Around the World in 24 Hours

     S. Claus reveals some of his secrets

      in an e-mail to Karlyn  Curran 

Here I sit in my overstuffed recliner, feet up, laptop on my lap (where else?) before a roaring fire in my cozy cottage at the North Pole. I'm exhausted--flat out, tired to the bone--however you want to put it, but satisfied, happy, and I must admit, more than a little proud. Once again my team and I pulled it off. Everything went pretty smoothly considering the scope of our operation. The happy smiles and laughter of kids around the world are what makes this all worthwhile for me.

Kids take my existence and activities on blind faith because they want to believe in me. Adults are another story--they question almost everything about me. Since you and I are old friends (I've known you since you were a little girl), I'm willing to do you a favor and let the Southport community in on some of my secrets about how I run my operation.

My reindeer and I really do fly around the world in 24 hours on Christmas Eve, but I cheat a little and have help from some witches who volunteer their time on Christmas Eve. You know, witches don't deserve their bad rap; many of them are very nice, otherwise ordinary people. Those that help me are experts in time and space travel and one of them always rides with me on the sled. If I'm flying over an ocean or a desert, she just blinks her eyes and in an instant we're past that. I start out at midnight in England at the prime meridian. That's important because this way I'm working with the change in time zones; I actually get to Cape Cod shortly after midnight your time.

The witch helps with the chimney thing, too. Many houses have modern chimneys that I can't squeeze through, but another blink of her eyes and I'm inside a house--right through the walls, quick and easy, as if by magic. Well, it is magic, isn't it? Helps with the soot problem, too, so I still look fairly decent at the end of the night.

Let me explain about my sled. The reindeer really do pull it and we really do land on rooftops whenever we can. But you and I both know that one sled isn't big enough to haul presents for all the kids in the world. I've solved that problem by having a fleet of sleds and several teams of reindeer. The elves pack my first sled as full as they can and when it's empty, another team of reindeer comes to meet me with a fully packed replacement sled.

When I'm on Cape Cod I try to use one of those great big summer homes on the water for the switch, because two teams have to land on the same rooftop. Besides, those houses are usually empty in the winter and no one is around to hear the extra noise. I just get out of one sled and into the other one and the empty sled goes back to the North Pole. Some of the elves get to drive the replacement sleds; it's a job perk that they love. The witch in each sled just blinks her eyes--twice, I think--and that makes the trip from the North Pole almost instantaneous.

Now--about Rudolph. He doesn't fly anymore. He's retired to a plush stall in a heated barn up here. The stable hands take very good care of him and the elves are always popping in with treats so he's pretty content. I've got a GPS so I don't need his red nose anymore, and on cloudy nights I've got landing lights on the sleds, just like those on airplanes.

It's a major organizational feat to get all the presents ready for delivery. The elves still make some of the toys (mostly the wooden toys and dolls), but now we buy a lot of stuff from China, especially the electronics. The Chinese give us a pretty good deal, too. We get deliveries starting several months ahead of Christmas and store it all in huge warehouses. Of course, everything's automated so we can pull out each child's order as his or her request comes in. Many of my computer operators are retired seniors who enjoy working here for three or four months every year. It's a happy place to work.

As for me, I have no plans to retire, and I'm still pretty healthy. I stay fit by exercising and eating properly. I used to smoke a pipe but I gave that up a while back. (I still sneak a few puffs now and then.) I should do more about my weight, but I've tried and, hey, nobody's perfect!

Oh, I almost forgot! There are some very special people who help me out without ever coming to the North Pole. There's a lady at Southport who works with school guidance counselors to get a list of needy kids and the things they want, and then all the kind people at Southport pitch in and buy the gifts for those kids. There's another woman at the Brookside condo complex in Bourne who does the same thing on a smaller scale. Then there are the Marines, church organizations, and even Starbucks that collect toys and help me out. This goes on in community after community all over the world. I really appreciate the help; my job would be overwhelming without it.

So that's about it. We've modernized our operation quite a bit over the years and I have a lot of outside help. I guess that's to be expected. The world's gotten a whole lot more complicated than it used to be.

Now, Karlyn, please do me a favor and ask the people at Southport not to spill any of this to people outside of Southport, and especially not to their grandkids or other little children. Children still want to believe in the old fashioned stuff--that's where the magic is for them.

I'm going to wind this down. Mrs. Claus is coming and I believe she's got a mug of hot chocolate for me. You know, she dotes on me, especially in the weeks after Christmas when she knows how utterly exhausted I am. No, it isn't hot chocolate. I see by the clock that it's 5:00 pm and she's got something even better in her hands!

Happy New Year!

MEMOIR

A Visit to Childhood

       by Ernie Ruber    

In July 1942, my mother having died, the U.S. Department of State took pity and permitted my sister Edith and me, aged 13 and 7 respectively, to leave Cuba and come to Miami where my father met us. He had only a small room in Manhattan and so he placed us in the care of his brother and sister-in-law in the Bronx. I went to school there for a year but it was not a happy year for our hosts and their teen-age daughter, or us.

Another relative had two sons who attended summer camp and lived during the rest of the year on a farm in the hamlet of Zena in Woodstock, New York. She suggested this arrangement to my father. He saw it as a solution of what best to do with us and sent us off to Zena. Edith stayed for summer camp but she was in high school, so my father got an apartment in Brooklyn and moved her in with him. At the end of the summer however, I eagerly asked if I could stay on the farm with my cousins, and my father agreed. And so I came to attend a one-room school in Zena for the next four years.

Ernie (left) with Gayle Mellert Donoghue and her husband Chris. Gayle and Ernie comprised the entire 1947 graduating class (8th grade) of the one-room Zena Elementary School.

In late August 2011, accompanied by my son and grandson, I returned to Zena on a search for my youth. There I met an old classmate, Gayle Mellert, now Donoghue, and her husband Chris. Gayle and I comprised the entire 1947 graduating class (8th grade) of the one-room Zena Elementary School. In June of that year I went to visit my father in Brooklyn to get my graduation suit. While there I came down with a terrible case of measles, which caused me to miss graduation and kept me in our apartment for the rest of the summer. Meeting Gayle again last summer, she said to me, "I never knew what happened to you; you just disappeared." She had counted on us graduating together, as had I, but I never realized that she had no idea why I had not returned for graduation. Anyway, here we were, the whole class of '47 at its first reunion, 64 years later.

Zena Elementary School was painted white in 1947. Today it survives as a residence occupied by an unfriendly person with dogs. The bell tower and bell can still be seen.

The 'little red schoolhouse' is legendary, but Zena Elementary was white in my day. Today, it survives and an unfriendly person (with dogs) lives in it. The bell tower and bell can still be seen; it was our privilege to ring it. The school was heated by a giant coal stove in the rear of the room. Our teacher, Mrs. Mallow, had a desk front and center, and to her right was a corner with two benches that served as a recitation area where we read aloud and discussed topics such as the history of New York State.

There was a water pump out front and, more important, a flagpole. We eagerly sought the honor of raising and lowering and properly folding and storing the flag. At the side and towards the rear were two two-holer outhouses, one for boys and another for girls. No unisex bathrooms!

From year to year, the number of students ranged from a high of 30 to a low of about 12. Technically, there were eight grades, but there were rarely students in every grade.Mrs. Mallow was a fine teacher and a nice woman. When she announced that she was to be married I quietly went up to her desk and asked, "Miss Burhans, aren't you too old to get married?" (That was me, foot always firmly in mouth). She kindly replied, "Ernest, I am only 35 years old." Red-faced I replied, "Oh, that's good, sorry I said anything."

I wish I had a film of how Mrs. Mallow managed to teach eight grades. She had to have been practical to survive such a pedagogic nightmare, and she was--sometimes to the extent of taking a bit of a shortcut. When I entered school as the only fourth grade student, she gave me a book and said, "Let's see how well you read, Ernest." I was always way ahead of my grade in reading, so this was no problem. "Excellent," she said after hearing me read, "You are promoted to fifth grade. You won't have any trouble catching up, but math may take a month or so." Now there were two of us in fifth grade!

The student body of Zena Elementary School, 1947, with their teacher, Mrs. Mallow. Technically, there were eight grades in the school, but there were rarely students in every grade. From year to year, the number of students ranged from a high of 30 to a low of about 12. Ernie is in the back row, third from the left, and Gayle Mellert is next to him.

Although I missed my graduation in 1947, I would have happily returned to live in Zena and attend Kingston High School. In Zena I rode horses, roamed the woods, trapped and enjoyed a Tom Sawyer-like life. My cousins and I swam in swimming holes wherever and whenever we pleased and fished for suckers while perched on fallen trees.

Once, in a frigid January, Butch Klementis and I rode our horses around the huge, 8,300-acre Ashokan Reservoir. It was so cold that we walked part way in the lee of our horses to get out of the wind. Dumb kids. (Some of you may recall the haunting violin air that suffuses Ken Burns's Civil War series on PBS. It's entitled "Ashokan Goodbye!" and was composed at a nearby camp.)

And of course I had chores--splitting wood for the stove (and hauling jugs of kerosene after we modernized), fetching coal from the cellar for the kitchen range, milking the goat, collecting eggs and shoveling manure. Rarely, only when necessary, I milked the cow. Try this to see what progressive paralysis of the hands feels like. We helped with the haying, and after spending a couple hours moving and packing hay in a sweltering hayloft in August, I had (at 12) the best beer I have ever had in my life.

But my father decided that I couldn't stay in Zena and go to Kingston High School, and now I know he was right. I moved in with him in Brooklyn and was enrolled at Midwood High School, a five-story brick cube with an unused, barren concrete courtyard in the center. With 5,000 students, Midwood was terribly overcrowded and I never had a class that didn't have twice as many students as the whole student body of Zena Elementary. To maximize room use, the school day was divided into three sessions: seniors 7:45 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., sophomores and juniors 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and freshmen 1:15 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Coincidentally, Gayle's husband, Chris Donoghue, was a student at Midwood at the same time I was there, but because of the school's size we never met. It was different and I coped, but I never loved the city like I did the 'sticks.'

Things have changed since 1947. Somewhere along the line, elementary schools in Woodstock were consolidated in this souless building.

Things have changed over the 64 years since I was last in Zena. In the 40s, there was only one other house in the mile between the farm where I lived and my school. We did 'big' shopping and saw an occasional movie in Kingston, about nine miles away, and seemingly farther. My old home still stands, but the land is much subdivided now and deer abound on the mile that I walked to school. The lawns and shrubs of today are easier grazing than the woods of my day. Thais's General Store and gas station is now an art studio, and people do their shopping in Woodstock or Kingston.

Thomas Wolfe famously said, "You can't go home again." And he was right; the people you knew are changed, and so are you, and some have moved or died. Familiar landmarks have been replaced with new construction. But of all the places I've been, Zena seems most like home, and insofar as it is possible, I did go home again for a few days last summer.

 A Lefty's Lament

by Dick Fellenberg  

In a world where 85 to 90 percent of us are right-handed it's not surprising that things are usually geared for right-handed people. Entering my home, I use my right hand to unlock and open the front door. In the kitchen I reach for the can opener; it's designed for right-handers, and when I reach for the microwave controls I fine them situated on the right! At my desk the scissors I pick up are designed for right-handers and the lamp's on/off switch is on the right. At our brand new library I notice the water cooler controls are set up for right-handers.

Five of the last six Presidents have been lefties, including Ford, Clinton and Obama.

Are there any compensating factors? Of course! Five of the last six presidents are lefties, including the incumbent. Leonardo da Vinci, a favorite of mine, was a lefty. So was Greta Garbo, one of my all time favorites! Equally important, the third Sepa Inca (The Great Inca) was called the "glorious left-hander," a tribute to the Incas' discerning nature.

Am I feeling some justifiable paranoia? Jean Babcock, a fellow lefty, has a ruler that runs from left to right, so that's comforting when you have to measure something. But the print in my newspaper and books never runs from right to left, which would be far easier for us lefties. Back in prehistoric times, as a kid in grammar school, we used fountain pens, so left-handers like me left smudges on the paper, drawing my hand across the paper from left to right. Jean also has a "dribble" cup for lefties, but it's hard to turn that into a positive! She has a guide for left-handed knitters, so that's helpful--if you knit.

But there is a bright side! Since my front door favors right-handers entering, it favors lefties leaving. Right-handed boxers avoid lefties like the plague. Left-handed pitchers baffle batters with wicked stuff and left-handed tennis players drive right-handers nuts. Taking off on my dictionaries definition of left and right, it's clear that someone to the left in politics can't be right while someone to the right must be right! Right?

Still not satisfied? Plan a celebration for Left-Handers Day next August 13. It's celebrated nationally.  Form a left-handers club and call it Southport's Southpaws, they exist all over. If your goal is to have some laughs and maybe discuss a product or two that would make our lives easier, I'm in!

It never ends! I'm a southpaw living in Southport on Portside Drive, and I fit right in. 

Non Compos Mendes 

• Puzzler Of The Month: How does Dagwood Bumstead keep his job?
  He's always in trouble with Mr. Dithers, shows him no respect and doesn't do a lick of work. And why doesn't Dagwood weigh 300 pounds? If I ate like he does I'd need new doorways.
• In response to a plea in a past newsletter to use Southport sidewalks...
  We would like to if:
      1) They were wide enough for two people of average girth to walk side by side     without doing a tightrope act.
      2) They were level and without saucers and hillocks to navigate, especially in the winter when the saucers collect water, which becomes ice, which becomes a hazard.
      3) The overhead and lateral flora and other vegetation were cut so we wouldn't have to bob and weave every 20 feet or so.
• Note to Those Who Use the Weight Room
  When you use equipment such as the balls and other apparatus, pleeeeze put it back where you found it. Don't leave things in the middle of the room for the next person to put away. This is your weight room; think of it as if it were part of your house. Also, it's customary to wipe down each piece of equipment as you finish with it. Much appreciated.
• Don't reporters use the "5Ws" rule any more?
  Who, What, When, Where and Why used to be mandatory in a news story lead paragraph, but you rarely see it any more. Read a news story and see for yourself.
• What ever happened to nicknames?
  When we were kids almost everyone had a nickname, and there were some great ones. 'Stoops' Grindle, for one. Stoops earned his nickname for his uncanny ability to hit the exact corner of the step every time he played stoopball (Hmmm, whatever happened to stoopball for that matter?) Then there was 'Too Soon' Hirsh, with the annoying habit of greeting people from too far away. One day in high school he waved to me and called my name from half a corridor away. That's when he got his nickname. My best friend, 'Mother' Rucker, with whom I was walking at the time said, "Too soon, man, way too soon." Another of my favorites was Eddie Marconi in my 11th grade homeroom. Eddie was, of course, nicknamed "Elbow."
• I've finally seen some of the new TV shows... The sitcoms in particular. Apparently the new wisdom is: If you can't be funny, crank up the volume on the laugh track. But there are some worthwhile shows out there. PBS has too many to list, but on the networks, if you haven't seen Harry's Law, Blue Bloods or The Good Wife, give them a try.
• Next time you pass a gas station...
  Look at how the price is stated: $3.44.9 for example. The price varies, but that anachronistic 'point nine' always remains. Some time in the last century when gasoline prices were in cents, not dollars, some pretty smart operator decided to add nine-tenths of a cent to the price of his gas and show it as, say, 35.9/cents per gallon. Pretty shrewd; it looked like 35 cents but was really 36 cents. Now, with gas well over $3/gallon, that point nine cents looks ridiculous. Come on you gas guys, man up and say $3.45 on your marquee instead of $3.44.9
• This Month's Unsung Hero: Ernest Ruber
  He's responsible for those informative botanical reading stations along Southport's trails and walkways. The nearly 30 stations were designed and installed starting in 2005 and completed in 2007. During the summer of 2011, Ernie revised and repaired all of the stations, adding two more in the process.
  
  The response to my plea in a previous column for Berkshire-Hathaway stock certificates was under-whelming. Someone sent me a certificate for five shares of Studebaker-Packard with a note saying that that's about what my column's worth.