Cael Sanderson, 159-0

(This column was written in 2006 and published in Fairways Magazine)

As children we all choose heroes.

We took personal ownership of our chosen heroes. They were ours. We protected them. We fought for them. We cheered them and defended them. And our heroes were always better than anyone else’s heroes and there were even arguments about it. And when they won we were proud, and their success enhanced our own self value, and in fact, there was a certain unrealistic transformation taking place wherein we actually felt that our support was helping them succeed.

When we discovered that one of our friends also shared our same heroes, then we suddenly realized that our friend was not only a friend, but a friend with very good sense.

My first big hero was Jackie Robinson. After that they came in bunches, including Bob Cousy, Bill Russell, Roy Campenella, Ted Williams, and Yogi Berra. New stars would come on the scene, Roger Bannister, Bob Beamon, Mohammed Ali, John Wooden, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan. The ones we chose remained our heroes and it took a lot for any other would-be-heroes to bump our originals off the top perch. One of the new ones who has moved right to the top is Tiger Woods, whose composure, grace, and determination are unmatched in golf today.

My heroes were mostly athletes. Subconsciously they were divided into two groups, the ones who were far away we would never know personally, and the ones who defended the home turf and who could be seen and touched, such as dynamic duos Arnie Ferrin and Vern Gardner, Mel Hutchins and Roland Minson, and Stockton to Malone.

As a kid I remember lying on the floor by the radio listening with my dad to the voice say “Let’s go with Utoco to the basketball game,” and cheering whenever the Aggies, Utes, and Cougars were playing.

Time moved on and the hero list grew, and to the top of the list went Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. It grew closer and closer to home with Merlin Olsen, L.J. Silvester, Max Perry, Cornell Green, Bill Munson, Lee Grosscup, John Ralston, Wayne Estes, and Billy McGill. After he moved to Utah Billy Casper joined the list, and of course, Johnny Miller, Kresimir Cosic, LaDell Andersen, LaVell Edwards, Stan Watts, Dick Motta, Steve Young, Danny Ainge, Frank Layden, Mike Reid, and Jay Don Blake were just some of the local heroes who made it big in the Big Time.

Those in the Utah Golf Hall of Fame and our UGA Gold Club are all on my hero list.

As we mature our list broadens from athletes to other areas of interest, and some of our heroes don’t become so until after they’ve passed on and we only become aware of their greatness after the fact. My list includes Nelson Mandella, Martin Luther King, Michel Gorbachev, Albert Einstein, Jimmy Carter, Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, and William Greider.

Sometimes we each attach to a ‘special’ hero, one that you can almost call your own. One that the world hasn’t really idolized, but you are way smarter than the rest of the world, and he is your ‘special’ find.

I have one of those heroes. He was featured on the Wheaties box, and so he is no secret, but he is not known far and wide. His achievement was slow and obscure and was building without much public notice and when he finally reached the pinnacle it was suddenly all over. He won’t be forever in the public eye, but his achievement may never be matched.

His achievement was so obscure that I didn’t even know about it until I saw the Wheaties box. His name was Sanderson. He was a wrestler. I knew that name. I had written about a wrestler named Sanderson years before. I wondered about the connection. It was close. It was his dad.

I took that Wheaties box home, and placed it in a prominent place in my den, right on the television where I could see it as a daily reminder of the possibilities of the human spirit.

The Wheaties Breakfast of Champions box declared,

“Cael Sanderson, 159-0.”

Cael Sanderson. Cael!! The name itself is so majestic. I wonder if he would have achieved such high levels of success if he had been named Joe, or John, or Bill. How much does your name mean to you? Is your very name a motivator for excellence? An intimidator of foe?

Cael!! How would you like to fight a Cael? “In this corner Cael Sanderson. In this corner Shrinking Violet.”

159-0. Just what is that all about? Stunning—that’s what it’s all about. At Iowa State, competing in the toughest wrestling league in America, he won his first college match, and his second, and his third and on through his freshman year, and his sophomore year, and his junior year, and his senior year, and yes, four straight NCAA championships with 159 straight wins and zero losses. That unbelievable winning streak occurred over a four year period of time that included normal life crises such as flu, colds, nagging injuries, personal relationships, dating, marriage, jobs, bills to pay, tests to take, making weight, not to mention that all of your opponents are studying films to find your Achilles Heel and lying in wait to beat the unbeatable, but to no avail.

“In this corner, Cael Sanderson. In this corner Shrinking Violet,” all 159 of them.

It is, in my mind, the single greatest athletic achievement ever. Bar none. We could have some healthy arguments over it, but that’s my choice as the greatest of all.

And then, to top it all off, he went on to win the Gold Medal at the Olympics, an incredible achievement made almost incidental by his unbelievable collegiate record. And oh, incidentally, he also won four straight Utah State High School championships.

Yes, that’s right. This hero hails from Heber, a Wasp from Wasatch High School. A local hero making it big in the Big Time.

Do heroes have heroes? Of course, and one of Cael’s childhood heroes was the Bill Probst family. Bill’s son Jake is one of Cael’s best friends.

Bill Probst was the chairman of the Utah State Amateur this year and through Bill we were able to get Cael to speak at our traditional Breakfast of Champions. This year the centerpiece on each of the tables was a Wheaties Breakfast of Champions box featuring our guest speaker. It brought extra meaning to the specialness of our Champions Breakfast that has featured many other heroes, including Bill Korns, Frank Layden, LaVell Edwards, Arnie Ferrin, Bill Korns, and most of our former champions.

Sanderson’s personality came through immediately, quiet, modest, soft spoken, intense, focused:

“Success is a choice….We are responsible for what we think, for what we do, and what we say….If you see a person on top of a mountain you know he didn’t just fall there…Don’t focus on the hurricane around you, focus on the eye of the hurricane….expect obstacles….If you’re going through hell, keep on going….A dog who hunts doesn’t stop to scratch his fleas.”

Those were some of the tidbits Cael gave to a riveted audience that included the 32 match play finalists and our former champions, and for me, getting to meet and listen to my heroes at the Breakfast of Champions will always remain part of the thrill of the tournament I love the most, The Utah State Amateur Championship.

Proposed Senate Health Care Reform Bill

Should Be Named ‘Hurricane Katrina’

If you’ve observed news reports on the health care reform process you have probably been impressed that Howard Dean is one of the best informed in the country on the issue. He has made good sense all through this process—and now, after working cooperatively with everyone on the issue, and the Dems have completely caved, he has thrown down the gauntlet—-vote NO if this thing doesn’t change for the better.

President Obama and the Senate Democrats have allowed this bill to be butchered to the point of disaster—just to get a bill. In the interest of compromise they have been compromised. Earlier on this blog Watts Cookin wrote a column entitled ‘Lipstick on a Pig’ and that’s what we are getting—-only worse. The lipstick has been smudged all over the pig’s face.

If this bill passes the Senate the only saving grace for the Democrats will be the moment when the House and Senate bills meet at conference. The House bill is much better than the Senate bill and if the bad from the Senate is eliminated and the good from the House can survive then all this discussion is overwrought panic. The senators and the administration are counting on being able to ‘kick over the traces’ at the conference session.

One of the huge albatrosses is the requirement than everyone must buy health insurance, an idea that won’t work and is fundamentally repulsive and is also in the House bill. That clause alone is enough to make a nation sick. It’s a bill that requires getting blood out of a turnip and it ain’t going to happen. Furthermore, it’s not a tax on income or property, it’s a tax on just being alive.  How can we make it mandatory for people to pay for health insurance when they don’t have any money and can’t even get a job? It won’t work without enormous government subsidies, subsidies that will have to increase dramatically every year. What do we do with those who won’t mandate? Throw them in jail? Deny them coverage at emergency rooms?

This Senate bill is about as far away from the ideal Single Payer system as one can imagine. The claim is that this Senate bill will cover some 30 million people who haven’t been covered before. How will that happen? By compelling them to join up at whatever fee the insurance companies demand, and fining them if they don’t? This isn’t free enterprise. This is slavery.

What should be done? The Democrats should put together a health care bill that can garner 51 votes, will work for America, including a strong public option, but preferably single payer, limits on insurance administrative costs, and call for an up and down vote on the matter and let the naysayers of both parties suffer the consequences. Make the naysayers actually filibuster. Make them take up the nation’s time in a clearly minority position and watch their support at home erode. The Republicans and DINOs who are opposed to any reform and will not vote YEA on anything, have butchered the bill to where everyone ought to vote NO.

This lovey, dovey contrived ‘it’s still a good bill’ is a song and dance being sung by many Senate Democrats and the Obama administration simply for political purposes. Most of them are disappointed or outright disgusted by the end result, but at this point they have determined that any bill will save face and they can claim victory if they repeat the message often enough. This is not governing. It is playing politics. Getting a ‘W’ on the Democratic side and a ‘L’ on the Republican side has become the goal. Health care reform has become the football and all the air has been kicked out of it.

However, as soon as that mandatory payment to health insurance companies is law there will be a whole new class of anti-government protesters, and they will be from the left and the right. It will not be pretty! This mandatory payment is the seed of sorrow and has been glossed over in the discussions with little analysis of the downsides. It is fraught with problems.  How are families to be handled in this individual mandate? Does this mean that a father is mandated to cover his spouse and children? Until when? What about college students with no income? What does the mandate cover? Is the cost of the mandate different for different ages? For different health conditions? For differing healthy living styles?

The cost of premiums will skyrocket, making mandatory compliance even more revolting. The misery index for Americans can be measured as in inverse relationship to health insurance stock prices, and those stock prices just reached a 52-year high in anticipation of the passage of this colossal legislative mess.

What negatives are there in this bill for insurance companies? Nothing. They can charge what they damn well please. Their profit is guaranteed. It is said the bill contains safeguards that places a percentage restriction on the amount of their revenue that can be paid for administrative costs and profit, but that will not hold down premium costs for the American people, and in fact, is another incentive for the insurance companies to increase premiums. Every increase in premium will result in a net dollar profit gain for the insurance companies. They will still have every incentive to raise premiums.

Some are hailing that it now prevents the insurance companies from disallowing coverage based on pre-existing conditions, which is very nice and appropriate, but only raises the cost of all premiums and adds to the bottom line for insurance companies. That is not a negative to insurance companies at all. It just changes their actuaries.

Insurance companies are the health care problem and they have been strengthened, not weakened, and we are going down the wrong road. This bill will increase  the cost of health care and diminish America’s capacity to compete in the global market place. It’s claim of providing for insurance for 30 million more Americans can only be a magic number pulled out of the sky. The only way that is possible is for almost complete government subsidy for millions of  people.

And of course, one of the most revolting developments in the whole process are the bribes that the Obama Administration have handed out to get votes, the most egregious being to Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Criminal charges should be filed in that case. If that isn’t bribery then a duck isn’t a duck and America has been screwed.

Why not cut the chase and get Single Payer on board now? Single Payer resolves most of these problems and we will eventually adopt it.

Many of the senators who intend to vote for this Senate bill think they will have time to amend and reform it before the disaster is felt, but the dikes around this bill are not going to hold back the water.

Perhaps the bill should be named Hurricane Katrina.

Edited, after passage of Senate bill, Dec. 21, 2009

The Making of a Legend: Merlin Olsen

There’s something special about being able to say “We knew him before the world did!’

To millions of sports fans Merlin Olsen became a legend as one of the Fearsome Foursome of the Los Angeles Rams. He was in the Pro Bowl 14 years, more than anyone else, and never missed a game in his 15 years with the Rams and was inducted into the College and Pro Football Hall of Fame, and he continued his success as a popular television commentator and actor.

Long before that time, as a sophomore at Logan High, and before he had even played one game, he became a football legend to his high school teammates on the first day of practice.

As an awkward, oddly shaped teenager, with head and feet already full grown and anxiously waiting for his body to catch up, the only thing the varsity players knew about him was that he was big and strong and could possibly be a good football player someday—-and that he was only a mere sophomore.

In those days there were no little league or junior high football programs and this mighty man hadn’t played a down of real football anywhere. He was an unknown, even to himself.

At Logan High there was a tradition—-that sophomore’s didn’t go through the varsity dressing room to get to the football field. Sophomores had to bypass the varsity locker room and go out the front door and make the long loop to the gridiron. The side door of the varsity dressing room went straight to the field and would have been a significant short cut for the sophomores—–but for tradition. Sophomores had their place and it wasn’t in the varsity dressing room.

Sometime near the beginning of that 1956 season Merlin let everyone know in advance that he was not going to abide tradition. He declared that he was going through the varsity dressing room directly to the field. The gauntlet had been thrown down, albeit in a friendly, but competitive manner.

When the day approached tensions rose, and nary a varsity player left the dressing room early that day. They were laying in wait for this ‘bigger than life’ sophomore who thought the shorter distance made good sense.

As a puny little guy with big ears and the team manager I knew my place. I was a spectator. Spectating is what I was good at, and the scene that unfolded that day remains vivid to me to this day.

All the other sophomores played their assigned roles and went around the varsity dressing room, but true to his word, Merlin entered the varsity domain. Several varsity players attempted to grab him, but they couldn’t hold on to him and they went rebounding across one of the benches. It was obvious that this needed to be a team effort and so others took up the challenge and the skirmish area broadened as he twisted and turned and threw off attackers one after the other, but gradually the varsity guys worked him around benches and lockers into the shower area in an attempt to douse him, and they eventually did, but not without the varsity getting drenched as well. That was the only day the varsity took a shower before practice, and when the melee was over Merlin was still standing, wet, but begging for more. There was no more. He had earned his stripes, respect all around.

Merlin Olsen went through the varsity dressing room that entire year while all the other sophomores continued according to tradition.

To me, that was the day Merlin became a legend and all of his Logan High classmates have taken pride in Merlin as he became an American sports legend, and we’ve all been just a little bit better than we would have been without him in our lives.

Utah State University honored him the other night and announced that the football field would be named in his honor, and that a statue would be built and displayed in his memory.

He is suffering from a rare cancer that is attacking the pleura of his lungs and it is cutting his breath shorter each day. We wish him the best in his current difficult struggle.

My bet is that whenever it is that he gets called to the other side he will follow the same pattern he did in all aspects of this life, he will go through the varsity dressing room and directly to the playing field.

Merlin, your Logan High classmates commend you for your life of achievement at every level, and especially for the dignity with which you did it.

“We knew you before the world did!”

(Edited Dec. 11, 2009)

Olive Branch from LDS Church Will Be Huge

The announcement that the LDS Church is supportive of the Salt Lake City statute that prohibits discrimination against gays in housing and employment has implications far beyond Salt Lake City and changes the landscape of gay politics, not only in Utah, but across the nation. This is no lightweight matter.

Dr. Gary Watts (my brother), one of Utah’s foremost gay rights activists, and a former Mormon who resigned his church membership over the issue, said, “I believe this is the first time in the history of the church that it has ever publicly said anything supportive of gay rights. It is a sea change and great news and I commend the church for this progress.”

While it was a foregone conclusion that SLC was going to pass the ordinance, the announcement by the LDS Church preceding the vote turned it into a unanimous vote.

Some vocal anti-gay rights legislators had already threatened to override the ordinance if SLC passed it, but now that seems unlikely, and in fact, the legislature will now be under extreme pressure to pass a similar state wide statute.

The influence of the LDS Church is far reaching and could even have positive effects beyond state borders.  There are a significant number of Mormons in the state legislatures throughout the west, and a change of attitudes on their part can have influence with others and turn minorities into majorities quite quickly.

Even on the national level it will have influence. There are four Mormon senators, including Majority Leader Harry Reid, Utah’s two Republican senators Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett, and  Mike Crapo of Idaho, and at least ten in the House of Representatives, who will be more open  to reconsider national non-discrimination laws in housing and employment, hospital visitations, and other legal considerations that have been denied gays and their partners. They each have influence with other colleagues, and of course, President Obama has surely taken note of the clear public stance by the church and he can use it to help form national opinion. Although the LDS Church has no influence with the evangelical churches, it has worked closely with the mainstream churches in recent years and the newly articulated LDS viewpoint will be duly noted.

Furthermore, the announcement will have an immediate and positive effect of influencing its general church membership to recognize the importance of respect for gays and will have a chilling effect on Mormons who have seemingly thought they had a green light from their leaders to bash gays. It may even result in a more civil tone and tenor coming from the mouths of our Mormon legislators who hitherto have led the gay-bashing chorus at the capitol over the past dozen years without any rebuke from their church.

This is a big moment and the LDS Church is to be commended for this monumental shift in attitude.  However, with all the positives there is a clear downside. The church has thrown down the gauntlet even harder when it comes to gay marriage. The announcement provocatively said that gay marriage ‘would do violence’ to the institution of marriage and it was made perfectly clear that the church won’t be bending on that one.

While this announcement is not an apology for its sins of the past in its treatment of gays, it is certainly an about face, and is about as much of an apology that one can hope for from a church that never admits to a mistake. It has yet to apologize for denying blacks the priesthood for more than a century and so gays should not be expecting apologies anytime soon.

The face saving statement infers that it is not a change of policy, that it always supported equal rights for gays because it is the ‘fair and reasonable’ thing to do and that it always supports ‘human dignity,’ but that dishonestly brushes aside the continual rejection of previous proposals much too flippantly.

The church has had many opportunities in the past 15 years to be a leader on the issue, and it has chosen to be a stumbling block every step of the way. In fact, just last year, in trying to quell the backlash of Prop 8 in California, the church made a public announcement that it ‘would not object’ to legislation supporting nondiscrimination against gays in a laundry list of rights. Equality Utah took the church up on the statement, produced the legislation, but when push came to shove the church failed to support any of them. Not objecting to something and supporting them are apparently two different things and the bills failed miserably.

While this action by the church is monumentally good news it doesn’t whitewash the past. It is still there, loud, clear, and devastating, and the future is still very, very murky. The church can’t erase all those years of anti-gay rhetoric with an olive branch in one hand, a hammer in the other hand, and the still pompous pretention that it has done nothing wrong.

Following the extensive backlash after Proposition 8 in California, the LDS Church, through its Apostle Dallin Oaks, has gone to its roots to gain public support—victimization. It won’t work.

It’s pretty obvious that violence, including vandalism, is not condoned by either side of the gay rights issue, and it is appropriate to single out any such instances and seek appropriate prosecution of violations.

That said, the whining of the LDS Church and its attempt to turn itself into a victim because of some scattered and isolated vandalisms is a rather pathetic scene. It’s like the bully on the block running for cover when some of his victims surprise him by getting up from their beating and fight back.

Our landscape is strewn with the broken lives of thousands of gays humiliated at the hands of the pulpit and its repulsive message that has condoned the real vandalism of homophobia, including Matthew Shephard, Harvey Milk, and our suffering gay children who are bullied and abused physically, mentally, and spiritually in our public schools, who are homeless because of rejection, many of whom are driven to suicides, and some of them occurring on the chapel doorsteps; and still the false prophets disavow their carnage.

The vandalism of homophobia doesn’t scar buildings, it scars souls, of both the giver and the receiver.

Let’s not let the churches change the fundamental nature of this problem. Gays are the victims and churches and their old-age dogmas born in mythology are the perpetrators. Without the all knowing, cocksure self-righteousness of religious people who insist on condemning, berating, marginalizing, ostracizing, and discriminating against gays there would be no problem. Most of the rest of the world has adopted a ‘live and let live’ attitude. Let’s not let a few scattered, isolated instances of resistance create a new victim.

Oppressors should expect resistance and the oppressed should resist. The resistance against all churches and their members who diminish the rights of gays should increase not decrease.

The resistance should have the goal of stripping the churches of their deceitful message and its illusions of righteousness. Their message is not the Golden Rule, but its antithesis. It is not a message of Love Thy Neighbor, but the opposite. It is not pro-family, but virulently anti-family. Focusing on that simple truth is the greatest strength of the gay movement. The gay movement is teaching the world true religion.

Let’s remember that it is not just Mormons, but Catholics, Muslims, some Baptists, and many other religions who have wielded the sword of oppression against gays. In Utah gay rights activists are targeting the Mormons because they are their closest, most visible, and most active foe and gay rights advocates have a responsibility to fairness and justice to respond vigorously and appropriately.

We should push forward fervently, while proceeding with malice toward none, remembering that our oppressors are our own friends, our own brothers and sisters, and our own moms and dads. It is a new untraveled road for them. Let us understand where they are coming from, where they have been, and give them a chance to arrive. That day is coming. We are near. More and more newly discovered parents of gays, when faced with the difficult choice, are rejecting their church rather than their children. Every gay is part of a family, and an extended family, and those tentacles reach into every home in the world. It’s an Oxymormon for a church to think it can be pro-family and anti-gay at the same time. Anti-gay churches cannot survive this tsunami of understanding that is sweeping the earth.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,
And all the King’s horses,
And all the King’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty
Together again!!

What better way to describe the current status of the health care system in America?

The Humpty Dumpty health insurance system in America is broken and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and yet this Congress seems to be waffling on fixing this mess. Single Payer has apparently been taken off the table and an ‘ethereal’ public option is being bandied about as a possible crumb to the masses who are demanding change.

We need to give up on Humpty Dumpty and start all over with a Single Payer system that covers everyone. We will eventually have it, but for now we seem content to put our finger in the dike while the water pours over the top, ala New Orleans.

Insurance groupings should not be determined by thousands of groups of varying sizes and rates with loopholes that exclude and deny coverage. Under Single Payer everyone in the nation would be considered one insurance group and because of its size it will  be more efficient, more fair, more inclusive, and less expensive.

Under the present employment based system, health care is the elephant in the room at many  job interviews. The employer is desperately trying to avoid hiring possible health problems, and the employee is desperately seeking a job to get insurance. It is a corrupting, deceptive, unethical conflict that should have no bearing on employment.

The employer is quick to hire an employee whose spouse is working for a company that has a better health care plan because the company can then unfairly shift health costs of its employees to the other company. A person that appears to be a health care risk has little chance in a job interview. It is an American tragedy that we have been unwilling to face. The idea that a person can’t get a job or shift jobs because they are a health care risk is about as cruel as it gets, and some want to call it the great American free enterprise system. Too many employees have become the equivalent of indentured servants, and conversely employers have become ‘indentured employers,’ stuck with employees whose health risks suddenly escalate and in many cases force them to abandon giving insurance at all or face bankruptcy.

Under Single Payer this would change because everyone would be covered, and at the same rates. All businesses would be on equal footing regarding health insurance.

The current situation is also a nightmare to our great physicians and more and more of them are becoming advocates of Single Payer, and some polling shows that a majority of physcians lean toward Single Payer. Office expenses for doctors have escalated over the years as they try to cope with the myriad differences of health insurance companies. Doctors are plagued by these unnecessary costs due to insurance companies creating artificial mazes to delay payment of legitimate bills.

The most important person in the doctor’s office has become the reimbursement specialist, and they truly require specialist training to understand all the intricacies of insurance trickery. We are now giving degrees or certificates to indicate expertise in the field.

Doctors are also plagued by predatory lawyers who are wallowing in the same hell hole as our predatory lenders. To be satisfactory the new Single Payer system of health care must provide  greater protection to our good doctors from the frivolous lawsuits that increase the cost of medicine for everyone, and yet maintain legitimate malpractice protections and assure quality control systems. Conversely, we should also eliminate the conflict of interests doctors have established through self-referrals that increase unnecessary procedures and increase costs.

The people of America are clamoring for a new health care insurance system while the people of Canada are as content as Obama is with a microphone. There isn’t a nation in Europe that would trade systems with us. They aren’t even discussing change.

Despite all this sense we don’t appear ready yet for Single Payer health care. President Obama would go for it in a minute if the climate was right, but the health care climate is as polluted as the air we breathe. One stigma facing lawmakers are the terms ‘nationalized’ or ’socialized medicine’. We need to realize that Single Payer is not nationalized health care. Doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceuticals remain independent. It nationalizes only the way insurance is delivered.

While it would have a dramatic negative effect on the health insurance industry there will still be demand for supplemental insurance policies similar to what is happening in Medicare.

Too many Americans have been raised with an anti-government phobia, and yet nationalized health insurance would be the very best cure for our ailing free enterprise system, and in fact, the current health insurance system is a cancer eating up the free enterprise system day-by-day.

If the wimpy Democrats cave in to the whiney Republicans and we end up with Humpty Dumpty again we will have fulfilled one of the most repeated campaign mottos—we will have put ‘lipstick on a pig.’

Watts Cookin’ is a continuation of a column started in 1957 when Joe Watts became sports editor of The Herald Journal in Logan, Utah. Ray Nelson, Joe’s first editor, gave Joe’s column the Watts Cookin’ tag.

Here it is—2009—-52 years and thousands of columns later, and Joe is still writing Watts Cookin’—-this blog being its final resting place in the not to distant uncertain future.This blog will include columns, essays, and thoughts  from Joe and some of his friends and writers he admires. The topics will be wide ranging, including sports, humor, politics, religion, economics, ethics and morality. It is a work in progress and will morph wherever it goes. It will gradually include great writings of the past from the world’s best commentators, and will be a publishing place for new writers with conventional and unconventional viewpoints.

Opinion pieces will be sought from others, and all are welcome to submit essays for publication. Comments about the articles will be published, but there will be no anonymous and unapproved comments posted.

Readers can be assured that all comments will be civil and purposeful. High standards of journalism will be expected.