The miracle of financial aid.....

(I never saw the real ring so this one is a fantasy)

A friend of mine was the Director of Admissions at a small college, in the day, and she related this story quite sheepishly.

A mother and daughter came to visit with her, and the daughter was fully acceptable to the school, however, they wanted to talk about finances. The mother was a small, chubby woman who wore older style, drab clothing, and spoke with a heavily accented voice. She wanted what was best for her daughter, of course, but it’s always a matter of funds.

The Financial Aid Forms had been filled out, and there was obvious need. The school would pitch in some scholarship funds as well, so it would be possible for the daughter to attend.

For those of you who are not from the US, or do not have kids going to colleges, I do need to explain. The FAF (Financial Aid Form) gives a score related to your ability to pay. It’s based upon income and holdings, as well; you need, as I remember, to provide tax forms etc. to back up all your answers to many financial questions. Your scores are than matched with available funds from federal, state and local sources, as well as school work, federal work study and scholarship dollars. Usually, students must make their own contributions as well as parental contributions based on your financial records. These days it’s quite challenging to come close enough to meet need.

In those days it was easier, although the information needed etc. was pretty much the same as now.

After the work was over, and the class was in, and the young woman was secure in her place in the freshman class, the Admissions Director was quietly sitting at home on a Saturday morning, looking out her front window. A Cadillac limousine pulled up to the house. The driver got out and opened the door for a well dressed gentleman who walked up to her house. He knocked on the door and she answered.

He introduced himself to her, and in a heavily accented English he thanked her for the very nice way she had helped his wife and daughter in his daughter’s college experience, and he handed her a small package as a token of his appreciation.

She thanked him, and he went back to his car and drove away. After he was gone, she opened the box and inside was a diamond ring! She took it to a jewelry store on Monday and had it appraised, just to make sure it was real (of course it was!).

She went back and checked the financial aid information. It seems he showed an annual income of $12,000!

My fathers last car...

While I am in an automobile mood, I thought I’d talk about my father’s last car. This is not directly related to my recent car buying, I hope, but it was brought to mind by that experience.

My father, late in his life and a few years’ from retirement, went out to find a car.

We had a 1960 Pontiac Bonneville, a very wide vehicle capable of sitting four across if needed. It was just a few years old but while in the dealership, I guess, getting his car fixed, he must have seen the future.

The 1963 Buick Riviera had just come out and it was fantastic! I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life! It moved him and must have killed my mother, but he bought it.

He waited for delivery, as they did not have what he wanted in stock. It was a cream colored one with leather seats of the same color. It had four seats and was the size of a battleship! It had a special plate made that said "Made Expressly for Harry Greenblatt" and it sat above the shift lever.

It was summer time and I was home with the Pontiac. I usually took my parents to work in the summer and kept the car, but picked them up after work. The dealership called and told me the new car was in. I told the salesman that my father was at work and he asked me to deliver the trade-in and take the new car. I was floored! They would trust me to do this?” The dealer was nuts! I know I was 18, but still, I couldn’t believe it!

I didn’t tell my father what we were doing, and went to the dealership after checking the trade- in for money and papers. They gave me the new car. I jumped for joy and drove away in seventh heaven.

I drove down to my father’s office and waited for him on the parking lot. Eventually he came out looking for me and couldn’t find me. I waved at him. He was dumbstruck! Just like me, he was astonished that the dealer would trust me with the transaction and letting me sign for everything.

My mother was equally surprised by the events and was flabergasted that they would trust me as well. (I think there may be a theme here.) My father (who did trust me) let me drive the rest of the way home myself, and didn’t take over driving at the office, I guess I remember this as a great day for all of us, and a true father son bonding experience.

In the end, the car sat for a year while my father was hospitalized and later as he was in a nursing home. It slowly corroded a bit, and after his death in 1970, my mother gave the car to me. It needed too much work for me to deal with, and I donated the car to a school vocational program. They spent $1,100 on parts for it, in order to get it running well again. Even then, they continued to have some problems, but were able to sell it to recoup their expenses.

All those later problems aside, my father’s last car was a symbol of wealth and happiness. We had no wealth, but when we drove it we felt happy!

Simulated Xylonite and other disasters...

I can’t remember if I’ve told this one before, but I looked through all of them (up to 380) and can’t find it easily, so, here we go.

In 1958 we would drive around aimlessly on a Friday night looking for girls, parties, friends etc. and just hang out. We didn’t really ever accomplish much, but we had a good time.

Often, if it was late, we’d listen to WCKY from Cincinnati, Ohio, a 50,000 watt station pushing out old time country music to the world.

From Wikipedia :

WCKY is an AM radio station in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, broadcasting at 1530 kHz with 50,000 watts, and its transmitter is located in nearby Villa Hills, Kentucky

WCKY dates back to the late 1920s, and achieved a 50,000 watt signal in the early 1940s. It was founded by L.B. Wilson, a longtime broadcaster in the region. Originally, WCKY was licensed to Covington, Kentucky, and was treated as a Kentucky-based station. This status helped WCKY's case before the FCC to increase power to 50,000 watts by the late 1930s - even though it was literally across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio and fellow 50,000 watt station WLW. WCKY's city of license moved to Cincinnati by the early 1960s. During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, WCKY was used to broadcast news and information to the area, due to its southerly directional signal pattern.

The advertising was particularly hilarious to us, as it was a country music station delivering to a country audience and selling products that made no sense to sophisticated urban teen aged boys.

Featured were such products as an autographed picture of Jesus, reading glasses (“Do you have trouble reading the small print in your bible?”) which came, by the way, in a genuine simulated xylonite* case and chickens by mail, the root of my troubles in this story.

Four of us were driving around looking for something to do when the free chickens commercial came on the radio. It was almost free, as there were some shipping costs, but it was $2.00 for 100 chickens! Guaranteed live delivery! How could we resisit?

We figured if we split it four ways, we would each put up fifty cents (we did this immediately) and send for the chickens. I agreed to be the sender. Now, we needed someone to send them to.

Our friend Ted’s name came up and we thought that since he was not with us, he had no vote so we’d send them to him. Besides, why tell him, he’d find out soon enough!

I dutifully took the money, wrote down the information and made my plans. We thought that rather than send them to Ted, as he had too Jewish a name and they’d know we were fooling around (were we nuts?), we’d give him a country name so it would be OK.

Now there were not a lot of farms in Baltimore, Maryland, which was where we were sending them, but we were worried about names. So we invented a country name, Ezekiel Miller (who knows where that came from or why I could remember this after all these years.) We sent for 100 chickens to be sent to Mr. Miller at Ted’s Baltimore home, without his knowledge. We quickly forgot about the whole thing and life continued.

If nothing happened after that, I’d have no story, but, it did happen. Some weeks later Ted called and asked me if I knew anything about chickens. I cracked up!

His mother was at home one day when the postman rang the bell and told her he had a package for her. It was very large, and she asked about it and he told her he wasn’t sure what it was but that it was alive! She also had to pay postage due, which I had to reimburse her for.

She was afraid to open the package and waited for Ted to come home and explain this to her, which he of course couldn't do.

100 baby chicks were delivered, and they were cute. Four had not survived the trip (and I’m sure they would have replaced them for free but we didn’t ask for more). The family had, at least, a sense of humor.

Ted’s father had a friend who owned a farm and the chicks were delivered out to him (I hope) and we were made to promise we’d never do this again to anyone, and we never have…

*Xylonite. Fibrous vegetable matter (e.g. cotton and flax waste and old rags), dissolved in acid and neutralized, which produced a substance called Parkesine, named after its inventor, Edmund Alexander Parkes (1813–90), of Birmingham. In its liquid state it was used as a waterproofing agent, in its plastic form for insulation, and, with the addition of oils, glues, and colour, for making objects, e.g. tubes and architectural enrichment. Capable of being coloured, and susceptible to a high polish, it was first exhibited at the International Exhibition, South Kensington, London (1862). In the 1890s it was developed as a substitute for plaster cornices, friezes, mouldings, and other decorations in rooms, and was supplied in accurately moulded prefabricated 3-metre (118.11 inches or 9.843 feet) lengths which were then fixed to timber grounds by means of screws. Its extreme light weight made it easy to handle and fix.

Somewhere my father is smiling...

When I was a kid, cars defined you. Your status was visible in your automobile. While some of that is prevalent today, most of it has gone away.

When I was a kid, there were no foreign cars. OK, of course they were somewhere, but in reality they had little impact. The war had ended and no one, at least no one I knew, would ever think of a German or Japanese car. I did have a Morris Minor in 1962, but that’s English and some of them existed, just without much impact. When I bought my first VW in 1963, there were parents of some of my friends who would refuse to drive in a German vehicle and that was just the way it was.

The hierarchy of automobiles in my house was the General Motors line. There were no Chryslers, and especially no Fords in our family.. So it went from Chevrolet to Pontiac to Oldsmobile to Buick to Cadillac.

Rich people drove Cadillac’s. There were no arguments there. My uncle, who was the rich guy in our family, always drove a Cadillac. He even had a special numbered license plates which my father assured me were given to special people who had the political pull to get these. This was in the days before vanity plates where you pay for your own craziness.

I remember a friend whose father had an Imperial and it was impressive, and even my father acknowledged the beauty of it, and knew it was expensive, but of course a Chrysler product so we didn’t discuss it. We simply were a brand loyal General Motors family.

My father liked my first car, a 1950 Ford, but it was a kid’s car so it didn’t matter to him. He thought the Morris Minor was a bit of a wreck, which it was, and he liked the VW. The VW bus I bought in 1969 was a real treat to be in and he came along when I picked it up. He was surprised by the whole experience.

He passed away in 1970, leaving his Buick Riviera to me.

I hadn’t thought about all this. Having had so many different cars, vans and trucks over the rest of my life, this story hadn’t struck me until recently, when I bought a Cadillac. It’s not new, but looks it, sort of. It wasn’t expensive, at about the cost of my wife’s used Ford Escape. It’s a SUV, or a crossover model, the SRX, and is black, powerful, smooth and heavy and all the things my father would say about Cadillac’s.

I once took a friend for a ride in my father-in-laws 1972 Cadillac Sedan Deville because he asked me to, as he had never been in one and simply wanted the experience.

I owned a 1956 Coupe Deville for a year or so but it was a hand me down and older (about 11 years when I got it) and therefore did not impress my father.

It’s just a funny thing, the thought that somewhere my father is smiling, or maybe even laughing, because I finally made the right decision!

An old scare...I almost stopped dancing

The story I remember was that in the early 80’s, my Uncle was hospitalized.

After he arrived at the hospital, he got out of bed (they never checked his blood pressure which, it turns out was sky high) and fell. He hit his leg on the bed when he hit the floor. The leg bruised badly, worsened (he had diabetes) and eventually was taken off.

I remember seeing him in the hospital, and I saw his leg. It was a bad color.

On May 6, 2001, I slipped in the shower, my left leg was in, the shower floor was wet and my right leg (on a rug at the time) slid across the floor and my leg slammed into the side of the bathtub.

The pain was bad, but I never fell. After a while the pain subsided and I went about my day. Gradually it began to feel better. The leg was hard and warm (this could be a good thing, but not for your leg).

One day I was putting on my socks, and I looked at my foot. It looked black (and blue) just like my uncle’s leg. I freaked!

I came back from the Doctor, and my leg was OK. It was bleeding internally a bit, but the blood was going down toward my foot, turning it a bad color. I did get on the mend. I was truly scared for a while.

I had bad visions about spending the rest of my day in a hospital.

Make fish, not love...

Today I decided to go with a new recipe. Every now and then I’ve written about food, and it usually involves some earlier story about a food article we’ve done, but today I’ve decided to go with a new one. This was last night’s dinner, made up from a novel reference.

In a recent James Patterson novel (I have no idea what the name is) that I'm listening to on my MP3 player in the car, one of the characters makes a dinner for his girlfriend, a Crabmeat Stuffed Tilapia. He tells her that he can prepare it, put it in the oven, and they can have forty five minutes to make love, and the dinner will be ready.

Now any cook would know that any tilapia dish made in an oven for forty five minutes would be like a fish brick. I loved the sound of the dish, but knew the writer didn't research the recipe a bit. It had little to do with the story and he probably didn’t care. For me, I can’t remember the name of the book, but can remember the food item. It says much about the writer, and me.

I read through a number of crab meat stuffed tilapia recipes on the internet and realized that any boy from Baltimore knows more about crab than the food writers ever will. So I went with the combination of recipes and my gut instinct. This is not rocket science.

Crabmeat Suffed Tilapia

Ingredients: (This is for two people, not the usual four)

2 tilapia filets about 6 ounces each (170 grams)

1/3 lb. fresh crab meat (fresh if possible)

1 stalk celery

1 small onion

1-2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley (or dried if needed)

2 tbs. butter

½ cup bread crumbs (I used whole wheat I made myself)

1 tbs. lemon juice

1 teas. Old Bay Seafood Seasoning (I guess you could use 1/4 teas. cayenne if you have no access to Old Bay, but a boy from Baltimore always has his Old Bay)

Sprinkle of paprika

Instructions:

Chop the onion and the celery into fine pieces
Sauté in a small skillet, with some butter, until softened

Chop the parsley and add to the onions and celery

Remove from the heat and add crab meat, bread crumbs, lemon juice and the Old Bay (or cayenne) and mix together very well

Form the mixture into two large crab oval crab cakes and place on a greased baking dish

Place a tilapia filet on top of each

Dot fish with butter and sprinkle on the paprika

Put in a 400 degree oven for 15-20 minutes (mine was done in 15 minutes in a convection oven)

Serve on plate with lemon wedges (and anything else you'd like to add)

Serve with a smile, but make love before or after, there is not enough time while baking.

Cowboy Lobsterfest

It’s hard to describe that evening; you’d have to be there. Yet, it is worth telling.

In late summer, 1999, we were invited by some friends who are Lama Ranchers, to meet them down in Black Diamond, AB, for a lobster dinner. This is an annual special at the Black Diamond Hotel. So, we said sure.

It took us an hour and twenty minutes to get there.

Our friends were waiting, and had a table reserved for this sold out feast. It was an all cowboy and cowgirl place, we were overdressed, even though I had on khakis and a sweat shirt.

We sat at long tables covered with paper, and awaited the dinner. Every other person in the room was smoking as well as hooting and hollering. We had beers (champagne was out of the question) and awaited the call. When the food came, we lined up as quickly as possible, but we were toward the back.

It was a long, inefficient line but we got there, got our lobster and salad bar, and sat. It was a two lobster dinner but you had to go back for another try for lobster #2. It was really great, and we loved the food. For $18 each, it was sort of a deal if you lived somewhere near the place.

They had a band, a Newfy band (Newfoundland) because of the lobsters, who were dead and couldn’t hear the music.

So here we were, in a cowboy bar, eating lobster and listening to a basically Irish band while the cowboys danced to such favorites as “Whiskey In The Jar” (one of my all time favorites) “I went a riding over Kilgarry Mountain…” and “He’s only a Newfy In a Calgary Hat”.

It was a surreal experience.

It took us an hour and twenty-minute to get home.