By Jeffrey Page
We’ve got an economy in the pits. We’ve got people who would put our drinking water at risk to frack for natural gas. We’ve got several pretty weird people wishing to make the race against President Obama next year. We’ve got a changing climate. We’ve got war.

So on the surface, I concede, my connection of a catalog from L.L. Bean with my still unanswered question about whatever happened to childhood may not be sound like a barn burning issue.

But wait a second. I’m talking about children, which automatically makes it important.

Next time you wonder whatever happened to childhood, remember one of the primary activities of winter when we were kids. In a snowball fight we’d scoop up some snow – the wetter the better – pack it into the shape of a ball and heave it.

We would team up with a friend on one side of, say, a driveway and two of our friends would be on the other side. The four of us would make snowballs as fast as possible, and toss them across the divide. If our aim and timing were good, and if our arm was strong enough, we’d toss a snowball and nail one of the other kids with a snowball that pounded into an arm or a chest – or (best of all) in the face. Then we’d hide from counterattack in the ragged snow forts we had built.

In fact, one of the things that happened to childhood is that we allowed retailers and merchandisers to get their hands on it. Specifics? Here’s one.

Arriving in the mail this week was an L.L. Bean catalogue offering all manner of parkas, gloves, hats and socks to keep you warm and dry. So far, so good.

And there, at the bottom of Page 23, was one of the explanations of what has happened to childhood.

We used to make snow balls with out hands. But now, for $29.95, Bean will sell us a five-piece kit containing two pliers-like devices with attached cups. Fill the cups with snow, squeeze, and presto; you have what the catalogue writer describes as “perfect snowballs.”

Also in this set of “fun tools” are three plastic molds. Fill one with snow and you have a turret. A turret? The thing that goes on castles? What’s next? A moat? Fill the other two molds and you have shapes with which to make snow blocks – your snow fort’s walls.

“These fun tools let kids build their own snow forts and fill them with perfect snowballs,” Bean says.

The most important part of childhood is learning about the world and how it works. One of the things we learned was that scrunching snow in our hands rarely resulted in a “perfect snowball,” whatever that actually is. But we also learned that perfection wasn’t the point. The idea was to do our best and have fun.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

Photography by Rich Gigli

Autumn Fog

 Excerpt from Autumn Days- By Will Carelton 1845-1912

Yellow, mellow, ripened days,
Sheltered in a golden coating;
O’er the dreamy, listless haze,
White and dainty cloud-lets floating;
Winking at the blushing trees,
And the somber, furrowed fallow;
Smiling at the airy ease,
Of the southward flying swallow
Sweet and smiling are thy ways,
Beauteous, golden Autumn days.

A young Joe Frazier ... "the little guy"

By Michael Kaufman
“Bum decision,” said my father. “The little guy won every round!” The “little guy” was 20-year-old Joe Frazier. It is hard to think of a man who stands at 5’ 11” and weighs 205 lbs. as “little,” but that is how it looked that summer day in 1964 at the Singer Bowl on the grounds of the New York World’s Fair. That was the site for the finals of the U.S. Olympic boxing trials. Winners in their respective weight divisions would go on to represent the U.S. at the Olympic Games in Tokyo. The heavyweights fought last.

Frazier’s opponent was Buster Mathis, some four inches taller and nearly 100 pounds heavier. Most of the pre-fight buzz had focused on Mathis, especially because he had beaten Frazier in one previous meeting that year—Frazier’s only loss as an amateur prior to the Olympic tournament. Mathis had cruised to the finals, dominating smaller opponents.

We had ringside seats. My father was a knowledgeable boxing aficionado and enjoyed sharing stories with me about his favorite fighters, such as Joe Louis, Benny Leonard and Sugar Ray Robinson. As a young man he had enjoyed putting on the gloves and sparring with his friends until one day he broke the nose of his best friend Abe Bolker, and he never boxed again. Yet he always spoke proudly of his younger brother, my uncle Willie, who was a boxer in the Navy during World War II. And he still followed the so-called “sweet science” or “manly art of self defense,” as boxing was often called.

My first memory of boxing is the Rocky Marciano-Joe Louis fight in October 1951, when I was 5. I watched on a 10-inch TV screen with my father and uncles at my aunt Sadye and uncle Joe’s house in Far Rockaway. Everyone was sad. I didn’t understand what Uncle Willie meant when he said of Louis, “He’s a shell.” A shell was something you found at the beach. By 1951 Louis was years past his prime and fought only because he desperately needed the money.

Some 47 years after the Frazier-Mathis fight in the Olympic trials a few memories still stand out. Mathis was extraordinarily fat. He towered over Frazier but the feisty “little guy” was not intimidated and was the aggressor throughout. My father said the judges almost always prefer the aggressor to a fighter forced to be on the defensive for most of a fight. A rare exception was Muhammad Ali, who we watched train for his first fight with Sonny Liston in 1962. The first day we saw Ali (then still known as Cassius Clay) spar at the Fifth Street Gym in Miami Beach my father said, “This guy has no chance. Nobody ever won a championship fight backing away all the time.” But by the end of the second day he changed his mind: “This kid is gonna beat Liston. I’ve never seen a heavyweight with such quick hands and feet!” Few experts agreed. The final odds for that fight were something like 8-1 in favor of Liston.

Mathis wore his trunks very high in his fight with Frazier in the Olympic trials. He looked comical but it served him well: When Frazier hit Mathis with legitimate body shots, the referee warned him about low blows. In the second round, he penalized Frazier two points for hitting below the belt. Frazier would say later, “In a three-round bout a man can’t afford a points-deduction like that.” Despite losing the second round because of the deduction, Frazier was a clear winner in the eyes of almost everyone but the judges. The decision was heartily booed.

“All that fat boy had done was run like a thief,” Frazier complained. “Hit me with a peck and backpedal like crazy.” When Frazier returned home to Philadelphia he was so upset that he considered giving up boxing altogether. But his manager Duke Dugent and trainer Yank Durham convinced him to make the trip to Tokyo as an alternate in case something happened to Mathis. Good thing they did. Mathis injured his hand and couldn’t compete. Frazier went on to win the gold medal.

Frazier and Mathis would fight again as professionals four years later at Madison Square Garden, and again there were some dubious aspects to the matchup. By then Ali had been stripped of his title for refusing induction into the Army during the war in Vietnam. The Frazier-Mathis fight was proclaimed a “world championship” match by the New York State Athletic Commission. To be honest, I don’t remember the fight as much as I remember the way Jimmy Cannon, a sports-writing legend, spat on the sidewalk as Leonard Shecter and I walked past him on our way in to the arena.

Mathis again wore his trunks high but this time it didn’t help. A relentless Frazier wore down the bigger, heavier man, and the fight was stopped in the 11th round. From 1968 to 1970, Frazier made six defenses, including a fifth-round TKO of World Boxing Association champ Jimmy Ellis in a “unification” fight. But everyone knew who the real champion was, and in the summer of 1970 public pressure forced the overseers of boxing to grant Ali a license to fight again. Demand quickly grew for a showdown between the undefeated champion and Frazier.

Ali knocked out top contenders Jerry Quarry and Oscar Bonavena, setting the stage for one of the most anticipated heavyweight title fights in boxing history. I was privileged to cover those and many other memorable boxing events. But I haven’t watched a fight in years. I’ll explain why in my next post.

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.

Photography by Rich Gigli

Cape May Lighthouse

Steadfast, serene, immovable, the same,
Year after year, through all the silent night
Burns on forevermore that quenchless flame,
Shines on that inextinguishable light.

The Lighthouse by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Joe Paterno ... time to go

By Bob Gaydos

The lead on the Associated Press story Wednesday afternoon was straightforward and shocking at the same time:  “STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) — Joe Paterno, the Penn State football coach who preached success with honor for half a century but whose legend was shattered by a child sex abuse scandal, said Wednesday he will retire at the end of this season.”

At the end of the season? Is he kidding? Are they kidding? Are the trustees of Penn State going to let Paterno, living legend or no, get away with that?

Those were my italicized thoughts immediately on reading the AP story, after following nearly 24 hours of non-stop coverage of the Penn State scandal, not only on radio and TV sports talk shows, but on network and cable TV news shows and on the front page of every newspaper in the country.

“Joe Pa,” the 84-year-old face of Penn State was, as usual, setting his own terms for when he would leave his beloved university. Or at least he was trying to. But this time, Standup Joe, as he is also lovingly known around State College, has no leg to stand on. That he was still football coach Wednesday afternoon was an upset in itself. For him to be allowed to coach on the weekend against Nebraska and then stay on to the end of the season would be the most profound insult to the alleged victims of the assaults and their families and would tarnish even more the image of Penn State.

The issue in this case is simple: What legal and moral responsibility did Paterno, as head coach and de facto king of Penn State, have in protecting young boys from sexual assaults from one of his coaches? Again, quoting from the AP story: “Paterno said he was “absolutely devastated” by the case, in which his one-time heir apparent, Jerry Sandusky, has been charged with molesting eight boys over 15 years, including at the Penn State football complex.”

Paterno reported an allegation of such an assault nine years ago to the university’s athletic director after Mike McQueen, a graduate assistant on the football team who said he saw Sandusky in the shower at the university with a 10-year-old boy, reported it to the coach. Legally, McQueen and Paterno apparently feel they did all they had to do.

Maybe so. That’s for the state attorney general to decide. Morally it’s a different matter. And the answer is clear: No, neither man did all that needed to be done. The assistant coach did not try to stop whatever was going on in the shower. Instead, he called his father who told him to leave. They talked about it and told Paterno the next day. Paterno told the AD. Nine years later — during which time Sandusky continued to operate a foundation to serve underprivileged young boys and continued to be seen around Penn State — Sandusky was arrested and athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz were charged with failing to report the incident to the authorities.

But there was Paterno, several times a target for those who thought he was too old to coach and should retire and now holding the record for most football wins among Division I schools, still on Wednesday afternoon attempting to dictate the terms of his retirement.

It is an arrogance and sense of entitlement that no serious board of trustees can allow to succeed. Paterno made much during his tenure of holding his football players to higher standards, morally, than coaches at other schools. It is part of what created his legend. Failing to notify police authorities for nine years, during which time school officials made it clear they weren’t going to pursue legal action against Curley, was more than a lapse in judgment, it was a profound moral lapse. Or maybe the image Paterno has projected all these years was false.

Whatever the case, Paterno and school officials suggest by their callous disregard for the boys and potential future victims that protecting the reputation of the school comes first and, at Penn State, the football reputation trumps all.

It is sad, it is troubling, it is infuriating. In this day and age, there are still adults who do not recognize that there is a moral obligation to do everything possible to protect the most vulnerable among us from predators — even when to do so may harm other people and institutions we hold close. Sometimes we are indeed our brothers’ keepers.

Retire at the end of the season? No way. Joe Pa should have retired with humility Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday night, the board of trustees fired him immediately. Finally, the trustees reclaimed control of Penn State.

bob@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page
For reasons other than the obvious, I wish Al Page were alive today, sitting at his table, sipping his coffee, and reading the story in the Times about what the great people of Ohio have done.

They basically told the governor, John Kasich, and his Tea Party pals around the country that you don’t ask the voters to go along with you as you try to bust a union representing people who work for the public good. People such as cops and teachers. People such as firefighters and highway workers.

By a resounding vote, Ohioans took a state law that severely restricted public workers’ rights to bargain collectively, and tossed it right where it belongs, in with the soiled diapers, sour milk, rotten cheese and the rest of the trash that other public service workers – sanitation men – haul away.

Al Page was a furrier a long time ago when wearing fur was more acceptable than it is now. He took mink skins and turned them into coats. He was good at it, so good that he was assigned by his bosses on 57th Street to make a mink coat for the wife of King Farouk of Egypt.

Al was a member of a not especially strong furriers union, which, when it seemed like it was going out of business, affiliated with a butchers union. He often complained about working for one of the foremost fur salons in the world – one that made huge amounts of money – and then, around Christmas every year, being rewarded with a bottle of Scotch. What he needed was higher pay, but the boss didn’t listen. Still, Al understood that a weak union was better than no union.

Having survived the Great Depression he was a union man through and through, whose advice as far back as I can remember was that there was strength in organizing.

In the Sixties, when the New York Post called to say the job I had applied for, as a copyboy, was available, I grabbed it. It would pay $48 a week. Only later did I understand the drudgery of my hours: 1 in the morning to 8 in the morning. For working that shift, I got an additional $1 a night.

I started complaining almost immediately.

Al urged forbearance and said I should guess what my pay would be if the Newspaper Guild had never organized the Post. He said I should guess how much night differential would be, or if would be any at all. And anyway, the lousy pay wouldn’t last forever.

I think Al Page would have savored the story in the Times about the Radical Right’s historic train wreck in Ohio, where voters informed Kasich and his friends that public workers are not to be toyed with, that they deserve respect and that they are not the cause of the miserable economy.

I’m sure he would have delighted in the numbers. Sixty-two percent voted to kill that stinking law.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Gretchen Gibbs
It’s almost always a treat to find the name of somebody you know in The New York Times. Today, however, I was saddened to see the name of a student I taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University before I retired. It was an article about how there are no longer enough internship sites for potential psychologists, with a quarter of the applicants unplaced. Some students find unaccredited experience, but many must wait a year to re-apply. The internship is essential to the granting of the Ph.D., so a large number of doctoral psychology students are floundering, their loans increasing as their hopes sink.

Joanna, the student featured in the article, had it all: intelligence, good grades, outside experience, and good references. Part of the problem is the economy, and the amount of money it costs an institution to provide good training, but another part is that there’s just too much competition in the field. I will return to this issue.

Another recent Times article about psychology concerned a Dutch academic, Diederik Stapel, who was found to have committed fraud in several dozen published papers. Some of these fraudulent findings were reported in the Times itself. The article talks about the dangers of psychology research, where data is not usually shared and journals don’t check statistics. One survey found that 70 percent of researchers acknowledged “cutting corners” in reporting data, and another, which looked at actual published studies, found that 50 percent contained at least one statistical error.

(I wrote an article for Zest a few months ago about the decline effect, how initial findings in science often do not hold up. Many esoteric explanations for this phenomenon have been put forward, but the problem of fraudulent data has not generally been explored.)

What do Joanna, the student without an internship, and Diederik Stapel have in common? I have no respect for Stapel, who has betrayed the ethics of my profession, while I am fond of Joanna. They have both, however, struggled to get ahead in an extremely competitive field.

“Publish or perish” applies in all academic fields, but in psychology as compared to, say, history or English, the publications must be empirical studies, usually with hundreds of participants. The data from these subjects must be collected, entered into the computer, analyzed, and written up. Without graduate student assistants and doctoral projects, it would be impossible to produce anywhere near the necessary number of studies per year, generally three or four. What if your study doesn’t produce the findings you hypothesized? Nobody will publish negative findings. The journals of the American Psychological Association generally reject over 90 percent of the submissions anyway. The level of the competition means that the temptation to “cut corners” in reporting data is enormous. I haven’t ever knowingly made errors in my publications or presentations, but I didn’t go back to check the raw data or the statistical work of my graduate students, who were also under pressure to publish as they applied for internships and jobs. I don’t know anybody who does that kind of checking.

My point is that the field is too competitive. There are too many psychology majors in college, most of whom are disappointed because they can’t get into graduate school. Then there are too many graduate students, who now can’t get internships, let alone jobs. Then in the universities there are too many researchers jockeying for position and promotion. When I started my professional career 40 years ago, psychology was a field more like the Humanities than the Sciences. Today, we keep finding out more and more about less and less. Most of the published articles aren’t interesting, having to do with esoteric aspects of problems nobody in the public would want to know about. As one of my students said, “Even my mother’s head falls into the mashed potatoes when I try to tell her about my dissertation.”

I’m not sure why psychology is so popular – a topic for another day. I don’t think it’s going to last, though. As the trend toward more and more competition continues, something self-correcting is going to happen. Students will drop out of psychology as a major, graduate applications will go down, and universities will struggle to recruit psychology professors. I will have mixed feelings about this development.

Kayvan Sabeghi

(Note: A second Iraq War veteran was seriously injured last week in Oakland after a run-in with police using tear gas and other riot control measures in connection with Occupy Oakland.  What follows is a first-hand account of the man’s treatment in an Oakland jail.)

By Max Gaydos

He had been making phone calls, trying to post bail and it seemed like he’d be out soon. They told him his bail would post in four to six hours and he slouched into a sitting/sleeping spot on a bench like the 20 or so rest of us occupying the cell.  Some of us were awake and talked with him about what his charges were. He told us he was charged with assault on an officer and how the police actually just beat him

Some time later, I noticed how sweaty and clammy he was, with his arms clenching his stomach. He stumbled to the window and pleaded for medical help. He was disregarded. Those of us in the cell witnessing this naturally wanted to help. How one can ignore such obvious pain and need for help is sickening. One kid banged on the cell door until the on-duty officer came around to open the door and tell him to stop making so much noise. Clearly skeptical of the many pleas for medical assistance coming from the cell, the officer made it clear he felt we were wasting his time.

By this point, Kayvan had collapsed to the floor at the officer’s feet and was saying things like, “I can’t breathe,” “my whole f…ng stomach,” “Dude, I’m passing out, I’m passing out, I’m just passing out.”

I don’t know if he ever did pass out, but it was enough for the officer to ask him what his name was. Speech was coming with difficultly for Kayvan, but he managed to answer. He then began throwing up what looked like stomach acid. The officer asked for someone to bring over a garbage pail. A nurse did so and asked other rudimentary questions, though Kayvan was still not getting the amount of attention he surely seemed to need.

Lying on the floor, hovering around his puddles of puke, he answered all the questions. Then they shut the cell door and he crawled down the corridor out of sight. A janitor pushing a mop bucket rattled down the hallway.

Later, the officer came back to talk to those in our cell. He told us to let him do his job and to not make it harder for him. He asked if any of us had any kind of medical degree to qualify us to handle or even comment on how he handled the situation. A resounding silence he understood to mean no. But we all had taken Kayvan at his word.

* * *

Here is a link to an initial report on Kayvan Sabeghi by The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/04/occupy-oakland-second-veteran-injured?fb=optOut&fb_source=message

Later reports in the San Francisco Chronicle said Sabeghi, 32, “told members of Iraq Veterans Against the War that he was beaten with nightsticks on his hands, shoulders, ribs and back by police or Alameda County sheriff’s deputies. He suffered internal injuries, including a lacerated spleen, he told the group. Emily Yates, a member of the group, said Sabeghi was awake and alert when she visited him at the hospital Friday. Sabeghi identified himself as a veteran, Yates said.”

Max Gaydos, a native of Scotchtown, is an art student on leave from SUNY Purchase, currently living in Oakland.

By Shawn Dell Joyce
Josephine-Louise Public Library in Walden signed on for the Ten Percent Challenge and is taking measures to reduce its energy usage by 10 percent. Director Ginny Neidermier describes the library’s motivation as mainly to replace many of the old windows in the building. “For a very long time we knew the windows on the first and second floors, and the balcony doors of the second floor had to be addressed. Due to the deterioration of the wood, many of these windows and doors either failed to open or close securely, rendering them essentially useless, and causing significant energy loss.”

Neidermier notes that “as the windows began to deteriorate, it became difficult to keep them open, and they certainly were not air tight. Storm windows were old, with some storms missing. During winter months or cases of extreme wind, the windows and doors would offer their seasonal rattle!  Every year we would get out our duck tape and try and seal the spaces! Needless to say, there was significant heat loss. A NYSERDA audit was completed around 2008 with recommendations and proposals for the Municipal Building. As with everything else, it would cost the Village money that simply was not there.”

Many municipalities face the same budget crisis that the library has: They would like to replace old windows and be more efficient, but efficiency costs more upfront and pays for itself over time. Right now, NYSERDA is offering free and reduced-rate audits for municipalities but will be doing away with this program within the month. Municipalities have to move quickly to take advantage of the free audit incentive before it expires this year. Sustainable Montgomery has a link to the audit application on their website at sites.google.com/site/sustainablemontgomery/audits-more

Neidermier is very resourceful and community-minded. She and her staff were able to find a way to replace the windows in the public library without having to raise community taxes. The library filed for a matching grant through the Division of Library Development. The library shares the Municipal Building with the Police Department and the village offices. The grant funds were only available for the library portion of the building. The municipality is already looking for ways to fund changing windows, fluorescent fixtures and other energy leaks in the rest of the building.

The project for window replacement and restoration is almost complete, and Neidermier is tabulating the results of their efforts using this season’s upcoming heating bills, and reducing the use of air conditioning in milder weather. Neidermier says, “We are hopeful the reduction will be more than 10 percent. However, we have already experienced a difference. The drafts from the windows and doors from past years are non-existent, as well as the “street noise.” The windows are also treated with a “uv ray” coating, protecting some of the book collection from long-term sun damage.”

For Josephine-Louise Public Library the Ten Percent Challenge has been a win/win situation. Neidermier says, “It seemed a natural fit to sign on. This year we have applied for the same matching grant from the Division of Library Development and are currently waiting on the final outcome of funding. The goal of this project is to upgrade some of the electric and plumbing on the first floor library, making energy improvements where possible and allowing more efficient use of water and conservation.”

Shawn Dell Joyce is the director of the Wallkill River School in Montgomery, a benchmark business in the Ten Percent Challenge. shawn@zestoforange.com

Photography by Rich Gigli

Dawn, Horton Brook, N.Y.

Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And To-morrow is only a Vision;
But To-day well lived makes
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!

By Kalidasa 4^th Century