Restless Patient Discovers RLS
     From Nightwalkers Winter 2008 Issue
     Robert Yoakum has been a journalist for most of his life so it was natural for him, when diagnosed with restless legs syndrome, to write about the puzzling disease.  His first magazine article on RLS, which carried the subtitle “The most common disease you’ve never heard of,” ran in Modern Maturity and generated more than 40,000 letters from readers which flooded the offices at the RLS Foundation.  This was, by all accounts, the moment that the RLS Foundation officially entered the national scene.  In the piece to follow, Mr. Yoakum reflects back on his early years with RLS and why awareness was such a huge part of what he felt called to do – so that no one else had to live with a disease, and live without help for that disease, again.
     The first objective of the Restless Legs Syndrome Foundation is awareness.  It was essential to acquaint the public with knowledge of this little known and often misdiagnosed disease.
     It won’t go down as a major event in the annals of American medicine, but my encounter with Nurse Blanchard belongs at least as a footnote in any account of attempts to further awareness among doctors, researchers, patients, caretakers, and the public at large.
     With one exception, my relations with nurses have been amicable.  That exception was with Nurse Blanchard (or at least that’s what we’ll call her) who played a brief but important role in the awareness campaign for RLS.  My operation at Johns Hopkins that led to my troubled encounter with Nurse Blanchard involved loss of sleep, that I was to learn later on, was caused by restless legs syndrome.  I learned that one of the pills dispensed by Nurse Blanchard permitted sleep – in part because it stopped the creepy-crawly sensations brought on by RLS, but it was certainly a mistake to congratulate Nurse Blanchard for what seemed to me like a medical miracle.  She promptly eliminated that magical pill from my nightly medications.  She feared that I would become addicted.  I took the loss of the helpful pill to the residents who visited my post-op bed, morning and night.  Neither the night nurse (Blanchard) nor the residents knew that RLS existed.  What Nurse Blanchard was sure of, however, was that I shouldn’t continue to get a pill that actually subdued the sensations in my legs that prevented sleep.
     My repeated protests merely irritated Nurse Blanchard, but they intrigued the residents in the spirit of scientific research.  The young doctors were trying to identify the source of my torture.  One of them said that he had heard about a syndrome that resembled my symptoms.  But his curiosity and sense of scientific inquiry did not soften the stance of Nurse Blanchard.  Her nighttime embargo of my helpful pill remained in place.  However, it wasn’t the interest of the residents or the obstinacy of the nurse that opened the door of knowledge.  It was, rather, that the door was opened for me by a startling coincidence.
     To quote from my book on the subject:
          While still in the hospital I was plagued as never before by both restless legs and another condition known as PLM.  Unknown to me, progress on both disorders was being made by neurologists in that very same hospital.  Not long after the operation, I received a copy of the Hopkins Medical News and was riveted by an excellent description of my nightly anguish in an article entitled “Rest for the Weary.”  I recognized my enemies immediately.  They were called RLS and PLM.  The article cited Dr. David Buchholz, associate professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins:  “People with restless legs syndrome get what Buchholz calls ‘creepy-crawly’ sensations in their legs when they lie in bed and try to fall asleep.  The feeling, centered mostly in the calf muscles, is ‘very distressing, and it drives people crazy to try to lie still.’  Moving – pacing, massaging or stretching the muscles, or bicycling the legs in bed – provides temporary relief.  But then it comes right back as they try to lie still again.  It’s a plague for the people who have it.”
     I decided not to share my discovery with the disagreeable Nurse Blanchard, feeling certain that my revelation would be taken as another salvo in our pill dispute.  I did, however, share my discovery with the agreeable residents.  Years later, I was to learn that traumas, and especially operations, could trigger restless legs syndrome.  Even so, I didn’t regret my failure to share this medical finding with Nurse Blanchard.  Some readers will think of me as being churlish and, worse, violating scientific protocol that calls on all of us to share new knowledge.  It was foolish of me, or course, to leave the nurse in an ignorant state.  After all, it would be the other patients of Nurse Blanchard who would suffer.  In a sense, I was punishing myself in the unlikely event that Nurse Blanchard is reading this article.  I want her to accept my apology.
     Her campaign played an unwitting role in my discovery of RLS.  A discovery that doesn’t belong in the annals of medicine but did serve as a first step in my own awareness of this now widely recognized disorder.
 

Our speaker this evening, Russell Baker, was called  in a 1979 TIME Magazine cover story,  “The Good Humor Man.”  The  article celebrated Baker’s winning of his first Pulitzer prize, for commentary. That same year he also received a George Polk award.
 

Ten years later in another Time article, this time noting the publication of his book, The Good Times, R.Z.Sheppard wrote of him: 
 

“For satire, parody, and burlesque on short notice, he has few equals.  He has had what many journalists would consider a dream career, and nobody tells him what to do.  Or so it would appear.”
 

On the publication of another Baker book Jacques Barzun wrote,
 

“One of his great merits is that he breaks with the excessively verbal tradition of American humor and deals with things.”
 

And David Halberstam wrote of Baker in 1997, in Vanity Fair,
 

“  He is simply the most talented New York Times journalist of one and quite possibly two generations, and his column in the Times has been a National treasure.”
 

What lead to this extraordinary writing career ?
 

         Bob wrote the following poem for an article regarding spring cleaning for the Lakeville Journal’s April 19, 2007 edition. 
      My wife suggested that I clean out the garage.
     “It’s springtime,” she explained.
     “We could even use it to keep the car in.”
     Could that actually come to pass? 
     Everest has been scaled. 
     Oceans have been spanned.
     So why not our car in the garage?! 
     Okay, what must go?
     The horse, of course. 
     Thirty years of National Geographics. 
     Six bicycles, flat and rusty and several other toys with wheels.
     Plastic Christmas tree with star and wreath with squads of mice. 
     Ornaments in boxes with tangled strings of lights.
     Stack of tires, mostly worn. 
     Science projects from school. 
     Tools, including those that were never used.
     Skis, boots, and poles.
     Neighbor’s borrowed garden hose.
     Three dead cactus plants.
     Cracked aquarium with sailing ship in a bottle.
     Clothes from every era.
     A tuba and a set of drums.
     Two treadmills and other body builders.
     “Springtime,” I said, “comes too soon!”

The late S.J. Perelman (he might have written) was always punctual, and (as another humorist wrote of him) “sui generis to a fault.”

Sui generis he was. There isn’t another American writer who could perform such stunning and daring acrobatic feats with words.

Articles written about Perelman in life, like the obituaries printed last week, often contained an acrobatic simile because there was no better way to describe what the humorist did so superbly.

“For more than 50 years,” wrote Robert Taylor in the Boston Globe obituary, “Perelman hurtled through the air without a net, executing dazzling triple and quadruple somersaults and landing on his feet effortlessly as he reached the swinging platform at the end of a sentence.”

Ten years earlier, in the New York Times Magazine, William Zinsser made the point that “Life today has become so outlandish that it outstrips the writer’s comic imagination…Against such odds the miracle is that Perelman keeps going out on the wire.”

Zinsser – a friend of Perelman’s and author of that sui generis gag – wrote that his admiration of the great humorist was based on his courage: “No other kind of writer risks his neck so visibly or so often on the high wire of public approval. It is the thinnest wire in all literature, and the writer lives with the certain knowledge that he will frequently fall off.”

It was with Bill Zinsser that I first med Sid Perelman. The encounter was in a Manhattan Chinese restaurant. The food was good and the conversation both comic and competitive.

We had all traveled a great deal, but neither Zinsser nor I could hold our own against Perelman’s travelmanship. The three of us might have been to Bangkok, for example, but only Sid would know about the opium-addled and alcoholic Scotsman who ran a bakery specializing in scones (I asked whether he ever sold cold scones sober) and haggis. Or perhaps an obscure bookshop in Rangoon that specialized in 13th century religious erotica.

Years later, at another dinner in London, I asked Perelman whether he had ever heard from a famous woman editor who had been ridiculed and rapiered by him in a piece called “The Hand That Cradles the Rock.”

He chuckled. The editor had, like Perelman himself, moved to London. A notorious party-giver and namedropper, she must have been torn between Perelman as the cause of her punctured pride and Perelman as a social prize.

The latter won out, so she sent him a party invitation that began, “Dear S.J.” – something Sid was never called by those who knew him well. After he had told the end of the story, I wondered: Was he correct in assuming that it was funnier to sign his note of regret “S.J.” as he did, than to hoist her by her gaffe by signing “Sid?” Later I decided he was right. She would eventually find out and wince.

“Generally speaking,” Perelman told Zinsser in that magazine interview, “I don’t believe in kindly humor…One doesn’t consciously start out to be a social satirist. You find something absurd enough to make you want to push a couple of anti-personnel bombs under it.”

Perelman was a tough specimen, who; if he had been told that a heart of gold beat beneath his flinty exterior, would have demanded a transplant – if only to avoid aiding and abetting a cliché.

He appraised mankind’s activities with the cool eye of a jeweler at work. What he saw was a world filled with poltroons, boobs, brigands, blackguards, gold diggers, social climbers, fanatics, and fakes.

(He found them all in Hollywood, which he learned to loathe. Writing about the movie “Sweethearts,” starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, to which he had contributed some dialogue, Perelman said, “My name never made the crawl on ‘Sweethearts,’ for which I still beam eternal gratitude. The two stars were not called ‘The Iron Butterfly’ and ‘The Singing Capon’ inadvisedly; their archness made toes curl all over the world.”)

Sentiment made him nervous. One couldn’t picture him decorating a tree on Christmas Eve. He was no Scrooge, but he was certainly no Santa.

It was possible to imagine him wassailing, though – in part because of the drinking ceremony’s association with England, which he loved, and in part because it was a neat word, which he loved even more.

Every now and then I look with envy on the success of columns devoted to astrology and other forms of soothsaying, so I float a few predictions of my own.  One thing is certain:  I can’t be wrong more often than Jeane Dixon and some other columnists.On this occasion I’m going to predict some great discoveries that will be made in the next decade. Not easy, you say? It sure isn’t, but here goes anyway:

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WILL DISCOVER WHERE CONGRESSMEN COME FROM.
The late Margaret Mead, anthropologist, wrote about a Pacific isle where natives had not made the connection between sexual intercourse and the birth of babies.  Nine months is a long time and it simply hadn’t occurred to the islanders that the two events were linked.

In the same way, Americans still have not, as they emerge from the 1970’s, made the connection between their own political apathy and ignorance on one hand and, on the other, a Congress crowded with felons, loonies, jingoists, buffoons, demagogues, fanatics, and scoundrels.

Call me a giddy optimist, but I predict that in the 1980’s Americans will find out that they themselves are the ones who elect the Congress (for which only 15 percent of the voters have any use, according to polls); that congressmen are not brought by storks or chosen by court astrologers or left by the tooth fairy, but are conceived in polling booths all over the nation.

THE REST OF THE WORLD – AND THE SOUTH KOREANS THEMSELVES – WILL DISCOVER WHAT HAS BEEN GOING ON IN SEOUL. 
The South Korean capital has been the scene of a murky tragio-comic opera – the cast and plot of which cannot be sorted out by reporter or computer.  It will not all come clear in the 1980’s, but at least some sense will emerge.

JEANE DIXON, THE SEERESS-ASTROLOGER-CRYSTAL BALL READER, WILL BE RIGHT ABOUT ANOTHER LONG-SHOT PREDICTION, BUT THE PUBLIC WILL DISCOVER THAT 3,749 OTHER FORECASTS WERE ALL WET.  AND THEY WILL IGNORE HER.
Impossible, you say?  The public has always been gullible?  Well, just wait and see.  But I will admit that this is my long-shot prediction for the decade.

IRANIANS WILL DISCOVER THAT EVERY EMBASSY IN  TEHERAN, AND, INDEED, EVERY EMBASSY IN THE WORLD, SENDS SECRET INFORMATION BACK TO ITS PARENT COUNTRY, AND EMPLOYS SPIES.
If the people holding hostages in the American Embassy are really university students, they must have cut class when the history of diplomacy was taught.  Had they gone to school they would have learned that all embassies perform several functions:  giving parties, encouraging business deals, issuing visas, providing information, and obtaining information.  And of all these functions, the last is the most important.  When the Iranians discover the truth about embassies, they will, of course, apologize and lower the price of oil.

PARENTS WILL DISCOVER THAT ADOLESCENTS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN, AND WILL ALWAYS BE, SLOPPY.  AND THEY WILL RELAX.
This prediction will be greeted with understandable skepticism by youth, but I see signs of

Another Look:
A Typical TV Ad Family
by Robert Yoakum
     Have you been curious about the lives of those families you see on television?  I don’t mean the families in situation comedies, but the folks you see in commercials.
     Here, in anticipation of a new TV ad season, is an interview with one of last season’s families:
     “How does it feel,” I asked Mr. William Random, “to be the father in a typical TV ad family?”
     “Well,” Mr. Random replied, jumping into the air and snapping his fingers, “I smell clean!”
     “You what?!”
     “I smell clean!  With Lifebuoy I’m not just clean.  I smell clean!”
     “He’s gone bananas,” interrupted Mrs. Random, smiling.  “He’s shower-happy.”
     “Oh, by the way,” Mr. Random said, “this is my wife, and she’s quite a woman.  We’ve been married for a lot of years now, and she looks better to me all the time.”
     Mrs. Random smiled affectionately at her husband and said, “That’s because I do the right things and take good care of myself.  I try to get my rest, I exercise, and I take a Geritol tablet every day.”
     “My wife,” Mr. Random said fondly.  “She cares about herself.  And I love her for it.”
     “So I could say you’re a family without problems, right?”
     “Well, not exactly,” Mr. Random said.  “When I went bowling yesterday I had nothing but gutter balls.  Nagging backache.  Ruined my sleep, too.”
     “That’s right,” Mrs. Random agreed, “but I told Bill to try my Doan’s pills because they sure help me.”
     “Jean also helped me get back in the swing today when I didn’t feel like going shopping with her,” Mr. Random said.
     “It’s true,”  Mrs. Random said.  “When my husband is out of sorts because he needs a laxative, I get one that’s not harsh:  flavored Haley’s M-O.  It’s the gentle way to get back in the swing.”
     “And when I had trouble sleeping last night,” Mr. Random added, “my wife gave me Sominex.  It really does make me drowsy so I can get to sleep.”
     “I’m confused,” I said.  “Earlier you told me it was Doan’s pills that helped you sleep because they fixed your nagging backache.”
     “Oh, I took a lot more than that last night!”  Mr. Random exclaimed.  “Jean also gave me Bayer’s microencapsulated timed-release aspirin because it helps me wake without that morning stiffness.”
     “Your wife gave you Doan’s pills and Haley’s M-O and Sominex and Bayer aspirin?!”
     “And I love her for it.”  Bill said, squeezing his wife’s hand.
     “Don’t forget Alka Seltzer Gold, dearest.  You said it washed your heartburn away.”
     “Right.  And I almost forgot Dristan nasal mist.  And Bufferin.  And Sine-Off.  And Excedrin P.M.  And Sinutab.  And .  .  .  Yaarrch!  Waasgh!  Bruuop!”
     Mr. Random leaped into the air, snapped his fingers; and collapsed.
     “I think you’ve overdone it, Mrs. Random!”  I exclaimed.  “You’d better call a doctor!  He needs help fast!”
     “Then what he needs is Anacin,” she replied.  “While all the leading pain relievers reach an effective level in the bloodstream in minutes, only one of them hits and holds the highest level. And that’s Anacin.”
     But it turned out to be curtains for Bill Random.  His wife took his demise philosophically, however.  “Well,” she said, shrugging, “no more ring around the collar.”

Library lectern again forges writers’ early links to Paris
By Chester B. Hansen
New Canaan Advertiser 3/18/93
     Robert Yoakum will be playing second banana when he takes the platform Sunday, April 4, at the New Canaan Library to introduce Art Buchwald for the second annual Attwood Memorial Lecture.
     He alone would be worth the price of admission.
     For this event, however, there will be no need to prove it.  Admission to the Attwood lecture is free.
     A columnist and humorist like Buchwald, Yoakum was a long-time, old-time friend of Attwood.  Like Attwood, he started as a Paris-based newsman in the city room of the Paris Herald, now known as the International Herald Tribune.  And like Attwood, he afterwards turned to magazines with an occasional fling in presidential campaign politics and public service.
     Politics And Humor
     As a humorist, Yoakum won the anonymous fame that infrequently comes to a speechwriter when he and his wife Alice produced what many remember as the choicest line in Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 try for the White House, “Eggheads of the world, unite!  You have nothing to lose but your yolks.”
     He is currently revising a book of political satire on which he was working with Bill Attwood before the latter’s death in 1989. It is titled “A Candidate’s Manual:  Time-Tested Ploys for Bamboozling the Public” and will be published by Random House.
     Yoakum is also doing his memoirs for that publisher.
     Those memoirs have their European beginning in 1947 when Yoakum arrived in Paris with $100 after having served in the Army in World War 2.
    
     Writing In Paris
     He soon discovered that even in Paris free-lance writing is a mean way to pay the rent and he went to work for Reuters, the British press service.  A year later, he was at the Herald.
     There he met Bill Attwood who would leave in 1949 to become European correspondent for Collier’s magazine.
     They were joined that same year by Art Buchwald, another thin-soled expatriate in Paris.  Buchwald, an ex-Marine, high school and college drop-out, had scammed his way to Paris on the GI Bill to study French.  Once there, he went through the motions while cutting classes to become a stringer for Variety, a theatrical newspaper.
     Now fancying himself a boulevardier, Buchwald promoted a job for himself as restaurant and nightlife critic for the Herald in 1949.  Yoakum was then on the masthead as city editor.
     Thereafter, all three went separate ways that crisscrossed as paths do for journalists.  Buchwald went to Washington to become a celebrity satirist with his wicked wit.  Yoakum returned to the U.S. as a magazine writer with a twice-weekly syndicated humor column.  Attwood became a foreign correspondent, author, editor and publisher of Newsday.
     Presidential Prose
     Along the way, Attwood and Yoakum joined forces as volunteer writers in Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 presidential campaign.  And in 1960 each became a full-time speechwriter for John F. Kennedy.
     With the election of Kennedy, Attwood was named U.S. Ambassador to Guinea and afterwards as ambassador to Kenya by Lyndon Johnson.  When Chester Bowles, a former congressman and governor of Connecticut, joined the “New Frontier” as Deputy Secretary of State, Yoakum went with him to Washington’s Foggy Bottom.
     Several years earlier, Yoakum – in a fit of entrepreneurship – had sought unsuccessfully to launch a newsmagazine in competition with Time and Newsweek.  It was to be peppered with humor and signed pieces, shunning what many perceived to be the political bias of those other publications.
     Prospective writers included Bill Attwood, Art Buchwald, John Crosby, Robert Shaplen and William Zinsser.
     Yoakum quit this exotic adventure when Philip Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, purchased Newsweek.
    
     Global Exposure 
     From 1970 to 1986, Yoakum’s syndicated humor column appeared in newspapers here and abroad.  It had been started with the encouragement of Harold Evans, then editor of The Sunday Times in London. 
     As Evans was to observe afterwards, Yoakum broke the nationality barrier by creating a wit that travelled well across borders.  He was one of the few Americans to succeed in cracking a smile among British readers.
     Yoakum was attending Northwestern University when he, like Attwood, was called to service in World Was 2.  He finished after the war at the University of Chicago.
     He now lives in Lakeville with his lawyer wife, one golden retriever and the family cat.  They have three grown children.
     Reception Scheduled 
     The Attwood lecture on April 4 will start at 5:30 p.m. in the Adrian Lamb Room of the New Canaan Library.  It will be followed by a reception upstairs in the Curtis Gallery.  To accommodate the overflow crowd that is expected, the library will provide an audio-video hook-up to the main reading room.
     Leonard W. Cotton, president of the Library’s board of trustees, will present Sim Attwood and members of their family.  David Bryant, who will be reporting as the Library’s new director the next day, also will attend.
     The Attwood Memorial Lectures are funded by an endowment established by friends of Bill and Sim Attwood from New Canaan and elsewhere around the world.  It is administered by the board of the New Canaan Library.

Bill Plante’s North Shore:
A Look at Humor Writers

One of the funniest sights I have seen in recent weeks was Bob Yoakum shaking his left index finger under Art Buchwald’s right jowl.

Here were two of the nation’s finest humorists looking for all the world as serious as Sadat and Begin trying to resolve the problems of the West Bank Palestinians.

The scene took place at the First Amendment Fair (shade of Thomas Jefferson, please note) held at Washington, D.C.’s old Pension Building, the site, someone insisted, of Lincoln’s inaugural ball. The fair’s proceeds are to go to a fund established by The Reporter’s Committee to aid those members of the press, who, in the performance of their duties, run afoul of judges who believe it is better to put newspaper people in jail than to permit them to protect news sources. I hope that Thomas Jefferson’s spirit, wherever it may be hovering, appreciated both the need for supporting The First Amendment as well as the fun we had doing it. But, back to the finger-pointing.

The occasion, I was told later by Yoakum, had to do with Buchwald’s recommending Yoakum to New York Times humorist Russell Baker for membership in an obscure humorist organization, the total complement of which would not fill a booth in the crowded night spot where another of this nation’s humorist, Mark Russell, does his thing.

All of which is a long way around the barn to make the point that there just aren’t many funny people in print these days. Well, that is not the right way to say that, of course. There are legions of funny people in print, and it is almost impossible to read straight news stories about them without breaking up — or down, as the case may be.

What is rare is the writer who sees humor where others see little and who is able to conjure the words to express it. It is the most serious of business which is why you rarely see guys who write the stuff smiling.

Writing humor is hard work because its purpose is to attract, amuse, instruct, titillate, inform, chastise, caress, deflate, satirize and to illuminate the subject matter with a special kind of light. No wonder humorists growl at their dogs, children and spouses, in that order.

As a matter of historical note, Buchwald and Yoakum worked together in Paris when both were striplings. When they split, Buchwald took the humor route, and Yoakum decided to go straight. He returned to humor writing a half dozen or so years ago.

Those who read the columns in this newspaper recognize style differences. Art Buchwald’s material usually follows a predictable format. He seizes upon an event of the day, interpolates it into a faintly camouflaged setting and then proceeds to destroy whatever it is that presents itself as an absurdity.

There are probably 999,999 writers out there who know they can do the kind of thing Art Buchwald does. The problem is that the words just do not seem to come out of their typewriters in the right order.

As for Bob Yoakum, his stuff seems even easier. There is no set format. It is an inductive kind of humor, a gentler stroke. There is more subtlety. But a scalpel can cut as deeply as an ax, and the result can be as deadly. There just isn’t so much blood lying about after the coup de grace.

Erma Bombeck, whose material we also use, has an angular style which sends us scurrying up the backstairs one minute, around three turns in the hallway in a rush to find the bathroom, only to find that we’ve been fooled into a broom closet in the basement. She is a gag writer, without peer, the standup comic of writing humorists, who deals with every day frustrations as devastatingly as Mark Russell does the world of politics.

Russell Baker, of The New York Times, casts his fictionalized public events in the same direction as Buchwald, although with a literary flair more reflective of the old New Yorker Magazine, back in the days of Thurber, White, et al. He is Sunday’s bright relief from the deadly fare of The Times, and I look forward to his view from that exalted perch.

Mark Russell has to be seen, in person, to be fully savored. When he is off and flying, which is likely to happen without warning during a regular routine, he is this nation’s finest political satirist. But he is fundamentally, a verbal man, one whose genius is ignited by an appreciative audience in a relatively small room. It is one thing for Russell to write a line and quite another to deliver it in person. Those who read him with appreciation should take the trouble to look him up when in Washington.

Buchwald, Yoakum, Baker, Russell, Bombeck — add a half dozen or so more and you have the nation’s humor cadre. They are a precious few to be stroked, coaxed and applauded as our only real hope for sanity in a zany world.

(Bill Plante is executive editor of Essex County Newspapers.)