came to signify a person of large size, strength and/or achievement, as in She is a titan of industry. One problem with Titan as the name for a professional football team is that the qualities of size (most lines now averaging well over 300 pounds per bulky player), strength and achievement (many pro players were college All-Americans) is that it could describe the players on any professional team. Nothing distinctive. No edge. The greater problem with the name, though, is that with a capital T the moniker Titan describes a LOSER in giant letters. We won’t even go into the adjective titanic, associated in the minds of most people with the biggest sunken ship disaster in history. Did those who chose really know? And if they did know, why didn’t they care? Perhaps they were merely enchanted by the pretty tip-of-the-tongue alliteration of the t sound? If so, Tennessee Tornadoes might have been a better choice.

And as long as we’re wandering down this road, but without getting into the drugstore associations of the name, what would possess anyone to name a team the Trojans? We’re talking more than Southern Cal here; there are high school and college Trojan teams all over America. Tony and I wonder why. Granted, the Trojans held the Greeks to a scoreless tie for ten years or so, which suggests a formidable defense but doesn’t change the fact that they finally lost the war and that their best Dick Butkus-type warrior, Hector, turned tail and ran when faced with Achilles, the Greek version of Jim Brown. Eventually forced to fight, Hector went down quickly. Further humiliation ensued when Achilles, off the back of his chariot, dragged Hector’s corpse by the heels for a few victory laps around Troy’s walls. Even then, the Trojans might have saved the day but, like Cronus, proved too mentally challenged to do so. Wily coach Odysseus concocted a razzle-dazzle hollow wooden horse play that completely faked out the Trojans and brought the first Testosterone Bowl to an unmerciful end: Greeks 7, Trojans zip. The post game celebration included pillaging, plundering, burning, and raping—not unlike many post championship celebrations today. Of course, Southern California’s football team seems to be the exception that proves the rule. Still, the question remains: why was the name picked in the first place?

What’s in a name, Shakespeare once asked. Well, maybe nothing. On the other hand, maybe something. So why take the chance? Change the name! Other sports teams have done it. Before they started working on the title Baseball Team of the Century the New York Yankees were the New York Highlanders. Did the name change help them become a better team (the acquisition of Babe Ruth probably had something to do with it too)? Who knows? But, as I said before, why take the chance? All you Titans and Trojans out there, think about it. And because I so much want to help, here’s a special suggestion for the Tennessee Titans. Why not change to a name from a more contemporary mythology, a name that stands for ultimate teamwork leading to victory. I humbly submit the Tennessee Borg. Prepare to be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

Pete Rose and the Hall: Let’s Make a Deal!

In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare has the line, That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet. If Shakespeare were alive today he might be tempted to add, Unless the other name is Pete! A few years ago Pete Rose was the Interview in the April 2000 issue of Playboy magazine, in which he continues his tiresome litany about how rudely he’s been treated by the professional baseball establishment and its refusal to reinstate him so he can gain his rightful place in the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York. Yeah, yeah, this is whiney old stuff and I don’t intend to pursue here whether or not Rose actually bet on baseball (though I’d bet significant dough that he did) or whether baseball Commissioners have been screwing him over, from Bart Giamatti (who Rose thinks threw him out of baseball because Giamatti was a jealous, power-mad type who couldn’t cope with Rose’s fame) to Bud Selig, former new and used car salesman.

It seems appropriate that Rose has done some of his spleen venting in a publication with boy in the title because Rose appears to be one of those individuals who never developed much emotional maturity or mature intelligence; in other words, he never really grew up. Remember those kids in grade and high school who were always doing bad things but would never admit it or accept responsibility, even when caught red-handed? It was always somebody else’s fault? Somebody (the teacher, the principal, etc.) had it in for them, or was out to get them? Or the rules didn’t apply to them; the rules were only for losers and nerds? Rose still seems to be one of those kids.

Gertrude Stein once said, Rose is a rose is a rose. Whatever that meant to her, to me it means that Pete Rose will never change. It’s still mainly games, gambling and babes with him; always has been, always will be. Peck’s bad baseball boy will go to his grave believing himself the picked-on, blameless martyr, and in his own immature, narcissistic mind one of the very greatest players in the history of the game. After all, hasn’t Rose said that his name is synonymous with baseball? That’s Pete’s opinion, of course, and he has every right to it. But I think he crosses into foul territory in the Playboy interview when he grumbles, How could I not be in the top 50 of ESPN’s ‘Greatest Athletes of the Century?’ and then grouses about Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz, who came in #33 on the ESPN list: That guy worked two weeks. I worked 24 years. Gee, what a classy guy Rose is. I’ll bet he thinks ministers have cushy jobs because they only work one hour a week. Let’s just remind ourselves that in two Summer Olympics Mark Spitz won nine gold medals. Carl Lewis (#12 on the ESPN list) won nine gold medals too, but it took him more than two Olympics to do it. No one, anywhere ever, had won seven gold medals in one Olympics—except Mark Spitz.

Actually, ESPN named ten baseball players to its list of top 50 athletes of the century: Babe Ruth (#2), Willie Mays (#5), Hank Aaron (#14), Jackie Robinson (#15), Ted Williams (#16), Ty Cobb (#20), Joe Dimaggio (#22), Lou Gehrig (#34), Mickey Mantle (#37), and Sandy Koufax (#42). That ESPN anointed Koufax the greatest pitcher of the century needs addressing, but not here and now. Rose at least had enough smarts not to claim he is more worthy than any of these ten players, so he picks on a white swimmer. Say what you will about Pete, he’s got guts.

But make no mistake, Charlie Hustle is indeed a consummate hustler. He actually has duped a large number of folks into believing he belongs on such a list. Recall the public vote a few years ago for all-star team of the century? Rose received more votes than Willie Mays for a position in the outfield. So just how good was Rose, really? Well, to borrow a line from Casey Stengel, You can look it up! So yes indeed, let’s look it up! Please realize, though, that I don’t mean looking up popularity numbers like how many times Rose graced the cover of Sports Illustrated or The Sporting News, or how many dollars worth of Rose bobble heads or autographed pieces of memorabilia he has hustled at card shows. I had other numbers in mind when I pulled off the shelf my copy of Total Baseball , edited by J. Thorn and P. Palmer, and flipped to the section titled All-Time Leaders. Here’s what I found.

Pete Rose was one hell of a good baseball player. Over 24 seasons (same number as Ty Cobb) he set major league records for games played (3,562), at bats (14,053), and hits (4,256). Let’s ignore for the moment that Rose played in 528 more games and had 2,619 more at bats to get 66 more career hits than Ty Cobb. For many years there was a Ford Fricking asterisk after Roger Maris’s 61 homers to indicate Maris had eight more games than Babe Ruth to break Ruth’s record of 60 homers in a season. If anyone ever needed an asterisk it’s Rose (2,619 more at bats to get 66 more hits?). But let’s not quibble; like a tattoo in bad taste, the Maris asterisk was eventually removed. Rose also scored 2,165 runs, putting him fourth all-time, but when we look at the column listing runs per game production, Rose doesn’t appear among the top 100 players. Gee, must have been an oversight. I wonder where Rose ranks on the Clutch Hitting Index. Hmmmmmmmm. He’s not in the top 100 on this list either.

What? Not in the top 100 for lifetime batting average? Oh, that’s right, lifetime Pete was .303. Gee, even a swing-for-the-fences guy like Babe Ruth had a .342 lifetime average. It even looks here as if Rose had only one season in which he averaged higher than Ruth’s lifetime .342. The fact of the matter is that Rose was pretty much a one trick pony, a singles pinger. He hit loads of singles; 3,215 of his 4,256 hits were the ninety-foot variety. True, only Tris Speaker hit more doubles (793) than Rose (746), but then Speaker had 3,846 fewer at bats. Pete did hit 160 home runs, an average of about 6.5 per season. As for triples, Charlie Hustle seldom hustled as far as third; even beer-belly Babe had more. Let’s face it, over his last few seasons EGO kept him grinding and plodding along for the greater ultimate glory of Rose, who is at the top of the hit list largely because he hung around, and hung around, and hung on, and hung on long after his remarkable baseball skills began to fail him. For example, over his last five seasons his batting average was a composite .257. By way of comparison, over the last five years of his 24 seasons Cobb averaged .347.

Finally, let’s look at the Total Player Ratings List in Total Baseball, a ranking composed of various and weighted batting, base running and fielding statistics. With no pitchers included, the top ten ranked players are: l) Babe Ruth, 2) Cobb, 3) Aaron, 4) Williams, 5) Mays, 6) Lajoie, 7) Speaker, 8) Schmidt, 9) Hornsby, and 10) Wagner. Joe Morgan and Johnny Bench, both teammates of Rose on Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine, are ranked 15th and 76th. Rose comes in at number 120. With pitchers added to the list, Rose drops to number 176. Perhaps more surprising is that he wasn’t good enough overall to crack the list of top 25 baseball players of the era 1961-1988, even though the editors call him the most exciting player of his age. Ah yes, there are all those semi-mystical and crowd-pleasing intangibles, like running full speed to first on a walk,