The Pathological Personality

In medicine we know the basic personality of specialists.  Pediatricians, warm and fuzzy.  Orthopedists, “strong as an ox, and twice as smart!”  Surgeons, cut it out and ask questions later.  And pathologists, just a little removed.

So here’s the story.  My stepdaughter Sara has a cat, Blinky, also known as The Blinkster, now up to 14 years of age.  An indoor cat, and never one to turn down a meal, so, rotund.  But lovable.

Unfortunately, ironically given his name, Sara noticed a couple of months ago that Blinky couldn’t blink his left eye.  We took him in to a cat ophthalmologist who diagnosed a condition called Feline Restrictive Orbital Myelofibroblastic Sarcoma (FROMS).  The tissues behind the eye get invaded and the eye can’t move and the lid can’t close, which leads to erosion of the cornea, pain, and then blindness.  Poor Blinky had to have that eye removed.  It was sent off for examination to the cat pathologist who is the best expert on this condition, in Minnesota.  That’s what he does for a living, examine cat eye specimens. 

Sara took it well.  She knew that the other eye would likely become involved and Blinky had been with her a long time, but she did what people do in this situation, take it one day at a time and appreciate the time you have.  Still, thinking ahead, she thought that when the other eye did become involved, rather than have a blind old cat in failing health, she thought that euthanasia would be the best course.

Then, two weeks ago, Sara thought Blinky was having trouble moving his right eye, just as had happened with the left.  So she took him into the vet.  Maybe so, said the vet.  But not too bad yet.

So, being a medical professional herself, Sara figured she would call the pathologist in Minnesota, since he is the expert.  She got him on the phone, and he said that it sounded like progression, and actually he was surprised it hadn’t happened a little faster.  It was sad.  Sara, who had been holding it together pretty well, teared up as she discussed with him whether to euthanize or not.

The pathologist heard her tearing up.  His voice softened a little, and Sara could tell he was affected.  She listened attentively then, as he talked to her.  He said slowly, “Well, if you do decide to go and euthanize him, could you send me the head?”

Budd Shenkin

But Would You Want To Do It?

It’s legal to park your money in a Swiss bank account –

BUT WOULD YOU WANT TO DO IT?

It’s legal to open a company in Bermuda to avoid US taxes –

BUT WOULD YOU WANT TO DO IT?

It’s legal to park your money in the Cayman Island to avoid US taxes –

BUT WOULD YOU WANT TO DO IT?

It’s legal to take your salary from Bain Capital as “carried interest” and pay a 15% tax rate –

BUT WOULD YOU WANT TO DO IT?

It’s legal to take capital losses in 2009 and erase all your tax obligations –

BUT WOULD YOU WANT TO DO IT?

It’s legal to buy your wife a $100,000 horse and deduct it from your taxes –

BUT WOULD YOU WANT TO DO IT?

It’s legal to declare that you have “retired retroactively” and keep your salary for those years –

BUT WOULD YOU WANT TO DO IT?

And it’s legal to vote for a tax avoider and vulture capitalist for President –

BUT WOULD YOU WANT TO DO IT???

Budd Shenkin

Business School Ethics

I was sitting next to Larry, an acquaintance of mine at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.  He is also a professor at the Haas School of Business.  I forget what the issue was, but I said, “Hey, that’s not the right thing to do!”

Larry said, “Well, it’s legal.”  He meant that it was OK to do it because it was legal.

There it is, right there.  Business School Ethics.

Remember all the Harvard Business School guys at Enron?  They thought that most of what they were doing was OK to do because it was legal.  Well, they were certainly wrong on the first count, and it seems they were wrong on the second as well.  Locked up, Skilling is at least.  Many of the others got away.

After their downfall you would think the B-School would have been embarrassed.  If they were, I didn’t hear about it.  As a doctor, I thought, they need a Hippocratic Oath of some sort.  I saw some discussion of that in the press but it seemed to peter out.  I can see why.  After all, an oath to be ethical would be very controversial at a school of business.

This is precisely Mitt Romney’s problem.  He is part and parcel of the whole ethic of business.  Trying to win allegiance from rednecks he says, “I have some friends who own NASCAR racers.”  Right, Mitt, you’re right in there.  “Corporations are people, too, my friend.”  It’s so deep you can’t erase it.  It’s just who he is.

So, I hope this business with his wealth and tax-avoidance and off-shoring his money goes on and on.  His defense is so pathetic – “It’s legal.”  These laws were passed (and paid for) by guys like him, so of course it’s legal.  If he pays less than 15% of his income to taxes – “It’s legal!”  Great, Mitt, what an ear you have.  It’s not tin, it might be aluminum.

At last the Dems and the press are getting onto an issue that should stick.  It is so emblematic of who he is. 

People left out at the bottom?  “That’s the nature of capitalism.” 

Poorer people not being able to find health care?  “They should have thought about that when they were in school.” 

Demo a $3 million house and erect a $10 million one with a 12 car garage with an elevator?  “Well, I can afford it and I have a big family.”

Thanks, Mitt, you’re a real prince.

What have we come to, when he is more acceptable than the other Republican candidates were?

Jesus.

Budd Shenkin

Lola Baseball

Last Friday was our day with Lola, age 2 years 5 months.  So we set out for Walgreen’s to pick up some medicine.  Last time we did this I made the mistake of walking down the candy aisle, which led to the purchase of a particularly cloying box of Hello Kitty super-goo colored animals.

This time, I started down the same aisle, realized my mistake, and took the next aisle instead, and Lola followed.  But the Walgreen’s marketers are not fools, and this time we found ourselves in the toy aisle.  Lola is a quick learner, and she has become amazingly adept in stores at surveying shelves and focusing quickly.  She surveyed, focused, decided, reached, and grabbed the Dora the Explorer Bat and Ball –  a large, soft bat and ball with Dora looking straight out at us from the shrink wrap.  As she pushed it at me, she declared, “My birthday present!”  Perhaps the predominance of lawyers in our family is not coincidental, because she was very convincing.  And luck was on my side because it was on sale for $3.99.  A cardinal point of the Budd Shenkin Theory of Child Rearing is "Give In Early."  You don't want them to think they can make you do something by a tantrum or prolonged pleading, so don't go down that road.  Accordingly, I put the Dora the Explorer bat and ball in the basket. 

We caught up with Ann at the pharmacy check out line.  Ann took the Dora bat and ball with an understanding smile and gave it to the check out clerk, who looked at her for confirmation that this was a valid addition.  So Lola piped up, “It’s my birthday present!”

The clerk smiled softly and asked Ann, mother to mother, “When is her birthday?”

“February!” said Ann with a bemused smile and then a giggle, and the clerk laughed with surprise and her own bemused appreciation, and put it in the bag.

As we left the clerk and passed by the next in line, a compact Black man in a work jacket, he told Lola with his soft African accent, “Happy Birthday!”  What a sweet man he was, and we had to laugh.

So, since then she and I have been playing “Lola Baseball” in our back yard.  Here’s the way Lola Baseball works.  She grabs either the Dora bat or the Dora ball and says “Pitch!”  If she has the bat she holds it with two hands right over her head, and I throw it to try to hit the bat.  If she has the ball and I have the bat, she throws it – she is a pretty good pitcher -- and I usually hit it.  Whichever it is, she then yells, “Strikeout!”

If I’ve been hitting she grabs the bat out of my hands and throws it on the ground.  She takes the ball and throws it in the dirt under the little grapefruit tree.  She grabs me by the thighs, turns me around, and forcefully – forcefully! -- pushes me and yells, “Run, Baba!”  I run up our little path about six or seven yards and turn around and jog back and she laughs uproariously.  The play is apparently ended then, because she then finds the ball, grabs the bat, and we do it once again.

Then her attention is usually diverted to something else.  After all, she’s only two.  I heard a rumor she recently had a birthday.

Budd Shenkin

Wanna Buy Some Plants?

It was a beautiful morning in May, a blessed month I have always thought. Sun shining, coolish air in the 60’s, and a Saturday. I had planned to take the two year old to Home Depot to buy some plants, probably inpatiens for the shade, maybe some herbs as well. We like to do it together. Last time at OSH she grabbed a few plants and pots, but them in the cart and hung on to the end of it, facing me as we walked, knuckles just showing and blond hair bobbing an prominent. This time we headed for the plant sale at Martin Luther King, Jr., Junior High School where Alice Waters has pioneered the edible garden. The little girl was in the car seat in back, surveying the landscape as we proceeded from South to North Berkeley, not missing a thing. First past John Muir Elementary School, where she hopes to play in the playground, and where she told me that Allie, Nick, and her Mommy had attended. She doesn’t miss a thing. Then past the Clark Kerr Campus, where I informed her it was a school and she said she wanted to go to school. Then past the field on Gayley Road where they play lacrosse and soccer; she wants to play soccer. Then down Hearst past the Goldman School of Public Policy, where I told her I had gone. “I want to go there, Baba,” she said, thus becoming one of the earliest applicants. We found the plant sale, got her out of the car seat, and toddled in. On the way to the plants was a little pond, really a mud puddle. She wanted to stop, so who was I to say no? She got a couple of little sticks, stirred the water, then decided throwing them in was more fun. There were lots of little reeds and they all got thrown in. We proceeded on and found two girls who were face painting. She got up on a stool and decided she wanted to be a zebra, which was the picture on her T-shirt. OK, a zebra it was to be, some white blotches and some black, but for some reason with whiskers, too. Can’t blame people for thinking she was a cat, but they were corrected by the little girl, “A zebra!” Which she confirmed by looking in the mirror again and again from different angles. Then we saw some chickens in a cage, and she saw pointed out to me that there was one duck, as indeed there was. Over to the goats. Back to the mirror for the zebra watch. Then it seemed possible to buy some plants, but she took off for the mud puddle again, with reeds, and this time slipping in to it up to her knees. She didn’t cry much at all, but we repaired to a flat rock in the sun, took off the little socks, rolled up the pant legs, and used the little sweatshirt to dry the legs and put the shoes back on sans the socks. It could have been time to visit the plants, but she looked up and said, “Snack?” We avoided the pizza, it was 11 AM, and found her a chocolate cupcake and myself a cup of coffee and Acme sticky roll, and we repaired to a picnic table in the sun. Shared with grandparents, parents, and a couple of little kids and found that the grandparents were from Philadelphia and resented their son’s transplantation. I got the little girl some water and she washed her face, wiping off some of the face painting. The grandfather told her not to do that, that the face painting would come off, and the son said, “Dad!” which made the grandfather retreat with some resentment. That’s not what we do in Berkeley, he knew. The grandparents live in Jenkintown and a different era, I guess. I told them I was from Philadelphia originally but they didn’t seem thrilled, since that meant that I, too, had moved away. It was time to go, so we toddled off with the cupcake in a little box, mounted the car seat, turned around and drove down Grant and then onto Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. The little girl looked around and commented as we drove home, “Want to buy some plants?” Instead we got gas and arrived home two hours after leaving, ready for new adventures in the here and now. Budd Shenkin

How Not To Be A Dick

The wonders of the modern world – telephony. An instance where modern finance actually helped us – ATT was broken up, and no more do I have to listen to the modern equivalent of my father trying to get off the phone as I called home from my freshman year at Harvard, Boston to Philadelphia, “Well, it’s long distance….” My Mom, on the other line, remonstrating, “Henry, he needs to talk to you!” “Well, everyone knows that math and science are harder,” said my Dad, responding to my expressed concerns with my studies. And I guess that was all I had to hear, even if it wasn’t particularly true. What was harder wasn’t math and science, it was Harvard. But encouragement was what I needed, and even just a word or two was fine, and still remembered 52 years later. So I called my son Allie where he lives in Panama yesterday to chat, and with modern telephony and computers, it was a free call. He is pursuing ye old Ph.D. in environmental science, commuting from Panama to Bolivia, his field work site, and to Gainesville, his home university. Jet planes with competitive fares, free telephony, and calling him from my car. I’m used to it all, but still I can appreciate it. I called Allie to chat and asked how he was doing and he said the dissertation was going fine, making good progress. So I remembered something else about my Dad. It was the summer of 1970, and my ex-wife and I and Allie and Nicky were spending a few weeks in my parental home in Society Hill in Philadelphia, in between leaving my post with the Public Health Service in Washington, D.C., and driving out to Berkeley for graduate school. Somehow I just kind of assumed that it would be OK for this family of four to stay with them. A nice summer time, and while they enjoyed us, I’m sure they had other ideas besides our squeezing into their house for the duration. I was pretty unconscious, gotta say. Anyway, there we were. My Dad said I should write a book about my fascinating experience the previous two years in the Public Health Service, heading the Migrant Health Program. He was right, I should and I eventually did. But at this point there was only the idea. I guess I was writing an outline. I was downstairs. But actually I wasn’t writing the outline at that point, I was reading “Ball Four” by Jim Bouton. Sitting in that white scoop chair that swiveled around, reading about the club house attendant for the Yankees who told Bouton he had stopped ordering orange juice for the team because it disappeared too fast, as Bouton wondered at the logic of the stupid of the world. So, down comes my father to look at me, and he says, “You’re not writing your book? You’re reading Ball Four?” Then paused, looked at me, and said gently, “You’re really disgusting.” That’s what I told Allie that I was reminded of, and Allie said, “He really said that?? ‘Disgusting?’ Oh, man!” “Yes,” I said, “but it wasn’t so bad. My Dad said it with love. He always said it with love. My mother, well, maybe another story.” So Allie said, “So that reminded you? And you’re wondering how I’m doing on my dissertation?” “No,” I said. “I’m wondering if I’m being a dick.” He laughed, and I laughed. And actually, I don’t think I was being a dick. Especially since I remembered what it was like to be a dick, when I was on the other side of it. Budd Shenkin

Dick Clark

Well, Dick Clark is dead. Sic transit gloria mundi.

I remember Bandstand. Not that I watched it more than one or two times in my life. But I passed through it.

Until 8th grades I lived in West Philadelphia, 47th and Osage for most of the time, in the penumbra of the Penn campus some 15 blocks to the east. It was white then and not run down, with alleys for playing ball, and corner drug stores for playing pinball and very occasionally sitting at the soda fountain and discovering a cherry coke, and inside the houses we sat down for Leave it to Beaver dinners with no TV. From 4th through 8th grades the Shenkin kids deserted the local public school Henry C. Lea Elementary and Sayre Junior High in favor of suburban Friends’ Central School out on City Line. In the morning we would either take a green station wagon school bus, or my mother would drive me and my three siblings to school. The route was always the same, and we listened to Ed McMahon on the radio with my mom, or we would talk and have our little games in the station wagon. Kids can be a little ghoulish, and just a few blocks north of 63rd and Market Streets, as we passed a long, low sign on a grassy front lawn, we would recite in low-pitched sonorous unison, “J. McCullough, Undertaker!” And laugh at our own impertinence.

But that doesn’t have anything to do with Dick Clark, yet. That was saved for the ride home. By 7th grade I could come home by myself after late afternoon sports, taking a bus, the El, and another bus. You could do that then and parents wouldn’t fear for you. The Red Arrow suburban bus from the school to the 69th street terminal was populated by school kids with important conversations. I remember telling Richie “Boop” Reinhart that I had discovered that “fuck” was a dirtier word than “shit,” because after all, everyone had to shit. It seemed perfectly clear at the time.

At the 69th Street Terminal I would walk from the bus terminal at one end to the El (elevated train) terminal at the exact opposite end, punctuated in the middle by the donut shop, with big, glazed donuts staring me in the face as I passed. I disciplined myself not to stop because I knew they weren’t good for me, and also the fact that donuts cost money I think was also in there somewhere. Two Friends’ Central girls seemed to hang out there, one small, blond, freckled, slightly coarse and loud; the other taller, darker, shyer, and to me much more attractive. There were guys from other schools around there with them. They were racy. But while I looked, I don’t think I stopped more than once or twice, just to get a donut.

OK, still no Dick Clark. The El had stops at 63rd street, 60th, 56th, 52nd, and 46th. I was 46th. While the train worked its way there I diverted myself by trying to hold my breath between the stops, from doors closed to doors opened. Usually I think I had to take one or two breaths, or maybe I made it without breathing between 63rd and 60th. One time I read the other side of the Daily News someone was reading and saw banner headlines, Bannister Runs Four Minute Mile!

At 46th Street is where Dick Clark comes in. I climbed down the stairs to get the bus that would take me from Market Street to Osage. At 46th and Market were the studios and offices for WFIL, the ABC local outlet. I knew it because my brother and I and best friend Arnold Bernstein had gone there on various Saturdays in the past to be in the little audiences for Pud’s Prize Party (Pud was the rotund character for Fleer’s Double Bubble Gum), and Tom Morehead’s radio kids sports show, where I was once an interviewee plucked from the audience to aver that I liked playing defense better than offense in football, which was a surprise to me as I said it, having never been asked before, but true. That was about all I said. I was probably picked for interviewing because he saw me talking loud and laughing in the audience pre-show, or because we kept coming week after week. But beyond “defense,” I don’t think I said too much, gentle as Tom was in urging me forward and filling the verbal space, but what can you do with stage fright?

But that was before I commuted. Later, in the midst of my commute, coming down from the El, I would see a snaking line outside WFIL, filled with kids from West Catholic and maybe some from West Philly, and other high schools, waiting to get into Bandstand. The “American” came later. At first it was to be hosted by Bob Horne, but when he was discovered taking girls from the show home with him – understandable but regrettable – he was replaced by squeaky-clean Dick Clark.

A friend who was another passenger in the school station wagon reciting “J. McCullough, Undertaker,” recounts how he was 27 blocks away from the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention watching one of the most famous and influential events of the 20th century on TV, just the same as he would have been watching in Tulsa. I can say that I passed by the pimpled crowd from West Catholic, as a good private school boy heading home, in much the same fashion. I knew what I should be doing, and I got on that bus to go over to Osage Avenue and home. Bye bye Dick Clark.

OK, I have to admit, that’s not much of a brush with celebrity. But in fact I did see Dick Clark in the flesh once. We had moved out to Wynnewood and I was a senior at the great Lower Merion High. American Bandstand had guest schools for some of its shows, to leaven the West Catholic crowd, and I heard from my friend Lynn Sherr that it was our turn. She tried to organize a group of us to go down there, but actually only a few of us actually went. I was one of them. I don’t think I was one of the dancers the cameras focused on. I hope not. We were definitely out of place.

But I did see Dick Clark. As I lurked nearby, he introduced a new act, a guy named Chubby Checker (this was the era of Fats Domino, so I think the hefty Chubby was not using his real name.) Clark introduced him as a great new talent and only 18 or 19 years old or so. Then afterward I heard their private conversation.

Chubby said to him, with come distress, “I’m not 19, I’m 23!”

Clark patiently but firmly and I think pedantically explained to him, “The public likes youth!”

Chubby took it and didn’t argue back.

Right there you could see the beginnings of Clark’s later, greater career as a producer. But me, I really didn’t think about it or analyze it. I just remembered it. I was headed to college and medical school.

RIP.

Budd Shenkin