Procrastination's Fatal in Planning Yule Cards

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

November 13, 1953

   THE HOLIDAYS have an insidious way of sneaking up on the unwary.  Before you know it, Christmas is next Friday and--if you are a man--you're no more ready for it than during the World Series.

   Some very precise timing is required, since your schedule must include the search for the ornament that goes on the top of the tree and having the neighbors in for fruit cake.  Unless you get the Christmas cards off your neck your ulcers will rebel to such a degree during the last-minute frenzy they'll give you distress until Easter.

   The greeting card routine is the biggest booby-trap of all.  Now is not a bit too early to plan your strategy.  If you want your card to be meaningful you cannot make a mad dash to town on Dec. 22 and come up with anything significant.

   A BRIEF replay of the procedure at my house may prove of value to those who have not yet established a plan of operation.  At least it will point up mistakes to be avoided.

   Circumstances normally dictate that we do the thing the hard way, with me doing most of the sweating.  We start with a snapshot of the family, taken in a last year's snowbank to provide appropriate Yule background.  This, superimposed on a greeting card, would be adequate for a sane family.  For us it is a bare beginning.

   "Why don't you write a poem, too?" my wife suggests, adding a helping of gush concerning my skill in such matters to soften me up.

   So I write a poem.  Composing it is the simplest part of the chore.  My introductory lines go something like this:

Now comes the end of '53

And we are happy as can be.

   With such a fruity beginning it is easy to carry on.  But reaching a stopping point comes hard.  I am inclined to grow so daft over my doggerel that, instead of winding up with a sonnet, I come up with something which compares favorably, in length at least, with Evangeline.

   THE NEXT maneuver is to make out a list, using the cards you received last year as a guide.  This is easy provided you can find last year's cards.  Our custom is to stash them away so carefully that they vanish without a trace.  We are forced to fall back on a document, now yellow with age, listing names we typed shortly after Pearl Harbor.

   For a week memories are dredged for additions to the list, and drawers rifled for the present addresses of the Fluegels and Merritts, who moved some time ago to Dodge City and Cedar Rapids respectively.

   We assume that 75 cards will be adequate, which means that in the final shakedown we pare the list down to 125 names and never are sure until Christmas Eve if 125 cards will be adequate.

   RETURN NOW to the poem.  Making more than 100 copies of this gem on a typewriter is no breeze even for an advanced hunt-and-peck operator.  I never make less than six carbons.  The last two are badly out of focus but we send them along anyway, since we don't have to decipher the things.  Typographical errors must, perforce, be ignored.  Only once did I turn an eraser loose among this jungle of carbons.  The results profaned my sense of tidiness.  

   After the 16-hour typing stint, my mate is ready to address and stuff the envelopes.  There is, however, one additional bit of business.  To her very personal friends she must send more than a picture and a poem.  She must write each a note on the back of the picture.  Her very personal friends number approximately 125.

   She chooses the witching hours of the night to make her contribution to the Yule correspondence, preferring to work in our bedroom so as not to be alone.  I won't mind, of course, since I can sleep in a boiler factory.

   Armed with fountain pen and three or four apples, she takes up the yoke, pausing in her pen scratching and munching now and again to wonder why I don't quit muttering and go to sleep, for Pete sake.

   WHEN everything goes smoothly like this we have our cards in the mail by Dec. 20.  It is best that the deadline be no later than this.  Otherwise you run out of time.  You need at least three days to find out what gift your wife expects and another day to buy it.

   There are then left those precious minutes in which to get the tree decorated and the stockings filled and to get the bicycle for Junior and the doll house for Mary in from the garage and to wrap the family gifts and repair the two strings of lights that just blinked out and fall into bed before the little ones rout you out to start the merry day.

 Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Bookshelves Inspire a Builder

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

January 19, 1964

   LAST FEBRUARY this correspondent's adult education course in woodworking was ground into the sawdust because of a fall on the ice.  I had paid more than $10 for lumber and fittings and was nicely launched on some bookshelves when I broke an arm and had to give up.  I cannot use power tools with one hand.  Without help, I barely can use them with two.

   But incapacity did not remove the need for more book space.  Books we hadn't seen for years--some of them borrowed, I was to discover--were moldering away in dark corners for lack of display room.  We didn't actually know what books we had.  Some were here, some there.  Inventory was all but impossible.

   FOR 11 MONTHS my 10 bucks worth of pine, the lumber I had planned to convert into a facility for my basement study, lay in the attic.  Then, after the holiday madness was over and the numbness had subsided, I thought of that costly jag of timber and closed in on the stuff.

   Had the work been done under the eye of the woodworking instructor I might not have been given an "A."  Progress was amazingly swift, however, probably because of a certain casualness about measurements and to some extent because my wife kept her distance.

   NORMALLY at the first swing of the hammer she smells trouble and wonders what I'm doing.  This time she wasn't alert to what was going on until near the finish.  I fooled her by using screws rather than nails.  But even the best of us can't avoid occasional pounding.  If hammers weren't needed they wouldn't be made.

   When the time finally came to pound, my wife warned me that the blows were cracking the upstairs plaster.  But subsequent search, just as I suspected, revealed no cracks.  Women automatically subscribe to what the Pentagon terms the strategy of overkill.

   SUBJECT to a few minor refinements, the bookshelves are now finished and hanging from the rafters.  To those who might find esthetic or artistic fault, I can say only this: the installation fulfills its main function.  It holds a heap of books.

   The volumes formerly piled on the desk are in it.  So are the books which had graced a couple of shelves above the desk--shelves originally used for paint, varnish, putty, nails and other do-it-yourself torments.  I'm now assiduously bird-dogging books from attic corners and putting them on the new shelves.

   I'M ALSO thrilled.  Such triumphs are small, of course, to men of broad gauge and accomplishment, but they can give an ordinary life a new destiny and purpose.  I told my son and wife this and they seemed amused.  They smiled.

   I said I was exhilarated to the point where I might buy a full line of power tools and become a sure-enough builder of whatever needed building.

   Dormant skills might flower.  A new craftsman might be born, a sleeping artisan awakened.

   Wife and son kept on smiling.

Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Thanksgiving With Grandparents

By DAVID W. GUTHRIE

Guest columnist of Charles M. Guthrie

published by the StarTribunewww.startribune.com

David  Guthrie  (front-center)

November 22, 1964

   GRANDPA GUTHRIE sent me one dollar and said why didn't I try writing a colum for him and if what I wrote was worth puting in the paper I could keep the one dollar.

   I asked what I should write about and he said he did not care as long as it was something I knew about and it would be rediculus for a 10-year-old kid to write about Vet Nam or Goldwater.

   He said Thanksgiving is coming up and you might try something about that.  My cosin Mark Shoberg did that last year and Gramps thought it might be good for all his grandsons to have a go at Thanksgiving and make it a tradishon.  But there are eight of us and that would be six more years to go and the old gent might not be writing a colum that long on account of being dead and besides there is no law against the stork bringing more kids.

   I THOUGHT A BETTER idea would be to write about our two Scotties but Gramps said he had wrote a piece about dogs earlyer in the month and the readers could not stand another one so hear goes about Thanksgiving.

   Sometimes we go to Butch and Edna's which are my other grandparents in Jeffers but usually we spend Thanksgiving on Grandma and Grandpa Guthrie and probly will do it again this year if Dad can get off work.  He is a dog and cat doctor and dum animals are just as lible to get sick or hit by a car on a holiday as any other time, Dad says.  But it is to late to cry about that now.  He should of thought about that before he went into vetnery.

   A while back I heard Gramps say that maybe we would eat out this Thanksgiving to give Grandma a breather and not be working her head off in the kitchen.  I would not care much about eating out as Grandma is a neat cook.

   There are six in our family counting Mom and Dad.  And Dad's sister and her husband have four boys to and they are driving to the old folks for Thanksgiving to.  That makes 12 of us and Uncle Tom and Grandma and Gramps make it 15 so I am not worried about eating out.  This would cost the old fellow 40 bucks or more and there is nothing he likes better than money.

   MAYBE HE THINKS he could feed the grown ups for about 21 dollars and us eight little kids could get one half portions and maybe eat for a buck and a quarter each.  Well, if he thinks we will hold still for that he has another think coming because I and Todd and Mike can put it away about as good as Dad.  And my cosins Mark, Cary and Paul eat good to.  The only ones who would not cry about one half portions are my brother Scott and cosin Bobby who are to little to know it when they get gipped.

   We go kind of pot luck on Thanksgiving.  Grandma gets the worst of it with the turkey and dressing and potatoes and stuff but my Mom brings salad and pickles and stuff and my aunt brings minse and punkin pies.  She could leave out the minse for all I care but it is Gramps favorite and he is her father and she likes to humer him.

   It is fun to go there because Grandma never throws nothing away.  There are old cars and trucks in the garage and toys in the basement and atic and if Gramps had his way they would all be throwed out as he says it is just something to stumble over but Grandma says as long as us kids like to play with it she will hang on to it because that is what grandmas are for.

   My Dad says to pay no attention to Gramps as he does a lot of blowing which does not add up to nothing but wind and Dad ought to know what he is talking about as he was Gramps little kid once.

Mad magazine  #39  May 1958  

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'Storms'--a Pain in the Neck! (It's Time to Change 'Em, Gents)

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

Minneapolis Tribune Staff Writer

published by the StarTribune

October 3, 1948

   Let's face it, gents.  The melancholy days are here.  It's time to put on the storm windows.

   The thought of it may fill you with deep and abiding repugnance, as it does me.  I have long listed the storm window as the home's top torment and its inventor as a Machiavellian fiend.  In my moments of calm I realize that he may have been a benign gentleman who sought only to stop winter's march past the threshold.  But when in the throes of jimmying storm windows into place I know no calm.  The ghost of this inventor haunts me.  I feel his scoffing presence as I strain to affix protesting sash to window frame.  He chuckles as I bark knuckles, and howls as I inadvertently stick my foot through glass.

   Were it not that my family's wish is my command and that I am a slave to convention, I would let my storm windows rot in the garage.  I would wear red flannels, earmuffs and overcoat in all my waking hours, thumb my leaky nose at the drafts and be rid forever of a chore that converts me from an affable husband and father into a screaming despot.

   I have endured this torture for some two decades, however, and deem it a solemn duty to pass along to the neophyte the pointers I have stumbled upon along the way.

LOOK 'EM OVER

   Although taking off the screens and putting in the windows is enough to try a man's soul, there is more to the job than this.  The screens must be inspected for holes, mended and painted.  My tendency is to postpone this until spring.  Come spring, I postpone it until fall.

   Then look over your storm windows.  The four or five that Junior has thrown his baseball through will have to be hustled off to the glazier.

    You will find gaping voids in others crying for putty.  Fail to install same and your window is but half efficient.  I always figure to put on the putty after the window has been hung.  Then I forget the whole thing.

   Your screens pointed up for spring and put away, your storm windows chinked, you are set for what can be the most irksome job of all--washing the glass.  But you can make of it a casual, breezy job.  I line the windows up against the garage, blast them fore and aft with the garden hose, then let the law of evaporation take over.

YOU CAN'T WIN

   Your windows will emerge with a few streaks, but research convinces me that there'll be streaks regardless.  I've rubbed the glass with cheesecloth, muslin, winter underwear, old flannel shirts, newspapers.  Look at the pane from one angle and it sparkles like a trout stream.  From another it resembles a map of Minnesota rivers.

    On most window ledges you will encounter a discouraging assortment of debris--cobwebs, bobby pins, dirt and cigarette butts.

   I find it expedient to bat this refuse away with my hat.  Be certain to do this while the little woman isn't looking.  She'll insist that you clean ledge and window frame with soap and water.  Women cling to the outmoded belief that one must toil mightily to do a job well.

   But the hat-fanning method accomplishes the major results and speeds progress amazingly.  In all jobs around the house I give studied inattention to the little niceties.  After all, time marches inexorably on.  Our little stay is brief enough at best and if we louse it up with petty and tedious detail we have no time for loafing, bridge, ball games and quiz shows, the things that give life character and meaning.

   Now to hang the storm windows.  First, you must know what window goes where.  This data is mandatory.  If you've done the job on your present abode before, you have already sweat out this  information and have marked the windows.  We experts favor the number system and I recommend it to any layman not confused by numbers running into two digits.

OH, YEAH?

   But if you're putting up the windows for the first time you might as well know you're going to suffer.  The fellow who lived there last year will tell you you'll have no trouble.

    "They're all marked," he'll say.  "Can't go wrong."

   They're marked, yes, in Sanskrit.  And rather than knock yourself out trying to crack the code you'll be ahead in time and sanity if you start from scratch.

   Although many use a measuring stick to advantage, I favor the trial and error method.  Feet, inches and fractions thereof irk me.  If you're lucky you'll find that one in five windows fits without much coaxing.  But most have a nasty tendency to change shapes and sizes during the off season.  You'll have to go at these with a plane.  Do so, though, with caution.  Anger gets you nowhere.  In my hot-headed twenties I was given to paring living room windows down to bathroom size during bursts of passion.  A rule of thumb method I now use with occasional success is to assume that if the storm window is more than a quarter of an inch too large or too small it's in the wrong spot.

   If yours is a two-story house, you may meet your Waterloo on the second floor.  If cursed with hypsophobia to the degree that I am you'll be terror-stricken.  The manly method is to lug your window up a ladder and slap it into place.

    I wouldn't do that for all Fort Knox's gold.  I cart it up the stairway, scuffing woodwork and dressers and swiping mirrors and cosmetics off dressers en route to my goal.

   I ease the storm sash out the window.  Then, with chest and stomach balancing on the ledge, I grope blindly above with my burden, seeking the moorings.  Thus far success has always come before apoplexy.  It would be well, if you have a small boy in the house, to have him hold your feet down, thus preventing a headlong death plunge.  And, if you can reach the seventh rung of the ladder without contracting rigor mortis, by all means hang the window from the outside.  It will enhance your standing in the community.

    A word of caution.  Don't listen to the World Series while putting up the windows.

   In the ninth inning of the seventh game two years ago, tragedy struck the Boston Red Sox and me simultaneously.  While St. Louis was scoring the winning run I rushed from my post of duty to the radio, and smashed the finest storm window the family ever owned.

Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the 

express approval of the StarTribune.

These Are Emotional Times for Baseball-Crazy Fellows

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

September 28, 1954

   THERE'S a tense week ahead for the baseball fan, starting tomorrow with the World Series.  I don"t mean the lucky cuss who can watch a game with the cold, analytical eye of a loan shark, alert for fine strategy and play.  I mean the bleeder, the wretch who follows one particular club and who is lifted to ecstasy or booted into despond by that club's varying fortunes.

   These are the boys who will suffer--the ones who love the Cleveland Indians or the New York Giants. They will hover around the radio or TV sets like June bugs around an arc light, gnaw their fingernails up to the elbow, chain smoke, go into apoplexy with every opposition rally and wish that the torment would end so they could relax and get some sleep.

   THIS ADDICTION to baseball in general and one club in particular makes no sense whatever.  Life goes on regardless of how one game or one series comes out.  Your baseball bug tells himself that every time his team loses --and he keeps right on bleeding.  The disease is incurable.

   It has its roots back in childhood, I think.  Nobody who fails to develop an interest in the game when he is a kid can acquire the suicidal devotion to it in later life that the baseball nut has.  The genuine addict probably played some as a boy and had visions of one day being a big leaguer.  Or he developed a fancy for one player and took that player's club to his bosom, there to hold it unto death.

   I caught the disease from a book, written long ago by Christy Mathewson, immortal New York pitcher.  It was called "Pitching in a Pinch" and it laid hold of me good.  I since have known few care-free summers.  My heart has belonged to the New York Giants.  If I am the soul of amicability of an evening it's because the Giants have won.  If I beat the kids and drive my wife to tears with snide remarks about the stew it's because they've lost.

   MAYBE you think I'm riding high now, since the Giants have won the pennant.  I am, but it's an uneasy ride.  I'm afraid of that low-down Cleveland club, which never has lost a World Series.  If they win this one I shall survive, I suppose.  The Giants have failed me before, and often, and I have muddled through.  But each tragedy has left its scar.

   When the Giants took on Leo Durocher  as manager I felt that I was cured.  He had been manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and I hated both him and the Bums exceedingly.  But it made no difference.  Even though my estimate of Durocher is little changed, the Giants are still my boys.  I would string along with them if Georgi Malenkov were manager.

   Nice guys, somehow don't manage the Giants.  They've had but one who could qualify as such.  He was Mel Ott, a great player but no barn burner as a pilot.  The others, John McGraw, Bill Terry and Durocher, hardly could qualify as charmers.

   Just as managers make no difference in my allegiance, neither does team personnel.  If my current raves, Willie Mays and Johnny Antonelli, were traded to the Pirates my affections would not shift to Pittsburgh.  Willie and Johnny would become enemies.  If the Giants and Cardinals swapped complete teams, Stan Musial would become my ideal.

   I HOPE this week to shift some of the work to a couple of associates who are not baseball crazy.  Then I can watch the games.  In doing so, though, I shall be playing into Cleveland's hands.  Seldom do I see or hear a game that the Giants win.  I jinx them.

   It wasn't Bobby Thomson's homer that decided that playoff game between Brooklyn and New York back in '51.  I was the unsung hero.  I watched this one until the Giants went into the last half of the ninth, trailing by three runs.  By then my suffering had been too much.  I walked away, to mourn alone. A few minutes later the fellows were yelling that New York had won.  I raced back to the television set just in time to catch the final commercial.  But had I remained, Thompson would have been just another out.

   I'm going to watch this series, though.  I have laid up a store of cigarettes and aspirin and my fingernails are a nice length for gnawing.  And I've done what I could to counteract the jinx.  I have a dollar down on Cleveland--and I seldom win bets.  I hope I lose this one.  But if I don't there will be a slight monetary solace for an aching heart.

Addendum--   The Giants swept the Series in four games to win their first championship since 1933, defeating the heavily favored Indians.

Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express consent of the StarTribune.

Exercise is Something for an Oldster to Shun

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

May 29, 1954

   I WAS with some foolish fellows the other evening who were showing off by standing stiff-legged and bending over to touch their toes.  I don't know what they were trying to prove unless it was imbecility.  For me it would be.  I cannot bend over and even reach my kneecaps and have no desire to try.  It's tough enough lacing my shoes each morning.

   Anyhow I deem the whole business of exercise as silly for anyone past 30 and wish I could escape it entirely.  I wish I didn't have to push a lawnmower or work black dirt into the lawn, or clean up the winter's infestation of debris and junk, and wash windows and put up screens.  Anyone victimized by the spring cleanup who still has a taste for tennis or softball or push-ups is either young or crazy.

   IN A TIME of madness a couple of weeks ago I let myself in for some utterly fruitless exercise.  I purchased a portion of black dirt, a bag of fertilier and a sack of seed.  I resolved to convert my submarginal plot into a showplace--to make a dozen spears of grass flourish where one had languished before.

   The results have been about what I knew in my heart they would be--less than spectacular.  I have done everything but sit up nights with my lawn and can detect little reward for my husbandry.  I have, however, no word of reproach for the black dirt, fertilizer or grass seed, although the price of seed might convince the credulous that the stuff will grow on a tile floor.  The fault is entirely mine.   Grass may survive pestilence, blight or drought.  It cannot survive me.  All I get for such labor is exercise--and exercise I can do without.

   THEY SOUNDED me out the other day about a brand of exertion that is completely abhorrent.  They wanted me to play in a church baseball league.  The mere thought of it gave me a charley horse.

   The fact was brought home to me six years ago that nobody on the far side of 40 should have any truck with baseball besides consuming peanuts and hot dogs and hurling epithets at the umpire.

   At that time I got involved in a game and made a clean hit to centerfield.  I was thrown out trying to stretch it into a single and there has been a distinct tenderness around the right femur ever since.

   I HAD BEEN forewarned several years earlier, while living out west, that exercise was for the birds--but not for one gone flaccid from pecking a typewriter.  I joined the "Y", figuring that the body, once a thing of sinewy and rippling responsiveness needed firming up.

   I swam.  I galloped around the indoor track, hung over the parallel bars and shot baskets.  Then I somehow got entangled in a basketball game with a bunch of kids and aged five years in as many minutes. It was then that I knew the havoc time had wrought.

   When I afterward looked at myself in the locker room mirror I beheld a stranger.  The face was a crimson blob.  The jaw hung slack.  The eyes were those of a man wallowing in a hangover.

   There were no more trips to the muscle factory.  I realized that I was getting on.

   MY WIFE tells me I should take up golf.  But a man has his pride.  I took up golf once, 18 holes of it, and was so bad that even among a bunch of duffers I was a man apart.  If I ever golf again I'll have my wife pack a picnic lunch that I can eat under a tree, remote from the fairway, In the general locality of where I suspect my ball to be.

   If you don't spend 90 per cent of your time hunting the ball, you get in a lot of good walking playing golf, though.  And what is better than walking for the middle-aged?  What, in truth, is left but walking?

   If you take it slow and rest thoroughly afterward it is not overtaxing.  The wonders of nature are all about you--lilacs, pussy willows, lobelia, chicory, wild columbine
 and such.  There are beer cans to kick out of the path.  There is time to read any billboards within sight; time to sit under a tree and gain new strength from the good earth; time to think about those yesterdays when spring meant something.

   The next time my wife says we ought to take a walk around Lake Harriet I'm going to surprise her and go.  I want to see if I'm up to it.  We made the junket once--back in '47--and it was quite a pleasant hike, though a bit tiring.  This time I plan to take my cane.

Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Small Boy Sizes Up a Vacation

Me

   (In which a travel-weary father reluctantly writes a 10-year-old's version of a vacation)

By TOM GUTHRIE

(son of CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff)

published by the StarTribune

August 1, 1959

   MOM said we had to eat what was in the refrigerator as it would spoil before we got back.  I don't care for scraps.  Neither does Pop, but for four days before we went on our vacation he was choking down cottage cheese, olives, celery, carrots and beans.  You will look a long time before finding a fellow more willing to save a buck.

   The old man never had driven to the east coast before.  He says he is mainly a dirt-road driver and when you ride with him you know it.  We did fine until we hit strange country.  Then Pop began making wrong turns and cussing out the highway department for being so Scotch with road signs.  "You'd think they cost a thousand dollars apiece," he griped.

   THE ONLY evening we holed up early was at Norway, Mich.  We got there about 5 p.m. the first day, after a free lunch on my sister in Rhinelander, Wis.  Pop knew we could get a bargain rate on a cabin, with me sleeping on our cot.  Some sleep!

   Otherwise we kept driving until all the motels were filled up.  As long as Mom sees "vacancy" signs she figures we can drive on a little further, and Pop doesn't like to get reservations ahead.  He says it freezes  your schedule.

   OUR SCHEDULE was thawed out good the second day, when we pulled out of London, Ontario, and drove the wrong way for 25 miles.  Mom, who spent more time looking at road maps and tour books than scenery, said something was rotten in Denmark because we weren't coming to any of the towns we should.  But the old man said he knew what he was doing as the guy said the motel we stayed at was right on the route to Niagara Falls.

   "Maybe we're going in the wrong direction," said Mom.

   "We are not going in the wrong direction," Pop sneered, "but to make you happy I'll stop at the next gas station and inquire."

   WE HAD a late breakfast in London, Ontario.  After 50 miles of driving we had made no gain.  Some breakfast!  Mom and Pop were white with fury.

Me at Niagara Falls

   Niagara Falls made everybody happy again.  "It's a good thing we have the kid along," Pop cracked, "or they'd take us for a couple of honeymooners."  Mom smiled, giving the old man credit for a nice recovery, and everything was fine until we crossed the bridge back into the U.S. and began groping around for the New York thruway, which everybody said we couldn't miss if we followed the signs.

   They said we couldn't miss a lot of places but the old man missed them all.  Finally he said he would strangle the next guy who said "you can't miss it."  To follow the signs, he said, you needed the eyes of a falcon and the nose of a bloodhound and also should be a mind reader.  He would give his eye teeth, he said, to be driving down a country lane that was garnished with horse manure.

   ON THE turnpikes things were better.  There was only one way to go.  They were even simpler than Choteau, Mont., Pop said, and he often let Mom drive on them.  The only thing she didn't like was passing big trucks on curves, even though there was no chance of getting smeared if she kept in the passing lane, as the old man kept yapping at her.

Pop and me looking at the Mayflower

   We stopped at Boston before going to Cape Cod for a week and Pop said they should tear the place down and start over, sparing only the historic spots.  He said Boston obviously was laid out by a guy with delirium tremens and if he spent a week there he'd die of claustrophobia and frustration. 

   We took a sightseeing bus you could fry an egg on but it was worth the price to watch the driver thread the thing through dinky one-way streets and miss barber poles and store fronts by inches.  He also had to yack about Paul Revere and Bunker Hill.  The guy deserves a raise.

   IT RAINED most of the time on Cape Cod.  We spent one lively morning looking at old tombstones.  One inscription said "Death Is Gain."  Pop said the fellow must have driven in Boston.  We also saw Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrim monument in Provincetown and a hermit crab.

Me and Mom at Plymouth Rock

   In New York we took a boat ride around Manhattan and saw the Statue of Liberty and a lot of bridges and tall buildings and Pop bought me a hot dog in a burst of generosity.

   On the way home we stopped at Gettysburg and in a museum they had a map of the battlefield with blue and red lights that flashed on and off while a fellow explained how the Confederates got smeared.  Near Gettysburg we stopped at a place where cokes were only a nickel.  It was all quite historic.

   BACK ON the turnpike Mom looked at the map and said we were close to Wheeling and she'd like to slip down and see Helen Gregory.

   "For your information," Pop declared, "we are not slipping down anywhere to see anybody.  We already have slipped around for 3,500 miles.  I'm ready to slip home."

   That's what we did.

Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Trials of a Parakeet Owner

Pierrot and Tom

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

Aug 3, 1957

   IF YOU'RE willing to overlook assorted turtles and goldfish--and to discount a couple of white mice which still may be loose in the garage--I can say without fear of contradiction that the family never has lost a pet save through natural death or by design.

Dad at the Great Falls Tribune

   Our Boston terrier was with us for 14 years and full of beans until her demise.  A bunny purchased for a long-ago Easter grew into giant maturity despite dogs, cats and finally owner indifference.  The kids "sold" it to a rabbit farmer for a dollar.  The dollar had been slipped to the man by my wife.

   A horned toad bought in early summer was turned loose weeks ago because of the feeding problem. Live insects, which seem plentiful enough, come suddenly into short supply when sought as feed.  But the toad hangs around.  We see it a couple of times a week in the flower beds.  It will hole up in the rock garden come winter, no doubt, and reappear, stolid and imperturbable, next May.

   BUT LATE last Saturday afternoon the roof fell in.  Pierrot, the parakeet, than which there is none cuter or smarter, swooped through the momentarily open porch door and into the blue.

   Six months ago I'd have said that any adult who mourned the loss of a parakeet wasn't quite grown up.  If this is true I admit adolescence.  We combed the neighborgood, scanned the trees with binoculars, whistled and called, put the cage outside with the door open, hoping that hunger would draw our wanderer home.  We all were sick deep inside.  Our son cried himself to sleep.  We felt like joining him.

   "But we haven't lost a pet yet," my wife said feebly, "and I think our luck will hold."

   She was whistling in the dark.  Next morning there was nothing near the cage but sparrows and nobody we contacted had seen a  parakeet.

   AFTER a solemn Sunday, I put and ad in the paper.  The move was a ten-strike.  The ad appeared Tuesday and the phone began ringing.  It seemed that the city was swarming with blue parakeets on the loose.  We heard that one had been rescued from Lake Calhoun.  We saw one that had been taken from Lake Harriet.

   Our hopes high, we began running down the leads.  But as bird after bird proved a stranger, I finally was ready to claim anything other than a bald eagle.  Succumbing at last to the urge to fetch home a parakeet, we bought a feathered vagabond from a woman and took it home.

   But it wasn't our perky, perpetual-motion chatterbox.  Plump, stodgy and silent, it would only eat and  roost.  To my son's objection, I dubbed it Pokey, the Blue Goose, and my wife vowed that if we didn't find our bird within 24 hours she'd roam the pet shops for his double.

Ricky and Snowy

Skeeter and Elvis

   BY WEDNESDAY but one parakeet finder remained to be contacted.  After work that day, with Brad Morison, a colleague, I started out.  Brad left instructions that if his wife called the office she should be told that he would be late for dinner, being engaged in a silly parakeet safari.

   I had small hopes.  The address was miles from our home, far out of parakeet range, I figured.  When we arrived I told Brad to wait in the car, I'd be right out.

   He waited for some time, while two other people and I tried to catch a bird flying around in a large room, a bird in no mood, after four days of adventures, to have another one.  Capture required 20 minutes.

   I DROVE home in wild elation, with Brad holding Pierrot in a cardboard box and making snide remarks about chaperoning a parakeet and wondering why I was so sure the bird was really mine.  Morison is a tropical fish man.

   But my wife and child welcomed the prodigal with an ecstacy unseen in the old hut since Christmas. We were even ready to accept the Blue Goose as a permanent resident, despite Pierrot's initial hostility.

   We didn't have to do so, however.  A couple of hours later we got a phone call from the neighborhood where we'd obtained the bird.  The caller proved to be the owner.  She took Pokey away.

   Now everyone's happy.  But our son wants another parakeet as a companion for Pierrot--one we can name Pierrette, naturally.

Pippin (parrotlet)

Piedemont (parrotlet)

(P.S. Pierette has arrived)


Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

    

Black Bug is 'Freed' after These 20 Years

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

Of the editorial/opinion page staff

published by the StarTribune

December 3, 1967

   WE TOOK Big Joe out of the garage a while back.  He had been hanging in the rafters for 20 years and must have been pleased to get into the light and savor the prospect of some action.

   There had been action aplenty back about 1947 after my older son had painstakingly put Big Joe together and readied him for the Soap Box Derby.  The black bug won one heat and thereafter was retired, but not before it had given me the type of thrill associated with ski-jumping or Russian roulette.

   My son had a paper route in those days and his Sunday burden was such that my conscience goaded me into assisting him.  We used a wagon of inadequate size to haul the bundles from the station to where we spotted them.

   ON THIS particular Sunday the lad said that since we had the big bug we might as well use it instead of the little wagon, so we wheeled Big Joe a couple of blocks to an intersection from which point it was down-grade to the station.

   Before getting aboard, I mentioned with some trepidation that we had to go through a couple of intersections and since Big Joe had no brakes whatever we might get creamed by an automobile.  The chance of this was remote, my son said, since it was barely 5 a.m.  So off we started, hitting the first intersection at about 30 m.p.h., going faster through the next one, but suffering damage only to my nervous system.

   Shortly thereafter I consigned Big Joe to the garage rafters.  He was too hot an item for the boys in the neighborhood.  I told my son that if he ever had a compelling reason for getting the thing out of mothballs he was free to do so.

   HE NEVER DID.  He finished school, got married and moved away.  A second son came along but the cut of his jib was different.  He noticed Big Joe and would reach up and give its wheels an occasional spin but he never asked to ride the thing.  Neither did his playmates, although the Tierney kids next door gave it some longing looks and Katie could have talked me into getting it down had she turned on the charm.

   Then, on a Sunday afternoon this fall, my son and his family checked in for dinner.  Big Joe came into the conversation and there was much begging from the grandsons.  We went into the garage and lifted it from the rafters.

   WITH ITS WHEELS back on the ground and layers of dust removed, the bug seemed as shiny and sturdy as ever and won admiring glances from the assembled smallfry.  We maneuvered it into my son's station wagon and when the family drove off the curtain came down on some history.

   Through the mist of years I could see my son mooring an electric motor to the work bench and using it to spin and break in the special wheels he'd bought.  The wheels spun for days and he periodically applied lubricants and abrasives.

   Then there were Big Joe and his pilot high on the ramp and poised for the race--not long afterward, defeat.

   The word now is that Big Joe has fallen apart.  It's just as well.  His new surroundings were hilly and dangerous, and I'm glad he collapsed before anyone got hurt.

Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune

 

Travel Arrangements Can Kill You

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

June 25, 1960

   TRAVEL is a staunch ally of enlightenment--and enlightenment enriches living.  And yet I gravitate more and more to inertia.  This drift toward immobility is never more pronounced than during preparations for a vacation.  I find travel arrangements about as stimulating as Brussels sprouts or a letter from Uncle Ernest.

   It's not travel per se that's galling.  There's a thrill in heading for faraway places, shedding the familiar and becoming a vagabond.  It's implementing the venture that kills me--the details, the scheduling, the road maps and reservations, the writing to Joe and Vera that we're coming and isn't it wonderful!

   

   THE FULL impact of the labor involved in this annual flap hit me the other day when I came upon a "vacation checklist" in a trade magazine.  Its aim was to help but all I got out of the thing was frustration, rebellion and fatigue.  The whole awesome parade of preparation was therein contained--from putting a stop order on the milk to making out a will.

   What a fool I'd been to assume in past years that an oil change and grease job had readied the car for the test.  Sixteen checks should be made on the car, everything from tail-pipe to radiator.  I blushed in shame to recall having once transported my loved ones over 4,000 miles of vacation trail with questionable tires and no jack.  I found the jack in the garage on our return and was visibly shaken.

   BUT GETTING the car ready is only a starter.  There's the house to consider.  You can't simply lock it and leave it.  You must give some trustworthy neighbor a key and have him or her--usually her--take in the mail, water the plants, turn a light on at night to give the appearance of occupancy, and check for gas leaks and fires.

   If the neighbor is a real pushover she also will spray the roses and make her kids mow the lawn.  It's particularly important that the yard be cared for.  Returning to knee-high grass and sagging petunias reduces the thrill of homecoming and also your standing in the neighborhood.

   THE LONGER I studied this vacation treatise the more convinced I became that it was a committee job, with each member feeling compelled to make a contribution.  One suggestion, tossed out by a demon for detail, called for listing all items in each suitcase and fastening the list inside the lid.

   Such silliness would make our vacation a tragic farce.  It might reduce the risk of loss but would represent an expenditure of time and energy far too great for the picayune reward.  Better to leave your toothbrush in Tucson, I say, than drive yourself batty taking inventory.  When scheduled to be in Yellowstone ogling Old Faithful, my wife and I would be mired down in South Dakota pursuing a pair of socks.

   THERE IS a far easier way to prevent loss than this.  When you have everything rammed in the suitcases and are ready for the next leg of the journey, simply make a final inspection of your lodging.  If nothing is found under the bed, on or inside the dresser, in the clothes closet or bathroom, the only sane conclusion you can reach is that nothing's been forgotten.

   The plan isn't infallible.  You occasionally leave swimming suits hanging from trees or fishing rods leaning against cabins.  But you do get away early and frequently without loss of temper.

Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.