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OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
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ON MY SUMMER EXCURSION  Stan attempts to make a point to wife Bobbie at the annual Columnists.com dinner in California, but she's already engaged in conversation with some perfect stranger. |
A TRIP OUT WEST
Some Fun and Frolic
With Kindred Spirits
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
I suspected our trip out West was going to be a disaster when our US Airways plane came up lame for us at Philadelphia airport.
But I was wrong.
We schlepped a half-mile to a new terminal, got onto another plane, took to the air some three hours late and landed in the paradise of northern California without incident. Whew.
We went on to a week of comraderie with old friends and children; met an editor I have been working with for several years but had never met; enjoyed the fruits of academia and some tennis on the Stanford campus; was impressed by a statue that took me back to the 1968 Olympics; tsk-tsked at some of the inflated newspaper verbiage about Michael Jackson; marveled at the impact of technology in the environs of Silicon Valley down the road from San Francisco.
And we got to hear Baba Shiv.
We came out west for a reunion of a journalism fellowship program we enjoyed at Stanford University in 1976-77. Stanford spread out a lush red carpet of parties, dinners and lectures. We heard some dismaying talk about the dismal state of newspapers, laced with some hopeful words about new avenues of spreading the news to the public.
We could do without such as a front-page story in The San Francisco Chronicle on Michael Jackson that included this: “The coverage in the 11 days that have passed since the pop singer’s death has served as a cultural opiate, a chance for Americans to forget the recession, the nation’s two wars and the debate about health care….”
At Stanford we heard Luis Fraga, a visiting professor from the University of Washington, trace the growth of the Hispanic population in the USA. He included a somewhat startling graph that projected there will be more Hispanics than whites in the country in 2050.
Fraga, a quick-witted, rapid speaker, noted that Judge Sonia Sotomayor had followed the much-quoted-by-Republicans’ line about wise Latina women with this comment conveniently ignored by the Republicans: “I…believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group.”
And we heard Baba Shiv.
Before the days at Stanford, we stayed in Palo Alto with an old friend, Dick Sasuly, a horse racing handicapper par excellence. And we drove out to Walnut Creek east of Oakland to visit with the only living sports writer who covered the second Joe Louis-Max Schmeling fight in 1938.
He is 98-year old Lester Rodney, frail in body, strong in spirit with his good and great friend, Mary Harvey. Rodney, the onetime sports editor of The Daily Worker, was one of those instrumental in fighting to bring blacks into major league baseball. For a long time Branch Rickey and official baseball preferred to ignore Rodney’s unceasing lobbying for blacks, for Jackie Robinson, but recognition has been coming to him during the past decade.
Part of Rodney’s remarkable story is that he made a new life for himself out west after leaving the Communist party and the Worker. He became a religion editor with the Long Beach paper, took up tennis with a vengeance and was nationally ranked in the 80s and 85s-and-over and the like. I pray he hits the century mark in stride.
And we heard Bava Shiv.
A coming together party of the staff of Thecolumnists.com website provided a face-to-face meeting with editor Ron Miller. He is Mr. Columnists.com.in my book. Ever encouraging, he has been enlivening these columns with headline and graphic wit for nine years. Two dozen of us lifted our glasses to Miller, to each other and to the website which gives us all a chance to keep on writing, to keep on venting, to keep on breathing.
Some regular readers of these efforts from Left Field might remember the stark report by my daughter, Ellen, on the fire last year which destroyed her house on the hills above Santa Cruz. She and Alan are renting, while erecting another house in San Jose near Los Gatos. We we were more than a little impressed by the progress of the new house.
Ellen and Alan are a pair of peerless computer aces toiling at PARC (Palo Alto Research Company). We were impressed and amused by their side-by-side computering at home when they were not eating or walking their sweet, rescued dog, Cassie.
Note: as far as we could tell there is no place in all of San Jose where one can buy a New York Times. Even a trip to the bookstore at the San Jose State University campus proved futile. But we were rewarded on campus by the sight of a huge statue dedicated to Tommie Smith and John Carlos. I covered the event in which the two San Jose State sprinters made the clenched fist protest against discrimination after finishing one-three in a 1968 Olympics sprint at Mexico City. Yes, I took pictures.
And, oh yes, Bava Shiv.
He is a Stanford business school professor. The brochure describing his work said, “His research focuses on decision neuroscience, with specific emphasis on the role of emotion in decision making, the neurological bases of emotion, and non-conscious mental processes in decision making.”
That’s a mouthful way of saying the good professor teaches businesses to get people to buy things. And Baba Shiv (the name is Indian) was engaging and funny.
On our trip back to Philadelphia our US Airways plane arrived 40 minutes early--after which we had to wait for 20 minutes until our plane found an open gate. Traveling is not for sissies.
©2009 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted July 20, 2009.
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