time * place * soul

By Moshe Parelman     Jimmy Carter, 1976               Tom Long and I were standing by the curb outside his house. He wanted to show me something. On the street someone had written with red spray paint, “Humphrey Sucks.” I wondered who would have done such a thing. Living as we were in highly Republican Johnson County, a collection of upscale Kansas City  suburbs , there were certainly a lot of suspects. Then I noticed a hint of a smile starting to form at the corner of Tom’s mouth. How could I have been so gullible? Tom, of course, had written it himself.             Hubert Humphrey was a favorite politician of my family. Humphrey was a kind of Jewish heirloom. In fact, earlier that year, my parents had asked my Ouija board who would win the presidential election in 1976. Wonder of wonders, the Ouija board spelled out “Humphrey.” What the Ouija...

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...