WELCOME

Welcome to Burt’s Eye View and this my first column on Substack. For the past 12 years I have written a “humor” column for The Malibu Times, and I will hopefully continue to do so for many years to come. When you are 83 years old, you don’t have a good handle on exactly what “many” means.

I put the word “humor” in quotation marks because humor is a very subjective thing, and everybody doesn’t always get my humor. Several years ago a friend of mine suggested I write a column about the high number of fatalities on our local highway. I asked my friend how many years he had been reading my column, and when he replied that he had been reading my column for years, I asked him whether he had noticed it was a humor column— apparently not.

My columns tend to be autobiographical and observational. I think it is understatement to say I have led an unusually interesting life. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. took a nap in my bed; Carly Simon walked on my back; I turned down a $500,000 bribe by the mafia; I lost millions of dollars in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme; I spent five months in the hospital when I contracted polio at age 7; I was elected the youngest mayor in the country in 1971; and now I live in Malibu, California where my home burned down.

Enough preamble. Below is my first column, which like most of the columns I will be posting here, has also been published in The Malibu Times. It is often difficult for my readers to find my column on the paper’s website, so this platform should allow easier access to an expanded audience. If you like what you read, please let your friends, or enemies for that matter, know they can also read my column for free.

By the way, since most of the time, but not always, this is a humor column, you should be pre-warned that for me, humor trumps truth every time. If you take what I write literally, you do so at your own risk. I hope in this time of many dark clouds, these columns will make you smile and perhaps even laugh.

Burt Ross

PREMATURE WITHDRAWAL

No, my reader, this column has nothing to do with taking your money out of a certificate of deposit before it matures, nor does it have anything to do with a supposed form of birth control. This is a G-rated column, so get your mind out of the gutter.

Rather this column has everything to do with my attending a Harvard-Yale football game back on November 23, 1968. Both teams were undefeated, but the Yale bulldogs were favored to beat the Harvard Crimson (Tommy Lee Jones played offensive guard for Harvard). The game was rather one-sided and with 42 seconds to go, Yale was winning 29 to 13. I turned to my date and said, “Let’s get out of here and beat the traffic.”

So we left the stadium and as we did, the sellout crowd continued to roar and roar and roar. No, they were not cheering my exit. They were apparently excited about something Harvard was doing, but since I was in the parking lot virtually alone, I could only assume that Harvard had scored a touchdown.

I decided to turn on the radio just as the crowd erupted in a second wave of hysteria. Harvard had in fact not only scored a touchdown, but then a two point conversion, and had miraculously gotten the ball again. What I heard on the radio was nothing short of extraordinary—with only a few seconds to go Harvard scored a second touchdown and again executed the two point conversion to tie and end the game 29-29!

Harvard had scored 16 points In less than a minute leaving Yale and me somewhat out of it—in my case, literally. The game has been hailed as the greatest comeback in the history of college football and was made into a 2008 documentary called “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29.”

I guess I can honestly say it was the greatest football game I almost saw. And yes, I did beat the traffic.