On Monday, May 18, we made the elongated 391-mile drive to Rio Vista, an outlying sub-suburb of San Francisco. After a quick set-up, we met Dupp for dinner at The Point restaurant on the Sacramento River where we began all our catching up.
Dupp is a most interesting guy. Like Job, he’s put up with a mountain of travails in his lifetime, yet he never loses his optimistic spirit and “can-do” attitude. While serving as an attorney for the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s corp, Dupp and his wonderful and pretty wife Glenda had three boys to go along with Glenda’s daughter. But shortly after the birth of their last son, a tumor was discovered in Glenda’s brain. After an operation, she was never the same and soon ceased being able to be a part of her family’s lives, leaving Duppy alone to raise four kids under ten-years old while working a stressful job in the military. But he persevered, determined to give those kids all he had.
Several years later he married Faye. The kids grew up and moved out and on but always had a touchstone in their dad to help with the difficult decisions. In retirement, Dupp and Faye threw themselves into fundraising, doing marathons to raise great sums for the American Cancer Society.
And then just about a month before we were to visit the Lambs, wife Faye underwent heart bypass surgery, the same procedure I had done three years ago. More obstacles for the two of them to overcome, but together, they did. Faye is still battling but seems to be recovering pretty well. And Dupp is … well, as ever, he’s still our “Duppy.”
Then again on Wednesday, we joined the Lambs for pizza in downtown Rio Vista. A very interesting friend of theirs, Hans, joined us. He had played basketball for Boston College back in the 50’s and had almost beaten Jerry West’s strong West Virginia team in the NCAA tourney. The three guys talked basketball as the ladies practiced their yawning.Later that night, we got home in time to watch the final “Late Night with David Letterman” show. I go way back with Dave, watching him with all the other “goons” during his midnight to 1 a.m. slot after Johnny Carson. It had always bothered me that Dave didn’t get the “Tonight” show when Johnny left. I pretty much blamed Jay Leno for being a weasel, so from the night Johnny left on up until Jimmy Fallon took over, I refused to watch even one minute of the Leno “Tonight” show. I’ll miss Dave, especially his younger, zanier years, but it was time for him to move on.
Somehow, we Three Stooges made it to the downtown area where, along with 41,840 other rabid fans there for the Giants 350th straight sell-out game, we made our way along the ocean sidewalk to the ballpark. Doing our customary walk-around-the-outside-of-
Additionally, there were the obligatory statues of Juan Marichal and Willie Mays with which I posed. We even got out behind the right-field wall where the kayakers paddle about in the bay waiting to retrieve any well hit home runs by sturdy left-handers.Once inside the park, we went on our search for this stadium’s best concession. Ballpark foods have a “Top Ten List” as rated by “TenBest.com”; San Francisco’s “Crazy Crab’z Grilled Crab Sandwich” holds down the number nine spot, so we decided we had to have one.
DK, as is her wont, had studied up on all the teams we would be seeing this summer before we left Arizona so that she could be wearing the correct team color-combinations at each game. Today she was in Giants’ orange and black.
We made it up to the third deck for our standard ballpark picture, only this one had a special guest photographee (Dupp) included in it. Just expanding our horizons.
In a great game featuring two of the best left-handers, nay, probably the two BEST pitchers in all of baseball, Giants’ World Series hero Madison Bumgarner pitched San Fran to a 4-0 win over their arch rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers and their perennial Cy Young winning pitcher, Clayton Kershaw. Bumgarner even rubbed salt in the Dodgers’ blue-blood by smacking a home run in his first at-bat.
If you take out the sentiment of seeing games at the 1912 Fenway Park in Boston and the 1914 Wrigley Field in Chicago, we unanimously decided this had to be the best stadium we’ve seen … and we only have one left to visit. Seattle, you better have your game face on for us when we visit in 12 days.Afterwards, Jordan led us on a cross-country walk to the fine “Lefty O’Doul’s Bar” for some post-game libations. Lefty was a fine baseball player from the San Francisco Seals minor league team as well as the New York Giants in the 30’s. After retirement, he opened up his bar which has persevered ever since. DK and I have made it a tradition that whenever we’re in San Fran, we always make a pilgrimage to Lefty’s. There, I order some beers and two giant corn-beef sandwiches while DK she picks out a booth. It’s a different booth each time; Lefty’s walls are covered with photographs of all the great baseball players, most of them from 1900-1940. My job then is to tell DK a story about whichever player’s picture is featured most prominently in our “booth-du-jour.” And I’ve never failed to relate an appropriate tale. Today’s booth featured the 1908 Chicago Cubs, winners of the World Series that year (and the last one the Cubs would see for 107 years and counting).
So for today’s booth story for DK, Dupp, and Jordan, I chose a dramatic recital, from memory, of the epic baseball poem, “Tinker to Evers to Chance.” Enjoy:“These are the saddest of possible words:
Tinker to Evers to Chance.
Trio of bear Cubs fleeter than birds:
Tinker to Evers to Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
making a Giant hit into a double,
words that are weighty with nothing but trouble:
Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Applause, applause, applause.
Not to be outdone, Dupp then told the story of how he used to keep his rambunctious, young boys in line. When they would misbehave, he did NOT have to discipline them with a spanking or a time-out. He would simply inform them that if they didn’t shape up, he would go to his closet, don his old bell bottoms and clogs he wore constantly in the 70’s, and would then show up at their school announcing that he was their father. It worked every time.
DK and I then went our separate ways … oh, just for the day. She returned to BART to go uptown in order to take a Pilates class while I wandered over to “The Cartoon Art Museum.” Yes, I’m still a kid. They were having a special showing of a comic series called “Darth Vader and Friends.” I mean, cartoons AND “Star Wars”? Does it get any better than that? The series of framed art depicted Darth Vader raising tykes Luke and Leia as if he were a traditional father. The exhibit was very colorful and portrayed a lot of quite funny scenarios.Diedre’s Pilates class was taught by Laura Kirkeby, the beautiful daughter of DK’s best Minnesota friend Jennifer Kirkeby. Jennifer is a longtime playwright and actress. She’s extremely funny. To visualize her on stage, picture Carol Burnett on steroids.
Daughter Laura, along with her sister Amber, are both college grads with degrees in dance/choreography. They are incredible hoofers, so amazingly agile in that way young people disgustingly have, and have both done their fair share of acting.
I remember back when they were little, about seven and five, we had them on “The Kaye and Stuart Show,” the variety cable-TV program DK and I wrote, directed, produced, and starred in. It aired in over 100 cities in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Anyway, Jenn would dress the little girls up like two old ladies, calling them “Millie and Molly.” Then when Diedre and I were doing our idiot show, we would periodically cut away to a shot of the two of them. There they’d sit with the most disgusted looks on their faces. Millie (Laura) would pompously turn right to the camera and announce, “I was TOLD this was going to be entertaining.” And an equally bored Molly (Amber) would nod in agreement, then plaintively ask, “Is this almost over?” They stole the show every time.It was so great catching up with Millie … I mean “Laura” … now as a beautiful young woman making her way in the world of dance. We found a great little Thai place for lunch just blocks away from the Pilates studio where we could all get caught up. You know, the children of our friends, along with DK’s siblings’ kids, have become our de-facto kids (along with Charlie, Casey, and Samantha) and we absolutely love seeing them become so accomplished in their new adult lives.
On our last day in Sandy Francisco, we were off on a road trip to see friends in the Napa Valley. On our way out of town, we spotted Rio Vista’s many windmills. Of course, they were not quite like the quaint windmills surrounded by tulips typically seen in Holland. Rio’s windmills actually bore a closer resemblance to the monsters in “War of the Worlds.”
The house will, incredibly enough, include a 9-CAR GARAGE! Yes, Howard is a big-time car collector. Last year we saw seven of his classic cars at their Atlanta home. But since their dream home is still in the planning stages, they only have three of their collector cars with them at their rental in Yountville while the rest are in storage. Howard describes the ones they do have on hand thusly:
-a Jaguar F-Type, 550 hp, super-charged, 0-60 in 3.4 seconds, ¼ mile in 11.6 seconds at 122 mph, topspeed 195 mph;
- a Ferrari 599 HGTE Fiorono, the reigning Ferrari super car from 2008-14, 640 hp, V12, 0-60 in 3
seconds, ¼ mile in 11 seconds, 0-150 in 14 seconds, does 210 mph;
has no idea what its 0-60 time is.
And I collect baseball cards. We all have our “thing.”
We then walked to dinner through the local “Tobacco Free” park. The six of us had dinner at Lucy’s, one of the top restaurants in the country. You could tell it was really one of the swells: when you ordered your meal, it was easy to notice that the clown’s head was solid gold.
Classy!
All right, we’ll pick it up next week as we hit the Oregon Trail. Stay tuned.
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