“Relief recipients were warned yesterday that they must get rid of television sets, telephones, and other ‘luxury’ items in their homes or face being dropped from relief rolls.” So began the newspaper article on September 25, 1962.
At that time, Harold Swank was the executive secretary of the Public Aid commission. He ordered his staff to begin canvassing their clients for failure to comply. He also told them to warn the Public Aid beneficiaries that if they did not sell all such items within the month, the relief checks would stop.
An exception was made for telephones if needed for health reasons or to help get a job. “Luxury” items would be allowed to be kept if purchased before the person went on relief or were received as gifts. But, the aid recipient must be able to prove this.
Another policy statement directed by Mr. Swank at that time warned those on the public dole that children out of wedlock would not be tolerated, even resulting in forced removal of children from the home.
Mr. Swank was a tough cookie who interpreted and possibly amended the law to suit his own personal bias. As director of Public Aid, he was a party to several lawsuits alleging unfair practice. For example,
in 1971 his agency was sued in class action for not giving the same benefits to children between the ages of 18 to 20 still living at home and going to school as those younger. The Supreme Court of the US upheld his office’s interpretation of Illinois statutes and did not find it unconstitutional.
In 1964, his office was chastised by the US Department of Agriculture for lax security of a warehouse containing commodities given by the Feds to the State of Illinois to pass along to welfare recipients. Over $3500 in goods were stolen and Mr. Swank was sent a bill to pony up for the loss. When Mr. Swank balked, he was told “too bad” as his own staff admitted they did not do a good job in protecting against thievery. However, he was promised that the Department of Agriculture would “hold on” to the check for thirty days to give him a chance to prove that security was more than adequate.
A follow-up correspondence in January 1965 mentioned that although Swank indicated that there were three burglary alarms on doors in the warehouse and that an intruder had once been caught, this was not sufficient proof that the pilfering of commodity cards was properly protected. Further inspection proved that the warehouse doors could be opened as wide as 18 inches before the alarm would trigger. Therefore, the Department of Agriculture was instructed to deposit the check received from the State of Illinois. It also intimated that Swank’s own employees were embezzling the stock and that his staff looked the other way.
In 1965, Harold Swank testified before a US Senate subcommittee that the federal government must take the lead in providing birth control services for the poor. “Unwanted children bring higher welfare costs and contribute to family breakdowns.” He also said that although the Feds should start the ball rolling that there will come a time when the Federal Government would pass it along to the State level to administer.
On August 5, 1965, Harold denied a request by a lady for public aid telling her that if her estranged husband was not giving her the court-ordered $35 a week that she should seek legal action against him. It was not the obligation of his office to cover for husbands who did not pay their obligations. He also told her that as she was 42, she was young enough to go out and get a job to help take care of herself and her two children. In fact, he pointed out to her that she was just as legally obligated to support her children as well as her estranged husband.
In 1968, Mr. Swanks office demanded that a mother of nine children on welfare use a $1500 settlement given to her twelve year old daughter due to injuries sustained to her eye. The Department of Public Aid wanted to reduce the family’s monthly allotment by a pro-rated amount that could be withdrawn from the daughter’s savings account.
The daughter’s lawyer argued that the money should not be touched and be saved as future tuition for the girl to go to college. The State then filed suit in court arguing that the girl was not college material.
Earlier, in 1968, his office was sued – again in class action- because it only provided a $90 a month shelter allowance. The person suing felt that it was discriminatory because some people obviously needed a larger residence when they had a bigger family.
Can you imagine a person like Mr. Swank running a relief agency today?
Some immigration stories turn out well; others, just plain make you shake your head. Take these two people and learn from them: Gac Filipat (pronounced Gus Felipi) and Eduardo Saverin.
Mr. Filipat came to this country from Yugoslavia twenty years ago. He took a job as a custodian at Columbia University because they offered up to fourteen free college credits a year for employees. Columbia only accepts ten percent of applicants a year. He took them up on it while he went about his business of cleaning toilets and the like. By the way, a full year’s tuition at Columbia as of 2011 was pegged at $45,290. Slightly more than half the students were entitled to some type of financial assistance to a maximum of $40,259.
Gac came to this country speaking little English but ended up taking a heavy dose of English literature classics. He has fulfilled only half of his dream. He intends to stay on as a custodian and continue with graduate courses which are also payment exempt for employees. Not bad for a man of 52, huh?
On the other side of the coin is Eduardo Saverin. He was born in Brazil of wealthy stock. The family moved to Miami, Florida in the United States when he was thirteen where it was relatively safer as Eduardo had been the target of kidnapping attempts. He went to Harvard University where he made friends with three other guys who created Facebook. He was not involved in the technological end but rather was the chief financial officer and business manager. There was a falling out between him and Mark Zuckerberg, the techno genius, and a parting of the ways. But not before his shares in the nascent company were established. As it stands now, Mr. Saverin, is eligible to own more than $3.5 billion dollars worth of Facebook stock after its imminent IPO.
This sounds like a nice fairy tale. Someone comes to this country for a better, safer life and makes a ton of money fulfilling the American Dream. He’ll probably show his appreciation by establishing a charitable trust foundation to help other Americans, right? Wrong! Mr. Saverin left the good old US of A in 2009 to take up residence in Singapore. In 2011 he renounced his US citizenship to help reduce his capital gains tax obligations on his Facebook ownings. From what I have read, this can translate to a savings between $600 million to $1 billion. But even if the savings is only $300 million- after all, whats a few hundred million between friends?- there is a certain degree of disgust directed towards Eduardo.
On the one hand, we have a feel-good story of an immigrant coming to America to help it become a better country by adding his hard-scrubbed effort to be useful and productive. On the other hand, we have another type of immigrant who came here- maybe not because he wanted to- and made sure he took advantage of everything this country has to offer and gave back some tax money while he quickly exited to greener pastures.
Okay, we’ll take the money- we’re not that stupid.
“Give an inch and take a mile” is one of those common phrases found in a dictionary of idioms. It very
well expresses the disparity found in situations where someone is getting taken advantage of (usually me). One must speak it in frustration sprinkled with a dash of sarcasm.
For example-you can pretty much tell what takes up much of my mind- let’s say you are driving your car on a major road and are behind three others as the light turns red. As the drivers ahead of you quickly slow down and put on the brakes, so do you. There is a hamburger drive-thru joint at that corner and while you have been sitting there for thirty seconds wondering when the cross light is going to warn the intersecting traffic with a yellow signal, all of a sudden a car inches up to the exit area of the drive-thru. The driver lets his foot off the brake gently so he can move his car off the driveway closer to the street. This is universal way of letting the car that is on the street know that when the light turns green, the car yearning to get out of the drive-thru is going to attempt a mad dash into traffic. No harm, no foul- maybe. Traffic in our direction wasn’t moving anyway.
Except, in my case, being in the car behind the good Samaritan who allows the driveway guy onto the road, I’m busting a gut. All of a sudden, I see an armada of two or three more cars hankering to tailgate the guy coming out of the drive-thru and squeak into traffic. The driver ahead of me happens to be too nice a guy and he is willing to let everyone else who wants out of the hamburger joint to get in their cars, rev up the engines, and move out into traffic. And then, he decides not to move because the light has now turned yellow again and doesn’t want to get a ticket. In the meantime, I’m now the fourth car from the stoplight.
Naturally, if the shoe were on the other foot and it was I trying to get into traffic from a shopping strip parking lot, the fellow in the third car waiting at the light would give me a dirty look and dare me to get within two feet of his mobile sheet metal. And then I’d be honking the horn and turn my head and see that there was a police squad car just passing by in the other direction who luckily did not notice I was the guy blasting away the serenity of outdoors.
Time out:
Inch derives from something Latin that means ‘one-twelfth’. Most common people long ago who didn’t own a ruler used the size of a thumb to roughly gauge an inch. I guess they figured you could stack twelve thumbs and it would equal the length of their foot. Mile also has a Latin origin that refers to the Roman word for one thousand. So what we have here is a phrase born out of a situation where one person gives a twelfth of kindness and the recipient forces an exaggeration one thousand times over.
Okay, time-in.
For those of you who don’t drive or maybe don’t care if you let six cars into traffic ahead of you because you are not in a hurry to go anywhere, let me present another example of kindness being sullied.
You are standing in the checkout lane with a shopping cart full of twenty-five or so items. You’ve just about finished putting the last item on the moving counter but are waiting for the person ahead of you to figure out how to slide their credit card on that ubiquitous device and then remember to use the stylus pen to sign the screen. Suddenly, a short of breath person appears behind you holding two items in his hands with a meek smile and a puppy dog look on his face. Silently, he is sending you a telepathic message to please let him jump ahead of you because he only has two items and his wife and baby are sitting in the car.
Being the nice guy that you are, you gesture with your hand to let him step ahead and take care of his quick purchase. He now gives you a full smile and says, “thanks!”. Of course, the second item the checkout lady tries to scan returns a bad beep. She does it again and still no satisfaction. A third attempt is just as futile. She picks up the phone sitting next to the register and announces to the Maytag repairman guarding Jack Benny’s vault, “price check on register six.” The unseen messenger slowly gets up in the employee lounge trying to remember if he is using his cane or walker today while he slowly makes his way to register six. Five minutes later he shows up to take the item with the bad pricing back to whence it came and look for a clue of a price label on the shelf.
I ask the clerk why she can’t void the first item and put it aside so she can do mine where I am confident all items have good bar codes. The guy I was nice to looks at me with a “whom do you think you are, selfish bastard?” glare. The clerk stares at me as if I am a trouble maker and says indignantly, “I don’t void sales. Just you wait.” (Who am I, Henry Higgins?)
Ten minutes later as I am still standing behind the recipient of my benevolence as we both await the completion of the sale. Did the messenger get in a car and drive to the manufacturer of the product to find out what he charges and then do his own profit markup to come up with a price? All the while, I am promising to never ever be nice again.
The lottery seems to bring out the devil in too many people. The following true lottery incidents all point to underlying desperation of too many souls affected by an economy running in place.
Connecticut:
A man claimed he won a $254 million first prize in the Powerball game. The store where the winning number was issued did not deny that he visited there regularly. He may even have been on the surveillance camera filming the checkout counter at the time the ticket was sold. But, he could not produce the ticket because he lost it. You know what they say- “no tickee, no washee!”
Iowa:
A 16 million dollar winner was issued in December, 2010. No one came forth until the last day or so of eligibility- a full year later. The thing was, the winner mailed it in from New York, claiming to have bought it while visiting Iowa a year earlier. The stranger part was that the name of the winner was a corporation with a person’s name acting as agent. There was no corporation listed in New York with the spelling on the ticket and the agent allegedly had previously conspired to do criminal acts in other states and was currently under legal entanglement. The Iowa authority was not releasing the money as they were suspicious as to whether the ticket was faked or if the true owner was trying to hide his or her identity due to trouble with the law.
Arkansas:
A most bizarre situation involving a lady who grabbed the winning ticket out of a trash can in a convenience store after it had been discarded there. The Arkansas authorities gave her the money, which came out to about $680,000 after taxes. She quickly bought a used truck and gave some money to her kids. Now, the authorities took away the remainder as it sat in escrow by court order.
As originally noted only a few days ago, a judge found for a woman who argued that she had “accidentally” discarded the ticket in the trash because she thought it was a loser. We had reported earlier that the purchaser had tested the barcode scan of the ticket and the machine came back and indicated it was a loser. However, the story had substantially changed since then. The lady who found the ticket said that it was a scratch-off type and the numbers were only partially scratched.
The garbage can lady often would peruse the garbage can for tossed tickets. Why? Apparently there was a second-chance pool where one could register non-winning tickets at the lottery agency website.
She took the tossed ticket home with others and logged into the website to enter the numbers. The site would not accept the input and she quickly realized that only some of the numbers were made visible. Once she scratched the rest, she found that it was worth a cool million dollars.
The purchaser argued that she would never have relinquished the ticket if she knew it was a winner. She also claimed that the winning prize had to go to the one who purchased it. For some reason, this made sense to the judge who heard the case. He preliminarily awarded the money back to her.
However, by now a third party had entered the fray. The store manager said that the scavenger lady illegally took the tickets from the garbage can. She said that all discarded tickets belonged to her due to a deal she made with the store owner. She said there was a “Do Not Take” sign on the garbage can.
However, there were several regular store patrons who were willing to testify that was not the case, that people took from the bin all the time and that the sign was not up when the the lady put her hands elbow deep into it.
The judge froze access to the money until he can straighten this out.
Louisiana:
A man went to the store to buy his regular lottery ticket. The clerk accidentally gave him the wrong
type of ticket but took the correct money, rung it up and could not void the transaction. He was a little upset until he saw that it was a $1 million winner. He promised to give the clerk a token of his appreciation after he received the money.
With his wife sitting next to him while being interviewed, he said: “My wife said that she loves me to death. Now, I believe it.”
Idaho:
This finally story has a feel-good ending. A homeless man won a $250 thousand dollar lottery prize. He eloquently explained how it would not change him. He said he knew that even though the amount was a lot to get in one swoop, it was not enough to sustain him. He wanted to use the earnings to go to school and get educated enough to get a good job. He also said he would help others as best as he could.
He had survived being shot in the head at the age of 19 and I suspect that he will survive this success as well.
The phone rang and woke me out of a dream while taking an afternoon nap. (The nap, not the dream is one of the perks of working at home. In the interest of fair reporting, I split up the day so that a good portion of the work I do is in the evening hours when it is convenient to remote in to client’s computers without interfering with their processing.)
I picked up the phone on the nightstand to the left of the bed and answered the call.
Me: “Hello?”
Caller: “Hello, this is Vishnu. I am calling on behalf your health insurance company. They want to know if you are willing to take a three to four minute survey on the quality of the customer service they recently provided to you.”
Me: “Sure, if it is not going to take more than three or four minutes.” Like I was otherwise busy, huh?
Caller: “Yes, it will not take more than three of four minutes. Let us begin…”
Flashback: a few months ago I had a colonoscopy procedure. The only reason I agreed to do it (I know- it’s important) was because I was aware that my insurance company would pay for it as long as it was written up as pre-screening and not exploratory. (Incredible, no?)
So three weeks after the exam, at the end of the month and I guess the hospital’s billing cycle, I received notice that my insurance provider paid for the procedure after chopping down the retail price by more than 50% (a 21th century game played where the covered patient is in the middle of an economic tug-of-war). It also indicated that I did not owe the unpaid portion the hospital.
A couple of weeks later I got a statement from my insurance company that the hospital billed for the anesthesia. The insurance company again reduced the charges by more than half but I was obligated to pay the remaining $377. Being ignorant and usually in a rush to get things out of the way, I figured that the small print in my policy indicated that the anesthesiologist’s time was not covered. So, I when I got the bill from the hospital, I wrote the check and mailed it.
I mentioned this to my all-knowing older sister who is married to a doctor in the aforementioned hospital organization. She is also a pro at disputing hospital bills and said I was too quick to pay the bill. She said my insurance company made a mistake.
I sheepishly called the insurance company and they looked at my coverage and agreed that a mistake had been made and that they should have paid the bill. They said it could take a week to 10 days to straighten it out with the hospital and then I could chase them down for my refund.
I waited two weeks and received nothing in the mail regarding the billing correction. I went online to the insurance company’s website and still saw nothing had happened to correct the billing. I then emailed the customer service department asking them to check out the claim and let me know the updated status.
Two days later which was this past Wednesday, I received a phone call from their customer service letting me know that the correction was now being made. I thanked them and hung up . That’s the conversation that this research group wanted to follow up on Friday and find out if I was made satisfied.
Back to Present:
Caller: “So, did the customer service representative solve your problem on the phone the other day?”
Me: “I think so.”
Caller: “No, you must say either- very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, somewhat unsatisfied, very unsatisfied.”
Me: “Okay, very satisfied.”
Caller: “Good. How many calls did you have to make before you were satisfied?”
Me: “None. They called me.”
Caller: “Sir, you had to make a call.”
Me: “No. like I said, they called me.”
Caller: “Sir, they called you because you called them.”
Me: No, I emailed them and then they called me.”
Caller: Then you cannot take this survey.”
Before she had a chance to say “I’m sorry” and/or “goodbye”, I hung up and realized my nap was over.
And now, the hunt for the refund begins.. Tallyho!
Recently, we’ve seen some weird things happening in the scramble for lottery prizes. Not too long ago, one Baltimore county lady got her fifteen minutes of fame by jumping the gun and claiming she was one of the three official winners to the largest MegaMillions payout ever. Then a day or two later after becoming the darling of the news media set, she admitted she had not looked at her “winning” ticket closely and acknowledged that maybe not all the numbers matched.
In the meantime, her quick desire to grab for the gusto caused a lot of ill will with her co-workers who claimed that they gave her the money to purchase tickets as a group. They demanded she share the money. In the end, it was someone else who claimed the winnings and the lady with the erstwhile stardust demeanor went back to working for a living like the rest of us albeit with a few less friendly co-workers.
Now comes word that a judge in Arkansas incredibly awarded a winning lottery ticket back to a lady who had thrown it away in a garbage can after another lady who has a hobby of rummaging through trash for discarded tickets found it and claimed her million dollar winner. The judge said that throwing a ticket in a garbage can does not constitute giving up on ownership- geesh! In the meantime, the one who cashed in the ticket was apoplectic because she had already used some of the winnings to buy a new truck and give cash to her children.
Which reminds me of the time a couple of years ago I took Ma to a ballgame at Wrigley Field. We stayed until the very end of a happy outcome and made our way towards the ballpark exit near Sheffield and Addison. Just as we were exiting the building, an usherette handed each of us a scratch-off coupon from a unisex haircut franchise store called SuperCuts. I had no use for it and started to walk toward an outdoor garbage can near the curb on Sheffield to toss mine in. Ma saw my action and handed her coupon to me saying, “here!”. I thought her gesture meant that she had no use for it either.
So I took her coupon and threw it in the garbage can as well.
The next thing I hear is Ma yelling at me, “hey, what did you do that for?” I replied, “why? You don’t go to SuperCuts. You go to a beauty parlor, right?” She said, “No! I stopped a couple of years ago when my social security benefits went down after Dad died. Your sister takes me to SuperCuts.”
I said, “oh, well.”
She said, “get the coupon and check it.”
I said, “Ma- I ain’t putting my hand in that garbage can feeling for a coupon.”
She said, “yes you are.”
So I saw that there was an unscratched coupon near the top of the can and figured it mind as well be hers. I grabbed it, scratched it and it magically displayed that she was entitled to 50% off her next visit to SuperCuts.
Uh, do me a favor. Don’t tell this to a certain lady in Arkansas. She may insist that she was visiting Wrigley that day and it was her ticket.
Is going to college for four years still worth the investment? Let’s see what it cost forty years ago (yikes!) when I went to school compared to what it costs now to go to the same college and its relationship to the cost of living.
Northeastern Illinois University
1970
Two trimesters – a total of $195
2012
Freshman Fall 2011, Spring and Summer- $5255.80*
* see http://www.neiu.edu/DOCUMENTS/Admissions%20-%20Docs/Class_Schedule/Summer_2012_Tuition_and_Fees.pdf
In all fairness of reporting, the last time I set foot on campus at Northeastern Illinois University was the Spring of 1974. In those days, the school was on a trimester schedule. If you were full time, you took at least two trimesters. If you were looking to graduate a little early, like I did, you accelerated the process by going during the summer as well.
During the Spring of 1970 while in the last throes of high school, I already knew I was going to NEIU. In those days, it was still called Northeastern Illinois State College. The name change came around the end of my sophomore year along with expansion of the campus physical structure and course options.
I knew by the very beginning of that first summer of freedom from going to mandatory schooling where you were treated like a baby (deservedly, of course) two important facts that blended together:
1) My parents (led by Dad) were not going to pay for any more schooling. They had spent hard earned money putting me through private education from kindergarten to graduating high school.
2) The first year’s tuition at Northeastern was $97.50 per trimester.
The dollar amount was a lot to me. I had done a couple of odd jobs while a senior in high school that allowed me to put away a couple of hundred dollars for spending money but it was not enough because I needed to also buy text books and take the bus daily to school.
Ma’s brother was a labor lawyer and was kind enough to convince a client to hire me at their factory for the summer. In those days this country still had manufacturers that hired American born eager-to-work laborers. The company made notebooks and I was assigned to the heat seal department where the company logo was stamped on the inside of each notebook. The machines had to be kept hot. There was no air conditioning allowed in the area. One day I had to take five salt tablets when it got close to 95 degrees. The salt helped me retain the tremendous amount of water I was sweating off.
I unhappily got used to getting up early to make sure I punched in on time. I also got used to watching the clock and taking a lot of harassment from the veterans who thought I had no business working there. It was supposed to be an eight week summer opportunity but I quit after seven of them. I had to join a union so that my pay rate after one month jumped from 1.60 (the minimum) to 1.80 an hour. I probably put away about $300 to be used towards tuition and other school-related expense.
I knew that this was not enough to carry me over for an extended time. Luckily, I was able to get a part time job that gave me $25 a week. This may seem like a pittance now but it went a long way then for a guy who was living at home and did not as of yet drive a car. Bus fare was probably 25 to 35 cents each way and I did not have classes scheduled for all five days a week. As a sophomore and junior in college I was lucky to work at a department store for as much as fifteen hours a week and more during the summer. So, I managed college expenses without a problem.
A neighbor across the street- who incidentally more than 40 years later still lives across from Ma- told her about something called an Illinois State Scholarship Grant and that I should apply for it. I kind of shrugged and said that there was no way I would get it. At the time, I was still under the naive notion that scholarships were only based on academic achievement. I soon found out that it didn’t matter if you were an Einstein or not. The point was did you need assistance? Of course I did. So, I applied and was accepted but not to begin until the following year. Each subsequent year I had very little paperwork to fill out to keep extending the largesse.
The one fly in the ointment would be whether Dad would cooperate and provide his financial information to the State of Illinois in order to be judged if our family was deserving of this assistance. Usually he was loathe to share private information. He had begged off from providing me assistance as he still had three other kids to put through private school as well as an oldest child going to Roosevelt College who had earned an academic scholarship. But, he knew instinctively that the State of Illinois would come through and he gave the info.
I never saw any of Dad’s tax returns but in his later years when I had to help Ma file the 1040′s while he was in a nursing home, I learned how much he earned. I can only surmise that in the early 1970′s, he was making about $20,000 a year from the main source and other side work he did.
The point of all this is that depending on how you want to interpret what a full time course load costs
now at NEIU, it is at least twenty-five times as much as it was in 1970. Dad would have to be making about a half million dollars to compare to what he made then. Clearly, the average breadwinner does not make this amount. In 1970, going to a reasonably priced state college would have been 1% of Dad’s yearly income.
The question is what has happened in the past forty or more years that a state college education needs to cost on an annual basis 5 to 10% of income? Was tuition too cheap back then? Was the education being delivered not as good as now? Does spending more than $30,000 on four years of college result in a person getting a good job or help him figure out how to make a good living?
A study done by an educational research group found that in 2009-2010, 74% of students had financial aid of some type while 55% had Grants. The amount of the grant covered roughly half the tuition fee. Needless to say, back in 1970, the Grant covered the entire amount of my $97.50 per trimester tuition. By the time I graduated in 1974, the fee had gone up to $200 per trimester. The State of Illinois was still paying 100 percent of the fee.
Are there too many students going to college? 58% of the students are female which is about the average nationwide. Less men are going for higher education or is it that colleges prefer to accept women?
I have one nephew who never stepped foot in college. In fact, he never finished high school. I’m not sure he even has a G.E.D. But, he makes a living offering financial services to businesses.
Another nephew went to Law school and spent several years being the first one out the door because he was the last one hired as firms downsized. Hopefully, now he has found his niche.
College taught me to think, analyze, and communicate both verbally and in writing. What I do for a living I learned after my four year degree by taking a couple of courses in computers. I spent a few years in the minors- so to speak- going from job to job gaining experience for the right opportunity to put up my own shingle. Without college, I never would have been smart enough to process in my head all the things that happened and to gain from them.
Okay, you want to know why Medicare is going bankrupt? Because of policy-making decisions such as the following that recently happened to Ma.
Ma had to spend a couple of weeks in a rehab facility getting back on her feet after a mysterious virus and reaction as well to an antibiotic knocked her out of commission. She spent a few days in one hospital while they tried to figure out what was actually wrong. When the doctors threw in the towel, I took Ma to a second, more capably staffed hospital and they quickly resolved her disorder and gave her appropriate medicine that started her back on the road to being herself.
However, she still could not stand without help. This is what happens when you are older and off of your feet for several days. It also didn’t help that close to a year earlier she had broken her second hip and was anyways used to walking with a cane outdoors.
As she had spent at least three days in the first hospital with an ‘inpatient’ status and not just for observation, Medicare was obliged to cover her at a rehabilitation facility as long as she was showing an effort to get better. In other words, if she was never going to walk again, all bets were off and she would have to spend an eternity at an extended care facility as a private pay customer.
Decisions would be made on a daily basis by the certified staff physical therapists if she was showing improvement or was wasting their time. Because she was not a candidate for dementia or Alzheimer, it was just a matter of getting back on her feet with the appropriate confidence. She went through two-a-day sessions- one of physical and the other of occupational therapy. Before seven days were up, she was walking almost to the same level as she was before the illness. It was now just a matter of the infection clearing up and returning to full strength.
Medicare, however, only covers 100% up to 20 days. After that, it is a matter of the part B insurance company kicking in a portion and the patient the rest. A rehab facility can be an expensive experience
considering that not only does the person get a room for the night as well as the therapy, but also gets three meals a day and some entertainment.
After two weeks, Ma was ready to go home and planned on doing so on a Sunday. However, the facility in question did not schedule therapy sessions on Saturday but on Sunday instead . When Ma decided she wanted to go home on Sunday, they told her that if she did, she would be obligated to pay for the last day she stayed overnight which was Saturday. This was because they had no way to certify that she had fulfilled her therapy obligation properly for that day as there was no therapist in the building. However, if she waited until Monday, it would be no problem to get a therapist to certify her completion of therapy on Sunday and Medicare would then be obligated to cover her through that day as she left on Monday morning.
To recap, Medicare was willing to pay for two extra days of her rehab stay because of a lack of proper certification while she was willing to say,”forget it- let me go home a day early and save yourself some money.” And now you know another reason why Medicare is becoming non-sustainable.
Some expressions take on a life all of its own. Consider this: “No man is an island.”
In the early 1960′s our family had by now comfortably situated ourselves in a large two flat in the Austin neighborhood on the far west side of Chicago. Our first floor apartment was laid out so that on the far north end was the kitchen, enclosed backroom parlor and the dining room. Walking south through a corridor on the right or west side were two bedrooms and on the left was our only bathroom and our parent’s master bedroom. It was in that latter room where they hid all the presents we received on various special occasions until the time was right.
At the south end was the living room, which in those days we also called the front room, and a small front parlor where one could sit in an upholstered orange colored fancy chair and look through the three sided bay windows in the parlor to the action going on outside on the sidewalk. Believe me- that was important to a burgeoning ten year old to make sure that he was not missing opportunities to play with friends and neighbors outdoors.
At that point in time we had only one television- a so-called portable Zenith sitting on a stand with rolling coasters. This meant that sometimes the set would be in the front parlor, other times several feet away in the living room in front of the fire place, in our parent’s bedroom or even all the way to the dining room.
But there was one instrument of entertainment that stood its ground. It was the Zenith Stereo H-Fi Console that anchored the north wall in the living room. It was at least four feet wide and three feet (if not more) off the ground, made of wood with cloth covers over the speakers. It was state-of-art with solid-state electronics, AM/FM radio, AFT (automatic fine tuning) and an automatic record changer that allowed one to stack several 33 1/3 lp’s as well as antiquated 78′s using a special adapter.
Dad seemed to enjoy making it a family thing to go to major department chain stores such as E J Korvettes and Sears in the recently opened shopping malls in Oak Brook further west and Golf Mill all the way out to the hinter lands of the northern suburbs. While Ma was busy looking for kid’s clothes or a new appliance, Dad was sneaking off and taking whomever didn’t need to try on the merchandise with Ma to the record collection section. He would peruse the album covers for quite a while until he found either something affordable or, what the heck, something he knew all of us would enjoy.
One album he brought home that we played over and over again was songs performed by Dale Lind, a well-known local Chicago celebrity. His signature song which played last on the album’s second side was “No Man is an Island”. Most songs Dale sang usually were played in minor mode, or musical half steps. This lent the feeling of whatever came out of his mouth as if he was in conversation with the guy upstairs but the listener was allowed to eavesdrop.
The only other person I heard sing that song was Jan Peerce. Once we got a second television set and the opportunity to watch our favorite shows became more available, I drifted away from the once-beloved Stereo Hi-Fi. Of course, there was also high school to focus on when I didn’t watch Batman twice a week or Laugh In or whatever other campy, short-run popular culture phenomenon.
Time has a way of moving along rapidly, especially if you are not having any fun with it. By the late 1960′s, we had moved to the far north side of the city and the Zenith had found a new location anchoring the west wall of our townhouse. Although there were three floors in the new abode- a basement and an upstairs- as well as a second bathroom, there was less privacy as the main area on the first floor was a combined dining and living room. If one wanted to watch television while another wanted to listen to the fancy record player (after all, that’s what it really boiled down to), a fight equal to the shenanigans prior to the Liston-Clay bout broke out.
When our parents finally purchased a color tv in the early 1970′s, that was it for the Stereo Hi-Fi. It was moved to the basement and its space taken up by a bookcase. I don’t remember too many of the other four siblings going downstairs to listen to a record when they could buy a cassette tape and play it in the comfort of their bedroom.
The new millennium was not kind to Dad. In October 2002, on his eightieth birthday, he fell down and broke two ankles and spent the rest of his life in a nursing home outside of one night when we took him home to give him a breather from being institutionalized. We understood very quickly that it would not work out as both his ability and desire to stand on his own two feet no longer would happen.
Ma and I recognized how much he enjoyed the handful of cassette tapes I bought for him to hear. She casually said how it was a shame that he could not listen to all the old 33 1/3 lp’s he cherished that were still sitting in the basement. At that very moment I replied, “why not? How do we know if the Zenith works or not unless we try it? If it does, I can try to record blank tapes by placing the cassette recorder as close to the cloth speakers as possible and see how it goes.”
There was only one impediment- the cloth speakers had water stains from all the mini floods the basement experienced as well as the unit had not been plugged into the wall outlet in more than ten years.
I put in a blank cassette into a tape recorder and grabbed a handful of record albums and chose what to play. One was the Dale Lind album. I plugged in the Hi-Fi power cord into the outlet, opened the cabinet lid and placed the album onto the turntable. The auto-changer was broken but who needed it anyway? I turned the knob to the ‘on’ position and forty years returned with the snap of a finger. I immediately pressed the ‘record’ button on the cassette and let it go for a minute. I then stopped it, pressed the rewind button back to the beginning and pressed ‘play’. I was a kid in a candy store. With a successful sound check, I was able to determine how far away to hold the cassette recorder in my hand while the record played, scratches and some static nevertheless.
Even though it meant I had to hold my hand up to the record for twenty minutes or so and not waver, it was well worth it. I brought the recordings to Dad and he listened as if it were still forty years ago and he could strut around and lead the imaginary orchestra accompanying Lind. When “No Man is an Island” played, Dad sang along as if in a duet, on key and with the right tempo. Afterward he said that Ma would love it if she could hear it as well.
Yesterday, I was viewing a YouTube recording of a “To Tell The Truth” game show episode from May 13, 1962. The first set of three contestants was of one where each claimed to be the real George Tweed who evaded capture in the early years of World War II on the island of Guam. Up to 28,000 Japanese soldiers combed the island looking for him and a handful of other sailors who had not yet been taken as prisoners of war. The others were eventually found and killed. He successfully hid out with the help of natives for two years before he was able to signal American troops out at sea.
After the real Mr. Tweed was revealed, the host, Bud Collyer, mentioned that a movie had just been made about the incident. It was called, “No Man is An Island.” No mention was made during the give and take by the panelists and the three contestants as to why Mr. Tweed survived the ordeal. The premise of the movie, though, was that he had been a self-centered person who had a spiritual awakening and learned to trust the Guam natives.
The original expression of “No Man is an Island” is credited to John Donne, an English poet who lived from 1572-1631. The poem ends with another famous phrase, also turned into a movie title, “for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”
The lyrics to the song written in the early 1960′s are attributed to Joan Baez.
Dinah Shore was not only an iconic 1950′s through 1970′s television star but also one devoted to supporting American soldiers overseas during World War Two. So, much so, that she volunteered to act as our answer to Tokyo Rose. For those who are unaware, Tokyo Rose operated in the Pacific broadcasting Japanese radio propaganda to create disillusionment among American soldiers and hopefully result in mass surrenders. Axis Sally did the same in Europe.
Dinah started to build a following on the radio in the 1930′s with her “the-girl-next-door” personality.
By the early 1940′s, she was an excellent female singer and foil for Eddie Cantor on his top rated radio show. Although she was pleasant enough to look at, she was very self-conscious about her appearance which showed in the few movies she did. She decided, therefore, to focus thereafter only on radio and subsequently on television.
After World War Two broke out, she took advantage of increasing radio exposure by performing on Armed Forces shortwave broadcasts. She was so affected by the letters she received from soldiers overseas, that she felt it important to make a statement and go where the action was- the European Theater of Operations- as the U.S. Army pushed their way to the Rhine River and a foothold into Germany.
In one thirty day period, Dinah claimed she slept in a real bed maybe twice, the rest of the time experiencing the same conditions as the soldiers she entertained. When asked, she readily accepted the request to record songs in German (which she spoke by reading the phonetic spelling on cue cards) and speak words to the Germans soldiers advising them to surrender or never be able to go home and see their loved ones. In fact, during one of her field performances for a group of U.S. soldiers, she was advised that sentries posted to check for snipers found one sitting high atop a tree in a daze listening to her sing rather than pointing a rifle in her direction. When captured, the German soldier said that he just wanted to hear the Fraulein sing as he had in her propaganda broadcasts.
Male baby boomers of draft age during the Viet Nam era knew it was a different type of war, but compare Dinah’s brand of American loyalty to that which Jane Fonda exhibited. Fonda put together stage shows to lure American soldiers stateside and convince them to rethink their actions if sent to Viet Nam. In April, 1972, she visited the capitol of North Viet Nam, Hanoi, and made disparaging remarks about how the U.S. Army targeted civilian sites. This would have been akin to an American going to Berlin in 1945 and talk how evil President Roosevelt was for allowing the city of Dresden to be destroyed. Fonda made several broadcasts in Hanoi deploring American leaders as “war criminals.” She also allegedly said that American prisoners of war lied about being tortured and if they did, they deserved it as the things they did warranted severe punishment.
Ironically, Jane and Dinah were long time friends and Jane guested on Dinah’s daytime talk show in 1976. You can see a picture of this event by clicking below:
Is “The Office” ripe for cancellation? A 2.2 Nielsen ratings and 6 share for the most recent episode translates into a 4.31 million viewership. In previous years, the show was good for more than double the numbers.
Ricky Gervais is a British comedian who hit pay dirt with a brilliant idea for a television sitcom called “The Office”. It was so popular with Americans who loved watching English humor (humour?) that he developed a version for U.S. Audiences. What made the show so singularly entertaining was the standout performance of Steve Carell as the boss, Michael Scott.
Carell decided to leave the show at the end of last season after success with a string of hit movies. Much to do was made in the final four episodes of finding a replacement. Among the several candidates to take the helm (no pun intended [spoiler alert]), one was played by Will Ferrell who quickly realized one of three things: a) he was a bad fit- different type of comedy than he was capable of doing, b) bad chemistry with the other actors, c) was disinterested in shrinking his monetarily rewarding movie career to perform in 22 episodes of a television series. In fact, the storyline on how he bowed out of the plot was an insult to the intelligence of loyal viewers.
Those of us who don’t think much of Mr. Ferrell as an actor (although he had a great five minutes at the end of the “Wedding Crashers” movie) were glad he did not look to make the guest role a more permanent one. Then at last season’s final episode, actor James Spader appeared on the scene as Robert California. He proceeded to do his way-too-obvious imitation of William Shatner (that’s what he got for hanging out with Bill on another television series [Boston Legal] for a few years) and turned the show into a Luigi Pirandello Theater of the Absurd. The fictional Mr. California was put in charge of the company at the corporate level and he chose to promote Andy Bernard (played by Ed Helms) to the task of office manager. This latter assignment made regular viewers happy.
Midway through this new Steve Carell-less season, Mr. Gervais decided to hire Catherine Tate to play Nellie Bertram, an over-the-top nervous-laden Britisher as Andy’s permanent replacement when he took a temporary leave of absence to earn back the love of his life. It is still too early to know how the storyline plays out.
Historically, a few television shows had been lucky when there has been significant changeovers in the cast. The most obvious was “MASH”, which McLean Stevenson exited after seventy episodes and was replaced by Harry Morgan who stayed with the show for 179 episodes until the end. In addition, Wayne Rogers was replaced by Mike Farrell and Larry Linville by David Ogden Stiers. In all three cases, each new actor blended in well with the existing cast even if their personalities were different than their fore-bearers.
Another famous cast switch was in “Bewitched” where the same character, Darrin Stephens was played by two different men- Dick York for 156 episodes, and then Dick Sargent for another eighty-four. It was a testament to Elizabeth Montgomery’s acting ability that she showed very little change in her demeanor or on-screen relationship after the switch. Another interesting tidbit was that Sargent was originally offered the role and had to turn it down because of other obligations. It was only after York became ill and no longer able to perform did they go back to their first choice.
There are those who think that the “classic” episodes with York showed more poignancy. In addition, with the disclosure by Sargent years later that he was homosexual changed the perspective of those who now watched the reruns of the later episodes to read more into the interacting than there may have been. Interestingly, Florence Henderson discusses in her autobiography how she had to adjust her on-screen interaction with Robert Reed, who played her husband in “The Brady Bunch”, after she quickly figured out that he also had a non-standard sexual orientation along with the fact that he really preferred to wear togas and other costumes and teach Shakespeare to acting classes.
However, with “The Office”- what the heck was Gervais thinking? Didn’t he bother to look at the daily rushes on a television monitor to see if Tate’s performance was working or not? For one, Ms. Tate photographed terribly and was a pain to look at. Not her fault- this reality check had killed the careers of a lot of talented people. For another, her sense of timing and humor was totally not in synch with the rest of the cast.
If the purpose of this subplot was an attempt to stir the pot and shake the audience out of its comfort zone and renew the show’s fascination- it failed miserably. It didn’t help either that the extended maternity leave taken by Jenna Fischer’s Pam Halpert in both real and play role life neutered Jim Halpert’s (John Krasinski) performance.
Even in today’s scattered audience loyalty with so many cable channels, four million is a low turnout. Ricky Gervais could probably care less about this criticism and advice. Still, I’ll say it regardless- Put the show back to the way it worked so beautifully in the past. Let the core group of actors play off each other with their unique quirks and eliminate the disjointed attempts at mixing different methods of acting styles. Maybe word of mouth will then get you back to a regular eight million plus viewership. Or risk losing the remaining four million viewers to the next hot British transplanted show.
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April 22, 2012 at 11:20 am
Recent circumstances caused me to become an informed critic of Hospital Emergency Rooms. Ma had the misfortune to visit two of them in one week. The hospitals were located about three and a half miles apart along the same major road in north suburban Chicago.
The short part of the story is that Ma and I were brought by ambulance to Hospital A’s emergency room a week ago Friday night at 1:45am. She was experiencing severe abdominal pain. She begged for morphine several times but was denied any type of relief until they had a modicum of an idea what was wrong with her. However, they did not bother to try to find out until they took a CT Scan at around 5am. Exactly- we were at the mercy of the hospital personnel for more than three hours.
A few things did not help the situation. One was that Ma was given cubicle room number 1 which was near the front electric doors that seemed to swing open every few minutes with a new calamity. It made the environs both cold (weather-wise) and noisy. Around 4am or so (it’s hard to get all the facts straight when you are trying to sleep with your eyes open and sitting in a chair) a single mom and her twenty year old daughter were seated outside Ma’s curtained-off room. The lady proceeded to talk her head off lecturing to her daughter about the evils of going to parties at other people’s houses when you don’t know them. The lecture was orated a little too loud as well as it went on for quite a while. Being that is was inappropriate for the mother to start shouting about her daughter’s welfare in a public area as well as it was getting close to 5am, I drew open the curtain, and in a somewhat considerate tone (yeah, sure) , told the mother to “move somewhere else or shut up”.
It took less than fifteen minutes to wheel Ma to some magical location in the building to do the CT Scan and bring her back to where I sat in a stupor after being awake for more than twenty-two hours. Fifteen minutes later, I pestered the Emergency Room doctor as to whether someone actually bothered to look at the scan and make a decision. She told me that the attending physician we had requested was being contacted and would decide whether to admit Ma or not.
By 7am, we got the good (?) news that Ma would be admitted upstairs to try to figure out what was wrong with her. Now, it was a matter of hurry up and wait for a bed to become available. I threw a tantrum at 8:45am and a nurse volunteered to wheel Ma upstairs.
For three days, the yokels at hospital A could not figure out the cause of Ma’s pain nor were they willing to check with her regular doctor associated with a different hospital chain for her medical history. While I was in a business meeting on Tuesday, Ma called me to say that the Resident doctor told her that they were releasing her because she was not getting better nor could they figure out what her problem was. The so-called medical expert suggested that she follow up with another CT Scan in two to three months. Still, she was in severe pain and could not stand on her two feet. But, that wasn’t their problem- it was not a medical issue, it was a ‘social’ issue. Translated, it meant that Medicare would not cover her for any more hospitalization. So, they wanted her to get lost. She had a choice to either go home or to a nursing care facility that Medicare would cover for up to 20 days only because she spent the requisite three days in a hospital. I subsequently found out that “hospital stay” meant that it had to be in the category of ‘inpatient status’ and not ‘observation’. Although, come on, who is kept in a hospital for three days for just observation? Otherwise, Medicare would not cover her getting well as a nursing care facility.
I asked them to get her transferred to the hospital associated with her real doctor. They said they could not because she had already spent three days in this one and it would require a new case number in order for Medicare to cover it. The other hospital would not take her in a transfer. But, they would if she went to their emergency room. Aha!
Wednesday morning we left the bad guys hideout and drove down the road another three miles or so to Hospital B. It was a different experience going to their Emergency Room as I rolled Ma in on her wheelchair to the registration area as opposed to being brought in by ambulance. At Hospital B, we were asked to sit down and relax and were almost immediately greeted by a nurse in the lobby area. She escorted us into the Emergency Room theater of operations and asked the Maitre D’, I mean, physician’s assistant to assign her a room as if she had a reservation.
Once in our comfy cubbyhole, I was asked if I cared for a drink. Instead, I asked for the washroom. After given directions and taking advantage of its availability, I made note that it had a lock on the door as opposed to Hospital A which did not and which probably caused- I’m sure- awkward moments.
At Hospital B we spent ‘only’ six hours in the emergency room this time instead of the seven and half hours we experienced at Hospital A. The transfer to a room upstairs went more smoothly and by the next morning, the diligence of the two resident interns as well as “hospitalist” resolved Ma’s mysterious condition. She had a virus as well as an infection. They changed the type of antibiotic that the other hospital had recommended and she started to improve immediately. By 6pm, she was on her way to a rehab facility to recover and get back on her feet.
“Your honor, it must be something they add to the Lake Michigan water we drink in the Chicago area. Three very recent news events are submitted to the court for you to judge.”
In the first, last Thursday at 5:00pm a lady approached a teller at a bank in Albany Park, on Chicago’s northwest side. She handed over a note that read: “all of your money, no cops, no dye pack”. The teller looked at it replied, “sorry, the bank is closed now. Come back tomorrow.” With that, the would-be robber left the building very quickly. But not before she had her five or so minutes of fame on the bank’s surveillance camera. It was quite easy to recognize her. She was dressed in plaid pajama bottoms and a dark-colored hooded jacket with a large emblem on its back.
She stayed away Friday and Saturday but couldn’t resist the temptation to return to the scene of the aborted crime. What she didn’t account for into her planning was that the bank personnel were given some time to watch the film of the erstwhile perpetrator and memorize her face and other accoutrements. On Monday, April 2, she showed up at the entrance to the bank and was immediately spotted by one of the tellers. The police were notified, acted quickly and nabbed her. Her accomplice, a male, tried to make a getaway but after a short chase was also handcuffed. As it turned out, he also was a film star of a sort. His profile matched that of the person on the bank’s surveillance video of the robbery that took place on March 23 in which $2,589 was taken.
The second addition to the hall of shame took place on April 2 at night when a different lady decided to go to a tavern establishment in Melrose Park, a part-bedroom, part-light industrial complex suburb to the south of O’hare Airport. She took a seat at the bar to have a drink. Soon after, she was shoved and then punched by an alleged inebriated woman who claimed that her bar stool had been unlawfully usurped.
The first lady- no, not the President’s wife- called police and went outside from the watering hole to wait for them to show up. Thirty minutes later, as they arrived she decided it was in her best interests to re-enact the scene as it occurred. She tried to demonstrate the uppercut and the officer, not buying into it, grabbed her arm and twisted her wrist to put her into a back hold and threw her against the squad car. Other officers yelled at him to let her go.
Our heroine claims that the officer continued to act rough with her as they went to the police station so that she could file a report. She also says that other police officers were peering into her car looking for evidence of possession of illegal substances while she was in the police station.
Naturally, she went to see a lawyer on Tuesday and has filed suit against the Village of Melrose Park for use of excessive force, false arrest and battery.
If you are confused by this second narrative because you are not sure if the police decided to treat her as if she got into a bar fight and not the victim of circumstances- so am I. But that is considered part of a night’s entertainment in the Chicago metropolitan area. Oh, and drive-by shootings as well.
However, the real kicker is the third chapter of our saga and not funny at all. This is taken from the alleged police report. On Friday, March 31 at 10:00pm, Village of Grayslake Chief of Police had an accident with his car just over the border in Wisconsin. Grayslake is in the northern part of Illinois not too far from the state line. Thankfully there were no injuries other than pride. The Kenosha County sheriff’s police arrested him for allegedly drunk driving.
This is what the arresting officer had to say in his report: “I could smell a strong odor of intoxicants coming from his breath. I also observed that the eyes were bloodshot and glossy. His speech was slow.”
When asked if he had been drinking, the police chief said he had had a few beers with dinner. When asked if he was carrying a gun, he pointed to the 9mm pistol in his holster underneath his shirt. When the arresting officer removed the gun, he found seven rounds of live ammunition in it including one in the chamber. He refused a sobriety test and against his will was taken to a hospital. At the hospital he said he had had three vodka martinis at dinner.
The police chief earns about $130,000 a year in a job he has held on a temporary basis since last summer. Just two months ago, he was given permanent status winning out from over 120 applicants.
He has been on the force for more than twenty years.
By the time his case goes to court the issue of his job title may be resolved one way or another. The judicial system can decide whether he is guilty of the alleged charges. I wonder if stupid really is the right word to describe someone who has been in law enforcement for more than two decades to put himself into a situation he has to defend. Or do those guys in Kenosha not like us good citizens from Illinois?
Maybe because it occurred on a Sunday, but it seemed as if April Fools Day went by quietly this year. No national publicity pranks that I heard of and no personal exposure to “gotcha!”.
I take that back. There was one big-time hustle done to a group of people on Sunday, possibly the most expensive one ever. You see, late Friday night the winning numbers of the largest Mega Millions lottery jackpot ever were announced. The gross pot, if only one winner emerged, was $656 million. As it turned out, there were three winners: One in Kansas, one in a small town of maybe 4000 residents in Illinois near the St. Louis border, and one in Baltimore.
This meant that each of the three winners will receive $105 million after the requisite 20% federal withholding tax is taken. It will behoove the winner to make sure to set aside at least another $35 million to pay the rest of the federal and possibly state income taxes. I’m sure, though, that any of us can accept living on just $70 million, right?
By the way, if there had been only one ticket sold, the take-home after taxes and lump-sum distribution would have been about $347 million. Lottery authorities said that the odds in getting the winning number combination was 1 in 176 million. This meant that all a person had to do was write down on however many lottery punch cards all 176 million number combinations, pay for it and play. As each ticket entry only cost one dollar, if there had been only one winner, he or she would have still been $100 million plus ahead.
I read that on showdown Friday one professional athlete who was making over a million dollars this year and scheduled for a slight increase next year was plunking down $10,000 in tickets because he wanted to win and show everyone else up. Knowing now that he was not among the three winners, I guess he is back to doing whatever it is he is good at.
Here is where the alleged scam comes into play: In Illinois, the winner must be revealed. In Kansas and in Maryland, they can choose to remain anonymous. As it is, Maryland was the first state to announce that someone in Baltimore County held the winning ticket. They were so proud because it had been a long time coming that the state had a Mega Millions winner and it was hurting sales.
Once the news hit, television network news camera teams rushed to the 7-11 store where the winning ticket was sold. Cameras pointed to the machine that dispensed the quick pick receipt as if it were the Holy Grail revealed. Reporters were being told to leave because the store could not conduct business as usual.
The excitement and pride in a locality gaining a modicum of fame was so Hollywoodesque except for one thing that would put a damper on the celebrating. Apparently, one person came forward reluctantly. A Haitian immigrant who works at McDonalds was put in charge of buying lottery tickets for a group of co-workers. And she did. But she also said that maybe an hour before cutoff time, she went back to the store to purchase for herself one more ticket. She claimed that the winning ticket was the one she did solo.
Told that none of her co-workers believed her, she said that she would share some winnings with them to have peace of mind. But, now she also said that she ‘thinks’ she has the right numbers because some of them matched. Video surveillance cameras at the 7-11 show that it appears a man was purchasing the ticket at the time the winning numbers registered and not a woman.
Now it turns out on April 10, the Maryland Lottery officials stated that the true winner(s) in Baltimore came forward. It was a trio of people in the world of Academia. One was a woman in her 20′s, another in her 50′s and the third, a man in his 40′s. Since in Maryland they do not have to identify themselves to the public, their lives can continue as such for the time being. Of course, they have to split their share of the $105 million three ways, but that should be the worst of their problems- or mine for that matter.
One is a special education teacher, another an elementary school teacher and the third is an administrator. I presume that they will be giving up their jobs by the end of the school year or be subject to the typical harassment that goes with others being jealous of their co-worker’s good fortune.
As for the original McDonald’s claimant- I presume she is glad that the co-workers who buy tickets in a group with her no longer plan to kill her for holding out on them.
(This story was first published on April 2, 2012 under the title, “Who’s the Fool?”)
Remember when they used to say, if they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they….”? Most of us baby boomers were either in our teens or early twenties when we finally heard those immortal words spoken by astronaut Neil Armstrong, “one small step for man…”. Supposedly we experienced the ultimate, unless you believed it was faked in some New Mexico studio.
But that was so many years ago. It seems as if we haven’t had a good example of prowess and progress to attach to since then. At least our generation could shout to anyone, “damn it! If we can put a man on the moon, then you can build a car that gives 100 miles to the gallon and make it cheap enough for anyone to own.” Or, “you can build your factory in America and figure out a way to compete economically with the garbage they make in China.”
Our parent’s generation used to tell us at meal time, “eat it all up- there are kids starving in Europe.” How was my eating something I didn’t like help some kid in Yugoslavia feel like he went to bed with a full stomach? After a while, with the threat of the cold war, we figured that half of Europe was full of Commies so who cared if they went to bed hungry?
Our parents also told us about not having a dime during the Depression but they all seemed to come out of it unscathed. We weren’t buying it. We wanted a hula hoop or a gun and holster set with plastic bullets that shot. Our parents’ bragging rights were that they finally had a real refrigerator and not an ice box. Or a washing machine and dryer in the basement instead of going to a laundromat and popping coins into a slot to get the clothes cleaned.
Our grandparent’s could maybe shout, “if they can put sound to movies, why can’t they….?” But somehow that didn’t resonate when they were frustrated with seeing progress in more important areas of life. Besides, I don’t think my grandparents went to a movie theater for years until they were older and my parents took them along.
I remember the moon landing day all too well- July 20, 1969 when the historic event took place. I was watching the Cubs that Sunday on television playing a double header against the Philadelphia Phillies, beating them twice. The broadcast was interrupted by a news bulletin to show the moon landing as it happened. Naturally, I had mixed emotions because I would rather be watching the Cubs and figured that space exploration was something that was gonna happen on a regular basis anyway.
The fact is that there were only a handful more subsequent touchdowns of human feet on the moon’s crust surface. But it signified a solid example of American bragging rights, of our desire and willingness to conquer new heights. No challenge would go unturned. It was progress at its best.
So, what do the kids of today hang their hat on? I-pods? I-pads? The Internet? “If I can chat with someone in Kabul, why can’t they…” Or, maybe kids don’t get frustrated. They are so spoiled and coddled. They don’t have to memorize multiplication tables- they use calculators in the classroom. They get all that they want. They don’t get challenged to thinking to demand more fuel-efficient cars or food that doesn’t make you fat but satisfies your taste buds.
I guess I’m beginning to sound like the man on the moon.