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Opinion
Friday, February 18, 2000
Master of Polka now paid to clown around
Former KJHK radio show host pursues laughter
I got a letter the other day from a fellow who dropped out of school last semester to join the circus. He was the host
of a KJHK show that aired for a couple of years. The program — kinetic, frenetic and dramatically irrelevant — had a substantial and devoted following of area listeners.
"was the "Polka Show."
It was the "Polka Show." Its master was David Hennessy. He loved Polka. He knew Polka. He had boxes and boxes of Polka on vinyl.
He abandoned them all for the circus. It was God's calling, he said.
On his show, sometimes he would play the whole song for you. Often he would stop the music and
sing it for you instead. He would halt the record to tell a story about Polka, but then he purposely would speak in spoken English.
His on-air performances flew at warp speed. I have a friend
who was the host of the show that aired after Hennessy's "Polka Show." He told me.
Hennessy would play a disc, dlib into the microphone and shovel drv
cake mix into his mouth with a finger, Friends of Hennessy have told me that he carried a can of black beans around with him, in case he needed the energy.
Polka and Hennessy were like sausage and kraut, a perfect match. That's why it
was sad to hear his show go silent. His answering machine in Lawrence, when I called to interview him said, "If you're looking for Dave, he's gone to the circus."
Now the other Barnum and Bailey clowns call him "Henny."
The circus first stationed him in St. Petersburg, Fla. where his
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clown unit weathered the winter. Hennessy was set to work repairing the trapeze act gear. He also began to learn tumbling and makeup skills from the other clowns.
Many of the clowns Hennessy lives with are from Europe. Hennessy speaks Polish with several of them, and they swap Polka tapes.
I've included here portions of Hennessy's letter in which he describes what being a clown is like. At the beginning of January, the circus train began rolling down the tracks on its new tour. Hennessy got his first taste of the profession.
"I live in a very comfortable room ... in which there are enough cabinets and shelf space to keep everything I brought with me (most of my Polka records are in storage with my futon in Missouri). I have a sink and a refrigerator in my room and there is a common kitchen with a range and microwave. This is the clown car so there is a nice community feeling among the clowns living here."
His family wasn't too thrilled about his vocation, Hennessy said.
But when I called his grandmother in the Bronx, she sounded delighted
"He was always jumping around," she said. "He said when he was very little that he wanted to be a clown, but I never believed him."
Hennessy says he spends Mondays and Tuesdays traveling to new towns. The next five nights he pops out of the clown car in an Elvis costume, rides the clown float and draws attention to the giant cannon that will fire one of his coworkers through the air.
Hennessy writes: "As we usually finish our shows around 9:30-10 p.m., the circus is something of a nocturnal life.
Kyle Ramsey / KANSAN
the show, and I try to go right to bed because I'd rather eat a big breakfast early than a big meal before bed. When I sleep, I'm usually so tired that I don't hear much of anything except the other clowns cooking or an occasional train passing by.
"Sometimes our train yards are by themselves or sometimes they are with live trucks near by. Either way, they are usually in the old, industrial part of the city. Like the circuit people say, our train is 'a town without a zip code' and
we 'see America through its backdoor.'"
Hennessy and another first-year clown are charged with the onerous task of cleaning and preparing a "soap mat" used in one of the clown stunts. The mat is as big as a circus ring, Hennessy said. Sometimes the work isn't as rewarding as Hennessy supposed it would be. He writes: "In the preshow, the main challenge is not to fall into the 'autograph/picture' mode. It is easy and comfortable, but not really clowning. I want to do more bits for laughter. But it is hard when there is a program in one hand and a pen in your left. The irony is, though, that people want the auto-
Editorials
what they want!
"Despite these challenges, I love the job immensely.
It is great to get in the
morning and know that your goal for the day is to evoke laughs!"
The circus life — good work if you can get it. Better, perhaps, than being an Overland Park graduate student in journalism.
Curry is an Overland Park graduate student in journalism.
Maxwell's financial aid proposal contradictory, unfair to students
Facing higher tuition next year, many students gladly would welcome more financial aid from the state. Student Body President Korb Makwell's proposal for increasing financial aid, though, is not only unrealistic and unlikely, it also could do more harm than good.
This sounds great in theory. But the problem is that the tuition increase was implemented because Board of Regents schools were facing budget cuts. If the budgets were crunched so
Maxwell is urging the Legislature to allocate the $3.6 million in revenues from the tuition hike to financial aid awards granted by the state, by which students could choose whichever state school they wanted to attend.
Tuition increases should mend higher education budget crunch, not be recycled in form of aid
much that a tuition hike was needed, how could it possibly be fiscally responsible to turn around and give that money to students in the form of financial aid? It seems a bit ridiculous to raise students' costs to give them money back.
The idea of directing money to students in the form of aid is a great idea, but not if the new money was generated to make up for across-the-board spending cuts. In fact, Maxwell's proposal might even be damaging because it would take needed funds away from the University of Kansas and put them into the hands of students at other schools.
Providing Kansas students access to higher education is a worthy goal, but access means nothing if the quality of education declines because of a lack of funds.
Maxwell's proposal is entirely appropriate, but only when Kansas higher education is not experiencing the acute financial pains it is now. Giving more students an opportunity to go to college is a good thing, but let's save this idea for the time when schools do not have to charge students more to give them more.
Kursten Phelps for the editorial board
StudEx chairman should resign post
As Student Senate elections approach, the stage already is set for controversy within the campaign structure itself.
Despite an obvious conflict of interest, Marlon Marshall, a declared candidate for student body vice president for the United Students coalition, has said he will not resign as chairman of the Student Executive Committee. When asked earlier this week if he intended to resign, he said, "No. I will not."
This presents a problem. As StudEx chairman, Marshall already has appointed the members of the elections commission. This creates the possibility for an ethical and political dilemma in the future.
If a complaint is filed with the elections
Marlon Marshall's candidacy for student body vice president presents a conflict of interest
commission during campaign season against a candidate or coalition, the commission is charge with investigating the alleged violation. Marshall's appointees may be hesitant to punish him.
In any case, it's too late to undo the damage that already has been done. Members of the elections commission were chosen last fall, before Marshall's official declaration of his candidacy. If Marshall had even considered running
for student body vice president, he should have resigned before appointing them. Now, they cannot be removed.
Furthermore, as partisan debate heats up in Senate during campaign season, the StudEx chairperson is often called upon to mediate in a neutral capacity. It is hard to believe that Marshall will be able to be objective this spring.
The only possible solution is Marshall's resignation before the campaign season officially begins. Such a move would not only bolster the integrity of his campaign, but also that of his coalition.
Marshall's decision to retain his position as StudEx chairman only harms the integrity of his campaign.
Drew Ryun for the editorial board
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I had read the headlines and articles about the retirement of Charles Schulz, creator of Charlie Brown and the Peanuts comic strips, for weeks. The news seemed to have no impact on me. I felt indifferent.
That's why it surprised me last Sunday when I felt a slight pang while reading his final farewell strip in the newspaper — and that pang became a bang an hour later when I saw on the news that Schulz had died earlier that morning of colon cancer.
I looked at that morning's comic strip again. It seemed to contain an even deeper, more sincere meaning. It was a letter to his fans and readers addressed, "Dear Friends," thanking them for their support and
explaining his decision to retire. He had signed his name and 2-13-00, a date that will be remembered as the incredibly coincidental death of both the comic and the cartoonist.
An Internet link on the official Peanuts Web site that allowed fans to send a card to Schultz via e-mail was replaced with news of his death early Sunday afternoon.
After seeing these things, memories of childhood Peanuts and Charlie Brown experiences came surging back. The characters must have made some impact on my family — my 31-year-old brother has a three-inch, colored Snoopy tattoo on his left forearm, and his home in Des Moines, Iowa, is filled with Joe Cool memorabilia.
My parents' house is filled with reminders of Peanuts play of years past. An old green blanket with the baseball-playing beagle across it still sits in the basement closet, full of holes and rips. Like Linus, my sisters and I relied on the blanket for both familiarity and fun. Sometimes it was a cape or a tent. The yellow plush Woodstock toy is stored away in the house somewhere, too. I still remember dragging it along with me through mud puddles during outdoor adventures. And then there was
the snoopy Snow Cone Machine I had when I was 8 — along with every other kid on the block. The contrapaction was all the rage, but I never could endure the torment of awkwardly cranking the plastic红 handle to crush enough ice cubes to make a full-sized cherry snow cone.
Like many of my friends, I grew up watching the Charlie Brown Halloween television special with the Great Pumpkin, as well as the Christmas show with the pathetic, scrawny tree that Charlie Brown loved. I watched with glee as Snoopy took on the personalities of a novelist, Flash Beagle and an adventurous World War I Flying Ace.
So many others in my generation have similar childhood memories of the comic strip and its characters. But the sadness that surrounds the death of Schulz and the end of his creation proves that our generation was not the first to love the Peanuts gang. My mom grew up reading the comic strip — its appearance in the morning newspaper was a constant she depended on when her Air Force family frequently moved to new places. She collected Woodstock pins as a high school student in the late 1960s. She welcomed the introduction of new characters, especially Rerun, who debuted in 1973.
I didn't read the comic strip on a faithful, daily basis. And there were times that I skipped past it because it contained yet another struggle between Charlie Brown and his kite. When I did read it, it rarely made me laugh out loud as some of my other favorite comic strips had the tendency to do.
But Peanuts' impact could not be measured with a single day's installment. Its characters presented real life with a twist of humor and heart that people, including me, could relate to. People didn't always take Schroeder's pianolaying talent seriously. Snoopy couldn't always write well on his first — or second — attempt. Linus needed his security blanket. Pig Pen was a mess but just wanted to be accepted. And most importantly, Charlie Brown showed us that you can fall at many things, act like a blockhead and still manage to earn a world of fans.
O'Toole is a Wichita junior in journalism and English.
Feedback
Forget Rocker; fight bigger problems
I would like to comment on the Feb. 16 *Kansan* cartoon in which Atlanta pitcher John Rocker is depicted as a member or supporter of the Ku Klux Klan. I feel it is time that the popular media stopped kicking the dead horse that is Rocker's life as a "sports hero." Rocker is an immature, naive and downright dumb young man.
However, he is not some kind of arch-villain of prejudice.
By continuing to attack Rocker, we as a society take our eyes off of much more pressing matters. Every day people of various minorities live in a climate of prejudice that hinders their pursuits of happiness. By picking one politically vulnerable scapegoat for this matter, we dodge having to do any real work to change the situation.
We live in a country in which, only a year ago, one man was dragged to death behind a truck because he was African American and another man was pistolwhipped to death because he was queer. Certainly this is a sign that, if we wish to end prejudice, we have much greater hills to climb than overcoming one man's idiocy.
Erik Goodman Beavercreek, Ohio, senior
Broaden your mind: Today's quote
"We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh." — Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche