Hunting Down The Welfare Queens

             I was attracted to Joe Nocera’s column on the Op Ed page of this week’s New York Times (Living in Fear of the NCAA) that tells us of the probing into the very personal financial lives of the families of some college star athletes. The column set my mind wandering back 60 Years to a time when I found myself professionally involved in what you might call, the hunt for “welfare queens”, a similar, but slightly different situation.

            I was a young reporter quite new to the business, and somewhat naive to the realities of big city daily journalism. I was assigned to the “health and welfare beat” of the Cleveland Press. The job was touted by my top editors as key for Ohio’s largest newspaper that had earned a reputation as serving the fundamental needs and interests of the hard working blue collar population of our great town.

           Our  compasionate concern for the working poor, the sick and helpless, and their struggles for a decent life in our heavy industry town separated our newspaper from the rest. Indeed, Time magazine had just listed The Press one of the ten greatest newspapers in the nation. 

Coming To Terms With The Enemy

       It is often said that time is of the essence.

       Indeed:  As the seconds, minutes, days and years, tumble relentlessly by, the movement of time emerges as a haunting, implacable enemy.  Chasing you from behind.  Catching up even as you seem to run faster. And then leaving you in its dust once more.

          I don’t like that. I never have. 

          I recall, many years ago, as a young journalist, I was dating a very attractive red-headed social worker who I had met while covering the Juvenile Court. She was a joy to be with. One night we drove down to Perkins Beach, a lovely, fairly private place to park to look at the stars, or whatever.

After philosophizing about the beauty of the brightly lit downtown skyline, I put my arm around her and moved close, as though to kiss.  She pulled away. “Too soon”, she whispered through her warm, perhaps passionate breath.

“Finite anxiety” was the problem, she said almost clinically, concerning my move to caress her.  Too frantic. Too focused on time, advised this lovely young Baptist who declared that she believed in reincarnation. For her, time was a friend. For me it was the enemy.  Needless to say that relationship, with its excellent potential, never went anywhere.

Time had taken its toll.

I have often wanted to stop the movement of time.  To make it stand still to force it backwards.  To dispose of it entirely.

          Now that I have moved well into my golden years this intense pursuit of the runaway clock has become much more than an intellectual enterprise.

 I have tried to convince myself that time itself does not actually exist except as the concoction of some Middle Ages scientists who were trying to calculate the movement of the sun around the earth and, after Galileo, the earth around the sun.

         But, as the age of reason progressed, time became almost pervasive. The master, rather than the servant. There was the March of Time weekly feature at the movies, Time Magazine, and of course, Timex watches which “keep on ticking when they take a licking,” as John Cameron Swayze used to say on the radio.