Word Back: In America, We're All Bozos on This Red-White-And-Blue Bus

Part 2 of Word Back: America

I explore word choice in "Make America Great Again."

What was America like in my youth? Was it all fun and games?

Yes and no. 

The Wayback Machine takes us back to my collegiate years, 1969-1976. Yes, I was on the seven-year B.A. Plan. 

I remember the legendary Firesign "I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus" Theater perform at the UF Gator Growl in 1975? And wasn’t I there physically although my mind was wandering due to cannabis? I looked it up. Yes, Firesign Theater performed at the ’75 Growl. As I looked up the event's history at the HardyVision Institute of Pop Culture, I found this header: “Frequently Asked Questions: Gator Growl’s Stand-up Comedian History.”

Wow. That was my question. Thanks, WWW. Sometimes hummingbirdminds are glorious. I scrolled down to this:

When did Gator Growl start hiring big-name stand-up comedians?

In 1970, UF alumnus Buddy Ebsen (of “Beverly Hillbillies” fame) was invited to be the Gator Growl emcee. Of course, he’s not a stand-up comedian, but he did show up and lent a celebrity flair as he told showbiz stories and talked about how nice it was to be back.

In 1974, the musician Jim Stafford was the emcee. The Independent Florida Alligator reports that the Winter Haven native opened the show with his song “Wildwood Weed” blaring over the loudspeakers, and later in the show “he sang his big hit – ‘Spiders and Snakes,’ accompanied by six dancing girls.” 

In 1975, the show was emceed by the comedy duo of Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman of the Firesign Theater.

But it was Bob Hope in 1976 who was Gator Growl’s first nationally known stand-up comedian headliner. He would return to headline Gator Growl in 1979 and in 1983 at age 80.

I was right about Firesign! Jed Clampett was a UF grad – who knew? And Bob Hope hosted three times, once when I was allegedly in the crowd in ’76?

Instead of continuing my research into Firesign, which was the day’s assignment, I scrolled down to a video: “The Bob Hope Collection at the University of Florida.” Really? The Smathers Library has a huge Hope collection willed it by the Bob and Dolores Hope Foundation, most of it previously displayed at the World Golf Hall of Fame Museum at World Golf Village off I-95 west of Ponte Vedra Beach where they do a lot of golfing. The new World of Golf Museum is now in Pinehurst, N.C., near swanky Pinehurst C.C. Its largest display is a women’s locker room with more than 160 lockers of famous women golfers.

So comedian golfer Bob Hope’s collectibles are now at the UF Library? That is something. This is the same library where I spent hundreds of hours learning how to be a writer. I read through the reading list former radical Nelson Algren handed out in my creative writing class. I read Harry Crews' Esquire column because I couldn't afford my own subscription. I read it all. I wrote thousands of words in my journal. I wrote and wrote. 

And now I remember. In my youth, Bob Hope was my favorite comedian. And I wasn’t alone. As quoted in the 16-minute library video, Time Magazine’s Richard Schickel said he admired Hope’s “rapid-fire patter” and “as a kid growing up, I thought he was terribly funny as did most of the nation.” Me too. He and Bing Crosby were hilarious in their “Road” pictures. I loved how they broke the “fourth wall” to comment right at the camera, right at me sitting in suburbia. He had his own TV show. He traveled the world entertaining our troops fighting fascists and commies or just confused about why they were so far from home. He cracked me up. At one point, he was a starving artist in Vaudeville. The photo of that hopeful kid is in the UF collection.

I became a know-it-all college kid and Hope was out. He was part of the establishment. He was buds with Nixon and supported our foray into Southeast Asia. He was going to get us killed. He wasn’t funny anymore. I threw Bob Hope under the bus (the Bozo bus) because he was too establishment. 

Bob Hope tear-gassed me. Not him but him and his pals at Honor America Day on the National Mall on July 4, 1970. I return now to the American I was that day, a 19-year-old confused U.S. Navy midshipman on leave. I told the story in a 2019 blog post:

There were lots of fireworks at the July 4, 1970, event, not all of it in the sky. American Nazis attended to protest Vietnam War protesters and the Yippies staging a smoke-in at the Washington Monument. Police tried to maintain a DMZ between the protesters and Silent Majority picnickers. When that failed, park police fired tear gas at the rowdy hippies and gas clouds drifted over the multitudes. This led, as one reporter wrote, to a "mad stampede of weeping hippies and Middle Americans away from the fumes." At the same time, the U.S. Navy Band played the Star-Spangled Banner from the Lincoln Memorial stage.

I was in that mad stampede. I picnicked with my buddy Pat's family. When the fumes reached us, Pat and I scrambled to lead his grandmother and younger sisters to safety. Pat and I had been tear-gassed several times that spring at the University of South Carolina during protests of the Kent State killings. It was no fun for young people but could be dangerous for the elderly. We made it out of the gas cloud and, when the hubbub died down, we returned to our picnic. Later, we listened to Honor America Day jokes from Bob Hope and Jeannie C. Riley's version of Merle Haggard's "The Fightin' Side of Me." Then, despite the chaos or maybe because of it, we admired the bitchin' fireworks display. 

So this is America, all of it, all of us, me and Bob Hope and you. We're All Bozos on This Bus.

The ballad of Baba the Thin Man and the Good Ship Cameronia

My sister sent me a packet of stuff she cleaned out of her attic. In it, I found a printout from The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation. I took it from there.

My maternal grandfather, Irish immigrant Martin Hett, boarded the S.S. Cameronia on a late May afternoon, 1915. He was 15. The ship was five years old. Spiffy little vessel, the Anchor Line, flew the British flag, built in Glasgow. 10,963 gross tons, 515 feet long, 62 feet wide. Top speed 17 knots. Two masts and two funnels, steel hull with four decks. Carried 1,700 passengers, 250 in first class, 450 in second class, and 1,000 with Grandfather in third class. Port of departure: Liverpool. Port of arrival: New York City. Arrived with all hands June 7, 1915.

RMS Lusitania: First British four-funneled ocean liner, called an “ocean greyhound” by the Cunard Line, six passenger decks carried 2,198 including almost 600 in sumptuous first-class compartments, Launched June 7, 1906; sunk on its voyage from New York by Germany’s SM U-20 on May 7, 1915 with loss of 1,197 souls, some bodies found floating, some washed up on Irish beaches, some just disappeared into The Deeps. A Vanderbilt was among the dead. 

Grandfather was originally booked on the Lusitania along with more than 1,000 other third-class passengers. Now shipless, Grandfather had to hang around the Liverpool docks looking for an alternate booking. Apocryphal family stories have him booking steerage on another ship that is also torpedoed and sunk. We like this because we can tell listeners that our teenage Grandfather tempted fate during the war but made it to America after all. Grand tale, no?

I don’t know why I keep calling him grandfather. As a precocious American toddler, a future English major and writer, I called him Baba so everyone else did. My cousins called him Gramps. My father, his son-in-law, called him Mart. Mom called him Dad.

Not sure what Liverpool looked like in spring 1915. My guess is that it looked a lot like the post-war city of 1919-1920 in the first episodes of “Peaky Blinders.” The Great European War was wrapping up its first year with hellish fights in France and Belgium and the Battle of Gallipoli in far-off Turkey. The war in what we now call the Middle East doesn’t get much movie time except for “Gallipoli” and “Lawrence of Arabia” but it was crucial to what came after and the fate of The Good Ship Cameronia.

Baba made his way from Ellis Island to Chicago and in 1917 worked on the El with his brother.

In 1919, David W. Bone’s book “Merchantmen-At-Arms: The British Merchants’ Service in the War” was published. An experienced merchant seaman and author, Bone explores in great detail the war at sea. He relives the April 15, 1917, sinking of the troopship Cameronia in Chapter XII: 'THE MAN-O'-WAR 'S 'ER 'USBAND'. The ship carries almost 3,000 troops to Egypt. You can read the full text at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/31953/31953-h/31953-h.htm#. It features drawings by Muirhead Bone, an etcher and watercolorist who was a war artist in the First and Second World Wars. Here are excerpts:

An alarmed cry from aloft—a half-uttered order to the steersman—an explosion, low down in the bowels of the ship, that sets her reeling in her stride!

The upthrow comes swiftly on the moment of impact. Hatches, coal, shattered debris, a huge column of solid water go skyward in a hurtling mass to fall in torrent on the bridge. Part of a human body strikes the awning spars and hangs—watch-keepers are borne to the deck by the weight of water—the steersman falls limply over the wheel with blood pouring from a gash on his forehead. . . . Then silence for a stunned half-minute, with only the thrust of the engines marking the heart-beats of the stricken ship.

*****

Uproar! Most of our men are young recruits: they have been but two days on the sea. The torpedo has gone hard home at the very weakest hour of our calculated drill. The troops are at their evening meal when the blow comes, the explosion killing many outright.

*****

Many of the life-boats reach the water safely with their heavy burdens, but the strain on the tackles—far beyond their working load—is too great for all to stand to it. Two boats go down by the run. The men in them are thrown violently to the water, where they float in the wash and shattered planking. A third dangles from the after fall, having shot her manning out at parting of the forward tackle. Lowered by the stern, she rights, disengages, and drifts aft with the men clinging to the life-lines. We can make no attempt to reach the men in the water.

*****

It is when the most of the life-boats are gone we realize fully the gallant service of the destroyers.

*****

We are little more than clear of the settling fore-end when the last buoyant breath of Cameronia is overcome. Nobly she has held afloat to the debarking of the last man. There is no further life in her. Evenly, steadily, as we had seen her leave the launching ways at Meadowside, she goes down.

Many of the troops were rescued by destroyers Nemesis and Rifleman.

Baba loved his ice cream. The Thin Man died at 90.

P.S.: There was another S.S. Cameronia built by the Anchor Line that sailed on its maiden voyage in 1921. It too was requisitioned as a troopship at the outbreak of World War 2 and took part in the 1942 invasion of North Africa, was torpedoed and towed to Algiers for repairs. She was the largest troopship to participate in Operation Overlord on June 6, 1944. She carried passengers to Palestine in 1948. Scrapped in 1957.

Winter is coming and it's time to stockpile soup for a nasty 2025

I blame Max Brooks.

Yes, the guy who wrote “World War Z” and the excellent graphic novel, “The Harlem Hellfighters” (artwork by Caanan White).

In his 2020 book, “Devolution,” Brooks combines a gigantic eruption of Mount Rainier and a Sasquatch invasion and civil war and the bumbling of clueless techies. All hell breaks loose.

Most people are woefully unprepared because we are Americans and live for the moment and ourselves. We do not stockpile food and supplies like the LDSers and Preppers. Why bother? Nothing’s gonna happen.

In “Devolution,” residents of the wired Greenloop community high in the scenic Washington state mountains must find ways to do without grocery deliveries by drone, solar power, and cell connections as they struggle to survive. The elderly artist in the co-op knows how to grow spuds from potato eyes and how to trap and dissect rabbits for a yummy stew.

I was thinking about that while staring at the canned soups at Publix. Look at all of those cans. They don’t need refrigeration. They don’t really need to be cooked as they are MREs. So, acting on instinct and paranoia, I grabbed a bunch of Progresso soups. You don’t even need a manual can opener as you can open the can yourself even if you have difficulties with aging hands as I do. I imagine that all of the refrigerated food is eaten or spoiled. We have long since eaten all the packaged crackers and cookies and snacks.

Soup will save us. I grabbed a dozen cans. Piled them high in the cart. When Chris caught up with me, she surveyed my shopping cart and asked, “Why all the soup?”

“Winter is coming.”

“This isn’t ‘Games of Thrones’ “

“Winter, it’s still coming.”

“I know. But not this week. And we have a fridge and freezer filled with food.”

“People are talking about a civil war. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.”

“You watched ‘Ghostbusters’ again?”

“But what if…”

“What if what?”

A crowd gathered by the soups. People stared at us, and then at the beautiful red-and-white cans of original Campbell’s, tiny tributes to Andy Warhol. Some wanted to get their own soup to stockpile for a looming disaster such as one the USA will face on Jan. 20, 2025.

Chris, alas, had her way. I put back most of the soups. We kept Campbell’s chicken noodle and Progresso creamy tomato and basil.

The rest of the shopping trip was uneventful. I managed to slip in a box of saltines and boxes of Band-Aids, the large kind, the kind you would use for post-apocalyptic wounds. I checked out and went home to continue reading “Devolution,” large-print edition.

And I had to ask myself: What if?