Category Archives: History

Lie-niversary

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Now, I’m not dogging anyone for telling a fib. There are few of us in this world who could say they’ve never uttered a single untruth. But don’t you agree that if someone plans to tell a lie, she might at least endeavor to cover up her tracks? Or at the very least, not tell a lie that could easily be checked and later exposed?

If history teaches us anything, apparently not.

Janet Cooke, former reporter for the Washington Post, went down in flames on this day in 1981, after she had to give back the Pulitzer Prize because she ran a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict that was just plain made-up. I am trying this morning to empathize with her claim that once the initial story ran, the interest was so overwhelming that it was too late to retract it. When the Post checked out claims she made on her resumé — saying she’d studied at Vassar and the Sorbonne, and that she’d won an award with the Toledo Blade — and found them wanting, the jig was up.

Well, like my mother always said: the truth always comes out. And sometimes it’s really painful.

Again, today’s post is not a homily by a long shot. I ain’t no angel, believe it. But sheesh, if you’re going to tell a story in an effort to fool millions of people, at least have a plan regarding how you’re going to deal with the fallout. And it seems that having it happen to one person doesn’t necessarily discourage others.

Hmmm.

Fink, off to the school house

Photo: The Phil Donahue Show

Weird genius

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Nikola Tesla. Albert Einstein. Ludwig van Beethoven. Chuck Barris.

Chuck Barris?

OK, putting him in the above company is a stretch. All right, it’s ludicrous. But the fact remains: the guy made himself a gazillionaire by coming up with three game show ideas (among others) that made borderline voyeurism acceptable for the middle class, and introduced low-brow, bottom-feeder humor to American television. And now look…voyeurism and bottom-feeder humor are now among the defining benchmarks of American video entertainment. That’s sayin’ somethin’, folks. I’ll go one further and say that without Chuck Barris, we may not have intelligent TV classics such as Jackass, Southpark, and The Simpsons. Gems, all. But I digress.

Barris created three of the most successful game shows of the 60s and 70s: The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and The Gong Show. Admittedly, I was a regular viewer of all three.

If you look at Gong Show highlights on YouTube, you’ll find that they are all pretty much unfunny now, although it sure looked like the “celebrity” judges (who the sam hill was “Jaye P. Morgan” anyway, really…) had fun watching those horrible acts and giving out the grand prize of $516.32 (no joke, that was 1st prize). Barris’s on-set behavior was so crazy, it left one Gong Show winner to wonder on his YouTube posting:

How much snow did our good Chuck blow if our good Chuck did blow snow?

Heh. [Cute, although I did not find any references to drug use in any of my research.]

But there was definitely a method to Barris’s madness. He turned love into a TV commodity. In 1965, he launched The Dating Game, a live version of Mystery Date, where “three eligible bachelors” would answer questions from a girl on the other side of a partition. Based on their answers, the girl would choose one guy to take her on a date, which was arranged by the producers of the show. Cool, eh?

Sometimes, the questions were just a *bit* suggestive, although not anything too outlandish. But Barris took care of that problem with The Newlywed Game.

It was probably the first time the word “nooky” was said on network television. And it didn’t take a genius to figure out what they were talking about.

I wasn’t a big fan of the host, Bob Eubanks. He just looked and sounded smarmy to me. But not as smarmy as Barris himself later on, as he stumbled his way through the Gong Show tapings. I wonder how much of that he actually remembers, or if it was all an act, a la Dean Martin.

But that’s OK. We remember, and YouTube remembers. That oughta provide a lifetime’s worth of embarrassment for him. But all this doesn’t even scratch the surface of his penchant for the bizarre. His “unauthorized autobiography” (ooh that’s hilarious, Chucky baby), Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, secured his weirdsville status pretty much for life. From WikiPedia:

In his autobiography Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, originally published in 1984, Barris claimed to have worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as an assassin in the 1960s and the 1970s. Barris tends to neither confirm nor deny this in interviews. A film adaptation of the book was made in 2002. Directed by George Clooney and starring Sam Rockwell, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind depicted Barris as being responsible for 33 killings. Barris wrote the sequel Bad Grass Never Dies in 2004. The CIA deny Barris ever worked for them in any capacity. After the release of the movie, CIA spokesman Paul Nowack said Barris’ assertions that he worked for the spy agency ‘[are] ridiculous. It’s absolutely not true.'”

I’m partial to Cecil Adams’s take on Barris, at The Straight Dope. Ha.

So yeah. Weird genuis.

Gotta go to Starbucks…breakfast with the boss this morning. Yummy.

FO

JD playing JD

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Oh yeah…I gotta see this. I like it that Johnny is not playing Jack Sparrow for once.

Instead, he’s playing Public Enemy #1: John Dillinger. And according to my research, Mr. Dillinger got a bad rap from the American “justice” system, despite robbing dozens of banks and living like a celebrity.

According to the book, Curious Facts About John Dillinger & J. Edgar Hoover (Kekionga Press, 2008), John was a nice guy who was beaten down early by the legal system; sent to prison for something that should have gotten him probation at the worst.

Along with an older accomplice (an ex-convict who actually got off easy), he tried to rob the neighborhood grocery store in small-town Indiana. It went wrong and the guys ran away with no money. Then, this:

Ed Singleton (who hired a lawyer), even though he had a prior felony conviction and was ten years older than [Dillinger], received a 2-to-14-year sentence and was released after two years. Dillinger [whose parents were told by town police officials that John didn’t need a lawyer] was given 10 to 20 years.

The long sentence Dillinger received for a first-time offense, the betrayal on the part of the authorities, and the light sentence his partner received formed a bitterness in him which grew more intense with every year behind bars. ‘This made a criminal out of Dillinger,’ [then-governor of Indiana Paul] McNutt concluded.”

John Dillinger was actually a polite, nice boy who lived on a farm with his dad and step-mother. [In fact, Dillinger’s great nephew has sued – successfully and often – to preserve his great uncle’s reputation as a gangster, but not a killer. He also, of course, openly cashes in on the use of his uncle’s name, much to the consternation of his critics.]

Possibly more “curious” than the facts about Dillinger in this book are the wacko stories about that schmuck J. Edgar Hoover. Whoa. That’s a post entirely unto itself.

Anyway…

Check out the trailer for Public Enemies:

Yay…I’m there.

Photo credit: IMDB.com, Dillinger Museum

I kind of knew him, too.

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Twenty years ago, Tim Richmond died. Maybe you don’t know who he was (especially if you didn’t follow NASCAR back then, or if, like some of you, you weren’t alive in the eighties), but he put Ashland, Ohio on the motor sports map.

Fellow RtB poster Michael was his neighbor. I’d totally forgotten about that…

A tragic story, to be sure, that of Tim Richmond. I remember serving him drinks at the Country Club where I worked for that one summer, when he got his racing start. He’d have a group of his friends (and his parents) around him, all yelling, laughing, smoking, getting crazy…and he was the life of the party. One time, I was invited to sit down with all of them at the end of my shift. He was really interesting, and seemingly lots of fun. We laughed a lot that night.

I also remember a couple of years later when he got Rookie of the Year or something at the Indy 500 race. I heard it on the radio and thought, “Wow, I know him.”

If you’ve seen the movie Stroker Ace with Burt Reynolds, you’ve seen Richmond. He had a bit part at the beginning of that film, as I recall.

tr1Then he got sick. Then he was dead. The cause was complications from AIDS, which, back then, was still a horrifyingly mysterious death curse, surrounded by ignorance, supposition and hysteria. According to what I’ve gathered, Richmond’s efforts to get back into racing after his diagnosis were met with considerable opposition. A guy named Tommy Thompson wrote a rather nice tribute to him here. Wikipedia also has some good information.

However, the overriding opinion is that Richmond was a victim of a witch hunt, and that he didn’t stand a chance in the good-old-boy system of NASCAR cronyism.

In 2005, David Poole wrote a bio about him. I think I might buy it.

I came across Tim’s name yesterday as I was looking at a list of well-known graduates of my alma mater (Ashland University). Although Tim only went one year and then dropped out, he was still on the list.

So was Madalyn Murray O’Hair. Yikes. I had no earthly idea. No surprise I didn’t know, though, with AU being a good Brethren Church school & all. I imagine they didn’t mind sweeping that one under the carpet.

RF, off to another weird Wednesday.

Photo credit: Sports Publishing, LLC

Courage II

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I am forever awed by stories of selfless bravery fueled by the love of one’s country, and incredible tales of survival in the face of impossible odds or the direst situations. That kind of courage/will/patriotism is somewhat rare nowadays, agreed? I like to write about those people. (If you’re curious and have the time, here’s Courage I.)

Do you know of anyone who would have entered Auschwitz – the largest and most inhumane of all the large and inhumane death camps of World War II – voluntarily? As I found out last night, there was just such a man.

Witold Pilecki, an officer in the Polish army, willingly infiltrated Auschwitz, posing as a prisoner, in order to gather intelligence on the Nazis and to organize an uprising to free everyone from the camp. The SS had other plans, unfortunately.

His story is incredible — and sad. The tale can be read in many different places on the web, but a good composite location for the salient points is at a blog belonging to this Polish Canadian, who provides information gained from his own research of anecdotes and archived documents.

Auschwitz was bad enough for Pilecki, but he met his end, in a cruel twist of fate, at the hands of the Communists of his own country, who accused him of conspiracy. Quoting from the blog:

Witold Pilecki escaped from Auschwitz on the Easter Monday 1943, he also survived the Warsaw Uprising an[d] the German POW camp in Germany.

He returned to Poland after the war and started organizing resistance
against the communists. When he learnt that the Allies would not help to liberate Poland from the Soviets he started demobilizing the military underground organization.

It was then, that the communists arrested him.

He was interrogated and tortured for many months. His finger nails were pulled out and his collarbones broken and he could hardly walk. He never “talked.”

After his process, which was a simple farce, he was sentenced to death by a firing squad. There was no firing squad though. The executioners dragged him [to] the basement of the Security Headquarters building, into the boiler room. He was gagged and could not walk.

They shot him with a single slug into the back of his head. He was buried somewhere on the rubbish tip (landfill) next to the Powazki Cemetery. His body was never found.

I wonder why this guy isn’t ranked up there with Oskar Schindler, and people like these, who daily risked their own lives to save others — or for that matter, anyone who ever served in the military, and either stayed the course and lived to tell the tale, or died trying. When you read about guys who deserted the US Army and are now livin’ it up in Germany, it really puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?

Fink, enjoying the quiet, the coffee, and the 2-hour delay