Remembering my old Scoutmaster

Mr. Palazzo (center) at a cabin in which we camped at Camp Bullowa, at which it snowed. Best campout ever.

NOTE: I do not know when this originally ran, and I don't know if this is the way it appeared in print, exactly.

My old digital archives are so out of date I can't open a clean version of my old work.

From the file creation date info, it might have been around July of 2003 when I wrote this. The time fits, because I was in the waning days of my time at The People-Sentinel.

I saw a post from the daughter of my old Scoutmaster today on Facebook. So I thought I would dig this up.

(I thought I had all my latter work saved as a pdf, but nope.)

Anyway, on to Mr. Palazzo.

Originally published in The People-Sentinel around July 31, 2003.)

I don't know why, but I thought the unhappiest thing a wedding invitation might garner was a "Sorry, I am unable to attend" check.

I didn't expect him to come, but I sent the invitation on anyway, just in case. If he couldn't, it would let him know that after so many years, I still remembered him. But the answer for Nick Palazzo came instead in a letter to my father.

I shouldn't call him by his first name. He was my Scoutmaster when I was growing up. I always called him Mr. Palazzo. It's an Italian name, and only one person, a priest at St. Helen's parish in New York, pronounced it correctly when we were growing up – Pah-lots-so.

He was the Scoutmaster of Troop 56, St. Raymond's. He's the guy who watched us. He didn't try to teach us "leadership" like they do in some troops these days. He saw who the natural leaders were and he tried to develop them.

He worked in the city planning office of New York City.

When the terrorists attacks happened on Sept. 11, I thought of Mr. Palazzo, because he had given us, when we moved to South Carolina, something to remember New York City with. They were five books, the city planning documents for all five boroughs of New York. They were so big, square pages bigger than a phonograph record. I mostly looked back on those pages to the book on the Bronx, about Parkchester, where I grew up. But the Manhattan section had a detail plan for something called the World Trade Center, which wasn't complete.

It weighed about 20 pounds, at least.

It was a great gift to give someone leaving the greatest city in the world, in my case under protest. It kept us connected.

He was an usher at the church. He was a father.

When I signed up, even though the Scouts met in the basement of St. Raymond's Elementary School, I never knew how heavily tied into religion the Scouts were. But as a Cub Scout, he got us to get our religious medal, the Parvuli Dei. And he was my instructor when I went through the Boy Scout-level Catholic Scout award – the Ad Altare Dei.

That's Latin, and it means Approaching the altar of God.

It was a big deal, and I still have the cross badge and red white blue and yellow ribbon that I earned by listening, in part, to what Mr. Palazzo taught us.

I must have been 12 when I went for it, and I am 37 now. A quarter of a century has passed, yet I can still remember one night, walking home from an Ad Altare Dei class, at which Mr. Palazzo tried to teach us about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, which we Catholics call the Beatitudes. It was an odd situation for me, that class. Mr. Palazzo was a "civilian" yet he was teaching us religion. He wasn't a priest or a nun or a school teacher.

But he made the most salient point I've ever been taught.

"Blessed are those who show mercy, for mercy shall be theirs," Jesus said. What did that mean, Mr. Palazzo asked. I was a kid, and of course I didn't know. I thought maybe it meant there was a scorecard up in heaven, and you got points later on, in the afterlife. He knew it wasn't so silly.

So he taught me.

"When you do something for someone else, don't you feel good inside?" he asked. I thought I did.

"Isn't that a mercy?" he asked. Indeed it is. I can hear his voice, I can see him standing next to me, me on the other side of my father and my brother as we walked home.

He was just a good man, a man who told me that sometimes my ability to make people laugh was also a mercy for those people, a mercy that should return to me.

I am on the verge of tears as I write this.

I just wanted the invitation to perhaps thank him for always teaching me, and he never saw it.

He was a large man, though. Late in life, he developed diabetes. He got a sore on his foot that wouldn't heal. He was put in the hospital, and some toes were amputated, then his leg, at the knee. The second amputation caused a blood clot.

On Thursday, I found out all that. His wife Phyllis wrote a letter to my father because she had gotten the wedding invitation.

I found out Thursday Nick Palazzo died. He died back in January, and I just found out Thursday.

I need some mercy, Lord; mercy for Mr. Palazzo, a good, good man who I never thanked.

It doesn't have to come back to me, but right now, I could use some myself.

Edit to add: I think an online obituary I found is his. Lists "Nicholas A Palazzo was born on February 20, 1926. He died on January 24, 2003 at age 76." 

Dad (center) and Mr. Palazzo (right) at the cabin we camped in at Camp Bullowa where it snowed, we had an epic snowball fight and we went out after Bigfoot at night.

Thoughts on The Last Jedi soundtrack

DO I HAVE TO SAY SPOILERS?

I have always been a fan of the great John Williams, and I have pored over every recording of his Star Wars soundtracks. A lot of time, I have found it's the music, not the performances that tell us what we are supposed to feel in movies,and very most particularly with a John Williams score.
Just as a prefatory note, I was thrilled to finally be able to get the soundtrack to The West Wing by the great W.G. "Snuffy" Walden. And I almost, almost wish I hadn't.
It is a fantastic soundtrack, but it is not separately as listenable. Walden's soundtrack sets the scenes so well. But just to kick back and listen, it's not great in that separate way.
Anyway, when I went into the theater the first time, I thought I recognized most of the themes that Williams was basing his music on. And I wasn't sure, but I was thinking that they were just the themes that Williams had created, many of them years ago, without what I consdered the tailoring Williams did for each theme when it is actually used on screen.
For example, Williams wrote a theme, Luke and Leia, for the scenes in the Return of the Jedi where Luke tells Leia she is his sister and he has to face their father.
But on the Special Edition soundtrack, they include first the performance cue that was actually used in the movie, which they named "Brother and Sister" on the album (for lack of a better word these days).
But it sounded like they were using "Luke and Leia" almost straight up in the scenes in which Luke and Leia have a tender but brief reunion. And just now listening to both, I think I am pretty much on target about that.
Also, Williams wrote "Yoda's Theme" for The Empire Strikes Back, but he tailored for the couple of cues where he raises the X-wing out of the swamp and shows Luke what the Force is really about. And he also made it an "action" cue, as Williams described it, for when Luke is attacked briefly by Boba Fett on Cloud City.
But when Yoda's Force ghost shows up in The Last Jedi, the music playing is a very close rendition of just Yoda's Theme.
Also, a piece of music that has never been played on screen before, straight up, but used to inform other cues is Princess Leia's Theme. It appears in The Last Jedi, straight up, when Leia uses the Force for the first time on screen.
It might read like I am saying John Williams was phoning this soundtrack in, but I am just pointing out the very specific choice I think he made. I think he saw the movie bringing those characters back, and he brought back their themes to give the fans who wish nothing to change to have exactly what they wanted.
Because Leia using the Force is a very different Leia than the one Williams wrote that theme for, but the theme absolutely works.
In The Force Awakens, Williams revisited the romantic cues he came up with for Han and Leia's flirtation where they fall in love. And it's obvious the characters are still in love, but that love is different. And Williams used the theme in that movie to inform themes without it being straight up the same.
I don't know what Williams was thinking when he chose to go this route with those themes for those characters. But he came up with some new stuff for this movie, so he quite specifically was not phoning it in.
The Luke and Leia theme blends into the theme you hear in a lot of the commercials, don don don donnon. The music on Canto Bight is thrilling. Williams uses steel drums, like he used so famously in the Cantina Band music, but this is completely different.
On screen, much is made of what appears to be a ship landing in a steaming bay, but it turns out to be a futuristic iron pressing some Imperial uniform. The scene is said to be reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."
John Williams gets in on the "Brazil" act as well. Part of the Canto Bight music is about 20 seconds or so of a theme used in that movie a lot.
I find it interesting that the name of the track for Luke's battle with Kylo Ren is called by Williams, "The Last Jedi."
But there's one theme that Williams changes.
In the liner notes to the original Star Wars soundtrack album from back in 1978, Williams said that he used the "Force theme" for the twin sunset scene, to show Luke's hopes and dreams for the future.
The theme has been played in just about every Star Wars film ever since. Sometimes exactly the same as it was in Star Wars, like at the end of Revenge of the Sith, where it is used in the same setting -- Luke's aunt and uncle watching a twin sunset.
The Force Theme is present a couple of times in the Last Jedi.
At one point, it weaves so sweetly and turns into Rey's Theme that you might think it was the plan from 1977.
But it's played, and played slower and sadder, at the end, when Luke looks at what appears to be a twin sunset, and he dies, fading away into the Force like Yoda did in Return of the Jedi and maybe Ben did in Star Wars. I am pretty sure it's the track called "Peace and Purpose" on the soundtrack.
The soundtrack, I think, begs the question of who The Last Jedi is. It tells us, by title, that from Luke's battle with Kylo Ren, that it's Luke. The movie mostly says it is Rey, but suggests "Broom Boy" from the final scene might be, since he displays Force abilities.
I think the Soundtrack answers the question definitively. The music that plays over the Broom Boy, as he gazes into the stars they way Luke gazed at that twin sunset on Tatooine, is the Force Theme, very similar to the Force Theme from Star Wars. (Maybe it's a little closer to how it was used at the end of Revenge of the Sith, but still. It hearkens back to staring off and dreaming of something better.
That is as pure a Star Wars moment as any.)
There's a lot going on in this soundtrack, but if you've never bought a Star Wars soundtrack, this one just about has it all.

Agents of Shield/Captain Marvel theory

So. If you are into Agents of Shield and Marvel movies, read on.
Otherwise, total geek alert right now. If you are going to make fun, leave now.
We good? OK.
In my slow rewatch of the episodes, in Season 1, Episode Yes Men. Main thrust of the episode is not relevant. But they just got back from the Guest House and saving Skye with the Kree, blood, I guess? Anyway, Phil asks Lady Sif if she's seen any aliens and if any of them are blue, and she rattles off some names, including the Kree, which we all assume the GH alien to be.
And Lady Sif assures the Son of Coul that NONE of them have ever visited the earth. We know this is not true, because Inhumans.
But the Kree experiment that created the Inhumans goes back millennia. So, where does this Kree body come from?
And the thought that popped into my head was, why is Captain Marvel the movie going to be set in the '90s, when up until now, the history of heroes in the Marvel movie universe has been Captain America in World War II, then a whole bunch of failed experiments to try to recreate the super soldier serum which result in the Hulk, AIM, Centipede, Deathlok, Garrett, extremis. But no real other heroes until the Battle of New York. That's what we've been told.
But now, Captain Marvel is going to be fighting Skrulls in the '90s and will have a costume.
And it keeps coming back to me. Where does this dead, sliced-basically-in-half Kree come from?
In the comics, the ancient enemies of the Skrulls are the ... ding ding ding ... Kree.
Nick Fury will be in this movie. Will he get a warning from a Kree about the Skrulls? Will this blue Kree be a good guy, perhaps even a now blue Mar-vell of Kree, who helps save the earth and pass his powers on to Danvers to help save the earth when he gets sliced and diced by a Skrull?
Will a drop of his blood perhaps save Danvers' life, letting Fury know that it would be worth it to keep the Kree body for decades.
Afterward, does Carol Danvers go incognito until they need her again?
Was SHE, at least originally, the Avenger Fury said he kept the body to save?
The downside of this theory is that the movie universe doesn't care all that much about the TV universe.

Edited to add: Clark Gregg is confirmed as being in the Captain Marvel movie.  

Agents of SHIELD is about to end its fifth season with an ending that can serve as a series finale rather than a season finale. And they have heavily name-dropped events from  Avengers Infinity War. So the SHIELD finale is taking place during the mad Titan’s invasion. 

It totally feels like they could GO THERE snd do the thing. 

Also, Jude Law is cast as Mar-vell. I don’t think they would turn him blue. But they did turn Zoe Daldana green and Scarlett Johanssen blond. 

So you never know. 

Blast from the Past AGAIN: On Jackie Robinson Day

I am a serial rehasher of things I have written before, when they seem to somehow become relevant again.
I saw the Jackie Robinson biopic "42" with Dad this weekend. And this seems, again, relevant. 
I'll have TWO more comments at the end. 

 

Dad taught me to be who I am

News Editor

Stephen Guilfoyle

When he was born –

• a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not yet president.

• the greatest epoch of the 20^th Century, World War II, was nine years in the future;

• a small man full of hatred was legally forbidden to speak in Germany, but Adolf Hitler, not yet elected to anything, was gaining influence and backing from powerful industrialists of that country;

• there was a 40-foot deep pit on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 32nd Street, where, 18 months later, would rise the grandest building ever built, the Empire State Building; and

• the New York Yankees were the greatest baseball team ever, with a lineup that included Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

I’m a mean kid at times and sometimes I make fun of my dad for being old.

But I look back on the world into which he was born and I realize that he has indeed somehow, behind my back, really gotten old.

I’ve never much written about my dad because it’s more fun to make fun of Mom, because her sense of humor is always taxed.

I often wonder why someone like Dad, who always jokes, ended up with Mom, who almost never does.

Dad and I go to movies. That’s what we do. We talk football now.

I am whatever kind of man one might think I am because of what I learn from him.

But I learn not from him telling me what he wants to teach, but from my watching what he

does.

I picked the historical markers, because they all have some significance to either his life or my

view of it.

Roosevelt, well, that’s my joke. “Geez, Dad, you were born before Roosevelt was President.”

And Roosevelt was president for a long time.

The Empire State Building, well, I connect that with Dad because he’s always seemed to

me a New Yorker. He’s settled down fine in South Carolina these past 20 years, but it’s just not his natural place.

If someone were to put him in an alien zoo and were to create his natural habitat, there would have to be canyons made of concrete and glass and subways.

Hitler is not included because Dad was a tyrant. Dad is a gentle man. But Dad took a little trip to Ireland when he was a youth and got stuck there for years because of World War II.

He was raised over there by his aunt.

It shaped him to be a very different sort from his brother and his sister.

I include the Yankees because, despite being born in the Bronx, the Yankees were never his team.

But it is important to note that the greatest team of all time was the Yankees of the ’30s.

When my father was born in 1930, those Yankees were a segregated team, white men only need apply.

One of the most important lessons I learned from my father, and about my father, came unspoken

but etched in deep.

My father’s favorite baseball team was dem Bums, the Brooklyn Dodgers. His favorite player

was Jackie Robinson.

My father loved Jackie Robinson’s ability to make a play out of nothing, score a run after getting

walked to first base.

It taught me all I ever needed to know about race relations and how to judge people. You judge a man by his ability, not by the color of his skin.

What a fabulous teacher he was. I gained a core belief in justice and fair play and fundamental human equality, just because Dad said, “Jackie Robinson was my favorite baseball player.”

So my Dad turned 70 Tuesday.

I wish there were someway to stop it, but I can’t. Instead, I’ll remember again all that he’s taught me. .

And I’ll feel humbled, because I’m not half the man he is, but I’ll feel lucky that I know to keep trying to measure up.

P.S. Dad liked the movie. But he doesn't like it as much as he liked "The Jackie Robinson Story." It's probably because Jackie Robinson played Jackie Robinson. (And Pee Wee Reese played Pee Wee Reese, for that matter.) Thought it was good. But it's no Jackie Robinson.
P.P.S. Dad would absolutely have loved the PBS miniseries on Jackie by Ken Burns. I know I did.

2015 Christmas Letter

Friends and family,
Yes ... the letter at Christmas carries on. Kind of.
Taking a cue from the McClatchy Corporation, which just shuttered the Enquirer-Herald of York/Clover, not because it wasn't making money but because it wasn't making enough, we have decided to go with the times and shutter the print version of our Christmas letter.
The current market forces are such that print has an ever-decreasing shelf life, and we are nothing if not hip and up with the latest trends. So we are introducing our first "Digital-only" Christmas letter.

The Guilfoyles of Fort Mill frankly are looking forward to the end of 2015. It has been a year of ups and downs, but the downs, while outnumbered by ups, have been low, low downs.
On the downside, I am still missing my Dad. Particularly around the holidays, or any week with a “day” in it. He was the bright center of the Guilfoyle family, always one with a joke.
And we are still missing my best furry friend. Harry, my first dog, who died a couple of months after Dad. Annie, our other dog, had become the most surprising gentle girl. She was hyper-competitive with Harry, it turns out, but now she just wants to be around us.
But now Annie is not with us any more.
She was a remarkable dog. She survived eating a whole bar of dark chocolate and getting her stomach pumped one New Year's Eve. She had her side slashed open one time when we visited Spartanburg, though we have no idea on what she caught her skin.
She slowed down a bit after being viciously attacked and bitten by another dog last year. She suffered about eight nasty bites. It was scary, but she has recovered.
But she came down, very suddenly, with a cancer that cost her her appetite at times and made it hard for her to even sleep. We said goodbye right after Thanksgiving.
I remain a copy editor and page designer working in Hickory, N.C., designing newspaper pages (sports right now) since October of 2010.  I am primarily working on the Dothan Eagle.
The people I work with are terrific, but it’s a LONG commute with terrible  hours. My car now has more than 280,000 miles, so that's 30,000 plus since last year.
Patricia remains ensconced in the Diocese of Charlotte, N.C., where she is editor of the Catholic News Herald.
She put together a project for us to work together on, and we went on pilgrimage to Philadelphia when Pope Francis visited the United States in Septmber. We had a really good time but were exhausted after. The days were filled with pilgrimage stuff and covering the pilgrims, but when they came back to the hotel at night to rest up for the next day, we had to post our videos and file our stories.
Patricia said she liked watching me interact with people. It's a side she doesn't get to see often. I just like watching her be her organized self.
It has been a good year for our son, Stephen Christopher. He is now 9 and a third-grader.
We are still with Pack 9 at St. Patrick's Cathedral.
There's a new program for all Cub Scouts and we are a little behind where we were a year ago. We are working on a new Pinewood Derby car with help from Uncle Johnny.
I am Pack 9’s assistant cubmaster, God help the children, and still the interim Tiger Den leader.
Stephen has also taken up Tae Kwan Do. He is already a Green Belt. He got a year's lessons as a present from his Aunt Caca. Thanks, sis.
We know we haven’t been around as much as we could. We are doing well, but our life is just non-stop hectic most days, so that when we get some free time together, we just generally want to do something quick and easy and together. But never doubt our affection.
Have a merry Christmas.
(Email is still the best way to reach me. I check it every day.)
“We love you anyway.”

Stephen, Patricia, Stephen Christopher
sguilfoyle@comporium.net

Dec. 24, 2014

#MissingBud

#MissingHarry

#MissingAnnie

My Philly pilgrimage to the pope, with my wife

Here's the first article I wrote on the trip.

Families embark on pilgrimage to Philadelphia, hope to see Pope Francis

Here's another preview article.

Merry seeks Pope Francis, and St. Katharine Drexel, in Philly

This is where you can find all our reporting while on the trip.

Faith, family and Mission: Pilgrimage to Philly

 http://www.phillyandfrancis.tumblr.com/

This is the article at the end, co-written with my lovely bride.

Family, Faith & Mission: Pilgrims journey to Philadelphia to experience Pope Francis

A good trip.

10 years later: Remembering a brassy, bawdy bud

Published originally in The News & Reporter, Dec. 2 , 2005

I once boasted I never suffered writer's block.

I was young then, and I know the truth now.

Sometimes the words don't come.

Words define reality and allow it to be shared by others who don't experience it. So if you write down some real thing you lived but tried to block out, you can't hide from it. You think to share it, hoping to ease your pain, but you also know, when it is there, printed in ink, in your own words, you won't be able to hide from it anymore.

It's been almost a month since I heard, and on this topic, the words just wouldn't come.

A few months back, I wrote about my first real boss in this business, Mardy Jackson, as part of a column boasting about how wonderful a profession journalism is.

Mardy Jackson gave me my first reporting job. She took a chance hiring me, because my freelance work at the time meant I was struggling, not having gotten a full-time gig at a "real" paper.

Through me, she showed the people who ran that newspaper company the truth of an aphorism much quoted but not always followed -- "Take care of the news, and the ads will take care of themselves."

She hired me to be a professional writer for her, to take care of the news.

As I got better at doing that for her, the ads started taking care of themselves.

She was always, always, always trying to teach me. She'd teach me with a tale of her hard life, a brutal job evaluation, a lede paragraph so slashed up it looked like Freddy Krueger got to it, or even a dirty joke.

When I first got on board the paper in Cheraw, she was involved in a debate with others in the company. She was publisher of the paper, but she didn't join the Rotary Club or the Chamber of Commerce board. She felt it would be a conflict. If she heard something one of those civic groups didn't want out yet, she would, hypothetically, be torn between her oath to the group and her duty to the readers.

But she was all about her readers, first and always, so she would never really have been torn. Instead of being a hypocrite, instead of pledging to work with a group that might ask her to keep a secret she knew she wouldn't, shouldn't keep, she didn't join.

She'd heard all the "get involved in the community" arguments from the people in such groups. Some, she knew, sincerely believed their groups were the best things for the community, and she respectfully disagreed, for herself.

She also knew others wanted to co-opt her, to join the groups as a way to muzzle her. She was on to them from the get-go.

She told those leaders, told others in our company and told me, privately, that you don't need to get involved in those groups to be involved.

Like me, she was raised a Catholic and knew all about guilt. But she wouldn't let anyone make her feel guilty because she wasn't involved the way they expected her to be involved.

She taught me that working for a paper, one that brings real news, is the ultimate community involvement. It is perhaps the best way to improve your community.

You hold up a mirror to your community, let it see itself for what it is. If there is a blemish here, the community can fix it. If there's a bright spot here, the paper can shine a light on it for others outside to see. The good and the bad, both are in a community newspaper.

Mardy had resigned before I moved from Cheraw to Barnwell. But we stayed in touch and I got to apply her teachings.

In Barnwell, I was challenged by several to "get involved" in civic groups or serve on this or that board. One mean little fellow tried to trip me up as those others had tried to trip up Mardy.

Get involved, he said. What he meant was don't ask critical questions until you get involved the way he defined involvement. Don't fret being asked to keep a secret from your reader if necessary, he said.

My answer was at the ready because of Mardy.

I told him I couldn't serve because I would be asked to keep secrets from my readers. That, I told him, would break the promise I made — I don't keep secrets from my readers.

He didn't get it. I went further, and said if he was a real community leader, he ought to make the same promise. Don't keep secrets from your constituents.

He didn't like that, but Mardy would have roared with laughter, loving it

She taught me another lesson recently, a hard one for me to take.

She quit the Cheraw paper years ago, but she didn't move away. She wrote a novel or two, tried to get them published, freelanced here and there, farmed, did some records checking and private investigations.

She lived a pretty interesting life from a place where those afraid of the truth had called her an outsider just because she had refused to join "those" groups as publisher of the paper.

She was involved in her community in the way she chose. As publisher, she did it by providing information. After journalism, she was as involved as ever.

When the need arose, she took a leading role.

At some point in the last couple of years, some nameless bureaucrat made a decision to move a line on a map. Suddenly, Mardy didn't live in a fire district anymore.

We'd both written about rural fire protection, and she knew the dangers immediately. Even if she never had a fire in her little trailer, she knew her insurance was going to skyrocket.

The problem didn't just affect her. It changed things for a whole bunch of her neighbors, so she helped those neighbors organize and take action. She wrote grants that helped them form a new volunteer fire department, buying land, building a station and most importantly, paying for a new fire truck.

They had a barbecue a few weeks back at the department. They put her name on the truck.

The barbecue was held in her memory. Early in the summer, she was diagnosed with cancer. Before I heard, I noticed she wasn't responding to the infrequent but regular e-mails I sent her.

I later learned she was having such a hard time of it she stopped seeing all but her immediate family.

A few weeks back, I went to Cheraw to do a job for a newspaper group, but didn't take the time to see her. She died a few days after my trip.

I had no idea it was as bad as that.

I am perplexed by many things in her passing. She was a health nut who never smoked, yet somehow got lung cancer that killed her just a few months after her diagnosis. She was just in her 50s. It's unfathomable.

Perplexed by those facts, I am sure of others.

She gave me a chance when no one else would. I thanked her many times for that chance, but never enough.

I am also sure that she has taught me that final lesson, again one about community involvement.

She's now shown me that, if I ever decide to give this profession up, I can still be involved. You don't have to be in the steady group, or even at a newspaper, to make a difference, Mardy's final involvement, helping create a fire department, is going to save people's lives.

I am proud of being a journalist and being involved in a community by informing it. I truly can't imagine not working at a newspaper.

But when I remember that it took me almost a month to write about Mardy Jackson, my mentor, my friend, my bawdy, brassy Madonna of information, I see that maybe, someday, I might have to leave the profession.

Because sometimes, the words don't come.