Day 22 of Nat'l Emergency: Seven Samurai Memories

To commemorate the 100th birthday of the late Toshiro Mifune, the lead actor in many of Japanese director Akiro Kurosawa’s films, including “Seven Samurai” and “Rashomon,” Turner Classic Movies broadcast the flicks Wednesday. I recorded them.

“The Magnificent Seven” with Yul Brynner and a host of other soon to be well-known actors including Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Eli Wallach and James Coburn, was adapted from “Seven Samurai.” Not that it really matters. This blog post is not really concerned with “Seven Samurai.” Rather the focus is on the person with whom I saw the film for the first time, Steve Kreinberg.

In September 1971 I attended an evening orientation program for graduate students enrolled at the Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University. I knew no one among the roughly 80 attendees, but by some karma found myself drawn to a straight-haired, mustachioed, willowy fellow with a slight Southern twang from growing up in Gainesville, Fla. We immediately bonded, not because we turned out to be perhaps the only Jewish students but more probably because, as we acknowledged to each other later that evening, we both reconnoitered the venue prior to the meeting time to ascertain where the bathroom was located. 

Steve was two years older than my 22 years. He was married to Nancy, a nurse, who I met when we returned to his basement apartment. I was surprised to learn Nancy was headed back to their residence in San Francisco for the duration of Steve’s stay in Syracuse. 

Steve and I became almost inseparable that year despite the fact that we shared very few classes. Evenings and weekends were our bonding times. We ate pizza at the Varsity, an off-campus hangout. We drove out to the closest Lum’s in DeWitt to savor hot dogs steamed in beer, or my preferred meal, a fried shrimp basket with fries, washed down with beer served in frosted glasses. 

We went to movies. It was with Steve (and Gilda during one of her visits) that I saw “A Clockwork Orange.” We especially enjoyed Woody Allen’s “Bananas” and “Play It Again, Sam.” Steve became such a devotee of Allen that he wangled an interview with him while serving as the movie critic of the Syracuse New Times, a two-year-old alternative newspaper. Though Allen was in the middle of editing “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask,” he agreed to meet Steve at his Manhattan studio.

After Steve returned to Syracuse he was uncharacteristically quiet. When the next edition of his paper did not run his interview I demanded an explanation. Sheepishly he admitted he lost all professional composure in the presence of Allen. He just kept gushing, “You’re Woody Allen. I love your work.” There’s only so many times he could say that before Woody determined the interview was going nowhere and he dismissed Steve.

We also bonded over our shiksa (Gentile woman) fantasy, a real life blonde in our class named Donna Doherty. We barely spoke a word to her that year but hardly a day went by that her name and image did not crop up in our conversations. (As an aside, she lived in Branford, Conn., outside New Haven. I owe my first reporting job to my fascination with her. When looking for a job in 1972 I came to a fork in the road in Ansonia. The right fork led to Bridgeport, the left to New Haven. I chose New Haven because it was closer to where she lived. I got a job at The New Haven Register. Two years later Donna joined the paper as a sports writer. She eventually became editor of Tennis magazine.)  

Back to Steve: After we earned our master’s degree in newspaper journalism in the spring of 1972 Steve went back to San Francisco despite his constant fretting that reporting jobs would be hard to land. While I started work on The Register, Steve wound up working for a public relations firm. His marriage ended. He decided to try his luck in Los Angeles. 

Steve became one of the five question writers for the old “Hollywood Squares” show (the one that featured Paul Lynde in the center square). He was expected to write 50 acceptable questions per day, and yes, celebrities were counseled before each show on topics they would be asked. After “Hollywood Squares” Steve and his writing partner Andy became staff writers for “Archie Bunker’s Place” (Carroll O’Connor’s successor show to “All in the Family”) as well as for “Herman’s Head,” “Saved by the Bell,” “Head of the Class,” “Nine to Five” and “Mork & Mindy.”

He had married Robin Baskin, like Nancy a nurse. They had a son, Oliver. As with Nancy, they divorced. Robin, Oliver and Steve moved to Asheville, NC, because, as Steve related to Gilda and me during one of our visits to his California apartment, Los Angeles was no place to raise a child and besides, he had accumulated enough money to leave the Hollywood rat race. We visited him in Asheville. He came to New York with Oliver. We took them to a New York Yankees game. But our get-togethers ended almost 30 years ago. 

One of these days I will do two things. One, I will watch “Seven Samurai.” All I remember from the first time was it was almost impossible to read the English subtitles, partly because we were watching the film on Steve’s small portable television but more importantly because the white outfits of the samurai obscured many of the words superimposed in white. 

Second, I will contact him. As I had done in the past I googled Steve, Robin and Oliver as I was writing this blog post. This time I came up with information I could use to contact him. If we are successful in reconnecting I will owe it all to time spent sheltering-in-place and TCM’s broadcast of “Seven Samurai.”

From Worst Cabinet Secretaries to Monuments Supporting Upholders of Slavery

Did you see results of the unscientific poll as to whom is the worst member of Donald Trump’s cabinet?

As reported by Gail Collins in The New York Times last week, the “winner” was Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos (https://nyti.ms/2sTmSr3). 

I disagree. For me, it is a three-way tie.  

Cabinet picks are both political and enabling choices. A president selects people who supported his election and who are willing to carry out his agenda, especially if it parallels their own. 

So Betsy DeVos was a perfect choice by Trump as secretary of education. However, she is not his worst pick as she is doing exactly what she has always professed to believe. As is Scott Pruitt at EPA. 

The winners, yes winners, for worst cabinet members are Rex Tillerson at State, James Mattis at Defense and Jeff Sessions as attorney general, the first two because they have subjugated the best interests of the United States to their loyalty to an incompetent leader set on a course of destroying the credibility and standing of America throughout the world, and the third for not realizing his obligation is to be the chief legal officer of the country and defender of the Constitution and not to be the servant of a president with little or no allegiance to rights won through years of sacrifice both at home and abroad.

Tillerson, Mattis and Sessions are the true enablers of the Trump presidency. 

Trumped by Spellchecker: Having railed against spelling mistakes generated by an over-reliance on Spellchecker and a lack of proofreading context, I was hoisted on my own petard the other day. 

Spellchecker didn’t catch that I misspelled “countermand” when stating nobody is able to overrule a president’s nuclear strike order. I had written “counterman,” not countermand. 

No one advised me of my mistake except my brother who wrote, “As they say in the old country, please don’t countermand the counterman. He knows what you want to eat.”  

For me at the deli it’s usually a tongue sandwich on seeded rye with a side of cole slaw and french fries or potato knish. Washed down with either a Diet Coke or diet Dr. Brown’s black cherry soda. 

Right now I’m eating crow.

Spellchecker isn’t the only application that’s done me wrong lately. My British friend Dave Banks sent me a note, meaning to end it with a “Thanks, Mur.” When I received the email it read, “Thanks, Murban.” 

Asked, “Where the heck did Murban come from?,” Dave replied, 

“Mur!

“I wrote MUR!

“I hate predictive text!!!”

So do I.

In case you’re wondering, murban is a term for a man’s turban (http://www.refinery29.com/is-the-male-turban-becoming-a-fashion-trend?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email_share). Or it could refer to the Murban Bab Oil Field 84 kilometers northwest of Abu Dhabi Islands. 

Frosted Glasses: Another one of my early adulthood touchstones has disappeared. 

The last Lum’s restaurant, a freestanding unit in Bellevue Nebraska, outside Omaha, closed May 28 (if you’re wondering how I found out about the closing, Gilda read an article in the Omaha World-Herald. She reads it every day. It’s her way of staying current with what’s going on where Ellie, Donny and CJ live. Here’s the article that Gilda uncovered in The World-Herald: http://www.omaha.com/news/goodnews/man-who-dined-and-dashed-years-ago-sends-to-last/article_f454a6b6-55fc-11e7-821d-df15ec7c719a.html. It’s an interesting story about paying back a long-term debt.). 

It was in a Lum’s on Route 5 in Dewitt, east of Syracuse, NY, in 1971-72 that I learned to love beer served in a frosted goblet. I would go there with Steve Kreinberg, a fellow graduate student at the Newhouse School of Public Communications of Syracuse University. 

Lum’s was a chain of family restaurants whose signature dish was hot dogs cooked in beer. I preferred their basket of fried shrimp dipped in cocktail sauce, but what made a visit to Lum’s special was the frosted mugs used to serve the beer. To commemorate those days I keep a few tall glasses frosting away in the freezer. Here’s more on the history of Lum’s: http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/local/rocroots/2016/11/05/whatever-happened-lums/93327386/

Monuments to an Infamous Past: During the Civil War, 11 states seceded from the Union to form the Confederacy in defense of slavery. The South has many monuments to “the cause.” Richmond, VA, is the latest city considering removing Civil War monuments from positions of prominence.

Sounds reassuring. So how do you explain that, according to USA Today, there are between “700 and possibly more than 1,000 Confederate monuments in 31 states—in public parks, courthouse squares and state capitols”?

Many, said USA Today, “were created by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which was advancing the spurious idea that the South left the Union and fought the Civil War over states’ rights, not slavery.” (http://amp.usatoday.com/story/101870418/)

Those 20 non Confederate locations include Union states, such as “Massachusetts, Iowa and Pennsylvania and states that in 1861 were mere territories, such as Montana, Arizona and Oklahoma.”

North Carolina, once considered a template for a New South of tolerance and equality, has added 35 monuments since 2000, according to a University of North Carolina survey, USA Today reported. 

We have a long way to go as a country when we still venerate soldiers who fought to keep fellow human beings as slaves. 

The Domestication of Murray and Other Meshugas

When asked over the years if I cooked, Gilda usually replied, nine times out of ten I could boil water—maybe. I would respond, Gilda and I had a mutual-partition-of-domestic-labor-pact: she would cook, we’d both enjoy the gourmet meals she prepared, I would be in charge of setting the table and cleaning up the dishes and pots and pans. 

The arrangement worked fairly well from my perspective for 40 years, but change is afoot. Given Gilda’s work schedule which includes waking up at 5:18 am, I have been conscripted into the meal preparation corps. Tuesday night was our first dinner at Maison Murray, Cucina Murray, Bistro Murray or just plain Murray’s Kitchen. We dined on broiled salmon, baked potatoes garnished with butter and sour cream, and steamed broccoli. We don’t eat dessert, as a rule, unless you count after-dinner pills as a treat. 

Tonight’s pre-tennis menu includes cheese blintzes and salad. 

Don’t think my cooking exploits know no bounds. I’m very much the neophyte chef in the kitchen, though I’ve put together a list of some dozen meals to rotate into our Monday through Thursday repasts. I’m writing down detailed instructions for each dish, making sure we have a balance of protein, starch and vegetable. 

This is a brave step for me, though not entirely a new world as I cooked for myself while in graduate school at Syracuse University. In my garret of an apartment in an old Victorian-style house on East Genesee Street, I would cook tuna casserole, meat loaf and anything else that would fit into a toaster oven. I also learned to drink beer, really drink beer. My friend and classmate Steve Kreinberg introduced me to Lum’s, a chain of family restaurants whose signature dish was hot dogs cooked in beer. I preferred their basket of fried shrimp, but what made a visit to Lum’s special was the frosted mugs used to serve the beer. To commemorate those days I keep a few mugs frosting away in the freezer. 

This Is Crazy: I'm always amused when gentiles try to speak Yiddish. They never get the intonation right. For example, instead of a guttural, growly “chutzpah” that conveys the indignant reproach of the speaker, it usually comes out as a soft “hutzpah,” a kind of “oh, really” quality to the put down.

Incorporating Yiddish in one’s writing isn't easy, either. Take Maureen Dowd’s attempt in her column last Sunday for The NY Times. Analyzing Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential prospects, Dowd wrote, “Her challenge is to get into the future and stay there, adding fresh people and perspectives and leaving the Clinton mishegoss (italics added) and cheesiness in the past.”

When I first read this I chuckled. I wondered how many non-Jews would realize she meant to say “meshugas,” the Yiddish word for craziness. I was all set to lambaste her for failing to correctly spell meshugas when I decided to do some checking and came across the following 2009 article from The Jewish Daily Forward (http://forward.com/articles/116716/clearing-up-the-meshugas-for-maureen-dowd-and-will/). 

For those not willing to jump on the link, here’s a precis: It seems Dowd had previously used the meshugas spelling but was chastened by Times columnist and wordsmith William Safire that the correct spelling was mishegoss. Safire might have been the only one to believe that, but his stature was sufficient for Dowd to follow his example. 

The lesson to be learned from this—before criticizing, it’s a good idea to check as many facts as possible. Thank you Google and the Internet.

Mr. Lucky: I consider myself fortunate not to be in school these days, not when technology enables teachers to monitor a student’s reading and study habits (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/technology/coursesmart-e-textbooks-track-students-progress-for-teachers.html?ref=education&_r=0). From high school on, I was a lousy student. I received good grades in subjects I was interested in, but not because I read the course material. I was just hard-wired, or lucky enough, to know the answers in subjects ranging from history to English to elementary sciences. 

I’d be in real trouble if my grades depended on whether I was reading the assignments. 

For Shame: There’s no doubt Margaret Thatcher was a polarizing figure, not just in British politics but throughout the world, as well. I find it shameful, however, that while media baron Rupert Murdoch praised the former prime minister for being "undoubtedly one of the most important figures in the 20th century. I found her attitude an inspiration in my business life,” he allowed his British tabloid paper, The Sun, to trumpet her passing with the following headline: “Maggie Dead In Bed At Ritz.” 

How tawdry. How lacking in respect. How shameful.