Heaven had 12 channels and no snow

When you're rummaging through your childhood home, and your family's life, you find things.

You have absolutely no idea why they were saved, but you're amazed and happy that they were.

Cable television came to Baton Rouge, but not all of Baton Rouge, in 1975. Aunt Sybil and Uncle Jimmy lived in north Baton Rouge -- this was '75, so that would have been pre-apocalyptic north Baton Rouge -- and working-class north Baton Rouge had Cablevision, while my working-class east-central Baton Rouge environs . . . didn't.

Obviously, north Baton Rouge was something just shy of the Beatific Vision some 38 years ago, because you could get 12 channels on your TV there with no static at all. Bless them . . . no static at all.

Cablevision was amazing. So amazing that I begged this Dec. 20-26, 1975, edition of Cablecast off my aunt and uncle. And I saved it. And almost four decades later, it turned up in a forgotten box on a dirty shelf in a blazing-hot utility building in the back yard.

NOW, almost four decades later, I'm sitting here thinking, "We were ape over 12 lousy channels, and none of them were Turner Classic Movies or ESPN?" Of course, in 1975, there wouldn't be an ESPN for another four years, but that's not important now.

Then again, if you lived in Baton Rouge in 1970, you had your Channel 2 and you had your Channel 9. One was NBC, the other CBS and they divided up what anybody wanted from ABC.

We got Channel 33 -- and ABC full time -- in October 1971.

And we finally got public television in 1975, about the time we got cable TV. Yeah, getting 12 channels was a big frickin' deal.

SUCH A big deal, I'm sure the very prospect made News Scene on Channel 9.

Spin the people the way they want

Part of what poliicians do -- in their spare time when they're not lining their pockets or conducting ideological thermonuclear warfare in America's fallowed halls -- is tell people what they'd prefer to believe.

This, of course, exists in stark contrast to what actually is. Or was. Or will be.

Enter President Obama, speaking to a group of aging Korean War veterans on this, the 60th anniversary of the armistice that silenced the guns but never formally ended the war:

When the war ended with a cease-fire rather than a surrender, Mr. Obama noted, some offered the cynical quip "die for a tie" to describe the result of the war that had claimed the lives of more than 36,000 Americans and over a million South Koreans.

But "that war was no tie," the president said as he stood before thousands of veterans and their families on the National Mall, within sight of the Korean War Memorial. "Korea was a victory."

As a result of the heroism of those who fought, he said, tens of millions of South Koreans are able to thrive in a free and prosperous country instead of living under the thumb of tyranny in North Korea.

"Let it be said that Korea was the first battle where freedom held its ground and free peoples refused to yield," he said. To the veterans and their families, he added, "You have the thanks of a grateful nation and your shining deeds will live now and forever."

THIS, of course is revisionist history. It is ascribing a ex post facto point to what many, if not most, Americans saw as pointless six decades ago.

And no one -- no one, save the communist Chinese  -- was declaring victory in the Korean conflict. As one network radio commentator said on this day in 1953, how do you declare victory when no one's keeping score, when you have no clear objectives?

Gosh, this sounds familiar.

The commentator went on to liken the Korean War to a football game where the field has no goalposts and the entire objective is to keep the other team from crossing the 50-yard line. In other words, contra Barack Obama's revisionism, "Die for a tie."

It is what you settle for when "making the world safe for democracy" doesn't exactly work out.

HERE, THEN, is what we were really saying about Korea when the all the firing was freshly ceased. It comes from an old, old reel-to-reel tape made by an Omaha doctor who thought the moment momentous enough to electronically scrapbook for future generations . . . and then salvaged by this future generation at an estate sale a decade ago.

3 Chords & the Truth: Your musical refuge

Sometimes, life's a bitch.

Can't be helped; it just is. And sometimes you just feel like . . . you feel like . . . you feel like. . . .

Well . . .

Well, you feel like you might as well go out of town and dig a ditch. And that's when you need to escape into the music.

3 Chords & the Truth is here to aid in your getaway. I mean, sure is somethin' slick goin' on, sure is somethin' slick. I hate it when that happens.

And the Big Show is here to help. Because we understand. 'Nuff said.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

The things you save

Mama never threw out anything. At least not much more than garbage and old coffee grounds.

Now she's going to be 90, she fell and broke her hip and she can't live in the house in Red Oaks anymore. Mama's seen better days and, frankly, so has Red Oaks, which has the misfortune to lie north of Florida Boulevard and east of Eden in my hometown of Baton Rouge.

Week before last, my wife and I made a frenzied trip back South to see Mama in the hospital and take care of a few years' worth of loose ends. All in six days.

Part of the process that will hit almost every middle-aged child of someone in God's good time is disposing of a life -- a life that's over, or a life that's merely transitioning to a phase where your home is no longer your own, and neither are your choices. What you rarely realize until it's slapping you in the face . . . over and over and over again, that is when it's not punching you in the gut . . . is that you're disposing of your own life, too.

YOU, in the course of a week, frantically rummage through your childhood home, through all the stuff that Mama never threw out and, ultimately, through your memories both blessed and cursed. You rummage through your childhood, grabbing the precious things to take home as one grabs what's most precious as they flee a burning house, and you say goodbye.

Goodbye to all your old stuff -- yet again. Goodbye to the home of your childhood. Goodbye to your childhood. I'm home again, but Thomas Wolfe was right, or at least mostly right.

“You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

IT'S JUST as well, I reckon. But just the same, I'll hang on to these relics, second class, of one of my earliest Christmases, 'round about 1962. I'll hang onto Fred and Dino and the Flintstone Flivver. (Ninety-eight cents, cheap!)

It was a yabba dabba doo time. A dabba doo time. It was a gay old time.

The pause that refreshes . . . then and now

Florida at Riverside Mall, Baton Rouge, La., May 1987.

Florida at Third, Baton Rouge, La., last week.

Home uh da happiess stomachs on ert

Fleur de Lis, Government Street, Baton Rouge.

Retail bldg. Skylights, indoor garden. Make offer.

Once upon a time, one of the nicest retail spots in my part of Baton Rouge was I.H. Rubenstein, one of a local chain of department stores and one of the anchors of the Broadmoor Shopping Center.

It sat right between the Broadmoor Theatre and the National Food Store. Way back there then -- when dinosaurs roamed the swamps, gas was 45 cents a gallon, you could buy all the 45s you could eat at TG&Y, Buckskin Bill ruled the local TV scene, and I had hair -- the Broadmoor Shopping Center was a happening place.

Then again, that was before my hometown pretty much abandoned my old neighborhood. That was before "my" part of town (and lots of others) turned into a reasonable facsimile of Port au Prince and the hair jockeys at the Broadmoor Barber Shop all started packing heat.

Not an exaggeration -- I was there just last week on a not-so-pleasant trip back home to see my 90-year-old mother in the hospital and clean out her home of 57 years . . . the home of my childhood.

SHE WON'T be living there anymore. I probably won't set foot in it again. It's a hard thing.

Like I said, I.H. Rubenstein was a nice place, and the flea market that took over the space after the department store closed wasn't unfortunate, at least as flea markets go. Then again, both were pre-Port au Prince.

What you see here is post-Port au Prince. And somebody expects to sell or rent this mess.

Somehow, I don't see that happening, though I think it would be a fine spot to relocate the city-parish government. Very appropos, don't you know?

I've written a lot about my hometown on this blog, and I've covered the creeping blight of Baton Rouge on more than one occasion; I don't need to belabor the point here. And when she lived in Red Stick for a while, New Jersey-native Colleen Kane made a vocation of chronicling the abandoned places of my old home via her Abandoned Baton Rouge blog.

She even did a post on the Broadmoor Shopping Center almost five years ago. Yes, decrepitude has been an issue there for some time now.

PLUS ÇA CHANGE . . . etcetera and so on in "America's Next Great City."

Third Street, Baton Rouge

 

Riverside Mall (Third Street),

Baton Rouge, La., circa 1981.

  

Third Street, Baton Rouge, La., circa Tuesday.

3 Chords & the Truth: Happy POP! July BOOM! 4th

This week on the Big Show, we celebrate Independence Day with a stellar lineup of all-American music.


Except when it's British or Irish or something.

Because that's how we roll on 3 Chords & the Truth. Now, the idea behind the (BOOM!) is in maximizing the (POP!), which of course leads one to (BLAM!) and, thus a stellar listening (WHOOSH! KABOOM! POPPOPPOPPOP! POP!).

AND THAT is why you're certain to enjoy this edition of the Big Show. It's a lead-pipe cinch.

I mean, just wait until you hear the (WHOMP! CRACK! BOOM!)! You won't believe your ears, and you'll be hooked on 3 Chords & the Truth more than ever.

"Music for the people" ain't just a meaningless slogan, after all. It's a (POW!) of (BRAPPP!).

IT'S 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. (BOOM!)

Then again, maybe not

Yes, seeing is believing. Or is it?

We live in an age when making people believe what you want them to believe is easier than ever. You can even provide them with "proof" that what plainly isn't, in fact, is. Ergo, half the crap you see on Facebook -- or InfoWars.com.

Remember that when our betters in Washington decide, at their leisure, that now is the time to blow the bejeezus (bemohammed?) out of the mullahs in Iran or the Assad dictatorship in Syria in the name of Truth, Justice, the American Way and the War on Terror.

Remember Iraq. And remember that your friendly, neighborhood federal government has a lot more money and resources than a college-age filmmaker in Rochester, N.Y.

Seeing is believing

I never would have believed anyone could bring M.C. Escher's "Penrose Steps" from optical-illusion fancy into reality. But seeing is believing . . . and it's at the Rochester Institute of Technology!

I mean, wow!

3 Chords & the Truth: Fun is in not getting there

Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?


No.

If you think about it, in this life we never quite get "there." We've booked till-Kingdom-come passage on the journey of life, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

You see, our journeys, if we do them right, are ones of unending discovery -- we're always being surprised by life. We're always learning something new . . . even if it's old.

This week, like every week on 3 Chords & the Truth, is kinda like that. Because we're trying to do the Big Show right.

Like life.

LIFE BRINGS, this time on the program, a world of "grown-up music" from grown-ups' radio out of the mists of memory and middle-age musing. Your Mighty Favog gets in those moods sometimes.  This time on the Big Show, the Royal We are wondering what if we took all this old stuff from back in the day -- the stuff Mom and Dad listened to and toward which idiot kids like me turned up our snot-noses -- and brought it to the present, throwing in a little contemporary stuff and a lot of jazz.

Just another musical milepost on the 3 Chords & the Truth journey of discovery . . . and fun.

I mean, if discovery can't be fun sometimes, you just as well crawl under a rock. But I digress.

Let's just say this part of the journey is learning that when former snot-nose kids have to eat some record (and radio) crow over the succeeding decades, it ain't bad once you get used to it. And this edition of the Big Show not only ain't bad, it's pretty dadgum good.

Enjoy!

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there.  Aloha.

Turn out the lights, the party's over

June's almost over, another College World Series has been consigned to the pages of Omaha sports history, and now it's time for fireworks, sweet corn, blistering Plains heat and daydreaming about state fairs and college football.

But not until we get in some parting shots.

Like these.

 

 

 

The cotton-candy dude abides

If you don't count some smart-assed teenager plopping himself down in the middle of a bunch of Mississippi State fans at the last game of the College World Series, then yelling "C'mon, Bruins! Beat those rednecks!" . . .

And if you lay aside an incensed Bulldog partisan responding in his thick Mississippi drawl with "C'mon 'Dawgs! Beat them queers!" and thereby proving the smart-assed teenager's point, the most memorable sound coming from Sections 203 and 204 at TD Ameritrade Park in downtown Omaha went something like this.

"Cotton caaaaandy-buhdybuhdybuhdy-buhdyyyyyyy! Cotton caaaaandybuhdybuhdy-buhdybuhdyyyyyyy!"

THAT meant the SnoFloss cotton-candy dude (not to be confused with the Sta-Puft marshmallow man in Ghostbusters) soon would be coming down an aisle near you. I almost was wishing I could abide cotton candy.

"Cotton caaaaandybuhdy-buhdybuhdybuhdyyyyyyy! Cotton caaaaandybuh-dybuhdybuhdybuhdyyyyyyy!"

The first time I laid eyes on the purveyor of $5-per-cavity SnoFloss, I turned to my wife and our friends and said "Holy crap! It's The Dude!" Or at least a young, cleaner-shaven version of Jeff Lebowski, the lesser. They all agreed.

And I could totally see The Jeff Bridges Dude selling cotton candy at the ball yard. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Would cotton candy and White Russians abide? I haven't a clue.

NOR DO I have a clue about the real backstory of the SnoFloss cotton-candy dude. For all I know, he's a tea-party Republican pursuing his MBA at Creighton. With an emphasis on cotton caaaaandybuhdy-buhdybuhdybuhdyyyyyyy!

You may be a radio geek if . . .

. . . your ringtone is the late-'60s/early-'70s sounder for ABC radio's American Contemporary Network. If you are of a certain age, you'll remember it. 

Yeah, I'm a radio geek, all right.

Beer may be hazardous to your manhood

I could be wrong (though I really doubt it), but I think there's a metaphor for contemporary American society squirming around somewhere in this Ohio story.

Also everywhere in this story is a sharp sympathy pain down the groin of every living man . . . and probably a few dead ones, too.

Brace yourselves and read on. Or not.

Lorain Police say a homeless man was Life Flighted to the hospital after cutting off his penis.

Cops were called to the area of East 21st Street and Access Road Tuesday around noon after an unauthorized man was seen on CSX Railroad property.

Officers found the man with his hands and gym shorts covered in blood. He told officers that he had just cut his penis off. According to the police report, he said he tried to use an old rusty saw, but he used a broke bottle when the saw didn't work.

The man told police that "Busch (beer) made me do it."

YOU KNOW WHAT? I'd love to hear a contemporary Don Draper's sponsor pitch to the Busch beer people with that one stuck in his mind. And close to his heart . . . which you know if you're a Mad Men aficionado.

"Gentlemen, I'll probably never see you again, so I have to tell you something.

"I didn't enjoy Busch beer on a sun-splashed sandy beach with a blonde on each arm. That's what every American man would like to think of whenever he pops the top on a cold Busch. Get it? (leer) No, the truth is, I grew up in a whorehouse in Pennsylvania, and I was raised by a stepmother who didn't want me. 

"After I'd go through the pockets of johns while the whore were otherwise, shall we say 'entertaining' them, the girls would pay me off with a cold Busch beer. And I savored every golden drop of that cheap-ass beer because, gentlemen, your beer was the only thing that could kill enough of my brain cells -- dull enough of the psychic pain -- so I could somehow cope with growing up in a whorehouse with a stepmomma who couldn't care less if you lived or died, which, let me tell you, is kind of like cutting your own tallywhacker off with a busted beer bottle. Probably an old Miller High Life bottle. 

"Frankly, if I had my way, I'd tell you not to advertise your beer at all. Because if Busch beer is good enough to kill the pain of growing up in a whorehouse . . . if it's good enough to anesthetize you while you cut off your own tallywhacker, it will sell itself with no help from Sterling Cooper and Partners. 

"Gentlemen, thank you for your time. I'm going around the corner to get loaded."

The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat

For the College World Series championship

last night, your final score is UCLA 8 . . .

 

Mississippi State 0

What would they know of such things?

This is the view from Omaha's TD Ameritrade Park just north of downtown.

One sportswriter from Baton Rouge, home of the LSU Tigers, apparently finds this as surprising as he finds the new home of the College World Series lacking in charm.

While I will admit that, with the dismantling and redevelopment of the Union Pacific repair yard and the ASARCO lead smelter, NoDo doesn't have the "gritty" charm of, say, a vista dominated by refineries, chemical plants and a crumbling working man's paradise, you sometimes have to wonder how willfully insular some people -- and places -- can be.

Scott Rabalais writes in The Advocate:

As for the College World Series’ new home, there is no question the ballpark is an upgrade over old Rosenblatt Stadium, a collection of jigsaw pieces the NCAA and the city of Omaha assembled into a 24,000-seat ballpark over the years.

TDAPO is clean, has a broad, sweeping main concourse that allows you to keep up with the lack of offense on the field from any concession or souvenir stand, much improved locker room facilities, indoor batting tunnels and state-of-the-art media facilities.

What it doesn’t have is charm, something the College World Series has lost in the quest to be bigger and better.

Rosenblatt wasn’t the best ballpark in America. It had claustrophobic, dark concourses, few of the all-important club seats and cramped clubhouses for the participating teams. It was the kind of place where you had to go outside to change your mind.

But what it lacked in modern amenities it made up for with buckets of homey ambiance. It fit into the slightly gritty South Omaha neighborhood that grew up around it like a ball in a well broken in baseball glove. The ballpark was like a beloved weekend retreat on False River — not the place where you would want to entertain heads of state, but where you wanted to visit over and over again.

TD Ameritrade Park shiny and new and is surrounded by shiny new restaurants, watering holes and eateries. As an example of urban renewal, it’s top notch. Who knew Omaha could look so slick and refined?

But the new ballpark has the feel of something valuable behind glass that is to be admired but not touched, and certainly not a place where you would feel comfortable putting your feet up on the furniture. It’s a place you would like to visit, but sort of like going to the White House. You’re afraid if you sit on a chair the Secret Service is going to come repelling out of the rafters and hoist you away.

Another thing TD Ameritrade Park probably has over Rosenblatt: big walk-in freezers. In that respect, the new CWS ballpark is in keeping with the warm and fuzzy feeling that everyone gets from the NCAA.

At least TDAPO accomplishes one very important thing: it kept the College World Series in Omaha with an unprecedented 25-year contract. If a new home that leaves everyone with a bit of a chill is the Faustian bargain necessary to guarantee that the city which nurtured the CWS – which loved it before rest of the country figured out it was cool — then it’s worth the loss of rough-hewn folksiness that was Rosenblatt. But just barely.

WHO KNEW it would take a downtown stadium for a sportswriter who's been following LSU to Omaha for years to notice the city's progression toward "slick and refined" over the last couple of decades?

As someone who happily left Baton Rouge for Omaha before it became "so slick and refined," my inner snarkster muses that Rabalais' profound revelation about my city is kind of like a resident of South Sudan proclaiming his disbelief at how "slick and refined" were the Norwegian aid workers. Get out much?

Digitalballparks.com

THEN AGAIN, when this is your ballpark just north of downtown, maybe people should just consider the source. Though I'm sure Pete Goldsby Field is loaded with charm. Tell 'em the story again about how Felipe Alou wasn't allowed to play in an Evangeline League game there against the Baton Rouge Rebels in the late '50s because of . . .  you know.

I always find it amazing, though not necessarily surprising, when folks from places that rarely even try give left-handed "compliments" to places that bust their asses to excel. Is where I'm coming from.

3 Chords & the Truth: He played the hits

EDITOR'S NOTE: This blog post originally ran Aug. 31, 2009, and then again in September 2010. I repost it again today in memory of A. Lamar Simmons, the man who in 1946 helped to give life to a little radio station in Baton Rouge, La. -- one that would in time be known to all as the Big 91 or, alternatively, the Big Win 910 -- and then went on to run it for decades.

Likewise, this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth will be an encore presentation of a tribute to 'LCS, and ultimately to the Top-40 stations of my youth, that first ran Sept. 10, 2010.

May God rest your soul, Mr. Simmons. And thank you.

Here's the show.

* * *

One thing kids today will never know is what it was like to have your own radio station.

Not what it's like to be a bazillionnaire and own your own big-time broadcast outlet but, instead, what it's like to be devoted to a radio station, this hometown entity that plays cool tunes (well, mostly) and becomes your window on a world much, much larger than the hick burg in which you find yourself trapped. Face it, unless you're a kid growing up in New York, L.A. or Chicago, you think where you're from is That Which Must Be Escaped.

And I'll bet L.A. and New York kids probably want to flee to Paris or Rome. Maybe London.

You see, long ago, radio stations were living things. They were staffed by live human beings whose job it was to entertain and enlighten other live human beings. These were called "listeners," something radio has radically fewer of these days.

Oftentimes, way back deah den (as my mom says), people would find one station or another's personalities and music so compelling that the station, in a real sense, became "their" station. Listeners took emotional and figurative ownership.

They listened day and night. They called the DJs on the "request line." (And note, please, this was an era when "DJ" immediately brought to mind a radio studio, not a dance club.)

Listeners went nuts for the contests, whether it was the chance to win $1,000 or just a promotional 45. They'd pick up a station's weekly survey to see where their favorite songs ranked this week.

They'd wake up to the "morning man" and boogie down to the groovy sounds the afternoon drive guy was spinning out through their transistor radios.

Boogie down to the groovy sounds? Ah, screw it. You had to be there.

THE REAL business radio was in back during its second golden age -- the Boomer age of Top-40 AM blowtorches . . . and of laid-back, trippy FM free-form outfits, too -- was the business of making memories. That stations sold some pimple cream while selling even more records was just a happy accident, at least from the perspective of their loyal fans.

Back when the Internet was more like the Inter-what?, radio was the Facebook of its day. It told us about the world . . . and about each other. It served up new music for our consideration.

Likewise, a station's listeners formed the pre-social-networking incarnation of what became Facebook groups and fan pages. In short, between the hits and the ads, between the disc jockeys and the contests, radio was community.

All you needed to join was an eight-transistor job, or maybe a hand-me-down table radio in your bedroom, its tubes glowing orange in the darkness as the magic flowed from its six-inch loudspeaker.

AT ITS BEST, radio comforted the afflicted, afflicted the comfortable, lifted downcast spirits, was a friend to the lonely and provided the soundtrack for the times of our lives. To this day, I can hear a song and immediately think "WLCS, 1975," or "WTIX, summer on the Petite Amite River, 1972."

And every early December, my mind will drift back to a late night in 1980 when I was studying for finals at Louisiana State, with my head in a book and WFMF on the stereo. Bad news through the headphones, and -- at least for my generation -- "something touched us deep inside."

It was the Day the Music Died. Again.

Tonight my mind drifts back to Aug. 31, 1984. That was the night a close friend passed into that good night of blessed memory.

That night, the Big 91, WLCS, played its last Top-40 hit and left the Baton Rouge airwaves for its new home in the youthful memories of aging teen-agers like myself. Two-and-a-half decades later, it just doesn't seem right that it's gone.

OF COURSE, lots of things don't seem right nowadays.

That WLCS isn't there anymore -- hasn't been there for more than a generation -- is just one of them in the mind of one Boomer kid from a middling city in the Deep South. You can read about why that is here.

But a couple-odd decades in retrospect, it seems to me that Aug. 31, 1984, was in a way about as profound as the deaths of Buddy Holly and John Lennon -- the intangible end of something we still haven't quite gotten our minds (or our culture) around.

It's not that the actual deaths of Holly or Lennon, or of the "Big Win 910," precipitated some sort of musical or cultural cataclysm in themselves. It's just that things were happening.

And being that things were happening that more or less coincided with each instance of "bad news on the doorstep," it's handy to use these events as markers.

For me, the demise of WLCS -- and the deaths of many stations that were nothing if not actual life forces in their own cultural rights -- signals The Great Unraveling.

The unraveling of a common culture is what I'm getting at, I guess.

Lookit. As much as we kids claimed stations like 'LCS as our own, we can't forget that many of our parents listened, too. Or that Top-40 radio of old played what was big, period -- be that Jefferson Airplane or Frank Sinatra. Because of WLCS, I think I could comprehend more than my own little world of teen-age angst and teen-age fads.

And it's why I feel just as comfortable with Andy Williams and Tony Bennett -- and, yes, Ol' Blue Eyes -- as I do with (ahem) "harder" fare. My world is bigger, richer, more diverse because of a 1,000-watt AM station in a midsized Southern state capital too often prone to calling too much in life "good enough for government work."

Thank God, that couldn't often describe the Big 91.

And because "good enough" wasn't often good enough at WLCS -- because the men and women who worked there just did what they did and did it well -- I owe its memory more than I can repay.

If, after these 25 years, somebody were to require that I pen an epitaph for my long-dead friend, I'd write just this: WLCS played the hits.

These colors don't run

LSU is gone from the College World Series, but Eunice, La., is in the house at the North Carolina-North Carolina State game Thursday.

Geaux Tigers!