Rant #2,641: Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah

Good morning, everyone!
 
Wake up! It’s time to wake up!
 
And if you don’t know that it is time to get up out of bed to start your day, I will play "Revele" on my bugle to alert you that it’s time!
 
What am I talking about here?
 
Let me tell you.
 
We are in the middle of spring—although temperatures around these parts have been frigid lately—and summer is right around the corner.
 
And with the pandemic lessening up to a certain degree, maybe we can have a real summer, unlike what we had last year when we were right in the thick of everything.
 
And that means that if you have younger kids, camp might be right around the corner.
 
As a kid, I went to day camp, so I was out of my mother’s hair from about 8 am in the morning until maybe 3 or 4 pm most weekdays during the summers of the mid to late 1960s and early 1970s.
 
We did lots of great things during camp, and I really loved the experience. All my friends went to camp, and whether it was going to the beach or an amusement park, or playing ball, or whatever, I had the time of my life in our camp, which was called, appropriately, Rochdale Village Day Camp, named after our neighborhood in South Jamaica, Queens, New York.
 
My sister went, too, and you can just imagine the sigh of relief my mother must have had when we were both out the door and headed to camp during those hot summer days.
 
And I guess that is why I was drawn to a TV show that was all about camp, albeit sleep away camp, an NBC show called “Camp Runamuck” that aired for just one season—1965-1966—and for just 26 episodes.
 
The show’s basic premise--which was very loosely based on some elements of Allan Sherman's "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah" hit song--was that a long-established boys’ camp run by a drill sergeant of a camp director was suddenly infiltrated by a girls’ camp that situated itself right across the lake from the boys’ camp.
 
The Interaction of the two camps was the focus of the comedy, and that not only was the interaction of the boys and girls in the two camps, but of the camp counselors, who often got into ridiculously funny situations between each other.
 
The stars of the show were classic second- and third-banana actors of the time period, and if you didn’t know their names, you certainly knew their faces from numerous TV and movie appearances.

 
Arch Johnson played the boys’ camp director, and this guy was probably on just about every show there was in the mid to late 1960s. Other male camp counselors included Dave Ketchum--of numerous commercials. movies and TV shows--Dave Madden—s few years before he became a somewhat big third-banana star on shows like “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” and in particular, “The Partridge Family—and Leonard Stone—who later was a semi-regular bad guy on the updated “Dragnet” TV series.
 
On the female counselors’ side was the chief counselor, played by Alice Nunn, Hermione Baddeley—later on “Maude”--and Nina Wayne.
 
And if you blink, you might miss some very young campers who went on to bigger and better things, including Maureen McCormick, who a few years later would be one of the kid stars of “The Brady Bunch.”
 
Anyway, as a kid, I found the show a must-see, and I remember watching the sitcom each and every week while it was on. I guess one of the draws was that being that the show was on during the fall and winter, it made me think of my upcoming time in camp during the summer, and I am suire that is what the producers—chief among them David Swift, the show’s creator—thought would be a big draw of the show for younger viewers, which it was directed at to begin with.
 
However, running up against “The Wild Wild West” and “The Flintstones” didn’t help the show, and I guess I was one of the few people who actually watched “Camp Runamuck,” because it was canceled after just one season.
 
Anyway, why do I bring all of this up more than 50 years after the fact?
 
Being semi-retired gives me the chance to do things that I wouldn’t normally have the time to do, and one day, I was searching through YouTube for one thing or another, and lo and behold, I found the first episode of “”Camp Runamuck” just sitting there waiting for me to watch it … and watch it I did.
 
It was the pilot episode, and it basically set the premise for the show, where the boys’ camp thought they had the full run of their area somewhere in the forest that they were in, but their world was changed forever when the girls’ camp set up shop just across the lake from them.
 
The acting is over the top, which is perfect for this type of show, which was almost like a cartoon brought to life.
 
And I remembered so much from the show that I thought I forgot—primarily the relationship between camp counselors played by Dave Madden and Nina Wayne.

 
Madden played the innocent camp counselor who liked girls but never had too many encounters with them, and Wayne played the curvaceous, sexy counselor from across the lake with maximum sex appeal no matter what she was doing.
 
I mean her name was “Caprice,” so she dripped sensuality in a G-rated kind of way.
 
Every time Madden saw Wayne, he would get frazzled and shake, with the sound effects to match.

 
When I saw the first scene of the interaction I just described, it brought the show back home to me. I mean, when the show was on, I was eight years old, and I probably didn’t fully understand what was going on, but the show all came back to me when I witnessed that scene for this first time in more than 50 years.
 
After watching the first episode and completely enjoying it as I did all those years ago, I searched YouTube some more, and lo and behold, all of the show’s episodes—the full run—are there for the taking.
 
If you want to watch the show yourself, the first episode can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAG03NhtycQ, and you can find the rest of the episodes pretty easily afterward.
 
Once I heard the camp-oriented theme song, I knew I was back in another place and another time, and when I saw that interaction between Madden and Wayne—the sister of Carol Wayne, by the way—I knew that I had hit a home run by actually finding this long-forgotten show.
 
And by the way, Nina Wayne, who fit the part she was playing to a “T,” like they say, is on Facebook, so if you want to interact with her, she can be found at https://www.facebook.com/nina.wayne.56. She is as nice as she can be on her site.
 
Seeing “Camp Runamuck” again after all these years really brought me back to a different time and place in my life … I could never have believed that I would be where I am today if you told me all those years ago about my future life, but whatever the case, it is nice to be able to find footnotes to your childhood like this, things you thought only you remembered but later found out that you are just one of many who remember things like this.
 
Now, my mission is to get through the entire series, and I know that I will laugh, laugh and laugh some more, making me think back to my own time in day camp.
 
Have a great weekend. I will be out of pocket on Monday—no, I am not going back to camp on that day--but I will speak to you again on Tuesday.

Rant #2,640: Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)

Today, April 22, is Earth Day.
 
This annual “celebration” has been going on for decades, since 1970, but how do you celebrate the day?
 
I guess I already celebrated Earth Day in my own way, as I took out the garbage this morning.
 
I did not recycle my water and soda and beer containers yet, and I don’t think I am going to do that today, but I do go to the recycling machines for my precious nickels about every other week.
 
I do remember the first Earth Day back in 1970. I remember exactly what I did, and I have to tell you that even then, I wondered exactly what one was supposed to do to celebrate the day.
 
I lived in South Jamaica, Queens, at the time, and a friend and I took the bus into downtown Jamaica to a very interesting book store that sold comic books of all types, including X-rated ones like “Fritz the Cat.”
 
We each bought a couple of comic books—no X-rated ones--and took the bus back home to read them and add them to our collections.
 
I mean, do you really think that I was going to go to a park and pick up garbage from the ground just because it was Earth Day?
 
Heck, I was 12 years old at the time, a few days away from turning 13. \
 
My bar mitzvah was just a few days away, so there was no way that I was going to pick up garbage.
 
I had way more important things on my mind at the time, and quite frankly, the same holds true today.
 
I took out my own family’s garbage, just as I used to do when I was a kid. Back then, when I lived in Rochdale Village, we had the incinerator chute on every floor, and occasionally, we got a show when we took out the garbage, as the incinerator was all fired up, and we dumped our garbage when the flames were shooting up, so we got something of a light show when we threw out our garbage.

Throwing out the garbage, both then and now, should be enough to check off the box about what I did to support the environment on Earth Day.
 
I remember back then, we were all learning a new word, ECOLOGY, and what that meant for our civilization and our planet.
 
We would soon learn another word—RECYCLING—and we have been trying to clean up our planet for the past how many years?
 
Where I live, we have to use our own bags when we shop, so not only do we have to wear a face covering, we also have to bring our own bags with us, which is a bit of a nuisance.
 
But we have been told that plastic bags, and even paper bags, clutter up the environment, do not break down easily, and are a pockmark on our ecological efforts.
 
Of course, this is because many of us don’t know how to discard these bags after we use them, and we leave them about like we leave empty beer cans, paper wrappers, and the like.
 
Now, we have to use these reusable bags which are a nuisance, and which some say hurt our own “human” ecology by festering germs, acting like a vinyl Petri dish of muck.
 
I mean, how many people actually wash their shopping bags after each use?
 
Not me, I can tell you that.
 
Some stores still give out the bags for free, and we can get them when we grocery shop if we want to be charged five cents per bag, but that is not something that I feel the need to do.
 
I go with the flow, and bring my own bags, and heck, they have the insignia of the bank where my wife works right on them, so I am proud to support the cause, whatever cause that is.
 
The fact of the matter is that Earth Day or no Earth Day, my allergies are killing me, and whether that has to do with pollution, the way the world has aged, the junk we still have flying all over the place, or something else really doesn’t matter.
 
I still can’t breathe, and it has nothing to do with anyone putting their knee on my throat. It has to do with my own personal biological makeup, and yes, my allergy shots have helped me immeasurably.
 
Come to think about it, way back on the first Earth Day, I was still about three years or so away from my first allergy shot, which I got when I was 15 years old and have been consistently getting each month since then.
 
And yes, I am better, thank you.
 
But way back in 1970, the study of allergies wasn’t as progressed as it is now. We knew that some people were allergic to some foods—another friend of mine was allergic to orange juice—but the study of allergies as it related to hay fever, pollen and other things was just in its infancy, so I suffered greatly back then on certain days.
 
Only a few years later had this study advanced to the point where using a simple test—it wasn’t really “simple,” per se, but the “staple gun” test was accurate—they could tell people exactly what they were allergic to, and yes, I was allergic to a lot of things in the air and in the environment.
 
So to sum everything up, what does Earth Day mean to me?
 
Honestly, not that much.
 
But I do take out the garbage, I do recycle my bottles and cans, and I do use my reusable grocery bags when I shop.
 
So even though I don’t put too much credence in the day, and I don’t honor it like perhaps it should be honored, I do do certain things that I wouldn’t have thought about doing more than 50 years ago when the first Earth Day dawned.
 
I don’t think I deserve a pat on the back for that; it just means that I have gone with the flow of the mission to clean up our planet not necessarily because I have gone out of my way to do so, but because that is the way it is now.
 
Again, in 1970, my upcoming bar mitzvah was my focus, not what wasn’t making the trash basket.
 
I was no “Phil D. Basket,” but I guess we all are now, to a certain degree. 

Rant #2,639: Again

Well, yesterday was some day, wasn’t it?
 
After handling several things I had to do for work in the morning, I ate lunch, and then as I always do, I checked my email to see if there was anything else in there that I needed to take care of.
 
There wasn’t, so I was able to turn on the TV and go in and out of my email the rest of the day to see if there was any work to be done.

And at about 11:30 a.m. or so, all hell broke loose on Long Island.
 
The very day that I wrote about the almost constant episodes of gun violence that we are currently experiencing, just hours after I typed my last word of yesterday’s Rant on the subject, the very gun violence that I was talking about happened right in my backyard, so to speak, on Long Island.
 
An employee of a local supermarket went to work, and for reasons not revealed just yet, decided to use his place of work for target practice.
 
As shoppers were in the supermarket, he went upstairs to the second floor of the establishment and opened fire on at least three people, killing one and hitting two others.
 
He somehow got out of the market and made his way back to one of his known residences, and after several hours, the police were able to nab him and put him where he belongs, hopefully for a long, long time.
 
The incident put the entire area in West Hempstead and close environs on total lockdown, because there was a time that no one had any clue where the shooter was, and you can’t have someone like this running around with schools and businesses right off the heavily traveled main thoroughfare known as Hempstead Turnpike.
 
I sat there riveted by the coverage of the shooting, in particular by News 12, the locally produced news service, that was there seemingly moments after the incident occurred and stayed with it, live, for the next several hours.
 
The service eventually dispatched several reporters to the scene, and they got some great footage, in particular of the police storming the building where the shooter was holed up in.
 
And the shooter … it is really a sad thing, to tell you the truth.
 
The guy has a record, he also had some past mental health problems, and when the reporters read off his background resume, you can just see that the store had given this guy a chance, a chance to put his troubled past behind him by giving him a job as a cart assistant, which basically means that he was moving shopping carts out of the parking lot and bringing them back to the store for shoppers to use.
 
And he paid the store back for its gratitude for him by shooting the store’s manager dead and two others met his bullets too.
 
Where he got the gun—a standard handgun—is another story, and I am sure that that will come out in the wash soon.
 
But while the incident was horrible, the coverage of it was spectacular, exactly what TV coverage of something like this should be, and what makes television, still, the greatest source of on-the-spot news that we have.
 
Anchor Tara Joyce led viewers through a myriad of information coming from numerous sources related to the incident, oftentimes listening with one ear to a witness while with the other ear, listening to producers and others directing her to the next segment of the event, while speaking as calmly as possible about what was going on while alerting viewers that their children in school might be on lockdown.
 
This was at-the-moment TV at its best, and when all the networks that reported on the incident allotted what they felt was ample time to it and went onto other things, News 12 stayed with it until its conclusion, when the man was apprehended.
 
It was great reporting, and I could not turn myself away from the screen during this entire coverage. It was that good.
 
And then, as this story unfolded, we learned that there was going to be a verdict in the George Floyd case, and the verdict came about two hours after the previous story had just about ended.
 
The cop who put his knee on Floyd was convicted on all counts, and I do think that it was the correct verdict, given all the evidence brought out at the trial.
 
The cop, or the ex-cop, used excessive force in keeping Floyd pinned to the ground, and I do believe the ex-cop got what he deserved.
 
I personally knew he would be convicted, but honestly, I did not think he would be convicted of all charges.
 
But when the verdict came back relatively quickly, I kind of knew what his fate was going to be, and I think he and his lawyers knew it too.
 
And as usual, the reaction was pretty much what I expected, too.
 
I put up on Facebook that while I agreed with the jury’s decision, I did not agree with the way Floyd was being portrayed by the media and several politicians, including the attorney general of Minnesota, who in a nationally televised news conference, characterized Floyd right after the verdict was rendered as pretty much a choir boy.
 
He was not anything of the kind, and if he didn’t out up some resistance to his arrest for trying to pass counterfeit bills, he would still be with us.
 
That being said, yes, he was a human being, and he didn’t deserve to die this way.
 
Well, when I put my feelings up on Facebook, I got the usual hateful treatment.
 
I was called a racist, I was told that I “needed Jesus in my life,” and I was called a few other things that I won’t go into here.
 
Again, I agreed with the verdict, but because I said that Floyd wasn’t a model citizen, I got raked over the coals.
 
Fine with me, as Facebook has a habit of bringing out the worst in people. We all know that, and its ugly head was reared again yesterday.
 
OK, I am a big boy, and I can take it.
 
So yesterday was quite a day on the local and national scene, a day where one could literally sit in front of the television for hours at a time and not waste their time for one minute.
 
Again, it shows the power of television, something I have known about since this once six year old kid sat for hours at a time in front of the television one November weekend to see how the assassination of President John. F. Kennedy played out.
 
Television is often labeled as a video garbage pail, and it often is just that.
 
But when you have days like yesterday, you see that the absolute power of the medium still exists, and can still be vital.
 
I have been a vocal opponent of how TV handles news today, but yesterday, in particular on the local level, it did its job.
 
That is what TV can be when the occasion calls for it, and I just wish that there were less occasions like this, and TV just did this as a matter or course. 

Rant #2,638: Bullet With Butterfly Wings

Welcome to Tuesday, April 20, the 110th day of the year.
 
For me, it is going to be the same old, same old, a day just like any other since I semi-retired.
 
Do some work, do a little shopping, make my son’s lunch for work, cook dinner, wait until my wife comes home from work, watch a little TV, and then go to sleep.
 
Nothing much else is happening.
 
But April 20 is one of those days that historically rings out as a somewhat special day on the calendar, and not for all the right reasons.
 
Just looking at the recent past, it is a day that will truly live in infamy.
 
It unfortunately is not a good day for many of us, simply because this day marks the 22nd anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre, where two young people killed 13 people and wounded 24 others in a gun rampage in the Colorado high school.
 
There was no rhyme nor reason for their senseless act, which included home-made bombs, one of which was found in the school’s cafeteria.
 
The two assailants—who were school outcasts and were reportedly targets of bullying—committed suicide.
 
This event rocked our nation to its core, because prior to this, schools were thought to be the true sanctuary of peacefulness, the one place young people could be where they didn’t have to worry and didn’t have to be afraid.
 
But things changed when this happened, and during the past 20-plus years, schools have become targets for numerous mentally deranged people to vent their frustrations at, and there have been several almost copycat events that I won’t go into here.
 
And, of course, we continue to suffer from such violence apart from schools, whether at the workplace, at the mall, or in our neighborhoods.
 
I have to tell you, this year, there seems to have been one mass shooting after another without stop.
 
I don’t know if the pandemic is fueling all of this rage, but we have had one such event after another, and I am going to say the latest was at that FedEx warehouse the other day, but I haven’t checked the news out yet, so there could have been other, more recent ones.
 
That is how bad it has gotten.
 
And yes, gun advocates, the problem is the proliferation of weapons on the street, their easy availability—most of the guns involved in these massacres are legally purchased—and their use by the mentally deranged.
 
I do not argue that we have a right to bear arms—we do, and if you feel the need to protect yourself and your family by legally purchasing a gun, that is your right, and it is also your problem.
 
But what of high-power artillery?
 
I do not understand why people need to have firearms that bear clips of 50 or even 100 rounds, and why people not only need one of these types of firearms, but they seemingly need more than one of these in their collections.
 
Those types of firearms should only be used for warfare, and not for personal protection, and these are the types of firearms that are prevalent in these massacres, because they can be shot off quickly, making the carnage quick.
 
Can someone please explain to me why anyone, any citizen, any one person needs such a firearm in their possession?
 
Again, I am not talking about a pistol. I am talking about multi-shot guns like Glocks and the like.
 
The problem with the pro-gun lobby is that they mix in a regular pistol with these types of guns, pretty much stating that the banning of ANY gun takes away their personal rights as American citizens.
 
Personally, a gun is something that I have no need to possess, no need to have a license for, no need to have in my home.
 
But that is me, and I do not agree that the banning of ALL guns is the way to stop gun violence.
 
You feel the need to have a gun, you get your license and do it legally, that is fine with me.
 
But possessing multi-shot artillery like the firearms that have been used in these massacres? There isn’t a reason in the world to own such a firearm and to have such artillery in your home.
 
NONE.
 
And it does not abridge anyone’s rights by banning them.
 
The FedEx shooter was a young, mentally deranged person who casually, and legally, was able to obtain such artillery from his local gun shop.
 
How could such a thing have happened?
 
Look, we already know that background checks are very lax, and just about anyone, in any mental state, can get a gun.
 
The interesting thing is that in this particular case, the person in question had had a history with police, had had a mental history that even his mother questioned about to authorities, and had already had a gun taken away from him by the police.
 
But he was able to somehow skirt all of this and purchase not just a gun, but firearms that could wipe out people in one fell swoop, which is exactly what happened.
 
And it should not have been allowed to happen.
 
The checks and balances were not there, not in place, and not strong enough to prevent his legal … again, I say LEGAL ... purchases.
 
Look, most of the people who own guns are good people, are mentally sound, and would never put themselves in such a situation where they were using these firearms to wipe out a swath of people.
 
But with lax firearms laws in this country, without a national firearms law or set of laws, there is laxity in the process.
 
And when you have the lax laws we have with the mentally ill in this country, occasionally the two will mix, and you have mentally deranged people bearing arms, which is not a good compatibility in any way, shape or form.
 
So for gun enthusiasts, nobody is taking away your right to bear arms by banning assault-type artillery from legal purchase.
 
You can still own all the pistols you want, or feel that you need.
 
But you do not need assault-type weapons in your arsenal.
 
If you feel that you do, then you must question yourself as to why you need these guns—and for that matter any guns—in your possession.
 
There is something deeper here than your rights as a citizen to bear arms if you feel the need to own artillery with clips of 50 or 100 or whatever.
 
To me, it is sickness, total sickness, but it will go on because not all the states in our union are on the same page related to the bearing of arms.
 
It is our right to bear arms, as it is our right to drive, but would you drive a late model car or a high-firepower tank if you had the opportunity?