Did you know that my pal Floyd Norman animated on Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? You may find this hard to believe but he did. That movie was made before Floyd was born but he didn't let a little thing like that stop him. Here — I'll steal part of the explanation from his fine blog…
It was the fifties and Walt Disney Productions had already launched a weekly television show on ABC. The Old Maestro and his creative staff were busily looking for projects they could exploit. Walt knew his audience delighted in seeing behind the scenes stuff and what goes on in the making of an animated film. Disney's writers came up with a brilliant idea. Since so much energy and imagination go into the making of an animated film what if we allowed the Disneyland audience to see material that never made it into the finished motion picture? A good example would be "Snow White." Animator Ward Kimball had put a good deal of effort into two sequences that never made it into the completed film. One sequence featured the seven dwarfs building Snow White's bed. However, the material Walt decided to show was the famous soup eating sequence. There was even a delightful song written by composer, Frank Churchill. It was entitled, "The Rhythm in Your Soup." Even better, the song recorded back in the nineteen thirties was still in the Disney's vault. Television audiences would finally see an entertaining sequence that had been "hidden" for years.
However, once the unseen footage was pulled from the archive, the Old Maestro had a major concern. The animation was fun and entertaining, but the sketches were clearly loose and rough. Perhaps a little too rough for television audiences not used to viewing rough animation. Walt Disney made the decision to clean up the footage. He wanted the drawings a little tighter, yet not so much as to lose the energy and vitality of the animator's original drawings. A crew was needed to get the soup eating sequence ready for prime time.
The year was 1956, and a group of young animation apprentices had just been hired. Having completed their thirty days of training, the young animation trainees were moved into a large room in 1-F, on the first floor of the Animation Building. I was one of those young trainees and our first assignment was to clean-up the rough sketches in Ward Kimball's soup eating sequence.
There's more on Floyd's blog which you should read often. In fact, if you're interested in animation, you should especially read this post on respectability for animators. You can check it out after you watch the soup sequence that Floyd was discussing…
Once upon a time, I had a good friend named Don Segall, who wrote for television and sometimes for comic books. Don passed away in 1994 and I wrote about him in this column.
Bob Elisberg was also privileged to know Don. He recently wrote this piece about him.
I realized I may have left out one part of the story about the lady at the market who couldn't afford to pay for her groceries…
As I haven't mentioned here lately, I feed feral cats in my back yard. At one point, I was up to four who turned up on my back porch every evening: The Stranger Cat, Max, Lydia and Sylvia. The Stranger Cat, as discussed here, passed away two years ago.
Max — a cat so large that if you wanted to turn him around, you had to employ the PIT maneuver, disappeared in November of that year. I wrote about that here. That left me with the ones I'd named Lydia and Sylvia.
Lydia still comes around. Lydia is the cat who, back in 2008, I spent days trapping so I could take her into the vet for a pussycat abortion and a procedure that guaranteed she could never get that way again. You can see a photo of her here. She still comes around almost every night for chow.
Up until around ten days ago, Sylvia was usually with her. They've become close friends, always nuzzling and watching out for each other. In the photo below, you can see a photo of Sylvia from back in the days when she and Max were, as they say, an item. She's the one on top.
Ten days ago, Sylvia disappeared. There's a lot of construction going on next door to me and I figured that had scared her off…but ten days is a long time to not see a cat who seemed dependent on me for food. I figured either something bad happened to her or she found someplace else to get a steady flow of food and would no longer come this way.
Early in the evening, I fed Lydia and since she was alone again, I decided to just presume Sylvia was gone for good.
Then as mentioned, I went to the market at 3 AM. When I got back, two ladies were waiting on my back steps for me: Lydia and Sylvia. I asked Sylvia where she'd been but with a coy look in her eyes, she refused to tell me. That was okay. I fed her anyway. That's how happy I was to see her.
I don't know why she came back but I can't shake the feeling that it had something do with helping that lady in the market.
Last night in a supermarket about 3 AM, I saw a woman have a serious breakdown. She was buying some items — not a lot, maybe $35.00 worth of cheese, meat and cereal. A basic shopping list. The checkout clerk rang her up, she swiped her credit card —
— and it was declined. No good. Not accepted.
The clerk was very polite in informing her she'd have to pay some other way but she had no other way: No cash, no other card. She did not seem shocked that her card was rejected; just that it had happened sooner than expected. "I thought I had more money left," she muttered before bursting into tears. They were not tears of embarrassment. They were tears of desperation and panic and "I don't know what to do anymore." (That was something else she said.)
I was two back from her in line. The man after her and ahead of me was an Orthodox Jew — beard, black suit and hat, ziziths dangling from under his coat. We stood there and watched this poor woman weeping. She was about 45, maybe 50. She looked sad before the clerk gave her the bad news, and you could tell it was the latest in a long string. "I can't pay," she moaned. "I don't know what to do."
The checkout clerk didn't know what to do, either. He gave a look to those of us in line. It seemed to be saying, "Please…let's give her a minute." No one in line was impatient.
And then the woman let out a cry. I cannot describe it. If I was writing a scene in a TV show and I wanted an actress to make that sound, I have no idea what words I would put on the page to tell her what I had in mind. I'd probably write something about a cry of pain that seemed to say, "I can't endure any more of this…there is too much pain in my life."
That still wouldn't get the actress to make that sound but it might summarize what was on that poor woman's mind at that moment. Clearly, she could not pay. Clearly, she could not get on with her life in any way without groceries.
I saw the gentleman ahead of me take out his wallet and check how much he had. I whispered to him, "I'll split it with you." Behind me, the next person in line pulled out a ten and a couple of others kicked in. There were at least ten people waiting to pay at this, the only counter open at this hour. Most of us got together and paid for the woman's groceries and we gave her about thirty dollars in cash that she really seemed to need.
She cried about that too, crying at the generosity but also, I'm sure, that she was dependent on, as they say, the kindness of strangers. She thanked us about eighty times and then made her way with her purchases out the door. (In my area, they have to charge now for paper bags. I noticed that the checker didn't charge her for the ones she needed.)
I have no idea where she was going. I wonder if she did.
The gent in front of me paid for his purchases and departed wordlessly. As I swiped my credit card, I turned to the people after me and said, "If this isn't accepted, you're all paying for my English Muffins." A bit of a laugh. Then I asked the checker, "How often does that happen?"
He said, "Maybe twice a week. When it happens, it happens most often on the late shift. But usually, they swear the card is good and our system is screwed-up. They get angry at us, like it's our fault they can't pay. Sometimes, customers like you pay for them. A couple of times, I've felt so bad for the people that I've paid for them. That's if it's only a few dollars. I couldn't have paid for this woman. Not on what we get paid here."
The next person in line said, "If you pay for them, do they come back the next night figuring you'll pay for them again?"
He said, "No, never. We never see them again. That woman who just left here…you will never see her in this market again. It's too painful. It just reminds them of how bad off they were that night."
Health care is so politicized in this country now that it's come to this: Someone had to conduct a study and issue a report to affirm the premise that you're less likely to die prematurely if you can afford medical treatment. Really. Here's the last paragraph of the article I just linked to…
Dr. Benjamin Sommers, the Harvard University School of Public Health assistant professor who led the study, agreed, saying, "It seems pretty clear that expanding insurance coverage will lead to gains in saving lives." Obamacare's Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) component is also conducting its own experiment to examine the effects of expanding health care, and will be key in determining whether the Massachusetts results were state-specific. But until then, Jonathan Gruber, an MIT professor who worked on both the Massachusetts and national health care reforms, says, "We should basically be back to our presumption that health insurance improves health."
We may soon have a controversial finding that you're more likely to keep your teeth if you can afford to go to a dentist now and then. At least it would be controversial if Barack Obama says it's so.
In their book The Illusion of Life — now outta-print and beastly expensive — Disney Legends Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston identified twelve "principles" of animation. Animator Cento Lodigiani has made this little video to list and demonstrate them…
A lot of folks have written me to ask what my e-mail problem is with Time-Warner and if it's fixed yet. No, it's not fixed, in large part because it's not a constant problem, the kind you can analyze because it always happens…and then you can know when it's gone because it doesn't happen anymore.
What it is is not easy to explain so don't think you're dumb if you can't understand this: I have several e-mail addresses that are mostly "at" domains that I own. For instance, I own www.newsfromme.com. If you write to me at www.newsfromme.com, your e-mail is then forwarded to the address that Time-Warner gives me and I pick up that message via my account with them. As a back-up, that same e-mail is simultaneously forwarded to a GMail account I have.
It has come to my attention the last few weeks that I have not been receiving all my e-mails. I've also noticed that a few e-mails that do get to me arrive in my Time-Warner mailbox many, many hours — in a few cases, days — after they've been sent. I finally took the time to investigate and found that the messages that never showed up in my Time-Warner mailbox, or showed up late, turned up on time in the GMail backup.
This does not happen all the time. Around 85% of all messages sent to me show up in both at the same time. But I monitored both for a few days and discovered that about 15% weren't arriving in the Time-Warner mailbox or were delayed for some time.
During my marathon Tech Support calls yesterday, I had six other incoming telephone calls that I ignored so they went to voicemail. I have Time-Warner digital home phone service and when a call goes to voicemail, a nice little robot at Time-Warner sends me an e-mail to inform me. All six of those messages showed up instantly in my GMail account. Only four showed up in my Time-Warner account. So messages that Time-Warner was sending me weren't making it into my Time-Warner mailbox.
And no, I did not have any incoming messages blocked and no, they did not go into my Spam folder and no, the missing messages were not huge in size. The gent at Tier 2 Technical Support there who took 75 minutes to not solve the problem and then accidentally disconnected me insisted on operating on the following assumption: Time-Warner e-mail works flawlessly and if I'm not getting all my messages, I must have something set wrong on my computer. I could not knock him off that premise.
Finally, after way too much time on the phone, redialing and redialing when they hung up on me, I got to a guy in Tier 3 who acknowledged my settings were correct so the problem must be elsewhere. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, that problem does not happen all the time. It didn't happen with several e-mails he sent me. So we're monitoring the situation and I'm tracking when it happens and we're going to continue this discussion. I simply ran out of time and energy to deal with it last night.
Actually, the problem I think they should be working to fix is the one where you call Tech Support and they keep you on hold for long, long periods and then drop your call. That Undercover Boss TV show has what I think is an intriguing premise. If you own or run a company, you should be required to call your support people once a month and see what it's like to get them on the line and talk to them.
Two great guests visit Stu's Show today. Darrell Van Citters is a well-respected director of animation and also a fine historian of animation by others. He did that great book on the making of Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol and he has a new book out called The Art of Jay Ward Productions which features…well, it probably features the art of Jay Ward Productions. The other guest is Greg Ehrbar, an expert of many things but especially records for kids and All Things Disney. Greg co-authored Mouse Tracks, an all-encompassing book on the history of Walt Disney's own record label. He will talk about that and also Inside the Whimsy Works, the autobiography (though Greg had a hand in it) of Jimmy Johnson, who ran that amazing record label and worked with Roy Disney. Stu could fill the time with either gent so it oughta be jam-packed with interesting conversation.
Stu's Show can be heard live (almost) every Wednesday at the Stu's Show website and you can listen for free there. Webcasts start at 4 PM Pacific Time, 7 PM Eastern and other times in other climes. They run a minimum of two hours and sometimes go to three or beyond. Shortly after a show ends, it's available for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are a paltry 99 cents each and you can get four for the price of three. The ones where I guest should be cheaper but they aren't.
I've been having trouble with my e-mail which comes to me via Time-Warner Cable. Foolishly, I decided to call up and see if their Tech Support folks could help.
I called up and waited through all the silly announcements for sports TV packages and such. I got someone on the line relatively quickly (2 minutes) and explained the problem to her. She put me through to someone in Tier 2 Support. I explained the problem to a lady in Tier 2 Support and then the phone went dead on me. Disconnected.
I waited a minute or so to see if she'd call me back. After all, she had my phone number. Since she didn't, I called back and again waited through all the announcements, then got someone and explained what happened. The person apologized profusely, then put me through again to Tier 2 Support. This time I got a guy whose response to everything I told him was to say, "Let me put you on hold for a moment" and then he'd leave me there listening to the bad hold music for 5-10 minutes, then come back and give me an answer that made no sense.
I was on this call for one hour and 15 minutes, most of it spent on hold, and I was no closer to a solution to my problem than when I started. I asked the gent to kick my call up to Tier 3 or a supervisor or someone smarter…anyone. He said he would and then the line went dead. Disconnected.
I again waited to see if he'd call back. He didn't. I called again and listened to the announcements and finally got a human being. I explained the story thus far, they apologized a lot and put me through to Tier 3.
I waited on hold for Tier 3 for 25 minutes. A gentleman finally came on line and asked, "How may I help you?" I said, "Well, first of all, I was just on hold for 25 minutes and —"
And that's far as I got with that call. I suddenly heard silence from his end and when I said, "Hello, are you there?" I got nothing. But I didn't hear that rapid beeping I heard before when I was disconnected and I heard room noise on his end. So I just waited and waited, speaking every so often to see if he'd respond and he didn't. Finally, I heard him say, "Sir, I can't keep holding this line open. Call back if you want help" and I was, again, disconnected.
By the way: I have Time-Warner digital phone service.
I called up again. I'm a sucker for punishment. I got a recorded announcement that told me all lines were busy and that if I wanted, I could leave a callback number and they'd call me when they had a human being to talk to me. Estimated time: 4-6 minutes. I arranged for this.
Five minutes later, a person called me. I explained what was going on and said I wanted to talk to a supervisor to complain. The person said, "Certainly, I'll connect you" and put me on hold, whereupon I began writing this message. It's now twelve minutes that I have been waiting on hold to complain about waiting on hold and the hold music has stopped and I am hearing dead air which means, I think, I've been disconnected.
Yeah, I've been disconnected. Let's see what happens when I call back and —
No, I'm not disconnected. It just sounded that way for three minutes. Then a Supervisor (that's what he says he is) came on the line and I read him everything before this paragraph. He has put me on hold but before he did, he took my phone number and promised to make sure that if I got disconnected again, he would call me back and I wouldn't have to restart the process.
Well, what shall I write about there while I'm waiting? I may have enough time to retype Ulysses. How about if we discuss Benghazi? I figure the new outcry about this is the Republicans' way of admitting that Obamacare is working well enough to be of no use to them as a campaign issue so they need something else. I agree with those who say there was no mistake or wrongdoing with Benghazi that's even been alleged that wasn't clearly made a thousand times over with regard to the Iraq War without this kind of outrage.
And I've now been on this latest call — the one complaining about being on hold forever — for thirty minutes.
Hey, let's watch a video. This is a cute little bit of animation set to one of Allan Sherman's songs. For those who are too young, the weird words in the tune are mostly brand names and advertised secret ingredients — like Platformate, a well-promoted additive in Shell gasoline, once upon a time — from when the song was recorded in 1965. (Hey, remember when oil companies used to advertise and try to sell us on the idea that their gas was better for our cars than someone else's gas?)
I think a few of the brand names are spelled incorrectly but why quibble? It's a nice bit of computer magic and the animator, Freek "Frzi" Zijlmans, even credited the fonts at the end. I'll watch it along with you and let's see if I'm still on hold by the time we get to the end of it…
Okay, a nice gent at Time-Warner Tech Support in Colorado (!) came on the line just before Mr. Sherman finished his song. I explained to him that I've been on hold long enough to have AT&T Universe installed in my home and he's efficiently looking into my problem which I don't think is going to be solved tonight. But I have reached someone who seems competent and determined to help so there's a moral victory right there. I'm going to post this and I'll update later, if and when anything happens.
I get from one to five calls a day from folks who claim to be contractors. Some of them probably are. Some of them are probably outta-work folks who answered an ad somewhere that they could make Big Bucks from their home phone. They were sent a script and a list of numbers to call…and if calling and reading me that script results in me hiring their construction firm to construct, they will get a commission.
As I've written here before, a lot of those scripts commence with outright lying…
Hello, Mr. Evanier! My name is Sam Footface with Fazzblatt Construction. We spoke last August and you were so nice to me but you said you weren't quite ready to do that construction work you had planned on your home and you said to call back in May. If you're ready now, I would like to send one of our crew members over to give you that free estimate we discussed…"
I stop them after the part about how we spoke last August and I say, "No, we didn't. You're lying." At that point, they either hang up or they argue for about twenty seconds and hang up…and I don't blame them. They're obviously not going to sell me and they have other names on their lists. I wonder what the batting average is on a job like that. One nibble out of a hundred? One out of five hundred?
I wonder how those people feel about getting the figurative door slammed in their faces every minute or so, hour after hour. They also have to depend on their employer giving them an honest reporting of what kind of business resulted from their calling and giving them an accurate accounting of the sales on which their commissions will be based. How far can you trust an employer that hired you to lie to people?
Of all the zillion and one calls I've received, my favorite well may be one that came in last week. I suspect the caller in this case actually was a contractor and not a very successful one. The guy sounded weary and fed up…kind of like Don Imus without the cheery twinkle in his voice. Here with fictitious names inserted is how that call went…
HIM: Mr. Evanier, this is Harvey Sneezeguard with Sneezeguard Construction. I'm wondering if you need any work done on your home…
ME: You're about the eighth contractor to call me this week and it's only Tuesday so —
HIM: Hey, listen, I don't need you to act like I'm wasting your time. I'm just trying to earn a living like a good American and I don't need you pissing on a hard-working family man trying to feed his family. And don't you lecture me either about how you're on the "No Call List." It doesn't apply to individual businesses like mine and I can call you and do whatever I have to do grow my business and keep the doors open. If you don't need any contracting at the moment, fine. But don't tell me I'm wasting your time because you don't know me and you have no right to say that!
ME: How soon can you be here to start building an add-on to my home?
No, I didn't speak that last line and it wouldn't have mattered if I had because he slammed down the phone after he said what he said. This is not the first call like this I've received with a lot of hostility involved but it was the most amazing. Anyone wondering why this guy is in such need of customers?
A photo I took at the 2002 Mid-Ohio Con in Columbus, Ohio.
Dick Ayers, one of the last of the major artists of the early "Marvel Age of Comics," has died. It happened yesterday, only days following his 90th birthday. The cause is being reported as complications from Parkinson's Disease, a condition he had battled for some time.
Ayers was born April 28, 1924 in Ossining, New York. He did his first comic art while in the Army Air Corps during World War II. After his discharge, he sought work from comic book publishers but was told his work wasn't quite good enough. He studied with Burne Hogarth at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School in New York, later known as the School of Visual Arts. The co-creator of Superman, Joe Shuster, visited the class and this led to Ayers assisting Shuster, who by then needed a lot of help due to failing eyesight. Ayers then worked for any number of publishers throughout the fifties but he was best known for a western hero he designed named The Ghost Rider.
Eventually, he did most of this work for Stan Lee at the company now known as Marvel. When the company had to downsize, Ayers found himself out of work and wound up getting a job, which he hated, at the post office. He continuously pestered Stan Lee to help him out of that situation and eventually, Stan brought him back to ink much of what Jack Kirby was doing for the firm and also to pencil some comics.
He was pretty good at inking Kirby's work and not bad at taking over the penciling of a strip that Kirby had launched. He drew Giant-Man, The Human Torch and others but super-heroes were not his strength. He did better at westerns and war books including a long run on Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos. At one point, Marvel even decided to revive The Ghost Rider, reportedly without permission, and Ayers wound up drawing a new version of that old character.
In the seventies, Dick had some trouble giving editors at Marvel what they wanted and he eventually found himself without sufficient work. Neal Adams intervened at DC to get them to take him on and for years, Dick worked mainly as a layout artist for them. He did many issues of Kamandi, The Unknown Soldier, Jonah Hex and other DC titles. Fans began to approach him about doing re-creations of his past work, particularly covers he'd done with Kirby, and he did a lot of that. That put him on the convention circuit where I got to spend a lot of time interviewing him on panels and talking with him when we weren't on stage. He was a charming gent with an amazing lifetime output of popular comics. They don't make 'em like that anymore.
This is the story of how my mother died. The ending is not as sad as you might expect. The parts before it are but not the ending.
As I've written here before, her health was pretty bad the last few years of her life. She could barely see, she could barely walk and she kept having episodes of Congestive Heart Failure. There were other problems as well but those were the three biggies.
(I was in a restaurant one day during all this and I said to the person I was with, "They're just awful, these episodes of Congestive Heart Failure." A man was just leaving the next booth and he stopped at my table and said, "I didn't hear what show you were talking about but nothing could be worse than episodes of William Shatner's new series." I'm not sure which William Shatner series he was talking about but I have a feeling it was at least a little more enjoyable than Congestive Heart Failure.)
Her three main problems kept her from doing almost every one of the things she loved to do. The bad eyes prevented her from reading or fully enjoying television. Her bad legs kept her from travelling. The Congestive Heart Failure kept her from eating any of the things she loved. I would guardedly and occasionally bring her foods she probably should have avoided or take her to restaurants for them. My reasoning — and her doctor agreed — was that one such meal every now and then wouldn't hurt and she needed something like that to lift her at least partway out of her many depressions.
Eventually though, the depressions got so bad that even fried clams couldn't make them go away…and if you knew how much my mother loved fried clams, you'd realize how deep those depressions were. She spoke increasingly of wishing it would all be over, especially before she went totally blind. She was legally blind. She just wasn't totally blind…yet.
She loved her independence. She loved living alone in a house she'd lived in for close to sixty years and she was able to live there and by herself as long as she had a tiny bit of sight. We talked it through again and again and she didn't like any of the options she'd have once her "good eye" (which wasn't very good) failed her. Could she live there alone? No. Could we move in a 24/7 caregiver? No. Could she move in with me? No. Okay, what about moving into an Assisted Living Facility? No, no, no. She hated every alternative.
Her answer? Go before her vision did. Time and again, she reminded me of my promise not to allow resuscitation, not to allow her to be kept alive on some machine.
She kept threatening to eat all the things they told her she couldn't/shouldn't eat. For seemingly half her life, she was in Kaiser Hospital for this ailment or that ailment or some other ailment. She had a lot of ailments. She used to joke that she'd met every doctor in the facility except the ones who handled pregnancies, rollerblading injuries and erectile dysfunction.
Every patient, of course, has a medical record of all their appointments, tests, hospitalizations, examinations, etc. Later than you might have thought, Kaiser converted all of theirs from paper to computer and someone had to scan my mother's records. An administrator there congratulated my mother on having the thickest file in the history of the entire nationwide Kaiser organization. She was oddly proud of that.
She began to speak more and more of chili dogs. Whenever she stayed at that hospital, she was aware that right outside during the day, there was a food truck that specialized in them. Each time I asked her if she needed anything, she'd ask me to go down and get her six of them with onions. I'd reply as if I'd misheard her, "Fine. I'll bring you a box of unsalted saltine crackers and a fresh box of Kleenex."
One time she asked for the six chili dogs, I asked her, "What would you do if I did bring them?"
She didn't hesitate for a second. She answered, "Eat them and die happily." Then she added, "If you're a good, loving son, you'll bring them to me before I can't see at all." Other people in that position ask for poison or a gun. My mother favored Death by Chili Dog. I understand some states are now considering that in lieu of Lethal Injection.
Slowly but certainly, my concern about her changed. It was a tough turn to make but I moved from wanting her health to improve to wanting the end to be soon — certainly before she was blind without the "legally" — and free of pain. I was already there when her personal physician at Kaiser told me there was nothing more they could so for her at the hospital.
My mother wanted to go home but I instead put her into a nursing facility she'd been in before — a pretty good one, even though it was a pain-in-the-ass for me to drive all the way down to it in Torrance. They had a good Physical Therapy department and I told her that she needed some of that before she'd be able to return to her home. But I wasn't fooling her and she wasn't fooling me: She knew that I knew that she knew that I knew that she was not going back to that house, especially to live alone.
She was not uncomfy there. I hired a private caregiver to come in, take care of her laundry, get her things she needed and keep her company on those days when I could not get down there. The caregiver, as you're about to hear, more than earned what I paid her.
I was not there when the end came. I was voice-directing a Garfield recording session that afternoon and once it was over, I'd planned to drive down to the nursing home to visit her as I did every other day.
There is, of course, no "good" time for Congestive Heart Failure but some times are better than others. The day, for instance, was the last day her stay in that nursing home was being paid-for by Kaiser health insurance. We'd maxed out her covered days and starting the next morn, I was going to begin paying out-of-pocket by way of the nose, which would have really upset her if she'd known. At the time, I didn't know the precise date I'd begin paying and she didn't, either. At least, I don't think she did.
Also, the time of day was ideal for her. The nursing facility had an affiliation with Kaiser and they sent Kaiser doctors over to check on all the Kaiser patients who were housed there. The Kaiser doctor had visited her a half-hour earlier and was just leaving the building when it happened. The caregiver was with her, just getting ready to go on an errand.
Suddenly, my mother felt a pain she'd never felt before, knew exactly what it was and yelled, "Get someone." I'm sure at that moment she was more concerned about pain than survival. She probably even liked the part about not surviving any longer.
Instantly, the caregiver sprinted out to the parking lot where the doctor was just getting into her car to head back to Kaiser. Ten seconds later, the doctor was in my mother's room with her bag. She took one look at my mother, ordered an ambulance and administered something to lessen the pain.
The nursing home had its own ambulance and it was only two blocks from a very large hospital. That was one of the reasons I'd chosen it. They had her there in five minutes, as opposed to the hour or so it would have taken if she'd had that attack at home.
In the rush, her purse and her I.D. were separated from her so the emergency room crew did not immediately get the "do not resuscitate" directive. In its absence, they did everything they could to bring her back to life but nothing helped. Her purse with the D.N.R. notice in it arrived a few minutes later but by then, it didn't matter.
I wished, of course, I could have been there but it was best that she went quickly. Nothing will ever convince me she wasn't happy it was over…especially before she went totally blind. The E.R. doctor who phoned to break the news to me said it was probably painless, in large part because the Kaiser doctor was there and gave her something. I'm not sure what it was but I'd like to think it was six chili dogs. With onions.
I still intend when I get a moment to write a long post about the late Al Feldstein, a giant in the world of comics who I feel deserves a lot more credit for many of the things he accomplished…and maybe a bit less for a few of them. Pressing deadlines — the kind Al was fierce about meeting all his life — prevent me from doing that just yet.
However, a whole cluster of e-mails have come in from folks asking me where on this silly blog of mine they can find the story I told here two years ago about Al Feldstein and Ray Bradbury. Here is where you will find Part One. Here is where you will find Part Two. Here is where you will find Part Three. And here is where you will find Part Four.
Some day soon when I (ho-ho) have some time, I will be adding a new feature to this blog — an index of where to find my most-read posts. There are well over 20,000 posts here — I missed noting when we hit the 20,000 mark a few months back — and at least 3,000 of them are not about cole slaw, tomato soup, Frank Ferrante, Jay Leno, Jack Kirby, Obamacare, baby pandas or famous people dying.
