Category Archives: Places

The Fourth of July

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This is a day of eloquent words.  The celebration of that eloquence is overshadowed by the festival this day has become.

We’re not talking only about the eloquence of the Declaration of Independence, approved by the Continental Congress on this day (but not signed by the 56 delegates for some time), but for the eloquence of a speech by a special man before thousands of admirers on this date.

This is the day in 1939 that Lou Gehrig, one of the greatest players and greatest people to play baseball, said goodbye—with words of courage and gratitude before a crowd of almost 62,000 people in Yankee Stadium who had come for baseball games but mostly to pay tribute to Lou Gehrig.

The words were spoken a little more than a month after a consequential trip to Missouri.

The most memorable line came at the beginning, not the end—as is the case with the Declaration’s most famous line.

“Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.

“Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn’t consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure, I’m lucky. Who wouldn’t consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball’s greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I’m lucky.

“When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift – that’s something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies – that’s something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter – that’s something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body – it’s a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed – that’s the finest I know.

“So I close in saying that I may have had a tough break, but I have an awful lot to live for.”

As far as the trip to Missouri—

Gehrig had sensed something was wrong when he hit “only” .295 in the 1928 season with 29 home runs and 114 runs batted in—the kind of season most of today’s major leaguers would love to have.  But it lowered his lifetime batting average to .340 and left him 287 hits short of becoming the seventh player with 3,000 hits, an achievement he could have expected to reach in 1939 under normal circumstances.  It also left him seven short of 500 home runs and six short of 2000 runs batted in, both statistics he would have achieved in ’38 if he had had a normal year.

He was troubled at the start of the 1939 season by the fact that he was only four for fourteen in the World Series, all of the hits being singles, and going four-for-28—again, all singles—to start the year.  He didn’t hit a home run during spring training and his coordination in the field was off.  He played his last major league game on April 30, then told manager Joe McCarthy he was benching himself after 2,130 straight games.

But there would be one more game. Gehrig was still the Yankees’ captain, often the man who took the lineup card to the home plate umpire at the start of the game, as he did during a series in June against the St. Louis Browns. It was there that Gehrig told reporters he was going to the Mayo Clinic soon for some tests but expected to return to the playing field during the summer.  “I can’t help believing there’s something wrong with me,” he told them. “It’s not conceivable that I could go to pieces so suddenly. I feel fine, feel strong, and have the urge to play…I’d like to play some more and I want somebody to tell me what’s wrong. Usually a fellow slows up gradually.” But this year, he said, “Without warning…I’ve apparently collapsed.”

After wrapping up the series with the Browns, the Yankees went to Kansas City for an exhibition game against their best minor league team, the Kansas City Blues, team that matched rising Yankee star Joe DiMaggio against brother Vince, who played the same position for the Blues against the Blues’ up and coming double play duo of shortstop and future Hall of Famer Phil Rizzuto and second-baseman Jerry Priddy, who combined that year for 130 double plays, a league record. They were called up by the Yankees in ’41.

Lou Gehrig played his last game on June 11, 1939 in Kansas City. He played in great pain, but played errorless ball at first base. His last at-bat was in the third inning. He grounded out to Priddy.

While the rest of the team took a train to Cleveland for a series there, Gehrig and his wife, Eleanor (in this AP photo from 1936), flew to Rochester for tests on the 13th that she had arranged.  Six days later, the clinic’s Dr. Harold C. Habein issued a “Two whom it may concern” letter telling Gehrig he had been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, an illness that “involves the motor pathways and cells of the central nervous system and in lay terms is known as a form of chronic poliomyelitis—infantile paralysis.”

The letter concluded, “The nature of this trouble makes it such that Mr. Gehrig will be unable to continue his active participation as a baseball player inasmuch as it is advisable that he conserve his muscular energy. He could, however, continue in some executive capacity.”

Gehrig took the letter to manage Joe McCarthy and team president Ed Barrow on the 21st.  They released the information to the media that day and announced that July 4th had been set aside for Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day at the stadium.

Gehrig admitted he was shocked by the findings. He told New York sportswriters, “Mrs. Gehrig and I are fully resolved to face the situation calmly” and he called the trip to the Mayo Clinic “the best move I ever made.” But he didn’t ignore the reality of his situation. “My friends tell me not to worry. They slap me on the back and say, ‘Don’t worry, Lou. Everything is going to be all right.’ But how can I help worrying.”

He was honored during a forty-minute ceremony held between games of a doubleheader against the Washington Senators.  There were a lot of gifts including a fruit bowl and two candlesticks from the New York Giants. The one that might have had the most meaning was a 21-inch silver trophy from his 1939 teammates, their names and a poem by New York sportswriter  John Kieran engraved on it.

To LOU GEHRIG

We’ve been to the wars together;
We took our foes as they came:
And always you were the leader,
And ever you played the game.

Idol of cheering millions:
Records are yours by sheaves:
Iron of frame they hailed you,
Decked you with laurel leaves.

But higher than that we hold you,
We who have known you best;
Knowing the way you came through
Every human test.

Let this be a silent token
Of lasting friendship’s gleam
And all that we’ve left unspoken.
Your Pals of the Yankee Team.

When Gehrig walked back to the dugout that day, the only one of the many gifts he took with him was that trophy.

Kieran said his poem was a “feeble interpretation” of how the players felt about Gehrig, who was his neighbor in the suburb of Riverdale, New York. Kieren often visited Gehrig as his health declined. One day, Kieran later related, Gehrig pointed to the trophy and said, “Some time when I get—well, sometimes I have that handed to me—and I read it—and I believe it—and I feel pretty good”

Lou Gehrig died, only 37 years old, On June 2, 1941.  Six months later, the Baseball Writers Association of America voted unanimously to ignore the traditional waiting period for admission to the Hall of Fame and unanimously elected him.

When Eleanor Gehrig died in 1984 she donated that trophy to the Hall of Fame. It and other Gehrig memorabilia are on display in Cooperstown.

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis is known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. There still is no cure for it. Nor is there an effective treatment to stop it or reverse its progression.

July 4th.  A day we normally observe eloquent words.  Perhaps a few of us today will remember, too, words not only of eloquence but of courage in the face of a life to come and gratitude for the life that had been.

 

Our Weimar Moment

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Weimar, Germany is the country’s celebrated cultural city, the home of writers Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Composer Franz Liszt lived there for a time, as did 16th century painter Lucas Cranach the Elder.  Walter Gropius founded the  Bauhaus movement and the Bahaus School of design there. It also was the home for a time of artists and architects such as Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, and Henry van de Velde. Composer Richard Strauss and philosopher Fredreich Nietzsche also lived there briefly. It is the city where Germany’s first democratic constitution was signed. It lasted from the end of World War I to 1933, when Hitler killed the Weimar Republic.

It also is four miles from the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp.

At various times in World War II and the years leading to it, 240,000 people were imprisoned and where an estimated 56,545 died or were murdered.

And the people of Weimar claimed they did not know of what was happening there—-although slave laborers from the camp worked in its munitions industry.  When American soldiers found the camp in early April, 1945, they were stunned by the human wreckage the Nazis had left behind.  General Patton ordered the soldiers to go to Weimar and round up thousands of the “unaware” citizens and force them to tour the camp to see the atrocities being conducted in the name of their country.  A reporter for The Guardian, a British newspaper wrote:

There in groups of 100 they were conducted on a tour of the crematorium with the blackened frames of bodies still in the ovens and two piles of emaciated dead in the yard outside, through huts where living skeletons too ill or weak to rise lay packed in three-tier bunks, through the riding stables where Thuelmann, the German Communist leader, and thousands of others were shot, through the research block where doctors tried new serums on human beings with fatal consequences in 90 per cent of the cases.

It was an experience they can never forget. Most of the women and some of the men were in tears as they moved from block to block. Many were crying bitterly. Some of the women fainted and could be taken no farther.

Legendary American journalist Edward R. Murrow toured the camp three days after the Army arrived.  He was so shaken by what he saw that he waited three days to broadcast his story by short-wave radio back to CBS in New York. I believe it is the greatest broadcast in radio and television history:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlhQvPfYSXk

A few days later, the Dean in Weimar, Richard Kade, speaking for the Protestant church in Germany said, “We carry no blame for these atrocities.”  In a memorial service many years later, one of Kade’s successors, Henrich Herbst, admitted Protestant Christians had not “courageously admitted and put a name” to the “unspeakable suffering of women and children, Jews, communists, Social Democrats and Christians” at Buchenwald.

I visited Weimar on a lovely June morning when the streets near the town square were filled with singing and music by college students whose year had ended, where merchants had set up their little booths on the square selling their wares.  I bought a gold gingko leaf pin for Nancy that day. The gingko is the official tree of Weimar.

We had lunch with the mayor and after that, as a cold front had moved through the area and the afternoon was chilly and misty, we visited Buchenwald.

And we saw the ovens.

And urns filled with ashes.

And we put little stones on the outlines of the barracks that Murrow described so graphically.

And we all thought of people living four miles away who chose not to know what was happening at Buchenwald.

We are living a Weimar moment in America today.

A special Congressional Committee is taking us on a graphic tour of January 6, 2021.  But there are those who want to ignore the brutal ghastliness of that day and its attack on our democratic-republic form of government.

Murrow began his historic broadcast, “Permit me to tell you what you would have seen and heard had you been with me on Thursday.  It will not be pleasant listening. If you are at lunch or if you have no appetite to hear what Germans have done, now is a good time to switch off the radio for I propose to tell you of Buchenwald.”

Last Thursday might, Congressman Bennie Thompson sounded a 21st Century equivalent to Murrow’s introduction: “We can’t sweep what happened under the rug… So, tonight and over the next few weeks, we’re going to remind you of the reality of what happened that day, but our work must do much more than just look backwards. The cause of our democracy remains in danger. The conspiracy to thwart the will of the people is not over. There are those in this audience who thirst for power, but have no love or respect for what makes America great, devotion to the Constitution, allegiance to the rule of law, our shared journey to build a more perfect union. January 6th and the lies that led to insurrection have put two and a half centuries of constitutional democracy at risk.”

Twenty-million television viewers that night began the equivalent of the tour the citizens of Weimar were forced to take.  That night and in meetings to come, we will see what many of us have chosen not to see or to know. It will not be pleasant viewing.  If you have no appetite to hear what has been done, this is a good time to turn off the television for the committee is going to explain what happened on January 6.

Just as Wiemar residents in 1945 chose to turn away from what was right in front of them, there were many who chose to, and will choose in future hearings to, look away, to seek out channels where the work of the committee is ignored or downplayed or where they will be encouraged to think of other things. If you don’t think about what happened on January 6 and why, it didn’t happen.  You “carry no blame” for those events.

The Post-Dispatch reported the major Republican candidates for Roy Blunt’s Senate seat seem to have adopted the Weimar Defense.  They took to Twitter to attack the committee findings—even before the hearing Thursday night began.

Eric Greitens called the hearing a “show trial.” Mark McCloskey expanded on that idea by calling the hearing a “fraud show trial” and claimed it is “government abuse you expect from Soviet Russia, China or North Korea.”  Eric Schmitt called the committee “a joke.”  Vicky Hartzler wants her people to ignore what the leader of her party might have done (we’ll learn more specifically what his role in that dark day was in more detail later) and look at her perceived failures of President Biden and congressional Democrats. She called the hearing a “sham.” Billy Long said it was a “reality show” that avoided Democratic party failures on various issues.

McCloskey is dead wrong. There are no congressional hearings in Soviet Russia looking into Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, no hearings in China on that country’s repression in Hon Kong, and no investigations in North Korea about the impoverished population and the saber-rattling of the country’s leader.

A joke?

We wonder if those who think the hearings are a joke smiled as Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards recounted when the mob moved in while she and her fellow officers tried to hold them back with nothing more than bike racks. “I felt the bike rack come on top of my head and I was pushed backwards and my foot caught on the stair behind me and I—my chin hit the handrail. And then I—at that point I had blacked out. But my—the back of my head clipped the concrete stairs behind me.”

And were they chuckling when she described regaining consciousness and went to help those trying to hold back the mob on the Lower West Terrace of the Capitol and, “more and more people, you know, started coming on to the west front?”

The arrival of Metropolitan Police officers stopped the advance so, “for a while I started decontaminating people who had gotten sprayed and treating people medically who—who needed it.”

Did the joke get funnier as she described getting back behind the next line of bike racks and being sprayed in the eyes and another officer started to take her away to get decontaminated but they never made it because they were tear gassed? “I saw, I can just remember by—my breath catching in my throat because what I saw was just a—a war zone…I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were officers on the ground…they were bleeding. They were throwing up.”

And were those saying the hearing was a joke dissolve into side-holding laughter as Edwards told the committee, “I saw friends with blood all over their faces.  I was slipping in people’s blood…Never in my wildest dreams did I think that, as a police officer, as a law enforcement officer, I would find myself in the middle of a battle.”

That’s really hilarious.

There was nothing funny about what happened January 6. And those who suggest that these hearings are a show or a joke or a fraud or who suggest we become like the citizens of a city known for its culture who chose not to want to know about the hideous events on their doorsteps are beneath respect.

Jesus told his followers (John 8:31-32), “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Our freedom is at risk with those who think the search for the truth of what happened January 6 is a fake, a fraud, a show, or a laughing matter.

This is our Weimar moment.  If we are to be disciples of freedom, we must not be afraid to see the truth of what happened January 6 and how it came about. The committee will escort us through that camp.

If we love our country we must be unafraid of what we will see.

The difference one letter makes

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The regular consumers of these eloquent literary effusions might have noticed nothing was posted in its usual place on Monday.  That is because your loyal correspondent, in the springtime of his senility, posted the intended Monday meditation on Thursday.   He apparently was too eager to get to St. Louis for an automobile race later in the weekend that he mis-dated the time the material should be exposed to the waiting public.

The column that suggested no place is safe from a “loon with a gun and a grudge” and we should expect a mass shooting to happen wherever we are elicited two responses, nonetheless.  One suggested just doing away with the Second Amendment.

To be clear, for any who felt the column advocated such a thing:

If we did away with the Second Amendment I would have no right to own my Daisy BB gun!  Or my father’s J. C. Whitney .22 rifle or the antique 12-gauge shotgun with the crossover stock.   I’m not advocating eliminating the Second Amendment although some of the (to me) irrational defense of it might need to be dismissed—and polls indicate large numbers of Americans agree with the assessment that it is time for some social and legal parameters to be established within the amendment’s framework.

The problem is the difference made by one letter.  The letter is “L.”

Pols versus polls.

Sometimes our political figures love polls.  If they’re winning.

Sometimes our political figures hate polls.  If they’re losing.

But polls seem to mean nothing to our Pols who are deafened by an adequate number of dollar bills that they allow to be inserted into their ears.

It’s not just this issue, either.

While individual political leaders and/or candidates steadfastly deny that currency-filled campaign coffers affect their votes; that they only buy access—the additional “access” seems often to be convincing of the rightness of the donor’s position.

The dollar value of political courage has never been calculated, but in this issue there seems to be some kind of a threshold that tips the recipient away from the popular will. And there seems to be an organization among many organizations that has the biggest thumb on the scales because it has the greatest concentration of paper ear plugs. .

As long as courage is cheap and access is for sale, the polls on mass shootings will mean enough Pols will keep any significant parameters from being established within the Second Amendment.

So my BB gun is safe.

But the question is: When will things become so disastrous that “access” cannot be bought?

Underlining that rhetorical question is the results from this weekend.

People at a graduation party in Summerton, SC (a town that previously had never made any national headlines your correspondent has noticed) didn’t think it could happen there.  Nor did people at a bar in Chattanooga, TN. Or people living their lives in the moment on a busy street in Philadelphia. The 100 people at a party at a Phoenix strip mall probably hadn’t given a mass shooting a thought—until they were the middle of one. The same likely is true of a similar crowd at a graduation party at a private home in Socorro, TX.   Or the people at a bar in Mesa, AZ.  And a gas station parking lot fight in Macon, GA leaves one dead and three others hurt.

The news aggregation site AXIOS* calculates the total at 11 dead and 54 others hurt, just this weekend.

Just another weekend in America where, as The Onion has observed more than 20 times:

‘NO WAY TO PREVENT THIS,’

SAYS ONLY NATION WHERE

THIS REGUARLY HAPPENS

 

The Quick.

And the Dead.

The Pols.

The Polls.

And the dollars keep going into the ears of those who find it beneficial to be deaf.

-0-

*The AXIOS weekend scorecard:

Summerton:  Two cars stop at a house where a graduation party is being held and shots are fired into the house. One dead. Seven wounded.

Chattanooga: Shooting near a bar. Fourteen wounded by gunshots. Three others hit by cars. Two dead by gunshot wounds. One dead when run over by a car fleeing the scene.

Philadelphia: Three dead and at least eleven others hurt when three shooters open fire on a busy street.

Phoenix: One dead, eight others hurt in altercation at a party led to shooting.  The dead person is a 14-year old girl.  Two of the wounded have life-threatening injuries.

Socorro: A fight at a high school graduation party turns into a shooting. Five teenagers wounded.

Macon: Argument in gas station parking lot leaves one dead and three hurt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Streets of America

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I’m on the Missouri River Regional Library Board and we have a special social problem we’re trying to work out.

The public library is a place where homeless people (the current politically correct phrase for them seems to be “the unhoused”) can go to stay cool on hot days, warm on cold days, dry on wet days. There are public bathrooms, chairs to sit in, benches to sit on, newspapers and books to read.

Some folks drink. Some folks sleep.  Some folks have or cause problems.

They can’t fill their days hanging around in downtown businesses, including restaurants, shoe stores, clothing stores, offices, and the like.  So they gravitate to a public place (the courthouse and city hall don’t work) such as a library.

So the library staff is put in an awkward position.  These folks are the “public” and our building is a public place. But some of our “homed” (if you will) patrons aren’t comfortable when they come into the library and have to walk past these folks outside the front door or sitting with their bag of belongings inside. We have to respect their discomfort.

It’s a humanitarian issue and it’s a community issue and we’re working with some local groups to explore better options for these homeless citizens and for us and our patrons.

Some of our readers might recall the 70s duo of Brewer and Shipley—Michael Brewer and Tom Shipley.  They’re still around and they still perform together.  We had them a few years ago for our Community Concert series.

Some folks have never gotten over their big hit, “One Toke Over the Line,” about smoking marijuana.  But what once was radical music is becoming mainstream living.

One of the songs they did at our concert was “The Streets of America.”  It came to mind the other day when we were thinking about this special issue at the library.

In this era when political advantage is being sought by those who stoke fears that immigrants are inherently evil and a threat to American Values (a vague phrase that has had whatever blood is in it sucked out by whose own criteria for Americanism are not above question), or some people should just not be seen where other folks live and work, we were reminded of that song. We found a video of a Brewer and Shipley concert on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrzGpwvmoQ4

The song is about 50 minutes in.

They wrote the song in 1993. It’s copyrighted by Eye Forty Four Music (as in I-44, which goes through Tom Shipley’s town of Rolla—Michael lives in Branson). It’s on their “Shanghai” CD.

Leaving home, losing pride
Some suffer, some simply die
For a glance at the streets of America

I’m not sure why they call it the land of the free
But I know why they call it the home of the brave

I see sisters and brothers
Trading one heartache for another
And a shot at the streets of America

Those who have they ain’t givin’
Those who don’t are workin’ for a livin’
They’re forgotten on the streets of America

I’m not sure why they call it the land of the free
But I know why they call it the home of the brave

I hear so many voices
Telling me there ain’t many choices
When you sleep on the streets of America

I’m not sure why they call it the land of the free
But I know why they call it the home of the brave
I’m not sure why they call it the land of the free
But I know why they call it the home of the brave

“I hear so many voices telling me there ain’t many choices when you sleep on the streets of America,” they sing.

Reciting the Biblical adage that “the poor will always be with us” doesn’t solve the problem of those who sleep on our streets because it misinterprets the issue.

In a place defined by some as a “Christian nation,” the statement should not be used as a dismissive.  It should be seen as the obligation such a nation should assume if it truly believes in the words of the one who said, “Inasmuch as you do for the least of these…..”

It’s not often that we think of a library as a place where this obligation is played out.

But it is.

 

A Black Life That Mattered

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It’s not the only one, of course, but this story is an example of how traditionally told history ignores the importance of some people and why there is nothing wrong with broadening our understanding of the past and re-orienting our view of it.

There is nothing to fear from a more holistic understanding of our history.

This is the story of a black life that mattered.  Except it HASN’T mattered until recently.

While Cole County was celebrating its bicentennial in 2020-2021, your persistent researcher started trying to learn about Stephen Cole, the “pioneer and Indian fighter” for whom the county was named (supposedly).  A couple of 1823 newspaper articles about Cole County recounted that it really was named for Stephen’s brother, William Temple Cole, who was killed in a central Missouri Indian ambush a decade before the county was organized.

The traditional telling of the story of the settlement of Cooper County has Temple’s widow, Hannah and their nine children, joined by Stephen, his wife and their five children, in a pirogue (a hollowed out log) paddling across the icy Missouri River from Howard County to the area that’s now Boonville in February 1810.  They supposedly arrived on the south shore of the river but all of their supplies were still on the north side and they couldn’t get back to them for several days.

Hannah is memorialized as the first white woman to settle in Cooper County (meaning, we presume, the first non-Indian).  There’s a statue of her in Boonville.  A big rock in a cemetery along Highway 5 about 13 miles south of town marks the approximate location of her burial.

It’s a nice story.  Except that the usual telling of it has Hannah as a widow seven months before she became one.

And it ignores the fact that she was not the first white woman to settle that area.  She was ONE of the first two.  Stephen’s wife, Phoebe, disappears from the narrative. It’s almost as if she’s never left that pirogue.

But it’s likely there was a THIRD woman in that not-so-little boat.

Her name was Lucy.

She doesn’t show up in the traditional narrative until Hannah’s death many years later when she’s mentioned. It’s likely she’s not mentioned along with the other family members because she wasn’t family.

Our traditional story-telling doesn’t spend any time talking about chairs and cooking pots and beds—–the property settlers took with them. Lucy was Hannah’s property, her slave.

She apparently had been with Hannah since Hannah and Temple were married.  She probably helped with the birth of the nine children.  She came west from Virginia to Kentucky, to the wilds of Missouri, and then across the river that day (whenever it was) and helped with the settlement work on that river bluff.  And she remained with Hannah until the end of Hannah’s life.

Supposedly she’s buried in the same cemetery as Hannah, perhaps at the foot of Hannah’s grave.

If Hannah was the first white woman to settle south of the river and west of Montgomery County, then Lucy had to have been the first African-American settler of a county that was 36% enslaved at the start of the Civil War. But that’s not recognized in the usual story of Cooper County or of the city of Boonville.

She was every bit the “pioneer” as Hannah (and Phoebe).  She faced the same dangers the Cole family faced, especially during the years when Indians were marauding in the area during the War of 1812. But she never drew a breath of free air.  We don’t know when she was born, or where.  We don’t know when she died, or where. Maybe she’s buried near Hannah. Maybe not.

Cooper County makes a big deal of Hannah.  But in a county where six percent of the population today is black, there’s no recognition of Lucy.  No statue.  No gravestone in the cemetery south of town.

It’s this kind of cultural oversight that some folks think needs to end. That wish, however, has been coopted by what has happened to phrases such as “The 1619 project” and “Critical Race Theory” that call on us to recognize this nation was more than what has been in the standard national narrative. They have become politicized phrases to be attacked vehemently.

We should not fear the challenge that 1619 and CRT give us to see our history more broadly because understanding the history of people whose origins are not rooted in northern Europe lessens their marginalization, recognizes their humanity, and makes all of us more American.

And Lucy?

Last September, we told her story to the Cooper County Historical Society.  Afterwards, one of the descendants of Hannah Cole got up and promised that there would be a proper stone for her installed at the cemetery before the next reunion of the Cole family in Boonville next summer.

Lucy’s life mattered in the early part of our state history but her story is an example of some of the shortcomings in the telling of that history.  Her life matters today. To all of us.

Perhaps if as much energy could be expended to end the shortcomings of our traditional history-telling as is spent attacking those who say it’s about time we told it more holistically, all of us would be richer people and we would live in a greater nation.

A Christmas Story

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It was a scrawny little tree, bought from the remnants on the tree lot just a few days before Christmas.  It only took one strand of blue lights to decorate it, it was so small and spare of limbs.  My mother had put some strips of cotton on the limbs to simulate snow.

Outside, the real snow was shoetop deep and slushy. The little Illinois town was about to button itself up for Christmas and I hadn’t bought my parents anything.  I was fourteen.

We’d done a lot of shopping in the last two weeks, a whole lot of shopping.  But not for Christmas.

About two weeks earlier, I had dashed out the front door of our farmhouse, avoided tripping over Mac the dog, who liked to run with me to the school bus, climbed aboard, found a seat and away we went without a backward glance at the house—-

—that was a smoldering hole in the ground the next time I went back to that corner.

Augie Adams, an angular, friendly fellow who rented our pasture for his horses, greeted me that afternoon when I was summoned to the principal’s office from my PE class.  “Do you know where your mother is?” he asked me, a tension in his voice I remember but did not then recognize.  “She’s driving my dad around on his territory,” I told him—my dad was a district manager for a farm equipment company and still wasn’t allowed to drive because of a summer heart attack.  Augie immediately relaxed and then told me, “Your house burned down and we pulled her car out of the garage but we couldn’t find her.”

And that was how I learned just before Christmas that all I had was what I was wearing.

Just before Christmas.

My parents rushed to the school to pick me up and then we went out to see what there was to see. The fire department had no chance to save the house or the garage.  They did put out a pile of brush nearby.

My parents stayed with a farm family down the road. I stayed with a classmate in town that night and the next morning we headed to Decatur and to the Montgomery Ward store to start our lives over.  We found an upstairs apartment in a house in town.  The president of the student council at Sullivan High School came into study hall a few days later and gave me an envelope, saying, “The student council thought you could use this.”

Inside was a $100 bill.

All these years later, I think about what I lost in that fire—a baseball card collection that might put my grandchildren through college if I still had it: fifty years of National Geographics a spinster aunt had given me when she broke up housekeeping and went to live with relatives, a rolltop desk, a model airplane collection.  I think about the pictures and other things that were the family archives.  I think about my parents, who had survived the Depression and the Kansas Dust Bowl, and the World War, and now dealt with starting all over.

I don’t remember what I got that Christmas—maybe because what was under the tree was so secondary to what we’d had to get for the previous couple of weeks.

But I do remember that I had to get something for my parents.   And so that evening, maybe it was Christmas Eve—I don’t recall—

Dad gave me four dollars and I set out for downtown before the stores closed to find something.   And in Anderson’s Gift Shop, I found something kind of special—-remember, this was 1955—-liquid pencils.

(Ballpoint pens had only been around for about ten years by then and the first ones I had didn’t work very well. We were still a pencil and fountain pen family, as were many families.)

The liquid pencils looked just like the familiar yellow pencils we used at school but they had a ballpoint cartridge in them with black ink so the writing kind of looked like number two pencil writing.

So we had Christmas with that little tree. We probably spent part of Christmas Day having a big dinner (dinner was a mid-day meal then, supper was at night). I don’t remember but this was in the days when families still had a lot of relatives within 30 or 40 miles and holiday and weekend Sunday afternoons were often spent visiting Aunt This or Uncle That.

A few years ago, the alumni association back home asked me to emcee the homecoming banquet.  I asked the student council president to join us that night to let all of the old grads know what was going on at the “new” high school—which then was about fifty years old.  And when he was done, I repaid the student council for its Christmas present to me in 1955.   That hundred dollar bill all those years ago was the equivalent to about $800 now.  But I decided to round up the total a little bit and gave the council $2,000 for a fund to help some other students who might suffer a devastating loss in the future.

Sometimes a Christmas gift deserves a gift in return, even if it’s not for several decades.

This isn’t the stuff of a Hallmark movie.  It’s just a Christmas story and there’s a lot I don’t recall about that time—-I do remember that by New Year’s Day we’d gotten a 36-foot trailer to rent and had moved it out to the site of our old house, there to house my parents, my grandmother, me, and Mac the dog. My father and I spent New Year’s Day pulling buckets of water out of the cistern and dumping them on the coal pile in the basement that was still burning inside three weeks after the house burned.

We built a new house, the dirt from the basement filling the ashes-filled hole where the old house had stood. And we celebrated several Christmases there before Mom moved to a place in town. We had trees every year but I don’t remember them.

But I do remember a tree that was so forlorn in the tree lot that nobody else wanted it and what it meant with its blue lights and its cotton snow as my family rebuilt our lives as well as our new house.

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Christmas is a time for story-telling.  For remembering.  Perhaps you had—or will have in these next few days—-a Christmas of special meaning.  If you’d like to share that story, use all the space in the comment box with this entry.

 

 

Notes from the road

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(Abandoning the quiet street for a few days in search of adventure.)

Our recent trip to Colorado, via Kansas of course, featured a munchkin toilet, a Ferris wheel inside a store, a revelation of what’s in a cheeseburger (or so it seemed), and a place where dart-throwing is a game for sissies.  And, oh yes, we DID see some mountains this time.

We drove across Kansas, which we kind of like to do.  The Flint Hills in the eastern part, the wide open sky and countryside, the windmills lazily—most of the time—creating electricity, the scattered houses and small towns on the high prairie on the west side.

Whenever we make that trip, we cannot help but compare I-70 in Kansas to I-70 in Missouri.  We were at peace on the highway in Kansas. It’s smooth, quiet, and features FEW billboards.  We all know about I-70 in Missouri, a butt-ugly disgrace of sardinesque traffic cans that cram cars, trucks, bigger trucks, campers, RVs, pickups, motorcycles and Heaven knows what else into a tight space at 80 mph, with elbow to elbow billboards advertising everything from Ann’s bras to somebody’s porn shop.  Driving on I-70 in Missouri is a tiring slog through mile after mile of advertising sludge.  Crossing into Kansas generates an instant feeling of freedom.

If you make it to Goodland, about 18 miles short of Colorado, and if you stay at the Quality Inn, do not let the clerk give you Room 102.  It’s a nice room for normal-sized people.  But if you have to use the bathroom—-

That’s our tablet in front of the toilet to give you an idea of the scale of the fixture. The tablet is 8.25 inches tall. The, uh, facility must have been purchased from Munchkin Plumbing just down the road from Dorothy’s farm.  It’s good for a pre-schooler, probably. But for adults?

We will not elaborate. You can use your imagination.

Goodland’s a nice, small town known for having the largest easel painting in the world.  In fact, it’s a Van Gogh painting.  Van Gogh was never in Kansas but he was famous for his five paintings of sunflowers.  And we know what the state flower of Kansas is.

The easel is 80 feet tall (That’s Nancy underneath it for perspective) and is visible from the highway as you come into town from the East.  It’s on your right and easy to miss from a distance.

Kansas has two things that have come to symbolize the state, other than sunflowers.  It has windmills, 3500 of them.  And grain elevators.  One of those in Goodland reminds us of a great ship of the plains waiting to load its cargo.

A lot of first-time travelers to Colorado are disappointed when they don’t see mountains as soon as they cross the state line.  It takes a while before they start to rise against the western horizon. The traveler begins to see them about 45-50 miles from Denver.  But in July, we couldn’t see them at all from there and they were only vague shadows in the western forest fires smoke when we were as close as four or five miles.  Here’s the picture we used in our July 31 entry. It was taken from six miles away:

But the day after Thanksgiving, we drove out to the same area, or close to it:

Or, looking south:

It never quite looked like Colorado in July.  But it sure looked like it at Thanksgiving.

We went to Loveland one day, to a place that seemed to be a cross between Bass Pro/Cabella’s and Dick’s Sporting Goods.  We saw a woman walking around with her cat in her backpack, which had a clear plastic cover and air holes to give Puff air.

Can’t see the cat?  Look at the lower right, just above the right air hole and you’ll see two yellow eyes.  Several folks had their dogs with them. Not service dogs.  Just dog dogs. It’s part of Colorado’s laid-back culture.

The place had a Ferris wheel right in the middle. Big sucker.  We haven’t been on one in years so we rode it and got a good look at both stories of the store.

We expected Colorado to be Colorado in late November and early December—a few years ago we ran ahead of an ice storm all the way back home as far as Salina holed up for the night while the storm passed and then came the rest of the way to Jefferson City on a cold, wet day with cleared roads but ice and freezing rain on the trees and roadsides.  So we packed appropriate cool or cold weather clothes.

It was in the 60s or low 70s every day but one.  The day before Thanksgiving it was a raw, gray day in the low 40s. There were even a few tiny snow things in the air.

We had an eye-opening experience on the way home to Missouri. We stopped for lunch at a famous fast food place in Burlington, Colorado and learned:

Wow!  And all this time I thought those things were 100% ground beef!

Here’s another discovery from Kansas:   There’s a bar in Topeka that doesn’t seem to have much interest in dart-throwing.

 

Kansas was a place where a 6-foot-tall scowling temperance crusader named Carrie Nation stormed through the doors with an axe in her hand and started breaking up bars.

I don’t know if I’d want to spend much time in a place where there’s a lot of drinking going on and people are throwing axes.

But, you see, there ARE interesting places in Kansas.  Just don’t get in the way of an axe or, if you have bad knees, check into Room 102.

 

Why didn’t you go with them? 

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You promised you would.  Remember you said during  your pep rally, “We’re going to walk down—and I’ll be there with you—We’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.  Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women….’

You said “we” five times, and you promised to “be there with you.”

But you didn’t go, did you?   You just turned them loose then and you strolled back to the warmth of the big white house.

Sure was a funny way to lead.

Kind of like Jimmy Doolittle.  Remember how he watched fifteen B-25s take off from the security of the bridge of the Hornet?

And we’re all familiar with General Patton, commanding the Third Army from his bunker in London as his soldiers swept across France and into Germany.

George Washington, relaxing by the fireside at Mount Vernon, received regular reports on the fine living conditions at Valley Forge.

The examples are so numerous—-

Some of us are old enough to remember Martin Luther King telling his marchers who had traveled with him from Selma to Montgomery Alabama, “The battle is in our hands. And we can answer with creative nonviolence the call to higher ground to which the new directions of our struggle summons us. The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways that lead us easily and inevitably to quick solutions. But we must keep going.”  And I’m sure you remember that Dr. King, after speaking words somewhat more eloquent than yours, got into his long black Cadillac and drove back to Selma where he waited for reports of what happened in Montgomery.

Actually, the leaders in these and other situations never said, “I’ll be with you.”  But they were.  They were with those they commanded.

What might have happened if you had been a man of your word that day?  Could you have spoken to the crowd of “peaceful tourists” and urged them not to break windows, break down doors, assault security officers, vandalize offices, and force members of the House and the Senate to flee for their lives?

Would you have tolerated a noose and a sign that said, “Hang Mike Pence,” or would you have encouraged more respect for a man carrying out the constitutional duties of the Electoral College?

Could your calming presence have saved the life of Ashli Babbit?

Could you have prevented the arrests of more than 600 “tourists,” many of whom face significant time in prison or in jail while their families wonder what’s to happen to them if you had said as the crowd surged toward the doors and windows, “Wait!  We’re just here to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.  Go back out behind the fence and demonstrate out there.”

Oh, if only you had kept your promise.

“I’ll be there with you,” you said.

You’re no Jimmy Doolittle. Or George S. Patton.  Or Martin Luther King.

Or any number of other great leaders who led from the front instead of retreating inside their  nice, warm, safe quarters where they could do as you did(according to some accounts),  joyfully watch what you unleashed.

You expressed some concern a few days ago that the September 18h celebration of the January 6 insurrection was intended to make you look bad. What looked bad was the small number of people who gathered to celebrate the day,

Too bad you weren’t with them, either. Be comforted by the fact that you could not have looked worse on September 18th than you did on January 6.

But, once again, you weren’t in the front ranks. Others took all the risks and you watched it all on television. Again.

Once again you’re the man who wasn’t there.

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today.

Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

—or maybe, walk away.  You’re good at that.

Bicentennial

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A big weekend is ahead as Missourians celebrates its bicentennial—two-hundred years since President Monroe signed the proclamation making Missouri the nation’s 34th state, the second state west of the Mississippi.

But if all we do is look back, we’re ignoring a responsibility we have for creating the state that will celebrate its TRIcentennial.

The Maori people of New Zealand have an ancient proverb: Ka mua, Ka muri that translates into “walking backward into the future.”

That is what our bicentennial is about—walking into a future we cannot see while looking back on the historic and the familiar things that shaped the present, knowing that we have changed as a people during this journey and that our descendants will be a changed people, too.

Some who do not understand how different we are fear who or what our next generations will be—and out of that fear are making what surely will become futile efforts to confine that future to present, or even past, standards that often are not based on history but are based on the myths of history.

We cannot stop time and if we are realistic about our future as a people, we must recognized that those who gather to celebrate our state’s TRIcentennial in 2121 will be different in appearance, social relationships, political references and in a multitude of other ways we cannot anticipate no matter how hard we might resist.

We are honoring those first settlers of mid-Missouri. But the historical record shows how different from us they were.  We know the names of the men but it is harder to learn the names of their wives and even more difficult to learn the names of the slaves they brought with them. We know they were people of hope, of ambition, and hard work, qualities necessary to survive in a world where fire was an essential ingredient of life. We live in a world where fire is a disaster at worst and a mostly decorative feature of a modern living room at best.

In our world, our homes and even the furniture in them are not products of our own hands. We travel farther in an hour than they sometimes traveled in a week, more in a day than some of them traveled in their lives.

They were not the first Missourians.  In Montgomery County’s Graham Cave State Park, evidence has been found of human habitation 10,000 years ago, long before the Osage populated much of Missouri—and other sites in Missouri date back farther than that.

We are observing 200 years in a place inhabited for thousands of years. We should honor the memories of the ancient ones, too.

We celebrate the bicentennial of man-made boundaries that define where we are and a history that tells us who we have become. But if we look only back on what was and became what is, we are making a serious mistake.  Walking backwards into the future endangers those who will be that future.

Our responsibility is to turn and face that future, respectful of the past but unafraid of the changes that our descendants will make because they must remain, as the people of 200 years ago were, people of hope.

What we do today—what we ARE today—lays the foundation for the state and nation our grandchildren’s grandchildren will inhabit.

So the Missouri bicentennial gives us some choices to make.  Will we continue to follow the trails our ancestors established through extraordinary effort and the  inalienable truths and hope that they brought with them……or will we follow trails of fiction and fear too easily established these days, and too easy to blindly follow?

Will we be a people fearful of one another, often victims of those who would generate fear among us for their own purposes or  power…..or will we be a people who recognize there is nothing wrong with a different heritage, a different color, a different outlook on identity, a different faith?

Will we be people spooked into division, derision, and disrespect….or will we be a people of thought, who seek understanding rather than hostility, people who respect knowledge, and who trust our neighbors regardless of their differences from us?

Will we be the kind of people who choose leaders who  DEmand blind allegiance or the kind of people with wide-open eyes and minds who choose leaders who COmmand respect?

What kind of people are we going to be as we lay the foundation for the kind of people we want our grandchildren’s grandchildren to be?

A hundred years from now, our grandchildren’s grandchildren will gather around the then-weathered monuments we have put up to honor the bicentennial.

What kind of people—in what kind of counties, state, and nation—do we want to have gathered around those monument in 2121?

Our generations will take those first steps on the new trail that stretches before us—the steps that will determine what kind of people and what kind of nation will be here in 100 years. We cannot take those steps by walking backward into the future. We must be unafraid to recognize our grandchildren’s grandchildren will not be like us.  We have to lay a foundation that allows them to be better than us.

We have to create a trail that is broad enough for all and grows broader as it advances. We have to create a trail that is not darkened by division, derision, and disrespect but is brightened by intelligence, independence, and acceptance.

And we must begin building a foundation strong enough to support a  greater nation than we are today.

So let our celebration of the past be brief.  Let our steps today be steps that those celebrating the TRI-centennial of our Missouri will be as grateful to us for taking—as we are for the steps taken by those who were here first.

We will honor the yesterday by the honorable steps we take today into tomorrow.

(The State Historical Society of Missouri was designated by the Missouri General Assembly to be the lead organization for planning the bicentennial. Coordinator Michael Sweeney has worked with every county to plan some event or project celebrating the event. You can learn more about what’s happening statewide or in your area at https://shsmo.org/missouri-2021.)

Making a house a home

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(It might sound a little old-fashioned, but what’s inside a house—or rather, what’s inside those inside a house—make it a home.  Dr. Frank Crane explains the values that make a house a home.)

THE HOUSEHOLD GOODS

The walls of a house are not built of wood, brick, or stone but of truth and loyalty. Unpleasant sounds, the friction of living, the clash of personalities are not deadened by Persian rugs and polished floors but conciliation, concession, and self-control.

The curtains that screen the household gods from the eyes of the vulgar and the curious are not woven of lace, but of discretion.

The food of the home is not meat and bread but thoughtfulness and unselfishness for these keep joy alive.

The real drink is not wine or water, but love itself, which is the only known thing that is at once a food and an intoxicant.

The bed is not to be of down and white linen but of “a conscience void of offense toward God and toward man.”

The lighting is not to be of the sun by day or by electric bulbs at night but by loyal affection, shining always in dear hears, burning always in true hearts.

Your home is not where you layoff your clothes but where you lay off your cares.

The cellar of your house is not be filled with apples or rare vintage but with the memory of sacred intimacies, of little heroisms unknown to the world of sufferings borne nobly.

In the attic, you do no store old trunks, letters and gowns, but you keep there the kisses, sayings and glances that cheered you when you gathered them fresh, and are now a sweet sorrow when dried by time.

The house is not a structure where bodies meet, but a hearthstone upon which flames of souls which, the more perfectly they unite, the more clearly they shine and the straighter the rise toward heaven.

Your house is a fortress in a warring world, where a woman’s hand buckles on your armor at morning and soothes your fatigue and wounds at night.

The beauty of a house is harmony.

The security of a house is loyalty.

The joy of a house is love.

The plenty of a house is in children.

The rule of a house is service.

The comfort of a house is in contented spirits.

The rats and mice in a house are envy and suspicion.

The maker of a house, of a real human house, is God himself the same who made the stars and built the world.

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