It used to be that whenever someone bought a new car, part of the purchase agreement entailed the custom of visiting friends and relatives and taking them for a spin.
Even if the car was old, as long as it was new to the buyer, the obligation remained. Well, most of us Trujillos were in our teens before our parents got a “new” car, a ‘41 Plymouth. But the main drawback was that the year was 1950, and the new-to-us car already had 12,000 miles on it.
“Wow! Only 12,000 miles! Why it’s practically new,” some living today and driving 2008 Impalas might say. But wait. An odometer reading of 12,000, half the distance around the globe, simply meant that you’d better enjoy the car now, because by the time it reached 25,000 miles, bad things happened, like needing ring jobs.
What’s a ring job? Not sure, but I think it has to do with replacing ringy thingies that cling and ping when the doo-hickeys wear out. That procedure often cost as much as the car was worth. That’s one reason we still find many similar makes and models decorating people’s yards.
The plan usually is to buy another used car of the same year and model, “for parts, so I can fix my old car.” Yeah, right. Then why do you have even a third car of the same year, make and model?
But back to ancient customs:
Around 1954, Ford, Chevy and Plymouth made radical changes to their lines, adding chrome strips and fins. I was thrilled when an upperclassman from Immaculate Conception School, Carlos Sanchez, showed up for my complimentary new-car ride. His parents had bought it just that day. Now I think Carlos had intended instead to pick up my brother Severino, who was in Carlos’s grade, but as he wasn’t in, I became the surrogate.
There was nothing during that ride that could have convinced me we’d not reached the height of the technological spectrum. No matter what, the synchromesh transmission just had to be the ultimate. The ride was the smoothest I’d ever experienced. As a 14-year old, I believed that if I lived to see the 21st century, I’d never see a machine more advanced.
That conviction remained when a cousin invited me to help break in his 1955 Ford Fairlane, priced at about $1,700. That year, when my friend Beo Martinez showed up with a new Plymouth Savoy, well, I developed a great deal of admiration for Chrysler products as well.
Suddenly any new-ish car became the standard of excellence. Some may ask, “But what about the higher-priced cars, like the Olds, Buick, Mercury and DeSoto? Weren’t they even better than Fords?” I didn’t have an answer then, but now I simply say, “Living on Railroad Avenue, we didn’t see many middle- or high-class cars, or new cars, or even cars of any sort.”
My grandson and namesake, one person who seems to enjoy hearing Pompah talk about the olden days, asked how I could have considered those “rolling orange crates” of the 50s the ultimate in luxury, comfort and safety.
“Why, they didn’t have seatbelts in those days,” Arthur said. He’s right, as most of the transmissions were manual, the dashboards weren’t padded, the cars ran on leaded gas, and worst of all, they sometimes had a scratchy AM tube radio as opposed to today’s units which enable the driver to pipe the cell phone through the car’s speakers and drive hands-free. Or cars with MP3 and iPod capabilities.
The complimentary, inaugural new-car ride has gone into desuetude, whether due to time constraints, the lack of community cohesiveness, the surplus of new cars, the cost of gas or any number of reasons. I believe most people already tool around in their own late-model vehicles, making the free-ride opportunity superfluous.
And though today’s cars really are made to last longer than the 25,000-mile-maximum behemoths of yesteryear, it’s likely people today trade in their cars more frequently. And does any new car really look significantly different from any other?
When cruising Las Vegas with friends in the ‘50s, teens grokked and prided themselves on their ability to spot any friend a mile away on the basis of the model, make, year, color, fender skirt, sun visor or cracked windshield.
Today, in my family, we rely mainly on the color: That’s a grey car; then it might be our son.
A while back, as my wife left a supermarket, she noticed a man struggling to get into our car. He wrestled with the key and seemed frustrated as Bonnie asked, “What are you doing with my car?” Embarrassed, the man asked her if she could help him open it. He said something about just having bought the car and not yet being familiar with the product.
She finally convinced him that he was trying to unlock the wrong car. So he shuffled over to his own car.
But what was he thinking? Our car at the time was a bright red Ford Focus with keyless entry. The man finally unlocked and drove off in a dull grey Chevy Nova about 10 years older than ours.
And he didn’t even offer a new-car-to-me ride to Bonnie or anybody else in the parking lot.

It’s amazing how long it takes for people to forget. That idea came to mind as I discussed the “Golden Days” of Highlands with a friend who attended college in the ‘60s.

What impressed me the most was her recollection of the old Student Union Building, called the SUB, which should have been called the HUB, as it linked many departments and buildings and was the de facto center of the campus.

Decades ago, the old SUB was supplanted by the Communication Arts Department, and for the last years of my career, I had an office and taught classes there. But this isn’t so much about the building; rather, it’s about interesting people who “lived” there and led some of us to believe they’d become SUB-human.

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Under the heading of “I don’t understand classical music but I know what I like,” I confess an addiction to much of it. We used to call it “long-haired music,” a glimpse of the likenesses of 18th-century composers will validate.

In the hippie movement of the ‘70s, with groups like “Three Dog Night,” the term “long-haired” took on a different meaning.

My addiction took hold at an early age, and it’s afflicted all of my siblings as well.

My mom, ever the pragmatist, didn’t care for Beethoven’s symphonies and passed off her lack of interest by complaining, “me da calentura.” What? The Eroica symphony making Mom feverish?

She’d explain that it seemed as if the thousands of notes that make up a Mozart concerto, for example, had been forced through a tube. “And then it’s like they’re playing it backwards.”

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It never fails. I win the bet every time but will never win again once people catch on. It’s simple: I like to tell people that they cannot correctly count backwards from 10 to 1. I add that somewhere in the middle numbers there’ll be an inadvertent tangue-toungler to cause them to flub.

Instinctively, they rattle off “10, 9, 8, 7…” and immediately I cut them off with, “You messed up.”

Why? Well, because they didn’t follow directions. If their job is to “count from 10 to 1 backwards, that means they need to follow the 1, 2, 3 sequence.

It’s really a silly little trick, one that has made me so wealthy I’m building a dozen retirement cottages in Pendaries. Well, maybe just a pup tent in my backyard.

It’s the same kind of confidence I exuded when reacting to an e-mail from Joann Martinez, the former Carnegie librarian. The message asks us to pronounce certain words correctly the first time.

I was up for the challenge, and to keep things honest, recorded myself.

Try it yourself: Continue reading →

Math anxiety is a term universally understood as the condition in which a student freezes up or manifests other anxiety symptoms such as dizziness, sweaty palms, nausea, headaches or fatigue during consideration or before taking an examination on fractions decimals or algebra.

Interesting that one doesn’t hear much about grammar anxiety or history anxiety or various other anxieties. Many colleges, including Highlands, routinely offer sessions on coping with math anxiety.

Math anxiety must never be confused with or compared to writer’s block, an affliction what latches on only to graduate students. It’s characterized by days of waiting for inspiration for that all-American composition and features wastebaskets full of crumpled paper untimely ripped out of the typewriter. A modern-day version of writer’s block includes White-Out on the laptop screen. Continue reading →

In discussing communication with a friend, a counterpart, from another newspaper, I learned that the content of the paper is what you say, whereas the typography — type fonts, sizes, styles, etc. — is how you say it.

Well, that’s brilliant. In many years in this business, I’d never thought of it that way. Any article, even one about something dull, has its own content, but if spiced up with flashy headlines, it becomes something else.

That led to the question of “It’s not what you say, but how you say it.” We can say “I love you” in such a sneering, venomous way that the lovee has no choice but to say, “It’s not what you say, but …” By the same token, we can say anything in a kind way and get a conflicting message across. Tone of voice counts. And it works with animals as well — maybe even better.

We tried this with my son Diego’s Rhodesian ridgeback, Zeus: Instead of “Here, nice puppy,” we called him a cow but said it sweetly, whereupon he transferred himself from the carpet to my lap. Try it sometime, but preferably with a dog weighing less than 75 pounds.

Back to people: Continue reading →

Men don’t get a fair break in popular culture. Notice the comic books of old, the Turner Classic Movies comedies, even today’s sitcoms: Most of them show men — incorrectly — as inept, overweight, bumbling, pathetic creatures ever in need of a woman’s guidance.

The hardest my wife Bonnie ever laughs is when watching a movie such as “The Big Lebowski,” with Jeff Bridges, in which there’s a lot of he-man posturing but little action. If women had been in that situation, Bonnie — and virtually all women — would believe, the situation would have been handled differently. Continue reading →

“You people at the Optic are so-oo negative. Why don’t you print something positive for a change?” We’ve heard that many times. So, in an effort to out Pollyanna myself, I herewith attempt some positive stuff. It’s a wonderful, helpful and expensive message board that lights up Mills Avenue near Robertson High School. It’s an electronic, digital sign that flashes announcements and gives the time and temperature.

In the olden days, when analog was the norm, we could say about downtown clocks that hadn’t operated in years, “Well, on the positive side, at least a stopped clock is correct twice a day.”

But what about digital clocks? Usually then they’re on the fritz, they’re simply turned off. But the digital clock on Mills has been locked at 8:27 for days, possibly not able to adapt to Daylight Savings Time. So, in a negative vein, we could say the clock is wrong 1,438 times a day, but it’s more positive to say it’s correct two times a day, once in the evening, once in the morning.

But wait. My clock-watching task force just informed me that, unlike the analog counterpart, the stalled digital clock also shows “p.m.” So that means it’s correct only once a day. Sorry, but I tried to be positive on this one. Continue reading →

Something happens when people turn 80. In the case of my parents, for example, age 80 was the time they begin to lose bone and muscle mass. They simply became smaller people.

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Over the past 42 years, as I’ve switched hats from journalism teacher to English teacher, I’m often asked, “What the difference?”Ah, but citing the differences would cover several columns. For now, the important distinctions are in the audience: For the most part, assignments given in English/composition classes end at the teacher’s desk; in journalism classes, the goal is publication, before a larger audience.So it is with letters to the editor, possibly the most popular feature in the daily press. As copy editor, I get to field most of the submissions, and I’ve become aware of many repeated features, including extreme length. Overall operation of the editorial page, however, rests with Tom McDonald, editor and publisher.

Some people expect us to do the research for them. Some letters — particularly from schools — omit first names, as students use Mr., Ms. or Mrs. We then call the writers, asking them to provide the given names, or we go to the phonebook. Continue reading →