wouldn’t be surprised to see one playin’ outfield for the Pirates before it’s over.”
“Hell,” said Marvin Coddlemeyer, “if we get women in here, we going to have to change a lot of things.”
“Like what?” asked Gilbert Harskins.
“Well, for one thing, we won’t be able to spit on the floor or have the weekly belching contest. Women don’t go in for spittin’ on the floor or belching.
“We’ll also have to quit telling nasty jokes, and Leon Caldwell won’t be able to do that funny thing where he paints eyes on his belly and uses his navel for a mouth and pantomimes ‘She Was Just a Stableman’s Daughter, but All the Horsemen Knew Her.’”
“That’d be a shame,” said Cootie Carnes.
“I’ll tell you what else,” said Marvin Coddlemeyer.
“Women will want to have congealed salad and celery sticks instead of possum and sweet potatoes, and I guarantee you it won’t be a month before they’ll be sittin’ around here drinkin’ white wine and talking about their hairstylists.”
“Marvin’s right,” said Cootie Carnes. “A man’s just got to have a place he can go now and then and just be himself and say what he wants to and scratch where it itches. Dammit, Leon, quit spittin’ on my shoes.”
Curtis Knowles hadn’t said a word during the entire discussion. Curtis had been married four times, once to a lady lawyer, and was held as an expert on females.
“Boys,” he said, “if a woman can sit here with us and listen to all the bull and put up with chewin’, spittin’, belchin’, cussin’, and Leon Caldwell’s navel, I say she’s what I’ve been lookin’ for all my life and hadn’t been able to find. A woman who would put up with a man just bein’ himself.”
A hush fell over the crowd.
“I move we put an ad in the paper,” said Cootie Carnes. “I’d like to meet a woman like that myself.”
Let’s Get the Trains on Track
I’ve heard enough about airlines taking care of their planes so that they break in half on landing or the top rips off in flight.
I don’t want to know anymore about how many near-miss midair collisions there are and about how we don’t have enough air-traffic controllers.
And I don’t want to hear anything else about unhappy airline employees. Deliver me from the guy who’s mad at his boss and is in charge of making certain all the bolts are tight for the flight to Omaha.
I’ve been saying this for years and nobody will listen to me, but maybe now, with all the frightening things that are going on in the airline industry, somebody will.
Bring back the train!
All we’ve got now in this country as a passenger rail system is the government-subsidized Amtrak that is far behind the systems of other countries. So much so, it is an embarrassment.
The French and the Germans and the Japanese know something about passenger trains. They run them at speeds over two hundred miles per hour and very few of them ever get hijacked, rerouted during bad weather, or canceled because there’s nobody to drive them.
We need an alternative to air travel. Driving is unsafe and tiresome, and if you want to ride the bus, you’ll get a seat next to some guy with a bad cough and there’s nowhere to go to get away from him.
But a train. If the French can build one that runs smoothly at two hundred miles an hour, certainly we can.
Let’s say you are traveling from Chicago to Atlanta. That’s about seven hundred miles.
To fly, you have to get to O’Hare from the Loop, which is a pain and costs you. You leave at 4:00 PM for a 5:30 flight.
Your plane backs out of the gate at 5:45 and doesn’t actually take off until 6:15. The flight is just over an hour, but due to heavy traffic at Atlanta’s Hartsfield, you have to hold for twenty minutes.
You finally touch down in Atlanta three hours and change after you left for O’Hare.
But then you’ve got to ride the shuttle to the main terminal and wait on your bags. After that, it’s a cab ride into town. You get to your hotel after what has at least been a four-hour ordeal.
But the two hundred-mile-an-hour train from Chicago to Atlanta:
It leaves Union Station, a short cab ride from the Loop, where you work. Zoom, off you go. It’s smooth. It’s relaxing. There’s a guy next to you coughing, so you go to the club car for a drink.
There’s a few quick stops, like the old days when the train stopped at every crossing. Maybe there’s ten minutes in Louisville. And another in Nashville. And Chattanooga.
You arrive in Atlanta’s downtown station, let’s say in five hours.
It’s about the same as the flight, only think of the hassle you’ve avoided and the money you’ve saved in ground transportation.
Putting a modern, efficient passenger system to work in this country would probably cost trillions, I admit.
So let’s make peace with the Russians and then use all the money we’re spending on missiles to bring back the trains.
What a great idea, and I know how to get the president to agree.
Take Air Force One away from him and put him out there in the crowded, unfriendly skies with the rest of us.
Why Not a Jerk Patrol?
New York City has formed what I presume to be the first bigot patrol in the long history of law enforcement in this country.
The move, announced last week, was instigated after outbreaks of racial violence in the city, “just like down South,” as Mayor Ed Koch put it.
Before racial incidents occurred in such places as New York’s Howard Beach, Mayor Koch thought bias and prejudice ended just south of Baltimore someplace.
According to reports I read, New York’s bigot patrol will work like this:
Cops in plainclothes or disguise will go into neighborhoods with a history of racial disturbances and act as bait for bigots or, bigot-bait, whichever you prefer.
Black decoys will work Howard Beach, for instance, to deal with anyone manifesting racist tendencies.
Assistant Chief John Holmes, commander of the new unit, explained it all this way:
“We want to say to bigots: the next time you set upon somebody in the streets, he is liable to be a police officer and you are liable to be under arrest.”
I hope Archie Bunker has heard about all this.
But why not a bigot patrol? We tried legislation and education as a means of ending prejudice and that hasn’t worked. Perhaps a little police muscle will do the
