Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Colorful living tip of the day number 397 dare friends to barge into a house with a welcome mat, sit on the couch, grab the remote, and ask the startled homeowner to bring them a beer.
[00:00:13] Hi, I'm Chris Rodell, and welcome to season two, episode six of use all the Crayons, the podcast that tells you how we're always keeping it colorful right here in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, the vibrant heart of the lovely Laurel Highlands.
[00:00:27] I, for over the past 40 years, spent my days chasing more than 3200 of the most compelling human interest stories on the planet. I guess that means I know a thing or two about what interests humans. Today we'll be talking about Major Frank Burns, Captain Derek Jeter, and the benefits of having youthful hoodlums for friends.
[00:00:49] In the interest of enhancing your use all the crayons experience, I'm going to reduce the usage of programmed sound effects in favor of more organic sounds. That means if you hear a bell ring, you'll be hearing an actual bell. Or me saying in a falsetto voice, ding.
[00:01:05] I do this even as I'm aware of the risk of losing a niche audience who enjoy listening to dead air and incessant clicks.
[00:01:12] I vow to resume the practice if I ever sense profit in running a podcast named Dead Air and incessant clicks.
[00:01:20] Ding.
[00:01:22] Take the day off and do something incompetent and mean spirited today. It's the 83rd birthday of Major Frank Burns. Larry Linville, the man who crafted perhaps the most indelible character in american pop culture, was born on this day in 1939. The five times married Linville, whose only other claim to fame was coincidentally, a series of ill fated romances aboard the fictional love boat, died April 10, 2000, at the age of 60. But to me at least, ferret face Frank Burns will live forever. It's a measure of the esteem I hold Frank Burns in that when Matt Lauer saluted former Today show colleague Bryant Gumbel on their shared birthdays, I thought of calling up and demanding equal time. For Burns, Mashery remains one of the most endlessly fascinating tv shows in history, because no other show has ever ranged from the gamut from fall down funny to train wreck terrible. From 1972 through 1983, the show was compelling, sometimes for all the wrong reasons. What caused the show to go bad? Was it when Klinger stopped wearing dresses? When BJ took over for the incomparable trapper John?
[00:02:28] When this insufferable Sydney Freedman became a fixture? Or was it when Colonel Blake's plane nose dived into the South China Sea, a riveting episode that still to this day lands like a punch to the solar plexus. The show took hits on all these dramatic transformations, but nothing caused the essence of the original, hilarious premise to leak out of the storied series. Like when they lost Frank Burns. He was the moralizing prig who cheated on his wife. He was the flag waving patriot who stole purple hearts from wounded soldiers for his own self glorification. He was the bumbling doctor who kept getting promoted over wealthier, worthier physicians.
[00:03:06] I'll never forget the episode when Radar was a budding writer doing an assignment about amusing anecdotes. Burns told a story about growing up in Indiana, next door to a little wheelchair bound boy named Timmy. With evident glee, Frank tells of how Timmy was happily waving at the Burns family when he lost control of his wheelchair. It plunged down the stairs, across the lawn and crashed the flailing invalid into the Burns family sedan.
[00:03:33] He cackles witch like throughout the storytelling as BJ, Hawk and radar listen in horror when he concludes. BJ, the designated voice of conscious, says, that must have been awful. Frank says, no, he just scratched the paint a little. Then he gets furious when the cheerful buddy buddy reaction he'd sought results in scorn. It's brilliant. It combines a kind of malevolence and mean spirited pettiness that used to united the nation. Today, all our bad guys divide us. Even deliberately cast evildoers like Montgomery Burns and Tony Soprano have their rooting sections. That's why we need more men like Frank Burns in our lives. We need people so bumbling and incompetent and loathsome that the whole world can point our children into him and say, see that man in the white smock on the stethoscope? He's pure evil. You don't want to grow up to be like him. He's a mean, cheap, and selfish stooge from whom no goodness results.
[00:04:24] So today, in honor of the great Frank Burns, I'm going to try and do something incompetent and mean spirited.
[00:04:31] Looking back over this incoherent blog post, I can surmise the incompetent parts already taken care of. Now the hard part can I go against my gentle nature and do something deliberately mean spirited?
[00:04:50] You're going to do ten things on your phone in the next 30 minutes that if someone had said 25 years ago you'd be doing it on a phone in 2024, you'd have been blown away. What will tomorrow's phones be doing?
[00:05:06] Twice this week, purported loved ones asked me word for word the exact same question. Are you crying?
[00:05:14] Read it like that, without any inflection. It's a beautiful question.
[00:05:17] It's what caring souls say to one another any time someone's in need of human understanding. But my wife and daughter, 14, didn't have compassion on their agendas. Their intent was to mock.
[00:05:29] My instinct was to sleeve away the tears, issue a strong denial. Why? No, no, I'm not crying. Then dash into the nearest bathroom, slam the door behind me, and settle in for a good long sob.
[00:05:38] Through teary hindsight, however, I realized I should have responded the way Colonel Nathan Jessop did in a few good menta, when that sniveling Tom Cruise character kept badgering him if he'd ordered the Gitmo code red. You're goddamn right I'm crying. Now put your arms around me and repeatedly say, there, there, until I'm done blubbering. I had nothing to be ashamed of. I mean, what grown man doesn't cry at Gatorade commercials?
[00:06:01] The New York Derek Jeter ad starts out with the iconic shots of Manhattan. The great Jeter is on his way to a game, one of the final games. He appears composed, reflective. He is magnificent. He is the great Derek Jeter. How could he be anything but? He says to the driver, you know what? I'll walk from here. And he exits the vehicle. I'd say it's like Jesus strolling through Jerusalem. But the analogy would be flawed. Jesus couldn't hit. He greets children, sanitation workers, bars full of delirious Yankee fans. In the background, Frank Sinatra is singing my way. I guess that's what really gets me. We honored my late father's request. We play my way at his zero four funeral.
[00:06:42] So a song sung by a performer who enjoyed international acclaim and fabulous wealth throughout his life was played at the pauper funeral of an unknown optician who died so broke even the red pin on his least Dodge neon was pegged hard on e.
[00:06:57] It's a poignant irony, I see, because, especially for me, because it's increasingly looking like dad's way will be my way.
[00:07:05] I've loved Jeter six years longer than I've loved the sassy little rascal who was ridiculing me for my sentiments.
[00:07:11] He played baseball, my favorite sport, with exuberance and skill. That right there is enough. People loved ty Cobb for that. And Ty Cobb was, at the very least, a racist and a malicious prick.
[00:07:22] Cobb was everything the great Jeter is not.
[00:07:25] Understand. Jeter's played 20 years, is the most visible athlete in what was called the media capital of the world. And that was before everyone with a smartphone became media conscripts. Yet Jeter has never once been involved in even a minor scandal. He's even once been in a drunken lout, rude to a doorman, or left anything less than a huge tip for even surly waiters. It's remarkable. I have far less visibility and renowned for committing at least one of those scandalous infractions every day before lunche. Then there are the women. I remember one year reading he dated 30 of the Maxim magazine hottest women list. The list included Scarlett Johansser, Minka, Scarlett Johansson, Minka Kelly, both Jessica's Beale and Alba, and most of your sports illustrated swimsuit lovelies. Good for him, sure, but that's not really an achievement. Beautiful women will understandably throw themselves at any rich and famous athlete. What is exceptional is that none of the women he's dumped has ever come out and bad mouthed him like, say, all those tramps did with tiger woods. In this apparent age of kiss and tell, no one's ever had said he's cheap, rude, kinky, or has a snicker worthy penis.
[00:08:36] So what we've seen for the last 20 years is something remarkable. I do cry whenever I see a human doing something that exalts humanity. I cry over great art, the triumph of justice, random acts of kindness, and the sight of an old man teaching a child how to catch a fish. I cried a little more the night that Jeter hit a game winner on his last helmet bat.
[00:08:58] I guess sometimes I cry when I know something great. I once was privileged to cheers, going away for good.
[00:09:06] Explain to friends that there are evident flaws in the language when I can enjoy an engrossing film but disdain a gross one.
[00:09:17] This is a story about friendships and firestone. Friendships are something I consider essential to human existence. Firestone is a dandy golf course, three, actually, in Akron, Ohio. Tiger, Phil and the rest of the PGA played there recently.
[00:09:31] Well, this was written a long time ago. My father was friends with Bobby Nichols, Firestone's head professional, from 1967 through 1980. I'm unclear how my father, a humble optician, became friends with the winner of the 1964 PGA Championship, but I figured it had something to do with glasses. My father parlayed countless sets of free glasses for golf pros into friendships and free golf. He was humble, but he was wily.
[00:09:57] He was my best friend when he died in 2004. It was probably around 1978 when Nichols invited him to come play Firestone. After exchanging pleasantries and probably new prescription sunglasses, Nichols asked Dad if he wanted to play by himself or with a member, a sociable sort. Dad said he'd prefer the company of a member.
[00:10:17] The very first member to come by was a nearly 80 year old man named John Hunsicker. A lifetime of smoking cigars had led to the removal of a cancerous voice box. His ability to speak in a human voice was gone. The cigars were not. He was smoking one when they were introduced.
[00:10:35] I need you at this point to use your imagination and pretend you're having, you're hearing me pretending to be a man who talks in a flat, artificially amplified and robotic voice of someone who needs to press a microphone to his throat to communicate. How do you do?
[00:10:51] How do you do?
[00:10:53] My father was taken aback. It's a startling experience to be addressed by a voice like that, I thought. Dad said, geez, Bobby, what did you stick me with this guy for? He thought his day was ruined.
[00:11:05] It was 08:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning when they got to the first tea, my father apprehensive about the company. Before we put our teas in the ground, he said, he turned to me and raised his little microphone to his hole in his throat and said, would you like a stinger? My father attended plenty of bar in his day. He knew a stinger was a nasty little brandy and cream de minthe butt kicker of a shot. He said, a stinger? Are you kidding me? It's 08:00 in the morning.
[00:11:30] John turned to my dad, raised his advice to his throat, and said, what are you, some kind of pussy?
[00:11:36] And just like that, this unlikely pair became very good friends.
[00:11:40] John would invite us out a couple of times a year to play Firestone. I probably played it five or six times over three years. Some great memories. So when I met Pete's brother Lee at a memorial service for their sister Ann, who died at age 55 in 2010, I had a happy response when he said that he was a golfer and a member at Firestone. Why don't you come out someday and we'll play Firestone? It'll be fun.
[00:12:04] We finally set it up for earlier that month.
[00:12:09] Lee is ten years older than Pete, and we'd never met until his sister's memorial service. Their father had died suddenly the week after Lee graduated from high school, when Pete was just eight.
[00:12:19] I don't remember seeing, I don't remember meeting Pete in the 7th grade. I just remember him always being there and the two of us always joking and laughing. I thought a lot about Pete in that drive to Akron. I thought about how a life that's been strewn with lively friendships. His was maybe the most pivotal. He was rebellious, audacious, and never failed to question authority. He had a car, a beard, a fake id and a nervy enough at the age of 16 to enter beer distributors and convince skeptics he was, by God, 25.
[00:12:48] We and our buddies spent so many summer nights in the woods, drinking, arguing and wondering how many good albums Bruce Springsteen had left in him after the river.
[00:12:58] And we never stopped laughing.
[00:13:00] I never thought there was any hoodlum element to us, but there's plenty of great stories about us getting chased and sometimes caught for pool hopping or bursting into abandoned houses to party.
[00:13:11] The golf with Lee and his friend Todd was fantastic. Toward the end, Lee said, there's three things necessary for a great day of golf, where you golf, how you golf, and with whom you golf. And the first two are overrated.
[00:13:25] Later, over drinks, I turned to Lee and told him what I'd concluded about his brother.
[00:13:29] You know, I hope this won't, you won't take this wrong, but I wouldn't be the man I am today if I'd never known Pete.
[00:13:37] By that I meant by many conventional professional benchmarks, stability, savings, material accumulations. My life has been an abject failure. And I didn't want him to think I blamed Pete. He looked at me the way I guess my dad looked at old John Hunsaker when he raised his arm to speak. I can't believe you said that, he said, because I was enjoying our day. As I was enjoying our day, I kept looking at you and thinking I was golfing with Pete. You're both just so loquacious, engaging and friendly. He then turned to Todd and surprised me when he said Pete was a juvenile delinquent. After our father died, he really rebelled. I was gone and he was left to be raised by two women, so he was always into trouble.
[00:14:16] I never once thought of my old friend in that way. I thought of him as a complicated kid behind the wheel of a 72 Plymouth barracuda on a restless quest for honest answers to big questions. He just happened to let me ride shotgun.
[00:14:29] Pete didn't go to college like the rest of us. He joined the Navy and later the merchant marines. I still see him every couple years, and he's still bright, charming and wonderful. That's how Lee sees him, too. We weren't together enough to know each other as brothers, but as a person, he's just become this wonderful, happy guy. I just love him so much.
[00:14:48] So my role models were juvenile delinquents in that regard, Pete and I are like. In one more respect, we're both very lucky men.
[00:14:56] Thanks for joining us. That's all for this week. I hope you have a great week, and I'll see you next week at the Fort Ligonier days. Outside of second chapter books on Main street, my colorful living tip of the day is learn the fine art of knowing precisely when to quit. Thank you. Yes.
