When anyone has lived as long as I have, it would be foolish to claim that there have not been some mistakes along the way. The Great Decider may differ with that conclusion, but he is busy trying to extricate the United States from the mess he has created in Iraq. These are some of my mistakes, which are not necessarily of major league caliber.
The title has to do with a baseball metaphor. When a pitcher throws a pitch that the catcher has no hope of catching, the official scorer will rule it a wild pitch. On the other hand, if the pitcher throws a pitch that the catcher should have caught and he misses it, the official scorer will consider it a passed ball. In my existence, there have been more than one or two wild pitches and a similar number of passed balls. Let me tell you about them.
This incident took place in Moscow. It happened after Stalin died and there were a succession of strongmen such as Brezhnev and Khrushchev. Moscow was always a dismal place for American travelers. In this instance, Howard Pappert and I found ourselves in Moscow at the end of a long two-week trip.
I felt a cold coming on and my supply of Kleenex, which I carry in my pockets, was running low. Stupidly, I set out one afternoon to locate a new supply of Kleenex. In point of fact, there was no such thing as Kleenex in that era in Moscow nor all of Russia.
Outside our rooms near the elevator was a stern woman who gave us the keys to our rooms and who demanded them back before we left the hotel. She was a no-nonsense person who, I thought, was part of the Secret Police apparatus. I showed her my pocket-sized pack of Kleenex and hoped that she could tell me where I could buy another package. She had no interest whatsoever and in effect told me to get lost. That is what I did.
It had always been my belief that the largest department store in Moscow would carry such an item. That large department store was called G.U.M. When Howard and I found the G.U.M. department store, it turned out to be an enormous warehouse with high ceilings and with clerks whose main function seemed to be to refer you to another clerk. The Russian clerks did not inform the prospective buyer that they had no such item, but rather they referred you to another clerk who was equally unhelpful. After four or five such interviews, I concluded that the G.U.M. department store had no Kleenex. If an investigator had been called in, he would have informed me that there was no Kleenex factory in the Soviet Union, as it was called then. And he would have informed me that the Russians would not import this item. One such clerk thought that I had lost my sanity when I demonstrated to her that the Kleenex could be blown on and then thrown away into a waste basket. This must have seemed entirely wasteful to this female clerk, who must have regarded American ways as wasteful.
I made do with whatever Kleenex that were left and when Howard and I boarded the Swissair jet for the flight to Warsaw at six o’clock the following morning, we were happy people. After shots of brandy were offered by our Russian hosts and then by the steward on the Swiss airliner, my on-coming cold seemed to disappear. So much for Kleenex in the Soviet Union or, as it is now called, Russia.
Now, we turn to my experience with the International hotel industry. Because American travelers stay in hotels, there is a natural affinity between the telephone industry and the hoteliers. The custom at the time was for the hoteliers to add enormous surcharges on calls from their establishments back to the United States. In many cases, the hotel would add a surcharge of more than 300%, which was all profit for them. AT&T mounted a campaign called Teleplan, with the thought that if the hotels would quit the imposition of enormous surcharges, AT&T would run advertisements in this country informing travelers of that fact. This would mean more business for the hotels and it would mean more business for AT&T’s international operations. The first two agreements covered all hotels in Israel and in Ireland.
The International Hotel Association held two meetings a year in exotic spots. One of such meetings was held in Katmandu, Nepal. Because I was to make a speech at this convention, I asked that our suppliers in this country prepare scarves and neckties with the Teleplan logo on them to be offered to the attendees at the International Hotel Association meeting in Katmandu. Obviously there was some expense involved because these were intended as keepsake items. When the neckties and scarves were finished, the manufacturer brought them around to show me what had been done and also to show me the large box into which these items were to be placed to be mailed to me at my Katmandu hotel. The scarves and neckties were impressive.
I should have known that there was trouble in the air when I was informed that it would be necessary to pay the Nepalese Customs Office a substantial sum of money. I believe the rake-off came to nearly $100. When the box containing the scarves and neckties did not show up in Katmandu in time for me to use them, I went to the Post Office. There I found the box that had been shown to me by the manufacturer of the scarves and neckties, and it had been torn apart. There was not a single item left in the box. The clerks at the Post Office began to offer me degraded English until I finally arrived at the thought that very few things get through Nepalese customs without being pilfered. I was out my $100 as well as the scarves and neckties. Cal Tuggle, who accompanied me on this trip, claims that on the streets of Katmandu, he saw dozens of beggars and bicycle-riding boys with Teleplan scarves around their foreheads and wearing Teleplan ties. But Cal Tuggle wears glasses and I am sure he was quite mistaken.
In the final analysis, the speech went well but it would have been better had we had scarves and neckties. And there was a view from our hotel rooms of Mount Everest. I know Katmandu is a long way to go, but where can anybody else find a view of Mount Everest? The lesson I learned was to never, never trust the Nepalese custom’s office.
There is a third gaffe on my part which qualifies as either a wild pitch or a passed ball. On October 31, 2005, following the unsuccessful surgery on my eyes, I intended to retire for the evening. I was led to the bathroom by a licensed practical nurse so that I could brush my teeth. Being newly blind, I assumed that it would be easy for me to hold my toothbrush in my left hand and spread the toothpaste on the bristles with my right hand as I had always done. This was a great mistake. The toothpaste went everywhere except upon the bristles. There was toothpaste on my hand as well as on the washbasin. For the next eleven days while I was still in Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia, brushing my teeth was a struggle. Finally my wife suggested that as a child, she used to put toothpaste on the index and middle fingers of her right hand and wipe it on the lower teeth in her mouth. I thought this was a juvenile thing to do but my attempt to brush my teeth had now reached desperate proportions. So I tried the Miss Chicka method and it seemed to work. Since that time, I have used her method to the exclusion of all others.
All of this brings to mind the example of Charlie Windsor (nee Wettig) who bears the title of Prince of Wales in the English Monarchy. For years it was alleged that on his trips to the bathroom, Charlie was accompanied by at least one or two footmen. When he went to brush his teeth, Charlie the prince held out his toothbrush and one of the footmen would spread the paste on its bristles. Biographers have not settled upon whether Charlie brushed his teeth or whether one of the footmen did the scrubbing. It is ironic that a footman is expected to brush the teeth of the future King of England.
The Prince of Wales remarried about 18 months ago to his paramour of 35 years, Camilla Parker-Bowles. The British Official Secrecy Act prevents us from knowing whether Camilla performs the services formerly provided by footmen or whether the footmen are still at work.
Upon my release from the Wills Eye Hospital, I returned home and searched the want ads in the Star-Ledger of New Jersey newspaper. Unfortunately, there were no footmen advertised as being willing to work on a commoner such as myself. Perhaps this may be another case where illegal immigrants will perform work that Americans refuse to do. In any case, after 16 months, I still put the toothpaste on the forefinger and middle finger of my right hand and wipe it off on the inside of my lower teeth. No longer do I worry about spreading the toothpaste over my hand or the washbasin. Whether this constitutes a wild pitch or a passed ball, I will leave it to the official scorer to make his determination.
Well, there you have three examples of wild pitches and passed balls. All of them involve your old essayist. I intend to keep the wild pitch and passed balls category open for future gaffes. With the 2008 presidential race warming up already, I am quite certain that within a month or two I will have more gaffes to report. These will keep the official scorer and the Great Decider busy until the new president takes office. If the new president has “WP” or “PB” after his/her name, you will know that he or she is one of us.
E. E. CARR
January 30, 2007
Essay 232
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Kevin’s commentary: You know, I don’t recall another essay of a similar name cropping up anywhere between this one in 2007 and the 2014 essays. I will of course take this to mean that Pop has made no mistakes since then. As evidence of this claim, in part of a note to the family recently, Pop wrote that “I hope that I have not offended any of you and I do not think that I have offended any of you. If you think that I have, stand up and I will try to knock you down.” To my knowledge nobody had to go up to New Jersey the next day to be knocked down, which is obviously a good sign.
For better or worse though the part of this essay that stood out to me the most was the news on Kleenex. I grew up in Austin and was prone to getting Cedar Fever in January, a month in which I invariably ran through boxes upon boxes of tissue. To this day you would be hard-pressed to find me without a Kleenex in my left pocket. That said, when I read the news about their nonexistence in the soviet union, I thought of two things.
First, did they use disposable napkins, or were the napkins all cloth? If they were disposable I feel like they make decent enough substitutes for Kleenex, as do paper towels. If cloth napkins were used, that’s pretty damn close to a handkerchief, an item which I have never personally made use of but certainly would do the job. Finally if all of these options failed, certainly there must have been toilet paper available. Did you inquire after the GUM store’s best two-ply?
P.S. Today I uploaded a very unique picture to the essay published yesterday, “MAKING FRIENDS.” I wish today that we could claim to be a friend of “all Arab nations” as we could then.