This is the 23rd in an ongoing series of personal Memories. All the others are in links at the bottom.
Forty-three years ago this week, I got married. I’m told for the last time.
It happened in the same old Toronto church where my parents had been married 43 years before that. It was very Canadian; we had a bagpiper and signed the same thick, old marriage register as my Mom and Dad had.
Since we were both journalists, my final wife picked late November because all the election coverage would surely be over by then, and neither of us anticipated 2000.
The honeymoon was to begin on a transcontinental train trip. I had previously made the same peaceful journey to write a feature about Johnny Bryk, a jolly man who had been a railroad chef who had cooked no one knows how many meals on how many trips.
For 40 of his 55 years, Johnny had clicked along the rails all over North America. “It kind of gets in your blood,” he explained. He knew what sections of track were so rocky he couldn’t cook his special soups and how full the pot could be elsewhere. Same for custards.
When I told him our honeymoon plans, Johnny said he’d work that trip. His shopping list for the full train: 30 dozen eggs, 22 loaves of bread, 60 pounds of beef, 65 pounds of chicken, 50 pounds of potatoes, and 18 heads of lettuce.
As everyone in Canada knows, late November means one thing: the Grey Cup, their Super Bowl. Being farther north, Canada sensibly has its Thanksgiving harvest holiday early in October.
Most Canadians are huddled along the southern border. So, when you get more than 100 miles north of there, towns are few, the woods are people-free, and in November, the lakes are frozen. Beautiful, peaceful sights to watch pass by.
It was with some surprise that when we arrived in the Dining Car for our first marital dinner together, the chief steward, Dansil Braithwaite, seated us but then said we were unworthy of a menu that night.
Soon, however, Johnny Bryk and all the dining-car crew appeared at our table with full-course Thanksgiving turkey dinners they had prepared secretly for the honeymooning Americans.
Turns out, a large turkey was on Johnny’s shopping list, but not the trip’s menu.
The train’s entire crew was also happy to celebrate the strangers’ wedding because they, too, each got an unexpected non-seasonal turkey feast. And pumpkin pie.
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I don’t believe there was a connection between my arrival in Japan and the eruption of Mount Usu. But I’ll take it.
I’ve been afflicted since youth with an intense curiosity about how and why things work. You may have noticed that in the politics columns here. My wife of 43 years (it seems like only 41) introduces me with the cautionary, “This is my husband, Andrew. He asks a lot of questions.”
So, when an “extinct” volcano erupted on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, you’ll not be surprised I was soon on the way there with my interpreter, Hiro Yoshizaki.
Japanese, as opposed to me, are quite accustomed to earthquakes, sometimes several a day. So, no one at first thought much about them in the prosperous Toyaku Onsen resort area when the shakes began that summer.
At one point, instruments detected 1,480 quakes in 24 hours, ironically during the annual festival celebrating the local volcano. An ocean of molten lava was trying to escape from far below.
Understandably, the volcano festival ended abruptly when, after decades of slumber, the 2,400-foot Mount Usu began spewing black smoke several miles high, carrying millions of tons of sand, sludge, ash, and rocks the size of a very smart person’s head.
The sight’s novelty concluded when the hot subterranean detritus began landing on streets, cars, homes, and coating vast agricultural areas with a pumice-like powder.
It was like watching that tiny DuMont screen in the earliest days of television. No color. Nothing but grey. The entire landscape for miles was a monochrome grey –- trees, grass, immense fields, cars and trucks, every inch of every road and street, houses, including the roof and all sides layered with ash.
Blue lakes were grey. So were people if they stayed outside long enough. Headlights could only pierce a few feet.
Nothing but grey. Sometimes 3 feet deep. The ash had drifted out over an area twice the size of Massachusetts.
Eventually, once worked into the ground, the pumice would enhance the soil. But so much all at once was temporarily devastating.
Evacuations created numerous ghost towns. Damage was in the multiple millions to property, crops ready for harvest, and timberlands, not including wildlife left without food and the economic shock to crucial local tourism.
“It’s all so far beyond any human calculations,” said Yasushi Niki, a town official wearing a helmet.
He was playing a bad round of golf when the eruption began. Soon, the course was covered by three inches of ash. “Now I get to start over,” he added.
Residents and businesses had all given up straightening any wall decorations of photos, calendars, signs, as the earthquakes continued.
I knew not to run out any door during an earthquake because that’s when and where glass, signs, and walls tend to tumble into streets.
We were standing in the middle of the main street, marveling at the monochrome wonderland on everything in every direction, when a fire truck arrived to produce a sight forever etched in my memory.
The men scrambled about assembling hoses and connecting hydrants. Then, they aimed the powerful streams of water at the second story of one building.
Suddenly, the original color was there. And then the windows. Back and forth, the hoses down to the ground floor, and that color emerged too.
It was like the Warner Bros. cartoons where a giant brush swished a swath of color across the screen.
One by one, building by building, story by story, they washed away the grey powder and revealed, once again, the colors that had made the town human.
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Forty years ago this year, Los Angeles hosted the Summer Olympics. It coincided with Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign. Both of them were big deals.
As usual, the Olympic Torch was carried across the country. I was curious (here we go again) what that was like. My plane into St. Louis was late, so I missed the parade’s start.
There I was on foot, chasing the open-topped press bus through downtown. It seemed like a marathon, my heart said.
The Olympic Torch parade that humid afternoon was pretty much like any urban parade you’ve ever seen, and I began to doubt my story idea. By late afternoon, we had left the city, and most media left too. And that’s when I felt at home.
AT&T, which sponsored the torch caravan on its 82-day, 9,100-mile trek across 33 states, provided employees as volunteer runners. They ran four miles apiece in shifts, about 125 miles a day over 18 hours. After dinner, I began riding in the torch car, a specially-equipped Chrysler convertible with an extra-low gear and a spare flame in case of wind.
The runners worked hard but had a good collegial time. Coming up a long hill, her tennis shoes clomping on the pavement, one woman runner drew guffaws in between gasps for air.
“You know…” she said, “Missouri….gives… good….head ……wind.”
Then, things changed unpredictably as we ran deeper into the countryside darkness. It started with 15 kindergartners, all dressed in red, white, and blue, banging tambourines and bells, chanting “USA USA.” Two boys costumed as tiny Uncle Sams held a crayoned sign, “All the Way Across the USA.”
Every few hundred yards, even after midnight, runners encountered groups, small and large, gathered by a mailbox on the roadside, offering encouragement, cold drinks, praise, and prayers.
If children were there, runners let them each carry the 4.5-pound torch a few feet for parents’ cameras.
In one town, off-duty runners spotted a youngster in an oxygen mask watching from an upstairs window. They lit a spare torch and took it up for him to hold.
Everything and everyone was photographed multiple times. They brought lawn chairs, tractors, coolers, and pickup trucks. Many had driven long distances, waited hours to see sweating strangers in shorts jogs carrying a torch with a tired arm.
Then, often from the back of a crowd, someone would start humming. The “Star-Spangled Banner” would break out or “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Hats came off. Hands covered hearts.
Through Linn, Useful, and Knob Noster, Union, Sedalia, and Festus, they showed up. Crowds of 1,000 in a town of 300. Church bells, sirens, and air horns sounded. Sidewalks lined with candles.
What started out as an Olympic event had turned into an organic display of U.S. patriotism.
Skip Haffley took the day off from cleaning houses in Gray Summit. She stood in front of her home with her brother and son, holding up the United States flag that had adorned her father’s coffin. ”It’s America, you see,” she explained.
They wore dresses and overalls, shorts and skirts, blankets, even nightgowns and hair curlers. They shouted encouragement and whispered wishes, “Go get ‘em, son” and “Hold it high, Laddie.”
State troopers noticed one youngster had been pedaling his bike alongside for quite a while. He was 15 miles from home on his way to California with the torch.
Sharon Miller drove to the corner of Highways 50 and K to witness the torch with her 12-year-old, who wanted to be an Olympian someday. Oscar Hagemeyer, who was 71, drove there too.
Sharon and Oscar had lived on adjoining farms for eight years and never met. “That torch brought us together,” Miller said.
Updates: Johnny Bryk retired, and I fear has passed on now. That Hokkaido town did recover. But Mount Usu belched again in 2000. ICYMI, Ronald Reagan rode that Olympic Torch wave of patriotism to an overwhelming 49-state reelection win in 1984.
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This is the 23rd in an ongoing series of personal Memories. Please share yours in the Comments. Links to the others are below:
The Horrors I Saw at the Three 9/11 Crash Sites Back Then
The Glorious Nights When I Had Paris All to Myself
Inside Political Conventions – at Least the Ones I Attended
Political Assassination Attempts I Have Known
The Story a Black Rock Told Me on a Montana Mountain
That Time I Sent a Message in a Bottle Across the Ocean…and Got a Reply!
As the RMS Titanic Sank, a Father Told His Little Boy, ‘See You Later.’ But Then…
Things My Father Said: ‘Here, It’s Not Loaded’
The Terrifyingly Wonderful Day I Drove an Indy Car
When I Went on Henry Kissinger’s Honeymoon
When Grandma Arrived for That Holiday Visit
Practicing Journalism the Old-Fashioned Way
When Hal Holbrook Took a Day to Tutor a Teen on Art
The Night I Met Saturn That Changed My Life
High School Was Hard for Me, Until That One Evening
When Dad Died, He left a Haunting Message That Reemerged Just Now
My Father’s Sly Trick About Smoking That Saved My Life
Encounters with Fame 2.0
His Name Was Edgar. Not Ed. Not Eddie. But Edgar.
My Encounters With Famous People and Someone Else
The July 4th I Saw More Fireworks Than Anyone Ever
How One Dad Taught His Little Boy the Alphabet Before TV – and What Happened Then
