Under what circumstances can the parents of a young T1 child expect another entity to provide blood testing services for that child? 

That’s the question at the heart of a story from Austin, Texas, involving Miles MacLaughlin, a four year old boy with Type 1 diabetes, and the non-profit Southwest Family Branch of the YMCA. 

The youngster was accepted last year into the YMCA’s Mother’s Day Out program, which is described as an informal “baby-sitting service” that provides supervised activities for kids several times a week.  Apparently, when the MacLaughlins began using the program, they understood that the service did not involve caring for their child’s condition by testing his blood sugar and administering his insulin. 

Miles’ parents are now saying that the YMCA should provide blood sugar monitoring services for their son while he is at the facility because his condition meets the description of a “disability” as defined by the Americans with Disabilities Act.  The YMCA says that it does not have the expertise in such areas, and that training a staffer to perform testing on the boy would not be feasible because its workers volunteer their time on a rotating basis. 

YMCA attorney James Ruiz also maintains that diabetes is not a disability. 

The YMCA understands that it has obligations under Title III (you GDAT!! readers know all about Title III) of the Americans with Disabilities Act to provide equal access for people using their goods, services, and facilities that are available to the public.  In the past, it has made accommodations for people with disabilities. 

What say you about this fine little nugget?  Here’a a video report on the story from the local TV station.  Where do you draw the line between accommodating people with medical conditions, and actually providing medical services for them?  Do you think the boy’s parents are right to expect the YMCA to monitor his blood sugar during the hours he spends at their Mother’s Day Out program?  Or is the YMCA meeting its obligations by accepting the boy into its program but not accepting responsibility for his medical needs during that time?

Here are the last bunch of people I’d like to meet, or would have liked to meet.

Les Paul. What is Les Paul famous for? If you said a particular model of Gibson guitar, you’d be right -- but only partly right. Les Paul was an innovator in “sound on sound” recording (among numerous other effects and techniques) at a time in music history when other recordings were made with all the musicians playing simultaneously. Working in Edison-like fashion, Paul opened the door to a new universe of sound possibilities using his own amplifiers, recorders, reverb boxes, and whatever else he thought could get him to the sounds he was after. Recently, he agreed to donate the original equipment from those long ago sessions to the Smithsonian, and I can’t think of a more appropriate place for it.

Paul had plenty of time to think about his innovative recording techniques while in a hospital bed after a terrible car accident near Davenport, Oklahoma in 1948. At first, doctors weren’t sure he would even survive, and then they told him he may lose his right arm. That little nugget of news got him to thinking about building a special type of guitar playable with just one hand. Fortunately, it wasn’t necessary. The right arm was saved, but had to be fixed at the elbow at a permanent angle so that he could still use it for playing.

As a high school kid, I, like a lot of other young fellows, coveted the Les Paul solid body, and eventually got my hands on a cheap, trashy foreign-made copy that fell apart under the weight of my abuse. Then, around 1980, I bought myself the real McCoy, and cared for it meticulously once I saw what all the fuss was about.

Today, at about 93 years of age, the unstoppable Les Paul continues to gig on Mondays at the Iridium in New York City.

Philippe Petit. In August of 1974, this acrobatic Frenchman wrote the final chapter of a plan that he had hatched in a Paris dentist’s office six years earlier. With a little help from his friends, Petit got by security, and made his way to the rooftop of the South Tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. In half a dozen years, he had learned all he could about the towers, and even masqueraded as a reporter to interview a Port Authority official about the buildings. After a covert evening of setting up, the nimble Petit stepped out onto a 1” diameter cable stretched 130 feet between the buildings and literally danced out into the morning air a quarter mile from the streets below. I’ve often wondered what Petit tells his financial adviser in response to the question, “How would you describe your tolerance for risk?”

Walter E. Williams and Thomas Sowell. Reading these two fellows’ columns every week is like working toward an advanced degree in economics and common sense.

Groucho Marx. Hooray for Captain Spaulding!

Bobby Orr. Singlehandedly, Bobby Orr revolutionized the role of defensemen in the National Hockey League, and then, for good measure, won a couple of scoring championships to show forwards what they could be doing better, too. He earned eight consecutive Norris Trophies as best defenseman, scored not one, but two Stanley Cup winning goals, and never, ever, hid behind a Dave Semenko-type enforcer when it was time to drop the gloves.

He rekindled the flame in a sport that soon exploded in popularity in the Northeast, and he wasn’t brash about his accomplishments, either. In the moments after most of his incredible feats, he would simply look down at the ice and coast to the bench, never seeking to make a show of further embarrassing an opponent with shameful displays of trash talk or sophomoric celebratory dances.

After an injury-shortened career, Orr left the ice having played the game better than it ever was, and ever will be played. To paraphrase old time Boston Bruin Milt Schmidt, if there’s ever going to be someone better than Bobby Orr, I hope the good Lord keeps me on this Earth long enough to see him.

Mel Blanc. “What’s up, Doc?”

Frank Caliendo.  (Worker bees put your sound down pre-clicking.) Meeting Frank Caliendo would be like meeting a small army of other celebs all at once. I could cross off William Shatner, John Madden, Jack Nicholson, Pat Summerall, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Charles Barkley, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dr. Phil, John Malkovich, Jay Leno, Donald Trump, Adam Sandler, Andy Rooney, Chris Rock, Robin Williams, all of the Seinfeld characters, James Lipton, Dick Cheney, Tony Soprano, Sean Connery, Al Michaels, Austin Powers, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Koppel, Tom Brokaw, and even Yoda. You could pick a Top Ten of your own just by meeting Frank once!

Kestrel, Finch, Egret, Larry, Eagle, Vulture.

Oh, alright. How’s this:

“Anything you say can and will . . .”

Or my Emergency Back-Up Six Word Memoir:

“The Sox swept another World Series.”

Colleen tagged me the other day, and now that everyone else on the planet has been tagged already, I’ll just put up the rules and be done with it.  Thanks, Colleen!

1) Write your own six word memoir
2) Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like
3) Link to the person that tagged you in your post, and to the original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere
4) Tag at least five more blogs with links; and
5) Leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

The more I think about this little topic, the more big names pop into my head. Today, there’s even a diabetic in the mix. So here are a few more folks, and hopefully I’ll be able to close it out next time. Thanks again, Kelly, for starting all this.

Viktor Frankl. If I could meet Frankl, I would listen intently to his words, and waste no time uttering any of my own.

Bobby Clarke. It’s about time a diabetic made my list. The former captain of the Philadelphia Flyers played this great game of hockey as if everything was on the line, every tick of the clock. He was a rugged, tough, competitive, talented, daring, dirty, and smart leader. He could not be intimidated, especially when skating for his country’s honour, as the great Soviet forward Valeri Kharlamov found out. It was Kharlamov who came out of shift against Clarke with a broken ankle to show for it. The Russian had earlier doled out his own fair share of beaver food (hockey lingo for dirty stick work) to Clarke and other Canadians, and years later Clarke said that "If I hadn't learned to lay on a two-hander once in a while, I'd never have left (the minor league town of ) Flin Flon." 

On another occasion, the entire Soviet team left the ice against Philadelphia during an exhibition game, refusing to stand for any more of the hard-hitting tactics of Clarke’s team.

When Clarke is talked about in hockey circles, the discussion invariably includes the pair of Stanley Cup Championships in the 70s, his part in the 1972 Summit Series that pitted Canada against the Soviets, and his contribution in the 1976 Canada Cup series. But for our purposes here in the O.C., I should mention the initial reluctance of NHL teams to show interest in a minor league star afflicted with a chronic disease. Sparing you the details, once that particular problem was hurdled, and Clarke had been drafted by the Flyers, other teams quickly offered deals trying to get him for themselves.

In training camp, after a couple of serious insulin reactions, Frank Lewis, a member of the team’s coaching staff, took it upon himself to develop a dietary regimen for Clarke to follow. It included Coca Cola with extra sugar before games, orange juice with more sugar between periods, and chocolate bars for emergencies on the bench between shifts. It worked, and the rookie Clarke never missed a game in his first season in the NHL.

I’d have a hard time leaving Clarke off any fantasy team roster, if I was given to such pursuits. That he played at the highest levels of his profession well before the days of home blood glucose monitors earns him my admiration and respect, even given my allegiance to the Boston Bruins, and my scorn for the rest of the Broad Street Bullies.

Lenny Skutnik, Roger Olian, and Arland Williams . The word “hero” is used far too loosely these days, but for these men there is simply no more appropriate term. The first two men plunged separately into the icy waters below Washington D.C.’s 14^th Street Bridge on January 13, 1982 in order that they might save the lives of people who were aboard the Air Florida Flight 90 that had just crashed after taking off from Washington National Airport in blizzard conditions. Williams, a passenger who survived the impact, later died in the horrific event following his own heroic efforts to save others. It is men like these that I try to think of whenever I find myself whining over something that I really don’t want to be doing.

Louis, Neil, and Lance. Each of the Armstrongs fascinates me.

George Plimpton. You have to give this man credit. As an author devoted to something called “participatory journalism,” he knew that in order to write from authority on a subject, even in his enjoyable, self-effacing way, he needed to experience it firsthand. In more than 30 books, he described with great wit what it’s like to pitch against major league hitters, to golf with the likes of Palmer and Nicklaus, to take punches from boxer Archie Moore, to run a play against truck-sized linemen as a QB in the NFL, and to face Pancho Gonzalez across the net of a tennis court.

A source of amusement for me is to re-live a former life by standing behind the protective glass just in back of the goal during warm-ups at pro hockey games. I particularly enjoy taking uninitiated friends to that spot just to watch their initial flinching at the first of a thousand pucks to smack like lightning bolts into the glass. Only there can one “enjoy” the terror of multiple rock-hard biscuits moving at 120 mph in the chaos of monstrous bodies without fear of life-threatening injury.

Plimpton’s book, Open Net, is an engaging and often sophomorically preposterous (practical jokes include teammates secretly spraying his clothing with a product called “U-Stink”) account of goaltending in the NHL from the perspective of someone who admittedly had absolutely no business standing between the pipes. That he donned the pads against Philadelphia’s Broad Street Bullies in the 70s speaks to an undeniable determination to get at the truth. Later, he lamented a missed “opportunity,” having been safely tied up with reporters after his brief on-ice stint when his teammates and the Flyers erupted into a bench-clearing brawl. Between you and me, he was smart to stay with the reporters rather than return to the ice and face Philly’s blood-thirsty, stick-wielding, axe-murderers with names like Bob “Hound Dog” Kelly and Dave “The Hammer” Shultz.

I suppose his ineptitude for skating was the determining factor in securing a spot as a goalie, where the general misconception is that skating ability is not required to “simply” remain upright in the goal crease. His readers learned otherwise, as he wrote of his five minutes of playing time being spent mostly flat on the ice. I also doubt that anyone thought to tell him beforehand of predecessors like Pittsburgh Hornets goalie Baz Bastien, who years earlier sacrificed an eye after taking a puck in the face, or of Gilles Villemure, who was initially thought dead after catching one in the Adams apple.

Plimpton did not limit himself (or his readers) to sports experiences. In pursuing his life’s endeavors, he worked with the Grucci’s, a family of professional pyrotechnics, he was shot by John Wayne in a movie, and he was a percussionist under Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. Were he alive today and sitting in my living room, he would no doubt listen to my story of a diabetic, and then spend a week testing his own blood sugar and sticking himself with needles.

Gotta love a guy who wants to get it right.

Picking up from last week’s post, here are some other names for my list of people I would like to meet, or would like to have met. And I do confess to a somewhat (though not completely) sports-heavy list.  Guilty as charged.  But you didn’t expect me to rattle off a roster of Food Network hosts now, did you? So let’s get to it.

Ben Franklin. “Here comes the orator, with his flood of words and his drop of reason.” In these days of persistent political perversity provoking the patient populous, producing particularly painful perturbances, few descriptions apply so aptly to today’s political candidates than these centuries old words of Ben Franklin.

Henri Richard. Over our respective hockey careers, “The Pocket Rocket” and I combined for a record total of 11 Stanley Cup Championships. I’m pretty proud of our effort.

Bud Collins. Why this walking, talking, tennis encyclopedia was ever removed from the broadcast booth and “replaced” by John McEnroe is utterly beyond my ability to understand. Collins has the capacity to provide any tennis fan, no matter how knowledgeable, with the who, what, where, when, and why of practically any high-level tennis event in history, and to do it in an understandable, entertaining manner with undying enthusiasm and good cheer. And he does it in some of the most obnoxious pants on the planet. If you’re a tennis fan, you gotta love Bud Collins. If you’re not a tennis fan, listen to him for five minutes, and he’ll make you one.

Now, technically Mr. Collins doesn’t qualify for this list because I did meet him briefly once on a practice court at the International Tennis Hall of Fame at Newport, Rhode Island. But I’d love to meet him a second time. So Bud, if you’re reading GDAT!! every day like all the other really smart people, be sure to swing by the house next time you’re in Florida. The welcome mat is always out.

Bill Russell. Over our respective basketball careers, Russell and I combined for a record total of 11 NBA Championships. I’m pretty proud of our effort.

Red Auerbach. Who would not want to sit and listen to just one more fantastic story from the mastermind of the Boston Celtics?

Dr. Isaac Cowen. I still want to know what was in that bag.

Fred Cusick. What Bobby Orr was on the ice, Fred Cusick was behind a microphone. Those of us lucky enough to have heard Cusick call a game or interview a sports figure witnessed a man unmatched in his preparation, dedication, exuberance, and love for his profession. For those who never had the chance, one of Cusick’s early and important interviews can be seen as a DVD special feature to the Disney movie, The Greatest Game Ever Played, where a young Cusick’s extraordinary 28 minute walk-and-talk with Francis Ouimet in 1963 is the only existing recorded interview of the former caddy who became the unlikely 1913 U.S. Open golf champion. If you like golf history, I recommend it very strongly.

Cusick’s career ranged from time as a copy boy at the Boston Globe, to commanding sub chasers during WWII. Along with my schoolboy friends, I came to know Cusick in the early 1970s as the TV-38 play-by-play announcer for the Boston Bruins. Unlike today’s announcers who are spoon-fed inane statistics to regurgitate into their microphones, Cusick worked tirelessly to prepare himself for every broadcast. He made no false allusions toward neutrality between the Bruins and their opponents, yet always spoke frankly of the performances of players on either bench. When the Bruins won, you knew exactly why, and felt as if you were part of the victory. More importantly, when they lost, you not only knew why, but also got a lesson in humility and good sportsmanship. This man’s broadcasts were of supremely high quality, and each one made you look forward to the next game.

Stick handling up and down the driveway as a twelve year old on squeaky metal roller skates, I can’t begin to count the number of Bruins goals I recreated in those glory days of New England hockey. But I do know that every last one of them was to the re-play in my head of the previous game's call by Fred Cusick.

There are still a few more important folks that I have to put on the list, and I’ll get to them soon. If I don’t post again before Sunday, let me wish everyone a very safe and Happy Easter.

The Queen of Wean has done it again, folks.  ;^)

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Last week, Kelly put together a post of her Top Ten people she’d like to meet, living or dead, in no particular order, and encouraged me to do the same. After a wee bit of thought, I could not limit myself to a mere ten names. There are just too many to stop at ten. So I’ll break up my fragmentary roster over a couple of posts. Here are a few folks I came up with, in no preferential order, along with a brief (or not so brief) comment on each one.

Mark Twain. If I asked you to describe a coyote, what words would you use? Twain used these: “A living, breathing allegory of Want.” Oh, for a trace of such accuracy and efficiency.

Jim Lovell. How do you keep your cool inside a sardine can when something explodes outside, dooms any chance you had of landing on the moon, and could very likely mean you’ve seen your last blade of grass? Lovell has the answer.

Anne Frank. How do you keep your cool inside a secret annex when things are exploding outside, and could mean you’ve seen your last blade of grass, too?

Ted Williams. Imagine what this ace Marine fighter pilot’s military flying career would have been like had it not been interrupted by baseball. ;^) Seriously, this man’s service to his country, which included several too-close-for-comfort brushes with the hereafter, is routinely overlooked, but he was a driven, dedicated man based on his baseball career alone.

Aside from his two Triple Crowns, 18 All Star games, six American League batting championships, four home run titles, and two MVPs, he got himself on base in a record 84 consecutive games in 1949. In 1941, going into a double header at the end of the season, he was batting .3995, enough to “technically” be credited with .400. He was given the option of sitting out the games to secure that lofty average, but turned down the offer from manager Joe Cronin, saying that “If I’m going to hit .400, it’s going to be with more than just my toenails on the line.” Williams went 6 for 8 that day, finishing at .406, the last major league player to achieve such a level of hitting excellence.

On another occasion Williams asked for less money one season after what he considered a lackluster performance the previous year. How many of today’s prima donnas do that?

Even if you’re not a sports fan, there is an important life lesson to be learned from the way Williams approached hitting a baseball: never swing at a ball that’s out of the strike zone. So much of what we deal with everyday is out of the proverbial “strike zone.” Television programs, junk food, computer and video games, telephone solicitations, politicians, advertising, high fructose corn syrup, mendacious general contractors, rap, news media, infomercials, extended warranty contracts, awful movies, road rage, Britney Spears, cigarettes, etc., etc. These are things often best ignored, like a "3 and oh" fastball in the dirt. Williams said that if you start swinging at pitches that are a half inch out of the zone, soon they’ll be a full inch outside, and before long you’ll be chasing nothing but bad pitches. In life, everyone swings at bad pitches once in a while, but I like Williams’ disciplined practice of letting the bad stuff sail right on by.

Fred Banting and Charles Best. I owe my life to them.

Jesus Christ. Speaking of people I owe my life to . . .