Blogging in My Blood

[This originally ran in April 2007.]

Mama Shakes and I spent much of the day going through old family photos and papers, reading many of the letters from my grandfather. He was a NYPD detective working the nightshift, and he often spent the quiet wee hours writing letters to her, his daughter who had moved to Indiana to attend university (and stayed to marry the Hoosier boy otherwise known as my dad). This is an excerpt from a letter to Mama Shakes, dated February 10, 1970, 2:00am. (Very specific!)

Two patrolmen downstairs laughed pretty good. Lt. Dinkelacher had just told them a sad joke. But patrolmen ALWAYS laugh at lieutenants' sad jokes. If all audiences were patrolmen and all comedians lieutenants, what a laughing place this would be! And double it for captains. I once saw a standing ovation for an Inspector who recited a poem about a dog who lost his asshole! (This is true.) I was standing and clapping like hell at the time! I may have whistled loudly, too, to overcome another sergeant (a real brownnoser) who was clapping louder than I was.

The thing about my grandfather is that he was a blogger. He loved capturing moments of his life in notes and letters and cartoons he'd draw, and, long before Photoshop or virtual exhortations to "Caption This Photo," he was clipping images from the paper and adding his own commentary, giving them to my grandma, mailing them to my mom, or hanging them on the wall at the precinct for the other cops, just to give them a laugh. Gene, my grandfather, was a Goldwater Conservative, and not in some generic sense; he actually supported Goldwater. Today, those particular politics ("keep your nose outta my pants") would make him a progressive – an irony that I'm quite certain he would have found hugely amusing, considering that Mama Shakes spent her early childhood believing "goddamnliberal" was one word.

Nevertheless, he was an equal opportunity mocker, so his subjects were as likely to be Republicans as Democrats. Below are some of my favorites, which I thought the Shakers might enjoy, too. The faces have hardly changed…


[Click to embiggen. Yes, that's George H.W. Bush throwing a pitch at Shea Stadium. The Bushes: Ruining baseball across the country since the 1960s.]


[Referring to Ronald Reagan.]


[Saudi Arabia...meet Plains, Georgia.]


[Sounds about right.]


[And thus we see that the media has been garbage for at least 40 years, having dedicated a full-page spread to Nixon deplaning.]



Fin.