McCook Daily Gazette: Columns: Mike Hendricks

Will gets married (03/19/10)
I drove down to Lincoln last Thursday to attend the wedding of my youngest son Will. He was getting married to Erica Lance, a beautiful young woman from Seward, at the Apothecary in the Haymarket in downtown Lincoln. It was 40 degrees when I left McCook but I ran into snow at Holdrege and the temperature quickly dropped down to 34 degrees. ...

The John Daly saga (03/12/10)
Just about everyone, even non-golfers, know who John Daly is and his reputation precedes him every where he goes. He is the idol of "the common man" and plays to that image. He played college golf at the University of Arkansas and lives in Dardanelle, Ark., just four miles across the Arkansas River Bridge from the town I came from when I took the teaching job at MCC and moved to McCook...

Wasted days and wasted nights (03/05/10)
One of the greatest tragedies of life in America is that so many people throw away their chances. I've never understood how someone can be born in the greatest country in the world and not avail themselves of the opportunities that people in most other nations of the world would give anything to have. The history books are replete with people who gave up everything and risked everything, even their lives, to come to America while far too many of the people born here were doing nothing...

The way we were (02/26/10)
A friend and I were reminiscing about our childhoods the other day and those old memories just came rushing back into my consciousness. I grew up in an extended family with my mom, dad, grandmother, great-grandmother, aunt and uncle all living under the same roof in a small town in Arkansas. Four women and two men so it was a pretty matriarchal family. The women pretty much ruled the roost...

Wallismarsh -- Part II (02/19/10)
It's my understanding that last week's column created quite a stir. I say "it's my understanding" because I write my columns the same way a football coach prepares for and coaches a game. Most coaches don't read their press clippings and neither do I. They're not going to change the way they coach and I'm not going to change the way I write. I pick my subjects carefully, write what I feel or believe and then do it all over again the next week...

Wallismarsh (02/12/10)
I've been writing this column for 12 years now and I don't suppose I've ever been as incensed as I was over an anonymous posting this past week by the person who used the handle mentioned in the title of this column. The last time I thought what someone wrote merited a response was from the ignorant Sheriff in northeast Nebraska who thought he knew what MADD stood for when he didn't and that he DIDN'T know how the DUI laws are significantly impacted by that strong interest group's perspective. ...

Drugs and doctors (02/05/10)
Drugs don't always work and doctors aren't always right. In the Feb. 8 edition of Newsweek magazine, science editor Sharon Begley reports something many of us already intuitively believed; that some drugs aren't effective and placebos can result in a self-fulfilling prophecy...

The art of the deal (01/29/10)
Barack Obama is finding it much harder to govern than to run, just like Bill Clinton did in 1992. And the reason for both their difficulties is much the same; bad advice from their inner sanctum in the West Wing. This tendency among new presidents to do something earth shaking in their first hundred days is bad precedent but it seems no one learns from their predecessor's mistakes. ...

Pants on the ground (01/22/10)
There's a new song sweeping the nation, thanks to General Larry Platt, a 62 year old African American and his appearance on last week's "American Idol" television show. Some of the words to the song go like this: Pants on the ground Pants on the ground...

Much ado about nothing (01/15/10)
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada and Senate Majority Leader, has been raked over the coals recently about a statement he made during the 2008 Presidential campaign. He's quoted in a recently released book as saying that "America is ready to elect a light-skinned Black man with no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one."...

Come out and show your face (01/08/10)
One of the legacies of political advertising AND newspaper commentary has been a requirement to identify yourself. If you wanted to produce a political handbill attacking a particular opponent, you were required to say who you were somewhere on that handbill. ...

They're all patriots (12/31/09)
The nattering nabobs of negativism have increased a hundred fold since Spiro Agnew made that comment penned by William Safire many years ago when he was vice-president of the United States. It seems the only way we can sell newspapers or get people to watch our television shows or listen to our radio programs is to be on the attack; to be negative, to denigrate character or motive, or to lampoon honest and heart-felt sentiments...

Triumph and tragedy (12/24/09)
I drove down to Arkansas last Friday with the intention of staying through Christmas. Friday was my youngest son Will's birthday and he was to graduate from college on Saturday with a teaching degree in Speech Education so it was a proud weekend for all of us...

When you stray, you pay (12/18/09)
I had to write about Tiger Woods this week because his fall from grace has teaching points for all of us, regardless of who we are or our station in life. Tiger owned the world due to his ability to play golf. Many people believe he's the greatest golfer that ever lived and was certain to eclipse all of the records held by Jack Nicklaus, the premier golfer of the world, until Tiger came along...

Two parties, different rules (12/11/09)
Just when I thought I had gotten out, I get pulled back in by the character assassinations in the last few weeks of Sen. Ben Nelson and other officials of the Democratic Party including the President himself. I remember clearly a few years ago when I referred to President G.W. ...

No Mike at Night (12/04/09)
Mike Hendricks' column fell victim to computer troubles this week.

The lack of self-respect (11/27/09)
It takes all kinds of people to make a society work and thrive. For every entrepreneur and successful business leader we have, there is an unskilled worker doing the jobs many of us wouldn't do to make the world work. Every society is a patchwork of educated, skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers and without those people who work the menial jobs with low pay and few benefits, life would be much harder for those at every other level...

The Derail Bar and Grill (11/20/09)
The Derail Bar and Grill has historically been the site for some of the best parties ever thrown in McCook and last Saturday was no exception. Of course, the Derail isn't a bar and grill at all, it's a garage next to Tim and Barb Shannon's house across the street from the Chief Hotel. He named it the Derail because Tim is a retired railroader and I added on the bar and grill moniker myself...

The face of America is changing (11/13/09)
"Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door." (Inscription on the Statue of Liberty.) As Bob Dylan wrote and sang, "the times they are a-changin." In 1960, the Caucasian population in the United States was 85 percent, the African-American population 11 percent and the Hispanic population less than 4 percent. ...

Our promises are our vows (11/06/09)
They walked around opposite corners one day and bumped into each other. She looked up at him, he looked down at her and their lips met. Their fates were sealed forevermore with that kiss; at least his was. That kiss started an almost four-year long relationship that promised to end in marriage one day because these two people were soulmates in every sense of the word...

Domestic Abuse Awareness Month (10/30/09)
She was a beautiful woman/child. She was sweet, demure, shy, and didn't warm up to strangers very quickly but to those she did, her personality came shining through. He was a man's man; a multi-sport athlete and a good-looking guy who, with a little patience, care, love, and understanding, could have been anything he wanted to be...

The herd mentality (10/23/09)
I received a very nice letter this week from U.S. Senator Ben Nelson in response to the "Through With Politics" column I wrote a few weeks ago. I'm not going to say much about the contents of the letter because it was personal and private but the senator did make one point I would like to address today. ...

A good Samaritan (10/16/09)
Ben Coburn and his son were on their way to Denver last weekend to catch a Broncos game. Ben has been a season ticket holder for many years and they were both excited to be going, even though the weather was less than favorable. Freezing rain, sleet and snow were falling as they left and it didn't get much better as they traveled west but Ben and his boy were pumped about seeing the undefeated Broncos play the mighty New England Patriots so they kept on going...

Death (10/09/09)
Boy, we don't like to use that word. We have all kinds of euphemisms we use for dying: passed on, passed, passed away, beyond the bar, succumbed, deceased, and expired are just a few. One of the things now written on a person's chart among health care professionals is "negative patient care outcome."...

Be careful what you wish for (10/02/09)
We've all heard the old saying, "be careful what you wish for, you might just get it." This is a corollary to another saying, "The grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence." What we don't hear very often is that sometimes the grass IS greener on the other side of the fence. ...

The way things would have been (09/25/09)
Romantic love causes more pain and more joy than anything else in the world and it's truly the one thing in our lives that the more we find out about, the less we realize we know. I get a lot of grief from my ex-wife when I write about the love of my life because she thinks my boys should be the loves of my life. ...

Through with politics for a while (09/18/09)
The level and tone of political discourse has become so ugly, accusatory, uninformed and intolerant that I'm making a conscious choice to remove myself from the political arena for awhile, both publicly and privately. I've never seen or heard anything quite like it in the years I've been following politics...

The oil capital of the world (09/11/09)
The title of this column is what Tulsa, Okla., used to be called. I don't know if it still is or not. My mom and dad moved there in the late 50s and, after a long deliberation with the rest of my extended family, it was decided that I would stay in Arkansas during the school year because no one wanted to take me out of a small school and put me in a large one...

I can't make you love me, if you don't (09/04/09)
The title of today's column is taken from one of the greatest love songs ever and sung by Bonnie Raitt. It's something that a lot of people never think about and most people simply don't believe but it's true. I tell my students this every single semester in the love and family section of my sociology classes and more than once in my Sociology of Love and Relationships class and I'm absolutely certain it goes right over the top of most of their heads...

The amazing Facebook (08/28/09)
Of all the technological advances we've seen in recent years on the Internet, perhaps the most amazing ones are the social networking sites; places like Twitter, My Space, and especially Facebook. I have a page on all three but Facebook is the only one I use daily...

It's that time of year again (08/21/09)
It's been a really fast summer. At least it feels that way to me. Maybe it's an age thing but it seems like time continues to speed up. It seems like only yesterday that we were graduating another crop of successful students from MCC and already it's time to start a new academic year...

A better way to watch TV (08/07/09)
Most people around the country, including those of us in Southwest Nebraska, have three television delivery systems; cable, Direct TV and Dish and each of them delivers their programming essentially the same way through a concept called packaging. They bundle a group of television stations together into different packages, put a price on each of them and the customer chooses the one he wants. ...

The seminal events of our life (07/31/09)
Even though all of us are different, we all share many commonalities as well and the most obvious of those are the significant moments that occur in all of our lives sooner or later; births, deaths, marriages, etc. And even though these things happen to everyone, when they happen to us, it's always a life-changing experience. I had one of those last Friday when my middle son got married...

Winning is everything (07/24/09)
Most people either watched, listened to or heard about Tom Watson's seemingly impossible quest to capture the British Open golf championship in Scotland last week. It was a story that resonated not only within the golfing community but with the non-golfing public as well because Tom Watson is 59 years old. ...

Be careful what you wish for (07/17/09)
Most of us are familiar with the phrase, "Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it." I had a girl tell me that once. I understand its meaning, but I've never quite been won over to its value. Certainly we might someday end up regretting wanting something, pining for something, perhaps even obsessing about something and then our prayers seem to be answered and we actually get what we wanted and end up regretting that we did...

Another excellent adventure, Part III (07/10/09)
The morning after the Joe Cocker concert, I had breakfast at the casino with Carnell and Marlene while Linda got ready for our trip back to Arkansas. This time we stayed on the Interstate, driving north on I-35 to Oklahoma City, and then west on I-40 to Russellville. It was a much simpler trip than the ride over. There were no two lane roads, no towns to drive through and no road construction so even though it was a little further in miles, the drive time was almost exactly the same...

Another excellent adventure II (06/26/09)
Continuing where I left off in my last column, my son Michael picked me up at Tulsa International Airport and we headed for Arkansas. The drive is a little under three hours and it went by pretty quickly because we had a lot of things to talk about. Linda, my ex, had KFC and all the fixings waiting on us when we got there and after dinner and a couple of glasses of wine, I turned in after a long, somewhat harrowing, day...

Another excellent adventure (06/19/09)
A fellow I've known for a long time told me not long ago to stay away from writing about my trips and expeditions because people don't care about them. He thought I should only write about substantive topics that stimulate thought, discussion, and conversation. On the other hand, other people tell me they look forward to reading about my journeys, either for vicarious reasons or to see what foibles I experienced because something bad usually happens when I venture outside of McCook...

The political conundrum (06/12/09)
Effective this past June 1, I can't go to my favorite watering hole and smoke a cigarette anymore. I can't do that because the Unicameral passed a state-wide no smoking ban for any establishment open to the public; except for the cigar smokers who enjoy a special exemption for who knows why...

John Mullen Pro Am is more than just a golf tournament (06/05/09)
Once a year something magical happens at the Heritage Hills Golf Course in McCook. Bernie and Nona Mullen return to stage and participate in the Mullen Pro Am golf tournament, a tournament started 21 years ago by them in honor of their son John, a former assistant pro at Heritage Hills, who died of cancer in 1986. Monies generated from the tournament go to the American Cancer Society in its ongoing quest to find a cure...

The demons within us (05/29/09)
Jim Nantz, a CBS Sports announcer, mentioned on the air during a golf tournament a couple of weeks ago that he has a severe snake phobia; even to the point of waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking snakes are in his bed. John Madden, the former NFL coach of the Oakland Raiders and football announcer has retired from broadcasting Sunday Night Football on NBC because of his fear of flying. ...

Sometimes friends get it wrong (05/22/09)
There are five or six of us that hang out together on a regular basis. We golf together, socialize together, and discuss all things related to sports together. Sometimes we go outside the sports world for a discussion topic and that's what happened this past week...

The professor responds (05/15/09)
As I was looking over my class rosters for the upcoming spring semester last January, I noticed with a great deal of surprise and at least a little trepidation that Dick Trail and his wife Ann were enrolled in my Sociology of Love and Relationships class. ...

Education, income and job security (05/08/09)
As we approach the time of the year when Pomp and Circumstance will be playing on football fields and gymnasiums across America as we graduate another crop of young people, it's important for all of us to understand the role education plays in a person's life...

Grading the professor (05/05/09)
Today I am taking a final exam in the college class that Ann and I enrolled last winter. SOCI 2990. MC 01 "Sociology of Love and Relationships" said the Catalogue. Designed and taught by Professor Mike Hendricks PhD. Mike may be better known to you readers as "Mike at Night" from his Friday columns in the McCook Daily Gazette...

Golf season has officially started (05/01/09)
Golf season doesn't officially start for me until I play my first tournament and that was accomplished this past Sunday. Jim Lemon and I have partnered for the past several years at the Fireman's Scramble, a two-person golf scramble sponsored by the Cambridge Volunteer Fire Department and hosted by the Cross Creek Golf Links in Cambridge...

The culture war continues (04/24/09)
One of my favorite cable shows is Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel which airs on HBO every month or so. It's a penetrating, introspective look at how sports impact on people's lives; sometimes individually, sometimes collectively. A recent episode examined the culture war that continues in our nation's K through 12 educational system in regards to competition and the "no touching" policy that many schools are currently implementing...

What's happening to religion? (04/17/09)
The cover of the April 13, 2009, Newsweek magazine shouts in bright red words against a black background, "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." The article that addresses this statement is actually titled "The End of Christian America" and reports that the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points in the past two decades. ...

Stuck in a snowdrift (04/10/09)
I had business in North Platte last Saturday and drove up mid-morning. There were predictions of snow but the weather forecasters have been so dismal at getting snow predictions right this year, at least in this area, I didn't pay much attention to them...

After the love has gone (04/03/09)
"Tell me you'll love me for a million years; then if it don't work out, you can tell me goodbye." (The Casinos) The strong winds we've had in the area recently blew my satellite dish out of kilter and, consequently, I've been without television for the past two weeks waiting for DirecTV to come and reposition it. This has not been a good experience but I'll write about that at a later date. The outage, however, has given me the chance to watch some DVD's I haven't seen in a while...

The electric chair debate (03/27/09)
Wow! Let's bring the electric chair to McCook, the method of punishment finally ruled as "cruel and unusual" by the Nebraska State Supreme Court, the last state to abolish its use, on February 8, 2008. That means it was deemed as a cruel and unusual way to take a convicted felons life by all the states in the U.S. except Nebraska; the state that abolished it last...

The greatest compliment a man gan get (03/20/09)
I've had a lot of successes and a lot of failures in my life, as most of us have. It's the grand litany of life that makes it so. We have our peaks and our valleys and we can only hope that when this grand adventure draws to a close, we've somehow been fortunate enough to have had more ups than downs...

In favor of merit pay (03/13/09)
The President has come out in favor of merit pay for teachers, a concept I have long supported, although most teachers' unions do not. Consequently, as President of the McCook College Faculty Association, a branch of the Nebraska State Education Association which is a member of the National Education Association, I might find myself at odds with the policy of those two bodies...

The choices we make change our lives forever (03/06/09)
Sometimes when I get in a melancholy mood, I think back on my life and the myriad of choices I've made that has me where I am and I always wonder how totally different my life would have been if my choices had been different. I had the skills when I was young to be a professional baseball player, just like my dad was, but I got too interested in girls and, consequently, didn't work hard enough to perfect my craft...

The dream weaver (02/27/09)
One of the things the experts still haven't been able to figure out is the whole dream experience. Why do we dream and why do we dream what we dream about? It's not that there aren't any theories. In fact, there are as many theories about dreaming as there are about practically anything. But for all the books and articles written on dreams and dream interpretation, there's still more we don't know than we know...

My friend Jerry Porter (02/20/09)
I first met Jerry 12 years ago at the old Elks Club on a Sunday afternoon. I had missed the weekly Sunday morning services there and wasn't even for sure they would still be open when I got there. It turned out that they were so I walked in and took my regular seat at the far end of the bar by the door...

Dec. 21, 2012, The End of Days (02/13/09)
The History Channel did a week's worth of shows a couple of weeks back about Armageddon and the End Times so I DVR'd them in order to watch them back to back which I just finished doing. It's all some pretty incredible, far-out stuff and I wanted to comment on some of the conclusions drawn in the series...

A checklist for marriage (02/06/09)
We've spent a lot of time over the past four weeks in the Love and Relationships class I teach discussing and pondering the love choices we make and how we can know whether the people we choose really love us or not. I've never really been a big fan of "How To" lists, especially when it comes to interpersonal relationships because we're all different and it's highly unlikely that there is a "one size fits all" formula that works the same way for everyone, although there ARE certain things it's hard for a happy, successful marriage to do without.. ...

Against the Washington bailout (01/30/09)
The House passed the $819 billion stimulus bill Wednesday night in the hope of giving a shot in the arm to our comatose economy. The vote was 244-188. Eleven Democrats voted against the bill while no Republicans supported it. Even though pleas were made from both sides of the aisle for bipartisanship, little was to be found...

A new morning in America (01/23/09)
There have always been two distinct sides to my personality. One is the hard-charging, have-a-good-time, politically and socially interested, macho, sports-minded side and the other is the vulnerable, caring, emotional side when something really touches my heart. I've cried at the movies, cried watching television shows, and cried in front of the loves of my life. I had several of those emotional moments while watching Tuesday's Presidential Inauguration...

I'll tell you what I would have done (01/17/09)
The Love and Relationship class I'm teaching at the college got off to a good start this week with an enrollment of 20 which includes Kugler pilot, flight instructor and fellow Gazette columnist Dick Trail and his wife Ann. I look forward to the contributions a seasoned married couple can make to the class and the insights they will be able to provide our traditional students in the class who aren't yet married. ...

The sociology of love and relationships (01/10/09)
I saw a couple out and about last weekend that I haven't seen for awhile. They've been married for quite some time and he pretty much ignored her like he usually does. She had an affair a while back that most of their friends, including him, knew about but he didn't leave her or ask her to leave and she didn't leave him or ask him to leave. Even though this particular example involves a wife being unfaithful to her husband, it certainly works the other way around too...

People need people (01/03/09)
Barbara Streisand's hit song from the 1964 movie "Funny Girl," contains the words of today's column title and those words are just as relevant today as they've ever been. People really DO need people. For example, children deprived of human contact, called "feral" children in scientific lingo, grow up to have much shorter life spans, along with other mental and physical developmental disabilities, than do those exposed to human contact from birth...

Mike Hendricks
Mike at Night