Insight: Looking back on an indelible friendship

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

It’s been mentioned that if you embrace the unfamiliar it can often lead to unexpected friendships.

I first met Ray Clifford in September 1971 as a freshman attending New Mexico Highlands University. I was about to turn 18 and he was five years older and 23, having served as a military policeman on a patrol boat on the Mekong River during the Vietnam War.

Ray Clifford, back row fifth from right, and Ed Pierce,
front row fourth from right, were members of the same
college fraternity in 1971. COURTESY PHOTO  

Clifford was 6 feet tall and weighed 240 pounds while I was 5 feet 6 and 130 pounds. I was in school to earn a degree and launch a career, while he was there for beer, parties, women, good times and certainly not academics.

My tuition was paid for by student loans and his was covered courtesy of the GI Bill from his service in the U.S. military. I was from Rochester, New York and he was from Breezy Point, New York on Long Island.

Somehow, both of us ended up in the same fraternity pledge class and were living in the same fraternity house off campus. After getting to know Ray Clifford for a few weeks, I determined that something was unusual about him, especially when he requested a room to live in the basement.

His ambition was to become a police officer or detective in New York City, but I sensed that his temperament wasn’t a great fit for that. He was quick to anger and often exhibited poor judgement. He drove recklessly when borrowing another fraternity member’s car and he would carry a bottle of peach schnapps in his coat to take sips in class when the professor wasn’t looking.

It just didn’t seem like he was all there at times, and I can cite examples of his questionable actions.

Once when I was carrying a laundry basket down the cellar stairs filled with dirty clothes to wash, I stopped just inside the door to turn on the light and see where I was going. Immediately after turning on the light, it went out and someone grabbed me from behind around the neck and held a butcher knife to my throat saying, “What are you going to do now?” I realized it was Ray Clifford right away because of the tone of his sing-song voice and I asked to be released, telling him I watched "Kung Fu" on television every week. He laughed and told me that I should be more careful when entering darkened rooms in the future.

During our fraternity pledge weekend where we were supposed to leave the area for 48 hours and not be found, the entire pledge class traveled more than 100 miles away to a remote cabin.

Not long after arriving, Clifford went outside to smoke and those of us inside the cabin heard a gunshot. He came running in saying he had brought a pistol and fired it indiscriminately, but a bullet had ricocheted off a fencepost and somehow hit a cow standing nearby in a field. He was scared and wouldn’t let us notify the farmer so we spent the next two days fearful that the police would arrive and arrest us all for murdering a heffer.

As the first semester exams neared and before everyone departed to go home for the holidays, the fraternity held a huge dance. Clifford made what he called “Breezy Bash,” a concoction of fruit punch and generous amounts of alcohol mixed in. While people were dancing, I observed him add six bottles of Everclear (pure alcohol) to the “Breezy Bash” and I’m sure it produced quite a few hangovers for anyone who drank it.

He shared his first semester grade report with me while we were flying home for Christmas. In Economics, he had received a “C,” but in American National Government, Psychology, English 101, and Earth Science, he received an “F.”

Before the school year ended, he was involved in a fight and melee that spring while sticking up for a fellow fraternity brother who had been called a racial slur and then punched at the Student Union Building on campus.

Many members of our fraternity and college administrators were surprised though when Ray Clifford did not return that fall for his sophomore year.

Years passed and I eventually served in the U.S. Air Force, got married, earned my college degree and began a career in journalism writing for newspapers.

In 2010, I was watching a baseball game on television in early May at our home in Florida when the phone rang. I answered it and was shocked to learn it was Ray Clifford on the other end.

He said a fellow fraternity member had given him my number. He told me that he had obtained degrees from both Saint Francis University and Florida International University and had never married. He had worked as a court officer for the State of New York and was now retired and living in New Smyrna Beach, Florida about 80 miles from me.

I told him about my newspaper career and my wife and family, and before we said goodbye, he said to me, “We sure had some crazy times in college, didn’t we?’

Years later I found out that he had died at the age of 65 in 2013.

It’s my contention that no friendship we ever make is purely by accident. <

Andy Young: The necessity of all five vowels

By Andy Y.

Exactly how many people on this planet speak English cannot be determined precisely, or at least not for certain. The total, according to Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia where many folks go to obtain esoteric information, is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 billion. However, if that seems a bit inflated, well, it is. For the majority of Earth’s denizens, English never has been and never will be their primary method of sharing ideas. 

A mere 360 million earthlings consider it their primary form of expression. Others converse (or trade opinions) by employing Spanish, French, Mandarin, Arabic, Farsi, or Hindi. These are only a few of the many other systems of engaging in verbal or written interactions by employing a common system of terminology. English is, for many people, at best a secondary method of engaging in conversation and/or written correspondence with others.

While there are 26 letters in the alphabet, five are widely considered more important than all the others. Were it not for vowels, words, phrases, and sentences as we know them might not exist. Imagine trying to clearly convey a vital message, verbally or in writing, if speakers, writers, and all other creators of oral and written transmission of ideas didn’t have those five most important letters of the alphabet at their disposal!

Even professionals who examine books, articles, words and sentences for a living can’t effectively analyze controversies related to literary topics if they’re limited to availing themselves solely of mere consonants.

Make no mistake: this analytical commentary is not intended as a jab at the letters B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, W, X, Y, and/or Z. These twenty-one easily recognizable symbols have served English speakers with clarity, honor and distinction for more than one and a half millennia, and it’s likely they’ll persist in doing so for at least that long into whatever period of time lies ahead for mankind. Consider for a moment the prospect of a vowel-less world. It’d definitely be a wretched one, since there’d be severe limitations regarding the capability of men, women, and children to know what anyone else was thinking at any given time or place.

If it weren’t for vowels there’d be no viable way to attempt to compose even a brief letter, to say nothing of lengthier written pieces like this one, which consists of a mere fifty dozen words. Can anyone fathom a life devoid of the alphabet’s five-letter assemblage of vowels?

If these five splendid letters didn’t exist, there’d be no effective form of oral or written expression available to anyone. Imagine trying to relay messages with only hand signals or facial expressions, while emitting only snorts or groans. We’d have to “baaah” like rams or ewes, and assign meanings to words like zvmmt, kwrss, pklxz, or qmkllffs! I don’t see that as being even a remote possibility.

Crafting a viable, coherent dissertation while deprived of even one specific vowel doesn’t seem doable. Composing a 600-word article that doesn’t contain each of them at least once is inconceivable even for me, and I’ve got an exceptionally healthy imagination. I’m really glad nobody ever assigned me to write a lengthy treatise on the importance of vowels, while at the same time prohibiting me from employing a specific one even once. To decent writers, each vowel is of vital importance.

Thank goodness for these five essential letters. I can’t imagine writing an essay sans any A’s, E’s, I’s, or O’s. It’s simply not attainable for me.

Nevertheless, it might be achievable for someone else.

Maybe even yew. <

Insight: If You Wanna Be Happy

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Recently I listened to part of a podcast featuring a so-called expert discussing her series of books instructing people how to be happy.

The podcast’s host described how this “happiness expert” has sold more than two million books and is one of the most requested public speakers currently in America. Using what she says are scientific resources while pursuing opportunities and experiences fostering growth and learning is this author’s mantra and she advocates that self-knowledge and strong relationships are the keys to unlocking happiness.

Listening to her share her rationale about how to create happiness made me think that I too could detail what makes me happy and not charge anyone a dime for my thoughts on the subject.

Without further ado, here’s Ed’s Happiness Rules, free of charge:

Rule #1: Surround yourself with upbeat people. I’ve found that I’m happiest when I reduce the amount of time I spend with negative people, whiners and complainers, anyone who is easily annoyed or know-it-all Debbie Downers. Anyone who makes me laugh is a great way to start my day and I believe that associating with upbeat, happy and positive people always rubs off on me.

Rule #2: Inject something of personal significance into every day. Hardly a day goes by when I am not listening to music or spending time with my baseball card collection. Music does indeed soothe my soul and remains a huge part of my personal happiness equation. My music makes me feel nostalgic and content and so does reviewing my baseball cards as it produces a similar feeling for me. No matter what it is that is significant to you, I recommend finding out what that is and enjoying it as often as possible.

Rule #3: Eat breakfast for dinner. At least one night a week, forget spending hours preparing a meatloaf, making mashed potatoes and tossing a salad for the family. Trust me, a hearty stack of buttermilk pancakes, scrambled eggs, hash browns, fruit, toast and juice at dinnertime always leads to a very happy evening in my household.

Rule #4: Sleep when you are tired. I do have a regular bedtime that I turn in each night, but during the college basketball season, I occasionally skip that bedtime to stay up late watching my favorite team play on the west coast. Believe it or not, by the time the games are over, I sleep soundly through the rest of the night.

Rule #5: Take a walk. I do not go to the gym each morning and I do not spend hours every day working out or exercising. However, I do enjoy taking my dog for walks and just being outside in the fresh air and trying to keep up with my canine friend does work wonders for me.

Rule #6: Focus on what you can control while watching the news. Whenever I sit down for an extended period and watch the news on television lately, it seems that I quickly become overwhelmed with the state of the world. Multiple airplane crashes, wartime massacres, starvation, looming economic problems, injustice, terrorism, natural disasters and diseases can certainly drive a person to the looney bin faster than any attempt to change the channel. After consuming a half-hour of televised daily misery and conjecture, what I do is try and think of all the positive things happening in my life and discount those uncertain world and national events that I simply have no control over. Turning off the non-stop barrage of cable news is beneficial.

Rule #7. Think only good thoughts about other people. We live in such a divisive society today that makes us distrust everyone and everything. It’s not easy to be kind and compassionate and not find shortcomings in others that you see out and about every single day. I recall Michael Jordan once saying during an interview that he had missed 26 game-winning shots during his professional career and yet he didn’t stop taking them, and he ended up winning six NBA championships. Jordan credits his teammates thinking good thoughts about him and having the confidence that he could accomplish what he did in basketball. During my own career in journalism, I’ve discovered that telling someone something positive about them can truly make a difference in how they view themselves and their work.

Rule #8: Let go of the future. We all have worries about what lies ahead for us down the road, be it old age, poor health, loneliness, a shortage of money because of the rising cost of living or losing our close and cherished friends to cancer or heart disease. I recommend forgetting all the worry and angst and simply taking things day by day. Otherwise, anxiety and depression take charge and control of your life, and that’s not what life should be about, no matter where your journey takes you.

It's my contention that as I go through life, my happiness is not about being enormously wealthy or blessed with athletic talent or possessing movie-star looks. What makes me the happiest are the little things that I’m truly grateful for such as a loving wife and family, a new granddaughter born March 5, and wonderful friends. <

Andy Young: Ahead to the future or back to the past?

By Andy Young

When someone asked me not long ago if I would rather visit with my great-great grandparents or meet my great-great grandchildren, my initial reaction was, “What an utterly random question!”

Both are intriguing possibilities though, even if neither seems likely to occur anytime soon. Barring changes in the space-time continuum, there’s no chance I’ll ever meet my grandparents’ grandparents. As for seeing my grandchildren’s grandchildren, since I’m currently both grandchild-less and eligible for Medicare, it’s hard to imagine I’ll live long enough to see three additional generations of Youngs.

That established, there are reasons to desire both of these theoretical scenarios. For me oral history is far more fascinating and relevant than opening a textbook to read someone’s biased version of past events.

Hearing recollections from people who genuinely experienced history is the closest thing to actually being there. And while any eyewitness account of the past can bring history to life, hearing one from actual ancestors would make those particular memories even more vivid.

There would be some challenges involved with meeting my ancestral great-greats, since some of them probably spoke English with difficult-to-understand accents, and others didn’t speak it at all. But where there’s a will there’s a way, and I’ll bet if I were to somehow find myself face-to-face with a great-great grandmother or great-great grandfather, we’d be able to figure out some effective way to communicate.

However, checking in with my great-great grandchildren would be tempting, too. There are multiple upsides to meeting one’s four-generations-ahead descendants.

Given the current state of humanity, the future is even more unknowable than the past. It’d be thrilling to meet my great-great grandkids, although the prospect of lasting long enough to do so seems unlikely. Still, while it’s easy to imagine what the future might look like, wouldn’t it be great to find out for certain how accurate our conception of it actually is?

After thoughtfully considering this conundrum, and in the process squandering many hours that could have been better utilized for trifles like working, eating, and sleeping, I’ve come to what I consider the only logical conclusion.

First of all, for either of these scenarios to occur, time travel would be required. Assuming mankind obtains this ability sometime in the next two decades or so, I’m going to buy myself a time machine, which I will use to travel back to meet with my great-great-grandparents. That journey won’t just be through time, though. It’ll also be geographical, since I know for a fact that I’ve got progenitors from both Ireland and Hungary, and perhaps from parts of North America as well.

Once time travel has been normalized there’ll be plenty of vehicles to choose from, and with that in mind I’m going to opt for a really big one. That’s because what I plan to do after briefly experiencing what life in their world was like is to transport all 16 of my great-greats back to the present, where I can update them on what life is like here in the first quarter of the 21st century.

I’ve got nothing against any of my forebears, but I suspect that after getting a taste of what life in the middle of the 1800s entailed, I’ll be ready to return to a world with electricity and indoor plumbing, to name just two amenities I’d prefer not to go without for long.

Another reason that going back in time makes more sense than journeying ahead: suppose I travel forward four generations, only to arrive and subsequently find out that I don’t have any great-great grandkids?

Or, even worse, that nobody does. <

Insight: Déjà vu thought through

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

The other night I had a dream in which I was in a dark movie theater watching “The Sound of Music” with my date, Angela Cartwright, who was an actress who appeared in that film as Brigitta von Trapp.

Angela Cartwright portrayed Penny
Robinson on the 1960s TV series
'Lost in Space.' COURTESY PHOTO

Angela Cartwright was a longtime crush of mine growing up in the 1960s. Along with “The Sound of Music,” she starred as Penny Robinson in the classic television show “Lost in Space” and portrayed the stepdaughter of Danny Thomas on “Make Room for Daddy.”

I never missed anything with Angela Cartwright in it and so it’s interesting that she showed up in my dream 60 years later. But it seems the concept of people coming and going in my life has been a recurring theme for me.

For several years while I was attending college in the 1970s, I worked at a business called American Furniture Company. It was a physically demanding job that only paid me $2.70 an hour.

My duties were to unpack boxes of furniture delivered on the loading dock, remove the furniture from plastic coverings and ask a store merchandiser where it needed to be displayed on the sales floor. Unpacking and preparing it for display was the easy part, carrying it out to the sales floor was the hard part.

Some of the sofas and large couches were heavy and the store owner would only let us carry the furniture by their arms, thereby protecting them if we bumped into doorways. The merchandisers were tough and demanding, wanting these new pieces of furniture displayed immediately and they were not always kind to dock workers like me.

But one merchandiser was. Jerry Sena was always friendly and good-natured and laughed a lot with the dock workers. He always treated me with respect, and I found out he was an avid tennis player.

During Wimbledon or the U.S. Open, Jerry would pause at the display of televisions on the sales floor to see if Jimmy Connors or Cris Evert was playing in a match that day. If he was directing us to the location where he wanted the sofa or dinette set placed on the sales floor, I knew he was aware of how heavy the load we were carrying was, and he would give us a chance to stop and take a small break at some point.

Eventually I asked for a raise from $2.70 to $3 per hour at American Furniture. The store owner told me he would give me a 5-cent raise to $2.75 but since I had only worked there for two years, his policy was not to pay anyone $3 an hour unless they had worked for him for five years.

I moved on and eventually enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and following my military experience, I obtained my degree in journalism and started to work for newspapers as a reporter about 13 years after working for American Furniture Company.

One of the jobs I worked at was as a reporter for a twice-a-week newspaper called the Valencia County News-Bulletin in Valencia County, New Mexico.

Not long after being hired there, I was at my desk typing when I heard a voice speaking on the phone in a nearby cubicle and it sounded familiar. For several weeks if I was at my desk in the mornings, I would hear this voice and I racked my brain trying to figure out where I had heard it before.

One day I left my desk and walked over to that cubicle and discovered that the voice belonged to an advertising representative for the newspaper. When I introduced myself as the new reporter for the News-Bulletin newspaper and shook his hand, I realized that it was Jerry Sena.

We worked together for several years there before I moved to Florida, and I would sometimes have dinner with Jerry and his wife Yvonne at their home. To me it was just another example of someone re-entering my life after an absence.

The same can be said of some of my high school classmates, many of whom I had last seen in the early 1970s.

One day in November 2000, I was working for a newspaper in Florida and the phone rang. On the other end of the line was a former high school classmate of mine named Bob Fay.

He told me that I was on a list of missing school classmates, and he was tracking people down so I could be invited to our 30th high school reunion in 2001.

As it turned out, going to that reunion brought many people I knew and had grown up with back into my life after a stretch of more than 30 years. As I reconnected with them, I felt grateful and was happy to learn what had happened to them in their lives.

Through the years, some of my classmates who attended that 30th reunion celebration passed away, so the chance to see and talk to them again is not lost on me.

There’s an old saying I once heard that “people come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” In my case, I can certainly attest to that as the truth. <

Barbara Bagshaw: Maine’s educational leadership is failing our students

By State Rep. Barbara Bagshaw

I am encouraged that the woeful state of Maine’s education system is finally getting some public attention. Sadly, it is negative attention at both the national and state levels. For some time, parents, teachers and many students have been calling for a change in focus and a return to teaching the basics.

State Rep. Barbara Bagshaw

Just recently the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released its’ results for 2024. NAEP measures the reading and mathematics proficiency of 4th grade and 8th grade students in American public schools.

It is one of a handful of nationwide standardized tests that can be used by policy makers to evaluate the effectiveness of state public education systems.

Since 2013, Maine spent 71 percent more per pupil, a total of $26,000 per student. Despite increased spending, the results of the NAEP report are disturbing:

· Maine had the biggest drop in reading and math proficiency in the country, falling 10 percentage points since 2019.

· Just 33 percent of Maine fourth graders are proficient in math.

· Only 26 percent of those fourth graders were proficient in reading.

· Only 25 percent of eighth graders were proficient in math and 26 percent in reading.

To begin to fix the problem, we need to start at the top.

Clearly what Maine is doing as a state is failing our students. We can no longer afford to focus on experimental diversity, equity and inclusion and gender issues at the expense of traditional learning.

That, unfortunately, is not the position of Maine’s Commissioner of Education. Before our committee, she stated that “unfortunately academics will have to take the back seat” to social-emotional learning and gender studies.

Our test scores are abysmal, and it seems that the powers that be are satisfied with that. When questioned about out low scores, they stated they see the scores as “neither good nor bad.” We are spending the most we ever have on education – with the results the worst they’ve ever been.

This session, I have sponsored and co-sponsored a number of bills designed to strengthen education and promote school choice bills. Unfortunately, Maine’s educational leadership and its focus on everything but student achievement, is failing us.

Through my extensive work with school systems, I’ve learned that the legal firm Drummond and Woodsum is running most of Maine’s schools – they have a monopolistic grip on school boards across Maine.

School Boards are never given an opportunity to hear any other legal opinions – they are at the mercy of Drummond & Woodsum’s interpretation which is always very left leaning. In fact, school board members are told if you have angry citizens come to a school board meeting, listen to them and essentially disregard what they say.

Local school boards and parents need access to as much information as possible in order to make sound decisions that affect our children’s future.

As a former art teacher, I understand that social emotional learning is important. Music, teachers and sports coaches also understand the value of social emotional learning. In spite of that, it cannot be at the expense of academics. We have excellent teachers in the state of Maine. We should give all the new teachers a raise, as well as stepping up the pay of all our seasoned, beloved teachers. This can be done without raising taxes if we prioritize Maine citizens over illegal aliens.

As a member of the Education Committee, I am committed to giving parents a greater voice in their children’s education and finding ways to improve student learning. I had the opportunity to go to a School Choice Summit for legislators in Utah last summer. They, in fact, say where there is choice, there is instant improvement in public schools because there is choice.

Maine taxpayers deserve choices.

It is an honor to represent part of Windham in the Legislature. If there is any way that I can be of assistance, please contact me at barbara.bagshaw@legislature.maine.gov .My office phone number is 207-287-1440. You can find me on Facebook. To receive regular updates, sign up for my e-newsletter at https://mainehousegop.org/ <

 

Andy Young: The folly of competing with St. Patrick

By Andy Young

Relatively few people are familiar with St. Gertrude of Nivelles, who, when she was 10 years old, rejected her social-climbing, ambitious father’s proposal that she marry the son of an influential duke.

Later the selfless young woman ran a monastery that provided care and shelter for travelers, the sick, and the elderly. Worn out by a life of perpetual piety, fasting, and charity, she died at age 33, and was justifiably canonized by Pope Clement XII in 1677, a mere 1,018 years after her death.

I didn’t know this until recently. Nor, in all likelihood, did anyone who is reading this. But that’s not our fault.

The person responsible for America’s collective ignorance on this particular subject is the knucklehead who decided to declare March 17 as St. Gertrude of Nivelles Day. What’s dumber than pitting this altruistic woman’s “day” against a fellow saint’s day of commemoration? And not just any saint, but the one who drove every snake out of Ireland!

Surprisingly though, St. Gertrude’s press agent was far from the stupidest publicist of all time.

Few people know March 17 is also Doctor-Patient Trust Day. But given that hardly anyone thinks of anything not green and/or related to St. Paddy that day, it’s no wonder so many people currently distrust their doctor(s).

Why would anyone in their right mind choose to commemorate a person or an event on a day that’s already universally recognized for something else? If I were in charge of doing public relations for doctor-patient trust or St. Gertrude, I’d fire the underling(s) responsible for choosing March 17 for our cause’s special day and replace them with someone possessing at least an ounce of common sense.

Trying to draw national attention to a person or organization on St. Patrick’s Day is pure folly. But March 17 isn’t the only date that’s been foolishly chosen by some clueless publicity agent(s).

If you haven’t consumed any breadsticks lately, perhaps that’s because the morons in charge of making people desire these slender, crisp delicacies chose the final day of October as National Breadstick Day.

The people whose job it is to boost breadstick sales aren’t the only imbecilic publicizers who chose Halloween as the one day of the year to call attention to their product or cause.

National Magic Day, National Unity Day, National Knock-Knock Joke Day, National Muddy Dog Day, and Girl Scout Founders Day all fall on Oct. 31, the one date each year where virtually everyone with a pulse is fixated on Halloween.

It’s no wonder illiteracy is on the rise, given that both International Book Giving Day and Read to Your Child Day fall on Feb. 14, a date when most people have romance on their minds. No wonder reading has plummeted from the already-low spot it had previously occupied on the average American’s priorities list.

Another worthy cause has chosen Valentine’s Day for its annual call for attention, but whoever opted for designating Feb. 14 as National Impotence Day either has an affinity for irony or a mean streak the size of the Grand Canyon.

Unfamiliar with copyright laws? Blame it on the dope who made Jan. 1 Copyright Law Day. And don’t expect any dramatic rise in vegetarianism this year, since Independence from Meat Day falls, along with National Hillbilly Day, Jackfruit Day, and Invisible Day, on July 4.

Anyone responsible for promoting a specific cause who willingly chooses the date of a pre-existing national celebration for their annual “Day” clearly has rocks in their head.

Competent publicists, it seems, are rarer than invisible, impotent, breadstick-eating hillbillies who tell knock-knock jokes and trust their doctors. <