T. Buckingham Thomas Archive 2025 August

Among the many peculiarities of the English language is the fact that despite similar spelling, the words “cone” and “done” do not rhyme. The vowels are oh and uh.

But merge those words into “condone,” and the vowels magically switch to uh and oh. Uh-oh!

I was watching a telecast of Formula 1 racing. Silverstone, the home of the British Grand Prix earlier in the season, was mentioned several times. Most of the announcers pronounced it with a long o. However, the host of the Sky Sports pre-race show — excuse me, the presenter of the Sky Sports buildup — called it “Silverstun.” How very British.

That sounds strange to me. Every time.

INCIDENTAL UPDATE, AUGUST 31: During today's televised buildup for the Grand Prix at Zandvoort, I noticed a good-sized white van parked in the background. On it was painted the bold slogan HIER PAST MEER IN DAN EEN PICNIC. Naturally, that demanded a little research.

It turns out that there's a European company called Picnic that uses a fleet of compact electric vans like the one at the left to deliver groceries to homes.

Probably the larger white van belongs to a fancy caterer, because its cheeky Dutch slogan translates to IN HERE, MORE FITS THAN JUST A PICNIC.

Now I think I understand.

In the late summer of 1962, Richwood High School’s football players practiced in the morning behind the grade school. Classes hadn’t started yet; the Richwood Fair ran through Labor Day, and school always reopened the day after.

Over at Memorial Field, the custodians had fired up the tractor and mowed the grass. As a team manager, I was assigned to rake up the clippings. Someone took my picture near the visitors’ sideline.

Notice my short hairstyle. I used to visit the local barber shop fairly frequently. Nowadays it’s at least two months between my haircuts. Also nowadays, schools open in August.

There’s a story in the local paper almost every day about another school’s prospects as it wraps up its scrimmage games and training camp, preparing to open the season. I often find myself reading such articles without being completely up to date on the personalities involved.

This Monday, there was such an article labeled “Duquesne.” Duquesne is a local university that as recently as 1992 played lowly Division III football, though they’re now in the Division I Football Championship Subdivision. [UPDATE: They'll play Pitt at noon on August 30, 2025.]

I guessed this Ferry person might be the Duquesne football coach. I’ve heard his name before.

I wondered how they’d managed to find four Irish teams that knew how to play American football.

That’s a lot of touchdowns for a defense to allow. And for some reason, they seem to be proud of it.

Aha! That changes everything! A sharpshooting guard doesn’t play football. No rifles are permitted on the offensive line. A sharpshooting guard might be a member of the security detail or the basketball team. That suggests Ferry is probably a basketball coach, and because “Micah” sounds like a boy’s name, Ferry must be the men’s basketball coach.

Now I understand — though I still wonder why the article couldn’t specify the sport up front, and why a team would fly across the Atlantic to practice hoops in August.

AUGUST 25, 2025
THE OTHER MURAL

Gail DeGood-Guy's father Tommy DeGood once worked at my father's auto dealership in Richwood, Ohio.

She points out that my former hometown boasts not only a new mural at the bank but another one, added last year at the entrance to the kid-friendly park at Richwood Lake.

Here's a closer look at parts of it.

No, vengeance was mine, claims The Murderous Cypriot Communist in Brother Billy's latest Bible-based interview.

Sprouting from a crack in the sidewalk next to my apartment, a lowly weed has reached unprecedented heights. Why did it grow so tall?

Back in 1979, I described an article I’d read about the seemingly intelligent behavior of certain jungle vines in Costa Rica. I think something similar is taking place in my own back yard.

My young weed looked around and saw the dark vertical bars of the metal railing only inches away. It reacted as though those were rival plants. It would have to become tall to outreach them for the light, so it quickly grew long stem segments with only one leaf apiece, dozens of them. It grew straight up, and it grew and grew until it had reached a height of three feet, taller than the competition. Only then did it bend to the right toward the sun and begin producing buds.

Would you know enough to optimize your growth like this?

Who says animals are smarter than plants?

Speaking of biology, associate professor PZ Myers is a biologist way up in Minnesota. He had a high school experience not unlike mine, according to his blog from August 16:

I attended my 40 year high school reunion last night. It was interesting and strange. But mostly pleasant. I know many people have horrible memories of their school years, and all too often public schools are nightmarish mills of cliques and bullying and ugly social oppression, but I was lucky. I was the wimpy nerd, I would have been the easy target for bullying, but it didn’t really happen, and I had friends among all the little petty in-groups — the jocks, the cheerleaders, the stoners, the AV weirdos, everyone — and they were always pretty porous and accepting. Dang it, I don’t have any good horror stories to tell from those years! I went through high school without getting beat up (which, I know, is a low bar to set, but still...) I think the thing is my high school class was generally just a decent group of people. I was lucky that way.

AUGUST 17, 2025 FAMILY

As patriarchs and matriarchs age and pass away, who keeps the family traditions together with reunions and Thanksgiving dinners? Cousins!

That was the case when I took some photos of my mother's side of the family in the late 1960s.

The collection is this month's 100 Moons article.

The anniversary of the Woodstock music festival rolled around again this weekend, which reminds me again of Melanie Safka. [She passed away in 2024.]

I wrote about her in 2008 and again in 2009. She looked like this later, but in 1969, she was there on stage, in the rain, singing.

Afterwards she recalled:

I’m still finding out more about Melanie. I recommend this performance of Gary White’s sad ballad, rawer and more evocative than Linda Ronstadt’s 1970 hit. And I also recommend this remarkable 2015 duet with a current music star. “C’est la seule chose que je peux faire.”

When my song becomes a part of the river,
I cry out to keep me just the way I am.

Will our blood become a part of the river?
All of the rivers
     are givers
          to the ocean
according to plan, according to man.

There's a chance
    peace will come
        in your life.

Please buy one.

My pastor from the 1960s, John C. Wagner, has passed away at the age of 84. The funeral is tomorrow in Delaware, Ohio.

“It was partly because of his suggestion that I went to Oberlin College,” I recalled to his son John Jr. this week, “and it was partly because of his example that I adopted Oberlin’s attitudes of peace and inclusiveness towards all humanity.”

What I haven’t described here was his paralysis. He was 14 years old when he contracted polio in 1945, yet he continued to smile while getting around with crutches. By 1955, he was married (to Miriam, seen here in Richwood) and had a B.D. from Yale Divinity School. He later earned a Ph.D. from Ohio State and studied at the Sorbonne and two other institutions.

I learned these details from his obituary, which continues, “As a young pastor, he asked to be appointed to ‘a small church in a small town where I could learn to be a minister.’ He served United Methodist congregations in Green Camp and Richwood, Ohio.” He was in Richwood from 1961 to 1965, when I was in high school and he was in his early thirties.

After leaving Richwood, Rev. Wagner left the pulpit. He was on the United Methodist Church conference staff and then served as an administrator and professor at United Theological Seminary before retiring at the age of 65.

According to the obituary, “In retirement, he continued teaching at the Church of the Messiah in Westerville and the Methodist Theological School in Ohio. He was a wise, brave and compassionate man who took genuine risks for social justice. Against the wishes of his bishop and superintendent, he protested the segregation of churches in Mississippi in 1963, and the Columbus Athletic Club. He demonstrated against the wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Iraq, and was an advocate for the full inclusion of all persons and perspectives in the UMC. Deeply Christian, he cherished his relationships with people of all faiths. He was intuitively kind.

“Polio kept taking its toll on his muscles, his mobility, and finally, his breathing, but he never wavered in using his voice for love, justice, wry wit, and endless puns.” A few years ago Yale reported, “Since 2000 he has used an electric wheelchair and scooter. With Miriam's help John gets around very well and hasn’t hit anybody.” The obituary notes, “John leaves behind Miriam, his wife of 62 years, who made his long life and ministry possible.”

AUGUST 11, 2025 THE SIGN FOR NO

Human:
No, Milo! Stop that!

Dog:
Why are you shaking your head from side to side, human?

Human:
That's the universal sign for disapproval. You taught me that.

Dog:
I did?

Human:
Last week, I offered you scraps of food. You eagerly accepted meat or cheese, but when I held up a broccoli floret, you growled and emphatically turned your head away. Then you looked back, noted that I was still holding a vegetable, and repeated the motion.

Dog:
I am not a vegetarian! But I am proud to have taught you a gesture.

I described in this article how, as a high school student, I experienced the sudden termination of the John F. Kennedy era in 1963.

The next Presidency, that of Lyndon Johnson, ended when LBJ announced he would not be a candidate for re-election.

I was on a brief break from college and was at home with my parents that Sunday night, March 31, 1968. We watched the President’s televised Oval Office speech. For more than half an hour he discussed the ongoing Vietnam War. Eventually he turned to America’s increasing doubts about what we were doing there.

In other words, I realized, Johnson doesn’t want to get entangled in the upcoming Presidential campaign. He’s not going to run for re-election. But it took him another half minute to get around to saying it.

It was this last sentence that apparently shocked everybody, but not those of us who were still paying attention after 40 minutes. We could see it coming.

Like most people, I had been annoyed by the occasional news reports casting suspicion on the leader of the free world following a relatively unimportant 1972 burglary at the Watergate. You can listen here to a caller on our morning show in 1973. Author Rick Perlstein explained, “People want to trust the king. People don’t want to believe this about their President.” But eventually the revelations forced us to believe it, and Nixon had to quit.

On Thursday, August 8, 1974 — 41 years ago today — it was announced that the President would be addressing the nation at nine o’clock that night. They didn’t say he would be resigning, but everybody knew it. In Washington, Pennsylvania, that afternoon, our TV3 crew was taping a Bronco League baseball game for a delayed cablecast starting at eight PM. We decided that when nine o’clock rolled around, anybody watching our game would be switching channels to see Nixon quit. Therefore, we might as well interrupt the baseball playback and put him on our channel as well.

As we recorded the game at Washington Park’s Bronco Field, during the first hour sportscaster Larry Schwingel explained to the viewers that they could stay with us and not miss the historic speech nor any of the ball game. That night during playback, Tim Verderber was at the controls. The game was playing on a U-Matic videocassette recorder which had audio/video inputs but also an RF tuner. We set the tuner to Channel 11. I was monitoring NBC on another TV set in the back of the control room. When NBC switched to the White House at 9:01, I cued Tim. He waited a second, maybe to let Larry finish a sentence, and then pressed the Stop button. The VCR’s output switched from tape playback to tuner input, and Nixon was on TV3 — as well as virtually all the other eleven channels of our cable system. When he finished 15 minutes later, Tim merely pressed Play again, and the baseball game resumed.

When I was a young TV graphics operator, sports networks changed their “look” every year to suggest freshness and excitement: a different font, a different background, a different logo treatment. Often, when I reported to a game and received the current software on an 8” floppy disk, it was labeled “new look.” But if that disk was still around a year later, the label would be out of date. I thought it ought to be more specific, like “1995 look.” But what did I know?

When I was even younger, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing competed using actual stock cars, supposedly purchased from a dealer's stock right off the showroom floor. Well, obviously these vehicles did have modifications like tape over the headlights and seat belts and fancy paint jobs, but they were recognizably Fords or Chevys or Plymouths — or Studebakers like this one.

Gradually the “stock” pretense was dropped. Instead, NASCAR required all entrants to use a standard specification, thereby containing costs while maintaining competitiveness. By 2021 this blueprint was called Generation 6. In 2022, Generation 7 was introduced, with improved aero and downforce packages. Gearheads still call this the Next Gen racecar.

Now in 2025, planning for Generation 8 is in its initial stages. Steve O'Donnell, NASCAR's Chief Operating Officer, has revealed a few key focus areas such as the incorporation of environmentally friendly fuels, but he added that “We're working on everything.”

If this is going to be the successor to the Next Gen, what's it going to be called?

AUGUST 2, 2015
LATE-NIGHT SHUFFLES

In the late 1980s, I watched It's Garry Shandling's Show on Showtime. From this rather offbeat comedy series, I remember one episode in particular which aired live on November 8, 1988 — the night of the presidential election.

Other channels were declaring Republican George H.W. Bush the landslide winner, as shown on this map.

But Garry was presenting his own returns on his own hand-drawn charts, which somehow favored his candidate, Michael Dukakis. Soul Train host Don Cornelius came on to announce that the Democrat had won.

About 24 minutes into the half-hour, in an accident of timing, back in Boston the actual Dukakis appeared at a hotel to concede. Garry knelt in front of the TV monitor showing the live speech and ad-libbed an anguished plea to his “winning” candidate not to give up.

Then in the next decade, Garry starred on HBO'S The Larry Sanders Show. As the beleagured host of a late-night talk show, Larry often worried that his network was considering hiring someone else to take his place. Hey now!

The “someone else,” Larry’s potential successor, kept showing up at the studio with occasional cameos from 1996 to 1998. I don’t think I’d ever heard of this guest star. Because he was playing himself rather straight in those six episodes, he did little to impress me.

I’ve since learned, however, that in real life the guest star actually was a finalist to replace more than one late-night host: David Letterman in 1993 and Tom Snyder in 1999. He did in fact replace Arsenio Hall in 1994.