Little excitement as 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 looms

I met Buzz Aldrin 20 years ago.

It was at an event at the South Florida Science Museum in West Palm Beach, Fla., and he was there because the planetarium was named for him. He talked with a local radio talk show host named Jack Cole about the space program, and then signed books. He was genial, gracious and tolerant of the very long line of people who came to see him.

A reporter for a small local newspaper was there, and she asked me, “So what did this guy do anyway?” It stunned me that someone could have so little knowledge.

A few weeks ago, I did a story about a woman in Bradenton who sewed the flag that went to the moon on Apollo 11 and is still up there. The exhibit’s artwork was less interesting than the artifacts, including a jigsaw puzzle of The New York Times’ front page from July 21, 1969, and newspapers from Houston.

A 22-year-old girl was looking at the exhibit and I walked up to her to ask her what she thought. She seemed pretty bright but admitted that she actually had had no idea that there had been space missions to the moon in the past, and that men had actually walked on its surface. Florida’s public schools are focused mainly on standardized testing because that’s how school administrators get $150,000 a year jobs in the system, and subjects like history and science are considered disposable.

It’s hardly a surprise. Many people I talk to have no idea that there was a time when giant Saturn V rockets took men into space. No one has left the gravity of Earth since December 1972, 37 years ago, when Apollo 17 set off to explore the mountains of the moon. I’ll grant you, the space shuttle has done some good work and the International Space Station is important, too, but 37 years of orbiting the Earth is a bit much.

A few months ago, I met a journalism colleague named Pat Duggans at a library in Sarasota. He was talking about his book “Final Countdown,” about the end of the space shuttle program, and asked the audience which mission was the first they remembered. I replied, “Apollo 8,” the first mission to the moon. Duggans said he had talked to several people in and around the space program who still believed, even after all the missions to the moon, that Apollo 8 was the most exciting.

For the first time, humans were breaking free of the bonds of earth. For the first time, men were riding atop the Saturn V. For the first time, human eyes (as opposed to space probes) would see the “dark side of the moon.” And on Christmas Eve 1968, a live TV broadcast from lunar orbit brought it all home to us that three members of the human race, while studying the surface of an alien world, wanted us to share it with them.

It was an exciting time, but the best was yet to come. I still remember the excitement building for the Apollo 11 mission, which was to be the first to land men on the moon. In my family, we prepared for the party. It was a Sunday night, and we learned that the moonwalk would happen at 9 p.m. The scene was re-enacted in the movie “Apollo 13” and I’m sure many people still remember it, watching that ghostly image of Neil Armstrong coming down the ladder and then stepping off into the universe.

It saddened me that future missions – save for Apollo 13 – did not get the attention they deserved. Those astronauts who walked on the moon and orbited its surface saw the most astonishing wonders and we learned an enormous amount about the moon, and even today we’re learning from those samples they brought back more than 35 years ago. And a mission in October will set off an explosion on the moon, visible from the Earth to those of us with telescopes, that may open up even more wonders.

One time, I was at my grandmother’s house and the TV was on. And on the TV was a scene from the moon, with the caption “Live from the surface of the moon” under a shot of a man in a space suit. Imagine that, live pictures from another world. In 1972, people, it was a big deal to me if to no one else.

I dreamed of being an astronaut and going into space, but a stunning incompetence with math and the political currents of the age worked against me. I had to set my sights lower and watch as others set off for what’s beyond Earth. The closest I’ve gotten in aboard commercial airliners; maybe I can have my ashes sent into space after I die, but I’ll never be a spaceman.

People who were still interested in space exploration were called “space cadets” and ridiculed. Who really cared about a bunch of guys going somewhere and bringing back a bunch of rocks? It was all a canard, some said, and there are still those who believe the Apollo program was shot on a soundstage at a top-secret location, and that the men who went to the moon were threatened with awesome punishments if they revealed the truth.

It sounds almost absurd to say that I believe the astronauts when they say they went to the moon. It’s like saying computers don’t exist.

I can wonder at the awesome achievements in the past, and the achievements to come. Maybe I’ll live to see humans return to the moon, watching on TV as they explore that place just 240,000 miles away. Maybe they’ll find the old Apollo hardware and take us on a tour, showing us the descent stages of the lunar modules, the flags, the Rovers from Apollos 15, 16 and 17, the tracks from feet and wheels, and that golf ball that Alan Shepard hit on Apollo 14.

Maybe a new generation will learn that there was a time when people went to the moon and did things that scarcely seem believable today with equipment that seems impossibly ancient. But it happened, it really happened.

On July 20, 2009, for a moment I think we should forget about our problems, our cares, our worries, and honor that day when human beings decided it was time to become, as Carl Sagan once said, “citizens of the cosmos.”

While I was still working for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, I was doing one of my least-favorite jobs – editing the calendar listings – when I noticed that a local science museum was having an event with Dr. Edgar Mitchell, who walked on the moon on Apollo 14. He and Alan Shepard explored the Fra Mauro region of the moon, and it was the most awesome honor I can imagine as a reporter to have had the chance to shake hands with a man who had gone to the moon. He was friendly, gracious and very generous with his time, both with me and with the people and children who came.

He answered the kids’ questions and shared some of his ideas and philosophy with them. Mitchell is truly a man of the cosmos, even if some of his ideas are not totally accepted. Still, when a man has walked on the moon, I’ll listen to what he has to say.

Another voice is that of President John F. Kennedy, who of course made this declaration in his “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs” on May 25, 1961:

“I therefore ask the Congress, above and beyond the increases I have earlier requested for space activities, to provide the funds which are needed to meet the following national goals:

First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. We propose to accelerate the development of the appropriate lunar space craft. We propose to develop alternate liquid and solid fuel boosters, much larger than any now being developed, until certain which is superior.”

But the best expression is, I think, the speech he gave on Sept. 12, 1962, at Rice University in Houston:

“Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it — we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding. …

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

Maybe July 20, 2009, will be the beginning of a new time when we reach out and really begin a work that’s more than just going someplace, but making a better life for us all.

Of course, that’s from a charter member of the “space cadet” corps, but I can always hope.

You’d think John Lennon had died again

It’s a rule that if you’re a blogger you have to write a column about how Michael Jackson was such a genius and how the world will never recover from his death.

Well, I find it hard to feel that way. I confess, I laughed at the jokes about the glove, the music (I’ve heard endless parodies – some obscene – of his songs), the children, Neverland, etc. You can’t say he was cut down in his prime, because I think his prime was long past.

Let’s face it, maybe he would have found a future career playing Vegas or an Indian casino for an aging cadre of fans – others have, and made a good living at it – but Michael Jackson was hardly an artist.

I told someone at work today that you’d think he was John Lennon. Now, there was a tragic death that shouldn’t have happened. Who’d expect a nutso fan to go after Lennon? I mean, I’m sure every celebrity worries that every smiling fan they encounter may turn out to have serious mental problems, but to have someone pull a piece on the walrus and blow him away, well, before Dec. 8, 1980, it just couldn’t have happened.

I was more broken up about the death of Farrah Fawcett, whom I keep calling in my mind Farrah Fawcett-Majors. Sorry, that was who she was back in the 1970s.

She defined the look of that time, and nearly every teenage girl from that era seemed to want hair like hers (of course, all the girls from that era had no interest in me; not much has changed), though there was one I remember who showed up for school one day with her hair cut shorter than mine. Sorry, the Marine look was pretty awful on me and even worse on girls.

My favorite memory of Michael Jackson and his family was in 1984, when he and the band were going to play New York City. The hysteria was pretty wild, and there were stories going around that some schools (private schools, maybe) had threatened dire levels of discipline to students who went to the concert. They didn’t like Jackson’s religion and thought he was a bad influence.

There were always those who despised Jackson for his music, his commercial appearances and the growing weirdness. He was a tragic figure, but he brought it all down on himself.

As someone in the news media, you have to realize that the only thing celebrities fear worse than having the media dogging your every step is the media not dogging your every step. Of course, I find that kind of reporting to be total junk and always wanted relegated to the back of the paper, but if there’s some interest, well, we have to do what the people want.

The supermarket tabloids will go into editorial orgasm and I bet right now there are page layout people (in India, maybe) designing pages with “MICHAEL’S LAST DAYS” and “HIS FAMILY IN TEARS” splashed across pictures of the gloved one.

I won’t miss Michael Jackson. I never bought his music. I feel bad for his family, though, and the kids.

But Michael Jackson had it all, and totally blew it, and he’ll get no sympathy from me.

Quiet, but not silent

If you’re one of the people (or the one; Thanks, Mom!) who’s been following my blog, you might have noticed that it’s gone quiet of late.

Looking at the calendar on the site, I see I haven’t posted anything since May 24, when I wrote a long post about my time in the Postal Service.

What’s the deal?

Well, my job at thebradentontimes.com is keeping me very busy, and I have also been writing a lot.

When I was a copy editor at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, I rarely wrote anything beyond headlines or cutlines, though sometimes I was able to cover a story with prior permission. Now that I’m at a startup, I’m out there every day covering stories and writing. We just hired another reporter, so thebradentontimes.com has two people producing news. Actually, there are a couple other people, but they’re more in the weekly area of writing.

It’s kind of fun – as well as challenging – doing daily journalism. I’m learning how to attend a government meeting and get the gist of what’s happening. It seems sometimes that it all proceeds at a snail’s pace, with long debates about minor points, but much of what we see today in Florida is the product of government boards – county commissions, city councils, etc. – engaging in these meetings. And the media must be there to let the people know what’s happening.

With another reporter, we’re able to capture more of what’s going on in Bradenton and the results are encouraging. More stories means more readers and more readers means more advertisers, and more advertisers means more revenue so we can hire more people and become a better news source. As newspapers shrink, I know that the Web sites like thebradentontimes.com will catch up and fill in the gap. We’re missing a lot of stories, I grant you, but I think we’re catching a lot.

The great thing about the Web is that there’s no length limit, and I am able to quote more people at greater length about issues that I cover. That’s an advantage of the Web over newspapers. I know that reporters chafe at the limitations in the newspaper. I hated to have my stories cut, and to have to cut stories as a copy editor, to get it all to fit.

So my writing efforts have been transferred to the new site, but I will keep up the blog. In the meantime, please keep commenting, and don’t forget to visit thebradentontimes.com.

Giving your life to fix the Postal Service is not worth it

I’ve been reading the long laments over the possible loss of postal facilities and post offices, and somehow I get the feeling it’s déjà vu all over again.

Maybe it’s because when I quit the Postal Service in June 1994 it was going through the same talk of changes, and remember that the Internet and Web were nowhere near as powerful as they are now.

Back then, there was chatter about cutting the “people who don’t touch the mail,” but that died away after a few postal managers and 204Bs (acting supervisors) either had their jobs changed or were sent back to regular work. Soon, those who were out of management were reinstated, and people who’d been taken out of the administrative offices found themselves back among the desks, copiers and filing cabinets.

And there were even more people in management and administration. A little-known thing outside the Postal Service was that people who had been injured (or claimed that they were injured) on the job sometimes ended up working in the office, pulling down the same pay but posting stuff on bulletin boards, making copies, etc. One of my strongest memories from the early 1990s was of a career awareness conference where almost the entire EEO office of several facilities was people on some sort of injury comp.

I had ambitions to improve myself, which is a ticket to career stagnation in the Postal Service. I guess taking management classes on my own time and at my own expense marked me as someone to keep out of management at all costs. When I managed to talk my way into a position as a 204B, I was assigned to oversee an unmotivated group of people, most of whom could not follow even the simplest instructions. My fondest memory is of someone I had worked with making a lame excuse for not doing something, and me shouting “Bullshit!” at her. I got a talking-to for that from another supervisor.

One thing that is certain: when it came to supervision, I blew chunks. (I didn’t do much better as a manager at a newspaper, though I’ve mellowed since.)

Another “fond” memory is that when one supervisor (who nearly set the record for sex harassments and often wrote people up for discipline on their first night on the job) saw me dressed for supervision and announced: “Now you’ll see what kind of trash these assholes really are.”

Getting busted back to craft was almost a relief, and while I was really upset, it actually was a good thing because it motivated me to register for college and get serious about a new direction.

Oddly, I continued to work and work well. Admittedly, I did decide to burn up a small portion of my mass accumulation of sick leave if there was a big test the next day, but mostly I came in, did the job and went home. My heart was in college, and while most were impressed at my determination to get my degree, a few were convinced I was crazy. One thing you have to do when you’re trying to improve yourself is to remember that others become very worried when you’re starting to change.

People would tell me that I’d never get a job outside the Postal Service, that I’d be an educated idiot, about their cousin Wilbur who had a bachelor’s degree but was still a moron, or their Aunt Hortense, who got a college degree and was working the drive-through at Burger King because she couldn’t find any job in her field.

A couple of the management types noticed that I had stopped applying for management jobs. I used to intensely study the openings, and wore out several typewriter ribbons making up the Form 991s and 2945As (I think that’s what the latter form was), sending the forms in and waiting to hear if I got an interview. My lack of success became frustrating, and helped convince me that I was wasting my time and theirs.

A tour supervisor said one day she noticed that I hadn’t applied for the latest batch of management jobs, and I said that I was on a new track and didn’t want to waste any effort on a hopeless endeavor.

It takes determination to get ahead. For six years, I worked at a large postal facility at night, then went home to sleep, then went to college, first at Palm Beach Community College and then at Florida Atlantic University. I was able to pay as I went, and graduated from both colleges with no student loans. I was also active on the schools’ newspapers.

I can see why so many, especially in management, were trying to discourage me from pursuing higher education. One manager had told me, “Henry Ford said blue-collar workers need to know only three things: Where to show up for work, when to show up for work, and how to do their job. Everything else is a waste.”

In fact, managers with just GEDs or high school diplomas were mostly eager to keep the upper hand intellectually over workers. Someone with college could stir up a lot of trouble and might even take seriously the notions then being bandied about regarding  contacting the Postmaster General directly about conditions at the facility. (They even gave out a toll-free number.)

I did even more than that. I wrote opinion pieces in the local newspaper, and even sent long, detailed letters to the Postmaster General. I’d get back from the latter’s office mildly threatening letters about not bothering his excellency with my comments. One of the nastiest letters I ever got was from the local head of HR at the postal facility, telling me – he thought – once and for all that I should just stop griping and accept that I was doomed to be a low-life.

Seeing no future in the Postal Service, I decided that trying to change things was pointless. But I was developing journalism skills, and decided to tweak the nose of management with a new employee newsletter. I called it “Samizdat” because I knew no one would even know what that meant. (Samizdats were illegal publications written by dissidents in the Soviet Union.)

I’d lay out articles, grab stuff out of Federal Times and other publications, and even take stuff from memos sent down from Elephant Headquarters. I loved to watch incognito as people picked up my newsletter in the break room and read it. Right then, I fell in love with journalism and the power of the written word.

I was nearing the end of college, with enough credits to graduate. I decided that I’d graduate in April 1994 and quit in June 1994, so I decided to go out in a blaze of glory. I sent the Postmaster General a copy of several issues of “Samizdat” and a letter detailing the racial views of one supervisor (a very bitchy white girl with a propensity for using the “N-word” whose reward for hating black people was being put in charge of a number of black employees) and another who was just evil toward everyone. Local management seemed to figure they had the right idea even if they were violating several rules governing behavior, and I thought since I was leaving I might as well do something good.

Well, I got more than I bargained for. The local plant manager summoned me to his office, with the black shift supervisor. I had asked the Postmaster General to come to the facility in West Palm Beach, Fla., where I would name names. The plant boss asked me to name names, so I did. I also reported the use of the “N-word” by one supervisor, and said I didn’t care what happened to me since I was leaving in June (this was around March 1994, before my graduation.)

The plant manager actually tried to talk me out of quitting, and dangled the prospect of an immediate promotion to management if I stayed. I could help fix the Postal Service from within with my knowledge, experience, education, training and understanding, he said.

It’s important to recognize that the above-mentioned qualities were often used as reasons to not advance someone in the Postal Service, so I was immediately skeptical. What would happen when he or the other people moved up, I wondered. I could be left in a very bad position. I said I’d think about his offer.

Also, I had seen in more than 10 years multiple plans to treat the workers better, and they all fell apart due to management opposition. Supervisors rarely acted to make like better for the workers in the Postal Service, and those significant few who tried found themselves treated as outcasts and usually transferred to less desirable shifts or even sent back to craft. When all else failed, kick ass and take names and write everyone up was the way to go.

I talked to the few supervisors I respected, and they expressed their own dismay with their current positions. I appreciated the honesty, and decided not to accept the offer.

Did I ever regret quitting the Postal Service? No. I moved on in my life and career, and found that no one cared that I had worked there when I went looking for a job. Could I have fixed the Postal Service? I doubt it. The system rewarded those who were corrupt and punished those who were honest. New hires would sometimes foolishly believe that if they blew the whistle on something that they had protection, but that was on paper. Announce that a facility was sending mail to the wrong place or doing something else wrong, and the offenders would get off scot-free while those who made the charges would find themselves with a ruined life.

In one case, a supervisor who reported over-reporting of mail volume nearly had his life destroyed. To me, it just wasn’t worth losing everything to fix a broken system whose managers wanted it to stay that way. Life is just too short to waste on lost causes.

This goes for a lot of other places as well. It would be nice to believe that one person can fix some place, but unless you’re rich you’ll probably end up destitute, in debt and unemployable.

Face it, some places will never work right. I’ll admit that I get all the mail I’m supposed to from the Postal Service. I suppose it does a good enough job. About the only thing I’d give the agency credit for is giving me enough salary to have a decent middle-class life (albeit as a single man living alone with cats) and to finish a college degree without taking on debt.

Other than that, the Postal Service went its way, and I went mine.

Waiting for the weather to break

It’s been a while since I posted to the blog because I’ve been so busy with work. My new job is great, and I’m doing more writing than ever before. I never thought I’d land back in journalism, and it’s sure a good feeling.

I took the plunge a couple of weeks ago and ordered a new mount for my telescope. I guess being around those new-fangled “GoTo” setups infected me with “gotta-have-it-itis.” So I placed the order, helped stimulate the economy a little, and finally on Wednesday UPS dropped off a big, heavy box.

I’ve been assembling and tinkering with a new Celestron CG-5GT equatorial mount. I also bought the Celestron GPS device, polar alignment scope and the Losmandy dovetail to adapt my C-8. It’s all hooked up and ready to roll, and I even practiced with it in a bedroom – where the GPS naturally did not work – and confirmed that the mount works.

So what’s the problem? Well, when I finally got everything assembled and ready to go, my part of Florida entered the summer weather pattern of wind and rain in the afternoon and clouds in the evening. I thought Saturday night (May 16) would be a good time for me to align the polar scope and try to go through the hand controller and mount alignment, but Mother Nature had other plans. It rained in the afternoon and when it got dark, there were still plenty of clouds around.

On Sunday night, I tried again and again I had it all set up and ready to roll, and even had neighbors over, but the clouds rolled in again.

I’m kind of anxious to see how it performs, though I know I have plenty of time.

Will I ever see the stars again?

Wonders of the sky available to all

It was kind of a bittersweet night last Saturday at the “Sidewalk Astronomy” event in Lakewood Ranch.

Many people who had never looked through a telescope before got to see Saturn, and most believed that we weren’t putting them on; that really was the ringed planet (though the rings are getting closer to edge-on.)

The Moon was a joy, as it always is when you can show the shadows of the mountains and craters, and many a kid walked away almost stunned. Many a parent was grateful that we in the Local Group were willing to take out our expensive equipment and share the wonders of the night sky with others.

Of course, while organized events are over for now, I plan on doing a lot of observing in the interim either in front of or behind my house. I recently decided to upgrade my mount to one of those new-fangled “Go-To” types, and there will be a learning curve for me, but I had some experience helping a good friend with his “Go-To” telescope, so I think I’m up to the challenge.

The astronomy club has done so much to keep the flame of science burning bright. Schools are cutting back pretty much anything that isn’t on the FCAT, and it’s good that they know that we amateur astronomers can supplement their efforts. We had some amazing events at schools this past year, and I can remember the kids bursting out of the school auditorium at one event and almost running for our telescopes.

Actually, while the kids were amazed, the parents were also thrilled. “I’ve never looked through a telescope before,” several parents said to me.

“I’ve never seen telescopes like that before,” a few said to me. It looks like we’re packing mortars, some of us, with our short-tube Schmidt-Cassegrains (a few have Newtonians, Dobsonians and refractors, though). But when they see the Orion Nebula, the Andromeda Galaxy, the Double Cluster or any of those other wondrous objects in the sky, I know we’ve made some headway.

I’ll be sharing views in front of my house this summer, if the bugs cooperate. It’s never too late to learn the wonders of the sky, I always say.

In the meantime, as Jack Horkheimer says, keep looking up!

Counting the days until the next version of Windows

Monday was the last straw for me.

I was at the Manatee County governmental complex, getting ready to live blog a government meeting, and my laptop was giving me fits.

Not the hardware, mind you. It’s an HP and I like working on it. But the operating system is Windows Vista. You know what that means.

Connecting to a network outside of my home network can be an adventure with this system. Once before, it had gotten all “ooh, be careful!” on me, and this time I was in no mood for its nonsense.

Still, I got an “It’s taking a little longer than usual” to connect to the network warning, followed by the dire advice that I was on a public network and someone else could see my computer. Well, I wasn’t going to surf porn, just try to blog during a meeting.

Then, once I finally got connected, I couldn’t access my paper’s admin site. I texted the tech guy at the paper, and he e-mailed me alternate URLs, but he sent them to my company e-mail, which also was inaccessible.

I tried rebooting and lost several minutes as I waited for Vista to start up.

Finally, I got started again. Nothing. No access to my company’s sites.

There was always a brief note about a DNS error at every access attempt. I don’t give a flying %@$#%$ about the error, Vista, just fix it so I can get some work done!!!!! And stop warning me about things I already know about!!!!

I was covering a story a few months ago when I saw someone using a beta version of Windows 7, and asked him about it. He said it was great, worked well and that he definitely planned on buying the release version when it came out. He was even playing a multiplayer network game at the time, and it was working beautifully.

Microsoft is becoming the new IBM with its aggravating software, absurd methods and infuriating warnings.

I will give them my money once more, and this time it better work!

Goodnight, Pontiac

It’s Sunday night, probably the last night before the news becomes official.

Pontiac, the fabled auto nameplate of General Motors, is going to join Oldsmobile in the pantheon of dead names.

We like to think that there’s some stability to old auto makes, but as someone who has read both “The Complete National Georgraphic” and “The Complete New Yorker” (the latter to late 1946), it’s a reality that many, many nameplates and auto manufacturers have gone away.

From the early 1930s to 1946, lots of makes and nameplates fell by the wayside, especially during the Depression years. Goodness had nothing to do with it.

For example, one of GM’s makes between 1909 and 1931, according to Wikipedia, was Oakland.

According to the site:

Pontiac was the first of the companion marques introduced, and in its first year outsold the larger, heavier Oakland. By 1929, GM sold 163,000-plus more Pontiacs than Oaklands. The discontinuation of Oakland was announced in 1931 and the Pontiac would be the only one of General Motors’ companion makes to survive beyond 1940, or to survive its “parent” make.

And now it’s Pontiac’s turn to go.

I only owned one Pontiac, my red 1987 Firebird. It was a nice car that served me well. I traded it in for a Saturn in 1993, and when I bought my 2007 Mustang in December of 2007, it was like buying a Firebird all over again because it’s such a hot-looking car with a V6.

But the fact that car names are retired is no comfort to the Pontiac dealers who will have no product to sell or the owners who own “orphan” cars. True, no doubt GM will support the cars with parts and warranties, but this is another end of an era.

Goodnight, Pontiac. You will be missed.

New stadiums, old complaints

A recent story in The New York Times about some of the seating at the new Yankee Stadium brought back some memories.

It must have been 1975 or 1976, and my friend John from 80^th Street in Elmhurst showed me an ad in the Times. The rock group Pink Floyd was going to be playing Madison Square Garden as part of its “Animals” tour. Did I want to go?

I said yes. I was into all the big rock bands of the time that are still around today, albeit a few with replacements for guys who died of drugs, alcohol or whatever. Pink Floyd’s music annoyed my parents, which was a plus (remember, this was pre-”The Wall”) and I had never been to a concert before.

I had heard one might meet girls at such an event, and I was keen to see if my charm and ability would work as the dulcet tones of “Money” or “Sheep” sounded through the Garden.

John ordered the tickets and they came in the mail a few days later. Stamped on them were words: “OBSTRUCTED VIEW OF STAGE.” That worried me.

Actually, while we did have an obstructed view, we were high enough up that we could see most of the stage, and even some little beings holding guitars, doing something on keyboards and pounding on drums. Since they mostly stayed in one place, we saw everything, including the big movie screen and the giant inflatable pig that soared over the crowd.

All in all, it was a great concert. Of course, I didn’t meet any girls (and little did I know that that wouldn’t change and so far hasn’t.) We didn’t care that we didn’t see all the stage. Pink Floyd played, I listened and we only remembered how high we got. (If you get my drift.)

People going to see the Yankees play at their stadium and the Mets at Citi Field have discovered to their dismay that those cheap outfield seats suffer from a similar malady that I encountered at the concert: their view of the field is obstructed.

Some folks who paid lots of money to scalpers for cheap seats in left field at Yankee Stadium learned that they cannot see anything in right or right-center field.

As Joshua Robinson reported on April 17 in the Times:

Yankee Stadium’s Section 201 may be nearly 500 feet from the front row of Section 20, but in dollar terms, it is much further than that.

Section 201 is one of the two blocks of seats that flank the Mohegan Sun Sports Bar in center field, leaving the fans there with a heavily obstructed view of the outfield. For the regular season, the Yankees have priced those tickets at $5.

Staring back at them are the front rows of Sections 17B to 22, which bends from dugout to dugout behind home plate and includes the 100 most expensive seats in the ballpark. They range in price from $2,500 to $2,625, and the Yankees have had to spend money advertising their availability.

The picture with the story makes it clear that even plays at first base are a mystery if you are in certain seats.

 Of course, there were other ways to see the game from the cheap seats.

They were helped out by three televisions bolted to the wall of the sports bar that showed a live feed of the game, though many fans said a few extra screens would have been appreciated, particularly in the glare of the sun.

 It is practically a New York tradition to declare, no matter where one sits at a venue, that “Our seats sucked.” Still, paying admission to a game and then having to watch some of it on a video screen makes me wonder why people didn’t just stay home and watch it on TV. Granted, you have to deal with the inane commentary and endless close-ups of fans between pitches, but at least it’s a lot cheaper. And with some tickets crossing the $1,000 mark for a single game, you can get a nice big-screen TV.

I only went to two games at the old Yankee Stadium. My first was when I was in CYO baseball as a pre-teen. The Yankees were playing the Tigers, I think, and we sat in the bleachers. The stratification was obvious to us: no vendors, no yearbooks and scorecards for sale, and home plate was far, far away. My second game was with my friend John from the Pink Floyd concert, and we saw the Yanks in one of the Billy Martin era. We had decent third-base side seats, as I recall, though some Yuppies showed up in the third inning with their wine and dinners, sat behind us, and one of them spilled wine on my friend’s hockey jacket. He was pretty pissed off.

My fondest memories of the Mets and Shea Stadium were in the mid- to late-70s, when the Mets really stunk up the National League. John and I would buy general admission seats, which were less than $5, watch the first couple of innings from the upper deck, and then walk down the ramps to the next levels and just claim unsold seats closer to the field.

The ultimate from our perspective was to get into the field boxes. I guess a lot of people had the same idea we did because the stadium managers later erected a chain-link fence around the field-level entrances and had guards checking tickets to make sure no one bought cheaper tickets and sneaked in.

So we found a way around it by simply finding the spot in the second level where the wall was at its lowest, and just hopping into the field boxes. I remember one doubleheader where we ended up just on the first base side of home plate. We were so close, we could hear the catcher grunt when he caught the ball. Of course, they weren’t checking tickets on the way out, so we weren’t caught.

Soon, the stadium management got wise to the wall-jumpers, and put up a fence.

Today, when you can’t even leave your seat to go to the john during “God Bless America” at Yankee Stadium, the idea of sitting where you’re not supposed to is anathema. I suppose the joy of buying a cheap ticket and just moving into an unoccupied and more expensive seat is another of those sacrifices we have to make for the safety and security of our nation.

Too busy to blog, and soon to be busier

It’s been a hectic past couple of weeks and I’m finally getting around to adding to my blog.

The big story is this: I landed a job. I’ll be working as news director (and other assignments as they arise) at The Bradenton Times. I’ve also been working for the past couple of weeks with the U.S. Census, but I haven’t decided yet if I’ll stay with that job.

(Things seem a bit disorganized at the Census right now, as my assignments were canceled due to reorganization. I had one almost completed, too …)

So Friday is back to full-time work, and I’m glad of it. Indeed, I’m so excited, I offered to go out and cover a story on the tax protests in the area for my new news site today.

So that’s the latest, and stay tuned for updates as they occur.