Insight: Yard Sale Confessional

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

I have a confession to make. For many years I avoided going to yard sales, garage sales, estate sales, thrift stores or flea markets because I saw no purpose in it and didn’t understand why anyone would want to accumulate more of someone else’s junk or castoffs. But was I ever wrong.

Slightly more than 20 years ago, my wife encouraged me to drive her to a community wide garage sale in Florida and in looking over a table, I discovered a perfectly good wristwatch priced at just $2. Having $5 cash on me at the time, I paid for the watch and used the $3 change at the next house we stopped at to purchase complete sets of 1988 and 1989 baseball cards which were priced at $1.50 each.

When the weather was nice, visiting yard sales became a favorite Saturday morning activity for us. There were some things we could afford, and some we passed on. Not having small children, I avoided any neighborhood sales with piles of baby clothes or toys stacked in the driveway. My wife being an avid reader, she always stopped at sales that featured boxes of books. I preferred visiting ones with practical things I could use for our home, such lawn furniture, shovels or hedge trimmers.

And best of all, many of these used items up for sale came without a hefty retail price tag.

Once when we told my mother that we were spending a Saturday morning driving around looking for garage sales, she shook her head and gave me a quizzical look.

“I don’t understand why you would want to go rummaging through some else’s used underwear,” she told me. “I wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near one of those places.”

She didn’t know it at the time, but the chair she was sitting in at our home when she said that came straight from a yard sale. So were the napkins and glasses at the dinner table we ate at.

Through the years my wife accumulated an enormous selection of like-new children’s books for her classroom by visiting yard sales. Some of the books were priced at a fraction of what they would cost if purchased at a store.

Many pieces of furniture in our home have been rescued from a yard sale or a thrift shop, repainted and repurposed to fit our décor. We’ve found bookcases, several wardrobe cabinets, a kitchen clock, a bicycle, an antique soup tureen, a dresser and a like-new microwave oven that way.

For years I would buy most of my clothing at a department store and pay full price. But after seeing a generous selection of gently used pants and shirts and jackets at a thrift store, my thinking changed. I still buy some new clothes as needed but if I can find pants in great condition at a thrift store for $4 that fit me well, I’d much rather do that than pay $48 for new ones.

I can go through my closet right now and find several winter coats, five or six sweaters, some dress shirts and pairs of pants that came from a yard sale or a thrift shop.

Our beloved Scrabble game that swivels came from a garage sale. So did a pink serving dish in our cupboard that resembles one my wife’s grandmother had when she was a child.

Yard sales and garage sales have also been a way for us to get out of the house and to do something together on weekends. I’ve found it’s also an excellent way to meet people who live in our community and to learn more about streets and the geography of where we live.

Now that we have grandchildren, my wife is always on the outlook for inexpensive clothes for them at these local sales. Sometimes a sale at a local church will include homemade baked goods.

This summer at a church sale near our home I found a huge selection of record albums priced at $1 each with many of them still in the original retail shrink wrap. At a flea market nearby, I purchased a DVD set of Season 3 of the old television series “The Fugitive” for just $3.

The exciting thing about visiting a yard sale or a garage sale or an estate sale is that you never know what you will find there or what kind of deal you can make. Sometimes near the end of the sale, items will be greatly reduced in price just to get rid of them. Or you can offer what you can afford and many times, your offer will be accepted.

After the sales are over, sometimes leftovers will be set at the end of the driveway in boxes for free to anyone who wants them. The same thing happens when people are moving and can’t take everything. My wife and I just found a sitting room chair in perfect shape from neighbors who were moving while we were out walking our dog, and it had a free sign on it.

I’ll never know why I never went to a yard sale when I was younger, but I confess that I’m hooked on it now. <

Andy Young: Humiliation with a capital B

By Andy Young

I’ve never earned a paycheck as a butcher, baker, sous chef, dietician or short order cook. Consequently, I have no special knowledge about nutrition, not to mention any professional experience preparing, cooking, presenting or serving food. In retrospect, perhaps I should have kept that in mind before opening my mouth some years ago when I heard someone blabbing about a certain edible item.

I had joined a group of friends and acquaintances at a local sports bar. One of the latter, a serial center-of-attention-craver who loved eating nearly as much as he did boasting about himself and embellishing his supposed myriad accomplishments, was raving about some “Buffalo wings” he was consuming. I tried listening respectfully to his tiresome discourse, occasionally murmuring in faux agreement and even nodding when it seemed appropriate. But when it appeared he wasn’t planning on stopping, I decided enough was enough.

After checking to make sure it wasn’t April Fools’ Day, I decided to shut down our verbose, attention-hogging pal by bringing up a verifiable fact that would mercifully end emphatically conclude his ongoing harangue.

Trying (though not terribly hard) not to seem smug or condescending, I blurted, “Buffalos don’t have wings, ____________!” (I’ll leave the term I addressed him with to the imagination, since some might consider it inappropriate for inclusion in a family publication.)

Momentarily flustered by my interruption, the speaker paused, presumably staggered by the superbly timed zinger I had just launched his way. That self-important braggart had been holding court for what I, and presumably everyone else, felt was far too long. Now everyone was staring at me. Suddenly I had become the center of attention.

Full disclosure: I’ll admit that for the briefest fraction of a second, I found myself bathing in approval, enjoying what I assumed were the appreciative and admiring stares of my grateful peers.

But the silence my clever quip had evoked continued for what seemed a bit too long. (Looking back, maybe everyone there was checking to make sure it wasn’t April Fools’ Day.) Then I noticed the gazes of my companions morphing from admiration to incredulous. It was apparent I had committed some significant faux pas.

Panic set in, followed by full-blown paranoia. Had I forgotten to zip my fly on my return from the men’s room? Was there something unsightly hanging out of one of my nostrils? Had I inadvertently worn a pink shirt to an establishment where all 15 TV sets were tuned to football games, truck pulls, or professional wrestling?

My mistake became obvious when the blowhard I thought I had shut down triumphantly retorted, “They’re called Buffalo wings because they were invented in Buffalo, New York, ______________.” Irony of ironies, he had expertly employed the ultimate weapon to humiliate me: the very same derogatory term I had used on him just seconds earlier. The difference: he had used it far more accurately.

I spent the rest of the evening brooding silently, responding only when one of my now all-too-jovial chums referred to me with one of several new nicknames, including “Buffalo Boy,” Buffalo Bill,” and, most insultingly, “Buffalo Chip.”

Fate can be awfully cruel sometimes. If that big-mouthed egotist in our group had only mentioned any other food that began with B, I’d never have suffered through that horrible night of humiliation. Why couldn’t he have been holding forth about beans, blueberries, butter, bass, baby back ribs, bacon, bagels, burritos, baklava, beer, bologna, bread, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, bok choy, Baked Alaska, beets, bananas, burgers, buns, beef stew, or even Vitamin B?

Hmmmmm.

I wonder if Vitamin B was named after Buffalo.

Correction: In last week’s column I incorrectly stated that no one born in the 1950s has ever been president or vice-president of the United States.. Thankfully though, several alert readers pointed out the inaccuracy, noting that Mike Pence, who was vice-president from 2017 to 2021, was born on June 7, 1959. The error was mine. However, in my defense, Mr. Pence is pretty easy to forget. <

Insight: A Matter of Character

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

If you close your eyes and think about it, I am confident that you can come up with at least several influential people who contributed in a significant and positive way in your life through their guidance or example.

Giles Hobin taught music at
Rush-Henrietta High School
for many years and was an
inspiration for many students.
COURTESY PHOTO 

Whether it’s a parent, a teacher, a coach or a mentor, we all have experienced a person who we can turn to for advice in making decisions and point out the differences between right and wrong when we are young. These situations leave an indelible imprint upon us which can become our moral compass when we eventually become adults.

This is called character, and that word comes from a Greek term meaning “I engrave.” Our own character is something that is “etched into” us by the experiences that we go through in our lives. Character development continues throughout our lifetime and in my opinion, each day opportunities arise to do something to further build our character into something that others can try to emulate.

Here are three influential people who helped shape my life in a positive way.

I first met Giles Hobin when I was a sophomore in high school. He was a music teacher at the school I attended in Henrietta, New York and was unusual to me for a distinct reason. On the first day of chorus class, he didn’t come across as authoritarian, rather, he made jokes and made his students feel comfortable and accepted. At the age of 14, Giles Hobin treated me unlike any adult had ever done before. He didn’t talk down to me, was always upbeat and his love for music was contagious.

His class met three times during the week, and I eagerly looked forward to each session. There was always a great exchange of ideas and viewpoints in his classroom, and I was astounded to learn that although he was 50 years old, he liked to listen to the same music I did. Most of all, I came to value his positive outlook on life, and the fact that in every interaction I had with him, he treated me as an adult and not just another hopeless teen searching for a future.

Some 56 years later, I am still friends with other many students in that class and I’m confident that all of them will tell you the exact same thing – that Giles Hobin was the best teacher they ever had and a major positive influence upon their life.

Tech Sergeant Bill Crosland was an imposing authority figure for me when I served in the U.S. Air Force. He had served in the Air Force during wars in Korea and Vietnam and was now in charge of the department I had been assigned to in 1977. He was a strict and no-nonsense supervisor who had grown up on a farm in Georgia and had a pronounced Southern drawl when speaking.

Being rather headstrong and new to the military, I ended up in his office many times for being overheard complaining about certain jobs I was given, such as sweeping and mopping floors or picking up litter on our unit’s grounds. To my genuine surprise, instead of yelling at me or admonishing me for my comments, Crosland took the time as a supervisor to explain to me why each of those unsavory tasks were important and fit into our unit’s overall mission.

Later when I became a supervisor myself, I came to appreciate Crosland’s approach and have used the same technique myself when I’ve had to counsel employees. He always treated people with respect and took the time to make sure that I knew that nothing I was sitting in his office for was personal. He also fiercely defended the people he supervised, and in my case, that meant a lot to have someone in a position of authority in my corner responding to the unit’s First Sergeant or commanding officer.

Dr. Harry Lancaster was my first journalism teacher in college in 1971 and had started writing for newspapers in the 1930s. He offered me strong advice about what readers expected from newspaper articles, suggesting that anything beyond the “5 Ws” – Who, What, When, Where, Why – was non-objective. He offered strong criticism of my writing and day by day in his Journalism 101 class, I could see my own improvement in storytelling.

But what placed Lancaster on my list here was his dogged insistence to me that journalists are chroniclers of life and must remain impartial always. He detested grandstanding journalists tooting their own horn or marketing themselves. He disliked journalists who inserted themselves into stories or who offered opinions supporting one side or the other about stories they covered.

Lancaster believed great articles reported truthfully about the human condition and a situation’s lasting implications for the future. He considered it to be a privilege to tell the stories of others. I often recalled him telling me that when I was covering a sporting event during my career and thinking I would have paid the newspaper I was working for to watch that game and then write about what happened.

Each of these individuals helped make me who I am today, and the world sorely needs more of them. <

Andy Young: The forgotten decade

By Andy Young

Ordinarily people like me (English-speaking heterosexual white males who don’t practice a non-Christian religion) should be the last Americans to complain about prejudice.

That established, I’m no crackpot conspiracy theorist, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent one of my demographics is quietly being subjected to the worst type of discrimination.

It’s clear my age-alike peers and I are being victimized by an insidious plot. But who (or what) is behind it? The government? The Illuminati? The Russians? The Dallas Cowboys? Whoever they are, their plan has been diabolically effective.

In elementary school we were told that anyone could grow up to be America’s president. George Washington and John Adams, both of whom were born in the 1730s, were proof of that.

As decades elapsed, a wide variety of straight white males (and occasionally their families) took up residence in the White House, including Thomas Jefferson, who was born in the 1740s; James Madison and James Monroe (1750s). and John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson (1760s). William Henry Harrison represented the 1770s, Martin Van Buren and Zachary Taylor the 1780s, and John Tyler, James Polk, and James Buchanan the 1790s. Millard Fillmore (1800) was technically born in the 18th century as well, but for this essay a given year’s first two digits are the only significant ones.

The 19th century’s initial decade saw the births of Andrew Johnson (1808) and Abraham Lincoln (1809), confirming what should have been obvious: the inherent fairness of having at least one American commander-in-chief born every decade. But then came a presidential-birth-free ten-year stretch, the eighteen-teens. Thankfully people born between 1810 and 1819 probably weren’t aware of the historical injustice they’d suffered, given the nation’s limited history at the time. But fairness returned with the 1820s (Ulysses Grant and Rutherford Hayes), and at least one future American chief executive was born in the 1830s (James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland), 1840s (William McKinley), 1850s (Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson), 1860s (Warren Harding), 1870s (Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover), 1880s (Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman). 1890s (Dwight Eisenhower), and nineteen-aughts (Lyndon Johnson).

The nineteen-teens were teeming with future presidents (Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, and John F. Kennedy), and Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush were both born in 1924. The 1930s got skipped, but understandably, given the domestic (Great Depression) and foreign (rise of Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan) situations during that particular decade. Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, Trump and Biden were all born in the 1940s, and a youthful (during his presidency) Barack Obama was born in the 1960s.

But speaking for 1950s natives everywhere, where’s our president?

It looks increasingly likely that when it comes to presidential births, the 1950s are destined to be snubbed, since neither Donald Trump (1946) nor Kamala Harris (1964) qualifies.
 
The youngest 1950s natives will be 69 years old in 2028, when the leading presidential hopefuls will likely include Ron DeSantis (born 1978), Corey Booker (1969), Nikki Haley (1972), Pete Buttigieg (1982), Ted Cruz (1970), Bernie Sanders (1941), Gretchen Whitmer (1971), and J. D. Vance (1984).

At least the eighteen-teens (John Fremont in 1856) and the 1930’s (Michael Dukakis in 1988) each got a major party presidential candidate. Not only has no 1950s native ever gotten the Republican or Democratic nomination, the only 1950s-born vice-president nominee was John Edwards, a man best remembered for cheating on his cancer-stricken wife. Can’t our decade do better than that?

To my fellow 1950s natives, we’ve been hornswoggled. That fairy tale that claimed anybody can grow up to be president? Balderdash.

None of us ever had a chance.

Curse you, Dallas Cowboys! <

Insight: Humility doesn’t need to be noticed

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

I recently read a magazine article which drew distinctions between a sense of humility and having excessive pride in an achievement that you’ve accomplished.

The article’s author mentions that humility is a character trait of self-esteem and suggests that lofty achievements do not require you to brag or gloat about them, while pride is a personal quality of recognizing that you’ve personally done something significant and are happy about it.

In the article, it cited a survey saying that most Americans found that humility was not a character trait that translated to life satisfaction and not something sought in a leader, a great athlete or a movie star. Results of the survey indicated that Americans look at our culture as a competition where only the best person lands the job, wins the Olympic medal, is elected to a government position, or can afford the purchase of an $8 million home.

The author related that in the day and age that we live in, it’s tough to understand the need for humility in our society and how we all deal with each other every day.

This made me think of some of the people I have admired in my lifetime, and what made them special to me.

I’ll start with my father, who was a World War II veteran. He never wanted to be a soldier, in high school he had his mind set on becoming a mechanical engineer and designing things to make people’s lives better. Yet on his 18th birthday in 1943, his draft notice from the U.S. Army arrived in the mail.

Trained for the infantry, he was assigned to a combat unit bound for Libya and Morocco and then to an outfit participating in the liberation of Anzio, Italy from the Germans. During that battle, a vital communications line at a forward outpost had been severed, so a volunteer was sought to see what had happened to it and to restore it. When that volunteer didn’t come back, a second volunteer was sought. Again, hours passed, and it was determined that a third volunteer was needed to find out what had happened and repair the broken communications line.

That third volunteer was my father. He followed the line all the way to the outskirts of a small village where he saw the bodies of the two volunteers from his unit laying on the ground by the broken line. He determined that they were dead and worked quickly to fix the broken communications line. Suddenly, he heard a gunshot and felt pain in his back. A German sniper in a church bell tower had shot him and my father lay still and played dead hoping that when darkness fell in a few hours, he could get to safety.

Within 15 minutes, my father noticed the German sniper walking toward him. He bent over and started going through the pockets of the other two dead volunteers from my father’s unit. In great pain and bleeding profusely, my father raised his rifle and shot the sniper. He crawled to the communications line and restored it to operational status. Medics transported my father for treatment and he survived. Not long after, he was awarded the Bronze Star medal for bravery and heroism for his actions in combat.

Years later when I asked him about his time in the U.S. Army, he told me it was “nothing special.” He told me about traveling across the Atlantic Ocean on a troop ship and what the American encampments were like in Libya, but he left out the combat details of his military service. I found after his death about the specifics from paperwork he had stashed away in his closet.

I attribute his not wanting to talk about his experiences in combat to humility. He grew up during the Great Depression and coming from a family of eight kids, he had set a goal to be the first in his family to graduate from college and to own a home. The way he viewed it, his military experiences were necessary to preserve our American way of life and protect everyone’s future freedom to pursue our goals in life.

Many of the military veterans I’ve had the privilege to meet and interview in my journalism career have similar stories. It’s like they have compartmentalized their combat experiences, put them in the rearview mirror and hit the gas pedal to move forward. They have not forgotten seeing good friends and colleagues lose their lives but choose to live in the present day with humility, rather than relive the horrors of war.

The same thing can be said of Hall of Fame National Football League and Major League Baseball players that I’ve interviewed through the years. For the most part they are nostalgic about their achievements, but do not brag or gloat about them. As one college basketball player I interviewed once told me, his greatest thrill was in making the college team when only a select few players are chosen to compete at that level.

To me, genuine humility is something we all should strive for. It’s a willingness to forego pretense and accept that we are all human deep down inside.

Andy Young: King of the wordsmiths

By Andy Young

Until recently I didn’t realize that “assesses” is, with eight letters, the longest English word that contains just a single consonant, albeit one that appears four times. Nor was I aware that “bookkeeper” is the only common word in the English language with three consecutive pairs of double letters.

But I know it now, thanks to Richard Lederer, who has authored more than 50 books on the English language. One of them, “Word Circus,” contains not only the fascinating information above, but numerous essays on (and examples of) anagrams, puns, oxymorons, and various other forms of wordplay.

There’s plenty more delightful word trivia where that came from. For instance, the two longest words whose letters all appear in alphabetical order are “billowy” and “beefily.” Conversely, “sponged” and “wronged” are the two longest words with all their letters in reverse alphabetical order.

The shortest word containing all five vowels in alphabetical sequence is “facetious,” while the shortest one containing each of the five vowels in reverse order, with each appearing only once, is “unnoticeably.”

“Redivider” is the longest palindromic word in the English language.

“Overstuffed” and “understudy” each contain four consecutive letters (RSTU) in alphabetical order.

Lederer isn’t just a wordsmith; he’s a lettersmith as well. Who else would point out that H, I, O, and X are the only letters that look the same when seen in a mirror…even when they’re being viewed upside down!

Fans of presidential anagrams will enjoy some of Lederer’s efforts in that area, including: “He did view the war doings” (Dwight David Eisenhower); “Loved horse; tree, too” (Theodore Roosevelt); A rare, calm jester (James Earl Carter); and “Insane Anglo warlord” (Ronald Wilson Reagan).

Looking to stump your friends in a game of Hangman? Try using crypt, nymph, rhythm or their plurals, since none contains an A, E, I, O, or U.

In another of his books, “Crazy English,” Lederer rhapsodizes about lengthy words like “inappropriateness,”a seventeen-letter noun, “incomprehensibility,” which is two letters longer, and the 28-letter “antidisestablishmentarianism.” The definitions of the first two words cited here are self-evident. The third, unsurprisingly, means: “A doctrine against the dissolution of the establishment.” This brings to mind a three-letter word which, when spelled backward, is the title of a Paul Newman movie: duh!

Try as I might, I cannot choose my favorite Richard Lederer bon mot. Think it’s easy? Good luck selecting the best of this tiny sampling of his gems.

“Writing is a way to capture fleeting thoughts and immortalize them on paper.”

“Reading is like traveling through time and space without leaving your chair.”

“Language is a playground, and grammar is the rulebook.”

“Words have the power to hurt, heal, inspire, and transform.”

“The more words you know, the more ideas you can express.”

“Language is a living organism that evolves and adapts over time.”

“It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.”

“Language is a dance – a delicate balance of rhythm, melody, and meaning.”

“The secret to good writing is rewriting.”

“Language is the foundation of civilization. It is the glue that holds a people together.”

It’s hard to ascertain which English language writer has penned the greatest number of published words. Some have speculated it’s William Shakespeare. Others point to Agatha Christie, whose books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in other languages, or L. Ron Hubbard, who was credited with 1084 published works. But I think that when it comes to writing words about words, Richard Lederer has easily outdone them all.

Now if only I can find a bookkeeper who assesses such things to confirm it. <

Insight: Class is in session

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Teachers are the heart and soul of the American educational system, but it took me marrying one to fully appreciate all they do for us.

Here are a few examples of things that I have observed in the 20 years I have been married to a grade-school teacher:

At the elementary school she taught at in Florida when we first met, she had 22 students in her class. The school had a copy machine exclusively for teachers but to hold down expenses, it would limit teachers to 10 copies made per day. If my wife had to give a test that day, she’d have to plan for it three days ahead based upon her daily copy limitation.

The same thing applied for student handouts or anything else needing to be copied, therefore, to create more flexibility, some teachers would have to negotiate with other teachers who were not making copies that school day. More often it resulted in teachers purchasing a copier for their homes and meant the teacher paid the additional expense of buying copier ink, paper and the copier itself.

Weekends were supposed to be days off for teachers, but a good portion of that is spent grading a mountain of papers or preparing lesson plans for the coming week. Contrary to what I thought previously, most teachers don’t just stand before their students and wing it, they have a plan for everything they want to instruct and developing those plans takes hours of work.

Record-keeping for teachers is also time-consuming. It used to be grades were entered into a teacher’s notebook, but these days grades are kept digitally and navigating that process is not always easy. One year, while adjusting to a new record-keeping software system, all the additional comments my wife entered for student report cards were published twice for some inexplicable reason. The double comments were flagged by the school principal and all her report cards had to be redone at the last minute before being sent home with the students.

One year my wife was assigned to a classroom without a bathroom. Her students had to leave the classroom and walk several doors down to use the restroom. On the first day students had returned to school after two weeks off for the Christmas holidays, a student asked if he could use the restroom, and my wife allowed him to. She asked him to return to the classroom as soon as he was done. It happened to be the lunch period for some other classes at the school and after a few minutes had elapsed, the principal showed up at the classroom door with the student who had left for the restroom.

It seems the student had entered an unlocked classroom of students who were gone for lunch, and he was caught going through the purse of the teacher in that classroom. When asked, he said he was told his teacher wanted to wish the teacher whose purse he was rifling through a “Happy New Year.” That student wasn’t allowed to leave for the restroom unaccompanied again that school year, giving plenty of work to an ed tech assigned to my wife’s classroom.

No matter how hard she tried to help him, that student’s grades never improved and by the end of the school year, he failed to meet the minimum standards to advance to the next grade. My wife recommended to his mother that having him repeat that grade might give him a better grasp of reading and math. However, the student’s mother chose not to hold him back and instead pulled him out of public school and entered him in the next grade at a nearby charter school.

One story that left me scratching my head was about a reading coach at the school. This woman had been a classroom teacher at one time but over the years had been promoted to a position overseeing reading activities and lessons at the school. To help her, the school district gave her volumes of books and instructional materials to share with the teachers to help them boost student reading.

But the reading coach refused to share any of the books with the teachers. She insisted the best way to instruct reading was to read to students attending the school. To get her to visit their classrooms, teachers had to make an appointment and when she was available, she would come in and read to students.

During another school year, my wife was assigned a student who was represented by an attorney. That same class had a defiant student who refused to do his assignment. When my wife asked him to try, he said, “No.” When asked again, he said, “What am I speaking Spanish? I said no.”

My wife’s teaching career included many moments of triumph and success for her students and recently a student she taught in the 1990s reached out to thank her for inspiring her. That student is now a psychologist in Ohio. Many of my wife’s past students are now parents of their own with kids in school themselves.

Teaching is a noble profession that shapes the future, and in my opinion is greatly unappreciated. <