On Baseball & Hyprocrisy

02 Saturday Apr 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, Youth

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Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds, Baseball, Bigotry, Bob Ryan, Color Line, Cy Young, George Will, Hank Aaron, Henry Aaron, Hypocrisy, Integrity of the Game, Joe Di Maggio, Josh Gibson, Lou Gehrig, Mike Lupica, Mythology, Myths and Legends, Pope Lupica, Purists, Purity of the Game, Race, Racism, Records, Reggie Jackson, Satchel Paige, Sports, Steroids, Ted Williams (Baseball), Willie Mays

Fenway From Legend's Box, Fenway Park, Boston, June 21, 2008. Jared Vincent via Flickr http://flickr.com/photos/23999911@N00/2607333633 - Permission granted under the terms of the cc-by-2.0 license.

A new baseball season has arrived for this estranged ex-fan of the game. Millions of people celebrate as if this is a rite of spring, like a cherry-blossom festival or an opportunity to spend more time outside. When I see the start of baseball, it merely reminds me to up my dosage of Zyrtec and Rhinocort.

But that’s not quite true. It also hits me in the brain and gut with the common mythologies and hypocrisies of America the Beautiful. Especially this spring, with Barry Bonds on trial for perjury — and indirectly, for using steroids, sullying the game, not to mention his Hall-of-Fame record prior to ’99. The guardians of the game — baseball purists like George Will and numerous others, and sports reporters like Pope Lupica and Bob Ryan — supply us with the myths and legends of Babe Ruth, Joe Di Maggio, Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Mickey Mantle and Cy Young. Along with their records, those precious records. Of home runs, total hits, hitting streaks, RBIs, strikeouts, wins, stolen bases, games played, batting averages, slugging percentages. The stuff that makes baseball America’s pastime (which should always be written as past-time, or past-its-time), different from all the other major sports.

The hypocrisy comes from this ridiculous notion of keeping the game separate and holy, like the sabbath for orthodox Jews and for the most devout of Christians and Muslims. Except that this game, this most American of games, is about as pure as New York City snow two minutes after hitting the ground. The biggest, most disgusting hypocrisy of all is how most baseball purists will celebrate Babe Ruth’s greatness any day over a Henry Aaron, Willie Mays, Reggie Jackson, or Josh Gibson. Or Walter Johnson over Satchel Paige. That sixty-four years since Jackie Robinson broke the color line in major league baseball, there’s still a color line in baseball’s precious records, as well as among the people who hold them. That alone is a stomach-churning, blood-pressure-raising shame.

But this issue of who should and shouldn’t be in Cooperstown because of the Steroids Era in baseball, well, it presupposes a false dichotomy. That there was a time before, say ’88, where baseball wasn’t dirty, and that with anabolic steroids and HGH, baseball became dirty. But since ’03, baseball’s become clean and transparent again. This is beyond ridiculous. Baseball’s been as dirty as any sport in American history, in fact dirtier, than the other sports put together. Between amphetamines and illegal drugs, pine tar and Vaseline balls, sharpened cleats and headhunting and the exclusion of Blacks, the sport and the individuals involved in it have been seeking and finding competitive advantages for as long as baseball has been a professional endeavor.

Still, the biggest myth and hypocrisy in baseball remains its insistence that its records are sacred, above critical scrutiny and reproach. I have a problem with this, and not just because of the racism that’s built into any records achieved prior to 1947. But because baseball’s sanctimonious bigotry infects any record that’s been achieved in the sixty-four years since. Whether it was Roger Maris in ’61, Hank Aaron in ’74, or Barry Bonds before ’99, much less after.

As long as the guardians of the game remain White, male and overly connected to baseball as patriotic and its records as sacrosanct, baseball’s hypocrisy will know no bounds. “It’s a shame and a pitiful,” as my father would say. And it’s also a reason I hope my son never plays this wretched game.

Teachers That “Demon”-ize History

29 Tuesday Mar 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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A.B. Davis Middle School, Demontravel, History, History Teaching, Humanities, K-12 Education, K-16 Education, Pedagogy, Schools of Education, Teaching, Teaching and Learning

Qin Shihuangdi, China's 1st Emperor, book burner and scholar burier (except for historians of the Qin kingdom), 221-210 BCE. In public domain.

As I promised ten days ago in my “This…Is…Jeopardy?” post, this one continues my thoughts about the inability of most students and teachers to appreciate how to really teach and learn from history. To think that what most in the profession call social history has existed for a half-century, yet few outside of academia actually teach history in this manner. That between the schools of education that prepare them, the curricular paradigms adhered to by state boards of education and the rules and regulations at the district and school building level, few history teachers encourage their students to imagine. Or to think critically. Or to ask “how” and “why” questions.

And we pay for these educational atrocities every single day, in our public discourse, in journalism, in international politics. Not to mention in our idiotic discussions of race, class, gender, religion, sexual orientation, in just about every endeavor that involves thinking beyond our selfish selves.

Michelle Bachmann Portrait, US Congress, January 14, 2011 - A case in point. In public domain.

The worst example of this for my money was my eighth grade US history teacher, Mr. Demontravel. Or as he preferred in the last three months of eighth grade in the spring of ’83, Dr. Demontravel (he had finished his doctoral thesis on the Civil War. Or as I liked to call him throughout that year, “Demon Travel.”

Beyond the trivia of him finishing his doctorate, Demontravel’s teaching style, while terrible, was also one that remains all too typical in our public school (and unfortunately, some of our colleges as well). His was a class that sucked the life out of history for most of the Humanities students at A.B. Davis. Like most teachers of K-12 social studies or history, it was an important and obscure dates, important names, and key places class.

Unlike most social studies teachers, his teaching methodology was the epitome of lazy. Every class, five days a week, Demontravel would put up five questions on the blackboard for us to copy down and answer using our textbook. At the end of every two-week period, we’d get a fifty-question multiple choice exam made up of those questions written out on the blackboard over the previous two weeks, helping Scan-Tron stay in business.

Demontravel rarely stood up to lecture or do anything else. Lectures for him might as well have been appearances by Halley’s Comet, only the lectures were far less memorable. This process went on unabated for forty-weeks, four marking periods, seventeen exams (counting the final), an entire school year. Calling this boring would only get you into the door of the intellectual famine Demontravel subjected us to in eighth grade.

Over the years, I’ve had hundreds of students complain about various versions of this kind of history teaching. That they hated history, didn’t understand its purpose. Many students have loved my teaching of social history off and on over the past two decades, and have told me so, that there interest in a particular issue or topic was peaked as a result of one of my courses. But there are some, perhaps as many as ten percent of my students (about 200 in all) who would’ve preferred the mind-numbing methodology of teaching history as trivia. For that group, Demontravel would’ve been a preference over being able to

Newt Gingrich, potential 2012 GOP candidate, at CPAC meeting, February 20, 2010. (Irony is that Gingrich, an opponent of social history, was a history professor for eight years before turning to a political career.) Gage Skidmore. Permission granted via Creative Commons and attribution to Gage Skidmore.

understand that, like life, history is full of irony, hurt, passion, hatred, and serendipity.

Maybe this is a losing battle, that most students will never have a teacher with the ability to inspire them to think beyond the trivial when it comes to history. Maybe this is a losing battle because there are far more demons traveling through K-12 as social studies and history teachers than there are people like me, or my late teacher Harold Meltzer, for that matter. I have a feeling, though, that generations from now, future students will look at this aspect of hypocrisy in American education and just shake their heads. They won’t understand why it was so hard to teach the truth of how and why good, bad and ugly things occurred in US and world history.

Living in the Land of “No!”

23 Wednesday Mar 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race, Youth

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Academia, Academic Writing, Ageism, Bias, Bigotry, Career Options, Forbes Quadrangle, Historical Dictionary of American Education, History of Education Quarterly, Multiculturalism, No!, Passion, Pitt, Race, Richard J. Altenbaugh, The Second Plate, University of Pittsburgh, Wesley Posvar Hall, Writing, Yes

People forming a "NO" to London's Heathrow Airport Expansion, May 31, 2008. Source: The Daily Mail http://bit.ly/hc0KSP

There was a time in my career and life when I was desperate to publish an article in a scholarly journal. Right after finishing grad school at Carnegie Mellon at the end of ’96, I set out to write a literature review essay on how folks in education foundations and education policy had covered multiculturalism and connected it — or, in most cases, not connected it — to the politics around this controversial topic during the 1980s and 1990s. Of all the things I’d written up to this point in my career, this was a bit ambitious.

I had submitted an article for publication with the History of Education Quarterly in March ’97 and had made several revisions at Richard Altenbaugh’s request. He was the new senior editor of the journal, as it had recently moved from Indiana University to Slippery Rock to be under his direction. Altenbaugh had also been my professor for my education foundations graduate class in the spring of ’92, and I’d done entries for his Historical Dictionary of American Education, which was published in ’99.

Historical Dictionary of American Education Cover, March 23, 2011. Donald Earl Collins

At Altenbaugh’s behest, I met him and a wildly bearded co-editor at an informal meeting in March ’98. We met at The Second Plate, an eating place on the second floor of Forbes Quadrangle at Pitt, where I’d spent my homeless days in ’88, my history major days, and my first two years of grad school. Over the course of a two-hour lunch that had little to do with the food, Altenbaugh and his assistant grilled me about the contents of my article, my writing in general, and about the publishing business. Now I knew that this essay would need more revisions, but a two-hour inquisition on why a twenty-eight-year-old was too young to make bold conclusions based on existing studies was just a ridiculous argument.

For Altenbaugh and the other editor, I was simply too young to write an essay that reviewed previous scholarly work. Their logic: “even a senior scholar with fifteen years in the field would have trouble pulling this off.” The editors also insisted that the only road to academic Nirvana regarding my work would be through publishing academic articles and books that met the approval of an exclusive scholarly community. Translation: “write something that is interesting to a few other professors — but not so exciting that it would catch the public’s attention — and by all means do not work on something as controversial as multiculturalism.” Oh yeah, they also recommended that get approval for my essay draft from two elderly, nearly-dead White historians before resubmitting to the journal.

Bottom line: my essay was rejected, given a “No!” Not because it didn’t have potential, or because the early drafts weren’t any good. But because I was working on a topic too cutting edge as a Black male who even now at forty-one would be too young — according to these guys — to work on a state of the profession essay on multiculturalism, much less thirteen years ago.

Did their “No!” matter? In one sense it really did. I knew that the topic itself was too controversial for most conservative-thinking (in a topical, not political, sense) editors in scholarly publishing. That there were few venues for me to address multiculturalism in an academic sense. I also knew that their “No!” was about much more than my topic. My age and my race also played a role in their decision to not publish my essay — they said as much by implication. Funny thing is, that in these weird times, I’d probably have a much better shot at publishing this essay now than I did when multiculturalism seemed more relevant.

But in the end, it didn’t matter at all. I was already in the middle of a five-year period of questioning whether I was an academic historian first and a writer second, or was it really the other way around? If the latter was true — and it’s turned out to be — then what did it matter that I pushed to publish on a topic that I cared about, but I was already beginning to lose passion for?

What I learned from that “No!” is that there are times to force a “Yes!” out of the land of “No!” And that there are other times when I should choose to take that “No!” and evaluate my own motives for wanting a “Yes!” In the case of my growth as a writer — both in academic writing and in other kinds of writing — there couldn’t have been a better, more bigoted “No!” than the one I received thirteen years ago.

This…Is…Jeopardy?

18 Friday Mar 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Politics, Pop Culture, Youth

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Alex Trebek, Grading, History Trivial, Humanities, Humanities Program, Instructor, Jeopardy, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon public schools, Pitt, Professor, Students, Teaching, Teaching and Learning, Teaching Assistant, Teaching History, University of Pittsburgh

The first class I ever taught was as a guest lecturer my first semester of grad school at Pitt. Larry Glasco, my advisor, had me take charge of his History of Black Pittsburgh course one November Thursday in ’91. It was a task made easier by the showing of the documentary Wylie Avenue Days during the two-hour and twenty-minute class. With about a quarter of the class composed of adult learners, including several who’d grown up in the Hill District during the time frame covered in the documentary, it became a real conversation about experiences with racism and inter- and intra-racial relations in Pittsburgh in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. It was a great introduction to teaching.

In the two decades since, I’ve often wish that all of my classes had the kind of intellectual balance that my first class possessed and I as instructor helped provide. Sadly, many times in my journey as a teacher, instructor and professor, I’ve had students who showed as much interest in discussing the hows and whys of history as Glenn Beck of FOX News Channel has in science and the truth.

These students, about one out of every six I’ve taught over the past two decades (about 300 in all) have taken up an amount of my teaching time. They’ve groused about the assignments I’ve given them to do, the exam questions I’ve created to assess their knowledge. They’ve gnashed their teeth about my grading, about how tough I supposedly can be in assigning grades. With papers, short-answer exams, multiple choice tests, even fill-in-the-blank quizzes. There’s been no pleasing this group of students.

Until now. It occurred to me about a year ago. I was watching yet another episode of Jeopardy, and it swung to a history category, one that I would’ve swept if I’d been on the show that day or anytime since the show came back on the air in ’85. That then reminded me of something one of my Humanities classmates from Mount Vernon High School said to me soon after finding out that I was ranked fourteenth in the Class of ’87. “All you can do with history is play Jeopardy,” he said with derision.

That memory then reminded me of how teachers like our seventh through tenth grade social studies teachers taught us. Whether Court, Demontravel (who I’ll talk about later this year), Flanagan or Zini, the idea was to be able to spit out as many date-connected facts, names and battles as quickly and accurately as possible. With no thought about human nature, empathy with the struggles of individuals and groups, or any attempt to explain the processes behind why something happened, like slavery, Jim Crow or Indian removal, for instance.

To satisfy my students who want a high school version of history, I need to come to class next semester and draw a gigantic box on the chalkboard. In that box, I’ll draw six columns by five rows of smaller boxes within this huge box. In the top box of each column, I’ll write in a topic area, say, “Colonial America,” “Expanding Voting Rights,” “‘Eq’-words,” “Myths & Legends,” “My Founding Fathers,” and “Rebel Yell” (this on the American Revolution and the Civil War) across all six. There wouldn’t be any money values, just number values, from 1 to 5 from the easiest to most difficult questions. Daily Doubles would help struggling students make up points, while Double Jeopardy sessions would help the best students solidify their A’s.

This is a great idea, isn’t it? My least interested students can then pretend that they’re learning history by being entertained and memorizing history trivia. My students who need to learn or sharpen their critical thinking skills will find themselves sorely neglected. And my most interested students would be ready to strangle me.

In the end, it’s not worth it to turn my part in this profession into Sony Entertainment, especially for a minority of the students I’ve taught over the years. Besides, I can’t afford to buy Watson to impress my students, or at least, have someone pretend that they have the artificial intelligence of IBM’s Watson by sounding like a teraflop supercomputer.

World Book Encyclopedia’s Insidious Effect

15 Tuesday Mar 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Ass-Whuppin', Imagination, Intellect, Learning, Mrs. Shannon, Parent-Teacher Conference, Peter Cottontail, Reading, Reading Level, Reading Scores, Runaway, Running Away, Teacher Crush, Third Grade, World Book Encyclopedia

World Book Encyclopedia, 1978 Edition, March 15, 2011. Source: http://cgi.ebay.com

I’ve talked about how World Book Encyclopedia literally changed my life from a reading standpoint between December ’78 and April ’79. It was after running away from home to get away from my new stepfather, the now-and-forever abuser and idiot Maurice Washington. I talked about how after my mother gave me an ass-whuppin’ that seemed to last forever, I was forbidden from having any playtime for six weeks. I punished myself, my mother and my idiot stepfather by picking up the A volume of World Book Encyclopedia and began to read it. “I’ll show them!,” I thought.

I made a point of reading and reading. By the time I decided to go outside again, it was April ’79, well past my six-week grounding. And my SRA test for fourth grade confirmed that I had raised my reading score from 3.9 (just barely at the fourth grade level) to a 7.4 (the equivalent of an above average seventh grader). So much for punishing my mother and myself!

Many of my former classmates, and certainly a number of my closest friends, have heard parts and various versions of this story over the years. But I’ve hardly ever told the story of how I had access to the ’78 edition of all thirty or so volumes of World Book Encyclopedia in the first place. That started because of a teacher crush, the second one I had in my first four years of K-12. This one involved my third grade teacher at William H. Holmes Elementary, Mrs. Shannon. She was fun, funny, beautiful, and dressed like a young Sue Simmons from WNBC-TV New York did when she started working for Channel 4 earlier in

Sue Simmons, circa 1978, March 15, 2011. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of low resolution of picture and relevance to subject matter of blog.

’77-’78.

Like most crushes I’ve had over the years, this one snuck up on my eight-year-old self and hit me in the head like a 90-mph fastball from Randy Johnson. And like the crushes I’d have when I reached Humanities in middle school and high school, I acted weird throughout February and March ’78. I became shier than I already was. I found myself daydreaming during reading time, not following instructions for assignments, just generally out of sorts.

Then there was the Easter play, the Peter Cottontail play. I wanted to play the lead role of Peter the Bunny, but all Mrs. Shannon wanted me to be was a stupid flower. I was mad, acted out, and she punished me by taking me out of the play all together. Following that, I refused to talk to her in class the next day. “You don’t have to speak,” Mrs. Shannon said as she sent me to sit in the corner until I was ready to talk again. I stayed in that corner the rest of the afternoon.

The following week, this week thirty-three years ago, Mrs. Shannon called for a parent-teacher conference with my mother and soon-to-be idiot stepfather. My mother, who had only been to two meetings at my schools since kindergarten, now found herself finding out that I was a bad student. Well, not exactly. Mrs. Shannon told them, “He has the ability. He has the potential. He just doesn’t want to concentrate.” Then she suggested that my mother could find a way for me to focus through World Book Encyclopedia. “It’ll draw out his imagination,” Mrs. Shannon said.

That’s all I thought and talked about on my way home with my mother. I brought it up so much that my mother said, “Alright already!” after two days of me constantly asking about it. We met a World Book sales person, and my mother wrote a check for $310, which was a lot of money for her. Within a week, four or five boxes reached 616, by far the largest order of books I’d see until grad school.

I didn’t start reading them immediately, and my mother complained about “spending all that damn money” on these books. But after December 2, ’78, my Saturday of running away from home, the investment began to pay off, and with it, the ability to think and imagine while being as weird as I wanted and needed to be, and others believed me to be as well. It’s a bittersweet memory, how I became a brainiac, how a teacher crush put me on a path of intellect and writing, of constant remembering and of painful transformations. How insidious knowledge — and the search for it — can be.

Five Ingredients to Higher Education Access and Success

11 Friday Mar 2011

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Academic Preparation, College Access and Success, Disadvantaged Students, Education Reform, Financial Aid, Higher Education Access and Success, K-16 Education, Low-Income Students, Parental Engagement, Postsecondary Education Access and Success, Race, Social Class, Social Preparation, Student Development, Student Engagement, Students of Color, Underrepresented Students, Will to Power

Five Ingredients for Cream of Mushroom Gravy with Bell Peppers, Soy Sauce, Chicken Broth and More Mushrooms, March 10, 2011. Donald Earl Collins

There should be five pillars to college access and success, similar to the Five Pillars of Islam, essential for the successful and lifelong practice of Islam. For all students, but especially for disadvantaged and underrepresented students, having a guide to the five most necessary ingredients for college entrance, matriculation and graduation is long overdue.

I should know. Between six years of Humanities in Mount Vernon, New York’s public schools in the ’80s, twenty years off and on as an instructor and professor, and a decade’s worth of nonprofit work in fields like civic education and K-16 education reform. So many students — especially those without the financial means and the academic preparation necessary to be successful at the college level — fail for lack of knowledge and lack of access to such knowledge as well.

Based on reports like the Pathways to College Network‘s A Shared Agenda (2004) and the Social Science

Questions That Matter Report Cover, June 15, 2006. Social Science Research Council

Research Council’s Questions That Matter (2006), the book Double the Numbers (2004) edited by staff from Jobs for the Future, as well as the work of innovative organizations like The Posse Foundation, below are what I believe are the five ingredients of higher education access and success, in order of their importance.

1. Social Preparation: Students must be prepared for the world outside of their towns, cities, neighborhoods, blocks, apartment buildings, homes and individual families. Most disadvantaged and underrepresented students are inadequately prepared for the cultural, social class, philosophical, ideological and spiritual differences between them and most traditional college and college-age students. Leadership development, critical thinking (and not just for academic purposes), a sense of belonging, a passion for active learning are all the seasonings needed to help students become socially comfortable in a postsecondary setting. Academic preparation is one important aspect of a student’s social preparation for college, but it’s not the only one.

2. Academic Preparation: This is of obvious importance, but in terms of higher education access and success, it’s actually overemphasized. Or at least, the acquisition of facts and the assessments used to determine how successful students were at assimilating these facts has been overdone. This high-stakes testing phase in the history of American education has also put too much of the task of preparation on individual teachers, and not enough on the students themselves. Academic preparation for college requires broad knowledge. But it also requires students to be able to analyzes and interpret facts, to begin to put facts together in combinations that cannot be derived by simply reading a textbook or from a teacher’s lesson plan. That requires good-to-great teachers, administrators, and students.

3. Parent, Family and Community Engagement: This aspect of K-16 educational success never gets the attention it deserves. Active parents and adults in schools can and does create the atmosphere necessary for students’ academic and social preparation in the college access and success process. There are times, of course, in which parental engagement can evolve into abuse of staff and teachers, particularly with parents and families who have unrealistic expectations of their children and their children’s teachers. For disadvantaged and underrepresented students, however, it’s of the utmost importance for parents and other concerned adults to be engaged in this process, to apply pressure on schools and students when necessary.

4. Financial Means and Aid: This is a nice phrase, but the fact is, student loans account for nearly three-fifths of the funds for a four-year degree for most students. The real issue here is to not only take advantage of scholarships, application fee-waivers and need-based aid like the Pell Grant and SEOG grants. It’s also to use social preparation and engaged parents to find additional funds and to agitate for more need-based state and federal aid. Or to use academic preparation to obtain the substantial private and state-level merit-based scholarships to cover the skyrocketing costs of college.

5. Will to Power: Researchers and practitioners rarely discuss this aspect of postsecondary access and success. But the bottom line is, the difference between success and failure for any student really is how much pain they are willing to endure to be successful in finishing a college degrees. Even with the proper academic preparation, excellent social preparation, solid financial aid and consistent parental and community engagement, it’s ultimately up to each student to decide to overcome whatever obstacles they face, especially once they become a college student. While willpower alone isn’t enough, it’s still a necessary ingredient to make the other four ingredients jell.

Columns In The Inner Court of The Baal Temple, December 4, 2007. Ddxc. Already in the public domain.

Had I known even half of this back in the day, I wouldn’t have been homeless my sophomore year at Pitt, struggling financially most of my time as an undergrad, or reluctant to take on leadership roles prior to my senior year. But my will to realize success and graduate overcame all of that, making the difference between where I am now and where I was so long ago.

Dumb Ass Communications, Inc.

08 Tuesday Mar 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Abuse, Arguments, BET, Bob Johnson, Business, Business Proposal, Comedy of Errors, Domestic Violence, Dumb Ideas, Hebrew-Israelites, Judah ben Israel, Marriage, Maurice Washington, Mount Vernon New York, Parents, Poverty, Sun Lion, Sun-Lion Communications, unemployment, Vicks Building, Wilson Woods

Lion and Sun, December 30, 2006. Original by [http://www.cais-soas.com/News/2006/December2006/30-12.htm CAIS

Of all my one-time stepfather Maurice Washington’s get-rich-quick schemes, the one that was the most elaborate, most expensive, most ridiculous of ideas was one that initially had some promise. In the year after he and my mother reconciled while making us all into Hebrew-Israelites in ’81, he concocted the idea of beginning a media entertainment business.

His great vision was to start a business that catered to Blacks audiences in TV and radio land, one that would redefine how media would in fact reach niche audiences. Maurice wanted to call it Sun-Lion Communications, partly after his Hebrew-Israelite moniker, Judah ben Israel, a lion of Jehovah. Of course, the dumb ass didn’t know that he was following a combination of Babylonian astrological, Persian and

Sun Lion Coin, 13th Century, Seljuq Turks. Source: http://mehmeteti.150m.com/thamara/index.htm

Islamic traditions in the process.

The plan grew from an idea at the end of ’81 into a full-fledged business proposal during ’82. So much so that my mother took $2,500 of the precious and pitiful few funds we had and bought a business license to incorporate this Sun-Lion Communications. In fact, she did that this time twenty-nine years ago. The one thing that my mother did right in doing so, that stuck in Maurice’s craw for years afterward, was to get a business license in her name, not my stepfather’s.

That was one of the underlying reasons for the Memorial Day ’82 incident in which Maurice drop-kicked my mother into unconsciousness — besides him being an asshole, of course. My mother may have made many dumb decisions over the years, but she wasn’t an idiot. Maurice had plenty of ideas before. When we first met the blowhard in ’77, Maurice told me and my older brother Darren that he was “a writer, a lawyer and a doctor.” All while driving a Reliable Taxi cab in Mount Vernon. Even at the age of seven, I wasn’t that naive. I knew enough to ask, “So how many books have you written?” But he did write. Street poetry and a few half-worked out plays. With time, focus and a lot of hard work, who knows?

Maurice, though, never wanted to work that hard. After losing his cab driver job on April 30, ’79 because he was literally caught sleeping at the wheel, he’d been unemployed for more than three years. At one point prior to him and my mother separating before becoming a Hebrew-Israelite, Maurice had the idea of starting a restaurant, to which my mother said, “Yeah, if you wanna eat us outta business!” in response.

I digress. After Memorial Day ’82 and spending most of June and July abusing me — I was a witness, to domestic violence, after all — Maurice finally got a job. It was as a part-time security guard for the closed Vicks plant in the middle of Wilson Woods (it’s a school now, I think). Within a few weeks of working the night and weekend shifts guarding the empty building, Maurice found inspiration. He had a “vision from God” that this empty shell was where Sun-Lion Communications would be headquartered, with studios, satellites, soundproofing, and so many other things a media business would need.

Although the idea still had promise (Bob Johnson had started BET only three years earlier, mind you), it was a high-risk business, with national cable in its early toddler stage. Not to mention our own growling stomachs, my mother consistently three weeks behind in rent, and us facing Con Ed’s warnings of our electricity being cutoff because we were $180 behind on that too.

That led to one of my mother and Maurice’s classic 616 arguments at the end of October ’82. In the living room, with all of our run-down furniture, Maurice was bellyaching about my mother’s refusal to put the business license in his name and her lack of emotional support. “I support a candy shop if we had the money, but we don’t,” she said. With Maurice yelling, demanding, “Give me the license, woman!,” I started worrying, as I was in the kitchen, drying dishes from the wonderful dinner of Great Northern Beans and rice. It was the standard meal when the idiot decided that he should play the role of stepfather and father and help feed us.

“How much you think this gonna cost?,” my mother finally asked.

“A hundred million dollars,” Maurice said.

“Man, you must be a fool!” my mother yelled. “With that kind of money, why would I need to start a business? You must think I’m pea-brained idiot!”

“You are!” Maurice yelled as he walked out the living room, went into the master bedroom, put on his clothes and coat and then came back up front, and left.

That was the last time I heard about Sun-Lion Communications. My ex-stepfather was and remains a dumb ass, never having found his way in this world, and about as good at business as he’s been as maintaining a proper diet and good health.