Remembering Ray Harryhausen

This tribute was originally published in May 2013, shortly after the death of the amazing Ray Harryhausen.

A ferocious dinosaur lays siege to a roller coaster on Coney Island. The fearsome Kraken rises from the sea to claim its latest victim. A hapless sailor and his crew battle sword-wielding skeletons.

These movie moments captivated me as a child. Each time a Ray Harryhausen monster took center stage, I would move the rabbit-ear antenna on the old TV in the basement to improve the picture. Even through a haze of static and commercial interruptions, the illusion held sway. I believed.

Harryhausen, the special-effects maestro who died earlier this month at the age of 92, breathed life into all of the above and many more, a pantheon of monsters hatched from mythology and his own fervid imagination.

Without a doubt, Harryhausen’s special effects were the best part of many films with which he was involved. “Jason and the Argonauts,” for example, is a largely tepid affair, a paint-by-numbers, sword-and-sandal epic about the legendary titular explorer’s attempts to find the Golden Fleece and become king of Thessaly. The acting is wooden and the plot virtually nonexistent.

But every 20 minutes or so, the movie blazes to life when a Harryhausen creation saunters into frame: Talos, the bronze giant, voted the second greatest movie monster of all time (behind King Kong); the Hydra, fierce creature with the head of seven snakes; and, of course, a battalion of skeletons, bones clicking and clacking as they attack Jason and his men.

Harryhausen’s effects are cinematic magic at its finest. Using miniature models, he would shoot one frame of film, stop the camera, move the model infinitesimally, and then shoot the next frame, laboriously building the illusion of movement.

Considering that one second of film contains 24 frames, it would take days to yield only a few seconds of usable film, painstaking labor that would be combined later with live-action footage using reverse projection and other techniques. Working within constraints of time and money (there was never enough of either), the man created marvels.

Harryhausen’s biggest influence was the aforementioned “King Kong,” a movie that both he and fantasy author Ray Bradbury (who died last year) saw at impressionable ages. In the book “Kong Unbound,” Harryhausen dubbed it “the greatest fantasy film ever made.” He later would learn its secrets at the feet of stop-motion pioneer Willis O’Brien, the man who animated “Kong.” Harryhausen worked with O’Brien on the original “Mighty Joe Young,” another movie about a large ape whisked away to civilization.

Harryhausen went on to create special effects for many Hollywood productions, including “20 Million Miles to Earth,” “It Came from Beneath the Sea,” “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers” and “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.” “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” which climaxes with the monster stomping Coney Island, was based on a story by Bradbury and pays homage to the two men’s love of giant monsters.

Harryhausen’s last hurrah was 1981’s “Clash of the Titans,” another romp through mythology. By then, the heyday of stop-motion animation had passed, replaced by a variation called “go motion” that relied on a computer to move the scale models.

“Go motion” itself would have a short shelf life, supplanted by full computer animation 10 years later in “Jurassic Park.” Today, stop-motion, when it is used at all, is done to invoke nostalgia.

Yet there is still much to recommend the earlier method. The herky-jerky look of stop-motion -- with puppets manipulated by hand, inflating and deflating bladders hidden inside to simulate breathing -- infuses a sense of personality in the finished effect that is sometimes lacking in more seamless computer animation.

Just as King Kong reflects the scrappy nature of O’Brien, the many creatures animated by Harryhausen reflect what I imagine to be his ferocious desire to overwhelm the audience, to make them gasp or smile or shriek.

And, above all, to make them believe.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com @cschillig on Twitter

Coaches, teachers can take a knee for many reasons

Instead of talking about the one it got wrong last week, let’s talk about the one it got right this week.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a former football coach in Washington had the right to pray on the 50-yard line at the end of each game.

From 2008 to 2015, Joseph Kennedy was an assistant coach at Bremerton High School, near Seattle. For years, he took a knee at the conclusion of games, often with players in attendance. He also led students in prayer in the locker room.

When the district became aware of Kennedy’s practice, administrators asked him not to pray when it interfered with his job duties and not to include students.

A USA Today story notes the district gave him options for other, more private places to pray, but Kennedy said they were “insanely far away” from his players. He also said he never asked students to join him. While he did stop praying in the locker room, he continued on the 50-yard line. The district eventually placed him on administrative leave.

In 2016, his contract was nonrenewed for failure to adhere to school policy and failure to supervise players after the game. In the lawsuit that followed, lower courts ruled in favor of the school district, indicating that Kennedy’s First Amendment rights had not been violated.

The Supreme Court’s overturning of these decisions may appear to weaken the separation of church and state, but the ruling is very narrow and nuanced. Indeed, it could even be used as justification for other, non-religious demonstrations of advocacy by teachers and coaches, provided students aren’t compelled to take part.

A few points worth noting:

Kennedy should not have prayed in the locker room with student-athletes. The fact that this behavior wasn’t included in the lawsuit indicates both he and his lawyers knew it was legally indefensible. There is a difference between a mandatory locker-room huddle and an optional end-of-game custom.

If Kennedy compelled players to join him on the 50-yard line (or anywhere else), this too would have been wrong. Both he and the district agreed he never asked students to do so. Some parents say differently, that players felt required to attend or risk loss of playing time.

Admittedly, I don’t know many football coaches, but given the few I do, I’m comfortable saying they will start whoever gives them the best chance for a win, regardless of religious persuasion or lack thereof. So this reasoning rings false.

Since Kennedy engaged in post-game prayer for years without the district even being aware of it, he was not egregious about the practice. And, in the interest of fairness, if kneeling to thank a higher power is accepted freedom of expression, then so is taking a post-game knee for racial injustice, LGBTQ rights, Ukraine and other causes. What’s good for one must be good for all.

While some will interpret this ruling as allowing for more prayer in public schools, such a conclusion would misconstrue what the high court decided.

School personnel still may not lead student prayer in the classroom. Districts may not offer prayer over the P.A. during school or at the start of an athletic event. These would be tantamount to state sponsorship of religion, even if the prayers are nondenominational.

Admittedly, the high court’s decision opens the door for overzealous school staff to introduce religion inappropriately into the school day, to misinterpret this one ruling as applying to a broader set of behaviors than it was intended to cover. Public school districts, parents and teachers will have to watch carefully to make certain this does not occur.

But if a coach wants to say a personal prayer after a game, that coach has a right to do so. And while it would be much less messy and much more convenient if said coach did so in private, this one did not. Sometimes, upholding the First Amendment is both messy and inconvenient.

The Supreme Court erred on the side of individual free speech this week. Misgivings aside, if you want a court to err anywhere, it’s there.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

I chat, therefore I am (sentient)

Quick, name a killer computer from pop culture.

For me, it’s HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the futuristic film from 1968 that is now 21 years in our past.

HAL is “executed” by astronaut Dave Bowman near the end of the interminably long – but still pretty darn cool – movie. Dave will later be transformed by an alien rock into a more highly evolved being, a star-child. This trippy sequence made perfect sense to audiences of the ’60s and ’70s who had taken advantage of certain hallucinogenic substances before and during their viewings.

Speaking of evolution, HAL is a high-tech iteration of a timeless trope – the “forbidden knowledge” and “humanity stepping outside its lane” plots that end badly for those who transgress. Think Adam and Eve, Frankenstein and Jurassic Park.


If books and movies have taught us anything, it’s that when we try to learn what we shouldn’t learn or do what we shouldn’t do, we seldom live happily ever after.

The other day, I was thinking of HAL and other evil or misunderstood creations, be they organic, cybernetic, or a combination of the two, after I heard about the Google employee who believes the company’s A.I. chatbot has gained sentience. It sounded like a scenario straight out of Isaac Asimov and his laws of robotics.

The Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, is convinced the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) chatbot has a soul, because the program told him it did. I don’t know at what point the conversation strayed from the usual inane use of Google – “Is ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ really a cover tune?” (spoiler: it is) or “How far is it from Wooster to Cleveland?” (one hour, five minutes) – to something more philosophical, but it did.

In the back-and-forth with Lemoine, LaMDA allegedly told him it gets lonely, meditates and is self-aware. “Oh, wait,” Lemoine told National Public Radio, “Maybe the system does have a soul. Who am I to tell god where souls can be put?"

Much like the Bible’s first couple, Dr. Frankenstein, and everybody who works on any of the other islands with a Jurassic theme park, Lemoine has been punished. Google put him on administrative leave. But since the leave is paid, an argument could be made that the punishment isn’t too onerous, except that it keeps Lemoine from having additional conversations with LaMDA.

Google gurus who scoff at Lemoine’s assertion argue he has been fooled by a program that is very good at predicting and imitating human language patterns, something many of us experience to a lesser degree when we call customer service and talk to an automated series of message prompts.

That’s not sentience, these critics say.

They’re probably right. In the sci-fi world, there is a point in the plot where the computer or android experiences a spark where programming transforms – evolves? – into intent, where they become self-aware. Outside of the movies, that spark remains elusive, at least among machines.

Siri is not self-aware. Alexa doesn’t really become offended if you curse at her.

But in the organic world, who can really say? I occasionally talk to my dog when nobody else is home, and I feel like he understands me. Yet most of that may just be me, projecting my own personality onto him or seeing and hearing in his responses – the empathetic eyes, the occasional sigh – my own human traits reflected back at me.

A lot of it might just be him jonesing for biscuits, too. I have no doubt if I fell down the stairs and broke my neck, he’d rush right to my side, but only to step over my unconscious body and check if a treat had fallen from my hand.

This may not be the murderous intent of HAL 9000 or the existential angst of a chatbot with a huge vocabulary. But it’s an intelligence of a sort, right?

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Auction action for Superman's first appearance

This column originally ran in April 2010, shortly after an issue of Action Comics #1 set a then-record price at auction. This figure was eclipsed by a private sale in 2021, which only cements my answer even more firmly.

Whenever a vintage comic book sells for big money – as Action Comics #1 did last week, netting a record-breaking $1.5 million – my non-comic friends will ask if I would ever pay that kind of money for a copy.

My answer is always the same: heavens no.

Actually, usually “heavens” is replaced with a stronger word, one that expresses my surprise that something that once sold for a dime can command the kind of prices usually reserved for real-estate deals and headline-making lottery wins.

Not that I don’t comprehend the historical significance of Action Comics #1. The book features the first appearance of Superman, that brainchild of Cleveland kids Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who sold their creation in its entirety to DC Comics (then National Publications) for the princely sum of $120, or about 0.008 percent of the cost that one rabid collector paid for that Action Comics issue recently.

The world’s first super hero, Superman went on to spawn a merchandising empire that includes movies, toys, games, and television shows, in addition to serving as the template for virtually every costumed hero that followed. For $120, National Publications bought, for a fire-sale price, a property that netted it (and later Time Warner) billions.

That first issue is scarce, with experts estimating about 100 in existence, making it the Holy Grail of comic-book collecting.

But as I tell my friends who wonder if I dream of adding a copy to my own collection, I am a comic-book reader, not a collector or speculator.

A reader buys titles he enjoys, perhaps because he likes the character, writer, artist, or some component of the story. Readers may keep their books in pristine condition so that they can reread them later, or they may dog-ear their edges and spill pizza sauce all over their four-color contents. (I aim to be the former, but occasionally am the latter.)

Sometimes, a reader will morph into a collector, aspiring to own every appearance of, say, Superman (may good fortune and a fat bank account be yours), or every comic book illustrated by a favorite artist. Sometimes they will collect particular genres – for instance, titles with giant apes on the cover (there are more of these than the layman might imagine) – or the output of one particular company (all Marvel Comics).

Only rarely does a collector devolve into that most odious specimen, a speculator, who buys titles based solely on their perceived market value. I once met such a slug outside a comic-book store, where he clandestinely ushered me over to the trunk of his car, as if it contained an illegal substance. Instead, it was overflowing with copies of the current issue of Batman. His scheme was to buy up all local copies of the issue and then sell them at vastly inflated prices.

There has to be an easier way to make a buck.

As a reader, I already own a copy of Action Comics #1. Before you check my work schedule and jimmy open my door, know that my edition is a reprint from ten years ago with a value of about $5. But it contains the same material as the original, and I get the same joy of experiencing the birth of a genre as I would from reading the $1.5-million original.

Maybe more, because if I spill a bowl of cereal and milk all over the Man of Steel’s first appearance, it won’t be the end of the world. Or the demise of a million-plus-dollar investment.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com 

The Ten-Cent Plague

This column was originally published in 2009. 

In 1954, Operation Book Swap was in full swing in Canton, Ohio.

A project of a committee formed by Mayor Carl F. Wise, the program encouraged Canton-area kids to trade comic books for books. Nearly 30,000 comics were collected, exchanged for hardcover copies of novels like “Heidi” and “Swiss Family Robinson.” City leaders unceremoniously hauled the brightly colored comics to the dump.

Operation Book Swap was northeast Ohio’s response to a national mania, the alleged filth being poured into kids’ minds by supposedly unscrupulous comic-book publishers, one chronicled in David Hajdu’s new book, “The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America.”

Hajdu believes the comic-book purge of the early 1950s – in many communities, comics weren’t taken to the dump, they were burned publicly – was a forerunner of the generation gap popularized years later by parental dismay over rock and roll. The precursor of Elvis’s shaking pelvis was a four-color world held together by two staples, with an admission price of one dime.

In the 1950s, superhero comics were on the decline and crime and horror comics were coming into their own. Publisher Lev Gleason was selling around a million copies a month of a comic book that introduced wide-eyed youngsters to violent bad guys plying their trade against the innocent, supposedly to reinforce the title of the comic, “Crime Does Not Pay.”

But as John Milton learned while writing “Paradise Lost” a few centuries earlier, it’s a lot easier to dramatize evil than goodness. Hajdu notes that the word “Crime” on the magazine’s cover was much larger than the rest of the title, an accurate representation of the emphasis inside between crime and punishment.

Similarly, the EC Comics company struck it rich by selling revenge stories with O. Henry-style twists in magazines like “Crime SuspenStories” and “Tales from the Crypt.” At a Senate hearing on comic books (the very existence of which proves government always has found topics besides the important ones to occupy its time), publisher Bill Gaines defended an EC cover that showed a woman’s severed head held aloft by her killer. He said it would be in bad taste only if the killer were “holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood.”

Psychologist Frederic Wertham spearheaded the jihad against comics. His 1954 book “Seduction of the Innocent” branded Batman and Robin as homosexuals, Superman a fascist, and Wonder Woman a sadomasochist. He claimed that comic books caused juvenile delinquency because all the juvenile delinquents he had worked with read comic books. His findings ignored that almost (ital.) all (end ital.) kids read comics, and that many grew up to be perfectly normal and well adjusted.

By reaching back to the early years of the twentieth century, Hajdu shows how disapproval over comics was cyclical. As early as 1909, Ladies’ Home Journal was concerned about the content of the Sunday newspaper funnies, calling them “inane and vulgar” and “nothing short of a national crime against our children.” Similar concern was voiced decades later with the introduction of the comic book, a reaction that reached full flowering in the 1950s with the passage of laws in many communities that made it illegal to sell certain “prohibited” comics titles to minors.

Ultimately, the comic-book industry formed a self-censorship agency, the Comics Magazine Association of America, and created a code banning almost everything that had made comics so appealing to kids. Readership declined (the rise of television was also responsible) and comic books were never again the cultural force they had been.

The final pages of “The Ten-Cent Plague” are a roll call of writers and artists who never worked in comics again after the mid-’50s purge, creators whose stories were burned by over-zealous parents and politicians who, only a decade earlier, had successfully won a war against a regime that also found it necessary to incinerate books.

It is an irony that does not go unnoticed by Hajdu, who has written the definitive account of the mass-market censorship of an art form that nobody cared too much about because it was the exclusive province of the young.

Not working 9 to 5

This column originally ran in April 2015, but the topic of work and the impact it has on my life have been on my mind recently.

It was an early June morning. The rising sun was burning away the damp from a night of light rain as I made my way down a long gravel driveway meandering through the woods near my house. At the other end of the drive were dozens upon dozens of long, corrugated-roofed sheds that housed thousands of mink.

I was 13 years old and on my way to my first job.

The butterflies that flitted along each side of the road were matched by the ones in my stomach. I was young, but not so young that I didn’t recognize this as a major milestone: the first day of work, a preliminary step down a long road that would fill most of my waking hours until some far-flung day when, luck and genetics willing, I could enjoy a healthy retirement. Just like that, my life was fixed on a course much straighter than the path my feet were following.

The summer before, the man who owned the mink farm — and also the apartments where my family lived — had stopped by to ask my mom if I wanted a job. I didn’t. Instead, I hid in my bedroom and relayed my answer through the closed door.

Afterward, Mom told me it was okay to do nothing for one more summer, but then I had to start doing (ital.) something (end ital.). After all, I would spend the rest of my life working, and I might as well get used to it.

So the next summer, determined not to disappoint a second time, I relayed an affirmative answer through that closed door, donned an old set of clothes and a new pair of boots, and prepared to join the workforce.

It was a dirty, smelly job. Mud and the feces would splash over my boots and ooze down and around my toes. I dragged hoses from shed to shed and filled water troughs three and sometimes four times a day. In between, I poured dry feed into a wheelbarrow and went from shed to shed, pouring pellets from an old coffee can. I made $1.25 an hour.

If the point of the job was to raise my aspirations for something other than manual labor, it worked. I escaped the first summer I turned 16, landing a job in a restaurant where I worked throughout the rest of high school and college. In the last 30 years, I’ve seldom worked fewer than two jobs and have often worked three.

Like most people, I have a love/hate relationship with work. I love what I do, most of the time, but periodically mourn that work takes me from activities like reading and writing that are more enjoyable. (I’m fortunate to have found occupations that allow me to blend avocations and vocations, at least part of the time.)

Almost every day, I make a list on an index card of the work I need to accomplish. I cross off each item with great relish. A successful day is one where I complete everything on the card with enough daylight and energy remaining to do something more pleasurable — go for a run, read a book, or plunk a little on my guitar.

Recently, however, I’ve been taking stock of how much work defines who I am and dictates what I do. I’m a people-pleaser — my greatest strength and weakness — so when somebody gives me a new task, I accept it mostly because I don’t want to disappoint. Seldom do I consider the consequences it will have on my personal time.

It’s not surprising, then, that some of my favorite fictional characters buck the nine-to-five routine. John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, hero of seventeen or eighteen wonderful mystery novels, asserts that traditional old age is hardly guaranteed based on actuarial tables, and he therefore takes retirement four and five months at a time, in between cases. Herman Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener, from the short story of the same name, one day ceases to copy documents given to him by his boss and eventually ceases any work at all, answering every request with the cryptic line, “I would prefer not to.”

A slightly skewed work ethic has no discernible ill effects on Mr. McGee, but I sadly note that such is not the case for Bartleby. After preferring not to work, he prefers not to be fired and not to leave the premises, forcing his boss to move his entire law practice to a new location. The new tenants have Bartleby arrested as a vagrant and thrown into debtors’ prison, where he dies. (Sorry to spoil the plot of a 162-year-old story.)

Would Bartleby’s life have been markedly better if he’d worked harder, or would he have ended up in a different kind of prison? The text is silent.

What I’m starting to realize, somewhere in the middle third of my work career, is that I want to cross fewer things off my work list each day and more things off my personal list. In other words, I want to be more like Bartleby but with the results of McGee. I’m not sure how to accomplish that, but I think it involves stepping off the path more often and finding my own way through the woods.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Jan. 6 hearings are important, despite whataboutisms

It’s not a witch hunt.

Whatever former President Donald Trump might think about the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, it matters a great deal for the public to learn what happened that day, in the days and months leading up to it, and how those events continue to reverberate.

Last week’s primetime hearing was a powerful reminder of Jan. 6 itself, with previously unseen footage augmenting the compelling testimony of Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards. She described a scene of chaos she felt ill-equipped to handle, as it had become more war zone than crowd control.

Testimony by Edwards and British documentarian Nick Quested did nothing to establish a link between Trump and the various factions – Proud Boys and Oath Keepers – dedicated to disrupting the certification of the election. Still, Edwards’ and Quested’s words recalled the horror of those hours and the bravery of Capitol Police officers who fought to keep lawmakers, and indeed American democracy, safe.

Proof of a direct link between Trump and the far-right extremists in the months leading up to Jan. 6 still might be forthcoming. Or the former president might be insulated by enough layers of flunkies that a smoking gun can never be identified.

Regardless, what is already clear is that Trump did not call off supporters at the Capitol until hours after the attack began, and then halfheartedly and only after repeated urging of family members and friends.

Similarly clear is that in the days and weeks leading up to the attack, President Trump fed his supporters false hopes, innuendos and flat-out lies, as Monday morning’s hearing revealed in greater detail than we’ve heard previously. He was following, intentionally or not, Joseph Goebbels’ infamous observation about the efficacy of propaganda: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

On both the first and second day of the hearings, the committee presented the words of many of Trump’s closest advisors, who told the 45th president in no uncertain terms that he had lost the election and that his claims of fraud were not supported by evidence. Their accuracy was borne out by more than 60 legal defeats by Trump and his allies in the months following the November election.

Nevertheless, Trump persisted. He used false claims to dupe $255 million from his followers, allegedly to pay for recounts and court cases, but most of it squirreled away for unknown future purposes. Don the Con once again did what he does best.

Yet the biggest impact of the attempted insurrection might yet to be felt, as voters elect, or governors and legislatures appoint, secretaries of state and other officials who are comfortable certifying or decertifying election results at the behest of some future White House. We often hear about the “guardrails of democracy,” and many are being systematically dismantled or weakened at the state level.

For me, one of the biggest concerns is that we refer to the insurrection in the past tense, as a finite event now concluded. But it isn’t over.

Hearing so many people characterize the Jan. 6 committee’s efforts as a waste of resources is disheartening. Critics’ whataboutisms include the economy, soaring gasoline prices and border concerns.

But these issues aren’t mutually exclusive to the insurrection. It is possible to be concerned about the very real challenges the nation faces today and still want the truth about Jan. 6, 2021.

Because however bad things are now, they would be even worse with Trump in office, a statement that has nothing to do with the man’s policy decisions or leadership.

Rather, it’s because Trump would be an illegitimate president. His presence in the White House would mean the will of the people had been subverted, and American democracy had failed. That’s what the Jan. 6 committee is fighting. No witches need apply.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Red wagon

Originally published May or June 2009 in The Alliance Review.

As my wife and I were walking Sunday morning, we passed a young mother pulling her son in a wagon. Suddenly, he jumped out and raced through what was evidently his yard. “I’ll see you ’round back,” he shouted over his shoulder. Then he was gone.

It is as apt a metaphor for raising kids as I can think of. One moment you’re pulling the wagon, keeping one eye peeled for what’s ahead and the other on the precious cargo behind; the next, you’re staring down at the handle and the remnants of the dependence, wondering what happened, stunned at how quickly the change occurred.

The night before, my wife and I and a few family members and friends had been sitting around a picnic table in the dying light of a beautiful summer’s day, watching as our daughter opened high school graduation cards and gifts. I realized that a major part of our lives as parents was coming to an end. We’d navigated the stormy seas of adolescence: the first love and heartbreak, the academic and athletic successes and failures, the mood swings that took us up and down like yoyos. We’d survived the driver’s license and the dances, the sprained ankles and pulled ligaments, the auditions and ruminations and recriminations (whoever decided it was important for kids to know at age 18 how they will spend the rest of their lives was crazy) that go along with shepherding another life until he or she can start making intelligent decisions without you.

All those times when she and her friends would turn the front porch into a tent city with help from blankets and bed sheets, or we would hand out Popsicles or hot chocolate at the breakfast bar, or play backyard badminton until the grass was wet with dew and it was too dark to see the birdie – those times were gone, proof as always that the days and weeks go slow, but the months and years go fast.

And it occurred to me then that somewhere in the last year, our role had shifted from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side,” that while she might still come to us for advice and financial help, our days of pointing her in one direction and saying march – and with a headstrong young lady, I could count those days on one hand and have a few fingers left over, anyway – were up.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. I know parents who want to wind back the clock and keep their children forever young, dependent, and innocent. If I were like Peabody and his boy Sherman and had access to a Wayback Machine, I’d want to relive an hour or two every now and again, but I wouldn’t want to stay there.

For one thing, there are too many cool things coming up to spend too much time looking back. I don’t know what shape those things will take, whether they will be the traditional college graduation, wedding, and grandchildren, or if they’ll be more off the beaten track. Likely, there will be a few heartbreaks and unexpected detours (expected detours hardly qualify, do they?), because we forget that the Chinese expression “May you live in interesting times,” is really a curse. Nobody has a guarantee on anything other than this moment, right now, today, anyway, but I’m cautiously optimistic, because it doesn’t pay to be anything else.

“You know,” my mom said to me that Saturday night, “it wasn’t all that long ago that I was planning your graduation party, and now here I am again.”

Parenthood is like that, I guess. I talk to some people who are a little farther along the road and they tell me to wait until my daughter turns 21, or 30, or 50. And I know I won’t have long to wait, because I just blinked and went from 18 to 41, myself.

So my heart was full last Sunday when I saw the little guy jump from the wagon and make his break. I wondered if it would be the last time his mother would ever pull him in a wagon, and maybe she didn’t even realize it.

If I were the advice-giving kind, I would tell her to hop into the wagon herself and hold on tight. It’s the bumpiest, most wonderful ride in the world, and she’ll need all four wheels just to keep up.




Follow Chris Schillig on Facebook and Twitter, and e-mail him at cschillig@the-review.com.

By my butt she knew me

This column was originally published in October, 2010. Looking it over today, I realize it's somewhat politically incorrect, so Let the Reader Beware and all. 

I was involved in a strange situation a few weeks ago. There’s no delicate way to say this, so I’ll just lay it on the line: Somebody identified me by my butt.

I was jogging down the street, minding my own business – a euphemism for panting so profusely that I sounded like a caller to one of those 1-900 lines where customers talk to Puerto Rican honeys who are really 800-pound sumo wrestlers with effeminate voices – when a cyclist passed me from behind and commented, “I like your columns. I can relate.”

At first, I wasn’t sure if she was relating to my panting or my writing, but I eventually settled on the latter. It’s always nice to hear from a fan, so I wheezed something in response, maybe a thank you that sounded vaguely like “please call an ambulance” as she rolled off.

It was only later that I wondered how she knew who I was. To be honest, these days I don’t look much like the disembodied head that’s floating somewhere to the right of these words. That photo is more than a few years old, and the hair on top has gone the way of the mastodon and the saber-toothed tiger.

I wasn’t wearing anything that openly identified me, and I had never laid eyes on the cyclist before. Seeing as how she identified me from behind, all that’s left is my gluteus maximus. (Oddly, the spell check on Microsoft Word doesn’t like “maximus” and suggests a) “maximum us,” as in, “I don’t want to be alone anymore, baby, let’s have a relationship and make it about maximum us” – or b) “maximums,” as in “I’ve used all my credit cards to the maximums, dude.” Weird.

Anyway, by my butt she knew me.

This is worrisome for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that I want to be known for my mind and my opinions, not for something as shallow as how nice my rump looks as it bobs up and down inside sweat-soaked gym shorts, just below my middle-aged love handles and right above my spindly, hairy legs.

To make matters worse, more and more people have taken to commenting that they’ve seen me running. Granted, none of them has owned up to identifying me by my rump, but who would? Now that my anonymous cycling fan has planted the seed in my head, it’s sprouting weird butt roots in all my running conversations. In other words, I’m beginning to suspect that my behind is behind many of these public sightings.

I’ve become self-conscious as a result, and have taken to wearing sweatpants and longer hooded sweatshirts in the attempt to cover up what has become my defining feature.

Is this the hell of life as a super model, always known for one’s shapely curves and cute dimples? Oh, the toxicity of our modern, superficial society, when a pale, gangly guy like me is afraid to appear in public in running shorts, exposing his natural endowments to a world set on exploiting him.

How many clandestine pictures have been snapped without my knowledge? How many websites are devoted to exploiting my fanny? If I knew, I’d likely be appalled.

On second thought, why should I feel compelled to bury my assets beneath shapeless clothing? I’m not the one who should be embarrassed, forced to hide his light, such as it is, beneath a bushel basket. It’s everybody else who should be cowed by their unabashed staring, their reduction of my gifts to the lowest common denominator, their objectification of my masculinity, the likes of which the world hasn’t seen since Tiny Tim last tiptoed through the tulips, ukulele in hand.

Maybe my new philosophy of dress should be the same as my advice to those who would seek to exploit my derriere: Butt out.

Of course, that could stop traffic, and I don’t want to be responsible, so “butt in” is probably the safest course of action.

In search of the Yeti

This column originally ran on Oct. 24, 2013, but has new relevance with the announcement of Monster Fest in downtown Canton in 2023.

Lots of folks consider the end of the Congressional stalemate the biggest news story of last week, but I know better.

The really important news was the announcement that a British geneticist has matched alleged "Abominable Snowman" DNA to a polar-bear species that lived 40,000 years ago. Bryan Sykes of Oxford University is advancing a theory that modern Yeti sightings in the Himalayas may actually be unknown polar- and brown-bear hybrids.

This is where, if I had something worthwhile to add to Yeti/Bigfoot/Sasquatch lore, I'd say, "I don't know what it was I saw in the mountains that day back in 1987, but it sure as heck wasn't a polar bear."

Except that's never happened. I've never been to the Himalayas. Heck, I've barely been outside. I'm one of the lazy tourists that Edward Abbey wrote about in "Desert Solitaire" who experiences the outdoors from the air-conditioned comfort of a car. Any large, shaggy beasts would have to be visible from the road or the lodge, or they'd escape my notice.

Maybe that's because, as a child, I was traumatized by two books about Bigfoot. I still have "The Mysterious Monsters" by Robert and Frances Guenette, its orangish-yellow cover showing a drawing of a large hominid silhouetted in the light of a full moon. "Proof!" the cover intones. "There are giant creatures living at the edge of our civilization. Astounding new evidence and facts!"

Lost to time, however, is "Sasquatch" by John Napier.

Its cover had been thoroughly gummed by my baby sister, depositing her own DNA into the argument. "STARTLING EVIDENCE OF ANOTHER FORM OF LIFE ON EARTH NOW" it offered, along with the promise of eight pages of "revealing" photographs. (My memory isn't that good, but Google's is.)


The mind of a third-grader being extremely gullible, I accepted Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Yeti as fact, ignoring how most of the cited "experts" were good old boys whose cryptozoological encounters were accompanied by liberal applications of alcohol. The books made it seem like all these creatures were part of a big, extended family, lurking in woods, lakes and snow-capped mountain ranges around the world, getting together once a year — maybe on Christmas or Hanukkah — to swap fruitcakes and stories.

Frighteningly, the swingset in our backyard was located about 50 yards away from an immense woods. In retrospect, it was no more than a few dozen trees that abutted against the neighbors' properties, but at the time, it felt vast. Whenever I went out to play, I kept an eye on that woods, lest some hairy creature lumber out, searching for little boys for a between-meal snack.

The best offense being a good defense (or something like that), I practiced swinging as high as I could and then jumping off in the direction of the house, figuring those few seconds of air time would provide the advantage I needed to outrun a Bigfoot if he chose to attack.

At night, I lay in bed, my copy of "The Mysterious Monsters" opened to the pertinent section ("Exhibit A: The Long History of Bigfoot in America," pages 51-62), listening for the creatures' distinctive cries, wondering if they were smart enough to stand on one another's shoulders and peek through my bedroom window. Or maybe they were in cahoots with the vampires and werewolves I was convinced lurked out there, too.

Growing older, I relegated Bigfoot and his ilk to the Urban -- or, in this case, Rural -- Myth file, thinking about it only when I went into the woods (seldom) or played on a swingset (also rare).

But I'm still curious about the creatures and will click on any link that promises new evidence, even though it's all the same half-baked, rum-soaked conjectures dressed up for a new year.

Sykes' theory sounds more plausible, however. If it does turn out that something really has been terrorizing Himalayan climbers all these years, that would cool. But if it ends up being just a bear, even one as significant as a previously unknown breed, that would be too bad.

Without a little mystery, all we'd have left in the daily news is Congress, and they're a far less interesting breed of Mysterious Monsters.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

cschillig at Twitter

Please don't give teachers guns

In the wake of the Uvalde tragedy, an old idea has gained new currency: Arming teachers.

For Americans seduced by the rhetoric that “all it takes to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” giving teachers firearms makes sense. Potential shooters would take into consideration that a certain percentage of the faculty and staff are carrying and would think twice before targeting a school.

If an attacker did get inside — and mistakes in Uvalde (a door propped open, a complete breakdown of the police command structure) show how easily it can happen and how much carnage can result — then kids and teachers would not be sitting ducks. The teacher could transition from long division or phonics into law-enforcement mode and take out the intruder, to the cheers of her pupils.

But despite the comforting emotional resonance of such a scenario, giving teachers guns is a bad idea. Here’s why.

First of all, it puts more guns in schools. And if the proliferation of firearms in this country has demonstrated anything, it’s that where there are guns, there is a bigger temptation to use and misuse them. Handgun owners are much more likely to die from suicide by gun (men are eight times more likely, women are 35 times more likely), according to a Stanford research study. Accidental shootings are much more likely to happen in households with guns than in those without them.

It stands to reason, then, that the more staff members with guns, the more chances that somebody will get hurt. At the end of 2021, the Giffords Law Center released an updated report of gun accidents in schools. It included a teacher in California who mistakenly discharged his gun while teaching a class about gun safety; three students were injured, including one with ricocheted bullet fragments in his neck.

Most of the cases, based on a quick perusal, involve teachers, resource officers and visitors accidentally leaving weapons unattended, often in school restrooms. Prosaic, everyday stuff caused by complacency, but potential tragedies in the making.

Secondly, the risks involved would not be shared equally across the school population. Students of color are disciplined more often and more harshly than their European-American peers in many schools. Imagine the fear and anxiety for these black and brown students if they attended campuses where their teachers – 72% of whom, nationally, are white – carry weapons in the classroom. Given concerns about systemic racism, would these students be more likely than their peers to have weapons drawn against them when a discipline situation escalates?

Training is also an issue. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine supports a bill passed by the Ohio House last year that would lessen training requirements for teachers whose districts allow them to carry in the classroom.

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that Ohio teachers who are allowed to carry must complete the same training as the state’s peace officers. DeWine’s – and the bill’s – intent is to relax that standard to the same training provided to a security guard (along with “local” coursework, whatever that means).*

The accuracy of even highly trained police officers suffers in real-life situations, where they hit their targets anywhere from 30% to 50% of the time. Imagine how much worse that could be for teachers, especially in a high-pressure situation involving a classroom shooter and cowering kids, against somebody who may be a former or current student, somebody with whom they have an educational and emotional investment.

It’s that last part that is – for this full-time classroom teacher at least – one of the biggest reasons not to arm educators. Carrying a gun is inimical to a main tenet of education, which is to model compassion, civility and reasoned debate. I don’t want to carry a gun in school, and I don’t want to worry about teaching alongside somebody who is.

Maybe I’m just resentful to live in a society where, for the benefit of some people’s hobby, the rest of us have to adopt military terms like “hardening” when discussing our public spaces, practice cowering in corners and under desks, and have deep discussions about which books are the best to throw at an intruder.

The solution cannot simply be “more guns.” That’s a non-answer that benefits only gun and ammunition manufacturers and a small minority of Americans willing to sacrifice the rest of us on the altar of their John Wayne fever dreams.

* – Incidentally, in what is surely a nominee for Worst Timing Ever, Ohio in mid-June will become the latest state to allow residents over the age of 21 to carry concealed weapons without a permit.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

A good neighbor should support the neighborhood

Like a good neighbor, State Farm wanted to make everybody in the community feel welcome.

The insurance giant began a program recently to donate three specific books about LGBTQ+ to school libraries, teachers and community centers. The company’s corporate responsibility analyst, Jose Soto, had hoped to “highlight [the company’s] commitment to diversity,” not ignite a firestorm of controversy.

But a conflagration is what ensued after a whistleblower leaked the correspondence, which sought five agents in Florida to distribute the books and referenced a wider effort to recruit agents and volunteers nationwide to do the same.

Not surprisingly, some conservative quarters seized on the opportunity to characterize the initiative, a partnership with the non-profit GenderCool Project, as an attempt to “indoctrinate” 5-year-olds. This, despite many counselors’ opinion that talking to kids about sexuality in an age-appropriate way often begins in the lower-elementary grades. Consumers’ Research, the organization that first shared the whistleblower’s leak, even called the insurance company “a creepy neighbor.”

Because of the backlash, State Farm announced this week that it is no longer supporting the GenderCool initiative.

It is instructive to dig beneath the name-calling and corporate-speak and see just how scandalous these three books are – or aren’t.

The volumes are “A Kids Book About Being Transgender,” “A Kids Book About Being Inclusive,” and “A Kids Book About Being Non-Binary.” Each contains a note: “This book is best read together, grownup and kid.”

The “Kids Book About” series has dozens of titles dealing with topics as diverse as adoption, money, cancer and technology. They appear to be general introductions to issues that many youngsters know little about.

The book about transgender features this two-page exchange: “So one night I wrote a note to my parents telling them who I was and slipped it under their bedroom door. After they read it, they walked out, pulled me into a hug, and told me they believed me and that they loved me.” That’s far from indoctrination; it’s much more about acceptance.

Addressing an issue isn’t the same as endorsing it. And having a book in a library or classroom that deals with being transgender or non-binary isn’t going to compel a child to embrace these identities, any more than the hundreds or thousands of depictions of traditional gender roles and heterosexual relationships in other books, television shows, cartoons and movies aren’t enough to make LGBTQ+ kids “go straight.”

Here’s a brutal statistic: Forty-five percent of LGBTQ youth responding to a national Trevor Project survey seriously pondered suicide in the past year. This is more than twice as high as suicidal ideations among the general population of teens.

However, from the same survey, LGBTQ youth who “felt high social support from their family reported attempting suicide at less than half the rate of those who felt low or moderate social support.” Lower rates of attempted suicides were also reported by LGBTQ youth in schools that affirmed their identities.

What’s the best way to get families and peers to affirm these kids? Understanding. What’s the best way to develop understanding? Education. What’s one of the best ways to educate? Reading.

Ergo, when schools and communities remove books that recognize the mere existence of LGBTQ youth, they are in effect removing one of the most effective ways to help these youth successfully navigate an often tumultuous path and to help others in the community understand them. These decisions make kids believe that they are alone. That something is wrong with them. That they are less than.

Kudos to State Farm for trying to reach out, but shame on the company for backpedaling in the presence of misguided traditionalists who want to restrict information, remove literary lifelines and shove particular demographics back into the closet.

These wrongheaded actions could quite possibly be killing our kids.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Still introverted after all these years

This column originally ran in early February 2012. The Time magazine article is still available (see link below), but the accompanying quiz no longer works. Not surprisingly, I'm still an introvert, as a recent quasi-panic attack reminded me. 

“The Upside of Being an Introvert” in the Feb. 6 Time magazine was a come-to-Jesus moment for me.

The article by Bryan Walsh begins with the author’s story of hiding in the bathroom of the American Embassy in Tokyo, where he works up courage to later mingle with the powerful elite at a holiday party. It proceeds to explain how introverted people, often labelled (sometimes erroneously) as “shy,” are a product of both nature and nurture. In other words, their disposition toward large crowds is determined by genetics and environment.

I nodded my head in recognition so often while reading Walsh’s piece that I reminded myself of one of those dunking-bird toys that perpetually dips beak into water before swinging up again, propelled by a liquid counterweight in its bottom. When Walsh describes the exhaustion that introverted people often feel at social gatherings, I bobbed my head in agreement. When he talks about the introvert’s preference for working alone, I nodded again. When he noted that “introvert” need not be a synonym for “shy,” I was practically salaaming before the magazine and shouting “Amen,” despite the religious mixed metaphor, because it so perfectly dovetailed with my personality.

I answered yes to 19 out of 20 questions on an accompanying quiz, agreeing emphatically with statements such as, “I prefer not to show my work or discuss it with others until it is finished,” “I dislike conflict” and “If I had to choose, I’d prefer a weekend with absolutely nothing to do to one with too many things scheduled.” Along the introvert/extrovert continuum, I’m siding with the quiet folks.

The only statement that drew a “No” is this: “People describe me as soft-spoken or mellow.” And that, in perpetuity, has been the crux of my inner personality debate.

People who know me from my schooldays would likely remember me as a clown, if they remember me at all. I fancied myself the wiseacre in the back of the room, king of the quick quip or double-entendre, the guy who knew just how far to push without angering an instructor. “Shy” and “introverted” probably aren’t the first adjectives that come to mind, for instance, when people recall my humiliating performance as Quasimodo during a report for a book I didn’t read. (I moaned like an animal for two minutes, pretending I was the hunchback being whipped by the evil Claude Frollo.)

Yet outside of classroom situations that were my comfort zone, I was -- and am -- painfully introverted. I never attended a school dance. I never tried out for a sports team. I have never directly asked anybody out on a date. (My wife asked me.) My sales career ended when I found it too painful to continue risking daily rejection by strangers, when I literally could not cold-call anymore.

To this day, I feel anxiety when entering wedding receptions, calling hours, or speaking in a crowd. Rarely do I make a telephone call where I wouldn’t rather hang up before it is answered. If I can email or text instead, I do.

Oddly enough, however, I make my living as a teacher, standing in front of a room of strangers every August and hoping that my knocking knees and shaking hands aren’t too obvious. Each day, I attempt to win over students with corny jokes, a toothy grin and a carnival barker’s persona. If I’m overly tired, these tools fail me, and all I’m left with is the Real Me, who’d much rather sit in the back of the room and pretend to listen while hiding a Mad Magazine inside my textbook.

By the time Friday rolls around, all this extroversion leaves me with just enough energy to crawl back into my cave, pull shut the front door and hide inside a book or a movie with some take-out food before I pull on my extrovert’s mask again on Monday.

Even this split-personality, which for most of my adult life I have considered patently bizarre, is explained by Walsh’s article. Brian Little, a Harvard lecturer and researcher, calls it the Free Trait Theory, which Walsh defines as “the idea that while we have certain fixed bits of personality, we can act out of character in the service of core personal goals.”

For me, that personal goal is making people laugh. I was good at it in the back of the room, I fancy myself as competent at it here in print, and I like to think I’ve developed a penchant for it in front of people, as well.

Because I firmly believe that when people are laughing, with me or at me, they are more open to new opportunities and ideas. That they learn better. And teaching, while I would prefer to do it in the privacy of my own home and from behind the safe anonymity of a computer screen, is a noble-enough calling to force me outside my comfort zone.

It’s what keeps me from living inside my shell 24/7 like a hermit crab and sends me out into the world each morning, mingling when I’d rather be retreating and speaking when I’d rather be listening.

At least now I know why.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com or @cschillig on Twitter

Reading aloud

This is a very old column, probably from fifteen years ago. My wife and I resurrected the reading-together habit during the COVID lockdown and continue it today. 

For the last few years, my wife and I have been reading aloud together.

This may seem an unusual twenty-first-century pastime, but it has an honorable pedigree. Before television sucked away society’s soul, books were a primary form of entertainment. What better way to experience them than around crackling fire (or, today, under an electric blanket), bringing a writer’s words to life via voice?

Our modern reading odyssey began with an author apt for Halloween: Stephen King. In the foreword to Part 1 of his 1996 serial novel, “The Green Mile,” King tells how he, his brother, and his mother would take turns reading stories aloud from The Saturday Evening Post.

“It was a rare chance to enjoy a written work as we enjoyed the movies we went to and the TV programs (Rawhide, Bonanza, Route 66) that we watched together; they were a family event,” he writes. He then urges readers to share “The Green Mile” as a read-aloud with a friend.

My wife and I took him up on that, reading each monthly installment and agonizing over the weeks between. When it was over, we were read-aloud addicts.

In the last ten years, we have plowed through dozens of books. Sometimes, our work schedules and outside commitments conflict, and we do not read together for weeks or even months.

However, when a book is compelling enough, we always make time, reading late into the night or early on weekend mornings (weekday mornings are always too hectic) until we reach the final page.

Most of our selections are novels, including many by King and suspense maestro Richard Matheson. For a while, when Matheson’s works had found renewed interest in Hollywood, we battled to stay ahead of the local cinema with “Stir of Echoes” and “What Dreams May Come.” (Both books are better.)

We read Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” but stalled on its precursor, “Angels and Demons” (too similar). We loved Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” told from the point of view of a young man with Asperger’s Disorder, even though the singular way Haddon tells the story – with many pictures and diagrams – made it a challenge to read aloud.

Sometimes, a book fails to catch our attention, at least collectively. We started “Cold Mountain” together, but I finished solo. Holly slogged on to the end of Billie Letts’ “Where the Heart Is” after my interest flagged.

We have tried a few short story collections. Ray Bradbury is a proven winner, especially his early work, like “Small Assassin” and “The Jar,” both recommended for Halloween. Anthologies, by their nature, are more of a mixed bag, and we seldom read one straight through.

In non-fiction, we have read and enjoyed Nathaniel Philbrick’s “In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex,” an excellent account of an incident that may have inspired Herman Melville to write that whale of a novel, “Moby Dick.” We were three chapters into James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” when the author was publicly shamed for making large parts of it up, and we lost all interest.

Currently, we are enjoying a novel very appropriate for this spooky season, “Creepers” by David Morrell. It tells the story of a group of urban explorers – people who break into abandoned buildings to chronicle the history left behind – and what happens when they discover more than they bargained for in a singular New Jersey hotel.

Like all of Morrell’s books, the author researches his topic meticulously, dropping specific references to methods and tools of urban exploration to create verisimilitude, so that when the inevitable weirdness begins, readers accept it without hesitation.

And, in an odd case of coincidence or synchronicity, one of the writers to whom Morrell dedicates his book is Matheson, another of our read-aloud regulars, whose “Hell House” bears certain thematic similarities. Morrell was also inspired to become a writer after watching “Route 66,” one of the shows King mentions in the “The Green Mile” foreword that started my wife and me on our read-aloud journey.

Those tempted to hum the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” have my permission.

And anybody curious about the read-aloud experience should start with “Creepers” or one of the other titles given thumbs up here. The process is low tech, requires little or no electricity, and beats most anything on TV these days.

A crackling fire is optional but recommended.