Appropos of nothing

Two figures now figure more and more prominently in my life these days — Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln.

Mostly it's circumstance. Also, age.

If youth is wasted on the young, so is history. Now that I'm not young, history has grown richer and more rewarding. Maybe I have a more patient regard for mortality.

Mark Twain roamed, however briefly, the streets I roam every day. He wrote for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise newspaper, and talked the Sacramento Union into sending him to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) from whence he would send occasional features.

Twain had a thing or two to say about Sacramento in its youth, and I quote him when the occasion warrants, on tour of the Old Sacramento Underground.

He found lifting the city to protect it from flooding a foolish marvel. Of course, being Twain, he made it sound as if the city was lifting only the streets, but leaving the buildings where they are.

"Some people call it a priceless blessing, because children who fall out of second story windows now cannot break their necks as they formerly did," he wrote. "That this may be regarded in the light of a blessing is, of course, open to grave argument."

It's mostly funny to adults on tour. I'm not sure children and teenagers like it. Ah, youth!

Two key anniversaries came up last month. One that just hopped away was the annual Jumping Frog contest in Calaveras County, the so-called Gold Country. Twain brought that event into being by the force of words alone, buttressing a story he'd been told about a jumping frog contest during the Gold Rush. The short story catapulted Twain to fame.

Key to the story is covert tampering and corruption — even before FIFA! — a frog made to eat buckshot and so impede its ability to jump.

Which is why I drew this cartoon 25 years ago, thinking of the fun Twain might have had when someone wanted to enter an imported goliath frog from Africa to compete in the jumping frog contest.

Contest officials protested and forbade the imported frogs — only American bullfrogs would do.

Of course, there's no story in that. Twain knew. A strange frog, leaping and bounding above and beyond the pack — that's the punchline. Competitors would have demanded to know the secret. The imported-frog owner should have sneaked the frog in and asked forgiveness rather than permission.

Abraham Lincoln was assassinated 150 years ago last month. He never came to California, but I read lately he entertained notions of retiring here. He got so much love from the new state, and returned in kind. California's admission to the Union tipped the balance toward free states over slave states, the gold found was helping finance Union war efforts, and several of the key military minds — those who eventually helped turn the war in Union favor — came from California.

Lincoln's dream of one nation lay gleaming in the ground in Old Sacramento. Most people walk over it without notice. I try to stop my tour groups and regard it:

The western end of the great Transcontinental Railroad.

A coast-to-coast line of defense and supply, the railroad would truly make the states United. Lincoln was fascinated by the idea and spoke at length and depth with Granville Dodge, the visionary engineer behind the Union Pacific, being built westward from Omaha, Nebraska. Surely he would have buttonholed Theodore Judah, the brains behind the Central Pacific Railroad being built eastward from Sacramento to join the Union Pacific, had Judah not died young before his plans could take shape.

Political power from slave states fought for dismemberment of California, so that Southern California — or whatever that state would have been called — would be another slave state and restore the balance of free vs. slave. A railroad stretching coast to coast from the south would have strengthened that divisive plan.

It was all the more important that the Transcontinental Railroad trace a northerly route and help hold the country together. So important, perhaps, that the "Big Four" directors of the Central Pacific Railroad — Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins and Leland Stanford — took advantage of Lincoln's zeal and distractions over the Civil War to bamboozle the federal government into awarding far more in subsidies and real estate than the railroad should rightfully have gotten.

Twain probably liked that story. I imagine he would have enjoyed telling it.

People on tour often ask about ghosts. Though I let them down gently, I do feel Twain walking the shady sloping alleys of the old town, blowing smoke literally and figuratively. And I can see Lincoln in the day's heat, arms akimbo, near the Central Pacific depot, kicking at his dream, gleaming in the earth.

So nobly advanced

Seven score and eight years ago, the Union held, the great experiment in democracy carried on, turning on Abraham Lincoln's famous words to commemorate the national cemetery under construction at Gettysburg.

Then along came Willie Brown to turn democracy into a rigged game.

Not him alone, of course. You could say the system has been gamed from the get-go. Today U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, for example, leads his party in let's-filibuster-every-appointment-President-Obama-proposes-because-we-want-him-to-fail-at-every-step-and-serving-our-own-constituents-is-so-boring. Corrupt Democrats, reasoning rightly that their voters have forgotten they exist, take the under-the-table money and run, again, on their records.

Willie Brown, though, was the Grand Master.

He was Tip O'Neill "all politics is local" old school. He was good to San Francisco and The City loved him back, returning him many times to state office where his game board was set up to his deft maneuver.

The Assembly speaker learned from another Grand Master, former speaker and state treasurer Jesse Unruh who once said of lobbyists, "If you can't eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women and then vote against them, you have no business being up here."

Brown shook off almost every controversy that followed him. President Reagan had nothing on the Assembly speaker. Willie Brown's Teflon™© was weapons grade.

Accused by open-government activists of holding secret lawmaker meetings, Brown admitted to it and essentially told the public, "So what?" I took it a step further with this cartoon and put Brown in Lincoln's place; I figured this is a good week to post it. If he saw the cartoon at all, Brown might have smiled. Plink! See, not a scratch!

Only term limits could defeat Brown, who was the poster child for the term-limit initiative movement. Even then Brown bounced back as mayor of San Francisco, giving The City its very model of swagger and bravado and fedora-capped style. His nickname: Da Mayor.

The state has named the western span of the Bay Bridge — the older stretch that connects The City with Treasure Island — the Willie L. Brown Jr. Bridge.

Enough said.

Cheap parlor tricks

[Committed to memory, with the hope it would time-release into folds of my conscience … ahem]

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting place for those who died here, that that nation might live. This we may in all propriety do.

But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have hallowed it far above our poor power to add or detract.

The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, while it cannot forget what they did here.

Rather, it is for us, the living — we here: Be dedicated to the great task remaining before us. That from these honored dead, we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion. That we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain. That this nation shall have a new birth of freedom. And that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

[Ta da.]

President Lincoln presented these words 150 years ago today. Some variation of these words, anyway. At least six versions exist. I memorized one attributed to John George Nicolay, Lincoln's personal secretary, for no other reason than I could, as my own captain of history.

No one is to say, of course, which version Lincoln truly spoke. The punctuation is mine, and a few of the words may be off: A this for the, perhaps.

It struck me Nicolay might have the version that hews closest, the version last worked over by Lincoln's pen, with Nicolay as his last test audience; it struck me too, in my limited knowledge of the subject, that these words sound more like dialogue, a dictation of what was said rather than what others, including Lincoln, might have hoped to hear.

I memorized it just to do so, because the words were sweet and full but foreign, because in doing so I learned more about why Lincoln gathered and arranged these words to say, gathered and arranged them for certain detonations of meaning.

(Here is an interactive deconstruction of the words, with two history professors describing the world behind them. Try, if you may, to read Garry Wills' book Lincoln at Gettysburg, such a thorough analysis of that world. In my hillbilly logic I scoffed at how a book could be made from a speech some 300 words long. Wills' book is so full, it turned out, I had trouble learning from it, felt I was suddenly incapable of learning anything, suffocating under the torrent of scholarship.)

No one hears me recite Lincoln's words except our dog, who must put up with it from time to time on morning walks, if she's paying attention at all. If she was, she has heard it more frequently in the last few days. No one else is going to hear them, either, unless one day I'm in public somewhere and someone calls out, "Quick, does anybody know the Gettysburg Address?" Hasn't happened.

I'm nowhere near the first, of course, to point out that people do remember what he said there and have forgotten what they did there in Gettysburg — that Confederate forces had not expected to engage in this crossroads town but did so with superior tactics, until the Union somehow used topography and technique to drive Confederate forces back. More than 50,000 died in that battle, said to have turned the Civil War to the Union's favor, and kept the United States intact.

"Four score and seven years ago," strikes us strangely; maybe we don't know where it comes from, but we know the words. Gettysburg is a battle in a war long ago; the North won.

I also memorized some of the words Shakespeare breathed into Henry V as the king rallied his  outnumbered English soldiers before the Battle of Agincourt against France. I remembered them for all the wrong reasons, trying to impose a brand among the Boy Scout Troop when I was Scoutmaster. I wanted them to think of themselves as a band of brothers.

But you can't impose esprit de corps on a group; it must arise from those who share in the group. And if one does try to impose unity, for god's sake don't use words meant to stir men into grievous battle … unless you're going into battle. These kids were backpacking.

Still I tried. I even fashioned a convoluted Scoutmaster's Minute (supposed to be a short moment of reflection at the end of a Troop meeting, emphasis on minute; mine were nothing if not overwrought, and never shorter than three minutes; poor Scouts …) which concluded with these words:

This story shall the good man teach his son: And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by, from this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be remember'ed. We few — we happy few — we band of brothers. For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother. Be he ne'er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition. And gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon St. Crispin's Day.

I spoke it with all the drama I could dredge, fairly shouting into the night — we met outdoors in summer — "to the ending of the WORLD!" Some of the Scouts' eyes got big with surprise or shock that I dared be such a dork. What an embarrassment I was many times. Well meaning, but an embarrassment.

Still, the words remain with me.  The dog doesn't hear them as much.

I heard actor Peter O'Toole say once that he had memorized all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets, that they are his constant and comforting companion. As a Gold Rush tour guide I have memorized spiels, even lengthy ones of my own devising, and quote from Mark Twain — but those feats are absolutely nothing compared to the work of actors I know, who made the majority of the first corps of tour guides I belonged to. When I can I go to their plays, amazed at what they have fit into their heads and hearts, spilling it onto the stage.

People I know from one and two generations back seem as children to have learned many passages from memory — The Song of Hiawatha, say, or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The practice escaped my generation, or I was taking experimental history and English classes when others were getting the basics and the classics.

I recommend it, though. Memorize something; let your brain go through the try-and-fail-and-try-again process of committing a lengthy stretch of words to memory. Give your brain something extra to do. As names of public figures more and more slip my memory even as I see their faces — as I enter and exit rooms more than once without remembering what I was to do there — I know it couldn't hurt me.

Maybe the words will trickle into your heart and be your constant and comforting companion.

My Medici, Part IV: Is this the end?

Little-known fact: The tail of an evolving pink dog will eventually curl downward as it reaches the zenith
of evolutionary development. A wrap-around for a promotional coffee

Over several happy years, Greg Archer posed many promotional problems for me to help solve when he owned The Rest Stop, a Sacramento bicycle accessories store.

He still poses fun problems as owner of Archer Bicycle Repair.

In addition to  promotional postcards, a bicycling cap and racing jerseys, Archer dreamed up a bunch of ads and promotional possibilities. Here are some of the rest.

"Nothing compares with the simple pleasure of a bike ride," said John F. Kennedy, in the barely legible type along
the crest of the hill. Why did he say it? I don't know. It's not world peace or nuclear winter, but it works here.
For a mug that didn't get made.

"I've got an idea," Greg would say over the phone, and a new adventure would commence, usually starring the pink dog.

Greg was building the identity of the store he inherited when he bought it, and establish it as the go-to source for, as he said it, everything for bicyclists but the bike. It was serious business run unseriously; customers could count on staffers' time for answers or just some tangentially bike-related conversation.

The list of ideas exceeded Greg's ability to produce it. Coffee mugs and a water bottle hit the shelves next to the jerseys and cap.

Ads frequented the neighborhood publications.

A new fiery pink sign even hung above the store door.

But the official flags never flew. And the beers remain unbrewed. Pity.

Rest Stop Bohemian is my favorite … this is a spec sheet for Greg Archer, with internal notes.

Made into an embossing stamp (below), it validated The Rest Stop gift buck.
In what I'm sure is the worst Latin translation possible, it says, "My dog ate it."