And then I wrote...

by Dick Schilling, Editor Emeritus

... that I am a day late in my routine this week, and at my age and state of life, routine is important.
The reason is that I lost Monday to all intents and purposes, due to a couple of unexpected events. Both turned out well, however.
One was the fact that the British Open (or as the rest of the world calls it, The Open) was delayed a day by bad weather. When I first turned on the TV Monday morning, Iowan Zack Johnson was playing well and was in contention, so I had to continue watching. Well into the middle of the afternoon, Johnson won the Claret Jug in the playoff.
It is Johnson’s second major tournament victory. He won the Master’s eight years earlier at Augusta.
While Iowans celebrated Monday, the sports reporters elsewhere pouted. They wanted Jordan Spieth to win, since it would have been his third major of the year, and that would have been a really big story. ESPN called Johnson’s win “anticlimactic.” Shortly after the tournament ended, they played a long tribute to Spieth, even though he tied for fourth. It was shades of Tiger Woods, when then networks always had many minutes of tape about him in reserve.
Oddly enough, it was Woods who Johnson beat for his Master’s win, and the national press didn’t like that, either.
Spieth may be the heir-apparent to Woods, but Monday should have been Johnson’s day and his only.
The other factor was I was without a land line telephone over the weekend, until the technician came to fix the problem Monday. He was amazed to see the box, or lack of one, where the phone line enters the front porch. It was the same old fixture that was present when we moved into the house in 1945. There was a foreman at the newspaper office who was well acquainted with some of the old job presses, and when one would fail, he always said something like “it has worked for 50 years, I don’t know why it would quit now!”
Well over a year ago, cousins who are my closest relatives insisted I get a cell phone for “emergency” use, in case I was away from the land line when something happened. The late Don Shelton suggested that if that was all I wanted it for, I should get a low cost, low use pre-pay deal. I learned little about the phone and used it only a couple times, until the land line quit. Who knew my “emergency” requiring a cell phone would be the failure of a land line?
The learning experience of introducing myself to my cell phone may be a welcome sidebar.
By the way, our telephone number in the 1940s was 281M. I can remember that, when there are many later names and numbers I have forgotten!