Turner: Trump oval on ballot would be hard to fill in

Near the end of my father’s life more than 10 years ago, his macular degeneration had gotten so bad that I had to fill out his election ballot for him.

At one point, this raised an ethical quandary. More about that in a moment.

Not sure why my mother didn’t do it for him. Perhaps because she largely relied on my recommendations in local races and wanted to handle both ballots at the same time.

So I went over to where they lived on the South Hill. We got out the ballots. I read aloud the various elected positions and names of the candidates, filling in the indicated ovals as we went. As I recall, we did local and state offices first.

It was a fairly simple process which we approached with appropriate seriousness.

Then we came to the presidential race. My dad instructed me to cast his vote for a man I personally did not respect and definitely had not voted for myself.

(Looking back, and considering some of the things we have witnessed recently, I now regard that former president as a towering statesman. Relatively speaking.)

I don’t remember if we discussed it or if my pen paused before I filled in the oval.

The truth is, it wasn’t hard. I was not about to disenfranchise a combat veteran and decorated Air Force officer just because he supported someone I opposed. My dad deserved to vote.

But what if my father was still alive and wanted to vote for the current president?

I’d like to think I could turn him around by reminding him he had not spent all those hours in a B-52 so he could vote for someone many regard as a traitor, willing to sell us out to the Russians.

What if he insisted? Maybe I would have gone ahead and done it, confident that the majority of voters in the great state of Washington would trump his misguided choice. But I wouldn’t have felt good about it.

Just wondering

If you had to guess, what would you say is the likely correlation between how someone voted in the 2016 presidential election and believing that the moon landing never happened?

Jussssst outside

My mention of impaired-vision fireballer Ryne Duren prompted a note from John McTear over in Idaho.

John grew up in Philadelphia and graduated from high school in 1962. His dad knew sportswriter Bob Vetrone, who got John a job as a ticket taker at Connie Mack Stadium.

“Duren did a couple of stints with the Phillies during that period. It wasn’t rare to chat with the players pregame and before the gates opened. Duren said he used his wildness as a tool.”

He threw his last warm-up pitch as the batter approached home plate. As John recalled, that pitch invariably would be way off the mark, sometimes over the catcher’s head. Duren feigned not being able to see how badly he had missed.

“He had awful eyesight, wore Coke bottle glasses and made it part of his schtick. Ballplayers in those days weren’t rich and were very approachable. A far simpler era.”

For the record

Lisa Nunlist, Larry Carroll, Lew VanDeMark and other readers knew “Hotter than a match head” is from the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City” (1966).

Today’s train memory

Marilyn Othmer, who describes herself as my “old” pal, shared this.

“When I was growing up in Spokane we lived in a big old two-story house across the river from what was then Fort George Wright. We could hear the bugler playing “Taps” at sundown for troops stationed there.

“From my upstairs bedroom window later on I could hear the horn on the Great Northern Railway’s Empire Builder, which was the big streamliner back in the day. It would be heading for Seattle, which seemed to me at the time to be halfway around the world.

“Also, I could see the revolving light that shone on the front of the engine which made a circle-eight.

“Every time I hear a train whistle I think back to that time. Living in Spokane Valley now, I hear a lot of those. It seems like they make a mournful sound that I didn’t think of when I was a kid.”

End note

The recent discussion in this space about baldness prompted Judy McKeehan to recall what she used to say to her husband when he was alive.

“I always told Mike it wasn’t how much hair you had but how you wore it off that counted.”