Monthly Archives: November 2021

“Holiday Ball Drive” Kicks Off

by Woody

Editorials are generally as disposable as the newsprint on which they are printed, and yet one that appeared in The New York Sun in 1897 might as well have been carved in granite because it remains relevant and favored well over a century later.

Headlined “Is There a Santa Claus?” it began with a letter from young Virginia O’Hanlon:

“Dear Editor –

“I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.’ Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?”

The Sun’s reply included the now famous line, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” and continued: “He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.”

A mountain of gifts from “Woody’s Holiday Ball Drive.”

Indeed, how dreary would the world be with no Virginias – and, alas! no Sarahs, Davids and Briannas. Those are the names of just three fabulous kids who have contributed in past years to “Woody’s Holiday Ball Drive” that kicks off once again today to give sports balls to local disadvantaged youth.

Indeed, 10-year-old Sarah emptied her “Jar of Chore Money”; 14-year-old David used his birthday gift cards; and 9-year-old Brianna collected and redeemed recyclables for a full year; all to buy a small sleighful of gift balls to donate.

The seed for this endeavor was planted about 25 years ago at a youth basketball clinic when former Ventura College and NBA star Cedric Ceballos awarded autographed basketballs to handful of lucky attendees. Leaving the gym afterward, I happened upon a 10-year-old boy who had won one of the prized keepsakes. . .

. . . which he was now dribbling on the rough blacktop outdoor court, and shooting baskets with, all while perhaps imagining he was Ceballos with the game clock ticking down to the final buzzer.

Meanwhile, the real Ceballos’ Sharpie signature was of course wearing off.

Curious as to why the boy had not carefully taken the trophy basketball home to put safely on a bookshelf, I interrupted his playing to ask.

“I’ve never had my own basketball,” he answered matter-of-factly between shots.

At Christmastime, visions of that boy – and other boys and girls like him, who don’t have their own basketball to shoot or soccer ball to kick or football to throw – danced through my head. So I asked you dear readers to help make the holidays happier and you responded like champions.

Once again, I am asking you to drop off new sports balls (no batteries required!) at a Boys & Girls Club, YMCA, fire department or house of worship. The organization’s leaders will see that they wind up in deserving young hands.

Also, through Dec. 15, you can handoff your bouncing gifts at Jensen Design & Survey at 1672 Donlon St. (weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.) near Target on Telephone Road in Ventura; or have online orders shipped to the same address; and I will take it from there.

If you participate, please email me at woodywriter@gmail.com so I can add your generosity to this year’s tally.

Together, we can prove The Sun’s long-ago words still ring true: Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and ball-giving MVPs – Most Valuable Philanthropists – exist.

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Woody Woodburn 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

 

Thanksgiving Tale From Childhood

by Woody

Serendipity smiled, winked as well, and made me laugh earlier this week by bringing one of my favorite Thanksgiving memories to mind.

To begin, my two-weeks-shy-of-three-year-old granddaughter told me, with a grin and a giggle, all about “Pete The Blue Cat” who is a character in one of her books. It is actually from the award-winning “Pete the Cat” series by James and Kimberly Dean, but dear Maya calls him “Pete The Blue Cat” for obvious reasons.

I, in turn, shared with Maya a story about my grandparents’ cat, Pete, an orangey-blonde tabby who I obviously renamed “Pete The Orange Cat” in my retelling.

Before proceeding with that tale, let me share some further literary serendipity. The very day before Maya’s conversation about “Pete The Blue Cat,” I had read her a new book via video chat, as I often do, since she lives in the Bay Area.

Titled “I Want My Hat Back” by Jon Klassen, it won the Theodore Seuss Geisel Honor and is about a bear who, as you can guess, has lost his cap. Throughout the pages he asks a series of animals he encounters, “Have you seen my hat?”

The fox, frog, rabbit, turtle, snake and armadillo are of no help and eventually the bear laments: “Nobody has seen my hat. What if I never see it again? What if nobody ever finds it? My poor hat. I miss it so much.”

At long last, a deer asks the bear what his hat looks like.

“It is red and pointy and…” the bear answers.

Which brings me back to my Thanksgiving memory. We had enjoyed a full feast, complete with a variety of at least six home-baked pies because my Grandma Mabel loved to make everyone’s favorite, and were getting ready for the 45-mile drive home.

“I can’t find my hat,” six-year-old me announced with emergency in my voice.

I asked everyone – my two older brothers, younger sister, mom and dad, Mabel and Grandpa Ansel – if they had seen my hat, but no one had. No one needed to ask what my hat looked like because I wore the Davy Crockett coonskin cap, complete with ringed tail,  everywhere except in the shower.

A search party was organized and the entire family looked low and high, upstairs and downstairs, with no luck. Pop, anxious to get on the road before the holiday traffic, and Ohio’s winter weather, got too bad, finally said we had to go.

Nobody has seen my hat, I surely sniveled. What if I never see it again? What if nobody ever finds it?

Grandpa soothed my woes by promising he would keep looking until he found it and would bring it when he and Mable came to our house for Christmas dinner. Trailing the rest of my family like a sad little caboose, I trudged towards the front door.

My poor hat. I miss it so much.

Suddenly, Mabel sang out excitedly, “Here it is! I found it!” She had spotted the tip of the tail of my coonskin cap poking out from beneath the dining room table’s formal tablecloth that draped all the way to the floor.

Mabel reached down to retrieve the Davy Crockett hat and . . .

. . . MEOWWW-HOWWWL!

She had yanked Pete The Orange Cat’s striped tail!

My pouty lower lip instantly gave way to laughter.

I won’t spoil the ending of the book “I Want My Hat Back” for you, but my tale of that long-ago Thanksgiving evening concluded with all of us giving belated thanks we weren’t Pete The Sore-Tailed Cat.

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Woody Woodburn 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

 

Hole Leads To Whole New Beauty

by Woody

Imagine a teenager looking in the mirror while getting ready for prom and seeing an eyesore pimple. That’s the kind of chill I felt the other day when I put on my favorite pullover and spotted a small hole, impossible to miss, in the front.

Understand, I have had this wool, olive green, quarter-zipper, vintage Patagonia pullover for close to two decades, and have babied it for half that time trying to extend its life as long as possible. As a result, it has spent more time inside a dresser drawer than out in the world, which is not a good thing.

Also as a result, it has made more than its share of appearances at happy gatherings and special events, which is a good thing. The unsightly new blemish, however, promised to retire Ol’ Green from marquee billing.

While age finally claimed its youthful beauty, I did not want the small hole to get stretched and pulled and torn into a larger one. “A stitch in time saves nine” but, alas, my skill with needle and thread is limited to sewing a button back on a shirt. Meanwhile, my wife felt the emotional pressure of a surgeon being asked to operate on a loved one and begged out.

My next thought was to ask my dear Betsy Ross-like friend Kathy. I wish you could see her handiwork on Ol’ Green. Darned if her darning isn’t masterful. The interwoven needlework is nearly invisible.

In truth, I’m actually glad the repair is slightly visible. I say this after thinking about the Shakers who were renowned for their furniture design and craftsmanship, yet deliberately introduced a “mistake” into the things they made in order to show that man should not aspire to the perfection of God. Flawed, they believed, could be ideal.

Ol’ Green is now similarly ideal.

Navajos, echoing the Shakers, purposely weave a single imperfection into their handmade blankets. To their eyes this makes the blankets more, not less, beautiful. In his terrific book, “Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West,” author Hamptom Sides elaborates on this mindset:

“Navajos hated to complete anything – whether it was a basket, a blanket, a song, or a story. They never wanted their artifacts to be too perfect, or too close-ended, for a definitive ending cramped the spirit of the creator and sapped the life from the art. So they left little gaps and imperfections, deliberate lacunae that kept things alive for another day.

“Even today Navajo blankets often have a faint imperfection designed to let the creation breathe – a thin line that originates from the center and extends all the way to the edge, sometimes with a single thread dangling from its border. Tellingly, the Navajos call the intentional flaw the ‘spirit outlet.’ ”

Henceforth, I will take the Shakers’ and Navajos’ perspectives to heart when I wear Ol’ Green and embrace its repaired imperfection as a “spirit outlet.”

“Kintsugi” also comes to my mind, which is the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with seams of gold and, in the process, making the object even more beautiful for having been broken. That is exactly how I feel about my beloved pullover.

From now on, instead of saving Ol’ Green for special occasions I am going to wear it regularly. And when future holes and “spirit outlets” appear, and surely they will, I may ask Kathy to perform her seamstress wizardry with gold thread instead of perfectly matched olive.

Ol’ Green-and-Gold will then be even more beautiful than ever.

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Woody Woodburn 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

 

Turning Fall Clock Way, Way Back

by Woody

Clocks get turned back an hour Sunday, but a dear near-centenarian pen pal of mine jumped the gun by turning the calendar pages back many decades.

Actually, Doris is my “typewriter” pal for she always types her letters to me. She is a superb typist, by the way, with her most-recent two-page missive having only two corrections made in black pen – an extra s crossed out and a 9 turned into a 0 – which is about double her average of misstrikes.

I thought Doris’s latest delightful correspondence deserved a wider readership than just me, so here is an excerpted dose of Ventura history and nostalgia.

“You asked about the location of the high school campus, so I may just chatter here about the Ventura I remember. I was born up on a hill, Three Sisters Hospital or something like that.

“I attended the Mill School thru first grade, then E.P. Foster, then The Avenue School. That building was located sort of behind where Santa Clara and Main Street meet, and I do not know when it disappeared. Grades 7-10 and the last two years of high school were at the present-day Ventura High School building on Main Street.

“At that time the building also had JC classes. As you can imagine, for girls especially at about twelve years of age, going to another school where there were also SIXTEEN-year-old girls was a major adjustment. So there were sponsors (tenth-graders, of course, so very sophisticated and all) for the younger girls. I had one and later became one – recently an acquaintance told me her mom said I was her sponsor and she remembered me. I don’t even remember me at all at sixteen!!

“My dad was also born in Ventura. He was friends with so many people and it was enjoyable to feel like I had an extended family when I would walk down the street and an older person would say hi to me — especially Emilio Ortega, the handsome postmaster!

“I loved my childhood even with all of the ‘deprivations’ of the Depression and then World War II. We always had very little, didn’t need more, and if we had a bit less we didn’t notice. I do know it helped that my dad was always lucky to have a job, whereas so many were not so fortunate. He worked for the Southern Counties Gas Co., and we lived on Lewis Street, which was a very nice neighborhood.

“So, see what happens when you ask a simple question. In answer to your other question about my typewriter: Now I have a Lexmark (IBM) and I have no idea the year of its manufacture. I will have it go to the Neptune Society with me, it is so dear to me.

“At twelve, I received a Smith-Corona portable in a dandy case. I believe it went to college with my son Rick after I taught all of my kids to be handy with it and I moved along from Underwoods to IBMs — Selectrics and an Executive. I did have a computer, but had no room here for it and find I can live quite comfortably as long as this machine sticks with me.

“Sometime I will tell you about my experience typing the California Bar exam for a Stanford Law School graduate, way back in the mid-1950s.” Added in handwritten black ink: “He did pass!”

Typing again: “As you can see, these 96-year-old fingers are plum wore out!!”

Then, in closing, in Palmer Method cursive as smooth as warm maple syrup: “Love, Doris”

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Woody Woodburn 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