Friday, February 28, 2025

Good night my first hero

 


 
                         
This week I learned about the death of one of my greatest influences growing up. I guessed immediately when I saw his daughter's name on the text message and it hit me like one of the baseball bats we used to swing together. He grew up in Northern New Jersey four years ahead of me doing the same in Western New York. He was just enough older especially in those developing teen and early adult years to be a perfect role model.

My earliest recollection of Ed Penslien was our connection with baseball. Living where he did, he cheered the New York Yankees while I followed the Brooklyn Dodgers. We put that difference aside and over the years we had several "catches" together while we talked about life. Ed was the first person as I recall gave me a lasting life lesson. We were watching a game on TV at his house when a player muffed a ground ball. I said something about what an awful player this guy was. Eddie corrected me immediately saying something like "every player on that field is better than you'll ever be. You have no place saying he's awful." I didn't argue, I understood quickly he was talking about how good players in the majors are, not how bad I was. Even now I hesitate before I criticize a play in any sport I'm watching. 

I do remember walking through the woods near his house and seeing dinosaur footprints preserved in the rock.

We weren't always the nice kids parents want. There was the time he was out of high school and I might have been also but not sure. This was a wild period in his life and one I was to emulate just a few years later. He took me out to a club that was just over the state line into New York (where the drinking age was 18). Full of people with a loud band and good-looking girls everywhere. We stayed several hours and headed home. We both knew this might be a a little touchy. We sneaked around to the back of the house and as quietly as possible opened the door and stepped into the dark kitchen. Then the lights went on. There were both of our mothers sitting at a table their facial expressions warlike and oh boy did we get a talking to.

For a while we didn't visit much but now and then I caught wind of his activities and I sort of knew he was out there somewhere still carrying on. Then one day my mother told me Ed was settled down, getting married (in a tone that said she thought I should too). Then a week or so later she told me he had driven his little sports car off the road and landed in a field. I laughed and thought "Nah he's not done yet." A few years later I did the same thing, woke up in my car in a cow pasture with a cow looking at me through the window.

Then there was the story of my wedding. It was scheduled for late afternoon and I was getting cold feet. My father didn't drink, but every Christmas salesmen gave him bottles of booze. He hid them in the darkness of a back corner in a lower-level kitchen cabinet. We were sitting around all day with little to do and I guess around noon I went into that stash and poured myself a drink. I'm not sure if Ed had one. Anyway after that one and a couple more I made a proposal to him. I suggested we take his car right now and head for Boston. My plan was to sell our bodies to Harvard medical school (I'd heard they paid and then made sure they could collect the body when you left it). Then we could go on a wild bender through New England until the money ran out. Of course he would have none of it and the wedding went on as planned, though I don't remember a whole lot of the rest of the day.

At one point I had imagined a great bachelor life for us living in a cool apartment and working in New York City with a cabin in the forests and mountains to the north.

Over the years we went our separate ways me to Alaska and him to a more sedate life in the business world. He brought his son to Alaska in the 90s and we spent a week moving around even going to the East Pole, a cabin I had built in the Alaska Bush where I lived for several winters. It was during this time he delivered the greatest compliment I think I have ever received. I was telling his son about some of our wild adventures and how I had always looked up to his father, my hero. At this point Ed interrupted me. He said, Tim I have been in business for years, you on the other hand are a legend in this family. Thinking about it now I'm guessing I blushed, but he wouldn't let me argue.

Still, to this day only he can call me that because in my mind he was the guy I looked up to and admired. Rest easy my friend, I am not far behind you still. Lifting a glass to you tonight, my first in 2025. I am giving up for the night. Blame it on the whiskey I drank in your honor.

My sympathies to his daughter Janice, his son Ed and Nancy who must be the most wonderful former  wife anybody could ever have.

 

His family wrote
With deep sadness, we share that our beloved father, Edmund B. Penslien, passed away yesterday Feb. 27. 2027 at 86.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, Dad served in the Navy and worked in sales most of his life. He was successful with his own business and as an investor. In 2000, he moved to the San Francisco area to be closer to his son Ed Penslien, his granddaughter Lily, and his daughter Janice.
In retirement, he enjoyed good food, ballroom dancing, and outings with his beloved Goldendoodle, Sam. Loved by family and friends for his quiet generosity and easygoing nature, he will be deeply missed.
Honoring his wishes, there will be no formal memorial. We invite family and friends to remember him with kind thoughts and fond memories. He will be laid to rest at Sacramento Valley National Cemetery in Dixon, CA.

Google blogger is fighting with me tonight. The photo caption should be Eddie is on the left between his parents at Niagara Falls. I'm the little guy on the right in the short pants.
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Memorable quotations

The best way to know you are having an adventure is when you wish you were home talking about it." — a mechanic on the Alaska State Ferry System. Or as in my own case planning how I will be writing it on this blog.

"You can't promote principled anti-corruption without pissing off corrupt people." — George Kent

"If only the British had held on to the airports, the whole thing might have gone differently for us." — Mick Jagger

"You can do anything as long as you don't scare the horses." — a mother's favorite saying recalled by a friend

A poem is an egg with a horse inside” — anonymous fourth grader

“My children will likely turn my picture to the wall but what the hell, you only get old once." — Joe May

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” — Ernest Hemingway

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.― Kurt Vonnegut

“If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”―Stephen King

The thing about ignorance is, you don't have to remain ignorant. — me again"

"It was like the aftermath of an orgasm with the wrong partner." – David Lagercrants “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.”

Why worry about dying, you aren't going to live to regret it.

Never debate with someone who gets ink by the barrel" — George Hayes, former Alaska Attorney General who died recently

My dear Mr. Frost: two roads never diverge in a yellow wood. Three roads meet there. — @Shakespeare on Twitter

Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

"The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling," Adm. Ernest King, USN

Me: Does the restaurant have cute waitresses?

My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

I'm not a writer, but sometimes I push around words to see what happens. – Scott Berry

I realized today how many of my stories start out "years ago." What's next? Once upon a time?"

“The rivers of Alaska are strewn with the bones of men who made but one mistake” - Fred McGarry, a Nushagak Trapper

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stared at walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. – Meg Chittenden

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka

We are all immortal until the one day we are not. – me again

If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain Actually you could do the same thing with the word "really" as in "really cold."

If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin

It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of. – Shirley Hazzard

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence -- Bertrand Russell

You know that I always just wanted to have a small ship to take stuff from a place that had a lot of that stuff to a place that did not have a lot of that stuff and so prosper.—Jackie Faber, “The Wake of the Lorelei Lee”

If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

If an insurance company won’t pay for damages caused by an “act of God,” shouldn’t it then have to prove the existence of God? – I said that

I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. – Eugene O’Neill

German General to Swiss General: “You have only 500,000 men in your army; what would you do if I invaded with 1 million men?”

Swiss General: “Well, I suppose every one of my soldiers would need to fire twice.”

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.—Gloria Steinem

Exceed your bandwidth—sign on the wall of the maintenance shop at the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center

One thing I do know, if you keep at it, you usually wind up getting something done.—Patricia Monaghan

Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I’ll tell you. A borderline sociopath. Someone smart, inquisitive, stubborn, disorganized, chaotic, and in a perpetual state of simmering rage at the failings of the world.—Brett Arends

It is a very simple mind that only knows how to spell a word one way.—Andrew Jackson

3:30 is too late or too early to do anything—Rene Descartes

Everything is okay when it’s 50-below as long as everything is okay. – an Alaskan in Tom Walker’s “The Seventymile Kid”

You can have your own opinion but you can’t have your own science.—commenter arguing on a story about polar bears and global warming

He looks at three ex wives as a good start—TV police drama

Talkeetna: A friendly little drinking town with a climbing problem.—a handmade bumper sticker

“You’re either into the wall or into the show”—Marco Andretti on giving it all to qualify last at the 2011 Indy 500

Makeup is not for the faint of heart—the makeup guerrilla

“I’m going to relax in a very adult manner.”—Danica Patrick after sweating it out and qualifying half an hour before Andretti

“Asking Congress to come back is like asking a mugger to come back because he forgot your wallet.”—a roundtable participant on Fox of all places

As Republicans go further back in the conception process to define when life actually begins, I am beginning to think the eventual definition will be life begins in the beer I was drinking when I met her.—me again

Hunting is a “critical element for the long-term conservation of wood bison.”—a state department of Fish and Game official explaining why the state would not go along with a federal plan to reintroduce wood bison in Alaska because the agreement did not specifically allow hunting

Each day do something that won’t compute – anon

I can’t belive I still have to protest this shit – a sign carriend by an elderly woman at an Occupy demonstration

Life should be a little nuts or else it’s just a bunch of Thursdays strung together—Kevin Costner as Beau Burroughs in “Rumor has it”

You’re just a wanker whipping up fear —Irish President Michael D. Higgins to a tea party radio announcer

Being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are—Michelle Obama

Sports malaprops

Commenting on an athlete with hearing impairment he said the player didn’t show any “uncomfortability.” “He's not doing things he can't do."

"… there's a fearlessment about him …"

"He's got to have the lead if he's going to win this race." "

"Kansas has always had the ability to score with the basketball."

"NFL to put computer chips in balls." Oh, that's gotta hurt.

"Now that you're in the finals you have to run the race that's going to get you on the podium."

"It's very important for both sides that they stay on their feet."

This is why you get to hate sportscasters. Kansas beats Texas for the first time since 1938. So the pundits open their segment with the question "let's talk about what went wrong." Wrong? Kansas WON a football game! That's what went RIGHT!

"I brought out the thermostat to show you how cold it is here." Points to a thermometer reading zero in Minneapolis.

"It's tough to win on the road when you turn the ball over." Oh, really? Like you can do all right if you turn the ball over playing at home?

Cliches so embedded in sportscasters' minds they can't help themselves: "Minnesota fell from the ranks of the undefeated today." What ranks? They were the only undefeated team left.

A good one: A 5'10" player went up and caught a pass off a defensive back over six feet tall. The quote? "He's got some hops."

Best homonym of the day so far: "It's all tied. Alabama 34, Kentucky 3." Oh, Tide.

"Steve Hooker commentates on his Olympic pole vault gold medal." When "comments" just won't do.

"He's certainly capable of the top ten, maybe even higher than that."

"Atlanta is capable of doing what they're doing."

"Biyombo, one of seven kids from the Republic of Congo." In the NBA? In America? In his whole country?

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"They're gonna be in every game they play!"

"First you have to get two strikes on the hitter before you get the strikeout."

"The game ended in the final seconds." You have to wonder when the others ended or are they still going on?

How is a team down by one touchdown before the half "totally demoralized?"

"If they score runs they will win."

"I think the matchup is what it is"

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"Somebody is going to be the quarterback or we're going to see a new quarterback."

"That was a playmaker making a play.”