Archive for the ‘Memories & Milestones’ Category
The Day Santa Died
By Cecil Scaglione
Mature Life Features
‘Twas the day before Christmas.
We got to the butcher and picked up our gallantine for Christmas Eve and lasagna for Christmas dinner. Gallantine is a tradition here. A chicken is de-boned and stuffed with everything from prosciutto to pistachios and hard-boiled eggs to eggplant, then pressed and cooked, sliced and eaten cold. Got chores done while we were out – cash from the bank ATM, started the car, and checked out our last-minute grocery list — as a humid sirocco-like wind swooped in and made the town almost summery. Lou dropped by for a grappa and headed home for a shower. Riccardo dropped by about midday and said he’d skip tonight because he won’t be able to find a parking space because of midnight Mass at the church.
Then he told us. “Bobbie died,” he said
Bobbie was ambushed by a deadly heart attack on his early-morning walk with his dog. He had been looking forward to playing Santa: “A true Santa Claus from the North,” he told me several days earlier. He was proud of the fact that he was the first non-native offered the role. He even let his beard grow to match his thick head of white hair. He had been a technical-magazine editor in Sweden before chucking it and moving to Panicale, where he augmented whatever pension and other funds he had by managing rental properties, organizing travel tours, and dabbling in real estate.
I skidded down to the piazza to scout out the facts. Lou was right behind me. We ran into Simone’s wife (Aldo’s daughter-in-law who owns and works with her husband at the osteria they opened in the apartment Bev and I rented on our first trip). Lou got our foto and she told us “Babbo Natale e morta.” I asked if they found an alternate. She nodded her head: “Qualqu’ uno” (somebody).
I asked if her osteria’s Christmas Eve dinner (30 euros per person) was full. She shook her head “no,” and explained they didn’t start planning/advertising early enough. I said they’ll start earlier next year. She nodded “si.”
Then she added that Santa was due to land in the piazza at 3:30 p.m. We returned to the apartment and sipped a few until it was time to check the piazza. It was still warm and humid but it started to drizzle on the couple of dozen kids and their parents scattered around the 550-year-old fountain. So they trooped into below-street-level club room across the alley from the osteria. Guillermo said the club room was made available after it started to rain. Santa and his jingling bells were greeted about 4:20 by applauding parents and wide-eyed youngsters. Everyone got something. Even the adults — each received a little package of candy that was handed out by the children.
But no one seemed to miss Bobbie.
(A few days later, a hearse squeezed up through the steep archway and a clutch of mourners followed the casket into the church for Mass. When the service ended and the remains rolled back into the vehicle, no one followed but everyone applauded Bobbie’s passing as the long car slipped down into the piazza and out the Umberto 1 gate.)
Mature Life Features, Copyright 2011
Cliff Robertson Redux
By Cecil Scaglione
Mature Life Features
The death of Oscar- , Emmy-, and Theater World Award-winner Cliff Robertson (shown in photo) revived a flash of our thoroughly enjoyable meeting decades ago.
It was in the late ’60s at the annual Quill Award dinner held by the Windsor Press Club (across the river from downtown Detroit). I chaired the annual black-tie presentation of the award that I co-founded a few years earlier to honor people who “made outstanding contributions to the flow of information on Canadian affairs.”
Mr. Robertson was in town the same weekend as that year’s dinner to attend the premiere of “The Devil’s Brigade,” in which he starred with William Holden and a cast of several recognizable names and faces. We had invited Mr. Robertson weeks earlier to our dinner and asked if he would like to participate in the “official” presentation in some form or other.
We didn’t hear from him until he showed up with the manager of the theater where the film opened. It wasn’t a problem because all we had to do was pull up a couple of chairs at my table. While that was going on, I asked him if there was anything he wanted to do and if there was anything I could do for him. He held up his left hand, spread his thumb and forefinger about four inches apart and said, “I’d like a little shot of Scotch.” That set the tone. He said, if it was alright with us, he preferred to schmooze rather than intrude on our program. So I introduced him to our club president and the Montreal editor/publisher who was the Quill recipient.
I made certain he never ran out of Scotch for the rest of the evening. One of the things he mentioned in our conversations was that he had just bought the film rights to “Flowers for Algernon,” a sci-fi short story I had read, that he said was going to win him an Oscar. It did. The movie was called “Charly.” I thanked him for adding some gloss and class to our gathering and he thanked us for the invitation and invited me to knock on his door if I ever got to Hollywoodland. As it turned out, I got to his old stomping grounds here in San Diego — he grew up and went to school in La Jolla — but never managed to cross his path.
But I still smile when I think of that evening.
Bloggin’ Blackout
While the eastern portion of the country is sinking under never-ending rain and Texas is a big burning bush, it seems petty and poutish to even talk about the electrical-power disruption that blacked out about 5 million people in San Diego County and portions of Mexico, Orange County, and Arizona around Yuma (where the cascade began). Everything stopped shortly after 3:30 p.m. Thursday. Rumors and speculation began immediately from people passing by. Power lines were cut, the work of terrorists, Southern California and parts of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and Mexico all down. Reports were difficult to get because we discovered not many folks in the neighborhood have battery-operated radios. A lesson. Another lesson: our cell phones were not working. Our land line was our only link with the outside. We called the company that monitors our security alarm system and asked them if they had any information. We were told the two major power lines into this region had been cut and power would be resumed tomorrow morning at the earliest. Called Mike and exchanged information. Heather and Bev played phone tag a bit because of heavy traffic. Heather finally got through, Bev called her back and everyone got connected. So we hauled out candles and flashlights and Bev made tuna salad for dinner and I opened a bottle of wine and we sat out front in the balmy full-moon night and chatted with neighbors Dave and Keri for a couple of hours before toddlin’ off to bed. It was rather pleasant. Real quiet. Few cars on the street. People out walking because there was little else to do. No planes in the sky because the airports were shut down. The power resumed sometime during the night. Bev said it was about 2 a.m. When I got up at 6:30, both the Wall Street Journal and SD U-T were out in the front yard.
Two Good Men
By Cecil Scaglione, Mature Life Features
It isn’t every day I get to have lunch with a couple of priests.
Nor is it every day I travel a few thousand miles to nosh with a couple of high-school buddies whose friendship can be traced back to the 1940s. They grew up around the block from each other in the shadow of the Pro-Cathedral of the Assumption in North Bay, Ontario.
Monsignor John H. Caswell was already in the parking lot of the lakeside roadhouse when I arrived. The Right Rev. Father Dennis J. Murphy slipped in seconds later. Our last gathering had been more than a quarter century earlier when a handful of the old gang set aside an evening at Murphy’s cottage on the south shore of Lake Nipissing. It was during an alumni gathering at Scollard Hall, the North Bay high school we attended in the 1950s when a dozen or so Resurrectionists molded a couple of hundred boys into shape each year.
Since graduation, Caswell crafted a television network in Sudbury for the Diocese of Sault Ste. Marie and Murphy carved a career in Catholic education.
This Cas-Murph-Scag lunch was set up after my wife and I, now living in San Diego, decided to take an R&R (relatives and reminisces) swing up to Pennsylvania to visit her folks and to Toronto to visit my brother Louis. An auld-lang-syne visit to North Bay seemed appropriate. A quick e-mail to Caswell was all it took. His ready response was that, while both men manage crammed calendars, such meetings deserve priority since old friends are passing away with regularity.
As we greeted each other, neither priest showed signs of his recent battle with cancer. Caswell trumped esophagus cancer a few years earlier. Murphy had just completed a radiation program for his prostate problem. “I thank God for Cas’s presence during my treatments,” Murphy said later.
There was no table talk of the awards and accolades these two retired reverends logged over the years. For example, Caswell’s work with Cath-Com Productions earned him a prestigious Gabriel Award in 2005 from the Dayton, Ohio-based Catholic Academy for Communications Arts Professionals. Sharing the awards program that year was U.S. television icon and NBC news senior vice president Tim Russert, who died recently. That same year, Murphy was cited by the Ontario Catholic School Trustees for his support and service as, among other positions, director of Catholic education.
Our lunch was punctuated with a lot of pauses over the passing of associates and acquaintances, grins and nods over accomplishments by colleagues and classmates, and guffaws over dredged-up happenstances of long ago. The two clerics were eight years old when they met in 1943, shortly after the Caswells moved to the Bay from Smith’s Falls. “One of my earliest memories was being invited to play ball after supper with his family,” Caswell said. Not only did Murphy have a few brothers and sisters, he had “a big side yard.”
“We certainly played road hockey – the R.H.L (Road Hockey League) – from that time on,” Murphy added. There were touch-football games with other kids on the block. And the pair played on the same midget hockey team at Scollard Hall.
“Dennis was ahead of me in school, so he had a jump start on giving the seminary a try,” Caswell recalled. “Remember, at that time there were a number of guys from our home parish who were already ordained or in the seminary. This was inspiring in itself and, when Murph went, it was only natural that I should give it some serious thought.” Murphy attended St. Augustine’s Seminary in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough while Caswell chose St. Peter’s in London, Ontario. Caswell was unable to make Murphy’s 1960 ordination in the church that dominated their neighbourhood because St. Pete’s was not yet out for summer vacation.
But Murphy made Caswell’s two years later. “He was on Bishop (Alexander) Carter’s staff and master of ceremonies for the diocese (of Sault St. Marie) for all such events as ordination,” Caswell said. “It was a special moment for me,” Murphy added.
Murphy continued his studies in such faraway cities as Rome and Brussels, did parish work at the Pro-Cathedral and Corpus Christi church in North Bay, held administrative and leadership posts in local, provincial, and national religious and secular boards and commissions, and wrote extensively on Catholic education. He was also appointed co-ordinator of Pope John Paul II’s September 1984 visit to English-speaking Canada.
Caswell applied further education, experience and expertise to building the diocesan communications network into a polished professional organization centred around its weekly Mass for Shut-Ins telecast while taking on parish work, including several years as pastor of Christ the King church in Sudbury, Ont.
And over the decades, they nurtured and nourished their friendship. “It really is quite remarkable,” Murphy said, “that during the last almost 50 years, although I worked many of those years in Ottawa and Toronto and Cas was in the diocese, we managed to see each other often. There were the summers when I was home. The same was true for many long weekends, Christmas and Easter holidays, and so on. It didn’t seem to be any big deal, but we just stayed together.”
“We try to stay in contact as much as possible without getting in each other’s way,” said Caswell. “I have always had the enormous blessing of being considered part of his family and he was always considered part of mine. It’s a given that he and I are always there for each other, in good times and bad. If there has been any mentoring, it’s been more by example than words.”
“The business of being there for one another is true,” Murphy added, “We certainly have prayed for and remembered each other not only in … less-felicitous moments but on all the happy occasions that have been part of our lives. I don’t recall us being much into offering spiritual advice or guidance to each other but I am sure we have communicated to each other much of what we hold of value.”
Such as their ongoing friendship.
Source: http://www.foreveryoungnews.com/article/13751
(This article originally appeared in Forever Young News)
Tuesday Apr 20, 2010
Holiday Heads-up
(Somehow, this item got tucked into here, waaaaaaay out of date.) Got the suitcases and coolers to air out for next weekend’s packing. Driving to Phoenix Monday Dec. 20 to spend the week visiting with the kids and grandkids. Will also be neighbors with Joe and Edith Brown from Kitchener in a mobile home park near Steve and Heather. Joe was a photog at the K-W Record when I worked there, which seems like a long time ago on a galaxy far away. Should be a comfortable week. Have to get to the discount houses there and pick up some new wardrobe items since I’ve given all my XL clothing away and need to replace them with mediums..
Will update this with some of the thoughts and things that mark Christmas commemorations in the desert sprawl.
Louis’ Birthday
‘Twas a bright afternoon 72 years ago when Temiskaming & Northern Ontario Railway Dr. Hall emerged from our tar-paper railroad shack in Feronia and told me he’d brought me a baby brother. I was told of making the comment, which I recall, that the doctor take him back “and throw him in the lake.” I remember the day because I was 4 1/2, old enough to remember, and any visit from the doctor was memorable. We lived in Feronia, about seven miles from North Bay, and we received few visitors other than the farm folk who lived in the community. It wasn’t even big enough to be a hamlet. I also recalled in later years that, while I was told to stay outside and play while the doctor was there, it wasn’t all that long and I never heard any noise from inside. But I do remember it was a bright, buzzing July day out in the country — one of those days when you could hear the bugs so busy at work none were bothering you.
Mature Life Features 