BOO WHOM! Halloween Again

I do not understand why, once a year, I am expected to provide a sugar rush to every kid in the neighborhood. This is the annual fall shakedown. The bonfire of the bonbons. And should I try offering these adolescent vagabonds healthy treats like diced carrots, sliced celery, a couple cheese chunks on toothpicks or, God forbid, a little rice pilaf,  rather than being thanked for saving a young heart, my house would be egged, my windows soaped, and my cat redecorated.

What these ‘Kinder Mafia” demand is pure dextrose, not a mere saccharin rush. Their obsession with fructose, glucose, lactose, sucrose and maltose is neither healthy nor reasonable. They expect me to feed their sugar habit. . Oh, sure, they dress it up in fairy costumes and go door to door chanting, “Treat or trick”. But what they really mean is "Show me the Chocolate!"   This is not the holiday the ancient Druid priests envisioned, nor the Aztec mortuary artists. It is not a holiday. It is sugar wealth redistribution, confectionery socialism straight out of the barrel of a gummy bear.

The roots of Halloween were planted long before Christians had enough saints to celebrate "All Hallowed Saint’s Day". The Aztecs were celebrating Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) even before they were speaking Spanish,  maybe 3,000 years ago.  And the Druids in Ireland were celebrating “Samhain” by carving turnip Jack-o-lanterns,  2,500 years before they saw their first pumpkin.  "And how", you may ask, "could offerings to Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec Goddess who was still born, become individually packaged bags of M&Ms’ handed out to a skeleton named Debbie or Bobby?  And I will answer you, ‘Only in a world where the love child of Salvador Dali and Ma Barker is allowed to design holidays, that’s where!

This is the night for hyperventilation and hypertension - when the line between the dead and the not-really-alive (also known as Donald Trump) becomes fuzzy, and everyone grows concerned about ghosts, spooks, ghouls and zombies entering our world.  But its common knowledge that ghosts can not manipulate physical objects. So they can only harm you psychologically, meaning Scientologists   are safe since they don’t believe in anything that might hint at L.Ron Hubbard's level of insanity. And nobody should be afraid of “spooks” because once you speak a spook’s name they are “spooken for” and thus rendered harmless; which is what Dick Cheney did to the spook Valerie Plame.

Now Dick Cheney was a real live ghoul, one of  those creatures who revel in death and horror and who keep coming back to life again - usually on Fox News - the network staffed by brain dead zombies. Rupert Murdoch's invention is the perfect example of how we are terrified of all the wrong things in this life and death.

I cannot imagine Dick Cheney and his fellow Federalist Society banshees  will cease being such soul sucking terror mongers just because they have finally passed beyond the veil of death. Hell, they will just be getting started!. 

Yes, on October 31st,  I will be answering my door bearing a bowl filled with tribute, because I don’t want to spend half of November pulling toilet paper out of my rain gutters. However, we could instead of this terror Halloween been celebrating "Reformation Day",  when, in 1546, Martin Luther nailed his “95 Things I Hate About The Pope” to the front door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. He was was later charged with deformation of church intellectual property. But I diverse...

So, logically, children could be going door to door, calling, “Treat or I’ll nail your butt to the door, you papist low life, and, oh, by the way have you got any Jews hiding in here?”  A bit hard to see children squeezing candy out of that transaction.  So I guess we were lucky we got the screwed up jawbreaker, mini-Snickers holiday we did get, and not an endless election season that lasts four long painful years and gets won by the Russians.

The truth (as if that ever mattered about holidays) is that Martin Luther defiantly nailing his arguments to the church door was probably no more real than George Washington chopping down a cheery tree. Neither thing really happened. And neither does ghosts or ghouls.  And this year you just might see Martin Luther costumes on Halloween Night.  I did see a George Washington once, but that was so long ago the costume was probably made in the United States.

This year Americans will spend over $6 billion on this mish-mash of a holiday. Almost all of our black and orange fix, like cocaine, is provided by overseas suppliers who have no other connection to us, and although that kind of chump change would barely support the occupation of  Afghanistan for a month, it does work out to about $65 per family each year. Our family is not spending anywhere near that much, so I figure Donald Trump and his Wall Street buddies must be spending like a billion each to make up for what us po' folks are'nt  spending anymore - call them  the ghoul creators.

About 4 million Americans will even be buying costumes for their dogs this year, like PetSmart’s spider web dog collar for $12, or PetCo’s dogie Pumpkin dress- up for $16. It gives a whole new meaning to the term "Puttin' on the dog".  Still, this canine costume capitalism is surprising. considering that dogs and skeletons would seem to be a natural costume combo,  popular with dogs as well as the humans. And once the holiday was over you would not have to store the costume -  you just let Rover bury it.

But as a nation we seem determined to spend as much as possible on this “dead holiday thing”.  We will be putting 2 million pirates (mostly boys, and far outnumbering the original pirates) on the streets that night, along with 4 million princesses - mostly girls and about equal to the number of real princesses) with adults to follow behind them, as back-up muscle. At the ring of the door bell us older folks, cowering in our homes, then answer the door armed with only a half-empty bowl of bite sized Three Musketeers, and hope that is enough to buy us protection for another year.

And that is where all smart adults should be on Monday night, dreading the sound that fills the night with horror and chills the bones; “Trick or treat, trick or treat, give us something good to eat. Or else.”  Yes, Trick or Treat, and bon appetit, my fellow cowering masses. And if you survive this night, you have just two years until the next horror ; election day 2018!  Boo Who? Boo You, that's who!

- 30 –

BOO WHO?

I do not understand why, once a year, I am expected to provide a sugar rush to every kid in the neighborhood. This is the annual fall shakedown. The bonfire of the bonbons. And should I try offering these adolescent vagabonds healthy treats like diced carrots, sliced celery, a couple cheese chunks on toothpicks or, God forbid, a little rice pilaf,  rather than being thanked for saving a young heart, my house would be egged, my windows soaped, and my cat redecorated.

What these ‘Kinder Mafia” demand is pure dextrose, not a mere saccharin rush. Their obsession with fructose, glucose, lactose, sucrose and maltose is neither healthy nor reasonable. They expect me to feed their sugar habit. . Oh, sure, they dress it up in fairy costumes and go door to door chanting, “Treat or trick”. But what they really mean is "Show me the Chocolate!"   This is not the holiday the ancient Druid priests envisioned, nor the Aztec mortuary artists. It is not a holiday. It is sugar wealth redistribution, confectionery socialism straight out of the barrel of a gummy bear.

The roots of Halloween were planted long before Christians had enough saints to celebrate "All Hallowed Saint’s Day". The Aztecs were celebrating Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) even before they were speaking Spanish,  maybe 3,000 years ago.  And the Druids in Ireland were celebrating “Samhain” by carving turnip Jack-o-lanterns,  2,500 years before they saw their first pumpkin.  "And how", you may ask, "could offerings to Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec Goddess who was still born, become individually packaged bags of M&Ms’ handed out to a skeleton named Debbie or Bobby?  And I will answer you, ‘Only in a world where the love child of Salvador Dali and Ma Barker is allowed to design holidays, that’s where!

This is the night for hyperventilation and hypertension - when the line between the dead and the not-really-alive (also known as Donald Trump) becomes fuzzy, and everyone grows concerned about ghosts, spooks, ghouls and zombies entering our world.  But its common knowledge that ghosts can not manipulate physical objects. So they can only harm you psychologically, meaning Scientologists   are safe since they don’t believe in anything that might hint at L.Ron Hubbard's level of insanity. And nobody should be afraid of “spooks” because once you speak a spook’s name they are “spooken for” and thus rendered harmless; which is what Dick Cheney did to the spook Valerie Plame.

Now Dick Cheney was a real live ghoul, one of  those creatures who revel in death and horror and who keep coming back to life again - usually on Fox News - the network staffed by brain dead zombies. Rupert Murdoch's invention is the perfect example of how we are terrified of all the wrong things in this life and death.

I cannot imagine Dick Cheney and his fellow Federalist Society banshees  will cease being such soul sucking terror mongers just because they have finally passed beyond the veil of death. Hell, they will just be getting started!. 

Yes, on October 31st,  I will be answering my door bearing a bowl filled with tribute, because I don’t want to spend half of November pulling toilet paper out of my rain gutters. However, we could instead of this terror Halloween been celebrating "Reformation Day",  when, in 1546, Martin Luther nailed his “95 Things I Hate About The Pope” to the front door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. He was was later charged with deformation of church intellectual property. But I diverse...

So, logically, children could be going door to door, calling, “Treat or I’ll nail your butt to the door, you papist low life, and, oh, by the way have you got any Jews hiding in here?”  A bit hard to see children squeezing candy out of that transaction.  So I guess we were lucky we got the screwed up jawbreaker, mini-Snickers holiday we did get, and not an endless election season that lasts four long painful years and gets won by the Russians.

The truth (as if that ever mattered about holidays) is that Martin Luther defiantly nailing his arguments to the church door was probably no more real than George Washington chopping down a cheery tree. Neither thing really happened. And neither does ghosts or ghouls.  And this year you just might see Martin Luther costumes on Halloween Night.  I did see a George Washington once, but that was so long ago the costume was probably made in the United States.

This year Americans will spend over $6 billion on this mish-mash of a holiday. Almost all of our black and orange fix, like cocaine, is provided by overseas suppliers who have no other connection to us, and although that kind of chump change would barely support the occupation of  Afghanistan for a month, it does work out to about $65 per family each year. Our family is not spending anywhere near that much, so I figure Donald Trump and his Wall Street buddies must be spending like a billion each to make up for what us po' folks are'nt  spending anymore - call them  the ghoul creators.

About 4 million Americans will even be buying costumes for their dogs this year, like PetSmart’s spider web dog collar for $12, or PetCo’s dogie Pumpkin dress- up for $16. It gives a whole new meaning to the term "Puttin' on the dog".  Still, this canine costume capitalism is surprising. considering that dogs and skeletons would seem to be a natural costume combo,  popular with dogs as well as the humans. And once the holiday was over you would not have to store the costume -  you just let Rover bury it.

But as a nation we seem determined to spend as much as possible on this “dead holiday thing”.  We will be putting 2 million pirates (mostly boys, and far outnumbering the original pirates) on the streets that night, along with 4 million princesses - mostly girls and about equal to the number of real princesses) with adults to follow behind them, as back-up muscle. At the ring of the door bell us older folks, cowering in our homes, then answer the door armed with only a half-empty bowl of bite sized Three Musketeers, and hope that is enough to buy us protection for another year.

And that is where all smart adults should be on Monday night, dreading the sound that fills the night with horror and chills the bones; “Trick or treat, trick or treat, give us something good to eat. Or else.”  Yes, Trick or Treat, and bon appetit, my fellow cowering masses. And if you survive this night, you have just two years until the next horror ; election day 2018!  Boo Who? Boo You, that's who!

- 30 –

HOLLIDAY ON ICE

I suppose everyone was expecting a happy ending. The “Holiday On Ice” skating show had started well after 8pm in front of 4,300 spectators, most of them members and guests of the Shrinners. Smoothly the cast ran through the numbers; “Holidayland”, followed by “The Sleeping Beauty”, “Egyptian Fantasy”, “Rhapsody For Strings”, and “Waltz At Maxims”. And just after 11pm the stars – including the talented Jeanne “Jinx” Clark  (above)– were gathered just off stage for the grand finale as the chorus filled the rink and dixieland jazz swept up the audience.

In the south west corner of the building, just under box seats section thirteen, fifty-four year old Wilbur Gauthier was supervising his staff of vendors when something caught his attention. He thought it sounded like tea kettle left on the boil. As he walked toward the back of the room Gauthier was startled to see a six foot propane tank fall and begin to roll across the concrete, hissing loudly. In an instant the floor was covered in a thickening white mist. Horrified, Gauthier screamed for everyone to clear the room, and started to run toward the tank. He never made it. It was 11:06pm, Halloween night, 1963.

The State Fair Coliseum in Indianapolis had been constructed in 1939, and built to the cautious standards of the Great Depression, of stone and steel; otherwise the disaster could have been much worse. Walter Spangler was sitting in section 12, in the North West corner of the coliseum. He remembered, “The show was virtually over. Suddenly there was a dull thump.” Then, directly across the coliseum from his seat, “…there was a tremendous column of fire – about 15 feet in diameter, and 40 to 50 feet high. Along with it was literally a column of bodies…dozens of people flying through the air. Their arms and legs outspread. Then there was a lot of screaming.” 

Vivian Barkley remembered that, “The bodies looked like rag dolls." The victims began falling amidst the costumed skaters on the ice. Mrs. Manford James told a reporter later that she saw “…pieces of cement, people, arms and legs flying through the air. You could see bodies falling into the flames…” 

And then a second, larger explosion threw 128 seats and 700 square feet of concrete flooring of section 13 into the air and sent it plummeting onto the 240 bleacher seats at the north end of the coliseum floor. Five hundred square feet of the floor caved into the basement. In that initial 54 people were dead and almost 500 were injured. The death toll would go higher.

Walter Spangler forced his way through the chaos that followed the explosions, trying to reach the injured. “I saw a woman lying on top of another woman. One woman’s head had been flattened by a large piece of concrete.” 

Pauline O’Neal recalled, “I saw two men carrying children, begging for someone to help them, but everyone just stared.”  

Mrs. Marilyn Barngrover remembered, “Shriners near us helped keep people calm and we moved out very quickly.” The explosion had knocked Mrs. Robert Stoeckinger onto her back. She said, “The little girl who helped pick me up had a gash in her head, but I didn’t notice it until later.” 

Mrs. Myrtle Ericsson said “…I grabbed my purse and started out. I fell over a fire hose and cut my lip and was bruised…I’ve never seen so many bloody people.”

The reason for all this agony was originally considered a containment by the refining industry. Because it is heavier than methane, with which it is found naturally, propane has a tendency to collect in the elbows and bends of pipes, forming blockages.

So it is necessary that propane, butane and other similar containments be removed from “natural gas” before it is sent down pipelines. It was only a matter of time (1913) before an inventive chemist (Dr. Walter O. Snelling) discovered that, although propane will normally boil at anything over – 42 C, if kept under pressure it can be shipped and handled as a liquid (U.S. patent #1056845). 

At the point of use, a simple relief valve can convert the propane back into a gas, and allow access to its stored energy. But that makes the relief valve the weak point in the system. Today all propane tanks have a thick metal safety collar that protects the valve from being bent or broken. In 1963 (below)  they did not.

Every ambulance in Marion County was dispatched to the scene. And “…literally hundreds of nurses, doctors, first aid volunteers and firemen…” who were off duty rushed to offer assistance.  But because they were not ready in advance, most of their efforts were too late.

Because it was Halloween night there were 200 extra Indianapolis police officers on duty and they were quickly rushed to the coliseum as well. An auto wrecker was driven into ice to pull sections of concrete “the size of pianos” off the victims, and then a construction crane. 

The coliseum got so crowded that Chief of Indianapolis Police Robert Reilly eventually had to bar any further traffic from the fair grounds, including ambulances and first aid workers. The injured were sent to six area hospitals.  But there was not attempt to keep track of who was sent where, or even how many were even sent to hospitals.

The next morning the county coroner laid out the dead in rows on the ice (above) , and family members had to walk along their bloody, chard and dismembered ranks to identify their loved ones. The last official victim died in February of 1964. The total death toll then stood at 74, with 386 injured, including 176 who were still hospitalized. There was a public outrage over the tragedy, and a conviction that somebody should be held accountable.In December a Grand Jury had indicted State Fire Marshal Ira J. Anderson and Indianapolis Fire Chief Arnold Phillips on misdemeanor charges for failing to inspect the coliseum, specifically the haphazard storage of large numbers of propane tanks in busy work areas. But neither man was convicted, destroying any hopes for civil suits brought by the victim’s families against the state, which was then able to hide behind the concept of "sovereign immunity."

It’s an old English common law idea that “The King can do no wrong.” The concept was grafted into the constitution in 1794 in The Eleventh Amendment: “The Judicial power…shall not be construed to extend to any suit…commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by citizens of another state….”  And in 1890, in Hans V Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court held it effective even against private citizens trying to sue their own state. In other words, you can’t fight city hall. 

But civilians had no such protection. The President, vice President and local manager of “Discount Gas” which had supplied the propane tanks,  were also indicted, as was Coliseum manager Melvin Ross, and the concession manager Floyd James, all on manslaughter charges. But the only person actually convicted was Edward Franger, president of Discount Gas, who was found guilty of assault and battery. And even this conviction was overturned on appeal by the Indiana State Supreme Court.

Much has changed since that horrible Halloween night. Beside the safety collar on propane tanks, the disaster is used as a teaching example of how not to organize rescue operations and how not to treat the families of victims. The Coliseum Disaster Fund raised $78,000 (over half a million today) from the public.  Lawsuits by 379 victims produced $4.6 million in monetary awards, or a little over $12,000 per victim.

It would be 2003 before a plaque (above)  was installed in the Indiana Fair Grounds “Pepsi” Coliseum, to remember those who died and were disfigured physically and emotionally by the tragedy.  In any tragedy, it seems, there is no such thing as justice or a happy ending.

- 30 -