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Davis Young
- Nov 16, 2021

DY: In Just a Few Words (#57)

It only takes one bullet.

My father was discharged from the Army at a military base in Santa Ana, California, in 1946 at the conclusion of World War II. My mother, my brother and I had remained in our native New Jersey while he concluded his service. I was six years old at the time.

Post-war California was where it was going to happen. Lots of jobs. An historic housing boom. People from everywhere rushing to the Golden State to stake their claim to a future bursting with opportunity. My father sent for us - and that is how we spent the next five years living in the burgeoning community of Altadena, California.

I enrolled at the fast-growing Daniel Webster Elementary School, where I rather quickly expanded my vocabulary in the Daniel Webster tradition and also learned lots of other useful facts and figures. I became addicted to baseball. My friends and I went from schoolyard to schoolyard, vacant lot to vacant lot honing our baseball skills. At night, we would listen to radio broadcasts of Pacific Coast League games out of earshot of parents who thought we were sleeping.

I learned a lot about baseball in those days. And, one day, I also learned about something else. I got a lesson in something a bit less fun. It goes under the name of gun safety. As I read and see daily media accounts of the recent movie set gun tragedy involving Alec Baldwin, it reminds me that I should share my story.

We lived on Oakwood Avenue in Altadena, and a kid named Larry lived up the street. One day I was up at Larry’s house, hanging out like a normal 10-year-old kid, when he came back into the room carrying a rifle. I was standing directly across the room from him. Larry explained the gun belonged to his older brother. He wanted to show me how it worked. An important part of that was to show me how a gun fired.

He knew the gun wasn’t loaded so he pulled the trigger. A rather loud noise ensued as a bullet whizzed past within a couple of inches of my neck, embedding itself in the wall behind me. Lucky me. Larry - with no intent to do so - could have killed me or put me in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. I’m not quite sure how he ever explained that hole in the wall to his parents, but I can assure you that from that moment on, we both had a healthy respect for guns and the damage they can cause when they get into the wrong hands.

That day could very well have been the end of me and scarred my friend, Larry, for life - just as Alec Baldwin will now wake up every morning with thoughts of a mishandled gun etched in his memory. What a shame.

Guns are dangerous. If you have one, keep it under lock and key. 2021 marks 72 years since I learned this valuable lesson. What a shame it would have been to have missed seven decades of holidays, birthdays, Karen, kids, grandkids - and baseball. That’s a sobering thought.

When the 2016 Republican National Convention came to Cleveland, Karen and I went downtown to join in the excitement. There at the center of our city were thousands of people wandering around, including a young man with an assault rifle carried over his shoulder and a pistol strapped to his side. Do you know why he did that? Because he could.

If you have a gun, so be it. Just be sure it’s out of reach of 10-year-olds or anybody else.

DY: In Just a Few Words is a blog that comes out when something needs to be said or every Tuesday - whichever comes first. Davis Young is a communications professional who adds 50+ years of experience and perspective to issues of the day. His emphasis in DY: In Just a Few Words will be humor (a touch of sarcasm here, a pinch of facetiousness there...). Once in a while, he will touch on something a bit more serious - but hopefully not too deep or depressing.

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Davis Young
- Nov 9, 2021

DY: In Just a Few Words (#56)

Please don't tell my mother.

Do you know what a night crawler is?

You probably think it’s a fancy term for a person who is out all night every night crawling from pub-to-pub. About sunrise, a night crawler somehow finds his/her way home, crawls into bed and rests up for a few hours when it’s time to be a night crawler again. You don’t want to be one of those.

Where I was raised in New Jersey, our town certainly had them and as I got older some of my boyhood friends became night crawlers. Sad. A terrible way to spend one’s life.

But that’s not the type of night crawler I am here to talk about today.

When I was a young boy, I fell in love with fishing. We had all kinds of good places to fish, including a creek just down the street that was stocked with trout. Stony Brook they called it. And - for sure - on Thursdays after school you could find 13-year-old Davis wading around in hip boots with my fly rod in quest of those elusive trout.

Guess what I used for bait? Yup, night crawlers. They would come out every night in our lawns and gardens, especially when they were wet. They were worms, big thick, gooey worms sometimes as much as six inches long. Trout love them. On Thursday afternoons, the trout would line up at a top secret fishing hole waiting for my arrival.

Because they come directly from the earth, night crawlers have a lot of dirt on them. It doesn’t take long for the dirt to soil one's hands and, in particular, to get under one’s fingernails. So, with dirty hands and fingernails and perhaps a trout in my creel, I would hear my mother ringing a cowbell, her signal that it was time to get home and change for Thursday afternoon dancing school.

I loved my mother, but I truly hated dancing school. Fishing was definitely more fun. And, so I would drag my feet, fishing right up to the last moment when I would fly home, put on a white shirt, clip on one of my two ties, put on my Sunday suit, slip into my Bass Weejuns and head off to dancing school with my mother. All the mothers came every week. I know my mother came because she was afraid I might slip out a side door and soil our family’s good name. (Little did she know....)

Two things stand out in my memory about dancing school.

The first is that at age 13, all the girls - no exceptions - were taller than me. If I stared straight ahead while learning the Fox Trot, my eyes would be focused directly on their chins.

The second was that all the boys had to wear white gloves. To this day, I am proud indeed that underneath those beautiful white gloves were reminders of my friends the night crawlers. That’s a secret I have kept for all these years. Had any of those other mothers known what was under my white gloves, I would have been severely punished - perhaps even run out of town. And, at the very least, I would have been required to take an additional year of dancing instruction. Heaven forbid! Anything but that, please.

Today, those tall, beautiful young maidens are all in their 80s. They have shrunk in height and I have grown in self-confidence. Our heights are now nearly equal.

I apologize to each and every one of them for my night crawler escapades in white gloves. It’s time for me to tell my night crawler story and for those nice girls from good families to know how sorry I am. My father, who was a public servant, used to say you need to have clean hands to go to court. You also need clean hands to go to dancing school. I sure hope none of those girls ever got involved with a night crawler.

That’s my dancing school story and I’m sticking to it.

Davis Young
- Nov 2, 2021

DY: In Just a Few Words (#55)

In that moment, I realized I was neither old money nor new money.

Some years back, we made several trips to Charlottesville in southern Virginia to join with college friends attending horse steeplechases. If you’ve never been to a steeplechase, the well-trained horses and their riders put on a good show as they come by multiple times on a long, set course. A good steeplechase draws thousands of people wandering around on beautiful property feeling good about themselves and, in the back of their minds, asking how such an important happening would include someone like me?

A steeplechase is a social event every bit as much as - and perhaps even more than - an athletic contest. If you’re at a steeplechase and you pay attention, my experience is that you will see three distinct types of people.

Group one are self-important, but low profile attendees. You don’t know them. They aren’t self-promoters hoping some media person will ask if it’s alright to take their picture. Old money likes a low profile. But you know they’re important because they are attending the same event you are. Many steeplechase spectators carry themselves as models of understated success.
That said, there are others who clamor for attention. They are clearly new money and want to be noticed. They’re easy to spot because they dress to the nines - men in blazers and neckties and women with hats that rival anything you might see at the Kentucky Derby. Unlike old money, new money wants you to take their picture.
The third group includes the heavy drinkers. Steeplechases are all-day events and cocktail hour starts very early. Heaven forbid that anyone would ever be thirsty at a steeplechase. It must be five o’clock somewhere is an expression you might well hear as early as 10 a.m. as the Bloody Marys and Mimosas are served as an integral part of steeplechase tail-gating.

All this is a mere prelude to a weekend up in the horse country of northern Virginia. We were invited to a major steeplechase near the home of a college friend. Also attending would be my college roommate and another college friend.

On the day we were to start a six hour car trip to our host’s home, it occurred to me that I should bring a gift. I had not seen this person for many years and had no knowledge of what he might like. So, I took a shot in the dark, ventured out to our neighborhood liquor store and purchased four bottles of very fine White Zinfandel. I knew it was premium wine because each bottle cost $6.00. My total tab for four was $24.00. I carefully gift-wrapped my treasured cargo in a brown paper bag with some of that morning’s Cleveland Plain Dealer wedged between the bottles to keep them from clanking and - worse yet - breaking.

As we turned into our host’s driveway, I knew immediately I was in trouble. That driveway was at least a quarter-mile long and on both sides were herds of prize cattle. Off in the distance I could see his home - large with enormous white pillars. Just beyond the house were vintage cars - at least three or four. What was I to do? It was too late to turn around and buy better wine. I just had to suck it up and commit to living with everlasting embarrassment.

The host and my college roommate were outside awaiting our arrival. I pulled up and retrieved the paper bag with four $6.00 bottles of wine and said, I hope you’ll enjoy this small gift of appreciation. Our host responded, This is absolutely wonderful. I’ll chill these down right away and we’ll have them for dinner tonight. And, much to my chagrin, we did have that terrible, cheap wine that very night.

What happened next is a memory I cannot shake. My college roommate - who preceded my wife as my roommate - said, Davis, would you like to see Bob’s wine cellar? Mortified, but ever the good guest, I gulped and responded, Of course. Off we went to a temperature-controlled wine cellar with 1,100 bottles of imported French wine in wooden crates. I have had many instances of abject humility in my life, but that was by far my largest experience of feeling small.

But, I couldn’t let total humility stop me. Up and at ‘em the next morning, and we were off to the last steeplechase I ever attended. I am not old money and I definitely kept my head down that day, but several attendees did come up to me and ask, Didn’t you used to be somebody?

Four bottles of crummy $6.00 wine. What kind of person would be so classless as to give that as a gift? The guilt and shame I carry from having done that will last a lifetime. I’ve been in counseling for 30 years trying to come to grips with what I did. I still can’t shake it.

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