Ocean Rescue Rescues Memories

April 21, 2022April 22, 2022 by Woody

A big-wave warning was issued at Magic Sands Beach, as previously mentioned here about my recent trip to The Big Island of Hawai’i, and a strong rip current carried a swimmer further and further from shore.

The lifeguard on duty, sitting in a towering chair, called out with a bullhorn for the man to come back in. Either the command was ignored, or the swimmer was unable to heed it, and he was pulled deeper out to sea.

Before tense seconds could add up to a New York minute, the lifeguard – imagine David Hasselhoff in the old TV show “Baywatch” and you have an accurate portrait – flew down from his perch, ran and dove into the surf, and swam like he was challenging for an Olympic gold medal.

David Hasselhoff as Mitch Buchannon in “Baywatch.”

“Baywatch” originally aired from 1989 to 1999, but my mind raced all the way back to “Quarrywatch” in the 1940s starring my dad as the fictional Mitch Buchannon in red swim trunks.

During summers in high school through medical school, Pop was a lifeguard at Muzzy’s Lake, a flooded rock quarry in Urbana, Ohio. He started out earning fifty cents an hour.

“That beat the heck out the twenty-five cents an hour I made at my first summer job when I was fourteen, pumping gas at Blue Synoco,” Pop, now 95, recalls vividly. “Gas was sixteen cents a gallon – I remember that because most customers bought a dollar’s worth which was six-plus gallons.”

At Muzzy’s he eventually worked up to one dollar an hour and notes: “That was good money!”

He earned it. One single summer, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Pop made 46 saves. Understand, Muzzy’s attracted upwards of a thousand people a day on weekends. Combine those crowds with a gently sloping bottom that in one blind step dropped off suddenly from friendly chest-deep water to 30-plus feet and you had the deadly ingredients for drowning.

Once, far outside the buoys marking off the swimming area, a car rolled off a towering bluff at the far end of the quarry and plummeted into deep, deep water. As it sank, Pop – an intercollegiate swimmer – raced freestyle to the crash site and dived down to the ear-popping cold depths in hopes of rescuing anyone trapped inside. It took three lung-burning tries before he finally located the car.

Thankfully, it was empty.

When a tow truck arrived at the scene, Pop dove down, down, down a fourth time to attach a chain so the car could be pulled out. It was a “Baywatch”-like episode in real life. Indeed, in photographs during his final years lifeguarding at Muzzy’s Pop seems chiseled from quarried stone at 6-foot-3 and 205 pounds and comes into black-and-white focus like Mitch Buchannon with a crew cut instead of longish curls.

In more than half a dozen summers in the tower chair, Pop – and his best friend and co-lifeguard, Dunny – had only one death occur during their Quarry Watch. A young boy, with a congenital heart problem it turned out, quietly sunk down underwater. There was no splashing, no struggle, no telltale sign of trouble for a lifeguard to see.

Meanwhile, the boy’s parents were not keeping a watchful eye and eventually sounded the alarm too late. Their son tragically drowned in less than three-feet of water that he could stand up in.

Happily, the Magic Sands Beach lifeguard towed the struggling swimmer to shore with the aid of a small torpedo-shaped buoy.

Isn’t it funny that traveling on vacation not only creates new memories, it can also rekindle old ones.

To be continued…

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

Sad Goodbye To A Merry-Go-Round

April 14, 2022April 15, 2022 by Woody

The chronicles of my Hawai’i adventures, previously promised to continue today, are postponed a week in order to share about a dear friend I lost last Sunday.

There is a good chance, if you live in or have visited Ventura County, she was your friend as well. I say “she” because just as ships are lovingly considered female, so too should merry-go-rounds.

The carousel at Ventura Harbor Village spun round and round for the very last time, to be replaced – as too often happens to nostalgic treasures – by something new called “progress.” Wild horses could not have kept me away from saying a final goodbye to these mild horses that gallop gently in circles. The hand-painted menagerie also included a giraffe, zebra, rooster and St. Bernard.

The circa-1970s carousel found a home at the harbor in the mid-1980s and in 1990 I took my then-3-year-old daughter on it for the first time. A fair guess is that we returned a hundred times more, at least, in the years that followed for what she called our “Daddy Dates.” While we rotated among numerous eateries at Harbor Village, we always, always rode the carousel.

And always, without exception, my daughter rode Rudolph. I think she initially picked him because it was summertime and she thought that was the funniest thing in the world – Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer being here in the warm sunshine instead of at the snowy North Pole. Ever thereafter she continued to politely hand over her arcade ticket at the gate and then rush excitedly past all the other animals and climb aboard Rudolph.

My daughter and I have enjoyed other carousels near and far, from the Ventura County Fair to Monterey’s Cannery Row, from Disneyland to Disney World, from San Francisco’s Pier 39 to New York City’s Central Park, but nowhere has she found another Rudolph and so always she has been a little disappointed.

Indeed, while some merry-go-rounds are bigger, or have brighter lights or shinier paint, the Harbor Village carousel will forever remain my favorite because of all the memories it carries with my daughter – and son, too, although he has never adored it quite so dearly. Yes, on the soundtrack of my life’s happiest moments the calliope music of the Harbor Village carousel plays a verse.

Adding to the melancholy of the farewell day, my daughter – herself now a parent of a 3-year-old girl – was unable to make it down from the Bay Area for a final carousel “Daddy Date.” Happily, I took an equally beautiful date. One of my favorite pictures of my wife is a black-and-white portrait when she was 5; now, as she sat astride the St. Bernard, I imagined her in living color at that age.

When I first started taking my daughter on the carousel it cost all of dollar as I seem to recall. This time it was four bucks per person, a bargain nonetheless because a five-minute ride on a time machine is priceless.

As I emotionally orbited round and round, I took a selfie video to send my daughter. My quick-thinking wife did something even better – she made a video call and that is how our little girl “virtually” rode her beloved merry-go-round during its last go-round. Naturally, she teared up saying goodbye even from afar.

“Don’t cry because it’s over,” I said over the phone, repeating a quote by Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, “smile because it happened.”

I need not tell you which carousel animal I rode. Some of the red paint has worn off his nose, but to my wistful eyes Rudolph never looked finer.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

A Small Pleasure on The Big Island

April 7, 2022 by Woody

Third try was the charm indeed.

Early in the pandemic, seemingly a decade ago, my wife and I had a long-planned trip to Hawai’i – my first ever – cancelled. A year later, after arrangements were again all made, a tsunami-sized COVID-19 surge forced a second postponement.

At long last, we recently made it to The Big Island, to Kona, to Lyman’s Bay where we stayed in a lovely one-bedroom retreat with a postcard view of the ocean brought to life.

We filled the week with sightseeing and snorkeling, with a day hike to Akaka Falls and an evening luau under a sky as pink as the inside of a conk shell, yet one of the biggest highlights was our tiny third-floor balcony. It was here where we started each morning by watching surfers carve their moves into the waves like hands writing script in invisible ink on the water’s surface. Evening happy hours were spent similarly.

A song lyric from The Beach Boys – “Catch a wave, you’ll be sitting on top of the world” – played in my mental jukebox as the wave dancers lined up, usually no less than two dozen of them, waiting and positioning to catch their next turn on top of the world.

While the surfers in this corner of paradise were nearly all adults – perhaps paddling out before going in late to the office; or diving in in the early evening on the way home after a full workday – they came into focus like school kids at play during recess.

One morning, when there was a “Big Wave Warning” all day for swimmers and snorkelers at nearby Magic Sands Beach just a mile south, the number of surfers in Lyman’s Bay swelled twofold to catch waves that were nearly triple the size of the previous few days’ head-high curls. Even super-sized, the waves broke as if in slow motion, gently almost, left-to-right looking on from the beach, and maintained their form so long they could be ridden for what seemed like a full minute.

Our final evening on our beatific balcony in Kona, the waves were so ginormous, and the Monet-painted sunset so impossibly gorgeous, that in addition to surfers lining up out on the water, runners and walkers and cyclists stopped en masse along the narrow-but-well-trafficked beachside road to gaze. Some cars even pulled over and parked, their occupants joining the entranced crowd.

After the sun melted fully into the horizon, the spectators gradually resumed their runs and strolls and rides. In turn, the brotherhood of surfers likewise grew smaller and smaller as one after another grabbed his or her final ride, happy and tired and probably looking forward to coming out again tomorrow morning, or next evening, or the upcoming weekend.

Eventually, there were only three surfers remaining in the bay, in the water, in the deepening darkness.

“That’s his last one,” my wife or I would say when one of these night riders caught a wave—

—but each time that surfer would paddle back out.

The longer this stubbornness against the dark went on and on, the brighter my already bright mood became until it shone like the rising moon. No matter their ages, I realized, these three men were at heart still boys at play.

It was as if they were shooting baskets in the driveway, or practicing skateboarding tricks in the street, and their mothers had just called them in for dinner on a warm midsummer’s night and they shouted back: “Just five more minutes, pleeeease!”

Or, in this case, “Just one more wave!”

To be continued…

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

This ‘News’ Has Expiration Date

April 1, 2022 by Woody

BREAKING NEWS: The items in today’s column expire at midnight.

HOLLYWOOD – The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today issued a press release announcing it is rescinding Will Smith’s “Best Actor” Oscar and will return it only if the star of “King Richard” slaps Samuel L. Jackson in the face … and lives to tell about it.

COOPERSTOWN, NY – Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred today announced another new rule aimed at shortening game times. Beginning with Opening Day on April 7, batters will get only two strikes and three balls.

“Two-and-one is the new full count,” Manfred noted.

LOS ANGELES – The Super Bowl champion Rams today announced they have signed actor Will Smith to a one-year deal for $22-million as a defensive lineman.

“His head slap is reminiscent of the great Deacon Jones,” Rams General Manager Les Snead said. “With Aaron Donald and Will together, no opposing quarterback will be safe.”

SILVER SPRING, MD – The FDA, citing a series of recent scientific studies, today declared that chocolate chip cookies are a “super food” high in antioxidants and taste.

NEW YORK – National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell today announced that beginning with the 2022 season, the NFL will address its Traumatic Brain Injury and concussion epidemic by having all players wear 1930’s-era leather helmets without facemasks.

“We feel this will stop the players from using their heads as weapons,” Goodell said.

NEW YORK – In stunning medical news, more than 13,000 oncologists in the United States, and nearly 200,000 other healthcare workers specializing in cancer treatment, filed for unemployment today after losing their jobs.

“It’s the most wonderful news imaginable,” one newly unemployed oncologist said. “We have wiped out cancer with a vaccine so there just isn’t any work for us anymore.”

WASHINGTON, DC – “Whoa, not so fast!” Surgeon General of the United States Dr. Vivek Murthy said today regarding the eradication of cancer. “The vaccine only saves the lives of those who will take it.”

SOMEWHERE IN LOW-EARTH ORBIT – Jeff Bezos, The World’s Richest Person with an estimated wealth of $165 billion, today proclaimed from his Blue Origin capsule: “I win, I win! I am the champion of World Monopoly! Now let’s reshuffle the Chance and Community Chest cards, and I’ll start all over with $1,500 – 2 x $500, 2 x $100, 2 x $50, 6 x $20, 5 x $10, 5 x $5 and 5 x $1 bills. This time I’ll even pay when I land on the Income Tax space. Good luck, everyone!”

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Department of Education today announced it will use the bulk of a $164-billion windfall from an anonymous donor for a national curriculum in MAC – Music, Art and Creative writing – and place an emphasis on attracting the very brightest students.

“While we recognize STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics – helps make life better,” a spokesperson explained, “we feel without question MAC makes for richer lives.”

EVERYTOWN, USA – Millions of Baby Boomers marched nationwide today in apology for their previous grumpy-toned complaints about Millennials and Generation Z being overly coddled with inflated senses of entitlement.

The marchers’ signs included: “Millennials Are Magnificent!”

“Our College Education Was Affordable – Sorry!”

“Gen Z Rockz at Volunteering!”

“What The Heck Is TikTok?”

NEW YORK – The Pulitzer Prize Board today announced a surprise award honoring Woody Woodburn.

A board member explained: “Woodburn is not as good a writer as he should be; he’s not as good as he wants to be; but thank goodness at least he’s better than he used to be.”

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

A Walk Long Remembered

March 25, 2022 by Woody

A very personal anniversary arrives next week, not of my wedding, but rather a milestone marking 35 years to the morning when I walked with John Wooden for the first time.

March 31, 1987 – Tuesday then, this year Thursday – was a day so special I marked it in my datebook of birthdays and anniversaries to remember. It proved to be an occasion that changed my life for Coach became my friend and mentor, and later a great-grandfather figure to my two children. I pinch myself still for such grand luck.

Coach and me during one of many magical visits.

In the long span since, I have written more columns on Wooden than on anyone else, as well as a book; when I give guest talks he is the person most often asked about, even now 12 years after his death at age 99; so here is a stroll down memory lane.

After interviewing Coach following a lecture he gave, he invited me to join him on his daily four-mile walk. Aware of his maxim, “Be on time whenever time is involved,” I left Santa Maria when the stars were still out and arrived in Encino with nearly an hour to spare.

At the appointed time, seven o’clock sharp, I nervously pressed the buzzer outside the condominium’s entrance. Coach, true to his code, was ready and waiting and immediately came out. After warm pleasantries on a cool and dewy Southern California spring morning, we set forth around Mister Wooden’s Neighborhood.

For the first mile or two, I peppered Coach with basketball questions but he then turned the tables and asked about my life. He was delighted to learn I was going to become a father in August and asked when was the due date.

“The eighth,” I replied and Coach stopped cold, his eyes visibly misting up. That was his and Nell’s wedding anniversary, he shared. High school sweethearts, they had been married 53 years before her death to cancer two years before our walk.

On that magical morning, I was 26 and Coach was 76 – the exact age at which my paternal grandfather died two decades earlier. Indeed, sitting in Coach’s living room after breakfast I felt like I was not with a living legend so much as visiting with what I fondly remembered my beloved grandfather to be like.

Like Wooden, my Grandpa Ansel was raised on a Midwestern farm – in Ohio rather than Indiana. Like Wooden, Grandpa enjoyed Shakespeare greatly and also similarly favored “Hamlet.” Like Wooden, Grandpa loved poetry and wrote verse. And like Wooden, Grandpa had once been a schoolteacher, albeit for only a few years in order to earn tuition for medical school.

Moreover, Grandpa’s familiar reminder to me, “If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right,” surely echoed Coach’s oft-repeated aphorism, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” Similarly, Grandpa’s “If you don’t learn anything today it will be a wasted day” dovetailed perfectly with Coach’s “Learn as if you were to live forever; live as if you were to die tomorrow.”

John Muir, reflecting on meeting – and walking with – Ralph Waldo Emerson in the Yosemite Valley, wrote: “Emerson was the most serene, majestic, sequoia-like soul I ever met. His smile was as sweet and calm as morning light on mountains. There was a wonderful charm in his presence; his smile, serene eye, his voice, his manner, were all sensed at once by everybody. A tremendous sincerity was his.”

Such is how I felt about John Wooden during our first walk and visit – and feel so still.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

This Moving Day Needs No U-Haul

March 18, 2022 by Woody

According to U.S. Census Bureau data, each person in the United States will on average move residences 11 times during her or his lifetime.

According to data retrieved from my memory, I rank well above average having moved 16 times – and that counts college, with three different dorm rooms and one off-campus apartment, as just one singular residence.

A handful of my moves have spanned only a couple miles; my most recent relocation measured just four blocks; and one boyhood move was merely two houses away, while others were marathons.

Perhaps the most memorable move was also the longest, driving coast-to-coast towing a U-Haul behind a stick-shift pickup truck with my newlywed wife and me, plus our two dogs, shoehorned inside the two-seat cab. Apollo 11’s capsule was less cramped, yet we repeated the claustrophobic feat returning to California from Delaware.

I have moving on my mind because today I make another memorable move – from Saturdays to Fridays in order to remain in The Star’s print edition. In some ways, it feels like my toughest move ever. After all, Saturday mornings have been my column’s home for nearly 11 years. Before me, Saturday’s were also home to Chuck Thomas, Bob Holt, Joe Paul, Jr. and Julius Guis, legends all.

Change is often not easy and moving Saturday’s edition of The Star exclusively online will surely upset some readers. But here’s another thing about change: while it can be a headache, it also often brings unexpected bonuses. Let me share a story…

My paternal grandfather, I have little doubt, would have bought an Apple Macintosh home computer when it was first released. Too, if he were alive, he would without question excitedly stand in line for the latest iPhone and just as surely read his favorite newspaper on an iPad or laptop rather than get newsprint all over his fingers and thus require extra hand-scrubbing before delivering a baby or performing surgery as a small-town country doctor.

You see, my Grandpa Ansel loved technology and had a history of being an early adopter. For example, long before he had the first color Zenith TV on his block, Grandpa bought one of the very first ballpoint pens manufactured – an expensive “Reynolds Rocket” that cost a princely $12.50 in 1945.

“He loved that pen,” my dad recalls, adding with a laugh, “for about two days.”

On Day 3, the state-of-the-art writing marvel sprung a leak that left a huge ink stain over the breast pocket of Ansel’s Arrow white dress shirt. It looked like he had been shot in the chest and was bleeding dark blue blood.

Not only was Grandpa out 12 bucks and change for the pen, but another $4.50 for a new collared shirt. However, instead of ranting at technology’s foibles, Grandpa shrugged it off. He just said, “A shirt salesman needs to make a living too” and bought a new Arrow – although it was a couple years before he bought another “newfangled ballpoint pen.”

While you cannot clip out a cartoon, recipe or column from online and stick it on the refrigerator with a magnet, “newfangled” e-editions still boast many advantages from speedier delivery to never getting soaked in the rain. Maybe those of us who have shunned The Star’s online edition will finally take the leap on Saturdays and learn to navigate it – and, very likely, learn to love it.

“When you leave home,” Maya Angelou said, “you take home with you.”

I like that thought: I’m leaving Saturday’s, but also taking them with me to TGIF. I hope you’ll keep visiting me.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Readers’ Poetry, Memories, Laughs

March 12, 2022March 12, 2022 by Woody

One hundred fourteen springs ago “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” with music by Albert von Tilzer and lyrics by Jack Norworth, was submitted to the United States Copyright Office.

Inspired by – more accurately, angered by – Major League Baseball’s ghost town-like empty and quiet ballparks, Bill Waxman, a longtime Dodgers fan and a reader of this space, sent me his own updated lyrics “with apologies to Jack Norworth” but none for the team owners:

“Lock me out of the ball game / Lock me out of the crowd

“I’ve got no interest in unfettered greed / Baseball’s a pastime we no longer need

“So it’s look, look forward to football / A game upon which we’ll depend

“Because no one will really care / When the lockout ends.”

My requiem to a lovely tree felled near my home brought numerous reader responses, including this time capsule from Kate Larsen:

“I, too, have many trees that trigger great memories. Probably the best is the big chestnut tree in my best friend’s yard. In Michigan, there are lots of horse chestnut trees with their pointy green shells just begging to be shucked. My friend, Sally, and I loved to collect them.

“One year we had literally bushels full of these wonderful chestnuts. My mom insisted we get rid of them in the fall, so we dumped them off the side of the porch. The next spring we had a myriad of baby chestnut trees growing! Needless to say, we spent hours pulling them up and hardly ever collected them after that.”

“You inspired me to plant more trees for grandchildren to enjoy!” vowed William Goldie, who also shared a BBC news story reporting that a tree cloned from the very one that dropped an apple on the head of Sir Isaac Newton – and thus led to his discovery of the laws of gravity – and planted in 1954 in the Cambridge University Botanic Garden was recently toppled by a storm.

On a happier note, a clone of that cloned historical tree will soon be planted in the garden.

“I grew up with a “junk drawer” – actually a shoe box in a kitchen drawer,” shared Wayne Saddler. “But we called it “The Hell Drawer” since we always went there when someone exasperatedly exclaimed, “Where the hell is it?”

James Barney shared his own hellish junk-drawer memory:

“Deborah makes ours look nice and tidy. Hence, when you need anything that SHOULD be in a junk drawer, look elsewhere. Case in point, and this happened recently, I was awakened by an intruder in the middle of the night. I leapt out of bed and banged the heck out of my foot. Immediate agony.

“Howling in pain, I hobbled down the stairs to the kitchen where I discovered: 1) no intruder; 2) that I was now standing in a pool of blood that was growing rapidly; and 3) there was NO tape in the junk drawer to make a bandage.

“I had to wrap my foot in a dish towel, take painful step after painful step down to the basement to get duct tape to fashion a bandage, then drag my now-throbbing foot up two flights of stairs where I discovered a dog who barely lifted her head and a wife who had slept through it all.

“Outcome: One broken toe, lost toenail, and an ‘intruder’ which turned out to be the robot vacuum which has run every night for the past two years. I’d kill for a decent junk drawer with a Band-Aid or tape!”

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

A Beautiful River of Runners

March 7, 2022 by Woody

Standing along the dusty banks of The Ventura River Trail this past Sunday morning, very early and very cold, I could not help but think of Norman Maclean’s novella “A River Runs Through It.”

Instead of a stream teeming with trout, a running river of humanity was flowing through the tree-line bike path for the annual Ventura Marathon, Half-Marathon and 5K.

As I cheered for my son and future daughter-in-law, as well as for the other entrants in all three events, a quote from Maclean’s masterpiece came to mind – although I had to look it up in order to get it exactly right here: “The fisherman even has a phrase to describe what he does when he studies the patterns of a river. He says he is ‘reading the water’, and perhaps to tell his stories he has to do much the same thing.”

My daughter-in-law Jess epitomized the spirit of the day!

It struck me there were surely 2,511 different stories taking place on this morning, one for each entrant. For example, my son’s fiancé was running her first half-marathon, and successfully; he was running his umpteenth 13.1-miler, but first since battling a year-long foot injury, and with a PR; and hometown star Garrett Reynolds was making his marathon debut with a swift-as-a-salmon-heading-downstream time of 2 hours, 23 minutes.

“Reading the water” revealed many, many more stories. Such as a mother who, no matter how fast she ran, always remained one stride behind her sleeping baby in a running stroller. Likewise, a father pushed a wide-eyed child who seemed as gleeful as if he were riding in a bobsled.

Stories. A grandfatherly man with his race bib pinned to a pink T-shirt in honor of breast cancer awareness. Surely some runners were heroically battling cancer at this very moment and others were cancer survivors.

Stories. A 10-year-old girl and a 76-year-old woman finished the marathon and also an 83-year-old man and a 15-year-old boy. In the 5K, an 8-year-old boy and 10-year-old girl and 75-year-old woman and 84-year-old man. The half-marathon, which featured the most stories with 1,429, similarly spanned many generations.

Stories. One spectator along the river route was especially memorable. I dare say he cheered for each and every single runner, giving his smile to – and putting a smile on – all 2,511 faces. Honestly, I don’t know how he did not go hoarse yet for two hours he never let up.

Indeed, whether the runner was floating speedily on winged feet or struggling with sinking spirits, in a pleasant southern accent he tirelessly offered encouragement: “Only two more miles! … Relax your face… Lift your knees… You’ve got this! … You’re a winner!”

Other spectators likewise applauded for the 10K runners as wholeheartedly as for half-marathoners and marathoners, and cheered for the swift as loudly as for the slow. In return the runners smiled or gave a thumbs-up sign or with huffing breaths said, “Thank you.” Each in-person exchange was worth a thousand “Likes” on social media.

Eventually, the three streams – the marathon, which started at sunrise; half-marathon, beginning half an hour later, halfway down the trail; and 5K, starting still nearer the ocean – all merged into one river that flowed through the finish chute at Ventura Unified School District headquarters.

Arriving at the homestretch, every runner, regardless their time or distance raced, was greeted with a shout-out by name on PA system and rewarded with cheers from the throng of spectators. As it should be, for each of the 2,511 shining faces had earned a new story to tell.

No trout stream was ever more beautiful than this running river.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Thanks, ‘Carissa’, for the Ventura Shout-out

February 25, 2022 by Woody

I remember watching “Little Miss Sunshine” in a downtown Ventura movie theater a number of years ago and the audience erupted with applause and cheers at the dramatic pageant arrival scene when Steve Carell’s dad character, driving the family in a bright yellow VW Microbus, misses the freeway exit and has to take an overpass to turn around…

…and the brief on-screen “star” is our 101 California Street exit – only four blocks away from the movie theater we were watching in – with the high-rise Crowne Plaza beach hotel in the background.

If you are at all like me you feel a similar thrill whenever you see Ventura in a Hollywood role. For example, our downtown in “Swordfish” or several local spots in “Two Jakes” or our beloved pier in “God Bless America” to name three more.

I imagine it’s how Monterey’s “Cannery Row” neighborhood must have felt to be immortalized in John Steinbeck’s novel of the same name. Less famously, the fictional coastal town of Cabrillo hints strongly of Ventura – and the old Star-Free Press – in my predecessor Chuck Thomas’ novel “Getting Off The Map.”

Well, a new book has me smiling and cheering for featuring Ventura in its pages. Actually, the fictional beach town is named Buena Vista, but make no mistake it is Buenaventura. From the beach and pier to Main Street and the foothills, its author – Dallas Woodburn – pays homage to her dear hometown through and through.

My daughter’s second novel, “Thanks, Carissa, For Ruining My Life” from Immortal Works, has just been published and – Boasting Dad Warning – instantly soared to No. 1 on Amazon’s list of Young Adult New Releases.

The story centers around two teenagers, Rose and Brad, who travel parallel journeys of self-discovery, empowerment, and acceptance after popular “queen bee” Carissa tears apart their lives. In Hollywood parlance, it’s “Brittany Runs a Marathon” meets “Some Kind of Wonderful.”

A wonderful kind of thing some writers like to do is scatter “Easter eggs” that only certain readers will find and recognize. “Carissa” has a basketful of such hidden treasures. For example, Tony’s Taco Shop is obviously Snapper Jack’s; Nature’s Grill makes a cameo as Nature’s Café; and in a role encompassing its own storyline is the Buena Vista radio station WAVE-104.3 that is, clear as a Santa Ana wind-blown summer day, Ventura’s KVTA-1590 where Dallas has been a guest on esteemed radio personality Tom Spence’s morning show. The observant reader will find more brightly dyed local gems.

Books are time machines and while “Carissa” will surely transport most readers back to high school, it carries me to when Dallas was only 6 or 7 and already dreaming of becoming an author. In my mind’s eye I can still see her, sitting tall on her knees, in a chair at the kitchen table and typing on her great-grandfather’s restored Underwood No. 5 typewriter. Punching the QWERTY keys, firmly with only her right index finger, she let her imagination soar.

There was modern magic in that 1911 heirloom: in second grade, Dallas had a poem – “Peanut Butter Surprise” about a PB&J sandwich made with a jellyfish because the grape jelly ran out – published in The Star’s “Kids Corner” feature and in fifth grade self-published a book of short stories and poems that sold 2,000 copies.

The little girl’s big dreams kept coming true with a play produced off-Broadway, a John Steinbeck Creative Writing Fellowship, and a handful of awards for her debut novel “The Best Week That Never Happened” two years ago.

Thanks to “Carissa” her writing life remains charmed, not ruined.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Lovely ‘Poem’ Becomes Woodchips

February 18, 2022 by Woody

One hundred nine rings in an oak stump ago, Joyce Kilmer penned “Trees” with one of the most widely familiar opening couplets in America poetry:

I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.

I thought of these words as I looked out my window and across the street as a lovely “poem” got sawed down, cut up, turned into woodchips and trucked away.

It was like seeing a theatrical street version of Shel Silverstein’s classic children’s book “The Giving Tree” starring two workmen in white hardhats and optic-yellow vests. Actually, this story was even sadder for this tree’s limbs would not be used to build a house for the grown boy; its trunk not crafted into a boat to sail the seas; when the workmen’s work was finished, there was not even a stump left to sit and rest upon.

Majestically tall, its trunk too thick to reach one’s arms around, the tree had become a botanical Leaning Tower of Pisa that was in danger of being toppled by a strong wind.

And so, beginning at 9 o’clock, a loud-crying chainsaw turned morning into mourning as a workman in a gargantuan cherry-picker amputated the branches one by one by one, thicker to smaller, as he hydraulically rose higher, higher, higher.

The felled branches were next cut into manageable lengths and fed into a woodchipper. The lines of a “poem” went in, mulch came out.

Lastly, the towering barren trunk came down. Instead of being made into long lumber for a home or boat, it was sawed into short logs to be burned in fireplaces. This was not a heartwarming thought.

It was not my tree, not in my yard, and yet all the same it was mine, and yours too, because trees are for all of us to enjoy. From start to finish, what took many decades to become living poetry was erased in less than four hours. It was tree-mendously sad.

Kilmer again: A tree that may in summer wear / A nest of robins in her hair.

No more birds will nest in the lovely tree I used to see out my east-facing kitchen window, the rising sun climbing its branches each day.

The melancholy event gave me pause thinking about a handful of memorable trees in my life: The evergreen beside the driveway of my first boyhood home that my two older brothers and I attempted blind shots over during games of H-O-R-S-E. The sturdy buckeye we swung Tarzan-style from a rope near a pond. The apple tree I picked snacks off of on a shortcut home from grade school. The orange tree my two kids helped me plant when they were in grade school. The giant redwoods we saw, in awe, as a family. And on and on.

I think “poems” fill all our lives more than we generally realize. We draw trees in kindergarten and climb trees as older kids and hopefully at least once plant a tree, for as the Greek proverb states: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” Old women, too.

Kilmer once more: Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.

Afterwards, this fool walked over to determine how old the tree had been by counting its rings, but the stump was cut off below ground and covered with dirt. I may be overestimating its age by half, but I like to think it sprouted in 1913 – the same year “Trees” came into being.

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WOODY WOODBURN

Writer, "Streaker" & Speaker

Category Archives: Columns

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Lovely ‘Poem’ Becomes Woodchips