Write if you get work; hang by your thumbs.

As a very young child, I became obsessed with the radio.  In those days, we had never heard of FM and while we had heard of TV we were never exposed to it.  No, this was plain old a.m. radio.

Back then, radio played a much bigger role in everybody's life, perhaps similar to what TV eventually did.  As I say, I was obsessed with it.  When I was six years old, I dreamed of being a radio announcer.  I don't think I could've imagined anything in life that would've been more important.

During the daytime, radio was dominated by what we called "soap operas".  They were fifteen minute programs, five days a week, with heartwarming but cliff hanging stories that begged loyalty.  Almost invariably they were sponsored by soap companies.  We had "Oxadol's Own Ma Perkins, Pepper Young's Family, the program that is brought to you by Camay the Soap of Beautiful Women, and Lucy Linton's Stories from Life, brought to you by extra soapy Sunlight.  Even the ever popular Happy Gang urged us to "keep happy in the Happy Gang way, keep healthy with Palmolive each day."

Eventually, I became a preteen and entered my early teenage years.  Of course, I became cynical.  I discovered a hilarious comedy duo by the name of Bob and Ray.  Apparently, they started as a morning combination on a Boston radio station, but I was able to catch up to them along with the rest of North America on WSYR Syracuse (I grew up in Kingston).

Bob and Ray pretended that they were serious radio announcers, often doing newscasts and other important things on their radio station.  Ray, the anchor, would send Bob out as Wally Ballou to cover such things as traffic accidents.  They had an ongoing soap opera called The Lives and Loves of Linda Lovely.  The announcer that for that program, with a great baritone voice, identified himself as O leo Lahey.  From time to time, they would interview the National Director of the American Say a Song Society who would, with a soprano fake English accent, announce that we should say songs such as "You Ain't Nothing but a Hound Dog"rather than sing them.  You get the point.

Bob and Ray would solemnly sign off every program with the following words "this is Bob Elliott reminding you to write if you get work" "and this is Ray Goulding reminding you to hang by your thumbs."  There was never an explanation as to why they said it, but as a true disciple I have always said goodbye to as many people as I could with one or other of those phrases.

As a young lawyer I got to know Margaret Day, a grandmother who told me, amongst other things, that the phrase "right if you get work" was said as a goodbye in the depression of the 1930s to people getting on boxcars to go out west looking for a job.  Maybe.  I don't know.  She remembered those days; I didn't.

After a while, I added the phrase "see you next Sunday'.  These words were always uttered by Andy from Amos and Andy on the radio to remind people to tune in again the following week.  This was a little more commercial and I can't tell you why I added it to the other two phrases.

The same above-mentioned Margaret Day, ran an organization called Young People in Legal Difficulties.  I had recently bought a cottage and was feeling guilty that most city folk never see such things.  Margaret Day convinced me to take some of her charges up to the lake.  One of them was a redheaded kid.  All I remember about him was that he had a few mental health issues.  If he was impressed with something he would say "far out, heavy duty, wired for sound, artificial hippie".  I am sure a psychologist would be happy to analyse why he said that.  I won't get into it here but that is why those phrases were added to my mantra.

My nephew, Malcolm: McCulloch, may not have heard what I was saying very well.  He started to say Owen Sound instead of wired for sound, so I added that to my mantra.

When my two grandnephews, at about the age of seven, tried to play monopoly before they grasped the rules, Callum was really out of it while his twin brother, Quinn, seemed to grasp the purpose of the game.  Quinn said, in explanation,, "it's all about the money".  He said it in such a funny way that I added that to my mantra.  My wife, Myrta, added "button up your overcoat" so why not throw that in permanently , as well.

So there you have it.  The reasoning behind why I say such silly things when I am saying goodbye to people.  My niece, Elspeth, says she intends to repeat some of this at my funeral.  She won't have a chance.  I intended to out live her.

A whole bunch of stuff I want to tell you

Let us settle something first before we get into other parts of the diatribe.  My ego is such that I hope that you are all wondering how I am doing in this coronavirus season.  There are a whole bunch of rules were set down by the Ontario Retirement Communities Association (ORCA).  We have them all in effect as well as a few directives is coming right from the Ministry of Health.  We received an email from the ministry overnight indicating that, unless a resident is very very ill, only healthcare workers, including PSW's, can enter our building at all.  We can have no outside entertainment of any sort; our newly hatched chickens have been whisked away. For now, at least, there is not even an exercise program in the mornings.

Personally, however, I am doing very well.  I have a very large room; I have a lot to read; I have my computer.  I have the luxury of knowing that my urinary tract infection which started last November is now completely cleared up.  I am a healthy man and I can only say to COVID19, I may be part of your target demographic, but you won't get me.

That being said, I do miss the fact that every outside diversion has closed down.  I particularly miss going to McWheelers, the wheelchair gym at McMaster University which I attended two or three times a week.  I will also miss a choral concert and a philharmonic concert which I had hoped to attend this month.  But all of humanity must fight this thing together and there will be light at the end of the tunnel.

About ten days ago I saw a film.  I saw it in an old-fashioned movie theatre which has had a complete restoration to the way it was when it opened in 1935, the Westdale Theatre in the trendy Westdale section of Hamilton.  I am very impressed with this theatre.  It has pretty well all of the attributes of the old theatres that I used to go to as a child.  You enter from the street to an Art Deco lobby complete with a place to buy popcorn.  There are 350 seats in this theatre, so it is unlike those which happy cut up into two or more screens.  It was a lot of fun.  The movie I saw, Parasite, was okay.

Did you know that the movie chain, Cineplex, is being sold to foreign interests?  A number of films that are made with Canadian government support get that grant money on the basis of a guarantee from Cineplex that they will show the movie.  A lot of producers are worried.

I received a whole bunch of books for Christmas and I have started them all, but it takes me a long time to read a book and so I have not finished most of them, yet.  My friend Hal Mattson, doesn't actually give me books but reports to me that he has read a book that I just have to read because he keeps thinking of me all the time he's reading it.  I guess that is a complement.

One of the ones he recommended to me is "The 100-year-old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared" byJonas Jonasson.  It was written in Swedish but I read an English translation because my Swedish is not very good.  It is hilarious.  I laughed openly on a number of occasions. 

It is a story of a 100-year-old man who climbed out the window of his old age home in order to avoid his 100th birthday party.  He proceeds to meet a number of strange people and in the process of a few days manages to commit a couple of relatively violent homicides.  This story is interspersed with the story of his life, between the years 1905 and 2005.  It turns out that he, without any planning whatsoever, lived a Forest Gump -type life, travelling around the world east to west and then west to east.  Because of a drinking binge that he has with Harry Truman he gets to meet all the great leaders of the twentieth century in similar circumstances.  As I say, it is hilarious and, because it is a relatively old book, written in 2006 , practically everybody who I speak to about it has already read it and that is kind of neat.  We can reminisce about it together.

Well as I often say on occasions when it's time to say goodbye "write if you get work".

A lost chance to have a philosopher king as leader of the western world

The Democratic Party in the United States seems to have closed the door on the possibility of giving the western world an exciting new leader.  I am referring to the withdrawal last night from the campaign for Presidential nomination of Pete Buttigieg (or Peter, as he was known before he got involved in politics)         .

I carved out a certain luxury during the course of my life by involving myself in a number of political campaigns where I got to know the candidate very well or, in some cases, I knew people who knew the candidate very well – people I trusted.  I like to think that I played at major role in convincing cerebral people, deep thinkers if you will, such as John English and John Milloy to enter the political arena.

I do not have that luxury when it comes to American politics so all I know is what I gather from the media.From the media I have learned that Peter Buttigieg is, indeed, a very cerebral person.  Might I suggest that until he got involved in politics he might have been known as a nerd.  His parents were both middle-class academics.  He got a chance to study history and literature at both Harvard and as a result of a Rhodes scholarship, Oxford.  He has taken a major interest in international affairs.  I cannot discern to what extent any of the other candidates have done that.  His advocacy has always been what I would call left of centre.  He chose to serve in Afghanistan, apparently to educate himself so as to better understand his own advocacy for world peace.

You may have watched some of the debates, as I have.  When it got down to the last six candidates it was very interesting.  The others seem to have been enjoying badmouthing each other.  While he did a little bit of that himself, it did not seem to come naturally.  In a very noisy atmosphere, he looked calm and, yes, cerebral.  I notice that at one point he said "I am the only one on the stage who is not a millionaire, I think".  Nobody challenged him on it.  Why should they?  Except for Michael Bloomberg, who is obviously a billionaire, the rest of them have spent their whole adult lives in Washington in elective office and, strangely, accumulating fortunes. (That does not happen in Canadian politics).  Clearly, Buttigieg would have been a breath of fresh air to American national politics.

Would it not have been delightful to have something of a philosopher king as the "leader of the free world", a man who relys on his religious convictions when talking about matters such as climate change

If I am not mistaken,Buttigieg would have been the youngest president in the history of United States, a record now held by John F. Kennedy.  By contrast, either Saunders or Biden will be the oldest, a record that, if he is reelected, could become held by Donald Trump.

So what is to become of this young fellow?  Saunders says that he will not choose "an old white guy" (those are his words) as his running mate, and it does not make sense politically for either he or Biden to choose Buttigieg for that role.  The timing of his withdrawal, perhaps based on finances as much is anything else, is clearly a boost for Biden and Biden owes him "big".

 I wonder if he would make a good Secretary of State.  Just a suggestion, Joe.

Where have you been all this time?

Hi, folks.  Apparently, it has been 1 1/2 years since I said anything on my blog.  This hiatus might have gone on forever had I not been challenged by my grandnephew, Callum Sobey Cooke, to start writing again.  Callum will be fifteen in a few weeks; I will be eighty-three in August.  It invigorates me to think that I might have something to say in which he would be interested.

So here goes.

I don't expect to be writing any long essays.  Rather, I hope to go on my blog on a fairly regular basis just talking about whatever's coming into my mind at the time.  I hope I can inspire somebody; at the very least, I may entertain a few of you.  I have to be tough-minded in listening to your criticisms.  In the past, I reviewed a movie only to find that somebody who had better knowledge of the history involved did not find it a very good film.  Then I reviewed a book which I clearly did not like and did not finish.  Somebody quite close to me decided to read the book and read it right to the very end, apparently enjoy ing it a great deal.

 We have a new carpet in the hallway here Caroline Place, my retirement residence.  If I do say so, it looks rather sharp and I'm rather proud to be living here.  I am now in my eighth year, so I guess I should be proud.  Well, so much for that comment!

Let me get back you when I figure out how to post this and think of something more interesting to say.

Unhinged, by Manigault Newman Omarosa

Recently, a friend of mine handed me a book and suggested I might read it. I don't know whether I took him aback or not, but I confessed that I had never heard of the author. Clearly, the author, herself, assumed that I knew I great deal about her and, indeed, that everybody should.

I also confess that I may have resented being asked to spend time exploring the chaos going on inside the United States White House. I prefer to wait until the historians sort it all out.

I found the author's discussion of her own life, however, to be very intriguing. She was born into a tenement in Youngstown, Ohio, a rusting old steel town, which had seen better days. When she was three years old, while spending time with an aunt, the home caught fire and her cousin was burned to death. When she was seven, her father was murdered. When she was a teenager, her gangster brother was the subject of drive-by shootings wherein everybody else in the house was dodging bullets. She decided it was a good idea to get out of there. [Incidentally, her brother was, also, eventually murdered.]

"Getting out of there." nvolved becoming Miss USA [a pageant owned by Donald Trump] and going to prestigious Howard University.. Somehow, that took her to the White House where she worked for Pres. Bill Clinton. If it is that easy to get away from a poverty-stricken neighbourhood, it is amazing that other people don't do it.. Clearly, Omarosa, as she brands herself, possessed a great deal of determination and ability to make it to the top.

After working for the Clintons, she apparently became a national figure through her appearances on the television production of The Apprentice. I guess that is where I should have been more in touch with pop-culture so that I could have grasped her fame. My ignorance reminds me off the moment when I had been told that Princess Diana had died. My first response, of which I am now ashamed, was "so what".

Following her stint on the very popular TV show, which show made Donald Trump famous as somebody that was good at publicly firing people without showing any compassion, she trained to become a pastor. That seems extremely odd. We are never given any explanation as to why.

She doesn't seem to have done any serious pastoring. Rather, she went to work on Hillary Clinton's election campaign in 2015. The problem is that, after all this dedication, she was not offered an important position on Hillary's campaign team. Donald Trump, on the other hand, was anxious to have her, especially since she was a woman and had black skin.(We all know that skin colour is very important in American politics.)

The rest is history. She went to work in the White House and then, displeasing Trump, was fired. Of course, that meant that she should now write a book.

I am not sure what the moral of all this is, except to say that she seems to be a rather intriguing person

The octogenarian returns

I got a notice from somewhere that it will, as of tomorrow, be a full year since I wrote anything on my blog. I think I got a little bit of writers block after trying to turn myself into a journalist and finding, after publication, that I got a few facts wrong. I will try to amend that from here on in and speak to you about whatever is on my mind.

I am now eighty-one years old. The last year has been very eventful for me. I have been in very good health and, as a result, have enjoyed a great deal of good leisure time visiting with friends and family and reading. I have read a lot of really good books. Two that stand out, this summer, are "Thank You for Being Late" by Thomas L Friedman and "Growing Pains – The Future of Democracy [and Work] by Gwynne Dyer. Neither book is very well titled but, between them, they have helped me come to grips with so much of what is happening so quickly in the world today. We need to understand the rapid growth of scientific knowledge, particularly in in the field of engineering and the fact that politics and administration are hopelessly behind. Perhaps, someday, I will go into these issues in some depth.

In the meantime, let me tell you that I'm spending a lot of my time trying to stay healthy by going to the very invigorating McWheelers gym at McMaster University and a very therapeutic pool at St. Joseph's Villa.

Now that I've gotten this far, I hope I'm back in the habit and, while I haven't said very much today, you will indulge me that fact and let me get back on track.

Why Do Nations Mistreat Their Own Citizens?

I live in a retirement residence with about 100 other people.  One of them is Joyce Hirasawa.  Joyce was born August 19, 1925 in Burnaby British Columbia.  She was the youngest of four children.  Her mother died when she was quite young and her father remarried and had four more children, only to be widowed again.  Fred, as her father was known, worked in a sawmill.  He built his own home and the family planted their own vegetables.  They were solid citizens

In the summer of 1942 Joyce was fifteen and about to turn sixteen.  She was a typical happy-go-lucky Canadian high school student.  One day the RCMP came knocking at the door.  They entered the house and went through all the cupboards.  They confiscated the family radio and took Joyce's Brownie camera.  Some of us, who are over seventy, remember Brownie cameras.

That's not all. Fred was sent to a work camp leaving what, by this time, were six children without a parent . Joyce and her older sister were sent, along with the four younger children, to live in tents in Hastings Park.  In September they were moved to a community called New Denver in the interior of British Columbia.

Eventually, Fred convinced the authorities that he was a carpenter and, because carpenters were needed in the New Denver community, he was allowed to return home.  During the fall the family continue to live in tents.  Eventually, a shack was built for them.  They could she see through the cracks in the wood in their shack that very cold winter.

The following spring the whole family was moved to a place called Picture Butt, Alberta.  They were placed on a sugarbeet farm which was owned and operated by German speaking immigrants.  (The irony of the situation didn't seem to have occurred to Joyce when she was telling me the story.)  They worked this farm until Joyce was twenty-two years old, 1949.  Then the family was allowed to move into Tabor into the home of another German-speaking family.  Joyce was permitted to travel to Calgary to take a dressmaking course but, even then, she needed regular clearance from the RCMP in order to board trains between Calgary and Tabor.

Eventually, Joyce met and married George, a Japanese Canadian from Tabor and they had six children.  Joyce proudly showed me a picture taken on their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 2005, showing all six children, their spouses and eleven grandchildren.  George's profession was that of a chicken sexer.  A chicken sexer is a person who looks at chicks when they come out of the egg and divides the hens from the roosters.  I am told the family moved to Hamilton because Hamilton was in need of a chicken sexer.

It is extremely difficult to imagine the rampant and thoughtless racism that existed in North America and in Japan in 1941 and 1942.  There is evidence that the Japanese were building an industrial complex in the late 30s, including activities such as confiscating car plants from the "big three" American car companies and handing them to Toyota, in anticipation of a war.  There is also much evidence that a war was about to begin. The polls in the United States showed that the population of that country was quite expecting it to be  immersed into World War II even before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Nevertheless, governments on both sides seem to have encouraged racial hatred.  Within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, President Roosevelt had convinced Congress to declare war.  Within a few days, the Canadian government had placed into effect racist programs with the intent of destroying the Japanese community on Canada's west coast and proceded to confiscate the property of Japanese Canadians.  The Japanese attacked Hong Kong and by Christmas Day had almost 2000 Canadian troops captured as prisoners of war.  These prisoners were treated in a most inhumane manner. Many were murdered and many had to spend the rest of the war in virtual slavery.

I still find it hard to comprehend that decisions were made on both sides in a manner that involved such a gross violation of  the human rights of Canadian citizens.  Apparently, there is no evidence whatsoever that any Canadian citizen of Japanese ancestry expressed any treasonous opinions or showed any inclination to support Japan in the war.  Briefing notes from the military and from the police as well as public expressions of opinion by the leaders of both the military and the RCMP cautioned against taking any steps of a racist nature. They also cautioned against encouraging the inflammation of anti-Japanese feelings by political leadership.  What racist feelings that did exist were expressed on Vancouver Island, not on the mainland, even although practically all Japanese Canadians lived on the mainland.

Cabinet documents and other speeches and writings that have been subsequently unearthed seem to show that one person, Ian Alister Mackenzie, a partisan Liberal strategist and the sole member of the Cabinet from British Columbia, convinced the whole Cabinet to embark on a program of moving all people of Japanese ancestry out of British Columbia.  All their property was seized and sold to "white" Canadians. Similar programs took place in the United States, but that country was much more careful in preserving the property of their citizens and permitted them to return to the West Coast even before the conclusion of the war in 1945.  As Joyce's story shows, Canada continued to torment its innocent citizens right up until 1949.

In 1988, after the Americans set the example by offering an apology and some structured compensationto their citizens, then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney offered an apology and some structured compensation, in a lesser amount of money than the Americans had been given, to Japanese Canadians.

I am trying to grasp why people express hatred toward other ethnic or religious groups.  In so doing, I reach back into my own memory.  In the summer of 1945 I was seven years old and my brother, Mac, was fifteen. The "War in Europe" had ended and our national attention was being turned, really for the first time, to the war against Japan.  We owed it to the Americans, who had done so much for us in Europe, to help them .Young men were being encouraged to join up and relieve pressure on the tired troops who were about to be brought back from Europe and sent on to the Orient.  Mac felt a duty to join up as soon as he reached his sixteenth birthday which would have been August 8th.  You can imagine the relief in our family when we were told on August 6th that an atom bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, creating a distinct possibility that the war was about to end.

Mac passed away some years ago but, in a conversation we had shortly before he died, he expressed to me the huge fear he had had about having to go to a foreign country and fight people who seemed to be aliens to him.  He had never seen a Japanese person when he was fifteen years old.  All he knew was what he read in war oriented comic books where "Japs" were painted as evil monsters.

21,000 people were ordered out of British Columbia, with all of their property seized.  Regulations remained in place until 1949.  That generation couldn't speak for themselves but an apology eventually occurred in 1988, when the next generation pointed out the injustices which had occurred.  Let us as a people make certain that nothing like this ever happens again.

The good news is that Joyce has recovered and has a good life, as is evidnced by her her living happily in this retirment residence.