I received the bad news about my brother Gene and his wife Carolyn splitting up a couple of days ago. I've been mulling over what it is about the Rogers' boys through a couple of generations that seems to make it difficult to stay with just one wife. I'm the outlier here, and sometimes it worries me, and makes me take stock of the condition of my marriage. I think that's a good thing for every marriage now and then, kind of like rebooting the computer to get a fresh start.
Speaking of computers, as I was perusing my Document folder I ran across this love letter I wrote to my Carolyn about seven years ago. Sometimes as we get older we forget that the younger generation needs to know from us what makes for a happy life and what makes for a happy marriage. We can't just keep silent and hope they can figure it out for themselves.
Since I'm writing to adults here, hopefully, I'm not going to edit this old letter, and I'll follow up with some clarification, since I was writing to someone who remembered all the places and events I mentioned.
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A Letter to my Lover,
Without any legal guarantee, you chose to be with me for life, as I offered the same promise to you.
You went with me to Woodland, taking on two young boys who needed a home, and although we had tough times, we also had memorable days exploring mountains and forests together.
You followed me to Silver Springs, to live in a drafty block house, with a shocking electrical system, a balky water pump, and winds that could tear doors off of the pump house and car. Food was scarce, but remember how good that Mexican pizza was, and hot dogs roasted in a cave?
For a short while, we went back to California, to Santa Ana. I don't remember any good times there. Fear, depression, and betrayal by my best friend come to mind. The bright spot was when you chose to follow me away, anywhere, no matter where, as long as we were together.
For nearly a month, we camped in a tent by the river in Snelling, where the mosquitoes tried to carry us away. We camped at the top of Sonora Pass, and nearly lost our food and sleeping bags when they fell out of the back of the car on a huge bump. We camped on top of Grand Mesa, and we camped on Dallas Divide, where you got sick on Vienna sausages. We camped on top of Uncompagre Ridge, and spent a night near Slumgullion Pass. We were poor, but we were together.
Wes was born nine months later in Nucla, where we made a home for our family for nine years. You followed me into quicksand in Bull Canyon and rode with me down Black Bear Road, not to mention threading our way through avalanches on Red Mountain Pass.
You followed me to a job interview at Tempiute tungsten mine, and breathed a sigh of relief when I turned it down. But I knew you would have gone if I had taken the job. You are tougher than anyone I know.
When I took the job at Winnemucca, you moved out on thirty acres of sand, sagebrush, and rattlesnakes. We've fought floods, gnats, mosquitoes, Mormon crickets, and cat catching coyotes. We've overcome forty below zero winters, clueless and deceptive school administrators, and long lonely power plant outages every spring.
As we look forward to a spring together, planting trees and flowers, hoping to go on walks and rides together, I know how lucky I am to live and love with you. No one could ask for a better wife and partner. I'll love you always.
Don Jan 25, 2008
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My sentiments haven't changed at all--only grown deeper.
In the paragraph on the places we camped, that was one month in June when I quit work in California and bought a double sleeping bag and pup tent, bought some food and camped out in national forest campgrounds and parks as I looked for work anywhere but California. It was the poorest we ever were, and the happiest we had ever been. "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose!"
When we ran out of money, I had a good line on a job in Colorado, but the start was several weeks away, so we drove to Oklahoma and stayed with Carolyn's brother Larry and his family for a couple of weeks. I will never forget the Oklahoma hospitality we received there.
The job at Tempiute mine was a first attempt to leave Colorado when it was becoming obvious that the obsolete electric station there was going to be closed. Tempiute was a lonely mine near Rachel, NV, now located on the Extraterrestrial Highway. It was fifty miles away from the nearest post office and school, and although the wages were great, we just couldn't quite make the leap to that much isolation.
We do love isolation, though. I don't know how a couple can keep the spark going in an apartment building in the city. The whole object of hiking into the woods and four wheeling into the desert wilderness is to find solitude to be exploited for love. You have not known real honest sex unless you have felt the sun and breeze on your butt. You don't know what a thrill is unless you have looked up while standing in an isolated creek enjoying sex and realizing there is a bobcat peering down from the bank above you, curious what all the commotion is about.
Sex is an integral part of any happy marriage, and too many people see it as a way to make babies, and not as a way of connecting two people together intimately and completely. As Carolyn and I get older, we have slowed down some, but we haven't given up yet.
I remember at a retirement party for one of my fellow employees in Colorado, somebody (who probably had a couple of beers too many) asked him how sex was at his age. He grinned and said, "When I was younger I could go all night. Now that I'm older it takes all night, but it's just as much fun!"
This Easter, after our own version of fertility rites, I asked her how she felt. She said, "I'm happy. Even my hair's happy!" I told her I knew just how she felt, because my toenails were still grinning. "And my moustache smells so good I'm not washing my face tomorrow!"
Boredom has never been a part of this marriage!
Monday, April 6, 2015
Thursday, March 12, 2015
An evening in Hell.
I am still exhausted this morning. Yesterday was the evening from hell. I haven’t been this frustrated and frankly, scared, in years.
It started with my volunteering to go to a conference in Carson City, NV, to listen to speakers from the AFL-CIO on the series of bills in the legislature that are directly attacking the rights of working people. For the first time in many years, the Republicans have majorities in both houses of the state legislature and the governorship, and they are rushing to get all their pet legislation passed while they can. They know that when the anti labor laws start affecting the people in Nevada, they will lose the next election badly, but they are determined to do their worst anyway.
They just passed a bill to do away with prevailing wages on school construction. That will drive wages down in the construction industry, making workers poorer.
They have bills lined up to abolish overtime and eliminate the eight hour day. They want to reduce or eliminate the minimum wage. They want to eliminate worker’s compensation. Strangest of all, they want to eliminate medical benefits covering policemen, firefighters, and other public workers as soon as they retire from active duty.
Economic depression is defined as too many products and not enough customers rich enough to buy those products. Of course, Republicans don’t like to hear the word depression any more, at least since Herbert Hoover and George W. Bush, so now they just call it austerity. It’s the same thing.
Why would a rational businessman try to make his customers poorer? Are they insane? Deluded? Or have they conveniently forgotten that their employees are also their customers?
Sorry, that is not the subject I meant to write about. The scary event had to do with my wife Carolyn. While I was attending the AFL-CIO conference, Carolyn took the car and drove north about 35 miles to Reno (actually Sparks) for a dental appointment to replace a crown that had fallen off. Her appointment was at 4:00 PM and my conference was to be over at 5:30 PM, so we figured there wouldn’t be much of a problem driving back to Carson City to pick me up and go home.
I got out of my meeting a little early, about 5:00 PM, so I sat down on a bench outside to wait. It was a little chilly, but I expected her there shortly. At 5:30 she wasn’t there, so I tried to call her. She did not answer, so either her cell phone was off, or buried inside her coat or purse so she couldn’t hear it. I froze out about 6:00 and went back into the Carson City Nugget Casino and Convention Center and called again. No luck again. I left a message each time so if she checked her phone she would know I was trying to call. At 6:30 I called again, with no response. I hate being helpless. This is where frustration starts, and a little fear begins. Just before 7:00 she calls me! I am overjoyed, and ask if she is back in town. She says she doesn’t know, and she is lost. She doesn’t know what town she is in. I ask her to look around and find a street name nearby. She came back with Keystone. My heart sank. This street is way west of Reno--not south--and I know how badly lost she is. She mentions that she is getting low on gas, and I made a huge blunder. I asked her to look on the dashboard and tell me what the range says. Our new car has a number telling how many miles are left. She said 67 miles. I should have told her to find the nearest gas station and fill it up, but I didn’t.
Instead, I calculated the she was less than forty miles north, and told her to come back south to Carson City. I also talked her through the process of selecting the address of the Carson City Nugget into the Garmin GPS. I had programmed it in earlier, before we left the house.
After several missteps, we got it in and she saw the purple road showing on the map, so I told her to just follow that purple road, and I’d see her in a little bit.
Well, an hour went by with no sign of her, and no word on the phone. It’s been three and a half hours since she left the dentist’s office, and that is about a 45 minute drive.
Finally, the phone rings. I ask if she is in Carson City yet. She says no. I ask if she has left Reno yet, and she doesn’t know--she thinks she missed Carson City somehow. I ask if she is following the purple road, and she says no, she forgot. Now I tell her to find a gas station immediately, because I know she is about to run out. She tells me she is on South Virginia Street, so I know she is on the right track, but without enough gas to get all the way to Carson City. So she says she is going back to find a station. I tell her I love her, and good luck.
In about a half an hour, my phone rings again. A strange voice asks if I’m Don Rogers, and I say yes. The voice on the phone says he is with the Nevada Highway Patrol, and not to worry, that they are getting a gallon of gas for my wife, and will point her in the right direction when they get her some gas in a few minutes. I am about to cry. I suggest to the officer that she is totally confused, has been driving for over three hours until she ran out of gas, and I am worried she will get lost again. A gallon of gas from her location is just enough to make it to Carson City if she doesn’t get lost again. He says not to worry, they will make sure she gets here safely. Carolyn calls me a few minutes later to reassure me she has a gallon of gas now, and will see me shortly. The officer asks to speak to me, and says he will have her follow him to Carson City and asks again for my exact location. I tell him the Nugget Casino, and he says good, that is what Carolyn told him, also. He asks if I’m in shape to drive when they get there and I tell him I’ve only been drinking coffee by the quart, and I’m alert as hell. He laughed and said they would be there in about 30 to forty minutes.
Right on the money at at 10:00 PM I see the Highway Patrol car pull into the parking lot with Carolyn following closely. When she finds a parking spot, I go over to the car, and the patrolman is already there to make sure I’m OK. He asks how I feel, and I tell him I’m about to cry with relief, and a little sick but alright. He tells me what I already knew--that the gallon of gas is probably almost gone, so fill up immediately. I thank him, shake his hand, and point out the Shell station just a block north where I will fill up before heading out to Winnemucca. He tries to reassure me that because of the new freeway construction between Reno and Carson City, an lot of people get lost out there, and there are no gas stations for about a twenty mile stretch.
This morning I realize I forgot to get his name or offer to pay for the gallon of gas. Sometimes I think I’m losing it, too!
So after filling up, we headed out through Dayton, Silver Springs, and Fernley, Nevada, on our way home. We stopped at the brand new Denny’s at the Flying J truck stop in Fernley and ate a very late dinner, and then we drove on to Winnemucca, arriving here after 2:00 this morning.
We both slept very soundly and late, and are still recovering from the ordeal. Carolyn agrees that she won’t be driving alone on unfamiliar roads again.
Life is what happens after you plan how you think it should be. A corollary to that is old age ain’t for sissies!
It started with my volunteering to go to a conference in Carson City, NV, to listen to speakers from the AFL-CIO on the series of bills in the legislature that are directly attacking the rights of working people. For the first time in many years, the Republicans have majorities in both houses of the state legislature and the governorship, and they are rushing to get all their pet legislation passed while they can. They know that when the anti labor laws start affecting the people in Nevada, they will lose the next election badly, but they are determined to do their worst anyway.
They just passed a bill to do away with prevailing wages on school construction. That will drive wages down in the construction industry, making workers poorer.
They have bills lined up to abolish overtime and eliminate the eight hour day. They want to reduce or eliminate the minimum wage. They want to eliminate worker’s compensation. Strangest of all, they want to eliminate medical benefits covering policemen, firefighters, and other public workers as soon as they retire from active duty.
Economic depression is defined as too many products and not enough customers rich enough to buy those products. Of course, Republicans don’t like to hear the word depression any more, at least since Herbert Hoover and George W. Bush, so now they just call it austerity. It’s the same thing.
Why would a rational businessman try to make his customers poorer? Are they insane? Deluded? Or have they conveniently forgotten that their employees are also their customers?
Sorry, that is not the subject I meant to write about. The scary event had to do with my wife Carolyn. While I was attending the AFL-CIO conference, Carolyn took the car and drove north about 35 miles to Reno (actually Sparks) for a dental appointment to replace a crown that had fallen off. Her appointment was at 4:00 PM and my conference was to be over at 5:30 PM, so we figured there wouldn’t be much of a problem driving back to Carson City to pick me up and go home.
I got out of my meeting a little early, about 5:00 PM, so I sat down on a bench outside to wait. It was a little chilly, but I expected her there shortly. At 5:30 she wasn’t there, so I tried to call her. She did not answer, so either her cell phone was off, or buried inside her coat or purse so she couldn’t hear it. I froze out about 6:00 and went back into the Carson City Nugget Casino and Convention Center and called again. No luck again. I left a message each time so if she checked her phone she would know I was trying to call. At 6:30 I called again, with no response. I hate being helpless. This is where frustration starts, and a little fear begins. Just before 7:00 she calls me! I am overjoyed, and ask if she is back in town. She says she doesn’t know, and she is lost. She doesn’t know what town she is in. I ask her to look around and find a street name nearby. She came back with Keystone. My heart sank. This street is way west of Reno--not south--and I know how badly lost she is. She mentions that she is getting low on gas, and I made a huge blunder. I asked her to look on the dashboard and tell me what the range says. Our new car has a number telling how many miles are left. She said 67 miles. I should have told her to find the nearest gas station and fill it up, but I didn’t.
Instead, I calculated the she was less than forty miles north, and told her to come back south to Carson City. I also talked her through the process of selecting the address of the Carson City Nugget into the Garmin GPS. I had programmed it in earlier, before we left the house.
After several missteps, we got it in and she saw the purple road showing on the map, so I told her to just follow that purple road, and I’d see her in a little bit.
Well, an hour went by with no sign of her, and no word on the phone. It’s been three and a half hours since she left the dentist’s office, and that is about a 45 minute drive.
Finally, the phone rings. I ask if she is in Carson City yet. She says no. I ask if she has left Reno yet, and she doesn’t know--she thinks she missed Carson City somehow. I ask if she is following the purple road, and she says no, she forgot. Now I tell her to find a gas station immediately, because I know she is about to run out. She tells me she is on South Virginia Street, so I know she is on the right track, but without enough gas to get all the way to Carson City. So she says she is going back to find a station. I tell her I love her, and good luck.
In about a half an hour, my phone rings again. A strange voice asks if I’m Don Rogers, and I say yes. The voice on the phone says he is with the Nevada Highway Patrol, and not to worry, that they are getting a gallon of gas for my wife, and will point her in the right direction when they get her some gas in a few minutes. I am about to cry. I suggest to the officer that she is totally confused, has been driving for over three hours until she ran out of gas, and I am worried she will get lost again. A gallon of gas from her location is just enough to make it to Carson City if she doesn’t get lost again. He says not to worry, they will make sure she gets here safely. Carolyn calls me a few minutes later to reassure me she has a gallon of gas now, and will see me shortly. The officer asks to speak to me, and says he will have her follow him to Carson City and asks again for my exact location. I tell him the Nugget Casino, and he says good, that is what Carolyn told him, also. He asks if I’m in shape to drive when they get there and I tell him I’ve only been drinking coffee by the quart, and I’m alert as hell. He laughed and said they would be there in about 30 to forty minutes.
Right on the money at at 10:00 PM I see the Highway Patrol car pull into the parking lot with Carolyn following closely. When she finds a parking spot, I go over to the car, and the patrolman is already there to make sure I’m OK. He asks how I feel, and I tell him I’m about to cry with relief, and a little sick but alright. He tells me what I already knew--that the gallon of gas is probably almost gone, so fill up immediately. I thank him, shake his hand, and point out the Shell station just a block north where I will fill up before heading out to Winnemucca. He tries to reassure me that because of the new freeway construction between Reno and Carson City, an lot of people get lost out there, and there are no gas stations for about a twenty mile stretch.
This morning I realize I forgot to get his name or offer to pay for the gallon of gas. Sometimes I think I’m losing it, too!
So after filling up, we headed out through Dayton, Silver Springs, and Fernley, Nevada, on our way home. We stopped at the brand new Denny’s at the Flying J truck stop in Fernley and ate a very late dinner, and then we drove on to Winnemucca, arriving here after 2:00 this morning.
We both slept very soundly and late, and are still recovering from the ordeal. Carolyn agrees that she won’t be driving alone on unfamiliar roads again.
Life is what happens after you plan how you think it should be. A corollary to that is old age ain’t for sissies!
Monday, January 5, 2015
The Rest of the Story
Early in the spring of 1958, before school was out, Dad came down to Merced and picked us up in his green and white 1956 Buick Special and headed east to Illinois to visit his parents. Mom had never driven an automatic transmission before, so Dad showed Mom how to shift into Drive with her foot on the brake, then give it the gas and hang on. The DynaFlow transmission had a unique torque converter with a variable vane stator, which prevented any jerk when shifting. It was hard to feel any shift at all, in fact. The motor just roared at one speed and the car went faster and faster.
Two other unique features on Buicks of that era were the starter switch on the gas pedal and the speedometer display. The starter switch was actually on the carburetor, built into the throttle body. To start the engine, you turned the ignition key and just stepped on the gas pedal. When the engine started, manifold vacuum would disconnect the starter switch so the starter could not function while the engine was running.
The speedometer did not have a pointer hand like most other speedometers. It looked like a red line under the numbers which moved to the right as speed increased. I saw one disassembled years later, and found it was actually a drum behind a horizontal slot. On the drum was painted a red helix on a black background. As the drum was turned by the same mechanism that rotated the needle on other speedometers, the red portion rotated upward and seemed to move across the dial. It gave the car a more solid, substantial feeling than those puny little needles!
John remembers stopping at a restaurant in Livingston, California, called “The Palms” where we all had breakfast. He swears he remembers having pancakes that morning 49 years ago. His memory will be a great help in telling these stories, because it’s so much better than mine!
There was another brief stop in Reno where we kids got to watch Mom and Dad get married again, (that seemed a little surreal) and then we were on the road again. Nevada had no speed limit between towns then, so Dad was over 100 mph everywhere he could across the state. Mom cringed, and I'm sure now she had some regrets already, but we kids loved it! There is something in the Rogers' genes that imparts a need for speed.
As we left Nevada and entered Utah, the speed limit dropped to 70 mph, but the road actually got much straighter as we went out onto the salt flats. Dad took it right up to 120 mph, burying the red spear point that Buicks used for a speedometer into the right of the display. After many miles of this, suddenly Dad said, "Hang on, I've got to slow down fast." He had seen a police cruiser on the other side of the divided highway, and he was crossing the median to follow us. It's still hard to believe, but Dad dropped the shift lever into low range, and the car jerked hard and slowed down rapidly to 70, whereupon Dad put it back into drive, without once turning on a brake light to give him away. The policeman caught up quickly, of course, and followed us for several miles before deciding to give up and go back to the other lanes. They just don't make transmissions like that old Dynaflow anymore.
Evening came as we entered Salt Lake City, where we stopped to eat, and Dad toured us through downtown, showing us the statue to the seagulls, and told us the story of how the Mormon pioneers had a wagon team turn a circle, and then they made all the streets as wide as that circle, which is why the streets there are so wide. None of us wondered at the time how he had come to know so much about Mormons.
It was night as we left Salt Lake City, headed east on Highway 40. All three of us brothers went to sleep in the back, kneeling on the floor with our heads on the rear seat, facing backwards. Sometime in the middle of the night there was a heavy thud and shudder, and we woke up as Dad was sliding to a stop. Something smelled awful, and steam swirled around the car. As Dad went by a flock of sheep, the last one had suddenly jumped in front of the car, and we hit it square in the middle of the grill. The die cast metal grill had shattered and punched myriad holes in the radiator, and besides that the sheep was still under the car, stuck on the exhaust pipe and muffler. Dad backed off of the sheep, and then pulled forward to the side of the road. There was a small stream down an embankment off the road, so after plugging the holes in the radiator with little pieces of cloth, he refilled the radiator with a discarded beer can he found beside the road. He left the radiator cap loose on the first notch, and we slowly started east again. This happened between Vernal, Utah, and the Colorado border. I remember stopping several more times that night for Dad to refill the radiator before we came into Craig, Colorado, at dawn.
Dad stopped at the first service station he came to, and they sold him two cans of Bar's Stopleak, and let him use the water hose to try to wash some of the remains of the sheep from off the bottom of the car. We all had been retching and gagging for hours. Dad ran the engine until it was hot, then poured in the stop leak. After a minute, he pulled out the rags, and we watched the little streams of water choke off and dry up one by one. It was magic! After filling up with gas, Dad went to the local highway patrol office to see if he could get compensation for the damage to the car. They just chuckled, and informed him it was open range, and if the rancher found out who hit the sheep, he would want his livestock replaced. Since it was in another state, they encouraged him to keep on driving east, so that's what we did.
I don’t remember much of the rest of the trip through Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa. It was anticlimactic, to say the least, and the only thing that sticks with me was listening to the Everly Brothers hit, “Dream, Dream, Dream” and another song by Perry Como, “Kewpie Doll” on the radio. The Bar's Stopleak did its job all the way to Illinois, and back to Oregon again, where Dad replaced the radiator and grille.
We did not go directly to Chillicothe, where our grandparents lived, when we arrived in Illinois. The Seventh-day Adventist church in Peoria was arranging a surprise program for our Grandmother Rogers, modeled on the popular television program “This Is Your Life.” She had nine children, who as soon as they were able, had moved away to other places. The church had convinced most if not all of them to return to Peoria on a Friday evening for the program to honor their mother.
She was seated on the stage while the pastor began to tell the story of her life, and as he came to stories of her children, they would come out on stage with their families to honor and hug her. She was more and more amazed, as sons and daughters she hadn’t seen in years came onto the stage.
I don’t remember whether our family was near the first or last, but when the pastor announced Vernon and his family were here to greet her, tears of joy overwhelmed the surprise on her face, and she hugged and cried with all of us. I’m sure she had thought she would never see us together again as a family. She was almost right.
The next day, after the Sabbath church services, our Dad was baptized into the Adventist church again, and we all hoped that this was going to be the start of a new life with a father again.
After a few days of visiting with family, including a potluck dinner at a large park on the Illinois river in downtown Peoria, we loaded up and headed west again. We went up through Wyoming and Idaho following highway 30 to La Grande, Oregon.
Since we had not finished the school year yet, Mom and us kids went back to Merced to finish the school year. Dad lent us his second car, which was a 1949 Nash Airflyte.
We all thought it was pretty ugly as cars go, but years later we found that it had been designed using a wind tunnel and was actually way before its time in several areas. The Nash was the first to use unit body construction, with no separate frame underneath. That made the car lighter and yet more rigid on rough roads. It also had an ignition switch on the steering column, something that didn’t happen on other makes until decades later.
The flathead six cylinder engine was unique, using a “sealed in” manifold for simplicity and reliability. The carburetor was bolted directly to the cylinder head, which had the appropriate passages to carry the fuel mixture to the intake valves.
This car also had a Borg-Warner overdrive unit, which helped get great gas mileage. There was a collar type switch on the column shift lever to switch in and out of overdrive. When you were in high gear, you just twisted the switch on, then let up on the gas. There was a slight clunk as the gears changed, then you were in a higher gear. It was possible to downshift by double clutching, but it took skill and timing so usually we just shifted out of overdrive after stopping. While the unit was in overdrive, the car freewheeled if you backed off, so when encountering downgrades in the mountains, it was a good idea to pull the mechanical handle under the dash to lock out the overdrive, otherwise you risked burning up the brakes.
The most famous item on the Nash was the reclining seats. Many fathers would not let their daughters go out on a date with a boy driving a Nash. The front seatbacks reclined all the way down flush with the back seats, making a bed for two people. I’ve heard of girls becoming pregnant in Volkswagens, but it would be a lot more comfortable in a Nash!
After school was over that year, we all went back to Oregon in the Nash and moved into the housing Dad had for us.
Dad had a mechanic job at M. J. Goss Motors in La Grande, and we all lived in an 8’ X 35’ Nashua trailer house in a small trailer park just south of town. This wasn’t large enough to be called a mobile home by any stretch of imagination. When they talk of “shotgun houses” in New Orleans, I think of that trailer.
In the front was a small living room, which had a table in one end to become the dining room, which was next to the sink and stove, which qualified that end as the kitchen. Through a narrow door was the first bedroom, with cabinets on one side of the passage for closets, and bunk beds on the other side for us kids. I had the top bunk, and I think Bill and John shared the bottom.
Through another small door and you were in the bathroom next to the toilet and sink. Behind them was a small bathtub—so small you had to sit with knees high and feet pulled in. Luckily none of us were overweight.
The last room through the next door was the second bedroom for Mom and Dad. The double bed pretty much filled the room, except for a narrow aisle down one side to get back to the closet. From the door, climbing across the bed was required to get to that aisle.
There were no playgrounds or parks nearby, so we got into trouble pretty regularly. We were chastised for sneaking across a wooden fence and eating berries in a little garden next door.
A block away was a drive in movie, and Bill and I noticed that there were wooden ladders wired to the structure all the way to the top. So every day we would climb a ladder and look around. But the ladders were old and rickety, and the baling wire had loosened through the years, so we would chicken out and come down every day without getting to the top.
It’s funny how familiarity breeds contempt—each day we climbed a little higher, because—well, we climbed that high yesterday and the ladder held OK, didn’t it? I think it took about a week or so until Bill and I both risked that last, highest ladder, and crawled out on top of the movie screen. I remember it being maybe two feet wide and forty feet long, covered in tarpaper and coarse sand composite roofing. I don’t remember either of us standing up, but maybe I have blanked it out. I know we had to talk ourselves into crawling over to the ladder and beginning the long, shaky descent back to earth.
At one end of the trailer park was what seemed to be a junk storage area, with old logs and boards and car parts piled around. We found an old Ford front axle, with the hubs and wheels still attached (no tires) and Bill and I got the bright idea of stacking two long straight pine logs on top of another log so the two logs had a good slope. By spacing the logs the same distance as the wheels, we could sit on the axle and roll down to the bottom, where the axle would stop when it hit the dirt. Of course, you had to ride with your feet held straight out in front so they wouldn’t touch the ground. We gave all the neighborhood kids rides, including the girls, and great fun was had by all.
How we managed this without anybody breaking both legs I’ll never know. It’s just one more thing that gives me shudders thinking about now.
A few days after we had moved into La Grande, Oregon, Dad took the whole family out to eat at a local restaurant. Our waitress was obviously an old friend of his, and he introduced Ethel to all of us. We all knew he had lived there for a year or two, and nobody was surprised that he would know her.
He worked at M. J. Goss, a Chevrolet/Oldsmobile dealer in town as a mechanic. He told us about the attic above the parts room, that he said was filled with old Studebaker parts left over from when the place had been a Studebaker dealership. I guess he just moved the old parts upstairs when he stocked the new GM parts below. I have often wondered what ever happened to those old parts. With the restoration revival going on presently, those parts would be worth millions now.
In a few weeks—less than two months—Dad said we were all going to move back to Merced, California. We were all getting a little homesick, I think, and we kids anyway, welcomed the announcement. He explained that Mom would be pulling the trailer down behind the Buick, and he would follow us down as soon as he could wrap things up in Oregon. He spent the next week fitting a two wheel dolly to the front of the trailer to help carry the load. The Buick had soft coil springs on the back axle, so it couldn’t have carried the weight without crunching the springs down to the rubber stops.
He also fitted a trailer hitch to the car, and installed a brake controller under the dashboard on the right of the steering column. The trailer brakes were electro-magnetic and seemed to be either off or full on with trailer tires squalling and smoking.
On the appointed day, we all piled in the Buick and headed north on old Hwy 30. The route chosen was to go north to Pendleton, bend west to Biggs Junction, then south on Hwy 97 to Weed, California, where we would follow Hwy 99 south to Merced. Any other route would involve a narrow, winding mountain pass across the high Sierras.
Dad showed Mom how to drive the rig, and he drove us through the Blue Mountains to the top of Cabbage Hill. There was a rest stop up there, and we stopped and ate lunch, I think, and then Dad left us there to hitchhike back to La Grand. The old highway switchbacked down from the crest of the Blue Mountains, the foothills looking like leaves of a cabbage. I remember the stories of log trucks losing their brakes and crashing on the hill on a regular basis.
There has been speculation that he hoped Mom would just crash and kill all of us before we reached the bottom, but that may be some longstanding anger issues coming out. I don't remember.
I always knew Mom was tough when she needed to be, but looking back on it now, it still amazes me just how she was able to do it. I know she knew Dad better than us kids did, and suspected things that never occurred to us at the time. I wonder now how much pure rage had to do with it.
She actually did a fair job hauling that trailer down the road. She made the turn at Biggs Jct. alright, and had very little trouble until we came to Klamath Falls, Oregon. Somewhere in the middle of town she lost track of the truck route, and we found ourselves in the middle of old downtown, with cars parked on both sides, and two narrow lanes in the middle. Drivers around us were honking their horns and hollering at her, but eventually she got out of downtown and found a place to pull over and stop. I don’t remember now if she asked for directions, or figured it out on the map, but before too long we were on the highway south again.
In the same situation, I would probably have given some of those other drivers a one finger wave, but our mother would not have done so under threat of firing squad.
As she neared Sacramento, Mom decided she didn’t want anymore downtown city driving, so she consulted the map and found a route around the city on the west side, through Dixon and Rio Vista, joining back up to Hwy 99 at Lodi, California.
We were rolling along pretty good south of Dixon, even though the roads were very narrow, when a loud noise and a lot of jerking let us know we had trouble. Both of the small wheels on the trailer dolly had blown out, and we were miles from any town. Not that it made a lot of difference, because Mom was nearly out of money, too.
We sat there for a long time, with Mom crying some, and praying some, partially blocking one lane. Eventually a local man, a farmer, I think, stopped and offered to help when he saw the situation. My brother Bill said he heard him mutter something about any man oughtta be shot who’d send a woman and her kids out alone on the road with a rig like that.
This was well before woman’s liberation, but even now I tend to agree with him.
The two tires and tubes were 8” or 10” size, expensive and hard to find, and it took most of a day to get them and put them back on the dolly. I am sure the Good Samaritan refused money for the tires and work, because Mom still had enough money for gas to Merced.
The only other trouble was when we came to the bridge crossing the Sacramento River—a narrow steel girder bridge that had two of the smallest lanes and looked a mile long. Mom stopped at the north end, and I think she bowed her head and prayed as we waited for oncoming traffic to clear the bridge. When she thought it was hers, she headed out onto the bridge straddling the center line. Before we reached the other side, some guy in a pickup entered the other end. I think Mom said another prayer, which would have been close to a swear word except she sincerely meant it when she said, “Oh, Daddy!” She squeezed as far to the right as she dared, and I’m sure she closed her eyes and waited for the crash, but somehow the pickup missed us and we missed hitting the side of the bridge.
I believe it was the next day when we pulled into the driveway of Aunt Ora’s house at 1430 E. Santa Fe Dr. It was early in the dark of the morning, so Mom parked outside near the street and we all went back to the trailer and went to sleep until dawn. We were awakened by our cousins knocking on the door at sunrise. After a happy reunion with our Aunt Ora and cousins Jim and Glenn, I backed the trailer into the driveway because Mom did not know how to back a trailer, and I had some experience from backing at the Appling’s farm with their Allis-Chalmers tractor and trailer. With Mom and others all helping direct, we got it parked behind the house with the tongue facing the driveway.
Mom called Vern to let him know we had arrived. John says there was some time lapsed between our arrival and the phone call that ended it all, but I can’t remember that. I have forgotten much of the details of those days, but I seem to remember an icy chill going through me outside the house when I heard Mom scream and wail loudly as Aunt Ora rushed in to console and comfort her. Vern had told her on the phone to keep the Buick and trailer, that he wasn’t coming down ever, and he would be sending divorce papers shortly.
It’s a wonder she didn’t die right there. I know she wanted to.
Several weeks later the divorce papers arrived, and the reason for the divorce was desertion—Mom had deserted Dad! Having no money for lawyers, and never wanting to see him again, she signed the papers and sent them back.
Two other unique features on Buicks of that era were the starter switch on the gas pedal and the speedometer display. The starter switch was actually on the carburetor, built into the throttle body. To start the engine, you turned the ignition key and just stepped on the gas pedal. When the engine started, manifold vacuum would disconnect the starter switch so the starter could not function while the engine was running.
The speedometer did not have a pointer hand like most other speedometers. It looked like a red line under the numbers which moved to the right as speed increased. I saw one disassembled years later, and found it was actually a drum behind a horizontal slot. On the drum was painted a red helix on a black background. As the drum was turned by the same mechanism that rotated the needle on other speedometers, the red portion rotated upward and seemed to move across the dial. It gave the car a more solid, substantial feeling than those puny little needles!
John remembers stopping at a restaurant in Livingston, California, called “The Palms” where we all had breakfast. He swears he remembers having pancakes that morning 49 years ago. His memory will be a great help in telling these stories, because it’s so much better than mine!
There was another brief stop in Reno where we kids got to watch Mom and Dad get married again, (that seemed a little surreal) and then we were on the road again. Nevada had no speed limit between towns then, so Dad was over 100 mph everywhere he could across the state. Mom cringed, and I'm sure now she had some regrets already, but we kids loved it! There is something in the Rogers' genes that imparts a need for speed.
As we left Nevada and entered Utah, the speed limit dropped to 70 mph, but the road actually got much straighter as we went out onto the salt flats. Dad took it right up to 120 mph, burying the red spear point that Buicks used for a speedometer into the right of the display. After many miles of this, suddenly Dad said, "Hang on, I've got to slow down fast." He had seen a police cruiser on the other side of the divided highway, and he was crossing the median to follow us. It's still hard to believe, but Dad dropped the shift lever into low range, and the car jerked hard and slowed down rapidly to 70, whereupon Dad put it back into drive, without once turning on a brake light to give him away. The policeman caught up quickly, of course, and followed us for several miles before deciding to give up and go back to the other lanes. They just don't make transmissions like that old Dynaflow anymore.
Evening came as we entered Salt Lake City, where we stopped to eat, and Dad toured us through downtown, showing us the statue to the seagulls, and told us the story of how the Mormon pioneers had a wagon team turn a circle, and then they made all the streets as wide as that circle, which is why the streets there are so wide. None of us wondered at the time how he had come to know so much about Mormons.
It was night as we left Salt Lake City, headed east on Highway 40. All three of us brothers went to sleep in the back, kneeling on the floor with our heads on the rear seat, facing backwards. Sometime in the middle of the night there was a heavy thud and shudder, and we woke up as Dad was sliding to a stop. Something smelled awful, and steam swirled around the car. As Dad went by a flock of sheep, the last one had suddenly jumped in front of the car, and we hit it square in the middle of the grill. The die cast metal grill had shattered and punched myriad holes in the radiator, and besides that the sheep was still under the car, stuck on the exhaust pipe and muffler. Dad backed off of the sheep, and then pulled forward to the side of the road. There was a small stream down an embankment off the road, so after plugging the holes in the radiator with little pieces of cloth, he refilled the radiator with a discarded beer can he found beside the road. He left the radiator cap loose on the first notch, and we slowly started east again. This happened between Vernal, Utah, and the Colorado border. I remember stopping several more times that night for Dad to refill the radiator before we came into Craig, Colorado, at dawn.
Dad stopped at the first service station he came to, and they sold him two cans of Bar's Stopleak, and let him use the water hose to try to wash some of the remains of the sheep from off the bottom of the car. We all had been retching and gagging for hours. Dad ran the engine until it was hot, then poured in the stop leak. After a minute, he pulled out the rags, and we watched the little streams of water choke off and dry up one by one. It was magic! After filling up with gas, Dad went to the local highway patrol office to see if he could get compensation for the damage to the car. They just chuckled, and informed him it was open range, and if the rancher found out who hit the sheep, he would want his livestock replaced. Since it was in another state, they encouraged him to keep on driving east, so that's what we did.
I don’t remember much of the rest of the trip through Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa. It was anticlimactic, to say the least, and the only thing that sticks with me was listening to the Everly Brothers hit, “Dream, Dream, Dream” and another song by Perry Como, “Kewpie Doll” on the radio. The Bar's Stopleak did its job all the way to Illinois, and back to Oregon again, where Dad replaced the radiator and grille.
We did not go directly to Chillicothe, where our grandparents lived, when we arrived in Illinois. The Seventh-day Adventist church in Peoria was arranging a surprise program for our Grandmother Rogers, modeled on the popular television program “This Is Your Life.” She had nine children, who as soon as they were able, had moved away to other places. The church had convinced most if not all of them to return to Peoria on a Friday evening for the program to honor their mother.
She was seated on the stage while the pastor began to tell the story of her life, and as he came to stories of her children, they would come out on stage with their families to honor and hug her. She was more and more amazed, as sons and daughters she hadn’t seen in years came onto the stage.
I don’t remember whether our family was near the first or last, but when the pastor announced Vernon and his family were here to greet her, tears of joy overwhelmed the surprise on her face, and she hugged and cried with all of us. I’m sure she had thought she would never see us together again as a family. She was almost right.
The next day, after the Sabbath church services, our Dad was baptized into the Adventist church again, and we all hoped that this was going to be the start of a new life with a father again.
After a few days of visiting with family, including a potluck dinner at a large park on the Illinois river in downtown Peoria, we loaded up and headed west again. We went up through Wyoming and Idaho following highway 30 to La Grande, Oregon.
Since we had not finished the school year yet, Mom and us kids went back to Merced to finish the school year. Dad lent us his second car, which was a 1949 Nash Airflyte.
We all thought it was pretty ugly as cars go, but years later we found that it had been designed using a wind tunnel and was actually way before its time in several areas. The Nash was the first to use unit body construction, with no separate frame underneath. That made the car lighter and yet more rigid on rough roads. It also had an ignition switch on the steering column, something that didn’t happen on other makes until decades later.
The flathead six cylinder engine was unique, using a “sealed in” manifold for simplicity and reliability. The carburetor was bolted directly to the cylinder head, which had the appropriate passages to carry the fuel mixture to the intake valves.
This car also had a Borg-Warner overdrive unit, which helped get great gas mileage. There was a collar type switch on the column shift lever to switch in and out of overdrive. When you were in high gear, you just twisted the switch on, then let up on the gas. There was a slight clunk as the gears changed, then you were in a higher gear. It was possible to downshift by double clutching, but it took skill and timing so usually we just shifted out of overdrive after stopping. While the unit was in overdrive, the car freewheeled if you backed off, so when encountering downgrades in the mountains, it was a good idea to pull the mechanical handle under the dash to lock out the overdrive, otherwise you risked burning up the brakes.
The most famous item on the Nash was the reclining seats. Many fathers would not let their daughters go out on a date with a boy driving a Nash. The front seatbacks reclined all the way down flush with the back seats, making a bed for two people. I’ve heard of girls becoming pregnant in Volkswagens, but it would be a lot more comfortable in a Nash!
After school was over that year, we all went back to Oregon in the Nash and moved into the housing Dad had for us.
Dad had a mechanic job at M. J. Goss Motors in La Grande, and we all lived in an 8’ X 35’ Nashua trailer house in a small trailer park just south of town. This wasn’t large enough to be called a mobile home by any stretch of imagination. When they talk of “shotgun houses” in New Orleans, I think of that trailer.
In the front was a small living room, which had a table in one end to become the dining room, which was next to the sink and stove, which qualified that end as the kitchen. Through a narrow door was the first bedroom, with cabinets on one side of the passage for closets, and bunk beds on the other side for us kids. I had the top bunk, and I think Bill and John shared the bottom.
Through another small door and you were in the bathroom next to the toilet and sink. Behind them was a small bathtub—so small you had to sit with knees high and feet pulled in. Luckily none of us were overweight.
The last room through the next door was the second bedroom for Mom and Dad. The double bed pretty much filled the room, except for a narrow aisle down one side to get back to the closet. From the door, climbing across the bed was required to get to that aisle.
There were no playgrounds or parks nearby, so we got into trouble pretty regularly. We were chastised for sneaking across a wooden fence and eating berries in a little garden next door.
A block away was a drive in movie, and Bill and I noticed that there were wooden ladders wired to the structure all the way to the top. So every day we would climb a ladder and look around. But the ladders were old and rickety, and the baling wire had loosened through the years, so we would chicken out and come down every day without getting to the top.
It’s funny how familiarity breeds contempt—each day we climbed a little higher, because—well, we climbed that high yesterday and the ladder held OK, didn’t it? I think it took about a week or so until Bill and I both risked that last, highest ladder, and crawled out on top of the movie screen. I remember it being maybe two feet wide and forty feet long, covered in tarpaper and coarse sand composite roofing. I don’t remember either of us standing up, but maybe I have blanked it out. I know we had to talk ourselves into crawling over to the ladder and beginning the long, shaky descent back to earth.
At one end of the trailer park was what seemed to be a junk storage area, with old logs and boards and car parts piled around. We found an old Ford front axle, with the hubs and wheels still attached (no tires) and Bill and I got the bright idea of stacking two long straight pine logs on top of another log so the two logs had a good slope. By spacing the logs the same distance as the wheels, we could sit on the axle and roll down to the bottom, where the axle would stop when it hit the dirt. Of course, you had to ride with your feet held straight out in front so they wouldn’t touch the ground. We gave all the neighborhood kids rides, including the girls, and great fun was had by all.
How we managed this without anybody breaking both legs I’ll never know. It’s just one more thing that gives me shudders thinking about now.
A few days after we had moved into La Grande, Oregon, Dad took the whole family out to eat at a local restaurant. Our waitress was obviously an old friend of his, and he introduced Ethel to all of us. We all knew he had lived there for a year or two, and nobody was surprised that he would know her.
He worked at M. J. Goss, a Chevrolet/Oldsmobile dealer in town as a mechanic. He told us about the attic above the parts room, that he said was filled with old Studebaker parts left over from when the place had been a Studebaker dealership. I guess he just moved the old parts upstairs when he stocked the new GM parts below. I have often wondered what ever happened to those old parts. With the restoration revival going on presently, those parts would be worth millions now.
In a few weeks—less than two months—Dad said we were all going to move back to Merced, California. We were all getting a little homesick, I think, and we kids anyway, welcomed the announcement. He explained that Mom would be pulling the trailer down behind the Buick, and he would follow us down as soon as he could wrap things up in Oregon. He spent the next week fitting a two wheel dolly to the front of the trailer to help carry the load. The Buick had soft coil springs on the back axle, so it couldn’t have carried the weight without crunching the springs down to the rubber stops.
He also fitted a trailer hitch to the car, and installed a brake controller under the dashboard on the right of the steering column. The trailer brakes were electro-magnetic and seemed to be either off or full on with trailer tires squalling and smoking.
On the appointed day, we all piled in the Buick and headed north on old Hwy 30. The route chosen was to go north to Pendleton, bend west to Biggs Junction, then south on Hwy 97 to Weed, California, where we would follow Hwy 99 south to Merced. Any other route would involve a narrow, winding mountain pass across the high Sierras.
Dad showed Mom how to drive the rig, and he drove us through the Blue Mountains to the top of Cabbage Hill. There was a rest stop up there, and we stopped and ate lunch, I think, and then Dad left us there to hitchhike back to La Grand. The old highway switchbacked down from the crest of the Blue Mountains, the foothills looking like leaves of a cabbage. I remember the stories of log trucks losing their brakes and crashing on the hill on a regular basis.
There has been speculation that he hoped Mom would just crash and kill all of us before we reached the bottom, but that may be some longstanding anger issues coming out. I don't remember.
I always knew Mom was tough when she needed to be, but looking back on it now, it still amazes me just how she was able to do it. I know she knew Dad better than us kids did, and suspected things that never occurred to us at the time. I wonder now how much pure rage had to do with it.
She actually did a fair job hauling that trailer down the road. She made the turn at Biggs Jct. alright, and had very little trouble until we came to Klamath Falls, Oregon. Somewhere in the middle of town she lost track of the truck route, and we found ourselves in the middle of old downtown, with cars parked on both sides, and two narrow lanes in the middle. Drivers around us were honking their horns and hollering at her, but eventually she got out of downtown and found a place to pull over and stop. I don’t remember now if she asked for directions, or figured it out on the map, but before too long we were on the highway south again.
In the same situation, I would probably have given some of those other drivers a one finger wave, but our mother would not have done so under threat of firing squad.
As she neared Sacramento, Mom decided she didn’t want anymore downtown city driving, so she consulted the map and found a route around the city on the west side, through Dixon and Rio Vista, joining back up to Hwy 99 at Lodi, California.
We were rolling along pretty good south of Dixon, even though the roads were very narrow, when a loud noise and a lot of jerking let us know we had trouble. Both of the small wheels on the trailer dolly had blown out, and we were miles from any town. Not that it made a lot of difference, because Mom was nearly out of money, too.
We sat there for a long time, with Mom crying some, and praying some, partially blocking one lane. Eventually a local man, a farmer, I think, stopped and offered to help when he saw the situation. My brother Bill said he heard him mutter something about any man oughtta be shot who’d send a woman and her kids out alone on the road with a rig like that.
This was well before woman’s liberation, but even now I tend to agree with him.
The two tires and tubes were 8” or 10” size, expensive and hard to find, and it took most of a day to get them and put them back on the dolly. I am sure the Good Samaritan refused money for the tires and work, because Mom still had enough money for gas to Merced.
The only other trouble was when we came to the bridge crossing the Sacramento River—a narrow steel girder bridge that had two of the smallest lanes and looked a mile long. Mom stopped at the north end, and I think she bowed her head and prayed as we waited for oncoming traffic to clear the bridge. When she thought it was hers, she headed out onto the bridge straddling the center line. Before we reached the other side, some guy in a pickup entered the other end. I think Mom said another prayer, which would have been close to a swear word except she sincerely meant it when she said, “Oh, Daddy!” She squeezed as far to the right as she dared, and I’m sure she closed her eyes and waited for the crash, but somehow the pickup missed us and we missed hitting the side of the bridge.
I believe it was the next day when we pulled into the driveway of Aunt Ora’s house at 1430 E. Santa Fe Dr. It was early in the dark of the morning, so Mom parked outside near the street and we all went back to the trailer and went to sleep until dawn. We were awakened by our cousins knocking on the door at sunrise. After a happy reunion with our Aunt Ora and cousins Jim and Glenn, I backed the trailer into the driveway because Mom did not know how to back a trailer, and I had some experience from backing at the Appling’s farm with their Allis-Chalmers tractor and trailer. With Mom and others all helping direct, we got it parked behind the house with the tongue facing the driveway.
Mom called Vern to let him know we had arrived. John says there was some time lapsed between our arrival and the phone call that ended it all, but I can’t remember that. I have forgotten much of the details of those days, but I seem to remember an icy chill going through me outside the house when I heard Mom scream and wail loudly as Aunt Ora rushed in to console and comfort her. Vern had told her on the phone to keep the Buick and trailer, that he wasn’t coming down ever, and he would be sending divorce papers shortly.
It’s a wonder she didn’t die right there. I know she wanted to.
Several weeks later the divorce papers arrived, and the reason for the divorce was desertion—Mom had deserted Dad! Having no money for lawyers, and never wanting to see him again, she signed the papers and sent them back.
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Charities
Charities
About this time every year I see the same posting on Facebook listing salaries of charity CEOs in an obvious attempt to influence donations to certain charities. The intent is commendable, but the execution leaves a lot of questions in my mind. They always list a bunch of charities with directors or CEOs who receive $0 compensation. That runs red flags up right away.
Really? Did their children die of hunger last month? Are they living under a bridge somewhere because they couldn’t pay the rent?
Somewhere there must be a bookkeeping dodge explaining this. In the case of religious charities, maybe they are compensated as clergy, with a parsonage, expense account, and other funding provided by the tithes and offerings of his parishioners. Maybe that is a good deal for non members who donate, but you can’t compare charities fairly without having all the numbers showing.
Some of the numbers are just fabricated out of whole cloth, or are years out of date. I suggest a check with SNOPES.COM will reveal these
As a former board member on a local United Way group, I am always sad to see the United Way attacked as a “bad” group to donate to. Most of that goes back to a situation where a national director was living in an ostentatious lifestyle that offended many people. Some of the scandal was real, but some was from misunderstanding of the way a large national charity works. I would include the Red Cross in the same category in the following explanation.
The United Way of the USA is a national organization that provides lobbying services; television, radio and magazine advertising; presentation materials such as brochures and videos, affiliation with the NFL for game schedules; and training materials and legal liability coverage for local groups. They are NOT a fundraising organization. They are a corporation with benefits and services to sell to local groups, who are fundraisers.
The local group I was associated with was United Way of the Great Basin, which covered five northeastern counties of Nevada, which, before this group was formed, was a distant part of a United Way group hundreds of miles away based in Reno. When the gold mines were booming, some of the businesses and banks in Elko realized that fundraising for local charities was being made more difficult by the perception that we were raising money for a Reno charity, who only sent some of it back to us. By having a local group we could fundraise with the idea that the money we raise here stays here to help local people. It was a good idea that caused problems later on.
Our local United Way paid a flat rate, about 1.4% I believe, to the United Way of the USA. For that we were allowed to use their logo on our literature, use their TV and other media advertising, and got lots of football schedules and videos with famous football players telling of the great things that local United Way groups were doing with the donations. We had no input into salaries, compensation, expenses or any other functions of the national organization. We just bought their product.
And their reputation, too, for good or bad. In the overall picture, though, we could not have printed the materials, bought TV and radio spots, etc, for the money we paid them.
Local United Way groups are formed to facilitate fundraising and distribute the funds fairly to local organizations. For donors, the main benefit is the ability to donate regularly through payroll deductions at work. No writing checks or digging through your pockets for spare cash every month. For charities, they can cut back or eliminate all the time and trouble of raising money to continue their work. They get a predictable and steady supply of funding from the local United Way. Less pain and trouble for all concerned.
I got involved through a rather circuitous route. I was first asked by my company to be the coordinator/spokesman for our annual company United Way campaign at the power plant where I worked. This consisted of holding meetings to present the campaign and convince people they should donate, and passing out and later collecting the donation envelopes after they were filled out.
I wondered for years why they asked me, the machinist, usually found in the back of the plant running a lathe or mill, and not ever in charge of meetings or gatherings of any kind.
Then one day I remembered--the runway.
After finding that the plant property included a whole section with nothing on it, I pestered several plant managers for permission to grade a runway across it so I could fly to work now and then. After about three managers refused me, finally one said if I lined up all the permits from all the county, state and federal authorities, I could do it on my own time. So I did!
The county said if I wasn’t building a structure, no problem. The state of Nevada was very encouraging, as they liked to see more access to the back country. The Feds were not only happy to approve, they wanted to put it on the sectional charts when I finished it. I told them I couldn’t get them permission to do that yet, since I didn’t own the land. The plant manager seemed surprised when I returned with the results, but he kept his word and told me to go ahead.
One of the contractors on the site had an old grader that had sat unmoved for a couple of years, so I asked them what the problem was, and if I could borrow it if I fixed it. They agreed! It had a broken shaft to the lifting mechanism for the blade, and it needed a battery. I measured up the shaft and made a new one, being a machinist, and I went down to talk to Chuck at the vehicle maintenance shop about getting a battery. Chuck told me they replaced the batteries on the plant trucks on a regular schedule, so he happened to have a couple of batteries that had just been removed but still serviceable. He donated one, and I was in business.
So for two long weekends, I surveyed the strip using an ancient marine GPS, which told me my anchor was dragging if I moved it too fast, and then graded off the brush to make a smooth dirt runway one mile long and 75 feet wide. I enjoyed flying to work many times, and sometimes a tech from Reno flew out for a few hours of work at the plant. By flying, he could make a one day trip instead of needing a motel for a two day trip by car.
One day the plant manager called me to his office and told me I needed to defend my runway, grinning. We had forgotten to notify Idaho Power Company, a partner in the ownership of the property, that we had a runway on the plant site. He said they were panicked about liability issues, and wanted the runway closed. I asked the plant manager to schedule me for a presentation at the next ownership meeting, which he did.
If a computer presentation program like Power Point was available then, I had never used it, so after researching and calling for information from the Aircraft Owner and Pilots Ass’n and other flying organizations on liability issues concerning private runways, I put it all together and printed out brochures with a history of the plant, including the planes that had landed on the entrance road, the non issue of liability if someone landed on the runway uninvited (all the risk was his, and we could sue him for damages), and a follow up section to finish showing the very tangible benefits to the plant for alternate evacuation if the only access road were blocked by a truck or train wreck, and the possibility of mass casualty evacuation in case of a disaster at the plant, since the nearest trauma center was in Reno, over 200 miles away.
I brought a dress shirt and slacks to work on the appointed day, since several vice-presidents of both ownership companies were attending, and when introduced by the plant manager, I got up, went to the front of the room, had the brochures passed out, and remembering all I had been taught in college, gave them my best presentation of the facts and the benefits.
It was about a ten minute presentation, and knowing that some of the vice-presidents were also pilots, I added that rather than close the runway, they might consider improving it with pavement, so they could save time traveling to the plant on the next ownership meeting. Driving across Nevada can be so tiring. I got a brief round of applause when I finished, along with shocked looks from some of the management at the plant who thought I was just the machinist. They tabled the motion to close the runway and I never heard of it again. They never paved the runway, either.
Funny how one topic leads into another! I believe it was shortly after this that I was asked by the plant manager to put on the United Way presentation for the plant. That’s how the machinist got to be in charge.
Since the operations crews were on rotating shifts, just one presentation wouldn’t do it. There was no way to get all the employees in one room at the same time. So I always had to hold meetings with small groups at different times to get all 120 people taken care of. I say always because every year, they asked me to do it again. I don’t think it was just because I was so good at it!
I had been putting on the meetings for a couple of years when the United Way of the Great Basin was formed. The first year they came to the plant to help with the presentation, they asked me if I would be willing to be on the Funds Distribution Committee. I didn’t know what that was, so they explained I would come to a meeting and listen as the various local charities explained their mission and goals, presented their budgets, and asked for funding from the United Way. When they were all finished, we would divvy up the funds we had on hand to distribute for the coming year.
The first year was easy! There weren’t very many charities and service groups asking for funding, and we had had great success in our fundraising, so everybody got what they asked for, and some even more. We told the Red Cross, who had no local office, that we would double their request if they opened a Winnemucca office, and they did it in two weeks!
We still had money left over and somebody mentioned a group of local ministers who put a fund together for travelers who came to the churches on the main highway through town to ask for help when they broke down or ran out of money on their way through town. The churches on Main Street got all the hits, and the churches out in the residential areas didn’t get hit that often, so they had arranged to share the load between them with an informal sharing pool.
We offered them help getting their credentials as a 501 (c) (3) charity and then helped fund them. Worked out great for both of us.
The next year wasn’t nearly as easy, as more charities and service organizations found us, and every year thereafter we had to disappoint some people who had hoped for more. We spent long hours arguing to come to a final conclusion on where the money would go. We were all non paid volunteers.
Which brings me back to the issue at hand: If someone is listed as receiving $0 for working for a charity, can you believe that? I got no salary for my volunteering, but my company gave me time off to travel to Reno for training sessions, they arranged for my time at the plant for meetings to be paid at the regular machinist’s pay rate, and they provided a meeting room and furniture as needed for the United Way campaign rallies. So while I wasn’t paid for my United Way work, I was paid my usual wages so I didn’t lose money, either.
So I would argue that when you are comparing charities, don’t just look at the national organization--find out what is happening locally, in your immediate area. Talk to people and find out who people go to for help when they are in trouble in your particular town. It may be a church that is particularly active. It may be the local Red Cross affiliate--each one is run by a local person. I’ve known good ones and I’ve met bad ones. Check out the Salvation Army--even though it is a religious organization, they work with volunteers from other churches. I’ve seen the local SDA preacher ringing the bell by the red bucket, and my wife volunteered one bitterly cold December evening.
If you have more time than money, ask if you can volunteer. Due to the recession and the recent political hostility toward poor people, there is a severe shortage of concerned, motivated volunteers. When you volunteer to help others, no one is helped more than you. You will receive an education that cannot be bought.
I think this one is getting a little long, so I’ll quit and continue this narrative later.
December 4, 2014
Don Rogers
About this time every year I see the same posting on Facebook listing salaries of charity CEOs in an obvious attempt to influence donations to certain charities. The intent is commendable, but the execution leaves a lot of questions in my mind. They always list a bunch of charities with directors or CEOs who receive $0 compensation. That runs red flags up right away.
Really? Did their children die of hunger last month? Are they living under a bridge somewhere because they couldn’t pay the rent?
Somewhere there must be a bookkeeping dodge explaining this. In the case of religious charities, maybe they are compensated as clergy, with a parsonage, expense account, and other funding provided by the tithes and offerings of his parishioners. Maybe that is a good deal for non members who donate, but you can’t compare charities fairly without having all the numbers showing.
Some of the numbers are just fabricated out of whole cloth, or are years out of date. I suggest a check with SNOPES.COM will reveal these
As a former board member on a local United Way group, I am always sad to see the United Way attacked as a “bad” group to donate to. Most of that goes back to a situation where a national director was living in an ostentatious lifestyle that offended many people. Some of the scandal was real, but some was from misunderstanding of the way a large national charity works. I would include the Red Cross in the same category in the following explanation.
The United Way of the USA is a national organization that provides lobbying services; television, radio and magazine advertising; presentation materials such as brochures and videos, affiliation with the NFL for game schedules; and training materials and legal liability coverage for local groups. They are NOT a fundraising organization. They are a corporation with benefits and services to sell to local groups, who are fundraisers.
The local group I was associated with was United Way of the Great Basin, which covered five northeastern counties of Nevada, which, before this group was formed, was a distant part of a United Way group hundreds of miles away based in Reno. When the gold mines were booming, some of the businesses and banks in Elko realized that fundraising for local charities was being made more difficult by the perception that we were raising money for a Reno charity, who only sent some of it back to us. By having a local group we could fundraise with the idea that the money we raise here stays here to help local people. It was a good idea that caused problems later on.
Our local United Way paid a flat rate, about 1.4% I believe, to the United Way of the USA. For that we were allowed to use their logo on our literature, use their TV and other media advertising, and got lots of football schedules and videos with famous football players telling of the great things that local United Way groups were doing with the donations. We had no input into salaries, compensation, expenses or any other functions of the national organization. We just bought their product.
And their reputation, too, for good or bad. In the overall picture, though, we could not have printed the materials, bought TV and radio spots, etc, for the money we paid them.
Local United Way groups are formed to facilitate fundraising and distribute the funds fairly to local organizations. For donors, the main benefit is the ability to donate regularly through payroll deductions at work. No writing checks or digging through your pockets for spare cash every month. For charities, they can cut back or eliminate all the time and trouble of raising money to continue their work. They get a predictable and steady supply of funding from the local United Way. Less pain and trouble for all concerned.
I got involved through a rather circuitous route. I was first asked by my company to be the coordinator/spokesman for our annual company United Way campaign at the power plant where I worked. This consisted of holding meetings to present the campaign and convince people they should donate, and passing out and later collecting the donation envelopes after they were filled out.
I wondered for years why they asked me, the machinist, usually found in the back of the plant running a lathe or mill, and not ever in charge of meetings or gatherings of any kind.
Then one day I remembered--the runway.
After finding that the plant property included a whole section with nothing on it, I pestered several plant managers for permission to grade a runway across it so I could fly to work now and then. After about three managers refused me, finally one said if I lined up all the permits from all the county, state and federal authorities, I could do it on my own time. So I did!
The county said if I wasn’t building a structure, no problem. The state of Nevada was very encouraging, as they liked to see more access to the back country. The Feds were not only happy to approve, they wanted to put it on the sectional charts when I finished it. I told them I couldn’t get them permission to do that yet, since I didn’t own the land. The plant manager seemed surprised when I returned with the results, but he kept his word and told me to go ahead.
One of the contractors on the site had an old grader that had sat unmoved for a couple of years, so I asked them what the problem was, and if I could borrow it if I fixed it. They agreed! It had a broken shaft to the lifting mechanism for the blade, and it needed a battery. I measured up the shaft and made a new one, being a machinist, and I went down to talk to Chuck at the vehicle maintenance shop about getting a battery. Chuck told me they replaced the batteries on the plant trucks on a regular schedule, so he happened to have a couple of batteries that had just been removed but still serviceable. He donated one, and I was in business.
So for two long weekends, I surveyed the strip using an ancient marine GPS, which told me my anchor was dragging if I moved it too fast, and then graded off the brush to make a smooth dirt runway one mile long and 75 feet wide. I enjoyed flying to work many times, and sometimes a tech from Reno flew out for a few hours of work at the plant. By flying, he could make a one day trip instead of needing a motel for a two day trip by car.
One day the plant manager called me to his office and told me I needed to defend my runway, grinning. We had forgotten to notify Idaho Power Company, a partner in the ownership of the property, that we had a runway on the plant site. He said they were panicked about liability issues, and wanted the runway closed. I asked the plant manager to schedule me for a presentation at the next ownership meeting, which he did.
If a computer presentation program like Power Point was available then, I had never used it, so after researching and calling for information from the Aircraft Owner and Pilots Ass’n and other flying organizations on liability issues concerning private runways, I put it all together and printed out brochures with a history of the plant, including the planes that had landed on the entrance road, the non issue of liability if someone landed on the runway uninvited (all the risk was his, and we could sue him for damages), and a follow up section to finish showing the very tangible benefits to the plant for alternate evacuation if the only access road were blocked by a truck or train wreck, and the possibility of mass casualty evacuation in case of a disaster at the plant, since the nearest trauma center was in Reno, over 200 miles away.
I brought a dress shirt and slacks to work on the appointed day, since several vice-presidents of both ownership companies were attending, and when introduced by the plant manager, I got up, went to the front of the room, had the brochures passed out, and remembering all I had been taught in college, gave them my best presentation of the facts and the benefits.
It was about a ten minute presentation, and knowing that some of the vice-presidents were also pilots, I added that rather than close the runway, they might consider improving it with pavement, so they could save time traveling to the plant on the next ownership meeting. Driving across Nevada can be so tiring. I got a brief round of applause when I finished, along with shocked looks from some of the management at the plant who thought I was just the machinist. They tabled the motion to close the runway and I never heard of it again. They never paved the runway, either.
Funny how one topic leads into another! I believe it was shortly after this that I was asked by the plant manager to put on the United Way presentation for the plant. That’s how the machinist got to be in charge.
Since the operations crews were on rotating shifts, just one presentation wouldn’t do it. There was no way to get all the employees in one room at the same time. So I always had to hold meetings with small groups at different times to get all 120 people taken care of. I say always because every year, they asked me to do it again. I don’t think it was just because I was so good at it!
I had been putting on the meetings for a couple of years when the United Way of the Great Basin was formed. The first year they came to the plant to help with the presentation, they asked me if I would be willing to be on the Funds Distribution Committee. I didn’t know what that was, so they explained I would come to a meeting and listen as the various local charities explained their mission and goals, presented their budgets, and asked for funding from the United Way. When they were all finished, we would divvy up the funds we had on hand to distribute for the coming year.
The first year was easy! There weren’t very many charities and service groups asking for funding, and we had had great success in our fundraising, so everybody got what they asked for, and some even more. We told the Red Cross, who had no local office, that we would double their request if they opened a Winnemucca office, and they did it in two weeks!
We still had money left over and somebody mentioned a group of local ministers who put a fund together for travelers who came to the churches on the main highway through town to ask for help when they broke down or ran out of money on their way through town. The churches on Main Street got all the hits, and the churches out in the residential areas didn’t get hit that often, so they had arranged to share the load between them with an informal sharing pool.
We offered them help getting their credentials as a 501 (c) (3) charity and then helped fund them. Worked out great for both of us.
The next year wasn’t nearly as easy, as more charities and service organizations found us, and every year thereafter we had to disappoint some people who had hoped for more. We spent long hours arguing to come to a final conclusion on where the money would go. We were all non paid volunteers.
Which brings me back to the issue at hand: If someone is listed as receiving $0 for working for a charity, can you believe that? I got no salary for my volunteering, but my company gave me time off to travel to Reno for training sessions, they arranged for my time at the plant for meetings to be paid at the regular machinist’s pay rate, and they provided a meeting room and furniture as needed for the United Way campaign rallies. So while I wasn’t paid for my United Way work, I was paid my usual wages so I didn’t lose money, either.
So I would argue that when you are comparing charities, don’t just look at the national organization--find out what is happening locally, in your immediate area. Talk to people and find out who people go to for help when they are in trouble in your particular town. It may be a church that is particularly active. It may be the local Red Cross affiliate--each one is run by a local person. I’ve known good ones and I’ve met bad ones. Check out the Salvation Army--even though it is a religious organization, they work with volunteers from other churches. I’ve seen the local SDA preacher ringing the bell by the red bucket, and my wife volunteered one bitterly cold December evening.
If you have more time than money, ask if you can volunteer. Due to the recession and the recent political hostility toward poor people, there is a severe shortage of concerned, motivated volunteers. When you volunteer to help others, no one is helped more than you. You will receive an education that cannot be bought.
I think this one is getting a little long, so I’ll quit and continue this narrative later.
December 4, 2014
Don Rogers
Monday, October 27, 2014
Low-fat and Alzheimer’s
Here is what we know for sure:
A high fat, no carbohydrate diet (ketogenic) has been used to cure thirty percent of intractable pediatric epilepsy patients at Johns Hopkins University Hospital--patients who could not be helped by any other therapy.
The only treatment that has ever even slightly improved cognitive function for patients with Alzheimer’s Disease is a ketogenic diet, (high fat-low carbs).
Autopsies of Alzheimer’s patients brains show a marked deficiency of lipids and cholesterol compared to people without Alzheimer’s.
The myelin sheath that forms the insulation around our neuron cells and axons is composed of fatty substances. When people joke about “coating their nerve endings” with chocolate or bacon, they may be unknowingly literal.
In the last thirty years the world has seen an explosion of Alzheimer’s Disease, Autism and ADHD--all neurological diseases. While some cases are related to genetics, that would not explain the sudden rise in cases. That can only be ascribed to environmental changes during that time period.
It is fairly obvious that good neurological health depends on fats in our diet. Fats are essential in the maintenance and repair of our nervous system.
Concurrent with the epidemic of neurological disorders has been the sudden emphasis on eating a low fat diet to protect the heart, circulatory system and specifically the coronary arteries. There is now a whole shelf of items in the grocery store labelled low-fat, fat free, heart healthy. etc. In almost every case what has replaced the fats are more carbohydrates--starches and sugars of one kind or another.
Which leads to the other epidemic--obesity and type 2 diabetes. Most people associate obesity with eating fatty foods, but that may be too simple. The obesity epidemic has occurred at the same time people are cutting their fat intake. One in three people have or will get diabetes, and that has nothing to do with fats in the diet--it is related to the carb intake.
All of these things are happening in the last thirty years or so. Sure, correlation is not necessarily causation but are there any better ideas? If fats are essential for neurological health, and the country has an epidemic of neurological diseases after cutting fats out of the diet, what is hard to understand about that?
If most of our processed foods have been spiked with extra sugar, high fructose corn syrup and starches to replace the lost fat, and we suddenly have an epidemic of obesity and diabetes follow, what else should we think?
I am not an unbiased observer here. I was a vegetarian for most of my youth as a Seventh-day Adventist, careful to eat lots of vegetables, fruits and nuts. When I would have been eating meat, I had wheat gluten and textured soy protein instead. When I was drafted into the US Army, I gave that up, and gained thirty pounds in the first two months of basic training, due to a huge increase in calories and a great reduction in physical exertion.
My wife and I became vegetarian about three years ago because she was having digestive problems with eating meat, and it’s easier for two to eat vegetarian than just one. I am now having second thoughts.
One of the saddest parts of growing old is losing friends and relatives to the relentless advance of age. The part that upsets me most are those who lose their minds to Alzheimer’s and dementia before they go. I still know a fair number of Seventh-day Adventists, and it seems to me that an inordinate number fall prey to dementia way too early as they age.
I knew the Lloyd family, who were strict, devout, vegetarian Adventists in Colorado when we lived there. They needed an organ player for their services, and they asked me to play, even though I was not a member. I became close friends with Ernie Lloyd. He was a pilot who flew his plane over the mountains every week to carry the preacher over from Montrose to Nucla to give the sermon. He was very active and smart, but he rapidly lost his mind in his sixties and died not knowing anyone.
My good friend and coworker here in Nevada, Ken Lighthouse, has lost his father and his brother to Alzheimer’s. Both were devout Adventist vegetarians. His brother was a medical missionary in Guam for several years before he became unable to do the work and was sent home when he was sixty five.
I know of other Adventists with dementia related problems, and it breaks my heart.
The Adventist church just concluded a health survey of their membership, and I looked for information on dementia, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s, but was unable find any data on those lines. The results were focussed on heart health, it seemed to me. I would love to find some data on vegetarian, low-fat Adventist diet and rates of Alzheimer’s Disease.
I have been researching online and reading books on the subject, and I am of the belief that we need much less carbohydrate in our diet, and a lot more fat for complete whole body nutrition. For too long the focus has been on heart health only, while we overlook the devastation our “heart healthy” diet may doing to the rest of our bodies.
When my son Wes was studying nursing in school, I wrote an essay entitled “Cyanide cures Cancer.” No, it wasn’t about laetrile, or any other quack medicine. It was just I saw the problem with surveying drug efficacy against one disease and ignoring all the others. If all you do is check if it prevented heart attacks, you miss the whole picture. The gist of the article is if you take 5 grams of cyanide in the morning, it is guaranteed you will never die of cancer. So--since we are only looking at cancer--cyanide cures cancer!
The question must be asked, “If a low fat diet kept people from dying of heart attacks, what did they die of instead?” If continuing research shows millions died of Alzheimer’s and complications of obesity and diabetes rather than heart attacks because they ate low fat, high carb diets, what is the advantage?
After reading a book, “The Story of the Human Body” by Daniel Leiberman, I decided to put the Paleo diet to the test. I have always had a problem keeping my weight down, and through the years I have tried every diet available to try and lose weight. One year I lived on one foot long Subway sandwich a day all spring. I lost thirty pounds. I gained it back before winter.
I tried other low calorie diets, and the pattern was always the same. I’d lose the weight in the spring, and put it back on by fall. Must be bear genes, I figured. Actually, after a couple of months fighting hunger and feeling weak, I would get depressed thinking about spending the rest of my life hungry and decide I’d rather be fat.
The premise of the Paleo diet is that humans have evolved as hunter/gatherers and are adapted to eating vegetables, fruit, nuts, and meat. Nobody ate grains until about 10 or 12 thousand years ago, when agriculture started, and our bodies cannot handle the excess energy involved in starches and sugar. So if we go back to that original diet our bodies will automatically regulate to our optimum weight and stay there. Best of all, you will not be hungry. Eat all you want, stop when you are satisfied--just don’t eat any wheat, rice, corn, sugar or potatoes.
I can report complete success so far. Since May I have lost thirty pounds and stabilized there. I have never felt better. I have never felt hungry. I snack on peanuts and pecans, and not the dry roasted ones either. I came in second in a bicycle race this summer, and I’m working on riding to the top of Winnemucca Mountain on my Trek mountain bike. I ride at least two miles every day to get the mail out at the highway, and once a week I ride into the post office, which is 14 miles round trip. I feel like I can live well on this diet for the rest of my life.
I am thinking of asking my gastroenterologist if it might be worthwhile to taper off my autoimmune suppression drugs and the anti-inflammatory drugs that control my chronic ulcerative colitis. Some people have found that removing carbs from the diet relieves the symptoms. That would be nice!
I sent my son Wes a long article entitled, “APOE-4: The Clue to Why Low Fat Diet and Statins may Cause Alzheimer’s,” by Dr. Stephanie Seneff. It is over 25 pages long with lots of references to lots of studies theorizing that statins and low fat diets are responsible for the Alzheimer’s explosion. I am hoping he is as impressed as I was. I think there’s something here!
Here is what we know for sure:
A high fat, no carbohydrate diet (ketogenic) has been used to cure thirty percent of intractable pediatric epilepsy patients at Johns Hopkins University Hospital--patients who could not be helped by any other therapy.
The only treatment that has ever even slightly improved cognitive function for patients with Alzheimer’s Disease is a ketogenic diet, (high fat-low carbs).
Autopsies of Alzheimer’s patients brains show a marked deficiency of lipids and cholesterol compared to people without Alzheimer’s.
The myelin sheath that forms the insulation around our neuron cells and axons is composed of fatty substances. When people joke about “coating their nerve endings” with chocolate or bacon, they may be unknowingly literal.
In the last thirty years the world has seen an explosion of Alzheimer’s Disease, Autism and ADHD--all neurological diseases. While some cases are related to genetics, that would not explain the sudden rise in cases. That can only be ascribed to environmental changes during that time period.
It is fairly obvious that good neurological health depends on fats in our diet. Fats are essential in the maintenance and repair of our nervous system.
Concurrent with the epidemic of neurological disorders has been the sudden emphasis on eating a low fat diet to protect the heart, circulatory system and specifically the coronary arteries. There is now a whole shelf of items in the grocery store labelled low-fat, fat free, heart healthy. etc. In almost every case what has replaced the fats are more carbohydrates--starches and sugars of one kind or another.
Which leads to the other epidemic--obesity and type 2 diabetes. Most people associate obesity with eating fatty foods, but that may be too simple. The obesity epidemic has occurred at the same time people are cutting their fat intake. One in three people have or will get diabetes, and that has nothing to do with fats in the diet--it is related to the carb intake.
All of these things are happening in the last thirty years or so. Sure, correlation is not necessarily causation but are there any better ideas? If fats are essential for neurological health, and the country has an epidemic of neurological diseases after cutting fats out of the diet, what is hard to understand about that?
If most of our processed foods have been spiked with extra sugar, high fructose corn syrup and starches to replace the lost fat, and we suddenly have an epidemic of obesity and diabetes follow, what else should we think?
I am not an unbiased observer here. I was a vegetarian for most of my youth as a Seventh-day Adventist, careful to eat lots of vegetables, fruits and nuts. When I would have been eating meat, I had wheat gluten and textured soy protein instead. When I was drafted into the US Army, I gave that up, and gained thirty pounds in the first two months of basic training, due to a huge increase in calories and a great reduction in physical exertion.
My wife and I became vegetarian about three years ago because she was having digestive problems with eating meat, and it’s easier for two to eat vegetarian than just one. I am now having second thoughts.
One of the saddest parts of growing old is losing friends and relatives to the relentless advance of age. The part that upsets me most are those who lose their minds to Alzheimer’s and dementia before they go. I still know a fair number of Seventh-day Adventists, and it seems to me that an inordinate number fall prey to dementia way too early as they age.
I knew the Lloyd family, who were strict, devout, vegetarian Adventists in Colorado when we lived there. They needed an organ player for their services, and they asked me to play, even though I was not a member. I became close friends with Ernie Lloyd. He was a pilot who flew his plane over the mountains every week to carry the preacher over from Montrose to Nucla to give the sermon. He was very active and smart, but he rapidly lost his mind in his sixties and died not knowing anyone.
My good friend and coworker here in Nevada, Ken Lighthouse, has lost his father and his brother to Alzheimer’s. Both were devout Adventist vegetarians. His brother was a medical missionary in Guam for several years before he became unable to do the work and was sent home when he was sixty five.
I know of other Adventists with dementia related problems, and it breaks my heart.
The Adventist church just concluded a health survey of their membership, and I looked for information on dementia, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s, but was unable find any data on those lines. The results were focussed on heart health, it seemed to me. I would love to find some data on vegetarian, low-fat Adventist diet and rates of Alzheimer’s Disease.
I have been researching online and reading books on the subject, and I am of the belief that we need much less carbohydrate in our diet, and a lot more fat for complete whole body nutrition. For too long the focus has been on heart health only, while we overlook the devastation our “heart healthy” diet may doing to the rest of our bodies.
When my son Wes was studying nursing in school, I wrote an essay entitled “Cyanide cures Cancer.” No, it wasn’t about laetrile, or any other quack medicine. It was just I saw the problem with surveying drug efficacy against one disease and ignoring all the others. If all you do is check if it prevented heart attacks, you miss the whole picture. The gist of the article is if you take 5 grams of cyanide in the morning, it is guaranteed you will never die of cancer. So--since we are only looking at cancer--cyanide cures cancer!
The question must be asked, “If a low fat diet kept people from dying of heart attacks, what did they die of instead?” If continuing research shows millions died of Alzheimer’s and complications of obesity and diabetes rather than heart attacks because they ate low fat, high carb diets, what is the advantage?
After reading a book, “The Story of the Human Body” by Daniel Leiberman, I decided to put the Paleo diet to the test. I have always had a problem keeping my weight down, and through the years I have tried every diet available to try and lose weight. One year I lived on one foot long Subway sandwich a day all spring. I lost thirty pounds. I gained it back before winter.
I tried other low calorie diets, and the pattern was always the same. I’d lose the weight in the spring, and put it back on by fall. Must be bear genes, I figured. Actually, after a couple of months fighting hunger and feeling weak, I would get depressed thinking about spending the rest of my life hungry and decide I’d rather be fat.
The premise of the Paleo diet is that humans have evolved as hunter/gatherers and are adapted to eating vegetables, fruit, nuts, and meat. Nobody ate grains until about 10 or 12 thousand years ago, when agriculture started, and our bodies cannot handle the excess energy involved in starches and sugar. So if we go back to that original diet our bodies will automatically regulate to our optimum weight and stay there. Best of all, you will not be hungry. Eat all you want, stop when you are satisfied--just don’t eat any wheat, rice, corn, sugar or potatoes.
I can report complete success so far. Since May I have lost thirty pounds and stabilized there. I have never felt better. I have never felt hungry. I snack on peanuts and pecans, and not the dry roasted ones either. I came in second in a bicycle race this summer, and I’m working on riding to the top of Winnemucca Mountain on my Trek mountain bike. I ride at least two miles every day to get the mail out at the highway, and once a week I ride into the post office, which is 14 miles round trip. I feel like I can live well on this diet for the rest of my life.
I am thinking of asking my gastroenterologist if it might be worthwhile to taper off my autoimmune suppression drugs and the anti-inflammatory drugs that control my chronic ulcerative colitis. Some people have found that removing carbs from the diet relieves the symptoms. That would be nice!
I sent my son Wes a long article entitled, “APOE-4: The Clue to Why Low Fat Diet and Statins may Cause Alzheimer’s,” by Dr. Stephanie Seneff. It is over 25 pages long with lots of references to lots of studies theorizing that statins and low fat diets are responsible for the Alzheimer’s explosion. I am hoping he is as impressed as I was. I think there’s something here!
Saturday, September 6, 2014
GESTALT
GESTALT
I have been trying to think of a word I once knew that refers to how the mind, once having learned or seen something new, then sees the same thing repeated more often afterwards, since the mind has been sensitized to whatever it was. Separate unnoticed items suddenly coalesce into something you didn’t see before.
Aha! I quit trying so hard and it just appeared in my mind--Gestalt! I’ll go back to the top and type it in for the title.
The first instance of gestalt that I can remember is after I went to the Chevrolet dealer in town to buy a Geo Metro. I was riding the company van every day with a dozen or so people out to the power plant where I worked, which was about forty miles from my house.
I had been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and was taking an immuno-suppressant drug. I got sick so often I ran out of sick leave, so I knew I had to get out of the van and start driving myself to work, and I wanted the highest mileage car I could get.
I was very specific on the car I needed--a used Geo Metro with 5 speed manual transmission, and no extras except a heater. I had read reports that it got 54-55 miles per gallon of gas, and that’s what I needed to match the cost of the van.
After a couple of weeks, the dealership called me up to show me a car they had found for me. They had been unable to find a Geo Metro to my specs, but they had a Ford Festiva with 5 speed manual transmission and a heater. I had never seen (or at least noticed) a Festiva, but I researched it and found it got 54 mpg on the highway, and Consumers Reports listed it as very reliable, so I bought it. That was in 1995, and I still have it, running good, with 308K miles on it.
But that’s not what I sat down to write about. What astounded my wife and I was that after I got the Festiva, everywhere we looked there were more! They became so noticeable that we would just point and say, “There goes a red one!” or “There goes a blue one!” and we both understood perfectly.
In a week we went from “Never heard of it” to “They’re all over the place!” I’m sure there were not more Festivas on the road--our increased knowledge had changed our perception. That’s my understanding of gestalt!
Now I’m having the same experience with the diet I’ve started. A couple of months ago, in the spring, I was dismayed to find I was nearly 240 lbs and my belt and pants were straining to encircle me. 40” waist and 240 lbs seem to define a red line in my mind that I just cannot cross. So I started my annual end of winter diet again.
I usually do a modified Atkins diet after a three day fast to erase my insulin levels and kill the hunger. I have been researching such low carb, increased fat, fiber and protein diets and I find more and more research supports this as a healthy alternative to just counting calories.
The great thing about this diet is ignoring calories. Fat is far more filling and the sense of fullness lasts for hours, not just minutes as carbohydrates do. There is a reason Chinese food leaves you hungry in an hour--it’s all white rice and corn starch--major carbs, which trigger an insulin burst and then the crash.
I lost 9 lbs the first week, and after nearly three months I’ve lost 31 lbs and still slowly losing weight.
I’ve heard this diet described as a “no white” diet. No white sugar, no white potatoes, no white rice, no white pasta, nothing made from white flour, etc.
The only good white thing I can think of is cauliflower--eat all that you want! In fact, if you steam it, mash it with lots of butter and a little garlic salt you will think you’re eating mashed potatoes.
For breakfast I have a Gardenburger™ with a big pat of butter on top. I eat it like a pancake. It’s very filling, but doesn’t leave you with that sick feeling that too many pancakes do. I also drink a tall glass of Kirkland™ Soy Milk with vanilla, which I use to take my morning medicine (I’m still on immunosuppressants).
For snacks I eat peanuts, cashews, pecans, walnuts--big handfuls and calories are not important. Nuts fill you up quick, unlike chips. I can’t eat just one bag of Wavy Lays™.
Did I mention that my wife and I are vegetarian? Meat and milk makes Carolyn’s stomach hurt, so when she decided to go veggie, so did I. I was raised that way, and it’s easier for two to do it if you’re cooking and eating together.
For dinner we have all the vegetables we want: broccoli, Zucchini, asparagus, Brussel’s sprouts, green beans, etc. either steamed or nuked with lots of butter or cheese. We’ve found that Mexican food is wonderfully suited to this diet, and we love Mexican food. Beans, onions, peppers, avocados, and lots of cheese. There are some carbs in the tortillas, but not many if they’re thin enough.
Remember, if you don’t eat carbs, you can have all the fat you want. Contrary to conventional wisdom, fats are not only good for you but are essential for good neurological health.
I’ve been waiting for years for the first large scale study on people who live on low fat diets and early onset of Alzheimer’s. I suspect a link, but I can’t prove it yet.
I do know that one hundred years ago, Johns Hopkins University hospital was curing about a third of infantile and juvenile epileptics whose seizures were uncontrolled by any other method. They completely removed all traces of carbohydrates from their diet and fed them all the fat they wanted--lots of meat, butter, cheese, etc. They remained on this strict regimen until they went through puberty, then were able to resume a regular diet without the seizures returning.
Anyway, back to gestalt. Since I’ve been on this diet, everywhere I look someone is mentioning new research, or a new book is out, or a TV or radio program is mentioning low carb high fat diets.
I heard Bob Edwards on SiriusXM™ radio interview Daniel Lieberman on his new book The Story of the Human Body. His field of study is evolutionary biology, and his book contends that humans were adapted for a hunter/gatherer diet, which has few cereal grains or sugars, and mostly consisted of nuts, fruits and wild meat, with fibrous leafy vegetables and tubers added during hard times.
He attributes the rise of many health problems to an agricultural diet which started about ten thousand years ago when men first started tilling the land and planting crops, especially grains. He dates the onset of many diseases and epidemics including heart disease, diabetes and tooth decay, to the inundation of starches and sugars into our bodies, which were not designed for them.
I went to my dentist’s office last month for a routine teeth cleaning, and the dental hygienist was amazed that I had no plaque or scale on my teeth. What usually takes an hour or so with ultrasonic tools took about ten minutes with a simple scraper tool. Since my less than rigorous dental hygiene was not the cause, it must have been my low carb diet!
I was listening to the radio program “On Point” a few days ago, and they were having a panel discussion on low carb diets with three doctors. The one doctor that still touted low fat dieting was trying to make the point that if you limit any food group, you will lower calories and lose weight. He was right, but he missed the part about carbs creating hunger by triggering insulin rushes. You can lose weight on a low fat diet, but you will be fighting hunger the whole time. Several surveys and studies have shown that people lose weight faster on a low carb diet, and they tend to stick to it better because their hunger is satisfied by the fats.
Last night I watched a special PBS NOVA program on The Ghosts of Machu Picchu, a city built high in the Andes mountains by the Incas. The archeologists and other scientists were very interested in how they managed to grow enough food to sustain a city built on top of a rugged mountain peak.
They analyzed bones found in the ruins with scientific instruments and found a higher than average amount of Carbon 13. This isotope is indicative of a diet largely of corn. Corn is mostly carbohydrate, with easily digested sugars. It’s no accident that High Fructose Corn Syrup is becoming the dominant sweetener in most processed foods and drinks. It’s cheap and plentiful!
The other confirming evidence was the terrible condition of their teeth, with great decay evident in young adults. Once again, carbs have proven to be detrimental to teeth, as well as the pancreas, liver and circulatory system.
At the risk of oversimplification, I visualize starches and sugars as alcohol, burning fast and furiously, and needing a lot of insulin quickly to deal with all the fast energy. Fats and oils, on the other hand, burn slowly, spreading their energy over a much longer time frame, and not needing any insulin at all. Your body needs energy, and if there are no carbohydrates to burn, your body will burn the fats instead, actually lowering the lipids and cholesterol in your circulatory system, and using the stored fat in your body as well.
So here I am on a quasi Paleo veggie diet, losing weight and feeling better than I’ve felt in a long time. Someday when I reach my weight goal, I will have to introduce a little more carbohydrate to get stabilized, but I’ll never go back to all the starch and sugar I used to eat. I like having healthier teeth and reducing my chances of type 2 diabetes. I also like the feeling of being full most of the day, with no cravings bedeviling me.
I also like the fact I need to buy some new pants and belts. I’m against the last hole in my belt, and all the other holes have been used in this last year.
Don Rogers
Sept 5, 2014
Late edition, gestalt still operative:
Shedding pounds with a high fat diet
Can you lose weight with a diet that places no restrictions on your fat intake? Those who swear by the Atkins plan and other low-carbohydrate regimes have long insisted you can--and new research backs them up, reports The New York Times.
In a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, a racially diverse group of 148 obese men and women were given diets to follow. Half were put on low-fat regimes, which limited their total fat intake to less than 30 percent of their daily calories, while the other half followed low-carb diets that involved eating mostly protein and fat.
Over the course of a year, those on the low-carb diet lost more than eight pounds more body fat, and showed greater improvements in cholesterol levels and other measures of cardiovascular health. Those on the low-fat diet did lose weight, but most of it was muscle, not fat.
“This is one of the first long-term trials that’s given these diets without calorie restrictions,” says Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist at Tufts University who was not involved in the study. “It shows that in a free living setting, cutting your carbs helps you lose weight without focusing on calories.”
THE WEEK, Sept 19, 2014, page 21 under Health and Science.
(Paragraph breaks added)
I have been trying to think of a word I once knew that refers to how the mind, once having learned or seen something new, then sees the same thing repeated more often afterwards, since the mind has been sensitized to whatever it was. Separate unnoticed items suddenly coalesce into something you didn’t see before.
Aha! I quit trying so hard and it just appeared in my mind--Gestalt! I’ll go back to the top and type it in for the title.
The first instance of gestalt that I can remember is after I went to the Chevrolet dealer in town to buy a Geo Metro. I was riding the company van every day with a dozen or so people out to the power plant where I worked, which was about forty miles from my house.
I had been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and was taking an immuno-suppressant drug. I got sick so often I ran out of sick leave, so I knew I had to get out of the van and start driving myself to work, and I wanted the highest mileage car I could get.
I was very specific on the car I needed--a used Geo Metro with 5 speed manual transmission, and no extras except a heater. I had read reports that it got 54-55 miles per gallon of gas, and that’s what I needed to match the cost of the van.
After a couple of weeks, the dealership called me up to show me a car they had found for me. They had been unable to find a Geo Metro to my specs, but they had a Ford Festiva with 5 speed manual transmission and a heater. I had never seen (or at least noticed) a Festiva, but I researched it and found it got 54 mpg on the highway, and Consumers Reports listed it as very reliable, so I bought it. That was in 1995, and I still have it, running good, with 308K miles on it.
But that’s not what I sat down to write about. What astounded my wife and I was that after I got the Festiva, everywhere we looked there were more! They became so noticeable that we would just point and say, “There goes a red one!” or “There goes a blue one!” and we both understood perfectly.
In a week we went from “Never heard of it” to “They’re all over the place!” I’m sure there were not more Festivas on the road--our increased knowledge had changed our perception. That’s my understanding of gestalt!
Now I’m having the same experience with the diet I’ve started. A couple of months ago, in the spring, I was dismayed to find I was nearly 240 lbs and my belt and pants were straining to encircle me. 40” waist and 240 lbs seem to define a red line in my mind that I just cannot cross. So I started my annual end of winter diet again.
I usually do a modified Atkins diet after a three day fast to erase my insulin levels and kill the hunger. I have been researching such low carb, increased fat, fiber and protein diets and I find more and more research supports this as a healthy alternative to just counting calories.
The great thing about this diet is ignoring calories. Fat is far more filling and the sense of fullness lasts for hours, not just minutes as carbohydrates do. There is a reason Chinese food leaves you hungry in an hour--it’s all white rice and corn starch--major carbs, which trigger an insulin burst and then the crash.
I lost 9 lbs the first week, and after nearly three months I’ve lost 31 lbs and still slowly losing weight.
I’ve heard this diet described as a “no white” diet. No white sugar, no white potatoes, no white rice, no white pasta, nothing made from white flour, etc.
The only good white thing I can think of is cauliflower--eat all that you want! In fact, if you steam it, mash it with lots of butter and a little garlic salt you will think you’re eating mashed potatoes.
For breakfast I have a Gardenburger™ with a big pat of butter on top. I eat it like a pancake. It’s very filling, but doesn’t leave you with that sick feeling that too many pancakes do. I also drink a tall glass of Kirkland™ Soy Milk with vanilla, which I use to take my morning medicine (I’m still on immunosuppressants).
For snacks I eat peanuts, cashews, pecans, walnuts--big handfuls and calories are not important. Nuts fill you up quick, unlike chips. I can’t eat just one bag of Wavy Lays™.
Did I mention that my wife and I are vegetarian? Meat and milk makes Carolyn’s stomach hurt, so when she decided to go veggie, so did I. I was raised that way, and it’s easier for two to do it if you’re cooking and eating together.
For dinner we have all the vegetables we want: broccoli, Zucchini, asparagus, Brussel’s sprouts, green beans, etc. either steamed or nuked with lots of butter or cheese. We’ve found that Mexican food is wonderfully suited to this diet, and we love Mexican food. Beans, onions, peppers, avocados, and lots of cheese. There are some carbs in the tortillas, but not many if they’re thin enough.
Remember, if you don’t eat carbs, you can have all the fat you want. Contrary to conventional wisdom, fats are not only good for you but are essential for good neurological health.
I’ve been waiting for years for the first large scale study on people who live on low fat diets and early onset of Alzheimer’s. I suspect a link, but I can’t prove it yet.
I do know that one hundred years ago, Johns Hopkins University hospital was curing about a third of infantile and juvenile epileptics whose seizures were uncontrolled by any other method. They completely removed all traces of carbohydrates from their diet and fed them all the fat they wanted--lots of meat, butter, cheese, etc. They remained on this strict regimen until they went through puberty, then were able to resume a regular diet without the seizures returning.
Anyway, back to gestalt. Since I’ve been on this diet, everywhere I look someone is mentioning new research, or a new book is out, or a TV or radio program is mentioning low carb high fat diets.
I heard Bob Edwards on SiriusXM™ radio interview Daniel Lieberman on his new book The Story of the Human Body. His field of study is evolutionary biology, and his book contends that humans were adapted for a hunter/gatherer diet, which has few cereal grains or sugars, and mostly consisted of nuts, fruits and wild meat, with fibrous leafy vegetables and tubers added during hard times.
He attributes the rise of many health problems to an agricultural diet which started about ten thousand years ago when men first started tilling the land and planting crops, especially grains. He dates the onset of many diseases and epidemics including heart disease, diabetes and tooth decay, to the inundation of starches and sugars into our bodies, which were not designed for them.
I went to my dentist’s office last month for a routine teeth cleaning, and the dental hygienist was amazed that I had no plaque or scale on my teeth. What usually takes an hour or so with ultrasonic tools took about ten minutes with a simple scraper tool. Since my less than rigorous dental hygiene was not the cause, it must have been my low carb diet!
I was listening to the radio program “On Point” a few days ago, and they were having a panel discussion on low carb diets with three doctors. The one doctor that still touted low fat dieting was trying to make the point that if you limit any food group, you will lower calories and lose weight. He was right, but he missed the part about carbs creating hunger by triggering insulin rushes. You can lose weight on a low fat diet, but you will be fighting hunger the whole time. Several surveys and studies have shown that people lose weight faster on a low carb diet, and they tend to stick to it better because their hunger is satisfied by the fats.
Last night I watched a special PBS NOVA program on The Ghosts of Machu Picchu, a city built high in the Andes mountains by the Incas. The archeologists and other scientists were very interested in how they managed to grow enough food to sustain a city built on top of a rugged mountain peak.
They analyzed bones found in the ruins with scientific instruments and found a higher than average amount of Carbon 13. This isotope is indicative of a diet largely of corn. Corn is mostly carbohydrate, with easily digested sugars. It’s no accident that High Fructose Corn Syrup is becoming the dominant sweetener in most processed foods and drinks. It’s cheap and plentiful!
The other confirming evidence was the terrible condition of their teeth, with great decay evident in young adults. Once again, carbs have proven to be detrimental to teeth, as well as the pancreas, liver and circulatory system.
At the risk of oversimplification, I visualize starches and sugars as alcohol, burning fast and furiously, and needing a lot of insulin quickly to deal with all the fast energy. Fats and oils, on the other hand, burn slowly, spreading their energy over a much longer time frame, and not needing any insulin at all. Your body needs energy, and if there are no carbohydrates to burn, your body will burn the fats instead, actually lowering the lipids and cholesterol in your circulatory system, and using the stored fat in your body as well.
So here I am on a quasi Paleo veggie diet, losing weight and feeling better than I’ve felt in a long time. Someday when I reach my weight goal, I will have to introduce a little more carbohydrate to get stabilized, but I’ll never go back to all the starch and sugar I used to eat. I like having healthier teeth and reducing my chances of type 2 diabetes. I also like the feeling of being full most of the day, with no cravings bedeviling me.
I also like the fact I need to buy some new pants and belts. I’m against the last hole in my belt, and all the other holes have been used in this last year.
Don Rogers
Sept 5, 2014
Late edition, gestalt still operative:
Shedding pounds with a high fat diet
Can you lose weight with a diet that places no restrictions on your fat intake? Those who swear by the Atkins plan and other low-carbohydrate regimes have long insisted you can--and new research backs them up, reports The New York Times.
In a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, a racially diverse group of 148 obese men and women were given diets to follow. Half were put on low-fat regimes, which limited their total fat intake to less than 30 percent of their daily calories, while the other half followed low-carb diets that involved eating mostly protein and fat.
Over the course of a year, those on the low-carb diet lost more than eight pounds more body fat, and showed greater improvements in cholesterol levels and other measures of cardiovascular health. Those on the low-fat diet did lose weight, but most of it was muscle, not fat.
“This is one of the first long-term trials that’s given these diets without calorie restrictions,” says Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist at Tufts University who was not involved in the study. “It shows that in a free living setting, cutting your carbs helps you lose weight without focusing on calories.”
THE WEEK, Sept 19, 2014, page 21 under Health and Science.
(Paragraph breaks added)
Monday, July 21, 2014
A Conversation at the Gate
A Conversation at the Gate
“ I don’t understand, Lord! Why am I over here with the goats and not in that flock of sheep headed for heaven?”
The Lord replied, “Truly I have tried to make humans understand what I really want, but they have refused to hear my message and they make up their own doctrines. That is not what I want.”
“But Lord, haven’t I studied the Bible daily, found the TRUTH in the Adventist church, always kept the Commandments faithfully, went to church on the correct Sabbath day, the seventh day, and believed in the spirit of prophecy?“
The Lord replied, “I have never forgotten anything, and I don’t remember saying any of those things. I gave you new commandments--love God, love your fellow man. I made examples of the priests and Levites, who kept those old commandments to the letter, but had no love for anyone but themselves.
“But Lord, weren’t they God’s chosen people?”
“That was an early misunderstanding from the very beginning. As any parent would, I told them they were special and loved. They mistook that to mean they were better than all the rest of my children. So many make that mistake!”
“So there’s nothing special about being Adventist?”
“The Lord said, “The only thing special is how much harder it is for Adventists to quit worrying about keeping that old law to the letter, and quit acting like they are something special. That was the sin of the Levites, and I abhor self-righteousness.”
I said,”Well then, I guess I don’t have to keep the Sabbath any more.”
God said,”Have to? Have to? Have to? I made the Sabbath for man, not the other way around! That law was given to slave owners who worked their slaves all day every day. I was trying to show them that loving people should allow their workers at least one day a week off for rest and relaxation. But the religious leaders made it a test, a burden--something for people to watch and judge others by. That rule was to give your employees a break, not so some people could feel more righteous than others.”
“In every way I tried to point out that the Sabbath is a joyous day off from the regular grind. I pointed out that it is OK to prepare food if you are hungry, it is OK to go out and rescue livestock that are stuck in the ditch, that it is OK to pick up your bedroll if you need to move it, in spite of what the Levites think.”
I asked, “Were the Levites really so bad? You seem to have it in for them.”
He said, “Yes, but only because I love them so much, and like wayward children, they are so stubborn and hard headed they will not listen to me. I told a parable of the Good Samaritan, and they missed the meaning entirely! They just thought we should like good guys like the Samaritan.”
“I was contrasting the priest, a great leader of the church, who was in a hurry and didn’t have time to stop and help the wounded man beside the road; the Levite, who was of the tribe of the temple men, who were proud that the Ten Commandments were entrusted to them and who strove to show how righteous they were, and how correctly they kept every detail of the law; and a heathen Samaritan who did not know or keep any Jewish law and were hated by the Jews just like the Palestinians are now. The Samaritan was the one who stopped to help the wounded man, bandage his injuries, and take him to a place of refuge.”
“So you like the heathen Samaritan better than the religious Jews?”
God said, “I made them all and I love them all, but only the Samaritan had my spirit of love inside him. I wish all humans could just accept my love in their hearts, and quit fussing about the details of religious doctrines.”
I wondered, “Surely there is one religion that is the TRUE religion. Which is it?”
The Lord replied, “All of them and none of them. LOVE is the true religion, and if you have my love in you, you have the true religion. I have faithful loving children who are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, heathen and even Adventist. Look around and see the love pouring out of my followers all over the world.”
“My apostle Paul wrote a whole chapter on the fruits of the spirit--the things we should see if a person has my spirit of love in him. Not once in the whole chapter did he write ‘doctrinally correct’, or ‘law keeping’. In fact, in another of his letters, the one to the Galations, he makes it plain that righteousness does not come from law keeping. Having your name on the membership rolls of the Adventist church is not a ticket to the kingdom. In fact, as I mentioned before, it might be an impediment.”
“It sounds hard to do.” I commented.
The Lord replied, “Only if you refuse to turn loose of the things of this world, to quit grasping at false objects of desire. There is no lasting happiness in money or the things that money can buy. How many rich people kill themselves every day learning this lesson too late? The only lasting joy is in loving other people and working together with fellow humans.”
“But some of them are lazy, no good bums!” I countered. “They’re hard to love.”
“Yes, sometimes it seems that way, doesn’t it?” God said. “But the rule is to let me judge--not you. Men look on the outside, but I can see the heart and I know the end from the beginning. If you have love you will feel the need to do the right thing.”
“Compassion will compel you to help feed hungry children any way you can, even if their mother is trapped in drug addiction. Love will cause you to visit those in jail, even though they may have committed some horrible crime. When you see a beggar on the street, your non-judgmental love will push you to buy an extra burger and drink and take it to him. If you have love, this will not be much of a trial to overcome.”
“But Lord, what if they are taking advantage of my goodness?”
He reminded me that he had covered that topic in the Sermon on the Mount. He said, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.”
“I want to believe, but I need more faith. Can you help me?” I asked.
God said, “You must only believe that my grace and mercy are sufficient to cover your doubt. I once found a pagan Roman Centurion who had more faith than all of Israel.”
“Is it too late?” I asked, still standing on the wrong side of the gate.
“I am not willing that any should perish.” said the Lord. “With me, all things are possible! Since you have asked, be filled with my love, and enter into the kingdom.”
“ I don’t understand, Lord! Why am I over here with the goats and not in that flock of sheep headed for heaven?”
The Lord replied, “Truly I have tried to make humans understand what I really want, but they have refused to hear my message and they make up their own doctrines. That is not what I want.”
“But Lord, haven’t I studied the Bible daily, found the TRUTH in the Adventist church, always kept the Commandments faithfully, went to church on the correct Sabbath day, the seventh day, and believed in the spirit of prophecy?“
The Lord replied, “I have never forgotten anything, and I don’t remember saying any of those things. I gave you new commandments--love God, love your fellow man. I made examples of the priests and Levites, who kept those old commandments to the letter, but had no love for anyone but themselves.
“But Lord, weren’t they God’s chosen people?”
“That was an early misunderstanding from the very beginning. As any parent would, I told them they were special and loved. They mistook that to mean they were better than all the rest of my children. So many make that mistake!”
“So there’s nothing special about being Adventist?”
“The Lord said, “The only thing special is how much harder it is for Adventists to quit worrying about keeping that old law to the letter, and quit acting like they are something special. That was the sin of the Levites, and I abhor self-righteousness.”
I said,”Well then, I guess I don’t have to keep the Sabbath any more.”
God said,”Have to? Have to? Have to? I made the Sabbath for man, not the other way around! That law was given to slave owners who worked their slaves all day every day. I was trying to show them that loving people should allow their workers at least one day a week off for rest and relaxation. But the religious leaders made it a test, a burden--something for people to watch and judge others by. That rule was to give your employees a break, not so some people could feel more righteous than others.”
“In every way I tried to point out that the Sabbath is a joyous day off from the regular grind. I pointed out that it is OK to prepare food if you are hungry, it is OK to go out and rescue livestock that are stuck in the ditch, that it is OK to pick up your bedroll if you need to move it, in spite of what the Levites think.”
I asked, “Were the Levites really so bad? You seem to have it in for them.”
He said, “Yes, but only because I love them so much, and like wayward children, they are so stubborn and hard headed they will not listen to me. I told a parable of the Good Samaritan, and they missed the meaning entirely! They just thought we should like good guys like the Samaritan.”
“I was contrasting the priest, a great leader of the church, who was in a hurry and didn’t have time to stop and help the wounded man beside the road; the Levite, who was of the tribe of the temple men, who were proud that the Ten Commandments were entrusted to them and who strove to show how righteous they were, and how correctly they kept every detail of the law; and a heathen Samaritan who did not know or keep any Jewish law and were hated by the Jews just like the Palestinians are now. The Samaritan was the one who stopped to help the wounded man, bandage his injuries, and take him to a place of refuge.”
“So you like the heathen Samaritan better than the religious Jews?”
God said, “I made them all and I love them all, but only the Samaritan had my spirit of love inside him. I wish all humans could just accept my love in their hearts, and quit fussing about the details of religious doctrines.”
I wondered, “Surely there is one religion that is the TRUE religion. Which is it?”
The Lord replied, “All of them and none of them. LOVE is the true religion, and if you have my love in you, you have the true religion. I have faithful loving children who are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, heathen and even Adventist. Look around and see the love pouring out of my followers all over the world.”
“My apostle Paul wrote a whole chapter on the fruits of the spirit--the things we should see if a person has my spirit of love in him. Not once in the whole chapter did he write ‘doctrinally correct’, or ‘law keeping’. In fact, in another of his letters, the one to the Galations, he makes it plain that righteousness does not come from law keeping. Having your name on the membership rolls of the Adventist church is not a ticket to the kingdom. In fact, as I mentioned before, it might be an impediment.”
“It sounds hard to do.” I commented.
The Lord replied, “Only if you refuse to turn loose of the things of this world, to quit grasping at false objects of desire. There is no lasting happiness in money or the things that money can buy. How many rich people kill themselves every day learning this lesson too late? The only lasting joy is in loving other people and working together with fellow humans.”
“But some of them are lazy, no good bums!” I countered. “They’re hard to love.”
“Yes, sometimes it seems that way, doesn’t it?” God said. “But the rule is to let me judge--not you. Men look on the outside, but I can see the heart and I know the end from the beginning. If you have love you will feel the need to do the right thing.”
“Compassion will compel you to help feed hungry children any way you can, even if their mother is trapped in drug addiction. Love will cause you to visit those in jail, even though they may have committed some horrible crime. When you see a beggar on the street, your non-judgmental love will push you to buy an extra burger and drink and take it to him. If you have love, this will not be much of a trial to overcome.”
“But Lord, what if they are taking advantage of my goodness?”
He reminded me that he had covered that topic in the Sermon on the Mount. He said, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.”
“I want to believe, but I need more faith. Can you help me?” I asked.
God said, “You must only believe that my grace and mercy are sufficient to cover your doubt. I once found a pagan Roman Centurion who had more faith than all of Israel.”
“Is it too late?” I asked, still standing on the wrong side of the gate.
“I am not willing that any should perish.” said the Lord. “With me, all things are possible! Since you have asked, be filled with my love, and enter into the kingdom.”
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