New and Experienced Climbers Over 50 #27

djkyotewrote:

The idea that 'things were just different then' doesn't hold water.

Hiking trails and ski runs weren't named racist or misogynist names bitd, seems to have been  climbers from the 'golden era of climbing'

Geez, the list of mere simple place names is huge. It'll take ages to get just the "Indian" references a wee smidge more kind. My high school teams were The Dalles Indians, and my yearbook sports a big nosed cartoon face with the single feather in a head band. Anyone have a "squaw" anything near them? Or understand what Tetons are?!   

EDIT to add, I just flipped through my yearbook, to confirm my vague memory. I was part of producing the yearbook, 1974-75 (the year I graduated). That logo was on everything only 2 years earlier. And was going away. My memory, confirmed, is that we, the student yearbook staff, quietly chose to leave it out of our yearbook. The marching band still had their uniforms, the logo is not visible anywhere else in the yearbook, including the sports teams.

No idea what they call themselves today, but at least that caricature is gone.

If anyone is at all familiar with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? That, is the Oregon I grew up with. Celilo is the reservation. All of that book is very barely fictionalized factual places.

And, yes, things were indeed different for some of us.

I grew up in The Dalles, graduating in 1975. There was precisely 2 black kids....in my entire school career, none in my class. Ditto kids from Celilo. Asian? None I remember. 

My little black kitty I had to put down very recently and can not lay to rest until this snow is gone and the ground thawed enough to chip out the place I have in mind?

Was dubbed Sambo by the old man next door who started feeding this sweet kitty....then changed his mind. 

When we took over taking care of her, that name got changed to Samech, by my husband, shortened to Sam at the first vet visit....but she was Catcat to me.

Because part of my early history includes the proud day I was asked to read out loud to my second grade classmates.

My book choice I enjoyed, and wanted to share? And no one had any objections?

Little Black Sambo.

As an even younger girl?

My mom caught us doing "eenie meanie miney mo, catch a (n word) by the toe. If he hollers make him pay, fifty dollars every day. My mom told me to pick the very best one. O U T says out goes he." 

ZERO idea of any of the meaning to any of that.

What mom told us? Well, I don't remember, but it was abundantly clear if it was ever heard that again, there would be consequences. 

My mom?

She, was born in 1922. And grew up in Little Rock Arkansas. 

This same mom was close to tears, and struggling, when she regretfully told me I should probably not play with the little boy who (briefly) lived down the alley from us. 

He was black. Plus a boy. 

All of us are old enough to have too many of these sorts of stories. Every "ism" possible, up to and including now. And ... slurs, sure. But a full range, up to and including violence.

Are we still like that?

I like to think things are actually better. And, yes, I do believe they are.

But then, librarians become criminalized....

And I simply fall into despair.

Again.

Please, let's not forget our histories. Or push people out. It's a long ugly messy slog of a process, this respect and kindness thing. 

But closing ranks with only those who are precisely exactly like what we think we are, is not the way, imo.

Amongst my ticks on here?

I'm proud to have [redacted].

Because I too, was young, once upon a time, a long time ago. And the FA is one of the most compassionate people I've ever met, who gave me great kindness when it really mattered.

Snow number 5 has arrived.   

I soooo need to bury my little black Catcat.

H.

rgold, OLH …. Solid posts.

Things have changed for sure.

I grew up in a military family- my Father started in 50 and was USAF. The first branch to mix races. He taught us this. “Judge people by who they show you to be not by skin color, political beliefs or religion…” I found that the Polish dudes usually had the best polish jokes …

I lived with all sorts of races and never had problems with anyone. Things were getting better till about oh 15 years ago. When politicians started adding the race of people to the beginning of the description Americans.

Later 

Lori I sent you a email did you get the attachment? 

Hellen so sorry about your cat cat. Your eni meni mini mo story is exactly what I was talking about. I lived a very sheltered life and when kids in school told jokes like that I either didn't know how to process it or didn't fully understand what it really meant. I had to learn that stuff as a young adult.  One of the catalysts for my education was karate class. For the first time in my life I had friends and training partners who were African American and Asian. As a little white kid growing up on a farm in Vermont in the 60s without TV I didn't even know that there was a civil rights movement happening. I didn't know what sex was until Junior high. I had seen farm animals do it but had no clue what they were doing and didn't know that humping was where the babies came from.     

One of my worst foot in mouth episodes was at an Easter dinner when I was perhaps 5 years old and we had a Chinese guest. When he told me he was Chinese I asked him if he was the enemy. I could see that it visibly hurt him.  My response was obviously failing on my parents part for not educating me better with difficult subjects and in that specific case also largely a result of the hype around the cold war in the 60s even in kindergarten we learned how to duck and cover.

All that being said in this day and age there's no excuse for any racist bs.  It's also not necessary to turn everything into a fight. 

Wow, plenty of thin ice to skate out onto here right now. I’ll just say this. I’ve known Jan for decades, and we lived for many years under the same roof. I love him like a brother and will always vouch for his character. But he is a stubborn, tenacious bugger, traits which served him very well as a climber, and make him a great friend. I’ll just leave it at that. I think that the civil manners displayed by those here who have felt a need to take him to task are a credit to the quality of the people who gather on this thread.

________________

I grew up steeped in the civil rights movement. After the divorce my mother and I lived in the “Manhattanville Project,” a complex of subsidized low-income housing operated by the New York City Housing Authority. Its Six 20 story buildings stand on 12 acres, several blocks north of 125th Street, in Harlem. 1,200 apartments housed roughly 3,000 residents. In 1963 my single mom and I were among them. I was ten years old. We lived there while she finished earning her bachelor’s degree at CCNY, the City College of New York, a short subway ride uptown.

It was a tough neighborhood. Tenant patrols, some carrying baseball bats, roamed the hallways and lobbies doing what they could to maintain order. The city assigned six police officers to the entire complex, one cop for each building. There were very few white people to be seen.

In 1964 she married my stepfather, who was fresh out of jail. He was a Freedom Rider, a civil rights activist who put his money where his mouth was.

Much in the way that Nick describes, even after the end of World War II most northerners in this country were comfortable living in ignorance of the deep south's institutionalized racism. It was more than just the laws; woe be it for the black man who was accused of offending a white woman. The south in the 1950's was a society where the Ku Klux Klan was mainstream, segregation was the law of the land, and violence against blacks was a sport.

The Freedom Riders were a loosely organized movement. Young black and white men and women – mostly college students – traveled into the southern states to violate racial segregation laws.

These 'Jim Crow’ laws dictated that blacks were to use separate facilities than whites in public places. Blacks rode in the back of the bus and sat at the far end of the counter in a diner. Restaurants had to have separate dining rooms and separate entrances for blacks and whites. Blacks attended separate schools and used separate public bathrooms and water fountains. Blacks were not welcome in public parks and libraries.

Incredibly, The Supreme Court sanctioned these laws under their “separate but equal” doctrine until, in 1953, Earl Warren became the Chief Justice. 1954 ushered in a series of landmark rulings by the Warren Court, most famously Brown vs. the Board of Education, which brought an end to segregation in public schools. But, while the Supreme Court legally overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal,” Jim Crow laws remained business as usual for another decade, until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Freedom Rider's strategy was one of civil disobedience; to deliberately violate these laws, peacefully resist arrest, and then refuse to post bail, planning to serve out their sentence (or as much as they could). The southern courts were stupid enough to oblige them, they likely would have thrown away the keys if they could have. Over a period of about two years, more than 50 busloads of Freedom Riders traveled down into the deep south. The spectacle of hundreds of northern college students being jailed for weeks or months for committing such crimes as using a "colored" bathroom or sitting at the wrong end of the counter at a diner and refusing to move was a wake-up call for the snoozing northerners. And, of course, there were the beatings. The young Black Freedom Riders, some of them women, took the brunt of it.

The Freedom Riders were significant among the many activists' efforts that shone the bright light of day on the darkness of the deep south's race laws and their violent underpinnings.

Seven years after Earl Warren was sworn in as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and three years before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights act of 1964 into law, my future stepfather rode into the heart of 1961 Mississippi on a Trailways bus packed with young freedom riders on a mission. When they got off the bus at the terminal in Jackson, he walked directly into a “colored” men's room. He did seven months in Parchman State Penitentiary for the crime of deliberately entering a “Colored” bathroom and refusing to leave when directed to do so by a police officer, thus resisting arrest.

When, after his release, he returned to resume his position as an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, a position he was told would be there for him, he was terminated. He landed a position at the State University of New York at Buffalo, from which he eventually retired as a tenured Professor Emeritus in Literature and Psychology.

In his later years, after nearly 50 years had passed, if you brought up the subject of the Freedom Riders, he would beam with pride. If you were at his home, he’d bring out his copy of “Breach of Peace, Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders.” On the last page of this book is a photograph of a set of chess pieces he smuggled out of prison when he was released. They shaped the pieces by hand from wet bread and let them dry. The players were in separate cells, so they would call out the moves. “King's Knight to Queens Bishop Four…” and so forth. There was even one guy in there who could keep the game in his head. He didn't need a board or pieces of bread.

Ralph Robert Rogers, Freedom Rider. From the Civil Rights Digital Library.

I post this here because we really have come a very long way since then, and the road has been paved with the blood sweat and tears of Americans of all stripes. I don't think it hurts us to appreciate this, and to take some pride in it.

_____________________

I remember where I was when I heard the news of Dr. King's murder. It was the morning of April 5th, 1968. Our family sat down for breakfast at a small table in the kitchen. My mother turned the radio on, expecting to find classical music, but the regular programming had been preempted by the news of Dr. King's murder the evening before. My stepfather fell apart. It was the first time I'd seen a grown man cry.

Ralph Robert Rogers passed away on January 15, 2017. He was 88 years old, and of sound mind. He could recount, with pride, every day of his time as Freedom Rider. And, in the game of chess, he was not to be trifled with.

^^^^

RESPECT!  Might be the best post ever on this site! 

Hope you got to Boulder at the north end of the park!

My 1st time there I was 16 or 17, skinny white kid.

Couple of black dudes started watching and were like, your a crazy honky , we had a smoke and talked for awhile, my 2nd fun experience with black dudes. The 1st, I was 9 or 10, bass fishing in Florida, solo and hooked my biggest bass ever, perhaps the proverbial 5 lb bass, got it out of the water and was wrestling it.  A car of 4 black guys stopped, I was like holy shit, the black guys are gonna steal my bass, I was scared shitlless , they helped me wrestle it off the hook and into the bike basket and went on their way !  But as a kid from Long Island, I was taught that they were gonna steal it.

WOW! that's a story Kris. 

djkyotewrote:

The idea that 'things were just different then' doesn't hold water.

Hiking trails and ski runs weren't named racist or misogynist names bitd, seems to have been  climbers from the 'golden era of climbing'

Wasn't an entire ski area in northern California recently renamed because their old name was no longer acceptable?  And it hosted the Olympics under that old name...

You can try to whitewash your own sport if you want but you are unlikely to be successful.

Wow, Kris, you must be very proud of your stepdad. I was in junior high school in South Florida in 1961. (The Miami area was a bit of a northern island in the South. My folks were from NYC and Brooklyn.) I remember waiting anxiously when Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner went missing. In 1965, I was shocked to still find separate restrooms in a Greyhound station in Georgia. Those Freedom Riders are my model for how to resist oppression.

Edit to add, your mom sounds like a pretty tough cookie too.

Thanks, Wendy, for mentioning the three murdered civil rights workers, killed by police and locals for registering Blacks to vote. For those not familiar with this story, the wiki page is reasonably accurate and complete. 

I am proud of my stepdad, but mostly grateful. If he had not been there when I needed him the most, life would not have gone well me.

Kristian Solemwrote:

I grew up steeped in the civil rights movement... 

Fascinating story Kristian.  A good childhood friend, Andrew Goodman, was one of the three Freedom Riders (James Chaney and Michael Schwerner were the other two) murdered in Mississippi by white supremacist law officers and their accomplices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Chaney,_Goodman,_and_Schwerner.

Had he survived, Andy would have been eighty now, like me, and like Edward Rogers, would have a lot, both good and bad, to reminisce about.  Andy died in 1964, and yet he is still with us in a way, because his grieving parents, wanting the brutal murders of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner to stand for something positive and meaningful, started the Andrew Goodman Foundation, whose mission is "to make young voices and votes a powerful force in democracy."   andrewgoodman.org/

Warmed chocolate protein powder as a night cap (post event).

Indoor bouldering tonight on some moderate (for me) problems + did two new slightly challenging ones, followed by weighted chin-ups (only 8 kilos for 3 sets of 4) and DB rows (25 kilos) followed by some stretchy band stuff while watching tv.

Decided I need to start doing more resistance stuff as I’m podgy and losing muscle mass.

Feeling very old lately. Had to descend the airplane steps the other day one step at a time.

But I’m keeping on keeping on.

Carl Schneiderwrote:

Warmed chocolate protein powder as a night cap (post event).

I’ve been mixing dark chocolate protein powder my son left ar home into my morning double shot espresso.

Indoor bouldering tonight on some moderate (for me) problems + did two new slightly challenging ones, followed by weighted chin-ups (only 8 kilos for 3 sets of 4) and DB rows (25 kilos) followed by some stretchy band stuff while watching tv.

Roughly the same workout. I’m starting to attempti my old front lever pull-ups I did when I was young.

After the tougher climbs, I’ll sprint up a couple easier ones as well.

This is my typical climbing workout done over a 3 hour period:

Lead two warmup climbs 

Lead two to three hard climbs

Lead several near maximum difficulty climbs

TR a couple maximum difficulty climbs

TR sprint up two relatively easy climbs

TR cause I’m close to muscle failure

Attempt a set of front lever pull-ups on 18mm to 20mm edges three or 4 fingers.

Rest two days, hike one of them and do more leg workouts.

Decided I need to start doing more resistance stuff as I’m podgy and losing muscle mass.

Same, I was 237 and maybe even 250 pounds, now only 190-ish, but I think 178 should be achievable? Some muscle mass loss may be acceptable?

At least, that’s my target weight?

Feeling very old lately. Had to descend the airplane steps the other day one step at a time.

After a climbing workout, same. Takes me a couple days to fully recover.

Keep in mind that John Gill is much older than either of us…

Lori Milas wrote:

In 1980 Bachar was free soloing 512s? So I cannot wrap my mind around this. And I guarantee no one is doing this today, nor do they even want to.

There are people soloing routes harder than Bachar ever climbed on a rope.

https://www.climbing.com/news/alfredo-webber-age-52-free-solos-5-14b/

Sam Cieplywrote:

There are people soloing routes harder than Bachar ever climbed on a rope.

https://www.climbing.com/news/alfredo-webber-age-52-free-solos-5-14b/

Yup. Standards have changed. When I started climbing 5.13 was still a big deal. Now there are probably a half dozen kids on my local gyms team that can climb that hard. Of course hard soloing is still not common but the definition of hard has changed.

Sam Cieplywrote:

There are people soloing routes harder than Bachar ever climbed on a rope.

https://www.climbing.com/news/alfredo-webber-age-52-free-solos-5-14b/

He's qualified to join this thread at 52 years... not too shabby for a young dude.  

Emil Briggswrote:

Yup. Standards have changed. When I started climbing 5.13 was still a big deal. Now there are probably a half dozen kids on my local gyms team that can climb that hard. Of course hard soloing is still not common but the definition of hard has changed.

Many of the kids (15 to 18) at my home gym are competing on V11-V12. Yes, incredible.

There's only 8a to 8a+ climbs there. Getting setters capable 8b+ is a bit, challenging.  

I lurk on this thread a lot and don’t post much. (Although I do post now and then elsewhere on MP). I have to say some of those stories from the Civil Rights era are pretty powerful. It also brought back childhood memories of racist comments that were common… even my own ignorant jokes at times. I like to think we, as humans, are constantly growing. It may be slow, and it may be two steps back and one step forward at times, but we learn and grow. Hopefully, I’m not just blinded by my optimism… Thanks to all of you who contribute to this wonderful thread. 

Li Huwrote:

I’ve been mixing dark chocolate protein powder my son left ar home into my morning double shot espresso.

Roughly the same workout. I’m starting to attempti my old front lever pull-ups I did when I was young.

After the tougher climbs, I’ll sprint up a couple easier ones as well.

This is my typical climbing workout done over a 3 hour period:

Lead two warmup climbs 

Lead two to three hard climbs

Lead several near maximum difficulty climbs

TR a couple maximum difficulty climbs

TR sprint up two relatively easy climbs

TR cause I’m close to muscle failure

Attempt a set of front lever pull-ups on 18mm to 20mm edges three or 4 fingers.

Rest two days, hike one of them and do more leg workouts.

Same, I was 237 and maybe even 250 pounds, now only 190-ish, but I think 178 should be achievable? Some muscle mass loss may be acceptable?

At least, that’s my target weight?

After a climbing workout, same. Takes me a couple days to fully recover.

Keep in mind that John Gill is much older than either of us…

I often have a plan for a climbing session but it goes out the window within five mins and I end up climbing what inspires me. I need to lose some fat but also gain some muscle. The problem with losing muscle mass as one ages is that with loser skin you end up looking like a cross between Iggy Pop and Grandpa Simpson. 

Emil Briggswrote:

Yup. Standards have changed. When I started climbing 5.13 was still a big deal. Now there are probably a half dozen kids on my local gyms team that can climb that hard. Of course hard soloing is still not common but the definition of hard has changed.

When I started climbing 5.8 was a big deal!!!!

Alan Rubinwrote:

When I started climbing 5.8 was a big deal!!!!

Should we start going down the list of those 5.8's from 60+ years ago and note what they are rated today?