It's that time of the week again when I come here to Kos and beg for clicks and forwards and likes and all that good cyber-stuff so I can keep having the most fun I've had since I retired, at least the most fun with my clothes on.
This week, I decided to write a fuller explanation of why this means so much to me here in the Intro and move the teaser itself down below the fleur-de-kos because, after all, most Kossacks don't know me in the real world and so it's a big imposition to ask them to care whether I get to keep this little retirement gig that's so much more fun than acting as a visiting judge.
I’ve been hired to write a weekly humor column in the vein of my childhood hero, Will Rogers.
It started out called “Friday News Dump,” which was not a good idea of mine. The traffic has improved since they changed it to “How Did I Miss That?”
Will Rogers carried an old manual typewriter with him wherever he traveled and on every movie set. He filed his dailies by Western Union and he got his material the same place I do. Everywhere he went, he had all the local papers delivered to him--and in those days all the big cities had at least two dailies with a morning and evening version.
He always made his deadlines, no matter what was going on. He even made his deadline the time he drove all night to get back from a movie set because his son was dying of what turned out to be diphtheria.
I could never match that, which is why I only proposed a weekly rather than a daily.
When I think of what I'm trying to accomplish with this column, I remember my favorite editorial cartoon about the appointment of Clarence Thomas to fill the "black seat" on the SCOTUS formerly occupied by Thurgood Marshall. It showed Thomas crawling up the laces of a humongous pair of shoes labeled "Thurgood Marshall."
I'm no Clarence Thomas in that I take the Indian side and the side of the little guy against the big guys, just like Will Rogers did. But I'm acutely aware of the size of the boots Will Rogers left and how unlikely it is I could ever walk in them.
When I was a kid and visited the Will Rogers Museum for the first time, I paused longest in front of one glass case. On the wall inside it were pics of the plane crash that took his life, of Will and Wiley Post, of Will sitting on a barrel pecking away on the typewriter. And inside the glass was the typewriter, all smashed from the crash. That broken typewriter summed up for me what we lost.
When I left home at age 16, the first thing I bought for myself with my earnings was a manual typewriter.
Fifty years later, I finally get the chance to write the same kind of column.