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30 dicembre "Crazy" Lee RobbI suppose most people would call Lee "Crazy" but since he always introduced himself as "Crazy Lee" how could you not avoid referring to him as that? Lee worked as a "Sanitation Engineer" for the City of Columbus. He lived somewhere on campus and during Fall and Winter quarter you would not see him but you knew when Spring arrived cause Lee would emerge and be ready to play Softball. In our case Lee would mentor and coach Bobby Long as manager of Mama's co-rec softball team.
Summer time is the best of time on the OSU campus. Most of the students go home and the character (and characters) of the campus area becomes more obvious when the multitudes of students stop overrunning the area. In my day Lee was a fixture of this stage. He would enter and exit this stage always walking in a hurry and he was always walking. I never saw Lee drive a car and I don't think he owned one. Lee's consuming passion was softball. His knowledge of the sport was second to none and he participated on multiple softball teams (but never two in the same league). Lee never liked being on center stage but would step forward long enough to bow in thanks to the person he pushed out there and Lee had developed the act of pushing to a high art form.
As a result of Lee’s constant activity, he kept a regular schedule and when your allotted time was up he would gracefully depart for his next destination and conversely you could set your watch on his arrival. Lee was a philosopher at heart and would wax eloquently about the human condition and its consequences. It didn’t take long for you to realize he was much more learned than his chosen station in life. He would often employ the Socratic Method in his conversations..."What do you think about this...Do you think about that?" He was always trying to help us younger folks by making us vocalize a view to a subject we had not yet considered. He is the most gracious person I have ever met. Always constructive, Always encouraging. And if he had anything bad to say he would always frame it from a third person perspective.
Lee loved to flirt with the waitresses by declaring his appreciation of their service to him as a patron and his admiration of their beauty and character with incredible strings of multisyllabic phrases. Lee made Yogi Berra look like an amateur. And as you tried to process all of the words to form the ideas behind them you realized this guy thought at a level few could keep up with. Saying things that sounded light and warm hearted on one hand and after time and thought would yield something really quite profound... But young people are rarely willing to put that kind of effort into analyzing the words of "Crazy" older man, but, Lee knew that and I think he constantly sought to find the company of those who were rare enough figure out his mastery of the double-entendre and I'd like to think he thought I was one. 09 dicembre Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue...Ester Craw had blue eyes but she couldn't be 5 foot on her tippy toes but every Tuesday night for most of my years at Mama's this 60 + year old women would pack Mama's to the rafters with college kids singing vaudeville classics like "Bicycle Built for Two", "Ain't She Sweet", "Five Foot 2" etc. and after everyone was lubricated well enough she'd herd all of the patrons into the alley to do the "Hokey Pokey" and the Chicken Dance. Ester had/has spent her whole life playing the accordion (I don't know if Ester is still kicking. I Goggled her and there is a German language page describing an accordion festival in Florida with a picture of her from 2004) . She even toured with Bob Hope during World War II. And while she spent Tuesdays at Mama's most other nights she would be performing at Deibel's in German Village. My first introduction to Mama's occurred when my roommate Grant Morgenstern who frequented Ester's Performances invited me to come with him one night and I obliged. I quickly became a regular patron of the place and got a job there within 6 months. To this day I don't know what prompted me to apply there. I had a good job already and really didn't need the work but it had a great fringe benefit and that was I could drink beer while I worked for free (you win some and you lose some and I think the owners got the short end of the stick on that one with me ;-). I think Gene hired me because I was 6'2" and 250 lbs. And I think they thought I would make many a person think twice about starting something in there. One day a patron called me Chef-Boyd-Ar-Dee after seeing a TV commercial at the bar, I kinda liked it so I let the name stick. But I would later shorten it to..."The Chef"...again I digress. I usually worked Tuesday Nights and was known to sing "I Left My Heart in San Francisco"... er... Well...let’s just say I got to sing it as it was not my singing that drew the multitude of people on those evenings. Ester's big draw was passing out cheap plastic "leis" and then encouraged everyone to pass them around by kissing the recipient. Many a patron (mostly male) would be able to brag they got "lei-ed" at Mama's. Though many a girl would find ways to have a group date at Mama's so they could communicate "Hey You! Have you thought about me?" to unsuspecting guys without uttering a word. Tuesday's at Mama's was a light hearted and fun time. I so rarely have days that are as care free as I felt then and the songs we sang with Ester have reinforced that in my mind to this day. |
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