Excerpted from WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”

Chapter 22: FRIENDLINESS

“If we magnified blessings as much as we magnify disappointments,

 we would all be much happier.”

– John Wooden

*  *  *

When I am running it is my nature to smile and give a “runner’s nod” or quick wave to others I encounter on the roads, trails and bike paths. In more intimate social situations, as with many writers, I am a bit introverted. However, Coach Wooden helped me become more outgoing with a folksy story from his life. It remains one of my favorites.

*  *  *

On the way to the airport after a weeklong stay in Southern California, the visitor from the Midwest complained to his transplanted host: “John, I honestly don’t know how you can stand to live here. No one is friendly here like they are back home.”

“Sure they are,” the host answered. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I’ve been here an entire week and not a single person out on the street or sidewalks has said ‘Hi’ to me.”

“Did you say ‘Hello’ to them?” asked the host.

“Well, no, because I didn’t know any of them.”

John Wooden, the host for his visiting Hoosier friend, shared this anecdote – this life lesson – with me more than a couple times. Each retelling was punctuated by a wry smile.

                  I was reminded of this story when I traveled to West Lafayette, Indiana to visit Dallas at Purdue University, Wooden’s alma mater, which is only ninety miles from Coach’s hometown of Martinsville. For good reason Purdue proudly claims “Johnny” as its favorite son to this day.

                  Back to Wooden’s story about the visitor and friendliness. I would like to share a few scenes that played out during my small-town Indiana trip.

                  At the airport, from across a large room an elderly woman asked the airline workers if they had someone who could help with her luggage. When no response came, she asked again, more loudly, and in more distress. This time an airline worker yelled back, his voice cold and uncaring: “No, ma’am!”

                  In a blink, a traveler in the middle of a long line gave up his place to go assist the woman. The friendliness did not end there. When the Good Samaritan returned to the end of the line, the person at the very front beckoned him to go before her – which, incidentally, was much further ahead than where he had been standing before he went to help. What is more, the rest of the people in line warmly waved him forward.

                  Also I saw this: A mother in a parking lot with a small child balanced on one hip, a bag of groceries in the other arm and car keys apparently misplaced in her purse. In stepped another woman who kindly lent a helping hand and also took her shopping cart to the return rack.

                  Another example: A gentleman in a suit and tie raced out of a bagel shop for about one hundred yards in pursuit of a young woman pushing a stroller in order to give her the pacifier her baby had dropped.

                  And another: A boy, no older than eight, was a quarter short paying for a smoothie and began searching his pockets for more change. A stranger behind him, college-aged, reached into his own pocket and handed the needed coin to the cashier. A small thing, yes, but it mattered to the young boy.

                  Lastly: Hellos from strangers; friendly smiles in passing; small talk and small acts of kindness. There is nothing like Hoosier hospitality – except that all of the above travel-day scenes happened in Ventura and Los Angeles International Airport before I arrived in Indiana.

                  As Civil War Union General Joshua Chamberlain observes in Michael Shara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels: “Home. One place is like another, really. Maybe not. But the truth is it’s all just rock and dirt and people are roughly the same.”

                  Coach Wooden knew this well. Sometimes you just have to say “Hello” first.

 *  *  *

Excerpted from WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”

• Unsigned paperbacks or Kindle ebook can be purchased here at Amazon.
• Personalized signed copies are available here!

Caregivers is “Jewell” of an Organization

“Giving does not empty your hands,” says my son, Greg, wise beyond his years. “It prepares them to be filled.”

Too, giving prepares your heart to be filled. Caregivers Assisting The Elderly, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary in Ventura County, is proof of this.

Jewell Butcher with her favorite scarf.

A decade past, as a high school sophomore, my daughter became a volunteer for Caregivers’ “Building Bridges” intergenerational program. Her heart was filled by the experience.

 “After school and on weekends, groups of teenagers supervised by Caregiver adults visit the homes of senior citizens and help them with gardening, cleaning, and other household chores,” Dallas notes. “But the most requested service is simply providing a few minutes of company.”

Caregivers as friendship givers.

By coincidence, Jewell Butcher lived alone less than a mile away from Dallas.

It was no coincidence Jewell’s house was freshly painted as bright yellow as a sunflower on the outside and inside the blue of a cloudless summer sky. Jewell, then 76, had recently survived a heart attack and when she returned home she wanted to be surrounded by cheerful colors.

“The obvious pleasure she found in our company filled my heart,” Dallas recalls of her first Caregivers visit with Jewell. “She told us a little about herself, but mostly asked questions – about school, about our families, about our dreams.”

Bidding goodbye, Jewell hugged Dallas and warmly said: “Please come back soon.”

Dallas did. She dropped by “The Sunflower House” frequently. Jewell would make tea and the two would talk for hours on end.

“She was a natural storyteller who delighted in the smallest details,” Dallas remembers. “I learned that as a young woman, Jewell and her mother moved to California from Missouri. She had lived in Ventura for more than half a century and I loved hearing what my hometown was once like.”

Long before Caregivers assisted Jewell, she was the caregiver for her mother through a long terminal illness.

“Even when sharing a sad story,” Dallas marvels, “Jewell would end it with a smile and say, ‘I sure am lucky. I’ve had such a blessed life.’ She was an inspiration.”

Around the time Dallas moved off to college, Jewell moved into an assisted living facility. They talked about the similar new chapters in their lives: “I was making new friends in the dorms and going to parties on weekends; she was making new friends in the dining hall and going to bingo nights.”

In Dallas’s absence, her younger brother visited Jewell.

“She never married and had no children, but I like to think Greg and I became her surrogate grandchildren,” Dallas says, adding happily: “Other Townehouse residents often assumed we were her grandkids and she always smiled and never corrected them.”

Going out to lunch delighted Jewell and Dallas laughingly remembers how her frail companion sprinkled Splenda on most everything, even syrupy pancakes and crepes.

But an even sweeter memory was the time Jewell asked Dallas and Greg to drive her to the store because she dearly wanted a disposable camera.

“We had to go right away in the middle of a visit,” Dallas retells. “When we finally returned to her room the urgency of her request became clear – she wanted to take a picture of the three of us to hang on her refrigerator.”

“I miss you when you’re away,” Jewell told them.

“We miss you, too.”

When the photos were developed, Jewell mailed copies to Dallas and Greg. She also enclosed a snapshot of her wearing a sky-blue scarf Dallas knitted as a gift the previous Christmas.

“I love that photo,” Dallas says. “I have it in a frame on my dresser. Jewell’s smile was contagious – still is.”

Having one’s heart filled eventually exacts a steep price: heartache. Three years ago this week a brief illness claimed Jewell’s life at age 86.

“I was living in Indiana and as always sent my dear friend a card for Valentine’s Day,” Dallas shares. “Jewell died on February 12, but I like to think she received my card before she passed.”

I like to think so, too. I know this: Caregivers is a Jewell of an organization.

*

Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for the Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. His new memoir WOODEN & ME is now available.

WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the

 Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”

• Personalized signed copies are available at WoodyWoodburn.com
• Unsigned paperbacks or Kindle ebook can be purchased here at Amazon

Club’s Story is a Real Page-Turner

If her memory serves, and Doris Cowart’s mind is quicker than a Google search, Tillie Hathaway merits credit for starting the first book club in Ventura.

“Her husband was a lawyer and she was an RN who made house calls on horseback, so this was sometime before World War II,” recalls Doris, who herself enjoyed a long post-buggy nursing career after coming to Ventura in 1951. “The club is still going.”

It meets now on the second Thursday each month at rotating homes but always beginning at 1 p.m. with coffee, dessert and small talk about children, grandchildren and great-grandkids, vacation cruises and doctor appointments, before finally turning to page-turners.

Doris, who at age 90 swims one-mile four days a week, joined The Thursday Book Club a full half-century ago when the year’s best-sellers included “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” by John Le Carre and Ian Fleming’s “You Only Live Twice.”

Because nonfiction people only live once, and because of Alzheimer’s, and because of people moving away, membership slowly dwindled. Meanwhile, a second longtime local book club experienced similar losses.

So the two groups had a blind date to see if they were compatible. They were. Today’s merged membership consists of Mary Ann Benton, Annette Clark, Mary Jo Coe, Doris Cowart, Rose Adelle Marsh, Billie Radcliffe, Katherine Stone, Suzanne Sheridan, Barbara Swanson and Arlys Tuttle. Three have been members for 50 years while only two for less than a decade.

To be sure, E.L. James’ “Fifty Shades of Grey” won’t have the staying power of this Nine Shades of Gray And One Redhead. Their hairstyles are short and stylish, varying from straight to curls; lipstick and reading glasses seem required while e-reader tablets are optional.

“Oh, no. No e-reader for me,” says Arlys Tuttle. “I’ll always love books with pages you can feel and turn.”

The problem with e-books, the Nine Shades of Gray And One Redhead agree, is you can’t share one among friends until no one else wants to borrow it, at which time you can donate it to The Friends of the Library to resell for fundraising.

Another fundraising effort is the passing of “The Money Bag” – a blue canvas sack with a drawstring that looks like something a pirate would keep booty in – for each member to contribute loose change.

“If somebody dies we know their interest and buy a book for the library in their honor,” Mary Ann shared.

Added Doris, laughing: “It’s not an honor any of us wants!”

Laughs are frequent.

One woman concluded her review of a book that a fellow member had also read: “Fascinating, didn’t you think?”

“No, I didn’t like it,” came the reply followed by merriment all around.

Another lady, after hearing a positive review, asked to borrow the book next only to see her name written inside the cover as the original owner. She teased herself: “I read a book and forget it two weeks later!”

To be fair, there are myriad books to try to remember considering each member regularly reads two or six or even more a month. They then take turns giving synopses on a couple, good and bad.

A mere sampling of recommended reads on this day included: “And The Mountains Echoed” by Khaled Hosseini; “The Tennis Partner” by Dr. Abraham Verghese; David McCullough’s “Truman” and “John Adams”; “The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild” by Lawrence Anthony; and “Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald” by Therese Anne Fowler.

Also Elizabeth Stout’s “The Burgess Boys” and “Olive Kitteridge”; “The Snow Child” by Eowyn Ivey; “The Racketeer” by John Grisham; “Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before” by Tony Horwitz; “The Round House” by Louise Erdrich; “Winter of the World: Book Two of the Century Trilogy” by Ken Follett; and “The Lowland” by Jhumpa Lahiri.

Oh, yes, and “The Longest Ride” by Nicholas Sparks, of which Doris sheepishly shared: “I hate to admit I bought this in a weak moment, but it was actually one of his better ones.”

No one, however, confessed to reading “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

*

Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for the Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. His new memoir WOODEN & ME is available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com and Amazon.com.

Sports Columnist Forges Bond with Legendary Coach

By Ken McAlpine

Special to The Ventura County Star (June 8, 2013)

(Ken McAlpine lives in Ventura. His magazine articles have earned three Lowell Thomas awards, travel writing’s top award.)

John Robert Wooden was teacher, mentor and friend to many, but few have gotten to the heart of Wooden (and, with Wooden, it’s the heart that matters) like Woody Woodburn.

Woodburn’s new memoir “Wooden & Me: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to ‘Help Make Each Day Your Masterpiece’ ” is a marriage made in writing heaven. Two men cut from the same Midwestern cloth — woven with integrity, honesty and a need to do for others — Woodburn, a national award-winning columnist, and UCLA coaching legend Wooden forged a special bond, and a friendship that lasted over 20 years.

Woodburn first met Wooden as a youth basketball camper in 1975 and the magic begins here. But this is not a book about basketball. Wooden’s gift was to see the bigger picture, and Woodburn possesses the same gift. The result is a book that moves and motivates and makes you care about the not-so-simple values that make this world a better place.

John Wooden’s sporting accomplishments were almost beyond belief. His won-loss record, his NCAA championship wins, we could list the numbers here, but Coach made little of these accomplishments. “What was the biggest highlight of your career?” he was once asked, Woodburn shares. “When Nellie married me,” he said.

This was a man, writes Woodburn aptly, of “rare grace.”

Woodburn’s prose also is rare grace. Wooden was larger than life because he didn’t try to be; Woodburn writes a lovely book because he has a simple, unselfish aim.

“Coach helped shape my life, and grandly,” writes Woodburn. “My friendship/mentorship with him was a precious gift, one that came wrapped with a bow of responsibility to share with others the life lessons he shared with me the best I can strive for is to pay forward in some small measure by sharing his wisdom with others ”

That Woodburn knew Wooden doesn’t distinguish him from hundreds of others: what distinguishes Woodburn is he cares about people and good things. Wooden knew this, and so the two became real friends (Woodburn has a stack of letters from Coach that he keeps in a fireproof safe along with other pen-and-paper family heirlooms).

Wooden’s friendship deepened to include Woodburn’s two children through their growth into young adulthood. Because they were real friends, “Wooden & Me” touches every chamber of the heart. At times the book is funny and upbeat, at times, poignant and sad. Woodburn often got through his own difficult times with help, actual and inspired, from Coach, and Woodburn returned the favor. Together they raised friendship to an art.

The value of friendship, honesty, integrity and hard work, these are things that always merit reminding and are evident throughout the pages of “Wooden & Me (currently available through www.WoodyWoodburn.com). Indeed, Woodburn turns the lessons he learned from Wooden into lessons we can all use.

“Remember, Woody,” Coach told him more than once, “good things take time — and good things should take time. Usually a lot of time.”

This book is a very a good thing.

© 2013 Ventura County Star. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.