time * place * soul

By Moshe Parelman 1.           Hank Stram        Hank Stram coached the Chiefs from the inception of the American Football League in 1960 until 1974. In that time he produced three championships and one Super Bowl victory. Stram never fit the profile of the NFL coach. He didn’t have a southern accent; he didn’t wear a hat; he wasn’t a tough guy. He was more the genius, the football visionary, or as he called himself in a famous mic’d up performance while coaching the Chiefs in Super Bowl IV, “The Mentor.”        In seventh grade I was in the same Unified Studies class as Hank Stram’s son, Gary. (Unified Studies was a 1970s liberal approach to education involving the merger of social studies and English in a two-hour block with the same teacher in the same classroom.) Gary was smitten with Marn Jensen, who I knew from grade school. Marn’s family came to town when we were in the fifth grade. All the guys went gaga ...

1.      All the President’s Men (1974) by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein All the President’s Men , more than any other book, captures the romance of Watergate: good vs. evil, the dogged hunt for the truth; figures in the shadows; coded messages; two neophytes (one vaguely resembling Robert Redford, the other looking a little like Dustin Hoffman) rousing the dangerous, secretive organization. One of the first books written in the style of the New Journalism, which combines non-fiction with the story-telling techniques of fiction, All the President’s Men remains in our memory because it was written to (and because it was made into a movie). Woodward’s and Bernstein’s book has become a fable, an actual legend, stirring in our unconscious. Who can recite the contents of any of the three articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon approved by the House Judiciary Committee? But if I said, “Deep Throat would be a cool person to hang out with, but I would...

The Boxer (and the Writer) November, 1974 Someone, I believe it was Steve Imber, began roasting a dinner roll over the candle at the center of the table. Others took up the challenge, jabbing their forks into rolls and holding them over the single flame. Before the roll experiment, we sat awkwardly, six boys in sports coats and slacks who had nothing in common except being invited there by me. Now a bit of mischief united us. Suddenly the volume was turned up on my bar mitzvah dinner. While the adults sat eating dessert and drinking coffee, we snuck away and descended on the site of that bar mitzvah celebration, Kansas City’s new Alameda Plaza Hotel. Steve Imber led the way again. With the same enterprise it took to produce the roasted dinner roll, Steve waded into the down escalator and began running up. Everyone followed. A long period of backward escalator riding ensued. We we’re running down the up escalator when Mark Pelofsky pointed him out loitering on the bottom floo...

I’m watching my favorite basketball player, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, on TV lope up the court, his long arms dangling on either side of him, his face impassive. Setting up to the left of the basket, he takes a pass and shoots his patented “sky” hook shot: thrusting off his left foot, his body rises above the court, torso twisting right, right arm following in an arc. As his arm reaches the top of its semicircular path, above his seven-foot-two-inch frame, the ball gently rolls off his fingertips – almost more magic trick than athletic feat. After the game, I go outside and shoot sky hooks at the basket nailed to the roof above the garage. I’m careful to execute each sky hook exactly as Kareem does, even though it’s bordering on the preposterous for a five-foot-something 12-year-old to be attempting a shot designed to maximize the height advantage of a man more than seven feet tall – even if I am tall for my age. To mimic the sky hook, I record the physical Kareem in my memory and my mu...

On a snow-covered Sunday morning in February I sloshed through suburban Kansas City in my family’s rusting, forest green Bel Air with my friend Tom. Fifty white boxes stuffed with bagels, lox and cream cheese were stacked on the back seat. The night before I had stayed up all night with my B’nai B’rith Youth Organization chapter preparing the prepaid packages for delivery to Jewish families throughout Kansas City, the group’s annual fundraiser. I drove through the winding streets of a Leawood, Kan., subdivision clinging to the steering wheel, exhausted. Tom, who was Catholic, sat beside me munching on leftover, unclaimed Lender’s bagels. The Chevy Bel Air, the first car my dad had purchased new, in 1966, had by 1978 known prouder times. Rust spotted the body and covered the roof; the front seat was marred by gaping holes, which my father had concealed with prickly seat covers. The trunk was inexplicably sealed shut (Tom said that missing Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa was buried...