A “Between The Lines” Look at Barry Kibrick
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Author Archives: Woody
Column: The Cancer Bell Tolls
For Whom the Cancer Bell Tolls
While the order of stanzas often changes, the message in a poem by Martin Niemöller, a prominent Protestant pastor who spent seven years in Nazi concentration camps, remains constant and tragic:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me –
And there was no one left to speak for me.
Eight decades after Niemöller penned these powerful words they have taken on new meaning to me. Personal meaning. About another heinous killer.
First cancer came for my young children’s beloved daycare provider, Jeannie.
Then cancer came for my dearest friend, Karen.
Then cancer came for Eric. And Louise. And Keith.
After gallant battles by each, and despite everything modern medicine could throw at it, this Gestapo of a disease unmercifully claimed all of their lives.
Then cancer came yet again and again, for my dad just over a year ago and two months later for my eldest brother. Surgery and radiation and chemotherapy – and let’s be honest, luck and god’s grace, too – saved their lives.
Then cancer came for me. Last Dec. 17, my wonderful dermatologist, Dr. Jill Mines, took a biopsy from a crack in my lip that stubbornly wouldn’t heal. The lab results came back positive for squamous cell carcinoma in situ: skin cancer.
A few weeks later Dr. Arthur Flynn, a talented plastic surgeon, sliced a wedge out of my right lower lip. For a while I looked like a bass that lost a battle with a barbed fishing lure. But the painful pout was a small price to pay because the new biopsy margins came back clear. Translation: The doc got it all.
Cancer is not only frightening, it is frighteningly common. To give you an idea, two out of five Californians will be diagnosed with some form of the disease in their lifetime. In other words, the cancer club is about as exclusive as Sam’s Club.
The good news is the American Cancer Society is making an impact through groundbreaking research to prevent, diagnose, treat and cure cancer. In fact, its annual Relays For Life raise funds that help save 400 birthdays each day.
The Relay For Life of Ventura will be held next Saturday (May 18) beginning at 10 a.m. and feature a festival of food trucks so even if you are not participating directly, you should drop by.
(Other upcoming local Relays For Life include: Ojai’s Nordhoff High, June 1; Westlake’s Oaks Christian School, June 8; Hueneme High, June 22; Fillmore’s Harmony Community Center, July 12; and Carpinteria’s Linden Field, July 20.)
After long successful runs at Ventura High and then Buena High’s football stadiums, this year’s Ventura event – under the guidance of new tireless chairperson Patty Abou-Samra – is moving to the San Buenaventura State Beach. It is difficult to imagine a more beautiful setting.
Actually, in a manner, this coastal site will become even more breathtaking with the sight of 1,500 members on 65 relay teams as they walk for 24 hours around the clock and around a circular 400-meter path outlined in chalk on the grass field. Their shared purpose is to raise funds, raise awareness, raise hope.
Raising more goose bumps than a Pacific sunset does will be the nighttime Luminaria Ceremony where hundreds of candles outlining the walking path’s perimeter will be lit, each flame representing a loved one’s life prematurely extinguished by cancer.
John Donne, a 17 th century English poet, wrote these immortal words that inspired no less than Ernest Hemingway: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
When I look in the bathroom mirror a slight scar on my lip reminds me for whom cancer’s bell tolls; it may toll for thou, too; or surely for someone thou’st knows or loves.
*
— Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at woodywriter@gmail.com
Column: “Poem” is now Wood Chips
From Lovely “Poem” to Wood Chips
One hundred years ago, Joyce Kilmer penned “Trees” with one of the most widely familiar opening couplets in American poetry:
I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.
The other morning I looked out my window and across the street as a lovely “poem” got sawed down, cut up, turned into wood chips 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 hard hats and optic-yellow vests.
Actually, this story was even sadder for this tree’s limbs were not 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.
An arborist could tell you what type of tree this was, but I cannot. Were I to venture a guess, wise readers would surely point out my ignorance. No matter. What is important is it was majestic, perhaps 70 feet tall and leafy with a trunk I could not reach my arms around.
Something else important: the tree had become a botanical Leaning Tower of Pisa, cracking and raising a section of sidewalk. And if it toppled, it would fall across a busy street. Too large to be braced or straightened, the tree was a danger that surely needed to come down.
And so at 9 a.m., a whining chain saw turned an overcast morning tenfold gloomier. Standing in the basket of a gargantuan cherry-picker, a workman cut off the large branches one by one by one as he hydraulically rose higher and higher and higher.
Far below, the felled branches were cut into manageable lengths and fed into a wood chipper that roared like a jet engine. Lines of a “poem” went in, mulch came out.
And then the tall, barren trunk came down, made not into lumber for a home or boat, but into short logs to be burned in fireplaces. This was not a heartwarming thought.
From start to finish, what took decades and decades to become living poetry was eliminated in less than four hours. It was tree-mendously sad.
It was not my tree, not in my yard, and yet it was mine and yours because trees are for all of us to enjoy. Trees are one of nature’s Hallmark cards — an ironic thought since some trees literally become greeting cards. Or, more irony here, newsprint.
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 kitchen window looking east, the sun rising above it in the late spring mornings.
The melancholy event gave me pause to think 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 near a swimming hole that we swung from on a rope. The apple tree I picked snacks off on a shortcut home from school. The orange tree my two then-young kids and I planted. 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.”
Kilmer once more:
Afterward, this columnist fool walked over to determine how old the tree had been by counting its rings, but the stump was cut off below the ground and covered with dirt.
I may be overestimating by half, but I like to think this tree had sprouted in 1913, the same year as “Trees” came into being.
Book Review: “Sweet Thursday”
“SWEET THURSDAY” by John Steinbeck (288 pages). 
FLASH REVIEW: How in the world did this novel, that was almost titled “The Bear Flag,” escape my reading eyes until now? My past loss is my current gain for while Steinbeck has written numerous novels that are more acclaimed, and rightly so, I dare say this could be the Master Storyteller’s most “enjoyable” piece. The wordsmith-ing is, of course, as close to perfect as possible; the characters ring true, the dialogue is spot on; and the plot is woven together elegantly. In a word, this love story is indeed “sweet” (yet gritty, too) and I can see why many consider this their favorite Steinbeck work. Something else struck me: though originally published nearly 60 years ago, some of Steinbeck’s insights on humanity and political thoughts expressed in the pages seem prescient, as powerfully appropriate today as when written. Rating: 4.5 STARS out of 5.
Book Review: “The Ghost Runner”
“THE GHOST RUNNER: The Tragedy of the Man They Couldn’t Stop” by Bill Jones (352 paperback.) FLASH REVIEW: 
I think non-runners will appreciate the tragic life story of John Tarrant, who had a boardinghouse childhood more grim than Dickens would dream up and made all the worse in his teens by the death of his mother shortly after WWII. I KNOW that runners, especially marathoners, will have a hard time putting this book down (though reading while simultaneously shaking one’s head in sympathetic anger can be a challenge). This is the journey of a steel-legged and iron-willed English runner sentenced to fight amateur athletic brass for decades. As a result he must illegally race in the shadows without a bib number all because he earned a few pounds in his hardscrabble youth as a boxer and thus was deemed a “professional” in running. Denied any chance at his Olympic dreams, The Ghost Runner, as he becomes famously known in the newspapers and sporting world, wears disguises before jumping into marathons and 24-hour ultras at the last second last at the starting lines. In the process he becomes an inspiring legend through victory and heartbreaking defeat, the latter often due to his stubbornness and refusal to pace himself rather than always bolting to the lead from the start. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the entire tale is that it has taken so long to be told. RATING: 4 Stars out of 5 for marathoners; 3 Stars for non-runners.
Running Essay: Golden Role Model
Jackie Joyner-Kersee Gives Back
Jackie Joyner-Kersee remembers.
“We’d stop to eat after a track meet and everyone else would buy something but I wouldn’t,” the Olympic multi-champion recalls of those long-ago days on the East St. Louis Railer Youth Track Team.
“I’d have to wait until I got home because I didn’t have any money. My mom always taught us, ‘If you don’t have, don’t ask.’ I’d run six events and still say I wasn’t hungry.”
She remembers her coach finally figuring it out. Since Jackie didn’t have, and wouldn’t ask, he started insisting she share some of his food.
Fast forward four decades. When youths at the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Boys & Girls Club in East St. Louis kept showing up hungry, Jackie didn’t wait for them to ask for food. Don’t have, don’t ask. She started a meal program.
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Jackie remembers. Which is why there even is a JJK Boys & Girls Club in her hometown. Because of the huge role a youth recreation center played in her young life, she purchased thirty-seven acres of land and built a facility bearing her own name outside – and her time inside.
“We all need encouragement, so it’s important that they can come in and see my smiling face instead of just my name on the building,” Jackie told me a few years ago. “I take being a role model very seriously. It’s a responsibility that comes with being in the limelight. Someone out there likes you or your style, so you have an influence on them whether you like it or not.
“An athlete shouldn’t take the place of a parent, but some kids don’t have a parent as a role model so then that does fall on you.”
*
Jackie remembers.
Mary Joyner was more interested in her children receiving an education than in them starring in sports.
“When I was 10,” Jackie says, “I told my mom I’d go to the Olympics and do you know what she told me? She told me she’d rather I go to college. That’s the same thing I tell kids at the center.”
It is not lip service. Jackie, who graduated from UCLA in 1985, gives educational scholarships through her foundation.
Still, sports are important at the $6-million JJK Boys & Girls Club facility that annually sees 2,400 youths ages 6 to 18 come through its doors.
“We try to use sports, and also drama and music and computers, to get them interested in school,” Joyner-Kersee explains.
*
Jackie remembers.
“We didn’t always have things, but we always had love,” Jackie recalls of her own childhood, her smile sparkling like her diamond earrings.
The letters she receives from children at the JJK Boys & Girls Club touch her heart, and sometimes break it.
“They’ll write me, ‘I love coming here because I feel so much love here,’ ” Jackie shares. “Most of us take being loved for granted, but some of these kids don’t get love at home.”
“I see courage come through the youth center’s doors every day,” she continues. “Courage to me is believing and never giving up – in anything, not just athletics. If you have that flame within you, and you get some encouragement along the way, you can accomplish your dreams.”
Jackie is a profile in courage. To give you an idea, she won six Olympic medals (three of them gold) over four consecutive Olympics; set world records; and won every sports award imaginable while fighting asthma her entire career.
Now, the heptahlon is grueling enough if you lungs work properly. But to do the 200 meters, 100-meter hurdles, high jump, shot put, long jump, javelin and 800 meters in two days when it feels like you are breathing through a cocktail straw, that takes courage.
*
Jackie remembers.
And so she started a unique program, “Daughters Without Mothers.”
Jackie, you see, became a daughter without a mother during her freshman year at UCLA when Mary died from spinal meningitis
“Not sharing the Olympics with her was the biggest downer in my life,” says Jackie, who turns 51 in 2013 – thirteen years older than her mother was when she died. “I want other girls who lose their mothers to know they aren’t alone.”
Jackie remembers where she came from.
“I’ve been blessed so I want to give back,” she allows. “When I leave this earth, I want to leave behind something that will help others.”
Because she remembers, Jackie Joyner-Kersee is unforgettable.
Book Review: “Together We Jump”
TOGETHER WE JUMP, A Novel by Ken McAlpine (March) 361 pages. FLASH REVIEW: This is a beautiful quilt – a love story, in fact several; a coming of age story of two brothers; and a coming into acceptance of old-age story; a story prominently featuring a Mustang, an alligator and heroic turtles; of life and death, of real war and inner wars; a story with the poetry of Frost and Auden gracefully weaved into the prose of McAlpine: “The pain we suffer is not in things beyond us. The pain is in realizing, too late, that these things were not beyond us” and “Life is a tug of war between how we would like things to be and how they are. War is the same, magnified horribly.” And how can you not love a protagonist named Pogue? RATING, in honor of Roger Ebert: Two Thumbs Up!
Column: Sibling revelry
Hardship Proves To Be A Gift
In the Easter morning video the girl, almost 6, benevolently leaves the easy-to-see colored eggs for her 3-year-old brother to collect. When he has difficulty finding some of them, she guides him with hints and sometimes a pointing finger. In the end, his basket has the bulk of the bounty compared to hers.
In many ways, the scene encapsulates the two decades that have followed: the big sister has always looked out for her little brother, even after he literally became bigger at 6-foot-3. Indeed, it is often the case even after we become adults that we remain locked in our childhood roles among family.
A week ago, a crisis struck. Let’s just say the bottom fell out of an Easter basket, spilling and breaking the dyed eggs. The girl, now a young woman, phoned from 2,200 miles away; “distraught” falls far shy in describing her emotional state.
It is times like this that a daughter needs her mother. However, because the latter was in a deadline vise at her work, the girl insisted she could manage and that Mom stay home.
Similarly, the daughter demanded that her dad also remain at home to help care for his own father – her beloved “Gramps” – who had just undergone knee replacement surgery. Briefly, the roles had been turned upside-down as the grown son became the father and the father became the son.
Lastly, the girl’s younger brother could surely not fly out to be by her side because he was physically and mentally exhausted, having arrived home the night before the crisis struck after traveling for 20 hours across 12 time zones following a five-week sojourn halfway around the globe.
While the parents discussed matters, the son went on-line at 10 p.m. and booked himself a flight; the last-minute ransom pricing causing him no pause. “She needs me,” he said simply, emphatically, as he hurriedly packed. In bed at midnight, he rose at 3 a.m. to make his 6:15 a.m. flight. Upon landing three time zones east he took a long bus ride and then a short taxi trip to her doorstep at 6 p.m.
To this sentimental fool it brought to mind the closing scene in “It’s A Wonderful Life” when Harry, a Navy pilot and war hero, leaves in the middle of a banquet where President Truman is presenting him with the Congressional Medal of Honor to fly through a blizzard from New York to Bedford Falls because his big brother George is in a crisis.
Despite the three-years age difference, it is not rare for people being introduced to the sister and brother to inquire if they are twins. Beyond appearance, they have always shared a twin-like bond. But perhaps never were they closer than during this tribulation.
“He’s the best gift you and Mom ever gave me,” the daughter said on the phone the night he arrived.
Over the next seven days, the brother proved to be penicillin for the ailment. He tackled the crisis head-on, providing leadership and labor, wisdom and support, loving words and a shoulder to cry on, all on his own, all on little sleep.
Sometimes the son becomes the father; certainly the young man became a man, period. Or, as the girl noted: “I have always been the big sister, but this week he has become my big brother.”
Asked how he was holding up midway through his rescue mission, the son quoted former Navy Seal Eric Greitens, who wrote in his best-selling book “The Heart and the Fist”: “When a task is necessary, its difficulty is irrelevant.”
When his sister needed help, everything else was irrelevant.
“She’s the best gift you ever gave me,” the son said, repeating what his big sis had said of him only days earlier – words that are the best gift a parent could ever hear.
And so in many ways, like a favorite old Easter morning video, I cherish the crisis that has now passed. Indeed, to other parents I wish them their own gift-wrapped hardship if it will reinforce their kids’ sibling bonds.
— Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for the Star. You can contact him at WoodyWriter@gmail.com or through his website at www.WoodyWoodburn.com
Book Review: Team of Rivals
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin (944 pages). FLASH REVIEW: I have read more than a dozen books about Lincoln and the Civil War, visited Gettysburg twice, and hence put off reading “Team of Rivals” because I figured it couldn’t possibly offer much more or live up to its billing. I stand corrected. To my mind, “ToR” is the definitive book on Lincoln. When I got to the final page of this thick tome I was disappointed only in one way — that it was ONLY 944 pages long! I wanted more! RATING: 5 STARS out of 5.
Running Essay: Shoe-in Inspiration
This Ultra-Man is a Shoe-in to Inspire Kids
* * *
“Momma always says there’s an awful lot you could tell about a person by their shoes. Where they’re going. Where they’ve been. I’ve worn lots of shoes.”
— Forrest Gump
*
You can tell an awful lot about Ed Wehan by the pile of running shoes on his front doorstep. The ones caked with dirt tell you he has been on muddy trails. The cleaner ones with worn treads tell you he has traveled countless sidewalks and roads. The newer ones tell you he has more miles to go.
Ed has worn lots of running shoes. He has worn them to complete 115 marathons and 40 ultra-marathons of 50 to 100 miles. While the fictional Forrest Gump went on a running journey that lasted three years, two months, fourteen days, and sixteen hours, Ed has been running for a full four decades.
His odyssey began in 1973 when, at age 29, he didn’t recognize the reflection in the mirror. After earning an MBA at the University of Southern California and joining the working world, Ed fell out of shape. Understand, as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, he had been a supreme athlete. A four-year varsity tennis star, he once made UCLA’s Arthur Ashe – then the nation’s No. 1-ranked collegiate player – work to earn a 6-3, 6-3 victory.
Ed treated running like an opponent’s weak lob – he attacked it. In less than three years he went from jogging a few laps on a track to running a full marathon in 3 hours, 30 minutes.
“My compulsive personality took over,” recalls Ed, who broke 3 hours in his third marathon and ultimately lowered his PR to a blazing 2 hours, 36 minutes. (Ed, who turns 69 this Thursday going on 47, still regularly breaks 4 hours; last month he ran a 1:52 half-marathon.)
Looking for a new runner’s high, in 1979 Ed entered The Western States 100 – an insanely tortuous 100-mile race up, down and across California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. He finished seventh overall in 18 hours, 48 minutes to become only the 15th person to earn a coveted silver belt buckle for breaking the 24-hour barrier.
While Ed was tireless as a mule at 100 miles, in 50-mile ultras he had the speed of the Pony Express. In fact, in both 1984 and 1985 he clocked the fastest Masters (age 40-and-over) times in the nation at the distance with a best of 5 hours, 39 minutes – an average pace of 6 minutes, 46 seconds per mile!
The running accomplishments of this longtime resident of Ventura, California are all the more remarkable when you learn Ed is a cancer survivor of more than two decades and a dozen years ago he had open-heart surgery to correct atrial fibrillation. He had actually completed a couple 100-mile races with his heart functioning at about 60 percent capacity. Not surprisingly, Ed ran six miles the day before heart surgery. Six months later, he finished third in a 50-mile ultra.
Seven years ago, Ed took on a new challenge – fighting childhood obesity by promoting physical activity and nutritional education. Specifically, he helped create “SummerFest” for local school kids that was named the Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness “Event of the Year” for the State of California three years ago.
“It takes a community to fight childhood obesity,” Ed says. “Parents can’t do it alone, teachers can’t do it alone. It takes all of us advocating for, and being role models for, healthy eating and physical activity.”
“I don’t expect every kid to want to run a marathon or climb Mount Whitney,” says Ed, who of course has reached that summit – the highest peak in the contiguous United States at 14,505 feet – with his teenage daughter. “But hopefully we can encourage kids, teachers and parents to make physical activity a part of their lives.”
And start building their own pile of running shoes on their front porch.– You can contact Woody at WoodyWriter@gmail.com