Requiem For A Goose

Mr. (Goosey) Goose 1999-2018. The picture on the left is from when I first met him on July 20, 2014 and the one on the right when I last saw him on December 31, 2017.

  A few years back there were a few days during each year that I would take a few days off from work and stay home with Daisy and Baxter while Kathy would drive Ben and his belongings to his school in Idaho. Normally my dog walking routine is pretty structured but during these stay home days I would walk Daisy and Baxter through the alleys to sniff different areas while I would check out the backyards in the neighborhood. I would also take them 4 blocks north to Riverside Cemetery. The cemetery is on a huge stretch of property with a river in the back with lots of trees and right by the entrance is a large pond with geese, ducks, and a single swan. Daisy and Baxter loved meandering along the paths and I liked checking out all the different birds that would congregate at the pond.

  On July 20th, 2014 I took the beagles to the cemetery and there was a big group of people at one end. I recognized one member of the group as Levi, a high school friend of Matt’s. I stopped to say hi and Levi told me that his family was there to bring their pet goose to the pond to live. The goose had lived his entire life (13 or 14 years) at the acreage where Levi’s family lived with his mother but when the goose’s mother died he was very lonely so they were going to bring him to the cemetery where would be plenty of geese and people to hang out with. The goose’s name was Mr. Goose and while Levi and his family were gathered to say good bye to him and make sure he would be OK at the pond.

  I had been posting pictures of Daisy and Baxter, and the rest of the animals on Facebook since early 2011. I originally posted puppy pictures but Kathy’s family wanted to see how the beagles were getting on each week so I made taking and posting the pictures part of my weekly routines. Now that I actually knew one of the geese at the pond I talked Kathy into taking the beagles there on our Sunday morning walks and took pictures of Mr. Goose and the rest of the birds each week. Kathy would bring some bread to feed the animals and I would take pictures.

Mr. Goose was pretty sociable with the non-Canadian geese. Here are his crowds from 2015 and 2017.

  At the beginning of Mr. Goose’s stay in the cemetery pond we would find him apart from all the other birds but with a couple of months he gravitated towards the two other non-Canadian geese – a grey goose and a brown goose with an orange bulb on his beak. There are a number of people that stop by the pond to leave buckets of corn or feed bread to the birds. The winters could be rough but the cemetery staff always had a patch of the pond heated enough for some swimming room and there seemed to be enough food to go around if not enough to keep them from turning their nose at the bread Kathy would bring on Sundays. Mr. Goose seemed much older than the rest of the crew and preferred to stay out of the water but he was a personable sort that come up to you and squawk in order to get some bread and attention.

  We used to take our kids to the duck pond for some exercise and cheap entertainment but you notice more things when you go every single week for a few years. For the first couple of years there were three white ducks and a wood duck with a fluffy head as regulars along with the geese, swan, and the rest of the wood ducks. One year one of the white ducks was gone and the next year the fluffy headed duck was gone as well. The grey goose disappeared but was replaced by two more white geese that looked like streamlined versions of Mr. Goose. The grey goose disappeared one spring and then this past summer all the wood ducks and white ducks disappeared all in one weekend. The pond looked pretty bare without any wood ducks but within two weeks an entire new group of wood ducks had made their way to the pond. And every spring this Canadian goose with a crooked neck shows up with a group of baby geese that we would see grow bigger and bigger every year.

The birds at the duck pond come and go. The fluffy headed duck, brown and white duck, and the 3 white ducks were my favorites to look at but all disappeared in the past couple of years....

  And through this all was Mr. Goose who was slowing down with age and swung one leg awkwardly when he walked but had also become a local celebrity. He made the front page of the Marshalltown paper in 2015 (where I found his name was Mr. Goosey Goose) with the news that Levi’s mom is writing a children’s book about his life and times. Mr. Goose was also in the paper this year. One of Mr. Goose’s white goose pals had passed away from cancer and Mr. Goose was so despondent the cemetery was looking for a companion for Mr. Goose.

  This past week has been bitterly cold with the temperatures barely getting to zero. On Sunday, Kathy and I didn’t even walk to the pond – we drove Daisy and Baxter the four blocks. The pond was almost completely frozen. I took some pictures and Mr. Goose looked miserable. He was huddled in a ball and had that unkempt manner that has become all too familiar to me in seeing more pets than I care to remember in their last days. I thought he was dead but he perked up when Kathy threw some bread his way and grabbed as much as he could reach without getting up. Kathy and I both remarked how off Mr. Goose looked and hoped that it was just the cold weather and he would perk up soon.

  I got the news from Levi via Facebook that Mr. Goose has passed away on Tuesday. The cemetery called Levi’s mom and he has already had his funeral. It is sad to know I’ll never see Mr. Goose at the cemetery again but I was happy to have made his acquaintance. The only problem I had with Mr. Goose is the same problem I have with most animals I get to know – they just don’t live long enough. I’ve been through this with more animals than I care to think about and it is never fun to watch what are pretty innocent creatures get frail and die. I’m reminded of this daily when I see an older picture of Daisy and Baxter with their dark brown and black fur and compare to their ever-whitening faces. I guess the best we can do for the animals we care about is to try to make their lives as great as possible. That is certainly the kind of life Mr. Goose had by being brought to the Cemetery’s pond after his mom passed away. He had companionship and plenty of people came by to feed him. I’m not sure a goose or any other animal can have it better.

Rest In Peace Mr. Goose. I hope you enjoyed your life and have an even better afterlife.

In Comfort

  Three weeks ago I wrote how I went to see the ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Movie’ with my neighbor Don on the day after Christmas. Don has lived in the house next to our garage as long as we lived there. Don worked 4 blocks away at the hospital cleaning up and bringing hospital stuff to the incinerator. He would come over the house for Thanksgiving, Easter, and Christmas dinners when he wasn’t visiting his other relatives. When Don retired he drove his car (a 2001 Cavalier) in town until he had an accident and lost his license. After that Kathy took Don to the grocery store with her on Mondays and I would occasionally give him a ride if he needed to get drugs at the drug store or run some other errand.

  Last week Kathy couldn’t take Don to the grocery store on Monday because the kids were heading back to school from their winter breaks and she was going to spend all day driving 110 mile round trips to the airport. She called Don’s cell phone and left a message that she would be going grocery shopping on Tuesday. This was not an unusual occurrence and Don would call if he was out of eggs (Don would eat 4 eggs for breakfast every day) and we would pick up what he was out of.

  On Tuesday Kathy went to the garage to go grocery shopping and Don wasn’t waiting by his back door. Kathy went to Don’s back door and knocked but there was no answer. She opened the door and called Don and found him face down on his bathroom floor. Don has passed away sometime over the weekend. Kathy called the police and Don’s nephew to let them know. We looked for the next couple of days for the obituary to be in the paper and finally there it was and the first sentence was:

  Donald “Don” Hornberg, 84, of Marshalltown, Iowa, passed away on Tuesday, January 10, 2017, in the comfort of his own home.

  Well, there you have it! Someone found dead on their bathroom floor actually ‘passed away…in the comfort of their own home’. I was never in Don’s house but I have to think he had more comfortable furniture than his bathroom floor. I read the rest of the obituary (and you can too by clicking here) but had a hard time getting past the fact that if the very first sentence was hardly the truth how much of the rest of the obituary could be believed. So since I have had way too much experience in writing obituaries this past year I thought I’d write what I knew about Don and at least it would be the truth.

  Don never married or had kids and lived in a rundown house next to mine for the last 30 or so years. As I mentioned Don worked in the sanitation department of the local hospital for many years. He liked working there and would tell me that how well he was treated by the big shots at the hospital and when he got sick the doctors would give him sample medications to save him the expense of buying it himself. I have been sorely tempted to make the hospital a source of ridicule in the Broken Pawn. They spent a fortune to rebrand themselves from the Marshalltown Medical & Surgical Center (a name that makes it readily apparent where you are and what you do) to the ambiguous Central Iowa Healthcare. Then they spent $35 million on 'Phase 1' of a new facility on the south side of town two years ago. All this spending led to bad press when the emergency room doctors quit because they weren’t being paid. Eventually the CEO had to resign and the hospital recently filed for bankruptcy. And this is a non-profit hospital! But I never trained my sights on this hospital because of Don’s stories about how well he was treated.

  Don’s main passion was pop culture. He loved movies, country music, and coins. He was the first person on the block to have a satellite dish and he subscribed to 5 HBO channels so he would be sure not to miss any of their featured films. He recorded movies on tapes and later DVD’s and would order collections of his favorite television shows. His favorite show was ‘Smallville’ but he enjoyed all the superhero shows like ‘Agents of Shield’ and when a new superhero movie came out would go to see it with us or by himself. Don was an avid coin collector and would get the mint set of each year’s coins. He had a few silver and gold coins but didn’t talk too much about them. Every couple of Christmases he would get our kids a set of mint coins for the current year. Collectibles never seem to be worth what the owner thinks they are so I don't know how much Don's coin collection was worth except it was worth a lot to him. A lot of single guys who never get married end up with a lot more money than anyone would ever expect. I doubt Don was one of those guys although it wouldn’t surprise me either. One thing I’m sure of is that I’ll never know.

  Don never owned a computer or used the Internet. I don't know whether that was a blessing or a curse. He may have become a big time trader in movies, coins, and records. Or he may have become a spending addict buying all kinds of things on the web that he couldn't afford and didn't need. Don had a small town attitude but was pretty sophisticated about coins and collectibles so I tend to think he would have tended to the former but it remains yet another thing I'll ever know.

  Another thing Don was passionate about was Alcoholics Anonymous. Don was a long time member and used to sponsor other recovering alcoholics. I never saw Don take a drink and he didn’t talk very much about his drinking days but he seemed to take pride in his mentoring other alcoholics. I never belabored the point and since I haven’t had a drink in over 25 years I wasn’t someone in need of mentoring. Was Don a falling down drunk who was saved by AA or a guy who occasionally had a drink he shouldn’t have? It is just another thing I’ll never know.

  Don loved Texas. He had spent some time there in his youth and he talked about it with so much joy I would constantly forgot that he was born and bred in Iowa and not a Texas transplant. I think he moved there to be with some family that moved back to Iowa and he moved back with them. Don always enjoyed our beagles but was a cat person himself. He always had an indoor cat and would occasionally feed the outdoor cats. He had a cat when he died which was gone when Kathy looked for it.

  When Don had a car accident and the state took away his drivers license Kathy would take him to the grocery store each week and I would see him walking to the Liquor Depot to get Lottery tickets or to the Courthouse to catch a bus. I’d give him a ride if he needed one but I think losing his license was one of the best things to ever happen to Don. He was always kind of overweight and was always short of breath but once he had to walk Don stopped being short of breath and seemed to be in much better shape than before. I think it added years to his life and quality to those years as well.

  So that’s the Don I knew. There were a lot of things I knew about him and a lot of things I didn't and never will know about him. He was just a normal guy who had a pretty simple life that was full of the things that interested him. I always enjoyed talking to him about movies and coins and such and wish I had more time for stuff like that. While I know he didn’t die in the ‘comfort’ of his home I do know he had a comfortable life.

The Man Who Lost Everything and Nothing At All

R.I.P. Bill 1920-2016 (I took the liberty of inserting some songs I listened to this week as I wrote this)

  My friend Bill died last Monday at the age of 96. I lived down the block from Bill for the 22 years I’ve lived in Iowa. For the first dozen or so years we only met on weekend mornings. I’d walk Queenie the beagle and her son Tuffy the half beagle to the Jiffy for beef stick treats and see Bill walking his Cairn Terrier Mindy on North Center Street. We would pet each other’s dogs and talk about the Hawkeyes in football or basketball season.

  I didn’t know how old Bill was but I knew he was quite a bit older than I was and a lot taller as well. Sometimes Kathy and I would see Bill drive his wife Marilyn and daughter Becky down the street or see them at the K-Mart but for many years we never talked except on our walks. I never saw Bill walking too much in the winter but when I’d see him in the spring he’d give Queenie a big pet and say “Good to see you made it through the winter, Queenie old girl!”

  In the summer when Kathy and I would walk Queenie and Tuffy on the weekend we’d see Bill, Marilyn, Becky, and Mindy on their front porch and visit with them for a few minutes. I’d see Bill on his riding lawn mower doing his lawn and the lawns on the two houses next to his. I asked him about it one time and he told me that he owned all three houses, with Becky living in half of one and renting out the rest.

  When Queenie and Tuffy passed away within weeks of each other in the fall of 2010, we didn’t see too much of Bill since we had no dogs to walk. The week after we got Daisy and Baxter in December of 2010 Kathy and I put them in our coats and walked down to visit Bill and Marilyn. They were as enamored by the little beagle pups as we were and we visited a lot more after that. When we saw them on the porch during the summer on our afternoon walks we would stop and visit sometimes for an hour or more.

  Less than a year after Queenie and Tuffy died, Mindy had a sudden illness and passed away. Bill, Marilyn, and Becky were devastated. It reminded me a lot of how I felt after losing Queenie and Tuffy but after a few weeks they got a new Cairn terrier named Abby and life continued. Seeing their joy with Abby and our joy with Daisy and Baxter helps me to realize that while the last few days, weeks, or months of a pet’s life is truly awful it’s the price to be paid for the happiness they bring.

  Soon after getting Abby, Bill started having blackouts. It was taken care of by medicine but his doctors thought it wasn’t a good idea for him to drive any more. I was worried for Bill because I remember when my grandpa hurt his back at the age of 96 and couldn’t drive his health deteriorated quickly and he was gone within weeks. That wasn’t Bill though. He wasn’t happy about not driving but still looked forward to having Becky take him and Marilyn to his favorite diner for lunch or out shopping.

  Later on Bill’s hips started hurting so much that he had a lot of trouble walking. He said one of his few regrets was not getting hip replacements in his 70’s because he was too old to have them done now. It was not only hard for him to walk – he also had trouble just getting comfortable in a chair. Bill rarely discussed his hips and when he did it was in a matter of fact tone without a hint of complaint.

  A couple of years ago Bill and Marilyn’s son Terry got sick and died. He was 71 so he wasn’t a young man by any means, just in comparison to his 90+ year old parents. When I was 11 my 18 year old sister died in an accident. My parents were never the same after that so I marveled at how Bill and Marilyn put aside their sadness and continued on even though I knew they had to be even more devastated then when Mindy died.

  Earlier this year Marilyn passed away at the age of 93. Kathy and I visited Bill that night. I remember him telling us that both he and Marilyn wanted to pass away first because neither wanted to live without each other. I figured Bill would have a lot of people visiting after Marilyn passed away but a couple of weeks later we were talking to Becky and she said that no one was visiting very much. I offered to hang out with Bill on Saturday afternoons if he wanted. Becky thought it would be OK so I started coming over on Saturdays when I wasn’t doing chess stuff.

  I’d walk down the block on Saturday afternoons and watch a few hours of TV with Bill. Bill loved golf so we would watch whatever golf tournament was on and after it ended watch the great old Superman TV shows from the 1950s and then the news. When the news was over Kathy would walk Daisy and Baxter down the block to get me. The beagles would say hi to Bill and we’d meet again the next week. Bill and I getting together on Saturday afternoons wasn’t some sort of ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’ deal. It was just two guys passing time together which is sometimes all you need in this world.

  While I was playing chess in Jackson in August, Kathy wrote me to tell me Bill had suffered a stroke. We went to see him in the hospital. He was doing fine but the stoke robbed him of his ability to speak except for the occasional word here and there. Bill recovered quickly and was soon sent to a rehab hospital in Ames. The hospital in Ames was just a few miles from where I am currently assigned so I went to visit Bill over my lunchtime. I was struck by how quickly Bill was getting his speech back, He went from words to phrases to occasional sentences and was back home in three weeks. Bill was a guy who just wouldn’t quit!

  Kathy and the beagles and I visited Bill on our evening walk the week before last. He was talking a little and in generally good spirits. Later that week Bill had a heart attack. It wasn’t fatal but he was so old that any procedure would kill him so Bill was sent home where he passed away after a week.

  I can’t say I knew Bill very well but I can say I liked him an awful lot and will miss him a lot also. Even though as I said Bill and I did not have this ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’ relationship where the older dying man imparts his lifetime of collected wisdom I did learn a lot from Bill because like Yogi Berra said "You can observe a lot by just watching." I watched Bill lose just about everything in this world. He lost his ability to drive, he lost the ability to walk, he lost his dog, he lost his only son, he lost his wife, he lost his ability to speak, and finally he lost the ability to get better. But Bill never lost himself. He was the same optimistic guy from the day I first met him until the day I last saw him and never changed – only his circumstances did. When my circumstances change for the worse I hope I can handle it half as well as Bill.

I'm not planning my funeral or anything but I could think of worse songs than this to be played at mine... See you later, Bill!

The Longest Winter

We lost something special when Marilyn passed away last week.

  I’m getting kind of sick of people dying. My stepmother-in-law Penni has been in poor health for years with diabetes and no immune system to speak of. Three weeks ago she was in the hospital recovering from one of her many illnesses when her brain just stopped functioning. She was kept alive for a few days while relatives flew to South Carolina to say their goodbyes and went quickly once the plug was pulled. Penni was 70. Kathy went to South Carolina for the funeral while I worked and stayed home with the beagles.

  Two weeks ago longtime chess player and organizer Roger from Ames passed away. I wrote about Roger last week and don’t want to repeat myself except to say I liked and respected Roger and he was 77 when he passed. I hadn’t seen Roger or Penni in a number of years and while their passing was a shock it was not something that impacted me very much. Yes that does sound cruel but it is just the way it is and I can’t recall if I’ve seen anything different in anyone I’ve ever known (although not many will admit to it).

  I’ve written in the past about my neighbors Bill and Marilyn from down the block, their daughter Becky, and their Cairn Terrier Abby. When Kathy and I take Daisy and Baxter on their nightly walks if the weather is warm enough we would see them on their front porch and visit for a half hour or more. Bill and Marilyn are in their 90’s so we don’t see them outside unless the weather is very warm. I dislike winter but I figure that if I could get to March I had it made because any snowstorms or freezing weather would be fleeting and it would only be a few weeks before the weather would be warm enough to hang out with Bill and Marilyn which is how I knew winter was over.

  Now when people are in their 90’s making it through the winter is not a sure thing. Over the past 20 years I’ve seen Bill go from walking his Cairn terrier and driving Marilyn and Becky around town to walking his dog with the help of a cane to not being able to drive and having to use a walker to even get to the front porch. And I’ve seen Marilyn rip the skin from her arm from scraping it against a door and then watch it take all summer to heal. But every winter they made it through and every summer we would visit on their front porch.

  This last winter was a rough one for Marilyn. She was in and out of the hospital and we saw the sign outside their house saying there was no smoking because oxygen was in use. Needing oxygen is rarely a good sign but in the last few weeks Kathy and I saw her sitting in her living room waving to us as we walked the dogs past and the oxygen sign went away. Last month Becky let Daisy and Baxter in so Marilyn could pet them. It’s always fun seeing Marilyn’s delight at seeing Daisy and Baxter in the winter. We would hold them up and she would beam as she petted each of them and say ‘You remember me, don’t you?’ Daisy will let anyone pet her and Baxter is standoffish to strangers but Baxter would always let Bill and Marilyn pet him. I had a standoffish relationship with both my grandmothers (especially my dad’s mom who didn’t speak English) but Marilyn reminded me of the idealized sort of grandmothers I would read and hear about – mostly cheerful, mostly wise, and always kind.

  Two weeks ago the oxygen sign returned to Bill and Marilyn’s house and then the Saturday before last when we were taking Daisy and Baxter on their noon walk we saw a funeral home car parked on Bill and Marilyn’s block. We didn’t know what was going bit we had our suspicions and tried to make up a scenario that the funeral home car was just making a cold call or was there for the sick guy that we knew lived across the street. We went about our afternoon but at 4 we got a call from Becky telling us that Marilyn has passed away that morning at home. We went over and hung out with Becky and Bill who told us that Marilyn hadn’t been doing very well for the past week and just couldn’t breathe anymore.

  Becky went out to get dinner and Kathy and I stayed with Bill who told us both he and Marilyn wanted to go first so they wouldn’t have to live without each other. We talked a bit and Becky came back with their dinner so we left. On Tuesday we went to the funeral/memorial service. I don’t go to a lot of funerals but I did go to this one which was about as depressing as I expected. Marilyn was all dressed up, made up, and fixed up for the viewing. One of the relatives marveled at how good she looked and asked my opinion. I felt like saying she looked better a couple of weeks ago but I knew that wouldn’t be a good thing to say which is a big part of why I hardly ever go to funerals. There was a slide show with pictures of Bill and Marilyn all through their lives and some people talked about Marilyn and Bill and this life and the next life. There were a couple of songs (one of which was ‘Happy Trails’) and the ceremony was over.

  Marilyn’s passing bothered me more than the death of any person for at least 30 years and that includes both my parents. I wondered about why that is and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is because her life and death had an impact on me every day. We’ve walked Daisy and Baxter a couple of dozen times past Bill and Marilyn’s house in the past weeks and it just isn’t the same knowing that Marilyn won’t be on the couch waving to the beagles or having us bring them into the house for her to pet them. And I’m not even especially looking forward to winter being over as much. I’m sure we’ll still hang out with Bill and Becky and Abbey but it won’t be the same. Left unspoken is how Bill will handle being without his wife of 73 years. The whole thing is a bummer and while I thought I’d feel better after writing this I don’t feel any different than I did when I started writing this a week ago - I’m getting kind of sick of people dying.

Marilyn chose Happy Trails to be played at her funeral. I haven't thought much about my funeral's playlist but this Johnny Cash song would be a front runner...

...while this Bob Dylan tune would be near the end of the list

Roger That

Roger Gotschall (1938-2016) on the left awarding Tim McEntee his 2008 Iowa Chess Championship trophy and on the right receiving some Italian sausage with me at the Marshalltown Salvation Army in 2011. Even into his 70's Roger had a full head of hair that made me wonder why he ever wore a hat.

  It was a cold Saturday in January of 2002 that warmed up enough to have me make a spur of the moment decision to take my two children (5 year old Ben and 8 year old Matt) 40 miles west to Ames, Iowa so they could play in a chess tournament. It was their 4th tournament. I’d never been to Ames before and had a little trouble finding the school but arrived with a half hour to spare. This was the days before readily available internet and I had my cash and sons’ membership cards in hand. I found the tournament director and handed over the boys’ membership cards and cash. The tournament director asked me why I hadn’t signed up beforehand and before I could say I wasn’t planning on going if it was too cold or snowing this tournament director got real loud and angry, telling me that he was sick of people showing up at his tournaments unannounced and that from now on he wasn’t going to let latecomers play in the first round of his tournaments. I had paid an extra $10 for not pre-registering and the thought crossed my mind that I should punch this guy in the mouth but my kids were there and besides this guy was a lot bigger than me (although I was younger and I suspect faster) so I quickly got me and my kids away to get ready for the tournament. That was my first of many meetings with Roger Gotschall from Ames, Iowa who passed away last week at the age of 77.

  Since Ames was the closest town to Marshalltown that had any chess tournaments and all the chess tournaments in Ames were run by Roger we ran into each other frequently in next few years. I never got yelled at by him again but I also pre-registered for his tournaments if at all possible. One thing that was unique about Roger was that he was and is to the present time the only tournament director in Iowa to regularly hold tournaments on Sunday afternoons which is an outstanding chess tournament time for me personally and any parents or children involved in youth sports or school activities.

  In 2006 I took on the task of reviving the Iowa State’s Chess Association’s disintegrating scholastic program and got to deal with Roger on a more or less equal footing. As the coach of five scholastic chess clubs in Ames Roger rightfully wanted a lot of input into the scholastic process. We didn’t agree on everything and quite often didn’t agree on anything. Roger could be incredibly helpful like when he double checked 20 new membership forms for missing birthdates or addresses (saving me days in getting the tournament rated) and also incredibly infuriating like the time I thought he was going to schedule the high school championship tournament but he wouldn’t answer my emails even though I could see him playing on the Internet Chess Club every night.

While most of the successful scholastic teams I've observed in Iowa rode the strength of a few top talents, Roger's teams tended to rely on a deep roster of competent players that found themselves in the winners circle more often than not.

  By the end of my second year of running the scholastics Roger and I understood each other a little better and got along a lot better as well. Roger was a strict traditionalist and a believer in procedure and the chain of command. This manifested itself in ways I sometimes found silly although it gave his clubs and tournaments a rock-solid structure for decades. What Roger had that I appreciated most was that he was the genuine article. He was who he presented himself to be, an old-school guy of integrity. If I asked Roger a question I could count on a straight answer and if he didn’t want to answer a question he didn’t answer it instead of making up a lie. I suspect Roger didn’t appreciate my unconventional approach to running and publicizing tournaments but he had an appreciation of my work ethic and technical savvy as well as the rising Iowa scholastic attendance after years of decline. Whether one of my unconventional ideas worked out well or poorly Roger would be the first (and many times only) person to let me know his approval or disapproval but always with insight into why he arrived at his decision.

  Roger was an engineer by trade. I later learned when working with dozens of engineers at Fischer Controls that engineers perform their job by following the physical laws. For example, a valve made of a certain metal that has to transport a specific liquid at a particular pressure must have thickness and couplings and screws within certain tolerances or else it won’t function properly without exception. In the engineering world there is little to no room for negotiation of physical law. And Roger was like that in running his chess clubs and tournaments – there was a proper way to do things and little to no room for negotiation. As a self-taught software programmer I have been trained to live in a world of chaos. I can write a great program that does exactly what the user wants it to do but it may stop working because some anti-virus program refuses to let my program write to the hard drive or an operating system change hides the printer information or serial port or the computer just goes haywire and makes my program go haywire also. And I’m like that in running tournaments – I expect chaotic things to happen that I have no control over and just try to be flexible so I can stay afloat if a tidal wave hits.

  Roger and I were such polar opposites that it naturally took us awhile to get each other but I believe we respected each other a lot. I can offer proof of my respect by noting that since 2010 I have played in one Iowa tournament that wasn’t run by me or Roger. I infer Roger’s respect by noting that 7 of the 9 Iowa tournaments since 2010 that Roger played in that he didn’t run were my Thursday Night blitz tournaments. When I came to one of Roger’s CyChess tournaments or Roger came to Marshalltown to play in a blitz tournament I would say ‘Hi Roger’ and Roger would say ‘Hello, Mr. Anzis’ (he did always call me Hank after the initial 'Mr' greeting). Roger had a deep bass voice and he spoke slowly with grave intonations and Pinteresque pauses that made you think we were discussing matters of world importance instead of the Cyclone's shooting guard or whether a pawn belonged on a6 or a5 in a particular position. Roger's voice and cadence was so distinctive I was able to imitate it well enough to be able do a one-man stage performance although I would have needed to manufacture a full head of hair and get some inserts for my shoes to properly play the part.

  There were a couple of ways where Roger and I were alike, but even in our similarities we were dissimilar. I am a die hard Yankee fan (the most successful American League team) while Roger was devoted to the St. Louis Cardinals which is the most successful of all the National League teams and all baseball teams except for the Yankees. Our chess styles were opposites but similar in that they are opposites of our personalities. I accept chaos and unpredictable change as a given but over the chess board I like the simplest positions possible and will go to great lengths to avoid complications. Roger was a traditionalist in every sense of the word but over the board loved to sacrifice material and play for the attack and wild positions where the normal guidelines of chess are almost useless. We played four times in tournament chess: two Marshalltown blitz games, a 45 minute game in Urbandale in 2008, and last July in a chess.com online blitz tournament. By the luck of the draw I had White in all four games. All our games followed a familiar pattern of Roger getting a better position before making a big mistake to allow me a technical win. Roger had a lot of chess knowledge, won his section at the 2004 U.S. Open, and has had a number of very instructive winning middle game attacks and endings. I don’t know if the mistakes were him trying to make something happen against my simplistic play or part of old age since I didn’t play him as a younger man but he was a dangerous opponent who scored a lot of upsets and could beat anyone if he was on.

In his later years Roger's constant companion was Cypher the Boston Terrier. Someday they will be walking together again...

  One thing Roger and I had unconditionally in common was a love of dogs. Roger read my blog and knew all about my beagles Daisy and Baxter. In 2011 Roger showed up to play blitz in Marshalltown on a Thursday night and was beaming like a little kid when he told me he had gotten a dog. He then told me his dog was named Cypher and that Cypher was in his car waiting for the tournament to finish! It wasn't an especially hot or cold day but I told Roger to bring Cypher in to the chess club since the Salvation Army majors had a dog that had run of the facility and dogs were not uncommon in the building. Roger brought Cypher in and I have to say Cypher was the best-behaved dog I’ve ever seen. He sat down at Roger’s side and never made a sound. Cypher came with Roger to Marshalltown two other times and I saw Cyper in Ames whenever I played there.

  Roger and I were more chess friends than friends although more than casual acquaintances. I enjoyed our occasional encounters once I got past our rough beginning. I haven’t seen him since 2012 when he stopped his CyChess Sunday tournaments and I stopped my Thursday night blitz tournaments. I’m glad I got to know Roger and I’m better off for knowing him. Hopefully we’ll have another chance to play chess someday and when we do I imagine it will be his turn to have the White pieces.

A Guy who got it

Ed (19??-2011)

  Last Wednesday, I received the unwelcome news that my friend Ed from the Salvation Army had passed away this week at his home. In February, I wrote about how I attended Ed’s sermon at the Salvation Army and how inspired I was from it. When I saw Ed in March, he told me he was working on a sermon in May and would let me know when he was ready. We talked about his February sermon and I’m happy now that I got to tell him how inspired I was.

  On Thursday at chess club, Majors John and Judith were preparing for Ed’s funeral which was going to be on Friday morning. I wanted to go, but at work I had a time critical project that was coinciding with a maintenance shutdown of some government servers and had to be in Des Moines (A telling sign that my priorities are out of whack). Major John was Ed’s best friend and Ed had followed him around to his different posts in the Salvation Army. He told me that Ed had died sometimes between Tuesday (when he was last heard from) and Wednesday (when he was found) while working on his computer.

  The next to last time I saw Ed was on the courthouse square in late April. My wife and I were out doing our Saturday rounds of the thrift stores and on our way back saw that Ed was out on the square with his hot dog stand during the annual Garden show. I stopped over and had a fantastic Chicago-style Polish Sausage with hot sauerkraut, relish, and mustard while we chatted a bit. Ed was having a great time selling the hot dogs and talking with the food vendor next to him.

  The last time I saw Ed was in May on a Thursday night. We were having our chess club and Ed was cooking a dinner for a service organization that was having a meeting at the Salvation Army. I remember asking Ed when he was going to have the sermon he was telling me he was working on and he said he didn’t know. He then told me that he was the luckiest guy around because he was able to get his hot dog stand even though he never had a way to afford one because everything just came together to get him one.

  Ed had a little table in the Salvation Army kitchen that was piled high with his books and notes for future sermons. He was very religious and believed we are living in the end times, but unlike some of the very religious people I know, he never acted like he was going to heaven and you were going to hell unless you agreed with him. I always judge people by how they are with me and Ed was always supportive of my efforts to reach people through chess.

  I never even knew Ed’s last name, but that’s probably the way he wanted it. He was more about results and actions than names and titles. I saw all the old photos of Ed that were being set out for the funeral. Since I only knew him for the last few years, there was obviously a lot I’ll never know about him. I remember his joy at making a batch of chicken wings or chili for us to feast on during chess club and I also remember him working to the point of exhaustion picking up supplies in Des Moines and driving them to Applington-Parkersburg when the town was nearly destroyed by a tornado.

  My friend Alex Golubow wrote me once that “really make a positive difference in other people's life and that is when life is worth living...”. That describes Ed to a T. Rest in Peace, Ed. I’ll be doubling my efforts to see you someday and get another one of the best Chicago style dogs around.

Remembrances of Steinbrenner

  George Steinbrenner passed away at the age of 80 yesterday. He bought the Yankees when I was 13 and was a central figure in my teenage years. There will be a lot of talk about how George was a visionary and that is true. He wasn’t the first owner to buy players (the Yankees bought Joe DiMaggio from the San Francisco Seals for $100,000 in 1936, and the Boston Red Sox paid $100,000 for Jimmy Foxx a few years before that), but he was one of the first owners to ransom a city for stadium improvements when he threatened to move the team to New Jersey in 1973 and he was the first baseball owner to put the majority of his team’s games on cable when he agreed to sell 12 years of Yankee games to the Madison Square Garden network for $500 million over 12 years. Even though that was an unheard of amount at the time, by the end of the contract it turned out that Madison Square Garden had made a great deal because everyone wants to watch the Yankees and companies would pay top dollar to advertise on the games. After the contract expired, Steinbrenner was able to start his own cable network (another first) and keep all the profits.

  I wasn’t as upset by Steinbrenner’s passing as I was when the great Yankee player and manager Billy Martin died in a 1989 car accident. Maybe it was because I was younger or maybe it was because Billy’s death was unexpected. I think it was because when George would fire and rehire Billy in the 70’s and 80’s the crowd of Yankee fans I hung with in New Jersey identified with Billy as the former Yankee player, World Series MVP, hard living, hard drinking, fight at the drop of a hat winner we all wish we could be. We all saw Steinbrenner as the silver spoon rich shipbuilder son of a rich shipbuilder jock-sniffing wannabe athlete. (None of us had dad’s who were shipbuilders or even rich).

  It’s easy to think Steinbrenner was a much beloved figure during his whole ownership reign from listening to all the tributes this week, but he was referred to by his employees of the 70’s and 80’s as ‘The Fat Man’, ‘Manager George’, ‘Georgie Porgie’, among others. In 1982, Steinbrenner let Reggie Jackson sign with the Angels and decided to remake the Yankees into a ‘speed team’. He bragged about plan, but the team was awful and on a Sunday afternoon game against the Angels, Jackson hit a long home run in blowout game and 40,000 people chanted “Steinbrenner Sucks!” for the rest of the game. The chant was again heard in the early nineties when the Yankees were the worst team in baseball and fans wore paper bags on their head. And of course there was Billy Martin’s famous reference to his felony conviction for illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon, “The two of them deserve each other. One’s a born liar (Reggie Jackson), the other’s convicted.” Billy was drunk at the time, but he lost his job just like the famous secretary who brought Steinbrenner a tuna fish sandwich instead of roast beef.

  Steinbrenner bought the Yankees near the end of a 12 year drought of World Series appearances, but the arrow was already pointing up and many of the key components of the great teams of the late 70’s were already in place. Steinbrenner benefitted by the onset of baseball free agency because he now could just get players by paying them directly instead of giving money and good young players in trade to other teams for the same players. This meant that it only cost money for Reggie Jackson, Goose Gossage, and Catfish Hunter and the team didn’t have to trade top prospects like Ron Guidry for them. Since no other team was willing to spend for free agents, George had the field to himself and could get any player he wanted.

  Rooting for a championship contender every year is great and Steinbrenner deserves a lot of the credit for pushing the team over the top, but the constant hiring and firing of managers and the strategy of trading top prospects in favor of accumulating all-star caliber players to be backups started to backfire in the early 80’s. The top-line free agent players could get almost the same money the Yankees would pay from teams like Gene Autry’s Angels and Ted Turner’s Braves and would use the Yankees high bids to sign with other clubs for almost the same money and the security of not being lambasted by the New York media, embarrassed publicly by the owner, or just losing their playing time because the owner could decide to buy a different all-star player. After the embarrassment of losing the 1981 World Series to the Dodgers after winning the first 2 games, (George broke his hand after what he said was a fight with some Dodger fans on an elevator and he never forgave his expensive free agent Dave Winfield for going 1 for 22 in the series), George ended up overpaying for mediocre talent and having to trade top prospects for real star players. The teams of the middle 80’s had an awesome offense led by Rickey Henderson, Don Mattingly, and Dave Winfield, but never even won a division, always being undone by well-paid but underperforming players like Ed Whitson, Ken Phelps, Pascual Perez, and Steve Kemp who were superstars only in their paychecks. What few prospects came up through the farm system were traded for either has-beens or someone who just had the best year of their career before resuming their mediocre ways. Steinbrenner was thought of as a laughing stock by Yankee fans and most of the baseball writers I read and there were many calls for him to sell the team.

  In the late 80’s the team became undone by Mattingly’s back injury, Henderson wanting a new contract and forcing a trade, aging pitching, and no prospects in the farm system. The Yankees were a last place team into the early nineties. Steinbrenner was on the US Olympic Committee and when he was caught paying a known gambler for information that may have proved Dave Winfield threw the 1981 World Series, he accepted a voluntary lifetime ban from baseball rather a suspension which may have gotten him thrown off the Olympic Committee. I think Winfield was paid for his poor performance and George got a raw deal, but so soon after the Pete Rose scandal, baseball decided to sweep the affair under the run and punish Steinbrenner for consorting with gamblers. With no expectation of winning and without the pressure from the owner, the Yankees rebuilt their farm system, made some smart trades to get players like Paul O’Neill, and were ready to contend when Steinbrenner’s ban was lifted. The 90’s Steinbrenner was much smarter than the 80’s version. He stopped ranting and railing against the players and managers and let his front office use the Yankee money to get the missing pieces of the puzzle instead of getting every available player who ever made an All-Star team. The result of this was the dynasty of the late 90’s. After the aging of that group, Steinbrenner went back to his old ways of overpaying for the biggest names available (Jason Giambi, Alex Rodriguez, Bobby Abreu) and while making the playoffs every year, the team did not have the cohesion needed to win a championship.

  Steinbrenner was mostly concerned over his last years of owning the team with getting the new Yankee Stadium built. He tried to get it put in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but even threatening to move to New Jersey could not get him such prime real estate. He arranged to build the stadium across the street from the old one and turned the team over to his sons in 2007. I thought had a stroke based on how suddenly he disappeared from the public eye, or maybe I just didn’t notice a larger than life figure turn old and frail until he was. In any event, I give Steinbrenner a lot of credit for bringing championships to New York, and I’m glad he lived long enough to see the Yankees win a World Championship in the stadium he built. Rest in Peace, George.