Friday, June 26, 2009

Winning the Lottery

August 5th, 1971 fell on a Thursday near the end of summer vacation and in the small burg of Elizabethtown it was no more or less remarkable than any other day, unless you were a guy who was born in 1952, or you cared about one who was.

If you were a male born in 1952, as I was, this would be the day that someone from the Selective Service Board would draw a date from a rotating drum and a corresponding number between 1 and 366 from a second drum. The resulting pairing of those drawings, designed to be as random as possible, would determine whether we continued our college education and began our adult lives, or we interrupted that education for a tour of duty in the Vietnam War with the very real possibility of never having an adult life. The thought of that possibility made for a restless sleep the night before. It felt a little like waiting for the jury to come back at your murder trial.

I spent the night before the draft lottery at the farmhouse of my stepfather's parents and I rose early the next day. The drawing wouldn't be televised until mid-morning, but I was too anxious to sleep. I had a bowl of cereal and finally positioned myself in front of a black-and-white TV set with a snowy picture from the rusty antenna on the roof. I waited for what seemed like ages to see the numbers "December 21" and "341" crawl across the screen. I wasn't going to Vietnam.

My stepfather's parents lived on a farm a couple of miles outside of E-town and avoided social contact whenever possible, which seemed to be just fine with the rest of town. When their son's dilapidated, red and white '56 Ford finally died, they parked it in the front yard. They raised a few hogs and rented out a field for someone else to grow corn, but the large farm was mostly unproductive.

Mildred and Clay were angry, spiteful and mean-spirited, if I were to be totally honest. Still, Mildred's response to the lottery results dumbfounded me, but then, there were a lot of responses to the Vietnam War that I wouldn't have expected. When I turned from the TV screen with a huge smile on my face, her anger was the last thing I expected.

"It isn't fair", she spat at me. "Why does Ronnie have to go into the military and you don't?"

Her son, Ron, had enlisted and planned to make the Navy a career, but that didn't seem to matter. The draft lottery produced winners and losers and it was clear that no one who lost would consider any system equitable. I headed out the door to be with my friends and to see how they had fared.

As I drove into town, the lead guitar riff from Grand Funk Railroad's Closer to Home blaring from the 8-track and the windows rolled down, I remembered a day in American Government class two years before when our teacher, Mr. Baird, had raised a point that had long troubled me. A smart and well-educated man, Mr. Baird had somehow earned the nickname "Squeezel" from students and that moniker had been passed down from class to class for two decades. He was rather short, had a high voice, and strutted around like a rooster. The nickname was nonsensical, but it fit.

His perplexing point, regarding the draft, was that student deferments were illogical. Why should society, or one's parents for that matter, pay for a young man's college education and then send him to war where he might be killed? Wasn't it more efficient to send him to war first and possibly save the cost of a college education? I found the argument both heartless and specious. Any young man and his parents would gladly pay the cost of a college education to live four more years. His argument was clearly more attractive from his podium than from where we sat.

Our physics class was taught by Mr. Bailey, who shared both Mr. Baird's physical stature and conservative position on the war, but was much younger. I'd guess twenty-five. He sat on a stool behind a large lab table at the front of the room and his feet didn't reach the floor. Somehow, he had successfully dated a senior in his class a few years before and then married her after she graduated with the full knowledge of the administration, the students and the town, a situation I find as difficult to understand in retrospect as Mr. Baird's argument.

One morning we entered class and took out our physics books only to notice that our teacher's face was red and a vein protruded from his neck. Three high school students had published an underground newspaper with the headline, "Fighting for Peace is Like Fucking for Virginity". It was a bold move in a conservative town and the vulgar title alone was grounds for expulsion in western Kentucky high schools in 1969. Mr. Bailey was repulsed by the profanity and resented the political statement so deeply that he spent the entire period ranting about patriotism. Ironically, as the bell rung, he ended the tirade by saying, "I never had to serve, but if I were called up, I'd go in a heartbeat." Observe how easily those words roll off the tongue, I thought, another argument that sounds better from the safe side of a college deferment.

I walked out of the classroom with my best friend, Steve. "Wasn't that great?" he asked enthusiastically. I thought he was referring to Mr. Bailey's political statement and I began to disagree, but he quickly added, "Do you realize he talked the whole period and we just got to skip an entire physics class?"

I made my first call that day to Steve's house and he was a little more focused on political realities by then. Tall and so thin that we called him "Straw", Steve was an excellent student, the starting guard on our basketball team and our high school's best tennis player. He had a letter jacket, a pretty girlfriend and the golden touch. It seemed that everything good came to Steve and if you had asked me before the lottery how he would fare, I would have been certain that good fortune would seek him out.

Steve met me with a smile that afternoon, just hours after the draft lottery. It seemed that lottery position 352 was even more joyful than 341, though neither of us was in danger of ever wearing fatigues.

Hanging out at the Burger Chef was typically saved for Saturday nights, or for Friday nights when there was no football or basketball game, but we all knew that everyone would show up after such an important day, even if it was midweek. We parked our cars and milled around, as one by one our friends arrived, parked their cars and walked over to our circle. You knew the news by their expression long before they told you.

The sole exception was Stuart Davis. His expression looked the same as any other time I'd ever seen him, a constant half-smile. Stuart was a handsome, stocky, blond-haired offensive guard on E-town's championship football team. He was the first guy in our class who could grow real sideburns and his girlfriend was one of the prettiest girls in the history of high school. In college, he had joined ROTC, another bold move during the Vietnam War era when it seemed that more kids were burning down ROTC buildings than joining. "What's your number?" we asked.

"Two forty-one", he answered with that smile and a slight shrug, "but it doesn't matter. I'm joining the Navy to become a pilot." Now, the ROTC thing made sense.

Gary Jenkins, the guy we called Jinx, approached our group soon afterward with his small lottery number written large in his facial expression. Gary was a smart kid who ran cross-country and played on the football team. He was also the victim of abusive foster parents, though we didn't know it at the time. "I got number sixty", he told us. "I am so screwed."

Stuart offered consolation in the clumsy way of a high school football player. "Jinx, I'd give you my number if I could. I'm not going to use it."

It didn't help, of course. Gary stood there for much of the evening with both hands in the pockets of his jeans, nervously shifting his weight back and forth from one foot to the other, his gaze darting all around the parking lot to avoid eye contact. His shoulders were tensed inward like someone would do to keep warm on a chilly day, not during the Dog Days of summer.

Cola was the next to join the group with the most unique reaction. Bobby Tabb's nickname came from Coca-Cola's diet drink of the seventies, Tab Cola. He was a fun kid to have around. He played on the football team and sang in the Madrigals chorus. Cola was not the brightest student in E-town's Class of '70, but he somehow remembered the words to every popular song ever written and he could do Frankie Valli falsettos. In another time, Bobby would have never considered going to college. Academics just weren't his strong suit.

Before the Selective Service Act of 1971 was passed, college deferments were the ticket out of military service. If you could get into college and stay there for four years, you would likely avoid the draft, so the smart play was to go to school and run the clock out. Dick Cheney famously received five draft deferments and not a single U.S. Senator or Congressman lost a son in the Vietnam War.

Eventually, the nation grew weary of the unfair toll the war had taken on minorities and the underprivileged and the Selective Service Board was pressured to create a fairer method for draft selection. The draft lottery was implemented to solve that problem.

New college deferments were eliminated in 1971. If you received a high draft lottery position, you could voluntarily give up your deferment for a year in which you were unlikely to be drafted, after which you would no longer be eligible. With a low number, you could remain in college and be subject to the draft for one year after graduation. Bobby had hated college, but he had worked his butt off to keep his grades up. Failing out of school meant being drafted, a powerful incentive.

'Well?" we asked as he approached.

"Number 290!" he gleamed, but that wasn't the only good news. "I don't have to go to college, anymore!" he quickly added.

We spent that evening congratulating our friends with high lottery numbers and consoling those who weren't as fortunate. We assured those in the middle that they would ultimately avoid the draft, since no one knew how high in the draft the military would need to go when the time came. Would number 170 be drafted? Would 180? It was a Kafkaesque moment in our young lives when a government bureaucracy would use a purely random process to decide our fates, or so it seemed.

That Thursday in August of 1971 felt like a fateful moment, but as it turned out, 1971 was the last year of the draft of the Vietnam War era. The war ended, as did Richard Nixon's presidency, before any of us would be drafted. I graduated from college and moved to the East Coast to work and raise a family. Steve became a Baptist minister and moved away, to South Carolina last I heard. Bobby still lives in E-town, but Gary built a successful travel agency business in Louisville. Stuart Davis did become a Navy pilot and the last time I saw him he was flying 737's for Federal Express. When I asked how he liked it, he replied, "After flying A-6's off a carrier deck, it's a little boring."

The clock ran out on the war before it ran out on our deferments. My friends and I had dodged a bullet.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Glory Days

Most athletes’ glory days are over when they graduate from high school. Mine never made it past sixth grade.

I recently received a letter from a cousin with whom I had lost touch decades ago. In it was a folded newspaper clipping of our sixth grade basketball team from 1964. My cousin, Mike Stallins, played center and I was the point guard for Hall Street Elementary School in Madisonville, Kentucky. That’s me on the far right wearing number 14. Mike is in the center wearing number 10, as my aunt helpfully annotated with a green ballpoint pen. We won Hall Street’s first (and I suspect only) city basketball championship that year.

It was Hoosiers without Gene Hackman.

We had it all, red satin gym trunks short enough to impress Larry Bird, red cotton jerseys. Heck, we even had cheerleaders and they had uniforms.

There were eight teams in our league from Madisonville and a couple of small surrounding communities, Hanson and Anton. Waddell Avenue Elementary and West Broadway Elementary had better teams than Hall Street, but Pride Avenue Elementary regularly beat us all. We were at best a fourth place team. The season progressed with few upsets and all eight teams played in the tournament.

The remarkable thing about Pride was their backcourt—their guards were the only two black kids in the league. Their mothers came to every game and were the only African-Americans in the stands. I remember how they cheered louder for their kids than any other parents at the game, but more than that I remember how much better players their kids were than just about anyone else.

I couldn’t appreciate at that age how much courage it must have taken for those two twelve year olds to play basketball in an all-white league in 1964, or for their parents to sit in the stands and draw attention to themselves and their children. I learned just a few years ago that I had grown up, before moving away after seventh grade, in a small enclave of staunch segregationists in western Kentucky. Most of Kentucky had integrated schools by 1964, but Madisonville and surrounding communities were some of the last holdouts. The owner of the Madisonville Messenger, from which these clippings were taken, argued in editorials that blacks preferred segregation. Pride Elementary, ironically, had been at the center of racial tensions just a few years before. Nearby rural communities Sturgis and Clay had made national headlines a few years earlier by defying integration. I was living in a cauldron of civil rights struggle, but was too young to realize it.

Before I go on with my story, I owe it to Kentuckians to point out that theirs is not an unusually racist state. On the contrary, Louisville was among the first large southern cities to integrate its schools and most of the state followed quickly, but according to histories of the area, western Kentucky held communities that did not. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Kentucky now has far fewer active hate groups than any other southern or bordering state, or the Midwest. Hate groups were a minority that didn't represent our community or the state then, nor do they now. But, back to my story.

We played Waddell Avenue in the semifinals and, although we were underdogs, found ourselves tied with a minute to go. I was fouled and went to the line to shoot a bonus. I was the second leading scorer on our team. My cousin scored more but that was because he was the tallest kid in the league and the referees didn’t call lane violations. He stood in the lane beneath the basket and just shot over the defender. I hit nothing but net on both free throws, putting us ahead by two with just seconds remaining.

Waddell guards brought the ball down court, but Mike was able to tie up his defender and set up a jump ball at midcourt. Waddell called timeout.

Our coach furiously laid out a strategy for the last few seconds, but I paid little attention. I just wanted to get back on the court and play ball. I heard him say something about having Mike tap the ball to the far end of the court so Waddell would use up time bringing the ball back up. He told us not to even try to take possession, because we might foul. He wanted us to get back on defense and simply wait for their guards to run the ball down, and hopefully run out the clock.

Mike tipped the ball into the opponent’s court, just like Coach had told him to do. I ran the ball down, just as Coach had told me not to do, but just as I grabbed it with both hands, a Waddell guard ran into me and I went back to the foul line. I sank both shots, putting the game out of reach.

I was one of the last to reach our dressing room and when I walked down the steps, Coach screamed, picked me up and swung me around in the air. My head bumped into Mike Travis’ lip as Coach spun me and his lip began to bleed. Mike yelled and dripped blood, but no one seemed to notice. Coach, apparently not confident that we could win the upcoming final against Pride, kept yelling, “We’re gonna’ get a second place trophy!” We hoped he meant “at least a second place trophy”, but he never said that.

My Dad and I walked in total silence through the cold winter evening from the gym to our car, staying close by the streetlights, I, wondering if I had done something good enough to make him proud and he, wondering how to tell me that I had. “Well, you bailed them out of that one, didn’t you?” he finally offered. “I guess so”, I replied and and, fathering being what it was in the sixties in the rural south, that was the last discussion that would ever be on the topic.

Truth be known, I remember nothing about the final game against Pride the next evening except the last play. Somehow, we were tied with five seconds left in the game, despite having been clobbered every time we played them in the regular season, and we had the ball. Coach called timeout and frantically drew up a play. I can’t tell you what he said now because I didn’t listen to him then. Gary Phillips inbounded the ball to me, I dribbled to the free throw line and saw my cousin, Mike, inexplicably standing alone under the basket. I remember throwing him a bounce pass to avoid the defenders between us, he turned to shoot and I saw the ball drop through the net as the horn sounded.

After a frantic celebration that none of us even remotely expected, the All Tournament Team was announced. I was a shoo-in. I was the second leading scorer on our team and my pressure free throws had clinched the semifinal game. I had an assist on the game-winning basket in the final. My cousin’s name was announced and then Gary Phillips’ was announced. I sat on the floor waiting to hear my name long after the list was completed and the crowd had headed for the exits. So long, glory days. It was an experience I would relive several times throughout my business career. Sometimes in life, you “bring home the bacon” and someone else gets to eat it.

As I stared at the clipping my cousin had mailed me, I was reminded of a special time in my life when youth allowed me to enjoy playing basketball unhindered by the knowledge that we weren't actually good enough to win a championship and oblivious to society's imperfections, even as they stared me in the face. I eventually turned the clipping over and noticed what was on the back. Amazingly, it was a nearly complete editorial cartoon that showed a Civil Rights Bill floating in a “sea of politics” with only the top half of the caption, “At the Mercy of the Currents” spared by the scissors. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed by President Lyndon Johnson in July, a few months after Hall Street Elementary’s City Championship. Glory days, indeed.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

A Good Day Fly Fishing

He had been napping in the passenger seat as I drove the interstate through rural Virginia farmlands, past their endless fields of grasses left brown by the August heat and lack of rain, but turning off the highway onto the dirt road was his wake-up call. He removed his earphones, laid his iPod down and then raised his seatback.

"Are we almost there, Dad?"

"Almost."

When did he get so damned big? A couple of years ago we wore the same size wading boots. Now he wears a size larger than me. At six-feet two, he's still shorter than me, but catching up fast. In a year he'll be driving.

My favorite picture of Cary, my oldest child, was taken the day we brought him home from the hospital. I am carrying him to his crib, making a tiny hammock of my two outstretched hands joined at the fingertips and he lies sleeping across my two palms on his stomach with one arm hanging down and room to spare. Cary and my two hands fill the entire frame. His basketball shoe won't fit in my two hands nowadays.

The rear view mirror is useless. An opaque cloud of gravel dust spews from my car and frosts the tires with a fine white powder as we drive the back roads near the Shenandoah River. The head of the dust cloud swirls violently near my rear bumper but then gradually subsides until, several minutes after I have passed, its distant tail settles slowly back into the heat and quiet of the afternoon. A large, brown grasshopper hangs onto the side of a grayed fence post that still shows the small stubs of lopped off branches from its earlier life as a cedar tree. As we pass, its motion catches my eye. It flaps its wings and hops an amazing distance into the adjoining field of brown weeds. He's a good quarter-mile above the river now, but the smallmouth hope he'll come closer. I take a swig from the bottle of water in the cup holder.

We find a spot to pull off the road just above the riverbank and rig the fly rods in the heat as the dust settles and I finish off the water bottle.

I hate this part. It takes so long to rig the rods and you're right next to the river. It's like waiting for everyone else to be served before digging into your birthday cake.

"What leader should I use, Dad?"

"I'm gonna use a 4X. The water is so clear and low I'm afraid anything bigger will spook 'em. You remember how to attach them loop-to-loop?" I ask without looking up from my own knotting chores.

"Yeah. Are you going to use a popping bug?"

"I'll probably start with one." One of the attractions of fly fishing is seeing the fish hit the fly while it floats on the water's surface. "You need help with the clinch knot?"

"Nah, I'm good."

I pull two more bottles of water from the cooler, stuff them into my fanny pack, balance my fly rod in my right hand, and head down the steep bank into the river with Cary close behind. Dirt breaks loose and rolls down the bank ahead of me as I dig in my heels for purchase and try not to run downhill into the river. The cool water spills over the top of my wading boots.

We usually fish for smallmouth with 6- or even 8-weight fly rods, but the river is low and we plan to fish dry flies, so we take 3- and 4-weight rods, instead. Though there is absolutely nothing in my experience to suggest that I can predict how a fishing trip is going to unfold, I nevertheless convince myself that we won't be catching large fish today and small fish are more fun to catch on a lighter rod.

In August, rainstorms are as scarce as modest fish stories and the Shenandoah flows like syrup, simmering in the sun until it feels like bathwater on our bare legs. The stargrass beds, covered with tiny, yellow, star-shaped blossoms on top of dark green branches that float just below the surface, grow so thick in the river that you would think you could walk on top of them. Stargrass fouls baited hooks and spinning plugs, but our dry flies drift over their beds, teasing out the fish hiding in their shadows. These grass beds are as close as the river comes to a neon sign saying "fish are here".

Cary and I spread out to give each other room to cast, but stay close enough to chat. I find a dinner plate-sized opening in a sea of stargrass and cast a small dry fly into it. A fish strikes it immediately, but I miss the hook set, then quickly cast back to the same spot and this time I catch a smallmouth. I love to miss a fish and then catch him with a subsequent cast or a different fly. It's what I like best about fishing, solving a problem, catching a wary fish by convincing him that a few pieces of thread and feather on a steel hook is actually a living insect. See, once I miss him, I know he's there. And then he is usually mine.

I release the fish quickly, returning him unharmed to grow and maybe even to catch again one day. He darts back into the shade and protection of the grass bed.

It's a Wednesday. I love to fish on weekdays, and not just because I frequently have an entire stretch of river to share with only my son, though that would be reason enough. It's somehow comforting to be reminded that while I work and wait for weekends to fish, the river, the smallmouth and the mayflies are oblivious. Fish dimple the water's surface, sending out concentric rings and silently sucking in their dinner of fallen mayfly spinners in the last hour of light every day, even when I'm crawling through the evening rush hour traffic wishing I were fishing, instead.

When you think a fish has sipped in your fly, you pull back on the rod with a quick tug to set the hook. Too quick and your fragile leader may snap or you jerk the fly out of the fish's mouth. Too slow and the fish knows something isn't natural and he spits out the fly. If either of these happens, or if there was never really a fish in the first place, you're just waving a stick in the air. But if there is a fish and you're timing is just right, you feel resistance to the upward motion of your rod, your floating fly line jumps off the water and pulls taut, the rod bends easily under the strain and the fun begins. It's the difference between raising your arm to grab a fistful of air and raising your arm to grab the leash of a German Shepherd that would really rather be somewhere else.

Sometimes, fishing can be insanely challenging. Sometimes, it's so easy it isn't much fun. It can be both at different times of the same day for one fisherman. It can be challenging for one fisherman and easy for another in the same place on the same day.

Today is my day. I am in the zone. Every other cast ends with that electrifying feeling of a taut line when I raise my rod tip to set the hook. Moments before, I held a lifeless stick. Now it springs to life, bends and trembles in my hand, the smallmouth's every movement traveling through the stressed fly line like a bow drawn across a violin string to the tip of my graphite rod and on to my forearm, directly connecting me with the quarry at the end of my line exactly as if I had reached my arm out thirty feet and grabbed the fish with my bare hand. To a fly fisherman, there are few better feelings in life.

It is a good day, but not a great day, because my son doesn't share my luck. As the saying goes, I can only be as happy as my saddest child. I coach him, I encourage him, I tie a fly identical to mine to his leader, I sharpen his hook with a small triangular file, but the fish don't bite for him.

"Are you about ready to leave?" I finally ask, hoping he will not be. I'm not ready to leave the fishing, not ready for a long, quiet drive home.

"I guess", he shrugs, "if you are". His body language is even less convincing than his words. It says that fishing and not catching got old a long time ago.

I have just cast a small dry fly near the roots of a tree growing from the bank and shading a large fish, I hope, from a brutal mid-afternoon sun. I cast five times to the same spot and catch five sizeable bluegills from a pool no more than four or five feet wide. But no smallmouth. I reckon that ending the day catching a nice bluegill might salve Cary's ego, so I ask him to wade over to my spot for a few minutes before we leave.

"Trade rods with me and try my fly. Cast it upstream about a foot from the bank just to the left of those roots."

Cary swaps rods with me and his first cast misses the spot. "About three feet further upstream, I tell him. Try again."

He has a serviceable, if not consistent cast for a 15-year old, having joined me on these trips for the fourth straight year. Good enough, in fact, to have landed a nice snook and a redfish on our trip to the Everglades last spring. But consistently accurate fly-casting takes years of practice. Cary is at that point where he follows five wobbling, off-target, surface-plunking casts with a loop so tight it could pass through a screen door, the fly stopping just above the surface and quietly lighting like a real insect just inches from his target.

His second cast is a bulls-eye and the fish hits it instantly. The smallish 3-weight rod bends sharply.

"I think it's big, Dad", he says hopefully. Fishing has just become a lot more fun.

A few minutes later, Cary lands a 17-inch smallmouth, the largest either of us has ever caught in the Shenandoah. Just upstream are five men taking a fly fishing class, standing in a row across the river and learning to cast. I lift the smallmouth by its lower lip, remove the fly and hold the fish high, hoping they will notice.

It is a mystery of fishing that I can cast a fly into a small pool and catch five eight-inch bluegills in a row, and then my son can cast my same fly into the same small pool with my rod and catch a seventeen-inch smallmouth. Would I have caught the same fish on my next cast to that same spot? I hope not. I want to believe that it was not luck, that there are moments, like this one, when life is simply perfect. Catching this one grand fish alone seems to have improved his perspective on the past three hours and I am freed to feel good about my own successful day. Our ride home will be animated.

Cary explains this mystery with the verbal swagger he generally reserves for our one-on-one basketball games in the driveway, when he heaves an off-balance, desperation prayer of a shot that somehow finds the basket. "Technique, Dad", he asserts with mock sincerity. "It's all about technique."

We call it a day. We hook our flies to the largest line guides near the cork handles of our fly rods, reeling in the loose line until it is neat, and wade back across the river, just far enough upstream of the fly fishing class to avoid their flailing backcasts, and to our Jeep atop the steep dirt riverbank. A few steps before we reach the water's edge and our day of fishing will end, several large smallmouths dart teasingly past our ankles to some anticipated meal or hiding spot upstream.

Oh, what the hell, just one more cast.

"Wait a second, Cary."

I unhook my fly from the guide, the reel singing as I strip off several yards of fly line into the pool behind me, make a couple of false casts to shoot some line, and cast to a spot upstream and just ahead of where these fish should be by now. My fly gently lights on the surface and just begins to drift with the current when I hear a pop! on the water's surface and instinctively raise my rod tip. I feel the resistance and my line stretches taut.