Insight: Hard to Forget

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Last Sunday, when everybody was celebrating their wonderful dads on Father’s Day, I stayed off social media and avoided seeing their heartfelt tributes and photographs.

A 1943 photo shows Ed Pierce Sr. at the age
of 18.  COURTESY PHOTO

It wasn’t because I’m opposed to friends showing their love for their fathers, rather that special day brings back a flood of painful memories for me.

I’d describe my father as the wittiest, smartest and most laidback individual that you’ll ever meet. He put himself through college on the GI Bill and by working part-time jobs after World War II.

He was the first-ever college graduate in his family and earned an engineering degree from Rochester Institute of Technology.

After college, he got married to my mother and worked as a mechanical engineer for Delco Corporation. He was assigned to Delco’s team developing a portable torch in the early 1950s and was proud to show me his name on the patent for that device, now called the Bernzomatic, and commonly used for soldering, woodworking and other applications.

It was hard to overlook his silly sense of humor. He would create ridiculous parody songs ala Weird Al Yankovic that usually came from novelty songs he heard on the radio. The first one I heard him do was about margarine and sung to the tune of “Witch Doctor” by David Seville, who would later go on to create songs by Alvin and the Chipmunks. He also adapted 1960s country songs such as “Wolverton Mountain” by Claude King or “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!” by Alan Sherman to his own hilarious parodies of climbing the Adirondack Mountains and another about smoking.

Very little was beyond his ability to poke fun at. He turned “The Battle of New Orleans” by Johnny Horton into a song about a broken kitchen sink disposal. The Herman’s Hermits song “I’m Henry the VIII, I Am” became “I’m Henry the Ape, I Am.”

But his best tune that he would sing to our family repeatedly on automobile trips or driving to the Woolworth’s store was a 1960s novelty song called “They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” by Napoleon XIV. And when a sequel song by a female singer named Sloppy Jane called “They’re Coming To Take Me Away, Ha Ha!” came along several years later, he would sing that one too except in a high-pitched voice.

He found humor in everyday objects and word play. Sent by my mother to the supermarket to get fixings for a spaghetti dinner, he returned with what he proclaimed was “Itralian sausage” and a box of what he told my mother was fake spaghetti. She told him there was no such thing and he answered, “there sure is, it’s an impasta.”

When we moved to a new home closer to his job, the master control for an in-house intercom system was equipped with a radio and he could direct music to wake us up directly into our bedrooms. So many times before school I would be sleeping soundly only to be awakened by loud twangy 1960s country songs I detested such as "Please Help Me, I'm Falling" by Hank Locklin, “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” by Tammy Wynette and “I’ve Been Everywhere” by Hank Snow.

By the time I got dressed and made it downstairs for breakfast, he’d be sitting at the kitchen table reading the morning newspaper and would say something to me like “Isn’t it kind of early to be listening to music Buddy Boy?”

As the years went on his quirks became legendary among our family members.

He had a penchant for snacks and would drive several miles to a K-Mart, purchase a bag of cheese popcorn for $1.69 or marshmallow Circus Peanuts for $1.25 and put it on a credit card. When I asked him why he just didn’t pay cash for those items, he told me his line of available credit would go up if he continued to do that. If I mentioned the credit card interest he was paying on such small purchases, he said it was a small price to pay for having his credit line expanded, in case we ever needed it for some reason.

Another time he ordered dentist supplies from a mail-order catalogue insisting that he could save money by practicing self-dentistry. And he was truly self-conscious about only standing 5-foot-5 thanks to our Polish genetics with his 4-foot-10 mother and a father who was just 5 feet tall. To compensate for his vertical challenges, he ordered a pair of elevator shoes from a magazine ad and would wear them to work every day. His elevator shoes gave him all of 2 additional inches when worn and lifted him to the status of 5-foot-7, but he told me he felt wearing them made him more imposing.

“I feel like jumping center against Wilt Chamberlain when I wear those shoes,” he told me on the phone when I was in college.

Just two days after his retirement as a mechanical engineer, a drunk driver struck my father’s car head-on as he was driving home on a Sunday night in 1991 in Florida. He was 65 and had survived combat in Morocco and Italy during World War II but couldn’t outmaneuver an impaired motorist.

Father’s Day has always been tough for me ever since. <

Andy Young: Read this an hour from now

By Andy Young

Sir Sandford Fleming (1827-1915), a Scottish and Canadian engineer, is generally considered the originator of the time zone. His innovation was inspired after he missed a train due to a printed schedule which erroneously informed him that his train was leaving in the morning when in reality it left in the afternoon.

In 1876, Fleming proposed adopting a single worldwide clock, one based on 24 time zones, with each one being an hour (or 15 degrees of longitude) wide. Fleming’s plan was, with some modifications, put into motion after the International Meridian Conference of 1884 recommended the Greenwich Meridian as the international standard for zero degrees longitude.

I was 18 years old when I first left the Eastern Time Zone on a camping trip with three friends who had just graduated from high school with me. When we left the Province of Quebec and crossed into Campbellton, New Brunswick, the clock jumped ahead, turning 60 whole minutes into vapor.

At day’s end it seemed the day had gone by unusually quickly, and indeed it had, since it had consisted of just 23 hours. Thankfully we recovered our lost 60 minutes the next day when we returned to the USA and Eastern Daylight Time.

My next departure from Eastern Time occurred four years later, but I don’t remember much about it. That was probably because I had crossed over the Mississippi River into Central Time by air, and was so excited about landing in Omaha, Nebraska after my first-ever plane trip that I didn’t take heed of the time change.

The vast majority of Earth’s denizens live their entire lives inside one specific time zone. India and China each have just one national time zone, and relatively few of either of those heavily populated nation’s citizens ever travel internationally. The same goes for most residents of third-world countries across the globe.

I’ve spent time in five different United States time zones, plus two more in Canada. In America, the Central, Mountain, Pacific, and Alaska time zones are, in order, one, two, three, and four hours behind ours. I’ve also spent a total of almost three weeks in the Newfoundland Time Zone, which is 90 minutes ahead of Eastern Time. Don’t ask why; I’ve got limited space, and the explanation would take up far more than what remains of it.

There’s a reason for my current fascination with time zones: I’m filing this column from St. Andrews, New Brunswick which is on Atlantic Time. If you’re reading this column at noon in Windham, know that it's 1 p.m. here, and also in Digby, Nova Scotia, where my companion and I are headed next. From there, we’ll continue on to Peggy’s Cove, Prince Edward Island, the Hopewell Rocks, and the Canadian Chocolate Museum before returning home on what for us will be a 25-hour day.

Sleep patterns aren’t the only things a change of time zone impacts. It’s not easy putting together a weekly 600-word column under normal circumstances, but trying to convey thoughts eloquently in writing from a different time zone is particularly challenging. This essay doesn’t flow as smoothly as most of the previous columns I’ve produced for this newspaper. This time zone change has me a little off my game.

But I can learn from experience. <

Insight: Start of a Lifetime Passion

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Time truly is the great equalizer and has taught me to be persistent in chasing my dreams.

Ed Pierce still needs 45 cards to complete his collection of
1962 Topps baseball cards. COURTESY PHOTO

Back in June 1963, I was 9 years old and had just finished fourth grade at a Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic school in Rochester, New York. One morning, I was out riding my bike when my friend Philip Marsh, who lived three doors down from me, waved at me from his garage and said he wanted to show me his collection of baseball cards.

I knew what baseball was having watched a few games on television and played on a Little League team, but I had never held a baseball card in my hands prior to that. Philip had a shoebox filled with 1962 cards and said his father worked for a department store and had brought some cards home for him.

As I looked at some of the cards in the shoebox, I was fascinated by the player photographs, the statistics on the back side of the cards and a small cartoon containing a fact about each player in the set. Philip told me that these cards were from last season and new packs of 1963 cards were now being sold for a nickel in nearby stores.

He said that he was more of a football fan than of baseball and asked his father to bring him some 1963 football cards once they were issued. I saw an opportunity and asked Philip if he would be interested in trading me the shoebox of cards for a stack of Adventure Comics that I had collected.

Adventure Comics were my favorite, and I had been given a subscription as a gift for my 7th birthday. A new Adventure Comic Book with the “Legion of Super Heroes” would arrive every month in our family’s mailbox rolled up in a brown paper wrapper.

By the time I proposed the trade, I had a stack of 12 or 13 Adventure Comics in my closet to offer Philip and to my surprise, he accepted the deal. I went home, got the comic books, and swapped them for the 1962 baseball cards.

My mother was not happy I had done that. She told me because the cards were owned previously, the shoebox could contain insects, and she wouldn’t let me keep them in my bedroom. At first, she didn’t want them in our house, but my father somehow got her to agree to let me store them in the basement.

He would set up a card table for me in the basement, and I would sit there for hours examining each card and writing down each card’s number in my Big Chief writing tablet. I discovered that not all the 598 cards issued by the Topps Chewing Gum Company in the 1962 set were in that shoebox, but I did have more than 400 of them.

That summer turned into fall and in September 1963, I returned to school for fifth grade. Several of my classmates also collected baseball cards and I was able to trade some duplicate cards in the shoebox with them for cards I did not have.

I was able to obtain the rookie card of Milwaukee Braves outfielder Howie Bedell that way and was thrilled to make another deal with a classmate to give up two of the three Casey Stengel cards in the shoebox for a Darrell Johnson card. The classmate was a huge fan of the New York Mets and wanted the Stengel cards as he was the first manager of the Mets in their inaugural year of 1962. Getting that Darrell Johnson card was quite an accomplishment for me as he had been named as the manager of Rochester’s minor league baseball team for the 1964 season.

In March 1964 though, my baseball card collection sustained serious damage from which 62 years later I am still recovering. Fifth grade report cards were sent home for review by my parents, and my mother took one look at the “C” grade I had received in mathematics and became outraged. 

She grabbed me by the ear and took me down the stairs to the basement. She picked up my shoebox of 1962 baseball cards and removed around 250 cards and placed them in the washtub near the washing machine. She doused them with lighter fluid, struck a match, and made me watch as the cards burned. She told me I gave too much time to those baseball cards and didn’t do enough to receive what she considered to be an acceptable grade in math.

It turned out to be the only “C” that I ever received in elementary school on a report card, but in the passing years since, I have spent an enormous amount of time replacing and tracking down the cards I lost that day.

Many of those 1962 cards that I once owned were destroyed but have significantly increased in value over the years. My burned 1962 Mickey Mantle near-mint condition card sells today for anywhere between $3,000 to $4,000.

These days I still collect baseball cards, but I have found that 1962 is a very difficult set to accumulate.

Maybe someday I’ll finish what I started. <

Tim Nangle: How my office can help you navigate state government

By Senator Tim Nangle

Many people know that serving in the Maine Senate means voting on bills, working on policy and representing our district in Augusta. But some of the most important work my office does happens outside the Senate chamber.

State Senator Tim Nangle

Government can be difficult to navigate, especially in stressful situations. Whether you are trying to understand a notice, access a state service, resolve an issue with a department or find the right person to contact, my office can help identify the next step.

That could mean contacting a state department on your behalf, connecting you to available programs or referring your issue to the appropriate federal, municipal or legal resource when it falls outside our purview.

There are limits to what a legislative office can do. My office cannot guarantee a specific outcome, override state or federal law, or force an agency to make a particular decision or provide legal advice. But we can help make sure your concern reaches the right place, that you understand the process and that your voice is heard.

Before serving in the Legislature, I spent years as a paramedic and served on the Windham Town Council. Those roles taught me the importance of showing up, listening carefully and helping people find a path forward when they are dealing with something unfamiliar or overwhelming.

Over the past couple of years, my office has helped residents in Windham, Raymond, Casco, Frye Island and Westbrook with a wide range of issues.

For example, several residents raised concerns about inconsistent mail delivery, including delays that affected their bills, medications and other important mail. While mail delivery is a federal issue, my office helped elevate those concerns to the appropriate federal partners and requested follow-up from the U.S. Postal Service.

In another case, a constituent contacted my office with concerns about health insurance changes that would have affected their ability to see their regular doctors. My office helped connect the constituent with consumer resources and information about continuity of care so they could better understand their options.

We have also helped residents and local workers navigate state licensing, certification and education-related questions. In one situation, a local educator was trying to understand a certification issue that affected their ability to continue working in a school setting. My office helped communicate with the appropriate state department, clarify the process and identify next steps.

Other neighbors have reached out for help understanding property tax relief programs, benefit applications, utility concerns or other state resources. Sometimes there is no immediate fix, but helping someone understand what programs exist, what paperwork may be needed, or which office is responsible can make a real difference.

These cases are all different, but they have something important in common: a resident had a problem, did not know where to turn and reached out for help. That is exactly what my office is here for.

Hearing these issues also helps me do a better job in Augusta. The calls, emails and conversations my office receives help me understand what people in our communities are experiencing. Sometimes we can help resolve an individual issue. Other times, a case reveals a broader challenge with a state program, agency process or law that may need attention.

If you contact my office for assistance, it is helpful to include your name, town, contact information, a brief explanation of the issue and any relevant deadlines. If you have a notice, letter, case number or previous correspondence, that can help us direct your concern to the right place.

Serving as your senator means being available not only during session but throughout the year. Whether you have a question, need help navigating state government or want to share a concern about our community, I hope you will reach out.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me at [email protected] or call my Augusta office at 207-287-1515. We’re here to help.

State Senator Tim Nangle represents District 26 including Windham, Raymond, Casco, Frye Island, and part of Westbrook.

The opinions in this column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of The Windham Eagle newspaper ownership or its staff. <

Andy Young: Expeditiously returning to Dreamland

By Andy Young

Aside from realizing the place where one is sleeping is either on fire, floating away in a flood, or sinking into the ground during an earthquake, the most common rationale for waking up in the middle of the night is a need to use the facilities.

But there are numerous non-physical grounds for what eminent somnologists refer to as Sleepus Interruptus, and almost all involve ongoing conflict in the insomniac’s mind.

Those who struggle with sleeplessness are usually kept awake by obsessing over issues they cannot control, which deprives their mind and body of much-needed nightly regeneration. Examples include ongoing issues with specific entities, such as an unhappy spouse/significant other, an overly demanding boss, ineffective subordinates, wayward children, overbearing parents, the government, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big Tobacco, or the greedy billionaires who control Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Tobacco.

Others are kept awake by issues they have even less control over, like the weather, the Boston Red Sox, arrogant, narcissistic politicians, or realizing that "arrogant, narcissistic politicians” is a redundancy. (Upon further reflection, so is “greedy billionaires.”)

There are also people who lie awake at night due to social-media-driven drama. But that’s on them. I’m not responsible for curing anyone’s self-inflicted stress.

That established, I’m determined to find a sure-fire cure for those impacted by the scourge of chronic nocturnal restlessness.

Obviously, there aren't any easy fixes for insomnia. If there were, they’d have already been implemented, and everyone’s life would be hunky-dory, or for Gen z’ers, “chill.”

Having accepted that middle-of-the-night awakenings will happen from time to time, I’ve been searching for a dependable recipe for getting back to sleep on such occasions and have decided the most practical way of calming a troubled mind is turning its attention to something else. But to what, exactly?

Whoever thought counting sheep was the best way to return to Dreamland must have worked regularly with ovines. But for obsessive-compulsive types like me, all sheep look alike and worrying about whether or not every little lamb in my charge gets back into the corral makes me even less likely to nod off.

I’ve tried making alphabetical lists, like naming fruits beginning with each letter (apple, banana, cherry, etc.). That worked for a while, but inevitably I struggle with the question of whether an eggplant is a fruit or a vegetable, which puts me even more on edge.

A similar mental activity: naming an animal for each letter of the alphabet. Ape, bison, cheetah, donkey, elephant, frog, giraffe, hippopotamus, ibex, jaguar, kangaroo, leopard, monkey, narwhal, ostrich, penguin, quail, rabbit, stork, tiger, unicorn, viper, walrus, yak, and zebra. But this too ends in frustration, since I can never think of an X animal (a xylophone isn’t an animal; I looked it up), and I refuse to resort to semantics, like counting ex-animals such as passenger pigeons or dinosaurs. Plus, unicorns aren’t real, either.

Trying to name all 50 states is another activity that has potential, but struggling to remember the last one (hint: it’s usually Nebraska, Arkansas, or West Virginia) just creates more frustration.

Another potential mind occupier: naming New York Met players whose last names begin with H: Rick Herrscher, Chuck Hiller, Bill Hepler, Willard Hunter, Tom Hall, Ron Hunt, Tim Harkness, Ed Hearn and Jack Hamilton all qualify. But that only works for a specific sub-genus of baseball nerd.

But after lengthy research, I’ve concluded the most reliable method for getting back to sleep involves thinking of words beginning with Z. Try it!

Zipper. Zombie. Zero. Zoo.

Zen. Ziplock. Zephyr.

Zamboni. Zilch.

Zzzzzzzzz.

It works every time! <

Insight: A Fortuitous Twist of Fate

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

If you haven’t heard this story before, it’s one I’m proud of and especially today.

Ed and Nancy Pierce were married in Cleveland, Ohio on
June 11, 2005 and are celebrating their 21st wedding
anniversary. COURTESY PHOTO

Back in 2004, I was trying to reestablish myself after a year of riding a roller coaster with a girlfriend who was always raining when the sun was shining. She was like Joe Btfsplk, a character in the old Lil’ Abner newspaper comic strip who brought disastrous misfortune and accidents to anyone in his vicinity with a small, dark rain cloud perpetually hovering over his head to symbolize his bad luck.

I didn’t see it at first following that nasty breakup, but my world was about to change forever for the better.

Following years of being single and constantly looking for the right person, I agreed to meet a woman near where we lived in Florida for ice cream, and it turned out to be the best date that I had ever had. She was funny, good looking, had a good job as an elementary school teacher, and could carry on a conversation.

I resolved to see her again, and when I called to ask her for another date, to my surprise, she said she’d like that.

We spoke again on the phone before that second date but told me she had some news that might scrap those plans. It seems that after our first date, she visited a doctor and had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She was having surgery to remove a lump the following week with an uncertain future of chemotherapy and radiation after that.

She told me she understood that having survived a bout with cancer myself, if I wanted to back away because of her diagnosis I could.

Having spent more than a year of my life undergoing cancer surgeries, chemotherapy and visits to the oncologist, I knew how worried she was. I shared my own cancer recovery story with her and told her if I could overcome what I did, she certainly could too.

I spent that summer checking up on her, making sure she was eating, and helping however I could.

By that fall when school started again, I was amazed that despite frequent appointments for chemo and radiation, she was back in her classroom and teaching students.

When Christmas break arrived, she came by with her dog to spend the holidays and never went home. She moved out of her apartment and into my condo. Sometime in January 2005, she told me her youngest son was graduating from high school in June in Cleveland, Ohio and wanted to fly there from Florida for that. She asked if I wanted to accompany her there and see where she had been living before getting divorced and moving to Florida.

The more I thought about it, I thought it could be a great time to also get married, and I mentioned that to her while watching coverage of the Michael Jackson trial on television one evening. She thought that would be great and said she had friends where we could possibly have a small wedding.

Those friends agreed to host a wedding at their home, and I found a wedding officiant online who was available that weekend. She knew a bakery there that baked a wedding cake for us. She bought a dress for $1 at a thrift shop to get married in. She made the invitations herself, and I found a restaurant and bar on Lake Erie that had been a favorite of many celebrities passing through Cleveland where we could have a wedding reception.

A few days before the wedding, we met the minister who was going to marry us. He was happy to do so and asked if he could come to the reception and bring his wife, however we couldn’t afford two more meals and he said he understood.

Just a day before the wedding, I went to a recommended barber and recoiled when I saw the haircut that I’d received. It was disappointing but I decided to make the most of it. 

During the wedding ceremony late that Saturday afternoon, the minister suddenly deviated from the script and told our wedding guests how he knew we were meant to be married. He said on Friday evening he had been admitted to the hospital in pain and had to pass a kidney stone. Once it was over, he told his physician that he was supposed to marry us the next day and when he woke up on Saturday morning, he was well enough to be discharged from the hospital.

He told our wedding guests that in his opinion, his speedy recovery from passing the kidney stone had to be divine intervention and that’s how he knew that we were meant to be married. I was a bit shocked, but it seemed to fit with everything else about this wedding.

This year on June 11, Nancy and I will celebrate our 21st wedding anniversary and I have never regretted a moment of our lives together. We’ve gone from Florida to New Hampshire to Maine and each working strenuous fulltime jobs to semi-retirement.

It’s been a great life and even though there have been obstacles along the way, I’m truly a very lucky man. <  

Andy Young: How many idiots?

By Andy Young

It’s astounding how many idiots currently operate motor vehicles here in Maine.

The two most common types of bad drivers I encounter are the ones in front of me who are traveling too slowly, and the ones behind me who’re going too fast.

But they aren’t the only menaces. Another example is the swerving nitwits who veer in and out of all three lanes on the interstate in an effort to arrive at their destination 90 seconds earlier than they would if they went merely 5 to 10 mph over the speed limit like everyone else does.

Another annoyance: cretins who hit their horns for no apparent reason or, even worse, lean on them in bumper-to-bumper traffic jams, as if doing so will magically make the standstill disappear so they can go back to doing 90 mph and/or continuing to play on their phone. But perhaps the worst scourges are the dopes who never turn down their high beams, or worse, flash them in the eyes of oncoming cars for reasons only they know.

A recent commute home reminded me of just how plentiful the supply of bonehead motorists is. The sun still hadn’t set when I began my 45-minute trek after a meeting which had concluded at 8 p.m. It was a beautiful evening, and traffic was light as I headed up the Maine Turnpike.

But the relaxing drive took a turn for the worse once I got onto I-295 North. I was in the left lane passing a slower vehicle when I saw flashing lights in my rear-view mirror. Terrified, I glanced at my speedometer, but I was only going 55 mph. The posted speed limit was 50, but no one gets pulled over for going five miles per hour above the limit.

It turned out the light-flashing vehicle behind me wasn’t a police car, but a pickup truck being driven by an impatient moron who apparently wanted me to get out of his way. Once I passed the car in front of me, I got back into the right lane and was rewarded with a loud honk of the truck’s horn as it whizzed past me going about 70. And then … the driver pulled into the right lane and slowed to about 45 mph!

Irritated, I pumped the brake to avoid rear-ending him. Was the driver drunk? Or was he trying to alert me to some problem? Did I have a flat? Was I leaking fuel? Was my trunk open? Apparently not, and after another mile or so of slow-motion foolishness, he finally left the highway, at which point I resumed traveling at a normal speed until reaching my own exit at about 8:45.

It must have been Idiots’ Night Out, because as I proceeded down the two-lane route leading to my hometown, I was treated to a parade of cars heading the opposite way, each of which was flicking their high beams as they approached me. A couple of the dumbbells did it several times. It was getting frustrating, because thanks to all the pinheads flashing their brights, it was getting really hard to see the road ahead of me since my own headlights seemed dim by comparison.

And that was when I discovered I had neglected to turn those headlights on. Which was, obviously, why everyone had been tailgating, honking, and flashing their beams at me.

It’s impossible to overestimate the number of knuckleheads currently driving cars on Maine’s roads.

The only thing that’s certain: last Monday night between 8 and 9 p.m. there was one more of them than I originally thought there was. <

Insight: One of the good ones

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Sometime around the age of 15, I got the notion that I could play football.

Ed Pierce and Chuck Young sit and talk during a high school
reunion gathering in Henrietta, New York last August.
They were teammates on the Rush Henrietta JV football
team in 1969. COURTESY PHOTO

Despite being a little over 5 feet in height and weighing 103 pounds, I could run fast but that was about the extent of my football ability. I didn’t weigh enough to make a difference, and I had trouble memorizing plays. The varsity football coach talked me into becoming a manager for a few games to see if I’d rather do that. I lugged around a lot of mesh bags of footballs and filled water bottles for other players.

Eventually though, I told the coach I wanted try playing and so he assigned me to the junior varsity team. Most of the players on the JV were a grade below me and looking to demonstrate their skills and move up to play on the varsity.

The JV coach said the team could use defensive backs, so I was excited to run through plays in practice as a safety and pass defender. In the first practices that I participated in with the JV team, I learned that football at the JV level was intense, and not everyone was enthusiastic about someone my size thinking they could play among players much taller and stronger than me.

For at least a month during practice, I stood in the backfield holding a tackling dummy as the team’s linemen ran through plays. One player made it his mission to hit me hard and knock me down on every play that came my way. He outweighed me by at least 150 pounds and towered over me at 6-foot-2.

Each time he hit me, this angry lineman would scream at me to stay down or to quit the team. He was unrelenting and I found it hard to believe anyone could stay as angry as he was for weeks at a time.

Several times while practicing plays in which the offensive linemen pulled into the defensive backfield in my direction to block for running backs, the player who took delight in knocking me senseless crashed his helmet into mine with force.

Through those hits I came to learn what the expression “seeing stars” meant. Each time his helmet crashed into mine things suddenly went dark. Then little bits of light began to show through before I fully regained my senses just in time to set up for another play.

Each day I would walk home from practice sore and covered with bruises in just about every imaginable place. The thought of quitting entered my mind often but for some reason, I was determined to stick it out.

After several weeks of taking physical punishment from the same lineman on almost every play in practice, my father asked me what I was trying to accomplish when I could easily ask the varsity coach to let me go back to being a manager.

My answer to him was the same answer I gave to that lineman. “I hate to lose and I’m not going to quit.”

Our JV team had already played six games of an eight-game schedule by that point and the chances of me getting into a game decreased with each passing week.

But I stood my ground and held on each time that lineman put yet another vicious hit on me. Before practice ended one Wednesday afternoon, he not only knocked me to the ground, but he also then stepped on one of my hands and stood over me bellowing out a loud “Hoo-Rah.”

At that moment, I was in pain and had trouble getting to my feet. A hand reached down and offered me help up. To my surprise, it was our team’s star running back, Chuck Young. He told the lineman to leave me alone and said enough was enough.

He said because I wouldn’t quit and withstood weeks of violent hits from that lineman that I deserved some respect.

Before the next practice, the coach told the team to save the hard hits for our opponents on game days and not in practice.

Chuck became my close friend and introduced me to all his other pals on the team. 

During the fourth quarter of our seventh game of the season on the road, the coaches instructed me to go into the game, and I played the safety position for the rest of the fourth quarter. On one play a long pass was thrown my way, and the opponent’s receiver had me beat but the quarterback overthrew him by 15 yards, and the ball fell to the ground.

On the team’s bus ride home from that game, Chuck Young led a “Three Cheers for Ed Pierce,” and it was one of the best moments I have ever experienced.

I remained friends with Chuck through the years and followed his career as he became a police detective, retired from that, and then worked as a mortgage professional. He was married, had a daughter and a granddaughter.

At each passing class reunion, we would sit and reminisce about the old days.

Sadly, Chuck passed away in January and we all miss him. There are indeed many good people out there and Chuck Young was one of them. <

Rookie Mama: I’ve got high pizza pie in the sky hopes

By Michelle Cote
The Rookie Mama

Mamas.

I’d like to take a moment to spin a little praise for an oft-underrated player in the pantry freezer game – frozen pizza.

Frozen pies are a delicious, effortless way to feed your family in a pinch, when you’re short a pinch of this, and an ounce of that.

When you don’t have the thyme, and you don’t have the time – frozen pizza’s got you.

It just about checks all the pizza boxes when it comes to convenience on a budget.

Many of you know how I am frequent flyer of slow cooker bliss – There’s nothing like dumping ingredients in a pot, going about a busy day, and returning home to the cozy, savory scent of a home-cooked meal as though an invisible chef’s been slowly stirring a pot all day.

There are faster methods to this such as the Instant Pot, but that’s the pot I’m not going to stir today.

Several months ago, I began stocking up on various frozen pizzas for the basement chest freezer so we’d be at the ready for last-minute friend visits.

As my boys age out of the picky phase and into the eat-everything-and-anything phase, their friends do too, and pizza’s an easy pie for the win that pleases most.

I was surprised to learn that, although the cost of absolutely everything-and-anything has skyrocketed as of late, the cost of a frozen pizza remains reasonable.

I won’t shout that too loudly, I suppose.

But even store-brand pizza pies are scrumptious, as well as scrumptiously budget-friendly.

It’s my pizza bliss.

Friday evening found my second-born and I on the hunt for some formal wear during an epic rainstorm.

I braced myself, knowing too well we’d be hopping store to store for a suitcoat his size.

The demise of local menswear shops in my hometown, along with that of secondhand sporting equipment still hurt deep.

I’d planned to make from-scratch pizza, as I often do about once a week – It’s not complicated, it just takes a bit of time.

And basil.

Instead, I was able to take precious time with my young tween man and trek out to find a suit while my husband took care of the rest of our boy gang, and when we finally scored a perfectly fitting suit, drenched from the rain and all in the parking lot, I called up my husband and asked him to preheat the oven – This was a perfect night for frozen pizzas.

Again, pizza bliss.

You see, my family are a mix of spicy, some saucy, some certainly cheesy – perhaps the pizza metaphor’s a good one for us, as we do find ourselves stretched thin at times.

So, here’s where frozen pizza’s my unsung hero, my flour-laden secret agent, something of which I didn’t give a first or second thought until only recently as a serious contender for dinner prep ease.

And now I pluck these frozen goods from my freezer with glee.

I’m clearly still a rookie, still learning.

My oldest is 14 – I began this column when he was newborn and I was a rookie in absolutely every sense of the word – but I’ve come to learn that finding ways to simplify when I can remove a sort of indiscernible barrier.

Because raising and feeding a crew of four young boys during varsity lacrosse season is no lie.

So, take advantage of helpful, mini conveniences in life as you can so you can spend time with those that matter most.

Your kids will only be spicy, saucy, and cheesy under one messy roof for a short time.

And as for finding formal suits for growing lads during downpour days – godspeed.

­­– Michelle Cote lives in southern Maine with her husband and four sons, and enjoys camping, distance running, biking, gardening, road trips to new regions, arts and crafts, soccer, and singing to musical showtunes – often several or more at the same time! <

Andy Young: So what was I sorry about?

By Andy Young

I’ve never needed sophisticated equipment to listen to music. The closest I ever had to a stereo was the year in college my roommate and I put our respective clock-radios at opposite ends of our dorm room and tuned them to the same station.

High end audio equipment is a lot pricier these days than it was in the late 1970s, but that hasn’t impacted me. That’s because I can listen to just about any song(s) I’ve heard previously inside my head. The only problem: these inner concerts are rarely planned ones. The tunes I hear begin indiscriminately, often prompted by some random stimulus I see or otherwise sense nearby. With rare exceptions, I cannot control which melody, if any, will be playing at a given moment.

Whenever I hear someone snap their fingers, “The Addams Family” theme invariably commences inside my head. References to Kansas or George Orwell start Dan Hartman singing, “I Can Dream About You,” since it was near the top of the charts during a memorable week that I spent in Wichita in 1984. And when someone tells me something in confidence, The Go-Go’s “Our Lips are Sealed” begins playing, although no one hears it but me.

Sometimes my brain plays a random song for no apparent reason, like last week, when I started hearing “I’m Sorry,” one of John Denver’s signature country-pop ballads of the mid-1970’s. Denver died at age 53 when the plane he was flying plunged into Monterey Bay, off California’s central coast.

That brought to mind John F. Kennedy Jr., Thurman Munson, and Amelia Earhart, all of whom died young while flying airplanes. But since my inner playlist doesn’t include any dirges, the thought of all those prematurely dead pilots conjured the uplifting “Fly” by the Kelly Parker Band.

Later my thoughts returned to Mr. Denver, which got me thinking of other accomplished individuals who share their last name with a major American city, like Ralph Boston, the 1960 Olympic gold medalist who was the first man to long jump over 27 feet; Reggie Cleveland, who pitched for four major league baseball teams in the 1970s; and Martin St. Louis, the coach of the National Hockey League’s Montreal Canadiens. Also in that category: Whitney Houston, Rick Springfield, Tracy Austin, Joaquin Phoenix, Mitch Richmond, Oscar Charleston, and Johnny Knoxville, not to mention fictional characters Oscar Madison, Stella Dallas and Nathan Detroit. I don’t count any famous Lincolns, Washingtons, or Jacksons though, since those last names belonged to famous people before becoming cities, but … just the thought of them brought on Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.”

It’s great having the ability to hear music I like on my internal stereo without infringing on those around me, and for free. It’s too bad I can’t control which song on my personal Hit Parade is playing at any particular moment, although some things are all but certain.

For example, if I’m driving late at night, sooner or later the Commodores’ version of “Night Shift” will start playing in my head. Any time I pass a YMCA, the Village People will begin performing, and during loud electrical storms Jay Ferguson’s “Thunder Island” invariably comes back to me. And once the storm concludes, my now-calmed inner stereo often transitions to Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers co-crooning “Islands in the Stream.”

I still don’t know why “I’m Sorry” came to mind last week, though. Could I have been subconsciously mourning all those people who died in plane crashes? Or maybe I was just remorseful about not knowing why John Denver begins randomly singing inside my head every so often. <