Recent Writings

People want to know what I've been saying, so here it is. 

This was in response to a column by Hoppy Kercheval, who writes for both the Charleston Gazette-Mail  and the Morgantown Dominion-Post. The Charleston paper published this as a letter two weeks after I sent it. I sent it to Hoppy and  he gave me ten minutes on his radio program.

"Hoppy's not entirely wrong about the Democratic Party. He says 'The party needs strong top-of-the-ticket candidates to energize voters...'  Whether or not the three of us who stepped up to run as Democrats for Congress are 'strong' is a matter of opinion, but three of us did step up. That would be me and Angela J. Dwyer in the northern Second District and Lacy Eugene Watson in the southern First District.

"All of us are interested in slowing or stopping climate change, creating gender and racial equity, helping West Virginia by fixing the roads via the Infrastructure Bill, helping the poor in our state by reinstituting the Extended Childcare Tax Credit, and capping the price of insulin so that people afflicted with diabetes don't have to choose between food and medication. We are all pro-choice, pro-LGBT, pro-union and worker.

"Since the primary, it's left to Mr. Watson and me to be the Democrats in the race. If by 'strong' Hoppy means 'raised a lot of money' we are not. But we don't have the benefit of the corporate and dark fund money that our opponents have. I personally am grateful to the sixty-five or so donors to my campaign, friends and family across the country and people who have heard my message in West Virginia. 

"Our opponents refused to certify the results of the last election, encouraging the false claims of fraud by the former President. 

"The Democrats in the race, with or without support from the National Democratic Party, are in it for the people of West Virginia. We could be strong with support from the good people of our state."

On Monday, July 25th, our Governor added  to the Legislature's "one-day" special session, a call to "clarify" the state's abortion law, in light of the Supreme Court majority overturning Roe vs. Wade. I drove to Charleston on Wednesday, leaving home at 5:30 A.M., to sign up to speak at the one public hearing on the bill scheduled for 9 A.M., with sign-ups at 8. We were close to 100 of us who signed up to speak, about two-thirds against the bill they had passed, which banned all abortions, with no exceptions. The special session adjourned Friday, having taken no action on the original tax cut proposal, and with the two houses of the Legislature not agreeing on locking up doctors who perform abortions or what, if any, exceptions could be made to the abortion ban for rape or incest. Each speaker was allotted 45 seconds (really!) to speak, so I paraphrased the first and third paragraphs. Martha Shamberger from my committee sent this out as a press release on Wednesday; no one published it.

Press release

From: Barry Lee Wendell, Democratic candidate for Congress in West Virginia-2.

Re: HB-302

"This bill takes a private decision about terminating a pregnancy away from the two people involved and their medical team and gives it to the state. This is unnecessary and intrusive.

"The Governor introduced this bill Monday afternoon and scheduled a hearing for the public at 9 A.M. Wednesday. For anyone with a day job or child-care issues, or anyone living in my constituency in the northern half of West Virginia, it was nearly impossible to attend this hearing. This is disrespectful to the people of our state.

"The Governor and the Legislature have repeatedly talked about increasing the population of West Virginia by encouraging young people to stay and people from outside the area to move here. Open minds and hearts and a willingness to accept diversity of thought and religion would do infinitely more to get young people to stay here than tax breaks for the rich and giveaways to large out-of-state corporations. 

"Rabbi Victor Urecki  of Charleston, said on Twitter yesterday, and I agree with him, '… any difficult decision of what to do is made by the woman and the guidance of her family and clergy if she chooses.That is the Jewish position and one accepted by many.That may not be the Christian view for some.' " This law violates the separation of church and state guaranteed by the United States Constitution. 

I will be available before the hearing on the front steps of the Capitol after signing in around 8 A.M. and after the hearing. "

After the hearing, there was a loud demonstration in the rotunda of the state capitol by pro-choice activists. I felt ill suddenly and left the building.

A friend in Fairmont is a member of Physicians For a National Health Program. She arranged for me to speak to the West Virginia chapter of the group on Zoom on Sunday, July 31. Here are my remarks to them:

 PNHP 7/31/22

"I am Barry Lee Wendell, the Democratic candidate for United States Congress in West Virginia’s Second District, which covers all twenty-seven counties in the northern half of the state.  I’m a native of Baltimore, Maryland. I spent the first half of my life in Baltimore, New Orleans and Miami and the second half in Los Angeles, Crescent City, California and for the last ten years, Morgantown, where I served two two-year terms on the city council. 

"I looked at your website, and I am interested in your three parts of 'Medicare For All,' Chronic Care, Prevention and Job Freedom. I have stories relating to each of these. 

"I worked as an SSI claims representative in Miami from 1978 to 1984, when I was promoted to Los Angeles as a supervisor. I was in the southernmost office in Dade County. Many of our clients were poor farmworkers, Black from Georgia or Spanish-speaking from Mexico. We also had refugees from Cuba and Haiti, and people from Puerto Rico who were only eligible for SSI if they lived in the fifty states. One day, a well-dressed professional-looking woman came to my desk. She wanted to file a claim on behalf of her son, who was turning eighteen. He had cystic fibrosis. His parents had enough income that as a child, he was not eligible for SSI or Medicaid. The medical bills for her son were exorbitant, and they could get no help. They had taken out second and third mortgages on their house. At eighteen, their son was an adult. I filled out the papers for her to have her son sign. She said he was unable to come into the office, and was not planning to enroll in college. She looked surprised that I would ask that, but as a college student, he would not have been eligible. The case was quickly approved by the medical people in another office, and her son received a small SSI check and, more importantly, Medicaid to pay his enormous hospital bills. He died three months later. That there was no help for these parents and others like them, I still find baffling. Poor families could get Medicaid from the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program or would have to go to the emergency room where the state would have to pick up the tab.

"I’ve heard politicians say that undocumented people in our country should not be able to receive medical treatment. But if there is a pandemic, COVID-19 for instance, and people are turned away because of their immigration status, then they are likely to further spread disease through the general population. If there is a contagious disease in our community, then everyone must be treated, whatever legal status they have, regardless of their ability to pay for care. It’s not rocket science. Everyone must be protected and treated, or else everyone in the community is vulnerable. Yes to prevention.

"Many of us have been in jobs where we stayed for the benefits. I worked for more than eighteen years in Los Angeles Unified School District as a substitute. If I worked one hundred days in a school year, I was eligible for good health insurance through the district. 

"Though this benefit is no longer available, I was able to keep my health insurance in retirement if I had one hundred days in fifteen consecutive years and was at least fifty-five years old. In February 2003, seventeen years after I started with the District, when I was fifty-three, I suffered a heart attack while visiting my mother in Baltimore. It was her seventy-fifth birthday, and she was dealing with pancreatic cancer. I was supposed to miss three days of work, but I missed two weeks. Three weeks after my return to Los Angeles, my sister called and asked me to come back. Mom was in hospice and it looked like she was near the end. I saw her the last two days before she died. I missed another two weeks of work, and as of late March, I didn’t have one hundred days in. I was working three days a week and going to cardiac rehab two days, instead of the three days they wanted me to do at rehab.

"I came home from school one day to find a letter from the Substitute Unit saying they were firing me for 'not working enough.' They knew about my heart attack and my mother’s death. I threatened to go to the newspapers with this story, and they backed down. I retired on my fifty-fifth birthday, kept my health insurance even to today, although I have Medicare now. 

"I should have been able to leave that job after my heart attack, instead of risking my health, indeed, my life, by going to work when I could barely walk up a flight of steps.

"My experiences in life teach me that we should have a national free health insurance plan, to protect all of us from epidemics, to get the chronic care people need, and to not leave it to employers who are always trying to cut costs, to provide health care for our people. I will publicly support national healthcare, and I pledge to work for it if I’m elected to Congress this year. Thank you for having me on your call today. "

If you've read all of this, and have questions, while you can post here, it might be more efficient to send a question to me at barrywendellforcongress2022@gmail.com. if you are so moved, you can mail a check  made out to "Barry Wendell for Congress" to Barry Wendell for Congress, P.O. Box 831, Morgantown, WV 26507. If you go to ActBlue.com, you can put my name in the box at the top of the page and make a donation there. Thanks for reading.

The Beach Boys - Light And Dark

Like most people my age (66 next week) I love The Beach Boys. They were an important part of our youth. They spoke to our culture, even if we didn't own a car or live near a beach, or have much experience with girls. Musically, although we would never admit it, they were a bridge between our parents' love of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals and our love of Chuck Berry-early Elvis rock and roll.

This summer, the Brian Wilson bio-pic Love and Mercy came out. Joe and I saw it around July 4 in Columbia, Maryland, on the way back to my sister's house from a day in Baltimore while we were on vacation. Like most arty movies, it never played in Morgantown. The movie was both exhilarating and depressing. I loved seeing recreations of the early Beach Boys, and the recording sessions for Pet Sounds, one of the most acclaimed albums in history. The rivalries within the group, the bickering, and Brian's descent into craziness was hard to watch.

I thought I would add to my résumé of classes at OLLI, the "school" for people over fifty, by teaching a class about The Beach Boys. I've already taught about the Brill Building, Motown, and the British invasion from 1964-1969. Today, October 15, I'm teaching the albums from late 1967 to 1973. Hard times for the group.

Most of the Beach Boys albums I bought new were after the group's peak popularity. Two of these, Surf's Up, from 1971, and Holland, from 1973, are among my favorites. Yet these did not sell well when they were new. People were listening to Elton John and Carole King, Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack in those days.

I've been researching as much as I can about The Beach Boys. I've gone back and listened to the albums, read one book about the group and one specifically about Brian Wilson, watched dozens of YouTube videos, and read countless Wikipedia articles.

The Beach Boys really were America's post-war band. they grew up in a boring suburb and had parents who gave them everything at a tremendous psychological price. They were immensely talented but only their junky stuff is what people like ("Barbara Ann" for instance). As a singer, I appreciate that they were always in tune with each other, even when performing live. They sang harmony as well as the great vocal groups of the 50s that Brian so admires. I saw them twice at the Baltimore Civic Center when I was a teen, once in their red-striped shirts, and once with beards and hippie clothes.

Like many of us, they made bad choices about drugs and sex in the sixties and seventies, lost control of their money and their lives, and yet still keep going.

In their later years, they are doing what they can, even if they don't speak to their own family members, nursing hurts and recriminations that are decades old.  The Beach Boys will appear in Zanesville, Ohio, next week. The ads point out that the group consists of Mike Love (who won the right to the group name in court) with Bruce Johnston, who has been with the group since 1965. Brian Wilson is still recording music. He was interviewed in Rolling Stone about the harrowing movie about his life. When asked if things were that bad, he says they were worse.

In Love and Mercy, Brian is under the care of psychologist Eugene Landy, who controls Brian's entire life. This is my Hollywood one degree of separation story.

I took a class at UCLA Extension in 1985 called "The Career Exploration Seminar." At the time, less than a year after my move from Miami to Los Angeles, I was working as a supervisor in the SSI program at the Watts Social Security office. The managers hated me, I still believe because I wouldn't work Saturday overtime, and because I directed my United Way donation to The Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Community Center. I knew I was going to leave there. After some research, directed by the teacher, I thought I would like to be an actor, a cliché about newbies in L.A. There was a gorgeous woman in the class named Alexandra Morgan, an actress. She wanted a new career because, being past thirty-five, no one would hire her. Having never met such a beautiful woman, I was shocked. She encouraged me to give acting a shot. At the last class, we exchanged addresses. She lived on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, where the movie stars live. I asked her about that and she said "I live with my boyfriend."

 We all went out to a restaurant and the boyfriend came. I sat next to him. He looked a little crazy, sort of like Jack Nicholson playing a crazy person. He was older, maybe fifty, in good shape, and with a diamond stud earring. I asked him what he did for a living. He told me he was a psychologist, and when I said he must do well out there in Malibu, he said "Actually, I only have one patient." I never saw him or Alexandra again. He was Dr. Eugene Landy, Brian Wilson's doctor.  I found out three years later, when Brian came out with an allbum, and on the liner notes, thanked Dr. Landy. Some of the songs listed Alexandra Morgan as lyricist. I don't know if Dr. Landy was as bad as he is portrayed in the movie. He was better looking, for sure.

Everyone has their troubles and grief. We are all under appreciated in some way. A friend now is gravely ill. Her family members, who rarely speak to her, are coming to Morgantown today to see her. Joe is spending much of the day at the hospital. He has written a beautiful prayer asking God for healing when things look desperate. Two women at The League of Women Voters meeting last night told me about their terrible diagnoses and the trials of chemotherapy. I'm just recovering from angioplasty, and I'm lucky to still be alive.

Brian Wilson has lost his two brothers and is estranged from his cousin who helped found The Beach Boys. I know that for many years he didn't see his children from his first marriage. In the Rolling Stone article, he talks openly about being old, about his patterns of behavior and how he copes with his mental health issues.

I cry when I hear Beach Boys songs like "When I Grow Up To Be  A Man," written when they were young and wondering, like all of us, what their lives would be like. Now we know, and even if we are happy, as I would say I am, it's heartbreaking to look back at all that has happened.

The Beach Boys, at least the ones we remember from the early 1960s, are still popular. We think about the pretty girls, the handsome young men (HYMs) we were or wanted, the powerful impractical cars of the era, and the optimism of the times.In my class, we're going forward into a darker era. It should be interesting.