Yes Virginia

I don’t know why kids like these "Instant Messenger" things on the computer so well. Student’s tell me how they talk with their friends at all hours of the night on their instant messenger. If their folks have a separate phone line for the internet, girls can talk about a boy with their friends on the computer while talking to the actual boy on the phone.

I never have liked the Instant Messengers. Whenever I’m on the computer, I’m trying to get something done, to have people keep popping on trying to talk to me ends up just being an interruption. But I have to tell you, I had the most interesting conversation online the other day and I thought I might share it with you, gentle readers.

BigRedGuy:: Hey Ted, how R U? Feel like a chat?

coachmallory:: Who is this?

BigRedGuy:: My screen name ought to give it away.

coachmallory:: Frank Solich?

BigRedGuy:: No ho ho ho, if I were him I wouldn’t want to talk to a member of the press. Try again, I’ll give you a clue- I know when you’ve been sleeping…I know if you’ve been bad or good.

coachmallory:: Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge?

BigRedGuy:: Ho ho, no, but I’m almost as busy.

coachmallory:: Santa? Wow, why would you take time out of your busiest time of year to instant message me?

BigRedGuy:: Well, Ted, I just wanted to thank all the business people of Charter Oak for all the work they went through to make my visit there such a success for the children in your community. Since you have a weekly column in the NEWSpaper, I thought you were a natural resource for me to tap.

coachmallory:: Happy to help, Santa. It certainly was a blast. I know my little girls loved it. They got to see you and received a bag full of goodies, watched cartoons, munched on cookies, won prizes and played with all their friends from all over the area.

BigRedGuy:: Well, Charter Oak has had a long tradition of bringing me to see the kids.

coachmallory:: Oh I know! My wife Bethany was telling me about how when she was little, you gave them all a bag of peanuts and popcorn, then they’d all sit down to watch 8mm movies on a screen in the corner of the Community Building.

BigRedGuy:: And inevitably some naughty little boy would start throwing peanuts or popcorn at the screen or at one of his little friends and bedlam would soon ensue, Ho Ho!

coachmallory:: Well I bet there were quite a few boys in town who’d get coal in their stockings because of that, huh?

BigRedGuy:: Well, now you know Ted, I don’t think of myself as the purveyor of justice that a lot of people seem to think I am. The rain falls on both the just and the unjust, you know.

coachmallory:: So, you just bring presents to children, no coal?

BigRedGuy:: That’s right. I represent generosity, not vengeance, that belongs to the Lord you know, Ho Ho. And even He prefers mercy to sacrifice, you know. Besides, there are too many children who won’t have much of a Christmas at all, let alone a merry one. I don’t think they should be denied just for throwing a little popcorn.

coachmallory:: But what about that legendary list?

BigRedGuy:: Let me tell you something, my list is a lot longer than that 12,000 page Iraqi weapons of mass destruction dossier. I’ve gotten rid of most of the paperwork though, nowadayz it’s all digital. All I have to carry around is my personal electronic organizer. It’s really more of a shopping list than a naughty/nice thing- you have to be REALLY bad to get on the naughty side. I’ll let you in on a secret though, there’s not enough coal in West Virginia for Saddam and Osama’s stockings.

¡Feliz Navidad!

Growing up in Phoenix, my Michigander cousins would often pity us for never getting to enjoy a white Christmas. Usually I’d let it go, sorta like when they’d ask if we had to shake the snakes and scorpions out of our boots before we hiked to school. Eventually, I had had enough and sat them down with a globe for a history lesson.

"Look," I’d say, "here’s Bethlehem, see? Follow this line of latitude around and what do you notice about Phoenix?"

"Hmmm," they’d inevitably reply.

"Yeah, well, see, same latitude, similar weather patterns, so BACK OFF," I’d boast. I didn’t bother going into how at Lutheran elementary school we’d learned that Bible scholars suspect that Christ may have actually been born in April anyway.

I’ll admit though, that living in the subtropics doesn’t present an environment in line with the quintessential American ideal of a holiday season. This occurred to me just the other day at school. I set up a cardboard fireplace and hung stockings for Cheerleaders and Yearbook staffers. A student asked me "what’s the fireplace for," before I could explain about the stockings another kid answered, "for Santa, DUH!"

"But he comes down the chimney, there’s no chimney here."

I tried for years in vain to get my parents to move to a house with a fireplace for that very reason. But you don’t NEED a fireplace in Phoenix. It’s a desert. Perhaps to humor me, my parents would put up a decorative cardboard fireplace from Sears.

"But we don’t have a chimney," I’d protest.

"Well, uh, um, that’s Okay, Santa will come down our air conditioning vent ducts." Apparently that satisfied me. I mean, really, think about it, if a 300 pound, 500 year old man in a red velvet suit can circumnavigate the earth in one night with flying reindeer and fit down a chimney flue- he can fit through our AC unit and pop out our cardboard fireplace. It’s "Christmas Magic."

Iowegians may enjoy cookies, cocoa and casseroles, but one of my favorite memories were the tamales dad brought home at Christmas from a Mexican deli near the airport where he worked. It may have only been one or two years, but my memory elevated it to the stature of tradition.

A really neat Christmas tradition we had was going to the Sisters’. The Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary was a cloister of Lutheran nuns. That’s right, all you Catholics (and Lutherans) who just did a double take. The story was that a Sunday school class of girls were in the only building not destroyed when the allies bombed Darmstadt Germany. They pledged their life to the Lord. Their leader, Mother Basilea Schlink could drop names like Deitrich Bonhoeffer and Corrie ten Boom.

Their compound, Kanaan in the desert was in the shadows of Mummy Mountain. Ironically, just miles away from a POW camp for NAZI sailors during WWII. Some of them had escaped with a map and a raft, headed for the Salt River, little did they know that the Salt is a dry wash bed 11 ½ months out of year.

At any rate, these Lutheran nuns in the middle of the desert, like that Sidney Potier movie "Lilies of the Field," had the greatest Christmas cookies and tea, and elaborate German decorations around a Nativity scene where everyone would sing and listen to the Christmas message. All us tiny kids got to ring bells and tambourines. Instead of a tree, they used juniper branches. It smelled great.

Don’t believe in Lutheran nuns? Check out their website at www.kanaan.org

You can’t imagine all the poinsettias in Phoenix. At the art museum there was always a display of trees, the best ones were made of potted poinsettias. Of course it just wasn’t Christmas without a few wreaths made of chili peppers.

No, we didn’t have snowmen, but lots of people liked to decorate their Saguaro cacti with Santa costumes or spray tumbleweeds with flocking and stack them on top of each other to make "Frosty the tumble-weed man."

Luminaries and the celebration of ‘La Posada’ (Mary and Joseph trying to find a room at the Inn, the Posada) is a powerful image of Christmas for me. So are little Indian children and angels by southwestern artist Ted Degrazia. Arizona Highways always had the most beautiful pictures of Spanish missions or the Grand Canyon dusted with a little snow, you can probably see some at www.arizhwys.com.

I admit it, when it’s 3° out and I have to shovel snow I sometimes miss the bougainvilleas and balmy breezes, but now I get to cuddle under flannel sheets and sip hot cocoa. And just the other day, as we were driving through the countryside, my daughter gets to spy a heard of does in the corn stubble and announce to us that she sees "Reindeer!"

Murphy's Law & Order

In case you hadn’t noticed, Mallory isn’t German, it’s Scotch-Irish. My mother’s maiden name is Reilly. Shortened from O’Reilly, as Irish as you can get.

Now, I’ve known quite a few Irishmen in my time. O’Sullivan were good people, I can’t say as I ever got a long too well with any O’Briens, but most of the Murphy’s I’ve known have been really fun to know.

Most of them, that is, except for one. The one who was in Congress. At least I assume he was in Congress, because he’s got a low named after him. You know the one, "Murphy’s Law." It’s one of the shortest laws in the U.S. Code, all it says is "If anything can go wrong, it will."

I think it was co-sponsored by Congressman Morton. I think this because the box of Morton’s Salt reads "When it rains, it pours," these two sentiments inevitably go together, at least in my life.

For whatever reason, Ellie, our 11 month-old never needs a diaper change until, Gracie, our 3 year old has an accident. And for reasons I can not explain, Gracie only seems to have accidents just after my wife Bethany has gone out the door to some meeting at school. Does this kind of scenario sound at all familiar to any of you?

I think it’s time Murphy’s Law was changed. Maybe we could start a letter writing campaign to get this Murphy character removed from office. All I know is, we have to do something.

What I’ve learned to do is to obey the law. Better to go along with it and ride it out to the end than try to break it, you’ll always get caught. Here’s an example of what I mean-

So, I was trying to get this Thanksgiving dinner thing going for Church (huge thanks to all you LYF kids & parents for pulling it off by the way). At any rate, we had our computer serviced and in the process, last year’s notes and letters on the dinner got erased.

I forgot to order the potatoes from Staley’s, they agree to get them for us anyway, I don’t know how much to order for and between their move and personnel changes, they can’t find our records either. My mind remembers our Ash Wednesday Soup Supper and tells them we expect maybe sixty people. Not a problem, they’ll have the bags of potato mix ready for me to pick up whenever I can come get them.

Friday night I picked up a movie at Citgo and pulled in across from the Oak’s Club to pick up an order of Chicken. If Murphy’s law hadn’t already been in effect, it was just about to. I figured I’d only be a minute or two so why not leave the engine running, it’s a small town and a cool night.

I closed the car door and started for the bar, and start to saunter across the street, but get yanked back like a dog tied to a tree in the middle of the yard. The corner of my coat was caught in the car door.

"No sweat," I thought, "I’ll open the door and release my coat" No dice, the door was locked. "Well, okay, it’s just a few blocks, I’ll walk home to get my spare set of keys. Oh, yeah, I forgot, my coat’s caught in the door and it’s really cold. Hmmm. I could stand here and look nonchalant in my coat, and wait for Bethany to bring the extra set of keys, oh, yeah, I pretty much have to call her to let her know I need the keys."

"Hmm, Okay," I said to myself, "I’ll slip off my coat and nonchalantly, leave it on the ground next to the car and walk into the bar, pay for the chicken and ask to use their phone. Geez, there’s a lot of people in there. I don’t need the whole town knowing I locked my keys in my car- while it was running." Then I noticed the lights in the lobby of Staley’s- "Great, I thought, I can use their phone, isn’t there something I need there anyway? Oh yeah, the potatoes for Sunday."

Guess what, who ever was there didn’t answer when I asked if anyone was there. "Shoot, I can’t use the phone without asking, well, it’s not long distance, maybe they won’t mind- hey this way, even they won’t have to know how dumb I was." I call home, go figure- thanks to Murphy’s Law, Bethany is giving the girls a bath and can’t get to the phone. I leave a message, but our answering machine is downstairs in the den, she’d never hear it. I call back four times, hoping that one of the times she’ll at least hear the phone and check the messages. Each time my message was more anxious, the fifth time I called I was down right irritated- Murphy’s Law again, that’s the time she picks up, why would she want to help my when I’m so crabby? And, Murpy’s law, that’s when Allan Staley comes out of the kitchen with me on his phone.

Well, the happy ending is that she bundled the girls up in their pajamas and came with the keys so that I could bring the car, my coat, the potatoes and the chicken home without being too embarrassed. Of course I had to call the next day and ask Rick and Al if they would prepare the potatoes AND gravy for us, like they have every other year and make enough for 200, rather than just 60. Thank God, and Rick and Al, they could, would and did. Whew!

Best of all, no one except Bethany and Al Staley ever knew about the whole thing with me locking my keys in my car. Well, that is, until now.

Attitude of Gratitude

This time of year, the former U.S. History teacher in me can’t help but come out. Since the first seven years of my teaching career were at a parochial school, I had the opportunity to teach about how important faith was in the lives of many of our country’s great leaders.

Abraham Lincoln is one of my all time favorite examples. In July or 1863, not long after the battle of Gettysburg had turned the civil war in the Union’s favor, Lincoln called for a national day of Thanksgiving, Praise and Prayer;

"I invite the people of the United States to assemble on that occasion in their customary places of worship, and in the forms approved by their own consciences, render homage due the Divine Majesty, for the wonderful things He has done in the Nation’s behalf,

and invoke the influence of His Holy Spirit to subdue the anger, which has produced, and so long sustained a needless and cruel rebellion, to change the hearts of the insurgents,

to guide the counsels of the Government with wisdom adequate to so great a national emergency,

and to visit with tender care and consolation throughout the length and breadth of our land all those who, through vicissitudes of marches, voyages, battles and sieges, have been brought to suffer in mind, body and estate,

and finally to lead the whole nation, through the paths of repentance and submission to the Divine Will, back to the perfect enjoyment of Union and fraternal peace."

Lincoln was the President who made Thanksgiving an National Holiday. He didn’t ask us to watch a parade, eat ourselves silly, fall asleep during a football game and the next day shop-till-we-drop. He asked us to pray.

First to thank God for all we had. Especially during tough times, we can thank God for all He’s given us. A bumper crop, good neighbors, decent school, freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom from fear and freedom from want. Loving family and cherished friends.

Then that God would work in the hearts of our enemies. Why do people think that the only way to get anything accomplished is with a suicide bomber’s terrorist attack? I can’t understand why terrorists don’t use non-violent means to accomplish their goals. It worked wonders for Ghandi and Martin Luther King, these men changed the world. Perhaps it’s not change or disagreement that motivates them, maybe it’s just evil, anger and hatred. All the more reason for us to pray for them, that there might be peace on earth.

Lincoln wanted Americans in the North to pray that the Holy Spirit would turn the hearts of the Southern rebells. We can pray for all our rivals and adversaries, not just Muslim terrorists. The acquaintance who irritates you, the bully at work or school, your ex. Pray that God would soften their hearts and make them more loving, more patient, more kind.

Then Lincoln asked Americans to pray for their government, for their leaders.

Next he wanted Americans to pray for those who have lost family members and property during the Civil War. We were full of prayers for the victims and families of 911 for the first several weeks afterward, but how long has it been since we prayed for their peace and recovery? It’s easy to forget when we get on with our own lives. What about families who have lost their jobs, homes, or farms in the recent recession? What about the family of the mother and child killed on 141 outside of Mapleton this month, or for the families of the immigrants trapped in the railroad car discovered in Denison this fall?

Finally Lincoln asked Americans to pray that God would direct us all as a Nation, to repent of our sin and selfishness and to follow His will, so that we would be able to know real peace and real prosperity serving Him.

In October of 1863 Lincoln issued another proclamation, for a Thanksgiving holiday the last Thursday in November. Thanksgiving came about because Lincoln believed that we should give thanks even in the midst of war and suffering. This is some of what he said in that proclamation;

"The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they can not fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God."

To which I say, "Amen"

Midwestern Boy

When I was in junior high, I was trying to figure out who I was. Isn’t that what every kid is doing in junior high? I looked around at my friends and all their lives seemed more exciting than mine did.

Lots of kids were dealing with their parents’ divorces; some kids had lots of money or knew someone famous. Everybody else seemed to have a more interesting life than mine. Mine was just too boring, too "Leave it to Beaver." I had both parents, they worked hard to make sure we had clothes and food and they loved us. We lived in a ranch house in the suburbs where my brother and I had paper routes. Boring-ville.

When I was in junior high in Phoenix, the Black kids had a culture; the Mexican kids had a heritage and a culture and great food. American Indian kids had all that and cool pow-wows and costumes and stuff. The Italian kids had great cooking and style.

I felt left out. I thought that White Anglo Saxon Protestant lower-middle class suburbia was boring. If only we were rich or poor or members of some oppressed minority group. Drama, passion, contrast. Could you imagine? Envying hardship. Other kids turned to teenaged angst, punk rock and pot. I turned east.

Hardly anyone in Phoenix is from Phoenix. My parents had left the Detroit area in 1968. Now there’s drama, it just took years and college classes about recent history for me to see it. They wanted a better life for us. Better weather, better economic conditions, and away from all the racial tension and political unrest that Detroit had come to symbolize.

What it meant for me was that I could say I was (sort of) from the Midwest. Suddenly I had a sense of identity. I had a culture, even if it was kind of bland. The summers we spent in Michigan I was introduced to such foreign, exotic and romantic things as twilight, casseroles home made pies, fishing, and Jell-O salads.

Then I stumbled upon a radio show that was all about my newly chosen ethnicity. Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" on National Public Radio. I’d savor it the way I imagine Eastern Europeans under Soviet oppression savored the Voice or Democracy on Radio Free Europe.

Keillor's self-effacing humor focused on what’s funny about the mundane. Like how the front-row for Lutherans is five or six rows back. Or his "Young Lutheran’s Guide to the Orchestra:"

"Many Lutherans start out playing clarinets in marching band and think of it as a pretty good instrument and kind of sociable…But the symphonic clarinet is different: clever, sarcastic, kind of snooty. It's a nice small town instrument that went to college and after that you can't get a simple answer out of them. It _is_ a French instrument, you know. Ever wonder why there are no French Lutherans? Probably the wine wasn't good enough for them."

I thought this was great stuff, especially since I played the clarinet in junior high and hated it. All the cool kids played trumpet or drums. But my older brother had played clarinet, so I played clarinet. Keillor made it okay, I was humble, it’s good to be humble, learn to laugh at yourself.

Who knew? I went to Concordia College in Nebraska because of their great art program, because they offered me a scholarship, and because it was far away from home.

Junior year of high school on the plane to Journalism Workshop at Ball State University in Indiana, kids from all over the country assumed I was from Chicago. When they found out I was from Phoenix, they’d look at me funny. Too heavy, too short, too pale, too not-blonde.

Then there was the one about the Art Major and the farmer’s daughter. Just that he married her, no joke. So, that’s how I became a Midwesterner, I married into it. Kids at Boyer Valley are always asking why anyone would want to choose to live in rural Iowa. They want nothing more then to get the heck out of their one-horse town.

I tell them that I lived in the second largest city in America for the better part of a decade and I’d much rather live in a village than a megalopolis. Sure, we still have crime, and drugs, and poverty, but I never had dinner with my state representative in LA, I never knew my postmaster by name. I never talked to the LA County Sheriff about being a fellow church youth counselor.

This is a good place to live and a good place to be from. You can say, ‘I’m an Iowan’ and not be ashamed, it may not seem as exotic as being an Ethiopian, but why be jealous of hardship? Why not appreciate your roots and how blessed you are to be from the heartland?

Don't look down

It’s a hard lesson to learn, but cheerleaders learn it every year, usually in the searing heat and glare of the late summer sun at camp, long before the school year and the football season begin. The lesson is, Don’t look down. Put another way, attitude determines altitude.

Pilots know this. If you raise the aircraft’s nose up, the plane flies up. Cheerleaders have to learn this too; where your eyes go, your body tends to follow. If you look straight ahead at the crowd, you’ll keep your balance, look down, even for an instant, and your body will begin to lean.

Cheer is not the only sport in which this principle applies. A basketball shooter doesn’t watch the ball, to make a basket, they have to focus on the hoop. Golfers can try to follow their ball after they swing, but at that instant they follow through, they’d better be concentrating on where they want the ball to go if they want to avoid a wicked slice.

A few weeks ago PBS host Allan Alda talked to University of Arizona scientists about this on his show, Scientific American. It seems that whether it’s a tennis serve or a volleyball serve or a hunter after a pheasant, the principal is the same- where you look, there you go. Don’t look at the ball, look at where you want it to go, don’t look at the bird, aim at where you expect it to be the moment your shell reaches the same point in space.

If you don’t want to fall, don’t look down. Principles are things that can usually be applied in other areas of life. That’s why sports are good for kids, they learn valuable life lessons without even realizing it- a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

Seems there have even been studies that suggest that while you’re walking down the street, if you tend to constantly be looking at the ground, your mood sours, whereas if you look up more, you’ll naturally become more upbeat, less tense, even happy. One theory is that when you look ahead or up, more light can make it into your eyes. In the fall and winter when days get short and clouds hide the sun or people stay inside all day, some people begin to suffer symptoms of what doctors call seasonal affective disorder (SAD). So looking up can literally, physiologically keep you “up.”

Let’s use our “don’t look down” principle as an analogy for other things.

Take people. If we expect the worse, they probably won’t disappoint us. If we’re critical of them or defensive toward them, they’ll treat us as we’ve treated them. If we look for even one good thing in them and appreciate it, we may even bring out the best in them.

Take politics. If a candidate focuses only on what’s wrong about his opponent, he or she only turns off the voter. America is fundamentally an optimistic place, voters want to know what the candidate’s hope and plans and qualifications are. Ever notice how when one person is looking up, everyone else starts looking up? We want to see what they see. “What is that? What are they looking at?” It’s compulsive. That’s leadership.

Take work. If you focus on how hard it is or how unpleasant, it only makes it more unpleasant. Time drags on when you watch the clock. If you focus on a goal or your accomplishments, it’s much easier.

Take business. If you focus on your obstacles, expenses or irate customers, you’re dooming yourself. If you focus on trying to build relationships, and on trying to provide your customers with what they want and need, you’re bound to succeed.

Take religion. There’s Law and Gospel, right? The Law shows us that this world is messed up because people are basically selfish and short sighted. What does that get us? It’s meant to humble us and make us realize that we need God. Great, but if we never stop focusing on how bad we are and how bad everybody is, we’ll never get on with living. The Gospel is the good news that God loves us even though we’re selfish and short-sighted. It shows us that He wants to have a relationship with us and He wants to help us be selfless and broaden our vision.

Take any problem we have or all of life for that matter. Take society in general. If we insist on always being critical or negative, where does that get us. Nowhere, stuck, stagnant, digging downward. But if we look forward or look up, guess what- we’ll at least stand firm and tall, at best, we’ll start moving forward.

Many a cheerleader who has the bruises to prove that “don’t look down” is one of the most important lessons anyone can ever learn.

Oh Great Pumpkin, where are you?!

Today I carry on a ritual that I began when ten years ago. I’m sometimes known, not as "the Art teacher," but as "the teacher who shows Peanuts videos." Today, of course, is the day to see "It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown," in Mr. Mallory’s classes.

Call it my contribution to stemming the tide of darkness, violence, anger, and over commercialization of Halloween. Occasionally over the years people have asked me how I, being someone so deeply religious can celebrate Halloween. I tell them if Charles Schultz could do it, that’s good enough for me.

Schultz has been important to me since I was a tot. You know how there’s always that project in 4H where the kids have to show off a collection they’ve accumulated? Well, mine was for Cub Scouts and it was my collection of 1950’s and 60’s Peanuts books. That collection might have been what led me to want to become a cartoonist and to become an art teacher.

Like lots of little kids, I liked to feel sorry for myself, I’d get picked last for teams, I couldn’t kick a football to save my life. So it made perfect sense that I found comfort in Peanuts. When Lucy first pulled the football on TV in "It’s the Great Pumpkin," in 1965, millions of little kids who felt sorry for themselves identified with poor Charlie Brown.

The more I read about Peanuts creator Charles Schultz, the more I admired him. You may have heard much of the trivia about him since the 50th anniversary of Peanuts and his death early in 2001. He’s originally from St. Paul, Minnesota. His father was a barber, just like Charlie Brown’s. He had a beagle puppy named Sparky who’d eat anything. Schultz’s first published drawing was of Sparky eating razor blades; he sent it in to Ripley’s Believe it or Not.

Schultz thought about becoming a pastor, he was active in his church. He fell in love with a red-haired girl, like Charlie Brown, but lost her to a friend because he was too shy to speak up in time. After serving in WWII he sent in one of those "draw Tippy the turtle" Art tests for Art Instruction Schools. Eventually he worked for them as an Art teacher while he tried to get his cartoons published in magazines and newspapers.

In 1950 United Features Syndicate started selling his comic strip "little folks" and renamed it "Peanuts." In 1965 CBS took a chance on his half-hour special "A Charlie Brown Christmas." It broke the rules, it didn’t have a hyper active fast pace, it didn’t have a laugh track, it included a score performed by a jazz trio. Real children performed all the voices of the children. Little Cathy Steinberg, who played the voice of Sally, Charlie Brown’s little sister couldn’t even read yet! They had to read her lines to her and have her repeat them into the microphone. And most daring of all, it had an overt Christian message. They read from the Bible itself on national television.

The very next year, in 1966 came the Great Pumpkin. Both specials were perennial favorites on CBS for more than thirty years. Now Disney’s ABC owns the rights, but generations continue to enjoy Schultz’s masterpieces.

The Great Pumpkin has a lot to say about life. Linus is the Quixotic prophet, desperately trying to convince people to believe in the Great Pumpkin, but like Jesus called the unbelievers of His day, the other kids in the neighborhood remained "ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving (Isaiah 6:9 & Mark 4:12)."

But, like most of us Linus is a bit of a hypocrite. Lets face it, was it really about having the most sincere pumpkin patch, or was it about getting the big prize of all the candy and toys showered on you as the Great Pumpkin flies through the air. It’s about faith as opposed to works.

It’s also about greed and misplaced faith. Sally could have just trusted her big brother and get candy just by asking for it, but instead she follows the false prophet Linus and squanders her entire night sitting in a pumpkin patch, hoping for a for a bigger pay off than any of the other kids. "Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened (Luke 11:8-10)."

Halloween was once All Saint’s Day Eve, a Church holiday, and then it became about superstition and fear. For a while in America, Halloween was about little kids, neighborhoods, hospitality, generosity, candy and costumes. In recent years it seems to have become more and more about big kids and adults, parties, pranks, blood and gore, demons and witchcraft, vampires and serial killers.

I say, take it back. Claim it for decency, civility and little kids. Make it about faith and mystery, surprises and silliness, not about meanness, anger, revenge and evil. Read the comics, rent "It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown," and buy good candy, not just candy corns either, but something chocolate. But please, please, remember poor Charlie Brown and don’t give any little kids rocks.

I was a teenage werewolf

"How did you ever end up coaching Cheerleading?"

Boy, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that one. Speaking as a Journalism teacher, if I wasn’t the male Cheer Coach, I’d probably encourage my students to interview him. I’d think there’s a story there, it certainly is a novelty.

When I attended the Iowa Cheer Coaches Association conference in Ames a couple of years ago, I was one of only two male coaches, and the other guy was coach at a junior college.

There has really only been one time, to my knowledge, that someone gave me a hard time about it. It was in L.A. An Athletic Director at another Christian school approached me, assuming I was one of the football coaches, to let me know something about that days game. When I explained to him that I wasn’t the football coach, I was the cheer coach, he laughed and made a homophobic joke and sympathetically asked me how I "got stuck" with cheerleading.

When I told him that I didn’t feel like I had been "stuck" with it and that I actually enjoyed it, he didn’t quite know what to do with me. He awkwardly back-stepped out of the conversation and made his way to the "real" coaches.

"So, how did you come to coach something like cheerleading?" I hear you ask. Alright, I’ll tell you.

I wasn’t ever particularly good at sports as a kid. Freshman year of college, I happened to be in the student union when some of the girls on the cheer squad came looking for guys to be "yell leaders." There were only four of them and they needed more to help them build pyramids.

I was full of school spirit and figured it was a great way to meet girls, so "what the heck." That was just one season, freshman year. My wife Bethany, on the other hand, didn’t cheer in college, but she did for years in high school.

The first year that we taught at Los Angeles Lutheran Jr/Sr High School, Bethany was expected to coach both junior high and varsity cheer. It didn’t take long for us to see that it was unreasonable to expect a rookie teacher to be expected to coach two sports simultaneously. When we approached our principal with the dilemma, he was more resourceful than we had anticipated. He had remembered from my file that I had cheered in college.

At first I was very reluctant, but we reasoned that Bethany and her high school cheerleaders could help me train my junior high cheerleaders. Besides we welcomed the additional stipend, meager as it was.

I have to tell you, if teaching is both one of the most difficult and yet most rewarding professions, coaching is even more so. You can’t get to know a student very well once a day during a fifty minute period alongside twenty or more other students, you can get to know them fairly well when you have just six or eight of them for a couple hours every single day. My hope and prayer is that by coaching, I can make a greater difference in the lives of a few young people.

I coached junior high cheer for about five years. After two or three, Bethany got out of coaching and took on other responsibilities as L. A. Lutheran’s Spiritual Life Director. No doubt, a step toward becoming a counselor, like she is today. During that time they went through several different Varsity coaches. I’d like to think that for a while, some of my junior high squads performed better than their high school counterparts. Eventually, they asked me if I would take over the varsity squad and assigned the junior high to a new rookie teacher.

I coached two more years in LA and I considered it a ministry, not just an after school activity. We prayed before and after games and once a week we had a meeting/Bible study kind of the way I imagine a Fellowship of Christian Athletes "huddle" might have at a public school. I wanted to be a "coach," and not merely a "sponsor," so I made every effort to work hard every practice and improve as much as we could. Our squads attended camps and attended workshops and combed through magazines and videos for ideas.

I’m honored to say that the cheer coach at Lutheran High in L. A. today cheered for me as a junior high student and for both Bethany and I as a high school student. It’s a kick to exchange email with her about what our squads are doing.

This is my third year coaching cheer at Boyer Valley and my ninth year coaching altogether. There are ups and downs, and anytime you’re dealing with teenagers, let alone teenage girls there are days when you feel like you’re going crazy. But it’s still a lot of fun, and as rewarding as ever. I may not be the best coach that’s ever been around the sport, and my squads may never get on ESPN, but I like what I do.

School spirit is important. Supporting the other teams, coaches, and athletes at our schools is important, and I’d like to think that being a positive adult male influence for young women is too.

A little Shop-Talk

October 6-12 was National Newspaper Week. I bet ya didn’t even notice, did ya? I noticed, but then I don’t just teach Art, I teach Newspaper and Yearbook.

You might have noticed that a couple of weeks ago that many newspapers, CNN and Good Morning America ran a rather peculiar story. Most of them cited the World Health Organization as reporting that within a couple of hundred years, there would be no more natural blondes.

According to Bill Hoffmann’s story in the New York Post, a German research laboratory believed that the gene for naturally blonde hair would become extinct by the year 2202. Supposedly two things were bringing about the demise of the blonde gene. For one, it’s a recessive gene anyway, and for another, men are supposedly more attracted to fake blondes than real ones so they’re not reproducing as much as they used to.

Well, the word over the wire services is that the World Health Organization never issued such a report, never did such research and doesn’t know where the story came from.

According to Lawrence Altman at the New York Times, CNN got it from Good Morning America, ABC anchors heard it from an ABC producer in London, who saw it in a British newspaper.

These guys obviously forgot three basic rules of journalism.

First; "Get it first, but first get it right"

Second, which is one way you make sure you get it right; "Confirm information with at least three independent sources."

Third; "Use reliable sources"

In this day and age of 24 hour news, the internet, cable and satellite TV, too many reporters are quoting each other instead of returning to the original source of the information. Or maybe Charles Gibson just wanted to know whether or not Diane Sawyer dyes her hair.

I bring it up because I don’t think we appreciate our small, local newspapers enough. It’s not easy to put one of these things together every week and get things done right and get them done on time.

Sure, a few weird people like me thing it’s fun, but a lot of really hard working farmers think that planting and bailing and harvesting is fun, that doesn’t make it easy. Those folks who’s names are in that box on the bottom left corner of page two go through a lot of stress for ten or twelve hours every Monday and Tuesday. From writing, checking, rechecking, pasting up and correcting to folding and stuffing, labeling and delivering they’re working hard to put it together. And they’re not becoming millionaires doing it.

Someday I think I’d like to write a feature story on the history of Lyon Publishing. A small town, small business that’s stayed in the family and been recognized throughout the state for it’s contributions to journalism and their communities. It started with the Schleswig LEADER, added the Mapleton PRESS , added the Ute Independent and then consolidated it with the Charter Oak TIMES. Again, not making millions, doing it 1) for the love of the work, a lot like why farmers farm and 2) to serve us, the community.

And don’t think that having a Mapleton company own the Charter Oak & Ute paper is anything like the Chicago Tribune Company owning the Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s not even comparable to the Omaha World Herald buying out the Council Bluffs Nonpareil. The Herald is owned by the Ganett Corporation, by the way, who publish USA Today. Mapleton are our neighbors, part of rural western Iowa.

One of the best things about the small, local press is that you get to be part of it. You send in your story ideas, you hold us accountable when we get a fact wrong or a name misspelled (miss-spelled?) (sic).

Heck, you can actually write the stories or take the pictures! I for one have really appreciated the things that people like Lynn Hoffman, JoAnne Seufert, Ken Lally and Mary Ellen Keating contribute. And if you enjoy this column at all, don’t just tell me, tell Mike & Barb Lyon. Better yet, tell your friends and relatives and try to convince them to buy a copy or even better, subscribe.

But you know what we’d really appreciate? Letters to the editor. It’s easy to mail it, or give it to Jackie, or email it. My email address is under my byline, or you could send it straight to the office at mpress@pionet.net.

The more you contribute and participate, (not to mention the more people who subscribe) the better the NEWSpaper will be. It will be more personal, more unique to us, and you’ll make it more likely that we’ll be able to continue to have our own local newspaper on into the future.

Plant Dirt, Harvest Mud

Let me get this straight- a Senatorial candidate held a private strategy meeting where he and his supporters were venomous, angry, and full of malice toward his opponent. It’s a shame that hatred would be what motivates you to run for office, but big deal, we’d expect a candidate to be full of venom and malice toward their opponent, I suppose.

Someone secretly tape-recorded this meeting. That’s not cool. Remember all the trouble tape recorders got Richard Nixon into? Oh, and lemme see if I remember this right… some how or other a transcript of this tape recording was got into the hands of this candidate’s opponent (the incumbent Senator). Wow.

On top of all this, someone from the incumbent’s camp leaked a copy of this transcript to the press. Big surprise there. Were they hoping that the public would be outraged and offended by the things that were said at the meeting? It seems like instead focus is on how unscrupulous it was to leak the transcript and how suspicious it is that the incumbent received a copy to begin with.

At first it was thought that the person who did the recording was an invited guest, later it was suggested that the recorder was a long time friend of the incumbent.

Sound like a bad episode of NBC’s "The West Wing?" Don’t I wish. This is what’s happening right here in Iowa, between candidate Greg Ganske and Senator Tom Harkin.

Now at the risk of losing the respect of many of you I’ll admit something to you….My name is Ted Mallory, and I’m a registered Democrat. I didn’t have to say it as if I were at a twelve step meeting before George Bush Sr. made it into a dirty word back in his run for President in 1988, you know, "the L-Word."

The reason I tell you this is to lend credence to this next confession- I’ve never been a big Harkin fan. I can’t put my finger on it, there’s just something about him that doesn’t set right. Not a good reason, my fellow Democrats will probably say, but what can I say? I try to weigh information heavier than intuition when I vote, but it’s still there, and it nags at my gut.

Mind you, I in no way see Ganske as a hero or a victim in this scenario. Politics, like war, is Hell, I guess. And, like in war, both combatants are equally covered in the mud, blood, and filth. Only for one of the first times since I first cast a ballot, I don’t have a side to root for.

The gubernatorial race isn’t much better. My Republican friends had pretty well convinced me that Governor Vilsack was too urban, too influenced by partisan politics on the National level, and bad for education. Then their candidate came on TV with negative campaign commercials. What can I say about them? They’re gross. They grossly oversimplify the issues. Gross, gross, gross.

Okay, you’re right, it’s not fair to make fun of a guys name. But my point is this; We know who you’re against, but what are you for? I would have thought that of any state in the Union, Iowa would be a place where political candidates would be practical, plain spoken and positive. I consider what we’re going through a leadership drought. The field isn’t producing a decent crop of leaders. All we have are reporters dishing up dirt and candidates slinging mud.

I don’t know anything about Democratic Congressional candidate Paul Shomshor. What I know about Republican candidate Steve King is that some Republicans I respect thought of him as their second or third choice in their Primaries. It’s hard to jump ship when the gruel’s just as tepid in the other crew’s galley.

Back in June I interviewed Crawford County Democratic Party Chairman Les Lewis for a story about the Primary elections. He had high praise for our neighbor Clarence Hoffman, he said Clarence was "more of a rural representative than a Republican representative."

There’s what we need, bi-partisanship, post-partisanship, and concern for and focus on your constituents, rather than on winning at all costs. Stop the attacks and dirty tricks. Stop the negative ads. Start telling us what you plan on doing for us.

Coming home

Last week I flew back to Phoenix for my nephew Daniel’s Baptism. I didn’t get much sleep the night before I left and that was probably just as well. It meant I was too tired to be nervous about flying only days after the first anniversary of 9/11. Fewer people fly since 9/11, which meant that there was no one beside me to be disturbed if I happened to snore.

I scored a window seat, so I could survey the landscape as we made our decent over my native Arizona. They’ve just finished the late summer monsoon season, so there was fresh grass on the mountains that been scorched by the forest fires of this summer. There was even a little water in usually dry washes and river-beds that don’t usually have rivers in them. I noticed that instead of square sections, Arizona farms are disk shaped, due to the pivot sprinklers used to water crops in the desert.

When we came across Phoenix itself is when it hit me- that old saying about not being able to go home again. The reason you can’t go home again is because you can’t step in the same place in a river twice. The river is constantly moving and changing. Phoenix isn’t much like the western town I grew up in.

When I was a kid, we had a dirt road in my subdivision that they had to put oil on to keep the dust down. Across that road were horses and chickens. Today, Phoenix seems to be a vast expanse of concrete and winding freeways.

My folks picked me up and we left Sky Harbor International Airport and ventured out into the blinding sunlight and 104° heat. To my delight, my Mom bought tickets for my Dad and I to see the World Champion Diamondbacks play the Milwaukee Brewers that afternoon.

More evidence of Phoenix’s changes. As a kid we went to minor league games of the Phoenix Giants at a small stadium by the power plant. It smelled like soda and beer and sweat. Bank One Ballpark ("BOB") is more like the Mall of America, air conditioned and filled with shops, neon, and fast food outlets. Downtown used to be run-down, and nearly vacant. It used to be full of office workers, homeless people and police. Now it’s polished and "touristy," full of campy cowboy and southwestern statues and shops.

I loved it. Randy Johnson pitched 17 strikeouts for his 22nd complete game win this season. Junior Spivey hit a grand slam, Tony Womak stole two bases, and Steve Finely and Louis Gonzales caught pop-flies. Dad bought Daniel, Grace, and Ellen D’Backs clothes and we listened to the post-game show on the radio as we made our way up Central Avenue to the Squaw Peak Parkway.

The D’Backs have changed Phoenix too. As I graduated from high school, Phoenix was reaching critical mass. Growing up, it was home to Indians, Mexicans, and people who moved there after WWII or in the late 60’s. But, much like America, it grew almost uncontrollably and it’s different ethnic groups, religions, incomes and political interests were beginning to do one of two things; either cause conflict, or water-down and lose any sense of cohesive identity. Having a winning pro baseball team gives Phonecians something to rally around. Like the terrorist attacks have united the Nation, baseball has united Phoenix.

By the way, Kurt Schilling graduated from my High School, brag, brag. (As if I knew him) He was a Senior when I was a Freshman and Shadow Mountain High School had 2,300 students. My older brother Bart said he sat behind him in Algebra. Bart said Kurt struggled in math.

Monday morning I went for a hike in the Phoenix Mountain Preserve near my parent’s house. I got up at six, witch wasn’t hard since that’s eight, central time. I hiked up the east face of Shadow Mountain so that I could look out over the city and watch the sun rise over the Superstition Mountains. A coyote crossed my path under a palo verde tree. Of course, minutes later, so did a pair of joggers and their black lab. Further along the trail I smelled the sweet aroma of sagebrush and creosote and noticed a jackrabbit scurry across an arroyo under a mighty saguaro. Of course, minutes later, I also caught wind of a city bus and saw a police helicopter scurry across the sky.

As I flew back into Omaha, I noticed the colors go from tan to green as we came east over Colorado and Nebraska. A beautiful sight were the rolling hills. The square sections of farms reminded me of a great patch-work quilt, spread over an inviting bed or sofa. The sun was just setting as I drove into Charter Oak, St. Boniface’s steeple welcomes you home if you come in on L51 from the South. No sooner did I park in front of "Mallory Manor" (a.k.a. "the Butler House," or "the Weed House.) than Gracie came racing down the walk to give me a hug.

You can go home again. It’s just that where you call home may change. I still love Phoenix, but I really love coming home to Charter Oak, my home town.

September 11- one year later

My daily commute has to be one of the biggest perks to living back here instead of LA. In LA, we’d get on the freeway and plug along through traffic till we merged with another freeway and get off in time to sit through several traffic lights before we finally got to school. The colors we saw concrete gray and smog beige. Now, when I take L-51 South to Dunlap at sunrise, the colors are different every day. If I encounter any traffic it’s farm equipment or deer. Plenty of time to think and prepare for the day.

This morning (9/11) as I drove in I listened to live coverage of the memorial services at the sight of the World Trade Center on National Public Radio. New York Governor George Pataki recited the Gettysburg Address. He reminded people at the memorial that Lincoln was at the dedication ceremony of battlefield that was to become a war memorial. Pataki noted that he had the same responsibility 139 years later.

Consider Lincoln’s words with new emphasis:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

I was crying. As I passed Dunahm’s barn and headed for the railroad tracks, I was crying. That place that used to be the capital of the financial world is now a holy place, a resting place, and a memorial. No matter what they build there, a statue, new offices, a park. It will always be "Ground Zero."

It is for us the living to be dedicated to the task before us. How long until unity, service to others, volunteerism and patriotism go out of fashion again? So many returned to Church at this time last year, but how many have continued to attend? We’re resolved as a nation to not be pushed around, to not be attacked again, but how has our foreign policy changed? Have we taken up the mantle of responsibility that only the most affluent society, the only remaining super power can take up? Have we changed? Every Christmas there’s a cliché about living every day as if it were Christmas. Will we make every day ‘Patriots’ Day?’

The weekend before you read this, I traveled to Phoenix for the baptism of my brother’s first baby. I have to admit that for the first time in my entire life I’m nervous about flying in an airplane. I hope that that’s not the only kind of change we experience. I hope that we’ll take our freedom less for granted. I hope we’ll make an effort to get to know the people who live around us. I hope we’ll be more likely to give and less likely to make demands on others. I hope that we’ll not only show more appreciation for policemen and firemen but for postal employees and pilots too. I hope we’ll volunteer more. I hope we’ll try to find solutions together, rather than sticking to party lines. I hope we’ll pray more.

Looking at books of photos of 911 in Wal-Mart one is struck by how much Ground Zero resembled a volcano for weeks after the attack. The landscape was irrevocably changed

Where were you?

I was in my in-law’s living room watching the American Country Music Awards when a husky voice I was used to hearing sing ‘feel-good’ songs stopped me in my tracks and brought me to tears. That was the live premiere of Alan Jackson’s "Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)." If you’re like me, that was the cathartic moment you needed to put you over the edge. Weeks of pent-up anxiety, anger, and anguish gushed out.

Where were you when the world stop turning on that September day
Teaching a class full of innocent children
Or driving down some cold interstate
Did you feel guilty 'cause you're a survivor
In a crowded room did you feel alone
Did you call up your mother and tell her you loved her
Did you dust off that bible at home

I was about to begin Drawing class. The kid who came in and first announced that "they crashed a plane into some building in New York" was nonchalant, as if he was cooler than the rest of us because he knew something we didn’t. He acted as if it was just an exciting scene in a movie or a video game, he wasn’t shocked or horrified at all, he was excited.

At first I assumed that it was a small private plane, either a freak accident or a bizarre suicide. Since I teach Journalism and used to teach History, I felt that it wouldn’t be out of line to take some time from Drawing class to look the news item up on CNN.com. I had been in Journalism class as a Sophomore in high school when the space shuttle Challenger blew up. Our teacher turned the radio on for us all day so we could witness history. Now was my turn to do the same. What I saw on the internet shook me to the core.


Did you stand there in shock at the sight of that black smoke
Rising against that blue sky
Did you shout out in anger, in fear for your neighbor
Or did you just sit down and cry
Did you weep for the children who lost their dear loved ones
And pray for the ones who don't know

One thing that struck me was what a beautiful day it was. It was beautiful here, but the sky was just as clear and just as blue over New York City. That made the American Airlines luxury liner even more striking. You see, my father had worked for American Air Freight for 45 years. He wore a blue American Airlines uniform years before he was married, years before I was born. There had never been a time I could remember when the shiny aluminum planes with patriotic red, white, and blue lettering hadn’t been a part of my life. Like John Deere green for many people around here, those planes represented America for me. They symbolized my Dad, family, security, everything right and good and fair. That made it like using a policeman’s own gun to shoot him to death

Did you open your eyes, hope it never happened
And you close your eyes and not go to sleep
Did you notice the sunset the first time in ages
Or speak to some stranger on the street
Did you lay down at night and think of tomorrow…

Did you go to a church and hold hands with some strangers
Stand in line and give your own blood
Did you just stay home and cling tight to your family
Thank God you had somebody to love

I remember driving home that afternoon and thinking, again, about what a remarkable beautiful day it was, and yet I had never known such a terrible, ugly day. I felt claustrophobic under a wide-open sky. I couldn’t escape that fact that there were no planes in the sky- as if there are ever many noticeable over rural Iowa anyway, but it still felt overwhelming. All the cold-war fears of WWIII that I grew up with came back, compounded by all the end-of-the-world fears from TV Evangelist’s false prophesies. That was compounded by a new fear, that I hadn’t ever had as a child or a teen. Fear as a parent for my children.


I watch CNN but I'm not sure I could
Tell you the difference in Iraq and Iran
But I know Jesus and I talk to God
And I remember this from when I was young
Faith, hope and love are some good things He gave us
And the greatest is love

Pastor Gebhardt was at a pastor’s conference, so our Elders and St. John’s asked me to speak at a memorial service. All I could think about was FDR. Not so much what he said after Pearl Harbor, but what he said when he was first inaugurated. He was talking about the Great Depression and essentially he told Americans that if facing this makes us reevaluate our values, if it forces us to come together and help each other, and if it leads us to seek God for His help and His sovereignty, then it will be a good thing, not evil. Sure enough, Romans 8:28 has played itself out in our nation over the past year.

Yesterday, Charter Oak’s American Legion organized our churches to ring their bells in honor of the victims of September 11, 2001.From now on, each time you hear the bells, why not take a moment to pray for our nation and for your neighbors? Next Wednesday (9/18) morning at 7:30, why not join together around the flagpole at Charter Oak-Ute High School and spend a few more minutes praying. The third Wednesday in September is "See You At The Pole Day." (For more information visit www.syatp.org.)This year it comes one week after the first anniversary of what Congress has decided to call "Patriots’ Day." What better way to show our patriotism than to pray for our nation and it’s leaders?

And I remember this from when I was young
Faith, hope and love are some good things He gave us
And the greatest is love

The Tin man is rusty

There it goes. Summer. Last Monday was the unofficial end. Oh sure, it’s dang hot this week, and autumn doesn’t officially begin until September 23, but you and I both know that the jig is up. The kids are back to school, the tomato, zucchini, and cucumber crops are tapering off and there really isn’t any more good fresh sweet corn. The last big BBQ, the last family reunions, the last trip to the lake, that was last weekend.

Here’s how my goofy brain works; it’s Labor Day so I think about Memorial Day, the other book-end on summer. Whenever I think about Memorial Day I think about three things, veterans, the Indianapolis 500, and the Wizard of Oz. That’s not so weird. For decades the Wizard of Oz and the Indy 500 always came on TV that weekend, so stay with me.

Okay, so I’m thinking about Frank Baum’s "The Wizard of Oz," that makes me think of Labor Day again. "What? Where is he going with this?" You’re saying to yourself, trust me, I’ll get there.

The Wizard of Oz is actually an allegory. An Allegory is a story where everything symbolizes something else, right? Come to find out that Dorothy represents all of us, at least we average Midwesterners. The Wizard represented politicians, the Emerald City is Washington D.C., all our hopes and dreams for a better life are pinned on the Wiz.

The Cowardly Lion is the Church, it’s supposed to reign in our lives, but too often Christians are too complacent or too frightened to take a stand for what’s right. The Scarecrow is Farming, Agriculture, the American Farmer. Scarecrow was probably the smarted person in the story of the Wizard of Oz, but too often we in rural America sell ourselves short. I hear students everyday put themselves down because they’re from Iowa or from a small town, when in reality we’re no less intelligent or sophisticated then anyone else in America.

The Tin Man is more rusty than ever these days. He represented the American worker. I don’t know if it’s the 50’s fear of Communism, the 60’s and 70’s corruption and unrest, or the rampant greed and materialism of the 80’s and 90’s, but it seems like people just don’t respect labor anymore. In the 90’s, less than 15 percent of workers belonged to unions, in the 1950's of nearly half did.

It could be that all we ever hear about is the "new economy," information and service have replaced manufacturing. It could be that we encourage our kids to get white-collar jobs to make more money. It could be that more and more blue-collar jobs are held by immigrants. Sometimes we whites wish life and America would just stay white. Whatever the reason we forget about the working man. Even if politically you’re opposed to labor unions, you should still recognize and respect the contribution of workers.

We think of farmers on thanksgiving and veterans on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, but on Labor Day, we think about Boats, Brauts, and Bud Light.

Let me give you a refresher course. In the 1890’s Pullman Illinois was a "Company Town." That meant workers lived in homes rented to them by the Railroad they worked for. Pay was low and rent was high.

It reminds you of the line from Tennessee Ernie Ford’s old tune "Sixteen Tons"-

"Saint Peter don’t ya call me ‘cause I can’t go, I owe my soul to the company store."

At any rate, Eugene V. Debs came in and organized the American Railway Union. They went on strike for better by, lower rent and a day off once a year. President Grover Cleveland broke the strike and Debs went to prison, his ARU was disbanded, and Pullman employees were forced to sign a pledge not to unionize again. Unions were pretty much eliminated until the Great Depression.

In September 1892, union workers in New York City took an unpaid day off and marched around Union Square in support of a national holiday for workers.

1894 was an election year. President Cleveland seized the chance at conciliation, and Labor Day was born. He was not reelected.

Think about your folks. Whether they’re farmers, teachers, mechanics, hair-dressers, sell insurance, drive truck, or work at the plant, they were working to keep a roof over your head, clothes on your back and food on the table. Labor day is summer’s last hurrah, but it should also be a day when you say thanks to people who work hard to make life better. Without the Tin Man, you’d never get out of the woods.

Happy New Year

I suppose that not all of you are celebrating this holiday with me. For most of you New Year’s happens in January. Oh, there may be some of you who focus on the "Fiscal Year," which ends in June (I think, thank God I’m not an accountant). Some of you might be asking, "What’s he talking about? The Jewish New Year? I didn’t know he was Jewish? The Chinese New Year? The Muslim New Year?"

No, silly reader, I’m talking, of course about the New School Year, well under way for a week by the time you’re reading this. Just as farmers measure the passage of time by the crops and the seasons, we teachers and students see January only as the middle of the year, the last end of the first Semester. No, for us in "the United States of Academia," the New Year began last week.

"If your New Year starts in August," you may ask, "what year is it?" After all, on your calendar it’s 2002, for Orthodox Jews, its 5760. Well, it depends who you ask. For most students it’s a name, not a number.

"I’m in THIRD grade," they might tell you. Or you might hear a parent tell you "Mary Beth is gonna be a Sophomore this year." It can get confusing, like when you ask a teacher how old a child is, "Well, let’s see, Johnny’s sister is a fifth-grader now, so I think he’s a first grader, isn’t he? No- wait, wait,wait, he’s in Mrs. Browns class, so he must be a second grader this year." Of course they never tell you the child’s age, you’re just supposed to figure out in your head how old you were when you were in second grade and assume that Johnny is about that old, plus-or-minus a year.

For teachers, it’s different. I have a friend for whom this is the year "15," although they’re thinking they may only have three or four left because they’re starting college classes toward a new career. Other’s start counting backwards, "Only two more till the IPERS (pension) kicks in, I’m thinking maybe three more, but I’ll probably still sub after that."

Still other teachers restart their calendar depending on their location or responsibility. I believe our new Superintendent at Boyer Valley was in the year 18 when she became a principal, but then there was a completely different year system as principal and of course now this is only year ONE. Can you imagine? As if the world was just created? How strange, not 2002, but just ONE.

For me this is not just the New Year, it’s the new decade. No, wait, not yet, this is the LAST year of the decade. Just as 2000 wasn’t really the start of the new Millennium, 2001 was. I started teaching in 1993, so this is just the start of year TEN, the second decade won’t start until next August.

Confused? So are History, Math, Science and Accounting teachers, so don’t feel bad. Oh, did you know that on the Chinese calendar, this is the year of the Horse? Well, I don’t know about Charter Oak-Ute, but at Boyer Valley, this is the "year of the Goose." Don’t ask.

Well, whatever year it is for you, make it a good one, full of learning and challenge. Don’t let the anxiety of book reports put your stomach in knots. Enjoy the aromas of pencil shavings, chalk dust, magic markers, teacher’s lounge coffee, hot lunch and gym socks. Think of August as a time of renewal, of fresh starts and second chances. If you’ve broken all your resolutions

City mice visit country mice

Last week some very dear friends visited us from the Thousand Oaks area in California. When we first met John and Diane D'Agostin, their tiny apartment was literally in the shadow of the Warner Brother's Studio complex in Burbank, around the hill from the Hollywood Bowl and down the street from Disney and NBC. This summer they flew to Minneapolis to see other friends and decided that rather than having us drive up, they wanted to experience what real-life farming and small town life was like.

I'm not sure what was more fun, seeing things through their LA native eyes, or the eyes of four little girls, our 8 month and 3 year-olds and their 2 and 4 year olds.

We actually have a lot in common. Both in LA and Charter Oak, one puts the word "the" before naming a major freeway. In Southern California, they have "the 5, the 405, the 101 and the 210. In Charter Oak we have "the Ricketts Highway, the Dunlap Highway, and the Ute Highway."

What was probably the most foreign to them was listening to public service announcements on the radio warning listeners to be careful where they dig in their back yards so as to avoid power lines. Diane marveled at the lack of concrete and congestion. She thought that it would be unnerving to be isolated on a farm place, at least living in a town, you're around people. She compared it to an island in a sea of rolling prairie.

I was proud to introduce them to some of the greatest joys of late summer; thick Iowa pork chops, home grown tomatoes and cucumbers from the neighbors, Dad's sweet corn, home made ice cream, and of course, Grandma Laura's fresh baked bread and cinnamon rolls.

Devin, our four-year-old goddaughter, was startled by a grasshopper on her car door. Of course as she stood and told her dad about it, she was oblivious to the dozens more bouncing back and forth above her head.

We took them for a field trip to see Uncle Melvin Neddermeyer's hog operation. "Peee-uuuw!" complained little Devin, long before the car door opened. Our friends think that every city-dweller should have to come see how much hard work is put into raising the food they so easily take for granted. They asked us about how many uses there are for corn and soy, like feed, plastics, and ethanol.

The girls all enjoyed a ride on Grandpa Allan's John Deere, but they probably enjoyed the ride in the wagon pulled by the rider mower just as much. They saw goats and ducks and chickens at Dan North's house up the hill. We opted for the Zoo rather than the State Fair, because it was a shorter drive and we thought it would be more child-friendly, but they got a kick out of the nightly fair highlights on IPTV.

As a transplant from the city myself, their visit really reinforced for me how blessed we are to live in a community where people wave when they drive by, as opposed to one where all they'll wave is the finger. Iowa is a great place to visit, but I'd rather live here.

What I did on my Summer Vacation

Last May, as summer was getting closer, I started thinking about finding a summer job. Lots of teachers do. Last year, I helped a contractor strip and re-paint coolers in the Farmland for a few weeks. It was hard work. Unfortunately, the contractor had jobs lined up this year that would put his operation in Illinois most of the summer. Not that Farmland is in a position to use him right now anyway.

I remembered advice that my Aunt Rene' gave me years ago; "do something that will help you in your field." Rene' was a college academic and career counselor, after all.

So, since I'm the yearbook advisor for Boyer Valley High School, it made sense to look for work taking pictures, writing stories, and designing layouts.

When she was in high school, my wife Bethany had worked for Mike and Barb Lyon at the Charter Oak-Ute NEWSpaper and the Mapleton PRESS. So, I knocked on Mike's door (actually it was an email). I felt that I had to convince him that I was far more competent than I was as a college kid when Bethany and I worked for him on the Charter Oak Centennial Edition the summer before we got married. To my surprise, he gave me a chance.

What a great job! I had three goals when I started; to get to know more people in and more about the community, to hone my skills so that I'd become a better Journalism teacher in the Fall, and to give back as to the people who have given so much to me and my family.

What I got was to live out a boyhood fantasy. Other guys dream about winning the Daytona 500 or playing quarterback in the Rose Bowl. As editor of my school newspaper at Shadow Mountain High School in Phoenix, Arizona I planned on pasting-up copy at a major metropolitan daily. My best-case scenario had me either as the political cartoonist or a political columnist for the Chicago Sun Times.

This summer I not only had to ask the Crawford County Democratic party chairman on line one to "please hold," so that I could answer a call from the Republican party chairman on line two- I actually got to sit in the boss' chair and layout the front page. More importantly, I got to meet and know more about some wonderful people- you.

So, I must say thank you to Mike and Barb for giving me this opportunity and to you, gentle readers, for your gracious encouragement and support. If teaching, coaching, Church youth group, and helping raise two little girls will allow it- I hope to freelance some stories, commentary, and maybe even some comics for you throughout the year. We need your input too. Please give us your feedback and ideas. Email us your opinions, story ideas and reactions to what we run. This is your paper; participate with us in serving our communities.