Dennis West
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WestWords is a collection of columns by Dennis West that have appeared in The Beacon, a newspaper that covers the Walworth County, Wisconsin, area. The essays, most of which are humorous, contain a great deal of information, trivia and (non-caloric) food for thought.
Among the subjects treated in WestWords are:
• Pogo, the Old English Sheep Dog who was in the running for world’s dumbest canine
• The author’s mother, a frustrated nurse who painfully injected her children with penicillin the consistency of toothpaste every time they sneezed
• A musical career that ended when the author took a shot at playing drum major instead of his sousaphone and couldn’t keep 100 University of Illinois band members from marching through a hedge
• A Roman used-chariot salesman who invented a truth serum
• plus essays about language misuse, TV commercials, heavy-metal music and much more.
Add a generous helping of trivia and you have a humorously entertaining, informative and thought-provoking collection by award-winning journalist Dennis West, publisher and editor of a wildly popular small-town newspaper called The Beacon.
Dennis West was born, old and grumpy, in Rockford, Ill., in 1943. He attended the University of Illinois in Urbana for two years, then stumbled through a number of jobs before landing one at WROK radio. He spent most of the next 25 years selling advertising, managing others who did the same, and finally becoming president and general manager of WIFR-TV and a Vice President of Worrell Broadcasting. During his 21 years at WIFR, he won several awards for editorial writing from such organizations as United Press International, the Associated Press and the Illinois Broadcasters Association. He also served on the CBS Television Network Affiliates Board. After leaving television in 1988, he and his wife, Kathi, moved to their summer home in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. A year later, he returned to school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he finished the journalism degree he had begun in 1961.
After serving as editor of The Bay Times and running his own advertising agency, he purchased a monthly newspaper called The Beacon, in 1996. It has since become a bi-weekly publication with a circulation of 20,000 in the greater Walworth County, Wis., area, which includes the resort communities of Lake Geneva and Delavan. Part of that publication is a section called Good Humour, the British spelling of which has kept the ice cream company from suing him.
In addition to WestWords, he has completed “Bringlish: A Reader’s and Viewer’s Guide to British English,” which should be available shortly.
I’m a sneeze stifler. That sounds like someone who smothers small animals, but it merely means that, instead of letting a sneeze wake everyone in the neighborhood and spraying bacteria over a 12-foot radius, I hold it all in.
Dozens of shocked know-it-alls who profess to be more concerned for my safety than their personal health, have told me that stifling a sneeze is: 1. stupid; 2. against the laws of God and nature; and 3. sure to result in blowing my brains out through my ears one of these days. They’re probably right.
I always thought I stifled sneezes in order: not to call attention to myself; to keep from disturbing others; and save them the trouble of saying “God bless you.”
The practice of invoking the blessing of the deity every time someone sneezes results from a belief that sneezing causes the heart to stop momentarily, which results in a mini-death from which the victim needs to be protected. Or something like that.
Members of the scientific community who have investigated this contention say it’s baloney, which shows what they know. It’s actually liverwurst. Or bull excrement, to put it politely.
I would rather take a chance on exploding my cerebellum than have to respond “Thank you” to everyone within range who mindlessly mumbles “God bless you” every time I sneeze.
It also saves me the trouble of surreptitiously wiping my hand on my sock after I use it to cover my mouth. No, I don’t carry a handkerchief. That’s why I wear socks. But that’s another story.
While all of these are valid reasons for stifling – some people say smothering – a sneeze, it wasn’t until recently that I discovered the real reason I do it.
Avoiding pain
When I was young, my mother worked for a doctor. Like most nurses, she thought she knew more about science and medicine than Louis Pasteur, Jonas Salk and Dr. Scholl combined.
As a result of her vast medical knowledge, mom was always ready to treat any malady that threatened her family. But I always had the impression she wasn’t as worried about us as she was eager to practice medicine.
Ours was the only refrigerator in the neighborhood stocked with milk, brown lettuce, leftover Spam and penicillin. There were other little bottles with rubber tops in there too, but we were only concerned about the Big P.
Whenever we exhibited a symptom of any kind, mom would head for the fridge and pull out the little bottle filled with the lifesaving white liquid. Unfortunately, the cold turned its consistency from liquid to that of caulking compound. Heating it in a pan of water was supposed to liquefy it, but our hovering Florence Nightingale never took enough time.
She splashed a couple of inches of water into a small aluminum saucepan that looked as though it had been through the Crimean War and then dropped the bottle into it, placed it on top of the stove and went to get the dreaded syringe.
Although she never said where she had acquired this ancient implement, we assumed it was from an auction at a veterinary clinic. It was huge. Only cattle could have previously been subjected to its use. Captain Ahab’s harpoon was a toothpick compared to the time-and-use-dulled needle that protruded from its tip.
Unfortunately, the syringe was always handy. She dropped it into the dented pan, let it stew for a minute or two, assembled it, wiped the needle with alcohol and plunged it into the penicillin bottle, which she held up to the light like a slightly deranged Bela Lugosi as she tried to draw the medicine with it’s bicycle-pump-sized plunger.
Then she’d swipe the target with alcohol, give it a slap – which was meant to numb it and help with the pain, but only succeeded in contaminating the spot she had just sterilized – and then, with the motion of a darts player, jab the infernal apparatus from about a foot away. Unfortunately, the penicillin never liquefied properly. It was like pushing toothpaste through the needle and into a frail body, usually in the region of the hip.
“Oh, don’t be such a baby,” she’d respond to my screams of pain.
Because of the pressure it took to force the Crest-like substance through the needle, the procedure lasted for what seemed like an eternity. But it was probably no more than half an hour.
“There,” she would say, withdrawing the needle, “that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“Mmmph,” I would answer, rubbing the baseball-sized lump near my right buttock and limping off to sit on my left hip until the burning sensation subsided, usually in two or three days.
Strangely, given all this evidence, it didn’t dawn on me until my thirty-ninth year why I stifled sneezes. I had learned to do it in childhood in order to avoid the deadly harpoon and the penicillin paste, which followed an olfactory eruption as surely as Bill Clinton followed bimbos.
“But mom,” I’d protest, “I was just grinding pepper and got some up my nose.”
“A likely story,” she’d sneer, donning her little white cap and reaching into the fridge to her pharmaceutical stash in back of the fuzzy blue leftover macaroni and cheese.
If it had been a long time since her last ministration, she might get excited enough to shout, “Somebody boil some water,” as though a birth were imminent instead of a possible death by inoculation.
So nobody sneezed much at our house. To this day, if I forget, or can’t manage, to stifle one, my reply to a well-intentioned “God bless you” is liable to be, “So’s your mother!”
