Tag Archives: gun control

Another ‘Four-Dot’ Day in America

by Woody

Another school shooting, an all too familiar daytime nightmare in America, and my heart weeps again not only for the victims senselessly murdered, but for everyone who knew them – most especially their young classmates and friends who will be haunted the rest of their lives, of this I am personally certain.

Back when tennis balls were white instead of optic yellow, instead of numerals to help identify them when they strayed onto an adjacent court they had one, two, three or four blue-colored dots. Superstitiously, I always favored using one-dot balls.

Children from the Covenant School hold hands as they wait to reunite with their parents.
(George Uribe / Associated Press)

The summer I was 10, my superstition changed to four-dot balls – I refused to play with them. If I opened a can that had four-dotters inside I would trade these new balls with someone else, even for used ones. You see, I had four-dot nightmares.

To this day, in fact, fully five decades later, the same nightmares return from time to time, triggered by certain headlines and movie storylines. These terrible dreams are proof that our childhoods never leave us for mine have followed me from childhood in The Sixties in Ohio to adulthood in Southern California in the 21st Century.

David was one of my childhood tennis buddies. When he was 10, he was kidnapped from a tennis court. Days later, his lifeless body was found in a remote wooden shed and I will spare you further horrific details. It was a very, very long time before I slept peacefully through the night.

David and I were not best friends. We lived far across town from each other and went to different schools. But we were the same age and we both played tennis and we took group youth clinics together.

The weekend before the kidnapping, we had played each other in the first round of a tournament on The Ohio State University campus. Since we were in the youngest division, we got sent to a court in the boonies a bike ride away from the check-in table.

My recollection is fuzzy on the final score of our match, but this part remains in sharp focus in my mind’s eye: Early in the second set, after I had won the first, David broke a racket string. Back then youth players did not have a spare racket, or two, at courtside as is commonplace today.

Two older kids, waiting on deck at courtside to play their match after we finished ours, impatiently said David would have to default. Thanks to my two older brothers teaching me to stick up for myself, I said we were allowed to find a racket to borrow. We eventually got one at the check-in table and rode back and resumed play and I won the match.

A week later, and forever since, I wished I had lost. I even felt guilty about winning. You see, as mentioned, David was abducted from a tennis court. “Maybe,” I reasoned, “if he had won our match he wouldn’t have been motivated to go practice his serve all alone.”

All that was found on that public tennis court where David was last seen alive was a single tennis ball. Importantly, a tennis ball with four blue dots on it.

Important because four dots, his older sister told police when David was first reported missing, was their secret code: a four-dot ball purposely left behind meant “trouble.”

In the first 86 days of 2023 there were 129 mass shootings in America. In other words, statistically every day here has become a four-dot day and the victims are not limited to those who are shot.

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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.

“March For Our Lives” Monsoon

by Woody

Is your Club or Group looking for an inspiring guest speaker or do you want to host a book signing? . . . Contact Woody today!

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1StrawberriesCoverWooden-&-Me-cover-mock-upFor a Personalized Autographed copy of “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME” or “WOODEN & ME” mail a check for $25 to:

Woody Woodburn

400 Roosevelt Court

Ventura, CA 93003

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A “March” Monsoon of Raindrops

 It is said that when a raindrop lands on the peak of the Continental Divide, two fates are possible: it will either roll downhill eastward and flow into watersheds that eventually drain into the Atlantic Ocean, or gravity will pull the raindrop downward to the west and it will ultimately reach the Pacific Ocean.

In truth, one lone raindrop alighting on the backbone of the Rocky Mountains will not travel thousands of miles. However, when that single raindrop combines with another and others and countless more, together they fill streams and flow into rivers and wash into the ocean.

Floodwaters washed across America from sea to shining sea this past Saturday. In fact, the surge was global with “March For Our Lives” rallies held in an estimated 800 cities and towns in the U.S. as well as in the U.K., France, Japan, India, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, even Antarctica.1KenMarch

The March For Our Lives movement seeking gun reform legislation was initiated by teenagers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where 17 students and faculty were shot to death on Valentine’s Day.

Ventura High students Samantha Pedersen, Micah Wilcox, Sam Coats and India Hill organized a local March For Our Lives event for county residents at Ventura’s Plaza Park. I had planned to attend the morning gathering, but at the last minute something came up making it problematic to do so. With hundreds expected to march, one less person – one less raindrop – would surely not matter.

A text message from my son, who hours earlier marched in New York City’s Central Park, encouraged me to postpone my conflicting obligation and go to the rally. It proved wise advice. Being a raindrop in the monsoon was a goose-bumps experience.

Plaza Park was an ocean of humanity fully filled with high school students, who are the backbone of the March For Our Lives movement, alongside young children and adults of all ages.

Based on my experience with sports crowds that are accurately counted by tickets, the published estimate of 1,000 marchers was understated by half at least. Consider this: while an army of participants remained gridlocked like the 405 at rush hour while waiting to exit Plaza Park’s southwest corner to begin marching, the leaders of the parade had already finished and returned full circle. In other words, the stream of marchers was one mile long and two and three abreast.

Along the route, drivers honked car horns in support of the marchers and their handmade signs, including these:

“Arms Are For Hugs, Not Killing” and “Arm Us With Books Not Bullets, Love Not Lead.”

“Marching For My Grandchildren” and “We Call BS.”1march

“I Want To Read Books, Not A Eulogy” and “Bullets Are Not School Supplies.”

A girl of perhaps age five, wearing a pink knitted pussy hat, had a poster reading simply, but powerfully, “Keep Me Safe” and an older youth’s sign featured a caped crusader and this warning: “Voting Is Our Superpower.”

To naysayers who call the marches a one-day gimmick, I offer this: the effort and time expended to drive or take a bus or plane to a city holding a rally, park and walk fair distances to the actual event site, and then march and listen to speeches far exceeds what is required for a short trip to the voting booth in November.

As I was leaving the Ventura event, a vanity license plate on the car parked next to mine summed up what the March For Our Lives raindrops must do as they continue to merge and flow: “PRRSIST.”

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden & Me Kickstarter Front PhotoCheck out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

Boston Massacre Misnamed Today

by Woody

1StrawberriesCoverWooden-&-Me-cover-mock-upFor a Personalized Autographed copy of “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME” or “WOODEN & ME” mail a check for $25 to:

Woody Woodburn

400 Roosevelt Court

Ventura, CA 93003

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The Boston Massacre Misnamed Today

On March 5, 1770, eight British soldiers fired into a crowd of civilians and the result was The Boston Massacre.

What a quaint use of the word “massacre.” With flintlock muskets of the 19th century, the tally was: three dead and two mortally wounded.

On Oct. 1, 2017, one man with an armload of 21st-century assault rifles and here is what a massacre has become:

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If this—59 dead, 527 wounded, by one civilian—is what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Second Amendment, they were idiots.

I do not believe our Founding Fathers were idiots.

I believe we Americans are.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden & Me Kickstarter Front PhotoCheck out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

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