Kate Schulte 1951-2011

Some people simply radiate goodness... you can even get drunk and barf on their nice rug and they say ohhh, that is nothing. When you reconnect with them years later, they never mention the rug, and instead tell you how wonderful you are. They impart their special magic to all of those around them. These are very rare, beautiful souls on this earth.

We have lost one.

Goodbye, dearest Kate.

~*~

SCHULTE, Kate "Kathaleen Beth" Schulte, beloved wife, mother, sister, aunt, and friend, left our company on September 15 from an apparent heart attack at the age of 60. Kate was born in Wichita, KS, and settled in Columbus, OH, in 1975. Her earliest work for justice was with farmworker organizers and the Columbus Tenants Union. In 1984, she met her swoon-unit, Michael Vander Does, on a memorable trip to the Kentucky Derby. Allen Ginsberg was a guest at their engagement party in July 1985 and they married a few months later. She loved and cared for her stepdaughters, Nicole and Naima Vander Does, as if they were her own. She loved to travel. The Yucatan, Italy, and New Orleans were favorite destinations. She attended 17 Jazzfests, seven Kentucky Derbies, and too many ComFests to count. She was a graduate of The Ohio State University College of Law, after which she became a well-known civil rights attorney. Perhaps her proudest legal work was on the Brunet firefighter sex discrimination case. A remembrance will be held at Ray's Living Room, 17 Brickel St., Columbus, OH, on Saturday, October 8, 2011 at 6 p.m., for her family and friends to celebrate her beautiful life.

From: Columbus Dispatch

~*~

I got on a bus once, drug-addled, and Kate was there. I meandered on back to sit next to her... I didn't even ASK if I could sit there. I told her I was all messed up on drugs.

"Well, you don't look like it!" she whispered, conspiratorially. And then she started telling me about her law book. I remember that it sounded very cool and interesting.

She reminded me, "Isn't this your stop?" She was right! Without Kate, would have ended up in Worthington or somewhere.

What I remembered, when I heard the news of her passing, was her warm, bright smile that day, when I sat next to her. She made even some silly druggie feel like the most important human being in the world.

So many people recall the warm, inclusive smile, and how it made them feel.

~*~

Yippies regularly crashed parties given by various important liberals and lawyers, which we loved to do. Go ahead, try to throw your poor lefty relations out of the party! (Sometimes they did.) We will talk trash about you and call you rich!

It was a game: "Do you think they'll let us in?"

But not at Kate's party: "Oh, that's fine, I love the Yippies. Somebody has to bring some controversy, don't they?!" (Was that a dig at the boring liberals?) She warmly invited us in, plied us with cheese and wine and introduced us to the well-heeled Democrats. She seemed to enjoy knowing scruffy anarchists, and also seemed to quietly enjoy ruffling those rich liberals a bit.

Official Yippie verdict on Kate: What a great person!

~*~

On Facebook, I told her, you know you are old when you are friending the people you used to babysit. She loved that. And it was via Facebook that I reconnected with a beautiful soul, and then lost her, in a year's time. And ohhhh my, it does hurt.

I've written about the modern phenomenon of experiencing death so up-close and personal via Facebook, and how it is now turning into a common occurrence. I hope this grief will not also become commonplace, but then again, perhaps it will serve to make us treasure every minute that much more.

As Kate would have done.

Places I've lived - a Google street view tour

At left: I am born. (First place I lived, according to my birth certificate. There were 5-7 other people living there too, but not certain of the exact number. It's the house in the middle.)



I have finally learned how to make photos of screen shots. Unfortunately, I have not figured out how to crop the picture in Microsoft Paint. If you goof up, makes a big HOLE on the screen! Aiyee!

To celebrate my newfound, hard-won knowledge (took all day!) -- here are some screen shots of places I've lived, lifted wholesale from the redoubtable Google Street View. You could DIE from all the excitement.

I initially did these as a test, and then when I saw the finished result, decided to post them here. I apologize in advance for the rather blah nature of these locales; I'm sorry my life hasn't been lived in particularly picturesque spots. Instead, you get the complete working class tour of OHIO. All of these locations are in Columbus, except for the paper mill. (I guess Massillon, Ohio, is not big enough to get the full Google Street View treatment yet?) I lived in all of these places before the age of 25... my family didn't like to stay in one place. In pre-digital days, it was much harder (if not impossible) for bill collectors to find you if you moved around all the time.

I admit the houses and apartments look rather boring, but my family livened up the block, let me assure you.

I did not attempt to put these in chronological order, since I am not even 100% sure what the order IS, and I know I'd get it messed up. But I did manage to put the schools last, which is saying something!

PS: You can click to enlarge, I just discovered.

Below:

1) This apartment building is currently being torn down or already has been; HERE is a relatively current Facebook photo mid-demolition. (I am not sure if that link will show up or not, some Facebook photos link acceptably and some don't; not sure of the rhyme or reason for that.)

There wasn't any message from God on the building while I lived there, though.

2) I think we were 3rd flat from the end on the right. This is the first place my baby ever lived!

3) This is where I had my first drug overdose as a teenager. Ah, memories. We lived in the apartment furthest from the road, Apt. D.

I really liked it here, despite some accidental mucking around with mama's pills. (Hey, nobody's perfect.)

4) The layout of the apartment in #3, reminded me of this one, where I lived when I started kindergarten. (See, this is why I told you it could never be chronological. Are you kidding?)

5) Ogden Avenue on the Hilltop, the last place I lived before moving south. I loved this old house, which my grandmother was buying on "land contract"--which I never understood. They foreclosed on it anyway.

It did not have that awful white screen on the porch--but I will admit that the ugly green color is the same... mercifully it has faded a bit over time.

6) My mother's house (also on the Hilltop), which was not blue and would never be blue if my mother was still alive. :( She will haunt those poor people for painting it that color!

Although it's 10 rooms, with full attic, garage and basement, the age and location of the house made it a hard-sell... I did not try to stop the foreclosure, but it broke my heart. My mother owned this house since the mid-70s.

7) Duplex with red doors, we lived on the right side. This is where my child was conceived! (more than you really wanted to know)

8) This used to be the Rustic Tavern on West Broad Street, owned by my aunt Ruth. It looked very different then. My mother sang in the country-and-western house-band there, and we lived upstairs.

This is where I first heard Last Date, since I could hear it through the ceiling, and knew this meant they were closing up for the night. I could be sound asleep and still wake up on the first notes of Last Date. (note: evillll YouTube yanked the song in that link, so try this one.)

9) When my mother and stepfather broke up, my mother left me here (age 9) with relatives and promptly disappeared for months. Thus, I didn't like the house.

I do remember that this was where I discovered the Monkees. :)

10) We lived on the right side of this duplex; the tan house on the far left was the home of Mickey Mantle's cousin, also surnamed Mantle, who used to drink (in earnest) with my grandfather. I don't remember his first name since of course, in those days, we called adults "Mr"--thus I recall his name was "Mr Mantle"...

11) Left side of duplex this time! I think the couch on the curb really makes the photo.

12) Isn't that chain-link fence awful?! My grandmother would have totally flipped out. Needless to say, it wasn't there when we lived there.

13) This was a drug store when I lived above it. One of the businesses on the ground floor was the first place I ever smoked weed--an R & B/funk record store called Jim's House of Soul.

It sure was!

14) This old building was the paper mill my stepfather worked in, located in Massillon Ohio. The sidewalk in front is where he walked the picket line during the strike.

There was a huge, musty old room of discarded books, magazines and comics, ready to be recycled into pulp... my stepfather brought me paper bags full of great stuff to read almost every day. THIS is where I learned to LOVE to read, and began reading for pleasure and enjoyment. They were old and sometimes (maddeningly!) had pages missing, but I loved them all. This was where I first learned to love comics, especially. Also, ancient movie magazines... where I first saw my beloved ELIZABETH!

The recycle-room of the paper mill was a magical place to me.

15) Lindbergh Elementary School, where we had to learn to spell CHARLES LINDBERGH correctly on spelling tests. I'll bet you never had to do that.

The iconic "Charlie Brown Christmas" piano music always makes me think of this school; candy canes and cutting out paper snowflakes.

16) Deshler Elementary School, where we were dismissed early after the assasination of JFK.

17) Hilltonia Middle School, which was called JUNIOR HIGH when I attended. I still think JUNIOR HIGH sounds better; who decided to name them all MIDDLE? Yech.

It was NOT a two-toned building when I attended... yech to that too.

18) West High School, my um, alma mater. ((((screams))))

Looks exactly the same.

~*~

Hope you enjoyed your tour!

May 4th: This day in history

Kent State student John Filo's Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of Mary Ann Vecchio discovering the slain Jeffrey Miller.


41 years ago on April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon announced that military operations would be expanding into the neutral, peaceful country of Cambodia, which had the bad fortune to share a border with Vietnam. Viet Cong insurgents were said to be hiding in the mountains of Cambodia. (In fact, the USA had already been conducting a secret bombing campaign, unbeknownst to the general public, engineered by Nixon and his butchers, named Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger.) These illegal, immoral, reprehensible acts were the acts of criminally insane men, who had just realized they were losing their filthy, insane, extremely expensive war.

The result of this announcement was demonstrations on many American college campuses over the next few days. Nixon had promised to end the war, and proved to be a liar. The anger of the youth who would fight this war was palpable. At Kent State University in Ohio, demonstrators burned down an ROTC building. It was never known if this was deliberate or just an act of vandalism that got out of hand. Ostensibly due to this event, Governor James Rhodes declared Martial Law on the campus of Kent State University and sent the National Guard onto the campus. He also held a press conference in which he made famous inflammatory statements: "They're worse than the brownshirts and the communist element and also the night-riders and the vigilantes," Rhodes said. "They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. I think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America."

On May 4th, a demonstration was scheduled for noon. There were about 2000 people gathered for the demonstration, and about 1000 troops on campus. For unknown reasons, the Guard decided to break up the demonstration, and ordered the crowd to disperse. They were met with rocks and flying debris. The Guard responded with tear gas, and it was on.

I have read multiple versions of what happened next. Several facts dominate these versions: the kids were returning the tear gas cannisters (which do POP loudly like guns when they go off) and the Guard seemed very confused and didn't know what to do. At one point, none seemed sure of which direction to advance, but advance they did. At 12:22 PM, after guardsmen had advanced to the top of the hill near Taylor Hall and the parking lot, they turned and fired. They commenced firing for 13 seconds and fired 67 M-1 semiautomatic bullets. They wounded nine students, and murdered four in cold blood. Only two of these four students, Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, were actually demonstrating against the war. The remaining two, Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder, were merely changing classes.

No one knows who gave the order to fire, if anyone did.

The kids in the National Guard were the same ages as the kids on the campus. These kids were all facing the same reality--the males of both groups were trying to avoid going to war. One group could afford college and the other could not, but could somehow get into the Guard. There is no question there was significant class hostility directed at the college kids by the Guard; the males in the Guard were closer to actual combat in Vietnam, although William Schroeder attended Kent on a ROTC scholarship and may well have intended to become an Officer himself.

From this incident, we learned that even the pampered children of the middle class were expendable. We learned that totalitarianism can erupt quickly and suddenly, particularly in small, contained areas where there exists considerable class hostility, panic, and loaded weapons. We learned that the Governor of Ohio was a fascist and a murderer, as was the President and his henchmen, all of whom nodded approvingly at the murders at Kent.

The lines were drawn very clearly, especially for me. I woke that morning in Ohio, to see that my state was all over the national news, all over the newspapers. We had various Moments of Silence for the next week. Everyone seemed to know someone involved. My grandmother cried and explained to me that these students were exercising their civil rights, and had been shot for it. "You have to remember this," she told me.

In the subsequent lawsuits, the families received an average of approximately $63,000 per student.

~*~

Originally posted here on May 4, 2008.

Ohio - Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

Friday nights in northern Ohio...

Children all over northern Ohio used to stay up late on Friday nights to watch Ghoulardi, who hosted horror movies and other fun stuff. We loved him! Apparently there is now a whole book out about him and his Cleveland-based show (see link), which I must read.

He did a memorable spoof on the immensely-popular 60s nighttime soap opera "Peyton Place", which he called Parma Place. It began with polka music, unlike the respectable New Englandish music that signaled the beginning of "Peyton Place"... In addition, the "drama" consisted of finding new places to put plastic pink flamingos in the yard, as Ghoulardi frequently complained to his long-suffering wife (curlers forever in her hair) that he couldn't find his Cheez Whiz. It was so OHIO... I don't think the jokes translate well to these modern times, but we loved it to death.

I loved all the wonderfully-shlocky horror movies I saw during that time, and have included some old trailers below.





~*~

Children of the Damned (1964)



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Check out the question mark on the wall behind William Castle's head. Not sure of the significance.

13 Ghosts (1960)



~*~

Caution: major sexism, as a woman's brain/head survives and her scientist boyfriend scouts out other sexy bodies to sew onto her head. (Really, and we GREW UP on this stuff!)

The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1960)



~*~

Lighthouse encased in ice on Lake Erie

CLEVELAND, Ohio (CNN/WKYC) - Check out this amazing sight.

You're not looking at a snow sculpture. It's actually a lighthouse encased in snow and ice.

It happened after the chilly winds moving through Cleveland blew water and snow all over the Cleveland Harbor West Pier lighthouse.

Parts of Ohio have seen more than a foot of snow in the last few days thanks to a late fall snowstorm.

I understand just how the poor lighthouse feels! And I am very glad I am not in my home state of Ohio right now--as cold as it presently is, South Carolina clearly has its advantages.

I promise I will eventually write a real post. I have so much crap piled up on my "to do" list, I haven't even had time to pay my damn car insurance. The only recreational time I've had recently, I spent watching reruns of Fight Club with Mr Daisy and eating vegetarian quesadillas from Moe's.

And what have you been doing this week? Be especially nice to your local overworked Christmas retail employee!