by Arthur Black
They called him Pipeline Moe because he could line a golf ball straight as a laser beam, shot after shot after shot. Ben Hogan wasn’t buying. Hogan claimed that any golf shot that went straight was “an accident.” One day he stood behind Moe as he pounded a ball arrow-straight down the fairway. “Accident,” murmured Hogan. Moe teed off another one. “Accident,” said Hogan. After six more drives Hogan shook his head and walked off, muttering, “Keep hitting those accidents, kid.”
Moe Norman wasn’t a golfing legend; he was a golfing god. A score of sixty is considered a perfect game, virtually unattainable. Moe carded three games of fifty-nine and four of sixty-one. Most golfers only dream of a hole-in-one. Moe had seventeen. He owned the course record at thirty different clubs. He held multiple championships from Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta and the approbation of every knowledgeable golfer on the continent.
So how come the rest of us never heard of him?
Because Norman was paralyzingly shy. It’s a wonder he ever worked up the nerve to swing a club in front of spectators; in most social situations, Moe couldn’t string two words together. When he won the Canadian Golf Championship in 1955, officials couldn’t find him to present the cup. Moe was hiding in the locker room.
No one knows why Moe was so profoundly uncomfortable in public, but that and his volcanic temper (snubbed by a PGA functionary for violating the dress code, Moe swore he would never play in the US again—and he didn’t) consigned Moe to the sidelines of the pro golfing world. He played in exhibition matches, even played rounds “back to front”—driving with a putter, putting with his driver—and still made par. He drove himself from tournament to tournament in his dusty old Cadillac (which he slept in, usually), subsisting on junk food and winning enough to keep him on the circuit.
He dominated the Canadian golf scene in the 1950s but he shunned the Bigs, perhaps afraid of being embarrassed again. Lee Trevino: “I think if someone had just taken Moe under their wing and said, ‘Look, we’re going to play here, don’t be afraid’—there’s no telling what Moe Norman could have won.”
He mesmerized onlookers, including the president of Titleist Corporation, who was so impressed he offered a lifetime contract that paid Moe five thousand dollars a month. Just to play golf.
It was generous, but it was late. Moe was sixty-six by then, and past his prime. Nine years later he was dead, of congestive heart failure.
But the anecdotes live on. Such as the time he and Sam Snead were playing a fairway intersected by a creek 240 yards away. Snead warned Moe he couldn’t clear the creek with a driver. “Not trying to,” said Moe. “I’m playing for the bridge.” Snead’s shot landed on the near side of the creek; Moe’s landed on the bridge, then dribbled across to the other side.
Ho-hum. Just another Moe Norman accident.
Just a Card to Say: Way to Go!
A word or two on behalf of the postcard.
I know—they’re hopelessly old-fashioned. Went out with hoop skirts and penny-farthing bicycles. Imagine sitting down to write a card to someone. First, you have to think of something to say, then you have to look up their mailing address after which you have to cough up—what is it, close to a buck now?—for a stamp. Finally, you have to find yourself a post box (good luck with that) to drop the card in.
Oh yes—and brush up your penmanship skills so you don’t come off looking like a drunk or a chimp playing with a ballpoint.
Put yourself through all that when you’ve got the option of hauling out your cell and tweeting them in a nanosecond? Ridiculous.
And yet . . . there’s something about a postcard that no BlackBerry, iPhone or Android device can match. A postcard is from me to you—not from one device to another. And the fact that so much time passes between thinking of writing it and popping it in the mail means consideration is involved. You have time to think about what you’re saying. It’s not just tap it out and press “SEND.”
There is one other, ah, factor that makes me personally fond of sending postcards.
I happen to have several thousand of them in my attic. Unused. They are blank on one side; the other side shows a photo of me under the banner “BASIC BLACK.” I used to host a weekly radio show on CBC by that name. I retired ten years ago and while cleaning out my office I noticed three boxes of unsullied Basic Black postcards stacked by the garbage can. I asked the janitor what was happening with them. “They’ll be shredded, I guess.”
A high, keening wail filled the halls of the CBC. It was the wraith of my ancient departed Scottish grandmother wailing, “Och, aye, ye’ll no be wastin’ those, laddie.”And I didn’t. I took those boxes home and for the past ten years I’ve been scribbling on their backsides and sending them out to whoever tickled my fancy.
A friend asked me if I didn’t feel a little weird, sending out postcards advertising a radio show that’s been off the air for a decade. Not at all, I said. I look on them as tiny retro gifts from an age gone by that I send to people I admire. What’s more, postcards impose a necessary brevity that is almost poetic. The reduced message area means you really have to think about what you write—no room for discursive ramblings about weather, your wonky knee or the hapless Blue Jays.
As for whom to send a card to—for that I take the advice of a writer named James Mangan, who says those postcards and letters matter a great deal—even if all they say is “Attaboy!”
“Write to the author whose story gave you a delightful half-hour last night,” says Mangan. “Write to the cartoonist whose strip you devoured this morning; to the teacher who inspired you twenty years ago; to the doctor who saved your baby’s life; to your old employer to show him there was something more between you than a paycheque.”
You get the picture. There are dozens—probably hundreds—of people you’ve fantasized about patting on the back and saying “Well done” to. A phone call is a bit over the top and a tweet or an email would just be, well, a tweet or an email.
Perhaps it’s an Air Canada flight attendant who found your missing wallet or a Paralympics wheelchair racer who made your heartstrings twang. A grocery clerk who smiled when you needed it badly; perhaps a politician who did the right, instead of the expedient, thing. The world is full of people who behave better than they absolutely have to. Won’t you send at least one of them a note or postcard to tell them so?
Attaboy!
Sally Armstrong: Hero
When I retired from hosting Basic Black in 1992 it meant, among other things, giving up my weekly commute to Vancouver. At my retirement party a producer sidled up to me and said, “Are you sure you can handle living full time on Salt Spring? I mean, I know it’s peaceful and all, but man, it’s the boonies! You’ll go stir-crazy.”
Well, I’m ten years in and I wish I could sidle up to that producer and say, “Were you drunk?” I’m as busy as I ever was when I slogged off to Vancouver every week. The only things no longer in my life are police sirens, panhandlers and getting stuck in the George Massey Tunnel in rush hour.
Okay, and a weekly paycheque. That’s missing too. But as for outside stimulation, that’s not a big problem on Salt Spring. In the last month I’ve been to talks by Robert Bateman and Wade Douglas; I’ve seen the movies The Artist and The Hunger Games; spent an evening listening to world-renowned blues harmonica virtuoso Carlos del Junco . . .
Oh yeah, and I got to hear Sally Armstrong, too. She spoke at the Salt Spring Legion and she is a powerhouse. I first met her a million years ago when she was editor of Homemakers magazine and I was a freelancer trying to sell her a story about a brothel in Thunder Bay.
That story didn’t pan out, because of a lack of enthusiasm. Not on Sally’s part; she was gung-ho but I kind of lost interest when I discovered that the proprietors of the brothel had strong-ish Montreal Mafia connections.
But that, as Sally would probably say, is another story. She uses that phrase a lot as she segu
es from one chapter to another of her turbulent life. She’s been an editor and a columnist and a reporter and a documentary filmmaker. She’s hit most of the world’s hellholes: Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, Bangladesh. She’s spent much of the past fifteen years in that hellhole of hellholes—Afghanistan. She specializes in investigating zones of conflict—specifically, the plight of girls and women trapped there. She’s not doing it as a sightseer or a thrill-seeker. Sally Armstrong wants to change things. And she thinks that mobilizing the women is the way to do it.
Hard to argue. Males have been in charge of those hellholes since forever, and look at the mess they’ve made. And contrary to the tone we detect on the news, Sally Armstrong is optimistic about Afghanistan’s future—albeit guardedly. She talks about the actions of one group called Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan. It’s headquartered in Calgary but has volunteer chapters across the country. They threw a series of potluck suppers, “that most Canadian of institutions,” as Armstrong calls them. They raised enough money to put fifty thousand Afghan girls in schools. It doesn’t take billions. An Afghan teacher earns about $750 a year. And when you’re in a country with an illiteracy rate of 85 percent, the only way out is up.
More importantly, women in Afghanistan are taking their first shaky steps in support of women in Afghanistan. Armstrong told the story of Noorjahan Akbar, a student who started a group in Kabul called Young Women for Change. They collect books, set up libraries, arrange lectures. She’s just twenty-one, but 65 percent of Afghanis are under the age of twenty-five.
They’ve only known bombs and blood and chaos and corruption but they have access to iPhones and the Internet and they want something different. With agents like Sally Armstrong and Noorjahan Akbar spreading the word, in venues as various as Kabul markets and the Salt Spring Legion . . . they just might have a shot at it.
Cuts Like a Knife
I once saw the oldest knife in the world—well, the oldest one we’ve found, so far. It was in a British museum and came all the way from a gorge in Africa. It was just a chunk of volcanic rock chipped with another stone until it was roughly triangular, rounded at the top for a handhold, tapering in two sharp edges to a dagger point. Custom fabrication by some nameless prehistoric toolmaker a million and a half years ago. Didn’t look like much, but in terms of human evolution it was as important as fire, the wheel and E = MC2. That knife was our equalizer. We didn’t have teeth like a shark or talons like a lion or speed like a cheetah or muscles like a bear. But we had a knife, and before long (in evolutionary terms) mankind would have spears and arrows and, in another blink of the evolutionary eye, hunting rifles and fish-finding radar.
Knives continued to evolve, too. Today we have penknives, jackknives, Barlow knives and Bowie knives. On the sinister side we have bayonets, stilettos and switchblades; on the utilitarian side we have machetes, pruning knives, paring knives and potato peelers.
Knives aren’t the only things that have evolved. So have knife makers. On my island, Salt Spring, lives a man who is a natural descendant of that Stone Age African craftsman who smashed rocks together to make an edge sharp enough to cut flesh nearly two million years ago. The descendant’s name is Seth Cosmo Burton and he is a maker of knives. Cosmo knives, he calls them. He often uses rock too, but only for the handles of his creations and only the finest of rock—jade, lapis lazuli, marble, sodalite and Salt Spring flowerstone.
As for the blades, they’re in a class by themselves. Burton started out making steel blades the conventional way, but—well, he evolved. Now he uses a process called crucible particle metallurgy to smelt his metal on his own forge. It gives a sharper, harder, purer edge to the steel.
Burton’s made all kinds of knives, from pocket to hunting, but he seems to be turning to chef’s cutlery now and chefs seem to appreciate his attention. Chef Bruce Wood says his Cosmo chef’s knife is quite simply the nicest one he’s ever used. Anthony Sedlak, who hosted a show on The Food Network, said Cosmo knives are as much works of art as they are quintessential culinary tools.
And he’s right—sometimes it’s hard to get past the beauty of a Cosmo knife to realize that it exists to do what that stone chunk in the British museum—the most basic tool man ever made—was created to do. To cut. Go to Burton’s website, www.cosmoknives.com, and click on the video that shows Burton slicing through three hanks of inch-thick hemp rope lashed together, suspended. The knife goes through them like a laser through butter. In one swipe.
Makes you wish the paleolithic artisan sweating over his chipped rocks in that African gorge a couple of million years ago could see what he started.
Saskatchewan Floyd
This a story about Saskatchewan Floyd. I don’t know his full name but that’s what he’s known as down at the coffee shop. Rangy kind of guy, thirty, maybe forty, carrot-coloured hair, smiles a lot, walks on the balls of his feet. Showed up on a spring day a couple of years ago in a beater Ford pickup with rusted fender wells, a block heater cord sticking out of the grill and Saskatchewan plates. Said his name was Floyd and he was looking for work.
Nobody said anything out loud at the time, but I think a lot of us placed our personal subconscious bets on how long Saskatchewan Floyd was going to last.
Prairie people don’t always fare as well as they should on Salt Spring. Oh, they handle the summers fine—who wouldn’t? It’s like the Mediterranean here. But then there’s the other ten months of the year, which lean toward grey. And wet. All that downfalling moisture tends to erode the esprit de corps of somebody raised under the big sky and blazing sunshine of Saskatoon or Swift Current or Brandon.
Actually, the winters get to a lot of Salt Springers, native and otherwise. That’s why each fall there’s a mass migration from these shores—not just hummingbirds, Canada geese and robins and finches—featherless Salt Springers too. They borrow the wings of United and Alaska Airlines, Air Canada and WestJet and take off for Malaque, Manzanilla and Maui, where the living is easy, sunny and dry.
Some of us don’t migrate of course. We have to stay home and work. Like Saskatchewan Floyd, who surprised us. He was still here the next spring and the spring after that. He was still driving his beater pickup but the Saskatchewan plates had disappeared and BC plates had taken their place. Now three, maybe four years later, he’s a fixture down at the coffee shop most mornings before he goes off to work at whatever he does.
I was behind him in the coffee lineup the other day, about the third straight day of rain we had. I asked him how he was doing with the weather. His eyes lit up, he laughed, went into a squat and drew a circle with his forefinger about a metre across on the coffee shop floor.
“Back in Maple Creek,” he said, “if we were out on a job and the sky turned dark we’d draw a circle like that in the dust.
“Soon as we counted thirty-five drops of rain in that circle, we were gone. We didn’t work in the rain. Hell, it was so dry out there our tools would disintegrate in the rain.” He shook his head. “First winter I spent in Vancouver, we had fifty-nine straight days of rain.”
I asked him, how come he stuck it out? How come he was still here? “Well, it wasn’t easy at first,” said Saskatchewan Floyd. “I’d heard about depression but I’d never really experienced it. Then a friend of mine said I should get into gardening. I did. And it’s made all the difference.”
I said that gardens didn’t do much better in a Salt Spring winter than folks from the Prairies do. Gardens turn brown, lose their leaves, go dormant.
“Not mine,” said Saskatchewan Floyd. “I ain’t got but one plant in a pot. I keep it in the living room. Under a grow light. Every morning before I go to work I get down on my knees beside that plant, I look right into that grow light and I say, ‘Come on, Mary Jane, grow—you can do it.’ I don’t know how the plant’s gonna turn out but I feel great.”
Saskatchewan Floyd and his one-plant grow op. I think he’s gonna fit right in.
&n
bsp; How Old Is “Old”?
When I read the details of the survey my first thought was: what would Satchel say?
Satchel being Leroy Robert “Satchel” Paige, possibly the greatest pitcher ever to throw a baseball. Joe DiMaggio said he was the best he ever faced; Bob Feller said likewise. Hack Wilson, a power hitter from the same era, said a ball thrown by Paige “looked like a marble” when it crossed the plate. Paige had names for his pitches—Bat Dodger, Midnight Creeper, Midnight Rider, Jump Ball, Trouble Ball—but the experts say they all really came down to one pitch, a near-warp-speed fastball that batters could hardly see much less hit.
We’ll never know just how good Paige was because he was a black man, barred by the colour of his skin from Major League baseball for most of his career. He didn’t break the Major League colour barrier until he was old enough to be retired. But Paige wasn’t ready to retire. He became the oldest rookie to play in the Bigs, debuting with the Cleveland Browns at the age of forty-two.
Paige simply refused to act his age. He played like a teenager, bouncing around the so-called Negro Leagues for decades. He also played ball in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic before finally putting in nearly twenty years in the majors. He started his pro career in 1926. He was still fanning batters for the Kansas City Athletics in 1965.
It’s a pity Satchel’s gone to his reward because I’m pretty sure he would have had a belly laugh if he’d seen the survey I mentioned earlier. It was a telephone poll of 2,969 Americans conducted by the Pew Research Center, a Washington DC “fact tank.” The main question the survey posed: how old is old?
Not surprisingly, the answer turns out to be—it depends who you ask. Respondents who were born around the Second World War opined that “old age” commences at about age eighty-one. Baby boomers thought it was closer to seventy-seven. Generation Xers, whose birth year falls between 1964 and 1970, expected to get doddery around the age of seventy-one, while Generation Yers, a.k.a. the Millennials—that’s what they’re calling pups born in the 1980s and 1990s—figured they’d start losing it about the age of sixty-two.