Lost In The Desert

I was in Egypt when I was 15, but it took many years for me to realize
where I'd been and what I'd really seen.



~ by Russ Allison Loar (1st camel on left!)
© All Rights Reserved

Life On The Moon?

M y grandfather Herman Allison, born August 4, 1885, in Morgan's Mill, Texas, once told me that when he was a schoolboy, a topic for debate was:
"Is the moon inhabited?"

He lived long enough to see Neil Armstrong stand on the moon, on television.

~ Words and artwork by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

Notable People I Have Met ~ Part Eleven

Don Callender ~ Marie Callender's founder


   I was always a rather small cog in the wheel of American journalism, yet I was lucky in meeting notable and accomplished people. I sought them out whenever the opportunity arose, wanting more than anything to hear the stories of how these extraordinary people succeeded and how their thought processes worked.

   I was lucky at the very beginning of my journalism career. I’d only written a few stories during my internship in 1984 at The Orange County Register when the editor suggested I write a story about a newly remodeled Marie Callender’s restaurant in Tustin, California, nearing completion. After contacting the restaurant manager, she mentioned that the founder of the restaurant chain, Don Callender, would be at the restaurant in a few days and I could interview him then. I jumped at the chance.

   When I walked into the restaurant for my lunch meeting with the 57-year-old Don Callender, he eyed me suspiciously until I told him I was the reporter from The Orange County Register he was expecting. He said, “When I saw your shiny shoes I thought: Oh no, here’s another one of these guys from the city." He said shiny-shoed city inspectors were making it difficult for him to open the remodeled restaurant.

   The luncheon interview lasted several hours. He was eager to tell me about the origins of his 112-restaurant chain, how it began with his mother, Marie, making pies for restaurants. “My mother was a good cook at home,” Callender said. “She made good pastries and she was working for a place that had a little lunch counter and she made pies.”

    Callender was generous with his time as we ate lunch, telling me how his parents, Cal and Marie Callender, began a wholesale pie business in 1947 to help supplement the trailer park family’s meager income. They operated out of a rented 20-by-20-foot Quonset hut in Long Beach. Callender delivered his mother’s pies on his bicycle.

   “I grew up on dirt streets and outhouses,” Callender told me. “We started with a rolling pin and 700 bucks. I used to go to work at 11 o’clock at night and work till 5 the next afternoon.”

   The first Marie Callender’s coffee and pie shop opened in 1964, in Orange. In 1986, Callender sold the chain of 120 restaurants to Ramada Inc. for a reported $80 million.

   Callender said his success was born of a strong work ethic and a close-knit family. “Every time you see a kid in a workplace with his parents, I guarantee you, you’ll see a happy kid. They’ve got a sense of worth.”


~ by Russ Allison Loar
~ Photo by Mark Rightmire for The Orange County Register
© All Rights Reserved

Collections

The first things I collected were stuffed animals, but only two of them slept with me at night. Of all my furry friends and playmates, I dearly loved the little gray cat and flop-eared brown dog who slept under the covers and kept me from feeling lonely at bedtime. I sleep with a little calico cat named Sally now who likes to snuggle into the crook of my arm.

I’ve never lived anywhere very long without cats. My grandmother collected stray cats, and so did I, having about a dozen when I lived next to a farm.

I collected small metal cars and loved to drive them around cities I made from colored blocks.

When I was 17 years old I raced my Ford mustang at Irwindale Raceway and won a few trophies.

I collected 45 rpm records, songs I heard on the radio. I listened to them over and over again. Each week when I went to the music store for my trumpet lesson, I bought a new “single” to add to my collection. I pretended I was a disc jockey and would announce each record I played.

One summer I won a contest on radio station KFWB by being the first caller. I talked to disc jockey Gary Owens and he sent me a Gary Owens coloring book and KFWB bumper sticker.

 When I was a newspaper reporter in Newport Beach, California, I also did daily newscasts for a local radio station. Someone told me they heard my broadcast in a supermarket where the station was playing.

 I collected coins and stamps, ordering them from catalogues and putting them into albums. I looked through everyone’s pennies, trying to find  a 1909-S VDB, the rarest of Lincoln pennies. It never turned up. I learned that the reason certain coins and stamps were worth so much money was the same reason I’d never find them.

 As I grew up, my collections shifted from things to experiences. I collected friends, lovers and accomplishments. I collected books I’d read—favorite stories and favorite poems. I collected knowledge and learning. I collected songs and poems I wrote. I collected performances I played as a musician. I collected the talented musicians I played with. After I became a newspaper reporter, I collected my best published stories. I collected every famous and interesting person I met.

I collected family photographs, all the way back to stiffly posed portraits of great-grandparents, arranging them in albums. I collected my family, my parents and grandparents, my sisters and brothers, my wife and the many years of our marriage, the companionship of my sons, the infectious laughter of my blonde-haired, blue-eyed granddaughter.

I collect memories, and as I grow old they reveal meanings I’d never fully understood. I collect the acts of kindness I’ve received and try to pass them on to others. I collect wisdom and continue to learn and relearn the lessons I’ve been taught from those still living and those who have passed on, their words still speaking to me.

I’ve collected my many shortcomings, my failures and my sins, for which I ask forgiveness in my many prayers.

 I collect the joy and the sadness in this world, the tragedies and victories of the spirit, the damnations and the revelations. Sometimes it’s all too much and so I pack some of my collections away in boxes, knowing I can always unpack them if need be, knowing I’ll never look inside some of those boxes again, knowing all things change and life should move forward, mindfully forward.

My house is full of things useful and decorous, impractical and silly, remnants of a long life. I look at these objects and they remind me who I’ve been, who I still am. Someday I’ll leave all my collections behind, passed onto others to forge new meanings, so grateful for having lived here on Earth awhile.

~ Text and photograph by Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved